Opposite the throbbing life is the quiet life of the mind, or we might say, "where people live in their heads." Our culture has rapidly expanded its offerings of fantasy to accommodate this preoccupation. People reinvent themselves through social networking, choose avatars, or assume names. Some even attempt to alter their bodies surgically in order to match their ever-more extreme internal conceptions of themselves.

Consider this reflected in the mirror of smart phones. Ride on any bus or train or plane or walk through the public square, and you will hear earbuds pounding the brain with decibels or find eyes fastened upon radiating screens for hours. Consider this in terms of Internet traffic. At any given moment, the great majority of Internet bits traveling round the world are assembling bestial images and sounds or fulfilling the wishes of fantasy-seekers and social networking practitioners. Pornography alone occupies more than seventy percent of all Internet traffic.

Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensees that God has placed a void inside each of us, which, if we do not fill it with Him, then we shall vainly attempt to fill it with things that are not of God. Whether it is the pulsing, bestial life or the a life given to fantasy, each becomes an extended and powerful process of self-absorption, leading us over greater and greater distances from God. For closeness to God cannot come through self-preoccupation. It comes through a letting go of self-absorption and an opening to the other.

Think of the state of mind and soul we call "falling in love." Here is a turning away from self-absorption and a looking outward. The mind and soul are always in a state of mindful expectancy. They seek the Beloved everywhere and at all times. And when the Beloved appears, the heart leaps within us, not towards ourselves but outwardly, in a sense wiping our inner slates clean. And in this leaping, we are open to anything and everything!

Nothing is like the peace we feel simply sitting beside our special one, holding hands in silence, two hearts in unison, two breaths coming into the same, shared rhythm. True love participates in the only Divine property to be found in life, and no love can be authentically true unless it be grounded in God, Whose nature and element love is. This sweet meditation of love is no illusion. As anyone who has experienced it can tell you, it is as real as the blood coursing through our veins and arteries. Indeed, judging by the volumes of letters and poems and songs that are written, we might say, it is the most imposing reality the world knows in its common hours.

Neural scientists can see it. They can see the violent, chaotic music washing over the brain expressed by an over-excited amygdala, the brain's seat of primal urges like rage and lust. They can see the quiet, problem-solver sitting at a computer expressed by the excitation of the brain's prefrontal lobe, where thinking and planning and fantasizing are done. And they can see two lovers sitting side-by-side, perfectly configured to each other in silence expressed by the brain going dark. Neural activity ceases.

The picture posted with this reflection shows two images: the brain before and during meditation. The left side expresses normal activity indicated by the yellow, pink, red, and white colors. The right side, expressing the meditative state, shows that the brain has turned off. For God does not live in the brain, nor will we ever find Him by over-exciting our intellectual or animal minds.

When our experience of love moves beyond the human realm towards the purely Divine, our brain cells and neural activity are no longer relevant. The holy man who helped the world to understand this, St Gregory Palamas, we remember today on the Second Sunday in Lent. His feast actually celebrates something more precise, which is the triumph of Orthodoxy over Western Scholasticism: the triumph of prayer over syllogistic logic and the dismissal of the rational mind as a means towards God. It would be Gregory Palamas who would lead us to the truth that only in quieting our minds, turning off our intellectual activity, do we come into the Presence of the Lord. He wrote in his masterpiece, The Triads,

By contrast, the turning-off of the mind permits the soul freedom to hear the Spirit without distraction or constraint. But how do we stop intellectual activity? Gregory Palamas replied, by using a method of prayer developed on Mt. Athos as monks were feeling their way through mystical darkness and into the Divine Presence, — what St Gregory of Nyssa called (about a thousand years earlier) "luminous darkness." Gregory makes the distinction between the "light of knowledge," which leads to darkness, and mystical darkness, which leads to Divine Light:

Hesychasm fulfills the Divine command spoken at Matthew 6:6:

Hesychasm was not without its detractors. Leading the attacks was an Orthodox monk named Barlaam, trained in hyper-rational Western Scholasticism (and influenced by Thomas Aquinas). Barlaam ridiculed these Athonite practices condemning Gregory, in particular, as a heretic and a blasphemer. How could anyone, Barlaam asked, claim to come into the true Presence of God? God is unknowable, unseeable, incomprehensible, inscrutable! But the technology of Scholasticism, teaching him to objectify all things, giving pride of place to intellect, led him in the wrong direction. To borrow the words of Bishop Kallistos (Ware),

Gregory says,

Let us likewise turn all of ourselves — our hearts, our souls, our minds, our bodies — away from everything in the world .... except God. For in this act of devotion, removing the shoes of our clay, we shall see the Creation as it really is: "the grandeur of God, all Creation as one gigantic Burning Bush." For all good things have come of God, and of His own goodness has He given us. Let us turn off all the things that lead away from Heaven, quieting our minds, resting our minds. And with the Prophet Habakkuk, let us say,