MINDFULNESS AND THE PRAYER OF RECOLLECTION

‘The practice of Christian meditative Recollection eventually shifts into what (Evelyn) Underhill calls the prayer of Quiet, as the subject eventually stops the willed concentration on the object of Recollection and simply rests passively within this deep inner consciousness, free of all sensory and cognitive attachments.  Although Underhill speaks theologically of this condition as an awareness of the soul’s unity with its ground or ‘Pure Being’, she describes it as ‘an  almost complete suspension of the reflective powers’ that leads to a  radically passive condition that mystics have called in negatively descriptive language ‘ecstatic deprivation’, ‘nothingness’, ‘utter stillness’, ‘Interior Silence’, or ‘emptiness’. This altered state of consciousness is a kind of consciousness-purity that is not properly describable and is best characterized by silence. Although quite positively affective, mystics speak of the ‘naked orison’ or ‘divine dark’ of this state of consciousness purity, in contrast to the normal busy activities of the sensory-cognitive intentional mind.’

 From: EXPLORING PROCESSES AND DYNAMICS OF MYSTICAL CONTEMPLATIVE MEDITATION:

SOME CHRISTIAN-BUDDHIST PARALLELS

by Michael Stoeber
https://philarchive.org/archive/STOEPA-3v1