Tag Archives: stillness

Interrupting the skeuomorphs

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Anyone who was involved with personal computers around 25 years ago will be all too familiar with skeuomorphs, those little pictures of familiar material things that were so often used as interface elements – ring-binder pages for calendar applications, or the little gleaming jewel-like forward and back buttons in a web browser like Netscape Navigator 9 or Internet Explorer 7. They’re still in use today – the virtual keyboard of your smart phone is a skeuomorph – there isn’t a keyboard there at all: it just looks, and works, like one.

It seems to me that our day-to-day experiences are not unlike existential skeuomorphs – they allow us to remember, to interrogate and interact with events, but they are no more than pictures of what actually happened. Of course, we couldn’t operate, couldn’t even usefully perceive anything, without them. Part of the phenomenological action of psychedelics is surely just that: the disabling of this delicate interface through which we encounter the world. No wonder a person on a bad trip feels they are going mad; temporarily (we hope) they are. The world may be an inconceivable web of fields and probabilities, but we perceive real tables and chairs, cats and boxes; they may be illusions, but they are benign (Dennett) and necessary illusions, as real as we are ourselves.

Only in the stillness of meditation – or a sudden unbidden illumination – can we, if only for a moment, allow a fully open awareness to catch a glimpse of what actually is.

All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost…

What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.

Andreas Müller, No-thing – ungraspable freedom

(I wrote at greater – if more subjective – length about this last year. It seemed to me today, though, that it was worth mentioning again in the context of these perceptions. I am not a neuroscientist, nor even a philosopher of mind; I am only someone who has occasionally encountered something that seems almost as if it might be the tangible fruit of such disciplines in direct experience.)

Doors

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There is something about doors. They are curiously inevitable. Largely unchanged long into history, they can let their users in or out, keep them safe or keep them prisoner; let them rest or let them run.

Our senses are only the doors of our perception; what we see or hear is as much story as data. Turn off the processing, the algorithms of interpretation that make us who we are, and the crazy lights of elsewhere will threaten to wipe all we ever knew like words written in the steam across a bathroom window. That’s the hope and the fear of psychedelics; but we cannot know what is real by simply breaking down the doors of what it is to be human.

All we are is the infinitely delicate pattern our minds trace on the fields and particles of our fleeting scrap of what is there. Beneath it all the ground holds, beyond beginning or end. The doors we are given are ways in to what is real, our own dear and transitory lives; they let us in, not shut us out. Stillness, patience, the gentle breath: these are the ways to the fields of wonder, the steadiness of being.

In the end…

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This morning the light in my room was particularly crystalline. The autumn sunlight crossed the floor, bringing with it the silvery blue of the open sky above the trees. Somewhere in that blue brightness an airliner passed high overhead, the muted rumble of its engines just on the edge of hearing.

There was a time, when I was briefly close to death, that a kind of blessed completeness replaced all normal perceptions, and I knew that my life, full as it was of things undone, loose ends, plans unfulfilled, goodbyes unsaid, could be laid down just as it was, and it would be all right. Not merely okay, but right – as it should be. The way would hold all that had been, and this life that had been mine would be completed, perfectly. There was nothing whatever wrong; it was all safer than I could have ever imagined.

This morning, very gently but suddenly, in the midst of practice, I knew this to be true not just in the immediate presence of death. This sense returned in open awareness, complete and sure, that everything – everything – is safe in the end, in the way, in the ground itself. There is truly nothing whatever to worry about. Not even death. Especially not death.

Curiosity and glory

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I think sometimes we are in danger – I know I have been – of undervaluing simple curiosity. I love to – and don’t often enough – come to practice full of curiosity, aching to see what I will find in the stillness.

There was a period in my teens when I went through a fever of discovery – Bertrand Russell, surrealism, the Beat poets, WB Yeats, CG Jung, Charlie Parker, Johnny Griffin, Charlie Byrd – over a period of maybe three or four years. I remember my own first frightened attempts at writing, consumed by curiosity and terror in equal measure. Whatever would I discover? But I couldn’t stop.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

To follow that faint tracing, to find out where it leads – ah, the hunger to follow, see what is there, to see what is. So many times I have been sidetracked, but it is always there: the hunger, the utter delight. It is what draws me back to practice, time and again.

This evening, in the grey light falling over the room I love, I was just threading the edges of breathing when the noises from the road – the road at the end of the long garden, past the other apartments and the hazels and the birch trees – were somehow transfigured. Traffic sounds: shushing, purring, stuttering; voices; dogs’ desultory barking – they all became delicious, rich and nourishing. As sustaining as breath itself, they were a wonderland of sound as intricate as lacework, a mathematics of passing as playful as the squirrels who sometimes chase each other between trees behind the garden. Without touching what I felt I was so grateful, without even knowing the words for it.

In simple stillness – absolutely simple, plain stillness, not in the least special stillness – there are uncountable treasures. Just what is is infinitely precious, unrepeatable, necessary. Not having a reason, the heart cries out at the glory of it.

Be still

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Everything is because of something. Every cause is the effect of a cause. It goes on. That we do know. It goes on. There is no such thing as “the same”.

Time seems to be like this – it is just what we call the succession of things, the order of cause and effect. The night sky is like this too. The unchanging stars are no such thing. They come and go, live and grow, change and die, and the star nurseries of the unthinkable nebulae bear more – it’s just that we are such frail and transient scraps of life we don’t see it, outside of the great observatories, the university astrophysics departments.

Jane Hirschfield once said, “Zen pretty much comes down to three things – everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.”

When we pay attention, when we start awake in the midst of the dream, we can see it – and the cold of the vast stellar winds touches for a moment our warmth and our littleness.

We are born to see things, hear things, touch things. Be still.

Among the points of light that come to be, that which does not seems dark; dark to all our senses, dark to all we can think.

Be still. Only in the stillness that underlies thought, that precedes perception, can we see that the glittering changes are the passage of things, like wavelets across the deep pond. The wavelets are water, but the water is boundless. The points of light are only light. All that is, that comes to be and then passes into something else, is. Before  (through, beneath, among) the beings, the ground.

The ground is no thing. Before being, isness. Be still.

Atheism and consciousness

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What is consciousness? This may sound like a simple question but it is not. Consciousness is at once the most obvious and the most difficult thing we can investigate. We seem either to have to use consciousness to investigate itself, which is a slightly weird idea, or to have to extricate ourselves from the very thing we want to study. No wonder philosophers have struggled for millennia with the concept; and for long periods scientists refused even to study it. The good news is that, in the 21st century, ‘consciousness studies’ is thriving. Psychology, biology, and neuroscience have reached the point where they are ready to confront some tricky questions: What does consciousness do? Could we have evolved without it? Is consciousness an illusion? What do we mean by consciousness, anyway?

This does not mean that the mystery has gone away. Indeed, it is as deep as ever. The difference now is that we know enough about the brain to confront the problem head on. How on earth can the electrical firing of millions of tiny brain cells produce this—my private, subjective, conscious experience?

(Susan Blackmore, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction)

In the philosophy of mind, mind–body dualism denotes either the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinct and separable. Thus, it encompasses a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, as well as between subject and object, and is contrasted with other positions, such as physicalism and enactivism, in the mind–body problem.

(Wikipedia)

Confronted with the luminous intricacies of being human, it is easy to see why dualism is so attractive to us. It not only allows us to ignore the issue of how brains might produce consciousness – in this view they don’t, not directly at least – but a separate, detachable, immaterial self can transcend a finite human life span, go off on out-of-body adventures, communicate mind-to-mind, and all manner of other handy things. But what could it be, this supernatural plug-in person? Of what could it be constituted, and by whom or what? How could the data connection function between it and the physical brain? These questions are at least as hard as trying to understand how that brain might give rise to subjective experience – much harder perhaps, it seems to me.

We know from tragic cases of brain injury, disease, and surgical intervention just how profoundly consciousness, and the sense of self, are affected by gross changes to the physical structure of the brain (Blackmore,  ibid., pp. 25ff.). It seems obvious to me then, as a layman, that my own subjectivity is, after all, a result – however subtle – of electrochemical processes within my own nervous system, and that when those processes cease, as they will when I die, so that subjectivity will cease also.

But this is not a crude oversimplification, nor a bad thing in itself. It is just how things are, to the best of our understanding. The human brain is a structure of mind-boggling intricacy (it is estimated that there are around 86 billion neurons in the average brain, each neuron of which connects to about 1,000 others). It seems to me entirely feasible that the human personality and consciousness could arise from such vast computing power. But how this comes about remains, still, the mystery.

I take it to be axiomatic, therefore, that our notions of meaning, morality, and value presuppose the actuality of consciousness (or its loss) somewhere. If anyone has a conception of meaning, morality, and value that has nothing to do with the experience of conscious beings, in this world or in a world to come, I have yet to hear of it. And it would seem that such a conception of value could hold no interest for anyone, by definition, because it would be guaranteed to be outside the experience of every conscious being, now and in the future.

The fact that the universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character in this moment—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in the first place. Although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our being itself. That doesn’t leave much scope for conventional religious beliefs, but it does offer a deep foundation for a contemplative life. Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly or not discovered at all.

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

This is one of the things that contemplative practice so clearly demonstrates: all that we know, or feel, or perceive, takes place in consciousness. In choiceless awareness all things can be seen directly to arise in consciousness: the rising and falling of my chest, the warm cooing of the wood pigeons in the trees behind the garden, an idea for a blog post, the grumble of a bus leaving the stop outside the gate, the ache in my knee. All these and more appear in consciousness – where else could they appear? – and my only connection with them is in that appearing. Even the ones that affect me directly, like the breeze through the open window, that is beginning to cool as evening comes on, I only know about as their effects on me – my cooling skin – appear in my awareness.

To remain still, not seeking or holding, within the bright field of awareness, the isness of all that arises in my mind is not other than the isness of things in themselves: the open ground in which things arise, and pass.

Finding out for yourself…

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What [spiritual] people have realized is one of the best secrets of life: let your self go. If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person. That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul, or in anything supernatural.

Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

I have come to realise with increasing clarity over the last few years that Dennett’s definition of spirituality here applies with equal force to spiritual institutions. To the extent that they – churches and most other religious systems and associations – consist in the belief in an immortal soul, and its relation to a supernatural world and its beings, mediated by means of myth and dogma, their necessity to the spiritual life itself is no more than an appearance.

(I have occasionally been moved to wonder if the reason why religions seem sometimes to offer safe haven to the contemplative is not in order to maintain control. A domesticated mysticism is so much less worrying than the wild kind.)

My journey to this place has been more hesitant and less clear-sighted than I would have wished, I admit. I don’t wish to make excuses for this, though I find an unexpected ally, perhaps, in Jiddu Krishnamurti, when he writes:

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.

I sometimes find that choiceless awareness itself – that still awareness that lies at the centre of our practice – does lead to a kind of hesitancy, or at least to the appearance of hesitancy. All we can honestly do is try to remain open in stillness; perceiving, rather than knowing, what is.

I’ve been thinking…

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(With apologies to Daniel Dennett)

Sitting quietly in what best seems called – in Krishnamurti’s phrase – “choiceless awareness” involves

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…  (Toni Bernhard)

Now of course “whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness” can often not be the sound of traffic on the road at the end of the garden, or the calls of the jackdaws settling down for the evening under the roof of the old water tower, nor even the slight discomfort in one’s left knee, but some thought, profound or (usually) pointless. And then the temptation is to follow the thought: to begin to cogitate, or ruminate, to calculate. What to do about it?

In some systems of meditation thoughts can be overlaid with a mantra (the nembutsu for instance) to which the attention is transferred, thus allowing the thought to die away naturally. The problem here is not only that the mantra will supplant open awareness itself, but that a mantra has content. It means something. Inevitably it has a religious context, and drags all manner of baggage in its wake. (The nembutsu involves the name of Amida Buddha, and the myths around Amida, and the several Amidist philosophies, and so on and on.)

Another approach is to anchor attention solidly, usually to the breath, not allowing it to stray. But then once more our open awareness has been replaced with focused attention, the quiet engagement of awareness with whatever is, that is central to our practice, replaced with a muscular effort of will.

But of course a thought is only another object of awareness. When we hear the blackbird singing in the hazels at the back of the garden his voice forms the object of our awareness – a response in the auditory cortex in our temporal lobes – and choiceless awareness would leave it at that. So with the thought. If we can leave it as just another object of awareness, rather than as the beginning of a train of thought, and return to the breath, the next object – a sound outside, a breath, a rumble in the tummy, another breath – that is all that is needed. And if we fail? Well, the train of thought we’ve just boarded is only another object of attention, and then we can return to the creak of the trees, the solidity of the floor, the quiet changes that pass, just what is…

Road songs

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Since my teens I’ve loved the idea of the road song – music that you play to accompany driving, that somehow measures out the miles in bars and choruses, but is not (probably) about the travelling in itself.

I’ve been blogging on one platform or another since 2005; for four or five years before that I kept a website where I regularly published something like this kind of episodic writing. At one point, and I honestly can’t remember when, it occurred to me that all these bits of (mainly) prose were something like my own road songs, much more than considered accounts of anything. Consequently, they’re not autobiographical as such; they don’t tell a connected story, but are more in the nature of snatches of music heard in passing.

Lately I’ve been trying harder to be honest about some of the tentative conclusions I come across along the way, but I know that knowing is not as easy as that. AC Grayling:

One can believe a true proposition and have a justification for doing so, but the justification can be the wrong one for holding that belief. For example: suppose you believe that Fred is in the next room because you heard Fred’s favourite tune being strummed on Fred’s peculiar-sounding guitar. Fred is indeed in the next room, so your belief is true; but he has taught a friend to strum his favourite tune on his peculiar guitar, and it is the friend strumming. Your justification for holding this true belief is therefore not the right justification in the circumstances. So if you claim to know that Fred is in the next room on the basis of the evidence you employ to justify that claim, you cannot be said to know that Fred is there; you only or merely believe that he is. And very often, indeed, our beliefs are merely beliefs because the justification for them is insufficient to make that belief amount to knowledge.

Human consciousness is not – well, mine isn’t, anyway – so coherent a thing, or so independent of the objects of its perceptions, as to allow me to say, “This is what I think,” and have done with it. Susan Blackmore, in her luminous and heartwarming book Zen and the Art of Consciousness, writes:

At any time in a human brain there are multiple parallel processes going on, conjuring up perceptions, thoughts, opinions, sensations and volitions. None of these is either in or out of consciousness for there is no such place. Most of the time there is no observer: if consciousness is involved at all it is an attribution made later, on the basis of remembering events and assuming that someone must have been experiencing them in the past, when in fact no one was…

Even more interesting will be to understand the basis of those special moments in which one asks ‘Am I conscious now?’ or ‘Who am I?’ I suspect that these entail a massive integration of processes all over the brain and a corresponding sense of richer awareness. These probably occur only rarely in most people, but contribute disproportionately to our idea of ‘what it’s like to be me’. This kind of rich self-awareness may happen more of the time, and more continuously, for those who practise mindfulness. Does it completely disappear in those who transcend it?

To be still, not interfering – not even to ask Blackmore’s questions – allows something odd to happen, it seems to me. The “multiple parallel processes” appear to settle out, like sediment in a disturbed pond. Some sort of clarity supervenes: the layers of the mind rearrange themselves, perhaps, to continue with the metaphor, and the sense of a sequence, or progress, of events is replaced with something else, that is like the patterning of sunlight on the wavelets across the pond. Jiddu Krishnamurti:

When there is no illusion the “what is” is most sacred. Now let’s look at what actually is. At a given moment the “what is” may be fear, or utter despair, or a fleeting joy. These things are constantly changing. And also there is the observer who says, “These things all change around me, but I remain permanent”. Is that a fact, is that what really is? Is he not also changing, adding to and taking away from himself, modifying, adjusting himself, becoming or not becoming? So both the observer and the observed are constantly changing. What is is change. That is a fact. That is what is.

All that happens is that the stillness allows what is to appear, that’s all. The road disappears; the road songs go on changing, and yet somewhere there is something steady. Wieland Samolak:

When I was a teenager I used to sit on an empty field listening for hours to the sounds of distant cars, railroads, helicopters, and other motorized objects. These sounds, which are very rough and noisy when they are near, attracted me from the distance because they had merged and diffused into a continuum when they reached my ears. By this experience it came to my mind that it is more satisfying for me to listen to continuous changes within one sound than to the combinations of discrete sonic events usually found in music.

Just noticing what is – whatever appears in the field of consciousness, without having to label it or evaluate it, without having to either focus one’s attention on it or wrench one’s attention away from it – is perhaps the freshest, most peaceful thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to: what is, is, and there’s nothing that needs to be done about it.

Just noticing…

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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.

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

Earlier this year I wrote:

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 from a mountain hut.

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, and perhaps to ‘fess up to doing it on a regular basis. Maybe someone has to…