Walter Hilton (1320-1395)

July 26, 1983. This is the eighth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Ware on the mystic century. Tonight's lecture is entitled Walter Helton who live 1320 to 1395. He is the author of a book called the ladder of perfection.
This, um, I will try to reshape and recut a little bit of some of the ideas too, to highlight them because we're dealing with such a profound and to the rationalizing tendency of the 20th century, academic mind, it's such a mysterious era and it's difficult to assess at a completed motion. The development of Western mystical thought it's much easier to understand Asian mystical thought. It's much easier to go in from scratch and learn about the Bhagavad Gita or the Sophies or the Taoists or the Zen Buddhists than it is to understand Western mystical thought. And one of the real difficulties is that it begins it's such a harmless way, almost off the cuff. One of the earliest protagonists of the Western mystical tradition was a woman named Saint Hildegard canonized letter on Hildegard was born about 10 90 and lived for almost 80 years, 90 years.
And she published nothing until she was in her late fifties. And because a friend of hers, a monk was in correspondence with her. She sent to him a manuscript, which was illustrated by her own hand pictures, unbelievable mystical drawings, full color gilded, and there's explosive mystical insights. And she called it the CVS, which was, um, a contraction for the, um, science of the way Scientia Vivia VAs, SKIVI us. And with Hildegard and her contemporary, who was a finally a protector of hers and put her in contact with the Pope Saint Bernard of Clairvaux to whose experience in mind Hildegard was the most profound voice of his age. He said, and at the same time you had the two geniuses, the victories, Hugh of Saint Victor, and Richard of Saint Victor. So at the beginnings of the 12th century, you have this sudden explosion of four or five individuals who knew each other very well coming out of what had been a barren plane of human aspiration.
They so-called dark ages were not as dark as they were painted at one time, but there was a median, a granulation of human capacity, and it was observed with great wisdom. One time that the only Spire on this whole vast plain of mediocrity was John Skoda, Syrah Eugena, but suddenly in the 12th century, you have the explosion of the appearance of the mystics on the scene, the transformation of building from actually putting up thatched huts to Gothic cathedrals, all in one fell swoop, one generation, and it's like a mystery play in itself in Western history. How did this come about? And with the raising of sharp, you had the raising of an international civilization. So that by the end of the 12th century, Europe looked like one of its grandis ages. There was thoughts so profound that when it was next taken up again, it was taken up by the 17th century and turned into science and turned into, um, the reformation and turned into the nation state. And all of the things that we identify as the beginnings of the modern world actually came out of the word work about 700 years ago.
But in that movement, there was the drive to make a social expression of it, to draw it out from talented individuals who were pioneering out on the edges of sensibility on the Vanguard of thought on the very edges of possibility of social implication. There was a tremendous desire to share this information, share these discoveries, make a community available for these insights. And after several generations of this endeavor, there arose simultaneously the split personality of the European mind. One faction wanted to keep this information under lock and key and parcel it out only to those who were deserving, who supported an existing authoritarians order, which would then be perpetuated. And on the other side, there was, there were those who said, this is free for everyone. Anyone may have this because the fount of the information is a personal experience and individual experience.
And without the individual confirmation of this material in an actual life, it will jail us forever because it is such a powerful synthesis of many perspectives and several civilizations and cultures that without the freedom to experience and confirm for himself almost no man would be able to stack his short lifetime and his limited capacity to understand against this masterful synthesis. And so the church came in possession of both these traditions. At the same time you had, you had on one hand the authority of the church bolstered by an intellectual understanding that had been founded by the broad genius of Albertus Magnus honed to a fine filigree by the profound mind of Thomas Aquinas raised to the level of massive power politics by Saint Dominic and to the very fine mystical point by Meister Eckhart so that the Dominican order alone had made the Catholic church, a profound entity, a massive structure, and yet at the apex of its receiving this capacity, it found itself totally dispossessed. And the Pope's were thrown out of the Vatican. They were driven out of Rome and they were sent into exile in the Southern France around oven young. And there are the French Kings very quickly realizing that they had a very powerful tool in their hand, made sure that they had the throat of the Pope's in one hand and their own Septor in the other.
So from 1309 to 1377, the papel authorities were an exile in France and Avignon, the Southern France. And this was alluded to in writing, after writing in the 14th century, as the Babylonian captivity of Christianity, alluding back to the Babylonian captivity of the Jewish people under the Persians and the parallels were looked for with stringent, uh, expectation that somehow in all this, there must arise a Daniel of the Christian Church. There must arise someone for whom the experience of exile would have been the culminating significance for what otherwise was a travesty of history that at its culminating point at its apex of receiving authority and position and understanding and justification, it was thrown out. And then the added complication that when the [inaudible] was brought back from Xcel, from oven in 1377, the following year, the papacy split, and there were two papel lineages for 40 years until 1477, there were two different Pope lineages, two different, this great schism added fuel to the expectation that perhaps the significance of all this was that the church itself had fractured in history because there was some other quality needing to be born.
And the live wire integrated into any circuitry errand and it's buzzing around loose was the great profound ideas of walking to Fiora that soon, if not around 1260, but soon thereafter, there would be the age of the Holy ghost that there'd been an age of the father. There had been an age of the son, and now there would come an age of the Holy ghost, a third age characterized instead of by law or by love, by a wildcard spirit that went where it would that there was no longer a law grid to constrain it. And there was perhaps no longer a love interchange to mellow it and that some new quality, massive and wild and its unpredictability had come in possession of the world.
And as this idea grew and the feeling tones of human beings like ourselves began to rise in anxiety over what this might be, not only what it might portend, but where are we going? Whether there does history flow with all this increased capacity and in the midst of all of this avalanche of possibility, there came the Dole tinny clunk of the wooden nickel and the collection box that may be in all this, we are being deceived. Maybe we have fallen into the devils on the wildly deceiver. And so there Rose a great climber to have some way to tell what is legitimate spiritual experience and what is this unbelievably subtle counterfeit, spiritual experience from the deceiver. And in this, of course, the concern was how may we have rules of thumb whereby we may test, first of all, our own experience, how do we know that we are being led on in a spirit of true light, the deceiver Wiley close to an incredible victory exiled because of a pride fullness in his own nature and capacity needed only the companionship of man and his pride to steal the universe from God and with such high stakes, what links might he go to?
And on the other hand, the question was, how do we know about the other person? How do I know about your experience? How do you know about mine? And so the unruly lion's mane of the inquisition began to shake its hairs, ruffle its static, electricity in the air, and the age became one of incredible confusion.
And in this confusion, in the psychological melodrama that went on decade after decade, the 14th century became for those living in it, a veritable nightmare, and right at the very core of the century as if to split it in half by Columbia T piled upon apocalypse, the black death swept down on Europe and decimated the population. We have to even reverse that it left only a 10th of the population alive. 90% of many communities were wiped out and the Rhine Valley suffered earthquakes after earthquake some so devastating that the entire city of basil Baal was leveled to the ground.
All of this scene, absolute confirmation, not only to sensitive spirits at the time, but even the Dallas person on the street that something terrible was wrong with history. And who was the protectiveness in history, man, it wasn't the birds and the trees that had sinned. Somehow it wasn't the lilies in the field. It was man. He had done something. He had stepped out of line in such a massive way that stock had to be taken all over again of the entire inventory of human capacity. And in this incredible age, some of the finest minds of all time came into manifestation and we've seen with Meister Eckhart and with Yohanas taller yacht and Roy's Brock Richard raw. It was like a roll call of the great saints of all time coming back into manifestation, trying to put together again, a sense of man's continuity based upon his finest capacity, his ability to form a circle of meaning with his intelligence to permeate that structure with his sensitivity and through that sensitivity to extend transcendentally his understanding beyond this structure, but keeping it intact to the very sources of energy, God himself in the universe and what he needed to know more than anything else was with all this refinement now and in the presence of this tremendous anxiety and in face of obvious oblivion any day.
Now, what image do I register within myself about God?
What in me comes to the fore and this strenuous striation at the very breaking point of capacity. What image have I of God now? And that of course became the shocker of the age, because again and again, the image that came up that was confirmable by exact experience by step-by-step procedures to the point again, and again, was that man's ultimate image of God was nothing. Absolutely no thing. Absolutely. And this of course scared man, because he had been expecting that there must be somewhere ultimately a white haired wise person who will take care of the situation. And instead there was a vast darkness, not even a darkness, nothing and yet quietly holding courageously to that. Nothing for years on end, there came to be sensitive minds, sensitive spirits who began to characterize that experience as a light shocked darkness, that there were tinges of lightning in that never notice.
And that somehow out of that mysteriousness, all that was experienced came to be. But in order to sustain that courage, there needed to be just as we're discovering again, in our time a community of brethren who took care of each other in a primordial way and in a physical way, in a social way so that they could sustain this incredible strain, this pilgrimage into the edge of nowhere. And so the social origins of European thought had its root in the experience of this incredible nothingness of the divine capacity. And so society and religion developed complementarity and the core of politics is a religious perspective of man's puny, venous face of the, all. There was no other reason to come together to cooperate together, to found institutions together on larger scales, except to sustain us in view of this enormous unsettling confirmable perception.
So that the development of the sec, like the brethren of the free spirit and the friends of God and the brethren of the common life go hand in hand in the 14th century with the pioneering probes of the great mystics of that age. And the only way to follow that age, which is really the supportive horizon for our own is to follow the only clues that were left to us, the writings of those great mystics themselves. It's the only way to find our way out of that jungle of possibility. We cannot follow a history of military battles. We cannot follow a history of land holding families and nation States. There is no way to follow the history of the ideas up to our own time. None of those methods yields exactness and understanding they yield theories and counter theories, odd infinitum, but the only real understanding comes by going back to those human beings, who in that time represented the temperature, the barometers, the measuring instruments of their wholeness, of what was happening to the spirit of man in this movement.
The great friends of God movement becomes the key the car. And of course your a toddler who was the great individual, bringing the friends of God into connection with groups across the face of Europe. But especially in Strausberg, it was toddler who became the religious advisor to an extraordinary individual named Ruhlman Merce. One who had become a financial genius at a very young age, had made an enormous amount of money. And who decided at the apex of his life around 40 years of age to devote all of his fortune to the manifesting of God's work and his time not to give the money up, not to give it away or throw it away, but to use it.
And in this tendon between taller and Merce one, and these groups called the friends of God, a whole curious literature sprang up between 1350 and about 1380 on the continent of Europe. Now read you some of the titles. There are 16 titles, and you begin to get some idea of what was being talked about and said in this cyclotron of man's mystical capacity to integrate reality, these were the scientists of their day and they were working with the powers of the human being experimenting. And this group of pamphlets, small tracks was written and kept intact. And these are the titles. The first one is two 15 year old boys. The second, the imprisoned Knight, the third, the story of Ursula and Adelaide. These are life stories you see, and also mythological prototypes. The two Holy nuns in Bavaria, the spiritual stairway, the spiritual letter, the spark in the soul, a lesson for a younger brother of the order story of a man endowed with worldly wisdom, a revelation given to a friend of God on Christmas night, a young man of the world warnings, which the friend of God sent to the people, the book of the banner of Christ, the three halting places, the seven works of mercy, the book on prevent yet grace and this entire literature of the friends of God came into existence at that time.
And then as if these were Western European 14th century, you punish shards, there came a document which took the cream of all of them, the essence of the totality of them, and like the Bhagavad Gita becoming the punish out of the Upanishads a very strong, forceful, mystical document emerged called the Theologica Dramatica the Theologica Dramatica.
And 200 years later, when the loose ends of this tradition would be taken up again by the late Renaissance, by the individuals that we have looked at in another tradition, the good Abbott for thymus would rescue the theological Dramatica from the dusty shells dusted off and re-publish it and bring it out. And the readers included Martin Luther, who thought it was the most powerful book that he had read and they entire reformation comes out of the Theologica Dramatica and it links up to great FX, two great arrows together by this one live wire and in the theological Dramatica many chapters, it's about 134 pages and translation in English. Hard to find hard to find friends. I look for five years to find this chapter 10 is entitled how the perfect man have men have no other desire than that. They may be to the eternal goodness, what his hand is to a man and how they have lost the fear of hell and hope of heaven. They've lost both the fear of hell and the hope of heaven. That is to say they like in the Bhagavad Gita have acquired an equanimity of spirit, a yoga of purpose that neither the carrot, nor this tech have any influence any longer upon them, they are free dynamic and moving to manifest an incarnate.
The reality. And we are so used to saying the reality behind, whereas they would say the reality before let the physicality of the universe is what is behind it. But before it coming out of it, like a Holy vapor manifesting, the real is God, no one else, nothing else just, and only, and exactly that in this enormous millionaire of development. And then these complications, there came to be the need on the part of the church to get some reins of control back upon the situation, to get some purchase upon this and not just the church, but that religious experience was becoming free form. It was having any shape whatsoever. If there were 1000 individuals, there were 1000 ways to approach God, there needed to be some kind of uniformity brought back in the reason big, of course, that we're dealing only with the cream of the cream that were many abberant traditions, the brother of the free spirit, uh, or counseling that anything would work. And very much like the situation of total spiritual NRK was really coming to a head very quickly. In which case, even the spark in the germ of possible workability on any group would have been drowned in this total anarchy.
The answer to this, the response that counted to this did not come from Europe on the continent, but came from England. It came from England and one of the most profound spiritual works of all time called the Scala. Perfect. The onus, the scale of perfection or the ladder, the stairway, or the ladder of perfection, the very title of one of the mystical tracks of the brother and the friends of God. When Europe, we don't know when he was born, the author's name was Walter Hilton. Then he lived around North Hampton share. He died about 1396, and we suppose that about 1375 that he had given up their hermit's life notice hermit and her medic, uh, have a, uh, correlation you've given up the hermit's life. About 20 years before it's indicated. And several of his writings, I have another one called the goad of love, the stimulus Almarez, which mentions that he had at one time studied at the university of Paris so that whoever Walter was whenever he was born, probably around the time that Eckhart died around the 1320s Hilton came to the fore at a time when everything seemed to be fraying and yet full of possibility.
And with his ladder of perfection or his stairway of perfection, Hilton offered a way by which the spiritual life and its experience could be codified, could be brought into a formed pattern into a step by step procedure, into a, a yoga, which could be taught and confirmed at every step along the way. And so Walter Hilton is an enormously important individual for us to consider in terms of the world, in terms of all history, but in terms of the 14th century, he's a watershed.
Now the English mind, as we've observed before loves X, interesting loves the, the individual who in his own right. Goes off, away from everyone. And does it all the Lawrence of Arabia, that's sort of a character. Walter Hilton wrote the book ostensibly to a woman who was beginning her career as an anchor, right, as an anchor, as they use the feminine. And what this was is that inside the large churches, there were certain individuals who made a lifelong commitment to die to the world and be born to Christ. And they would be taken into the church and given a little area in the church to live in a cell. And then they would be bricked in there would be walled in and they would spend the rest of their lives in that Walden cell in the church. And these were called anchor rites or anchorages. And the whole notion was to die to the world that it no longer had any effect on one whatsoever.
And yet, and yet here's an enormously sophisticated, complicated book written to council, one of the anchor offices. So they had an influence and they had a Concourse with the society of the time, but it was within the peculiar bifurcation that had come to rise. The human cry was for a legitimate spiritual experience trembling all the time that there might be some subtle counterfeit by the devil himself who had roped you in. And so there had to be some kind of proof, some kind of confirmation, and these persons, these anchor rights, and these hermits seemed to offer the best indication of trustability. After all, there was nothing that they were after. There was no element of pride in their work whatsoever. And so Hilton addresses his book. And the very first, there are two books, books, one and books, two book, one has 93 chapters in book two 46 chapters.
Now show you how the two books are different, very different. The first book begins. He says spiritual sister in Jesus Christ. I beg you to consider yourself well-paid in the calling, by which our Lord has summoned you to his service and to remain steadfast in it by the grace of Jesus Christ, labor industriously with all the powers of your soul to bring to the reality of virtuous, living the state, whose image and semblance you have taken on the state whose image Imago and semblance you have taken on. So that the prime Orgill guideline here, the orientation is that a human being has stepped out from the world out from the frame of reference that we would recognize and phenomenal time space and taking themselves into a condition where there is only one image, which they will wish to manifest, not their own face, but the face of spiritual experience as it comes to be. And it's truthful wholeness, whatever that face might be. And because they are manifesting it, not to show to anyone else, they are sealed up, they are walled in, they are to manifest it so that it may come into being in this world, because there is, of course, as we have seen overwhelming need for this, there is a need for God to have lightning rods on the earth so that his energy may come into our ground.
And these anchor rights, these mistakes, these hermits were exactly that they were specifically fashioned to stick out away from everything, to bring the universal energy back into the ground, which lost somehow massively lost its whole capacity to have divine energy flow through it. And the obvious consequence of this travesty, where the earthquakes, the plagues, the Wars, the famines, the incredible times that were there. And the first 15 pages of the stairway of perfection written probably in the 1380s, I would imagine he goes into describing Walter Hilton, does how there are three stages of contemplation, three distinct stages that there is in fact, a way of testing the validity of one's development by ascertaining, whether you have come through these three stages or not, he writes contempt, contemplative life has three stages. The first consists in the knowing of God and spiritual things. This knowledge is obtained through reason human teaching and the study of Holy scripture. It brings with it neither spiritual affection nor inward saver, which are only experienced through a special gift of the Holy spirit. The stage of contemplation belongs, especially to educated men and learn it. Scholars who buy diligent, labor and lengthy study of Holy scripture have come to this knowledge.
And he says, this kind of knowing is good. It is the first stage of contemplation. Then there is a second stage of contemplation. He says in here that the second stage of contemplation consists principally in affection without light for the understanding of spiritual things, commonly simple unlearned men who give themselves diligently to devotion experience this kind of contemplation Bhakti. As we would know it in Asia, it is experienced in this way, writes Hilton, the man or woman by grace of the Holy spirit feels in meditation given by God, the fervor of love and spiritual sweetness as the passion of Christ or any one of the deeds of his manhood comes to mind where he feels a great trust in the goodness and mercy of God, which has forgiven him his sins, or given him great gifts of grace. And there are in fact, two levels of the second stage of contemplation. The first one, the lower level
Is by grace, that
Feeling a fervor does not always come when a man wishes for it, nor does it last, very long. It comes and goes as he wills, who gives it as God wills, it will come and go and it doesn't stay very long. One has sporadic and intermittent experiences of goodness of the feeling tone of elation or dedication, and then it flats out or fades away. And one goes on, but the higher level of the second stage of contemplation can only be experienced and retained by those perfectly at rest and body and soul. In other words, there is an equilibrium focus, attainable whereby we receive in a continuous fashion this goodness, because we have made a receptivity for it. We have in fact, then this level of contemplation, which Hilton then as he always is, want to do, quote st. Paul, whenever he wishes to point to the fact that this not only is his understanding, but is traditional from mystical Christianity from the beginning, he then gives Saint Paul usually from Corinthians in this one. This is from Ephesians. Don't become drunk with wine, but be filled with the Holy spirit, speaking to yourselves in hymns, Psalms and spiritual, canticles singing and saying Psalms in your hearts to our Lord. So that there is the second level of the second stage of contemplation, where there's a continuity of praise occurring within oneself. This image incidentally and Paul.
You remember the transformation of water into wine. It's the transformation of a doctrine, which has no flavor to a doctrine, which has a capacity to produce headiness. It's the taking of the flatted out intellectual understanding and making of it. A living fermented drink. Paul here is going the third step beyond that saying, don't even become drunk with wine, much less drinking, just plain water laws, which have no life in them, or even wine of inspiration, which has capacity to spark you.
Please turn your cassette now. And I'll commence playing a gun on the side after a brief pause.

END OF SIDE 1

Keep just playing water laws, which have no life in them, or even wine of inspiration, which has capacity to spark you. There's something even beyond that, which is the Holy spirit. And remember then, because one of the core, uh, realizations of this is baptism. We don't baptize with water. We baptized with the fire of the Holy spirit and that's beyond the wine. That's beyond the transformation of water into wine that is on a wholly transcendent level, that there are no longer as even any comparison. There are no superlatives. The Holy spirit is not a good, better, best superlative, but it is outside of the frame of measurement whatsoever. And that is this that man then needs to understand is the third level of contemplation. The third stage of contemplation. He says, in fact that Walter Hilton says that the second level very often at its beginning is like milk for children. And later on, it's like sustenance for adults, but then there was a third, a third level. And that in fact, this third level of contemplation is a, you know, something else. And in order to bring ourselves to this third level, we have to realize a difference between meditation and prayer.
A difference that meditation enables us to see and enables us to perceive, to conceive, to understand, but that prayer is different. Prayer enables us to cure. And it's the difference between having a clear vision and being able to do something with that vision totally to restore the wholeness of man. That's one thing to see the wholeness and see the possibility of wholeness. It's a whole other to bring it into doing, to actually do it so that meditation helps us to see, but prayer helps us to cure so that therefore, in these second levels of contemplation, we're concerned all the time with meditation. Then the third level, we're concerned with prayer, with the efficacy of curing, the cure of souls. Somebody wrote a beautiful study of human psychology. One time, the cure of souls and UMES psychology. And this is the purpose not just to see and not just to understand, but to cure and Hilton very often uses the term reform, but he uses it as we would use it radically as restructure, not reform and just turn over a good leaf, but reform in restructuring and re cutting the pattern and going back and seeing what the grain of reality is like and cutting along the grain.
So that then we have that Promethian task of being able to carry divine fire because we know how the Reed cuts. And we know that we can hold in our hand the torch of Liberty, because it took a re cutting of the physical structure of reality in tandem with our spiritual equanimity to bring this about. And that, that only happens when it is true, that there is no way to counterfeit that, that the devil was thrown out of heaven because he felt that he could do that by drawing a picture of it. And God said, nice try no cheese. Bye bye.
So that pride has that. It's all ultimate manifestation of very curious, our, it likes to think it can do, but doesn't want to take the trouble to do because when it takes the trouble to do it falls on its face can't can't. And so pride loves to engender around itself, incredible obstacle so that no one can figure out what it is finally that we should do. And so it goes on and on. And so the most prideful of all spiritual teachers surround themselves all the time with infinite complexity and labyrinthine orders, rules, and stages. And we supposing that way are dedicating ourselves to a mammoth task run. The little wheels like nice mice of these black magicians of the spirit was a false spirit. So that Walter Hilton then says there is a third stage of contemplation, which is as perfect as contemplation can be on earth, consists both in cognition and affection that is in knowing God and loving him perfectly.
This can happen only when a man's soul has first been reformed reformed by the fullness of virtues, to the image of Jesus. Now, Hilton will go on in the first book and he will talk about this image of Jesus, but to leap ahead just a little bit. And I realized that we don't have all the time in the world, but we have to do this, right. He will, at the end of book, one, stop talking about the image of Jesus. And at the beginning of book two, he starts talking about the image of God in the soul. So that the first book is written by a man who is straightening out for himself. The understanding of the Christian religion, according to the Catholic faith, faith, according to the church structure of the time. And then the second book, he is looked over, even that scaffolding and seeing the night sky full of stars. And he says, chapter one, that a man is the image of God and soul and his soul that a man is the image of God and his soul. That's what a man is. That's what a man is. And that's somehow he has to go through this incredible vanishing point of nothingness about himself in order to realize that that's the nothingness applies just to the phenomenal time space. It vanishes to the point they call it in yoga Bindu.
But in that vanishing, there is an infinite horizon that rises in complementation to is a false gods, going to the prideful, veils being lifted. And what comes into Ken then is the reality of God. Neat. You observed once with very great wisdom when the half gods go, God really does come. So that Walter Hilton is concerned in here with making clear the fact that these virtues, which he's singling out, have an architectural quality to them. And he spends many pages on the term, meekness, meekness. We don't mean Clark Kent, nibbling and arrow root biscuit, not that kind of meekness that meekness is anti pride. Meekness is the quality by which pride is sapped of all of its strength and glory, all of its pretension. And that meekness links up like a friend, like a natural process to the very next stage and manifestation of anti pride, which is steadfast faith, steadfast, faith, stiff stiffness, funny Darshawn I think it's called in Sanskrit.
It's the same in the Bhagavad Gita, the man of steadfast wisdom obtains, because in order to keep it steadfast, you have to have an equanimity, which is not pulled one way or the other. And along with meekness and steadfast faith then arises naturally as the third element, making a firm ground is this stability of intention, stability of intention, no more need to make new year's resolutions. You're going to be good, none of that anymore, because the intention has a stability, which is consistent from there on because the intention is not to manifest any quality of yourself, no matter how ingenious, nor to braid any of your great, wonderful powers and capacities into some super conduit of egotism it's to disengage all of that concern and allow another to enter and be there. And what other is there in all the universe? There is only one to God alone is so that with meekness and steadfast faith and stability of intention, pride becomes Sapp. And on page 93, Chilton goes into how to pray because we need them to learn. How do we actually affect this process of cure for ourselves?
The use of prayer is profitable and helpful in acquiring purity of heart, because it destroys and obtains virtues. Not that you need to use prayer to show or explain to our Lord what you desire. You don't have to draw outlines or color in any outlines with the act of prayer because it's referential. If you need to think in terms of referential is transcendental, that doesn't have any appeal to the here and now it opens up the here and now to receive from the beyond. So that prayer is the art of making the unknown, the invisible manifest because you welcome it in. And he goes on to say like a clean container. One receives the grace. Our Lord will give freely to you clean container. And he means clean. The experience sometimes is as if someone had taken a large cotton swab and wiped you out inside. So that there's nothing psychologically or memory or imaginatively left, it's like wiped, clean, big, huge cue tip of the spirit that just wiped you clean.
You could care less, whether it was a rolls Royce or 22 rolls Royces, or whether someone was ready to give you the guilted diploma of universal wisdom. It doesn't make one bit of difference. Hilton says this grace cannot be experienced until you have been tested and purified by the fire of desire and devout prayer. So that in making this space, we literally burn away ourselves parts of ourselves. And this is why prayer is so difficult and why there has to be a stability of intention. And there has to be a steadfast faith. And there has to be quality of meekness structurally there, because prayer is not a nice little harmless thing. It is a cure of souls and it burns away the draws that leaves a hole. It leaves a hole and all those plans and all those desires and all that imagination of what might be if only I had.
And the thing most feared by the ego of course, is having holes in itself that it cannot control. So he says for though, it is true. That prayer does not cause our Lord to give you grace. That is, there is no compulsion in that it doesn't work by a magic sympathy. Nevertheless, it is the route by which freely given grace comes to a soul. It comes because it's freely. Given there is a charity, a Donna, a universal quality in the motion of gun that comes to a man who has made a hole in himself big enough to allow for all of his own plans to have fallen through and evaporated in this, how to pray after he gives the directions, then he brings up the fire of love, what we had last week. Richard roll the fire of love, not so much the book, but the quality of the fire of love and Hilton here. Interestingly says not every man who speaks about the fire of love really knows what it is.
Not everyone who speaks about it really knows what it is. There are often those who have great intuition or great, uh, synthesizing powers who are able to sense somewhat imaginatively, what it might be like. And then hastily speak from that basis. And quite often, the snags that we get in our spiritual teaching come from teachers who have only that capacity. They think they know, and that's not good enough because there is a vast difference in golf between knowing and not knowing, not every man who speaks about the fire of love really knows what it is. I can't tell you what it actually is. And this is the way a man who knows what speed. I can't tell you exactly what it is cause it's not, it's not thing it's not a describable limital definable object, except that it is never physical. It says Walter Hilton. I can't tell you exactly what it is except that it is never physical, nor is it physically felt.
And this produces a conundrum for the pride for the prideful spiritual teacher, especially because there is no way to know. There is no way to be sure physically or in its ramifications, except that the good life begins to manifest itself. And the pattern of living that you produce around you begins to flow is the only way by their fruits. You shall know them. That's that phrase. The only way to tell there is no one who can experience a high Dharma samadhi and know he had it because there's nothing there to experience when this was perceived in the second world war by John Paul SART. And he wrote his famous essay on the whole. He thought that there must be something to fill that hole and it must be the world that fills it. And therefore the transcendental ego as the receiver of the world. And this is the devil's zone.
This is exactly turning at topsy turvy. The only thing that is received in that hall is the experience of God and its whole wholeness so that, uh, he brings us then to the dangers of premature meditation. He says, there are many people who championed the bet. They get an insight. They think they can really go with it and do this. And it is then that they scramble their possibilities because they have not built carefully. They have not refined the container. And so by fudging right away, they get an imperfect condition and it cracks right away. And where does it crack that pracs right along the lines of pride.
Oh boy, I have done this before anybody. I'm only 30 years old and I've already got it, Nate, or I'm such and such. And I'm really universal. And all that. That's where this comes in. Even today, the farm lands of Oregon are filled with this kind of garbage, the dangers of premature meditation. Then he says there is a structure of training, which allows us at least to begin to approximate the sense of wholeness. And he says, this is where the church comes in. That the church in its wholeness has a cycle that it goes through every day matins and so forth. It has a cycle that goes through every year and that these cycles are to show us how many different steps and how many different counters we need. And so if you don't know how to pray, we were given a beginning, look, prayer, our father so that they are father becomes the anchor, the primordial, uh, Outrigger of the ritual of the Catholic church in order to begin to teach a person how to pray. And of course that prayer was given by Jesus and then to go with it, of course, there are lots of developments. Now he goes into the hail Mary and I would wish just to, uh, put this though, a footnote in for you that the Mary that really counts and this kind of wholeness is not Mary, the mother, but Mary Magdalene, because Mary Magdalene is the compliment.
And Mary Magdalen spent 30 years as a hermit out in the se communities. And it was she who was the primordial wisdom teacher in the Sophia literature. And if you take a look at the, uh, Holy Sophia literature, you'll see that is Mary Magdalene, who teaches the disciples, how to understand spirituality because they're all the time taking metaphor for a motive. And that's very nice, but it won't do at all. It doesn't cure. You can't cure by metaphor. You can understand, but you can't cure. So he goes on then in chapter 34 to talk about free form meditation and about the fact that free form meditation, um, has the following characteristics. Now I'm going to tell you, he writes a little about meditation, according to my best judgment. You must understand that in meditation, there is no certain well established rule. Every man must follow.
All right, he's given us the regular form, the regular line. Now he's saying you, of course must realize this mature individuals, that this was only a starter, that there really is no set pattern and that this can be a problem for us. Especially if you find yourself in your own way, exceeding whatever guidance you might have hand sees writing the stairway of perfection, because he's going to try and take it as far as he can go, which he feels is sufficient to be of service all the way. So he says four meditations come from the free gift of our Lord to chosen salts. In other words, the vision, the spiritual vision, when it does come, comes as a gift that on a certain level, man, no longer sees with his eyes, but he sees what a divine eye, a single eye that has said in some places so that this comes later on.
He also writes in here in a very curious way, and this is the core of an awful lot of the theological metaphysical problems in the Catholic church. He writes about the different temptations of the devil. And he says that God has given permission to the devil to tempt man. And consequently later on, he will say, it does no good for us to fight against temptation on a physical level. That on the phenomenal level, there is no resolution of the problem because the resolution lies beyond the phenomenal. And if you feel that you are attempted, if you feel that anger or lust or envy are working on you, you cannot reply to them in kind without furthering the anxiety and the tension you have to go outside of that whole frame of reference outside of that whole, whole horizon of counters to a numinous quality and that numinous quality, the conundrums of quantity disappear and evaporate.
They no longer have any kind of compulsiveness to them. They are compulsive, but they are compulsive only if we see them as carrot or stick, which is why as we began tonight, that with equanimity of spirit, man, neither fears, hell nor desires heaven in Walter Hilton, stairway of perfection, he goes on and he brings us finally to a poignancy in the first book in chapter 54 and 53, 54 and 55. He brings us finally to an understanding, which is very difficult for him to write in the 14th century some 600 years ago and difficult for us even to hear today.
He says here what the image of sin resembles and what it is in itself. But perhaps you're beginning to wonder he writes what this image of sin resembles. Therefore, so you don't waste time on it. I'll tell you what it is like no physical thing. What is it? Then you ask, I tell you truly, it is nothing capital letters. You can prove this for yourself. If you test it, as I shall explain, draw your thought into yourself, away from all the physical things. And you shall soon find nothing where in your soul can rest. Some of God has nowhere to lay his head, not in a pathetic mode, but in an actual radical, real mode.
This nothing is nothing else. But darkness of conscience and an absence of love and light as sin is nothing but an absence of God. This comes straight from Dionysius. The Areopagite sin as nothing but a complete absence of God. Therefore we have a problem. We have a paradox. We are trying by prayer to create a hole at ourselves. And we experienced that as sin as nothing. So the very crux of the emotion that would save us, we repel from ourselves as if it's the one thing we don't want. And this is why trust is so incredible. And courage is so incredible why these virtues are indispensable and why a community of good persons like-minded persons must be sustained to the end of time. They must be taught to come together and stay together and support each other. Because this is a very strange and weird and paradoxical cure. We have to take what we thought was the poison in order to cure ourselves.
And this of course becomes a difficulty. He says, nevertheless, you have to labor and sweat within this darkened conscience, your own darken conscience. That is you must draw your thoughts inward from all physical things, as much as you can. Then when you have discovered capital letters, absolutely nothing but sorrow and blindness in this darkness. If you want to find Jesus, you must suffer the pain of this conscience and abide in it for a while. You should dread in lows, this darkness, this nothing like the devil from hell, and you should despise it and shatter it completely for Jesus in his joy is entirely hidden within this nothing. And you'll never find him in your search unless you pass through this darkness of your conscience. This is the spiritual labor I've been talking about. And this labor is the reason I'm writing all this. I want to motivate you to do it. If you feel the grace, this darkness of consciousness, nothing I've been talking about is the image of the first Adam man before the fall.
That's the image of the primordial Adam. So that man has to go back through the whole metaphysical history of the universe, to his origins and passed back through the Rome of manifestation back to God. And if he's not willing to do it, he faces infinite exile. The universe is growing vast and wild. It's a large enough prison to contain him forever. If he chooses and in his fallen pride in grand jury, he feels that he's free because he has a billion, billion worlds to go to and toy with dominate and control and manipulate. And it's all the wrong way. Well, there's a lot more, but I think we've run out of time. The book's available friends.

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