Tag Archives: contemplative

Quietly

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This body is undeniably growing older, gradually disintegrating, moving toward its eventual disappearance, like a wave merging back into the ocean, which it never actually left. This growing up and growing old—like the ocean rising, cresting, and falling—is a movement in time, and time turns out to be a kind of imagination, a way of conceptualizing or thinking about what is happening. The only actual reality is the eternity of Here-Now, this one bottomless moment, from which we never depart, except in imagination, and that imagining only happens now…

As the body ages, I become in some ways more limited. I know, for example, that it’s too late to go to medical school, and I know that there are many people and places dear to my heart that I will never see again. That vast realm of future possibility is closing down and shrinking. And as I wrote about in my last book, Death: The End of Self-Improvement, that limitation is actually a blessing. It forces us to find freedom and fulfillment right here in this very moment.

And indeed, I feel increasingly unlimited in a deeper sense. I’ve been freed from the seductive allure of future possibilities. I’ve been brought home. I find myself ever more deeply appreciating the simple moments of love and joy in everyday life—a few words exchanged with someone I pass on my morning walk… the gorgeous song of a bird and my own heart leaping with joy on hearing it and another bird responding, the three of us somehow dancing together in a field of love… sitting later in my armchair, seeing the shadows of a flock of birds passing quickly again and again over the walls of the buildings across the way, shadows flashing out of emptiness and vanishing, and each time, the heart again leaping with joy, while the green leaves on the red bud tree outside my window shimmer in the light and the breeze. How simple it all is.

Joan Tollifson

Increasingly I feel that Tollifson is right, here. Growing old, I have been brought home in some strange way. Without entirely withdrawing, in the eremitic sense, from life and community, I seem to have found a peace in the midst of things that I had not expected to find.

How much of this rest and quietness of heart is down to aging, or to good company; how much is due to practice, and how much to sheer grace I have no idea. I don’t really know if those distinctions make any sense, even in their own context. I do know that I would not exchange these days for any, or all, of the days of my youth.

The last light of evening between the trees is a soft lilac grey, a colour beyond imagining, that will last only minutes now. The fringe of ragged cloud above is darkening moment by moment, and the birds have gone quiet, even our neighbours the seagulls who breed and roost on the buildings across the road. After what seems like weeks, the air is cool and damp. There is more rain on the way.

Einklammerung

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At its core, the epoché (from the Greek word meaning “suspension”) refers to the act of suspending or “bracketing” all judgments and assumptions about the world. This suspension is not about doubting the existence of things, but rather about setting aside all preconceptions, biases, and taken-for-granted beliefs. In other words, it is the process of withholding judgment about the nature of the external world to focus on pure experience itself.

For Husserl, the purpose of epoché is to return to a more original, direct experience of phenomena, where the subjective and the objective are not yet split. By “bracketing” or suspending the natural attitude—the everyday way we engage with the world based on assumptions—we can get to the essence of our experiences, as they appear to consciousness, unmediated by theoretical frameworks or prejudices.

Epoché in Phenomenology: Husserl’s Method of Suspension

Einklammerung, bracketing, epoché – is Western phenomenology’s version of the Heart Sutra‘s “Form is emptiness (śūnyatā), emptiness is form”, perhaps. For Edmund Husserl the act of bracketing was not an intellectual curiosity, it was a means to what he called “transcendental consciousness” or “pure consciousness” – something very close to the Dzogchen concept of Rigpa, “the pristine awareness of the fundamental ground itself.” (Wikipedia)

Once we have performed the epoché, we are no longer tied to the particularities of the world. Instead, we can see the world as it is constituted by our consciousness. For Husserl, this is a profound insight, as it reveals that the world is not something external and independent but is, in some sense, dependent on consciousness for its very existence. The epoché uncovers the transcendental nature of experience, which has profound implications for how we understand reality and our place within it.

Epoché in Phenomenology (above)

Western philosophy is prone to run aground on the shoals of terminology and syntax. The simplicity of just sitting, in plain awareness of the moment’s breath, of the sounds beyond the window, the movement of the air, without naming them, without distinguishing them as objects or processes or implications – the Einklammerung happens all by itself, without struggle or willpower; just in the mere being there, in showing up, no more and no less, morning and evening, and sitting there, in stillness. Nothing else.

Gifts of hiddenness

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As I grow older, I’m struck more and more by the heroic effort ordinary people are making every day: the people here at the retirement community where I live who are walking with walkers, recovering from strokes or falls or dealing with Parkinson’s or MS…

Many of us noticing the time it takes now to do things once done quickly and the enormous effort to do things that once seemed easy and some of us requiring help with our most intimate tasks. So much we once took for granted is gone. And the gift hidden in this, as I’ve said before, is that we are brought home to right here, right now, just this, just as it is—finding the beauty, the joy, the freedom in the midst of limitation.

Joan Tollifson

Epicurus’ phrase, lathe biōsas, “live in obscurity”, is coming more and more to describe the way I find myself not only living, but being profoundly grateful to live. Growing older comes of course with all the limitations Joan Tollifson describes, but just as she says, it is full also of hidden gifts; gifts of hiddenness, in fact.

Like Tollifson, we too live in a retirement community, and many of the friends we made when we moved in here ten years ago are gone now, whether dead, or just moved on to a care home. We are among the youngsters here, I suppose, and we are still relatively capable. But to live where achievement, acquisition, progress is no longer expected is in itself a blessing. There is no need to explain, no need to prevaricate. Contentment is not seen as a character flaw.

In such a setting, the freedom to study, to practice, to write comes easily. Silence and stillness are gifts too, and as precious in themselves as the soft scented air of evening through the window, the little sounds of birds settling in for the night, the soft tapping of my keyboard. To be alert to the infinite in the tiny moment, the limitless ground beneath each breath; these are mysteries within the plain fragments of passing time that no one would suspect who didn’t live among them, obscurely and at peace.

Sounds

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This evening the sounds from the open window were clear and somehow more present than they often seem. The traffic from the road not a hundred yards away sounded almost like the tide on a shingle beach, only not so regular. The birds were quiet, though; the magpie family in the biggest of the hazels at the back of the garden were having a quiet (for magpies) conversation, and there was a blackbird trying a few desultory phrases, but his heart wasn’t really in it. A summer breeze rustled the leaves from time to time.

Sitting by the window, especially in summer, is full of these beloved instants. Even the familiar chair, and the floor beneath my feet, are gifts of love, somehow. Living beside a relatively busy main road through the town, and in distant earshot of the Bristol trains, there are always background sounds, some indefinite as the breeze, and some as clear and unmistakable as the buses that grumble away from the two nearby stops, one on either side of the road – on hot days with their air conditioning units whining with that particular, slightly panicky sound they have.

Somehow these sounds have grown to be as familiar as breathing. They are not noise; there is nothing they are disturbing – least of all me – and yet they are not really background either. I suppose it’s just their place in the dear fabric of what is that holds them there for me. I have learned not to tell stories about them to myself, that’s part of it. What they are is their own whatness; in a sense it is none of my business, and yet I am as much a part of the day as they are. We share this pool of Dorset air, its frequncies and its warmth, the movement of the breeze. We are together while I sit, morning and evening, the sounds and I. What more could I want?

This word, is

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In The Book of Privy Counseling, the anonymous author—who also wrote the well-known Cloud of Unknowing—says: “… There is no name, no experience, and no insight so akin to the everlastingness of truth than what you can possess, perceive, and actually experience in the blind loving awareness of this word, is.”

There is no name, no experience, no insight closer or truer than the truth of our own being, our own isness. There is no place closer to reality than the place we’re standing on. That is why resistance to what is, is so challenging. But it’s also the reason that it can be so fruitful for practice. In a moment when we say to ourselves, “I don’t want this”—whatever the this is—we are effectively saying no to reality. There are things, like injustice or willful harm, which should be resisted. Yet here I’m referring to the many ways in which we refuse or deny reality, and which inevitably cause harm. Refusal to accept situations that don’t favor us, for example, from the trivial to the momentous. Denial of our impact on others, of illness, of death.

The practice of contemplation, therefore, creates a space in which to work with our resistance so that we can choose is. And more, it gives us the opportunity to fall in love with it. Because we don’t have to like all aspects of reality. Like or dislike have nothing to do with contemplation. Yet we can learn to love reality’s isness, which means honoring ourselves and others and things and beings as we and they are. From this perspective, contemplation is the profound practice of loving what is, of resting in and into what is, of not distancing ourselves from ourselves and the world.

All of us have wanted things to be otherwise at some point in our lives. All of us have wished for different choices, different stories, different results. Yet there’s enormous strength—and infinite possibility—in learning to love what is instead of what should have been, and one way to do this is to learn to attend, allow, and accept.

Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, Tricycle Magazine, May 2022

One of the problems I have thinking of myself as some sort of teacher, or even someone with the brass neck to write a blog like this, is that I find it hard to give any answer for others on this question of accepting: it seems horribly presumptuous and patronising to tell another how they should live in the face of what might, for them personally, be terrible tragedy of a kind I maybe have never had to face myself.

Yet I have lived through difficult times in my own life, more than once; and by some grace I have found my way through to a happier old age, and a better relationship, than I could ever have hoped for. I do mean grace, too: this is not some kind of false modesty.

What do I mean by grace, then, in a non-religious context? Perhaps some action of cause and effect beyond my own understanding or will, something that “just happened”, for which I can take no credit; happenstance apparently, but with a deeper meaning than mere chance. Buddhists might call it karma, but actually it is much more like the Taoist sense of wu-wei: the natural action of what is; the coming together of circumstances beyond conscious control or foresight. Somehow it makes sense not only of the present, but of the past as well, as antecedent for this now, this somehow amazed “blind loving awareness of this word, is.”

So how could we live in view of this? All I can say is that the one thing that has seen me through is acceptance – acceptance of what is, what has come to be, without wishing it otherwise. One cannot help but grieve at times, but that is different from raging at what has come to be, or calling it unfair. It just is. Actually I am profoundly grateful for a life so marked, since otherwise I might never have discovered the wonder of acceptance, Gelassenheit, the simple allowing of what is. And then almost certainly my now would have been other, and less, than it is.

Umwelt

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If you sit still for long enough then it will become apparent that there is no such entity as a discrete, permanent self that “has” experiences, thoughts, sensations. Of course there are experiences, but no one “has” them – they are no one’s possession, for there is no one separable from experience to possess them. And yet…

And yet it certainly feels as though I am I, feeling things. I have memories, preferences, longings, losses – so many losses – that don’t belong to anyone else; and they feel like the same kind of thing as these experiences, thoughts and sensations that happen in the present…

What is going on?

In the semiotic theories of Jakob Johann von Uexküll there crops up a wonderful word, Umwelt, the specific way an organism perceives, and interacts with, its environment and its particular circumstances. Not only does the Umwelt of a tick, or a bat (von Uexküll’s own examples) differ from yours or mine, ours differ from each other’s, just as one bat’s Umwelt will perhaps subtly differ from another bat’s.

Now, Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology – the study of subjective, lived experiences – used another, not dissimilar term, Lebenswelt (life-world), to speak of the human Umwelt, just as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins used his own term inscape to describe the unique inwardness – thisness – of a thing, and instress to describe its effect on the one who beholds the thing.

Maybe there is something here. Maybe this sense we have of being a “self” is precisely what each of our individual Umwelten feels like from the inside. Could this be the source of the very illusion of a soul, a granular individuality that goes on in such apparently adamantine uniqueness that it is impossible to conceive of its dissolving, even into the blessed expanse of death? The contemplative endeavour itself then becomes nothing less than the great adventure of seeing beyond the borders of the Lebenswelt, beyond the doors of perception themselves, out in the open ground of isness itself.

In defence of humanism

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Humanism is a philosophical outlook, but in itself is a minimalist one, deliberately so because a key requirement of it is that individuals should think for themselves about what they are and how they should live. Standardly, a philosophy is a fully fleshed-out affair, consisting in a detailed view of the world, of humanity in it, of the relationship between human beings and the world, and of human beings with each other. All the great philosophies have a metaphysics that underwrites the ethics they urge. But humanism requires no commitment to teachings beyond its two fundamental premises, and it imposes no obligations on people other than to think for themselves. Because it does not consist in a body of doctrines and prescriptions, backed by sanctions for not believing in the former and not obeying the latter, it is as far from being like a religion as anything could be.

…[I]t remains that each humanist, starting from the shared premises that frame an overall humanistic attitude to life and the world, must work out what that means given his or her own talents for creating a life truly worth living, in both the following respects: that it feels good to live it, and that it is beneficial in its impact on others. In the pages to follow, one version of a humanist ethics is sketched. It is not intended as prescriptive, or as closing debate on any of the topics it touches; it is illustrative of a humanist endeavour which proceeds from its chooser’s own efforts to fulfil the one humanist obligation: to think.

AC Grayling, The God Argument, p.148

The other week, a commenter suggested that humanism presented an alternative belief system to the one(s) presented by religion. I knew then that this was not so, as I explained in the subsequent post; but the question troubled me. I knew that I recalled something in Grayling’s book that addressed this concern, but I couldn’t at the time find it. I have now reproduced it above!

This whole question has been on my mind the past week, in between working on another, related, project, and some thoughts occur to me. One of the problems with religion – any religion, but acutely the Abrahamic ones – is that they rest upon authority: the authority of holy scripture, of tradition, and of those contemporary representatives (priests, imams, pastors, elders, rabbis) on whom the ancient authority, or some proportion of it, has devolved, inasmuch as they have been ordained, appointed, to mediate it to their congregations. The whole edifice of religion rests on tiered authority, ultimately underpinned by a reward and punishment system with some kind of assumed metaphysical origin. (Even the religious traditions of Buddhism fall under this stricture, though in a typically more nuanced way.)

Now, spirituality is one of the most intimate, personal and sensitive areas of human life; it seems wholly wrong that any external authority should seek to impose control upon a person’s spiritual life. The result, so often, is more or less visible religious trauma. It is illuminating to consider that perhaps the next most intimate, personal and sensitive area of a person’s life is their sexuality; it is no coincidence that most, if not all, religions seek to control that also.

Humanism, as Grayling points out in The God Argument (above and passim), is nothing like this. It has no authority, nor does it seek authority. Like the very earliest “atheist” strands of Buddhism, humanism states that each humanist must work out their path for themselves. Others, directly and through their writings, may give assistance and advice, but each of us must do it for ourselves. To require anyone to accept beliefs on external authority is not only not necessary: it is an abuse of human freedom; and besides, it is the deepest unkindness.

Contemplative practice is just exactly “finding out for oneself”, unmediated by the authority of scripture or tradition; perhaps that is why so many contemplatives, from Meister Eckhart and Al-Hallaj to Thomas Keating and Richard Rohr, though they would never have considered themselves humanists, have faced anything from severe criticism to murderous supression from the authorities of their respective religions. To remain free to tread our own way with diligence – what more could anyone ask?

One life

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The question of personal immortality stands on a somewhat different footing. Here evidence either way is possible. Persons are part of the everyday world with which science is concerned, and the conditions which determine their existence are discoverable. A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be sceptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal, and that the organised energy of a living body becomes, as it were, demobilised at death, and therefore not available for collective action. All the evidence goes to show that what we regard as our mental life is bound up with brain structure and organised bodily energy. Therefore it is rational to suppose that mental life ceases when bodily life ceases. The argument is only one of probability, but it is as strong as those upon which most scientific conclusions are based.

Bertrand Russell, What I Believe

When I sit quietly, as I did this evening, in the soft breeze from the open window, with the sounds of the birds mingling with the street sounds – human voices, tyres on the road, a distant train horn – merely being alive is infinitely precious, its own stillness bright with presence. And yet I know very well that this one life that I have known is entirely finite; its perfect whatness would not be were it not.

Seen like this, death is a dear friend, as necessary to life’s loveliness as being born. What is there to fear? To dissolve in the end into simple light, the plain isness that underlies all things and yet is no thing? Not fearful, but just right; all things finding their duration as their place – and in that their beauty, and all the wonder that they are.

(See also my post earlier this year, Making friends with death)

“We Must Have Courage”

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I very very rarely publish anything on this blog that is even vaguely political, but an article I read this morning in Lion’s Roar touched and inspired me more than anything I’ve read for a long time.

Those of my readers who live in the USA or Canada, or those who, like me, have good memories of those vast lands, and so many reasons for gratitude to their great people, will understand why this piece by Kaira Jewel Lingo, the Black American dharma teacher, moved me so much. It is too long to write in its entirety here, but I hope these few paragraphs will lead you to click through and read the whole piece:

Like many, I’ve experienced the past months as an unrelenting, reckless assault—not only on people, especially the most vulnerable among us: immigrants, the poor, the disabled, LGBTQIA+ individuals, BIPOC communities, women, children, veterans, students, and the elderly—but also on the very fabric of our shared life. It’s understandable to feel helpless, powerless, and scared at the immensity and speed of the destruction. I feel scared, too.

The intention of the barrage of devastation is to immobilize us and convince us that resistance is futile. But as Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny, it’s when people keep their heads down and “obey in advance” that authoritarian regimes succeed. How can we practice and apply the dharma so that we can claim our own power in this moment and take meaningful action? What Buddhist wisdom can inspire us?

…

Tending to this very moment is so important, for the future is made only of this moment. When we feel powerless and helpless, we can come home to ourselves and connect with our breath and body. In his last teaching before he passed away, the Buddha encouraged his disciples to cultivate the “island within.” That is, we shouldn’t take refuge in any other person or thing, but only in the energy of awakening that each of us has inside. We can each do this now. Only by tending to reality, moment by moment, can we access our inner power. We may be tempted to give up our inner power when feeling helpless in the face of external power, but this would be a kind of obeying in advance. Don’t do it!

Kaira Jewel Lingo

Gelassenheit

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I’ve mentioned before here Martin Heidegger’s use (after Meister Eckhart) of the term Gelassenheit, but it is only recently that I’ve come to realise how closely it expresses my own experience. In a fascinating essay on the Metanoia website, Viktorija Lipič writes on exactly this:

…meditative thinking (or meditative contemplation) is understood as a form of receptivity and attentive waiting, while at the same time remaining open to what is (by contrast, not limiting oneself or determining one’s expectations to what one ought to be open to, ought to receive, ought to wait for etc.). It is a dwelling in openness…

For Heidegger, Gelassenheit holds within itself two main attributes: a) a releasement toward things and b) an openness to mystery. Releasement is one of the main aspects of what is our true nature. This nature by default also includes openness, and through this openness allows us to have an instantaneous and uninterrupted connection to Being. Releasement must therefore include openness and allow openness to come into being, allowing the being to open itself (to mystery) through releasement.

Releasement can be further separated into two elements: releasement from, and releasement to (this can also be thought of as ‘authentic releasement’). It is important to point out that meditative thinking is “not a simple opening to Being, as the nature of authentic releasement (or releasement to) might suggest, for it involves a resolve in regard to Being” (Heidegger, 1966, p. 26). Rather, it is in meditative contemplation that we are open to Being, and in the steadfastness of being open, are exposed to it (i.e., Being). What reveals Being, is therefore, as Heidegger would say, an “in-dwelling” in Being itself.

An exploration of Gelassenheit through Meister Eckhart and Martin Heidegger

In many ways, Gelassenheit reminds me of Eckhart Tolle’s sense that presence in the Now is the openness to Being itself (The Power of Now, pp.64-65), but perhaps its most immediate resonance is with Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance:

[W]hen 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.”

But 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.

Radical Acceptance, pp. 315, 317

The number of words I’ve used here, and their apparently challenging nature, in fact totally belies the ease and simplicity of Gelassenheit itself. This “lett[ing] go into what is seen” is such a natural, instinctive thing to do that what is amazing is that somehow we’ve forgotten how to do it, and that for most of us it is only found (again?) after many cumulative hours of practice.

Amusingly enough, this last week I’ve been suffering with a particularly baroque example of the common cold; in facing an uncomfortable and inglorious illness like that, acceptance, and an openness to what merely is, transforms what could otherwise be an infuriating and miserable waste of time into something precious and valuable – the nose taking on the role of an oyster, perhaps. Of course it’s not that a stinking cold is in and of itself a pleasure; merely that if you truly don’t fight it, it has all sorts of hidden gifts and little revelations, places of peace and stillness concealed among the sniffles and the shivers.

The loveliness of open acceptance opens onto the field of Being almost directly – that is the entirely unexpected thing. There is nothing else to do, no extra technique to learn, no final supreme effort. The “vast and shining presence” simply is, and is isness in itself. There is no river to cross, no high and jagged peaks to climb; it was there all along, and we never knew.