What actually is

This “close but not identical” affinity between Western unitive and Eastern nondual suggests that we look a little more closely at the phenomenological aspects of this transition—or in other words, what the structures of perception are actually doing beneath all the metaphysics and devotion. Clearly there is a big shift in perception that takes place between “dualistic” and “nondualistic” levels of consciousness, resulting in these signature experiences of oneness and an unboundaried, flowing sense of selfhood. But what if this shift is not primarily about what one sees but how one sees? That it betokens not so much a new level of conscious attainment as a permanent shift in the structure of consciousness itself—as it were, a rewiring of the “operating system”?

…I find [this approach] useful because it lifts the discussion beyond the traditional interior and subjective (read “fuzzy”) criteria used to measure nondual attainment (“How do you know if you’re enlightened yet?”) and brings it into direct dialogue with some objective, quantifiable markers increasingly verifiable in the emerging field of neuroscience. It allows us to look at the concept/experience of nonduality not through the lens of personal spiritual attainment but through the lens of the continuing evolution of consciousness.

Cynthia Bourgeault

We humans appear, for better or worse, to be people who understand the world, and each other, in terms of language and symbol; we are semiotic creatures. This understanding underlies the “user illusion” paradigm used by Donald Hoffman and Daniel Dennett, where human awareness is compared to the user interface of a computer system (whether a desktop workstation or a smartphone or anything in between); the underlying reality, whether in terms of molecular science or computer code, being approached through representations, rather than directly, since the latter would be far too complex to interact with moment by moment, even supposing the user understood it on its own terms. But as Cynthia Bourgeault points out, some such image applies equally to questions of metaphysics and devotion!

And yet, just as the interface elements on this tablet allow me to manipulate them in ways that cause real events at the level of machine code, and hence enable me to write this blog post, and later to post it online, so the way we understand contemplative experience truly affects the phenomenology of our spirituality, and hence the nature and effect of our practice. It actually does matter immensely to us how we tell ourselves about the ineffable; and yet for all our tall tales, the ineffable remains what it is.

The ground of being remains the reality of all that is; without it, nothing could have come to be, and nothing can be lost from it. What we call life and death are merely the crests and troughs of wavelets; the stream goes on. Whether we call it God, or Being, or describe it in terms of mathematical physics, it is the bright isness, Eckhart’s Istigkeit, that no-thing from which all things have their being; which we touch in the unknown interior of our practice. Our part is simply to trust the grace, however named, that opens our hearts to what actually is.

Eastering *

Jesus was not the lone exemplar. Jesus was not the standalone symbol for the pattern of the universe. Resurrection is just the way things work! When we say hallelujah to our own lives, to where they’re going, to what we believe in, and hope for. 

Reality rolls through cycles of death and resurrection, death and resurrection, death and resurrection. In the raising up of Jesus, we’re assured that this is the pattern for everything—that we, and anybody who is suffering—is also going to be raised up. This is what God does for a suffering reality. What we crucify, what reality crucifies, God transforms. I don’t think it’s naive to say hallelujah. We have every reason, especially now, since biology and science are also saying this seems to be the shape of everything. It just keeps changing form, meaning, focus or direction, but nothing totally goes away. 

Of course, it’s an act of faith on our side. In our experience, our most cherished people, pets, and even places, fade away—but Jesus is the archetype of the shape of the universe. To believe in Jesus is to believe that all of this is going somewhere and that God is going to make it so. All we have to do is stay on the train, stay on the wave, trusting that by our crucifixions, we would be allowed to fail, fumble and die, and be transformed by grace and by God.

Richard Rohr

[Jesus] left us a method for practicing this path ourselves, the method he himself modeled to perfection in the garden of Gethsemane. When surrounded by fear, contradiction, betrayal; when the “fight or flight” alarm bells are going off in your head and everything inside you wants to brace and defend itself, the infallible way to extricate yourself and reclaim your home in that sheltering kingdom is simply to freely release whatever you are holding onto—including, if it comes to this, life itself. The method of full, voluntary self-donation reconnects you instantly to the wellspring; in fact, it is the wellspring. The most daring gamble of Jesus’ trajectory of pure love may just be to show us that self-emptying is not the means to something else; the act is itself the full expression of its meaning and instantly brings into being “a new creation”: the integral wholeness of Love manifested in the particularity of a human heart…

As Paul so profoundly realized, “up” and “down” do not ultimately matter, for in kenosis consciousness reclaims dominion over energy. The pathway to freedom, to the realized unity of our being, lies in and in fact is coextensive with the sacramental act of giving it all away, making “self-giving” the core gesture through which all the meaning, purpose, and nobility of our human life is ultimately conveyed.

Cynthia Bourgeault

The intuition that death is not the end, that the way to light is through the darkness of entire surrender, is fundamental to the contemplative life in all traditions. Easter is only one expression of it, though it is certainly the most powerful expression available to us in the West. Where we so often go wrong is in assuming that “life” somehow implies the survival of something like an ego. Ego is precisely what must be surrendered, in contemplative practice just as, ultimately, in death. Personhood, whether imagined as human or as divine, is not what we think it is. As Buddhism so clearly sees, there is actually no such individual self – it only looks that way; and that illusion ends with surrender, with death. Life cannot fall out of the ground of being; the ground is life; life is being.

I am gradually coming to realise that language and culture are inescapable; I can no more escape my native English, and Englishness, than I can change my own genes. No wonder the language of the Christian contemplative life has so strong a resonance for me; it is simply the way that I perceive things, left to myself. That, after all, is how the Gospels came to be peppered with imagery that looks as though it has been borrowed from its contemporary pagan surroundings almost as much as from its native Jewish culture; that is simply how language turned out for the New Testament writers when they tried to find words for a reality beyond words.

My innate Einzelgänger-ishness remains, of course. But maybe I can embrace, rather than struggle with, my native contemplative heritage. The sense of homecoming I felt at Willen Priory was perhaps not illusory after all, but a real intuition; not a homecoming to a place so much as to a language, to a way of understanding that which is beyond language.

*Eastering, as a verb, seems to have originated with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland‘.

Faithfulness

The first thing that we begin to grasp, if we are listening to this teaching, is that meditation is a discipline, a learning process, something we must be faithful to, because in our meditation we are entering into the deepest relationship of our life. We must come to our meditation as if we are approaching the person we love most in the world, and what is needed in all relationships is fidelity. So we enter into meditation with fidelity knowing that in the discipline of it, we are becoming true disciples, true learners.

(from Aspects of Love 1 by Laurence Freeman OSB)

Meditation, any form of contemplative practice, is an odd, sometimes paradoxical kind of a thing in some ways; not least of which is the fact that despite its being so clearly a beginner's activity (see the last post here) it only reveals itself for what it is after long faithfulness. None of the contemplative disciplines is a practice for anyone looking for instant results: only after uncounted repetitions can you begin to see what is going on, and like a human relationship, only after long faithfulness can you truly touch the heart of it, and even then it's not a thing you find, but a place you find yourself in.

Hanging in there is sometimes difficult. It's so easy to think that if I only changed to some alternative practice my difficulties would be resolved, or I'd be able to step up to another level... But there it is again: this isn't about levels, it's about turning up, day after day, just quietly, not looking for any result, but letting go of the whole idea of results.

Meditation is also non-acquisitive. We are not trying to acquire anything; there is nothing to acquire. The dynamic of meditation is not trying to get anything but to lose, to let go. It is in the losing and the letting go that we will find everything that we have, everything that we are given.

(Freeman, ibid.)

An acuteness of love and attention...

In Sarah Bachelard's recent book A Contemplative Christianity for Our Time, she quotes from the epilogue to Christopher Fry's play A Sleep of Prisoners:

Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.

We do live, as did the WWII soldiers in Fry's play, in just such a time. Archimandrite Sophrony wrote, some years ago now, as if he were writing yesterday:

It has fallen to our lot to be born into the world in an appallingly disturbed period. We are not only passive spectators but to a certain extent participants in the mighty conflict between belief and unbelief, between hope and despair, between the dream of developing mankind into a single universal whole and the blind tendency towards dissolution into thousands of irreconcilable national, racial, class or political ideologies. Christ manifested to us the divine majesty of man, son of God, and we withal are stifled by the spectacle of the dignity of man being sadistically mocked and trampled underfoot. Our most effective contribution to the victory of good is to pray for our enemies, for the whole world. We do not only believe in - we know the power of true prayer... 

The Jesus Prayer will incline us to find each human being unique, the one for whom Christ was crucified. Where there is great love the heart necessarily suffers and feels pity for every creature, in particular for man; but our inner peace remains secure, even when all is in confusion in the world outside... 

As Bachelard points out, there is no sense in which prayer, let alone contemplative prayer, is to be thought of as a substitute for human endeavour, scientific, political, or whatever. But it is not less than those things. So far from a retreat from or a defence against pain, our calling may be to an acuteness of love and attention so keen and detailed as to constitute prayer itself; an entering, in effect, into the pain of the cross of Jesus that, as Helen Waddell shows in her novel Peter Abelard, goes on and on throughout all history, like a ring in the trunk of a tree; Calvary being only the visible bit, the saw-cut that reveals the ring. The cross, in all of its pain and desolation, continues through all time, the pain itself by which Christ's mercy is present always as redemption and grace.

Whatever technical interpretation we place on the theology of crucifixion and atonement, the direct spiritual experience of "an entire universe of horrifying anguish" (Rebecca Tope) is, to me at least, the most fundamental call to prayer, and the reason why for me only a contemplative practice can come anywhere near answering that call. Not for the first time I am reminded of this passage from Praying the Jesus Prayer by Br Ramon SSF:

We have seen that the Jesus Prayer involves body, mind and spirit... The cosmic nature of the Prayer means that the believer lives as a human being in solidarity with all other human beings, and with the animal creation, together with the whole created order (the cosmos). All this is drawn into and affected by the Prayer. One person's prayers send out vibrations and reverberations that increase the power of the divine Love in the cosmos.

The Christian is well aware of the fact that the world is also evil. There is a falseness and alienation which has distracted and infected the world, and men and women of prayer, by the power of the Name of Jesus, stand against the cosmic darkness, and enter into conflict with dark powers... The power of the Jesus Prayer is the armour against the wiles of the devil, taking heed of the apostle's word, 'Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayers and supplications...' [Ephesians 6.18]

Being Quiet

During this time when physically attending corporate worship of any kind is difficult, not to say inadvisable, and Zoom meetings have remained their distracting and inadequate selves, there has been plenty of time to be quiet, and to allow the assumptions and traditions by which our spiritual lives are usually conditioned to settle out, as it were, like the cloudiness in a newly-established aquarium.

Wikipedia defines religion as "a social-cultural system of designated behaviours and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements."

Contemplation, however differently it may be defined in different traditions, is at root a kind of inner seeing, an experiential encounter with the ground of being that gives rise to, and sustains, all that is. The many techniques of contemplative practice may in the end give rise to contemplation, but their intention is much more modest: to train attention and consciousness sufficiently to still the field of awareness. Of course the outer forms of mediation or contemplative practice are very different, and conditioned by the religious tradition within which they arise, but very broadly something like this seems to be intended by them all.

In this period of quiet settling, separated from the religious atmosphere and bustle of corporate worship, I have begun to sense that the "social-cultural system" of religion is something quite separate from the "experimental faith" (cf. Quaker faith  & practice 19.02) of contemplative practice, and crucially, the one does not depend upon the other.

Where this is leading I am not at present certain, but there is a clarity developing that I had not expected, nor intentionally "worked towards". The inward solitude of these unusual times is proving strangely fruitful. This is what Martin Laird once called a "pathless path": as Dave Tomlinson wrote, "Human language is unable to describe the external realities of God with any precision. As we have seen, this does not make language useless; it simply means that we have to accept its limitations... Religious language or talk about God and the spiritual realm is therefore inherently provisional and approximate in nature."

Perhaps it is time that silence and practice are allowed to stand without language: the field still, and open. It seems to be so for me.

The First Sunday of Advent

 Digitalnun writes,

Advent begins quietly, almost stealthily, with a call to stay awake and alert and prepare for the coming of the Lord. We are simply clay, to be fashioned anew by the Potter into the shape most pleasing to him. The emphasis is not on our doing but on his. That gives to the Advent season a wonderful freedom and joy. So, out with those prideful programmes of self-improvement, those ambitious schemes of prayer and fasting! Instead, welcome the silence, the mystery, the quiet pondering of scripture. Become, in the best sense, a child again, filled with wonder and awe at what is unfolding before your eyes. With the humility of Mary, the fidelity of Joseph and the joy of John the Baptist, let us prepare in our hearts a place for the Lord.

There is such comfort and hope in the simplicity of this. For me, it brings the same sense of compassionate, merciful grace that the Jesus Prayer carries, or the Pureland Buddhist Nembutsu. Simple prayers for imperfect people. Just practice.