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.
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Monday, January 26, 2026
Friday, January 9, 2026
Bowing to rocks
The longer I keep on with this contemplative life, the more it seems to me that life apart from the main current of consensus reality, as well as apart from formal religion, is essentially a spirituality embedded in the everyday.
Rodney Smith, in an excellent article in Tricycle Magazine Summer 2010, wrote:
When I was younger, I followed the example of an experiment once performed by Krishnamurti: I placed a rock that held no special significance on my mantel and bowed to it each day. I did this deliberately to see whether I could infuse a unique quality into something completely ordinary, simply by incorporating the rock within a morning ritual. At the end of a month, the rock held a special, holy place in my perception.
The Buddha statue, the zafu [cushion] we sit upon, the saintly picture or poem, the states of mind accessed in meditation, solitude, or even nature itself, can all become accentuated beyond the ordinary by infusing them with special attention. When we invest the sacred into specific conditions, we feel spiritual only when we are having those experiences. The rest of life goes spiritually unnoticed…
It is… in the middle of our total involvement that this alchemy of spirit can best be engaged. Our life becomes focused around this transformation as our primary intention for living. We find everything we need immediately before us within the circumstances and conditions we long begrudged ourselves. Spiritual growth becomes abundantly available and is no longer associated exclusively with any particular presentation of form.
The alert reader will probably have picked up something of this in my own writing, where I describe with such affection the window where I normally sit to practice! (Of course, there is a healthy side to this too: keeping to a routine, spatially as well as temporally, takes away the unnecessary complication of deciding the where and the when of sitting) But practice is not special – it is the simplest and more ordinary thing to do; and a life lived in the mindfulness it affords is not a life of drama and strangeness so much as a life more deeply than ever embedded in ordinary things, in other people, and in the countless plants and animals, fungi and minerals with whom we share our world.
It is not that the insights and presence that come with practice are not sacred; it is more that though their sacredness all the everyday accidents and affects of life can be seen in their actual, intrinsic sacredness, and unless we live in and for them, we cannot realise the truth that lies within us all: that we all rest in the same ground, and are ripples on the same stream. Each of us, human or mouse, ant or mountain, is born and dies according to our time; and yet it is the one isness from which we are born, within which we live, and to which we shall return.
Rodney Smith, in an excellent article in Tricycle Magazine Summer 2010, wrote:
When I was younger, I followed the example of an experiment once performed by Krishnamurti: I placed a rock that held no special significance on my mantel and bowed to it each day. I did this deliberately to see whether I could infuse a unique quality into something completely ordinary, simply by incorporating the rock within a morning ritual. At the end of a month, the rock held a special, holy place in my perception.
The Buddha statue, the zafu [cushion] we sit upon, the saintly picture or poem, the states of mind accessed in meditation, solitude, or even nature itself, can all become accentuated beyond the ordinary by infusing them with special attention. When we invest the sacred into specific conditions, we feel spiritual only when we are having those experiences. The rest of life goes spiritually unnoticed…
It is… in the middle of our total involvement that this alchemy of spirit can best be engaged. Our life becomes focused around this transformation as our primary intention for living. We find everything we need immediately before us within the circumstances and conditions we long begrudged ourselves. Spiritual growth becomes abundantly available and is no longer associated exclusively with any particular presentation of form.
The alert reader will probably have picked up something of this in my own writing, where I describe with such affection the window where I normally sit to practice! (Of course, there is a healthy side to this too: keeping to a routine, spatially as well as temporally, takes away the unnecessary complication of deciding the where and the when of sitting) But practice is not special – it is the simplest and more ordinary thing to do; and a life lived in the mindfulness it affords is not a life of drama and strangeness so much as a life more deeply than ever embedded in ordinary things, in other people, and in the countless plants and animals, fungi and minerals with whom we share our world.
It is not that the insights and presence that come with practice are not sacred; it is more that though their sacredness all the everyday accidents and affects of life can be seen in their actual, intrinsic sacredness, and unless we live in and for them, we cannot realise the truth that lies within us all: that we all rest in the same ground, and are ripples on the same stream. Each of us, human or mouse, ant or mountain, is born and dies according to our time; and yet it is the one isness from which we are born, within which we live, and to which we shall return.
Friday, November 14, 2025
Self and stream
We are, says Daniel Dennett, illusions. Benign user illusions, but illusions nonetheless. Our minds construct our sense of self in order that we may see how we relate to others, to objects, to ourselves; but we are not what we think we are. If we look closely within, “look for the one who is looking”, in Sam Harris’ version of the Dzogchen pointing-out instruction (Waking Up, p.138ff), we find no one.
We are waves – modes in Spinoza’s terminology – on the stream of becoming, nothing more. We arise, travel a little distance, and subside. But we are never separate from the stream, nor are we, ultimately, other than the other waves: we are all the stream itself, streaming. Our sense of self, of being discrete, separate, independent is a useful feature of our minds, but as we became civilized it came to be more of a bug than a feature. We have actually come to believe that we are separate; and we have come to treat others – human and otherwise – as though they were separate from us, as though they could be found and lost, bought and sold, fought and exploited, loved and abused at will. But they are more than our sisters, more than our brothers: we are, literally, the same substance as each other.
To touch the edge of what is, to glimpse the living expanse of Istigkeit, the endless ground, cannot be unseen, un-touched. To be still, if only for a moment, is to see that we can never become un-waved – we may be wind-blown, scoured by cross-currents, but we are still waves, no more; and no less than the stream itself.
We are waves – modes in Spinoza’s terminology – on the stream of becoming, nothing more. We arise, travel a little distance, and subside. But we are never separate from the stream, nor are we, ultimately, other than the other waves: we are all the stream itself, streaming. Our sense of self, of being discrete, separate, independent is a useful feature of our minds, but as we became civilized it came to be more of a bug than a feature. We have actually come to believe that we are separate; and we have come to treat others – human and otherwise – as though they were separate from us, as though they could be found and lost, bought and sold, fought and exploited, loved and abused at will. But they are more than our sisters, more than our brothers: we are, literally, the same substance as each other.
To touch the edge of what is, to glimpse the living expanse of Istigkeit, the endless ground, cannot be unseen, un-touched. To be still, if only for a moment, is to see that we can never become un-waved – we may be wind-blown, scoured by cross-currents, but we are still waves, no more; and no less than the stream itself.
[First published 12/11/2025]
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