So tonight I wanted to shift gears from the Buddhist tradition of Lama Shabkar and turn to another great tradition and a great saint whom I mentioned, I think last time, a saint of the Syriac Church in the 600’s. His name is Isaac the Syrian (at least that’s what he’s called—sometimes Isaac of Nineveh). This book, The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian by Hilarion Alfeyev, is an excellent introduction because it’s an incredible compendium of quotations. As you can see, I’ve noted a lot of them; I will not try to read all of them.
But what’s extraordinary about not only St. Isaac but also the Syriac Church of that time, which is one of the earliest churches that received its gyana directly from Yeshua and the first disciples. It was a very early church, and although it’s called the Syriac Church, it extended all the way to Persia. Isaac was actually born in what’s currently called Qatar, which was then part of the Sassanid Empire. There was an Islamic takeover basically during his lifetime—a regime change that had huge effects on the Church, which nonetheless was able to sustain its integrity—largely because of the great mystics who sustained it in those times, including St. Ephraim a few hundred years earlier and then St. Isaac.
So the three main Christian churches are the Latin, the Greek, and Russian Orthodox, and the Syriac. And then you have offshoots like the Coptic in Egypt. The Syriac Church extended all the way into India, where it’s called the Syro-Malabar Church, and then beyond into China, where it morphed by fusing with Daoism. There is also a Sufi tradition in China that has integrated with Daoism and with Chan and Zen, and these are very fascinating forms of Christianities.
Isaac the Syrian takes you from the earliest stages of the spiritual journey where you’re totally enmeshed in the anavamala (to use the Kashmiri term)—believing you’re an individual being in a world and God is beyond—to that point where the reality (the truth of nonduality) opens up. And his insistent focus is on bringing the mind to stillness—no different than the Buddhist tradition or Advaita or Daoism or Shaivism, whatever. All have the same agenda. But the Syriac Church and Isaac have a different approach to that because it is a very deliberate and conscious form of bhakti, unlike the nondualities of the East that tend to begin with the understanding that you’re not really in bondage and you’re always already in the consciousness of the One Self. This can actually boomerang on the ego that will misinterpret it as meaning, “Well, then I don’t need to do anything”, rather than, “In order to realize that, I must annihilate the illusory ego by stopping completely its chattering narratives.”
I’m going to start with the second to last stage of prayer, according to Isaac, which he calls “luminous meditation” (there’s one step beyond it which he calls “mystical wonder”). Here’s a quote from him:
If you are desirous of tasting the love of God, my brother, ponder, and with understanding meditate, on the things that pertain to Him and which have to do with Him and His holy nature: meditate and ponder mentally, cause your intellect to wander on this all your time
[in other words, don’t wander into ego thoughts; wander totally into the fascination with the presence of the energy of God within], and [then] you will become aware of how all the parts of your soul become enflamed with love, as a burning flame alights on your heart, and desire for God excels in you. . . .[This] Luminous meditation on God is the goal of prayer; or rather, it is the fountainhead of prayers, in that prayer itself ends in [this pure] reflection on God. There are times when a person is transported from prayer to a wondrous meditation on God.[In other words, “Emaho!” is what he’s talking about.]And there are times when prayer is born out of meditating on God. All these are different stages in the course run, in divine fashion, by the intellect in the stadium of this world, each person having his gaze fixed on the crown. [I would say the crown chakra is what he’s referring to.] The crown of the solitary is the spiritual enjoyment of Christ our Lord. Whoever has found this, has received from this world a pledge of those things which are to come.
OK, so he’s already getting intimations of Sat Yuga. And then the next phase, which is the complete stillness of the mind, which he calls spiritual prayer:
The saints of the age to come [right, which is not Sat Yuga but Sangam Yuga, the age that Sat Yogis are in to create Sat Yuga] . . . the [sages] of the age to come do not pray with prayer when their intellects have been swallowed up by the Spirit, but rather with awestruck wonder they dwell in that gladdening glory. So it is with us, at the time when the intellect is deemed worthy to perceive the future blessedness, it forgets itself and all things of the world and no longer has movement with regard to any thing.
So complete stillness of mind brings one into the vibrational frequency of God. And then he says:
In the life of the spirit . . . there is no longer any prayer. Every kind of prayer that exists consists on the level of the soul of beauteous thoughts which arise. . . . [but] On the level and . . . life of the spirit, there are no thoughts, no stirrings; no, not even any sensation or the slightest movement of the soul concerning anything, for human nature completely departs from these things [of the world]and from all that belongs to itself. Instead it remains in a certain ineffable and inexplicable silence [the Kashmiris use the same word “inexplicable,” anakya in Sanskrit], for the working of the Holy Spirit stirs in it, having been raised above the realm of the soul’s understanding.
So the soul is transported beyond itself into the stillness of the Supreme Lord.
When the mind is entirely without any kind of reflection, this is silence of the mind and not purity of prayer. It is one thing to pray purely [which is one-pointed and with total devotion and adoration], and quite another for the mind to be [perfectly] silent from any wandering at all or [even] from insight into the words of prayer, and to remain without any stirring.
And then he adds, interestingly:
No one is so stupid as to want to find this by means of struggle and the strength of his own will, for this is the gift of the revelation to the intellect, and it is not within the reach of pure prayer, or a matter of the will.
You can’t pray for this. It’s not a matter of the will, it’s grace. So it’s very difficult, I think, for most postmodern egos to recognize the reality of grace and to be humble enough to ask for it. And when you believe that nonduality is already the truth and you don’t recognize that as long as you believe you are a being in a world, your only way to God is through humility, through surrender—total surrender—until there is absolute stillness. And that is the portal to the grace. The grace comes when one has given oneself in that way. This stage is sometimes called theoria (where “theory” comes from, but it means the vision of God); and sometimes it’s called knowledge, he says (meaning gyana, gnosis); and other times, the revelation of the noetic essence of God-consciousness.
Once the intellect enters the realm of stillness, it ceases from prayer [because it ceases from all mental movements]. . . .As soon as the governance and the stewardship of the Spirit rule the intellect [in other words, you’ve been taken over by God],then a man’s nature is deprived of its free will and is led by another guidance. [This is extremely important. In this phase God takes over. You have no more will of your own. It is the will of God that then brings the intellect into the final state.] Where, then, will prayer be, when a man’s nature has no authority over itself, but is led whither it knows not by some other power, and is not able to direct the movements of the mind and what it chooses, but at that moment is held fast in a captivity by which it is guided whither it does not perceive? But according to the testimony of scripture, at such a time a man will not possess a will, nor will he know whether he is “in the body or out of the body.”
This is a very beautiful description of someone who obviously has been there, and it’s absolutely accurate and congruent with all the traditions. There’s more I could read, but I’m going to skip.
On the wings of faith [then] she [the soul] soars aloft, taking leave of visible creation; she becomes as one drunken in awestruck wonder of her continual solicitude for God; and by simple, uncompounded vision, and by unseeing intuitions concerning the Divine Nature.
God has no parts. It’s absolute simplicity and total stillness because it’s beyond time and space. It’s the same as when Ramana says, in the final stage of ajatavada there is no world, there’s never been a world, there’s only the Self. This is the reaching of that through surrender.
It is not possible that even one in a thousand righteous men should be accounted worthy of this lofty noetic perception. And indeed, the theoria concerning our Lord’s incarnation and his manifestation in the flesh is also said to arise from [this] theoria concerning the Divinity.
In other words, you will recapitulate the Christening of Christ—the absolute realization (whether it happened during the baptism with John the Baptist or in the desert, there was that moment)—and this same moment is our destiny when we have surrendered.
