In my recent review of The Way of the Pilgrim, I discussed how some Orthodox hierarchs have become hesitant about hesychasm. The controversy surrounds the practice of the Jesus Prayer and its pairing of a person’s inhalations and exhalations with the words of the Prayer. In itself, there is nothing dangerous or controversial about the method described in the book by the Pilgrim or by the Fathers in the Philokalia; it simply hopes that prayer become as natural to a person as their breathing, heartbeat, or any other autonomic physical process. The goal is for the person surpass the periodic, willful effort we normally employ while praying; instead, he will reach a point where the Prayer is so natural that it’s as if he’s “doing nothing.” The Prayer prays itself. God prays the Prayer in us, as St Philaret of Moscow said in his famous morning prayer: “Teach me to pray, and pray Thyself in me.”
However, the hierarchs are right to point out that spiritual immature people can abuse this method. Through vigorous hyperventilation or sheer pride, some overeager adoptees of this method can stimulate psychosomatic states which they could confuse as a “spiritual experience.” People stricken with this “spiritual materialism,” as Chögyam Trungpa calls it, think that spiritual realities are things that can be amassed and hoarded. Rather than the calming of the passions and engendering of a peaceful stillness (ἡσυχία) which defines hesychasm, this abuse leads to rouses the emotions and bodily senses while fostering narcissism and delusion. Spiritual experiences cannot be hoarded.
Where does this tendency for abuse come from? What can we do about it?
The Addicted Mind
Our tendency for abuse stems from our minds, which have been formed and deformed by a culture of addiction. While obsession and temptation exist in all culture, our Western culture is unsurpassed in the diversity of ways we lead ourselves astray. Human temptation was relatively weak before we began exporting our junk food, sexualized entertainment, inane yet catchy music, algorithmic social apps, and ubiquitous marketing strategies to the rest of the world. Now it’s rare to find a corner of the world that doesn’t have people staring into their phone; gaudy advertisements are emblazoned in the background; canned music that sounds like nothing playing from nowhere; a jaded stare, a restless agitation, and quiet hunger seeps out of all these faces.
Within our consumerist model, one can find a sinister spiritual parody at work. Naturally, all humans are called back to a more bestial form through food and sex. But our system moves people up a hierarchy of temptations upward from the body, to the mind, and even the spirit. Take sugar for example. We begin with the primal rush of sugar which makes us feel good. Then, we supplant that taste with an advertisement that reminds us of how good sugar feels. Then, that euphoric feeling is supplanted by vigilance for notifications which herald these advertisements that bring the feelings. Then, through random intermittent rewards, we keep that vigilance alert and on the watch for new patterns of desirable products. Finally, we use the some design patterns in every marketable corner of a person’s so that he’s constantly triggering the cycle to start over again. At this point, the person doesn’t even need sugar—they just want the feeling of sugar which they search for in anything. Once the carnal pleasure becomes a feeling, mind spends its time recalling that feeling and searching for ways to get that feeling again when the memory becomes too faint. While the body might get this process started, all the rest takes place in the mind. In addiction (Sucht), the search itself (suchen) supplants the good it searches for: “It’s about the journey, not the destination,” one could say.
Throughout the life of our ego, we have become habituated to trusting our problem-solver and its thoughts and feelings. To practice watchfulness is essentially to practice distrusting them. p. 315
Our world capitalizes on our main virtue and turns it into our main vice. With its foundations in Greek philosophy, Western culture has always prized its ability to prime minds for curiosity, inquiry, exploration, conversations, arguments, discovery, and creativity. But our systems play tricks on this mind which wants to solve problems, figure things out, and discover something new; by making minds that are interested in so many different facets of the world, we make them more distractible and reactive. Now, where once curiosity and wonder led to insight and revelation, we find distraction and agitation leading to more distraction and more agitation. Again, we move this process up from the body, through to the mind, and up to the level of spirituality as well. Thus, this chronic condition can even turn the practice of Jesus Prayer into a compulsive repetitive rattling off of words and chasing of experience. It might distract the mind for awhile, but it will ultimately leave one awash and numb in the same oblivious burnout as everything else we abuse.
Higher & Lower Minds
Since this malady has come from the West, I’d suggest we look for a remedy from the East. In Hieromonk Damascene’s Christ the Eternal Tao, we can find a unique achievement with many insights that can help set minds aright. One part of the work is a retelling of the Gospel in the poetic and philosophical style of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. The other part is a mystagogical catechism of sorts that anthologizes and synthesizes wisdom from both Taoist and Orthodox sources. This work brings together the Taoist concept of the Tao (道) with the Biblical concept of Christ as the Logos (λόγος) in a creative and harmonious way, which yields illuminating insights that transcend culture. It turns out there is much in Taoist philosophy that can support Orthodox prayer and keep it safe from spiritual abuse.
When so many of the issues above are born of our minds, it helps to realize we have more than one. In both the Greek of Patristic philosophy and the Chinese of Taoist philosophy, there categories of mind which map conveniently unto one another. Firstly, we have a “higher mind” which the Taoists call “yüan-shen” (元神) and the Fathers call the “nous” (νοῦς). Secondly, we have a “lower mind” which the Taoists call “yüan-shen” (元神) and the Fathers often called “psyche” (ψῡχή).
The content below was originally paywalled.
All the addictions described above afflict our lower mind. Our psyche or anima is our vital force which moves our body all around this world. It has a taste for the external, which leads to to go outside of itself in search of experience and understanding. Unfortunately, all of our spiritual and psychological pathologies are also found in the psyche’s struggle with the world; conflict, drama, pleasure, agitation, boredom, control, chaos, relief, and addiction make up the life of this lower mind. The psyche is the instrument our canned music plays; it is the set of buttons our devices press; it is where our tumultuous struggles play themselves out day-to-day.
Our thoughts, as we have said, lie in the realm of action and are bound to earthly time. Our immortal spirit, however, transcends earthly time and abides not in action but in stillness. p. 322
In contrast, our higher mind abides above all the noise that our psyche gets lost within. If the life of psyche is defined by change, the life of nous is defined by changelessness; the nous can be obscured, neglected, or covered, but it cannot change. In that sense, it is timeless or eternal. Because it is not influenced by its external circumstances and changing whims of the times, the nous is immune from the temptations that might otherwise ensnare the psyche. Without the stillness of the nous, we are tossed around by whatever afflicts our psyche. But what is the activity of this higher mind or spirit? What does it do? The Taoist answer is “Nothing” (無, wu).
Doing Nothing
The Western mind doesn’t find wu wei (無為) or “not doing” a satisfactory answer. In fact, it is threatened by nothing: when our world is full of nothing we call it nihilism and when a person does nothing we call him a worthless bum. We cannot not be doing something. We’re addicted to doing. If we do nothing, we will be nothing. However, it is precisely our ability to do nothing that grounds our ability to do anything: he who is not free not to do is not free to do.
Wu wei is the wise art of doing nothing, and it relates closely to the Orthodoxy notion of “dispassion” or “apathy” (ἀπάθεια). Rather than letting oneself be affected by the passions, hesychasm seeks the stillness of dispassion. While Fathers in the Philokalia encourage “watchfulness” (νῆψις) of the wily thoughts (λογίσμοι) swirling about the mind, they counsel people not to engage with them. The more we argue or struggle with our thoughts, the more energy and power we give to them, which is of course used against us as they grow into greater temptations. The one thing dispassion desires is to be free of desires. Likewise, its work will not look like work; this dispassionate, vigilant attention is actually an active “not doing.” What results is a stillness that grounds all the other work we do; Lao Tzu illustrates the usefulness and freedom opened up by this nothingness in Chapter 11:
Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.
Hesychasm’s decline in the Orthodox West may be due to an overemphasis on asceticism. Ascesis (ἄσκησις) means “exercise” or “training,” and it’s a concept more easily picked up by our culture which is enamored with overactive productivity. The stories of monks fasting, doing prostrations, holding all night vigils, living on pillars, or digging caves in the cliffside are more dramatic and interesting to us, especially when compared to a monk sitting in his cell “doing nothing.” Likewise, many parish priests enthusiastically encourage their communities to go to services, to do the fasts, and to get involved with ministries; there are much fewer priests who would tell their people to do less, to do nothing, to be still.
While we need both, I’d suggest that the activity of asceticism needs to be balanced with the stillness of nepsis and hesychasm. Otherwise, we risk becoming lost in a flurry of activity and lose the peace that only comes from being still with God in prayer: “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps 45:10). This stillness and openness makes us more useful and ready to do the will of God, just as Lao Tzu described with the hub of the wheel and the void of the vase. Ironically, nothingness is useful, as Hmk. Damascene puts it: “The follower of Christ the incarnate Tao seeks to become just such a useful nothing” (383). This nothingness and openness results from our self-emptying (κένωσις), which was never more perfectly achieved than in the life of Christ the Eternal and Incarnate Tao:
If nothingness or self-emptying is the axis of the universe, then the Cross of Christ, the greatest sign of man of the self-emptying of god, now becomes that axis. Christ the Tao/Logos stands at the axis; and there, in the “space where there is nothing,” we find not an impersonal voiced, but the personal heart of the selfless, self-forgetting God. p. 271
Empty Your Prayers
While some may be on guard against prayer being “vain repetitions” or “empty phrases,” it seems that true emptiness is exactly what our prayer has been lacking. Rather than filling us up with stimulating spiritual experiences, prayer should empty us of these insatiable emotions. Instead of exercising our will through forceful effort, we must be poured out and sacrificed it in prayer; this language of emptiness and openness can also be seen in Thomas Aquinas who called prayer “the unfolding of the will to God so that He might fill it” (Summa Theologica III, 21, 3 ad 2). While the collaboration of our will and our minds works to solve many problems in our lives, it can also cause many of the problems in our lives. But through prayer, we acknowledge their limitations and open up the will and our minds—both the nous who is always attending and the pscyhe who must join the nous in its contemplation. It’s only when we quit doing things that God can truly do things with us. As Hmk. Damascene puts it:
The main reason why people fail in the spiritual life is that they have not learned the secret of non-action: deep down, they are still trusting and relying on themselves. p. 323
In the case of the Jesus Prayer, it probably doesn’t help to call our inhalation and exhalation a “breathing exercise.” Again, this ascetic practice might lend itself to abuse by encouraging people to breath in a vigorous, self-conscious, or otherwise unnatural way; this would run contrary to the stillness and peace which are the whole point of the Prayer. We should “inhale softly and exhale softly” otherwise we will excite our nerves and our prayer will be “hot-blooded,” as St Ignatius Brainchaninov puts it: “The above mechanism is fully replaced by the unhurried enunciation of the prayer, by a short rest or pause after each prayer, by gentle and unhurried breathing, and by the enclosure of the mind in the words of the prayer.” All of these concepts—Gentle, unhurried, rest, pause— are so rarely found in our world today.
With all this in mind: watch your breath come and go with the unchanging eye of the nous, without doing anything. Watch yourself be filled and emptied like Lao Tzu’s vase. If you feel yourself trying to control things, practice wu wei—actively not doing anything. Don’t seek images or feelings. Just let yourself become more of a “useful emptiness” wherein the Word himself can speak. For when it comes to our prayer, it’s not about the words but the Word. And as Lao Tzu would remind us: the word that can be spoken is not the Eternal Word (道).
Links
Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao
Lao Tzu, The Tao Te Ching
Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism