Here’s where I’ll post summaries and comments about Christian mystical practice, especially of Orthodox mysticism as expressed in Kyriacos Markides’ The Mountain of Silence and Gifts of the Desert.
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On Logismoi
A Logismos is a thought of particular power and intensity, that does not originate from within you but is sent from either a heavenly source (providing, as a general rule, feelings such as inner peace and joy) or a demonic source (which normally causes fear, anxiety, hatred, confuson, or turmoil of one kind or another, etc.)
So how do you deal with troublesome, negative logismoi? For example, suppose I’m working on a patient and the thought occurs to me, “you’re no good at this. You’re unworthy. You should give up and be a cashier or a dishwasher, if you can even do that.” Father Maximos points out that if I engage with this thought or fight it, I quickly get involved in a losing battle: the assault of this logismos can eventually lead to a destructive obsession or addiction, such as depression or drug addiction. The end result of this process is very possibly the complete shut-down of my spiritual life. What then do I do when assaulted by a destructive logismos like the one above?
The best strategy is to ignore it, almost as if I were doing centering prayer and some other thought popped up other than my sacred word; I just go back to the sacred word without thinking any more about the interruption. In the case of a logismos, I recognize the thought for what it is: the logismos is something alien to me and who I am essentially as a child of God, and I can just let the thought pass by. As Father Maximos says, “Our first defense against destructive logismoi is complete indifference…ignore them completely. Never open up a dialogue… Do not interact with them either out of curiosity or out of overconfidence… completely disregard it.” (p.135). So when a thought like the one above comes to mind, I can just say, “oh how interesting, that’s a destructive logismos!” and then ignore it, and go back to the Jesus Prayer or whatever else I was doing
But suppose the logismos is persistent and keeps popping up. If it is really troubling me and I’m finding it difficult to ignore – perhaps I even find myself starting to believe the thought – a helpful strategy is to use a splitting logismos. This just means to focus my mind on something else that can really grab my attention. This can be anything from physical exercise, some form of manual work like gardening, hugging a tree, or even something foolish or irrelevant like counting the number of cracks in the sidewalk (or like counting sheep when trying to go to sleep). This is one reason why monks do so much physical labor, as it helps them combat negative logismoi.
Another problem can arise when the logismos is so upsetting that it profoundly shakes you. For example, suppose the logismos that assaults me is something like “You’ve been a failure at everything in life; why don’t you just die now and relieve everyone else of the burden of having to deal with your company?” Something that negative and ugly can shake me up a bit, so much so that I might become scared or confused. In such a case, I first need to get my bearings rationally so that I’m not in a state of panic. I can use reason to remind myself of times in my life when I haven’t failed, when people have actually sought out my company, etc. Also like Jesus when he was tempted, I can quote scripture: we are fearfully and wonderfully made, we are children of God, servants of the most high, God saw what he had made and said it was good, etc. (IMHO this is one reason memorized verses can be valuable).
Then once I’m not in a state of panic I can go back to prayer. Prayer, including the Jesus Prayer, and participation in the other mysteries of the ecclesia is what brings us to spiritual health and freedom from destructive logismoi, according to the path of Orthodox mysticism as described in TMoS by Father Maximos. As he says, “This kind of spiritual work is what we call in one word askesis, meaning prayer, fasting, confession, communion, the study of the word of God and the life of saints, sleepless nights in all-night vigils and so on… That is the path that the soul takes in order to attain spiritual health.” (p. 139).
“O My Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.”
Here’s some beautiful words on the Jesus Prayer, from Kyriacos Markides’ _Gifts of the Desert_, as said by Father Maximos:
“The Jesus Prayer literally means ‘Jesus Christ grant me your mercy, which is what I need in order to meet you, in order that you may live inside me and that I live as you wish me to live, so that you may find rest within my own being and existence.’ This is the mercy of God. It is the love of God…true prayer is the means by which to ask God to help us love him…
God’s love is a given. It is we who need to learn how to love God. We don’t ask God to love us. His love is total and unconditional. It is we who need to heal ourselves so that we may be able to experience God’s love. It is we who have a problem in this relationship. Therefore, the mercy that we seek is so that God may heal our existence in such a way that we may allow God to find rest within our own hearts. It is as if we ask of God to create a space within us so that we may be allowed to bring about our own union with his love. This is what we must first and foremost ask of God. When that happens then God offers us whatever else we might really need…
Our true existential need is union with God. The craving for worldly goals and objectives is a false substitute for that inner need. When that is satisfied then our heart and mind work in their natural primordial condition, in a continuous memory and contemplation of God. A person in reality enters within the furthest regions of his own being…prayer is the method that helps us penetrate into the center of our existence…
Christ instructs us that when we pray we should retreat into our ‘treasury’, that is, into the depths of our being, free of external distractions, so that we may let ourselves cry out to God the pain we experience in his absence. Our passions and the consequences of our transgressions that torment us, which form the sum total of the problems we face, can become a powerful force for prayer.
I am convinced…that the antidote against all the problems people face as a result of their isolation living in modern cities or anywhere for that matter, is prayer. The systematic practice of prayer will lead them to that space within themselves where God resides, where they will discover their true personhood and uniqueness. They will find their wholeness not in external events and in ephemeral phenomena but within the context of their relationship with God. I do believe that the best resistance and inoculation of the person against atomization and loneliness is prayer…you can develop the capacity to commune with God and as a result of that you learn to commune with your fellow human beings. Once you do that you can never again experience loneliness or anxiety or the feeling of being lost.”
Reflections on Illnesses of the Heart, from The Mountain of Silence, Chapter 5.
In TMoS, Markides relates a conversation with Father Maximos where they discussed praying the Apostle’s Creed. Maximos mentioned that “…during the liturgy…we try in reality to move from an intellectual faith in God to the actual vision of God. Faith becomes Love itself. The Creed actually means ‘I live in a union of love with God.’… This is the kind of faith that the saints possess as direct experience. Consequently they are unafraid of death, of war, of illness, or anything else of this world. They are beyond alll worldly ambition, of money, fame, power, safety, and the like. Such persons transcend the idea of God and enter into the experience of God… The entire methodology of the authentic Christian mystical tradition as articulated by the saints is to reach that stage where we become conscious of the reality of God within ourselves.” (p. 45).
All this sounds wonderful. But why is it that we are not already in that stage? If God is everywhere and in fact inside of us, why is it a difficult thing to have an experience of God? What gets in the way of us experiencing God at a deeper level?
What gets in the way, according to the tradition that Father Maximos represents, is the fact that our hearts are twisted away from God; we have illnesses of the heart. These spiritual illnesses are like veils that block God from our sight or distract us away from a vision of God to something else (usually an idol of some sort). Luckily, there are cures for all these illnesses.
The first and most significant illness of the heart is ignorance: not of the right kind of intellectual knowledge, but of the lack of experience of God in the heart. Basically, if you haven’t had an experience of God, you don’t know what you’re missing. What you don’t know, you don’t miss. So, one may not feel any need for God because one doesn’t know what it means to experience God’s presence. We live in darkness and don’t know it. Ignorance is the most basic illness of the heart.
The cure for this is prayer for the ill person by others, askesis including prayer, and of course Grace. The person who’s truly ignorant often doesn’t know anything is wrong, so prayer by others that such a person have an experience of God’s love is a very significant thing.
Forgetfulness is another illness of the heart. The heart does not remember God, and forgot how to be in a prayerful state. The natural state of a human being is the continuous contemplation and memory of God. Forgetting God, specifically the heart’s forgetting the experience of God and thus not being in the prayerful state, is an illness.
The cure for forgetfulness is prayer, especially ceaseless prayer such as the Jesus Prayer. Through this practice of prayer, the heart is reminded of God and eventually learns to have a continuous focus on God’s presence. Although this sounds counterintuitive it is, the Orthodox elders tell us, perfectly possible for our heart to be attached to, live with, function in, and be joyous with the presence of God while we are simultaneously engaged in other activities.
Interestingly, modern research lends additional credibility to this claim by the holy elders. It turns out that a significant portion of the physical heart – something like 40% to 60% – is neural tissue, the same kind of tissue as the brain. In addition, the heart has an electric field at least 1000 times stronger than the brain’s, and can be detected with current instrumentation up to a distance of 10 or 12 feet, so perhaps the heart is able to perceive electromagnetically through this field. So in a way it makes perfect sense, even in scientific terms, to say that the heart has its own intelligence and its own perception.
While it may be difficult for beginners to experience truly ceaseless prayer at all times (especially when simultaneously doing intellectual work) we are advised by Father Maximos in TMoS not to let our inexperience discourage us. We can begin by saying the Jesus Prayer in moments of idle time (or any time when we don’t need to concentrate much on some other task), for example when washing the dishes, waiting for the bus, in line at the bank, when stuck in traffic or at a red light, when going to sleep, going for a walk, etc. Also we can set aside time in our day to focus exclusively on the Prayer, like first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Over time, our heart learns the habit of praying ceaselessly, and we are thus cured of the illness of forgetfulness of God.
Another illness is hardness of heart: all of us have hearts that have grown hard to one extent or another. Even though we may desire knowledge of and union with God, Grace cannot enter us because our hearts don’t allow it. We are excessively preoccupied with worldly affairs, overly focused on physical pleasures, and/or too obsessed with wealth. These things toughen the heart; the heart’s energy and power goes towards them instead of towards God, and our focus becomes distracted and fragmented.
Concerns about our daily affairs and other worldly issues – from small issues like what to eat for dinner and what to buy at the grocery store to bigger issues like how to earn a living, where to live, or what to do about the current political situation or today’s wars, slavery, starvation, etc. – these things can dominate our heart’s energy to such an extent that there’s no room for God. We spend hours, perhaps days without a thought for God, and before we know it we’re only passingly concerned with God on Sunday mornings and sometimes not even then. The heart becomes hard, and there’s no room for the seed of God’s grace to grow inside it.
If we live in the world and aren’t monks or nuns then we need to do things like plan what to eat for dinner, figure out how to make a living, and discover how best to care for our fellow humans, our mother earth, and our companion creatures on it. The problem is not that we do these things, but that we allow ourselves to become so preoccupied with them that we forget about God and have no room for divine grace in our heart.
Fortunately there is a cure for hardness of heart. Once we are aware of the problem, we can practice in such a way that we can go about our lives doing everything we need to do but are still focused on God with our hearts. Father Maximos recommends that “…upon waking up… begin the day with the Prayer. If you do that… you will notice the following. When you discipline the mind to start being preoccupied with God from the moment you wake up, your day will begin to unfold within the Prayer and will bring a certain inner peace.” (p. 59)
In addition to prayer and other forms of askesis, one of the most important practices to soften a hard heart is to learn how to accept sorrows as a gift from Heaven. Not that we should celebrate or seek after suffering in some kind of masochistic manner, but when in life sorrows occur we should recognize them as opportunities for spiritual growth, opportunities for our hard hearts to soften.
Father Maximos advises us to make a conscious practice of learning how to be patient with small temptations of grief. We can then gradually learn how to accept greater incidents of suffering without collapsing under their weight. As Father Maximos says, too many of us disintegrate as people under the weight of even slight sorrows or disappointments. Making the conscious decision to see these things as opportunities to soften our hearts is thus a valuable spiritual practice.
Imprudence is yet another illness of the heart. A heart that is imprudent is one that suffers from folly. It occurs when one is not aware of fundamental limitations and takes things for granted. Like the rich fool in the parable, one may accumulate more and more money only to die, when the money will no longer be of any use to us. The basic problem with one who is imprudent in this spiritual sense is, according to Father Maximos, that their heart does not have the memory of death. The memory of death helps to bring into proper perspective worldly things like monetary wealth, physical posessions, social position, physical health, or any other physical blessing or acheivement. The truth is that these are passing things, and someday they will all come to an end. Our spirits will go on, but our time in these physical bodies is finite. Remembering this can help us to prioritize our time in such a way that the eternal things, the things that really matter – like love of God, love of each other, love of creation – are first in importance in the way we live our lives.
There are other illnesses of the heart as well, such as blindness and contamination, but as Father Maximos tells us, “…the primary illnesses out of which spring all the others are ignorance and forgetfulness of God.” The hope for us is that “Whenever human beings make contact with the inner self and discover the divine reality within, they automatically get healed from all the heart’s illnesses. This is the real healing of the self.” (p. 65).