The Way of the Heart.
A lot of my attention has been drawn to this issue through my years as a Gnostic - and with the ol’ timers in Doinel and Bricaud’s gnostic churches I feel Martinist and Gnostic Christian are brothers in arms in the struggle for following that way (Way of the Heart… I am no longer so sure about the name, it sounds fine and pleasant, but does it not depend what we put into the word "Heart"?).

I suspect what anyone travelling along these roads have to do is recognize that they have had an education, which is to say, have been taught - and that it is time to move onwards into a territory where the certainty of formula and conclusions no longer are insured by "trust"/"faith" alone – I’m reading Herder these days - and am reminded that such thinkers as Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Kant and Herder - almost contemporaries with LCSM; read the simile/image of the passage from St. Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians "when I was a child" - "now I have come of age" - "now we see through a glass darkly, but then we shall know even as we are known" - in context with a meaningful transition from one phase of historical and cultural development in our civilization to another, hopefully better.

That this "childhood" - collective or individual - shared or private - is necessary is supported in the way almost all instructions speaking directly to the heart, begins with a significant event; such as a journey, a fall, a break with the past and so forth; in order to go anywhere you need a starting point, we shouldn’t forget that the simile struck of our soul and our spiritual potentional are that of a seed; a mustard seed, or a spark.

I consider many modern esoterisms to have prematurely "matured" in self-esteem without accumulating the necessary experience, especially in the asset known as the participating body; which is to say - those who partake of and contribute to - the Magnum Opus in this their set and setting; instructing a quietism which whereas faith has become unfashionable, depends too greatly on assumptions, on the old mechanism of "if (that particular) someone said it, it must be true" - childhood education, an education we mostly need in order to have... something to transcend… Something to grow up and out of.
Which means - that I think a lot of well-intentioned tutors in that department of human intellectual activity - are continually tripping themselves up, falling prey to an utterly pitiful condition of learned arrogance.
What a great challenge for every one of us? It is not for me or for you given to disassemble the machinery (...) which somehow does not seem to work… yet or perhaps any longer.. it is for us given to achieve a certain rhythm for our own appartus, by which we may advance.
As for Quietism - I wont pass judgement on those who consider the status quo of today and their condition as the most beautiful and good; if this is an authentic experience, more power to it; as for myself, I experience myself as someone who have found himself immersed in an environment ever-changing, where truths and meanings does not necessarily remain the same; where my personality still is mutable and afloat, despite the intense experience of being anchored in something much greater and stronger than our collective dreaming of "the world". As such a one, do I not then need to accept change as a necessary condition of life? I am born into death, striking a simile by way of body; my cells began to die when I was still in the womb, before I was found to be a developed organism, a human being - I was experiencing loss. The "I" of this confession is not absolute, I have acquaintance with another reality - the "surface" upon which I have this acquaintance is "another Self", in the sense that I experience division - by way of being confined to this "space" and "time" of our collective dream. My sense of identity as well as my conscious attention - is divided; this is where I began, and I am quite a far way off from reintegrating the Kadmon, or ultimately submitting to the Ain Sof: I understand change and division, I do not master it, just as I do not master death; I cannot dwell in the garden forever - I do not dwell in the garden forever. Neither escape (evasion) nor surrender will alter the condition of my humanity; which is not only my humanity but the whole genus and species in which I find myself to be. To illustrate, perhaps not the argument against quietism, but rather the relevance of division (and necessity of integration) - take into consideration the "child" and the one who has "come of age" in St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians - can anyone of us claim to not have been a "child"? Or resist the responsibility of the "man"? Yet, at the same time - we are both child/son and man/father - and these two are separate domains which besiege each other, in individual lives as well as the "fate of the world".