Tag Archives: contemplative

Process and coinherence

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Prehension is not perception in the ordinary sense, and it is not causation as traditionally imagined. It is the way an event takes account of the world it inherits. Without it, the past would be dead, the present spontaneous, and continuity impossible. To prehend something is to include it in one’s own becoming. This inclusion need not be conscious, deliberate, or even noticeable. It simply means that what has happened contributes to what is happening.

Every actual occasion prehends its predecessors. It does not choose whether to do so. Prehension is mandatory. What is optional is how it prehends…

The past does not act on the present by pushing, transmitting force, or occupying the same space. Instead, the present appropriates the past. Influence travels forward because it is taken up, not because it is imposed.

This replaces external causation with internal relation.

Robert Flix, [AN] Whitehead in Plain English, p.62

Contemplation is an entering, in profoundly open awareness, into the process of prehension. This isn’t a passive reception, an observation only; it is a deliberate participation in, a strengthening of, the relational web between occasions, between things, events and their relations.

This seems to me why contemplatives have so often, especially those practicing within the traditions of a religion, connected the idea of contemplation with intercession, whether in the developed theology of hesychasm, or in Buddhist conceptions of metta or tonglen. Looked at like this, contemplative prayer in its intercessory dimension is not superstition but metaphysics; the practitioner, through their inevitable coinherence with the suffering inherent in existence, prehends the brokenness of things, holding them in the light of unbroken awareness. In effect, the practitioner enters into the suffering as the suffering enters into them: acting as a lightning-rod between what merely is and the ground of being itself – God, if you will allow the term.

In A Little Book of Unknowing, Jennifer Kavanagh writes:

…Faith is not about certainty, but about trust… 

We have seen that there is little about which we can be certain. Certainty may be undermined by limitations of the current state of knowledge; the subjective nature of experience; the fluid quality of the material world; or the intervention of unforeseen events. But beyond these aspects of the world about which we often assume knowledge, there is a dimension of life to which rational explanation simply doesn’t apply. Most people would admit that there is much that we cannot apprehend through reason or through the senses. We might know a fact with our brains, but not be able to understand what it means, to fully experience its reality – the age of a star or the trillions of connections within the human brain – some things are too big, too complex, for us to conceive. Einstein, who knew a thing or two about factual knowledge, felt that “imagination is more important than knowledge”. There is a dimension which co-exists with the material, rationally grounded world, is not in opposition to it or threatened by scientific development but happily stands alone in the context of everything else.

Reading Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics seems at last to be providing me with a framework within which I can begin to understand what has always been a deep instinct in my own practice: that it wasn’t merely a solipsistic exercise in self-improvement, but a real work of weight and consequence beyond my own narrow concerns. In a sense, it doesn’t matter of course whether I can explain it to my own or anyone else’s satisfaction; what matters is that it does work, is actual work, in some obscure corner of the healing of things.

Returning

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We still seek wholeness. It is intrinsic to human identity that, however much we have achieved, we are never satisfied. We hunger and thirst for what lies beyond our grasp and even beyond the horizon of our desire. Religion and spirituality, which are less easy to divorce than we thought – are the elements of culture that deal with this desire beyond desire. Where are they taking us? Where do we have to redefine the old terms by which we try to understand ourselves in this longing for wholeness? …

When belief takes the place of faith in the religious mind the possible range of spiritual experience and growth is critically limited. When religion emphasizes belief rather than faith it may find it easier to organize and define its membership and those it excludes. It is easier to pass judgement. But it will produce, at the best, half-formed followers. The road to transcendence is cut off, blocked by landfalls of beliefs as immoveable as boulders, beliefs we are told to accept and do not dare to put to the test of experience. In such a rigid and enforced belief system what I believe also easily slides into what I say I believe, or what I am told to believe or what I feel I ought to believe, because the I that believes becomes so dependent on the identity generated by the structured belief system we inhabit.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, pp.3,9

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

The spiritual life looked at from within resembles not so much a ladder or an ordered progress as it does a rather tatty wheel. It does move, but it moves at least as much round and round as it does forward. It is a process of trial and error – trials and errors. It seems to be more like an organic thing, subject to odd diversions and random mutations, than a neat structure assembled according to a set of plans.

Coinherence is one of those luminous words whose meaning flickers at the edge of comprehension, as though it names something you already half-know in your bones. Charles Williams was fond of using it, but its roots extend far further back than that. If ultimate reality (God, the Way) is in fact process, relational union, rather than an object or a person, then relational living is intrinsic to life itself, and it has profound implications for human behaviour, ethics and purpose. Specifically, it speaks to the contemplative life in ways that make sense of much monastic teaching over the years, right from the Desert Fathers and Mothers to the present day.

Pain and difficulty – what used to be called “tribulation” – are intrinsic to life itself. “Change and decay in all around I see,” wrote Henry Francis Lyle, and an open heart risks breaking daily at the news from across the world, even in supposedly stable and civilised nations. But if we are aware that all that is – not only, if especially, conscious beings – rests in the ground of being just as we do ourselves, then our presence in contemplation becomes much more than a state of mind. We are not “praying for” those for whom our hearts are torn; we are recognising our shared being, recognising an existential bond that exists already. Love is not symbolic, but structural: a circulation of grace, strength and suffering.

The living current of grace that coinheres in all existence is the source of what is – the Tao as the mother of the ten thousand things – and yet it is the heart of our contemplation itself. Only if we sit still can we be present as aerials, signs, receiving stations for that grace. The mist covers the distances, and our vision is not good; but we don’t need to know or to believe: our unknowing is itself our practice and our compassion. Perhaps all we need is love.

This rib cage of failure

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It is simple enough to lose sight of the liberating nature of our failings. They often seem to lead us into some parched, lonely place—a place of dry bones. The problem is not our inadequacies, much less the freight of the failures we carry, but the loss of perspective on what we resent most in ourselves. Light forever shines from within the rib cage of failure. But reactive mind is too cluttered to realize that this is the nature of divine love: flowing waters of mercy for all who are parched—each of us… Nor is reactive mind capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, pp.95-6

Just as death is the inescapable precondition for new life, so failure and error are the necessary spring of change and growth in the spiritual life. Only when we will let ourselves know that, only in the wreckage of our plans and conclusions, only in the defeat of our new beginnings and our fresh initiatives, can we be broken open to the current of grace that will wash us out into the open sea of becoming.

Behind all these metaphors there is a very simple fact, it seems to me: that only when we cease completely from self-justification, when we are prepared without reservation to let go of whatever role we imagined for ourselves – spiritual humanist, say, or secular Buddhist – can we discover what the flow of change – the Way, the leading of the Spirit, call it whatever feels right – is tending towards.

I think this applies both in our own inner lives and in the broader life of humankind. We can see it in the unceasing pattern of evolution (species don’t remain static, however attached we may have become to one or another expression of their diversity) and in the breakdown and reformation of institutions. Sarah Bessey (Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith) sees it in the breakdown of the established churches, and in the tentative shoots of a radical, open faith appearing through the rubble, like fireweed springing up through the rubble of bombed buildings following WW2. (Yes, I am old enough to remember seeing it for myself from the top decks of London buses, riding with my mother looking over the makeshift hoardings that attempted to conceal the broken gaps in the terraces and the rows of shops beginning to struggle back to some sort of normality after the end of hostilities!)

“Everything passes/everything changes/just do what you think you should do,” sang Bob Dylan (‘To Ramona‘). But what Martin Laird calls “reactive mind” is too wrapped up in what it thinks it thinks to know; it is only when we keep still enough in our own awareness that we are “capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.”

The annihilation of difference

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It begins to appear
this is not what prayer is about.
It is the annihilation of difference,
the consciousness of myself in you, of you in me. . .
Circular as our way
is, it leads not back to that snake-haunted
garden, but onward to the tall city
of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.

RS Thomas, from ‘Emerging’, Collected Poems 1945-1990

For most of my life – in fact since about the age of five – my life seems to have been centred on silence, stillness, the presence of something overwhelming but infinitely desirable, unnamable but closer somehow than my own breathing. Of course I didn’t even try, as a young child, to name it – or even really to try and think about it at all. It merely was.

Ever since then, I have been trying to find words. Words to tell others, certainly, but more than that, words to tell myself where I have been. (Words for this kind of thing are never in the present tense – they must refer to something remembered, to some trace in the mind left by the God behind whom the door has already closed.) And words, it seems, bring community. That is perhaps what they are for, after all. But communities own their words, own their people; or so they feel.

I have found myself, of course, borrowing words wholesale from others who have come this way before. But they are others’ words, however sublime they may be, however hallowed by time and tradition. In these late years all I can do is try to speak of what still leaps up in my heart at echoes, snatches of music, phrases from the Psalms, sunlight through high windows. I know RS Thomas’ hard-found annihilation of difference – it is what has haunted me all these years. It lies beneath my sitting every night and morning. It will be waiting for me, softly, after my last breath. I have no other name for it, since it is no thing. Dear, endless, it merely is.

A wider mercy

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Then, for no good reason, you remember.

Oh. Right. This is experience. This is radiant presence. This whole thing is what I am.

And immediately, even if nothing changes on the surface, the weight drains out of the moment. The seriousness falls away. The same pain, the same confusion, now sit inside a wider mercy.

The cosmology could not be simpler.

There is only this field of experience. It is what you are. Everything that seems to be happening is that field showing itself to itself, in this impossible, intimate way.

The story will go on. The interpretation will never stop. The madness will continue, in you and in the world. On that level, nothing is ever finally resolved.

At the same time, the one fact is always quietly in place, before any of it, as all of it…

Rob Barker, from This Radiant Space

Union with God is not something we can or need to acquire. By way of the contemplative skills of engaged receptivity and release, we realize this Union ever more deeply and clearly throughout the course of the days given us. God is too simple to be absent. It is we who, with complicated and cluttered minds, remain unaware that this foundational Light is flowering perpetually in the fertile and unfathomable right now. As St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions: You are “more intimate to me than my inmost self.” Paraphrasing this very line, Meister Eckhart preaches: “The soul takes her being immediately from God: therefore God is nearer to the soul than she is to herself, and therefore God is in the ground of the soul with all His Godhead.” St. Augustine likewise knows this grounding light: “This light itself is one, and all those who see it and love it are one.”

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light, p.24

We are not separated; there is nothing we can do, or need to, to achieve union, nonduality, oneness. We just need to step out of the light – which is why we practice, of course. If we don’t do something regularly, we forget. We forget anyway; but at least our practice gives us something to remind us, a place to look back at when we feel entirely lost.

And feeling lost reminds me of the wider mercy of which Rob Barker writes. The light, the radiant presence, the endless ground is not neutral. It is not abstract. Now, I am not saying – and nor is Rob Barker or Martin Laird – that it is a person. You can’t point to it, and say, “There it is, over there!” If you could, it would not be one. It is no thing, but it is not an abstraction. It is real, far more real than we are, more real even than the solid earth beneath us. We, and all the “ten thousand things”, are only fleeting eddies in its unceasing stream, of which we are already part. The wider mercy is all that is, and it is merciful. In the end, It is our only home.

There is something

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There is something
that contains everything.
Before heaven and earth
it is.
Oh, it is still,
unbodied,
all on its own,
unchanging,

all-pervading,
ever-moving.
So it can act as the
mother
of all things.
Not knowing its real name,
we only call it the Way.

Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 25, tr. Ursula le Guin

There is a mystery in stillness that cannot be classified, explained or described. It is outside knowing, not to be contained in words or thoughts. Why would we even mention it, if it were not before and beneath, above all things that are?

As we live in the everyday reality we know, the things we see and hear, touch and smell and taste are images in the mind, icons that helpfully stand for whatever actually is. We tend to think that what they seem to be is what they are, standing for nothing else but how they look, sound, feel, smell or taste. They are useful, indeed benign (Dennett), user illusions; they seem to be what is really there; but they are not. They allow us to interact with each other, and with things, but they are generated as appearances, icons, within our own brains – and like any interface, they can be subject to errors. (An example from close to home: I have severe retinal damage in one eye, and as a consequence, I suffer from visual release hallucinations. These appear like perfectly concrete things – in my case usually animals of one kind or another – within the normal setting of our home. They are not, repeat not, “imaginary”. They appear indistinguishable from the real thing – an actual cat, for instance – except that if I focus on them directly (my good eye works just fine) they disappear without a trace. But they were real while they were there: just as real as my desk, or the rather chunky printer that sits on it.)

Perhaps we were always supposed to be able to see that what we take for reality is only appearance; perhaps we were all supposed to be what we now call contemplatives, or mystics, but we forgot. Perhaps our habitual taking of appearances for true being is a computational brain function that has over many generations got out of hand. Or perhaps we contemplatives are just weird anyway.

If we sit still, without trying to make sense of anything; sit pointlessly, not aiming to achieve anything at all, we can see for ourselves that bright something – no thing – before all things, and know it for our true home, before we or any thing was born. “Oh, it is still, unbodied, all on its own, unchanging,..”

Wolf Moon

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This afternoon the Wolf Moon rose over the tall trees behind the garden, butter-yellow and gleaming in the late daylight, seeming far brighter than the setting sun. Somehow it tugged at our hearts to see it there in the clear air, appearing to hang above the feathery treetops like a memory from another time.

There seems to be something atavistic in our being human that responds to “signs in the sky” – the moon especially – from some pre-scientific place we’ve long since forgotten to be consciously aware of. Wolves have been absent from England since around 1390, and yet the very phrase “Wolf Moon” resonates with some ancient yearning in us. The cold air itself seems to long for something lost.

To sit still by the window in the moonlight is one of the loveliest things at this time of year. In the 8th century CE the Chinese poet Li Bai wrote:

At the foot of my bed, moonlight
Yes, I suppose there is frost on the ground.
Lifting my head I gaze at the bright moon
Bowing my head, thinking of home.

We were already home, watching the moon rise; and yet something of Li Bai’s nostalgia touches me in moonlight. What is it I am longing for? Ah, but it is a sweet longing, though. I don’t expect something to fulfil it. I am at peace in the moonlight. I don’t want anything, and yet. And yet in the New Year’s rising away from the solstice there is a yearning, even when there is no moon. Perhaps as I said there is something in our merely being human that carries with it wordless memories from times we cannot remember, far back before people built cities or wrote history.

Somehow our practice, and whatever philosophy we derive from it, has to leave room for these times of strange resonance. Dear old Li Bai, the poet and traveller of the Tang dynasty, evidently knew all about this.

Endings and beginnings

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So many blogs and newsletters across the internet at this time of year are looking back over the last 12 months, and on into the next 12, reflecting on the changes their writers have seen, and the things they expect to come. I don’t think I’d have much to add to this conversation per se. What interests me is the nature of endings and beginnings themselves, and whether they are what they usually seem to be.

So often we look at events as having discrete boundaries: they begin here, where there was nothing before, and they end there, leaving things different from how they had been. After the end of an event, there is a time when nothing is happening; and then, Boom! There’s another event just beginning out of the empty place that was waiting for it to begin.

If we sit still, though, and listen, what we find is that there is a ceaseless rippling of the bright water of the stream of coming-to-be. Sounds, and presence, and thoughts, and weight, without their own duration or dimensions. Where is the beginning of a wave, and its end? They are only arbitrary points on an oscilloscope trace: the wave waves. It has no beginning in reality, nor does it end. It waves.

Spinoza called these waves modes, and the stream substance: his one substance, God or nature (Deus sive natura) appearing in the modes of cats, or mountains, or people – rather as the Tao appears as “the ten thousand things” in the Tao Te Ching (Ch. 42). To see this, whole and undivided – as it is – is the end of fear, and the beginning of peace. May this peace be with you all, this coming year.

Be happy

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Happiness… appears at first to be a temporary experience that occurs from time to time, but when investigated turns out to be ever-present and always available in the background of experience.

As such, happiness is not a temporary experience that alternates with unhappiness. It is not the opposite of unhappiness, any more than the blue sky is the opposite of the clouds. Just as the clouds are the veiling of the blue sky, so unhappiness is the veiling of happiness.

Happiness is our very nature and lies at the source of the mind, or the heart of ourself, in all conditions and under all circumstances. It cannot be acquired; it can only be revealed.

We cannot know happiness as an objective experience; we can only be it. We cannot be unhappy; we can only know unhappiness as an objective experience.

Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware, p.8

It might be objected that happiness is a somewhat flippant concept when compared with more serious and weighty (dare I say, manly?) ambitions such as progress, or the acquisition of knowledge. But think for a minute: What would one wish to progress towards? Why acquire knowledge? The famous phrase from the US Declaration of Independence suggests, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”, But these are objective measures; they mean nothing without our essential being; in Spira’s words, happiness itself.

In Spinoza’s system, an active emotion is an emotion that arises from our own adequate understanding (our power), not from external events. The highest active emotion is Joy (laetitia), which he defines as the “transition to a state of greater perfection.”

  1. When you achieve the Third Kind of Knowledge (the intuition), you are having the most “adequate idea” possible—you are understanding a part of the world (or yourself) as it truly is in the mind of God/Nature.
  2. This act of perfect understanding is the highest expression of your mind’s power.
  3. The feeling that accompanies this ultimate act of understanding is the ultimate Joy.
  4. Because this Joy is directed at its cause—the eternal, necessary order of God/Nature which you now intuitively grasp—Spinoza calls it the “Intellectual Love of God.”

(Google Gemini, response to user query, 4 November 2025)

I myself would probably choose the word “joy” over “happiness”; but surely Spinoza and Spira are saying the same thing, essentially.

In my own experience – and an experience is, as Spira points out, necessarily second-hand, a mere carrier for the instant – the dropping away of the clouds, whether of unhappiness or of craving or simple self-regarding, reveals a bright stillness that is nothing other than the open ground itself, endlessly beyond life or death or identity. It is no thing, being itself, and holds all the “ten thousand things” (Laozi) in its isness. To know that – which is to say, be that – is the parting of the clouds Spira describes; Spinoza’s “blessedness” (Beatitudo). It is not so much an epistemological shift as an ontological one: not what (or how) one knows, but what one knows one is.