In Addison Hodges Hart’s substack post about the doctrine of ‘silent transmission’ in the Chan/Zen Buddhist tradition, he notes, two related aspects that are common, not only to Ch’an/Zen, but to all contemplative traditions. The first of these is that, realization or awakening or “encountering God” is always a “silent transmission,” one that cannot be described or neatly reduced to logical assertions. This can be understood as one way to define apophatic spirituality, at the center of which is the practice of silent contemplative engagement that is the focus of this website. The second aspect Hart notes is, that such a personal inner awakening can’t be a collective experience, but entirely a lonely enterprise, and he concludes that, we are always alone interiorly. Setting aside for the moment the relationship, if any, between spiritual collectivity or communion and individual interiority or aloneness, I would like to briefly examine the latter.
Reading Hart’s words brought to mind the neoplatonic maxim about the spiritual path being a, flight of the alone to the alone, and I recalled an experience I’d had in meditation several years ago. As had been the case for many years and is still now, I was sitting in contemplative silence on my cushion at home alone one day when I became instantaneously and inexplicably rapt in the sense of being a single consciousness alone throughout space and across all time. It is difficult to convey how tremendous and terrifying this sense of aloneness was, and I later came to imagine it theopoetically as the aloneness of God itself. In any event my sense coming out of it was of having discovered a gaping wound in the heart of reality, which was also my own personal wound. And though this feeling of transpersonal/personal woundedness lingered for several hours that day, my meditation seemed none the worse for wear in the subsequent days and the intensity of the feeling gradually faded in due course as the experience mercifully never repeated itself.
Moving on I just sort of put that experience out of my mind and continued practicing until sometime later I came across this quote from Swami Vishnudevananda: When all other obstacles have been overcome by painstaking, dauntless effort, and all the internal enemies have perished, one faces what appears to be a great void. This must too be crossed by the meditator. It is accompanied by an overpowering feeling of being stripped bare and left totally alone. There is nothing that can be seen or heard. The aspirant is beyond seeking solace in others, and confronts the necessity of depending entirely upon themselves.1 I wondered then if my experience might somehow have been akin to that. Here I would note that though I have hardly overcome all obstacles and internal enemies in my life, I have maintained a certain painstaking and dauntless effort in contemplative silence. Subsequently over the years since my encounter with that terrifying aloneness, I have more and more frequently experienced something of a quite opposite nature in contemplative silence - a unequivocal sense of completeness, connection and goodness.
In consideration of the meaning of all this I turn to Dominican patristic scholar and contemplative Martin Laird who writes: Healing is revealed when we discover that our wound and the wound of God are one wound.2 There’s a great mystery here. Might this not have some meaning for the relationship between our individual efforts to heal that wound(s) alone in contemplative silence and the possibility of coming together in spiritual communion with others? Again, Martin Laird provides good counsel: Contemplation is sheer gift. There is nothing we can do to bring forth its flowering, but there are important skills, without which it will be unlikely to flower. It is this sort of harmonious synergy between human effort and divine grace that leads St. Augustine to comment, "So while God made you without you, he doesn't justify you without you."3 Laird is here pointing to the essential unity of personal and transpersonal intention and effort in contemplative silence. In this respect I think the justification of which St. Augustine speaks is at least partly constituted in the realization that one shares the wound of aloneness with all being(s) and takes as a shared intention the ongoing healing of that in meditation/prayer. In Christianity this has been referred to as ‘putting on the mind of Christ’ and in Buddhism, bodhicitta (the mind of awakening). Maybe that is the ultimate gift of contemplative silence - that may be accordingly understood as indispensable to truly coming together in communion for/with the greater good that is our highest aspiration.
Rodney P. Devenish, Natural Mind Meditation, pg.233
Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land, pg.118
Ibid., pg.54
I have felt this feeling while meditating. I have only reached it a couple of times. However it didn't frighten me.