Meditations On The Tarot

"Look at a tightrope walker. He is evidently completely concentrated, because if he were not, he would fall to the ground. [...] Yet do you believe that his thought and his imagination are occupied with what he is doing? Do you think that he reflects and that he imagines, that he calculates and that he makes plans with regard to each step that he makes on the rope? If he were do that, he would fall immediately."

"The changing of work, which is duty, into play, is effected as a consequence of the presence of the "zone of perpetual silence", where one draws from a sort of secret and intimate respiration, whose sweetness and freshness accomplishes the anointing of work and transforms it into play."

"Concentration without effort [...] It is the profound silence of desires, of preoccupations, of the imagination, of the memory and of discursive thought. One may say that the entire being becomes like the surface of calm water, reflecting the immense presence of the starry sky and its indescribable harmony. And the waters are deep, they are so deep! And the silence grows, ever increasing...what silence! Its growth takes place through regular waves which pass, one after the other, through your being: one wave of silence followed by another wave of more profound silence, then again a wave of still more profound silence...Have you ever drunk silence? [Then] you know what concentration without effort is."

"The tenet of the basic oneness of the world plays the same fundamental role for all theory as that of concentration for all practice. [...] All search for truth [...] postulates its existence, i.e. the fundamental unity of the multiplicity of phenomena in the world. Without this unity nothing would be knowable. How could one proceed from the known to the unknown [...] if the unknown had nothing to do with the known?"

"If one wants to practice some form of authentic esotericism [...] it is necessary to be the Magician, i.e. concentrated without effort, operating with ease as if one were playing, and acting with perfect calm."

"[T]he principle underlying all the [...] Major Arcana of the Tarot is "that of the rapport of personal effort and of spiritual reality." [...T]he first and fundamental principle of esotericism (i.e. of the way of experience of the reality of the spirit) can be rendered by the formula: Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play; make every yoke that you have accepted easy and every burden that you carry light! This counsel [is attested by] the words of the Master Himself: "My yoke is easy, and my burden is light" (Matthew xi, 30)."