Tag Archives: practice

A wider mercy

2 Replies

Then, for no good reason, you remember.

Oh. Right. This is experience. This is radiant presence. This whole thing is what I am.

And immediately, even if nothing changes on the surface, the weight drains out of the moment. The seriousness falls away. The same pain, the same confusion, now sit inside a wider mercy.

The cosmology could not be simpler.

There is only this field of experience. It is what you are. Everything that seems to be happening is that field showing itself to itself, in this impossible, intimate way.

The story will go on. The interpretation will never stop. The madness will continue, in you and in the world. On that level, nothing is ever finally resolved.

At the same time, the one fact is always quietly in place, before any of it, as all of it…

Rob Barker, from This Radiant Space

Union with God is not something we can or need to acquire. By way of the contemplative skills of engaged receptivity and release, we realize this Union ever more deeply and clearly throughout the course of the days given us. God is too simple to be absent. It is we who, with complicated and cluttered minds, remain unaware that this foundational Light is flowering perpetually in the fertile and unfathomable right now. As St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions: You are “more intimate to me than my inmost self.” Paraphrasing this very line, Meister Eckhart preaches: “The soul takes her being immediately from God: therefore God is nearer to the soul than she is to herself, and therefore God is in the ground of the soul with all His Godhead.” St. Augustine likewise knows this grounding light: “This light itself is one, and all those who see it and love it are one.”

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light, p.24

We are not separated; there is nothing we can do, or need to, to achieve union, nonduality, oneness. We just need to step out of the light – which is why we practice, of course. If we don’t do something regularly, we forget. We forget anyway; but at least our practice gives us something to remind us, a place to look back at when we feel entirely lost.

And feeling lost reminds me of the wider mercy of which Rob Barker writes. The light, the radiant presence, the endless ground is not neutral. It is not abstract. Now, I am not saying – and nor is Rob Barker or Martin Laird – that it is a person. You can’t point to it, and say, “There it is, over there!” If you could, it would not be one. It is no thing, but it is not an abstraction. It is real, far more real than we are, more real even than the solid earth beneath us. We, and all the “ten thousand things”, are only fleeting eddies in its unceasing stream, of which we are already part. The wider mercy is all that is, and it is merciful. In the end, It is our only home.

Trust what opens

1 Reply

First and foremost, I would say follow your own light—trust your own sense of what opens things up and what just amplifies the confusion. Everyone is unique, each moment is unique, and no one else knows what you need. In my experience, life always gives us exactly what we need—including the difficulties and apparent setbacks. Everything that shows up is part of your unique path. You can’t get it wrong.

What I would suggest, whenever it invites you, is to simply give open, innocent attention to the bare actuality of present experiencing – hearing sounds, feeling sensations, seeing shapes and colors – just this bare actuality that is here before, during and after the thought commentary about it.

Joan Tollifson

The further I go on this path, the clearer it seems to me that there is no one way. As Tollifson says here, “Everyone is unique, each moment is unique, and no one else knows what you need.”

So often I have fallen into the trap of thinking that I needed to sign up, take vows, commit to one way or path or tradition – or another! – when I have had my own way waiting beneath my ribs all along. Besides, over the years we each change:

For a long time, we may be caught up in trying to figure out which one is right, which one is the best, which one is the highest truth, the most effective, the most advanced, and so on. But eventually we realize these are false questions. These seemingly different maps all have something valuable to offer, and none of them can fully capture every dimension and possibility of this living reality.

No map is itself the territory that it helps us to navigate. And so, we learn to take from each what resonates now, and not to mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. We even learn that the moon and the pointing finger are not two, that mapping is an activity of the territory, that nothing is outside of this seamless no-thing-ness. We find many apparent paradoxes, and we discover that reality is not one, not two. We lean this way and then that way. Thankfully, different imaginary rugs we try to stand on get pulled out from under us. Again and again we wake up. Just this!

What is it? We can’t say. And yet, apparently we have to say something, just as we apparently have to act in one way or another. And so, these words and all the many spiritual practices and pointers on offer have all poured out choicelessly from we know not where into the great listening presence that we all are.

Joan Tollifson, from another essay

I know that writing like this, Joan’s or mine, will horrify some good and honest people who do believe that there is one right way, and that holding faithfully to the way we are “called to walk” is the only way. To them I’d have to say that if that is good for you, fine, and so much the simpler in a sense; but please don’t seek to apply your own structures and boundaries to us Einzelgänger und Einzelgängerin who can no longer live metaphorically indoors.

Ultimately, the whole contemplative life is so exceedingly simple that we often cannot credit it with being that easy. We feel it must be more complicated, more effortful than that: if only there were more blood, sweat and tears we might believe it, but simply to wander, “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown”, is just too much like the end of term for us to trust.

If we do stay still, still enough to listen to the woodlice walking beneath the bark, to see the little velvety red mites scampering on the stonework in the sun, to hear the meltwater trickling beneath still frozen snow, then we will often find that the ground opens of itself, devoid of words or traditions, no thing at all but bright and placeless. And then there will no longer be any need to worry about paths, really.

Geworfenheit

1 Reply

We didn’t choose to be born, and there is nothing about our coming to be here that was voluntary. We did not choose our biological sex, nor our blood group, nor the colour of our skin, or hair, or eyes; we didn’t choose our nationality, nor the century into which we were born, nor the social class we were born into. Crucially, we didn’t choose our parents: we didn’t choose our genetic makeup, nor the parenting skills our parents did or did not possess; come to that, we didn’t choose whether we were the child of a stable couple, or a single parent, nor whether we had a step-parent or even two. We were just thrown into life, to make what we could of where we landed.

Martin Heidegger called this “Geworfenheit“, thrownness. Life was already underway when we were born: we found ourselves in an ongoing story, and we had to find our own part to play as we went along. This isn’t so much determinism as the felt inevitability of being. Our Geworfenheit is not so much our fate as the condition of our living at all; you cannot choose where your path begins – you can only respond to it.

We do not stand outside reality, we arise within it; and our freedom is not exemption from the necessity of our being in the world, but intimacy with it. Perhaps something like this is what Jesus meant when he said, as it is reported, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8 ESV) If we will only stop trying to solve life, stop trying to control beings – ourselves or others – the world will disclose itself to us, as it is.

Gelassenheit: releasement, openness, stillness; if we will only be still, the way opens, of itself. This is all our practice, really – just opening our hands to what actually is.

Biological fate

3 Replies

In Ch.1 of her 2019 book The Science of Fate, (annoyingly, the Kindle edition is not paginated) Hannah Critchlow writes:

The science that suggests we are all, to a large extent, at the mercy of our neurobiology, driven in the direction of certain decisions and behaviours, susceptible to certain conditions, is very compelling. On one level every one of us, however uniquely complex and valuable, is also simply a human animal whose principal… is to interact with others to exchange information that will contribute to the collective consciousness and, if we’re lucky, pass on our genetic material. Deep drives are at work to further those basic goals and they are largely beyond our control.

Even what we think of as the more individuated aspects of our behaviours, the ones that we feel instinctively must be the product of nurture more than nature and more under our own conscious control, are formed at a deep level by innate factors we were born with and that were reinforced in our earliest years. Our personality, our beliefs about ourselves and the way the world works, how we respond in a crisis, our attitude to love, risk, parenting and the afterlife: any of the highly abstract opinions and character traits you care to mention are deeply shaped by how our brain processes the information it receives from the world. When we start to probe the idea of being a free agent in control of our life in the light of what neuroscience is now showing us, it can feel as if the space available for free will is shrinking fast and we’re stuck in a loop that refers us back endlessly to a prior stage of preordained experience.

Ideas such as this have the power to evoke sometimes quite spectacular emotional reactions in those who hear them for the first time, or are reminded of past unhappy encounters with the likes of Spinoza, who have called into question our often unthinking assumptions about free will. There is a deeply visceral dislike, in many people, of the idea that our personal sovereignty might be in any way impugned. We long to be able to say, with all the conviction of William Ernest Henley, “I am the master of my fate,/I am the captain of my soul.”!

Critchlow herself, a page or two later, points out:

During my lifetime there will be significant discoveries, applications and ramifications. It’s possible that, as we discover more about the neurobiology of belief formation and prejudice, we might be able to boost our openness to new ideas, say, with massive consequences for reducing conflict at every level.

Not that it will be straightforward. Our predecessors were shaken to the core by the ideas of Newton, Darwin and Einstein. They had to re-evaluate humanity’s place in the universe. Perhaps neuroscience is now demanding of us that we embark on a similar journey of thought disruption. We as a society will certainly have to consider the implications and ethics of its insights.

But the matter of free will seems to me really to be a not matter so much of ethics, or even metaphysics, as it is a simple misunderstanding of the workings of our minds. Sam Harris (Free Will, 2012, p.49):

It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can’t make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions. However, I think that this mystery is itself a symptom of our confusion. It is not that free will is simply an illusion—our experience is not merely delivering a distorted view of reality. Rather, we are mistaken about our experience. Not only are we not as free as we think we are—we do not feel as free as we think we do. Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying close attention to what it is like to be us. The moment we pay attention, it is possible to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our experience is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.

Contemplative practice is, as Harris himself explains at length in Waking Up, by far the most practical way (at least for those of us who are not professional neuroscientists!) to understand the inescapability of this illusion. Our plans and intentions, from the grand to the trivial, are no more than thoughts rising to the surface of the mind’s pond – no more and no less than any other thoughts that may be observed in the stillness of our practice. Our actions, no less than our thoughts, are the result of patterns of cause and effect leading back in an ultimately uncountable regression to the beginnings of time. Benedictus Spinoza saw this:

Because God [Deus sive Natura] is infinite substance, everything follows from God’s essence with the same necessity that the properties of a triangle follow from its definition. In Spinoza’s words, “things could not have been produced by God in any other way, nor in any other order.”

True freedom, for Spinoza, is not the ability to choose otherwise, but the ability to act from the necessity of one’s own nature, in harmony with God/Nature. Thus, freedom is understanding necessity.

Microsoft Copilot, response to user query, 2 November 2025

This may sound harsh, but it is not. The “freedom [of] understanding necessity” is a state of such crystalline stillness and clarity that Spinoza himself referred to it as “blessedness”. In Zen terms, Satori might be the right word; for the Taoist, it is the joy of accordance with the Tao:

To live a Taoist life is to become fully aware of our body, mind, and world—and of awareness itself. Our presence shines more and more brightly. To live in alignment with the Tao is to relish the inner peace, joy, and contentment that arise…

(Elizabeth Reninger)

Bowing to rocks

Leave a reply

The longer I keep on with this contemplative life the more it seems to me that a life apart from the main current of consensus reality, as well as apart from formal religion, is essentially a spirituality embedded in the everyday.

Rodney Smith, in an excellent article in Tricycle Magazine Summer 2010, wrote:

When I was younger, I followed the example of an experiment once performed by Krishnamurti: I placed a rock that held no special significance on my mantel and bowed to it each day. I did this deliberately to see whether I could infuse a unique quality into something completely ordinary, simply by incorporating the rock within a morning ritual. At the end of a month, the rock held a special, holy place in my perception.

The Buddha statue, the zafu [cushion] we sit upon, the saintly picture or poem, the states of mind accessed in meditation, solitude, or even nature itself, can all become accentuated beyond the ordinary by infusing them with special attention. When we invest the sacred into specific conditions, we feel spiritual only when we are having those experiences. The rest of life goes spiritually unnoticed…

 It is… in the middle of our total involvement that this alchemy of spirit can best be engaged. Our life becomes focused around this transformation as our primary intention for living. We find everything we need immediately before us within the circumstances and conditions we long begrudged ourselves. Spiritual growth becomes abundantly available and is no longer associated exclusively with any particular presentation of form.

The alert reader will probably have picked up something of this in my own writing, where I describe with such affection the window where I normally sit to practice! (Of course, there is a healthy side to this too: keeping to a routine, spatially as well as temporally, takes away the unnecessary complication of deciding the where and the when of sitting.) But practice is not special – it is the simplest and more ordinary thing to do; and a life lived in the mindfulness it affords is not a life of drama and strangeness so much as a life more deeply than ever embedded in ordinary things, in other people, and in the countless plants and animals, fungi and minerals with whom we share our world.

It is not that the insights and presence that come with practice are not sacred; it is more that through their sacredness all the everyday accidents and affects of life can be seen in their actual, intrinsic sacredness, and unless we live in and for them, we cannot realise the truth that lies within us all: that we all rest in the same ground, and are ripples on the same stream. Each of us, human or mouse, ant or mountain, is born and dies according to our time; and yet it is the one isness from which we are born, within which we live, and to which we shall return.

There is something

1 Reply

There is something
that contains everything.
Before heaven and earth
it is.
Oh, it is still,
unbodied,
all on its own,
unchanging,

all-pervading,
ever-moving.
So it can act as the
mother
of all things.
Not knowing its real name,
we only call it the Way.

Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 25, tr. Ursula le Guin

There is a mystery in stillness that cannot be classified, explained or described. It is outside knowing, not to be contained in words or thoughts. Why would we even mention it, if it were not before and beneath, above all things that are?

As we live in the everyday reality we know, the things we see and hear, touch and smell and taste are images in the mind, icons that helpfully stand for whatever actually is. We tend to think that what they seem to be is what they are, standing for nothing else but how they look, sound, feel, smell or taste. They are useful, indeed benign (Dennett), user illusions; they seem to be what is really there; but they are not. They allow us to interact with each other, and with things, but they are generated as appearances, icons, within our own brains – and like any interface, they can be subject to errors. (An example from close to home: I have severe retinal damage in one eye, and as a consequence, I suffer from visual release hallucinations. These appear like perfectly concrete things – in my case usually animals of one kind or another – within the normal setting of our home. They are not, repeat not, “imaginary”. They appear indistinguishable from the real thing – an actual cat, for instance – except that if I focus on them directly (my good eye works just fine) they disappear without a trace. But they were real while they were there: just as real as my desk, or the rather chunky printer that sits on it.)

Perhaps we were always supposed to be able to see that what we take for reality is only appearance; perhaps we were all supposed to be what we now call contemplatives, or mystics, but we forgot. Perhaps our habitual taking of appearances for true being is a computational brain function that has over many generations got out of hand. Or perhaps we contemplatives are just weird anyway.

If we sit still, without trying to make sense of anything; sit pointlessly, not aiming to achieve anything at all, we can see for ourselves that bright something – no thing – before all things, and know it for our true home, before we or any thing was born. “Oh, it is still, unbodied, all on its own, unchanging,..”

Simple alignment

4 Replies

As I read books and articles by others on the path of inquiry and self-understanding, I am often struck by how often they begin with an autobiographical note; and how often that note concerns their authors’ early experiences with religion. A perfect example of what I mean would be Laurie Fisher Huck’s article ‘Goodbye God‘ in Tricycle Magazine, July 2022. She begins:

I first met God when I entered grade one at Holy Rosary, a Catholic elementary school, where the classes were so packed we had to crawl over one another to get to our seats. Towering black-robed nuns patrolled the aisles with rulers ready to smack naughty hands, and priests, who were known to be next to God, bestowed their blessings upon our little bowed heads. Obsequiousness was paid off in holy cards. 

I didn’t. As I have written elsewhere, I was brought up as the child of a single parent by a mother who quite explicitly taught me to steer clear of anyone who would try and convert me to one faith or another. She was adamant that I should grow up to make up my own mind about spiritual things.

Of course, once I went to prep school there were such things as assemblies, where among other things we had to memorise and repeat together the Lord’s Prayer, but that was about it. We had a weekly lesson entitled “Scripture”, but as far as I can remember it consisted of little but child-friendly presentations of Bible stories such as the life of Moses, and other accounts of Old Testament heroes. It made rather less impression on me than did reading Charles Kingsley’s accounts of Theseus and Jason the Argonaut in The Heroes, in the lovely dark blue leatherette-bound edition I had once received as a birthday present.

All this is merely a preamble to saying that when I came to investigate spirituality seriously for the first time in my late teens and early twenties, I had no religious upbringing to build on, or to overcome. But I am an Englishman: there is an osmotic cultural wash over all my thoughts, over even the way I experience things. When I encounter Buddhist or Vedantist teachings there is still a slight shock of the unfamiliar, and even now a tendency to translate terms and concepts – Rigpa, say, or Ishvara – into some sort of Western expression or framework.

The problem doesn’t arise, though, with Christian theology and mystical writing. I can pick up Cynthia Bourgeault or Richard Rohr and read them like a native – however alien some of their assumptions may be to me these days – something I still can’t do even with Westerners who have since become thoroughly embedded in Buddhist life and culture, like Daishin Morgan or Pema Chödrön.

Why is this? Certainly I have the greatest respect for Eastern thought, especially for philosophical Taoism, and much of Mahayana Buddhism, but somehow reading it usually fails to awake in me the kind of instant recognition I get from reading Christian mysticism, that sometimes strikes with the force of, say, the opening bars of a Bach fugue.

Uncomfortable though I am with much academic philosophy, it is often with great relief that I turn to philosophers like Benedictus Spinoza (a Portuguese Jew living in 17th century Holland), or AC Grayling in our own time. The more I continue with my own quiet practice of open awareness, the deeper my sympathy with (broadly!) mystical philosophers like Spinoza, Martin Heidegger or Paul Tillich.

But I am no more a philosopher myself than I am a teacher of nonduality. I am simply someone who spends time sitting quietly and writing about it. No, that is faux naïf. Of course I read, and think; but I have no formal qualifications or standing. All I can do is share a few things that have struck me as significant, or insights into matters that have been troubling me and have suddenly come clear. Perhaps the truth is really no more than that having begun blogging twenty years ago, I seem unable to give it up!

Chasing after experiences

1 Reply

If we’re referencing “being awake” or “liberation” to a particular experience or state of mind—maybe a very expanded, open, peaceful feeling—that will inevitably prove disappointing because that state will disappear. The open aware presence it reveals is simply what remains when the me-system is quiet or when it is totally accepted as simply the weather of this moment. That open boundless aware presence is actually ever-present, even when apparently obscured by obsessive, me-centered thoughts. It is the common factor in every different experience. And those thoughts are nothing other than this same aliveness, the One Reality, showing up as thoughts. Experience is ever-changing like the weather. It’s never personal. It’s a happening of the whole universe. But if we take the stormy, cloudy, foggy weather personally, then it seems like we have lost that expanded openness that we tasted before. If we imagine that there is a persisting, independent self (“me”) who is either awake or not awake, that is only an imagination. No such persisting, independent self can be found. There is no experiencer outside of experiencing. Clinging to or chasing after experiences of spaciousness is a great way to avoid them. And eventually, we see that every experience, whether contracted or expanded, clear or muddy, is always just this.

Joan Tollifson, Silence

I think that perhaps Tollifson has expressed here more clearly than anything I can remember reading why I tend increasingly to be suspicious of teachings that rely too much on technique – whether the use of any form of psychedelic substance, or any sort of psychological manipulation aimed at inducing particular experiences or “altered states”.

As Joan points out here, the “open aware presence” of the contemplative mind is “nothing other than this same aliveness, the One Reality, showing up as…” whatever happens to be in our field of awareness right now. It might be the gentle passage of breath against the edge of our nostrils, or the bright stillness of the quiet mind; but it might just as easily be the grumble of a bus pulling away from the stop in the street outside, or a sudden metallic clang from the water company yard behind the old reservoir. Or it might be an old fear, or an old fantasy, or something we forgot to buy at the shops, rising unbidden to the surface of memory. Whatever the field of awareness contains now is just what it is. There is nothing else for it to be; and looking for another, better, experience is plain old fashioned confusion.

When we do nothing but practice sitting still for a certain amount of time each day, it becomes clear that past and future are an illusion. There is no past. There is no future. There is only this moment. This one tiny moment. That’s all there is…

Attainment always happens in the future or in the past. It’s always a matter of comparing the state at one moment to the state at another moment. But it makes no sense to compare one moment to any other moment. Every moment is complete unto itself. It contains what it contains and lacks what it lacks. Or perhaps it lacks nothing because each moment is the entire universe.

Brad Warner, The Other Side of Nothing: The Zen Ethics of Time, Space and Being

Time and practice

1 Reply

There is an odd thing about time: that practice which appears pointless, tedious, or irredeemably flawed nevertheless works just as well, in terms of growth or awakening, as the most apparently instructive or illuminating kind.

Time is the key, it seems. What happens during actual sitting matters far less than we might think; it is only over the months and years that the value of our practice appears, and even then with little reference to our memories of good – or bad – sessions.

Once again, it seems, all we need to do is to sit still, as patiently as we can manage. Something is going on beyond our conscious notice that we simply don’t understand; something that changes everything when we are not looking.

Our quiet breathing, the flickering, adhesive passage of thoughts, the sounds filtering up from the street, birdsong, weather – these are what matter in the end, it seems. How we feel about them at the moment seems to have little to do with anything. As the years pass things will change, as they do anyway; only we shall be changed in different ways – at times radically different – than we would have been without our practice. Could we have chosen differently? I’m not sure the question even makes sense. We are the change, ourselves; and what we were is no longer here.

Sit still. Watch. Nothing else is needed, except that we show up on time.

Open awareness

2 Replies

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

John Keats, The Complete Works of John Keats: Poems, Plays & Personal Letters, p.763

Slowly it is being borne in upon me that open awareness is not so much a state of mind among other states of mind, but mind itself. Forgive me if I quote here again a summary of Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge, but it may help to refresh our minds:

In Ethics (Part II, Proposition 40, Scholium 2), Spinoza outlines three kinds of knowledge:

  1. Opinion or Imagination (opinio): Based on sensory experience and hearsay—fragmentary and often confused.
  2. Reason (ratio): Deductive, conceptual understanding of things through their common properties—clearer, but still mediated.
  3. Intuitive Knowledge (scientia intuitiva): A direct, immediate grasp of things through their essence in God—non-discursive, holistic, and transformative.

Spinoza writes that intuitive knowledge “proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.” It’s not inference—it’s seeing.

(Microsoft Copilot, response to user query, November 9 2025)

What I referred to the other day as “our normal everyday consciousness” is Spinoza’s first kind of knowledge: limited, conditional and conditioned, irredeemably self-centred. The second kind of knowledge is the one we employ in thinking things through, whether how to hang wallpaper straight or the ontological argument – Keats’ “irritable reaching after fact and reason”. But the third kind is a leap into something entirely different.

The third kind of knowledge is direct seeing; and in my experience, just sitting, simply aware of thoughts just as much as sensations, of sounds, and of the body’s weight and presence, you begin to be aware somehow of awareness itself; not as a thing among other things, but as the bright field within which things come to be. Somehow awareness itself is not other than the open ground of all that is – isness itself.

This is not a matter of academic philosophy  – in any case I have no formal training in that field at all – but of plain observation. Open awareness is an overarching presence, awareness itself, objectless and unconditioned. Within awareness itself things appear – the “ten thousand things” of the Taoists, the Śūnyatā of the Mahayana Buddhists, Spinoza’s modes – but open awareness, that holds and gives rise to them all, is no thing. It merely is.