Tag Archives: death

What actually is

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This “close but not identical” affinity between Western unitive and Eastern nondual suggests that we look a little more closely at the phenomenological aspects of this transition—or in other words, what the structures of perception are actually doing beneath all the metaphysics and devotion. Clearly there is a big shift in perception that takes place between “dualistic” and “nondualistic” levels of consciousness, resulting in these signature experiences of oneness and an unboundaried, flowing sense of selfhood. But what if this shift is not primarily about what one sees but how one sees? That it betokens not so much a new level of conscious attainment as a permanent shift in the structure of consciousness itself—as it were, a rewiring of the “operating system”?

…I find [this approach] useful because it lifts the discussion beyond the traditional interior and subjective (read “fuzzy”) criteria used to measure nondual attainment (“How do you know if you’re enlightened yet?”) and brings it into direct dialogue with some objective, quantifiable markers increasingly verifiable in the emerging field of neuroscience. It allows us to look at the concept/experience of nonduality not through the lens of personal spiritual attainment but through the lens of the continuing evolution of consciousness.

Cynthia Bourgeault

We humans appear, for better or worse, to be people who understand the world, and each other, in terms of language and symbol; we are semiotic creatures. This understanding underlies the “user illusion” paradigm used by Donald Hoffman and Daniel Dennett, where human awareness is compared to the user interface of a computer system (whether a desktop workstation or a smartphone or anything in between); the underlying reality, whether in terms of molecular science or computer code, being approached through representations, rather than directly, since the latter would be far too complex to interact with moment by moment, even supposing the user understood it on its own terms. But as Cynthia Bourgeault points out, some such image applies equally to questions of metaphysics and devotion!

And yet, just as the interface elements on this tablet allow me to manipulate them in ways that cause real events at the level of machine code, and hence enable me to write this blog post, and later to post it online, so the way we understand contemplative experience truly affects the phenomenology of our spirituality, and hence the nature and effect of our practice. It actually does matter immensely to us how we tell ourselves about the ineffable; and yet for all our tall tales, the ineffable remains what it is.

The ground of being remains the reality of all that is; without it, nothing could have come to be, and nothing can be lost from it. What we call life and death are merely the crests and troughs of wavelets; the stream goes on. Whether we call it God, or Being, or describe it in terms of mathematical physics, it is the bright isness, Eckhart’s Istigkeit, that no-thing from which all things have their being; which we touch in the unknown interior of our practice. Our part is simply to trust the grace, however named, that opens our hearts to what actually is.

Having walked through the fire

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The period of early Christianity is one of the key building blocks in my lineage of faith. It’s an overlooked area for much of the Roman Church and its child, Protestantism. With the self-sufficiency and arrogance that has often characterized the West, we have proceeded as if the first centuries of Christianity were unimportant, or not part of the essential Christ mystery. The very things the early Christians emphasized—such as the prayer of quiet, divinization, universal restoration, and the importance of practice—are some of the most neglected parts of the Western Church. 

After the legitimation and, some would say, the co-opting of Christianity by the Roman Empire in the 4th century, many Christians fled to the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Cappadocia (Eastern Turkey). We call these men and women the desert fathers and mothers (or abbas and ammas). The desert Christians emphasized lifestyle practice, an alternative to empires and their economies, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a very simple spirituality of transformation into Christ. The desert communities grew out of informal gatherings of monastics and functioned much like families. This tradition preceded the emergence of systematic theology and the later Church councils. Since the desert monks often lacked formal education, they told stories, much as Jesus did, to teach about ego, love, virtue, surrender, peace, divine union, and inner freedom. 

Richard Rohr, A Radical Foundation

During the period of pandemic lockdowns, I wrote, in one of the early posts on this blog, of

…my growing sense that the contemplative life is once again moving out from the monasteries and ashrams into a new desert, that of the world, or at least of places set apart within the world…

Time and again contemplatives have broken away from the apparent corruption of state churches on the one hand and religion-inspired revolutionaries on the other, sometimes forming loose communities, and retreated from formal organisation almost altogether. Examples are as diverse as the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt and Syria around the 4th century [CE], the Pure Land (Shin) schools of Buddhism founded by Honen and Shinran in 12th and 13th century Japan, and the Quakers in 17th century England.

These contemplative movements, often based around simplicity of practice and openness to the Spirit, seem to arise when not only are the religious establishments in a compromised and sometimes corrupt condition, but the state is in flux, sometimes violent flux. [Our present political uncertainties], scoured by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, would seem to provide fertile ground for contemplative change in this way.

It isn’t merely the sociology of religion at stake here, though. There is a fundamental shift in spiritual perspective, I suggest, when we step outside the conventions and hierarchies of organised religion – to say nothing of the inner bindings of doctrine and dogma – into an uncharted space of presence and necessary, rather than mandated, practice. There is no longer any traction for the human instinct for security and status; those things no longer afford an escape or a distraction from the inner work.

Out there in the wild, there was no one to impress, no need to cultivate a reputation. A lot of things didn’t matter anymore out there. The desert fathers and mothers wanted to keep the edges hot and to imitate the life of Jesus…. In short, theirs was a countercultural spirituality carrying a prophetic edge. Some of them had been draft dodgers and tax resistors. In fact, some of the women had fled from being sold into a marriage that would’ve been little better than slavery. 

A spiritual resistance movement takes shape among these desert monks, questioning the commodification and militarization of life in the wider culture. They had no use for the ego advancement and social climbing to which even Christians had begun to aspire. You see this in their practice of what they called apatheia, a fierce indifference to unimportant things….  

What do you learn to ignore and what do you learn to love? What needs to die in your life and what do you need to affirm unreservedly? These two questions are the heart of desert spirituality. The desert becomes a tomb, said the monks, a place for the demise of the ego. But there’s also an immense joy and release in that, in learning to die before you die. You’re finally set free to live with abandon. No one is freer than those who have looked death in the eye, have walked through the fire, and are able now fearlessly to love.

Belden Lane, quoted in Rohr, ibid.

So once again we have that sense I wrote of recently, that the nearness of death is in itself a gateway to the vast openness from which all things become, the ground of all that is. There is no getting around it: only as we face the ending of all we thought we were are we free at last to see that what we actually are is none other than what actually is.

Against fear

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Everything that is comes to be because of a combination of causes. When the causes and conditions are sufficient, the body is present. When the causes and conditions are not sufficient, the body is absent. The same is true of eyes, ears, nose, tongue, mind; form, sound, smell, taste, touch, and so on. This may seem abstract, but it is possible for all of us to have a deep understanding of it. You have to know the true nature of dying to understand the true nature of living. If you don’t understand death, you don’t understand life.

The teaching of the Buddha relieves us of suffering. The basis of suffering is ignorance about the true nature of self and of the world around you. When you don’t understand, you are afraid, and your fear brings you much suffering. That is why the offering of nonfear is the best kind of gift you can give, to yourself and to anyone else.

Thich Nhat Hanh, from Tricycle Magazine, February 2025

We, and all we perceive – from ants to oceans to galaxy clusters – are contingent. Nothing exists of itself, from itself: everything that is depends upon something else, upon prior conditions, preceding events… We soft walking things, and the farthest stars, are no more than brief appearances born of brief appearances; on the face of – what? The physicist might say, “spacetime” – but then concede that spacetime itself depends upon prior conditions.

All we can say is that things exist; that they’re frail, temporary appearances, but they are. Isness, Eckhart’s Istigkeit, is the only ground of their appearing. “[It] is before all things, and in [it] all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17) The ground of being is just that: it is no thing, and it is the ground of all that comes to be. There is nowhere else to go, no end to the beginning. I sometimes have to call it love.

Making friends with death

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For almost at long as I can remember I have been – or tried to be – friends with death. Let me try and explain.

It’s of course a truism to say that the death is the one thing we can be absolutely sure of: we don’t know quite when we’ll die, or indeed how, but we do know that each of us will die. I knew this surprisingly young.

The year I was due to go to school I contracted bacterial meningitis, and spent some time – over Christmas and New Year! – in a coma. When I had recovered enough to talk, my mother made no attempt to conceal from me how afraid she’d been of losing me. This struck me as odd, but somehow right. The time between falling ill, which I remembered quite well, and waking up one sunny morning in the little bedroom upstairs, surrounded by my favourite soft toys, was an utter blank. Where had I been? I had no sense of anything – not blackness, not dreams; nothing. An absence of me, entirely, and of all else besides.

The idea, the concept, of not being alive any longer I don’t suppose I like any better than anyone else; but the experience of being close to death seems to be quite different. There have been times since that long childhood illness when I have been plausibly close to death, and yet I have not found myself afraid: I have found myself surprised.

Death is an old friend. To dissolve in the end into simple light, the plain isness that underlies all things and yet is no thing: what is there to fear? Death follows us, yes, but he is our own death; dear, familiar, kind, and faithful.

Perhaps it is good to make friends with death for ourselves: to greet him first thing in the morning, say goodnight; check in with him when we wake during the night. He won’t be asleep.

The truth can only heal

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This brings us to the critical factor of seeing meditation, reading, and contemplation as conjoined. We should not be satisfied to just think about impermanence and death; we have to have the real experience, which comes from meditation. To read about Buddhism’s approach to death is important, but it needs to become an existential concern and to be translated into something approximating a real intuition or a real encounter with death. Following such a path will prevent our knowledge from evaporating in the actual experience itself. From a Buddhist point of view, so much depends upon our habits, and so thinking about death in a certain way helps us to get used to it, to become habituated to it. Therefore a real transformation has to take place on an emotional and intellectual level. Most of us have a fair degree of intellectual understanding of the facts, but that is really not the main point. A sense of impermanence has to be felt and experienced. If we understand it truly, we will handle all our tribulations far better, such as when our relationships break up, when we get divorced, when we get separated from our loved ones, when relatives die. We will handle all of these situations far differently with a truer appreciation of impermanence than we would otherwise have…

Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, Tricycle Magazine, June 2015

Impermanence, the realisation in actual experience that nothing lasts, nothing is eternal, seems to many people a gloomy doctrine. Actually it is anything but. The burden of hope is lifted; the agony of yearning is eased in the coming of light. The truth can only heal; only the truth can truly heal.

As Traleg Kyabgon says, though, this has to be experienced, not merely learned. The intellect may find such a thought easy enough to grasp – or it may not! – but it is only in lived experience that the heart can know. This is grace; the grace of practice, the gift of sitting still; or else it may be the grace of pain itself, accepted either willingly or helplessly. Either way, I have not found it something I could set out to learn: it had to happen to me. (Various monastic traditions, Christian and Buddhist, have disciplines intended to make it easier – meditations in charnel-grounds, for instance – but again I suspect that they are more ways to open the heart to grace than to compel it to learn some technique or accomplishment.)

I have been uncommonly fortunate. Not only do I have my practice, grown and changed to fit over many years, but I have had more than one close encounter with the finitude of my own life. These last have been great gifts; but they are not something one could seek out intentionally – what the news reports call a “life-changing industrial accident” would be an odd sort of spiritual discipline!

I think what lies at the heart of what may be learned from all these practices and encounters is acceptance – even glad acceptance – of the fact that life and death belong together as do the two sides of one coin, as do day and night, summer and winter. Not only is one impossible without the other, but they are a succession, parts of a cycle. Our little lives are not just rounded with a sleep, but with a waking too; just as next summer will be another year, so there will be another life. Not I – I am as fleeting as the leaves – but another will wake to a new day, in another time that might have been different had I not passed this way before.

Impermanence

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I realised not long ago that I have tended for most of my life – albeit unconsciously – to reckon the worth of things by how long they are likely to last; and this despite the fact that so many things I love and whose presence gives meaning to my own life – small plants, lively insects, the changing skies, the seasons of the year – are ephemeral by their very nature, and they last only moments, days or weeks or months, before reaching an end implicit in their merely being what they are. I love humans, too, I realised, for who they are not for what they might achieve; and humans don’t last long compared with trees, or with the rock formations that are such striking and ancient companions of ours in this part of the country.

The worth of something, as I had unthinkingly valued it, is its essence: the thing that exists, persists, being the thing itself. It is an illusion: phenomena, any phenomena, are empty, surely, of any such essence. They are merely what they are, and that in relation to all else that is, to the shifting patterns on the bright skin of the stream, “the ever-transforming patterns of the cosmos as a whole.” (Reninger) It’s clinging to this idea of essence that gives rise to our constant craving, our helpless longing for permanence that is the growth-point for the whole tragic enterprise of human pride – the error of Ozymandias.

We are frail, and temporary, and lovely; we are precious as all life is precious, and our loveliness, like the loveliness of all that lives, is in our fleetingness. The points of light on the sparkling water last an instant – their beauty is in that. Death is implicit in being born; life would not be possible without it, and it is a loyal friend to the living. All we need is to sit still, and watch the emptiness of separate things; the delicious freshness of impermanence itself will come by like the scent of flowers through an open window in summer. Death will come and sit on the end of our bed, and fill his pipe, and talk to us of life; and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

Coming to be

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Time is things coming to be, that is all. It moves, or so it seems to us, in the patterning and unpatterning that is life and death. All we are ourselves is just this coming to be; bright patterns on the river surface, flickering for a few or many moments and then gone in a swirl, or settling gently back to the quiet of some pool under the dappled shade.

How could it be otherwise? How could we be master of our fate, we who are nothing but the moments of what happens to be? What could be happier than to see that we are free at last from the menacing years and the straitened gates, free to be all that we have come to be, and nothing more?

Sitting quietly by the window, in the light of the little lamp across the room, there isn’t anything but this stillness, this peace without seeking. This, for now, is all there is, and all there needs to be. What else could it be?

[The second paragraph is an answer of sorts to William Ernest Henley’s poem ‘Invictus’, from which I have borrowed some images.]

Fade into emptiness

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[F]or a period of time each day, try to sit in shikantaza, without moving, without expecting anything, as if you were in your last moment. Moment after moment you feel your last instant. In each inhalation and each exhalation there are countless instants of time. Your intention is to live in each instant.

First practice smoothly exhaling, then inhaling. Calmness of mind is beyond the end of your exhalation. If you exhale smoothly, without even trying to exhale, you are entering into the complete perfect calmness of your mind. You do not exist anymore. When you exhale this way, then naturally your inhalation will start from there. All that fresh blood bringing everything from outside will pervade your body. You are completely refreshed. Then you start to exhale, to extend that fresh feeling into emptiness. So, moment after moment, without trying to do anything, you continue shikantaza…

Even though your practice is not good enough, you can do it. Your breathing will gradually vanish. You will gradually vanish, fading into emptiness. Inhaling without effort you naturally come back to yourself with some color or form. Exhaling, you gradually fade into emptiness—empty, white paper. That is shikantaza. The important point is your exhalation. Instead of trying to feel yourself as you inhale, fade into emptiness as you exhale.

Shunryu Suzuki, not always so

To the conscious self, emptiness will always feel like death. But in emptiness that which is unnamed, aside from words, is free for once. Elizabeth Reninger:

It may take weeks, months, or even years to unwind certain psychic or physical contractions and break free of old habits and beliefs. But unlearning and release can also happen in a single moment of aesthetic rapture, or with a deep belly-laugh from understanding a joke, or from the dizzying mental meltdown of fully grokking a paradox.

In such moments, we’re left in a “space” characterized by an unspeakably sweet kind of knowing, a spaciously vivid awareness that is sometimes likened to the experience of a mute person tasting candy. The only thing that we might be able to say is “Ahhh . . .”

Out of such moments—these gaps between thoughts—arise a natural innocence, curiosity, and spontaneity, along with the deepest kind of contentment. If only for a moment, we are at home.

Home is in fact the emptiness we so struggle against. The way things come to be, the patterns on the surface of the stream – they are only moments in emptiness, points of light on the water. There is no thing to find: the sweet essence itself is emptiness, inexhaustible, yet quite outside “is” and “is not”: the safest place there is.

Where all things return

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The river, the Tao, the open ground, the source. These are all words, but no thing. Only things have beginnings, or ends. All things (and that includes cats, and people, and impossibly tiny bugs of all kinds) that exist, are. They have being; if they seem to share nothing else, they share that.

The Tao is no thing. It is not a substance. It is without dimensions, without duration, for you can only measure things; but it is. Isness, in fact, is what it is. It can’t have come from anywhere; there is nowhere it could lead. But it is where all things return, even you and I.

The way is empty,
used, but not used up.
Deep, yes! ancestral
to the ten thousand things.

Blunting edge,
loosing bond,
dimming light,
the way is the dust of the way.

Quiet,
yes, and likely to endure…

Tao te Ching, tr. Ursula le Guin

Sitting by the window in the dusk

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Sitting by the window in the dusk this evening, I kept being drawn back to listen to the rain. It connected itself somehow to my breath, drifted between patches of thought, drew me back to itself softly – trickling in the guttering, pattering in the trees, the shush and splash of tyres out on the road.

Pema Chödrön, writing in Lion’s Roar:

One of my favorite subjects of contemplation is this question: “Since death is certain, but the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?” You know you will die, but you really don’t know how long you have to wake up from the cocoon of your habitual patterns. You don’t know how much time you have left to fulfill the potential of your precious human birth. Given this, what is the most important thing?

Every day of your life, every morning of your life, you could ask yourself, “As I go into this day, what is the most important thing? What is the best use of this day?” At my age, it’s kind of scary when I go to bed at night and I look back at the day, and it seems like it passed in the snap of a finger. That was a whole day? What did I do with it? Did I move any closer to being more compassionate, loving, and caring — to being fully awake? Is my mind more open? What did I actually do? I feel how little time there is and how important it is how we spend our time…

If you take some time to formally practice meditation, perhaps in the early morning, there is a lot of silence and space. Meditation practice itself is a way to create gaps. Every time you realize you are thinking and you let your thoughts go, you are creating a gap. Every time the breath goes out, you are creating a gap. You may not always experience it that way, but the basic meditation instruction is designed to be full of gaps. If you don’t fill up your practice time with your discursive mind, with your worrying and obsessing and all that kind of thing, you have time to experience the blessing of your surroundings. You can just sit there quietly. Then maybe silence will dawn on you, and the sacredness of the space will penetrate…

Another powerful way to do pause practice is simply to listen for a moment. Instead of sight being the predominant sense perception, let sound, hearing, be the predominant sense perception. It’s a very powerful way to cut through our conventional way of looking at the world. In any moment, you can just stop and listen intently. It doesn’t matter what particular sound you hear; you simply create a gap by listening intently.

I have come to love the noises through the window where I sit to practice. They are plain, familiar sounds: traffic, birdsong, the wind in the trees along the back of the garden, voices, the odd metallic clang from the yard by the old reservoir… Early in the morning, or on evenings like this one, they become their own lovely lacework realm of sound, intricate and nourishing, their texture as real as each breath, as the sensations of my body resting on the good floor. What more could one want than what is, in each instant that it’s heard? Everything is here; this precious instant is gift and grace; there is no next or before, and from that all healing springs.