Home > Hesychasm

1 The Hesychastic prayer

In practice, the Hesychastic prayer bears some superficial resemblance to mystical prayer or meditation in Eastern religions ( Buddhism, Hinduism, compare with Yoga), although this similarity is often overly emphasized in popular accounts.

For example, it may involve specific body postures, and be accompanied by very deliberate breathing patterns. It involves acquiring an inner stillness, ignoring the physical senses. The hesychasts interpreted Christ's injunction in the Gospel of Matthew to "go into your closet to pray", to mean that they should ignore sensory input and withdraw inwards to pray. It often includes many repetitions of the Jesus Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.". While some might compare it with a Mantra, to use the Jesus Prayer in this fashion is to violate its purpose. One is to never treat it as a string of syllables for which the "surface" meaning is secondary. Likewise, hollow repetition is considered to be worthless (or worse than worthless) in the hesychast tradition.

Saint Theophan the Recluse once related that body postures and breathing techniques were virtually forbidden in his youth, since, instead of gaining the Spirit of God, people succeeded only "in ruining their lungs."

1.1 Gregory Palamas: defender of Hesychasm

Hesychasm was defended theologically by Gregory Palamas at about three separate Hesychast Synods in Constantinople in the 1340s; he was asked to by his fellow monks on Mt. Athos to defend it from the attacks of Barlaam of Calabria, who advocated a more intellectual approach to prayer.

2 See also

• Christianity
• Eastern Orthodoxy
• MysticismMysticism is meditation, prayer, or theology focused on the direct experience of union with divinity, God, or Ultimate Reality, or the belief that such experience is a genuine and important source of knowledge. Perspectives of mysticism A wide range of pe
• Philokalia
• The Way of a PilgrimThe Way of a Pilgrim is the English title of an 19th century anonymous Russian autobiographical work, detailing the narrator's journey across the country while practicing the Jesus Prayer devoutly, with the help of a prayer rope and the study of the Philo
• MeditationMeditation usually refers to a state of extreme relaxation and concentration, in which the body is generally at rest and the mind quieted of surface thoughts. Several major religions include ritual meditation; however, meditation itself need not be a reli
• Prayer
• TheosisIn Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic theology, theosis meaning deification or divinization is the call to man to become holy and seek union with God, beginning in this life and later consummated in the resurrection. Theosis comprehends our salvation f
• ChakraIn Hinduism and its spiritual systems of yoga and in some related eastern cultures, as well as in some segments of the New Age movement, a chakra (from the Sanskrit word for wheel, circle is thought to be an energy node in the human body. The seven main c (Hesychastic centres of prayer--not an Orthodox Christian use of the term)