Thank you for your very perceptive reply Brother Ambarsaria ji peacesignkaur
I think what I was meaning earlier - or rather not that I was meaning but the hesycasts - is that we of the modern West have been raised with an underlying assumption, summed up in the well-known phrase of Rene Descartes at the beginning of the Enlightenment era: "
I think, therefore I am." The worldview of modern rationalism, which has lost an awareness of the unchanging soul in man, leads one to the assumption that our thoughts are what or who we are, and, conversely, that we are the sum total of our thoughts. Therefore, we automatically feel that we have to trust our thoughts, to take a stand for them, to defend them as we would our own life.
This is the underlying falsehood of the modern worldview and psychosis. It is precisely by placing
absolute, unmitigated trust in the formulations of the human mind — rather than in the Divine — that modern Western man has come to water down or abandon his once-cherished Christian Faith and indeed embrace mere materialism or atheism.
There is something deeper than our thoughts, a
Person made in God's Image, immortal, unchanging because he has his origin and destiny in the Mind of God who will never die.
Sometimes negative thoughts crop into our mind. Its perfectly natural because none of us are perfect. However some people notice these thoughts and identify them as part of their
Self. They thus come to the conclusion that
Lust is innate to them; that hatred is innate to them; that pride is innate to them; that envy is innate to them when none of these things are. There is no such thing as 'evil', what we call evil is simply the lack of Good which alone exists. And so people lose their true selves, which can only be found in God, and give heed to the false, lower self they have created themselves.
Thought leads to thought patterns, which leads to identity with those thoughts, which leads to a mask covering the true purity within, the pure relection of God in the spark of our soul.
Rarely are people true to themselves. They become what they think they are, rather than who they truly are because they allow life experiences, habits, the way the dress, the food they eat, the friends they hang around with, and the thoughts they think "define" them rather than seek for definition of themselves in God.
We human beings wear so many masks of our own creation.
We take refuge in our thoughts, fantasies and emotions because they provide us with a deceptive sense of security and self-sufficiency. But Christ tells us to abandon that security and make ourselves vulnerable, relying wholly on our Creator. Both Christ and Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism (a Chinese religion), likened this state of self-abandonment to the will of God in the present moment to the mind of a little child who has not yet developed a mature ego.... "
Become as little children," they said.
A child is much more in synch with the true Origin of knowing than is an adult. Simple and spontaneous, the little child knows without knowing
how he knows. He can be happy without knowing he is happy. Isn't that beautiful and wondrous? He just IS. What adults often consider joy or contentment is in truth the emotional excitement of their ego; while a little child's happiness consists in the simple, selfless joy of being alive.
When Christ told each person to "deny himself" and "lose his life," he was not suggesting that one obliterate the conscious mind, thereby denying our unique Personhood as some New Agey type people seem to want to do. Rather, he was telling us to purify it by casting off the false ego that has grown on it like a parasite and which is covering it. Thinking, imagining, dreaming and emotion are not destroyed, rather they are wholly submitted to the higher Will of God.
"...Prayer cannot be pure if the mind is actively engaged in following thoughts. For prayer to be pure, it must arise from a pure spirit, or nous, and this can only occur when one first stands watch, and thus rises above thoughts and images...The holy fathers of the Orthodox Church say that man was created in a state of pristine simplicity—pure awareness. In the beginning, his thoughts and memories were not diversified and fragmented as they are today, but were simple and one-pointed. He knew no mental distraction. While being wiser than any human being today, he was in a state of innocence, like a child, and in this state he lived in deep personal communion with God, and in harmony with the rest of creation.
Being in such close communion with God, primordial man participated directly in God’s grace, which he experienced as a divine and ineffable light dwelling within his very being...
With man’s departure from the Way, he lost the primal simplicity and became fragmented. His awareness was no longer single and one-pointed. As St. Macarius the Great wrote in the 4th century, “Man’s thoughts became base and material, and the simplicity and goodness of his mind were entertwined with evil, worldly concerns.” Also with his departure from the Way, man fell under the illusion of his self-sufficiency. Before, when he had lived in communion with God, he did not regard himself as self-sufficient. Living in harmony with the Way, he had acted spontaneously, without striving and without self-interest. When he stepped away from God, he fell to the lie that he could exist of himself. This is a lie, because without God willing him into existence, he would be nothing at all. Now man acted with calculation, no longer spontaneously, striving for the sake of personal gain, and pitting himself against others. Man had been made to desire and to seek God, to rise ever higher toward God in the communion of love. But when he departed from the Way, he fell to love of himself, and to desire for created things. Since the desire for created things is against man’s original nature, it leads to suffering. It can never bring true, complete, and lasting happiness..."
- Hieromonk Damascene, Eastern Catholic (or "Orthodox") mystic
all the time.
