Inner truth in the Western world

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Painting - the Orange Road Map, by Praxis member Lillian Delevoryas

Praxis members learn to use the study of history to study certain qualities of human nature  The qualities to which I refer now are that:
 

Firstly, modern man is not true to his nature. Certain natural qualities do not manifest automatically in us, even with good upbringing, religion, or ideal social conditions.

Secondly, we do not act intentionally, and so are not true to our nature.  Purely outward assertiveness is an empty imitation of inner intention.

Thirdly, we forget our real nature: the inner meaning of the saying that ‘nobody remembers the lesson of history’ applies specifically to the fact that we ‘forget ourselves’.
Fourthly, we repeatedly forget what we have learned about this: on the way to learning how to make these efforts and long after we can bandy their names about with great ease and enthusiasm, we continue repeatedly to forget their exact nature.

Many of the great changes in human history can be understood in terms of this process. So the study of history can be used not only as a reminder of what we should remember, but as a way of discovering how it became lost. From this we may uncover certain short-lived successes in correcting this situation, and from this we may begin to rediscover ourselves.

All of this means that Christianity was once different from what we know of it today. There have been small changes in our ideas about the faith, and changed beliefs have led to large changes in the life that flowing from those beliefs.
During the period when the Roman Empire fell into decay, around the sixth to eighth centuries, political divisions led to the introduction of certain small but highly significant changes in Christian doctrine. The whole character of the Church and the society it informed (in an ancient sense of the word) changed as a result. More than this, where those changes ruled, particularly in the West, the result was that, after that time, there was a significant difference in the character and capability of the majority of Christians. This influenced the form and character of European civilisation, particularly in its Western part. In the West, too, the church began to fall into disrepute.

Yet, even today, the original form and ancient vitality of Christianity survives almost hidden from view in monasteries and hermitages of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. This is what we now know as Esoteric or Inner Christianity. In our Western world, those truths are so little known, and the need for them so little understood, that many of us regard esoteric truth as a secret science, a concern only of people with strange and even impractical interests; a hobby or some kind of obsession!

In other times, and in other places even today, the picture is very different; esotericism is simply a discipline of the psyche, but one concerned with inner knowledge ... at its best, with necessary inner knowledge. Its importance lies in the fact that behind certain of the great civilisations of the world lies a way of thinking ... a way often recognized as one of the world's great faiths; one great faith to shape the inner form of many different peoples, and to shape and keep-whole the inner form of a whole civilization.

These civilising faiths possess or possessed 'esoteric' keys, dedicated to healing the culture by healing the psyches of its participating individuals so as to connect those individuals back to the roots of their life:

to meaning and purpose:
to the capacity to love;
to an awareness of God's presence and support;
to a source of healing and personal renewal;
to a state of inner stillness;

In some great communities, including parts of ‘Hindu’ India, healing esoteric traditions such as Yoga, Zen, and Sufism, are supported and sustained as an essential part of civilisation; in what we now call the Western world, this is not so, and today the Information World, the high-tech commercial culture of the West, is slowly but surely eroding the inner traditions of the rest of the world, and leaving high-tech barbarism in its wake. Our so-called Western Civilisation, which grew up first in Europe, is such a case. The religion at its heart was Christianity, but when that Christianity lost its inner meaning, it ceased to fulfil its original role, so that the original form became forgotten or hidden from view except from those who by grace or effort experienced those truths directly within themselves.

So it was at that point, and as a result of that violent change, that Christianity began periodically to act in strangely un-Christian ways, so that it began to fall into disrepute while the Christian world began to disintegrate around it.

Yet the original faith survives to our time as the Christian Esoteric Tradition