When we look within, the “I” that looks is saturated by this Vastness; when we look without, this “I” is liberated of itself by its immersion in the very Vastness that indwells it (Jn 14:10; 17:22-23), much like the sponge that is immersed in the ocean depth that fills its every membrane. When the sponge looks out, it sees only ocean; when it looks within, it sees only ocean. We are graciously immersed in Jesus’ own awareness of the simplest of facts: “He who sees me sees the Father” (Jn 14:7). “The Father and I are one” (Jn 12:45). To lose our life (Mt 10:39) is to find it “hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3), in the overflowing, simple such ness of what is.
Not only is this blossoming of awareness from within a depthless depth out of reach of doubt’s arthritic grip but also it presents itself as always having been present throughout our entire personal history. It quite rightly seems to us that there has been a slow, gradual blossoming, but once this blossom has opened it is obvious that the depth less depth of awareness has always been this open, sunlit absence. This realization is just another roadside paradox of the spiritual path. This absence is not the lack of something that ought to be there, but the overflowing of Vastness as right Now. The inner Vastness that overflows as Now, in which all of us “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), cannot be absent, not due to any constraint, but due to the naked simplicity of its freedom. Certainly this spacious, silent land can seem to be absent or distant to the distracted, discursive, calculating, or frenzied mind. But to the still mind of the inner eye, “the eye of the heart,” or the “gaze of the mind,” as Augustine calls it, it is and always has been closer to us than we are to ourselves.
The sun of awareness in the gaze of the heart is not a heightened state of awareness that soon descends into a trough of awareness only again to ascend the heights. The Vastness of awareness itself grounds all these changing states of mind. The condensation of our innumerable states of mind—thoughts, mood, and character—is an ever-changing pattern of weather. But this terrain of mountains and valleys of simple awareness witnesses all these changing patterns of weather as they move through our psychological terrain, changing as all weather changes. The heart’s vastness receives pain, strife, confusion, fear, anger, frenzy, yet is untouched by pain, strife, confusion, fear, anger, frenzy. It is as immediately present to pain or illness that is being healed as it is to pain or illness that is not being healed. It receives and lets go as a riverbed receives and lets go—both at the same instant—of all the water of daily life the river carries along.
Awareness itself, the very aware-ing, is never awareness of some thing, yet by virtue of its simplicity it grounds all things and therefore is never separate from anything. The gaze of the heart is always gazing into God, for this is quite simply what the heart’s depth does. R. S. Thomas states more clearly the inherent paradox of gazing into God:
“Because it is not I who look
but I who am looked through, Gloria.”
This undeniable luminous Vastness that slips out of any clothing that mere words can weave, but of which every tongue must tell, is not a physical light that occurs in space and time. Saints and sages throughout the tradition frequently warn us about thinking of it as a physical form. Saint Augustine reminds us that, while he was busy concerning himself “only with things that are contained in space, this light was not in space.” Evagrius says the demon “cunningly manipulates the brain and converts the light surrounding the intellect into a form.” Saint Diadochos warns that if this light “has a shape [it] is the product of the evil artifice of the enemy.” He insists that we should not take up a spiritual path “in hope of seeing visions clothed with form or shape; for if we do Satan will find it easy to lead our soul astray. Our one point is to perceive the love of God fully and consciously in our heart.”
Why the insistence that this inner light has no shape? Academic theology reminds us that this mystery we call God is beyond what can be grasped as shape and form in the way we grasp tangible things. Saint Teresa gets straight to the point when she says it is because “It is all about love melting in love.” Saint John of the Cross would suggest that this is not a blurring of identities but just the way things are. “It seems to such a person that the entire universe is a sea of love in which it is engulfed, for conscious of the living point or center of love within itself, it is unable to catch a sight of the boundaries of love.” This realization is not a confusion of the discursive mind’s conceptual distinction of Creator from creature but creation’s ultimate clarity and consummation.
On the spiritual path “we walk by faith and not by sight” (2 Cor 5:7). The full splendor of the sun of awareness reveals the most ordinary daily events to be transparent to David’s splendid gallery of light. This is the Fact: our liberating reduction to porous simplicity: the infinitely luminous expanse of right Now. “This light itself is one, and all those are one who see it and love it.”
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
