Today's sitting ran from 3-3:45 am. It was focused and intense, but dry, as most sessions are. The wayward mind was brought to heel, but discursive operations continued. I was hard by the boundary that separates what Augustin Poulain calls the prayer of simplicity from what he calls the prayer of quiet. But I remained this side of the border, and this side of the first stage of the mystical properly speaking.
Poulain's definition is excellent: "We apply the word mystic to those supernatural acts or states which our own industry is powerless to produce, even in a low degree, even momentarily." (Fr. Augustin Poulain, S.J., The Graces of Interior Prayer: a Treatise on Mystical Theology, Caritas Publishing, 2016, viii + 680 pp. A translation of the French original first published in 1901. Emphasis in original.) Poulain's tome may well be the greatest secondary source on mystical theology ever written. It is in the same league as The Three Ages [sic] of the Interior Life by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O. P.)
The main point here is that one cannot enter the mystical by one's own power. Grace is needed. Herewith, a crucial difference between Christian and Buddhist meditation. 'Crucial' from L. crux, crucis, meaning 'cross,' has a special resonance in this context.
A New Testament analogy is apropos: "Knock and it shall be opened unto you." (Matthew 7: 7-8, KJV.) If a door is locked from the inside, I cannot pass though it by my own power: I must knock. The knocking is within my power, but the entry is due to the initiative of another who is not in my power. The prayer of simplicity, the fourth degree of ordinary prayer, is within my power and is like the knocking; the first degree of mystical prayer is not in my power and is like the allowance of entry.
About the prayer of simplicity, Poulain says that "there is a thought or a sentiment that returns incessantly and easily (although with little or no development) among many other thoughts, whether useful or no." (8) Here are three examples of my own that are either Christian or proto-Christian.
The Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."
A favorite line of mine from Plotinus' Enneads: "It is by the One that all beings are beings."
An invention of mine with a Thomist flavor: "The Lord is Being itself."
In each case, one runs through a short sentence. The run-through is discursive (from L. currere, to run) in that it constitutes an interior discourse. One does not develop these thoughts, but repeats them to oneself incessantly in a condition in which other thoughts obtrude either as distractions or as further developments. There is nothing mystical going on; one remains on the discursive plane even if one whittles longer phrases down to shorter ones. One has not yet achieved inner quiet. One is merely knocking on the door. To use the Jesus mantram as an example:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner --> Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner --> Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me --> Lord Jesus Christ have mercy --> Lord have mercy --> Lord, Lord, Lord.
The whittling process may lead to one-pointed concentration on one word. This brings one to the edge of the discursive plane. Whether one goes over the edge into the mystic is not up to one. It is a matter of grace or divine initiative.
Poulain, following The Interior Castle of the great Spanish mystic St. Theresa of Avila, calls the first degree or stage of mystical union the prayer of quiet or "the incomplete mystic union." (48) In this state, "the divine action is not strong enough to hinder distractions," and "the imagination still preserves its liberty." (49).
The claim that God's action brings about the first degree of mystical union is a metaphysical claim that goes beyond the phenomenology of the situation. The same is true of the claim that the mystical state is one of union with God. If we put God between the Husserlian brackets, and attend solely to the phenomenology, we can still ground a distinction between the fourth state of ordinary prayer, the prayer of simplicity, which remains on the discursive plane, and the first mystical state.
During the session of 25 July 2019 I experienced a sudden, unanticipated, unwilled, shut-down of all thoughts. Mental silence supervened all of a sudden, on its own. It subsided soon enough, and the philosopher's attempt at analysis only speeded its departure. If one is granted a taste of this blissful quiet one must simply receive it, without analysis, and with gratitude. The experience of inner quiet, whether or it it is the effect of a transcendent Source, is undeniable and unmistakable.
On 7 December 2109 I sat from 3:30-4:22 am. From my notes:
Very good session. A touch of grace, hard to describe: a pacifying presence of something beyond my mental operations. Subtle, but unmistakable.
On 18 February 2020, the experience was as of a subtle summons, a summoning away from mental chatter and the useless rehearsals of stale thoughts, toward silence, waiting, patient attention, interior listening and hearkening. Hearken, horchen, gehorsam, Gehorsamkeit.
Finally, a note on the ‘as of’ locution. This is a philosopher’s term of art (terminus technicus) that signals a salutary sobriety and epistemic caution. To describe an experiencing as of such-and-such is to describe it is such a way that no affirmation is made of the reality of the intentional object, but also, no denial of the reality of the intentional object. To describe an experiencing as of a summons to mental quiet is to stick to the phenomenology of the act and its object and to remain neutral on the question whether someone or something was issuing a summons ab extra. ‘An experience of such-and-such,’ by contrast, suggests a doxastic commitment to the reality of the intentional object.