(The self that does not arise or cease)
As I ponder this question, infinite space reveals itself once more. For as hard as I look, I cannot find myself. I can only find thoughts, memories, fears, beliefs and concepts that constantly arise and cease. But whoever I am does not arise or cease. I am who I have always been. Different thoughts and a new body, but I am who I am. And as my mind stills, consciousness expands without limit. There is a deep sense that, indeed, it has no limit. It, too, is infinite, vibrantly alive space.
(Contemplation as waking up: prayer, presence, now)
To pay profound attention to reality is prayer, because to enter the depths of this moment is to encounter God. There is always only now. It is the only place that God can be found. Our minds find paying full attention to now very difficult. This is because our minds live in time. Our thoughts are preoccupied with past and future, and the present moment is missed. This means that the reality of God is missed. We live in a dream; contemplation is waking up.
In talking to God, we also nurture the ability to listen. A full mind cannot listen. Listening In relationship we have to learn to listen as well as to talk. Listening is more difficult. It is more difficult because much of the time we are not really listening to the other, but to ourselves. As the other person talks we listen not to them, but to our minds.
To listen to God, we first of all have to stop listening to ourselves. We have to offer our minds to God that our thoughts may be shaped, colored and illumined by His spirit. Listening does not involve abandoning thought, but requires that our thinking is placed on the altar of God. The traditional Christian word for the practice of listening to God is “meditation”.
(The wild horses: stilling the mind at daybreak)
The mind does not want to still. It is now getting light and the cup of coffee has been finished. There is a temptation to pick up the cup once more just in case there are a few drops left – anything to put off the effort of bringing stillness to the mind. Thought clamours. From the moment of awakening, the mind has been convinced there is a problem that requires urgent attention. It does not know what the problem is, but it must exist. Since that moment the mind has accelerated, as it has begun the process of obsessing with the challenges of the day ahead. Perhaps one of them is “the” problem. The contemplative knows that unless the commitment to stilling is made as soon as possible, the mind will begin to resemble wild horses racing around a paddock. It is better to calm the horses now, rather than later when it will be much more difficult.
Immediately the turbulence of the mind diminishes. It was so simple. Yet why was the resistance so great?
Where once there was resistance to entering the stillness, there is now resistance to leaving it. Contemplation, however, is not about escaping from the world; it is about nurturing a new relationship with life, so that one can truly love God and one’s neighbor.
As we rest for a while in the stillness, in that space in which thoughts are born, live and die, strangely there is still a profound sense of being “someone”, of being a unique individual. However, no words will suffice to contain this experience of personhood. There is just an experience of intensely alive “presence”. This is who we truly are. We are the child of the light and the stone; the fruit of that relationship.
A contemplative mind, being not scattered, fragmented or lost in unreality, is therefore an ordered mind. This is not a manufactured order imposed by strength of will, but an order that naturally arises from being connected with reality. It is an order rooted in simplicity, for the real is simple. It is an order rooted in acceptance, for to deny what is real is madness. And from this state of acceptance arises the wisdom not to manufacture unnecessary choice.
(The tug to the next moment: addiction to becoming)
But, strangely, the power of the tug can most clearly be seen in “little” things. I have begun to notice the tug of dread when there is some empty time ahead of me. I do not know what to do next. This can happen in the morning upon awakening when I have a clear day. I have noticed how my mind immediately begins to accelerate as it searches for ways to fill the time. The sense of relief when it thinks of something to do is palpable. I have noticed it also when I come home from work in the evening. I have two hours until there is something on the television that I might want to watch – my mind begins to feel very strange. The tug to the next moment dominates our lives. It is what cuts us off from the fulness of life. Its power comes from its hidden nature. When we become still – usually first outwardly, then inwardly – its hiding place is revealed. In the light of awareness it will fight energetically for a while, but will always eventually succumb.
The next moment is not denied, but it is known from inner stillness. My friend and I did eventually walk around the bend in the path, but it was not in response to the tug. The natural flow of life brought the bend in the path through us; we remained still.
When one becomes aware of the mystery of one’s own existence, however, the meaning of life is revealed – it is simply to be fully alive. Paradoxically, in the fulness of life the question of meaning does not even arise. The experience is so rich, so all-consuming that the question is irrelevant. A person does not ponder the meaning of life when she is fully alive. Through the practice of close attention this can be seen. Questions of meaning disappear when inner stillness is present and reappear when the tug to the next moment reasserts itself.
(The collective nightmare: imagination mistaken for reality)
Its fundamental suggestion is simple, but shocking. Most of us, most of the time, are just like the man lost in his imagination. Also, just like him, we are responding to the real world from this realm of fantasy, not from the realm of truth. As a consequence we create, needlessly, immeasurable suffering and chaos. This is bad enough at an individual level. As a collective nightmare it brings war, genocide, poverty and ecological disaster. There is nothing esoteric about this teaching. We can see its truth simply by paying attention to our own lives.
Contemplative prayer is giving profound attention to what is real, not what is unreal. Stilling the mind as a regular practice reveals the addiction. The more it is seen, the more its power is reduced. In stillness we observe its workings. Through contemplative practice we do not discard the imagination, for it is a great gift, but allow it to be a wonderful tool in the toolbox of wise living. We stop believing it is who we are.
Whereas before he had seen aggressive, strutting, loud young people, now he saw their uncertainty, their fear, their desperate need to be accepted by the group. He saw how they competed with each other for the attention of the opposite sex; how they constantly watched everyone else for signals as to how they were being viewed; how they looked at every car that passed to make sure that their outrageous behaviour had been noticed. As he watched, memories of his own adolescence came to mind. And, slowly, compassion arose. Not the idea of compassion, but that vast spaciousness of love to which the word can only point. All the thoughts of fear, anger and condemnation were still present, but now they were but pinpricks in a majestic, wonderful background. Before they had been everything; all that he thought he was. Now he was the limitless space in which they were held. He had paid attention and seen the truth.
On the contemplative path, slowly but surely, our anchor in the world becomes not our relationship with a set of ideas, but the nurturing of inner stillness and good fruit in the world. It is in this way that we discern the work of the Spirit. And the Spirit is not limited by our theologies and philosophies. It blows where it will and cannot be systematized. On the contemplative path we seek to be right, not consistent.
The first is to use our imagination to create frenetic mental activity. We author, and believe with all our might, a great story as to what life is about. It might be a religious story. Or, it might be a story that says the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure, excitement, power, money, achievement, success, knowledge, tribal belonging, family or a special relationship. Usually, a number of these themes will be present. Each of these great themes will be lived out by different people in varying ways. For one person the pursuit of pleasure will involve a wild hedonistic lifestyle; for another, a day spent fishing. For some, tribal belonging will mean committing oneself to public service for the benefit of all or risking one’s life in war. For others it will involve worshipping a football team. “Success” for a university graduate will be very different from that for a person less gifted.
The second strategy which is adopted to cover the void is to dull the mind. This is the opposite of the first strategy, which is to create great, all-consuming activity in the mind. Through dulling consciousness, we hope to avoid awareness of the black hole of meaninglessness at the center of our lives. So, we dull consciousness with things like television, alcohol, drugs and, even, excessive sleep.