Cosmogenesis: In a Small Boat, Drifting on the Ocean/ Part 3 and beginning of Part 4

By Brian George

3

In her comment “I Hate America,” Joan of Art wrote:

“I still clench my teeth every time some loud-mouthed American screams to me across the street, "It's not Halloween!" because costume is my form of social dissent. These cowboy fuckers see a gorgeous queen of a woman in her full sequined Egyptian attire and then think that an appropriate response is to scream rudely across the street to make her feel like crap. Am I to have compassion for their sheer idiocy and rudeness?

“I think the problem with a sample study of taking four well-meaning Americans and writing a book based on the American Dream is that most Americans are stupid as hell. I apologize for being so vulgar about this—but freedom in this country has seemed to turn into the right to shut other people down. The internet has been launching demonic energy at me as a result of tagged words in my Election Art Battle, and I am having to fight multi-demented black magicians and demons right now to get them the fuck off of Earth.

“Please don't misread my passion for anger. I am immortally pissed. I am also strangely at peace in the battle of the multidimensional war of which I am now a part. I will not let them take me out. The fates of Sirius and Earth are interwoven. The veil between the dimensions has fully opened—at least from where I'm standing, grabbing demons and sending them back through the Halls of Amenti to the dimension from which they sprang.”

4

“What a strange manner of being dead”

Hi Joan of Art,

When faced with a pod of rude recombinants from America, it is possible that gratitude is the only correct response. If the world cohered—already, and without change—in a state of unbroken fullness then we would not ever be tempted to depart from Hyperspace. No food would be delivered to the gods. They would look like skeletons. With no blood to refresh their beauty, their idealized proportions would be abstract, and few inter-species marriages would endure. Ambassadors would lose track of which language they were speaking. If some percentage of the public were not ignorant, then why would you need to have compassion for them? Already, they would be members of the elect. I can only hope that my other-dimensional teachers do not withhold their compassion until I am perfect. That would certainly be quite a wait! 

In the mean time, the Underworld has need of us. The genius of the Great Year fades. Space appears flat—not like the 10-dimensional labyrinth that it is—and the World of Light sinks beyond the edge of the horizon.

“Sleepers also share in the work of the cosmos,” said Heraclitus. It has taken me quite a while to begin to guess what he meant. Among other things, I think that he was saying that there is a purpose to unconsciousness. As when we breathe, the light goes in and out—i.e., it cannot go in without also going out. If the stars did not revolve, and the genius of the Great Year was completely self-enclosed, then immortality and death would not be any different. There would be no variations on the 12 archetypal themes.

When I was a senior in high school, I discovered a poem by Cesar Vallejo that in part reads, “You people are dead, but what a strange manner of being dead. Anyone might say that you were not.” “Aha,” I thought, “my sentiments exactly!” Since then, my attitude towards human ignorance has changed, more on some days than others, but I still have immediate access to the emotions that I felt. And should I, by some lessening of testosterone, be somehow tempted forget my sense of adolescent outrage, updated access is guaranteed by such groups as the Tea Party, who spare no expense in providing me with fresh targets for my disgust.

For example: Wolf Blitzer, in a CNN debate, asks Ron Paul about a 30 year-old male who has “chosen” not to purchase health insurance. He goes into a coma, and requires six months of intensive care. Should society just let him die? Paul answers, “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks. This whole idea that you have to prepare and take care of everybody…” The crowd then erupts in shouts of “Yeah! Yeah! Let him die!” This is not the response of a group of conscious beings. Even now, I could not help but feel: We are watching a live broadcast from one of the cities of the dead. They are no doubt starved for biomorphs, and are making every effort to increase their population.


(Illustration: Max Beckmann, Carnival)

Cosmogenesis: In a Small Boat, Drifting on the Ocean/ Part 2

By Brian George

The transparency of the epileptic boat

Hi Gilberto,

You wrote, “Hyperspace is certainly not a shelter from the storm. Although we (seemingly) escape, we only set the stage for a return to the same situation. Perhaps different settings, time periods, characters, genders, etc. In my humble opinion, the lesson not learned is the lesson gladly returned. Although I do like the option of escaping for a cosmic nap and dealing with certain things later....”

My sense is that we are entering a period of transition in the relationship between dimensions, in which the interaction between the vertical and the horizontal axes will be redefined. No exchange will be fixed, and a shock wave will run upwards, through the “higher” worlds, as well as outwards, through the global body.

It is possible that there will be no non-participants in the revolution against History—that the past and the future will be seen as our wayward children, as flawed but necessary aspects of a project that we undertook long ago. At the moment, I feel that I am being carried forward in a small boat on an ocean, with no real way to steer. No matter, since even the small boat must go; all transport must begin and end with the body, in its role as a primordial vehicle.

Collectively, we are approaching a near death state, and the knowledge for our own good hidden beyond death is beginning once again to speak. There is no time like the “present” to confront the projection of our fears. At a certain stage in our initiation, it may dawn on us that trauma is not other than a door to ecstasy—a door that opens at the center of the sky—or, conversely, that ecstasy may be the key that unlocks the hieroglyph of trauma.

“Non-attachment” is often seen as a meditative accomplishment, but it is naturally present, for a time at least, in the normal near death experience, as it may be also in the current transition between worlds. The freefall of the world economy may force us to make a virtue of necessity; we are picked up by the hair. Each ego must become a movable “omphalos.”


(Illustration: Wassily Kandinsky, Painting with Three Spots, 1914)

Cosmogenesis: In a Small Boat, Drifting on the Ocean/ Part 1

By Brian George

A while back, I posted an essay on Reality Sandwich called "Habits of the Heart." I have assembled an essay out of some of the comments from the forum, which I have been in the process of revising. (Comments to me are as orignally written--my own comments have been expanded and revised.) Over the next few weeks, I will be posting the nine sections of this essay. Here is the first part:

__

And in this sense, I say, the world was before the Creation, and at an end before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive, though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise, and Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain.”—Thomas Browne, from “Religio Medici,” 1643

1

The Enigma of the Labyrinth; Any Wrong Turn is Correct

Hi Somatics,

In your comment entitled “Culture Cage”, you wrote, “Crazy crossed wires frizzing miles and miles of toxic channels carved through your synapses through long fermentation. Language is black magic and the double edged sword. Please only take it out of the sheath to reflect light into the dark not to hack away at gifts placed around you. Mr. McKenna stated ‘culture is not your friend.’ He wasn’t wrong. Are you wearing clothes or are you the clothes?...Truths are only evident in the pit of the stomach or the centre of the chest. Plant vegetables or create your thing and chuck away the television or magazine.”

I do believe that we—as the collective embodiment of the vision on which this country was founded—have reached an impasse, but it is an impasse only in terms of our own level of understanding. All of my work is premised on the assumption that the universe coheres in a state of multidimensional perfection; it cannot be broken. This, of course, presents us with a paradox, since Time would appear to break all things. Without being “broken” the Primordial Male/Female Body cannot act or reproduce, and creation would remain a hermetically sealed dream.

You speak of a “double edge sword,” and in this intuition you are correct: The energy of the trickster is never far from my thoughts, and a love of paradox is at the heart of my creative method. When faced with mutually impossible alternatives, the mind can jump to a different level of connection. Ends and beginnings are not necessarily different. When the “common wisdom” is a euphemism for oligarchic propaganda, and our habitual modes of interpretation do not really explain a thing, then perhaps we would do well to approach each fact or phenomenon as a koan. The Monk Mayo asked this question of the Sixth Patriarch: "What is Zen?" The Patriarch answered, "When your mind is not dwelling on the dualism of good and evil, what is your original face before you were born?" This would suggest that real knowledge cannot be reached by a process of addition; instead, it has to do with the removal of all irrelevant objects in the foreground.

Let us say that some ancient trauma has blocked access to the Macrocosm: Our instinct is to run from the event, which, with each step that we take, gets closer. Glass towers are built on the emptiness that is left when indigenous tribes—with most but not all of their oral literature—are erased. YHVH is pleased, as is Calvin—the stone god of psychopaths.

Yet there is no starting over. Fear has turned us into victims, and a near-death experience could not come soon enough. A sword, in the end, is intended to destroy, and thus to liberate the energy that has been trapped within a form, but it is up to us as to whether this will lead to discrimination. I envision a perfect sword strike, in which each head will be split open from the crown to the pineal gland, and that out of this will rise our perception—now direct—of the sphere whose center is as large as its circumference.

(Illustration: Leonora Carrington,

“There was a time when only wise books were read”—Czeslaw Milosz

By Brian George

(This is my second comment to archetypal astrologer and social critic Jessica Murray on her “MotherSky” post “Beyond Irony.”)

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”—Czeslaw Milosz

Hi Jessica,

You wrote, “It’s remarkable, by contrast, how un-ironic writers from earlier epochs were. Many of the Victorian thinkers, even the sober, philosophical ones, come across now as eye-rollingly naïve. A good example is Charles Dickens, who condemned the injustices of his time in prose that strikes our modern tastes as unbearably sentimental. But there is one thing about his un-ironic tone, with its unabashed outrage, its florid idealism (he had an Aquarius Sun and a Sagittarius Moon conjunct Neptune, for heaven’s sake) that you can’t argue with: it passes the test of time. Irony is less able to make this claim.”

As you can probably tell, my intention was not to disagree with you, but rather to call attention to a different type of irony. Hemingway said that it was essential for a writer to possess a “built-in bullshit detector.” A sense of irony is one of the signs that this detector is functioning properly. To me, a sense of irony is a particular instance of an ability to see the world from a multitude of angles—an ability which can also manifest in the form of visionary intuition, as the lightning flash that transforms sense into nonsense and nonsense into sense. My wife associates the birth of her sense of irony with her first psychedelic experience.

Here are a couple of context-subverting comments attributed to Diogenes that you might find amusing:

1) “After being banished from Sinope, Diogenes said, ‘The Sinopeans have condemned me to banishment; I condemn them to stay at home!'"

2) “When asked how he would like to be buried, Diogenes replied 'face downwards.' When asked why, he explained that the Macedonians were rising in power so rapidly that the world would shortly be turned upside down and he would then be the right way up.”

When I was at Mass College of Art, I had a philosophy teacher from Hungary called Jasminka Udoviki. She was an excellent teacher, but, perhaps because English was not her native language, or due to her passion for social justice, she seemed to have no sense of irony whatsoever. During one semester, she refused to grade any of my essays, claiming that they were too “poetic,” and that the language was too far outside the bounds of normal philosophical discourse. Unlike Nietzsche or Cioran, I suppose. Luckily, I still ended up with an A minus in the course.

In retrospect, I can see that the problem was less one of metaphor than of irony. She would tend to take almost all of my ironic statements at face value. This meant that she would often think that I meant the exact opposite of what I actually meant; any subsequent arguments would then make no sense at all


(Illustrations: James Ensor, The Intrigue, 1911/ Roman theatre masks)

On the Darkness Behind the Mask of the Many-Faced Muse of Irony

By Brian George

I have long been an admirer of the work of Jessica Murray, author of the terrific book “Soul-Sick Nation; An Astrologer’s View of America,” and host of the blog “MotherSky.” Jessica is a practitioner of what she calls “Archetypal Astrology.” What most impresses me is that she is able to move fluently back and forth between a macrocosmic perspective—which I sometimes see as that of a disincarnate soul, at the tail end of its involvement in a time cycle, i.e., that of a Gnostic "Aeon"—and a cutting edge awareness of key social, political, and cultural issues of the day. Over the next week or so, I will be posting a number of comments that I wrote for the forum on her essay “Beyond Irony.”

Hi Jessica,

You wrote, “It must say something about our society that the use of irony has become so all-pervasive. Why do we rely on it so much in writing? Why do we frame so much of what we say with finger quotes? It strikes me that irony is essentially a self-protective mechanism, disguised as a stylish gesture. It works by holding its cards close to the vest. When we’re being ironic, we allude to our point instead of throwing all of our weight behind it. We make a show of holding back our sincerity. Irony makes no claims to opening the heart, in either the speaker or the listener.”

I have often had similar thoughts about a certain type of irony. If deployed as an all-purpose attitude toward the world, the subversive force of irony can quickly become boring. As the saying goes, “To a hammer everything looks like a nail.” Too much hyper-self-awareness is—ironically—not that different from unconsciousness. True insight is attentive to its object, whereas the judgment of the ironist is on everything and nothing, and all judgments must inevitably confirm his/her sense of superiority.

Well, that settles that! As the agents of the City Beyond Time, we should no doubt strive to be 100% sincere.

As a poet, however, I also have a somewhat different way of looking at the issue, for, without irony, there would be no modern poetry. Not every type of irony reflects the disengagement of the slacker. In fact, irony can be one of the primary weapons that allows a poet to take on an empire, and that empowers him to move freely against overwhelming odds. It is the pin that pops the metaphysical balloon, the slingshot that takes down Goliath.

For example: I am truly in awe of some of the poetry that was written in Eastern Europe after World War II—when, for some period of time, literature itself was thought to be impossible. These writers--among them Milosz, Celan, and Herbert—give form to my intuitions as to how spiritual vision can be tempered by and integrated with a weight of historical knowledge. To all of these writers, irony was one of the primary weapons in their arsenal. To use it well was a matter of life or death.

Here is the beginning of Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Caligula Speaks”:

Caligula Speaks

Among all the citizens of Rome

I loved only one

Incitatus—a horse

when he entered the Senate

the unstainable toga of his coat

gleamed in the midst

of purple-lined assassins

Incitatus possessed many merits

he never made speeches

had a stoic temperament

I think at night in the stable he read the philosophers

I loved him so much that one day I decided to crucify him

but his noble anatomy made it impossible

he accepted the honor of consulship with indifference

exercised authority in the best manner

that is not at all

he would not be persuaded toward a lasting liason

with my second wife Caesonia

thus unfortunately the lineage of centaur ceasars

was not engendered

that is why Rome fell

These writers often seem to be saying: Civilization does not automatically progress. True change does not come through politics. No technological solution can be expected to appear on the horizon.

There is often a very visceral sense of the reality of evil, of bureaucratic corruption, and of the power of the lie. At the same time, there is no easy recourse to stern moralistic finger wagging. Something altogether more mysterious is often going on—the veil between the worlds has ripped, and a wave of supernatural force has begun to transfigure common objects.

Irony here performs a function similar to that of metaphor—it is a method of linking seemingly discontinuous meanings, and of jumping between one level of reality and the next. Unlike the slacker version, this use of irony is expansive rather than contractive. It is a tool for liberation. Reading the best of Eastern European writers from this period, it is difficult for me not to view myself and my contemporaries as naive, and I look to them for clues as to how I might be possible to “begin beyond the end.”

And, finally, here is Herbert’s “The Envoy of Mr Cogito”—a very non-ironic statement by an otherwise highly ironic writer. In it, the author gives us direct access into the world view and sense of purpose that underlie his use of irony.

The Envoy of Mr Cogito

         

Go where those others went to the dark boundary

for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees

among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live

you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous

in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea

whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

let you sister Scorn not leave you

for the informers executioners cowards—they will win

they will go to your funeral with relief will throw a lump of earth

the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

and do not forgive truly it is not in your power

to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

beware however of unnecessary pride

keep looking at your clown's face in the mirror

repeat: I was called—weren't there better ones than I

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring

the bird with an unknown name the winter oak

light on a wall the splendor of the sky

they don't need your warm breath

they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go

as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends

because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain

repeat great words repeat them stubbornly

like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

and they will reward you with what they have at hand

with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way you will be admitted to the company of cold skulls

to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland

the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

Be faithful Go

(Translations by John and Bogdana Carpenter/ Illustration: Roman Comedy and Tragedy masks)

Interplanetary Cruises; Europa's Festival of Lights

By Elizabeth George

(This is a brochure that my daughter, Elizabeth, did for her Earth Sciences course last year. For me, the piece has a lot of metaphysical resonance. Aside from being fun, it also stirs up memories.)

Interplanetary Cruises™

Presents:  

Europa’s Festival of Lights™

Once every twelve years, the Meeya Meephla of Europa enact one of their most sacred and joyous rituals, the Festival of Lights, “jnsdjewi vn2i3hr;lm;wmef!!!!in!!their “ in their telepathic language. 

During this exotic festival, the gentle, gigantic, disk-shaped Meeya Meephla, whether young or old, single or paired, pull out all the stops as they compete in artistic displays of the most spectacular bioluminescent light shows this side of the galaxy. 

You will board the luxurious Celestial Star solar sail ship at Earthport and after a glorious two weeks of delicious food and fun activities, you will be safely flash-frozen for the remainder of the trip to Europa. Upon arrival, you will experience our signature full spa treatment defrosting and rehabilitation, that will leave you feeling relaxed and rejuvenated, and ready for the next leg of your journey… descent through Europa’s  scenic sixty-mile ice layer into the moon’s  tranquil inner sea.

While in orbit around Europa, you will have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to observe Jupiter’s Great Red Spot-a hurricane of unimaginable power and fury.  (Sightseeing trips to Io and Ganymede are also available at additional cost.) You will board the Europa Explorer, a state of the art vehicle capable of melting through miles of ice and then traveling through the silent saline depths of the moon’s interior.  Though compact, the Europa Explorer was designed for the comfort and convenience of its passengers. Warm baths of Europa’s mineral rich ocean water will be provided, as will beverages flavored and colored with the Meeya Meephlas’ favorite luminous bacterial slime. Drink enough of it and you too may become phosphorescent! 

From the large unobstructed cabin windows you will see the gathering of the Meeya Meephla by clan, color, and temperament, followed by the grand procession into the competition space. Earthwords can’t describe the wryness, the majesty, the pure imaginative genius of the competition displays!  Incorporating the best of dance, light painting, martial arts and epic poetry, the beauty of the Festival of Lights ensures that you will never be the same again.  The hospitality of the Meeya Meephla will astonish you. Europa’s natives are truly the gentle giants of the Solar System and their “hearts” are as big as their disks. They welcome Earthfolks with all of their many open arms…all they ask is that you leave their world as clean as you found it, and keep unimaginative thoughts to yourself. 

The Europa Festival of Lights™ Cruise leaves Earthport on March 1^st, 3010 and returns on June 1^st, 3013. Cost for a single fare is five megacredits, in advance.

Please note: You will have the opportunity to purchase professionally made recordings of the entire festival or individual performances in dreamy or audi-visi formats.

C:\Users\owner\Documents\Cruise leaves Earthport  on March 1st.docx

There is No Beauty without some Strangeness of Proportion/ Part 19/ Section 21

By Brian George

21

Here today, and gone tomorrow, and then back before you knew that it had left

“At night man kindles a light for himself when his eyes fail to see; thus in life, he is in contact with the dead when asleep and with the sleeper when awake."—Heraclitus, Fragment 40

Hi Collie,

In your alternate identity as “Harold Stryderight” you wrote, “Again last summer, three metallic orbs were photographed at South Field on July 27, 2008, while they were being pursued by a British military helicopter. There have been many independent reports of that kind, too many to list here...

“Using standard commercial cameras, a few dedicated investigators have captured on film what appear to be space time portals or wormholes opening up in the sky next to a newly forming crop picture (see “Crossovers from Another Dimension” by Terje Toftenes.) Others such as Winston Keech, Gary King, and Paula Presdee-Jones have photographed a brief flash of ‘sheet lightning’ at 3 AM, followed quickly by a new 300-meter crop formation in the field below, when no human fakers were visibly present.

“Based on the general facts presented so far, which are accepted by practically all knowledgeable researchers in the field, one might conclude that the unknown creators of this strange crop-based messaging system possess a level of advanced technology, which is far beyond anything that ordinary humans on Earth today possess.

“For example, they seem to have no need for large flying saucers or UFOs, since their technology has evidently advanced beyond that point. Instead, they seem to be sending small, gravity-insensitive robotic probes across large distances of space and/or time, in order to create such amazing pictures. Those devices have been evidenced numerous times by the sighting of a small metallic orb or ball of light near a newly-formed crop picture, whether by eyewitness account or on camera.

“Where exactly might such probes be coming from? Another star? Another planet in our solar system? Our future or maybe even our past?”

Much thanks for your rigorous and yet intuitive research into what, by its nature, is an almost radioactive subject—a subject able to subvert the mind. It attacks—from everywhere and nowhere—like a virus, with an alien lust perverting the innocent wet-dream of the skeptic, who, with each passing day, becomes more feverish with denial, and striking fear into the heart of every scientist without a death wish. There is no way to get past the great challenge that it poses. Like those 18th Century explorers who had not yet discovered longitude, we must trust that good questions might well conjure up good answers.

The theorem that got away will resuscitate Pythagoras.

Several cities will resurface off the Northwest coast of India. By folding them up, we will be able to take them with us—wherever we might choose to go.

Their music again audible, the planets will leave the clockwork of their orbits—all too boring!—and then present themselves to the Great Assembly for instructions, before the Sun itself retracts into a cloud.

It seems possible that something has changed in the past year.

As the implications of the circles become more difficult to escape, so too we become more desperate to escape them. Lines arcing from the 10th dimension may soon intersect the 3rd, thus rendering obsolete all maps of the Flat Earth. For, even now, they are quaint.

Most often, you have put aside your culture-specific biases, and, step by step, have allowed yourself to follow where the trail of the evidence leads.

I would take issue with one point, however:

Although it would certainly seem that one or more small spheres are quite often associated with the appearance of a crop circle, it may be too much of a leap to describe them as “small, robotic probes,” or to argue that they are made from metal. Living mercury, perhaps? Or orichalcum?

They may indeed be momentarily solid, and, at least in daylight, exhibit a kind of metallic shine. I would also provisionally agree that they are most probably “unmanned” or “uninhabited”—at least in the sense of not being filled with tiny men—but here we are on shakier cosmological ground, if any ground, in such a scenario, can be said to exist at all.

Could we not see them as the local points of focus within a vast, non-local field? And if so, it would make little difference if we described them as “inhabited,” or not.

Such a sphere could, just as easily, be described as The Eye of Horus, as The Stone of the Philosophers, as a Soul—which the Vedas say is as large as the top joint of the thumb—as a Messenger, or as The Bindu.

Again: Let us theorize, for just a moment, that we humans did not first exist as bodies, but rather as non-local fields. These fields, being not “here” and not “there,” could then also be interpreted as infinitely dense points of focus, in which are encoded all the knowledge of past worlds.

We might expect to see the type of anti-gravitational “here today, and gone tomorrow” behavior that is characteristic of these spheres—with “tomorrow” being one fraction of a second off. Stepping, as if through a mirror, we find ourselves some 10,000 years in the future, but then, just as quickly, it is time for us to go back.

The gods play. Our future selves may object to our being wiped out “accidentally.” Thus, Mercury is sent. With glyphs in hand, he rides upon a sphere of orichalcum, which is powered by a seed.

Such a sphere might best not be imagined as one object, but rather as a hyper-object that has been “statistically renormalized.” Galactic in scale, and Akashic in its familiarity with superimposed frames of reference, it nonetheless shows a “tendency to exist” in a particular time and location.

"And he is much higher in beauty than all those that are good"

By Brian George

This is my second comment to Miguel Connor on the Reality Sandwich forum for his piece "'Gnostic' is an Open Question; An Interview with Elaine Pagels":

Hi Miguel,

Much thanks for the time and energy that you have spent in this luminous exposition of current trends in Gnostic scholarship! It would take an essay to respond to all of the issues you raise, but let me touch in passing on the following two:

1) Whether the term “Gnosticism” originated as an insult—in which case it would mean something like “know-it-alls”—and whether we should discard the term for this reason.

2) Whether the term “Gnosticism”—whatever its origin—should continue to be used because it points to an attitude that is rooted in the metaphysics of the texts themselves.

You wrote, “No extant ancient writing uses the term Gnosticism (although we can find Judaism, Christianity, Paganism etc). In fact, the word 'Gnostic' does not appear in the NHL. That does not mean scholars think there were no Gnostics. The Church Fathers wrote that many groups used 'Gnostic' as a self-designation.”

It is not really that unusual for a term that begins its life as an insult to be transformed into a general term of description. For example, “Impressionism,” “Fauvism,” and “Cubism” all originated as insults that were thrown by outraged critics. There was something about each of them that rang true, however; people chose to ignore the first negative associations, and the terms continue to be used.

So too, people continue to use the term “Gnosticism” because it is useful in giving form to a multifaceted phenomenon, and because it points to an orientation that is clearly visible in the texts.

Let us look, for example, at this famous statement by Valentinus: “We are liberated by the knowledge (gnosis) who we were, what we have become, where we were, whither we have sunk, whither we hasten, whence we are redeemed, what is birth and what rebirth.” The term “gnosis,” as it us used here, is of value not because Valentinus would have referred to himself as a “Gnostic,” but rather because he is arguing that we should reestablish a sense of direct contact with our origins.

In the “Nag Hammadi” texts, there is frequently a great emphasis put on terms such as “Nous”—“Mind”; “Ennoia”—“Thought”; “Pronoia”—“Forethought”; and “Epinoia”—“Afterthought.” What would, in other systems, be seen as abstract philosophical categories are here personified as independent actors or living cosmological forces.

In “Trimorphic Protennoia”, a presence says: “I am androgynous. I am Mother and I am Father since I copulate with myself and with those who love me, and it is through me alone that the All stands firm. I am the womb that gives shape to the All by giving birth to the Light that shines in splendor. I am the Aeon to come. I am the fulfillment of the All, that is, Meirothea, the glory of the Mother. I cast Speech into the ears of those who know me.”

This small voice in the ear is one mode in which Gnossis might be experienced. Other modes might be the sudden flash of illumination, the flood of other-dimensional imagery, or the non-verbal and non-visual sense of contact with the beyond—as by an infinite extension of the skin. At the tips of our fingers—which is also the circumference of space—we have access to the knowledge of the Primordial Female/ Male.

The tone of paranoia that we find in so many Gnostic texts may be more a function of the psychology of late empire—a theatrical trapping, which is not as central as we think. The key factor that unites these modes of knowing may be the reawakening of a-cosmic memory—of a form of memory that operates beyond (or beneath) the force-fields of creation.

A “Big Bang” does seem to have occurred between the first and fourth centuries AD, but my sense is that this was neither caused by, nor focused very specifically upon, what we would think of as the “person” of Jesus Christ. He was the particular instance of a universal form—like the youthful Krishna when he served as Arjuna’s charioteer.

Whatever we might choose to call them, and whatever they may have called themselves—whether Sethians or Telestae or Valentinians or Manicheans—these groups are “Gnostic” in terms of the emphasis that they place on the role of first-hand knowledge. Conversely, they often caution us as to dangers of belief—for beliefs can all too easily become the playthings of the Archons.

To “know,” as Valentinus says, is to remember where we have come from, and this frees us from any need to be dependent on external dogma.

The Kaleidoscopic Force-Fields of the Archons



By Brian George

This is my first comment to Miguel Connor on the Reality Sandwich forum for his piece "'Gnostic' is an Open Question; An Interview with Elaine Pagels":

Hi Migel,

The study of Gnosticism, and a deep engagement with the Nag Hammadi texts, played an important role in my intellectual, creative, and spiritual development. I have always been grateful to any writers who could provide me with insight into this period, and among them was Elaine Pagels, whose “Gnostic Gospels” I have read perhaps four or five times through the years. There had always been an aroma of Christian sentimentality to Pagels’ thought—kind of like the scent of Easter lilies—which was a bit distracting, perhaps, but not at all unpleasant. Sadly, if what you are describing is accurate, it would indicate that Pagels has gone in the direction of full blown Christian apologetics.

What I find truly amazing is the idea that “Gnosticism” is somehow too restrictive a category while “Christianity” is not. This passage is instructive: “Furthermore, within these accepted Gnostic categories, there exist so many contradictions in history, dogma and even praxis that it makes them all but cumbersome.” I believe that it was Irenaeus who said, “Each week, the Gnostics invent some new cosmology.” I had always assumed that this statement went to the very heart of Gnosticism, which never struck me as in any way a “movement,” but rather a very loosely woven network of schools—with no centralized authority and no fixed set of beliefs.

The idea that you can make the almost incomprehensibly broad category and/or world of “Gnosticism” less restrictive by funneling all of its contradictions into the tiny box of “Christianity” seems, on the face of things, absurd. The box of Christianity is already filled to the point of bursting with the fetishization of the personhood of Jesus.

The three excerpts below illustrate the problem that I have with what seems the current tendencies in Pagels’ thought. And I have to say that a phrase such as “can induce a deeper midwifing of the tenets of Jesus Christ” sends a shiver down my non-Christian spine. Must be my past life memories acting up again! The three excerpts are as follows:

“(Pagels) views these terms as needlessly problematic, at best, and ultimately intellectually constraining at worst. Pagels stressed this issue throughout much of our discussion for the basic reason the terms "Gnosticism" and "Gnostic" hijack an individual's ability to fully retrieve the bounty found in the formative stages of Christianity.”

“Pagels perhaps went further than other academics in stating that even accepting Gnostic subdivisions such as Valentinianism and Sethianism was potentially falling into the mental quicksand of leaning too much on expedient but generalizing labels. Doing this inevitably creates a myopic projection into the Nag Hammadi library itself, conceivably aborting the possibility of taking accurate snapshots of youthful Christianity.”

“Pagels believes the most sapient approach is to discard all conventional Gnostic groupings and place them under the Christianity rubric. Without these constraints, apocryphal and canonical texts, the Church Father writings, and historical evidence are beheld together in a more harmonious manner that can induce a deeper midwifing of the tenets of Jesus Christ.”

While I have no doubt that Pagels is still a conscientious scholar, it would be hard to look at the above quotations and not conclude that her method is one of “putting the cart before the horse.” World famous or not, five scholars can look at the same body of evidence in five wildly different ways. This is a given. But next we must ask, “To what extent is the scholar fully aware of her blocks and biases, and is she able to work with her limitations to penetrate more deeply into a text?” The key thing is, perhaps, to be able to take oneself by surprise.

In the same way that it was said that “All roads lead to Rome,” I cannot help but suspect that, in Pagels’ current mode of data collection and analysis, all roads must lead inevitably to the redemptive heart of Jesus.

It’s as though you were to research the development of the idea of social justice in the ideal commonwealth, starting from the Renaissance. You would first look into Francis Bacon, let’s say, and then John Locke, and then John Stuart Mill, and then Charles Fourier, and then Karl Marx, and then Mikhail Bakunin, and then Andre Breton, and then John Paul Sartre. And, after years of intense thought and investigation, you would then place them all into the all-inclusive category of “Republicanism”—because, after all, it’s really all about “Republicanism” anyway, isn’t it?

“But,” a disinterested observer might object, “Republicans aren’t utopians, and it is questionable as to whether any stated concern for social justice should be taken at face value.” So too, I would argue that the great majority of Christian sects—either now or then—have shown very little interest in the cultivation of vision states, or in the direct perception of vast cosmological structures.

Let me state my own position clearly: I do not want a Savior. I do not need one, and I have no idea of what I would do with one if he/ she were to suddenly appear. I do, however, have a use for the flashes of insight that are to be found in Gnostic texts.

Why We Still Need Gurus

By Jason Kephas

"Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other thing; for thereby there cometh hurt.”—The Book of the Law

From a strictly Darwinian perspective, the whole of nature is in competition with itself. The survival of the fittest is a competition, a struggle for dominance, and if organisms do not compete, they do not survive. Perhaps the most obvious area of competition, among humans as well as other animals, is the sexual arena. (The other obvious one would be that of territory, and food.) Males compete among one another for sexual dominance and the resulting access to females. (If it’s to a lesser extent that women also compete for the prize men, that may be because it is more “natural” for several women to share one man than vice versa.) If a boy child has male siblings, such rivalry begins early, in competition for the mother’s love. Even if he doesn’t have siblings, there is the Oedipal struggle with the father for the same, and apparently this early tension prepares the organism for the ongoing struggle of existence. The paradox of this arrangement is that father and son, or even child and sibling, are not actually in competition in any real (survival-based) sense, because they are part of a single “tribe” or system in which there is enough to go around for everyone. The struggle is rather a psychological and emotional one. As long as the father and the son are not perceived as equals—and even though both may experience the other as a threat—there is no need for any actual conflict between them. When the son begins to approach manhood, however, the rivalry becomes dynamic, and is even a fundamental ingredient of a coming of age ritual for the child. Defying the father’s authority is a rite of passage which, to some degree at least, is enacted by most young men (though often with a surrogate father figure, if the biological father is no longer present in that role).

Based on my own recent brush with guru worship and cult mentality, the function and appeal (and also trap) of gurus is that they help us to recreate this primary arrangement. Like a child with its parent, the person who follows a guru experiences him or herself as fundamentally inferior to their teacher, at least insofar as they consider him or her to be enlightened, a person of knowledge, an avatar of the divine, a living embodiment of truth, etc. In order to accept another human being as one’s guru, one must believe that they have attained a higher level of being in comparison to oneself—in other words, that they are superior in every conceivable way. This is how a child experiences its parents—and adults in general—as belonging to a different species, a different genus. The child then aspires, on the one hand, to please its parents and earn their favor through good behavior; on the other hand, as it matures, it attempts to match its parents’ behavior as the means to become an adult in its own right. A child grows up then through a combination of obedience and imitation, which is more or less identical to how followers relate to their gurus. This, at least, is the social overlay. At a more primal level, a child’s growth is a biological inevitability, and since any child that grows to be an adult thereby supplants its parents in the evolutionary chain, it grows up not merely to equal but to surpass (become superior to) its parents. This is where the parallels with gurus and followers begin to fall down, because it is almost unheard of for followers to surpass their guru in stature. What tends to happen, rather, is that at some point the guru is “exposed” in his humanness, and as a result loses his following, or a significant part of it.

Part of coming of age for every child entails seeing its parents as flawed, human individuals and thereby rejecting those elements of parental conditioning which do not hold up under scrutiny, that prevent the child becoming an individual rather than facilitate that process. Consciousness evolves through a combination of obstacles and challenges with nurture and support. If life were all obstacles and no support, none of us would survive; but if it were all nurture and no challenges, we would never grow strong enough to leave the nest and make our own way. The sexual drive eventually forces every child out of the nest. Perhaps this is why the sexual drive creates friction even early on—if Freud was correct about the Oedipal dynamic—when the child wishes to replace (slay) the father in order to “have” the mother all to itself? Symbolically, this is what must occur for the generations to continue. In those early years, a child must sublimate its desires in order to adapt to the reality that it is not equal to its father and cannot “have” its mother the way the father does. With adolescence, the boy-child does become equal to the father, having outgrown (ideally, though often in our culture this does not occur) his infantile desire for the mother. He is then ready to start a family of his own and continue the ancestral linage. Where this natural generational growth cycle breaks down, however, is in the absence of a strong, actively engaged father to set an example for the child, while at the same time providing the challenges of male competition and rivalry through which the boy enters into manhood.