The creative momentum of returning to our practice whenever we become aware that our attention has been stolen is now completely well established. This itself implies that there has been an expansion of awareness. We spend less time battling with the fact that there are thoughts stealing our attention. We have more or less stopped commenting to ourselves on the fact that we are forever commenting on the incessant commentaries in our heads. We let the mind be, just as we let the weather be. Whereas before we simply believed we were this constantly changing weather—now storm, now sun, now deluge, now drought, now week after week of grim gray weather—the realization is dawning on us that we are not this ever-changing weather of inner commentary.
There is an abiding, and increasingly stable, inner calm and spaciousness that allows us to behold our life circumstances with greater ease and wider perspective. It is as though, at the earlier stage, we had encountered our inner battles as we would encounter a bee inside a telephone booth. The same bees are experienced very differently now that we know ourselves not as narrow and tight, but as wide-open and endless fields, where the soul can “bathe in its own space,” as David Scott puts it, and “make long swathes in meadow lengths of space.”” This is what Evagrius calls that “open country whose name is prayer.”
If our practice has featured the use of a prayer word, it is common not to have to repeat it consciously (though we are completely free to). There is a practical, fundamental unity between the concentration of attention (facilitated by the prayer word) and the expansion of awareness. The two are as one. It is impossible to separate the concentrated plop of a pebble in a pond from the water’s widening ripples of reception. With this expansion of awareness comes an inner stability in the midst of the joys, ordeals, or tedium of daily life however it happens to be.
The present moment has an utterly reliable way of being exactly the way it is at any given moment. This paradox of the inner unity of concentrated expansion has opened up the present moment, revealing in this “sunlit absence” life as firm and unshakable as it is an ungraspable flow: unshakable because it is our foundation; ungraspable, because it is constantly being poured out as sheer gift. This inner stability is the fruit of a maturing practice of contemplation: “Continuity of attention produces inner stability; inner stability produces a natural intensification of watchfulness and in due measure gives contemplative insight into spiritual warfare. This in turn is succeeded by persistence in the Jesus Prayer … in which the mind, free from all images, enjoys complete silence.”
The rising of the moon exerts a powerful pull on the earth and its waters. Likewise the moonrise of Christ’s presence in the heart’s sky exerts a powerful draw on our awareness. This is different from seeing by torchlight. Seeing by torchlight focuses on cultivating skills of watchfulness with respect to what appears in awareness. Seeing by moonlight is not an increase in the things we need to be aware of, but the expansive opening up of awareness from within. Awareness opens and expands in response to the pull of the rising moon of Presence in the sky of the heart. However, with this moonrise come new challenges as well; for it is very easy to get caught in the allure of the moon.
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
