I was planning this evening to write a post on the radical simplicity of practice, and how it actually doesn’t need most of the religious and organisational trappings that have accumulated, like barnacles on a ship’s hull, over so many years, when it occurred to me that six months ago I had written precisely that post. Here it is again:

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Achieving or revealing spontaneous presence is not about striving or effort but about relaxing deeply into the natural state of mind. It’s like a river flowing effortlessly down a mountain—there’s no force or control, just a natural movement in harmony with gravity. When we stop trying to control or manipulate our thoughts and experiences, we allow awareness to flow naturally. By simply resting in the present moment, without grasping or pushing away, we recognize that this spontaneous presence is always there, like the river’s flow…

Achieving spontaneous presence is not about adding something new but about recognizing and resting in the innate clarity and awareness that is already there, ever-present, like the sun behind the clouds.

Pema Düddul, ‘Finding Presence: A teaching and practice on the Four Yogas of Dzogchen Semde’ in Tricycle Magazine, October 2024

This teaching carries so many echoes of shikantaza, of what we know of the simple practices of classical Taoism, that it reminds me of the essential plainness that seems to me the truest contemplative practice. I have long felt that the complexity of religiosity, with its rules and rituals and its levels of attainment (whether Christian or Buddhist or whatever else) is – at least for me – the enemy of the contemplative life.

Earlier this year [2024] I wrote:

Words, when it comes to spiritual things, are signs only in the sense we mean when we speak of hints and premonitions as “signs”, not in the sense of street signs, or signs on office doors in a hospital. They are not, by their very nature, precise and prescriptive; it is their very vagueness that allows them to be used at all, for they can do no more than offer us a glimpse into someone else’s experience – a window, if you like, into that which it is to be them.

We risk all manner of missteps when we conflate the term “spirituality” with concepts like religion, or the supernatural; and we risk worse when we consider it intrinsically opposed to science, or to critical thinking.

As I get older, it increasingly seems to me, perhaps counterintuitively, that religion itself only gets in the way of the spiritual life. Doctrine, scripture, tradition: they are beside the point, mere distractions. Elizabeth Reninger: “The only thing that needs to die is our mistaken belief in separation, the habit of seeing our human body-mind as existing separate from the ever-transforming patterns of the cosmos as a whole.”

Stillness, the open awareness of what simply is, would appear to be all that is needed: only to give up all of our effort and striving, and quite plainly and naturally rest in the vast openness of what is – which is all we ever were or could be. It really is that simple.