Tag Archives: Vanessa Zuisei Goddard

This word, is

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In The Book of Privy Counseling, the anonymous author—who also wrote the well-known Cloud of Unknowing—says: “… There is no name, no experience, and no insight so akin to the everlastingness of truth than what you can possess, perceive, and actually experience in the blind loving awareness of this word, is.”

There is no name, no experience, no insight closer or truer than the truth of our own being, our own isness. There is no place closer to reality than the place we’re standing on. That is why resistance to what is, is so challenging. But it’s also the reason that it can be so fruitful for practice. In a moment when we say to ourselves, “I don’t want this”—whatever the this is—we are effectively saying no to reality. There are things, like injustice or willful harm, which should be resisted. Yet here I’m referring to the many ways in which we refuse or deny reality, and which inevitably cause harm. Refusal to accept situations that don’t favor us, for example, from the trivial to the momentous. Denial of our impact on others, of illness, of death.

The practice of contemplation, therefore, creates a space in which to work with our resistance so that we can choose is. And more, it gives us the opportunity to fall in love with it. Because we don’t have to like all aspects of reality. Like or dislike have nothing to do with contemplation. Yet we can learn to love reality’s isness, which means honoring ourselves and others and things and beings as we and they are. From this perspective, contemplation is the profound practice of loving what is, of resting in and into what is, of not distancing ourselves from ourselves and the world.

All of us have wanted things to be otherwise at some point in our lives. All of us have wished for different choices, different stories, different results. Yet there’s enormous strength—and infinite possibility—in learning to love what is instead of what should have been, and one way to do this is to learn to attend, allow, and accept.

Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, Tricycle Magazine, May 2022

One of the problems I have thinking of myself as some sort of teacher, or even someone with the brass neck to write a blog like this, is that I find it hard to give any answer for others on this question of accepting: it seems horribly presumptuous and patronising to tell another how they should live in the face of what might, for them personally, be terrible tragedy of a kind I maybe have never had to face myself.

Yet I have lived through difficult times in my own life, more than once; and by some grace I have found my way through to a happier old age, and a better relationship, than I could ever have hoped for. I do mean grace, too: this is not some kind of false modesty.

What do I mean by grace, then, in a non-religious context? Perhaps some action of cause and effect beyond my own understanding or will, something that “just happened”, for which I can take no credit; happenstance apparently, but with a deeper meaning than mere chance. Buddhists might call it karma, but actually it is much more like the Taoist sense of wu-wei: the natural action of what is; the coming together of circumstances beyond conscious control or foresight. Somehow it makes sense not only of the present, but of the past as well, as antecedent for this now, this somehow amazed “blind loving awareness of this word, is.”

So how could we live in view of this? All I can say is that the one thing that has seen me through is acceptance – acceptance of what is, what has come to be, without wishing it otherwise. One cannot help but grieve at times, but that is different from raging at what has come to be, or calling it unfair. It just is. Actually I am profoundly grateful for a life so marked, since otherwise I might never have discovered the wonder of acceptance, Gelassenheit, the simple allowing of what is. And then almost certainly my now would have been other, and less, than it is.

Plain ordinary mind

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In her beautiful essay The Gift of Contemplation, Vanessa Zuisei Goddard writes:

In The Book of Privy Counseling, the anonymous author—who also wrote the well-known Cloud of Unknowing—says: “… There is no name, no experience, and no insight so akin to the everlastingness of truth than what you can possess, perceive, and actually experience in the blind loving awareness of this word, is.”

…

The practice of contemplation, therefore, creates a space in which to work with our resistance so that we can choose is. And more, it gives us the opportunity to fall in love with it. Because we don’t have to like all aspects of reality. Like or dislike have nothing to do with contemplation. Yet we can learn to love reality’s isness, which means honoring ourselves and others and things and beings as we and they are. From this perspective, contemplation is the profound practice of loving what is, of resting in and into what is, of not distancing ourselves from ourselves and the world.

Yesterday, I wrote of the dimensionless metaphysical ground that is Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit. I know this kind of thing can sound wilfully abstruse, and yet it is truly the simplest thing; well, except that it is no thing! To sit still, aware of nothing except what is – whether the sound of tyres on the road beyond the garden, or the continual appearance of unsought dreamy thoughts, or the solid floor beneath – is as plain and ordinary a thing as one could find to do. To remain merely aware of whatever enters the field of consciousness is not even slightly complicated, and yet it is the work of a lifetime.

To learn to love what plainly is, as Goddard says, is the foundation of equanimity, the amor fati of the Stoics. And yet, this ordinary “resting in and into what is” is the very ground of isness itself. There is no other; and yet this unvarnished awareness is itself the most utterly fundamental reality, the open ground itself, before all differentiation. It is only.

Unseen

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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.