What you describe is entirely normal, and your way of describing it is accurate, if a bit casual! The ego is indeed fighting against being “downsized”. Longer, more discursive prayers give the ego a certain amount of elbow room, as it were; we can “sleep” between sentences, and “coast” through the memorized passages. But this isn’t possible, or at least it’s much more difficult, when we’re invoking the Name: its brevity, and the force of its repetition, keeps “squeezing” the ego, and the ego doesn’t like it!

What to do? A certain balance is important. It’s important, in other words, to combine rigor with gentleness. You mustn’t give up, or give in, in order to flee to something less demanding. On the contrary, it’s crucial, especially at times like those you describe, to take yourself firmly in hand and say, “This is my Way forward toward an increasing freedom and peace and happiness. I mustn’t allow myself to fall back into my old habits.” On the other hand, you must avoid all sense of “punishing” or “getting back at” the ego; this itself is just an egoic trick. After all, we’re trying to get past the illusion that everything somehow depends on us; it’s the Name that carries us, protects us, sustains us, feeds us—if only we let it.

So by all means don’t stop invoking: keep yourself focused on that practice, as much as you are able, but as you do so think of the “space” of the Name—the matrix of those precious syllables—as a little garden of peace, in which you need only rest and “melt”.

Believe me, I’m keenly aware of the problems you’re facing, and I thank God every day I’m not just starting out, as you are, in the college teaching business. May Heaven guard and defend you. For “business” is precisely what it’s become, at least at big universities like mine. Assessments, outcomes, credit productions, research dollars—only what can be counted counts.

I’ve not done a careful survey, mind you—in part because surveys are merely more numbers!—but I have little doubt you’re right: truly maieutic teaching has been all but swamped by the transmission of facts and the promulgation of politically fashionable –isms. About all you can do, if you wish to survive and make tenure while remaining true to principles, is to hunker down, say your prayers, and prepare for each and every class as if it were your last and as if your work were being judged, not by the students or some mindless dean whose sole concern is warm bodies, but by Saint Socrates himself.

You might also take some consolation from knowing that there are still a few real teachers out there, or at least a few compromised and self-confessed pretenders who gratefully remember having been taught by a genuine master and regret how much has been lost. In case you didn’t see it, I would highly recommend you take a look at an article that appeared this past May in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Fond and Fearful Memories of an Influential Professor”, by Ellen Handler Spitz. Spitz is an art professor at the University of Maryland, and her article is a deeply moving tribute to her Columbia University philosophy mentor, Mary Mothersill, who died earlier this year. I couldn’t help but think of my own “elitist” and “quirky” undergraduate mentor, John Crossett, whom I have mentioned before in this forum. Indeed the parallels are a little spooky.

“She was unabashedly elitist, whereas today’s professors cringe at the idea of harboring even the remotest trace of snobbery…. These many decades hence, I marvel at the brilliance of her pedagogy. Before the days of political correctness, and predicated on a strong, quirky personality, her teaching style was intended to hand down a particular canon derived from her own education—Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume…. She wanted, openly and boldly, to implant her own passions, predilections, and prejudices in her students. Her pedagogy relied on aura, respect, deference, and even dread…. To whiners and shirkers, Mary would bark, ‘Get cracking!’ She did not suffer fools gladly. Nor sloth….

“In a musty aerie on the highest floor of Milbank Hall, we studied the dialogues of Plato. Mary had chosen Hippias Minor, the text in which Socrates poses intricate questions about lying. Pacing back and forth in the narrow space, she would gaze pensively at an apparent vacuity or out the window for long stretches, and the silence that packed the room was thunderous. No other teacher I had ever studied with behaved this way; it was as though she were modeling for us the very processes of reflection—rethinking for herself every argument from start to finish. As she interrogated us about the text, no step was glossed over or hurried. There we sat, on our hard wooden chairs, trapped in varying degrees of puzzlement, forced to inhabit the wretchedness of our not knowing, desperately longing for closure, wishing for deliverance from the awkward void she refused to fill. For Mary brooked no quick solutions, no leap to a ‘bottom line’. Leaving us in the limbo of our own bafflement and the text’s apparent unintelligibility, she bided her time until, at last, someone broke the unbearable silence. From this experience, repeated weekly and relentlessly, I learned and relearned, or tried to learn, that true understanding requires patience … and that intellectual work must be done only by you yourself—it can never be done for you by anyone else….

“Rarely did [Mary] intervene or save a student; yet she always listened attentively. Unlike some professors of today, she was not indifferent. Not saving you in class did not signify abandonment. It was a means of compelling you to find out how to save yourself. It was for this that I revered her: for making us sit there and face and then push the limitations of our own understanding, for unwaveringly committing herself to teaching us philosophy as she believed it should be taught, and even for her sheer arrogance (justified in my mind by years of erudition and achievement and also by what I sensed as a smoldering intellectual passion).

“No mass-produced Internet pedagogy will ever give us a Mary Mothersill. Nowadays professors seek to be receptive to students, not dictatorial. We try to cover acres of ground to compensate for what students have not previously learned. We even valorize what formerly would have been deemed mistakes. We forswear severity and scorn; we try to be nice. We try not to teach in order to reproduce ourselves, encouraging our students to ‘think independently’. But we have lost something. As we mourn the passing of our teachers, we should remember what they gave us, each in his or her own way. And reclaim it. Not to imitate it, but to build anew on whatever was good and effective in it, for theirs was a pedagogy that, with all its faults, eschewed shortcuts and transported some of us on unforgettable, everlasting journeys into the intoxicating center of the life of the mind” (The Chronicle Review, Volume 54, Issue 35, p. B28).

I don’t know what you mean when you say that traditional scientists such as the alchemists “identified” themselves with the Divine Principle rather than with the material world. I rather doubt it was very often a case, even theoretically, of Tat tvam asi, but perhaps you’re thinking of some less exalted, or more metaphorical, form of identification.

In the final analysis, the fundamental difference between the traditional and modern sciences can be reduced to the question of whether one is looking “at” or “along” the world of phenomena—this is a C. S. Lewis distinction (see his short essay “Meditation in a Toolshed” in God in the Dock) that I often come back to—and whether one privileges Aristotle’s material and efficient or his formal and final causes.

As I tell my university students, the dispute between evolutionists and “creationists”—I put this word in quotation marks to show that I’m using it in a sense broad enough to include Platonists and Plotinists, as well as Semitic cosmogonists—is not a dispute over how to interpret a common set of perceptions; it’s a dispute over how to perceive, and thus over what is perceived. Perhaps you will recall in this connection Owen Barfield’s distinction in Saving the Appearances between “alpha thinking” and “figuration”. You might also want to take a look at my recent lecture “Requiring Religion” for a somewhat fuller sense of the epistemological divide that’s at stake here.

I realize prayer has lately become something of a vicious circle for you, if one may use this rather ill-sounding phrase for so sacred a subject. This is not the first time you’ve told me of your difficulties in praying to a God you still have trouble believing in and with a view to an immortality that often seems to you equally doubtful. Frankly, if I were praying only “to” such “a” God and only “with a view” to this goal, I would probably have trouble praying too.

Prayer of the Heart, however, is much too concrete, too simple, too immediate, and too immediately self-confirming for such doubts to “catch up” to it. Just a few weeks of practice—serious practice, mind you—should be enough to confirm this high praise. And if the term “prayer” is still a problem, because of the past associations you mention, by all means call it something different. Label it “watchfulness”, if you prefer, for fundamentally it’s simply our effort to be attentive instead of sleeping our way through life, and properly practiced it’s as easy as blinking your eyes, and yet at the same time deeply refreshing and instantly rewarding.

“Easy!” you may well reply. “And what of the demands involved in a truly ‘proper’ practice?” I know you worry—nearly everyone does!—about concentration, and you feel as though you’ve been wasting your time when your mind continually strays from the mantram. In fact, however—and I’ve pointed this out several times in Anamnēsis—in some ways the most fruitful sessions of Invocation are the ones in which we’ve been given the most opportunities, not to sit comfortably at the Center, but repeatedly to bring our minds back to that Center, which means we have every reason to rejoice in distractions!

I admit I’m teasing, but my playfulness has a serious purpose, for there’s certainly nothing “wrong” with distraction as such. For that matter there isn’t anything “wrong” with not doing anything about it—that is, with failing to use distraction as an occasion for practicing the Method of return. This isn’t a moral issue about which you need to feel guilty. It’s a question of “skillful means”, as Buddhists would say.

Certainly, the Name is the Named, and this means we must approach our spiritual work with a keen and respectful sense of the sacred. But be careful that the sacramental identity in question doesn’t keep you from invoking out of a sense of unworthiness. Of course, you’re unworthy! Now, the question is: in what precisely does that “unworthiness” consist? Whence does it come? How deep does it go? The more interested you allow yourself to be in finding an answer to these questions, the more joyful will your prayerful acts of self-observation become.

I agree, certainly, that we must guard our hearts carefully against presumption, but we needn’t suppose in doing so that metaphysics and esoterism are themselves presumptuous. There is of course such a thing as intellectual pride, but there is also such a thing as anti-intellectual pride. Humility doesn’t mean pretending we don’t see what we do.

It’s unclear, even after numerous conversations with His Grace, whether Archbishop C. can’t see that there must be Māyā in divinis, or whether—ex officio—he has simply decided not to talk about it for fear of scandalizing the bhaktic faithful. Either way, it remains the case that a God who freely chooses to do what He might not have done must be the relatively absolute self-determination of a God who is necessarily all He does and necessarily does all He is, in the ever-present Now of eternity.

It has rightly been said that “Metaphysics cannot be taught to everyone, but if it could be there would be no atheists”. Let us add: there would also be no fideists.

I’m very sorry to learn of your illness. I was asked much the same question you pose a few months ago by another correspondent, who had been told he was suffering from a terminal disease and was writing to request my advice about “spiritual” books. Here, if you’re interested, is what I told this person: Mental Health and the Classics.

But yours seems a very different case: for one thing your sickness isn’t immediately life-threatening, at least as far as you know, and for another you’ve already read Plato—perhaps even more times than have I!—as well as Dionysius and Boethius. And though Ramana Maharshi is new to you (or so I gathered from your message), you’re nonetheless familiar from your studies of Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy with much the same intellective strategy, which consists in pulling back from the demands of the seeming self by objectifying it and subjecting it to a dispassionate analysis. A reading list along these lines would seem quite beside the point.

It is perhaps worth noting, however, that one of the authors in this list, namely Boethius, was only three years older than you when he died. Did you realize that? I suppose the kshatriya in you may say that bearing a martyr’s death would be much easier, because more glorious, than dealing with your own present sufferings, trivial though they may appear by comparison. Perhaps, but the Consolation nonetheless suggests that its author felt his fair share of “trivial anxieties” as well! Maybe rereading his book—surely one of the very greatest of all the “great books”—in this light could be a useful meditation for you.

There’s no guarantee, of course, that this will free you from anxiety about death. Nor, I hasten to add, is freedom from anxiety necessarily the unmitigated good you (not unnaturally) imagine. It may well be that your feeling of dread is precisely the God-given means you require to provoke a keener interest in disciplined spiritual practice, the interest you have so often confessed you don’t have. Could it not be that these present sufferings are but a wake-up call to your soul, a true memento mori? Not even the quintessential orison of the Heart can, or should, “cure your anxiety”, and it would be the height of foolishness for me to promise such a cure, or for you to expect it. On the other hand, what I can promise is that faithful perseverance in this mode of prayer will give you the distance you need to observe your anxiety with an increasing dispassion.

This “distance” may at first persist only a heartbeat or two. Eventually, though, the practice will lead to a point where the anxiety is no longer needed and dies away of its own accord. I have no way of knowing when you will reach this stage. But whether it’s on this side of your death, in the midst of your dying, or after your death makes no operative difference. The point is simply that a continual, attentive return to the Name is an excellent way to prepare for that death—as do all those who (like Plato) “pursue philosophy aright”—whether it comes (as you have worried) very soon or only many years hence.

Yes, of course: the doctrine of the Resurrection places the emphasis on a continuity—indeed a physical, “flesh and blood” continuity—between what we are (or seem to be) now and what we shall be after death.

For Christians, the Gospel accounts of Christ’s resurrectional body have always been regarded as paradigmatic: whatever was true of Him will be true for us as well, and this means that in the Resurrection we too will be able to eat and be touched, and our bodies will bear at least some of their distinguishing physical marks. For the Christian tradition, as for the other Semitic exoterisms, Paradise is thus limited (your word) to a perpetuation of the individual state, or—as you put it—to the idea that the “ego will live again”. Here we return, as so often, to the essential distinction between salvation on the one hand and liberation (moksha) on the other.

But we must be very cautious in using this term “limited” lest we end up despising Heaven’s promises and gifts! Commenting on the Sufi aphorism that “Paradise is but a prison”, Schuon wisely observes,

“The words in question are essentially the expression of an experience on the part of men who have penetrated the veil of Māyā; presented as a postulate or a program, it has about it something that is singularly disproportionate, unreal, and ill-sounding. That Paradise can be a ‘prison’ means: the world of phenomena, whatever it may be, is perceived as a limitation, or a system of limitations, by him who has tasted the Essence; it does not mean: Paradise is not good enough a priori for this man or that man; quod absit” (René Guénon, Some Observations [Sophia Perennis, 2004], p. 47).

And let’s be certain to remember this too: though Christian eschatology takes no explicit interest in anything beyond the individual state, a fully orthodox understanding of the Resurrection is nonetheless obliged to take seriously these words of the Beloved Disciple: “Now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as he is” (1 John 3:2). He who sees God the Son as He is, and who has truly become a son of God himself, is clearly no longer merely human; or if he is human, we’re not! His “natural energies” have been replaced by the “uncreated energies” of God (Saint Maximos the Confessor), and he has become “without origin and infinite” (Saint Gregory Palamas).

To know that “we shall be like him” is to expect continuity, as I’ve admitted already, but isn’t it obvious that there must also be a dimension of discontinuity? For though He could be touched (John 20:27), He could also pass though locked doors (John 20:19). Here we have, at the very level of the Gospel’s “flesh and blood” narrative, an esoteric opening toward the supra-formal, and thus toward liberation or deliverance.

Asked whether in the Resurrection men would have the same body, a new body, or no body, Origen responded, “Yes!”

Regarding your question about finding a spiritual master, I would caution you to be careful about placing quite the emphasis you have on “presence”. Of course, you certainly have a right to expect that a genuine shaykh or murshid will display all the virtues and that his bearing will in some fashion manifest his inward station. On the other hand, you should beware of getting caught up in displays or phenomena. As it happens, the gifts and attainments of a true master may be veiled, whether by virtue of his simplicity alone or, in some cases, by his deliberately surprising and paradoxical actions. We Orthodox, as I’m sure you know, speak about the “fool for Christ”, and there are analogues to this possibility in every tradition.

A certain caution is particularly important for those who are seeking to follow a path of gnosis, for it’s in the very nature of jnāna marga to accentuate doctrine and the objective techniques of method, not psychosomatic states and experiences, nor by extension the personal “charisma” of the guide. There are of course Sufi taruq in which the barakah of the shaykh constitutes an important dimension of spiritual life for his disciples, who are nourished as it were by the perfumed atmosphere of his presence. I’m told by a former student of mine who entered the Naqshabandi Order in order to become a murid of Shaykh Nazim that he’s an excellent example of a master of this kind and that many of the disciples in this tarīqah are—not surprisingly, perhaps—mutabbarikun rather than “travelers” proper. It sounds as though the master you’ve encountered is in the same basic category.

Please understand that I don’t at all mean to disparage this possibility; it doubtless meets the needs of certain seekers. But it shouldn’t serve as a measure of all legitimate Sufism, nor of spiritual guidance more generally.

You speak of occasionally having the sense that something within you, which is “more than you”, is always praying, even in the moments when you are feeling the most distracted and spiritually indolent; and when you have this experience, you say, it’s as if you were positioned in some way “behind” yourself.

This is a not uncommon sensation for someone who is engaged in a disciplined life of prayer. One thinks of the words of Solomon: “I sleep, but my heart waketh” (Canticles 5:2). It should be accepted with gratitude, certainly—as a “consolation”, to use Roman Catholic parlance, and as an encouragement toward further spiritual effort. But I would not recommend that you attempt to “make something of it” or to “do” something with it.

As Schuon wisely pointed out, “Instead of being governed by phenomena or following inspirations, we should submit to principles and accomplish actions. What God wants of us or what He wishes us to know is to be found in things that are certain and necessary, not in things that are probable and moreover conjectural”—things, precisely, like the meanings or messages that we might otherwise be tempted to suppose lie hidden in unusual states of consciousness. This is clearly excellent advice, and applicable on numerous levels.

Perhaps I should add, however, that what you describe does amount to an experiential confirmation of the fact—were confirmation needed—that duo sunt in homine (“there are two [selves] in man”): namely, the psycho-somatic individuality, on the one hand, and the transpersonal Spirit or Intellect, which is increatus et increabile, on the other. It’s in the nature of things that the created should sometimes “sense” the Uncreated, but it would be a mistake to try to magnify or manipulate this sensation, or to lay in wait for an encore.

One is grateful for the warmth of the sun, especially after days and days of cloudy weather, and one may enjoy seeing its image on the surface of a calm pool of water. But concentrating too exclusively on the warmth or the reflection can easily lead away from the sun itself.

I believe you’d be wise to get some distance on your emotions. We’re to have cool heads and warm hearts, not hot heads and cold hearts. Not that you’re very close to running the latter risk—your evident compassion seems proof against a low cardiac temperature—but your mental apparatus does appear close to boiling! So let’s stop and give this some calming thought. If an esoterist knows anything, it’s that not everyone is an esoterist. Most people need propositional boundaries, and it’s in the very nature of things that every religion thinks its boundaries the best. True, vilifying other paths is stupid, but it’s surely not the first time you’ve encountered people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

In any case one goes to Church—as I’ve pointed out many times before—not to enter into an ecumenical dialogue or to promulgate the virtues of metaphysics, but simply and solely to participate in the Holy Mysteries, and the Church in its wisdom decided centuries ago that the validity and efficacy of those Mysteries do not depend on the intelligence, and certainly not on the open-mindedness, of a given priest. Forgive me for being blunt, but yes: you were definitely “in error” in walking out of a Divine Liturgy. It’s not the poor Liturgy’s fault, after all, if the homilist says something silly. And frankly, being “broken hearted” or feeling the need to “weep” for “the whole world” seems to me a little over the top. We can wish all day long that people were different or for the world to change, but better that we focus our energy—energy that would otherwise be wasted—on our rule of prayer, for in this at least we have the realistic hope of changing something that we really can change for the better: ourselves.

I had to smile when you spoke of Missouri as “the Bible belt”. “Hah,” I thought, “she ought to live in South Carolina!” No, you probably don’t have the temperament for the sort of thing I do in my teaching and writing. So go ahead—if you wish—and pass my Paths to the Heart along to this priest, inwardly asking God to help you stop feeling “an aversion to taking communion” from him simply because, by God’s grace, you’ve been given the power to see his limitations for what they are. And then, if St George’s continues to seem problematic, check out another church in town. As you’ve surely discovered, at least some Orthodox are more contented than Father N. with leaving it to God to decide how salvation works and who exactly is going to benefit from it.