Session Three: What Is at Your Center?

Retreat Series: Spirituality for Atheists, Agnostics, Druids, Pagans, and Seekers

One Center Only, and Why You Placed It There

Introduction

In the first two sessions, you met the six questions and began to fill them with the particulars of your life. This third session asks a single, clarifying question: What is at your Center—one Center only—and why did you place it there?

Martin Buber wrote that the world is not comprehensible but embraceable by embracing one of its beings. The Center you choose is the place where you decide what, or whom, you will embrace. It is not a scientific measurement. It is a lived decision.

Most people discover that several things compete for the Center. The invitation is not to invent a noble Center. It is to notice the one that has actually been receiving the decisive share of your energy and loyalty.

Your Center is the one, only one, apex value that, if you took it away, the rest of life would feel incomplete, missing that capstone of being. As an atheist or agnostic, you hold that the notion of god held by anyone else is fictitious and lacks a ground in reality. Fair enough. If so, what is there for you that would be the substance on which you base reality as you can reason and observe it?

When I asked that question, with the specific caveat that there is no God, I challenged myself to write down four pillars of meaning that, given my unique position in evolution, let me choose what there is to life. There is no right or wrong because each of us is different and unique, but my choices should still connect to reality.

Next, I placed them in order of importance (not a dissertation on each one, but one word or a few words I can say, “These four are the foundations of reality, my purpose in life, based on the purpose of reality from Question One.”).

Next, I identified five false centers that, if I used them, would keep my humanity from evolving in harmony with all that is, and would keep tripping over itself.

Next, I spent thirty minutes in silence just looking at the results. No lofty thoughts, no mention of any god or higher force, just me in that upper room of my inner self, the place where no one wants to look, alone with myself.

What I came up with, and what is unique only to me, is my purpose in life.

Try it. No god. No other person. No “ism.” Just you. I can’t tell you what your answer might be, but my answers gave me a systematic approach to what makes life tolerable. I don’t measure my outcome against yours; instead, I accept where I am in life right now and how it all fits together.

Meditation

Begin by listing every claim that has tried to occupy the Center of your life. Include the obvious ones and the quieter ones: achievement, being needed, financial security, a particular relationship, creative work, the avoidance of conflict. Do not edit the list for respectability. Write what has in fact organized your choices.

Now reduce the list to one. Ask which claim, when threatened, produces the strongest reaction in you. That reaction often reveals the true Center. Maslow would see this as an unmet need or an unused capacity. Name it plainly.

Why did you place it there? Trace the history. Was the placement conscious? Did it come from early experience, a crisis, or the simple accumulation of daily decisions? You do not need a dramatic origin story. A sequence of ordinary choices is enough.

Test the Center against the other five questions. Does this Center give a coherent purpose to life as you understand it? Does it describe reality in a way that matches what you have seen? Does it allow the pieces of your life to fit together? Does it make fierce love possible? Does it remain meaningful when you remember that you will die? If the Center fails one or more of these tests, you are free to notice the failure.

Some people discover that their Center is the wish to remain decent in small ways. Others find that the Center is a particular craft or a particular person. Still others find that the Center is avoiding a deeper question. All of these are possible answers.

You may decide to leave the Center where it is. You may decide to move it by one small degree. Either choice is yours. The upper room of the inner self does not demand a conversion. It offers a place to look at the Center you have already chosen and ask whether you still intend to keep it.

Sit with the single Center you have named. Let the reasons you placed it there remain visible. If a new question arises, write it down. If nothing arises, remain in the quiet. The fact that you have looked is itself a form of attention. That attention belongs to you.

Three Reflections on What Science Cannot Measure

“The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” — Albert Einstein.

“The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe bother to exist at all?” — Stephen Hawking

“The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.” — Martin Buber.

Contemplative Time of Fifteen Minutes

Find a quiet place. Sit or lie down comfortably. Go to the upper room of your inner self and shut the door on commentary. Stay in silence and solitude for fifteen minutes. If thoughts come, notice them gently and return to the quiet. There is nothing to achieve. Be present to your own experience and to the questions that remain after measurement ends. If fifteen minutes feels long today, stay as long as you can. Begin again when you are ready.

Action

After the silence, choose one small, concrete action that arises from what you have noticed in these reflections. It may be as simple as writing one sentence about one of the questions, contacting someone you have been meaning to reach, or sitting in silence again tomorrow. Do one thing, small enough to complete before the day ends. Then notice what happens.

Copyright of Michael F. Conrad, Ed.D. The Center for Contemplative Practice. All rights reserved, with collaboration from Grok.

www.organism.earth