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After following the path of interior prayer for over 23 years, I question, indeed, if one can live in union with Life, or with anyone or anything in Life, apart from this interior prayerfulness. This even in common forms of praying, otherwise one tends to pray oneself, which much called prayer is, as in personal thoughts and feelings, rather than simply allowing prayer, before and beyond personal or unpersonal, to happen within oneself and express itself. And this expression, thereby, into the world, and without need for words, thoughts, or images, for this subtle, lively expression of Love loves without need to adorn Itself in anything, for Love is Its own elegance.
If, then, I am prayerfully with you, I am totally present with you, not merely to you, not merely I as another person with you a person, and I am not allowing thoughts or feelings to come between us, regardless of how called good and that surely they do arise into awareness. Rather, thoughts and feelings, at best, are expressions of this communion and, likewise, means to celebrate and enjoy it. That is, the oneness itself, as intersubjective sharing, is present to be celebrated, while the content of the sharing, such as what we might say, is secondary to the act of communion-happening, love-appearing. And, in this, one can feel in the body the deepening of this, as the sharing moves from surface to depths, this until one senses a resting in a stable, subtle Togetherness greater than those who are sharing. In this is a quiet movement of peacefulness, this in which restfulness is, the self not needing to be touched by other than the natural stimulation and seduction of Life Itself. And even in touching the other, which this inter-subjectivity may lead to, for Spirit seeks to express bodily, the felt-sense of touch is the act of Love, not merely for any sensory gratification. In religious terms, two touching becomes a sacrament of Life, and a means of giving form to the formless union. In this touching is each time new creation.
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We can know, when prepared, different senses of sharing with others. One, when we are being treated as an object. Also, when someone is being with us. Then, the sense of one being in us and our being in the other. These latter two can easily be so close to each other as to appear indistinguishable, for oneness is not negated by "with" and expresses it. Yet, likewise, the reverse is true. Furthermore, the physical body is included in this communion and grounds the interiority of sharing in time and locates it in space. Here, however, the body is the servant of the Subtle, and when two bodies are interacting, together they as a unity are serving the One.
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In the Gospels Jesus meets alone and at a well a foreign woman, a Samaritan, a people the Jews despised as racial and religious unfits. His followers have gone into a nearby town to bring back food. While she has spoken about the Jews and her people disagreeing on where to worship God, Jesus speaks, "They that worship God must worship God in Spirit (or, breath, wind, spirit) and truth, ...". This would support seeing "Spirit" is the subtle (as indicted by "breath" or "wind") ground of prayer, that prayer and true prayers arise from the domain of the ungraspable Unseen ~ Who sees breath? Who sees wind? Who holds either in the hand? So, one, in a sense, retreats from identifying with the sense world to the interior Temple within: here, within not merely meaning inside the body, but into a more subtle experience of Reality that includes the physical body. Then, the sense world appears so to serve the inner workings of Grace, or Fellowship.
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