Evagrius insists as strongly as St. Hesychios on the importance of cultivating this first stage of watchful awareness. In our discovery of inner stillness, we first learn a good deal more about our obsessive mental habits than about inner stillness. But Evagrius is convinced that this ordeal with thoughts is crucial to our contemplative training and that we should take every opportunity to observe all we can about these thoughts; which thoughts “arc less frequent in their assaults, which are more distressing, which yield the field more readily and which are the more resistant.” He is not trying to get us to have no afflictive thoughts (this would halt our contemplative training) but to stop, turn around, and look right into them. “Observe their intensity,” he says, “their periods of decline and follow them as they rise and fall.” Note whether there is anger by itself or anger and fear. How long does it last? What sets it off? “What is the order of their succession and the nature of their associations.” In order to “observe their intensity,” their “rise and fall,” or the “order of their succession,” we have to withdraw our attention from the inner commentaries, be still before them, and eventually look right into them, right through them. Even if they continue their chatter for another decade or so, we simply remain before them “profoundly silent and still and in praying.” Thus we gradually move from agitated victim to silent witness.
This simple, sifting, spiritual skill of watchful awareness changes our relationship with any sort of thought or feeling. Normally we are caught up in the story we tell ourselves about the thought or feeling, Say, for example, we become easily envious of people who wear expensive clothes, “Look what she’s wearing! Who does she think she is with that Chanel jacket and that ridiculous Louis Vuitton bag. Typical of her. Absolutely typical. She’d be better off with a tongue stud.” The story threads along, and we miss the simple envy that set it off. Or perhaps we are so easily threatened because we compensate for our sense of inadequacy through expensive clothing and as a result are stitched right into the weave of this inner chatter.
The variety of these dramas is endless. What is important is that we can observe as much as possible, but not in order to replace it with another drama, such as “I shouldn’t be this way” or “I shouldn’t be having these thoughts.” The practice of awareness gradually enables us to meet whatever happens, before we begin to talk to ourselves about what has happened. Over time, things change. We experience simple fear, anger, shame, calm, joy, pride instead of an inner commentary on the fear, anger, shame, calm, joy, pride. It is the inner chatter that keeps us enslaved.
What are the effects of the practice of awareness at this early phase of seeing only by torchlight? We grow in the ability to turn around and see our thoughts and feelings (no matter what their strength) as simple events distinct from the tempest of stories we relate to ourselves (and likely to others) about them. Whatever it is in us that grasps and craves is soothed and calmed and begins to loosen its grip. The inner chatter needs this craving in order to cling. But inner charter cannot cling to simple awareness. It simply appears and disappears in awareness like so much weather moving through the valley. Thoughts slow down, we feel more spacious within. That which sees the thought arise and fall is free of it and free to pray in the midst of it. This is what St. Teresa discovered for herself, and so can we.
This is the first phase of the expansion of awareness, a phase we return to over and again as needed: learning to scrutinize, learning to observe without commenting on what is happening within us instead of being dragged back into the inner chatter that serves as cloth for the fashionable outfit of a new identity. The clothing of alienation requires no emperor.
With this sense of inner spaciousness, we are less reactive to and more receptive of all manner of inner movements. This spaciousness is inherently still, poised, and watchful. Watchful inner stillness does not mean the absence of struggle, but stillness in the midst of struggle, “profoundly still and in praying.”
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
