BAQA · THE ABIDING AFTERWARDS
The closing essay: on the ordinary afterwards, and on the account this collection owes about the word in its title.
It ends on an ordinary afternoon, in a car park or a corridor or a kitchen. Something gets packed away. Somebody says they will be in touch.
Whatever the years were, this is the form the end takes, and nobody has ever found it adequate.
The question the Sufi and Zen material both put, in different vocabularies, is what survives the car park. Not what it felt like — what is still there on the Tuesday afterwards, when the thing that organized everything is gone.
One failure chases the hours. The other disowns them.
The good hour becomes the point, and a person starts arranging their life around the recurrence of a state. It recedes as they approach, because chasing is the checking, and the years fill up with disappointment about hours that were fine.
The other direction: “it was only a game, only a job, only a phase.” It protects against the loss and it throws away what was actually built, which is the subject of this essay.
Worth saying that the attribution is vague. This circulates as an ancient Zen saying and its actual provenance in this wording is modern and unclear, which is true of a surprising amount of popular Zen.
The Sufi terms are more precise. Ḥāl is a passing state; maqām is a station, something that has become stable. The distinction is technical and it is the one this essay is actually using.
The Zen oxherding sequence is ten images tracking a practitioner: searching, finding, taming, riding home, and then a series of images of increasing emptiness.
The tenth picture is the one that matters. The man comes back into the marketplace, with a sack, apparently ordinary, and the caption has him going among people with open hands.
The sequence does not end in transcendence. It ends in a shop. That is either the deepest thing in the tradition or a consolation prize, and the collection has to decide which, which is what the rest of this essay is about.
The technical version of ḥāl and maqām is the distinction between a state and a trait, and the relevant literature is on transfer.
The honest report is that transfer of psychological skills across domains is weaker than practitioners assume. Skills trained in one context tend to stay in that context unless transfer is explicitly taught and practised in the new setting, and this finding is old, robust and routinely ignored.4
What does appear to carry is narrower: self-efficacy beliefs formed through mastery experience generalize somewhat, and identity-level changes persist better than technique-level ones.5 Neither is automatic.
The practical consequence is unsentimental. Nothing transfers because it was meaningful. It transfers if it is deliberately bridged, and the bridging has to be specific — named, and practised in the place you want it.
This is the place to settle up about the word Not-Two, because a collection with that title is one short step from something this library explicitly refuses.
The refusal is in the Practice guide’s closing essay: much of the apparent agreement between traditions is an artifact of selection. Ideas chosen on one criterion — usefulness to a secular modern reader — will look as though they share something, and what they share may be the criterion.
A non-duality collection is the worst offender available. The entire genre works by quoting Advaita, Zen, Dzogchen, Sufism and Neoplatonism in sequence and inviting the reader to notice that they are all saying the same thing. They are not.
Advaita Vedānta holds that there is one reality and your deepest self is identical with it. Buddhist anattā denies that any such self exists — an enduring, unchanging essence, that is, rather than persons or ordinary self-reference, neither of which it disputes. These are contradictory answers to the same question, and Indian philosophers argued about it, in detail and in writing, for roughly a thousand years. Daoist wu wei is not a metaphysical claim about selfhood at all. Sufi fanā occurs inside a theism the others do not share. The twentieth-century gathering of these into one English category was done largely by perennialist writers with a thesis, and the thesis was that the traditions agree.
So what is this collection, if not that? It is twelve observations about one seam — the boundary between a person and what they are doing — several of which were made independently, in incompatible systems, meaning different things. The observations are worth having. The convergence is not evidence of anything, and I have tried to cite each one in its own language rather than stacking them up as a chorus.
And the one claim in the collection that really is mine — that the boundary-softening and love are one event, in essay ten — is labelled as mine there for the same reason.
The case against
A reader could say: you have selected twelve ideas on the criterion of being useful and compatible with a secular modern outlook, arranged them around a theme you chose, and the fact that you disclaim the convergence does not undo having built the collection around it.
That is fair. The disclaimer is not a solution to selection bias; it is a statement of where the bias is. What I would say in defence is only that the alternative — not saying so — is worse, and that naming the criterion is the most any collection like this can do.
Write down, once, what this has actually given you that is not a result, a standing or a number. Be specific and expect the list to be shorter than you assumed.
Then bridge each item explicitly. Where does this apply, outside the thing it was built in? Say it out loud, name the setting, and practise it there. The research is clear that it does not travel by itself.
Separate ḥāl from maqām honestly. Which of these are good hours you have had, and which have become something you now have? The first list is usually much longer, and mistaking one for the other is what the collecting failure is made of.
And stop chasing the state. It is a passing condition, it was never the point, and the tenth picture has a man in a marketplace with a sack.
Almost all of this is writing, and the first band is harder than it sounds.
The sequence ends in a marketplace. Whether that is the deepest thing in the tradition or a consolation prize is a question the tradition does not settle for you, and I am not going to settle it either.
What is checkable is smaller: states are passing, nothing transfers because it was meaningful, and the bridging has to be done on purpose and in the place you want it.
And the account on the title: these traditions are not saying the same thing, they contradict each other on the central question, and the convergence this collection appears to display is partly something I arranged by choosing what to include. The observations still hold. The chorus was never there.
Write the inventory: what has this given you that is not a result, a standing or a number? Sort it into passing hours and things you now have.
Then bridge one item explicitly — name the other setting and practise it there. Nothing transfers because it was meaningful.
Terms are given in the language of the tradition they belong to — Sanskrit for Vedāntic and Buddhist material, Chinese for Daoist, Arabic for Sufi — and are not treated as synonyms for one another, because they are not. Where a rendering is condensed it is marked as such. Modern research is cited by author and publication, with links where a stable public page exists.