This and More Than This

“But now I want you to understand that although in the beginning I told you to forget everything save the blind awareness of your naked being, I intended all along to lead you eventually to the point where you would forget even this, so as to experience only the being of God.”
—Privy Counsel Chapter 12

In the Buddhist tradition, a distinction is made between meditation practice for concentration (shamatha) and for insight (vypashana). The idea is that the untrained mind is a bit too wild and unsettled for wisdom to emerge immediately in a new meditation practice. The mind must gain focus. And so the meditator begins by focusing on the breath, and returning to the breath over and over again when distractions arise, until the mind becomes laser-like and bright in its focus. The breath becomes ever more subtle as the process goes on.

Eventually, the mind is settled enough that the meditator can begin to peer into the nature of the thoughts and feelings that arise in the mind. This is insight practice, and here we study each mental object by looking carefully to see its impermanence, the unsatisfying results of clinging to it or pushing it away, and by looking for the separate “self” that creates it (and we don’t really find one). Thus, we gain greater liberation over the landscape of our minds.

The Christian mystics use slightly different language for this process, but the steps are nearly the same. In the Cloud of Unknowing, the author recommended that the beginning contemplative practice with a “sacred word” to calm and focus the mind. In Privy Counsel, he does not mention the word at all, but instructs us to focus on a naked awareness of our own being (which is a kind of insight meditation). But now he tells us that this has all just been preparation for the next step, which is the raw, unmediated experience of the being of God.

In this final experience, the self is “forgotten” as the contemplative is completely submerged into the infinity of Being itself. The author likens this to the experience of lovers. “The lover will utterly and complete despoil himself of everything, even his very self, because of the one he loves…He desires always and forever to remain unclothed in full and final self-forgetting.”

We want to know more about this experience and to describe it, but it cannot be described in words. It can only be experienced. I've already said too much about it by way of commentary. I'll end with this: those who have been there say that it is a kind of pure awareness of the present moment, just as it is, but that the experience of this takes us beyond this and connects us to that which is more than this. And in that vibrant life between this and more than this is the whole universe.