Tag Archives: Benedictus Spinoza

Self and stream

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We are, says Daniel Dennett, illusions. Benign user illusions, but illusions nonetheless. Our minds construct our sense of self in order that we may see how we relate to others, to objects, to ourselves; but we are not what we think we are. If we look closely within, “look for the one who is looking”, in Sam Harris’ version of the Dzogchen pointing-out instruction (Waking Up, p.138ff), we find no one.

We are waves – modes in Spinoza’s terminology – on the stream of becoming, nothing more. We arise, travel a little distance, and subside. But we are never separate from the stream, nor are we, ultimately, other than the other waves: we are all the stream itself, streaming. Our sense of self, of being discrete, separate, independent is a useful feature of our minds, but as we became civilized it came to be more of a bug than a feature. We have actually come to believe that we are separate; and we have come to treat others – human and otherwise – as though they were separate from us, as though they could be found and lost, bought and sold, fought and exploited, loved and abused at will. But they are more than our sisters, more than our brothers: we are, literally, the same substance as each other.

To touch the edge of what is, to glimpse the living expanse of Istigkeit, the endless ground, cannot be unseen, un-touched. To be still, if only for a moment, is to see that we can never become un-waved – we may be wind-blown, scoured by cross-currents, but we are still waves, no more; and no less than the stream itself.

Blessedness

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In the practice of contemplation, one comes eventually to embrace an apophatic anthropology, letting go of everything one might have imagined as constituting the self—one’s thoughts, one’s desires, all one’s compulsive needs. Joined in the silence of prayer to a God beyond knowing, I no longer have to scramble to sustain a fragile ego, but discern instead the source and ground of my being in the fierce landscape of God alone. One’s self is ever a tenuous thing, discovered only in relinquishment. I recognize it finally as a vast, empty expanse opening out onto the incomparable desert of God.

Belden C Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, p.12

Once you grasp that everything is God/Nature — every rock, every thought, every heartbreak — you can cultivate what Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God. It’s not emotional worship, not kneeling or chanting. It’s a serene joy that comes from seeing yourself as part of the eternal system, understanding necessity, and embracing it.

This love is eternal because it’s rooted not in transient causes but in the recognition of God/Nature itself, which is infinite. When you reach this state, you stop feeling like a victim of circumstances and start feeling like a conscious expression of the whole…

The reward is a state Spinoza calls beatitudo — blessedness. It’s not paradise, not an afterlife, not heavenly reward. It’s here, now, in the clarity of mind that comes from understanding necessity and loving the totality of existence.

Robert Flix, Spinoza in Plain English, pp.35-36

At the end of things – literally – lies no thing: the utterly desert lack of all we had come to know as necessary to the self, to the “soul” as we had been taught to understand it. Even our practice, our dear and familiar sitting, is blown through and shredded by the unrelenting wind of absence.

It is only here, only in this placeless place, that we can grasp – not with thought, not with desire, nor with longing, even, but with the barest love – “what is the breadth and length and height and depth” (Ephesians 3:18) of our unknowing of the boundlessness of that “vast, empty expanse” that opens onto the living ground itself. Only here could we rest – will we, in the end, come to rest.

Following the stream

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It seems to me that what comes to be is, in its own essence, no more (and no less) than the necessity of things to be what they are: caused by events in what we call their past, and in turn causing events, and entities, in what we call their future. There is a continuous flow of coming to be – of being – that is inevitable, unceasing, beautiful. We are each of us ripples in that stream, brief appearances; and yet we are not other than the water, the flow itself, and that does not end.

I’m not sure what to call it. The ancient Chinese called it the Tao; Benedictus Spinoza called it God – although that was dangerously far from the God of Abraham with whom he’d been brought up.

The necessity of the flow, the inevitability of it, Spinoza saw to be nature itself, the universe, the continuum; and it was that which he called God (Deus sive Natura). To know that, realise it, live within it, breathe it as a cat breathes air or a fish water, he called the love of God.

What is necessary of itself does not cease: it is. Meister Eckhard wrote of it as Istigkeit; it is the open ground, in which as things come to be, and change, and die, and are not lost. The ripples rise, and lap, and fade; the stream flows on.

Otherness

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In my last post, I mentioned my sense that in situations of what I called transcendent powerlessness we can touch – or be touched by – something electric and quite beyond ourselves. In that post I wrote,

…something may sometimes happen in situations of extreme danger and radical insecurity that may not be unlike finding one’s finger in the spiritual power outlet. Something just as shocking; something with just the same sense of encountering a force from somewhere else…

I sometimes think that the technology of contemplation – the methods of meditation, the years of study and discipleship – are nothing more than means, sometimes elaborate means, of bringing about the very experience of powerlessness I have been describing. Of course, such experience can be misunderstood, can be fled from, rejected in a myriad ways, while its subject retreats either back into everyday life, or into some kind of addiction. But if the tide is taken at its flood, if the powerless moment is embraced as gift, coming in some strange way from elsewhere, then anything can happen.

What is happening here? Throughout the years philosophers, from the ancient Taoists to Spinoza, have found themselves unable to avoid treating the necessity of what could otherwise seem raw causality with something close to personification.

There is something undifferentiated and yet complete.
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Soundless and formless.
It depends on nothing and does not change.
It operates everywhere and is free from danger.
It may be considered the Mother of the universe.
I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 25 (tr. Chan)

God is the Determiner (but not a Planner): God/Nature is the immanent (indwelling) and necessary cause of all things. God doesn’t stand outside the world creating and planning by free will, like the personal, transcendent God of traditional religion. Instead, the order and regularity of the universe—the natural laws—are God’s nature.

Google Gemini, in conversation with the author on “Spinoza’s Determinism and God”

In contemplative practice one may occasionally find the sense that, in the sheer powerlessness of sitting still, something breaks through that Dzogchen practitioners would call Rigpa, “the ‘pristine awareness’ that is the fundamental ground itself.” (Stephen Batchelor). Somehow this is always unsought – you cannot bring it about, and trying is entirely counterproductive.

Of course the parallel immediately appears here with the traditional Catholic concept of infused contemplation – “…a state that can be prepared for, but cannot in any way be produced by the will or desire of a person through methods or ascetical practices” (Burke & Bartunek).

As I wrote yesterday, there is nothing here but grace. One can go so far in faithful practice, in preparedness and in waiting, but no farther. Even Spinoza wrote of the “intellectual love of God”, his term for the highest spiritual attainment, as intuitive rather than rational. I think we experience the ground of being, especially when encountered unawares, as so profoundly “other” because its immanence and necessity are so far from our own state as one of the “ten thousand things” (Laozi); and yet we are not other. We did not plan our birth: our very existence rests in the ground itself – we are from being itself, and that by sheer grace.

All it comes down to

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All that practice comes down to, in the end, is acceptance: that open stillness that listens to the unsaid, watches quietly for the opening of the undifferentiated ground beneath all that is, the Istigkeit that is no thing, but Being itself.

What Spinoza called “intuitive knowledge” (see Flix, Spinoza in Plain English, p.30) is only this: the releasement of grasping – the surrender of the idea of the separate self – that is reached directly in choiceless awareness.

There is nothing else, really. The house of peace (Heidegger’s Wohnen) is no less than this: to let go of all striving: to accept, finally, one’s oneness with the simple, undifferentiated ground. Sitting still, the door just opens of itself, that’s all.