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What Is
Hesychasm
The term hesychasm originates from the Greek word
hesychia — inner quietness. This direction is based on two methodological
principles, which are closely related to each other:
achievement of hesychia and “opening” the
spiritual
heart. Without this inner quietness,
meditation is not
possible. And meditation — after the stage of
learning and encompassing the ethical principles of
life suggested by God — is the basis of further
development of the consciousness on the spiritual
Path. It was striving to achieve hesychia and
advancing then to cognition of God that formed this
direction of the “Christian raja yoga” known as
Hesychasm. The most important feature and the highest value of
this direction consisted in the fact that Hesychasts
from the very beginning accepted the correct guiding
line — realization of Jesus Christ’s instructions
that one can develop love in oneself only through the
work with the spiritual heart. In
particular, they discovered that if one moves the
concentration of the consciousness from the head
into the spiritual heart, this stops the “inner
dialog”, which prevents meditation. And, in the case
of full success, — i.e. when the consciousness is
fully placed in the spiritual heart, one can understand on one's own experience what Jesus meant by
speaking about the spiritual love! The life of such
people changed and they could really love each other
and everything around themselves with truly Christian love: “as
they love themselves” and even more than themselves. And with further development of the spiritual heart,
they got the ability to fall in love with God.
About the Jesus Prayer Seeking the ways for development of the spiritual
heart, Hesychasts invented the method called “Jesus
prayer”. Its formulas may be different: from “Jesus
Christ, the Son of God, have a mercy on me!” to the
most simple and perfect version: simply an
appeal-entreaty to Beloved Jesus to enter into my
spiritual heart with the humble repetition of His name:
“Jesus! Jesus!…” … But in later time, very few were able to achieve
positive fruits from using the Jesus prayer. Many
people even believed that “its secrets were lost”… But this is not true: in reality, mass of
“believers” lost Christianity in general — given
that they refused the ethics preached by Christ. And
this resulted in a failure to form — up to the last
years — a comprehensive and scientifically correct
approach to human spiritual development.
Philokalia One of the most known literary sources on Hesychasm
is Philokalia.
See also:
•
Philokalia
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