What keeps us from truly understanding, from listening and communicating with the world around us? It is identification with our thoughts. This is what blocks our contact with reality. The mute and deaf the man whom Jesus heals is not experiencing reality. He cannot truly communicate with anyone. It takes an encounter with Jesus for him to experience reality in its fullness. It is a story about removing blockages to reality, and for us it is our thoughts.
An overlooked mystic named Francisco de Osuna offers wise advice around thoughts and prayer. Osuna was a Franciscan friar who lived in the early sixteenth century. He wrote a book – The Third Spiritual Alphabet – that taught St. Teresa of Avila to pray. In his book, Osuna writes, “The more thoughts you entertain, the hungrier and more greedy you will be for different experience, according to the wise man: ‘The soul running loose will be hungry.’ The soul is ruined and dissolute when it allows the mind and thoughts to flit about wantonly, running off wherever they wish. When they finally do wander home, worn out, dying of hunger, they come dragging behind an even heavier load of desire and greed.” Without some awareness and interior silence our thoughts will run wild and stir up egocentric desires that result in forgetting God.
Furthermore, he talks about the “war of thought.” He notes that “thoughts start war if the gate is not closed.” Without awareness of our thoughts and a redirecting of our minds to God, we will lose the ongoing war with our own thoughts. They will lead us into egocentric attitudes and behaviors. He tells us “not to engage in…interior conversations” but to cultivate divine silence. He teaches a way of prayer called recollection or no pensar nada, which we can translate, a bit loosely, as “not thinking anything.” It is contemplative prayer; it is opening to God beyond the mind, for Jesus says “‘Ephphatha!’ – that is, ‘Be opened!’”
We need deep, silent prayer. Otherwise, there will not be any healing or transformation. To heal, Jesus prays. Thurston writes, “Jesus looks up to heaven, the standard Jewish posture for prayer, and thereby indicates the source of the healing.” The deaf and mute man Jesus heals experiences liberation through prayer. Osuna knows this. Thus, he teaches the prayer of recollection or no pensar nada.
Osuna teaches us to prayer by being “blind, deaf, and mute…absorbed in God.” He tells us to be “blind…in the spirit” and that “we must renounce imagination and its distractions so that we remain alone, our soul undisturbed by the deafening noise of voices.” He also writes, “we should also be mute within, speaking no words…[God] wishes us to pray silently in spirit.” We are to “quiet our hearts and observe perpetual silence…to ascend to high contemplation.”
Essentially, we practice recollection by not thinking and resting in God: “being silent from with, engaging in no reflection whatsoever…and forbid thought to enter.” The silence and nothingness of this prayer is the silence and nothingness of God. No pensar nada means to stop thinking: In prayer, we turn attention away from the content in our minds to enjoy God alone in faith and love. We are forgetting self in the silence deeper than thinking even as thoughts pester us. In practice, we remain interiorly blind, deaf, and mute concerning our thoughts. This involves the silencing of the imagination and understanding to be anchored in God alone.
Osuna knows that the more we disregard our thoughts, the more we come into contact with reality, and the Reality of all realities is God. “In this…state of quiet the understanding is so stilled and sealed, or it might be more accurate to say so occupied” in God that we are transformed. He then tells us: “An old man whom I confessed—he had practiced these spiritual things for more than fifty years—told me in great confidence that…his understanding was so stilled and occupied from within that nothing of creation could take form in it.” A true mystic!