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Notes from Cynthia Bourgeault: Olympic Park Inst. Centering Prayer Retreat – Sept. 1-5, 2003


This post was originally published in Christopher Page’s blog, In A Spacious Place. Additionally, this was originally posted at 10 seperate reflections from the retreat. During our site migration, we have condensed these posts into one for ease of reading and use.


Christopher was ordained in the Anglican Church of Canada in 1980. He has been the Rector of St. Philip Anglican Church in Oak Bay, B.C. since October 1993. He has been married to Heather since August 26, 1977 and has two grown daughters and four granddaughters. These notes are reflections and notes from Christopher's time at Cynthia's Centering Prayer Retreat at the Olympic Park Institute Sept. 1-5, 2003.


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Note #1 Monday evening


It’s not really dark in that dark night.  It’s not really a void in the cloud.  There’s plenty there to see.  But you use a different set of preceptors.


What is the true self?  If you stop short in this teaching, you can sometimes get the idea that the true self is simply the healthy ego.  This is a great trap in the teaching.  This is not what Thomas teaches.


The movement from the personal self to the transpersonal self or from the psychological self, from the experience of our self as basically psyche, to perceiving ourselves as more and more consciousness itself.  What is it that is deeper than, that undergirds all these characteristics that bubble up in us?


The movement from your self as soul to your self as spirit, from a more boundaried, finite, descriptor based feeling of you (I am my feelings, my history, my stories about myself, my reactions, my gifts, etc.) to a relationship with ourselves where we perceive ourselves as a living moving conscious realization, of a consciousness that is unboundaried.


Don’t stop with your psychologically well-adjusted self.  What’s deeper than that?


There is something in us which is already at this point living beyond death and is in itself unboundaried.  And the real trick, which is sometimes referred to in mystical language as the union of soul and spirit, or the marriage of soul and spirit, is about somehow making connection in our self between that part of us which is truly and rightly finite, personal and that which is truly and rightly not finite and not personal.


There is that within us which has the capacity to grow so broad and tall and deep that, like an oak tree, it connects the earth and the heavens.  That’s our teleology; that’s what we are here for.  To do this we have to learn to fall into the ground and die.  At every level we are being asked to die to something less real in order to be born into something more real.

It may be that you are bigger than all the stories you have told yourself.  (Nun – “My story” = “Mystery”)  You become lost in the wonder of your being, not because its your being, but because it is Being and you’re a part of it.


This is the passage into unitive consciousness, into a oneness that doesn’t cancel out the particular.


We have tended to get confused between mystical experience and visionary seeing.  We tend to think that mystical experience means having these great altered states of consciousness experiences, very exuberant oneness kinds of intimate encounters with God.  And those things happen to some people and they don’t happen to other people.  It depends more on temperament than anything else.  But unitive seeing is a quality of being that can and should come to everybody, the fruit of a consciousness grown mature and ripe.  It ought to be the normal human state by the time you reach 60 or so.  Because what really is involved in unitive seeing is simply seeing from that place of oneness within you, seeing from centre within you.  And you already know how to do that.  You know the place from which unitive seeing comes.  All you have to do is learn to work it and trust it.


Only unitive seeing can be truly compassionate.  They are almost synonymous.  Because, as long as you are trapped in binary thinking with its judgments, and its either/or, and its standards, you can’t possibly be compassionate.  You are always going to be judging.  Whenever you are judging someone is left out in the cold.  You can’t have judging without a judged.  We have to learn to move beyond the thing which sees in terms of opposites, one of which is good and one of which is bad.



Note #2


There are different kinds of mediation situated on a sliding scale from concentrative to receptive, with concentrative being the most attention based and the receptive being pure intention.


There are basically three schools of meditation, three stops on the scale:


1.  Concentrative practices based on attention.  Give you something simple to tether your mind to, pulls your mind back.  Christian Meditation uses the mantra for this purpose.  Following the breath.  Body based concentrative practices, moving attention around in the body.  Always tethering the mind to something.  Jesus Prayer.


2.  Awareness practices – Buddhist.  Goal to be able to step back and experience what usually goes on in our usual emotional , psychological state as simply energy phenomena happening at times so that you learn not to put your sense of identity in it.  So that when thoughts come up or feelings, you just go “angry thinking,” “fear,” “impulse.”  You watch, you label, you take a giant step back in your being and are able to keep your hands off it.  So you begin to see that you are not your emotional reactivity because, if you can watch it, you must be bigger than it.


3.  Surrender practices – CP works on that moment where you face a choice to go with the though or to let it go.  CP works over and over again on that moment.  The goal is not to clear your mind of thoughts.  The goal is to be able to be willing to let go when something calls your attention to the fact that you are thinking.


This gesture of surrender is the gateway; it’s the connecting of the finite with the infinite.  The gesture itself contains the whole thing.


Centering Prayer (CP) is a practice of surrender.  It is a meditation form based entirely on the gentle art of surrender.


Awareness practice goal = “clear mind.”  This is not the goal of CP.  The goal in CP = purity of heart.  The reward is in the freedom to give – how are you ever going to be closer to God, more like God than when you give away everything?

Trust the process.


CP is embodied prayer.  You’re not escaping from your body when you are doing CP.  What you are doing is you are going within the body that lives within your body.  Or, to put it another way, you are going into the body that your body lives within.  There is a whole field of aliveness which lives in you and which is you and which you are by and large completely unaware is there.  When you are in touch with that you are in touch with that which lives beyond death and it is right there in your body right now.


There are two fundamental motions required in the spiritual journey, two operations.  And you have to be proficient at both or you are incomplete: 1.  attention, 2. surrender.  They are the breathing of the spiritual life.


Attention = “I am here.”



Note #3 Tuesday a.m.


There are two modes of spiritual being:


1. Kataphatic – prayer using forms.  Prayer which relies on the faculties = reason/ intellect, memory, emotions, will, imagination – all the things that tie us to our usual mind and our usual sense of self.  Reinforces your kataphatic self, your ordinary awareness, your usual psychological sense of who you are and what you are all about.


2. Apophatic – prayer that does not make use of your usual faculties.  Doesn’t reinforce kataphatic self.  Instead reinforces “spiritual awareness.”


Centering Prayer (CP) = apophatic prayer.  Every mistake we get into in CP is a result of trying to bring a little kataphatic into CP.  We get the idea we are supposed to use our silence to hear God who can only speak in a whisper.  In fact the silence is its own reality.  It is reality listening at a more subtle level.


No matter what can be gained by taking the hook of mystical experience, it is not worth the price.


The ego abhors a vacuum which it perceives as emptiness and loss of control.  So it will keep trying to seduce you back into the kataphatic realm which is its natural realm.

What do we gain by staying with the apophatic?


You are learning the art of spiritual non-possessiveness which is the opposite of “spiritual materialism” which is the ‘bete noir’ of spiritual seekers = tendency to help ourselves to spiritual experience for the building up of our ordinary awareness.  We think that there’s a great realm out there called the “mystical,” called the “unitive.”  And it exists just right out there and if we can grab it, and get something for us, it will make our usual self stronger, more real, more flexible, more enlightened, more able to cope.  So we go into the realm of the mystical wanting to bring something home with us.  John of the Cross called these “spiritual consolations.”


The ego always feels under nourished.  There isn’t enough, it doesn’t have it yet, it’s not quite safe, it isn’t there yet.  That is built into the nature of egoic consciousness.  Egoic nature is founded in scarcity.  It is founded in a way the mind works which splits the world into subject and object, into God and me, into other and self.  And so you’re always feeling cut off.  This is the anatomy of the mind = how the brain works.  As long as you are perceiving in subject/object polarity, you will perceive lack, cut off from the whole and you will believe the goal of the trip is to get yourself back to the whole.  And you always feel that others have more.  And you always feel you’re wounded.  Everybody feels less than they could be.  It is built into the thought structure of that thing you want so badly – your perfect ego.  You can’t have it that way.


The first thing God does for most of us on the spiritual journey is to drench us in goodness and sweetness.  We feel whole; we feel like we’ve finally been allowed to come in out of the cold.  This is an immature phase of the spiritual journey.  When you are starting with egoic consciousness, you need it.  But it becomes a crutch which is a wonderful thing when you have a broken leg. But when you are healed, a crutch just slows you down.  So what happens is that God gradually or sometimes swiftly removes the crutch.  And if you’ve been using your spiritual practice for spiritual materialism, what you do is you get plunged down into the dark nights.  All of a sudden you sit down and there are no consolations.  Instead your skin is crawling.  This is a sign of progress.  So don’t get hooked in the first place.  Rather than grabbing on, you let go.  As long as the mind grabs, you are patterning materialism.  Instead in CP we pattern letting go so deeply and so profoundly that you wouldn’t even think of anything else.



Note #4


Why is this non-clinging response so important?


1.  most of the world’s spiritual traditions have taught that bad, dark, negative, destructive, demonic things can only enter you through the imagination.  And the imagination can only be activated when you grab on.  Imagination is an organ of perception that has to be disciplined first.  And discipline means it has to be disconnected from the personal ego.  When we grab on to it and use our imagination, we can be opened up to all sorts of realms of small self stuff.


If we can let go and not grab on, we stay present at that deeper, clearer place, that clear light that is always there at the ground of our being.


What you are doing when you grab on to an insight or an illumination is that you are grabbing on to the form rather than to the consciousness itself.  And you are creating yourself or recreating yourself at the level of form, this one particular psychological being, rather than staying present to this immense opportunity you have during the prayer to simply flow as being itself.


2.  The moment you grab on with your spiritual materialism you are back into the experience/experiencer dualism.  You become the one who is having an experience.  You become the one that something is happening to.  God is giving you this little insight.  Dualistic consciousness cannot possibly experience unitive being.  As long as you want to hang on to the experience/experiencer dualism and be the one who wants to revel in all these “creatures”/experiences, where your journey will be stopped, no matter how good it feels, is at the level known as the illuminative (the middle stage between purgative and unitive).  The illuminative stage is characterized by the fact that there is a very contented ego that has wonderful mysterious unitive experiences.  But you are having experiences and you can go further than this dualistic consciousness which can have unitive experiences but cannot be unitive consciousness.


You don’t need to stop at the illuminative.  What can happen is that you can move right through it, hit the place where you really do suspend the subject/object dualism, become unitive being and then willingly flow back into the personal from the wholeness.  And then you operate in the world as a true saint who wears personal consciousness as a dress, as a mantle, as a kind of ornament and knows that it is necessary as service in this life, to wear the ornament.  But you are not confused for a moment that you are that.  The form comes and goes but you as consciousness are deeper than that form.  And you know that so clearly that it allows you to go through life clinging to nothing.  The great investments, the things that you build, you can leave at a moment’s notice.  There are no hooks any more.  You’re not doing anything to express yourself, or assert yourself, or acquire yourself.  And therefore you’re not manipulating anything.  You’re not lying.  You’re not trying to make the cosmos be the way you want it to be because you know that place where you can at a moment’s notice flow with Being itself and know that nothing is lost and everything is.  That’s the place CP is pointing you to.


In CP you are not making your mind a blank.  You are turning over the reigns of your being to a deeper intelligence.


We are all a combination of shadow and light for our entire lives.  Enlightenment is in each of us.  We all have a kataphatic and an apophatic self.  As you practice CP the capacity to be in touch with the Divine Wisdom in you increases.  The universe is drenched in Divine Wisdom.  And the only thing that causes most of us to miss it is our preoccupation with our psychological self.  As you begin to learn how to clear away the veils which are all created by your clinging on exclusively to your own story, you begin to breathe deep breaths of this wisdom.



Note #5 Tuesday afternoon


It is only the power of your intention that is going to call you back.


Emptiness is not the goal.  Emptiness is not within your capacity anyway.  However, emptying is.


Kenosis = core principle of Christian theology.  Phps. 2:5-11 – Christ’s operational mode is down.


Self-emptying = self-giving


Most spiritual practice is based on the model of “anabasis,” elevation, raising, of concentrating the energy, raising its intensity, collecting it, keeping it from being squandered on low level psychological reactions.  Most of us run around in a deplorable state of non-presence, lost in the smog of our “I need,” “I want,” “I have to have.”  We live in a state of “not really here.”  It is possible to gather the scattered energies of your being to be more here, more present, to be able to say “I am.”   In a state of concentrated presence it is much more possible to believe in the action of grace.


There is another way of arriving at the core spiritual sense, not by storing it up but by pouring it out.  You reach union through the act of giving it away = how God created the world in the first place, an act of prodigal self-giving = katabasis (“tantra” = arriving at union through complete self-emptying).


John the Baptist = the archetype of store it all up asceticism


Jesus = the archetype of pour it all out self-squandering


Perichoresis describes how Trinity moves by complete emptying of the Father into the Son, the Son into the Spirit, the Spirit into the Father, the Father into the Son.  It’s like a water wheel, continuous circular emptying from one bucket into another which creates movement.

Self-emptying is the whole of the path.  Being is infinite and flows to us from an infinite and unstinting source if we just don’t get in the way.  You don’t have to run around worrying about preserving yourself.  You don’t have to end your life as a miser hanging on to your last few drops of being-energy before you get snuffed out.  Don’t worry about being depleted.   Only the ego gets depleted.  There is replenishment of being constantly.


CP is pure self-emptying.


Most meditative practices belong to the store it up school.  We want to be quiet so we can store up more quiet, more calm, more stability, more inner awareness so that we can ascend to higher states.  We want to hang on to our presence.


With CP there is absolutely no resistance.  We’re practicing exactly the path that Jesus walked.  If something has got you thrown out of the kingdom into your own orbit of fear, you can always recover your connection with source by simply letting go of anything you are clinging to, and at that moment of letting go the union with the unstinting source of being is restored in you.  The only thing that makes it hard is because we only do it partially.  Surrender is the easiest thing in the world.  It’s partial surrender which is difficult.

You don’t need to go around protecting yourself all the time.  What you need will be given to you.


You don’t give to get.  It doesn’t matter if you are filled.  There is a sublime freedom beyond the give to get.



Note #6 Tuesday evening Q. & A. 


Burnout is an ego phenomenon.  At the root of burnout is the phenomenon Gerald May calls “spiritual narcissism,” which feeds on the fact that we don’t know ourselves very well.


Very rarely can we give with purely unmixed motives.  People who burnout are usually responding to programs they don’t know they have.  There is a compulsive quality in some of our efforts to pour ourselves out, that compulsive quality, doing it out of lack and hoping secretly to be recognized, or to be safe, right, virtuous.


We are blind to ourselves so we get tired.


We need to be able to taste the ego-component in things and relax it.


Just do what you do.


“Love your neighbour as yourself” = as your other self, as if your neighbour is you = the kaon of unitive vision.  Egoic seeing translates “as much as you love yourself.”  Unitive seeing knows your neighbour is you.


“The dark night of he spirit” – don’t agree with Thomas that it’s the battle with cultural conditioning.  I believe that it has to do with the letting go and the passage through the last and the scariest of the three relinquishments:  1.  our will  2.  our identity  3.  our vitality.  Usually we assume that we are our energy and that what gives us energy is good and what takes away energy is bad.  Sometimes you have to fall through being in charge of your own energy replenishment.  Passage where you are kept alive, not by your own personal energy (bios) but by zoe, the life force itself that comes from love.  You don’t get this passage without being willing to relinquish your claim to be the source of your own energy.



Note #7 Wednesday a.m. 

Serene light shining in the ground of my being, Draw me to yourself. Draw me past the snares of the senses, Out of the mazes of the mind. Free me from symbols, from words, That I may discover the Signified, The Word unspoken in the darkness That fills the ground of my being.

“Subtle perception” is the birthright and the necessity of a maturing human being.


What to the ego looks like darkness, or the void, or emptiness, is actually crawling with light at a subtle level.  It is not that it is really dark, it is just that we have been using too small a part of ourselves.


In the fog you have to orient yourself according to where you are.


It is not emptiness.  If you open up and use a whole different set of senses you discover a sense of belonging to a whole.  You discover the world as a luminous web coming to us in every flower, stone, sharp edge.


Inside this thing we call our physical senses there is a whole other more subtle system at work in us, a whole other different kind of coherent instrument of perception.  In Christian terms it is often referred to as the “spiritual senses.”  It is generally just alluded to and not explained by people like Bernard of Clairvaux in his Commentary on “Song of Songs,” talking about continuity between something that is outward and physical and something that is inward and much more subtle.  They are connected without being the same thing.

This is something more subtle than energy.


Matter = condensed form of energy.  Energy = condensed form of psychic force which is the realm of attention, will, love.  Psychic force = realm Sufis call “names of God.”  These things have power.


What is it in the prayer that comes up and reminds you of your intention, that comes up out of your depths?  Trust it = powerful expression of psychic force.


God breaks into this sphere in the forms of measurable qualities: love, generosity which result in energies.


Key piece in system of subtle perception = the heart.  In the modern West we tend to minimize heart to the seat of my personal emotional life, my personal affectivity.  We use it as shorthand for someone who is in touch with their emotions.


There are two overlapping senses of heart:


1.  Semitic = symbol for core of human person, seat of the personal, true self.

2. Eastern Orthodox & Sufi = organ of perception, purpose to connect us to subtle senses.


We pick up information with more than just the mind.  And this information is vital to our well-being and to the well-being of the planet.


The heart is given to us as an antenna to pick up the qualities of God and to re-transmit them.  As you begin to learn to use and trust the heart you begin to find where you are.  The heart is the gateway to subtle perception.  It receives and it transmits.  We move out from and in alignment with that which we receive.


You can’t think your way to the heart.  The heart works by obedience.  Obedience is not knuckling under.  It comes from the Latin Ob Audire, “to listen deeply.”  The heart is the compass needle that always pulls North.  The heart tugs.  You begin to feel your heart pulling you.  So you can tell when you are on and off by a certain quality of aliveness.  As that pull to centre gets stronger so you are more reliably able to follow your true trajectory.  So our real business in the spiritual life is not so much deconstructing the ego as it is nurturing the heart.  So we can recognize that tug in us which is not just an emotional thing but is sensate.

As your heart becomes stronger in its ability to pick up the sonar it relativizes egoic consciousness so that egoic consciousness just isn’t as interesting any more.  The loss of aliveness you get when you run off into your egoic schemes is instantly recognizable and the loss of visceral connection to true centre is so heart breaking that you move back on.


In CP your heart is becoming attuned and you are getting more and more able to follow it.



Note #8 Wednesday Afternoon 


Christianity, Islam, Judaism, the Semitic traditions all talk about something happening to the heart.  Eastern Orthodox talks about the burning of the heart.  Sufis about the spinning of the heart.  CP the magnetization of the heart.


Once we find centre, we have a sonar system for moving out into the world.  When you lose touch with centre, you lose your lifeline.


What is the best food for nurturing the heart?  The best heart food is surrender.  CP won’t do it by itself if you are not practicing the surrender in daily life that CP practice is patterning into you.


Wisdom comes from opening your heart and tuning your heart so that you can hear it and receive it.


When the Jesus event fell into the epicenter of world time and place, the concentric rings of the impact of this event went out in all directions geographically.  It traveled West, East, and South down into Africa.  And each line of development along these shock waves took on slightly different forms.  What we are used to in the West, and what we used to think was the only Christianity that existed, was a particular line of development which is Roman.  Christianity went East into countries which are now Islamic.  But Islam took shape in the 6/7th c. and for many centuries these were Christian lands which had preserved an understanding of Jesus’ message which was far more intimate than the one that went West.  The East recognized Jesus more clearly within the cultural context that he operated in. Early Oriental, non-Byzantine Orthodoxy was from the start much more pluralistic, much more open to diversity of expression and became an underground conduit of some of the oral transmission of Christ much more accurately than a lot of the stuff that went West.


When we look at Sufism, we are coming back to some of the transformational wisdom of Jesus.  Sufism is not to go away from Christianity, but is to come back to it far more intimately.


Once the heart begins to open and once you have begun to establish this tether of obedience by which you can align with the Divine, the other gifts begin to unfold in their time, as needed and as is compatible with your own personality, lighting up the beauty of your own finite being with the qualities of the Divine and Infinite which will express themselves in your finite being like light shining through cut glass.


Dare to trust what begins to emerge. We know but we back off from what we know. We can’t stay present to that level of truth that we really recognize as the core of our being.  If we could, we could flow as our true self which only exists as it flows beautifully and gracefully.  It is the pattern of your own being that flows out from the alignment of the heart toward God.  But we fall off that, because we need to bring our false self along with us.  We forget that we know that we know how to know what we know.  But it comes back.  It doesn’t matter how many times you fall off.  Something is sustained and it will carry you.



Note #9 Thursday a.m.

‘And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (Matthew 6:5,6)

Read at 2 levels:


1. outer level – don’t pray to be seen.  But let your prayer be in secret ie. in sincerity.

2. metaphor for what happens in passage from kataphatic to apophatic.  Close door to outer faculties.  Room = heart, spiritual awareness.  Go into your centre and close the door to the outer world and pray in secret – ie. prayer in which you don’t know what is going on.  The secret is from yourself.  When we try to get at the secret, we are caught in self-reflection.


You are relinquishing your right to a personal cognitive experience of the Divine.  This is where this prayer is pushing.  The only way you can get beyond the experience/ experiencer dualism is to give up the right to have the experience.


When the subject/object dualism drops out in us we lose the ability to stand back and perceive the mountain and say “Aha, how beautiful it is,” so that you don’t even know that God is even there anymore.  God has collapsed.  There is no longer any inside and outside.  You simply step inside love and are lost in it and flow out of it into the world.  You sense some sort of deeper grounding where you are being held.  We simply enter without even any claim to bring something back with us.


In most meditation schools, the “I am” presence is important.  The goal is to be present in a deep way in your deep personal “I am” and not to lose your grip on that personal consciousness.  And we have to admit that to experience the “I am” is one of the powerful and important experiences of personal consciousness.  To feel the “I am” presence is the be all and end all of many spiritualities, the fundamental reverberation of being itself.  Most meditational practices aim at clear mind to connect with pure being consciousness.  This lies behind Christian Meditation – you have to stay present, to attain to a state of conscious pure presence which is the full realization of your individual personalized participation in Divine being.


“Sinking mind” = when no thoughts but nobody present, wonderful haze but a trap which takes you away form the clear mind you are aiming towards.  Comes from Vipassana background in which goal is state of “I am” conscious presence.


CP goal beyond conscious presence.  What is the state beyond presence itself?


The Taste of Hidden Things – 4 types of prayer


1. prayer of the tongue – can be mechanical

2.  prayer of the heart – personal affectivity begins to be engaged, begin to be in touch with your yearning = level of “oratio”

3. prayer of seer/secret – corresponds to entry into apophatic prayer.  The “I am” fundamentally resounds in you.

4.  prayer of the ruah/spirit – level at which spirit within contemplates God in total cognitive silence.  What goes on in the spirit is a secret even from the conscious self = the ultimate apophatic state and you have to trust it.  Have to come back because, having reached that place, you as a practitioner have a responsibility to become conscious, to allow that which has been carried and which is going on like a secret fire in the heart of your holy of holies to reverberate in your being by saying “I am,” by being aware, by practicing presence.


CP without a vessel of presence around it can collapse into a psychological yen.


The Cloud = irreducible communication gap built in by the fact of infinitude and finitude trying to relate.


Only in the West and post-John of the Cross does emphasis on contemplation being a gift ever show up.  And it reflects Western Christianity’s control issues.  We got this whole dichotomy between acquired and infused contemplation and we’re trying to say that contemplation is a gift which means that we can’t get our hands on it.  I think that teaching is wrong.  Actually, they are two separate tracks.  And one of the mistakes we made along with making contemplation the pinnacle of our prayer is that we also developed this developmental thing that first you have to go through the prayer of the tongue and then heart, seer, master conscious presence and then you may fall into contemplation.  In fact they are two different operations and we need to be working on them all the time simultaneously.  CP works along the path of surrender.  And surrender if you trust it, connects you instantly with that place at the heart of the secret.  It takes you beyond presence.


The thing of contemplation being a gift you see very clearly emerges from a kataphatic level of consciousness which is fully related to giver and receiver.  In other words that kind of teaching is not at the level it is describing.  And it’s what’s dogged the path of Western Christianity.  You do through surrender go directly into the prayer of total cognitive silence.  This is one track.  The other track is the track of attention, of conscious presence, of moving from personal self to transpersonal self.  They are separate tracks.  We need to be fluent in both of them.  But the mistake is putting prayer in as the apotheosis of what really is a different track which is the surrender track.


Suppose that from the beginning we started with the deep contemplative self that always from beginning to end was perfect, was full, was beyond and that the real problem was that we didn’t have a bridge to it.  So the real goal is not so much melting the false self as strengthening and tempering the finite being so that it can bear the beams of love.  Move from epicenter out.  Centre is the holy of holies which you live in in complete cognitive silence to your self.  Around that is this level of the transpersonal self, the “I am,” not what you are but that you are, that you sound in yourself and use to be present and use to relativize that next one which is that affective terribly immature self that’s yearning and seeking but is so intent on its own agendas and its own woundedness.  We can flow out from the centre of our self to humanize all those levels of being and bring them into relationship with each other.  That is the spiritual journey.



Note #10 Thursday afternoon


Problem of apparent dichotomy between contemplation and action.  How do we narrow the gap?


There is something in you that should be able to flow out in all directions so that life is not an interruption of your silence but a chance to practice it in a different art form more and more deeply.


Silence is not an external state but an internal state.  And it is possible to hold very deeply an interior state of silence in the midst of activity.  You are not dependent upon an external state of silence.


You say “yes those are the conditions, yes I embrace them.”  So you are no longer fighting against the conditions.  The conditions are as they are.  What I can do is choose to place myself within them = attitude which allows us to go back into life.


In life we spend most of our time bracing and fighting with the conditions, pushing them off, resisting.  This creates a state of inner turmoil where there cannot possibly be an inner silence.  So you start complaining and lose the opportunity to rise to the occasion by embracing it from a deeper place.  You can use the conditions of your life to practice your prayer.


This is an internal accepting having to do with what’s going on in the moment.  It doesn’t have to do with what you’re going to do for the rest of your life.  It doesn’t have to do with rolling over and playing dead.


Confronted with any situation in life, anything that hits you in the external world, you have a choice in the moment.  You can harden and resist or you can soften and yield.  If you harden and resist, if you brace against it, you will be thrown out of peace and back into ego.  If you yield, soften and consciously embrace this now regardless of its psychological content, you will stay connected with your practice and then you can choose what to do.


The contemplative stance says that intelligent conscious choice can only be made from a place of inner embracing first.  As long as you’re fighting, as long as you’re running from it, you won’t be able to choose from other than your small self.


If you show up, you have a responsibility to be present.


If you show up but are not present, you are diminishing your own being.

This moment can always be endured.  Where we get into trouble is that we borrow trouble from the future.


Embrace exactly what’s here now without resisting it.  You will find that life will flow through it and it can actually energize you.  Turn and meet it with consciousness.  Things will flow into you and out of you.  Be present to the possibilities that are always there in a moment when you put yourself fully in it.


It doesn’t have to be pleasant.  Your ability to survive and flourish in it is not dependent on your first making it pleasant.  You don’t have to lie to yourself and pretend a situation is not what it is.  You can work with the conditions as they are.


“Take a position; leave a position.”  When a position is over, you leave it and take a new position without nostalgia, without looking back.  Every moment has a different demand and requires different energy.  Every situation is fresh.  States come and go.  Being remains.  There is a vein of continuity that connects them and makes them into one unbroken action.

You can do this prayer in any state because it is an act of being.  It is a gift of being.


A river does run through your life and it is God.  We must learn to trust the river.


Every position in life is a sacred gesture of the altar and you need to meet them with the right energy.


No comparison – let every moment be fresh = beginner’s mind.



Thursday Evening Q & A


Attention brings us to that place of “I am” presence.  It increases your connection to your “I amness.”  You need to learn to put your mind at one point, keeping it there and being able to give attention when things are not interesting.  Attention is a sacred substance.  What you pay attention to grows.  Attention practice tends towards the acquisitive.  So surrender is needed to learn to flow out into life.  They are parallel tracks.  We have to learn both.


Human beings are three centered: 1.  mind  2.  emotional = nervous system  3.  body = moving centre.  All three need to be engaged and in balance.  Each centre has its particular wisdom to give.  Skills need to do the spiritual centre are embedded in the body.


Trying to learn faith with the head is crazy.  Everybody needs to have some kind of physical spiritual practice which allows you to be more fully present to being.


Your major purpose in this prayer is preparing you soul to be a tabernacle for God.

 
 
 

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