Learn how Eastern Orthodox Christian spirituality provides seekers of our day clear guidance on acquiring stillness, overcoming the passions, dealing with thoughts, and cultivating the virtues, as well as precise teachings on spiritual *deception, all of which* guides seekers more safely and surely on the path to communion with God (Tao – Chinese). In the profound mystical and contemplative tradition of the Christian East, seekers are able to go well beyond the realizations in Eastern religions. It will be a long – awaited answer for those who, having turned away from modern Western religiosity, are drawn to the freshness, directness and simplicity of Lao Tzu and eastern philosophies, and at the same time are strangely, inexplicably drawn back to the all-compelling reality of Jesus Christ.
Hieromonk Damascene (Christensen) is an Eastern Orthodox priest, monk and spiritual child of ascetic and spiritual struggler Bl. Father Seraphim Rose, of St Herman of Alaska Monastery, Platina, California. Fr Damascene is the author of Fr Seraphim Rose: His Life And Works and Christ The Eternal Tao, as well as numerous articles on Eastern Orthodox faith, doctrine and spirituality.
Raised a nominal Christian, Fr Damascene came to believe that a personal God or gods was a “less enlightened” spiritual Truth than that of the Trans-Personal experience taught in Buddhism. Through his practice of Zen Buddhism, he experienced what he describes as “darkness, infinite nothingness, existing outside of space and time, where everything is Now and time has no meaning.” After having this experience, he met Father Seraphim Rose lecturing on his college campus (UC Santa Cruz). Fr Seraphim had been a student of Zen with Alan Watts, and of Taoism under a genuine transmitter of the Taoist philosophical tradition, Gi-ming Shen, before becoming an Eastern Orthodox Christian convert and monk. Through an on-going relationship with Fr Seraphim, who became his spiritual father, Monk Damascene came to discover that the Truth was not just an abstract idea, sought and known by the mind, but was something personal – even a Person – sought and loved by the heart. As he later wrote, “And that is how I met Christ.” He was at Fr Seraphim’s bedside when he reposed less than two years later.
Christ, the Eternal TAO Seminar.
