I want my blog to be a refuge of rest, insofar as is possible, away from what is currently happening in the United States. First off, nobody can be “on” 100% of the time without burning out, and there are plenty of other avenues where people can find and use excellent information compiled by those who have expertise in religious minority advocacy, sustainability, and related issues that matter to many of us. Second, I used to do a lot of scenario-scripting while preparing posts on my blog — multiple days spent brainstorming likely reactions and crafting phrases and paragraphs to anticipate them before the posts were ready, and I could write the posts themselves in (mostly) one sitting as a result of that thinking process. That took a lot of cognitive energy. I’m trying to relax that reflex because it was exhausting, and I also don’t think it actually helped.
The reflex also happened with the “what do I even say about the USA right now” blog post. I’ve had to keep myself from thinking about it — save in bursts when I do — because of point two above. Most of my mental energy has been allocated to things other than blogging, and by this point, I believe I may have actually abandoned that post.
To that end, I want to share the actual pronoia (divine providence) practice that I have been doing daily since a week or so after the election. When I say “daily,” I mean that I have been doing this meditation daily during the time I am at shrine, typically as the concluding part of praying to Apollon, and on days that are too hectic or I’ve had a problem keeping my routine, I will just recite it once for “all beings” aloud while standing, followed by a pause for a few deep breaths (instead of silently meditating on a kneeling bench). That one-minute version has happened maybe five or six times. I also think it is worth reading Problem 6 of Proclus’ Ten Problems Concerning Providence — I recommend buying directly from Bloomsbury for the most recent translation and supplementing with the Thomas Taylor one for the piety if you’re curious about it — because it is very grounding. The entire treatise, alongside meditating on the pronoia-focused propositions in the Elements of Theology, is a helpful guide to the goal of this pronoia practice. Previously on this blog, I put together a piece on it, which may also suffice.
I adapted the following italicized statements from what is said during a metta practice, and the […] part is meant to be replaced with ever-expanding circles of regard from the self. (This has also been helpful for processing being diagnosed with autism because re-indexing life experiences is a jarring and time-consuming experience, and I don’t need negative self-talk to make it even more intense.) I usually do three silent repetitions of the four statements with many pauses.
- May […] be healthy. This starts with the idea of the harmonized body, and thinking of the soul within that body. To be balanced.
- May […] be unified. Dionysos was divided into pieces by the Titans; the soul is an image of this, divided from herself, and it is through Apollon and Athene that she is unified and gathers herself together.
- May […] have well-being. The Buddhist version of a pronoia meditation focuses on happiness. I decided not to include that in a pronoia meditation due to the influence of reading Iamblichus, where true happiness and well-being come from that process of unification and being able to “look” upwards at our priors — and ultimately the Henads AKA the Gods — whatever that means in the physical world. The focus on well-being seemed to belong here.
- May […] be at peace. Peter Gabriel’s “Sky Blue” has the lines, “I keep moving / to be stable / free to wander, / free to roam.” Generation is warfare; the peace and harmony of what is above generation is the resting point that we can cultivate even when everything outside is boiling and changing.
I regularly do one of these sequences:
- Myself, a family member or friend, a customer service person I’ve engaged with in the past day or two, someone I don’t gel with, and then all beings
- Myself, my work team, all beings
- Myself, a community I’m in and am fond of, a community that is extremely trying right now (e.g., all of us Americans), all beings
- Myself, a friend experiencing a hard time, a person from work or social interaction, someone I don’t gel with, all beings
- Myself, a family member or friend, someone I hold neutral regard for, ambient spirits that may be around with whatever valence, all beings
- … and so on
Many of us live in a broader societal environment that has, over the past few decades or even since our childhoods, taught us to be vicious to one another. It’s a crop with hardy roots, with fertile seeds carried on the winds we faced as we were growing up, and we cannot improve without unlearning that. In this context, a pronoia practice is both deeply centering and healing, in addition to its core function of connecting us to the Gods through seeking to become as like them as possible.
KALLISTI 
Loved it Kaye! (And gave me an excuse to listen to Blue Sky). Also, thanks for the recommendation of Proclus’ Ten Problems Concerning Providence.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Kaye, this is a beautiful exercise! I’m glad it’s been helpful to you, and glad that you’ve shared it here for the rest of us! I’m a bit hesitant, though, to call it a pronoia practice, rather than a supporting piece of such a practice, but neither its totality, nor its culmination or telos.
At least as I understand Plato and Proclus, I see two primary ways of describing pronoia: the narrow sense, based in the etymology, of knowing-in-advance what is needful, and the broader sense, entailed by the former, of doing the outward-facing activities, on the basis of that knowledge.
For the former, the “pre-” (pro-) element seems critical: not so much “before in time,” as “before” in a metaphysical sense. This is a divine type of awareness that’s situated not at the level of the recipient of providence herself, nor even at the level of intellect contemplating the recipient’s forms/paradigms, but at a still higher level that knows the recipient not according to categories (that would be formal/paradigmatic, at the level of nous) but kata to hen, “according to the one,” in her perfect individuality/oneness. Proclus has a very precise account of this distinction between nous and pronoia in proposition 134 of the Elements of Theology. All that, while also keeping in mind that even intellect is above the normal level of a soul’s own activity (which is, rather, dianoia). For that full scale of pronoia-nous-dianoia (and even one step below that), we can turn to paragraphs 3-4 of Proclus’ Ten Doubts Concerning Providence that you cited in the post.
For the latter, broad sense, I have in mind the account that Plato himself gives us in the tenth book of the Laws, where he argues that for the Gods, the three contributing factors of knowledge (i.e., pronoia in the narrow sense as above), power to act appropriately, and the will to act in that way, are all present eternally, and therefore the Gods act providentially both toward the whole and toward all parts and all individuals, eternally and at every moment. Which is to say that the will for beings to have what they need is not yet, in itself, pronoia. For that will or aspiration is not in itself the knowing of individuals kata to hen which comprises pronoia in the narrow sense, and it’s only one of the three pillars which together give rise to pronoia in the broad sense.
For us as more partial creatures, meanwhile, the invitation seems like it’s more multipart. First, regarding the narrow sense, there’s an invitation to find the understanding of each being not according to general categories and the needs associated with those categories (e.g. the needs of someone as human being, as soul, as citizen, as daughter, etc.), but kata to hen, in each being’s unique individuality. Second, regarding the broad sense, there’s an invitation to develop and sustain all three pillars — the just-mentioned form of knowledge, along with the will and the ability/power — such that outward activity necessarily and immediately follows. So I’d look for a pronoia practice to take up one or both of those invitations, as fully as possible.
It’s an interesting question whether there is some lesser-but-still-good form of providence available to us that, unlike that of the Gods, is based on forms, universals, or categories rather than on personhood or individuality. But even if there is, I think we should be striving to transcend that, to get to the kata to hen type of knowing that characterizes divine providence, and which Proclus and Olympiodorus both describe as the highest level of virtue, where because of that mode of knowing, our activity becomes one with theirs. And even at that lower (still good!) level, it’s only providence insofar as the cultivation of knowledge, will, and ability lead into actual giving of needful things, so a full-on pronoia practice, even at the reduced level, would involve some work on all three pillars and would culminate in some outward-directed action of providing some specific thing to some specific recipient.
I see the practice you’ve given in the post, rather, as taking for granted the first pillar (knowledge, in its lower, merely formal sense) and working on the second pillar, but still awaiting both the third pillar and above all, the culminating act of giving. I think it might also be beneficial to include at least the aspiration to have knowledge of the recipients of our gifts in the highest, most individual sense, if not also some practical working toward that end.
I offer this in the spirit of encouragement, lest by limiting the practice to only one of the contributing causes of pronoia, we stop short of the culminating activity, and short of the fully divine way of knowing-and-acting. I think it’s great to begin here with this practice, but with an eye to the greater goal, of providentially knowing-and-arranging the cosmos together with the Gods, insofar as possible for us as human beings.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yes, all of what you’ve written is very important context for what is actually going on above, and I think it’ll be helpful for people to read, especially anyone landing on this post from a search. One of the things I didn’t mention (but probably should have) was that I view this in terms of cultivating receptivity and awareness, like how one might leave the shade and stand in sunlight for the warmth, because the Gods are always overflowing with goodness and providential care, yet in the day-to-day of things, it is very difficult for most people to keep that front of mind, much like how someone (me) working in a basement may forget it’s sunny outside due to the windowless environment.
The third pillar (giving) is implicit as well, I think? What I’ve noticed doing this practice is that it helps my outlook and actions towards the other people around me in a subtle way, and I notice the difference in my behavior the most on days when I can do a fuller form of the practice. Perhaps this is just that it helps me get out of the intense gravitational pull of my own thoughts, though, so it could be of less or no use to those who don’t have that challenge.
LikeLiked by 2 people
It may also be worth considering how the loving-kindness meditations in Buddhist traditions, which are the antecedents of all this, operate when they’re in their natural habitat in the animist, polytheist practices of Asian Buddhism. This is relevant both to pronoia as being fundamentally outward-directed to literally change the world (rather than our own minds/feelings), and to the mode of knowing kata to hen.
In Southeast Asia, when a rampaging elephant is literally running out of the forest about to destroy your village and hurt a bunch of people, Buddhist monks employ lovingkindness practice as a very practical tool. It’s not at all about changing their own mindset; it’s about literally pacifying the elephant to save lives and buildings from getting stomped! Of especial interest for us as Platonists, is that there’s a right and a wrong way to attempt this. The wrong way is for the monk to send loving-kindness at the elephant, which simply doesn’t accomplish anything at all, and the village still gets smashed. The right way is for the monk to send loving-kindness at the guardian spirit of that elephant; the guardian spirit then does the work of pacifying the elephant, on the monk’s behalf.
In Platonic terms, I would describe what’s happening here as follows: The guardian spirit is, of course, a daimon. The monk is knowing-and-acting at the divine level, perfectly united with an appropriate God (exactly as Olympiodorus describes henōsis, i.e., the kata to hen level of virtue/prayer), with that activity directed downward from the divine level, via an appropriate intermediary, to affect the elephant.
On the “downward” bit: Iamblichus tells us in De Mysteriis that insofar as we’re acting only as souls, we could never possibly command even a daimon, much less a God. But at the heights of theurgic practice, we can speak and act in the person of the God to command various spirits/daimones — which is precisely what both Proclus and Olympiodorus tell us is happening in pronoetic knowing-acting kata to hen which characterizes the pinnacle of self-knowledge, virtue, and prayer, and is also exactly what the Buddhist monk seems to be doing in this case.
Regarding the intermediary spirit, a divine activity normally passes via the guardian daimon (either of the species, or of the individual) to affect an animal, again as we see here.
Which is all to say that even the corresponding Buddhist practice, in at least some of its traditional animist/polytheist contexts, fits pretty nicely the account of pronoia I’ve suggested in the first comment, and is really not a matter of changing our own psychology/feelings. This is obviously just one exemplum, but I do think it’s a telling one.
Finally, I think all of this is a good reason why in general, if we’re going to look to Buddhist traditions for suggestions of practical exercises, it’s critical that we look to those traditions in their animist, polytheist Asian forms, rather than the stripped down, psychologized Western appropriations of limited, decontextualized practices — lest we unwittingly import the atheism, humanism, and psychologism of the latter (and of our wider over-culture) into our own traditions.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Oh and P.S. Lest anyone think that bringing talk of the “divine” of “acting as a God” to discussions of Buddhism is a mistake, it’s definitely not. A key aspect of Buddhist tantra is cultivating “divine pride”, the total identification of oneself with some particular, individual Goddess or God, such that you’re able to act as if you were that God.
LikeLiked by 2 people
That is so very theurgic. I agree with what you’ve said about needing to reach for the actual polytheistic traditions instead of what we get in the West, which is … filtered … strangely. 🫨 For instance, I’ve noticed since starting to listen to some Emergence Magazine podcast episodes that the hosts are very comfortable to invite people who have a theurgic disconnect and who echo the estrangement narratives one frequently sees (regardless of the person’s background), but they wouldn’t be comfortable with the raw animist, polytheist versions that haven’t been packaged for a disconnected audience. Thank you so much for sharing the Platonic interpretation part as well. That will add a lot of depth for anyone who comes across this post and conversation.
LikeLiked by 2 people