[1] See Saint Theophan the Recluse, The Heart of Salvation

[ii] Werner Jaeger: Early Christianity and Greek Paedaeia, Harvard, 1965. P153

[iii] Not all subtle sensations have spiritual significance, nor do the highest mystical impulses equate with any ordinary sensations, yet even here an increase in sensibility is valuable -- although we should be warned that it has its problems.

2. 

There was an ancient image in which memory was compared to a wax tablet

The facts behind this view are confirmed by Plato, and it is worth remembering that before the time of Christ he had echoed many aspects of the Christian teaching, although without that completeness [1] that led to practical results. The esoteric model of memory, properly understood, will tell us that we must transform our memory by increasing its sensitivity so that it registers things other than the merely sensory, by becoming more discriminating, that is, by registering the subtle and meaningful, not the coarse and purely external, and in this way purifying the memory of illusions.

The parable of the Sower, written in the time of Christ to describe memory in terms understandable to a population predominantly of farmers, uses a model very similar to that used by Plato. Plato conveyed the same basic principles as the Gospel parable, but did so by describing the memory as being like one of the wax tablets they used for writing on. In that Greek analogy, what happens to the 'impressions' that fall on the memory depends on the condition or 'temperature' of the wax. The similarities of the two models make one suspect that they are different versions of a standard model of memory once used in classical esoteric teaching. Like the parable of the Sower, Plato's model described three conditions of memory:

If it is too hard, nothing is retained; this is like the seed that falls on the edge of the road, where the earth is too hard packed and the seeds cannot root. This leads to forgetting of all but the strongest impressions, and so the gentle impressions of spiritual experience are not retained.

If it is too soft, too much is retained, the memory is not sufficiently selective, but instead retains irrelevancies and untested delusions, which blanket the memories we wish to retain. In this case the impressions of spiritual experience are usually obscured, a few may survive, but they will not be remembered often enough to lead to any change in our lives.

If the wax is in perfect condition, at a perfect temperature, we retain what we wish to retain.

The parable of the Sower

In this language of parable, another very valuable image is that of Adam in the garden, and perhaps, paradoxically, the garden as the seedbed in man, the very soil in which: “a Sower went forth to sow".

Gregory of Nyssa wrote, linking the parable of the Sower and that of the tares, and saying that the field in which the tares grow is the heart.

Christian tradition retains this not only as idea, but as experience that extends the idea of the garden beyond that of mere memory to what might be described as states of memory. As the abbot of one of the Athos monasteries once said: "To be in the liturgy is to experience paradise." [11]] This is based on doctrine, but it is confirmed in experience, for in an Athonite liturgy one captures again the tears and the joys of that Garden long lost to us, which yet lies all around us: the paradise of the heart which the head can never see unaided. This paradise is approached through tears, through self doubt, through the penetrating experience of repentance ... never merely through doctrinal ideas or simple theory. Always, it involves emotional, felt experience, sharp, embarrassing, remorseful, self-­revealing, suddenly joyful, often painful, bearing strange undercurrents of sorrow perhaps, but real... above all, real; the tears of real people.

"Out of the strong came forth sweetness." (Judges 14: 14.)

And it is in this garden that the Sower went forth to sow:

And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying,

"Behold, a Sower went forth to sow; And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.

"Who hath ears to hear, let him hear." (Matthew 13:3-9.)

The place where the Sower spread his seed, the field where the enemy planted the tares, the wax tablet of Plato’s analogy -- in the esoteric tradition these are in the spiritual or noetic heart ... a heart which can be found by beginning from the physical heart, but is in fact something much deeper, the darkness beyond the mind, Saint John of the Cross’ thought that transcends reason. This is the field tended by the householder of God. That is why Gregory of Nyssa, quoting his sister Saint Macrina as his teacher, wrote about the parable of the tares that:

“In that story, the householder planted good seed; we are undoubtedly his household. When the enemy had observed the men sleeping, he sowed the useless weeds amongst the nourishing crops, putting the tares in the midst of the grain. And the seeds sprouted alongside each other, for it was inevitable that the seed planted along with the grain would also sprout along with it.... We suppose that the Scripture is representing those impulses of the soul by the healthful seeds. If only each of them had been cultivated for good it would undoubtedly have produced the fruit of virtue for us. But since error in the judgement of the good has been sown along with these impulses, that which alone is truly good by nature has also been overshadowed by the plant of deceit growing up with it.... This is where the impulse of desire has been led by misjudgment concerning the good... The other emotions in the same way have produced worse plants instead of better. For this reason the wise farmer allows the weed which has grown amongst the seed to remain there, taking care that we do not remove the better part as we might if desire was altogether uprooted as well as the useless growth. For if this should happen to our human nature, what is there which would raise us towards union with the heavenly. So you see that the farmer leaves the bastard seeds in us, not intending that they should permanently dominate the more honourable sowing, but that the field itself, for this is his figurative name for the heart -- through the natural power residing in it (which is nous, reason) -- should dry up the one part of the plants, but render the other part fruitful and thriving.” [iii]

Illusory Memories

When this ancient model is used to describe memory, it tells of three states of memory, two of which lead to forgetting of the more subtle experiences of life. We forget these things because the matter of memory is 'too hard' -- not receptive enough -- as with the seed that fell by the 'roadside', so that the impressions left by spiritual experiences begin to grow, but they cannot 'take root', with the result that the experiences that happen are forgotten, because the memories do not form as a clear impression. Or it is too soft, too receptive, so that too many different kinds of memory are taken in, and the more subtle memories are obscured or overlaid by the coarser and stronger memories or simply by those that come later. Finally, there is memory that is like good soil; cleared or purified, tilled so that it receives a clear impression of the subtle memories, and retains them without their being covered over, and kept from excessive 'growth' of worldly impressions that would otherwise cover over the spiritual memories.

Psalm 118 (119 in Modern Bibles), is recognized by monks of both Eastern and Western churches, and is said by some to be a key to the esoteric tradition. It is an important text for monks in orders such as the Benedictines. The first verse says:

"Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the LORD." (Psalm 119:1 Psalm 118 in the Orthodox version.)

For this reason, monks in the Eastern church take care, even today, to quite literally lower their eyes from the world, so as not to take in too many worldly impressions. The conclusions of this can be summarized by saying that, to prevent our forgetting the spiritual, a certain preparation is necessary: we need to eliminate certain impediments to spiritual consciousness: but what are these 'impediments?' And how do they link with the diakrisis mentioned at the beginning of this Chapter. In part, the answer to this question is obvious:

It was Evagrius (again) who wrote about our memories that:

"Both virtues and vices make the mind blind, the one so that it may not see the vices; the other so that it might not see the virtues." [iv]

If our thought determines to what we attend, then one type of obstruction to consciousness exists simply in wrong or incomplete patterns of thought. This is exactly what happens today, since the dominant thought held in our times, the misconception which claims that inner experience is unimportant, means that we form the habit of attending only briefly or incompletely to inner sensations. Thus, in self-fulfilling prophecy, we do not find what we expect not to find: giving no attention to the inner world, we find there nothing of importance -- if we find anything at-all.

Thus, Clement of Alexandria was correct when he put it that what we believe ourselves to know makes us blind to what we might truly know.

"If any man thinketh that he knoweth anything, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know." For the truth is never mere opinion. But the "supposition of knowledge inflates," and fills with pride; "but charity edifieth," which deals not in supposition, but in truth. Whence it is said, "if any man loves, he is known." [v]

Careful self-observation confirms the statement, made by modern commentators on this tradition, that in the normal, unpurified human mind, illusions are as much part of the content of memory as is genuine knowledge -- perhaps more, since the only knowledge we normally possess is partial knowledge or 'knowledge of the world', shaped by man's mind with all the distortions this is prone to. This idea agrees with the Indian tradition of the Vedas, in which maya, illusion, prevents vidya, knowledge.

Cassian, when we quote his comments on diakrisis a few pages further on, refers to this form of discrimination as a means of preventing illusion, and elsewhere it is said that without this the student falls from grace.

But separate from this, in the last quotation from Clement, we can find certain statements about Love (as charity).

• Love does not deal in supposition, but

• Love deals in truth, and

• If any man loves, he is known.

This supports the observation that the higher planes of Love possess a cognitive capacity which relates directly to the higher planes of memory, and in this we may find a clue to the nature of that seed that I was earlier unable to define.

Now Published by Praxis Research Institute, A Different Christianity has now been reprinted many times.