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Christian Sannyasa
L.M.: Please describe now your own meditation practice, and discuss its importance for your life within this Christian sannyasa tradition.
W.T.: My spiritual practice very much centers on meditation—contemplative prayer, or contemplative meditation. I like to say contemplative meditation rather than Christian meditation contemplative meditation instead of Centering Prayer. There is only one meditation—just as there is only one sannyasa. Though there are people from different traditions who take sannyasa. There is only one consciousness. And there is only one love; all love is the same. There are different expressions of it, but love is love. Then too to have compassion is to let go of yourself. Now I prefer to use the term contemplative meditation because that is the goal. It is contemplative, mystical experience that is a direct kind of contact with the divine--through being receptive to the divine presence. An important distinction between Catholics, or Christians, in the West and Indians is—the Indians will never ask you: What is your idea of God? They will ask you: What is your experience of God?
So it's out of this experience that I am speaking. I have always known it to be a personal, intimate, enveloping, invading, and irruptive, divine presence. But it is very apophatic, because you never see God's face. I remember something Bede said to me one day many years ago, while on a walk in a London park. We were talking about the nature of mystical experience, and of contemplative mystical union. And he said to me: “It's like sitting in a dark room.” This is the via negativa. You are sitting in a dark room and someone comes in. You can't see them. And they put their arms around you. You know they're there. But you can't see their face.
You have this incredible intimacy with God, but there's always mystery. You know it as this incredible, loving, all-embracing and all-consuming presence. That is my experience of God, and I think that my awareness is maintained through the grace of God. It's not anything that I am doing. I always kind of consider myself to be a failure at meditation.
L.M.: I know I do, maybe we all think that.
W.T.: I have been trained as a philosopher and theologian, and one of the great hazards of that is having a mind.
L.M.: A too analytical mind.
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