Tag Archives: liminality

When there is nothing left

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One of the strangest realisations of contemplative practice is that the closest place to the truth is when everything is broken. Really. When the thing you thought you could never survive is upon you, when the last thing you could rely on has given way under your feet, then you can see what is actually there. Until the bridge breaks beneath you, you have no idea what is really going on at all. You have your plans, you have your resources, you have your own strength and your courage; until you don’t. Until the worst happens. And then you are free. Oliver Burkeman:

This is the point at which you enter the sacred state the writer Sasha Chapin refers to as “playing in the ruins.”

In his twenties, Chapin recalls, his definition of a successful life was that he should become a celebrated novelist, on a par with David Foster Wallace. When that didn’t happen—when his perfectionistic fantasies ran up against his real-world limitations—he found it unexpectedly liberating. The failure he’d told himself he couldn’t possibly allow to occur had, in fact, occurred, and it hadn’t destroyed him. Now he was free to be the writer he actually could be. When this sort of confrontation with limitation takes place, Chapin writes, “a precious state of being can dawn. . . . You’re not seeing the landscape around you as something that needs to transform. You’re just seeing it as the scrapyard it is. And then you can look around yourself and say, OK, what is actually here, when I’m not telling myself constant lies about what it’s going to be one day?”

When there is nothing left, the way opens. Only when you can sit still in the ruins of all you had lived for, and see what is actually there, can you begin to wake up at last.

The promise of the end of suffering is the hook that we grab on to, and for a long time after we’ve begun to practice we try to maintain our personal fantasy of what exactly that end of suffering is going to look like. But it doesn’t end up looking like what we expect—or what we want.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

All this sounds like very bad news, but in truth it is the best news possible. When what is not is gone, when our hopes and our fears turn out to be the same thing in the end, then we can see that what is is, in Thomas Merton’s words, the “little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty” that is iness itself, the open ground. And that, perhaps, is why we practice.

A Lighthouse for Dark Times

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It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another — that the system is most pliant, most possible. This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions, during which everything seems to be falling apart and entropy seems to have the last word. And yet here it is, solid beneath our living feet — feet that carry value systems, systems of sanity, just as vulnerable to the upheavals of phase transition yet just as resilient, saved too by the irrepressible creative force that makes order, makes beauty, makes a new and stronger structure of possibility out of the chaos of such times.

Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state…

[But w]e too are living now through such a world, caught again between two ages, confused and conflicted, suffocating and suffering. But we have a powerful instrument for self-understanding, for cutting through the confusion to draw from these civilizational phase transitions new and stronger structures of possibility: the creative spirit.

Maria Popova, The Marginalian (with thanks to What’s here now)

Liminal lands

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There are always liminal lands, out beyond the predictions of common sense or myth, where the mind encounters places strangely common to human experience. Jungians would call them archetypal, perhaps; they crop up, for instance – often in passing – in fantastic fiction. A few examples might be CS Lewis’ Narnia (the Shribble Marshes), Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea (Osskil), Michael Moorcock’s other London (Jerry Cornelius’ Notting Hill), the American Southwest of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger sequence.

But sometimes they exist in everyday time and space. Lucy Pollock (the emphasis is mine):

At the pumping station, far out on the liminal land through which the river flows, the dog and I turn for home. The fields now are lush with flowering grasses, but for weeks in the winter they will be submerged and this track will become a narrow causeway across the floodplain.

My rage abates. Of course we need science and biotechnology and billions of data points, as we seek to improve the lives of older people, our future selves. But side by side with the science we need a deep and abiding understanding of what it means to be human.

I have encountered such places myself. Much of my earlier writing had to do with them, and their strange coexistence between mind and place: the Wye Valley, the worked-out coal country along the River Browney, Western Park in Leicester. There have been darker places too, since then; like the high grounds above Kimmeridge Bay, home to PD James’ The Black Tower, or the post-UKAEA wasteland of Winfrith Heath. But yours will be different again, like Lucy Pollock’s: places between, times that do not quite align.

Contemplative practice has, in itself, nothing to do with such things. And yet the deep instincts – I’m tempted to call them mystical, even though the word has so many unhelpful connotations – that draw people to the contemplative life – as to the methodologies of psychonautics – are human instincts. Might it not be that these same instincts are themselves the door to this fundamental way of being human – to the liminal lands – since they are themselves in a way reflections of, or reflected in, the silent illumination of the contemplative condition itself?