Tag Archives: contemplative

Amor fati

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The literal translation of the Latin phrase amor fati is “love of fate”; the Wikipedia article states simply, “It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary.” Though the phrase has come for many to be associated with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, it has its roots in the writings of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

For most of my adult life, I have had the obscure sense that there was a grain in the way things come to be, a natural falling into place that, if yielded to, would ultimately lead to the right end. At times, I have had no words for it, hardly dared to trust my own intuition; at other times I have sought, or been taught, to characterise it as the will of God, and my own role as that of surrender to that will. This, perhaps, is getting closer, as the Christian contemplative tradition has for many years understood, most clearly in the hesychast teachings of the Eastern church.

Over time, though, it has become clearer that – for me, at any rate – its most poignant expression is in the philosophy of the Tao. “The Tao is that from which one cannot deviate; that from which one can deviate is not the Tao.” (The Doctrine of the Mean, as quoted by Alan Watts) He goes on:

However, it must be clear from the start that Tao cannot be understood as “God” in the sense of the ruler, monarch, commander, architect, and maker of the universe. The image of the military and political overlord, or of a creator external to nature, has no place in the idea of Tao.

The great Tao flows… everywhere,

to the left and to the right,

All things depend upon it to exist,

and it does not abandon them.

To its accomplishments it lays no claim.

It loves and nourishes all things,

but does not lord it over them.

[Lao Tzu 34, tr. Watts]

Yet the Tao is most certainly the ultimate reality and energy of the universe, the Ground of being and nonbeing.

The Tao has reality and evidence, but no action and no form. It may be transmitted but cannot be received. It may be attained but cannot be seen. It exists by and through itself. It existed before heaven and earth, and indeed for all eternity. It causes the gods to be divine and the world to be produced. It is above the zenith, but is not high. It is beneath the nadir, but is not low. Though prior to heaven and earth, it is not ancient. Though older than the most ancient, it is not old.

[Chuang Tzu 6, tr. Fung Yu-Lan]

To “accord with the Tao,” then, is to drop back, sit still, pay attention. Cause and effect are the way things happen. They are one thing, really. The separation of the two words is quite artificial. There is a deep peace in knowing this, and more than a peace. Truly to embrace the coming-to-be of what comes to be is to love the way itself; and yet it is not something to be attained, not an achievement or an accomplishment. The path opens of itself. All one can do is be still.

Choiceless awareness

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[One] mindfulness meditation technique is termed choiceless awareness or bare awareness. In this technique, we begin by paying attention to the sensation of the breath (this settles the mind and body), but then the instruction is to let our attention rest on whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness. This is… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself. In the quotation that begins this chapter, Indian spiritual teacher and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti uses the word “freedom” to describe this awakening. As a meditation practice, choiceless awareness is similar to the Zen meditation technique known as shikantaza, which roughly translates as just sitting. I love the idea of just sitting, although for me, just lying down will do—which takes me to my number one rule regarding meditation: be flexible.

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

Gradually I have come to realise that the phrase choiceless awareness is not just yet another technical term for one technique among the many kinds of Buddhist or related meditation, but a vital descriptor of what actually happens when we sit in stillness. Choicelessness is the open and unreserved receiving of whatever arrives – be it bodily sensation, sound, thought, desire, emotion or whatever – as simply an arising within consciousness. It is the grounding of our own awareness in the ground of being itself. There is nothing else, nowhere to go, no thing to find.

Krishnamurti himself did not prescribe a practice, or technique, for achieving choiceless awareness; in fact he actively avoided doing so. He was strongly opposed to any suggestions that the path to this open awareness might be marked by stages of realisation: he believed that choice – in the sense of selecting any object of attention over any other – should just stop. When I first encountered the teachings of Krishnamurti, in my twenties, I found this fiercely frustrating. I thought I needed instructions, techniques, a programme. “Just tell me what to do!” (Perhaps this was one reason among several that I so readily fell in with the Christian contemplative tradition when I encountered it in person a few years later.) But, unsurprisingly, Krishnamurti was the wiser…

This journey I am proposing that we take together is not to the moon or even to the stars. The distance to the stars is much less than the distance within ourselves. The discovery of ourselves is endless, and it requires constant inquiry, a perception which is total, an awareness in which there is no choice. This journey is really an opening of the door to the individual in his relationship with the world.

Jiddu Krishnamurti: Madras, 7th Public Talk, December 13, 1959 Collected Works, Vol. XI

As Toni Bernhard suggests in the passage above, shikantaza is perhaps one way to square the circle. Brad Warner puts it like this:

When we do nothing but practice sitting still for a certain amount of time each day, it becomes clear that past and future are an illusion. There is no past. There is no future. There is only this moment. This one tiny moment. That’s all there is.

And in this moment what can you attain? You have what you have right now. Maybe in the future you’ll get something. But that’s not now.

Attainment always happens in the future or in the past. It’s always a matter of comparing the state at one moment to the state at another moment. But it makes no sense to compare one moment to any other moment. Every moment is complete unto itself. It contains what it contains and lacks what it lacks. Or perhaps it lacks nothing because each moment is the entire universe.

Brad Warner, The Other Side of Nothing: The Zen Ethics of Time, Space and Being

A window on what is

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I find the study of phenomenology in my amateur way endlessly fascinating; it is all too easy to follow it down philosophical rabbit-holes, as I have done in several posts recently. But the contemplative life, related though it is to the practice of philosophy (as seen so clearly in some Buddhist schools like Yogācāra) deals in itself not with discursive thought but with direct experience; which is one of the reasons I have for so long been drawn to the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition of hesychasm, or to the Pure Land Buddhist practice of the Nembutsu – not primarily because of the nature of these practices themselves (repetitive prayer) but because of their extreme simplicity.

Now, phenomenal experience is sometimes characterised as a tunnel (Metzinger), a “benign user illusion” (Dennett, glossed so brilliantly by Susan Blackmore) or a mindstream (Yogācāra). The idea generally seems to be that what we experience from moment to moment is a transparent, essentially functional but ultimately illusory interface that the mind provides between reality and our (equally illusory) experience of a permanent self. Reality itself is far richer and stranger, and the self is “but one of the countless manifestations of the Tao” (Ho (PDF)). To say these things can of course provoke in the reader a myriad of misunderstandings, and to realise them oneself can cause a temporary existential disruption that is horribly like a classical bad trip. Misleading though many of its Perennialist assumptions may be, one of the best accounts of what is at stake must be Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. Donald Hoffman finds the same position in Erwin Schrödinger:

[Schrödinger’s] position boils down to this: what we call the physical world is the result of a process that Schrödinger called “objectivation”, i.e. the transformation of the one self-world (Atman=Brahman) into something that can be readily conceptualized and studied objectively, hence something that is fully void of subjective qualities. In the theory of conscious agents this amounts to the creation of “interfaces”. Such interfaces simplify what is going on in order to allow you to act efficiently. Good interfaces hide complexity. They do not let you see reality as it is but only as it is useful to you. What you call the “physical world” is merely a highly-simplified representation of non-dual consciousness.

Donald Hoffman, Schrödinger and the Conscious Universe (IAI News)

Last year I attempted, as I periodically do, to explain to myself how this paradoxical relationship between overthinking and contemplative practice could possibly work. I concluded:

I have written elsewhere of the profound stillness I experienced recovering from childhood meningitis; in many ways, my contemplative practice over the last 40-odd years has been an attempt, scattered as it has at times been, to recover that stillness.

These things are nothing new. The Taoist tradition beginning between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, and the Chan Buddhist writings in the early centuries of the present era, are full of wanderings “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown” (Chia Tao). And the central tradition of (at least Zen) Buddhist meditation consists of “just sitting” (shikantaza).

The falling away of purposeful action, in itself the very simplest thing, seems one of the hardest to achieve – perhaps because it isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposeful action. This appears to me to be the snag with so many programmes of practice involving concentration, visualisation, ritual and so on.

The paradox inherent in practice, any practice, only begins to thin out in sheer pointlessness, either the pointlessness of a repeated phrase such as the Jesus Prayer, or the Nembutsu, or of merely sitting still. The power of shikantaza is simply powerlessness, giving up, complete acceptance of what is without looking for anything. When you cease to try to open the doors, they open by themselves, quite quietly. Not looking, the path opens.

Humanism and spirituality

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It is all too easy to find arguments that spirituality is too compromised a word to be used in the context of any discussion of humanism, or indeed atheism. As Marilyn Mason writes,

To sum up, “spiritual” and “spirituality” almost always require explanation if they are to communicate clearly, and so I think that it would be better to abandon them altogether, and leave them to the religious. If we are really talking about emotions or emotional development or emotional literacy, or aesthetic awareness or experiences, or love of nature or humanity, or love and goodness, or hope, why just not say so?

On the other hand, many would argue that spirituality is far too useful a word to be discarded merely because it has uncomfortable associations for some people. Jeremy Rodell:

Even if we accept that Humanists have a “spiritual dimension”, it can still be argued that we shouldn’t use the word “spiritual” because of its religious connotations and lack of clear definition.

The snag is that no other word will do as well if we want to communicate what we mean. Terms such as emotion, aesthetic awareness, love of nature, or simply love, goodness or hope simply don’t do the job. Just because it’s used for everything from the experiences of Catholic nuns to New Age gurus, doesn’t mean it’s off-limits to us. In fact atheists are uniquely positioned to understand that all of these people are really talking about the same thing, but they interpret it through the filter of their (to us irrational) beliefs. We shouldn’t allow the religious to ban a useful word from our vocabulary.

André Comte-Sponville believes that it is vital to reclaim the word:

Spirituality is far too important a matter to be left to fundamentalists. Tolerance is far too precious a possession to be confused with indifference or laxity. Nothing could be worse than letting ourselves be deadlocked into a confrontation between the fanaticism of some – no matter what religion they lay claim to – and the nihilism of others. Far better to combat both, without either conflating them or falling into their respective traps. The name of this combat is the separation of church and state. It remains for atheists to invent the spirituality that goes with it…

Atheists have as much spirit as everyone else; why would they be less interested in spiritual life?

The purpose of this blog is, as its subtitle suggests, to discuss contemplative spirituality and practice, so you would expect me to come down on the side of retaining such a useful word. But there is a more important reason to be writing this post, I think.

Sam Harris, in a passage I’ve quoted here often before, writes:

I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences are false. But the fact [is] that… [t]he human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover.

Later in the same book, he continues:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Susan Blackmore (an atheist and patron of Humanists UK) has written an excellent little book, Consciousness, A Very Short Introduction, where she puts her finger on precisely the point at issue here:

What is consciousness? This may sound like a simple question but it is not. Consciousness is at once the most obvious and the most difficult thing we can investigate. We seem either to have to use consciousness to investigate itself, which is a slightly weird idea, or to have to extricate ourselves from the very thing we want to study. No wonder philosophers have struggled for millennia with the concept; and for long periods scientists refused even to study it. The good news is that, in the 21st century, ‘consciousness studies’ is thriving. Psychology, biology, and neuroscience have reached the point where they are ready to confront some tricky questions: What does consciousness do? Could we have evolved without it? Is consciousness an illusion? What do we mean by consciousness, anyway?

This does not mean that the mystery has gone away. Indeed, it is as deep as ever. The difference now is that we know enough about the brain to confront the problem head on. How on earth can the electrical firing of millions of tiny brain cells produce this—my private, subjective, conscious experience?

This is the question which underlies all my own searching, and while I am delighted to leave the neuroscience to the professionals – like Blackmore and Harris – those of us who have devoted a large part of our lives to contemplative practice need to offer our small contributions, from the inside, as it were. It is not only relevant, I think, to contribute our moments of vastness and wonder, but to bear witness to the daily process of insight that our steady work entails.

Earlier this year I wrote,

Sitting quietly – just noticing whatever appears in the field of consciousness, without having to label it or evaluate it, without having to either focus one’s attention on it or wrench one’s attention away from it – is perhaps the freshest, most peaceful thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to: what is, is, and there’s nothing that needs to be done about it…

The practice of choiceless awareness… that I have been describing is not a kind of daydream, or an unusual state of consciousness even: it is a quiet but exceptionally alert quality of mind, without straining after attention either…

This quality of stillness, of just noticing, is such a simple thing that it would be easy to dismiss it as inconsequential. It is not. It seems important, somehow… that someone is prepared to do this, and perhaps to ‘fess up to doing it on a regular basis. Maybe someone has to…

Atheism and metaphysics

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Metaphysics can seem to be a rather slippery term. On the one hand it can be taken to be “the study of the most general features of reality, including existence, objects and their properties, possibility and necessity, space and time, change, causation, and the relation between matter and mind” (Wikipedia) but on the other, being the study of, in one sense, how things come to be, it is too easily conflated with religious creation myths, or with cosmologies intricately involved with religious doctrines of causality and phenomenology.

But “according to modern scientific knowledge, mental events and processes presuppose the existence and reality of material things. Thinking, for example, implies the existence of a bird or a mammal with a brain. Or a momentary event, such as the proverbial cat sitting on the mat, presupposes the real existence of the cat, the mat, the earth under the mat, as well as a real human observer of the event.” (Morris)

But for me, that which is intended by using the term “ground of being” (Tillich) is precisely that which can be known directly as “no-thing” in contemplation. I am not talking here of an idea, a common factor in a Huxley-like perennial philosophy, but of a repeated and very direct experience of what Quakers have referred to as “the light”, as described for instance by Emilia Fogelklou (she writes in the third person): “Without visions or the sound of speech or human mediation, in exceptionally wide-awake consciousness, she experienced the great releasing inward wonder. It was as if the ’empty shell’ burst. All the weight and agony, all the feeling of unreality dropped away. She perceived living goodness, joy, light like a clear, irradiating, uplifting, enfolding, unequivocal reality from deep inside.”

This kind of experience can of course not be described terribly clearly, nor can it be communicated directly, and any attempt is likely to fall into superlatives such as Fogelklou’s. But the experience is as real and direct as any sensory experience, perhaps more so, and it has a curious undeniable quality, a great lifting and healing of the heart. I use Tillich’s term for it not because I have any particular attraction for that as an idea, but because it seems to get closer than anything else I have read to the encounter itself. There is a visual analogue that sometimes occurs in meditation – and which can lead to the experience I am trying to describe – of the visual field itself, seen through closed eyes, extending suddenly through and beneath what ought to have been the observing mind, but which is no longer there.

Now, I have long enough experience in contemplative practice to know that experiences are not things to hang onto, still less to seek after, and I would not be happy if any words of mine sent anyone on a quest for experiential chimeras. Yet the experience itself, with all its indelible affect, has occurred so often over the years, since childhood, that I find myself referring to it over and over again, and it remains for me a kind of lodestone.

Are these metaphysical experiences, insights? Are they therefore somehow at variance with the fundamental insight of atheism that the idea of another, supernatural, layer to existence, within which the human self can somehow transcend, or survive, the electrochemical apparatus of the central nervous system, is illusory? I don’t think so. Daniel Dennett’s insight into human phenomenology as a “benign user illusion” coincides well with the Buddhist conception of things as empty of intrinsic existence (śūnyatā) – all of which seems to me to be a formal expression of what I have come to experience as “no-thing.” Andreas Müller:

All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost…

What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.

Cause and effect

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Things have consequences; they are themselves consequences. Sometimes it’s easy to forget this – sometimes things seem merely to be chance, or else they are the result of someone’s action, out of their – or God’s – “sovereign will”. But those ideas are never true. The “chance” occurrence had causes. The cliff fall came about because of heavy rain falling onto fissured and unstable ground – someone was injured because they hadn’t heard the Coastguard warnings, and were walking too close to the base of the cliffs…

Fate? Karma? The will of God? What do these things mean, except attempts to explain to ourselves how things beyond our control could happen to us, or to those we care about? Karma actually seems to me to come closest: the idea that cause and effect are ineluctable – what is sown will be reaped. Karma, though, is usually more naturally understood in its human, ethical dimension:

The Buddha defined karma as intention; whether the intention manifested itself in physical, vocal or mental form, it was the intention alone which had a moral character: good, bad or neutral […] The focus of interest shifted from physical action, involving people and objects in the real world, to psychological process.

Richard Gombrich, Buddhist Precept and Practice.

The Chinese concept of the Tao – “[t]he Tao can be roughly thought of as the ‘flow of the universe’, or as some essence or pattern behind the natural world that keeps the Universe balanced and ordered” (Wikipedia) – seems to me closer to the metaphysical implications. To harmonise one’s will with the Tao, to accept the way things come to be, is to cease to swim against the current, to follow “the watercourse way” (Watts).

The Stoics frequently talked about ‘living in agreement with nature’. This, in part, means that it is within our nature to be social, cooperative beings who want the best for others, and for people around us to thrive. Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, said, ‘All things are parts of one single system, which is called nature; the individual life is good when it is in harmony with nature.’

Bridgid Delaney, Reasons Not to Worry: How to be Stoic in chaotic times.

To live in harmony with nature in this sense requires a willing abdication of knowledge and willfulness. Alan Watts again:

[P]eople try to force issues only when not realizing that it can’t be done—that there is no way of deviating from the watercourse of nature. You may imagine that you are outside, or separate from, the Tao and thus able to follow it or not follow; but this very imagination is itself within the stream, for there is no way other than the Way. Willy-nilly, we are it and go with it. From a strictly logical point of view, this means nothing and gives us no information. Tao is just a name for whatever happens, or, as Lao-tzu put it, “The Tao principle is what happens of itself [tzu-jan].”

This is of course, as I suggested in a recent post here, very close to what has been called, in Christian contexts, “quietism” – which has widely been criticised as heretical, due to its rejection of doctrines around free will and supernatural determinism.

But (and I quoted her in the linked post) Jennifer Kavanagh explains:

Welcoming uncertainty, embracing it, does not mean commending ignorance or trying not to know; it’s not about the rejection of knowledge. It’s not about the negation of the intellect, but its enhancement. It is a recognition that cognitive thinking cannot reach everything, an understanding that the scientific and spiritual approaches are not incompatible, just different, complementary, dimensions. Not either/or but both/and.

The contemplative embracing of this principle is perhaps most clearly seen in the practice of shikantaza, just sitting, watching for the way to open:

Zazen or enlightenment is not about finding a particular state of mind, for all states of mind are fleeting and cannot be relied upon. When you know who is sitting, you know sitting Buddha. This expression is a bit strange; why not say sitting like a Buddha? I prefer to say sitting Buddha because there is nobody sitting like a Buddha; there is just sitting Buddha. That Buddha never stops sitting, but we must awaken to her presence–not that sitting Buddha is either male or female…

A theme I return to again and again is to just do the work that comes to you. Such an attitude is open-ended in the way that life itself is open. If you give yourself to the way, the way appears and that way is always changing.

Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha.

Atheism and consciousness

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What is consciousness? This may sound like a simple question but it is not. Consciousness is at once the most obvious and the most difficult thing we can investigate. We seem either to have to use consciousness to investigate itself, which is a slightly weird idea, or to have to extricate ourselves from the very thing we want to study. No wonder philosophers have struggled for millennia with the concept; and for long periods scientists refused even to study it. The good news is that, in the 21st century, ‘consciousness studies’ is thriving. Psychology, biology, and neuroscience have reached the point where they are ready to confront some tricky questions: What does consciousness do? Could we have evolved without it? Is consciousness an illusion? What do we mean by consciousness, anyway?

This does not mean that the mystery has gone away. Indeed, it is as deep as ever. The difference now is that we know enough about the brain to confront the problem head on. How on earth can the electrical firing of millions of tiny brain cells produce this—my private, subjective, conscious experience?

(Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction)

In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism and enactivism, in the mind–body problem.

(Wikipedia)

Confronted with the luminous intricacies of being human, it is easy to see why dualism is so attractive to us. It not only allows us to ignore the issue of how brains might produce consciousness – in this view they don’t, not directly at least – but a separate, detachable, immaterial self can transcend a finite human life span, go off on out-of-body adventures, communicate mind-to-mind, and all manner of other handy things. But what could it be, this supernatural plug-in person? Of what could it be constituted, and by whom or what? How could the data connection function between it and the physical brain? These questions are at least as hard as trying to understand how that brain might give rise to subjective experience – much harder perhaps, it seems to me.

We know from tragic cases of brain injury, disease, and surgical intervention just how profoundly consciousness, and the sense of self, are affected by gross changes to the physical structure of the brain (Blackmore,  ibid., pp. 25ff.). It seems obvious to me then, as a layman, that my own subjectivity is, after all, a result – however subtle – of electrochemical processes within my own nervous system, and that when those processes cease, as they will when I die, so that subjectivity will cease also.

But this is not a crude oversimplification, nor a bad thing in itself. It is just how things are, to the best of our understanding. The human brain is a structure of mind-boggling intricacy (it is estimated that there are around 86 billion neurons in the average brain, each neuron of which connects to about 1,000 others). It seems to me entirely feasible that the human personality and consciousness could arise from such vast computing power. But how this comes about remains, still, the mystery.

I take it to be axiomatic, therefore, that our notions of meaning, morality, and value presuppose the actuality of consciousness (or its loss) somewhere. If anyone has a conception of meaning, morality, and value that has nothing to do with the experience of conscious beings, in this world or in a world to come, I have yet to hear of it. And it would seem that such a conception of value could hold no interest for anyone, by definition, because it would be guaranteed to be outside the experience of every conscious being, now and in the future.

The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character in this moment—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in the first place. Although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our being itself. That doesn’t leave much scope for conventional religious beliefs, but it does offer a deep foundation for a contemplative life. Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly or not discovered at all.

(Sam Harris, Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion)

This is one of the things that contemplative practice so clearly demonstrates: all that we know, or feel, or perceive, takes place in consciousness. In choiceless awareness all things can be seen directly to arise in consciousness: the rising and falling of my chest, the warm cooing of the wood pigeons in the trees behind the garden, an idea for a blog post, the grumble of a bus leaving the stop outside the gate, the ache in my knee. All these and more appear in consciousness – where else could they appear? – and my only connection with them is in that appearing. Even the ones that affect me directly, like the breeze through the open window, that is beginning to cool as evening comes on, I only know about as their effects on me – my cooling skin – appear in my awareness.

To remain still, not seeking or holding, within the bright field of awareness, the isness of all that arises in my mind is not other than the isness of things in themselves: the open ground in which things arise, and pass.

Atheism and quietism

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Quietism is a term with an odd and surprisingly contentious history. It is used of both a tendency in philosophy and a direction within Christian contemplative thought and practice. (You can find well- linked Wikipedia articles on the philosophy here, and the contemplative term here.)

But I believe the insight underlying both these Western traditions of stillness and unknowing can be found far farther back in history.

Chao-Chou [Zhaozhou Congshen] asked, “What is the Tao?”

The master [Nan-ch’üan] replied, “Your ordinary consciousness is the Tao.”

“How can one return into accord with it?”

“By intending to accord you immediately deviate.”

“But without intention, how can one know the Tao?”

“The Tao,” said the master, “belongs neither to knowing nor to not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it’s like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?”

(quoted by Alan Watts in Tao: The Watercourse Way)

In the Zen practice of shikantaza (just sitting) there is nothing to achieve: no particular state of mind, no exercise of concentration, nothing to get rid of. In doing nothing there is perfect freedom.

None of this requires a supernatural dimension at all; that fact seems to have been one of the reasons Christian quietism was condemned as heretical. Unknowing is a fundamental admission, the very underpinning of scepticism. Stevie Wonder wrote: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer – superstition ain’t the way…” Jennifer Kavanagh:

Welcoming uncertainty, embracing it, does not mean commending ignorance or trying not to know; it’s not about the rejection of knowledge. It’s not about the negation of the intellect, but its enhancement. It is a recognition that cognitive thinking cannot reach everything, an understanding that the scientific and spiritual approaches are not incompatible, just different, complementary, dimensions. Not either/or but both/and.

Unknowing, and the abandonment of the need to know, to possess knowledge, is in a sense the gate to the liminal lands I wrote about in my last post. It is also the starting point of the scientific method, and the heart’s defence against all kinds of creeds.

Liminal lands

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There are always liminal lands, out beyond the predictions of common sense or myth, where the mind encounters places strangely common to human experience. Jungians would call them archetypal, perhaps; they crop up, for instance – often in passing – in fantastic fiction. A few examples might be CS Lewis’ Narnia (the Shribble Marshes), Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea (Osskil), Michael Moorcock’s other London (Jerry Cornelius’ Notting Hill), the American Southwest of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger sequence.

But sometimes they exist in everyday time and space. Lucy Pollock (the emphasis is mine):

At the pumping station, far out on the liminal land through which the river flows, the dog and I turn for home. The fields now are lush with flowering grasses, but for weeks in the winter they will be submerged and this track will become a narrow causeway across the floodplain.

My rage abates. Of course we need science and biotechnology and billions of data points, as we seek to improve the lives of older people, our future selves. But side by side with the science we need a deep and abiding understanding of what it means to be human.

I have encountered such places myself. Much of my earlier writing had to do with them, and their strange coexistence between mind and place: the Wye Valley, the worked-out coal country along the River Browney, Western Park in Leicester. There have been darker places too, since then; like the high grounds above Kimmeridge Bay, home to PD James’ The Black Tower, or the post-UKAEA wasteland of Winfrith Heath. But yours will be different again, like Lucy Pollock’s: places between, times that do not quite align.

Contemplative practice has, in itself, nothing to do with such things. And yet the deep instincts – I’m tempted to call them mystical, even though the word has so many unhelpful connotations – that draw people to the contemplative life – as to the methodologies of psychonautics – are human instincts. Might it not be that these same instincts are themselves the door to this fundamental way of being human – to the liminal lands – since they are themselves in a way reflections of, or reflected in, the silent illumination of the contemplative condition itself?

Silence (iii) Listening to woodlice

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Contradictions have always existed in the soul of [individuals]. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Part 2

One of the striking effects of long-continued practice is the discovery that the continual churning of thoughts need not be addressed, need not even be opposed or counteracted. Questions need not be answered; contradictions need not, as Merton saw, be resolved. Ultimately, there doesn’t even need to be a conscious letting go (as in centering prayer): all that needs to be done is to observe, very gently, the arising of a thought, the impulse to respond, but softly to return to the breath, to the sound of a distant train passing in the cutting under the bridge, another breath…

There is such a dear freshness in this kind of silence, in the very simplicity of it, the ordinariness of what is. Susan Blackmore writes that on retreat in the Welsh mountains once,

I remember sitting there one evening with a group of other novice meditators, struggling to get comfortable, sitting cross-legged on my cushion and looking down at the bare wall in front of me in the standard Zen fashion, when [the retreat director] said that our minds should be so calm that we would hear a woodlouse crawling across the floor. Somehow this stuck with me and I wanted to be able to hear that woodlouse.

Listening to woodlice: that’s all it is about, really, in one sense. The quiet step of a woodlouse walking across a wooden floor in Wales, the Bristol train rumbling under the bridge just down the road here, the rise and fall of my chest, this year’s robin trying out his song. This is enough; what else could there be?