Tag Archives: Jiddu Krishnamurti

Just as it comes

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Tara Brach, in her book Radical Acceptance, points out that acceptance and awareness are inextricably woven together in contemplative experience.

Acceptance Brach defines as:

[t]he way out of our cage [of our own beliefs and fears,] accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is that we are aware of what is happening within our body and mind in any given moment, without trying to control or judge or pull away. I do not mean that we are putting up with harmful behavior—our own or another’s. This is an inner process of accepting our actual, present-moment experience. It means feeling sorrow and pain without resisting. It means feeling desire or dislike for someone or something without judging ourselves for the feeling or being driven to act on it.

But this acceptance is rooted in as well as interwoven with what I call (borrowing Jiddu Krishnamurti’s phrase) “choiceless awareness”. It is not an attitude we can simply adopt, as an act of will. Much later in the same book, Brach explains,

when 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” [Dzogchen].

As Brach points out above, “This can be disconcerting, scary, incredibly mysterious.” Especially at times when the externals of life are less than solid – times of loss or grief, isolation (perhaps on an extended retreat), or simply the continual change that can come to seem the only constant in life – a genuine spiritual crisis can arise*. The necessity of acceptance can then indeed be radical, for it is only in accepting our fear, our utter loss of bearings, that the way opens. It may not look anything like we had expected.

Reality is only what actually is. It cannot be what was, or what might be. It is only when we sit very still that we can see that, realise it. Everything else is just a picture, a synthetic interface the mind presents, like these words on the screen of the tablet I’m writing on: useful, practical, but not actually there; something to help us get from here to there, wherever there might be, even when there is the place where we have intended to sit, the time we have set aside for our practice.

In being still, aware only of what comes into awareness, just as it is – thoughts, sensations, emotions, even the meanings we want to attach to these appearances, we come to perceive that

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.

(Brach, ibid.)

*[Difficult times in our practice can occasionally get out of hand. Do not take these occasions lightly. If you do not have a trusted guide to whom you can turn, Cheetah House specialise in helping meditators who are experiencing meditation-related difficulties and providing meditation safety training to providers and organizations.

Tara Brach, on her own website, has a useful downloadable guide to Working with Fear and Trauma.]

Entheogenic?

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In our everyday dealings with the world around us, and with its inhabitants, both human and otherwise, we generally seem to make use of a practical mode of consciousness characterised, in my experience, by shortcuts and subroutines – usually referred to as “habits”. Half the time we’re not even really thinking about what we’re doing – which gives rise to the common but slightly disturbing experience of realising one’s just driven several miles on a regular route with no real conscious sense of the events of driving, or of the route itself. Where have we been?

Neuroscience offers the explanation of something called the “default mode network”:

It is best known for being active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering. It can also be active during detailed thoughts related to external task performance. Other times that the DMN is active include when the individual is thinking about others, thinking about themselves, remembering the past, and planning for the future.

(Wikipedia)

One might be tempted to rename it the woolgathering network.

Contemplative awareness, on one level at least, consists precisely in becoming aware of these changing brain-states, as opposed merely to knowing about them in theory.

Even just recognizing the impermanence of your mental states—deeply, not merely as an idea—can transform your life. Every mental state you have ever had has arisen and then passed away. This is a first-person fact—but it is, nonetheless, a fact that any human being can readily confirm. We don’t have to know any more about the brain or about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world to understand this truth about our own minds. The promise of spiritual life—indeed, the very thing that makes it “spiritual” in the sense I invoke throughout this book—is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

(Sam Harris, Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality without Religion)

But there is more, of course. Elsewhere on this blog I wrote:

Before I turned five, I contracted meningitis, and spent what would have been my first year of school slowly recovering. I spent some of the most peaceful and untroubled hours of my life lying on a rug by the old apple trees in the orchard at the back of our house, under the endless vault of the open sky, listening to distant aircraft passing high overhead, or on a flaking stone bench on the patio, watching the little velvety red mites scampering in the sunlight. Time was unlike anything I’d known before, an open ground of appearing, empty of thought, mostly, but fertile with becoming.

In those long months I had no name for this clear, undimensioned place, and I don’t suppose it would have occurred to me to ask anyone what, or where, it might be. I just was, and was where I was. In many ways, the years since have been a journey back.

But how does one make this kind of journey as an intentional, more or less healthy adult? Religion offers maps, of varying quality – The Cloud of Unknowing, any number of Buddhist and Vedantic texts, the writings of the Eastern Orthodox (Christian) monastic tradition, to name a few – but they come, as I wrote yesterday, with sticky remnants of their religious backgrounds clinging to both thought and practice.

Throughout history, in different cultures, people have made use of entheogens, drugs (including traditional psychedelics such as mescaline and psilocybin and DMT, as well as modern synthetics like LSD) intended precisely to achieve this kind of altered consciousness. But even the best-engineered pharmaceuticals are blunt instruments, and in my experience (I experimented with them myself in my twenties) can do at least as much harm as good. Besides, the traditional varieties are by no means immune to the sticky remnants of their own religious origins.

But the word entheogen is an interesting one. Roughly, it means something like, “giving rise to the god within” (éntheos genésthai). This is instructive, since although the scholars (Carl Ruck et al.) who coined the term were referring to the use of psychoactive drugs, maybe this useful word could be extended to cover many traditional, religious contemplative practices as well.

But as Sam Harris points out in one of the passages I quoted yesterday,

This is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a book, because many readers will have no idea what I’m talking about when I describe certain spiritual experiences and might assume that the assertions I’m making must be accepted on faith. Religious readers present a different challenge: They may think they know exactly what I’m describing, but only insofar as it aligns with one or another religious doctrine. It seems to me that both these attitudes present impressive obstacles to understanding spirituality in the way that I intend.

Once again, Jiddu Krishnamurti’s term “choiceless awareness” is so useful here, along with the simple practice it entails. My childhood experience in the orchard was precisely that, as have been so many more momentary occasions in the long years since. Andreas Müller (I have quoted him on this blog before) has one of the best descriptions I know:

All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost…

What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.

Finding out for yourself…

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What [spiritual] people have realized is one of the best secrets of life: let your self go. If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person. That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul, or in anything supernatural.

Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

I have come to realise with increasing clarity over the last few years that Dennett’s definition of spirituality here applies with equal force to spiritual institutions. To the extent that they – churches and most other religious systems and associations – consist in the belief in an immortal soul, and its relation to a supernatural world and its beings, mediated by means of myth and dogma, their necessity to the spiritual life itself is no more than an appearance.

(I have occasionally been moved to wonder if the reason why religions seem sometimes to offer safe haven to the contemplative is not in order to maintain control. A domesticated mysticism is so much less worrying than the wild kind.)

My journey to this place has been more hesitant and less clear-sighted than I would have wished, I admit. I don’t wish to make excuses for this, though I find an unexpected ally, perhaps, in Jiddu Krishnamurti, when he writes:

Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity…

You know, unless you hesitate, you can’t inquire. Inquiry means hesitating, finding out for yourself, discovering step by step; and when you do that, then you need not follow anybody, you need not ask for correction or for confirmation of your discovery.

I sometimes find that choiceless awareness itself – that still awareness that lies at the centre of our practice – does lead to a kind of hesitancy, or at least to the appearance of hesitancy. All we can honestly do is try to remain open in stillness; perceiving, rather than knowing, what is.

I’ve been thinking…

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(With apologies to Daniel Dennett)

Sitting quietly in what best seems called – in Krishnamurti’s phrase – “choiceless awareness” involves

paying attention to the sensation of the breath (this settles the mind and body), but then the instruction is to let our attention rest on whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself…  (Toni Bernhard)

Now of course “whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness” can often not be the sound of traffic on the road at the end of the garden, or the calls of the jackdaws settling down for the evening under the roof of the old water tower, nor even the slight discomfort in one’s left knee, but some thought, profound or (usually) pointless. And then the temptation is to follow the thought: to begin to cogitate, or ruminate, to calculate. What to do about it?

In some systems of meditation thoughts can be overlaid with a mantra (the nembutsu for instance) to which the attention is transferred, thus allowing the thought to die away naturally. The problem here is not only that the mantra will supplant open awareness itself, but that a mantra has content. It means something. Inevitably it has a religious context, and drags all manner of baggage in its wake. (The nembutsu involves the name of Amida Buddha, and the myths around Amida, and the several Amidist philosophies, and so on and on.)

Another approach is to anchor attention solidly, usually to the breath, not allowing it to stray. But then once more our open awareness has been replaced with focused attention, the quiet engagement of awareness with whatever is, that is central to our practice, replaced with a muscular effort of will.

But of course a thought is only another object of awareness. When we hear the blackbird singing in the hazels at the back of the garden his voice forms the object of our awareness – a response in the auditory cortex in our temporal lobes – and choiceless awareness would leave it at that. So with the thought. If we can leave it as just another object of awareness, rather than as the beginning of a train of thought, and return to the breath, the next object – a sound outside, a breath, a rumble in the tummy, another breath – that is all that is needed. And if we fail? Well, the train of thought we’ve just boarded is only another object of attention, and then we can return to the creak of the trees, the solidity of the floor, the quiet changes that pass, just what is…

Road songs

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

I’ve been blogging on one platform or another since 2005; for four or five years before that I kept a website where I regularly published something like this kind of episodic writing. At one point, and I honestly can’t remember when, it occurred to me that all these bits of (mainly) prose were something like my own road songs, much more than considered accounts of anything. Consequently, they’re not autobiographical as such; they don’t tell a connected story, but are more in the nature of snatches of music heard in passing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just noticing what is – whatever appears in the field of consciousness, without having to label it or evaluate it, without having to either focus one’s attention on it or wrench one’s attention away from it – is perhaps the freshest, most peaceful thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to: what is, is, and there’s nothing that needs to be done about it.

Just noticing…

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Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity…

You know, unless you hesitate, you can’t inquire. Inquiry means hesitating, finding out for yourself, discovering step by step; and when you do that, then you need not follow anybody, you need not ask for correction or for confirmation of your discovery.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Sitting quietly – just noticing whatever appears in the field of consciousness, without having to label it or evaluate it, without having to either focus one’s attention on it or wrench one’s attention away from it – is perhaps the freshest, most peaceful thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to: what is, is, and there’s nothing that needs to be done about it.

There is always a risk, of course, in talking like this. People who like things cut and dried are often suspicious of what appears to them to be an impractical vagueness; those from a background of religious orthodoxy will wonder if there’s a heresy lurking in there somewhere.

Robert C Solomon writes:

Spirituality is a human phenomenon. It is part and parcel of human existence, perhaps even of human nature. This is not to deny that some animals might have something like spiritual experiences. But spirituality requires not only feeling but thought, and thought requires concepts. Thus spirituality and intelligence go hand in hand. This is not to say that intelligent people are more spiritual, but neither is it to buy into a long tradition of equating spirituality with innocence misconstrued as ignorance or even as stupidity.

Spirituality for the Skeptic: the Thoughtful Love of Life

The practice of choiceless awareness (in Krishnamurti’s phrase) that I have been describing is not a kind of daydream, or an unusual state of consciousness even: it is a quiet but exceptionally alert quality of mind, without straining after attention either. Toni Bernhard suggests that,

[i]n this technique, we begin by paying attention to the sensation of the breath (this settles the mind and body), but then the instruction is to let our attention rest on whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself…  As a meditation practice, choiceless awareness is similar to the Zen meditation technique known as shikantaza, which roughly translates as just sitting. I love the idea of just sitting, although for me, just lying down will do—which takes me to my number one rule regarding meditation: be flexible.

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

Earlier this year I wrote:

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

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

This quality of stillness, of just noticing, is such a simple thing that it would be easy to dismiss it as inconsequential. It is not. It seems important, somehow – and here I hesitate, as Krishnamurti suggested – that someone is prepared to do this, and perhaps to ‘fess up to doing it on a regular basis. Maybe someone has to…