"They were predictable people, predictable because they worked for the robot. What the robot said they would also say, what the robot did they would also do, and what the robot believed was what they believed because people like them had fed that belief into it. And they would always be right so long as the robot worked, because the robot was the standard of rightness. There was no originating passion in them. Whatever they felt was original would die the moment it came into conflict with what the robot was geared to feel.” (Scott P The Raj Quartet. London. Heinemann p 432)

My (professional) heroine, Florence Nightingale, also broke the 'robotic' conventions of her time. She described how she found her 'must' - that which she had to follow, no matter the obstructions, which, among other things in her case, led to the foundation of modern nursing.

And I include above a picture of a sculpture of Jesus from the Anglican Cathedral in Brisbane. I was fascinated by its audacity - not least because he is naked and is breaking free of something to which so many are attached, and all the symbolism that goes with that, perhaps also how Christianity can become robotic.

What is your 'must', your 'originating passion'?

Love, of course,

Stephen

In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.[1]

Our Sunday morning consideration, as war spreads its vicious tentacles, was of a man of peace. I was just about old enough to be aware of global events when Dag Hammerskjold, the then Secretary General of the United Nations, was killed indeed almost certainly assassinated, in an air crash in 1961. He was man of peace and, looking at his posthumous publication Markings, was deeply contemplative in nature.

As such, he was that rare phenomenon of someone who achieved high office and power, while not losing his soul. He felt it was possible to retain his connection to the Beloved, to hold inner peace amid war. In doing so, he overcame the temptation of the mystic to want to withdraw from the horrors of the world and into Quietism, “an indifference to and impatience with, not only ‘works’ in the conventional sense, but also all the institutional and intellectual aspects of human life.”[2]

That tension between being in the world as participant, yet not captured by it an of it, has been a regular part of our discourse in our School. Hammarskjold shows us the common path to live with this contradiction - by differentiating his essence, his I Amness, from the many ‘I’s of identities he, like all of us, possesses. His life was lived from the former:-

“At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I’s. But in only one of them is there a congruence between elector and elected. Only one – which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I.”[3]

Hammarskjold, like many other followers of the Way, senses the ‘Another’ present in all things, yet contained by none. It is the Alone, the One, of which Plotinus speaks, in which we are alone, but paradoxically therefore can never be alone. It is the faith in even in nights, of which the poet Rilke writes, where he finds “a great presence”[4] is moving there.

Rilke’s faith in nights summons us, like Hammarskjold, to “keep our hearts open in hell”[5], to find our point of participation (however great or small that is outwardly judged to be) free of our ego agendas.

And thus, I return to Hammarskjold and adapt his words[6] for a prayer:

‘That each moment may we let go of the image which, in the eyes of this world, bears our name, the image fashioned in our consciousness by social ambitions and sheer force of will. That we may in each moment trust in blind devotion in the Another in which we are.’

Love

Stephen

March 1st 2026

Thy will be done

[1] Hammarskjold D 1971 Markings. London. Knopf pxxi

[2] Auden W 1971 Foreword. Markings. London. Knopf. pxxxi

[3] Hammarskjold op cit 1 p 19

[4] Rilke R (trans. Barrows A & Macy J 2005) You darkness. New York. Riverhead p63

[5] Wright S 2024 Fugue. Penrith. SSP p26

[6] Hammarskjold op cit 1 p24

The original Greek texts of the New Testament, as well as the early Aramaic words (brought to us anew with the amazing work of Neil Douglas-Klotz) are literally and metaphorically written in a different language.

By the time the Bible was given to me in school, I was terrified of hell. Like many in the Christian tradition, then and now, hell and heaven were and are real physical places. The former ‘down there’ the latter ‘up there’. Yuri Gargarin, famously the first man in space, reported that he saw no heaven or angels; toeing the atheist party line of the USSR at the time. Science has done a good job of refuting so much biblical ‘truth’ – not many of us would take our child with epilepsy to an exorcist, or consider burning a suitable response to a woman healer.

That distortion of heaven and hell has kept people in place for millennia. Does anyone believe in them now? It seems about 40% of the UK population still does.

Followers of the Way tend to be more circumspect about such concepts, and incline to the realisation that heaven and hell are not places, but conditions, qualities of consciousness. Primarily varying according to the sense of connectedness to or oneness with the Beloved – the closer and more loving the more heavenly, the more separated and fearful the more hellish. From that inner place of harmony (heaven-connection) we find the world with all its ‘sham and broken dreams’ a liveable place.

[Curiously, at least to me in my role as a spiritual director, I have sat with many people who have felt like they were in hell. When asked to describe it, words such as cold, lonely, dark, solitary are commonly used. It seems that hell is not the hot and fiery place usually depicted, but a condition that is brutally isolated and desolate. I wonder, what is your experience of hell? May be add some commentary here.]

Of course, trying to experience only heaven and avoid hell, the inclination of our personalities, is a kind of hell itself! Wanting one and not the other creates attachment which keeps us stuck; letting go and finding that unifying Beloved trusting and loving relationship, which transcends clinging desire, seems to be the key. Here the Greek original is helpful in the use of the word Truth, which Jesus (English translation) uses. English translations tend towards ‘truth’ as facts, and ultimate truth applicable only to Jesus. But the Greek aletheia does not indicate facts, but process. It means unforgetting. Our Way to Truth invariably means breaking through the veils of constructs and memories and stories which have left us with a distorted view of the Real. A view which is discovered there within us as we unforget.

Easy peasy of course! Throw a switch and we have instant aletheia!.... But to help us on our Way we have assorted spiritual exercises such as we find in our School, not least the simplicity of prayer.

Rabiah, the first recorded female Sufi (to my knowledge) wrote in one her verses[1]:-

I carry a flaming torch in hand

And a bucket of water in the other:

With these things

I am going to set fire to Heaven

And put out the flames of Hell

So that voyagers to God can rip the veils

And see their real goal.

I share Rabiah’s words; the page in Daniel’s book that fell open to me this morning as I readied for 9am silence. May we carry bucket and torch each moment to rid the Way of delusions and illusions and help us in our aletheia. Thus, may we encounter its twin: anamnesis – re-membering.

Love, Stephen, probably February

Thy will be done

[1] Rabiah in Dyer D 2016 The 99 Names of God. Kendal. Chickpea Press. p41

Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough,

A flask of wine, a book of verse – and Thou

Beside me singing in the wilderness –

And wilderness is paradise enow.[1]

My uncle was an unschooled farmer, a quiet man who taught me much about nature and the ways of the farm animals. I was, literally, farmed out to him and my aunt as they had no children; my own mum was an exhausted woman with a hard man for a husband. In many respects my uncle was more of a father figure to me than my own.

When he died, I was left some of his books. The first surprise was that he had any books at all, he never revealed his inclination to reading; second hand encyclopaedias and, the second surprise, poetry. He would sing folk songs on our walks or while mucking out the pigs, but never a hint of his love of poetry. One of these works is a gloriously illustrated copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1048-1131). It’s one of those deeply mystical works that can be interpreted at many levels. In this case either as a statement of the lover for his human beloved, or for the Beloved.

In the latter case, this quatrain (the full Rubaiyat is a series of hundreds of such four-line verses, rubaiyat derived from the Arabic word rubai meaning four) is full of spiritual meaning. Like his more famous compatriot, Rumi (1207-1273), he was an ecstatic lover of the Beloved. ‘A loaf of bread beneath the bough’ suggests spiritual nourishment while sheltered from the world; all the spiritual food we need is from the Beloved. Wine, verse and singing suggest the presence of the spirit and the opening of the heart to union with God. Thus full-filled, the contemplative is able stay present, all that he or she needs is to be at one with the Beloved. In that condition, even the horrors of the world, the wilderness, can be embraced as part of all-that-is; the great unfolding cosmic story.

I was prompted to return to Khayyam after reading the autobiography of that marvellous actor Anthony Hopkins, who mentions him as an inspiration. I knew of Hopkins only through his many roles of stage and screen, and not, until now, his personal journey through Asperger’s and alcoholism; and with it the emergence of a gentle, uncluttered spirituality. There is something of the Way about him, as an escapee from his Welsh chapel background and into a general wariness of the religious.

He tells a story of Chekhov, to which Hopkins seems to relate: “One morning, travelling in a coach to meet a friend for breakfast, he noticed a funeral ceremony about to take place in a nearby cemetery, and he asked the driver to stop for the moment. He watched the casket lowered into the newly dug grave and listened to the bereaved saying prayers. He contemplated the meaning of it all, the great imponderables. Then, having faced the ineffable mystery of the universe, he signalled the coachmen to continue the journey. His next thought was about the deliciousness of the coffee waiting for him at breakfast.”[2]

Like Khayyam’s quatrain above, the Chekhov story mirrors Hopkins’ evolving contemplative spirituality in the face of suffering, in its almost Zen-like equanimity. Hopkins later, in a lovely turn if phrase that would not be amiss in our School, concludes “There’s nothing to win; there’s nothing to lose. No sweat, no big deal. Of myself I am nothing, and of myself I can do nothing. It is the presence within than transforms and does anything.  Of myself, I am nothing. And so I go about this business doing the best I can with what I’ve got.”[3]

He was writing about the acting world, but he could as well have been talking about the contemplative life. After all, are not our many identities just actors? And if so, who’s the playwright?!

Stephen.  February 2026.

[1] Khayyam O (trans. Fitzgerald E 1869) The Rubaiyat. Glasgow. Collins. p58

[2] Hopkins A 2025 We did OK, kid. London. Simon & Schuster. p131

[3]  Hopkins op.cit.2 p 223

Our School has no doctrines or theologies. We are not bound by a faith for we have members from all faiths and none. What binds us together is not an ideology but a purpose, the fulfilment of a longing for the Beloved through experience and encounter, the dis-covery through praxis of that Beloved in a unique relationship that is paradoxically common to all. In opening to our essential I-Amness, we find that same essence of self-identification across traditions, the I Am.

That relationship, as we sink into it over time and trials, is life transforming. It is gloriously illuminating and can also be tricksily ego inflating. In my early, new-agey days I awoke one day to say aloud ‘I am God’. As did everybody else in the group. A statement both true and false depending on its interpretation. The ego gets a grip on it and, lo and behold, the next thing we know we’ve either abandoned our responsibilities, or formed a cult, or thrown ourselves of a skyscraper believing ourselves to be immortal and we can fly.

Like all our experiences and insights, discernment is the key. ‘Is this true?’

Clearly I am not God, as will be evidenced when, when the bread I will have for breakfast will not toast itself at my command. Nor will the various ailments of my body right themselves by my orders. Nor will the various ills of the world be put to right by my wishes no matter how heartfull.

Deification, a word found along the Way, does not mean that we inflate ourselves as the Beloved, but it does recognise in our essential nature that we are of the Beloved. There is something of that Life force in all of us, indeed as it is in all of material reality. Not so much pantheism or come to that panentheism, rather a deep recognition, re-cognition, (to rearrange a quote from the Pagan poet Epimenides in the 6th century BCE and cited by St Paul) of the One in whom we live and move and have our being, and which lives and moves and has being in us.

Deification does not mean that we become God, the Beloved, rather that we learn to identify with the divine in every aspect of our being, we draw close in relationship as one in the One, a kind of union where we see as the Divine sees, know as the Beloved knows. Now I’m slipping into anthropomorphic terms here, for I do not think that the Beloved thinks or knows as we do, nonetheless we come to reflect those qualities in our everyday lives – learning to see through the delusions and illusions of ordinary reality, opening our hearts and actions to living compassionately. Not for nothing across traditions do we commonly see the symbol of the eye as representing the Divine. Awareness, loving awareness, is the key to seeing our true nature and our deified relationship in the Beloved.

And now at 0845, time for a cuppa and then at 9 to sit with you all and All.

Love

Stephen

 ...From the works of Amado Nervo (1870-1919): idolised in his own country of Mexico, but little known elsewhere. Mystic and poet. See his works in Poems of Faith and Doubt trans John Gallas 2021, and Plenitude (trans. Alfonso Zabre 1938). The latter is hard to get hold of, but assorted translations appear on the internet, and it is from Zabre's work that the poem The Sign is taken;a poem I have often shared in our groups as it explores how we can speak our truth (or not) amid the crowd who do not understand.....

This morning's translation and slightly edited, was based on Gallas' work....and touches on the notion of Christ not just as a one-off (idolised) being, but as a quality of consciousness, embodied in Jesus as the prime example, readily available to all:-

Christ
Christ came not from the sky,
but from the depths of our souls;
deep, deep in the lands
of the spirit that understands.

Look not for Christ in a cloud;
who sits not there on a throne.
Look not for Christ in the stars -
their lights are but chemistry, flames of stone,
gases and globes, dark matter and moons,
no more. And the planets about us, like earth,
revolve still without Christ, shining balloons
lit by the sundogs that gave them birth.

Christ came not from the sky,
but from the depths of our consciousness,
and the ancient instinct in us all.
Christ came not from above,
but rose from the immanent sea,
profoundly quiet and armed with love.
Christ is, has been, and shall always be.
Search inward then, down in the darkness of life,
with the light of love, beyond the bright shore,
and Christ will be there before.


And in case you have forgotten it, or cannot find it among the handouts, here is the earlier poem about sharing:-

The Sign by Amado Nervo

Talk not to all about things sublime and essential
Seek the level of him with whom you speak
So as not to humble or distress him.
Be frivolous too, when you are with the frivolous,
But once in a while, as if unsought,
Drop into their cup, on the foam of frivolity,
A very small petal from the flower of your dreams.
If it is not noticed, recover it cautiously,
And, always smiling, go your way.
If, however, someone picks up the frail, small petal and examines it, inhales its fragrance,
Give him forthwith, and carefully, a sign of direct understanding.
Then let him behold one, or a few, of the marvellous flowers in your garden,
Tell him of the indivisible Divinity which surrounds us all.
And give him the magic word,
The Open Sesame to true freedom.

It was very lovely to enjoin in our silent gathering today.

Blessings to one and all from a clear blue, ice cold Lake District morning.

Stephen

January 4th 2026

Thy will be done

One of the groups to which I belong is having explorations of ‘The Incarnation’ – being as this is Christmas. I dropped out of the discussion, as it was entirely led by particular biblical interpretations and I did not feel there was much space for other suggestions.

I begin with a truth, of course, that the scripture we use was not written initially in English. Everything we have before us is a translation. Not necessarily wrong, but possibly missing out many elements and nuances. In these notes to you all, I have often cited the Aramaic work of Neil Douglas-Klotz and others, bringing us new and deeper insights that help us to read the mythos as well as the logos.

Jesus was not, after all, born on December 25th – that was an arbitrary decision by the then Roman emperor, to fit it with existing Pagan festivals. The exact date has been the subject of scholarly debate for generations. Early Christians did not celebrate the birth of Jesus a) because they did not know when it was and b) because it was to miss the point; emphasising a kind of idolatry of one man and an event rather than a moment-by-moment truth of the relationship between Realities.

Now as to incarnation, the notion of the divine reality descending into human form, taken literally that narrows our options. Jesus is reduced (or elevated, depending on your point of view) to a one-off idol and the story that follows is factually true. A contemplative perspective also sees this story symbolically, spiritually true, about the nature of the incarnation. That the Christ consciousness is born in us, all of us, or we are made aware of it, when we are reborn out of our personalities, our ego perceptions of I am who I think I am. In that sense, born of a virgin (consciousness) uncluttered by the accretions of what we believe we are as humans, indeed our limited understanding of who ‘we’ is at all.

From this perspective, the Christ was not only supremely embodied only in Jesus (at birth), but is a potential in all of us. He perfected the way to attain this condition in his life and teachings. That’s why we hang on to the Jesus story at the roots of exploring the Way, he lived it for us and offers us the teachings…a Way, however, that does not rule out the illumination of truth in other traditions.

I find myself repelled by so much that has become Christmas. It has become a global phenomenon even in cultures that do not subscribe to Christianity. Why? Because it has been colonised almost entirely be capitalism. It took the religious story and Santa and embellished the whole damn thing into a money-making machine in which it requires no small effort to be unseduced, cling to the essence and still be joyful amid the ersatz schlock. In a sense, every time one of us comes up for air and sees what’s really going on and finds the Beloved there, that is a moment of incarnation.

I leave you with a birthing story, which I’m not sure I’ve revealed to many (but if I have, scroll on to the reflection at the end). It concerns our School. Anyway, I think for the first time to feel prompted to set it in writing.

I was quite involved in the Anglican church in the local parish, as well as guiding the ‘Caring for the Carers’ retreat days the Rydal Hall Diocesan Centre. Dave Roberts, Director of Communications for the Diocese urged me to meet up with Richard Passmore. Neither were priest and the latter was heading up the ‘Fresh Expressions’ work of the Diocese – supporting innovative projects to encourage more people into a life of faith. Dave felt Richard and I would have much in common, both being somewhat ‘on the edge’, if not over the cliff, when it came to conventional approach to religion in general and Christianity in particular.

It was 10am on the 17th August 2017. Richard came to my home, which also doubles as a retreat for those in spiritual crisis, among other things. We sat on the deck in front of the house, my base for my morning meditation and tai chi…and a place to simply sit and watch life unfold around me. With the nearest neighbour a mile away, it’s a precious bucolic idyll; a startling contrast to the working-class Manchester estate in which I was raised.

Richard and I chatted as if we’d known each other for years, sometimes touching into the most intimate aspects of our beliefs and values. Dave was right, there was indeed a lot of common ground. I enthused particularly about my deep years-long dive into the contemplative Way, and I felt there was such a hunger for it, inside and outside the church, and how I felt prompted to help this is some way. Richard turned to me and simply asked, ‘What do you want?’. For what seemed an age no words were needed. Almost like a photograph, an image flashed before me. “I need a School,” I said, ‘Somewhere remote on the side of a mountain. The Lake District is a great and often unsung heart of so much spiritual life, there must be the right spot somewhere that isn’t weighed down by being associated with church, or any religion, for that matter. The School is not the building, it would be a gathering of fellow travellers who’ve been wandering around in the spiritual quest, nomads who can’t feel at home because of creeds or community mores. They’re longing for a direct and deepening relationship in the Beloved, free of labels and doctrines, and their transformation in being and doing in the world. They need other seekers to hang out with for mutual support. I envision a ‘course’ of sorts, with residential session and weeks apart to permit time to read and pursue spiritual exercises.”

I was used to working with so many of these nomads down the years.  People feeling lost from rule- bound communities, yet whose hearts we longing for the Beloved. Sometimes it would be 1-1 work, sometimes group retreats and courses, especially with my fellow trustees and spiritual directors, mark and Jeannie, of the Sacred Space Foundation. ‘Beloved’ was my term of choice for the Presence, because it got me and others free of a gendered God, and I knew that others grew in such language too. I’d been gifted with teachings in the spiritual life from wise teachers, almost 40 years of them by then. “I’d just like to find the right milieu and support to make it happen.. Something that has the deep secure roots in the Christian mystical life that I’ve been given, and which is also open and free and secure enough to say ‘this is true’ in other traditions too.” And because of my interest in our local saint, Kentigern, and a book of the same in press, I felt it had to have his name.

Within the month, by chance if chance it be, Richard and his wife Lori, also part of the Fresh Expressions team, had set in motion some ‘open days’ for possible course participants. Kristopher, one of our trustees, helped me find a suitable venue on the side of Blencathra, our local mountain, and slap bang in the middle of Kentigern territory, religion neutral and with views to die for. Richard unearthed some secretarial support within the diocese, with a view that this might continue for a few years until the School could stand on its own feet. Lori came up with the logo and designed the prospectus. Networks were plugged to the max to get the word out. Together they made things happen, such that with breathtaking speed, the first cohort of 18 students of the contemplative Way gathered on the side of a mountain. Between two residential weekends, six months apart, we conferred and learned together, back up with regular letters from me which morphed eventually into the Heartfullness book. The rest is pretty much history.

Maybe some day a detailed account will be written. But that’s the gist of the birthing, inspiration followed by the hard graft of making it into ordinary reality. And it felt like a birthing, an incarnation, not least in the quality of being swept along in something that was not under my control and natural falling into place of all that was needed. That’s how things move when they are meant to be, I guess. The course has now touched the lives of 96 participants, about half keep in contact, members have created a website, organise an annual gathering with about 20 attending each time, and extra events with guest teachers. While initially being Diocese of Carlisle supported and assuming only Cumbrians would attend, the world soon spread, such that apart from participants across the UK, seekers from the USA, Ireland and Switzerland have joined us.

But my point here, apart from relating a story that means much to me, but perhaps relatively little to you, is that birthing is not just about making babies. And for some at least, the Christmas story is more powerful as the personification of a deity. It is not a one-off event. The Christ when seen as a quality of human consciousness takes us to a wholly (holy!) different level of awareness of truth. Embodied in Jesus, the one whom we came to call the Christ, we find the prime exemplar of deification and the potential of incarnation of the same in each of us. This kind of Christification is not an idolatry/////…………., but a birthing of the highest self, of full awareness, of joining with the divine and infused by the same in each of us. As the Christ consciousness thus incarnated and ripens to fullness, each moment this happens, both we and Christness are born again.

So, at this time of year, or any time of year come to that, what in you, in each of us, this moment, this day, and the next, and the next, and…is ready and waiting to be birthed? What is our inner nativity ready to bring into the world, once or many times, it is all there. Waiting to be born. Christmas is every day then. Not an event, but a forever process.

SGW Christmas 2025

Framed by the history of human religions, Christmas is a rather recent innovation. Early Christians did not celebrate Christ-mass, for two reasons. Firstly, they did not know Jesus’ date of birth…that came later with Emperor Constantine’s political masterstroke of uniting state power with religious power. Secondly, because early Christians were wary of creating an idol of Jesus, rather than emphasising the transformative message that he brought - the Christness as a condition; of awakening, a potential in all of us, uniting with the Beloved in each moment. Not as a one-off event around one being, rather an opening to hope for everyone.

Since then, layer upon layer of story has been built around one of the greatest stories ever told, where truth and fantasy vie for authority; its power marshalled by the new commercial empire of global capitalism. Add to that the toxic quality when this story is lashed to extreme politics (Christian Nationalism – huh, if ever there was an oxymoron that is one, the Jesus message is entirely international. My dad, who did his bit in the Royal Air Force in World War 2 had very strong views on nationalism. I recall a conversation in my early teens, he said something like, “Be careful when somebody puts ‘national’ on something that belongs to everybody. It usually means the [expletive deleted] want to make something theirs that doesn’t belong to them and keep everyone else out.”)

Not that I would wish to get into defining Christianity here for there is an enormous spectrum of positions. Within our School there are those who cleave to the Biblical accounts (English translation thereof) as historically true, those for whom very little of it is literally true yet spiritually so when read symbolically, and those for whom this story is not part of their tradition at all. The common bond is what lies beneath them all, less belief and more relationality.

The commercialisation which has colonised Christmas has done so with relentless expansion within my lifetime. It is hard to stand against it, to not walk around and be drowned by muzak carols in every marketplace or collide with jolly Santas in every town centre or suffocate with the faux and cutesy imagery of the nativity (“How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given…” – only a man could write a carol like that about childbirth!). And don’t get me started on ‘we three kings’…there were not!

Sometimes I can feel like I am drowning in saccharin, suffocating in the inauthentic.

And yet, and yet…

I am profoundly formed by that story since childhood. It has fed the man – the tunes, the rituals, the stories have become part of my spiritual DNA. Amid the alienating mush and sometimes downright falsehoods, I recall that I am also surrounded by family and friends bringing loving attention to one another, neighbours offering to help out, volunteering, being kind, making an effort…all the kinds of things that happen when we look for and offer the good that is planted more deeply than all that is wrong. And then I realise and remember, actually, most folks are like that most of the time anyway and the doomscrolling of daily life is only feeds a false impression of being human most of the time.

And then deeper, over and against all the money-grabbing and flummery and superficiality, there is a story there not lost, of the profound truth of the nature of reality, of the union between loved and Beloved, that sustains and transforms. A transformation encountered in a commitment to the practice of the Way, no matter how much we forget, or get lost, or mess up, that takes us into something infinitely more worthy in the here and now. Those moments of illumination accrued over the years, sometimes as a long slow burn, sometimes as a flickering in-out flame, sometimes as mighty blast. The condition that is an infrequent event or a moment-by-moment birthing of a way of seeing that is the Christing of our natures; contemplation.

Those moments are the nativity – every time someone wakes up to the Real, those burstings of enlightenment into the everyday, until eventually, in time and out of time, if we keep showing up, paying attention, staying receptive, doing the work….we become the thing the heart longs for, in each of those moments of awakening, of loving awareness…

There is a chant I learned long ago….

“Out of the womb of a human heart, Christ is born. Out of the womb of a human heart, Love is born.”

And so dear friends on this evening as I ready to sit in the dark and remember, and wonder what in myself and each of us is waiting to be born this night, this year, this life….. let us remember, in the words of the Desiderata, that with ‘all it’s sham and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.’

And may each of us, as the year turns, birth that beauty way in ourselves and others in each moment this Christmas until the essence of Christmas is a lived experience every day beyond.

With love

Stephen

Dec 24th 2025

Nirvana is often misunderstood as the Buddhist version of the Christian heaven. In a sense it is, if we get away from heaven as a place; rather a condition of consciousness. Heaven in this sense is unity with ultimate reality, piercing of the eternal, and liberation from the powers, attachments and conceptualisations of the ego.

Schools like ours arise to help us ask the right questions about such ideas. They do not have all the answers, but are hives full of spiritual honey to power our flights for the way Home.

One of the ideas underpinning the approach of our School, rooted in Christian mysticism and arguably offering a different dimension to the Buddhist approach, is that this liberation does not lead to an experience of a neutral emptiness, but a heartfelt recognition of an immense unknowable Presence; in all things yet contained by none. All the mystics (including those from other traditions such as the Sufis) that we have explored in our work hit the same spot – somewhere along the journey they are touched by the Real, the Presence, that is a profound Love at the foundation.

Friedrich Heiler, a 20thC German theologian wrote of this ‘blow out’ (one translation of Nirvana) as blasting away all of our attachments, and not just the ego ones, but also thoughts and definitions that we once thought of as unalterable. ‘Contemplation is directed towards the ultimate, the highest, the absolute, towards God in His totality and infinity, in His unutterable plenitude. In contemplation, the spirit gazes into an abyss, an ocean, a dazzling sun. All concrete conceptions and imaginings, all corporales similitudines, are left far behind; banished are all the religious and cultural symbols, even the humanity of the Son of God, the child in the manger, the sufferer on the Cross, are left behind.”[1]

While Heiler was writing in the (masculinising) language of his time, he strikes truths that many find fierce, so fierce in fact that this can be the point at which many on the Way retreat or stop. Firstly, we look into what may at first seem a terrifying abyss of seeming nothingness – without attachments and concepts (of self and God) then what? Secondly, that non attachment is not selective. It suggests non-attachment to all, including contemplation and our ‘knowledge’ of God.

Getting into a condition of non-attachment can be tough work, especially the escape from ego identification. For some people, whose lives have been of struggle and suffering, the process can be a blessed release. But for (most) others it can, initially at least, be full of anger, resentment and anxiety – after all, if we’ve spent a lifetime birthing hard-won identities, qualifications, roles and finding our place in the world, it can seem awfully unfair now to have to let our attachment to them go! However, the fruit of such work and surrender proves to be profound compensation, when we touch a truth that at the root of it all is Love.

With patience, persistence and perseverance we may find this liberation lets us float more freely from the gravity of ordinary reality into the magnetic field of attraction to the Real. This is often accompanied by a drying up of our interest in and need for all the usual paraphernalia of religious and spiritual practices. We leave behind, or at least we do not need or hang on to them in the same way, all the panoply of our spiritual lives from our daily practices to our participation in religious communities. They have served their purpose. Life become a condition of that sense of unity day by day and night by night…our lives have become prayers, hymns, worship.

I felt this to some degree on a recent week on Iona leading a group through the Way of contemplation. Despite my long history of working and holidaying on Iona, and participation in the Community, somehow the ‘churchy’ language seemed to jar more than usual, as we lurched from abbey services into the deep inquiry and practices in the ‘classroom’. There isn’t much room for doubt or creativity in liturgy – once it’s written down it tends to have a fixing effect no matter how inclusive and well meant. Not only can such things rub against the grain in us when they no longer seem true, we can also feel a kind of grief at their loss of meaning and a wondering ‘if not this, then what?’…more grist to the spiritual mill!

Lastly, this condition is not a flight from the world. Quite the contrary. It’s a common thread that the deep dive into the condition of heaven, while being a lived state, does not mean we lose the need to perform our everyday duties. Thus, are heaven and earth synthesised in service.

Stephen. November 2025

[1] Heiler F 1960 Contemplation in Christian Mysticism cited in Naranjo C and Orenstein R 1971 On the Psychology of Meditation. London. Allen and Unwin.p73

I could pick thousands of such examples, but here’s just one, from the 14th century. This was a time of the ‘Friends of God’; a controversial, at the time, movement across European Christianity emphasising the personal relationship and experience of God rather than through church rules. Rulman Mershwin wrote:-

“And so it was as I was walking in the garden in this penitent frame of mind it came to pass that a clear light quickly surrounded me, and I was taken up and swept up from the earth and carried in all directions back and forth throughout the garden. And as I was being carried in this way I felt as if extremely sweet words were being spoken to me. What this light was and this leading power and the sweet words, I do not know; God certainly knows, but it was all beyond my comprehension. When this happy hour was over and I came to myself once again, I found myself standing alone in the garden. And I looked around and saw no one nor anything else, ut felt only a copious stream of tears flowing from my eyes, which I was unable to stop.”[1]

It seems that most people at some point in their lives can have such non-ordinary experiences. They can be very seductive. They’re enticing. We can want more of them. Some religious organisations and assorted New Age courses and teachers hold great store by them and seek to offer and encourage them. Whether auditory, visual, physical or emotional, or various combinations of same, we may crave more of them because they are so exciting or can make us feel special or that we are getting somewhere – whatever – they can become distractions from the spirit of the depths or persuade us that they are signs of true mysticism.

They are not. Such experiences may offer us insights along the Way. I’ve had a few in my time and am writing from an island where many people pilgrimage in the thought or hope that they might have them. They can teach us much – about ourselves as much about God – but they are not the be all and end all of contemplative spirituality, which belies the need for the quiet patient and persistent discipline of spiritual practice and development, subject to rigorous discernment and examination with our spiritual director. In having the experience, we need to be sure of the meaning. And having learned from them (or learned from not having them) move on. Do not become attached either way.

The opposite of the whizzbang is the ‘that’s interesting’ experience. We journey to the sacred site or watch the spiritual practice fascinated by experience, caught up in the facts and figures, the like or dislike judgements. As such, to quote Eliot in Four Quartets, we ‘have the experience but miss the meaning’. Visiting and witnessing as tourist may mean that we miss the depth of insight and illumination to our spiritual lives that an approach with reverence, respect and humility can bring.

The whizz bang experiences are not an arbiter of whether we are contemplative in our Way or not. Seduction by factoid interest is equally diversionary from the contemplative. Both are the reverse. Indeed the former may indicated psychopathy and the latter an awareness shortfall! They are known by their fruits – do they bring us more humility, wisdom, compassion and service; draw us closer to the Beloved? Or do they wrap us up in more self-absorption and addiction to distraction and the superficial?

Stephen. Iona. 2025

[1] Kepler T (Ed) 1960 The Mystical Writings of Rulman Mershwin. Philadelphia. Westminster Press p40