“The rule of every serious esotericist should be to be silent—often for a length of years—concerning every new spiritual illumination.”

Will-to-Serve

“The will-to-serve underlies the fundamental Hermetic attitude. Instead of putting forward the hand to take, the human being opens his mind, his heart and his will to receive that which will be graciously bestowed upon him. The inspiration, illumination and intuition that he seeks are not so much conquests accomplished by his will; they are rather gifts from above, preceded by the efforts of the human will endeavouring to become worthy.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p69.

Triangle of Life

“The divine and flaming Word shines in the world of the silence of the soul and ‘moves’ it. This movement is living faith—therefore real and authentic—and its light is hope or illumination, whilst all springs from the divine fire which is love or union with God. The three ‘ways’ or stages of traditional mysticism—purification, illumination and union—are those of the experience of divine breath or faith, divine light or hope, and divine fire or love. These three fundamental experiences of the revelation of the Divine constitute the triangle of life—for no spirit, no soul and equally no body would be able to live if entirely deprived of all love, all hope and all faith.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p71.

One Eternal Way

“One will always have to do with the sole way—and always the same way—of eternal mysticism: the way of purification, illumination and union. Because there is no other, and there has never been another, and there never will be any other.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p366.

“There are many tracks, but there is only one way. This means to say that whatever one does, one advances and grows only in the sense of purification, illumination and union; and that whatever one knows and whatever experience one has, the criterion of true progress is solely progress in purification, illumination and union. One judges a tree by its fruits; one judges the mystic, gnostic, mage and philosopher by their faith, hope and charity, i.e. by their progress in purification, illumination and union.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p367.

Sacred Vows and Inner Gardening

“The states or stages of the soul corresponding to concentration, meditation and contemplation are those of purification, illumination and union. And it is the three sacred vows of obedience, chastity and poverty which render concentration, meditation and contemplation effective, with a view to the realization of the soul’s purification, illumination and union. These are the practical ‘secrets’ of inner ‘gardening’—concerned with the laws of growth (and not those of building) of the human being, in the sense of his becoming ever more human, i.e. in the sense of human evolution without the impasses of specialization.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p456.

Law of Correspondence

“The law of correspondence between the column of prayer (problems, suffering, effort) and that of benediction (illumination, consolation, fruits) is found expressed by the Master in the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p101.

Historic Spiritual Illumination

“Jacob Boehme was a shoemaker, and was illumined. When he had had the experience of illumination (’…the Door became opened to me, so that in a quarter of an hour I observed and knew more than if I had attended a university for many years…’).” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p162.

“The illumination that the Buddha had under the Bodhi-tree revealed three truths to him: that the world is a wheel of births and deaths, that its movement is fundamentally nothing other than suffering, and that there is a way towards the center of the wheel, which is at rest.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p241.

Divine Protection

“The thesis that I am advancing with one hundred per cent conviction is that every Hermeticist who truly seeks authentic spiritual reality will sooner or later meet the Blessed Virgin. This meeting signifies, apart from the illumination and consolation that it comprises, protection against a very serious spiritual danger.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p281.

Maturation of Illumination

“The rule of every serious esotericist should be to be silent—often for a length of years—concerning every new spiritual illumination or inspiration that he has, so as to give it the necessary time to mature, i.e. to acquire that certainty which results from its accordance with moral consciousness, moral logic, the totality of spiritual and ordinary personal experience—and that of friends and spiritual guides of the past and present—as also with divine revelation, whose eternal dogmas are guiding constellations in the intellectual and moral heaven. And it will be only after having arrived at such an accordance that a personal illumination or inspiration can be considered communicable and presentable.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p641.

Taste of Higher Consciousness

“Sometimes we attain states in which the False Personality is entirely shut out and we have a kind of illumination and happiness that is entirely unknown  to us in the ordinary states of Consciousness in which we pass most of our existence. All sense of worry disappears as well as all the usual feelings of ‘I’. All forms of jealousy, all forms of internal considering  vanish. One is alone with oneself and tastes a new kind of Consciousness which is little short of a state of bliss.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p922

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Logion 24 
His students said to him,
“Take us to the place where you are,
since we are required to seek after it.”
He answered them,
“Whoever has an ear for this should listen carefully!
Light shines out from the center of a being of light
and illuminates the whole cosmos. 
Whoever fails to become light is a source of darkness.”

Logion 83
Yeshua says…
Images are revealed to humanity
while the light within them is hidden
by the brilliance of the Father’s light.
It is God who is being revealed,
but the image of God
remains concealed by the blaze of light.

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Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Jeremy Tarcher, 1985

Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise. 

Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.