“A donkey going round and round in a mill cannot step out of the circle to which it is tethered.” This is how St. Hesychios describes the state of awareness that is held prisoner to inner chatter. Although we may feel perfectly at home with going around and around and around in circles of inner chatter, he says that this actually blinds us to something deeper: “with our inner eye blinded, we cannot perceive holiness or the radiant light of Jesus.”” Hut with sufficient cultivation of watchfulness, our attention can be liberated from this mill, if only for brief periods. We begin to move from a sense of our interior life as narrow, flat, cramped, and tethered, to a real sense of inner spaciousness that is neither asinine nor tethered to anything at all.
The donkeys of our dull obsessions may be walking around and around the mill, but the ground on which they tread, the ground of their monotonous bondage, is solid and still, extending for miles and miles into open countryside. When we glimpse something of this wide-open space within (despite the fact that our donkeys remain), we have begun to awaken to the depths of the present moment simply because we have a changed relationship with the clouds of dust kicked up by our inner chatter.
We discover something of what St. Diadochos meant when he likened our awareness to the sea that we can look right into and “scan its depths” when the waves on the surface of awareness have calmed. This marks an important transition. Saint Hesychios described an earlier state of awareness in which we simply observed our thoughts under the torchlight of Christ carried in the hand of the intellect “along the tracks of the mind.” Note, however, that Christ is not considered to be an object of awareness, but the reason why awareness is becoming more luminous. Aided by the light of the torch that we grasped firmly, we had a good deal of work to do: battling with thoughts, scrutinizing thoughts, cultivating watchfulness.
But now St. Hesychios says this luminous dimension of awareness has nothing more to do with grasping a torch. “Now the Light of awareness appears to us like a full moon, circling the heart’s firmament.” We cannot grasp moonlight even as we are bathed in it. Walking by torchlight along the tracks of the mind has now led us to the threshold of our Center, a Center that is everywhere, what the ancients called “the heart.”” For some this is a gradual transition, for others a decisive breakthrough. It really does not matter; for in either case there are several characteristics of this inner expansion of the heart.
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
