Israel Centeno

“With the same gaze with which God looks at us, we look at God.”

— Meister Eckhart

As I read The Book of Her Life by Saint Teresa of Jesus and Edith Stein’s reflection on it, I am moved to think that only through contemplation does the soul know the soul, and, in knowing, knows that it knows.

In that state of silence, stillness, and presence before God, the soul discovers something that cannot be grasped by thought or measured by reason: knowledge arises from communion, not observation.

That is why the so-called hard problem of consciousness is so difficult to resolve.

Consciousness cannot be reduced or quantified.

And the same is true of God:

He cannot be categorized as either object or subject, for He transcends both.

The distinction between subject and object belongs to our temporal condition,

to a reality where space and time force us to separate the knower from the known.

But beyond creation, when those coordinates dissolve, such distinctions lose meaning.

There, where time is no longer sequence and space no longer divides,

God cannot be defined as the one who sees nor as the one who is seen,

for He is pure act, the very being of existence without opposition.

And yet the mystics —Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Edith Stein— speak of a place within the soul that is elusive and infinite, a point of contact, a portal.

It is not physical, nor is it an idea;

it is the point where the soul connects with the eternal and steps outside the frame of space and time.

This interior portal is the true center of the soul.

There is no thought there, only presence.

No subject, no object, only communion.

And though we perceive it as intimate, even small,

that point must be infinitely vast,

for it contains the fullness of God.