Tag Archives: Quaker faith & practice

A sensitivity to things not yet known

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We do not know, when we sit down to practice, what we shall find in the silence. It seems obvious to say it, but it is too easy to forget that practice is never routine: each time we are setting out on a voyage into trackless places. No one has been here before, least of all ourselves.

Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity…

You know, unless you hesitate, you can’t inquire. Inquiry means hesitating, finding out for yourself, discovering step by step; and when you do that, then you need not follow anybody, you need not ask for correction or for confirmation of your discovery.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

We do well to hesitate. There is no place here for preconceptions. Sitting quietly – just noticing whatever appears in the field of consciousness, without having to label it or evaluate it, without having to either focus one’s attention on it or wrench one’s attention away from it, is perhaps the most radical – in the literal sense of the word – thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to; no maps, despite the reams of paper that have been expended on the subject, for this utterly solitary journey. Each of us has to go there alone; each of us has to find out for ourselves what is there.

To cast away knowing, to give up the idea that words can hold the open fields of what merely is, is sometimes called the apophatic way; but really it is no more than giving up the attempt to describe the indescribable.

The practice of choiceless awareness (in Krishnamurti’s phrase) is not a kind of daydream, or an altered state of consciousness even: it is a quiet but exceptionally alert quality of mind, without straining after attention, or imagining some kind of goal or outcome towards which our practice is supposed to lead. “For what we apprehend of truth is limited and partial, and experience may set it all in a new light; if we too easily satisfy our urge for security by claiming that we have found certainty, we shall no longer be sensitive to new experiences of truth. For who seeks that which he believes that he has found? Who explores a territory which he claims already to know?” (Quaker faith & practice 26.39, from which passage the title of this post is also taken)

Toni Bernhard:

[I]n this technique, we begin by paying attention to the sensation of the breath (this settles the mind and body), but then the instruction is to let our attention rest on whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself… As a meditation practice, choiceless awareness is similar to the Zen meditation technique known as shikantaza, which roughly translates as just sitting. I love the idea of just sitting, although for me, just lying down will do—which takes me to my number one rule regarding meditation: be flexible.

How to Wake Up, p.104

This quality of stillness, of just noticing, is such a simple thing that perhaps it would be easy to dismiss it as inconsequential. It is not. It seems important, somehow, that there is someone who is prepared to do this, quietly getting on with it, day after day. Perhaps someone needs to.

Ground Swell

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In almost all types of contemplative practice that depend upon a simple quietness, whether Centering Prayer, vipassana meditation, zazen according to the Sōtō Zen tradition, or whichever, there is a sense that comes to arise of an open field of attention, not unlike a crystalline expanse within, or coterminous with, the visual field (whether one’s eyes are open or closed). Keeping still, it is apparent that this clear space, the ground of one’s consciousness, is not other than the ground from which things appear – sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions, whatever – and pass. Somehow it cannot be different from the ground of becoming itself.

There is a line from the Heart Sutra, “Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness” that expresses the quality of this perception better than anything else I’ve read. And yet this realisation, if that’s the word, like the practice within which it occurs, is not a religious thing at all. Sam Harris writes,

I have long argued that confusion about the unity of religions is an artifact of language. Religion is a term like sports: Some sports are peaceful but spectacularly dangerous (“free solo” rock climbing); some are safer but synonymous with violence (mixed martial arts); and some entail little more risk of injury than standing in the shower (bowling). To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical attributes required to do it. What do all sports have in common apart from breathing? Not much. The term religion is hardly more useful.

The same could be said of spirituality. The esoteric doctrines found within every religious tradition are not all derived from the same insights. Nor are they equally empirical, logical, parsimonious, or wise. They don’t always point to the same underlying reality—and when they do, they don’t do it equally well. Nor are all these teachings equally suited for export beyond the cultures that first conceived them…

Of course, it is true that specific Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystics have had experiences similar to those that motivate Buddhism and Advaita, but these contemplative insights are not exemplary of their faith. Rather, they are anomalies that Western mystics have always struggled to understand and to honor, often at considerable personal risk. Given their proper weight, these experiences produce heterodoxies for which Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been regularly exiled or killed.

Harris, Sam. Waking Up (pp. 19-20, 22). Transworld. Kindle Edition.

The pause in religious communities coming together for worship caused by the current pandemic is widely touted as making a permanent difference to church attendance, and to the conduct of public worship in future months and years (Zoom worship, blended online and in-person services, and so forth) but for me at least it has had a far more fundamental effect. I have come to realise, as I wrote recently on The Mercy Blog, that “In this period of quiet settling, separated from the religious atmosphere and bustle of corporate worship, I have begun to sense that the ‘social-cultural system’ of religion is something quite separate from the ‘experimental faith’ (cf. Quaker faith & practice 19.02) of contemplative practice, and crucially, the one does not depend upon the other.”

This blog is intended, at least in part, to chart that exploration.