THE PURPOSE OF INNER CHRISTIANITY

Going beyond the literal in religion

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The cure

The Church legitimised by Constantine formally defined its cure for religion that was without understanding; for faith that had become mere empty words. This cure can be made to manifest again through the conversion of an initial superficial belief in doctrine into a deep inner transformation of the nature of individual ... that is to say, of all that happens within an individual and shapes them, physically as well as psychologically; in their words and actions as well as in the thoughts, feelings and attitudes of their psyche - for false faith is no more than a symptom of a malformed psyche. 
It cause is purely verbal religious doctrine, whose sense is only sensory and goes only 'skin deep', for the realities of religion will act in us therapeutically, but only to the degree that they have been fully understood. It is the process of understanding it which makes it active within us. The real meaning of inner Christianity is therefore found in the need to cure the errors in the way we understand; an understanding developed in our youth which take the form of beliefs and in that inflexible form become rooted in the individual psyche. Once there, they become the basis of our thinking and as such not only distort all that we think, colour all that we feel, and determine all that we do, but they also distort our perceptions of ourselves and the world to a degree that is extremely harmful, making us unable to perceive either our state or our situation.

THE WORK OF RENEWING A FORGOTTEN INNER PATH

Praxis Research Institute is defined by its work - a task directly concerned with the restoration of the ancient Hesychast teaching and discipline of inner Christianity.
This tradition was once a viable alternative to the almost epidemic escape into eastern religions, something that is currently taking from the churches many of those most motivated to a spiritual life, and particularly those who are aware of the need for inner knowledge as an adjunct to spirituality. In the early church it filled the same needs as those filled in other great faiths today by Yoga, Sufism, and Zen Buddhism.
So well hidden has that Christian inner discipline become, that our work in Praxis necessarily began with research to recover hidden truths and regain an accurate understanding of their meaning. Our investigations into the history of Christian thought show that there is a basic problem in modern Christianity of all denominations.

 Incomplete versions of this tradition have been discovered and taught in the past two and a half centuries, but the search has never been made public nor pursued to completion.

This investigation did not begin with praxis and will; not end with us. We have been fitted from various ongoing attempts to recover this lost knowledge, going back to the middle of the eighteenth century, and spreading over half the world, although only an incomplete part of the results of these investigations has reached the West, re-worded in the often misunderstood teachings of G.I.Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky, and in the similar but more obscure work of Boris Mouravieff's Centre for the Study of Esoteric Christianity, which existed in Geneva in the 1950's and 60's, and whose work Praxis Research Institute was formed to continue.
The task of Praxis is thus to contribute to the restoration of these lost teachings to the Western world; not only to continue their recovery, but to give them new forms adapted to our contemporary genuine understandings of the world and of ourselves, but faithful to the spirit of the original teaching.