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.”