This little book introduces the reader to the Paisian tradition from his time through to the lives of the Optina Elders, giving a brief history of how this spiritual transmission developed from the labors and spiritual hunger of St. Paisius Velichkovsky on Mount Athos to his disciples in the Roslavl forests in Russia to the Optina Monastery which over the course of 100 years produced a series of fourteen charismatic elders. This is the tradition that gives us the Philokalia, The Kollyvades Fathers, and the spiritual renewals of Greece and Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries.