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First-Millennium spiritual psychology rediscovered

The dominant kind of thinking in our Western world of the Third Millennium is rationalist, intellectual, humanist, driven by people's assumptions, and by the fact that most of us now form reactions to important concepts without properly examining them. One result of this is that today most of us have the same blind-spots in our thinking about what happens within us. That is, we are almost blind to ourselves, something that manifests in a general uncertainty about what happens within us, about might be called the ''Self,' and related phenomena such as consciousness.

Yet our Christendom sprang from the very different Eastern Roman Christianity of the First Millennium, the Eastern core of which survived to Palamas time in the 14^th Century, long after by the end of the first half of the first century of the second Millennium, by which time the character of its Western part had been effectively destroyed by conquest and widespread enslavement. That first millennium Christianity might almost be seen as a different civilisation, centred not around power our outer science, but around an inner-directed religion, so that, even today, the psychological knowledge within it can be precisely defined by statements in Palamas Triads. It was:

·         A world driven by an inner science, with its own criteria, consensus, experimental method … a method that did not aim to produce data, but to produce understanding.

·         A world with its own psychological discipline a world where not everyone mastered that 'technology,' but those who did became saints.

·         A world that went underground after the Turkish invasion. But which still survives today as a ‘secret church,’ an underground mystical tradition in the secret fastnesses of Europe and nearer Asia: like Mount Athos.

·         A different Christianity, one without the wild differences that exist between churches in our times.

Later in his book, the Triads  – and in this description of it - Palamas provides enough information to define key moments of time in the life of that civilisation whose science was based on the inner view derived from human experience, and whose ‘funeral oration’ was represented by his three-volume Triads, or at least he shows clearly that in his time the era which was coming to an end, or at least being driven underground, was effectively a religious civilisation far larger than most of the civilisations that flourished one after another in Central America.

MILLENNIUM

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Spiritual crisis of the West  

Notices to Readers