Tag Archives: stillness

One Mind

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[D]o not let the idea that your body will scatter into the four elements make you feel that everything is pointless. Instead, you should understand the principle that everything continuously scatters and then gathers together again. Practitioners do not see this world as futile, because they realize that the very impermanence of the world enables them to awaken to the truth.

If you think that, in order to know the Buddha-dharma, you have to throw away your body because the flesh is worthless, then this is an extremely misguided thought. If there was no body, what could you see and hear with? How could you encounter the world, how could you think, how could you broaden your wisdom?

Because the son exists, you can know that the father also exists; through the existence of the servant, you can see that the master exists. By understanding visible phenomena, you can come to know the invisible essence, the non-material foundation, that gives rise to and animates all visible phenomena, and which always works together as one with all things. The body is not an eternal entity, but because you have a body, you can know the workings of the foundation, the source of life and all phenomena.

Daehaeng, One Mind: Principles

Open awareness, the still acceptance of our intrinsic nature in silence, quietly reveals that the ground of being, the very foundation of all that is, is not other than itself. We do not somehow land on the ground of being like metaphysical helicopters: we exist, so we are not other than that from which we arise. There is nothing to find, nothing to become. We are already that open, bright and boundless space within which all things become.

Unseen water

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Gill Pennington, writing in The Friend, quotes John O’Donohue:

The spirit of a time is an incredibly subtle, yet hugely powerful force. And it is comprised of the mentality and spirit of all individuals together. Therefore, the way you look at things is not simply a private matter. Your outlook actually and concretely affects what goes on. When you give in to helplessness, you collude with despair and add to it. When you take back your power and choose to see the possibilities for healing and transformation, your creativity awakens and flows to become an active force of renewal and encouragement in the world. In this way, even in your own hidden life, you can become a powerful agent of transformation in a broken, darkened world.

Absent a theistic metaphysics of prayer, I have often been puzzled how to explain to myself, let alone anyone else, my persistent sense that there really is some point to the contemplative life beyond the sort of solipsistic self-improvement promised by some of the more widely advertised meditation apps. O’Donohue has nailed it, and I am grateful to Gill Pennington for the passage she quoted in her Thought for the Week in The Friend.

Being fully present to all we encounter in this moment as it is, rather than as we might wish, or fear, it to be, we are present as aerials, signs, receiving stations. Even, perhaps especially, in “[our] own hidden life”, we  become a source of healing and peace. Hiddenness itself, the hiddenness of practice, of silence and stillness, comes like unseen water to a dry land.

Where we live

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Where we live is now, this moment. There is no getting away from it, by all appearances. Memories are events in present consciousness that represent things we once experienced: they have no more vital connection to time past than an artist’s sketch does to its subject. Similarly plans and worries are merely mental representations of imagined futures: they may affect how we react to events in the future, but we cannot know what those events will be till they happen.

So much of our lives are lived among these dreams, and yet they take place now, not in the remembered past nor in the imagined future. All our practice takes place now, as well, and its purpose is to stay still in now. There are sounds from the street, the gulls overhead, the thoughts that represent things, and the ones that don’t – they come and then pass There is nothing else to do, no other place to go. Just sitting still is all – nothing is outside now.

“If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?” – Eihei Dōgen

Binding and Loosing

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Words can be slippery things, but they have more power to change things than we often give them credit for. Take the word “religion” for instance. The first two definitions the Oxford Dictionary offers are, “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods” and “a particular system of faith and worship.”

Contemplation, “a form of… prayer or meditation in which a person seeks to pass beyond mental images and concepts to a direct experience of the divine” (sense 5) is, obviously, at least potentially at odds with “religion”. That “direct experience” might not be of “a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.” It might not fit into the doctrines of “a particular system of faith and worship.” This has been the problem with contemplatives for millennia. Time and again they have broken away from state churches on the one hand and politico-religious revolutions on the other, sometimes forming loose communities and sometimes not, and have retreated from formal organisation almost altogether, at least at the beginning. Examples are as diverse as the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt and Syria around the 4th century AD, the Pure Land-derived schools of Buddhism (Jōdo-shū, Jōdo Shinshū) founded by Honen and Shinran in 12th and 13th century Japan, and the Quakers in 17th century England.

The word “secular” is defined (sense 1) as, “not connected with religious or spiritual matters.” Now, this is slightly problematical, as Sam Harris points out in Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion. He writes

Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit… many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition.

I do not share their semantic concerns. Yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term—apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative—with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.

It seems to me that we are (well I am at least) coming to a crossroads, exacerbated and given an added sense of urgency, as with so many other things, by the current pandemic. For many of us, even if we are not contemplatives as such, a system of faith and worship based on the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God set over against his creation, no longer describes our experience. Over the past year, many of us, bereft of conventional (or unconventional) worship, especially those of us who have resisted the distracting simulacra of Zoom church, have found ourselves sinking further into a direct experience of – what? Grace? Mercy? A stillness and a strength far beyond our own resources or imagination? All of those, perhaps. What are we to name it?

Lenorë Lambert writes of a secular dharma, based on an openness to all sources, but guided especially by the Pali Canon, an emphasis on practice, and accessibility to “anyone, anywhere, from any background or life circumstance”. The experience of lockdown has shown us (some of us were already getting the idea here and there) that special buildings and rituals, special forms of words, formulations of orthodoxy, scriptural literalisms, and many other aspects of conventional religion, are simply not required baggage on the spiritual path. Yes, we can learn from them – and often we will need to learn from them – but we are not beholden to them, as though we couldn’t walk without them.

Of course such attitudes will threaten many of our erstwhile co-religionists, and we owe them great courtesy and care as we move along our own paths. But the ground of being lies beneath all that is, and holds us all in being, whatever words we use for it. May we be true, gently, to what we find.

Straight and Level

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In her recently published book on the secular dharma, The Buddha for Modern Minds: a non-religious guide to the Buddha and his teachings, Lenorë Lambert writes, on dealing with the problem of instinctive reactivity,

The challenge is to bring mindfulness… to this process so that we can see the mechanics of our own dramas being created. However, our mind takes the shape of what we rest it on. So being with the unpleasant process we’ve whipped up here makes us feel … unpleasant. We react by avoiding it somehow. Instead, we need to learn to hold our seat in discomfort, to be with it. Think of a rider on a horse-in-training. The horse is skittish and scared of the new experience of having a human on its back. It’s flighty and it bucks.

A skilled rider can hold their seat, that is, stay in the saddle, even though the horse is bucking around. Psychologists call this ‘distress tolerance’, the willingness to experience discomfort rather than ‘act out’ (do something ineffective out there in the world… to get rid of the unpleasantness).

Lambert, Lenorë. The Buddha for Modern Minds: a non-religious guide to the Buddha and his teachings (p. 154). Flourish Press. Kindle Edition.

My own unsought image for the process has long been that of the World War II torpedo bomber pilot, whose job it was to hold his aircraft straight and level, at a precisely determined height low over the water, come what may, until he reached the release point, a few hundred yards from the target. Regardless of anti-aircraft fire from the target ship and her escorts, regardless of enemy aircraft attacking from above, regardless of shell-splashes endangering his aircraft, he held his course. Frequently an aircraft, if it made it to the release point and pressed home the attack, would be so badly damaged it never made it back safely to base.

There have been times in my life, as there are in anyone’s, when some such image as this has been the aptest to come to mind. But distress tolerance has another, far quieter side, that too easily remains unseen. To stay still, in the midst of turmoil and loss, to sit with it, often seems a rare gift in our present time. In the March 1 issue of Friends Journal, Tricia Gates Brown writes,

Sprawled on handmade quilts in a grassy orchard, sharing an outdoor, physically distanced visit with my friend Karen under purple pear and transparent apple trees, I am nowhere near a desert. My Willamette Valley farm home is more Edenic than it is barren, devoid, or austere. Yet when Karen, a spiritual director, asks, “Where are the voices teaching us how to be in the desert?,” she put words to a question my heart has been formulating for weeks. We had been cringing at the online events of COVID season: Zoom video conferencing preschool for her daughter; Zoom outdoor school for my fifth-grade goddaughter; Zoom dinner parties; Zoom yoga; Zoom reunions; online plays; online church. We are zooming out.

Am I the only one who wonders if all this screen-staring and cyber-connection replaces anything at all? Real face-to-face connection is irreplaceable. Or who wonders if our online stand-ins are sometimes making us more off-kilter, keeping us from doing the work that might nourish us in this time? …

What if instead of grasping to fill the void, we embraced it? What if we settled deeply enough into this void, this desert, to learn what it has to teach? What if we recognized the powerful, metaphorical spiritual stage of the desert and that many of us are in it? …

It may sound heretical to suggest this: perhaps we should dive fully into this new desert and coach others on being there. Maybe we should stop trying to replace what cannot be replaced: school, social lives, organized groups, church, classes. Some might un-school the kids for a year; learn how to foster well-being while being alone; plumb deeply the question, “Who am I?”; take a full-on sabbatical from training and from organized sacred rituals…

The desert of the heart is an interior solitude, a place of healing as well as of grieving, a straight and level place amid the flying debris of so much that has seemed stable and dear, our “normal” lives. Our practice is our compass. Without it we are lost. Whether insight meditation, the Nembutsu, Centering Prayer or whatever we have found to be our path, this feels more than ever to be a time to sit with it, in the void that was our accustomed selves, and watch…

Silence

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I have loved silence as much as or more than I have loved music – and of course music is only what it is by virtue of the silence that comes with it, both the kind you can write down, that is threaded all through it, and the kind that underlies it, an open ground beneath the whole structure of sound.

Contrary to our common imagination, our solar system, and the space beyond our heliosphere, is bathed and criss-crossed with unheard, magnetic sounds, that can can even be converted to audio waves that we can hear with our human ears. ClassicFM has some samples, and NASA too has shared some from much further away in the depths of interstellar space. But under these too is silence: a silence bright with starlight and seamed with barely imaginable gravitational waves.

The fertile stillness that silence is seems very close to the dark transparency that sometimes one can touch in contemplation. It seems to me that in contemplation perhaps all we are doing is stripping away the accretions of thought and habit, draining the mind’s default mode that tries to fill our resting moments with its lowest common denominator daydreams. All that we are, all we have come from, rests in the ground of being itself, and it may be that we can touch the edge of that ground itself in silence, in the resting place between breaths, or the quiet of sitting still.

Ground Swell

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In almost all types of contemplative practice that depend upon a simple quietness, whether Centering Prayer, vipassana meditation, zazen according to the Sōtō Zen tradition, or whichever, there is a sense that comes to arise of an open field of attention, not unlike a crystalline expanse within, or coterminous with, the visual field (whether one’s eyes are open or closed). Keeping still, it is apparent that this clear space, the ground of one’s consciousness, is not other than the ground from which things appear – sense perceptions, thoughts, emotions, whatever – and pass. Somehow it cannot be different from the ground of becoming itself.

There is a line from the Heart Sutra, “Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness” that expresses the quality of this perception better than anything else I’ve read. And yet this realisation, if that’s the word, like the practice within which it occurs, is not a religious thing at all. Sam Harris writes,

I have long argued that confusion about the unity of religions is an artifact of language. Religion is a term like sports: Some sports are peaceful but spectacularly dangerous (“free solo” rock climbing); some are safer but synonymous with violence (mixed martial arts); and some entail little more risk of injury than standing in the shower (bowling). To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical attributes required to do it. What do all sports have in common apart from breathing? Not much. The term religion is hardly more useful.

The same could be said of spirituality. The esoteric doctrines found within every religious tradition are not all derived from the same insights. Nor are they equally empirical, logical, parsimonious, or wise. They don’t always point to the same underlying reality—and when they do, they don’t do it equally well. Nor are all these teachings equally suited for export beyond the cultures that first conceived them…

Of course, it is true that specific Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystics have had experiences similar to those that motivate Buddhism and Advaita, but these contemplative insights are not exemplary of their faith. Rather, they are anomalies that Western mystics have always struggled to understand and to honor, often at considerable personal risk. Given their proper weight, these experiences produce heterodoxies for which Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been regularly exiled or killed.

Harris, Sam. Waking Up (pp. 19-20, 22). Transworld. Kindle Edition.

The pause in religious communities coming together for worship caused by the current pandemic is widely touted as making a permanent difference to church attendance, and to the conduct of public worship in future months and years (Zoom worship, blended online and in-person services, and so forth) but for me at least it has had a far more fundamental effect. I have come to realise, as I wrote recently on The Mercy Blog, that “In this period of quiet settling, separated from the religious atmosphere and bustle of corporate worship, I have begun to sense that the ‘social-cultural system’ of religion is something quite separate from the ‘experimental faith’ (cf. Quaker faith & practice 19.02) of contemplative practice, and crucially, the one does not depend upon the other.”

This blog is intended, at least in part, to chart that exploration.