Contemplative Inquiry

January 24, 2018

RESTING IN BEING

Last autumn I worked with two on-line resources developed by Peter Russell (1). The first was a brief meditation course, which nudged me into a particularly easeful and surrendered meditative style. The second was a webinar series under the Science and Nonduality umbrella (2), Resting in Being. From this I picked up a helpful definition of nonduality (a translation of Sanskrit advaita). Going back to the time of the Upanishads (3), it invites us to think of ourselves as clay pots. If we look at two pots together (or any number) we find only one clay. Peter Russell describes the clay as ‘mind stuff’. Older Vedantic tradition uses the language of divinity, whilst Tantric Buddhists speak of ‘primordial nature’ (4). Russell is careful to distinguish nonduality from union, unity, or complete identity. My human relationship to the clay (mind stuff, primordial nature) is one of ‘not I not other than I’ (5). I am distinct but not separate.

This ground reality is ever-present and pervasive, yet oddly hard to recognize. No recognition is necessary for a successful human life, yet without it many people experience a sense of loss and alienation or intuit that something of consequence is missing. We invent grail quests and ladders to heaven, strategies for enlightenment or redemption, to address the perceived deficit. These in turn tend to become displacement mechanisms, deflecting us from the very goal we seek. The direct approach points us back to our immediate experience. Peter Russell uses words like ‘being’ and ‘awareness’ – suggesting indeed that that latter might also be turned into a doing word: ‘awareing’. Process terms better express both the movement of experience and the stillness within it. Ursula Le Guin does the same with ‘Taoing’ (6).

As a term, I find ‘resting in being’ useful in guiding me into contemplative awareing. I feel opened, energized and expanded. My centre of gravity shifts. I feel porous, spacious, held within the whole: here, now and home. The years of contemplative inquiry have boiled down to this. It is the stance I am taking away. My remaining sense of inquiry concerns the influence of this stance on the rest of my life and I will look at this in another post.

(1) Spirit of Now website peterrussell.com

(2) https://www.scienceandnonduality.com

(3) The Upanishads Introduced and translated by Eknath Easwaran Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, CA: Niligri Press, 2007 (2^nded.)

(4) https://www.dharmaocean.org/

(5) https://contemplativeinquiry.wordpress.com/2016/01/29/book-review-not-i-not-other-than-i/

(6) Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way Boston & London: Shambhala, 1998 (New English version by Ursula K. LeGuin with the collaboration of J. P. Seaton)

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January 19, 2018

IMBOLC ADVENT

Erin nighean Brighde* has recently written about ‘Imbolc Advent’. I like this term. Where I live, mid-January could feel cold and dull and flat. It could be a time of post-festive blues, and a very long way from spring. My cure, from the early 1990’s, has been the eight-fold wheel of the year, now lived by many groups within and beyond the modern Pagan community. It has enriched me enormously.

For the last week or so I have been leaning in to Imbolc, the festival that, at the beginning of February (Northern hemisphere), celebrates the return of the light, the appearance of early flowers and traditionally also the birth of lambs. In Druidry, it is strongly linked to the Goddess Brigid. My leaning in to Imbolc this year has been interwoven with the transformation of three initially parched hyacinth bulbs (a late seasonal gift) in a pot of dry earth. The change began when I saw them draw water from a saucer. Its rapid disappearance was like watching a speeded-up film. Within a couple of days, stalks had burst almost alarmingly out of the bulbs, and it was not long before the scented bell-like lavender blue flowers emerged from the spikes. I realize that this was a contrived indoor event, but I have experienced it over the last week as a stunning display of life and growth, and hence an image of Imbolc Advent.

During the life-time of the Druid contemplative group, we tended to meet outside the festival times, partly to avoid clashes with other commitments, and partly to practice tuning into the year at other times. We could do this by taking the previous or following festival as a reference point and notice the mid-term difference, or we could more simply pay attention to the world we were in at the time of meeting. Over time, we developed a greater sensitivity to the rhythms and tides in the year as nature’s unfolding processes, since we were not focusing on the festivals themselves as events. Nonetheless, they remained important markers for our experience. They helped to provide us with a common language and orientation. That being said, I remember something special around Imbolc, out of all the eight festivals. The fire in the hearth, the arrangement and decoration of the space (snowdrops in particular) gave us a powerful experience of Brigid as a presiding energy, making Imbolc one of our most resonant times.

*Erin nighean Brighde https://hereternalflame.wordpress.com/2018/01/14/imbolc-advent-2018/

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January 7, 2018

CONTEMPLATION AS SACRAMENT

Everything is sacred, but dedicated time and space provide a focus. They deepen our recognition of what is already true. Sacrare in Latin means ‘to hallow’ and I feel hallowing to be mostly about my quality of attentiveness. Although, subjectively, I am always here and always now, I can be here and now, and relate here and now, in a more conscious and loving way, when the time and space are dedicated.

Since beginning contemplative inquiry in November 2011, I have had a morning practice that has been structurally constant whilst varying in specifics. It is framed by a minimalist Druid liturgy to establish and hold the nemeton, the dedicated sacred space. It includes exercise and energy work, walking and sitting meditations, and a brief loving-kindness meditation. These activities have referenced different traditions at different times, whilst preserving a consistent outline and intent.

This practice is the heart of what I do in formal contemplative practice. Since I draw on diverse traditions, this solo practice has developed within an overall context and narrative determined by and for me. I have never worked through a simple adoption of ‘teachings’, to me a somewhat infantilising term, and a residue of authoritarian spirituality. I have always maintained an independent approach, which I find necessary to a critical and creative culture of inquiry. It necessarily includes a meta level of evaluating traditions as well as a normative one of learning their views and practices.

I will continue with the same practice structure post-inquiry. Fundamentally (in I hope a good sense) I understand my practice as a sacrament, celebrating ordinary incarnation in this world. It works on two levels. The first is the dedication and framing of the whole practice. The second, more intensive level, is within my sitting meditation. This now uses a Shaivite Tantric rather than Buddhist form. It is an eyes closed meditation, aligning the breath to a mantra – which is something I’ve quite often done over the years, including the use of the Druid ‘awen’*. Here I use ham-saa. Traditionally this invokes Shiva as the empty awareness of the Cosmos and Shakti as its energy and form. My own sense is of deepened appreciation of the miracle of being and becoming, and a sense of how this is at once personal and universal.

I sometimes find that all my attention dissolves into the mantra. Its pulse and vibration become all that exists in my awareness. The meditative disidentification from world and perception, body and sensation, feeling and thought, leaves this one reality. The experience here is of existence acknowledging itself, in a way that doesn’t seem to be about me, as such, or in any sense a personal possession. Whether or not the experience happens in full, or whether the practice simply points to it, this mantra meditation hallows my contemplative practice. It is the heart of its heart.

Paradoxically, as this practice deepens, my ‘inquiry’ energy begins to fall away. Where I am now feels like a destination. Though I still have work to do in the integration of experience and understanding, I am no longer looking for new frameworks or resources. On completion of the inquiry, my contemplative life will continue, but it will have a different note.

https://contemplativeinquiry.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/awen-mantra-meditation/

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December 20, 2017

POEM: A WINTER EDEN

Warmest wishes to everyone for the festive season and the coming year. Here and now I don’t have a ‘deep midwinter’ feeling, despite the short days. I’ve been walking by my local canal in a largely green world, with a defining image of sunlight on ivy. Alders are growing catkins. Midges abound. Robert Frost’s poem below, in a snowy New England setting, celebrates the exuberance of life whenever it gets a chance.

A winter garden in an alder swamp,
Where conies now come out to sun and romp,
As near a paradise as it can be
And not melt snow or start a dormant tree.

It lifts existence on a plane of snow
One level higher than the earth below,
One level nearer heaven overhead,
And last year’s berries shining scarlet red.

It lifts a gaunt luxuriating beast
Where he can stretch and hold his highest feat
On some wild apple tree’s young tender bark,
What well may prove the year’s high girdle mark.

So near to paradise all pairing ends:
Here loveless birds now flock as winter friends,
Content with bud-inspecting. They presume
To say which buds are leaf and which are bloom.

A feather-hammer gives a double knock.
This Eden day is done at two o’clock.
An hour of winter day might seem too short
To make it worth life’s while to wake and sport.

Robert Frost

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December 14, 2017

SHADOW

“We identify our shadow … with that visible shape we see projected on the pavement or the whitewashed wall. Since what we glimpse there is a being without depth, we naturally assume that shadows themselves are basically flat – and if we are asked, by a curious child, about the life of shadows we are apt to reply that their lives exist only in two dimensions.

“Suppose, however, that on the same afternoon a bumblebee is making its way from a clutch of clover blossoms on one side of the road to another cluster of blooms in an overgrown weedlot across the street, and that as it does so the bee happens to pass between me and the flat shape that my body casts upon the pavement. The sunlit bee buzzes toward me, streaking like an erratic, drunken comet against the asphalt sky, and then it crosses an unseen boundary in the air: instantly its glow dims, the sun is no longer upon it – it has moved into a precisely bounded zone of darkness that floats between my opaque flesh and that vaguely humanoid silhouette laid out upon the pavement – until a moment later the bee buzzes out the opposite side of that zone and emerges back into the day’s radiance.

“Although it was zipping along several feet above the street, the bumblebee had passed into and out of my real shadow. Its visible trajectory – gleaming, then muted, then gleaming again – shows that my actual shadow is an enigma more substantial than that flat shape on the paved ground. That silhouette is only my shadow’s outermost surface. The actual shadow does not reside primarily on the ground; it is a voluminous being of thickness and depth, a mostly unseen presence that dwells in the air between my body and that ground. The dusky shape on the asphalt touches me only at my feet, and hence seems largely separate from me, even independent from me – a kind of doppelganger. The apparent gap between myself and that flat swath of darkness is what prompts me, now and then to accept its invitation to dance, the two of us then strutting and ducking in an improvised pas de deux wherein it’s never very clear which one of us is leading and which is following. It is now obvious, however, that that shape slinking along on the pavement is merely the outermost edge of a thick volume of shade, an umbral depth that extends from the pavement right up to my knees, torso, and head – a shadow touching me not just at my feet, but at every point of my person.”

David Abram Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology New York: Vintage Books, 2011

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December 8, 2017

BOOK REVIEW: THE WAY OF THE LOVER

Highly recommended. The full title is: The Way of the Lover: Sufism, Shamanism and the Spiritual Art of Love. For me, the strength of this book is its successful synthesis of apparently diverse influences. As a road map for the spiritual journey throughout the life course, it has coherence, power and integrity.

Sufism is the ground. We are introduced to a cosmos saturated in divinity both in origin and manifestation. As Syed Hamraz Ahsan says in his introduction, “Sufis are divine lovers … the path begins at the heart and ends at the heart”. Yet “the pathway to love and the divine may not always be simple or clear”. Since everyone and everything embodies divinity, any relationship is a relationship with the divine.

Ross Heaven uses a medicine wheel structure for the human journey of life and love. Beginning at (or before) birth (East) it moves through youth (South) and mid-life (West) to age (North). Each stage has challenges. Fear can become a distorting part of the picture very early. As we grow up, we are challenged to discover our authentic power and its skillful use. Throughout our adult lives we are under pressure to navigate with clarity and vision through the stress and confusion that go with loving and being loved, and to evolve through loving service. At the Centre is the “true soul, the wise Elder and the newborn”. Within this structure he offers teaching stories; insights from humanistic, developmental and transpersonal psychology; personal anecdotes; and awareness exercises.

The stages of the journey, and several psychological models, are clearly spelled out. They are saved from over-prescription through the use of stories and their rich ambiguity, and by the over-arching presentation of an exploratory, free-spirited and non-controlling spirituality. The Way of the Lover offers something to readers with specific issues of concern and those with a more open and generalized interest in the journey. Ross Heaven distils considerable wisdom and experience within this book, not least when he ends by reminding us to move on and rely on our own experience.

Ross Heaven The Way of the Lover: Sufism, Shamanism and the Spiritual Art of Love Winchester UK & Washington USA: Moon Books, 2017 (Moon Books Classic)

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December 4, 2017

KABIR: ECSTATIC FLUTE

I know the sound of the ecstatic flute,

But I don’t know whose flute it is.

A lamp burns and has neither wick nor oil.

A lily pad blossoms and is not attached to the bottom!

Where one flower opens, ordinarily dozens open.

The moon bird’s head is filled with nothing but thoughts of the moon,

And when the next rain will come is all that the rain bird thinks of.

Who is it we spend our entire life loving?

Kabir Ecstatic poems Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992 (The English translations are free enough for Robert Bly to call them ‘versions by Robert Bly’. There is an earlier set of translations published by MacMillan in New York in 1915 by Rabindranath Tagore assisted by Evelyn Underhill under the title Songs of Kabir. Whilst I don’t follow Bly in calling the English of the earlier work “useless”, I do find that Bly’s interpretation has more passion and power. The Bly work includes an insightful afterword Kabir and the transcendental Bly by John Stratton Hawley).

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November 27, 2017

INQUIRY HIBERNATION

I see a lot of bare trees now. In some ways I feel like hibernating; in some ways I feel fresh and stimulated by the relative cold. I certainly need to surrender my contemplative inquiry to the secret processes of the underworld, placing my surface attention elsewhere.

In this period, I will post the occasional poem and book review, and offer seasonal thoughts and greetings.

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November 25, 2017

A WAGER

“In the words of Shakespeare, ‘And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, a poet’s pen turns to shape them and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’. All thought, feeling, sensation and perception give to airy nothing – this full, empty, luminous loving substance – a temporary name and form.

“The finite mind – thought, feeling, sensation and perception – is a temporary localization of infinite Consciousness, love and beauty. The three forms or three activities of the finite mind – thinking, feeling and perceiving – clothe this airy nothing, this luminous, empty, loving Presence, with their own particular qualities and limitations, making this airy nothing, this luminous, empty, loving substance, appear as thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions

“But in doing so, this luminous, empty, loving substance never ceases to be itself. It never becomes anything other than itself, such as an object, person, self or world. It simply modulates itself within its own infinite being, knowing itself in and as the forms of all experience, but never ceasing to be and know itself alone”. (1)

This is the proposition, or invitation, of The Direct Path, as presented by the teacher I am attending to most. The resource I am using has audio and book versions in one package. Passages like the one above are interwoven with guided meditations designed to reframe our experience through a careful introspection that is both precise and gentle. When listening, I am more focused on the meditations. When reading I am more focused on the passages, which work like a Lectio Divina – words to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest. Looking at key words closely, I can appreciate Shakespeare’s use of ‘imagination’ as a light-touch anticipation of Coleridge’s: “the primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation” (2).

At the level of the finite mind I have reached a stage of provisional assent to the Direct Path view. I don’t want to drown out any doubt with the urgent, monological discourse of a new ideology. I notice this tendency in the non-dual community, and I suspect it comes from an impatience with ambiguity and difficulties in holding a point of tension. For me, that would indicate a covert lack of confidence in my inquiry process. At the same time, I want to live from this kind of understanding. In my version, I feel like the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu, with the equivalent dilemma of wondering whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. I would say ‘both’ – not holding this view in a fundamentalist way, but strongly enough to live from.

So, I’m adopting the strategy of Blaise Pascal*, who in seventeenth century France decided to make a wager about God: “if God exists, he is infinitely incomprehensible. So human reasoning has no way of determining whether or not he exists. We cannot make up our minds on the basis of reasoning. But we must make up our minds. How is it to be done? Pascal suggests that adopting belief in God, and leading a Christian life, is the soundest bet. In event of winning the bet, an eternity of bliss is gained. In the event of losing the bet, the loss incurred is utterly insignificant. The alternative, – i.e. unbelief – can at best incur an utterly insignificant gain, at worst an immense loss.” (3)

I do not see myself facing the same consequences as Pascal, either in Earth or Heaven, from making a ‘wrong’ choice. But I adopt the strategy: making my existential choice and embracing what flows it.

*Blaise Pascal (1623-62) French mathematician, physicist, religious thinker and philosopher.

(1) Rupert Spira Transparent Body, Luminous World – The Tantric Yoga of Sensation and Perception Oxford: Sahaja Publications, 2016

(2) Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia Literaria: Or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions Dent: London, 1906 & 1956 (Everyman’s Library. Edited and with an introduction by George Watson)

(3) Thomas Mautner The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy London: Penguin, 1996

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November 23, 2017

POEM: WOMAN TO LOVER

I am fire

Stilled to water

A wave

Lifting from the abyss

In my veins

The moon-drawn tide rises

Into a tree of flowers

Scattered in sea-foam

I am air

Caught in a net

The prophetic bird

That sings in a reflected sky

I am a dream before nothingness

I am a crown of stars

I am the way to die.

Kathleen Raine Collected Poems Counterpoint Press, 2011

NOTE: Rupert Spira* uses this poem to illustrate “the dissolution of the separate self which is the essence of all intimacy”. Given that the poet is Kathleen Raine, I accept this as a fair interpretation of her work. But of course her own language is more resonant and compelling, and suggests more than it says – as is the way of poetry.

*Rupert Spira The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter Oxford: Sahaja Press, 2017

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