We have spoken of the first fundamental principle of the Hermetic Path according to Our Dear Unknown Friend. He calls for โconcentration without effortโ via the joy of work transformed into play; of the easy yoke and light burden of Christ.
He continues by informing us that for this concentration without effort, this way of the single eye that Christ speaks of in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, is required silence. Here we have then the Christian Traditionโs threefold path of Union with God, I.e. that of Purification, Illumination and Union. This is not a formula of a horizontal causation however, whereby one accomplishes the task of godhood, an apotheosis familiar perhaps to more pagan and especially new age movements.
It is, in correspondence with the revelation of God as triune, a dynamic and eternal pouring out from one to the other. The initial pouring forth being of the Godhead Himself, for whosoever has the inclination toward the spiritual life did not create for himself this impetus โex nihiloโ, it was there by grace of God. Who, being so inclined to the mystery of God did not sense that something of himself has always โtouchedโ the Holy One? Who, being so inclined, has not always felt as if the voice of God was on the wind and the light of God lay just beyond the shadow of this world? Who of those ones has not thirsted for a water so pure as to cleanse them wholly from the inside, out?
It is by grace of God that these desires have been planted as seeds in the human heart. And as one is cultivated and nurtured so the others are also.
Understanding this, however, we as living in this temporal state see things first in horizontal succession before we are able to be drawn into the fulcrum point; of the centre of things -and be drawn inwards and upwards, that is, beyond.
So, one must needs initially to place there attention on โpurificationโ, mortification of the flesh as it is called. This is silence and stillness.
All those passions which aggravate the bodies of a man. All those thoughts that violently agitate the mind keeping it from rest. These must be fasted from and rightly ordered in the life of he who would have his eye made single and who desires to cleave to God in unity.
Stillness and silence. This is the truth of the begetting of the Son, first as found โpre-incarnationโ, specifically as we read in the book of Genesis, when the world, created as Theophony, was given form and measure, before which it is void and without form. Then at the annunciation when Our Lady who verily is the Mother of the World of the New Creation, namely the Church, is the pure Virgin, immaculately conceived, that the incarnate God-man might dwell within her.
If the world were not still and silent it would not have been able to take into itself the โfiat luxโ of God nor would it have permitted the Spirit of God to move upon it.
If Our Lady were not still and silent she would not have permitted the Spirit of God to move upon her and the Light of God to be conceived within her. She would not have uttered her fiat.
So it is that for the light of God to enter in we must be purified, purged. The light then, who is Christ, who is revelation itself, can enter in and reveal the Father. Knowing the Father then we may love the Father through Christ which is the perfect, eternal Love of the Holy Trinity.
Stillness and silence. For all Iโve said Our Dear Unknown Friend says it best:
โConcentration without effort โ that is to say where there is nothing to suppress and where contemplation becomes as natural a breathing and the beating of the heart โ is the state of consciousness (I.e. thought, imagination, feeling and will) of perfect calm, accompanied by the complete relaxation of the nerves and the muscles of the body. It is the profound silence of desires, of preoccupations, of the imagination, of the memory and of discursive thought. One may say that the entire being becomes like the surface of calm water, reflecting the immense presence of the starry sky and its indescribable harmony. And the waters are deep, they are so deep! And the silence grows, every increasing โฆ what silence! Its growth takes place through regular waves which pass, one after the other, through your being: one wave of silence followed by another wave of more profound silence, then again a wave of still more profound silence โฆ Have you ever drunk silence? If in the affirmative, you know what concentration without effort is.โ
โBe still and know that I am God.โ Psalm 46:10
