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WEB 4 - ARCHIVE
Commentary 14 - Page 4 |
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Darkness of
the psyche The Hermit's Message
Way of Theosis Psychological method Prayer of the heart
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Fallen man most of the time appears to consist only of these two elements. The psyche forms and grows while life exists in the body. It departs when life departs. The Greek word means activity of psyche: this is the constant activity of life, it is ever-changing psychology. In the everyday state of human consciousness there remains no certain idea that there exists anything permanent beyond the constantly changing activity of the psyche.
But in this model there is a mystery about the nature of awareness and attention which remains unanswered. Every schoolteacher knows that when we attend we remember better. We know that attention connects us to what is happening, helps us understand it, sometimes changes the way it happens. But in this model, attention is like a piece of string with only one end! We see whatever falls within the sphere of attention, but attention itself continues to lie outside that sphere. Palamas writes that: “As for us, we not only recollect our nous into our body and then in our heart, but within itself.” A little later he adds: “… in fact the nous is not like the eye, which sees the different visible objects but cannot see itself. “The nous operates in one way in its function of exterior observation: (This is what the great Dionysius calls the movement of the nous “along a straight line.”) “It has another way in which it comes back to itself, then acts from itself, then becomes aware of itself.” It is only at this point, when the nous is entirely withdrawn from all sensations of the outside world, of the body, and of the psyche, that it becomes aware of its own existence.
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