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The knowledge of the heart makes us true to ourselves

Today, 'esoteric knowledge' is commonly believed to be the name for miserly-held secrets. In fact, its real meaning is nothing like this, the term refers to this kind of Christian knowledge - knowledge held not in what we now call the intellect, but in the heart, which formed the basis of ancient practices which we now describe as 'emotional education.' When we are in a certain state, this 'knowledge of the heart' unites everything: for any individual, such knowledge is unified, coherent, consistent. For those in the early church whose science was based on such knowledge, theology and philosophy, physics and all the sciences branched from a single stem. Even today, the knowledge of the heart unites, but the head-knowledge of our Western world, once it is given authority, is taken from a million different sources that do not quite fit together, and so it fragments the psyche into different 'departments,' different specialisations. And the different departments no longer understand each other. They no longer speak the same language. Babel is built of purely verbal definitions, while built around the living realities of prayer, the heart knowledge of the early Christian could weave the related discoveries of many intellectual disciplines into a single truth - a single workable solution. Saint Paul called this 'the wisdom of God,' and the knowledge of the head he called 'the wisdom of this world.' In this, he was not turning against the teaching of Christ, for to those who have eyes to see it there is evidence that the teaching of Christ's gospel, in offering as it did a 'unitive solution' for the human situation, was rich in pure, clear, and unitive heart-knowledge. This heart-knowledge is the true Christian esotericism. It is not secret, but it has been customary to 'bury' it: to make it difficult to find, because unless it is found as the result of effort, it is not valued, and unless it is valued it does not lodge in the heart, but is simply remembered in words.

There are many aspects to emotional education. For example, Saint Paul says: "Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up." St. Gregory Palamas said about this: "Do you see? There exists a kind of knowledge that is without love. It does not purify the psyche in any way, as it lacks the love which is the head, the body, and the very root of all virtue. But how could this knowledge which does not build up anything properly, (as does love), allow us to be made in the image of Him who is good?"

Because of this, we are beginning to study how certain single truths can unite different disciplines even today. We take the questions of philosophy and the remaining uncertainties of neuroscience, and then link them to the findings of early spirituality. On a smaller scale we are beginning to take the problems of spirituality and contrast them with the necessities of psychotherapy and the certainties of the physical sciences. In the return to unified knowledge, it is reasonable that one discipline resolves the problems of another.