After we have been long dedicated to silent prayer and experience it largely as restful and peaceful, it is easy enough to feel quite happy simply to stretch out in this hammock of contemplative practice and enjoy a martini of quietude. In this case we have managed to avoid the pull of the moon on our awareness and instead have become besotted by the moon’s allure.
This is not to deny the real progress we have made over the years in prayer and service. Guided by torchlight we have learned to step carefully along the road, negotiating inner battles. There has been unquestionable development in the accuracy of our self-knowledge; we know the crucial distinction between any sort of interior weather and the mountain on which this weather comes and goes. We probably have experienced (perhaps even for long periods) an undeniable inner recollection. But this new challenge is typically that of the seasoned intermediate.
Just because our practice has led us to a certain inner calm and recollection, we should not assume that we are home and free. Saint Augustine speaks to this when he says, “Take care that a time of calm repose does not lead to laxity and forgetfulness of God.” There is a way to recognize the state of awareness that indicates when this calm repose has been besotted by the allure of the moon. Very soon after settling into our practice (if not immediately after), a dull, inattentive, graying-out settles in. There may be the entire spectrum of thoughts flowing by, but, while we are not quite caught up in reacting to them, we are more or less immersed in them and being swept along passively with them. Yet we feel fairly restful and content with it all. These thoughts don’t have the blaring narrative of the previous season. By contrast these thoughts are thick and dense, characterized by a lethargic calm that is really a dulling of awareness. This dulling of awareness is not terribly far from a state of dozing off. In fact it is not uncommon for the occasional snore to serve as our reminder to return to our practice. But often we do not fall quite asleep and, while we are certainly not alert, we find we can pray for an hour or more resting in this comfy hammock and its martini of mantra. If someone looked at us sitting in prayer, he or she would not see an engaged and vigilant peace in our face and bearing, but instead a drooping face ready to nod off at any moment; the breath is short and shallow, as far from the abdomen as possible; the body not alert but slightly hunched over. Admittedly this hammock of prayer is rather comfy. But it is not enough to stay in this nice place. We do well to cooperate actively and work with our attention, with the support of our own body and breath.
The contemplative’s inner stance is not one of being swept downriver along with everything else. The contemplative’s repose is not a passive state but an engaged, silent receptivity, “an ever moving repose,” as St. Maximus the Confessor calls it. Like a riverbed, which is constantly receiving and letting go in the very same moment. Vigilant receptivity and non-clinging release are one and the same for this riverbed awareness as it constantly receives all coming from upstream while at the very same moment releasing all downstream. The receptive letting-go of this riverbed stillness characterizes what the pull of the moon “rising in the firmament heart” is trying to teach us.
Saint Isaac the Syrian teaches us to “Love silence above all things, because it brings you near to the fruit that the tongue cannot express . . .and, then, from out of this silence something is born that leads to silence itself.” If we stay in the comfy hammock of lethargic inattentiveness, we slow our cooperation with what is trying to come to birth.
Awareness is born from the silence that draws us and “leads to Silence itself.” Awareness is another name for Silence itself.
As we work with our attention in our practice, it often seems as though we are excavating a mountain with a spoon. But we gradually sense that we are encountering something deeper. The prayer word flows directly into an ocean depth of awareness, deeper than the reach of the senses. Saint Hesychios says of watchful awareness: “Its branches reach to the seas and to deep abysses of contemplation, its shoots to the rivers of the beauteous and divine mysteries.” When we plumb the depths of our practice we are embraced by a Living Presence that has known us from all eternity (Jer 1:5). In this knowing Presence in which Knower and known are as one, the prayer word and the flowing vastness of simple awareness are one, Presuming the Jesus Prayer as one’s prayer word, Saint Hesychios says we can look right into the mind: “The more closely attentive you are to your mind, the greater the longing with which you pray to Jesus …. Just as close attentiveness brilliantly illumines the mind, so the lapse from watchfulness and from the sweet invocation of Jesus will darken it completely.” This brilliant illumination that St. Hesychios refers to is always present within us, shining like the sun (cloud cover or not); though this tact of perpetual presence only gradually dawns on our everyday mind first “in the intellect like a torch,”‘ then more deeply and expansively in the “heart’s firmament,” and now in the innermost depths of the heart “like the sun.”
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
