Awareness is not like a solid tabletop or flat-screen TV. Saint Diadochos says awareness is more like the sea, which, when calm, we can see right into: “When the sea is calm, fishermen can scan its depths and therefore hardly any creature moving in the water escapes their notice. But when the sea is disturbed by the winds it hides beneath its turbid and agitated waves what it was happy to reveal when it was smiling and calm; and then the fishermen’s skill and cunning prove vain. The same thing happens with the contemplative power of the intellect.” The ocean depth of awareness can be gazed into. This is the invitation of interior silence. We look right into the mind, right into awareness itself in which thoughts and feelings appear and disappear, whether they are like troubled, stormy waters or feathery ocean foam.
Saint Hesychios says the practice of watchful awareness yields “continuous insight into the heart’s depths, stillness of mind unbroken even by thoughts which appear to be good, and the capacity to be empty of all thought.” The deeper our insight into these depths, “the greater the longing with which you will pray.” Saint Teresa also knows this depth-dimension of awareness: “I used to he tormented by this turmoil of thoughts,” she recalls. “A little over four years ago I came to realize by experience that thinking is not the same as mindfulness …. I hadn’t been able to understand why, if the mind is one of the faculties of the soul, it is sometimes so restless. Thoughts fly around so fast. . . . It was driving me crazy to see the faculties of my soul calmly absorbed in the remembrance of God while my thoughts, on the other hand were wildly agitated.” She learns from her own experience that there is something deep within her that remains absorbed in prayer even amid the whirl of thoughts in her head.
Saint Hesychios sees a direct link between our growth in watchful awareness and the gradual manifestation of the Light of Christ. The two are simultaneous: the more stable and expansive our awareness, the greater the suffusion of awareness in Light. This gradual realization of the loving light of awareness is the simplest and most profound thing that can happen in our lives this side of death. It reveals death’s double-hinged doors.
Whatever blessings we may receive in our devotional lives, our family lives, our lives spent in service of God and neighbor, our contemplative lives will keep us very practically focused for quite some time on the ordeal of our thoughts. This ordeal of thoughts is the making of the contemplative. Whether feelings of being blessed or consoled are absent or abundant, cultivating the practice of vigilant awareness is vital.
Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
The Five Powers
The spirit is of divine origin. It has its own energy. It is the source of ideas. It orders reason, if reason accepts it as guide.
The mind is the faculty which originates thoughts. Judgment is the appreciation of the thoughts originated: positive if they are good thoughts, negative if they are otherwise.
Imagination is the ability to picture something to ourselves. It is a mistake to say that everything we can picture to ourselves is on that account true. It may be true or it may be false. And it can happen that the mind, if it lacks discrimination, can take the false for true.
Sensitivity is the reaction following the judgment of good or bad thoughts.
In this way, the powers of the human soul are distinguished, and this is how they act when they are true to their nature.
To live in accordance with their nature is good: it means to win salvation.
To live in opposition to their nature is shameful: it means to prepare oneself for punishment.
To live on a higher plane than the natural is splendid: it means to deserve every commendation.
Niceta Stethatus
The Spiritual Paradise, 5 (SC8, pp. 70ff.)
~ Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain, A Patristic Breviary: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
