But this definition tends to sounds a bit dangerous. It’s like letting go of the steering wheel. The Catholic meaning may be a “letting go”, but also a “turning away from sin and back to God” - a sort of metanoia. In practice, it wouldn’t be like letting go of the steering wheel, but more of like - “I’m going to let go of the idea of driving off that cliff, so I can turn back to the safe road…”
For me, the “steering wheel” refers to my egoic, conscious mind. When I fly an airplane on autopilot, I’m still responsible for the plane, but I can trust that as long as I’m where I should be and have plenty of clearance, a fifteen second glance away from the instruments will be uneventful.
But everything we are taught, we are taught about it as a matter of focused attention. We are never taught to engage our peripheral awareness, with notable exceptions of learning to drive and playing video games. You get good at it, then even though you might be focused on one thing, you recognize threats and things that need attention in your peripheral vision.
Contemplation, to me, is a method to harmonize the conscious and subconscious minds. Of what I call “focused” and “peripheral” consciousness. When we sleep, we trust that we will be safe even though we’re not counting our heartbeats, timing our breathing, and doing all the other things to keep us alive and well. But when we are awake, it’s always SOMETHING. We’re constantly aware of this or that, thinking about this or that, worrying over tomorrow, responding to distractions.
So we give our focused minds a break by letting them rest, and trust that we are not in any danger by virtue of sitting here quietly for a few minutes. Once we get used to living without intentional focused thought, it empowers our subconscious based on increased trust of itself, BY the conscious.
I look at the subconscious as an army of workers and technicians, monitoring bodily functions, keeping our balance, etc. The focused mind is the boss, but the subconscious is what actually does the work. In 11 years and over 50,000 I’ve even come up with techniques that worked for me, to open communications between the conscious and subconscious, so that the conscious may instruct the subconscious, and the subconscious will conform to the will of the conscious by renewing itself. Then once I got going (it took years to get going) things started to move along faster, to the point I’ve pretty much “signed off” my subconscious to operate independently, and only to make me aware in the conscious mind, of things it needs to know or otherwise will find interesting.
Before I leave it, I wonder if I’ve gone too far off the center here for anyone to follow me so I’ll give a simplistic example:
A young man is wandering about in a room full of people 30 years his senior. Out of the corner of his eye, he spots an attractive young woman (the only one in the room near his age), and goes over to talk to her. My point is that he was not looking “at” the girl, and he may not even been looking “for” that or any other girl. But he noticed her because two things happened: 1) his peripheral mind (via peripheral vision) noticed she was there, analyzed her enough to know she may be of interest to the man’s conscious attention (notice it selected her in a big room of people moving around – so there is some type of pattern recognition algorithm at work) and 2) the notification happened – maybe in the form of “hey there’s a girl over here,” or maybe more simply, “hey, turn your head that way.”
Once I trained my subconscious to be sensitive to the things I care about and how to recognize them, it became my partner rather than my foe. This correlates with what I call my “birth in the spirit” or “saw that I am in the kingdom.” Note the kingdom of God, which itself is an attitude of love, is not only for after we die.
Alan
(some actually claim that Blessed Ruusbroec is the greatest ever Trinitarian mystic yet seen by the Church).
) this is a surprisingly keen insight into contemplative prayer! Tarantino has it one: in most forms of “prayer” we yak on so much about our problems and beseech God for this and that.