Tag Archives: contemplative

Secular or supernatural?

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As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, the word “spirituality” can seem a slippery one. For some, spirituality necessarily implies the supernatural, and our imagined relations with that realm, for good or ill. For others (myself included) it “centers on the ‘deepest values and meanings by which people live'”. (Wikipedia: Spirituality)

Secular spirituality is the adherence to a spiritual philosophy without adherence to a religion. Secular spirituality emphasizes the inner peace of the individual, rather than a relationship with the divine. Secular spirituality is made up of the search for meaning outside of a religious institution; it considers one’s relationship with the self, others, nature, and whatever else one considers to be the ultimate. Often, the goal of secular spirituality is living happily and/or helping others.

According to the American philosopher Robert C. Solomon, “spirituality is coextensive with religion and it is not incompatible with or opposed to science or the scientific outlook. Naturalized spirituality is spirituality without any need for the ‘other‐worldly’. Spirituality is one of the goals, perhaps the ultimate goal, of philosophy.” [Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life]

(Wikipedia: Secular Spirituality)

So what is the supernatural, and what is wrong with seeking to establish – or recognise – relations with it? The supernatural is generally taken to imply a realm or system transcending material nature, the locale of some kind or kinds of divine, magical, or ghostly entities; revealing, or thought to reveal, some power beyond scientific or natural comprehension. There is, it seems to me, little or no evidence for such a sphere. (Susan Blackmore discusses this at length in Seeing Myself : What Out-of-body Experiences Tell Us About Life, Death and the Mind, chapters 2 and 15 especially.) But spirituality is another matter. The search for meaning, and, in contemplative practice, the direct experience of that meaning, is perhaps the most important thing I have encountered. For the umpteenth time here, I think I need to quote Sam Harris’ brilliant summary:

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.

The eagle-eyed among my readers will have already spotted the slightly edited strapline to this blog’s title: “Secular contemplative spirituality…” It just seemed time to make that clear.

What’s in a name?

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Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points. Does it point beyond itself to that transcendental reality, or does it lend itself too easily to becoming no more than an idea in your head that you believe in, a mental idol?

The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God. Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim exclusive possession of Being. It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am that. So it is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

We humans still have much of our tribal ancestry hanging around: we tend to feel lost and unsafe unless we can identify as part of something larger than ourselves. When I was a teenager it might be whether you were a mod or a rocker; some identify strongly with others of their own race; very often it is a religious identification, sometimes zoomed-in to which actual congregation or meeting one belongs to, or which particular doctrinal flavour one adheres to.

These affiliations are tremendously sticky, in terms of social psychology, which perhaps explains in part why people find it so difficult to distance themselves from cults, however pernicious. They don’t only consist in feeling warm fuzzies for those just like us; they all too often involve feeling anything but warm fuzziness for those who are different – “othering” them. They provide us with a secure identity, with protection against those suspicious others, with a home and a community.

All such communities have badges. They may be visual (as with the mods and rockers) or audible (shibboleths); they may be emotional or conceptual, but they work. (Even those whose practice is dedicated to the realisation of the illusory nature of the self can unthinkingly fall into tribal identification – the vipassana lot, or the Pure Land ones, Sōtō Zen or Rinzai.) Tragically, these identifications can even be projected onto a deity or a metaphysical conceit, and then we really are in trouble: “My God is the only true God; yours is a heretical invention!”

Words are sometimes at the very heart of these identifications, and we don’t realise it. I recall a conversation over lunch with a friend some months ago, where I was trying to explain why I wasn’t comfortable any longer using the word “God”. I said that for me the word gave entirely the wrong impression if used of the metaphysical ground. “God” implied for me a being, so that one could say, “Look – there’s God, over there at the table by the door!” But she is a Catholic; of course she uses “God” to define a finite entity, even if the Catechism of the Catholic Church says he is a mystery (CCC 230).

Eckhart Tolle uses the word Being to speak of the metaphysical ground, just as Meister Eckhart used Istigkeit, or Paul Tillich “Ground of Being”. Some avoid using any term to refer to the ground: things exist, they say, what more do we need? But at the end of it all, is isness. I have to call it something, even if it is ineffable.

Am I trying to avoid identification altogether? Why? I admit that since childhood I’ve never been all that comfortable with being a part of something, especially a something, like a religion or a political party, that requires right attitudes, right speaking, right thinking as well as right (moral) action. However close I feel to so much Buddhist teaching, and no matter how immense the gratitude and respect I feel for so many Buddhist teachers, I am not a Buddhist. The same applies to Taoism, contemplative Christianity, or any other community of practice. After all these years perhaps I am just happier out on the borderlines, in the saltmarshes of the spirit.

Wandering home

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The mind wanders. Of course it does. As Louis Sokoloff discovered as long ago as the late 1950s, the brain never stops its processing, and if it is not actively engaged in some task or another it wanders. Where? Robert Wright explains:

As for where the mind wanders to: well, lots of places, obviously, but studies have shown that these places are usually in the past or the future; you may ponder recent events or distant, strong memories; you may dread upcoming events or eagerly anticipate them; you may strategize about how to head off some looming crisis or fantasize about romancing the attractive person in the cubicle next to yours. What you’re generally not doing when your mind is wandering is directly experiencing the present moment.

To recognise this fact, clearly and without judgement or any attempt at inward coercive control, is one of the first tasks of meditation, especially vipassana meditation. The wanderingness of the mind has a name: the default mode network (DMN); defined, in Wikipedia, as “a large-scale brain network… best known for being active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering.”

Wright continues (above):

In one sense it’s not hard to quiet your default mode network: just do something that requires concentration. Do a crossword puzzle or try to juggle three tennis balls. Until you get to a point where juggling is second nature, you probably won’t be fantasizing about the attractive person in the cubicle next to yours.

What’s hard is to abandon the default mode network when you’re not doing much of anything—like, say, when you’re sitting in a meditation hall with your eyes closed. That’s why you try to focus on the breath: the mind needs some object of focus to wean it from its habitual meandering.

I have found that it is foolishly easy to characterise the default mode network as somehow the enemy, not only during meditation itself but when one catches oneself, instead of mindfully shaving, or washing up, instead doing the task on autopilot, while the mind goes off on any of those fruitless missions Wright lists. It’s infuriating!

Needless to say, stamping one’s foot, or calling oneself names, does no good at all. It is tempting to use one of the well-worn tools like the Nembutsu or the Jesus Prayer, which are not only employed in formal contemplative practice, but can be useful as “arrow prayers”, to borrow an old Christian expression, in order to damp down the wandering mind. But – to replace the pointless ponderings and fantasies of the DMN with an all but unconsciously uttered phrase is possibly not all that much of an improvement, regardless of how one feels about the content of that phrase.

If the point in question is to pay attention – to do things carefully and consciously, with full awareness – then a quite different approach is needed. Sam Harris:

The quality of mind cultivated in vipassana is almost always referred to as “mindfulness,” and the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial. There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant…

Mindfulness is a translation of the Pali word sati. The term has several meanings in the Buddhist literature, but for our purposes the most important is “clear awareness.” …

There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of passion—a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body—thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant. One of the great strengths of this technique of meditation, from a secular point of view, is that it does not require us to adopt any cultural affectations or unjustified beliefs. It simply demands that we pay close attention to the flow of experience in each moment.

The cultivation of mindfulness as a doorway to choiceless awareness, more than merely as a  way to reduce anxiety or depression, or to improve task-oriented concentration, is a practice shared by many spiritual disciplines, but expressed (and developed) most clearly in vipassana and in shikantaza.

Viewed from this perspective the footling of the default mode network is perhaps no longer an embarrassing impediment, but an unexpected ally. Once we have become used to spotting its activities in formal meditation, it becomes easier and easier to recognise when it attempts to hijack our everyday activities. And once recognised, it can become, paradoxically, a welcome beacon back to clear attention, a seamark to the open ground of presence wherever we begin.

All by itself

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The way gives them life; Virtue rears them; Things give them shape; Circumstances bring them to maturity. Therefore the myriad creatures all revere the way and honour virtue. Yet the way is revered and virtue honoured not because this is decreed by any authority but because it is natural for them to be treated so.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (51)

This passage, among others, has given rise to the Taoist concept of ziran, “just-so-ness” (Suzuki). The way goes on; to be truly human is to walk in the way, to “accord with the Tao”: “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.” (Tao Te Ching tr. Muller).

It is so simple, but how can it be done? Like Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teaching on choiceless awareness, it can be frustrating to read words like this, with little or no indication of a practice. (There isn’t one in either Krishnamurti or in the Tao Te Ching.) I have often written of shikantaza, the Sōtō Zen practice of “just sitting”, in its simplicity and quiet; but I have also found myself drawing parallels with the Eastern Orthodox practice of hesychasm, and with the Pure Land practice of the Nembutsu. Both of these can of course be seen as a variety of prayer, and many of their practitioners would argue strongly that this is so. But the repetition of a short phrase, either the Jesus Prayer or the Nembutsu, has a quality of practice that is not quite expressed either by the word “prayer” or the word “mantra”, as I understand it.

Let me try and explain. The Nembutsu in particular, often transliterated “Namo Amida Bu”, is usually translated, “I take refuge in Amitābha Buddha”. Amitābha is a compound of the Sanskrit words amita (“without bound, infinite”) and ābhā (“light, splendour”). The recitation of the Nembutsu is seen, in Jōdo Shinshū, as the practitioner’s response to tariki (“other power”) – the power of Amitābha, sometimes expressed as simply “the way things are”. The practitioner does not cause anything by their practice, nor do they plead for anything to be done for them: they merely acknowledge its having been done. They “accord with the way”. As Shinran, the founder of Jōdo Shinshū, wrote:

For myself, I do not have even a single disciple. For if I brought people to say the nembutsu through my own efforts, then they might be my disciples. But it is indeed preposterous to call persons “my disciples” when they say the nembutsu having received the working of Amida.

The beauty, it seems to me, of practices such as hesychasm and Nembutsu is their extreme simplicity, coupled with their explicit renunciation of any sense that it is the practitioner’s hard work that is at stake in the process of awakening.

(It’s important, too, to recognise that, despite all our acceptance of the way, of “other power”, this is not a way of passivity – an accusation often levelled at Christian Quietists from the C12 Beguines right through to William Pollard and Francis Frith among C19 Quakers! To walk in the way may at times be active indeed; the point being to walk in accordance with the way, not to cease walking altogether!)

It seems to me that any practice, like its practitioner, needs simply to disappear in contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. Enter a practice of total simplicity and poverty of intent, such as either the shikantaza, “just sitting”, or the Nembutsu – the total “hands-off” (shinjin) entrusting of oneself to the way.

Be still

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Everything is because of something. Every cause is the effect of a cause. It goes on. That we do know. It goes on. There is no such thing as “the same”.

Time seems to be like this – it is just what we call the succession of things, the order of cause and effect. The night sky is like this too. The unchanging stars are no such thing. They come and go, live and grow, change and die, and the star nurseries of the unthinkable nebulae bear more – it’s just that we are such frail and transient scraps of life we don’t see it, outside of the great observatories, the university astrophysics departments.

Jane Hirschfield once said, “Zen pretty much comes down to three things – everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.”

When we pay attention, when we start awake in the midst of the dream, we can see it – and the cold of the vast stellar winds touches for a moment our warmth and our littleness.

We are born to see things, hear things, touch things. Be still.

Among the points of light that come to be, that which does not seems dark; dark to all our senses, dark to all we can think.

Be still. Only in the stillness that underlies thought, that precedes perception, can we see that the glittering changes are the passage of things, like wavelets across the deep pond. The wavelets are water, but the water is boundless. The points of light are only light. All that is, that comes to be and then passes into something else, is. Before  (through, beneath, among) the beings, the ground.

The ground is no thing. Before being, isness. Be still.

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.