Home > Work > The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice
1 " Centering Prayer is not about developing concentration, attaining clear mind, conscious presence, a strong witnessing “I,” some desired state. In Centering Prayer you merely practice and practice the core kenotic motion: “let go, make space, unclench”—thought by thought by thought. "
― Cynthia Bourgeault , The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice
2 " My prayer tends very much toward what you call fana [annihilation in God]. There is in my heart this great thirst to recognize totally the nothingness of all that is not God. My prayer is then a kind of praise rising up out of the center of Nothing and Silence. If I am still present “myself,” this I recognize as an obstacle about which I can do nothing unless He Himself removes the obstacle. If He wills, He can make the Nothingness into a total clarity. If He does not will, then the Nothingness seems itself to be an object and remains an obstacle. Such is my ordinary way of prayer, or meditation. It is not “thinking about” anything, but a direct seeking of the Face of the Invisible, who cannot be found unless we become lost in Him who is invisible.3 "
3 " But when this instruction is understood not as the deliberate cultivation of an interior vacuum (“sinking mind,” as it’s sometimes called), but rather, as a willing divestment of all possessions even up to and including personal consciousness, its appropriateness becomes clear—and its ability to inform the Christian life, dazzling. Slowly, steadily, Centering Prayer patterns into its practitioners what I would call the quintessential Jesus response: the meeting of any and all life situations by the complete, free giving of oneself. "
4 " The great wager around which the Western Inner tradition has encamped is that as one is able to release the heart from its enslavement to the passions, this other heart emerges: this “organ of contemplation,” of luminous sight and compassionate action. For what one “sees” and entrains with is none other than this higher order of divine coherence and compassion, which can be verified as objectively real, but becomes accessible only when the heart is able to rise to this highest level and assume its cosmically appointed function. "
5 " is to break through the bonds that attach the individual to the world of his senses and separate him from his eternal nature. "
6 " In various traditions the witness has been identified with “Real I,” “the true self,” and “essential being,” but all of this naming misses the point. Witnessing is, if anything, a verb: an innate capacity of human consciousness to be present to itself as a field of awareness. Though personal, it is not a person—not an other—but a subtle capacity of consciousness itself, so far as we know gifted to the human species alone. Its purpose seems to be to keep track simultaneously of the horizontal axis—our life in time—and the pure divine awareness that is always intersecting this axis. "
7 " Nada te turbe, nada te’espante; Quien a Dios tiene nada le falta. Nada te turbe, nada te’espante, Solo Dios basta. "
8 " From this quantum shift in the hardwiring of perception, of course, the much celebrated spiritual and moral attainments would understandably flow, since a mind that does not need to separate and exclude in order to perceive reality will encounter far less resistance in the current of life and inflict far less violence upon others. "
9 " Once you see this, it’s the touchstone throughout all his teaching: Let go! Don’t cling! Don’t hoard! Don’t assert your importance! Don’t fret. “Do not be afraid, little flock, it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom!” (Luke 12:32). "
