As we saw in the last chapter, our consciousness can be likened to a river, with our thoughts passing like boats along its surface. The surface of the river represents our ordinary psychological level of awareness. But a river also has its depths, and so does our awareness. Beneath the ordinary psychological level of awareness, there is the spiritual level of awareness where our intellect and will are functioning in their own proper way in a spiritual manner. Deeper still, or more "centered," is the Divine Indwelling where the divine energy is present as the source of our being and inspiration at every moment (see Diagram 4). Personal effort and grace meet at the most centered or inward part of our being, which the mystics call the "ground of being" or the "peak of the spirit."

Diagram 4

LEVELS OF AWARENESS

Many methods of meditation make use of "sacred words," but these words are used in different ways, aimed at different levels of our awareness.

The sacred word is a gesture of the consent of our spiritual will to God's presence in our inmost being. The word appears in our imagination but exercises no direct, quieting function on the level of our ordinary stream of consciousness. Rather, it only expresses our intention, the choice of our will to open and surrender to God's presence. This is the difference between Centering Prayer and a practice that utilizes some form of attention, as in looking at a candle, repeating a mantra, or visualizing some image. That is why we do not have to repeat the sacred word continuously We only use it to maintain our intention of faith and love toward God. As long as thoughts go by like boats on the surface of the river without attracting our desire or causing an aversion, we do not need to return to the sacred word. In these instances, there is no interruption in the orientation of our intention toward God.

When we consent to the presence and action of God using the sacred word as a symbol of our intent, this movement of our will manifests itself very delicately in our imagination. The word does not have to be carefully articulated. It is neither reflected upon nor analyzed. It is simply a gesture or a symbol. Starting from one of the external senses (we can use a sacred gaze or breath as well), we move to the spiritual level and to the spiritual senses, which are analogous to the external senses. The sacred word comes from the heart and reverberates in the imagination only momentarily, whereas a mantra or a concentrative process is designed to slow down the flow of thoughts.

The primary function of the sacred word is not to push thoughts away or to thin them out. It is rather to express our intention to love God, to be in God's presence, and to submit to the Spirit's action during the time of prayer. It is only when one of the boats does not simply go by but attracts or repels us that we need to return to our sacred symbol. The reason is simple: when we are attracted to a particular thought, we have begun to lose the purity of our general loving intention to be in God's presence.

The sacred word, as we saw, is like a focusing apparatus on a camera, but the focus adjusts not an image but our intention. At the start of our prayer, we direct our general loving attention toward God, but there is no content. That is why it may be difficult for some to feel at ease with this practice at first. We let all particular thoughts go by without exception, no matter whether they are pleasant or painful or whether they bring spiritual consolation or a bombardment of thoughts and feelings. Occasionally, if we are bombarded by a particularly heavy siege from the unconscious, it may be difficult or impossible to return to the sacred word. Then we just sit with it, and the pain itself becomes our sacred symbol. Such surrender is still a deep consent to God's presence and action within. There will be more on this in Chapter 8.

All methods that lead to contemplation are more or less aimed at bypassing the thinking process. The reason is that our thinking process tends to reinforce our addictive process - our frenzy to "get something" from the outer world to fuel our compulsions or to mask our pain. If we can just rest on a regular basis for twenty to thirty minutes without thinking, we begin to see that we are not our thoughts. We have thoughts, but we are not our thoughts. Most people suffer because they think that they are their thoughts and if their thoughts are upsetting, distressing, or evil, they are stuck with them. If they just stopped thinking for a while every day as a discipline, they would begin to see that they do not have to be dominated by their thoughts.

Please remember that the term "thoughts" in our explanation of Centering Prayer includes not just concepts or images, but feelings, sense impressions from within and without, and even spiritual sensations. Every perception whatsoever goes under the umbrella of "thoughts."

The various methods that prepare for contemplation speak to the psyche in different ways. If we look at the whole spectrum of these varied forms of preparation, we can see that they range from receptive methods to concentrative methods. A concentrative method would be one in which we do much or all of the work - that is to say, when we constantly repeat a mantra, focus on our breathing, look at a candle or similar object, maintain a certain posture, or think about a Zen koan (an unresolvable conundrum). In a receptive method such as Centering Prayer, there is no attempt to focus attention. Our effort remains minimal.

Some methods are more concentrative; others are more receptive (see Diagram 2, page 56). In Zen there is a particular practice that is quite close to Centering Prayer in that one just sits in the prescribed posture, paying no attention to thoughts. Maintaining the posture, at least in the beginning, requires some effort. Centering Prayer, which, does not even require posture beyond "relaxed but alert " is about as far in the receptive mode as one can go.

It is intentionality that distinguishes Centering Prayer from other forms of prayer. The difference between attention and intention is a difficult distinction for people who are not doing Centering Prayer. They see the external similarities between Centering Prayer and other forms of meditation and think they must be the same.

In Centering Prayer, we are not even attending to the thoughts going by. Indeed we are abstracting from the whole level of our ordinary psychological awareness in order to cultivate spiritual awareness.

We all begin life as a single cell. This is our personal big bang, so to speak. But there is enough energy in the single cell to sustain the whole rest of our lives. Let us call that our inmost center, or the divine ground of our being (see Diagram 4, page 67). From that center unfolds the true self and the right manifestation of that energy. We know that for reasons we call the human condition, we are not in contact with our true self. In response to the pain that may go back to infancy, birth, or even prior to birth as some recent therapeutic practice suggests, we develop very early in life what is called the false self, which represses the true self and hides its potential from us. This false self interacts with our environment under the influence of pain and self-protectiveness with the net result that we experience ourselves most of the time dominated by external events and our emotional reactions to them. The false self is functioning when we are dominated by external events instead of acting with freedom.

Our ordinary psychological awareness is somewhat like being at a movie that is extremely engrossing. Being dominated by events and our emotional reactions to them is like being at a movie that is so good that we identify totally with the plot or with one or another of the characters and forget that we are in the theater. Similarly, we are most of the time out of touch with the spiritual level of our being and allow events to dominate us rather than choosing what to do with them. As we work on this process through Centering Prayer and recognize the dynamics of the unconscious, our spiritual faculties and true self are being liberated. That experience relativizes our emotional investment in symbols of happiness demanded by the false self. The reason is we are beginning to experience inner peace, which is the happiness we really seek. In the practice of Centering Prayer, we encounter the same emotional reactions we had before, only now we notice them instead of blindly reacting to them. It is essential that we learn to recognize the tendencies of our false self if we want to be happy, because only in recognizing them can we change them. We do not have to analyze them; we just have to notice them and let them go.

As interior freedom develops, we become like people at a lousy movie who know that they can get up and leave anytime. We also know that we are free to stay. This is the difference between a spiritual practice that is working and one that has not yet begun. In a process that has not begun, we continue to allow ourselves to be dominated by other people, circumstances, and the inner dynamics that were set in place in early childhood and over which we did not have control. As we begin to practice, we know that we have to own these dynamics in order to move beyond them, become our true selves, and manifest all the creative possibilities that God has given us. As this realization grows in us, we begin to act from our center. The chief effect of Centering Prayer is to live from our center This of course does not mean that we do not interact with the world. On the contrary, we interact better than before because we are not defending ourselves from people or circumstances, but living reality as it unfolds. Centering Prayer, then, is not just a method of prayer but initiates a process that involves the response of our whole being to the gospel and its values.

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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