Constant craving

Recently I have come to see that – for me, anyway – the enemy of choiceless awareness is not so much the problem of distractions in themselves, but some kind of craving. Now, I don’t mean reasonable appetites so much as the longing for things to be something other than they are. There is nothing wrong with the impulse to seek food when we are hungry or shelter when we are cold and wet, nor with legitimate libido or the appreciation of natural things; the problem seems to arise with discontent, the reaching out that thinks that if it could only grasp its object it would be instead content.

There is nothing new in such an insight. I have known for years about the Buddhist teachings regarding trishna (or tanha in Pali) and dukha (dukka): craving and discontent as they are usually translated. But it is one thing to find them in textbooks and another to come to realise them for oneself, out of a clear blue sky, as it were, simply when trying to meditate.

Whether due to my Western culture and background, or to my own inherent insecurities, I had always tended to read these concepts as something like moral precepts, things one was told off for doing. But as Tara Brach explains,

The Buddha expressed this in the first noble truth: Existence is inherently dissatisfying. When I first heard this teaching in high school in its most common translation as “life is suffering,” I of course thought it meant life is nothing more than misery and anguish. But the Buddha’s understanding of suffering was subtler and more profound. We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing—our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can’t hold on to anything—a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self—because all things come and go. Lacking any permanent satisfaction, we continuously need another injection of fuel, stimulation, reassurance from loved ones, medicine, exercise, and meditation. We are continually driven to become something more, to experience something else.

(Radical Acceptance)

There is, it seems to me, nothing whatever that can replace – or shortcut – practice. Learning about these things is always secondhand. We are hearing, reading, about someone else’s lived experience; only our own will do; and that only in the long hours of practice, or else, occasionally, in the sudden shock of some mortal crisis. The Buddha is reported to have said, “Find out for yourself what is truth, what is real.” It seems to have been good advice.

Finding out for yourself…

What [spiritual] people have realized is one of the best secrets of life: let your self go. If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only just scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will indeed be a better person. That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul, or in anything supernatural.

Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

I have come to realise with increasing clarity over the last few years that Dennett’s definition of spirituality here applies with equal force to spiritual institutions. To the extent that they – churches and most other religious systems and associations – consist in the belief in an immortal soul, and its relation to a supernatural world and its beings, mediated by means of myth and dogma, their necessity to the spiritual life itself is no more than an appearance.

(I have occasionally been moved to wonder if the reason why religions seem sometimes to offer safe haven to the contemplative is not in order to maintain control. A domesticated mysticism is so much less worrying than the wild kind.)

My journey to this place has been more hesitant and less clear-sighted than I would have wished, I admit. I don’t wish to make excuses for this, though I find an unexpected ally, perhaps, in Jiddu Krishnamurti, when he writes:

Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity…

You know, unless you hesitate, you can’t inquire. Inquiry means hesitating, finding out for yourself, discovering step by step; and when you do that, then you need not follow anybody, you need not ask for correction or for confirmation of your discovery.

I sometimes find that choiceless awareness itself – that still awareness that lies at the centre of our practice – does lead to a kind of hesitancy, or at least to the appearance of hesitancy. All we can honestly do is try to remain open in stillness; perceiving, rather than knowing, what is.

Atheism and contemplation

As I suggested yesterday, there will be those who feel that these words don’t sit comfortably with only a conjunction between them, but that isn’t what I wanted to write about.

Contemplative practice is, though patently a spiritual activity, not necessarily a religious one. Many contemplatives, especially within the Abrahamic religions, have lost their good name, their freedom, and sometimes their lives – witness Meister Eckhart and Mansur Al-Hallaj, for instance. Even religions founded on contemplative insights, like Buddhism, all too often regarded the practice itself as best confined to those under monastic vows.

Susan Blackmore (a patron, incidentally, of Humanists UK) has this to say:

So I looked very hard into what it’s like to be me and I found no answer. The very thing that the science of consciousness is trying to explain, disintegrated on closer inspection.

When I stare into the face of arising experiences, I find that the whole idea of there being a me, a ‘what it’s like to be me now’, and a stream of experiences I am having, falls apart.

It falls apart, first, because there is no persisting me to ask about. Whenever I look for one, there seems to be a me, but these selves are fleeting and temporary. They arise along with the sensations, perceptions and thoughts that they seem to be having, and die along with them. In any self-reflective moment I can say that I am experiencing this, or that, but with every new ‘this’ there is a new ‘me’ who was looking into it. A moment later that is gone and a different self, with a different perspective, pops up. When not reflecting on self, it is impossible to say whether there is anyone experiencing anything or not.

It falls apart, second, because there is no theatre of the mind in which conscious experiences happen. Experience, when examined closely, is not the show on our personal stage that the illusion has us imagine. Sensations, perceptions and thoughts come and go, sometimes in sequences but often in parallel. They are ephemeral scraps, lasting only so long as they are held in play, not unified and organised, not happening in definite times and places, not happening in order for a continuing observer. It is impossible to say which ones are, or were, ‘in consciousness’ and which not.

This is a contemplative insight par excellence. Blackmore herself came to it, as the title of the book from which these paragraphs are borrowed, Zen and the Art of Consciousness, suggests, through years of practice.

For many of us, the beginnings of insights like Susan Blackmore’s come occasionally in rare moments of stillness, lost in nature or confronted with great art. But they are generally fleeting, and attempts to note them down all too often are found incomprehensible when we look at them later. Blackmore again:

Even more interesting will be to understand the basis of those special moments in which one asks ‘Am I conscious now?’ or ‘Who am I?’ I suspect that these entail a massive integration of processes all over the brain and a corresponding sense of richer awareness. These probably occur only rarely in most people, but contribute disproportionately to our idea of ‘what it’s like to be me’. This kind of rich self-awareness may happen more of the time, and more continuously, for those who practise mindfulness.

More difficult may be to find a practice distinct from a religious one which is yet coherent and durable. Susan Blackmore seems to have ended up with something very similar to traditional Rinzai Zen kōan practice; I have found myself with one nearly indistinguishable from Sōtō Zen shikantaza. But there are many others, from various Buddhist traditions, from Advaita Vedanta, from Christian centering prayer, that can provide us with a framework of practice that is not inextricable from its mythic or metaphysical background. What matters is keeping on.

Atheism and spirituality

Lisa J Miller (The Awakened Brain: The Psychology of Spirituality and Our Search for Meaning) tells the story of a high school girl she, Miller, once interviewed, who gave an account of a profound spiritual experience she’d once spontaneously had. The young student’s account ends:

“…I was connected to something bigger. I thought, ‘I’m here. I feel like I’m just me.’ It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I feel so much smarter. Like anything is possible. I love it!” She smiled again, then shrugged. “But it’s not scientific. And I believe in science and evolution and everything.”

Here, given gently as a natural part of a connected narrative, is the nub of a problem that Lisa Miller herself encountered during her post-graduate research. On one occasion, after she had presented a paper on the role of spirituality in resilience to depression a colleague in the audience responded, “I’m just trying to figure out what this data really means. It can’t be spirituality that’s making the difference.” It was a long haul to get her work accepted as scientifically valid while remaining true to the experience of her subjects.

Sam Harris, in a passage I’ve quoted here before, writes:

I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences are false. But the fact [is] that… [t]he human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover.

Later in Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion, we read:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.

Atheism and spirituality are not opposed: it only looks that way through the lenses of our cultural preconceptions. If we are already convinced that spirituality is unscientific mumbo-jumbo, then that is how we will hear first-hand accounts of such experience; if we are already convinced that all atheists are irredeemably reductionist physicalists, then we shall be on the defensive before any conversation can even begin.

We need those who, like Lisa Miller and Sam Harris, are prepared to ignore the prevailing preconceptions and look for the sources of these profound ways of being human. There are more implications than merely our own personal journeys, too. Human wellbeing, resilience and connectedness, on a fundamental level, depend – as Miller points out – upon the possibility of brain-states that are an inherent part of who we are. That this is “biologically identical whether or not [we are] explicitly religious, physiologically the same whether the experience occurred in a house of worship or on a forest hike in the ‘cathedral of nature'” (ibid.) is perhaps one of the essential insights of our time. We need to celebrate the fact that our vital spirituality is in no way dependent on our belief in supernatural entities; that atheist spirituality is alive and well, and (at least potentially!) living between the ears of each of us.