The freedom of the elbow

Again and again, I find liberation in the very places I thought it was not—in brokenness and imperfection, disappointment and disillusionment, limitation and death, failure and darkness, unresolvability and uncertainty, groundlessness and everything falling apart. This is “the freedom of the elbow not bending backwards,” as they say in Zen. Of course, the elbow can’t bend backwards without breaking. So this is not the freedom to do what I want, but the freedom to be as I am, and the freedom for everything to be as it is, which is no way and every way, and never the same way twice. This is the freedom of nothing to grasp…

For me, the never-ending, always Now, pathless path of awakening boils down to simply being awake, being present, being truly alive—seeing the beauty in everything, living in gratitude and devotion, enjoying the dance of life, being just this moment, not knowing what anything is, clinging to nothing, recognizing—not in the head, but in the heart—that everything belongs, that nothing persists, that every moment is fresh and new.

Joan Tollifson, Death: The End of Self-Improvement, pp.262,263


While human actions are completely determined, Spinoza introduces a notion of human freedom that is compatible with determinism:

• True Freedom is Understanding: Freedom isn’t the ability to choose against causes (free will), but the ability to understand the necessary causes that determine us.
• Activity vs. Passivity: A person is passive when they are determined by external causes and inadequate ideas (passions).
• A person becomes active and more free when they act from adequate ideas (reason) and understand that they are part of the necessary order of God/Nature. This intellectual understanding leads to the highest state: the intellectual love of God (Amor Dei Intellectualis).

(Google Gemini, response to user query, October 2025)

The flow of becoming, the stream, the Tao, is what it is. What comes to be in our frail and transient lives is only the result of causes far beyond our understanding, and leads on to effects we cannot know. What we can do is pay attention to the grace of the tiny, beautiful things among which we live: the endless sparkling of the wavelets of the stream.

Freedom is to know, all-of-a-piece, that what we are is nothing other than the stream itself, and that the stream runs in the course of what merely is: the ground itself. But how?

As Joan Tollisfson says, the path of awakening comes down to being awake: just that. The only way I know to be awake is practice; simply watching what happens, watching what becomes as it is becoming, is the only way. It is so simple, so perfectly simple; and yet it is the hardest work I’ve known. To be aware, without choosing an object, is the purest kind of attention; and yet it is like holding a bare wire.

Only sit still, in quiet. Don’t seek anything – watch. Live quietly, in obscurity, as Epicurus advised, and just watch. There is nothing else to do.

Succession and substance

The stream is nothing less than the sparkling surface of becoming. For us, I suppose, it is time, since we are transient waves on the motion of what is coming to be; and we can only see what has been – which we call life, or the past.

To come to an end of knowing, to a place where reason and observation fail us, is the beginning of what Spinoza called the Third Kind of Knowledge: direct perception of what is as a necessary, unique expression of the immediate activity of the stream (God, the Tao). In that we are the locus of seeing, the inevitable awareness in which things come to be what they are.

For me it is in simply sitting still that we come to see the glittering light from the wavelets on the swift skin of the stream itself. We are each no more than that, but beautiful; and able to love, each in our lift and fall on the running stream. Nothing is lost. The stream goes on, and each wavelet cannot be other than the stream itself.

This entry was posted in awareness, consciousness, contemplative, death, isness, practice and tagged Benedictus Spinoza, Laozi

An admission

It seems to me that perhaps I may have been precipitate in switching back entirely to Blogger as a platform. It is hard, sometimes, to admit that one may have made a mistake; but possibly I have done just that.

Instead of my readership from the WordPress blog following me over to Blogger, I now seem to have two separate sets of readers – with a few honourable exceptions. Certainly my list of subscribers on WordPress remains constant; they do not appear to have resubscribed on Blogger en masse!

For the time being, then. it appears that I may have to run both plaforms in parallel until something settles out and I can continue on one or the other. That having been said, I shall post repost here the handful of posts from the last week on Blogger; for a while at least I shall publish any new posts on both platforms.

Needless to say, I shall be interested to hear from any of my followers – once the initial sense of nuisance has passed, perhaps – which of the two platforms you find most useful as a reader.

Is it possible?

Is it possible, at this very moment, to do what we may not have ever been able to do before, which is to look down at the shape our life has made and—suspending all judgment, throwing away every possible frame—simply marvel that this is the shape that my life has made, this and no other?

Noelle Oxenhandler, What Is the Shape of My Life?, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2025

To sit with this question, simply as it is, may be not unfamiliar when applied to the breath, to the sitting body, to the sounds outside, or to the sunlight on a blank wall or closed eyelids. But it is less familiar when turned, as Oxenhandler does here, to oneself. It is a strange and disorienting practice, with a dzogchen quality, like a wordless pointing-out instruction, about it somewhere. Something appears like a bright skein on the velvety dark of the stream, a shape of purling water, nothing else.

Recently I have found myself drawn into just such a practice. It is not something I choose. It rises up through the usual pattern of unbidden thoughts, and asks for space at least to be, like a map drawn on glass. There is nothing dramatic about it, no sense of "my life flashed before my eyes" - and yet it is there, a kind of Tube map of a lifetime, glittering behind closed eyelids. The least attention, and a pattern enlarges, a stream of cause and effect reveals itself, and is - what? - forgiven? Something like that. An act, yet again, of grace, anyway. There is no judgement here, no impulse to improve anything. It just is as Noelle Oxenhandler suggests (ibid.):

[T]hrough the ups and downs, the joys and heartbreaks of my own... life, there is something I have always been seeking that is beyond any conditions, that is not defined by the particular shape my life has made, by the roads either taken or not taken. In a way, it might be called a kind of negative capability toward the past, an unknowing of the known—in the sense of refraining from any judgment as to whether what happened was good, bad, something to be regretted or celebrated, whether all together it made the shape of a life that “worked out” or “didn’t work out.”

On the map beneath the glass there is nothing even to heal. The lines and stops stand out against the dark, and my breath comes and goes. There is no story here, just a pattern in the quiet. Nothing to conclude. The bright pattern stands against silence, as it is.

Vastness

...[W]hen we look within, there is no entity, no mind-substance, no self, no thing we can identify. There is just awareness—open empty awareness. We can’t locate any center, nor can we find an edge to our experience. Unless we anchor ourselves again in thoughts, or grasp after desired sensations or feelings, we have nowhere to stand, no firm ground. This can be disconcerting, scary, incredibly mysterious. While there may be a profusion of activity—sounds, sensations, images—there is no thing to hold on to, no self behind the curtain managing things. This seeing of no thing is what the Tibetan teachers call “the supreme seeing.” 

But this emptiness, this “no-thingness,” is not empty of life. Rather, empty awareness is full with presence, alive with knowing. The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience...

We look back into the emptiness that is the creative source of all stories and emotions, into the formless fertile space that gives rise to all of existence. There, we “see the universe as it is.”...

With practice, recognizing our natural awareness takes less and less of an effort or sense of doing. Rather than climbing up a hill to get a view, we are learning the art of relaxing back and wakefully inhabiting the whole vista. We look back into awareness and then simply let go into what is seen. We become more at home in awareness than in any story of a self who is falling short or on our way somewhere else. We are at home because we have seen and experienced firsthand the vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being.

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance, pp.315-317

Vastness is an experience, if that is the right word, that most of us only encounter looking up at the night sky on a clear night, or perhaps gazing out across the ocean when the sea is glassy calm, and seems to extend beyond the rim of the world. But there is an interior vastness that opens directly on the ground of being itself, no-thing, the endless expanse before differentiation, before "thingness" ever was.

Silence itself leads us in the end to what merely is. Only in inward silence can we see out across the shore of our own unquiet sea. If we will only sit still and be quiet, the peaks and troughs of our fears and our longings will settle out; and then, perhaps, the way will open across the water. But we must wait, we must be still and want nothing. Only when we are at an end of ourselves can we receive the grace that comes in silence, in the stillness that lies behind our breath, behind the little sounds from beyond the window, behind our having been born. For it is grace. All we can achieve is the letting go, nothing more. The best we can  do is to get out of our own way, for the fundamental ground is always there, patient, immeasurable, without beginning. We have only to trust, to let go without assurance, drop ourselves, into the empty stillness that is always waiting for us, always there.

The fundamental unknowability of God

In the Wikipedia entry on Panentheism, we read:

Baruch Spinoza... claimed that "Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived. "Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner." Though Spinoza has been called the "prophet" and "prince" of pantheism, in a letter to Henry Oldenburg Spinoza states that: "as to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature (taken as a kind of mass or corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken". For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world.

According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote "Deus sive Natura" (God or Nature) Spinoza did not mean to say that God and Nature are interchangeable terms, but rather that God's transcendence was attested by God's infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God's immanence. Furthermore, Martial Guéroult suggested the term panentheism, rather than pantheism to describe Spinoza's view of the relation between God and the world. The world is not God, but it is, in a strong sense, "in" God.

It seems to me that in this sense Spinoza's God is almost the Western philosophical equivalent of the ancient Chinese philosophical concept of the Tao. The Tao is not itself "the ten thousand things" (i.e. material existence) but "The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of Heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things." (Laozi) To sit quietly and recall that the coming to be of things in time is no more than the result of things that have been, and that things themselves rest in the open ground as wavelets rest in the flowing stream, is to see that the stream itself - the Tao, God, Being - is prior to all that is. "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17 NIV).

As Spinoza himself pointed out, there are three kinds of knowledge:

In Ethics (Part II, Proposition 40, Scholium 2), Spinoza outlines three kinds of knowledge:

1. Opinion or Imagination (opinio): Based on sensory experience and hearsay—fragmentary and often confused.

2. Reason (ratio): Deductive, conceptual understanding of things through their common properties—clearer, but still mediated.

3. Intuitive Knowledge (scientia intuitiva): A direct, immediate grasp of things through their essence in God—non-discursive, holistic, and transformative.

Spinoza writes that intuitive knowledge “proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.” It’s not inference—it’s seeing. 

(Microsoft Copilot, in response to user query, 31 October 2025)

The second kind of knowledge, rational thought, cannot make the connection with the Ground. But to sit still with the knowledge, to sit stil in the impossibility of speech, like a Zen monk with a koan, is to allow "the fundamental unknowability of God" (Wikipedia) to open into the Ground all by itself. When we come to an end of what we can say - what we can think - the only path open is the way of emptiness, into the infinite pleroma of what actually is.

Further reflections of a marsh-wiggle

Five years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a post on an earlier blog which I feel may bear re-posting here. What is interesting is how, despite the potentially misleading quote from CS Lewis, it contains the seeds of my present path and its praxis, and of my still gradually crystallising realisations regarding solitude. Here it is:

I have struggled for much of my life with what might be described as my calling, my primary vocation, or whatever term might better be used to describe what I am supposed to do with my “one wild and precious life”, to plunder Mary Oliver again.

I have known since childhood the power of solitude, of lonely places; and I have always been most at home alone in the grey wind, without a destination or timetable, or sitting by myself in a sunlit garden, watching the tiny velvety red mites threading their paths on a warm stone bench. I used to think it was my duty to enter that world on some kind of a quest, looking to see what I might find, what treasure I might bring back to the known world.

Eve Baker writes, in Paths in Solitude:

The solitary is the bearer of the future, of that which is not yet born, of the mystery which lies beyond the circle of lamplight or the edge of the known world. There are some who make raids into this unknown world of mystery and who come back bearing artefacts. These are the creative artists, the poets who offer us their vision of the mystery…

But a raider is not at home: his raids are fitful incursions into a land not his own, and what he sees there he sees as raw material, uncut stones he may haul back into the world of action and reward, there to be cut into poems, music. The real treasures of the hidden world are scarcely visible to a raider, nor, like Eurydice, will they survive the journey back to the known world.

Eve Baker goes on:

But there are also those who make solitude their home, who travel further into the inner desert, from which they bring back few artefacts. These are the contemplatives, those who are drawn into the heart of the mystery. Contemplatives have no function and no ministry. They are in [that] world as a fish is in the sea, to use Catherine of Siena’s phrase, as part of the mystery. That they are necessary is proved by the fact that they exist in all religious traditions. Contemplatives are not as a rule called to activity, they are useless people and therefore little understood in a world that measures everything by utility and cash value. Unlike the poet they do not return bearing artefacts, but remain in the desert, pointing to the mystery, drawing others in.

Marsh-wiggles live, in CS Lewis’ Narnia, out in the salt marshes beyond the hills and the forest, and farther still from the cities bright with trade and pageantry. Their simple homes are set well apart from one another, out on the “great flat plain” of the marshlands. Puddleglum, the marsh-wiggle we meet in The Silver Chair, comes up with, when his back is against the wall, one of the most remarkable statements of faith in Lewis’ fiction:

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all of those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones… We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia… and that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull as you say.”

Perhaps contemplatives are only kidding themselves. Perhaps they are, to take Baker’s semi-irony literally, quite useless people. But our uselessness may yet be a good deal more useful in the dark and doubt of humanity’s pain than all the utilities of the marketable world.

It seems that life as a marsh-wiggle may be closer to my own calling than I would have guessed. To move deeper into the saltmarsh of the spirit, closer to the edge of the last sea, may mean the giving up, not of love and companionship perhaps, but of many of the comfortable certainties, and the familiar tools of the raider’s life. A wiggle’s wigwam is good enough, maybe.

[First published 7/8/2021]

Secular or supernatural

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, the word “spirituality” can seem a slippery one. For some, spirituality necessarily implies the supernatural, and our imagined relations with that realm, for good or ill. For others (myself included) it “centers on the ‘deepest values and meanings by which people live'”. (Wikipedia: Spirituality)

Secular spirituality is the adherence to a spiritual philosophy without adherence to a religion. Secular spirituality emphasizes the inner peace of the individual, rather than a relationship with the divine. Secular spirituality is made up of the search for meaning outside of a religious institution; it considers one’s relationship with the self, others, nature, and whatever else one considers to be the ultimate. Often, the goal of secular spirituality is living happily and/or helping others.

According to the American philosopher Robert C. Solomon, “spirituality is coextensive with religion and it is not incompatible with or opposed to science or the scientific outlook. Naturalized spirituality is spirituality without any need for the ‘other‐worldly’. Spirituality is one of the goals, perhaps the ultimate goal, of philosophy.” [Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life]

(Wikipedia: Secular Spirituality)

So what is the supernatural, and what is wrong with seeking to establish – or recognise – relations with it? The supernatural is generally taken to imply a realm or system transcending material nature, the locale of some kind or kinds of divine, magical, or ghostly entities; revealing, or thought to reveal, some power beyond scientific or natural comprehension. There is, it seems to me, little or no evidence for such a sphere. (Susan Blackmore discusses this at length in Seeing Myself : What Out-of-body Experiences Tell Us About Life, Death and the Mind, chapters 2 and 15 especially.) But spirituality is another matter. The search for meaning, and, in contemplative practice, the direct experience of that meaning, is perhaps the most important thing I have encountered. For the umpteenth time here, I think I need to quote Sam Harris’ brilliant summary:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

The eagle-eyed among my readers will have already spotted the slightly edited strapline to this blog’s title: “Secular contemplative spirituality…” It just seemed time to make that clear.

[First published 1/9/2025]

Contemplative reading

I was at a loss to think how to title this blog post. If you Google “spiritual reading” you will immediately be flooded with psychic suggestions, tarot divinations, horoscopes and astrology, interspersed with the occasional Catholic site recommending “reading [the] lives of saints, writings of Doctors and the Fathers of the Church, theological works written by holy people, and doctrinal writings of Church authorities.” None of these are what I was looking for, you may be pleased to know.

If you are a member of a monastic community, Buddhist, Christian or whatever, you will probably find that daily study of some kind is part of the discipline of life, or, if you are a Benedictine, that in accordance with Rule 38, “Reading will always accompany the meals of the monks.” But leading a secular contemplative life comes with no such in-built reminders that practice shouldn’t take place in an intellectual vacuum.

I have found that regular reading from what is actually a fairly small list of contemplative writers has become an indispensable part of my own practice. Readers of this blog will likely know who they are already, but people like Toni Bernhard, Tara Brach, Pema Chödrön, Daishin Morgan, Larry Rosenberg, Alan Watts have become my companions on the way, and I keep returning to their books over and over again.

I’ve not yet made a time and a place in my day for this kind of regular reading, but it occurs to me that perhaps I should. It is too easy to get sidetracked into reading only more speculative or philosophical writings, and think that’s the same thing. It isn’t; and that’s just the point. Something in the heart – mine, anyway – gets dried out and brittle without the companionship of those who are also following the contemplative path.

A (very) short booklist:

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha

Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

[First published 28/9/2024]

What's in a name?

Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points. Does it point beyond itself to that transcendental reality, or does it lend itself too easily to becoming no more than an idea in your head that you believe in, a mental idol?

The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God. Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim exclusive possession of Being. It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am that. So it is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

We humans still have much of our tribal ancestry hanging around: we tend to feel lost and unsafe unless we can identify as part of something larger than ourselves. When I was a teenager it might be whether you were a mod or a rocker; some identify strongly with others of their own race; very often it is a religious identification, sometimes zoomed-in to which actual congregation or meeting one belongs to, or which particular doctrinal flavour one adheres to.

These affiliations are tremendously sticky, in terms of social psychology, which perhaps explains in part why people find it so difficult to distance themselves from cults, however pernicious. They don’t only consist in feeling warm fuzzies for those just like us; they all too often involve feeling anything but warm fuzziness for those who are different – “othering” them. They provide us with a secure identity, with protection against those suspicious others, with a home and a community.

All such communities have badges. They may be visual (as with the mods and rockers) or audible (shibboleths); they may be emotional or conceptual, but they work. (Even those whose practice is dedicated to the realisation of the illusory nature of the self can unthinkingly fall into tribal identification – the vipassana lot, or the Pure Land ones, Sōtō Zen or Rinzai.) Tragically, these identifications can even be projected onto a deity or a metaphysical conceit, and then we really are in trouble: “My God is the only true God; yours is a heretical invention!”

Words are sometimes at the very heart of these identifications, and we don’t realise it. I recall a conversation over lunch with a friend some months ago, where I was trying to explain why I wasn’t comfortable any longer using the word “God”. I said that for me the word gave entirely the wrong impression if used of the metaphysical ground. “God” implied for me a being, so that one could say, “Look – there’s God, over there at the table by the door!” But she is a Catholic; of course she uses “God” to define a finite entity, even if the Catechism of the Catholic Church says he is a mystery (CCC 230).

Eckhart Tolle uses the word Being to speak of the metaphysical ground, just as Meister Eckhart used Istigkeit, or Paul Tillich “Ground of Being”. Some avoid using any term to refer to the ground: things exist, they say, what more do we need? But at the end of it all, is isness. I have to call it something, even if it is ineffable.

Am I trying to avoid identification altogether? Why? I admit that since childhood I’ve never been all that comfortable with being a part of something, especially a something, like a religion or a political party, that requires right attitudes, right speaking, right thinking as well as right (moral) action. However close I feel to so much Buddhist teaching, and no matter how immense the gratitude and respect I feel for so many Buddhist teachers, I am not a Buddhist. The same applies to Taoism, contemplative Christianity, or any other community of practice. After all these years perhaps I am just happier out on the borderlines, in the saltmarshes of the spirit.

[First published 31/8/2024]

NB!

It may seem obvious, but I find it’s sometimes too easy to forget that contemplative practice isn’t just what happens twice a day on the cushion (chair, bed, carpet…) but is threaded through the rest of life, including sleep. I have found that, as well as the inevitable – and usually benign – ways that perception and emotion evolve, insights sometimes appear at unexpected times – the edges of sleep, particularly – that are often hard, if not impossible, to recall. Unless one makes a note…

Over the years I have found that a notebook is almost as essential a tool as a place to sit. I do mean a notebook, not a journal; journalling is an honourable spiritual discipline in its own right, but it isn’t what I’m referring to here. What I’m getting at is something that is always close at hand, where I can jot down reflections and realisations – not during formal practice of course! – as they arise, before they’re lost in the vagaries of thought and memory.

What sort of a notebook you use may depend on what sort of person you are, and what you’re used to, what you’re most comfortable with. One thing I would say, though, is that it will probably work better the simpler it is. This is probably not the place for artisan paper and a vintage fountain pen, nor for a fully-fledged word processing application. What’s needed is something more like a reporter’s notebook and a cheap biro, or a really simple notes app like Google Keep or Samsung Notes.

Personally I have come to prefer using my phone for things like this – I’m at ease with technology, you can use it in the dark, it doesn’t leak on the bedclothes… I’ve become very comfortable with glide typing, and I can type silently this way very nearly as fast and as accurately as I can with a physical keyboard. (Contrary to the linked article, Gboard and Samsung Keyboard work pretty much as well as SwiftKey for glide typing, once enabled – take your pick!)

Some people, though, seem to find that technology disables – or distracts – rather than enables such an intimate thing as making notes as part of a contemplative life. For them whatever notebook they like (I do have a preference for some kind of lay-flat sort that you don’t have to hold open) and whatever pen is comfortable will work best.

The important thing is not how you make notes, but that you do it. It doesn’t matter whether you feel you are gathering ideas for some more formal writing – like a blog post, or a book – or merely to refer back to later: the important thing is that the actual process helps locate the insight in language, where it can seep out and bless the whole field of cognition. That’s why, perhaps, it has to be an easy process, that’s not going to draw attention to itself – something you’re really comfortable with, like a pair of old walking shoes…

[First published 25/9/2024]