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Traditonal Gnosis: A 20-point Manifesto
Feb. 20th, 2019 01:17 pmOn belief and practice:
1. Traditional Gnostic schools of thought posit an original spiritual unity that came to be split into a plurality, through a series of emanations. This doctrine can be conceptualized as either Monism or Panentheism.
2. As a result of this pre-cosmic division, the manifest universe was created. The lower layers of existence, which would include the material universe, were created by beings possessing inferior spiritual powers to that of the Godhead and His highest emanations. Some historical Gnostic doctrines speak of these lesser spiritual beings resembling entities like Jehovah of the Hebrew scriptural canon (The Christian Old Testament), and many of the anthropomorphic deities found in most ancient polytheistic religions. Other doctrines speak of a benign or neutral Demiurge (Artificer) being/spirit (or series of artificer beings) who created the material universe.
3. Differing Gnostic teachings and myths feature both male and female emanations of God (often referred to as either Aeons or Archangels) who were involved in the cosmic creation. Some Gnostic myths organize these emanations into a hierarchy of male-female pairs, somewhat reminiscent of the ancient Egyptian religion.
4. In the cosmos, space and time is imagined as having either a malevolent or constrictive character and may be personified as demonic beings (or simply, capricious forces of nature) separating man from God. In other doctrines, the domains contained within space and time are a part of an illusion or at least a rather distorted or degraded version of the higher realms.
5. For humankind, the material universe is either vast prison or an illusion that ensnares souls. Human beings are enslaved both by the physical laws of nature and by man-made moral laws that are based on worldly-material power dictates (like the Mosaic code, as an example) and other legalistic religious doctrines and creeds that were created by fallible, flawed and corrupted men.
6. Humankind may be personified as Adam (or Anthropos), who lies in the deep sleep of ignorance, his powers of spiritual self-awareness stupefied by materiality. And within the soul of each individual human of this physical world is an "inner man," a fallen spark of the divine substance. Since this exists in each person, we have the possibility of awakening from our stupefaction; a human soul requires many lifetimes (death/rebirth cycles) of cumulative experience on the material plane to reach the point where an awakening is possible.
7. What ultimately ignites the awakening is not obedience, faith, or good works, but knowledge of the divine. However, to attain knowledge of the divine, a seeker must cultivate for himself higher states of consciousness and attaining these higher states requires the cessation of habits, behaviors and activities that turn people down toward the material plane and thus away from divinity. Gnosis-seekers must work hard to purify their souls and attain a state of temperate, benevolent and disciplined conduct. This is accomplished through leading life of performing good works, avoiding destructive lifestyles, engaging in virtuous conduct, and striving to attain an all-around excellence of character.
8. Before the awakening, individual humans often undergo some sort of psychological crisis event; things like: troubled dreams, trials and tribulations in their daily life, loss of a loved one, having a crisis of conscience of some form or another, ect.
9. Man does not attain the knowledge that awakens him from these dreams by cognition (intellectual reasoning and speculation) but through direct revelatory experience, and this knowledge is not conveyable information but a modification of the sensate being.
10. The awakening (i.e., the salvation) of any individual is a cosmic event; upon attaining salvation, the the individual is liberated from the cycle of deaths and rebirths on the material plane; this cycle can be symbolized as either the Wheel of Fate/Karma, or the Ouroboros, i.e. the serpent who eats its own tail.
On Ethics and Modernity:
11. The heartfelt rejection of fallible, man-made moral law codes and ossified religious doctrines asserted by the powers of this world as bring “inerrant divine revelation” is enjoined upon every person of good conscience. Gnosis-seekers must reject the authority of religious dogmas that have been shaped by the dictates of money and politics.
12. Having said that, a Traditional Gnostic is reverent toward time-honored teachings and practices and is thus quite diligent and discerning when it comes to determining which teachings are legitimate and which are fanciful, misleading, incomplete and conceived in error. The Traditional Gnostic must be able to identify and reject false teachers.
13. The Traditional Gnostic must be especially skeptical toward any spiritual, metaphysical or religious ideas that have emerged in the modern era, that is: within the last 500 years of Western cultural development. Most modern doctrines on ethics and the human condition are tainted by the corrupting influences of materialism, hedonism, consumer culture, money, dependence on technological conveniences, erroneous ideas about “progress” occurring in a perfectly linear and material manner, and of course the literalist approach to interpreting ancient religious scriptures.
14. The most recent modern ethical doctrines tend to: overwhelmingly emphasize rights (legally sanctioned protections and entitlements) over duties, assert material pleasure as being the highest good, and encourage the pitting of the sexes and racial/ethnic and subcultural lifestyle groups against one another in the name of things like “progress” and “social justice,” thus dividing and destabilizing communities and nations. Very little emphasis is placed on the individual's collaborative role within their family and community, and their obligations and responsibilities toward their social surroundings in general. The Traditional Gnostic must be able to balance their state-granted rights as an individual with their responsibilities to society.
15. Modern ethical doctrines tend to tie their concept of “progress” directly to the advancement of material science and technology, with almost no attention given to spiritual goals and perspectives on the matter. This set of assumptions tends to imply an eventual material-utopian “end of history” event whereby humanity will be “saved” by some sort of technological singularity. In contrast, the Traditional Gnostic must be able to differentiate spiritual progress from the advancement of material knowledge and innovation, and recognize that technology is merely a tool (which can be used to bring about both good and bad outcomes), and not an end in itself. First and foremost, the Traditional Gnostic must prioritize a spiritual worldview over a material one.
16. Many groups and people today claiming to be “Gnostic” actually prioritize these aforementioned modern ethical doctrines over genuine Traditional Gnostic teachings and a spiritual worldview in general, probably owing more to a lack of awareness on the matter, as opposed to a willing ideological orientation. As a result, they will cheery pick fragments of Gnostic teachings and shoehorn them into a modern or postmodernist worldview that is defined by many of the traits outlined above. The is tantamount to the material tail wagging the spiritual dog. To alleviate this cognitive dissonance, the Traditional Gnostic must be able to frame ancient Gnostic teachings within the proper historical context and resist the urge to confuse or conflate such teachings with modern ethical speculations.
17. The Traditional Gnostic must envision ethics as the means for individuals to improve themselves first and foremost, rather than being the act of forcing some set of lofty-sounding abstract ideals onto the world around them. The latter endeavor usually involves flawed people trying to “save the world” before first addressing their own character flaws and bad habits. The result of this is more often than not, a rather predictable drama whereby people project their own demons onto the world and end up doing more harm than good, despite originally having good intentions.
18. The Traditional Gnostic will be able to differentiate genuine Gnostic teachings from literal interpretations of Gnostic-themed myths which have the potential of promoting a cosmic victim mentality for human beings. In other words, when the constrictive and inconvenient aspects of manifested nature are excessively anthropomorphized, human beings may be seen as helpless victims of all-powerful supernatural comic book villain characters and thus things like adolescent-rebellious attitudes toward existence and world-denying escapism are encouraged. When in actuality, according to various Wisdom teachings, humans are more often than not the victims of their own vices and short-sighted worldly endeavors. In other words, the so-called “archons” are alive and well within our own psyches and we certainly have it within our power to battle them. In summary, the Traditional Gnostic will aspire to be a hero rather than a victim.
19. Having said that, people have often indeed been victims of circumstance and collective ignorance over the many many centuries of human history. Victims are ultimately people bereft of agency (willpower) and self-awareness and thus strewn about by chaotic forces. Thus, Gnostics must be ever compassionate and forgiving toward people in the grip of ignorance and flawed modes of living and conceptualizing the world. Of course this doesn't mean accepting their flawed worldviews, but rather recognizing the root causes of error and thus cultivating the awareness and ability required to isolate oneself from the corrupting influences of error.
20. And finally, the Traditional Gnostic must resist the urge to harbor hatred in their heart toward various historical forces, movements, ideologies and institutions which have oppressed, suppressed and mercilessly attacked Gnostic thinkers, visionaries, sects and movements throughout the last 2,000 years or so of history. The Gnostic may recognize that such oppressive and evil-spirited movements have been first and foremost political projects and not genuine religious or spiritual endeavors. The Traditional Gnostic must resit the urge to employ a boogeyman or scapegoat to pin all of humanity's problems onto. Understanding error does not mean the need to conjure up a storm of negative emotions. In the end, a negative mental or emotional state means a negative spiritual state. Such a state inhibits spiritual growth and makes liberation/salvation impossible until this antagonistic state is dissolved into the aether.
1. Traditional Gnostic schools of thought posit an original spiritual unity that came to be split into a plurality, through a series of emanations. This doctrine can be conceptualized as either Monism or Panentheism.
2. As a result of this pre-cosmic division, the manifest universe was created. The lower layers of existence, which would include the material universe, were created by beings possessing inferior spiritual powers to that of the Godhead and His highest emanations. Some historical Gnostic doctrines speak of these lesser spiritual beings resembling entities like Jehovah of the Hebrew scriptural canon (The Christian Old Testament), and many of the anthropomorphic deities found in most ancient polytheistic religions. Other doctrines speak of a benign or neutral Demiurge (Artificer) being/spirit (or series of artificer beings) who created the material universe.
3. Differing Gnostic teachings and myths feature both male and female emanations of God (often referred to as either Aeons or Archangels) who were involved in the cosmic creation. Some Gnostic myths organize these emanations into a hierarchy of male-female pairs, somewhat reminiscent of the ancient Egyptian religion.
4. In the cosmos, space and time is imagined as having either a malevolent or constrictive character and may be personified as demonic beings (or simply, capricious forces of nature) separating man from God. In other doctrines, the domains contained within space and time are a part of an illusion or at least a rather distorted or degraded version of the higher realms.
5. For humankind, the material universe is either vast prison or an illusion that ensnares souls. Human beings are enslaved both by the physical laws of nature and by man-made moral laws that are based on worldly-material power dictates (like the Mosaic code, as an example) and other legalistic religious doctrines and creeds that were created by fallible, flawed and corrupted men.
6. Humankind may be personified as Adam (or Anthropos), who lies in the deep sleep of ignorance, his powers of spiritual self-awareness stupefied by materiality. And within the soul of each individual human of this physical world is an "inner man," a fallen spark of the divine substance. Since this exists in each person, we have the possibility of awakening from our stupefaction; a human soul requires many lifetimes (death/rebirth cycles) of cumulative experience on the material plane to reach the point where an awakening is possible.
7. What ultimately ignites the awakening is not obedience, faith, or good works, but knowledge of the divine. However, to attain knowledge of the divine, a seeker must cultivate for himself higher states of consciousness and attaining these higher states requires the cessation of habits, behaviors and activities that turn people down toward the material plane and thus away from divinity. Gnosis-seekers must work hard to purify their souls and attain a state of temperate, benevolent and disciplined conduct. This is accomplished through leading life of performing good works, avoiding destructive lifestyles, engaging in virtuous conduct, and striving to attain an all-around excellence of character.
8. Before the awakening, individual humans often undergo some sort of psychological crisis event; things like: troubled dreams, trials and tribulations in their daily life, loss of a loved one, having a crisis of conscience of some form or another, ect.
9. Man does not attain the knowledge that awakens him from these dreams by cognition (intellectual reasoning and speculation) but through direct revelatory experience, and this knowledge is not conveyable information but a modification of the sensate being.
10. The awakening (i.e., the salvation) of any individual is a cosmic event; upon attaining salvation, the the individual is liberated from the cycle of deaths and rebirths on the material plane; this cycle can be symbolized as either the Wheel of Fate/Karma, or the Ouroboros, i.e. the serpent who eats its own tail.
On Ethics and Modernity:
11. The heartfelt rejection of fallible, man-made moral law codes and ossified religious doctrines asserted by the powers of this world as bring “inerrant divine revelation” is enjoined upon every person of good conscience. Gnosis-seekers must reject the authority of religious dogmas that have been shaped by the dictates of money and politics.
12. Having said that, a Traditional Gnostic is reverent toward time-honored teachings and practices and is thus quite diligent and discerning when it comes to determining which teachings are legitimate and which are fanciful, misleading, incomplete and conceived in error. The Traditional Gnostic must be able to identify and reject false teachers.
13. The Traditional Gnostic must be especially skeptical toward any spiritual, metaphysical or religious ideas that have emerged in the modern era, that is: within the last 500 years of Western cultural development. Most modern doctrines on ethics and the human condition are tainted by the corrupting influences of materialism, hedonism, consumer culture, money, dependence on technological conveniences, erroneous ideas about “progress” occurring in a perfectly linear and material manner, and of course the literalist approach to interpreting ancient religious scriptures.
14. The most recent modern ethical doctrines tend to: overwhelmingly emphasize rights (legally sanctioned protections and entitlements) over duties, assert material pleasure as being the highest good, and encourage the pitting of the sexes and racial/ethnic and subcultural lifestyle groups against one another in the name of things like “progress” and “social justice,” thus dividing and destabilizing communities and nations. Very little emphasis is placed on the individual's collaborative role within their family and community, and their obligations and responsibilities toward their social surroundings in general. The Traditional Gnostic must be able to balance their state-granted rights as an individual with their responsibilities to society.
15. Modern ethical doctrines tend to tie their concept of “progress” directly to the advancement of material science and technology, with almost no attention given to spiritual goals and perspectives on the matter. This set of assumptions tends to imply an eventual material-utopian “end of history” event whereby humanity will be “saved” by some sort of technological singularity. In contrast, the Traditional Gnostic must be able to differentiate spiritual progress from the advancement of material knowledge and innovation, and recognize that technology is merely a tool (which can be used to bring about both good and bad outcomes), and not an end in itself. First and foremost, the Traditional Gnostic must prioritize a spiritual worldview over a material one.
16. Many groups and people today claiming to be “Gnostic” actually prioritize these aforementioned modern ethical doctrines over genuine Traditional Gnostic teachings and a spiritual worldview in general, probably owing more to a lack of awareness on the matter, as opposed to a willing ideological orientation. As a result, they will cheery pick fragments of Gnostic teachings and shoehorn them into a modern or postmodernist worldview that is defined by many of the traits outlined above. The is tantamount to the material tail wagging the spiritual dog. To alleviate this cognitive dissonance, the Traditional Gnostic must be able to frame ancient Gnostic teachings within the proper historical context and resist the urge to confuse or conflate such teachings with modern ethical speculations.
17. The Traditional Gnostic must envision ethics as the means for individuals to improve themselves first and foremost, rather than being the act of forcing some set of lofty-sounding abstract ideals onto the world around them. The latter endeavor usually involves flawed people trying to “save the world” before first addressing their own character flaws and bad habits. The result of this is more often than not, a rather predictable drama whereby people project their own demons onto the world and end up doing more harm than good, despite originally having good intentions.
18. The Traditional Gnostic will be able to differentiate genuine Gnostic teachings from literal interpretations of Gnostic-themed myths which have the potential of promoting a cosmic victim mentality for human beings. In other words, when the constrictive and inconvenient aspects of manifested nature are excessively anthropomorphized, human beings may be seen as helpless victims of all-powerful supernatural comic book villain characters and thus things like adolescent-rebellious attitudes toward existence and world-denying escapism are encouraged. When in actuality, according to various Wisdom teachings, humans are more often than not the victims of their own vices and short-sighted worldly endeavors. In other words, the so-called “archons” are alive and well within our own psyches and we certainly have it within our power to battle them. In summary, the Traditional Gnostic will aspire to be a hero rather than a victim.
19. Having said that, people have often indeed been victims of circumstance and collective ignorance over the many many centuries of human history. Victims are ultimately people bereft of agency (willpower) and self-awareness and thus strewn about by chaotic forces. Thus, Gnostics must be ever compassionate and forgiving toward people in the grip of ignorance and flawed modes of living and conceptualizing the world. Of course this doesn't mean accepting their flawed worldviews, but rather recognizing the root causes of error and thus cultivating the awareness and ability required to isolate oneself from the corrupting influences of error.
20. And finally, the Traditional Gnostic must resist the urge to harbor hatred in their heart toward various historical forces, movements, ideologies and institutions which have oppressed, suppressed and mercilessly attacked Gnostic thinkers, visionaries, sects and movements throughout the last 2,000 years or so of history. The Gnostic may recognize that such oppressive and evil-spirited movements have been first and foremost political projects and not genuine religious or spiritual endeavors. The Traditional Gnostic must resit the urge to employ a boogeyman or scapegoat to pin all of humanity's problems onto. Understanding error does not mean the need to conjure up a storm of negative emotions. In the end, a negative mental or emotional state means a negative spiritual state. Such a state inhibits spiritual growth and makes liberation/salvation impossible until this antagonistic state is dissolved into the aether.
