Tag Archives: religion

Recovering the sacred

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Each of us has a unique spiritual design that pulls us toward freedom. The problem arises when we listen to others for our direction, or think we “should” do something because others have done it in the past. Spiritual growth is a fine-tuning of our ear to the needs of our heart.

What obscures this understanding in many of us is the belief that the silent retreat is a priority over other expressions of life. When we believe we are not where we need to be for spiritual growth, we relegate our daily life to a secondary tier. We energetically pull out of our spiritual life and wait for the appropriate secluded moment in order to fully engage. Leaning toward or away from any experience creates an anticipation of fulfillment in the future, and the sacred that exists here and now is lost. Discovering the sacred within all moments is the hallmark of awakening…

The lay Buddhist begins to recover the sacred in the most remote areas of life, in the midst of difficulty and dissatisfaction, loneliness and despair. The reality of problems is challenged and investigated, and life begins to thrive free of circumstances and conditions. The heart takes over and is resurrected from the conditioned habits of mind.

Rodney Smith, Tricycle Magazine Summer 2010

Smith has put his finger here on an issue that has long troubled me. There is that in me, if not in all of us, that so easily divides life into partitions: sacred/profane; spiritual/material; worthy/unworthy. Even the concept of lay Buddhism has for me too religious a connotation, tending to one side of the old religious/secular dichotomy. As I wrote last year,

So many of our practices find their roots in one religion or another – most often Buddhism – that they bring with them sticky remnants of their original religious context. Buddhist practices frequently imply a background acceptance of the concepts of karma and rebirth, for instance; and practices with Christian roots may come with background assumptions regarding the role of the Holy Spirit in the contemplative life.

…these things can be a problem. It is impossible to talk about, even to think about, the spiritual life without using words; and these kinds of words so often – especially for those of us with a past involvement in the formal contemplative life – help maintain an unconscious religious atmosphere that clings to the mere fact of practice itself, and can easily act like a tinted lens that colours our experience, and the ways we communicate it, even to ourselves.

If I were to adopt a label, I suppose it would have to be simply Humanist; a humanist of a particularly contemplative bent, perhaps, but a humanist nonetheless. If we are truly to recover the sacred – the “actually loved and known” (David Jones) – to be, after all, the bits and pieces of an ordinary life – all those things so often dismissed as merely “quotidian” – then it seems to me we need to flee these traces of formal religious language. It is so easy to lose the sacred among the habits and assumptions of our daily lives that to add these ancient designations to the mix seems unhelpful to say the least. As Rodney Smith generously concludes his article:

The lay Buddhist harbors no defense, seeks no shelter, and avoids no conflict for the resolution of wholeness. It is here in the middle of our total involvement [with daily life] 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.

To arrive where I started…

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Whatever the origin of religion, it is so often present in our lives as a way to try to understand the ineffable; a way to give presence and weight to an experience that defies words; that takes place outside of thought and perception. What are we to do with such an experience – a thing commonly known as mystical, or numinous? It cannot be thought, or described, since it is entirely beyond the realm of cognition and language.

This was my own experience; as a young man – even as a child – I had been prone to experiences like this, for which I had no words, nor even a broad category or discipline to which to assign them. (The nearest I got to the feeling was reading about astronomy or zoology or meteorology – a sense that here was something in terms of which everything else made sense, rather than my trying to make sense of it.)

It wasn’t until I spent an extended period in hospital in my teens that I had the freedom to begin to explore; to realise that the natural direction of this condition of mind was philosophical, even metaphysical; and I was in my early twenties before it became clear that it was something I learned to call “spirituality”. When I began to discover that I was not alone in this, of course my fellow pilgrims were in general religious people, and so it seemed to me that these must be religious experiences. Despite my having early on read Jiddu Krishnamurti and Lao Tzu, it was all too easy to understand these experiences in terms of either Buddhism, or later, irresistibly, the Christian mystical tradition – which of course brought the whole complex machinery of faith clattering along with it.

Extraordinarily, despite my by then growing and scarcely repressed doubts, it took the enforced isolation of the recent pandemic, and the discovery of writers like Sam Harris and Susan Blackmore, finally to shake me loose; to let me realise that, as Harris points out so poignantly in the first chapter of Waking Up, “Either the contemplative literature is a catalogue of religious delusion, psychopathology, and deliberate fraud, or people have been having liberating insights under the name of ‘spirituality’ and ‘mysticism’ for millennia… there are deeper insights to be had about the nature of our minds. Unfortunately, they have been discussed entirely in the context of religion and, therefore, have been shrouded in fallacy and superstition for all of human history.” Somehow, I had to recapitulate this for myself; it often amazes me to realise that it took me the best part of my adult life “to arrive where [I] started, and know the place for the first time.”

Simple presence

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Achieving or revealing spontaneous presence is not about striving or effort but about relaxing deeply into the natural state of mind. It’s like a river flowing effortlessly down a mountain—there’s no force or control, just a natural movement in harmony with gravity. When we stop trying to control or manipulate our thoughts and experiences, we allow awareness to flow naturally. By simply resting in the present moment, without grasping or pushing away, we recognize that this spontaneous presence is always there, like the river’s flow…

Achieving spontaneous presence is not about adding something new but about recognizing and resting in the innate clarity and awareness that is already there, ever-present, like the sun behind the clouds.

Pema Düddul, ‘Finding Presence: A teaching and practice on the Four Yogas of Dzogchen Semde’ in Tricycle Magazine, October 2024

This teaching carries so many echoes of shikantaza, of what we know of the simple practices of classical Taoism, that it reminds me of the essential plainness that seems to me the truest contemplative practice. I have long felt that the complexity of religiosity, with its rules and rituals and its levels of attainment (whether Christian or Buddhist or whatever else) is – at least for me – the enemy of the contemplative life.

Earlier this year I wrote:

Words, when it comes to spiritual things, are signs only in the sense we mean when we speak of hints and premonitions as “signs”, not in the sense of street signs, or signs on office doors in a hospital. They are not, by their very nature, precise and prescriptive; it is their very vagueness that allows them to be used at all, for they can do no more than offer us a glimpse into someone else’s experience – a window, if you like, into that which it is to be them.

We risk all manner of missteps when we conflate the term “spirituality” with concepts like religion, or the supernatural; and we risk worse when we consider it intrinsically opposed to science, or to critical thinking.

As I get older, it increasingly seems to me, perhaps counterintuitively, that religion itself only gets in the way of the spiritual life. Doctrine, scripture, tradition: they are beside the point, mere distractions. Elizabeth Reninger: “The only thing that needs to die is our mistaken belief in separation, the habit of seeing our human body-mind as existing separate from the ever-transforming patterns of the cosmos as a whole.”

Stillness, the open awareness of what simply is, would appear to be all that is needed: only to give up all of our effort and striving, and quite plainly and naturally rest in the vast openness of what is – which is all we ever were or could be. It really is that simple.

Escaping to cool waters

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Too often, seen from the point of view of mystical religion, with its sometimes mesmerisingly beautiful symbolisms and occasionally heroic asceticism, humanism can seem a grey, if worthy, doctrine – more suitable to university departments of sociology and politics than to contemplative experience. But that would be a mistaken view. So often, things – like love or pain – look very different from the outside than they are, lived, on the inside. AC Grayling describes humanism as,

an account of the better alternative to religion, the humane and positive outlook of an ethics free from religious or superstitious aspects, an outlook that has its roots in rich philosophical traditions, yet is far more attuned to our contemporary world, and far more sensitive to the realities of human experience, than religion is.

This is an outlook that the general term ‘humanism’ now denotes. It is an outlook of great beauty and depth, premised on kindness and common sense, drawing its principles from a conversation about the good whose roots lie in the philosophical debates of classical antiquity, continually enriched by the insights and experience of thinkers, poets, historians and scientists ever since. 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. I hope the latter is the destination of all humanity, as more people come to understand this ethical outlook as far the better alternative…

[It] is a beautiful and life-enhancing alternative outlook that offers insight, consolation, inspiration and meaning, which has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with the best, most generous, most sympathetic understanding of human reality.

However reassuring a framework formal religion can provide for contemplative practice, the stifling effects of  dogma and the scriptural imperative can seem to weigh on the spirit like a heavy woollen hood. Grayling uncannily nails my own experience when he describes escaping to “cool waters and green groves.” Set free in this way, spirituality does not risk becoming the New Age pick’n’mix feared by the proponents of religious mysticism, but instead, as Sam Harris writes,

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary… Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Eternal life?

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In Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life, Larry Rosenberg ends his chapter on choiceless awareness with a Q&A session. One of the questioners asks:

Q: Ideas and beliefs about rebirth are often mentioned in dharma books. I wonder if you could tell us whether you believe in rebirth.

A: If you are a person brought up in a culture that has believed in rebirth for thousands of years, such as in Tibet or Thailand, the answer is obvious. I’ve known wonderful Tibetan teachers who look at me with sympathy when I say I’m uncertain about rebirth. On the other hand, many professors in the sciences might look at you like you’re crazy if you even mention the subject. All I know is that I am open to the idea but honestly don’t know!

One of the reasons I no longer profess to be a Christian, and could never be a Buddhist in any formal sense, is just this question.

In Christian doctrine God is held to be eternal – though opinions vary as to whether this implies that he exists outside time altogether, or whether he exists simultaneously in all dimensions of time, past, present and future. To die as a Christian is to possess eternal life (John 10:27-28) through knowing God (John 17:3). The only way I could ever make sense of this was to think that the instant of death must somehow be atemporal, and that in that moment outside time one might meet God. I have never been able to make any sense of the idea of a portable plug-in soul that could somehow be translated to a land beyond the sky. Maybe I never was a “proper” Christian.

Similarly, any idea of rebirth runs into the same problem, only worse. Not only is there the question of what might constitute the soul to be reborn, and where it might be located, but Buddhism explicitly, and cogently, states that there is, in a living person, no permanent unchanging self or essence (anātman). So what is to be reborn?

The metaphysical mechanics of life after death don’t make any sense to me, however they are expressed. That there is life after death – that the human race will go on, and so will all the other forms of life – is undeniable; but my life after my death? I’m not sure that idea even makes sense.

Cause and effect is another matter, maybe. Things have consequences; they are themselves always consequences. There is no discernible beginning or end to this chain of causation (karma), short of cosmological speculations about the “beginnings” of time. I was born as a result of certain events in history – my mother and father met; they met because of their work during WWII; there was a war because of certain political, economic and military factors, and so on and so on, back into time – and there will be certain limited consequences of events in my own life that will outlive me. But this is not the same as me in some way continuing, or recurring into the future.

But things exist. They are. There is a ground of being – Istigkeit, Tao – from which, in which, all things arise.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.

Tao Te Ching

Things go on. Where they come from, where they go – I’m not sure those are questions that mean anything in the context of being itself; hence the “nameless” in the Tao Te Ching.

All we can do, all we need to do, is sit still. Daishin Morgan:

A theme I return to again and again is to just do the work that comes to you. Such an attitude is open-ended in the way that life itself is open. If you give yourself to the way, the way appears and that way is always changing.

Atheism and metaphysics

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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.

‘Satiable curtiosity*

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It seems to me, as I grow older, that one of the really essential things to cultivate in oneself is the continued sense of curiosity. I am lucky enough to have been born with more than my fair share of it, and to have been brought up by a mother who encouraged me in it.

I have never been able to see an insect without wanting to know its name, its taxonomy, its place in the world; and the same goes for most things I encounter, from the tiniest and apparently least significant creatures to things of cosmic proportions, like the scintillations of Sirius in the night sky. (I cannot tell you how delighted I was eventually to read that Sirius is actually a binary star!)

I am doubly fortunate that getting older seems to have done nothing to dim this insatiable hunger of enquiry in me. Richard Dawkins once wrote:

Isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?

It wasn’t until I spent an extended period in hospital, in my teens, that I had the freedom to begin to realise that the natural directtion of this curiosity of mine was philosophical, even metaphysical; and I was in my early twenties before it became clear that it was only really happy in what I learned to call “spirituality”.

Practice is the place where spiritual curiosity finds its home. For far too long I thought that there must be some religious significance to this, but in fact there is no need for such a hypothesis. The wonder of isness itself is quite enough. Lawrence M Krauss:

The one experience that I hope every student has at some point in their lives is to have some belief you profoundly, deeply hold, proved to be wrong because that is the most eye-opening experience you can have, and as a scientist, to me, is the most exciting experience I can ever have.

I feel like this almost every time I sit down to meditate, and it is one of the inexhaustible delights of the journey, the heart’s own song in the velvet fathomlessness of what actually is.

*”Satiable curtiosity” – from Rudyard Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child

Entheogenic?

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In our everyday dealings with the world around us, and with its inhabitants, both human and otherwise, we generally seem to make use of a practical mode of consciousness characterised, in my experience, by shortcuts and subroutines – usually referred to as “habits”. Half the time we’re not even really thinking about what we’re doing – which gives rise to the common but slightly disturbing experience of realising one’s just driven several miles on a regular route with no real conscious sense of the events of driving, or of the route itself. Where have we been?

Neuroscience offers the explanation of something called the “default mode network”:

It is best known for being active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering. It can also be active during detailed thoughts related to external task performance. Other times that the DMN is active include when the individual is thinking about others, thinking about themselves, remembering the past, and planning for the future.

(Wikipedia)

One might be tempted to rename it the woolgathering network.

Contemplative awareness, on one level at least, consists precisely in becoming aware of these changing brain-states, as opposed merely to knowing about them in theory.

Even just recognizing the impermanence of your mental states—deeply, not merely as an idea—can transform your life. Every mental state you have ever had has arisen and then passed away. This is a first-person fact—but it is, nonetheless, a fact that any human being can readily confirm. We don’t have to know any more about the brain or about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world to understand this truth about our own minds. The promise of spiritual life—indeed, the very thing that makes it “spiritual” in the sense I invoke throughout this book—is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

(Sam Harris, Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality without Religion)

But there is more, of course. Elsewhere on this blog I wrote:

Before I turned five, I contracted meningitis, and spent what would have been my first year of school slowly recovering. I spent some of the most peaceful and untroubled hours of my life lying on a rug by the old apple trees in the orchard at the back of our house, under the endless vault of the open sky, listening to distant aircraft passing high overhead, or on a flaking stone bench on the patio, watching the little velvety red mites scampering in the sunlight. Time was unlike anything I’d known before, an open ground of appearing, empty of thought, mostly, but fertile with becoming.

In those long months I had no name for this clear, undimensioned place, and I don’t suppose it would have occurred to me to ask anyone what, or where, it might be. I just was, and was where I was. In many ways, the years since have been a journey back.

But how does one make this kind of journey as an intentional, more or less healthy adult? Religion offers maps, of varying quality – The Cloud of Unknowing, any number of Buddhist and Vedantic texts, the writings of the Eastern Orthodox (Christian) monastic tradition, to name a few – but they come, as I wrote yesterday, with sticky remnants of their religious backgrounds clinging to both thought and practice.

Throughout history, in different cultures, people have made use of entheogens, drugs (including traditional psychedelics such as mescaline and psilocybin and DMT, as well as modern synthetics like LSD) intended precisely to achieve this kind of altered consciousness. But even the best-engineered pharmaceuticals are blunt instruments, and in my experience (I experimented with them myself in my twenties) can do at least as much harm as good. Besides, the traditional varieties are by no means immune to the sticky remnants of their own religious origins.

But the word entheogen is an interesting one. Roughly, it means something like, “giving rise to the god within” (éntheos genésthai). This is instructive, since although the scholars (Carl Ruck et al.) who coined the term were referring to the use of psychoactive drugs, maybe this useful word could be extended to cover many traditional, religious contemplative practices as well.

But as Sam Harris points out in one of the passages I quoted yesterday,

This is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a book, because many readers will have no idea what I’m talking about when I describe certain spiritual experiences and might assume that the assertions I’m making must be accepted on faith. Religious readers present a different challenge: They may think they know exactly what I’m describing, but only insofar as it aligns with one or another religious doctrine. It seems to me that both these attitudes present impressive obstacles to understanding spirituality in the way that I intend.

Once again, Jiddu Krishnamurti’s term “choiceless awareness” is so useful here, along with the simple practice it entails. My childhood experience in the orchard was precisely that, as have been so many more momentary occasions in the long years since. Andreas Müller (I have quoted him on this blog before) has one of the best descriptions I know:

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.

Sticky remnants

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Despite my rather cheerful posts earlier this month, there can be problems with non-religious spirituality that aren’t always immediately apparent. Sam Harris remarked, in the first chapter of Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality without Religion (still the standard text for this kind of journey):

This is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a book, because many readers will have no idea what I’m talking about when I describe certain spiritual experiences and might assume that the assertions I’m making must be accepted on faith. Religious readers present a different challenge: They may think they know exactly what I’m describing, but only insofar as it aligns with one or another religious doctrine. It seems to me that both these attitudes present impressive obstacles to understanding spirituality in the way that I intend.

But the problem appears to persist even after Harris’ readers have – at least to some extent – settled into their new spiritual home. So many of our practices find their roots in one religion or another – most often Buddhism – that they bring with them sticky remnants of their original religious context. Buddhist practices frequently imply a background acceptance of the concepts of karma and rebirth, for instance; and practices with Christian roots may come with background assumptions regarding the role of the Holy Spirit in the contemplative life.

As Harris points out, these things can be a problem. It is impossible to talk about, even to think about, the spiritual life without using words; and these kinds of words so often – especially for those of us with a past involvement in the formal contemplative life – help maintain an unconscious religious atmosphere that clings to the mere fact of practice itself, and can easily act like a tinted lens that colours our experience, and the ways we communicate it, even to ourselves.

What can we do about this? I don’t have a simple answer, still less one that suits every case. But the answer that seems to work – at least for me – better than any other I’ve tried is in fact very simple in principle. Tara Brach writes of the practice of choiceless awareness,

Our attentive presence is unconditional and open—we are willing to be with whatever arises, even if we wish the pain would end or that we could be doing something else. That wish and that thought become part of what we are accepting. Because we are not tampering with our experience, mindfulness allows us to see life “as it is.” This recognition of the truth of our experience is intrinsic to Radical Acceptance: We can’t honestly accept an experience unless we see clearly what we are accepting.

(Radical Acceptance)

I have been finding lately that resting – it sounds much easier than it often is! – in surrender to the plain awareness of coming-to-be is the best medicine, if only one can just practice it rather than being drawn away into thinking it through. As I wrote recently,

Just noticing what is – 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 freshest, most peaceful thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to: what is, is, and there’s nothing that needs to be done about it.

Atheism and the Tao

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The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao
The names that are given do not contain their true meaning
Within the nameless is the true meaning
What is named has a mother and she is the mother of ten thousand things
The un-seeable is always seeable within the internal to those who are not bound by desire
Those who live in a state of desire see only the external illusion of manifestation
These two opposites are born from the same source
The source contains its mystery in darkness
Within the darkness is the darkness that is the gateway to the mysteries

(Tao Te Ching, tr. Dennis Waller)

In all the translations of, and the writings about, the Tao (when spoken, ‘Dao’) there is an insistence that words and names are superfluous, that the Tao – while apparently having no objective reality of its own – can only be experienced subjectively. It is a philosophy, a pursuit of wisdom and a study of natural realities. Tao is not a religion: that is Taoism. We must, however, use words to explain how Tao came to be written down, what part it played in history and what its relevance is in the modern world.

(Pamela Ball, The Essence of Tao)

As Pamela Ball points out, the Tao is not a religious concept, any more than my much (over?) used phrase “the ground of being”, which I derived originally – if I remember correctly – from Paul Tillich via Richard Rohr. But in many ways they are both pointing towards the same truth: that the ontological source of all is, though quite literally inconceivable, able to be encountered.

So what has any of this to do with atheism? Well, it is next to impossible to approach this inconceivability of the utter beginning of what is from within the creedal framework of organised religion. (A few have managed it – witness Eckhart’s Istigkeit or Merton’s point vierge – but they are rare geniuses out on the perilous edge of their faith.) But without these constraints it seems more possible, if no easier, to find words for what has all too often been set aside as ineffable.

This is why experience, whether by a formal practice of meditation or by sheer force of circumstance (as in, for instance, near death experiences), will never be supplanted by even the most sophisticated reasoning. “I can’t find the words…” may be the beginning of wisdom.