Tag Archives: practice

Bowing to rocks

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

What is awareness?

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Sitting quietly, it becomes apparent that awareness is not the same thing at all as thought. It’s not the same as physical sensations, either. Thoughts and sensations are objects within awareness; things seen, perhaps, against stillness. Awareness is no thing; it can’t be the object of any subject whatever, it seems.

Try it. Try merely being aware of awareness. (It’s much the same as Sam Harris’ introduction to the practice of Dzogchen – “looking for the one who is looking”.) You will find that there is no self to look, nor a self to be looked for, There is only awareness – and that is, after all, no thing.

To sit like this, merely aware – of thoughts just as much as sensations, of sounds, and of the body’s weight sitting – you might 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 seems to be a big metaphysical bite; but it is not to be chewed, not to be thought through. Leave the thoughts where they fall. Sit in plain awareness, and all the mind’s anxious grasping will eventually fall away like leaves in autumn. The bright field of awareness is all that is; in fact, it really is all that is. Time and place, things and thoughts, are all simply ripples on that bright surface, nothing else.

Sit still. Be quiet. There is nothing you need. Let the bright field be your only home; it is, anyway.

Succession and substance

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The stream is nothing less than the sparkling surface of becoming. For us, I suppose, it is time, since we are transient waves on the motion of what is coming to be; and we can only see what has been – which we call life, or the past.

To come to an end of knowing, to a place where reason and observation fail us, is the beginning of what Spinoza called the Third Kind of Knowledge: direct perception of what is, as a necessary, unique expression of the immediate activity of the stream (God, the Tao). In that we are the locus of seeing, the inevitable awareness in which things come to be what they are.

For me it is in simply sitting still that we come to see the glittering light from the wavelets on the swift skin of the stream itself. We are each no more than that, but beautiful; and able to love, each in our lift and fall on the running stream. Nothing is lost. The stream goes on, and each wavelet cannot be other than the stream itself.

Is it possible?

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Is it possible, at this very moment, to do what we may not have ever been able to do before, which is to look down at the shape our life has made and—suspending all judgment, throwing away every possible frame—simply marvel that this is the shape that my life has made, this and no other?

Noelle Oxenhandler, What Is the Shape of My Life?, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2025

To sit with this question, simply as it is, may be not unfamiliar when applied to the breath, to the sitting body, to the sounds outside, or to the sunlight on a blank wall or closed eyelids. But it is less familiar when turned, as Oxenhandler does here, to oneself. It is a strange and disorienting practice, with a dzogchen quality, like a wordless pointing-out instruction, about it somewhere. Something appears like a bright skein on the velvety dark of the stream, a shape of purling water, nothing else.

Recently I have found myself drawn into just such a practice. It is not something I choose. It rises up through the usual pattern of unbidden thoughts, and asks for space at least to be, like a map drawn on glass. There is nothing dramatic about it, no sense of “my life flashed before my eyes” – and yet it is there, a kind of Tube map of a lifetime, glittering behind closed eyelids. The least attention, and a pattern enlarges, a stream of cause and effect reveals itself, and is – what? – forgiven? Something like that. An act, yet again, of grace, anyway. There is no judgement here, no impulse to improve anything. It just is as Noelle Oxenhandler suggests (ibid.):

[T]hrough the ups and downs, the joys and heartbreaks of my own… life, there is something I have always been seeking that is beyond any conditions, that is not defined by the particular shape my life has made, by the roads either taken or not taken. In a way, it might be called a kind of negative capability toward the past, an unknowing of the known—in the sense of refraining from any judgment as to whether what happened was good, bad, something to be regretted or celebrated, whether all together it made the shape of a life that “worked out” or “didn’t work out.”

On the map beneath the glass there is nothing even to heal. The lines and stops stand out against the dark, and my breath comes and goes. There is no story here, just a pattern in the quiet. Nothing to conclude. The bright pattern stands against silence, as it is.

[First published 20/11/2025]

The fundamental unknowability of God

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In the Wikipedia entry on Panentheism, we read:

Baruch Spinoza… claimed that “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived. “Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner.” Though Spinoza has been called the “prophet” and “prince” of pantheism, in a letter to Henry Oldenburg Spinoza states that: “as to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature (taken as a kind of mass or corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken”. For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world.

According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote “Deus sive Natura” (God or Nature) Spinoza did not mean to say that God and Nature are interchangeable terms, but rather that God’s transcendence was attested by God’s infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God’s immanence. Furthermore, Martial Guéroult suggested the term panentheism, rather than pantheism to describe Spinoza’s view of the relation between God and the world. The world is not God, but it is, in a strong sense, “in” God.

It seems to me that in this sense Spinoza’s God is almost the Western philosophical equivalent of the ancient Chinese philosophical concept of the Tao. The Tao is not itself “the ten thousand things” (i.e. material existence) but “The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things.” (Laozi) To sit quietly and recall that the coming to be of things in time is no more than the result of things that have been, and that things themselves rest in the open ground as wavelets rest in the flowing stream, is to see that the stream itself – the Tao, God, Being – is prior to all that is. “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17 NIV).

As Spinoza himself pointed out, there are three kinds of knowledge:

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, in response to user query, 31 October 2025)

The second kind of knowledge, rational thought, cannot make the connection with the Ground. But to sit still with the knowledge, to sit stil in the impossibility of speech, like a Zen monk with a koan, is to allow “the fundamental unknowability of God” (Wikipedia) to open into the Ground all by itself. When we come to an end of what we can say – what we can think – the only path open is the way of emptiness, into the infinite pleroma of what actually is.

[First published 16/11/2025]