The Human Condition 7

Where are you? This is one of the great questions of all time. It is the focus of the first half of the spiritual journey. 7

God is existence. In everything that exists, God is present. Ihe greatest reality is God’s presence. The problem is that we only access that presence to the degree that our interior life is attuned to it. Hence the importance in the Christian tradition of listening to sacred scripture, which is much more than just listening to its literal meaning. It is sitting with the text in the presence of the Holy Spirit and allowing the Spirit to deepen our capacity to listen. That in no way denigrates the value of the literal listening simply doesn’t stop there. The external word of God is designed to awaken the presence of the word of God in us. When that happens, we become, ina certain sense, the word of God. 27

(Mythology is not untruth; it is simply an attempt to speak the truth in a symbolic with the points to a reality beyond words are concepts.) 28

Contemplation and the Divine Therapy 29

Who are you? that is the great question of the second half of the spiritual journey. 29

But every moment of our lives, God is asking us, "Where are you? Why are you hiding?"

All the questions that are fundamental to human happiness arise when we ask ourselves is excruciating question: where am I? Where am I in relation to God, to myself, and to others? These are the basic questions of human life. 7

As soon as we notice we are annoyed or angry about something, we tend to protect ourselves by projecting the cause of our upsetting emotion onto a situation or another person: "They" did this to me. "They" are always a problem. But, in fact, the real problem is not "them" but us. All biases and prejudices are the attitudes of a child from ages four to eight. If they are present in us, we are still functioning at the level of a preadolescent. 16

The false self is deeply entrenched. You can change your name and address, religion, county; and clothes. But as long as you don’t ask i to change, the false self simply adjusts to the new envlronment. For example, instead of drinking your friends under the table as a significant sign of selfworth and esteem, if you enter a monastery, as I did, fasting the other monks under the table could become your new path to glory. In that case, what would have changed? Nothing. 17

In the world that lies ahead, religious pluralism is going to penetrate all cultures. How we live together with different points of view is going to become more and more important. I don't know whether we can make progress in such a project without a contemplative practice that alerts us to our own biases, prejudices, and self-centered programs for happiness, 21 especially when they trample on other peoples rights of minutes. 22 21-22

Where are you? Is, indeed, a question of great magnitude. Are you still at the age of one or two, where your emotional program for security is the chief energy that determines your decisions and relationships, specially the relationship between God and you? 23

Contemplative prayer starts modestly, but as soon as it begins to reach a certain intensity, it opens us to the unconscious. Painful memories | that we have forgotten or repressed begin to come to consciousness. Primitive emotions that we felt as children and that we have been compensating for may come to consciousness.
How should we handle these afflictive emotions? By facing them, by feeling them. Feelings that have been repressed have to be allowed to pass through our awareness once again in order to be left behind for good. Most of the time, they don’t need psychotherapy; they just need to be evacuated. We might say that we are suffering from acute psychic indigestion, a nausea of a psychological character that is interfering with our mental health and all our relationships.
In contemplative prayer, the rest we experience is so deep that it allows the inner defenses to relax, and the body, with its great capacity for health, 25 says, "Let’s get rid of these emotional blocks once and for all." The psychic nervous system may explode in primitive emotions or intolerable mem. ories. For a few minutes, you feel that you would rather be in hell. But then it is over. 26 25-26

The fact that we experience anxiety and annoyance is a certain sign that, in the unconscious, there is an emotional program for happiness that has just been frustrated. 30

Suppose that through a practice like Centering Prayer, which prepares us for contemplation, the primary locus of the divine therapy, we take half an hour every day for solitude and silence, just to be with God and with ourselves (without knowing yet who that is). As a result of the deep rest and silence 31 that come through such a practice, Our emotional programs begin to be relativized. They were designed at a time when we didn't know the goodness and the reassurance of God's presence. The presence of God is true security. There really isn't any other. Divine love is the full affirmation of who we are. Interior freedom is the gift of God as we let go of our attachments and aversions, our "shoulds," and the emotional programs of happiness that we bring with us from early childhood and that are totally impracticable in adult life.
Through a spiritual practice like Centering Prayer, we begin to experience spiritual awareness. Ordinary life then becomes like a lousy movie where we don’t identify with the characters or plot. We can get up and leave—something we can't do in daily life when we overidentify with our ordinary stream of awareness and its contents. That is the inner tyranny that opposes true freedom. The freedom of the children of God means we can decide what to do about particular events. We live more and more out of self-actuating motivation rather than the domination of our habitual drives to be esteemed, to be in control, to feel secure.
Centering Prayer and other practices that lead to Christian contemplation move us toward interior freedom. We open ourselves to God and allow ourselves to rest in a silent place beyond thinking, a 32 kind of oasis in a day of emotional turmoil. Even from a purely human perspective, everybody needs some solitude and silence in daily life, just to be human and creative about the way one lives.
This sort of spiritual discipline is a therapy for the tyranny of the false self, not only for our emotional programs for happiness, but also for our overidentification with family, nation, religion, or group. Of course we Owe a measure of gratitude to our nation, religion, and family. But it 1s interesting that Jesus said that unless we hate our parents, we can’t be his fisciples. By this he didn’t mean that we should not love and respect them and care for them in their old age, as commanded by the Fourth Commandment of the Torah, but that we should not have a naive loyalty to a particular group (even one’s family) that disregards injustices that need to be corrected. Sometimes, for the sake of peace or in order to be loved, one sweeps serious problems under the rug instead of dealing with them in honesty and truth.
Once a regular practice of Centering Prayer has been established, we move normally in each period of prayer toward a place of rest where our faculties are relatively calm and quiet. Thoughts are coming downstream, but as we learn to disregard them, we begin to enjoy a sense of the divine presence. 33 31-33

Centering Prayer is not an end in itself, but its deep rest loosens up the emotional weeds of a lifetime. When our defenses go down, up comes the dark side of the personality, the dynamics of the unconscious, and the immense emotional investment we have placed in false programs for happiness, along with the realization of how immersed we are in our particular cultural conditioning. 34
Everybody is culturally conditioned to some degree. Even the greatest saints only reach a certain degree of freedom from cultural overidentification. That overidentification is challenged in Centering Prayer. We spend the first part of our lives finding a role—becoming a mother or father, a professor, a doctor, a minister, a soldier, a business person, an artisan, or whatever. The paradox is that we can never fully fulfill our role until we are ready to let it go. Whoever we think we are, we are not. We have to find that out, and the best way to do so, or at least the most painless way, is through the process that we call the spiritual journey. This requires facing ~ the dark side of our personality and the emotional investment we have made in false programs for happiness and in our particular cultural conditioning. Rest in Centering Prayer provides us with profound healing. ‘To be really healed requires that we allow our dark side to come to full consciousness and then to let it go and give it to God. The divine therapy is an agreement that we make with God. We recognize that our own ideas of happiness are not going to work, and we turn our lives over completely to God.
What happens during this process is a certain unloading of primitive emotions or a bombardment of thoughts that we never expected to have on the spiritual journey. lo evacuate that material, all 35 we have to do, under normal circumstances, is to wave good-bye as it passes through our awareness. Then, when we return to our original intention— usually through some symbol of turning inwardly to God, such as saying a sacred word or following the breath as a sacred experience—this process starts over again. We move toward rest. The rest, when deep, releases repressed material from the unconscious. We experience a kind of psychic nausea and then a sense of freedom from having gotten rid of a wad of undigested psychological data from early childhood. To submit to the divine therapy is something we owe to ourselves and the rest of humanity. If we don't allow the Spirit of God to address the deep levels of our attachments to ourselves and to our programs for happiness, we will pour into the world the negative elements of our self-centeredness, adding to the conflicts and social disasters that come from overidentifying with the biases and prejudices of our particular culture and upbringing. This is becoming more important as we move into a global culture and into the increasing pluralism of religious beliefs. 36 34-36

As we become more aware of the dynamics of our unconscious, we can receive people and events as they are, rather than filtered through what we would like them to be, expect them to be, or demand them to be. This requires letting go of the attachments, aversions, "shoulds, and demands on others and on life that ref lect the mentality of a child rather than that of a grownup. The latter, under normal conditions, is responsible for his or her choices. 37

What makes us think God has gone away? The divine presence can’t go away. God is existence and fills everything that exists (St. Thomas Aquinas). The Gospel teachers that Christ is present in the storm, not just emerging from the storm. 40

Here the great wisdom saying of Jesus comes to mind: "He who seeks only himself brings himself to ruin, whereas he who brings himself to nothing for my sake discovers who he is’ (Mt 10:38). To bring oneself to nothing—no thing—is to cease to identify with the tyranny of our emotional programs for happiness and the limitations of our cultural conditioning. They are so strong in our culture that even our language reflects them. We say, "I am angry." But you are not angry; you just have angry feelings. 41 You may say, "I am depressed." No, you are not depressed; you have feelings of depression.
It is not feelings that are the problem, but what we do with them that matters. The freedom to dea] with them and to confront them with reason and faith is what makes us fully human.
The beginning of our spiritual conversion is followed by a transition period that 1s always dark, confusing, and confining. Then comes a period of peace, enjoyment of a new inner freedom, the wonder of new insights. That takes time. Rarely is there a sudden movement to a new level of awareness that is permanent.
What happens when we get to the bottom of the pile of our emotional debris? We are in divine union. There is no other obstacle.
As long as we are identified with some role or persona, we are not free to manifest the purity of God's presence. Part of life is a process of dropping whatever role, however worthy, you identify with. It is not you. Your emotions are not you. Your body is not you. If you are not those things, who are you? That is the big question of the second half of the spiritual journey.
The process of spiritual growth is like a spiral staircase. It goes down, and it also goes up. Every movement toward the humiliation of the false self, if we accept it, is a step toward interior freedom and inner resurrection. This new freedom is not control; ‘tis the freedom not to demand of life whatever we used to feel was essential for our particular idea of happiness. 43 41-43