4^th March, 2024 • Søren Aas

Chapter VIII - The Second Form of Contemplation

This chapter we concern ourselves with the second form of contemplation. Whilst the first form, covered in the last chapter, was about looking outwards to see reality as it is, the second form is about retreating within to experience the stillness of our Being.

Until now we have been dealing with experiences that are to an extent relatable to the material world, but now we will be entering increasingly spiritual territory. For many of us, this may seem an alien way to look at things. Our modern western society assumes that we can know everything, we just need to figure it all out. In the words of Neil deGrass Tyson God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.. Certainly our knowledge is growing, but until proved that we can know everything, we have to choose to believe if we actually can know everything, or not. Do you find a big bang more convincing than God saying be light, or are there somethings we just cannot know? Underhill invites us to venture onwards and find out for ourselves.

Commentary

To briefly recap last chapter, The First Form of Contemplation, led us to become aware of the natural world and realize that we are all part of the web of life. As we continue the first form of contemplation gradually it will transform into the second form, the subject of this article. As our connection to life all around us grows, we will gradually start to become aware of a higher plane of existence. Until now our minds have tried to make sense of Reality as best it could, using the tools it has (words, thoughts etc). The mind made laws, classifications and relations etc to help us make sense of our experiences. What comes to our attention is that there is a greater meaning that pervades life and that we can begin to become aware of, though it still is out of reach. If we halt our journey here, we can enjoy the world as a nature mystic, but the path continues onwards to greater meaning, so let us press on towards a larger consciousness of living things.

Somehow we yearn for meaning and if we follow up this impulse by keeping our attention focused on life around us we will be rewarded with ever increasing realizations. We must let ourselves wander in to the unknown, for our preconceptions will only hinder our advance.

Life is all around and we all share a life force, we are all connected. If we have come to this conclusion we see that every living thing is an expression of an underlying force, a creative pressure that blooms, lives and dies. The material world is animated by something other than itself. The piglet that is born and squeals its first sound is animated by something we are unable to explain. It is this that we cannot put into words, this mystery, that we are calling life force, and it permeates us all.

By familiarizing ourselves with the what is created (material world) and the potential for creation (spirit) we can get to know them and be sure of them. It is this knowledge that sets us free from our self centered prison. Through a humble and disinterested acceptance of life we can now see that the great web of life, which we all are part of, pours out from the same source, giving rise to everything, both good and evil. This source we cannot understand, but we can know it as something like want, desire, pressure or love. A word of caution is in order, for if we realize that the material is an expression of something greater, we need to remind ourselves to see things as they are and to want what is, if we instead start thinking that the spiritual plane is better and that the material plane is somehow undesirable (dirty, impure etc) we start to go astray.

So we have a creative force of raw potential that manifests itself in finite forms. The potential is eternal and the finite is absolute. Being is when potential becomes finite, and consciousness is able to be aware of itself. This is a mystery above our pay grade, but can we really hope for our limited reason to completely understand ourselves? The mystics would say no, but that we can achieve a feeling of wholeness by sensing an assurance of Reality. Our search, or unrest, is seeking for meaning, and though we may not be able to conclude rationally what our meaning is, we can through our awareness come to feel what meaning is.

So, how did we get to this awareness of meaning? Our process was to first observe that our self hood was a mental game we where playing with ourselves. Then we deliberately used our awareness to observed Reality as it was, not how we thought and this in turn led us to a union of love. To go up to the next level we will repeat these three steps.

In the beginning, when we realized our consciousness was chaotically fleeing from one thing to another, we decided to stand back and hold our awareness on what we willed and wanted. By doing this we could see clearly and found that our self hood or ego was a mental construct in a chaotic state and that there existed something which endured and was unchanging, something outside the state of flux. This something, this spirit, can at once be everything and also one thing. Because it is everything it contains in it a capacity for the infinite.

Now, if you ever felt you where not good enough, that is the infinite making itself known to you. It cajoles us onwards, to bigger, better, faster, more!

To function in daily life, we use our thoughts to aid us, but every time we are thinking and living in our head we must focus our attention on doing so, and take our attention away from our simply being. If we are continually creating mental models and analyzing we are not sensing and being. To know God, we need to learn to just observe and be, not paying attention to our mental activities. We can only experience God, for God can not be conceptualized.

Our first stage of contemplation established our relation with creation, it is a masculine act of experiencing what is without. The first stage started by going within, through observation, to realize a truer apprehension of Reality.

The second stage of contemplation is a feminine sensual and intuitive realization of what is within. The second stage seems in comparison a mirror image, through observation we sense a plane of existence that we cannot understand and therefore we can only retreat within ourselves towards a simple and undifferentiated Being, leading to emptiness and freedom, to an intense and vivid silence. In this silence we experience a certainty, that we cannot understand or analyze, but that all the same we are certain is good. The mystics say we have entered into the Freedom of the Will of God [and we are now] a part of a higher, slower duration into a higher life of unity from a lower life of multiplicity. We have experienced for ourselves that the first and second forms of contemplation are two complementary ways of experiencing and uniting with Reality. We are aware that the material world is flowing, yet we also are aware of the eternal stillness, and we are able to tune in to them, if only fleetingly for we are always a part of time. Still, we are both humans caught in time and spirits of the eternal.

Experiencing Eternity within the stillness can be comforting to some and unsettling for others. But having experienced it for ourselves, however briefly, will affect how we see ourselves and our place in things.

Final thoughts

The paradox of how we can exist in both Time and Eternity is something we can not understand at a logical, material level, yet we can fleetingly sense the truth of it. This polarity can both give a joyous quality to our lives or terrify us, yet we cannot deny that it somehow is meaningful, even though it is inexplicable.