Tag Archives: secularism

Second best?

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Occasionally I find myself wondering if living the contemplative life outside of a community, be that a monastic community of some kind, or merely a community of faith – a sangha, or a eucharistic community of some kind – is somehow second best; if, in effect, I am missing out on a vital component of the spiritual life. After all, one is continually reminded in every other email newsletter that the sangha is the third of the Three Jewels, or that “there is no such thing as a freelance Christian.”

But for some time now I have been convinced that, for me at least, 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. Of course there is always the strong, and conventionally approved, temptation to declare oneself a member of some religion or other, and even of some tradition within that religion, but AC Grayling uncannily nails my own experience when he describes the humanist as one escaping to “cool waters and green groves.”

As I recently quoted from Rodney Smith (in an excellent article in Tricycle Magazine a few years back):

For a few people, a full lifetime as a monastic or living many years on retreat is a wise direction. 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.

Hardening of the oughteries – the sense that one life, one’s actions, are never enough, that one “must try harder” in the words of the old school reports – is a well-known occupational illness in the spiritual life. To truly pay attention in practice will, sooner or later, reveal our own iteration of Smith’s “unique spiritual design”; and open awareness will lay bare the treacherous thoughts of inadequacy and weakness that give rise to the oughteries, and they can be left be the roadside like any other thoughts.

It sounds easy; it isn’t. Millennia of conformity and obedience, centuries of misdirected authority vested in the structures of religion, stand in our way, muttering of heresy and disobedience, exclusion and damnation. Who are we to question such “thrones and dominions”? Each of us must find the path our own feet were built for; but the way of the “cat who walks by himself” is an ancient and honourable way, whatever the guardians of the faiths may say. As I said once before here, I think perhaps we should recognise the Einzelgänger or Einzelgängerin as a distinct and proper calling in themselves. I don’t mean by this literal loners, nor hermits in either the religious or the colloquial sense; but contemplatives who find that they are temperamentally unsuited either for formal membership of some church or meeting, or for the particular relationship of personal discipleship; those, in fact, who can only thus be true to their “unique spiritual design”.

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.

Seamarks

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The Buddha’s teaching was focussed on the one purpose of showing how to find the end of suffering. He identified the cause of suffering as the afflictions of ignorance and desire and set out a path leading to liberation from these afflictions. That path begins with the recognition of the need to train oneself. This arises from an inner prompting and an observation of how suffering touches everyone, that all things are impermanent and there is nothing substantial in which we can find true refuge. Next comes the need for an ethical life for ourselves so that we can know peace and tranquillity, and to help others, since through sympathetic understanding we realize that others suffer in the same way as we do.

Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha

The Buddha did not found a religion – he taught a way of contemplation, a way out of the confusion and panic that so much of human life seems to consist in, where we know that even the pleasures and satisfactions we seek so desperately are spoilt by our fear of losing them even in the instant they are grasped.

The Buddha taught that suffering is caused by misreading our senses and interpreting the data in a manner that suggests an “I”. It seems as though stuff happens to “me”. I have the impression of being one thing and the world around me another thing. I am drawn to seek pleasure and avoid pain. This basic motivation has its roots in the feeling of an “I” set against the world…

In questioning the basic assumption that this “I” is real and permanent, Buddhism teaches that the “I” we treasure has no independent existence of its own and cannot exist without everything else being the way that it is. All of existence is interdependent so to view the “I” as a separate thing is an illusion.

Morgan, ibid.

In these realisations there are no gods or demons, and no angels or prophets either. The Buddha taught simply, “Verify for yourself whether what I teach corresponds with the truth…”

Philosophical Taoism is not a religion either. Neither in Laozi nor in Zhuangzi can we find a pattern of worship or a dogma laid down, though there are plenty of references to the gods of traditional Chinese folk religion. It is more an approach to metaphysics than a faith, and its ideal is the person of wisdom and understanding rather than devotion.

In the thousands of years these teachings have been knocking around human history, they have accrued countless superstitions and religious structures and rituals; but none of these is more than tradition and observance. The central philosophy, and its roots in practice, may evolve; but they remain praxis, not doctrine.

It seems to me that contemporary, largely humanist, understandings of contemplative spirituality are a vital next step in being able to “verify for [ourselves]”. Writers like Tara Brach, Sam Harris, Toni Bernhard and Susan Blackmore likewise are not looking for followers, but trying to pass on the fruit of their own experience. Each generation seems to find its own contemplative language, and each of us has our own small measure of responsibility in carrying that forward; in sharing, directly or indirectly, some of the seamarks we have noticed on our own voyages. No one else can do it for us…

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.

Physicalism vs spirituality?

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In the broadest terms, the philosophical theory of physicalism maintains that the explanation for how minds came about is no different from the explanation for how rivers, trees, mountains and meadows came about. Mind was not something extra, added at the beginning or somewhere along the way; rather, from the stock of basic physical ingredients that make up a human—mostly oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium and phosphorus—all that was required was the cooking.

Barbara Gail Montero, Philosophy of Mind: A Very Short Introduction

It is sometimes feared that abandoning dualism – “which maintains that the immaterial mind, or soul, is an additional ingredient, brought into the world by God at the moment of conception” (Montero, ibid.) – will leave us bereft of the spiritual dimension of life, which for many of us is the sweet core of our own being. But as Sam Harris says, in a passage I seem to be unable to avoid quoting on a regular basis,

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. 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.

An analogy that sometimes occurs to me is one drawn from technology. Of course this blog could not exist without the internet, without the web host’s data centres and the fibre optics that connect them, without this tablet I’m writing on, and its connection to the internet, without the hardware whose screen you are reading now. But however carefully you study any of that hardware, you will not come across these ideas. They are data; and the content management system that brings them to you is software. These are not, in the crude sense, material things; but they are entirely dependent on all that copper and silicon and glass, not to mention the rare metals, so intricately and painstakingly manufactured to contain and to convey them.

Minds are not the brain’s neurons and their blood supply, nor the neurotransmitters that ripple across their synapses; and while you could get a pretty good idea from the brain’s activity that there was something going on, you will never find a mind in there, in the sense of a physical structure, no matter how long you scan and probe and watch. Mind, and the mind’s subjectivity, is not, in the crude sense, a material thing; but it is entirely dependent on all those intricate and beautifully balanced cells and fluids and exchanging gases, not to mention the heart and lungs and blood and liver and all the rest of the kit that allows the physical brain to keep running.

None of this should give us cause to grieve. Just as understanding, however sketchily, the intricacies of the internet cannot take anything away from the ideas and dreams it conveys, nor can the work of the neuroscientist or the philosopher of mind detract from the beauty of contemplative spirituality, or the love between those who practice and teach it. The stillness is what it always has been; the open awareness that is grounded there is just as luminous. All we need is to be still enough to let it be.

Secular or supernatural?

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As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, the word “spirituality” can seem a slippery one. For some, spirituality necessarily implies the supernatural, and our imagined relations with that realm, for good or ill. For others (myself included) it “centers on the ‘deepest values and meanings by which people live'”. (Wikipedia: Spirituality)

Secular spirituality is the adherence to a spiritual philosophy without adherence to a religion. Secular spirituality emphasizes the inner peace of the individual, rather than a relationship with the divine. Secular spirituality is made up of the search for meaning outside of a religious institution; it considers one’s relationship with the self, others, nature, and whatever else one considers to be the ultimate. Often, the goal of secular spirituality is living happily and/or helping others.

According to the American philosopher Robert C. Solomon, “spirituality is coextensive with religion and it is not incompatible with or opposed to science or the scientific outlook. Naturalized spirituality is spirituality without any need for the ‘other‐worldly’. Spirituality is one of the goals, perhaps the ultimate goal, of philosophy.” [Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life]

(Wikipedia: Secular Spirituality)

So what is the supernatural, and what is wrong with seeking to establish – or recognise – relations with it? The supernatural is generally taken to imply a realm or system transcending material nature, the locale of some kind or kinds of divine, magical, or ghostly entities; revealing, or thought to reveal, some power beyond scientific or natural comprehension. There is, it seems to me, little or no evidence for such a sphere. (Susan Blackmore discusses this at length in Seeing Myself : What Out-of-body Experiences Tell Us About Life, Death and the Mind, chapters 2 and 15 especially.) But spirituality is another matter. The search for meaning, and, in contemplative practice, the direct experience of that meaning, is perhaps the most important thing I have encountered. For the umpteenth time here, I think I need to quote Sam Harris’ brilliant summary:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. 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.

The eagle-eyed among my readers will have already spotted the slightly edited strapline to this blog’s title: “Secular contemplative spirituality…” It just seemed time to make that clear.

Binding and Loosing

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Words can be slippery things, but they have more power to change things than we often give them credit for. Take the word “religion” for instance. The first two definitions the Oxford Dictionary offers are, “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods” and “a particular system of faith and worship.”

Contemplation, “a form of… prayer or meditation in which a person seeks to pass beyond mental images and concepts to a direct experience of the divine” (sense 5) is, obviously, at least potentially at odds with “religion”. That “direct experience” might not be of “a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.” It might not fit into the doctrines of “a particular system of faith and worship.” This has been the problem with contemplatives for millennia. Time and again they have broken away from state churches on the one hand and politico-religious revolutions on the other, sometimes forming loose communities and sometimes not, and have retreated from formal organisation almost altogether, at least at the beginning. Examples are as diverse as the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt and Syria around the 4th century AD, the Pure Land-derived schools of Buddhism (Jōdo-shū, Jōdo Shinshū) founded by Honen and Shinran in 12th and 13th century Japan, and the Quakers in 17th century England.

The word “secular” is defined (sense 1) as, “not connected with religious or spiritual matters.” Now, this is slightly problematical, as Sam Harris points out in Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion. He writes

Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit… many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition.

I do not share their semantic concerns. Yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term—apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative—with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.

It seems to me that we are (well I am at least) coming to a crossroads, exacerbated and given an added sense of urgency, as with so many other things, by the current pandemic. For many of us, even if we are not contemplatives as such, a system of faith and worship based on the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God set over against his creation, no longer describes our experience. Over the past year, many of us, bereft of conventional (or unconventional) worship, especially those of us who have resisted the distracting simulacra of Zoom church, have found ourselves sinking further into a direct experience of – what? Grace? Mercy? A stillness and a strength far beyond our own resources or imagination? All of those, perhaps. What are we to name it?

Lenorë Lambert writes of a secular dharma, based on an openness to all sources, but guided especially by the Pali Canon, an emphasis on practice, and accessibility to “anyone, anywhere, from any background or life circumstance”. The experience of lockdown has shown us (some of us were already getting the idea here and there) that special buildings and rituals, special forms of words, formulations of orthodoxy, scriptural literalisms, and many other aspects of conventional religion, are simply not required baggage on the spiritual path. Yes, we can learn from them – and often we will need to learn from them – but we are not beholden to them, as though we couldn’t walk without them.

Of course such attitudes will threaten many of our erstwhile co-religionists, and we owe them great courtesy and care as we move along our own paths. But the ground of being lies beneath all that is, and holds us all in being, whatever words we use for it. May we be true, gently, to what we find.

A Quiet Life

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All through our repeated pandemic precautions and lockdowns, when physically attending corporate worship of any kind has been difficult, not to say inadvisable, and Zoom meetings have remained their distracting and inadequate selves, there has been plenty of time to be quiet, and to allow the assumptions and traditions by which our spiritual lives are usually conditioned to settle out, as it were, like the cloudiness in a newly-established aquarium.

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.”

Contemplation, however differently it may be defined in different traditions, is at root a kind of inner seeing, an experiential encounter with the ground of being that gives rise to, and sustains, all that is. The many techniques of contemplative practice may in the end give rise to contemplation, but their intention is generally more modest: to train attention and consciousness sufficiently to still the field of awareness, and to recognise the incessant activity of the mind as a process, or bundle of processes, that runs on beneath awareness all by itself, rather than assuming it to be a discrete and permanent self or soul, set over against its perceptions. Of course the outer forms of mediation or contemplative practice are very different, and conditioned by the religious tradition within which they arise, but very broadly something like this seems to be intended by them all.

In this period of quiet settling, separated from the religious atmosphere and bustle of corporate worship, I, as I suspect many of us, 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 that, crucially, the one does not depend upon the other.

Churches and religious groups seem mostly to be operating on the assumption that once the pandemic is under control, and something approaching normal life is restored, their worshippers will flood back, Catholics to Mass, Quakers to their meetings, everyone to their accustomed place. It may not happen, at least not in the way, or to the extent, that most people appear to expect. The sea change of the pandemic, and the enforced crash course in information and communications technology it has brought, have accelerated a process of secularisation that has been gathering momentum for a long time.

Now, secularisation is a term loaded with assumptions and prejudices on the part of both those espouse it, and those who oppose any such idea. Stephen Batchelor points out (After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age, p.15, Yale University Press, Kindle Edition) that both the word “religious” and the word “secular” are difficult terms in our present time. He writes,

Secular critics commonly dismiss religious institutions and beliefs as outdated, dogmatic, repressive, and so on, forgetting about the deep human concerns that they were originally created to address… “Secular” is a term that presents as many problems as “religious.”… there seems to be no reason why avowedly “secular” people cannot be deeply “religious” in their ultimate concern to come to terms with their brief and poignant life here and now.

I have written elsewhere of my growing sense that the contemplative life is once again moving out from the monasteries and ashrams into a new desert, that of the world, or at least of places set apart within the world. I wrote then:

Time and again contemplatives have broken away from the apparent corruption of state churches on the one hand and religion-inspired revolutionaries on the other, sometimes forming loose communities, and retreated from formal organisation almost altogether. Examples are as diverse as the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt and Syria around the 4th century AD, the Pure Land (Shin) schools of Buddhism founded by Honen and Shinran in 12th and 13th century Japan, and the Quakers in 17th century England.

These contemplative movements, often based around simplicity of practice and openness to the Spirit, seem to arise when not only are the religious establishments in a compromised and sometimes corrupt condition, but the state is in flux, sometimes violent flux. [Our present political uncertainties], scoured by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, would seem to provide fertile ground for contemplative change in this way.

I have no idea where this is leading, but there is a clarity developing that I had not expected, nor intentionally “worked towards”. The inward solitude of these unusual times is proving strangely fruitful. This is what Martin Laird once called a “pathless path”: as Dave Tomlinson wrote, “Human language is unable to describe the external realities of God with any precision. As we have seen, this does not make language useless; it simply means that we have to accept its limitations… Religious language or talk about God and the spiritual realm is therefore inherently provisional and approximate in nature.”

There is no obvious name for what is happening. It seems not to be “secular” in the way religious people might fear, but it isn’t “religious” either, in the way that secularists might assume. It is not eremitical exactly, certainly not in the traditional sense of hermits as ones living in geographical isolation.

Perhaps it is time that silence and practice are allowed to stand untitled: the ground still, and open. It seems to be so for me.

[Parts of this post were published earlier on The Mercy Blog, but have since been adapted and expanded.]