A Primal Concrete Apprehension

The most essential atitude toward oneself among Christian contemplatives is accepting that the thinking, feeling, and willing parts of themselves have nothing to do with either verifiable reality or truth. Instead, contemplatives realize that the ground of all being and truth lies in direct, unmediated primal experience. One’s being in the world is not something that is deducible from a concious awareness of one’s own existence. The world and God (YHWH - I AM) is intuited by them as immediate and present. It is in this light that their empirically inclined selves can be accepted for what they are, namely, contingent, partial, ethereal, and unreal in every sense other than that they simply exist alongside everything else in the world. Being is not the abstract objective idea that it has come to mean in the work of scholars and theologians, but a primal concrete apprehension that is intuitively and directly grasped in personal and direct experience, and which by its very nature is inexpressible. Innumerable people in the church and throughout history - such as St. Theresa of Lisieux - have embodied this. They have experienced what others simply believe. And if anyone is to blame for the fact that others do not experience this it most certainly the church itself for not teaching people how to get beyond their own egos. But that would be because the teachers themselves are too convinced that what they think, and who they have socially fabricated themselves to be, is more real than who they are.

the pines sing

the wind is real enough

- Han Shan