Category: Hermetic Tradition

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Have You Ever Drunk the Silence?

Concentration without effort … is your life tossed to and fro by random events, thoughts, feelings? Or do you live life consciously? It begins with Silence …

Le Bateleur

Rene Guenon claimed that at times when the authorities had lost the inner meaning of things, initiates would pose as jugglers or horse traders. That way, they could travel from village to village, under cover as it were, to meet with other initiates. One can imagine them carrying Tarot cards as a teaching tool, since they appear to be a harmless game, and are much more compact than transporting a library. That is how I see the first card, Le Bateleur (the Juggler or Magician), as an itinerant initiate. The name of the card is a French pun on “the low deceives you” (“le bas te leurre”), but the initiates are not deceived.

Valentin Tomberg relates this card to “concentration without effort”, reminiscent of Taoism, which is the necessary first step on the journey through the deck. Our Friend writes:

Concentration without effort, which means there is nothing to suppress and where contemplation becomes as natural as breathing and the beating of the heart, is the state of consciousness — of the intellect, the imagination, the feelings, and the will — a state of perfect calm, accompanied by the complete relaxation of the nerves and muscles of the body. It is the deep silence of desires, concerns, imagination, memory, and discursive thought. We would say that the entire being has become like the surface of calm waters reflecting the immense presence of the starry sky and its inexpressible harmony. And the waters are deep, oh how deep! And the silence increases, always increasing, what SILENCE! Its growth takes place in regular waves which pass, one after the other, through your being: one wave of silence followed by another wave of deeper silence, then yet another wave of even deeper silence … Have you ever drunk the silence. If so, you know what concentration without effort it.

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Practical Monism

It is risky to attribute the views of the Anthroposophic Tomberg to the Catholic Tomberg since the Meditations are the best way to know the author. He himself wrote:

“No matter what other source he might have, he will know the author better through the Letters themselves.”

Nevertheless, his conversion was never a complete rejection of his past, since his earlier thinking permeates the meditations. So concepts and ideas from the early writings that are recapitulated in the Meditations are well worth exploring. In the article titled H.P. Blavatsky’s “Secret Doctrine” and Rudolf Steiner’s “Outline of Esoteric Science”, Tomberg explains the concept of Practical Monism.

First he points out the principle that the Will follows the Intellect. That is why sound doctrine and knowledge are so important. Eventually, he writes, “all thinking sooner or later becomes willing”. Doctrines that force a one-sided choice, particularly if it is contradictory to one’s disposition, offer no viable path. As an example, he points to the Secret Doctrine as forcing the choice between spirit or matter.  Tomberg explains:

The practical consequences of this choice are contradictory to the disposition of European people, for they do not actually have a tendency toward one-sidedness… For this reason the Secret Doctrine contains no description of a path of initiation intended to be put into practice. And Madame Blavatsky, in other places on this subject, tries to show the European reader how it is actually hopeless for him to take up the path of Eastern occultism. For that, he would, as a first step, have to give up his whole European nature, because it is, as such, a hindrance.

He then defines Practical Monism: the practice of the monistic “not only — but also” instead of the dualistic “either — or“. Practical monism is actually a threefoldness rather than a duality. Thus it joins two opposites into a third element. He writes:

Knowledge and action are joined together by the cosmic love principle — making possible the transformation of knowledge into action.

In the Letter on Justice, Tomberg reiterates this point:

And the love of God? It is this third, essentially Christian, principle which has held the balance through the course of centuries … Insofar as there is peace at the heart of Christianity, it is due only to the principle of the supremacy of love.

There are many applications of the Principle of Practical Monism in the Meditations. For example, there is the reconciliation of realism and nominalism. In the Letter on the Hermit, he adds the duality of idealism and realism, as well as faith and empirical science. Hermetism, then, is the “threefold synthesis” of these antinomies. Of course, there is the reconciliation of pagan intellectuality and Jewish prophetic spirituality through the crucified Christ.

In his essay, Tomberg explains that a spiritual path intended only for those of particular tendencies would be senseless. The path of Practical Monism:

can be trodden by anyone. It appeals to that in a man which strives after the transformation of the ‘lower’, the darkness, into the ‘higher’, the light filled. On this path both poles of human nature are taken into account: what is still to be transformed is here just as valuable as what is already transformed.

In the original essay, Tomberg contrasts Rudolf Steiner’s book Esoteric Science to the Secret Doctrine. The former book, he says, it suitable for European man because it recognizes the Christ impulse that synthesizes the matter-spirit duality in the latter book.

Tomberg concludes the essay with an important principle. In any doctrine, he explains,

we must ask not only about the truth told therein, but also about the completeness of that truth. For incomplete truths can lead the whole practical striving of a person down a blind alley. Therefore, when considering occult writings we must ask: What follows from this for life?

All too often, in perpetual debates that never get resolved, that question is overlooked: what difference does it make for life? Tomberg concluded that Esoteric Science was superior to the Secret Doctrine. We can surmise that at some point, Tomberg came to the realization that Anthroposophy was still an incomplete answer to the question for life. Hence, he must have seen that the Roman religion was a better answer. In other words, with his conversion, life goals opened up for him.

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Meditation on the Immaculate Conception

Immaculate Conception

One can also say that the incarnated human being is the product of two heredities—horizontal heredity and vertical heredity, the latter being the imprint of the individuality form above and the former being the imprint of the ancestors here below. This seeks to express that he is the product of two imitations—horizontal and vertical, i.e., that in order to become what he is he owes it to imitation of his ancestors from the past and to that of himself above. In the last analysis, therefore, it is a matter on the one hand of horizontal heredity going back to the archetype or terrestrial heredity, i.e. Adam, and on the other hand of vertical heredity rising up to the Father who is heaven, i.e. God. This is why it is so important to allow light from the dogma of the immaculate conception to convince us of its truth, for what is at stake is the line of vertical heredity—“God-man heredity”. ~ Valentin Tomberg

The Father gave her his Son, the Son came down into her virginal womb to become her child; in her the Holy Spirit miraculously fashioned the body of Jesus and made her soul his own dwelling place, penetrating her whole being such an ineffable manner that the expression “Spouse of the Holy Spirit” is far from adequate to express the life of the Spirit in her and through her. In Jesus there are two natures, divine and human, but one single Person who is God; here on the contrary we have two natures and two persons, the Holy Spirit and the Immaculata, but united in a union that defies all human expression. ~ St Maximilian Kolbe

For the Word generated by the Father is understood by the one in whom it is received perfectly – by that person who is the Immaculate Conception. ~ St Maximilian Kolbe

By the power of the Holy Spirit the Word became incarnate from the Virgin Mary. ~ Nicene Creed

Just as Eve was the genetic equivalent to Adam, apart from the X chromosome, so likewise is the New Adam the genetic equivalent to the New Eve. In our time, given our knowledge of biology and genetics, the possibility of a virginal conception is no longer inconceivable.

So Jesus, the New Adam, is the genetic image of his Mother, Mary, the New Eve. Moreover, while the body of Jesus was in Mary’s womb, her soul was, in Kolbe’s words, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. As we saw in Letter II on the High Priestess, the Holy Spirit can be reflected only in the completely unperturbed soul, a soul protected from sin. That is Mary, who understood the Spirit perfectly.

As Tomberg points out, we are under the law of horizontal heredity, in imitation of his ancestors, going back to Adam. This prepares the biological and social environment in which the individuality can incarnate. Hence, Jesus appears at a specific time and place, to the mother prepared to receive him.

While Mary was “full of grace” from the beginning, we are likewise called to be full of grace; this is theosis. The is confirmed in Mary as the Queen of Heaven. For us, it is something to be achieved. For that she is our model.

Jesus has two natures, divine and human, in one Person. We, through theosis, can have a divine as well as a human nature. However, we retain our own Person, so this union of the human with the divine requires two persons. By purifying our own soul, the Holy Spirit can become better and better reflected in our own consciousness. Then the Logos is born in us, too, and we put on our true Self:

And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me. And that I live now in the flesh: I live in the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered
himself for me. ~ Galations 2:20

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Secret Movements of the Heart of Man

Translated from Letter to a Friend, or Political, philosophical, and religious considerations on the French Revolution by Louis Claude de Saint-Martin. (French title: Lettre à un ami ou Considérations politiques, philosophiques et religieuses sur la Révolution française.

Here he points out that the Truth must be first found in the spirit and heart of man, by introspection; this Truth is anterior to the traditions, and confirms what he is taught in Tradition. This comes without effort.

[25] So the elements, air, sound, time, weather, languages, math, the close alliance which is found among the good and base customs of natural and civil society, the political institutions whose invention belongs to us less that we believe, since we can create nothing, history of the human race, the same scene of his prejudices and his universal errors in which one would have probably found a fixed residue, if one gave himself the necessary time and attention to let its volatile and the heterogeneous parts evaporate, the inexpressible and secret movements of the heart of man, especially that type of holy veneration by which he is seized when he contemplates his own grandeur, and which, in spite of his crimes, darkness, and deviations, reveals it to himself like a naked God, (allow me the term) like a God ashamed, who blushes to find himself exiled on the earth, who weeps from the inability to show himself in it in his true and sublime form, and who is more reserved and more embarrassed again in the face of virtue. Here are the paths in which the thought of man had been able to find as many religions, that is, as many of the means to unite to himself his intelligence, his spirit, and his heart as the only source from which he descends, and without which there is no peace for him; because while carefully roaming over these paths, he could not fail to meet the one who belongs to him, and who would have led him infallibly to his end.

[26] I warn you, my friend, that with so many gifts which are offered to the observers to support their religious principles, I am pained by never seeing them employ any of them, and abandon them all to resort to books and miracles. The sacred books that they quote to us, are naturally at such a distance from the belief and thought of man, that it is not astonishing to see them miss their target with identical weapons. The verities which he is concerned about are anterior to all books: if one does not begin by teaching man to read these verities in his being, in his mysterious circumstances in opposition to the thirst of his heart for the light, finally in the movement and the play of his own faculties, he grasped them poorly in his books: instead that if, by the active inspection of his own nature, he already saw himself as what he is, and foresaw what he can be, he receives without effort the confirmations that he can find of them in the traditions, and which serves only as the support of an already existing fact and recognized by him.

[27] All the more, it is also like that with miracles: I believe that it is a word that one would never have pronounced before man without having previously begun to attempt to discover the key to his being. One can never repeat it too much, it is in him, and in him alone, that man can find the understanding of all miracles; because if he had once glimpsed the miracle of his own nature, there would no longer have been anything about them which can surprise him.

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The Tableau of God

Translated from Letter to a Friend, or Political, philosophical, and religious considerations on the French Revolution by Louis Claude de Saint-Martin. (French title: Lettre à un ami ou Considérations politiques, philosophiques et religieuses sur la Révolution française

In a wide ranging discussion of the French Revolution written in the form of a letter to a friend, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin turns, in these passages to the question of demonstrating the existence of God. Moving beyond the philosophical arguments, Saint-Martin is intent on demonstrating the God who is active in the soul and in the world.

The atheist is unable to see that God is reflected in the human soul. In denying that, the atheist is veiling the very thing that brings attention to his existence, replacing it with the darkness of nothingness. Unlike the Gnostics or the Platonists, Saint-Martin does not see the material world as a prison, since it, too, passively reveals the creative power of God.

An important point he makes is that there must be some common essence between God and man as the basis any possible communication. Ultimately, this can only be recognized and cannot be demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction. The translation follows.

[12] The true atheist, if there is one, and consequently the truly impious man, is the one who, turning his gaze on the human soul, is unaware of its grandeur and disputes its spiritual immortality, since it is only in the character and the immensity of the gifts and virtues, of which the soul of man is susceptible, that we can see reflected, as in a mirror, all the pure and sacred rays, of which the tableau of God must be composed: thus, to extinguish the human soul is to cover the Divinity with a lugubrious veil that this soul alone has the power to bring to attention in all worlds; it is to extinguish that eternal sun whence everything originates, and to immerse it, with the universality of things, in the mourning and the obscurity of nothingness.

[13] The only means that we would therefore have of proving the true God, the God ruling over free beings, finally the loving God and source of a joy that can be communicated to other beings, would be without doubt to demonstrate in his creature the existence of some base or some essence similar to his, and even to obtain and to feel this joy of which He is the principle; finally, it would be to demonstrate the spiritual and immortal existence of the human soul which, in its radical and integral nature, is fully desire and fully love, finding itself to be then the active witness of the holy and loving God, as physical nature is the passive witness of the powerful and creator God, we would have placed thereby all the foundations of the building, and it would only be a question of working on its construction: for it is very much without doubt that the immortal existence of the human soul has been recognized, as several good spirits have done on earth; but to recognize a thing, is not always to demonstrate it.