The path beneath our feet

I find myself drawn increasingly away from any form of organised religion into a kind of a settled solitude (spiritually speaking – I am not living in any particularly physical isolation) where contemplative practice seems to be becoming both more central and less contrived as time goes by. And as this unsought condition continues to settle, the impossibility of its slotting back into any religious framework grows clearer too.

This may be 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.”

Lenorë Lambert, among others, has written of a secular contemplative path, based on an openness to all sources, but guided especially by an emphasis on practice, and accessibility to “anyone, anywhere, from any background or life circumstance”. The experience of lockdown showed us (some of us were already getting the idea here and there) that special buildings and rituals, special forms of words, formulations of orthodoxy, scriptural literalisms, and many other aspects of conventional religion, are simply not required baggage on the spiritual path. Yes, we can learn from them – and often we will need to learn from them – but we are not beholden to them, as though we couldn’t walk without them.

It may be that my own already eremitical inclinations have fallen, perhaps not entirely by chance, in with an already growing cultural current. As Sam Harris points out in Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion,

Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit… many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition.

I do not share their semantic concerns. Yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term—apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative—with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.

I shall be interested to see where all this does eventually lead, though I doubt if I shall live long enough to get more than a glimpse. But it strikes me that in an odd kind of a way that doesn’t matter. All that each of us can do is walk the path we find beneath our feet at this moment. Speculations are entertaining, but they can’t be more than that. None of us can follow the web of cause and effect that brought us here more than a couple of threads back into what seems to be our past, still less make any reliable prediction of where we are going. What we can do is pay attention to where we are: that, in effect, is simply our practice.

I do not know

The apophatic denial – I do not know – humbles us and leaves us vulnerable, certainly. At the same time, it can be a tool of resistance and subversion.” (JP Williams)

To understand that we do not understand doesn’t just call into question what we think we know, but all that we have been told. The old names will not do; the familiar roles will not play out any more. And yet even to say this sort of thing contains its own risk: Kipling’s The Cat That Walked by Himself can seem a romantic figure, and can draw attention to what he seems to be, rather than what he is not.

So Williams’ “resistance and subversion” are not merely to tradition and dogma, but to ourselves: to what we think ourselves to be, certainly; but also to what we would like to be. The ground of being is no thing; to be still enough to hear its silence (1 Kings 19:12 NRSV) we must become what we are, empty of self. Not knowing, without substance, no things ourselves. I suppose all this fuss about practice, and wayfaring, is no more than that.

Grace

Anything we can say in words is myth, or legend. Even when we go out of our way to sound objective, precisely factual, our words are mere illustrations, revealing more about us and our systems of perception and cognition than ever they do of what we are trying to describe. If that is so of “ordinary” facts and events, how much more is it of spiritual ones?

But there is more. God is a word, and so are form, and emptiness. Science uses words to describe fields and probabilities – though mathematics apparently does a better job. We give accounts of things; we label even the ineffable so as to remember, to recognise what we have been.

Words are the tools of knowing. Unknowing is almost by definition their absence. But presence? Grace.