My Practice 

By John Cowan

There will be seven sections.

The first will relate some wonderful spiritual events that I have experienced or heard or read. This section is intended to help you become confident that you too can induce wonderful experiences. In this section you will also be briefly introduced to the concept of the panentheistic God (the all-in-God, God) as a theory that supports the existence of wonderful experiences. 

The second section will give you a method for initiating such a pursuit. “Who are you?” will be the question. From the exercise that flows from the question will come an understanding of yourself as “Awareness” or “Being Aware.”

The third section, “The Empty Mind,” will show you a way to empty your crowded mind so that instead of fixating on thoughts and feelings the mind will offer you a clear view through to reality.

The fourth section, “Some Moments in my Experience of this Practice,” will give you a perspective on some of what this pursuit costs in time and energy.

The fifth section is “Love.” I present a little different take on the “command” to love. The question: “How can you command the response of love?” will be answered; “You cannot.”

Section six is “After-thoughts.”

Section seven is “Sinking Down into Being,” something I have experienced just a little, but enough to sketch.

Section One: Some Wonderful Things

In my early forties, during the time I was a program manager at Control Data for computer-based educational programs and the father of two young boys and the husband of one wife, I nearly always slipped out at night after the children were in bed for a three-mile run. 

One of those nights, as I gained my normal running cadence, I found myself matching my steps with a quiet, barely audible chant. “A distant God, and a lonely man.” I must have chanted that for a mile or so before I realized I had turned it around and now was chanting, “A distant man and a lonely God.” 

Where did this come from?

In my Roman Catholic education, my parents squeezed the nickels so that both I and my sisters nearly always attended Catholic schools. I had been encouraged to talk with God, and I had spent twelve years of semi-monastic life in the seminary, eight in the Roman priesthood and even now while working for a corporation I was registered as a priest in the Minnesota Episcopal Diocese and from time to time exercised my orders at the pulpit and altar, and donated a fair amount of time to leading projects for the Episcopal Church of Minnesota. I prayed a lot.

But I admitted then, as I am admitting now, that God was on the end of a long-distance line. I did not feel cuddled by God. I pretty much felt on my own. This night, as I was lamenting my situation, my unconscious self, or some other such factor, was determined to shift the blame for this condition from God to whom I had wanted to ascribe it, to me, who had been ignoring God.

All my training had been about a God, all powerful, all knowing, in charge of everything, of course not living on a cloud, just in some other dimension far, far away. How likely was this God to really care for me.? Jesus said God did. And for him that may well have been the case. 

The God I worshipped, I say this in hindsight, was not the abba of Jesus (“abba” is Hebrew for “daddy”) but the God of Aristotle, the biggest name in Greek philosophy, who taught before the time of Jesus. Aristotle’s God was the unmoved mover. Not anybody’s beloved companion. The unmoved mover was out there somewhere pushing the load. The theologians had abandoned Jesus in favor of Aristotle. They probably did not mean to. 

During the medieval period of theological formation Aristotle had more standing with the intellectual community than did Jesus. Jesus was the miracle man. Therefore supernatural. Even divine. Not an intellectual challenge. Or to put it another way, intellectual inquiry was stymied by the “fact” that God was different, that is “supernatural.”  

Some theology teachers have begun to change this message. They are teaching a panentheistic God. “panentheistic” means “All in God.”  They teach that we are immersed in God. Everywhere, inside and outside of us there is God. 

God is not above nature, super-natural. God saturates nature. Everything that happens is natural. 

As the bugler sounding taps into the sunset calls, “God is nigh!”  In this scenario Jesus becomes somebody who woke up to the fact that God was nigh. Jesus is not only not divine, but someone who can be imitated. Some have tried. And some have succeeded. 

And now that is what I expect. That God is nigh. I expect that God is not only at my elbow, but in my heart and in yours. It took a while to get this perspective, but after a while the pile of God sightings got large enough for me to see them. And then I read the panentheistic theory. The rest of this section is about God-sightings.

The reason for the shift from a supernatural God, to a natural one is this: A hypothesis should account for the appearances. The hypothesis of a supernatural God that is both all powerful and good does not account for the bad things in creation. On the other hand, the atheist position of no God, does not account for what appears to be the direction the universe is tending. It seems someone is steering this. Who?

This leaves a natural God who is continuing the process of creation and bumping into obstacles difficult to surmount, including the leading creative experience, human beings, who are slow to respond to God’s coaxing. This freed me to see God coaxing everywhere and instead of dismissing wonderful experiences I began to accept them as the working of a natural God.

What I did next was aided by reading and experiencing the meditation traditions of the east. Their doctrine of nondualism teaches that nothing is two. Therefore, all, including God, are wrapped together in a loving bun. These traditions have been going the “all in God” direction for two thousand and more years. 

When I started thinking like this, one of the first things I did was attribute to God the unconscious change in my words while running, and then the change in my perspective. It was I who was forgetting God, not God forgetting me. The panentheistic God had changed my mind.

While my Roman Catholic upbringing, including my Irish relatives and certainly my Catholic seminary, led me to the God of Aristotle, my Swedish grandparents were firmly fixed as followers of Jesus’ abba, although they never heard that word.  They read the Bible every night.  They followed what the Word commands. They were certain in their expectation of the Resurrection.  They would attribute a favorable stoplight to God. God in the person of Jesus hovered over their lives constantly.

I loved them dearly but did not think much of their theology. I am in the process of reconsidering this judgement. For instance, I have always remained confident of God’s triumph in the end.  Now, I realize my confidence is based on that huge picture on their living room wall of Jesus standing in the back of a boatload of disciples, calming the storm.   Whether or not Jesus was actually in that boat, his abba is available to calm my storms. Probably not really because of the picture on the wall but because of the confidence of the two old people who put it there.

Sharing Jesus’ and gramma’s and da pa’s confidence in God will cause my life to work out well.  By “well” I mean for the greater good. Not necessarily my individual good. While this does not make for much of a sales pitch, it looks better when you realize that is the only pitch that fits reality. Remember Jesus. His life worked out well for the greater good. Not his good. Unless his good was lost in the greater good. And it was. So that ends that.

I had a vision once. I think it an excellent example of a wonderful experience. Since I am not a candidate for canonization my having a vision is not likely. I am confident that this vision was not granted as a reward for holiness. I think it happened for the sake of someone else. 

At this time, I was working as an independent organization development consultant. Mostly I did team buildings. I was scheduled to facilitate a three-day session with the leadership team of 3M’s Fasteners division. They make the tapes that hold diapers together. Do not laugh. They made lots of money! Second highest profit generator in the corporation. Lots of babies, lots of diapers, lots of fasteners equals lots of money.

The person helping put this meeting together was the Director of Personnel, a woman about my age then, about forty-five. As we finished up the last details, she said that she might not be at the meeting herself since her son who lived in California was very, very ill and might die soon. She might even go out there even though his partner was a nurse and had the situation well in hand. Since this was the height of the Aids epidemic and her son had a “partner” not a “wife,” I waited for more. After a little silence she continued that he was gay and the disease was Aids. 

I gave her my deepest sympathy. Aids was a bad way to die. That was partly because many withheld compassion since the victim was seen as a sinner, who should not have done whatever he did. Talk about kicking a guy when he is down.  I said that if she could not be at the teambuilding and he did die, I would appreciate an invitation to the funeral.

Everything happened as foreseen. Except I did not receive an invitation. I put that off to the fact that my incidental moment in her life was unlikely to be remembered in the turbulence she must be experiencing.

I went to the funeral anyway. I was partly drawn by wanting to see how a Roman Catholic Church would deal with someone who died because of behavior they condemned. For the record: They did well.  The focus was on the pain and the loss and the life well lived. No mention that he was gay. That could have been upgraded, but that would be asking a lot. This was “back in the day.” Somebody in the local parish already had stuck his neck out.

I caught the mother afterward for a moment in the hallway and was surprised by her delight in my coming. Then I went home, sat on the edge of the bed, and changed my socks. 

In the middle of doing this, I had a vision.

It was a white etching. I could see through it to the window and the tree outside. The etching featured her son, chest, head, and shoulders rising out of a cloud, dressed in a toga and being welcomed by men and women similarly dressed. He was ascending into heaven.

A minute, and then the vision disappeared.

I sat there a while. I assumed it was her son, although it did not need to look like him. How could it? I also assumed that while I did not purposely create the vision in some way I must have.   I had never seen even a picture of him. Then I thought, “I better tell her. This should make her happy.” I left her a call at 3M describing the apparition and went about life. 

The next day when I returned to my office telephone I had a call recorded from her. She said that my experience was no surprise. Her son had stood at the foot of her bed that same night and told her how happy he was that his suffering was over. 

This is the last time I ever spoke to her about this. I worked with the team for some time afterward and do not remember her at all from then. I took this miracle so thoroughly in stride that I did not even tell my wife. No big deal. It felt normal. 

I had had a vision and it was no big deal. It probably shouldn’t be a big deal. If God is everywhere, should not events such as this happen often?  Unless of course it is so unexpected that it cannot occur. Jesus used to say to the recently cured that it was their confidence that made them whole. Maybe we do not have miracles because we do not have confidence that miracles can be had. 

About thirty-five years later I read Bruce Chilton’s book, Rabbi Paul. He describes Paul’s conversion as an experience similar to my vision. Even more, he reminds us that James and the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem accepted Paul’s vision of Jesus resurrected as being the same as theirs. Chilton seems to mean that all their visions were generated within them. He seems not even to claim that they saw their visions externally after generating them.  

That was one example of a wonderful experience. And here is another.

George Fox, one of the Quaker founders, while in the midst of the ongoing stress over not receiving guidance from the English churches in its many members and leaders and denominations for the extreme puzzlement he was in about his spiritual condition and hearing a voice that assured him that the answer to his question was at hand, and returning to paradise and becoming like Adam before the fall, seeing all things as bright and beautiful.

Sort of a one-of-a-kind moment, right? God works in exceptional ways. Well, no. I know quite a few times God worked that way. I ascribe the following to God, because we are all in God and therefore, odd things can be ascribed to a natural God. 

I am at a conference for Organization Development people. A rap on my room door. There stands a man my height and weight and age with a big beaming smile. He ascertains my name, and I his, and he says, “I hear you are a religious person?” I am and I say so.

“I hear you were a priest?” I was and say so.

“Well, then I would like your help.”

“I’ll certainly try.”

“Here is my problem. I was in the shower and I was visited by God. I did not see him, but I experienced him. I had been feeling dead-ended by life for days. I was considering suicide. I have a date with a psychiatrist when I get back. That has all changed. After God came, everything is bright and beautiful. I am filled with joy.”

As much impressed by his radiance as by his words, I remonstrated, “What’s wrong with that.?”

“What’s wrong with that? I am an atheist! Now what am I supposed to do?”

I did not have a good answer. Saying the obvious probably would be seen as taking cheap advantage of the situation in order to grow the church. I did not tell him the experience following the vision would probably go away. Except for a few people, who I know only from a great distance, that level of intensity for most people goes away fairly soon, although it does leave an aftereffect.  

I have bumped into several people similar to him since. At the time I spoke with him, I already was one such.  For me it was a four-day secular workshop, a massive change in perspective. Probably the key moment was at two in the morning when a woman I was “helping” told me the only reason she was talking to me was that she pitied me. 

In the process, over the next couple of days, of reorganizing my self-image to account for anyone viewing my magnificence as pitiful, I entered a life of brightness. And then quietly over the next three weeks the brightness receded and I was much like I was before, only some change, and a memory of what had been , and a ferocious intent to bring it back again.  (This same workshop had another excellent after effect. I will come to that later, in section five, about love.)

My training was to be a good boy and then, for growth beyond good behavior, to wait patiently for God to perform on me. A supernatural God might do that eventually. But with a panentheistic God is there not a way that I can approach this that would increase the odds for Godly action. 

Can we collaborate with God? Is God like an electrical source that requires that you plug the toaster in before the wall socket can deliver the power. What to do to plug in the toaster?

At his baptism did Jesus experience a random act of God opening to him a new way of existing?   With a panentheistic God, could it not have been Jesus’ personal intensity combined with this important, critical occasion, baptism by his wild risk taking -cousin, that drew power into a natural situation and lit Jesus up to a natural but extraordinary way of being. This way of being his followers overblew with their imaginings of clouds and thunder, and a voice from heaven. Which overblowing was quite unnecessary because Jesus’ life after this moment was enough to blow quite a few fuses, even without exaggerating the baptismal event.

Generations of Jesus’ followers after his death endured forty days of intense training to come to the day when they were set up to explode into a new way of being at baptism. The period was called Lent.

Christians, have since divested the baptismal ceremony that climaxed Lent of intensity and performed it on babies whenever is convenient in a ceremony that no one really understands.  

I have experienced similar phenomena to the old Lenten training period in the Cursillo movement. “Cursillo” means “short course.” Four days of theoretical and emotional training run by straight-laced churches, produces some very effective outcomes. While I do not know of long-term studies, I do know Cursillos are memorable from talking to graduates and being a graduate once and member of the leadership team three times. 

Most attendees do pop out, at the end of the course, changed people. Some deeply changed, some change not so much. Some lastingly, some for a while. Very few find the experience meaningless. I have never heard it denigrated by a participant.  

I was a leader at one. Second assistant chaplain was the title.  That was given me in a meeting because I complained during the meeting about being the assistant chaplain when I was much older than the chaplain, and better schooled and wiser. The rector, (boss man) reduced me to second assistant chaplain on the spot. When I asked who the first assistant was, he said, “Nobody. The position is empty.” 

We danced and we sang. We listened to lay speeches from unexpected sources. We were stormed by outsiders eager to show us service and love. We went to bed late and rose early. We did not shower. One of us was demoted.  When I kissed the first four who came to my station for communion, all women, on the forehead, the fifth, a man, complained that I had not kissed him. From there on I kissed everyone.   

From that madness came changed lives!

Was Fox’s change brought about by a finger from heaven? As one who trusts this panentheistic model I think it more likely that it was brought about by internal forces, primarily anxiety, heated to a boil and then suddenly released. A buried way of being, seeing, and doing popped to the surface. Much more likely for me than God’s heavenly hand.  This is the panentheistic God’s method, and with a very earnest subject collaborating, it can be successful, just not heavenly. Anybody could do it. The conditions, just have to be ripe.

I have seen many such explosions in secular settings when the natural pressures were ramped up. A Minnesota friend of mine while driving a rental car in California found herself lost in the woods at a dead end, while anxiously trying to get to an important appointment. In turning around she got stuck. One tough little punk, nevertheless she gave up and burst into tears, and then, in that moment of relaxation saw the world in its true glory. 

I have known other people who have had similar, accidental experiences. Not with the intensity of Fox’s nor with similar results in the surrounding world, although those who were so blessed were well aware that they were now experiencing life in an unusual and vibrant way. For those whom I know, this was for a time only. 

I knew someone briefly who had lived in brightness for six months. I was surprised that he had no desire to return. He preferred ordinary life. Maybe he remembered what happened to Jesus. Besides, he was making much money and had clients to last out a year. A consultant’s dream. With that, who needs the Kingdom of Heaven?

Most such instances go unreported because since “awesome” and “crazy” look quite similar the recipient is slow to risk ridicule and loss of social status.  Drugs do induce for a short time similar states.  If you have a vision, say that it was drug-induced. That is socially acceptable, even if illegal.

In all of this section, my point is that wonderful events are available. They happen. We do not talk about them. I also introduced the term “panentheistic God“ to account for the existence of wonderful experiences. 

If you do not find that God or any God necessary for these effects, ignore the idea. It is not important in order to continue reading. The inventors of the methods you are about to learn did not believe in a panentheistic God either. I am one of those who need the panentheistic God concept to fill what seems to me a gap in the logic of the universe if it is conceived with no God.  Alfred Whitehead the architect of Process Philosophy was trying for a Godless system. But it would not work. It did not make sense without a God.  I agree with Whitehead. (I bet that pleases him.)

Still and all, the God I am invoking is a panentheistic God, and as such, a natural phenomenon. The wonders I have written about here I think natural wonders. Someday such wonders may be taken up in courses in psychology, or pharmacology. This may already be happening.

I have a Quaker Friend, a rather staid lawyer, trained by a Lutheran Pastor, his father, who rises in defense against any attempt to remove drugs from the table of spiritual aids. They gave him a jumpstart on his spiritual life by unveiling a world that he would not have known existed. At the same time, he forcefully brings to the meeting the learnings of the Bible, Old Testament as well as New.

Section Two: Who are you?

What I am offering here is not a step to the surprising experiences of the first section. It is possible that will happen , but not my intent. All of that chapter was an indication of what is possible for humans under the guidance of the panentheistic God. I am offering in Section Two and Three two things to do and in Section Five (Love) one way to think.  These three will profoundly deepen your contemplation experience whether that is Worship, or your morning meditation, or gazing at the sunset. This is the first step in this practice! 

What do you have to do to attract the power that changes? The tradition of the “Advaita,” a Hindu philosophy that predates the Buddha,” ​says, “Know who you are!”  The founders of Quakerism words for the experience were “sinking down.” I find the Advaita a clearer directive on getting to the state, or “”non-state” as they would insist. I have never seen directions for Sinking Down. I have for the Advaita process.

This injunction, “Who are you?” is not a rational question asking for a rational answer. Your response will appear after discarding who you are not. The following is the exercise:  Observe! Take time to look at each item and time to realize that each is not you. 

You are not the wall across the room. 

You are not the hand in front of your face. (Lift your hand, look at it until you can separate the hand from the awareness of the hand.)

You are not your eyes. (Become aware of your eyes as separate from your awareness.)

You are not the workings of your mind. (See the gap between you and the wall as similar to the gap between you and the mind.)

Anything that you can observe is not the you that is observing it. If you can observe it, it is not you. So what is left?

You can experience yourself being aware of what you observe from a place deep in your head. That is what is left! Going through those steps, from wall to hand to eyes to mind to awareness, is a useful exercise for alerting​ you to who you are. 

Who am I​?  I am awareness. I am that​​ which I cannot directly observe. I am awareness. 

Many who do this exercise report feeling themselves as an aware presence in the back of the skull. Some few report the ​ ​feeling ​in their​ chest. Having identified​ who you are, you can see ​“through​” your eyes, not ​“with”​ them, if you choose.  Try attending to a vision that includes the awareness of your eyes within the vision. This apparently worked for the poet William​ Blake​: 

“This Life’s dim Windows of the Soul Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole And leads you to Believe a Lie When you see with, not through, the Eye.“

At first, I thought “looking through the eye” only a parlor trick, but it has the effect of distancing your awareness another step from the turmoil you are aware of. Even your eye is not you. Nor is your mind.

With every physical thing plus the mind before you, what is left that can be called you? “Being aware.” That​​ is the fundamental you. 

Why switch from “awareness,” to, “being aware?” ​To the scientist, everything is in motion. That is what the microscope tells her. With seeming foreknowledge of today’s science, the teacher of the Advaita ​knew that you were not an abstract quality but an active embodiment, “being aware.” (I will use “awareness” and “being aware” interchangeably in what follows.) 

You are an event. (so also say Process philosophy, and science.) Do not get a swelled head. So is a frog an event. And a dandelion. And a rock.​ ​The last a very slow-moving event unless you are watching the molecules with an electronic microscope.​ 

At the same time, the teachers of the Advaita realized that nothing is separate from anything ​ ​so you are not separate from God. How could you exist at all, if ​you were ​separate from the source of being? 

This works not only in nondualism, the philosophy of the Hindu, but in dualism.​  One of the dualistic arguments for the existence of God ​made by​ Thomas Aquinas, the best known​ of Christian medieval theologians, is the argument from efficient cause. He said that you need connection to God not only to be come into being but to continue to be. Even this great dualist saw the deep, necessary, and constant connection between one​ and the Other. God cannot just cast you forth and leave you alone. The tube of life must remain connected. (If you need further confirmation of that consider that the fact that you die, indicates that you do not possess your own being. If you did you would cling to it successfully.)

In order to contemplate, the first motion is to remember that you are, “Being Aware” and that active awareness is centered in your body, and God is radiating in and around you. You and God are not two. 

From that place of distance from the world outside, from the pain in your knees, even from the workings of your mind and the surges of your heart, you will see reality more clearly. You will no longer be confused by your own feelings, for they are fewer and now observable as other than the basic you. You will not be hurt by others’ attacks because the basic you is the being aware, not the parts of you others tend to attack. There is a small but definite experienceable space between what is seen and the you that is being aware of what is seen. You can see everything including your faults, dispassionately.

Practice seeing everything as separate from the one seeing.  Several times. Take a day to practice it maybe ten times. Make the separation easy to do through repeated doing.

I found it helpful to not expect that I would live every moment aware but that being aware would be ​my default position. Many quiet times during the day I give myself a gentle push into it. I see the opportunity, and in the seeing itself comes the push, and I am awareness​. I back out a little from the situation I am in. Hard to do when things are hectic. Easier while waiting for the sun to set. And then some day you will be able to do it easily in the midst of life’s fuss. (They tell me.)

At this point you have in hand everything you need to know. You are ready to contemplate. No more switches to throw before you begin. You are plugged in. Sit down. Be aware that you are being aware. Allow yourself to become aware of all that emerges into your consciousness without evaluation. 

Section 3) Emptying the Mind

​As I become quietly focused on myself and my surroundings, I am besieged with feelings, memories, daydreams, desires, fears. They are what prevent me from seeing the world as it is now. By simply allowing them from partial awareness into full awareness they will be resolved and disappear. Isaac Penington says so. 

Similarly, the great Zen master Dogen said, “We study the self to know the self. To know the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by the ten thousand things.” (“Self” and “Mind” being​ synonyms in this context. What I meant by mind is the churning whirlwind of information that coalesces from time to time into desires and decisions. That, simplified, is pretty much what Dogen meant by self.) 

The ten thousand things being​​ all of what we call reality. Trees, puppies, people, cars, mountains, streams, cats, etc.. The inability to see beyond the self, the mind, is​ what stands between us and being like Jesus or Fox or the many who live in the astonishing brightness of reality. Note that it is ​we​ who are awakened by the ten thousand things. Your puppy awakens you.  The picture of a fully clothed seven-year-old child drowned and lying on a beach awakens you. The sight of your wedding ring awakens you. The sound of a bugle playing taps awakens you. You will find yourself with a heightened sensitivity over time. You will weep more and laugh harder.

​ Do not ​try​ to scrub out what you see as useless or even evil activity among all the stuff jamming your brain. Just become aware of the workings of the mind. As Penington said, and as Dogen said, awareness itself will move the unwanted from the mind.  Note well, observe the thought or feeling or intention or dream as an object. Do not engage with it. Engagement will suck you back in. You will forget that you are awareness.

Do not be too quick to label something “unwanted.”​​ We have a purity standard that might be usefully challenged. What is nice and not nice is open for question in the situation, and this process should allow for that. Skip the good or bad label. If it should be unwanted, it will leave

We think Jesus a sweetheart of a guy, who went through life kindly loving all always. Tell that one to the Pharisees, for whom he rarely had a kind word and frequently a harsh one. Ever been called or called anyone a whitewashed sepulcher?  (In Jesus time a sepulcher was a burial room usually drilled into a hill, the door frame whitewashed to conceal its ugliness.)  Jesus called Pharisees whitewashed sepulchers. (There is argument about that. Many scripture scholars think it was a later generation of gospel story tellers who were having battles with the Pharisees that inserted the enmity into the Jesus story.)

 In your sinking down, you may discover that this is the time appropriate for anger or for lying or for running away and other things good people do not do. 

When the mind is full, I am blinded. I cannot settle into the experience of the here and now. When, after the elimination of interior obstacles, such as feelings, memories, daydreams, desires, and ​fears, the mind is empty, I enter reality. I am fully present to life. 

“In your absence is your presence” (from the Advaita).​ In the absence of the cluttered self, the underlying self, “being aware”​ emerges. This empty self lives only in the here and now. The present becomes a bright spot, indeed. 

Does this not sound like what happened to George Fox?

If the moment is not turning bright for you, check to see if you are experiencing some urgency to move on to the next thing. Experience the urgency until it leaves you. Then the ten thousand things will brighten. 

In daily life, notice how often the present is dull because the future beckons. And in its turn, when present, that future ​will become dull. Washing dishes can be bright, if you wash dishes. One of the sayings of the ancient Zen masters was, “When chopping wood, chop wood. When carrying water, carry water.” 

​You have not been aware of your own presence until you have left​ the clutter behind. Then a sense of who you are rises in you. Perhaps for the first time, you will​ experience your own power.   

This fullest self is the panentheistic God working within you to accomplish God’s intention for God’s creation. This broad objective we know only dimly. But if we settle into this power, we will have a confident knowledge of its immediate call. We will know what to do now! (It may be that it is time to make a mistake, and you have been chosen to make it.)

If you do not allow this power to be exercised, it will diminish, as will your sense of self. The energy of your presence must flow into the world, or the tide will turn, and the world will drown your power and presence. It is important that the world not drown your power and presence. 

How does a panentheistic God influence the world? A primary way is ​ through the power and presence of people like you who are listening for God’s will and intent on executing it. You are vitally important to this project. Do not allow yourself to be cancelled. 

A short summary story of nearly everything: You have heard of the wonderful world, but you have never seen it. You find you are sitting in a glass room filled with junk and therefore cannot see. By saying you are “awareness” and nothing else you are removed from the room and all is better, but to see the world you still need to see through the junky glass room. You find that if you simply observe items in the room the useless disappear and the useful remain. Then you see clearly, and love what you see. Miraculous? Not really! Natural? Guess so. Fits with a natural God.

Section 4) Some Moments in my Experience 

with this Practice:

It is not as if this mind clearing is an easy task. Although I had heard of it long before, for me the first hint of it being possible for ordinary folk came during Friends General Conference in 2016. Not seeing any workshop I wanted to attend, I registered for the “Extended Meeting,” which was three hours of silent worship every morning for five days. I dedicated that time to being aware of who I was in the present moment, including my perceptions of my surroundings, using the methods I have described above.

I am old. I was quickly tired and quickly decided I would attend only Extended Meeting, meals, and the evening program. On day two, I nearly had an empty mind. By day three, much of the time was just quiet. There was nothing extraordinary but pleasant. Most of my normal irritation wasn’t there. People looked accessible, loveable, kind.

Just by giving myself time for the practice, six hours over two days, I was running out of distractions. Given the time, emptying the mind was easy. My mind did not empty in three hours. Day one ended as full as it began. But day two showed glimmers of emptiness.

In the afternoon of Day Two, I began a habit of coming back to a screen house outside the meeting room in mid-afternoon for a fourth hour. Not because it was a bright idea or a “should” or even an experiment. I just liked sitting there, almost empty, letting the outside drift in and out. I smiled at squirrels, was enchanted by birds.  I was being aware. 

I am 85 years old and started meditating when I was 18 in a pretty second-rate Christian system. We held exercises in imagination, such as talking to the Virgin Mary just after her chat with the angel. What would you ask her? What would she say?

In my fifties, I switched to some useful Buddhist systems. I had substantial experience in Vipassana meditation, considering that I remained Christian. I read Zen and the Advaita. I wrote a book “ Taking Jesus Seriously: Buddhist Meditation for Christians”  and taught from it for several years.  There’s nothing like writing a book or answering questions from serious learners to focus the mind. 

Since up until now I have mostly sounded like a visitor to Quakerism, allow me to clear up that misunderstanding by telling you about my convincement experience. 

I was testing the feel of Twin Cities Friends Meeting for three weeks. On my fourth First Day, midway through unprogrammed worship. Ralph stood. Bearded and shaggy and blind, he looked like a prophet on a bad day. 

He said, “It says in John’s Gospel (big pause) that Jesus said, (big pause) ‘I am the way, (pause) the truth, (pause) and the light.’ (huge pause) You cannot come to the Father (huge pause) except through me.”  A one-minute pause featuring Ralph glaring with blind eyes and then the declaration, “My Jesus would not say that!” He sat down, and I became a Quaker.

Despite my use of the east, I am a Quaker. In all that I am teaching, I have not deviated from the Quaker way. I still am sinking down to the seed. That is what I recognized in Ralph. The truth rising from the seed and the conviction.

Later, I told Ralph that the vast majority of scripture scholars that I read think Jesus did not say that or anything else in John’s Gospel. Ralph thanked me for the information, but he did not seem a bit relieved. He already knew the truth.

Approaching 70, I focused on Quakerism, still personally attached to parts of the Buddhist systems. And at 85, I am now applying the methods described in this pamphlet.

I tried to lure my home meeting, Twin Cities Friends in St. Paul, Minnesota, into the extended meeting process with one two-hour session a week for five weeks. People liked the idea. A couple even attended most of it. The other 175 did not. 

It was clear to me that while this was too much time and effort to ask, it was not even close to being enough to empty even my mental trash basket, and unlike my potential recruits, I knew emptiness was possible.  And unlike many of them, I was retired.  

2019 was the next time the Friends General Conference occurred in my vicinity. Despite my having informed my extended family that there was only one week in the summer that I could not go on family vacation, the week of the Fourth of July, the week of the conference, the week of the extended meeting, my eldest announced that he had a cabin rented for that week and we were committed. This is what happens when you produce a high-roller. You get rolled over.

My son actually understands the value I placed on attending the Extended Meeting. He envied my going. He meditates himself. He forgot. 

I love all five of my grandchildren, their parents, my wife, and Wisconsin in the summer. We take a week together every year at some cabin or other.  Cowan camp, complete with titles on T-shirts. Still, that year, I, the patriarch, skipped the family vacation and went to Friends General Conference. 

Same schedule for me as in 2016. It was very helpful. I was comfortable with the process I had learned and was learning. Quiet occurred early, although not immediately, and once again, I was surrounded by beauty, and my mind for extended periods was empty.  The ten thousand things were vividly apparent. 

Since then, I have found ways to cobble together time and place for my own continued exploration of the not-quite-empty mind. Nothing like retirement to allow room for work.

I wonder sometimes if seekers of many persuasions have not overplayed the meaning of enlightenment.  They speak of it as a nearly impossible breakthrough, given only to the few.  Zen practitioners in particular set this goal and then fail to achieve it. Perhaps enlightenment is simply the empty self, living in normal surroundings. Perhaps they have set the bar too high. I never hear of any ordinary person passing it. 

A few extraordinary people pop into it. People come from all over the world to meet them. The teachers explain their inner life, and these people who came return home, it seems to me, unchanged. Some of them return often to worship at the shrine and return home still unchanged. Or at least not enlightened.

At some Eastern temple, the story goes, a reporter was allowed a day with the great teacher who was head of a massive international meditation enterprise. The teacher tried to instruct the reporter on what had blown him into a different dimension. Not too successfully!

After noon time prayer, with the guru standing quietly on a balcony and a couple hundred students arrayed before him, the reporter, knowing this was just one of many such groups, asked him, “How many followers do you have in the entire world?”

The guru thought a moment, and then said, “Maybe ten?”

Section 5: Love

But what does any of this have to do with following the call of love so central to the Gospel?  So far, what I have described seems to be solely for self-gratification. Surely Jesus did not die in the process of promoting self-gratification. 

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” (Paul speaking to the Ephesians.) We have the ability to take on the same mind that Jesus took on. The empty mind is aware of the world as it is and is led as Jesus was to spontaneous love and instant compassion. It is not a supernatural miracle but a natural reaction. When your mind is not cluttered, the world is beautiful and loveable, sometimes sad and tragically loveable. Remember the fully clothed child, lying on a beach, drowned.

We have been told to love the world. But in the case of love, imperatives are futile. To love the world, you must know the world as loveable.

You have heard the story of the Boy Scout who helped a struggling old lady across the street. She was struggling because she did not want to go! That is what the demand that we love creates. Authentic love requires a response to the other as he or she really exists, not a response to an internal imperative of your own.

         I was granted that state for a couple of weeks in my early thirties after a four-day intensive workshop (the one I told you about before and promised to speak of again) and telling my mother I loved her, maybe for the first time. Then I entered the present. It was very nice! Although, it was a little hard on the objects of my affection. They were not ready for all my pent-up energy at once. One of my friends said that I was charged with electricity. Getting too close led to shocks.  When I told my mother I loved her, after a half hour of weeping together, I told each of my three other nuclear family members the same thing. My father disappeared into the kitchen to pour himself a drink, and my sisters simply disappeared.

Ah well.

But more important to me was the fact that I loved the world for a couple of weeks. The world itself awakened my love. Everyone called out to my heart. Some for their beauty, some for their pathos. I was enlightened by the ten thousand things. 

Then life cluttered my mind. I was again normal.  

I did not know a way back then. Now I do. First, I must know my basic self, Being Aware. Then I use my one tool, my awareness to discard the blinders. Then the world will be loveable. I will discard the blinders in the silence. This is a much easier route to the Gospel life than straining to love what I am unable to love.  

The Navajo say, “Walk in beauty.” They know the beauty is already there. Take off the blinders. You’ll love everything and everybody. I think the Navajo have discovered in their walking in beauty the same ten thousand things that Dogen spoke of., and that Fox experienced.

I have never heard or read this next paragraph, but I think it true and explanatory of many spiritual failures. 

When you pay attention to something, you do so because you have enough love for it to be interested in it. If you do not have that love, you turn your attention away from it, and if you think it dangerous, you seek safety even farther away from it. You approach reality with caution.

However, if you do not continue to love everything, you will not experience the world drawing your attention and love.  You cannot have hatred and experience enlightenment. Not hatred for anything or anybody. I am not confident you can even have caution. Dogen did not say you would be enlightened by some of the things. Jesus did not say love those you find appealing and sneer at those who do not meet your standards. 

To love, you must see. To hate is to refuse to see. If you saw you would not hate . 

(I think getting angry is different than hating . I think Jesus capable of the former. At least that is what the Gospels say. I can be angry with someone I love. Can’t you? But I cannot hate them and still love them.)

Way back in this essay I promised you two things to do that would help you experience wonderful things. I promised you one idea. This section on love is the one idea. 

These three, awareness, emptiness, and love  emerging as a result of a huge shock to a person’s system creates a dramatic change, which for most appears fleeting. The result of these three emerging through a contemplative practice is gentler but lasting. Neither path, the shocking or the gentle, is a supernatural miracle. Both are the result of stilling the mind and allowing the information of external reality in. It is not brighter really. You are just much more sensitive. A panentheistic God’s miracles are natural phenomena.

I return to where I began. Does the panentheistic God have an intention? It would seem so. Over the eons, the world seems to be moving toward awareness, and to be aware, we humans, who for the moment appear to be in the lead will have to free ourselves from the bonds of instinct, culture, history. Teachers, leaders, religions, media, all and more combine to weigh us down with yesterday’s hatreds

Free from those burdens we can become aware. We can empty our minds. Once deeply aware, we will become lovers.   It has been done. Jesus, for instance, Francis of Assisi, George Fox, Sister Mary Thomas (my 8^th Grade teacher) and thousands of others. 

This process works backwards also. Forward is that awareness and emptiness leads to love, and the reverse is also true. Love, particularly loving action, tends to drain the mind of the blockages, such as useless thoughts, feelings and intentions. Which leads to awareness. 

Fox’s dictum, “Go through the world seeing that of God in everyone,” is not a command but the natural result of improved eyesight. 

Section 6: After-thoughts and reminders

We started with the panentheistic God, the “all in God” God. The natural God who encompasses, lives in, and creates all that is.  The hypothesis of this God answers the questions about God that earlier hypotheses did not. It finds middle ground between the hypothesis of the supernatural God who is all powerful and all good and yet seems unable to stifle pain, suffering, and evil and the denial of any God, which denial does not account for some definite indications of order, intention, and change for the better that require a powerful force working for these outcomes.

Is this God a person? Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theological genius, thought that no God, even his supernatural one, was a person. He taught that we call God a person because that is the grandest title we have available, but God is more than a person.

Unfortunatey,  since “person” is the grandest title we have available, the statement that God is not a person is seen as diminishing God, since it instinctively seems to you and me that “person” is the top of the hierarchy, even when told by Thomas that it is not. 

Of course, this reminder makes us less likely to feel like God is a personal chum eager to do our bidding if asked.

We explored the possibility of what seem extraordinary events occurring naturally as both lucky products of normal life and as an intentional product brought forth by human actions.

We borrowed from the followers of the Advaita their starting point for contemplation, recognizing our true self as “Being Aware.” The quiet begins when our true self is held slightly distant from the activity of mind and body.

But what to do with that troubled and busy mind? We find that, as the Zen master Dogen teaches, being aware of its contents, bringing each item in turn to the foreground quiets the mind. We begin the process of emptying the mind.

I took you on a trip through some personal experiences to give evidence that such can happen to ordinary folk. For me it took a lot of time and work. 

How does this relate to loving the world? Since love is a response, it cannot be mandated, but since the world uncovered by the empty mind is loveable, the path to love is easy once the obstructions to seeing are overcome. As George Fox said, “Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone.” It is not a command but a result. And it is everyone who has that of God in him or her, not just those who agree with your politics. This appears to be the panentheistic God’s intention, that the world becomes loving and conscious.  We humans have been graced with the leadership of the parade. So far.

Section 7: Sinking Down into Being

Now that I have become at ease with the portal into consciously being aware, from time to time I find myself aware of being.  It is a rich and fleeting experience.  No particular thing is held in focus, including myself. All is lost in the realization of being itself. There is no other. There is no I. There is all.  

“That is why an indispensable element of any spiritual practice is cultivating one’s ability to let go of all doing and simply be. To be able to sit and do nothing, truly nothing, is a remarkable spiritual attainment.” Christopher D. Wallace, “The Remembrance Sutras.”

I would say more about awareness of being if I knew more. It is new to me. My moments are only moments, and they are rare indeed. The difficulty seems to be that to be aware of being, all must stop, including the desire to be aware of being. Now there is a puzzle! Many now translate the word that has been translated as “desire” as “clinging.” As do I. So you intend something, and there will be no difficulty if you do not cling to your intention. This distinction can be useful in many places. 

In practicing

Being Aware

I become

Aware of Being

This last becomes easier day by day.  I find that the awareness of my Being is triggered by the awareness of the being of another.  Apparently I, at least, remain beholden to the “I and Thou” teachings of Martin Buber, or the facts as he has described them. This pleases me. May not be necessary for you, but consider it if you are having difficulty finding your Being, find another’s Being, focus on it. Respect it. It helps wake you up. I have cut flowers around the house that I see the God in, and wake in the process.

I now have read Rupert Spira, Being Aware of Being Aware who has made the last step easier.  Resting in the brightness of this last realization, placing my attention on the subject of the exercise, Awareness, me, brings the peace that comes with a state of completion. Rest and contentment flow from being aware that I am aware. Trust me. Or read Rupert Spiro. 

The work never ends. But I have. Thank you for listening, so to speak. I appreciate your walking this way with me.