As I hinted in the last chapter, I understand the unconscious in a very different way from Freud while acknowledging the great contribution of his observational genius. In my terminology, which reflects a more Jungian viewpoint, the unconscious comprises both positive and negative elements. It contains within it potentials in ourselves that we are not yet aware of as well as emotional material and emotionally charged events that have been completely repressed.* Or to put it another way, we can distinguish two parts to the unconscious, one the psychological and the other the ontological (level of being). The psychological contains our whole personal history, especially emotional traumas, that we repressed at an early age, chiefly for survival motives.

The ontological unconscious, or level of being, contains all the human potentialities for spiritual development that have yet to be activated. These can be differentiated into the natural energies and the energies of grace. In a sense, both energies are divine since God is the creator and sustainer of both. The natural energies go by various names such as life force, dynamic ground, kundalini, cosmic energy. Through them we participate in the creative process through which all things that exist emerge and to which they return. In Christian terms, it might be called "the Light that enlightens everyone coming into the world" (prologue to the Gospel of John). This energy gradually unfolds, if it is not interfered with, from conception to full bodily maturity, and at the same time it serves through the brain and nervous system as the basis of mental and spiritual development.

Along with this innate and divinely created energy, which most of us are more or less out of touch with when we first set forth on the spiritual journey, there is the Divine Indwelling which Christians call the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--three infinitely distinct "Persons" in one undivided unity, to use the terms of the early Fathers of the Church. This enormous but still unconscious divine life is bestowed on us in baptism, or with the desire for baptism expressed in a serious commitment to the spiritual journey Thus, we share in the divine life, whether we know it or not, both by nature and by grace. The realization and actualization of this inherent human potential to be "divinized"--the term loved by the Greek Fathers of the Church--might be called the human adventure. The priority we give to this adventure determines more or less the extent of the ontological powers of the unconscious that will be actualized in our particular lives.

Because we are dealing with the unconscious, we sometimes run into blockages to our growth both human and divine. These may be physical, emotional, or spiritual. Centering Prayer, as it becomes contemplative in the strict sense, gently but relentlessly invites us to face up to issues that we are not acknowledging in our lives. Sometimes we do not even know what they are. Sometimes the problem is an unconscious process like one of the emotional programs for happiness, some aspects of which we have not yet recognized. The blockage alerts us to the fact that something in us is not giving way to God's will. But we seem to be powerless to do anything about it under our present circumstances. All we can do is wait and pray for the wall to fall down. And sometimes it is a long wait.

When we are doing Centering Prayer regularly (i.e., twice daily), there is a constant wearing away of our opposition to grace. There may be an unconscious resistance to acknowledging something God wishes to show us or to receiving something God wishes to give us. This resistance can manifest itself in different ways: for example, by physical symptoms like pain or a sense of not being able to say "yes" sincerely, or a generalized uneasiness. But if we can just wait it out and continue our regular practice of Centering Prayer, eventually the pocket of resistance begins to dissipate.

We normally come to full, reflective self-consciousness around the age of reason completely out of touch with the divine energy within us. Centering Prayer is the movement of consenting to God's presence and action within us. The longer we do the Centering Prayer practice, the less we may notice when we go to a deep place. So we think, "I'm not getting anywhere." We remember that there were times when we were strongly seized by the presence of God. The human organism has an incredible capacity to adjust to circumstances. People without an arm or a leg, who are blind, or who have some other physical disability, adjust to life. We can also get used to divine consolation or deep rest to such a degree that we do not even notice it. This does not mean that grace is any less active in us. We may have been absorbed in God often in the early days, but now after three or four years, our prayer time is like brushing our teeth; we just do it automatically every night and morning. If we experience the prayer of quiet, it does not make the same impression that it did when it was new. We sit and pray, but nothing seems to happen. We are aware of thoughts going by and then get up and go about our business, and day follows day.

In actual fact, the purifying process is going on all the time, but it no longer has the signposts it had when we could say, "Now I'm at rest, now I'm unloading, now I'm having primitive feelings, now I'm trying to return to the sacred word." The sense of rest is relative, so we have to deduce our deep absorption in God through other signs. One of these is the swift passage of time. We sit down and thoughts keep going by. Since we have not learned to ignore all prerecorded commentaries, the thought comes, "This isn't much of a prayer today " And yet as the beeper goes off at the end of our prayer period, it seems like we had just sat down. When we do not notice the passage of time or when it seems very short, we must have been in a deep place. Time is the measure of motion, of particular objects going by. When there are a lot of thoughts, prayer seems long. When we are aware of a lot of thoughts and prayer still seems like a short time, then we must have been firmly centered. Remember the great gospel teaching: the Kingdom of God is not in grandiose experiences, but in the passage of ordinary time. This is where the seeds of grace are growing. God intervenes in our prayer, but not so we would notice it. The deeper our prayer actually is, the more it habitually drops out of aur ordinary awareness. When we experience spiritual consolation, this is our interpretation of the divine action within us. Hence it is conditioned by our cultural background, temperament, and personal history.

The subtler and more spiritual the experience of grace, the less we perceive it. This does not mean that we should resist spiritual experiences in the form of consolation, interior sweetness, or waves of love. We may need them. God speaks to us on every level of our consciousness at different times in our lives. But as we climb the ladder of consciousness beyond the rational level into the intuitive, our idea of God expands and God ceases to relate to us at the other levels.

Many contemplatives cannot do discursive meditation or make particular aspirations. They are just paralyzed. They can use these mental processes well enough outside the time of prayer, but as soon as they try to pray, they fall into a state of helplessness. The Spirit has taken over their prayer and she could not care less about their reflections. Spirit wants brilliant thoughts, she can call on the angels. If God was looking for geniuses, he would have created more of them. What God is after from humans, according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, is our love.

Thus deep rest can be present in prayer, but its source is on such a high frequency that it is no longer translated as rest or consolation. There is simply a mysterious attraction or hunger for God. This is one of the surest signs that one is progressing in contemplation. The Spirit moves us to renew our consent whenever it gets a little fuzzy because some flashy boat on the river of ordinary awareness conjures up one of the emotional programs with roots in the unconscious. Until we have completely emptied out the false self with its emotional programs for happiness along with their tormenting desires, passing thoughts will continue to cause aversions or attractions because there is still something to be stimulated in the unconscious. When there is no longer anything to stimulate, inner freedom is complete and peace is habitual.

The spiritual sense of rest that we experienced in the first few years begins to be refined into an abiding state that might be called "peace," a peace that is not sensible--i.e., perceptible to the senses. It is beyond joy and beyond sorrow because it is rooted in the divine presence. One is secure in the steadfast love of God. Our peace is subject to some alarms, however, as long as there is false self material that has not been evacuated and is thus susceptible to the stimulation that awakens the conscious or unconscious desires of one or other of our emotional programs.

Rest moves toward peace. Peace does not have a particular content. We are not peaceful about something. We are just peaceful. This is one place where the psalms are topnotch in explaining the experience: "I have calmed and quieted my soul. Like a child weaned on its mother's breast, so is my soul" (Ps 131). We see the image of the child whose fretful struggle for its mother's milk has finally subsided and who can accept mother as mother without bothering about her milk. Is this an advance or not?

If we can rest in God, not in the sense of a feeling, but in the sense of contentment with whatever the psychological content of our prayer may be, time goes fast. Once in a while we may uncover some unconscious material, but it is not dramatic anymore. Primitive emotions from early childhood may pop up, but after acute psychic nausea has been experienced a few times, we are no longer afraid of it. The newness of the experience is the reason why it may seem so traumatic at first. We go on unloading the undigested emotional material of a lifetime, but now the unloading of the unconscious tends to be relatively unobserved and to take place in the ordinary course of prayer.

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* The latter are to be distinguished from the subconscious, which is material that we deliberately place there and know it is there, like a mantra or aspiration that we have repeated so many times that it says itself as, for example, the Jesus Prayer.                    RETURN TO TEXT

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Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

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