Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes

As we enter the path of transformation, the most valuable thing we have working in our favor is our yearning.

RESIST no thought; RETAIN no thought; REACT to no thought; RETURN to the sacred word.

Jesus never asked anyone to form a church, ordain priests, develop elaborate rituals and institutional cultures, and splinter into denominations. His two great requests were that we “love one another as I have loved you” and that we share bread and wine together as an open channel of that interabiding love.

Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness.

Philippians 2:5: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” The words call us up short as to what we are actually supposed to be doing on this path: not just admiring Jesus, but acquiring his consciousness.

It's not about right belief; it's about right practice.

It’s very, very simple. You sit, either in a chair or on a prayer stool or mat, and allow your heart to open toward that invisible but always present Origin of all that exists.

To mourn is to touch directly the substance of divine compassion.

All will come of its own accord in good time and with abundant fullness, so long as one does not attempt to hoard or cling.

Somewhere in those depths of silence I came upon my first experiences of God as a loving presence that was always near, and prayer as a simple trust in that presence.

What the theologian shrinks from, the poet grasps intuitively.

What Jesus is saying here, powerfully and clearly, is that if you do the work of transforming your being, moving beyond the egoic mind, then you become a living spirit.

When the field of vision has been unified, the inner being comes to rest, and that inner peaceableness flows into the outer world is harmony and compassion.

Beginning in infancy (or even before) each of us, in response to perceived threats to our well-being, develops a false self: a set of protective behaviors driven at root by a sense of need and lack. The essence of the false self is driven, addictive energy, consisting of tremendous emotional investment in compensatory "emotional programs for happiness," as Keating calls them.

Meditation is the tool you use to “upgrade your operating system,” to move from that “either/or” thinking of the binary mind into the more spacious heart awareness that sustains the wisdom way of knowing.

Blessed are the ones who have become spiritually "domesticated"; the ones who have tamed the wild animal energy within them, the passions and compulsions of our lower nature.

As we actually taste the flavor of what he's teaching, we begin to see that it's not proverbs for daily living, or ways of being virtuous. He's proposing a total meltdown and recasting of human consciousness, bursting through the tiny acorn-selfhood that we arrived on the planet with into the oak tree of our fully realized personhood. He pushes us toward it, teases us, taunts us, encourages us, and ultimately walks us there.

Somehow when the heart becomes single, the rest will follow.

A sophiological Christianity focuses on the path.

Most important of all, do everything you can to nurture your spiritual intelligence. It is your only genuine source of hope, direction, meaning, and comfort.

We all live with this terrible, heartbreaking hypocrisy in Christianity, when the teaching finally leaves us in th dust. How do we die before we die? How do we love our neighbors as ourselves? How do we bridge the gap between what we believe and what we can actually live?

Centering Prayer is not about developing concentration, attaining clear mind, conscious presence, a strong witnessing “I,” some desired state. In Centering Prayer you merely practice and practice the core kenotic motion: “let go, make space, unclench”—thought by thought by thought.

At the center of our being is a point of pure nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark that belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God written in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.4

One can only imagine how greatly the political and religious culture wars of our era could be eased by this simple courtesy of the Law of Three: (1) the enemy is never the problem but the opportunity; (2) the problem will never be solved through eliminating or silencing the opposition but only through creating a new field of possibility large enough to hold the tension of the opposites and launch them in a new direction. Imagine what a different world it would be if these two simple precepts were internalized and enacted.

Where there's surrender, synchronicity tends to follow, which is one of the most delightful side effects of a surrender practice.

If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you will kill you.

Wisdom is passionate and heartfelt, giving rise to compassion and love.

Find the place where your feet know how to walk / And follow your own trail home." The way to your heart begins with your feet on the ground, quietly but intensely present.

This is crucial: The reward for following Wisdom is immediate. The Way to is the Way of.

To walk the way of Wisdom is to become transparent to the Light that is your very being.

Beneath the surface there is a deeper and vastly more authentic Self, but its presence is usually veiled by the clamor of the smaller “I” with its

Judaism says that you are to partner with God in the work of tikkun, repairing the world with justice, kindness, and humility.

JESUS’S PATH WAS exactly that, a radically unmanageable simplicity—nothing held back, nothing held onto. It was almost too much for his followers to bear. Even within the gospels themselves, we see a tendency to rope him back in again, to turn his teachings into a manageable complexity. Take his radically simple saying: “Those who would lose their life will find it; and those who would keep it will lose it.” Very quickly the gospels add a caveat: “Those who would lose their life for my sake and the sake of the gospel will find it.” That may be the way you’ve always heard this teaching, even though most biblical scholars agree that the italicized words are a later addition. But you can see what this little addition has done: it has shifted the ballpark away from the transformation of consciousness (Jesus’s original intention) and into martyrdom, a set of sacrificial actions you can perform with your egoic operating system still intact. Right from

The Risen Lord is indeed risen. Present, intimate, creative, 'closer than your own heartbeat,' accessed through your vulnerability, your capacity for intimacy. The imaginal realm is real, and through it you will never be separated from any one or anything you have ever loved, for love is the ground in which you live and move and have your being. This is the message that Mary Magdalene has perennially to bring. This is the message we most need to hear.

I find nothing in the Gospel of Thomas that contradicts any of Jesus’s teachings in the canonical gospels. Rather, it rounds them out metaphysically and creates a newfound sense of awe as we see just how original and subtle his understanding really is. He is the first truly integral teacher to appear on this planet. As we take a fresh look at these teachings at once familiar and strange, we’re catapulted forward again along a path that rings with the power of truth.

I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, and so I created the worlds both visible and invisible.”4 Both the saying itself and the understanding that illumines it derive from a profound mystical intuition that our created universe is a vast mirror, or ornament (and the Greek word “cosmos” literally means “an ornament”), through which divine potentiality—beautiful, fathomless, endlessly creative—projects itself into form in order to realize fully the depths of divine love.

The Jesus Trajectory Love is recklessness, not reason. Reason seeks a profit. Loves comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed. Yet in the midst of suffering, Love proceeds like a millstone, hard-surfaced and straight forward. Having died to self-interest, she risks everything and asks for nothing. Love gambles away every gift God bestows. The words above were written by the great Sufi mystic Jalalludin Rumi.6 But better than almost anything in Christian scripture, they closely describe the trajectory that Jesus himself followed in life.

Letting go is not in order to get something better (the point Paul misses in the second half of his Philippians hymn); in and of itself it is the something better. For it immediately restores the broken link with the dynamic ground of reality, which by its very nature flows forth from a fullness beyond imagining.

You are the breath of God. You are the way God is aware of God in the immediacy of your life. You are the way God feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, frees the wrongly imprisoned. You are the way God brings justice, mercy, and humility to life. But because you want to be more, you end up being less: the way God brings horror, hate, and holocaust to every corner of the globe.

No one, of course, had foreseen that the first annual Eagle Island Wisdom School would follow so closely on the heels of the events of September 11, but in its shadow our time together was imbued with a newfound sense of purpose that what we were doing was no longer merely a spiritual luxury but a prophetic first step toward the recovery of a vision of human purpose badly eclipsed-and desperately needed-in the Western world.

And so meditation rests on the wager that if you can simply break the tyranny of your ordinary awareness, the rest will begin to unfold itself. At first when you begin a practice of meditation, it feels like a place you go to. You may think of it as “my inner sanctuary” or “my place apart with God.” But as the practice becomes more and more established in you so that this inner sanctuary begins to flow out into your life, it becomes more and more a place you come from.

Jesus taught from the conviction that we human beings are victims of a tragic case of mistaken identity. The person I normally take myself to be—that busy, anxious little “I” so preoccupied with its goals, fears, desires, and issues—is never even remotely the whole of who I am, and to seek the fulfillment of my life at this level means to miss out on the bigger life. This is why, according to his teaching, the one who tries to keep his “life” (i.e., the small one) will lose it, and the one who is willing to lose it will find the real thing.

What goes on in those silent depths during the time of Centering Prayer is no one’s business, not even your own; it is between your innermost being and God; that place where, as St. Augustine once said, “God is closer to your soul than you are yourself.” Your own subjective experience of the prayer may be that nothing happened—except for the more-or-less continuous motion of letting go of thoughts. But in the depths of your being, in fact, plenty has been going on, and things are quietly but firmly being rearranged. That interior rearrangement—or to give it its rightful name, that interior awakening—is the real business of Centering Prayer,

PLEASE COME HOME Please come home. Please come home. Find the place where your feet know where to walk And follow your own trail home. Please come home. Please come home into your own body, Your own vessel, your own earth. Please come home into each and every cell, And fully into the space that surrounds you. Please come home. Please come home to trusting yourself, And your instincts and your ways and your knowings, And even the particular quirks of your personality. Please come home. Please come home and once you are firmly there, Please stay home awhile and come to a deep rest within. Please treasure your home. Please love and embrace your home. Please get a deep, deep sense of what it's like to he truly home. Please come home. Please come home. And when you're really, really ready, And there's a detectable urge on the outbreath, then please come out. Please come home and please come forward. Please express who you are to us, and please trust us To see you and hear you and touch you And recognize you as best we can. Please come home. Please come home and let us know All the nooks and crannies that are calling to be seen. Please come home, and let us know the More That is there that wants to come out. Please come home. Please come home For you belong here now. You belong among us. Please inhabit your place fully so we can learn from you, From your voice and your ways and your presence. Please come home. Please come home. And when you feel yourself home, please welcome us too, For we too forget that we belong and are welcome, And that we are called to express fully who we are. Please come home. Please come home. You and you and you and me. Please come home. Please come home. Thank you, Earth, for welcoming us. And thank you touch of eyes and ears and skin, 'Touch of love for welcoming us. May we wake up and remember who we truly are.

It’s a long, slow process. And it has a couple of component pieces. The core attitude that the Christian tradition works with is the piece called ‘surrender’ or ‘kenosis’. Kenosis is the word in Greek which Saint Paul used to depict ‘putting on the mind of Christ’. And it, basically, is pretty close to what the Buddhists mean by non-clinging. Doesn’t hang on, doesn’t insist, doesn’t assert, doesn’t grab, doesn’t brace, doesn’t defend, you know. It’s the mind that [she sighs and relaxes outwards]. We try to put that mind on. In one of those ancient early Christian writings, the Gospel of Thomas, the students asked Jesus, “What are your students like, how would you describe them?” and He said, “They are like small children, playing in a field not their own. When the landlords come and demand, “Give us back our field!” the children return it by stripping themselves and standing naked before them.” So that’s the description from Jesus of this process. So it’s the lifelong practice, the core practice, of learning to recognise when you’ve gotten into one of these postures: tightened, urgent, angry, self-important, and in that moment… Open to Him. So that’s the hang of it, that’s the heart of it combined with a couple of complementary practices which come from the mindfulness sector. The one being – the piece that I learned from the Gurdjieff Work – is to learn how to even notice when you’re getting into these states of constriction, and smaller-self urgency, and automaticity, because we don’t notice that automatically. It’s like you don’t notice the moment you fall asleep at night. So you sink into these lower, unfree, ugly states of being automatically. So you have to learn to even notice when that happens. And the second – Interviewer: There is this point… where you see you could go both ways, you could serve the ego or you can surrender. And you can decide. Cynthia: Yeah. There is definitely that point. What makes it difficult though is that for a long, long time in the practice you can see that point. You can see yourself going over the waterfall, but you don’t have the power to swim away yet. So what you have to do is live in the gap and say, “Oh my God, look at what’s happening to me, I can see that I’m sinking but I don’t have the force to stop.” And it takes a long time until we have the force. And to be able to see that you’re falling into a bad state doesn’t, for a long time, mean you can do anything about it. I think that’s a truism that disappoints many people, so the even more painful penance is you just have to sit there and watch it. Your only real choice is can you just see it, and the horror and remorse and helplessness, or do you just pretend, “Oh well, I’m really right! I’m going to fight for this for all…” Can you just go with the lower state or can you wait in the gap? So for me that’s brought a whole new meaning to that whole British cliché ‘mind the gap’!

The gospel that day (Matthew 4:19) described Jesus’s recruitment of his first disciples from among the Galilean fishermen and concluded with the line, “at once they left their nets and followed him.” The monk merely commented, “Would that we might do the same.

The practice of meditation is indeed an authentic experience of dying to self ... it is like a "mini-death," at least from the perspective of the ego ... We let go of our self-talk, our interior dialogue, our fears, wants, needs, preferences, daydreams, and fantasies. These all become just "thoughts," and we learn to let them go. ... In this sense, meditation is a mini-rehearsal for the hour of our own death, in which the same thing will happen. There is a moment when the ego is not longer able to hold us together, and our identity is cast to the mercy of Being itself. This is the existential experience of "losing one's life." ... Just as in meditation we participate in the death of Christ, we also participate in [Christ's] resurrection. At the end of those twenty minutes or so of sitting, when the bell has rung, we are still here! For twenty minutes we have not been holding ourselves in life, and yet life remains. Something has held us and carried us. And this same something, we gradually come to trust, will hold and carry us at the hour of our death. To ... really know this is the beginning of resurrection life.

That person does indeed see from a perspective of singleness—and just as Jesus called for, there is now no separation between God and humans, or between humans and other humans, simply because separation isn’t factored into the new operating system. It is no longer necessary for perception, so it simply falls away like scales from the eyes.

Rather, it perceives by means of harmony. It’s like hearing the note G played and instantly hearing a D and a B around it that make it into a chord, that join it to a whole. When heart-awareness becomes fully formed within a person, he or she will be operating out of nondual consciousness. But it’s not simply a higher level of the same old mind; it’s a whole new operating system! That person does indeed see from a perspective of singleness—and just as Jesus called for, there is now no separation between God and humans, or between humans and other humans, simply because separation isn’t factored into the new operating system. It is no longer necessary for perception, so it simply falls away like scales from the eyes.

Jesus here places his entire bet on the process of interabiding: I in you, you in me, all in God, God in all. It is not a ladder but a circle that brings us to God: the continuously renewed giving and receiving which in its totality is where God dwells.

The other reason why the mind has been regarded with a certain amount of suspicion is its tendency to pull us into a smaller, mentally constructed sense of ourselves: to confuse being with thinking.

Every moment of conscious presence actually takes place in eternity.

In one of his most beautiful insights, the contemporary Christian mystic Thomas Merton once wrote, “At the center point of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point of spark which belongs entirely to God.

As in the Gospel of Thomas, it’s merely the “seek and you shall find” part without the confusion, wonder, and reorientation—and also, without the “sovereignty.” For all such spiritual sleepwalking bypasses that crucial first step, that moment when the heart has to find its way not through external conditioning but through a raw immediacy of presence. Only there—in “the cave of the heart,” as the mystics are fond of calling it—does a person come in contact with his or her own direct knowingness. And only out of this direct knowingness is sovereignty born, one’s own inner authority.

My prayer tends very much toward what you call fana [annihilation in God]. There is in my heart this great thirst to recognize totally the nothingness of all that is not God. My prayer is then a kind of praise rising up out of the center of Nothing and Silence. If I am still present “myself,” this I recognize as an obstacle about which I can do nothing unless He Himself removes the obstacle. If He wills, He can make the Nothingness into a total clarity. If He does not will, then the Nothingness seems itself to be an object and remains an obstacle. Such is my ordinary way of prayer, or meditation. It is not “thinking about” anything, but a direct seeking of the Face of the Invisible, who cannot be found unless we become lost in Him who is invisible.3

Author Cynthia Bourgeault presents an instructive parable in her book The Wisdom Way of Knowing that captures the essence of what this ancient knowledge tradition says to us about us:   Once upon a time, in a not-so-far-away land, there was a kingdom of acorns, nestled at the foot of a grand old oak tree. Since the citizens of this kingdom were modern,

In prayer we acknowledge God as the suprenie source from which flows all strength, all goodness, all existence, acknowledging that we have our being, lift, itself from this supreme Power. One can then communicate with this Source, worship it, and ultirmatelil place one"s eery center in it.

Lady Catherine Bourgeault placed her fork on her plate and ended the pretense that she was enjoying her supper. She had scolded the cook repeatedly, but as long as the baron did not care nothing would change.

As Cynthia Bourgeault summarizes it: “Our only truly essential human task here, Jesus teaches, is to grow beyond the survival instincts of the animal brain and the egoic operating system into the kenotic joy and generosity of full human personhood. His mission was to show us how to do this.” Jesus

All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. —T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding

(As the poet Rumi says, “Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere; they’re in each other all along.

The gospels record a comical but poignant trail of miscomprehensions and botched efforts to follow the master’s lead, culminating in his near-total abandonment during the crucifixion.

Because we sit there in the gap for a long time saying [gasps]. And that’s when you begin to learn the meaning of ‘Lord Have Mercy’. I can’t do anything to raise my state but what I can do is stay honestly ahead of, in plain sight, what’s happened, acknowledging. Here I am. And I think it’s from that repeated acknowledgement of my own helplessness at that level, but refusing to simply hide from that helplessness, that gradually, gradually, gradually the energy that had originally gone into your, sort of, ego programmes gets recaptured to begin to hold this other kind of field of awareness, of attentiveness, that’s not identified with that small self acting out and can begin to become a nest for that deeper and fuller and truer wiser self to live in. And then we begin to Be. Then we begin to have Being. And it’s from that Being that sometimes we can pull ourselves out of that spiral we were heading into, and it’s from that Being that we can begin to offer our force of Being to the world as love, as assistance, as a shift in the energy field for someone else. ‘Baraka’ the Sufis call it. But it comes slowly, because you can’t just, kind of, click your heels together and have Being. It has to accumulate slowly in your being for a life of painfully bearing the crucifixion of inner honesty, and slowly it emerges. Interviewer: So that brings up the question in me, what is then freedom? Because you go on this journey. We start out on this journey to become free, which we call enlightenment. Cynthia: Well, you know, we have so many mixed metaphors as Western and Eastern ways of contexting reality come together like tectonic plates. And they don’t often match up. I think, in a very obvious way, freedom is easy. At the obvious level, what it means is what you’d call ‘freedom from the false self’. Most of us think we’re free, and yet we are not free at all because we are under the absolute compulsion of agendas, addictions and aversions that have been programmed into us from early life, and sometimes from the womb. We have our values, we have our triggers, we have our flash points, we have our agendas. And, as A.H. Almaas said so famously, “Freedom to be your ego is not freedom.” Because that’s slavery. You’re being pulled around by a bull ring in the nose. So part of the work of freedom begins when you can stabilise in yourself this thing that some of the Eastern traditions helpfully call ‘witnessing presence’, which is something deeper that’s not dependent on the pain-pleasure principle, that’s not attracted by attraction, or repulsed by aversion. You know, as my teacher Rafe, the hermit monk of Snowmass, Colorado, used to say, “I want to have enough Being to be nothing.” Which means he is not dependant on the world to give him his identity, because he’s learned his identity nests in something much deeper. [...] And as you finally become free to follow what you might call the ‘homing beacon of your own inner calling’, you realise that it’s only in that complete obedience that freedom lies. And, of course, the trick to that is the word ‘obedience’, which we usually thinks means knuckling under, or capitulating, really comes from the Latin ‘ob audire’, which means ‘to listen deeply’. So, as we listen deeply to the fundamental, what you might call the ‘tuning fork’ of our being – which is given to us not by ourself and is never about self-realisation because the self melts as that realisation comes closer – you find the only freedom is to be your own cell in the vast mystical body of God.

the apt conclusion may be not that the universe is meaningless but that we have identified meaning with rational explanation. "Might it not be the case that the reason for existence has no explanation in the usual sense?" he asks-and then answers himself with a remarkable observation: "This does not mean that the universe is absurd or meaningless. Only that an understanding of its existence and properties lies outside the usual categories of rational human thought"5

A soldier bursts into a monastery cell and thrusts his rifle into the belly of a meditating monk. The monk goes right on meditating. “You don’t understand,” says the soldier, a bit taken aback: “I have the power to take your life.” The monk briefly opens his eyes and smiles sweetly at the soldier. “No, it’s you who don’t understand. I have the power to let you.

With nothing to gain from the human adventure—nothing to prove, nothing to achieve, and a dangerously unboundaried heart that left him defenseless against the hard edges of this world—Jesus came anyway: that, claims Bernadette Roberts, was the real crucifixion!

sacred mystery of Jesus’s passage through the human realm is a profound testament to love.

Could it be that this earthly realm, not in spite of but because of its very density and jagged edges, offers precisely the conditions for the expression of certain aspects of divine love that could become real in no other way? This world does indeed show forth what love is like in a particularly intense and costly way. But when we look at this process more deeply, we can see that those sharp edges we experience as constriction at the same time call forth some of the most exquisite dimensions of love, which require the condition of finitude in order to make sense—qualities such as steadfastness, tenderness, commitment, forbearance, fidelity, and forgiveness. These mature and subtle flavors of love have no real context in a realm where there are no edges and boundaries, where all just flows. But when you run up against the hard edge and have to stand true to love anyway, what emerges is a most precious taste of pure divine love. God has spoken his most intimate name.

And here we arrive at the full problem of the resurrection body. What is it? Modern science has come to the understanding that matter is only condensed energy – which, moreover, was known by alchemists and Hermeticists thousands of years ago. Sooner or later science will also discover the fact that what it calls “energy” is only condensed psychic force – which discovery will lead in the end to the establishment of the fact that all psychic force is the “condensation” of purely and simply, of consciousness, i.e., of spirit. Meditations on the Tarot

On the up side, the fruit of her “blackness” is a feisty independence that makes its presence felt throughout the poem. She tends her own garden, has her own freedom, and makes her own choices. In a world geared toward the silencing of women’s voices, her own voice speaks loud and clear.

The imaginal penetrates this denser world in much the same way as the fragrance of perfume penetrates an entire room, subtly enlivening and harmonizing. My favorite image to begin to access this admittedly mind-bending notion still comes by way of a striking vignette in Isaak Dineson’s Out of Africa, in which she recounts coming upon a beautiful snake moving through the grass, its skin glistening with subtle, variegated colors. So taken with that snake was she that her servant killed it, skinned it, and made it up into a belt for her. But to her dismay, the once glistening skin is now merely dull and grey, because all along the beauty had lain not in the physical skin, but in the quality of the aliveness. The imaginal is that quality of aliveness moving through this realm, interpenetrating, cohering, filling things with the fragrance of implicit meaning whose lines do not converge in this world alone, but at a point beyond. As the Gospel of Thomas describes it: I am the light shining upon all things, I am the sum of everything, for from me Everything has come, and toward me Everything returns. Pick up a stone and there I am, Split a piece of wood and you will find me there.

The other reason why the mind has been regarded with a certain amount

Only from the level of spiritual awareness do you begin to see and trust that all is held in the divine Mercy. But once grounded in that certainty, you can begin to reach out to the world with the same wonderful, generous vulnerability that we see in Christ.

Ephesians 3:16–19 (NIV), which is really the charter of contemplative prayer: I pray that out of his glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled with the very nature of God.

it’s difficult to put words around an experience that is deeply personal and intuitive. But in general, you’re in the right ballpark if you sense your aim as “to be totally open to God.” Totally available, all the way down to that innermost point of your being; deeper than your thinking, deeper than your feelings, deeper than your memories and desires, deeper than your usual psychological sense of yourself—even deeper than your presence! For ultimately, what will go on in this prayer is “in secret

Once you see this, it’s the touchstone throughout all his teaching: Let go! Don’t cling! Don’t hoard! Don’t assert your importance! Don’t fret. “Do not be afraid, little flock, it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom!” (Luke 12:32).

In various traditions the witness has been identified with “Real I,” “the true self,” and “essential being,” but all of this naming misses the point. Witnessing is, if anything, a verb: an innate capacity of human consciousness to be present to itself as a field of awareness. Though personal, it is not a person—not an other—but a subtle capacity of consciousness itself, so far as we know gifted to the human species alone. Its purpose seems to be to keep track simultaneously of the horizontal axis—our life in time—and the pure divine awareness that is always intersecting this axis.

In a cosmos whose innermost nature has been revealed as Mercy, we need merely rest in the goodness of that embrace and trust,

But when this instruction is understood not as the deliberate cultivation of an interior vacuum (“sinking mind,” as it’s sometimes called), but rather, as a willing divestment of all possessions even up to and including personal consciousness, its appropriateness becomes clear—and its ability to inform the Christian life, dazzling. Slowly, steadily, Centering Prayer patterns into its practitioners what I would call the quintessential Jesus response: the meeting of any and all life situations by the complete, free giving of oneself.

From this quantum shift in the hardwiring of perception, of course, the much celebrated spiritual and moral attainments would understandably flow, since a mind that does not need to separate and exclude in order to perceive reality will encounter far less resistance in the current of life and inflict far less violence upon others.

The great wager around which the Western Inner tradition has encamped is that as one is able to release the heart from its enslavement to the passions, this other heart emerges: this “organ of contemplation,” of luminous sight and compassionate action. For what one “sees” and entrains with is none other than this higher order of divine coherence and compassion, which can be verified as objectively real, but becomes accessible only when the heart is able to rise to this highest level and assume its cosmically appointed function.

As Boehme puts it: “When you remain silent from the thinking and willing of self, the eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking will be revealed in you. . . . Your own hearing, willing and seeing hinder you so that you do not see and hear God.

Nada te turbe, nada te’espante; Quien a Dios tiene nada le falta. Nada te turbe, nada te’espante, Solo Dios basta.

contemplative prayer is simply a wordless, trusting opening of self to the divine presence. Far from being advanced, it is about the simplest form of prayer there is. Children recognize it instantly—as I did—perhaps because, as the sixteenth-century mystic John of the Cross intimates, “Silence is God’s first language.”1

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our son-ship. It is like a pure diamond blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it, we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.3

is to break through the bonds that attach the individual to the world of his senses and separate him from his eternal nature.

Centering Prayer is aimed at healing the violence in ourselves and purifying the unconscious of its hidden and flawed motivation that reduces and can even cancel out the effectiveness of the external works of mercy, justice, and peace.

Prayer is not a request for God’s favors. True, it has been used to obtain the satisfaction of personal desires. It has even been adopted to reinforce prejudices, justify violence, and create barriers between people and between countries. But genuine prayer is based on recognizing the Origin of all that exists, and opening ourselves to it. . . . In prayer we acknowledge God as the supreme source from which flows all strength, all goodness, all existence, acknowledging that we have our being, life itself from this supreme Power. One can then communicate with this Source, worship it, and ultimately place one’s very center in it. Piero Ferrucci, Ineffable Grace (p. 254)

what remains with me vividly to this day is my recollection of a circle of light that shone out from Rafe and enfolded us both, and the deep sense of comfort and familiarity between us, as if we had somehow always known each other and were merely resuming a conversation that had gone on from eternity.