Tag Archives: contemplative

By the window

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By the window where I sit I am always aware of the sounds from outside – more so when it’s mild enough to leave the window ajar on its hook – and they have come to be an important part of my practice, somehow. Gradually I have come to tell myself less stories about them, but they are always there, as inevitable as my breathing, but more various.

 In summer there is birdsong – the blackbirds especially, and the inevitable magpies (if you  can call that song). In winter there isn’t much except the chacking of jackdaws from their roost in the old water tower, and the occasional robin’s episodic twitter. But there’s always the traffic from the road at the end of the garden: the background shush (and splash if it’s raining) of tires, recognisable engines – motorcycles (I have to try and avoid identifying these), buses, lorries – the occasional wail of a siren. Sometimes you can hear voices from the bus stop on this side of the road.

I always sit with my eyes closed, but I am aware of the light. I don’t know if that’s because, unconsciously, I remember what it was like when I sat down and set my timer, or whether I’m picking up the light through my lowered eyelids. I do have a sense, though, of the presence of the day around me, whether it’s first thing in the morning or before supper in the evening. There’s a clarity about that which reminds me of the season as well – bright sunlight at both ends of the day in summer, dimpsy in winter.

It’s more than ten years now that I’ve been sitting in this particular window. Generations of birds have come and gone, the trees at the back of the garden are taller now – and one fell in a high wind earlier this year – and the shrubs have grown and changed. Leaves drift these November days across the lawn, building up around the bushes until they’re cleared again. This place has become dear and familiar; there is a sense, almost, of the Benedictine quality of “stability of life”, and these ordinary things have acquired for me something approaching sacredness – the more so because they are ordinary. There is nothing else I need.

[First published 14/11/2025]

An admission

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It seems to me that perhaps I may have been precipitate in switching back entirely to Blogger as a platform. It is hard, sometimes, to admit that one may have made a mistake; but possibly I have done just that.

Instead of my readership from the WordPress blog following me over to Blogger, I now seem to have two separate sets of readers – with a few honourable exceptions. Certainly my list of subscribers on WordPress remains constant; they do not appear to have resubscribed on Blogger en masse!

For the time being, then. it appears that I may have to run both plaforms in parallel until something settles out and I can continue on one or the other. That having been said, I shall post repost here the handful of posts from the last week on Blogger; for a while at least I shall publish any new posts on both platforms.

Needless to say, I shall be interested to hear from any of my followers – once the initial sense of nuisance has passed, perhaps – which of the two platforms you find most useful as a reader.

A sense of naked inadequacy

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Apophatic spirituality has to start at the point where every other possibility ends. Whether we arrive there by means of a moment of stark extremity in our lives, or (metaphorically) by way of entry into a high desert landscape, the sense of naked inadequacy remains the same. Prayer without words can only begin where loss is reckoned as total.

Belden C Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, p.36

It is no surprise that we humans would deny death’s certain coming, fight it, and seek to avoid the demise of the only self we have ever known. As Kathleen Dowling Singh puts it in her groundbreaking book, The Grace in Dying, “It is the experience of ‘no exit,’ a recognition of the fact that the situation is inescapable, that one is utterly at the mercy of the power of the Ground of Being … it is absurd and monstrous.”

“The Ground of Being,” a commanding phrase that Paul Tillich used, is an excellent metaphor for what most of us would call God (Acts 17:28 [“For in him we live and move and have our being”]). For Singh, it is the source and goal that we both deeply desire and desperately fear. It is the Mysterium Tremendum of Rudolf Otto, which is both alluring and frightful at the same time. Both God and death feel like “engulfment,” as when you first gave yourself totally to another person. It is the very union that will liberate us, yet we resist, retrench, and run…

The path of dying and rising is exactly what any in-depth spiritual teaching must aim for. It alone allows us to say afterward, “What did I ever lose by dying?” It is the letting go of all you think you are, moving into a world without any experienced context, and becoming the person you always were anyway—which you always knew at depth, and yet did not know at all on the surface.

Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond, p.111

I have observed that contemplative practice does not have about it the linear quality we are used to in many other kinds of practice: if you practice a skill, say playing a musical instrument, you will get better at it. As time goes by, if you practice faithfully and intelligently, playing will become almost effortless – you will not have to think at all about where to find a note, or how to finger a certain scale or chord – they will just be there for you, embedded in muscle memory and musical instinct; and over the years it just gets better. But contemplative practice is not like that at all. One is never an expert; things you thought you’d learned months ago suddenly leap out as real difficulties, real terror even. The simplest thing, like keeping a slip of attention on the breath, as an anchor to return to if lost in thought, will unexpectedly appear horribly difficult. One day you hardly notice a thought as you sit, peacefully and still; the next you are plagued with anxieties, fantasies, mundane recollections, until you feel like getting up and doing something useful instead.

What is going on? I think we forget that it is in brokenness, in extremity, that the the way to the bright fields of being opens, not in experiences of bliss or jewelled visions. In fact, not in  experiences at all.

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn’t a problem. The mind didn’t have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds. In any emergency, either you survive or you don’t. Either way, it is not a problem.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now p.65

To meditate, year after year, it seems to me, is to find oneself continually in extremis: nothing is achieved – there is no ladder, and in any case half the rungs are missing, and the ones that remain are cracked and treacherous. One only practices this way if every other possibility has failed, if the easy way has turned out to be no way at all. Only this way can we hope to come across the sunlit uplands; and yet even there, the light will skin our littleness like sand in a gale. It is all we come to long for, the only place we will be at home.

Blessedness

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In the practice of contemplation, one comes eventually to embrace an apophatic anthropology, letting go of everything one might have imagined as constituting the self—one’s thoughts, one’s desires, all one’s compulsive needs. Joined in the silence of prayer to a God beyond knowing, I no longer have to scramble to sustain a fragile ego, but discern instead the source and ground of my being in the fierce landscape of God alone. One’s self is ever a tenuous thing, discovered only in relinquishment. I recognize it finally as a vast, empty expanse opening out onto the incomparable desert of God.

Belden C Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, p.12

Once you grasp that everything is God/Nature — every rock, every thought, every heartbreak — you can cultivate what Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God. It’s not emotional worship, not kneeling or chanting. It’s a serene joy that comes from seeing yourself as part of the eternal system, understanding necessity, and embracing it.

This love is eternal because it’s rooted not in transient causes but in the recognition of God/Nature itself, which is infinite. When you reach this state, you stop feeling like a victim of circumstances and start feeling like a conscious expression of the whole…

The reward is a state Spinoza calls beatitudo — blessedness. It’s not paradise, not an afterlife, not heavenly reward. It’s here, now, in the clarity of mind that comes from understanding necessity and loving the totality of existence.

Robert Flix, Spinoza in Plain English, pp.35-36

At the end of things – literally – lies no thing: the utterly desert lack of all we had come to know as necessary to the self, to the “soul” as we had been taught to understand it. Even our practice, our dear and familiar sitting, is blown through and shredded by the unrelenting wind of absence.

It is only here, only in this placeless place, that we can grasp – not with thought, not with desire, nor with longing, even, but with the barest love – “what is the breadth and length and height and depth” (Ephesians 3:18) of our unknowing of the boundlessness of that “vast, empty expanse” that opens onto the living ground itself. Only here could we rest – will we, in the end, come to rest.

Following the stream

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It seems to me that what comes to be is, in its own essence, no more (and no less) than the necessity of things to be what they are: caused by events in what we call their past, and in turn causing events, and entities, in what we call their future. There is a continuous flow of coming to be – of being – that is inevitable, unceasing, beautiful. We are each of us ripples in that stream, brief appearances; and yet we are not other than the water, the flow itself, and that does not end.

I’m not sure what to call it. The ancient Chinese called it the Tao; Benedictus Spinoza called it God – although that was dangerously far from the God of Abraham with whom he’d been brought up.

The necessity of the flow, the inevitability of it, Spinoza saw to be nature itself, the universe, the continuum; and it was that which he called God (Deus sive Natura). To know that, realise it, live within it, breathe it as a cat breathes air or a fish water, he called the love of God.

What is necessary of itself does not cease: it is. Meister Eckhard wrote of it as Istigkeit; it is the open ground, in which as things come to be, and change, and die, and are not lost. The ripples rise, and lap, and fade; the stream flows on.

Otherness

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In my last post, I mentioned my sense that in situations of what I called transcendent powerlessness we can touch – or be touched by – something electric and quite beyond ourselves. In that post I wrote,

…something may sometimes happen in situations of extreme danger and radical insecurity that may not be unlike finding one’s finger in the spiritual power outlet. Something just as shocking; something with just the same sense of encountering a force from somewhere else…

I sometimes think that the technology of contemplation – the methods of meditation, the years of study and discipleship – are nothing more than means, sometimes elaborate means, of bringing about the very experience of powerlessness I have been describing. Of course, such experience can be misunderstood, can be fled from, rejected in a myriad ways, while its subject retreats either back into everyday life, or into some kind of addiction. But if the tide is taken at its flood, if the powerless moment is embraced as gift, coming in some strange way from elsewhere, then anything can happen.

What is happening here? Throughout the years philosophers, from the ancient Taoists to Spinoza, have found themselves unable to avoid treating the necessity of what could otherwise seem raw causality with something close to personification.

There is something undifferentiated and yet complete.
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Soundless and formless.
It depends on nothing and does not change.
It operates everywhere and is free from danger.
It may be considered the Mother of the universe.
I do not know its name; I call it Tao.

Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 25 (tr. Chan)

God is the Determiner (but not a Planner): God/Nature is the immanent (indwelling) and necessary cause of all things. God doesn’t stand outside the world creating and planning by free will, like the personal, transcendent God of traditional religion. Instead, the order and regularity of the universe—the natural laws—are God’s nature.

Google Gemini, in conversation with the author on “Spinoza’s Determinism and God”

In contemplative practice one may occasionally find the sense that, in the sheer powerlessness of sitting still, something breaks through that Dzogchen practitioners would call Rigpa, “the ‘pristine awareness’ that is the fundamental ground itself.” (Stephen Batchelor). Somehow this is always unsought – you cannot bring it about, and trying is entirely counterproductive.

Of course the parallel immediately appears here with the traditional Catholic concept of infused contemplation – “…a state that can be prepared for, but cannot in any way be produced by the will or desire of a person through methods or ascetical practices” (Burke & Bartunek).

As I wrote yesterday, there is nothing here but grace. One can go so far in faithful practice, in preparedness and in waiting, but no farther. Even Spinoza wrote of the “intellectual love of God”, his term for the highest spiritual attainment, as intuitive rather than rational. I think we experience the ground of being, especially when encountered unawares, as so profoundly “other” because its immanence and necessity are so far from our own state as one of the “ten thousand things” (Laozi); and yet we are not other. We did not plan our birth: our very existence rests in the ground itself – we are from being itself, and that by sheer grace.

Powerless

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Learning to navigate life’s changing nature from center is one of the gifts of endarkenment (to commit to turning toward rather than away from physical and symbolic darkness and to learn to perceive with the heart—beyond unconscious bias and hierarchical perception). Change invites us to affirm our participation with life beyond the isolating, but seemingly sheltered, visible security. With reverence toward the divine darkness, we can learn to meet our human experience of change with openness rather than fear. We can learn to surrender to rather than resist the groundlessness of change. We can learn to lean into the changing nature of existence, realizing the freedom that arises from not knowing and realizing we do not have to fear the unknown.

Deborah Eden Tull, in an extract from her book Luminous Darkness, published in Tricycle Magazine, August 2025

One of the most striking encounters with powerlessness that many of us have had to navigate was the recent pandemic, Nick Cave: “Suddenly, there was an extraordinary sense of relief, a sort of wave washing through me, a kind of euphoria, but also something more than that – a crazy energy. A sense of potential, maybe? Yes, but true potential. Potential as powerlessness, ironically. Not the potential to do something, but the potential not to do something.”

There are many ways to understand this odd experience. There have been other times in my life, too, when I have lost for a time – for all I knew, forever – the ability to choose my own course. (I think particularly when I suffered what the press describe as a “life-changing accident”, and had to face the prospect of losing my career, my home – a farmhouse that came with the job – and all sense of security in an instant.) And I experienced Nick Cave’s strange sense of immense, electric potential; there was a genuine exhilaration, a quality of being right at the nexus of change. Anything could happen, anything could be lost; and somehow there was nothing to fear, however frightened I was.

Perhaps this sort of thing lies at the root of the old quip about there being no atheists in foxholes. Of course those in imminent danger of death don’t suddenly acquire a full-featured evangelical faith, but something may sometimes happen in situations of extreme danger and radical insecurity that may not be unlike finding one’s finger in the spiritual power outlet. Something just as shocking; something with just the same sense of encountering a force from somewhere else.

We are back with the odd intersection of semantics with experience. A committed Christian at the time, I experienced an immediate sense of the nearness of God; a Buddhist like Deborah Eden Tull might find something different again. The spiritual landscape within which we live, the words that come with the tradition we occupy: these things condition our very experience, and yet the truth of what each of us encounters is the same. It has to be, if it is real.

Perhaps it’s in these extreme situations – pandemics, near-fatal accidents, instants of loss and devastation, that we can suddenly see clearly, if we are open enough, in a way that has at least something in common with the fruit of years of contemplative practice. It was during an intense spiritual and psychological crisis, coming at the climax of years of anxiety and suicidal depression, that Eckhart Tolle had the encounter with terror and surrender that changed in an instant the course of his life, and led him to spend the next few years externally lost and homeless, yet radiant within, trying to work out what had happened to him. (See the Introduction to The Power of Now)

I sometimes think that the technology of contemplation – the methods of meditation, the years of study and discipleship – are nothing more than means, sometimes elaborate means, of bringing about the very experience of powerlessness I have been describing. Of course, such experience can be misunderstood, can be fled from, rejected in a myriad ways, while its subject retreats either back into everyday life, or into some kind of addiction. But if the tide is taken at its flood, if the powerless moment is embraced as gift, coming in some strange way from elsewhere, then anything can happen.

Contemplative practice is a far safer path; and yet, strangely, the apparently uneventful years of faithful practice can crystallise in a moment, providing a cradle of unsought meaning to hold the instant of transcendent powerlessness. In that moment of acceptance, just as in a crisis met with surrender, there is nothing left but grace.

Faith and contemplation

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We still seek wholeness. It is intrinsic to human identity that, however much we have achieved, we are never satisfied. We hunger and thirst for what lies beyond our grasp and even beyond the horizon of our desire. Religion and spirituality, which are less easy to divorce than we thought – are the elements of culture that deal with this desire beyond desire. Where are they taking us? Where do we have to redefine the old terms by which we try to understand ourselves in this longing for wholeness? …

When belief takes the place of faith in the religious mind the possible range of spiritual experience and growth is critically limited. When religion emphasizes belief rather than faith it may find it easier to organize and define its membership and those it excludes. It is easier to pass judgement. But it will produce, at the best, half-formed followers. The road to transcendence is cut off, blocked by landfalls of beliefs as immoveable as boulders, beliefs we are told to accept and do not dare to put to the test of experience. In such a rigid and enforced belief system what I believe also easily slides into what I say I believe, or what I am told to believe or what I feel I ought to believe, because the I that believes becomes so dependent on the identity generated by the structured belief system we inhabit.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, pp.3,9

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 p.24

There’s a kind of hunger that draws one in, further and further. It’s not that present practice is wrong, or inadequate; but that there’s always more, literally infinitely more, and the heart cannot rest – it has to go on, further in and further up. This is, to put it in rather technical words, part of the phenomenology of contemplation – first person experience, in everyday words.

One of the great pitfalls of the spiritual life is to refuse to see, or understand, what is given to us in first person experience, because it does not fit what we have been taught, or have come to believe. Perhaps this is why contemplatives and the contemplative way seem so often deeply threatening to both religious authorities and secular presumptions, and why they so often provoke resistance and even oppression. (One has only to read the biography of St John of the Cross, of Gutoku Shinran, or even of Eihei Dōgen, to see what I mean.)

Faith, in one sense at least, is just this “unreserved opening of the mind” to contemplative experience, and the acceptance of its implications for one’s life, however difficult or unlikely they may seem.

The Sufi scholar Oludamini Ogunnaike, speaking in an interview:

There’s a famous Ḥadīth that says, “God is beautiful and that he loves beauty.” Here beauty is not just a distraction or temptation, but instead a reflection of the Divine, it is the Divine.

But this can mess you up.

The analogy that one of my teachers uses is birds flying into windows. The world is like that, a fun house of mirrors. You see the beautiful face of the Divine reflected everywhere, but if you just run toward it at full tilt, you’re going to keep smacking into it. You’re not going to get to kiss your beloved. So you have to learn to navigate the world of reflections of Divine Beauty. The sweetness we taste in sugar is a reflection or manifestation of Divine Sweetness, but if we just eat sugar all day, we’re going to get very sick. So it’s a process of recognizing and understanding the manifestations of the Real in every phenomenon and treating each with the proper adab or courtesy it demands. You can see God in a crouching tiger, but it’s still usually good adab or manners to give it a wide berth.

Contemplation seems to require patience, and stillness. I know from my own past life the danger of running to kiss reflections! But still the hunger, and the excitement, call us on. To sit still, in silence, in faith, when the tides of yearning are at flood, is perhaps the hardest and most necessary thing we shall have to do.

Keeping it simple

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Remember that thoughts are only the product of the momentary confluence of a great number of factors. In themselves they do not exist. Thus, the moment they arise, recognize that their nature is emptiness. They will immediately lose their power to produce other thoughts, and the chain of illusion will be broken. Recognize the emptiness of thoughts and let them relax into the natural clarity of the transparent and unaltered mind.

Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, quoted by Mathieu Ricard in The Art of Meditation

In my last post I wrote of the conscious state of illumination (often referred to by Catholic writers as “contemplation” or “infused contemplation” – a different usage to “contemplative practice” as I employ the phrase here) is a gift. It cannot be achieved. It seems to me that intent needs simply to disappear in the practice of 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. But nevertheless the absence of intent, replaced with a simple dwelling in the presence of what is, now, is the only sure way I know to becoming vulnerable and available to illumination, to open objectless awareness.

The obstacle, of course, is the incessant passage of thoughts through the mind – a stream which of course we cannot halt, since they are in this context no more than noise thrown off by the machinery of the conscious mind. But mere recognition will loosen their grip on our attention; and as Dilgo Khyentse points out, they will fall away of themselves from the awakening mind.

Simplicity, poverty of intent, remains at the heart of practice for me. The beauty, it seems to me, of practices such as hesychasm (contemplative practice based on the Jesus Prayer) and the 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. But really, faithfully and regularly sitting still – whether formally, as in shikantaza, or just resting for a moment on the way – is all that is needed in the end.

All it comes down to

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All that practice comes down to, in the end, is acceptance: that open stillness that listens to the unsaid, watches quietly for the opening of the undifferentiated ground beneath all that is, the Istigkeit that is no thing, but Being itself.

What Spinoza called “intuitive knowledge” (see Flix, Spinoza in Plain English, p.30) is only this: the releasement of grasping – the surrender of the idea of the separate self – that is reached directly in choiceless awareness.

There is nothing else, really. The house of peace (Heidegger’s Wohnen) is no less than this: to let go of all striving: to accept, finally, one’s oneness with the simple, undifferentiated ground. Sitting still, the door just opens of itself, that’s all.