03/29/2019
Meister Eckhart said, “Being is God.” Richard Rohr says God or Spirit is a verb. Cynthia Bourgeault writes that “attention is an energy field in its own right, a subtle substance that reflects being itself. “With these thoughts in mind, I smiled as I reread in Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, “You are cut off from Being as long as your mind takes up all your attention. When this happens – and it happens continuously for most people—you are not in your body. The mind absorbs all your consciousness and transforms it into mind stuff. You cannot stop thinking.
“To become conscious of Being you need to reclaim consciousness from the mind. This is one of the most essential tasks on your spiritual journey. It will free vast amounts of consciousness that previously had been trapped in useless and compulsive thinking. A very effective way of doing this is simply to take the focus of your attention away from thinking and direct it into the body, where Being can be felt in the first instance as the invisible energy field that gives life to what you perceive as the physical body.”
“Having access to that formless realm in truly liberating. . . We may call it the Unmanifested, the invisible Source of all things [i.e., God], the Being within all beings. It is a realm of deep stillness and peace, but also of joy and intense aliveness. Whenever you are present, you become “transparent” to some extent to the light, the pure consciousness that emanates from this Source. You also realize that the light is not separate from who you are but constitutes your very essence.
Returning now to the topic of Centering Prayer, Cynthia writes in her latest book that the value and strength of Centering Prayer is that “it builds within a person a new center of gravity” through which we can let go of the traditional reflection of the mind with thoughts and “remain rooted in being [God awareness/Consciousness] through sensation, not reflection.”
As I was exposed to these teachers, I began to practice moving through my day with more attention to where I place my attention and to surrendering the narratives that play out on the screen of my mind. One day as I ran through a canopied trail observing light flickering through the trees and paying attention to my body’s experience to what it felt, saw and heard, I woke up to the vibrancy of Being beneath my normal inattentiveness. Halting in my tracks, aware of the intimacy, I began laughing, “Has it been this easy all along?” Several years later, I’d still say yes, it’s that easy and also quite hard to come to that realization and discipline. Sending encouragement to drop the monkey mind, move attention into the present and discover what it means to be a still, polished mirror reflecting Being.
