contemplation | Contemplative Inquiry

BOOK REVIEW: THIS IS NOT A DRILL, AN EXTINCTION REBELLION HANDBOOK

This post re-blogs a review from The Earthbound Report, where the book is is described and highly recommended by a reviewer currently setting up a local XR group.

It was due in September, but the publisher has taken an ’emergency’ approach to getting the Extinction Rebellion handbook ready. How much of that is a marketing opportunity I really couldn’t say, but it’s welcome and useful. (And I love the subversion of Penguin’s logo on the front cover.) I’m in the middle of helping […]

via Book review: This is Not a Drill, an Extinction Rebellion Handbook — The Earthbound Report

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Greg Goode has been a student and teacher of the Direct Path, a name given to the teachings inspired by Shri Atmananda Krishna Menon (1883-1959). He describes the path as providing “a strikingly modern way to experience peace and happiness that are unruffled by circumstances” (1).

Goode, who is based in New York, also holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Rochester and serves on the board of the peer-reviewed journal Practical Philosophy: Journal of the American Philosopher’s Association. He champions a modern form of radical scepticism based on a combination of eastern and western influences. In the extract below, he talks about the inspiration of the American philosopher and ‘liberal ironist’ Richard Rorty (1931-2007) in his own work.

“For most of his forty-year career, Rorty challenged the ideas of philosophical certainties and metaphysical foundations. … For Rorty, ‘liberals’ are those who wish to avoid cruelty to others and ‘ironists’ are those who face up to how their most cherished beliefs and desires have no objective grounds.

“Rorty’s work in this area spoke deeply to me, so I adapted his political antimetaphysical notion of the liberal ironist for spiritual purposes, conceiving the ‘joyful ironist’. The joyful ironist has found loving, open-hearted happiness without dogmatism. The joy comes from love and happiness, often found as a result of inquiry, insight, or devotion. The ‘irony’ has to do with a radical relationship to conceptuality and language, as explained below.

“Normally, we have a vocabulary (which includes a conceptual scheme) that we feel expresses the truth of things. Rorty calls this ‘our final vocabulary’. For those on a spiritual path, the path itself may become their final vocabulary. For others, their final vocabulary may be popular science. Whatever their final vocabulary, people believe it’s better than other vocabularies at representing reality accurately and correctly. Perhaps they believe it’s grounded or guaranteed by reality itself. A final vocabulary might not even be recognized as a vocabulary by those using it. It might just feel like ‘the truth’. This could be called the metaphysical approach to truth and language.

“In joyful irony, we continue to use language, and we continue to have a final vocabulary, but with a difference. We no longer have a model in which there’s language on one side and reality on the other, and our vocabulary points to reality. In fact, the very idea of a strict dualism between language and reality stops making sense. It’s not that one side creates or reduces to the other. Rather, the idea of drawing a line to separate them loses the sense it had before. The issue no longer has any metaphysical importance. No vocabulary seems as if it does the best job of drawing such a line.

“The joy and the irony must work together. If you’re joyful without being ironic, you’ll still have attachments to your own views of things. And if you’re ironic without being joyful, you may be bitter, cynical, sarcastic and pessimistic. Heartfelt wisdom includes both sides. Joy adds love to irony. Irony adds clarity to joy.”

(1) Greg Goode After Awareness: The End of the Path Oakland, CA: Non-Duality Press, 2016

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June 5, 2019

POEM: A SPECIAL DAY (CHOSEN FOR ELAINE)

Today

is a very special day.

Today we celebrate

sun and rain,

light and dark,

the cycles of life,

the great turning

of the wheel.

Today we celebrate

every leaf on every tree,

every feather on every bird,

every drop of water in every stream.

Today we celebrate

green growing ones and winged ones,

two leggeds and four leggeds,

all who walk, crawl,

swim or fly.

We celebrate

each breath of air,

each morsel of food,

each beat of our hearts,

each healthy cell.

We celebrate

the profound miracle

of being alive

in this body

in this moment

on this planet.

Today,

like every other day,

is a very special day.

Kai Siedenburg Poems of Earth and Spirit: 70 Poems and 40 Practices to Deepen your Connection with Nature Our Nature Connection, 2017

(Poem shared on the occasion of my wife Elaine’s birthday. It was transcribed for me on a card sent to me on my own birthday last month. It prompted me to buy the collection, which I recommend.)

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May 30, 2019

HAIKU BY SARYU

Without a brush

The willow paints the wind

Zen Haiku, selected and translated by Jonathan Clements

London: Frances Lincoln, 2000

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May 29, 2019

TRUE MEDITATION AND THE GRACE OF DISAPPOINTMENT

“If you run from disappointment, you run from life itself. Disappointment can soften the mind and open the heart. If you let it.

“…. When life doesn’t turn out the way we’d hoped, disappointment can burn hot inside. The invitation? Turn towards the burning place. Actually feel the pain, instead of numbing it or running towards some new dream. It’s more painful to run away, in the end. The pain of self-abandonment is the worst pain of all.

“Break the addiction to ‘the next experience’. Bring curious attention to that which you call ‘disappointment’. Contact the fluttery sensations in the belly, the constricted feelings in the heart area, the lump in the throat, the fogginess in the head. Stay present for what’s alive …. Do not refuse the now.

“Turn towards this burning moment; this is true meditation. Breathe into the uncomfortable place. Don’t abandon yourself now for a new imagined future. Don’t leave yourself for the world of thought. Find your home in what is.

“Let the mind chatter away today, but don’t take it as reality. Disappointment is bringing you closer to yourself. To your breath. To the weight of your body upon the Earth. To the sounds of the afternoon. To the evening’s song. To the sense of being alive. To a deep surrender to the imperfection of this human experience.

“… Return to the heart …Soften into the moment. Return Home . The moment as it is … The moment as it is. Let all expectations melt. Into the silence. Into a new beginning. Disappointment is the gateway.”

Jeff Foster The Joy of True Meditation: Words of Encouragement for Tired Minds and Wild Hearts Salisbury, UK: New Sarum Press, 2019

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May 6, 2019

DAYFLY

“The brief dayfly dies before evening; summer’s cicada knows neither spring nor autumn. What a glorious luxury it is to taste life to the full for even a year. If you constantly regret life’s passing, even a thousand long years will seem but the dream of a night.”

Yoshida Kenko A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees Kindle edition of a Penguin Classic. This is a selection taken from Essays in Idleness and probably written around 1329-31 CE. Translated into English by Meredith McKinney.

The son of an administration official, Kenko was born Urabe Kaneyoshi and served as guards officer in the Imperial palace. He became a Buddhist monk in later life, living in a hermitage within a Zen monastery. He has been seen as the most important Japanese literary figure of his day, retaining something of a secular lens on the world despite his monastic standing. He also wrote: “it is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.” I like him for writing that sentence, and I like being able to read it.

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May 3, 2019

ARNE NAESS AS PHILOSOPHICAL VAGABOND

“Naess embodies the spirit of philosophy in its original sense as being a loving pursuit of wisdom. It is a deep exploration of our whole lives and context in pursuit of living wisely. The essence of Socratic inquiry is to know ourselves. From his work on Pyrrhonian scepticism to his … positive statements on pluralism and possibilism, Naess says he is a ‘philosophical vagabond’ or ‘wandering seeker’, what the ancient Greeks called a zetetic’” (1).

In 1968 Arne Naess (1912-2009) published Scepticism (2) two years before resigning as chair of philosophy at the University of Oslo to devote himself to environmental problems. Part of this book focuses on Sextus Empiricus (150-225 CE), the last recorded Pyrrhonist philosopher in a line going back to Pyrrho of Elis (c360-c272 BCE).

Pyrrhonists, as described by Sextus Empiricus, neither made truth claims nor denied the possibility of making them. Instead, they cultivated a deeply embedded attitude of suspension of judgement (epoche), allowing possibilities to stand open within the process of continuing inquiry. Such a turning away from the drive for intellectual closure enables peace of mind (ataraxia) in our engagement with the richness and diversity of experience. As Naess says, the Pyrrhonist philosopher “leaves questions open, but without leaving the question. He has however given up his original, ultimate aim of gaining peace of mind by finding truth because it so happened that he came by peace of mind in another way.” (2)

Naess was not himself a Pyrrhonist, but clearly valued the Pyrrhonist frame of mind. He took something from it into his later work, as is made clear in Alan Drengson’s introduction to Naess’s Ecology of Wisdom (1):

“… there is never one definitive interpretation of philosophical texts; there is never one description of an event and all processes are complex interactions involving changing forces and relations, internal and external. Experience and the processes around us form changing patterns or gestalts. The nature of reality is multidimensional and creative. … Our spontaneous experience is so rich and deep that we can never give a complete account of it in any language, be it mathematics, science, music or art … As a deep questioner and seeker, Naess remains free of dogmatic and monolithic doctrine about the world … [which] partly explains why he celebrates a movement supported by diverse people with many world views”.

I enjoy this view of inquiry, and feel inspired to carry it forward more consciously in my own work. My sense is that it will bring my inquiry more into the world, without its losing its contemplative core.

(1) Arne Naess Ecology of Wisdom UK: Penguin Books, 2016 (Penguin Modern Classic. First published 2008)

(2) Arne Naess Scepticism Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1968

April 29, 2019

FACING EXTINCTION

My survival is on the line, along with any legacy and any memory of me. This applies to everyone I know and care for, and everyone else too. It applies to everything in culture and nature for which I have an affinity or to which I feel connected. Whenever I let this in, really let it in rather than just acknowledging it, I feel freshly shocked. Threat feels immediate. I have no sense of time.

After the first sense of a physical-energetic punch, there comes a pause, followed by a chaos of feelings, thoughts and images that stream for a while through my being. Eventually the storm passes. I regain some equilibrium, and with it a fuller presence in the flowing moment. There is something in the sheer joy of experiencing that remains unsullied and becomes my anchor. But I still need to ask myself how I stand with this awful knowledge, alongside another awful knowledge of the nuclear threat, and the normal knowledge of my own natural death. How do I respond to any of these? How, specifically, do I respond to ecological breakdown? The timescale here isn’t quite the possible ‘anytime’ of the other threats, and I may not be around. But it’s dangerously close, already compromising the life of the wider world. How do I hold this understanding? What do I do?

For me, this points to the value of psycho-spiritual as well as political work in facing the threat of a mass extinction on planet Earth. Last week I attended a promising taster for a forthcoming online course ‘Facing Reality’ (see https://www.livingfocusing.co.uk/ calendar). This will use Focusing methods to look at what ecological breakdown means “for your life, work and relationships. How is it impacting you? What happens when you take it in?”. It starts from the premise that “many of us are feeling overwhelmed and confused but it’s hard to know what to do about it. In response, we often either turn away or dive into action without seriously confronting our reality and giving enough space to feel into our emotional and intuitive response. By finding the courage to turn towards the mess we are in with a like-minded community, we can empower our response in a more authentic way and build personal agency for our creativity, gifts and action”.

The course leaders quote a saying to the effect that we can avoid reality, but not the consequences of avoiding reality. Courses like this are a good way of facing reality in a supportive environment, and I plan to be part of this one. This one is open to the public. You don’t need a Focusing training to take part.

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April 23, 2019

DEFINING ‘SECULAR’

Stephen Batchelor’s Secular Buddhism (1) explores what a “nonreligious, this-worldly, secularised Buddhism” might look like. This post is part of my own inquiry into what it means to feel ‘secular’ whilst engaged in ‘spiritual’ practices and connected with modern Paganism. Batchelor uses ‘secular’ in three overlapping senses:

A general contemporary usage where ‘secular’ stands in contrast to whatever is ‘religious’ – the two terms being clearly polarised whilst not very clearly defined.
A Latin derived sense of ‘this age’ (saeculum) – referring to “those concerns we have about this world, that is, everything that has to do with the quality of our personal, social and environmental experience of living on this planet”.
A Western, historical-political sense, acknowledging a 2-300-year period of ‘secularisation’ that has transformed the whole culture to the point where most people can live “almost their entire lives without giving religion a thought”.

Stephen Batchelor talks about an “uncompromisingly secular reading” of the Buddha’s teaching, in which “one returns to the mystery and tragedy of the everyday sublime. Instead of nirvana being located in a transcendent realm beyond the human condition, it would be restored to its rightful place at the heart of what it means each moment to be fully human”. He is an admirer of Ludwig Feuerbach, a student of Hegel who came to reject his teacher’s emphasis on the primacy of Spirit in the unfolding of history and advocated instead a liberal, materialist and atheist view of the world. “Feuerbach’s basic idea is simple. ‘Religion’, he wrote in the preface to his most famous book, The Essence of Christianity (1841) ‘is the dream of the human mind. But even while dreaming we are not in heaven or the realm of Nothingness. We are right here on earth’”.

In this way, Batchelor acknowledges all three senses of ‘secular’: a distancing from traditional religious belief, an affirmation of the world and time, and the rise of modern secular belief systems – Feuerbach was an early influence on Karl Marx. I like the way Batchelor teases out these meanings, especially his acknowledgement of ‘movement in time’ aspects as well as ‘not religious’ ones. I am more open and agnostic about the language of ‘heaven or the realm of Nothingness’ alongside that of being ‘right here on earth’. If we treat these as states rather than places, then I can see them intertwined dimensions of being. But I do not hold this as an ideology. I stand, rather, in openness and unknowing: the direct experience of At-Homeness in a flowing now is my ground and source, with or without a cosmic warranty.

Another sense, that of interconnectedness in the web of life, grows out of my At-Homeness – and this is firmly situated in place, time, and history. That place and time, right now, is one of distress, division and confusion, facing runaway climate change as a collective existential threat. My inquiry asks to to be alive to this collective wounding, and to contribute to a healing. In previous inquiry phases, I worked with modern Druidry and Paganism, focusing largely on the ‘nature’ aspect, but also on the powers of imagination and deep cultural stories. I then turned to other paths with a stronger emphasis on contemplative practice and its benefits. There is a treasure trove of resources in all of these these explorations, and I shall continue to draw upon them in my new inquiry cycle.

(1) Stephen Batchelor Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2017

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April 21, 2019

SOPHIAN WISDOM

This post is about Sophian wisdom and how to nurture it. It is based on a new understanding of a familiar story. In October 2016 (1), I reviewed Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight (2). Bolte Taylor, then a neuroanatomist at the Harvard Medical School, experienced a devastating stroke. There was terrible loss, and luminous discovery. Her left-brain hemisphere was almost destroyed and needed eight years of intensive work to recover. She lost her agency, her language centres, her narrative identity, her memories, her ambition, her busyness and her ‘hostility’ (her own word). “Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor died that morning”. But a quality of experiencing continued – peaceful, at times euphoric, with what Bolte Taylor subsequently described as a sense of grace, and of being-at-one with the universe.

Even from within this state, Bolte Taylor eventually found the will to recover what she had lost. But this would not be a simple return to life before the stroke. “It would have to be something new …When I experienced the haemorrhage and lost my left hemisphere language center cells that defined my ‘self’, those cells could no longer inhibit the cells in my right mind. As a result, I have gained a very clear delineation of the two very distinct characters cohabiting my cranium. The two halves of my brain don’t just perceive and think in different ways at a neurological level, but they demonstrate very different values based upon the types of information they perceive, and thus exhibit very different personalities. My stroke of insight is that at the core of my right hemisphere consciousness is a character that is directly connected to my feeling of deep inner peace. It is completely connected to the expression of peace, love, joy and compassion in the world”.

According to Bolte Taylor, “the right brain thinks in collages and images. Responding to the longer wave lengths of light, its visual perception is blended and softened, with a lack of edge that allows it to dwell on the bigger picture and how things relate to one another. It tunes in to the lower frequencies of sound that are readily generated by our body gurgles and other natural tones. It is biologically designed to readily tune in to our physiology”.

For me, now, Bolte Taylor’s story suggests an understanding of Sophia and what her wisdom might be pointing to. She quotes a saying: ‘peacefulness should be the place we begin rather than the place we try to achieve’. We can live from this insight without the need for a stroke. My contemplative practice works to actualise this insight in a more gradual, gentler way. But to live a full human life, we need all our resources. As Bolte Taylor says. “We begin in this place, but we don’t isolate ourselves there. We need to use the skills of the left mind too, permeating it with this sense of peace and connectedness”.

The left mind “perceives the shorter wavelengths of light, increasing its ability to clearly delineate sharp boundaries – adept at identifying separation lines between adjacent entities. It tunes into the higher frequencies of sound, supporting the development and use of language. It speaks constantly, weaves stories, processes information with remarkable speed and efficiency, maintains personal identity and communicates with the outside world”, Thus the wisdom of Sophia starts from the peaceful and connected consciousness of our ‘right mind’ while using the skills of our’ left mind’ to bring it out in the wider world.

(1) https://contemplativeinquiry.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/stroke-of-insight/

(2) Jill Bolte Taylor My Stroke of Insight: a Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2008

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Contemplative Inquiry

Tag: contemplation

June 11, 2019

GREG GOODE AND ‘JOYFUL IRONY’

June 5, 2019

POEM: A SPECIAL DAY (CHOSEN FOR ELAINE)

May 30, 2019

HAIKU BY SARYU

May 29, 2019

TRUE MEDITATION AND THE GRACE OF DISAPPOINTMENT

May 6, 2019

DAYFLY

May 3, 2019

ARNE NAESS AS PHILOSOPHICAL VAGABOND

April 29, 2019

FACING EXTINCTION

April 23, 2019

DEFINING ‘SECULAR’

April 21, 2019

SOPHIAN WISDOM

Tag: contemplation

Quote | June 17, 2019