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.

Sein zum Tode (being-towards-death)

It is towards death that we are always living, from the instant we are born if not before. What we are is mortal; life itself exists only inasmuch as it will die. And this is not a tragedy.

We treat death like a defect, an unfortunate end to the story. It's an event that happens at some point and ends the party. We don't see it for what it is for Heidegger: the most fundamental structure of our being, defining every single moment...

If death is merely a future event, it has no power over our present actions. We can ignore it until it knocks at the door. This perspective makes us forget the preciousness of the moment and leads us to structure our lives as a succession of obligations and distractions...

Do not understand death as an end, but as the "possibility of the absolute impossibility of existence." It is not a distant threat, but the ever-present possibility that all other possibilities end. This realization is not frightening, but liberating. It lends infinite depth to every second. Every breath, every conversation, every project begun derives its value precisely from the fact that it is not a given. Failure is then not the end of the world, but part of a finite, precious process. Just as Heidegger's teacher Edmund Husserl bracketed the world in order to penetrate to the essence of things, so the awareness of death brackets the trivialities of everyday life in order to penetrate to the essence of life.

Valentin Graf, 'Heidegger Sein zum Tode einfach erklärt: Profis setzen den Tod als Strategie-Bef'

To "live towards death" like this is not morbid: as Valentin Graf points out, it is peace and freedom. All that we are tends towards this end; it is the one thing common to all humanity - indeed to all that lives. All that is will end. Only isness itself - Meister Eckhart's Istigkeit, Spinoza's Deus sive Natura - does not, since it is the open ground of being-itself, from which all that is derives. The river flows, and is in its flowing; the lovely eddies on the bright surface come and go; their transitoriness is their very nature.

The year I was due to go to school I contracted bacterial meningitis, and spent some time - over Christmas and New Year! - in a coma. When I had recovered enough to talk, my mother made no attempt to conceal from me how afraid she’d been of losing me. This struck me as odd, but somehow right. The time between falling ill, which I remembered quite well, and waking up one sunny morning in the little bedroom upstairs, surrounded by my favourite soft toys, was an utter blank. Where had I been? I had no sense of anything – not blackness, not dreams; nothing. An absence of me, entirely, and of all else besides.

The mental picture, the concept, of not being alive any longer I don’t suppose I like any better than anyone else; but the experience of being close to death seems to be quite different. There have been times since that long childhood illness when I have been plausibly close to death, and yet I have not found myself afraid: I have found myself surprised, and I have lived since then in that glad knowledge.

Death is an old friend. To dissolve in the end into simple light, the plain isness that underlies all things and yet is no thing: what is there to fear? Death follows us, yes, but he is our very own death; dear, familiar, kind, and faithful. 

Contemplation and language

As I have mentioned before on this blog, writing in secular terms about the contemplative life, even thinking about it (as opposed simply to living it), is all but impossible without engaging with the religious language in which it has been clothed for most of its recorded existence. It is hard to write about the interior life without a framework of what is, effectively, myth, no matter which religion’s terminology is used the describe, even to think, about it. After all, it is so much easier to use a ready-mixed religious language, in which various shades of meaning may be taken more or less for granted without having to struggle actually to describe them. But as AC Grayling wrote:

There are people of sincere piety for whom the religious life is a source of deep and powerful meaning. For them and for others, a spiritual response to the beauty of the world, the vastness of the universe, and the love that can bind one human heart to another, feels as natural and necessary as breathing. Some of the art and music that has been inspired by faith counts among the loveliest and most moving expressions of human creativity. It is indeed impossible to understand either history or art without an understanding of what people believed, feared and hoped through their religious conceptions of the world and human destiny. Religion is a pervasive fact of history, and has to be addressed as such…

To move from the Babel of religions and their claims, and from the too often appalling effects of religious belief and practice on humankind, to the life-enhancing insights of the humanist tradition which most of the world’s educated and creative minds have embraced, is like escaping from a furnace to cool waters and green groves…

[W]hat alternative can the non-religious offer to religion as the focus for expression of those spiritual yearnings, that nostalgia for the absolute, the profound bass-note of emotion that underlies the best and deepest parts of ourselves? Often this question is asked rhetorically, as if there is no answer to it, the assumption being that by default religion is the only thing that speaks to these aspects of human experience, even if religion is false and merely symbolic. The symbolism, some views have it, is enough to do the work.

The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, pp.1,7

Contemplation is not about escaping the world; it’s more about seeing the threads that connect it to all that is. It’s not a matter of reconciling the world to some imagined deity; it’s a matter of discovering that the world is not other than its metaphysical ground. Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” “Where I place my attention shapes what I become. To attend to the suffering of others, the beauty of the world, or the silence within is to participate in the creation of meaning—not because a god demands it, but because the world needs it.” (Mistral Le Chat, in response to user query)

To express the not-other-ness of each other, of “all that is made” (Julian of Norwich), is more often the work of poetry – see Mary Oliver, or JH Prynne – than of philosophy; and when philosophy does take up the challenge, the result is famously difficult – Martin Heidegger, AN Whitehead, even Benedictus Spinoza, for instance. A few, RS Thomas occurs to me, manage to write poetry that is as difficult to read as the metaphysicians. So who am I to complain that I don’t find this blog easy to write?

The only approach that seems to offer a glimmer of hope here is, perhaps oddly, unknowing.

Much has been made of the difference, indeed the opposition, of religion and science. But the more we hear of modern scientific research, especially in physics, the closer they seem to be. Contrary to popular belief, science is not about establishing indisputable facts, it is about positing and attempting to prove (or disprove) hypotheses, with the understanding that any discovery may be superseded in the future. Science is about a spirit of enquiry. The unknown is accepted, even welcomed as a challenge for future research. As biologist Stuart Firestein said, “What we don’t know is our job. It’s much more interesting to think about what we don’t know than what we do know.” That too is the mystic position.

But, whereas scientists may see this place as a challenge to learn more and to eradicate more areas of uncertainty, for mystics or spiritual seekers, the challenge may be about embracing that uncertainty, about accepting that for some questions there will be no answers – and that it doesn’t matter. Not only that it doesn’t matter but that the unforeseen may contain riches that go beyond what in our habitual ways of thinking and in our workaday lives we are capable of imagining. In giving the unforeseen more of a chance, we are opening up opportunities for our creative selves, for spontaneity, for the part of us that goes beyond the routine certainties of everyday life.

If we recognise that it is the unforeseen that might have the most importance in our lives, we may allow ourselves to welcome uncertainty…

Jennifer Kavanagh, A Little Book of Unknowing, p.15

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.

Simple alignment

As I read books and articles by others on the path of inquiry and self-understanding, I am often struck by how often they begin with an autobiographical note; and how often that note concerns their authors' early experiences with religion. A perfect example of what I mean would be Laurie Fisher Huck’s article ‘Goodbye God‘ in Tricycle Magazine, July 2022. She begins:

I first met God when I entered grade one at Holy Rosary, a Catholic elementary school, where the classes were so packed we had to crawl over one another to get to our seats. Towering black-robed nuns patrolled the aisles with rulers ready to smack naughty hands, and priests, who were known to be next to God, bestowed their blessings upon our little bowed heads. Obsequiousness was paid off in holy cards.

I didn’t. As I have written elsewhere, I was brought up as the child of a single parent by a mother who quite explicitly taught me to steer clear of anyone who would try and convert me to one faith or another. She was adamant that I should grow up to make up my own mind about spiritual things.

Of course, once I went to prep school there were such things as assemblies, where among other things we had to memorise and repeat together the Lord’s Prayer, but that was about it. We had a weekly lesson entitled “Scripture”, but as far as I can remember it consisted of little but child-friendly presentations of Bible stories such as the life of Moses, and other accounts of Old Testament heroes. It made rather less impression on me than did reading Charles Kingsley’s accounts of Theseus and Jason the Argonaut in The Heroes, in the lovely dark blue leatherette-bound edition I had once received as a birthday present.

All this is merely a preamble to saying that when I came to investigate spirituality seriously for the first time in my late teens and early twenties, I had no religious upbringing to build on, or to overcome. But I am an Englishman: there is an osmotic cultural wash over all my thoughts, over even the way I experience things. When I encounter Buddhist or Vedantist teachings there is still a slight shock of the unfamiliar, and even now a tendency to translate terms and concepts – Rigpa, say, or Ishvara – into some sort of Western expression or framework.

The problem doesn’t arise, though, with Christian theology and mystical writing. I can pick up Cynthia Bourgeault or Richard Rohr and read them like a native – however alien some of their assumptions may be to me these days – something I still can’t do even with Westerners who have since become thoroughly embedded in Buddhist life and culture, like Daishin Morgan or Pema Chödrön.

Why is this? Certainly I have the greatest respect for Eastern thought, especially for philosophical Taoism, and much of Mahayana Buddhism, but somehow reading it usually fails to awake in me the kind of instant recognition I get from reading Christian mysticism, that sometimes strikes with the force of, say, the opening bars of a Bach fugue.

Uncomfortable though I am with much academic philosophy, it is often with great relief that I turn to philosophers like Benedictus Spinoza (a Portuguese Jew living in 17th century Holland), or AC Grayling in our own time. The more I continue with my own quiet practice of open awareness, the deeper my sympathy with (broadly!) mystical philosophers like Spinoza, Martin Heidegger or Paul Tillich.

But I am no more a philosopher myself than I am a teacher of nonduality. I am simply someone who spends time sitting quietly and writing about it. No, that is faux naïf. Of course I read, and think; but I have no formal qualifications or standing. All I can do is share a few things that have struck me as significant, or insights into matters that have been troubling me and have suddenly come clear. Perhaps the truth is really no more than that having begun blogging twenty years ago, I seem unable to give it up!

All it comes down to

All that practice comes down to, in the end, is acceptance: that open stillness that listens to the unsaid, watches quietly for the opening of the undifferentiated ground beneath all that is, the Istigkeit that is no thing, but Being itself.

What Spinoza called “intuitive knowledge” (see Flix, Spinoza in Plain English, p.30) is only this: the releasement of grasping – the surrender of the idea of the separate self – that is reached directly in choiceless awareness.

There is nothing else, really. The house of peace (Heidegger’s Wohnen) is no less than this: to let go of all striving: to accept, finally, one’s oneness with the simple, undifferentiated ground. Sitting still, the door just opens of itself, that’s all.

[First published 14/10/2025]

Gelassenheit

I’ve mentioned before here Martin Heidegger’s use (after Meister Eckhart) of the term Gelassenheit, but it is only recently that I’ve come to realise how closely it expresses my own experience. In a fascinating essay on the Metanoia website, Viktorija Lipič writes on exactly this:

…meditative thinking (or meditative contemplation) is understood as a form of receptivity and attentive waiting, while at the same time remaining open to what is (by contrast, not limiting oneself or determining one’s expectations to what one ought to be open to, ought to receive, ought to wait for etc.). It is a dwelling in openness…

For Heidegger, Gelassenheit holds within itself two main attributes: a) a releasement toward things and b) an openness to mystery. Releasement is one of the main aspects of what is our true nature. This nature by default also includes openness, and through this openness allows us to have an instantaneous and uninterrupted connection to Being. Releasement must therefore include openness and allow openness to come into being, allowing the being to open itself (to mystery) through releasement.

Releasement can be further separated into two elements: releasement from, and releasement to (this can also be thought of as ‘authentic releasement’). It is important to point out that meditative thinking is “not a simple opening to Being, as the nature of authentic releasement (or releasement to) might suggest, for it involves a resolve in regard to Being” (Heidegger, 1966, p. 26). Rather, it is in meditative contemplation that we are open to Being, and in the steadfastness of being open, are exposed to it (i.e., Being). What reveals Being, is therefore, as Heidegger would say, an “in-dwelling” in Being itself.

An exploration of Gelassenheit through Meister Eckhart and Martin Heidegger

In many ways, Gelassenheit reminds me of Eckhart Tolle’s sense that presence in the Now is the openness to Being itself (The Power of Now, pp.64-65), but perhaps its most immediate resonance is with Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance:

[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. 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.

Radical Acceptance, pp. 315, 317

The number of words I’ve used here, and their apparently challenging nature, in fact totally belies the ease and simplicity of Gelassenheit itself. This “lett[ing] go into what is seen” is such a natural, instinctive thing to do that what is amazing is that somehow we’ve forgotten how to do it, and that for most of us it is only found (again?) after many cumulative hours of practice.

Amusingly enough, this last week I’ve been suffering with a particularly baroque example of the common cold; in facing an uncomfortable and inglorious illness like that, acceptance, and an openness to what merely is, transforms what could otherwise be an infuriating and miserable waste of time into something precious and valuable – the nose taking on the role of an oyster, perhaps. Of course it’s not that a stinking cold is in and of itself a pleasure; merely that if you truly don’t fight it, it has all sorts of hidden gifts and little revelations, places of peace and stillness concealed among the sniffles and the shivers.

The loveliness of open acceptance opens onto the field of Being almost directly – that is the entirely unexpected thing. There is nothing else to do, no extra technique to learn, no final supreme effort. The “vast and shining presence” simply is, and is isness in itself. There is no river to cross, no high and jagged peaks to climb; it was there all along, and we never knew.

[First published 16/6/2025]

The empty field

 Hongzhi Zhengjue wrote:

The field of boundless emptiness is what exists from the very beginning. You must purify, cure, grind down, or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits. Then you can reside in the clear circle of brightness. Utter emptiness has no image, upright independence does not rely on anything. Just expand and illuminate the original truth unconcerned by external conditions. Accordingly we are told to realize that not a single thing exists. In this field birth and death do not appear...

Enacting and fulfilling the way of non-mind, finally you can rest. Proceeding you are able to guide the assembly. With thoughts clear, sitting silently, wander into the center of the circle of wonder. This is how you must penetrate and study...

The practice of true reality is simply to sit serenely in silent introspection. When you have fathomed this you cannot be turned around by external causes and conditions. This empty, wide open mind is subtly and correctly illuminating. Spacious and content, without confusion from inner thoughts of grasping, effectively overcome habitual behavior and realize the self that is not possessed by emotions.

Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi (Tuttle Library Of Enlightenment)

Increasingly it seems to me that sitting quietly is the only thing needed: everything else finds its source in boundless emptiness. As the Tao Te Ching reads:

Something that contains everything,
Quiet and still, pure and deep;
Here before heaven and earth,
Alone and unchanging
Like a mother bringing up her children
Formless, it completes all things.

Not knowing its real name,
We call it the Way.

Tao Te Ching, ch. 25

There really isn't anything to find, and yet a whole lifetime searching is well spent. This "being there" (Heidegger's Dasein?) is perfectly complete, containing no thing. What else could we need?

Sangha and solitude

In classical Buddhism the Three Refuges are the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The third of these is a Sanskrit word used in many Indian languages, including Pali (saṅgha) meaning "association", "assembly", "company" or "community". In Buddhism the term is used more or less narrowly to imply the monastic community, or sometimes more widely to include all people who practice Buddhism correctly, whether lay or clerical. (Wikipedia)

Interestingly, Tara Brach chooses to redefine the three refuges as awareness, truth, and love: "The three facets of true refuge – awareness, truth, and love – come alive as we dedicate our presence to them. As we open to these three gateways, they reveal the one taste of freedom inherent to all paths of awakening." She goes on to suggest that this implies "a yearning for more belonging" that we can "fully inhabit [as a] refuge of love". (Reflection: The Three Refuges)

Winton Higgins has some harsh, even sarky, words for those who may decide that the concept of the sangha can be bypassed in our modern world:

After all, they may think, I have access to a plethora of how-to-meditate books and podcasts, and I can even download a meditation app. I can meditate by myself in my own bedroom, where I can also jump online and read or listen to any number of dharma talks. I can listen to dharma podcasts anywhere and any time, even while driving to work. If I want to talk to others about it, I can join an online chat room.

Okay, I understand that in other times and places people needed their sanghas because they had nowhere else to sit in peace and had no other access to the dharma. But it’s not like that any more. Besides, I’m a busy person and can’t afford to be tied down to a fixed weekly commitment (unless it’s for something really important like football training). And finally, frankly, I’m simply not a joiner. Sorry. Two refuges are enough for me.

Winton Higgins, Revamp, Tuwhiri 2021 (p.152)

He goes on to explain that in his view we are dependent beings who discover ourselves in community, in relationship, and that the sangha is best understood as "unmediated face-to-face communication with others who are actually present." (p.153) Undoubtedly this is correct within Higgins' own terms, but - leaving aside for a moment the effects of the present global pandemic on our face-to-face possibilities - solitude is an equally vital component of the contemplative life. The Buddha himself, after all, came to awakening in solitude. Stephen Batchelor:

There is more to solitude than just being alone. True solitude is a way of being that needs to be cultivated. You cannot switch it on or off at will. Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it. When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.

For those who have rejected religion in favor of secular humanism, the notion of solitude may imply self-indulgence, navel-gazing, or solipsism. Inevitably, some may be drawn to solitude as a way of escaping responsibility and avoiding relationships. But for many it provides the time and space to develop the inner calm and autonomy needed to engage effectively and creatively with the world. Moments of quiet contemplation, whether before a work of art or while observing your breath, allow you to rethink what your life is about and reflect on what matters most for you. Solitude is not a luxury for the leisured few. It is an inescapable dimension of being human. Whether we are devout believers or devout atheists, in solitude we confront and explore the same existential questions.

Stephen Batchelor, The Art of Solitude, Yale U.P. 2020, loc. 76

Higgins does, I am sure, understand this, for he writes, in his section on "Intensity as a modern virtue" (p.110 ff):

One of the thinkers that Peter Watson gathers into his fold is precisely Martin Heidegger, whom we met in chapter 4. He also identified care (Sorge) as the mainspring of an authentic human life, one intensely lived. Like the Buddha, Heidegger also introduced the tempering value of letting-go (Gelassenheit).

To live intensely must never translate into wilfulness – into our turning into meddling control freaks as we cultivate receptivity. Were we to fall into that trap, we’d be blocking the sensitive exploration of our experience. Thus Heidegger extols calm, composure, detachment, release – letting things be. This principle comes close to the Buddha’s upekkha (equanimity), one of the four vital ‘immeasurable’ emotional tones of the awakening mind.

(op. cit. (p. 112)

Solitude and Gelassenheit (a wonderful word that Heidegger presumably sourced from the 14th century contemplative Meister Eckhart) are to me indivisible. But what strikes me in this passage is the way Higgins connects this with Sorge (care, concern, even worry, for others) with the process of letting things be. There are echoes here of Tara Brach's "awareness, truth and love"!

I have long felt that there is an immense freedom in solitude. The heart expands, somehow, in this unaccustomed space, and deliberate thought becomes more free and spacious too. Somehow I find myself able to think recklessly about, feel compassion for, even love, people against the mere thought of whom I’d have felt I had to defend myself had I not had this freedom.

Henri Nouwen wrote,

Solitude greeting solitude, that's what community is all about. Community is not the place where we are no longer alone but the place where we respect, protect, and reverently greet one another's aloneness. When we allow our aloneness to lead us into solitude, our solitude will enable us to rejoice in the solitude of others. Our solitude roots us in our own hearts. Instead of making us yearn for company that will offer us immediate satisfaction, solitude makes us claim our centre and empowers us to call others to claim theirs. Our various solitudes are like strong, straight pillars that hold up the roof of our communal house. Thus, solitude always strengthens community.

Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey, HarperOne, 2009 (loc. 930)

My own love of solitude was well established long before our lives were redefined by the pandemic neologism "lockdown" - from childhood it has been both a refuge and a source of life to me. Earlier this year I wrote here,

Churches and religious groups seem mostly to be operating on the assumption that once the pandemic is under control, and something approaching normal life is restored, their worshippers will flood back, Catholics to Mass, Quakers to their meetings, everyone to their accustomed place. It may not happen, at least not in the way, or to the extent, that most people appear to expect. The sea change of the pandemic, and the enforced crash course in information and communications technology it has brought, have accelerated a process of secularisation that has been gathering momentum for a long time...

There is no obvious name for what is happening. It seems not to be “secular” in the way religious people might fear, but it isn’t “religious” either, in the way that secularists might assume. It is not eremitical exactly, certainly not in the traditional sense of hermits as ones living in geographical isolation.

Perhaps it is time that silence and practice are allowed to stand untitled: the ground still, and open.

There is much more to explore here, and generous-hearted guides like Winton Higgins and Stephen Batchelor will no doubt have more to teach us as we all come closer to understanding what life will be like on the other side of this present crisis, and we come to face more closely the other crises, social, political and environmental (Higgins is especially good, and deeply hopeful, on this in the final section of Revamp) that are no doubt coming down the pike. Meanwhile, our own practice is our North star. In sitting we can find all we need.