Valentin Tomberg – Meditations on the Tarot

2019-11-282020-12-22

Advent Meditation Week 1

Just as we celebrate and anticipate the Incarnation of the Logos on the material plane, so, too, we want to prepare for the analogous birth within the human soul.

Valentin Tomberg, in Letter II, refers to the “second birth” as Christian Yoga. Hence, the elements of Christian Yoga are analogous to the stages of yoga described by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras. In Letter XVI, The Tower of Destruction, these stages are related to the three stages of the spiritual life described by St. John of the Cross. Hence, we have this schema relating these yoga stages in three languages:
Continue reading “Advent Meditation Week 1”

2017-02-262017-02-28

Stages of Hermetic Meditation

The Aim of Meditation

In the Letter on the Fool, we learn that Christian meditation pursues the aim of deepening the two divine revelations:

Holy Scripture
Creation

Ultimately, this will awaken a consciousness and appreciation of Christ’s work of Redemption. Hence, our meditation will lead to contemplation of the seven stages of the Passion. That task will be a follow up to this essay.

Sacrifice

To understand the Redemption, it is first necessary to start with understanding the cosmic significance of the idea of Sacrifice. In the Letter on the Emperor, we learn of two sacrifices:

Creation is a sacrifice: to allow freedom
Incarnation is a sacrifice: the fact of freedom

Creation is effected by a divine contraction and by voluntary divine powerlessness, which is akin to crucifixion. Freedom is the key to understanding Providence in history. On the one hand, without freedom, God would be a “divine tyrant”; yet on the other hand, because of man’s freedom, God’s power may be falsely doubted. Tomberg summarizes it:

God is all-powerful in history inasmuch as there is faith; he is crucified insofar as one turns away from him.

The fact of freedom led to the Incarnation. The sacrifice is not limited to the cross, since the Incarnation itself was a sacrifice. Sergius Bulgakov in Sophia: The Wisdom of God describes it this way.

Christ underwent all the limitations and infirmities of human life. He was subject to every human propensity: he experienced hunger and thirst, exhaustion, grief, temptation. … The agony [of the cross] provides clear evidence at once of the reality of his human nature and of the depth of his self-abasement.

Moreover, his understanding of man’s nature was not sugar-coated as it so often is today. Christ was fully aware of the human race living in spiritual darkness with stupidity, weakness, sloth, lust, injustice, disease … in short, sin. This was accompanied by the awareness of God’s wrath. Bulgakov concludes:

in his human nature the representative human feels the force of the sin of the whole world pressing upon him, the horror, for the one sinless being, of contact with sin, and of the justice of God outraged thereby.

Stages of Meditation

Tomberg describes three stages of meditation, above our ordinary waking consciousness. These stages, in a sense, correspond to the four levels of interpretation of sacred writings. These are summarized in the following table:

Stage	Object	Experience	Interpretation
Objective Consciousness	External images and sounds	Sensory phenomena	Literal
Imagination	Concentration on an inner image	Perception of spiritual phenomena	Allegorical
Inspiration	Inner silence, listening	Spiritual communications	Moral
Intuition	Beyond words and thoughts	Spiritual identification	Anagogical

In our ordinary state of objective consciousness, we learn the faith through sensory images and hearing. Exoteric faith is learned through images such as icons, statues, stained glass, art work, and the like. It is also taught by an authority.

Imagination

The beginning of meditation is our imagination (which Tomberg also calls “vision”) by which we try to concentrate on interior images. We try to visualize the events, perhaps even placing ourselves in them. Tomberg describes this as augmenting our experience. Objective consciousness is passive in respect to experiences, but the imagination is active. This may lead to the perception of spiritual phenomena, as described by several saints and venerables. Anne Catherine Emmerich and Maria d’Agreda have been such visionaries.

St. Francis de Sales describes this stage as the mind meditating on a subject with the aid of the imagination and discourse or reasoning.

Inspiration

In inspiration, we try to quiet the mind, listening silently. Whereas imagination requires effort, this stage is the beginning of concentration without effort. In silence, the gifts of understanding or wisdom may be received. Ideas or dogmas that seemed to be difficult to understand begin to make sense. Sometimes, issues in your own life will be cleared up. You may find that things “just happen” favourably. Not necessarily in your material life, but more so in your spiritual life, as one depends more and more on this for moral guidance.

Intuition

At the stage of ordinary consciousness, the source of knowledge or faith is from beyond one’s own being. Even at the stage of imagination, the images are still in a sense external, as something the I actively creates and envisions. There is still some of that in inspiration, although the process is passive rather than active; the source is beyond the I. In other words, there is the I, or Self, confronting an experience, whether sensory or spiritual.

In the stage of intuition, however, all images, words, and thoughts are relinquished. This may even feel like a “dark night”, a time of abandonment. The consolations of spiritual visions and communications seem to disappear. That is because the I itself must go. It is not a matter of a new and elevated experience, but rather a transformation of one’s very being.

Tomberg gives us the example of St Paul on the road to Damascus, to illustrate the three stages of vision, inspiration, and imagination:

Vision: He had the vision of Christ
Inspiration: He received communication
Intuition: No longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me

Purgation of the Senses and the Spirit

Given the importance of St. John of the Cross in the Meditations, it is worthwhile to learn from him. On the path to the Unitive Way, two conversions are necessary based on the purgation of the senses and the purgation of the spirit. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind.” (Luke 10:27) According to Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange in The Three Conversions of the Spiritual Life, this requires loving God for His own sake, not from self-interest or attachments. To love God with your whole mind means that your love is not affected by the ebb and flow of our experiences. This awareness will counteract the feeling of abandonment on the way to Union.

Hermetically, the path through the stages of mediations involves an alchemical transformation of the spirit, soul, and matter. This transformation is summed up by this pattern:

From the state of primordial purity before the Fall
To the state after the Fall
To Reintegration

Hence, there are a series of meditations suggested by Tomberg, that start by meditating on the state of primordial purity, concluding ultimately on the meditation on the Passion. This is the proposed sequence of meditations:

The seven days of creation
The seven stages of the Fall
The seven miracles of St. John’s Gospel
The seven “I am” sayings of Christ
The seven last words of Christ
The seven stages of the passion

The third stage is reached following the understanding of the Passion and then the Resurrection. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange summarizes the stages, based on the three conversions of the Apostles:

First Conversion: They became disciples of the Master, attracted by the sublime beauty of His teaching.
Second Conversion: This came at the end of the Passion, which had enabled them to divine the fecundity of the mystery of the Cross, enlightened by the Resurrection which followed it;
Third Conversion: It filled them with the profound conviction of this mystery. This resulted in a complete transformation of their souls.

The events of the Passion that are fruitful for meditation are these:

Washing of the feet
The scourging
Crown of thorns
The way of the cross
The crucifixion
The entombment
The resurrection

A more detailed examination of each of these will follow during the week.

Epilog on Love

The Scripture readings for Quinquagesima Sunday illustrate the first and third conversion. The Gospel was about the blind man by the side of the road (Luke 18:31-43) St. Gregory the Great understood this as an allegory about the human race, which was in a state of darkness following the Fall, but then came into the light.

The other text was from 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, the famous sermon on Love, or actually on Charity. Everyone seems today to know what love is, without realizing how difficult it is, what is worth loving, or even how to go about loving. Charity means “love” in the sense of the commandment to love God and your neighbor as yourself. As such, charity is the goal, not the beginning. The gifts of the Holy Spirit lead to Charity. It requires understanding and wisdom to know what to love. It takes strength to love in the face of adversity. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange sums it up like this:

It is impossible to have a high degree of charity without having at the same time and in a proportionate degree the gifts of understanding and wisdom, gifts which, together with faith, are the principle of the infused contemplation of revealed mysteries.

2016-10-07

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.

2014-08-30

Doubt and Certainty

Certainty is vanquished doubt, it is faith regained.

Adam and Eve by Cranach
In the meditation on Eden and the Fall in the Arcanum of the Lovers in Meditations on the Tarot, Valentin Tomberg tells us a little more about Hermetic meditation and how to obtain greater depth. He credits Carl Jung for discovering the method of successive explorations of the psychic layers in psychology. These depths extend even beyond one’s birth, and, since nothing dies, the entire past lives right now in the deep consciousness of the soul, i.e., the unconscious or subconscious. Keep in mind that this refers to the psychic memory, not necessarily the memory of physical events.

The example he uses is the story of Adam and Even in the book of Genesis. Unlike the fundamentalists who try to prove the historical and scientific veracity of the story as an objective event, Tomberg instead turns inward. He is not concerned with the external facts of the garden, trees, serpent, etc., but rather with the living psychical and spiritual realities that are revealed through the symbolism used in the story.

First of all, the story reveals the “beginning”, i.e., it is an initiation, not just of man as an objective being, but also of his interior states. That beginning is the primordial state of being in the image and likeness of God. The reawakening of that state is regeneration or theosis. But Paradise is also the beginning of the Fall, or the principle of temptation, which has three elements:

Eve listened to the voice of the Serpent
She saw that the tree is good to eat and pleasant to behold
She took some fruit, ate it, and then gave some to Adam

In general, temptation follows the following progression: listening, seeing, and experiencing.

The Tree of Life is the spirit, or higher centers, or true Self. The higher centers are oriented “vertically”, i.e., transcendentally. They hear the voice of God, which is one and unchanging. Adam-Eve are in unity and there is no doubt. Together, they are a pneumatic being.

Eve is the feminine principle of Adam, that is, the soul (or “anima”), i.e., the psychic (or “animal”) level. The serpent is the most cunning of the “animals” which is why “Eve” is the first target. (In English the connection between animal and anima is lost.) She listens to the serpent, which represents horizontal consciousness, i.e., the world as though it exists apart from God. The promise he makes is opposed to God’s command, so all of a sudden Even is faced with doubt as she entertains two contrary thoughts.

Just listening to the serpent is the root cause of the Fall, because the two opposing thoughts are considered to be on the same level. Yet the serpent’s claim seems plausible since the Tree of Knowledge is tasty and a delight to look at. This just increases the doubt to the point of an unbearable tension. There are two ways to deal with doubt.

One is to overcome it by rising up to a higher plane, that is, to return to God. This is the way to faith and certainty.
The other way is to try to resolve the doubt through experience. After all, Eve assumed that by actually eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, she could see for herself whether the serpent’s claim was true. This choice just leads to more confusion.

By interiorizing the story in this way, Tomberg elucidates the nature of temptation and how it is a constant presence in our spiritual lives, not just a unique event that happened to some other people in the indefinite past. God is One, but the devil is legion. Hence, in the “world”, we are bombarded with a barrage of opinions, all claiming to be the truth, and all contradictory with each other. This sows confusion. Now it should be a straight-forward decision to reject the ways of the world in favor of the ways of God.

Unfortunately, the glamour of the world is too delightful and we are nearly irresistibly attracted to it. What we hear sounds plausible, it makes us feel good, it enhances our self-esteem, and so on. Considering an idea in the mind then leads us to act on it, so we seek out various experiences by which we hope to assuage our doubt and find happiness. The temptation multiplies because, as Tomberg points out, those who fall into temptation try to draw others into the same experience as a way of confirming their own decision.

We don’t have to go into all the details and anyone can come up with countless examples from the news and in his own life. This meditation on Genesis is not meant to be a one-time meditation, so over time meditators can see more and more how the world entices us with its various promises. The reigning worldview is that if it feels good, it must be right. But that is tantamount to living at the level of an animal, when we really need to be living in the image and likeness of God.

It takes a lot of courage to resist all the temptations we face; just as the world lies to us, we lie to ourselves, hence the need to be extra vigilant. Ultimately it is a matter of Grace. There is no technique or process that will lead us to the primordial state. By clearing the soul of the perturbations resulting from temptations, we will open ourselves up to the experience of Grace. This cannot be forced. That is why Tomberg concludes:

One has experience but does not seek out experiences, because it would be contrary to the holy vow of Chastity to extend a hand and take from the tree of knowledge. The spiritual world does not tolerate experimenters. One seeks, one asks, one knocks on the door, but one does not open it by force. One waits for it to open.

2011-04-122017-04-13

Moral Purification of the Will

Man’s mind is rapt by God to the contemplation of the divine truth in three ways:

He contemplates it through certain imaginary pictures.

He contemplates the divine truth through its intelligible effects.

He contemplates it in its essence.

Now when man’s intellect is uplifted to the sublime vision of God’s essence, it is necessary that his mind’s whole attention should be summoned to that purpose in such a way that he understands nothing else by phantasms, and is absorbed entirely in God.

~ Mary of Agreda, Mystical City of God

Mary of Agreda has given us the three stages of Hermetic contemplation, which are related to their Yoga counterparts in the following table:

Hermetism	Yoga	Theophan	Description
Concentration	dharana	Spoken prayer	Visualization
Meditation	dhyana	Mental prayer	Mental Prayer
Contemplation	samadhi	Unceasing prayer	Prayer of the Heart

Plelase click to continue reading ⇒