Elemental Awareness

“It is not hard to master this way of thinking. I am certain that even the most uneducated man or woman, accustomed to a very primitive type of life, can easily learn it…And so, go down to the deepest point of your mind and think of yourself in this simple, elemental way…In any case, do not think what you are but that you are.”
—Privy Counsel, Ch. 2

The author expresses some amusement at the difficulty that the highly educated sometimes have with this practice, accustomed as they are to using their intellect to solve problems. He also recognizes the differences in language that different contemplatives might use in describing wordless prayer, based on their experience (that whereas he talks about going down, others might think of it as going up.)

At any rate, it all comes down to the “elemental awareness” of our own being. He forcefully reiterates that this is not introspection, and does not involve identifying the qualities of being at all. The awareness of one’s brokenness and sinfulness will be strong during contemplative practice, but studying this condition is thinking, not praying. Rather, he counsels that we instead lift our whole being, brokenness and all, just as it is, toward the Divine Being, with a simple confidence that the offering of our whole being is enough.

An Experimental Knowledge

“And since this is so, let grace unite your thought and affection to [God], while you strive to reject all minute inquiry into the particular qualities of your blind being or of his. Leave your thought quite naked, your affection uninvolved, and your self simply as you are, so that grace may touch and nourish you with the experimental knowledge of God as he really is. In this life, this experience will always remain dark and partial so that your longing desire for him be ever newly enkindled. Look up joyfully, then, and say to your Lord, in words or desire:

That which I am, I offer to you,
O Lord, for you are it entirely.

Go no further, but rest in this naked, stark, elemental awareness that you are as you are.”
—Privy Counsel, Ch. 1

I think I have ended up quoting the first chapter of Privy Counsel in its entirety. Each and every word explodes with meaning and power. I am in awe of the tremendous gift of each of these words.

In contemplative prayer, we reject all “minute inquiry” into the qualities of the self or the qualities of God. This is not introspection, not study, not discursive thinking at all. There is just the “blind,” “experimental” knowledge of God’s being, and ours. What thinking arises is “naked,” by which I think the author means that thought arises and passes away without attachment or aversion. Thought emerges in awareness and then returns to the void without comment or judgment on our part, a minute quality of our own “blind” being which we observe with never-before-seen clarity.

The author advises that this experience is always dark and partial until we enter completely into the beatific realms in the Life Beyond this one, and his explanation for this is that the partialness keeps us motivated to come back for more. While the author does not mention “love” in this passage, I think the analogy of human love is appropriate here. Part of the great mystery of human love is that no matter how many years we spend with our beloved, we always only see them partially, we never gaze into their own “blind being,” and so while we crave unity with the beloved, there always remains this fascinating, impenetrable separation. The tension between our union and our separation gives our love relationships a kind of dynamic energy that is some small way reflects the dance of Love between the contemplative practitioner and the Divine Being.

This may be best demonstrated in the author’s prayer, which hints at both unity and separation: “That which I am, I offer to you, O Lord, for you are it entirely.” While we experience our “difference” from God, we offer it back not because we have anything to give, but because what we are was never ours to begin with, but rather a manifestation and gift of the Divine Goodness in the first place.

This place of dark, energetic, wordless tension is where we dwell in contemplative prayer, a “naked, stark, elemental awareness that you are as you are.”

Sacramental Reality

“You keep in mind this distinction between yourself and [God]: he is your being but you are not his.”
—Privy Counsel, Ch. 1

The author takes pains here in the first chapter to be emphatic that he is not proposing some kind of theological reductionism, that our inner being is the equivalent to the Godhead. He seems very concerned that one might misinterpret this teaching as a kind of pantheism, equating God with the sum of reality.

He uses a very Thomistic kind of rationale for why this is not so, but in his introduction to the book, Father Johnston appeals to Teilhard de Chardin for a more cogent explanation, one that matches up with Huston Smith’s assessment that the Divine Being, while being more than the sum of reality, contains within it the sum of reality. This is a kind of panentheism, recognizing the Divine Essence at the core of all things. But while all phenomena reveal the Divine Essence, they are not its equivalent, and do not possess it or fully contain it. All things thus become sacramental: channels of grace, insight and love. But no such phenomena can be pointed to and of it said, “This is God.”

The Self Beyond the Self

“Let that quiet darkness be your whole mind and like a mirror to you. For I want your thought of self to be as naked and as simple as your thought of God, so that you may be spiritually united to him without any fragmentation and scattering of your mind. He is your being and in him, you are what you are, not only because he is the cause and being of all that exits, but because he is your cause and the deep center of your being. Therefore, in this contemplative work think of your self and of him in the same way: that is, with simple awareness that he is as he is, and that you are as you are. In this way your thought will not be fragmented or scattered, but unified in him who is all.”
—Privy Counsel, Ch. 1

The existence of the “self” is seen as a big problem in the contemplative traditions of world religions. There is no single way that the traditions have responded to this problem, but there is one common theme about what happens when the contemplative arrives at a state of deep inner awareness: the self ceases to be a problem, because the fragmentation and alienation that the normal sense of self creates in the mind is overcome and a deeper unity and wholeness emerges.

On retreat last spring with Vipassana meditation teacher Matthew Flickstein, we did a practice in which with every rising thought and sensation we shifted our locus of awareness toward the “self” that generated the thought. It was a difficult practice at first, and then a wide open space emerged within the mind, a kind of vast void. It was breathtaking and startling and extraordinarily peaceful.

But what was most amazing—and this experience continued for several hours after I rose from the cushion—all the elements of the “self” were still present. All my normal thoughts, feelings, memories and judgments—the “stuff” that we normally associate with “self”—still existed in the mind. They arose and disappeared as steadily as during “normal” states of awareness. The difference was that these phenomena existed in an infinite space inside the mind/heart/soul. I could see them appear and disappear, and looked upon them with the same consciousness that I noticed sounds and smells and the movement and activity of other people around me. Rather than being the center of my universe, the “self” appeared within the context of an enormous universe that I had never even noticed before.

This, I think, must be what Huston Smith is getting at in his book Why Religion Matters, when he discusses the “transpersonal” nature of God. For Smith, the old debate about whether the fundamental nature of reality is dual or non-dual (personal or impersonal) is irrelevant. For the Ultimate Reality, which is unified, contains within it all dualities, including all aspects of personhood. The problem only arises from a limited perspective that places so much emphasis on one thing that all other things are lost from view. From the Divine perspective, it is all seen, all embraced, all loved.

Unknowing

“See that nothing remains in your conscious mind save a naked intent stretching out toward God. Leave it stripped of every particular idea about God (what he is like in himself or in his works) and keep only the simple awareness that he is as he is…This awareness, stripped of ideas and deliberately bound and anchored in faith, shall leave your thought and affection in emptiness except for a naked thought and blind feeling of your own being.”
—Privy Counsel, Ch. 1

We know so little about God. This is the essence of apophatic theology, the tradition within the theistic religions that emphasizes negation. As we attempt to get our minds figuratively around God and to describe the Divine Being, we utterly fail. God is too vast to be contained in words or concepts. All we are left with is a “naked” awareness, naked because it is empty of all specific thought and feeling but for the reality of God and the reality of our own being, which on the deepest levels are one in the same.

“The blind feeling of your own being” is, for me, a simple, bare awareness of the present moment: a heightened sense of the sights, sounds and smells of my surroundings, as well as my own thoughts, feelings and experiences. Sometimes this is accompanied by the arising of peaceful sensations, and sometimes thoughts of judgment, discomfort, aversion, etc. This is my own being.

But when I stay with this long enough, there also arises an awareness of all this that is “me” within a context that is much, much larger, beyond the borders of my senses or even my imagination. My own being remains, but contained within an infinite field of awareness and experience. This, I believe, is what the author means by perceiving “God as God is.”

The Book of Privy Counsel

Peace be with all who read these words. This is my first post for a new blog on contemplative spirituality, but I've been jotting down these thoughts for probably five or six years now and e-mailing them out to friends and family as "Random Thoughts of a Cosmic Hobo." Primarily, they are my ruminations on a variety of spiritual topics.

My spirituality is informed by a blend of Buddhism, Taoism, Islamic Sufism, and mystical Christianity. At the present time I am studying and commenting on The Book of Privy Counsel, written by the anonymous 13th-century English author of the Cloud of Unknowing. Future posts will give more background on this book and its rich vision of Divine Union.

Pax,
-G