Tag Archives: stillness

Practice, silence, stillness

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I remember one afternoon as I was sitting on the steps of our monastery in Nepal. The monsoon storms had turned the courtyard into an expanse of muddy water, and we had set out a path of bricks to serve as stepping-stones. A friend of mine came to the edge of the water, surveyed the scene with a look of disgust, and complained about every single brick as she made her way across. When she got to me, she rolled her eyes and said, “Yuck! What if I’d fallen into that filthy muck? Everything’s so dirty in this country!” Since I knew her well, I prudently nodded, hopping to offer her some comfort through my mute sympathy.

A few minutes later, Raphaele, another friend of mind, came to the path through the swamp. “Hup, hup, hup!” she sang as she hopped, reaching dry land with the cry “What fun!” Her eyes sparkling with joy, she added: “The great thing about the monsoon is that there’s no dust.” Two people, two ways of looking at things; six billion human beings, six billion worlds…

Anyone who enjoys inner peace is no more broken by failure than he is inflated by success. He is able to fully live his experiences in the context of a vast and profound serenity, since he understands that experiences are ephemeral and that it is useless to cling to them. There will be no “hard fall” when things turn bad and he is confronted with adversity. He does not sink into depression, since his happiness rests on a solid foundation.

Matthieu Ricard, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skills p.22

It seems to me that the inner peace Ricard speaks of here is found only through practice, silence, stillness. There is no other way that I have found in all these years.

The gold standard for peace is the kind you touch in the nearness of death. The wonder that opens out when your own death appears to you unavoidable is not only the truest test of peace, but its strongest foundation. After that the interior life holds, despite pain, fear, disgrace, privation. I have been in a few bad spots over the years, and it seems that this remains so: it is the interior life that determines whether we find hope or despair, anxiety or grace. Even the inward experience of physical pain, whatever its outward sensation, seems subject to this pattern. In the end, all that can happen amounts to an appearance on the bright skin of awareness.

This sort of thing, of course, is how people can speak of odd, paradoxical things like gratitude for suffering. This is not some kind of perversion, or worse, some kind of Pollyanna wishful thinking; it is the discovery Ricard has made: that the life of inner peace is the surest underpinning. If that holds, then death has lost its sting – it can only be the wonder of that deep stillness, beyond the last glitter of the little waves.

Einklammerung

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At its core, the epoché (from the Greek word meaning “suspension”) refers to the act of suspending or “bracketing” all judgments and assumptions about the world. This suspension is not about doubting the existence of things, but rather about setting aside all preconceptions, biases, and taken-for-granted beliefs. In other words, it is the process of withholding judgment about the nature of the external world to focus on pure experience itself.

For Husserl, the purpose of epoché is to return to a more original, direct experience of phenomena, where the subjective and the objective are not yet split. By “bracketing” or suspending the natural attitude—the everyday way we engage with the world based on assumptions—we can get to the essence of our experiences, as they appear to consciousness, unmediated by theoretical frameworks or prejudices.

Epoché in Phenomenology: Husserl’s Method of Suspension

Einklammerung, bracketing, epoché – is Western phenomenology’s version of the Heart Sutra‘s “Form is emptiness (śūnyatā), emptiness is form”, perhaps. For Edmund Husserl the act of bracketing was not an intellectual curiosity, it was a means to what he called “transcendental consciousness” or “pure consciousness” – something very close to the Dzogchen concept of Rigpa, “the pristine awareness of the fundamental ground itself.” (Wikipedia)

Once we have performed the epoché, we are no longer tied to the particularities of the world. Instead, we can see the world as it is constituted by our consciousness. For Husserl, this is a profound insight, as it reveals that the world is not something external and independent but is, in some sense, dependent on consciousness for its very existence. The epoché uncovers the transcendental nature of experience, which has profound implications for how we understand reality and our place within it.

Epoché in Phenomenology (above)

Western philosophy is prone to run aground on the shoals of terminology and syntax. The simplicity of just sitting, in plain awareness of the moment’s breath, of the sounds beyond the window, the movement of the air, without naming them, without distinguishing them as objects or processes or implications – the Einklammerung happens all by itself, without struggle or willpower; just in the mere being there, in showing up, no more and no less, morning and evening, and sitting there, in stillness. Nothing else.

Sounds

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This evening the sounds from the open window were clear and somehow more present than they often seem. The traffic from the road not a hundred yards away sounded almost like the tide on a shingle beach, only not so regular. The birds were quiet, though; the magpie family in the biggest of the hazels at the back of the garden were having a quiet (for magpies) conversation, and there was a blackbird trying a few desultory phrases, but his heart wasn’t really in it. A summer breeze rustled the leaves from time to time.

Sitting by the window, especially in summer, is full of these beloved instants. Even the familiar chair, and the floor beneath my feet, are gifts of love, somehow. Living beside a relatively busy main road through the town, and in distant earshot of the Bristol trains, there are always background sounds, some indefinite as the breeze, and some as clear and unmistakable as the buses that grumble away from the two nearby stops, one on either side of the road – on hot days with their air conditioning units whining with that particular, slightly panicky sound they have.

Somehow these sounds have grown to be as familiar as breathing. They are not noise; there is nothing they are disturbing – least of all me – and yet they are not really background either. I suppose it’s just their place in the dear fabric of what is that holds them there for me. I have learned not to tell stories about them to myself, that’s part of it. What they are is their own whatness; in a sense it is none of my business, and yet I am as much a part of the day as they are. We share this pool of Dorset air, its frequncies and its warmth, the movement of the breeze. We are together while I sit, morning and evening, the sounds and I. What more could I want?

Release

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One of the English translations often offered for the German philosophical term Gelassenheit is “releasement”. Martin Heidegger seems to have used Gelassenheit to indicate both a “releasement to” and “releasement from”: in contemplation we are released from our need to classify and arrange our experience, but we are released to the mystery, the wordless isness beneath all that comes to be.

“It is in meditative contemplation that we are open to Being, and in the steadfastness of being open, are exposed to it (i.e., Being). What reveals Being, is therefore, as Heidegger would say, an ‘in-dwelling’ in Being itself.” (Viktorija Lipič, An exploration of Gelassenheit through Meister Eckhart and Martin Heidegger) This seems to me remarkably close to the Dzogchen concept of Rigpa – beyond attributes, the clear and undisturbed awareness of the ground.

Even in our own practice, this releasement from and releasement to takes place almost without our taking note of it. We are released from the need to solve our thoughts, satisfy our longings, escape our fears; and released to the stillness of open awareness, the radical acceptance (Brach) of what actually is. It is just that simple, for all the high-flown words we are tempted to decorate it with.

Umwelt

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If you sit still for long enough then it will become apparent that there is no such entity as a discrete, permanent self that “has” experiences, thoughts, sensations. Of course there are experiences, but no one “has” them – they are no one’s possession, for there is no one separable from experience to possess them. And yet…

And yet it certainly feels as though I am I, feeling things. I have memories, preferences, longings, losses – so many losses – that don’t belong to anyone else; and they feel like the same kind of thing as these experiences, thoughts and sensations that happen in the present…

What is going on?

In the semiotic theories of Jakob Johann von Uexküll there crops up a wonderful word, Umwelt, the specific way an organism perceives, and interacts with, its environment and its particular circumstances. Not only does the Umwelt of a tick, or a bat (von Uexküll’s own examples) differ from yours or mine, ours differ from each other’s, just as one bat’s Umwelt will perhaps subtly differ from another bat’s.

Now, Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology – the study of subjective, lived experiences – used another, not dissimilar term, Lebenswelt (life-world), to speak of the human Umwelt, just as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins used his own term inscape to describe the unique inwardness – thisness – of a thing, and instress to describe its effect on the one who beholds the thing.

Maybe there is something here. Maybe this sense we have of being a “self” is precisely what each of our individual Umwelten feels like from the inside. Could this be the source of the very illusion of a soul, a granular individuality that goes on in such apparently adamantine uniqueness that it is impossible to conceive of its dissolving, even into the blessed expanse of death? The contemplative endeavour itself then becomes nothing less than the great adventure of seeing beyond the borders of the Lebenswelt, beyond the doors of perception themselves, out in the open ground of isness itself.

Objectless

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In those deeper waters of Centering Prayer—in those nanoseconds (at first) between the thoughts, when your attention is not running out ahead to grab the next object to alight upon, you taste those first precious drops of an entirely different quality of selfhood… There is a deeper current of living awareness, a deeper and more intimate sense of belonging, which flows beneath the surface waters of your being and grows stronger and steadier as your attention is able to maintain itself as a unified field of objectless awareness.

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice, p.134

The state Cynthia Bourgeault mentions here is of course that which is often referred to, by writers as diverse as Tara Brach and Jiddu Krishnamurti, as “choiceless awareness”, and by Eckhart Tolle as “awareness of Being”. But there is a subtle resonance in Bourgeault’s phrase that I don’t find elsewhere. She goes on (ibid. p.138):

In the classic language of the Christian contemplative tradition, we are practicing moving from a cataphatic way of knowing (i.e., with an object-focused awareness) to an apophatic, or “formless” (i.e., objectless) awareness, emanating from a deeper capacity of the human soul in God.

God, known as the ground of being, Istigkeit, is no thing, and consequently can never be the object of our attention. As the Old Testament story of Moses on the mountain puts it, “you cannot see [God’s] face.” (Exodus 33:20)

In the same way, if you think about individual words and how we know what they mean, you’ll see that they work by dividing reality up into identifiable bits. Definitions enable us to home in on the right bit of reality – so that we can distinguish between a chair and a bed, for example, or between nutritious plants and poisonous ones. Words are a little bit like the machines that slice salami: they cut up reality into digestible chunks. But God isn’t a ‘bit of reality’. God is the source of the whole thing. So it’s not surprising that words won’t quite work properly when it comes to God.

J.P. Williams, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality, (Introduction)

All that we are, all that is, rests in the open ground as the hazelnut rested in the love of God in Julian’s vision:

And in this vision he [Christ] also showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball, as it seemed to me. I looked at it and thought, ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came to me in a general way, like this, ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for it seemed to me so small that it might have disintegrated suddenly into nothingness. And I was answered in my understanding, ‘It lasts, and always will, because God loves it; and in the same way everything has its being through the love of God.’

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Oxford World Classics, p.6

Only an awareness that, still and intransitive, does not take an object can open itself to reality that can never be its object. Only in silence can we touch that reflecting quiet, the still pool beneath unending light.

A certain stillness

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Stillness is a great discipline; it is the great discovery of meditation. Stillness becomes the dynamic of transcendence. The more still we are, the more we transcend our limitations. Now, stillness does not mean stopping. It is not static. We fully experience stillness when we feel how it is part of the whole process of growth in nature. There is a wondrous relationship between stillness and growth.

Laurence Freeman, Tasting Wisdom

Stillness seems to be inseparable from surrender. Stillness is not possible in the midst of inner warfare; though, in the inner life, to surrender does not mean to give in so much as to let go, and in this there is an immense simplicity, a lack of complication, of rules and prescriptions. Cynthia Bourgeault (she is contrasting Centering Prayer with other methods such as vipassana, and meditation using a mantra):

A surrender method is even simpler. One does not even watch or label the thought as it comes up, takes form, and dissipates. As soon as it emerges into consciousness, one simply lets it go. The power of this form of meditation does not reside in a particular clarity of the mind or even in presence, but entirely in the gesture of release itself.

Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, p.20

Eckhart Tolle has explained this particularly well. One of the great strengths of his approach to the contemplative life must be his gentle but steadfast refusal to adopt the terminology of any religion, without rejecting their inner meaning and resonance. It might be too easy to pass by Tolle due to the popularity of his books a few years ago; that would be a mistake – his work is uniquely valuable, if only to serve as a bridge between Buddhist or Advaita based methods and the Christian practices like Centering Prayer and Christian Meditation (WCCM) which have their roots firmly set in their religious foundations. In his remarkably useful little book, Practicing the Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle writes (p.20),

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.

Quietism, merely

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I have written on several occasions before – most thoroughly perhaps here – about quietism on this blog. But what exactly is it?

Quietism, as a contemplative tendency – it is too diffuse in time and background to be called a movement – is usually described as “that [which], in general, holds that perfection consists in passivity (quiet) of the soul, in the suppression of human effort so that divine action may have full play. Quietistic elements have been discerned in several religious movements, both Christian and non-Christian, through the centuries…” (Britannica)

Quietism, despite having a chequered history among Christians – it was often spoken against as a way of passivity, an accusation levelled at Christian Quietists from the C12 Beguines right through to William Pollard and Francis Frith among nineteenth century Quakers – is a no more than a basic and essential practice of simple unknowing in most schools of contemplative life, from the early Taoists in China,  through the Zen pioneer Dogen’s teaching of shikantaza (just sitting) in thirteenth century Japan, to the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti in the twentieth.

Of course in times of great peril and anxiety such quiet may seem an odd response, but as Andō pointed out in her post I reproduced yesterday, it may be the only true response. Hidden within the darkness and distress there is peace, and the coming light; but it can’t be seen from a place of fear and anger. From the standpoint of a febrile activism it truly appears not to be there. Only in absolute quiet, in an inward listening for the silence between appearances, can we touch the still point of the turning world (Eliot).

In some way that I struggle to explain in words, we deeply need those who, like Andō, have the courage to sit still in silence. To merely wait, hidden, in the “vast and shining presence” (Tara Brach) of what is, is perhaps the single most powerful thing that any of us can do.

Out of great darkness (a reblog)

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The endurance of darkness is the preparation for great light.

— St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul.

For those finding themselves lost in the darkness right now…

Does a seed know darkness, or miss the light, before it even breaks the surface, to grow and bloom?

Hidden in an empty field — ten thousand unborn flowers.

Is it already growing, reaching for the light, already there, hidden, unseen?

Look for yourself, enquire within, turn your attention away from the world, and to the depths of your very being, and you will find the light, masked by this darkness. It is not gone, it is merely hidden behind a veil of disbelief.

Knowing that this is so, reflect on your own seasons of darkness and light, and how they move you, shift you, and so much more is revealed by them.

Hidden in great darkness — great light.

[This is a straightforward reblog: words and image by Andō]

To sit quietly

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Some of our most commonplace concepts are so ubiquitous and pervasive that we lose sight of the fact that they are actually concepts. “The world,” “the body,” “the mind,” “the self,” “consciousness,” “awareness,” “nonduality” – we throw these word-concepts around without ever stopping to wonder what we are actually talking about. And next thing we know, we’re lost in some conceptual confusion, very much akin to wondering what will happen to me if I step off the edge of the flat earth. That’s an imaginary problem, as all of us in the 21st century realize, but for people in earlier centuries, it seemed quite real. And our own conceptual conundrums seem equally real to us. “Will I still be here after I die?” or “Am I enlightened yet?” or “Do I have free will?” can seem like perfectly sensible questions, but they are every bit as absurd as wondering what will happen to me when I step off the edge of the earth…

When we try to figure out “the meaning of life” or “the nature of reality,” or when we try to come up with a conceptual understanding of Consciousness, Totality, God, or the Ground of Being, we inevitably end up frustrated and confused. Any conceptual picture of reality is always subject to doubt, and no metaphysical formulation ever satisfies our deep longing for Truth.

What satisfies that deep longing of the heart is the falling away of the attempt to make sense of everything. Of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t still make relative sense of things in a functional way in daily life. But we stop trying to take hold of Totality, or grasp the Ground of Being, or figure out the meaning of life. Instead, we relax into simply being life. We learn to recognize (to see, to sense) when we’re beginning to grasp or fixate, and in that recognition, quite naturally there is an ability to relax and let go. When we stop trying to figure it all out, we discover that it doesn’t need to be figured out, and in fact, can’t be figured out! When we stop desperately trying to get a grip, we find nothing is lacking and there is nothing to grasp.

Joan Tollifson, Nothing to Grasp

The stillness of practice is exactly that: stopping trying to get a grip, stopping the discursive mind’s continual clutching after things to store away. “Aha!” it wants to say, “I’ve got this!” It wants to collect the Point of It All, and shelve it under Essential Facts, or something equally pointless. But it can’t.

The stillness of practice heals all that. It doesn’t solve problems or supply solutions: it lets them go. To sit quietly is all that is needed, truly. This is not inaction; it is the place where right action starts, if action is needed. Surprisingly, often, it isn’t. The way opens out of the stillness in its own time, and usually it has nothing to do with anything we think. As Tollifson says, it doesn’t need to be figured out.

In the stillness, we become aware of awareness; and it isn’t other than the ground, that is no thing, and is before, and holds, all that comes to be. There is nothing to choose, nothing to find. Be still, that’s all.