Tag Archives: shikantaza

Chasing after experiences

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If we’re referencing “being awake” or “liberation” to a particular experience or state of mind—maybe a very expanded, open, peaceful feeling—that will inevitably prove disappointing because that state will disappear. The open aware presence it reveals is simply what remains when the me-system is quiet or when it is totally accepted as simply the weather of this moment. That open boundless aware presence is actually ever-present, even when apparently obscured by obsessive, me-centered thoughts. It is the common factor in every different experience. And those thoughts are nothing other than this same aliveness, the One Reality, showing up as thoughts. Experience is ever-changing like the weather. It’s never personal. It’s a happening of the whole universe. But if we take the stormy, cloudy, foggy weather personally, then it seems like we have lost that expanded openness that we tasted before. If we imagine that there is a persisting, independent self (“me”) who is either awake or not awake, that is only an imagination. No such persisting, independent self can be found. There is no experiencer outside of experiencing. Clinging to or chasing after experiences of spaciousness is a great way to avoid them. And eventually, we see that every experience, whether contracted or expanded, clear or muddy, is always just this.

Joan Tollifson, Silence

I think that perhaps Tollifson has expressed here more clearly than anything I can remember reading why I tend increasingly to be suspicious of teachings that rely too much on technique – whether the use of any form of psychedelic substance, or any sort of psychological manipulation aimed at inducing particular experiences or “altered states”.

As Joan points out here, the “open aware presence” of the contemplative mind is “nothing other than this same aliveness, the One Reality, showing up as…” whatever happens to be in our field of awareness right now. It might be the gentle passage of breath against the edge of our nostrils, or the bright stillness of the quiet mind; but it might just as easily be the grumble of a bus pulling away from the stop in the street outside, or a sudden metallic clang from the water company yard behind the old reservoir. Or it might be an old fear, or an old fantasy, or something we forgot to buy at the shops, rising unbidden to the surface of memory. Whatever the field of awareness contains now is just what it is. There is nothing else for it to be; and looking for another, better, experience is plain old fashioned confusion.

When we do nothing but practice sitting still for a certain amount of time each day, it becomes clear that past and future are an illusion. There is no past. There is no future. There is only this moment. This one tiny moment. That’s all there is…

Attainment always happens in the future or in the past. It’s always a matter of comparing the state at one moment to the state at another moment. But it makes no sense to compare one moment to any other moment. Every moment is complete unto itself. It contains what it contains and lacks what it lacks. Or perhaps it lacks nothing because each moment is the entire universe.

Brad Warner, The Other Side of Nothing: The Zen Ethics of Time, Space and Being

Being still

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To remain still is one of the fundamental conditions of contemplative practice, and yet it is also one of its fruits. Many of us will remember how hard it was to stay still as children, even –  maybe especially – when we were explicitly told to. And yet I found that when I as a child had no choice but to remain still, the effect of that simple action – or lack of action – had effects that remain with me to this day.

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 but fertile with becoming.

Mathieu Ricard writes (The Art of Meditation, p.93):

According to Buddhist analysis, the world is a result of the coming together of an infinite number of causes and conditions that are continually changing. Just as a rainbow is formed at the precise moment the sun shines on a collection of raindrops and disappears as soon as the factors that produce it are no longer present, phenomena exist in an essentially interdependent mode and have no independent and permanent existence. Ultimate reality is therefore described as empty of independently existing animate or inanimate phenomena. Everything is relationship; nothing exists in and of itself. Once this essential idea has been understood and assimilated, our erroneous perception of our ego and our world gives way to an accurate view of the nature of things and beings – wisdom. Wisdom is not a simple intellectual construction or a compilation of information. It arises from a precise methodology that allows us progressively to eliminate mental blindness and the afflictive emotions that derive from it and, in that way, free us from the principal cause of suffering.

So long as we act in the world from our own will and desire, our own imagined, illusory sense of what is real, the emptiness of forms (“independently existing animate or inanimate phenomena”) will be invisible to us. It is only when we keep still enough that the fragility and contingency of all that appears to be will become clear, like the settling out of sediment in a pond that has been disturbed but is now at rest.

It seems to me that, short of illness or some other unsought but somehow accepted immobility, stillness can only be found in some kind of practice; as far as I am concerned, the simpler the better. Choiceless awareness – just sitting, shikantaza – or the steady releasement of Gelassenheit, are the ways that open themselves to me; gateways into silence and stillness so plain and simple that anyone can use them, regardless of skill or training. All that is needed is regularity and time – faithfulness, if you will – given to the simplest practice, for the “vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being” (Tara Brach) to open around us.

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.

Simple presence (republished)

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I was planning this evening to write a post on the radical simplicity of practice, and how it actually doesn’t need most of the religious and organisational trappings that have accumulated, like barnacles on a ship’s hull, over so many years, when it occurred to me that six months ago I had written precisely that post. Here it is again:

—

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 [2024] 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.

Listening in the silence

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So when you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence — your deeper self — behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.

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.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

This inward listening of which Tolle speaks is truly, as he himself says a few pages later, the preliminary state for becoming aware of the present moment as it happens. In his own words,

Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.

Simply to sit still, listening, is really all we need to do. The arising of thoughts then becomes thinking no longer, but just another appearance in the bright field of open awareness. We can listen to the thoughts bubbling up and falling away, without feeling that we are thinking them, just as we can listen to the cooing of the wood pigeons in the trees across the garden, the rising and falling of traffic sounds, or our own breathing.

Listening is an entirely open attention – undefended, accepting – to what may come. Aside from the strange moments of illumination sometimes hidden within great trauma and shock, there is no other time we are so open to what actually is. It may be the truest state we humans are heir to. And it is important to realise – which is why listening is so powerful a practice – that this is not something we achieve, or do: it is something we allow.

It seems to me that at its heart, all true contemplative practice is a way to this acceptance, as Tara Brach so memorably pointed out; which is why the radically simple ones appear to be the best, whether just sitting (shikantaza), naked intention (Centering Prayer) or some kind of repetitive practice such as hesychasm or the Nembutsu. All of them, when practised faithfully, lead to silence and to listening.

Something in the air tonight

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Recently, I have begun to appreciate air again, like a fluid, filling the lake beds of empty rooms, valleys, unused spaces… Sitting still, you can feel the air surrounding you, feel its weight, the lovely column of clear presence all the way from the thermosphere down, to wrap softly around limbs, press the skin of the face softly against the bone beneath, carry the song of that sleepy robin across the hollow depth of the garden to the open window of this room.

When I began meditating in earnest, I entered through the path of Zen. In this tradition, enlightenment is often described as our natural mind, and it’s said that the very act of meditation is already enlightenment. Yet, in Zen the practice is still essential. As Suzuki Roshi said, “enlightenment is an accident. Practice makes us accident prone.” We can’t demand enlightenment, but we can show up and do the practices…

Zen master Dogen said, “enlightenment is intimacy with all things.” This means the barriers of separation between self and other dissolve into a deep sense of interconnection with all of life. When I experience this awakening, I find an indescribable sense of peace and ease, yet also profound compassion for all who are suffering in the world and motivation to be of service.

Lisa Ernst, Lion’s Roar Magazine

Simply to turn up and sit seems to be all that is required. Nothing else is: not concepts, nor understanding, nor doctrine. Just sit still; it is already done.

Silence is the air knowing itself; the bright transparent place it has, that holds us all. Silence is alive with sound, with the singing waves of air; it heals the heart, stills the frantic thinking thing that will not rest. If it comes by accident, then its deliberate loveliness has always been there, only waiting to be found again. Holy, holy, the plain fact of it: that it is. That it is all that is, holds all that is; still, and bright, and true.

Stone lanterns

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I have always been strangely moved by the tōrō stone lanterns found in gardens and along paths around Buddhist monasteries and large houses in parts of Japan, and hence in similar places around the world in tribute. The one here is in the Japanese garden at Kingston Lacy in Dorset. Even as a boy I loved to look at garden ornaments like sundials and benches that stood out in the rain and sun, in the snow and the wind, bearing the marks of the weather and its changes.

To sit like a stone lantern may be a fanciful way of putting it, but there is something in shikantaza that is just like that, sitting still as the moments pass and the breaths, and the sounds outside drift unremarked across the comings and goings of thoughts. Sitting steadily, nothing moves; and yet there is nothing that remains unchanged, nothing that does not bear the marks of time and its weather. To do nothing, as the stone lantern does nothing, is to remain true to impermanence. Nothing is sought or planned; there is no goal or intention, only to sit still, out in the sun and wind of what comes to be, just that – and in that, all that is.

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.

A gift?

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I have long had the strange sense that the contemplative life has some value, some gift for more than its practitioner. It is the most useless way to live; and yet it is in some obscure way essential. Why is this?

The title of the ancient Chinese classic the Tao Te Ching is usually translated as something like “the book of the way and its power”. Perhaps there is a clue there, without meaning to get too fey about it. In Chapter 23 of Charles Muller’s excellent online translation:

Therefore there is such a thing as aligning one’s actions with the Tao.
If you accord with the Tao you become one with it.
If you accord with virtue you become one with it.
If you accord with loss you become one with it.

The Tao accepts this accordance gladly.
Virtue accepts this accordance gladly.
Loss also accepts accordance gladly.

To become one with just what is, one is at one with both presence and loss, with being and not being. It doesn’t feel like anything; but sitting still, something moves. I don’t know what it is, but somehow it draws from the emptiness that is the way itself, the ground of what is and is not. Not known, it is most precious; not to be held, it is maybe the gift the world needs.

Fade into emptiness

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[F]or a period of time each day, try to sit in shikantaza, without moving, without expecting anything, as if you were in your last moment. Moment after moment you feel your last instant. In each inhalation and each exhalation there are countless instants of time. Your intention is to live in each instant.

First practice smoothly exhaling, then inhaling. Calmness of mind is beyond the end of your exhalation. If you exhale smoothly, without even trying to exhale, you are entering into the complete perfect calmness of your mind. You do not exist anymore. When you exhale this way, then naturally your inhalation will start from there. All that fresh blood bringing everything from outside will pervade your body. You are completely refreshed. Then you start to exhale, to extend that fresh feeling into emptiness. So, moment after moment, without trying to do anything, you continue shikantaza…

Even though your practice is not good enough, you can do it. Your breathing will gradually vanish. You will gradually vanish, fading into emptiness. Inhaling without effort you naturally come back to yourself with some color or form. Exhaling, you gradually fade into emptiness—empty, white paper. That is shikantaza. The important point is your exhalation. Instead of trying to feel yourself as you inhale, fade into emptiness as you exhale.

Shunryu Suzuki, not always so

To the conscious self, emptiness will always feel like death. But in emptiness that which is unnamed, aside from words, is free for once. Elizabeth Reninger:

It may take weeks, months, or even years to unwind certain psychic or physical contractions and break free of old habits and beliefs. But unlearning and release can also happen in a single moment of aesthetic rapture, or with a deep belly-laugh from understanding a joke, or from the dizzying mental meltdown of fully grokking a paradox.

In such moments, we’re left in a “space” characterized by an unspeakably sweet kind of knowing, a spaciously vivid awareness that is sometimes likened to the experience of a mute person tasting candy. The only thing that we might be able to say is “Ahhh . . .”

Out of such moments—these gaps between thoughts—arise a natural innocence, curiosity, and spontaneity, along with the deepest kind of contentment. If only for a moment, we are at home.

Home is in fact the emptiness we so struggle against. The way things come to be, the patterns on the surface of the stream – they are only moments in emptiness, points of light on the water. There is no thing to find: the sweet essence itself is emptiness, inexhaustible, yet quite outside “is” and “is not”: the safest place there is.