August | 2023 | Contemplative Inquiry

August 27, 2023

THE WISDOM OF COMPASSION

“Toward all beings maintain unbiased thoughts and speak unbiased words. Toward all beings give birth to thoughts and words of kindness instead of anger, compassion instead of harm, joy instead of jealousy, equanimity instead of prejudice, humility instead of arrogance, sincerity instead of deceit, compromise instead of stubbornness, assistance rather than avoidance, liberation instead of obstruction, kinship instead of animosity.” (1,2)

Humanism extends our circle of care to all humans, clearly a high bar in our current state of culture. Druidry, certainly an animist Druidry embracing deep ecology, asks us to extend it further – to all beings. At first glance, it seems like a complicated and demanding ask in a world where life lives off other life, and where cooperation and competition necessarily co-arise. Yet for some people this stance towards the world is (or becomes) natural.

The passage in my first paragraph offers guidance on the Bodhisattva path in Mahayana Buddhism. Followers of the path let go of any quest for personal liberation to work for the liberation of all beings. Sometimes this is understood as a postponement of personal liberation, but the deeper insight is that ‘personal’ liberation makes no sense. In an interconnected and interdependent cosmos, only the liberation of all counts as any liberation at all.

In the Diamond Sutra (3) the definition of ‘beings’, put into the mouth of the Buddha himself, is as broad and inclusive as possible: “however many species of living beings there are – whether born from eggs, from the womb, from moisture, or spontaneously; whether they have form or no form; whether they have perceptions or do not have perceptions, we must lead all these beings to the ultimate nirvana so that they can be liberated.” Then the Buddha adds: “And when this innumerable, immeasurable, infinite number of beings has become liberated, we do not in truth think that a single being has been liberated”.

Thich Nhat Hanh (3) understands this last statement as saying “a true practitioner helps all living beings in a natural and spontaneous way, without distinguishing the one who is helping from the one who is being helped. When our left hand is injured, our right hand takes care of it right away. It doesn’t stop to say: ‘I am taking care of you. You are benefitting from my compassion’. The right hand knows very well that the left hand is also the right hand. There is no distinction between them. This is the principle of interbeing – co-existence, or mutual interdependence. ‘This is because that is’.”

I am not a Buddhist. I do not share the classical Buddhist views of karma and reincarnation. I do not associate final physical death with the term ‘liberation’. But I am aware of not, ever, being on my own – even when being, in the world’s terms, solitary. Apparent boundaries between me and my world are too soft: relationships are happening all the time. With this sense of the world in mind, the words below, repeated from the first paragraph, seem like common sense.

(1) From the Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-five Thousand Lines translated into English by Edward Conze, Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975 and cited in (2), below

(2) Red Pine, The Diamond Sutra: the Perfection of Wisdom. Text and Commentaries translated from Sanskrit and Chinese Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2001 See: https://www.counterpointpress.com

(3) Thich Nhat Hanh The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Diamond Sutra Berkeley, CA Parallax Press, 201

NOTE: Versions of the Diamond Sutra appeared as written texts in Sanskrit in the 2nd century C.E. and this version was translated from Sanskrit into Chinese in the early 5th century C.E. Works of this kind were used more for recitation and chanting in monastic settings than they were for silent reading.

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August 22, 2023

THE GINKGO TREE

“Higher up, … in the middle of a small clearing, there stood a gigantic ginkgo tree. In the scheme of tiny streets, this was practically the one single unoccupied space, and of course this plot of land was only precisely as big as was necessary for the ancient tree to exist, for it to get both air and sunlight, for it to have enough strength to spread out roots beneath the earth.

Every other plant on the upward inclining streets of the quarter of Fukuine belonged to either something or someone: it was the property, ornament, and decoration, the carefully guarded and cared-for treasure of one or another family building, reaching out from tiny pristine courtyards with blooming or budding branches, the perennially green foliage emerging suddenly next to the eaves of the tiny, hidden gates, or the regularly repeating fence slats …

Only … the ginkgo tree that belonged to nothing and to no one stood by itself in the clearing as if there were’t even anything that it could be tethered to, as if it couldn’t even belong to anything, a kind of unbridled, wild, dangerous being rising high above every building and roof and tree, already with its full fresh crown in the unaccustomedly gentle early spring and with its multitude of peculiar, fan-shaped leaves, or rather leaves that much more resembled a heart cracked down the middle, sighing with the gentle wind.

This was the ginkgo, bearing within itself the numbed depths of innumerable geochronological ages, its thick trunk only able to bear a Shinto rope with its paper streamers, and below, the wild proliferation of a holly bush grown out from one of its sides; the ginkgo, accordingly, was the only one that rose from this peaceful world, and was well visible from below as well, like a kind of tower, because everything else ended up concealing the other things, one house hiding another, one street hidden by another.

Only it – this colossal, and, among all the other plants, frighteningly alien and unknowable ginkgo tree – ascended, and unmistakably, as if it had not arrived her directly from a hundred million years ago, the dark Cretaceous era from which it had originated, so that someone would have to notice it, someone looking up from below, from the direction of the train station, who, having arrived, and searching for the correct direction, would take a look around.”

Extract from: Laszlo Krasznahorkai A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East London: Tuskar Rock Press, 2023. Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet.

NB I have done some minor pruning (…) to keep the focus on the ginkgo. For the sake legibility in this blog format, I have also divided the extract into paragraphs which do not appear in the original text.

August 17, 2023

COLOURS OF AUGUST, 2023

The haws are red and shiny on their hawthorn bushes. Blackberry remains tentative, its pale green fruit visible but still unripe. I see green leaves now leaning towards yellow. I am walking in a scrap of local woodland, bounded by a canal* on my left and housing some distance to my right. It is around 7.30 pm on 13 August, and I am opening up to the colours of late summer as they show themselves this year.

Looking up, I see a healthy crop of crab apples at different stages of ripening on their tree. The ripest apples are red, though their red is softer than that of the haws. The leaves of the apple tree are shinier than those in the background. I am aware of a light grey sky.

Nature in various forms finds a niche everywhere. This time has its own flowers, and again I see yellow. I am not the greatest botanist. and I cannot name with certainty these plucky if slightly battered blooms, saying hello from behind a fence. But I imagine them as poor relations of even the lesser celandine, and therefore almost certainly official weeds**. I hope and pray they remain safe here in these woods.

Below, looking at tangled leaves, I find a truly autumnal scene, in the yellowing and browning of leaves. It feels a bit early for this neighbourhood. The wheel of the year is still following its seasonal course, so far, but is becoming more erratic and unpredictable than in the past. I wonder about the future of the jet stream – and indeed the Gulf stream too. But in the moment, my heart opens and I love this pattern of plant life moving through its cycle and gradually, subtly, changing in appearance.

I photograph two teazel stalks, below, because I enjoy their shapes, because they are a further illustration of the browning theme, and also because of the visibility of the canal behind them. They don’t live in the canal, like bullrushes, but they like to be close. The image also includes an almost ghostly barge on the water below.

After leaving the woods, I am confronted (below) with the sky. I am facing west, across the Llanthony Priory gardens. I see dark stormy clouds, whose edgy brooding energy is somewhat modified by a blue opening in the distance. This dark grey, and the rain and storm it sometimes brings, have certainly been a feature of summer this year. There’s a strong contrast with last year at this time, when there was a heat wave, which for us still means C 30-35/F 86-95 with anything more being exceptional. In July 2022 part of the country briefly reached over C40/F 104 for the first time since records began. This year the grass is still green. Last year it burned up and the ground was parched and cracked.

Following the wheel of the year carefully, as it turns, is a valuable discipline for modern Druids, among others concerned with deep ecology (sacred ecology?) and the climate crisis. We don’t confine ourselves to celebrating our seasonal festivals, though we enjoy them too. For we now know experientially that the world is changing. The traditional rhythms of nature are not an eternal verity to rely on.

In some ways I find small personal observations emotionally more impactful than my limited knowledge of climate science and deep time geology. These are very helpful for context and framing, but personal experience is more immediate than these. It is also more deeply immediate, though less dramatic and disturbing, than reports of disaster elsewhere. Following the wheel of the year, we are doing more than making observations. We are celebrating and bearing witness to the life that surrounds us, offering our attention and energy to its continued flourishing. Blessings on the land.

*The Gloucester-Sharpness canal, England. Beyond the Gloucester docks, but not yet out of the city.

** A reader comments: “I think your mystery plant is ragwort, a much maligned ‘weed’ the destruction of which is encouraged by the UK government as it can be harmful to grazing animals yet is actually one of the best forage plants for pollinators”.

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August 12, 2023

TALIESIN THE SHAPE SHIFTER

This is my third in a series of posts drawing on Gwyneth Lewis’ and Rowan Williams’ modern English version of The Book of Taliesin (1), an anthology of bardic poetry from medieval Wales. My first post introduced the book and offered extracts from A Song of the Wind (2). The second looked at the importance of ‘The Old North’ (territories in north-west England and southern Scotland that shared the same history, language and culture as the people of Wales) (3). This, final, post looks at the development of the Taliesin figure in the later middle ages. In particular, I focus on the anthology’s section entitled Legendary Poems and on the translators’ understandings of bardic poetry, shapeshifting and awen. I also look at their reasons for interpreting the Taliesin of these poems as “a kind of Christian shaman”.

In these poems, the use of shapeshifting language is presented as being a feature of competition between rival bards. “The Taliesin figure demonstrates his superiority … by spelling out at triumphant length the questions he can answer about which his rivals are ignorant, and by listing the various embodiments he has experienced”. The translators give an example of this in the opening of The Battle of the Trees.

“I was in many forms

Before my release:

I was a slim enchanted sword,

I believe in its play.

I was a drop in air,

The sparkling of stars,

A word inscribed,

A book in a priest’s hands,

A lantern shining

For a year and a half.

A bridge in crossing

Over threescore abers (= estuaries).

I was path, I was eagle,

I was a coracle at sea.

I was bubbles in beer,

I was a raindrop in a shower.

I was a sword in the hand;

I was a shield in battle.

I was a harp string,

Enchanted nine years

In water, foaming.

I was tinder in fire,

I was a forest ablaze”.

The editors comment: “these extraordinary poems reflect a sophisticated and complex understanding of poetic composition in which the concept of awen is central. It would be misleading to translate this idea of inspiration as ‘Muse’: it is better thought of as a state of altered consciousness in which the poet receives knowledge of matters beyond what can routinely be learned. According to Gerald of Wales’ description of the awenyddion, or inspired soothsayers, of the 12th century CE, the gift of awen produces the same kinds of extreme behaviour as are associated with spirit possession: loud shouting, trance and catalepsy, disconnected but also very elaborate speech, narrated experiences of supernatural encounters which trigger the exercise of this gift, and a subsequent inability to remember what was said under its influence”.

Poems like The Battle of the Trees may be “an attempt to reflect the style or register of such ecstatic states of consciousness”. However, the poems themselves may not be “transcriptions of specific compositions originating in altered states”. In cultures that have a “routine ritual space” for “ecstatic phenomena”, the irruption of the supernatural will follow a familiar pattern. “There will be expectations about both the actual expression and the transmission of what has been delivered”. If poetry is to be recognised as the authentic voice of ecstatic perception, “it must follow certain classical, normative exemplars of poetic ecstasy”. The Taliesin of these poems is a composite figure modelling how to speak as an awenydd. He demonstrates a particular way of being a poet and sounding like a poet of this kind.

Religious tensions appear in The Spoils of Annwfn. The bard rails against the ignorance of monks.

“And the monks herd together, a pack of dogs,

In the contest with those

Who have mastered the lore –

Whether wind takes one path,

Whether the sea is one water,

Whether fire’s unstoppable force is one spark.

The monks herd together, a pack of wolves,

In the contest with those who have mastered the lore –

They don’t know how darkness is severed from light,

They don’t know the course of the wind in its rushing,

Where the wind will lay waste, what land it strikes,

How many saints in the sky’s vault, and how many shrines.

I will praise the Prince, the Lord, the Great One.

Let me not be sad: Christ will repay me.”

The translators point out that the shapeshifter Taliesin of the 12th century CE, is “multifaceted” compared to the court bard of the 6th-9th centuries. The later literature links Taliesin “especially with stories involving the figure of the sorcerer Gwydion and the ‘children of Don'”. His status as dewin (sage or sorcerer) or occasionally derwyd (druid) is “so equal in importance to his standing as a poet that the two might more accurately be said to become inseparable”. But he is also shown, as in the extract above, dutifully commending his work to God and as “being familiar with theological questions, most notably those relating to the Incarnation, and with apocryphal traditions surrounding the biblical narratives”.

Lewis and Williams conclude that “this later Taliesin becomes a bridge figure between traditional Welsh lore and the cosmopolitan world of early medieval ecclesiastical learning”. The extract above reflects “a resentment of the new monastic foundations after the Norman Conquest, the Benedictine houses that sprang up in proximity to the new castles and settlements in the Welsh Marches (English/Welsh border counties). Monks from continental Europe are unlikely by this date to have been familiar with or sympathetic to the rather older style of clerical learning represented by the riddling and legendary elaborations of the Christian story found in the Irish or Anglo-Saxon texts of the early Middle Ages; Taliesin thus becomes a mouthpiece for this archaic Christian lore as well as the archetypal bard and seer”. This is why the translators characterise Taliesin in his shape-shifting period as a “Christian shaman”.

(1) Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain Penguin Random House UK, 2020 (First published in hardback in Penguin Classics and 2019) Gwyneth Lewis was National Poet in Wales, 2005-6 and teaches at Middlebury College Vermont. Rowan Williams is a former Archbishop of Canterbury, subsequently Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

(2) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2023/08/07/

(3) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2023/08/10/

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August 10, 2023

‘THE OLD NORTH’ IN THE BOOK OF TALIESIN

This is my second post about The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain (1). The previous one introduced the book and included extracts from the poem A Song of the Wind. I am not qualified to judge the work of the translators Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams. All I can say is that I find their their modern English version highly readable. I am also grateful for its detailed introduction, which has prompted me to write further posts drawing on it. This one shines a light on the ‘Old North’ (Hen Ogledd), a key location for this bardic tradition, and on poetry referencing the ‘heroic age’ of the 6th century CE (100 – 200 years after the Romans withdrew from Britain).

Llyvyr Taliessin is a 14th century manuscript bringing together “compositions ranging in date from the 9th century CE – possibly even the 6th – to the 13th century CE”. As such “it brings vividly into focus the history and culture of more than one unfamiliar world. It gathers together the kind of songs that might have been sung in the Northern British courts of the 6th century with the poems of Taliesin’s various anonymous successors in an ongoing bardic tradition, which transformed him into a North Welsh prophet, a kind of Christian shaman, and, eventually, an honorary laureate of Llewelyn the Great, the first medieval ruler to control practically the whole of an independent Wales” (1).

The oldest group of poems in the anthology, here grouped together as Heroic Poems, is linked to a Taliesin mentioned in chronicles of the early middle ages, a court bard of the 6th century ‘heroic age’. Here we find an “individual writer who appears in the chronicles and other early texts … celebrating the material and military exploits of a number of patrons, and enjoying the rich rewards of his work.” He is named in the early 9th century History of the Britons, composed in North Wales but showing considerable retrospective interest in in the struggles of various British rulers, some apparently from Cumbria and the Pennine regions, against the Angles of the territories that would by the later 7th century become the Kingdom of Northumbria.

The History of the Britons includes a list of five notable Bards said to have worked in that earlier period. These are Taliesin; Talhaearn, called ‘father of awen; Neirin (aka Aneirin); Blwchfardd; and Cian Guenith Guaut (Cian, wheat-harvest of song). Neirin is credited with the authorship of the Gododdin which laments the failure of a British King from Edinburgh, in or around the last decade of the 6th century, to defend or recapture territories from Northumbria. Taliesin is briefly mentioned in this poem as a contemporary. He is identified primarily as the court bard of King Urien of Rheged. Rheged was (probably, at least at times) an extensive territory including much of what is now north-west England and south-west Scotland. This Taliesin was concerned with warfare and praise rather than with enchantment.

The map below shows the heartlands of the culture that birthed this literature. Its northern border runs from modern Edinburgh to Dumbarton, along the Roman Antonine Wall. The people who lived between the two walls (Antonine in the north; Hadrian’s in the south) were not generally part of the Roman Empire but they were influenced by it. They identified as Britons, not Picts, who lived to the north of both walls and had always kept their independence. On the map everything to the east of the dotted line belongs to the Anglo-Saxons. The Britons hold the west, as far as the Mor Hafren/Bristol Channel. What isn’t shown on the map is the south-west peninsula, also mostly British at this time, but cut off by the fall of three crucial towns – Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath. The people who the West Saxons named as the West Welsh, and who remember their old identity in Cornwall to this day, seem to have no role in the literature that uses the name of Taliesin. Even within Wales, this literature has a northern orientation.

The role of court bard could be materially rewarding, as this extract from the poem Here At My Rest:

“Here at my rest

With the men of Rheged

Respect and welcome

And mead for me!

Mead for me

To mark his triumph,

Gifts of fine land

To win me wealth,

Wealth in plenty

Of glittering gold,

Golden good times

And high esteem.”

This is not just a personal boast. One way to make a patron look good was by pointing to his generosity. But the best way to show Urien to advantage was to describe his prowess as a warrior and war leader, as in the poem All Through One Year:

“Son, go to the door.

Listen to the noise.

What’s the commotion?

Is the earth shaking?

The sea rushing in?

Approaching, a tide

Of foot soldiers cry:

‘Foe on the hill,

Urien kills.

Foe in the vale,

Urien impales.

Foe on the mountain,

Urien smites him.

Foe on the slope,

Urien will slice him.

Foe on the ditch,

Urien will fright him.'”

Each of the poems extracted above has the same ending:

When I’m old, out breath,

Commanded by death,

I will feel delight

Praising Urien aright.”

This is formulaic completion of work in a very formal genre, though I find this translation fluid and lively. I have no idea of what it was like to be the person who wrote it, or even his real opinion of Urien. But that is not the point of these poems. The Brythonic Old North was situated within a world of warrior aristocracies and their ‘heroic’ values, in which the Britons were relentlessly harried by Angles, Saxons, Picts, Gaels and, to an extent, each other. In the context of time and place, the propagandist role of the court bards, and its importance to their warrior patrons, is very clear. What intrigues me more is the later transformation, where Taliesin morphs into the mythic shape-shifting figure described by Rowan Williams as a ‘Christian shaman’. I will write about this in a later post.

(1) Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain Penguin Random House UK, 2020 (First published in hardback Penguin Classics in 2019)

For the two other posts about this translation, see: https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2023/08/07 and:

https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2023/08/12

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August 7, 2023

THE BOOK OF TALIESIN: A SONG OF THE WIND

The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain (1) is a modern English translation, first published in 2019, of the medieval Welsh collection brought together under the name The Book of Taliesin. It is translated and introduced by Gwyneth Lewis, National Poet of Wales 2005-6, who teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont, and Rowan Williams, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury and later Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Both are native Welsh speakers. I highly recommend this version to anyone who wants a translation tailored to a 21st century readership, and to improve their knowledge of the history and culture from which these poems spring.

The Song of the Wind, from which I present extracts, is an example of the Dyfalu (guessing) mode: the poet creates a sequence of riddles, metaphors and fanciful tropes in order to describe an object. When – as here – the answer is given by the title, the result is a performance of inventive paraphrase, designed to display the poet’s virtuosity. The evocation of the wind is connected to the part of Taliesin’s story in which Elffin, his patron, is imprisoned by Maelgwn Gwynedd in Deganwy Castle. Taleisin’s poetry conjures up a gale that demolishes the castle and frees Elffin. Evidently a capable bard could do that, back in the day.

“Guess who it is:

Made before the Flood,

A mighty creature,

No flesh, no bone,

No veins, no blood,

No head and no feet.

No older, no younger

Than he was before.

He’s not turned aside

By fear, nor by death.

He doesn’t experience

The needs of creatures.

…..

“He’s in fields, in woods,

With no hand, no foot;

Feels no age, isn’t struck

By pain or bad luck.

…

“And he wasn’t born,

So he can’t be seen.

He’s at sea and on land;

He’s unseeing and unseen.

…

“He’s brave, he’s bold

As he crosses the land.

He’s mute, he’s loud.

He’s full of sorrow,

He’s the noisiest one

On the face of the earth.

…

“He’s evil, he’s good,

He’s here, he’s there,

Creates a mess,

Makes no redress.

He makes no amends,

Because he’s blameless.

He’s wet, he’s dry;

He often comes by.”

(1) Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain Penguin Random House UK, 2020 (First published in hardback Penguin Classics in 2019)

For the two other posts about this translation please see: https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2023/08/10 and:

https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2023/08/12

August 1, 2023

LUGNASADH 2023: INQUIRY HARVESTING

A circle is cast on sand. It is almost complete. The image is that of the Wheel, tenth major trump in the Druidcraft Tarot (1). Arianrhod, as Goddess associated with the Wheel and the Milky Way, is casting the Circle of Life. The adjacent cave has resonances of both womb and tomb. The seashore is a liminal space. The Celtic Otherworld is often linked to the sea and what lies underneath its surface. This image as a whole is associated with harvesting. Arianrhod carries a flail as well as a wand and a symbolic eight-spoked wheel.

It is Lugnasadh/Lammas, the first harvest-related festival of 2023. I am sitting with the notion of ‘winnowing’ in my inquiry. In agriculture, winnowing involves blowing a current of air through grain to remove the chaff remaining after threshing. We find a reference to winnowing towards the end of the medieval Welsh poem The Hostile Confederacy from The Book of Taliesin (2):

“I have been a grain discovered,

Which grew on a hill.

He that reaped me placed me,

Into a smoke hole driving me.

Exerting of the hand,

In afflicting me,

A hen received me,

With ruddy claws, (and) parting comb.

I rested nine nights.

In her womb, a child,

I have been matured,

I have been an offering before the Guledig.

I have been dead, I have been alive.

A branch there was to me of ivy,

I have been a convoy.

Before God, I have been poor.”

It seems that winnowing (or being winnowed) is far from an end point to our journeys. The processes of life go on, very likely in unexpected ways. Any state of peace has to be found within these processes, rather than in efforts to halt or break out of them.

At Lughnasadh 2023 I find myself at ease within Druidry, though I do also continue to refine lessons from other paths that enrich my practice of Druidry. The most significant, and the best embedded, is ‘interbeing’ as a spatial relationship and its temporal equivalent ‘impermanence’. It is like a kernel of grain I have winnowed from Mahayana Buddhism to grow into another life in my Druidry. The Druid soil is fertile for this purpose, as indicated through the image of the Wheel drawn on sand, and the passage from The Hostile Confederacy in The Book of Taliesin. For me, Thich Nhat Hanh simply provides a particularly persuasive languaging of this perspective.

He says (3): “The insight of interbeing is that nothing can exist by itself alone, that each thing exists only in relation to everything else … looking from the perspective of space, we call emptiness ‘interbeing’ [NB ’emptiness’ here = empty of a separate self] ; looking from the perspective of time we call it ‘impermanence’ … to be empty is to be alive, to breathe in and breathe out. Emptiness is impermanence, it is change. …When you have a kernel of corn and entrust it to the soil, you hope it will be a tall corn plant. If there is no impermanence, the kernel of corn will remain the kernel of corn forever and you will never have an ear of corn to eat. Impermanence is crucial in the life of everything”.

There is another level to this year’s inquiry harvest. Recently I have engaged more fully with the challenge of Thich Nhat Hanh’s understanding of the Mahayana emptiness teachings, which stand behind the interbeing/impermanence insight. In the light of this understanding he finds neither an individual nor a cosmic self – and hence no ultimate reality or ground of being. “Our notion of emptiness should be removed. It is empty”. Many teachers I have worked with in the past are on the other side of this debate, finding the Divine in ‘Presence’ (Eckhardt Tolle), Pure Awareness (Rupert Spira), and the ‘Clear Awake Space’ of Douglas Harding’s Headless Way. They find God as ‘No-Thing’. For Thich Nhat Hanh, no-thing is simply nothing.

I have been all over the place on this question, developing a language and practices compatible with both views, as I slipped and slid between them. This is fine in its way, but I have wanted some kind of resolution, if only to avoid the energy drain of uncertainty around something that matters to me and to many spiritual traditions. Tomas Sander, co-writing with Greg Goode (4) has also explored the Mahayana ’emptiness’ texts. He reports that “as a person who had been seeking truth and ultimate reality” he finds a “greater sense of ease” in the approach of these texts. Unlike Thich Nhat Hanh, he does not take away an active disbelief in a cosmic ground of being. Instead, he arrives at a relaxed unknowing, a place of ‘joyful freedom’. He says: “spiritual teachings tend to have notions of absolutes, which by their very nature seem to trump everything else. None of them can claim to have an absolute, transcendent truth on their side”.

Tomas Sander finds that “it was a wonderfully freeing moment to recognize that there is no one way that reality ‘really’ is, and therefore no way to miss out on it”. So he adopts different criteria for evaluating spiritual paths. “They need to prove themselves on the level of ordinary, conventional reality with practical questions like: who does the view serve and who is being marginalized? Is the view helpful, compassionate or humane?’ I have known of and entertained this view for some time, but it has only recently clicked with me as a good way of settling this question. Metaphysical speculation will no longer be part of my inquiry. This does indeed feel like winnowing, like blowing away the chaff. The promised harvest? Druidry as joyful freedom.

(1) Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm The Druidcraft Tarot: Use the Magic of Wicca and Druidry to Guide Your Life London: Connections, 2004 (Illustrated by Will Worthington)

(2) William F. Skene The Four Ancient Books of Wales Forgotten Books, 2007 (First published in Edinburgh 1868

(3) Thich Nhat Hanh The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2017

(4) Greg Goode and Tomas Sander Emptiness and Joyful Freedom Salisbury: Non-Duality Press, 2013 (Section written by Tomas Sander)

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Month: August, 2023