Meeting the Messiah: 1

In researching Irene Pickard's archive it is inevitable that confronting the fundamental issue of the authenticity of Christianity was unavoidable. Hide as I might, investigating and challenging my own relationship to that vast two thousand year old tradition was not something I could duck out of. Inevitably, the very nature of the contents of the archive meant confronting my own understanding of what spirituality might be, what religions are, what role they have, and perhaps must have, in our lives, at a psychological level, if not also at a cultural and social level. 

I have for much of my life been a secular atheist, detached from involvement in any religious practice, believing myself immune to whatever appeal religions might have, protected by my intellectual training in the cannon of analytic philosophy. Religions were, ultimately, absurd, and their claims easily dismantled by the progressive application of ruthless logic. They had no useful part to play in life. They were at best delusions, at worst positively harmful. They were full of pre-scientific understandings of life, that necessarily melted away as the range and depth of our collective scientific understanding expanded. It was inevitable that they would be discarded into the dustbin of history, to borrow phrase much loved by Marxists. A lovely, clinically clean, brave new world was emerging due to intellectual advances, in which, no doubt, everything would be reducible in the end to a series of elegant mathematical formula or algorithms: intellectually satisfying in a mechanical sense, and sterile.

Only, that's not quite the truth about what happened to me. At about the age of thirty I collided with Zen Buddhism in the form of koans – intricate, logic destroying verbal Rubic cubes. Turn and turn them as you might, logical solutions are simply not possible. They twist the mind until eventually you are forced out of the comfort zone of your everyday frames of reference. Whoops! Bang! There goes the security of logical reduction used in defence of the frames of reference that you did not even know you had, but which had held your life in place until then. 

It was a bit like being plugged into Douglas Adam's Ultimate Perspective Vortex. You, naked and raw, are plugged in at one end and the vast complexity of the universe at the other. It is pretty clear which is going to win. Exposure to Zen induces a certain intellectual humility thereafter, and an openness to exploring what seemed intellectually off limits before. 

Having passed through the bowels of Zen, and on via Tai Chi and Qigong, where I encountered other meditative traditions, I have for the last decade been under the guidance of a Dzogchen practitioner from the Tibetan tradition: but I have also become a Quaker. I learned a little about them from my time teaching History, and I wanted to take a risk and try out going to a Meeting. What I did not expect was to fall through the silence into a place of honesty and welcome where I felt at home. It was whilst dipping my toes into the Quaker pond that I encountered Irene's archive.

As a researcher you are supposed to try to maintain some sort of objectivity in order to report on what you have found, however you are inevitably affected by exposure to your subjects' milieu of spiritual influence – you have to walk the same paths as the people you are studying – if in no more than you have to read what they read, read their comments as they digested what they were exposed to, read what they themselves wrote, and try to understand their understanding: you have to get inside their heads. It is a bit like wearing somebody-else's clothes and vicariously living aspects of their life whilst vainly trying not to be affected. You are inevitably changed by the experience.  

Historically, whether we like the fact or not, Christianity has done more to shape European culture than any other tradition, and via Europe, due to the technological and imperial explosion of the last three hundred years, the world. As a result an otherwise obscure Palestinian Jew of the first century CE has become the most influential spiritual teacher in history. Some influencer! Some obscurity! 2.382 billion followers (according to Wikipedia) beats anything on social media. It was clearly time to come to terms with the leviathan.

In the ten years since encountering Irene's archive, I have absorbed a very great deal that has deepened and widened my understanding. It has taken me places I would not have otherwise chosen to go, including having to come to some sort of terms with Christianity. Not my natural inclination. My early exposure to Christian piety had, I thought, inoculated me against having anything to do with 'faiths' – I do include them all – and led me to what I thought was a non-faith way: Buddhism. At least, that how Buddhism is often presented to the West, as being principally composed of meditative practices focussed on liberating the mind from the shackles of attachment. I now know that it is much more than that, and at bottom is just as much a faith-way.

Whatever my own views of Christianity, as a researcher I had to try to understand the Christianity of my subjects. Firstly there was Quakerism, at least that of the time of my subjects, which in itself meant delving into Quaker history. Then I had to try to understand Rendel Harris's Christianity – Irene's one time employer and mentor – and, the biggest ask of all, that of Carl Gustav Jung – the greatest intellectual influence on four of my subjects – Irene Pickard, Elined Kotschnig, P.W. and Marjory Martin – and significant in the life of the fifth, Bertram Pickard.

My subjects also met and were influenced by a number of the more prominent theologians of their time: Carl Barth, Adolf Keller, Visser 't Hooft, Paul Tillich and Martin Buber, among others. I had to develop at least a nodding acquaintance with their thoughts and even those of theological thinkers such as Kierkegaard.

It has been an interesting journey. It has made me realise that my early rejection of Christianity was based on a very simplistic understanding – but that vision is, after all, what I had been fed by the compulsory religious education and attendance as required in UK schools when I was young. I now know it to be a vastly more complex spiritual path. One that has left its footprint all over European thought, even those supposedly post-Christian traditions such as Humanism or Marxism, both hugely influenced by the Christian ethic, and in some ways being simply Christianity with God sucked out.

Ah, God – that's another problem, and one I still haven't come to terms with yet: the universe seems to get along perfectly well without. According to Jung I may be stuck at the 'death of God' stage. He may be right.

Liminal spaces or bathing in the Styx

The walls of hospitals have heard more prayers than the walls of temple, mosque, or church 

claimed a recent social media post, emblazoned across a photo of a hospital corridor, no doubt hoping to provoke comment. Was it intended to invite condemnation of institutionalised religion? Or comments on the human condition? Or on our relationship with religions – press the panic button/ pull the rip-cord/ set off the distress flare – otherwise don't bother me?

My thoughts were "Ah! the liminal spaces."

liminal |ˈlɪmɪn(ə)l|
adjective technical
1: relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.
2: occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.

What greater transition is there than that from life into death? Or lesser ones from able bodied to disabled? From having life threatening injury to being healed? From diseased to well? It is no wonder that they let patients sound a bell when their cancer treatment course is complete.

But, perhaps more importantly, they are spaces where our daily praxis fails – that web of expectation, action and result with which we order our day to day – where we are masters of events. We know how the day/week/month/year goes – except suddenly it doesn't. 

That's when we fall into a liminal space. 

The rules no longer work. 

It is very disorientating.

But it is also a rich source of wisdom. A space for potential growth. 

Rinzai Zen makes great use of catapulting the student into a liminal space where the student is dumbfounded. The koans are designed to twist the mind into capitulation because it is there that one's 'true nature' is encountered. 

The contemplative traditions of Christianity – largely denied to the laity –  likewise take the initiate into that liminal space.

Like Soto Zen, with its endless hours of sitting facing a wall, pilgrimages are intended not as glorified tourist trips, but to grind you down by physical exhaustion until you are nothing more than the pilgrim: they are intentionally liminal. No one should go on a pilgrimage with an iPhone! 

The meaning webs in which we spend our lives screen us from encountering the wilderness of the liminal; but they also confines us to culturally created comfort zones. 

The rationalist uses unimpeachable logic to cling to the safety of their web of meaning. The sharp edge of 'science' used as a sword to plunge into heart of any threat. Only science is not like that: it provides updatable answers depending on the best set of evidence available – it is a process. Sometimes an exquisitely honed tool – the gold standard of five sigma – sometimes little better than our current heuristic. 

Limply, those who would set religion off against science– you might as well say setting off irrationality against rationality – want to anchor their certainties in one or other received teaching – hallowed by time and no doubt deeply emotionally appealing and comforting – especially if you are 'born again' or 'saved' – but far too often contrary to testable fact. Belief is a poor substitute for hard earned knowledge, no matter how fervent the belief. 

There are those who, in the name of this or that faith, are only too ready to harvest people who are in liminality, posing as real life Charons ready to ferry the stranded to a safe shore on the other side, from one web of certainty to another: the real gift would be bathing in the Styx. 

Belief is a mistaken road if it is presented as a higher case of knowing. One should not believe. One should be open to experiences of the liminal – to its taste and feel – to the not knowing – to simply being in its raw state, shorn of intention. 

When people say they believe in the existence of God, it has never impressed me in the least. Either I know a thing and then I don't need to believe it; or I believe it because I am not sure that I know it. I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or divine.     Jung's reply to H L Philip's question about whether all we are limited to is knowledge of the God-archetype: H L Philip "Jung and the Problem of Evil": Rockliff, London, 1958

Take joy

Take joy in the nothing special moments of life, just in their being and their being so.

Houses of words

We build houses out of the words we believe so that we made hide inside them safe from the unknown, safe from the uncomfortable, safe from the threatening, safe from the questioning, safe from exposing our utter nakedness and want of coherence in the presence of a universe so vast that we cannot encompass it or comprehend it. “God” you utter and yet another brick is forced into place shielding you from all that you would keep outside. You offer me this brick and I have no idea what to do with it.

Just maybe you might feel the same too?

Why I am a unitarian*:

Because of the connectedness that underlies all things.

Because of the inseparability of the material and the divine.

Because seeking and not knowing is the path.

Because all paths are as one path.

Because of the partiality of any understanding.

Because of the inexpressibility of the truth.

Because of the life-light that burns through all people.

Because of the understanding that goes beyond words.

Because of the peace that passes all understanding.

Because of the temporarily of the self.

Because of the temporarily of humanity.

"We are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically" Carl Sagan

http://bit.ly/cDZhrY

 * unitarian with a small capital, not Unitarian with large one, because the word denotes a way of seeing our place in the universe and not the membership of a particular faith group - as admirable, or otherwise, as their beliefs may be.

From your first breath to your last

From your first breath to your last you will vie with the complexities of living; the multi-role-playing, many faceted torrent of each day pouring through you, like it or not. Staring blankly at a wall will not free you from this, nor from the obligations that it will trust upon you. But it was this torrent of meaning suffused life that brought you to the threshold of Zen, even for those born into traditional Buddhist societies.

It is in the dynamic tension between intelligent engagement with the everyday and meditative detachment that the path of growth lies. Each should inform the other; a dialogue between meaning and silence in which neither has the last word. Empty headed wall-staring is, ultimately, nothing more than self-indulgence - I would take a stick to anybody so obsessed.

Now get dressed again!

Although, in Western terms, ultimately Heraclitan, the no-self of Buddhism points to the impermanence and transience of all that may be experienced - even the qualia of your sense experience can vary depending on your state of health, or as an effect of taking psycho-active substances; or, for that matter, the impermanence of conciousness it self, which can be turned on or off by accident, as in coma, or by the use of anaesthesia; or can be fractured into the unintelligible kaleidoscope and meaninglessness of dementia.

But it may also get you to dig deeper, to see the whole “you” package as no more than a temporary phase that is to be passed through, perhaps to be replaced by another “you” at some other time or place. This is in part a mind-trick that in Buddhism lends plausibility to the doctrine of re-incarnation - but beware, it is a mind trick. 

So, strip away everything until your Buddha-nature stands naked – but then know that Buddha-nature is also an illusion.

No-mind is in itself just as phantasmal as mind.

Now, having totally undressed yourself and discovered that you are not your cloths, get dressed again.

Some Buddhist Scatterings

How can we be compassionate if we have never known suffering?
How can we help others if we have not known joy?

If we do not radiate joy others do not take light. We are the light in their darkness as they are the light in ours.

Your time is meditation is not an end in itself. Nor is it there just to enrich you.

The tranquillity of detachment is only meaningful in the context of passionate engagement. Passionate engagement is only meaningful against the background of the tranquillity of detachment. Each feeds the other in a virtuous spiral.

Realms of rebirth? Reincarnations? Who's fantasies are these?

Zen in the art of feeling

Emotions are strong, powerful beings; they are bigger than us; they extend out beyond us and fold us into the world; they are the ropes that hold us in place, the glues that bond us together, the thermostats and gauges by which we experience our well-being, or lack of it. Without them we would only be half alive soliptical zombies, or even automatons. What point would there be in life if you never wished to dance with joy? Never knew excitement, anticipation, longing, love, grief, loss or any and all of the other pantheon of emotions? They very much are just such a stuff as life is made out of.

The point is to know them for what they are. To let them be an honest part of your life. To let them flow through you like the natural streams that they are, not to dam them up, divert them, trap them or let them become foetid and stagnant. It is the psycho-dramas that we play that diverts them and which can make them so destructive. (At this point think of R D Lang or of CBT, and such like.)

Imagine your emotions as a wild horse upon which you must ride. You can just cling on, suffer and be carried where they will take you, or master the horse, tame it, make a friend of it, harness its energies and develop a harmonious relationship with it. You care for and nurture your emotions much as you would any other animal which you have. It is a life long companion that will carry you well, even through the heat of battle or on long and perilous journeys. Your emotions are your allies - let them not be your masters.

The point of much meditation is to observe yourself as a rider. This you can only do when you learn to quieten the incessant head chatter, the fleeting psychodramas, the pseudo images of self. Then you can let go of all of that and simply be. Only when you can sit, purposeless and quiet, that can you begin to learn. It is like developing a good seat in ridding so that you sit naturally and balanced and in a harmonious way with your horse. In this case the horse happens to be yourself.

A good rider is a good companion to ride with. A poor rider is a liability, or even a danger, to themselves and to others. They are not fun to ride with. They would be disastrous to undertake a journey with.

Zazen, or Zen style meditation, sometime call whole-hearted sitting, is a counterbalance to action. It is where one learns to sit well on one's own being, so that when faced with action you do not become unseated. It is the schooling ring where you master the seat that will enable you to ride through anything.

Traditionally many Samurai warriors would practice Zen because it gave them the supper clear mind with which they could face whatever their bonds of duty demanded of them. Likewise the taiko drummers practice zazen to give them the clarity of mind needed to perform. Good zazen lead to clear minded, and therefore more effective, living. It is no accident that great art, music, drama, sporting achievement or intellectual attainment all require a clear mind.

If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.

So you have dealt with the illusion of the everyday self and have created the "ghost in the machine", your escape pod, discovered the Buddha within, found your real nature. Now you need to destroy that illusion, that Buddha Nature, and wake up.

The Twin Illusions

Some speak of “absolute or divine consciousness” as opposed to “everyday consciousness”, or some such terms, suggesting that our routine states of mind are not fully real, that the state of consciousness we experience in meditation is somehow more so, that our everyday is no more than an illusion. This thinking is so much a part of the ways of seeing our human predicament intrinsic of in the traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism, amongst others faiths, and now absorbed into the New Age and other “think” of our Western mind.

However, I wonder, in the light of our modern scientific insights into the brain, whether it is these traditionally described states of mind that are not the real illusion, the real misconception, the real misunderstanding. The distinction between the “illusionary” nature of everyday life and the deeper “reality” of the meditative mind being no more than that between “background consciousness” and “foreground consciousness”; the trick of meditation being no more than learning to avoid higher level excitation of the brain whilst allowing, or even boosting, lower level excitation, thus experiencing the “background” state without its being masked by the foreground “noise” of higher level activity. A state that may we be very pleasurable and may lead to increased levels in the brain of those chemicals that lead to feeling of well-being, happiness, confidence, euphoria or even ecstasy, and which may therefore be taken as being more “real” in some sense.

In such brain states one may well believe that one is experiencing “oneness with everything”, or “unity with the divine”, or “being in the presence of God” or … ; well, that will depend on which discourse tradition you subscribe to as to how you will describe it. But, I am sorry to report, the meditative state may be no more “real” than the everyday state, just as much an “illusion”, but a grand illusion as opposed to a collection of petty illusions of the everyday.

Being carried away by the power of the experience of the meditative state can lead being deceived into believing in that grand-illusion every bit as much as you were originally deceived into believing in the petty-illusions. I suspect that part of understanding the “middle-way” is to learn that both polls, clinging to the petty-illusions of the the everyday state or clinging to the grand-illusion of the the meditative state are mistaken. In the end you are reduced to the ground of just being, no more, no less

Perhaps that is why so many Zen masters have resorted to hitting their pupils in order to force them to recognise their ground-state, to liberate them from the twin illusions.

An Ultimately Heraclitan Buddha

Although ultimately a Heraclitan answer, no-self points to the impermanence and transience of all that may be experienced; even the qualia of your sense experience can vary depending on your state of health, or as an effect of taking psycho-active substances; or, for that matter, the impermanence of conciousness itself, which can be turned on or off by accident, as in coma, or by the use of anaesthesia; or can be fractured into the unintelligible kaleidoscope and meaninglessness of dementia.

But it may also get you to dig deeper, to see the whole “you” package as no more than a temporary phase that is to be passed through, perhaps to be replaced by another “you” at some other time or place. It is in part a mind-trick to lend plausibility to the doctrine of re-incarnation; but then, re-incarnation is a doctrine that lends plausibility to the belief in a "self".

Strip away everything until your "Buddha-nature" stands naked – but then know that Buddha-nature is also an illusion and strip that way too. 

No-mind is in itself just as phantasmal as mind: the ultimate deconstruction. 

Self, no-self, no no-self, no "self" at all, no "no-self" at all, just words being stretched over the moment like a very inadequate pair of underpants. Do us all a favour and take them off, or, on second thoughts, keep them on. 

Now, having totally undressed yourself and discovered that you are not your cloths, get dressed again in your being, in your meanings, in your culture.

Random notes on sitting practice

How can we be compassionate if we have never known suffering?
How can we help others if we have not known joy?

If we do not radiate joy others are not warmed by us: we are the light in their darkness as they are the light in ours.

Your time sitting is not an end in itself, nor is it there just to enrich you.

The tranquillity of detachment is only meaningful in the context of passionate engagement. Passionate engagement is only meaningful against the background of the tranquillity of detachment. Each feeds the other in a virtuous spiral.

Realms of rebirth? Reincarnations? Who's fantasies are these?

"if I had not the body, what great calamity could come to me?"

... 及吾無身 ，吾有何患？
(Tao Te Ching - 13)

It is an odd trick of language and of logic to separate the "mind" from the "body". It is the body that is alive, that feels, that experiences; the nervous system and the central nervous system are simply parts of the means by which it does so - and the "mind" is an "illusion" created by the functioning of those systems. Our intelligence and our meaning gymnastics should recognise their visceral roots - the body is indeed precious for that is what we are, a conscious, feeling, sentient body.

No body => no being. 

So, yes, "if I had not the body, what great calamity could come to me?" - or joy or anything, come to that!

Let life flow through you moment by moment, breath by breath, heart beat by heart beat.

“The ghost in the Machine”

A body and a mind? Two entireties? Or equally, a body and a spirit? No amount of dissection will reveal the beating of a heart separated from that organ, nor the flight of a bird separated from its wings, nor the song separated from the thrush. The one is an object, the other its performance. You can have the dancer without the dance, but not the dance without a dancer, or a singer without the song, but not the song without a singer. Minds, spirits, souls, consciousness, et al – these are all but performances. The confusion of entireties with performances, whilst understandable, is an ontological error - a case of cloudy and somewhat wistful thinking.
 

And the mind? It is a performance, or more exactly, an orchestra of performances, an entire suite of symphonies, an immense repertoire.

When the dancer dies we may say "their spirit has left", but in truth there was nothing that left, only a performance that ended.  

Falling through time

I am no more than a bundle of absurdities falling though time and laughing.

Each breath

Drink each breath for they are all that we have.

What are we?

What are we but a bag of skin and bone burning with the fire of life for a while as it passes its way through us from the beginning of time to who knows where.

Which way?

The realisation that there is no internal world, only the external world internalised.
The realisation that there is no external world, only the internal world externalised.
Both are truths,
Both are untruths.

Descartes's "cogito" sees the world from the inside looking out and attempts to construct the outside from within.
Zen's "one-hand" sees the world pouring in from the outside and collapsing the self.

Creating monsters

Listening to the truth within,
Observing the wonder without.
Unbinding from the shackles of words:
Name it God and you create a monster,
Name it not and you close your heart.