The practice of wisdom purifies the heart by uniting the mind with the heart in the Holy Spirit, whose uncreated light illumines both mind and heart, opening to glorification of God through God in God, Holy Trinity unveiling and unveiled. The practice of attention stills both heart and mind by uniting them at centre in the Spirit’s witness to the Son, through whom both mind and heart unite in the Son’s glorification of the Father. The grace of the Holy Spirit pours out blessings of light and glory, like a roaring waterfall. The radiant intensity of wisdom fills the heart with wonder, intensifying wisdom to single-pointed intensity, plunging both mind and heart into ineffable awe-struck wonder. The Apostle Paul said he did not know whether he was in the body or out of it when he experienced glorification (2 Cor 12:2). The intensity of pure awareness in glorification transcends bodily sensation, whilst transfiguring the body in uncreated light, unveiling glorification as ineffable deification. Elders help to hold saints steady when they are overwhelmed by grace, knowing that expansion is followed by contraction, by a return to the temporal perception of a temporal gospel, following the timeless glory of the Eternal Gospel (Rev 14:6). The timeless grace of deification does not suddenly consume the temporal humanity of the deified, but it does consume the confusion and division that distance the grace of deification. When the Apostle returned to ordinary awareness, glorification continued to hallow his heart and mind as a hidden grace which wisdom discerns as purification or illumination.
Materialist nihilism mistakes the experience of glorification for hallucination, enabling it to preserve and maintain rationalistic control, but seers know the hallowing difference between illusion and grace, because in the light of discerning illumination, they are profoundly aware of the machinations of delusion. which are therefore very familiar to them. The experience of illumination reveals the old blindness of materialistic delusion to be utterly suffocating, shattering the shallow narrowness of its hollow conventionality. In the wake of glorification, ordinary distraction is experienced as vacuously vain and depressing. The Spirit of truth, as the timeless giver of life, purifies and illumines both heart and mind, so that when the Spirit awakens, it is experienced as a rushing, mighty wind (Acts 2:2), or as a roar of many waters (Rev 14:2). The experience of Pentecost may initially leave seers overwhelmed and struck dumb, even shattered, whereas when elders are able to offer steady support, saints who initially feel suspended between life and death, begin, through spiritual illumination, to live their death and die into divine, timeless life, becoming a stable foundation for glorification. The body reveals itself to be the radiant energy of uncreated light when the single eye of wisdom awakens (Mt 6:22-23). So called, ‘fools for Christ,’ are those in whom profound spiritual awakening may be accompanied by a state of mental instability or even derangement of some kind.
When grace pierces the heart, the mind descends into the heart to where the Spirit is praying unceasingly in Christ, awakening the heart to the timeless well-being of glory. To awaken to the body of light can initially be a frightening ordeal if uncreated energy appears to overwhelm our capacity to integrate the experience. In some souls, manic expansion may turn into depressive contraction, calling for a balanced grounding of these energies in stillness. The Name integrates awareness and presence at centre with saving wholeness, holding together what might otherwise fly apart. Grace purifies, then illumines the contrary, subtle energies of fallen states, integrating them from throne to crown. These energies are created heavenly but may be experienced as hellish to the extent that falls from glory have deranged them. Hell fire, from God’s side, is actually a living flame of love but vanity and pride resist love, first turning love into burning remorse, then into burning tears, then purifying fire, enlightening light and ultimately deifying glory. The grace of the Name is a union of wisdom and glory expanding into boundless awareness and infinite presence. The way of union embraces truth and life as it unites wisdom and glory, pure awareness with pure presence.
The eye of wisdom unites with the crown of glory when the Spirit of prophecy awakens the heart, uniting active and receptive awareness with active and receptive presence in God-centred survival, God-centred safety and God-centred security, which is the revelation of the throne below that sustains the crown above. If active awareness does not unite with receptive presence, fire burns confusion without water dissolving division, leading to destructive subtle war, not peace. The alchemy of peace is crucial and is ignored at a price. The wholesome circulation of the Chariot throne grounds wisdom in God’s God-centred glorification of God, uniting mind and heart in every illumined eye of spirit, radiating God-centred glorification throughout the Kingdom of the hallowed Name. If this union is not a healthy one, unhealthy degeneration sets in, microcosmically and macrocosmically. But true health is not a conditioned created phenomenon, but an unconditioned divine mystery, a union of unconditioned awareness and unconditioned presence in mind and heart. Divine-humanity in Christ is how things really are, to which prophecy bears witness. We believe and trust it because it is true, not because for us our beliefs make it true.
Occasionally, illumination occurs in combination with psychological confusion that generates spiritual confusion instead of union and hinders the healing of division, leading to a state of dislocation or dissociation instead of steadfast communion. Elders then give attention to healthy, individuated indivisibility to support the experience of illumination. Sometimes, illumination occurs in those who are still experiencing basic psychological integration, with the result that the eye of wisdom is distanced, even demonised. Elders, respecting the rights of psychological integration, freely bear with temporary demonisation out of wise and generous love, so that wholesome love ultimately breaks through. Occasionally, the gift of powers like healing may lead to temporary inflation, in which case elders point to the wisdom of profound humility. Sometimes, a predeliction for occultism leads to satanic inflation, in which case humble deflation is required to restore union to healthy communion. In an age of nihilistic materialism, symptoms of spiritual imbalance are regularly misdiagnosed and even healthy illumination is pathologised.
Sacred iconography never lost its awareness that saints and halos belong together, long after the union of mind and heart had become a very distant notion among nominal Christians. This meant that the symbolism of crowning was able to point to the experience of spiritual coronation, long after mystical theology disappeared in favour of the syllogisms of the academy. Doctorates were generally preferred, instead of the desert education of spiritual glorification, because worldly success, not spiritual illumination, was the order of the day. But the Spirit of truth gives life to heart and mind that academic study cannot do, except when prophecy infuses it with uncreated light. Holy fathers of old ably united both, proving that the dualistic division characteristic of modernity was never inevitable. The prayer of the Spirit in the heart is unceasing, but its power and glory remains unacknowledged unless it is discerned by wisdom. Graced fulness is unconscious until the mind and heart unite. Repetition of Patristic formulations falls far short of real Patristic transmission, which is renewed when wisdom breaks free of all Patristic sophistry. The Spirit proceeds from the Father to abide in the Son, revealing what it really means to abide in Christ. The Spirit’s witness is an infusion of inspired pedagogy in every generation.
The deifying union of mind and heart is not confined to the mind or the heart but radiates out into every centre of God-centred awareness. The sevenfold completeness of the fullness of wisdom was profoundly familiar to prophets and apostles, who handed it on through elders to saints as purification and illumination of the heart, leading to the fully conscious experience of death, resurrection ascension and glorification in Christ. The Spirit is uncreated breath but it does not follow that air without wisdom is deifying. The sun is an important symbol of uncreated glory but it does not follow that exposure to sunlight is defying. The ocean is a cleansing icon of the waters of uncreated presence, but surfing alone cannot glorify saints. But the Spirit, who is everywhere present and fills all things, does deify by proceeding from the Father to abide in Christ, who as the central axis of uncreated light, enthrones and crowns saints. The union of wisdom and glory in the heart expands awareness way beyond time and space, but temporal and spatial awareness contracts them. Confusion with the human off-centre confines but union with God at centre liberates. The union of the mind and the heart steers a middle way between the jagged rocks of time and space, avoiding confusion and division by embracing wholesome difference in healthy communion. Spiritual union, abiding in Christ, is the heart of healthy communion, an ineffable union which mirrors the deifying energy of the uncreated mind of Christ awake in the heart.