together this morning, we can start now by a moment of silence and put ourselves into God's presence before we start sharing. Give of all good gifts, we thank you for bringing us together here and for giving us time to reorientate our lives in your presence. And we ask you to bless all those who have made this time possible for us, especially all those who are taking our place at home and all those who would like to be with us and have been prevented.

[01:06]

We also pray that you may open our hearts to your Word in whatever form it comes to us, and that you may give us strength and courage to obey your Word. In this we pray in the Holy Spirit through Christ our Lord. Amen. Well, thank you very much, first of all, for inviting me to share this weekend with you. It's a joy for me. And I'm also challenged by the topic that Tony suggested, namely contemplative prayer. It's not the topic that I would have chosen. It sounds a little pretentious, but it's a challenge and we would have to tackle it.

[02:10]

What I would like to do, since we have three sessions available, is to speak this morning on the question what makes prayer contemplative and toss this around a little bit so that we get in touch with what it even is that we are talking about. And then by this trying to lay a basis on which this afternoon we can ask ourselves and then how do we go about it and get a little more practically. And then tomorrow I would like to draw out some implications of all this for a Christian worldview, for a broader vision and for the wider dimensions of contemplative prayer. At our time, we really have to look at the whole world when we speak about the spiritual life.

[03:12]

Now it's very important in this context that you ask all the questions you can possibly think of because obviously in three sessions we cannot cover all that needs to be said about this topic at all. And so we want to cover that part at least that interests you especially. And I can only guess and suggest some thoughts that interest me. Then at least one person here will be interested in what I'm saying. But you are responsible to draw this out in the direction that really interests you and is of importance for your life and quite practically too. So I encourage you to make mental notes, at least, of all the questions as we go along, and there will always be a second part to our session. The first part will be input, and the second part, the more important part, will be the question period in which you will, well, raise those questions that have arisen because of the input.

[04:22]

And before we start, I would like to ask you some questions. Two, to be precise. And I brought some paper, and I would like to hand this out. Maybe we can just pass it along. Oops, on both sides. And I would like to ask you, right off the bat, without any input from me, Now, what you think contemplative prayer is, since you asked me to talk about it, you must have some shred of an idea of what it is that we are talking about. Well, maybe we should give all the slips to Tony and he has to fill out 35 slips. Well, that's all right. Whatever you say, it doesn't have to be terribly profound. But somehow, your answer as to contemplative prayer is dot, dot, dot, and then you write just what you think it is.

[05:29]

Because that will give me a chance then when I look over those slips to get an idea of where we stand and what what I may already presuppose, because it's obvious to all of you anyway, and what might have to be supplied or corrected possibly even. You use the contemplative and meditative as interchangeable? I didn't say anything. I just said contemplative prayer. And then the second question would be, and you might want to keep that in mind right away as you're answering the first one, I would ask you to write, after you have written contemplative prayer is such and such, very succinctly of course, I would like you to write

[06:42]

Contemplative prayer is important for me personally because. Now you can presuppose that this is already written and you just make a little line and start with the because. But what comes before the because is contemplative prayer is important to me personally, otherwise you wouldn't be here, because. And then say why it is important to you personally. But I would appreciate if you'd all hand in the slips because, as I said, it would be a great help to me and in a roundabout way to our sharing.

[07:49]

Of course, you will have afterthoughts and you will feel that what you said was very inadequate and so forth. It would be too bad if you really thought that you could adequately answer those two questions in such a short time anyway. So it should be that you feel inadequate. The whole point is just, first of all, to give me a little bit of an idea of where we stand, and also to make you aware that you are bringing questions to this topic and that you are also bringing some of your own experience on which these questions are based, because everything here will hinge on tying contemplative prayer in with your own experience. If you did not already have experience and a great deal of experience with contemplative prayer, nothing that I could say would be of great help to you. Now I hear already someone sort of way in the back of your mind saying, gee, I'm not a contemplative, I'm in the wrong place here, or something like that.

[09:02]

But this is not so rightly understood. We are all contemplatives. it would be a great mistake to think that contemplatives are a special kind of human being. Rather, every human being is a special kind of contemplative, each one a very different kind of contemplative, the particular contemplative which is constituted by your particular experience, your particular background, even your particular shortcomings. God finds a challenge in making contemplatives out of such unlikely candidates as most of us are. This is also something that enters into the particular kind of contemplative that each one of us is invited to be and will have to become if we want to live a spiritual life fully.

[10:04]

This will become a little clearer when we ask what contemplation really means, what contemplative really means. That word contemplation is a very interesting word. It's of course a Latin word, contemplatio, and it is one of those technically terms from Roman religion that has been taken into our Christian vocabulary. You know that the Christians at first didn't speak Latin. They spoke Greek for quite a while, and then they had already a whole vocabulary and a whole spiritual universe of discourse before they started now thinking in Latin and translating all this into Latin. And the tendency was not to use technical terms, because there were still pagan Romans around who would use those terms in a pagan sense, and then the Christians didn't want to get this mixed up with their own Christian sense, and so the chances were that whenever they found a term that was already in use with a very specific meaning in Roman religion, they would rather replace it by another one, a less used one.

[11:24]

But this one was quite central to Roman religion, still the Christians took it over. The reason is that in this particular case this is so central to human religion to the basic primordial human religion long before we come to the Christian revelation that it belongs to Christians and to heathens and to everybody else and therefore the Christians had no difficulty taking it over. Well what did it mean for the Romans? The central part of this word contemplatio is this little syllable temp, T-E-M-P, and we have that in our English language, too, in many connections. We speak of temperature and of temperament, a template that a mason uses and so forth. And it meant, originally, But something that's cut out, a measure, a cut measure, set measure, cut out measure.

[12:35]

The temperature is the measure of warmth and coldness, and the temperament is the measure of your responses, and your tempers are the measure of your body in height and width to some extent. I don't know exactly how that works. and the template is the measure in which the mason lays the bricks, and so forth. So this measure in the Roman religion was originally a particular measured out area of the sky. The augurs, and that also is in our English language when we speak of inauguration, the solemn inauguration of something, but when the Romans inaugurated anything, Every day they had inaugurations of this or that thing. The augurs, who were their priests, would get together and look at this measured area in the sky and then project from what they saw there what was to be done here among us in this changing world.

[13:43]

Because the idea was that in the skies nothing ever changes. The sky, the blue sky, is the unchanging thing. And the weather comes and goes. and the clouds come and the birds come, but the sky is unchangeable. And somehow this idea of the unchangeable eternal law of the heavens, particular also with the stars and so forth, that stands behind the idea that you look to the sky and from there take the measure for your actions on earth. And so the templum, which we call a temple, Greek or Roman temple, was originally not a building, but was a particular measure in the sky, area in the sky, which the augurs intently looked at with intent consideration. That word consideration, we'll come back to that. And then it was projected onto the earth, and some stakes were set up that corresponded to this templum, and that was then the templum on earth, and it was still not a building, but a precinct, a sacred precinct.

[14:54]

And maybe they would set up stones, because this goes far back beyond Roman religion, Our word comes from Roman religion, but the concept is very, very ancient in primordial human religion. And you all remember Stonehenge? Well, these enormous stones were set up. That is the beginning of a temple as a building, but originally it was more like a garden. or rather like a sundial, a kind of walk-in sundial and star dial or calendar, walk-in calendar, because all the different stones in their relation to one another and positions reflected the unchanging aura of the skies down onto earth. by walking into this observatory, one raised one's heart and mind to the heavens, to that eternal order, and then was able not so much to predict, but to project the eternal order onto this earthly reality, which is anything but ordered and permanent and well set.

[16:07]

So it was an attempt to arrange everything on earth as it is in heaven. And since this, on earth as it is in heaven, was a rather important concept for the Christians, they saw no difficulty there in speaking about contemplatio. And besides, there was already in the Old Testament the great contemplative, in the sense Moses, who went onto the mountain, into the presence of God, into the cloud of unknowing, and then came down not only with the law that ordered everything on earth as it is in heaven, but with the design for the temper. And in those long passages, which we rarely read because there isn't very much in them we find nourishing like so many cubits long and so many cubits high and dyed purple and so many ropes and hanging and so many silver rings and all this. When the description of the tabernacle is given in the Bible, the one passage that comes over and over again and is extremely important for us and for our times is

[17:16]

And Moses built everything exactly according to the pattern that was shown him on the mountain, see, on earth as it is in heaven. That comes over and over again more than a dozen times in one single chapter in the Bible. And Moses built everything exactly according to the pattern that was shown him on the mountain. And then the New Testament picks that up, as you know, in the letter to the Hebrews, saying that was the most important thing about the tabernacle. That Moses built everything exactly as it was shown him on the mountain. So contemplation understood in that sense, in a deeply Christian sense, but more than that, in a profoundly religious sense, in the sense of a primordial religion that has already influenced and informed the Old and the New Testament, contemplation in this sense is the putting together of the heavenly reality of that which was shown to Moses on the mountain, in the cloud, in the presence of God, with what is going on here on Earth.

[18:27]

Now, if this is so, And if each one of us has to, in some way, be a contemplative like Moses, and if we know what we mean when we pray on earth as it is in heaven, then we must have some sort of an idea of what it is like in heaven. And that must be more than just the description that somebody else has given us, it must be something experiential. If contemplative prayer is real, we must have some idea what it is. in heaven that we want to project onto earth, because contemplation is the bringing together of the two. It is the bringing of the pattern into action, into our action down here. Now, unless we have the vision, how can we allow the action to be informed by the vision?

[19:32]

Often we speak of contemplation and we mean only the vision. We mean intent consideration of the vision. But consideration, the very word consideration, is a very similar word to contemplation. The con in both is the same, and it means bringing together. Contemplation, you have the templum, the heavenly vision, the order in the skies. In consideration, the word sidera means stars. And the word consideration was originally what a helmsman did on a ship. He considered, that means he looked up to the stars and plotted out his course. This is consideration. So, to be considerate means to look up to the cedar, to the stars, and plot our course on earth according to it. It's exactly the same idea as contemplation. So, to live considerately means that we somewhere have this vision.

[20:38]

Now, where do we have this vision? Where is this vision in your own experience? And I mean experience, I don't mean just reading the Bible and reading something about it. Where have you experienced the vision that informs your whole life? Well, we all have our own mountain peak experiences, like Moses, and something very important has happened in our time, namely that these peak experiences, which were always important in religion and were extremely important in the spiritual life, in the writings of the mystics and so forth, have been discovered or rediscovered, if you want, by contemporary psychology. And all of a sudden, a very great psychologist of our own time, Abraham Maslow, introduced the term peak experience into psychological literature and meant exactly the mystical experience, meant exactly the experience of that vision.

[21:45]

which we are talking about. In fact, Maslow originally called it mystical experience, but then because that is a little shocking for psychologists to speak about mystical experience, he sort of whittled it down and called it peak experience, which is a good term to, particularly if you remember that mountain on which Moses saw the vision, but it is also A good term because it suggests that when we are up on this peak in our peak experiences, we are somehow elevated over our everyday awareness. We are more aware, just like when we climb up on a mountain, we see more, it's a place of vision. So these peak moments in our life are moments in which we see more clearly. There are also peaks in the sense that a peak is usually just a point, and it takes a fairly long stretch to get up to it, and a fairly long stretch to come down and get up to the next one.

[22:54]

The peak itself is just a point, and so these peak experiences are usually very short. And they are moments of vision, and they are elevated. So all this suggests that peak experience is a pretty good term for it. It says more or less what the term contains. But let's for a moment pause and look how Maslow discovered those peak experiences. He describes it himself. He says he was a young Ph.D. He was coming from the West Coast to the East Coast, and there he had two teachers whom he admired enormously. And He was just marveling at those great human beings they were, so healthy, so creative. And so he wanted to find out what made them so creative, what made them so great as human beings. And he says, my psychological studies did not qualify me in any way to understand human greatness.

[23:55]

Psychology just doesn't do that for you. It does other things. You have to rely on something else. And so he set himself the task to understand human greatness. He set himself the task. As a psychologist, what can I say about this, what makes human beings great? And so he first started simply making notes on these two people and writing down observations about them. And then came the great day when, as he puts it, he suddenly discovered that there was a pattern in it all. He wasn't just making unrelated notes. There was a pattern emerging, a pattern of greatness. And then he set this, practically his whole life task, in exploring this pattern. And he got the idea that maybe psychologists have now for about a hundred years very intensively studied the behavior of mentally sick persons and have drawn conclusions on the normal ones.

[25:02]

So why don't we study the particularly healthy ones and see if we can draw some conclusions on the normal ones, and maybe that's a better approach. And he set his whole life task doing that, and He came and eventually worked with a great staff of co-workers all over the world and came up with, among other things, one type of experience that is particularly frequent among the creative people, among those who can cope very well with life and who are, in every other way, outstanding examples of what most of us would like to be. And that was this, what he originally called, mystical experience. And it was described by those people, sometimes in literature and in their diaries and sometimes alive, when he could still find these people and interview them, was described very much like the mystics described the mystical experience. He came to explore that further, but there was one more point of great importance in his research, namely when he discovered that not only the particularly creative people had those peak experiences, but everybody had them.

[26:22]

The only difference was that the particularly creative ones had them more frequently, maybe more ready to talk about them, because he also found that some people were very reluctant to talk about those moments. But those are little moments in which meaning flows into our lives, in which we discover what meaning means at all, what makes life meaningful. And so everything depends now on your finding in your own experience something that you might want to call a peak experience. Think of something that would correspond to that description as a moment in which meaning flowed into your life. And in order to make it easier, and so to say to prime the pump a little bit, I'm going to read you a good description of a peak experience. It's not easy to find, well, it's relatively easy to find them in literature, but it's not easy to find people who are

[27:24]

eloquent about it. Most people just gasp and gasp for breath and say, well, it was terrific, but I just can't put it into words. And even the mystics do that all the time. And then after they have written about it and waxed very eloquent, they say, oh, forget it all. This is more wrong than it is right. Words just can't hold such an experience. But here and there you come across a poet who will describe What all of us have experienced, and this is a description comes from a play, which many of you know, I'm sure, A Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill. and you don't need to know the play or you don't need to know any details about it. It's just a little piece in which, a little passage in which Edmund tells Tyron about his peak experiences. And he says, you have just told me some high spots in your memories. Do you want to hear mine? They are all connected with the sea. Here's one. When I was on the square head, a square rigger bound for Buenos Aires, full moon in the trades, the old hooker driving fourteen knots, I lay on the bowsprit, facing a stern, with the water forming into a spume under me, the mass, with every sail, white in the moonlight, towering high above me.

[28:46]

I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself, actually lost my life. I was set free. I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky. I belonged without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life. or the life of man, or life itself. To God, if you want to put it that way. And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I've had the same experience. I became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock swaying in the tide, like a saint's vision of beatitude, like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand.

[29:56]

For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there's meaning. Then the hand lets the veil fall, and you are alone, lost in the fog again. And you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason." Now, I'm quite sure that this corresponds to some experience we may have had. We may say, well, mine wasn't so high a peak. Doesn't make any difference. A peak is a peak. You don't have to measure the height. Even a mantel is a peak if it comes to a peak. But anyway, how can you compare your own peaks with somebody else's peaks? You know only your own. So all you need to know is that this in some way corresponds to your own experience, that you somewhere have had an experience in which you saw. something that is hard to put into words, saw-meaningfulness, something that need not be validated by any other experience, but that has all its validity in itself, in fact, against which you validate everything else.

[31:12]

You know what truth means because you have seen truth in that way. You know what beauty means because you have seen beauty. You know what goodness means because you have experienced goodness. That's what I mean. Somewhere these concepts are hinged. If somebody says truth, you know what truth means. Well, where did you experience it? If somebody says goodness, you know what it means. That's where you experienced it, those peak moments. That's what we want to hinge everything on, anchor on what I have to say. Now, it's very important that we are together on that. If there are too many people among us who say, well, I have not the slightest idea what either Eugene O'Neill or Maslow or David is talking about, I have absolutely no idea, well, then we'll have to spend a little more time on that. If you have some sort of an idea, then we can go on and we can I will try and draw out this morning a few paradoxes that are always implied in that experience and that lie at the basis of our spiritual life, of our prayer experience, and so forth.

[32:18]

I really need to know where we are now, whether we are still together, and so I won't put those on the spot who are not with us, but if we could have a show of hands of those who are with us, who somehow know what we are talking about, who somehow have a peak experience, a very specific one, maybe just a little one, maybe something they had this very morning. that lifted up your heart and mind, and it was something like, and seeing the vision, you are the vision, something like that, even just a very little flash. If you have that, if you know what we are talking about, would you please raise your hand? Wonderful, wonderful, all together. Okay, then I will just as a starter now, as a kind of laying the groundwork for what we'll need later, I will remind you of three aspects that should be there in your experience and will be there. We are not all that sure that you will be able to spot them and pinpoint them, but let's try.

[33:25]

And the first one would be this. If you try to talk about this experience, if you try to tell somebody about it, and you may not be inclined to do that, and that might be very good, because it's something very personal, very intimate to you, but if you tried it, you would find yourself inclined to say something like, At that moment, I was just carried away. I just lost myself. That is why some people, a particular type of people, and Maslow found that true, find it very difficult not only to talk about their peak experience, but even admit that they had peak experiences. They are the kind of people who find that they need to keep everything nicely under control. And they find it very difficult to admit that they lost themselves or they were carried away. They would refer to peak experiences as a momentary insanity that came over them.

[34:30]

But Maslow tends to think that those may be the only sane moments they really have in their lives. So there are different points of view on it. But at any rate, whatever it is, we tend to say, I lost myself, I was carried away, I was swept off my feet. And, paradoxically, you would also say, under the same aspect, that those were moments in which you were more truly yourself than at most other times. Yes, those were moments in which you were really yourself. Peak experience, also in that sense, that when you stand really on a mountain peak, you always have the feeling there you are truly yourself, you're kind of king of the mountain, and even as children we have this idea. Children always want to climb up on any sand pile or anything that comes to a little peak and then they stand on top because that makes them feel important and makes them feel truly themselves. That is kind of this feeling.

[35:31]

So, a very strange paradox. We say at the same time about the same experience, I lost myself. and yet I was more truly myself than at all other times. I was carried away and yet at those moments, strangely, I was really present where I was. Most of the time we are not really present where we are. 49% of us are still hanging on to something that has just passed, and 49% maybe are stretching out to something that has not yet arrived, and there's hardly any part of us left to be really present where we are. Most of the time we suffer from that. But at the peak experience, even if it's just for a split second, we are truly present where we are. Now, there's a paradox. And of course, it is a paradox that is quite closely connected, when we look more deeply into it, with the famous passage, he who loses his life will find it. But we'll come to that later.

[36:32]

We have our experience which stands behind it. We lose ourselves and at that very moment we are more truly ourselves than ever at any other time. We find our true self with a capital C, if you want. Now, another peak experience. Let me have a show of hands of those who think they somehow have experienced this. I lose myself, I find myself. Great, great, wonderful. We're really on the same wavelength. Next paradox. This is a little difficult to say. Somehow when you think about these peak moments, and that's why they are so meaningful, you would say everything made sense. And the strange thing, the paradoxical thing about it is that there was no reason why everything should make sense. Because even if the greatest experience happened to you, let's say a thunderstorm on Mount Sinai or something like that as you're visiting Mount Sinai, there still is no reason why everything should make sense.

[37:40]

And what you experience is truly that everything makes sense. It is as if And you had the answer to all those questions that usually bother you. But that's not very well expressed because it isn't as if you had the answer. It is more like you can finally live with the question happily ever after. That's more like it. You don't need to wait for the answers in order to be satisfied. Or another way of putting it is that you drop the questions and all of a sudden you notice that the only reason why you were not ready to receive the answer is that your hands were full of questions and you didn't have any place to put the answer if it came to you. And the answer is constantly pouring in on you, trying to get through to you, but you can't hold it because you're so busy with questioning. And all of a sudden you drop the question and there's the answer in all its glory. Or another way of putting it would be that You say yes, but you say a very special yes to whatever it is, and usually it's just a very small thing.

[38:48]

You look at this baby lying there in the crib and chewing, chewing, and you look at it And everything within you says, yes. And the moment you say yes, that's the answer to all your questions. And you discover that the answer to why is not because, but yes. Now that makes no sense on the level of logic, but in that moment you know what it means. the answer to why is yes. And anybody who has had this peak experience knows, yes, the answer to why is yes. But then you wake up, or rather you fall asleep, because this was the wake moment, and when you fall asleep, it goes the other way around than it normally goes in our dreams, where somebody will give you the answer to all your questions in a dream, And it will be something like, the answer to why is yes. And you say, oh, I must remember that. That answers all my problems. And then you wake up, and you have forgotten. Or you have written it down, and there it is on the page, and it says, the answer to why is yes.

[39:53]

And you say, gee, that made so much sense in my dream, but now it makes no sense at all. It's the same thing, but it's in reverse, because this is the real wake moment when you can really say, yes, the answer to why is that super yes. That's the answer. And then you fall asleep again, as I say. Now, that's another paradox. We just filed this away at the present moment. And the third paradox is Well, let me start this way. Suppose you were all alone when you had your peak experience, the particular one that you're thinking about now. Alone on a mountain peak, alone on a beach, alone walking in the woods, alone in a church, wherever it may be. Even though you were alone, you were not lonely. That is for sure. At the peak of your peak experience, you were not lonely because somehow you were together with all.

[40:54]

It was as if you were embracing everything, as if your heart were expanding to include everything and everybody. If there were no one else around to embrace, you embraced the rocks and the seagulls and the clouds and the sky and whatever else was around. you expanded, you were one with all. And even if the peak experience should have happened when you were with many people, maybe during some demonstration, or during a concert, or during a play, or whatever, even though you experience then that you are really one with all, and all these spectators, they are one heart and one soul, and that's part of the experience, whether it's objectively true or not, you are singled out, and you are in a special sense alone, as if the Boston Symphony now was performing Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 just for you, and you wonder why. And you wonder why Beethoven wrote this third movement just for you, and you are almost blushed because you are singing out there in the audience and it's all for you.

[42:03]

So the paradox is that when you are One with all, as in this last experience, you are really alone in a good and healthy sense. And when you are really alone, you are one with all. And the very word alone suggests a solution for this paradox, or at least also expresses this paradox, because while it means solitary, it spells out all one. all one, alone. And that suggests that when you are really one with all, you must be alone in this full and ultimate sense, because when you are one with all, there is nothing outside left with which you could be together. You're already together, all in one. And that ultimate togetherness, this ultimate belonging and all in oneness, that is also an aspect of the peak experience. And that would be the third paradox that I think we should focus on, that when I'm most alone, I'm one with all, and when I'm most truly one with all in a happy, healthy sense, I am truly alone, solitary, in a true and happy sense.

[43:18]

Now, we'll come back to all these during the question period. We can explore them a little further. I would just now like to project for a moment what I would like to pick up later. If this peak experience, characterized by these particular paradoxes, is the mountain vision, is the vision of the temple in the sky, then the process of contemplation and of contemplative prayer must be a projection of this, an actualization of that vision in our daily living. And how does that look now from the Christian point of view? from the traditional point of contemplative prayer in the fullest sense, contemplative life as contemplative prayer. What we experience at that peak moment is God's life in us.

[44:26]

It's God's life in us. We can talk about this more if you find it necessary later. But what the divine life means, if it means anything to you other than just words, is precisely anchored in your peak experience. Where else is it anchored? gotten the slightest taste of what the divine life within us means. It is anchored in those peak experiences, even though you may never have established consciously that connection. But you know what anybody means who says divine life by reference to those peak experiences and by no other reference. Maybe in a roundabout way, but ultimately that's where it ends up. And that divine life has traditionally, and now we get very traditional because the more you come to the core of things, the more traditional you can afford to be without getting stuck in it. This divine life within us has been traditionally seen as faith, hope, and love.

[45:30]

And so these three, faith, hope, and love, correspond, if they are fully and truly understand, to those three paradoxes. And I'm not going to develop this now, I'm just giving you kind of an idea in what direction we're going to explore this afternoon. Faith could be fully understood in the Christian sense as the courage to lose yourself and so find yourself. He who loses his life will find it. That's faith. Don't think of anything else. You know it. You have experienced it. And now all that depends is to put that mountain vision into practice down on Earth. And that unconditional yes, That is so different from all our other yeses. Most of our yeses throughout life are conditioned yeses. Yes if, yes but. Every time we say yes, we say, somewhere in the back of our mind we have a little bracket or a little footnote that says, if, and unconditioned that, and so forth.

[46:34]

But here, something happens. There's little baby smiles on you, and you say an unconditional yes to only this little smile. That's all. But that is your downfall, or rather your uprising of both, because when you say an unconditional yes to the smallest part of reality, you have said an unconditional yes of all of reality, because unconditional is unconditional, and that's what happens there. You have committed yourself. And that commitment, you see, an unconditional yes, is the commitment of hope, Krishna hope, which transcends immeasurably all the hopes we possibly can and is precisely that which remains when all our hopes go down the drain. That remains this unconditional yes, because the hopes are all those conditions that we make. We'll explore that also. And to be one with all, to experience, not just talk about or know or wish for, but to experience that super-integrity of belonging to all, of being one.

[47:51]

really mean by love. It's not some sentimentality or some preference for this or that person or this or that. It is the experience of belonging and the acting out of that ultimate and limitless belonging. That's another thing that we will have to explore when we come this afternoon to the application. This should be enough at the present moment to set a contemplative prayer into perspective, into a much wider perspective than making it just one particular practice of saying your prayers in this or that way. It is an all-embracing reality in the Christian life, in the spiritual life in general, Christian or not, which is the life of God within us lived. Now, the vision gives you a taste of what the life of God within us means.

[48:56]

The lived is all that is connected with faith, hope, and love, and all the difficulty that we encounter in living that way. This is as much as I think is necessary for this morning's input, I think there are many areas that we could explore later on along these lines. And besides, feel free to bring in anything that you would like to bring in, just to make sure that we cover it. I might say, well, this will come up tomorrow, this will come up this afternoon. But bring it up if you feel. Before we go for our coffee break, I would just suggest that if there are any points of immediate clarification then we might still pick this up now. If either you didn't understand a particular key word between my Austrian accent and the difficulty of the topic, well, then this might be important to pick that up, or any other question.

[50:02]

You spoke of the correspondence of faith, hope, and love with the three paradoxes, and then you spoke about and you corresponded faith and love I mean, did I miss what Hope corresponds to? Right, right. Hope corresponds in this view, and remember, this is just a grillwork, a grid that we lay over reality. There are no packages and no boxes and no barriers or walls in reality between those things. It's one and the same thing, and depending on where we look at it, it's always one and the whole. for purposes of approach, the hope would belong to, or we will talk about hope, under the aspect of that unconditional yes, you see, by which we open ourselves to anything that may come. And that's our, because the moment we say more about it, we have already gotten either into the area of faith and trust or into the area of love.

[51:04]

Just that openness. That's hope. Oh, Maslow, to my knowledge, has never written about faith, hope, and love in that connection at all. No. Maslow ended where we were talking about the mystical experience. That was the end of Maslow, as far as that's concerned. However, there's nothing that I came across in Maslow that would rule this out. As far as I can see, it's a perfectly legitimate And I have a very strong feeling that Maslow would have been absolutely delighted in hearing it, although he was a Jew, but certainly would have been quite delighted with this. But he himself did not draw these lines at all. Well, then maybe we can have a little cup of coffee or something.

[52:07]

And do you think we could come back in about 10 minutes, or is that not long enough? Which means you can bring We are ready for questions. And I want to remind you particularly that asking a question is a great service if you are answering to the others. Because usually when you are asking questions about these three others who wanted to ask the same question but didn't quite know how to formulate, One is that this experience defies definition or almost mnemonic at the moment.

[53:11]

You have a lot of them, maybe, because each one is different. Those things, those same sorts of names, Yes, in fact, the module currently in his research have died young, unfortunately, discovered what he called the plateau. This is what he was talking about now. Namely, that some people live on something, on a heightened awareness level, which could be compared with a plateau, if he's talking of speech. And relatively, their things are not as high

[54:16]

as they would keep the people who live on a much lower level, because, well, they're already sliding so high. It's like living in Tibet, and at 12,000 feet above the mountain there, it's just a little hill. Like, we can't raise our awareness, we can't raise our consciousness on a certain point, and then they shouldn't be surprised if we come up to a starting point anymore. This comes in all sorts of different contexts, which you might want to immediately think of. But some people have tremendous peak experiences in the context of post-traumatic renewal, baptism in the spirit, where these horrific peaks are born. On one of those, if you've got the tools, and you've got them, and although you haven't much, absolute phenomena or anything at that moment, because they have opened themselves on their life to the Holy Spirit.

[55:23]

So what great difference does it make at this moment? We're not like King Paul going back and forth and doing blind self-examination. It's more like King John who's gradually going into this stuff. So there are also the applications of this paradox. One day, I think there was one for another later on. I guess the movie was one that got banned. It was banned, but perhaps one That's a very important observation. But the whole question comes up all the time, what shall we do in order to dispose of ourselves to these people?

[56:44]

How can we bring them back? Well, we can't bring them back, and that is obvious, not because my family talks, but because we know that from their own experience, namely, it is always a surprise. No matter how you prepare yourself, it is always a surprise. That's part of it. If you read the preface, don't think it's only a surprise. It's part of it. C.S. Lewis, in his autobiography, which he called Surprise by Joy, gives you three different experiences around which the whole autobiography is built. And Surprise by Joy is a very good description of it. So, if it comes as a surprise, the less you cling to it, the more likely it will come back. the more you pursue it, the less likely it will come. Because the wholeness for its consistency is growing with life and opening with life.

[57:47]

Yes, it has a unique kind of quality, but I would not stress that so much because there are many people who speak about or experience it, and say it's always the same. There's one way in which you would say it's always the same, no matter how big it is in this context. It's always the same. And more than that, I don't know how much this is worth. already we are thinking about it, and it's the only way in which one can speak about it, but somehow we are always, in our deep experiences, stepping out of time, which is what U.S. Lawley calls a moment in and out of time. And when we step out of time, we are always in the same now. And therefore, our deep experiences of many, many years ago are as now, as those that you have this morning and those that you will have tomorrow.

[58:50]

And it's now. And this whole idea of the now is very, very important. It's part of the experience. So, one, so, two, we're going to be talking about what we love to do, especially with computers, what we love to do. So, we're going to talk about why we do it and what we love to do. And I'm going to just start with telling you about why we do it. Absolutely beautiful. And that's exactly what it is. It's the same as Boston already spoke about it, when he says, the current thing, that is, law reform conducts what corresponds in large part to our time, is not a long, long time.

[59:54]

Sometimes when you are waiting for a phone call, you say, I've already waited for an eternity for that card. Well, that's a funny way of putting it, but it has nothing to do with eternity. Eternity, so the Dutchman says, is the now that does not pass over. And you know what that means for how deep it's been. Absolutely. Sometimes it's close to a flash, sometimes it's a while, and it seems just like a flash. It's all down to time. There's a lovely poem and unfortunately I don't know the author. I have a copy of the book from Copsey. I can go to the author, the contemporary author, and I'm particularly interested in it because I always hope that somebody in the audience might recognize the author. And it speaks of, it has something to say about trying to bring those people towards this path. But who are these poor things at that? These poor things at that?

[60:56]

And this And this poem is called, The Place of Facts. When what has helped us has helped us enough, it moves off and sits down, not looking our way. After that, every time we call it, it takes away one of the answers it had given us. It sits laughing among its friends with long names, all of them nodding yes. When we stay there, they make fun of us, as we grow smarter because of the melting of our bones. So we know that only the people there, the people know this type of clean answer. Wanting to go back, and every time we go back, it takes away one of the answers it has already given us.

[61:57]

Well, if you try to conceptualize or to write about preconceived, is that clinging? I don't think so. There may be others, and we are very conflict-free, and we can share in many different ways, but this is not what I would necessarily connect with. On the contrary, we've been very much aware of our people's experiences, and so it's an important exercise in our spiritual life. And to a large extent, the reason why our spiritual lives are so meekly, you know, I'm alive. It's precisely that we don't need that connection. We always think Mr. Misfits are someone else, and we want to have this regret or compassion that it's still someone else. If I only were like Thomas Merton, well, you're not going to be like Thomas Merton, but I've already got one Thomas Merton.

[62:59]

That's enough. And we can move on. And precisely the one that's like you, because that's the one I haven't yet got. So you have to become your own contemplative. To bring that home to oneself is very important. But that's not feeling at all. That's it. It's more like what Jesus says, pick up the straps, you're nothing really lost. You're very wandering with the straps around you. I'm troubled over one thing, about mental sick experiences, and I think, I feel like it's not necessary to mention mental sick experiences as a healthy or moral outcome of that situation. For instance, I think of sick experiences which I have in war, or under mental mental propaganda, where I can feel at once, I can feel post or I can feel today, and you know, there's a lot that's between, and stuff. They may not even reach the point where they might be through one type of experience at a time.

[64:01]

And then, even that's when there's an element of sustainment of the experience, where the experience is coming from the source that we would like it to come from, who are accessible to our real-life situation, what they seem to have not been once without experience. Is it accessible or is it suspended? And I think a lot of, there might be other ways across the people who are housing persons who like to co-relax. There are young people who are attracted to home food, and there are people who are abstinent, and a lot of folks who would like outside to go for food. Well, I completely agree with what you're saying. In fact, we are anticipating why we have to have another course in psychiatry. In fact, we have to know, because we have only talked about the rhythm. Now we have to talk about the articulation of that rhythm.

[65:04]

There are different ways of approaching it, and I will not own time on trying to understand from what school I should come. Not because, and this may not be what will help me for someone else, but because it isn't for everyone and what will help me for me, and I want to share with you things from my own experience. And also, because one can have a healthy way of dealing with school experiences without being too obsessed with the school. So that's why I'm happy to share this right now, then we can come back to my report in the afternoon. But the question of what's sourced doesn't come at all unless you're feeding yourself a lot of those things. Things that make you go in circles. Because as long as you think that you might be the creator of your thoughts, there's always a good chance that you're not the creator of your thoughts.

[66:09]

But when you are absolutely sure that you are not deceiving yourself, which is the goal of this process, then you can be absolutely sure that you are deceiving yourself. So it doesn't leave you any. You have to live out of the current that you are doomed in order to live. Well, the banter things, as many of you know, which are part of this mantra, in which the Shastras are saying, never be concerned with the purity of your mouth, let's take it for granted that you are a good drunkard. That reminds me of the same director, in which I'm not talking about a larger commensal thing, it doesn't have to come from here, I'm talking about what's the mantra of the Buddha, which could be like that of the Buddha. It's not that it's unimportant, but it's somewhat unwanted, though, is it? Now they can watch these people involved in the movement more often. How do we now bring the good news to ourselves to live?

[67:28]

And the good news is all this good news stuff that's biased, how to deliver it? That is the subject. It needs to be in the consistent box. Helpful to share with the world. It would be great if you mentioned propaganda and who owns the phones. It's nice if people can lift themselves up into those secret communities by all sorts of hidden things, even by swipes. And you know, I've said in a lot of questions, it's not just to have the highest security, it's to do us. But what matters in the long run is what do they mean to us. And even if the story has just come to you on the most legitimate and wonderful day, once those instructions, while we are all sitting in the lobby or something like that, also have to be thrown exactly the same way, because you say, first of all, let's go out and let it hang there, and to learn how to interact with us making own applications. So, where does this experience come from?

[68:29]

It's quite irrelevant. What we make of this history is what it is. In that sense, it doesn't give you the challenge to live in hope. It doesn't give you the optimism to live in hope. It doesn't give you that sense of belonging that makes you act with love. If it doesn't do that, then you're acting without reason, but you have to go through it. may come in the past, but I'm still inspired to say, I'm still in the course of a technological systematization. I'm still trying to understand how to do it. But what I'm trying to do is that's the goal for me. I mean, I didn't like the culture in Nazi Germany. I mean, when I was in London, I didn't like the culture there. Really, really, really, no good quality, yes, no good, really. I think the first contact with this monastery was really hysteria.

[69:35]

I found it weird, because it's also just, actually, it's not what happened before the war, And I expect he puts his blood and dreams onto all I've given him. And I think that, uh, hopefully when they were looking at us, I was very enumerated on the books of the world, and I never thought of them as among the books of the world. But he's always told that he's used all that he was given, and means, uh, and I think that is one thing to do with the Christian doctrine. It's one thing to do with the Christian doctrine. It's one thing to do with the Christian doctrine. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, a good thing or a bad thing, but I just found out these experiences can heal you. There were many times, like looking for, you know, people always, thousands and thousands, they're missing out on their life, they don't need their time, they've lost the way, they couldn't go on, they can't go on. And there's no way that these experiences will ever stop healing you.

[70:38]

That's what it says, it goes like this, don't ask for it. And that's why I say it's mystical. It's mystical, you know. Matthew, [...] Matthew Well, I think that is quite possible, actually. But it is also necessary to make the decision by yourself, not by thinking of it. And also, I'm not sure that that's the original question, but anyway, I would very much like to think of the search for meaning. Let's continue exploring. But using your image, I would put it this way. The peak explosion that flashes the lamp, and you may have lost the coin somewhere else, not under that streetlamp.

[71:39]

You will always find yourself trying to look under the lamp, even though you have a notion that you were able to get the coin from somewhere else. It's a wonderful image. who exercised their soul and love, who fixed their sights on going into the dark and not looking under the light. That's what he did. But he didn't use the light, he didn't use the storms, because the way I understand, Religious, in general, but what is a religion? We have to have some notion of the logic. We may not be able to do it for sure, because the definition does hold a little bit to our failures, but religion is the quest of the human heart for meaning. Meaning is that which only exists between the dots. And from the guy who says, next to it is our heart, and to it is God. Thank God God gives me those glasses of moon so that I can see nobody in the moon.

[72:44]

When somebody thinks about new, great, long-term, that's, you know, I think you know what it means. Well, we must have a point of reference. That's called the reference tool, that self-validating tool of the student's school. That's where we know what we need to do. Well, that's the key question. Is the new validated by the students or the students by the new? That's the key answer right now. under a limit being stimulated to break through this curtain, not disrupted by the sexual labor of men. If you look at Hobart life, you look at life more of a tangible and long-reigning movement. And then I said, you know, please explain it to me. I saw this. I liked the image. I thought, what if I go for a walk in the park, and we're here in the afternoon? That would be nice, if we continue our evening. Then once, hence the pictures will go on, but it's really a void in the dark. We'll be stuck around, on the graphics, with the figures we all forget about, and the drinks, and the music, [...] and the

[73:55]

by the disdain of Christians and Bishops of New York, and somehow nothing that adds to good encouragement, and this is something that cannot be written with dynamica. Well, that's one way of approaching it, but it's not one. But I hope that in that process this afternoon or maybe tomorrow, we will see how this will turn out somehow. But I do have to say quite honestly that I think that the future is so important because it makes us know what we need. Otherwise, all the rest of you, I see your concern, I feel, but we do very much depend on the spiritual life to take on the responsibility for our spiritual life.

[74:56]

And as long as you think that somebody has given us the meaning out there, whether this is our spiritual vision, or the Buddhist vision, or anything else out there, We still have to ask ourselves, and what makes me convinced that this is universal? And you always come back to your own life because you have known this is universal. And to assume that responsibility is the first step in becoming an accomplished spiritualist. And it's not with us that we can learn universality, because we have never been invited here. But that was me, because I came from up in the streets of school. I feel like I've done it. I'm just back from the pre-religious experience, the religious experience, the church experience. And the scientific tradition, they're looking for a future student, because I feel like being a pastor, it's much more academic to me.

[75:57]

We've been frustrated in a lot of inspiration. Also, frustration plus inspiration. Also, for the short of knowing that I didn't know how to propose, it was not much validated for myself. But ultimately, there's not too much of a reason for that. In front of locals, I thought, when I first thought, it was hardly a disappearance. Maybe you have to put the star a little bit. You have to look for the rest of the repertoire. I see something in Medgar that was probably very fruitful, and I was very pleased by it. Presently, I do not want to seem like I'm teaching something that is closed off on the students, but I think that's the point of the master, and maybe that helps to clear out the edges. I don't see a film going on. And for the time being, we just have to intervene, because otherwise, things take time. We will have to close now, as much as we can. But there was one more question over there, so I'm ending it. I definitely trust you.

[76:58]

This is self-validating by the passing of the law, and that when we hope to install these functions as well as in private space, and that there could be things that follow out of it to self-help them, which also reinforces that it is a good thing. And I'm still seeing that other software have improved the way they are saying that. You can have this experience, and you can say, well, what's the big experience without a screen? Well, let's see what happens. And if it works that way, it's going to be absolutely magical. Because it's just one of those things that's going to put us through it all. But we spend a lot of time, you know, throughout the year, when it's possible to wear a mask. So first, it's good for the front, but also good for the movement of the person who is in there. And for citizens who are not supposed What's awful about that experience, however, is that it's so exhausting, because it's the wrong thing that's costing, however, to gather when there's a municipal that's having the wrong vision.

[78:13]

So in front of him, I thought, I thought, you know, he's in the classroom, so I thought, I thought, you know, he's in the classroom, so [...] I thought, you

[78:43]

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