Tag Archives: stillness

Acceptance and integration

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I have written much here about acceptance – including particularly Tara Brach’s concept of radical acceptance – and it seems to me one of the keystones of any contemplative practice. To accept the circumstances of our life, the time and place of our birth, our age and our state of health, the changing seasons… this is a way of being that underlies whatever peace and stillness we uncover.

Integration, the goal of so much psychotherapeutic theory and practice – most obviously in the Jungian tradition – is the core process of individuation, where hidden, unconscious parts of the mind – the shadow, the anima or animus, repressed or concealed complexes – are brought into conscious awareness to create a unified, whole self: the endpoint of healing.

Acceptance is key to integration, also: it is not possible to bring into open awareness these intensely charged unconscious materials without acceptance. To accept oneself, all of oneself, as at its heart given (see Martin Heidegger’s Geworfenheit for instance) is the beginning of our inner work, and its fruit.

All that we are is given to us, in its iridescent, changing beauty. The necessity of what is remains, but it is in a sense a contingent necessity. Our response is ours to make: to remain still and watch is the beginning of radical acceptance – Heidegger’s Gelassenheit if you will – and a fundamental surrender to isness itself. In hesychasm the principle of synergia – the cooperative working together of free will and grace – is perhaps the deepest human level of integration.

To sit still, just that, is the beginning and the end of practice. There is nothing else to do, nothing else is needed. The ground opens in this moment: there is nothing else, nowhere else to go.

Being present to death

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Now is the only moment we will ever know. Our memories of the past are experiences in the present. So are our thoughts about the future. So when we talk about not being present, we mean our attention is not on the present moment. It is focused on thoughts about the past or future.

We can be present in three ways. First, we can live for today, not worrying about yesterday or about what tomorrow may bring…

A second way, common to many meditation practices, is being aware of our current experience. Whereas most of our thoughts are about the past or the future, our sensory experience is always “now.” This is why basic meditation techniques often focus the attention on the body — the heartbeat, the breath, or some other sensation. The feelings in the body are always in the present.

And there is a third way of being present that can develop from this: being present to how it is to be present — not so much noticing your experience of the moment but noticing how it feels to be in the moment…

Savoring how it actually feels to be present motivates us to return here more often. As we do, the familiar, delightful feeling of being here now becomes a beacon drawing us home.

Peter Russell, Letting Go of Nothing

Death, it seems to me, is not a mishap or some kind of failure; it is as much a part of what we are as birth or love. It is not a horror to be evaded at the cost of our health, our happiness, our kindness; it is, as Hamlet half-suspected, really a consummation devoutly (but not impatiently) to be wished – a consolation for all ills, a reward for patience and a gentle homecoming at the close of day. It is a gift to be received alertly and with grace.

One of the blessings of growing old may be that it is harder by the day to forget that death is common to us all, without exception. Being present to one’s own death – whether in prospect or in actuality – may be perhaps the greatest liberation available to us.

In being present, though, one must as Russell says be present to presence itself – only so, I’ve found, is it even possible to know death for what it is, our oldest friend.

We do not see our hearts

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There are situations when one owes solitude to other people, if only not to bother them. But more than this, the multitude needs solitaries as it needs postmen, doctors and fishermen. They go out and they send, or bring, something back—even if they send no word and vanish finally from sight. The solitary is as necessary to our common sanity as wilderness, as the forest where no one goes, as the waterfall in a canyon, which no one has ever seen or heard. We do not see our hearts. I do not expect to be all that solitary for, as a paradoxical person, I am also gregarious and favour the rhythm of withdrawal and return. But in the mountain, I watch the Tao, the way of nonhuman nature (if there is really any such thing) and feel myself into it to discover that I was never outside because nature ‘peoples’ just as much as it ‘forests’.

Alan Watts, from Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown

It’s true – we do not see our hearts in the shadow of what we take to be ourselves. The end of our unknowing is the open ground itself; and that we cannot know, since it is no thing.

It seems an almost unbearable paradox that society should need solitaires just as it needs other tradespeople, and yet Watts is right. Somehow I have known this in the depths of my heart for most of my life, though most of the time I haven’t dared believe it, or it I have, I’ve allowed it to be concealed behind doctrine and religious explication. The call to this life of Einsamkeit is as real as any other, only we don’t like to talk about it. (We don’t like to talk about death either, the two things being more closely related than we think.)

Perhaps it’s just as well that the vocation of Einsiedler is not better known, since societies have a way of misunderstanding those whose paths lie outside the highways of commerce and politics. After all, it is not by being known that we can serve our fellow people, but by being unknown: hidden mycorrhiza in the soil of community. Julian of Norwich lived out her life as an anchoress, her life of prayer and solitude embedded in the city of her birth.

Books like Watts’ and blog posts like this one notwithstanding, all we need to do is to keep still and listen. What we may hear will be all our gift.

Part of the mystery

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The solitary is the bearer of the future, of that which is not yet born, of the mystery which lies beyond the circle of lamplight or the edge of the known world. There are some who make raids into this unknown world of mystery and who come back bearing artefacts. These are the creative artists, the poets who offer us their vision of the mystery… But there are also those who make solitude their home, who travel further into the inner desert, from which they bring back few artefacts. These are the contemplatives, those who are drawn into the heart of the mystery. Contemplatives have no function and no ministry. They are in [that] world as a fish is in the sea, to use Catherine of Siena’s phrase, as part of the mystery. That they are necessary is proved by the fact that they exist in all religious traditions. Contemplatives are not as a rule called to activity, they are useless people and therefore little understood in a world that measures everything by utility and cash value. Unlike the poet they do not return bearing artefacts, but remain in the desert, pointing to the mystery, drawing others in.

Eve Baker, Paths in Solitude, pp.10-11

As Steve Taylor writes: “However, awakened people travel lightly and transition easily. They perceive their existence as part of a vast network of being that will continue to flourish without them. They feel that they share their identity with the whole of the network, that something inside them is part of everything else.” The contemplative life is not a one-way relationship, as so often imagined by religious dogma. Sitting still, we find ourselves part of the unknowable ground as waves are part of the ocean: not other, and yet not exactly one with.

To live as part of the mystery, fully aware of our partial and temporary nature, might seem from an observer’s point of view a kind of death. In fact it is in truth a kind of death. The notion of ourselves as finite, detachable entities cannot live long in the desert. That is why we go there, into the desert of the heart. As Eve Baker puts it (ibid.), “The desert to which the solitary is called is not a place, but something that must be there below the surface of ordinary human existence. It is nowhere, a place of thirst…”

So much of this life is apophatic: we find ourselves in a trackless land, unknowing; what we are is no thing: in that we are part of the ground itself, nothing more. What else could we long for?

Small things

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I feel like I’ve written about the idea that God does not coerce but instead lures us toward greater justice, beauty, and etc a few times already. So rather than focus on this, or indeed the relational nature of the text [Matthew 10:40-42], I want to point out that process thought insists that every small thing is important.

In fact there are no ‘big things’ really – only collections of ‘small things’.

Everything is made up of cells, cells are made of atoms, atoms are made of sub-atomic particles which are sites of movement and energy. Solid things are largely made up of energy. Solidity itself is something of an illusion.

So yes, the reality we experience around us is, largely, an illusion. That ‘tree’ you can see over there is actually mainly energy, it is also a large group of small things, working together to be a tree. In that sense a ‘tree’ is a ‘society’, or even a ‘society of societies’ – we just think of it as an individual thing because that’s how it looks to us. In reality it’s nothing of the sort. And of course, the same is true of you, and the same is true of me. We are very complex, very sophisticated, societies. We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman put it. Apart from anything else, you currently contain something like a kilogram of bacteria in your internal organs. Good luck living without them.

So here we are encouraged not to despise ‘the day of small things’ – even the smallest act of care has a real impact. Offering someone a glass of water is not ‘just’ symbolic of an alignment with their cause, it’s also a real piece of participation in the constantly evolving web of relations.

It’s part of that idea: “for the want of the nail the shoe was lost, for the want of a shoe the horse was lost, for the want of a horse the battle was lost…” The smallest things, the most insignificant things, have real importance.

So here the writer imagines a network of households choosing to offer welcome to emissaries of Jesus, small things, vulnerable things. Moment by moment choices that shape the future. Depending on how you look at it, that’s either a deeply encouraging idea, or a terrifying one.

Simon J Cross

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated with small things – the spray of stamens on a Rose-of-Sharon, a harvestman resting spread-eagled on a brick wall beneath a windowsill, the tiny black bristles at the corner of a sparrow’s bill – these have seemed to me more precious, more freighted with meaning, than the ambitions of men.

The reality of things is relationship. Nothing can be without other things; that there are things at all depends on their relations one with another; depends, ultimately, on the ground of being itself.

TAO engenders One,
One engenders Two,
Two engenders Three,
Three engenders the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things carry shade
And embrace sunlight.
Shade and sunlight, yin and yang,
Breath blending into harmony.

Laozi, Tao te Ching, tr. Addiss and Lombardo, ch.42

Thought cannot embrace the quantum fields in which things consist: theoretical physics can learn about them to some degree, but to know reality at its fundamental level is impossible for the rational mind. Unknowing, remaining still, we can perhaps touch the skirts of this unseen world. All that is, we are; in the quiet, that we can know as we know a lover’s breathing. In the quiet, we can come home to that.

Gratitude and presence

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Perhaps the most notable overall change [in the awakening mind], though, is a general sense of well-being. In the same way that the taking for granted syndrome inevitably leads to frustration and dissatisfaction, ongoing gratitude leads to contentment and fulfillment. You will no longer crave things you don’t have or need, since you’re now able to appreciate what you do have. You’ll be free of the constant niggling need to add more to your life or to change your life situation, like an addict who is finally free of the craving for drugs.

You will also feel an enhanced sense of presence. In chapter 1, I mentioned that many qualities of wakefulness are interdependent, and this is particularly true of presence and gratitude. Gratitude brings us into presence, and presence creates gratitude. Our blessings are always in the present, whereas the taking for granted syndrome takes us out of the present, into imaginary future scenarios.

You might wonder: Is it actually possible to live in an all-encompassing state of gratitude, continually aware of the myriad blessings in our lives? But we don’t have to extend our gratitude so widely all the time… Gratitude should be a constant, underlying trait that arises organically in relation to our experience. And when we do have free moments of contemplation, we will naturally find ourselves extending our gratitude more widely, to encompass all of life itself and the Earth.

We should also remember that, as suggested in chapter 1, it’s unrealistic – and even unnecessary – to live in a perpetual state of spiritual ecstasy. Of course, we often have to focus our attention on practical tasks, such as driving or cooking or earning a living. In those practical moments, our sense of gratitude may recede from our awareness. But it will always be in the background, naturally arising when we relax our attention. This applies to all the other qualities of wakefulness… in general.

Steve Taylor, The Adventure: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Awakening. pp.51-52

Steve Taylor’s point about presence and gratitude is an important one. In sitting still, there is nothing, apart from the continual drift of thoughts, to distract us from the fact of our sitting, the weight of our body, the scatter of sounds in the background, the blessed pattern of our breathing. What we are is here, now, in this place and instant – and that is not other than the open ground itself, present before and beneath the space and time in which we live and die.

As Eckhart Tolle frequently points out, presence is in some way analogous to waiting: to wait with full alertness is to be fully present, fully attentive to what is. “Beyond the beauty of the external forms, there is more here: something that cannot be named, something ineffable, some deep, inner, holy essence.” (The Power of Now, p.96)

To be fully present is to be finally free from the constant burden of the little self – defensive, grasping, threatened – that keeps us from our own life, from the gratitude that is our true relationship with what actually is. To sit still in the silence of our heart is to be present at last, in the “ineffable… holy essence” that is our home.

The actually loved and known

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The contemplative life is not in fact about ideas at all, really. It is far more practical, even down-to-earth, than that. In a sense, the contemplative doesn’t care about constructing a metaphysical framework. What happens is merely experience. When a person enters the stillness of “awakened” consciousness, the rigid boundaries of the self drop away. The immediate, felt reality of that state is precisely one of mutual indwelling.

In that state, we don’t look at nature; we are in nature, and nature is in us. We don’t so much sympathise with another person’s suffering as we experience our existence as continuous with theirs. Charles Williams’ coinherence becomes simply a description of what it actually feels like when the ego’s filtering mechanism relaxes – when Huxley’s doors of perception drift open of themselves.

All that we are consists in our relationship with all that is; not in an abstract sense, but in vital, lived reality. When the boundaries of the self are fully defended, this is no more apparent than the atoms that constitute the hands typing these words; but the function of the contemplative mind is to dissolve those boundaries to little more than a fitful mist across what is. Each one of us is in fact infinitely permeable, and infinitely, intricately conditioned. We reflect each other, and are reflected, like dew drops in a web of uncountable dimensions, bright with the light of the isness from which they emerge. It follows that what each of us does or thinks or feels, in the minutest degree, affects all others, human or otherwise, sentient or not. And so we are ourselves affected, from the least to the farthest.

To know this, and yet to sit still, is in some way the greatest gift. “The ‘pristine awareness’ that is the fundamental ground itself” (Stephen Batchelor) holds all that is, the “ten thousand things” of the ancient Taoists: our sitting in some way brings them into that whole and healing light, despite ourselves. We cannot know it, cannot hold an image of it as we could hold a book or a glass paperweight; and yet unknown, it is most precious; not to be held, it is maybe the gift the world needs.

[*the title is taken from David Jones: “…[F]or only what is actually loved and known can be seen sub specie aeternitatis“]

Perennial

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It’s significant that the major characteristics of wakefulness I’ve identified through my research are essentially the same… as the main themes of wakefulness as described in the world’s spiritual traditions. (…[T]hese included union, inner stillness or inner emptiness, self-sufficiency, compassion and altruism, relinquishing personal agency, heightened awareness, and well-being.) This synchronicity validates the insights of spiritual traditions and shows that wakefulness can exist outside spiritual traditions and is more fundamental than the traditions themselves. It suggests that wakefulness exists as a psychological or ontological state in itself. It may be interpreted in terms of spiritual traditions, but it doesn’t have to be.

Theologians and transpersonal psychologists have long debated the existence of a “perennial philosophy,” a common core to the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. According to the perennial view, the same basic truths lie behind all spiritual teachings but they’re expressed in slightly different ways. They’re simply different paths leading toward the peak of the same mountain, though there are some superficial differences between them, of course.

On the other hand, some people dispute the existence of a perennial philosophy, believing instead that spiritual and mystical traditions are independent. There isn’t a common mountain — all the paths are heading in different directions toward different peaks. Any similarities between different traditions are the result of contact or influence…

This seems highly implausible to me. For one thing, even if there was a chain of influence in the way this argument suggests, surely the original teachings would have been altered beyond recognition over centuries of dissipation (similar to a game of telephone), rather than remaining essentially the same. But the best way of verifying perennialism is to look outside spiritual traditions, as we’ve done in this book. Most of the participants of my research had no familiarity with spiritual traditions or practices at the time of their awakenings, but still described them in similar terms to the mystics of many different traditions. (Some of them became familiar with traditions later — in some cases, many years later; in other cases, only to a limited degree.) This strongly suggests that there exists some form of underlying or perennial landscape of experience that precedes interpretation by spiritual traditions.

Steve Taylor, The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening, pp.233-234

[T]he physical world is not ultimately separate from its transcendental foundation, and so the perennial philosophy is a non-dualistic view of reality. There is no barrier between the so-called physical and metaphysical dimensions of reality (i.e., between the universe and its transcendent source); the two are a Oneness rather than a duality, and this is in contrast to systems of philosophy or religion that place a firewall between the transcendent realm and the physical world. For Perennialists, the universe arises from the Ground of Being, or, put the other way round, the Ground of Being takes form as the world around us. The One becomes the many, just as one ocean can rise up into multiple waves. Furthermore, and because we too are “waves” on the surface of a cosmic sea, our physical selves also arise from the Ground of Being. The Ground, therefore, is not only the Ground of Being but, consequently, the ground of our being as well.

Dana Sawyer, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded: A Guide for the Mystically Inclined, pp.33-34

Ever since I first read Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy in my early twenties, I have been drawn to the clean simplicity of the idea. In the passage I’ve quoted above, Steve Taylor provides one of the briefest and most credible responses to the most common criticism from both humanist and religious points of view: that the contemplative traditions, rooted in such radically different religious soils, cannot have anything in common. As Dana Sawyer points out, a few lines on from the passage above, “…human beings have the latent ability to grasp the content of the two previous postulates experientially. That is, we have a capacity, whether we cultivate it or not, to go beyond intellectual descriptions of the Ground of Being (transcendent) and the Oneness of Being (immanent) to the direct experience of these realities, as did the mystics of the past—and as do some mystics today.”

It doesn’t matter, either immediately or ultimately, whether the experience in question occurs within the taught practice of any one religion or philosophy; as Taylor explains above, “there exists some form of underlying or perennial landscape of experience that precedes interpretation by spiritual traditions.” I can testify to this myself: my earliest unitive experiences of inner stillness, emptiness and heightened awareness came around the age of five, long before I knew anything of religious or contemplative teachings in any form.

The simple phenomenology of contemplation – inner experience itself (by which I don’t mean experiences, altered states or spectacular changes in perception, but plain awareness) – will teach the foundational fact of oneness with the ground. Merely to sit still is usually quite enough…

Just noticing (edited and republished)

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I had intended to write a post here this evening when it occurred to me that I had already written, very nearly two years ago, almost the exact article I’d been planning. So here it is (somewhat edited):

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

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 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.

There is always a risk, of course, in talking like this. People who like things cut and dried are often suspicious of what appears to them to be an impractical vagueness; those from a background of religious orthodoxy will wonder if there’s a heresy lurking in there somewhere. 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.

Robert C Solomon writes:

Spirituality is a human phenomenon. It is part and parcel of human existence, perhaps even of human nature. This is not to deny that some animals might have something like spiritual experiences. But spirituality requires not only feeling but thought, and thought requires concepts. Thus spirituality and intelligence go hand in hand. This is not to say that intelligent people are more spiritual, but neither is it to buy into a long tradition of equating spirituality with innocence misconstrued as ignorance or even as stupidity.

Spirituality for the Skeptic: the Thoughtful Love of Life

The practice of choiceless awareness (in Krishnamurti’s phrase) that I have been describing is not a kind of daydream, or an unusual state of consciousness even: it is a quiet but exceptionally alert quality of mind, without straining after attention either. Toni Bernhard suggests that,

[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.

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

This quality of stillness, of just noticing, is such a simple thing that it would be easy to dismiss it as inconsequential. It is not. It seems important, somehow – and here I hesitate, as Krishnamurti suggested – that someone is prepared to do this.

We are brought up, certainly here in the West, to see life as intrinsically bound up in progress, or at least development, and that isn’t necessarily so in the spiritual life, despite our continual use of terms like “path” and “practice”. We use them in the unspoken assumption that the path leads somewhere, that we are practising for a performance, or an examination. Even in religious contexts it is often seen as wasteful self-indulgence to sit still when we could be up and out feeding the poor or preaching the good news, or making some other kind of progress in our “walk of faith”. But maybe the point is being missed somewhere.

Contentment has become something of a dirty word, yet a life without it is too often at risk of shallowness and politicisation. Febrile activism and polemical discourse without contemplative roots are no more likely to bring peace to the human heart, or to the human community, than war. We need to sit still. We need those whose path has petered out under the quiet trees, whose practice is no more than an open and wondering heart. There was good sense in the Taoist tradition of the sage who, their public life over, left for a hut on a mountain somewhere. There are good things to be seen sometimes from a mountain hut.

What we really are

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We pay attention to our own true nature and by becoming fully conscious of the union of our nature with Christ, we become fully ourselves. 

John Main, Word into Silence, p.18

The idea of time has many expressions, from chronological to biological, emotional to cosmic. We sometimes feel we have lived a lifetime in a moment. We can feel time as a crucifixion or as a resurrection. The vast figures measuring cosmic time in an expanding universe can seem overwhelming but the few years of a human life can seem more significant and precious. Time and mortality live out the drama of birth and death and the painful mystery of separation. In the light of faith we come by stages to see the all-pervading mystery of union…

This consummation of union, whether it is called nirvana, liberation from rebirth, enlightenment, moksha or heaven is part of the common ground of all religious wisdom when we understand religion in its mystical dimension. It refers to the experience of oneness, the transcendence of the ego’s centre of consciousness, the transformation of the dualistic mind, the movement from the mind’s self-mirroring complexities into the simplicity and pure vision of the heart, the non-duality of the spirit. With a silent passion deeper than their words and differences, all religions point to this. If they do indeed teach this way and not just pay lip service to it, religion offers our often sad and battered humanity a reasonable and empowering hope.

We both lose and find ourselves in the otherness of ultimate reality. This is easy to say but it is a hard paradox to wrestle with. It demands a deepening faith commitment. When the master class of life has taught us enough, commitment meets detachment and solitude, the recognition and acceptance of our uniqueness becomes more attractive and even easier. We gradually withdraw from unnecessary activity and distraction. We become freer from compulsions and addictions.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, p.76-77

What we really are is this. We are not what we think we are, frail isolated intelligences trapped in a zero-sum game of mere survival, creatures of allegiances and enmities, just barely hanging on. We belong. We are part of it all, wavelets on a limitless ocean of grace.

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

Faith is no more, perhaps, than this radical open-heartedness, this helpless surrender to what is, in David Jones’ words, “actually loved and known”. All our practice, all our patience and all our prayers come down to this simple oneness. What we used to be is dispersed, patched and rotted through with light. None of the old certainties can hold. They don’t need to: this trackless brightness beyond the memory of shorelines is the waking heart itself, nothing more.