The education of the psyche

According to inner tradition, because of this situation, the psyche has to be re-educated before it can experience and participate in the spiritual in any consistent way. Without this re-education, even the most intelligent psyche remains limited by the beliefs formed in it during childhood, and in our times those beliefs often include certainty that the spiritual does not exist. This is why, as Palamas puts it, ‘the perfume of the mysteries’ continually evades the philosopher who is too deeply involved in the outside world. In fact, says Palamas, it evades him until he is finally rescued by a developing fear of God.

This is a quite exact phenomenon. It is a specific process that begins when first we realise our own limitations and then this awareness becomes more than purely intellectual. This awareness must become emotional. It must be felt, and this feeling of its reality must apply not only to our studies but to the whole of our lives. Saint Anthony the Great in his ‘first letter’ refers to this when he speaks of three ‘levels’ of people seeking God, of which the first (and lowest) seek God to escape the troubles of their life. It is to people like this that the message of this section applies. Their problems are caused by the complications they have made for themselves in their outside lives. But as Palamas points out, to overcome the attraction of exterior things we have to free our inner lives from what he calls the ‘snares of the devil.’ ( 2 Timothy 2:26.)   This is a progressive process.   In it the formation of magnetic centre passes through several ‘alchemical stages’ which at this point we will elaborate in more detail than we have said before - stages that at first appear as follows:

1. Remembering that we are a spiritual being inhabiting a body.
2. Through the effort to remember, discovering that the spiritual is imprisoned by the physical, and deciding to free the spiritual from the physical.
3. Finding ourselves powerless to do so against the habits of inertia, wilfulness and self-indulgence which have been established over all the years since the beginnings of our lives. This powerlessness to change ourselves, leads to a fear of God’s power over our lives, but perhaps only when it is allied with an awareness of the real presence of God in our lives.

In the struggles that follow, we will gradually find or form a memory of true-Self-Will, which is something entirely separate and different from the everyday wilfulness of the ego.