Not a title conferred, and not a belief inherited, a decision made. One becomes a Researcher of Truth by deciding to seek.

Stylianos Atteshlis taught that no one can hand us proof of the great truths. Whoever truly seeks can find them, whether they are offered or withheld. But we must ask; we must open ourselves. The research of truth begins in that asking, and it ends nowhere, because the truth it seeks is living.

Our System for the Research of Truth

Stylianos Atteshlis named the path plainly: our System for the Research of Truth. It is not a creed to accept but a way of working, one he called methodical, safe, and self-evident, by which we come to verify the great truths for ourselves rather than take them on another’s word.

Directed study, observation, exercise, and meditation, pursued in love: by these, he taught, we attune ourselves to the Divine Laws, Forms, and Causes that govern life. The exercises and meditations themselves are gathered under The Practice.

And the System keeps the seeker free. Daskalos refused to be treated as a Master or Guru, asking only to be received as a Brother-Guide and friend, and he stressed the independence of each Researcher, discouraging any dependence. The one true Teacher, he taught, is within.

“We cannot claim that the System followed by the Researchers of Truth is the only one leading to perfection. There are many roads and paths towards the same goal.”

The road is long, and there are no shortcuts: sincere work with oneself, the slow purification of the personality from pettiness and weakness, harmony within before any gift is given. But the destination is not far away, it was never far away.

“We are going to know the truth, the more real, inner self, because we are already the truth.”

Stylianos Atteshlis

Daskalos, “the Teacher”

Stylianos Atteshlis was a Cypriot mystic, healer, and teacher, known to his students simply as Daskalos, the Greek word for teacher. For most of the twentieth century, from his home in Strovolos near Nicosia, he taught and healed quietly, gathering around him a circle of seekers who came to be called the Researchers of Truth.

He described his work not as a religion or a sect, but as a System for the Research of Truth: an esoteric Christian path by which each seeker verifies the great truths for themselves. He set it down in his own hand in The Esoteric Teachings, The Esoteric Practice, and the meditations of Gates to the Light, published through the Stoa Series in Strovolos.

He would not be called Master

Though his students revered him, Daskalos refused to be treated as a Master or Guru. He asked only to be received as a Brother-Guide and friend, and he stressed the independence of every Researcher, discouraging any dependence upon him. The one true Teacher, he insisted, is within.

The Seven Promises that ground our circle were, by his account, bestowed upon him in childhood by his Guide, Yohannan, and his whole life was grounded in them: service to Absolute Beingness, readiness to serve the Divine Plan, and love for every human being, whatever their behaviour toward him.

The healer of Strovolos

For much of his life Daskalos was known across Cyprus and far beyond as a healer. He received those who came to him without charge, tending illness of body and of soul as what he called a spiritual therapist, seeking the cause beneath the symptom. He and his students understood themselves not as masters but as servants, the “brothers and sisters of the oil,” who tend the suffering in a plain white robe and ask no name in return.

His method rested on what he taught as etheric vitality, the life energy that sustains the bodies: healing through the hands and through concentrated balls of light, working upon the etheric double and its centres, and, from afar, by directing healing energy in prayer. Such work, he cautioned, must be undertaken only with care and love, and never for display.

He did not claim these healings as his own power. They could not honestly be denied, he said, for “the doctors themselves verify” them, yet he returned the credit to God and to the unseen helpers who work through willing hands. In later years his life and work were observed and set down at length by the sociologist Kyriacos C. Markides, whose trilogy beginning with The Magus of Strovolos (1985) brought Daskalos to international attention.

We pass on these accounts as they were witnessed and recorded by others, in humility; our own help is offered freely, and only where it accords with God’s will.

How we stand in his lineage

Our Fellowship stands in the lineage of Stylianos Atteshlis, and we are grateful beyond measure for what he set down. Yet we hold his System as he himself asked it to be held: not as indisputable truth, but as an offered map, one by which each of us may run our own tests, to affirm, to revise, or to set aside, and so follow the truth wherever it leads.

This is faithful to him, not a departure from him. “We believe it,” he said of the truths, “and we also research it; blind faith has no place here.” And he would not claim his was the only road: “There are many roads and paths towards the same goal.” We take up his System, then, in that same spirit of free and earnest inquiry, and the one true Teacher remains, as he taught, within.

The teacher is within. To truly know oneself is to know God.

Those who take up this work gather in circles, study groups in this tradition around the world. Our fellowship is one such circle, and its foundation is the seven promises a researcher makes to their own soul.

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD… that he may teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths.”

A truth we live, not merely believe

The Foundations that follow are not a creed to accept on another’s word. They are a map to a country we mean to enter for ourselves. What the tradition seeks is gnosis, knowledge born of direct experience, a living relationship with the Divine within, rather than mere words carried in the memory.

Stylianos Atteshlis was plain about this. The gospel, he reminded us, “came not unto you in word only, but also in power,” and so he set out not only what is written but what is known first-hand. “We believe it,” he said of the truths, “and we also research it; blind faith has no place here.”

So read these pages as a beginning, not an end. Their purpose is fulfilled only when study passes into practice, and practice into a truth you have touched and known. To know oneself, the Teacher said, is to know God.

The Temple of the Heart

The mountain is climbed inward — and where the path finally leads is not a peak above us, but a sanctuary within.

The climb does not end on some far summit; it ends where it began — within. The Teacher was plain that the real sanctuary is not built of stone: the grandest cathedral and the humblest chapel only point toward it. “The real church,” he taught, “is the human form… we are the temple of God. Within us is the holy of holies, an inner sanctum, in the heart of every man and woman.”

We call this inner sanctuary the Temple of the Heart. We enter it by laying down, for a while, the thoughts and emotions of the day — until the mind grows quiet and still. “Be still,” the Psalm says, “and know that I am God.” In that quietude we find our true self, attune to our divine nature, and feel our kinship with all creation — for in His heart we are all one.

And there, upon the altar of the heart, burns what we call the True Flame — the inextinguishable Light the tradition names “the Light of Love for all,” the Sacred Fire in which, the Teacher said, the truth is found. It is an eternal flame that never dies; from it our fellowship takes its name. The Temple of the Heart is also where we meet one another, beyond distance — “where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I.”

“Within us is the holy of holies, an inner sanctum, in the heart of every man and woman. This temple can neither be soiled, nor destroyed. Go there… Christ is there. He awaits you.”

“On its altar light the lamp with the inextinguishable Light, the Light of Love for all.”

The Descent of Spirit

From God, through the worlds, to the threshold of the human heart.

“The purpose of man’s life on Earth is the gradual attunement to the voice of his Spirit within himself.”

Every seeker stands, sooner or later, before the oldest question: what is all this for? In our tradition the answer is not withheld as a mystery for the few, it is given plainly, and everything else in the teaching unfolds from it. What follows is our paraphrase of the foundations as Stylianos Atteshlis and his family taught them.

Who, then, is the “we” that returns? The tradition distinguishes two selves. There is the present-day personality, “George or Mary” the name and history of this one life, projected into the worlds of separation. And behind it stands the permanent personality: the eternal Self, “made of immortal supersubstance” who sends the present self out life after life and gathers home all that it learns. We are not the mask of a single lifetime. We are the one who has worn many, slowly assimilating them all into the Soul.

Why does this teaching matter? Because of what it dissolves. Once we know, not believe, but know, through our own experience, who and what we are, death loses its terror:

“I am and I am living, even after my bodies ‘die’.”

And so the practice is never separate from the living. As the tradition counsels, we should turn our life into a meditation, the attunement is made of ordinary days.

Paraphrased from “Understanding the Gates to the Light” in Gates to the Light by Panayiota Theotoki-Atteshli, with the recorded lessons of Stylianos Atteshlis (1988–1993).

The teaching begins where the Teacher began: with God, and it begins by refusing to shrink Him. The ancients called Him “He who has no name” for what name could contain the Infinite? Only one answer was ever given, and that to help our limited understanding: I am Beingness. And so the tradition speaks of Absolute Beingness, everywhere, filling everything, from the atom to the galaxies; a state of self-aware super-consciousness in which everything is, and from which everything draws the energy of its existence. And before all things, total and inexhaustible Love, never to be feared, only loved.

The Teacher offered a sculptor’s image: we see the artist, and we see the chisel in his hands, who made the statue? So with the universes: created by the Christ Logos and the Holy Spirit, who are not other than Absolute Beingness. Not three Gods, these three are one.

Everything else in the teaching, the worlds, the bodies, the work, descends from this.

Paraphrased from chapters one–three of The Esoteric Teachings by Stylianos Atteshlis (The Stoa Series, Strovolos).

“Listen to the beats of your heart… they are the voices of the Archangels telling you how much they love you.”

Within every form, from the human body to the universe, work four great intelligences: the Archangels of the Elements. They are not individualized beings who evolve as we do, but classes of divine expression, pure and simple, of God’s Power, Wisdom, and Goodness. They build and maintain every kingdom of life, and they can be worked with, consciously, gratefully, by anyone who learns their natures.

In the deeper exercises the circle builds a workshop for this communion: a square of white light drawn on the floor with the etheric hand, four triangles raised and joined into a pyramid three times one’s height, filled with white light, the front triangle kept for the golden light of the Logos. Within it, each Archangel is met, received, and thanked.

This is our emblem, explained: the four rays of our cross are red, violet, sky-blue, and silvery-white, the four lights of the attunement, meeting at the flame. Nothing is out of place in God’s plan.

We do not command these intelligences; we cooperate with them, and they are already at work in you.

Paraphrased from the Archangelic Attunement and “Archangels” in Gates to the Light by Panayiota Theotoki-Atteshli.

“The ‘bread’ which Jesus spoke of in the Lord’s Prayer is Mind.”

Before we can speak of bodies, worlds, or healing, we must name the one substance they are all made of. The tradition calls it Mind, with a capital M, and its teaching is startling in its simplicity: everything is Mind. “Everything has been built of Mind” the Teacher wrote, “in differing degrees and frequencies of vibration.” From the densest stone to the highest heaven, one Divine Supersubstance, thickened or refined. Mind is the ocean in which everything is formed and lives.

This is the ground beneath the whole practice. Because everything is Mind, thought is not idle: it takes form (the elementals). Because we are given etheric vitality, it can be gathered and directed, in visualisation, in the balancing of the bodies, in the healing our circle offers. What looks like mystery is only the lawful use of a substance we swim in and are made of.

We do not reach for a far-off power. We learn to use, consciously and gratefully, the daily bread already given.

Paraphrased from “Mind and Etheric Vitality” in The Esoteric Teachings by Dr. Stylianos Atteshlis.

“Heaven and the kingdom of the heavens are within the Mind… It is a state. And not a space.”

The tradition takes this saying of Jesus at its word, not as poetry, but as geography corrected. The kingdom is not a place we are carried to; it is a state we learn to enter. “Pay attention to this detail” the Teacher insisted, because everything in the practice follows from it.

Behind this stands the great teaching of the lessons: everything is the Mind. Mind is the medium through which the Christ-Logos and the Holy Spirit build the universes, from the densest matter to the highest heaven, one substance at different exaltations. The seven heavens are not seven skies but seven states within the Mind, and we are given the ability, and the right, to investigate them.

This is why the research of truth is inward work. Nothing needs to be crossed but our own inattention; no distance separates us from heaven except a change of state. Meditation, the keys, the promises, all of them are ways of changing state, exaltation upon exaltation, until what was always here can be seen.

The kingdom is not far. It has never been far. The work is learning to be where we already are.

Paraphrased from the session of 12 October 1988 in the recorded lessons of Stylianos Atteshlis.

The Human Being

The instrument we are given, its bodies, and the powers that move them.

“Without their etheric doubles our bodies would be empty shells.”

We are Spirit-Souls, pure, perfect light, seeds from God. Coming into the worlds of separation, we are clothed in Mind three times over: a noetical body of thought, a psychical body of emotion, and the familiar material body of flesh. Each lives in its own world and obeys that world’s laws; and yet the three are one being, you.

Each body is the vehicle of a world. The tradition speaks of three “worlds of separation”, the gross material; the psychic, the four-dimensional world of emotion; and the noetical, the five-dimensional world of thought, each with its own seven planes. Our material body lives and acts here; the psychical body in the psychic world; the noetical in the noetical. To be given a body is to be given a citizenship. To know the bodies, then, is to know the worlds we already inhabit, waking and, in sleep, beyond it.

The etheric doubles are the moulds and the life of the bodies, light-energy and etheric vitality, an exact replica moving in unison with the flesh. And they can be trained: the etheric hand extended to pour light, the etheric eyes learning to see, the etheric ears to hear. This is the sober anatomy beneath what our circle practices as spiritual perception and remote healing, not magic, but the disciplined use of a body everyone already has.

The energy centres, the chakras of the East, are whirlpools of this vitality, thousands of them, one at every pore and gland and fingertip. The tradition finds them named in scripture itself: churches, lamps, and stars.

Know the instrument, and the practices stop being mysterious, they become exact.

Paraphrased from “Being and Existing” and “Life Energy, Etheric Doubles, Energy Centers” in Gates to the Light.

“The Researcher of Truth should respect this mind vitality, because it is holy.”

Nothing we think or desire is idle. In the teaching of the tradition, every thought and every desire clothes itself in mind-substance and becomes a living form, an elemental. We are creating them constantly, waking and sleeping, with every wish, every fear, every repeated imagining. They go out from us, act in the world and on other souls, and return to the one who made them, stronger for every repetition.

This is the sober heart of the teaching: the same holy vitality builds angels or demons of our own making. A cherished resentment becomes a thing with a life of its own; so does a steady blessing. The Teacher warned plainly of the negative elementals, even of the “demon of egoism” that interferes the moment the work begins, not to frighten, but because a researcher must know their own workshop.

Hence the discipline. The third promise, to make good use of the divine gifts of thought and word, at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances, is elemental hygiene. The nightly introspection finds what we have built badly and withdraws its life. And the practice of conscious visualization, the third key, is the same power turned to service: healing sent across distance is an elemental of love, deliberately built, faithfully dispatched.

Guard the workshop. Everything you think is being built.

Paraphrased from the recorded lessons of Stylianos Atteshlis (sessions of 3 November 1988 & 1 December 1993).

The Teacher called it “the jungle within”, and he was blunt about its power: for most of us, the subconscious decides the circumstances in which we experience life. It can be our best friend and our worst enemy. Its attributes are what we carry from one incarnation to the next. Seated primarily at the solar plexus, it holds three chambers:

The subconscious is no small province, it constitutes three quarters of the present personality, residing in all three bodies, and it survives the death of the flesh. This is why the tradition takes its cleansing so seriously: the nightly introspection, the promises, the pure heart of the Beatitude. The jungle can be made a garden.

Purify the chambers, and what remains is the friend.

Paraphrased from chapter sixteen of The Esoteric Teachings by Stylianos Atteshlis.

Much confusion surrounds what the East calls karma. The Teacher restored its true face: the Law of Cause and Effect is not a system of rewards and punishments, and it is emphatically not the sadism of a punishing God. Every event has its cause; the Law is the great justice by which experience returns to its maker, wise, exact, and merciful.

Its administration is intimate: karma touches the present-day personality, never the permanent one, indeed it is our own permanent personality, with the Guardian Archangel, that administers the Law upon us, choosing conditions painful and pleasurable so that the needed experience is gained. The work of the Law is written in the heart. The slaps are sometimes sharp; they are always deserved, and always for a purpose, and our Guardian is gentler with us than our own soul is.

Nor are we its prisoners. Endowed with free will, reason, and holy Mind, we are meant to be its masters: to purify the unwholesome energies, to cease creating the negative, to break the chains binding us to the past. Our karmic state is simply the texture of our consciousness, the exact distance between our existence and our Being. And the Law is tempered throughout by Mercy: we pay little by little, according to our possibilities, never tested above our powers, and those who love us may, in love’s name, share the burden and help bear the pain. Few teachings honour that mercy as Christianity does.

Sow in the field of the Spirit, the harvest is already growing.

Paraphrased from chapter seventeen of The Esoteric Teachings by Stylianos Atteshlis.

The Practice

The work itself, the promises, the keys, and the law that fulfils them.

Held in common by Researchers of Truth, seven promises a seeker makes, not to any circle, but to their own soul.

I promise to myself…

The promises are not a wall to be scaled once and for all, but a path we return to each day. The seventh promise makes the returning its own practice: each night we examine where our thoughts, words, and deeds have fallen out of harmony, and quietly set them right again.

When we fall short, we are not condemned. Stylianos Atteshlis taught that repentance is not guilt but the realization of reality, the waking that lifts us out of a lie and turns us forward. And when we turn back, we are met as the son was met in the parable: the father, seeing him still far off, ran to embrace him. We are imperfect, and still we climb. The promises are simply how we begin again.

The promises were bestowed upon Stylianos Atteshlis when he was a child, by his Guide, and his whole life was grounded in them. His daughter counsels seekers to contemplate them daily, follow them, she writes, and life soon changes for the better. Every path our circle practices begins and ends here.

The kingdom is within, and it is locked only by our inattention. The tradition places five keys in the seeker’s hands: five faculties, trained slowly and used together, that open the gates.

“Many people seek the ‘golden keys’ without even knowing where the gates are.”

The keys are not collected, they are practiced, and each strengthens the next: observation feeds concentration, concentration steadies the image, the image teaches honesty, and honesty deepens the stillness. We train them together, in the circle.

The five capacities as set out in the introduction to The Esoteric Practice: Christian Meditations & Exercises (The Stoa Series, 1994), with the practice teachings of Gates to the Light.

“Your companion must be, mainly, the New Testament… in there are the golden keys of the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Ours is an esoteric Christian path, and its textbook is not hidden in any vault. The Teacher sent his students again and again to the New Testament, read not against the church, but beneath the surface: the golden keys of the kingdom are in it, he said, and they must be found. What the casual reader passes over, the researcher works open.

Read this way, the familiar verses become instructions. Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you, that is the method of the whole research, stated whole. First be reconciled… then come and offer thy gift, that is the preparation for every prayer and every healing. The kingdom of God is within you, that is the map. And whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, that is the promise on which our circle stakes its work.

So we read as researchers: slowly, inwardly, testing everything against experience, scripture in one hand, honesty in the other. Every gate we have found so far was already marked in its pages.

Take up the companion book. The keys are where they have always been.

Paraphrased from the recorded lessons of Stylianos Atteshlis and the counsel of Gates to the Light.

Our circle is small and gathers closely, so we begin not with an open door but with a conversation.

If this work speaks to you, write to us and tell us a little of yourself: what draws you here, and what you are seeking. We will find a time to talk together first, simply to meet one another and to sense whether this path and this circle are right for you.

There is no test to pass and no creed to profess, only an honest meeting between people who take the inner life to heart.

The evening itself is live and unrecorded, an hour and a half of shared practice in real time, held online. Being present together, in conscious effort, is part of the work.

The books our circle returns to, the Teacher’s own volumes and a few kindred works, for those who wish to read more deeply into the tradition.

Practices we return to for centering, stillness, and inner listening. Sit comfortably, let the breath settle, and let the teacher within speak.

These guided recordings are being prepared by the circle, and will appear here soon.

From the collected sessions of Stylianos Atteshlis, transcribed from the original Greek recordings.

We provide metaphysical assistance to those in need through the gifts God has given us to aid our brothers and sisters, the charismata (χαρίσματα). Our services are, and always will be, free.

If you carry a need, for healing, for insight, for prayer, you are welcome to ask. And if you feel drawn to the path itself, tell us a little of what you are seeking; we begin with a conversation, and will write back to arrange a time to talk. All that you share is held in confidence, and our help is always free.