Tag Archives: unknowing

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.

Ain’t superstitious

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In the old Willie Dixon song, he claims not to be, but believes the signs anyway: “Well, I ain’t superstitious, but a black cat crossed my trail…”

Stevie Wonder has a different take: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer – superstition ain’t the way…”

Sam Harris writes, “Math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition—and numerology is where the intellect goes to die.” The same thing, perhaps, applies to metaphysics.

Metaphysics can be a slippery word these days. “Metaphysics is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with epistemology, logic, and ethics. It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.” (Wikipedia) But Harris (ibid.) lists it along with mythology and sectarian dogma.

While it is true that probably all religions are filled with mythology and sectarian dogma, they do not all approach metaphysics like magic – and it seems to me, from experience, that metaphysics, at some level, is inseparable from the contemplative life.

[W]hen we look closely, we can’t find reliable external evidence of consciousness, nor can we conclusively point to any specific function it serves. These are both deeply counterintuitive outcomes, and this is where the mystery of consciousness starts bumping up against other mysteries of the universe.

If we can’t point to anything that distinguishes which collections of atoms in the universe are conscious from those that aren’t, where can we possibly hope to draw the line? Perhaps a more interesting question is why we should draw a line at all. When we view our own experience of consciousness as being “along for the ride,” we suddenly find it easier to imagine that other systems are accompanied by consciousness as well. It’s at this point that we must consider the possibility that all matter is imbued with consciousness in some sense—a view referred to as panpsychism. If the various behaviors of animals can be accompanied by consciousness, why not the reaction of plants to light—or the spin of electrons, for that matter? Perhaps consciousness is embedded in matter itself, as a fundamental property of the universe. It sounds crazy, but … it’s worth posing the question.

Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

Sam Harris again,

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Sam Harris, Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality without Religion

Things that seem very strange at first glimpse (like Willie Dixon’s black cat) may turn out on closer examination to make an uncommon degree of sense. Annaka Harris (op cit.) quotes a personal communication from Rebecca Goldstein to the effect that, “[c]onsciousness is an intrinsic property of matter; indeed, it’s the only intrinsic property of matter that we know, for we know it directly, by ourselves being material conscious things. All of the other properties of matter have been discovered by way of mathematical physics, and this mathematical method of getting at the properties of matter means that only relational properties of matter are known, not intrinsic properties.”

If matter is, as it seems, fundamental to existence, or at least to the material universe, and if it is in some way intrinsically conscious, then Paul Tillich’s conception of God as “ground of being” (being-itself rather than a supreme being among, or above, other beings – as the apostle Paul quotes from Epimenides (Acts 17:28), “[f]or in him we live and move and have our being”) seems inescapable. Only, as Tillich himself suggests, we may then have to give up using the word “God”.

There is, it seems, no way to “fall out of” being. If being itself entails consciousness, then even to say that individual consciousness ceases at death is, to say the least, problematic. And in any case, our conventional sense of an individual self is an illusion, as contemplatives throughout history have discovered. It is only a fiction of convenience, a way for the mind to locate itself, for a moment, in the body of which it is aware. (See Susan Blackmore’s wonderful book Seeing Myself for the correspondence of contemplative and neuroscientific insights here.)

It ain’t necessary to be superstitious: the belief in things we don’t understand turns out to be a mistake. There is enough wonder in what is.

No thing

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 In Tara Brach’s True Refuge, she writes:

Looking back through history, and across many religious and spiritual traditions, we can recognize three archetypal gateways that appear again and again on the universal path of awakening. For me, the words that best capture the spirit of these gateways are “truth,” “love,” and “awareness.” Truth is the living reality that is revealed in the present moment; love is the felt sense of connectedness or oneness with all life; and awareness is the silent wakefulness behind all experience, the consciousness that is reading these words, listening to sounds, perceiving sensations and feelings. Each of these gateways is a fundamental part of who we are; each is a refuge because it is always here, embedded in our own being.

As she goes on to point out in more detail, Tara Brach has here re-ordered the classical Buddhist Three Refuges (Buddha, Dharma, Sangha) to make more sense of the order in which most meditators encounter them. But awareness is more than meets the eye of anyone casually reading the words above. As Brach herself points out, in Radical Acceptance:

With practice, recognizing our natural awareness takes less and less of an effort or sense of doing. Rather than climbing up a hill to get a view, we are learning the art of relaxing back and wakefully inhabiting the whole vista. We look back into awareness and then simply let go into what is seen. We become more at home in awareness than in any story of a self who is falling short or on our way somewhere else. We are at home because we have seen and experienced firsthand the vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being.

We are in very strange territory here, approaching metaphysical assumptions that may not be easy to justify. But it has seemed to me, as long as I have been intentionally investigating these things, that open awareness is of more than our own personal being. Unconditioned awareness is, axiomatically it seems to me, not restricted to the personal. We come close to the ground of being itself, the luminous presence beneath all existence whatever, and we see it for a moment as it is. Even Sam Harris, who is not known for flights of metaphysical fancy, wrote, in Waking Up:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Brach again:

[W]hen we look within, there is no entity, no mind-substance, no self, no thing we can identify. There is just awareness—open empty awareness. We can’t locate any center, nor can we find an edge to our experience. Unless we anchor ourselves again in thoughts, or grasp after desired sensations or feelings, we have nowhere to stand, no firm ground. This can be disconcerting, scary, incredibly mysterious. While there may be a profusion of activity—sounds, sensations, images—there is no thing to hold on to, no self behind the curtain managing things. This seeing of no thing is what the Tibetan teachers call “the supreme seeing.”

But this emptiness, this “no-thingness,” is not empty of life. Rather, empty awareness is full with presence, alive with knowing. The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience. In this moment that you are reading, sounds are heard, vibration is felt, form and color are seen. This knowing happens instantaneously, spontaneously. Like a sunlit sky, awareness is radiant in cognizance and boundless enough to contain all life…

The beauty and power of this cannot really be described, not least because words like beauty and power imply some kind of comparison with some thing which might be less beautiful, less powerful, and “no-thingness” is not any kind of thing, but the source of all that is. Lao Tzu was surely thinking of this when he wrote, “The unnamed is the source of everything in heaven & on earth. Not wanting anything to be different, [w]e see the inner essence.”

Begin again

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There are so many things that hover at the edge of our conscious attention day in and day out – whether we are eating, going to sleep, waking from sleep, reading, writing an email – the shadows of war, famine, pestilence, extinction. The horsemen of the apocalypse seem to be our daily companions.

And yet this moment, this place of clear stillness, is what it always was. Hopes and fears, dreams, nightmares and reflections, they all rest in the ground of being that holds our planet, and our sun, and on beyond to before things began. We are not separate, any of us, from being. Even on this earth we are not invaders; we did not arrive from somewhere else. Each of us was born of parents who were born of parents too, and our bodies are formed from the stuff of this world. Our minds too. What we do, great or small, healing or harm, is part of the great pattern of cause and effect that holds our planet in its orbit. We may die – each of us, soon enough; our race too, eventually, however long we manage to hang on. Things do. There is nothing that is not impermanent.

This is not a call to passivity. It is a call, as Paul Kingsnorth pointed out recently in Tricycle, to witness. To sit still in this moment is the only place to begin. We cannot know what our place is in time until we realise that we cannot know. Things weave together, and each of us is woven into what comes to be. It isn’t, really it isn’t, given to us to choose the colour of our thread or its place in the pattern. What we do, though it may cost us all we have and are, is not within our free will, whatever we think that is. Only in the deep stillness of our unknowing shall we know how to act, and in that moment our action will not be a choice, but only where we are. Sit still, and touch the earth.

Bridges

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I continually find myself drawn back to surrender. At times, the desire to relinquish the grasp of the self and fall back into the stream of becoming is almost painful, a sharp longing miles from any greed or physical hunger. It is like the need for solitude, in some ways – and in any case a degree of solitude seems to be necessary even for the inclination to begin.

But surrender to what, or to whom? In theistic terms the answer might be straightforward, but otherwise? A lay neuroscientific way to put it might be to suggest something like the left brain’s analytical, critical faculties giving way, for once, to the intuitive, creative pondering of the right brain – but I’m not sure this tells us much more than the idea of surrendering to God, except without the emotional and metaphysical baggage!

We seem to need a bridge between the human experience of, longing for, surrender, and that surrendered to. For intellectually, conceptually, anything we might surrender to seems lost in a bright mist, invisible to the mind’s eye. it would be fatally easy to take a shortcut, to fall on the one hand into new age woo woo, or on the other into some traditional religious formulation such as the indwelling Christ or the pure land of Amida Buddha.

But, given that these attempts to frame a clearly spiritual experience are trying to get at something beyond mere cultural personification, they may in fact be attempts at bridging the gap, at carrying some kind of message to the courts of reason from out in the coastlands of the spirit.

In an interview, Taitetsu Unno once said,

The way I understand it, the historical Buddha, like you and me, had physical form, was born, and was destined to die. But the content of his being did not die and continues to live. And that is immeasurable life. And not only life. Because it brings us to awakening, it is also immeasurable light. We call it Amida.

Even Dewdrops Fall: An interview with Taitetsu Unno, Tricycle, Summer 1995

If we are happy to let “the content of… being” rest as the underlying, existential ground, rather than ascribing to it some individual essence or soul (which I doubt Taitetsu Unno would have meant in this context) then we do have something a bit more like a bridge, perhaps. The immeasurable, unknowable isness which precedes all things, illuminates and gives life to all beings, is given a name.

Satya Robyn:

As foolish beings, it is easier for us to form a relationship with unlimited light when we give this light a form, a story and a gender. Sometimes we connect with this light through an enlightened human being, as was the case with Jesus or with Shakyamuni Buddha. Sometimes we connect with it through a relationship with a more mystical figure, such as Amitabha Buddha or the bodhisattva Quan Shi Yin. A mystical Buddha has the ability to appear in whatever form is most valuable to the seeker.

Behind our human spiritual teachers and our mystical figures is the light, and the light itself is beyond gender…

Satya Robyn, Coming Home: refuge in Pureland Buddhism

In a way, practice itself, in whatever tradition – given that we who practise are frail, temporary, limited beings anyway – is no more than a bridge over the incoming tide, at the estuary of the spirit. Beyond is the limitless sea that bears us all.

[also published on Silent Assemblies]