Tag Archives: unknowing

Cause and effect

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Things have consequences; they are themselves consequences. Sometimes it’s easy to forget this – sometimes things seem merely to be chance, or else they are the result of someone’s action, out of their – or God’s – “sovereign will”. But those ideas are never true. The “chance” occurrence had causes. The cliff fall came about because of heavy rain falling onto fissured and unstable ground – someone was injured because they hadn’t heard the Coastguard warnings, and were walking too close to the base of the cliffs…

Fate? Karma? The will of God? What do these things mean, except attempts to explain to ourselves how things beyond our control could happen to us, or to those we care about? Karma actually seems to me to come closest: the idea that cause and effect are ineluctable – what is sown will be reaped. Karma, though, is usually more naturally understood in its human, ethical dimension:

The Buddha defined karma as intention; whether the intention manifested itself in physical, vocal or mental form, it was the intention alone which had a moral character: good, bad or neutral […] The focus of interest shifted from physical action, involving people and objects in the real world, to psychological process.

Richard Gombrich, Buddhist Precept and Practice.

The Chinese concept of the Tao – “[t]he Tao can be roughly thought of as the ‘flow of the universe’, or as some essence or pattern behind the natural world that keeps the Universe balanced and ordered” (Wikipedia) – seems to me closer to the metaphysical implications. To harmonise one’s will with the Tao, to accept the way things come to be, is to cease to swim against the current, to follow “the watercourse way” (Watts).

The Stoics frequently talked about ‘living in agreement with nature’. This, in part, means that it is within our nature to be social, cooperative beings who want the best for others, and for people around us to thrive. Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, said, ‘All things are parts of one single system, which is called nature; the individual life is good when it is in harmony with nature.’

Bridgid Delaney, Reasons Not to Worry: How to be Stoic in chaotic times.

To live in harmony with nature in this sense requires a willing abdication of knowledge and willfulness. Alan Watts again:

[P]eople try to force issues only when not realizing that it can’t be done—that there is no way of deviating from the watercourse of nature. You may imagine that you are outside, or separate from, the Tao and thus able to follow it or not follow; but this very imagination is itself within the stream, for there is no way other than the Way. Willy-nilly, we are it and go with it. From a strictly logical point of view, this means nothing and gives us no information. Tao is just a name for whatever happens, or, as Lao-tzu put it, “The Tao principle is what happens of itself [tzu-jan].”

This is of course, as I suggested in a recent post here, very close to what has been called, in Christian contexts, “quietism” – which has widely been criticised as heretical, due to its rejection of doctrines around free will and supernatural determinism.

But (and I quoted her in the linked post) Jennifer Kavanagh explains:

Welcoming uncertainty, embracing it, does not mean commending ignorance or trying not to know; it’s not about the rejection of knowledge. It’s not about the negation of the intellect, but its enhancement. It is a recognition that cognitive thinking cannot reach everything, an understanding that the scientific and spiritual approaches are not incompatible, just different, complementary, dimensions. Not either/or but both/and.

The contemplative embracing of this principle is perhaps most clearly seen in the practice of shikantaza, just sitting, watching for the way to open:

Zazen or enlightenment is not about finding a particular state of mind, for all states of mind are fleeting and cannot be relied upon. When you know who is sitting, you know sitting Buddha. This expression is a bit strange; why not say sitting like a Buddha? I prefer to say sitting Buddha because there is nobody sitting like a Buddha; there is just sitting Buddha. That Buddha never stops sitting, but we must awaken to her presence–not that sitting Buddha is either male or female…

A theme I return to again and again is to just do the work that comes to you. Such an attitude is open-ended in the way that life itself is open. If you give yourself to the way, the way appears and that way is always changing.

Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha.

Atheism and quietism

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Quietism is a term with an odd and surprisingly contentious history. It is used of both a tendency in philosophy and a direction within Christian contemplative thought and practice. (You can find well- linked Wikipedia articles on the philosophy here, and the contemplative term here.)

But I believe the insight underlying both these Western traditions of stillness and unknowing can be found far farther back in history.

Chao-Chou [Zhaozhou Congshen] asked, “What is the Tao?”

The master [Nan-ch’üan] replied, “Your ordinary consciousness is the Tao.”

“How can one return into accord with it?”

“By intending to accord you immediately deviate.”

“But without intention, how can one know the Tao?”

“The Tao,” said the master, “belongs neither to knowing nor to not knowing. Knowing is false understanding; not knowing is blind ignorance. If you really understand the Tao beyond doubt, it’s like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?”

(quoted by Alan Watts in Tao: The Watercourse Way)

In the Zen practice of shikantaza (just sitting) there is nothing to achieve: no particular state of mind, no exercise of concentration, nothing to get rid of. In doing nothing there is perfect freedom.

None of this requires a supernatural dimension at all; that fact seems to have been one of the reasons Christian quietism was condemned as heretical. Unknowing is a fundamental admission, the very underpinning of scepticism. Stevie Wonder wrote: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer – superstition ain’t the way…” Jennifer Kavanagh:

Welcoming uncertainty, embracing it, does not mean commending ignorance or trying not to know; it’s not about the rejection of knowledge. It’s not about the negation of the intellect, but its enhancement. It is a recognition that cognitive thinking cannot reach everything, an understanding that the scientific and spiritual approaches are not incompatible, just different, complementary, dimensions. Not either/or but both/and.

Unknowing, and the abandonment of the need to know, to possess knowledge, is in a sense the gate to the liminal lands I wrote about in my last post. It is also the starting point of the scientific method, and the heart’s defence against all kinds of creeds.

Silence (ii)

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One of the very first posts on this blog, back in February 2021, was on the subject of silence. I wrote there:

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.

Spiritual silence is strangely independent of the physical absence of noise. As I wrote recently, I long ago discovered even among noise and distraction “the ability to turn inward, briefly, to a place of stillness and absolute tranquility.” That ability has remained with me, and it is one of the gifts for which I am most grateful.

Cynthia Bourgeault writes:

Those who come back from a near-death experience bring with them a visceral remembrance of how vivid and abundant life is when the sense of separateness has dropped away. Those who fall profoundly in love experience a dying into the other that melts every shred of their own identity, self-definition, caution, and boundaries, until finally there is no “I” anymore-only “you.” Those who meditate go down to the same place, but by a back staircase deep within their own being.

I think silence is the back staircase; and there is an argument to be made that all forms of contemplative practice are no more, at the very bottom, than means of silence. The heart yearns for silence, even in its passions; at the end of all things there is silence, and it is out of silence that all things come to be. Silence is the utter want of naming, of distinctions; it is no thing, but it is our only home in the end.

‘Satiable curtiosity*

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It seems to me, as I grow older, that one of the really essential things to cultivate in oneself is the continued sense of curiosity. I am lucky enough to have been born with more than my fair share of it, and to have been brought up by a mother who encouraged me in it.

I have never been able to see an insect without wanting to know its name, its taxonomy, its place in the world; and the same goes for most things I encounter, from the tiniest and apparently least significant creatures to things of cosmic proportions, like the scintillations of Sirius in the night sky. (I cannot tell you how delighted I was eventually to read that Sirius is actually a binary star!)

I am doubly fortunate that getting older seems to have done nothing to dim this insatiable hunger of enquiry in me. Richard Dawkins once wrote:

Isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?

It wasn’t until I spent an extended period in hospital, in my teens, that I had the freedom to begin to realise that the natural directtion of this curiosity of mine was philosophical, even metaphysical; and I was in my early twenties before it became clear that it was only really happy in what I learned to call “spirituality”.

Practice is the place where spiritual curiosity finds its home. For far too long I thought that there must be some religious significance to this, but in fact there is no need for such a hypothesis. The wonder of isness itself is quite enough. Lawrence M Krauss:

The one experience that I hope every student has at some point in their lives is to have some belief you profoundly, deeply hold, proved to be wrong because that is the most eye-opening experience you can have, and as a scientist, to me, is the most exciting experience I can ever have.

I feel like this almost every time I sit down to meditate, and it is one of the inexhaustible delights of the journey, the heart’s own song in the velvet fathomlessness of what actually is.

*”Satiable curtiosity” – from Rudyard Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child

Atheism and the Tao

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The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao
The names that are given do not contain their true meaning
Within the nameless is the true meaning
What is named has a mother and she is the mother of ten thousand things
The un-seeable is always seeable within the internal to those who are not bound by desire
Those who live in a state of desire see only the external illusion of manifestation
These two opposites are born from the same source
The source contains its mystery in darkness
Within the darkness is the darkness that is the gateway to the mysteries

(Tao Te Ching, tr. Dennis Waller)

In all the translations of, and the writings about, the Tao (when spoken, ‘Dao’) there is an insistence that words and names are superfluous, that the Tao – while apparently having no objective reality of its own – can only be experienced subjectively. It is a philosophy, a pursuit of wisdom and a study of natural realities. Tao is not a religion: that is Taoism. We must, however, use words to explain how Tao came to be written down, what part it played in history and what its relevance is in the modern world.

(Pamela Ball, The Essence of Tao)

As Pamela Ball points out, the Tao is not a religious concept, any more than my much (over?) used phrase “the ground of being”, which I derived originally – if I remember correctly – from Paul Tillich via Richard Rohr. But in many ways they are both pointing towards the same truth: that the ontological source of all is, though quite literally inconceivable, able to be encountered.

So what has any of this to do with atheism? Well, it is next to impossible to approach this inconceivability of the utter beginning of what is from within the creedal framework of organised religion. (A few have managed it – witness Eckhart’s Istigkeit or Merton’s point vierge – but they are rare geniuses out on the perilous edge of their faith.) But without these constraints it seems more possible, if no easier, to find words for what has all too often been set aside as ineffable.

This is why experience, whether by a formal practice of meditation or by sheer force of circumstance (as in, for instance, near death experiences), will never be supplanted by even the most sophisticated reasoning. “I can’t find the words…” may be the beginning of wisdom.

In the stillness

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In the stillness of meditation, free from concepts, free from prejudices, we are able… to enter the experience directly. We are no longer trying to experience the experience, which is how most of us get so messed up. We get into something, then we start wanting to watch it, analyse it; we want to be in control of it; we want to be able to use it: to experience the experience. What we are learning in meditation, through the utterly simple practice of stillness and of letting go of all thoughts, is that we are able to enter into the experience of being as a whole person, and therefore, the experiences that happen don’t matter.

Laurence Freeman

It seems to me that contemplative practice, formal or otherwise, cannot be in any sense a goal-oriented activity. We are not seeking to achieve something, whether an experience or a state of mind; we are not going anywhere. All we are trying to do is to reveal to ourselves what is.

Language comes into this, of course. English is, at least when used for discursive prose, an irredeemably directional sort of a language. When we look for ways to speak of spiritual realities we seem either to slip into outright poetry – in which case we may convey a state of being but lose much of our ability to convey information; or we find ourselves adopting what Wittgenstein referred to as the “language game” of religion, of myth and liturgy. This, of course, is dangerous. (Even Sam Harris, in a book like Waking Up, begins by repudiating formal religion, but ends up adopting much of the language, and conceptual framework, of Buddhism.)

The alternative has to be in some way apophatic; not in the theological sense (since in denying predicates to God it ends up predicating his personal existence) but in the sense we began with, perhaps: we are seeking no thing at all. Or not even seeking: we find ourselves here. “Here” has been called ground, way, path, source, and perhaps it is all of these; but it is fact, plain and valid as a mathematical expression. It is what is, quite simply. The difficulty, if it is a difficulty, is in saying so without coming over as gnomic; but that may be a risk worth taking!

Am I conscious now?

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Susan Blackmore (Zen and the Art of Consciousness) asks the question, as a kind of koan, “Am I conscious now?”

It’s a good question. Am I? Have I been?

We must all be familiar with the sensation of listening to a favourite piece of music, and suddenly realising we’ve missed the best bit – the key change we love, the beginning of the bridge, whatever it is. We’ve been listening out for it, anticipating it, but when it comes our mind has wandered off into some fantasy, some memory, or a bird passing the window has caught our attention, and it is gone. Where? Were we aware of it?

Or we are meditating, paying attention to what is happening now, and we become aware (Blackmore uses this example herself, but I have had the identical experience many times) of a sound in the street outside. How long has it been going on? When we notice it, it has not just begun. And yet when we notice it, we are aware that we were aware of it already. It’s been going on for several seconds, quite distinctly, but we didn’t exactly notice. Now we do, and we remember, if that’s the right word, that it was happening already. Were we conscious then?

Here we are. For a moment, our whole attention is on now. Oh, the delicious freshness of it! We’re not remembering: we’re hearing it, feeling it, now! All that is, is now. There is nothing else. What else could there be?

Blackmore mentions Daniel Dennett’s objection to Cartesian dualism (which roughly states that there’s an I, sitting in here looking at a that, which is out there somewhere). But where is this I? There’s nowhere in the physical brain that could correspond to an I, no locus of consciousness, nor is there anywhere an incorporeal self (soul) could plug into the soggy assemblage of neurons between our ears. Dennett suggests rather that consciousness consists of “multiple drafts”. Blackmore writes (ibid.) “Dennett describes the self as a ‘benign user illusion’, and replaces the theatre with his theory of ‘multiple drafts’. According to this theory, the brain processes events in multiple ways, all in parallel and in different versions. None of the drafts is ‘in consciousness’ or ‘outside consciousness’; they appear so only when the system is probed in some way, such as by provoking a response or asking a question. Only then is one of the many drafts taken as what the person must have been conscious of. This is why he claims that ‘There are no fixed facts about the stream of consciousness independent of particular probes.’”

This makes more sense. Perhaps the light of attention picks out one or another draft, falls on one or another as the object of attention. But whose attention? Another draft’s attention? It’s all very puzzling.

But that moment. Now! That moment. There there is no sense of a shifting light of attention. There is only now. It has all come together in an instant, literally. This instant, now!

Perhaps we cannot know. Perhaps there is something here not susceptible of analysis. The bright instant is itself, represents no thing. It seems to rest in the ground of being directly, an isness that is only itself. Perhaps it is only light.

What is present

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The present is unconditioned, radically permeable; you could call it eternity. So little of the activity of the mind appears to be concerned with the present – there are worries about the future; regrets at the past; what-ifs, endless what-ifs of every colour and condition – but actually to keep still in the present, that is more difficult, and yet it is our only solace, our only freedom.

Of course this is why we practice, really. There is nothing in our mind, not in our thoughts or our imaginings, not in our desires or our interpretations of what we sense, that is truly now. By the time we perceive, by the time we identify and analyse what we see or feel, it is already past.

But suppose we could just sense – not remark upon, identify, classify – just sense. Whether we sense our own body and its autonomic systems – breathing, sitting, even digestion – or whether we simply register the input from our senses as it is (sound without its being the sound of anything, light without anything lit up) perhaps we could be as close to the present as it is given us to be in life.

Now is not then, nor is it to come: it is not even the space of some minute fraction of a second, it is infinitely thin – and so it is infinite, without time. It rests in the ground directly, and so it is our true home. For us, though we cannot know what it is, perhaps it alone is true.

I do not know

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“The apophatic denial – I do not know – humbles us and leaves us vulnerable, certainly. At the same time, it can be a tool of resistance and subversion.” (JP Williams)

To understand that we do not understand doesn’t just call into question what we think we know, but all that we have been told. The old names will not do; the familiar roles will not play out any more. And yet even to say this sort of thing contains its own risk: Kipling’s The Cat That Walked by Himself can seem a romantic figure, and can draw attention to what he seems to be, rather than what he is not.

So Williams’ “resistance and subversion” are not merely to tradition and dogma, but to ourselves: to what we think ourselves to be, certainly; but also to what we would like to be. The ground of being is no thing; to be still enough to hear its silence (1 Kings 19:12 NRSV) we must become what we are, empty of self. Not knowing, without substance, no things ourselves. I suppose all this fuss about practice, and wayfaring, is no more than that.

Grace

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Anything we can say in words is myth, or legend. Even when we go out of our way to sound objective, precisely factual, our words are mere illustrations, revealing more about us and our systems of perception and cognition than ever they do of what we are trying to describe. If that is so of “ordinary” facts and events, how much more is it of spiritual ones?

But there is more. God is a word, and so are form, and emptiness. Science uses words to describe fields and probabilities – though mathematics apparently does a better job. We give accounts of things; we label even the ineffable so as to remember, to recognise what we have been.

Words are the tools of knowing. Unknowing is almost by definition their absence. But presence? Grace.