Troubled times

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We live in troubled times, more troubled than many of us can remember. To be honest, though, a great deal of our lives are lived in times like these. My own generation lived through a Cold War that all too often threatened to heat up into nuclear conflict, the energy crisis of the 1970s, the Viet Nam War, the UK miners’ strike (and its brutal repression) of the 1980s, the Falklands War, 9/11 – the list goes on. Our parents lived through – and many of them, Susan’s and mine included, fought in – the Second World War. Of that appalling period of history, reminiscent in so many ways of our own, CS Lewis wrote at the time:

The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes…

Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the [one] who takes [their] long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

The Weight of Glory, pp.48, 61

Awareness of impermanence, the recognition that our lives are led in a dissolving world of ceaseless change, is not a doctrine of despair but of realism; and in that realism, hope. Somehow our very grief becomes, in extremis, a channel of grace. Sharon Salzberg:

At times, pain can reach such a powerful level that it can be devastating. In spiritual life, we might call it the dark night of the soul. In interpersonal life, we call it grief, and this intense emotional experience does not limit itself to the loss of someone who has died. It can occur as the experience of nearly any kind of deep loss.

To accept the love that is the motor of grief is to accept the role of mourners, of givers-of-thanks for what is being lost, bearers of unbearable hope. Death always follows life; but new life follows death. (Even in Chernobyl, the natural world is thriving as never before.)

To accept what is, it is necessary to know what is, now. This means attention, questioning, investigation. It means practice.

When we feel separate, small and encapsulated, the ungraspable nature of the living reality makes us feel insecure and out of control. And because reality sometimes contains enormous pain and suffering, we are easily prone to adopting ideas and beliefs that seem to provide security, control, explanations and so on. But belief is always shadowed by doubt. And the truth is, we are clueless. We cannot see the whole.

But we don’t need to! When trying to get a grip falls away, it is actually a huge relief!

Joan Tollifson, The Essentials (Substack)

Human culture is not “an inexcusable frivolity on the part of creatures loaded with such awful responsibilities as we.” (Lewis, ibid.) If we have one job in times like this, it is to be bearers, through our careful grief, of love, of grace, of light even, into this present darkness.

Tariki

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It seems to me that we are not so much human beings as human becomings. And it doesn’t apply merely to humans: there are feline becomings and bovine becomings, cephalopod becomings and fungal becomings. It’s becomings all the way down.

To speak of a “being” implies an object, a static substance that acts and is acted upon; a thing embedded like a rock in a stream called time. But this isn’t what we are. Even our cells are replaced on a regular basis, some every few days; we change and evolve, each of us, throughout our lives, and we are different people in different eras of our life, very often with different interests and abilities. This applies perhaps more strongly to some people than to others, but by and large it is true: a person in later life is quite different than the “same person” in their teens, or as the parent of a young family.

Our thoughts too shift and flicker moment by moment, despite any effort we may make to concentrate on even one stream of them. Even the most elementary contemplative practice will show us this in the first few minutes!

But it isn’t just the ephemeral creatures of earth that are becoming, moment by moment and aeon by aeon. Our planet itself is changing and remoulding itself – if you doubt that you’ve never lived through an earthquake – and even our own lovely Milky Way is a finely balanced eddy of gas and dust and stars sailing 630 km/sec along the Hubble Flow.

Nothing is static. There are no objects, except by convention. All is change and becoming. As Spinoza saw, there is no substance but God (or Nature): everything – ourselves included – is merely a mode of that infinite becoming. The ten thousand things are no more than sparkles on the broad river of the Tao.

Literally, no thing is the ground of becoming.

So if this is how it is, what of our vaunted human will? The slipstream of a passing gnat disperses it. But becoming is movement, an ontological wind over the ocean of what is. There is no need to lean, brows knitted, on the imagined oars of the will. Sit still; the sail is raised of itself, and fills.

Contemplation and language

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As I have mentioned before on this blog, writing in secular terms about the contemplative life, even thinking about it (as opposed simply to living it), is all but impossible without engaging with the religious language in which it has been clothed for most of its recorded existence. It is hard to write about the interior life without a framework of what is, effectively, myth, no matter which religion’s terminology is used the describe, even to think, about it. After all, it is so much easier to use a ready-mixed religious language, in which various shades of meaning may be taken more or less for granted without having to struggle actually to describe them. But as AC Grayling wrote:

There are people of sincere piety for whom the religious life is a source of deep and powerful meaning. For them and for others, a spiritual response to the beauty of the world, the vastness of the universe, and the love that can bind one human heart to another, feels as natural and necessary as breathing. Some of the art and music that has been inspired by faith counts among the loveliest and most moving expressions of human creativity. It is indeed impossible to understand either history or art without an understanding of what people believed, feared and hoped through their religious conceptions of the world and human destiny. Religion is a pervasive fact of history, and has to be addressed as such…

To move from the Babel of religions and their claims, and from the too often appalling effects of religious belief and practice on humankind, to the life-enhancing insights of the humanist tradition which most of the world’s educated and creative minds have embraced, is like escaping from a furnace to cool waters and green groves…

[W]hat alternative can the non-religious offer to religion as the focus for expression of those spiritual yearnings, that nostalgia for the absolute, the profound bass-note of emotion that underlies the best and deepest parts of ourselves? Often this question is asked rhetorically, as if there is no answer to it, the assumption being that by default religion is the only thing that speaks to these aspects of human experience, even if religion is false and merely symbolic. The symbolism, some views have it, is enough to do the work.

The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, pp.1,7

Contemplation is not about escaping the world; it’s more about seeing the threads that connect it to all that is. It’s not a matter of reconciling the world to some imagined deity; it’s a matter of discovering that the world is not other than its metaphysical ground. Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” “Where I place my attention shapes what I become. To attend to the suffering of others, the beauty of the world, or the silence within is to participate in the creation of meaning—not because a god demands it, but because the world needs it.” (Mistral Le Chat, in response to user query)

To express the not-other-ness of each other, of “all that is made” (Julian of Norwich), is more often the work of poetry – see Mary Oliver, or JH Prynne – than of philosophy; and when philosophy does take up the challenge, the result is famously difficult – Martin Heidegger, AN Whitehead, even Benedictus Spinoza, for instance. A few, RS Thomas occurs to me, manage to write poetry that is as difficult to read as the metaphysicians. So who am I to complain that I don’t find this blog easy to write?

The only approach that seems to offer a glimmer of hope here is, perhaps oddly, unknowing.

Much has been made of the difference, indeed the opposition, of religion and science. But the more we hear of modern scientific research, especially in physics, the closer they seem to be. Contrary to popular belief, science is not about establishing indisputable facts, it is about positing and attempting to prove (or disprove) hypotheses, with the understanding that any discovery may be superseded in the future. Science is about a spirit of enquiry. The unknown is accepted, even welcomed as a challenge for future research. As biologist Stuart Firestein said, “What we don’t know is our job. It’s much more interesting to think about what we don’t know than what we do know.” That too is the mystic position.

But, whereas scientists may see this place as a challenge to learn more and to eradicate more areas of uncertainty, for mystics or spiritual seekers, the challenge may be about embracing that uncertainty, about accepting that for some questions there will be no answers – and that it doesn’t matter. Not only that it doesn’t matter but that the unforeseen may contain riches that go beyond what in our habitual ways of thinking and in our workaday lives we are capable of imagining. In giving the unforeseen more of a chance, we are opening up opportunities for our creative selves, for spontaneity, for the part of us that goes beyond the routine certainties of everyday life.

If we recognise that it is the unforeseen that might have the most importance in our lives, we may allow ourselves to welcome uncertainty…

Jennifer Kavanagh, A Little Book of Unknowing, p.15

Process and coinherence

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Prehension is not perception in the ordinary sense, and it is not causation as traditionally imagined. It is the way an event takes account of the world it inherits. Without it, the past would be dead, the present spontaneous, and continuity impossible. To prehend something is to include it in one’s own becoming. This inclusion need not be conscious, deliberate, or even noticeable. It simply means that what has happened contributes to what is happening.

Every actual occasion prehends its predecessors. It does not choose whether to do so. Prehension is mandatory. What is optional is how it prehends…

The past does not act on the present by pushing, transmitting force, or occupying the same space. Instead, the present appropriates the past. Influence travels forward because it is taken up, not because it is imposed.

This replaces external causation with internal relation.

Robert Flix, [AN] Whitehead in Plain English, p.62

Contemplation is an entering, in profoundly open awareness, into the process of prehension. This isn’t a passive reception, an observation only; it is a deliberate participation in, a strengthening of, the relational web between occasions, between things, events and their relations.

This seems to me why contemplatives have so often, especially those practicing within the traditions of a religion, connected the idea of contemplation with intercession, whether in the developed theology of hesychasm, or in Buddhist conceptions of metta or tonglen. Looked at like this, contemplative prayer in its intercessory dimension is not superstition but metaphysics; the practitioner, through their inevitable coinherence with the suffering inherent in existence, prehends the brokenness of things, holding them in the light of unbroken awareness. In effect, the practitioner enters into the suffering as the suffering enters into them: acting as a lightning-rod between what merely is and the ground of being itself – God, if you will allow the term.

In A Little Book of Unknowing, Jennifer Kavanagh writes:

…Faith is not about certainty, but about trust… 

We have seen that there is little about which we can be certain. Certainty may be undermined by limitations of the current state of knowledge; the subjective nature of experience; the fluid quality of the material world; or the intervention of unforeseen events. But beyond these aspects of the world about which we often assume knowledge, there is a dimension of life to which rational explanation simply doesn’t apply. Most people would admit that there is much that we cannot apprehend through reason or through the senses. We might know a fact with our brains, but not be able to understand what it means, to fully experience its reality – the age of a star or the trillions of connections within the human brain – some things are too big, too complex, for us to conceive. Einstein, who knew a thing or two about factual knowledge, felt that “imagination is more important than knowledge”. There is a dimension which co-exists with the material, rationally grounded world, is not in opposition to it or threatened by scientific development but happily stands alone in the context of everything else.

Reading Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics seems at last to be providing me with a framework within which I can begin to understand what has always been a deep instinct in my own practice: that it wasn’t merely a solipsistic exercise in self-improvement, but a real work of weight and consequence beyond my own narrow concerns. In a sense, it doesn’t matter of course whether I can explain it to my own or anyone else’s satisfaction; what matters is that it does work, is actual work, in some obscure corner of the healing of things.

Returning

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We still seek wholeness. It is intrinsic to human identity that, however much we have achieved, we are never satisfied. We hunger and thirst for what lies beyond our grasp and even beyond the horizon of our desire. Religion and spirituality, which are less easy to divorce than we thought – are the elements of culture that deal with this desire beyond desire. Where are they taking us? Where do we have to redefine the old terms by which we try to understand ourselves in this longing for wholeness? …

When belief takes the place of faith in the religious mind the possible range of spiritual experience and growth is critically limited. When religion emphasizes belief rather than faith it may find it easier to organize and define its membership and those it excludes. It is easier to pass judgement. But it will produce, at the best, half-formed followers. The road to transcendence is cut off, blocked by landfalls of beliefs as immoveable as boulders, beliefs we are told to accept and do not dare to put to the test of experience. In such a rigid and enforced belief system what I believe also easily slides into what I say I believe, or what I am told to believe or what I feel I ought to believe, because the I that believes becomes so dependent on the identity generated by the structured belief system we inhabit.

Laurence Freeman, First Sight: The Experience of Faith, pp.3,9

We must… make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity p.24

The spiritual life looked at from within resembles not so much a ladder or an ordered progress as it does a rather tatty wheel. It does move, but it moves at least as much round and round as it does forward. It is a process of trial and error – trials and errors. It seems to be more like an organic thing, subject to odd diversions and random mutations, than a neat structure assembled according to a set of plans.

Coinherence is one of those luminous words whose meaning flickers at the edge of comprehension, as though it names something you already half-know in your bones. Charles Williams was fond of using it, but its roots extend far further back than that. If ultimate reality (God, the Way) is in fact process, relational union, rather than an object or a person, then relational living is intrinsic to life itself, and it has profound implications for human behaviour, ethics and purpose. Specifically, it speaks to the contemplative life in ways that make sense of much monastic teaching over the years, right from the Desert Fathers and Mothers to the present day.

Pain and difficulty – what used to be called “tribulation” – are intrinsic to life itself. “Change and decay in all around I see,” wrote Henry Francis Lyle, and an open heart risks breaking daily at the news from across the world, even in supposedly stable and civilised nations. But if we are aware that all that is – not only, if especially, conscious beings – rests in the ground of being just as we do ourselves, then our presence in contemplation becomes much more than a state of mind. We are not “praying for” those for whom our hearts are torn; we are recognising our shared being, recognising an existential bond that exists already. Love is not symbolic, but structural: a circulation of grace, strength and suffering.

The living current of grace that coinheres in all existence is the source of what is – the Tao as the mother of the ten thousand things – and yet it is the heart of our contemplation itself. Only if we sit still can we be present as aerials, signs, receiving stations for that grace. The mist covers the distances, and our vision is not good; but we don’t need to know or to believe: our unknowing is itself our practice and our compassion. Perhaps all we need is love.

This rib cage of failure

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It is simple enough to lose sight of the liberating nature of our failings. They often seem to lead us into some parched, lonely place—a place of dry bones. The problem is not our inadequacies, much less the freight of the failures we carry, but the loss of perspective on what we resent most in ourselves. Light forever shines from within the rib cage of failure. But reactive mind is too cluttered to realize that this is the nature of divine love: flowing waters of mercy for all who are parched—each of us… Nor is reactive mind capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, pp.95-6

Just as death is the inescapable precondition for new life, so failure and error are the necessary spring of change and growth in the spiritual life. Only when we will let ourselves know that, only in the wreckage of our plans and conclusions, only in the defeat of our new beginnings and our fresh initiatives, can we be broken open to the current of grace that will wash us out into the open sea of becoming.

Behind all these metaphors there is a very simple fact, it seems to me: that only when we cease completely from self-justification, when we are prepared without reservation to let go of whatever role we imagined for ourselves – spiritual humanist, say, or secular Buddhist – can we discover what the flow of change – the Way, the leading of the Spirit, call it whatever feels right – is tending towards.

I think this applies both in our own inner lives and in the broader life of humankind. We can see it in the unceasing pattern of evolution (species don’t remain static, however attached we may have become to one or another expression of their diversity) and in the breakdown and reformation of institutions. Sarah Bessey (Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith) sees it in the breakdown of the established churches, and in the tentative shoots of a radical, open faith appearing through the rubble, like fireweed springing up through the rubble of bombed buildings following WW2. (Yes, I am old enough to remember seeing it for myself from the top decks of London buses, riding with my mother looking over the makeshift hoardings that attempted to conceal the broken gaps in the terraces and the rows of shops beginning to struggle back to some sort of normality after the end of hostilities!)

“Everything passes/everything changes/just do what you think you should do,” sang Bob Dylan (‘To Ramona‘). But what Martin Laird calls “reactive mind” is too wrapped up in what it thinks it thinks to know; it is only when we keep still enough in our own awareness that we are “capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.”

Hesychia

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The greek word hesychia (ἡσυχία) is commonly translated as quiet or stillness. In Orthodox teaching it is often associated with the idea of nepsis (νῆψις), watchfulness. Grace settles over stillness, as the heart withdraws from its clinging and rejecting and its continual self-comparison. If we can keep still enough, and merely watch, the sediment of self-concern will precipitate out.

Martin Laird writes (An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, p.74):

We can just begin to see how contemplative practice gently loosens the knot of ego and calms the spasms of reactive mind. When we return our attention to our practice as soon as we are aware that our attention has been stolen, ego is less and less the focus of our attention. The television screen in our heads will continue its constant stream of noise and images. The more we watch and listen to it the duller we feel, a dullness we take to be normal. We grow bored with constantly flipping through channels in search of something that might, one of these rounds, land on something that gives us a sense of being alive instead of being deadened by the din of our minds. The practical answer is simple: let the television play. Simply don’t watch it. Gradually (neither in a day nor in a short while) the light of awareness begins to shine through this mental clutter and we begin to realize that the derived identity provided by ego no longer has the ring of truth. “We need to guard,” [Christian] Bobin says, “not only against the world, but against our preoccupation with ourselves, another door by which the world might creep back into us like a prowler into a sleeping house.”

Practice is like this. Regardless of why we thought we began in the first place, only in quiet persistence, rather than in mental heroics and spiritual metrology, can the heart be still enough for grace to break through like sunlight through the overcast.

Behind the hours of practice there is a quiet, luminous stillness; it is always there, has always been there, only we had forgotten it among the “noise and images”. Practice, it seems to me, is perhaps no more than a means – whichever means we have found fits us best – of keeping quiet; for it is only in quiet that we are able to open to the grace of that luminous stillness. This conscious state of illumination (often referred to by Catholic writers as “contemplation” or “infused contemplation” – as opposed to “contemplative practice”) is a gift. It cannot be achieved. It seems to me that intent needs simply to disappear in the practice of contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. But nevertheless the absence of intent, replaced with simple dwelling in stillness, in the presence of what is, now, is the only way I know to becoming vulnerable enough to be available to illumination – to the light of the open ground itself.

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The annihilation of difference

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It begins to appear
this is not what prayer is about.
It is the annihilation of difference,
the consciousness of myself in you, of you in me. . .
Circular as our way
is, it leads not back to that snake-haunted
garden, but onward to the tall city
of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.

RS Thomas, from ‘Emerging’, Collected Poems 1945-1990

For most of my life – in fact since about the age of five – my life seems to have been centred on silence, stillness, the presence of something overwhelming but infinitely desirable, unnamable but closer somehow than my own breathing. Of course I didn’t even try, as a young child, to name it – or even really to try and think about it at all. It merely was.

Ever since then, I have been trying to find words. Words to tell others, certainly, but more than that, words to tell myself where I have been. (Words for this kind of thing are never in the present tense – they must refer to something remembered, to some trace in the mind left by the God behind whom the door has already closed.) And words, it seems, bring community. That is perhaps what they are for, after all. But communities own their words, own their people; or so they feel.

I have found myself, of course, borrowing words wholesale from others who have come this way before. But they are others’ words, however sublime they may be, however hallowed by time and tradition. In these late years all I can do is try to speak of what still leaps up in my heart at echoes, snatches of music, phrases from the Psalms, sunlight through high windows. I know RS Thomas’ hard-found annihilation of difference – it is what has haunted me all these years. It lies beneath my sitting every night and morning. It will be waiting for me, softly, after my last breath. I have no other name for it, since it is no thing. Dear, endless, it merely is.

A wider mercy

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Then, for no good reason, you remember.

Oh. Right. This is experience. This is radiant presence. This whole thing is what I am.

And immediately, even if nothing changes on the surface, the weight drains out of the moment. The seriousness falls away. The same pain, the same confusion, now sit inside a wider mercy.

The cosmology could not be simpler.

There is only this field of experience. It is what you are. Everything that seems to be happening is that field showing itself to itself, in this impossible, intimate way.

The story will go on. The interpretation will never stop. The madness will continue, in you and in the world. On that level, nothing is ever finally resolved.

At the same time, the one fact is always quietly in place, before any of it, as all of it…

Rob Barker, from This Radiant Space

Union with God is not something we can or need to acquire. By way of the contemplative skills of engaged receptivity and release, we realize this Union ever more deeply and clearly throughout the course of the days given us. God is too simple to be absent. It is we who, with complicated and cluttered minds, remain unaware that this foundational Light is flowering perpetually in the fertile and unfathomable right now. As St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions: You are “more intimate to me than my inmost self.” Paraphrasing this very line, Meister Eckhart preaches: “The soul takes her being immediately from God: therefore God is nearer to the soul than she is to herself, and therefore God is in the ground of the soul with all His Godhead.” St. Augustine likewise knows this grounding light: “This light itself is one, and all those who see it and love it are one.”

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light, p.24

We are not separated; there is nothing we can do, or need to, to achieve union, nonduality, oneness. We just need to step out of the light – which is why we practice, of course. If we don’t do something regularly, we forget. We forget anyway; but at least our practice gives us something to remind us, a place to look back at when we feel entirely lost.

And feeling lost reminds me of the wider mercy of which Rob Barker writes. The light, the radiant presence, the endless ground is not neutral. It is not abstract. Now, I am not saying – and nor is Rob Barker or Martin Laird – that it is a person. You can’t point to it, and say, “There it is, over there!” If you could, it would not be one. It is no thing, but it is not an abstraction. It is real, far more real than we are, more real even than the solid earth beneath us. We, and all the “ten thousand things”, are only fleeting eddies in its unceasing stream, of which we are already part. The wider mercy is all that is, and it is merciful. In the end, It is our only home.