Chapter 1
"I am silently lost in God." -- Saint Catherine of Genoa
What is God?
‘I am’, before the words ‘I am’.
I would like to remain silent here but the written word does not permit.
‘I am’ is God’s confession in our hearts.
Abiding as ‘I am’ is what God is; abiding as ‘I am’ is what a person does.
Whatever God is, God must be whole, perfect, complete.
From the point of view of the whole, there are no parts.
Having no parts, God only knows itself.
No world, no person, no thing. No here or there, before or after, creation or
destruction, self or other. No time or space, no thought, no feeling, no body.
This absence of anything other than itself is love.
God knows itself simply by being itself. Its knowing itself is its loving itself.
And what is prayer?
Again, I would like to remain silent, for silence is the closest we come to
God before losing ourself in that.
Prayer is simply to remain as the ‘I am’ before the words ‘I am’. To abide as
that. Simply to be.
If this is clear to you, not just philosophically but experientially, read no
further. If not, let me elaborate.
Section 1
To understand what prayer is, it is necessary to understand what the term
‘God’ refers to. To understand what is meant by God, it is necessary to know
what one’s self is.
Our understanding of God, and thus our understanding of prayer, depends
upon our understanding of our self.
As individuals we look at the universe and wonder where it came from. We
presume that whatever creates the universe must precede and transcend it.
Hence, the conventional idea of a creator God that lies beyond the world, at
an infinite distance from ourself, arises as a result of the belief in ourself as
an individual. Thus, the trinity of the individual, world and God arises, each
an inevitable consequence of the individual’s point of view.
Believing God to be the creator of the world and ourself, we then enter into a
devotional relationship with it. We could say that the highest state of the
individual is to enter into a relationship of devotion to this creator God,
surrendering its will to the will of God. This relationship, which is enshrined
in much of the world’s great religious literature, places the individual in the
right relationship to God – one of devotion, adoration, thanksgiving, praise
and surrender.
Section 2
This path of devotion and surrender gradually purifies and attenuates the
individual until the question arises, ‘If God’s being is infinite, how can there
be room for an individual being within it?’
The existence of numerous finite beings would displace a part of infinite
being and infinite being would no longer be infinite. God would no longer be
God.
We come to understand that there is no room for the finite in the infinite.
The individual is not a finite being that exists at a vast distance from infinite
being but is an apparent limitation of God’s infinite being, the only being
there is.
The individual does not surrender; it is surrendered.
Just as there are not numerous physical spaces in the world – one for each
building – but one infinite and indivisible space, temporarily enclosed by
numerous buildings yet never mod-ified or divided by them, so there are not
numerous beings.
There is one being, God’s being, temporarily clothed in thoughts and
perceptions, seeming to become a temporary, finite self but never actually
ceasing to be itself.
A human being is God’s being temporarily clothed in human attributes.
God’s being is a human being divested of its qualities.
In prayer, we travel inwards through the layers of experience – thinking,
feeling, sensing, perceiving, acting and relating – until we come to our
essential, irreducible being. Divested of the qualities that our self derives
from the content of experience, it stands revealed as God’s infinite being.
The seventeenth century French monk Brother Lawrence said, ‘I removed
from my mind everything that was capable of spoiling my communion with
God’. When everything that can be taken from us is removed, all that
remains is God’s being, and we are that. That is the practice of the presence
of God.
Prayer is to understand and feel that the only being in us is God’s being, and
to abide as that.
Brother Lawrence continues, ‘I just make it my business to persevere in the
practice of the presence of God. My soul has a constant silent, secret
communion with God.’ This communion with God is simply remaining with
being, as being, which lies behind and in the midst of all experience.
There is one being from which everyone and everything derives its
apparently independent existence. The infinite appears as the finite without
ever ceasing to be itself.
Section 3
"Existence is being in motion; being is existence at rest." - * The
Practice of the Presence of God: The Original 17th Century Letters and
Conversations of Brother Lawrence (Xulon Press, 2007).
Prior to the emergence of things, being is unmanifest. Thus, it is empty,
formless, transparent, silent, still.
Prior to the emergence of things, being has nothing in itself other than itself
with which it could be divided. Thus, it is indivisible.
Having nothing in itself other than itself, being has no finite qualities with
which it could be limited. Thus, it is infinite.
Being shares none of the qualities of ourself as a person, although it is the
very essence of ourself and is all there is to ourself, just as a screen shares
none of the qualities of the movie and is, at the same time, its essence and
reality. Thus, being is impersonal and yet utterly intimate.
Intimate, impersonal, indivisible, infinite being, God’s being.
In this understanding, the distinction between the devotee and God gradually
diminishes until there is no difference between them. In the absence of any
distinction between the one who prays and the one that is prayed to, the
devotee and the beloved come closer until there is a great recognition: our
being is God’s being.
There is no room for an individual in this understanding.
There is just God’s infinite being and we are that. That is the ultimate
surrender.
Section 4
The individual and God cannot unite, for they were never separate to begin
with. As a concession to the apparent individual, what is traditionally
referred to as ‘union with God’ is the revelation of our prior unity. But not
even that, for there was never a time when there was a being apart from
God’s being, either to be separate or unified.
Infinite being knows nothing of separation or union. It is only from the
perspective of the apparently separate self that there is separation from God
and union with God. There are not two beings, let alone innumerable beings,
either to be separate from or united with one another. There is just intimate,
impersonal, indivisible, infinite being.
This utter absence of otherness is the experience of love.
Thus, love is not a relationship but the absence of relationship, the collapse
of the belief and feeling of self and other, individual and God.
This is what the Sufi mystic Jalaluddin Rumi meant when he said, ‘In the
existence of your love, I become non-existent. This non-existence linked to
you is better than anything I ever found in existence.’* In other words, love
is God’s nature; it is the prior condition of all relationship.
* Jalaluddin Rumi, ‘I Am Yours’, as translated by Fereydoun Kia, in The
Love Poems of Rumi, Deepak Chopra, ed. (Harmony, 1998).
God clothes itself in name and form and appears as the universe. When God
undresses, it reveals itself as being.
Clothing itself in name and form is the activity of creation; undressing is
prayer.
Section 5
Our being is not our being. It is simply being, God’s being.
Being does not belong to us as a person any more than the space in a room
belongs to its four walls. The space was not created when the house was
built. The space that seems to be in the room is in the same condition it was
in before the house was built.
Likewise, God’s being in us, as us, is in the same condition now as it was
before each of us seems, as a person, to have been born. Nothing ever
happens to being. It is coloured by human experience but never conditioned
by it.
Just as the space in the room remains in the same pristine condition
irrespective of what happens within it, so being remains in the same
condition irrespective of whatever we experience. Being is always in the
same innocent, ageless, peaceful condition.
Similarly, when the room’s walls are taken down, nothing happens to the
space. It does not suddenly reunite with the larger space of the universe,
because it was never separate from it to begin with. The space simply
remains as it always is. It isn’t relieved of a limitation, for it was never
limited in the first place. There are no individual spaces in the universe
either to be separate from or united with the space of the universe. There is
always only one space.
Likewise, when this body dies, nothing happens to being.
It does not suddenly reunite with God’s being, because it was never separate
from it to begin with. It does not lose its limitations, for it never acquired
any to begin with. It just appeared to be limited from the localised
perspective of a finite mind.
To speak of separation and union, distance and closeness, forgetting and
remembering is a compassionate concession to the separate self. From its
perspective, there seems to be separation and union, distance and closeness,
forgetting and remembering. God knows nothing of such things, although all
such knowledge is a refraction of God’s knowledge of itself.
Being eternally is. Its condition never changes. Being is unborn, without
change or death.
Section 6
One of the principal practices of the great religious and spiritual traditions
could be summed up in the Sufi saying, ‘Die before you die’. Die in this life
as an apparently separate self. Recognise that your being, having lost the
finite qualities that it borrows from the content of experience, stands
revealed as utterly intimate, yet impersonal, infinite being.
That is the death of the apparently separate self. Our own being is revealed
as God’s being, and our journey to God comes to an end in that recognition.
Then the never-end-ing journey in God begins, in which the mind, body and
world are progressively outshone in God’s presence. Our thoughts, feelings,
activities and relationships are gradually aligned with this new
understanding and become the means by which it is brought into the world
and shared with humanity.
There is no great union with God after death. For there to be a union with
God in the future, we would have to first stand as a separate being. Union
implies separation. There are not two beings – a separate being and God’s
being – that are now separate and will one day unite. There is just God’s
being, veiling itself from itself by clothing itself in human experience and
then divesting itself of that human experience and recognising itself as it is.
There is concealing and revealing, but never separation or union. Separation
and union belong to a preliminary stage of understanding that credits the
separate self with its own independent existence. For that one, the teaching
says,
‘Behave well, and when you die you will unite with God’, but at a deeper
level the teaching doesn’t credit the individual with their own independent
existence.
It is a misunderstanding to set oneself up as a being apart from God’s being.
To say, ‘I am God’ is not blasphemous, although one should never say such a
thing. What is blasphemous is to say, ‘I am a person’. In doing so, we set
ourself up as a being apart from God’s being. If we were separate from
God’s being, there would be two or more beings, and thus God’s being
would not be infinite and God would not be God. That is blasphemy.
Likewise, to see another as other is to assert that there are two beings, which
is to deny God’s being.
When we look inside ourself we find thoughts, images, feelings and
sensations, but if we travel further back through these layers, we find only
God’s being. When pure being becomes mixed with thoughts and feelings, it
acquires a limit and seems to become a person. Even then, it is still only
God’s infinite being, albeit clothed in personal experience.
Ultimately, there is no separate self either to be separate from or united with
God. There is only God’s being, concealing itself in human experience and
revealing itself.
To die before we die means to go deeply into ourself, through the layers of
personal experience, until we get to simply being, the raw experience ‘I am’.
That experience is utterly intimate – it is our very self – but is impersonal
and unlimited. It is God’s being.
Being eternally is. I eternally am.
Section 7
What becomes of our devotion when the devotee and the beloved are
recognised to be the same? Just as when attention is relieved of its object, it
subsides into its source of pure awareness, so when the one who is devoted
and the one to whom they are devoted are recognised as one and the same,
devotion loses its direction, its dynamism, and sinks back into the objectless
love from which it arose.
‘Lord, Thou art the love with which I love Thee.’ (Attributed to a sixteenth-
century Italian monk.)
In prayer, notice any impulse to move away from simply being towards
someone or something objective. To move away from being towards an
object of experience is the residue of an old habit of seeking God outside
ourself. But in order to seek God outside ourself, we must first set ourself up
as a self apart from God’s being, and, in doing so, we strengthen the feeling
of separation, thereby alienating ourself from God.
God lies at the source of our longing and can never be an object of it. Let
any impulse to move away from simply being come to rest in this
understanding. There is no room for effort in prayer, for effort would always
be from what is to what is not yet.
What seems from the point of view of the individual to be an effort that it
makes towards God is, in fact, the gravitational pull of God’s being acting on
the apparent individual.
This gravitational pull of God’s being on its own contracted form – the
individual – is grace.
Every individual’s desire for happiness, peace, love, justice, understanding,
compassion or beauty is really the individual’s response to the pull of grace
that they feel in their heart.
Our longing for God is God’s love for us. It is the pull of our being inviting
us to return from the adventure of experience to the sanctuary of the heart, to
return home.
Our longing never finds what it is looking for; it comes to rest in it.
Prayer is not a movement from ourself towards God. It is a divesting of
ourself of all the qualities we seem to have acquired from experience, and
the subsequent revelation of our being as God’s infinite being.
In this understanding, effort loses its dynamism and gives way to surrender.
Our longing is gradually divested of its dynamism and subsides into the love
from which it arose. It finds at its source what it previously sought at its
destiny.
There is no longer room for a movement from the individual towards God.
Any residual becoming comes to an end.
The silence that remains is our prayer.
Section 8
In prayer, we sink deeply into simply being. As we abide as that, our being is
divested, usually gradually but occasionally suddenly, of the limitations that
it acquires from human experience and stands revealed as God’s infinite
being.
Infinite being is not something that is known objectively.
It is what remains when nothing is known. It could be called divine
ignorance, the ‘cloud of unknowing’ that is darkness to the mind but light to
the heart.
In the Bhagavad Gita it says, ‘What is known by the mind is unknown to
God, and what is known by God is unknown to the mind’. (The Bhagavad
Gita, 2:69.) The mind refracts reality, God’s being, making it appear as a
multiplicity and diversity of objects and selves. Thus, the mind superimposes
its own limitations onto the reality it perceives, causing it to appear in a way
that is consistent with and an expression of its own limitations. Thus, just as
one cannot see white snow through orange-tinted glasses, the mind cannot
know reality as it essentially is, although everything that it knows is an
appearance of it.
The infinite can only know the infinite. Therefore, God’s being cannot know
anything finite directly. To know the finite, the infinite must contract into a
finite mind from whose perspective it perceives itself as the multiplicity and
diversity of the world.
Prayer is the reversal of this process – the individual loses the limitations
that it acquires from experience and stands revealed as infinite being. As it
loses its limitations, so the world loses the limitations that the finite mind
imposed on it and stands revealed as the same infinite being. What we
essentially are and what the world essentially is are the same.
Prayer is to abide in the empty sanctuary of the heart – to know nothing, be
nothing, seek nothing. In prayer, we do not allow our being to become
personalised by experience.
Being is utterly intimate, closer than close and, at the same time, impersonal
and infinite.
We allow our self to be as impersonal as God, and we allow God to be as
intimate as our self.
Section 9
Infinite being is that from which everything derives its apparently
independent existence. Thought divides it into names and perception refracts
it into forms. As such, the activities of thought and perception fragment
God’s infinite being, making it appear as a multiplicity and diversity of
objects and selves.
None of these objects and selves are such in their own right.
They are modulations of the one ever-present reality, God’s being.
In the words of the Sufi mystic Awhad al-din Balyani, ‘He was described as
every day in a different configuration when there was no “thing” other
than Him. And He is now as He has always been, since in reality what is
other than Him has no being. Just as in eternity-without-beginning and
timelessness, He was every day in a different configuration when no thing
existed, so He is now as He has always been, although there is no thing or
day, just as there has been from all eternity no thing or day. The existence
of the creatures and their non-existence are the same.’ (From Awhad al-din
Balyani, Know Yourself, translated by Cecilia Twinch (Beshara Publications,
2011).
Creation and destruction only seem to be real from the limited perspective of
the individual. However, nothing is created; nothing is destroyed. No person
or thing has its own independent existence. All borrow their apparent
existence from that which truly is: the being that shines in our experience as
the amness of our self and in the world as the isness of things.
Nothing – no thing – exists. Only God truly is.
Section 10
Be sensitive to any impulse to leave this ‘cloud of unknowing’ in favour of
the known. The sanctuary of the heart is dark. Nothing can be seen or known
there, nothing sought.
Let the residue of becoming dissolve in being.
From the individual’s perspective, prayer is a movement of itself towards
God. In reality, prayer is emptying ourself of ourself, the subsidence of
ourself in God’s being.
When our being is divested of all the limited qualities that it acquires from
experience, it stands revealed as infinite being. As the thirteenth-century
German mystic Meister Eckhart said, ‘To be empty of things is to be full of
God. The very best attainment in life is to remain still and let God act and
speak in you. But God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a
process of subtraction.’ (Meister Eckhart, the Essential Sermons,
Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, translated and edited by Edmund
Colledge and Bernard McGinn (Paulist Press, 1981).
As such, forgetfulness of self is remembrance of God. This self-forgetting is
the essence of prayer. We could equally say that the remembrance of self –
infinite, impersonal being – is the ultimate prayer.
Emptiness of self is the fullness of God.
To know something other than God one must set oneself up as a separate
subject of experience, a being apart from God. That is, things are only things
from the individual’s point of view. Thus, knowledge of things is said to veil
God’s presence. But for one who knows their being as God’s being, the
world loses its concealing power and becomes a revealing power. It shines
with its reality, God’s presence.
With your mind know ten thousand things, but with your heart feel only one
reality.
Section 11
Once we have understood that our being is God’s being, we can return to the
devotional literature contained in the great religious and spiritual traditions
and understand that, though written in conventional dualistic language, it
shines with this same understanding.
O my Lord, my whole being is Your self, and this mind which has been
given to me is Your consort.
The life-force, breath and energy which You have given me are Your
attendants.
My body is the temple in which I worship You.
Whatever I eat or wear or do is all part of the worship which I keep on
performing at this temple.
Even when this body goes to sleep at night, I feel I am in union with
You.
Whenever I walk, I feel I am going on pilgrimage to You.
Whatever I speak is all in praise of You.
So whatever I do in this world in any way is all aimed at You.
In fact, there is no duality in this life of union with Your self.
-- A prayer given to Dr. Francis Roles in 1977 by Shantananda Saraswati,
the late Shankaracharya of the north of India.
