Know Thyself
Musings on Gnosticism, Self-Understanding, Truth, and Love
This post belongs to a series devoted to reflections, musings, and philosophical takes on life and consciousness.
Today marks the second day after the U.S. presidential election. While there is indeed much to talk about, I’m choosing instead to focus elsewhere. While the future of the country—and the rest of the world for that matter—is extremely uncertain, I at least have control over my own much smaller sphere of influence. Shifting the world into a better place begins with the individual—for the more one can master their own domain, the more they can affect social groups at large.
Instead of world events, I will discuss something that’s been on my mind recently—Gnosticism. Gnosticism is essentially an early form of Christianity. In fact it could be seen as the true Christianity, before it was stripped of deeper wisdom and made orthodox by the church.
The word Gnosticism comes from an Ancient Greek word—gnothi— which means “to know.” This knowing is not like knowing a simple fact, but rather a deeper, felt knowing. It is an intuitive understanding that drills down to the core of one's being and resonates with the ring of truth. Today we hear the word agnostic, referring to someone who can’t make up their mind on the existence of God. Here, the prefix a- means “not,” as in atheist (not theist). Agnostic thus means, “I don’t know.” In contrast, the Gnostics did not believe in God. They simply knew.
While this sounds incredulous and ungrounded, gnostic tradition holds a wealth of self-understanding. The entire principle of Gnosticism was rooted in the fact that God was to be found within, rather than in some far off deity in the sky. Know Thyself (Gnothi Sauton) was written on the side of the Greek Oracle at Delphi. These ancient people knew the secrets to developing themselves spiritually, yet their teachings were disregarded and lost to time.
The Gnostics had an understanding of the Christian Mythos that knew the events were symbolic, rather than literal. They did not believe Jesus was actually resurrected, but that this was a metaphor for “crucifying” one’s own ego—laying bare that which strives for power, greed, and other drives stemming from ignorance. Crucifying the ego meant one could open up to the higher, divine wisdom of the heart—and discover the unyielding truth of love flowing through the current of all living beings. Jesus was a real human aggrandized into the role of savior. It could have been anybody, and in fact it is anybody. The story of Jesus being crucified is an archetypal story—one we can all relate to and follow.
When Carl Jung was developing his theories on individuation, he became increasingly interested in the Gnostics—and rightfully so. The gnostic interpretation of spirituality and religion was as close to his own, scientific model of self-development as any perennial tradition had been. The only difference is the use of symbolic versus empiric language, but the underlying truth remains.
Recently, there have been a number of texts discovered that are “additional gospels” to the Bible. In 1945, an Egyptian man discovered a large jar buried near a village called Nag Hammadi. Inside were roughly twenty-four texts—all additional and supplementary gospels to the known Bible. Since he discovered them while burying a man he murdered, he kept the texts a secret, though knew they were probably of some value. While sitting on these gospels, his mother unknowingly burned half of them as firewood (think of all the lost knowledge!). The remaining twelve were sold on the black market, finding their way into universities and eventually being translated.
These texts form the Gnostic Gospels, and give a shocking amount of insight into what Christianity really was. Not only do they state that the stories are metaphors—having an archaic, intuitive understanding of archetypal theory—but that the God in the Old Testament, Yahweh, is actually a being called the Demiurge, or Yaldabaoth.
Gnostic understanding of the Christian mythos follows as such: the Gnostics purported that the Demiurge was the initial creator of the material universe. This being was the abandoned child of Sophia, or wisdom. Alone and confused, the Demiurge arrogantly declared it was the one and supreme God and that all must worship it. This is why Yahweh in the Old Testament is blatantly psychotic—wantonly killing innocent people. Yahweh is really the Demiurge that is toying with humanity.
What is truly harrowing, is how the Romans, in an effort to exert control over their people, purposefully stripped the Christian mythology of any texts that did not fit their agenda. Gnostics were murdered, their knowledge lost. The Romans developed an Orthodox Christianity, which later became Catholicism. In this form of Christianity, the original Gnostic idea of God being both a Mother and Father was decimated, leaving only an angry Father to eternally please. This “Father” was really the Demiurge disguised as Yahweh, the God in the Old Testament who demanded he be worshiped as the supreme ruler of everything.
In purposefully selecting texts to fortify their interpretation, they could not only implement a patriarchal system: claiming that the masculine nature of God implies men are superior to women, but that in order for people to be faithful to the Church, they had to worship a god that was in all respects, a psychopath. This undermining of critical thinking with the tool of blind faith was one step towards creating a population who would blindly follow any authority—such as that of the emperor. If they could get people to go along with the idea that they had to respect God and follow his imprudent rules in order to be saved, they could get them to trust in a government that would be imparting equally outrageous rulership. Thus the entire heritage of patriarchal dominion was born, causing generations of grief and pain to everyone not in charge.
Furthermore, the Orthodox Christian interpretation shuns the body as unnatural and carnal. We are inherently flawed, or born into sin, and must be in constant repentance in order to be saved by grace. This is extremely backwards. The Gnostics teach that the body is of the earth, therefore it is of the Mother aspect of God. The mind, intellect, and spirit is of the Father, and throughout life we must find a way to balance these two opposing forces. Sexuality is something to be accepted and sacralized. A healthy, living body gives way to a healthy and dynamic mind. The two must join in union—operating in equality.
Here we can see that the origins of patriarchal Christianity has given rise to a society that praises dissociation, a topic I frequently write about. Shunning the body, shunning the earth, and instead operating on a militaristic excursion of willpower, domination, and toxic shame is only a recipe for a society drenched in ignorance and dogmatic control. These effects are still reverberating throughout Western societies today, and although the Church has less power than it once had, the Demiurge is still very much running the show.
Returning to the Gnostic tradition, we can see how the symbolic implications are multitudinal. First, it is my own belief that the demiurge is representative of the ego. In particular it is the relationship between the realm of consciousness the ego is intertwined with, and the rest of the psyche. This divide, and more importantly ones protectiveness over the egos domain, leaves it vulnerable to other forces emanating from the psyche. Without the expanded nature of egoic awareness, i.e. through developing wisdom, the ego is blinded by its own ignorance. Thus the demiurge—the real devil—is simply our own ignorance.
This is interesting when one thinks about how the physical world we experience and participate in is indeed an illusion. Science has taught us that what we take to be a concrete world of form, is really a vibrating mass of subatomic particles. Our limited perception only allows the world to be rendered in a particular way.
The human experience is only capable of seeing reality subjectively, that is through a biased filter. This filter imparts a degree of ignorance as the world will never be exactly how the ego perceives it. This is the concept behind the Demiurge being the “creator of the material universe.” Because of this filter, the world appears to us as we choose to see it. It is through tools such as science that we are able to understand the world outside of this inherent bias.
While science has been tremendous in overcoming Yaldabaoth’s stranglehold, in many ways empiricism has simply fallen into the role of supreme knowledge, and once again the Demiurge has gripped humanity. Now we can see the rift between those who deem themselves evolved because they believe in science, and those who think themselves…also evolved…because they value religion or spirituality instead. Truth is inherently multidimensional, and ignorance will creep in whenever one single path is chosen to be better than the rest.
What becomes interesting is how the truth is always partially revealed through these various disciplines. It is often said that science and empiricism are simply moving towards an understanding that mirrors what perennial philosophers and ancient sages have intuited. All truths are but half truths, and when we allow ourselves not to fall into the narrow lane of promoting one truth over the other, we can see the forest of wisdom over the trees of ignorance.
Following this, something I believe is that attaining higher levels of conscious awareness, i.e. enlightenment, involves the process of shifting one's subjective reality to ever deepening, subatomic levels of reality. In physics, there exists the idea that as we continue to divide atoms into smaller and smaller pieces, we eventually run into a quantum layer where there exists, simultaneously, both a particle and wave. This means there is an inherent level of uncertainty in the fabric of reality, and that only once these particles are observed are they solidified into one or the other.
So the naive ego perceives the world in such a way that these particles solidify to form a shape, something tangible. This is the metaphor of the Demiurge naively assuming it is the creator of everything. It is a false assumption. Truth runs much deeper than the senses can pick up.
Much like the great mystics of the eons have taught, transcending our own limited ego attunes us to a true essence of reality. Entering the transpersonal, expanded layers of awareness seems to be akin to perceiving the world on an increasingly quantum level, i.e. to experience reality from the position of wave/particle duality. The point where everything and nothing is possible.
When we reach this layer and are able to remain here in a balanced state, the world blooms in synchronicity and manifested potential. Doors open up where walls once stood. Anxiety falters, people welcome you. The very essence of love and wisdom surge through your being as you feel yourself to be truly alive and at-one with the world around you.
So we can see that ignorance is the unruly child of wisdom. That the demiurge is the bastard child of Sophia, and that the God Jesus preached about is not the same God the Jewish tribes worshiped and wrote about in the Old Testament. The real God is pure, radiant love. Christ crucified his ego, broke free from his own ignorance and returned to the pleroma, the source of love, being, and infinite potential.
While this is getting rather romantic and mystical, anyone who has undergone any kind of spiritual journey will know it really is all about returning to this divine love. Enlightenment is simply the process of emotional recovery. Enlightenment is suffering the cruelty of the world, and healing from it. The dark rift that ignorance creates is sewn back together with a true and pervasive sense of empathy.
When we can find this eternal source of love and wisdom within, we have discovered our own Gnosis. Our knowing.
When one is tapped into this infinite wellspring within, there is no evil in the world that can disrupt internal peace and balance. The more people who can recognize that the very source of being is alive and emanating from within, the more we can shift the tides of humanity towards a truly enlightened species.
Love is the driving force of life. Love creates new life. Love encourages you to get out of bed and to keep on going. This love needn't come from any outside source, we have the ability to truly love who we are, to be the parent, the lover, the teacher we always needed.
To be alive is to be love.
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"The Gnostics teach that the body is of the earth, therefore it is of the Mother aspect of God. The mind, intellect, and spirit is of the Father, and throughout life we must find a way to balance these two opposing forces. Sexuality is something to be accepted and sacralized. A healthy, living body gives way to a healthy and dynamic mind. The two must join in union—operating in equality." -This is what I've always found missing in Christianity and western spirituality. I'm so glad to have found this perspective hidden in the gnostic manuscripts. I find this cosmic balance in Mayan Cosmology. It's alleviating to find it here too, another ancestral science. Appreciating you ❤️🙏