by Gerald May

The programs I lead for Shalem always touch something that is going on inside me. One theme flows into the next like a mixing of currents. At the moment, I'm moving from the Summer Retreat's "Letting God Guide" into the Fall Psychology/Spirituality Day's fresh look at Will and Spirit, so the question arising for me right now is, "How does our consciousness affect our willingness for God's guidance?"

Immediately I think of intentionality, the capacity of the will to claim and commit to a desire. When I wrote Will and Spirit, I contrasted willfulness (overzealous intention to accomplish self-determined ends) with willingness (open intention to participate in the flow of life with God's guidance). The difference, I felt, was all in the quality of intention. I agreed with Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook's forthright statement: "Intention is everything."

I soon discovered, however, that while claiming one's desire is very important, intentionality does have a shadow side. For example, I found it hard to claim my intention to be willingly guided by God without making it a willful enterprise: "I WILL be attentive to God no matter what!" In silent stillness I could honor my desire for God, but it seemed impossible to claim the desire intentionally without taking it into my own hands and making it my agenda. The line is very delicate between willingness and willfulness, between open desire and over-intentionality.

Gradually I discovered that for me, at least, the difference really does have to do with consciousness. More precisely, it has to do with contemplative awareness: awareness that is unfocused and immediate. I think most people in Western society have been conditioned to be very intentional and very uncontemplative. We've been taught to set goals and strive to accomplish them by focusing our attention on the tasks at hand. The way to be intentional, we think, is to be single-minded, tunnel-visioned, and in control.

It is this very conditioning, I believe, that makes it seem so difficult to be contemplative while thinking analytically or trying to complete a task under pressure. Try this: sit quietly and be open to the sights and sounds around you and the feelings and thoughts within. Be here now in the present moment, with whatever prayerfulness naturally arises in you. This is contemplative awareness. Now set yourself a mental task: add a column of figures in your head, or plan a list of things you need to do, or think about the best way to handle a conflict you're facing. What happens to your awareness?

When I experimented with this exercise, I saw that my inner atmosphere changed. My mind focused on my intended task, trying to shut out other sights, sounds, thoughts and feelings, labeling them as "distractions." I was no longer contemplative, and the open, present prayerfulness disappeared because my intention had kidnapped my attention.

This observation revealed a lot to me. It explained why people so often feel a need to cycle contemplation and action like a piston in an engine: in and out, back and forth, opening-closing, praying-thinking, centering-acting, being-doing. It also explained why the scriptural mandate to "pray constantly" is so difficult, and why in meetings where we try to make decisions prayerfully, the prayerfulness and decision-making often seem competitive.

Along with this artificial separation between contemplation and action, I also felt a fragmentation of my sense of myself. Instead of being wholly involved in a moment's flow of living, intentionality made me feel as though my will were out in front pulling, or behind pushing, the reluctant remainder of myself toward my intended goal. "If you want to get this accomplished, you're going to have to get going."

I came to call this self-prodding "project mind." It is the same drive with which I pushed myself to do homework when I was in school, the way I managed to accomplish many things in my life that didn't come easily. In the past, I've been rewarded for and even proud of this way of doing things. It represents diligence and discipline, overcoming laziness and lassitude, forcing myself through my resistances to get something done. Now, though, I can't escape the feeling that, at least for me, it is a kind of sinful thing--a betrayal of my own nature and a denial of God's guiding presence.

The saving grace, I believe, is that it really doesn't have to be this way. I know now that it is possible to pray in action instead of alternating prayer and action. It is even possible to think analytically or add a column of numbers in one's mind without closing off one's immediate openness to other sights, sounds, thoughts...and prayer. With grace, one can indeed flow wholly in participation with God's presence in any given moment of life, moving through both pleasant and unpleasant undertakings inspired by rightness instead of driven by will. And what's even better...one can immediately appreciate and enjoy that it's happening that way.

One pays a price, of course, when one's willful habits of consciousness begin to change. Controlling things is out of the question. And intentionality must become increasingly delicate, the thinnest veil between desire and action. I suspect that what we know as intentionality eventually disappears entirely, leaving only sheer desire as the empty content of wordless prayer. This requires the simultaneous full-feeling of desire and relaxing our ego-grip on all our agendas, even those that are most spiritual. It means a continually deepening discovery that the fullness of selfhood lies not in claiming autonomy, dedication, or commitment--finally in not claiming anything--but rather in the magnificent being of who we authentically are in God, with God, loved and...embraced and infused by God, and as living manifestations of God's very Self.