That which plainly is

Perhaps the most important [thing] is that awakened awareness is not a state of mind; whereas mental states, no matter how exalted, come and go, awakened awareness exists prior to all passing states, as the ground of being in which all experiences arise and pass away. As I suggested earlier, it’s like space or air in this regard; without it, experiences would not occur…

Awakened awareness answers this question by providing a global, expansive, all-inclusive perspective in which the apparent center drops away and everything is welcomed for what it is, without being interpreted in terms of how it benefits or threatens the separate self. Not only that, but awakened awareness confers the realization that what’s looking out through these eyes and what’s being looked at, the apparent subject and the apparent object, are actually just expressions of the same limitless, uninterrupted, undivided field that’s inherently awake, luminous, and filled with love.

Stephen Bodian, Beyond Mindfulness, pp.28; 40-41

A statement like this risks raising hackles on the one hand on those who distrust metaphysics, and on the other on those who distrust language that tends towards the nontheist. There can be a sense of threat in a statement like this from Pema Chödrön:

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God… Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold… Non-theism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves… Nontheism is finally realizing there is no babysitter you can count on.

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart, p.53 (Kindle edition)

Practice inevitably involves walking out on some thin existential ice, and it is necessary to trust, somehow, that either the ice will bear your weight, or the practice itself will keep you from falling through. But trust is essential: panic can be disastrous, in much the same way that a bad trip can be the disastrous outcome of an experiment with psychedelics, only here there is no drug to wear off.

It is here that the concretising tendency of religion is such a comfort – especially when, maybe unexpectedly, confronted with grief or mortality. Here is Chödrön’s “hand to hold”: the cosmic babysitter when the monsters begin to close in.

But is metaphysics just religion intellectualised? There are metaphysical underpinnings in any religion, however deeply hidden they may be; and at least some religion may be metaphysics mythologised, made relatable.

But there is more to all this than a kind of psychological empiricism, or you would not be reading these words, any more than I would have written them, I suspect. As Stephen Bodian points out, the ground of being, “the limitless, formless, all-pervasive essence of what is” (ibid., p.102) is identical to the awareness within which experience itself arises. The unceasingness of that in utter experience is the end of faith, in both senses of the word “end”: that destination beyond which it is no longer necessary to believe, since one is at rest in that which plainly is.

[also posted on my other blog An Open Ground]

Prayer or Contemplation?

“Mysticism”. It’s an odd word. You think of “mystic” as a noun, and you might get a lot of odd mental images – fakirs and gurus, new age crystal-power proponents in billowing robe-like dresses, and maybe, if you happen to know about them, perhaps Christian ascetics on pillars in the desert. You will find people talking about the Religious Society of Friends as a mystical tradition, but rarely and obliquely in our official literature. Are we mystical, and if so, why don’t we talk about it much?

Openings: Standing Up for Quaker Mysticism – Sam Barnett-Cormack

Contemplative practice is sometimes seen as a useless activity, at best a somewhat solipsistic exercise in self-improvement, at worst a game for charlatans. Sam Harris, a man whom those familiar with him only by reputation might not associate with the contemplative life, 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.

Sam Harris, Waking Up, p.208

and in her recent title in the Quaker Quicks series, In Search of Stillness, Joanna Godfrey Wood says simply, “Until you have looked within, you cannot look outward to help others or move forward in action for yourself, for the community or for the world.”

But there is more to it than this. The contemplative life is is more than a preparation for works of secular action, more than an exploration of the inner world, however profound a path that may be.

As I suggested yesterday, I don’t believe it is by chance that in the Christian tradition contemplative practice is so often referred to as contemplative prayer. We humans are not alone: as John Donne saw,

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main…

John Donne, No Man Is an Island

What any of us does affects us all, in ways we may never come to understand. But understanding is not the point – that which people call God is not to be understood either – how can we comprehend the very ground of our being, the isness that engenders and contains all existence? It is easy to dismiss prayer as a primitive superstition, a pleading for magical intervention from some tyrannical ruler made in the image of a ghastly human father. But what if it is nothing of the sort? What if it is more like a conscious and intentional participation in what makes us what we are, in what makes us to be, at all?

Prayer, contemplative prayer, in any case is not something we do exactly. It is much more like something that comes upon us. Theophan the Recluse wrote:

Divine action is not something material: it is invisible, inaudible, unexpected, unimaginable, and inexplicable by any analogy taken from this world. Its advent and its working within us are a mystery… Little by little, divine action grants to man increased attention and contrition of the heart in prayer…

The spirit of prayer comes upon man and drives him into the depths of the heart, as if he were taken by the hand and forcibly led from one room to another. The soul is taken captive by an invading force, and is willingly kept within, as long as this overwhelming power of prayer still holds sway over it.

Theophan the Recluse, quoted in The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology, ed. Timothy Ware & Chariton of Valamo

We find ourselves walking through the world unarmed, vulnerable. Being present to all that we encounter as ourselves as prayer, rather than acting consciously to say prayers, we are present as aerials, signs, receiving stations for that which is both beyond and within us; that which we might call love.

Faith in change, trust in uncertainty

Simon Cross (Weekday Meditation 4/2/2022) quotes Thich Nhat Hanh:

If ten years pass without the growth of our belief, one day we will wake up and discover that we can no longer believe in what we did. The notion of ten years ago is no longer sound or adequate, and we are plunged into the darkness of disbelief.

Our faith must be alive. It cannot just be a set of rigid beliefs or notions. Our faith must evolve every day and bring us joy, peace, freedom and love.

The contemplative life is, beyond others, subject to change and growth. Without openness to change, faith ossifies into dogma, trust into a defensive rigidity.

Yet trust is necessary. Shorn of trust, our practice can become a precipice; and grief, loss, or any severe and unexpected pain become the sudden gust that takes us off our feet on the slick grass at the cliff’s edge. The sestet of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet reads:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

No worst, there is none… Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins gets it right. The sonnet holds no human hope, yet it sits within his wider body of work: Hopkins was a man whose faith shaped everything he did, and wrote.

In the Christian tradition, contemplation is very often known as contemplative prayer. This is not, I think, an accident of terminology. Contemplation, as the Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh saw so well, rests on the foundation of faith. (It is no accident that the works for which he is most known among Buddhist scholars are his translations into English and Vietnamese of the Heart Sutra, nor that he counted among his friends both Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King.)

Contemplative prayer, whether a practice like Centering Prayer, developed from the method outlined in The Cloud of Unknowing, or the Jesus Prayer, drawn originally from the contemplative practice of the Desert Mothers and Fathers, rests within the encounter with God, with the ground of being, in stillness. The faith of the contemplative is, like that of the Quaker, an experimental faith. Charles F Carter wrote:

True faith is not assurance, but the readiness to go forward experimentally, without assurance. It is a sensitivity to things not yet known. Quakerism should not claim to be a religion of certainty, but a religion of uncertainty; it is this which gives us our special affinity to the world of science. For what we apprehend of truth is limited and partial, and experience may set it all in a new light; if we too easily satisfy our urge for security by claiming that we have found certainty, we shall no longer be sensitive to new experiences of truth. For who seeks that which he believes that he has found? Who explores a territory which he claims already to know?

Quaker faith & practice 26.39

Change is a fundamental quality of life. It was the change within unicellular organisms long ago that set in motion the processes that led to the evolution of humanity, and we ourselves are born from change, to change throughout our lives. Without change, life would not be: the engine of the universe is change, on the tiniest scale to the unimaginably immense. It is how all things are made, and how they coinhere. It is this gift of change that rests in the hand of God, in the ground of being: if we trust this perception, if we trust that truth behind the opening words of John’s Gospel, there is nothing to fear. Only begin.