About Hesychasm

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interpreter in Gregory Palamas in the 14th century. Palamas, the most influential Greek Orthodox

theologian of the Middle Ages, taught that the most effective way to increase our awareness, integrate body

and soul, and open ourselves to God is to attend to our breathing.

In The Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts, Gregory described the process of pure prayer beyond

words or thoughts or concepts and advised his students what to expect.

The first step is to enter into our own body, not to flee from it. While this is very difficult at the beginning,

with repeated effort in time attention to breathing gathers together the mind that has been dissipated and

produces inner detachment and freedom.

For Palamas, this activity is not itself grace, but he tells us that God works in and through the body and soul

together to communicate supernatural gifts. As long as we have not experienced this transformation, we

believe that the body is always driven by corporeal and material passions.

In language that is at times similar to the Buddhist tradition, Palamas tells us that theoretical knowledge

cannot grasp this transformation. Only experience can convince a person that another form of life, free

Through prayer and the grace of God, every aspect of ourselves is transformed and crowned with virtue.

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In solitude and retirement the Hesychast repeats the Jesus Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have

mercy on me, a sinner." The Hesychast prays the Jesus Prayer 'with the heart'—with meaning, with intent,

'for real' (see ontic). He never treats the Jesus Prayer as a string of syllables whose 'surface' or overt verbal

meaning is secondary or unimportant. He considers bare repetition of the Jesus Prayer as a mere string of

syllables, perhaps with a 'mystical' inner meaning beyond the overt verbal meaning, to be worthless or even

dangerous. This emphasis on the actual, real invocation of Jesus Christ marks a divergence from Eastern

forms of meditation.

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Orthodox Tradition warns against seeking ecstasy as an end in itself. Hesychasm is a traditional complex of

ascetical practices embedded in the doctrine and practice of the Orthodox Church and intended to purify the

member of the Orthodox Church and to make him ready for an encounter with God that comes to him when

of Hesychast practice are considered secondary and unimportant, even quite dangerous. Moreover, seeking

after unusual 'spiritual' experiences can itself cause great harm, ruining the soul and the mind of the seeker.

Such a seeking after 'spiritual' experiences can lead to spiritual delusion (Ru. prelest, Gr. plani)—the

antonym of sobriety

an emphasis on freedom here, on increasing freedom, and thereby love. This is very Buddhist in some ways

but differs in being very relational and personal and not, rather, empty.

uncreated energies.

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Excerpt - on Page 3: " ... Their loving presence as personalized relations of uncreated energies of love

surrounds us, permeates us, bathes us constantly in their great loving communication ... "

Excerpt - on Page 61: " ... distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies. This is closely

related to his theology of light; for the uncreated energies are energies of light and of love. ... "

Excerpt - " ... to the uncreated energies of God, as well as trinitarian interpretations and the whole project of

process theology. ... "

Excerpt - " ... is solved and the door found in the horizon of immanence: Christianity's disclosure of an

immediate experi- ence of the uncreated energies of a radically transcendent, personal God. Here philosophical

solutions and theological truth coincide: the truth is a Who. Such ... "

I like to draw a soteriological distinction between a) what must we do to be saved and b) what can we do to

give God the greatest possible glory. Insofar as I largely conceive of the journey in terms of an aesthetic

teleology, both for me and for the cosmos, the Jesuit motto --- ad majorem Dei gloriam [AMDG], is close

to my heart. In fact, that soteriological distinction is really the same as that drawn by Ignatius in the

Spiritual Exercises, where he sets forth his Degrees of Humility. In a nutshell, my rough paraphrasing: 1)

we wouldn't want to ever offend God grievously 2) we wouldn't ever want to offend God even venially 3)

not only would we never want to offend God in the least, we truly want to even imitate Christ even in His

manner of suffering.

Truth be known, in my heterodoxy, I believe in apopkatastasis, or universal salvation, with some nuance. I

allow for the theoretical possibility of eternal separation from God only because I believe that God so loves

us and respects our free will (which is indispensable for authentic love) that God would never coerce us

into a relationship. At the same time, from a practical perspective, God's love and seductive appeal is so

very efficacious, it is difficult for me to conceive of anyone holding out forever.

I think it is apparent how these themes interweave. The answers to What must I do? and What must I do to

be saved? have already been giving humankind before religion arrives on the scene. All men of goodwill

are already in touch with the law written on every person's heart and in a position "to be saved" even

without being imputed invincible ignorance, even without being considered Christians, anonymous or not.

God so loved the world that soteriological issues have already been settled. This is a pneumatological truth

many already recognize, hidden though it may be by various theospeak obfuscations.

Back to my soteriological distinction, from a practical perspective, what religions bring to humanity's table

are answers to such questions as What can we do to give God the greatest possible glory? and prescriptions

for such as imitating Christ. Religions speak with authority to what it is we can hope for. And their coin of

the realm is not the propositional truth of the theoretical, heuristic and normative sciences, which rely most

heavily on inferential aspects of our integral act of knowing (although religion must properly defer to the

answers we get in those foci of concern). The coin of the religious realm is that of truth in relationship,

which includes assent, deference (obsequium), trust, fidelity, loyalty, love, forgiveness and such. The

values to be augmented and realized in this realm as we amplify the epistemic risks we are willing to take

are intrinsic and our commitments to them are unconditional and do not lend themselves to formal

construction. Intrinsic values involve a different calculus than extrinsic, perspectival and relational values.

The beauty is ineffable and infuses all of the other foci of human concern with such a significance as can

only properly be considered tran-significantly and only celebrated ritualistically as transignification and

Eucharist. Hesrt speaks to heart. And the heart has its reasons.

And I say all this by way of suggesting that, in affirming right speech, in searching for the most nearly

perfect articulation of the truth, toward the end of AMDG, I positively affirm a normative Christology. This

is the locus at which it comes to play regarding both what we can hope for and Whom we can trust with

such answers. But AMDG and right speech re: our hopes are not soteriological issues. For distinctly

soteriological issues, I must affirm, rather, a normative pneumatology. Thus Ignatius' Degrees of Humility

set forth rather substantive distinctions.

As I have observed, mostly from a distance, the discussions of nonduality over the years, my lingering

impression, to put it most succinctly, is that confusion tends to reign whenever epistemological

observations get extrapolated into ontological conclusions.

By epistemological, I mean all the different categories that people use for describing how it is that we think

we know what it is we might know. Some of these are:

1) sensation 2) thinking 3) intuition and 4) feeling;

1) descriptive 2) prescriptive 3) evaluative and 4) interpretive;

1) memory 2) understanding 3) will;

1) cognitive 2) affective 3) instinctual;

1) subjective 2) objective 3) intersubjective 4) interobjective;

1) positivist - science 2) philosophic 3) theistic 4) theotic;

1) empirical 2) rational 3) practical 4) relational;

1) apophatic 2)kataphatic 3) affective 4) speculative;

and so on and so forth, some more psychological, some more philosophical, some categories a blend of

such categories.

It is also my belief that, in large measure, our epistemological faculties are geared toward distinctly human

value-realizations and therefore correspond, at least roughly, to the values of 1)truth 2) beauty 3) goodness

and 4)unity, which, for example, religions express in 1) creed 2) cult 3) code and 4) community.

As we move from one value-realization approach to the next, different of our epistemic faculties will seem

to enjoy a primacy, which is to say that they will come to the fore in our experience. For example, during

liturgy, in our cultivation of beauty, we may be at certain points, mostly affectively engaged. Or, when

doing science, we may be moreso cognitively engaged, empirically focused. The important point, here, is

These different categories do represent different faculties which, for the most part, do correspond to

different methodologies which are autonomous. For example, faith and reason are autonomous. Positivist

sciences and normative sciences are autonomous. Apophatic encounters of reality and kataphatic

encounters are distinct, are autonomous. Our social-relational experiences that might inspire assent are

autonomous from our empirical-rational engagements that might inspire speculation. Our practical

approaches are autonomous from our theoretical speculations.

To recognize that these approaches to reality are autonomous is to recognize that they involve radically

different commitments in the form of value-realizations, pursuing truth, beauty, goodness or unity, for

example, and that they employ radically different terms and categories, which is to recognize that they are

And we know this, for example, from Helminiak's hierarchy of the positivist, philosophic, theistic and

theotic foci of human concern, each which appropriates the other. And we know this from the way that

faith relates to reason in fides et ratio. And we know this from Jungian psychology and Enneagram

paradigms that relate the faculties of sensation, thinking, feeling and intuition to our cognitive, affective

and instinctual levels. And we know this as we travel from the IS to the OUGHT, the given to the

normative, the descritive to the prescriptive, in our natural law interpretations and moral reasoning. And we

know this from our affirmation of such as Occam's Razor, where symmetry and beauty and facility guide us

to truth. And we know this whenever it seems that truth comes flying in on the wings of beauty and

I suppose the practical upshot of what I am saying is that we cannot take these different epistemic faculties,

metaphysical knowledge, which yields ontological insights about creation and Creator, which further

informs our theological speculations, which, in turn, have a weighty practical significance for our approach

to theosis, which has profound influence on our life of prayer, our life in community, our unitive strivings,

our formative spiritualities and our transformative journeys. And this is why I see such a real danger in the

radical apophaticisms and gnostic arationalisms that come from the category errors of those who wrongly

extrapolate nondual epistemological experiences to such broad, sweeping ontological conclusions

regarding, even, such metaphysical realities as the essential description of the Creator-creature relationship.

To engage in a seemingly robust description of a Reality to Whom we can otherwise only vaguely refer

(according to all time-honored dogma of every Abrahamic tradition) is heterodox, indeed. One of the

reasons that it is difficult to robustly describe the interplay of our different human faculties, that it is

difficult to attain explanatory adequacy for exactly how this tertradilectical tension navigates us toward our

is to recognize and affirm an unfathomable depth dimension to our human experience of God, creation and

one another.We are fearfully and wondrously made! It is nothing to trivialize through reductionistic

accounts, nothing to romanticize through overly simplistic and pietistic accounts. It is something, instead,

to inspire mysterium tremendum et fascinans!

There are time-honored traditions for discerning spirits, for evaluating alternating consolations and

desolations, for recognizing the fruits of the Spirit, for the treatment of private revelation, for the

recognition of true prophetic voices, for guaging the journey to human authenticity via intellectual

conversion, affective conversion, moral conversion, sociopolitical conversion and religious conversion. By

their fruits, then, ye shall know them. If there is one fruit that leaves a really bad taste in my mouth, then it

is impolitic speech and incivil, ad hominem discourse. Let us explore, then, the creative tension between

competing ideas and downplay any interpersonal tension, which is, rather, destructive of all that leads to

truth, beauty, goodness and unity.

In spiritual direction, it can be a thorny task discerning together existential versus psychological issues, or

spiritual emergence/emergencies. In psychology, it can be difficult to diagnose depression as organic or

reactive. The point is that none of this lends itself to a facile analysis.

But, also, in spiritual direction, suppose, for example, that one goal is to see ourselves as God see us, to

employ an Ignatian approach. Or, perhaps our director has us working through our different conceptions of

God, our different images of God. In either case, a proper understanding of our self, our false self, our true

self, or even our no-self, and a proper understanding of God, and a proper understanding of who we are

called to be in relationship to the world, other people, the self, the devil and the Trinity --- will profoundly

impact our life of prayer, our worship, our ministry, our fellowship. If we misconceive God as a stern,

unforgiving Father-figure, as an eternal policeman, then it will affect all of the above understandings and

experiences of self, other, world and God. If we misconceive the creature-Creator relationship when we

come out of a nondual experience, or a no-self experience, then it, too, can profoundly influence all of these

other understanding and experiences. This is not just a danger for people immersed in apophatic

experiences. We have always recognized that wrongful over- and under-emphases on this or that epistemic

capacity can lead to error. For example, an overemphasis on the apohatic and affective can lead to quietism;

on the affective and speculative can lead to encratism; on the kataphatic and affective to fideism and

pietism; on the kataphatic and speculative to rationalism; and so on and so forth. These encounters are

integrally-related. Wrenched out of their context in the whole, they get swollen to madness in their isolation

(to borrow a metaphor from CS Lewis). Quietism, arationalism, gnosticism and other insidious -isms are

the "fruits" of a tree not planted near living water. But so are rationalism, fideism, pietism, scientism and so

on. In my previous post, I prescribe, in mostly philosophical/psychological terms, a remedy, which has

significant practical import for the life of prayer and our life in community and our growth in authenticity

and interiority.

On my own journey, there are many distinctions that I have found very useful for processing my various

experiences. For example, I feel like I can legitimately distinguish between:

1) phenomenal states

2) developmental stages

3) psychic structures

4) epistemological faculties

5) ontological categories

6) metaphysical realities

7) positivist sciences

8) philosophic (normative) sciences

9) practical sciences (including theological)

10) theotic sciences (e.g. formative spirituality)

useful:

1) existential vs theological

2) apophatic vs kataphatic

3) natural vs supernatural

4) immanent vs transcendent

5) impersonal vs personal

and is not lost but transcended on the journey of transformation, which is to say that we go beyond it but

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I do not see anything wrong with viewing creation and creatures as quasi-autonomous realities that exist in

God with both the Creator and the created order operating in and through a Divine matrix of interrelated

causes and effects.

So, I certainly do not equate any conception of the transcendence of this False Self with an experience of

we should be aware that this is a very complex psychospiritual dynamic that doesn't lend itself to facile

analyses and diagnoses, whether from this depression or that, dark nights, enlightenment, the threshold of

contemplation, infused contemplation and so on.

I am grateful to people like Ken Wilber, Tony deMello and Bernadette Roberts for the depth of their

personal sharing and the breadth of their imagination and intellection. It provides much food for thought