The necessary factor is to not suppose a lot however to like a lot. ~ St. Theresa of Avila
In her writings entitled The Inside Fort, the mystic St. Theresa of Avila lays out the challenges of her personal non secular apply, observing with consternation how “the thoughts flies about shortly.” She describes a specific prayerful second when her soul rested in God, however “my thoughts, alternatively, was distracted.” Theresa’s lifetime of contemplation permits her to watch the character of what Buddhists name the “monkey thoughts.”
Teresa unpacks some tenants of mindfulness, reminding seekers that the thoughts’s ideas don’t replicate actuality. Theresa describes how folks dedicated to a lifetime of prayer typically surrender due to the thoughts’s relentless exercise. Sympathetic, she explains that typically once we interact in non secular apply “we can’t cease our thoughts; after which our colleges of the soul go along with it, and we expect we’re misplaced and have wasted the time spent earlier than God.” Anybody on the non secular path has skilled these moments of believing the thoughts’s proclamations of confusion or disconnection.
However Theresa tells us to take coronary heart, insisting that “Horrible trials are suffered as a result of we do not perceive ourselves…this lack of know-how causes the afflictions of many individuals who interact in prayer.” Theresa echoes a primary tenant of Jap non secular philosophy: we undergo due to ignorance. Emotions of disconnection or failure on the non secular path merely reveal the thoughts’s ignorance (avidya) of final fact. The treatment for that ignorance is non secular apply, which regularly reveals our interior actuality because the radiant Fact of God, the boundless love of pure consciousness.
Theresa, in addition to all mystics throughout traditions, encourages us to dive into the thriller with abandon. Cultivating devotion and love permits us to depart behind the thoughts’s doubt, misery, and worry, listening as a substitute to the guiding name of the soul’s deepest longing. That brings us to the place the place we understand — as Theresa places it — that now we have all the time been “fully joined with Him.”
