But how can it be achieved? Evidently, the contact and “coherence of the two wills” of different ontological status need some very special conditions, and it took several centuries for hesychast th practice to build a path to synergy. At the period of the so called Sinaitic hesychasm (7-10 cc.) a specific anthropological mechanism has been discovered and mastered that is the key to synergy.

This mechanism that I call the “ontological mover” is the combination of two activities, attention and prayer, the latter taking the special form of the hesychast incessant prayer. Here the attention secures the uninterrupted and incessant character of the prayer, and the prayer, due to such character, embraces all the levels of the human being and accumulates enormous energy directed entirely to personal communion with Christ. In this way a hesychast advances actually to synergy, and the access to higher steps of the Ladder is opened up.

At its higher steps hesychast practice takes a specific character with growing elements of spontaneity. New forms of prayer emerge called sometimes “automobile” (i.e. going on their own without any man’s effort) and a certain chain or hierarchy of new configurations of energies of a human person is generated in a spontaneous process that has an obvious resemblance to processes of self-organization. The most significant of these new phenomena is the radical change of man’s perceptive system: the formation or “opening-up” of some new perceptions takes place. These perceptions called often the “intellectual senses” (noera aisthesis) are completely different from all physical senses (though they have some likeness to the sight, for which reason hesychasts call the experience of them the “vision of the Light of Tabor” considering the event of Christ’s Transfiguration on the mount Tabor as the prototype of hesychast Theoria). Here the integral and fundamental reorganization of the human being begins that is generated by the Divine energy acting in man and manifesting itself explicitly and visibly due to synergy.