Into the Silent Land: The Practice of Contemplation

by Fr. Martin Laird, OSA

Originally read in late 2016, re-read this time in Advent, 2020

Introduction

• St Augustine, City of God: “We must fly to our beloved homeland.”
• God is our homeland. Our homing instinct takes us to God.
• St John of the Cross: “The Father spoke one Word, which was his Son, and this Word he speaks always in eternal silence, and in silence must be heard by the soul.”
• Spiritual practice not a technique, not steps that will necessarily bring about a result, disposes us to allow something to take place
• Focus of book on the practical struggles people face when they try to be silent, chaos in our heads, “like some wild cocktail party of which we find ourselves the embarrassed host”

Chapter 1 - Parting the Veil: The Illusion of Separation from God

• Author’s summary: “Chapter 1 will announce the foundation assumption that union with God is not something we are trying to acquire; God is already the ground of our being.”
• St Augustine, Confessions III:6:11, “God is closer to me than I am to myself” (interior intimo meo et superior summo meo), X:27:38, “O beauty ever ancient, ever new, you were within and I was outside myself.”
• The Cloud of Unknowing: “God is your being, and what you are, you are in God. … But you are not God’s being.”
• We cannot say what a human being is until we speak of God
• The sense of separation from God we all feel is actually just “pasted up” out of thoughts and feelings, just perceived: union is the fundamental reality
• Gal 2:19, “I have been crucified with Christ and yet I am alive; yet it is no longer I, but Christ living in me.”
• Communion in God, useful image of a wheel with spokes around a central hub, we are all spokes, the closer we are to God the closer we are to each other
• “God is that reality whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”
• For St Paul it is Baptism that accomplishes this union with God
  • The indwelling of Christ is the core of human identity, resolves all dualities
  • Col 3:1–4, Baptism: “Because you have died, the life you now have is hidden with Christ in God … Christ is your life … you too will be revealed in all your glory with Christ.”
  • This is not the personality, “pasted up images”, that we typically perceive as our “self”
  • Our deepest identity is Mt Sion, around which appear various patterns of weather, coming and going (Psalm 124), we are the mountain not the weather
  • Baptism and Eucharist are the sacraments of our deepest identity, hidden in the self-emptying of God in Christ
• The sense of separation from God is real, but does not have the last word, since it is generated by our minds, the separation itself is not real
• Our identity with God is like how in John 15:5 we are the branches and Christ the true vine, we are only branches insofar as we are part of the vine
  • Or like a sponge in the ocean, saturated
  • “Differentiating union”

Chapter 2 - The Wild Hawk of the Mind

• Author’s summary: “Chapter 2 presents a perspective on why most of us spend most of our lives more or less ignorant [that God is already the ground of our being]. It is precisely this noisy, chaotic mind that keeps us ignorant of the deeper reality of God as the ground of our being.”
• Illusion of separation God is what generates image of God as tyrant
• Story of a dog that had early in life been trapped in a cage, in later years, despite freedom could only run in tight circles, similar to the image Chesterton gives in Orthodoxy of the circle as the symbol of madness, the logical mind gone wrong
• R. S. Thompson’s “The Moor”
• The mind builds layers of anxiety, vanity and noise that are its kingdom
• St John of the Cross: “The Father spoke one Word, which was His Son, and this Word He always speaks in eternal silence, and in silence must It be heard by the soul.”
• Discusses the difference between knowing someone or knowing facts about someone, and true familiarity and communion with someone
  • This true communion could be called “unknowing”, St Augustine also calls it “learned ignorance”, Letter 130
  • Our unknowing God goes deeper into God than our knowing goes
  • St Diadochos distinguishes between the mind and the heart, where heart is not the seat of emotions, which like thoughts belong to the mind, but the true centre of the person
  • This heart, לֵב, is the seat of higher reason, unknowing
• When the thinking mind is not engaged in reasoning it boils with obsessive thoughts and feelings

Chapter 3 - The Body’s Call to Prayer

• The Screwtape Letters: “for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.”
• Your body’s stillness and your breath both facilitate the stilling of your mind
• Various sitting postures discussed, chair or traditional prayer bench, as well as Oriental postures like lotus; personally I think 正座 would be fine too
• The idea behind the prayer word is that if the mind can’t sit still, give it something to do, a short phrase or word to repeat silently
• Whenever we become aware that the attention has been stolen by some though, we gently bring ourselves back to the prayer word
• The Jesus prayer is a common prayer word
• We don’t reflect on the meaning of the prayer word, we simply repeat it
• However helpful posture and breath are, the prayer still depends entirely on grace
• Practising with the breath:
  1. Assume stable posture, take 3 or 4 deep breaths, breathing in with abdomen, restraining the exhalation a bit so that it is longer
  2. Combine the prayer word with breathing, if a phrase say half on the in-breath and half on the out-breath
  3. Let your attention rest gently but steadily on the breath as you breathe the prayer word. Eventually attention, breath, and word become a unity. This is your anchor in the present moment.
  4. Whenever you realize the attention has been stolen, bring it back to the breathing of the prayer word.
  5. People often become self-conscious at this stage due to the newness of the practice, but with time the awkwardness goes and the breath slows down and brings great calm.

Chapter 4 - The Three Doorways of the Present Moment: The Way of the Prayer Word

• Talks about J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, and how Franny discovers prayer and esp. the Jesus prayer
• The Jesus prayer helps the one who prays open depths within by stilling the wandering mind
• Early contemplatives realized the importance of not being drawn into interior dialogues, that spoil all inner peace, not to mention prayer
• They took inspiration from the temptation of Christ, where he refuses to dialogue with Satan, rather quotes Scripture
• St Augustine, Sermon 8, on the Third Commandment, keeping the Sabbath holy means entering into the true quiet of the Spirit of God: “Unquiet people recoil from the Holy Spirit. They love quarrelling. They love argument. In their restlessness they do not allow the silence of the Lord’s Sabbath to enter their lives.”
• Author says beware of linear notions of progress in prayer, asking what stage am I in, have I progressed? I suspect there is a great deal of wisdom in this yet I am also reminded of Thomas à Kempis frequently bringing up profectus in The Imitation of Christ
• “There is nothing that separates us from this depthless depth whose ground is God. Paradoxically, however, this is only seen to be the case after crossing threshold after threshold. The present moment is a gateless gate opening onto a pathless path.” Reference to 無門關?
• Contemplation is sheer gift. We cannot of ourselves bring it about, but there are skills which help it become more likely to flower.
• St Teresa of Avila in The Interior Castle, compares the contemplative practice with a cocoon gradually and delicately spun from which we eventually emerge: “So let’s get on with it, my friends! Let’s do the work quickly and spin the silken cocoon.”

The First Doorway

• Characterised by practical concerns like general fidgetiness to boredom and self-preoccupation
• Isn’t the prayer word just another video for the mind to watch? It will take care of itself eventually passing through the Third Doorway, but in the meantime the word is like a vaccination, a small does of the disease to call forth antibodies that will quell the disease
• The prayer word builds “recollection and detachment”
  • Recollection gives us calmness or ἀπάθεια (Stoic calmness or dispassionateness)
  • Detachment helps us let go of things, see through our mind games
• The challenge most people face at this gate is coping with noise in your head, or paralyzing boredom
• Don’t try to push the thoughts away or replace them with peaceful ones, merely keep returning to the prayer word
• Note the thoughts, let them be, return to the prayer word = “the practice”
• This skill or mental habit of returning to the practice whatever else is happening (all well or complete chaos) is all that is needed to pass through the First Doorway
• When we find that this practice is increasingly taking root in us, when we find ourselves returning to the refuge of the prayer word more and more whenever the reasoning mind is not needed for something, spending less time watching internal videos, then we have passed through the First Doorway
• The pretense is becoming the reality

The Second Doorway

• After the First Doorway, less mental energy is now required to repeat the prayer word, it is becoming second nature
• The task at the Second Doorway is to become one with the prayer word, as a dancer is one with the dance or a weaver with the loom
• Pure effort will not get us through the Second Doorway, but various skills cultivated at this time will help: letting go, living in the present moment
• A generous amount of time each day will help cultivate these
• Approaching the Second Doorway, the prayer word helps us see the more subtle mental patterns that shape and drive the thoughts that steal our attention
• The stillness of the prayer word now helps us spot not only the distracting thought but the mental-emotional pattern that caused it
• Before the First Doorway, the prayer word was a refuge from distracting thoughts, but crossing the threshold of the Second Doorway, we meet the thoughts with stillness instead of commentary, we let thoughts be, without chasing them
• After crossing the Second Doorway we may find we no longer need to repeat the prayer word, or only infrequently

The Third Doorway

• At this stage, we meet thoughts with stillness instead of commentary, so we start to shift our attention from thoughts to what is aware of the thoughts, the awareness itself
• This shift reveals however briefly the still mind
• Having done this one must wait, vigilant in the silence of just being, for “the present moment to open up”
• “Crossing the Third Doorway we encounter the ineffable.”
• “This typically registers to the mind as an indescribable vastness, streaming from all sides, streaming form no sides, an ocean full and overflowing with a luminous nothing.”
• Language of light often used to describe this breakthrough, dark to the discursive mind but light to virtues and contemplation, a “luminous darkness” according to St Gregory of Nyssa
• After the Third Doorway, contemplative practice is “a silent and uncluttered gazing into luminous vastness that streams out as our own awareness

Conclusions

• Thomas Keating recommends 20 minutes of practice twice daily, author recommends trying 8–10 minutes and slowly increasing to 20, then 30, then an hour twice daily!
• Communal prayer is still important, but contemplation will change how you participate
  • Liturgical prayer becomes a fountain of grace
  • More able to see earthly liturgy is a reflexion of the heavenly

Chapter 5 - Riddles of Distraction

• “The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel: for learning … the sayings of the sages and their riddles.” Prov. 1:1–6
• The “doorways of the present moment” each guarded by an array of distractions that works in tandem with the prayer word, to teach and train us in contemplation
  • The distractions are like riddles (like those of King Solomon’s sages) that when answered open the door for you
  • Distractions have within them the silent depths that we seek
  • Therefore, it’s not that we need to be rid of distractions, but we need to make them relax their grip and open to reveal their treasure
  • A kind of occultatio mysteriorum, like gargoyles who ward off those who lack the proper motivation
  • The proper motivation is loving communion with God
• The three riddles:
  • Are you your thoughts and feelings?
  • What do thoughts and feelings appear in?
  • What is the nature of these thoughts and feelings and who is aware of them?

The Riddle of the First Doorway: Are you your thoughts and feelings?

• The purpose here is to pry us away from identification with our thoughts and feelings
• We become so wrapped up in our reactions to distractions, all the commentary we produce on things, we hardly notice it, but we feel the bondage
• Contemplation brings not peace but a sword, which is why people don’t stick with it, it is “the meeting of chaos that is salutary, not snorting lines of euphoric peace”!
• Cultivating the practice with the prayer word helps us face our feelings instead of reacting to them.
• We realize that we are not our thoughts and feelings.

The Riddle of the Second Doorway: What do thoughts and feelings appear in?

• After the First Doorway we are much more aware of what is happening within
• No longer victim, but witness of what’s happening
• Evagrius’ advice is not to run from thoughts or suppress them as this causes more commentary; instead observe without commenting
• Meet feelings before they have a chance to “whip themselves up” into a dramatic story or video with commentary
• Observe each thought as it arises, watch it come and go, like weather on Mount Sion
• Don’t bring your false map of what prayer should be like, we should wish for no prayer except the prayer God gives us, often very distracted and unsatisfying
• Be comfortable with the sense of always being a beginner
• We have been staring at thoughts and feelings as they move about like clouds around us, and we are cramped by them. Now we see that they move in a vast landscape. We can identify the clouds in the landscape but we no longer identify with them.

The Riddle of the Third Doorway: What is the nature of these thoughts and feelings, and who is aware of them?

• Approaching the Third Doorway, try to look over the shoulders of our distractions, searching for something else, which is God in his cloud of unknowing
• What is the nature of thoughts and feelings, that is, do the thoughts have any substance of their own, are they actually real in the way I think they are? They cannot withstand direct gaze, they are nothing, empty
• Shift your attention from the distraction to the awareness itself; see that what gazes into the luminous vastness is luminous vastness itself
• The thoughts themselves have no substance. What beholds the vast and flowing whole is the whole itself. Christ is the way through the door and Christ is the door (cf. John 10:9, “I am the door. By me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved.”).