St Thalassios, Egypt

Do not neglect the practice of the virtues; if you do, your spiritual knowledge will decrease, and when famine occurs you will go down to Egypt. … The Egypt of the spirit is the darkness of the passions; no one goes down to Egypt unless he is overtaken by famine.

From the Orthodox Christian collection of texts, The Philokalia. The insight and understanding of such people can be so amazing and original to me. In the Bible account, the Jews in time of famine went to Egypt where Joseph had become under Pharaoh basically the governor of the country. Then, after initially prospering, they became slaves to the Egyptians, and I think after 400 years of oppression, after the various afflictions sent by God on the Egyptians, and staggeringly stubborn resistance, finally Moses leads his people out of the country, the Dead Sea is parted, and so on. 

Such people within Orthodoxy, such as here, Thalassios, view this as living spiritual parable, that is as presumably historically true, but simultaneously true on the deepest spiritual plane. And so the wandering in the wilderness before after much ups and downs, tests, tribulations and purging, is the path towards or away from the Promised Land in the spiritual sense, beyond simply the factual sense. 

And so if we fail to safeguard with discipline ourselves spiritually, we will in the subsequent famine of this inner sense, go down into Egypt, which is to fall into the world of the body, and simply sensual plane. After an initial seeming prospering there, in this “Egypt”, we then become enslaved by the passions and sensuality into which we have delivered ourselves. Release from this enslavement then involves all kinds of ordeals, and the self ensconced in this realm doesn’t even wish for release easily, never mind attain that release, and the attempt to gain release is an awful lot harder than accept the lot of remaining “in Egypt.” But of course there is no Promised Land but deepening enslavement otherwise. And this Egypt is self-love in general, and this goes so deep into the reality of our condition that it took and takes the completely self-sacrificing incarnation of the divine into the earth to open real freedom from it; otherwise we keep, however subtly this might be effected, being enslaved and lost in this mess of self-love and all its subsequent debasements; think for instance of the massive openings for vanity and delusion and all kinds of psychological squalor within the world of the gurus; or similarly the mess of our all-too human selves attempting to direct ourselves towards goals of “egolessness”. Even here we are exalted. Our ego attains egolessness! Hooray!

And so Thalassios writes, “Spiritual freedom is release from the passions; without Christ’s mercy you cannot attain it.”