Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, from ‘Signs of the Unseen’, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2024:

Ever since humans have had reason, both artists and mystics have been asking some variant of the following questions: What if what I see is not all there is? What if just beyond the limit of my senses there’s a whole other world, and what if that world has something important to teach us? In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James called this something “the Reality of the Unseen.” The Greek philosopher Anaximander called it apeiron, “the indistinct,” and identified it as the unifying, generative principle of all that we experience. In Zen we’d call it mind. My first Zen teacher, borrowing from Teilhard de Chardin, called it the ground of being.

“I don’t know what it is, but I know it is in me,” Whitman says, tiptoeing his way toward wisdom. And whatever it is, he adds, it’s untamed, untranslatable, without name—and then he names it: happiness. But this is no ordinary happiness. It’s not merely good fortune, nor is it subject to chance. It includes form, union, plan, eternal life. Taoism refers to it as the natural order of things, the eternal Tao.

The Tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

(Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation)

…This is why, amid so much that needs our attention, that needs our care, our work, our involvement, some of us stop and not do for a while. This is why we sit hour after hour focusing our attention on just one thing—the breath, a question, an image, a sound—diligently unnaming all the multiple things. So we can love them. So we can protect them the way we protect ourselves. We fiercely guard stillness and silence so we can guard that which in our to-doing gets lost or overlooked. We let go of thoughts so we can remember what we so easily forget. Yet paradoxically, it’s through forgetting that we remind ourselves of the unseen. It’s through the conscious, deliberate forgetting of names and forms and opinions and preferences that we recall what’s always been there, hidden just below the surface of our busy, clattering minds. (The Pali word sati, mindfulness, means to recall or bring to mind.) We could call this type of practice remembrance by forgetting or, in the language of the Tao Te Ching, attaining through nondoing. Its prerequisite: a cordoning off of our attention, a cloistering of our senses.

Sometimes I find myself hungry for this “cloistering” – so hungry it’s almost a physical sensation. One of the Desert Fathers, Abba Moses, is reported to have said, “Sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” Everything? That’s the thing, that’s the hunger, only if it is that then it is no thing, and that is more than the human heart can hold.

There is an odd passage in the Old Testament Book of Job that almost nails this strange and awful hunger:

“And after my skin has been destroyed,
    yet in my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see him
    with my own eyes—I, and not another.
    How my heart yearns within me!”

(Job 19:26-27 NIV)

I remember that once, in my early twenties, during a life not characterised by what a religious person might think of as “holiness”, I was suddenly struck one afternoon by the sense that if I were just to sit quietly enough for a while, in sufficient solitude, the doors of perception might swing open, and I would be confronted with the “Reality of the Unseen”; that which is no thing, the ground of being itself. Oddly enough, for someone who had been happy to experiment with psychedelics, I was terrified. This, I intuited, might turn out to be real; once seen, maybe, it might be impossible to unsee. Maybe, even more likely perhaps, it would unmake “me” altogether.

This is all at least slightly unnerving, of course, even at this remove of years. It’s odd to think of it, but there may be a real insight here. Maybe “forcing” the doors of perception (as one tries to do with any serious use of psychedelics, after all) is a bad idea, and maybe concentrated contemplative practice of any kind, without years of gradual work, really does carry mortal danger for the unprepared. Goddard again (I’d recommend reading her whole excellent essay):

[M]y longing got me thinking that maybe we use our knowledge and certainty as buffers. Maybe they’re our protection against taking in too much reality too quickly. So maybe it’s good that practice takes so long, that we generally see so piecemeal. We’re certain until we’re not, and then we go looking for a bit of ground to stand on. Slowly, tentatively, we take a step and then another, and we see a little more of what we couldn’t see before. Then we get cocky and become certain again—until we’re not, and then we take another step. And little by little, we walk ourselves into waking.