Text read by the Grand Orator during the ritual meeting
on 24 October 2025
How can we share our inner selves, or how can we reconcile silence and transmission, which was the theme of our previous convention and will be the theme of our next convention?
Indeed, there is always a link connecting our conventions, which is why I would like to highlight today the special link that connects initiatory transmission with the eminent role of silence on the path of the heart.
Silence: the voice of the heart. This was the theme of our convention, which took place from 29 May to 1 June 2025 in Erstein, Alsace. Initiatory transmission: this is the theme of our next convention, which will take place in Lyon from 14 to 17 May 2026, to accompany the transmission of the Grand Mastery of our Order to our sister Gadal by our Grand Master Gabriel. At first glance, it seems difficult to reconcile these two themes. In other words: can transmission take place in silence? And if so, what kind of silence might that be? And what kind of transmission?
To begin with, I must admit that I am not going to simply ask you to reflect in silence on the possible answers to these questions... I am going to speak anyway, as it is my role as speaker... However, you know as well as I do that any work proposed orally during our group meetings, or in writing as in the Torch, is not intended to flatter the ego of the person proposing it, but to first stimulate the personal reflection of the listener or reader, and then to encourage dialogue and fraternal sharing that build our egregore in a fruitful complementarity between intuition and intellect, between personal feeling and reason, the faculty of the universal.
In any case, the questions I propose we reflect on together correspond to those we asked ourselves at the conclusion of workshop 3 of our convention, in a joint sharing session led by the CROM: "How can we articulate shared silence and dialogue of the Heart in our daily lives and during our ritual meetings? Leaving aside daily life, I will focus instead on the ritual aspect of initiatory transmission and its connection with inner silence. For it is, of course, beyond the silence that consists of not speaking or making noise, it is about inner silence, that is to say, that inner life intimately linked to spirituality that silences within us the parasitic noises of our diffuse and multiple thoughts.
Indeed, if initiatory transmission consists of transmitting, what does it actually transmit, if not the ability to let the deepest part of oneself speak, that of spirituality?
Sharing our inner selves, in this context, does not mean sharing our moods, personal problems, anxieties or certainties in dialogues that are often mere monologues where each person expresses themselves without really listening to the other... In short, sharing our inner selves, in terms of our initiatory goal, does not mean letting our ego speak, although it would obviously be presumptuous to imagine that we could silence it completely. We must simply try humbly to put the ego in the background, so that we can listen more and more to the voice of the heart, which is the path of the heart.
In this approach to silence, Louis Claude de Saint Martin joins the great mystics of our religious traditions, such as Saint John of the Cross, who wrote: "The soul, in the silence of the dark night, finds rest and inner peace that prepares it for divine love." He also wrote: "Silence is the attitude that befits those who seek to hear the Word of God. " Thus, and I quote from the introduction presented by the Edouard Schuré group in the booklet for our convention: "The practice of silence and listening to the heart are means of spiritual transformation, leading the soul to a deeper understanding of God. Silence represents an essential space for listening to and understanding this inner voice. But this inner voice does not shut us in on ourselves; it leads us on the path of love, compassion and wisdom. Listening to the inner voice also means connecting with the universal love that is its source, with that divine spirit that speaks to all those who are silent enough to hear it. This is what Louis Claude de Saint Martin tells us in the first paragraph of The Ministry of the Human Spirit: "Human intelligence, by focusing only on external things, closes itself off from the nature of its being. As soon as man ceases to look at the true character of his inner essence, he becomes blind to the eternal source from which he descends... "This common source, which is the origin of our lives, is there for us to drink from. It does not belong to us, since it is offered freely to all those who come to drink from it and who can then share their inner selves in a fraternal dialogue, as expressed in this verse from song 222 of The Man of Desire: "Let us celebrate man, for he cannot exist for a moment without the life-giving act of his God, without the spirit being in him, as in a continuous vibration."
I particularly experienced this sharing of inner feelings with the FF and SS of the Andreas group during the Autumn Equinox ritual we celebrated on 20 September. While the Spring Equinox celebrates the divine Force that rises within us and pushes us to blossom visibly, with the Autumn Equinox we celebrate the descent of this same divine force within ourselves, in the silence of introspection, the silence of meditation, the silence of our inner selves. This is what the ritual says: "We will die to external life in order to be reborn to internal life. This will be an initiation into the mystery of death. For true initiation comes through death. Only death leads to the Light. " The ritual thus sets us on the path to spiritual reintegration, not making death a definitive and despairing end, but a step on the path to reintegration.
We experienced this ritual together, sharing moments of silence and gaining a better understanding of how to share our inner selves. It was not an intellectual understanding, but a fraternal and particularly initiatory sharing, which led to a common reflection on certain symbols that spoke to us in particular.
Our group ritual, and therefore the one we are currently experiencing, also calls us to share our inner selves in order to advance on the path of the heart. In this sense, initiatory transmission is not only from an SII to an F or an S to enable them to pass a degree, it is offered by each F and S to each F and S, because each of us transmits a ray of light to the other. Group work is essentially initiatory and therefore initiatory transmission, since it touches the innermost depths of each and every one of us. in its most intimate depths. The ritual creates, protects and promotes this moment outside of profane time, in a sacred place. There we experience a particular kind of breathing, between the inhalation that silently internalises our relationship with divine life, and the exhalation that allows us to rationally share our experiences, thoughts and feelings with others.
To conclude, in a few words: intuition and reason, silence and dialogue, these are the two phases of spiritual breathing that allow us to reconcile the two initiatory poles of interiority and transmission.
It is to this breathing, between interiority and the sharing of our ideas, that I now invite those of you who wish to speak...
Sister Sève, Grand Orator of the OM
