Tag Archives: practice

What is trust?

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I’m aware that yesterday’s post perhaps raised more questions that it answered. That’s not a bad thing in itself, perhaps, but it’s not always kind to one’s readers. Richard Rohr reminds us:

Unfortunately, the notion of faith that emerged in the West was much more a rational assent to the truth of certain mental beliefs, rather than a calm and hopeful trust that God is inherent in all things, and that this whole thing is going somewhere good. Predictably, we soon separated intellectual belief (which tends to differentiate and limit) from love and hope (which unite and thus eternalize). As Paul says in his great hymn to love, “There are only three things that last, faith, hope and love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). All else passes. Faith, hope, and love are the very nature of God, and thus the nature of all Being. Such goodness cannot die. (Which is what we mean when we say “heaven.”) … Christ is a good and simple metaphor for absolute wholeness, complete incarnation, and the integrity of creation.

The Universal Christ, p.22

Now I know that using the word “Christ” in this context may bring some readers up short, but bear with me here: there is more to New Testament Christology than often meets the eye. The apostle Paul says of Christ (Colossians 1:16-17 NIV):  “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (This of course is the source of the concept of coinherence so beloved of Charles Williams.)

Using the word Christ in this context is far closer to Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, the Original Ground of Dzogchen, or the Ground of Being in Paul Tillich’s writings, than it is to the “Jesus’ surname” usage common to some thoughtless conventional Christian preaching.

One difficulty we often run into on the far side of deconstruction, it seems to me, is finding words adequate to just this deeply experiential aspect of the contemplative life. It is all very well scraping terminology from neuroscience (or astrophysics, or academic philosophy) and often this can serve us well if we are trying to conceptualise spiritual realities. But our practice, and our awakened lives, ask more of us than conceptualising spiritual experience. Perhaps it is worth taking the risk, with Rohr and Williams and Tillich, of using the language of direct contemplative experience within our own culture. The contemplative life is a life of the heart, after all, and much of our practice depends upon casting a cold eye on the chatter of discursive thought! We cannot trust a bare idea as we can the direct faith that all things rest in Christ, in presence, in the open ground of isness itself – waves of the one ocean, if you will – and that to that presence they will return.

Unicity

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We are like waves in the ocean—ever-changing, inseparable movements of a seamless indivisible whole, and every wave includes the whole ocean. This one bottomless moment is ever-changing in appearance while never departing from the ever-present immediacy of here-now. The appearances vanish automatically as soon as they appear—they self-liberate as some traditions say—and there is peace in the simple immediacy of being alive, just as we are.

Thought poses as “me” and claims to be the thinker-chooser-doer, but no such entity can actually be found. Our thoughts, behaviors and apparent choices arise as movements of the whole. When we take it all personally and believe that we are small and separate and in control of our lives, feelings of deficiency, anxiety, guilt, blame, confusion and dissatisfaction inevitably follow.

Liberation from this kind of suffering can never happen in the future. It can only happen now, in the simple recognition that absolutely nothing needs to happen or not happen. Both the apparent suffering and the one who longs to be free are ephemeral appearances with no actual substance. All there is in every passing wave of experience, however it may appear, is the seamless indivisible ocean…

Realizing the choiceless and impersonal nature of everything that happens frees us from guilt, blame, false pride, and many other painful and destructive feelings that arise when we believe that we are separate and in control of our lives, and that everyone else is in control of their lives, and that we all could and should be doing a much better job. Recognizing the impersonal nature of everything gives us compassion for ourselves and everyone else when we fall short of our ideals.

We could say that the whole movie of waking life, including the central character we identify as “me,” is very much like a nighttime dream, and in a dream, the dream character is not writing or directing the show. The dream character doesn’t even really exist. The entire dream world is a movement of the dreaming consciousness, and none of the apparent objects or events exist outside of the dream. Or, alternatively, we could say that everything that happens is the result of infinite, interdependent causes and conditions. But any way we describe, map or formulate the living actuality is only a map or a description…

Unicity is eternal, which means timeless, ever-present, NOW. It is infinite, which means all-inclusive, boundless, limitless, HERE. This NOW-HERE is all there is. Have you noticed? There is no way to step outside of this. It cannot be objectified, although any words we use to point to it do seem to do just that, so we have to use words lightly. We habitually want something to grasp, something to hold onto, but in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense freedom…

Joan Tollifson, Liberation Here-Now

What we are, as waves on the ocean – or in Spinoza’s terms, modes of the one substance, God – is no more than the flickering of wavelets, a brief appearances that is gone, all but traceless across open water. And yet the wavelets are water; they are not other than the ocean itself; they don’t come from water, they are water.

Finally, the heart opens in the quiet. There is nothing to achieve, nowhere to go. To sit still is all we have ever needed: to sit still in the one place, which is now.

But as Tollifson goes on:

I’m never suggesting that we can or should ignore or dismiss the everyday relative dimension of reality. It’s real enough. But when we know it for what it is, it can be experienced in a different way, with much less suffering and more ease. And in the bigger picture, every mistake and every apparent imperfection is perfectly placed. There’s no way to get it wrong. There’s no “me” separate from the whole.

And this is never what we think it is, because thought conceptually divides, abstracts and freezes what is actually indivisible, immediate, and never the same way for even an instant. And yet, even thinking, conceptualizing, abstracting and dividing are also nothing other than unicity showing up as apparent thinking, conceptualizing, abstracting and dividing. The map is not the territory it represents, and yet, mapping is something the territory is doing. All there is in every passing wave of experience, however it may appear, is the seamless indivisible ocean.

What a huge relief!

Getting nowhere

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Wakefulness has been real and accessible for all human beings at all times and in all cultures. People from all cultures have been able to touch into it and explore its rich and radiant experiential landscape. They have simply interpreted and conceptualized it in slightly different ways, due to the different beliefs and conventions of their cultures. In Buddhism, perhaps because of Indian culture’s belief in rebirth, wakefulness is partly conceived as a state in which a person no longer generates karma and no longer needs to be reborn. But when expressed through the more dynamic and world-embracing attitudes of early Chinese culture, wakefulness is partly conceived as a process of becoming attuned to the Dao and living in harmony with it. On the other hand, people who live in monotheistic cultures — Jewish, Sufi, and Christian cultures — see wakefulness in more transcendent terms. To them, it’s natural to interpret the all-pervading spirit-force (which the Chinese conceive as the Dao and the Indians as brahman) in terms of God. They see it as divine energy, the being of God, and they conceive the goal of their development to be union with God.

In some respects, modern-day spiritual seekers are in a better position. In our secular culture we’re less obliged to interpret wakefulness through the prism of religious or metaphysical frameworks. It’s naive to think that there’s such a thing as pure experience — some degree of interpretation will always take place. No phenomenon exists outside the culture in which it develops, and no phenomenon is free from cultural influence. But there are degrees of interpretation. When we look at wakefulness outside spiritual traditions, we’re surely looking at it in a purer form, before added layers of interpretation. You could say that we’re looking at the raw materials, before they go through the filtering and manufacturing processes of spiritual and religious traditions.

Steve Taylor, The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening, pp.235-236

It is impossible, it seems to me, to write – or even to speak – about the contemplative life without to some extent interpreting and conceptualising it according to the conventions of our own culture. Even the language of radical nonduality – the writings of Tony Parsons or Darryl Bailey , for instance – borrows not only from Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, but from our contemporary scientific understanding of the neuroscience of consciousness, from philosophy more generally. I do myself, continually.

Yet we can to a large extent evade the worst of “the filtering and manufacturing processes of spiritual and religious traditions”. We may in many ways live in difficult times, yet most of us do have the freedom to think, even to speak and write, outside tradition. We can explore – and to a great extent we have the internet to thank for this – widely and deeply among contemplative thinkers and practitioners, and we can find encouragement to think for ourselves and to develop our own contemplative path,

No amount of reading, though, will open for us the door of what Steve Taylor refers to as wakefulness. Nor, I can’t resist saying, will making retreats, training for Zen ordination or attending Centering Prayer sessions at our local Catholic church. Wakefulness arrives of itself, in its own time. In Centering Prayer it would simply be referred to as grace, the gift of God. We cannot make wakefulness happen: it is not an achievement, a goal we could work towards. It is not something else, something different from where we are now, or what we are now. Wakefulness appears – it was never absent – when we stop trying to name and control what is.

The radical nondualists are in a sense right: practice cannot create wakefulness, and wakefulness can appear without a settled practice at all. No words can give it to us, unless perhaps we are on the brink of it ourselves anyway.

I’m often reminded of my frustration when first reading Jiddu Krishnamurti in my twenties: his words were wonderful, hinting at the very opening I’d been longing for, but there was no practice, no method, not even the suggestion of a pill one might take.

What Krishnamurti was writing about was what he called choiceless awareness, the quality of openness to what is, just as it is, in the instant that it is perceived. Taylor’s wakefulness. Wes Nisker:

Choiceless awareness allows the meditator to see how our experience creates itself; how sense impressions, thoughts, and feelings arise without our willing them; how they interact and influence each other. By engaging the quality of choiceless awareness, we can extract ourselves from the contents of what we think and feel and start to explore how we think and feel.

Choiceless awareness, wakefulness: the state appears when the mind ceases grasping after things, even spiritual things. And practice, while not the only way to refrain from grasping after spiritual goals and achievements, is for me at least the most reliable way.

That’s why I think shikantaza, or its near Christian relative Centering Prayer, is such a good practice. Nearly free from ritual and tradition in its native Zen form, shikantaza at least can be practiced without religious assumptions.

Just sitting, there is nothing to do, nothing for the mind to cling onto. There is only now: the sensation of breathing, the feel of whatever we are sitting on, the sounds from outside the room; nothing more. Even thoughts are no more than the flicker of shadows across a curtain in the sun. This condition is in itself perfectly free. It can’t be a means to anything. It is itself what all this is about; nothing more.

Mysteries and metaphors

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It seems that everything we can say about the contemplative life is metaphor. Indeed, it might not be stretching it to suggest that what we can say about pretty much anything is actually metaphor. However attached we are to the idea of plain speaking, even the most direct words applied to the most straightforward objects or circumstances are picture language, mere scratchings after what is in itself ineffable.

Elaine Aron:

Why the word path? Life path, spiritual path—we use path so much in this way that it has almost ceased to be a metaphor. Life, like a path, has ups and downs, detours, roadblocks, and so forth. The metaphor works for me…

But paths are more than maps of passive journeys. They involve choices, or at least noticeable changes in direction…

The beginning of a life often looks more like a moving sidewalk. You were born. No choice there. And you started to move along, to grow from a child’s body into an adult’s. Biology sees to that. Your society, through your family, saw that you received an education (you are reading this), so that you would be useful in some way, able to support yourself and contribute to the larger good. Depending how far along you are, biology and culture has supported your interest in finding a mate and having children, working at a job, and then retiring and maybe helping raise grandchildren. That’s the moving sidewalk, and of course we all add our unique touches to the trip, but maybe you made some larger choices… Maybe you decided not to have children or never to retire. Maybe you took up sailing and sailed around the world, or you raised parakeets and even made a living at it.

Time is what a path and a moving sidewalk have in common. Time has been taking you forward toward the end point.

(Spirituality through a Highly Sensitive Lens, pp.51-52)

To speak of a spiritual path has become as much a cliché as a metaphor, smelling of patchouli oil and self improvement. And yet it is hard to find another expression for whatever it is. But perhaps there is more to the threadbare phrase that even Aron suggests here. Her “moving pavement” reminds me of Martin Heidegger’s Geworfenheit – “thrownness” – the unique set of limitations of birth and time and society which each of us has inherited. Our choices are real, perhaps, but they are far more constrained than most of us would admit. Our spiritual path is what it is because of who we are; all the yearning we can yearn will not allow us to walk another’s.

It may be that our truest compass is merely to acknowledge this fact. “Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.'” (Isaiah 30:21 NIV) And the voice is that of our own authentic self, “who we are” at our barest essence: who we are in silence, in the stillness of our practice. The way is not another’s map, and the directions are not another’s doctrines. All we can do is to step out onto the mountain in the night wind, and listen.

The consolation of no exit

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We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating. From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal—this human predicament is a predicament that does not perfect itself.

But there is the consolation of no exit, the consolation that this is what you’re stuck with. Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament and the only consolation is embracing it. It is our situation, and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.

– Leonard Cohen, from a 1994 Shambhala Sun interview, with thanks to Joan Tollifson

To understand, with Cohen, that freedom lies in the embracing of necessity, is to realise that peace exists only in the radical acceptance of what actually is. We are all in the same mortal boat: no one here gets out alive; and compassion arises simply from this realisation.

For myself, I have come to see that understanding the inevitability of causality is the foundation not only of peace but of forgiveness. “The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause” (Spinoza, Ethics, 1a4) – and so this present moment that seems to be myself could not have been otherwise.

To sit still, and watch, is the beginning and end of practice. All we have come to be is here now, in this arrangement of limbs, this pattern of breathing, these half-heard sounds from beyond the closed window. The small birds flit between branches; the Weymouth bus is pulling away from the stop into the light evening traffic, and there is no wind. None of this could have been otherwise, and the blessed silence slips between every instant, complete and endless.

Otium

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In A Simplified Life, her beautiful account of being a contemporary hermit, Verena Schiller writes:

…I eschew any attempt at repetitive words of prayer while walking or working out of doors, though some find this helpful. Even after years of praxis, learning to do just one thing at a time does not come easily. ‘When you are walking just walk; when you are digging just dig; whatever you are intent on give it your whole attention. Whatever you are doing, do it with the whole of your being and as though it were the only thing to do and as though there was all the time in the world’, a counsel of perfection given me by Bishop John V. Taylor at the very beginning of my solitary exploration, echoing the wisdom of countless others all down the centuries. Rarely can this be even a remote possibility in most women’s lives. For me it is and, in a sense, carries a double responsibility: to practise this single-pointedness not only to deepen my own attentiveness but also on behalf of others caught up in unrelenting multitasking. Life and the work in hand is the prayer or, put the other way about, the prayer is the work. We live in a world characterized by extreme activism, restlessness and rush, yet a hallmark of this solitary life needs to be otium. [pp.112-113]

Gradually the contemplative life seems to take over the “rest” of one’s life; the simplest of tasks become luminous – almost at times numinous – with presence. Even simple conversations can become exercises in something akin to receiving spiritual direction… in the midst of discussing vegetables, perhaps!

Of course, as Schiller points out herself, this is a counsel of perfection; with the best will in the world too many jobs are done thoughtlessly, too many conversations slip by in mere chatter. But even so – to look back in less time each time, and see the gaps in attention, becomes its own often humorous discipline. (The Pure Land Buddhists have a lovely word, bombu, for just this kind of spiritual hamfistedness!)

Otium. It’s not a common word in most people’s vocabulary; but it means, at least in a contemplative context, a kind of holy leisure. Schiller (op cit., p.36):

In early monasticism, leisure or otium was not only an essential mark of the life of a monk, it was integral to the life itself. Leisure, otium, is how the monastic life was described in the early Middle Ages (a life free from negotium, of busyness and business). Few of us would recognize this as a description of contemporary monasticism, and even St Bernard, that great reformer and founder of the Cistercian Order, who had hoped to reduce busyness and business to a minimum in the life of a monk, was soon to amend this adage wryly to that of a negotissimum otium, a very busy leisure indeed.

The retired life can be otium per excellentiam, if we will only let it be. Practice need not be confined to the daily spells alone in one’s room: it can be allowed to spill out, just like the hermit’s, into walking, cooking, housework, even being together. It becomes a portable grace, a lovely thing that brightens all that it touches, even pain and concern, even the most mundane or dreadful things. It has begun to become an open channel to the hidden boundless grace that holds all things in becoming.

Troubled times

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We live in troubled times, more troubled than many of us can remember. To be honest, though, a great deal of our lives are lived in times like these. My own generation lived through a Cold War that all too often threatened to heat up into nuclear conflict, the energy crisis of the 1970s, the Viet Nam War, the UK miners’ strike (and its brutal repression) of the 1980s, the Falklands War, 9/11 – the list goes on. Our parents lived through – and many of them, Susan’s and mine included, fought in – the Second World War. Of that appalling period of history, reminiscent in so many ways of our own, CS Lewis wrote at the time:

The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes…

Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the [one] who takes [their] long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

The Weight of Glory, pp.48, 61

Awareness of impermanence, the recognition that our lives are led in a dissolving world of ceaseless change, is not a doctrine of despair but of realism; and in that realism, hope. Somehow our very grief becomes, in extremis, a channel of grace. Sharon Salzberg:

At times, pain can reach such a powerful level that it can be devastating. In spiritual life, we might call it the dark night of the soul. In interpersonal life, we call it grief, and this intense emotional experience does not limit itself to the loss of someone who has died. It can occur as the experience of nearly any kind of deep loss.

To accept the love that is the motor of grief is to accept the role of mourners, of givers-of-thanks for what is being lost, bearers of unbearable hope. Death always follows life; but new life follows death. (Even in Chernobyl, the natural world is thriving as never before.)

To accept what is, it is necessary to know what is, now. This means attention, questioning, investigation. It means practice.

When we feel separate, small and encapsulated, the ungraspable nature of the living reality makes us feel insecure and out of control. And because reality sometimes contains enormous pain and suffering, we are easily prone to adopting ideas and beliefs that seem to provide security, control, explanations and so on. But belief is always shadowed by doubt. And the truth is, we are clueless. We cannot see the whole.

But we don’t need to! When trying to get a grip falls away, it is actually a huge relief!

Joan Tollifson, The Essentials (Substack)

Human culture is not “an inexcusable frivolity on the part of creatures loaded with such awful responsibilities as we.” (Lewis, ibid.) If we have one job in times like this, it is to be bearers, through our careful grief, of love, of grace, of light even, into this present darkness.

Tariki

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It seems to me that we are not so much human beings as human becomings. And it doesn’t apply merely to humans: there are feline becomings and bovine becomings, cephalopod becomings and fungal becomings. It’s becomings all the way down.

To speak of a “being” implies an object, a static substance that acts and is acted upon; a thing embedded like a rock in a stream called time. But this isn’t what we are. Even our cells are replaced on a regular basis, some every few days; we change and evolve, each of us, throughout our lives, and we are different people in different eras of our life, very often with different interests and abilities. This applies perhaps more strongly to some people than to others, but by and large it is true: a person in later life is quite different than the “same person” in their teens, or as the parent of a young family.

Our thoughts too shift and flicker moment by moment, despite any effort we may make to concentrate on even one stream of them. Even the most elementary contemplative practice will show us this in the first few minutes!

But it isn’t just the ephemeral creatures of earth that are becoming, moment by moment and aeon by aeon. Our planet itself is changing and remoulding itself – if you doubt that you’ve never lived through an earthquake – and even our own lovely Milky Way is a finely balanced eddy of gas and dust and stars sailing 630 km/sec along the Hubble Flow.

Nothing is static. There are no objects, except by convention. All is change and becoming. As Spinoza saw, there is no substance but God (or Nature): everything – ourselves included – is merely a mode of that infinite becoming. The ten thousand things are no more than sparkles on the broad river of the Tao.

Literally, no thing is the ground of becoming.

So if this is how it is, what of our vaunted human will? The slipstream of a passing gnat disperses it. But becoming is movement, an ontological wind over the ocean of what is. There is no need to lean, brows knitted, on the imagined oars of the will. Sit still; the sail is raised of itself, and fills.

Process and coinherence

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Prehension is not perception in the ordinary sense, and it is not causation as traditionally imagined. It is the way an event takes account of the world it inherits. Without it, the past would be dead, the present spontaneous, and continuity impossible. To prehend something is to include it in one’s own becoming. This inclusion need not be conscious, deliberate, or even noticeable. It simply means that what has happened contributes to what is happening.

Every actual occasion prehends its predecessors. It does not choose whether to do so. Prehension is mandatory. What is optional is how it prehends…

The past does not act on the present by pushing, transmitting force, or occupying the same space. Instead, the present appropriates the past. Influence travels forward because it is taken up, not because it is imposed.

This replaces external causation with internal relation.

Robert Flix, [AN] Whitehead in Plain English, p.62

Contemplation is an entering, in profoundly open awareness, into the process of prehension. This isn’t a passive reception, an observation only; it is a deliberate participation in, a strengthening of, the relational web between occasions, between things, events and their relations.

This seems to me why contemplatives have so often, especially those practicing within the traditions of a religion, connected the idea of contemplation with intercession, whether in the developed theology of hesychasm, or in Buddhist conceptions of metta or tonglen. Looked at like this, contemplative prayer in its intercessory dimension is not superstition but metaphysics; the practitioner, through their inevitable coinherence with the suffering inherent in existence, prehends the brokenness of things, holding them in the light of unbroken awareness. In effect, the practitioner enters into the suffering as the suffering enters into them: acting as a lightning-rod between what merely is and the ground of being itself – God, if you will allow the term.

In A Little Book of Unknowing, Jennifer Kavanagh writes:

…Faith is not about certainty, but about trust… 

We have seen that there is little about which we can be certain. Certainty may be undermined by limitations of the current state of knowledge; the subjective nature of experience; the fluid quality of the material world; or the intervention of unforeseen events. But beyond these aspects of the world about which we often assume knowledge, there is a dimension of life to which rational explanation simply doesn’t apply. Most people would admit that there is much that we cannot apprehend through reason or through the senses. We might know a fact with our brains, but not be able to understand what it means, to fully experience its reality – the age of a star or the trillions of connections within the human brain – some things are too big, too complex, for us to conceive. Einstein, who knew a thing or two about factual knowledge, felt that “imagination is more important than knowledge”. There is a dimension which co-exists with the material, rationally grounded world, is not in opposition to it or threatened by scientific development but happily stands alone in the context of everything else.

Reading Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics seems at last to be providing me with a framework within which I can begin to understand what has always been a deep instinct in my own practice: that it wasn’t merely a solipsistic exercise in self-improvement, but a real work of weight and consequence beyond my own narrow concerns. In a sense, it doesn’t matter of course whether I can explain it to my own or anyone else’s satisfaction; what matters is that it does work, is actual work, in some obscure corner of the healing of things.

Returning

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We still seek wholeness. It is intrinsic to human identity that, however much we have achieved, we are never satisfied. We hunger and thirst for what lies beyond our grasp and even beyond the horizon of our desire. Religion and spirituality, which are less easy to divorce than we thought – are the elements of culture that deal with this desire beyond desire. Where are they taking us? Where do we have to redefine the old terms by which we try to understand ourselves in this longing for wholeness? …

When belief takes the place of faith in the religious mind the possible range of spiritual experience and growth is critically limited. When religion emphasizes belief rather than faith it may find it easier to organize and define its membership and those it excludes. It is easier to pass judgement. But it will produce, at the best, half-formed followers. The road to transcendence is cut off, blocked by landfalls of beliefs as immoveable as boulders, beliefs we are told to accept and do not dare to put to the test of experience. In such a rigid and enforced belief system what I believe also easily slides into what I say I believe, or what I am told to believe or what I feel I ought to believe, because the I that believes becomes so dependent on the identity generated by the structured belief system we inhabit.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, pp.3,9

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

The spiritual life looked at from within resembles not so much a ladder or an ordered progress as it does a rather tatty wheel. It does move, but it moves at least as much round and round as it does forward. It is a process of trial and error – trials and errors. It seems to be more like an organic thing, subject to odd diversions and random mutations, than a neat structure assembled according to a set of plans.

Coinherence is one of those luminous words whose meaning flickers at the edge of comprehension, as though it names something you already half-know in your bones. Charles Williams was fond of using it, but its roots extend far further back than that. If ultimate reality (God, the Way) is in fact process, relational union, rather than an object or a person, then relational living is intrinsic to life itself, and it has profound implications for human behaviour, ethics and purpose. Specifically, it speaks to the contemplative life in ways that make sense of much monastic teaching over the years, right from the Desert Fathers and Mothers to the present day.

Pain and difficulty – what used to be called “tribulation” – are intrinsic to life itself. “Change and decay in all around I see,” wrote Henry Francis Lyle, and an open heart risks breaking daily at the news from across the world, even in supposedly stable and civilised nations. But if we are aware that all that is – not only, if especially, conscious beings – rests in the ground of being just as we do ourselves, then our presence in contemplation becomes much more than a state of mind. We are not “praying for” those for whom our hearts are torn; we are recognising our shared being, recognising an existential bond that exists already. Love is not symbolic, but structural: a circulation of grace, strength and suffering.

The living current of grace that coinheres in all existence is the source of what is – the Tao as the mother of the ten thousand things – and yet it is the heart of our contemplation itself. Only if we sit still can we be present as aerials, signs, receiving stations for that grace. The mist covers the distances, and our vision is not good; but we don’t need to know or to believe: our unknowing is itself our practice and our compassion. Perhaps all we need is love.