Desert monks talking about silence of the mind

[Tad]

Here is an interesting video of desert monks talking about life in seclusion and using Jesus prayer to attain silence of the mind.

Father Lazarus teaches American pilgrim about silence and the Jesus prayer
https://youtu.be/ccAaMhSW_PY

[Alexander]

The Greek church has the teaching of hesychasm which is silencing the mind/contemplative prayer. This is one advantage of the Greek church over the westerners. I also appreciate them for their retention of mystery -- essential to communicate the higher truths of faith -- as well as for their elegant spiritual art.

If you are interested in this there is a book series called the Philokalia which includes a lot of ascetic & practical writings. There is a lot of good stuff/revealed knowledge in there. I also recommend The Ladder of Divine Ascent by John Climacus which is certainly a revealed text. He is probably one of the finest spiritual psychologists.

I thought about joining them at one point. They are, of course, susceptible to the same vices of all institutional religions. They can be very closed minded and provincial. They also lack clear explanations of the higher contemplative states, such as the out-of-body experience. I read the writing of one delusional monk who said the out-of-body experience went against Christian teaching. I think he's missing the point of the religion, hehe.

[Tad]

Hello Alexander,

Recently Ive been trying to spent some time exploring Christianity a little more. I read about different orders of monks, which was interesting. I learned about a desert father named Evagrius Ponticus who lived around the 2nd century. His practice and teachings were very impressive that I even ordered a little book.

It is uplifting to see that there are still some Christian monks that use ascetic and meditative practices. But like you said, unfortunately the mainstream church has done lots of damage to Christianity as a whole. It would be so nice if Christianity had remained fully mystic. Some Christian monks wear really cool uniforms with hoods. Too bad their doctrine is so limited. On the other hand, sometimes I think that the wise ones make great progress even in restricted institutionalized environment as long as it is less distractive than the regular human life.

For quite a while I tried finding a solid explanation of Jesus teachings since there is so much controversy about him. I think I finally did. I discovered a hindu/sufi teacher, Meher Baba, who gave teachings about Jesus that make more sense to me than anything Ive seen before. I highly recommend reading:
http://www.meherbabadnyana.net/life_eternal/Jesus_life.html

Anyway, I barely have time/energy for exploring religions and teachers. So for the most part I just try to dedicate some time for studying my favorite early Buddhist teachings (the pali canon) and doing practice which is essentially what Jhananda recommends.

[Alexander]

I agree. I deeply admire Christ and John the Baptist, who certainly lived an ascetical/monastic life as you say, and which later became the basis for Christian mysticism.