This excerpt by Charles shows a stage of his spiritual journey in 1985, where he is very much ensconced in the meditation method of John Main and influenced by the works of John Cassian’s Desert Fathers. Quite similar to the evolution of Merton’s beliefs, there is also the beginnings of a subtle influence of the Desert Fathers and Christian Mystics in emptying the self or false self and in the stillness of meditation, a communion with Spirit that already resides within us and yearns to be fully present.
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“…of Spirituality: Many confuse prayer with thinking about God. But prayer is not communication, it is communion. I think that most people are unaware of about 95% of the deeper levels of consciousness. We are mostly in touch with our body and soul (ego, intellect) but not our spirit. As a Benedictine (Trappist) our prayer tradition goes back to the early hermits in the desert and back into the earliest Christian tradition. We take a single word or phrase, and with spine erect, and with even breathing we repeat this in prayer. We usually find that our minds are full of monkey chatter. To be in touch with our spirit, we first have to be in harmony with ourselves before we can be in harmony with God. The mantra brings us to this harmony and brings us in touch with our spirit, and then we discover Spirit which is praying within us. This is not a mental thing. It is communion. We learn to leave ourselves behind, to leave our false self and discover our true self which has been there all along only we didn’t see it. The goal is to arrive at the place from which we started and to see the place for the first time. Not cogito ergo sum, but sum ergo cogito.”