Saint Teresa of Avila goes to great lengths to remind us that there is such a thing as inner light, “We are conditioned,” she says, “to perceive only external light. We forget that there is such a thing as inner light, illuminating our soul, and we mistake that radiance for darkness.” Saint Hesychios says our practice will dawn with yet a new brilliance, a “continuous seeing into the heart’s depths, stillness of mind unbroken even by thoughts which appear to be good and the capacity to he empty of thoughts.” With the training in silent prayer that we have learnt by torchlight and then by moonlight, our inner gaze is stilled and steadied in such a way that this inner light begins to dawn as brightly as the sun: “Just as those who look at the sun cannot but fill their eyes with light, so they who always have a steady gaze into their heart cannot fail to be illumined.” This discovery was one of St. Augustine’s great realizations; he sees that this inner light is itself illumined by Light shining in light: “the very light that shone in my eyes was mine no longer. For the light was within.” For Augustine and for many of the saints and sages, this is a glimpse of what the Psalmist glimpsed, “In your light, Lord, we see light” (Ps 36: 10). This is the liberating, rich poverty of contemplation: our practice is reduced to the sheer simplicity of Light shining in light. This is what David bodies forth in his Florentine gallery of light.
The luminous simplicity of this grounding awareness is beyond the reach of doubt. Saint Diadochos understates his solid surety of this when he says: “You should not doubt that the intellect, when it begins to be strongly energized by the divine light, becomes so completely translucent that it sees its own light vividly.” When certain inner conditions are ready and ripe, the ground of awareness opens up from within; the sun dawns, and we are utterly free of shackles. Our life circumstances, however, whether grim or glad, remain with us. Our character’s quirks remain firmly in place. But we are free in the midst of both sorrow and joy; free and gracious enough to welcome and respond to the present moment however it happens to be. We cannot pull this off ourselves, because what we usually take to be this “self” that likes to accomplish such spiritual feats as “awakening” or “enlightenment” has fallen away, lost (Mt 16:25), if only momentarily, like a crystal in sunlight.
Something “ever ancient ever new” dawns in awareness, not as an object of awareness, for it is too close to us for that, but as “a sunlit absence,” interior to awareness itself, “more intimate to me than my inmost self” as St. Augustine famously phrased it.
To the conceptual mind this awakening differs from previous ones. This luminous, flowing Vastness is constantly present whether we turn our gaze within or without, for in this Vastness there is no within versus without. This ground-awareness does not joust with divine presence-versus-absence, for it embraces both. It is beyond any possibility of doubt, for awareness saturates both doubt and consent, and its silence embraces both fear and trust. It is as Teflon to both past and future. Untouched by time, but without being excluded by time, it is yet within time but without being contained by time. Too simple to come and go, it is the “fullness of time” (Gal 4:4).
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
