An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation

Its receptivity is not passive. It is a generous receptivity that contributes to the life all round it:

Contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom—freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them

In his Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John, Eriugena writes of John, “He would not have ascended to God if he had not first become God.”7 This

“My only ‘me’ is God.” She continues, “In my soul I see nothing but God.”

The problem is not that God is absent but that God is so intimately present.

“There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

As the twentieth-century Serbian Orthodox monk Thaddeus of Vitovnica writes, “Everything is constantly changing; nothing remains static.”

inner vigilance is necessary but insufficient for contemplation.

It bears repeating that no extra effort or ingredient turns reactive mind into receptive mind. It is the exact same awareness. Receptive mind is simply less cluttered.

The simplicity of God is too intimately present for the thinking mind, whether reactive or receptive, to fathom.