Unseen water

Gill Pennington, writing in The Friend, quotes John O’Donohue:

The spirit of a time is an incredibly subtle, yet hugely powerful force. And it is comprised of the mentality and spirit of all individuals together. Therefore, the way you look at things is not simply a private matter. Your outlook actually and concretely affects what goes on. When you give in to helplessness, you collude with despair and add to it. When you take back your power and choose to see the possibilities for healing and transformation, your creativity awakens and flows to become an active force of renewal and encouragement in the world. In this way, even in your own hidden life, you can become a powerful agent of transformation in a broken, darkened world.

Absent a theistic metaphysics of prayer, I have often been puzzled how to explain to myself, let alone anyone else, my persistent sense that there really is some point to the contemplative life beyond the sort of solipsistic self-improvement promised by some of the more widely advertised meditation apps. O’Donohue has nailed it, and I am grateful to Gill Pennington for the passage she quoted in her Thought for the Week in The Friend.

Being fully present to all we encounter in this moment as it is, rather than as we might wish, or fear, it to be, we are present as aerials, signs, receiving stations. Even, perhaps especially, in “[our] own hidden life”, we  become a source of healing and peace. Hiddenness itself, the hiddenness of practice, of silence and stillness, comes like unseen water to a dry land.

#contemplative #GillPennington #JohnODonohue #practice #solitude #stillness #surrender

The perfect centre

Each morning invites you to be open and aware, as spacious as the sky that passes through you, recognizing “the precious nature of each day,” in the words of the Dalai Lama. No matter how frenzied you feel, no matter how shoved and strangled by the rush of events, you are standing in a single exquisite moment. No matter where you are, no matter how lost, you are standing at the perfect center of four directions. No matter how off-kilter you feel, you are standing in a place of perfectly balanced forces. Even if you feel abandoned by all that might comfort you, you are held in the embrace of what you cannot see.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Tricycle, July 2022

This is not quietism, not a call to abandon compassion and justice, but a necessary gift of grace, of rest and healing, in these days of fear and loss.

A long time ago now, Bob Dylan wrote, “Everything passes/Everything changes/Just do what you think you should do…” Impermanence is the only constant. No thing exists as itself alone: there is only becoming, and the dance of dependencies, each upon all else.. To rest as the open awareness in which all this arises is peace, and life, and the light that is the very source and ground of what is.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

#BobDylan #contemplative #grace #KathleenDeanMoore #stillness #surrender #TSEliot

Amor fati

The literal translation of the Latin phrase amor fati is “love of fate”; the Wikipedia article states simply, “It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary.” Though the phrase has come for many to be associated with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, it has its roots in the writings of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

For most of my adult life, I have had the obscure sense that there was a grain in the way things come to be, a natural falling into place that, if yielded to, would ultimately lead to the right end. At times, I have had no words for it, hardly dared to trust my own intuition; at other times I have sought, or been taught, to characterise it as the will of God, and my own role as that of surrender to that will. This, perhaps, is getting closer, as the Christian contemplative tradition has for many years understood, most clearly in the hesychast teachings of the Eastern church.

Over time, though, it has become clearer that – for me, at any rate – its most poignant expression is in the philosophy of the Tao. “The Tao is that from which one cannot deviate; that from which one can deviate is not the Tao.” (The Doctrine of the Mean, as quoted by Alan Watts) He goes on:

However, it must be clear from the start that Tao cannot be understood as “God” in the sense of the ruler, monarch, commander, architect, and maker of the universe. The image of the military and political overlord, or of a creator external to nature, has no place in the idea of Tao.

The great Tao flows… everywhere,

to the left and to the right,

All things depend upon it to exist,

and it does not abandon them.

To its accomplishments it lays no claim.

It loves and nourishes all things,

but does not lord it over them.

[Lao Tzu 34, tr. Watts]

Yet the Tao is most certainly the ultimate reality and energy of the universe, the Ground of being and nonbeing.

The Tao has reality and evidence, but no action and no form. It may be transmitted but cannot be received. It may be attained but cannot be seen. It exists by and through itself. It existed before heaven and earth, and indeed for all eternity. It causes the gods to be divine and the world to be produced. It is above the zenith, but is not high. It is beneath the nadir, but is not low. Though prior to heaven and earth, it is not ancient. Though older than the most ancient, it is not old.

[Chuang Tzu 6, tr. Fung Yu-Lan]

To “accord with the Tao,” then, is to drop back, sit still, pay attention. Cause and effect are the way things happen. They are one thing, really. The separation of the two words is quite artificial. There is a deep peace in knowing this, and more than a peace. Truly to embrace the coming-to-be of what comes to be is to love the way itself; and yet it is not something to be attained, not an achievement or an accomplishment. The path opens of itself. All one can do is be still.

#AlanWatts #awareness #ChuangTzu #contemplative #Epictetus #FriedrichNietzsche #LaoTzu #MarcusAurelius #surrender #Tao

Why shouldn’t it hurt?

We are all finding, all the time, a kind of core. We hope it’s resilient. And if it isn’t resilient – well, equally, I’m always saying to people that strength is an overrated virtue. There’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘I can’t. I really can’t cope with this,’ and turning to whoever or whatever it takes to get through. Although I suppose that resilience and strength are not quite the same. Resilience is being able to get up again, and strength is probably standing there while the rushing brook hurls around you – and there, the point is, you don’t have to get into it. You don’t have to be there. You don’t have to just survive. But I suppose for me – and this is just personal to me, only advice and not a tenet, ‘This is how it should be’ – there is something about that gathering of yourself every day, that regathering, too, which sets you up for the day to come.

Janet Ellis, in conversation with Andrew Copson, in What I Believe: Humanist ideas and philosophies to live by

There is an old Buddhist truism, often quoted and often misattributed, to the effect that “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional”. It can sound unfeeling – smug, almost – to one in the midst of real distress; but I have found, strangely, that it is true in the end. We are frail, impermanent, like all living things. Of course change and decay happen to us, and of course they hurt. The problem arises when we are either gripped by the longing for the pain to stop, or paralysed with fear of the reasons for the pain, of its possible outcome. The answer to this is practice.

Practice? How can that work? Surely we cannot sit calmly in meditation when our hearts are broken, when pain knots our guts, or fear steals our breath. Almost certainly we can’t; probably the best we can do at times like this is remember – and often enough that in itself will be too much. How often do we expect from ourselves things the human frame cannot sustain?

Practice, hour after hour, day after day, when all is well, or when there are only little irritations, little twinges: that is the practice that will stay with us when things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold; when all we had hoped for has failed, and the cliff edge slips from under our feet. It is then that we realise that as Janet Ellis says, “You don’t have to just survive.” That, beyond belief almost, “[t]his is how it should be.” That, weirdly, it’s all right. Why not? Why not me? Why shouldn’t something dreadful happen to me? Who else should it happen to, for goodness’ sake?

What practice does, I think, is allow us to accept. Finally, radically (in the original sense of “at the root”) accept what is, even if what is happens to be terrible. Pain, loss, grief: these are inevitable parts of being alive, as is the fear of them. The “suffering”, in the sense of the old Buddhist saying, comes from thinking they shouldn’t be – from trying to make them stop. One can’t, of course: they stop when it is time for them to stop, and not before. Certainly not to order. And it is this realisation that brings the suffering, the craving for it to be otherwise, to an end. The pain may well be as bad as it ever was; but it’s okay. Really. It’s okay. It is part of what is; what, in some unfathomable way, is “how it should be”. The wind-torn wave is just a part of the river, just water, still flowing.

#AndrewCopson #contemplative #JanetEllis #practice #suffering #surrender

Les seuls qui se défendent contre #Trump.
Et l' #Europe #UE ?
On n'entend que son silence et son inaction.

#DO #NOT #OBEY
#DO #NOT #SURRENDER
#DO #NOT #TOLERATE TO #BE #MASSIVELY #SPOLIATED

The truth can only heal

This brings us to the critical factor of seeing meditation, reading, and contemplation as conjoined. We should not be satisfied to just think about impermanence and death; we have to have the real experience, which comes from meditation. To read about Buddhism’s approach to death is important, but it needs to become an existential concern and to be translated into something approximating a real intuition or a real encounter with death. Following such a path will prevent our knowledge from evaporating in the actual experience itself. From a Buddhist point of view, so much depends upon our habits, and so thinking about death in a certain way helps us to get used to it, to become habituated to it. Therefore a real transformation has to take place on an emotional and intellectual level. Most of us have a fair degree of intellectual understanding of the facts, but that is really not the main point. A sense of impermanence has to be felt and experienced. If we understand it truly, we will handle all our tribulations far better, such as when our relationships break up, when we get divorced, when we get separated from our loved ones, when relatives die. We will handle all of these situations far differently with a truer appreciation of impermanence than we would otherwise have…

Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, Tricycle Magazine, June 2015

Impermanence, the realisation in actual experience that nothing lasts, nothing is eternal, seems to many people a gloomy doctrine. Actually it is anything but. The burden of hope is lifted; the agony of yearning is eased in the coming of light. The truth can only heal; only the truth can truly heal.

As Traleg Kyabgon says, though, this has to be experienced, not merely learned. The intellect may find such a thought easy enough to grasp – or it may not! – but it is only in lived experience that the heart can know. This is grace; the grace of practice, the gift of sitting still; or else it may be the grace of pain itself, accepted either willingly or helplessly. Either way, I have not found it something I could set out to learn: it had to happen to me. (Various monastic traditions, Christian and Buddhist, have disciplines intended to make it easier – meditations in charnel-grounds, for instance – but again I suspect that they are more ways to open the heart to grace than to compel it to learn some technique or accomplishment.)

I have been uncommonly fortunate. Not only do I have my practice, grown and changed to fit over many years, but I have had more than one close encounter with the finitude of my own life. These last have been great gifts; but they are not something one could seek out intentionally – what the news reports call a “life-changing industrial accident” would be an odd sort of spiritual discipline!

I think what lies at the heart of what may be learned from all these practices and encounters is acceptance – even glad acceptance – of the fact that life and death belong together as do the two sides of one coin, as do day and night, summer and winter. Not only is one impossible without the other, but they are a succession, parts of a cycle. Our little lives are not just rounded with a sleep, but with a waking too; just as next summer will be another year, so there will be another life. Not I – I am as fleeting as the leaves – but another will wake to a new day, in another time that might have been different had I not passed this way before.

#awakening #contemplative #death #grace #practice #surrender #TralegKyabgonRinpoche

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I am an atheist

I have written here before (most recently here) of my increasing difficulty with organised religion, its practices and its dogmas, its internal turf wars and its external grasping after the levers of political and, worse, military power. What I haven’t discussed clearly enough, perhaps, is my unease at a far more fundamental level. It has taken me far too long fully to admit this unease to myself, let alone to attempt to write about it. Even now I am nervous about setting it down in permanent form.

God is usually understood, in monotheistic religions, “as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith” (Wikipedia). I have very gradually come to realise that even at the most overtly Christian periods of my life this did not describe anything I could relate to the ground of being (Paul Tillich) of my own experience. I have increasingly found it impossible to “maintain the truth that God is beyond essence and existence while simultaneously arguing for the existence of God.” (Tillich)

Spirituality, it seems to me, is far more about the discovery of meaning and purpose in direct experience – ultimately of the ontological ground itself – than it ever has been about supernatural entities however exalted. As I keep saying, this is actually very simple: it is just a matter of practice, and some measure of honesty in thinking through the implications of one’s experience.

Sam Harris, in a passage I’ve quoted often here before, writes:

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.

Waking Up

I’m not sure I’ve encountered a better summary. And yet Harris also writes (ibid.) “…many spiritual teachings ask us to entertain unfounded ideas about the nature of reality—or at the very least to develop a fondness for the iconography and rituals of one or another religion.” I have been trying no longer to entertain unfounded ideas.

Nontheist Quakers, among others, have of course long engaged with this issue. But for me, at this late stage in my life, something simpler is needed. I have to own up to having discovered myself to be an atheist. There is no need to imagine the supernatural. The mystery of the natural is, at rest in its ground, all that we are. In that there is all the peace and clarity I had not expected, but had so long sought.

#atheism #contemplative #PaulTillich #practice #religion #SamHarris #surrender