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Chapter from the book of Dr.Vladimir Antonov
Practice of the Modern Hesychasm
What Is Hesychasm?
The term hesychasm originates from the Greek word hesychia — inner quietness.
Without this inner quietness, meditation is not possible. And meditation — after the stage of learning and encompassing the ethical principles of life suggested for us by God — is the basis of further development of the consciousness on the spiritual Path.
It is the striving to achieve hesychia and to advance 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 the Jesus Christ’s directions that one can develop love in oneself only through 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, it stops the “inner dialog”, which prevents meditation. And at full success — i.e. when the consciousness is fully placed in the spiritual heart, one — all of a sudden! — 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 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.
God supported them in this, providing them with the possibility to experience Him as Love. It resulted — at the end — in Merging of the two loving in the Embrace of Love.
Seeking the ways of 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 a humble repetition of His name: “Jesus! Jesus!…”
… But in later times, 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 the Christianity in general — given that they refused the ethics preached by Christ. And this resulted in failure to form — up to the last years — a comprehensive and scientifically correct approach to human spiritual development. In other words, there was not that scientific-religious direction which has been created up to now and called the Methodology of Spiritual Development.
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