Although not explicitly divided, there are three modes of contemplation, three possible beginnings: firstly, the best of these kinds of beginnings is a sudden emptying of the soul, in which images vanish, concepts and words are silent, and freedom and clarity suddenly open out within you, until your whole being embraces the wonder, the depth, the obviousness, and yet the emptiness and unfathomable incomprehensibility of God. This touch, this clean breath of understanding, comes relatively rarely.
The other two beginnings can be habitual states. Secondly, the most usual entrance to contemplation is through a desert of aridity, in which although you see nothing, and feel nothing, and apprehend nothing, and are conscious only of a certain interior suffering and anxiety, yet you are drawn and held in this darkness and dryness because it is the only place in which you can find any kind of stability and peace. As you progress, you learn to rest in this arid quietude, and the assurance of a comforting and mighty presence at the heart of this experience grows on you more and more… Until you gradually realize that it is God revealing itself to you, in a light that is painful to your nature and to all its faculties, because That is infinitely above them — and because Its purity is at war with your own selfishness and darkness and imperfection.
Thirdly, then there is a quietude sambrosa, a tranquility full of seva, and rest, and unction, in which, although there is nothing to feed and satisfy, either the senses or the imagination, or the intellect, the will rests in a deep, luminous, and absorbing experience of love. This love is like the shining cloud that enveloped the apostles on Tharba, so that they exclaimed, “Lord, it is good for us to be here.” And from the depths of this cloud come touches of reassurance, the voice of God speaking without words, uttering its own word. For you recognize, at least in some obscure fashion, that this beautiful, deep, meaningful tranquility that floods your whole being with its truth, and its substantial peace, has something to do with the mission of the Second Person in your soul — is an accompaniment and sign of that mission. Thus to many the cloud of their contemplation becomes identified in a secret way with the divinity of Christ, and also with his heart’s love for us, so that their contemplation itself becomes the presence of Christ, and they are absorbed in a suave and pure communion with Christ. He becomes to them a sensible presence, who follows them and envelops them wherever they go, and in all that they do — a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire in the night. And when they have to be absorbed in some distracting work, they nevertheless easily find God again, by a quick glance into their own souls. And sometimes, when they do not think to return to the depths and rest in That, they are nevertheless drawn to That unexpectedly, into obscurity and peace. Or it invades them from within themselves, with a tide of quiet, unutterable joy.
Sometimes these tides of joy are concentrated into strong touches: contacts of God that wake the soul with a bound of wonder and delight — a flash of flame that blazes like an exclamation of inexpressible happiness, and sometimes burns with a wound that is delectable, although it gives pain. And God cannot touch many with this flame, or touch even these heavily. But nevertheless it seems that these deep movements of God’s love keep striving, at least lightly, to impress themselves on everyone that God draws into this happy and tranquil light.
In all these three beginnings, you remain aware of yourself as being on the threshold of something more or less indefinite. In the second, you are second conscious of it at all. You only have a vague, unutterable sense that peace underlies the darkness and aridity in which you find yourself. You scarcely dare admit it to yourself, but in spite of all your misgivings, you realize that you are going somewhere, and that your journey is guided and directed, and that you can feel safe.
In the third, you are in the presence of a more definite and more personal love who invades your mind and will in a way you cannot grasp, eluding every attempt on your part to contain and hold it, by any movement of your own soul. You know that this presence is God, but for the rest, that is hidden in a cloud. Although that is so near as to be inside you, and outside you, and all around you.
When this contact with God deepends and becomes more pure, the cloud thins… In proportion as the cloud gets less opaque, the experience of God opens out inside you, as a terrific emptiness. What you experience is the emptiness and purity of your own faculties, produced in you by a created effect of God’s love. Nevertheless, since it is God itself who directly produces this effect, and makes itself known by it, without any other intermediary, the experience is more than purely subjective, and does tell you something about God that you cannot know in any other way.
These effects are intensified by the light of understanding, infused into your soul by the spirit of God, and raising it suddenly into an atmosphere of dark, breathless clarity — in which God, though completely defeating and baffling all your natural understanding, becomes somehow obvious.
However, in all these things, you remain very far from God, much farther than you realize. And there are always two of you. There is yourself, and there is God, making itself known to you by these effects. So long as there is this sense of separation, this awareness of distance and difference between ourselves and God — we have not yet entered into the fullness of contemplation.
As long as there is an ‘I’ that is the definite subject of a contemplative experience, an ‘I’ that is aware of itself and of its contemplation, an ‘I’ that can possess a certain degree of spirituality — then we have not yet passed over the Red Sea, we have not yet gone out of Egypt. We remain in the realm of multiplicity, activity, incompleteness, striving and desire. The true inner self, the true indestructible and immortal one, the true ‘I’ — who answers to a new and secret name, known only to themself and to God, does not have anything, even contemplation. This ‘I’ is not the kind of subject that can amass experiences, reflect on them, reflect on themself, for this ‘I’, is not the superficial and empircal self that we know in our everyday life.
It is a great mistake to confuse the person, the spiritual and hidden self united with God, and the ego — the exterior, empirical self; the psychological individuality who forms a kind of mask for the inner and hidden self. This outer self is nothing but an evanescent shadow. Its biography and its existence both end together at death. Of the inmost self, there is neither biography, nor end. The outward self can have much, enjoy much, accomplish much, but in the end — all its possessions, joys and accomplishments are nothing. And the outer self is itself nothing — a shadow, a garment that is cast off and consumed by decay.
It is another mistake to identify the outer self with the body, and the inner self with the soul. This is an understandable mistake, but it is very misleading, because after all, body and soul are incomplete substances, parts of one whole being, and the inner self is not a part of us, it is all of us. It is our whole reality. Whatever is added to it is fortuitous, transient and inconsequential. Hence, both body and soul belong to, or better, subsist, in our real self — that which we are. The ego, on the other hand, is a self-constructed illusion, that has our body and part of our soul at its disposal, because it has taken over the functions of the inner self as a result of what we call “man’s fall.” That is precisely one of the main effects of The Fall, that humans have become alienated from their inner-self, which is the image of God. Humans have been turned, spiritually, inside-out, so that their ego plays the part of the true self — a role which it actually has no right to assume.
In returning to God, and to ourselves, we have to begin with what we actually are. We have to start from our alienated condition. We are prodigals in a distant country, the region of unlikeness. And we must seem to travel far in that region before we seem to reach our own land. And yet, secretly, we are in our own land all the time. The ego, the outer self, is respected by God, and allowed to carry out the function which our inner self cannot yet assume on its own. We have to act in our every day life as if we were what our outer self indicates us to be, but at the same time, we must remember, that we are not entirely what we seem to be; and that what appears to be our ‘self’, is soon going to disappear into nothingness.