Tag Archives: contemplative

The truth can only heal

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This brings us to the critical factor of seeing meditation, reading, and contemplation as conjoined. We should not be satisfied to just think about impermanence and death; we have to have the real experience, which comes from meditation. To read about Buddhism’s approach to death is important, but it needs to become an existential concern and to be translated into something approximating a real intuition or a real encounter with death. Following such a path will prevent our knowledge from evaporating in the actual experience itself. From a Buddhist point of view, so much depends upon our habits, and so thinking about death in a certain way helps us to get used to it, to become habituated to it. Therefore a real transformation has to take place on an emotional and intellectual level. Most of us have a fair degree of intellectual understanding of the facts, but that is really not the main point. A sense of impermanence has to be felt and experienced. If we understand it truly, we will handle all our tribulations far better, such as when our relationships break up, when we get divorced, when we get separated from our loved ones, when relatives die. We will handle all of these situations far differently with a truer appreciation of impermanence than we would otherwise have…

Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, Tricycle Magazine, June 2015

Impermanence, the realisation in actual experience that nothing lasts, nothing is eternal, seems to many people a gloomy doctrine. Actually it is anything but. The burden of hope is lifted; the agony of yearning is eased in the coming of light. The truth can only heal; only the truth can truly heal.

As Traleg Kyabgon says, though, this has to be experienced, not merely learned. The intellect may find such a thought easy enough to grasp – or it may not! – but it is only in lived experience that the heart can know. This is grace; the grace of practice, the gift of sitting still; or else it may be the grace of pain itself, accepted either willingly or helplessly. Either way, I have not found it something I could set out to learn: it had to happen to me. (Various monastic traditions, Christian and Buddhist, have disciplines intended to make it easier – meditations in charnel-grounds, for instance – but again I suspect that they are more ways to open the heart to grace than to compel it to learn some technique or accomplishment.)

I have been uncommonly fortunate. Not only do I have my practice, grown and changed to fit over many years, but I have had more than one close encounter with the finitude of my own life. These last have been great gifts; but they are not something one could seek out intentionally – what the news reports call a “life-changing industrial accident” would be an odd sort of spiritual discipline!

I think what lies at the heart of what may be learned from all these practices and encounters is acceptance – even glad acceptance – of the fact that life and death belong together as do the two sides of one coin, as do day and night, summer and winter. Not only is one impossible without the other, but they are a succession, parts of a cycle. Our little lives are not just rounded with a sleep, but with a waking too; just as next summer will be another year, so there will be another life. Not I – I am as fleeting as the leaves – but another will wake to a new day, in another time that might have been different had I not passed this way before.

About time

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Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

Real meditation isn’t something you do; it’s something you cease to do… it is the freedom to notice what is already here… What is there to notice, right now, that matters? What’s available to your powers of attention, in this moment, that is important – or even sacred? … Meditation is simply noticing what is real, as a matter of experience, now and always – but always, and only, now.

Sam Harris, from a recorded talk on Waking Up

“Self” is not a single thing in a thousand guises; it is a word for the thousand guises themselves. To understand the “self” is to understand the usage of the word within the full range of its seeming contradictory manifestations. Now it’s this, now it’s that. Only when we try to grasp an essence or assert the priority of one aspect of self-experience over another do we find ourselves entangled in philosophical brambles with very real emotional thorns. Wittgenstein repeatedly said that the job of philosophy is not to answer questions like these, but to dissolve them, to show that they are nothing but pseudo-problems thrown up by particular aspects of our language. In taking this approach to what had traditionally been seen as intractable metaphysical conundrums, Wittgenstein, I believe, comes the closest of any Western philosopher to Zen.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

The thing about the self is that it is, as Wittgenstein pointed out, another substantive noun – like time – that can lead us to mistake the word for the substance. Time does not contain, or somehow lead to, the succession of experience: it is that successive experiencing. The self does not experience a succession of events: it is the experience. To sit still is to see this unfold, in real time.

The unfolding is the sacred moment itself. As Harris points out in his talk, it would be easy to be misled by what appears to be religious language here; but the sacredness of the moment resides not in some imported framework of belief that conditions, or interprets, or redeems the time. It is sacred because it is real. It is all that can be real – all else is a memory of time past, or an anticipation of time future; and these are only dreams. The world of speculation is empty, as empty as the idea of a self. The one end is only present; it is all that is real.

Happy New Year!

To sit still in winter

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Today, in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s Winter Solstice, a day variously to reflect on the past year, to celebrate the season’s turning from darkness towards the light of the coming summer, and to draw together in the warmth we humans have learned to make against the long cold. It is tempting to locate its origins in the Last Glacial Maximum, when our ancestors must have been so acutely aware of their fragility in the face of the huge weight of time and climate that bore down on them, and sought with such longing for an assurance of this turning season.

Today is also the day the United Nations has set aside as World Meditation Day, celebrated for the first time this year. (Jochen Weber, writing for the Secular Buddhist Network, has an excellent and well-linked reflection on their website.)

Meditation, as far as we can tell from historical research, has been practised in something like its present form for at least 5000 years; the Winter Solstice has been celebrated, in ways we can recognise, at Neolithic sites like Newgrange and Slieve Gullion for roughly the same length of time.

To sit still in winter, to wait for the season’s turning, to watch for the coming of the light, must be one of the deepest instincts of humanity, going far back into the beginnings of our species, perhaps even of our old, old relatives from before we modern humans appeared. Sitting in my warm, lamplit room this evening I felt for a moment part of all this, no different from the long succession of humankind whose DNA still sings in my own blood; and something in me was thankful, in a way I hadn’t imagined, for warmth and life, and for the sweet succession of generations of women and men who have watched, just as I do, for the light.

Threads

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This question is proving interesting, and difficult. I resolve to pursue it night and day. I have a go – asking myself from time to time, in the midst of ordinary life, ‘What was I conscious of a moment ago?’

As I get used to the exercise, the response settles down to a pattern. I usually find several things; several candidates for things I might have been conscious of a moment ago. Sounds are the easiest bet. They hang on. They take time. When I light upon them, they always seem to have been going on for some time, and it feels as though I have been conscious of them. There is the sound of the cars outside in the distance. There’s the ticking of the clock. There’s the beating of my own heart. And then – oh goodness me – how could I have ignored that. There’s my breath. Surely I have been watching my breath, haven’t I?

Susan Blackmore, Zen and the Art of Consciousness

I’m sure that, in a sense, this is a familiar enough experience for most of us: to suddenly become aware, in the midst of practice, especially, of an ongoing sound – a clock chiming, a cat purring (both examples from Blackmore’s book) – coupled with the realisation that it has been going on for some time already. But when? When did we become aware? At the first stroke of the clock? Or when we noticed it, say at four strokes? If it was the former, why hadn’t it been the focus of the conscious mind? If the latter, what was going on before we noticed?

There is no answer, says [Daniel] Dennett. There is simply no way in which one could ever tell. Looking inside the brain won’t tell you, for the signals were being processed in the relevant bits of brain whichever way you describe it, and asking the person won’t tell you because she doesn’t know either. So it’s a difference that makes no difference. And what should we do with a difference that makes no difference? Forget it; accept that there is no answer to the question ‘What was I conscious of a moment ago?’ Can that really be right? …

[W]hen I look, I can find at least one, and often many, threads of things that I might have been conscious of a moment ago but which seem to have had no connection with each other. Who then was conscious of them? Surely someone was because they have that quality of having been listened to, having been stared at, having been felt or smelt or tasted – by someone. Was it me? Unless there were several mes at once, then no. Or is it that I am split up in reverse; that going backwards I can find lots of routes to the past? This is how it seems. Threads is the right word. From any point – from any now – I can look back and find these myriad threads. They feel perfectly real. They feel as though I was listening to that blackbird’s song, that drone of traffic, that distant hammering somewhere up the hill, the purring cat beside me. But each one has this peculiar quality…

I can go round and round, starting with the middle of the view out there, working in carefully towards myself in the centre, and there I find only the same old view, to start all over again. How did that happen? I was looking for the me that was looking and I found only the world. It’s a familiar enough trick, but easily forgotten. Look for the viewing self and find only the view. I am, it seems, the world I see.

Blackmore, ibid.

That, of course, is the crux of all this, the unimaginable but undeniable Istigkeit that we always try not to see: there is no self remembering, no inner seamstress patterning the threads. There is the living loveliness of just what is, nothing more. What is arises of itself, comes to be because that is what it is. Light strikes the water, sparkling instants. Mind perceives. Thoughts think themselves. Everything is as it is, acts according to itself. What else could it be? There is only what is, clear and pure as a raindrop on the window of – what? – mind? Only what is. That is all there is.

Invisible

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For a long time, since in fact before I formed any kind of regular contemplative practice, and was still very unsure of the relations between philosophy, spirituality and religion, I have been drawn towards being somehow invisible among my peers. And of course, over the years, my contemplative practice has only deepened that longing. The effects of practice on life are sometimes subtle, and they are not always obviously connected to any subjective experience on the part of the one practising. All this tends inevitably towards the eremitic.

As I have said here before, I think perhaps we should recognise the Einzelgänger or Einzelgängerin as a distinct personality type in themselves. I don’t mean by this a literal loner, nor a hermit in either the religious or the colloquial sense; but a contemplative who finds that they are temperamentally unsuited either for formal membership of some church or meeting, or for the particular relationship of personal discipleship; perhaps even for the commitment of active membership in some political or social movement. This may seem austere to a detached observer, but it doesn’t feel that way from the inside, as it were. It may even be a necessary discipline.

Oddly enough, I can’t seem to detach this eremitical instinct from an acute sense of the moral necessity of equality. It has never made sense to me that – often in religious just as much as in political contexts – some people were disadvantaged, often for reasons over which they had no control themselves, compared to their fellows. That the fact that someone was a woman, or Black, or poor, or gay, would have anything to do with the opportunities life presented has increasingly seemed to me morally obscene. In an interview with Andrew Copson, published in the recent What I Believe collection from Humanists UK, Kate Pickett says,

I’m always quite impressed by the way Quakers talk about it, they have a testimony towards equality. I think that’s the way I think about it as well. People get a bit bent out of shape when they talk about equality, saying things like: ‘We can never have equality, and can never truly be equal, it’s utopian.’ And to a certain extent, that’s true, but we can have more equality. And we can work towards reducing inequality gaps in various aspects. So we can think about working towards reducing gender pay gaps, for example, and that’s improving equality. And even if we don’t get to exactly the same level, then we’re still making progress.

Organisations – even sometimes the Quakers! – have inequality gaps. It’s inevitable: the mere organising of people into structural groupings has this effect. Maybe the radical inward equality imposed by the contemplative life cries out against even this; perhaps that is why the longing for stillness and solitude seems somehow to include a longing for equality?

Certainly this instinct – and it is an instinct far more than a decision – for Einsamkeit feels like a healthy instinct for a wholeness, a completion, that I have far too often neglected. The inwardly eremitic life doesn’t, it appears, have necessarily to involve physical isolation or any experiment in extreme living: it is a solitude of the heart, a calling to a necessary quiet.

Seasons

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The contemplative life has seasons. Perhaps that should come as no surprise – this life is as impermanent and changeable as any other – but it’s important to bear in mind. I call these variations in experience and inclination “seasons” rather than stages or phases, because although they are not strictly cyclical like the seasons of the year, they certainly don’t appear to me to be rungs on some kind of ladder of ascent, as so many spiritual traditions seem to suggest. I don’t think the spiritual life works like that; at least, it doesn’t for me.

One thing I do think worth remembering is that the seasons of the contemplative life are not measures of success or failure, not markers of progress to be charted, expected or evaluated. They are much more like changing weather than they are like stages in the growth of a plant or an animal. (This of course is why I dislike the “ladder” paradigm – it so easily leads to self evaluation according to some external, artificial scale or standard.) We may find we need to go back over and over to some areas of understanding before we finally “get it”; this is not a fault, but merely a necessary step on the path. Your sticking places may very well not be mine, of course, and it would be misleading – distressing or even dangerous – for us to compare our progress as if they should be.

So what do I mean by seasons? They are sometimes, I think, merely technical – matters of concentration, alertness, inward honesty – that might be compared to the fine motor skills developed by practising a musical instrument. At other times they seem more like stages in the Jungian idea of transformation – and as such may need to be revisited at different times, and in different orders. At times we may find we are struggling with the losses involved in impermanence; at other times it may simply be that we are plagued by painful memories, and the fear or anger or remorse they bring with them. These are vitally important things, and I don’t think we can just tell them, “Come back next month – I’m supposed to be working on my sense-impressions this week.”

We need, as always, to be gentle with ourselves as we sit. I truly don’t think that for most of us a warrior mentality, flogging ourselves through some kind of spiritual boot-camp, is constructive. (For a few it may perhaps be, I confess – there are almost infinitely different kinds of people – but I suspect they are few and far between.) Truly listening to our hearts – if that’s the right term – in the course of faithful, persistent practice seems to be a sure enough guide. Keeping our regular times and duration of practice is key: coming back to sit without avoiding the difficulties, yet not overstretching ourselves by overly extended practice, is the safest way I have found to navigate these passages.

Another point is the necessity of study: we will get on far better if we will only learn from those who have been this way before. Kathleen McDonald:

[The contemplative path] requires a slow and gradual process of listening to and reading explanations of the mind and the nature of things; thinking about and carefully analyzing this information; and finally transforming the mind through meditation.

I have made a very short list of books I have found helpful in another post; I’ll just say here that this is again an intensely personal matter. You will have your own list of favourite books, and it may very well prove to be useful to have some of them handy on a desk or table – or on your e-reader app – where you sit, for ready reference at the end of practice, before you get caught up in quotidian things again.

I should just say, before I forget, that it took me a long time to twig this matter of spiritual seasons; and it was for me a major insight when I did. It is so easy, especially if one is practising without a human guide or teacher to consult, to think that there is something wrong with one’s practice because things don’t remain the same, or because they’re not progressing quite the way one has been led to expect. Patience, gentleness, listening – that’s all we need; and the resolution, if it all gets too scary, to ask for help.

Surrender, again

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I find surrender a difficult thing to write about, even really to think about if it comes to that. To attempt to understand this call to relinquish will and intention in, and through, practice is to attempt to grasp what is, by definition, ungraspable. All we can do, it seems, is – as always – to sit still.

Just sitting in open awareness begins with breathing, obviously. And breathing, in itself, involves surrender. Unless we are deliberately choosing to breathe in and out, as an act of will, then it just happens. Sitting still, we watch it happen. It always does, just as it does when we are asleep – unless perchance we have died. And that, in an odd sense, is just the risk of surrender. We have to surrender to the autonomic function of breathing, to its steady beat even when we are asleep. We have to trust the inflow and outflow, the coming and going of the breath, to keep us alive for as long as our life lasts.

In just this way the coming to be and the ceasing of things continues: night and day, summer and winter, birth and death. They are just phases of the one way, two sides of the one, and to accord with the way is just to remain quiet and watch. Everything that comes to be rests in the ground of its becoming, but only when we let it be can we see this, can we ourselves rest in peace, in the ground of our own being at last.

Impermanence

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I realised not long ago that I have tended for most of my life – albeit unconsciously – to reckon the worth of things by how long they are likely to last; and this despite the fact that so many things I love and whose presence gives meaning to my own life – small plants, lively insects, the changing skies, the seasons of the year – are ephemeral by their very nature, and they last only moments, days or weeks or months, before reaching an end implicit in their merely being what they are. I love humans, too, I realised, for who they are not for what they might achieve; and humans don’t last long compared with trees, or with the rock formations that are such striking and ancient companions of ours in this part of the country.

The worth of something, as I had unthinkingly valued it, is its essence: the thing that exists, persists, being the thing itself. It is an illusion: phenomena, any phenomena, are empty, surely, of any such essence. They are merely what they are, and that in relation to all else that is, to the shifting patterns on the bright skin of the stream, “the ever-transforming patterns of the cosmos as a whole.” (Reninger) It’s clinging to this idea of essence that gives rise to our constant craving, our helpless longing for permanence that is the growth-point for the whole tragic enterprise of human pride – the error of Ozymandias.

We are frail, and temporary, and lovely; we are precious as all life is precious, and our loveliness, like the loveliness of all that lives, is in our fleetingness. The points of light on the sparkling water last an instant – their beauty is in that. Death is implicit in being born; life would not be possible without it, and it is a loyal friend to the living. All we need is to sit still, and watch the emptiness of separate things; the delicious freshness of impermanence itself will come by like the scent of flowers through an open window in summer. Death will come and sit on the end of our bed, and fill his pipe, and talk to us of life; and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

Simple presence

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Achieving or revealing spontaneous presence is not about striving or effort but about relaxing deeply into the natural state of mind. It’s like a river flowing effortlessly down a mountain—there’s no force or control, just a natural movement in harmony with gravity. When we stop trying to control or manipulate our thoughts and experiences, we allow awareness to flow naturally. By simply resting in the present moment, without grasping or pushing away, we recognize that this spontaneous presence is always there, like the river’s flow…

Achieving spontaneous presence is not about adding something new but about recognizing and resting in the innate clarity and awareness that is already there, ever-present, like the sun behind the clouds.

Pema Düddul, ‘Finding Presence: A teaching and practice on the Four Yogas of Dzogchen Semde’ in Tricycle Magazine, October 2024

This teaching carries so many echoes of shikantaza, of what we know of the simple practices of classical Taoism, that it reminds me of the essential plainness that seems to me the truest contemplative practice. I have long felt that the complexity of religiosity, with its rules and rituals and its levels of attainment (whether Christian or Buddhist or whatever else) is – at least for me – the enemy of the contemplative life.

Earlier this year I wrote:

Words, when it comes to spiritual things, are signs only in the sense we mean when we speak of hints and premonitions as “signs”, not in the sense of street signs, or signs on office doors in a hospital. They are not, by their very nature, precise and prescriptive; it is their very vagueness that allows them to be used at all, for they can do no more than offer us a glimpse into someone else’s experience – a window, if you like, into that which it is to be them.

We risk all manner of missteps when we conflate the term “spirituality” with concepts like religion, or the supernatural; and we risk worse when we consider it intrinsically opposed to science, or to critical thinking.

As I get older, it increasingly seems to me, perhaps counterintuitively, that religion itself only gets in the way of the spiritual life. Doctrine, scripture, tradition: they are beside the point, mere distractions. Elizabeth Reninger: “The only thing that needs to die is our mistaken belief in separation, the habit of seeing our human body-mind as existing separate from the ever-transforming patterns of the cosmos as a whole.”

Stillness, the open awareness of what simply is, would appear to be all that is needed: only to give up all of our effort and striving, and quite plainly and naturally rest in the vast openness of what is – which is all we ever were or could be. It really is that simple.

A gift?

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I have long had the strange sense that the contemplative life has some value, some gift for more than its practitioner. It is the most useless way to live; and yet it is in some obscure way essential. Why is this?

The title of the ancient Chinese classic the Tao Te Ching is usually translated as something like “the book of the way and its power”. Perhaps there is a clue there, without meaning to get too fey about it. In Chapter 23 of Charles Muller’s excellent online translation:

Therefore there is such a thing as aligning one’s actions with the Tao.
If you accord with the Tao you become one with it.
If you accord with virtue you become one with it.
If you accord with loss you become one with it.

The Tao accepts this accordance gladly.
Virtue accepts this accordance gladly.
Loss also accepts accordance gladly.

To become one with just what is, one is at one with both presence and loss, with being and not being. It doesn’t feel like anything; but sitting still, something moves. I don’t know what it is, but somehow it draws from the emptiness that is the way itself, the ground of what is and is not. Not known, it is most precious; not to be held, it is maybe the gift the world needs.