Tag Archives: contemplative

What we can’t say

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We can’t say what or why this is, only that it is. No conceptual formulation can capture this living reality. We habitually search for certainty and something to grasp. But in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense openness and freedom…

Thought conceptually divides, labels, categorizes, interprets and seemingly concretizes the flow of experience, creating the illusory sense of apparently separate, independent, persisting things, including bodies, minds, the world, and a self that is supposedly authoring our thoughts and making our choices.

But if we give open attention to direct experiencing, we may discover that all apparently formed things, including people, are like waves in the ocean—ever-changing and inseparable movements of the whole. There is no substantial boundary between inside and outside, nor any findable center to experience.

Our urges, desires, impulses, interests, preferences, abilities, thoughts, emotions and actions are all a movement of the whole. Nothing could be other than exactly how it is in this moment. Realizing this is the freedom to be as we are and for everything to be as it is, including our apparent abilities or inabilities to change, heal or correct things.

Joan Tollifson, from the introduction to her website.

Simply to sit still, making no effort – not even to concentrate, not even to not think – just quietly, inwardly watching, listening: that’s all there is. Open awareness is the freedom we always looked for, fought for, dreamed of; only it was here all the time. We just hadn’t noticed, being too caught up in the chase.

There’s nothing to be, apart from this immediate occurrence. Nothing else exists. There’s nothing to create. We are created in each moment. We are this movement, moving spontaneously, automatically. There is no “self” directing this. Any urge that arises is not our creation.

Why look for truth in fantasies of name and form, when it is so easily felt in the flowing of this moment? …

You don’t have to observe this moment or cultivate any special awareness. It already feels like this happening is happening, so merely sit down, or lie down, and rest, making no effort at all, and let this happening present whatever it presents.

Darryl Bailey, A Summary of Existence: the sense of here and now

The freshness that comes in this stillness is the freshness of first light, almost literal dawning – “the mind revealing itself to itself”* – the sense of relief is beyond describing, like the last day of school! It’s all over. There’s nothing to look for any more. Everything is given, just as it is – there is nothing to strive for any more. Only be still.

We search for gurus, for ideal states, for enlightenment, a better life, a more perfect self. We analyze, we think, we strain to finally, totally “get it,” to know the answer, to do the right thing. And in the end—in sleep, or death, or waking up—it all dissolves into silence.

Joan Tollifson, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

*Major Briggs to his son Bobby, Twin Peaks, Season 2

Second best?

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Occasionally I find myself wondering if living the contemplative life outside of a community, be that a monastic community of some kind, or merely a community of faith – a sangha, or a eucharistic community of some kind – is somehow second best; if, in effect, I am missing out on a vital component of the spiritual life. After all, one is continually reminded in every other email newsletter that the sangha is the third of the Three Jewels, or that “there is no such thing as a freelance Christian.”

But for some time now I have been convinced that, for me at least, however reassuring a framework formal religion can provide for contemplative practice, the stifling effects of  dogma and the scriptural imperative can seem to weigh on the spirit like a heavy woollen hood. Of course there is always the strong, and conventionally approved, temptation to declare oneself a member of some religion or other, and even of some tradition within that religion, but AC Grayling uncannily nails my own experience when he describes the humanist as one escaping to “cool waters and green groves.”

As I recently quoted from Rodney Smith (in an excellent article in Tricycle Magazine a few years back):

For a few people, a full lifetime as a monastic or living many years on retreat is a wise direction. Each of us has a unique spiritual design that pulls us toward freedom. The problem arises when we listen to others for our direction, or think we “should” do something because others have done it in the past. Spiritual growth is a fine-tuning of our ear to the needs of our heart.

Hardening of the oughteries – the sense that one life, one’s actions, are never enough, that one “must try harder” in the words of the old school reports – is a well-known occupational illness in the spiritual life. To truly pay attention in practice will, sooner or later, reveal our own iteration of Smith’s “unique spiritual design”; and open awareness will lay bare the treacherous thoughts of inadequacy and weakness that give rise to the oughteries, and they can be left be the roadside like any other thoughts.

It sounds easy; it isn’t. Millennia of conformity and obedience, centuries of misdirected authority vested in the structures of religion, stand in our way, muttering of heresy and disobedience, exclusion and damnation. Who are we to question such “thrones and dominions”? Each of us must find the path our own feet were built for; but the way of the “cat who walks by himself” is an ancient and honourable way, whatever the guardians of the faiths may say. As I said once before here, I think perhaps we should recognise the Einzelgänger or Einzelgängerin as a distinct and proper calling in themselves. I don’t mean by this literal loners, nor hermits in either the religious or the colloquial sense; but contemplatives who find that they are temperamentally unsuited either for formal membership of some church or meeting, or for the particular relationship of personal discipleship; those, in fact, who can only thus be true to their “unique spiritual design”.

Recovering the sacred

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Each of us has a unique spiritual design that pulls us toward freedom. The problem arises when we listen to others for our direction, or think we “should” do something because others have done it in the past. Spiritual growth is a fine-tuning of our ear to the needs of our heart.

What obscures this understanding in many of us is the belief that the silent retreat is a priority over other expressions of life. When we believe we are not where we need to be for spiritual growth, we relegate our daily life to a secondary tier. We energetically pull out of our spiritual life and wait for the appropriate secluded moment in order to fully engage. Leaning toward or away from any experience creates an anticipation of fulfillment in the future, and the sacred that exists here and now is lost. Discovering the sacred within all moments is the hallmark of awakening…

The lay Buddhist begins to recover the sacred in the most remote areas of life, in the midst of difficulty and dissatisfaction, loneliness and despair. The reality of problems is challenged and investigated, and life begins to thrive free of circumstances and conditions. The heart takes over and is resurrected from the conditioned habits of mind.

Rodney Smith, Tricycle Magazine Summer 2010

Smith has put his finger here on an issue that has long troubled me. There is that in me, if not in all of us, that so easily divides life into partitions: sacred/profane; spiritual/material; worthy/unworthy. Even the concept of lay Buddhism has for me too religious a connotation, tending to one side of the old religious/secular dichotomy. As I wrote last year,

So many of our practices find their roots in one religion or another – most often Buddhism – that they bring with them sticky remnants of their original religious context. Buddhist practices frequently imply a background acceptance of the concepts of karma and rebirth, for instance; and practices with Christian roots may come with background assumptions regarding the role of the Holy Spirit in the contemplative life.

…these things can be a problem. It is impossible to talk about, even to think about, the spiritual life without using words; and these kinds of words so often – especially for those of us with a past involvement in the formal contemplative life – help maintain an unconscious religious atmosphere that clings to the mere fact of practice itself, and can easily act like a tinted lens that colours our experience, and the ways we communicate it, even to ourselves.

If I were to adopt a label, I suppose it would have to be simply Humanist; a humanist of a particularly contemplative bent, perhaps, but a humanist nonetheless. If we are truly to recover the sacred – the “actually loved and known” (David Jones) – to be, after all, the bits and pieces of an ordinary life – all those things so often dismissed as merely “quotidian” – then it seems to me we need to flee these traces of formal religious language. It is so easy to lose the sacred among the habits and assumptions of our daily lives that to add these ancient designations to the mix seems unhelpful to say the least. As Rodney Smith generously concludes his article:

The lay Buddhist harbors no defense, seeks no shelter, and avoids no conflict for the resolution of wholeness. It is here in the middle of our total involvement [with daily life] that this alchemy of spirit can best be engaged. Our life becomes focused around this transformation as our primary intention for living. We find everything we need immediately before us within the circumstances and conditions we long begrudged ourselves. Spiritual growth becomes abundantly available and is no longer associated exclusively with any particular presentation of form.

A mystery

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The fact that you are you, the fact that you exist in this moment is a miracle of sorts. There’s something fundamentally inexplicable about it. There’s no amount of knowledge that seems adequate to dispel the mystery of our appearance here. And whatever you know, whatever you believe, whatever you have done or hope to do, you have this moment of conscious life to contemplate. You have this minute, this hour, this day. And it will never come again.

Sam Harris

When I think of this mystery that Harris describes, my immediate reaction, quite unsought, is grief. The first time this occurred to me was in my early twenties, at a time in my life when I was feeling exceptionally fortunate. I was finding that I was at last able to do many of the things I had longed to do, I was in a happy relationship, I had no obvious material lack. One morning I was sitting on the sofa in the sun, reading, when – literally – out of a clear blue sky this mystery fell on me like a crystal shroud. In a instant I could see the long arc of geological time that had led up to this moment, and the numbing abyss of time ahead, in which not only would I no longer live, but all I loved and lived for would utterly perish, vanished forever in an interminable future I would never see. I thought my heart might burst, there on the warm sofa on that sunny morning, with the early summer breeze coming in through the open window.

Looking back, I can see that I had for a brief flicker of time glimpsed what Harris points out here – that this moment is utterly unique, utterly precious; and it will not come again. A little later in the same piece, Sam Harris says, “We confront the mystery of being in every moment, but we don’t notice it because this mystery is tiled over with concepts.” Perhaps for me the tiling had for a few minutes come adrift; certainly when I then attempted to write down what I had seen, I found I swiftly tiled it over again with concepts that were, on that morning, immeasurably reassuring.

In one sense the grief remains. It is at the centre of old and kind Buddhist practices like metta and tonglen; it sweetly – bittersweetly – informs the sense of the infinite preciousness of each moment, each perception. But not only are we impermanent dwellers in impermanence; we are not what we seem. The little self that is so lost in this tragic mystery is not: it is an illusion. There never was an atom of self adrift in eternity. There only ever is the moment itself. We are ourselves what is, nothing more. To actually realise this in immediate experience is the safest place; in every moment everything is, like the reflected world within a raindrop, only wholly present as itself. There is nothing to lose. Nothing means anything; everything is meaning.

[See also my own recent post Attention]

Lathe biōsas

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Epicurus promoted an innovative theory of justice as a social contract. Justice, Epicurus said, is an agreement neither to harm nor be harmed, and we need to have such a contract in order to enjoy fully the benefits of living together in a well-ordered society. Laws and punishments are needed to keep misguided fools in line who would otherwise break the contract. But the wise person sees the usefulness of justice, and because of his limited desires, he has no need to engage in the conduct prohibited by the laws in any case. Laws that are useful for promoting happiness are just, but those that are not useful are not just…

Epicurus discouraged participation in politics, as doing so leads to perturbation and status seeking. He instead advocated not drawing attention to oneself. This principle is epitomised by the phrase lathe biōsas (λάθε βιώσας), meaning “live in obscurity”, “get through life without drawing attention to yourself”, i.e., live without pursuing glory or wealth or power, but anonymously, enjoying little things like food, the company of friends, etc.

Wikipedia

I have written here before about the benefits of living a quiet life. I am not necessarily prescribing this as a universal panacea, of course, but I am saying that it is necessary to me. I have come to realise increasingly clearly that Epicurus’ “live in obscurity” is exactly the dictum for me. The tiny daily accidents of life, the passing sounds and impressions observed during practice and after, are infinitely precious and worth attention. Birdsong, the particular exhaust note of a motorcycle on the road at the end of the garden, the half-unconscious inflection in one’s partner’s voice – all of them perfect just as they are in their crystalline presence. Things like this are simply not accessible to one who is on a mission, busy making a name for themselves.

Silence and stillness are quite different from “perturbation and status seeking”; which goes a long way to explain my own reluctance to engage with social media, with activism and campaigning, with banging and shouting in all their increasingly prevalent forms. However good the cause, anger seems only to beget anger, and violence, violence. Unkindness of whatever sort is never the way to an increase in kindness.

For myself, there is no other way than to keep still, to remain alert to the smallest things: to the leaves and the snails, to the minute changes in the weather, the slight ticking you hear as the thermostat balances the warmth of the room. Practice is no more than a way to awareness itself, to the limitless ground. Be quiet. Be still. Nothing else will do.

Plain ordinary mind

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In her beautiful essay The Gift of Contemplation, Vanessa Zuisei Goddard writes:

In The Book of Privy Counseling, the anonymous author—who also wrote the well-known Cloud of Unknowing—says: “… There is no name, no experience, and no insight so akin to the everlastingness of truth than what you can possess, perceive, and actually experience in the blind loving awareness of this word, is.”

…

The practice of contemplation, therefore, creates a space in which to work with our resistance so that we can choose is. And more, it gives us the opportunity to fall in love with it. Because we don’t have to like all aspects of reality. Like or dislike have nothing to do with contemplation. Yet we can learn to love reality’s isness, which means honoring ourselves and others and things and beings as we and they are. From this perspective, contemplation is the profound practice of loving what is, of resting in and into what is, of not distancing ourselves from ourselves and the world.

Yesterday, I wrote of the dimensionless metaphysical ground that is Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit. I know this kind of thing can sound wilfully abstruse, and yet it is truly the simplest thing; well, except that it is no thing! To sit still, aware of nothing except what is – whether the sound of tyres on the road beyond the garden, or the continual appearance of unsought dreamy thoughts, or the solid floor beneath – is as plain and ordinary a thing as one could find to do. To remain merely aware of whatever enters the field of consciousness is not even slightly complicated, and yet it is the work of a lifetime.

To learn to love what plainly is, as Goddard says, is the foundation of equanimity, the amor fati of the Stoics. And yet, this ordinary “resting in and into what is” is the very ground of isness itself. There is no other; and yet this unvarnished awareness is itself the most utterly fundamental reality, the open ground itself, before all differentiation. It is only.

Dimensionless

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In stillness it can become apparent that the dimensionless ground, that is “before all things” (Colossians 1:17) underlies both phenomenal reality and the perception of that reality, since the mind’s original awareness – its intrinsic consciousness – is awareness of the ground itself. In this sense,

Consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter; indeed, it’s the only intrinsic property of matter that we know, for we know it directly, by ourselves being material conscious things. All of the other properties of matter have been discovered by way of mathematical physics, and this mathematical method of getting at the properties of matter means that only relational properties of matter are known, not intrinsic properties.

Rebecca Goldstein, in a personal communication to Annaka Harris

As long seen in the Dzogchen concept of rigpa, the ground is both dimensionless and atemporal. It is empty, from our phenomenological point of view, even of “emptiness” itself. It is no thing, in the most utter sense of that phrase. And yet each of us can be said to have it, in the identical sense that all beings are said to have “Buddha-nature”; only our own confusion, our incessant and self-identified thoughts, get in the way as the clear light of the moon is obscured by clouds. (There is even a Dzogchen term for this too – ma-rigpa!)

Perhaps this sounds complicated. The attempt to say it gets that way; and yet it is the simplest thing. All that is needed is to remain still enough, open enough to plain awareness; the ground is open, cloudless, without end or beginning. It isn’t even there. It, simply, is.

Only practice

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At times recently I’ve been tempted to see my previous years of practice, stretches of time I spent as a Christian contemplative in the world – rather than as a monastic of any kind – as perhaps wasted years; years I could have spent in some more fruitful way, such as the kind of practice to which I’m now committed. But gradually, it has come clear to me that it has all worked together, astonishingly seamlessly. There is no right or wrong way: there is only practice. The “story of my life,” disjointed though it has often appeared to me, is actually all of a piece. There is nothing to regret. There is no need to start over with anything.

I have mentioned before here my profound gratitude for occasions in my life when I have been injured or unwell, and the insights they have afforded me. These too, though, aren’t isolated occurrences in a life of somehow lesser significance; they are merely currants in a bun whose sugar and spice, and very ordinary flour, have been just as essential to the overall flavour.

I don’t mean to attribute any of this to some species of external cause, in the sense of acting under the control of some supernatural puppet-master; everything I have mentioned has merely been composed of natural events in a largely unremarkable life. Any sense of their fitting together, of their working towards some overarching purpose, is retrospective: the pattern only emerges as it nears completion. Perhaps it could even be suggested that without its later elements the earlier would be meaningless, or at least have an entirely different meaning; but perhaps “meaning” is too loaded a term altogether. A pattern, after all, only describes what has happened, what events have become; even if like one of Daniel Dennett’s real  patterns it does have significance beyond simple human interpretation!

There is a kind of peace here that I hadn’t perhaps foreseen. In one sense, nothing has changed – practice goes on from day to day just as before; and yet something is different in a way I find difficult to explain even to myself without falling into linguistic pits. Maybe nothing more needs to be said: what is being described here is a still-evolving process, not a destination. If there is indeed a pattern, it is probably much more like a vortex street than a snowflake, to misappropriate a metaphor. The practice remains. Nothing else is needed; there is nothing else we need to remember.

Just this simple

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Remember, you have been learning to allow the breath to flow naturally without imposing a model, form, or ideal on it. Now, with the same art of allowing, you open to your own life, your own experience, and watch everything reveal itself. As you sit, the entire mind-body process displays itself from breath to breath, and you watch it all arise and pass away, come and go. You are learning to refine the art of seeing, which is nonreactive and equanimous—a clear mirror that accurately reflects whatever is put in front of it…

There’s no such thing as a distraction, because whatever happens—that’s it. The same emotions that you see in your sitting meditation—whether peaceful, anxious, or full of doubt—provide you with the perfect materials for practice. What arises will vary from moment to moment. The breath, however, remains constant. Even when a powerful energy such as loneliness or agitation visits, the breath remains present. Perhaps it is in the background, quietly, in-out, in-out, while your awareness is mostly involved with loneliness or whatever it is that has naturally captured your attention. In this method, you take advantage of the breath’s constancy. It is such an obvious fact, and yet one that most of us often forget.

Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life

Really, it is just this simple. There is next to nothing to it, this practice of ours. And yet it is the work of a lifetime, and the more we go on, the lovelier we discover it to be. There is something so juicy, so moreish, about this whole enterprise. Part of it seems to be that we uncover the essential impermanence of everything that arises; and that of course includes ourselves. Once this is seen – truly seen, not just accepted intellectually to be true – then there is nothing more to fear. To watch this unfold, from breath to breath, all the timescales from pulse rate to year’s end to geological epoch meshing like the gears of the Antikythera mechanism, unpicks in a moment our own house of anxiety in which we have been taught to live. Our long schooling in the myths of progress and responsibility, the weight of the future, the despair of failure – all gone in the lightness of the breath, the flicker of sounds from beyond the window, the actual presence of our body’s warmth against the good floor.

More than this, the webbed patterns of causality seem to come clear, bright wires against the dark softness of the breath itself; they are as they are, and yet all their vast geometries of causality are all right – deeply, inalienably all right. What is is the most precious gift, Merton’s diamond, the open ground of isness in this ordinary room, this plain body resting in just now.

In another way, of course, what I’m describing isn’t complicated or difficult at all. What you are really learning—and this begins with following the breath—is the art of doing less and less until finally you are doing nothing, just being as you are and letting your experience come to you. There are no distractions; you are mindful of your present experience just as it is. Nothing in particular is supposed to happen. You attend to what is there just because it is there. It is your life at that moment. We are used to doing things all the time, trying to change our environment, improve our situation, so it may seem difficult to do nothing. Actually, there is nothing easier. You just sit and let the world come to you.

Larry Rosenberg, appendix to Living in the Light of Death: On the Art of Being Truly Alive

Stone lanterns

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I have always been strangely moved by the tōrō stone lanterns found in gardens and along paths around Buddhist monasteries and large houses in parts of Japan, and hence in similar places around the world in tribute. The one here is in the Japanese garden at Kingston Lacy in Dorset. Even as a boy I loved to look at garden ornaments like sundials and benches that stood out in the rain and sun, in the snow and the wind, bearing the marks of the weather and its changes.

To sit like a stone lantern may be a fanciful way of putting it, but there is something in shikantaza that is just like that, sitting still as the moments pass and the breaths, and the sounds outside drift unremarked across the comings and goings of thoughts. Sitting steadily, nothing moves; and yet there is nothing that remains unchanged, nothing that does not bear the marks of time and its weather. To do nothing, as the stone lantern does nothing, is to remain true to impermanence. Nothing is sought or planned; there is no goal or intention, only to sit still, out in the sun and wind of what comes to be, just that – and in that, all that is.