When you bring the 4 corners of yourself
together as one, you may then you can proclaim God one. Every word of your prayer should be filled with light, and when you pray,
you should contain worlds. ~Baal Shem Tov
Prayer develops our psyche from active to receptive, from outward towards inward. Through silent, receptive prayer (meditation) we integrate the mind-body as we learn to yield our will and need to the sacred flow of Eternal Truth.
F. Scott Peck said, “everyone has a spiritual life,
whether they acknowledge it or not.”[1] And spirituality, or
essential being, takes the entire self into account. Spirituality is the eros,
the relational energy that enlivens us, holds us together and integrates our
thoughts and emotions with our actions on all levels of being and doing.[2] While spirituality often
evokes religious ideology, psychologists tend to view spirituality as a
“universal human phenomenon, largely independent of concrete confessions or
religious organizations or movements.”[3]
“If
you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you
do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy
you.”[4]
These supposed words of Jesus from the
Gospel of Thomas imply the necessity of giving attention to the inner self, both
its essential loving nature and its [naïve] errancy. In fact, this statement
reflects the same idea of death or destruction as a result of failing metanoia
as indicated by Paul, Origen and Philo, mentioned above.* Spiritual wholeness or
healing is the balance of Mind:Body:Spirit. And because the body is an
expression of the Mind and Spirit, physical healing can also be augmented
through spiritual well-being. We are healed and whole when the energies of our
thinking and our behavior are tempered, guided, and integrated by a Spirit of
love. The fully integrated human being (using both factual and
intuitive/emotional memory) and doing (applying that “wisdom” in purpose) is a
person reconciled through the Spirit.
In the 6th
century BCE, the Buddha taught meditation as part of the Eight-fold Path of
spirituality, a mechanism by which suffering could be overcome and the
practitioner could become aware or enlightened.[5]
Saul was also relieved of the emotional
suffering that motivated him to slay Christians, and it was simply by realizing
the love of Christ and his participation in that relationship. There are two things that cause us to suffer:
one is not knowing who we are (Olendzki 2005) and the other is the tension of
what is and how it should be (Siegel 2007).[6],[7] We can resolve both these stressors through
contemplative mind, a perspective which is cultivated through prayer practice
or mediation. This is not a new concept; in fact it actually predates the
Buddha. Meditation or contemplative prayer has been the foundation of religious
(including Christian) spirituality for hundreds of years. But, at least since
the Age of Enlightenment (17th century), it has been buried under
our Western cultural bias towards rationalism.
The Hindu Vedas, the oldest sacred
texts in existence (1500-1000 BCE), the Buddhist and Taoist texts (500-400 BCE)
speak of meditation as a practice to cultivate mental balance, enlightened
consciousness, encourage wisdom, calmness and inner peace. In the Eastern
traditions, meditation was referred to as a “salvation path,” leading to
serenity, insight, and wisdom.[8],[9]
The Tibetan word for meditation is “gom,” meaning familiarity or habitual.[10] In Alexandria , Philo (20 BCE
– 40 CE), the Jewish philosopher, is credited as the first to notate a
contemplative prayer path leading to Godliness in the Western traditions.[11]
To pray, or meditate in Hebrew was called hāgâ, meaning to sigh or murmur,
and also, to meditate.[12] The Greek
translation of hāgâ was melete, which became the Latin, meditatio.[13]
The use of the term meditatio as part of a formal, stepwise process of
meditation goes back to the 12th-century Carthusian monk, Guigo II.[14] The Desert
Fathers and Mothers of the 4th century practiced contemplative
prayer, wishing to remove the onus of vice (ego) such that the true nature of
self (Godliness) was revealed through continued experiences of God in silence
and self reflection. John Climacus (7th c) (Ladder of Perfection) in the
Eastern church and John Cassian (435) (Conferences) in the Western church wrote of the desert
dwellers as deeply in love with God and fiercely committed to humility.[15]
Cassian’s writings were incorporated into the Rule of St Benedict, the founding
precepts of Western Monasticism, and further developed by an unknown writer in
the 14th century in the classic, Cloud of Unknowing. A
contemporary Christian contemplative practice that grew out of the “Cloud” is
centering prayer, revived as such in the 1960s by Benedictines, Thomas Keating and Basil
Pennington. Simultaneously, British Benedictine, John Main was originating what
would become the World Community for Christian Meditation. Christian
contemplative practices are numerous and varied, active and passive to suit
many personalities and spiritual types.
Inner well-being as critical for physiological health is very old wisdom
and the Mind: Body balance is infused into many ancient terms which apply to
both outer and inner realities, as we’ve already discussed. Another example is
shalom, meaning “peace” is from the Hebrew, “shalam,” to be “complete” or “whole.” Shalom, spiritually
interpreted, is the integrated state of a person in a right relationship with
God, with others, and within self. Shalom is reconciled being healed and at
peace within and without.[16] Over the past 40-50 years,
secular meditation has been widely employed in clinical psychology practice and
has shown benefits for autistic and attention deficit disorder in children. In
the last ten years much has been learned about the neurophysiology of the brain
during and after meditation, due in large part to medical professionals who are
also Buddhist meditation practitioners. The wellness benefits of meditation
practice are well established.[17], [18]
Peggy Beatty, Promoting Reconciliation Through Contemplative Christian Prayer Formation (excerpt)
Peace of reconciling oneness to all of you! Peggy @ Ecumenicus
* (From a previous section) The more challenging life becomes, the greater emotional stability required. Not by denial or distraction, which is often the way we cope, but by what is referred to in the Bible as “healing.” Indeed, this “suffering” we do is profoundly implied in the paschal mystery, wherein the suffering of Jesus the Christ results in “healing” for the world. When faith heals us, it is through our renewed realization that suffering can be overcome by love. We, in a very deep intuitive, not intellectual, way undergo what the Greeks called, metanoia, metá, meaning "beyond" or "after" and noeō,” meaning "perception" or "understanding" or "mind". Metanoia is a change of perception that allows us to overcome any and all psychological obstacles to our essence in love, which is our Imago Dei. Metanoia is related to gnosis or wisdom, which is inner knowing, intuition, insight. A Hellenistic understanding was the “Spirit of God in the mind of humanity.”[1] Strong’s concordance defines metanoia as repentance, a change of mind, a change in the inner man.[2] Philo, Origen and Paul make use of metanoia to refer to the response to death that occurs as a result of the life of misguided passions.[3] In this case, death does not mean end of life, but the psychospiritual “deaths” which are concept and behavioral barriers to realizing ourselves as true loving self, the Imago Dei. This is psychospiritual “death” that wanes as metanoia allows wisdom to rise. All behavior is reflective of a psychological state of mind. Suffering or woundedness arises as both external circumstance and internal response, not necessarily in that order.
Peace of reconciling oneness to all of you! Peggy @ Ecumenicus
* (From a previous section) The more challenging life becomes, the greater emotional stability required. Not by denial or distraction, which is often the way we cope, but by what is referred to in the Bible as “healing.” Indeed, this “suffering” we do is profoundly implied in the paschal mystery, wherein the suffering of Jesus the Christ results in “healing” for the world. When faith heals us, it is through our renewed realization that suffering can be overcome by love. We, in a very deep intuitive, not intellectual, way undergo what the Greeks called, metanoia, metá, meaning "beyond" or "after" and noeō,” meaning "perception" or "understanding" or "mind". Metanoia is a change of perception that allows us to overcome any and all psychological obstacles to our essence in love, which is our Imago Dei. Metanoia is related to gnosis or wisdom, which is inner knowing, intuition, insight. A Hellenistic understanding was the “Spirit of God in the mind of humanity.”[1] Strong’s concordance defines metanoia as repentance, a change of mind, a change in the inner man.[2] Philo, Origen and Paul make use of metanoia to refer to the response to death that occurs as a result of the life of misguided passions.[3] In this case, death does not mean end of life, but the psychospiritual “deaths” which are concept and behavioral barriers to realizing ourselves as true loving self, the Imago Dei. This is psychospiritual “death” that wanes as metanoia allows wisdom to rise. All behavior is reflective of a psychological state of mind. Suffering or woundedness arises as both external circumstance and internal response, not necessarily in that order.
[1] Holmes,
18.
[2] Strong’s
Concordance Online @ (http://biblehub.com/greek/3341.htm, Accessed April 20, 2014.
[3] John T.
Conroy, Jr., “The Wages of Sin is Death” the Death of the Soul in Greek, Second
Temple Jewish and Early Christian Authors., PhD diss., Notre Dame University, April 2008.
[1] Corinne Ware,
Discover your Spiritual Type. (Alban
Institute Publications, Inc., 1995), 10.
[2] Ronald
Rolheiser, The Holy Longing, the Search
for a Christian Spirituality (New York, NY: Doubledday/Random House, 1999),
22.
[3] Pavel Rican and Pavlina
Janosova, “Spiriutality as a Basic Aspect of Personality: A Cross-Cultural
Verification of Peidmont’s Model,” The International Journal for the
Psychology of Religion 20;2010:2-13.
[4] (Meyer, M. The Nag Hamadi Scriptures: Revised and Updated Translation of Sacred
Gnostic Texts(New York ,
NY
[5] Dhammacakkappavattana
Sutta: Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion, translated from the Pali by
Thanissaro Bhikkhu, 1993, Online @ http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn56/sn56.011.than.html,
(Accessed April 17, 2014).
[6] Olendzki
A. “The Roots of Mindfulness.” In Mindfulness
and Psychotherapy, ed. K. G. Germer, R. D. Seigel, and P.R. Fulton (New York : Guilford ,
2005), 241-261.
[7] Siegel, DJ. The
Mindful Brain (New York
[8]Heinrich
Dumoulin, James W. Heisig, Paul F. Knitter, Zen
Buddhism : a History: India
and China (Bloomington , IN
[9] Bhikkhu
Bodhi, In the Buddha's Words: An
Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon (Teachings of the Buddha) (Somerville , MA
[10]Rudy Harderwijk, A View on Buddhism, What
is Meditation, Online @ http://viewonbuddhism.org/meditation_theory.html,
Accessed April 20, 2014.
[11] Holmes,
17.
[12] Terje Stordalen, "Ancient Hebrew
Meditative Recitation", in Halvor Eifring (ed.), Meditation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Cultural Histories,
(London
[13] Lawrence S. Cunningham, and Keith J. Egan. Christian
Spirituality: Themes From the Tradition (New York : Paulist Press, 1996),
88.
[14] Ibid.,
38.
[15] Carmody, Denise Lardner and John Tully. Mysticism
Holiness East and West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 198.
[16] C.W. Ellison and J. Smith, “Toward an Integrative Measure of
Health and Well-Being,” Journal of
Psychology and Theology Vol 19, Spring 1991:35-48.
[17] Brandon L.Whittington and Steven J. Scher,
“Prayer and Subjective Well-Being: An Examination of Six Different Types of
Prayer,” The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion,
20,2010;59-68.
[18] P. Gregg Blanton, The Other Mindful
Practice: Centering Prayer & Psycholtherapy, Pastoral Psychol 60,
2011:133-147.
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