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The Radical Perceptual Shift — Part 3

Contemplation photo by A. Davey

— Most writers in the early Christina era called this radical perceptual shift away from the judging and separate self “contemplation.”

— Buddhists called it meditation, sitting, or practicing. 

— Hesychastic Orthodoxy called it prayer of the heart. 

— Sufi Islam called it ecstasy.

— Hasidic Judaism called it living from “the divine spark within.”

— Vedantic Hinduism (the earliest) spoke of it as nondual knowing or simply breathing.

— Native religions found it in communion with nature itself or the Great Spirit through dance, ritual, and sexuality: “original participation,” as Owen Barfield called it.

Richard Rohr
from The Naked Now; Learning to See as the Mystics See
Chapter: But We Have to Make Judgements, Don’t We?

To be continued . . .