CONTEMPLATIVE PRACTICES TO INTEGRATE THE HEMISPHERES
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Christian Contemplation beyond the hemispheres
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Christian Contemplation beyond the hemispheres
From Father Martin Laird’s “Into the Silent Land”
The foundation of every land is silence (Ws 18:14), where God simply and perpetually gives Himself. This Self-gift is manifested in the creation, in the people of God and their inspired (if stumbling) pursuit of a just society, and most fully, in the Christian view of things, in Jesus Christ.
This is the homeland to which every spiritual pilgrim is constantly being called, “called home/” as St. Augustine says, “from the noise that is around us to the joys that are silent. Why do we rush about… looking for God who is here at home with us, if all we want is to be with him?”
This joy that is silent is already within us. Its discovery is precious beyond compare.
R, S. Thomas expresses it with deceptive understatement: But the silence in the mind is when
“we live best, within listening distance of the silence we call God … It is a presence, then, whose margins are our margins; that calls us out over our own fathoms.”
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This silence is all pervading, from the innermost depths of the human being, whose margins are God’s margins, to the widest embrace of human compassion.
“What to do,” asks R. S. Thomas, “but to draw a little nearer to such ubiquity by remaining still.”
Let us journey home, then, to the silence of our own fathoms by becoming still.
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2 Replies
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Thanks Don… Martin Laird’s books are a great intro to Christian Meditation – Into the Silent Land, A Sunlit Absence, An Ocean of Light – and it is meditation that facilitates consciousness of RH open attention.
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Thanks Rodney. You might be interested in Les Fehmi’s Open Focus. Meditation ultimately results in a highly coherent integrated brain. And with truly integral meditation, the head brain is integrated with the heart brain (40,000 neurons) and the gut brain (100 million), and – to go further into Dan Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology, (IPNB), with the whole body and world (which Siegel calls transpirational integration)
In a way, Iain does a disservice to focus in such a limited way on just cortex, missing even the vital importance for meditation and life in general of subcortical regions, not to mention the entire body and world.
But it’s a good start!!
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