Q. How can enlightenment come without purification? I thought the two went hand in hand. Can you have one without the other?

A. I don't think you can have enlightenment without purification, certainly not full enlightenment. In Eastern religions, there are different stages of development such as I described in talking about the household of Bethany. Thus, there are levels of samadhi in Hinduism and Buddhism that are recognized as stages of enlightenment. There was a study by an American psychologist who visited a number of enlightened teachers in Thailand.¹ He found only one who was fully enlightened. One Zen master told me he knew very few Zen masters whom he regarded as fully enlightened. Thus, we are talking about partial enlightenment. If so, the false self is still in some degree active.

As we saw in discussing Lazarus as a paradigm of Christian enlightenment, the only cure for the false self is death. Without the Night of Spirit or its equivalent, no one is fully enlightened. Without that profound purification, one can make mistakes and lead people astray. In the Christian scheme of things, Jesus alone is fully enlightened. In his glorified body he is in us and we are in him, closer to us than any teacher, because through his Spirit he dwells within us. Everyone else who teaches in the Christian tradition is simply a disciple of Jesus.

Q. What is infused contemplation?

A. This is a term that John of the Cross has hallowed. In general, it means that the Seven Gifts of the Spirit, in particular the contemplative gifts of wisdom, knowledge, and understanding, have taken over one's prayer. You no longer have need of any method because the Spirit prays in you. Teresa of Avila, in The Interior Castle, describes the grace of interior recollection that is the infused sense of God's presence; next, the prayer of quiet in which God grasps the will while the other faculties wander about; partial union in which the faculties of imagination and memory are suspended temporarily; and finally, full union in which there is no self-reflection.

There are thus levels or stages of infused contemplation. The levels I have just mentioned do not include the Night of Spirit and the Transforming Union. It is only in the Transforming Union that the awareness of union with God is permanent and never goes away. Bridal mysticism, however, is not the end of the journey Beyond that are the stages of contemplation that are described by the great women mystics of the late Middle Ages like Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechtild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete.

Centering Prayer is a bridge between discursive meditation and our efforts to develop the receptive attitude suitable for infused contemplation. There is a kind of no man's land, so to speak, between our gentle efforts to be still before God in prayer and the Holy Spirit approaching us with the gift of infused contemplation. In this middle space, we do not know for certain whether the Spirit is predominant or our very gentle efforts. Infused contemplation, at least in the Carmelite tradition, is the habitual state of waiting upon God in loving attentiveness. John of the Cross describes infused contemplation as "totally receptive." Once in a while serious troubles come up, and then you may need to slip back into your former method to support you.

Q. The next question concerns tears during the time of meditation. Are tears always emotional baggage or is there a spiritual value to these tears?

A. Tears are a great gift. There is even a prayer in The Roman Sacramentary for the "gift of tears." The fathers and mothers of the Desert regarded them as a great treasure. Tears soften up the heart and open it to God in a wonderful way that no amount of reflecting can do. Tears are normally a sign of grief or compunction, They can also be a sign of a joy that is so great that there is no way to express it except to allow the tears to flow.

There is also a third source of tears that is significant in the process of the liberation of the unconscious. Most of us in this culture, especially men, have suppressed grief. Tears may be the first sign of the unloading of the unconscious. It often happens in Centering Prayer intensive retreats in which the participants pray four or five hours a day. They may experience so much physical and spiritual rest that the body too rests more profoundly than ever before. As a result, one's emotional defenses go down, and the first thing that usually comes to consciousness is the repressed grief of a lifetime. Tears may pour down one's cheeks for the entire time of prayer without one's knowing the cause, Actually, the body through deep rest has gotten permission to unload grief that has been stored in the organism and hindering the free flow of the natural energies and grace. If you get into sobbing, then for the sake of others in the prayer group, I would suggest going outside and doing your crying in a private place. But don't suppress it. It is liberating and healthy.

Q. How do you define sin?

A. Jesus has taken upon himself the sins of the world. He became flesh, that is, he became a member of the human race precisely as fallen. This is the human condition that I described above as the emotional programs for happiness and overidentification with one's primary group. The human condition involves the tendency to sin, described in theology as the "capital sins," a doctrine developed by Evagrius of Pontus in the fourth century. The tendency to sin is rooted in the energy centers that we create as infants and toddlers to deal with survival and security, affection and esteem, and power and control issues.

These needs become drives or demands to experience happiness in ways in which we are more or less driven to seek it. Of course, there is no hope of finding it. As infants we don't know what true happiness is. Nor can we make moral judgments that are really free until about thirteen or fourteen, and perhaps even later in our culture. When we reach the age of reason and free choice, we normally ratify our exaggerated demands for security and survival, affection and esteem, and power and control. We then tend to trample on the rights and needs of others and our own true good. And that is personal sin. For a morally free act there has to be full knowledge of the seriousness of the evil involved and full consent of the will. We thought sin was fairly easy to commit in centuries past but now, with our greater awareness of psychological factors, we may wonder how many people are sufficiently free to commit serious sin or to make lifelong commitments.

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1. Jack Engler in Transformations of Consciousness: Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development (Boston: Shambhala, 1996).

Continued Next Week . . .

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Excerpted from The Better Part by Fr. Thomas Keating

You can obtain a copy by visiting the Contemplative Outreach Bookstore.