"Pleasure of the senses is emptiness ever filling itself,

Yet remaining ever empty.

Pleasure of the soul is fullness ever emptying itself,

Yet remaining ever full."

-Heiromonk Damascene ("Christ The Eternal Tao" Part I ch 64 p184

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"The spirit is made blind by these three passions: avarice, self-esteem, and sensual pleasure. These three passions on their own full spiritual knowledge and faith, the foster-brothers of our nature. It is because of them that wrath, anger, war, murder, and all other evils have such power over mankind. Because of them we are commanded not to love 'the world' and 'the things of the world' (I John 2:15); not so that we should hate God's creation through lack of discernment, but so that we should eliminate the occasions for these three passions."

-St Mark the Ascetic (from "The Philokalia")

Each person is a universe;a greater world within a small one.It is here — in our greater interior world — that we may find and balance on that edge connecting the visible and invisible;the empty point of convergence that reveals the inseparability of being and not-being, created and un-created, finite and infinite...It is here that Christ is positioned as the Way conjoining knowing and un-knowing...We may meet Christ — the Logos, the Way, the Life —(or, rather, Christ will emerge to meet us)in the hour during which thought and image are not followed but allowed to liberate themselves and dissolve in the pure Light of unbroken Oneness and Love.We are to be, as Merton advises, like pristinely clean glass:being illuminated by the entering Light of the sun and disappearing in its Radiance.