Tag Archives: Eckhart Tolle

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.

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.

Mysterium Tremendum

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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

In a sense, meditation does just this, in small, repeatable doses, if we have the resolve to sit through what seem at the time to be dark places.  We are out of our depth, conclusively – and it can be all too easy to draw back, reflexively, like drawing back one’s hand from an electric shock. If we can sit it out, literally, then we may receive one of the greatest  gifts of our practice.

Just last week, I quoted Eckhart Tolle. I make no apologies for repeating the passage here, since what he says fits so precisely:

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

As Rohr suggests in Immortal Diamond, this may be why initiation rites have traditionally mimicked dying, and why so much of the language of traditional monastic spirituality used the terminology of dying to self, and rising to God. But we are once again at the thin edges of language here, and what actually happens is not in the least metaphorical.

As Rohr suggests, actually to encounter the metaphysical ground is not an experience (if that is even the right word for it) that it is possible to take lightly. It is overwhelming, in every sense of the  word, not least in the way that volition, self-determination, self-anything, are swept away in what simply is. And yet, and yet – where else could one ever hope for?

One small room

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You need one small room for yourself. This is very true: when you can really find yourself in a small room, then there is you yourself, and the whole universe is there, and the whole universe makes sense to you. Without your one small room, the whole universe doesn’t make any sense. So what you need now is a small room, and what you will need after your death is a small stone. That is the actual reality, which is always true for everyone.

Shunryu Suzuki, Becoming Yourself: Teachings on the Zen Way of Life p.32

I have grown increasingly to love my own small room. It has become soaked, somehow, at least in my own feelings, with the hours I have  spent there, and the changes I have seen in myself and in the seasons – in the years now, in fact – the trees growing and changing, generations of blackbirds coming and going across the lawn.

Strangely, though, I’ve also come to notice that the room travels with me. If I am aware enough of where I am, of the light moving across the floor, my own breathing in its little tides and intervals, then my own little room can be in a hotel, even a train seat or in an airport among all the other displaced travellers who wait with me, Stillness isn’t a thing you need to find so much as that you just need to step into, opening the  door and closing it behind you gently.

Perhaps the strangest thing I have found is that this small room of stillness is there, almost clearer and almost more precious somehow, in those times when the usual patterns of volition, of self-determination, seem to be lost, and whatever baneful thing is in the air has, finally, hit the fan.

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

Suzuki’s paradoxical remark about the universe begins to make sense. It is within now, as Tolle himself says, that what is is all there is. For once, we have dropped into the stillness that has lain beneath all that has come to be, and is beneath all that is becoming now. All the myriad contrivances of thought have dropped away; what is left is no thing – it is the ground itself, bright and unending.

Umwelten again, but cleansed

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The senses constrain an animal’s life, restricting what it can detect and do. But they also define a species’ future, and the evolutionary possibilities ahead of it. For example, around 400 million years ago, some fish began leaving the water and adapting to life on land. In open air, these pioneers—our ancestors—could see over much longer distances than they could in water. The neuroscientist Malcolm MacIver thinks that this change spurred the evolution of advanced mental abilities, like planning and strategic thinking  Instead of simply reacting to whatever was directly in front of them, they could be proactive. By seeing farther, they could think ahead. As their Umwelten expanded, so did their minds.

An Umwelt cannot expand indefinitely, though. Senses always come at a cost. Animals have to keep the neurons of their sensory systems in a perpetual state of readiness so that they can fire when necessary. This is tiring work, like drawing a bow and holding it in place so that when the moment comes, an arrow can be shot. Even when your eyelids are closed, your visual system is a monumental drain on your reserves. For that reason, no animal can sense everything well.

Nor would any animal want to. It would be overwhelmed by the flood of stimuli, most of which would be irrelevant. Evolving according to their owner’s needs, the senses sort through an infinity of stimuli, filtering out what’s irrelevant and capturing signals for food, shelter, threats, allies, or mates. They are like discerning personal assistants who come to the brain with only the most important information. Writing about the tick, Uexküll noted that the rich world around it is “constricted and transformed into an impoverished structure” of just three stimuli [heat, touch and scent]. “However, the poverty of this environment is needful for the certainty of action, and certainty is more important than riches.” Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. That is why Umwelten exist at all. It is also why the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound. Our senses filter in what we need. We must choose to learn about the rest.

Ed Yong. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, pp.7-8

When Aldous Huxley wrote his astonishing 1954 study of the effects of psychedelics on the human mind, The Doors of Perception, he pointed out that the human brain and nervous system, in their normal configuration, function so as “to enable us to live, the brain and nervous system eliminate unessential information from the totality of the ‘Mind at Large’.” Under the influence of mescaline, however, the “miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence” becomes apparent, unfiltered, just as it is.

Now of course this is not an escape from the sensory component of the human Umwelt – we are still constrained by the information our senses can respond to (mescaline cannot enable us to see in ultraviolet, or accurately to sense the earth’s magnetic field) – but it is at least a partial escape from the functional processing of that information stream that presents us with the familiar, usable world of the everyday. As Huxley himself pointed out, it is possible to perceive directly Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, the untrammelled isness of things, the being-itself that our minds dissect in order to construct our daily lives; in itself, it is, as William Blake remarked, infinite: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Absent hare-brained theories of medieval magic mushroom culture, Eckhart was not under the influence of psychedelics. The contemplative technology of unenclosing humankind has millennia of research and development behind it, and as texts like The Cloud of Unknowing reveal, it was highly developed in at least some strands of medieval European monasticism.  To see things as they are to our unedited senses – through our own cleansed Umwelt – is as basic a human ability as breathing; only most of us have forgotten how. As Eckhart Tolle points out in our own time,

Use your senses fully. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don’t interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don’t judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something — anything — and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the “isness” of all things. Move deeply into the Now.

You are leaving behind the deadening world of mental abstraction, of time. You are getting out of the insane mind that is draining you of life energy, just as it is slowly poisoning and destroying the Earth. You are awakening out of the dream of time into the present.

The Power of Now, p.63

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.

Belief systems?

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A commenter on yesterday’s post reminded me that perhaps I hadn’t made it sufficiently clear that I am not advancing humanism – or anything else come to that – as an alternative belief system to take the place of organised religion. For some this may be case – although I don’t think that’s what AC Grayling was recommending in the passage I quoted yesterday – but it emphatically isn’t my own approach at all.

The Einsamkeit of yesterday’s title is a German term usually translated as either loneliness or solitude; its alternative translations, seclusion or solitariness, are the ones that interest me, (Like so many German philosophical terms, it has its own resonance which doesn’t seem to have a one for one equivalent in English.) I was using it to indicate following the course that appears, spiritually – I’m reminded of the Taoist phrase “to accord with the way” – not adopting a ready-made spirituality from either organised religion or academic philosophy. (People like Eckhart Tolle, or Jiddu Krishnamurti, are exemplars of this kind of contemplative path.)

It is of course hard to find words for all this, which is one reason that the Christian tradition of apophatic theology developed among the Early Church Fathers – although something similar already existed among the Neo-Platonists – and from the opposite direction, perhaps, Buddhist (especially Zen) philosophy and teachings often emphasise Śūnyatā, emptiness of inherent existence. The ground of being, the Tao, Istigkeit, is no thing. It cannot be described; it isn’t really possible truthfully to construct a sentence with it as its object. Awareness seems to be irresistibly identified with it: we are aware with its awareness. At the end, it is all we are; but it is all we have ever been. Our practice is really nothing more than a means of stripping away whatever stops us seeing that. To construct, or to adopt, belief systems is massively to miss the point – and that is what I was, perhaps clumsily, trying to get at yesterday.

A certain stillness

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Stillness is a great discipline; it is the great discovery of meditation. Stillness becomes the dynamic of transcendence. The more still we are, the more we transcend our limitations. Now, stillness does not mean stopping. It is not static. We fully experience stillness when we feel how it is part of the whole process of growth in nature. There is a wondrous relationship between stillness and growth.

Laurence Freeman, Tasting Wisdom

Stillness seems to be inseparable from surrender. Stillness is not possible in the midst of inner warfare; though, in the inner life, to surrender does not mean to give in so much as to let go, and in this there is an immense simplicity, a lack of complication, of rules and prescriptions. Cynthia Bourgeault (she is contrasting Centering Prayer with other methods such as vipassana, and meditation using a mantra):

A surrender method is even simpler. One does not even watch or label the thought as it comes up, takes form, and dissipates. As soon as it emerges into consciousness, one simply lets it go. The power of this form of meditation does not reside in a particular clarity of the mind or even in presence, but entirely in the gesture of release itself.

Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, p.20

Eckhart Tolle has explained this particularly well. One of the great strengths of his approach to the contemplative life must be his gentle but steadfast refusal to adopt the terminology of any religion, without rejecting their inner meaning and resonance. It might be too easy to pass by Tolle due to the popularity of his books a few years ago; that would be a mistake – his work is uniquely valuable, if only to serve as a bridge between Buddhist or Advaita based methods and the Christian practices like Centering Prayer and Christian Meditation (WCCM) which have their roots firmly set in their religious foundations. In his remarkably useful little book, Practicing the Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle writes (p.20),

When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream — a gap of “no-mind.” At first, the gaps will be short, a few seconds perhaps, but gradually they will become longer. When these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you. This is the beginning of your natural state of felt oneness with Being, which is usually obscured by the mind.

With practice, the sense of stillness and peace will deepen. In fact, there is no end to its depth. You will also feel a subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within: the joy of Being.

Listening in the silence

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So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence — your deeper self — behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.

When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream — a gap of “no-mind.” At first, the gaps will be short, a few seconds perhaps, but gradually they will become longer. When these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you. This is the beginning of your natural state of felt oneness with Being, which is usually obscured by the mind. With practice, the sense of stillness and peace will deepen. In fact, there is no end to its depth. You will also feel a subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within: the joy of Being.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

This inward listening of which Tolle speaks is truly, as he himself says a few pages later, the preliminary state for becoming aware of the present moment as it happens. In his own words,

Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.

Simply to sit still, listening, is really all we need to do. The arising of thoughts then becomes thinking no longer, but just another appearance in the bright field of open awareness. We can listen to the thoughts bubbling up and falling away, without feeling that we are thinking them, just as we can listen to the cooing of the wood pigeons in the trees across the garden, the rising and falling of traffic sounds, or our own breathing.

Listening is an entirely open attention – undefended, accepting – to what may come. Aside from the strange moments of illumination sometimes hidden within great trauma and shock, there is no other time we are so open to what actually is. It may be the truest state we humans are heir to. And it is important to realise – which is why listening is so powerful a practice – that this is not something we achieve, or do: it is something we allow.

It seems to me that at its heart, all true contemplative practice is a way to this acceptance, as Tara Brach so memorably pointed out; which is why the radically simple ones appear to be the best, whether just sitting (shikantaza), naked intention (Centering Prayer) or some kind of repetitive practice such as hesychasm or the Nembutsu. All of them, when practised faithfully, lead to silence and to listening.

Apophasis

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It occurs to me that the dilemma I wrote of in my last post, that of being unable to find words for spiritual realities outside of one or another religious tradition, is similar to one faced by theologians and philosphers since classical times, which led to the development of apophatic theology, the discipline which attempts to speak not of God, but of what God is not. Words apply to things, and God – at least God as understood as the ground of being itself – is no thing.

Undifferentiated being, the ground and source of all that is, cannot have attributes – accidents, to use the theological term – that can be described. Being as it is the source of all, and the foundation of awareness itself, it cannot rightly be the object of any sentence. We can assign to it a term, Being (with a capital B) perhaps, as Eckhart Tolle prefers, or God; but all that does is function as maybe a placeholder for a name. That is about all it can do.

We can, of course, speak and think and write of practice; we can think, and write, critically of others’ thoughts and writings. To try to do this without unduly borrowing from avowedly Christian – or Buddhist, or Taoist, or whatever – terminology is certainly a good thing; but what is really essential is to try and avoid doing it with the phenomenology of the contemplative life itself. We must somehow find a way to speak only of the inwardness of the way, without attempting to explain or justify it. Writers like Tolle himself, or Nisargadatta Maharaj, often seem to get it right; whereas ones like Sam Harris or Chris Niebauer, with their heavy borrowing from Buddhist teachings, sometimes do not.

Perhaps my problem in all this comes down to diffidence, as much as anything. To endeavour to write truly about the spiritual life, and the reason for the spiritual life, without borrowing from the lexicon of one religion or another, requires a kind of self confidence I have always found difficult to acquire. Maybe it does come down to too much willingness to think, after all.

The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: “I think, therefore I am.” He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind. Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being “at one” and therefore at peace. At one with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as with your deepest self and life unmanifested — at one with Being. Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now