intentionally a piece of cake ...

What is the difference between Centering Prayer and other forms of prayer? I continue the struggle of maintaining a clear view of Christian distinctiveness when it comes to the mystical experience and the approach to prayer but I'm getting there. Thomas Keating in his book "Intimacy with God" distinguishes the usage of a sacred word or a sacred symbol from other Eastern Methods. "Rather than paying attention to these symbols we use them to express our intention."... again ...  "It is intentionality that distinguishes Centering Prayer from other forms of prayer" Here we have no attempt to focus attention on an object (like a flame) or to concentrate on a particular word. The usage of a sacred word is not its meaning but a simple stimulus to re-align our wills to the love of God. Here we have not a mental exercise or even an emotional experience but an exercise of the will to consent to the love of God. I find it easy to recognise an emotion and a thought but an act of or 'consent of the will' as something separate from thought, emotion or activity is a hard thing to recognise.
It all makes sense that love is essentially an act of the will. You can feel love, think love, say you love something or someone but wisdom is justified by her actions. We all know how cheap thoughts, feelings and words can be without any action to prove it. However here we are in total stillness so the only expression of the will in love is simply being in God's presence without any action. How can one discern any willfulness without action? Perhaps what is meant is this: I consent to God's love by simply allowing it to be here in this moment and simply availing myself to it as I am in this moment. No other action is suitable but non-action. This submission or consent is the essence of all true forms of Love that will follow.

heavy mental noise ...

Much of my thought life is engaged with anything but the Present Moment. There are too many extra thoughts! I have been trying to categorise them in order to recognise when I am not engaging with and simply 'being' in the Present Moment. All these thoughts clearly and not so clearly work with the false self to perpetuate an unconscious existence, an unreal world in which 'I' take centre stage caught in the autonomous (non) existence of thought forms thus robbing me of realising Essence! (What is the fall of man but the separation of Form from Essence - the loss of spirit, living in the flesh - the preoccupation with external at the expense of internal reality). So lets look at what constitutes this 'Mental Noise':

PAST RELATED:
Re-living past achievements and successes - this builds up the ego.
Re-living past failures and embarrassments - this too builds up the ego. If I cannot be important with a sense of achievement I can certainly get centre of attention with my sense of failure!

FUTURE PLANS:
Things I ought to do / Things I intend to do / Things i must not forget to do.
Projected fantasies of success
Fears of a future real or imagined event
Future Spiritual attainment ... Practicing the Present Moment as a means to an end.
INTERNAL THOUGHTS:
Fabricated Reality - little alterations to past scenarios, fantasies ... 
Analytical - Introspective circular thinking. Not to be confused with observational as one recognises the false egoic self.
Problematical - the false self thrives on problems - they give it meaning.
Distracting - I'll go and eat something. I will check Facebook for the nth time!
Internal conversations - things I would say if I could.

A GENERAL SENSE OF 'I'M NOT WHERE I SHOULD BE'. Space
A GENERAL SENSE OF 'NOT HAVING WHAT I THINK I NEED TO BE MORE FULFILLED'. Possessions

All these things can be seen as a frantic attempt to keep ourselves 'alive’. We are performing a kind of juggling act wasting energy and making so much 'noise'. All the time we are robbing ourselves of true life which comes from 'quietness', 'stillness' and an 'awareness' of all that we have and are NOW. ... and in that awareness we lose ourselves in Another ... there is no room for little 'Me' in the Present Moment which is not perceived through the conceptual work of the mind but intuitively through the 'spirit'.
I thought this. imagine that you are in a noisy factory in the middle of nowhere. The noise is deafening. You decide to walk out into the open air. What a relief! The noise is there but distant and the more you engage with the quietness of 'outside' the more distant the noise becomes until eventually you are so taken up with the view and the sounds of outside the noise in the factory seems no longer to exist. However, a quick blip and you begin to hear the noise again ... the distraction becomes so irritating you decide to go back in to try to shut it off but begin to be consumed by it again. 'Whatever we resist persists' - by trying to fight against and subdue noise we increase our awareness. By allowing it to be it ceases to persist.
Father Thomas Keating said our thoughts are like noisy children in the background. When we engage in Centering Prayer we are like adults focusing outside- perhaps looking out of the window - the noise of the 'children' recedes into the background. Until eventually the children, aware of your 'awarenes' become quiet and come to join in with what you are engaged in! Focussing on the Present Moment marshalls eventually all our faculties into its own alignment. This is nothing spiritual but natural - what we do with what we have NOW in relation to God is another thing!

Duality or Non Duality ... which is best? ;o)

Well how have the past few days of discovery panned out. In between gardening and more gardening (which I thoroughly enjoy) I have been doing some research. Having been so enamoured with my latest discoveries along the esoteric road - not least Eckhart Tolle I decided to backtrack. I am never too comfortable in throwing myself 'hook line and sinker' into things without stepping back and looking more objectively. However I reckon I have immersed myself into Tolle's philosophy enough to understand experientially where he is coming from. Definitely I conclude that Tolle and other modern day mystics have alot to offer in terms of finding the present moment and the fulfilment contained therein. However I  am not sure that I would agree with the religious interpretations and applications. The present moment is given to all ... we miss out in using it as a means to the future or living in the past ... but we do not have to spiritualise it anymore than we should spiritualise anything else we have in common ... an arm or a leg. The present moment is a given fact which Eckhart and others have kindly enabled us to see. How we interpret that fact and what we choose to do with it is another matter ...

Now my little web discoveries. Thanks to Fr Thomas Keating for whom I have alot of respect (3 books I recommend: Open Heart open Mind and Invitation to Love and Intimacy with God) I ended up giving my email address to Integral Life, Ken Wilber's big project. An email with a list of the latest posts lead me to (at long last!) a thinking Christian's contribution to non duality holding both the value of Buddhist concepts of non duality as a meeting point and also holding forth the Christian distinctiveness in a sensitive manner. Check out his post and the responses he was given: The role of Jesus in inter-spiritual dialogue by Cameron Freeman. Check out another of his posts entitled Good Friday: The impossibility of Nirvana. Excellent stuff! I must quote two of his references:

G. K. Chesterton “That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever... In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss... a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt... When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. [Mt 27:46 quoting Ps 22:1] And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt... Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” [cf The Everlasting Man CW2:344]

“A Cross is a blunt and graceless form. It has not the completeness and satisfying quality of a circle. It does not have to grace of a parabola or the promise of a long curve... A cross speaks not of unity but of brokenness, not of harmony but ambiguity, it is a form of tension and not rest... The cross is the symbol because the whacks of life take that shape... And unless you have a crucified God, you don’t have a big enough God.” Joseph Sittler  quoted in Westhelle, V. “The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross” Fortress Press, Minneapolis 2006.

Check out also Cameron's blog with an interesting article entitled 'Zen and the paradoxical language of Jesus' Thanks to this guy I have decided to carry on reading Jurgen Moltmann's The crucified God. It is not easy reading but I realise in order to dig deeply into the richness of conscious awareness and not simply indulge myself therein I must also keep in focus the raw reality of the sufferings of Jesus on the Cross. This is where the Christian mysticism (seems to me at this point) takes leave of other paths. This contrast is graphically notable in that between the smiling Buddha inwardly blissful with eyes closed to the world and the suffering Saviour arms outstretched embracing the world. Perhaps we have another paradox to consider. The promise of peace as we become present to all that is and the promise of suffering through being part of this groaning creation ...

I also checked out Eckhart Tolle’s critics. One argued that all his stuff is borrowed not least from Schopenhauer’s ‘The emptiness of existence’. I read that and conclude that it is not true … there are vast differences. However another Christian I have somehow linked up with (can’t remember how) is Fr Richard Rohr … check out an excellent article entitled ‘Living a life less ordinary’. Relevant to this blog I quote:

The act of contemplation helps us to observe the “unobserved” or false self, and by so doing, to gradually detach ourselves from it. But it is not something that comes naturally in our culture. “We are a capitalist society, into accumulation, not detachment,” Fr Rohr says. “That’s why people are attracted to Buddhism. Buddhists have kept their vocabulary and their honesty about the need for detachment up to date, whereas we’re just people who have invested heavily in our own opinions and rightness, with disastrous results.” The secret to detachment, he suggests, is to learn how to live more fully in “the now, not the past or the future”.

He has a book coming out in September The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See … Think I just might get it … anyway time for my 20mins listening prayer!

Centering Prayer

I have spent 20 minutes this morning and 20 minutes this evening being simply still in God's presence. Many distracting thoughts and feelings overtook me but the wonderful advice given by Thomas Keating is that we should not be phased by this. I find that thoughts and feelings are as imposing as we allow them to be. If we allow ourselves to be frustrated by them the more imposing they become. So the secret is to 'Let them be' ... accept them. When I do I find a detachment takes place. There is a space between the me that is thinking/feeling and the 'true self' that seeks to focus on God .. a releasing takes place and I am able to as TK suggests consent my will to the love of God.  We are never to evaluate our time with God as good or bad, successful or unsuccessful. Just being with Him is sufficient. I use my mobile phone as a timer so I dont keep having a quick peek to see how time is going.

Intro

Hi!

This is the beginning of my first real blog although I did make my own using dreamweaver but it got so inundated with SPAM that I have had to resort to this with all the bells and whistles that keep the spammers away! It is a kind of personal experiment with the whole idea of blogging. I understand that a general theme would be fitting and I will choose the word 'spirituality' ... I will be sharing my explorations and developments along the way and welcome feedback.

Why Urban Mystik and why the wrong spellink? Well ... Urban Mystic had been taken so I plumbed for the closest I could find. My belief is that spirituality should not be reserved for those who may be considered to be the elite ... the cloistered ... surrounded with nature's resonating language of God's handiwork. (I say 'considered to be' because i am sure that they themselves do not regard them selves as'elite' - furthermore God is a rather loaded word I know but rather than unpacking it I hope it will 'unpack' itself along the way.) ... hence the idea of a mysticism which is on street level available to the most ordinary and the most unassuming in the least expected places.

I will stop there and in my next post tell you a bit about myself and where I come from and where I have travelled. (spiritually speaking)

(24/8)I am 56 years old (yesterday!). More than 30 years ago I remember my spiritual search beginning having left the repressive confines of a boarding school and launching into a drug fuelled few years at University - they were good times and bad times. I took LSD which disorientated me but also awakened me to an altered state of consciousness. Recognising the damage such drugs could do I determined to seek the same experience without the use of drugs. I took up Buddhist Practice and meditative techniques using the I Ching for guidance. While my usage of such things was as much to do with being trendy than anything else there was a genuine search taking place. Total acceptance was key and I remember being perturbed by the fact that Jesus Christ while being someone I admired was at the same time someone I could not accept. Furthermore (how I dont know) I recognised that to accept Jesus was more than just to value his teachings or even his historical activities but to accept him as the centre of my life. After much trepidation and persuasion I finally accepted him in this way.

My experience of God at this point was so great my life was turned around. I gave up the drugs immediately and started to attend church. It seemed to me reasonable at the time that all relations to my past life were to be rejected which included my whole mode of seeking prior to this experience. 'Be here now' was one of the catchphrases I embraced prior to becoming a Christian. I labelled that concept with the passivity / existentialist tag and left it behind. Being still and being 'present' were ideas which I had left behind with the old life.

It is only over the past few years that I have begun to re embrace some of these ideas and considered them consistent with my Christian experience. It is thanks to books such as 'Practicing the Presence of God' by Brother Lawrence and 'Cloud of Unknowing' as well as techniques such as 'centering prayer' introduced by Father Thomas Keating that have enabled me to discover new Christian areas of prayer not too inconsistent with my previous approaches.

Further down the road I have looked into teachers such as Eckhart Tolle and the 'Sedona Method' with Hale Dwoskin. Under which label I would put these I dont know (If a label is necessary)- Esoteric, New Age, Buddhist - I dont know but I have found them extremely helpful in my spiritual growth. I am now asking such questions as: How distinctive is the Christian revelation from modern spiritual approaches to God? Where is the overlap? Is there room for dialogue? Can we afford to use new concepts to define God, sin, salvation etc without compromising the central tenets of the faith thus becoming more relevant to the present modern spirituality? I hope that this blog will contribute to research into this .... who knowzzzzz