Tag Archives: practice

In defence of humanism

4 Replies

Humanism is a philosophical outlook, but in itself is a minimalist one, deliberately so because a key requirement of it is that individuals should think for themselves about what they are and how they should live. Standardly, a philosophy is a fully fleshed-out affair, consisting in a detailed view of the world, of humanity in it, of the relationship between human beings and the world, and of human beings with each other. All the great philosophies have a metaphysics that underwrites the ethics they urge. But humanism requires no commitment to teachings beyond its two fundamental premises, and it imposes no obligations on people other than to think for themselves. Because it does not consist in a body of doctrines and prescriptions, backed by sanctions for not believing in the former and not obeying the latter, it is as far from being like a religion as anything could be.

…[I]t remains that each humanist, starting from the shared premises that frame an overall humanistic attitude to life and the world, must work out what that means given his or her own talents for creating a life truly worth living, in both the following respects: that it feels good to live it, and that it is beneficial in its impact on others. In the pages to follow, one version of a humanist ethics is sketched. It is not intended as prescriptive, or as closing debate on any of the topics it touches; it is illustrative of a humanist endeavour which proceeds from its chooser’s own efforts to fulfil the one humanist obligation: to think.

AC Grayling, The God Argument, p.148

The other week, a commenter suggested that humanism presented an alternative belief system to the one(s) presented by religion. I knew then that this was not so, as I explained in the subsequent post; but the question troubled me. I knew that I recalled something in Grayling’s book that addressed this concern, but I couldn’t at the time find it. I have now reproduced it above!

This whole question has been on my mind the past week, in between working on another, related, project, and some thoughts occur to me. One of the problems with religion – any religion, but acutely the Abrahamic ones – is that they rest upon authority: the authority of holy scripture, of tradition, and of those contemporary representatives (priests, imams, pastors, elders, rabbis) on whom the ancient authority, or some proportion of it, has devolved, inasmuch as they have been ordained, appointed, to mediate it to their congregations. The whole edifice of religion rests on tiered authority, ultimately underpinned by a reward and punishment system with some kind of assumed metaphysical origin. (Even the religious traditions of Buddhism fall under this stricture, though in a typically more nuanced way.)

Now, spirituality is one of the most intimate, personal and sensitive areas of human life; it seems wholly wrong that any external authority should seek to impose control upon a person’s spiritual life. The result, so often, is more or less visible religious trauma. It is illuminating to consider that perhaps the next most intimate, personal and sensitive area of a person’s life is their sexuality; it is no coincidence that most, if not all, religions seek to control that also.

Humanism, as Grayling points out in The God Argument (above and passim), is nothing like this. It has no authority, nor does it seek authority. Like the very earliest “atheist” strands of Buddhism, humanism states that each humanist must work out their path for themselves. Others, directly and through their writings, may give assistance and advice, but each of us must do it for ourselves. To require anyone to accept beliefs on external authority is not only not necessary: it is an abuse of human freedom; and besides, it is the deepest unkindness.

Contemplative practice is just exactly “finding out for oneself”, unmediated by the authority of scripture or tradition; perhaps that is why so many contemplatives, from Meister Eckhart and Al-Hallaj to Thomas Keating and Richard Rohr, though they would never have considered themselves humanists, have faced anything from severe criticism to murderous supression from the authorities of their respective religions. To remain free to tread our own way with diligence – what more could anyone ask?

Gelassenheit

3 Replies

I’ve mentioned before here Martin Heidegger’s use (after Meister Eckhart) of the term Gelassenheit, but it is only recently that I’ve come to realise how closely it expresses my own experience. In a fascinating essay on the Metanoia website, Viktorija Lipič writes on exactly this:

…meditative thinking (or meditative contemplation) is understood as a form of receptivity and attentive waiting, while at the same time remaining open to what is (by contrast, not limiting oneself or determining one’s expectations to what one ought to be open to, ought to receive, ought to wait for etc.). It is a dwelling in openness…

For Heidegger, Gelassenheit holds within itself two main attributes: a) a releasement toward things and b) an openness to mystery. Releasement is one of the main aspects of what is our true nature. This nature by default also includes openness, and through this openness allows us to have an instantaneous and uninterrupted connection to Being. Releasement must therefore include openness and allow openness to come into being, allowing the being to open itself (to mystery) through releasement.

Releasement can be further separated into two elements: releasement from, and releasement to (this can also be thought of as ‘authentic releasement’). It is important to point out that meditative thinking is “not a simple opening to Being, as the nature of authentic releasement (or releasement to) might suggest, for it involves a resolve in regard to Being” (Heidegger, 1966, p. 26). Rather, it is in meditative contemplation that we are open to Being, and in the steadfastness of being open, are exposed to it (i.e., Being). What reveals Being, is therefore, as Heidegger would say, an “in-dwelling” in Being itself.

An exploration of Gelassenheit through Meister Eckhart and Martin Heidegger

In many ways, Gelassenheit reminds me of Eckhart Tolle’s sense that presence in the Now is the openness to Being itself (The Power of Now, pp.64-65), but perhaps its most immediate resonance is with Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance:

[W]hen we look within, there is no entity, no mind-substance, no self, no thing we can identify. There is just awareness—open empty awareness. We can’t locate any center, nor can we find an edge to our experience. Unless we anchor ourselves again in thoughts, or grasp after desired sensations or feelings, we have nowhere to stand, no firm ground. This can be disconcerting, scary, incredibly mysterious. While there may be a profusion of activity—sounds, sensations, images—there is no thing to hold on to, no self behind the curtain managing things. This seeing of no thing is what the Tibetan teachers call “the supreme seeing.”

But this emptiness, this “no-thingness,” is not empty of life. Rather, empty awareness is full with presence, alive with knowing. The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience. In this moment that you are reading, sounds are heard, vibration is felt, form and color are seen. This knowing happens instantaneously, spontaneously. Like a sunlit sky, awareness is radiant in cognizance and boundless enough to contain all life…

With practice, recognizing our natural awareness takes less and less of an effort or sense of doing. Rather than climbing up a hill to get a view, we are learning the art of relaxing back and wakefully inhabiting the whole vista. We look back into awareness and then simply let go into what is seen. We become more at home in awareness than in any story of a self who is falling short or on our way somewhere else. We are at home because we have seen and experienced firsthand the vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being.

Radical Acceptance, pp. 315, 317

The number of words I’ve used here, and their apparently challenging nature, in fact totally belies the ease and simplicity of Gelassenheit itself. This “lett[ing] go into what is seen” is such a natural, instinctive thing to do that what is amazing is that somehow we’ve forgotten how to do it, and that for most of us it is only found (again?) after many cumulative hours of practice.

Amusingly enough, this last week I’ve been suffering with a particularly baroque example of the common cold; in facing an uncomfortable and inglorious illness like that, acceptance, and an openness to what merely is, transforms what could otherwise be an infuriating and miserable waste of time into something precious and valuable – the nose taking on the role of an oyster, perhaps. Of course it’s not that a stinking cold is in and of itself a pleasure; merely that if you truly don’t fight it, it has all sorts of hidden gifts and little revelations, places of peace and stillness concealed among the sniffles and the shivers.

The loveliness of open acceptance opens onto the field of Being almost directly – that is the entirely unexpected thing. There is nothing else to do, no extra technique to learn, no final supreme effort. The “vast and shining presence” simply is, and is isness in itself. There is no river to cross, no high and jagged peaks to climb; it was there all along, and we never knew.

Belief systems?

2 Replies

A commenter on yesterday’s post reminded me that perhaps I hadn’t made it sufficiently clear that I am not advancing humanism – or anything else come to that – as an alternative belief system to take the place of organised religion. For some this may be case – although I don’t think that’s what AC Grayling was recommending in the passage I quoted yesterday – but it emphatically isn’t my own approach at all.

The Einsamkeit of yesterday’s title is a German term usually translated as either loneliness or solitude; its alternative translations, seclusion or solitariness, are the ones that interest me, (Like so many German philosophical terms, it has its own resonance which doesn’t seem to have a one for one equivalent in English.) I was using it to indicate following the course that appears, spiritually – I’m reminded of the Taoist phrase “to accord with the way” – not adopting a ready-made spirituality from either organised religion or academic philosophy. (People like Eckhart Tolle, or Jiddu Krishnamurti, are exemplars of this kind of contemplative path.)

It is of course hard to find words for all this, which is one reason that the Christian tradition of apophatic theology developed among the Early Church Fathers – although something similar already existed among the Neo-Platonists – and from the opposite direction, perhaps, Buddhist (especially Zen) philosophy and teachings often emphasise Śūnyatā, emptiness of inherent existence. The ground of being, the Tao, Istigkeit, is no thing. It cannot be described; it isn’t really possible truthfully to construct a sentence with it as its object. Awareness seems to be irresistibly identified with it: we are aware with its awareness. At the end, it is all we are; but it is all we have ever been. Our practice is really nothing more than a means of stripping away whatever stops us seeing that. To construct, or to adopt, belief systems is massively to miss the point – and that is what I was, perhaps clumsily, trying to get at yesterday.

Einsamkeit

5 Replies

Despite my recent flirtations with religious language on this blog, I still remain unconvinced that organised religion is at all good for me. More than that, I’m honestly unsure that it is in fact a good way for people, in general, to conduct themselves.

The spiritual impulse, I am certain, is a deep and true inclination of the heart; it seems to be an essential part of what it means to be human. But, as I have often suggested here, spirituality does not necessarily imply religion – in many ways they are quite different things. Wikipedia defines religion as “a social-cultural system of designated behaviours and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements.” When I remember what it was like to be an active part of such a “social-cultural system of designated behaviours…” I keep coming back to AC Grayling’s remarks:

To move from the Babel of religions and their claims, and from the too often appalling effects of religious belief and practice on humankind, to the life-enhancing insights of the humanist tradition which most of the world’s educated and creative minds have embraced, is like escaping from a furnace to cool waters and green groves…

Humanism, accordingly, is the answer to the question often asked amidst the acerbic debates between proponents and opponents of religion: what alternative can the non-religious offer to religion as the focus for expression of those spiritual yearnings, that nostalgia for the absolute, the profound bass-note of emotion that underlies the best and deepest parts of ourselves? Often this question is asked rhetorically, as if there is no answer to it, the assumption being that by default religion is the only thing that speaks to these aspects of human experience, even if religion is false and merely symbolic. The symbolism, some views have it, is enough to do the work.

Humanism is the emphatic answer to the request for an alternative… [T]he most wonderful resources for good and flourishing lives lie in the intelligence, the experience, the wisdom and insight of our fellows in the human story; and it is from these resources that the humanist outlook derives.

The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, p.7 – but q.v. my own post In defence of humanism above.

Having escaped to “cool waters and green groves”, why do I find myself sometimes tempted to at least go back and look at the furnace door again?

Sociologist Nancy Nason-Clark has researched the parallels between abusive religious environments and abuse in intimate partnerships. She has determined that individuals—women in particular—who have been in high-control religious environments are more likely to be in abusive partnerships. These individuals have internalized that their voice doesn’t matter, that someone else is allowed to control them, that they are supposed to forgive, and that it would be a sin to leave. The systems are the same whether they are in a marriage, in a church, on a team, or in a workplace. And when our sense of self is eroded or devalued, or when someone who has control over us tells us they represent the will of the creator of the universe, it makes sense that we wouldn’t recognize the dynamic happening in another context.

Hillary McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing p.80

I would simply suggest here that perhaps the dangers Dr McBride outlines aren’t restricted to what she refers to as “high-control religious environments”; perhaps it is simply in the nature of organised religion – even in such apparently benign forms as a Quaker meeting or an Anglican parish – to set up these control systems, often quite unconsciously. It is not necessary to set out to devalue a worshipper’s own intelligence and their own voice: with the best will in the world, that is just what happens in religious systems, merely by virtue of what they are.

It seems that my own instinct – and it is an instinct far more than a decision – for Einsamkeit, for walking my own path of practice, feels like a healthy instinct for a wholeness, a completion, that I have far too often neglected. The inwardly eremitic life doesn’t, it appears, have necessarily to involve physical isolation or any experiment in extreme living: it is a solitude of the heart, a calling to a necessary quiet.

A certain stillness

2 Replies

Stillness is a great discipline; it is the great discovery of meditation. Stillness becomes the dynamic of transcendence. The more still we are, the more we transcend our limitations. Now, stillness does not mean stopping. It is not static. We fully experience stillness when we feel how it is part of the whole process of growth in nature. There is a wondrous relationship between stillness and growth.

Laurence Freeman, Tasting Wisdom

Stillness seems to be inseparable from surrender. Stillness is not possible in the midst of inner warfare; though, in the inner life, to surrender does not mean to give in so much as to let go, and in this there is an immense simplicity, a lack of complication, of rules and prescriptions. Cynthia Bourgeault (she is contrasting Centering Prayer with other methods such as vipassana, and meditation using a mantra):

A surrender method is even simpler. One does not even watch or label the thought as it comes up, takes form, and dissipates. As soon as it emerges into consciousness, one simply lets it go. The power of this form of meditation does not reside in a particular clarity of the mind or even in presence, but entirely in the gesture of release itself.

Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, p.20

Eckhart Tolle has explained this particularly well. One of the great strengths of his approach to the contemplative life must be his gentle but steadfast refusal to adopt the terminology of any religion, without rejecting their inner meaning and resonance. It might be too easy to pass by Tolle due to the popularity of his books a few years ago; that would be a mistake – his work is uniquely valuable, if only to serve as a bridge between Buddhist or Advaita based methods and the Christian practices like Centering Prayer and Christian Meditation (WCCM) which have their roots firmly set in their religious foundations. In his remarkably useful little book, Practicing the Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle writes (p.20),

When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream — a gap of “no-mind.” At first, the gaps will be short, a few seconds perhaps, but gradually they will become longer. When these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you. This is the beginning of your natural state of felt oneness with Being, which is usually obscured by the mind.

With practice, the sense of stillness and peace will deepen. In fact, there is no end to its depth. You will also feel a subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within: the joy of Being.

Powerlessness (at the top of the flume)

1 Reply

The way of pure faith is to persevere in contemplative practice without worrying about where we are on the journey, and without comparing ourselves with others or judging others’ gifts as better than ours. We can be spared all this nonsense if we surrender ourselves to the divine action, whatever the psychological content of our prayer may be. In pure faith, the results are often hidden even from those who are growing the most.

Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love, p.139

It would be all too easy to misunderstand Keating here as writing of belief: faith in the sense of a church’s “statement of faith” to which members are required to assent. I don’t think that’s the kind of thing he is referring to at all. Alan Watts writes:

I do not, at this point, wish to seem mysterious or to be making claims to “secret knowledge.” The reality which corresponds to “God” and “eternal life” is honest, above-board, plain, and open for all to see. But the seeing requires a correction of mind, just as clear vision sometimes requires a correction of the eyes.

The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must here 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…

The Wisdom of Insecurity, p.22

“Faith lets go” – it is in the letting go that pure faith, in Keating’s sense, consists. That willingness to “plunge into the unknown” whatever the intellectual, or even existential, risk is what lies at the heart of the contemplative adventure. In one sense, it is a willing embrace of the condition to which, willing or not, we shall all be heir in death. As the apostle Paul wrote, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” (Colossians 3:2-4 NRSV)

Many years ago I used to swim in a large city pool that had a huge and seemingly flimsy device called a flume: you sat at the top of a long, curving tube just large enough for a human body, with a stream of water running down it, holding onto two handles. Once you let go, that was it – you hurtled many meters down the twisty tube at ever increasing speed – your friction negated by the cushion of water under your bottom – until you popped out and fell the last meter or so into a deep pool, with a great splash. There was no stopping, no going back, no practical possibility of even slowing down; and the real thrill was in that moment at the top, just before you let go…

To live, consciously, at the top of the flume is one of the insights of the contemplative life. We are not safe – no life is – and the glory is in embracing that to the extent that the distinction – it’s only an illusion anyway – between our little selves and that limitless ground of being itself, in which we – and all that is – rest breaks down. Faith is merely to trust that, implicitly. Thomas Keating again:

Powerlessness is our greatest treasure. Don’t try to get rid of it. Everything in us wants to get rid of it. “Grace is sufficient for you,” but not something you can understand. To be in too big a hurry to get over our difficulties is a mistake because we don’t know how valuable they are from God’s perspective. Without them we might never be transformed as deeply and as thoroughly. If everything else fails, the dying process is the place where we will have no choice but to go through the transformation process because everything is in fact taken away. The spiritual journey is the commitment to allow everything we possess to be taken away before the dying process begins. This makes us of enormous value to ourselves and to others because we have anticipated death, and death is not the end but the beginning of the fullness of transformation. If we were born, we’ve already been through a facsimile of death and our body is well prepared for the final translation, or transition as some prefer to call it. We can’t see God without going through death…

Reflections on the Unknowable, p.156

Set and setting

1 Reply

Thinking over my last post here, and talking it through with Susan, I realised that much of the problem so often encountered by lone contemplative practitioners – spiritual crises, phenomenological dislocations of one kind of another – may all too often simply be due a lack of understanding of the contemplative equivalent of what the the psychonauts of the psychedelic community refer to as “set and setting”.

In their original context, set and setting were used to refer to a psychedelic drug user’s mindset and their physical and social setting at the time of their embarking on a trip. In the sense in which I am borrowing them, I mean the practitioner’s own personal beliefs, past experiences, unconscious biases and expectations (“set”) and their broader cultural, social and spiritual environment (“setting”). We in the West cannot escape our own culture – two thousand years of Christian spiritual tradition, and two hundred years of post-Enlightenment liberal thought – any more than we can escape what C.G, Jung called our “collective unconscious“: the psychological weight of symbols, myths and practices we have all inherited by virtue of our birth and upbringing.

I’ve been wondering what all this might mean for a contemplative living and practicing outside of a religious – monastic or otherwise – community. Perhaps tradition tends to act like a homing beacon, helping the practitioner locate their inner experience within a context shaped by centuries, millennia, of practice and its inherited understanding; and without which, the contemplative life can come to be experienced as unguided, adrift, destabilised. However much we try to find this sense of location within the philosophy of mind, evolutionary psychology or whatever, the resonant frequency of that beacon is missing. What we are is not theoretical: we are living beings, beautiful creatures with stars’ iron in our veins; the causes and effects that brought us to birth are shared with those among whom we live.

Finding correlates within the existing Christian non-dual tradition seems to be the beacon I have, with my eyes on the charts rather than on the sea, been missing. Reading Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault, David Frenette or Martin Laird, I can see that I am not alone out on the waves.

The all that is nothing is the effulgent ground of being from which all things are birthed. Union with Christ means oneness with the unseen and hidden ground of everything, a union that unites every separate thing. But because humans are so focused on single, visible separate things we tend to miss out on the unseen and secret source of everything. Jesus invites us to remember the source of everything when he says, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). The all of God is nothing because it is no one thing. The all of God is everything, or, better said, every separate thing comes from God.

David Frenette, The Path of Centering Prayer, p.102

Brass rings?

1 Reply

Following a contemplative path outside of any formal tradition has many benefits, as I have often pointed out here; but it has drawbacks as well. There are pitfalls in the contemplative life that a good teacher would be quick to point out, but which we might struggle to recognise for ourselves. (This is one of the many reasons I so depend upon what I have called contemplative reading.)

One of commonest problems – one that more or less everyone encounters sooner or later, especially if they enlist the aid of psychedelics at any point in their journey – is mistaking spiritual experiences for spiritual realisations. Traleg Kyabgon:

The distinction between spiritual experiences and realizations is continually emphasized in Buddhist thought. If we avoid excessively fixating on our experiences, we will be under less stress in our practice. Without that stress, we will be better able to cope with whatever arises, the possibility of suffering from psychic disturbances will be greatly reduced, and we will notice a significant shift in the fundamental texture of our experience.

There are many accounts in Tibetan Buddhist literature of how spiritual disturbances may arise, but all point to fixation on experiences as the cause. Fixation on our experiences is seen as another variation of fixation on the self.

Kyabgon underlines, of course, how this discernment is embedded in Buddhist teaching. Cynthia Bourgeault puts it from a distinctively Christian perspective:

So here’s a tough one: suppose, going back to that metaphor of boats on the river [thoughts arising during practice], you were suddenly to see amid the flotilla Jesus Christ himself calmly walking toward you on the water, smiling as he reaches forth his hand. The mystical brass ring! What do you do now? Put Centering Prayer on pause and grab it, right?

Wrong. The instructions remain the same. “If you catch yourself thinking, you let the thought go.”

Ouch!

What should we do as solitary contemplatives? It’s impossible to list all the potential missteps on the way, even supposing I were myself aware of them all. I can only reiterate the immense depth of wisdom available in the literature already, not only in books such as I have listed, but online, for instance at Tricycle Magazine (Buddhist) and Contemplative Outreach (Christian) . Serious, attentive reading is an essential part – for me at least – of practice. It really is that important.

To sit quietly

1 Reply

Some of our most commonplace concepts are so ubiquitous and pervasive that we lose sight of the fact that they are actually concepts. “The world,” “the body,” “the mind,” “the self,” “consciousness,” “awareness,” “nonduality” – we throw these word-concepts around without ever stopping to wonder what we are actually talking about. And next thing we know, we’re lost in some conceptual confusion, very much akin to wondering what will happen to me if I step off the edge of the flat earth. That’s an imaginary problem, as all of us in the 21st century realize, but for people in earlier centuries, it seemed quite real. And our own conceptual conundrums seem equally real to us. “Will I still be here after I die?” or “Am I enlightened yet?” or “Do I have free will?” can seem like perfectly sensible questions, but they are every bit as absurd as wondering what will happen to me when I step off the edge of the earth…

When we try to figure out “the meaning of life” or “the nature of reality,” or when we try to come up with a conceptual understanding of Consciousness, Totality, God, or the Ground of Being, we inevitably end up frustrated and confused. Any conceptual picture of reality is always subject to doubt, and no metaphysical formulation ever satisfies our deep longing for Truth.

What satisfies that deep longing of the heart is the falling away of the attempt to make sense of everything. Of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t still make relative sense of things in a functional way in daily life. But we stop trying to take hold of Totality, or grasp the Ground of Being, or figure out the meaning of life. Instead, we relax into simply being life. We learn to recognize (to see, to sense) when we’re beginning to grasp or fixate, and in that recognition, quite naturally there is an ability to relax and let go. When we stop trying to figure it all out, we discover that it doesn’t need to be figured out, and in fact, can’t be figured out! When we stop desperately trying to get a grip, we find nothing is lacking and there is nothing to grasp.

Joan Tollifson, Nothing to Grasp

The stillness of practice is exactly that: stopping trying to get a grip, stopping the discursive mind’s continual clutching after things to store away. “Aha!” it wants to say, “I’ve got this!” It wants to collect the Point of It All, and shelve it under Essential Facts, or something equally pointless. But it can’t.

The stillness of practice heals all that. It doesn’t solve problems or supply solutions: it lets them go. To sit quietly is all that is needed, truly. This is not inaction; it is the place where right action starts, if action is needed. Surprisingly, often, it isn’t. The way opens out of the stillness in its own time, and usually it has nothing to do with anything we think. As Tollifson says, it doesn’t need to be figured out.

In the stillness, we become aware of awareness; and it isn’t other than the ground, that is no thing, and is before, and holds, all that comes to be. There is nothing to choose, nothing to find. Be still, that’s all.

Listening for the silence

1 Reply

Waiting is a deep acceptance of the moment as such, even when we are actively practicing meditative inquiry. Part of Son [Korean Zen] involves asking, “What is this?” of our experience, but without any interest in an answer. We’re not waiting for something, we’re just waiting. We realize that our longing for an answer undermines the authenticity of the questioning itself. Can we be satisfied just to rest in this questioning, but in a deeply focused and embodied way? Can we wait without any expectations?

Going hand in hand with this waiting is also a quality of listening. Rather than just listening more attentively to the crows in the trees, the noises in the room, or the quiet hush of silence, think of listening as a metaphor for meditation…

With listening, rather than narrowing your attention on a particular sound “out there,” you open yourself up to allow the sound to enter you. The internal posture you assume is not that of a detached observer looking out onto something, but rather a completely vulnerable and open attention that allows sounds to stream into you from every direction. That’s a very different inner stance. Your physical posture might be the same, but your mental posture is the opposite to that of looking at something.

Stephen Batchelor, Tricycle Magazine March 2020

Listening has become a favourite metaphor for me, too; though it’s more than a metaphor, really. To be aware of sound in meditation, as with physical sensation, is an opening of oneself to what is coming to be, quite simply. There is no anxious reaching for understanding, nor any attempt to impose any kind of religious or psychological interpretation on what is perceived.

Listening, though, is also an inward discipline – an openness to quiet inklings that otherwise are drowned out by the usual internal chatter. It begins, sometimes, with an unsought willingness to hear the call to the contemplative life in the first place:

To know such a call is to feel its insistence. Having felt it, one can hide by running to distractions of one kind or another, but whenever there is a pause in the business of life, it is there awaiting our response. This call is the greatest blessing imaginable, and it sometimes feels like torture. Even though it makes so many demands, we would be bereft without it.

Daishin Morgan, Buddha Recognizes Buddha

But like so many things in this life, it is never simply a stage we pass through. The call is ever present, always renewed. It is always the same; and different, sometimes radically different, each time. If we are listening, we will find ourselves called deeper into the wilderness, away from the well-trodden places we may have become used to. For me, it has, as I said yesterday, led increasingly to quiet, and away from organised religion altogether.

Listening has become a listening for the silence that underlies audible sounds, beneath the birdsong and the distant clatter of the Bristol train, beneath the background hush of the breeze in the leaves. The silence holds the sound, infinitely precious and detailed, as the open ground itself holds all that comes to be, all its loveliness and horror, all its endless opportunities for being loved.