(I posted this on another discussion and have left it there, but am copying it here as I think it's a separate topic and a way of understanding the journey that I've been inclined toward for quite some time.)

Increasingly, I am inclined to think of the human spirit as one consciousness that is endowed with awareness, intellect and will, these three being inseparable, but also different kinds of potentialities. We can "lean," as it were, into our intellectual ability and exert ourselves in that manner, if we choose. We can also get in touch with our freedom, desires, intentions, etc., and work with that. Finally, we can lean into our capacity to be present and "just-be," or just observe what goes on within and about us. In each example, the other two potentialities are in the background, to some extent, and in the life of prayer and the practice of spirituality, we can see these three different leanings yielding three spiritual superhighways, if you will.

The way to God via intellectual engagement focuses on truth, clarifying one's thinking, discernment, nuance, theological reflection, and, mystically, an intuitive grasp of the One who is the Source of all truth. Jesus referred to Himself as the Truth, so he was affirming of this way. In Christianity, there are many examples of this mystical pathway -- Thomas Aquinas, Karl Rahner, etc. In Hinduism, this would correspond to Jnana yoga.

The way to God via will and intent is clearly Love. As with the way of Truth, we could work with the process of loving, let go of attachments, learn to be loved by God, and discover God as the Source of all love. This pathway is so well known in Christianity that it needs no elaboration. Here we find Jesus as the way, the one who connects us to God's love in such manner that we can never be separated from the love of God if we stay with Jesus. The Hindu pathway of bhakti yoga is similar, in this emphasis on love; so does karma yoga.

Both the way of truth and love lead to a kind of "dualistic mysticism" in that distinctions between creature and Creator are preserved so there's no confusion about who's who, and no babbling statements that seem to conflate God and creature.

The way of Awareness is not as well known in Christianity, but we're not complete strangers to it. Here we work with awareness, and attempt to move our center of presence from the reflective Ego to the non-reflecting aspect of the human spirit, which arises moment-by-moment straight from God. The deeper we go, the closer we come to that Ground of Being where we receive our life and existence from God. With reflectivity de-emphasized, the intellect and will are in the background of consciousness, with "see-ing" directly and non-reflectively the primary practice. When this practice is graced in a special way by God, we come to "see" how it is that all things arise from God and how God is omnipresent in and through all things. The non-reflecting aspect of the human spirit participates in the divine's own seeing and realizes the blissful, joyful life that is God's very nature. Intellect and will are still in play, but they become increasingly disinclined to reflective and willful operations that distort mystical awareness. Contemplative practices such as Centering Prayer and Christian Meditation can help to prepare one for this kind of mystical experience. In Hinduism, we find raja yoga exploring this pathway.

One final possibility is that it may well be that a mystic travels along one of the three superhighways for awhile, then moves onto another, then, later, perhaps the third. I believe one predominates, but because grace cannot help but overflow into all these areas, we will experience them all, to some extent. It does seem that once one comes to the way of Awareness, the other two recede into the background. There's little interest in theological exploration of God as Truth when the divine is looking out of one's eyes. Maybe that's what happened to Thomas Aquinas at the end of his life?

(The following is a philosophical poem, of sorts, originally published in my book, The Logic of Happiness, which is still for sale.)

Anthropology


1. Awareness is.
It cannot be reduced
to simpler components.


2. What is awareness?
Who knows!
Perhaps it is . . .
the light of the soul.
God.
the True Self.
Who knows!
What awareness is cannot be defined.
That awareness is cannot be denied.


3. For most, awareness is colored by desires,
which are, in turn,
generated by emotional states such as
insecurity,
shame,
resentment.
Desires arise to compensate these pains.
Ignorant thinking
based on irrational beliefs
about the self and reality
keep one caught up in desire.
Thus, for most, awareness is introverted
and caught up in preoccupation
over the fulfillment of desires.


4. When awareness is colored by pain,
then the world and others are seen
through a filter of desires:
as being for or against
the attainment of our desires.
This is the origin of friends and enemies,
of good and bad,
of love and hate.


5. When awareness is colored
by emotional pain and desires,
the attender in consciousness is a small self,
a self-concerned "I.”
This "I" experiences itself as real,
owing to the felt reality
of the emotions and desires
that keep it preoccupied,
the behaviors that proceed
from its decisions,
and the ripples these behaviors cause
in the world.


6. When awareness is freed from desire,
there is no small "I.”
Rather, the attender is synonymous
with awareness itself,
and with all sensations,
thoughts, and feelings
that enter the field of awareness.
Such awareness is limited only
by the body's fixation in time and space.


7. In the state of pure, or cosmic, attention,
sensory perception is uncontaminated
by thoughts, feelings, and desires.
There is just-seeing, hearing,
smelling, and touching.
Feelings come and go,
but they do not disrupt sensory perception.


8. Will can be used to focus awareness,
to concentrate and intensify awareness
in a certain direction.
Volitional awareness is defined as
paying attention.


9. When the will is open
to relationship and engagement in life,
attention is also opened
to become cosmic and pure.
This openness of the will is called agape.
Agape is the only stance that maintains
the will in openness
and awareness in purity.


10. Lack of openness to relationship
results in contraction of the will,
and, hence, a constriction of attention.
Therefore, openness
to loving relationship with all
is the only antidote
to the misery of the small self.


11. Rational thinking directs the will.
The will focuses awareness.
Awareness presents data
to the rational mind.
These are the three
irreducible and interrelated
dynamics of consciousness.
They are the spiritual qualities
of human beings,
incarnated in a body,
conditioned and formed
in a body in a culture,
and freed from the limitations
of the body at death.


12. The assault of evil
is directed against reason.
If people can be convinced
that they need lots of irrelevant things,
or that they can be okay
only if others approve them,
or that they must be perfect
and in control
to be safe,
then they will live in insecurity.
This contracts the will
and constricts attention.
This is the meaning of sin.


13. There is no liberation for the ignorant,
for those who can be persuaded to be fearful,
for those who do not value their worth,
for those who hold on to resentments.
Their rational intelligence is distorted.
Their attention is narrow and defensive.
Where there is ignorance,
there is superficiality
and lack of wholeness:
a fallen creature.


14. The struggle to know truth
is a struggle to free the will and awareness
from the ensnarements of evil.


15. Freedom from ignorance
does not lie in accumulating information,
but in knowing truth.


16. Truth is that toward which reason tends
when one lives with
one's own questions,
honors these questions,
and struggles to answer them honestly.


17. In the struggle to answer one's questions,
the mind is tamed,
the will is directed toward its proper end,
and awareness is progressively expanded.


18. The final Truth
is nonconceptual mystery —
just as the origin of awareness and will
cannot be defined.
The final Truth is ineffable;
it cannot be contained.
This does not mean
that Truth is an illusion,
or that the struggle to know Truth
is a waste of time.
It means only that Truth
is not-knowing as well as knowing.
It means that Truth is "seen" in awareness,
and loved with the will,
even as it is grasped by reason.


19. The three movements in the spiritual life are clear:
A. Recognition of one's condition by practicing honesty.
B. Resolution of one's emotional pain through forgiveness.
C. Retraining the mind to meet one's true needs by striving to understand truth and practicing loving relationship skills.


20. In summary:
Awareness "sees" the activities
of the will and intellect,
and is, in turn,
freed by their loving direction.

Thanks Phil, this poem was really helpful in giving words to things we sense but don't always know how to vocalize. I really enjoyed it.

quote:

Three spiritual superhighways

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quote:

Originally posted by johnboy.philothea:
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Yup. A few months ago I was reading a newspaper, and I felt frustrated that there was no "Like" button at the bottom of each article!

Phil, your poem has a wonderful sense of freshness and clarity to it.

When I started meditating and practising mindfulness, I wasn't sure how it fitted in with my Christian beliefs. I came to it through Thich Nhat Hahn's book The Miracle of Mindfulness. Shalomplace opened up the idea of awareness from a Christian perspective and I'm really happy and thankful for that. Now it seems that I'm speeding down the superhighway of awareness, branching off into the superhighway of will and devotion, and occasionally, but not too often these days, looping into the freeway of the intellect. thepoem is great. Very succinct. I'm thinking of copying it for my nephew who needs some sort of grounding for his wild existential flights of fancy.

Thanks for the affirmation, guys. There are lots of other poems and meditations like that in The Logic of Happiness, if you're interested. I have it set up now for paperback, Kindle, Apple's iBookstore, and Barnes and Noble. Last month it sold one copy overall so it's meeting a real need out there.

I'm thinking of copying it for my nephew who needs some sort of grounding for his wild existential flights of fancy.

LOL! I like the way you put things, Stephen. I'm still reading your Vital Source Kindle book at times and enjoying it. You surely have a way with words.

I'm eager to get to your book after reading that wonderful poem, Phil. But first, Stephen is next in line, after Mother Theresa.

Phil,

when I was reading your reflections after a year of absence here, I was thinking that what you experience and express is indeed something that was not explicitly a part of Christian tradition, but, nevertheless, it should have its place in it. Of course, Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, Meister Eckhart and Rhineland mystics, Ruysbroeck, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing - they all probably referred to something like that, but in a different language.

I've come to think about this experience as an experience of existence (following, of course, Maritain and Arraj), but in my study of Plotinus who is a clear example of this sort of mysticism, I have come to realize that Maritain's talking about "esse" is actually a half of the story. He tried to objectify the experience in order to analyze it and justify it rationally in Thomistic terms. But mystics themselves tend to speak rather about "seeing" or, as you, of "awareness" or "I", not about existence. Plotinus, for example, is often speaking about the need to change intellectual seeing into "a seeing that is not seeing" or into a infinite seeing without form. Or he says that the intellect has to withdraw into its depths or cease to be an intellect altogether, or that it should climb above itself as if carried on a top of a wave, in order to "see" the One that cannot be seen or known, or grasped. Sometimes he uses the language of touching the One or being in its presence, instead of "seeing", but it seems to refer to the same experience.

My point is that the mystics are speaking subjectively and expressing their experience, which is an experience of "not-seeing seeing" or of pure, luminous presence, about the metaphysical experience of existence. But it is difficult to use that language in Christian philosophical and theological tradition, because the traditional language or the language of St. Thomas was always objective and focused on reality first, not on our experience of reality.

But I think that we could and should introduce this language of awareness or seeing, because it is more close to the experience itself. Because we are through our souls intelligent, aware beings, the unknowable existence of our soul, from which all our faculties emanate as if from a hidden source, is a luminous existence. Our innermost "to be", our I-am-ness is always conscious and aware, even if it is not-knowing in the sense that it does not grasp objects distinct from the subject.

In the book I'm working on right now, I'm showing how St. Augustine who read Plotinus and used his thought in his own philosophy, consciously refrained from using this non-dual language and insisted that the soul sees God always in a "dualistic" fashion. It seems to be a traditional attitude of the Church towards the mysticism of the Self, of Awareness. So I wonder if we can ever, as the Church, create a space for that mysticism (however rare that is), without blurring the metaphysical distinctions we have to preserve.

Plotinus himself said that even though in the experience of the One, there is not-two, but only one, it is "an audacious thing to say". Even this Pagan philosopher had a trouble with the non-dual experience, beucase it tends to undermine the whole metaphysical structure. If there is "one, not two" in the supreme state of awareness, how can we preserve the differences between things? It is a tension that cannot be resolved easily or cannot be resolved at all. Maritain's essay on Hindu thought did not receive a lot of attention, apart from Arraj, did it?

quote:

My point is that the mystics are speaking subjectively and expressing their experience, which is an experience of "not-seeing seeing" or of pure, luminous presence, about the metaphysical experience of existence. But it is difficult to use that language in Christian philosophical and theological tradition, because the traditional language or the language of St. Thomas was always objective and focused on reality first, not on our experience of reality.

But I think that we could and should introduce this language of awareness or seeing, because it is more close to the experience itself. Because we are through our souls intelligent, aware beings, the unknowable existence of our soul, from which all our faculties emanate as if from a hidden source, is a luminous existence. Our innermost "to be", our I-am-ness is always conscious and aware, even if it is not-knowing in the sense that it does not grasp objects distinct from the subject.

Yes, in a nutshell, Mt. What I'm attempting to do in my teaching more and more is to speak of the essence of our human spiritual consciousness in terms of awareness, intellect and will, the most basic and foundational being this non-reflecting awareness which is always present in all acts of the intellect and will (and psychological and somatic experiences as well). So when reflectivity and decision-making activities are stilled, then one can come to a more direct experience of the awareness that always "is" prior to any act of cognition or behavior ("the face you have before you are born"?). Thomas and others surely knew of this, only they would not have considered it a faculty in the sense that intellect, memory, will, etc. are. But once we name this aspect of our human consciousness, we can begin to see how it is that one can experience a simple state of awareness as a spiritual experience with numinous and even cosmic dimensions, and note how this same awareness can be present during contemplative states, which, in addition, include some sense of the divine.

Are we on the same page, here?

BTW, how's family life?

I'm more inclined not to think about awareness as a distinct faculty, but - if it is in fact the esse of the soul, if it is what Tibetan Buddhists call "the nature of the mind" - as something prior to faculties, a ground from which both intellect and will emanate, as its acts or energies. Perhaps, it is only conceptual distinction, but you probably agree that, since awareness is present both in intellectual and volitional acts, but intellectual and volitional acts are not necessarily present as such in the state of pure awareness (they tend to be absent or absorbed into that), awareness is more their ground than something that exists on the same level (?). I suppose that Lonergan and Helminiak, in their concept of the first level of consciousness, try to present awareness as a faculty, but if we take awareness to be what they call non-reflecting consciousness, it is not a faculty, but something logically and spiritually prior to them. I guess, I'm really sounding now like Meister Eckhart and other Rhineland mystics, since they insisted that the "inner citadel" of the soul or its "depth", "fine point" or whatever they called it, is above faculties and above all activities of the soul. Eckhart had a clear tendency to equal it with God, like Thomas Keating.

An interesting thing is that - as far as I can tell from reading about it and from my little experience - that intellect and will are functional in the state of pure awareness, but they acts are somehow indiscernable from the awareness itself. I mean, if you are in that state, and you see your friend, you obviously recognize him without any effort, even though you might not think "O, I see my friend, his name is so and so. I haven't seen him for a while..." You also choose and decide, but in a spontaneous fashion - you can "decide" to approach your friend or not, but, again, it feels like it "happens" without any deliberate choice. I remember that in your book about kundalini you wrote about "intelligent sense-perception" or something like that. Sometimes buddhist masters sound like in the state of awareness there are only purified senses, and no intelligence and will, which would be, of course, nonsense, if it were literally true.
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Family life... well. For the first few months I wondered where I was... For me it was particularly difficult, since I had almost no time for prayer, eucharist or other formal spiritual practices. On top of that, since my daughter was born, I was in a state of aridity, with no spiritual consolations or additional energy that could help me through this. It was just me, and an always tired me, not a very good thing. I try to think that it was a spiritual cold shower and a good lesson about just doing what you have to do here and now. Now I understand the difference between contemplative and active life. If you have children, the amount of contemplative in active becomes - at least for me - really small. At times I envied you, when I remembered how you wrote that in the eighties, when you were raising your children, you still managed to wake up early and pray for an hour. I couldn't do that, I was too tired. But I believe that on the deeper level, beyond conscious apprehension, the loving relationship with God was present all the time, I just didn't feel it that much.
Perhaps, it deserves another thread about having children and spiritual life... Shasha? Anyone?

Thanks for the update on family life, Mt. I relate very much to what you've shared, and encourage you to start a discussion in the Christian Spirituality Issues forum. It is very difficult to be a contemplative raising little ones, but there are many blessings as well. An understanding spouse who recognizes one's needs for quiet times is quite helpful, here.

- - -

I agree that "awareness" is not a faculty insofar as it does not "do something" like the other faculties. It's just "there," but in such manner as to elevate all the faculties (including the psychological ones) to a new level of functioning on a spiritual level. This awareness is not just a "state" or ground, however, but also a "thou." It is not simply that there is awareness, but that there is always a subject of awareness that is, in fact, identical with awareness itself. This is what I call the "I" in my book, God, Self and Ego, with Ego being the very same "I" only as experienced reflectively -- a "me," as it were. I was writing about this by observing my experience before I read Helminiak and Lonergan, who confirmed it in their writings about non-reflecting attention. This "I" is the very same one who is the subject present to and within all intellectual, volitional, and psychological experience, so I see no need to consider it to be God.
- see http://shalomplace.com/view/godselfego.html and the summary at the bottom of the page.

And here is an image concept I use in my teaching. Apex = our spiritual umbilical cord/connection with the divine; aka the point of the spirit, or soul.

See http://heartlandspirituality.o...anthropology.006.jpg for full-size.