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This centering down, as used among Quakers, or Friends, is what occurs when one enters the sitting in silence. Memphis Friends Meeting, Memphis, Tennessee, defines this settling in.
Our first task when worship begins is to center down, to still the clamor of the world, to turn our attention to the inner voice.
Here, Friends speak of what to do in an unprogrammed gathering, where there is no planned sermon. Persons sit silently. To "turn the attention to" that voice within is not the same, I maintain, as listening to what might be spoken. If one wishes to speak of listening, it is best to refer to listening to the Silence Itself, which is being totally attentive to, meaning entirely with - in communion with - the Ineffable Unity. This language is outside our semantics, where even hearing does not refer to hearing.
This is well-articulated by Howard Thurman in theistic terms, in his "A Lull in the Rythym of Doing" (Meditation of the Heart).
When the awareness of God comes in - how He entered, one does not know - one is certain that He has been there all the time.
This centering down is referred to in Christian contemplative prayer as "recollection": that scattered is re-collected into a unity. This return is signaled both by a heightened clarity and expanded awareness. This awareness shows itself in the physical body, as the body seems to dissolve into a larger energy field, showing the physical body is only an aspect, and the densest and limited, of what Buddhists refer to as the Body of Buddha. This seeming to dissolve, however, is not dissolution, but a shift in the body's sense of body, the body manifesting in its subtle aspect and flowing with all surrounding it, which becomes thin likewise.
From the ego’s viewpoint
you have just one body
a separate entity
From a Buddha's viewpoint
your body is interconnected
interpenetrating inter-being
intimate with everything
*Tai Sheridan. Living in Buddha's Three Bodies.
Hence, the identity I-am-a-body is exposed as insubstantial, as is its kin I-have-a-mind. For recollection, while intensely centering, reveals its unity with all around it - the more one centers down, the more consciousness expands outward. Boundaries dissolve, for boundaries are of thought and feeling. The realm of the first language has no perimeters. Felt-receptivity to Presence heightens with this demise of body-and-mind identity, which has veiled the Light - a dense fog of thought and emotion hovering over the innately radiant Heart.
Hence, now, one hangs loose, releasing all tension, all effort, all sense of merit or goal: one is not even trying to be anything or anyone: all is an Omnipresence.
Pure presence has no breadth or depth, no high or low,
And this boundless indeterminacy precludes
any point of reference;
Pure presence has no agenda, nothing to do
and nowhere to go,
And absence of linear time and antidote
preclude goal-fixation.
Any contrived point of reference results in captivity,
So setting no goals whatsoever, relax into totality!
*Keith Dowman. Spaciousness: The Radical Dzogchen of the Vajra-Heart: Longchenpa's Treasury of the Dharmadhatu.
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