Via Positiva — Towards the Light
·The affirmative way, and the road of aspiration.
There’s a direction I’ve been quietly avoiding in these essays, and it’s time to turn and face it.
For a while now I’ve been leading you down. Into the earth. Not this, not this — the whole grammar of the descent: dissolving what’s false, refusing to be the passing content, entering the buried rooms. It’s honest work, and it’s half the work. But if you’ve been practising along with me, you may have noticed something strange: you can get very good at letting go and still arrive nowhere. You can empty the cup with real skill, and then sit there holding an empty cup, wondering why the enlightenment brochure oversold the view.
That’s because subtraction was never meant to travel alone. There’s a second road.
The mystics always had two feet. One walked the via negativa — the way of un-saying, of “not this,” of approaching the divine by stripping away every name too small to hold it. The other walked the via positiva, the affirmative or kataphatic road: approaching not by removing but by drawing toward — by image, by light, by longing. Dionysius, who left the Christian West its sharpest negative theology, wrote just as carefully about the affirmative ascent. The tradition never asked you to choose a foot. It asked you to walk.
And the affirmative road builds by a particular means. Not by acid. By light.
Here I have to tell you something the old texts state plainly and modern spirituality has largely mislaid: there’s a light in you. Not a figure of speech for a good mood — a light. The alchemists called them the scintillae, the sparks; Khunrath wrote of “fiery sparks of the world-soul, of the light of nature, scattered through the whole structure of the world” (Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae). Meister Eckhart called it the Fünklein, the little spark of the soul, and insisted it was uncreated and had never been separated from God — a claim the Church found alarming enough to put him on trial for. The Gnostics said the spark had fallen into matter and forgotten itself, and that the whole of salvation was its waking up. Different centuries, different words, one report: buried in you, under everything you spent the descent dissolving, there is light.
The Western esoteric tradition draws it as a sun above the head — not the sun in the sky, but an inner one, more truly you than the familiar self standing beneath it. I mentioned that image in passing once before. Here it steps to the centre, because the positive path is the road that leads to it.
And the road is walked by aspiration.
I want to rescue that word, because it’s been flattened into something like ambition — wanting to get ahead, get on, get more. That’s not it. Aspiration, in the contemplative sense, is closer to what a plant does at a window: a quiet, constant leaning toward the light, so steady you’d miss it if you weren’t watching. It’s longing given a direction. Where the negative path says not this and sets a thing down, aspiration says toward that and leans. Negation clears the room; aspiration is the reason you bothered to clear it.
But aspiration doesn’t walk alone, and this is where the affirmative path shows how much it actually asks of you. The leaning has companions, and each one feeds it.
The first is devotion — aspiration with love in it. A cold reaching gets you nowhere; the lean has to be warm, has to carry some of the heart’s ache, the quality the bhakti traditions of the East and the great lovers of the Christian West both knew — that you are not merely orienting toward a light, you are longing for a beloved. Devotion is what keeps the longing from going dry and clever.
The second is will — and here I mean almost the opposite of force. Spiritual will is not the clenched jaw of trying harder; it’s the quiet faculty that keeps you leaning when nothing whatever is felt, on a wet Tuesday in the ninth month of a dry spell. It’s built, exactly like muscle, by use — and the positive path builds it. Alongside will walks commitment, which is only will extended over years: the vow quietly renewed, the return to the cushion after the morning you were certain you were done. Not the heroic gesture — the unheroic return, again and again, that no one sees.
And these are gathered and enacted in ritual — the leaning made into a deliberate act. Ritual is aspiration given a body: the lit candle, the bow, the ordered sequence that says toward that with the hands and the breath and not only the mind. The alchemists were emphatic that the work needed a vessel and an ordered procedure; ritual is how the affirmative path keeps its shape instead of dissolving into a vague good feeling.
You could read all of that as a great deal of strenuous doing, and it is — and here is the turn that saves it from becoming one more project of the ego. You do every bit of it — devotion and will and commitment and ritual and the patient leaning — and the light still comes as a gift. That is grace, the last ingredient and the most important, because it’s the one you cannot manufacture. This is why the light withdraws from a grabbing hand: it was never yours to seize, only yours to receive. The whole affirmative path is strenuous effort that ends in open, empty hands — you do everything you can to prepare the room, then you stop, and let what you could never summon arrive. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers preserve this in their most beautiful form. Abba Lot once came to old Abba Joseph of Panephysis and told him he kept his rule, his fast, his prayer and his silence — what else should he do? The old man stood and stretched his hands toward heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire, and he said: “If you will, you can become all flame.” He did not hand Lot a sixth discipline. He pointed past all the doing to the fire itself — which is given, not achieved. Aspire with all your will; receive by grace. The two aren’t in contradiction. They’re the in-breath and the out-breath of the positive path.
There’s a further thing, and it’s the hinge into where these essays go next. The light is not something you believe in. You can hold the idea “there is a divine spark within me” as a warm thought for forty years and never once feel the warmth. The spark isn’t awakened by assent. It’s awakened by gnosis — direct knowing, the light recognising itself. The Gnostics’ word for salvation was never “faith.” It was gnosis: the spark becoming aware of what it already is. Which is only our own four words turned to face the sun — Beyond Belief, Into Knowing.
Let me tell you what this is like, since the descent gets all the press and the ascent almost none.
Sit long enough, with the room cleared and the leaning quiet and unforced, and something begins to be felt above you. Not imagined — felt. A warmth, a brightness, a sense of a source overhead that was always there and is only now being turned toward. It wants to come down. Left to itself, ungrasped, it descends — into the head, the chest, the body — and where it moves, things soften and clarify. This is not a visualisation you manufacture. It’s a perception, and it arrives on its own schedule, not yours. That is grace. Your only work is to keep leaning, and to keep your hands open.
And on the ordinary days when nothing whatever happens overhead — there are many — the aspiration is still the practice. You lean toward a light you cannot at that moment feel, on the strength of having felt it before, or simply on the strength of the longing itself. That unfelt leaning, held through dry weeks, isn’t lesser practice. It may be the truer kind.
So here’s the shape of the whole thing, both feet on the ground at last. The descent empties the cup; the ascent fills it with light. Neti neti clears the false; aspiration draws the true. You go down into the earth to dissolve what you are not, and you lean up toward the sun to receive what you are. Neither road arrives on its own. Subtract without aspiring and you get a clean, empty, purposeless quiet. Aspire without subtracting and you get a lit-up personality more pleased with itself than ever — the grasping hand reaching now for God. The two together are the practice. One clears; one draws. One says not this; one says toward that.
The light was never something you had to earn or import or deserve. It was the thing you were too full to notice — buried under the rooms you hadn’t entered, waiting beneath everything you were finally brave enough to set down. The positive path is simply the turning toward it, and the patience to let it come.
If this is a road you’d like to walk more deliberately than an essay allows, the door’s always open at the School of Knowing — come and have a look, and take only what’s genuinely yours to take.
Beyond belief — into knowing. Down into the earth; up into the light.