The mystic experience must be assisted by a daily and incessant prayer polarized in the region of the heart: the place where the “Inner Light” is experimented. About this, Saint John Climacus in the “Ladder to Paradise” (step 23:129) writes: “The Monk is a light that does not extinguish in the eye of the heart”.

 

But what is this Inner Light? It is not easy to give a definition because it is an experience, and to the extent of our experience the words take a particular meaning. The study of the “Inner Light” leads to the penetration of the most intimate regions of the human personality, at the point where the divine and the human meet.

 

The “Inner Light” is the intimate embrace with the Christ-Light, the Christ absolute perfection, absolute Wisdom, absolute Love, the totality of all the perfections; a Christ vibration, a welding with God. It is that: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; who has seen me has seen the Father; nobody goes to the Father except through me”, experimented in the heart as the Everlasting and Inner Light, realized as Illumination.

Saint John the Evangelist, in his Prologue to the 1st chapter of the Gospel, states precisely that Jesus of Nazareth incarnated the “Logos” or “Eternal Word”, which was eternally the “Life” and the “Light” of Humankind. Of this light signs are found in other Scriptures: The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Todol); The Egyptian Book of the Dead; the Koran; Zend-Avesta; the Zohar.

 

The divine Light exists before Humankind and so it is logical that all the Scriptures of different Peoples speak of it. One needs, certainly, to know how to see in the other Scriptures. It is hard to describe what is the experience to have God in the heart, when the heavy sensations of bodily gravity are suspended, and like the dead in Paradise, in the splendor and beauty of Paradise, God gives Himself in an embrace of Light, in a surge of Love which burns, transmutes, deifies. All this, as long as the experimenter is physically living, will be experienced for a certain length of time, because all vanishes on resuming the ordinary consciousness of waking.

 

The benefit of the bath of Light will remain. But such an experience will help when we die and we must repeat it in order not to lose our way. The dying must know how to recognize the Clear Light, the Uncreated Light, but if they have not experimented before it will not easily be recognized after the passing.

 

A great writer has explained many things about the Light, and we quote him gladly because he writes as an Archeosopher : Vladimir Lossky- The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church.

 

After all we have said, allow us not to define, for now, what the “Inner Light” is: you will know it with experience, a particular physiological and metaphysiological experience, because you will not live it outside your body, but in the blood which flows in your heart.

 

The blood, passing and re-passing through the capillaries of the lungs, oxygenizes, becomes red, vigorous, frees itself from toxins, poisonous gas and of the vital energy which has become antivital.

 

In truth, we say to you, having experimented it ourselves, that the blood which passes through the heart in the state of prolonged Illumination undergoes an analogous process of regeneration owed to the Light of Christ. This phenomenon is controllable and measurable by a seer of high level. In the anatomic sense, the heart of certain saints, after death, was revealed as histologically and morphologically changed. It is the history of Mysticism that records this astonishing manifestation: the renewal or the change of the hearts.

 

It is the physical extraction of the heart of flesh and the real substitution with another similar to that of Christ. Among the historical cases quoted by the Church we have those of St. Catherine of Siena, St. Margaret M. Alacoque, St. Michael de Sanctis, St. Catherine de’ Ricci, St. Ludgard, etc.

The change of the hearts is, in our opinion, a modification of the vital currents in harmony with the inner mystical state . Who is able to immerse themselves in the splendor of
Christ established in the heart is transfigured by this Light of Eternal Love; it is like taking a bath inside the Sun. The method to obtain this is ancient; dating back to the Prophets, to the first Apostles, the Christian Fathers of the desert, Grecian, Russian and of Asia Minor.

 

It is the prayer of Origen, Gregory of Palamas, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Thaumaturgus, John Climacus; it is the preparation for the Merkabàh of Ezekiel. So, always remember to be
exiled gods, who must practice the prayer of the heart full of Love to always remain in the Perpetual Light.

 

Tommaso Palamidessi

excerpt from "THE INNER LIGHT AND THE PREMISSES TO THE MEDITATION IN THE HEART"

from the 11th Booklet