It occurs to me that this post, though it was written when the pandemic was still near its height, says some things I’d wish to say now. In any case, more recent readers may have missed it first time around!
I was at a loss to think how to title this blog post. If you Google “spiritual reading” you will immediately be flooded with psychic suggestions, tarot divinations, horoscopes and astrology, interspersed with the occasional Catholic site recommending “reading [the] lives of saints, writings of Doctors and the Fathers of the Church, theological works written by holy people, and doctrinal writings of Church authorities.” None of these are what I was looking for, you may be pleased to know.
If you are a member of a monastic community, Buddhist, Christian or whatever, you will probably find that daily study of some kind is part of the discipline of life, or, if you are a Benedictine, that in accordance with Rule 38, “Reading will always accompany the meals of the monks.” But leading a secular contemplative life comes with no such in-built reminders that practice shouldn’t take place in an intellectual vacuum.
I have found that regular reading from what is actually a fairly small list of contemplative writers has become an indispensable part of my own practice. Readers of this blog will likely know who they are already, but people like Toni Bernhard, Tara Brach, Pema Chödrön, Daishin Morgan, Larry Rosenberg, Alan Watts have become my companions on the way, and I keep returning to their books over and over again.
I’ve not yet made a time and a place in my day for this kind of regular reading, but it occurs to me that perhaps I should. It is too easy to get sidetracked into reading only more speculative or philosophical writings, and think that’s the same thing. It isn’t; and that’s just the point. Something in the heart – mine, anyway – gets dried out and brittle without the companionship of those who are also following the contemplative path.
A (very) short booklist:
Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up
Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance
Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart
Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha
Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life
Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
It may seem obvious, but I find it’s sometimes too easy to forget that contemplative practice isn’t just what happens twice a day on the cushion (chair, bed, carpet…) but is threaded through the rest of life, including sleep. I have found that, as well as the inevitable – and usually benign – ways that perception and emotion evolve, insights sometimes appear at unexpected times – the edges of sleep, particularly – that are often hard, if not impossible, to recall. Unless one makes a note…
Over the years I have found that a notebook is almost as essential a tool as a place to sit. I do mean a notebook, not a journal; journalling is an honourable spiritual discipline in its own right, but it isn’t what I’m referring to here. What I’m getting at is something that is always close at hand, where I can jot down reflections and realisations – not during formal practice of course! – as they arise, before they’re lost in the vagaries of thought and memory.
What sort of a notebook you use may depend on what sort of person you are, and what you’re used to, what you’re most comfortable with. One thing I would say, though, is that it will probably work better the simpler it is. This is probably not the place for artisan paper and a vintage fountain pen, nor for a fully-fledged word processing application. What’s needed is something more like a reporter’s notebook and a cheap biro, or a really simple notes app like Google Keep or Samsung Notes.
Personally I have come to prefer using my phone for things like this – I’m at ease with technology, you can use it in the dark, it doesn’t leak on the bedclothes… I’ve become very comfortable with glide typing, and I can type silently this way very nearly as fast and as accurately as I can with a physical keyboard. (Contrary to the linked article, Gboard and Samsung Keyboard work pretty much as well as SwiftKey for glide typing, once enabled – take your pick!)
Some people, though, seem to find that technology disables – or distracts – rather than enables such an intimate thing as making notes as part of a contemplative life. For them whatever notebook they like (I do have a preference for some kind of lay-flat sort that you don’t have to hold open) and whatever pen is comfortable will work best.
The important thing is not how you make notes, but that you do it. It doesn’t matter whether you feel you are gathering ideas for some more formal writing – like a blog post, or a book – or merely to refer back to later: the important thing is that the actual process helps locate the insight in language, where it can seep out and bless the whole field of cognition. That’s why, perhaps, it has to be an easy process, that’s not going to draw attention to itself – something you’re really comfortable with, like a pair of old walking shoes…
Practice today was scattered; distracted doesn’t even cover it. One train of thought succeeded another with barely a break for open awareness between them. Trivial, juicy, engrossing – it hardly seemed to matter, just so long as it would take my attention away from the tiny precious instant that is all that is now. The delicious isness of the crisp air, the sounds from outside the window, were scarcely noticed between the pattering dissolution of one obsession and the cramping onset of another.
And yet the rest of the day was gentle, open, clear and attentive. What I did I did. I listened, truly listened, when people spoke. The most ordinary things came as gifts from the blue – and the autumn sky on this oddly warm day was as blue as blue – and even the busy streets were different, suddenly luminous with presence. Nothing seemed to take away this sense of grace and pattern. There was no such thing as irritation or impatience; everything had its own weight, its own benediction to deliver.
So what was going on? I have no idea. This “pathless path”, as Martin Laird describes it somewhere, has many odd sunken lanes to explore and wayside shrines to stumble across – one reason I have so little time in my own life for any idea of a “ladder of ascent” (John Climacus) however helpful others may find such things. Just sitting still is really all that is needed, pointlessly scattered though it may seem at the time. That doesn’t matter, it appears; what it seems to the conscious mind is beside the point. What is given is enough. There is nothing but what is given, anyway.
If there’s one thing that’s truly essential in contemplative practice, it’s keeping on keeping on. Sheer persistence lies at the heart of contemplation: session after session, day after day. Sometimes I think keeping at it is more important than what it is we keep at. Inevitably, over the years, there will be changes – sometimes radical, as mine have occasionally been – more often slight and gradual, as we reveal to ourselves more about the nature of mind, and of the way things come to be.
Importantly, though, we need to understand that practice doesn’t make anything happen. Perhaps though, for me at least, practice does make a place where it is possible for things to happen. Maybe practice functions like cultivating a field. Cultivation doesn’t make anything grow – you need seeds, and water, and warmth for that – but it does make a place where seeds can safely germinate. Awakening itself comes, it seems to me, from some kind of slow, unseen growth or change in the mind itself. Mindfulness, self-awareness, openness to what is – a more religious mindset might call it grace…
Breathing in, where do you feel the breath sensation? Breathing out, where do you feel it? You maintain this sense of bodily sensations that come and go. It’s not imagination. It’s not an image. You’re just learning this art of allowing, which in more religious language would be called surrender. Surrender to what? To what is, to the natural law that the breath is obeying as the lungs fill up and empty.
As you follow this way of practice, you take your seat and you’re upright and relaxed. You’re sitting, breathing, and learning how to stay with one theme: breathing in the context of the whole body. As you do that, of course, the world doesn’t stop. Wherever you are, there are sounds. Some of them are pleasant, like the birds singing “chirp, chirp.” Others are not so pleasant, such as the trucks, cars, ambulances, and police cars that speed up and down city streets. Letting sounds come and go, you’re learning to peacefully coexist with all that’s other than breath…
This comprehensive approach can be especially helpful for intellectual people, because there’s no verbal content; the intellect isn’t being fed. In this approach, you’re not for or against thought. You’re not trying to fix anything, not trying to use the breath as a stepping-stone to get anywhere. Rather, you allow the mind to think itself in whatever way it wishes. You’re learning how to temporarily let things happen. You’re learning how to let the mind do what it does…
Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life
Slowly, slowly. Sometimes things will happen suddenly – walls will fall, dark places illuminate – but more often, far more often, it will be so gradual that even the practiced attention won’t notice, until one day everything is different. Rosenberg again:
Maybe not all at once, but little by little, as breath awareness becomes more continuous, something very good comes out of it—you feel more calm, more peaceful. There’s joy. Otherwise, why bother doing it? If you haven’t experienced it, you will. It’s not mysterious. As the breath awareness develops, the body starts to relax because they’re all interrelated. Finally, you’ll see that it is just one life happening.
Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points. Does it point beyond itself to that transcendental reality, or does it lend itself too easily to becoming no more than an idea in your head that you believe in, a mental idol?
The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God. Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim exclusive possession of Being. It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am that. So it is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being.
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
We humans still have much of our tribal ancestry hanging around: we tend to feel lost and unsafe unless we can identify as part of something larger than ourselves. When I was a teenager it might be whether you were a mod or a rocker; some identify strongly with others of their own race; very often it is a religious identification, sometimes zoomed-in to which actual congregation or meeting one belongs to, or which particular doctrinal flavour one adheres to.
These affiliations are tremendously sticky, in terms of social psychology, which perhaps explains in part why people find it so difficult to distance themselves from cults, however pernicious. They don’t only consist in feeling warm fuzzies for those just like us; they all too often involve feeling anything but warm fuzziness for those who are different – “othering” them. They provide us with a secure identity, with protection against those suspicious others, with a home and a community.
All such communities have badges. They may be visual (as with the mods and rockers) or audible (shibboleths); they may be emotional or conceptual, but they work. (Even those whose practice is dedicated to the realisation of the illusory nature of the self can unthinkingly fall into tribal identification – the vipassana lot, or the Pure Land ones, Sōtō Zen or Rinzai.) Tragically, these identifications can even be projected onto a deity or a metaphysical conceit, and then we really are in trouble: “My God is the only true God; yours is a heretical invention!”
Words are sometimes at the very heart of these identifications, and we don’t realise it. I recall a conversation over lunch with a friend some months ago, where I was trying to explain why I wasn’t comfortable any longer using the word “God”. I said that for me the word gave entirely the wrong impression if used of the metaphysical ground. “God” implied for me a being, so that one could say, “Look – there’s God, over there at the table by the door!” But she is a Catholic; of course she uses “God” to define a finite entity, even if the Catechism of the Catholic Church says he is a mystery (CCC 230).
Eckhart Tolle uses the word Being to speak of the metaphysical ground, just as Meister Eckhart used Istigkeit, or Paul Tillich “Ground of Being”. Some avoid using any term to refer to the ground: things exist, they say, what more do we need? But at the end of it all, is isness. I have to call it something, even if it is ineffable.
Am I trying to avoid identification altogether? Why? I admit that since childhood I’ve never been all that comfortable with being a part of something, especially a something, like a religion or a political party, that requires right attitudes, right speaking, right thinking as well as right (moral) action. However close I feel to so much Buddhist teaching, and no matter how immense the gratitude and respect I feel for so many Buddhist teachers, I am not a Buddhist. The same applies to Taoism, contemplative Christianity, or any other community of practice. After all these years perhaps I am just happier out on the borderlines, in the saltmarshes of the spirit.
The way gives them life; Virtue rears them; Things give them shape; Circumstances bring them to maturity. Therefore the myriad creatures all revere the way and honour virtue. Yet the way is revered and virtue honoured not because this is decreed by any authority but because it is natural for them to be treated so.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (51)
This passage, among others, has given rise to the Taoist concept of ziran, “just-so-ness” (Suzuki). The way goes on; to be truly human is to walk in the way, to “accord with the Tao”: “Therefore there is such a thing as aligning one’s actions with the Tao. If you accord with the Tao you become one with it.” (Tao Te Ching tr. Muller).
It is so simple, but how can it be done? Like Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teaching on choiceless awareness, it can be frustrating to read words like this, with little or no indication of a practice. (There isn’t one in either Krishnamurti or in the Tao Te Ching.) I have often written of shikantaza, the Sōtō Zen practice of “just sitting”, in its simplicity and quiet; but I have also found myself drawing parallels with the Eastern Orthodox practice of hesychasm, and with the Pure Land practice of the Nembutsu. Both of these can of course be seen as a variety of prayer, and many of their practitioners would argue strongly that this is so. But the repetition of a short phrase, either the Jesus Prayer or the Nembutsu, has a quality of practice that is not quite expressed either by the word “prayer” or the word “mantra”, as I understand it.
Let me try and explain. The Nembutsu in particular, often transliterated “Namo Amida Bu”, is usually translated, “I take refuge in Amitābha Buddha”. Amitābha is a compound of the Sanskrit words amita (“without bound, infinite”) and ābhā (“light, splendour”). The recitation of the Nembutsu is seen, in Jōdo Shinshū, as the practitioner’s response to tariki (“other power”) – the power of Amitābha, sometimes expressed as simply “the way things are”. The practitioner does not cause anything by their practice, nor do they plead for anything to be done for them: they merely acknowledge its having been done. They “accord with the way”. As Shinran, the founder of Jōdo Shinshū, wrote:
For myself, I do not have even a single disciple. For if I brought people to say the nembutsu through my own efforts, then they might be my disciples. But it is indeed preposterous to call persons “my disciples” when they say the nembutsu having received the working of Amida.
The beauty, it seems to me, of practices such as hesychasm and Nembutsu is their extreme simplicity, coupled with their explicit renunciation of any sense that it is the practitioner’s hard work that is at stake in the process of awakening.
(It’s important, too, to recognise that, despite all our acceptance of the way, of “other power”, this is not a way of passivity – an accusation often levelled at Christian Quietists from the C12 Beguines right through to William Pollard and Francis Frith among C19 Quakers! To walk in the way may at times be active indeed; the point being to walk in accordance with the way, not to cease walking altogether!)
It seems to me that any practice, like its practitioner, needs simply to disappear in contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. Enter a practice of total simplicity and poverty of intent, such as either the shikantaza, “just sitting”, or the Nembutsu – the total “hands-off” (shinjin) entrusting of oneself to the way.
Dr. Welton assigned me to the newest body, where dissection had just begun, and specifically to the left hand. He wanted tendons and ligaments exposed. Day after day, I took my tools and sat alone beside the table and carefully opened the hand, following diagrams in a thick book. I did a good job. I gradually came to understand that hand, and all hands, in a way that remains with me now. But I came to understand something else as well. One day, I had almost finished exposing the tendons. I found that by pulling on them gently, I could move the fingers one by one. I had never been uneasy in that room, but that day I looked up the length of the body, naked except for the covered face, and all at once I was covered in goose bumps.
Dissection is more a psychological experience than an intellectual one for many people. I found it to be both. I remember more about how it felt to be with the dead, to touch and open a body, to see what happens to bodies, than any details about the insertion of the latissimus dorsi muscle. (I learned that, too, in a way I could never have learned from books.) Working with cadavers makes it clear what death is. A subject becomes an object. A person becomes a body. And, miraculously, turns back: this body, this firm, immobile object, is, was, a person, a warm, breathing person. A body is not an ordinary object—can never be an ordinary object. This particular object had once been awake.
With a jolt, I realized that what I was cutting apart had been a living hand, just like mine; that it had been pliant and animated. It had held a pen, shoveled dirt, bathed a child, stroked someone’s hair. That it was like my precious hands, which until that moment had simply been part of me. Alive. I realized, This man is like me. I already knew that this body was like my body; I could label its parts. But suddenly I knew that this man was like me. And that I would be like this man.
Sallie Tisdale, Advice for the Dying (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death
Sallie Tisdale’s recollection of her Anatomy and Physiology course is one of those passages that is especially precious to me. I cannot quite remember – it was long before my formal split from Christian faith and practice – precisely when it was I realised for myself, with perfect immediacy, that I was my body; my body was me, and one would not survive the other. It was sometime during the period when I was very ill with coronary heart disease, certainly, and, with the utter sense of reality that seems to characterise such times, I saw that death was no more than a dissolution into light – the safest, most natural consummation imaginable. (This was no intellectual exercise, but a vivid, real experience more certain than life itself.)
Throughout Buddhist literature in particular there are many intimations of this “clear light”, most notably I think in Dzogchen, where it is an attribute of the Ground (gdod ma’i gzhi). (I have long felt that Tillich’s phrase “the ground of being” was perhaps closer to expressing the irreducible Istigkeit than anything else I’ve read.) The ground of being is there, and only there, when we come to an end of ourselves. It lies far beyond all we know as self, or other – though it can appear to us so utterly other that we are tempted to hide from it – and yet the way to it is inward, into the extreme depths of what we are. The ground of being is no thing: it precedes thingness.
The ground is the end, that to which all things return. Kathleen Dowling Singh:
[Death] is the experience of ‘no exit,’ a recognition of the fact that the situation is inescapable, that one is utterly at the mercy of the power of the Ground of Being… Love is the natural condition of our being, revealed when all else is relinquished, when one has already moved into transpersonal levels of identification and awareness. Love is simply an open state with no boundaries and, as such, is a most inclusive level of consciousness. Love is a quality of the Ground of Being itself. In this regard and at this juncture in the dying process, love can be seen as the final element of life-in-form and the gateway to the formless.
Of course one cannot practice for death, at least not intentionally. But one can practice with death in mind. To sit in the bright stillness of shikantaza is no more than that.
That everything is included within your mind is the essence of mind… Even though waves arise, the essence of your mind is pure; it is just like clear water with a few waves. Actually water always has waves. Waves are the practice of the water. To speak of waves apart from water or water apart from waves is a delusion. Water and waves are one. Big mind and small mind are one. When you understand your mind in this way, you have some security in your feeling. As your mind does not expect anything from outside, it is always filled. A mind with waves in it is not a disturbed mind, but actually an amplified one. Whatever you experience is an expression of big mind…
Before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. This is called “mind-only,” or “essence of mind,” or “big mind.” After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life.
When the water returns to its original oneness with the river, it no longer has any individual feeling to it; it resumes its own nature, and finds composure. How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river! If this is so, what feeling will we have when we die? I think we are like the water in the dipper.
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
I find the study of phenomenology in my amateur way endlessly fascinating; it is all too easy to follow it down philosophical rabbit-holes, as I have done in several posts recently. But the contemplative life, related though it is to the practice of philosophy (as seen so clearly in some Buddhist schools like Yogācāra) deals in itself not with discursive thought but with direct experience; which is one of the reasons I have for so long been drawn to the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition of hesychasm, or to the Pure Land Buddhist practice of the Nembutsu – not primarily because of the nature of these practices themselves (repetitive prayer) but because of their extreme simplicity.
Now, phenomenal experience is sometimes characterised as a tunnel (Metzinger), a “benign user illusion” (Dennett, glossed so brilliantly by Susan Blackmore) or a mindstream (Yogācāra). The idea generally seems to be that what we experience from moment to moment is a transparent, essentially functional but ultimately illusory interface that the mind provides between reality and our (equally illusory) experience of a permanent self. Reality itself is far richer and stranger, and the self is “but one of the countless manifestations of the Tao” (Ho (PDF)). To say these things can of course provoke in the reader a myriad of misunderstandings, and to realise them oneself can cause a temporary existential disruption that is horribly like a classical bad trip. Misleading though many of its Perennialist assumptions may be, one of the best accounts of what is at stake must be Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. Donald Hoffman finds the same position in Erwin Schrödinger:
[Schrödinger’s] position boils down to this: what we call the physical world is the result of a process that Schrödinger called “objectivation”, i.e. the transformation of the one self-world (Atman=Brahman) into something that can be readily conceptualized and studied objectively, hence something that is fully void of subjective qualities. In the theory of conscious agents this amounts to the creation of “interfaces”. Such interfaces simplify what is going on in order to allow you to act efficiently. Good interfaces hide complexity. They do not let you see reality as it is but only as it is useful to you. What you call the “physical world” is merely a highly-simplified representation of non-dual consciousness.
Donald Hoffman, Schrödinger and the Conscious Universe (IAI News)
Last year I attempted, as I periodically do, to explain to myself how this paradoxical relationship between overthinking and contemplative practice could possibly work. I concluded:
I have written elsewhere of the profound stillness I experienced recovering from childhood meningitis; in many ways, my contemplative practice over the last 40-odd years has been an attempt, scattered as it has at times been, to recover that stillness.
These things are nothing new. The Taoist tradition beginning between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, and the Chan Buddhist writings in the early centuries of the present era, are full of wanderings “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown” (Chia Tao). And the central tradition of (at least Zen) Buddhist meditation consists of “just sitting” (shikantaza).
The falling away of purposeful action, in itself the very simplest thing, seems one of the hardest to achieve – perhaps because it isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposeful action. This appears to me to be the snag with so many programmes of practice involving concentration, visualisation, ritual and so on.
The paradox inherent in practice, any practice, only begins to thin out in sheer pointlessness, either the pointlessness of a repeated phrase such as the Jesus Prayer, or the Nembutsu, or of merely sitting still. The power of shikantaza is simply powerlessness, giving up, complete acceptance of what is without looking for anything. When you cease to try to open the doors, they open by themselves, quite quietly. Not looking, the path opens.
Metaphysics can seem to be a rather slippery term. On the one hand it can be taken to be “the study of the most general features of reality, including existence, objects and their properties, possibility and necessity, space and time, change, causation, and the relation between matter and mind” (Wikipedia) but on the other, being the study of, in one sense, how things come to be, it is too easily conflated with religious creation myths, or with cosmologies intricately involved with religious doctrines of causality and phenomenology.
But “according to modern scientific knowledge, mental events and processes presuppose the existence and reality of material things. Thinking, for example, implies the existence of a bird or a mammal with a brain. Or a momentary event, such as the proverbial cat sitting on the mat, presupposes the real existence of the cat, the mat, the earth under the mat, as well as a real human observer of the event.” (Morris)
But for me, that which is intended by using the term “ground of being” (Tillich) is precisely that which can be known directly as “no-thing” in contemplation. I am not talking here of an idea, a common factor in a Huxley-like perennial philosophy, but of a repeated and very direct experience of what Quakers have referred to as “the light”, as described for instance by Emilia Fogelklou (she writes in the third person): “Without visions or the sound of speech or human mediation, in exceptionally wide-awake consciousness, she experienced the great releasing inward wonder. It was as if the ’empty shell’ burst. All the weight and agony, all the feeling of unreality dropped away. She perceived living goodness, joy, light like a clear, irradiating, uplifting, enfolding, unequivocal reality from deep inside.”
This kind of experience can of course not be described terribly clearly, nor can it be communicated directly, and any attempt is likely to fall into superlatives such as Fogelklou’s. But the experience is as real and direct as any sensory experience, perhaps more so, and it has a curious undeniable quality, a great lifting and healing of the heart. I use Tillich’s term for it not because I have any particular attraction for that as an idea, but because it seems to get closer than anything else I have read to the encounter itself. There is a visual analogue that sometimes occurs in meditation – and which can lead to the experience I am trying to describe – of the visual field itself, seen through closed eyes, extending suddenly through and beneath what ought to have been the observing mind, but which is no longer there.
Now, I have long enough experience in contemplative practice to know that experiences are not things to hang onto, still less to seek after, and I would not be happy if any words of mine sent anyone on a quest for experiential chimeras. Yet the experience itself, with all its indelible affect, has occurred so often over the years, since childhood, that I find myself referring to it over and over again, and it remains for me a kind of lodestone.
Are these metaphysical experiences, insights? Are they therefore somehow at variance with the fundamental insight of atheism that the idea of another, supernatural, layer to existence, within which the human self can somehow transcend, or survive, the electrochemical apparatus of the central nervous system, is illusory? I don’t think so. Daniel Dennett’s insight into human phenomenology as a “benign user illusion” coincides well with the Buddhist conception of things as empty of intrinsic existence (śūnyatā) – all of which seems to me to be a formal expression of what I have come to experience as “no-thing.” Andreas Müller:
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.
