Invitation to Contemplation: Be StillPATHS AND PRACTICES IN THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH
Nothing you do can create enlightenment.
Then why are there spiritual practices?
To encourage your mind to be open and
still long enough to receive Truth’s gift.
While silence and stillness are actually all that are required, the egoic mind finds it challenging to rest in these dimensions, and so spiritual practices of all kinds have been developed to help quiet the mind and return it to its original nature. Do spiritual practices lead to Truth, or is Truth moving as spiritual practice?
Whatever path or practice you may follow, there are many ideas about what leads to the end of seeking. But I have yet to meet a single person in whom awakening, and hence a shift of identity, has occurred who did not describe its appearance as spontaneous and unexpected. Beforehand, there may have been practices or devastating life crises. Some had been searching for a lifetime; others seemed not to have been searching at all. There may have been apparent purification of the mind, development of single-pointedness, increasing ability to concentrate, practices that aim at opening the heart or various chakras, kundalini energy moving up the spine, or service (seva) that brought humility (or pride). Or there may have been such misery that they were tempted to end their life before something intervened to save it. Any of these experiences, or none of them, may have appeared. The question is: To what or whom have they appeared? To oneself, of course! And who is that self?
SEEKERS OF TRUTH
There are seekers of truth in many fields—physical, biological, and psychological sciences, for example. Whether seeking objective truth about the physical universe or subjective truth about psychological realities, each discipline will build on what is known but must remain open to what is unknown. Practitioners of each must question their assumptions, test hypotheses, and experience success and failure. Many ideas and theories once accepted as “truth” have been proven wrong. Are you open to the possibility that what you have accepted as the “truth” of who you are might be one of them?
If you are a seeker of ultimate Truth, are you willing to question your assumptions, theories, ideas, or opinions and step openly and nakedly into the silence and stillness of the unknown? It is here that Truth may reveal itself as both the knowing and the being of objective and subjective realities. It is in being humbled by our failures and in surrendering our attempts to “know” intellectually that knowledge may appear, a knowledge that the finite mind cannot possess.
TRUTH IS NOT SOMEWHERE ELSE
Actually, there is no path to Truth. Truth is not somewhere else. It is here now and requires no traversing of time or distance. Most practices, regardless of the tradition, are designed to encourage the seeker to discover that which is transcendently present in the immediacy of Now.
What is present now in your experience? What knows it? What is aware? The Truth of what you are! But conditioned thought holds that that is a body-mind, separate from all others, separate from life, separate from Truth. This is a bit like imagining a thought, an eyelash, or your fingernail is the whole of “you,” when all the while what is timelessly awake as You is looking out from one Consciousness at its own body of Being spread through billions of universes.
YET PATHS AND PRACTICES DEVELOP
While Truth is nowhere that you are not, the seeker imagines it is, so paths and practices have developed to aid the seeker in discovering, listening to, and entering the deeper, silent dimensions of one’s own being.
We may have a preference for the language and flavors of one particular tradition, practice, set of scriptures, or collection of teachings, but at the heart of the matter, there is no language for the deepest experience or revelations. The attempts to describe them are wrapped in languages and cultures that differ from one another. No tradition and no teachings hold exclusive ownership of Truth. Truth is not a belief, although beliefs appear. It is not created by faith or devotion, yet faith and devotion may appear. Allow yourself to move where you feel moved when you sense it is coming from that deep spiritual impulse.
In my experience, I seem to have been drawn to taste deeply of several traditions: Christian, Advaita, and Zen. Each provides beautiful expressions of the Infinite in unique ways, yet all seem to share in their deepest mystical traditions the same mystery that has no beginning and no end but is present here and now.
GRADUAL AND DIRECT PATHS
So-called paths to awakening can be considered gradual or direct, and each has its strengths and weaknesses. Gradual paths can help the seeker mature; become kinder, more open, ethical, or compassionate; able to concentrate attention; and become familiar with silence and presence. Gradual paths can sometimes leave one searching forever, however, trying to perfect a practice, one’s person, or one’s actions in order to have a better life or a better “next” life. Sometimes awakening is not even considered, as there is so much emphasis on the seeker’s practice. And of course, at times, a seeker’s attention to his or her breath may lead to the discovery that there is no one breathing; the breath is breathing itself, as is the rest of life.
Direct paths seek to uncover the infinite ground at the very beginning, directing the seeker to what is ever present and aware. Direct paths begin at the apparent end. Yet at times, early insights or glimpses of awakening that may occur on this path can provide a false sense of attainment for a spiritual ego. Even a very authentic awakening to our true nature does not, in itself, confer maturity or infallibility in one’s relative life.
WHAT PRACTICE IS THE “RIGHT” ONE?
Our so-called path is actually here, wherever we find ourselves walking. Yet minds are often confused about what path or practice is the “right” one and whether effort or no effort is required for realization. Some spiritual teachers demand great effort on the part of the student or disciple; others encourage following the moment. (For example: “You must sit twice a day every day regardless of your mind’s desires; disciplining your mind is the most important practice” versus “If you feel like meditating, then by all means meditate; if not, then don’t.”) What is right for you? The answers will simply appear as Consciousness moves to awaken itself from its own forgetfulness. The spiritual journey for each of us is tailored to our particular unfolding, preferences, temperament, sensibilities, language, culture, and need. I have always resonated with Nisargadatta’s observation:
When effort is needed, effort will appear.
When effortlessness becomes essential, it will assert itself.
You need not push life about.
Just flow with it and give yourself completely
to the task of the present moment.1
The ambitious spiritual ego does not want to give itself completely to the present moment. It believes the reality it is seeking could not possibly include this moment of experience. But tell me, what is absent from Totality? What could be separate from the open, ever-present Awareness that has been awake to every experience? The moment may seem beautiful, ugly, tender, harsh, loud, or soft; it includes rainy days and sunny days, the grocer at the corner store, the child at play in the park, our agony, our joy. What has been here in the midst of all changing experiences?
THE QUESTION OF PROGRESS
If you believe that you must sit on a cushion one hour a day or you will never “progress” on the spiritual path, you will either sit one hour a day or you will feel guilty that you are not. The idea of “progress” is always a concept of the mind, an idea that can certainly appear to be a motivating force. However, whatever action or experiencing you take to be “progress” simply appears when it appears, the action of the moment. “Progress” is based on memory. You imagine that “you” were somewhere in the past and that now you are somewhere else closer to the place you imagine you wish to go in the future. Such is the play of Consciousness, shifting experiences, but haven’t You simply been “here” for every experience? Who is the You?
IS EGO AN ENEMY?
In the spiritual search, it seems as though it is ego that searches, that follows practices, makes choices, imagines it is either progressing or remaining hopelessly stuck in its ambition to attain “enlightenment.” But it is also considered the “bad guy” in spiritual circles and so it imagines it has to somehow destroy itself. The ego that so earnestly searches and is so frequently frustrated is not a monster, not a demon; the ego is nothing you could destroy even if you wanted to, and it will not end its own life by any efforts it can produce.
The ego is not an enemy; it simply does not exist as what you imagine. Thought has constructed a separate “self,” which is an illusion. Even the idea of separation—that collection of thoughts and memories you have determined is “you”—is itself a limited reflection of what you seek. So-called ego derives its consciousness from the universal awareness/awakeness you imagine is somewhere else, but is it? The egoic mind of even the most sincere seeker does not know how to surrender, but is being surrendered to Truth, to love, to the openness of not knowing.
We might say that spiritual practices such as contemplation, meditation, and prayer are all methods used to ripen green wood so that it can be burned in the fire of Truth, the fire of love. The green wood is our habitual way of thinking, acting, and reacting as egos, as consciousness identified with limitation and the assumption of being separate. Spiritual practices are methods that can begin to soften our stance toward our self, toward life in general, and to open us to what transcends the habitual. They are invitations to become intimate with the wisdom of silence and stillness.
CONTEMPLATION
Contemplation is looking deeply into anything from one’s inner silence and stillness. In the spiritual seeker’s life it could be a teaching story, a poem, a passage of scripture in various traditions, or koan study in Zen. Koan study puts the student in a pressure cooker because the question asked cannot be answered through use of the intellect. One must become the question and demonstrate the answer, not talk about it. Sometimes the great pressure of the roshi refusing one’s answers time and time again can lead to a breakthrough. Contemplating scripture is a gentler process and includes not only thinking and feeling into it but also “becoming” the characters in the story or “being” what is described.
For many years, my spiritual life was centered on devotion to God as I understood God. I was not interested in knowing my Self. The Sanskrit words bhakti (devotion) and jnana (knowledge) were not in my vocabulary. I was no longer the angry child, wanting to know who took my mother away in death; as an adult, I just wanted to know God. I felt naturally inclined to meditate, although the Protestant church I attended said nothing about meditation, much less offered any instruction. So I bought a book about meditation and decided on the basis of what I read that I must practice it. Counting breaths held no appeal for me, so I decided to begin by contemplating a Bible verse.
The verse I chose was Psalm 46:10. Each morning, as I sat contemplating the words “Be still and know that I am God,” something inside gradually quieted down. Each word seemed to deliver a message or engage a question.
Invitation to Contemplation: Be Still
I would like to invite you to join me in contemplating these words and the felt sense of their meaning in your own experience. Let there be space and silence as you quietly allow the words and your experience to merge.
Be.
Just be.
Be still and know.
Be still and simply know that.
Be still and know that I.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know that I am God.2 
As I contemplated these words over and over for many years, I never for a moment imagined their meaning could lead to a human being experiencing his or her “I am” as the Divine. In becoming still, I imagined it might be possible to come closer to God.
When, years later, I read Ramana Maharshi’s words that the phrase Be still and know that I am God “sums up the whole teaching,” I realized that this verse was not one I had just picked at random, as I had supposed. It had been delivered by my Self, the inner guru, and was specific to the path that seemed to be unfolding in the life I imagined then was “mine.” Can you trust how your spiritual life wants to unfold as well? Each of us has a unique path to awakening if we are sincerely longing for Truth. There is no single way that the Divine awakens itself in its own experience of being human.
BHAKTI AND JNANA: DEVOTION AND KNOWLEDGE
Intense love is like moonlight and intense knowledge like sunlight.
The light of the moon—so delicate and healing to gaze upon—
is simply sunlight in another form. In the infinite sky of consciousness, you can always clearly observe sun and moon. . . .
Knowledge is the flower, love its fragrance.3
LEX HIXON
Knowledge is the experiential knowing or sensing of one’s true nature as emptiness, pure awareness, spirit, a “no-thingness” that is undivided. Love is the intimate response of the heart to the knowledge of oneness, the oneness of our single essence with every-thing. The Heart of Awareness does not separate the flower from its fragrance.
We cannot actually separate wisdom from its self-less love or love from wisdom, yet certain spiritual paths seem to focus more on one than the other. In the moment when longing for love finds itself to be love, or longing for truth discovers that it is Truth, both wisdom and love merge as one. Love flows from emptiness, and emptiness knows itself through love. Neither wisdom nor love can be “known” through books, texts, scriptures, or words of any kind, but only in the awake silence that reveals itself beyond words.
If you are drawn to the path of love and devotion (bhakti), then prayer, worship, service, ritual, chanting, mantra, devotional practices, and action will be part of your path. If you are drawn to the path of wisdom (jnana), then meditation, contemplation, self-inquiry may appear. But at some point, both the heart wishing to surrender to God and the mind searching for its Source will be surrendered to Silence.
The path of devotion is more suited to some temperaments and the path of knowledge to others. Or you might find, as happened in this life, that both may appear at different times. The bhakti path seeks to move the seeker out of self-obsession and toward love and union with God, to serve whatever love one has discovered. The jnana path seeks to drive the seeker inward, toward knowledge of Truth or the true Self, by seeking the Source of the seeker. It is known as an intellectual path and involves removing everything that is not Truth in order to discover the deepest essence or clarity.
The seeker who is a devotee and lover of God, who seeks to surrender all actions to God, comes to understand that everything is God. The intellectual seeker, “subtracting” all she is not, reaches the understanding that nothing exists except Truth (or God) and, in seeing the Oneness, comes to the love that flows out from such an understanding. Both paths will eventually end up in the same place—surrender to God or surrender to Truth. Both paths serve the Infinite and involve remembering our divine nature and manifesting that nature in our living.
STRUCTURED AND UNSTRUCTURED MEDITATION
There are many types of meditation practices in various traditions and also outside of traditions. They generally fall into one of two categories: structured or unstructured time sitting in silence and being still. Structured practices include concentration practices, such as counting or focusing on the breath, reciting a mantra, or visualizing the guru, and they are used for gathering the scattered mind and developing the ability to focus the mind in one place. They are useful practices in that they initially show the seeker how very active the mind is. They will frustrate the seeker at first; he will be sure he is not doing the practices correctly because his thinking keeps interrupting his focus on the object of concentration.
Over time, concentration practices do quiet the mind, and they have been shown to have benefits in reducing stress, lowering blood pressure, and bringing moments of calm into a troubled life or a restless mind. If these are the goals, they are quite useful. If you are a seeker of the Truth that frees one from one’s “self,” however, they may or may not lead to liberation, since the “meditator” may continue to feel separate from the meditation.
Unstructured meditation is an invitation to simply sit without attempting to control anything that arises. It is an invitation to be—to be the silence, not the one who is trying to be silent; to be the awareness, not the one who is trying to be aware. It is not about controlling experience or maintaining a certain state of consciousness. True meditation reveals what IS before any “state” of consciousness. There can be moments where there is no thought, no ego, and no time. We are conscious, if even for a moment, of being what we ARE.
This type of meditation occurs when consciousness sinks into the unknown, into the depths of silence, where there is no “meditator.” It is a deep listening to silence. Whether thoughts appear or do not appear is not a concern. We are not efforting to maintain a “state,” but rather coming to rest in our natural state. This form of meditation does not engage the ego, as do many structured meditation techniques. Of course, in the beginning you will encounter the noise of your “narrator,” but you are not engaged in battle with your thinking. In fact, as consciousness comes to rest in its home ground, we discover that thought cannot interrupt the awake silence we eventually discover is our true nature. It is just another phenomenon that comes and goes in the Heart of Awareness.
This type of meditation can render the ego more and more transparent, since we are no longer striving to make something happen. It is a beautiful opportunity to unhook from our digital and virtual worlds, from our goal-oriented minds, and simply rest as what we are. We begin to see that when we are not struggling against our thoughts or feelings, something knows how to realign itself with its true nature. In this type of meditation, we also come to connect with the deep well of silence and wisdom into which we can drop our most important existential questions. Into this depth of knowing, we can inquire: Who or what am I, really?
MANTRA MEDITATION
Mantra practice is a form of structured meditation, but one that can help connect the seeker with what is deeper than the mind. It gives the mind something to do as the rest of one’s being quiets down. If the mantra includes a name of the Divine, perhaps has been used for centuries, and holds the energy of thousands who have gone before, the sounds themselves seem to invite a deepening into a sense of the Divine. In India, mantra practice has been described as being akin to giving an elephant a stick to hold in its trunk while walking through a crowded marketplace. As long as it holds on to the stick, it does not disturb the market with its trunk swinging wildly from side to side.
In the midst of my early years of contemplation of “Be still,” a Hebrew mantra appeared from the stillness whose meaning I did not know, but I remembered the words clearly. In consulting a rabbi, I learned it was a common Hebrew blessing. Those words, “Baruch atah Adonai, Elohenu,” wove themselves into the very fabric of my life for the next ten years—in meditation, while driving to work, when waiting for a dentist appointment, between client hours. Whether I was feeling distressed or at peace, that Hebrew prayer (translated as “Blessed art Thou, Lord of the Universe”) spoke itself and sang itself through a strange melody in the depths of my being. It even showed up in my dreams, so embedded was it in my consciousness. Even now I sometimes sing it as a lullaby to my grandsons, and I sang it the night my husband lay dying. Sometimes we may not seek a mantra, yet one seeks us.
VIPASSANA MEDITATION AND MINDFULNESS MEDITATION
Vipassana, which means “to see things as they are,” is also called insight meditation, a form of structured meditation that comes from the Buddhist tradition. Initially the seeker is invited to notice the breath rising and falling or to notice other sensations, to pay close attention to the objects of awareness, and to note what is arising in consciousness by naming it. Rather than following the content of a thought or feeling, for example, the meditator is instructed to simply name “thinking” or “feeling.” So the experience of naming might appear as: “rising,” “falling” (when aware of the breath), or “hearing,” “thinking,” “feeling,” and so forth. In this way one comes to experience being a witness to one’s mind and body activity rather than being totally identified with or at the mercy of the changing objects of awareness. This can sometimes lead to a breakthrough in realizing that what is present in all experiences is what you are. Often, however, it leads to the seeker becoming identified with one part of the mind watching another while being continually identified as the “doer.” The egoic “doer” now becomes the “watcher.”
In true witnessing, we know what is happening in the moment that it is happening, but this requires no effort, no thinking about witnessing. When we are sitting, walking, eating, running, speaking, we know we are sitting, walking, eating, running, speaking. This is called mindfulness. Our attention is on the moment, and in that intimacy, we can touch the ground of Being itself. True Presence is not a “someone” trying to be present. Mindfulness meditation can be similar to Vipassana, although it is often applied in secular settings rather than as a Buddhist practice. It can also be a method of relating to one’s experience in a more accepting, nonjudgmental way that helps to reduce stress.
PRAYER
Prayer is communing with and listening in silence to the inner voice of the Beloved, in whatever name or form it has been given. Prayer opens the heart to something beyond ego. It may begin as a child’s prayer to a Santa Claus God in the sky, asking for things for the “me.” It may include devotion to a guru or a spiritual master for whom one has developed a great love. Often we do not come to prayer except in crises, when we are being broken open and have nowhere else to turn. Sometimes that is the value of our suffering; we are surrendered to a deeper wisdom that arises from beyond the egoic mind. In the deepest prayer, there are no words or requests, just a sense of communion or oneness with one’s sense of the Infinite.
In working with Mother Teresa, who called herself just “a little pencil in the hands of God,” I discovered that when there was a “need,” the first stop was not thought or the telephone, but the chapel. It was in silence that the inspiration for whom to call or where to go would come. Prayer is listening from the inner silence, love, knowledge, and wisdom of our deepest nature. It is a vehicle of Consciousness relating to itself, although the individual on the path of devotion will not likely call God Consciousness or Being. Rather, God is experienced personally as a deity, a friend, a guide.
Prayer may eventually lead beyond any and all ideas of a god or goddess, as one comes to know the Beloved as one’s Self, one’s deepest essence. The Christian mystic Meister Eckhart prayed to rid himself of any idea of God.
TO WHOM WOULD I BE PRAYING?
Often people who are somewhat familiar with the path of Advaita or nonduality will feel they should not pray. “To whom would I be praying?” they ask. But this can sometimes be an intellectual attempt to stop what might be a natural way of opening the heart to a greater love or greater humility in favor of the mind holding on to a philosophical stance. Truth holds no philosophical or religious dogma. It is so much simpler. If you are moved to pray, prayer can move you beyond yourself.
The real question is whether we are living our lives as a prayer. Once awakening has occurred, the prayer may simply be “thank you” for whatever moment is encountered—or, as the Advaita Vedanta teacher Jean Klein once put it, “thanking with no one to thank.” An attitude of gratitude is itself a prayer that can transform a life.
MYSTIC UNION
Intense devotion can bring about moments of mystic union with the Beloved. In these moments, separation dissolves in bliss. The problem with mystic union, however, is that in order to have the ecstasy of union, you have to separate, again and again. Bliss and ecstasy can be as addictive as wonderful sex, a heart-opening psychotropic drug, or fantastic food. But like all experiences, these come and go. They do not, in themselves, bring liberation. In my experience, moments of union came unexpectedly and were welcomed deeply, but something kept moving beyond them.