So we, we want to move now to the Byzantine or Orthodox mystical world, the world of the Eastern churches, the

Greek and Russian Orthodox churches. We're speaking really geographically if we're speaking of really after the 16th century. So we're not speaking anymore about Turkey but we are speaking about the Balkans, especially Greece, Romania and big parts of Russia. So we're really speaking about the Eastern part of Europe. Now, why did I start with Eastern Europe rather than with Western or Central Europe? This is because I'm speaking about a movement. Hesychasm, the mystical movement of the eastern churches, of Byzantine Orthodox Churches. And this movement, we can find the strong, not the strongest, but strong evidence for contact of the mystical movement that we spoke about with the Hasidic world in the 18th century. Now we'll find similar context also when we move to Western Europe, but here the con, context are quite striking, and it's a good place to start. because we're using really again the method of controlled comparison, we'll see parallels today with the Muslim world which was still active and is still active in the Balkan area, we'll see parallels with even developments further east. Of course Russia, we're speaking about the Eurasian context, the Asian context is not far behind. Also when we're speaking about Turkey and countries like that which and we'll speak also about other Mediterranean countries when we speak about the earlier routes of Hesychasm of the Orthodox mysticism. So the East is not far away. However, again the method of controlled comparison is always to focus on modern Europe. And especially to focus on movements or developments where there may have been contact with Kabbalistic developments as well, due to our central focus on Kabbalah. Now, again due to the central focus, I'm not a scholar of, of Hesychasm. I'm a Kabbalah scholar.

I meant to read these texts as a Kabbalah scholar. We'll be focusing on the more striking parallels to Kabbalistic Hasidic thought. I'll try and give my own take on it, I don't have any pretense to expertise here, so forgive me for, I don't always transliterate or pronounce the Greek or Russian terms correctly. Now, what I want to do now, is because of this difference, where, whereas in the case of the Kabbalistic text we did a close reading. Of Rabbi Kook's text. Here I want to do what's called a semi-close reading. That is, I'm not going to have the text in front of you, I'm going to summarize a couple of texts. But semi-close because I'm not going to summarize entire chapters in one fast swoop. But really, read it almost to the level of a page, not a paragraph but of a page. Now I want to speak a bit about the pre-modern roots of Hesychasm and focus on those things which are relevant to our theme, to psychology. Now, we don't focus much on the pre-modern, so I'll go through this rather quickly. Basically, we're speaking about a movement which grows out of the monastic movement of the Desert Fathers in various locations. And the strong location here, which is of course close to my heart, in terms of my own region, is in, in Palestine, in Gaza. And we'll speak soon about Sinai, which is not far from here, in Egypt. Where I used to go every every spring as a child. And we'll be speaking about re, religions which are very close to where I'm sitting relatively speaking. Now, this movement developed especially around the turn of the millennium, the writings of Symeon the, the New Theologian around the year 1000. And another big wave of development in the 14th century, especially two figures, the two Gregorys, Gregory of Palamas and Gregory of Sinai, again, Sinai. And then another big wave in the 18th, 19th

century which have took place in Greece and in Russia. And really in the history of the movement one specific location in Greece is very important. That's the monastery on Mt Athos. Where in the 14th century, not at the same time but the two Gregorys had periods there. And really Athos became to a large extent the center of the Hesychast movement. Now, this is, gives the geographical frame. We've got the origins in the fourth, fifth century. We've got distant origins. We've got a certain wave around the year 1000. We have a bigger wave in the 14th century. Accompanied, as we often find with mystical movements like controversies, there's a big controversy in the fourth century. Gregory of Palamas defends the Hesychast movement, and another move in the 18th, 19th century, which we'll focus on soon, I think that's the main focus for today. And another big wave today is actually a book about the global revival of Hesychasm. Again, I'll not always trouble you with all the details of every single book, just to know that there is a book about that. And the, there's certainly a revival of certain techniques. Now I want to speak about two themes in a movement. The somatic and the psychological. But of course also meet with, I would, you could call it a psychosomatic form of mysticism. But first I want to speak about the physical aspects of the move, of the techniques developed in the movement. The focus here is on mantra-like and I'm deliberately using the Eastern term, repetition of short phrases related to the name of God, related to the name of Jesus, and especially a very brief text known as the Jesus prayer. Which has various versions, but the gist of it is Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner. Now we've got three ideas here. We've got the idea of the mercy of Christ,

we've got the idea of the me, the self, whatever it is. That needs mercy. And the definition of the self through sin. And these are three themes that will recur in today's discussion. Now, the idea of repetition is not mere repetition. But just like in far Eastern techniques and also near Eastern techniques of Islamic mysticism, of Sufism. We have idea of repetition of phrases, accompanied by two things. One is by breathing. That is, the repetition is paced through breath. That is, so we've got the, the phrase itself, which through repetition sort of engraves itself on the unconscious mind. The idea of repetition. Create an unconscious clusters of meaning, is well known from hypnosis. We've got the, the use of breathing, which is very common in the entire mystical world. The idea of breathing, I think, is because it's a sort of bridge between the conscious and the unconscious. So something which we have conscious control of, but we're not entirely conscious of it most of the time. And then a third thing is visualing psychic centers. The idea is to descend from the head into the heart especially, that's why it's often called the prayer of the heart. And also descending even further below into the navel, again reminiscent of eastern techniques related to the hara, this, the, the, the belly, the tan t'ian, the navel area. I use a Japanese term, the Chinese term is dantian or tan t'ian. So the idea is to focus on what's called psychic centers. That if one centers in along the center line of the body, on certain areas which are both physically significant. The heart obviously. The navel, that's where we got our nutrition before we were born.

It's where a lot of the breathing happens, the internal organs. But also psychologically, emotions are on the heart. Emotional intelligence, if we could call it, in, in the guts, gut feeling, you know, in the stomach. So that's the third element. We've got repetition breathing, and naturally breathing will, we breathe into the chest, we breathe into the belly. And another thing is the idea of light, that one has to imagine these psychic centers filled with light. Now, here I've more or less summarized the history of the movements and I've summarized the somatic techniques, and what we're going to do now is we're going to go into more detail about the psychological aspects of the movement. So, already we focused on the idea of the heart. And we focused on the idea of constant prayer. The whole idea of a Jesus prayer is one of constant prayer, of praying all the time. Constantly repeating this phrase and others, prayer not as something which happens at set, designated times during the day in some ritual context, but as a constant occupation. And now, what I want to do in the next section, subsection, is to focus a bit more geographically on the 18th, 19th century and the possible meeting of Hasidism, and to focus also more on the psychological.