I am worm, I am slave, I am king, I am God. ~ Gabriel Derjavine

The “to be silent” therefore precedes the “to know”, the “to will” and the “to dare”. This is why the Pythagorean school prescribed five years silence to beginners or “hearers”. One dared to speak there only when one “knew” and “was able to”, after having mastered the art of being silent—that is to say, the art of concentration. The prerogative “to speak” belonged to those who no longer spoke automatically, driven by the game of the intellect and imagination, but who were able to suppress it owing to the practice of interior and exterior silence, and who knew what they were saying—again thanks to the same practice. The silentium practised by Trappist monks and prescribed for the time of “retreat”, generally to all those there who are taking part, is only the application of the same true law: “Yoga is the suppression of the oscillations of the mental substance” or “concentration is the willed silence of the automatism of the intellect and imagination”. ~ Valentin Tomberg

The theme of this past Sunday’s sermon was self-knowledge. It began with the notion that we are to know, love, and serve God. The priest pointed out that we cannot serve what we don’t love. Moreover, we cannot love what we don’t know (except perhaps in an abstract way). These are the three forms of a Christian yoga: jnani yoga (to know God), bhakti yoga (to love God), and karma yoga (to serve God). They are also analogous to the three rules of Hermetism:

• To know
• To will
• To dare

Although “to be silent” is usually the fourth rule, Tomberg puts it first. Interior silence is the “suppression of the oscillations of the mental substance”. As we learned from Plotinus, the Intellective Act cannot be known unless the soul is able to reflect it; that is, it must be free of arbitrary oscillations.

Knowledge of the Real I

Hence, to know God, one must first know oneself in order to find and eliminate the sources of these perturbations of the soul. What separates Hermetism from philosophy is that the former depends on certain exercises, not being limited to the discursive thought of the latter. For example, the traditional teaching is that the human being has, besides a physical body, three levels of the soul: the intellectual soul, the sensitive soul, the nutritive soul (although the names may be translated differently). In our work, we may use different designations for the same thing:

These, then, are known, not through philosophy, science or reasoning, but rather through direct observation. To know oneself, one has to understand how each of these centres operates, and how they interoperate, in one’s own life. However, the soul forms a unity, at least virtually, so there is no sharp separation. A deeper observation shows how parts of each of the souls interpenetrate each other. Thus, there is intelligence in the sensitive and nutritive souls, as well as automatic and emotional parts of the intellectual soul.

The first stage of self-knowledge is to recognize that our soul life is fragmented into a multiplicity of I’s, often in conflict with each other. Thomas Aquinas says that “everything is knowable so far as it is in act, and not, so far as it is in potentiality [or virtual]” (Question 87). Hence, the soul cannot be known as long as it is only a virtual unity. The Real I, which exists only in potential, must be actualised. The actualisation of this Real I is an act of concentration that unites all the apparent disparate parts of the soul.

NOTE: there are higher centres than those enumerated here, but they are not the topic of this post.

Levels of Being

One then sees that there are four levels of being, corresponding to differing understanding of the I.

The subconscious is active, for example, during sleep or in the autonomous functions of the organism. It also refers to those inner acts that affect our soul life, even when we are not conscious of them.

Waking consciousness is our normal state throughout the day, as it is what we are given as fallen human beings. However, self-observation shows that this state is really not fully conscious. We can see that it seldom rises above daydreams the operate just under awareness. It is subjective, leading to features like partisanship, querulousness, confabulation, fanaticism. The deleterious effects on social life are the results of a population stuck in this state.

Self consciousness is not given to us naturally, except perhaps in unusual conditions like boundary situations or in activities requiring extreme concentration. This is the state of objective consciousness, that of the just man.

Absolute consciousness is the consciousness of the Absolute. This is how we know God. The Beatific Vision is to know God in His essence.

This state is related to the notion of theosis. We can start with the attributes of God, the unmoved mover, for example. If the actualisation of the I is deep enough, one can get a sense of what it means to be an unmoved mover: the I observes, but is not disturbed by external events.