Hesychasm and Nepsis

Hesychasm is an eastern Christian form of living the spiritual life that has its roots in the first hermits who fled into the barren deserts of Egypt and Syria during the fourth century and succeeding ages. It is a spiritual system of essentially contemplative orientation which finds the perfection of the human person in union with the trinity through continuous prayer. Hesychasm comes from the Greek word hesychia. It means tranquility or peace. Hesychia is that state in which the Christian, through grace and his/her intense asceticism, reintegrates his/her whole being into a single person who is placed completely under the direct influence of the Trinity dwelling within that person.

It stresses an entire way of life in Christ that strives for total, loving surrender to the indwelling Trinity through a vigorous, even militant discipline of body, soul and spirit that was summarized in gospel terms as "purity of heart." The heart, in Scriptural language, is the seat of human life, of all that touches us in the depths of our personality-all affections, passions , desires, knowledge and thoughts. It is in our "heart" that we in prayer meet God in an I-Thou relationship. The heart, and not the mind, is considered in this spirituality of the christian east, as the center of our being, that which directs us in our ultimate values and choices. It is the inner chamber where, in secret, the heavenly Father sees us through and through. It is where we attain inner honesty, humility, integration and purity of heart...(G)Nostic Nunnery

• NEPSIS is the kind of sober-minded vigilance that characterises the ascetic life of the Fathers. It is usually translated as watchfulness. The adjective is NEPTIC.
• HESYCHIA means stillness, and the practice of stillness in the presence of God is called HESYCHASM...ORTHODOX PSYCHOTHERAPY
• The Hesychastic Centres of Prayer

Hesychasm (from the Greek for ""stillness, rest, quiet, silence") is a mystical tradition and movement that originated with the Desert Fathers and was central to their practice of prayer. Hesychasm for the Desert Fathers was primarily the practice of "interior silence and continual prayer". It didn't become a formal movement of specific practices until the fourteenth century Byzantine revival of meditative prayer techniques, when it was more closely identified with the Prayer of the Heart (The Prayer of The Heart is considered to be the Unceasing Prayer that the apostle Paul advocates in the New Testament.), or "Jesus Prayer". That prayer's origin is also traced back to the Desert Fathers—the Prayer of the Heart was found inscribed in the ruins of a cell from that period in the Egyptian desert. The earliest written reference to the practice of the Prayer of the Heart may be in a text from the Philokalia by Abba Philimon, a Desert Father. Hesychast prayer was traditionally practiced in silence and with eyes closed—not as a form of discursive meditation on different incidents in the life of Christ."

The words hesychast and hesychia were frequently used in 4th and 5th century writings of Desert Fathers such as Macarius of Egypt, Evagrius Ponticus, and Gregory of Nyssa. The title hesychast was used in early times synonymously with "hermit", as compared to a cenobite who lived in community. Hesychasm can refer to inner or outer stillness, though in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers it referred to inner tranquility....Desert Fathers (Wikipedia)

"...one of the Christian Desert Fathers, the monk Evagrius Ponticus (345-399 A.D.), taught a form of hesychasm (Greek: quiet) in which one comes to see the conditioned links between thoughts and emotions, and then, through meditation and prayer, finds a deep calm called apatheia. In apatheia the mind is integrated and purified of its naturally tumultuous activity, allowing one to simply “be” in God’s presence or to pray without distraction. Monks such as Evagrius believed that virtue in one’s speech and behavior would follow freely from a mind that is emptied of distracting thoughts. Some other Christian contemplatives would describe this emptying as a kind of on-going detachment from chaotic thoughts. It’s not that thinking goes away--sometimes our thoughts may bring blessings or healings!--but that we experience an inward spaciousness so that we are not so caught up in our own thoughts and worries. When we have this kind of detachment, we are less likely to mistake our thoughts and opinions for our present reality."...Christian Mindfulness & Emptiness

Evagrius Ponticus:
Excerpts from The Philokalia

• Evagrios the Solitary Introductory Note
• Evagrios the Solitary Outline Teaching on Asceticism and Stillness in the Solitary Life
• Evagrios the Solitary Texts on Discrimination in respect of Passions and Thoughts
• Evagrios the Solitary Extracts from the Texts on Watchfulness
• Evagrios the Solitary On Prayer: One Hundred and Fifty-Three Texts

Contemporary References to Hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer

• Jesus Prayer - Prayer of the Heart
• The Jesus Prayer
  "The most normal form of unceasing prayer in the Orthodox tradition is the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer is the form of invocation used by those practicing mental prayer, also called the "prayer of the heart." The words of the prayer most usually said are "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner." The choice of this particular verse has a theological and spiritual meaning."
  
  "The Jesus Prayer basically is used in three different ways. First as the verse used for the "prayer of the heart" in silence in the hesychast method of prayer. Second as the continual mental and unceasing prayer of the faithful outside the hesychast tradition. And third as the brief ejaculatory prayer used to ward off temptations. Of course, in the actual life of a person these three uses of the prayer are often interrelated and combined."
  
  "In the hesychast method of prayer the person sits alone in a bodily position with his head bowed and his eyes directed toward his chest or his stomach. He continually repeats the prayer with each aspiration and breath, placing his "mind in his heart" by concentrated attention. He empties his mind of all rational thoughts and discursive reasoning, and also voids his mind of every picture and image. Then, without thought or imagination, but with all proper attention and concentration he rhythmically repeats the Jesus Prayer in silence - hesychia means silence - and through this method of contemplative prayer is united to God by the indwelling of Christ in the Spirit. According to the fathers, such a prayer, when faithfully practiced within the total life of the Church, brings the experience of the uncreated divine light of God and unspeakable joy to the soul. Its purpose is to make man a servant of God."
• On Practicing the Jesus Prayer...by St. Ignatius Brianchaninov
  "This is the general rule for practicing the Jesus Prayer, derived from the Sacred Scriptures and the works of the Holy Fathers, and from certain conversations with genuine men of prayer. Of the particular rules, especially for novices, I deem the following worthy of mention."
• Introduction to the Jesus Prayer...by Mother Alexandra
  "The Jesus Prayer, or the Prayer of the Heart, centers on the Holy Name itself. It may be said in its entirety: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner"; it may be changed to "us sinners" or to other persons named, or it may be shortened. The power lies in the name of Jesus; thus "Jesus" alone, may fulfill the whole need of the one who prays."
• Jesus Prayer - Prayer of the Heart
  "The Jesus Prayer according to numerous Church Fathers is "essential" to our spiritual growth. The Jesus Prayer proclaims our faith and humbles us by asking mercy for our sinfulness. The Jesus Prayer is thought to be as old as the Church itself."
• Hesychasm (Wikipedia)
• Hesychast controversy (Wikipedia)
• The Jesus Prayer 1/3 (Youtube)
• The Jesus Prayer 2/3 (Youtube)
• The Jesus Prayer 3/3 (Youtube)
• Jesus Prayer Meditation (YouTube)

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Primacy of Love For All Living Things

The commandment to love was the primary guide for the Desert Fathers lives, and informed most of the stories and accounts in Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Their practice included not only the command to love all, but to be transformed by God's love. For those who lived the monastic community life it was especially prominent. Their efforts to live by that commandment were not seen as being easy—many of the stories from that time recount their struggles to overcome negative emotions such as anger and judgment of others. Helping a brother monk who was ill or struggling was seen as taking priority over any other consideration. Hermits were frequently seen to break a long fast when hosting visitors, as hospitality and kindness were more important than keeping the ascetic practices that were so dominant in the Desert Fathers' lives....source: Wikipedia

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Panentheism

A charming story recounts Anthony's relationship with the animals in an era when bearbaiting and torturing of animals was a widespread form of entertainment:

At first wild animals in the desert coming for water often would damage the beds in his garden. But he caught one of the animals, held it gently, and said to them all: "Why do you harm me when I harm none of you? Go away, and in the Lord's name do not come near these things again." And ever afterwards, as though awed by his orders, they did not come near the place.

Such tales of monks' encounters with animals were numerous: an aging monk fed a starving lion with dates, another shared his evening meal regularly with a she-wolf, still another taught an ibex, a desert antelope, which plants to eat and which to avoid....Dictionary of African Christian Biography

What is Panentheism?...God is the Universe, but More Than the Universe
"The term panentheism is Greek for "all-in-God," pan-en-theos. A panentheistic belief system is one which posits a god that interpenetrates every part of nature, but is nevertheless fully distinct from nature. So this god is part of nature, but still retains an independent identity...."

PANENTHEISM: THE SPIRITUALITY OF COMPASSION AND EQUALITARIANISM
"It is a matter of historical record that the saints, sages and avatars of the world's major religions have always emphasized our kinship with animals and with the whole of Creation: and that an attitude of humility, compassion and respect and reverence for all life is the key to a just, humane and sustainable society. This attitude does not preclude us form exploiting non-human life in order to sustain our own. Rather, it sets limits and raises questions because non-human life is as much a part of our moral and spiritual community of concern and responsibility as it is an integral part of the ecological community of planet Earth."

"The Christian hermetic desert fathers tried to preserve this Covenant of consciousness and conscience. They, like St. Francis of Assisi, saw the emerging age of commerce and industrialism as defiling and consuming the natural world. They did not accept the new world order of the Church of Rome that placed God above all (for God is also in all); and that placed humans above animals and Nature, and men above women."

PANENTHEISM VS. PANTHEISM
"This universal arrangement is not pantheism (all is God), but panentheism, a term devised by Karl C. F. Krause (1781-1832) to describe his thought. It is best known for its use by Charles Hartshorne and recently by Matthew Fox. Panentheism says that all is in God, somewhat as if God were the ocean and we were fish. If one considers what is in God's body to be part of God, then we can say that God is all there is and then some. The universe is God's body, but God's awareness or personality is greater than the sum of all the parts of the universe. All the parts have some degree of freedom in co-creating with God. At the start of its momentary career as a subject, an experience is God--as the divine initial aim. As the experience carries on its choosing process, it is a freely aiming reality that is not strictly God, since it departs from God's purpose to some degree. Yet everything is within God.

"The most practical value of pantheism is that it recognizes the presence of God everywhere, but it does this at an enormous cost. It provides for the presence of God as the only actor; God's presence is an overriding presence that cancels the possibility of the existence of anything else, of any genuine beloved, of any loving or unloving response to God. In pantheism, human existence or any other finite existence is at best a mystery. Explanation in any satisfying sense is impossible. There can be affirmation that there is nothing but God, but where that leaves the affirmer is unclear; his or her existence is no more than appearance, and enlightenment brings recognition of one's illusory status as a unique, permanent perspective in reality.

Panentheism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Contemplative Prayer

The purpose of centering prayer is to clear the mind of rational thought in order to focus on the indwelling presence of God, whereas other methods have some contemplative goal in mind: with the rosary, the Mysteries of the Rosary are contemplated; with Lectio Divina, the practitioner thinks about the Scripture reading, sometimes even visualizing it; and with hesychasm as understood in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the practitioner seeks to "see" the energies of God which appear as "uncreated light"...source: Centering Prayer

• THE PRACTICES OF MONASTIC PRAYER:ORIGINS, EVOLUTION, AND TENSIONS...by Columba Stewart

• Of the method of continual prayer...John Cassian...Conference 10, Chapter 10

• The Way of Mediation and Contemplation....by Teresa Tillson

• Contemplative Prayer in the Western Tradition

  "As Anthony and Cassian imply, repetition is important (at least initially) as a way to enter into the contemplative state. It allows us to let go of images and pictures and to give ourselves over entirely to the presence of God."

• An Interview with Father Thomas Keating

  "Fr. Thomas Keating is one the Garrison Institute’s founding spiritual advisors, and a co-founder of the Centering Prayer movement."

• the Lectio Divina homepage...by Richard McCambly

  "The phrase lectio divina, difficult to translated adequately, is the Latin for “sacred reading.” Personally, I like to translate it as reading which is sacred. Ordinarily lectio is confined to the slow perusal of sacred Scripture, both the Old and New Testaments; it is undertaken not with the intention of gaining information but of using the texts as an aide to contact the living God."

• Lectio Divina as school of prayer among the Fathers of the Desert...by Armand VEILLEUX, o.c.s.o.

  "The Fathers of the Desert remind us of the primordial importance of Scripture in the life of the Christian and the necessity of letting ourselves be constantly transformed in the crucible of the Word of God."
  
  "Moreover, even such a rapid study as we have made of the way in which they approached Scripture, of its very nature makes us call into question certain aspects of the modern conception of lectio divina, or more precisely, calls us to go beyond them to arrive at a deeper understanding of the unity of their lived experience. The monk, more than anyone else, cannot allow himself to be divided. His very name, monachos, reminds him unceasingly of the unity of preoccupation, of aspiration and of attitude proper to the man or woman who has chosen to live one sole love with an undivided heart."

• Informal History of the Christian Contemplative Tradition

  "This is an informal 'timeline' which traces the Christian tradition and practice of contemplative prayer. I say 'informal', because my resources are rather limited, and I would hesitate to present it as definitive. It is based heavily on writings by Thomas Keating, Gene Edwards, and William Menninger."
• From Robert Jonas, The Empty Bell:

• Christian Prayer, Meditation and Contemplation

• Christian Mindfulness & Emptiness

• Meditation, Prayer and Healing

Lectio Divina

"Lectio divina, translated as sacred reading, was likely brought to the Western Christian Church from the desert fathers of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine in the early fifth century. It was recommended for both lay persons and monastics in the early Christian centuries. Lectio divina is closely associated with the St. Benedict and Benedictine spirituality, and is highly recommended today by the Benedictines and Cistercians. Many later forms of Christian prayer are based on lectio."

Lectio divina, as it is traditionally taught, has four parts or elements:

Activity	Description	Purpose
Lectio	Read the passage, seek the word or God	Listen
Meditatio	Meditate on the passage and apply it to our own situation and needs	Reflect
Oratio	Pray in response to the word of God	Integrate
Contemplatio	Listen in contemplative silence, open to whatever God may wish to invite or impart	Receive

The Method

1. Choose a scripture or other sacred reading
2. Sit comfortably, but not too comfortably, back straight, chest open so the breath is free and open.
3. Read the passage slowly. Savor each phrase. What word phrase or idea speaks to you?
4. Read the passage again. Where does this passage touch your life? What do you see, hear, touch, or remember?
5. Read the passage a third time. Listen quietly.
6. Note insights, reflections, and personal response to the reading in your journal.
7. Follow the steps in order or go back and forth between them as you feel moved.
8. Finish by waiting for a few moments in silence.

Suitable subjects for Lectio include:

1. Psalms
2. The Lord's prayer
3. All scripture
4. The daily office lectionary
5. Devotional readings. The sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Merton's Seeds of Contemplation or No Man is an Island, the writings of Kathleen Norris, Roberta Bondi, Brother Lawrence, Thomas Kelly, are all suitable. Try also Zen and the Art of Archery, Peace Pilgrim, and works by Thich Naht Hahan....source: The Way of Mediation and Contemplation by Teresa Tillson

General Guidelines for Contemplative Prayer of all kinds

• Pick a quiet, comfortable place to pray and treat this place as sacred. Arrange a pillow or chair to sit on. Have a bible or other sacred reading at hand. Adorn your place with a plant, a candle, or other things that please you.
• Keep a spiritual journal. Write down dreams, feelings, and impressions from your prayer time, and anything else that seems important in your life. Date your entries.
• Sit up straight to make room for the breath. Breath naturally and slowly.
• Pray regularly. Treat this time as you would an appointment with a valued friend. 20 minutes is a standard prayer period. This is about the amount of time the body and mind need to become receptive and able to listen. Doing this twice a day will boost your spiritual growth.
• Focus on your relationship with God or on being receptive. Do not become attached to gifts such as visions or feelings of ecstasy and closeness to God. Neither be disturbed by trials such as aridity, loud thoughts, disruptive feelings, and the like. Both gifts and trials come and go. They are not a sign of how well your prayer is going, only that you are being changed. Look for the fruits of your prayer in everyday life, not in the prayer period itself.
• Pick a practice that suits you and stick with it. Be prepared to move beyond that practice as you are called to do so.
• Suspend the judging mind, but make room for the spirit to act within you. Expect to be transformed, but do not grasp after it. Rest and be intentional in your practice and the work will be done in you.
• A spiritual friend is someone you can talk about your practice and spiritual life with. It is good to have companionship along the way. A good spiritual director may be hard to find, though they are more common now than they were 10 years ago. Seek such a person if you feel called to do so or your inner way becomes hard and you need direction. A good spiritual director is someone who has prayed for many years. Consider asking at your local Catholic Church for monks or nuns who are experienced in prayer or spiritual direction. Teachers from the Eastern traditions such as Buddhism may be helpful to you. Many are highly skilled. Remember above all, "if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives to all men generously and without reproaching, and it will be given him (James 1:5)
• Be gentle with yourself. You are the temple of the Holy Spirit, and God is seeking you as eagerly as you are seeking God....

source: The Way of Mediation and Contemplation by Teresa Tillson

"The practice of prayer in Egyptian monasticism, and its later development, raised theological questions that haunted eastern Christianity for centuries after the “Golden Age” of Egyptian monasticism had passed. Evagrius, formed in the traditional practices of the Egyptian tradition, taught an ideal of “imageless prayer” that was in tension with the image-laden texts he and other monks pondered day and night.... Another aspect of his teaching on advanced stages of prayer, noted earlier, which Evagrius held in common with venerable Egyptian monks such as John of Lycopolis, was the appearance of a blue luminosity in prayer that both Evagrius and John interpreted as either a glimpse of God’s imageless presence or the natural light of the mind reflecting its divine Creator. This problem of human access to the divine essence would preoccupy much Byzantine theological reflection and culminate in the Hesychast controversy of the fourteenth century with its definitive distinction between the accessible divine energies and the utterly unknowable Godhead. Such disputes may seem recondite to us, but their impact on eastern Christianity was immense. Fundamental to all such controversy was the question confronting any serious Christian practitioner trying to make sense of an untidy sacred text and a God who seemed to insist on meeting human beings in time and place. It should be little surprise, then, that the monks of early Christian Egypt took on this challenge. Immersed in biblical texts, hallowing natural rhythms of day and night, attentive to body, senses, and surroundings, fully cognizant of the painfulness of charity and the allure of self will, they stand before us even now as the Sign of Contradiction promised by their Divine Master."...source: THE PRACTICES OF MONASTIC PRAYER:ORIGINS, EVOLUTION, AND TENSIONS...by Columba Stewart

An Alternate View

The Danger of Centering Prayer...by Rev. John D. Dreher

"Many people assume centering prayer is compatible with Catholic tradition, but in fact the techniques of centering prayer are neither Christian nor prayer. They are at the level of human faculties and as such are an operation of man, not of God. The deception and dangers can be grave." "Centering prayer differs from Christian prayer in that the intent of the technique is to bring the practitioner to the center of his own being. There he is, supposedly, to experience the presence of the God who indwells him. Christian prayer, on the contrary, centers upon God in a relational way, as someone apart from oneself. The Christian knows a God who is personal, yet who, as Creator, infinitely transcends his creature. God is wholly other than man. It is also crucial to Christian prayer that God engages man's whole being in response, not just his interior life. In the view of centering prayer, the immanence of God somehow makes the transcendence of God available to human techniques and experience."

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Teachings and Practices of the Desert Fathers

"[Christian] Monasticism began in the Eastern empire in the fourth century. In the early stages it was not linked with the church. It was Athanasius who took the first steps that finally brought the monastic movement under Church domination. The excessive austerities practiced by the Eastern monks were not to Benedict's liking. Their traditions had taken a very literal notice of the Christian view that the flesh was sinful. Accordingly they vied with each other who could achieve the rankest state of bodily neglect. To these unwholesome eccentricities the Benedictine rule put a determined stop. Authority and power was placed in the hands of the abbot who was appointed for life."...Early Christianity in Wisdom of the West...by Bertrand Russell

The Hermit Way of Life
"So who were the Desert Fathers? A majority were native Egyptians, mostly from the poorer classes, but others, from all parts of the Roman world, included men of high rank and high intelligence. Arsenius, for example, had been tutor to the sons of Emperor Theodosius; Evagrius was a subtle theologian; John Cassian, a well-travelled Rumanian, carried the desert traditions to southern France. One at least was black; Moses, first a slave, then leader of a gang of bandits, finally one of the holiest men in Scetis.

"Differences of rank or profession ceased to exist in the desert. There were, however, two levels, based on experience: Brother, a neophyte who needed to spend a few years as a disciple of some more seasoned hermit, and Father, or Old Man – not necessarily old in years – a hermit grown wise and virtuous enough to live alone and give guidance to others.

"A hermit's day typically began before dawn; sleep, though necessary, was an enemy stealing time from devotions. A father would meet with his disciples to recite psalms; all would then return to their individual cells and spend most of the day in solitary work and prayer ("Your cell will teach you everything," Moses said.) Work consisted mostly of weaving reeds or palm-fronds into ropes, mats and baskets which would subsequently be sold in the Delta villages; most hermits prided themselves on their independence and scorned charity. Sometimes hermits would hire out as laborers at harvest time, but this was frowned on, since it involved too much contact with the secular world.

"Around the ninth hour (3pm our time), father and brothers would gather again for the day's only meal, usually consisting of bread (one loaf per person was a normal week's ration) and vegetables such as beans and lentils. After the meal, hermits would visit with one another or ask more experienced elders for 'a word' – some nugget of wisdom, specially designed to apply to the individual concerned, on which one could subsequently meditate. Then they would return to their cells, rigorously examine their conduct over the preceding day, recognise and seek to eradicate their shortcomings, and finally, by the feeble light of an oil-lamp, continue working and praying until sleep overwhelmed them."...History and Hermits - The Desert Fathers of Egypt

• Struggling with logismoi
  We have learnt, after much observation, to recognize the difference between angelic thoughts, human thoughts, and thoughts that come from demons...Evagrius Ponticus...Texts on Discrimination in respect of Passions and Thoughts
• Primacy of Love For All Living Things
  What can we gain by sailing off to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous. Proof: the great travellers and colonizers of the Renaissance were, for the most part, men who perhaps were capable of the things they did precisely because they were alienated from themselves. In subjugating primitive worlds they only imposed on them, with the force of cannons, their own confusion and their own alienation....Thomas Merton...The Wisdom of the Desert
  
• Asceticism
  "...the Roman Empire between the fourth and fifth centuries experienced the development of a new form of Christian piety--the rise of asceticism. Both the Provinces of Egypt and Syria were home to the ascetic discipline; yet, the outward expression of the askesis [discipline, exercise, training] differed between the two areas. The geographical constraints and harsh desert climate severely limited the Egyptian ascetics, confining them to cells, where they practiced the ascetic discipline of fasting, prayer and meditation. Their modes of life differed from the ascetics in Syria, a province with a wide-range of geographical terrain, such as deserts, steppe-lands and mountainous areas, as well as more favorable climatic conditions. This allowed the Syrian ascetics to develop a more rigorous expression of the askesis, emphasizing bodily mortification. Although Egyptian ascetics were occasionally found to self-inflict harm upon their bodies, it was nevertheless mild in contrast to the Syrians, and an exception rather than a rule. The Syrians also aspired to live life as angels in the flesh, emulating the bodiless creatures that live in heaven. Although there was a marked contrast between ascetics in Egypt and Syria, ascetics in both provinces served as spiritual martyrs, as an out-growth of martyrdom that had ceased to play a role in Christianity after the official Imperial adoption of the religion, putting an end to the once frequent and wide-spread persecutions that claimed so many Christians in first few centuries A.D. Asceticism was truly a higher life, and an extreme expression of Christian piety, attested to by the countless men in Egypt and Syria who suffered for Christ."...source: Egyptian and Syrian Asceticism in Late Antiquity: A Comparative Study of the Ascetic Idea in the Late Roman Empire during the Fourth and Fifth Centuries...by Jeffrey Conrad
• Hesychasm and Nepsis
  Hesychasm is a mystical tradition of experiential prayer in the Orthodox Church. It is described in great detail in the Philokalia, a compilation of what various saints wrote about prayer and the spiritual life. In practice, the Hesychastic prayer bears some superficial resemblance to mystical prayer or meditation in Eastern religions (e.g., Buddhism and Hinduism, especially Yoga)...source: Wikipedia
• Contemplative Prayer
  "The Desert Fathers...practiced a form of prayer which could be described as meditation. In Buddhist terms, this ancient Christian meditation practice included both mantra meditation and non conceptual meditation. They would take a word, sentence or phrase from the Bible and repeat it over and over again. St. John Cassian, the Roman was based at a monastery in Bethlehem. He made a great contribution to world literature by producing two sets or collections of writings. These were the Institutes which recounted the practices of the monks of Egypt and adapted them for use in the colder, Western regions. Then later, Conferences given by various great Fathers of the Desert."...source: Christian Meditation by Brian Ruhe
• Recitation of scripture
  The lives of the desert fathers were filled with recitation of the scriptures—during the week they chanted psalms while performing manual labor and during the weekends they held liturgies and group services. The monk's experience in the cell occurred in a variety of ways, but the role of meditation on scripture was central. For them meditation was the oral recitation of scripture. The group practices were particularly prominent in the more organized communities formed by Pachomius. The purpose of these practices were explained by John Cassian, a Desert Father, who described the goal of psalmody (the outward recitation of scripture) and asceticism as the ascent to deep mystical prayer and mystical contemplation...source: Wikipedia
• Withdrawal from society
  The legalization of Christianity by the Roman Empire in 313 actually gave Anthony a greater resolve to go out into the desert. Anthony, who was nostalgic for the tradition of martyrdom, saw withdrawal and asceticism as an alternative. When members of the Church began finding ways to work with the Roman state, the Desert Fathers also saw that as a compromise between "the things of God and the things of Caesar." The monastic communities were essentially an alternate Christian society. The hermits doubted that religion and politics could ever produce a truly Christian society. For them, the only Christian society was spiritual and not mundane...source: Wikipedia
• Panentheism
  "A charming story recounts Anthony's relationship with the animals in an era when bearbaiting and torturing of animals was a widespread form of entertainment:
  
  At first wild animals in the desert coming for water often would damage the beds in his garden. But he caught one of the animals, held it gently, and said to them all: "Why do you harm me when I harm none of you? Go away, and in the Lord's name do not come near these things again." And ever afterwards, as though awed by his orders, they did not come near the place.
  
  Such tales of monks' encounters with animals were numerous: an aging monk fed a starving lion with dates, another shared his evening meal regularly with a she-wolf, still another taught an ibex, a desert antelope, which plants to eat and which to avoid."...source: Dictionary of African Christian Biography
• Controversy and Banishment in Paradise: Promuglating on the Nature of God and the Afterlife.
  "Scholars have seen two monastic camps: “Hellenic or Hellenized monks whose theology was more intellectual and more speculative than the naïve and literal beliefs of their Egyptian brethren."...source: COPTIC PALLADIANA I: THE LIFE OF PAMBO (LAUSIAC HISTORY 9-10)
• Visions and Special Awareness
• The Hermit Life and Mental Health

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Practical Mysticism...Chapter X...The Mystical Life

And here the practical man, who has been strangely silent during the last stages of our discourse, shakes himself like a terrier which has achieved dry land again after a bath; and asks once more, with a certain explosive violence, his dear old question, "What is the _use_ of all this?"

"You have introduced me," he says further, "to some curious states of consciousness, interesting enough in their way; and to a lot of peculiar emotions, many of which are no doubt most valuable to poets and so on. But it is all so remote from daily life. How is it going to fit in with ordinary existence? How, above all, is it all going to help _me_?"

Well, put upon its lowest plane, this new way of attending to life--this deepening and widening of outlook--may at least be as helpful to you as many things to which you have unhesitatingly consecrated much time and diligence in the past: your long journeys to new countries, for instance, or long hours spent in acquiring new "facts," relabelling old experiences, gaining skill in new arts and games. These, it is true, were quite worth the effort expended on them: for they gave you, in exchange for your labour and attention, a fresh view of certain fragmentary things, a new point of contact with the rich world of possibilities, a tiny enlargement of your universe in one direction or another. Your love and patient study of nature, art, science, politics, business-- even of sport--repaid you thus. But I have offered you, in exchange for a meek and industrious attention to another aspect of the world, hitherto somewhat neglected by you, an enlargement which shall include and transcend all these; and be conditioned only by the perfection of your generosity, courage, and surrender.

Nor are you to suppose that this enlargement will be limited to certain new spiritual perceptions, which the art of contemplation has made possible for you: that it will merely draw the curtain from a window out of which you have never looked. This new wide world is not to be for you something seen, but something lived in: and you--since man is a creature of responses--will insensibly change under its influence, growing up into a more perfect conformity with it. Living in this atmosphere of Reality, you will, in fact, yourself become more real. Hence, if you accept in a spirit of trust the suggestions which have been made to you--and I acknowledge that here at the beginning an attitude of faith is essential--and if you practise with diligence the arts which I have described: then, sooner or later, you will inevitably find yourself deeply and permanently changed by them--will perceive that you have become a "new man." Not merely have you acquired new powers of perception and new ideas of Reality; but a quiet and complete transformation, a strengthening and maturing of your personality has taken place.

You are still, it is true, living the ordinary life of the body. You are immersed in the stream of duration; a part of the human, the social, the national group. The emotions, instincts, needs, of that group affect you. Your changing scrap of vitality contributes to its corporate life; and contributes the more effectively since a new, intuitive sympathy has now made its interests your own. Because of that corporate life, transfusing you, giving to you and taking from you--conditioning, you as it does in countless oblique and unapparent ways--you are still compelled to react to many suggestions which you are no longer able to respect: controlled, to the last moment of your bodily existence and perhaps afterwards, by habit, custom, the good old average way of misunderstanding the world. To this extent, the crowd-spirit has you in its grasp.

Yet in spite of all this, you are now released from that crowd's tyrannically overwhelming consciousness as you never were before. You feel yourself now a separate vivid entity, a real, whole man: dependent on the Whole, and gladly so dependent, yet within that Whole a free self-governing thing. Perhaps you always fancied that your will was free--that you were actually, as you sometimes said, the "captain of your soul." If so, this was merely one amongst the many illusions which supported your old, enslaved career. As a matter of fact, you were driven along a road, unaware of anything that lay beyond the hedges, pressed on every side by other members of the flock; getting perhaps a certain satisfaction out of the deep warm stir of the collective life, but ignorant of your destination, and with your personal initiative limited to the snatching of grass as you went along, the pushing of your way to the softer side of the track. These operations made up together that which you called Success. But now, because you have achieved a certain power of gathering yourself together, perceiving yourself as a person, a spirit, and observing your relation with these other individual lives--because too, hearing now and again the mysterious piping of the Shepherd, you realise your own perpetual forward movement and that of the flock, in its relation to that living guide--you have a far deeper, truer knowledge than ever before both of the general and the individual existence; and so are able to handle life with a surer hand.

Do not suppose from this that your new career is to be perpetually supported by agreeable spiritual contacts, or occupy itself in the mild contemplation of the great world through which you move. True, it is said of the Shepherd that he carries the lambs in his bosom: but the sheep are expected to walk, and put up with the inequalities of the road, the bunts and blunders of the flock. It is to vigour rather than to comfort that you are called. Since the transcendental aspect of your being has been brought into focus you are now raised out of the mere push-forward, the blind passage through time of the flock, into a position of creative responsibility. You are aware of personal correspondences with the Shepherd. You correspond, too, with a larger, deeper, broader world. The sky and the hedges, the wide lands through which you are moving, the corporate character and meaning of the group to which you belong--all these are now within the circle of your consciousness; and each little event, each separate demand or invitation which comes to you is now seen in a truer proportion, because you bring to it your awareness of the Whole. Your journey ceases to be an automatic progress, and takes on some of the characters of a free act: for "things" are now under you, you are no longer under them.

You will hardly deny that this is a practical gain: that this widening and deepening of the range over which your powers of perception work makes you more of a man than you were before, and thus adds to rather than subtracts from your total practical efficiency. It is indeed only when he reaches these levels, and feels within himself this creative freedom--this full actualisation of himself--on the one hand: on the other hand the sense of a world-order, a love and energy on which he depends and with whose interests he is now at one, that man becomes fully human, capable of living the real life of Eternity in the midst of the world of time.

And what, when you have come to it, do you suppose to be your own function in this vast twofold scheme? Is it for nothing, do you think, that you are thus a meeting-place of two orders? Surely it is your business, so far as you may, to express in action something of the real character of that universe within which you now know yourself to live? Artists, aware of a more vivid and more beautiful world than other men, are always driven by their love and enthusiasm to try and express, bring into direct manifestation, those deeper significances of form, sound, rhythm, which they have been able to apprehend: and, doing this, they taste deeper and deeper truths, make ever closer unions with the Real. For them, the duty of creation is tightly bound up with the gift of love. In their passionate outflowing to the universe which offers itself under one of its many aspects to their adoration, that other-worldly fruition of beauty is always followed, balanced, completed, by a this-world impulse to creation: a desire to fix within the time-order, and share with other men, the vision by which they were possessed. Each one, thus bringing new aspects of beauty, new ways of seeing and hearing within the reach of the race, does something to amend the sorry universe of common sense, the more hideous universe of greed, and redeem his fellows from their old, slack servitude to a lower range of significances. It is in action, then, that these find their truest and safest point of insertion into the living, active world of Reality: in sharing and furthering its work of manifestation they know its secrets best. For them contemplation and action are not opposites, but two interdependent forms of a life that is _one_--a life that rushes out to a passionate communion with the true and beautiful, only that it may draw from this direct experience of Reality a new intensity wherewith to handle the world of things; and remake it, or at least some little bit of it, "nearer to the heart's desire."

Again, the great mystics tell us that the "vision of God in His own light"--the direct contact of the soul's substance with the Absolute--to which awful experience you drew as near as the quality of your spirit would permit in the third degree of contemplation, is the prelude, not to a further revelation of the eternal order given to you, but to an utter change, a vivid life springing up within you, which they sometimes call the "transforming union" or the "birth of the Son in the soul." By this they mean that the spark of spiritual stuff, that high special power or character of human nature, by which you first desired, then tended to, then achieved contact with Reality, is as it were fertilised by this profound communion with its origin; becomes strong and vigorous, invades and transmutes the whole personality, and makes of it, not a "dreamy mystic" but an active and impassioned servant of the Eternal Wisdom.

So that when these full-grown, fully vital mystics try to tell us about the life they have achieved, it is always an intensely active life that they describe. They say, not that they "dwell in restful fruition," though the deep and joyous knowledge of this, perhaps too the perpetual longing for an utter self-loss in it, is always possessed by them--but that they "go up _and down_ the ladder of contemplation." They stretch up towards the Point, the unique Reality to which all the intricate and many-coloured lines of life flow, and in which they are merged; and rush out towards those various lives in a passion of active love and service. This double activity, this swinging between rest and work--this alone, they say, is truly the life of man; because this alone represents on human levels something of that inexhaustibly rich yet simple life, "ever active yet ever at rest," which they find in God. When he gets to this, then man has indeed actualised his union with Reality; because then he is a part of the perpetual creative act, the eternal generation of the Divine thought and love. Therefore contemplation, even at its highest, dearest, and most intimate, is not to be for you an end in itself. It shall only be truly yours when it impels you to action: when the double movement of Transcendent Love, drawing inwards to unity and fruition, and rushing out again to creative acts, is realised in you. You are to be a living, ardent tool with which the Supreme Artist works: one of the instruments of His self-manifestation, the perpetual process by which His Reality is brought into concrete expression.

Now the expression of vision, of reality, of beauty, at an artist's hands--the creation of new life in all forms--has two factors: the living moulding creative spirit, and the material in which it works. Between these two there is inevitably a difference of tension. The material is at best inert, and merely patient of the informing idea; at worst, directly recalcitrant to it. Hence, according to the balance of these two factors, the amount of resistance offered by stuff to tool, a greater or less energy must be expended, greater or less perfection of result will be achieved. You, accepting the wide deep universe of the mystic, and the responsibilities that go with it, have by this act taken sides once for all with creative spirit: with the higher tension, the unrelaxed effort, the passion for a better, intenser, and more significant life. The adoration to which you are vowed is not an affair of red hassocks and authorised hymn books; but a burning and consuming fire. You will find, then, that the world, going its own gait, busily occupied with its own system of correspondences--yielding to every gust of passion, intent on the satisfaction of greed, the struggle for comfort or for power--will oppose your new eagerness; perhaps with violence, but more probably with the exasperating calmness of a heavy animal which refuses to get up. If your new life is worth anything, it will flame to sharper power when it strikes against this dogged inertness of things: for you need resistances on which to act. "The road to a Yea lies through a Nay," and righteous warfare is the only way to a living and a lasting peace.

Further, you will observe more and more clearly, that the stuff of your external world, the method and machinery of the common life, is not merely passively but actively inconsistent with your sharp interior vision of truth. The heavy animal is diseased as well as indolent. All man's perverse ways of seeing his universe, all the perverse and hideous acts which have sprung from them--these have set up reactions, have produced deep disorders in the world of things. Man is free, and holds the keys of hell as well as the keys of heaven. Within the love-driven universe which you have learned to see as a whole, you will therefore find egotism, rebellion, meanness, brutality, squalor: the work of separated selves whose energies are set athwart the stream. But every aspect of life, however falsely imagined, can still be "saved," turned to the purposes of Reality: for "all-thing hath the being by the love of God." Its oppositions are no part of its realness; and therefore they can be overcome. Is there not here, then, abundance of practical work for you to do; work which is the direct outcome of your mystical experience? Are there not here, as the French proverb has it, plenty of cats for you to comb? And isn't it just here, in the new foothold it gives you, the new clear vision and certitude--in its noble, serious, and invulnerable faith--that mysticism is "useful"; even for the most scientific of social reformers, the most belligerent of politicians, the least sentimental of philanthropists?

To "bring Eternity into Time," the "invisible into concrete expression"; to "be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man"--these are the plainly expressed desires of all the great mystics. One and all, they demand earnest and deliberate action, the insertion of the purified and ardent will into the world of things. The mystics are artists; and the stuff in which they work is most often human life. They want to heal the disharmony between the actual and the real: and since, in the white-hot radiance of that faith, hope, and charity which burns in them, they discern such a reconciliation to be possible, they are able to work for it with a singleness of purpose and an invincible optimism denied to other men. This was the instinct which drove St. Francis of Assist to the practical experience of that poverty which he recognised as the highest wisdom; St. Catherine of Siena from contemplation to politics; Joan of Arc to the salvation of France; St. Teresa to the formation of an ideal religious family; Fox to the proclaiming of a world-religion in which all men should be guided by the Inner Light; Florence Nightingale to battle with officials, vermin, dirt, and disease in the soldiers' hospitals; Octavia Hill to make in London slums something a little nearer "the shadows of the angels' houses" than that which the practical landlord usually provides.

All these have felt sure that a great part in the drama of creation has been given to the free spirit of man: that bit by bit, through and by him, the scattered worlds of love and thought and action shall be realised again as one. It is for those who have found the thread on which those worlds are strung, to bring this knowledge out of the hiddenness; to use it, as the old alchemists declared that they could use their tincture, to transmute all baser; metals into gold.

So here is your vocation set out: a vocation so various in its opportunities, that you can hardly fail to find something to do. It is your business to actualise within the world of time and space--perhaps by great endeavours in the field of heroic action, perhaps only by small ones in field and market, tram and tube, office and drawing-room, in the perpetual give-and-take of the common life--that more real life, that holy creative energy, which this world manifests as a whole but indifferently. You shall work for mercy, order, beauty, significance: shall mend where you find things broken, make where you find the need. "Adoro te devote, latens Deitas," said St. Thomas in his great mystical hymn: and the practical side of that adoration consists in the bringing of the Real Presence from its hiddenness, and exhibiting it before the eyes of other men. Hitherto you have not been very active in this matter: yet it is the purpose for which you exist, and your contemplative consciousness, if you educate it, will soon make this fact clear to you. The teeming life of nature has yielded up to your loving attention many sacramental images of Reality: seen in the light of charity, it is far more sacred and significant than you supposed. What about _your_ life? Is that a theophany too? "Each oak doth cry I AM," says Vaughan. Do you proclaim by your existence the grandeur, the beauty, the intensity, the living wonder of that Eternal Reality within which, at this moment, you stand? Do your hours of contemplation and of action harmonise?

If they did harmonise--if everybody's did--then, by these individual adjustments the complete group-consciousness of humanity would be changed, brought back into conformity with the Transcendent; and the spiritual world would be actualised within the temporal order at last. Then, that world of false imagination, senseless conflicts, and sham values, into which our children are now born, would be annihilated. The whole race, not merely a few of its noblest, most clearsighted spirits, would be "in union with God"; and men, transfused by His light and heat, direct and willing agents of His Pure Activity, would achieve that completeness of life which the mystics dare to call "deification." This is the substance of that redemption of the world, which all religions proclaim or demand: the consummation which is crudely imagined in the Apocalyptic dreams of the prophets and seers. It is the true incarnation of the Divine Wisdom: and you must learn to see with Paul the pains and disorders of creation--your own pains, efforts, and difficulties too--as incidents in the travail of that royal birth. Patriots have sometimes been asked to "think imperially." Mystics are asked to think celestially; and this, not when considering the things usually called spiritual, but when dealing with the concrete accidents, the evil and sadness, the cruelty, failure, and degeneration of life.

So, what is being offered to you is not merely a choice amongst new states of consciousness, new emotional experiences--though these are indeed involved in it--but, above all else, a larger and intenser life, a career, a total consecration to the interests of the Real. This life shall not be abstract and dreamy, made up, as some imagine, of negations. It shall be violently practical and affirmative; giving scope for a limitless activity of will, heart, and mind working within the rhythms of the Divine Idea. It shall cost much, making perpetual demands on your loyalty, trust, and self-sacrifice: proving now the need and the worth of that training in renunciation which was forced on you at the beginning of your interior life. It shall be both deep and wide, embracing in its span all those aspects of Reality which the gradual extension of your contemplative powers has disclosed to you: making "the inner and outer worlds to be indivisibly One." And because the emphasis is now for ever shifted from the accidents to the substance of life, it will matter little where and how this career is actualised--whether in convent or factory, study or battlefield, multitude or solitude, sickness or strength. These fluctuations of circumstance will no longer dominate you; since "it is Love that payeth for all."

Yet by all this it is not meant that the opening up of the universe, the vivid consciousness of a living Reality and your relation with it, which came to you in contemplation, will necessarily be a constant or a governable feature of your experience. Even under the most favourable circumstances, you shall and must move easily and frequently between that spiritual fruition and active work in the world of men. Often enough it will slip from you utterly; often your most diligent effort will fail to recapture it, and only its fragrance will remain. The more intense those contacts have been, the more terrible will be your hunger and desolation when they are thus withdrawn: for increase of susceptibility means more pain as well as more pleasure, as every artist knows. But you will find in all that happens to you, all that opposes and grieves you--even in those inevitable hours of darkness when the doors of true perception seem to close, and the cruel tangles of the world are all that you can discern--an inward sense of security which will never cease. All the waves that buffet you about, shaking sometimes the strongest faith and hope, are yet parts and aspects of one Ocean. Did they wreck you utterly, that Ocean would receive you; and there you would find, overwhelming and transfusing you, the unfathomable Substance of all life and joy. Whether you realise it in its personal or impersonal manifestation, the universe is now friendly to you; and as he is a suspicious and unworthy lover who asks every day for renewed demonstrations of love, so you do not demand from it perpetual reassurances. It is enough, that once it showed you its heart. A link of love now binds you to it for evermore: in spite of derelictions, in spite of darkness and suffering, your will is harmonised with the Will that informs the Whole.

We said, at the beginning of this discussion, that mysticism was the art of union with Reality: that it was, above all else, a Science of Love. Hence, the condition to which it looks forward and towards which the soul of the contemplative has been stretching out, is a condition of _being_, not of _seeing_. As the bodily senses have been produced under pressure of man's physical environment, and their true aim is not the enhancement of his pleasure or his knowledge, but a perfecting of his adjustment to those aspects of the natural world which concern him--so the use and meaning of the spiritual senses are strictly practical too. These, when developed by a suitable training, reveal to man a certain measure of Reality: not in order that he may gaze upon it, but in order that he may react to it, learn to live in, with, and for it; growing and stretching into more perfect harmony with the Eternal Order, until at last, like the blessed ones of Dante's vision, the clearness of his flame responds to the unspeakable radiance of the Enkindling Light.

END

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Practical Mysticism...Chapter IX...The Third Form of Contemplation

The hard separation which some mystical writers insist upon making between "natural" and "supernatural" contemplation, has been on the whole productive of confusion rather than clearness: for the word "supernatural" has many unfortunate associations for the mind of the plain man. It at once suggests to him visions and ecstasies, superstitious beliefs, ghosts, and other disagreeable interferences with the order which he calls "natural"; and inclines him to his old attitude of suspicion in respect of all mystical things. But some word we must have, to indicate the real cleavage which exists between the second and third stages in the development of the contemplative consciousness: the real change which, if you would go further on these interior paths, must now take place in the manner of your apprehension of Reality. Hitherto, all that you have attained has been--or at least has seemed to you--the direct result of your own hard work. A difficult self-discipline, the slowly achieved control of your vagrant thoughts and desires, the steady daily practice of recollection, a diligent pushing out of your consciousness from the superficial to the fundamental, an unselfish loving attention; all this has been rewarded by the gradual broadening and deepening of your perceptions, by an initiation into the movements of a larger life, You have been a knocker, a seeker, an asker: have beat upon the Cloud of Unknowing "with a sharp dart of longing love." A perpetual effort of the will has characterised your inner development. Your contemplation, in fact, as the specialists would say, has been "active," not "infused."

But now, having achieved an awareness--obscure and indescribable indeed, yet actual--of the enfolding presence of Reality, under those two forms which the theologians call the "immanence" and the "transcendence" of the Divine, a change is to take place in the relation between your finite human spirit and the Infinite Life in which at last it knows itself to dwell. All that will now come to you--and much perhaps will come--will happen as it seems without effort on your own part: though really it will be the direct result of that long stress and discipline which has gone before, and has made it possible for you to feel the subtle contact of deeper realities. It will depend also on the steady continuance--often perhaps through long periods of darkness and boredom--of that poise to which you have been trained: the stretching-out of the loving and surrendered will into the dimness and silence, the continued trustful habitation of the soul in the atmosphere of the Essential World. You are like a traveller arrived in a new country. The journey has been a long one; and the hardships and obstacles involved in it, the effort, the perpetual conscious pressing forward, have at last come to seem the chief features of your inner life. Now, with their cessation, you feel curiously lost; as if the chief object of your existence had been taken away. No need to push on any further: yet, though there is no more that you can do of yourself, there is much that may and must be done to you. The place that you have come to seems strange and bewildering, for it lies far beyond the horizons of human thought. There are no familiar landmarks, nothing on which you can lay hold. You "wander to and fro," as the mystics say, "in this fathomless ground"; surrounded by silence and darkness, struggling to breathe this rarefied air. Like those who go to live in new latitudes, you must become acclimatised. Your state, then, should now be wisely passive; in order that the great influences which surround you may take and adjust your spirit, that the unaccustomed light, which now seems to you a darkness, may clarify your eyes, and that you may be transformed from a visitor into an inhabitant of that supernal Country which St. Augustine described as "no mere
vision, but a home."

You are therefore to let yourself go; to cease all conscious, anxious striving and pushing. Finding yourself in this place of darkness and quietude, this "Night of the Spirit," as St. John of the Cross has called it, you are to dwell there meekly; asking nothing, seeking nothing, but with your doors flung wide open towards God. And as you do thus, there will come to you an ever clearer certitude that this darkness enveils the goal for which you have been seeking from the first; the final Reality with which you are destined to unite, the perfect satisfaction of your most ardent and most sacred desires. It is there, but you cannot by your efforts reach it. This realisation of your own complete impotence, of the resistance which the Transcendent--long sought and faithfully served--now seems to offer to your busy outgoing will and love, your ardour, your deliberate self-donation, is at once the most painful and most essential phase in the training of the human soul. It brings you into that state of passive suffering which is to complete the decentralisation of your character, test the purity of your love, and perfect your education in humility.

Here, you must oppose more thoroughly than ever before the instincts and suggestions of your separate, clever, energetic self; which, hating silence and dimness, is always trying to take the methods of Martha into the domain of Mary, and seldom discriminates between passivity and sloth. Perhaps you will find, when you try to achieve this perfect self-abandonment, that a further, more drastic self-exploration, a deeper, more searching purification than that which was forced upon you by your first experience of the recollective state is needed. The last fragments of selfhood, the very desire for spiritual satisfaction--the fundamental human tendency to drag down the Simple Fact and make it ours, instead of offering ourselves to it--must be sought out and killed. In this deep contemplation, this profound Quiet, your soul gradually becomes conscious of a constriction, a dreadful narrowness of personality; something still existing in itself, still tending to draw inwards to its own centre, and keeping it from that absolute surrender which is the only way to peace. An attitude of perfect generosity, complete submission, willing acquiescence in anything that may happen--even in failure and death--is here your only hope: for union with Reality can only be a union of love, a glad and humble self-mergence in the universal life. You must, so far as you are able, give yourself up to, "die into," melt into the Whole; abandon all efforts to lay hold of It. More, you must be willing that it should lay hold of you. "A pure bare going forth," says Tauler, trying to describe the sensations of the self at this moment. "None," says Ruysbroeck, putting this same experience, this meek outstreaming of the bewildered spirit, into other language, "is sure of Eternal Life, unless he has died with his own attributes wholly into God."

It is unlikely that agreeable emotions will accompany this utter self-surrender; for everything will now seem to be taken from you, nothing given in exchange. But if you are able to make it, a mighty transformation will result. From the transitional plane of darkness, you will be reborn into another "world," another stage of realisation: and find yourself, literally, to be other than you were before. Ascetic writers tell us that the essence of the change now effected consists in the fact that "God's _action_ takes the place of man's _activity_"--that the surrendered self "does not act, but receives." By this they mean to describe, as well as our concrete language will permit, the new and vivid consciousness which now invades the contemplative; the sense which he has of being as it were helpless in the grasp of another Power, so utterly part of him, so completely different from him--so rich and various, so transfused with life and feeling, so urgent and so all-transcending--that he can only think of it as God. It is for this that the dimness and steadily increasing passivity of the stage of Quiet has been preparing him; and it is out of this willing quietude and ever-deepening obscurity that the new experiences come.

"O night that didst lead thus,
O night more lovely than the dawn of light,
O night that broughtest us
Lover to lover's sight--
Lover with loved in marriage of delight,"

says St. John of the Cross in the most wonderful of all mystical poems. "He who has had experience of this," says St. Teresa of the same stage of apprehension, "will understand it in some measure: but it cannot be more clearly described because what then takes place is so obscure. All I am able to say is, that the soul is represented as being close to God; and that there abide a conviction thereof so certain and strong, that it cannot possibly help believing so."

This sense, this conviction, which may be translated by the imagination into many different forms, is the substance of the greatest experiences and highest joys of the mystical saints. The intensity with which it is realised will depend upon the ardour, purity, and humility of the experiencing soul: but even those who feel it faintly are convinced by it for evermore. In some great and generous spirits, able to endure the terrific onslaught of Reality, it may even reach a vividness by which all other things are obliterated; and the self, utterly helpless under the inundations of this transcendent life-force, passes into that simple state of consciousness which is called Ecstasy.

But you are not to be frightened by these special manifestations; or to suppose that here the road is barred against you. Though these great spirits have as it were a genius for Reality, a susceptibility to supernal impressions, so far beyond your own small talent that there seems no link between you: yet you have, since you are human, a capacity for the Infinite too. With less intensity, less splendour, but with a certitude which no arguments will ever shake, this sense of the Living Fact, and of its mysterious contacts with and invasions of the human spirit, may assuredly be realised by you. This realisation--sometimes felt under the symbols of personality, sometimes under those of an impersonal but life-giving Force, Light, Energy, or Heat--is the ruling character of the third phase of contemplation; and the reward of that meek passivity, that "busy idleness" as the mystics sometimes call it, which you have been striving to attain. Sooner or later, if you are patient, it will come to you through the darkness: a mysterious contact, a clear certitude of intercourse and of possession--perhaps so gradual in its approach that the break, the change from the ever-deepening stillness and peace of the second phase, is hardly felt by you; perhaps, if your nature be ardent and unstable, with a sudden shattering violence, in a "storm of love."

In either case, the advent of this experience is incalculable, and completely outside your own control. So far, to use St. Teresa's well-known image, you have been watering the garden of your spirit by hand; a poor and laborious method, yet one in which there is a definite relation between effort and result. But now the watering-can is taken from you, and you must depend upon the rain: more generous, more fruitful, than anything which your own efforts could manage, but, in its incalculable visitations, utterly beyond your control. Here all one can say is this: that if you acquiesce in the heroic demands which the spiritual life now makes upon you, if you let yourself go, eradicate the last traces of self-interest even of the most spiritual kind--then, you have established conditions under which the forces of the spiritual world can work on you, heightening your susceptibilities, deepening and purifying your attention, so that you are able to taste and feel more and more of the inexhaustible riches of Reality.

Thus dying to your own will, waiting for what is given, infused, you will presently find that a change in your apprehension has indeed taken place: and that those who said self-loss was the only way to realisation taught no pious fiction but the truth. The highest contemplative experience to which you have yet attained has seemed above all else a still awareness. The cessation of your own striving, a resting upon and within the Absolute World--these were its main characteristics for your consciousness. But now, this Ocean of Being is no longer felt by you as an emptiness, a solitude without bourne. Suddenly you know it to be instinct with a movement and life too great for you to apprehend. You are thrilled by a mighty energy, uncontrolled by you, unsolicited by you: its higher vitality is poured into your soul. You enter upon an experience for which all the terms of power, thought, motion, even of love, are inadequate: yet which contains within itself the only complete expression of all these things. Your strength is now literally made perfect in weakness: because of the completeness of your dependence, a fresh life is infused into you, such as your old separate existence never knew. Moreover, to that diffused and impersonal sense of the Infinite, in which you have dipped yourself, and which swallows up and completes all the ideas your mind has ever built up with the help of the categories of time and space, is now added the consciousness of a Living Fact which includes, transcends, completes all that you mean by the categories of personality and of life. Those ineffective, half-conscious attempts towards free action, clear apprehension, true union, which we dignify by the names of will, thought, and love are now seen matched by an Absolute Will, Thought, and Love; instantly recognised by the contemplating spirit as the highest reality it yet has known, and evoking in it a passionate and a humble joy.

This unmistakable experience has been achieved by the mystics of every religion; and when we read their statements, we know that all are speaking of the same thing. None who have had it have ever been able to doubt its validity. It has always become for them the central fact, by which all other realities must be tested and graduated. It has brought to them the deep consciousness of sources of abundant life now made accessible to man; of the impact of a mighty energy, gentle, passionate, self-giving, creative, which they can only call Absolute Love. Sometimes they feel this strange life moving and stirring within them. Sometimes it seems to pursue, entice, and besiege them. In every case, they are the passive objects upon which it works. It is now another Power which seeks the separated spirit and demands it; which knocks at the closed door of the narrow personality; which penetrates the contemplative consciousness through and through, speaking, stirring, compelling it; which sometimes, by its secret irresistible pressure, wins even the most recalcitrant in spite of themselves. Sometimes this Power is felt as an impersonal force, the unifying cosmic energy, the indrawing love which gathers all things into One; sometimes as a sudden access of vitality, a light and heat, enfolding and penetrating the self and making its languid life more vivid and more real; sometimes as a personal and friendly Presence which counsels and entreats the soul.

In each case, the mystics insist again that this is God; that here under these diverse manners the soul has immediate intercourse with Him. But we must remember that when they make this declaration, they are speaking from a plane of consciousness far above the ideas and images of popular religion; and from a place which is beyond the judiciously adjusted horizon of philosophy. They mean by this word, not a notion, however august; but an experienced Fact so vivid, that against it the so-called facts of daily life look shadowy and insecure. They say that this Fact is "immanent"; dwelling in, transfusing, and discoverable through every aspect of the universe, every movement of the game of life--as you have found in the first stage of contemplation. There you may hear its melody and discern its form. And further, that It is "transcendent"; in essence exceeding and including the sum of those glimpses and contacts which we obtain by self-mergence in life, and in Its simplest manifestations above and beyond anything to which reason can attain--"the Nameless Being, of Whom nought can be said." This you discovered to be true in the second stage. But in addition to this, they say also, that this all-pervasive, all-changing, and yet changeless One, Whose melody is heard in all movement, and within Whose Being "the worlds are being told like beads," calls the human spirit to an immediate intercourse, a _unity_, a fruition, a divine give-and-take, for which the contradictory symbols of feeding, of touching, of marriage, of immersion, are all too poor; and which evokes in the fully conscious soul a passionate and a humble love. "He devours us and He feeds us!" exclaims Ruysbroeck. "Here," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "the soul in a wonderful and unspeakable manner both seizes and is seized upon, devours and is herself devoured, embraces and is violently embraced: and by the knot of love she unites herself with God, and is with Him as the Alone with the Alone."

The marvellous love-poetry of mysticism, the rhapsodies which extol the spirit's Lover, Friend, Companion, Bridegroom; which describe the "deliberate speed, majestic instancy" of the Hound of Heaven chasing the separated soul, the onslaughts, demands, and caresses of this "stormy, generous, and unfathomable love"--all this is an attempt, often of course oblique and symbolic in method, to express and impart this transcendent secret, to describe that intense yet elusive state in which alone union with the living heart of Reality is possible. "How delicately Thou teachest love tome!" cries St. John of the Cross; and here indeed we find all the ardours of all earthly lovers justified by an imperishable Objective, which reveals Itself in all things that we truly love, and beyond all these things both seeks us and compels us, "giving more than we can take and asking more than we can pay."

You do not, you never will know, _what_ this Objective is: for as Dionysius teaches, "if any one saw God and understood what he saw, then it was not God that he saw, but something that belongs to Him." But you do know now that it exists, with an intensity which makes all other existences unreal; save in so far as they participate in this one Fact. "Some contemplate the Formless, and others meditate on Form: but the wise man knows that Brahma is beyond both." As you yield yourself more and more completely to the impulses of this intimate yet unseizable Presence, so much the sweeter and stronger--so much the more constant and steady--will your intercourse with it become. The imperfect music of your adoration will be answered and reinforced by another music, gentle, deep, and strange; your out-going movement, the stretching forth of your desire from yourself to something other, will be answered by a movement, a stirring, within you yet not conditioned by you. The wonder and variety of this intercourse is never-ending. It includes in its sweep every phase of human love and self-devotion, all beauty and all power, all suffering and effort, all gentleness and rapture: here found in synthesis. Going forth into the bareness and darkness of this unwalled world of high contemplation, you there find stored for you, and at last made real, all the highest values, all the dearest and noblest experiences of the world of growth and change.

You see now what it is that you have been doing in the course of your mystical development. As your narrow heart stretched to a wider sympathy with life, you have been surrendering progressively to larger and larger existences, more and more complete realities: have been learning to know them, to share their very being, through the magic of disinterested love. First, the manifested, flowing, evolving life of multiplicity: felt by you in its wonder and wholeness, once you learned to yield yourself to its rhythms, received in simplicity the undistorted messages of sense. Then, the actual unchanging ground of life, the eternal and unconditioned Whole, transcending all succession: a world inaccessible alike to senses and intelligence, but felt--vaguely, darkly, yet intensely--by the quiet and surrendered consciousness. But now you are solicited, whether you will or no, by a greater Reality, the final inclusive Fact, the Unmeasured Love, which "is through all things everlastingly": and yielding yourself to it, receiving and responding to its obscure yet ardent communications, you pass beyond the cosmic experience to the personal encounter, the simple yet utterly inexpressible union of the soul with its God.

And this threefold union with Reality, as your attention is focussed now on one aspect, now on another, of its rich simplicity, will be actualised by you in many different ways: for you are not to suppose that an unchanging barren ecstasy is now to characterise your inner life. Though the sense of your own dwelling within the Eternal transfuses and illuminates it, the sense of your own necessary efforts, a perpetual renewal of contact with the Spiritual World, a perpetual self-donation, shall animate it too. When the greater love overwhelms the lesser, and your small self-consciousness is lost in the consciousness of the Whole, it will be felt as an intense stillness, a quiet fruition of Reality. Then, your very selfhood seems to cease, as it does in all your moments of great passion; and you are "satisfied and overflowing, and with Him beyond yourself eternally fulfilled." Again, when your own necessary activity comes into the foreground, your small energetic love perpetually pressing to deeper and deeper realisation--"tasting through and through, and seeking through and through, the fathomless ground" of the Infinite and Eternal--it seems rather a perpetually renewed encounter than a final achievement. Since you are a child of Time as well as of Eternity, such effort and satisfaction, active and passive love are both needed by you, if your whole life is to be brought into union with the inconceivably rich yet simple One in Whom these apparent opposites are harmonised. Therefore seeking and finding, work and rest, conflict and peace, feeding on God and self-immersion in God, spiritual marriage and spiritual death--these contradictory images are all wanted, if we are to represent the changing moods of the living, growing human spirit; the diverse aspects under which it realises the simple fact of its intercourse with the Divine.

Each new stage achieved in the mystical development of the spirit has meant, not the leaving behind of the previous stages, but an adding on to them: an ever greater extension of experience, and enrichment of personality. So that the total result of this change, this steady growth of your transcendental self, is not an impoverishment of the sense-life in the supposed interests of the super-sensual, but the addition to it of another life--a huge widening and deepening of the field over which your attention can play. Sometimes the mature contemplative consciousness narrows to an intense point of feeling, in which it seems indeed "alone with the Alone": sometimes it spreads to a vast apprehension of the Universal Life, or perceives the common things of sense aflame with God. It moves easily and with no sense of incongruity from hours of close personal communion with its Friend and Lover to self-loss in the "deep yet dazzling darkness" of the Divine Abyss: or, re-entering that living world of change which the first form of contemplation disclosed to it, passes beyond those discrete manifestations of Reality to realise the Whole which dwells in and inspires every part. Thus ascending to the mysterious fruition of that Reality which is beyond image, and descending again to the loving contemplation and service of all struggling growing things, it now finds and adores everywhere--in the sky and the nest, the soul and the void--one Energetic Love which "is measureless, since it is all that exists," and of which the patient up-climb of the individual soul, the passionate outpouring of the Divine Mind, form the completing opposites.

Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People
Practical Mysticism...Chapter X...The Mystical Life

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The Six Enneads... By Plotinus (250 AD)

Index/Title Page

Porphyry: On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of his Work

• THE FIRST ENNEAD
• FIRST TRACTATE...THE ANIMATE AND THE MAN. (13 Sections)
• SECOND TRACTATE...ON VIRTUE. (7 Sections)
• THIRD TRACTATE...ON DIALECTIC [THE UPWARD WAY]. (6 Sections)
• FOURTH TRACTATE...ON TRUE HAPPINESS. (16 Sections)
• FIFTH TRACTATE...HAPPINESS AND EXTENSION OF TIME. (10 Sections)
• SIXTH TRACTATE...BEAUTY. (9 Sections)
• SEVENTH TRACTATE...ON THE PRIMAL GOOD AND SECONDARY FORMS OF GOOD..[OTHERWISE,"ON HAPPINESS"]. (3 Sections)
• EIGHTH TRACTATE...ON THE NATURE AND SOURCE OF EVIL. (12 Sections)
• NINTH TRACTATE..."THE REASONED DISMISSAL". (1 Section)
• THE SECOND ENNEAD
• FIRST TRACTATE...ON THE KOSMOS OR ON THE HEAVENLY SYSTEM. (8 Sections
• SECOND TRACTATE...THE HEAVENLY CIRCUIT. (3 sections)
• THIRD TRACTATE...ARE THE STARS CAUSES? (18 Sections)
  
• FOURTH TRACTATE...MATTER IN ITS TWO KINDS. (16 Sections)


• FIFTH TRACTATE...ON POTENTIALITY AND ACTUALITY. (5 Sections)


• SIXTH TRACTATE...QUALITY AND FORM-IDEA. (3 Sections)


• SEVENTH TRACTATE...ON COMPLETE TRANSFUSION. (3 Sections)


• EIGHTH TRACTATE...WHY DISTANT OBJECTS APPEAR SMALL. (2 Sections)


• NINTH TRACTATE...AGAINST THOSE THAT AFFIRM THE CREATOR OF THE KOSMOS AND THE KOSMOS ITSELF TO BE EVIL: [GENERALLY QUOTED AS "AGAINST THE GNOSTICS"]. (18 Sections)


• THE THIRD ENNEAD
• FIRST TRACTATE...FATE. (10 Sections)
• SECOND TRACTATE...ON PROVIDENCE(1). (18 Sections)
• THIRD TRACTATE...ON PROVIDENCE(2). (7 Sections)
• FOURTH TRACTATE...OUR TUTELARY SPIRIT. (6 Sections)
• FIFTH TRACTATE...ON LOVE.(10 Sections)
• SIXTH TRACTATE...THE IMPASSIVITY OF THE UNEMBODIED. (19 Sections)
• SEVENTH TRACTATE...TIME AND ETERNITY. (13 Sections)
• EIGHTH TRACTATE...NATURE CONTEMPLATION AND THE ONE. (10 Sections)
• NINTH TRACTATE...DETACHED CONSIDERATIONS. (3 Sections)
• THE FOURTH ENNEAD
• FIRST TRACTATE...ON THE ESSENCE OF THE SOUL(1). (1 Section)
• SECOND TRACTATE...ON THE ESSENCE OF THE SOUL(2). (2 Sections)
• THIRD TRACTATE...PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL(1). (32 Sections)
• FOURTH TRACTATE...PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL(2). (45 Sections)
• FIFTH TRACTATE...PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL(3). [ALSO ENTITLED "ON SIGHT"]. (8 Sections)
• SIXTH TRACTATE...PERCEPTION AND MEMORY. (3 Sections)
• SEVENTH TRACTATE...THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. (15 Sections)
• EIGHTH TRACTATE...THE SOUL'S DESCENT INTO BODY. (8 Sections)
• NINTH TRACTATE...ARE ALL SOULS ONE?. (5 Sections)
• THE FIFTH ENNEAD
• FIRST TRACTATE...THE THREE INITIAL HYPOSTASES. (12 Sections)
• SECOND TRACTATE...THE ORIGIN AND ORDER OF THE BEINGS. FOLLOWING ON THE FIRST. (2 Sections)
• THIRD TRACTATE...THE KNOWING HYPOSTASES AND THE TRANSCENDENT. (17 Sections)
• FOURTH TRACTATE...HOW THE SECONDARIES RISE FROM THE FIRST: AND ON THE ONE. (2 Sections)
• FIFTH TRACTATE...THAT THE INTELLECTUAL BEINGS ARE NOT OUTSIDE THE INTELLECTUAL-PRINCIPLE: AND ON THE NATURE OF THE GOOD. (13 Sections)
• SIXTH TRACTATE...THAT THE PRINCIPLE TRANSCENDING BEING HAS NO INTELLECTUAL ACT. WHAT BEING HAS INTELLECTION PRIMALLY AND WHAT BEING HAS IT SECONDARILY. (6 Sections)
• SEVENTH TRACTATE...IS THERE AN IDEAL ARCHETYPE OF PARTICULAR BEINGS? (3 Sections)
• EIGHTH TRACTATE...ON THE INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY. (13 Sections)
• NINTH TRACTATE...THE INTELLECTUAL-PRINCIPLE, THE IDEAS, AND THE AUTHENTIC EXISTENCE. (14 Sections)
• THE SIXTH ENNEAD
• FIRST TRACTATE...ON THE KINDS OF BEING(1). (30 Sections)
• SECOND TRACTATE...ON THE KINDS OF BEING(2). (22 Sections)
• THIRD TRACTATE...ON THE KINDS OF BEING(3). (28 Sections)
• FOURTH TRACTATE...ON THE INTEGRAL OMNIPRESENCE OF THE AUTHENTIC EXISTENT(1). (16 Sections)
• FIFTH TRACTATE...ON THE INTEGRAL OMNIPRESENCE OF THE AUTHENTIC EXISTENT(2). (12 Sections)
• SIXTH TRACTATE...ON NUMBERS. (18 Sections)
• SEVENTH TRACTATE...HOW THE MULTIPLICITY OF THE IDEAL-FORMS CAME INTO BEING: AND UPON THE GOOD. (42 Sections)
• EIGHTH TRACTATE...ON FREE-WILL AND THE WILL OF THE ONE. (21 Sections)
• NINTH TRACTATE...ON THE GOOD, OR THE ONE. (11 Sections)

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