The Greatest Gift is Choice

.......John Lash's book, Not In His Image.......

The latest to unfurl the banner of Gnosticism is John Lamb Lash, who describes the Gnostics of the ancient world as ‘the elite of Pagan intellectuals’ and declares that their writings are ‘the explosive charge that can blow the institution of the Faith off its foundations, for good and all.’ By ‘the Faith,’ he means the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition in its entirety, and he intends to do nothing less than convert his readers into latter-day Gnostics.

Lash seeks to rescue Gnosticism from the dustbin of Christian history and restore it to its rightful place amid the splendors of pagan antiquity. To signal his admiration for the fecund religious imagination of paganism, he capitalizes the word ‘Pagan’ as if it were a single faith rather than a phantasmagorical assortment of beliefs and practices. But he does point out that Gnosticism itself shouldn't be described as a religion or even a sect, if only because gnostokos was ‘the generic term for any person learned in divine matters.’ Above all, he insists that Gnosticism represents the path toward ‘spiritual deep ecology,’
symbolized by today's adherents of the Greek earth goddess Gaia.

Thus, for example, he condemns biblical scholars who do not see the continuities that Lash detects between the early Christians and the religious community at Qumran. He calls them ‘Zaddikites,’ but they are better known to the lay reader as the custodians of the Dead Sea Scrolls: ‘They fail to realize that the message of love in the charming miracle tales of the New Testament is a sugar coating on the bitter cyanide of Zaddikite ravings.’

But Lash is not concerned merely with scolding biblical scholars. His goal is to melt down the religious and philosophical ideas of antiquity and recast them as a serviceable faith for our world. In place of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, which he links to ‘the religious schizophrenia of the ancient Hebrews’ and which he flatly condemns as ‘annihilation theology,’ he proposes that we embrace Gnosticism and what he dubs ‘Gaian ethics,’ which he describes as ‘not a call to faith in God, but faith in the human species.’

The earliest scholars (who are no longer cited) regarded Gnosticism in the broad sense as a monumental spiritual movement of Asiatic origins, long predating Christianity.

But the Church ideologues who condemned Gnostics as heretics were not merely intent on eliminating diversity and difference so that they could impose uniform totalitarian doctrines (as they eventually did). They were far more intent on eliminating dissent, especially the informed dissent of Gnostics from the Mysteries, such as Hypatia, who argued brilliantly against salvationist doctrines.

     salvationism: The totalitarian belief system that asserts divine intercession in history, and imbues suffering with redemptive value. Includes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three dominant mainstream religions. Assumes superhuman rescue of humanity from its problems and off-planet, remote-control authority on morals, and divine retribution. (From the Glossary in Not in His Image)

Gnostic studies are so completely bogged down in specialist debate on obscure issues that no one pays attention to the unique and alarming message contained in Gnostic texts.

I propose three definitions of Gnosis, psychological, inspirational, and evolutionary, or shamanic. The psychological definition is:

    Gnosis is intuitive knowing of the heart that liberates us from social conditioning and ego-fixation.

As such, it is a path of questioning and learning, open-ended and unlimited in scope. The evolutionary aim of Gnosis is to realize human potential so that we can co-evolve with all species and serve Gaia’s purposes.

In his massive Gnostical treatise, ‘The Exegesis,’ science fiction writer Philip K. Dick says that Gnosis ‘consists of disinhibiting instructions’ that allow us to access ‘the core content of knowing already intrinsic to us.’ He believed that Gnosis enables the self-repair of ‘memory retrieval’ circuits that exist uniquely in the human species, but have been damaged. This accords with my view that humanity provides a memory-circuit for Gaia.

Dick assumes, as I do, that Gnostic teachings and practices were preserved in the Mysteries: ‘The ancients possessed techniques (sacraments and rituals) used largely in the Greco-Roman mystery religions to induce firing and retrieval’ of the memory circuits. He notes that these techniques had a restorative value for the individual, but Gnostics also ‘correctly saw the ontological value to what they called the Godhead itself, the total entity.’ That is, Gnostics recognized that these practices were not for self-glorification but to contribute to the healing of God, or Goddess. (‘The Exegesis,’ quoted in Valis, p. 108ff) This is consistent with the Gnostic assertion that we, the human species, are intimately involved with the ‘correction’ of the Goddess Sophia.

The inspirational definition is:

    Gnosis is the deep ecology of the human spirit.

In other words, Gnosis is to the religious experience of humanity what deep ecology is to our rapport with nature. This is close to the evolutionary definition:

    Gnosis is a way of encountering the Sacred as it is known to the powers that inhere in the natural world, i.e., the animating powers of the earth and the cosmos at large.

Gnostics were telestai, initiates in the Mystery Schools who broke their vows of anonymity to come out in the open and protest Judeo-Christian doctrines of Salvationism – doctrines that provide the ideological frame for the patriarchal/dominator agenda. Because the initiates emerged into the public eye during the first centuries of the Christian Era, scholars assume that Gnosticism must have been devised then and there.

This link to the entheogenic cult of the Eleusinian Mysteries confirms my view that Gnosis was a refined form of psychedelic shamanism, a visionary path dedicated to the Earth Goddess. Such links are totally ignored by Gnostic scholars.

What Gnosis really was, and what happened to it, determined the most decisive shift in the moral and spiritual life of Western civilization. The story of the Gnostics is the crucial missing chapter of that part of our collective story.

Scholars assume that Gnostic texts are valuable for what they tell us about the origins of Christianity, period. But using Gnostic texts to legitimate Christianity is contradictory to its radical message. The Gnostic protest against Judeo-Christian religion is written clear and large in the surviving materials, chaotic and fragmentary as they may be.

My intention in reworking the Gnostic materials is fourfold:

      First, to show what is valid in the Gnostic protest against the patriarchy and the salvationist agenda

      Second, to describe the rich spiritual heritage of pre-Christian Europe, destroyed in a centuries-long rampage of sexual, spiritual and intellectual genocide;

      Third, to restore and redevelop the Sophia myth, treating it as a story to guide the human species toward a sane and sustainable future;

      Fourth, to propose a corrective view of certain paranormal aspects of human experience, based on Gnostic writing about the Archons.

First, the claim that Gnostics regarded the material world as ‘a deterioration of spirit’ and a place of enslavement for the ‘divine sparks’ cannot be true. The paraphrase of Gnostic cosmology found in Irenaeus (Against Heresies, Book 4, Ch. 2) says that the earth we inhabit was formed from the body of the goddess Sophia, the supreme divinity in the Gnostic worldview. If the very substance of the material world is the embodiment of this divinity, how can it be considered evil, degenerated, and worthy of rejection? Furthermore, Gnostic texts such as the Apochrypon of John state that Sophia, in order to achieve the ‘correction’ by which she becomes realigned to the gods in the cosmic center (the Pleroma) depends in some sense on humanity. This being so, how can humans be viewed as ‘divine sparks’ that have fallen into blind enslavement in matter? The genuine Gnostic teaching states that we are not in essence divine sparks but we have a spark of divine intelligence, nous, by which we can recognize the fallen goddess and participate in her ‘correction.’ Our mission is not to escape from the world, but to take part in its transformation, extending even to the cosmic level.

Second, the claim that ‘the whole universe a depravation of the Deity,’ or to put it otherwise, that the material world is a creation of the Demiurge, who is a false deity, also cannot be true. Several cosmological texts explicitly state that the Demiurge cannot create anything, but only imitate the workings of the true gods, the Aeons of the Pleroma – and imitate them badly, at that.

The texts are explicit on this point: the Demiurge lacks ennoia, internationality. Saklas, the blind god, suffers a delusion that allows him to think he creates the cosmos, but it is really Sophia working through him that permits this delusion. What he does ‘create’ in his weird way is the stereoma, the planetary system exclusive of the earth, sun and moon – the ‘hebdomad’ of the seven planets. Clearly, the pseudo-deity cannot and does not create the earth, because this planet is uniquely the metamorphosis of Sophia herself.

In The Sophia of Jesus Christ (NHC III), KAZ occurs next to cosmos, stating a clear distinction between the earth and ‘the world’ as we conceive it. The world or system is our conditioned perception of the earth, or human reality on earth. Hoeller's distinction agrees with the observation of Jacque Lacarriere that Gnosis is about deconditioning our minds to perceive reality as it is, rather than as we assume it to be. The illusion of this world, the earth, is not in its own nature, but in our perception of it. But such is the nature of the human mind that we live in the perceptual frame we construct, rather than in the reality it frames.

I have never known a subject able to push people’s buttons as fast and hard as Gnosticism does. I believe this is because by its nature Gnosticism confronts us with our conditioning. (This is also the view of Jacques Lacarriere.) Yet without such a confrontation, we can never be free to know our own minds. We need ‘disinhibiting instructions’ to penetrate the layers of lies that have been implanted in
our minds.

After thirty odd years of research and reflection, I am convinced that they had the key knowledge we need to shatter the historical framework of the patriarchal/dominator agenda, and thereby undermine that agenda for good and all.

The unique knowledge Gnostics tried to impart to the world at large concerns the identity of Jehovah, the ‘father god’ of Judeo-
Christian religion. Gnostics claimed that the supernatural being billions of people take for God is insane and actually working against humanity. The core teaching specifies that Jehovah is really an alien entity, not just a bad idea or a delusional belief. It also specifies that Jehovah and his minions, the Archons, used the Jewish people to make an intervention into the human race. The Archons deviate us from our humanity through religious beliefs. Salvationism (i.e., reliance on a superhuman savior) germinated in the Jewish apocalyptic sect of the Zaddakim and went pandemic in Christian ideology centered on a transhuman messiah, Jesus Christ.

In short, Gnostics warned that Judeo-Christian religion is a deviant program implanted in the human mind, like a computer virus. Salvationism is an ideological virus, and its origin is not human. This is the core teaching of the gnostikoi, ‘those who know about divine matters.’ Search where you will, I don’t think you will find this message anywhere else.

Gnosis is the knowledge of how we are deviated, by what, and for what.

So much for the bad news, the spooky part of the message. But Gnostics also had sublimely good news to impart. They had a beautiful message about what guides us, the insuperable power of knowing that inheres in us and cannot be deviated. (This I call the wisdom endowment, or Sophianic endowment.) They presented a grand cosmic story in which humanity is intimately allied with the Goddess Sophia of the Pleroma, She who becomes Gaia. This story describes how Jehovah and the Archons were produced by the ‘fall of
Sophia,’ before our world was created by Her embodiment. Then,
when the earth emerged, it was captured in the planetary system, habitat of the Archons. Gnostics taught that these inorganic entities influence us by a kind of telepathic link. They use the power of suggestion when our attention is dulled by fatigue or over-stimulation. Gnostic texts contain vivid accounts of first-hand encounters with Archons, and they explain the motives and methods of the alien forces in explicit language.

But the message of Gnosticism is not ‘Blame it on the Archons.’ Far from it. The core teaching of Gnosis specifies that this alien species is not an autonomous force of evil that works against us. The Archons represent error, not evil. They do not cause mistakes in our learning process, but they affect our thinking so that our mistakes go undetected and extrapolate beyond the scale of correction. If we cannot correct our minds and redirect our actions, we cannot participate in Gaia’s process of alignment with the Pleroma, the celestial Gods.

And the Archons are, after all, our cosmic cousins, the offspring of Gaia-Sophia, though in a different way than we are. They are not the only extra-human species with which we have contact on earth, but they are unique in their predatory role. Gnostics taught that not all that happens in our minds originates there. This is an occult observation, compatible with the most advanced theories of noetic science today. It is, I would say, the single most important concept in the entire field of cognitive psychology. It explains how humans can be programmed to act in deviant and destructive ways, contrary to good sense, compassion, gut emotion, personal conscience, and their sense of humanity. Since the agents of the global program of domination (the ‘Illuminati‘) use occult techniques of mind control, understanding the Archon thesis of the Gnostics can alert us to how we are being manipulated. The implications of ‘Archon theory’ are profoundly practical and far-reaching.

All this strange business concerning Jehovah and the Archons is written large and clear in Gnostic texts, but ignored by scholars for obvious reasons. If we also ignore this scenario, dismissing it as a bizarre fantasy, a religious psychosis, or a remnant of Pagan superstition, we lose the opportunity to develop a coherent culture myth that connects humanity to its cosmic origins and to the future of the planet itself. Knowing how we are deviated could be the best thing that ever hapened to us, spiritually speaking.

Sometimes, you have to put sanity at risk to find out what it really means to be sane.

It’s much easier to find the core teaching in ourselves, in the intuitive knowing of our hearts where humanity dwells and our species' bond to Gaia is rooted.

There is another kind of faith, indicated by Gnostics by the term Pistis Sophia, ‘confidence in the indwelling wisdom.’

    You have to believe that you can discover innately whatever you are seeking to know through an external quest for knowledge.

It is a spiritual impulse charged with numinous content, a core teaching that lives and regenerates within those who learn it. This knowing within is Gnosis, not the assurance of a divine self, but the awakening of a faculty of higher cognition, a faculty that gives insight transcending the human condition. Whoever touches that core teaching is touched by divine revelation. An ever-new, ever-true, ongoing revelation.

There is no better way to approach Gnosticism than through the eye of the heart, where this revelation is perpetually in birth.