Rev. Theodore Nottingham: Deep Prayer

"For most people ordinary life is characterized by the sense that God is absent," notes scholar and author, Rev. Theodore Nottingham. "But if God were not present at every moment we would not be here either."

"Creation is not a one-time event," Nottingham points out in a poignant presentation on "Deep Prayer" (below), it is God's ongoing gift on every level of our being, from the tiniest quark in the universe of the subatomic world to the highest stages of consciousness."

"Theresa of Avalon wrote in the 16th century," he points out, "that 'All difficulties in prayer can be traced to one cause: praying as if God were absent.'"

"The external senses perceive the immediacy of material reality," Nottingham observes, "(while) the spiritual senses perceive the immediacy of Divine reality in various forms by means of a gradual process in which the Word of God is assimilated, interiorized, and understood."

Says the 13th century Persian mystic, Jalaluddin Rumi:

"You and your intelligence
are like the beauty and precision
of an astrolabe.

Together, you calculate how near
existence is to the sun!

Your intelligence is marvelously intimate.
It's not in front of you or behind,
or to the left or the right.

Now try, my friend, to describe how near
is the creator to your intellect!

Intellectual searching will not find
the way to that king!

The movement of your finger
is not separate from your finger.

                      . . . . .
                     
This visible universe has many weathers
and variations.
                       But uncle, O uncle,
the universe of the creation-word,

the divine command to Be, that universe
of qualities is beyond any pointing to.

More intelligent than intellect,
and more spiritual than spirit.

No being is unconnected
to that reality, and that connection
cannot be said. There, there's
no separation and no return.

                    . . . . .

"In the evolution of humanity's spiritual awareness," notes Nottingham, "we find that prayer becomes something very different. The great sages of all traditions reveal in their own lives that prayer is ultimately a uniting of human consciousness with a vaster life that they call divine. We can therefore trace the evolution of prayer from petition (or) asking, to intercession (praying for others), to contemplation - silence transforming prayer."

"We are then," he observes, "lifted out of the mundane consciousness which we mistakenly take for reality and experience the freedom and insight, and capacity to love, that transcends our ordinary way of being. The transforming power of prayer deals with a more attuned awareness, an exulted consciousness of the present moment, and a liberation from the psychological baggage that blocks our true identity. Consciousness is energy," he points out and with a little discernment of our inner lives, we can easily notice the difference in quality of our various states."

(Poem excerpts from Coleman Barks' "The Essential Rumi," pp. 151-152.)

The Tao: Beyond Preconceptions and Thought Structures

"In order to recognize the reality of (the) experience of Greater Being, " writes modern mystic philosopher, Karlfried Graf Von Durckheim, "we need nothing more that the 'sacred sobriety' of common sense. This, in fact, is that transcendental realism which is neither clouded nor inhibited by preconceived concepts and rational thought structures."

Steeped in Eastern spiritual traditions, yet grounded in his own Christian faith, Durckheim (a one-time consular diplomat in Japan) was well aware that preconceptions and strictly rational thought structures more often than not obscure the 'realities' they try to illuminate.

In the Tao Te Ching, we read:

When the superior man hears the Way.

      he is scarcely able to put it into practice.

When the middling man hears the Way,

      he appears now to preserve it, now to lose it.

When the inferior man hears the Way,

      he laughs at it loudly.

If he did not laugh,

      it would not be fit to be the Way.

For this reason,

There is a set of epigrmas that says:
      "The bright Way seems dim.

      The forward Way seems backward.

      The level Way seems bumpy.

      Superior integrity seems like a valley.

      The greatest whiteness seems grimy.

      Ample integrity seems insufficient.

      Robust integrity seems apathetic.

      Plain truth seems sullied.

      The great square has no corners.

      The great vessel is never completed.

      The great note sounds muted.

      The great image has no form.

      The Way is concealed and has no name."

 This "sense of reality" that is uninhibited by preconceptions and rational thought structures "permits the unique, unclassifiable quality of the experience to be as it is," notes Durckheim. "(It) accepts and savours it, and because of its very incomprehensibility, is intuitively convinced of its truth."

"We need practice in order to acquire the possibility of recognizing the quality of this reality," Durckheim points out. "By remaining alert and constantly prepared, we can learn to hear and feel the call of Divine Being in everything that happens to us. For this," he observes, "we need to work diligently in order to become vessels capable of receiving all that is poured into them."

[Karlfreid Graf Von Durckheim, "The Way of Transformation," p. 31.]

The Philokalia: A Discourse on Abba Philimon

"It is said that Abba Philimon, the anchorite, lived for a long time enclosed in a certain cave not far from the Lavra of the Romans. There he engaged in the life of ascetic struggle, always asking himself the question which, it is reported, the great Arsenios used to put to himself: 'Philemon, why did you come here?'"

"He used to plait ropes and make baskets, giving them to the steward of the Lavra in exchange for a small ration of bread. He ate only bread and salt, and even that not every day. In this way he took no thought for the flesh (cf. Rom. 13:14) but, initiated into ineffable mysteries through the pursuit of contemplation, he was enveloped by divine light and established in a state of joyfulness."

"When he went to church on Saturdays and Sundays he walked alone in deep thought allowing no one to approach him lest his concentration should be interrupted. In church he stood in a corner, keeping his face turned to the ground and shedding streams of tears. For, like the holy fathers, and especially like his great model Arsenios, he was always full of contrition and kept the thought of death continually in his mind."

"When a heresy arose in Alexandria and the surrounding area, Philimon left his cave and went to the Lavra near that of Nikanor. There he was welcomed by the blessed Paulinos, who gave him his own retreat and allowed absolutely no one to approach him, and he himself disturbed him only when he had to give him bread."

"On the feast of the holy resurrection of Christ, Philimon and Paulinos were talking when the subject of the eremetical state came up. Philimon knew that Paulinos, too, aspired to this state; and with this in mind he implanted in him teachings taken from Scripture and the fathers that emphasized, as Moses had done, how impossible it is to conform to God without complete stillness; how stillness gives birth to ascetic effort, ascetic effort to tears, tears to awe, awe to humility, humility to foresight, foresight to love; and how love restores the soul to health and makes it dispassionate, so that one then knows that one is not far from God."

-- A Discourse on Abba Philimon --
(Palmer et al., "The Philokalia," Vol. Two, pp. 244-345.)

Contemplative Practice and Disciplining the Mind

"You tell me nothing new; you are not the only one that is troubled with wandering thoughts. Our mind is extremely roving; but, as the will is mistress of all our faculties, she must recall them, and carry them to GOD as their last end."

"When the mind, for want of being sufficiently reduced by recollection at our first engaging in devotion, has contracted certain bad habits of wandering and dissipation, they are difficult to overcome, and commonly draw us, even against our wills, to the things of the earth."

"I believe one remedy for this is to confess our faults, and to humble ourselves before GOD. I do not advise you to use multiplicity of words in prayer: many words and long discourses being often the occasions of wandering. Hold yourself in prayer before GOD, like a dumb or paralytic beggar at a rich man's gate. Let it be your business to keep your mind in the presence of the LORD. If it sometimes wander and withdraw itself from Him, do not much disquiet yourself for that: trouble and disquiet serve rather to distract the mind than to re-collect it: the will must bring it back in tranquility. If you persevere in this manner, GOD will have pity on you."

"One way to re-collect the mind easily in the time of prayer, and preserve it more in tranquility, is not to let it wander too far at other times: you should keep it strictly in the presence of GOD; and being accustomed to think of Him often, you will find it easy to keep your mind calm in the time of prayer, or at least to recall it from its wanderings."

-- Brother Lawrence --
("The Practice of the Presence of God," VIII Letter)

That the undisciplined mind is restless, and goes where it will, is recognized in all religions. Indeed, disciplining the mind may be the central purpose of religion, as through disciplining the mind we attain to a higher and deeper consciousness in which we attain to the divine. "The mind is indeed restless, Arjuna," says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, "it is indeed hard to train. But by constant practice and by freedom from passions the mind in truth can be trained. When the mind is not in harmony, this divine communion is hard to attain; but the man whose mind is in harmony attains it, if he knows and strives for it."

"(E)very mind, no matter its present nature, can ultimately be disciplined and transformed" observes Swami Prabhavananda in his commentary on Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, "(and) can be, in Patanjali's phrase 'one-pointed' and fit to attain to the state of perfect yoga." However, as he later notes, disciplining the mind requires both practice and effort.

"(T)he thought-waves cannot all be controlled at once," Prabhavananda observes. "First we have to overcome the "painful" thought-waves by raising waves which are "not painful." To our thoughts of anger, desire and delusion we must oppose thoughts of love, generosity and truth. Only much later, when the "painful" thought-waves have been completely stilled, can we proceed to the second stage of discipline; the stilling of the "not painful" waves which we have deliberately created."

"The idea that we should ultimately have to overcome even those thought-waves which are "good," "pure" and "truthful" may at first seem shocking to a student who has been trained in the Western approach to morality," notes Prabhavananda, "but a little reflection will show him that this must be so."

"The external world, even in its most beautiful appearances and noblest manifestations, is still superficial and transient," he notes. "It is not the basic Reality. We must look through it not at it to see the Atman."

"Certainly," he concedes, "it is better to love than to hate, better to share than to hoard, better to tell the truth than to lie. But the thought-waves which motivate the practice of these virtues are nonetheless disturbances in the mind. We all know instances of admirable, earnest men who become so deeply involved in the cares of a great reform movement or social relief project that they cannot think of anything beyond the practical problems of their daily work. Their minds are not calm." 

"The mind of the truly illumined man is calm," Prabhavananda concludes, "not because he is selfishly indifferent to the needs of others, but because he knows the peace of the Atman within all things, even within the appearance of misery, disease, strife and want."

 [Prabhavananda and Isherwood, " How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali," pp. 23-24.]

Thomas Merton: First Lesson About Man

FIRST LESSON ABOUT MAN

Man begins in zoology.
He is the saddest animal.
He drives a big red car called anxiety.
He dreams at night
Of riding all the elevators.
Lost in the halls,
He never finds the right door.

Man is the saddest animal.
A flake-eater in the morning,
A milk-drinker.

He fills his skin with coffee
And loses patience with the rest of his species.
He draws his sin on the wall,
On all the ads in all the subways.
He draws moustaches on all the women
Because he cannot find his joy,
Except in zoology.

Whenever he goes to the phone to call Joy,
He gets the wrong number.
Therefore he likes weapons.
He knows all guns by their right name.
He drives a big black Cadillac called death.
Now he is putting anxiety into space.
He flies his worries all around Venus,
But it does him no good.
In space where for a long time there is only emptiness,

He drives a big white globe called death.

Now dear children
Who have learned the first lesson about man,
Answer your test:
“Man is the saddest animal.
He begins in zoology,
And gets lost
In his own bad news.

Mystics, Awakening and the Divine: A Sufi View

 “… Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God who is our home. ”

 -- William Wordsworth --
("Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.")

"Mystics are lovers going home," writes Sufi teacher and author, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, "living the passion and commitment that are needed to surrender and be taken, to become empty of oneself and filled with the Beloved."

"Little can be told," he suggests, "of the innermost mysteries of the heart, of how our own soul opens to God. And for each of us this jouney, our heart's pilgrimage, is unique, because each of us is unique. We are each a unique creation by the Great Artist, and each of us makes our own offering in the fire of love."

"We all come from God," he continues, "but when we are born into this world we forget. We forget from where we have come and that we are children of light. We take on the clothing of the world, leaving behind the "clouds of glory" of our true Home. The Sufi calls this the "journey from God," a journey of forgetfulness in which we leave Paradise behind."

But," Vaughn-Lee observes, "there are those who never quite forget, who keep a distant memory buried deep within them. As a result this world never seems like home; there is often a sense of not quite belonging, not fitting in."

"Mystics," he notes, "are strangers in this world, just because they remember their real home."

["Love is a Firre: The Sufi's Mystical Journey Home," pp. 20-21.]

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

In the following six-part video lecture, Vaughan Lee examines spiritual awakening, who and what it is that awakens, and what they awaken to.

In Memoriam: "To One Shortly to Die"

What words do you say to the dying? I had watched my friend decline and knew that this was, perhaps, the last time we would meet together, the last time I would be able to comfort, perhaps, the man who had brought and opened up a new vista of consciousness and being to my awareness.

How to reassure a man who really needed no assurance save what each of us might want when a companion on the spiritual path meets with us one last time on what we know will be our death bed?

Socrates, before the poison took hold, told his friends: "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die and you to live. Which is the better, only God knows." What was I to say?

We had walked a long way together on paths that had too briefly merged, and together we had explored what other wayfarers had said. And as he was no fabulist, but a realist, I chose the following poem by Walt Whitman, a spiritual kinsman, to reassure him and to ease him on his way:

TO ONE SHORTLY TO DIE

From all the rest I single out you, having a message for you,
You are to die - let others tell you what they please, I cannot prevaricate.
I am exact and merciless, but I love you - there is no escape for you.

Softly I lay my right hand upon you, you feel it,
I do not argue, bend my head close and half envelop it,
I sit quietly by, I remain faithful,
I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbor,
I absolve you from all except yourself spiritual bodily, that is eternal, you yourself will surely escape,
The corpse you will leave will be but excrementitious.

The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions,
Strong thoughts fill you and confidence, you smile,
You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick,
You do not see the medicines, you do not mind the weeping friends,
I am with you, I exclude others from you, there is nothing to be commiserated,
I do not commiserate, I congratulate you.

"Apart from the physical pain," I asked him, "is there any fear or suffering?" (For I'd asked this of an enlightened man upon his death bed, and he had laughed heartily at the proposition.)

"No, just confusion," he replied.

"What confuses you?," I asked.

"Why," he asked me, looking up, "do I struggle to hold on?"

I told him that there was no longer any reason for him to hold on, that he had learned all that he had come here to learn, and that he had taught scores of others (including me) what he had learned.

"I'll have to consider that," he said. And then he asked me to help him lay back down.

I laid him down, and he slipped off his oxygen mask. I told him that I loved him, kissed his cheek and took my leave. I am told that shortly thereafter he slipped into a coma, where he lingered for a day or so before departing.

The next evening, as I sat with my father waiting for a chorale to be performed, my thoughts turned back to my friend, for he had been a musician. "How much he would like this," I thought. And just at that time, I'm told, he revived for a moment, surrounded by others who loved him, and to whom he'd taught peace.

He lingered for a moment in silence, closed his eyes, and then breathed his last. It was in a silent and smiling acceptance, I'm told, that he slipped into his final deathless sleep. He had evolved.

Aldous Huxley: Annihilation of the Ego

What is the ultimate benefit of a contemplative practice? Is it not to come to a unitive state of consciousness and being, in which we realize that we, too, have broken the strong attachment chains of the ego and have become a conscious part of the divine, non-dualistic Ground of Being? Certainly, this is what the sages past and present seem to assure us.

John of Ruysbroeck

 The Flemish mystic, John of Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), observed:

"(In the Reality unitively known by the mystic), we can speak no more of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, nor of any creature, but only one Being, which is the very substance of the Divine Persons. There were we all one before our creation, for this is our super-essence. There the godhead is in simple essence without activity.

[Huxley, "The Perennial Philosophy," p. 31.]

Similarly,  in a description that is markedly similar to the Eastern process of negation, found in both Buddhist and Vedantist teachings, the renowned German mystic, Meister Eckhart, remarked:

"Thou must love God as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not image, but as He is, a sheer, pure absolute One, sundered from all two-ness, and in whom we must eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness."

[Ibid., p. 32.]

Sri Nisargadatta
(1897-1981)

"Our usual attitude is of 'I am this," the modern Indian sage, Sri Nisargadatta, observed. "Separate consistently and perserveringly the 'I am' from 'this' or 'that', and try to feel what it means to be, just to be, without being 'this' or 'that'. All our habits go against it and the task of fighting them is long and hard sometimes, but clear understanding helps a lot. The clearer you understand that on the level of the mind you can be described in negative terms only, the quicker you will come to the end of you search and realize your limitless being."

[Nisargadatta, "I Am That." pp. 59-60.]

Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963)

 "(T)here is a hierarchy of the real," Aldous Huxley observes. "The manifold world of our everyday experience is real with a relative reality that is, on its own level, unquestionable; but this relative reality has its being within and because of the absolute Reality, which, on account of the incommensurable otherness of its eternal nature, we can never hope to describe, even though it is possible for us directly to apprehend it."

"In the phrase used by Scotus Erigena," he notes, "God is not a what; He is a That. In other words, the Ground can be denoted as being there, but not defined as having qualities. This means that discursive knowledge about the Ground is not merely, like all inferential knowledge, a thing at one remove, or even at several removes, from the reality of immediate acquaintance; it is and, because of the very nature of our language and our standard pattern of thought, it must be paradoxical knowledge. Direct knowledge of the Ground cannot be had except by union, and union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrier separating the 'thou' from the 'That'."

[Huxley, supra., pp. 33-35]

I am neither 'this' nor all attachments and forms; neither name, self-image, feelings or thoughts; nor the ego. "I am That" - the divine Ground of Being.

Nottingham and Krishnamurti: The Fractured Human Psyche

One of the most insightful and informed ministers active today is the Reverend Theodore (Ted) Nottingham of Indianapolis' Northwood Christian Church. In a video that directly addresses the human condition, Rev. Nottingham examines the duality and multiplicity of the human psyche in view of the world's great wisdom traditions.



"If you've had a bad dream," Nottingham explains, "if a thought goes through your head in the shower, your state changes. We are very fragile in that way. We are fractured. We are multiple. We are legion."

"The whole purpose of true teachings," he notes, "is to reunite us so that we can bring together the core of our true self, rise up out of that brokenness and enter the nobility of truly being creatures of free will, creatures in the image of their Creator. One of the blinders for us," he explains, "is that we have a strange psychological way of not seeing these contradictions."

"This is the condition of the human being," Nottingham observes. "This is everybody. It is a condition that many teachers have called 'asleep,' because we are so unaware, (because) our attention is so diverted and fragmented and there is nobody home to be present to our reality."

"There has to be a step back," he notes. "The mystics call it 'detachment,' a position of conscious presence that is not dragged around by what is going on, that does not have the rug pulled out from under it at any moment, and that is dependable both for God and for ourselves."

The ability to detach from outward phenomena is possible, Nottingham notes, but it "has to be created," through practice in mindfulness. "We don't come with that," he warns, "and life conspires to keep us from that place of centering. All the spiritual disciplines return to this. Meditation, prayer, all of these methods and habits and ways of life offered to us by the teachings lead us into a centeredness within, in a place of inner quiet, an inner sanctuary that is sealed off from the outside."

"In the world," Nottingham notes, "we are in exile. Spiritual beings lost in a world of materialism, disconnected from our source, no longer dependent as we should be on that which is greater than we are, thinking that we are independent, (we are) cut off."

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jiddu Krishnamurti
(1895-1986)

Another great spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, made the same observations and voiced the same warnings regarding the many split off 'selves' that can exist within the human psyche.

"We are many and not one," Krishamurti observes. "The one does not come into being till the many cease. The clamorous many are at war with each other day and night, and this war is the pain of life. We destroy one, but another rises in its place; and this seemingly endless process is our life. We try to impose the one on the many but the one soon becomes the many."

"Our problem," he observes, " is not how to hear the one voice but to understand the composition, the make-up, of the many which we are are." Yet, this is exceedingly difficult, he notes (as so many other teachers have), because the parts - each with its myriad of desires - cannot undertand the whole. Thus, like Nottingham, he concludes that it is in understanding desire itself, and detaching from one's desires, that one comes to wholeness.

 "The voice of the many is the voice of the one," Krishnamurti writes, "and the one voice assumes authority; but it is still the chattering of a voice. We are voices of the many, and we try to catch the still voice of the one. The one is the many if the many are silent to hear the voice of the one. . . .

"To be aware of the whole, the conflict of the many, there must be an understanding of desire," he notes. "There is only one activity of desire; though there are varying and conflicting demands and pursuits, they are all the outcome of desire."

"Desire may not be sublimated or suppressed," Krishnamurti cryptically observes, "it must be understood without him who understands. If the entity who understands is there," he warns, "then it is still the entity of desire."

Complete detachment from desire through the experiential realization of one's wholeness, or centeredness, without any fractures, seems to be what is required. To see one's desire with one's very being, devoid of the raucous narrations of the many smaller 'selves' we each possess, is the way that leads us out of the mind trap we have created. For, "(t)o understand without the experiencer is to be free of the one and the many," Krishnamurti notes.

"In the awareness of this whole process," he writes, "there is a silence which is not of the experiencer. In this silence only does understanding come into being."

[Krishnamurti: Commentaries on Living: First Series," pp. 37-38.]

"

"The mystics," Nottingham notes, "tell us that you must be emptied, so that you may be filled . Meaning that it is possible, by eliminating the many false 'selves' of the psyche, for us to become "transparent to the divine," as the great 20th-century Christian mystic Karlfried Graf von Durckneim put it.

Thomas Merton: On Contemplation and the Inner Path

Eckhart Tolle
Author of, "The Power of Now"

The enlightened modern spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, made the observation that Rene DesCartes (the father of the 'empirical rationalism' that drives modern science) got it completely wrong in his most basic statement: "Cognito, ergo summa;"  or, "I think, therefore I am."

Objectively, DesCartes' famous dictum may be true; but subjectively, it is perhaps wholly wrong. As Tolle and so many rishis and sages of all ages and continents before him have pointed out, our "thinking without awareness" is the main dilemna of human existence. It is the root cause of all suffering.

Men and women get themselves confused with, caught up in, and identify themselves with, the restless inner dialogue of the human ego and then act upon it, usually to the detriment of others and always to the ultimate detriment of themselves.

Our usual mode of constant egoic thinking combined with an "outer" rather than "inner" religious worldview, and the sure-fire conviction that our exoteric religious beliefs are the only right and valid views, has been the chief source of man-made violence and death for millenia untold, and it continues to be so, as philosopher Ken Wilber has pointed out.

And yet, the "inner" or "esoteric" spiritual path that is present but largely ignored in most wisdom traditions is one of the few - and may be the only - way out of humanity's individual and collective suffering, as Wilber has concluded.

Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

As the renowned Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, observed in one of his letters that makes for the substance of the embedded video (below), the inner, contemplative path, rather than mere intellection and the application of reason, is the essence of all wisdom traditions.

To this effect, Merton notes:

"Oh, my Brother! The contemplative is not the man who has fiery visions of the cherubim-carrying God in his chariot, but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust; that is to say, in the surrender of our poverty and incompleteness, in order no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist."

In explaining what 'contemplation' and the 'contemplative life,' are,  Merton notes that contemplation is "a more profound depth of faith; a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images or words, or even in clear concepts." He observes:

"Contemplation is the highest expression of man's intellectual and spiritual  life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant source. 

Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that source. It knows the source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes beyond both reason and beyond simple faith. For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete."