We are silent whenever we pay attention. We pay attention when there is no ‘I’ thought, no self-reflective consciousness, no thought that we are the observer. This attention is the essence of prayer. Whenever we are in this state we are in prayer whether we are in church or supermarket, bedroom or boardroom, making love or making money. The dimension of our being that is addressed by the question of Jesus is perpetually in this state. When we pray, we return to prayer. When we listen, we return to silence.
All images echo some original reality. The original always has a silent presence which purifies and energises those who meet it. To encounter the original Jesus, however, means more than contacting the historical Jesus. The original Jesus manifests when we allow the countless images which religion and culture have accumulated to slip aside and be, at least momentarily, silent. A clear reading of the gospels and the work of silence in meditation prepare us for this.
Self-Knowledge and Friendship
It was one of the long golden summer evenings on Bere Island that made one forget the usual wind and drizzle. I was spending some weeks of solitude there. I had come down from my simple one-cold-tap cottage to give my cousin John a hand with putting a new roof on his barn. Though by nature, as I thought, more genuinely solitary than myself he had asked for some unskilled assistance in moving the timber beams. He was a couple of years older than me, healthy looking and handsome, extremely silent and reserved. Like his father he never stopped working. He had an Irish temper which could flash from his quiet depths like storms on the Sea of Galilee but he loved his chirpy ever-sociable wife and two boisterous little boys who all seemed to know how to handle his moods.
We were working on the roof and in my leisure moments I contemplated the slow gorgeous sunset over the sea. Evening was dying peacefully into night. I was gazing contentedly at the merging of the lines of sky and sea. Suddenly I realised John was calling me to help move some wood and I turned towards him. Our eyes met and there was an affectionate, amused look on his face as he caught my absent-mindedness. It was a fleeting personal connection but, for me at least, a moment of immense depth. As our two attentions met each other I saw our family likeness with a shocking, strange and impersonal kind of clarity. For a second I felt the presence of the bubbling soup of DNA that we all splash around in and from which our treasured individuality arises. It was quite different from any conceptual knowledge that could have been expressed as ‘he is my mother’s brother’s son’ or ‘there is the O’Sullivan look in us both’. The self-awareness was sharp and sudden; different from the way my self-absorbed ego usually tells me what I am feeling and what others think of me. It was not an emotional moment, not sentimental anyway, but it was painfully tender. It reassured me for an instant with a taste of the kind of human friendship that is deeper than we make merely as individuals. It takes longer to describe than it did to feel. It passed instantly and John pointed silently to the end of the piece of wood I was supposed to pick up and withdrew again into his hardworking solitude.
St Irenaeus and many others in the Christian tradition have said that ‘God became human in order that humans may become divine.’
Does nonduality and union mean that Jesus is really after all just me, my ‘true Self’, whatever that may be? Am I his true Self and is everything blurred into one like the sky and the sea at dusk?
Christian faith does not claim this. It is not the experience a person has of the risen Jesus. Yet non-duality was at the heart of his teaching and it is what he shares with us now. From the beginning Christian thinkers have reflected on the meaning of Jesus’ sayings about his union with the Father and their union with us. They have thought hard about the experience of faith which allows us to know him in his risen form. The great thinkers have seen how self-knowledge and the knowledge of God go hand in hand and dovetail in our knowledge of Jesus.
I am the good shepherd; I know my own sheep and my sheep know me–as the Father knows me and I know the Father–and I lay down my life for the sheep.1
St Augustine was fascinated by the question of self-knowledge, aware no doubt of how hard he had worked to gain it himself:
A person must first be restored to himself, that making of himself as it were a stepping-stone, he may rise thence to God.2
In his Confessions St Augustine was the first Western writer to define the sense of personal identity as intimately interior, self-conversing, seeking and anxious. He initiated the autobiographical narrative style that we take for granted as the way we think and talk about ourselves. Describing his search for himself as a search for God was not a mere literary device. His self-concern was given meaning because it pointed towards an ultimate self-transcendence. By self-analysis and writing he advanced towards self-knowledge in the telling (and invention) of his story and by the sharing of his hidden personality. This seems all quite familiar to us today, in the culture of the television chat show, as a means of understanding who we are. Yet there is a difference in motivation. However self-centred his autobiographical self-awareness might appear at times, it was led by a consuming passion to know God. This was the God he said was closer to him than he was to himself and who knew him better than he could know himself. He could therefore pray that he would come to know himself so that he could know God. It was a sublime kind of egotism waiting for an ecstatic release from the ego.
Augustine’s self-description is a particular example of a universal Christian theme. Throughout its tradition Christian mysticism has acknowledged the connection between self-knowledge, pointing towards self-transcendence, and the knowledge of God. It has been the consistent testimony of the great masters. For St Bernard self-knowledge is a process that begins by discovering how difficult it is to be human:
When someone first discovers that he is in difficulty, he will cry out to the Lord who will hear him and say ‘I will deliver you and you shall glorify me.’ In this way your self-knowledge will be a step to the knowledge of God; God will become visible to you according as God’s image is being restored within you . . .3
St Catherine of Siena in the fourteenth century stubbornly remained outside the cloister but cajoled popes and emperors with an authority born of her self-knowledge in God. Her ‘cell’, she claimed, was self-knowledge. In the beautiful flowering of the English mystical tradition in the turbulent fourteenth century, The Cloud of Unknowing stresses self-knowledge as the necessary pre-condition for all spiritual progress. It is the true meaning of humility, the Cloud says, distinguishing it from the many counterfeit forms which religious people are adept at confecting. Meister Eckhart in the same century preached on self-knowledge as the means for experiencing the divine likeness of the human person that is the truest reality of Selfhood.
Augustine, Catherine, the author of the Cloud, Eckhart are among the Christian teachers who affirm the spiritual significance of knowing oneself. Each person knows himself uniquely and so uniquely expresses his insight into the nondual, simple, nature of God and the Self. Union transfigures but does not destroy personal identity. A transformation of what we think we are, which at times however does feel like total annihilation, must take place in what St John of the Cross calls a dark night.
It is as if God is saying: You will never become humble while you are wearing your ornaments. When you see yourself naked you will learn who you are . . . Now that the soul is dressed in working clothes–dryness
