Spiritual inquiry | Contemplative Inquiry

December 9, 2015

POEM: WATER AND WAVE

I’m sharing this song of Kabir because I enjoyed it and felt cheered by it. I liked its devotional and ecstatic note – not my usual one.. I have harmonised it with my way of Sophia by changing a ‘his’ to a ‘her’.

I have been thinking of the difference

Between water

And the waves on it. Rising,

Water’s still water, falling back,

It is water, will you give me a hint

How to tell them apart?

Because someone has made up the word

“Wave”, do I have to distinguish it

From water?

There is a Secret One inside us;

The planets in all the galaxies

Pass through her hands like beads.

That is a string of beads one should look at with

Luminous eyes.

A weaver by trade but a poet-singer by calling, Kabir lived in fifteenth century India. His philosophy incorporated various beliefs of both Muslims and Hindus and later became one of the major influences behind Sikhism. Like Rumi, further to the west and generations earlier, his generously devotional and ecstatic path made him a natural bridge builder between traditions.

Kabir Ecstatic poems Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992 The English translations are free enough for Robert Bly to call them ‘versions by Robert Bly’. Given Bly’s freedom I have changed a ‘his’ to a ‘her’ above to support the poetry of my own gnosis. 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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December 3, 2015

POEM: THE MOON IN DEWDROPS

Simplicity and complexity, elegance and wisdom combined in the poetry of Japanese Zen. I notice that I respond more strongly to such poetry than I do to didactic texts about meditation and philosophy.

To what shall

I liken the world?

Moonlight, reflected

In dewdrops,

Shaken from a crane’s bill.

I particularly love this poem. The apparent naturalism of the imagery makes it powerful and accessible to anyone. Yet for me, this poem also brings up wider issues about reading and interpretation. The poet’s location in place, time and culture do make a difference. Ehei Dogen (1200-1253) was one of the first to transmit Zen Buddhism from China to Japan and was founder of the Soto School. His poem is a waka – a 31 syllable form predating the invention of haiku. Dogen is a key figure in both Japanese Buddhism and Japanese literature.

In Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddhism of all Japanese schools including Zen, the moon stands for Buddha-nature. So the poem teaches a familiar Mahayana truth that the moon (Buddha-nature) is completely reflected in every one of the countless dew drops (all things) without discrimination, namely one in all, all in one. This understanding is accompanied by a sense of fragility and impermanence within nature – strongly present in Japanese culture independently of Buddhism and reinforced by Buddhist teaching. Dogen gives us elegance and complexity in a 31 syllable form.

Hee-Jin Kim*, a modern Zen scholar, takes this further, bringing out Dogen’s sensitivity to history as well as to nature. He draws attention to the word ‘shaken’: each dew drop holds a full yet shaken reflection of the moon. Dogen lived in what was seen as a dark and ill-starred time in Japanese history. Many Buddhists thought that even their path was compromised and talked of degenerate dharma (mappo). Kim understands Dogen as resisting this ideology of despair whilst fully aware of the collective turmoil. On this reading, the poem asserts that timelessness is experienced within, and only within, momentariness, even when the times are stressed.

To what shall

I liken the world?

Moonlight, reflected

In dewdrops,

Shaken from a crane’s bill.

* Hee-Jin Kim Dogen on meditation and thinking: a reflection on his view of Zen Albany, New York: State University, 2007 (At the time of publication Hee-Jin Kim was Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon. He is also the author of Dogen-Kigen: Mystical Realist).

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November 30, 2015

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 26, 2015

THE WAY OF SOPHIA

“A Sufi mystic was staying with Rabiya. His name was Hasan. He must have heard Jesus Christ’s statement: ‘knock and it shall be opened to you. Ask and it shall be given to you. Seek and you will find it’. So every day in his morning prayer, afternoon prayer, evening prayer, night prayer, five times a day he said to God, ‘I am knocking, Sir, and I am knocking so much. Why has it not opened up to now? I am beating my head against your door, Sir. Open it.

“Rabiya heard it one day. Rabiya heard it the second day. Rabiya heard it the third day. Then she said, ‘Hasan, when will you look? The door is open. You go on talking nonsense – ‘I am knocking, I am knocking’ – and the door is open all the time. Look! But you are too concerned with your knocking and asking and desiring and seeking, and you cannot see. The door is open.” (1)

For me Rabiya is the Sophia in this story, the teacher and guide. Sophia emerges in the eastern Mediterranean. She is most associated with contexts that are urban, multicultural and entranced by the power of the written word. She inherits the rose from Aphrodite and Isis, and the grove from Asherah, the lost goddess of Israel. She becomes a traveller, eastward bound on the Silk Road, taking other names.

The Sophia of my experience is not quite the being of the traditions, though the traditions have fed me (2, 3). As a living presence, anam cara and guide, she undermines my pompous attempts to impose narrative order on the cosmos and thus possess the infinite. She stands for creative mythology, continuous revelation, and a compassionate free spirit. Infinitely sceptical and infinitely believing, she embraces the life of the senses, feeling and thinking. Yet she points also to other possibilities: nourishment in the silent heart of being, and the energy of what Coleridge called the primary imagination and Druids call Awen.

Osho Zen: the path of paradox New York, NY: Osho International Foundation, 2001
Caitlin Matthews Sophia Goddess of Wisdom, Bride of God Wheaton, ILL: Quest Books, 2001
Anne Baring & Jules Cashford The myth of the Goddess: evolution of an image London: Arkana, 1993
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia Literaria: or biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions London: Dent, 1965 (Edited with an introduction by George Watson)

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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 30, 2015

ANCESTORS

I watched the BBC series The Celts: Blood, Iron and Sacrifice recently and felt depressed – addicted as well, but depressed. My problem? I didn’t feel connected to anybody in the story. I couldn’t fully empathise. I acknowledge descent from people like them – probably in a humbler station of life than those who got the attention. I could offer gratitude and respect for their fecundity/virility, for their resilience, for doing the best they could with the life on offer. I felt uneasy at the display of their mortal remains on TV. But connection? Not really.

So where would I look for living ancestry? If we take the Eurasia of the time as a whole we find, as part of the cultural mix, an acute consciousness of something painful and awry in the military-aristocratic cultures of the day, perhaps in the very cosmos itself. We can follow this as a persistent theme in powerful emergent literatures. Such indeed was the revulsion that some teachers and writers became world and life denying. But that’s not true of everyone. The words below, attributed to the early Chinese Taoist Lao Tzu, seem grounded enough:

Brim-fill the bowl,

It’ll spill over.

Keep sharpening the blade,

You’ll soon blunt it.

Nobody can protect a house full of gold and jade.

Wealth, status, pride

Are their own ruin.

To do good, work well, and lie low

Is the way of the blessing. (1)

In Athens, a little closer to home, Socrates suggested that our highest good lies in our moral centre and best self, and that all external goods, such as bodily pleasure, health and social reputation are correspondingly of subordinate value. Essential good was to be sought within rather than in externals. Socrates himself was famous for the simplicity of his way of life. His ascetic follower Diogenes, a kind of crazy wisdom master described by Plato as “Socrates gone mad”, is said to have had a late life encounter with the young Alexander of Macedon, soon to become ‘the Great’. Alexander asked Diogenes if there was anything he could do for him, reckoning that if Diogenes came up with something it would establish a relationship of patronage and dependency. Diogenes was sitting against a wall and had been enjoying the sunshine until Alexander came along and loomed over him. So he requested the King to stand away from his sun. Alexander went on to fight his way through the Persian Empire all the way to India. There he cornered a group of gymnosophists (= naked sages, either Jain or Yogi) and happily repeated his pattern of asking clever questions and receiving sagely answers.

I am not a follower of Lao Tzu, Socrates or Diogenes, but I do feel connected to them. I have involved them in my contemplative inquiry. In this sense they are my ancestors. Edited and mythologised though they may be, they speak to me over the centuries. I realize that literary wisdom comes out of older, oral traditions. Humans are capable of wisdom and it doesn’t depend on writing. The Tao Te Ching is an anthology of verses passed from teachers to pupils who were expected to memorise them. I understand that their initial recording and publication were controversial in their day. Socrates and Diogenes didn’t care much for writing: they left that to others. I do not doubt that there were paths and people of wisdom in the Celtic-speaking lands – people who stuck by the way of personal relationship and oral transmission in their teaching: this is, after all, the rumoured way of the Druids. I just doubt that we would find them amongst the princes, warriors and court Druids presented in The Celts: Blood, Iron and Sacrifice.

So my Samhain thoughts this year turn to exemplars, teachers and sharers of wisdom – firstly and obviously those who are publicly known and remembered; secondly and perhaps more importantly with those who remain unknown but whose invisible influence has leavened the life of the world.

Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: a book about the Way and the Power of the Way (New English version by Ursula K. Le Guin, with the collaboration of J. P. Seaton, Professor of Chinese, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) Shambhala: Boston & London, 1998.

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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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