Unexpectedly, I find myself writing again at The Mercy Blog!
Contemplation
Surrender
A new post on Silent Assemblies: Surrender
Form and mystery
A new post on Silent Assemblies: Form and mystery
Ground level
The ground of being is simply what is, at its deepest level: Eckhart’s istigkeit. All that is rests in the ground by its own nature, and that includes us. But we are conscious; more than that, self-aware. In being aware of our own being, becoming truly aware in silence of our own isness as not separate from what is, we realise that the ground of our own self is not other than the ground of all that is.
Cynthia Bourgeault writes, “Mystical hope would simply be what happens when we touch this innermost ground and it floods forth into our being as strength and joy. Hope would be the Mercy-divine love itself-coursing coursing through our being like lightning finding a clear path to the ground.”
She goes on,
You may have noticed that those three experiences Bede Griffiths mentioned as “pathways to the center” have one thing in common: they all catapult us out of ego-centered consciousness. Those who come hack from a near-death experience bring with them a visceral remembrance of how vivid and abundant life is when the sense of separateness has dropped away. Those who fall profoundly in love experience a dying into the other that melts every shred of their own identity, self-definition, caution, and boundaries, until finally there is no “I” anymore-only “you.” Those who meditate go down to the same place, but by a back staircase deep within their own being.
This realisation of our own identity with the ground (it reminds me of the Buddhist concept of Śūnyatā) seems to me to be precisely Bourgeault’s “back staircase.” It is only in the total poverty of silence and stillness that we can find it, but it is our only home.
Am I conscious now?
Susan Blackmore (Zen and the Art of Consciousness) asks the question, as a kind of koan, “Am I conscious now?”
It’s a good question. Am I? Have I been?
We must all be familiar with the sensation of listening to a favourite piece of music, and suddenly realising we’ve missed the best bit – the key change we love, the beginning of the bridge, whatever it is. We’ve been listening out for it, anticipating it, but when it comes our mind has wandered off into some fantasy, some memory, or a bird passing the window has caught our attention, and it is gone. Where? Were we aware of it?
Or we are meditating, paying attention to what is happening now, and we become aware (Blackmore uses this example herself, but I have had the identical experience many times) of a sound in the street outside. How long has it been going on? When we notice it, it has not just begun. And yet when we notice it, we are aware that we were aware of it already. It’s been going on for several seconds, quite distinctly, but we didn’t exactly notice. Now we do, and we remember, if that’s the right word, that it was happening already. Were we conscious then?
Here we are. For a moment, our whole attention is on now. Oh, the delicious freshness of it! We’re not remembering: we’re hearing it, feeling it, now! All that is, is now. There is nothing else. What else could there be?
Blackmore mentions Daniel Dennett’s objection to Cartesian dualism (which roughly states that there’s an I, sitting in here looking at a that, which is out there somewhere). But where is this I? There’s nowhere in the physical brain that could correspond to an I, no locus of consciousness, nor is there anywhere an incorporeal self (soul) could plug into the soggy assemblage of neurons between our ears. Dennett suggests rather that consciousness consists of “multiple drafts”. Blackmore writes (ibid.) “Dennett describes the self as a ‘benign user illusion’, and replaces the theatre with his theory of ‘multiple drafts’. According to this theory, the brain processes events in multiple ways, all in parallel and in different versions. None of the drafts is ‘in consciousness’ or ‘outside consciousness’; they appear so only when the system is probed in some way, such as by provoking a response or asking a question. Only then is one of the many drafts taken as what the person must have been conscious of. This is why he claims that ‘There are no fixed facts about the stream of consciousness independent of particular probes.’”
This makes more sense. Perhaps the light of attention picks out one or another draft, falls on one or another as the object of attention. But whose attention? Another draft’s attention? It’s all very puzzling.
But that moment. Now! That moment. There there is no sense of a shifting light of attention. There is only now. It has all come together in an instant, literally. This instant, now!
Perhaps we cannot know. Perhaps there is something here not susceptible of analysis. The bright instant is itself, represents no thing. It seems to rest in the ground of being directly, an isness that is only itself. Perhaps it is only light.
What is present
The present is unconditioned, radically permeable; you could call it eternity. So little of the activity of the mind appears to be concerned with the present – there are worries about the future; regrets at the past; what-ifs, endless what-ifs of every colour and condition – but actually to keep still in the present, that is more difficult, and yet it is our only solace, our only freedom.
Of course this is why we practice, really. There is nothing in our mind, not in our thoughts or our imaginings, not in our desires or our interpretations of what we sense, that is truly now. By the time we perceive, by the time we identify and analyse what we see or feel, it is already past.
But suppose we could just sense – not remark upon, identify, classify – just sense. Whether we sense our own body and its autonomic systems – breathing, sitting, even digestion – or whether we simply register the input from our senses as it is (sound without its being the sound of anything, light without anything lit up) perhaps we could be as close to the present as it is given us to be in life.
Now is not then, nor is it to come: it is not even the space of some minute fraction of a second, it is infinitely thin – and so it is infinite, without time. It rests in the ground directly, and so it is our true home. For us, though we cannot know what it is, perhaps it alone is true.
More on faith and belief
Last month I wrote a post quoting Alan Watts:
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
The more I think about this, the more crucial it seems to me for the non-religious contemplative life. Religion, as defined in Wikipedia, “is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.”
Spirituality, on the other hand, is perhaps best defined by Sam Harris:
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
Faith is often used (and Sam Harris is sometimes guilty of this) merely as an alternative word for belief, whereas Watts’ definition seems to me far closer to the mark: “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.” This is precisely the kind of faith I find I need to continue with a contemplative practice, which is almost by definition “a plunge into the unknown”: the psychonaut casting off from the shores of consensus (conditioned) reality. (In this context, it is worth remarking that in a theocentric society, religious belief is consensus reality!)
18 months or so ago, I wrote,
As I have found myself increasingly at variance with institutional religion, Christian, Buddhist or whatever, and increasingly sceptical of its value either in the life of the spirit or in the life of society, so my naturally eremitical inclinations seem to have strengthened – dramatically so since the enforced isolation in which so many of us found ourselves during the earlier months of the recent pandemic. The opportunity for online fellowship and collegiality of one kind or another changes our expectations of community and communication almost daily.
As I grow older, and gradually (if sometimes inconsistently) settle into a life outside any religious framework, in companionable solitude, married eremitism, call it what you will, I find I am relatively happy not calling myself anything in particular. Ethically, I am a humanist; spiritually, it’s harder to say. While I will always be grateful to the institutional teachers I have encountered over the years – in my case mostly within the Christian contemplative tradition – I am happiest just getting on with it. The path, or whatever it’s called, is its own place. Names separate; in the ground itself there is no separation.
Opening into…
As we go on into whatever it is our practice is opening into, it seems to me to become apparent that the underlying or enclosing ground of being, isness, is neither a metaphysical abstraction nor a psychological apprehension, but a reality so profound that to think of it as a thing, or condition, is to miss the mark. This is why I keep on coming back to the word God, not as a trademark owned by one or another institution, but as the only way to speak of something more real than the earth beneath my feet, more alive by far than I am myself.
Now of course I’m aware that “God” comes with a vast deal of emotional and conceptual baggage for most of us, and for some of us that baggage may be a dead weight. For me, though, not having been brought up as a child to the profession of any formal religion, it is a treasury of bright images, a boundless resource for understanding where I may find myself.
Laurence Freeman writes, “By beginning [a settled practice] we learn pretty quickly that we meditate as disciples, not as entrepreneurs.” That is indeed how it feels to me; it is too easy, perhaps, to make our practice itself, or its imagined “goal” into the centre of this life, rather than following the light to which it tends.
Freeman again:
What happens is that a whole set of forces, inter-connected in the unity of our spirit, is released in our centre and radiates outwards to our lives. But it is not even this that is the fundamental goal. It isn’t this we are asking about when we say, ‘When will it happen?’ All these real and necessary dimensions, all these inter-dependent forces are signs and symbols of one unified force, the one unified reality. This is the power of the reality of the Spirit of God who dwells in our heart, in the final depth of our spirit, the Spirit of all creation which is also the ultimate goal and meaning of our life… Because we then know that ‘it’ is the Spirit which is both the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega. It is the beginning and the end of our meditation, of the whole journey of our meditation taken from the day we begin until the last day of our life.
Onyng
If the ground of being is no thing, literally not an object – as it must be, being the source and beginning of all that comes to be – then in our closeness to it we find we cannot speak of it, really. JP Williams writes: “Aside from the fact that the Creator of all cannot be any kind of ‘object’, the divine activity of ‘onyng’ [Julian of Norwich] finally removes the ground from under any duality. The soul’s ‘solitude’ is not necessarily a denial of divine presence; when it is united with God, there are not two beings to count. Peace and holiness are ‘held at no remove’, as John [of the Cross] says. In so far as the soul speaks at all there, it stammers, tripping itself up, disrupting its own saying.”
In the ground itself there is no separation, no “God” and “soul”; there is only being. There is no “life” and “death”, as if these were separated, states or places to transition between; there is only isness, beyond time or ending. What we think of as self (which is only a convenient fiction, anyway) is entirely subsumed in light. It is nothing: it has found no thing.
Groundswell
I use the phrase “The Ground of Being” – though I don’t usually capitalise it – often on this blog. It is usually credited to Paul Tillich, who used it in his Systematic Theology to refer to God as being-itself, though I doubt if he was its originator. The concept itself has been around for centuries, in Christian mysticism, in the Buddhist Dzogchen tradition, in the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Tao…
The ground of being is there, and only there, when we come to an end of ourselves. It lies far beyond all we know as self, or other – though it can appear to us so utterly other that we are tempted to hide from it – and yet the way to it is inward, into the extreme depths of what we are. In Cynthia Bourgeault’s words, “it is the spring at the bottom of the well of our being through which hope is continually renewed.”
Ontologically, the ground of being is the source of all that is; in Paul’s words, “He [Christ] is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17 NIV) It is hard to get away from what would appear to be religious language here, though it is as approximate and metaphorical as any other. Matthew Fox writes, “Divinity is found in the depth of things, the foundation of things, the profundity of things. We all have a depth, a ground, a presence and there, says Eckhart, lies divinity, for ‘God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground.'”
Yet the ground of being is no thing: it precedes thingness. One can’t really use it, in any meaningful sense, as the object of a sentence, and yet it keeps us wanting to use it as a verb, which is perhaps the reason why the writer known as John opened his gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1 NIV)
It seems that actually to encounter the ground is way beyond our pay grade. All we can do is to be willing to be encountered by it (though to be without it would be to be without existence at all). Cynthia Bourgeault has a quote for us:
Bede Griffiths, one of the great contemplative masters of our time, claimed that there are actually three routes to the center. You can have a near-death experience. You can fall desperately in love. Or you can begin a practice of meditation. Of the three, he said with a somewhat mischievous smile, meditation is probably the most reliable starting point.
Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope
The ground is the end, that to which all things return. Kathleen Dowling Singh wrote, “[Death] is the experience of ‘no exit,’ a recognition of the fact that the situation is inescapable, that one is utterly at the mercy of the power of the Ground of Being…” It is the safest place, out of which one cannot fall: it might even be called Love. In Dowling Singh’s words, again, “Love is the natural condition of our being, revealed when all else is relinquished, when one has already moved into transpersonal levels of identification and awareness. Love is simply an open state with no boundaries and, as such, is a most inclusive level of consciousness. Love is a quality of the Ground of Being itself. In this regard and at this juncture in the dying process, love can be seen as the final element of life-in-form and the gateway to the formless.”
[First published on An Open Ground]
A Long Restlessness 