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Is it possible?

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Is it possible, at this very moment, to do what we may not have ever been able to do before, which is to look down at the shape our life has made and—suspending all judgment, throwing away every possible frame—simply marvel that this is the shape that my life has made, this and no other?

Noelle Oxenhandler, What Is the Shape of My Life?, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2025

To sit with this question, simply as it is, may be not unfamiliar when applied to the breath, to the sitting body, to the sounds outside, or to the sunlight on a blank wall or closed eyelids. But it is less familiar when turned, as Oxenhandler does here, to oneself. It is a strange and disorienting practice, with a dzogchen quality, like a wordless pointing-out instruction, about it somewhere. Something appears like a bright skein on the velvety dark of the stream, a shape of purling water, nothing else.

Recently I have found myself drawn into just such a practice. It is not something I choose. It rises up through the usual pattern of unbidden thoughts, and asks for space at least to be, like a map drawn on glass. There is nothing dramatic about it, no sense of “my life flashed before my eyes” – and yet it is there, a kind of Tube map of a lifetime, glittering behind closed eyelids. The least attention, and a pattern enlarges, a stream of cause and effect reveals itself, and is – what? – forgiven? Something like that. An act, yet again, of grace, anyway. There is no judgement here, no impulse to improve anything. It just is as Noelle Oxenhandler suggests (ibid.):

[T]hrough the ups and downs, the joys and heartbreaks of my own… life, there is something I have always been seeking that is beyond any conditions, that is not defined by the particular shape my life has made, by the roads either taken or not taken. In a way, it might be called a kind of negative capability toward the past, an unknowing of the known—in the sense of refraining from any judgment as to whether what happened was good, bad, something to be regretted or celebrated, whether all together it made the shape of a life that “worked out” or “didn’t work out.”

On the map beneath the glass there is nothing even to heal. The lines and stops stand out against the dark, and my breath comes and goes. There is no story here, just a pattern in the quiet. Nothing to conclude. The bright pattern stands against silence, as it is.

[First published 20/11/2025]

The fundamental unknowability of God

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In the Wikipedia entry on Panentheism, we read:

Baruch Spinoza… claimed that “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived. “Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner.” Though Spinoza has been called the “prophet” and “prince” of pantheism, in a letter to Henry Oldenburg Spinoza states that: “as to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature (taken as a kind of mass or corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken”. For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world.

According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote “Deus sive Natura” (God or Nature) Spinoza did not mean to say that God and Nature are interchangeable terms, but rather that God’s transcendence was attested by God’s infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God’s immanence. Furthermore, Martial Guéroult suggested the term panentheism, rather than pantheism to describe Spinoza’s view of the relation between God and the world. The world is not God, but it is, in a strong sense, “in” God.

It seems to me that in this sense Spinoza’s God is almost the Western philosophical equivalent of the ancient Chinese philosophical concept of the Tao. The Tao is not itself “the ten thousand things” (i.e. material existence) but “The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things.” (Laozi) To sit quietly and recall that the coming to be of things in time is no more than the result of things that have been, and that things themselves rest in the open ground as wavelets rest in the flowing stream, is to see that the stream itself – the Tao, God, Being – is prior to all that is. “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17 NIV).

As Spinoza himself pointed out, there are three kinds of knowledge:

In Ethics (Part II, Proposition 40, Scholium 2), Spinoza outlines three kinds of knowledge:

1. Opinion or Imagination (opinio): Based on sensory experience and hearsay—fragmentary and often confused.

2. Reason (ratio): Deductive, conceptual understanding of things through their common properties—clearer, but still mediated.

3. Intuitive Knowledge (scientia intuitiva): A direct, immediate grasp of things through their essence in God—non-discursive, holistic, and transformative.

Spinoza writes that intuitive knowledge “proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.” It’s not inference—it’s seeing. 

(Microsoft Copilot, in response to user query, 31 October 2025)

The second kind of knowledge, rational thought, cannot make the connection with the Ground. But to sit still with the knowledge, to sit stil in the impossibility of speech, like a Zen monk with a koan, is to allow “the fundamental unknowability of God” (Wikipedia) to open into the Ground all by itself. When we come to an end of what we can say – what we can think – the only path open is the way of emptiness, into the infinite pleroma of what actually is.

[First published 16/11/2025]

Antinomian?

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Antinomianism (Ancient Greek: ἀντί [anti] ‘against’ and νόμος [nomos] ‘law’) is any view which rejects laws or legalism and argues against moral, religious or social norms (Latin: mores), or is at least considered to do so. The term has both religious and secular meanings…

The distinction between antinomian and other Christian takes on moral law is that antinomians believe that obedience to the law is motivated by an internal principle flowing from belief rather than from any external compulsion, devotion, or need.

Wikipedia

All human beings have a constitution which suffers when it sees the suffering of others . . . If people catch sight suddenly of a child about to fall into a well, they will all experience a feeling of alarm and distress . . . Because we all have these feelings in ourselves, let us develop them, and the result will be like the blaze that is kindled from a small flame, or the spring in full spate that starts with a trickle. Let these feelings have a free rein, and they will be enough to give shelter and love to us all.

Mengzhi (c. 371 – c. 289 BC)

A commenter on a recent post of mine suggested that membership of some kind of religious organisation (albeit a non-dogmatic one like The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)) might be a necessary defence against “isolation, individualism, even a form of antinomianism.”

This set me thinking. As I have said often enough on this blog, I am more than happy with what some might feel to be isolation; I am, I suppose, some sort of individualist, and always have been; but antinomian? Well, yes, perhaps – guilty as charged, I guess. One of the problems I have had all my life with religious systems and their organisations has been their insistence on adherence to some kind of law, some sort of list of dos and don’ts, of things to believe and beliefs to assent to, rather than reliance upon inner transformation, or simply upon straightforward ethical thinking.

Alice Roberts and Andrew Copson, in The Little Book of Humanism, p. 94:

Considering others is fundamental to our biology. But there’s always room for improvement. We can get better at being good people by thinking about what being good really means, reflecting on the needs of others and ourselves.

Humanists don’t believe in any supernatural source of commands or rules for being good. Instead, humanists hold that we need to think for ourselves about what sort of person we want to be and about the consequences of our actions.

Even people who say they’re taking their morals from religious authority, sacred doctrines or holy books mostly have a very selective approach to this – carefully choosing parts that chime with what they already believe to be moral and ignoring other parts. So, they’re not really learning moral lessons from scripture – rather, imposing their own morals on those archaic texts.

And this seems to me the key point: however much we may ascribe our being good to evolutionary biology’s drive to intraspecific cooperation, to what I called “inner transformation” (really, just the inevitable effect of mindfulness on one’s own unthinking selfishness), or to Scripture, it is actually no more than common sense: thinking through the consequences of our own actions in the light of the needs of others and of ourselves, and doing it thoroughly enough that it becomes second nature.

If this is antinomianism, and it rather looks as though by any accepted definition it is, then sign me up! The contemplative path cannot but be pathless; in itself it is a deeply moral thing to realise our intrinsic emptiness of a separated self; to add to it a layer of doctrines and strictures, from whatever source, seems to me like the gilding of lilies. Leave me the open ground, and the loveliness of the wild flowers, and I will take the risk – if risk it be – of wandering where there is no circumscription, no metalled road.

Einklammerung

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At its core, the epoché (from the Greek word meaning “suspension”) refers to the act of suspending or “bracketing” all judgments and assumptions about the world. This suspension is not about doubting the existence of things, but rather about setting aside all preconceptions, biases, and taken-for-granted beliefs. In other words, it is the process of withholding judgment about the nature of the external world to focus on pure experience itself.

For Husserl, the purpose of epoché is to return to a more original, direct experience of phenomena, where the subjective and the objective are not yet split. By “bracketing” or suspending the natural attitude—the everyday way we engage with the world based on assumptions—we can get to the essence of our experiences, as they appear to consciousness, unmediated by theoretical frameworks or prejudices.

Epoché in Phenomenology: Husserl’s Method of Suspension

Einklammerung, bracketing, epoché – is Western phenomenology’s version of the Heart Sutra‘s “Form is emptiness (śūnyatā), emptiness is form”, perhaps. For Edmund Husserl the act of bracketing was not an intellectual curiosity, it was a means to what he called “transcendental consciousness” or “pure consciousness” – something very close to the Dzogchen concept of Rigpa, “the pristine awareness of the fundamental ground itself.” (Wikipedia)

Once we have performed the epoché, we are no longer tied to the particularities of the world. Instead, we can see the world as it is constituted by our consciousness. For Husserl, this is a profound insight, as it reveals that the world is not something external and independent but is, in some sense, dependent on consciousness for its very existence. The epoché uncovers the transcendental nature of experience, which has profound implications for how we understand reality and our place within it.

Epoché in Phenomenology (above)

Western philosophy is prone to run aground on the shoals of terminology and syntax. The simplicity of just sitting, in plain awareness of the moment’s breath, of the sounds beyond the window, the movement of the air, without naming them, without distinguishing them as objects or processes or implications – the Einklammerung happens all by itself, without struggle or willpower; just in the mere being there, in showing up, no more and no less, morning and evening, and sitting there, in stillness. Nothing else.

Lathe biōsas

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Epicurus promoted an innovative theory of justice as a social contract. Justice, Epicurus said, is an agreement neither to harm nor be harmed, and we need to have such a contract in order to enjoy fully the benefits of living together in a well-ordered society. Laws and punishments are needed to keep misguided fools in line who would otherwise break the contract. But the wise person sees the usefulness of justice, and because of his limited desires, he has no need to engage in the conduct prohibited by the laws in any case. Laws that are useful for promoting happiness are just, but those that are not useful are not just…

Epicurus discouraged participation in politics, as doing so leads to perturbation and status seeking. He instead advocated not drawing attention to oneself. This principle is epitomised by the phrase lathe biōsas (λάθε βιώσας), meaning “live in obscurity”, “get through life without drawing attention to yourself”, i.e., live without pursuing glory or wealth or power, but anonymously, enjoying little things like food, the company of friends, etc.

Wikipedia

I have written here before about the benefits of living a quiet life. I am not necessarily prescribing this as a universal panacea, of course, but I am saying that it is necessary to me. I have come to realise increasingly clearly that Epicurus’ “live in obscurity” is exactly the dictum for me. The tiny daily accidents of life, the passing sounds and impressions observed during practice and after, are infinitely precious and worth attention. Birdsong, the particular exhaust note of a motorcycle on the road at the end of the garden, the half-unconscious inflection in one’s partner’s voice – all of them perfect just as they are in their crystalline presence. Things like this are simply not accessible to one who is on a mission, busy making a name for themselves.

Silence and stillness are quite different from “perturbation and status seeking”; which goes a long way to explain my own reluctance to engage with social media, with activism and campaigning, with banging and shouting in all their increasingly prevalent forms. However good the cause, anger seems only to beget anger, and violence, violence. Unkindness of whatever sort is never the way to an increase in kindness.

For myself, there is no other way than to keep still, to remain alert to the smallest things: to the leaves and the snails, to the minute changes in the weather, the slight ticking you hear as the thermostat balances the warmth of the room. Practice is no more than a way to awareness itself, to the limitless ground. Be quiet. Be still. Nothing else will do.

Dimensionless

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In stillness it can become apparent that the dimensionless ground, that is “before all things” (Colossians 1:17) underlies both phenomenal reality and the perception of that reality, since the mind’s original awareness – its intrinsic consciousness – is awareness of the ground itself. In this sense,

Consciousness 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.

Rebecca Goldstein, in a personal communication to Annaka Harris

As long seen in the Dzogchen concept of rigpa, the ground is both dimensionless and atemporal. It is empty, from our phenomenological point of view, even of “emptiness” itself. It is no thing, in the most utter sense of that phrase. And yet each of us can be said to have it, in the identical sense that all beings are said to have “Buddha-nature”; only our own confusion, our incessant and self-identified thoughts, get in the way as the clear light of the moon is obscured by clouds. (There is even a Dzogchen term for this too – ma-rigpa!)

Perhaps this sounds complicated. The attempt to say it gets that way; and yet it is the simplest thing. All that is needed is to remain still enough, open enough to plain awareness; the ground is open, cloudless, without end or beginning. It isn’t even there. It, simply, is.

Eternal life?

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In Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life, Larry Rosenberg ends his chapter on choiceless awareness with a Q&A session. One of the questioners asks:

Q: Ideas and beliefs about rebirth are often mentioned in dharma books. I wonder if you could tell us whether you believe in rebirth.

A: If you are a person brought up in a culture that has believed in rebirth for thousands of years, such as in Tibet or Thailand, the answer is obvious. I’ve known wonderful Tibetan teachers who look at me with sympathy when I say I’m uncertain about rebirth. On the other hand, many professors in the sciences might look at you like you’re crazy if you even mention the subject. All I know is that I am open to the idea but honestly don’t know!

One of the reasons I no longer profess to be a Christian, and could never be a Buddhist in any formal sense, is just this question.

In Christian doctrine God is held to be eternal – though opinions vary as to whether this implies that he exists outside time altogether, or whether he exists simultaneously in all dimensions of time, past, present and future. To die as a Christian is to possess eternal life (John 10:27-28) through knowing God (John 17:3). The only way I could ever make sense of this was to think that the instant of death must somehow be atemporal, and that in that moment outside time one might meet God. I have never been able to make any sense of the idea of a portable plug-in soul that could somehow be translated to a land beyond the sky. Maybe I never was a “proper” Christian.

Similarly, any idea of rebirth runs into the same problem, only worse. Not only is there the question of what might constitute the soul to be reborn, and where it might be located, but Buddhism explicitly, and cogently, states that there is, in a living person, no permanent unchanging self or essence (anātman). So what is to be reborn?

The metaphysical mechanics of life after death don’t make any sense to me, however they are expressed. That there is life after death – that the human race will go on, and so will all the other forms of life – is undeniable; but my life after my death? I’m not sure that idea even makes sense.

Cause and effect is another matter, maybe. Things have consequences; they are themselves always consequences. There is no discernible beginning or end to this chain of causation (karma), short of cosmological speculations about the “beginnings” of time. I was born as a result of certain events in history – my mother and father met; they met because of their work during WWII; there was a war because of certain political, economic and military factors, and so on and so on, back into time – and there will be certain limited consequences of events in my own life that will outlive me. But this is not the same as me in some way continuing, or recurring into the future.

But things exist. They are. There is a ground of being – Istigkeit, Tao – from which, in which, all things arise.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.

Tao Te Ching

Things go on. Where they come from, where they go – I’m not sure those are questions that mean anything in the context of being itself; hence the “nameless” in the Tao Te Ching.

All we can do, all we need to do, is sit still. Daishin Morgan:

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.

Secular or supernatural?

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As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, the word “spirituality” can seem a slippery one. For some, spirituality necessarily implies the supernatural, and our imagined relations with that realm, for good or ill. For others (myself included) it “centers on the ‘deepest values and meanings by which people live'”. (Wikipedia: Spirituality)

Secular spirituality is the adherence to a spiritual philosophy without adherence to a religion. Secular spirituality emphasizes the inner peace of the individual, rather than a relationship with the divine. Secular spirituality is made up of the search for meaning outside of a religious institution; it considers one’s relationship with the self, others, nature, and whatever else one considers to be the ultimate. Often, the goal of secular spirituality is living happily and/or helping others.

According to the American philosopher Robert C. Solomon, “spirituality is coextensive with religion and it is not incompatible with or opposed to science or the scientific outlook. Naturalized spirituality is spirituality without any need for the ‘other‐worldly’. Spirituality is one of the goals, perhaps the ultimate goal, of philosophy.” [Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life]

(Wikipedia: Secular Spirituality)

So what is the supernatural, and what is wrong with seeking to establish – or recognise – relations with it? The supernatural is generally taken to imply a realm or system transcending material nature, the locale of some kind or kinds of divine, magical, or ghostly entities; revealing, or thought to reveal, some power beyond scientific or natural comprehension. There is, it seems to me, little or no evidence for such a sphere. (Susan Blackmore discusses this at length in Seeing Myself : What Out-of-body Experiences Tell Us About Life, Death and the Mind, chapters 2 and 15 especially. But spirituality is another matter. The search for meaning, and, in contemplative practice, the direct experience of that meaning, is perhaps the most important thing I have encountered. For the umpteenth time here, I think I need to quote Sam Harris’ brilliant summary:

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.

The eagle-eyed among my readers will have already spotted the slightly edited strapline to this blog’s title: “Secular contemplative spirituality…” It just seemed time to make that clear.

A window on what is

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I find the study of phenomenology in my amateur way endlessly fascinating; it is all too easy to follow it down philosophical rabbit-holes, as I have done in several posts recently. But the contemplative life, related though it is to the practice of philosophy (as seen so clearly in some Buddhist schools like Yogācāra) deals in itself not with discursive thought but with direct experience; which is one of the reasons I have for so long been drawn to the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition of hesychasm, or to the Pure Land Buddhist practice of the Nembutsu – not primarily because of the nature of these practices themselves (repetitive prayer) but because of their extreme simplicity.

Now, phenomenal experience is sometimes characterised as a tunnel (Metzinger), a “benign user illusion” (Dennett, glossed so brilliantly by Susan Blackmore) or a mindstream (Yogācāra). The idea generally seems to be that what we experience from moment to moment is a transparent, essentially functional but ultimately illusory interface that the mind provides between reality and our (equally illusory) experience of a permanent self. Reality itself is far richer and stranger, and the self is “but one of the countless manifestations of the Tao” (Ho (PDF)). To say these things can of course provoke in the reader a myriad of misunderstandings, and to realise them oneself can cause a temporary existential disruption that is horribly like a classical bad trip. Misleading though many of its Perennialist assumptions may be, one of the best accounts of what is at stake must be Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. Donald Hoffman finds the same position in Erwin Schrödinger:

[Schrödinger’s] position boils down to this: what we call the physical world is the result of a process that Schrödinger called “objectivation”, i.e. the transformation of the one self-world (Atman=Brahman) into something that can be readily conceptualized and studied objectively, hence something that is fully void of subjective qualities. In the theory of conscious agents this amounts to the creation of “interfaces”. Such interfaces simplify what is going on in order to allow you to act efficiently. Good interfaces hide complexity. They do not let you see reality as it is but only as it is useful to you. What you call the “physical world” is merely a highly-simplified representation of non-dual consciousness.

Donald Hoffman, Schrödinger and the Conscious Universe (IAI News)

Last year I attempted, as I periodically do, to explain to myself how this paradoxical relationship between overthinking and contemplative practice could possibly work. I concluded:

I have written elsewhere of the profound stillness I experienced recovering from childhood meningitis; in many ways, my contemplative practice over the last 40-odd years has been an attempt, scattered as it has at times been, to recover that stillness.

These things are nothing new. The Taoist tradition beginning between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, and the Chan Buddhist writings in the early centuries of the present era, are full of wanderings “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown” (Chia Tao). And the central tradition of (at least Zen) Buddhist meditation consists of “just sitting” (shikantaza).

The falling away of purposeful action, in itself the very simplest thing, seems one of the hardest to achieve – perhaps because it isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposeful action. This appears to me to be the snag with so many programmes of practice involving concentration, visualisation, ritual and so on.

The paradox inherent in practice, any practice, only begins to thin out in sheer pointlessness, either the pointlessness of a repeated phrase such as the Jesus Prayer, or the Nembutsu, or of merely sitting still. The power of shikantaza is simply powerlessness, giving up, complete acceptance of what is without looking for anything. When you cease to try to open the doors, they open by themselves, quite quietly. Not looking, the path opens.

In the cloud?

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Thomas Metzinger suggests that the global neural correlate of consciousness (the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for the occurrence of the mental states to which they are related (Wikipedia))

…is like an island emerging from the sea—as noted, it is a large set of neural properties underlying consciousness as a whole, underpinning your experiential model of the world in its totality at any given moment. The global NCC has many different levels of description: Dynamically, we can describe it as a coherent island, made of densely coupled relations of cause and effect, emerging from the waters of a much less coherent flow of neural activity. Or we could adopt a neurocomputational perspective and look at the global NCC as something that results from information-processing in the brain and hence functions as a carrier of information. At this point, it becomes something more abstract, which we might envision as an information cloud hovering above a neurobiological substrate. The “border” of this information cloud is functional, not physical; the cloud is physically realized by widely distributed firing neurons in your head. Just like a real cloud, which is made of tiny water droplets suspended in the air, the neuronal activation pattern underlying the totality of your conscious experience is made of millions of tiny electrical discharges and chemical transitions at the synapses. In strict terms, it has no fixed location in the brain, though it is coherent.

Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

Now this is, as Metzinger would be the first to admit, highly abstract language to describe the warm, luminous immediacy that is the lived experience of phenomena. The scent of a lover’s hair, the golden light of sunset, damp air on the skin at dawn – an information cloud hovering above a neurobiological substrate? And yet how else could one experience these things?

Oddly enough, for me at least, Metzinger’s technical language comes closer to expressing what might be thought of as one’s soul than any Cartesian plug-in ghost. The beautiful world that is our necessary home is as much the gift of who we are as it is a place “out there”; we are not, and never have been, visitors. Like everything else, we are just what causality does: “the self is but one of the countless manifestations of the Tao. It is an extension of the cosmos.” (David Y F Ho (PDF))