Spiritual Energy

Love is the great union of the universe."  Theilhard de Chardin

There is no subject in the world which arouses greater curiosity than spiritual, or psychic energy. The energy that animates a body, that enlivens the soul; it lights the eyes and attracts life to itself. Spiritual energy is that which is absent in the corpse. Yet there is scant, scientific evidence that it even exists. Most have an awareness of this energy by their own, daily experience. It is often encountered in the simple, everydayness of life, and as well in the profound.

While science is largely unaware of its presence in the world, its realness, none more opaque scientifically, spawns the whole of Ethics which rests upon it. "The nature of this inner power is so intangible that the whole description of the universe in mechanical terms has had no need to take account... but has deliberate disregard of its reality," wrote Pierre Theilhard de Chardin in his work, The Phenomenon
of Man.
"The difficulties we still encounter in trying to hold together spirit and matter in a reasonable perspective are nowhere more harshly revealed... the building of a bridge between the two banks of our existence-- the physical and the moral-- if we wish the material and spiritual of our activities to be mutually enlivened. To connect the two energies, of the body and the soul in a coherent manner: science has ignored the question... [yet]we must advance."

"The inner face of the world is manifest deep within" and we are most aware of through our concrete behaviors that the two energies do combine, but we cannot easily, or not at all, make out the method. It seems, according to de Chardin, that the method is made of both a dependence and an independence, thus a mutual inter-dependence arises as it occurs to us that the "soul" must be "a focal point of transformation" at which point all energy converges. However attractive it may be to suppose that there is a direct transformation, it becomes clear that in practice, in love, it is their mutual inter-dependence, as clear as their inter-relation arising, says de Chardin writing about the nature of spiritual energy and love.

His book, The Phenomenon of Man, deemed radical when it first appeared in 1940, was blacklisted by many contemporary theologians upon its arrival; today de Chardin now occupies an esteemed place in the world of theology. His ideas give rise to the idea of humanity as a unifying factor of the universe, and man its bearer.

Love of the Contemplated

"The contemplation of the saints is fired by the love of the one contemplated..."   Saint Albert the Great of Paris

Writing about Aescetics and meditation, Thomas Aquinas, disciple of Saint Albert the Great wrote: that "our knowledge of the deus is arrived at, on this earth, by the light of burning love."
In contrast, the contemplation of philosophers is " merely intellectual speculation on the divine nature... the beauty of mental prayer and of mystical contemplation is in the soul's abandonment and total surrender of itself... to bear witness to God. The rest is silence," wrote Thomas Merton.

Other traditions also have much to say about meditation and prayerful contemplation; however in the west, it is the aescetics and the 'desert fathers' who have perhaps spoken most loudly.
Most, east and west, will likely agree with the words of Merton, "meditation does not have to be colorful or spectacular. The effectiveness of our mental prayer is not to be judged by the interior 'fireworks' that go off inside us when we pray. On the contrary, although sometimes the fruit of a good meditation [practice] may be an ardent and sensible love springing from vivid insights into truth; these so-called 'consolations of prayer' are not to be trusted without reserve, or sought for their own sake alone.'

'We should be deeply grateful when our prayer really brings us an increase of clear understanding and felt generosity, and we should by no means despise the stimulation of sensible devotion when it helps us to do whatever we have to do, with greater humility, fidelity and courage."
Thus it is quite possible that meditation practice which at times seems 'cold,' can actually be valuable because it is without feelings and this may be, for some, the most profitable. It can be a source of strength, bring us out of our immediate sense-reactions and to a point of contemplation where we may hold the idea or the contemplated up for more careful and detailed consideration. It may assist us to spiritualize our interior self, quieting the emotions, rising above the mundane, towards a place of reason and faith.

For this reason, Merton asserts that at this point, ignorance can make progress in mental prayer difficult; "those who think that their meditation must always culminate in a burst of emotion, fall into one or two errors...either they find their emotions run dry... or else they can almost always weep at prayer... in the beginning when our senses are easily attracted to created pleasures, our emotions will keep us" from turning to anything greater [more in depth], unless they themselves give continued joy and pleasure; pure, untempered emotion tends to eat itself up and we risk "resting in these things which are by no means the end of the journey." Here, Thomas Merton a Trappist monk writes in the true vein of an aescetic.