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(See Faith, Doxology, Attitude to the Passions). (See Lay Work, Prayer, Cares, Prelest, Reading the Holy Fathers). I consider the mercy commanded by the Lord, I see an unseen abyss, I see a height that is carried away from my eyes; He commands us: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36). To fulfill this commandment, one must become as merciful as the infinitely merciful Lord is merciful. “Broad, O Lord, is Your commandment!” (Ps. 118). Who will be able to fulfill it completely in action? Is it possible that the one who, embraced by Your Holy Spirit, has abandoned the walk so characteristic of infants with difficulty and extreme slowness along the path of Your commandments - begins to walk along them with gigantic steps, to fly rather than to march, to fly on the wings of the Spirit. But I, a sinner, a gloomy sinner, no matter how I look into myself, I always see the mixture of good and evil brought to the human race by its forefather, who boldly and sinfully ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I seem to people to be merciful. But, having accurately checked myself, examined myself, I find in myself one stupid mask of mercy. Vanity has mercy in me; passion is merciful in me; Selfishness is merciful in me, blood is merciful in me; but for the pure, holy commandment of Christ to move me to mercy, I do not find this in myself. When I, a gloomy sinner, come to my senses for a brief moment and wish to be merciful in accordance with the commandment of Christ, I see that I must inflict terrible violence on my heart. My heart disease is exposed by the holy commandment, convinced by it, I recognize myself, by the nature of a merciful person, as hard-hearted, a man-hater in relation to the Gospel. My heart agrees to be merciful according to the movement of blood; but to be merciful according to the commandment of Christ is crucifixion for him. Seeing myself this way, comparing my state with the one depicted in the Gospel for the disciple of Christ, I find that I, who have a natural disposition towards mercy, should not entrust myself to this natural disposition, but should mortify it. I am obliged to force myself to show mercy in accordance with the Commandments of the Gospel, even if this is associated with the violence of the heart, which carries within itself the infection of sin, common to all people. Natural mercy, as a product of flesh and blood, cannot be a God-pleasing virtue. That's not enough! It is hostile to the Gospel Commandments! To visit and kill him, the sword of the gospel was brought to earth. Those led by natural mercy remain in darkness under the influence of a fierce, all-evil ruler of the world. The Lord, the Savior of the world, during His stay on earth, once announced to His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem: there he would suffer a lot, be killed, and rise on the third day. Then the supreme of the apostles, Saint Peter, moved by natural mercy, began to contradict the Lord. You are merciful, Lord,” he said, “you should not have this.” To this expression of compassion and natural mercy, the Lord answered Saint Peter: Follow me, Satan, you are the temptation of Me: you do not think that the essence of God is human, but human. Was the word “Satan” really only a reproach in the mouth of the God-man? God forbid that such blasphemy should be allowed! With this word, the Lord depicts that the thoughts and feelings of fallen man are under the control of Satan, although apparently they seem good; The actions of man according to the desire of his heart merge into one with the actions of Satan. Our nature is so damaged by the sad fall! Then, the Gospel tells us, Jesus said to His disciples: If anyone wants to walk after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and come after Me. Whoever wants to save his soul will destroy it, and whoever destroys his soul for My sake will find it. That mercy must be put to death, the cause of which is blood; must gain that mercy, the reason, the source of which is the bright and holy commandment of Christ; she is the Spirit, she is the eternal belly. 6. 180–182 The fathers said: “Whoever wants to reach the Kingdom in a short way, let him introduce mercy into his heart.” By grace our reverend fathers became like God and bore human infirmities. 6.206 The perfection of Christian, and therefore human, virtue in a renewed nature is a gracious, God-imitating mercy produced in a Christian by the development of Divine grace given to him in Baptism and cultivated by the commandments. From such mercy comes spiritual purity; she feeds on it, she lives on it. Rev. Isaac of Syria to the question: “What is purity?” - answered: “Purity is a heart filled with mercy for every creature.” To the question: “What is a merciful heart?” - this great teacher of monastics said: “This is the burning of the heart for every creature, for people, for birds, for animals, for demons - in a word, for every creature. From the memory of them and the vision of them, the eyes of the merciful one shed tears due to the abundant and strong mercy that has taken possession of the heart. From constant patience, his heart became the heart of a child, and he cannot be indifferent when he hears or sees any harm or even minor sorrow to which a creature has been subjected. And therefore he brings prayer every hour, accompanied by tears, for the dumb, and for the enemies of the truth, and for those who slander him, so that they may be preserved and purified; even he does this about the nature of reptiles, out of great mercy moving excessively in his heart and in the likeness of God.” 2.407–408 (See Lord's Prayer, Condemnation, Jealousy). Alms greatly help the deceased, and God will bless the children for this, and their conscience will be calmer. 6.679 (See Estate, Charity, Wealth, Mortal Sins, Death). The word peace has two meanings in Scripture. 1) The word peace denotes all of humanity in the following and similar expressions of Scripture: “God so loved the world, as He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to judge the world, but through Him the world may be saved” (John 3:16-17). “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). 2) The word world denotes those people who lead a sinful life, contrary to the will of God, who live for time, and not for eternity. This is how the word world must be understood in the following and similar expressions: If the world hates you, know that it hated Me before it hated you. If only we were quicker from the world, the world would love its own. As if you are not from the world, but I chose you out of the world, for this reason the world hates you (John 15:18-19). Do not love the world, nor those in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him: for everything in the world, carnal lust, and desire, and worldly pride, is not from the Father, but is from this world. And the world passes away, and its lust: but he who does the will of God abides forever (1 John 2:15-17). Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that all the things of this world are enmity to God? Whoever desires to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God (James 4:4). Blessed Theophylact of Bulgaria defines the world as follows: “It is usual for Scripture to call the world the life of sinners and people of carnal wisdom who dwell in it: that is why Christ said to His disciples: you are not of the world. They formed part of the people living in the world, but, not being in sin, they were not of the world.” Most people have led and continue to lead sinful lives, abominable before God, hostile to God; for this reason, and because the majority of God's enemies are disproportionately large in comparison with the number of God's faithful servants, the majority are called the world in Scripture; that which refers to the majority is attributed to all humanity. Saint Isaac of Syria defines peace this way: “Peace is the common name for all passions. If a person does not first know that there is a world, then he will not achieve to know by how many members he has withdrawn from the world and by how many he is attached to it. There are many who, having renounced the world with two or three members and, having refused to communicate with it, have imagined that they are alien to the world by their residence. This happened to them because they did not understand and did not consider wisely that they died to the world with only two members, and their other members live inside the carnal wisdom that belongs to the world. However, they could not even feel their passions; without feeling them, they could not take care of healing themselves from them. According to the study of (spiritual) reason, the word world is used to compose a general name that embraces individual passions. When we want to call passions by a common name, we call them peace; when we intend to distribute them according to their particular names, then we call them passions. Each passion is a private action according to the principles of the world (Col. 2:8). Where passions cease to act, there the beginning of the world remains without action. The passions are the following: the lust for wealth, the desire to collect various things; bodily pleasure, from which lustful passion; lust for honor, from which envy arises; desire to be in charge; arrogance with the splendor of power, adorning oneself with magnificent clothes and vain utensils; human glory, which serves as the cause of memory malice; bodily fear. Where these passions cease to act, there the world died. And to the extent that some of these parts are left, the ascetic remains outside the world, which is so destroyed, being deprived of its constituent parts. Someone said about the saints that while they lived, they were dead: for while they lived in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. And take a closer look at yourself, for which of the above passions are you alive? Then you will know how alive you are for the world and how dead you are to it. When you understand what the world means, then you will understand from the above particular instructions in what ways you connected with the world and in what ways you renounced it. In short: the world is carnal living and carnal wisdom. The world is a harlot, attracting to her love those who turn their eyes to her with lust for her beauty. He who, although partially carried away by the love of the world and entangled in it, cannot get rid of its hands until the world deprives him of life (eternal). When the world completely exposes a person and carries him out of his house on the day of his death, then the person will know that the world is a flatterer and a deceiver. He who strives to emerge from the darkness of the world, while he is still among it, cannot see it. The world holds in chains not only its disciples, children and captives, but behold! He began to seize both the non-covetous and the ascetic, and those who had risen above him, to their deeds in various ways, trampling them and throwing them under his feet.” 5. 301–306 If the present age is darkness, then we run from it, we run, thinking that we have nothing in common with the enemy of God. He who wants to be his friend becomes an enemy of God (James 4:4), and who can help him who has become an enemy of God? And therefore, let us imitate our fathers and, like them, let us seek out the treasure that is within our hearts and, having found it, let us hold it tightly, cultivating it and preserving it: this is our purpose from the very beginning. 2.154 What does this mean? The world feels like a kind of desert, either because I myself live in the desert, or because a crowded society, when it is alienated from the Word of God, takes on the character of a desert. 6.542 Exactly: the world does not amuse people who reflect, but it, feeding us with sorrows, pushes away our love for it and directs it to God. The world wounds our heart and thereby heals its illnesses - earthly addictions. Untimely solitude destroys this work of the heart, which, having found peace, often again makes peace with the world and becomes colder towards God. These are not my thoughts, but I borrowed them from the ascetic fathers of the Church, and when I see experiences, they constantly confirm me in this way of thinking. 6.493 Let us despise the world and its opinion, because the Savior tells us: Whoever is ashamed of My words in this sinful and adulterous generation, of him I will be ashamed before My Father and His Angels. From pleasing the world, boldness towards God is lost, and from contempt for the world, a Christian becomes his own to God and with much boldness turns to His house, believing His word as the Word of God, and not with double-mindedness, from which the effect of the Word of God is weakened for the unbelief associated with double-mindedness. 6. 594–595 The peace of God is the portion of the saints of God; through the holy world, a Christian, having completed the race of repentance, is reconciled with God, with all circumstances, with all his neighbors, with himself; he is made the son of God by grace (Matthew 5:9). The peace of God is accompanied by the clear presence of the Holy Spirit in man; he is an action, a fruit of the Holy Spirit. Having acquired the peace of God within himself, he is capable of other final bliss: complacent endurance, joyful enduring of reproaches, slander, expulsions and other misfortunes. He who has acquired the peace of God is not afraid of external waves: on the scales of his heart, the consolation of grace has destroyed all the value of earthly great and sweet things, all the burden of earthly sorrow and bitterness. 1. 520–521 The gracious peace of Christ, by which the ascetic is introduced into pure prayer, is completely different from the ordinary calm, pleasant disposition of people: having settled in the heart, it fetters the outrageous movements of passions, takes away fear not by removing the terrible, but by a blessed, valiant standing in Christ, in which the terrible is not scary, as the Lord said: “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you: not as the world gives, I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, let it not be afraid” (John 14:17). Such spiritual power dwells secretly in the world of Christ that it tramples upon it all earthly sorrow and misfortune. This power is borrowed from Christ Himself: “In Me have peace. You will be in a world of sorrow: but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Called upon by heartfelt prayer, Christ sends down into the heart a spiritual power called the peace of Christ, incomprehensible to the mind, inexpressible in words, incomprehensibly comprehended by blissful experience alone. “The peace of God,” says the apostle to Christians, “surpasses all understanding, that it may guard your hearts and your minds on Jesus Christ” (Phil. 4:7). Such is the power of the peace of Christ. He is beyond all intelligence. This means: he is above every created mind - the human mind, the mind of the Angels of light, and the mind of the fallen angels. He, as the action of God, sovereignly, divinely controls the thoughts and feelings of the heart. When he appears, all demonic thoughts and sensations dependent on them flee, and human thoughts, together with the heart, come under his all-holy control and guidance. Henceforth he becomes their king and observes them, i.e. keeps untouched by sin, in Christ Jesus. This means: it contains thoughts unoriginally in the Gospel teaching, enlightens the mind with the mysterious interpretation of this teaching, and feeds the heart with daily bread, which comes down from heaven and gives life to all who partake of it. The holy world, with its abundant action, brings silence to the mind and attracts both soul and body to blissful tasting. Then all movement of the blood, all its influence on the state of the soul ceases: there is a great silence, a certain subtle coolness blows through the whole person and a mysterious teaching is heard. A Christian, held and protected by the holy world, becomes impregnable to adversaries; he is attached to the enjoyment of the world of Christ and, reveling in it, forgets not only sinful pleasures, but all earthly pleasures, both physical and mental. Healing drink! Divine healing! Blissful rapture! Exactly: what other beginning can there be for the renewal of man than the grace-filled feeling of peace, by which the constituent parts of man, separated by sin, are united again together! Without this preliminary gift, without this connection with himself, can a person be capable of any spiritual, Divine state created by the all-good Holy Spirit? Can a broken vessel, before it is repaired, be a container for anything? The feeling of peace in Christ, as well as of all grace-given gifts in general, begins first of all to manifest itself during prayer, as in that activity in which the ascetic is most prepared by reverence and attention to receiving Divine impressions. Subsequently, having become, as it were, an accessory of a Christian, he constantly accompanies him, constantly and everywhere rousing him to prayer, performed in the spiritual cage, pointing out from afar mental enemies and slanderers, repelling and striking them with his omnipotent right hand. 2.221–222 The Peace of Christ is the source of unceasing, mental, heartfelt, spiritual, grace-filled, spiritual prayer - prayer brought from the entire human being through the action of the Holy Spirit; the peace of Christ is a constant source of grace-filled humility of Christ, which surpasses the human mind. The one who says that grace-filled prayer is grace-filled humility and grace-filled humility is unceasing prayer will not be mistaken. 2.226 Not only flesh, but also blood will not inherit the Kingdom of God. But since the Kingdom of God is within us, we must conclude from this that as long as the heart sensations are excited and accompanied in us by the movements of the blood, until then we are alien to the spiritual action flowing from God. By spiritual, Divine action, the blood becomes silent and there is a “silence of greatness.” That holy peace, which is not in our fallen nature, but is and is bestowed by the Lord, a peace that surpasses all understanding, descends into the soul. He pours sacred peace into the mind, heart and body of the servant of Christ, unites these three together and presents them to Christ, immersed in the abyss of humility, brought into a state of Christ. This state belongs to a renewed nature. 6.254–255 The peace of Christ surpasses every mind that unites together a person cut by sin; The peace of Christ, filling our entire being with incomprehensible power and heavenly sweetness, begins to descend into the soul when it is cleansed of passions by keeping the commandments of Christ and pious deeds. In order to preserve the peace of Christ within oneself, in order to taste it abundantly, in order to be changed by it from the old into the new man, solitude is necessary. A treasure thrown down at a crossroads must certainly be plundered and stolen. Powerful is the peace that flows from the action of the Holy Spirit. Who can resist his attraction? Passions flee from his face; from action his mind and heart move to heaven. Man is reconciled to everything in God. He begins, as it were, to float in the immeasurable space of the spiritual world and learns that the commandment of God is wide and very wide. The peace of Christ accomplished martyrs and saints; he brings the Christian out from under the power of flesh and blood, uproots the sinful country from the soul and body, destroys the violent influence of demons on the soul and body, introduces into the Christian the properties of Christ - meekness, humility, goodness. The soul, having felt these properties, begins to taste wonderful peace - the guarantee and beginning of the eternal peace of the righteous in the villages of eternal bliss. 6. 419–420 Know that a person, when he is outside the state of the world, is in a state that is incorrect in relation to the law of Christ, in a state of self-delusion and delusion, in idolatry. 6.273 Without God's help and grace, none of the people is strong enough to resist the invisible struggles that arise in his heart and produce a spiritual storm. Prayer and reading the Word of God help in spiritual storms, but even with this help, a person will not soon cope with himself, will not soon ascend to the haven of indestructible calm, because it is not soon that thoughts and feelings of God are assimilated to our fallen nature, and it is not soon that faith becomes alive. From living faith in God comes complete submission to God, and from submission to God comes peace of mind and tranquility of the heart. 6.466 During the earthly life of the God-man, lovers of peace completed their atrocities by rejecting Christ and committing deicide (Matthew 23:32), and in the last times of the world they will complete their atrocities by accepting the Antichrist and giving him divine honor (John 5:42). Peacefulness is terrible! It enters a person in an inconspicuous way and gradually, and having entered, it becomes his cruel and unlimited ruler. People gradually prepared themselves and acquired a mental state capable of deicide; gradually they prepare themselves, acquire a mood and character capable of accepting the Antichrist (2 Thess. 2:7). 5.308 (See Salvation and Perfection). Christians living in the middle of the world should not be concerned with sublime monastic activities, especially silent ones. And the Lord commanded: Do not pour new wine into old wineskins. New wine breaks old wineskins, spills itself and destroys the skins; monastic works, when the laity take up them, themselves disappear and bring spiritual destruction to their workers. 6.367 Repentance befits a pious Christian living in the middle of the world - to reckon with his conscience every evening. And happy! If a Christian tries to live according to the commandments and examine himself daily, then little by little he will acquire contrition of spirit. 6. 368. The order of attention to oneself for one living in the middle of the world. The soul of all exercises about the Lord is attention. Without attention, all these exercises are fruitless, dead. Anyone who wants to be saved must arrange himself in such a way that he can maintain attention to himself not only in solitude, but also in the midst of absent-mindedness, into which he is sometimes drawn by circumstances against his will. Let the fear of God overcome all other sensations on the scales of the heart: then it will be convenient to maintain attention to yourself both in the silence of your cell and amid the noise surrounding you on all sides. Prudent moderation in food, reducing the heat in the blood, greatly promotes attention to oneself, and the heating of the blood - such as from excessive consumption of food, from increased body movement, from inflammation with anger, from the intoxication of vanity and from other reasons - gives rise to many thoughts and dreams, otherwise, absent-mindedness. The Holy Fathers prescribe to those who wish to heed themselves first of all moderate, uniform, constant abstinence from food. Having woken up - in the image of the awakening from the dead awaiting all people - direct your thoughts to God, sacrifice to God the beginnings of the thoughts of the mind, which has not yet accepted any vain impressions. With silence, very carefully, having completed everything necessary for the body for one who has risen from sleep, read the usual prayer rule, caring not so much about the quantity of prayer, but about its quality, i.e. that it be done with attention and, because of the attention, so that the heart is sanctified and enlivened by prayerful tenderness and consolation. After the prayer rule, again taking care of your attention with all your might, read the New Testament, mainly the Gospel. During this reading, carefully note all the testaments and commandments of Christ, so that you can direct your activities, visible and invisible, according to them. The amount of reading is determined by a person’s strengths and circumstances. One should not burden the mind with excessive reading of prayers and Scripture, and one should not miss one’s responsibilities for immoderate exercise in prayer and reading. Just as excessive consumption of food upsets and weakens the stomach, so excessive consumption of spiritual food weakens the mind, produces in it an aversion to pious exercises, and makes it despondent. For the novice, the Holy Fathers suggest frequent prayers, but short ones. When the mind grows in spiritual age, becomes stronger and matures, then it will be able to pray unceasingly. The words of the holy Apostle Paul apply to Christians who have reached the age of perfection in the Lord: I would like men to say prayers in every place, lifting up their holy hands without anger or reflection (1 Tim. 2:8), i.e. dispassionately and without any amusement or soaring. What is characteristic of a husband is not yet characteristic of a baby. Having been illuminated, through prayer and reading, by the Sun of Truth, our Lord Jesus Christ, let a person go out to the affairs of the daily field, paying attention so that in all his deeds and words, in his entire being, the all-holy will of God, revealed and explained to people in the Gospel Commandments, reigns and acts. If you have free minutes during the day, use them to read with attention some selected prayers or some selected passages from Scripture and with them again strengthen your spiritual strength, exhausted by activity in the midst of a busy world. If you don’t get these golden minutes, you should regret them as if you were losing a treasure. What is lost today should not be lost the next day, because our heart conveniently gives in to negligence and forgetfulness, from which is born the gloomy ignorance that is so disastrous in the cause of God, in the cause of human salvation. If you happen to say or do something contrary to the commandments of God, then immediately heal the mistake with repentance and through sincere repentance return to the path of God from which you deviated by violating the will of God. Do not stray outside the path of God! Confront the sinful thoughts, dreams and sensations that come with faith and humility with the Gospel Commandments, speaking with the holy Patriarch Joseph: “How can I create this evil verb and sin before God?” (Gen. 30:9). He who pays attention to himself must abandon all daydreaming in general, no matter how tempting and plausible it may seem; all daydreaming is a wandering of the mind, outside the truth, in the land of ghosts that do not exist and cannot come true, that flatter the mind and deceive it. The consequences of daydreaming are loss of attention to oneself, absent-mindedness and hardness of heart during prayer; hence the mental disorder. In the evening, going to sleep, which in relation to the life of that day is death, consider your actions during the past day. For someone who leads an attentive life, such consideration is not difficult, because due to attention to oneself, the forgetfulness that is so characteristic of an entertained person is destroyed. So, having remembered all your sins in deed, word, thought, feeling, bring repentance to God for them with disposition and a heartfelt guarantee of correction. Then, after reading the prayer rule, conclude the day begun with the thought of God with thoughts of God. ...The great Agathon said: “It is impossible to succeed in virtue without intense attention.” 1. 296–298 The path to God is prayer. The dimension of the journey taken is the various prayerful states into which the person praying correctly and constantly gradually enters. 1. 138 Prayer is the communion of life. Leaving her brings invisible death to the soul. What air is to the life of the body, the Holy Spirit is to the life of the soul. The soul, through prayer, breathes this holy, mysterious air. When you arise from sleep, let your first thought be about God; Bring the very beginning of your thoughts, still unimpressed by any vain impression, to God. When you go to sleep, when you are preparing to plunge into this image of death, let your last thoughts be about eternity and about the God reigning in it. The angel revealed to a certain holy monk the following order of thoughts in prayer, pleasing to God: “The beginning of prayer should consist of glorifying God, thanking God for His countless benefits; then we must bring to God a sincere confession of our sins, in contrition of spirit; in conclusion, we can offer, however with great humility, petitions to the Lord for our mental and physical needs, reverently leaving the fulfillment and non-fulfillment of these petitions to His will.” “As much as you pray, ask, believe, as you receive, and it will be done for you” (Mark 11:24), declared the Lord. And therefore, having rejected all doubt and double-mindedness, constantly remain in prayer with the Lord, who commanded you to always pray and not to be cold (Luke 18:1), that is, not to become despondent from the tightness of prayer, which, especially at first, is painful and unbearable for a mind accustomed to wandering everywhere. Sometimes our request is immediately heard; sometimes, according to the Savior, God is long-suffering for us (Luke 18:7), i.e. does not quickly fulfill what we ask: He sees that we need to stop this fulfillment for a while for our humility, that we need to get tired, to see our weakness, which is always revealed very sharply when we are left to ourselves. Prayer, as a conversation with God, is itself a high good, often much greater than what a person asks for, and the merciful God, without fulfilling the request, leaves the petitioner with his prayer, so that he does not lose it, does not abandon this highest good when he receives the requested good, much less. God does not satisfy requests the fulfillment of which is associated with harmful consequences; He does not satisfy those requests that are contrary to His holy will, contrary to His wise, incomprehensible destinies. The holy Apostle James proclaims to the sons of the world, asking God for earthly blessings to satisfy their carnal lusts: “You ask and do not receive, you ask evilly, so that you may depend on your desires” (James 4:3). Man sees on the face, but God sees on the heart (1 Sam. 16:7); but in a person the location of the heart is most consistent with the position of his face, his appearance. And therefore, when praying, give the most reverent position to the body. Stand like a condemned man, with your head bowed, not daring to look at the sky, with your hands hanging down. Let the sound of your voice be the pitiful sound of crying, the groan of one wounded by a deadly weapon or tormented by a cruel disease. Stand in your prayer as if you were standing before God Himself. Exactly: you stand before Him! You stand before your Judge and sovereign Master, on Whom your fate in time and in eternity depends. Intending to offer prayer to God, reject all earthly thoughts and concerns. Do not engage in thoughts that then come to you, no matter how important, brilliant, necessary they may seem. Give what is God to God, and you will have time to give what you need for temporary life in due time. It is not possible at the same time to work for God in prayer and occupy the mind with thoughts and worries of strangers. Forgiveness of everyone, all offenses without exception, even the most severe ones, is an indispensable condition for success in prayer. “When you stand praying,” the Savior commands, “forgive whatever you have against anyone, so that your Father, who is in heaven, will forgive your sins. If you do not forgive, neither will your Father who is in heaven forgive you your sins” (Mark 11:25-26). “The prayers of those who are wicked in memory are sowing on stone,” said the Monk Isaac of Syria. Moderate, prudent, constant abstinence from food and drink makes the body light, cleanses the mind, gives it vigor and therefore also serves as preparation for prayer. Incontinence of the belly makes the body heavy, plump, hardens the heart, darkens the mind with a multitude of fumes and gases ascending from the stomach to the brain. As soon as a satiated or satiated person gets up to pray, drowsiness and laziness attack him, many crude dreams are depicted in his imagination, his heart is unable to come to tenderness. Just as intemperance is harmful, so is immoderate fasting, or even more harmful. Weakness of the body, resulting from malnutrition, does not allow prayers to be performed in the proper quantity and with the proper strength. The amount of prayer is determined for each person by his lifestyle and the amount of mental and physical strength. The widow's two mites, which she brought to the church and made up her entire estate, landed on the scales of the just God, greater than the significant offerings of the rich from their excesses. Judge your prayer in the same way: assign to yourself the amount of it according to your strengths, remember the wise instruction of the great mentor of ascetics: “If you force a weak body to do things that exceed its strength, then by doing so you put darkness into your soul and bring it confusion, not benefit.” Being busy with social duties, and if you are a monk, then with obediences, and not being able to devote as much time to prayer as you would like, do not be embarrassed by this: serving lawfully and conscientiously prepares a person for fervent prayer and replaces quantity with quality. Nothing contributes more to success in prayer than a conscience satisfied with God-pleasing activity. 1. 139–144 The soul of prayer is attention. Just as a body without a soul is dead, so prayer without attention is dead. Without attention, a prayer pronounced turns into idle talk, and the one praying is thus counted among those who take the Name of God in vain. Say the words of prayer slowly; do not allow the mind to wander everywhere, but close it in the words of prayer. This path is narrow and deplorable for a mind accustomed to wandering freely throughout the universe; but this path leads to attention. Whoever tastes the great benefit of attention will love to oppress the mind on the path leading to blissful attention. Attention is the initial gift of Divine grace sent down to the worker and patiently suffering in the feat of prayer. Graceful attention must be preceded by one’s own effort toward attention, the latter must be an active evidence of a sincere desire to receive the former. One’s own attention is overwhelmed by thoughts and dreams, fluctuating from them; gracious - full of firmness. Forbid yourself from distracted thoughts during prayer, hate daydreaming, reject worries with the power of faith, strike your heart with the fear of God, and you will comfortably learn to pay attention. 1. 144 During prayer, the mind must be kept, and with all care, formless, rejecting all images drawn in the imagination, because the mind in prayer stands before the invisible God, Who cannot be imagined in any material way. Images, if the mind allows them in prayer, will become an impenetrable curtain, a wall between the mind and God. “Those who see nothing in their prayers see God,” said the Monk Meletius the Confessor. If, during your prayer, the image of Christ, or an Angel, or some saint, in a word, any kind of image appeared to you sensually or was depicted in you mentally, do not accept this appearance as true, do not pay any attention to it, do not enter into conversation with it. Otherwise, you will certainly be subjected to deception and severe mental damage, which is what happened to many. A person, until he is renewed by the Holy Spirit, is incapable of communicating with holy spirits. He, as still in the realm of the fallen spirits, in captivity and slavery to them, is able to see only them, and they often, noticing in him a high opinion of himself and self-delusion, appear to him in the form of bright angels, in the form of Christ Himself, for the destruction of his soul. Holy icons were accepted by the Holy Church to excite pious memories and sensations, and not at all to excite daydreaming. Standing before the icon of the Savior, stand as if before the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, omnipresent in Divinity and present with His icon in the place where it is located. Standing before the icon of the Mother of God, stand as if before the Most Holy Virgin herself; but keep your mind formless; the greatest difference is to be in the presence of the Lord and to stand before the Lord, or to imagine the Lord. The feeling of the presence of the Lord instills saving fear in the soul, introduces into it a saving feeling of reverence, and the imagination of the Lord and His saints imparts to the mind a kind of materiality, leading to a false state - a state of self-delusion. A high state - a feeling of the presence of God! They keep the mind from conversing with alien thoughts that denigrate prayer; because of it, the insignificance of man is abundantly felt; because of this, there is special vigilance over oneself, protecting a person from sins, even the smallest ones. The feeling of God's presence is brought about by attentive prayer. Standing reverently before holy icons also helps a lot in acquiring it. 1. 145–146 In an ascetic of prayer, success in prayer first begins to manifest itself through a special action of attention: from time to time it unexpectedly embraces the mind, enclosing it in the words of prayer. Then it will become much more constant and lasting: the mind, as it were, cleaves to the words of the prayer and is drawn by them to unite with the heart. Finally, tenderness suddenly combines with attention and makes a person a church of prayer, a church of God. Bring quiet and humble prayers to God, not ardent and fiery ones. When you become a mysterious priest of prayer, then you will ascend into God’s tabernacle and from there fill the prayer censer with sacred fire. Unclean fire - blind, material heating of blood - is forbidden to be brought before the all-holy God. Do not look for pleasures in prayer: they are by no means characteristic of a sinner. The desire of a sinner to feel pleasure is already self-delusion. Seek for your dead, petrified heart to come to life, so that it opens up to the feeling of its sinfulness, its fall, its insignificance, so that it sees them, confesses to them with selflessness. Then the true fruit of prayer will appear in you - true repentance. Delight in prayer is the exclusive destiny of God’s holy chosen ones, renewed by the Holy Spirit. Whoever, carried away by gusts of blood, carried away by vanity and voluptuousness, invents pleasures for himself, is in a woeful self-delusion. A soul darkened by living according to the flesh, a soul deceived and deceived by its pride, is very capable of such composition. The sensations generated by prayer and repentance consist of relief of conscience, peace of mind, reconciliation with others and the circumstances of life, mercy and compassion for humanity, abstinence from passions, composure to the world, submission to God, and strength in the fight against sinful thoughts and inclinations. Be content with these sensations - in which, however, you taste the hope of salvation. Do not seek prematurely high spiritual states and prayerful delights. They are not at all what they appear to be in our imagination: the action of the Holy Spirit, from which high states of prayer arise, is incomprehensible to the carnal mind. The feat of prayer seems painful, boring, and dry for a mind accustomed to being occupied only with perishable objects. It is difficult to acquire the skill of prayer; when this skill is acquired, then it becomes a source of constant spiritual consolation. Before starting any business, bring a prayer to God; with it, attract God’s blessing to your deeds and judge your deeds with it; the thought of prayer stops you from doing things contrary to the commandments. Whoever, before every deed and word, turns to God in prayer for admonition, help and blessing, he lives his life as if under the gaze of God, under His guidance. The habit of such behavior is convenient; There is nothing faster than the mind, said the Great Barsanuphius, nothing is more convenient than raising the mind to God in every need encountered. In difficult circumstances of life, increase your prayers to God. It is better to resort to prayers than to empty considerations of the weak human mind, considerations that for the most part turn out to be unrealizable. It is better to rely on Almighty God with faith and prayer than to rely on shaky considerations and assumptions on your weak mind. Do not be reckless in your requests, so as not to anger God with your foolishness: he who asks the King of kings for something insignificant humiliates Him. Bring to God (prayerful) petitions consistent with His greatness. Solomon asked Him for wisdom - he received it and with it many other benefits, because he asked wisely. Elisha asked Him for the grace of the Holy Spirit, especially before his great teacher, and his request was accepted. He who seeks in his prayer perishable earthly goods arouses the indignation of the Heavenly King against himself. Angels and archangels - these nobles of Him - look at you during your prayer, they look at what you ask from God. They are surprised and rejoice when they see an earthly person leaving his earth and making a petition to receive something heavenly; They grieve, on the contrary, for those who have ignored heavenly things and ask for their earth and corruption. 1. 145–149 The practice of prayer is the highest occupation for the human mind; the state of purity, alien to entertainment, brought to the mind by prayer, is its highest natural state; His admiration for God, the initial cause of which is pure prayer, is a supernatural state. 1. 151 Oral and public prayer is fruitful when it is accompanied by attention, which is very rare, because we learn attention mainly by practicing the Jesus Prayer. 1.256 Oral, public prayer, like any other, must certainly be accompanied by attention. With attention, the benefits of verbal prayer are innumerable. The ascetic must begin with it. Firstly, it is taught by the Holy Church to its children. “The root of monastic life is psalmody,” said Saint Isaac of Syria. “The Church,” says Saint Peter of Damascus, “with a good and God-pleasing purpose, accepted songs and various troparia due to the weakness of our minds, so that we, foolish ones, attracted by the sweetness of psalmody, would, as if against our will, sing to God. Those who can understand and consider the words they pronounce become moved, and thus, like on a ladder, we ascend into good thoughts. To the extent that we succeed in acquiring the habit of Divine thoughts, the Divine desire appears in us and attracts us to achieve understanding the worship of the Father in Spirit and Truth, according to the commandment of the Lord.” The mouth and tongue, which often exercise in prayer and reading the Word of God, acquire sanctification and become incapable of idle talk, laughter, or uttering humorous, shameful and rotten words. Do you want to succeed in mental and heartfelt prayer? Learn to pay attention verbally and vocally: attentive oral prayer automatically turns into mental and heartfelt prayer. Do you want to learn to quickly and forcefully drive away the thoughts planted by the common enemy of humanity? Drive them away when you are alone in your cell, with a loud, attentive prayer, pronouncing its words slowly, with tenderness. The air is filled with attentive, verbal and vocal prayer - and the awe of the princes of the air envelops them, their muscles relax, their nets decay and collapse! The air is filled with attentive oral and vocal prayer - and the holy Angels approach those praying and singing, stand in their faces, participate in their spiritual chants, as some saints of God were privileged to witness. 2. 185–186 Saint Isaac's answer to the question: “What is prayer?” - “Prayer is the abolition and idleness of thought from everything here and the heart, completely turning its gaze to the hoped-for future.” 2.228 From perfect humility and from perfect submission to the will of God, the purest, holy prayer is born. It cannot be born otherwise, from other actions: just as it is typical for grapes to be born on one vine, and on no other tree. 2.326 I personally conveyed to you how to read, according to the custom of those who are attentive, morning and evening prayers and an akathist to Sweetest Jesus, i.e. unhurriedly, very slowly, even drawn out, not trying to read the entire akathist or the entire collection of evening and morning prayers at one time, but taking care that the well-known section of these prayers you are reading is read with attention, as if into the ears of the Lord God, and not into thin air. 6.470 Anyone who wants to engage in godly prayer should only take care that during prayer his mind remains attentive, and his heart contributes to the mind with a feeling of repentance. Sometimes prayer is accompanied by abundant tenderness, which comes to a person independently of him, and sometimes during prayer a special dryness is felt - also for no apparent reason. One should look at these changes with indifference, as an experienced farmer looks at changes in the weather, knowing that after bad weather comes a bucket, and after a bucket comes bad weather. The farmer cares about successfully sowing and reaping the harvest, even if this involves great difficulty and great obstacles from bad weather; Likewise, one who engages in prayer takes care that his prayer is correct and that when he cultivates himself in it, he receives the gift of salvation from God, even if the feat of prayer is accompanied by labor and sorrow, and is denigrated by various temptations. He looks at sorrows and temptations as if they were storms that come and go. 6.534–535 The Holy Fathers said that the devil is especially envious of a person engaged in attentive prayer and brings various temptations upon him. This is not done without the Providence of God, for our essential benefit, and therefore we must endure the temptations of the enemy generously, surrendering ourselves to the will of God. The fathers also said: “Having prayed as you should, expect the opposite.” This means: after attentive prayer, when we are given abundant tenderness, some kind of embarrassment or temptation always occurs. One must guard against embarrassment, i.e. reject it when it comes, but one should not be surprised that it comes. 6.535 Walk the mental path with simplicity before God. Know that you are infected with sinfulness, that this sinfulness should naturally resonate in all your actions, and therefore cry prayerfully before God and nothing more. God is by no means an executioner, as you imagined, but an educator. Sometimes He sends grace-filled sensations as a consolation, and sometimes He allows, for the sake of humility, to be agitated by passions and to be attacked by spirits - both are done out of great mercy towards us, for the purpose of our significant benefit. 6.537 Tenderness and love for neighbors, who all, without exception, seem like Angels, are the fruits of true and unpretentious prayer. And the temptations we encounter, despondency and sleep serve as proof of how useful prayer is to us. 6.207 The general rule for everyone involved in prayer is to enclose the mind in the words of prayer, i.e. pray with attention. What the soul is to the body, attention is to prayer: without attention it is dead and has no meaning. You should take care to enclose your mind in the words of prayer both when praying the Jesus Prayer and when reading akathists and other prayers. The Holy Fathers advise those who want to succeed in prayer to practice both praying the Jesus Prayer and reading the rules - alternately. Such diversity facilitates the feat of prayer and promotes success. Beginners should engage in prayer little by little, but often, in order to maintain a taste for prayer and not produce fatigue in the mind, which leads to abandonment of prayer. When you are alone, pray a little out loud so that you can hear yourself - this helps to pay attention. One should not pay any attention to incoming thoughts, no matter how obvious they may be. The light of my paths is Your law, said the prophet, and nothing else. If you do not have proper attention during prayer, then do not be embarrassed. God will give attention in due time to those who, through constant practice of prayer and forcing themselves to pay attention, prove that they really want to pray with attention. One saint said: “I cast all my infirmities on God and surrendered myself completely to His will.” And you talk about yourself like that and you will calm down. 6.524–525 In all deeds, especially in prayer, constancy and patience are required. Impatience knocks down its delicate color, like frost and winds knock down the flowers of fruitful trees. Be patient in prayer (Col. 4:2), said the apostle: this is a distinctive property of practicing prayer. First, introducing the mind into prayer, accustoming it to it, do not keep it in it for a long time, so that it does not become unnecessarily tired, but introduce it more often to the practice of prayer. Oh! This activity requires compulsion! The criminal - our mind - does not like the prison of prayer; he needs crazy freedom; with violence it is necessary to drag him into prison, into chains - without this, the raging one will not be tamed, nor will he return to common sense. In due time, when he is tamed and becomes as quiet as an Angel, his heart comes out to meet him with all his spiritual strength, as with a child, with all his bodily abilities, as with slaves, and there will be peace in that house, holy peace from the Most Holy Lord, a great feast of renewal and resurrection. 6.296 In your prayers, immerse yourself entirely in repentance. There is a renewed state - you know that; and you are in a state of disrepair! And therefore remain in constant lamentation, in saving sorrow. Deny yourself! Do not have your soul honest to yourself, following the example of the holy Apostle. Evaluate yourself only by judging yourself. Be selfless before God. Do not allow yourself to expect grace: this is the state and teaching of those who are in self-deception and have fallen away from the Truth. Strive to see your sin and weep over it - this is your business. And God will do His work because He is faithful, He made a promise and He will fulfill it. Grace is His! It is His business to give it. Do not consider your garments clean, worthy of the spiritual bridal chamber, no matter how much you wash them; your judge is God. 6.267 Prayer requires constant co-presence and the assistance of attention. With attention, prayer is the inalienable property of the one praying; in the absence of attention, it is alien to the person praying. With attention it bears abundant fruit; without attention it bears thorns and thistles. The fruit of prayer consists in enlightening the mind and tenderness of the heart, in enlivening the soul with the life of the Spirit; Thorns and thistles are the deadness of the soul, Pharisaic conceit, vegetating out of heartfelt bitterness, content and exalted with the number of prayers and the time spent on pronouncing these prayers. That attention that completely keeps prayer from entertainment or from extraneous thoughts and dreams is a gift of God’s grace. We prove our sincere desire to receive the gift of grace, the soul-saving gift of attention by forcing ourselves to pay attention to each time we pray. Artificial attention - this is what we call our own attention, not yet overshadowed by grace - consists in, according to the advice of St. John Climacus, enclosing the mind in the words of prayer. If the mind, due to its news in the feat of prayer, comes out of its conclusion into words, then it must again introduce it into them. Characteristic of the mind, in its state of fall, inconsistency and disposition to float everywhere. But God can grant him steadfastness and grants it in due time for constancy and patience in his struggle. Especially conducive to maintaining attention during prayer is the very leisurely pronunciation of the words of the prayer. Pronounce the words slowly, so that the mind can more easily retain its conclusion in the words of the prayer, so that it does not escape from a single word of it. Saying the words a few times out loud when you are praying alone will help maintain your attention. Attentive prayer can and should be learned with particular convenience when performing the cell rule. Beloved brother! Do not reject the yoke of some boredom and some compulsion, initially getting accustomed to monastic cell activities, especially to the cell prayer rule. Stock up in good time with an all-powerful weapon - prayer; learn to act with it in good time. Prayer is omnipotent because of the Almighty God at work in it. She is the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God (Eph. 6:17). First one must be compelled to pray; soon she will begin to provide consolation and with this consolation to ease the compulsion, to encourage herself to compel herself. But prayer requires compulsion throughout life, and rare ascetics have freed themselves, due to the most abundant grace-filled consolation, from forcing themselves; prayer has a deadly effect on our old man; As long as he is alive in us, he resists prayer as if he were tasting death. Fallen spirits, knowing the power of prayer and its beneficial effect, try in every possible way to distract the ascetic from it, teaching him to use the time appointed for prayer on other matters; or they try to destroy and defile it with vain and sinful absent-mindedness, bringing in countless worldly and sinful thoughts and dreams while doing it. 5. 98–99 Anyone who has entered into a true feat of prayer is guided in it by God Himself, with wisdom incomprehensible to those who are not initiated into the sacraments of prayer. “Prayer,” said Saint John Climacus, “contains within itself a teacher, God, who teaches a person to understand (prayer), who gives prayer to the one who prays and blesses the years of the righteous” (1 Samuel 2:9). Thus, a successfully chosen medicine for any long-standing disease, touching its surface, immediately, at the first doses, brings relief. The same medicine, with its further use, begins to penetrate the body, disturbs the disease and, gradually expelling it, intensifies the pain, sometimes leading the patient into a painful state. With such phenomena, an inexperienced patient can easily doubt the beneficialness of the medicine, but skilled doctors see its beneficialness in these very phenomena. Exactly the same thing happens during prayer. When a Christian constantly and carefully engages in it, then little by little it will begin to reveal in him his passions, the existence of which he had not previously suspected in himself. She will reveal to him in a striking picture the fall of human nature and its captivity. When a Christian intends to emerge from the fall and free himself from captivity, then those spirits who have enslaved us to themselves will come and stubbornly rebel against prayer, which is intensifying to bring spiritual freedom to the Christian. This serves as proof of the reality of prayer, as the same great teacher of monks said: “We conclude about the benefits of prayer by the opposition from demons that we encounter when performing it, and we conclude about its fruit by our defeat of the enemy.” In the involuntary contemplation of our fall and in the struggle against our passions and spirits of evil, very often, mostly for a very long time, the Divine Providence keeps ascetics for their significant benefit. Seeing the passions constantly arising in oneself, seeing the constant predominance over oneself of sinful thoughts and dreams brought by spirits, the ascetic acquires the poverty of spirit commanded by the Gospel, is mortified for the world, becomes a true widow in spiritual terms and, from the strongest feeling of widowhood, orphanhood, loneliness, homelessness, begins with a special lack of studiousness, with a special persistence to chill the Judge, who does not fear God and does not shame man, with prayer combined with crying, to tire the Tireless One. “Although this Judge, being God, does not fear God, yet the soul, which, due to sin and fall, has become a widow in relation to Him, does not work for Him: He will take vengeance on her from her rival - the body and from her adversaries - the spirits" (St. John Climacus). How is this vengeance, this defense accomplished? The gift of the Holy Spirit to the ascetic, exhausted by the feat of prayer: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; press, and it will be opened to you. “Everyone who asks receives it, and he who seeks finds it, and it will be opened to him who interprets... The Father who is in heaven will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him” (Luke 11:9-13), - this is how the Lord assures us. But in order to receive the gift, it is commanded to ask, seek, and knock relentlessly on the spiritual doors of God’s mercy. 4. 355–356 Spirit of Novice Prayer Here we offer a teaching about the quality of prayer characteristic of someone who begins to go to the Lord through repentance. The main ideas are presented each separately with the aim that they can be read with greater attention and retained in memory with greater convenience. Reading them, feeding the mind with truth and the heart with humility, can provide the soul with the proper direction in its prayerful feat and serve as a preparatory exercise for it. 1) Prayer is the offering of our petitions to God. 2) The basis of prayer is that man is a fallen creature. He strives to receive the bliss that he had but lost, and therefore he prays. 3) The refuge of prayer is in God’s great mercy towards the human race. The Son of God, to save us, offered Himself to His Father as a propitiatory, reconciling sacrifice; on this basis, if you want to engage in prayer, reject doubt and double-mindedness (James 1:6-8). Don’t say to yourself: “I am a sinner; will God really hear me? If you are a sinner, then the consoling words of the Savior apply to you: “I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Matthew 9:13). 4) The preparation for prayer is: an unsatiated belly, cutting off cares with the sword of faith, forgiveness from the sincerity of the heart of all offenses, thanksgiving to God for all the sorrowful incidents of life, removing from oneself absent-mindedness and daydreaming, reverent fear, which is so characteristic of a creature when it is allowed to have a conversation with its Creator due to the ineffable goodness of the Creator to the creature. 5) The Savior’s first words to fallen humanity were: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is drawing near” (Matthew 4:17). Why, until you enter this Kingdom, knock on its gates with repentance and prayer. 6) True prayer is the voice of true repentance. When prayer is not animated by repentance, then it does not fulfill its purpose, then God is not pleased with it. He will not despise a broken spirit, a contrite and humble heart (Ps. 50:19). 7) The Savior of the world calls the poor in spirit blessed, i.e. having the most humble concept of themselves, considering themselves fallen creatures, located here on earth, in exile, outside their true fatherland, which is heaven. Blessed are the poor in spirit, who pray with a deep consciousness of their poverty; their prayers are the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 5:3). The blessed ones weep in their prayers from the feeling of their poverty, as if they will be consoled (Matthew 5:4) by the gracious consolation of the Holy Spirit, which consists in the peace of Christ and in the love of Christ for all neighbors. Then none of the neighbors, and the worst enemy, is excluded from the embrace of love of the one praying; then the one who prays is reconciled with all the most difficult circumstances of earthly life. 8) The Lord, teaching us to pray, likens a praying soul to a widow, offended by a rival, sitting relentlessly before an impartial and impartial judge (Luke 18:1-8). When praying, do not move away from this likeness in your soul. Let your prayer be, so to speak, a constant complaint against the sin that oppresses you. Go deep into yourself, open yourself with attentive prayer, you will see that you are definitely a widow in relation to Christ because of the sin living in you, hostile to you, causing internal struggle and torment in you, making you alien to God. 9) “The whole day,” David says about himself, “the whole day of his earthly life, lamenting as he walked, he spent in blissful sadness about his sins and shortcomings: for my body was filled with reproach, and there was no healing in my flesh” (Ps. 37: 7-8). Lyadvia is the name given to the procession along the path of earthly life; flesh - the moral state of a person. All steps of people along this path are filled with stumbling blocks through their own means and efforts. For our healing, the grace of God is necessary, healing only those who recognize themselves as sick. True recognition of oneself as sick is proven by thorough and constant repentance. 10) “Work for the Lord with fear, and rejoice in Him with trembling” (Ps. 2:11), says the prophet, and another prophet speaks on behalf of God: “On whom I will look, only to him who is meek, and silent, and who trembles at My words” (Is. 66:2). The Lord respects the prayer of the humble, and do not despise their prayers (Ps. 61:18). He - let's live, i.e. salvation for the brokenhearted (Isa. 57:15). 11) Even if someone stands at the very height of virtues, if he does not pray as a sinner, his prayer is rejected by God. (Reverend Isaac of Syria, Sermon 55.) 12) “On the day on which I do not cry for myself,” said some blessed worker of true prayer, “I consider myself to be in self-delusion.” 13) “Even though we undergo many sublime feats,” said Saint John Climacus, “they are untrue and fruitless if during them we do not have a painful feeling of repentance.” 14) The sadness of thinking about sins is an honest gift of God; he who wears it in his chest wears the shrine with due care and reverence. It replaces all bodily feats, with a lack of strength to perform them. On the contrary, labor is required from a strong body during prayer; Without it, the heart will not be broken, prayer will be powerless and untrue. 15) The feeling of repentance protects a praying person from all the snares of the devil; The devil flees from ascetics who exude from themselves the fragrance of humility that is born in the hearts of the repentant. (“Whenever the devil sees someone,” says St. Gregory of Sinai, “living in tears, he does not remain there, fearing the coming humility from crying.”) 16) Bring to the Lord in your prayers the babbling of a child, a simple childish thought - not eloquence, not reason. Unless you turn - as if from paganism and Mohammedanism, from your complexity and duplicity - you will, the Lord told us, like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 18:3). 17) A baby expresses all its desires by crying, and let your prayer always be accompanied by crying. Not only with the words of prayer, but also with prayerful silence, let your desire for repentance and reconciliation with God, your extreme need for God’s mercy, be expressed through crying. 18) The dignity of prayer lies solely in quality, and not in quantity. Then quantity is commendable when it leads to quality. Quality always leads to quantity; quantity leads to quality when the worshiper prays carefully. (Reverend Meletius, who labored in the Galician mountain. Poem about prayer. Ladder, Homily 28, chapter 21.) 19) The quality of true prayer is when the mind is attentive during prayer, and the heart sympathizes with the mind. 20) Contain your mind in the spoken words of prayer, and you will keep it in attention. Keep your eyes on your lips or closed - this will help connect your mind with your heart. Pronounce the words with extreme leisurelyness, and you will be more comfortable enclosing your mind in the words of prayer; not a single word of your prayer will be uttered without being animated by attention. 21) The mind, enclosed in the words of prayer, attracts the heart to compassion for itself. This sympathy from the heart to the mind is expressed by tenderness, which is a pious feeling that combines sadness with quiet, meek consolation. 22) A necessary accessory to prayer is waiting. When you feel dryness and bitterness, do not give up prayer: for your longing and struggle against heartfelt insensibility, God’s mercy, consisting of tenderness, will descend to you. Tenderness is a gift of God, sent down to those who remain and endure in prayer (Rom. 12:12; Col. 4:2), constantly growing in them, guiding them to spiritual perfection. 23) The mind, standing before the invisible God in attentive prayer, must itself be invisible, like the image of the invisible Divinity; those. the mind should not imagine any form in itself, nor from itself, nor in front of itself - it should be alien to dreaming, no matter how much this dreaming may seem immaculate and holy. 24) During prayer, do not seek delight, do not set your nerves in motion, do not get your blood hot. On the contrary, keep your heart in deep calm, into which it is brought by a feeling of repentance: material fire, the fire of the fallen nature, is rejected by God. Your heart needs to be cleansed by crying repentance and prayer of repentance; when it is cleansed, then God Himself will send His all-holy spiritual fire into it. 25) Attention during prayer brings calm to the nerves and blood, helps the heart to plunge into repentance and remain in it. Divine fire does not disturb the silence of the heart if it descends into the chamber of the heart, when the disciples of Christ are gathered in it - thoughts and feelings borrowed from the Gospel. This fire does not scorch or heat the heart, on the contrary, it irrigates, cools it, reconciles a person with all people and with all circumstances, draws the heart into ineffable love for God and for neighbors. 26) Absent-mindedness robs prayer. The one who has prayed absent-mindedly feels a vague emptiness and dryness within himself. One who constantly prays absent-mindedly is deprived of all the spiritual fruits that are usually born from attentive prayer, and acquires a state of dryness and emptiness. From this state is born coldness towards God, despondency, clouding of the mind, weakening of faith and from them deadness in relation to eternal, spiritual life. Yet, taken together, this is a clear sign that such prayer is not accepted by God. 27) Daydreaming in prayer is even more harmful than absent-mindedness. Absent-mindedness makes prayer fruitless, and daydreaming causes false fruits: self-delusion and, so-called by the holy fathers, demonic delusion. Images of objects of the visible world and images of the invisible world, created by daydreaming, are imprinted and slowed down in the mind, making it seem material, transferring it from the Divine land of Spirit and Truth to the land of matter and lies. In this country, the heart begins to sympathize with the mind not with a spiritual feeling of repentance and humility, but with a carnal feeling, a bloody and nervous feeling, timeless and disorderly, a wrong and false feeling of imaginary love for God. Criminal and abominable love seems unskillful in the spiritual experiences of a saint, but in reality it is only a disordered sensation of a heart uncleaned from passions, enjoying vanity and voluptuousness set in motion by daydreaming. This state is a state of self-delusion. If a person sharpens it, then the images that appear to him acquire extreme vividness and attractiveness. When they appear, the heart begins to heat up and enjoy lawlessly or, according to the definition of Holy Scripture, to commit adultery (Ps. 72:27). The mind recognizes such a state as grace-filled, Divine, then the transition to obvious demonic delusion is close, in which a person loses autocracy, becomes a plaything and a laughing stock of the evil spirit. God turns away with anger from dreamy prayer that brings a person into this state. And the sentence of Scripture comes true over the one who prays such prayer: Let his prayer become sin (Ps. 108:7). 28) Reject apparently good thoughts and apparently bright understandings that come to you during prayer, distracting you from prayer. They leave the realm of the false mind - they sit, like riders on horses, on vanity. Their gloomy faces are hidden so that the mind of the person praying cannot recognize them as his enemies. But precisely because they are hostile to prayer, distract the mind from it, lead it into captivity and painful enslavement, expose and empty the soul, precisely because they are recognized as enemies and from the realm of the ruler of the world. Spiritual mind, the mind of God, promotes prayer, concentrates a person in himself, immerses him in attention and tenderness, brings to mind reverent silence, fear and surprise, born from the feeling of the presence and greatness of God. This feeling in due time can become very intensified and make the prayer for the one praying the Terrible Judgment Seat of God. 29) Attentive prayer, alien to distraction and daydreaming, is a vision of the invisible God, attracting the sight of the mind and the desire of the heart. Then the mind sees without form and completely satisfies itself with non-seeing, which exceeds all vision. The reason for this blissful invisibility is the infinite subtlety and incomprehensibility of the Object to which vision is directed. The invisible Sun of truth - God - also emits rays that are invisible, but cognizable by the clear sensation of the soul: they fill the heart with wonderful calmness, faith, courage, meekness, mercy, love for neighbors and God. By these actions, visible in the inner heart cell, a person undoubtedly recognizes that his prayer is accepted by God, begins to believe with living faith and firmly trust in the Lover and Beloved. This is the beginning of the revival of the soul for God and blissful eternity. 30) The fruits of true prayer: holy peace of the soul, combined with quiet, silent joy, alien to daydreaming, conceit and heated impulses and movements; love for neighbors, not separating for love the good from the evil, the worthy from the unworthy, but interceding for everyone before God as for oneself, as for one’s own members. From such love for others, the purest love for God will shine forth. 31) These fruits are a gift from God. They are attracted to the soul by its attention and humility, and are preserved by its faithfulness to God. 32) The soul then remains faithful to God when it withdraws from every word, deed and thought of sin, when it immediately repents of those sins into which it is carried away due to its weakness. 33) We prove that we want to acquire the gift of prayer by patiently sitting down in prayer at the door of prayer. For patience and constancy we receive the gift of prayer. “Lord,” says the Scripture, “give grace-filled prayer to him who prays” (1 Samuel 2:9) patiently with one’s own effort. 34) For beginners, short and frequent prayers are more useful than long ones, separated from one another by a significant amount of time. 35) Prayer is the highest exercise for the mind. 36) Prayer is the head, the source, the mother of all virtues. 37) Be wise in your prayer. Do not ask for anything corruptible or vain in it, remembering the Savior’s commandments: “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all this,” i.e. all the needs for temporary life “will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33). 38) When intending to do something or wanting something, also in difficult circumstances of life, cast your thoughts in prayer before God: ask for what you consider necessary and useful for yourself; but leave the fulfillment and non-fulfillment of your request to the will of God - in faith and trust in the omnipotence, wisdom and goodness of the will of God. This excellent image of prayer was given to us by the One who prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, and the cup assigned to Him passed by. “Neither is My Will,” He concluded His prayer to the Father, “but Thine be done” (Luke 22:42). 39) Bring to God a humble prayer for the virtues and pious deeds you perform: cleanse and perfect them through prayer and repentance. Say about them in your prayer what righteous Job said in his daily prayer about his children: “When my sons sinned, and in their thoughts they thought evil thoughts against God” (Job 1:5). Malice is cunning: it inconspicuously mixes with virtue, defiles, poisons it. 40) Renounce everything in order to inherit prayer - and, raised from the earth on the cross of self-denial, commend your spirit, soul and body to God, and from Him receive holy prayer, which, according to the teaching of the Apostle and the Universal Church, is the action of the Holy Spirit in a person, when the Spirit dwells in a person (Rom. 8:26). Whoever neglects to practice attentive prayer, dissolved in repentance, is alien to spiritual success, alien to spiritual fruits, and is in the darkness of diverse self-delusion. Humility is the only altar on which people are allowed to offer prayer sacrifices to God - the only altar from which prayer sacrifices are accepted by God. “Whoever has achieved unceasing prayer has reached the edge of virtues and has become the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit,” said Saint Isaac. Prayer is the mother of all true, Divine virtues. It is impossible, no spiritual success is possible for one who has rejected humility, who has not bothered to enter into a sacred union with prayer. The exercise of prayer is the testament of the apostle: “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), the apostle tells us. The exercise of prayer is a commandment of the Lord Himself, a commandment combined with a promise: “Ask,” the Lord invites us, the Lord commands us, “and it will be given to you: seek, and you will find: press, and it will be opened to you” (Luke 11:9). Prayer will not slumber, it will fall asleep until it shows the one who loves it and constantly practices in it the palace of eternal pleasures, until it leads him into heaven. There she will be transformed into a constant sacrifice of praise. This praise will be unceasingly brought, the chosen ones of God will incessantly proclaim from the incessant feeling of bliss in eternity, which has sprouted here on earth and in time, from the seeds of repentance sown by attentive and diligent prayer. 2. 160–169 Prayer, vocal and physical Whoever engages in attentive prayer with constancy and reverence, pronouncing its words loudly or in a whisper, depending on the need, and enclosing the mind in words; who, during the feat of prayer, constantly rejects all thoughts and dreams, not only sinful and vain, but apparently good ones; To this the merciful Lord grants in due time mental, heartfelt and spiritual prayer. 2.202 Let no one who wants to succeed in prayer dare to think lightly and judge prayer, pronounced with the lips and voice with the attention of the mind, as an insignificant act that does not deserve respect. If the holy fathers speak about the futility of oral and public prayer, not combined with attention, then it should not be concluded from this that they reject or disparage oral prayer itself. No! They just demand attention from her. Attentive oral and vocal prayer is the beginning and reason for smart prayer. Attentive oral and public prayer are also mental prayer. Let us first learn to pray attentively, verbally and publicly, then we will conveniently learn to pray with our mind alone in the silence of our inner cage. 2.183 The Monk Nilus of Sorsky says that he who prays with his voice and lips without attention is praying to the air, and not to God. “It’s strange that you want God to hear you when you can’t hear yourself!” - says Saint Demetrius of Rostov, borrowing words from the Hieromartyr Cyprian of Carthage. And this definitely happens with praying lips and voices without attention - they do not hear you so much, they allow themselves to be entertained so much, their thoughts wander so far from prayer into foreign objects that it often happens to them to suddenly stop, forgetting what they read; or they begin to say words from other prayers instead of the words of the prayer being read, although the open book is before their eyes. How can the holy fathers not condemn such inattentive prayer, damaged and destroyed by absent-mindedness! “Attention,” says Saint Simeon the New Theologian, “should be as connected and inseparable with prayer as the body is connected with the soul, which cannot be separated, cannot be one without the other.” 2. 184–185 ...They (opponents of the Jesus Prayer), rejecting the experimental knowledge of mental prayer, cannot acquire in oral prayer the due attention that is provided primarily by mental prayer. Psalmody, performed publicly and orally, without attention, with significant entertainment, persistent from bodily workers who neglect the mind, has a very weak, superficial effect on the soul, delivering fruits consistent with the action. Quite often, when it is done unreasonably and in greater quantities, it gives rise to conceit with its consequences. “Many,” says Schemamonk Vasily, “not knowing the experience of smart work, mistakenly judge that smart work befits only dispassionate and holy men. For this reason, keeping, according to external custom, one psalmody, troparions and canons, they prefer this alone to their external prayer. They do not understand that such sung prayer was handed over to us by our fathers for a time, due to the weakness and infancy of our minds, so that we, learning little by little, would ascend to the level of mental doing, and not remain in psalmody until our death. What is more childish than this, when we, having read our outer prayer with our lips, are carried away by a joyful opinion, thinking about ourselves that we are doing something great, delighting ourselves with sheer quantity and thereby feeding the inner Pharisee!” 2. 306–307 (See Jesus Prayer, Vowel Prayer). The Spirit of God, commanding through the mouth of David complete hatred of invisible spiritual enemies, teaching us to resort to prayer to God for contrition and destruction of them, at the same time demands from us love for our enemies - men, demands forgiveness of the insults inflicted on us from our neighbors, demands this with the invocation: “O Lord my God,” the Psalmist prays, “if I have done this, if there is unrighteousness in my hand, if I reward those who repay me with evil: let me then fall away from my lean enemies: let the enemy take my soul in marriage, and let him overwhelm and trample my belly into the ground, and let my glory settle in the dust” (Ps. 7:4-6). Here are two sides who do evil: neighbors, people, and devils. The Holy Spirit teaches us that by taking revenge, repaying one's neighbor evil for evil - in words, or deeds, or thoughts - a person calls upon himself the battle of an invisible enemy, victory, overthrow by him, loss of grace. Glory is the grace of the Spirit. “He who prays for people who cause offense,” said St. Mark the Ascetic, “crushes demons; and he who argues with the first is crushed by the second.” 6.298–299 The Lord's Prayer begins with the invocation: Our Father! Which of the holy men would allow himself and his brethren, sinful, rejected people, held captive by the devil and eternal death, such an appeal to God? - Obviously, no one. Only God could allow this. He allowed; if He allowed, then He granted. The Son of God, having become Man, made men sons of God and His brothers. He refers to God the Father by right of nature: Our Father! And we are granted the grace-filled right to approach God as the Father, to begin our prayer to Him with a wonderful, suspicious beginning, which no one would dare to think of: Our Father! The beginning of the Lord's Prayer is the gift of the Lord, the gift of infinite price, the gift of the Redeemer to the redeemed, the Savior to the saved. The petitions that make up the Lord’s Prayer are petitions for spiritual gifts acquired for humanity through redemption. There is no word in prayer about the carnal, temporary needs of a person. He who commanded us to seek only the Kingdom of God and its righteousness, who promised to add everything necessary and temporary to those who seek this Kingdom (Matthew 6:33), teaches prayer in accordance with the commandment and promise. Following the proclamation and to the proclamation Our Father itself, an indication is immediately added to the place where the Father resides, unencompassed by any place, omnipresent, embracing everything with Himself: Our Father, who art in heaven. By indicating the location of the Father in heaven, the praying son is elevated to heaven. Forget everything earthly: ignore the earth - this shelter given to you for the shortest possible time; leave without attention all the accessories of the shelter, which will be taken away from you after the shortest possible time; turn all your concerns to your fatherland, to heaven, taken away by the fall, returned by redemption; Bring a prayer for the granting of eternal spiritual, all-holy, Divine blessings to you, exceeding in their immense dignity not only the comprehension of men, but also the comprehension of angels. They, these benefits, are already prepared for you; they are already waiting for you. The justice of God, inseparable from His goodness, requires that your will to accept heavenly treasures be revealed through your prayer and your life. ...The Lord's Prayer is given to sinners, and first of all they learn to ask God, their Father, hallowed be His name. In this request of a person lies the consciousness of sinfulness, of fall. This petition contains a request for the granting of sincere repentance. Hallowed be Thy name in my spiritual church! I ask this because I don’t find it in myself. I find the opposite: I am in sad enslavement to sin and to the fallen spirits who invented sin and infected me with sin. Criminal, stinking thoughts and sensations hover in my soul. Whether they enter it from the outside or are born in it, I don’t know; I know that they are unrestrained and powerful, that I have no power to expel them from myself and vomit them out. These thoughts and sensations make God angry; the all-holy God turns away from them; God is blasphemed by them; with them I remain a stranger to God. I need a cleanse! I need repentance! Grant me, my Heavenly Father, powerful repentance, which would cleanse my inner church from all impurities and stench, would make me capable of accepting the adoption You have given, would make me, even during my earthly journey, a resident of heaven. Until now I have been crawling on the ground. May true knowledge of God enter my soul! May it sanctify my mind, my heart, all my activities: may Thy name be hallowed in me (Matthew 5:8). This is the meaning of this petition. We can desire repentance and purity; we can and must use all means within our power to achieve them; but acquiring them does not depend on us. It is a gift from God. We must first of all pray to the Heavenly Father, so that from His spiritual treasuries He would send down to us the gift of repentance, through repentance he would cleanse us from sinful defilement, and adorn us with the blessed purity that beholds God (Matthew 5:8), which alone is capable of accepting the True Knowledge of God. Hallowed be Thy name! May Your Kingdom come! The Kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21). What a wonderful sequence in the Lord's Prayer! This sequence depicts consistency, gradualism, a sublime and holy system of spiritual progress. After asking for the gift of perfect knowledge of God, the Lord teaches a person adopted by God to ask for the Kingdom of God to descend into his soul. He commands us to ask for this Kingdom with the humble, feasible prayer of faith. It is impossible for a believer not to receive it. It is promised by the Word of God: “Whoever has My commandments will keep them; If anyone loves Me, My name will be hallowed; he who loves Me will be loved by My Father” (John 14:21). “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; If anyone loves Me, My name will be hallowed in him, and I will make my abode with him” (John 14:23). May Your Kingdom come! Wonderful request! A wonderful desire is aroused by petition! This bold prayer is being fulfilled. It is being fulfilled; The experiments that demonstrate its fulfillment serve as proof of this. ...In all centuries of Christianity, the tablets of church history have recorded experiences that reveal in the saints of God actions that exceed human nature, belonging not to human nature, but to God, who dwelt and reigned in holy men. The Monk Macarius of Egypt says: “In those whom the grace of the Divine Spirit has shone and settled in the depths of their minds, the Lord is like a soul.” Again this great one among the fathers says: “The action and power of the Holy Spirit abides in a renewed man.” He who has felt the Kingdom of God within himself becomes alien to a world hostile to God. He who has felt the Kingdom of God within himself can desire, out of true love for his neighbors, that the Kingdom of God will open in all of them. He can honestly desire that the visible Kingdom of God will come on earth, consume sin from the face of the earth, and establish the rule of Truth on it. ...Thy will be done as it is in heaven and on earth. The inhabitants of heaven are called heaven: by them the will of God is accomplished immaculately, unforgivingly. They no longer mix their own will with the will of God! They no longer have a separate will! Their will merged with the will of God. ...Christians are called earth. Each of us will not sin if, when pronouncing this petition, we understand our own middle by the name of the earth, without separating the body from the heart. Whatever direction the forces of the heart take, the forces of the body rush in that direction, and the attraction of the body is transformed, in accordance with the attraction of the heart, from carnal and bestial to spiritual, holy, angelic. The complete union of the human will with the will of God is a state of perfection that only a rational creation of God can achieve. Angels have this perfection. Our Savior is pleased that we, weak and unfortunate people, taken from the earth, wandering and restless on earth for the shortest possible time, and after it has passed, descending into the earth, acquire what the holiest heavenly spirits have. He commands us to seek a perfection that is still incomprehensible to us. He who has felt the Kingdom of God within himself learns not to be satisfied with it; he learns not to indulge in carelessness and inaction; learns to strive for the most abundant development in himself of the dominion of the Divine. May the will of God act exclusively in the entire being of man, in all his component parts, in spirit, soul and body, uniting with himself and within himself the will of these parts, separated by the fall. Only by the will of God can the human will, poisoned by sin, be healed; Only in the will of God and through it, the wishes of the constituent parts of man, which have taken different directions opposite to each other, can move from disagreement to agreement, unite into one desire. ...Give us this day our daily bread. We are not talking about food that perishes here! “Don’t worry about those who say what pits, or what we drink, or what we wear” (Matthew 6:31); it speaks of food that gives eternal life and endures forever; about the new food that the Son of God incarnate gave to people; about the bread of life that came down from heaven; about the bread of God, capable of satisfying and giving eternal life to the whole world (John 6:27, 33). The word daily means that this bread, in its quality, is superior to everything that exists. His greatness and holiness are infinite, incomprehensible; the sanctification and dignity brought by eating it are immense and inexplicable. The bread given by the Son of God is His all-holy Flesh, which He gave for the life of the world (John 6:51). The wonderful food is accompanied by equally wonderful drink. The flesh of the God-man is given for food to believers, His blood for drink. ...According to the dignity of food, according to the effect that occurs from eating in those who partake, the Lord called His Flesh the one true food, and His Blood the one true drink of man renewed by the redemption (John 6:55). The ordinary food of the sons of the old Adam, common to them with dumb animals, destroyed by digestion and unable to eliminate death - this food that perishes (John 6:27) became unworthy of the name of food when daily bread appeared, the bread of heaven, the bread that destroys death and teaches eternal life (John 6:58). Our daily bread - this is how the petition is written by the holy evangelist Luke - give us every day (Luke 11:3). Combined with the petition is a commandment that imposes on Christians the obligation, now so lost, of daily communion with the Holy Mysteries. Having said every day, the Lord expressed by this that without this bread we are not able to spend more than one day in spiritual life. Having said this today, he expressed by this that it must be eaten daily, that teaching it on the past day is not enough if it is not taught to us again on the current day. The daily need for it requires that we make this petition more frequent and bring it at all times; There is no day on which it would not be necessary for us to strengthen the heart of our inner man by using and partaking of it. (This explanation of daily bread does not make the reading of the Lord’s Prayer before the meal at all strange: material bread serves as an image of the bread that came down from heaven). And forgive us our debts, just as we forgive our debtors. Having granted sinners the most sublime blessings, blessings of the highest price, exceeding any price, bestowing them according to His infinite mercy, the Lord also demands from us mercy towards our neighbors. The mystery of atonement is based on mercy. It is a manifestation of God’s mercy towards fallen humanity and can be accepted only by the disposition of the soul, completely attuned to mercy towards fallen humanity. We cannot accept the redemption given to us by God except by having mercy on ourselves and on humanity; as having realized one’s sinfulness, one’s fall, one’s destruction; as having realized the sinfulness, fall, and destruction of all mankind; as having realized the general, all-perfect need for God’s mercy. ...The Lord said: If you forgive men their sins, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. If you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive you your sins (Matthew 6:14-15). A Christian must pay special attention to the mental illness of memory malice, drive it out at the first appearance, and not allow it to nest in the soul under any pretext, no matter how righteous this pretext may seem at the first glance at it. If we allow memory to act, it will devastate the soul, make all our deeds and virtues fruitless, and deprive us of God’s mercy. The sins we leave behind for our neighbors are a sign that the Spirit of God has taken possession of us, reigns in us, governs, guides our will. Until that time, a special personal effort is needed to resist the passion of memory malice. God will secretly assist our struggle against this passion, stopping obvious assistance, so that our will can be expressed with certainty. Memory malice is based on pride. Pride lurks even in God’s chosen ones, sanctified by grace. It is also necessary for them to be vigilant against this internal poison and against the murder of the soul generated by it through memory malice. By leaving the brethren their debts, we attract the grace of God into ourselves, retain it within ourselves, constantly leaving debts to our neighbors. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. The second half of the petition explains the first. Temptations are here called those true accidents and disasters when, for our own arbitrary desire for sin, we surrender to the power of the devil and perish, as Judas Iscariot was subjected to this. “Satan is in there,” says Scripture about him (John 13:27). The petition does not teach us to reject the sorrows necessary for our salvation, protecting us from our passions and demons. ...Together with the dogmas of the Christian faith, the holy Apostle Paul preached to the universe that through many sorrows it is fitting for us to enter the Kingdom of God (Acts 14:22). In the Epistle to the Hebrews, the apostle says that all those who pleased God were subjected to punishment and admonition from the Lord, that those who were not subjected to it were rejected by God as strangers to Him (John 16:33). Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one! Not only do not allow passions to prevail over us, through which we are with the devil because of our fall! Do not allow us to be carried away by our sinful will, by the fulfillment of which we deceive and destroy ourselves! Do not allow yourself to be deceived by false thoughts and teachings! Don’t let yourself be overcome by the love of money, the love of fame, the love of power! Do not allow us to be enslaved to voluptuousness and voluptuousness while we are abundant in earthly blessings, or to cowardice and murmuring when we are surrounded by deprivations! Don't let us sin! Do not allow pride to overtake us when we lead a virtuous life, and do not allow hopelessness and despair to engulf us in the event of any stumbling block... 4. 240–250 Prayer is smart, heartfelt and spiritual From the blessed action of the Holy Spirit in a person, at first an unusual silence begins to breathe in him, a deadness appears to the world, to the enjoyment of its vanity and sinfulness, to services in the midst of it. A Christian is reconciled to everything and everyone through a strange, humble and at the same time high spiritual reasoning, unknown and inaccessible to the carnal and spiritual state. He begins to feel compassion for all humanity and for each person in particular. Compassion turns into love. Then his attention begins to deepen during prayer: the words of prayer begin to make a strong, unusual impression on the soul, to shake it. Finally, little by little, the heart and the whole soul will move into union with the mind, and after the soul the body itself will be drawn into this union. Such a prayer is called smart when it is pronounced with the mind with deep attention, with the sympathy of the heart; heartfelt, when pronounced by the mind and heart united, and the mind, as it were, descends into the heart and sends up a prayer from the depths of the heart; spiritual, when it is done with the whole soul, with the participation of the body itself, when it is done from the whole being, and the whole being is made as if by one mouth saying a prayer. The Holy Fathers in their Scriptures often include both heartfelt and spiritual prayer under the same name of mental prayer, and sometimes distinguish between them. 2.218 Heartfelt prayer is most effective when prayed in the Name of the Lord Jesus; those who have received heartfelt prayer pray with spiritual prayer when they engage in prayer and psalmody. 2.219 Brother! It is not good for you to receive heartfelt prayer of grace prematurely! A premature feeling of spiritual sweetness is not good for you! Having received them prematurely, without acquiring preliminary information with what reverence and with what caution the gift of God’s grace should be preserved, you can use this gift for evil, to the harm and destruction of your soul. (St. Isaac of Syria: “We should not prematurely seek great measures, so that God’s gift is not consumed because of the speed of accepting it. Everything that is easily acquired is easily lost; everything acquired with heart disease is carefully preserved.”) Moreover, it is impossible to reveal grace-filled mental and heartfelt prayer in oneself through one’s own efforts, because uniting the mind with the heart and soul, separated in us by the fall, belongs to the One God. If we recklessly force ourselves and seek to reveal through our own effort those gifts that are bestowed only by God, then we will endure futile labor. And it would be good if the harm was limited to loss of work and time! Often proud seekers of states characteristic of renewed human nature are subjected to the greatest spiritual calamity, which the Holy Fathers call delusion. This is logical: the most basic point from which they begin their action is false. How can a false beginning not result in false consequences? Such consequences, called prelest, have different types and degrees. Charm is mostly hidden, and sometimes obvious; often puts a person in a state of upset, at the same time funny and most pitiful, often leading to suicide and ultimate spiritual destruction. But delusion, understandable to many in its obvious consequences, must be studied and comprehended at its very beginning - in false thought, which serves as the basis for all delusions and disastrous states of mind. In the false thought of the mind, the entire building of delight already exists, just as in a grain there exists the plant that should come from it after it is planted in the ground. Saint Isaac of Syria said: “The Scripture says: The Kingdom of God will not come without waiting (Luke 17:20). Those who labored with such spiritual assurance were subject to pride and fall. But we will set our hearts in works of repentance and in living a life pleasing to God. The gifts of the Lord come by themselves if the church of the heart is clean and not defiled. To seek with observation, I say, the highest gifts of God, is rejected by the Church of God. Those who attempted this suffered pride and fall. This is not a sign that anyone loves God, but an illness of the soul. And how can we strive for the highest gifts of God, when the Divine Paul boasts in his sorrows and recognizes fellowship in the sufferings of Christ as the highest gift of God!” In your prayerful feat, rely completely on God, without Whom the slightest success is impossible. Every step towards success in this feat is a gift from God. Deny yourself and surrender to God, let him do with you what he wants. But He, the All-Good One, wants to give you something that has never entered our mind or heart (1 Cor. 2:9); wants to bestow such blessings as our minds and hearts, in their fallen state, cannot even imagine. It is impossible, impossible for one who has not acquired purity to obtain the slightest understanding of the spiritual gifts of God, either through consideration or through comparison with the most pleasant spiritual sensations known to man! With simplicity and faith, cast your care on God. Do not listen to the ideas of the evil one, who even in paradise said to our forefathers: you will be like gods (Gen. 3:5). Now he offers you a timeless and proud desire to acquire the spiritual gifts of heartfelt prayer, which, I repeat, are given by the One God, who has determined his time and his place. This place is the entire vessel, both mental and physical, cleansed of passions. 2.202–204 Without any doubt, the most excellent in dignity of all earthly buildings is the church, or the house of God, the church; these words have the same meaning. Although God is present everywhere, in the church His presence is manifested in a special way: the most tangible and most useful for a person. Then only the manifestation of God is even more useful and even more tangible for man, when man himself becomes the church of God, having become the abode of the Holy Spirit, like the apostles and other greatest saints. But very few Christians achieve such a state... God's church is the earthly sky. “In the church of Your glory, O Lord, standing, standing in heaven,” sings the Holy Church. The church is the place of communication between God and people, all Christian sacraments are performed in it... Day and night the church of God resounds with the praise of God; there is no place in it for the words of this world. Everything in the church of God is holy: the very walls, the platform, and the air. The Angel of God constantly guards him; The angels of God and the saints of the triumphant Church descend into it. Presence in such a sacred building constitutes the greatest happiness for an earthly wanderer. The holy prophet David, although he possessed all the means of earthly pleasure and amusement, but as if having examined everything and assessed everything properly, he said: I have asked one thing of the Lord, this I will require: that I may live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, that I may behold the beauty of the Lord, and that I may visit His holy church (Ps. 26:4). This was spoken by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of David. Whoever, during his earthly life, visits the church of God as often as possible, as if living in it, will, having been separated from his body, very conveniently move for eternal celebration to the heavenly church, not made by hands, whose creator is God. In the church we pray, and are edified, and are cleansed of sins, and communicate with God. The Savior showed us the example of visiting the church of God (John 7:14), and the holy apostles also showed us (Acts 3:1). Christians of all times have recognized careful attendance at the church of God as their urgent duty. Saint Demetrius of Rostov likens visiting a church, during all the prayers performed there, to a royal tribute, which everyone must pay daily. If presence at every Divine service performed in the church is recognized by the holy shepherd as an indispensable duty of every pious Christian, all the more such presence is the sacred duty of a monk. ...We see a saving image of visiting the church of God in the visit to the church by a tax collector presented to us in the Gospel (Luke 18:10). The publican stood in the depths of the church, did not consider it permissible to raise his eyes to heaven, but struck his chest, saying: God, be merciful to me, a sinner. The publican left the church, having attracted the goodness of God to himself, and you, having come to the church, if you do not have any obedience in it, stand behind, in a modest corner or behind a pillar, so that you yourself do not have fun and so that your reverence is not exposed to shame by others; direct the eye of your mind to your heart, and your bodily eye to the ground, and pray to God in contrition of spirit, not recognizing any dignity, no virtue, admitting yourself guilty of countless sins, known and unknown to you. We sin a lot both in ignorance, and because of our limitations, and because of the damage to our nature by sin. Divine Scripture says: “God will not despise a contrite and humble heart” (Ps. 50:19). And you, if you pray with the consciousness of your sinfulness and poverty, then God will hear your voice from His holy church, and your cry of prayer before Him will enter His ears (Ps. 17:7). He will shower His rich mercy on you. If you have any duty at the church, then perform it with the greatest reverence and caution, as one serving God and not men. Together with the mentioned publican, the Gospel narrates, a Pharisee went into the church to pray. As a person of significance, the Pharisee stood in a prominent place. He probably had the idea - it is common to all Pharisees - to bring edification to the people present by his decent standing and prayer. He considered vanity harmless to himself, as someone who had succeeded in virtue, and some hypocrisy as excusable in the form of general benefit. What was the Pharisee's prayer? First, he glorified God. It's a good start. But after that he began to count not God’s blessings, but his own merits and virtues, so that according to such a calculation it should have started to be different. The Pharisee would have begun more correctly if he had begun directly by glorifying himself, and not God. God is glorified only formally, for some cover of pride. This pride manifested itself in the condemnation and humiliation of his neighbor, whose conscience was unknown to the Pharisee, whose consciousness of sin attracted the mercy of God. The Pharisee, hypocritically glorifying God, said: I am not like other men, predators, unrighteous, adulterers, or like this tax collector. I fast twice on Saturday, I give as much as I can tithe. What is obvious here is: unawareness of one’s sinfulness, awareness of one’s dignity, pride flowing from them, expressed by condemnation and humiliation of one’s neighbor. The Pharisee’s prayer was not accepted by the Lord, who at the conclusion of this tributary story said: Everyone who exalts himself will humble himself; the one who humbles himself will exalt himself. From this it is clear that everyone who wants his prayer to be accepted by God must bring it out of consciousness of his sinfulness and extreme insufficiency in relation to virtue; must offer it, rejecting the consciousness of his own merits, as if insignificant before the incomprehensible dignity of God; must bring it from a heart that has humbled itself before all its neighbors, from a heart that has loved all its neighbors, from a heart that has forgiven its neighbors all insults and insults. “But,” the prophet says prayerfully to God, “through the abundance of Thy mercy I will enter into Thy house, I will worship Thy holy church in Thy passion” (Ps. 5:8). The great mercy of God towards man is the establishment of public prayer services in God’s holy churches. These prayers were established by the apostles, their holy disciples and the holy fathers of the first centuries of Christianity by revelation from Above. Every Christian can take part in these prayers, and the illiterate assimilates the knowledge, eloquence, poetry of the spiritual, holy vitas and scribes of Christianity. With these prayers, anyone who wishes can very conveniently learn mental prayer: quantity of prayer leads to quality, the fathers said, and therefore lengthy prayers greatly help the ascetic move from verbal prayer to mental and heartfelt prayer. Church prayers contain extensive Christian dogmatic and moral theology; One who attends church unfailingly and carefully listens to its reading and chanting can clearly learn everything that is necessary for an Orthodox Christian in the field of faith. 2. 177–182 “The tax collector stood afar off,” the Gospel narrates, “not wanting to lift up his eyes to heaven, but he besieged his heart, saying: God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” The Gospel teaches us in these words that when praying, the position of the body must correspond to the humble disposition of the soul. In the church, one should choose a place not in front, not visible, but modest, which would not provide reasons for entertainment. We should not allow our eyes freedom: let them be constantly directed towards the earth, so that the mind and heart can be directed unhindered towards God. The publican looked bent over - so vividly did he feel the burden of his sins. And anyone who vividly feels this burden oppressing the soul will involuntarily take on the appearance of one bent and lamenting. 4. 25–26 Even during Divine services, it is useful to repeat a short prayer in the spiritual cell: it not only does not interfere with attention to the prayers read and sung in the church of God, but also promotes especially careful attention to them, keeping the mind from being distracted. If the mind is not kept in self-contemplation by short prayer, filling the soul with a feeling of repentance, then it will easily succumb to absent-mindedness; During the Divine service, ignoring church reading and singing, he will deviate into empty thoughts and dreams. 4. 29–30 When taking part in church activities, let us beware of displaying any special impulses of our piety that would sharply distinguish us from our brethren. “Pay attention to this,” said Saint John Climacus, “so that, being among your brethren, you in no way seem more righteous than them in anything. By doing otherwise, you will do two evils: you will offend your brothers with your feigned zeal, and you will certainly give yourself a reason for arrogance. Be diligent in your soul, without revealing it either by body movement, or appearance, or word, or hint.” 4.72 In church, when you find it necessary to sit down, sit down, because God listens not to the one who sits or stands, but to the one whose mind is directed towards Him with due reverence. The desire for God, reverence for God and fear of God are acquired by attention to oneself. 6.533–534 In church, do not read any special prayers, but listen to the Divine service. It is good to get used to the publican’s prayer, which is approved by the Lord and which the publican, as can be seen from the Gospel, said while in church. This prayer reads like this: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner,” or “God, cleanse me, a sinner.” This prayer is equivalent to the prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” or “Lord, have mercy.” Read from these prayers the one that you find most convenient for yourself. But be sure to read slowly and with attention. I advise you to stick to the second one. The first two prayers are identical; the third is a reduction of the second. In church, sometimes listen to the Divine service, and sometimes say a prayer with your mind, without ceasing to listen to the Divine service. You can pray together with your mind and listen to church prayer. The first promotes the second, and the second the first. The church service, when you stay at home, can be replaced by reading one of the akathists: an akathist to the Lord Jesus or an akathist to the Mother of God. In church, do not kneel and, in general, do not distinguish yourself from others in appearance by any features; but maintain both internal and external reverence. Bow as little as possible. There are only two bows to the ground during the Liturgy, at the end of it: when the Chalice with the Holy Mysteries is brought out twice. Resist yourself from getting excited and from all the impulses that are so contrary to humility. Demand silence and attention from yourself both when praying, and when reading, and in all your actions. This behavior brings humility to the spirit. Humility is overshadowed by the mercy of God. 6.532–533 (See PRAYER RULE). We can ask God for what we see as necessary and useful: but the fulfillment and non-fulfillment of our desires must be left to His holy will, completing with this submission to the will of God our desires and the consciousness of our unreasonableness in any of our requests, no matter how apparently good it may be. This is especially true in cases of doubt. 6.828 Whoever wants to serve God correctly should not ask God for anything specifically, such as tears or anything else, in accordance with his will; must ask God to give him what is good for his soul; a person does not know what exactly is good for his soul. He who, in his petition, renounces his own will for the will of God, can receive true humility. We must refrain from getting excited, and try to have the fear of God when praying - this is more correct. 6.519 I repeat the saying of Isaac of Syria: “If you pray to God for something, and He is slow to hear you, do not grieve about it: you are no smarter than God. This is done this way according to the wisest Providence of God, incomprehensible to the human mind.” And the fact that God loves us incomparably more than how much we love and can love ourselves must be believed without a doubt. “Everything,” the saint concludes his judgment on this subject, “is conveniently achieved and is quickly lost. However, everything acquired with heart disease is carefully stored.” 6.722 The feeling of the fear of God is high and desirable! When it acts, the mind often dulls its eyes, ceases to utter words, to produce thoughts: with reverent silence, which surpasses words, it expresses the consciousness of its insignificance and the inexpressible prayer that is born from this consciousness. Saint Isaac of Syria describes this state excellently: “A humble person, when he approaches prayer or is worthy of it, does not dare to pray to God or ask for anything. He doesn't know what to pray for; he is silent with all his thoughts, waiting only for mercy and the will that will be spoken about him from that Greatness Whom he worships. His face is bowed to the ground, and the inner vision of his heart is raised to the exalted gates of the Holy of Holies.” 2. 61–62 Having enslaved the body to the spirit through fasting, having made our spirit Angel-like in goodness, let us inspire it with prayer; Let our spirit acquire the blessed skill of quickly and often flying to God and asking for God’s blessing on our endeavors, God’s help for our actions. We will not be slow to see God as an assistant, as the ruler of our activities. This is not enough! Often ascending in thought to God, we will gradually clear our moral path from all lawlessness, not only gross, but also subtle, committed in thoughts and sensations. Who, calling on God for help, dares to call on Him to help a vicious cause? Who, submitting his petition to the view of the King of kings, does not first take care that the petition is worthy of the Royal and Divine gaze, penetrating into the secrets of the heart and seeing with equal clarity everything visible and invisible? If we ask anything according to His will, only in this will He listen to us (1 John 5:14), said the apostle. Who, turning to God every hour, does not acquire the conviction and feeling that he lives under the eyes of God, that his every deed, every movement of his soul is seen by the all-seeing and omnipresent God? Such conviction and feeling is a necessary consequence - the spiritual success of a Christian. May the merciful Lord grant us this success for the glory of His Name and for our salvation. 4. 109–110 Abba John Kolov said: “If a person has a Divine guarantee in his soul, then he can remain silent in his cell. Also, someone who, without a Divine pledge, can remain hopelessly in a cell, has a pledge of this world. One who has neither God’s deposit nor the deposit of this world cannot remain in a cell.” This means: one who practices mental prayer and crying is satisfied and values ​​the silence of the cell; You can value being in a cell because of some kind of passion, for example, because of a passion for needlework with a money-loving goal. Without these pledges, staying in the cell is unbearable. 7.268 (See Silence, Reasoning). “Gracious gifts,” states St. Seraphim, “are received only by those who have internal work and watch over their souls. Those who truly decide to serve God must practice the memory of God and unceasing prayer to the Lord Jesus Christ, saying with their minds: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. By such an exercise, while protecting oneself from distraction and maintaining peace of conscience, one can draw closer to God and unite with Him. We cannot approach God otherwise than through unceasing prayer, according to Saint Isaac of Syria.” 2.268 For monks and novices who deign to engage in the Jesus Prayer, in order to more conveniently avoid distraction and staying attentive, the Monk Seraphim advises standing in church during prayers with closed eyes and opening them only when sleep and drowsiness become aggravating. Then he advises to direct your gaze to the holy icons, which also protects against absent-mindedness and stimulates you to prayer. The novice becomes accustomed to the Jesus Prayer with particular comfort during lengthy monastic prayers. While attending them, why wastelessly and mentally harmfully wander your thoughts everywhere? And this can be avoided if the mind is not attached to anything. Practice the Jesus Prayer: it will keep your mind from wandering; you will become much more focused, deeper; You will listen much better to church readings and hymns - together and in an inconspicuous way, you will gradually learn mental prayer. 2.269 During church services, it is useful to practice the Jesus Prayer: it, by keeping the mind from being distracted, helps it to listen to church singing and reading. 5. 110–111 Headache is a common initial accompaniment of deep attention to the Word of God and prayer. “For the Word of God is living,” says the apostle, “and is active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, members and marrow, and judging by the mind and thought of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). Not only does it hurt you, it didn’t only hurt me; she was ill with the holy fathers - and they placed it in their writings. The Monk Gregory of Sinai says: “And having pain in the shoulders and the head many times, endure it more laboriously and diligently, seeking the Lord in your heart.” At times, from exercising in prayer, there is relaxation of the whole body, sweat, fever; all this is for beginners; For those who are successful, prayer strengthens and nourishes the soul and body. But even they sweat. However, you have been taught the easiest way of attention and prayerful feat, alien to any difficult mechanical bodily exercise, for which good health is necessary. Pay as little attention as possible to the little things, to all the sensations in your body; see that your mind remains in repentance and moves away from entertainment. I hope your headaches won't last long. And mine didn't last long. After they passed, the activity of prayer became, as it were, more natural to the mind and easier for it. When praying, do not demand from your mind anything that exceeds its strength, for example, indestructible, complete non-distraction. Mentally show your weakness and old age to God, saying: “Lord! You see all my dilapidation!” - and, enduring, generously endure the weakness of your mind. It is not in vain and not without purpose that it is said: “By enduring, I endured the Lord, and listened to me and heard my prayer: and raised me from the pit of passions and from the clay of the mire, and set my nose on stones and straightened my steps, and put a new song in my mouth” (Ps. 39: 1-4). 6.296–297 Ascetics engaged in mental feats are allowed primarily before physical feats of illness and other sorrows: from their actions, the ascetic must necessarily place his hope in God. As hope in God increases, self-confidence weakens; As self-confidence decreases, self-esteem decreases. With the weakening of these ailments, true humility begins to arise in the soul, on which the correctness and strength of any achievement are based. 6.599 Beginners who have somewhat tasted prayer tend to feel more war and be subject to bodily infirmities, because the body cannot withstand the touch of the spiritual and, so to speak, is shaken and melted by it, and the soul, having tasted God’s sweetness, becomes more sensitive to the bitterness of passions. Nevertheless, this is allowed by the all-wise Providence, so that humility, which is so inconsistent with the spirit of the age and alien to modern people, will take root in us. Only on the basis of humility can a person safely erect the edifice of spiritual work. Without humility, doing leads only to arrogance. You must distinguish between actions in you from illness and actions in your body from monastic feats. Only the first ones are told to the material doctor. By repentance, in its full sense, the heart is broken, and therefore the body. 6.831 Do not be surprised at your incomprehensible ailments. This is the fate of all those who are refined in smart work. Their illnesses and their healings proceed in a completely different order than those of other people. 6.834 “If you have pain in your shoulders and are often exposed to headaches, endure this with constancy and zeal, seeking the Lord in your heart, because the Kingdom of Heaven is the treasure of those who force themselves, and those who force themselves delight it (Matthew 11:12). The Lord indicated that true diligence lies in enduring these and similar diseases. Patience and waiting in every undertaking is the parent of mental and physical illnesses” (St. Gregory of Sinaite). The word illness here primarily means contrition of the spirit, crying of the spirit, illness and suffering from the feeling of one’s sinfulness, from the feeling of eternal death, from the feeling of enslavement to fallen spirits. The suffering of the spirit is communicated to the heart and body, as inextricably linked with the spirit and, by natural necessity, taking part in its states. In those who are weak in body, contrition of the spirit and its crying completely replace bodily labor, but from people of strong physique, oppression of the body is certainly required: in them, without oppressing the body, the heart itself will not acquire the blessed sadness that is born in the weak from the feeling and consciousness of weakness. 2. 282–283 Not only doing mental prayer, but also carefully reading deep paternal writings about it produces headaches. Heart contrition, due to the sinfulness, captivity and death revealed by prayer, is so strong that it produces suffering and illness in the body, the existence and possibility of which is completely unknown to those unfamiliar with the feat of prayer. When the heart confesses to the Lord its sinfulness, its wretched state, then the body is crucified. “I suffered,” says David, who is experienced in the feat of prayer, “and was muddled to the end, lamenting as he walked all day long. For my body is filled with reproach, and there is no healing in my flesh. I would become embittered and humbled to death, roaring with the groaning of my heart” (Ps. 37:7-9). 2. 283–284 Time. Duration of the feat Very rare people receive a connection between the mind and the heart soon after beginning the feat of prayer; Usually many years pass between the beginning of the feat and the grace-filled union of the mind with the heart - we must prove the sincerity of our will by constancy and patience. 2.267 It is very useful to know that the fruit of pure unparalleled prayer is the renewal of nature, that the renewed nature is supplied and adorned with the gifts of Divine grace; but the desire for premature acquisition of these gifts, a desire that, driven by conceit, forestalls God’s good will towards us, is extremely harmful and leads only to delusion. 2.304 A child, due to his spiritual age, is not capable of spiritual gifts: he will not use them for the glory of God, not for the benefit of himself and his neighbors, not for the defeat of invisible adversaries; he will use them to defeat himself, dreaming of himself, filled with destructive exaltation, destructive contempt for his neighbors. And alien to spiritual gifts, filled with foul passions, we are proud and magnified, we never cease to condemn and humiliate our neighbors, who are better than us in all respects! What would happen if we were trusted with some spiritual wealth, some spiritual gift that separates its owner from his brethren, testifying to him that he is God’s chosen one? Wouldn't it become the cause of terrible mental distress for us? Let us strive to improve in humility, which consists in a special blissful mood of the heart and is in the heart from the fulfillment of the Gospel Commandments. Humility is the only altar on which we are permitted by spiritual law to offer the sacrifice of prayer, on which the sacrifice of prayer ascends to God and appears before His face. Humility is the only vessel into which grace-filled gifts are placed by the finger of God. 2. 312–313 Among the incomprehensible, wonderful properties of the name of Jesus is the property and power to cast out demons. This property was declared by the Lord Himself. He said that those who believe in Him will give birth to demons in His name (Mark 16:17). It is necessary to pay special attention to this property of the name of Jesus, because it is of utmost importance for those who practice the Jesus Prayer. First, we need to say a few words about the presence of demons in people. This presence comes in two forms: one can be called sensual, the other moral. Satan dwells sensually in a person when he inhabits his body with his being and torments his soul and body. Thus, one demon can live in a person, and many demons can live. Then the person is called mad. From the Gospel we see that the Lord healed those who were possessed; the Lord's disciples also healed them, casting out demons from people in the Name of the Lord. Satan abides morally in a person when a person becomes an executor of the will of the devil. Thus, Satan came into Judas Iscariot (John 13:27), that is, he took possession of his mind and will, united with him in spirit. In this position were and are all those who do not believe in Christ, just as the holy Apostle Paul says to Christians who have converted to Christianity from paganism: “and you, who are the sins of the dead and your sins: in whom you sometimes walk, according to the age of this world, according to the prince of the powers of the air, the spirit, who now works in the sons of disobedience: in whom we also sometimes live in the lusts of the flesh ours, doing the will of the flesh and mind, and being by nature children of wrath, like others” (Eph. 2:1-3). In this position are found, more or less, depending on the degree of sinfulness, those who were baptized into Christ, but were alienated from Him by sins. This is how the holy fathers understand the words of Christ about the return of the devil with the other seven fiercest spirits to the spiritual church from which the Holy Spirit has departed (Matthew 12:43–45). The spirits that have entered in this way are again driven out by the Jesus Prayer, while living in constant and thorough repentance. Let's undertake a feat that will save us! Let us take care to drive out the spirits that have entered us due to our negligence, through the Jesus Prayer. It has the ability to revive those killed by sin, it has the ability to cast out demons. “I am,” said the Savior, “resurrection and life: believe in Me, even if you die, you will live” (John 11:25). These signs will follow to those who believe: in My name the demons will be destroyed (Mark 16:17). The Jesus Prayer both reveals the presence of demons in a person and drives them out of a person. At the same time, something similar happens to what happened during the expulsion of a demon from a raging youth after the Transfiguration of the Lord. When the youth saw the Lord come, the spirit shook the youth, and his mother-in-law fell to the ground, rolling around in foam. When the Lord commanded the spirit to come out of the boy, the spirit, from the malice and ferocity of the movement at which he came out, cried out, shook the boy strongly and for a long time, from which the boy became as if dead (Mark 9:17-27). The power of Satan, abiding in man during his distracted life, unnoticed and incomprehensible, when he hears the name of the Lord Jesus called upon by the one praying, he becomes confused. It stirs up all the passions in a person, through them it brings the whole person into terrible turmoil, producing various, strange diseases in the body. In this sense, the Monk John the Prophet said: “We, the weak, can only resort to the name of Jesus: for the passions, as it is said, are demons - and come from invoking this name.” This means: the action of passions and demons is cumulative; demons act through passions. When we see a special excitement and effervescence of passions during the exercise of the Jesus Prayer, we will not become despondent and bewildered because of this. On the contrary, let us be encouraged and prepared for feat, for the most thorough prayer in the Name of the Lord Jesus, as having received a clear sign that the Jesus Prayer has begun to produce in us its characteristic effect. Saint John Chrysostom says: “Remembering the name of our Lord Jesus Christ provokes the enemy to scold. For a soul that is in need of the Jesus Prayer can obtain everything through this prayer, both evil and good. First, she can see evil in the interior of her heart, and then good. This prayer can move the serpent, and this prayer can humble him. This prayer can expose the sin that lives in us, and this prayer can destroy it. This prayer can set in motion all the power of the enemy in the heart, and this prayer can conquer and eradicate it little by little. The name of the Lord Jesus Christ, descending into the depths of the heart, will humble the serpent who owns his pastures, and will save and revive the soul. Continue continually in the name of the Lord Jesus, so that the heart of the Lord and the Lord may consume the heart, and may the two become one. However, this work is not accomplished in one day or two days, but requires many years and time: a lot of time and effort is needed for the enemy to be driven out and Christ to move in.” Obviously, this is the work described here, with a clear indication of the instrument of work, about which the Venerable Macarius the Great speaks and invites in his 1st Word: “Go down, whoever you are, through the thoughts that are constantly growing in you, to your soul, a prisoner of war and a slave of sin, and examine to the bottom of your thoughts, and explore the depth of your thoughts: and you will see in the depths of your soul your crawling and nesting serpent, which killed you with the poison of the parts of your soul. The immeasurable abyss is the heart. If you kill the serpent, then boast before God of your purity; if not, then humble yourself, praying to God as a weak and sinner for your secrets.” The same great saint of God says: “The kingdom of darkness, that is, the evil prince of spirits, having captivated man from the beginning, surrounded and clothed the soul and its entire being, desecrated it all, captivated it all into his kingdom; he did not leave free from enslavement either his thoughts, his mind, his flesh, and finally, not a single part of it; dressed her all in a robe of darkness. This evil enemy has desecrated and disfigured the whole person - soul and body; He clothed man in the old man - defiled, unclean, contrary to God, disobedient to the law of God, that is, he clothed him in sin itself, so that man no longer saw as he wanted, but saw passionately, heard passionately, so that his feet were directed toward evil deeds, his hands toward the work of lawlessness, his heart toward evil thoughts. But we will pray to God that He will take off the old man from us, since He alone can take away sin from us: because those who have taken us captive and hold us in their power are stronger than us, and He has promised to free us from this slavery.” Based on these concepts, the holy fathers give those who pray the Jesus Prayer the following most soul-saving instruction: “If the soul does not suffer greatly from the persistence of sin, it will not be able to rejoice abundantly in the goodness of justice. He who wishes to purify his heart, let him constantly kindle it with the memory of the Lord Jesus, having only this through uninterrupted teaching and deed. Those who want to renounce their old age should not sometimes pray and sometimes not, but should constantly remain in prayer by observing the mind, even if they are outside the churches of prayer. Those who intend to purify gold, even if they allow the fire in the crucible to go out for a short time, then again harden in the substance being cleaned; Likewise, he who sometimes remembers God, and sometimes does not remember, destroys with idleness what he thinks he can acquire through prayer. It is common for a virtuous man to constantly destroy the earthiness of the heart with the memory of God, so that in this way evil is little by little consumed by the fire of the memory of good and the soul returns completely to its natural lordship with great glory. Thus, the mind, being in the heart, prays purely and unpretentiously, as the same saint (Diadochos) said: “Then prayer is true and unpretentious when the mind, while praying, is united with the heart.” Let us not be afraid, workers of the Jesus Prayer, of neither winds nor disturbances! I call demonic thoughts and dreams winds, and excitement the rebellion of passions excited by thoughts and dreams. From the midst of a raging storm, with constancy, courage and crying, let us cry out to the Lord Jesus Christ; He will rebuke the winds and waves, and we, having experienced the omnipotence of Jesus, will give Him due worship, saying: Truly you are the Son of God (Matthew 14:33). We are fighting for our salvation. Our eternal fate depends on our victory or defeat. “Then,” says the Venerable Simeon the New Theologian, “that is, when practicing the Jesus Prayer, there is warfare: the crafty demons fight with great indignation, through the action of passions they create rebellion and a storm in the heart, but in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ they are consumed and destroyed, like wax from fire. Again: when they are driven away and retreat from the heart, they do not stop fighting, but disturb the mind with external feelings from outside. For this reason, the mind does not very soon begin to feel silence and silence within itself, because demons, when they do not have the power to disturb the mind in the depths, then disturb it from the outside with dreams. And therefore it is impossible to completely free yourself from warfare and not be attacked by evil spirits. This is characteristic of the perfect and those who have completely withdrawn from everything and constantly remain in the attention of the heart.” Initially, the work itself seems unusually dry, not promising any fruit. The mind, trying to unite with the heart, first encounters impenetrable darkness, hardness and deadness of the heart, which is not suddenly awakened to sympathy with the mind. This should not lead the worker to despondency and cowardice and is mentioned here for the purpose that the worker should be forewarned and warned. A patient and careful worker will certainly be satisfied and comforted, he will rejoice in the immeasurable abundance of such spiritual fruits, which he cannot even imagine in his carnal and spiritual state. The action of the Jesus Prayer has its own gradualness: first it acts on one mind, bringing it into a state of silence and attention, then it will begin to penetrate the heart, awakening it from the sleep of death and signifying its revival by the appearance in it of feelings of tenderness and crying. Deepening even further, it little by little begins to act in all members of the soul and body, drive out sin from everywhere, destroy everywhere the dominion, influence and poison of demons. For this reason, during the initial actions of the Jesus Prayer, “there is unspeakable contrition and unspeakable illness of the soul,” says St. Gregory of Sinaite. The soul is sick, as if it were sick and in labor, according to the Scripture (Sir. 48:21): for the Word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, - that is, Jesus, - passes, as the Apostle testifies, even to the division of soul and spirit, members and marrow, and judges by the thought and thought of the heart (Heb. 4, 12), passes, destroying sinfulness from all parts of the soul and body. 2. 245–250 It is characteristic of mental prayer to reveal the passions hiding and secretly living in the human heart! She both opens them and tames them. It is characteristic of mental prayer to reveal the captivity in which we find ourselves among fallen spirits. She opens this captivity and frees us from it. Consequently, one should not be confused and perplexed when passions arise from fallen nature or when they are aroused by spirits. And just as passions are tamed by prayer, then when they arise, one should slowly and very quietly say the Jesus Prayer with the mind, which will little by little calm down the rising passions. Sometimes the revolt of passions and the invasion of enemy thoughts is so strong that it leads to a great spiritual feat. This is the time of invisible martyrdom. We must confess the Lord in the face of passions and demons with long prayer, which will certainly bring victory. 6.536 The name of our Lord Jesus Christ is Divine; the power and action of this name are Divine; they are omnipotent and saving; they are above our concept, inaccessible to it. With faith, hope, zeal, combined with great reverence and fear, we will accomplish the great work of God, given by God; Let us practice prayer in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ. “The constant invocation of the name of God,” says the Great Barsanuphius, “is a healing that kills not only passions, but also their very action. Just as a doctor applies medicines or plasters to the wound of a sufferer, and they act, and the patient does not know how this is done, so the Name of God, when invoked, kills all passions, although we do not know how this is done.” 1.258 The correct exercise of the Jesus Prayer follows naturally from the correct concepts about God, about the all-holy name of the Lord Jesus and about man’s relationship to God. God is an unlimitedly great, all-perfect being, the Creator and Recreator of men, the sovereign Ruler over men, over angels, over demons, over all creation, visible and invisible. This concept of God teaches us that we must stand before God in prayer in the deepest reverence, in the greatest fear and trembling, directing all our attention to Him, concentrating in attention all the powers of the mind, heart, soul, rejecting absent-mindedness and daydreaming as a violation of attention and reverence, as a violation of the correctness in standing before God, the correctness urgently required by the greatness of God (John 4:24. Matt. 22, 37. Mark 12,29,30. Isaac of Syria said beautifully: “When you fall down before God in prayer, in your thoughts be like an ant, like earthly reptiles, like a worm, like a babbling child. Do not say anything reasonable before Him; draw closer to God with a childish way of thinking.” Those who have acquired true prayer feel an indescribable poverty of spirit when they stand before God, praising Him, confessing to Him, presenting their petitions to Him. They feel as if they have been destroyed, as if they do not exist. It's natural! When the one praying abundantly senses the presence of God, the presence of Life Itself, the immense and incomprehensible Life, then his own life seems to him to be the greatest drop, comparable to a boundless ocean. The righteous, long-suffering Job came to such a state, having achieved the highest spiritual success. He felt himself melting away (Job 42:6), just as snow melts and disappears when the rays of the scorching sun fall on it. 1. 257–258 The Jesus Prayer is pronounced like this: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Initially it was pronounced without adding the word sinner; this word is added to the other words of the prayer subsequently. “This word, which contains the consciousness and confession of fall,” notes the Venerable Nilus of Sora, “is suitable and favorable for us to God, who commanded us to send prayers to Him out of consciousness and confession of our sinfulness.” For beginners, tolerating their weaknesses, the fathers allow the prayer to be divided into two halves: sometimes to say Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner, and sometimes Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. However, this is only permission and condescension, and is by no means an order or an establishment that requires indispensable execution. It is much better to constantly perform a uniform, integral prayer, without occupying or entertaining the mind with change and concern for change. And the one who finds the need for his weakness to change should not allow it often. Approximately: you can pray one half of the prayer before lunch, the other after lunch. Forbidding frequent change, the Monk Gregory of Sinaite says: “Those trees that are replanted often do not take root.” 2.234 We recognize it as our duty to present here, to the best of our meager understanding and meager experience, the teaching of the holy fathers on the artistic cultivation of the Jesus Prayer, with a clear designation of what kind of exercise in prayer and what kind of mental and heartfelt prayer befits all Christians and new monks without exception, and what kind of doing is characteristic of those who have succeeded, raised to success by God’s favor and God’s grace. by grace. Without any doubt, the first place among all methods should be given to the method proposed by Saint John of the Climacus, as especially convenient, completely safe, necessary, even necessary for the reality of prayer, befitting all Christians living piously and seeking salvation - both laity and monks. The great mentor of monastics speaks about this method twice in his Ladder, leading from earth to heaven: in a word on obedience and in a word on prayer. The very fact that he sets out his method in presenting the doctrine of obedience for communal monks clearly shows that this method is also prescribed for novice monks. The proposal of the method is repeated in a separate, lengthy teaching on prayer, after instructions for the silent, therefore, repeated for successful monks; this clearly shows that the method is very good both for the silent and for successful monks. We repeat: the greatest advantage of the method is that, while it is satisfactory, it is completely safe. In his word on prayer, Saint John Climacus says: “Strive to return, or rather, to enclose a thought in the words of prayer. If, due to her infancy, she becomes weak and deviates, bring her in again. Inconsistency is inherent in the mind. He who ordains everything can establish it. If you acquire this deed and constantly adhere to it, then the One who defines the boundaries of your sea in you will come and say to him during your prayer: you will come to this, and you will not pass away (Job 38:11). It is impossible to bind the spirit; but where the Creator of this spirit is present, everything submits to Him. The beginning of prayer is thoughts driven away by prayer at their very beginning; the middle - when the mind dwells in only words pronounced vocally or mentally; the end is the rapture of the mind to God.” In his word on obedience, St. John says: “Struggle with the thought constantly, returning it to yourself when it flies away: God does not require from novices to pray without soaring. Do not grieve when you are robbed, but be content, constantly returning your mind to yourself.” Here is taught a way to pray attentively, to pray both publicly and with one mind. The heart cannot help but take part in attentive prayer, as St. Mark said: “A mind that prays without entertainment oppresses the heart.” Thus, whoever prays according to the method proposed by Saint John Climacus will pray with his lips, his mind, and his heart; he, having succeeded in prayer, will acquire mental and heartfelt prayer and attract Divine grace into himself, as can be seen from the quoted words of the great mentor of monks. What more could you want? Nothing. With this type of exercise in prayer, what charm could there be? There is only one infatuation into absent-mindedness - a mistake, quite obvious, inevitable in beginners, capable of immediate healing through the return of thoughts to words, destroyed by the mercy and help of God, in due time, with constant asceticism. 2. 261–264 Experience will not be slow to show that when using this method, especially at first, you must pronounce words with extreme leisurely so that the mind has time to fit into the words as into forms; this cannot be achieved by hasty reading. St. John’s method is very convenient both when practicing the Jesus Prayer, and when reading prayer books in private, even when reading Scripture and patristic books. You have to get used to it, as if reading from the warehouses - with such leisurelyness. One who has become accustomed to this method has acquired oral, mental and heartfelt prayer, characteristic of everyone leading an active life. 2. 269–270 Hieromonk Dorotheos, our compatriot, a great teacher of spiritual feat, who in this dignity approaches Saint Isaac of Syria, advises those learning the Jesus Prayer to first pronounce it publicly. He says that vocal prayer automatically turns into mental prayer. “From vowel prayer,” says the holy monk, “mental prayer flows, and from mental prayer comes heartfelt prayer. The Jesus Prayer should not be said in a loud voice, but quietly, out loud to oneself.” When there is a special effect of absent-mindedness, sadness, despondency, laziness, it is very useful to perform the Jesus Prayer publicly: in response to the vocal Jesus Prayer, the soul is little by little awakened from the heavy moral sleep into which sadness and despondency usually plunge it. It is very useful to perform the Jesus Prayer publicly during the intensified invasion of thoughts and dreams of carnal lust and anger, when their action makes the blood heat up and boil, peace and silence are taken away from the heart, when the mind wavers, weakens, as if overthrown and bound by many indecent thoughts and dreams: the airy princes of malice, whose presence is not revealed by bodily eyes, but is recognized soul, according to the effect they have on it, having heard the terrible name of the Lord Jesus for them, they will become bewildered and confused, they will be afraid, and will not hesitate to retreat from the soul. The method proposed by the holy monk is very simple and convenient. It must be combined with the mechanism of St. John Climacus, that is, say the Jesus Prayer publicly, aloud to yourself alone, slowly and enclosing the mind in the words of prayer: enclosing the mind in the words of prayer is bequeathed by the priest himself. The mechanism of St. John Climacus must also be observed in the manner set forth by St. Nilus of Sora in the 1st Word of his Tradition, or the Rule of Scete. The Monk Nil borrowed his method from the Greek fathers - Simeon the New Theologian and Gregory the Sinaite - and simplified it somewhat. St. Nile speaks to what these saints said about holding the breath, i.e. so as not to breathe often: “and experience will soon teach that this is very useful for collecting the mind.” Some, not understanding this mechanism, attach excessive importance to it, hold their breath excessively, and thereby damage the lungs, at the same time harming the soul by assimilating the concept of wrong. All heated and overly tense actions serve as an obstacle to success in prayer, which develops only in the bosom of a peaceful, quiet, reverent mood in the soul and body. “Everything immoderate comes from demons,” said Pimen the Great. 1.260–261 Reject with quietness, as if refusing as unworthy, every image that appears to the mind or bodily eyes, whether of light or of some saint or angel, Christ Himself and the Mother of God, everything, everything. Try to keep your mind solely attentive to the words of prayer, formless, not imprinted in any way (no matter how subtle this image may be!), not occupied by any opinion, in complete selflessness. We fell by rejecting God, by reviving our own; and ours is insignificance, non-existence; after all, everything that we had before existence, starting from which, including which, we all received from God. 6. 323–324 You must seek spiritual success by cutting off your will. This work mortifies passions and removes, as if from hell, from carnal wisdom. In one who cuts off his own will, the action of prayer appears by itself when he exercises attentive prayer with the conclusion of the mind in the words of prayer. If a person is not first purified by cutting off his will, then true prayerful action will never be revealed in him. When the prayer action is revealed, then it will become clear that it is nothing more than a complete rejection of one’s will for the sake of the will of God. 6.734 I told you about the need to cut off your will. This applies specifically to the feat of prayer. You must renounce within yourself all consciousness of dignity for prosperity and in poverty of spirit (which is the cutting off of the will), in attention to the words and fear of God, stand mentally before God, cry out for mercy and expect everything from the mercy of God. He will do with us according to His will and according to His mercy; then it will be clear that the good bestowed by God is completely different from what man expected to receive. For those who have not renounced their will, delusion is dangerous. 6.736 The other day I carefully read “The Word on the Jesus Prayer.” It clearly states that prayer with the mind enclosed in the words of prayer is the most useful and safest, that the mechanism through nostril breathing with an effort to ascend with the mind into the heart is forbidden by the holy fathers for those who are not mature enough for such prayer! You need to pray in the first way, taking into account the general rule and not accepting exceptions to the general rule, which took place according to the special discretion of God. I try to get used to the first method only, as necessary for attention. Attention is the soul of prayer. I even try to eliminate everything else, so that the work is completely disinterested, so that success is completely left to the will of God. 6. 765–766 Stay resolute in confining your mind to the words of prayer. If at the same time some other mechanism appears by itself, then let it act until it goes away. If he moves away, don’t be embarrassed. Your prayer is still quite material. And therefore, the very mechanisms that you previously held incorrectly can be corrected by enclosing your mind in the words of prayer. With this last mechanism, an invaluable prayer action appears in its time, completely spiritual. Your search for a place of heart is very wrong! If you enclose your mind in words, your heart will come into sympathy with the mind. First you need to pray with this sympathy. Such a prayer is a prayer of repentance. When a person is cleansed through repentance, the place of the heart will be designated by itself. When you feel insensibility during prayer, then, despite this state of insensibility, it is useful to force yourself to attentive prayer and not give up the effort of prayer, doing the prayer loudly and slowly, because after insensibility, the grace of God suddenly touches the heart, and it comes to tenderness. The period of struggle with passions should not be burdened in any way. This period is appointed by God according to His wise discretion. The Scripture says: Having endured, I suffered the Lord, and listened to me. Also: I will raise the wrath of the Lord because those who have sinned against Him. Premature liberation from internal struggles is harmful to the soul. 6.768 If you abandon all desire for imaginary success, entrusting the matter of your success to God and entrusting your temporary and eternal fate to the will of God, and during your prayer you only care about attention, from which tenderness usually comes and is usually promoted, then your prayer feat will receive correctness. This will calm you down a lot. Calmness will be a sign of God's mercy. Also, I would not advise you to go into too much consideration of your sinfulness. It's enough if you know this. Spiritual achievement should be as less difficult as possible. 6.772 In human society one should pray with one’s mind, but in private one should pray with both mind and lips, somewhat aloud to oneself. 1.223 Slowly and attentively pronouncing one hundred prayers takes 30 minutes or about half an hour; some ascetics need even longer time. Do not say prayers hastily, one immediately after another; Take a short rest after each prayer, and thereby help your mind concentrate. Continuous chanting of prayers distracts the mind. Breathe with caution; breathe quietly and slowly: this mechanism protects against distraction. Having finished praying with the Jesus Prayer, do not indulge in various thoughts and dreams, which are always empty, seductive, deceptive; but according to the direction received in the prayerful feat, spend the time before going to bed. When going to sleep, repeat the prayer; go to sleep with her. Train yourself so that when you wake up from sleep, your first thought, first word and deed is the Jesus Prayer. Fathers advise to spend the afternoon meditating on the memory of death. This is quite correct, but the living Jesus Prayer is inseparable from the living remembrance of death; a living remembrance of death is associated with a living prayer to the Lord Jesus, who abolished death by death and gave men eternal life by His temporary submission to death. 5. 110–111 Wrong way of praying For someone beginning to learn the Jesus Prayer, the daily cell rule of a certain number of prostrations and bows to the ground, according to strength, will greatly help in learning it. They bow slowly, with a feeling of repentance, and with each bow the Jesus Prayer is said. An example of this prayer can be seen in the “Sermon on Faith” by St. Simeon the New Theologian. Describing the daily evening prayer feat of the blessed young man George, Saint Simeon says: “He thought that he would stand before the Lord Himself and fall at His most pure feet; he prayed to the Lord with tears that the Lord would have mercy on him. While praying, he stood motionless, like some kind of pillar, not allowing himself any movement either with his legs or any other part of his body, not allowing his eyes to turn curiously to the sides; he stood with great fear and trembling, not allowing himself to slumber, despondency and laziness.” The number of bows for the first time can be limited to twelve. Depending on one's strength and the convenience provided by circumstances, this number can gradually increase. When multiplying the number of bows, we must strictly observe that the quality of the prayer feat is preserved, so that we do not get carried away to a fruitless, harmful quantity, due to carnal fervor. From bowing, the body warms up and becomes somewhat tired: this state of the body promotes attention and tenderness. Let us beware, beware, so that this state does not turn into carnal fervor, alien to spiritual sensations, developing sensations of the fallen nature. A quantity that is so beneficial when the mood and purpose are right can be very harmful when it leads to carnal heat. Carnal heat is known by its fruits, by which it differs from spiritual warmth. The fruits of carnal heat are conceit, arrogance, arrogance, exaltation, otherwise pride in its various forms, to which charm is conveniently grafted. The fruits of spiritual warmth are repentance, humility, crying, tears. It is most convenient to perform the rule with bows when going to bed - at this time, after the end of the day's cares, you can perform the rule longer and more concentrated. But both in the morning and during the day, it is useful, especially for young people, to make a moderate number of bows - 12 bows and up to 20. These bows support the mood of prayer and the crucifixion of the flesh, maintaining and strengthening zeal for the feat of prayer. 1. 261–262 It is very useful for those who practice prayer to have icons of the Savior and the Mother of God of quite significant size in their cells. From time to time you can turn to icons when praying, as if to the Lord and the Mother of God who are present here themselves. The feeling of God's presence in the cell can become commonplace. With such a constant feeling, we will remain in the cell with the fear of God, as if constantly under the gaze of God. As if we are always in the presence of God, because He is omnipresent, we are always under the gaze of God, because He sees everything and everywhere. Glory to the all-merciful Lord, who sees our sinfulness and sins, who patiently awaits our repentance, who has given us not only permission, but also the commandment to beg Him for mercy. 1.293 If you hold back your breathing according to the art set forth in the Philokalia, you are doing well. This art is excellently shortened by the Monk Nil of Sorsky into the following words: “Do not breathe on the greyhound, for this contributes to the collection of the mind.” You too should be content with this, i.e. breathe quietly while praying. Tenderness and love for neighbors, who all, without exception, seem like angels, are the fruits of true and indelible prayer. And the temptations we encounter, despondency and sleep serve as proof of how useful prayer is to us. I commend you to the grace of God: let it instruct you, strengthen you and guide you, for without Me you cannot do anything, says the Lord. And pack! Avoid art about nostril breathing! When, God willing, the time comes, I will tell you. With this art, which was useful in its time, some have irreparably damaged themselves. Effortlessness, lack of daydreaming, tenderness, love for one’s neighbors—these are the true signs of true prayer. 6.207–208 The Monk Nilus of Sorsky commands us to close our minds in our hearts and hold our breath as much as possible so as not to breathe too often. This means you need to breathe very quietly. In general, all blood movements should hold and maintain the soul and body in a calm position, in a position of silence, reverence and fear of God. Without this, spiritual action cannot appear in us: it appears when all blood movements and impulses subside. Experience will soon teach that holding the breath, i.e. infrequent and gentle breathing is very helpful in bringing oneself into a state of silence and collecting the mind from wandering. 2. 279–280 (See Jesus Prayer Heat). You can pray standing, sitting, or lying down; those who are strong in health and strength pray standing and sitting, the weak can pray lying down, because in this prayer it is not the feat of the body that dominates, but the feat of the spirit. The body must be given a position that would provide the spirit with all freedom to act according to its nature. It is necessary to remember that here we are talking about the work of monks who, through sufficient bodily feat, brought their bodily inclinations into proper order and, due to their success, moved from physical to spiritual feat. 2.279 (See Jesus Prayer, Breathing). There are various manuals available to help new monks practice the Jesus Prayer. Let's list the main ones. Rosary or lestovka... Bows are counted by the rosary; Also, while sitting, the monks practice the Jesus Prayer, initially using the rosary. When attention intensifies during prayer, then the ability to pray the rosary and count the spoken prayers ceases - all attention turns to prayer. It is very useful to learn the Jesus Prayer, performing it with bows to the ground and from the waist, making these bows slowly and with a feeling of repentance... In church and in general when practicing the Jesus Prayer, it is useful to have your eyes closed. Hold your left hand at the chest, above the left nipple of the chest, slightly higher than it: the latter mechanism contributes to the feeling of the power of literature located in the chest. The fathers advise those who are silent to have a somewhat dark cell, with curtained windows, to protect the mind from distraction and to help it concentrate in the heart. Those who are silent are advised to sit on a low chair, firstly, because attentive prayer requires a quiet position, and secondly, in the image of the blind beggar mentioned in the Gospel, who, sitting along the way, cried out to the Lord: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me” (Mark 10:47) - and was heard and had mercy. Also, this low chair represents the rotting place on which Job was cast out, outside the city, when the devil struck him from head to toe with a cruel disease (Job 2:8). ...The sick and elderly should beware of excessive physical feats, so that it does not deplete their strength and does not take away the opportunity to engage in spiritual feats. The essence of doing is in the Lord and in His name. The paralytic was hung on his bed before the Lord through the cover of the house - and received healing (Mark 2:4). Healing is attracted by humility and faith. 2.293–294 According to our infancy, the holy fathers teach some aids to more conveniently accustom ourselves to the Jesus Prayer. These benefits are nothing more than aids that do not contain anything special. They should not be dwelled on with undue attention, they should not be given undue importance. All the power and all the effect of the Jesus Prayer flows from the worshiped and omnipotent name Jesus, the only name under heaven, in which it is fitting for us to be saved. Those who succeed do not need any external assistance: among the noisy crowds, they remain in silence. All obstacles to spiritual success are in us, in us alone! If something from the outside acts as an obstacle, then this only serves as an exposure of our weak will, our double-mindedness, our damage by sin. There would be no need for any external benefits if we lived as we should live. Our life is relaxed, our will is shaky, insignificant, and therefore we need external aids, like people with legs with crutches and a staff. 2. 310–311 You have chosen the good part, abandoning all mechanisms and being content with enclosing your mind in words - this will lead to the most correct results, without any admixture of delusion, which you could have been subjected to and, in part, have already been subjected to, using mechanisms that do not suit you. For myself, I hold on, when I hold on, to the only conclusion of the mind in the words of prayer - everything else appears, when it appears, by itself. 6.769 I offer poor advice to fathers and brothers: do not force yourself prematurely to discover within yourself a heartfelt prayerful action. Prudent caution is needed, especially in our time, when it is almost impossible to find a satisfactory mentor for these subjects, when the ascetic must make his way, gropingly, with the guidance of the writings of the holy fathers, into the treasury of spiritual knowledge and, just as gropingly, himself, choose from them what is characteristic of himself. When living according to the Gospel Commandments, engage in attentive Jesus Prayer according to the method of St. John Climacus, combining prayer with crying, having repentance as the beginning and goal of prayer. In due time, known to God, the action of heartfelt prayer will reveal itself. Such an action, revealed by the touch of the finger of God, is superior to that achieved by intense self-force through material benefits. It is superior in many respects: it is much more extensive, more abundant, it is completely safe from charm and other damage; he who has received in this way sees in receiving only the mercy of God, the gift of God, and who has achieved it through the intensive use of material benefits, seeing the gift of God, cannot help but see his feat, cannot help but see the very mechanical method he used, cannot help but attribute special importance to it. This, on the subtle mental path, is a significant shortcoming, a significant stumbling block, a significant obstacle to the development of spiritual success. There is no end or limits to the development of spiritual prosperity. An insignificant, imperceptible hope in something outside of God can stop the course of prosperity, in which both the leader, the legs, and the wings are faith in God. “Christ is everything to the believer,” said Saint Mark. Of those who used material aids with special care, very few achieved success, but very many were upset and damaged. 2. 296–297 They told about Abba John: when he returned from the harvest, he first went to the elders for prayer and edification; then he practiced psalmody; after that he moved on to prayer. He found such gradualism in his studies necessary to bring the mind to the state in which it was before leaving the cell. Anyone who has mental prayer should gradually return to it after he happens to be entertained. 7.263 Let us take advantage of God's indescribable mercy towards us! Let us accept it with the greatest reverence, with the greatest gratitude! Let us cultivate it for our salvation with the greatest zeal, with the greatest care! Grace is given by God in all its abundance, but to accept it or reject it, to accept it with all your soul or with double-mindedness is left to the discretion of each person. "Child! From your youth choose punishment, and even to your gray hairs you will gain wisdom. As if you sowed and sowed, approach it, and wait for its good fruits: you will labor little in its work, and soon you will eat its fruits” (Sir. 6:18-20). “In this morning your seed will be, and in the evening let not your hand leave you” (Eccl. 11:6). “Confess the Lord and call on His name. Seek the Lord and be strong: seek His face and take it away” (Ps. 104:1,4). With these words, Holy Scripture teaches us that the feat of serving God, the feat of prayer, must be performed with all our hearts, constantly and continuously. External and internal sorrows, which must certainly be encountered in the field of this feat, must be overcome with faith, courage, humility, patience and long-suffering, healing deviations and distractions with repentance. Both abandonment of the prayer feat and gaps in it are extremely dangerous. It is better not to begin this feat than, having started, to leave it. The soul of an ascetic who abandoned the exercise he had undertaken in the Jesus Prayer can be likened to land that was cultivated and fertilized, but subsequently abandoned; On such land, weeds grow with extraordinary force, take deep roots, and acquire a special strength. In a soul that has renounced the blissful union with prayer, abandoned prayer and abandoned by prayer, passions invade in a stormy stream and flood it. Passions acquire special power over such a soul, special hardness and strength, and are imprinted with bitterness and deadness of the heart, with unbelief. Demons, expelled by prayer, enraged by the previous expulsion, return to the soul; they return with greater fury and in greater numbers. The last to a person is worse than the first (Matthew 12:45) - according to the definition of the Gospel, the state of one who has been subjected to the dominion of passions and demons after being delivered from them through true prayer is incomparably more miserable than the state of one who did not attempt to throw off the yoke of sin, who did not take the sword of prayer out of its sheath. The harm from intervals or from periodic abandonment of the prayer feat is similar to the harm that comes from complete abandonment; The longer the interval, the more significant this harm is. During the sleep of the ascetics, that is, during their neglect of prayer, an enemy comes, invisible to the eyes of the senses, unnoticed by the ascetics who have allowed themselves to be carried away and distracted, and sows tares among the wheat (Matthew 13:25). The sower of tares is very experienced, cunning, full of malice; It is easy for him to sow the most malignant weeds, insignificant in appearance and in its beginning, but subsequently enveloping and entangling the whole soul with numerous sprouts. “Whoever is not with Me,” said the Savior, “is on Me, and whoever does not gather with Me, scatters it away (Luke 11:23). Prayer does not entrust itself to double-minded, fickle workers. 1. 293–295 The doctrine of the Divine power of the name of Jesus has the full dignity of the main dogma and belongs to the all-holy number and composition of these dogmas. Ignorant, blasphemous reasoning against the Jesus Prayer has all the character of heretical reasoning. 1.220 The basis for practicing the Jesus Prayer is prudent and careful behavior. Firstly, you must eliminate from yourself effeminacy and carnal pleasures, in all forms. One must be content with food and sleep that is always moderate, commensurate with one’s strength and health, so that food and sleep provide the body with due reinforcement, without producing indecent movements, which are from excess, without producing exhaustion, which is from deficiency. Clothing, housing and all material accessories in general should be modest, in imitation of Christ, in imitation of His apostles, in following their spirit, in communion with their spirit. The holy apostles and their true disciples did not make any sacrifices to vanity and vanity, according to the customs of the world, and did not enter into any communication with the spirit of the world. The correct, grace-filled action of the Jesus Prayer can only vegetate from the spirit of Christ: it vegetates and grows exclusively on this soil alone. Sight, hearing and other senses must be strictly guarded so that through them, like through a gate, adversaries do not break into the soul. The mouth and tongue must be curbed, as if shackled in silence: idle talk, verbosity, especially ridicule, gossip and slander are the worst enemies of prayer. One must refuse to accept the brethren into one’s cell, to go to their cell; one must remain patiently in one’s cell, as in a tomb, with one’s dead body—with one’s soul, tormented, killed by sin—and beg the Lord Jesus for mercy. From the grave-cell, prayer ascends to heaven; in that grave into which the body is hidden after death, and in the hellish grave into which the soul of a sinner is cast, there is no longer room for prayer. 1. 209–210 As much as fasting is needed for someone who wants to engage in and succeed in mental prayer, so much does he need silence or extreme solitude - generally possible withdrawal from wandering. 2.206 Accustom yourself to silence so that you can remain silent among people. Speak as little as possible, and then only when absolutely necessary. It is hard for someone accustomed to absent-mindedness to endure the suffering of silence, but anyone who wants to be saved and succeed in spiritual life must certainly submit himself to this suffering and accustom himself to solitude and silence. After short-term labor, silence and solitude will become desirable because of the fruits that the soul of a prudent silent person will not be slow to taste. 2.206 “If doors are often opened at rest, then warmth conveniently comes out of it. So the soul, when it speaks a lot, even if what is said is good, loses its warmth through the doors of the word. Why is silence in the mind good and useful when we engage in wise and soul-saving thoughts” (saying of the elders). Obviously, what is proposed here is mental activity, in which the main place is occupied by mental prayer and crying of the heart at the memory of death, the judgment of God, the eternal torment of hell and the eternal bliss of paradise. 7.376 The brother asked Abba Pimen for guidance. The elder told him: “As long as the cauldron is heated by the fire burning under it, neither a fly nor any other insect dares to touch it. When the cauldron cools down, then all the reptiles freely sit on it. A similar thing happens with a monk: as long as the monk remains in spiritual work, the enemy does not find the opportunity to defeat him.” This is the property of mental prayer: while it fills a person, it blocks the entry into him of all sinful thoughts. When the mind of the worker falls into relaxation and despondency, then sinful thoughts conveniently enter, conquer and carry away the ascetic. For this reason, it is especially important for the ascetic of mental prayer to constantly keep the mind in vivacity, in sobriety, not allowing oneself anything that leads the mind to relaxation: no verbosity, no overthinking, no entertainment and distraction, no excess in food, drink and sleep, no attention to the affairs of people and this world. 7.294 Pimen the Great spent his residence in the environment of a small hostel consisting of his brothers. Being constantly with them, he retired to himself and achieved perfection through constant and intense sobriety, eliminating all obstacles that could interfere with his work. The holy apostle teaches a very sure means of preserving heart peace and silence and mental prayer inseparable from them: bear one another’s burdens, he says, and thus fulfill the law of Christ (Gal. 6:2). People most rush into a state that is contrary to this: they seek from their neighbors unforgivingness and perfection in virtue, which are unusual and impossible for humans, moreover, having the most insufficient, even perverse, concept of virtue. Such a reckless striving does not allow the heart to plunge into self-contemplation and true humility, from which mental prayer and heartfelt silence flow; such a reckless striving keeps the heart in constant indignation and brings to the mind many thoughts and dreams that are alien to meaning. Bear each other's burdens, and thus fulfill the law of Christ. 7.296 (See Jesus Prayer, Name of God, Preparation). The gracious power of the Jesus Prayer lies in the very Divine name of the God-man, our Lord, Jesus Christ. Although numerous testimonies of the Holy Scripture proclaim to us the greatness of the name of God, the holy Apostle Peter explained with particular certainty the meaning of this name before the Jewish Sanhedrin, when the Sanhedrin interrogated the Apostle by what power or by what name was they granted healing to a lame man from birth? Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said: “The princes of mankind and the elders of Israel, although we are today tormented because of the good deeds of man, we are weak, because of this we were saved; Be wise to all of you and to all the people of Israel, for in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, for this reason this one stands before you healthy. This is the stone rooted from you who built it, which was at the head of the corner, and there is no other salvation: for there is no other name under heaven given among men, in which it is fitting for us to be saved” (Acts 4:8-12). This testimony is the testimony of the Holy Spirit: the lips, tongue, and voice of the apostle were only instruments of the Spirit. And another organ of the Holy Spirit, the apostle of tongues, issues a similar proclamation. “Whoever,” he says, “calls on the Name of the Lord will be saved” (Rom. 10:13). “Christ Jesus humbled Himself, becoming obedient even to the point of death, death on the cross. Therefore God also highly exalted Him, and gave Him a name that is above every name, that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, those in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (Phil. 2:9-10). David, who foresaw the distant future, sang, the forefather of Jesus according to the flesh, sang the greatness of the name of Jesus, picturesquely depicted the action of this name, the struggle through it with the beginnings of sin, its power in the liberation of those praying to it from the captivity of passions and demons, the gracious triumph of those who won the victory in the name of Jesus. Let's listen, let's listen to the God-inspired David! Describing with extraordinary clarity the establishment of the spiritual kingdom of Christ on earth, which is to take place in a thousand years, the king-prophet says that the dominion of the God-man will extend from sea to sea, and from rivers to the end of the universe. The kings of the earth will worship Him, all the nations will serve Him. Honor His name before them, and they will pray for Him and bless Him all day long. Blessed shall His name be forever; His name abides before the sun: and in Him all the tribes of the earth will be blessed, if the nations bless Him. Blessed is the name of His glory forever and ever: and the whole earth will be filled with His glory (Ps. 71. 8, 11, 14, 15, 17, 19). The great ministry of prayer, which brings people into close communion with God, has appeared on earth on a vast scale since the time of the reconciliation of people with God through the mediation of the God-man. This service embraced the universe. It settled in cities and villages; it flourished in wild, hitherto uninhabited deserts; it shone in dark dens, in gorges, in abysses and on mountain tops, in the depths of dense forests. The name of the God-man received the most important significance in the service of prayer, being the name of the Savior of men, the Creator of men and Angels, being the name of God incarnate, the Conqueror of indignant slaves and creatures - demons. Before Him - our Lord and Redeemer - the Ethiopians, demons, and His enemies, fallen spirits, will fall down and lick the dust (Ps. 71:9). “O Lord, our Lord, for Your name is wonderful throughout all the earth, for Your splendor is exalted above the heavens. From the mouth of a child and those who piss, you have made praise, O Thy enemy, for the sake of destroying the enemy and the local” (Ps. 8: 2-3). Exactly! The greatness of the name of Jesus is beyond the comprehension of rational creatures of earth and heaven; its comprehension is incomprehensibly accepted by infantile simplicity and faith. With the same disinterested mood one should begin to pray in the name of Jesus and remain in this prayer; constancy and thoroughness in prayer should be similar to the incessant yearning of a baby for its mother's nipples... Saint David enumerates the wonderful actions of the terrible and holy name (Ps. 110:9) of Jesus. It acts like accepted medicine, the mode of action of which is unknown to the patient and incomprehensible to him, and the effect itself is obvious by the healing produced. For the sake of the name of Jesus, used by the one praying, help comes to him from God and he is granted remission of sins; for this reason, Saint David, presenting to the view of God the devastation and disastrous state of the soul of every person caused by a sinful life, begging on behalf of all people for mercy, says: “Help us, O God, our Savior, for the glory of Thy name, O Lord, deliver us, and cleanse our sins for Thy name’s sake” (Ps. 78:9). ...By the power of the name of Jesus, the mind is freed from hesitation, the will is strengthened, and correctness is brought to jealousy and other spiritual properties; thoughts and feelings pleasing to God, thoughts and feelings belonging to the immaculate human nature - only such thoughts and feelings are allowed to reside in the soul; there is no place in it for thoughts and feelings that are alien, for God will save Zion, and the cities of Judea will be built: and they will dwell there, and inherit, and; and the seed of Thy servants will restrain him, and those who love Thy name will dwell in him (Ps. 68:36-37). In the name of the Lord Jesus, revival is given to the soul killed by sin. The Lord Jesus Christ is life (John 11:25), and His name is living: it gives life to those who cry to him to the Source of life, the Lord Jesus Christ. “For Thy name's sake, O Lord, live me by Thy righteousness” (Ps. 142:11); We will not depart from You: quicken us, and we will call on Your name (Ps. 79:19). 2. 239–246 When the seventy lesser apostles, sent by the Lord to preach, returned to Him after completing the service entrusted to them, they joyfully announced to the Lord: “Lord, even demons obey us in Your name” (Luke 10:17). Oh, how just this joy was! How thorough she was! For more than five thousand years the devil ruled over people, trapping them into slavery to himself and into kinship with himself through sin, and now he hears the name of Jesus - and obeys the people who hitherto obeyed him, is bound by those bound by him, and trampled upon by those trampled upon. In response to the disciples, who rejoiced at the overthrow of the power of demons over men and the acquisition of the power of men over demons, the Lord said: “Behold, I give you power to tread on the serpent and on the scorpion, and on all the power of the enemy: and nothing will harm you” (Luke 10:19). Power is given, but the freedom is given to use the power and trample on snakes and scorpions, or neglect the gift and arbitrarily submit to them. By the name of snakes, the holy fathers mean undertakings that are clearly sinful, and by the name of scorpios, they mean undertakings covered with the appearance of purity and even goodness. The power given by the Lord to His seventy disciples is given to all Christians (Mark 16:17). Use it, Christian! In the name of Jesus cut off the heads, that is, the initial manifestations of sin in thoughts, dreams and sensations; destroy the dominion of the devil over you; destroy all his influence on you; gain spiritual freedom. The basis for your feat is the grace of holy Baptism; the weapon is prayer in the name of Jesus. The Lord, having given His disciples the power to trample on snakes and scorpions, added: “Besides, do not rejoice in this, for souls obey you: rejoice, for your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). “Rejoice not so much,” says Blessed Theophylact, “that the demons obey you, but rather that your names are written in heaven: not in ink, but by Divine grace and God’s memory,” the Jesus Prayer. This is the property of the Jesus Prayer: it raises its worker from earth to heaven and includes him among the inhabitants of heaven. Staying with your mind and heart in heaven and in God is the main fruit, this is the goal of prayer; repelling and trampling on enemies who oppose the achievement of the goal is a secondary matter: it should not attract all attention to itself, so that through the consciousness and contemplation of victory it does not allow arrogance and conceit to enter into oneself, and does not suffer a terrible defeat over the victory itself... The Jesus Prayer was in universal use among Christians of the first centuries... It could not have been otherwise. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the most amazing signs were performed in front of the entire Christian society, which aroused faith in the unlimited power of the name of Jesus throughout the entire Christian society. Those who succeeded understood this power from their success. About this power, abundantly developing in the saints of God, the Venerable Barsanuphius the Great expresses himself as follows: “I know one servant of God in our race, at the present time and in this blessed place, who can raise the dead in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and cast out demons, and heal incurable diseases, and perform other miracles, no less apostolic, as the One who gave him the gift testifies, or, more precisely, talents. And what does this mean in comparison with what can be done about the name of Jesus! Having miracles before their eyes, the Lord’s testament in their memory, and fiery love for the Lord in their hearts, the faithful of the primal Church constantly, carefully, with the fiery zeal of the cherubim and seraphim, practiced prayer in the name of Jesus. This is the property of love! She constantly remembers her beloved; she constantly delights in the name of her beloved; she keeps it in her heart, in her mind and on her lips. The name of the Lord is more than any name: it is a source of pleasure, a source of joy, a source of life; it is Spirit; it gives life, changes, melts, idolizes. For the illiterate, it completely satisfactorily replaces prayers and psalmody; Those who are literate, having succeeded in the Jesus Prayer, abandon the variety of psalmody and begin to primarily practice the Jesus Prayer, for the sake of the abundant strength and nutrition inherent in it. All this is clear from the writings and decrees of the holy fathers. The Holy Eastern Orthodox Church offers all illiterate people, instead of all prayers, the Jesus Prayer, offering it not as an innovation, but as a well-known exercise. This decree,” together with other traditions of the Eastern Church, passed from Greece to Russia, and many of the common people, illiterate and even illiterate, were imbued with the power of the Jesus Prayer for salvation and eternal life, many achieved great spiritual success. 2. 250–253 You write that when you started practicing the Jesus Prayer, you struggled with despondency and its products: despair, bewilderment, sleep, etc. This is a good sign: “The benefits of prayer,” said St. John Climacus, “can be seen from the demonic obstacles that arise during the meeting,” i.e. prayerful. 6.205–206 The Venerable Nile of Sora, referring to the Venerable Nile of Sinai, says that “mental prayer is a paradise that must not only be cultivated, but also preserved. Having prayed as you should, wait as you should not.” In particular, the enemy, after prayer, fights with two passions: anger, which is directly opposed to prayer, and fornication, which is its carnal and satanic likeness in action, therefore destroying its action. The apostle said: if you cleave to the Lord, there will be one spirit with the Lord, but if you cleave to a harlot, even if only in thoughts, there will be one flesh with the harlot. May God grant you to overcome battles with patience and to go through prayer, if possible, without any material benefits. 6.833 Place of heart, literature The Holy Fathers, when teaching prayer of the heart, did not give precise instructions in which part of the heart it should be performed, probably for the reason that in those days there was no need for this instruction. Saint Nicephorus says, as if on a well-known subject, that literature is in the hearts and that when literature is aroused to participate in prayer, then after it the heart will also be aroused to such participation. It is difficult for those who know anything to foresee with all detail and thoroughness and prevent with a solution all the questions that may arise from complete ignorance: in what ignorance sees darkness, there is nothing unclear for knowledge. In subsequent times, the vague indication in the writings of the fathers on the heart was the cause of important bewilderment and the erroneous practice of prayer by those who, without a mentor, without studying the writings of the fathers with due care, based on superficial concepts hastily captured by reading, decided to engage in artistic heart prayer, placing all their hope in material aids to it. A definite explanation of this subject thus became a necessity. The human heart has the appearance of an oblong sac, expanding upward and narrowing downwards. Its upper end, located opposite the left nipple of the chest, is attached, and its lower part, descending to the end of the ribs, is free; when it begins to oscillate, this oscillation is called a heartbeat. Many, having no idea about the structure of the heart, recognize their heart where they feel its beating. When they begin the exercise of heartfelt prayer on their own, they direct their breath, introducing it into the heart, to this part of the heart, bringing it into carnal heat, and the heartbeat greatly intensifies; they call to themselves and impose on themselves an incorrect state and charm. Schemamonk Vasily, referring to Saint Theophylact and other fathers, argues that the three powers of the soul - verbal, the power of jealousy and the power of desire - are located like this: in the chest and in the upper part of the heart there is verbal power, or the spirit of man; in the middle - the power of jealousy; at the bottom is the power of desire, or natural lust. He who tries to set in motion and warm up the lower part of the heart sets in motion the force of lust, which, by the proximity of the genital parts to it and by its nature, sets these parts in motion. The ignorant use of material benefits will result in a strong incitement of carnal lust. What a strange phenomenon: apparently an ascetic is engaged in prayer, and the activity gives rise to lust, which should be mortified by the activity - and ignorance, which has abused material benefits, attributes to the Jesus Prayer what should be attributed to the abuse. Heartfelt prayer comes from the union of mind and spirit, separated by the fall, united by the grace of redemption. In the human spirit, feelings of conscience, humility, meekness, love for God and neighbor and other similar properties are concentrated; When praying, it is necessary that the action of these properties be combined with the action of the mind. All the attention of the person doing the prayer should be directed to this. The union is accomplished by the finger of God, which alone can heal the wound of the fall; the doer of prayer proves the sincerity of his will to receive healing by constantly remaining in prayer, confining his mind in the words of prayer, by external and internal activity according to the Commandments of the Gospel, making the spirit capable of uniting with the praying mind. 2. 297–299 What does the place of the heart mean? It is the verbal power or spirit of man present in the upper part of the heart, opposite the left nipple, just as the mind is present in the brain. When praying, it is necessary for the spirit to unite with the mind and say a prayer together with it, and the mind acts in words spoken with one thought or with the participation of the voice, and the spirit acts with a feeling of tenderness or crying. Union is granted in due time by Divine grace, and for the beginner it is enough if the spirit sympathizes and cooperates with the mind. If you maintain attention with your mind, your spirit will certainly feel tenderness. The spirit is usually called “heart,” just as the word “head” is used instead of the word “mind.” 1. 264–265 (See Jesus Prayer Heat, Union, Right Image). Others, who consider themselves gifted with spiritual reasoning and are revered by many as such, fear this prayer as if it were some kind of infection, citing “charm” as the reason - as if an indispensable companion to the exercise of the Jesus Prayer - they themselves move away from it and teach others to move away. The inventor of such a teaching, in my opinion, is the devil, who hates the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ, as it crushes all his power: he trembles at this omnipotent Name and therefore slandered it before many Christians, so that they would reject the fiery weapon, terrible for the enemy, - saving for themselves. Others, while practicing the Jesus Prayer, want to immediately feel its spiritual effect, want to enjoy it, not understanding that the pleasure that God alone gives must be preceded by true repentance. One must cry long and bitterly before a spiritual action appears in the soul, which is grace, which, I repeat, is given by the One God at a time known to Him. We must first prove our loyalty to God by constancy and patience in the feat of prayer, discretion and cutting off all passions in the most petty actions and their branches. The perfect way to practice the Jesus Prayer is to say it quietly with your lips or mind, always with attention and with a feeling of repentance. The devil does not tolerate the fragrance of repentance; from the soul that emits this fragrance from itself, it runs away with its charms. The Jesus Prayer, practiced in this way, is an excellent weapon against all passions, an excellent occupation for the mind during handicrafts, travel, and in other cases when it is impossible to engage in reading and psalmody. Such an exercise with the Jesus Prayer befits all Christians in general, both those living in monasteries and those living in the middle of the world. The desire to discover the spiritual action of the heart is most, almost exclusively, befitting of monks, and even then those who have known in detail the struggle with passions, with the conveniences provided by the place and other circumstances. 6.248–249 “Holy and heavenly fire,” says Saint John Climacus, “scorches some due to their lack of purity; others, on the contrary, enlightens as those who have achieved perfection. The same fire is called both a consuming fire and an enlightening light. For this reason, some come from their prayer, as if from a hot bath, feeling some relief from filth and materiality; others come out enlightened by the light and dressed in a pure robe of humility and joy. Those who, after their prayer, do not feel either of these two actions, still pray physically, and not spiritually.” Spiritual prayer is called here prayer moved by Divine grace, and bodily prayer is prayer performed by a person with his own effort, without the obvious assistance of grace. A second kind of prayer is necessary, as the same John Climacus asserts, so that grace-filled prayer may be granted in due time. How does the prayer of grace mark its coming? She marks her coming with a cry above natural, and man enters the gates of the sanctuary of God, his heart, in an ineffable confession. 2.276–276 “Just as it is impossible to see one’s face in disturbed water, so it is impossible for the soul, unless it is cleansed of alien thoughts, to achieve spiritual prayer” (saying of the elders). Spiritual prayer is called grace-filled prayer when the mind, because of its purity and complete aspiration towards God; will be worthy to be united with the Holy Spirit and come under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. 7.366 Many great fathers throughout their lives practiced oral and public prayer and, at the same time, abounded in the gifts of the Spirit. The reason for their success was that their mind, heart, whole soul and whole body were connected to their voice and lips; they said the prayer with all their souls, with all their strength, with all their existence, with all their humanity. So the Monk Simeon of Divnogorsk read the entire Psalter throughout the night. Saint Isaac of Syria mentions a certain blessed elder who was engaged in the prayerful reading of psalms, who was allowed to feel the reading only for the duration of the “glory” alone, after which Divine consolation took possession of him with such force that he remained for whole days in a sacred frenzy, not feeling either time or himself. During the reading of the akathist, St. Sergius of Radonezh was visited by the Mother of God, accompanied by the apostles Peter and John. They tell about the Monk Hilarion of Suzdal: when he read an akathist in church, the words flew out of his mouth, as if on fire, with inexplicable power and effect on those present. The oral prayer of the saints was animated by attention and Divine grace, which united the forces of man divided by sin into one, which is why it breathed such supernatural power and made such a wonderful impression on the listeners. The saints sang to God in heartfelt confession, they sang and confessed to God unwaveringly (morning prayers), i.e. without distraction; they sang to God intelligently (Ps. 46:8). 2. 186–187 Saint Sinait says: “Some, teaching the doctrine of prayer, propose to do it with the mouth, while others use only the mind - I propose both. Sometimes the mind, despondent, is exhausted from praying, and sometimes the lips; and therefore one must pray with both: with the lips and with the mind. However, one must cry silently and undisturbed, so that the voice does not confuse the feelings and attention of the mind and does not interfere with prayer. The mind, having become accustomed to doing it, will succeed and receive from the Spirit the strength to pray strongly and in all ways. Then he is not forced to pray with his lips and will not be able to, being completely satisfied with mental prayer.” 2.281 Studying the Gospels and Psalms by heart unusually develops oral, attentive prayer. 1.225 Experience will teach anyone who practices prayer that saying the Jesus Prayer, and all prayers in general, aloud, greatly helps to keep the mind from being plundered by entertainment. In the event of an intensified enemy attack, when one feels a weakening of the will and a clouding of the mind, vocal prayer is necessary. Attentive vocal prayer is both mental and heartfelt. 2.271 (See Vowel Prayer, Jesus Prayer). The most sublime mental activity is extraordinarily simple; needs, for acceptance, infantile simplicity and faith; but we have become so complex that this simplicity is both unapproachable and incomprehensible to us. We want to be smart, we want to enliven our self, we do not tolerate self-sacrifice, we do not want to act by faith. For this reason, we need a mentor who would lead us out of our complexity, out of our cunning, out of our tricks, out of our vanity and conceit - into the breadth and simplicity of faith. For this reason, it happens that in the field of intelligent doing, a baby achieves extraordinary success, but a sage goes astray and falls into the dark abyss of delusion. 2.256 An insufficient mentor is dangerous when teaching a novice good morals and the first rules of monastic life; the more dangerous it is for those who dare to hear the teaching about the great sacrament of mental prayer, leading a Christian to a secret, at the same time essential and completely tangible union with God. 6.87 Holy peace is the stillness of the mind, born from the fulfillment of the Gospel Commandments, mentioned by Saint Isaac of Syria in the 55th Word, which was felt by Saint Gregory the Theologian and Saint Basil the Great and, having felt it, withdrew into the desert. There, having occupied themselves with their inner man and finally formed him with the Gospel, they became spectators of the mysterious visions of the Spirit. It is obvious that the stillness of the mind, or non-vapority (the destruction of absent-mindedness), is acquired by the mind upon its connection with the soul. Without this, he cannot stop himself from floating and wandering everywhere. When the mind, through the action of Divine grace, unites with the heart, then it receives the prayer power about which St. Gregory of Sinai speaks: “If Moses had not received the rod of power from God, then God would not have struck Pharaoh and Egypt with it: so the mind, if it does not have prayer power in its hand, will not be able to crush sin and opposing forces.” 2. 224–225 Consoling and instructing communal monks engaged in monastic obediences, encouraging them to be diligent and thorough in their prayerful feat, Climacus says: “From monks engaged in obediences, God does not require prayer that is completely pure from entertainment. Do not be discouraged, being robbed by absent-mindedness! Be grateful and constantly force your mind to return to yourself. Perfect freedom from distraction is the property of the Angels.” Enslaved to passions! Let us pray to the Lord constantly, relentlessly, because all the dispassionate have moved through such prayer to a state of dispassion from a passionate state. If you relentlessly train your mind so that it never wanders away from the words of prayer, then it will be with you during your meal. If you allow him to wander around unchecked, then he will never be able to stay with you. The great worker of great and perfect prayer said: “I would like to speak five words with my mind rather than ten thousand words with my tongue” (1 Cor. 14:19). Such prayer - the grace-filled prayer of the mind in the heart, alien to soaring - is not characteristic of infants, and therefore we, like infants, caring about the quality of prayer - about attention through enclosing the mind in words - will pray a lot. Quantity causes quality. The Lord gives pure prayer to those who pray lazily, a lot and constantly with their prayer, which is defiled by entertainment. 1. 259–260 A feat of prayer... is a feat. We have to work hard. “Whoever patiently prays his defiled prayer,” said St. John Climacus, - and does not leave her, having become bored with her filth, God gives him true prayer in due time.” 6.774 Continuous prayer is commanded by God Himself. The Savior of the world said: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; press, and it will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7). “Should God not take vengeance on His chosen ones, who cry out to Him day and night, and be patient for them? I tell you that he will take their vengeance quickly” (Luke 18:7-8). The Apostle, repeating the teaching of the Lord, says: “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). “I want men to say prayers in every place, lifting up their holy hands, without anger or reflection” (1 Tim. 2:8). By the name of husbands the apostle means Christians who have achieved Christian perfection. Only perfect Christians tend to pray without anger and reflection, that is, in deep peace, in the purest love for one’s neighbor, without the slightest memory of malice towards one’s neighbor and condemnation of him, without being entertained by extraneous thoughts and dreams (without reflection). Such people can offer prayer to God in every place and at every time, lifting up and lifting up their reverend hands to Him: mind and heart, cleansed from passions, sanctified by the Spirit. Obviously, unceasing prayer cannot be the property of a novice monk; but in order to become capable of unceasing prayer in due time, he must accustom himself to frequent prayer. Frequent prayer, in due time, will automatically turn into unceasing prayer. Just as during continuous prayer it is most convenient to perform the Jesus Prayer, the novice should turn to the Jesus Prayer as often as possible. Did you have the shortest free time? Don't kill him in idleness! Don’t kill it by using it for some unrealizable and empty dream, for some vain, insignificant activity! Use it to practice the Jesus Prayer. If, due to weakness or, more correctly, due to the nature of fallen nature, you happen to get carried away by seductive dreams and thoughts - do not be discouraged, do not relax. Having repented before God of your frivolity and realized before Him your fallen nature and your passion, fall mentally before His mercy and take precautions against seductive dreams and seductive thoughts. He who does not get used to frequent prayer will never receive unceasing prayer. Continuous prayer is a gift from God, given by God to His servant and servant who has been tested in fidelity. “It is impossible to approach God otherwise than by unceasing prayer” (St. Isaac of Syria). Continuous prayer is a sign of God’s mercy towards man, it is a sign that all the powers of the soul have rushed towards God. Have mercy on me, Lord, as I will cry to You all day long. Make glad the soul of Your servant, for I have taken my soul to You (Ps. 85:3-4). 5. 112–113 (See Jesus Prayer, Name, Thoughts). Upon tonsure as a monk, when the newly tonsured person is given a rosary, called the “spiritual sword,” he is entrusted with unceasing, nightly prayer of the Jesus Prayer. Therefore, practicing the Jesus Prayer is the vow of a monk. Fulfilling a vow is an obligation that cannot be renounced. 1.203 The vow is pronounced by everyone. Neither the multitude of vow-breakers nor the custom of breaking gives legitimacy to the breaking. The flock to which the Heavenly Father has favored the Kingdom is not enough. A narrow path always has few travelers, but a wide path has many. In recent times, almost everyone will abandon this path, almost everyone will take the broad one. It does not follow from this that the wide will lose its ability to lead to destruction, that the narrow will become superfluous, unnecessary for salvation. Anyone who wants to be saved must certainly adhere to the narrow path bequeathed by the Savior. 1. 208–209 The brother asked Abba Pimen: “What should I think, silent in my cell?” The elder answered: “I am like a man mired in a swamp up to his neck, with a burden on his neck - and I cry out to God: have mercy on me.” This saying depicts the inner work of Pimen the Great. All of it came together in a prayerful cry. Have mercy on me! - this is an expression of crying that has penetrated into the soul. Crying, when it reaches its development, cannot be clothed in many thoughts and verbosity: it is content to express an immense spiritual feeling with the shortest prayer. 7.302 Abba Isaac said: One day I was sitting with Abba Pimen and saw that he had gone into a frenzy. I bowed to him to the ground, asking him to tell me where he was? Forced to declare his secret, he said: “My mind was at the Cross of the Savior in those minutes when Our Lady Mary stood at the Cross and wept; I would like to cry like this forever.” The Monk Pimen loved crying! First, crying cleanses from sins, then it begins to delight the purified one from time to time into spiritual visions (Ezek. 40:4-5), changing the mind, changing the feelings of the soul and body with a grace-filled change, inexplicable in the environment of carnal wisdom, exceeding all states characteristic of a fallen nature. The tears of a penitent, bringing repentance from the consciousness of sins, are associated with bitterness of the heart, with a painful effect on the body; The tears of someone who is purified and brings repentance from the abundance of humility are sweet for the soul and provide nourishment to the body itself. Saint Isaac of Syria calls the thoughts and sensations from which these tears flow and with which they are accompanied a land of joy. They change the very outer appearance of the human face. The ascetic enters into tears of consolation, tears - witnesses of God's mercy - bitter tears of repentance for sins, tears of pain over his sinfulness, about his fall, about enslavement to rejected spirits, about communication with them, about alienation from God, about the assimilation of enmity towards God. 7. 302–303 Let us not seek pleasure, visions; we are sinners, unworthy of spiritual pleasures and visions, incapable of them due to our old age. Through attentive prayer, let us seek to turn the mind’s gaze to ourselves in order to discover our sinfulness within ourselves. When we open it, we will stand mentally before our Lord Jesus Christ in the face of the lepers, the blind, the deaf, the lame, the paralytic, the demoniac; Let us begin before Him from the poverty of our spirit, from a heart crushed by illness over our sinfulness, a lamentable cry of prayer. Let this cry be unlimited in abundance! Let all verbosity and all variety of words prove incapable of expressing it. According to its abundance and inexpressibility, let it be clothed incessantly, let it be clothed in a prayer of few words, but of vast meaning: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. 2.313 (See Lamentation, Prayer of Jesus' Sickness). The initial fruits of prayer are attention and tenderness. These fruits appear above all others from any correctly performed prayer, especially from the Jesus Prayer, the exercise of which is higher than psalmody and other prayers. From attention comes tenderness, and from tenderness attention deepens. They intensify, giving birth to each other; they give her purity, eliminating distraction and daydreaming. Both true prayer and attention and tenderness are gifts of God. Just as we prove our desire to acquire prayer by forcing ourselves to do it, so we prove our desire to acquire attention and tenderness by forcing ourselves to do it. Further, the fruit of prayer is a gradually expanding vision of one’s sins and one’s sinfulness, which is why tenderness intensifies and turns into crying. Crying is the name for abundant tenderness, combined with the pain of a contrite and humble heart, acting from the depths of the heart and enveloping the soul. Then there are sensations of the presence of God, a living memory of death, fear of judgment and condemnation. All these fruits of prayer are accompanied by crying and, in due time, are overshadowed by a subtle, holy, spiritual feeling of the fear of God. The fear of God cannot be compared to any feeling of a carnal, even spiritual, person. The fear of God is a completely new feeling. The fear of God is the action of the Holy Spirit. From the suggestion of this wonderful action, passions begin to melt away - the mind and heart begin to be attracted to the continuous exercise of prayer. With some success comes a feeling of silence, humility, love for God and neighbors - without distinguishing good from evil, patience with sorrows - as God's permission and healing, which our sinfulness necessarily needs. Love for God and neighbors, which gradually appears out of the fear of God, is completely spiritual, inexplicably holy, subtle, humble, distinguished by an infinite difference from human love in its ordinary state, cannot be compared with any love moving in fallen nature, no matter how correct and sacred this natural love may be. The natural law, operating in time, is approved, but the eternal law, the spiritual law, is as much higher than it as the Holy Spirit of God is higher than the human spirit. 1. 290–291 (See Jesus Breath Prayer, Name of God). The brother asked Avva Arseny to give him instructions. The elder said: “Strive with all your might, so that by your inner work according to God, everything external will be overcome.” Inner activity is the same mental activity. It consists of attentive verbal and mental prayer, crying of the heart, remembrance of death, self-reproach, consciousness and confession of one’s sinfulness, and similar acts performed by the ascetic within the soul, within himself. 7.37 Abba Arseny said: “If we seek God, He will appear to us, and if we keep Him within ourselves, He will abide with us.” The saying comes from the most sublime monastic feat! It signifies that through true struggle one must attract the grace of God into oneself and, having received it, retain it within oneself through true struggle. Those who gave themselves up to laziness and carelessness after receiving grace lost it. 7. 37–38 (See Mental and physical feat). The benefits of the teaching or memory of God are innumerable: it is above words, above comprehension. And those who felt it are unable to fully explain it. Continuous prayer, as a commandment of God and a gift of God, is inexplicable by human reason and words. A short prayer gathers the mind, which, if not attached to teaching, said St. Isaac of Syria, then cannot stop floating and wandering everywhere. An ascetic can pray a short prayer in any place, at any time, during any activity, especially physical activity. Even when present at a church service, it is useful to engage in it not only when reading is not clearly intelligible, but also when reading clearly. It helps one to pay attention to reading, especially when it takes root in the soul and becomes as if natural to a person. Teaching in general, especially the Jesus Prayer, serves as an excellent weapon against sinful thoughts. The following saying of Saint John Climacus is repeated by many holy writers: “In the name of Jesus, defeat the opposing warriors: for neither in heaven nor on earth will you find a stronger weapon.” From unceasing prayer, the ascetic falls into spiritual poverty: learning to constantly ask for God's help, he gradually loses confidence in himself; if he does something successfully, he sees in it not his own success, but the mercy of God, for which he constantly begs God. Continuous prayer leads to the acquisition of faith, because the one who prays incessantly begins to gradually sense the presence of God. This feeling can gradually increase and intensify to the point that the eye of the mind will see God in His Providence more clearly than the sensory eye sees the material objects of the world: the heart will feel the presence of God. One who has seen God in this way and felt His presence cannot help but believe in Him through living faith, manifested by works. Continuous prayer destroys wickedness through hope in God, introduces it into holy simplicity, weaning the mind from various thoughts, from forming plans for oneself and others, always keeping it in the poverty and humility of the thoughts that make up its teaching. A person who prays incessantly gradually loses the habit of daydreaming, absent-mindedness, vain care and much care, and loses it all the more as the more holy and humble teaching deepens into his soul and takes root in it. Finally, he can come to the state of infancy commanded by the Gospel, become exuberant for the sake of Christ, that is, lose the false mind of the world and receive spiritual mind from God. Continuous prayer destroys curiosity, suspiciousness, and suspicion. From this, all people begin to seem kind, and from such a heartfelt commitment to people, love for them is born. He who prays unceasingly abides unceasingly in the Lord, knows the Lord as the Lord, acquires the fear of the Lord, through fear he enters into purity, and through purity into Divine love. The love of God fills its church with the gifts of the Spirit. 2.194–195 It is natural for many thoughts and dreams to arise from a fallen nature. It is even characteristic of prayer to reveal in fallen nature the hidden signs of its fall and the impressions produced by arbitrary sins (Callistus and Ignatius, Philokalia, volume 5, chapter 49). Also, the devil, knowing what a great good prayer is, tries during it to disturb the ascetic with sinful, vain thoughts and dreams in order to turn him away from prayer and make prayer fruitless. From the midst of sinful thoughts, dreams and sensations, from the midst of this enslavement of ours, let us cry out in prayer to the Lord all the more powerfully, like the Israelites who groaned from their deeds and cried out. And, as the Scripture says, their cry to God came forth from their works. And God heard their groaning (Ex. 2:23–24). The general rule in the fight against sinful endeavors is to reject sin at its very appearance, to kill the mysterious Babylonians while they are “babies” (Ps. 136:9). “He who fights intelligently,” said St. Nil Sorsky, - reflects the mother of the evil mental host, i.e. the first touch of evil thoughts on his mind. He who reflected this first touch at once reflected the entire host of evil thoughts that followed.” If sin, due to previous enslavement to it and skill in it, rapes us, then even then we should not be discouraged and fall into relaxation and despair; one must heal invisible victories with repentance and remain in feat with firmness, courage, and constancy. Sinful and vain thoughts, dreams and sensations can then undoubtedly harm us when we do not fight them, when we enjoy them and implant them in ourselves. From arbitrary association with sin and from arbitrary communication with rejected spirits, passions are born and strengthened, and charm can inconspicuously creep into the soul. When we resist sinful thoughts, dreams and sensations, then the very struggle with them will bring us success and enrich us with an active mind. A certain elder, who had succeeded in mental prayer, asked another monk who was also engaged in it: “Who taught you prayer?” The monk answered: “Demons.” The elder smiled and said: “What a temptation you uttered for those who do not know the matter! However, tell me, how did the demons teach you to pray?” The monk answered: “I was allowed a heavy and prolonged battle from fierce thoughts, dreams and sensations that gave me no rest day or night. I was exhausted and incredibly thin from the severity of this unnatural state. Oppressed by the onslaught of spirits, I resorted to the Jesus Prayer. The abuse reached such a degree that ghosts began to flicker in the air before my eyes sensually. I constantly felt that my throat was tied as if by a rope. Then, under the influence of the battle itself, I began to feel that prayer was intensifying and hope was being renewed in my heart. When the fighting, becoming lighter and lighter, finally subsided completely, prayer suddenly appeared in my heart by itself.” Let us pray constantly, patiently, persistently. God in due time will give grace-filled, pure prayer to those who pray without laziness and constantly with their impure prayer, who do not faint-heartedly abandon the feat of prayer when prayer does not yield to him for a long time. We see an example of the success of the persistent Jesus Prayer in the Gospel. When the Lord was leaving Jericho, accompanied by disciples and a crowd of people, then the blind Bartimaeus, who was sitting along the way and begging for alms, learning that the Lord was passing by, began to shout: “Son of David, Jesus, have mercy on me!” He was forbidden to shout, but he shouted all the more. The consequence of the incessant scream was the healing of the blind man by the Lord (Mark 10:46–52). So we too will cry out, despite the sinful thoughts, dreams and sensations that arise from our fallen nature and are brought by the devil to hinder our prayerful cry, and we will undoubtedly receive mercy. 1. 288–290 (See Thoughts, Jesus Prayer, Opposition). Nothing promotes prayer more than obedience, which mortifies us to the world and to ourselves. “The great benefit of prayer stems from obedience,” said St. Simeon the New Theologian. Those who are in obedience and engaged in monastic labors should in no way consider themselves free from the exercise of prayer: without this, the very labors and even obedience will be fruitless, moreover, they will bring the harmful fruit of vanity and other sins, which will certainly appear in that soul in which there will be a disastrous emptiness, in which the power and fragrance of prayer do not live. 2.158 Life in a monastery, especially a communal monastery, contributes to the beginner’s successful and lasting training in prayer, if only he lives correctly. Those who live correctly in the community are constantly presented with opportunities for obedience and humility, and these virtues, more than all others, prepare and attune the soul to true prayer. “Obedience comes humility,” said the fathers. 1.273 Every monk can easily test himself and soon see the effect of obedience and humility in response to prayer. Daily confession of your thoughts to your spiritual father or elder, renunciation of activities according to your own mind and will, will begin in a short time to act against absent-mindedness, destroy it, and keep the mind in the words of prayer. Humility before the elder and before all the brethren will immediately begin to bring tenderness to the heart and keep it tender. On the contrary, from acting according to your own will and according to your own mind, self-care will immediately appear; various considerations, assumptions, fears, dreams will appear to the mind, destroying attentive prayer. 1.277 (See Jesus Prayer, Nonparity). All Christians can and should practice the Jesus Prayer with the goal of repentance and calling on the Lord for help, practice with the fear of God and faith, with the greatest attention to the thoughts and words of the prayer, with contrition of the spirit: but not everyone is allowed to begin the sacred prayer with the mind in the cage of the heart. First of all, not only monks living in monasteries and engaged in obediences, but also lay people can and should engage in the Jesus Prayer. Such attentive prayer can be called both mental and heartfelt, as it is often performed with the mind alone, and in careful prayers, always with the participation of the heart, expressed by a feeling of crying and tears due to tenderness. The prayerful sacred act of the mind in the heart requires preliminary exercise in the first form of prayer, satisfactory success in this prayer. The grace of God itself, at a time known to it, according to its good pleasure, transfers the ascetic of prayer from the first image to the second. If it pleases God to leave the ascetic during the prayer of repentance, then let him remain with it, let him not seek a higher state, let him not seek it in the firm conviction that it is not acquired by human effort - it is bestowed by God. Staying in repentance is the guarantee of salvation. Let us be content with this state, let us not seek a higher state. Such a search is a sure sign of pride and conceit; such a search does not lead to success, but to stumbling and destruction. Saint Nile, based on the teaching of all the holy fathers, forbids prematurely striving to bring the mind down into the heart, to external and internal silence, to a feeling of sweetness and other high prayer states that open when the prayer of repentance is accepted by God and the enemies retreat from the soul. 2. 257–258. Saint Simeon the New Theologian, discussing the occasional failure of prayer asceticism and the tares of delusion that arise from it, attributes the cause of both failure and delusion to the failure to maintain correctness and gradualism in the asceticism. “Those who want to ascend,” says the Theologian, “to the heights of prayerful success, should not begin to go from top to bottom, but should ascend from bottom to top, first to the first step of the ladder, then to the second, then to the third, and finally to the fourth. In this way anyone can rise from the earth and ascend to heaven. Firstly, he must strive to tame and diminish passions. Secondly, he must practice psalmody, that is, oral prayer: when passions diminish, then prayer, naturally bringing joy and sweetness to the tongue, is considered pleasing to God. Thirdly, he must engage in mental prayer.” Here, of course, is prayer performed with the mind in the heart: the attentive prayer of beginners, with the sympathy of the heart, the fathers rarely deign to call mental prayer, classifying it more as oral. “Fourth, it must go back to the vision. The first is the property of the beginners; second - growing in prosperity; third – those who have achieved extreme prosperity; fourth - perfect." Further, the Theologian says that those who strive to diminish passions must learn to guard their hearts and to attentively pray the Jesus Prayer, which corresponds to their disposition. 1. 224–225 (See Jesus Prayer action, Heat). Prejudice against prayer Some, having seen the harmful consequences of a reckless feat and having only a superficial and confused understanding of the Jesus Prayer and the circumstances surrounding it, attributed these consequences not to ignorance and recklessness, but to the all-holy Jesus Prayer itself. Could anything be sadder, more miserable than this blasphemy, this beauty? 2.297 To succeed in prayer and to avoid delusion, self-sacrifice is necessary, which teaches one to seek only attention in prayer. Then the feat of prayer will become simpler and easier; Temptations, which, however, always accompany feat, will also be alleviated. If someone prematurely strives to reveal in himself the actions of heartfelt prayer, “to him,” says St. Nile of Sora, according to other saints. fathers, - heavy temptations from demons are allowed, beyond the strength of the forces.” Such aspiration is based on misunderstood exaltation and arrogance, which appears to be zeal. 6.770 What can you say about the actions you feel when you pray? They are decidedly bloody; You cannot help but admit that opinion also works. Your conscience, suspecting the justice and correctness of these actions, doubting them, can already serve as sufficient exposure. In addition, you are dark: Divine action would enlighten and satisfy you, satisfy you not with a feeling of sweetness, but with the knowledge of the Truth, from which a wonderful calmness and notification appears in the conscience. Warmth acts on the outside of your body; but you are completely unaware (this can only be comprehended by experience) how the soul moves into union with the mind, drags the body with it; how, in subtle cold and deep peace, a person, united with himself, above all struggle, alien to all sin, clothed in repentance, stands before the face of the Lord with pure prayer, embracing his entire being - and his very vigil. Then the blood ceases, the imaginary sweetness runs away, the person sees that he is a fallen being, is instructed in repentance, which should embrace him, make it possible for him to purify, through purification - union with God. Repentance should be the soul of prayer, without it it is dead, reeking of the stench of proud and seductive opinions! Repentance is the only door through which one can find saving pasture in the Lord. He who neglects repentance is alien to all good. 6.260 This prayer is the highest, most difficult and most sorrowful feat, requiring both complete selflessness and correctness of thoughts, otherwise the father of lies, taking the form of a bright Angel, approaches the heart with feigned delight, which, having felt and honoring it with the grace of Divine, a person is confirmed in his charm and begins to show its fruits with some signs of madness. For this, says St. John Climacus, God’s help is urgently needed, because it is incurable by humans. And truly, will he who thinks (if not says so) agree to accept spiritual advice from his neighbor that grace is his teacher? Is it natural for someone who thinks that he sees everything clearly and sensibly and in his soul to feel heavenly consolation to admit ignorance and delusion? 6. 475–476 At the present time there is a significant need for correct prayer, but they don’t even know it! They do not know that it should be an instrument and expression of repentance, they seek pleasure and delight, they flatter themselves, and with the instrument given for salvation they kill their souls. A correct understanding of prayer in our time is essential! She is the essential, the only leader in our time towards salvation. 6.766 (See Prelest, Jesus Prayer, Place of the heart). Holy, great, soul-saving feat of prayer. He is the main one and the first among the monastic exploits. All other feats are service feats to this feat; they are undertaken so that the feat of prayer is accomplished more successfully, so that the fruits of prayer are more abundant. “The head of all pious living,” said St. Macarius the Great, “and the top of all good deeds is constant stay in prayer.” What human position can be higher, can be compared with the position of a person admitted to a conversation by prayer with the King of kings, with the God of gods, with the Creator and sovereign Ruler of all visible and invisible, material and spiritual creatures? Due to the importance of practicing prayer, this exercise requires significant preliminary preparation. From those who wish to approach the King of Kings, He requires a way of thinking and a heart mood pleasing to Him, that way of thinking and that heart mood through which all the righteous of the Old and New Testaments came close to Him and pleased Him (Luke 1:17). Without this mindset and heart attitude, access is impossible, attempts and efforts to gain access are futile. If you want to approach God and become assimilated to Him through constant prayer, look around! Examine carefully your way of thinking: are you infected with any false teaching? Will you follow exactly and without exception the teachings of the Eastern Church, the only true, holy, apostolic one? If anyone disobeys the Church, the Lord said to His disciple, you will be like a pagan and a publican (Matthew 18:17), strangers to God, enemies of God. What meaning can the prayer of one who is in a state of enmity towards God, in a state of alienation from God, have? Consciousness of one’s sinfulness, consciousness of one’s weakness, one’s insignificance is a necessary condition for prayer to be graciously accepted and heard by God. All saints placed the basis of prayer on the consciousness and confession of their sinfulness and the sinfulness of all humanity. Man's holiness depends on the consciousness and confession of this sinfulness. The One who bestows holiness on people for their repentance said: “I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Matthew 9:13). Those who want to engage in the feat of prayer! Before you begin this feat, try to forgive everyone who upset, slandered, humiliated you, everyone who caused you any harm. The one before whom you intend to appear in prayer commands you: “If you bring the gift of prayer to the high altar of the King of kings, remember that one, as your brother has something for you: leave your gift before the altar, and go, first humble yourself with your brother, and then, when you come, bring your gift” (Matthew 5:23-24). Prepare yourself for prayer with impartiality and carelessness. From addictions - care. Held back by passions, distracted by worries, your thought will not be able to steadily strive towards God through prayer. “You cannot serve God and mammon: for where your treasure is, there your heart will be. Do not worry about the saying: “Whatever we drink, or whatever we drink, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:24, 21, 31, 33). Tear your mind and heart away from the earth and from everything earthly, and it will not be inconvenient for you to begin the invisible procession of prayer to heaven. If you suffer poverty, or sorrowful circumstances oppress you, or your enemy is plotting against you and persecuting you: leave it unattended - so that your attention during prayer is not disturbed by any entertainment, any embarrassment - leave unattended the memories and thoughts brought to you about your poverty, about your circumstances, about your enemy. The One who has complete power over you, your circumstances, and your enemy, says to His beloved: “Let not your heart be troubled: believe in God, and believe in Me” (John 14:1). “Whenever you pray,” the Lord commands, “go into your closet, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in secret” (Matthew 6:6). Whether you are in the company of people or are alone, try to constantly delve deeper into your inner spiritual cell, close the doors of your feelings and tongue, and pray secretly with your mind and heart. Having loved the feat of prayer, love solitude in a physical cell. Close its doors for yourself and for others. Patiently endure the boredom of the shutter: it will not be slow to be replaced by the most pleasant feeling. “Stay in your cell,” said the holy fathers, “it will teach you everything,” i.e. monastic life, which is all centered in prayer. Having loved the feat of prayer, love silence: it keeps the forces of the soul undivided, capable of constant prayer in the inner cell. The habit of silence makes it possible to silently pray from the heart even in the midst of noisy crowds. As a sacrifice to the love of prayer, sacrifice the pleasures of the senses and the pleasures of the mind, inquisitiveness, curiosity; keep your soul from all external impressions, so that God may be imprinted on it through prayer. His all-holy, invisible, spiritual Image does not tolerate dwelling in a soul clogged with images of the vain, material, transitory world. Do not admire visible nature, do not engage in contemplation of its beauties; do not waste precious time and soul energy on acquiring knowledge provided by human sciences. Use both strength and time to acquire prayer, performed sacredly in the inner cell. There, within yourself, prayer will reveal a spectacle that will attract all your attention; it will give you knowledge that the world cannot contain, the existence of which it has no idea. There, in the depths of your heart, you will see the fall of humanity, you will see your soul, killed by sin, you will see the coffin, you will see hell, you will see demons, you will see chains and shackles, you will see the flaming weapon of the cherub, guarding the path to the tree of life, prohibiting man from entering the abode of paradise - you will see many other mysteries hidden from the world and from the sons of the world. When this spectacle opens, your eyes will be drawn to it; you will grow cold towards everything temporary and perishable, with which you have sympathized until now. “Today or tomorrow we will die,” said Saint Andrew the Fool to the monk, distracting him from his attachment to the substance and explaining the folly of such attachment. Very true words! A very true depiction of the indefinite period of our earthly life! Not today, tomorrow we will die. Nothing is easier than dying. The longest life, when we come to the end of it, turns out to be the shortest moment. Why engage in something that, of necessity, we will have to leave forever, leave very soon. It is better to study ourselves through prayer, to study the life and world awaiting us, in which we will remain forever. The solitude of the cell and the desert are the abode of prayer. “He who has tasted prayer,” said Saint John Climacus, “will flee crowds: who, if not prayer, makes his lover, like a desert-loving onager, free from the need for society?” If you want to devote your soul to the work of prayer, remove yourself from the vision of the world, renounce human society, conversations and the eternal acceptance of friends into your cell, even under the pretext of love. Eliminate from yourself everything that interrupts and disturbs your mysterious conversation with God. Stay on earth and in human society as a wanderer. You are a wanderer. The earth is a hotel. The hour at which you will be called is unknown. The call is inevitable and inescapable; It is impossible to refuse or resist. Prepare yourself with holy prayer for the joyful departure from the hotel. 1. 152–156 “Let everyone depart from unrighteousness, naming the Name of the Lord” (2 Tim. 2:19), bequeaths the Apostle. This testament, which applies to all Christians, applies especially to those who intend to practice unceasing prayer in the Name of the Lord Jesus. The Most Pure Name of Jesus does not tolerate being in the midst of uncleanness: it demands that all unclean things be cast out and cast out from the spiritual vessel; entering the vessel according to the degree of its purity, it itself begins to act in it and perform further purification, for which a person’s own efforts are insufficient and which is required in order for the vessel to become a worthy container for a spiritual treasure, an all-holy shrine. Let us avoid satiety and even saturation; Let us make a rule of moderate, constant abstinence in food and drink; let us deny ourselves the pleasure of delicious food and drink; let us rest ourselves with sleep satisfactorily, but not excessively; let us give up idle talk, laughter, jokes, blasphemy; Let us stop unnecessary exits from the cell to the brethren and the reception of the brethren into the cell, under the pretext of love, the name of which covers up empty conversations and activities that empty the soul. Let us give up the dreaminess and vain thoughts that arise in us due to our unbelief, due to reckless care and our other passions. With the fullness of faith, let us cast everything on the Lord, and replace our many thoughts, our empty dreams with uninterrupted prayer to the Lord Jesus. 2. 307–308 A necessary, essential condition for success in the Jesus Prayer is staying in the commandments of the Lord Jesus. “Be in My love” (John 15:9), He said to His disciples. What does it mean to be in love with the Lord? This means: unceasingly remember Him, unceasingly remain in unity with Him in spirit. The first without the last is dead, and cannot even be realized. “If you keep My commandments, you will remain in My love” (John 15:10); if we constantly keep the commandments of the Lord, then in our spirit we will unite with Him. If we unite with Him in spirit, then we will strive towards Him with all our being, we will constantly remember Him. Direct your actions, all your behavior according to the commandments of the Lord Jesus, direct your words according to them, direct your thoughts and feelings according to them, and you will know the properties of Jesus. Having felt these properties in yourself through the action of Divine grace and from this feeling acquired an experimental knowledge of them, you will enjoy an incorruptible sweetness that does not belong to the world and this age, a quiet sweetness, but strong, destroying the heart’s disposition to all earthly pleasures. Having delighted in the properties of Jesus, you will love Him and desire that He should fully dwell in you; without Him you will consider yourself lost and lost. Then you will cry out unceasingly, crying out from the fullness of conviction, with all your soul: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. The Jesus Prayer will replace all other prayers for you. And what kind of idea can all of them contain and express, a more extensive thought about the pardon of sinners by Jesus? Set yourself the sole purpose of life to fulfill the will of Jesus in every circumstance, no matter how important or trivial it may seem; try to do the only deeds that are pleasing to Jesus, and all your deeds will be equally worthy of heaven. Love the will of Jesus more than the desires of your flesh, more than your peace and comfort, more than life, more than your soul. Read the Gospel as often as possible, study in it the will of the Lord and your Savior. Do not leave without attention the slightest feature from the Gospel, no apparently unimportant commandment. Curb and mortify all your own movements, not only sinful, but apparently also good, belonging to fallen human nature, often very developed among pagans and heretics, separated from the virtues of the Gospel, like the West from the Bostons. May all your old things be silent in you! May Jesus alone act in you with His most holy commandments, thoughts and sensations flowing from these commandments. If you live in this way, then the Jesus Prayer will certainly flourish in you, regardless of whether you are in the deep desert or in the midst of the rumors of a community: because the place of residence and peace of this prayer is the mind and heart, renewed by the knowledge, tasting, and fulfillment of the will of God, good, pleasing and perfect (Rom. 12:2). Living according to the Gospel commandments is the only and true source of spiritual success, accessible to everyone who sincerely desires to succeed, no matter in what external position he is placed by the unknown Providence of God. 2. 308–309 Praying the Jesus Prayer is a Divine institution. It was established not through the medium of a prophet, not through the medium of an apostle, not through the medium of an Angel: it was established by the Son of God and God Himself. After the Last Supper, among other sublime, final commandments and testaments, the Lord Jesus Christ established prayer in His Name, gave this method of prayer as a new, unusual gift, a gift of immeasurable value. The apostles already knew in part the power of the name of Jesus: they healed incurable ailments with it, brought demons into obedience, defeated, bound, and drove them away. The Lord commands this most powerful, wonderful name to be used in prayers, promising from it a special reality for prayer. “Whatever you ask,” He said to the holy apostles, “I will do from the Father in My name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. And whatever you ask in My name, I will do it” (John 14:13-14). “Amen, amen, I say to you, for whatever you ask from the Father in My name, He will give it to you. Until now, do not ask for anything in My name: ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be filled” (John 16:23-24). Oh, what a gift! He is the guarantee of endless, immeasurable benefits! He flowed from the lips of the unlimited God, clothed in limited humanity, called by the human name - Savior. ...From the Gospel, Acts and Epistles of the Apostles we see unlimited faith in the name of the Lord Jesus and unlimited reverence for this name of the holy apostles. In the name of the Lord Jesus they performed the most amazing signs. There is no case from which one could learn how they prayed in the Name of the Lord, but they prayed to it without fail. How could they not pray to them when this prayer was taught and commanded by the Lord Himself, when the commandment was strengthened by twice repeating and confirming it? If Scripture is silent about this, it is silent only because this prayer was in general use, not requiring special inclusion in Scripture due to its popularity and common use. The common use and well-known nature of the Jesus Prayer is clearly evident from the decree of the Church, which commands the illiterate to replace all prayers for themselves with the Jesus Prayer (Psalter followed). The antiquity of this ruling is undoubted. ...The monastic rule consists most of all in the Jesus Prayer. In this form this rule is taught in general to all monks of the Orthodox Church, and in this form it was taught by the Angel to St. Pachomius the Great for his cenobitic monks. The monk lived in the 4th century; The rule speaks of the Jesus Prayer in exactly the same way as the Lord's Prayer, the fiftieth Psalm and the Creed - as well-known and generally accepted. St. Anthony the Great, an ascetic of the 3rd and 4th centuries, bequeaths to his disciples the most thorough exercise of the Jesus Prayer, speaking of it as a subject that does not need any explanation. An explanation for this prayer began to appear later, as living knowledge about it became impoverished. The teaching about the Jesus Prayer was expounded in more detail by the fathers of the 14th and 15th centuries, when the exercise in it began to be almost forgotten even among monks. 2.234–236 Due to the soul-saving effect on us of prayer in general, and the memory of God or the Jesus Prayer in particular, as a means to remain in constant union with God and to constantly repel the attacks of the enemy, the practice of the Jesus Prayer is especially hateful to the devil. Those who practice prayer in the Name of the Lord Jesus are subject to special persecution by the devil. “The whole feat and all the diligence of our adversary,” says the Monk Macarius the Great, “is to turn our thoughts away from the remembrance of God and from love for Him; For this, he uses the delights of the world and distracts him from the true good to imaginary, unimportant goods.” For this reason, one who has dedicated himself to the true service of God through the unceasing Jesus Prayer must especially guard himself from distraction of thoughts, not in any way allowing himself mental idle talk, but, ignoring the thoughts and dreams that appear, constantly return to praying in the name of Jesus, as if in refuge, believing that Jesus is vigilantly concerned about that His servant who is constantly with Him with vigilant remembrance of Him. “Evil demons,” says St. Neil of Sinai, “at night they try to disturb the spiritual worker through themselves, and during the day through people, surrounding him with slander, misfortunes and misadventures.” This order in demonic warfare will soon be seen through experience by every practitioner of prayer. Demons tempt with thoughts, mental dreams, memories of the most necessary objects, apparently spiritual thoughts, arousal of care, various fears and other manifestations of unbelief. With all the various demonic wars, the feeling of confusion is always a sure sign of the approach of fallen spirits, even if the action they produce has the appearance of righteousness. To ascetics who pray alone and intensely, demons appear in the form of monsters, in the form of tempting objects, sometimes in the form of Angels, martyrs, saints and Christ Himself; One should not be afraid of demonic threats, but one should be very distrustful of all phenomena in general. In such cases, which, however, are infrequent, our first duty is to resort to God, surrendering entirely to His will and asking for His help: not to pay attention to the phenomena and not to enter into communication and conversation with them, recognizing ourselves as weak for communication with hostile spirits, unworthy of communication with the holy spirits. The true, godly ascetic of prayer is subjected to special sorrows and persecution from his brethren, men. And in this, as we have already said, the main figures are demons: they use as their tools both those people who have merged their activity with the activity of demons, and those who do not understand the battles of demons and therefore conveniently become tools of demons - even those who, understanding the cunning of the enemy, are not attentive and careful enough to themselves, and therefore allow themselves to be deceived. The most striking and terrible example of what terrible hatred for God, for the Word of God, for the Spirit of God can become infected by people who have merged the mood of their spirit with the mood of demons, we see in the Jewish high priests, elders, scribes and Pharisees, who committed the greatest crime among human crimes - Deicide. Saint Simeon the New Theologian says that, at the inspiration of demons, monks who lead a hypocritical life envy the true ascetics of piety and use all measures to upset them or expel them from the monastery. Even well-meaning monks, who lead an outward life and have no idea about spiritual life, are seduced by spiritual workers, find their behavior strange, condemn and slander them, and make various insults and oppressions against them. The great practitioner of the Jesus Prayer, the blessed Elder Seraphim of Sarov, suffered many troubles from ignorance and a carnal view of the monasticism of his brethren, because those who read the law of God bodily believe to fulfill it only by external deeds, without mental effort, not understanding what they say or what is affirmed about them (Tim. 1:7). “While walking the path of the inner, speculative life,” Seraphim instructs and consoles, drawing guidance and consolation from his spiritual experience, “one should not weaken, one should not abandon it because people, clinging to appearance and sensuality, amaze us with the opposite of their opinions to the very heart and try in every possible way to distract us from passing the inner path, putting various obstacles for us on it. We should not be hesitant by any opposition while walking this path, affirming in this case on the Word of God: “We will not be afraid of their fear, nor will we be troubled, for God is with us, we will sanctify the Lord our God in the heartfelt memory of His Divine Name, and He will be our fear” (Isa. 8:12-13). 2. 299–302 Allowing demons to tempt us is necessary for our success: by opposing our prayer, they force us to learn a particularly skillful use of this sword. With the sword of prayer, the fiery sword of the cherub guarding the path to the tree of life is crushed, and the winner becomes a partaker of the eternal life (Rev. 2:7). According to the ineffable wisdom of God, evil contributes to good intentions. When, in our solitude and while practicing prayer, passionate sensations and movements suddenly boil within us, fierce thoughts attack us, and sinful dreams appear to us in seductive vividness - this is a sign of the coming of enemies. Then it is not a time of despondency, not a time of relaxation: a time of achievement. Let us resist our enemies with intense prayer to God, and He will scatter and drive away our enemies. In invisible warfare, we do not always and do not quickly become winners: victory is a gift of God, bestowed upon the ascetic by God in his own time, known to the One God and determined by the One God. The very victories are necessary for us. Here we mean victories that come from our weakness and sinfulness, and not from a changed will. Victories are allowed to us to our humility, so that we see and study the fall of our nature, recognize the need for a Redeemer, believe in Him and confess Him. With such victories, our invisible enemies put shame on us because of the victory, and because of shame - relaxation in the prayerful feat, distrust in it, the thought of leaving it and moving on to good activities in the midst of human society. Let's not fall into deception! With selflessness and shamelessness, let us reveal our ulcer before our All-Good and Almighty Physician, who commanded this shamelessness that saves us and promised to crown it with vengeance on our rivals (Luke 18). Let us make a covenant in our souls: not to abandon the feat of prayer until the end of our lives, and to pass from its midst into eternity. Our modesty during victories is alien to the meaning: it is an evil mockery of our enemies. Is this fig leaf - modesty with its means - capable of hiding a person’s sin from the all-seeing God? God sees sin even without confessing sin. He seeks confession solely in order to heal. If He commanded His apostle to forgive his sinner and repentant brother seven times a day, how much more will He Himself fulfill this for us, who continually offer Him prayer and repentance (Luke 17:4). Let us pay careful attention to the following. Is it not our double-mindedness that strengthens our enemies in the fight against us? Is this not the reason for our frequent victories? Are we not ourselves strengthening the power and influence of our enemies over us, fulfilling their will by fulfilling our carnal desires, desires, and addictions? Are we not angering God by this, are we not driving Him away from ourselves? Doesn’t a love of peace operate in us, leaving behind us the appearance of servants of God, taking away the essential dignity of God’s servants, making us in essence enemies of God (James 4:4-5)? “A double-minded man is unsettled in all the ways of his virtues” (James 1:8): all the more will he waver on the path of the most sublime, primary virtue - prayer. He is rejected by God, no matter how warm or cold (Rev. 3:16). He will not be able to be a student of true prayer, bringing his disciples before the face of God for supernatural edification, leading them in the footsteps of Jesus, if he does not renounce all his possessions (Luke 14:33): the painful deviations of the will of fallen man towards the world. Those who are Christ's are the flesh crucified with passions and lusts (Gal. 5:24): only those who belong entirely to Christ can acquire true prayer. 1. 159–160 Many, having felt the disposition and zeal for spiritual feat, begin this feat recklessly and frivolously. They indulge in it with all their jealousy and ardor, with all their recklessness, not understanding that this jealousy and ardor are the most bloody and carnal, that they are filled with impurity and impurity, not understanding that when studying the science of the sciences - prayer - the most faithful guidance is needed, the greatest prudence and caution are needed. Alas! The right ways of God are hidden from us; They are hidden from us because of the blindness produced and maintained in us by the fall. We elect as leaders mainly those mentors whom the world has proclaimed as saints and who are either in the depths of delusion or in the depths of ignorance. Books written by heterodox ascetics who were in the most terrible demonic delusion, in communion with demons, are elected as leaders. The scriptures of the holy fathers of the Orthodox Church are chosen as leaders, who set forth the sublime prayerful feat of successful monks, a feat inaccessible to the understanding of beginners, not only to follow it - and the fruit of the spiritual feat is monstrously mental disorder and death. Sow the wheat and gorge the thorns (Jer. 12:13), says the Holy Spirit with pain to people who pervert good into evil by misusing good. A sad, truly sad spectacle! In the most sublime work of the mind, in the work that leads one who walks along the established steps to God, through wrong action he acquires darkness and corruption of the mind, mental damage, insanity, enslavement to demons, and destruction. 1. 267–268 The exercise of the Jesus Prayer has two main divisions or periods (graduality), ending with pure prayer, which is crowned with dispassion or Christian perfection in those ascetics to whom God is pleased to give it. Saint Isaac of Syria says: “Not many have been worthy of pure prayer, but small ones; those who have reached the sacrament that takes place after it and have crossed over to the other side (of the Jordan) are hardly found one from generation to generation, by the grace and favor of God.” Here the word favor is added to accurately express the writer’s thoughts. In the first period, the person praying is allowed to pray with his own effort; The grace of God undoubtedly assists the one who prays with good intentions, but it does not reveal its presence. At this time, the passions hidden in the heart come into motion and elevate the worker of prayer to a martyrdom, in which conquests and victories constantly replace each other, in which the free will of man and his weakness are expressed with clarity. In the second period, the grace of God palpably reveals its presence and action, connecting the mind with the heart, making it possible to pray without steam or, what is the same, without entertainment, with heartfelt crying and warmth; at the same time, sinful thoughts lose their violent power over the mind. The holy fathers point to these two states. Of these, the Venerable Nilus of Sora, referring to the Venerable Gregory of Sinaite, says: “When the action of prayer comes, then it keeps the mind to itself, amuses it and frees it from soaring.” For those who have not acquired the action of grace, the monk recognizes keeping the mind from distraction and attentive prayer as the most difficult, difficult, and inconvenient feat. To achieve the second state, it is necessary to go through the first, it is necessary to demonstrate and prove the validity of one’s will and bear fruit in patience (Luke 8:15). The first state of the worshiper can be likened to naked trees during winter; the second - to the same trees, covered with leaves and flowers from the action of the warmth of spring. Trees accumulate the power to produce leaves and flowers during winter, when their state has the entire image of a passive state, a state under the region of death. Let us not allow ourselves to tempt the Lord! Let us not allow ourselves to approach Him frivolously, with fearlessness, with double-mindedness, with a mood of doubtful inquisitiveness, for which entry into the Promised Land is forbidden (Heb. 3:8-11, 18-19). Let us approach as lost, as those in essential need of salvation, which is given by God for true repentance. The soul and purpose of prayer in both states should be repentance. For repentance brought through one’s own effort, God grants, in due time, grace-filled repentance, and the Holy Spirit, having taken possession of man, intercedes for him with unspeakable groanings: He intercedes for the saints in accordance with the will of God, which He alone knows (Rom. 8:26-27). From this it is clear that for a beginner, the search for a place of heart, that is, the search to discover in oneself the untimely and prematurely manifest action of grace, is the most erroneous undertaking, perverting the order, the system of science. Such an undertaking is a proud, crazy undertaking! The use of the mechanisms proposed by the holy fathers for successful monks, for the silent ones, is just as inconsistent with the novice use. When practicing prayer, beginners should maintain only the most reverent attention, one confinement of the mind in the words of the prayer, pronouncing the words very slowly so that the mind has time to be enclosed in them, and breathing quietly but freely. Some thought that in the very production of breathing there was something especially important, and, not realizing that unhurried and quiet breathing was commanded by the fathers to keep the mind from being distracted, they began to hold their breath excessively, and thereby upset their bodily health, which contributes so much to the feat of prayer. “Hold back,” says St. Gregory of Sinaite, “and your breathing, that is, the movement of the mind, closing your lips slightly when performing prayer, and not the breathing of your nostrils, that is, sensual, as the ignorant do, so as not to damage yourself by puffing yourself up.” Not only in the process of breathing, but also in all movements of the body, one should observe calmness, quietness and modesty. All this greatly helps to keep the mind from wandering. A mind that prays attentively will certainly attract the heart into compassion for itself, into a feeling of repentance. There is the greatest difference between the heart's sympathy with the mind and the union of the mind with the heart or the convergence of the mind in the heart. Saint John Climacus recognizes significant success in prayer when the mind remains in its words. This great mentor of monks asserts that the prayer of one who prays constantly and fervently, while concluding the mind in the words of prayer, out of a feeling of repentance and crying, will certainly be overshadowed by Divine grace. When prayer is overshadowed by Divine grace, then not only will the place of the heart open, but the whole soul will be drawn to God by an incomprehensible spiritual force, taking the body with it. The prayer of those who succeed in it is pronounced from the whole being. The whole person is made, as it were, through the mouth alone. Not only the heart of a renewed person, not only the soul, but also the flesh is filled with spiritual consolation and delight - joy in the living God (Ps. 83:3), in God, who acts tangibly and powerfully by His grace. All the bones of a true man of prayer say: Lord, Lord, who is like Thee? Deliver the poor from the hand of those who strengthen him, and the poor and the wretched from those who plunder his prayer and hope - from thoughts and sensations arising from fallen nature and excited by demons (Ps. 34:10). All Christians should strive to succeed in the prayer of repentance; The Holy Fathers invite all Christians to practice the prayer of repentance and to excel in it. On the contrary, they strictly prohibit the premature effort to ascend with the mind into the sanctuary of the heart for grace-filled prayer, when this prayer has not yet been given by God. The prohibition is associated with a terrible threat: “Smart prayer,” says St. Nil of Sorsky, repeating the words of St. Gregory of Sinaite, “a head above all deeds and virtues, like the love of God. He who shamelessly and boldly wants to enter God and often converse with Him, who is forced to acquire Him within himself, is conveniently killed by demons.” I beg, I beg you to pay all due attention to the formidable prohibition of the fathers. I know that some well-intentioned people, who actually fall into fornication and are unable, due to unfortunate habit, to refrain from falling, attempt to exercise heartfelt prayer. Could there be anything more reckless, more ignorant, more daring than this undertaking? The prayer of repentance is given to everyone without exception, given both to those possessed by passions and to those subject to violent falls. They have every right to cry out to the Lord for salvation, but entry into the heart for sacred prayer is forbidden for them: it is granted exclusively to the mysterious bishop, consecrated legally by Divine grace. Understand, understand that it is only by the finger of God that this entrance is opened: it is opened when a person not only stops from active sin, but also receives from the right hand of God the strength to resist passionate thoughts, not to get carried away and not to enjoy them. Little by little, purity of heart is built, and God gradually and spiritually appears in purity. Gradually! Because passions are diminished and virtues do not increase suddenly: both require considerable time. Here is my behest to you, beloved brother: do not look for the place of your heart. Do not try in vain to explain to yourself what the place of the heart means: this can be satisfactorily explained by experience alone. If God wants to give you knowledge, He will give it in due time, and He will give it in a way that natural man cannot even imagine. Engage yourself exclusively and with all care in the prayer of repentance; try to bring repentance through prayer: you will be convinced of the success of the feat when you feel poverty of spirit, tenderness, and crying within yourself. Achieving supernatural states of grace has always been rare. Pimen the Great, a monk of the Egyptian Skete, famous for the high success of its monks, who lived in the 5th century, in which monasticism especially flourished, used to say: “Many among us talk about perfection, but only one or two have actually achieved perfection.” Saint John Climacus, an ascetic writer of the 6th century, testifies that in his time the vessels of Divine grace were greatly diminished in comparison with previous times; the saint sees the reason for this in a change in the spirit in human society, which had lost simplicity and become infected with wickedness. Saint Gregory of Sinai, a writer of the 14th century, decided to say that in his time there were no men of grace at all - they had become so rare; Sinait points out the reason for this in the extraordinary development of vices that resulted from increased temptations. Moreover, in our time, the practitioner of prayer must observe the greatest caution. We have no divinely inspired mentors! Chastity, simplicity, evangelical love disappeared from the face of the earth. Temptations and vices have multiplied to infinity! The world is engulfed in depravity! Criminal love in various forms dominates human society like a sovereign tyrant! It is enough, it is enough if we are worthy to offer to God the only work that is essential for our salvation - repentance! 1. 268–272 When praying, you need to deny yourself, i.e. not to recognize oneself as worthy of any success, but to resolutely rely on God. One should not even think about success, but make sure that prayer is performed with attention. Subsequently, you will see that all your aspirations for success were nothing more than hobbies due to material fervor, without which it is impossible for anyone who is again starting a prayer feat, in which they focus and for which all other feats are undertaken as serving him. Conceit is always associated with passion. From self-sacrifice, which is explained above, comes true humility of spirit, poverty of spirit, and such humility attracts the mercy of God to a person. 6. 737–738 Warning his disciples against the wiles of the devil, he (St. Pimen the Great) says: “Everything that exceeds measure is from demons.” What the demons bring is recognized by confusion - this indispensable and inevitable fruit of their action. In smart work, in repentance itself, one must avoid excess. It must be done in great silence. The correctness of such doing is evidenced by the peace brought to the soul. 6.773 (See Heat, Jesus Prayer, Bows). (See Jesus Prayer, Warmth, Place). “Once, when Saint Macarius the Great was sitting in his cell, an Angel sent from God appeared to him and said: Macarius! do not be afraid of attacks from invisible enemies, because our good Lord will not retreat from you and will not cease to support you. Take courage, strengthen yourself, bravely conquer opposing principles and powers: but do not be proud of your deeds, lest Divine help leave you and you fall through a wondrous fall. Blessed Macarius answered, shedding tears: “Why should I be proud when my soul, like a depraved harlot, feeds on the stench of unclean thoughts brought by demons?” The monk was brought into such deep humility by the deep self-conception that his clever work brought him. In himself, he saw the fall of man and his communication with demons. This spiritual vision of him is depicted with extraordinary clarity, fidelity and detail in his conversations. 7. 284–285 Pimen the Great used to say to his brethren: “I assure you: where they throw Satan, there they will throw me.” This saying is the fruit of a spiritual vision of rejected spirits and the communication into which man entered into with them through his fall. This vision was revealed to the monk from a deep, correct self-view, into which he was raised by the Word of God, his clever work and Divine grace. 7.302 (See Sweetness, Jesus Prayer, Graduality). “The brother said to Abba Siso: “I see that the memory of God (mental prayer) constantly abides in me.” The elder said: “It is not a big thing that your mind is constantly directed towards God; great is it when someone sees himself as the worst of all creation." The elder said this for the reason that the true effect of mental prayer is always based on the deepest humility and stems from it. Any other action of mental prayer is incorrect and leads to self-delusion and destruction. 7.323 (See Jesus Prayer, Gifts, Obedience). Reading in the fathers about the place of the heart, which the mind acquires through prayer, one must understand the verbal power of the heart, placed by the Creator in the upper part of the heart - the power by which the human heart differs from the heart of animals, which have the power of will, or desire, and the power of jealousy, or rage, on an equal basis with people. The power of words is expressed in conscience, or in the consciousness of our spirit, without the participation of reason, in the fear of God, in spiritual love for God and neighbor, in a feeling of repentance, humility, meekness, in contrition of spirit, or deep sadness about sins, and in other spiritual sensations alien to animals. The power of the soul - the mind - although spiritual, has its place of residence in the brain: so the power of words, or the spirit of a person, although spiritual, has its place of residence in the upper part of the heart, located under the left nipple of the chest, near the nipple and slightly above it. The connection of the mind with the heart is the connection of the spiritual thoughts of the mind with the spiritual sensations of the heart. Since man has fallen, since his thoughts and sensations have changed from spiritual to carnal and spiritual, it is necessary, through the Gospel Commandments, to raise the mind and spirit to spiritual thoughts and sensations. When the mind and spirit are healed, then they will unite in the Lord. It is formed in due time, in the department of the heart, where the power of words, or spirit, is located, the wonderful, not made by hands, spiritual church of God, the Holy of Holies: there the mind descends, ordained by the Holy Spirit as a priest and bishop, to worship God by Spirit and Truth. Then the Christian will know by blessed experience what is said in the Holy Scripture: “You are the churches of God who live, as God said: for I will dwell in them and walk, and I will be God, and they will be my people” (2 Cor. 6:16). ...The mind and heart cannot be united otherwise than through the mediation of the Spirit and Truth. This means: the mind and heart will not be able to unite if they do not completely reject the fallen nature, if they do not completely surrender themselves to the leadership of the Gospel, if for constant and intense adherence to the Gospel Commandments they do not attract the grace of the All-Holy Spirit, are not healed and revived from its touch, from the overshadowing of it. Not only every sinful feeling and every sinful thought, but also all natural thoughts and sensations, no matter how subtle and disguised by imaginary righteousness, destroy the connection of the mind with the heart, putting them in opposition to each other. If you deviate from the spiritual direction provided by the Gospel, all aids and mechanisms are in vain: the heart and mind will never unite with each other. 5. 115–117 (See Union, Jesus Prayer, Place). (See Connection, Jesus Prayer Heat). With a special material effort towards heartfelt prayer, warmth begins to act in the heart. This warmth is a direct consequence of such a feat: every member of the human body that is subjected to friction becomes hot, and the same happens to the heart from constant, prolonged tension. The heat that comes from intensified, material achievement is also material. This is carnal, blood warmth, in the region of fallen nature. An inexperienced ascetic, having felt this warmth, will certainly imagine something about it, find in it pleasantness, pleasure, which is the beginning of self-delusion. Not only should one not think anything special about this warmth, but, on the contrary, one should take special precautions when it appears. Precaution is necessary for the reason that this heat, like blood, not only passes to different places in the chest, but can very easily fall on the lower parts of the womb, causing a strong combustion in them. Naturally, in this case, carnal lust, characteristic of these parts in a state of heat, begins to act. 2.294–295 (See Jesus Prayer Bowing). When Saint Andrew the Fool was raptured into paradise, then, as he told the priest, the abundant grace of God filling paradise produced in him that spiritual effect that is usually produced by mental prayer in those who have succeeded: it brought his mind and heart into union, and the person comes into a state of spiritual ecstasy and some self-forgetfulness. This rapture and self-forgetfulness together is a feeling of new life. Saint Simeon told his companion, Deacon John, that in the midst of the most powerful temptations his mind remains entirely directed towards God - and the temptations remain without their usual effect. In those who have been granted grace-filled overshadowing, the soul is constantly lifted up from the midst of sinful and vain thoughts and sensations by mental prayer, as if by a mysterious invisible hand, and grief is lifted up: the action of sin and the world remains powerless and fruitless. 1.276 A certain elder told me in a sincere conversation: “In worldly life, due to the simplicity of past times and the pious trend that prevailed at that time, I learned about the Jesus Prayer, practiced it and at times felt an extraordinary change in myself and consolation. Having entered the monastery, I continued to practice it... At first I was in obedience to the refectory: while practicing obedience, I also practiced prayer, combining it with humble thoughts that assisted it, according to the instructions of the fathers. One day I placed a dish of food on the last table at which the novices were sitting, and mentally said: “Accept from me, servants of God, this wretched service.” Suddenly such consolation flowed into my chest that I even staggered; The consolation continued for many days, about a month. Another time I happened to go into the prosphora room; I don’t know why, out of some impulse, I bowed very low to the brethren who were working in the prosphora - and suddenly prayer had such an impact on me that I hastened to go to my cell and lay down on the bed due to the weakness produced throughout my body by the prayerful action.” 1. 276–277 (See Consolation, Communion with God). (See Jesus Prayer, Name, Graduality, Heat). What is written by every holy writer is written from his grace-filled dispensation and from his activity, according to his dispensation and his activity. You should pay special attention to this. Let us not get carried away and admire a book written as if by fire, telling about high deeds and states that are not characteristic of us. Reading it, having inflamed the imagination, can harm us by imparting knowledge and desire for exploits that are timeless and impossible for us. Let us turn to the book of our father, who, in terms of the moderation of his success, is closest to our condition. With this view of the paternal books, in the initial reading of a monk who wants to become familiar with the inner feat of prayer, one can offer the instructions of Seraphim of Sarov, the writings of Paisius Nyametsky and his friend, schemamonk Vasily. The holiness of these persons and the correctness of their teaching are undoubted. 2.278–279 It is very useful for the practitioner of the Jesus Prayer to read the Prefaces of Schemamonk Vasily of Polyanomerulsky on the books of Saints Gregory of Sinaite, Hesychius of Jerusalem, Philotheus of Sinai and Nil of Sora. After reading these notes, reading the entire Philokalia becomes clearer and more useful. When reading the fathers, one should not lose sight of the fact that the measures of the beginners of their times are already the measures of those who are very successful in our time. The application of fatherly instructions to oneself and one’s activities must be done with great caution. 5.117 (See Reading the Holy Fathers). The Holy Fathers advise timely silence and they themselves tried to maintain it; complete and constant silence was maintained only by those saints of God who, from the abundance of grace, were in constant spiritual admiration. “The perfection of silence,” says Saint Isaac, “is silence about everything.” Thus the Great Barsanuphius, who had the gift of prophecy and the gift of miracles, fell silent; the silence of a passionate man is highly suspicious of charlatanism. 16. 129–130 (See Jesus Prayer, Residence). This is why we enter a monastery in order to discover the secretly living passions within ourselves and the relationship of our nature to the spirits of evil to which it has arbitrarily enslaved. For this purpose, we break ties with the world, leave the society of people, relatives, property, in order to see our inner bonds and break them with the right hand of the Lord. 1.344 Unfortunately for our time... many, entering a monastery, are concerned only with earthly things and remain alien to the monastic goal and monastic direction; Moreover, by their example and influence they shake other unestablished ones. What to do? This situation is very disastrous; but even this plight must be placed on the will of God and we must admit from the heart that we do not deserve another position, and if we deserved it, then a just and merciful God would certainly grant it. Such reflections bring peace and tranquility to the soul that truly seeks God: because the Word of God has determined for us to find peace of mind in a single humility and self-reproach. 6.335 Monastic life reveals to a person his weaknesses. 6.735 Out of sadness one should not go to a monastery, which can only be entered by calling. Everyone, as far as I know, who entered the monastery due to some external circumstances, and not by calling, is very fragile and certainly leaves the monastery with great troubles for the monastery and for themselves. 6. 134 Staying in a monastery without a sincere desire to lead a monastic life, and therefore eliminating from oneself the behavior that is required by the rules of the holy fathers, can only serve as harm and will lead the person being raped to such a life to the most tragic consequences. 6.752 What to do! Now the time is such that not only your monastery is in chaos due to the loss of the true concept of humility and piety according to God. If God tolerates such disorders, then we must endure all the more. And the sorrows that come to us from these disorders will serve us instead of true work, because monks of the last times were commanded to be saved by sorrows. 6.829 Monasticism is not a human institution, but a Divine one, and its purpose is to remove the Christian from the vanities and cares of the world, to unite him, through repentance and crying, with God, revealing in him from here the Kingdom of God. The mercy of the mercies of the King of kings is when He calls a person to monastic life, when in it he gives him prayerful crying and when, through the communion of the Holy Spirit, he frees him from the violence of passions and leads him into the anticipation of eternal bliss. 6. 688–689 The Monk Neil says that it is absolutely appropriate for a monastic to live according to the tradition of St. fathers: although we cannot compare with the fathers, we must certainly live in their direction and achieve unity with them in spirit. 6.745 Monasticism is a Divine institution through which Christianity reaches its highest development. Among the rules of this Divine institution is that people should enter into monasticism with true will and subject this will to strict examination and testing before taking vows. Those who have a cold and wavering will are strictly prohibited from entering monasticism. 6.753 Monks of the last times are destined to be saved by sorrows. There are no skilled elders. Divinely inspired monastic rules and life are shocked by the institutions of the carnal human mind; The spiritual success of only one person is dangerous, because it certainly leads the one who has it to exaltation and humiliation of his neighbor. For these reasons, it remains to work out salvation through the cross alone. This is the lot of those who are now being saved. 6.829 Conversation between a layman and a monk Layman: What is the significance of monasticism in the Church of Christ? Monk: Monks are those Christians who, if possible, leave all earthly pursuits to engage in prayer - the highest virtue of all virtues, in order through it to unite with God, as the apostle said: Cling to the Lord; there is one spirit with the Lord (1 Cor. 6:17). And since prayer borrows its power from all other virtues and from the entire teaching of Christ, the monks apply special care to the fulfillment of the Gospel Commandments, adding to the fulfillment of the commandments, which is obligatory for all Christians, the fulfillment of two councils of Christ: the advice on non-covetousness and the advice on celibacy. Monks, through their residence, strive to resemble the residence on earth of the God-Man: for this reason, holy monks are called “venerables.” Layman: Where did the monks get their name? Monk: The words monk, monastery, monasticism come from the Greek word monos, one. Monk means living alone or alone; monastery - a secluded, separate dwelling; monasticism is a solitary residence. This residence differs from the ordinary residence common to all; it is a different residence, and therefore in the Russian language the name “monasticism” was formed for it. Monk in Russian means “monk”. The words hostel, monastery, silence, hermitage, seclusion, desert life mean different types of monastic life. A monastic community is the cohabitation of a more or less numerous collection of monks who have a common divine service, a common meal and clothing, and are under the supervision of one abbot. Silence is the cohabitation of two or three monks in a separate cell, living on mutual advice or on the advice of an elder, having a common meal and clothing, holding divine services in the cell for five days, and on Saturday and Sunday coming to public services in church. Hermitage is the name given to a monk living alone. When a hermit remains permanently in a cell located in a monastery, then he is called a recluse, and his residence is called a retreat; when he lives in a deserted desert, he is called a hermit, and his residence is called desert life. Layman: When did monasticism begin? Monk: Since the time of the apostles, according to the testimony of the Monk Cassian. The Monk Cassian, a writer and monk of the fourth century, who surveyed the monastic monasteries of Egypt, in which monasticism especially flourished at that time, spent considerable time among the monks of the Egyptian Skete and passed on to later posterity the rules and teachings of the Egyptian monks, says that in the first times of Christianity in Egypt, the chosen disciples of the holy Apostle Evangelist Mark, the first bishop of Alexandria, received the name monks. They retired to the most remote suburban places, where they lived the most exalted life according to the rules that the evangelist gave them... Layman: What was the reason for the relocation of monasticism to places remote from cities and villages? Monk: This migration took place at the very time when the feat of martyrdom ceased and not only the chosen ones began to accept the Christian faith, not by a special calling, not with a determination to face the greatest disasters and death, but everyone in general, as the dominant faith, protected and spread by the government. Christianity became universal, but it did not retain its former self-sacrifice. Christians in cities and villages began to indulge themselves in many everyday concerns, to allow themselves luxury, carnal pleasure, participation in popular entertainment and other indulgences, which the primitive confessors of the faith shunned as renunciations of Christ in spirit. The desert provided a natural refuge and refuge, not disturbed by temptations, for Christians who wanted to preserve and develop Christianity in all its strength. “The desert,” says Saint Isaac of Syria, “is useful for both the weak and the strong: in the former, by moving away from matter, passions are not allowed to flare up and multiply, but for the strong, when they are outside of matter, they achieve the struggle with evil spirits.” Saints Basil the Great and Demetrius of Rostov depict the reason for the departure of Saint Gordius into the desert as follows: “Gordius is the escape of hail prayers, mercenary nicknames, princely majesties, the escape of ships speaking, selling, buying, swearing, lying, blabbering, the escape of games and mockery and ridicule, sojourn in the city, having pure hearing, pure eyes, and above all a purified heart, able to see God, and having been granted Divine revelations, and having learned great mysteries, not from man or man, but from the great teacher of truth, the Spirit.” Since the resettlement of monasticism in the desert, he acquired a special robe, with the aim of finally separating him from the laity. During times of persecution, both the clergy and the monks used the most common attire: this protected them to a large extent from the persecutors. 1. 456–460 True monasticism is invisible martyrdom; The life of a monk is a chain of continuous struggles and suffering: the winner is given an eternal life - the betrothal of the Holy Spirit. The monk whom God wants to enrich with spiritual intelligence and spiritual gifts is allowed to use strong attacks. “He who overcomes will inherit all things,” says Scripture, “and I will be his God, and he will be my son” (Rev. 21:7). So, let us not be discouraged! 5.343 The essential work of a monk is prayer, as the work that connects a person with God. All other works serve either as preparatory or facilitating means for prayer, or are given to those who, due to moral weakness or lack of mental abilities, cannot fully engage in prayer. 2.148 Monastic life, like Christian life in general, has weakened; Monastic life has weakened because it is in inextricable connection with the Christian world, which, separating weak Christians into monasticism, cannot demand from monasteries strong monks like the ancients, when Christianity, which lived in the middle of the world, abounded in virtues and spiritual strength. But monasteries, as an institution of the Holy Spirit, emit rays of light on Christianity; there is still food there for the pious; there is also storage of the Gospel Commandments there; there is also strict and dogmatic and moral Orthodoxy; there, although rarely, extremely rarely, the living tablets of the Holy Spirit are found. It is remarkable that all spiritual flowers and fruits grew in those souls who, at a distance from acquaintance outside and inside the monastery, cultivated themselves by reading Scripture and the Holy Fathers, with faith and prayer, animated by humble but powerful repentance. Where there was no such cultivation, there was sterility. 1.562 Nowadays it is difficult to find a well-maintained monastery! In many monasteries, various buildings of considerable size are erected, which give the monastery the appearance of prosperity. But this is a deception for a superficial glance. Monasticism itself is quickly being destroyed. Spiritual achievement is almost universally rejected; the very concept of it is lost. 6. 62–63 We must understand the spirit of the times and not get carried away by previous concepts and impressions, which are currently impossible to realize. The importance is in Christianity, not in monasticism; monasticism is important to the extent that it leads to perfect Christianity. 6.732 Layman: Explain, my father, what is the significance of celibate life and non-covetousness in monastic asceticism? It is dark for those who live in the midst of the world, who work for the public good, who give alms abundantly, and who do many good works, indicated and approved by the Gospel. With a lack of explanation, monastic life seems to be an idle life, devoid of both activity and benefit. Monk: Their meaning is of extraordinary importance. I will try my best to make it understandable for you. The one who distributed his property to the poor in order to show complete obedience to the Savior and completely follow Him, who himself became a beggar in order to subject himself to the hardships associated with poverty and abundantly bringing humility, destroys by this action all his hope for the world, focusing it on God. His heart moves from earth to heaven (Matthew 6:21), and he begins to walk on top of the waters of the sea of ​​life, supported by faith. His care is entrusted to the Lord, Who, having commanded His closest disciples to distribute property (Luke 12:33) and set aside worries about providing themselves with bodily needs, promised that those who seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness will have all these needs supplied by the providence of the Heavenly Father (Matthew 6:24-33). The servants of God are allowed various sorrows, during which God’s providence for them seems to be hidden and the influence of the world receives special strength, but this is necessary for teaching them a living faith in God, which constantly grows and strengthens from experience. Experiences expose the unbelief living in the fallen nature; they denounce the apostasy and renunciation of God that lives in fallen nature, because the heart, at the slightest weakening of observation of it, with sorrowful blindness rushes to place its trust in itself, in the world, in matter, and retreat from its trust in God (Matthew 14:22, 33). It seems that from this brief explanation it becomes obvious that abandoning acquisitions elevates the ascetic of Christ to an exalted spiritual state, which separates him from his brethren living in the middle of the world, and cannot be known to them experimentally. However, this elevated state is at the same time a state of constant suffering for the body and for all fallen nature: the Lord called it the Cross. In spiritual terms, the action of non-covetousness is similar to the action of a celibate life. The desire to overcome the property of nature, although fallen, leads to such a feat that those who have not experienced it cannot imagine. This feat, by which the renunciation of nature is accomplished, is supplemented by the crucifixion and cross, which are achieved by non-acquisitiveness, in which only the renunciation of property is accomplished. This feat brings one down into the depths of humility, leads to living faith, and elevates one to a state of grace. During this feat, as can be seen from the biographies of St. Anthony the Great, John the Long-Suffering and others, fallen spirits come to the aid of fallen nature and try to keep a person in the area of ​​fall. According to the difficulties of the struggle, victory is multi-fruitful: it is delivered and will be followed by a renewal of nature from the spiritual sensation that appears in the heart, so-called by the holy fathers. The nature remains the same human nature, but its sensation (in secular terms, “taste”) changes: thus, paper soaked in oil no longer accepts water, not because the nature of the paper has changed, but because its capacity is saturated with another substance that has no physical affinity with water. Layman: Nowadays, many people argue that a celibate life is unnatural for man, impossible for him, that the conclusion of a legal door for nature only forces nature to look for illegal doors. Monk: It is common for every person to judge by his own experiences. The unknown and untested seem to be impossible, but the known and experienced seem to belong to everyone. The Holy Fathers who wrote about this subject agree that celibate life is unnatural to fallen nature, that it was natural to man before his fall (Gen. 2:25), that after the renewal of nature, the ability for virginity and celibate life was returned to nature, that virginity and celibate life are respected above marriage, although married life has been elevated by Christianity to a higher degree than what it stood before Christianity (Eph. 5:32). The God-man led a virgin life; His Most Holy Mother was and remained a Virgin; the holy apostles John the Theologian, Paul, Barnabas and, no doubt, many others were virgins. With the advent of Christianity, regiments of virgins and virgins appeared. This feat was extremely rare before the renewal of nature by the Redeemer. Through the mediation of the Redeemer, God's favor was poured out on men, as the Angels justly sang (Lk. 2:14), and sanctified people with many different gifts of grace. The grace-filled abundance of Christians is picturesquely depicted in the sermon, which, according to church regulations, must be read by the priest to the newlyweds at the end of the wedding ceremony: “The great field of the Church of the great Possessor, God, is cultivated in three ways, decorated with harvest and fruit in three ways. The first part of this field is cultivated by those who love virginity and keep it uncorrupted until the end of their lives, and it brings into the Lord’s granary the fruits of virtues a hundredfold. The second part of the field is cultivated by the abstinence of widowhood, and bears fruit sixtyfold. The third is cultivated by the cohabitation of married couples, and if they spend their lives piously, in the fear of God, then the field bears fruit thirtyfold. In the same field there are different departments with different fruits, but all of them are blessed and praiseworthy, according to their purpose. The godly Ambrose says: we preach virginity in such a way as not to reject widows; We honor widows in such a way that we can preserve the marriage in our honor.” Layman: How can a Christian know whether he is capable or incapable of living a celibate life? In my opinion, this question should make it very difficult for anyone intending to enter monasticism. Monk: Capable - willing. Just as in the immaculate state of man it was left to him at will to remain in this state or to come out of it, so after the renewal of nature he was left at will to assimilate the renewed nature in all its development, or to use only to a certain extent necessary for salvation, or to remain in a state of fall and develop the fallen nature in himself. Renewal of nature is the gift of the Redeemer. For this reason, every gospel virtue is chosen by good will, but is given by Christ to the willer as a gift. Volition is proven by forcing oneself to virtue, and virtue is asked from God through diligent and patient prayer. All gospel virtues are alien to fallen nature; The ascetic must force himself to do everything; He must ask God for everything through humble prayer combined with heartfelt crying. Like other gospel virtues, celibate life is chosen by choice; the fight against the aspirations of fallen nature, the curbing of the body through exploits proves the sincerity of will; the gift of purity is asked from God by the consciousness of the incapacity of fallen nature for purity and the warmest prayer, filled with tenderness; the gift is bestowed by the overshadowing of Divine grace, changing and renewing nature. Blessed Theophylact of Bulgaria, thus explaining a person’s ability to live a celibate life (Matthew 19:12), concludes the explanation with the following words of the Lord: “Whoever asks receives, and whoever seeks finds.” Consider those lives of the saints in which their feat against fallen nature is described: you will see that all the saints moved from the ordinary state in which a person is incapable of a celibate life, into a state in which celibacy is characteristic, after an intense struggle against the wishes and attractions of fallen nature; you will see that their main weapons were prayer and crying; you will see that not only virgins have eliminated themselves from the need for marriage, widowers from repeating it, but also the most depraved people, filled with passions, stained with crimes, entangled and bound, as if in chains, by sinful habits, have risen and flown towards imperishable purity and holiness. 1. 469–474 (See Jesus Prayer, Monastic vow). “Without Christ there is no truth, no sanctification, no deliverance, and all wisdom without Christ is riot. Every wise man without Christ is foolish, every righteous man is a sinner, every pure man is unclean... What is ours: weakness, corruption, darkness, anger, sins” (St. Tikhon of Voronezh). 1.557 There is no way to acquire the mind of God while remaining in carnal wisdom. Carnal wisdom, said the apostle, is death. Carnal wisdom is enmity against God: for one does not submit to God’s law, for one can do less (Rom. 8:6-7). What is carnal wisdom? A way of thinking that arose from the state into which people were brought by the fall, directing them to act on earth as if they were eternal on it, exalting everything corruptible and temporary, destroying God and everything related to pleasing God, taking away salvation from people. 1.88 Truly, truly, I say to you: now, when there are no more works at all and spiritual wisdom is extremely rare, now the devil hates this wisdom so much that he would like to destroy it from the face of the earth, so that the Gospel remains with us only for our condemnation, and not for edification; for we will be judged according to the Gospel, as the Lord Jesus Christ foretold to us (John 12:40). The devil is ready to give us common sense tenfold and multiply our practical information a thousandfold, just to steal from us the knowledge of the cross, with which we can stand at the right hand of God. He who ascribes to himself information and common sense is likened to the devil, who wanted to recognize himself as a source of light. He is the source of imaginary light - carnal wisdom, which does not submit to the mind of God, bears the stamp of pride and contains the condition of all falls. 6. 224–225 (See Wisdom, Worldly Learning, Theoretical and Experimental Learning, Thought, Reasoning, Sciences, Heresy, Heretical Writings). (See Providence, Sorrow, Self-love, Faith). The Hieromartyr Zadok said: “Whoever is spiritual awaits martyrdom with joy, desire and great love, and is not afraid of it, being ready; But the hour of death is terrible for a carnal man.” 5.368 (See Feat, Heresy, Commandments). Novices should not engage in money-grubbing in their cells, i.e. various items of whim and luxury. Cell money-grabbing attracts the mind and heart of the novice: thus distracts them from God. In addition, it arouses daydreaming, which counteracts spiritual success. 5. 18 Abide in the haven of truth. The enemy of human salvation is trying to lure our thoughts from the haven of truth with various ghosts of truth. He knows the power of this network. This network appears insignificant to the untrained eye; the mind attracts to it with curiosity, with a magnificent, holy name, which usually covers up destruction. So the gullible nightingale, a particularly curious bird, is lured by food scattered under the net - and ends up forever in boring captivity. A false thought is destructive: it introduces darkness and self-delusion into the soul, making it a captive of the ruler of the world. The truth will set you free, said the Savior; it is obvious that a lie deprives you of freedom and subjugates the realm of the prince of this age. I wish that you were free, that the vision of your soul was pure and bright, that your mind was imbued with the light of truth and shed a gracious light on your entire life, on all your deeds. “If your eye is bright,” said the Lord, “your whole body will be bright.” We must keep our minds! He must constantly remain in the truth. I wish you this from my sincere heart! I wish you this from my aching heart! That is why it is painful because in modern times it is rare, very rare, who remain faithful to the truth, who have bowed their minds and hearts to its good yoke and its light burden - they have submitted with all simplicity and submission to Christ and His Holy Church. Save yourself, says St. Apostle Peter - from this generation of the obstinate! Turn away from the broad path along which almost everyone walks! 6. 428 –429 I want you to understand how important it is to monitor your way of thinking, your mind. A person is certainly led by his way of thinking: this is our light. We must watch our light with great care so that it does not become darkness, a false light, showing objects not in their places, not in their form, one instead of another. “Food, food is light, and there is darkness in you” (Luke 11:35). It is necessary that our way of thinking be imbued with the Truth. Apart from Christ, I do not understand and do not know any other Truth. And aren’t they blind, no matter who they are, who, at the time when Christ stands before them in the terrible greatness of humility, ask: what is the Truth? Delve deeply into my words! Please, I beg you! I beg you for your own salvation. Usually people consider thought to be something of little importance: therefore they are very little picky when accepting thoughts. But from accepted wrong thoughts all evil is born. A thought is like a ship’s rudder: the direction and, for the most part, the fate of the entire huge machine depends on a small rudder, on this insignificant plank trailing behind the ship. “A reverend thought will keep you” (Prov. 2:11), says Scripture; it teaches that the very beginning of our words should be truth. What kind of beginning of words is this, if not a way of thinking? The truth is witnessed on earth by the Holy Spirit. This is what the apostles said to the Jews. Witness of Christ - Truth - Holy Spirit. Where there is no testimony from the Spirit, there is no evidence of Truth. Anyone who wants to follow the Truth infallibly must remain in the teaching, sealed and witnessed by the Holy Spirit. This is the teaching of Holy Scripture and the holy fathers of the Eastern Church, the one holy, one Orthodox and True Church. Any other teaching is alien to the Truth - Christ, the Truth that came down from heaven, through the inexpressible mercy of God, revealed to people sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, mired in the dark and deep abyss of self-delusion, ignorance, fall, and destruction. 6. 435–436 The beginning of disasters lies in the impermissible and proud contempt of the commands of the Holy Spirit, in replacing them with our own statutes. This is the reason for the general disorder, the reason for the fall of Christianity, the moral decline, which always precedes civil disorder and foreshadows this disorder. There are Christians in particular, but the common, identical knowledge of the Truth has been lost, by which everything would be united into one spiritual body, with one way of thinking, in one spirit, under one common head - Christ. Nowadays, everyone has more or less his own way of thinking, his own religion, his own path, adopted arbitrarily or accidentally, recognized as correct or only justified. This countless flock, having lost connection and unity in truth and spirit, presents to the spiritual observer the appearance of the greatest disorder: each sheep wanders in its own direction, no one cares for it; people no longer hear - their hearing is so heavy - the saving voice of the true Shepherd, heard from His Holy Church, Who still loudly denounces their untruth, proclaims to them the right path, shows it. They were deafened by the noise of earthly, cruel cares, the noise of sensual amusements, the noise of earthly prosperity. Their soul is stuck to the earth, incapable of perceiving spiritual impressions. But some chosen ones still hear the voice of the true Shepherd, our Lord Jesus Christ. They follow this voice, making their way with the greatest effort and difficulty through the dense crowd, incoherently rustling, surrounding them. Until now, these chosen ones give justice on earth to Heavenly truth. There are very few of them! But the Lord encourages them. Fear not, He says, little flock, for the Father has deigned to give you the Kingdom. What is the sign of these sheep by which they could be immediately recognized? This sign is exact obedience to the Holy Church, fidelity to the holy Truth and the Holy Spirit. Guided by true humility, they renounce the understandings of their fallen natural mind and all human understandings, no matter how sublime and attractive they may seem in appearance. To remain faithful to God, they are not ashamed that the world calls them crazy. Not only do they generously endure persecution from the world, but they also subject themselves to various hardships, and thereby retain within themselves “the deadness of Jesus and His life.” This means: “to lose your soul in this age in order to win it for eternity through quickening by the Spirit.” Let us remain faithful to the Holy Spirit. He is Most Holy and Most Pure, He rests among the pure and holy, He loves the humble, who prove their humility not by anything outward, but by obedience of mind to the Gospel and the Church. He turns away from the self-righteous, who separate themselves from the unity of the Church for some thought that flatters the mind and heart. He moves away from them, and a dark spirit of delusion approaches them. “One false thought,” said one holy father, “can bring you down to hell.” The darkened sons of this world think more easily about thoughts about God; in their opinion, thinking about God one way or another is not a big problem. Unhappy ones! They do not know how important thoughts about God are, how important the Truth is in them and the Spirit that is always co-present and co-operating with it. From their mutual action is the revival of man into salvation, which consists in the communion of human nature with the Divine nature. On the contrary, false thoughts are always accompanied and assisted by the dark and crafty spirit of seduction. The father of lies is the devil, so says the Gospel; lying is a devilish property. He who has assimilated false thoughts has assimilated the properties of the devil, entered into kinship with rejected angels, and made union with God unnatural and unnatural. A stranger to God is a stranger to salvation and spiritual life. Let us protect ourselves from false thoughts and the heartfelt sensations that flow from them. From such false thoughts and feelings, the so-called “prelest” or self-delusion is formed, which has countless different types, according to the degree, according to the type of false thoughts and feelings accepted by a person as true. Let us acquire true knowledge of God, alien to error and speculation; it shines from the Holy Scriptures and the writings of the holy fathers, like light from the sun shining brightly at midday from the azure cloudless sky. 6.454–456 Prisoners in the prison of earthly wisdom! Let us hear those who have acquired spiritual freedom in the Lord and have been illuminated by spiritual intelligence! Born blind! Let us hear those who received their sight from the touch of the finger of God to their eyes, who saw the light of truth, who saw and knew in the radiance of this light the invisible and unknown to the carnal and spiritual minds. The Word of God and the Spirit who promotes the word reveal to us, through their chosen vessels, that the space between heaven and earth, the entire azure abyss of the airs visible to us, the heavenly regions, serves as a dwelling for the fallen angels cast out of heaven. “There was a war in heaven,” says the great viewer of the mysteries, Saint John the Theologian, “Michael and his angels made war with the serpent, and the serpent braced himself and his angels. And they were not able, and no place was found for them in heaven” (Rev. 12:7-8). This overthrow of the devil and the spirits carried away by him from heaven, according to the explanation of Saint Andrew of Caesarea, followed their first sin, when they were eliminated by holy forces from the angelic host and cast out from it, as the holy prophet Ezekiel tells about this (Ezekiel 28:16). In the book of Job, the fallen angel is already seen wandering in the immeasurable space of the heavenly realm; he wandered in it, quickly flew through it, tormented by insatiable anger towards the human race (Job 1:7). The Holy Apostle Paul calls the fallen angels the spirits of wickedness in high places (Eph. 6:12), and their head the prince of the power of the air (Eph. 2:2). Fallen angels are scattered in multitudes throughout the transparent abyss that we see above us. They do not cease to outrage all human societies and each individual individually; there is no atrocity, no crime of which they are not the instigators and participants; they incline and teach a person to sin by all kinds of means. “Your adversary is the devil,” says the holy Apostle Peter, “like a roaring lion he walks about, seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet. 5:8) both during our earthly life and after the separation of the soul from the body. When the soul of a Christian, leaving its earthly church, begins to strive through the air space to the mountainous fatherland, demons stop it, try to find in it an affinity with themselves, their sinfulness, their fall and bring it down to hell, prepared for the devil and his angel. This is how they act according to the right acquired by them. 3. 132–133 By the unknown wisdom of God, after the redemption of the human race by our Lord Jesus Christ, people were given freedom to choose life and death, to accept the Redeemer and redemption or to reject them. And many, unfortunately, very many, wished to remain in communion with Satan, in captivity and slavery to him, and declared themselves openly enemies of the Savior and His Divine Teaching. Also, many, having enrolled themselves in His army and declaring themselves His servants, violate the vow of loyalty to Him - by their actions, open and secret, they enter into an alliance with the spirits of evil. All who have clearly rejected the Redeemer are henceforth the property of Satan: their souls, upon separation from their bodies, descend straight to hell. But even Christians who deviate towards sin are not worthy of immediate relocation from earthly life to blissful eternity. Justice itself requires that these deviations to sin, these betrayals of the Redeemer be weighed and evaluated. Judgment and analysis are necessary to determine the degree of deviation towards sin of the Christian soul, in order to determine what prevails in it - eternal life or eternal death. And every Christian soul, upon its departure from the body, awaits the impartial Judgment of God, as the holy Apostle Paul said: He lies to die alone, and then comes the judgment (Heb. 9:27). The justice of God carries out judgment on Christian souls who have departed from their bodies, through angels, both holy and evil. The former, during a person’s earthly life, notice all his good deeds, and the latter notice all his crimes. When the soul of a Christian begins to ascend to heaven, guided by holy angels, dark spirits expose it with its sins unerased by repentance as victims to Satan, as guarantees of communication and the same eternal fate with him. To torture souls passing through the airspace, the dark authorities have established separate courts and guards in excellent order. Along the layers of heaven, from the earth to the sky itself, there are guard regiments of fallen spirits. Each separation is in charge of a special type of sin and torments the soul in it when the soul reaches this separation. The aerial demonic guards and judgment seats are called ordeals in the patristic writings, and the spirits serving in them are called tax collectors. In the time of Christ and in the first centuries of the Christian Church, the collector of state duties was called a publican. Since this duty, according to the simplicity of ancient customs, was entrusted to a person without positive responsibility and accountability, the tax collectors allowed themselves all means of violence, various kinds of tricks, fault-finding, countless abuses and inhuman robbery. They usually stood at city gates, in markets and other public places, so that no one could escape their watchful observation. The behavior of the tax collectors made them a terror to the people. According to his concept, the name of the publican expressed a person without feelings, without rules, capable of any crime, of any humiliating act, breathing, living by them - a rejected person. In this sense, the Lord compared the stubborn and desperate criminal of the Church with a pagan and a tax collector (Matthew 18:17). For the Old Testament worshipers of the true God, nothing was more disgusting than a servant of idols: the publican was just as hateful to them. The name publicans spread from people to the demons who guard the sunrise from earth to heaven, due to the similarity of the office and its performance. ...The doctrine of ordeals is the teaching of the Church (“The private judgment of God over souls, after their separation from their bodies, is preceded, according to the teaching of the Orthodox Church, by torture in the so-called ordeals, through which they, ascending from the earth, accompanied by Angels, pass through the air space and in which evil spirits detain them and expose all the sins they have committed in life,” Dogmatic Theology Orthodox Catholic Eastern Church). There is no doubt that the holy Apostle Paul speaks about them when he proclaims that Christians are faced with warfare against the spirits of wickedness in high places. 3. 135–138 The great saints of God, who have completely passed from the nature of the old Adam into the nature of the New Adam, our Lord Jesus Christ, in this elegant and holy newness, with their honest souls, go through the airy demonic ordeals with extraordinary speed and great glory. They are carried to heaven by the Holy Spirit, who, even during their earthly wanderings, constantly instilled in them the desire to be separated from the body and to be with Christ (Phil. 1:23). The Great Mark of France flowed like lightning through the heavens for one hour. (“Looking up,” says the Monk Serapion, who was present at the death of the Monk Mark, “I saw the saint’s soul, already freed from the bonds of the flesh and covered with white-light clothes by the hands of Angels and ascended to heaven.”) When the time came for the death of the Monk Macarius the Great, the cherub, who was his guardian angel, came, accompanied by a multitude of heavenly hosts. for his soul. The faces of the apostles, prophets, martyrs, saints, reverends, and righteous descended with a host of angels. The demons set up in rows and crowds at their ordeals to contemplate the procession of the Spirit-bearing soul. She began to ascend. Standing far from her, the dark spirits shouted from their ordeals: “Oh, Macarius! What glory have you earned!” “The humble husband answered them: “No! And I’m still afraid, because I don’t know if I did anything good.” - Meanwhile, he quickly rose to the sky. From other higher ordeals the air authorities again shouted: “Exactly! You escaped us, Macarius." “No,” he answered, “and I still need to escape.” When he had already entered the heavenly gates, they, sobbing with anger and envy, shouted: “Exactly! You escaped us, Macarius!” - He answered them: “Protected by the power of my Christ, I escaped your wiles.” (The procession of the Great Macarius from earth to heaven was seen by some of his disciples, who were in particular prosperity, and the Monk Paphnutius, who after the Great became abbot of the Skete, told about this procession.) - With such great freedom, the great saints of God pass through the air guards of the dark authorities because in earthly life they enter into irreconcilable warfare with them and, having won victory over them, in the depths hearts acquire complete freedom from sin, become the church and sanctuary of the Holy Spirit, making its verbal abode inaccessible to the fallen angel. Just as the resurrection of the Christian soul from sinful death takes place during its earthly wanderings, in exactly the same way, here on earth, its torment by the aerial authorities, its captivity by them or liberation from them is mysteriously accomplished here on earth; When walking through the air, this freedom and captivity are only revealed. 3. 151–159 Be sure to eat beef broth and other meat foods your body needs. At certain times, the Church established abstinence from meat food so that the constantly consumed meat food would not overheat the bodies, so that they would cool down and be relieved on the plant food of Lenten time, and not because eating meat actually contained any kind of sin or uncleanness. You might be interested in: