Tag Archives: stillness

When there is nothing left

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One of the strangest realisations of contemplative practice is that the closest place to the truth is when everything is broken. Really. When the thing you thought you could never survive is upon you, when the last thing you could rely on has given way under your feet, then you can see what is actually there. Until the bridge breaks beneath you, you have no idea what is really going on at all. You have your plans, you have your resources, you have your own strength and your courage; until you don’t. Until the worst happens. And then you are free. Oliver Burkeman:

This is the point at which you enter the sacred state the writer Sasha Chapin refers to as “playing in the ruins.”

In his twenties, Chapin recalls, his definition of a successful life was that he should become a celebrated novelist, on a par with David Foster Wallace. When that didn’t happen—when his perfectionistic fantasies ran up against his real-world limitations—he found it unexpectedly liberating. The failure he’d told himself he couldn’t possibly allow to occur had, in fact, occurred, and it hadn’t destroyed him. Now he was free to be the writer he actually could be. When this sort of confrontation with limitation takes place, Chapin writes, “a precious state of being can dawn. . . . You’re not seeing the landscape around you as something that needs to transform. You’re just seeing it as the scrapyard it is. And then you can look around yourself and say, OK, what is actually here, when I’m not telling myself constant lies about what it’s going to be one day?”

When there is nothing left, the way opens. Only when you can sit still in the ruins of all you had lived for, and see what is actually there, can you begin to wake up at last.

The promise of the end of suffering is the hook that we grab on to, and for a long time after we’ve begun to practice we try to maintain our personal fantasy of what exactly that end of suffering is going to look like. But it doesn’t end up looking like what we expect—or what we want.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

All this sounds like very bad news, but in truth it is the best news possible. When what is not is gone, when our hopes and our fears turn out to be the same thing in the end, then we can see that what is is, in Thomas Merton’s words, the “little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty” that is iness itself, the open ground. And that, perhaps, is why we practice.

About time

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Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

Real meditation isn’t something you do; it’s something you cease to do… it is the freedom to notice what is already here… What is there to notice, right now, that matters? What’s available to your powers of attention, in this moment, that is important – or even sacred? … Meditation is simply noticing what is real, as a matter of experience, now and always – but always, and only, now.

Sam Harris, from a recorded talk on Waking Up

“Self” is not a single thing in a thousand guises; it is a word for the thousand guises themselves. To understand the “self” is to understand the usage of the word within the full range of its seeming contradictory manifestations. Now it’s this, now it’s that. Only when we try to grasp an essence or assert the priority of one aspect of self-experience over another do we find ourselves entangled in philosophical brambles with very real emotional thorns. Wittgenstein repeatedly said that the job of philosophy is not to answer questions like these, but to dissolve them, to show that they are nothing but pseudo-problems thrown up by particular aspects of our language. In taking this approach to what had traditionally been seen as intractable metaphysical conundrums, Wittgenstein, I believe, comes the closest of any Western philosopher to Zen.

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide

The thing about the self is that it is, as Wittgenstein pointed out, another substantive noun – like time – that can lead us to mistake the word for the substance. Time does not contain, or somehow lead to, the succession of experience: it is that successive experiencing. The self does not experience a succession of events: it is the experience. To sit still is to see this unfold, in real time.

The unfolding is the sacred moment itself. As Harris points out in his talk, it would be easy to be misled by what appears to be religious language here; but the sacredness of the moment resides not in some imported framework of belief that conditions, or interprets, or redeems the time. It is sacred because it is real. It is all that can be real – all else is a memory of time past, or an anticipation of time future; and these are only dreams. The world of speculation is empty, as empty as the idea of a self. The one end is only present; it is all that is real.

Happy New Year!

No one to blame

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I’m always a bit skeptical when people talk about the increasing interest in Buddhism and the numbers of people appreciating the dharma and turning to meditation. It’s like the first week of a romance. When you first fall in love with someone—even if that person has purple hair and all kinds of what we call “extraordinary embellishments”—there’s just the feeling of love. You don’t see the blemishes; you see only the good things.

Yes, meditation and being calm and peaceful and loving, and generating compassion and doing good for others, and being more aware—these are all very good! But in the initial romantic stage, you may be looking through rose-tinted glasses. After that, you will see the hard work involved, hard work that will be done by nobody but you. This is why interest in Buddhism increases at first and then dips—and this dip is steep, because hard work will never make Buddhism very popular.

Moreover, Buddhism is the only philosophy that doesn’t have anyone to ascribe blame to but oneself for what’s wrong. Nor is there anyone but oneself responsible for producing what is good. To be put on the spot like this is not always seen as favorable by the human mind. Our cultures, social upbringing, and the design of our world condition us to hold some person or people or circumstance responsible for our situation. We have politicians to blame; we have God and the prophets, religious masters, and original sin to blame. We have many things to blame, including karma. It is very difficult to come to the point at which you see that blame is not actually logical—that everything depends on you, yourself.

Mindrolling Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche, writing in Tricycle Magazine

Every so often I find myself longing to be able to hand over the responsibility for walking this path to someone else – divine or human – who could absolve me of the weight of all this moral, intentional, intellectual hard work. A religion would be such a comfort. And yet…

The longer I seem to be able to try to follow this way, the less it does seem to be someone’s responsibility, either mine or God’s. Yes, as Khandro Rinpoche says here, there is no one else; but responsibility, in the sense of being the one to make it work? It’s inevitable that the ego, the left-brained, thinking self, will want to take responsibility, absent someone else to lean on – but the “executive self” can’t do it, can’t even see that there is a path. Only by keeping still, by watching to see what happens – of itself – can the busy little mind be persuaded to give up. Giving the whole process names, and hence regulations, is the root of the religious impulse itself, it seems to me.

I do wonder sometimes if we aren’t going through some kind of unseen spiritual revolution at the moment. Yes, the great religions appear to be flourishing – except when they’re not –  and the purveyors of slick solutions appear to thrive, but under the radar a good deal of quiet, hidden, patient practice seems to be going on. It’s invidious to draw direct parallels, but I am often reminded of the Desert Fathers and Mothers; not in their asceticism, but in their rejection of compromise and expedience in favour of interior silence and continual practice. Who knows where this is going? But that doesn’t matter – where it is going is just the flow of the stream in its bed; this is not the time for dreams and plans, but for emptiness and quiet.

Outside the window as I write this it is dark, but pinpoints of light from the road, and across the yard by the old reservoir, prick the blackness. At this distance they can’t be seen to illuminate anything, but the little lights are there in their own brightness. It seems very still. There is nothing to do but watch.

Not knowing, intimacy, mystery—all are words that convey a simple, yet profound, openness to the moment without any attempt to master, control, or understand it.

Barry Magid, Ending The Pursuit Of Happiness, with thanks to What’s Here Now

To sit still in winter

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Today, in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s Winter Solstice, a day variously to reflect on the past year, to celebrate the season’s turning from darkness towards the light of the coming summer, and to draw together in the warmth we humans have learned to make against the long cold. It is tempting to locate its origins in the Last Glacial Maximum, when our ancestors must have been so acutely aware of their fragility in the face of the huge weight of time and climate that bore down on them, and sought with such longing for an assurance of this turning season.

Today is also the day the United Nations has set aside as World Meditation Day, celebrated for the first time this year. (Jochen Weber, writing for the Secular Buddhist Network, has an excellent and well-linked reflection on their website.)

Meditation, as far as we can tell from historical research, has been practised in something like its present form for at least 5000 years; the Winter Solstice has been celebrated, in ways we can recognise, at Neolithic sites like Newgrange and Slieve Gullion for roughly the same length of time.

To sit still in winter, to wait for the season’s turning, to watch for the coming of the light, must be one of the deepest instincts of humanity, going far back into the beginnings of our species, perhaps even of our old, old relatives from before we modern humans appeared. Sitting in my warm, lamplit room this evening I felt for a moment part of all this, no different from the long succession of humankind whose DNA still sings in my own blood; and something in me was thankful, in a way I hadn’t imagined, for warmth and life, and for the sweet succession of generations of women and men who have watched, just as I do, for the light.

Coming to be

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Time is things coming to be, that is all. It moves, or so it seems to us, in the patterning and unpatterning that is life and death. All we are ourselves is just this coming to be; bright patterns on the river surface, flickering for a few or many moments and then gone in a swirl, or settling gently back to the quiet of some pool under the dappled shade.

How could it be otherwise? How could we be master of our fate, we who are nothing but the moments of what happens to be? What could be happier than to see that we are free at last from the menacing years and the straitened gates, free to be all that we have come to be, and nothing more?

Sitting quietly by the window, in the light of the little lamp across the room, there isn’t anything but this stillness, this peace without seeking. This, for now, is all there is, and all there needs to be. What else could it be?

[The second paragraph is an answer of sorts to William Ernest Henley’s poem ‘Invictus’, from which I have borrowed some images.]

Sitting by the window in the dusk

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Sitting by the window in the dusk this evening, I kept being drawn back to listen to the rain. It connected itself somehow to my breath, drifted between patches of thought, drew me back to itself softly – trickling in the guttering, pattering in the trees, the shush and splash of tyres out on the road.

Pema Chödrön, writing in Lion’s Roar:

One of my favorite subjects of contemplation is this question: “Since death is certain, but the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?” You know you will die, but you really don’t know how long you have to wake up from the cocoon of your habitual patterns. You don’t know how much time you have left to fulfill the potential of your precious human birth. Given this, what is the most important thing?

Every day of your life, every morning of your life, you could ask yourself, “As I go into this day, what is the most important thing? What is the best use of this day?” At my age, it’s kind of scary when I go to bed at night and I look back at the day, and it seems like it passed in the snap of a finger. That was a whole day? What did I do with it? Did I move any closer to being more compassionate, loving, and caring — to being fully awake? Is my mind more open? What did I actually do? I feel how little time there is and how important it is how we spend our time…

If you take some time to formally practice meditation, perhaps in the early morning, there is a lot of silence and space. Meditation practice itself is a way to create gaps. Every time you realize you are thinking and you let your thoughts go, you are creating a gap. Every time the breath goes out, you are creating a gap. You may not always experience it that way, but the basic meditation instruction is designed to be full of gaps. If you don’t fill up your practice time with your discursive mind, with your worrying and obsessing and all that kind of thing, you have time to experience the blessing of your surroundings. You can just sit there quietly. Then maybe silence will dawn on you, and the sacredness of the space will penetrate…

Another powerful way to do pause practice is simply to listen for a moment. Instead of sight being the predominant sense perception, let sound, hearing, be the predominant sense perception. It’s a very powerful way to cut through our conventional way of looking at the world. In any moment, you can just stop and listen intently. It doesn’t matter what particular sound you hear; you simply create a gap by listening intently.

I have come to love the noises through the window where I sit to practice. They are plain, familiar sounds: traffic, birdsong, the wind in the trees along the back of the garden, voices, the odd metallic clang from the yard by the old reservoir… Early in the morning, or on evenings like this one, they become their own lovely lacework realm of sound, intricate and nourishing, their texture as real as each breath, as the sensations of my body resting on the good floor. What more could one want than what is, in each instant that it’s heard? Everything is here; this precious instant is gift and grace; there is no next or before, and from that all healing springs.

The treasures of the storehouse

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In the past I have all too often found myself caught up frantically in the search for solutions, answers to dilemmas, where to go and what to do. When I was younger I so frequently struck out into uncharted and risky places, unhelpful relationships, odd career moves, simply in order to do something, get somewhere – anywhere – rather than live with uncertainty and indecision.

When I became involved with the Christian contemplative tradition, I encountered for the first time the concept of leaving such things “in God’s hands”; the idea being that in the fullness of time the Holy Spirit would convey the answer to the dilemma, directly or (more likely!) indirectly to the waiting mind. Now there is a very real benefit to be gained by such an approach, regardless of the prescribed methodology. The issue is left in abeyance for the time being, and out of the glare of anxious attention a solution may arise; or else the heart may become reconciled to the lack of one.

Of course there are alternative ways to explain this process to ourselves. “According to the left-brain, right-brain dominance theory, the left side of the brain is considered to be adept at tasks that are considered logical, rational, and calculating. By contrast, the right side of the brain is best at artistic, creative, and spontaneous tasks.” (Eagle Gamma, ‘Left Brain vs. Right Brain: Hemisphere Function’ in Simply Psychology, October 2023) So the problem the left brain has been desperately scratching at is left unsolved, until the patient, creative right brain has done its subtle work.

Needless to say, there is a Buddhist approach as well. Kaira Jewel Lingo, in an extract published in Tricycle Magazine:

These deeper life questions can’t be resolved at the level of the mind but must be entrusted to a different, deeper part of our consciousness. Thay suggests we consider this big question as a seed, plant it in the soil of our mind and let it rest there. Our mindfulness practice in our daily lives is the sunshine and water that the seed needs to sprout so that one day it will rise up on its own, in its own time. And then we’ll know the answer to our question without a doubt.

But we must leave the seed down in the soil of our mind and not keep digging it up to see if it is growing roots. It won’t grow that way! It is the same with a deep and troubling question. We ask our deeper consciousness to take care of it and then let go of our thinking and worrying about it. Then in our daily lives we practice calming, resting, and coming home to ourselves in the present moment, and that will help the seed of our question to ripen naturally and authentically. This process cannot be rushed or forced. It may take weeks, months, or years. But we can trust that the seed is “down there,” being tended to by our deeper consciousness, and one day it will sprout into a clear answer.

In Buddhist psychology this part of our mind is called store consciousness. This is because it has the function of storing our memories and all the various mind states we can experience in latent, sleeping form. For example, maybe you’ve experienced trying to solve a problem or find an answer to something that perplexes you. You think hard and circle round and round in your mind, but you feel you don’t get anywhere. Then you let the question go, and suddenly when you least expect it, inspiration or helpful ideas come to you in a time of rest, and you just know what to do. That is store consciousness operating. It is working on the problem for you while your day-to-day consciousness rests. Store consciousness works in a very natural and easeful way and is much more efficient than our thinking mind. When wisdom arises from store consciousness, it feels right in the body and we no longer have doubts.

But waiting for the answer to arise can be challenging at times, because we may really want to know the answer. We may find ourselves feeling deeply insecure and fearful if we don’t know what to do, which path to choose. We worry we will make the wrong choice, and we catastrophize about what will happen if we take this or that direction. It’s hard to find our way if we continue to feed this worry and fear. We can recognize that we are not helping the situation and stop. Returning to this moment, anchoring ourselves in our body, we will find the solidity of the home inside of us, which is capable of helping us find our way, if only we let it, and if we can let go of trying to figure out the future in our heads.

Whichever way we choose to understand it, the process – which can only take place in the heart’s stillness, whether through the explicit practice of mindfulness or by some analogous means – is profound and trustworthy. In fact, it seems often to be transformative, not only of our own lives but, in a deep and unexpected way, of the lives of those around us.

In an interview, also in Tricycle magazine, the Buddhist LGBT+ pioneer Larry Yang says,

As activists, we can be invested in the goal or specific change. Take your time. Experiment with the teachings yourself and see if they assist you to navigate the complexities and stresses of your own life. Explore for yourself how the impact of the mindfulness and heart practices can influence your work. Please feel invited to exploring freedom through the process, rather than the outcome. Freedom is distinct and different from justice. Working toward justice and equity are indispensable activities to level the disparities that create oppression. However, freedom is not dependent on external circumstances—not even justice. Can we do the difficult and hard work of social justice without our hearts becoming difficult and hard as well? Can we deeply engage with working toward justice from a place of inner freedom within our minds and hearts and use wisdom and compassion as forces to change the world? That is the invitation that I am passionate about exploring for myself…

Creating the stillness in the vortex of our lives helps us to create some sense of calm and tranquility in a world that seems to be crazy with violence and fragmented in its differences and conflicts. As we transform our own experience and relationship to our realities, we cannot help but affect those around us in radiating circles into the larger culture. These moments of freedom and transformation begin to change and elevate the consciousness and awareness of the world.

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.