Hic sunt dracones

Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.

David Bohm, quoted by Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan

Yesterday I mentioned the difficulty of writing, or even thinking, about spiritual realities without a set of symbols (like Christian iconography, or the elaborate tantric mythologies of Vajrayana Buddhism) that can provide a means for grasping the ungraspable, and the despair that can result from the loss of such a symbology. But there are – I hesitate to call them techniques – paths that undercut the whole ideational thing that symbols allow. To use examples from the two religious traditions I mentioned, the practice outlined in The Cloud of Unknowing, and the Tibetan Buddhist practice of dzogchen, both cut through Bohm’s circular paradox like Alexander’s sword through the Gordian knot. Sam Harris points this out neatly in Chapter 4 of Waking Up, in the context of the risks that may attend non-dual teachings without an accompanying discipline.

I’m all too clearly aware that an account like the one I published yesterday may, while intriguing, give the impression that whatever illumination I experienced came merely out of the blue. A commenter on Silent Assemblies, where I also published yesterday’s post, pointed out that others (he mentions the Quaker Isaac Penington in particular) may come to illumination “[a]fter a long period of seeking or contemplation, [when] there is a gradual loss of identity and sense of confusion, which can be very painful.” While out of the blue experiences may sometimes occur, (yesterday I mentioned Ramana Maharshi and Eckhart Tolle, who each, incidentally, had suffered deeply psychologically and spiritually, if without any preceding practice) I think Penington’s experience, and mine, may be more typical.

Once again, from a point of view deliberately outside of any religious tradition or language (though of course informed by their insights) I’d seriously recommend (re)reading Sam Harris’ Waking Up. I don’t know of a better introduction to this whole illumination thing than Harris’ book, especially since he, both here and online, carefully avoids recommending entering on the path of any religion, and “rejects the dichotomy between spirituality and rationality, … seek[ing] to define a middle path that preserves spirituality and science but does not involve religion.” (Wikipedia)

No thing at all

Over the last few months I have written little. If I am honest, I should have to say that this has not been because I have had nothing to say, so much as that I had run out of words.

Over the long years of my Christian contemplative practice – from the age of thirty, maybe – I was able to draw on the deep well of Christian iconography, theology, the Bible itself, for words and images to tell myself about the journey I was on; words which I could readily share. Since then it has been more difficult, much more difficult. I am not a Buddhist. Despite my great respect for Buddhism’s 2,500 years of spiritual and psychological research and development, and my love for many Buddhist writers classical and contemporary, their words do not on the whole “do it for me” in the way that the Christian tradition so often has.

Nonetheless, despite a couple of abortive attempts to return to formal, organised religion, and despite nearly a year of trying to live out a kind of “churchless Christianity”, I could not with any intellectual honesty understand myself as a member of a Christian church any longer. The faith that is indistinguishable from community, from the gathered people (ekklēsia) that is the church, simply no longer functioned as a descriptor for where I found myself.

Increasingly, despite (or because of) my subsequent unwavering practice of broadly vipassana-based meditation, or a version of centering prayer, I felt lost, my heart clogged with the dust of broken words, dry and hollowed out. I had no idea who I was any more.

It came to the point where all I could do was cry out (to whom?) in the cold hours before dawn, that I was lost, so lost. No maps I knew showed this desert place, wherever it was, and besides, my compass no longer worked. In this condition, tired out, I fell asleep.

When I awoke, light poured through the window across the bed. I was light myself, empty and crystal clear. No, I was not. I, was not; except that there was a gossamer memory that knew itself as me, someone who had, effectively, died in the night. “All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost.” (Andreas Müller)

That phrase, no thing, was all that was left of language that morning. (It is a phrase that has been with me, resonant and entirely resistant to explanation, for many years.) I cannot possibly describe the freedom, the irresistible joy that was left where I had been.

Since, the joy and the freedom have not dimmed. The gossamer memory of me still seems to function perfectly well as a way to get around in the phenomenal world, but it is no longer convincing. It is as transparent as glass. I so love all that is, even if it is no thing. Especially as it is no thing.

What happened? I don’t know. Of course I don’t. What happened is not the kind of thing “I” could know. This seems like a clever answer, a smarty-pants way to get one up on my readers, and that’s not what I’m trying to do. I can say, though, that it is not “something” that “I” achieved. Müller again: “What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.”

So is this the fruit of meditation? The culmination of some kind of a process? Obviously not. And yet. Could it have happened without a couple of years’ steady practice of meditation, following nearly forty of Christian contemplation? Yes, obviously. People like Eckhart Tolle and Ramana Maharshi each had their illumination following moments of great stress or despair, not unlike, according to their own descriptions, the desert place where I had found myself that night. They do not seem to have spent long years meditating in preparation. Ramana hadn’t had time, anyway; he was only sixteen.

But perhaps, for me at least, practice made a place where it was possible. It just happened, that much is clear. For me, it seems to have happened while I was dreamlessly asleep. But maybe practice functioned like cultivating a field. Cultivation doesn’t make anything grow – you need seeds, and water, and warmth for that – but it does make a place where seeds can safely germinate. I don’t know. Something had to get me out there into that desert – something had to shear away the props that upheld the idea of a me who could get somewhere, even into a desert.

There is certainly nothing I could have done to force such a thing to happen (and from the point of view of “I” that would have felt not unlike some sort of suicide) and it doesn’t happen to or for “me” anyhow. It happens. What is beyond is no thing at all.