contemplation | Contemplative Inquiry

THE WOODCARVER

Khing, the master woodcarver, made a bell stand

Of precious wood. When it was finished,

All who saw it were astounded. They said it must be the work of spirits.

The Prince of Lu said to the master carver:

“What is your secret?”

Khing replied, “I am only a workman.

I have no secret. There is only this:

When I began to think about the work you commanded

I guarded my spirit. I did not expend it

On trifles, that were not to the point.

I fasted in order to

Set my heart at rest.

After three days fasting,

I had forgotten gain and success.

After five days,

I had forgotten praise and criticism.

After seven days

I had forgotten my body

With all its limbs.

By this time al thought of your Highness

And of the court had faded away.

Al that might distract me from the work

Had vanished.

I was collected in the single thought of the bell stand.

Then I went into the forest

To see the trees in their own natural state.

When the right tree appeared before my eyes,

The bell stand also appeared in it, clearly, beyond

doubt.

All that I had to do was to put forth my hand

And begin.

If I had not met this particular tree

There would have been

No bell stand at all.

What happened?

My own collected though

Encountered the hidden potential in the wood;

From this live encounter came the work

Which you ascribe to the spirits.”

Merton, Thomas (1965 & 2004) The Way of Chuang Tzu Boston & London: Shambhala.

Chuang Tzu, one of the great figures of early Taoism, lived around 300 BCE. The frontispiece of this edition says: “He used parables and anecdotes, allegory and paradox, to illustrate that real happiness and freedom are found only in understanding Tao or Way of nature, and dwelling in its unity. The respected Trappist monk Thomas Merton spent several years reading and reflecting on four different translations of the Chinese classic that bears Chuang Tzu’s name. The result is this collection of poetic renderings of the great sage’s work.

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November 23, 2015

STOCKTAKING

In 2014 The Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD) celebrated its 50th anniversary. It’s now just over 22 years since I first joined. Where am I now?

I remember being reassured by the way in which OBOD was able to hold a point of tension between two seemingly competing narratives. The first was the sense of living relationship with the land and the inheritance of ancestral stories. The second was an open and generous universalism. Without the first, the second could be vague and vapid. Without the second, the first could become culturally inward-turning and defensive. I’ve always been grateful for this balance.

As part of the 50th anniversary year, Sharon Zak and Maria Ede-Weaving put together The Golden Seed: Celebrating 50 Years of OBOD as “an anthology of prose, poetry, images and crafts” (including a DVD) created by OBOD members and friends. It is still referenced at http://www.druidry.org though currently unavailable. In my own entry I said I was more comfortable with a language of “practising OBOD Druidry” than “being an OBOD Druid”. That’s how I still see it and I would now want to add that this practice itself sits within a (for me) larger framework that I would name as the Way of Sophia. This has been true for quite a while, and I will write about it more in the future. Here I just want to say where my Druidry continues to fit.

There are two huge lessons that I draw from Druidry. The first is about how to do solo practice. I can’t now imagine a core solo practice that doesn’t take place in a sacred circle, woven of ritual and liturgy. Allowing a slow evolution of movement and liturgy, I gain insight into my purpose and intent in a way that offers both clarity and embodiment. Within that circle, I include body and energy work and also some form of sitting meditation: the precise forms vary. There’s also an aspect of healing and blessing. Thanks to the OBOD distance learning course, this approach to practice has become second nature. Someone could have given me a list of instructions to this effect on the back of an envelope and I might have had a go with different aspects from time to time before coming across something else on the back of another envelope. But I had the chance to build an evolving practice over an extended period, in a way that was both self-directing (I have an allergy to gurus) and within a tradition that made support and guidance available (I also don’t operate brilliantly if unwitnessed and alone). This combination is quite rare in spiritual education, and it’s a great privilege to have a continuing relationship with this work on the mentoring side. The course covers a lot of other ground as well. But this was the piece that was transformational for me.

The second lesson concerns two intertwining challenges. Both are connected to the contemplative inquiry I’ve been involved in for just over four years. One is the challenge of responding to the Order’s invitation to members to take initiatives and offer varying forms of leadership, whilst still (if we so choose) being held within the collective and feeling part of it. The other is the contemplative journey itself. This has involved the further evolution of solo practice, but more importantly to the co-creation of an innovative house-style in group work and in particular of Day Retreats for small groups. I and my colleagues seem to have a good handle on this now, both within our own local group and in the wider community of Druids and fellow travellers.

These lessons are my guide as to where to put my energy within Druidry, offering contexts of connection, service and nourishment.

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November 12, 2015

POEM: A PILLOW BOOK

The wisdom of diffident humanism. Spontaneity, immersion-in-the-moment and dissolved boundaries aren’t everything. Our narrative natures may be present, self-conscious and hyper-sensitive as we negotiate connection between self and other. In my world this too has integrity, beauty, and tenderness.

I lie in bed, watching you

Dress yourself in nudity

For your part in a story

You are about to tell me.

Once upon a time, you seem to say,

There was a woman who took off all her clothes

And stood for a moment

With one hand on her hip.

You have my full attention

As you pile your hair on top of your head

And let it fall down again.

Up to this point I am familiar with the story.

Your movements suggest a possible outline,

But nothing is certain yet.

You lift your arms above your head

In a gesture of boredom or surrender.

Your hands touch in mid-air

And you turn them palm-side out

In a kind of question mark,

As you ask for help with the ending.

Hugo Williams, West End Final London: Faber & Faber, 2009. The publisher’s blurb describes this collection as a set of “sardonic investigations into the fault line between voice and projection”.

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November 5, 2015

POEM: OLDER

I was recently introduced to this poem, about being older, by my friend Rosa Davis. I’m grateful for the discovery.

It’s not quite god

Pocketed deep inside you now

This wording of your inner voice

No longer needing an answer

This chest-centred warmth

Stillness of snow

Sheltering every branch and twig

Not god, only a sense

That this is enough.

From Caroline Natzler, Only Grenadine Press, Catford: 2015

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November 2, 2015

CONTEMPLATING SOUL

What do we mean by soul? Why does it matter? For me, soul is a bandwidth of experience rather than a detachable entity. James Hillman described it as “a world of imagination, passion, fantasy, reflection, that is neither physical nor material on the one hand, nor spiritual and abstract on the other, yet bound to them both. By having its own realm psyche has its own logic, psychology – which is neither a science of physical things nor a metaphysics of spiritual things”. As Jung’s successor, he believed that “psychological pathologies also belong to this realm. Approaching them from either side, in terms of medical sickness or religion’s suffering, sin and salvation, misses the target of soul”.

As a champion of soul, Hillman is contrastingly a bit grumpy about spirit, another bandwidth of experience, which according to him “always posits itself as superior, operates particularly well in a fantasy of transcendence among ultimates and absolutes … strait is the gate and only first or last things will do … if people choose to go that way, I wish they would go far away to Mt. Athos or Tibet, where they don’t have to be involved in the daily soup … I think that spiritual disciplines are part of the disaster of the world … I think it’s an absolute horror that someone could be so filled with what the Greeks called superbia to think that his personal, little, tiny self-transcendence is more important than the world and the beauty of the world: the trees, the animals, the people, the buildings, the culture”.

Hillman’s sense of soul is deeply intertwined with “a style of consciousness – and this style should not even be called polytheistic, for, strictly, historically, when polytheism reigns there is no such word. When the daimones are alive, polytheism, pantheism, animism and even religion do not appear. The Greeks had daimones but not these terms, so we ought to hold from monotheistic rhetoric when entering that imaginative field and style we have been forced to call polytheistic”. Then, he says, soul can show its patterns through imagery, myth, poetry, storytelling and the comedy and agony of drama – releasing “intuitive insight” from the play of “sensate, particular events”.

A universe of soul is a pluralistic universe, a world of Eaches rather than the One or the All. For Hillman oneness can only appear as the unity of each thing, being as it is, with a name and a face – ensouled by and within its very uniqueness. He quotes William James as saying: “reality may exist in distributive form, in the shape of not of an all but of a set of eaches, just as it seems to be … there is this in favour of eaches, that they are at any rate real enough to have made themselves at least appear to everyone, whereas the absolute (wholeness, unity, the one) has as yet appeared immediately only to a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously”.

For me this is where the terms Oran Mor (Great Song) and Web of Wyrd – from the Celtic and Northern traditions respectively – come into their own. The diversity and uniqueness of every note in the song, of each position within the web, are fully honoured and acknowledged. But these metaphors do also speak of a song and a web. Their unity is a unity of interconnectedness and relationship. Our current scientific metaphor of the Big Bang is a bit similar, in giving us a vast universe (or multiverse) bursting from a point at which time and space themselves originate. This image will doubtless change and may come to be seen as a ‘local’ presence/event (?) within a yet ‘larger’ system (?) ‘beyond’ our knowledge. But it offers a sense of being of the same stuff, and having a common source which in time bound 3D terms we come from and in eternal terms we simply are. Some non-dualists make much of this second aspect and frame it as an affirmation of divinity. But I see such an ultimate unity-at-source as a weak aspect of any identity I can usefully lay claim to and I’m agnostic veering sceptical about any evolutionary teleology or ‘as-if’ intentional drive. The gift – a gift, certainly, evoking deep gratitude even in the absence of a discernible giver – is my precious, vulnerable, fleeting human life, time and space bound though it is. That’s why I value Hillman’s lens of ‘soul’, whilst also choosing to incorporate ‘spiritual’ disciplines into my own life.

Hillman, James The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire London: Routledge, 1990 (Introduced and edited by Thomas Moore)

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October 26, 2015

SAMHAIN GIFT

A Samhain gift from Sophia. Here, the pentagram image stands for a cycle of meditations, a pathway to wisdom. We move from peace (bottom left, the earth position) to joy (right hand, the water position) to love (left hand, the air position) to healing (bottom right, the fire position) to wisdom (top, the spirit position) and back to peace again.

It seems that for me inner peace, as well as being a condition of any real peace, is also the beginning of wisdom. Inner peace is a blessing and it is also a skill. We can learn how to access and develop it, though for many of us it doesn’t come easy.

The learning and practice are likely to involve encounters with distraction, agitation and turmoil. I find that there are two ways of addressing this – one is to have ways of diminishing and dispersing them; the other is to find a still point of peace within the distraction, agitation and turmoil themselves. Peace has its place within aroused states as well as calm ones. Essentially, I experience peace as a fundamental at-homeness, an affirmative being and belonging in the world.

Peace is the bedrock. But it isn’t everything. Rather, it opens possibilities. The first is joy, a kind of joy that comes from within peace. This joy may be still. It may be flowing. It may be calm. It may also be ecstatic. Peace and joy together create a very powerful internal state and in my view form the basis for the outward turn to love and aware engagement. This in turn enables the energy of healing – in relation to self, other and world.

The step to wisdom is next, though it assumes a parallel work of knowledge-building and understanding outside the meditative setting. Wisdom depends on these, yet is qualitatively different. In my experience it’s the qualities nurtured by intentional contemplative practice that make the difference.

In this view I acknowledge the influence of the Mahayana Buddhist idea of prajna, where wisdom is a union of spiritual knowledge (jnana) and compassion. The core text of Mahayana Buddhism is the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra (1), with prajnaparamita represented as a deep meditative state and also personified as Prajnaparamita mother of the Buddhas, just as further to the west Sophia has been represented as the mother of angels. In the text of the Heart Sutra the Buddha Gautama Siddhartha provides instruction to his disciple Avolokitesvara, who went on to develop a powerful female alter ego as the great Chinese bodhisattva Guan Yin – another Sophian figure.

The Sophian pentagram first came to me as a compelling image; then as a sequence of words. From there I quickly identified specific practices (already individually familiar) to work with the named qualities and states. It feels as if I’ve been given a direction for the next phase of my personal inquiry and practice, and it’s good to have that direction as a Samhain gift from Sophia.

The Heart Sutra: the Womb of the Buddhas Translation and Commentary by Red Pine. Berkeley, CA, USA: Counterpoint, 2004

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October 16, 2015

THE PEACE OF SOPHIA REVISITED

The peace of Sophia, given a chance, heals the violence within. This violence can be obvious and crying out to be worked with. It can also be hidden, unawarely latent, insidiously shaping both words and actions. In Thomas Keating’s language, such violence “reduces and can even cancel the effectiveness of the external works of mercy, justice and peace” (1). It is an argument he uses for promoting contemplative practice within the Catholic Church and Christian communities more widely.

In my exploration of contemplative traditions, Cynthia Bourgeault is the Christian writer to whom I have paid the most attention. An Episcopalian priest based in the USA, she is a long-term associate of Father Keating in the development and teaching of centering prayer. This is a modern contemplative practice modelled partly on Theravadin Buddhist insight meditation, and partly on the contemplative approach recommended in The Cloud of Unknowing, an English text from the later fourteenth century. “For heaven ghostly is as nigh down as up, and up as down: behind as before, before as behind, on one side as other. Insomuch that whoso had a true desire for to be at heaven, then that same time he were in heaven ghostly. For the high and the next way thither is run by desires and not by paces of feet” (2).

I think of Bourgeault as a Sophian teacher working within a Christian framework. I get this sense through a reading of three of her books: The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, The Wisdom Jesus and Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening. She has incorporated ‘Gnostic’ Nag Hammadi texts into her recommended sacred literature, especially The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Philip and The Gospel of Mary Magdalene. In her references to what Christians call ‘The Old Testament’ I see a leaning towards The Psalms, The Book of Proverbs and The Song of Solomon. I am neither qualified nor inclined to discuss her theology. But I do get the flavour of a Sophian sensibility that seems to me to inform her view and practice of (to use my language) meditation.

Bourgeault speaks of “a warm practice, a bit sloppier and dreamier than the classic methods of attention and awareness practices. You lose some time in day-dreaming, at least at the start, and that vibrant tingling sense of ‘I am here’ prized in so many meditation practices is not really a goal in Centering Prayer” (2). The key word is intention rather than attention, and the specific intention is to be deeply available – Bourgeault would say to God, I would say to a deeper nature. This means “available at the depths of being, deeper than words, memories, emotions, sensations, deeper even than your felt sense of ‘I am here’”.

Bourgeault counsels against the aim of making ourselves empty or still, saying that it is “like trying not to think of an elephant” and pretty much assures a constant, non-stop stream of thoughts. Instead, once the intent is established, it is a surrender method, “not working with mind at all, but going straight to the heart”. She says that “for most people, a typical Centering Prayer period looks like a sine wave: lots of ups and downs. There are moments when the mind is more restless and jumpy and thoughts come one on top of another. There are also moments of stillness, sometimes very deep stillness. You won’t be able to retrieve these moments of stillness directly, of course, because as soon as you start thinking about them they’re gone. But you will ‘remember’ them through a certain quiet gathered-ness that accompanies you as you get up and move about your day. Through the cumulative energy of this gathered stillness, Centering Prayer gradually imprints itself upon the heart”.

I’ve been drawn back to Cynthia Bourgeault’s work because of my inner promptings about peace, and the peace of Sophia. I will continue my exploration of her work. Whilst engaging I will of course be conscious of her theistic and Christocentric framework and the knowledge that I do not share it. This I think will make the experience all the richer, because it will include the challenge of fully accepting difference, and fully accepting the gift within it.

References:

Cynthia Bourgeault Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening Lanham, MD, USA: Cowley Publications, 2004 (from the Foreword by Thomas Keating)
A Book of Contemplation the which is called The Cloud of Unknowing, in which the Soul is Oned with God Anonymous (edited from the British Museum MS. Harl. 674 with an introduction by Evelyn Underhill) London: John M. Watkins, 1922
Cynthia Bourgeault Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind – a New Perspective on Christ and His message Shambhala: Boston & London, 2011

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October 5, 2015

TOWARDS A CONTEMPLATIVE NOTE: REFLECTIONS ON 3 OCTOBER

I sense that we are finding a contemplative note in Druidry. To an extent we have had it for a while, but it’s becoming more assured. Last Saturday we had an open contemplative day in Stroud for Druids and fellow travellers willing to join us. I worked with Elaine Knight and Nimue Brown as co-facilitators. Some of the participants travelled a considerable distance for the event. Many of those present were new to each other. Some were new to this kind of event.

Yet the day felt very cohesive. For me, the group note resonated strongly though also softly. The vibration was a subtle one, interwoven with silence and stillness, whilst also clear and distinct. Building community together, and working together, we were more than the sum of our parts. We created a group identity, and sounded our note. I understand this as our small contribution and offering to the Oran Mor, the great song of what is.

I’ve been reflecting on how this happened, and on lessons to take forward. The main single factor has to be that everyone in the group understood the offer, was open to the experience, and wanted it to work. This is such an obvious aspect of a success that it can go unrecognised, like the so-called ‘placebo’ effect in healing: people engage their good will, almost unconsciously, and it has a strong positive effect.

On the facilitator side, there are several things we got right and that I want to remember. Having a record will help that.

We made a good choice of venue for the occasion, and this was supplemented by the blessing of a golden autumn day. The programme relied on activities, which someone at another of our events named as “simple but profound”. This choice is definitely part of our note. The building of our ritual container, whist still ‘lean’, was just a little bit more elaborate than in our local group. It clearly marked our sacred space and our expectations about how we would work in it.

I also found myself casting our circle in ‘the contemplative grove of druids’. This time I was careful to avoid the term ‘grove of contemplative druids’. I have found naming ‘contemplative druidry’ to be a useful way of classifying a sub-set of interests within druidry. But I now believe that to think of people themselves as ‘contemplative druids’, a separate species within larger druid genus, is potentially divisive and doesn’t allow individuals to have inconveniently multiple interests. At the same time, when we join together in a contemplative event, we are indeed being intentional about contemplative practice. I have come to think of Contemplative Druid Events as a vehicle for a latent grove, a grove which constellates during our events and therefore deserves to be named. This grove provides space for our emerging note.

The note was considerably enriched when Nimue led a session that involved us in finding simple personal sounds and vocalising them over an extended period of time. After a while we could sense those diverse and discordant seeming sounds (our individual notes) come together as a collective sound where people spontaneously worked together. So the group note was worked for, discovered and explored in an absolutely literal way – and one which changed the atmosphere of the room. Later in the day, Elaine took the group through a version of an energy body exercise that went on to identify and reinforce the energetic connections between people, linking us as a group at subtle levels before moving into an animistic exercise. In my experience as a participant, these sections of the day were simple, profound and powerful too.

We made sure that we varied the pace of the day. Some of the work was relatively intense, but we had more leisurely and relaxed spaces as well, enjoyed time outside and made sure of an abundant supply of refreshments. For me, 3 October 2015 was a step forward in the evolution of our work. My heartfelt thanks to everyone involved.

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October 1, 2015

THE PEACE OF SOPHIA

This post is about contemplation and peace – peace as lived experience, rather than as hope or idea. I am discovering the peace of Sophia.

In my practice I experience Sophia as a psychopomp or inner guru. Conventionally she is a guide of light. Actually she is a guide of dark as well. Either way she points beyond herself. Generally using a method of subtle prompts and suggestions, she opens my way to a deeper nature.

Just recently she has been showing me a way to peace as an inner space, like a well-spring at the core of being. This is not a new idea, nor yet a new experience. But there’s more clarity around it, more definition – also, in a felt sense, more weight.

It began with an intense vision of braided threads – black, white and red, the traditional goddess colours. I felt nudged to identify the colours with peace, joy and love. Peace had some primacy. Although this is a triadic image, I began to see it as a four: black, white, red and black. Here the peace of the Goddess is defining. It is linked both to origin and return, and to spaces within and between other forms of experience. It may seem like simple negation. But it is an active force, like the ‘emptiness’ in some Asian traditions.

The good news is that ‘peace’ does not depend on external conditions. It can be accessed and developed within, both individually and collectively. This is why, to a certain extent, practices like meditation can be a protective or resiliency factor in relation to bad outside conditions. The trick here is to avoid a descent into the wrong kind of magical thinking and expect too much. Challenges still have to be dealt with at their own level: it’s just that having a baseline of inner peace tends to make practitioners more resourceful in dealing with the busy apparent world.

Cultivating the peace of the Sophia is currently centre stage in my solo work. In his foreword to Contemplative Druidry Philip Carr-Gomm quoted the well-known line “Deep peace of the quiet Earth”. My extension of that thought, based my current experience, is to say ‘as without, so within’. I believe this double recognition is necessary. To the extent that I am a nature mystic, the aspect of nature with which I am most concerned is me, in particular a deeper nature behind the surface personality. Only by attending to both this nature within and nature around and beyond me can I refine the relationship between them and so identify any gift I might have for the world.

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September 1, 2015

CONTEMPLATIVE DRUIDRY: MEME OR MOVEMENT?

On 3 October Contemplative Druid Events (CDE) – see http://contemplativedruidevents.tumblr.com – will hold its last planned event for 2015. This will be a Contemplative Day, in Stroud, Gloucestershire, England. The facilitators will be James Nichol, Elaine Knight and Nimue Brown. Our programme is designed for a group of up to 15 people, and 12 are already committed. With just over a month to go we have a comfortable size of group, with room for a few more.

CDE offerings are built around insights from the book Contemplative Druidry: People Practice and Potential about the kinds of contemplative work that most seemed to resonate for the present generation of Druids. We offer sitting meditations of based both on a bare attention and on active imagination. We have outdoor walking meditations and opportunities simply to be, with awareness, in natural settings. We use methods that draw on creative arts. We have developed ‘Awen space’ as a group opening to, in and as Spirit. We build our repertoire as we gain in experience.

Is CDE spearheading Contemplative Druidry as a movement? I don’t see it that way. CDE was created as a minimal level of organisation for a single purpose. This is to offer a particular kind of event to small groups of Druids and fellow-travellers willing to join us. In doing this, we also promote the contemplative Druid meme, which now seems to be well recognised in modern Druid culture. But the CDE brand does not exhaust the possibilities of contemplative Druidry and we wouldn’t want it to. Modern Druidry, which is in some senses a postmodern Druidry, has a strong commitment to free exploration and diversity. The contemplative meme will find its place within that wider cultural framework. For better or for worse, we will never, as a collective, be organised around a Druid ‘four noble truths’. Contemplative Druidry will mean different things, and inspire different journeys, for different Druids.

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Contemplative Inquiry

Tag: contemplation

November 30, 2015

THE WOODCARVER

November 23, 2015

STOCKTAKING

November 12, 2015

POEM: A PILLOW BOOK

November 5, 2015

POEM: OLDER

November 2, 2015

CONTEMPLATING SOUL

October 26, 2015

SAMHAIN GIFT

October 16, 2015

THE PEACE OF SOPHIA REVISITED

October 5, 2015

TOWARDS A CONTEMPLATIVE NOTE: REFLECTIONS ON 3 OCTOBER

October 1, 2015

THE PEACE OF SOPHIA

September 1, 2015

CONTEMPLATIVE DRUIDRY: MEME OR MOVEMENT?