Nowhere for the Ego to Cling
The Deeper We Go, The Weirder It Gets
Stephen Batchelor (b. 1953) is a Scottish Buddhist scholar, writer, and lay teacher. He has become known for advocating a “secular Buddhism” or a “Buddhism without beliefs” — seeking to return to the original teachings of Gautama Siddhartha without the mythology and metaphysical trappings that grew up around the core principles of Buddhism over the centuries, and in effect turning it from a philosophy to a religion.
Obviously, as a contemplative who is interested in the intersection between Buddhist philosophy and Christian mysticism, Batchelor’s ideas are very appealing to me: his vision of Buddhism is as compatible with Christianity (or any other faith tradition) as any other kind of secular practice, like mindfulness or analytical psychology.
But just because Batchelor’s secular Buddhism is stripped of metaphysics and myth does not make it shallow or “self-helpy” — on the contrary, the depth of insight Batchelor offers in his writings would pair well with the nuanced thought of contemplative Christians like Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating or Cynthia Bourgeault. In his book Buddhism without Beliefs, Batchelor makes these observations:
When belief and opinion are suspended, the mind has nowhere to rest. We are free to begin a radically other kind of questioning.
The deeper we penetrate a mystery, the more mysterious it becomes.
The more we become conscious of the mysterious unfolding of life, the clearer it becomes that its purpose is not to fulfill the expectations of our ego. We can put into words only the question it poses. And then let go, listen, and wait.
If he showed up at a dinner party with Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Marguerite Porete and John of the Cross, he’d fit right in — and the conversation would be lively indeed.
Is spirituality a question? Perhaps, or a series of questions: what gives life meaning? Can I trust the universe? Does God love me? How do I experience that love?
A mystic, then, is one who has dived deep enough into these questions to find the suspension of all belief and opinion, the falling away of proposition and dogma, and therefore no place for the mind (or heart) to rest. We see that life is not here to serve our ego (or anything about us), and that only the darkness and silence of contemplative waiting promises any kind of meaningful response to the ever-deepening mystery. Dive deep enough and the lines separating “Buddhist” and “Christian,” “traditionalist” and “progressive,” or even “theist” and “atheist” suddenly lose their meaning. In the cloud of unknowing, in the dark night of the soul, we “let go, listen, and wait.”
Before you enter the cloud and the darkness, that can sound terrifying. But once we enter and radically let go, we recognize it is our home.
Quotation source: Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening (Kindle Edition), pp. 97-99.