Los Pensamientos en la Oración Centrante

Thoughts in Centering Prayer Let's look at the third one, the most crucial one When engaged with your thoughts return ever so gently to the sacred word. We said that thoughts are inevitable We said they are integral in other words, they are part of the prayer and as far as we can tell from our present level of experience they are integral because your thoughts may be coming from the unconscious and may be part of the process of healing The Spirit works as a kind of Divine Therapist and one of the ways that He heals the unconscious is by allowing its feelings and its thoughts to surface especially during prayer and then later sometimes outside the time of prayer but it is precisely the programs in the unconscious what psychology calls the dynamics of the unconscious that hinder the free flow of grace and that needs to be addressed by the Spirit, brought to our attention, and we have to let go of them, both in our prayer and their consequences in daily life So you see right away that Centering Prayer involves the whole of life. And the activities by which we bring its fruits to daily life is almost as important a factor in the project as the time that we faithfully spend each day in the prayer itself. Suppose you were in deep conversation with someone you loved high up in an apartment house the windows are open, the traffic is going by and there's noise you can't stop all of a sudden there's a crash on the street and the decibels go up and you naturally feel a curiosity to go see what happened It's what happens when interesting thoughts or boats come down the stream of consciousness one wants to look at them and then as your mind begins to look at this thing, that is, the young man goes to the window to see what the accident was he suddenly remembers, "oh, what am I doing? I'm in this deep, cheek to jowl conversation a heart to heart conversation and I'm not interested, it's not the time to see what happened outside or to judge what you're really going to have for dinner, and so, you want to reinforce or reaffirm the original tete-a-tete that you were having, and so what do you do? you would turn your eyes back toward the beloved or your friend, as a gesture of renewing the conversation before it got somewhat disturbed, or you might and you might say "Excuse me" or you might say "As I was saying" Well, that's what the sacred word does to you.. It's when you are lifted out of your basic intention and start watching thoughts that you are attracted to or have an aversion to that you need to do something to return to the sacred word. But if the thoughts are just going by like noise in the supermarket you don't pay any attention to them, you are dimly aware that it's happening then there isn't a necessity to go back to the sacred word because you are already at the place where the sacred word is meant to facilitate your reaching which is the abiding turning and resting in the presence of God within you at the deepest level so let me sum up very briefly in this modest diagram here what I am trying to say Suppose that this is our ordinary awareness, the stream of consciousness that we are experiencing during the time of prayer and here are a few boats that are going by boats representing thoughts, feelings, images, and so on and there's usually a fleet of them, Sometimes the whole United States Navy seems to be going down with all the guns banging Whatever your experience you're having thoughts going by at this level, and a deeper level let's call this the ordinary level of our awareness and let's call this the spiritual level of our awareness which you're not aware of most of the time, except in a peak experience or when life or tragedy brings you to that place, so we're mostly unaware of what we might call the river itself on which all our thoughts and faculties are resting so we're absorbed or dominated in our ordinary psychological life by the objects of events and people and our emotional reaction to them The purpose then of Centering Prayer is to move from this level to this level, and indeed not to stop there, because human beings have greater depth than that but to move even deeper to the level of the true self which is our participation in the divine life and the Divine Presence itself as the source of our being at every level. and in accessing or awakening our awareness to this presence is the ultimate goal of contemplative prayer or centering prayer but to reach it we have to pass through the spiritual level and to awaken the true self and whatever God or the Divine Presence may want to share with us which is a whole new life, a transformed life, and which it seems to me is what the Gospel invites us to especially in St. John, where Jesus speaks of inviting us into the same union and unity that he experiences with the Father in the Holy Spirit hence, this is so important from the perspective of prayer as relationship Now, there are lots of prayers at this level our vocal prayers, our reflections, our Divine Office, and the sacraments. But each of these things, especially the sacraments have this mystical depth, or this mystagogic teaching which helps us to understand the symbols of the Church from this level, in which they are transformed and their meaning becomes more powerful more attractive and more personal as well as bonding us with everyone else who is having a similar experience in grace. And we might say that Centering Prayer is primarily involved in awakening this particular level as a preparation for going deeper still, which is the work of the various stages of contemplative prayer and mystical life