Quest Magazine

By Dianne Valla and David Rioux

Since religious man cannot live except in an atmosphere impregnated with the sacred, we must expect to find a large number of techniques for consecrating space

—Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane

Our souls hurt. They hurt in a dozen different ways. We are fed up, bored, despairing, depressed, angry. When our souls hurt enough, we become seriously ill. Whatever the medical diagnosis, the real sickness is a lack of wholeness.

Our left-brained society, with its almost total emphasis on processes involving fact and logic, robs us of a part of ourselves that we need to be completely human. What we lack is an intuitive state of being, a metaphoric way of experiencing a reality that is not grounded in space or time or matter. What we need is an inner life. More than that, we need a way of connecting that inner life to the rest of our being.

participating in rituals, we experience the reality of another dimension. Rituals are ways of bringing the inner life of spirit into the world of space and time. Through mindful participation in meaningful ritual, we learn to live spiritually. We are healed of the illness of separation from ourselves.

Healing rituals uplift the quality of the ground of our being in the same way that working a garden upgrades the soil. A garden is nurtured by gardening; the life of the spirit is nurtured through dedication to ritual. Our disordered souls are healed and made ready for growth. The most profound wounds of a hostile environment and of interpersonal injury can be transformed by consistently and intentionally enacting rituals for healing.

Soul Sanctuary: A Ritual of Healing

Creating a soul sanctuary, aside from having great healing properties of its own, can become a jumping-off place for many other rituals. Almost all rituals are initiated in personal sanctuary space. From that place, other symbolic ritual actions can continue in an environment that already has a feeling of the sacred.

Creating a sanctuary for the soul is a simple task, filled with delight. Sanctuaries can be actual places or places that are real only in the imagination. Perhaps we need to have both kinds. An imagined sanctuary can never be closed due to weather or for repairs or for lack of financial support. The important aspect is that we each select our own special place, whether it be the seaside, a forest, a mountaintop, a view of running water or a waterfall, a special garden, or a sacred power spot.

The only requirement for sanctuary space is that we select a place where we have felt our highest level of peacefulness. The main ingredient is the great inner warmth, security, and peace that we feel in this place. The more often we revisit our soul sanctuary, the more peaceful we will be. Even troubled persons, those with seriously dysfunctional childhoods and memories of no peaceful place at all, have been able to imagine a place where they might feel safe and at peace.

Despite the real simplicity of creating personal sanctuary space, we have discovered that the task can be mind-boggling. For some people it might take time to be able to overcome built-in inertia. What seems to have worked well in healing and growth workshops we have done has been for us to lend our private sanctuaries to others. We'll do the same here. Feel free to borrow one or the other, whichever appeals to you. Use it until you create one of your own, or use it permanently if you choose. There is no rent or copyright on imagined soul sanctuaries.

Dianne's Sanctuary

I have a special place I go when I need to get away from it all. It isn't a real place, but sometimes it is more real to me than any actual location could ever be. I call it the Lighthouse.

I walk along a path of very old, very worn stone slates set into grass. As I walk, I hear my footsteps on the path. At the end of the path is a set of steps leading up to the door of a round turret. I walk up the steps, not even needing to hold the handrail that is there for me should I want to use it. I arrive at the door, a door with a special key that only I possess. From a gold chain on my neck I lift the key to the latch. I can hear the click as the lock turns. I enter, being sure to lock the door behind me. In front of me is a narrow winding staircase that leads to the top floor of the Lighthouse.

Another door leads me to the room itself, my sanctuary room. It is a circular room with windows all around. All the windows are open and the sheer white curtains are blowing slightly in the gentle breeze. I move across the room to sit in the only chair in the room. It is soft, yet it supports my fragile back. I fold my feet under my body and rest in the comfort of the moment. I notice that the room smells fresh and clean. There is even a trace of sandalwood scent as if long ago incense had been burned to honor an ancient deity.

It is so quiet in this room that I can hear, in the distance, the sound of the ocean. It is a calm ocean today. I smell its salt now, and I know that the ocean was once my home. In this room, I know without any doubt that all is well and right and holy. I close my eyes and enter a deep meditation. The world and its cares are gone for me. All there is, is peace.

When I am refreshed, I leave, going back the same way I came. I am careful to lock the door so that nothing can disturb my sanctuary while I am away. I know that I can return again and again and that I will always find what I need here.

David's Sanctuary

There is a special place I go within myself to transcend the pains of the outer world, to seek resolution of a problem, to make ready to receive the answer to a question, to find peace. I call this spot my Hidden Cove.

To begin this inward trip, I sit in a comfortable chair, close my eyes, and take a few slow, deep breaths. Then I'm alone, close to the edge of a great cliff, becoming both an observer and a participant in an interior ritual. The whole scene is lit by the soothing ethereal light of the rising sun. I walk to the very edge of the cliff, where I find a stairway cut into the face of the rock. The black basalt feels smooth under my feet, yet it is not slippery. I see my feet starting slowly down the stairs. Slightly warmed by the early sunlight, the volcanic rock caresses my feet as I descend to a hidden cove along the ocean. With each step down, I feel more and more relaxed.

When I reach the beach, I'm totally relaxed, basking in a pleasant altered state of consciousness. I feel a pleasant, moist breeze blowing from the water across my skin. As I walk onto the beach, the sand feels slightly cool under my feet. There is still a slight chill to the early morning air. I look up to see the dulled dawn sun lighting the sky and coloring the waves a soft golden white. Framed by this splendid backdrop is a campfire burning in the middle of the secluded little beach. Driftwood logs surround the fire. There are a few figures sitting on logs, seemingly huddled around the fire for warmth. I walk purposefully up the beach toward the campfire and sit down on one of the smooth, worn logs. I'm facing both the fire and the ocean.

Directly to my right, on another log, I see my Inner Guide. In a heart-to-heart silent contact, I ask my Guide for the help I need. I sense strong energy vibrations flowing from my Guide to me. Though the other figures—spirit helpers—sit quietly on their logs, I know that they will be available to me when I need them.

A sudden rush of energy from my Guide causes me to look upward. Written across the sky is the answer to the problem I brought with me to this place. I am filled with gratitude; tears wet my eyes. Slowly dropping my eyelids, I let a deep well of thankfulness flow toward my Guide. Then I gaze out at the ocean. After a few minutes, which could be centuries for all I know, I feel totally energized and completely peaceful. I get up slowly, and calmly retrace my path back to the top of the cliff. When I open my eyes, I find I have returned to everyday life fortified with the gift of an answer to my prayer and a state of great peace.

Sanctuaries as Sacred Places

Notice that there are some striking similarities in the two soul sanctuaries. Both have elements that are old and worn. Both are near water, near the ocean in fact. Both are places where one goes to be away from the cares of the world and to find what is deeply desired. Both accounts are rich in sensory images: sight, sound, feel, and even smell.

There are differences, however. You must have noticed that, while one of us remains outdoors, the other goes into a building. One admits other beings into his soul sanctuary; the other takes every precaution to make sure she will be in complete solitude. Both sanctuaries meet the particular needs of the person who created them. Both can be changed any time to fit particular circumstances and needs. What is important is what works.

We each enact our own myth. We each set up a soul sanctuary that brings us peace. As Joseph Campbell says in The Power of Myth:

This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You need a room, or a certain hour or so in a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don't know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

Where will you build your place of healing and peace and sanctuary for your soul?

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Dianne Valla and David Rioux have been a team for more than twenty years. Both come from a background of teaching and have been practicing psychologists. At present, they are writing a novel about the rise of spiritual consciousness and a book of meditations on poetry.

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Originally printed in the March-April 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Booth, Eric. "Beauty is a Verb." Quest  89.2  MARCH-APRIL 2000): 50-53

By Eric Booth

Art and spirit meet in many places. Perhaps the most delicious, perhaps the most important, is in the experience of beauty. Shinto, an ancient spiritual tradition, worships at sites of beauty like waterfalls and rock formations. I believe that all people worship in the experience of beauty. However, in our secularized and hyperkinetic times, we usually overlook the significance of the occasion, and we rarely celebrate it with rituals and respect. Let me share my sense of beauty with you.

Over many years in practicing, teaching, and writing about the arts, I have become more dedicated to the verbs of art than to the nouns. Of course, those nouns—the paintings, music, dance, and theater performances, and later in human history the novels and poems—are as powerful and wonderful as they have been for the last ten thousand years or so. However, in our times we have come to overemphasize the "thing" aspect of art, to the point that our very definition of art now lies in those things.

The nounness of art explains why an overwhelming majority of Americans feel they have no place in the arts; the arts are about those fancy "things" that require experts and education to appreciate. So many feel art is irrelevant except for an annual pilgrimage to The Nutcracker or a haul through the Metropolitan Museum to view multi-million-dollar paintings on a trip to New York. We have noun-ified art just as we have commodified so many aspects of modern life.

I am fascinated by the verbs of art. It is what artists do as they create their nouns; it is what perceivers do when they respond by making connections to those nouns. We all participate in these verbs of creating and perceiving in bits and pieces throughout our lives. Indeed, pursuing this truth is the way to revive the arts in America, as I have argued in my book The Everyday Work of Art. I see beauty as a verb. Yes, there are beautiful things—they abound; but spirit and art really meet on the playground, in the action of beauty.

Beauty can't be a noun, except as an abstract idea like goodness, because it doesn't exist unless you participate in the present tense. Beauty is neither only in the eye of the beholder nor only in a beautiful "thing" itself, no matter how good-looking that thing may be. It resides in both beholder and beheld at the moment of their interaction. Beauty is a skill of experiencing, a kind of dialogue. Like any live-performance work of art, it exists only in the moments when it is happening. Beauty is a seeing or discovery of a satisfying whole that is completed by our participation.

For example, you might scrape together ten or twenty million dollars to buy yourself a nice van Gogh painting of sunflowers. (Don't forget the extra million for a proper security system and insurance.) You hang it on the living room wall, and sit down to visit with it. You might get a transporting sense of its beauty. On the other hand, you might also miss the experience, worrying about the humidity in the room. There will be other times when you sit with it, vaguely enjoying its presence, without really attending to it. Your thoughts are drifting; you are tired; something is bothering you—nothing beautiful is there.

Conversely, the neighbor's six-year-old may have sold you a drawing she made at school: price, a nickel. Mechanically, you stick it on the wall by the phone. And then you notice it; you start to see what the child has done, you see some clever ideas and accomplishments—beauty is there.

Although there are relatively few ultimate human masterworks (thank heavens for museums and performance halls), there is no shortage of beautiful objects, well-made things that require no ticket and will reward your attending with experiences of beauty. There is no dearth of natural beauty if you can see a single tree. Nouns are abundant. What is in short supply is the attending side of the beauty equation—the skills, the habits, the priority of engaging with worthwhile objects to discover beauty.

Beauty is more than nice, more than pretty, more than the opposite of ugly. You are making beauty every time you engage in a process that makes something more satisfying, more efficient, more effective, more elegant, more communicative, more complex, more compelling—more of whatever you see the project might become. In whatever work you invest yourself in—be it writing torts or touting warts, Total Quality Management or massage—beautifying pleases the senses and brings new order to the world.

It just plain feels great to make something beautiful; this is the main reason artists become and remain artists in spite of horrendous career difficulties—it feels good to make beautiful things. This reward alone provides enough joy to sustain many artists' lives. And when artists clog their direct pipeline to beauty with career concerns or emotional sludge, their joy diminishes, their spiritual connection dries out. The philosopher John Dewey made the point elegantly when he said that he couldn't quite define the word aesthetic, but he knew its opposite was anesthetic. Art is about being awake, alive, able to feel, and beauty is its quintessential moment.

You also make beauty every time you attend and connect to the beauty in something well made. Notice the word "connect." This too is a verb of creation. It is not that there are artists and audiences; there are only participators in the creation of beauty, and different people actively participate in different ways.

The power of beauty derives from four inherent truths.

1. Etymologically, "beauty" evolves from a word meaning "the good," "the ideal," "the whole." Beauty is yearning's superhighway, the most direct way to drive toward an individual's ultimate truths—which Paul Tillich described as spirit. We become part of a whole in beauty, which is why the heart opens and we feel connected to others. In beauty, we enter the whole, loving, cohesive world we dream about.

2. Beauty lives only in active collaboration between the thing and the perceiver. It requires that we come out and engage. (We may get that pleasant "nice feeling" of something that is beautiful as we let a symphony wash over us, for example, but we are not tapping what it holds, what it was made to give.) We often mistake the recollection of beauty for beauty—but don't ever forget the difference between a kiss and the remembrance of a kiss.

3. At the heart of that live encounter that we call beauty lies wonder. To experience beauty, we tap into and revive our capacity for wonder; and experiencing wonder reorders the world for a while. In wonder we are not alone; the world has a new pattern; joy and love are the law of the land.

4. In experiencing beauty, we create beauty and we become beautiful. If we experience the beauty of a dancer, we construct the experience by tapping into things we already knew about dance, about body movement, about life; we bring these understandings together in the serious play of perceiving, and make some beauty of our own. In engaging those artistic understandings that we hold inside ourselves in overlooked abundance, we become beautiful and add to the world's storehouse.

My terse grandmother used to warn her misbehaving, adolescent grandchildren with a stern look and the peculiar admonition: "Pretty is as pretty does." Elliptical as her approach was (especially to roughhousing boys), it stopped us in our tracks. We didn't care that much about being "bad," but being ugly . . . . She implicitly suggested that the actions of beauty formed the basics of a character; she gave me my first sense of behavior as a metaphor. It took me decades to appreciate her points, which she made beautifully.

The importance of beauty rises with our awareness of it. To a large degree beauty begets beauty. That doesn't mean we must buy new designer duds; it means that beauty assumes a more central, active place in daily life. With practice, beauty-making becomes a habit of mind. This mindset becomes an ordinary way to experience life, a celebration of the aesthetics of everyday things, which include the way light falls across a sidewalk, the ironic graffiti on an advertisement, and the pattern of wrinkles in a weathered face. The habit of beauty is expressed in a thousand tiny adjustments and thoughts within each day, all aiming toward the highest quality.

Look at the key moment of beauty, the instant when beauty grabs you, all of you, takes your breath away. Everything else stops, and there is only the experience of beauty. The mind ceases whirring. The reactive mechanisms shut off. The ego takes a hike. You are simply there, aware and alive. This is an important event, a mini-nirvana. In this occasion, you are meeting your naturally enlightened self, you are spiritually infused, you are . . . add your own preferred spiritual metaphors.

The moment of beauty is not a passive moment, even though it feels like the beauty reached out and grabbed you. You are doing important things. You are actively attending, you are responding with your heart and mind, with everything you have got. You are applying awareness of a high order. And perhaps most importantly, you are reminding yourself of what you are capable of the rest of the time.

In that moment of beauty, you expand what you know. As you allow yourself to experience the world of a beautiful thing, you change your understandings in response. That is, incidentally, how I distinguish between art and entertainment. Though these can only be determined by the individual involved, entertainment happens within what you already know, while art requires you to expand in order to experience a new world. And beauty woos you into expansion.

Beauty develops the mind and heart; but its power extends even further. Studying the writings of modern physicists, particularly those of Richard Feynmann, I have come to view beauty as one of the great forces in the universe. Feynmann first glimpsed the possibility of beauty as an elemental force when he was in high school. The story goes that he looked bored in science class one day as his classmates typically took three times longer than he did to solve a problem. His perceptive teacher, Mr. Bader, saw the impatient look on his brilliant student's face and came over and whispered a provocative thought to young Feynmann. In scientific terms, he challenged his student with the notion that light, like all things, follows the path of the beautiful. That thought shaped the scientific yearning of one of the creative geniuses of our time.

Feynmann spent a lifetime discovering the truths of beauty in science, as the actual ways the universe works. It might be said beauty is the organizing principle of nature, the structure of the universe. So many of the greatest human minds throughout history have all reported the same experience at the peak moment of finest accomplishment—seeing beauty.

When we intensely experience a clear awareness—whether through spiritual practice, meditation, alternative-consciousness disciplines, love-making, or the athlete's "zone"—in that state everything looks beautiful. The perception of beauty is inherent in enlightenment; and I think the reverse is also true. That is why those small occasions when beauty takes you are so terribly important. We are not offered sips of divine nectar very often, so we must taste whenever we can.

Seek out beauty. Seek it in the museum. Find it in the hardware store and in your mate's turn of phrase. Find it in the work you are doing today and in a dream image tonight. So simple, yet so profound. How can anything so delicious be so good for you?

Be prepared to find beauty, because if you are prepared, you will find it everywhere, even including the garbage dump. Ah, and how do you prepare to be awake to beauty? The answer to that is the spiritual practice you create. Many traditions and approaches provide excellent tools, but you prepare for beauty as an artist, working with the raw materials of spirit you have inside.

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An actor with many shows on Broadway and around the country, Eric Booth has become a writer and teacher of the Art and Education program at the Juilliard School and at Lincoln Center Institute. He is a frequent keynote speaker about the arts and leads workshops around the country. This article is adapted from his book The Everyday Work of Art, published by Sourcebooks in 1997.

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Originally printed in the March-April 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Mitchell B., Liester. "Hesychasm: A Christian Path of Transcendence." Quest  89.2  MARCH-APRIL 2000): 54-59, 65.

By Mitchell B. Liester

An ancient mystical tradition was lost to the Western world nearly a thousand years ago. Now, at the dawn of the new millennium, this profound yet practical path of transcendence is being rediscovered. Its name is hesychasm, from a Greek root meaning "to be still."

Hesychasm's roots extend back almost two thousand years to the beginnings of the Christian church. Today much of what we know about this spiritual path has been gleaned from the writings of mystics who populated the Middle Eastern deserts in the fourth century. These early ascetics are known as the Desert Fathers.

In the eleventh century, the Christian church split into the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. Catholicism rejected hesychasm, which encouraged individual experiences of the divine. As a result, hesychasm disappeared from Western culture but survived because the Orthodox church embraced and preserved this tradition of quiet meditation.

For the last millennium, hesychasm has remained shrouded in obscurity in the West. Why? One reason is that hesychastic texts preserved by the Orthodox Church were written in Greek or the languages of various eastern European countries. This made them inaccessible to most Westerners. Only recently have classics such as The Philokalia and The Ladder of Divine Ascent been translated into English. Another factor has been the cultural and political differences that separated Eastern Europe from the West. The fall of these barriers is permitting greater access to, and understanding of, this spiritual path.

Altered States of Consciousness

Practitioners of hesychasm, known as hesychasts, use Christian terminology to describe their experiences. If we permit ourselves the latitude of translating those descriptions into contemporary psychological terminology, we can glimpse the hesychast's inner world.

Hesychasts describe two types of consciousness: ego-centered and ego-transcendent. The former is a state dominated by attachments to the senses, emotions, intellect, and imagination. The latter involves detachment from those faculties.

The shift from ego-centered to ego-transcendent consciousness is called metanoia in Greek. The literal translation of this term is "transformation of the nous," but the English language contains no exact synonym for the word nous. Misleading translations are "intellect," "mind," or "reason." The nous bears no resemblance to the rational intellect (dianoia in Greek). Whereas the rational intellect uses deductive reasoning, the nous relies upon "immediate experience" or intuition. Therefore, the term metanoia is correctly understood as a shift from ego-centered to nous-centered, ego-transcendent, or, in hesychastic terminology, God-centered consciousness.

The ultimate goal for hesychasts is union with God (Greek theosis). Three steps are required to achieve this goal. The first is dispassion (Greek apatheia), which involves detachment from the senses and the emotions. The second is stillness (Greek hesychia), which requires detachment from the discursive intellect and the imagination. The final step is an abiding state of illumination called deification or perfect union with God (Greek theosis).

Hesychasts employ both physical and mental practices to achieve ego-transcendent consciousness. Although it is convenient to describe these practices separately, hesychasts view them as interwoven and inseparable.

Outer Practices

Physical or "outer" practices are designed to help hesychasts detach from the senses and the passions. What are passions? They are intense emotions that attract and hold attention. The Desert Fathers referred to passions as "diseases of the soul" because they anchor us in ego-centered consciousness (Spidlik 268). Despite this characterization, passions are not considered bad. Rather they are viewed as neutral. Passions are "fallen" (bad) only when they are misdirected.

Hesychasts employ a number of outer practices. For example, novices are encouraged to "withdraw from the world." This practice involves both social isolation and detachment from the passions. Fasting may consist of either complete abstinence from food or moderation in eating. Moderation is considered preferable to extreme deprivation, for the latter is said to increase subsequent overindulgence. Prolonged periods of prayer in conjunction with sleep deprivation are known as vigils. The practice of prostrations involves repeatedly bending the knees and prostrating oneself on the floor. These are performed in order to prevent "distracting cares." The term silence, in the context of physical asceticism, refers to the avoidance of unnecessary talking. Hesychasts advocate limiting speech to a bare minimum rather than total muteness. Isaac the Syrian explained the purpose of silence as awakening the mind to God (Cavarnos, Paths 19).

Through the regular practice of such physical or outer techniques, hesychasts experience a state known as apatheia (dispassion or passionlessness). This state is necessary to maintain higher states of consciousness. Maximus the Confessor, a seventh century hesychast, explained (Kadloubovsky and Palmer, Early Fathers 297):

As a bird tied by the leg, when it starts to rise upwards is pulled back to earth by the string, so the mind which has not yet attained passionlessness, although rising to the knowledge of heavenly things, is pulled back to earth by the passions.

Despite its great importance, passionlessness is a means, not an end. Once attachments to the senses and passions are transcended, attachments to the intellect and imagination remain. Mental or inner practices are used to release those attachments.

Inner Practices

Hesychasts utilize meditation and prayer to detach from their thoughts. The Greek word nipsis describes a state of focused attention in which the object of attention is the thoughts of the intellect. With time and practice, nipsis facilitates detachment from these thoughts.

Four levels of prayer are experienced by hesychasts: verbal prayer, mental prayer, prayer of the heart, and contemplation. Although these can be described as distinct types of prayer, hesychasts do not experience them that way. Instead, they are experienced as unfolding levels of prayer that occur during the spiritual journey.

Verbal prayer (or physical prayer) consists of reading, chanting, or reciting psalms. This form of prayer is sometimes used by hesychasts when they have difficulty sustaining mental prayer. Mental prayer involves speaking words inwardly with the mind, rather that outwardly with the voice. The most common form of mental prayer is the "Jesus Prayer," which has been described by Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain as follows (Cavarnos, Paths 28):

A person placing his mind within the heart and, without speaking with his mouth, but only with inner words spoken in the heart, [says] this brief and single prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me."

The Jesus Prayer is not exclusively a mental prayer. It can be spoken aloud or inwardly with the mind, and can also emanate from the heart.

Various psycho-physiological techniques are associated with the Jesus Prayer. Some monks use a prayer-rope to count recitations of the prayer. Others link this prayer to the breath, heartbeat, prostrations, or thoughts of death.

The third level of prayer, known as pure prayer or prayer of the heart, is said to evolve out of mental prayer. Prayer of the heart has been described as follows (Kadloubovsky and Palmer, Writings 156-7):

The mind should be in the heart'a distinctive feature of the third method of prayer. It should guard the heart while it prays, revolve, remaining always within, and thence, from the depths of the heart, offer up prayers to God.

The final stage of the hesychastic journey is called theoria or contemplation. This stage involves the cessation of all mental activity, at which point one is able to "see God in everything" (Spidlik 327).

Experiences Associated with Hesychastic Practices

On the path to union with God, hesychasts may encounter extraordinary experiences. These are not viewed as byproducts of spiritual practice, as our Western minds might interpret them. Instead, they are attributed directly to God. These experiences include: hesychia, spiritual gifts, divine light, and agape or love.

Hesychia is a state of detached awareness experienced during regular spiritual practice. Hesychia is not merely a phenomenon of the intellect. Instead, it involves detachment from the ego's faculties (the senses, emotions, imagination, and intellect). It is "a state of inner tranquility or mental quietude and concentration" (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware 1:365).

Spiritual gifts are said to originate directly from God, yet hesychasts generally distrust these gifts because they are viewed as distractions on the spiritual journey. Saint Paul (1 Cor. 12.4) described nine spiritual gifts, which Kelsey condensed into five categories: healing and miracles, gifts of proclamation, revelations, discernment of spirits, and wisdom or spiritual knowledge.

Hesychastic writers give sparse attention to the gift of healing, a term that refers to the ability to cure diseases. Their writings clearly state, however, that miracles and healings are gifts, not accomplishments. This distinction highlights the fact that miracles are viewed as resulting from the divine acting through the individual, rather than as an accomplishment of the individual.

The gift of proclamation is more commonly known as prophesy. Contemporary use of this term implies a foretelling of the future, but originally this term had a different meaning. The term prophesy described the transmission of information from ego-transcendent consciousness (a revelation of the Holy Spirit), regardless of whether it related to the present, past, or future.

Today, revelation is often misunderstood as well. This confusion can be attributed to our inability to discriminate between related phenomena. Nikitas Stithatos described revelation as a form of trans-sensory awareness that occurs "when the purified and illumined soul is able to contemplate in a way that transcends normal sense-perception" (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware 4:124). Revelation is different from sensory or intellectual knowledge.

Diakresis or discernment of spirits is the ability to discriminate between different types of thoughts. More specifically, it refers to the ability to distinguish between thoughts originating from the ego and thoughts originating from ego-transcendent consciousness. It is "a kind of eye or lantern of the soul by which man finds his way along the spiritual path without falling into extremes" (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware 4:429).

Knowledge obtained by the nous is different from knowledge obtained by the ego. The former is referred to as spiritual knowledge (Greek gnosis), whereas the latter is called natural knowledge or theoretical knowledge. Gnosis is nondualistic or intuitive, whereas sensory and intellectual knowledge are dualistic. Maximos the Confessor explained: "Spiritual knowledge unites knower and known, while (natural knowledge) is always a cause of change and self-division" (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware 2:282).

Divine Light is an inner light described as "spiritual" or "divine" and "the light of the spirit" (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware 2:39, 280; 3:43). This divine light can be seen with the eyes of the body, the eye of the soul (the nous), or both. Accounts of this light do not reflect an intellectual experience of light, nor are they metaphorical. Instead they describe a direct experience of a suprasensible light which provides knowledge that transcends time, space, and reason.

Agape or spiritual love is the final gift of the spirit. Agape has been described as theocentric as opposed to egocentric love (Sorokin 5). Maximus the Confessor described agape as "that good disposition of the soul in which it prefers nothing that exists to knowledge of God" (Kadloubovsky and Palmer, Early Fathers 287).

Progress on the hesychastic path is associated with increasing degrees of agape and decreasing levels of fear. Eventually, fear is completely transcended as it is replaced by what Diadochos of Photiki referred to as "perfect love" (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware 1:257).

Pitfalls Along the Path

The hesychastic path, like other spiritual journeys, is fraught with pitfalls. These range from relatively minor impediments to serious, life-threatening dangers. Three categories of pitfalls exist, although hesychasts do not group them in this way: early pitfalls, late pitfalls, and pitfalls resulting from interactions with others.

Early pitfalls occur when ego detachment is incomplete. Beginning hesychasts must overcome myriad attachments, so incomplete or partial detachment frequently occurs. For example, hesychasts can detach from thoughts, but not passions. Maximus explained (Kadloubovsky and Palmer, Early Fathers 329):

It is one thing to be freed from thoughts and another to be freed from passions. Men are often freed from thoughts when the objects of their passion are not before their eyes. Yet the passions meanwhile lie concealed in the soul and manifest themselves when the objects appear.

Another pitfall is distraction by mental images. This can lead to discouragement and despair. Ego suppression, which differs from ego transcendence, is yet another danger. Hesychasts strive to transfigure or "deify" their egos rather than suppress them.

Late Pitfalls follow some degrees of ego detachment. For example, travel beyond the limits of the ego can be a frightening experience, particularly if one is ill prepared. From the perspective of the ego, inner silence feels like death. Thus, the preparation that precedes ego detachment can influence whether this journey is a terrifying gauntlet into psychosis or an enduring state of transcendence. For this reason, hesychasts advise that the spiritual journey not be undertaken lightly. Symeon the New Theologian warned: "Some have become totally possessed, and in their madness wander from place to place. . . . Some of them have committed suicide" (Kadloubovsky and Palmer, Writings 153).

Misconstruing transitory experiences of transcendence for an abiding state of transcendence is another danger. This results in a condition termed laziness. Laziness occurs when an individual experiences ego transcendence, but does not work to maintain ego-detachment.

Ego-inflation is another problem. When the rewards of transcendence (or the Grace of God) are mistakenly viewed as accomplishments of the ego, ego-inflation results. Maximus the Confessor warned: "Knowledge is usually followed by conceit and envy, especially in the beginning" (Kadloubovsky and Palmer, Early Fathers 340).

Attachment to spiritual gifts or mystical phenomena is another obstacle. Hesychastic writers teach that such phenomena distract from the ultimate goal of union with god. Therefore, they do not view spiritual gifts as goals to be attained.

Attempts to understand ego-transcendent realms by the rational intellect invariably fail. The ego is incapable of understanding spiritual knowledge. Therefore, attempts at rational depictions of spiritual realms result in incomplete or distorted information.

Pitfalls associated with encountering others who have not yet experienced ego transcendence is the last category. Such encounters can result in criticism, judgment, or even condemnation. Symeon the New Theologian warned: "Those taught by God will be regarded as fools by the disciples of such as are wise in the wisdom of this world" (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware 4:47).

Contemporary Christian Contemplative Practices

Today the largest community of individuals who follow the classic hesychastic tradition is found on a Greek peninsula known as Mount Athos. This community consists of about two thousand monks of Greek, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Rumanian decent who live in twenty monasteries scattered about the peninsula. The oldest of these monasteries dates back to the tenth century.

Certain restrictions are maintained on Mount Athos. For example, no automobiles, carts, children, dogs, or musical instruments are allowed (Cavarnos, Anchored in God). Also, no women are permitted to visit (Cavarnos, Holy Mountain).

The hesychastic tradition is now surfacing within the Catholic church. In 1975, Father William Menninger developed the practice of centering prayer, which has been described as "A method of refining one's intuitive faculties so that one can enter more easily into contemplative prayer" (Keating, Open Mind 34; Keating, Invitation 1). It involves the repetition of a sacred word, which facilitates inner silence. Keating (Open Mind 40) likens this process to the emptying out of a bathtub:

Emptying the mind of its customary routines of thinking is a process that we can only initiate, like taking the stopper out of a bathtub. The water goes down by itself. You don't have to push the water out of the tub. You simply allow it to run out. You are doing something similar in this prayer. Allow your ordinary train of thoughts to flow out of you.

Summary

Hesychasm is an ancient mystical tradition that offers time-proven methods for detaching from the ego and experiencing transcendent states of consciousness. This tradition is not limited to reclusive monks. Anyone can be a hesychastic. The divine Chrysostom wrote (Cavarnos, Paths 44-5):

Even a man living within a city can imitate the life of monks. Indeed, even a man who has a wife, and who is occupied with the demands of his household, can pray, fast, and learn contrition. . . . Let us cultivate self-mastery and all of the other virtues, and let us bring into our cities the way of life which is sought in the deserts.

One of the unfortunate occurrences regarding the hesychastic tradition has been the mistranslation of ancient Greek terms by individuals who clearly had not themselves experienced transcendent states of consciousness. For example the Greek word hamartia means "to miss the mark." Hesychasts used this word to refer to the state in which one remains attached to the passions. Contemporary versions of the Bible translate hamartia as "sin," which implies a malevolent action deserving punishment. Similarly, the term metanoia, which refers to a shift from ego-centered to trans-egoic consciousness, is translated as "repentance," a term with profoundly different connotations.

Studying the words the hesychasts use to describe their tradition makes it apparent that much of our contemporary Christian terminology has been mistranslated. In this process, the original mystical meanings have been lost. In their place we discover the fingerprints of the Biblical translator's egos and their dualistic judgments (good/bad, right/wrong, etc.), which have left an indelible mark on much of contemporary Christianity, particularly fundamentalist branches, which lean toward literal interpretations of the English Bible. Journeying back to the early Christian writings of the hesychasts, we encounter a much kinder and gentler Christianity. We discover a tradition that provides a rich body of instructions for transcending the ego.

What happens when the Prayer of the Heart is repeated? A shift in consciousness occurs'a shift to a deep abiding peace'a stillness of mind that transcends everyday consciousness. A wellspring is opened from which another mode of being flows. In this state, trans-rational knowledge is acquired. This is the realm of intuition, revelation, and prophecy. This is the realm of ineffable experiences for which metaphors offer only approximate glimpses. This is the realm in which time and space are transcended. This is the realm of inner silence, which is available to each and every one of us, if only we are willing to listen.

References

• Cavarnos, Constantine. Anchored in God: An Inside Account of Life, Art, and Thought on the Holy Mountain of Athos. Athens, Greece: Astir Pub. Co., 1959.

• '''.

  The Holy Mountain. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1973.

• ''',

  trans. Paths and Means to Holiness. By Bishop Chrsostomos of Oreoi. Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1986.

• Kadloubovsky, E., and Gerald E. Palmer, trans. Early Fathers from the Philokalia. London: Faber and Faber, 1976.

• ''',

  trans. Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.

• Keating, Thomas. Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation. New York: Continuum, 1995.
• '''.

  Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel. Rockport, MA: Element, 1992.

• Kelsey, Morton T. Companions on the Inner Way: The Art of Spiritual Guidance. New York: Crossroad, 1985.

• Palmer, Gerald Eustace, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Philokalia. 4 vols. London: Faber and Faber, 1983-95.

• Sorokin, Pitirim. The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1954.

• Spidlik, Tomas. The Spirituality of the Christian East: A Systematic Handbook. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1986.

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Mitchell B. Liester, MD, is a psychiatrist in Monument, Colorado. His articles have appeared previously in the Quest, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology and Journal of Near-Death Studies. He can be reached at liester@aol.com.

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Originally printed in the March-April 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation:Luchakova, Olga and Johnson, Kenneth. "Icons: Windows to the Divine." Quest  89.2 MARCH-APRIL 2000): 44-49

By Olga Luchakova and Kenneth Johnson

If the language of icons has become unfamiliar to us and seems "naïve" and "primitive," the reason is not that the icon has outlived or lost its vital power and significance, but that even the knowledge that the human body is capable of spiritual transformation...is lost by men.

—Archbishop Ignatius Bryanchaninov

They stare at us from their niches in museums and art galleries, the intense ascetic faces lit with an otherworldly glow. Whole cosmograms dance in sweeping circles, lit with Byzantine gold, archaic mandalas of the Western world. These are the icons of Russia, Greece, and Byzantium, avidly sought by art collectors the world over.

But icons are more than works of art. They are the focus of a complex spiritual discipline that has its roots in archaic Christianity.

Mystical Christianity

Primordial Christianity included a system of self-transformation that led to theosis, the dissolution of the individual self in the Godhead. This contemplative system, called hesychasm or "the tradition of inner stillness," consisted of meditative practices designed to calm the mind, purify the passions, and develop skills of absorption. These practices of self-transformation and self-transcendence, such as "wakefulness," "inner stillness," and "the Prayer of the Heart," have been undeservedly forgotten. Though secretly preserved in the Eastern Orthodox Churches of Greece and Russia as an inner, esoteric teaching, they are virtually unknown in the West.

Throughout the centuries, solitary hermits have devoted themselves to prayer and meditation in the cave monasteries of Greece and in retreats amidst the vast Russian forests. Their meditative techniques, passed down solely through direct oral transmission and initiation, could be described as Christian Yoga or, to use the metaphor preferred by the hesychasts themselves, as a ladder by which the individual consciousness ascends from separateness to communion and identity with Godhead. Working with these techniques may help bring contemporary seekers to "recovery" from the "childhood abuse" of a fundamentalist Christian upbringing. Reconciliation with Christianity is a healing process for many people, since traumatic childhood memories often have a strong connection with religious archetypes.

Icons and Archetypes

The creation of and meditation on icons are significant parts of this hesychastic tradition. The icon as an art form is derived, in part, from the portrait painting of pre-Christian Rome, the first Christian icons being portraits of the early sages and saints. Eusebius, in his History of the Church, writes: "I have seen a great many portraits of the Savior, of Peter and of Paul, which have been preserved up to our times." According to legend, the Vladimir Mother of God (one of the most famous Eastern Christian icons) is in fact a portrait of the Virgin painted by St. Luke; and though New Testament historical criticism may dismiss the legend as a chronological impossibility, it nevertheless illustrates the belief that icons are genuine portraits of sages and saints.

Such legends and beliefs are important, for they reveal part of the secret of the icons' imaginative power over the worshiper. Icons are, first and foremost, portraits of archetypes. Divine figures and Christian saints may be the ostensible subjects of icons, but icons also show the attributes and archetypal powers of gods and nature spirits that reigned in the sky of the European mind long before the advent of Christianity.

In many cases, worship of the old pagan divinities never entirely died out. As archetypes—powers and potencies inherent in the human soul but not dependent upon ritual or dogma—they merely underwent a transformation, their attributes and even their stories transferred to the saints of the new religion. In Byzantine Greece, St. Catherine took on the nature of Aphrodite, and the people prayed to her for love. St. Nicholas doubled for stormy Poseidon, though in Russia he came more closely to resemble Volos, the pagan god of the dead. St. Elijah's fiery chariot formed a natural link with the ancient lords of thunder; in Greece he became the simulacrum of Zeus, and in Russia of Perun, the Thunder God. In Russia, too, peasants prayed to St. George as the protector of the land and celebrated his feast day by covering one of the local men in leaves and dressing him in green; this Russian St. George evokes memories of one of the most ancient gods of all, the Lord of the Wildwood who was worshiped as long ago as the Neolithic period.

The Magic of Icons

The merging of archetypes from different traditions, which occurs in iconic art, reflects the spiritual processes of both the psyche and the world. Archetypes are fluid and eternal. They transcend cultural boundaries, evoking parallels between religions, yet they sustain their unique flavor as carriers of the energies inherent in different spiritual traditions. An icon is a symbol as well as an image, and each of its separate components carries many different layers of meaning. The major informational charge of an icon, however, lies in its nature as an image, speaking directly to the unconscious through our senses, producing certain inner responses and altered states of consciousness.

Hesychasm deeply influenced the art of the icon. Icons carry the imprint of the states of consciousness attained by the hesychastic artists who made them famous, as well as the vibrations of the energies associated with the saints and gods who are their prototypes. A famous icon is like a painted sutra—a terse capsule containing nonverbal information about the stages leading to the attainment of theosis. "What the word transmits through the ears, the painting shows through the image," said St. Basil the Great.

The iconographer's art—even in its physical details—profoundly resembles that of the Tibetan tanka painters, as Nicholas Roerich noted long ago. The artists are typically meditators who receive powerful initiations before beginning their work; they fast, undergo purification rituals, meditate on the archetype, embody its state of consciousness within themselves, and then infuse their art materials with the uncreated energies of the prototype through meditation and prayer. Icon making is a long, meditative process; sometimes it takes years. The materials themselves become transfigured, carriers of grace. As with old sacred buildings or power spots, spiritual information is encoded in matter, elevating its vibrational level.

Though it has its roots in pre-Christian portrait painting, an icon does not look quite like a realistic portrait. It is, more properly, a portrait of the subtle and invisible (as opposed to the merely physical) body, a terrestrial attempt to convey knowledge of the forms that belong to celestial realms, hence the refined noses, arched eyebrows, halos, and elongated bodies. This refinement of human features illustrates the results of the fasting and asceticism that were frequently undertaken by the Eastern saints. According to the mystical theology of the Orthodox Church, God can incarnate, becoming flesh; and physical matter can be divinized, becoming subtle, close to spirit in its nature.

The canons of iconic art reflect the appearance of those who have been thus transformed by spiritual discipline. The use of gold, of "enliveners" (the white paint strokes that produce an impression of luminosity), of multiple washes of tempera that allow the underlying layers of lighter paint to shine through—all of these techniques reveal the inner luminosity contained in the bodies of the saints, as well as our own true "light nature." To experience this inner light is the very essence of the Christian yogi's practice. Symeon, called the New Theologian, wrote: "The Christian mystic dwells in light," hence the term "illumination" for one of the stages of attainment. When placed in a church, an icon serves as the source of the subtle energy that infuses the sacred space of the church itself. The icon works as an energy window, causing actual changes in the aura and cleansing the psycho-energetic centers of the human body.

Some icons—such as those depicting St. Seraphim of Sarov or Panteleimon the Healer—can be used as "projectors," which radiate the subtle energy that induces both physical and spiritual healing. In Eastern Orthodox terms, they "emanate grace." Other icons may actually serve as embodied states of consciousness, and contemplation of them may lead the devotee to actual knowledge of God through those states. The special nature of the iconographer's art allows him to imprint nonordinary, sacred states of consciousness into the icon, and these states can be absorbed by the meditator centuries after the creation of the icon itself.

The open-minded contemplation of and identification with an especially sacred icon may even be equivalent to receiving a powerful initiation from a living teacher. Hesychia, the "inner silence" identical to the peak spiritual experience cultivated in so many traditions, may be directly transmitted by certain icons of the Mother of God in her aspect of loving-kindness—for example, by the Virgin of Kazan. An icon of Christ the Savior in glory, which once followed the coffins of the czar's family members during Russian state funerals, depicts Christ in the deep absorption of essence and can transmit a state of consciousness beyond ego, the experience of oneness with God. When contemplated correctly, such an icon may present an entire initiation, signifying a new stage of spiritual progress for the seeker. Of course, this direct silent transmission from an icon is possible only if the mind of the seeker is ripe for such appreciation and ready to accept the gift.

Icons may also be used to induce a special kind of centering. In fact, they provide a specific attunement of the chakras or inner psychic centers in the mind, the heart, or (very rarely) in the belly or "center of power," more commonly used in folk healing and magic. The nuances of such centering may sometimes indicate particular ways for the practitioner to concentrate awareness on certain energy centers in the body and attain higher spiritual experiences. St. Xenia, the Vladimir Mother of God, and the Virgin of the Sign, for example, all awaken the heart center and indicate love and devotion or bhakti as the path to the Supreme. Icons of Sophia or of Christ the Pantocrator emphasize transcendental wisdom and insight; they work predominantly upon the sahasrara and ajna chakras, the crown and the so-called third eye. Finally, certain icons may be understood as mandalas, diagrams of an inner cosmos: these include icons of Christ as the Pantocrator and cosmological icons.

Meditating with Icons

If the Orthodox iconographer and Tibetan tanka painter share a particular mode of working, then sometimes so do the Christian contemplative, the practitioner of Tibetan deity yoga, and the Hindu bhakta. In all cases, the power of the sacred archetype is brought deeply and profoundly into the auric sphere of the practitioner, who strives for total identification with the archetype.

But if there are similarities with Eastern practices, there are also notable differences. In icon meditation, it is generally the image rather than the symbol that works upon our minds; hence the position of the body and hands, the gaze, and the over-all energy of the icon are perceived intuitively by the subconscious. This brings Christian practice closer to Hindu bhakti than to the Buddhist path, for such truly symbolic works of art as Tibetan mandalas require an intellectual knowledge of the meanings inherent in the symbols in order to be properly meditated upon and understood.

There are a number of different methods for working with icons, which are defined by the esoteric qualities of the icon itself. As a general rule, meditation on an icon begins by establishing a devotional attitude towards the archetype or saint in question. Visualize the iconic image in front of you and connect with its "embodied sage." After you have established an initial relationship, you may begin the meditative techniques.

First, relax and drop your awareness into your body. Let your eye muscles relax, so that your gaze is slightly out of focus. Let the icon itself guide you; surrender your state of mind to its influence. Turn your body into a relaxed, reflecting medium, thus allowing the icon to make its benevolent imprint within. The icon helps establish the inner current connecting the mind with the divine inside the practitioner's psyche. Awareness of the emotional content of your own dialogue with the archetype helps to integrate alienated and traumatized areas of the mind.

A deepening of this initial practice may lead to identification with the actual physical form of the saint as depicted in the iconic image, though unless the practitioner's consciousness is thoroughly centered in the body, as described above, the desired results will not be obtained. "Becoming the saint" leads to living that individual's inner experience, at least to a degree. The idam practice of Tantric Buddhism, which likewise creates an identification between the deity and the meditator, is very similar. Upon identification with the sage, practitioners open analogous levels of awareness and higher states of consciousness within themselves.

After you have learned to enter into dialogue and identify with the icon—letting it be reflected in your body, centering you and transmitting its state of consciousness—you may learn to meditate upon the icon by contemplating it from the vantage point of the energy structures within your body. For example, if you imagine your physical eyes within your heart chakra and gaze out from that point (opening your physical eyes too, of course), you will notice the subtle energies of the icon—its aura and radiant energies. You may attempt to "relocate" your eyes to the various chakras or energetic centers within the body and contemplate the icon from each one of them, even examining it from the space behind your back. These more sophisticated techniques will allow you to see the invisible and subtle energy content of these mysterious condensates of grace—the icons of the Eastern Christian tradition.

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Olga Luchakova, MD, PhD, is a spiritual teacher with a background in Yoga, Vedanta, and Hesychasm; she is an adjunct professor at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and John F. Kennedy University.

Kenneth Johnson studied Comparative Religion at California State University, Fullerton, and is the author of six books, including Mythic Astrology: Archetypal Powers in the Horoscope, North Star Road, and Jaguar Wisdom.

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