This rib cage of failure

It is simple enough to lose sight of the liberating nature of our failings. They often seem to lead us into some parched, lonely place—a place of dry bones. The problem is not our inadequacies, much less the freight of the failures we carry, but the loss of perspective on what we resent most in ourselves. Light forever shines from within the rib cage of failure. But reactive mind is too cluttered to realize that this is the nature of divine love: flowing waters of mercy for all who are parched—each of us… Nor is reactive mind capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, pp.95-6

Just as death is the inescapable precondition for new life, so failure and error are the necessary spring of change and growth in the spiritual life. Only when we will let ourselves know that only in the wreckage of our plans and conclusions, only in the defeat of our new beginnings and our fresh initiatives, can we be broken open to the current of grace that will wash us out into the open sea of becoming.

Behind all these metaphors there is a very simple fact, it seems to me: that only when we cease completely from self-justification, when we are prepared without reservation to let go of whatever role we imagined for ourselves – spiritual humanist, say, or secular Buddhist – can we discover what the flow of change – the Way, the leading of the Spirit, call it whatever feels right – is tending towards.

I think this applies both in our own inner lives and in the broader life of humankind. We can see it in the unceasing pattern of evolution (species don’t remain static, however attached we may have become to one or another expression of their diversity) and in the breakdown and reformation of institutions. Sarah Bessey (Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith) sees it in the breakdown of the established churches, and in the tentative shoots of a radical, open faith appearing through the rubble, like fireweed springing up through the rubble of bombed buildings following WW2. (Yes, I am old enough to remember seeing it for myself from the top decks of London buses, riding with my mother looking over the makeshift hoardings that attempted to conceal the broken gaps in the terraces and the rows of shops beginning to struggle back to some sort of normality after the end of hostilities!)

“Everything passes/everything changes/just do what you think you should do,” sang Bob Dylan (‘To Ramona‘). But what Martin Laird calls “reactive mind” is too wrapped up in what it thinks it thinks to know; it is only when we keep still enough in our own awareness that we are “capable of receiving this simple and simplifying fact: this rib cage of failure is the sanctuary of divine breath breathing us.”

Hesychia

The greek word hesychia (ἡσυχία) is commonly translated as quiet or stillness. In Orthodox teaching it is often associated with the idea of nepsis (νῆψις), watchfulness. Grace settles over stillness, as the heart withdraws from its clinging and rejecting and its continual self-comparison. If we can keep still enough, and merely watch, the sediment of self-concern will precipitate out.

Martin Laird writes (An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation, p.74):

We can just begin to see how contemplative practice gently loosens the knot of ego and calms the spasms of reactive mind. When we return our attention to our practice as soon as we are aware that our attention has been stolen, ego is less and less the focus of our attention. The television screen in our heads will continue its constant stream of noise and images. The more we watch and listen to it the duller we feel, a dullness we take to be normal. We grow bored with constantly flipping through channels in search of something that might, one of these rounds, land on something that gives us a sense of being alive instead of being deadened by the din of our minds. The practical answer is simple: let the television play. Simply don’t watch it. Gradually (neither in a day nor in a short while) the light of awareness begins to shine through this mental clutter and we begin to realize that the derived identity provided by ego no longer has the ring of truth. “We need to guard,” [Christian] Bobin says, “not only against the world, but against our preoccupation with ourselves, another door by which the world might creep back into us like a prowler into a sleeping house.”

Practice is like this. Regardless of why we thought we began in the first place, only in quiet persistence, rather than in mental heroics and spiritual metrology, can the heart be still enough for grace to break through like sunlight through the overcast.

Behind the hours of practice there is a quiet, luminous stillness; it is always there, has always been there, only we had forgotten it among the “noise and images”. Practice, it seems to me, is perhaps no more than a means – whichever means we have found fits us best – of keeping quiet; for it is only in quiet that we are able to open to the grace of that luminous stillness. This conscious state of illumination (often referred to by Catholic writers as “contemplation” or “infused contemplation” – as opposed to “contemplative practice”) is a gift. It cannot be achieved. It seems to me that intent needs simply to disappear in the practice of contemplation. How this is to be achieved is indeed a paradox: the falling away of purposive action isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposive action. But nevertheless the absence of intent, replaced with simple dwelling in stillness, in the presence of what is, now, is the only way I know to becoming vulnerable enough to be available to illumination – to the light of the open ground itself.

The annihilation of difference

It begins to appear
this is not what prayer is about.
It is the annihilation of difference,
the consciousness of myself in you, of you in me. . .
Circular as our way
is, it leads not back to that snake-haunted
garden, but onward to the tall city
of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.

RS Thomas, from ‘Emerging’, Collected Poems 1945-1990

For most of my life – in fact since about the age of five – my life seems to have been centred on silence, stillness, the presence of something overwhelming but infinitely desirable, unnamable but closer somehow than my own breathing. Of course I didn’t even try, as a young child, to name it – or even really to try and think about it at all. It merely was.

Ever since then, I have been trying to find words. Words to tell others, certainly, but more than that, words to tell myself where I have been. (Words for this kind of thing are never in the present tense – they must refer to something remembered, to some trace in the mind left by the God behind whom the door has already closed.) And words, it seems, bring community. That is perhaps what they are for, after all. But communities own their words, own their people; or so they feel.

I have found myself, of course, borrowing words wholesale from others who have come this way before. But they are others’ words, however sublime they may be, however hallowed by time and tradition. In these late years all I can do is try to speak of what still leaps up in my heart at echoes, snatches of music, phrases from the Psalms, sunlight through high windows. I know RS Thomas’ hard-found annihilation of difference – it is what has haunted me all these years. It lies beneath my sitting every night and morning. It will be waiting for me, softly, after my last breath. I have no other name for it, since it is no thing. Dear, endless, it merely is.

A wider mercy

Then, for no good reason, you remember.

Oh. Right. This is experience. This is radiant presence. This whole thing is what I am.

And immediately, even if nothing changes on the surface, the weight drains out of the moment. The seriousness falls away. The same pain, the same confusion, now sit inside a wider mercy.

The cosmology could not be simpler.

There is only this field of experience. It is what you are. Everything that seems to be happening is that field showing itself to itself, in this impossible, intimate way.

The story will go on. The interpretation will never stop. The madness will continue, in you and in the world. On that level, nothing is ever finally resolved.

At the same time, the one fact is always quietly in place, before any of it, as all of it…

Rob Barker, from This Radiant Space


Union with God is not something we can or need to acquire. By way of the contemplative skills of engaged receptivity and release, we realize this Union ever more deeply and clearly throughout the course of the days given us. God is too simple to be absent. It is we who, with complicated and cluttered minds, remain unaware that this foundational Light is flowering perpetually in the fertile and unfathomable right now. As St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions: You are “more intimate to me than my inmost self.” Paraphrasing this very line, Meister Eckhart preaches: “The soul takes her being immediately from God: therefore God is nearer to the soul than she is to herself, and therefore God is in the ground of the soul with all His Godhead.” St. Augustine likewise knows this grounding light: “This light itself is one, and all those who see it and love it are one.”

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light, p.24

We are not separated; there is nothing we can do, or need to, to achieve union, nonduality, oneness. We just need to step out of the light – which is why we practice, of course. If we don’t do something regularly, we forget. We forget anyway; but at least our practice gives us something to remind us, a place to look back at when we feel entirely lost.

And feeling lost reminds me of the wider mercy of which Rob Barker writes. The light, the radiant presence, the endless ground is not neutral. It is not abstract. Now, I am not saying – and nor is Rob Barker or Martin Laird – that it is a person. You can’t point to it, and say, “There it is, over there!” If you could, it would not be one. It is no thing, but it is not an abstraction. It is real, far more real than we are, more real even than the solid earth beneath us. We, and all the “ten thousand things”, are only fleeting eddies in its unceasing stream, of which we are already part. The wider mercy is all that is, and it is merciful. In the end, It is our only home.

Trust what opens

First and foremost, I would say follow your own light—trust your own sense of what opens things up and what just amplifies the confusion. Everyone is unique, each moment is unique, and no one else knows what you need. In my experience, life always gives us exactly what we need—including the difficulties and apparent setbacks. Everything that shows up is part of your unique path. You can’t get it wrong.

What I would suggest, whenever it invites you, is to simply give open, innocent attention to the bare actuality of present experiencing – hearing sounds, feeling sensations, seeing shapes and colors – just this bare actuality that is here before, during and after the thought commentary about it.

Joan Tollifson

The further I go on this path, the clearer it seems to me that there is no one way. As Tollifson says here, “Everyone is unique, each moment is unique, and no one else knows what you need.”

So often I have fallen into the trap of thinking that I needed to sign up, take vows, commit to one way or path or tradition – or another! – when I have had my own way waiting beneath my ribs all along. Besides, over the years we each change:

For a long time, we may be caught up in trying to figure out which one is right, which one is the best, which one is the highest truth, the most effective, the most advanced, and so on. But eventually we realize these are false questions. These seemingly different maps all have something valuable to offer, and none of them can fully capture every dimension and possibility of this living reality.

No map is itself the territory that it helps us to navigate. And so, we learn to take from each what resonates now, and not to mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. We even learn that the moon and the pointing finger are not two, that mapping is an activity of the territory, that nothing is outside of this seamless no-thing-ness. We find many apparent paradoxes, and we discover that reality is not one, not two. We lean this way and then that way. Thankfully, different imaginary rugs we try to stand on get pulled out from under us. Again and again we wake up. Just this!

What is it? We can’t say. And yet, apparently we have to say something, just as we apparently have to act in one way or another. And so, these words and all the many spiritual practices and pointers on offer have all poured out choicelessly from we know not where into the great listening presence that we all are.

Joan Tollifson, from another essay

I know that writing like this, Joan’s or mine, will horrify some good and honest people who do believe that there is one right way, and that holding faithfully to the way we are “called to walk” is the only way. To them I’d have to say that if that is good for you, fine, and so much the simpler in a sense; but please don’t seek to apply your own structures and boundaries to us Einzelgänger und Einzelgängerin who can no longer live metaphorically indoors.

Ultimately, the whole contemplative life is so exceedingly simple that we often cannot credit it with being that easy. We feel it must be more complicated, more effortful than that: if only there were more blood, sweat and tears we might believe it, but simply to wander, “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown”, is just too much like the end of term for us to trust.

If we do stay still, still enough to listen to the woodlice walking beneath the bark, to see the little velvety red mites scampering on the stonework in the sun, to hear the meltwater trickling beneath still frozen snow, then we will often find that the ground opens of itself, devoid of words or traditions, no thing at all but bright and placeless. And then there will no longer be any need to worry about paths, really.

The ethics of listening

Things come to be, and what they are is nothing but the way that they move; there is nothing that is that is not subject to change and dissolution. To “rage against the dying of the light” (Dylan Thomas) is to fail to see that the only way to live is to stay out of the way of what is coming to be, and let it become what it is to be.

If we listen to the stream, rather than trying to dam its flow, we find that we ourselves are no more than fleeting eddies on the bright water, and what is true is what the moment calls out. Then ethics is for us no longer a matter of what is written, but what is heard.

Light is only visible in the shadows; life needs death as up needs down. To see this for itself – see it, rather than working it out – dissolves our bitter grasp on outcomes, and leaves us free to find out the grain in things. To surrender to change – yes, and to decay – is to become free to live inside the pattern of what is necessary, rather than scratching at the surface of facticity.

Strangely, this is in no sense defeatism. Our freedom to act in accordance with what is might just as well involve us as the means of change ourselves: the tyrant’s brittle effort to resist the necessity of change is worn away to sand in the stream, carried down by the flow of what is true, by the slow processes of care and kindness.

To sit still, listening, still enough that the fragility and contingency of all that appears to be becomes clear, like the settling out of sediment in a pond that has been disturbed but is now at rest, is to find our own current in the stream of what is coming to be. If we do, then the smallest moment opens on to the limitless field that is the ground itself. There is nothing to wait for: what is is this.

Geworfenheit

We didn’t choose to be born, and there is nothing about our coming to be here that was voluntary. We did not choose our biological sex, nor our blood group, nor the colour of our skin, or hair, or eyes; we didn’t choose our nationality, nor the century into which we were born, nor the social class we were born into. Crucially, we didn’t choose our parents: we didn’t choose our genetic makeup, nor the parenting skills our parents did or did not possess; come to that, we didn’t choose whether we were the child of a stable couple, or a single parent, nor whether we had a step-parent or even two. We were just thrown into life, to make what we could of where we landed.

Martin Heidegger called this “Geworfenheit“, thrownness. Life was already underway when we were born: we found ourselves in an ongoing story, and we had to find our own part to play as we went along. This isn’t so much determinism as the felt inevitability of being. Our Geworfenheit is not so much our fate as the condition of our living at all; you cannot choose where your path begins – you can only respond to it.

We do not stand outside reality, we arise within it; and our freedom is not exemption from the necessity of our being in the world, but intimacy with it. Perhaps something like this is what Jesus meant when he said, as it is reported, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8 ESV) If we will only stop trying to solve life, stop trying to control beings – ourselves or others – the world will disclose itself to us, as it is.

Gelassenheit: releasement, openness, stillness; if we will only be still, the way opens, of itself. This is all our practice, really – just opening our hands to what actually is.

Harmony and freedom

To live in harmony with what actually is seems to me perfect freedom. All the we are, all that we can do, can ultimately be traced to antecedent causes; human bondage seems to consist in the attempt to fight that, or to ascribe it to some other cause. But what comes to be doesn’t seem to be, looked at sub specie aeternitatis, so much an iron necessitarianism as a supple flow – and to live in accord with it an easy, open response to its really becoming.

Freedom seems just to be acting in the openness of things’ true relations; just as in music the freedom to improvise truly means to play in accord with what the music itself wants to do, and so in the boundless liberty that the ancient rules of harmony and scales, rhythm and chords actually allow us.

To act in true freedom feels quite close to non-action, really, though it is not doing nothing. There is a seamless flow in what comes to be that, taken as it comes to be, is without effort or anxiety. The merest space of time is open space; and in that instant, everything is possible, yet only what actually is.

Seeing in the dark

Sitting this evening by the window, with the small sparkling lights of traffic flickering down the garden from the road beyond, there seemed to be no border, no place in myself or in the luminous dark beyond the glass where I could find an end or a beginning. Great upwellings of thought came and dispersed, leaving no memory I could discern in that moment. Somehow it was as though a crystalline space surrounded me; and yet I was that edgeless expanse just as much as I was the almost motionless body whose weight now rested in an immeasurable skein of gravity conditioned by who knew what accretions of mass and causes, out beyond discerning.

“The spiritual warrior fights darkness not other humans”, said Tara Brach in a recent podcast; and yet it is not a fight as anyone would think of combat. It is merely a settled intent to understand, to love, what is – David Jones‘ “…for only what is actually loved and known can be seen sub specie aeternitatis“. Jones is referring, I assume, to Spinoza’s use of the phrase: to see something sub specie aeternitatis being to understand it as a part of the infinite and eternal substance – God or Nature (Deus sive Natura) – beyond the constraints of time and place. (Ethics 5, p23s)

To sit in silence, and to love what actually is – this is possibly the most revolutionary act we are capable of. And yet even to say that is a thought; but what it represents is not. It is no thing; and to see it is to be no more than the night air, and the evening star over the leafless hazels. Only be still.

Merely to bear witness

When we discuss, as I did the other day, the question of free will and determinism, it is all too easy to get caught up in intellectual debate, but this was not my intention. I wrote then, “Our plans and intentions, from the grand to the trivial, are no more than thoughts rising to the surface of the mind’s pond – no more and no less than any other thoughts that may be observed in the stillness of our practice. Our actions, no less than our thoughts, are the result of patterns of cause and effect leading back in an ultimately uncountable regression to the beginnings of time.” To see this directly for oneself, rather than think about it, is the beginning of our actual awakening.

But the state of accepting realisation that Spinoza refers to in his Ethics as “blessedness” is not arrived at by debate or dialectic, despite Spinoza’s own sometimes misleading phrase “the intellectual love of God”. It is simply the immediate embrace of this “radical acceptance”, in Tara Brach’s phrase, of what actually is.

In her book, Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach writes:

The way out of our cage [of our own beliefs and fears] begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is that we are aware of what is happening within our body and mind in any given moment, without trying to control or judge or pull away. I do not mean that we are putting up with harmful behavior—our own or another’s. This is an inner process of accepting our actual, present-moment experience. It means feeling sorrow and pain without resisting. It means feeling desire or dislike for someone or something without judging ourselves for the feeling or being driven to act on it…

[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” [Dzogchen].

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. In this moment that you are reading, sounds are heard, vibration is felt, form and color are seen. This knowing happens instantaneously, spontaneously. Like a sunlit sky, awareness is radiant in cognizance and boundless enough to contain all life…

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.

To stay still, to avoid nothing – merely to bear witness – is, from the point of view of thought and feeling, absurd. And yet if we remain still enough to see that all that appears – sense objects, thoughts, feelings, memories – are the object of experience: then that which experiences the mind itself is simply awareness, pure, unbroken, underlying all that is thought and felt, all that suffers. It is the ground itself – unchanged, unchanging, unnamed – from which all change proceeds.

Biological fate

In Ch.1 of her 2019 book The Science of Fate, (annoyingly, the Kindle edition is not paginated) Hannah Critchlow writes:

The science that suggests we are all, to a large extent, at the mercy of our neurobiology, driven in the direction of certain decisions and behaviours, susceptible to certain conditions, is very compelling. On one level every one of us, however uniquely complex and valuable, is also simply a human animal whose principal… is to interact with others to exchange information that will contribute to the collective consciousness and, if we’re lucky, pass on our genetic material. Deep drives are at work to further those basic goals and they are largely beyond our control.

Even what we think of as the more individuated aspects of our behaviours, the ones that we feel instinctively must be the product of nurture more than nature and more under our own conscious control, are formed at a deep level by innate factors we were born with and that were reinforced in our earliest years. Our personality, our beliefs about ourselves and the way the world works, how we respond in a crisis, our attitude to love, risk, parenting and the afterlife: any of the highly abstract opinions and character traits you care to mention are deeply shaped by how our brain processes the information it receives from the world. When we start to probe the idea of being a free agent in control of our life in the light of what neuroscience is now showing us, it can feel as if the space available for free will is shrinking fast and we’re stuck in a loop that refers us back endlessly to a prior stage of preordained experience.

Ideas such as this have the power to evoke sometimes quite spectacular emotional reactions in those who hear them for the first time, or are reminded of past unhappy encounters with the likes of Spinoza, who have called into question our often unthinking assumptions about free will. There is a deeply visceral dislike, in many people, of the idea that our personal sovereignty might be in any way impugned. We long to be able to say, with all the conviction of William Ernest Henley, “I am the master of my fate,/I am the captain of my soul.”!

Critchlow herself, a page or two later, points out:

During my lifetime there will be significant discoveries, applications and ramifications. It’s possible that, as we discover more about the neurobiology of belief formation and prejudice, we might be able to boost our openness to new ideas, say, with massive consequences for reducing conflict at every level.

Not that it will be straightforward. Our predecessors were shaken to the core by the ideas of Newton, Darwin and Einstein. They had to re-evaluate humanity’s place in the universe. Perhaps neuroscience is now demanding of us that we embark on a similar journey of thought disruption. We as a society will certainly have to consider the implications and ethics of its insights.

But the matter of free will seems to me really to be a not matter so much of ethics, or even metaphysics, as it is a simple misunderstanding of the workings of our minds. Sam Harris (Free Will, 2012, p.49):

It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can’t make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions. However, I think that this mystery is itself a symptom of our confusion. It is not that free will is simply an illusion—our experience is not merely delivering a distorted view of reality. Rather, we are mistaken about our experience. Not only are we not as free as we think we are—we do not feel as free as we think we do. Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying close attention to what it is like to be us. The moment we pay attention, it is possible to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our experience is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.

Contemplative practice is, as Harris himself explains at length in Waking Up, by far the most practical way (at least for those of us who are not professional neuroscientists!) to understand the inescapability of this illusion. Our plans and intentions, from the grand to the trivial, are no more than thoughts rising to the surface of the mind’s pond – no more and no less than any other thoughts that may be observed in the stillness of our practice. Our actions, no less than our thoughts, are the result of patterns of cause and effect leading back in an ultimately uncountable regression to the beginnings of time. Benedictus Spinoza saw this:

Because God [Deus sive Natura] is infinite substance, everything follows from God’s essence with the same necessity that the properties of a triangle follow from its definition. In Spinoza’s words, “things could not have been produced by God in any other way, nor in any other order.”

True freedom, for Spinoza, is not the ability to choose otherwise, but the ability to act from the necessity of one’s own nature, in harmony with God/Nature. Thus, freedom is understanding necessity.

Microsoft Copilot, response to user query, 2 November 2025

This may sound harsh, but it is not. The “freedom [of] understanding necessity” is a state of such crystalline stillness and clarity that Spinoza himself referred to it as “blessedness”. In Zen terms, Satori might be the right word; for the Taoist, it is the joy of accordance with the Tao:

To live a Taoist life is to become fully aware of our body, mind, and world—and of awareness itself. Our presence shines more and more brightly. To live in alignment with the Tao is to relish the inner peace, joy, and contentment that arise…

(Elizabeth Reninger)