'Magnetisation' to God

The Praxis Research Institute has a excellent collection of articles on the Christian Fourth Way and Inner Christianity, including a series on The Magnetic Centre.

The idea of 'magnetism to God' was first applied to this inner phenomenon, so far as we know, in the second half of the nineteenth century by the Russian hermit Saint Theophan the Recluse, who around 1860-1870 speaks sometimes about magnetisation to God, and sometimes about Gravitation to God.

Theophan was a major investigator in this field of the Christian interior life. Under the Aegis of the Synod of the Russian church he spent seven years researching sources in the Middle-East before he became a bishop, and then a hermit.   He travelled round the monasteries of Syria, Egypt and Palestine, finding manuscripts which he had copied and shipped over the Russian, where he translated them...

This idea of magnetisation to God clearly expresses the higher stages of hesychastic prayer, prayer of stillness, which concerns the stage where, when the psyche reaches a certain point on the path, it is then 'rapt in God,' being drawn away from the attraction of the world by the glory given by God within him.

Read the series at the Praxis Institute website.