Tag Archives: contemplative

Silence (ii)

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One of the very first posts on this blog, back in February 2021, was on the subject of silence. I wrote there:

The fertile stillness that silence is seems very close to the dark transparency that sometimes one can touch in contemplation. It seems to me that in contemplation perhaps all we are doing is stripping away the accretions of thought and habit, draining the mind’s default mode that tries to fill our resting moments with its lowest common denominator daydreams. All that we are, all we have come from, rests in the ground of being itself, and it may be that we can touch the edge of that ground itself in silence, in the resting place between breaths, or the quiet of sitting still.

Spiritual silence is strangely independent of the physical absence of noise. As I wrote recently, I long ago discovered even among noise and distraction “the ability to turn inward, briefly, to a place of stillness and absolute tranquility.” That ability has remained with me, and it is one of the gifts for which I am most grateful.

Cynthia Bourgeault writes:

Those who come back from a near-death experience bring with them a visceral remembrance of how vivid and abundant life is when the sense of separateness has dropped away. Those who fall profoundly in love experience a dying into the other that melts every shred of their own identity, self-definition, caution, and boundaries, until finally there is no “I” anymore-only “you.” Those who meditate go down to the same place, but by a back staircase deep within their own being.

I think silence is the back staircase; and there is an argument to be made that all forms of contemplative practice are no more, at the very bottom, than means of silence. The heart yearns for silence, even in its passions; at the end of all things there is silence, and it is out of silence that all things come to be. Silence is the utter want of naming, of distinctions; it is no thing, but it is our only home in the end.

‘Satiable curtiosity*

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It seems to me, as I grow older, that one of the really essential things to cultivate in oneself is the continued sense of curiosity. I am lucky enough to have been born with more than my fair share of it, and to have been brought up by a mother who encouraged me in it.

I have never been able to see an insect without wanting to know its name, its taxonomy, its place in the world; and the same goes for most things I encounter, from the tiniest and apparently least significant creatures to things of cosmic proportions, like the scintillations of Sirius in the night sky. (I cannot tell you how delighted I was eventually to read that Sirius is actually a binary star!)

I am doubly fortunate that getting older seems to have done nothing to dim this insatiable hunger of enquiry in me. Richard Dawkins once wrote:

Isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?

It wasn’t until I spent an extended period in hospital, in my teens, that I had the freedom to begin to realise that the natural directtion of this curiosity of mine was philosophical, even metaphysical; and I was in my early twenties before it became clear that it was only really happy in what I learned to call “spirituality”.

Practice is the place where spiritual curiosity finds its home. For far too long I thought that there must be some religious significance to this, but in fact there is no need for such a hypothesis. The wonder of isness itself is quite enough. Lawrence M Krauss:

The one experience that I hope every student has at some point in their lives is to have some belief you profoundly, deeply hold, proved to be wrong because that is the most eye-opening experience you can have, and as a scientist, to me, is the most exciting experience I can ever have.

I feel like this almost every time I sit down to meditate, and it is one of the inexhaustible delights of the journey, the heart’s own song in the velvet fathomlessness of what actually is.

*”Satiable curtiosity” – from Rudyard Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child

Just as it comes

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Tara Brach, in her book Radical Acceptance, points out that acceptance and awareness are inextricably woven together in contemplative experience.

Acceptance Brach defines as:

[t]he way out of our cage [of our own beliefs and fears,] accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is that we are aware of what is happening within our body and mind in any given moment, without trying to control or judge or pull away. I do not mean that we are putting up with harmful behavior—our own or another’s. This is an inner process of accepting our actual, present-moment experience. It means feeling sorrow and pain without resisting. It means feeling desire or dislike for someone or something without judging ourselves for the feeling or being driven to act on it.

But this acceptance is rooted in as well as interwoven with what I call (borrowing Jiddu Krishnamurti’s phrase) “choiceless awareness”. It is not an attitude we can simply adopt, as an act of will. Much later in the same book, Brach explains,

when we look within, there is no entity, no mind-substance, no self, no thing we can identify. There is just awareness—open empty awareness. We can’t locate any center, nor can we find an edge to our experience. Unless we anchor ourselves again in thoughts, or grasp after desired sensations or feelings, we have nowhere to stand, no firm ground. This can be disconcerting, scary, incredibly mysterious. While there may be a profusion of activity—sounds, sensations, images—there is no thing to hold on to, no self behind the curtain managing things. This seeing of no thing is what the Tibetan teachers call “the supreme seeing” [Dzogchen].

As Brach points out above, “This can be disconcerting, scary, incredibly mysterious.” Especially at times when the externals of life are less than solid – times of loss or grief, isolation (perhaps on an extended retreat), or simply the continual change that can come to seem the only constant in life – a genuine spiritual crisis can arise*. The necessity of acceptance can then indeed be radical, for it is only in accepting our fear, our utter loss of bearings, that the way opens. It may not look anything like we had expected.

Reality is only what actually is. It cannot be what was, or what might be. It is only when we sit very still that we can see that, realise it. Everything else is just a picture, a synthetic interface the mind presents, like these words on the screen of the tablet I’m writing on: useful, practical, but not actually there; something to help us get from here to there, wherever there might be, even when there is the place where we have intended to sit, the time we have set aside for our practice.

In being still, aware only of what comes into awareness, just as it is – thoughts, sensations, emotions, even the meanings we want to attach to these appearances, we come to perceive that

this emptiness, this “no-thingness,” is not empty of life. Rather, empty awareness is full with presence, alive with knowing. The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience. In this moment that you are reading, sounds are heard, vibration is felt, form and color are seen. This knowing happens instantaneously, spontaneously. Like a sunlit sky, awareness is radiant in cognizance and boundless enough to contain all life…

With practice, recognizing our natural awareness takes less and less of an effort or sense of doing. Rather than climbing up a hill to get a view, we are learning the art of relaxing back and wakefully inhabiting the whole vista. We look back into awareness and then simply let go into what is seen. We become more at home in awareness than in any story of a self who is falling short or on our way somewhere else. We are at home because we have seen and experienced firsthand the vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being.

(Brach, ibid.)

*[Difficult times in our practice can occasionally get out of hand. Do not take these occasions lightly. If you do not have a trusted guide to whom you can turn, Cheetah House specialise in helping meditators who are experiencing meditation-related difficulties and providing meditation safety training to providers and organizations.

Tara Brach, on her own website, has a useful downloadable guide to Working with Fear and Trauma.]

Entheogenic?

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In our everyday dealings with the world around us, and with its inhabitants, both human and otherwise, we generally seem to make use of a practical mode of consciousness characterised, in my experience, by shortcuts and subroutines – usually referred to as “habits”. Half the time we’re not even really thinking about what we’re doing – which gives rise to the common but slightly disturbing experience of realising one’s just driven several miles on a regular route with no real conscious sense of the events of driving, or of the route itself. Where have we been?

Neuroscience offers the explanation of something called the “default mode network”:

It is 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. It can also be active during detailed thoughts related to external task performance. Other times that the DMN is active include when the individual is thinking about others, thinking about themselves, remembering the past, and planning for the future.

(Wikipedia)

One might be tempted to rename it the woolgathering network.

Contemplative awareness, on one level at least, consists precisely in becoming aware of these changing brain-states, as opposed merely to knowing about them in theory.

Even just recognizing the impermanence of your mental states—deeply, not merely as an idea—can transform your life. Every mental state you have ever had has arisen and then passed away. This is a first-person fact—but it is, nonetheless, a fact that any human being can readily confirm. We don’t have to know any more about the brain or about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world to understand this truth about our own minds. The promise of spiritual life—indeed, the very thing that makes it “spiritual” in the sense I invoke throughout this book—is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

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

But there is more, of course. Elsewhere on this blog I wrote:

Before I turned five, I contracted meningitis, and spent what would have been my first year of school slowly recovering. I spent some of the most peaceful and untroubled hours of my life lying on a rug by the old apple trees in the orchard at the back of our house, under the endless vault of the open sky, listening to distant aircraft passing high overhead, or on a flaking stone bench on the patio, watching the little velvety red mites scampering in the sunlight. Time was unlike anything I’d known before, an open ground of appearing, empty of thought, mostly, but fertile with becoming.

In those long months I had no name for this clear, undimensioned place, and I don’t suppose it would have occurred to me to ask anyone what, or where, it might be. I just was, and was where I was. In many ways, the years since have been a journey back.

But how does one make this kind of journey as an intentional, more or less healthy adult? Religion offers maps, of varying quality – The Cloud of Unknowing, any number of Buddhist and Vedantic texts, the writings of the Eastern Orthodox (Christian) monastic tradition, to name a few – but they come, as I wrote yesterday, with sticky remnants of their religious backgrounds clinging to both thought and practice.

Throughout history, in different cultures, people have made use of entheogens, drugs (including traditional psychedelics such as mescaline and psilocybin and DMT, as well as modern synthetics like LSD) intended precisely to achieve this kind of altered consciousness. But even the best-engineered pharmaceuticals are blunt instruments, and in my experience (I experimented with them myself in my twenties) can do at least as much harm as good. Besides, the traditional varieties are by no means immune to the sticky remnants of their own religious origins.

But the word entheogen is an interesting one. Roughly, it means something like, “giving rise to the god within” (éntheos genésthai). This is instructive, since although the scholars (Carl Ruck et al.) who coined the term were referring to the use of psychoactive drugs, maybe this useful word could be extended to cover many traditional, religious contemplative practices as well.

But as Sam Harris points out in one of the passages I quoted yesterday,

This is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a book, because many readers will have no idea what I’m talking about when I describe certain spiritual experiences and might assume that the assertions I’m making must be accepted on faith. Religious readers present a different challenge: They may think they know exactly what I’m describing, but only insofar as it aligns with one or another religious doctrine. It seems to me that both these attitudes present impressive obstacles to understanding spirituality in the way that I intend.

Once again, Jiddu Krishnamurti’s term “choiceless awareness” is so useful here, along with the simple practice it entails. My childhood experience in the orchard was precisely that, as have been so many more momentary occasions in the long years since. Andreas Müller (I have quoted him on this blog before) has one of the best descriptions I know:

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.

Sticky remnants

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Despite my rather cheerful posts earlier this month, there can be problems with non-religious spirituality that aren’t always immediately apparent. Sam Harris remarked, in the first chapter of Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality without Religion (still the standard text for this kind of journey):

This is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a book, because many readers will have no idea what I’m talking about when I describe certain spiritual experiences and might assume that the assertions I’m making must be accepted on faith. Religious readers present a different challenge: They may think they know exactly what I’m describing, but only insofar as it aligns with one or another religious doctrine. It seems to me that both these attitudes present impressive obstacles to understanding spirituality in the way that I intend.

But the problem appears to persist even after Harris’ readers have – at least to some extent – settled into their new spiritual home. So many of our practices find their roots in one religion or another – most often Buddhism – that they bring with them sticky remnants of their original religious context. Buddhist practices frequently imply a background acceptance of the concepts of karma and rebirth, for instance; and practices with Christian roots may come with background assumptions regarding the role of the Holy Spirit in the contemplative life.

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

What can we do about this? I don’t have a simple answer, still less one that suits every case. But the answer that seems to work – at least for me – better than any other I’ve tried is in fact very simple in principle. Tara Brach writes of the practice of choiceless awareness,

Our attentive presence is unconditional and open—we are willing to be with whatever arises, even if we wish the pain would end or that we could be doing something else. That wish and that thought become part of what we are accepting. Because we are not tampering with our experience, mindfulness allows us to see life “as it is.” This recognition of the truth of our experience is intrinsic to Radical Acceptance: We can’t honestly accept an experience unless we see clearly what we are accepting.

(Radical Acceptance)

I have been finding lately that resting – it sounds much easier than it often is! – in surrender to the plain awareness of coming-to-be is the best medicine, if only one can just practice it rather than being drawn away into thinking it through. As I wrote recently,

Just noticing what is – 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.

Constant craving

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Recently I have come to see that – for me, anyway – the enemy of choiceless awareness is not so much the problem of distractions in themselves, but some kind of craving. Now, I don’t mean reasonable appetites so much as the longing for things to be something other than they are. There is nothing wrong with the impulse to seek food when we are hungry or shelter when we are cold and wet, nor with legitimate libido or the appreciation of natural things; the problem seems to arise with discontent, the reaching out that thinks that if it could only grasp its object it would be instead content.

There is nothing new in such an insight. I have known for years about the Buddhist teachings regarding trishna (or tanha in Pali) and dukha (dukka): craving and discontent as they are usually translated. But it is one thing to find them in textbooks and another to come to realise them for oneself, out of a clear blue sky, as it were, simply when trying to meditate.

Whether due to my Western culture and background, or to my own inherent insecurities, I had always tended to read these concepts as something like moral precepts, things one was told off for doing. But as Tara Brach explains,

The Buddha expressed this in the first noble truth: Existence is inherently dissatisfying. When I first heard this teaching in high school in its most common translation as “life is suffering,” I of course thought it meant life is nothing more than misery and anguish. But the Buddha’s understanding of suffering was subtler and more profound. We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing—our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can’t hold on to anything—a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self—because all things come and go. Lacking any permanent satisfaction, we continuously need another injection of fuel, stimulation, reassurance from loved ones, medicine, exercise, and meditation. We are continually driven to become something more, to experience something else.

(Radical Acceptance)

There is, it seems to me, nothing whatever that can replace – or shortcut – practice. Learning about these things is always secondhand. We are hearing, reading, about someone else’s lived experience; only our own will do; and that only in the long hours of practice, or else, occasionally, in the sudden shock of some mortal crisis. The Buddha is reported to have said, “Find out for yourself what is truth, what is real.” It seems to have been good advice.

Atheism and the Tao

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The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao
The names that are given do not contain their true meaning
Within the nameless is the true meaning
What is named has a mother and she is the mother of ten thousand things
The un-seeable is always seeable within the internal to those who are not bound by desire
Those who live in a state of desire see only the external illusion of manifestation
These two opposites are born from the same source
The source contains its mystery in darkness
Within the darkness is the darkness that is the gateway to the mysteries

(Tao Te Ching, tr. Dennis Waller)

In all the translations of, and the writings about, the Tao (when spoken, ‘Dao’) there is an insistence that words and names are superfluous, that the Tao – while apparently having no objective reality of its own – can only be experienced subjectively. It is a philosophy, a pursuit of wisdom and a study of natural realities. Tao is not a religion: that is Taoism. We must, however, use words to explain how Tao came to be written down, what part it played in history and what its relevance is in the modern world.

(Pamela Ball, The Essence of Tao)

As Pamela Ball points out, the Tao is not a religious concept, any more than my much (over?) used phrase “the ground of being”, which I derived originally – if I remember correctly – from Paul Tillich via Richard Rohr. But in many ways they are both pointing towards the same truth: that the ontological source of all is, though quite literally inconceivable, able to be encountered.

So what has any of this to do with atheism? Well, it is next to impossible to approach this inconceivability of the utter beginning of what is from within the creedal framework of organised religion. (A few have managed it – witness Eckhart’s Istigkeit or Merton’s point vierge – but they are rare geniuses out on the perilous edge of their faith.) But without these constraints it seems more possible, if no easier, to find words for what has all too often been set aside as ineffable.

This is why experience, whether by a formal practice of meditation or by sheer force of circumstance (as in, for instance, near death experiences), will never be supplanted by even the most sophisticated reasoning. “I can’t find the words…” may be the beginning of wisdom.

Atheism and stoicism

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People try to get away from it all—to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul. Especially if you have other things to rely on. An instant’s recollection and there it is: complete tranquillity. And by tranquillity I mean a kind of harmony. So keep getting away from it all—like that. Renew yourself. But keep it brief and basic. A quick visit should be enough to ward off all [anxiety] and send you back ready to face what awaits you.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV

I remember that when I was in my early twenties and living in London, I was sometimes obliged to go to parties, as often happens at that age! I say “obliged” because that is how it often felt; I am too much of an introvert really to enjoy parties, however much I liked the people who’d invited me. Oddly, it was amidst the over-loud music and the chatter of slightly tipsy people that I spontaneously discovered what Marcus Aurelius describes here: the ability to turn inward, briefly, to a place of stillness and absolute tranquility – sitting on the stairs for a minute, perhaps, or taking refuge in the bathroom.

Remember, this is a blog post – I don’t mean it to be any more than another of my road songs – but it has occurred to me recently that Stoic philosophy is another of those things that has been unjustly neglected over the years of Christendom, having largely been discarded in the medieval period as just another of those pagan ideas (see Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World).

Not only though, I recalled, had I long ago discovered for myself Marcus Aurelius’ “micro-contemplative” moments, but I had much later found that the philosophy of Stoicism runs remarkably close to the practice of choiceless awareness in Sōtō Zen, in Advaita Vedānta, or in the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti. There is an old Buddhist saying to the effect that “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional”. Stoicism is far from the emotionless indifference it is sometimes caricatured to be, but it does imply almost exactly the same approach to suffering as that old Buddhist adage.

Severe illness is not something we have control over. We can mitigate the symptoms or use healing therapies hoping that the patient recovers. But the results are not up to us. Nevertheless, the patient can decide which position they take in regards to the situation. When the sickness is fully accepted, and the possibility of death as well, a human being can reach a state of inner peace (this is not medical advice – it’s philosophy). Staying calm during adversity, and letting go of the results, may come across as indifferent. However, this tranquility helps us to act in agreement with reason, instead of being overwhelmed by emotion. This probably leads to making better choices which increases the chances of recovery.

Einzelgänger and Fleur Vaz, Stoicism for Inner Peace

Absent the insistence of religious creeds and the framework they impose on belief and the interpretation of experience, the doors of perception are free to open once the power of powerlessness becomes clear. As I wrote in that post last year, “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.”

Finding out for yourself…

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What [spiritual] people have realized is one of the best secrets of life: let your self go. If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person. That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul, or in anything supernatural.

Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

I have come to realise with increasing clarity over the last few years that Dennett’s definition of spirituality here applies with equal force to spiritual institutions. To the extent that they – churches and most other religious systems and associations – consist in the belief in an immortal soul, and its relation to a supernatural world and its beings, mediated by means of myth and dogma, their necessity to the spiritual life itself is no more than an appearance.

(I have occasionally been moved to wonder if the reason why religions seem sometimes to offer safe haven to the contemplative is not in order to maintain control. A domesticated mysticism is so much less worrying than the wild kind.)

My journey to this place has been more hesitant and less clear-sighted than I would have wished, I admit. I don’t wish to make excuses for this, though I find an unexpected ally, perhaps, in Jiddu Krishnamurti, when he writes:

Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity…

You know, unless you hesitate, you can’t inquire. Inquiry means hesitating, finding out for yourself, discovering step by step; and when you do that, then you need not follow anybody, you need not ask for correction or for confirmation of your discovery.

I sometimes find that choiceless awareness itself – that still awareness that lies at the centre of our practice – does lead to a kind of hesitancy, or at least to the appearance of hesitancy. All we can honestly do is try to remain open in stillness; perceiving, rather than knowing, what is.

Blogging (an aside)

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Not for the first time I’ve been reflecting on blogging as a medium, helped in this instance by a commenter on my post yesterday.

“A blog (a truncation of “weblog”) is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts)” (Wikipedia) A blog post, as I use the term, is a special kind of short-form essay, usually on a particular subject.

Blog posts have their limitations. Mine tend to be 700 words or so on average; anything over about 2000 seems to me to be unwieldy, and clunky in the way many long poems can tend to be. At their best they can be, as I suggested in my recent post ‘Road songs‘, a sort of literary form all their own. I wrote there,

At one point, and I honestly can’t remember when, it occurred to me that all these bits of (mainly) prose were something like my own road songs, much more than considered accounts of anything. Consequently, they’re not autobiographical as such; they don’t tell a connected story, but are more in the nature of snatches of music heard in passing.

Sometimes I’m guilty of biting off more than I can chew. In yesterday’s post ‘Atheism and contemplation‘ I attempted to introduce, by way of a few quotes from one of my favourite writers, Susan Blackmore, Daniel Dennett’s ‘multiple drafts’ model of consciousness. Now, I attempted to squeeze into a medium-length blog post something that takes Dennett – one of the great philosophers of our time – more than 450 pages (and two appendices) to set out (Consciousness Explained), using a few paragraphs lifted from the work of a psychologist, academic and memeticist. I am none of these things…

I am a contemplative, though, albeit an amateur, or freelance, one – being neither a monastic nor under any other sort of vows – and Dennett’s philosophy of mind is something that has spoken deeply to me. It put into words, and into careful argued thought, impressions that my own practice had already brought home. Reading Blackmore’s condensation of Dennett (Zen and the Art of Consciousness pp. 34ff.) was one of those, “Oh yes, of course!” moments for me – and it is this illumination I tried, rather than the theory itself, to squeeze into my post.

Does blogging work for these profound questions? Can it ever? I don’t know. I’m sure Daniel Dennett wouldn’t have written 450-odd pages (and two appendices) if he’d thought that 750 words would do.  But to convey the immediacy of experience? Yes, I think it may – and that’s why, despite the perils and obvious difficulties, I do still go on blogging after all these years.