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Concluding Teachings on What’s After the Thoughts?

When the thoughts get stilled and the thoughts lose their binding power as afflictions there is apatheia, or purity of heart. Life is fuller of manifestations of God because the spiritual senses are awakened.

In the third renunciation one experiences the subtle shapes, smells, sounds of the spiritual senses that detect things proper to the spiritual life. In the ascetical life ceaseless prayer is not optional. This prayer that is always keeps the cycle of afflictions from rooting themselves in the renunciate's psychic.

The contemplative dimension is the manifestation of God in nature, scripture and experience. There are further teachings at how to work toward the third renunciation that is pure prayer.

It is in the third renunciation, after some experience of purity of heart, that one experiences some of the dark nights. After light comes further refining trials. Most of these trials are about doubt, about confusion about God, about consequences of zeal.

The fourth renunciation is beyond my experience. See Humility Matters and a dialogue with Thérèse of Lisieux, pp. 104–115. The practice of the Little Way is a skillful way toward cultivating this fourth renunciation. To love suffering is the fruit of this very high practice.

Thoughts really don’t matter after all! Unless they are a skillful means to renounce our own thoughts and watch and see that the Presence rises and gives us our own experience of God. Then, God works through us on behalf of others.

That break point between doing all for, with, to God actually shifts into God in us at-work on behalf of others.