Concentration Without Effort, Creation, and the Virgin Mary
Note: I accidentally paywalled the original post, so I am resending it to free subscribers.
All religious traditions agree: For anyone looking to advance spiritually, concentration is the essential prerequisite. A scattered and distracted mind and a heart divided by endless passions simply cannot progress in the inner life. For in such a fragmented state, one will simply become the plaything of psychic forces one hardly understand, much less control—and one may very easily be destroyed by them.
This is why the first card of the major arcana of the Tarot, the Magician, presents us with the task of learning concentration without effort. What is this concentration without effort? Valentin Tomberg summarizes:
Learn at first concentration without effort; transform your work into play; make every yoke that you have accepted easy and every burden that you carry light!
(Meditations on the Tarot, pg. 7
Effortless concentration, then, is necessary for any spiritual knowledge—the same effortless concentration of a juggler, or a tightrope walker, or a magician moving his hands so quickly and deftly that he seems to do the impossible easily. One must be one in oneself in complete calm, stillness, and silence. And when, and only when, one has attained this “one pointed mind” can the spiritual world disclose itself to the consciousness.
Tomberg’s first letter meditation expounds on this principle in great depth, but I would like to offer a few further reflections that have occurred to me on this topic, specifically the relationship between virginity, concentration, and creation.
Potentiality and Creation
When the ancients discussed the creation of the world, they recognized a dualistic principle at play. That is, they saw in God’s act of creation the coming together of two poles: male and female, or act and potency. In the union of the male and female principles, creation comes into being.
In the Aristotelian terms, the male principle is the form of things (eidos or morphe); the organizing principle that gives shape and structure. The female principle is matter (hyle), or pure potentiality—a word which of course is intimately related to the Latin mater or mother. Thus, creation is a union of form and matter, order and potentiality.
Similarly, in the Samkhya school of Hinduism, these two poles are purusha, or mind and consciousness, and the pakriti or female creative energy. One can conceive of field of pure energy, the pakriti, being acted upon by the pure ideas of Mind or consciousness, which gives it shape and form. Interestingly, modern quantum physics is increasingly describing a reality quite similar to these ancient conceptions of creation.
Christianity, too, is no stranger to such concepts as creation being a product of the male and female, though such conceptions have always been submerged beneath the surface and more implicit than explicit. I do believe a time is coming when they will become much more explicit, though that is perhaps in the distant future. Be that as it may, St. Maximilian Kolbe, who was deeply in love with the Virgin Mary, who he called the Immaculata, describes the creativity of male and female:
Everywhere in the universe we encounter action and a reaction equal but contrary to that action: coming and going, departure and return, division and reunification. Division, however, is always in view of reunification, for the latter is creative. This is nothing but a reflection of the most Holy Trinity in the activity of creatures.
Unification is love, creative love. God’s activity outside of himself does not proceed differently. God creates the universe, and this is in some way a separation. But by means of the natural law given to them by God, creatures perfect themselves, become like unto God, return to him. Reasonable creatures, in addition, love him consciously and unite themselves to him ever more by means of that love; they return towards him. In addition, the creature entirely filled with this love, with the divinity, is the Immaculate, the one without even the slightest stain of sin, the one who never deviated in any way from the will of God. She is joined in an ineffable manner to the Holy Spirit because she is his spouse; but this is true of her in an incomparably more perfect sense than anything this term can express among creatures (The Kolbe Reader, pg. 211, emphasis added).
Kolbe could not be more clear: Unification in love is creative. And in the Christian conception, this is the union of the Logos and Sophia, incarnate as Jesus Christ and Mary Immaculate, giving birth to creation and eventually, the new creation. But that is a topic for another time.
The Annunciation and Concentration Without Effort
What does this discussion of the creativity of the male and female principles have to do with concentration without effort? Simply put: Concentration without effort is nothing less than reducing the soul to the state of pure potentiality of the feminine principle. It is entering a state of virginity, or inner unity and integrity, in order to receive the creative imprint of the spiritual world upon the soul.
For philosophers tell us that the soul is feminine. That is, it is ultimately receptive to both the horizontal and the vertical: the horizontal through the doorway of sense impressions, the vertical through the inner silence of the heart.
The world of the senses is received more or less effortlessly through the biological organism of eyes, ears, skin, and the brain. The spiritual world, too, can be received effortlessly, but only if one has learned to cultivate the necessary silence and stillness for the spiritual world to disclose itself.
Ironically, this effortless receptivity to the spiritual dimension requires effort to cultivate. For left to ourselves, we quickly are overwhelmed by sense stimuli as well as the inner cacophony of cognitions and passions of soul. We must practice silence, often with great effort, in order for it to become effortless.
Nevertheless, the goal remains the same. We must become like Mary at the Annunciation: Silent, calm, and in a state of pure receptivity. For only when we have reduced ourselves to the state of pure potentiality can the realm of spirit work creatively in us. This is the heart of all mysticism.
But it is important to note that Mary did not receive the message of the Angel Gabriel uncritically. She sifted it and weighed it and questioned it. This is gnosis, rational reflection and analysis. And only when her conscience answered Yes to the angel’s message did she, through the miracle of human freedom, utter the words of creative sacred magic that echoed through the cosmos and brought a new world into being: Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.