I want to start with words attributed to the Armanian Mystic, G.I. Gurdjieff (there’s no evidence he said them):
Behind personality is essence.
Behind essence is Real I.
Behind Real I is God.
On Part 1, we distinguished our ordinary, everyday personality, or ego, as the parts of our self that are lost in thinking-feeling-doing, from what I called our naked sense of “I am”.
The I am that is beneath and before I am this, I am that.
The I am, which is grounded in the Great I AM of God’s Infinite I AM-ing.
This part, we’ll explore how these weave together and the practical implications of meditation and centering prayer on personality.
It’s a work in progress. I’d love to hear from you after reading!
Levels of Awareness, by Thomas Keating
Trapped?
Last week, we explored the Triangle—our personality self with its own unique patterns of thinking-feeling-doing—and how easily we become trapped in its loops of activity.
Trapped, we might say, like someone who lives in a giant mansion, but lives only in the basement.
Stuck in the basement of our being, unable to open to the greater Being that holds our busy thinking-feeling-doing together, we feel ourselves to be bodies deeply in need of rest from activity. Minds seeking space between busy thoughts. Hearts hoping to be less jerked around by emotions.
We’re trapped in the basement while there’s a whole mansion and garden to explore!
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But we can get “out of the basement.”
While our thinking-feeling-doing self is busy at work, God—the Ground of Being — is ever present beneath and within our busyness.
God, as the mystics know, is the field in which our lives unfold, the great I AM in which our small I am borrows its being.
In theological language, the Circle is the God in whom
“We live and move and have our being.” — Acts 17:28
The Circle is God as Being Itself, infinite is-ness in which every thought, emotion, and action arises.
And when we sink into being, into wholeness, we temporarily receive some rest from the busy thinking-feeling-doing self.
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But how can we find this greater Wholeness?
Enter contemplative practice: meditation, contemplation, Centering Prayer!
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Practice: Returning to the Center
If the Circle represents our Wholeness and grounding in God, then a meditation practice like Centering Prayer helps us return to it.
Meditation is how we return to our “Center” — God, the Circle of wholeness that is the Container that holds the dynamism of life.
On the Enneagram, the Circle holds the criss-crossing lines:
Practices like Centering prayer help us sink into something beyond the traffic of our busy selves.
The essence of Centering Prayer is simple: we consent to God’s presence and action within.
- We sit in silence, knowing God is ever present. Here. Now.
- When thoughts, feelings, and sensations arise, we let them go (this is our thinking-feeling-doing self)
- We gently return to our sacred word—a symbol of consent—as a way of dis-identifying with thinking, feeling, and doing, and saying Yes to the Ground of Being that holds it all
Each “return to the sacred word” is a miniature homecoming, a whispered “yes” to the deeper I AM beneath our inner noise.
Rather than engaging the thinking-feeling-doing self, we let it go and sink into a deeper part of our being.
Not by effort, but by surrender.
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But we don’t like to surrender. At least our egos don’t. Thus, we try to control our meditation!
“I’ll meditate, but it better be PEACEFUL!!!”
We often think meditation is about “emptying the mind”, and thus we bring an attitude of control and manipulation into the practice.
We “try” to “do” meditation as a way of “stopping” our thinking-feeling-doing.
Well, good luck with stopping that!
Centering Prayer is not about fighting our thoughts.
Contemplation is not about trying or doing.
It’s about relaxing all our efforting.
It’s about being.
Just being.
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Inside the Practice....
This is a big point about meditation:
Rather than fighting our thoughts, we simply stop identifying with them.Insofar as we try to “stop having thoughts”, we are just the ego trying to manipulate itself.
But if we can stop “trying” so hard, something far more important happens.
Centering prayer gives space for thoughts to arise as they normally do; we simply don’t give them attention with our ordinary mind. We “let them go” as a way of sinking into what’s beyond and beneath them:
God’s naked Being, within us.
And when we let go of our thinking —planning—analyzing—performing — critiquing—peace-seeking—heavy emotions, etc, what are we letting go of?
-We’re letting go of our “ego”
-We’re letting go of our personality
-We’re softening the patterns of thinking-feeling-doing-self
-We’re softening the patterns of our Enneagram Type.
We’re not attempting to “gain” anything. We’re practicing subtraction, letting go.
True surrender.
We are sinking into the naked Being that is already there.
And as we do this, perhaps to our surprise, the thinking-feeling-doing self does in fact go quiet, sometimes. (Traditionally, this is called the “gift of contemplation.” We can’t force interior silence.)
Instead of fighting or tightening around our mental and emotional patterns, we let them flow without giving in to them.
We are not suppressing them; we are letting them do their thing while falling back into the spacious presence that birthed them.
Instead of giving our ordinary thinking-feeling-doing awareness so much attention, we tune into something far deeper than the traffic of our minds.
We crawl out of the basement
We surrender into Being, God, who’s holding us together moment by moment.
We explore the mansion we’ve always lived in.
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This is the gift of pure prayer. Silence. Meditation. Contemplation.
The gift of learning our “Enneagram personality type” is that it shows which thinking-feeling-doing patterns we are more prone to get caught up in.
The gift of meditation and Centering Prayer is that it helps us to dis-identify with our automatic thinking, feeling, and doing patterns and learn to open to the Presence, awareness, being in which those patterns take shape.
Like clouds in the sky, our personality is a flow within a greater space.
What is this “space”?
God shining in our body as Being.
God shining in our busy minds as Awareness.
God shining in our hearts as Presence.
God. Here. Now.
