22nd December, 2022
Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence (Oxford University Press, 2011), 19-20.
Image: Dim Hou, unsplash.com/@dimhou
The short quote in the image above is taken from the longer quote from Martin Laird, below, from pages 14; 15; 16; 17-18 and 19-20 of A Sunlit Absence.
The practice of contemplation in the Christian tradition tends to emphasise the cultivation of concentration through the use of a short phrase or prayer word, often inspired by Scripture. …The basics are simple. We sit down and assume a solid, erect posture. … The body’s physical stillness facilitates interior silence, alertness, and calm. Quietly repeat the prayer word during the time of prayer. Whenever we become aware that we’ve become distracted, we bring our attention back to the prayer word. The practice is not to sit there trying to have no thoughts or only certain thoughts. Instead, we simply bring our attention back to our practice whenever we find that our attention has been stolen. The challenge lies in its simplicity. ...
In early seasons of practice there is typically very little sense of our abiding immersion in silence. Instead, when we try to be silent, we find that there is anything but silence. This inner noise is generated by a deeply ingrained tendency, reinforced over a lifetime, to derive our sense of who we are and what our life is about from these thoughts and feelings. This alienates us from the simple experience of thoughts and feelings. Instead we experience reactive commentaries on [them]. The ability to meet with stillness all that appears and disappears in awareness will gradually (very gradually) replace this deeply ingrained pattern of meeting experiences with reactive commentary. As our practice deepens, thoughts and feelings continue to come and go, but our relationship with them changes. … Whereas before we were caught in reactive commentary that caused us to push away or cling to the thoughts and feelings, we can now let them be, let them come, go, or stay without attending to them. …
As much a tangle as our practice may seem, it will begin to untangle. Something deeper begins to attract us, and this something deeper is more spacious, alluring, and silent than the tediously dramatic opera scores of inner chatter. The inner chatter will be present but its grip on our attention loosens. We can actually see through this mass of thoughts into something else in which they are immersed and saturated. Something is being born of the practice of silence, and this leads us into Silence itself.