The fourth level of Scripture is the unitive (anagogical). That takes place when you are so immersed in the world of god that the word is coming out of you as a kind of continuing revelation. John Cassian wrote that one of the indications of the unitive understanding of Scripture is when you chant the psalms as if you were composing them. You have been assimilated to the world and vice versa. 

One other aspect of the allegorical sense of Scripture should not be passed over. This is the unloading of the unconscious, or purification. Purification occurs when, because of the trust and honesty that develops toward God as a result of a lively identification with the texts of Scripture, we are able to confront the darker side of our personality. We begin to experience the biblical desert. The biblical desert is not a place, but a state in which we experience inwardly what the passage of the Israelites through the desert and other similar texts symbolize outwardly.

The allegorical level of Scripture involves the emptying of the junk in the unconscious--that is, the emotional damage that has been done to us from the moment we were conceived until now. Once we have cracked this shell of our ordinary psychological level of awareness with the help of contemplative prayer, we still have to work our way through or rather endure the spontaneous evacuation of all that emotional garbage. It has to be emptied out before the experience of divine union can be fully achieved and the true self can begin to motivate us rather than the false self, with its excessive demands and hidden agendas.

Notice the spiral movement of the four senses of Scripture. You are not just going around in circles. As you return to the same passage in Lectio Divina, it begins to take on new meaning. As you gradually interiorize the four senses of Scripture in your life, you come back to the same texts but at a higher (or deeper) level of understanding. This spiral motion is the way all aspects of the contemplative life develop. It is not a rocket that goes straight up. You keep coming back constantly to the same old routines, but they are not really the same because you change, even though nothing may change outwardly in your life. This is the invitation that Christ seems to be offering when he says, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear," implying that we could listen better if we could only listen deeper.

Remember the apostles on their way to Jerusalem when Jesus was trying to tell them about his passion and resurrection and they couldn't understand him at all? "Their minds were a perfect blank," Mark said. They didn't want to hear, and so they couldn't. One of the great obstacles to hearing the word of God is precisely our identification with the false self, with its habitual expectations, demands, or "shoulds" that just won't go away. Even when one commits oneself to God consciously, the healing of the unconscious does not really get underway until one accesses the allegorical level. Contemplative prayer hastens the process of evolution by enabling us to hear the word of God without wax in our ears--that is, to be empty of attachment to our own ideas, programs, and plans. How are we going to get to that point without some discipline? I don't think we can. Asceticism for its own sake, however, merely feeds the emotional programs and their pathology. A true asceticism must work on our unconscious motivation.

Contemplative prayer deepens the process of listening, and it does so by two experiences. One is the affirmation of our being at the deepest level, which comes through peace and spiritual consolation and enables us to entrust to God our whole story Not that God doesn't know it already; he is just letting us in on the secret. Without trust in God, we cannot acknowledge the dark side of our personality, our mixed motivation, and our selfishness in its raw misery. Deep prayer increases our trust in God so that we can acknowledge anything and are not blown away by it. Without that trust, we maintain our defense mechanisms. We try to hide from the full light of that realization. Like Adam and Eve, we hide in the woods. On the other hand, as our dark side is confronted, it is removed. By our acknowledging it, God takes it away The process of contemplative prayer is a way of releasing what is in the unconscious. The psyche has a need for evacuation the same as the body, and it does this as a result of the deep rest of contemplative prayer.

How does the dynamic of the word of God function? Take as an example the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea. The literal meaning is the historical event in which the Egyptians allowed the Israelites to escape and then recanted. The Israelites crossed a swamp called the Red Sea. The Egyptians in pursuit were all drowned when the waters swept over them. The Israelites escaped to sing a song of liberation on the other side. Then they spent forty years in the desert trying to reach the Promised Land.

The moral sense arises when we try to put behind us what Egypt represents, namely, the tyranny of sin. The allegorical sense emerges when we experience the desert inwardly--that is, purification, waiting for God, and the rebellions of human nature when it is confronted by the temptations of the desert. Finally, the unitive sense is the experience of actually reaching the Promised Land, the symbol of peace and divine union. The word "rest," or quies in Latin, has a classical meaning in Christian tradition. "Come to me all ye who labor and I will give you rest," is the famous invitation of Jesus. Mental and physical rest are great values. But a much deeper rest is found in freedom from the tyranny of sinful habits and compulsions. A still deeper rest is freedom from the roots of sin. Then one's emotions are no longer interested in those agendas of the false self but reverberate to the values of the gospel, finding joy in the practice of virtue and in freedom from the dark side of one's personality. Finally, the greatest rest of all is the rest of perfect love in which one can rest in the midst of the most intense activity since there is no draining of energy because of attachments or frustrations. With no emotional programs for happiness lurking in the unconscious to be frustrated, one can be motivated entirely by the will of God. The deepest rest comes from love.

Every time we move to a new level of faith, there is an initial experience of disintegration, distress, confusion, and darkness. If we are not forewarned about the spiritual journey, it feels like something has gone wrong--"Have I committed a secret sin?" This is the normal way that the present level of our understanding--our attitude toward ourselves, other people, and God--experiences that our life just does not work any more at that level. We are challenged or forced to move to a deeper level.

The transitional stage is always painful because we know only where we are now, and we are not always ready, especially in the beginning stages of that journey, to move into the unknown. What we know is better than what we don't know. We resist the moment of creative change.

What moves us from one level to another? That is the question. Is it something we do? According to the method of Lectio Divina, we just keep reading the Scriptures; that is all. We just keep listening, growing in trust, and growing in love as in any relationship. The Spirit who wrote the Scriptures is within us and enlightens us as to what the Scriptures are saying to us. The word is ultimately addressed to our inmost being. It starts with what is most outward and works toward what is most inward to awaken us to the abiding presence of God. When we are in the unitive understanding of Scripture, the outward word confirms what we already know and experience.

Within this dynamic of Lectio Divina we can sense the important role of contemplative prayer. In classic monastic practice, the spiraling movement of prayer within a single period of Lectio Divina--from discursive reflection on the word, to affective response, to resting in contemplation--seems to be the mysterious "drive shaft" in the larger movement through the four senses of Scripture, and particularly toward the allegorical and unitive levels where purification of the unconscious and the unitive state are experienced. In the normal development of Lectio, we move through the various stages of prayer without even thinking about them and without the self-conscious concern for our place in the spiritual journey, a preoccupation that tended to enter the tradition after the Reformation when the term "mental prayer" was invented. The term "mental prayer" does not appear in the literature prior to the sixteenth century.

In the way that history regularly deals with spiritual movements, people tended to get locked into categories. With the tendency to analyze that was so characteristic of the late Scholastic Middle Ages, the spontaneity of the spiritual journey got lost, and the final stage of Lectio, resting in God--the purpose of all the other stages--tended to be left out. One was expected to do spiritual reading and discursive mediation for x number of years; if one lived to be very old--or maybe on one's deathbed--one might hope for an experience of contemplation. But in actual fact one rarely or never expected it and hence did not take steps to prepare for it. As a consequence, it got to be more and more identified as a form of prayer that belonged exclusively in a cloister--and not even commonly there. The integral link between Lectio and contemplation was broken.

That link needs to be restored. The two practices grew up as one in Christian tradition and organically nourish each other. The experience of resting in God when Lectio moves to contemplation invites the emergence and healing of the unconscious. This in turn paves the way for us to listen and respond to the gospel at ever deeper levels of our being.

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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