Contemplative Consciousness, Commonage Consciousness, and Conspiration

By David Prichard

THE QUESTION:

At SCL, I have begun with caution, and with the question:  What is the spiritual need we are each possessed by which causes us to seek, and, in seeking, to gather?

In short:  What calls us, what binds us?

Even:  What justifies SCL’s existence as an organization?

GLEANINGS:

I have been learning my way into the School for Contemplative Living slowly, through relationships:  one conversation has led naturally to the next. Most of these have been with folks who are, or have been, on the Board of Directors, who are active in weekly groups, are local to New Orleans, or are donors. I am very glad now to be expanding the circle of communication fully, and welcoming a relationship with you all.

For so many I’ve spoken with, when asked what drew them to SCL, seeking for what bound all these different folks together, the answer I got was "William Theile,” the School’s founder and Director for over 15 years. The school was, then, in large measure and for many folks, William.

Others, in reply to the same question, spoke of the “what” which the school has been—its activities, retreats, its groups. Though William has moved on, these activities, of course, might be revived, the retreats and workshops continued.

Yet my caution, which I referred to above, has to do with a certain alertness in me to the common conflation of “contemplative” with certain practices or activities, with the what that a contemplative does. That what of the school—its workshops, its annual conferences—describes its activity, but not the driving why behind it.

Therefore the question: what is behind all the contemplative activities we engage in? Or as I like to phrase it, what are our spiritual needs driving us into action, into search, into gathering, into practice? Indeed, in speaking with William, he shared that it was through his need that SCL was conceived:  spiritual need made him seek out others to join with in contemplative practice.

THE NEED:

For some reason, the etymology of the world “contemplative” has kept near to me as I meditate on the School, and what its central force or need is. Almost like an old dog who continues to seek your hand with its muzzle, though you keep telling him, I’m working right now! the roots of the word have continued to nudge me, as if to say that right here, very close, is the needed clue.

Contemplari, or “com + templum”:  originally it meant “to mark out a sacred place for observation.” When one marks out a sacred space, one makes thin the usual veil between the worlds. From such a demarcated space, auguries might be made—which is to say that, what in ordinary life might appear only to be two crows calling from the pine trees, is, now, from within this special place, or state of observation, immensely meaningful, applicable to the deepest aspects of our lives, as well as a sign of the inseparability of the two worlds of the spirit and the flesh.

A School then, I mused, the object of which is contemplative living, responds to this need, to this longing:  that our ordinary lives might be saturated in meaning and united with the reality of Spirit.

I have heard echoes of this summation in conversation with many of you. One of you spoke of being pulled loose from your contemplative tether by the horrors observed in the world, of feeling unmoored by the cruelty and suffering known across our planet today. Meanwhile another of you feels in touch with a depth of peace and spiritual meaning, but cut-off from the world and its pains. A third spoke of dryness, saying, “it has been so long since I walked in wonder through my daily life.”

In these first two comments I hear a polarity: contemplation and action; depth of peace and meaning versus the world of chaos. They seem at odds. The third comment, I think, holds some key in the word “wonder,” which might help in reconciling the extremes.

JOINING HEAVEN AND EARTH:

There is a teaching from the Shambhala tradition in Buddhism that expresses the need for reconciling these extremes wonderfully. It comes in the form of advice given to the Prince and future Dharma King of Shambhala, advice well suited for the contemplative facing the challenges of living in our modern world:

When the prince first meets his subjects he might lose heart, seeing how much chaos and disorder — political, economic, psychological and sociological — there is in the world and seeing how much needs to be done during his reign. If the prince begins to take these problems too personally, he might lose his connection with heaven. On the other hand, if he pays no attention to them, he might lose his connection with earth.

Isn’t it so, with each of us? That in each day, and in each particular season of life, we each have some portion more of heaven, some more of earth. It would seem like a balancing act is in order, wouldn’t it? But in balancing we are still living with this duality, the spiritual on the one hand and the worldly on the other. We are caught in “either-or” living, which is one step away from living in doubt, confusion, judgement, and warfare.

As contemplatives, we are more than tightrope walkers. More than balancers. In the Shambhala jargon, we would say that our job is actually to join heaven and hearth—language strikingly akin to our western, gospel-based understanding of the kingdom of heaven, and it’s place here, on earth.

It is this joining of—rather than walking between—the worlds, that is uniquely contemplative (so long as we understand “contemplative” to be not exclusively Christian). It is, I believe, where that word wonder comes back in. To walk “in wonder through daily life” is to walk in a world where heaven and earth have been joined. To be a beholder. Of what? Of the new that is ever coming into being when heaven and earth are joined.

And “wonder” points one step further:  that this “contemplative place,” this marked out space for sacred observation, is actually a state of observation within us, a different way of being, a deeper seat of consciousness.

THE COMMON PLACE OF CONTEMPLATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

Cynthia Bourgeault names the realm in which this is possible, writing in her (in my view essential guide book to the would-be contemplative) The Wisdom Way of Knowing, “The name by which it is most familiar to Christians is the name by which Jesus called it: the Kingdom of Heaven.” She goes on to say that it is what the Greeks called the “intelligible world,” the Hebrews “the Mercy of God,” the Celts “faerie,” and the Sufi’s the “imaginal world.”

I relate these names from the various religious traditions for this reconciling, world-transforming state of consciousness, that we may be reminded of the deep inroads made across the religious and wisdom traditions of the world to this very same place—to this place of the contemplative, the “com + templum,” the place from within which the ordinary and the sacred are seen as one.

Further, when we see that Contemplative Consciousness is Commonage Consciousness, we get a taste of how fundamental, how so primordial this state is to our true nature. In this state we are rendered naked, or else blind — that is, it is a state unfamiliar to the “I” we habitually think ourselves to be, that “I” adorned with personality; unfamiliar to the “us” we culturally or religiously think ourselves to be.

There is a wonderful, koan-like expression of this from the great Cloud of Unknowing, written by a unknown English author of the Middle Ages (and the basis of Centering Prayer), which runs something like:  we must sit in blindness with the naked God. What?! We get to sit with God unadorned, naked in all His intimacy, but we may not see him? Or could it be that somehow it is in our accepted blindness (our willingness to go into the unfamiliar) by which we access this level of intimate presence?

Contemplative koans such as this should be unraveled over time, and through our practice…

What I wish to indicate is that when we gather in this place of contemplative commonage, whether individually or collectively, we might be surprised to see who reveals themselves as our true selves, and who reveals themselves as our neighbor, even as our Creator.

CONSPIRATION; In our Need we share not only the Place of Contemplation but the Breath of Spirit.

Another word blows in on the wind … “conspiration,” to breath together. From shared breath, we come into accord. This word is the origin of the exchange of peace in Church, the kiss of peace, as it once was, when breath and Spirit were literally exchanged.

Why does the Wind blow this word in here, and now, so near as we are to the close of this, already too long a reflection?

I feel myself being compelled, as I remember being as a young boy, to climb one branch higher than is safe into the tree top. For of course, one does not quite reach the heavens as one knew one could until the stability of the tree becomes the fluidity of the tree. There one enters that realm we might call “dangerous,” yet which might equally be called an “atmosphere of mercy. Mercy because it is uniquely there, a branch too far up, that we are faced with our need. Atmosphere be cause mercy, this high up, is not what keeps us safe but the consciousness we come into in which unity is possible.

I come back again to this notion of need, of putting ourselves into a place of need, of longing, because need holds the relational key to the state of consciousness we seek. I call it commonage, because the Contemplative Place is not a place we where we can be alone.

Or to offer one further Koan (for those of you who also climbed a branch too far as a child), this time from the Sufi mystic Ibn ‘Arabī (a contemporary and counter-part to Rumi), there, in this state of contemplative commonage, in the atmosphere of mercy, one may be “alone with the alone.” In his book, Alone with the Alone, Henry Corbin draws out Ibn ‘Arabī’s argument, which uses the famous hadith as its starting place, that “God so longed to be known that he created the world that it may know him.”

The deep secret here, and why, I believe “conspiration” insists on butting in, is that, while it is God’s sigh of longing that creates us, creates us continually, we mistake His sigh of longing for us for our own sigh of longing for him, deeming Him absent, and ourselves in need.

Truly our need, our sigh of longing, is a Shared Utterance. A Conspiration. The relational union we seek. It is at once our creating, and His, and our returning to our Source.

I know, thoughts like these, as Shel Silverstein would say, carry us to where the sidewalk ends. And there may be many parts of ourselves that do not want to look over the edge. Those parts, too, are welcome, and through their needs we might find ourselves relatable to others—find ourselves in communion.

And that is my hope for the School:  that we might be bold enough to share our human vulnerability, our limits, brokenness, and needs; and that we might do this in the name of the greatest possible transformation. Culturally, economically, politically—don’t we feel like we are where the sidewalk ends? Have climbed a branch to far?

May we, at The School for Contemplative Living be as daring as the world is erring. Let us join body, and consciously in this work of bringing heaven and earth together for all. We might, if so gathered, mark no small space upon the earth as worthy of wonder and praise.