“Seeing with the Eye of the Heart: a.k.a: The Contemplative Way of Knowing”
Nowadays people tend to hear the word “contemplative” as simply the Christian equivalent of what most the world knows as “meditation” —i.e., stilling the mind and resting in the flow of consciousness. But in the original understanding of the early Church Fathers, contemplation was primarily a way of luminous knowledge— “knowledge impregnated by love,” as St. John Chrysostom famously characterized it. Cynthia’s talk will explore this profound Christian intuition that contemplation is indeed a way of knowing—in fact, arguably the closest equivalent to what we now call Nondual perception. Drawing on insights from the Hesychastic Tradition of the Christian East as well as the Western medieval spiritual classic The Cloud of Unknowing Cynthia will explore what is arguably the key Western contribution to our understanding of Nonduality: that it is not accessed by the mind alone (mind understood here as “brain”), but requires “putting the mind in the heart,” an instruction to be taken not merely as a metaphor but as an actual physiology of transformation. We will see why indeed—in the memorable words of Antoine de Saint Exupery—that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Praying From The Heart
A Contemplative Way of Seeing
