Posted by This is part 2 of a presentation given to Benedict’s Well – a weekly group organised by the Oblates of the World Community for Christian Meditation.
The meditator, the contemplative, seeks God. We are committed to moving into God. Fundamental to this is the movement past all that is not God.
God is not image. God is not thought. God is not emotion. God is not feeling. These are not bad. They are, of course, necessary to a human life. A meditation practice contextualises these, integrates them into health. They are, however, not God.
We are committed to being divinised into a unique Love-expression on Earth. Noticing, observing, attending to anything else but the mantra is counter to this divinising pilgrimage as we meditate.
We must remember here that it’s ok, even necessary, to experience feelings during meditation. We experience; however, we don’t attend to the experience.
What does this mean?
John Main spoke about the pure experience of consciousness, and something called experiencing the experience.
There is the pure experience that happens separate to observation, separate to thought and image. It happens independent of self-consciousness, of ego.
Maybe this experience is contemplation itself – that movement of God, of Love in the heart (the centre of consciousness). If this gift is happening, we ignore it. That is to say, we don’t turn attention from the mantra to this experience. This experience is not God, it’s an experience of the movement of God. Ultimately, God is beyond this experience.
Maybe the experience we are having as we meditate is anxiety. Maybe it’s anger. Maybe its’s sadness. Perhaps there is resistance. These are welling and happening in and around the heart as we meditate. What do we do? We continue to gently say the mantra; we do not give attention to them. That is, we ignore them.
This seems harsh.
What may happen, over time, is that as the mantra draws attention into the heart, attention on the mantra also becomes attention on whatever is moving in the heart. However, rather than being caught up observing whatever is moving in the heart, be it peace, delight, anxiety, sadness, anger, resistance – attention can gently and lovingly be with these movements.
Here, listening to the mantra in the heart is allowing Love (who is God) to do what Love wants to do: heal us and divinise us.
Like Jesus in the gospel story, we can pass through the midst of what is clamouring for attention. Attention moves into the heart and, once there, participates with grace in the transforming of what, ultimately, gives the crowd so much energy: the split in human consciousness. Over time, self-consciousness fades and what is unconscious can be gently revealed in consciousness and healed. What remains is simple consciousness, being.
All this is possible because, as we meditate, we practice experiencing without observation.
To observe these experiences, be they contemplation, or fear, or anger, or sadness, or resistance, is to move attention to them, having an observed experience of them. It is to look at the crowd. This is to experience the experience.
Attention on the mantra keeps the experience pure, that is, untouched by observation.
This can be significant because as we observe these movements of the heart, we risk analysing them, and we also risk re-supressing and re-repressing them.
Attending to the mantra allows us to gently experience that which we may find at other times too difficult to experience, or too undeserving to experience.
We may simply not know how to experience without observation.
As we meditate, space is gradually allowed, a space free of self-conscious observation, for feelings to be experienced and integrated. The experience itself is often integration happening as we meditate. If we attend to the experience (that is, experience the experience) we risk integration ceasing.
Perhaps, however, in true Benedictine style, there may be an exception to this injunction to ignore everything else.
Maybe the feelings are too strong to ignore. They overwhelm us. We drop the mantra.
This is ok. To force ourselves in this instance to say the mantra is to do ourselves violence.
All we can do is continue in our commitment to a gentle un-noticing via the mantra, a gentle ignorance of what might be experienced. If the experience at that moment is too strong for this, then so be it. All will be well. In good time we will return to the mantra and go on our gently way through the crowd once more.
Beyond the crowd there is stillness. In this stillness is a silence that is beyond image, thought, emotion and feeling; this silence is as close as we can be to the divine in this part of life; it is a communion with God that we must be ignorant of if we are to be, here and now, wholly in it. During meditation, feelings associated with this communion are a gift to be experienced and ignored at the same time. Silence is beyond them. Â Â Â Â
So, here and now, we say our word in growing gentleness as an act of love, and in growing ignorance as an act of faith. When we discover ourselves distracted, we, as gently as we can, return attention to our word, ignoring everything else.