Tag Archives: contemplative

Road songs

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Since my teens I’ve loved the idea of the road song – music that you play to accompany driving, that somehow measures out the miles in bars and choruses, but is not (probably) about the travelling in itself.

I’ve been blogging on one platform or another since 2005; for four or five years before that I kept a website where I regularly published something like this kind of episodic writing. 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.

Lately I’ve been trying harder to be honest about some of the tentative conclusions I come across along the way, but I know that knowing is not as easy as that. AC Grayling:

One can believe a true proposition and have a justification for doing so, but the justification can be the wrong one for holding that belief. For example: suppose you believe that Fred is in the next room because you heard Fred’s favourite tune being strummed on Fred’s peculiar-sounding guitar. Fred is indeed in the next room, so your belief is true; but he has taught a friend to strum his favourite tune on his peculiar guitar, and it is the friend strumming. Your justification for holding this true belief is therefore not the right justification in the circumstances. So if you claim to know that Fred is in the next room on the basis of the evidence you employ to justify that claim, you cannot be said to know that Fred is there; you only or merely believe that he is. And very often, indeed, our beliefs are merely beliefs because the justification for them is insufficient to make that belief amount to knowledge.

Human consciousness is not – well, mine isn’t, anyway – so coherent a thing, or so independent of the objects of its perceptions, as to allow me to say, “This is what I think,” and have done with it. Susan Blackmore, in her luminous and heartwarming book Zen and the Art of Consciousness, writes:

At any time in a human brain there are multiple parallel processes going on, conjuring up perceptions, thoughts, opinions, sensations and volitions. None of these is either in or out of consciousness for there is no such place. Most of the time there is no observer: if consciousness is involved at all it is an attribution made later, on the basis of remembering events and assuming that someone must have been experiencing them in the past, when in fact no one was…

Even more interesting will be to understand the basis of those special moments in which one asks ‘Am I conscious now?’ or ‘Who am I?’ I suspect that these entail a massive integration of processes all over the brain and a corresponding sense of richer awareness. These probably occur only rarely in most people, but contribute disproportionately to our idea of ‘what it’s like to be me’. This kind of rich self-awareness may happen more of the time, and more continuously, for those who practise mindfulness. Does it completely disappear in those who transcend it?

To be still, not interfering – not even to ask Blackmore’s questions – allows something odd to happen, it seems to me. The “multiple parallel processes” appear to settle out, like sediment in a disturbed pond. Some sort of clarity supervenes: the layers of the mind rearrange themselves, perhaps, to continue with the metaphor, and the sense of a sequence, or progress, of events is replaced with something else, that is like the patterning of sunlight on the wavelets across the pond. Jiddu Krishnamurti:

When there is no illusion the “what is” is most sacred. Now let’s look at what actually is. At a given moment the “what is” may be fear, or utter despair, or a fleeting joy. These things are constantly changing. And also there is the observer who says, “These things all change around me, but I remain permanent”. Is that a fact, is that what really is? Is he not also changing, adding to and taking away from himself, modifying, adjusting himself, becoming or not becoming? So both the observer and the observed are constantly changing. What is is change. That is a fact. That is what is.

All that happens is that the stillness allows what is to appear, that’s all. The road disappears; the road songs go on changing, and yet somewhere there is something steady. Wieland Samolak:

When I was a teenager I used to sit on an empty field listening for hours to the sounds of distant cars, railroads, helicopters, and other motorized objects. These sounds, which are very rough and noisy when they are near, attracted me from the distance because they had merged and diffused into a continuum when they reached my ears. By this experience it came to my mind that it is more satisfying for me to listen to continuous changes within one sound than to the combinations of discrete sonic events usually found in music.

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.

Why?

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I realise that yesterday’s post may have seemed unnecessarily startling. “Atheist” is one of those words, like “evangelical” or “apostate”, almost guaranteed to produce a sharp intake of breath on the part of the reader. I apologise – but I did want to be definite, having prevaricated on the issue for so long.

Please don’t imagine that I’ve turned away from the contemplative life, or that I’ve decided to embrace some “There’s nowt but muck and brass, lad!” brand of materialism. I hope you’ll forgive me for quoting Sam Harris yet again:

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.

And that is the problem – if it is a problem – I have had to face here. It is far too easy to read the word “atheist”, as I sometimes did myself in the past, and imagine someone for whom “all talk of spirituality [is] a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception.” I am not that man.

In fact, until the relatively recent extremes of polarisation set in, many of those we think of as archetypal atheists, like Bertrand Russell, had hearts open to experience beyond everyday consensus reality.

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river – small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory: And Other Essays (Routledge Classics)

I confess that having spent much of my life wrestling with spiritual insight on the one hand and unease with the concept of the supernatural on the other, I am profoundly relieved to be able at last to admit, to myself as much as to anyone, that atheist probably does come closer to describing my metaphysical attitude than anything else I can think of. I did consider using the softer “nontheist” (a term beloved of some contemporary Quakers) but I couldn’t get away from the sense that to use the term of myself was once again clouding the issue. I have to admit, though, that there is a passage using it, in Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, that comes as close to expressing my own feelings at the moment as anything I’ve read:

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God… Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold… Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves… Nontheism is finally realizing there is no babysitter you can count on.

Now, or whatever it is

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Now, this moment, this placeless place between then and then, is more than the growing point, more than a beginning or a terminus. I would say it was timeless, but actually it is less than that. It is dimensionless, empty of any thing, emptier than anything. Perfectly void, it is the source of everything; infinitely less than an instant, all times flow from it, inexhaustible.

If you can be still enough, before and to come may drop away like leaves from the stem of now. The empty instant appears, immeasurable, perfect, unperishing. The aeons and their gravities flow from it and it is not lessened; the curving distances and their sheaves of light are born in the hollow of its unbeing.

Little and quiet, its unwearying expanse supports the stars. There is nowhere you could go that it is not, nothing you could remember that it doesn’t precede; no future you could dream of or wait for that it is not already awaiting.

Now is the safest place, the final refuge, the healing of every loss. You cannot fall out of now, cannot lose or forget it. It is gentler than sleep, stronger than death. Perhaps you could call it love.

Changes beneath the surface…

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This is another basic element of what we already know about meditation: What happens during your times of meditation is not important. It is a difficult truth for us to swallow, especially at the beginning of the journey, because we are looking for something to happen. We are investing the valuable time we have into meditation, so we want to be able to judge from immediate results what is happening. It is only gradually that we learn to let go of that greedy, rather technological, approach to meditation. We learn that what happens in meditation is much less important than what happens in our life as a whole, and that it is in a new view of life, a new vision of life, and above all in our relationships with one another and in our perception of the priority of love, that the real experience bears fruit.

Laurence Freeman

This is one of the key understandings when it comes to contemplative practice: that the point is not really, at bottom, any metaphysical conclusion so much as the effect on one’s life. This is where the contemplative life is set aside from philosophy in the conceptual sense, and becomes a way of living more than a way of thinking. Not only does one’s conception of life and the world change; but one’s whole pattern of relationships to it: one’s feelings and one’s very perception come gradually to change – imperceptibly at first – only later does one discover what has happened, how peace may have replaced anger, curiosity taken the place of worry.

In the stillness

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In the stillness of meditation, free from concepts, free from prejudices, we are able… to enter the experience directly. We are no longer trying to experience the experience, which is how most of us get so messed up. We get into something, then we start wanting to watch it, analyse it; we want to be in control of it; we want to be able to use it: to experience the experience. What we are learning in meditation, through the utterly simple practice of stillness and of letting go of all thoughts, is that we are able to enter into the experience of being as a whole person, and therefore, the experiences that happen don’t matter.

Laurence Freeman

It seems to me that contemplative practice, formal or otherwise, cannot be in any sense a goal-oriented activity. We are not seeking to achieve something, whether an experience or a state of mind; we are not going anywhere. All we are trying to do is to reveal to ourselves what is.

Language comes into this, of course. English is, at least when used for discursive prose, an irredeemably directional sort of a language. When we look for ways to speak of spiritual realities we seem either to slip into outright poetry – in which case we may convey a state of being but lose much of our ability to convey information; or we find ourselves adopting what Wittgenstein referred to as the “language game” of religion, of myth and liturgy. This, of course, is dangerous. (Even Sam Harris, in a book like Waking Up, begins by repudiating formal religion, but ends up adopting much of the language, and conceptual framework, of Buddhism.)

The alternative has to be in some way apophatic; not in the theological sense (since in denying predicates to God it ends up predicating his personal existence) but in the sense we began with, perhaps: we are seeking no thing at all. Or not even seeking: we find ourselves here. “Here” has been called ground, way, path, source, and perhaps it is all of these; but it is fact, plain and valid as a mathematical expression. It is what is, quite simply. The difficulty, if it is a difficulty, is in saying so without coming over as gnomic; but that may be a risk worth taking!

Part of a whole

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In an excellent article on the Humanists UK website, Jeremy Rodell quotes Albert Einstein:

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe – a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to the affection for those nearest us…

There are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny, only being.

This comes very close to my own sense of the ground of being as not simply another name for a personified God, but (as Paul Tillich himself saw) the metaphysical source, Being itself, (forgive the capitalisation!) from which anything comes to be at all. Perhaps the closest expression I had found before I read Rodell’s article was the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen sense of the pristine awareness that is the fundamental ground itself.

Rodell goes on (ibid.):

Almost all humanists would agree that the scientific method is by far the best way to understand objective truths about the world, including brains. But subjective experience is not, by definition, open to direct observation by anyone other than the person experiencing it, though it is undeniably both ‘real’ to that person and, as far as we know, unique, as we can’t get into the minds of others other than through their descriptions, or their artistic expression.

This “experiential spirituality” (Rodell’s phrase) is the realm of contemplative practice, surely. Our practice is very simple, no more than a matter of being set free from the entanglements of discursive thought in order to find ourselves consciously resting in the “groundless ground” of all that is. This is our home, after all; we can never fall out of being, and if philosophers like Philip Goff and Annaka Harris are right (not to mention the Dzogchen teachers like Longchenpa) even consciousness itself is fundamental to coming-to-be. The part, in effect, is not other than the whole!

Of babies and bathwater…

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I have written often enough here, particularly in this post, of my difficulty with organised religions, and with the structures of belief that tend to accumulate around an initial experience of faith. I have quoted him before, both here and elsewhere, but Alan Watts’ comment on the distinction between faith and belief bears rereading:

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Quakerism has described itself as “an experimental faith”. Charles F Carter, for instance, wrote:

True faith is not assurance, but the readiness to go forward experimentally, without assurance. It is a sensitivity to things not yet known. Quakerism should not claim to be a religion of certainty, but a religion of uncertainty; it is this which gives us our special affinity to the world of science. For what we apprehend of truth is limited and partial, and experience may set it all in a new light; if we too easily satisfy our urge for security by claiming that we have found certainty, we shall no longer be sensitive to new experiences of truth. For who seeks that which he believes that he has found? Who explores a territory which he claims already to know?

Quaker faith & practice 26.39

Contemplative practice is, it seems to me, just this – an experiment in “sensitivity to things not yet known”. It seems to me that it is vitally necessary both to be able to “make sense of the world through logic, reason, and evidence” (Humanists UK) and to maintain this open-eyed apprehension of spiritual perceptions. Robert C Solomon:

Spirituality is a human phenomenon. It is part and parcel of human existence, perhaps even of human nature. This is not to deny that some animals might have something like spiritual experiences. But spirituality requires not only feeling but thought, and thought requires concepts. Thus spirituality and intelligence go hand in hand.

Spirituality for the Skeptic: the Thoughtful Love of Life

This profoundly curious alertness to what is not external materiality seems to me both the intellectual basis of the philosophy of mind as a discipline, and the experiential basis of any true contemplative practice. What is not easy is to explain these things, even to ourselves, without the semiotic framework of religion. After all, the systems of meaning underlying the great religions took centuries, often millennia, to develop to their present forms. It is small wonder we find it hard to find the words!

Honesty in spiritual matters is both necessary and difficult, since the inner life is not generally accessible to objective assessment, still less to demonstration to another in the manner of a laboratory demonstration. It appears so much easier when there is a convenient set of symbols for spiritual realities ready made, as it were, on the shelf of the nearest religion.

Unknowing, the quality of openness and courageous acceptance of what is, being-in-itself, is perhaps the only way to start. If being itself entails consciousness – and it must, as the source and place of our own consciousness – then there is, it seems, no way for us to “fall out of” the ground of being. And that has more implications than I can begin to conceive.

Resting in the ground

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I think we have an inbuilt tendency, we humans – and it has grown worse, not better, over recent years – to division and factionalism. “Pick a side!” we shout at anyone who looks like sitting on the fence, or any other reasonable, considered position of balance. I need not point out how this works in politics and society; what concerns me here is how it can mislead us when it comes to spirituality.

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

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

[S]pirituality 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

I am coming to see that my sense of myself as “increasingly at variance with institutional religion, Christian, Buddhist or whatever, and increasingly sceptical of its value either in the life of the spirit or in the life of society, [and] my naturally eremitical inclinations seem[ing] to have strengthened…” is not limited to time and circumstance, but is simply where I belong.

We are brought up, certainly here in the West, to see life as intrinsically bound up in progress, or at least development, and that isn’t necessarily so in the spiritual life, despite our continual use of terms like “path” and “practice”. We use them in the unspoken assumption that the path leads somewhere, that we are practising for a performance, or an examination. Even in religious contexts it is often seen as wasteful self-indulgence to sit still when we could be up and out feeding the poor or preaching the good news, or making some other kind of progress in our “walk of faith”. But maybe the point is being missed somewhere.

Contentment has become something of a dirty word, yet a life without it is too often at risk of shallowness and politicisation. Febrile activism and polemical discourse without contemplative roots are no more likely to bring peace to the human heart, or to the human community, than war. We need to sit still. We need those whose path has petered out under the quiet trees, whose practice is no more than an open and wondering heart. There was good sense in the Taoist tradition of the sage who, their public life over, left for a hut on a mountain somewhere. There are good things to be seen from a mountain hut.

Love, friendship and solitude

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I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.

Rainer Maria Rilke (with thanks to Maria Popova)

Solitude, that contemplative necessity, can be a difficult thing. Perhaps it requires the solitary to relinquish all relationships and move out into the desert, either literally or metaphorically, as so many have done over the years. Or else it may be a thing of closed doors, of jealously guarded time in a study, or a bathroom, metered out in hours or minutes and maybe feared or resented as infidelity.

But it seems as if another way is at least possible, as Rilke explains: a delicate and sometimes perilous adventure in shared risk and trust, whose rewards can be as great, perhaps, as those of the relationship itself. I once used the phrase “married eremitism” here, and clunky though it is it does seem to sum up this companionable solitude, and how, eventually, it can become somehow a comfortable thing, sturdy and quiet but eager, almost, in its own way. It may be one of the loveliest gifts two people can give to each other.

“All goes onward…”

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All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Walt Whitman


Impermanence is the nature of every thing, and every thought. That we are transient and mortal, frail and temporary, is obvious to the least reflection. What we are is like the print of the wind on the sea, cats-paws on the bright surface of what is, here and gone before we know what we might be. And yet the water remains, shining.

To die is no more than that: the bright isness goes on, simply is. It is all there ever was, anyway, and nothing is lost. If we are the one who has not died, there is the grief, and loneliness; but the dead are not to be pitied. They are not, and what they were will always be, bright as the sea after the gust has passed. The clear ground lies open beneath the farthest stars.