This period is a passage from one level of consciousness or one level of faith to the next. The faith that worked through reason and the senses closes down after the springtime of the spiritual journey, especially in the recurring periods of the night of sense when the emotional programs for happiness are progressively uprooted by the divine action. Our own activity cannot heal us. Healing comes to us as we gradually submit to the divine action--including the time of weaning from the breasts of consolation--and accept in place of "felt" consolation the stable sense of God's presence on the level of pure faith. Pure faith does not seek rewards of any kind, especially sensible consolation, which might be called "spiritual junk food." The solid food of the spiritual journey is pure faith. It is the "narrow way that leads to life" and is exercised by waiting upon God in loving attentiveness without any specific psychological content.

Thus, intentionality is the star rising in the dark nights. It is the "focus" of contemplative prayer. As long as our intention remains pure--to serve God, to listen to God, to wait upon God, to surrender to God--then thoughts of whatever kind do not make any difference. They do not affect the purity of our prayer. In a sense we are what our will is doing. If our intention is firm to wait God out, submitting to the Divine Therapy, then the Divine Therapy is working.

Of course, our intention itself is not entirely beyond the reaches of the false self, even when the spiritual journey is well advanced. The false self is a master of delusion, and what we think we are doing for love of God and pure self-surrender can become subtly infected with spiritual pride. The final purgation of spiritual pride is traditionally known as the dark night of spirit. It is designed to free us from the residue of the false self in the unconscious and thus to prepare us for transforming union. Until this final purgation is undergone, we do the best we can with our intentionality, acknowledging and renouncing our subtle attachments as soon as they are perceived. We can bring the false self to liturgy and to the reception of the sacraments, but we cannot bring the false self forever to contemplative prayer because it is the nature of contemplative prayer to dissolve it.

The higher the frequency on which God communicates with us, the greater the divine transmission. There are no faculties to interpret the highest level. Faith alone contacts it. How? By our consent. Nothing could be easier. At first it is hard to be content with this radical simplicity How can we miss God if God is totally present? That is the problem. All spiritual exercises are designed to reduce the monumental illusion that God is absent. Not so. We just think so. Since the way we think is the way we usually act, we live as if God were absent. Whatever we can do to contribute to the dissolution of that confusion furthers our spiritual journey.

The unloading of the unconscious usually takes the form of emotionally charged thoughts. When our prayer settles down, the unloading becomes less obvious, except during a particular period of purification like an intense period in one of the dark nights. It should be obvious from Diagram 5 that thoughts and rest are two moments in the same circular process. By resisting thoughts or by treating them as distractions, we are also resisting the unloading process and thus delaying our healing. If we don't resist, the process goes on. Thus the primary practice is just doing it.

Of course, we have a right to know whether Centering Prayer is good for us. But we can only test that assumption by its effects in daily life. And what are those effects? There is something in human nature that equates success with something big. But this is not God's value system. By returning to the sacred word again and again, we gradually are wearing away the layers of false self until they are emptied out. Then our intention is not challenged anymore. It is always just "Yes." Our behavior becomes more and more motivated by divine love, which is totally self-giving, rather than by the self-centered universe or homemade self that we created in childhood in order to survive.

One other phenomenon needs to be pointed out here for the sake of those who are experienced in this practice. By experienced I mean those who have been doing it regularly, twice a day, year after year. Suppose you start your prayer and are moving into rest or peace. To beginners we say, "Whenever you notice you are thinking about some other thought, return ever-so-gently to the sacred word." Later we say, "Return to the sacred word whenever you notice you are attracted to some other thought." A beginner might not be able to grasp that distinction.

The sacred word is an intention, a movement of the will toward the spiritual level of our being. As we access peace, a double level of awareness may appear Let us suppose that thoughts are going by, such as something that happened twenty-five years ago, what is going to happen tomorrow, or maybe a plan about next summer's vacation. At the same time we know that we are not interested in these thoughts. We think, "Should I go back to the sacred word?" The very fact that we can think, "Should I go back to the sacred word?" means that we should not go back, because we are already where the sacred word is facilitating us to go. The sacred word cannot do more than that. If we are in a place of peace, we do not need our usual method because to abide in deep peace is the method.

Sometimes in Centering Prayer we experience two levels of consciousness at the same time: the awareness of thoughts and feeling--perceptions we are not interested in--and the awareness of a presence, however delicate, that we are committed to and experiencing, however subtly. In this case, no matter how many thoughts go by, we pay no attention. It is like noise in the street or music at the supermarket. We ignore it and simply put up with it. If we try to return to the sacred word to get rid of the noise, we are needlessly disturbing our peace. It is only when we notice an attractive thought that starts to pull us back to ordinary awareness (the surface of the river) that we need to return to the sacred word. Moreover, since we are in a place that is very refined, we do not have to say the sacred word clearly. We can just take note that it is absent or start to say it. That may be enough to restore the movement toward interior peace. But we have to do something, however delicate, to maintain the purity of our intention when it is challenged.

In a period of heavy unloading, what is coming from the unconscious is like a subterranean volcano erupting or an earthquake. Or we feel a tidal wave of thoughts, perceptions, and emotions that bury the sacred word. We cannot find it or if we do, it is of no help. In this case, the acceptance of the situation just as it is can be our sacred symbol for the time being. In other words, the fact of the primitive emotions or distressing thoughts in our awareness can be the symbol of our intention to be with God. When they subside, we return to the sacred word once again as if nothing had happened. It was just a squall. Even if we have been in a hurricane, we do not think about it. We are simply happy it is over and return to the sacred word.

Peace is the right relationship to everything: God, ourselves, other people, the cosmos. It is a balancing act. The experience of it is so subtle that we may think it is no experience. It is an experience, but if we are expecting something more, we think it is nothing. It is like the mustard seed in the gospel parable. It looks ever so small, but leave it alone and it will grow into a bush. We must keep our sights within the realm of the ordinary because that is where the Kingdom of God really is. If we get out of the realm of the ordinary, we have to ask if this is really the Kingdom. I am more worried about great experiences, especially visions and locutions, than I would be about unloading the unconscious. The former are much harder to deal with. It is hard to believe that they are not communications directly from God, but in actual fact, they are only our interpretation of these communications.

The most safe, secure, comprehensive reception of God, according to John of the Cross, is pure faith. It is in his words "the proximate means to divine union." A wonderful teaching, very pure, but it does not hold out any hope for the desire for compensatory satisfaction. Such desires slow down its coming. The desire for compensation, when translated into the spiritual journey, reaches out for spiritual goodies and junk food. God has to purify all that stuff out.

What, then, is the real food, and how does it nourish us? The author of Hebrews distinguishes body, soul, and spirit as the three basic elements of a human being. The physical body is the historical body that we are living in. The soul possesses its own special kind of energy. One of its manifestations is our emotions, as we experience them in relationships with others. For example, we feel compassion or instant rapport with someone. The other person may not have said anything. We may not know a thing about the person's life or aspirations, but something inside resonates with this person, and we know that we want to be friends. Or someone might say to us, "What you did touched me deeply". We did not actually touch this person at all, but there was an emotional interaction.

"Spirit" presumably refers to our spiritual energies, which is simply another way of describing the Holy Spirit's presence and action in our lives. As we saw in Diagrams 3 and 4, underlying our ordinary level of psychological awareness is a deeper level of spiritual awareness where we are intimately attuned to God at a more subtle level than our ordinary faculties of thinking and feeling. It is to this level that Centering Prayer addresses itself. Even more intimate is the awareness of the Divine Indwelling at the core of our being. When these spiritual energies are activated (which is a matter of our becoming increasingly sensitive to them, since God is never absent) and we are in actual contact with their full potentialities, the less we perceive them on the lower levels. Sensible consolation and reflection drop away. They are still available, but our way of relating to God is no longer dependent on them.

God seems to nourish us at each of these levels--body, soul, and spirit. As our personal development progresses, our idea of God becomes more expanded and profound. The Spirit reorders all the disorders that we experience in ourselves so that we can express the divine energy appropriately on each level of our being.

According to quantum physics, various levels of material energy can occupy the same physical space at the same time. In similar fashion, the divine energy can be at work in us at levels that cannot be perceived at all. That does not mean they are not real or present. On the level of grace, faith is purified of attachments and excessive dependency on ways that are good as stepping stones, but inadequate to manifest the full range of the divine presence and action. The spiritual journey as such may drop out of our immediate awareness. The divine energy is most powerful when it is least perceived by our faculties. When we sit down to do Centering Prayer and form our intention, we know the divine presence is already there. We do not create it. All we have to do is consent. The divine energy flows into us and through us. In its purest form it is available twenty-four hours a day at maximum strength. By consenting, we open to God as God is without trying to figure who or what God is. We consent to the divine presence without depending on a medium to express it, translate it, or interpret it in terms of our personal history, cultural conditioning, and temperamental bias. God communicates himself on only one condition. Our consent. Visions, consolations, experiences, psychological breakthroughs, all have value but only a limited value, pointing us to the maximum value, which is the whole of God in pure faith. This faith, once it is established as a conviction, changes our perspective of who we are and who God is. It operates appropriately through the theological virtues and the Seven Gifts of the Spirit, enabling us to respond to the realities and routines of daily life and to perceive the divine presence in the ordinary, the insignificant, and even in suffering.

There remains a further energy, which is reserved for the next life. That is what theologians call the Beatific Vision. This requires freedom from the limitations of the physical body in order to experience it. This energy is so intense that if it were not mediated by the ordinary affairs of daily life that distract us from continual contact with the divine energy, we would turn into a grease spot. This is the energy that lights the universe and forms the whirling nebulae. We can receive only a little of it at a time. In heaven we can have all we want. We can sink our teeth, so to speak, into the divine essence, because then our bodies will be glorified and able to handle that energy.

______________
Excerpted from Intimacy with God by Fr. Thomas Keating

Visit the Book Store to obtain a copy.