Wakefulness and illumination

[W]akefulness as it’s expressed in monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam takes people beyond those religions. When people wake up, they lose the sense of being identified with — and the need to belong to — a particular religious tradition. They begin to feel an all-embracing empathy and compassion that takes them beyond the divisions of religious or ethnic groups. As a result, such awakened individuals, even when they are affiliated with one particular religion, are usually ecumenical and open to other faiths. They see all religious and spiritual traditions simply as different paths to the same destination, or different views of the same landscape. Unlike conventionally religious people, they don’t see their tradition’s beliefs as “the truth” and try to defend them against opposing views.

Partly because of this, awakened individuals throughout history have had an uneasy relationship with the religious traditions they were affiliated with. Conventional religious leaders struggled to make sense of mystics’ awakened interpretations of religious teachings and often viewed them as blasphemous. Whereas conventionally religious people conceive of God as a personal being who oversees the world from another dimension of reality, religious mystics see God as an immensely powerful and radiant energy that pervades the whole world. And most radically, religious mystics don’t see this God as separate from themselves. God is the essence of their own being so that, in a sense, they are also God…

When a person becomes awakened, their experience effects the whole of humanity, in the same way that when a light is turned on it illuminates the space all around it.

Steve Taylor, The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening, pp.42-43, 45

For so much of my life I have struggled to make sense of my own instinct for the contemplative life; to accept that my own cumulative experiences of illumination might in fact amount to a kind of awakening; and crucially, that that wakefulness might have significance beyond my own narrow self and its concerns. Perhaps this, more than anything, has been the reason I expended so much effort trying to find a home for myself within organised religion, and why the attempt always proved fruitless in the end, either through my own self-sabotage or through the misunderstandings of others.

I say this, I think, not so much to justify my own somewhat chequered history as to, hopefully, provide a crumb of reassurance to anyone reading this who might find themselves in similar straits.

A couple of chapters later (ibid., p.74) Steve Taylor writes:

When wakefulness occurs in the context of spiritual or religious traditions, a person has a readily available framework (together with the guidance of others who have experienced wakefulness) to help them understand their state. Without such support, naturally wakeful people may experience some confusion and doubt. They may feel threatened by their spiritual impulses and try to repress them. It may take them several years to understand and accept their innate wakefulness fully.

Naturally awakened people who live in cultures that don’t support a spiritual understanding of the world are in particular danger of this difficulty. The values of their culture may clash with their awakened impulses. We all absorb cultural influences as we grow up, and it may take several years for naturally wakeful people to work off their cultural conditioning so that they can begin to live authentically. They may feel a powerful impulse to live a different kind of life — to turn away from materialism and hedonism, to simplify their lives and spend more time in solitude, for example — but it may be a number of years before they feel confident and autonomous enough to follow the impulse. Until then, they may feel an intense sense of frustration because their innate wakefulness can’t express itself.

For me at least, the process seems to have taken most of a lifetime; and yet, hesitant at it has been, its progress has been curiously inexorable. Awakening does have its own momentum; even my own persistently bombu foolishness has not proved equal to the task of impeding it.

It may be that not only has this impulse towards awakening been present in the lives of individual women and men throughout history, but that there is an evolutionary impulse in humanity itself. In which case, the crazy reverses seen so often in the ongoing processes of civilisation may somehow parallel the ones seen in the lives of so many of us contemplatives. Humanity may yet get there; and yet there is no there to get, is there? There are no objects or objectives, no destination: there are only swirls within the eddies in the stream of coming-to-be. The light glints on the bright water, flickers and is gone - no, there it is again, and gone. The only constant is change; and yet there is no changing from, nor changing to. No thing; only change, becoming; every thing and every self is no more than an appearance, fleeting and lovely, nothing more.

Mysteries and metaphors

 It seems that everything we can say about the contemplative life is metaphor. Indeed, it might not be stretching it to suggest that what we can say about pretty much anything is actually metaphor. However attached we are to the idea of plain speaking, even the most direct words applied to the most straightforward objects or circumstances are picture language, mere scratchings after what is in itself ineffable.

Elaine Aron:

Why the word path? Life path, spiritual path—we use path so much in this way that it has almost ceased to be a metaphor. Life, like a path, has ups and downs, detours, roadblocks, and so forth. The metaphor works for me…

But paths are more than maps of passive journeys. They involve choices, or at least noticeable changes in direction…

The beginning of a life often looks more like a moving sidewalk. You were born. No choice there. And you started to move along, to grow from a child’s body into an adult’s. Biology sees to that. Your society, through your family, saw that you received an education (you are reading this), so that you would be useful in some way, able to support yourself and contribute to the larger good. Depending how far along you are, biology and culture has supported your interest in finding a mate and having children, working at a job, and then retiring and maybe helping raise grandchildren. That’s the moving sidewalk, and of course we all add our unique touches to the trip, but maybe you made some larger choices… Maybe you decided not to have children or never to retire. Maybe you took up sailing and sailed around the world, or you raised parakeets and even made a living at it.

Time is what a path and a moving sidewalk have in common. Time has been taking you forward toward the end point.

(Spirituality through a Highly Sensitive Lens, pp.51-52)

To speak of a spiritual path has become as much a cliché as a metaphor, smelling of patchouli oil and self improvement. And yet it is hard to find another expression for whatever it is. But perhaps there is more to the threadbare phrase that even Aron suggests here. Her “moving pavement” reminds me of Martin Heidegger’s Geworfenheit – “thrownness” – the unique set of limitations of birth and time and society which each of us has inherited. Our choices are real, perhaps, but they are far more constrained than most of us would admit. Our spiritual path is what it is because of who we are; all the yearning we can yearn will not allow us to walk another’s.

It may be that our truest compass is merely to acknowledge this fact. “Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.'” (Isaiah 30:21 NIV) And the voice is that of our own authentic self, “who we are” at our barest essence: who we are in silence, in the stillness of our practice. The way is not another’s map, and the directions are not another’s doctrines. All we can do is to step out onto the mountain in the night wind, and listen.

The consolation of no exit

We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating. From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal—this human predicament is a predicament that does not perfect itself.

But there is the consolation of no exit, the consolation that this is what you’re stuck with. Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament and the only consolation is embracing it. It is our situation, and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.

Leonard Cohen, from a 1994 Shambhala Sun interview, with thanks to Joan Tollifson

To understand, with Cohen, that freedom lies in the embracing of necessity, is to realise that peace exists only in the radical acceptance of what actually is. We are all in the same mortal boat: no one here gets out alive; and compassion arises simply from this realisation.

For myself, I have come to see that understanding the inevitability of causality is the foundation not only of peace but of forgiveness. “The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause” (Spinoza, Ethics, 1a4) – and so this present moment that seems to be myself could not have been otherwise.

To sit still, and watch, is the beginning and end of practice. All we have come to be is here now, in this arrangement of limbs, this pattern of breathing, these half-heard sounds from beyond the closed window. The small birds flit between branches; the Weymouth bus is pulling away from the stop into the light evening traffic, and there is no wind. None of this could have been otherwise, and the blessed silence slips between every instant, complete and endless.