Spirituality | Contemplative Inquiry

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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November 21, 2017

INTENSIVE INQUIRY

Over the past two years, I have worked with three traditions apart from Druidry. These are Sophian Gnosticism, The Headless Way, and the Vietnamese Zen of Thich Nhat Hanh. Diverse as they are, they have all valuably nudged me in my current direction, which is one of intensive inquiry.

Through this inquiry, I am finding that what I call the Direct Path* is uniting the concerns of these three traditions, in a way that resolves the difficulties they raise for me, described below:

WAY OF SOPHIA To the extent that it is connected to a method, the Sophian (or Magdalenian) journey is a Christian Kabbalist one, a Jacob’s ladder from the apparent world to a Void beyond describable divinity and back again to a new experience of the world as kingdom, transfigured by a super-celestial vision. To the extent that I find a problem with this method, it is a tendency for the reality of my true nature to seem remote and hidden, obscured by a too-vivid myth making. The spirit gets drowned in the cocktail. When working with the image of Sophia, I found a more playful and free-spirited energy, not fitting easily in formal Gnostic Christian tradition. So, the system, as a system, doesn’t quite work for me.

HEADLESS WAY Richard Harding’s Headless Way – http://www.headless.org/ – is apparently non-mythic, and a variant, home-grown form of the Direct Path, or at least its first half. It is based on a set of experiments, which kick-start a non-dual recognition from the visual perception/brief shock of ‘not having a head’, and go on to further to develop the implications of this perspectival shift. The exercises worked brilliantly for me when I first did them. I experienced a powerful figure/ground shift, with the cultural common sense of subject-verb-object language very briefly driven out of me as the world sat on my shoulders. This then became narratized as the opening into an I AM, an ultimate identity of ‘clear awake space, and capacity for the world’.

Precisely this narrative brought about my fall. I could feel the counter coup of my demoted ‘third person’ as it happened. The Monkey King learned to become the Monkey Emptiness and take up a geographically familiar position in the vacant space above my neck. I ended with a sense of ‘fool’s gold’, though in retrospect this seems unfair. I had an important shaking up because of not having a head. Returning to the same territory through different means, I now resonate with Rupert Spira’s understanding that Consciousness cannot know itself as an object. I had tried to become, as a sentient being in the apparent world, absolutely the eye of spirit and although I AM the eye of spirit, I could not become it in that way, because becoming it makes it a conceivable object in the finite mind. I can only enact it through what I call the sacrament of the present moment. It is more as if the finite mind – not separate, yet also not identical – offers itself as a vehicle.

MAHAYANA BUDDHISM: After an interval, I turned to Buddhism, in the form of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Community of Interbeing, – https://coiuk.org/ – which renewed an occasional relationship with one or another Buddhist sangha going back for over twenty years. This time round the wheel I made sure that I studied the Emptiness teachings directly and wasn’t satisfied with meditation manuals and the modern version of Buddhist psychology. My study included Thich Nhat Hanh’s 2014 commentary on the Heart Sutra, (1) Jay Garfield’s translation of and commentaries on Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (2) and Vasubandhu’s Thirty Verses on Consciousness Only, (3) a Yogacara practitioner text presented by Ben Connelly with a new translation by Weijen Teng. I didn’t, this time, work with the Zen literatures of China and Japan.

The result of my study was that in meditation I got a much fuller sense of consciousness being the underlying reality, which thoughts, feelings, perceptions and sensations passed through. This pointed beyond ‘no separate self-nature’ in the sense of Thich Nhat Hanh’s psycho-social-ecological view of ‘Interbeing’, to a fuller sense of Consciousness Only. This experience, a fruit both of study and of practice, helped warm me up to my present encounter with the Direct Path.

I consulted the Science And Non-Duality (SAND) website – https://www.scienceanndnonduality.com/ – since I knew that many Direct Path teachers are linked to that network. First, I took a brief online meditation course with Peter Russell – www.peterrussell.com/ – to find out what basic breath meditation would feel like in an Advaita context rather than a Buddhist one. It felt soft and spacious. But my main concern was with the kinds of inquiry into core identity associated with the Advaita approach, having run into problems with the Headless Way experiments and traditional self-inquiry (‘Who am I?), since I could quickly come up with a rhetorically ‘right answer’ without it meaning very much experientially. I soon came across a new work by Stephan Bodian – https://www.stephanbodian.org/ (4), a former Zen monk, who went on to train in Western psychotherapy and became a student of Direct Path teacher Jean Klein*. He provides a bridge from Zen to the Direct Path and his book is rich in carefully crafted practice suggestions. I also worked with the inquiry suggestions in Greg Goode’s Direct Path (5). Greg Goode – https://greg-goode.com/ is a student of Francis Lucille, himself a student of Jean Klein.

Now I am working with Rupert Spira’s – https://non-duality.rupertspira.com/ Transparent Body, Luminous World (6) contemplations, clear that the Direct Path is the centre of my inquiry. Rupert Spira is another pupil of Francis Lucille, and for me does most to bring out the Tantric as well as Advaita aspects of Klein’s teaching. For him, Direct Path realization is just as much about finding love in sensation and feelings, or beauty in perception, as it is about finding truth in inquiry. All is held in Consciousness. Once we know this, really feeling and tasting the understanding, the question becomes: how do we celebrate and live from this reality? This is the point at which the sense of an embodied spirituality, animist, Earth honouring, with a view of deep ecology, indeed Druidry, come back into their own, held within a Tantric understanding.

I’m moving towards a decision about whether to anchor myself in this world view. Once that decision is made (if it is made), my primary attention will move to the outward arc – here called the Tantric one. This will likely change my practice. The intensive contemplative inquiry will burn itself out, leading to a new spiritual centre of gravity that includes contemplation and inquiry but is no longer defined by them.

*DIRECT PATH: I am specifically referring to the lineage begun by Jean Klein, combining Advaita Vedanta, India’s classical renunciate spirituality, with Kashmir Shaivism, a form of Tantra. The Direct Path is an exploration of objective experience in the light of our enlightened understanding, rather than a turning away from our experience in favour of its background of pure Awareness, as is the case of the Vedantic approach. If the Vedantic path is the path from ‘I am something’ – a body and a mind – to ‘I am nothing’, the Tantric path could be said to be the path from ‘I am nothing’ to ‘I am everything’. If the Vedantic path is one of exclusion and discrimination, the Tantric path is one of inclusion or love. The Direct Path brings them together.

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

(2) Nagarjuna The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995

(3) Ben Connelly Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacara: A Practitioner’s Guide Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2016

(4) Stephan Bodian Beyond Mindfulness: The Direct Approach to Lasting Peace, Happiness and Love Oakland, CA: Non-Duality Press, 2017

(5) Greg Goode The Direct Path Salisbury: Non-Duality Press, 2012

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

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November 19, 2017

MODRON AND MABON: A VISION

An absence untouched by narrative. Or, perhaps, original presence as an unnameable intimacy of experiencing. Undivided, it cannot know itself as object.

As if ‘then’, there is an appearance of appearances. The knowing of a primal mist and mirk, shot through with luminous flashes. It seems to spread through a dawning space and time which are still malleable, not yet settled or regulated.

Aeons pass, and figures step out of the mist. They emerge into a pale and heart-breaking winter light, softened by gentle rain. There are evergreen leaves and tiny sparkles of light, offered as watery reflections.

The people – there are two of them – come like refugees, suitably attired for the North. One is the Mother of All, here known as Modron, the destined Kali of a cool ambiguous land. The other is Mabon, her magical child. Their purpose here is to remind people of who they really are.

The Modron will not hold her human form for long. She will dissolve into the landscape and the elements, though her energy will still move through them. The Mabon’s task, no small one, is to stand by the Mother, to enjoy her gifts, and to show the way home.

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November 15, 2017

DIRECT PATH

I am working with a set of contemplations devised by Rupert Spira, a teacher in the ‘Direct Path’. Direct means not progressive: the view that there is no need to progress towards a desired spiritual goal, for we have always been at home. Our task is to live from this recognition.

The contemplations are presented in a book and six MP3 CD box set, with 24 guided meditations, each of which lasts for an hour or somewhat longer (1). I have worked with 12 so far. I have fully accepted the pre-suppositions of the teaching for the purposes of my inquiry, willing to discover what happens when I do. For me, it’s a game of ‘as-if’, which works better than either blind belief or defensive wariness.

It is proving a powerful experience, with gifts of tears and fears, safe and beautiful. It leans into lightness and joy. I’m reminded of therapeutic environments years ago. I am fully engaged, at an edge.

Part of the magic lies in Rupert Spira’s combining of Advaita Vedanta, India’s classical renunciate spirituality, with Kashmir Shaivism, a form of Tantra. He says: “the two traditions … are complementary aspects of a complete approach to the exploration of experience and not … at odds with each other …The Tantric path, of which the meditations presented in this collection are a contemporary expression, involves a turning towards experience.

“It is an exploration of objective experience in the light of our enlightened understanding, rather than a turning away from our experience in favour of its background of pure Awareness, as is the case of the Vedantic approach. If the Vedantic path is the path from ‘I am something’ – a body and a mind – to ‘I am nothing’, the Tantric path could be said to be the path from ‘I am nothing’ to ‘I am everything’. If the Vedantic path is one of exclusion and discrimination, the Tantric path is one of inclusion or love”.

I find the Direct Path, when presented in this way, clear, accessible, and effective. My work is solo and self-directed. I am free to engage with the whole of my experience and there is no need for preliminary practices or tribal norming. Yet I do have the assurance of knowing that Rupert Spira and his support team are contactable. These are ideal conditions for me when doing leading-edge personal work.

I am continuing my morning practice, which has been largely consistent over the last eight years, despite shifts of emphasis, and I maintain my link with a local Buddhist group. These are good, stabilizing things to do. But the energy of my contemplative inquiry is now in this new work – Rupert Spira’s programme and other direct path resources.

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

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Tag: Spirituality