Tag Archives: unknowing

Radical negation

Solitude and unknowing

Like sight, knowledge depends on an element of duality. Grammar distinguishes the ‘knower’ from ‘the object of knowledge’. Aside from the fact that the Creator of all cannot be any kind of ‘object’, the divine activity of ‘onyng’ [Julian of Norwich] finally removes the ground from under any duality. The soul’s ‘solitude’ is not necessarily a denial of divine presence; when it is united with God, there are not two beings to count. Peace and holiness are ‘held at no remove’, as John [of the Cross] says. In so far as the soul speaks at all there, it stammers, tripping itself up, disrupting its own saying.

Apophatic teachers therefore use the language of unknowing to mean something that is the opposite of blank ignorance. It signifies both an emptiness, an absence of anything that the mind can catch and hold on to, and also a fullness or excess – the heart and mind so filled with the vivid and dynamic life of God that there is no space or time left over as a ground for observation. The cloud of unknowing is not the same thing as God or union; it is a place of vulnerability where the divine may meet us. The beloved is sometimes present in the Shulamite’s chamber but sometimes there is only crushing absence there. We may climb to the top of the mountain but we can’t make God be there for us: that is a matter for grace.

JP Williams, Seeking the God Beyond: A Beginner’s Guide to Christian Apophatic Spirituality, p.65

It is an odd thing we’ve found here, that we keep finding as our contemplative way unwinds. Language doesn’t desert is so much as it self-deconstructs as soon as we begin to use it of God. We can write of the mystical life – people have been doing it for thousands of years, one way or another; but their words come to bits, always. Hence koans; hence the strange antinomies of the Psalms.

Solitude is inevitable. What matters most is unspeakable, in any normal language. Even to those we love and trust the most we can’t say where we have been. The attempt leaves us floundering in the seashells and spindrift along the shores of speaking, where the waves of Presence have washed us up, breathless and flattened in the sea wind.

The trouble is that we can’t really even think of God, not in any normal way, since discursive thought, like the language it uses to explain itself to itself, slices things up. That may not be too bad when it comes to things (though it can too easily divide what is indivisible) but it fails spectacularly with God, who is no thing. That’s why the author of The Cloud of Unknowing wrote, “Therefore I will leave on one side everything I can think, and choose for my love that thing which I cannot think! Why? Because he may well be loved, but not thought. By love he can be caught and held, but by thinking never.”

God, who is no thing, is not a being: ‘he’ is the very ground of being itself, isness (Istigkeit) before anything is. Only in incarnation can he be touched by us frail things of flesh.

If we are to speak of God

The paradox of active surrender

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“It is the first thing any one has to learn in order to live,” Henry Miller wrote in comparing the art of living to dance, driven by rhythm into which the dancer must relax. “It is extremely difficult, because it means surrender, full surrender.” Surrender, it turns out, is an essential part of testing the limits, which is in turn an essential part of transcending them — in other words, the raw material of creative breakthroughs. But the beautiful term that Jeanette Winterson used to describe the experience of letting art transform us — “the paradox of active surrender” — applies just as aptly to the art of living itself: Paradoxical as it may sound, to stop resisting that which we cannot control is the only choice we have, but it is also one we must actively make in order to transcend our limits.

Maria Popova

“The paradox of active surrender” might almost be another name for the contemplative life itself. The conscious state of illumination (often referred to by Catholic writers as “contemplation” or “infused contemplation” – a different usage to “contemplative practice” as I employ the phrase here) is a gift. It cannot be achieved. It seems to me that intent needs simply to disappear in the practice of contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. But nevertheless the absence of intent, replaced with a simple dwelling in the presence of what is, now, is the only sure way I know of becoming vulnerable and available to awakening, to open objectless awareness.

And yet surrender cannot help but be active in this context: one must intend to sit down, to be still – to surrender – even while one is relinquishing intent itself. The only response to such a paradox is simply unknowing: the embrace, the lingering, longing embrace, of what cannot be known, and yet is.

Part of the mystery

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The solitary is the bearer of the future, of that which is not yet born, of the mystery which lies beyond the circle of lamplight or the edge of the known world. There are some who make raids into this unknown world of mystery and who come back bearing artefacts. These are the creative artists, the poets who offer us their vision of the mystery… But there are also those who make solitude their home, who travel further into the inner desert, from which they bring back few artefacts. These are the contemplatives, those who are drawn into the heart of the mystery. Contemplatives have no function and no ministry. They are in [that] world as a fish is in the sea, to use Catherine of Siena’s phrase, as part of the mystery. That they are necessary is proved by the fact that they exist in all religious traditions. Contemplatives are not as a rule called to activity, they are useless people and therefore little understood in a world that measures everything by utility and cash value. Unlike the poet they do not return bearing artefacts, but remain in the desert, pointing to the mystery, drawing others in.

Eve Baker, Paths in Solitude, pp.10-11

As Steve Taylor writes: “However, awakened people travel lightly and transition easily. They perceive their existence as part of a vast network of being that will continue to flourish without them. They feel that they share their identity with the whole of the network, that something inside them is part of everything else.” The contemplative life is not a one-way relationship, as so often imagined by religious dogma. Sitting still, we find ourselves part of the unknowable ground as waves are part of the ocean: not other, and yet not exactly one with.

To live as part of the mystery, fully aware of our partial and temporary nature, might seem from an observer’s point of view a kind of death. In fact it is in truth a kind of death. The notion of ourselves as finite, detachable entities cannot live long in the desert. That is why we go there, into the desert of the heart. As Eve Baker puts it (ibid.), “The desert to which the solitary is called is not a place, but something that must be there below the surface of ordinary human existence. It is nowhere, a place of thirst…”

So much of this life is apophatic: we find ourselves in a trackless land, unknowing; what we are is no thing: in that we are part of the ground itself, nothing more. What else could we long for?

The actually loved and known

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The contemplative life is not in fact about ideas at all, really. It is far more practical, even down-to-earth, than that. In a sense, the contemplative doesn’t care about constructing a metaphysical framework. What happens is merely experience. When a person enters the stillness of “awakened” consciousness, the rigid boundaries of the self drop away. The immediate, felt reality of that state is precisely one of mutual indwelling.

In that state, we don’t look at nature; we are in nature, and nature is in us. We don’t so much sympathise with another person’s suffering as we experience our existence as continuous with theirs. Charles Williams’ coinherence becomes simply a description of what it actually feels like when the ego’s filtering mechanism relaxes – when Huxley’s doors of perception drift open of themselves.

All that we are consists in our relationship with all that is; not in an abstract sense, but in vital, lived reality. When the boundaries of the self are fully defended, this is no more apparent than the atoms that constitute the hands typing these words; but the function of the contemplative mind is to dissolve those boundaries to little more than a fitful mist across what is. Each one of us is in fact infinitely permeable, and infinitely, intricately conditioned. We reflect each other, and are reflected, like dew drops in a web of uncountable dimensions, bright with the light of the isness from which they emerge. It follows that what each of us does or thinks or feels, in the minutest degree, affects all others, human or otherwise, sentient or not. And so we are ourselves affected, from the least to the farthest.

To know this, and yet to sit still, is in some way the greatest gift. “The ‘pristine awareness’ that is the fundamental ground itself” (Stephen Batchelor) holds all that is, the “ten thousand things” of the ancient Taoists: our sitting in some way brings them into that whole and healing light, despite ourselves. We cannot know it, cannot hold an image of it as we could hold a book or a glass paperweight; and yet unknown, it is most precious; not to be held, it is maybe the gift the world needs.

[*the title is taken from David Jones: “…[F]or only what is actually loved and known can be seen sub specie aeternitatis“]

Process and coinherence

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Prehension is not perception in the ordinary sense, and it is not causation as traditionally imagined. It is the way an event takes account of the world it inherits. Without it, the past would be dead, the present spontaneous, and continuity impossible. To prehend something is to include it in one’s own becoming. This inclusion need not be conscious, deliberate, or even noticeable. It simply means that what has happened contributes to what is happening.

Every actual occasion prehends its predecessors. It does not choose whether to do so. Prehension is mandatory. What is optional is how it prehends…

The past does not act on the present by pushing, transmitting force, or occupying the same space. Instead, the present appropriates the past. Influence travels forward because it is taken up, not because it is imposed.

This replaces external causation with internal relation.

Robert Flix, [AN] Whitehead in Plain English, p.62

Contemplation is an entering, in profoundly open awareness, into the process of prehension. This isn’t a passive reception, an observation only; it is a deliberate participation in, a strengthening of, the relational web between occasions, between things, events and their relations.

This seems to me why contemplatives have so often, especially those practicing within the traditions of a religion, connected the idea of contemplation with intercession, whether in the developed theology of hesychasm, or in Buddhist conceptions of metta or tonglen. Looked at like this, contemplative prayer in its intercessory dimension is not superstition but metaphysics; the practitioner, through their inevitable coinherence with the suffering inherent in existence, prehends the brokenness of things, holding them in the light of unbroken awareness. In effect, the practitioner enters into the suffering as the suffering enters into them: acting as a lightning-rod between what merely is and the ground of being itself – God, if you will allow the term.

In A Little Book of Unknowing, Jennifer Kavanagh writes:

…Faith is not about certainty, but about trust…

We have seen that there is little about which we can be certain. Certainty may be undermined by limitations of the current state of knowledge; the subjective nature of experience; the fluid quality of the material world; or the intervention of unforeseen events. But beyond these aspects of the world about which we often assume knowledge, there is a dimension of life to which rational explanation simply doesn’t apply. Most people would admit that there is much that we cannot apprehend through reason or through the senses. We might know a fact with our brains, but not be able to understand what it means, to fully experience its reality – the age of a star or the trillions of connections within the human brain – some things are too big, too complex, for us to conceive. Einstein, who knew a thing or two about factual knowledge, felt that “imagination is more important than knowledge”. There is a dimension which co-exists with the material, rationally grounded world, is not in opposition to it or threatened by scientific development but happily stands alone in the context of everything else.

Reading Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics seems at last to be providing me with a framework within which I can begin to understand what has always been a deep instinct in my own practice: that it wasn’t merely a solipsistic exercise in self-improvement, but a real work of weight and consequence beyond my own narrow concerns. In a sense, it doesn’t matter of course whether I can explain it to my own or anyone else’s satisfaction; what matters is that it does work, is actual work, in some obscure corner of the healing of things.

Returning

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We still seek wholeness. It is intrinsic to human identity that, however much we have achieved, we are never satisfied. We hunger and thirst for what lies beyond our grasp and even beyond the horizon of our desire. Religion and spirituality, which are less easy to divorce than we thought – are the elements of culture that deal with this desire beyond desire. Where are they taking us? Where do we have to redefine the old terms by which we try to understand ourselves in this longing for wholeness? …

When belief takes the place of faith in the religious mind the possible range of spiritual experience and growth is critically limited. When religion emphasizes belief rather than faith it may find it easier to organize and define its membership and those it excludes. It is easier to pass judgement. But it will produce, at the best, half-formed followers. The road to transcendence is cut off, blocked by landfalls of beliefs as immoveable as boulders, beliefs we are told to accept and do not dare to put to the test of experience. In such a rigid and enforced belief system what I believe also easily slides into what I say I believe, or what I am told to believe or what I feel I ought to believe, because the I that believes becomes so dependent on the identity generated by the structured belief system we inhabit.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, pp.3,9

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

The spiritual life looked at from within resembles not so much a ladder or an ordered progress as it does a rather tatty wheel. It does move, but it moves at least as much round and round as it does forward. It is a process of trial and error – trials and errors. It seems to be more like an organic thing, subject to odd diversions and random mutations, than a neat structure assembled according to a set of plans.

Coinherence is one of those luminous words whose meaning flickers at the edge of comprehension, as though it names something you already half-know in your bones. Charles Williams was fond of using it, but its roots extend far further back than that. If ultimate reality (God, the Way) is in fact process, relational union, rather than an object or a person, then relational living is intrinsic to life itself, and it has profound implications for human behaviour, ethics and purpose. Specifically, it speaks to the contemplative life in ways that make sense of much monastic teaching over the years, right from the Desert Fathers and Mothers to the present day.

Pain and difficulty – what used to be called “tribulation” – are intrinsic to life itself. “Change and decay in all around I see,” wrote Henry Francis Lyle, and an open heart risks breaking daily at the news from across the world, even in supposedly stable and civilised nations. But if we are aware that all that is – not only, if especially, conscious beings – rests in the ground of being just as we do ourselves, then our presence in contemplation becomes much more than a state of mind. We are not “praying for” those for whom our hearts are torn; we are recognising our shared being, recognising an existential bond that exists already. Love is not symbolic, but structural: a circulation of grace, strength and suffering.

The living current of grace that coinheres in all existence is the source of what is – the Tao as the mother of the ten thousand things – and yet it is the heart of our contemplation itself. Only if we sit still can we be present as aerials, signs, receiving stations for that grace. The mist covers the distances, and our vision is not good; but we don’t need to know or to believe: our unknowing is itself our practice and our compassion. Perhaps all we need is love.

This rib cage of failure

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It is simple enough to lose sight of the liberating nature of our failings. They often seem to lead us into some parched, lonely place—a place of dry bones. The problem is not our inadequacies, much less the freight of the failures we carry, but the loss of perspective on what we resent most in ourselves. Light forever shines from within the rib cage of failure. But reactive mind is too cluttered to realize that this is the nature of divine love: flowing waters of mercy for all who are parched—each of us… Nor is reactive mind capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, pp.95-6

Just as death is the inescapable precondition for new life, so failure and error are the necessary spring of change and growth in the spiritual life. Only when we will let ourselves know that, only in the wreckage of our plans and conclusions, only in the defeat of our new beginnings and our fresh initiatives, can we be broken open to the current of grace that will wash us out into the open sea of becoming.

Behind all these metaphors there is a very simple fact, it seems to me: that only when we cease completely from self-justification, when we are prepared without reservation to let go of whatever role we imagined for ourselves – spiritual humanist, say, or secular Buddhist – can we discover what the flow of change – the Way, the leading of the Spirit, call it whatever feels right – is tending towards.

I think this applies both in our own inner lives and in the broader life of humankind. We can see it in the unceasing pattern of evolution (species don’t remain static, however attached we may have become to one or another expression of their diversity) and in the breakdown and reformation of institutions. Sarah Bessey (Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith) sees it in the breakdown of the established churches, and in the tentative shoots of a radical, open faith appearing through the rubble, like fireweed springing up through the rubble of bombed buildings following WW2. (Yes, I am old enough to remember seeing it for myself from the top decks of London buses, riding with my mother looking over the makeshift hoardings that attempted to conceal the broken gaps in the terraces and the rows of shops beginning to struggle back to some sort of normality after the end of hostilities!)

“Everything passes/everything changes/just do what you think you should do,” sang Bob Dylan (‘To Ramona‘). But what Martin Laird calls “reactive mind” is too wrapped up in what it thinks it thinks to know; it is only when we keep still enough in our own awareness that we are “capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.”

The fundamental unknowability of God

An Open Ground

Contemplative spirituality and practice

Tag Archives: unknowing

Radical negation

If we are to speak of God

The paradox of active surrender

Part of the mystery

The actually loved and known

Process and coinherence

Returning

This rib cage of failure

The fundamental unknowability of God