Gnosticism: Esoteric Insight and/or Christian Heresy?

Just to clarify - I am neither a Christian nor a 'Gnostic' in the sense of following a path having some relation to the ideas of the old gnostics.
Personally, I find the yoga philosophy of India far more useful and appealing in terms of my own inner consciousness and development.
My interest in Christianity and gnosticism is part of my general project of looking into different religions and beliefs etc. I don't do it because I'm seeking for some new form of Christianity.
I have to live here in the UK, a country that is largely entirely secular. There is nothing even resembling the way Christianity is in the USA here. But I like to talk to people and I find it useful to be able to put some of what I want to say in terms that are at least a little bit familiar, and in western clture in general, that means Christian terms.
Also as a person with a lifelong interest in history it's veryuseful to know a certain amount about Christianity as it played such a large role in the past in Europe and beyond.

In my opinion, Luther comes over as a somewhat crude, beer swilling individual, a very long way from being any kind of mystic and utterly ignorant of anything to do with gnosis. Entirely emotional/mental with virtually nothing of the spirit.
The Catholic church seems lost - stuck in the middle ages, riddled with child abusers,hung up in general on sex and especially on homosexuality, adhering to a bizzare doctrine of Papal infallibility and the reat of it.
As for modern would be gnostics - I wish you and them luck. But as I said before, I think too much has been lost to reconstitute the thing.

 

Guilt comes from thinking you are doing something wrong. When you think you are doing something wrong you are inclined to feel bad, and when you feel bad you commit further sin from a sense of culpability, liability, and shame. Remove the initial guilt at being born a human being and people behave naturally with natural moral sense. Absolute forgiveness and unconditional love is one of the ways we can be cured of wrongdoing. When we have a world of blame and retribution all we see is endless war and disharmony.

 

I think you are putting the cart before the horse.

I say so purely from personal experience.
Think of it like how lightning works. The massive power is above while we little powers are on the ground.
Our love for other is what must grow first, my experience, before our small spark of lightning give the larger power a path to the earth. The feeling found is overwhelming joy and not what I would call love, although it is likely love generated.

I found what people call a soul mate, now my wife, before my apotheosis. It may be that that depth of love within us is required before the higher love of what most call God can be found. I get that from this following quote.

Matthew 18:20 - For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

Regards
DL

 

True but they give this two fingered typer's source of thinking and save me a lot of typing time. If I did not support the idea given, I would not give them.

As to some other thinking ill of you thinking you are God. Pfft.
Just give the the right definition as they are obviously wrong in theirs.

Who cares what they think of you anyway. If you are master of your own ship, that is a lot more important than the fools who are not. Your life is about you. Not about them.

Step up. Or bend the knee to another. Be your own man, or a slave to another.

Regards
DL

 

It may always be but not the vile garbage creeds that we now suffer like Christianity and Islam.

Both Christianity and Islam, slave holding ideologies, have basically developed into intolerant, homophobic and misogynous religions. Both religions have grown themselves by the sword instead of good deeds and continue with their immoral ways in spite of secular law showing them the moral ways.

Jesus said we would know his people by their works and deeds. That means Jesus would not recognize Christians and Muslims as his people, and neither do I. Jesus would call Christianity and Islam abominations.

Gnostic Christians did in the past, and I am proudly continuing that tradition and honest irrefutable evaluation based on morality.

The Theft of Our Values - Top Documentary Films



Humanity centered religions, good? Yes. Esoteric ecumenist Gnostic Christianity being the best of these.

Supernaturally based religions, evil? Yes. Islam and Christianity being the worst of these.

Regards
DL

 

Exactly where that fools belief now leaves us. With a God of the Gaps.

Think fractals and what the ancient intelligentsia thought. They said that in a supernatural reality the erath would sit on a turtle that sits on a turtle that sits on a turtle ad infinitum.

If there is one God above a man God, then there can be another God above that ad infinitum.

Note all the Gnostic style movies that our thinking is credited for creating. All multiverse thinking, as far as I know, began with Gnostic Christianity. That shows how far ahead of our time we were and that is why the inquisitions were sent to decimate us. We fought the law of the land, Christianity, and they won by cheating and accepting to be the puppet of governments. They abandoned their search for God to suck on the public tit. Bastards all.

Regards
DL

 

If that were true, I would not have had enough to choose Gnostic Christianity as my religion.

Remember that a lot that was lost was likely not terribly important as free thinkers think of the here and now as more important than the past. Further, the other more intelligent and moral than Christianity and Islam are her to remind us that seeking knowledge and wisdom is more important than seeking an imaginary supernatural construct and idol worshiping it.

All religions look at each other about the same way now and intelligent thinking will inevitably win out in all of them.



Intelligent thinking is a part of why there is a lot of interest in Gnostic Christianity. If there is a future for religions, Gnostic Christianity will lead it.

Regards
DL

 

I disagree completely but am not here to speak to such derailing things.

Regards
DL

 

You would punish me for speaking the truth? Just as your Christ was?

 

I see problems with what you are saying here. If we say, as did both the Gnostics of antiquity and the medieval Cathars, that this world is the creation of an ignorant demiurge or of Satan, it's always going to be hard to have much of a pro-life or even pro-cosmos attitude.
Let's leave the old gnostics aside for a moment and look at the Cathars, for the sake of simplicity.

It appears from what is known, and that is n't much, only what the inquisitors saw fit to record, that the Cathars believed in a form of reincarnation. They thought that the spirit has fallen into this evil world from it's true home with God, and it trapped here in ignorance and suffering by the devil, whose world this is. Not only will you be reborn over and over, but you can be reborn as an animal and have to suffer all that would entail. The only way out was to recieve therite knownas the Consolamentum from the Cathar Perfecti, the likelyhood of which occurence in this world was seen as not particuarly high.
So - yes, it is all based on what most people define as the supernatural, and yes, they took an attitude that the only hope is escape from this cycle of endless suffering through some form of Christian salvation.

My own view is that this is probably the only possible world that could sustain life as we know it. It can certainly be improved upon though in many ways. Probably, evolution is the way a self-organizing system will eventually perfect itself - and we humans are a part of that, despite the fact that the world we have made is far from the best possible and reallysomething like a catastrophe spread out over time.

 

Anyway. I gnosis.

 

A very big question. Just a short reply is that I think maybe monotheisms in general will struggle to change or adapt - eastern religions are probably more adaptable and have more content relevant to our contemporary needs and those of the future. Maybe also stuff like shamanism could have a role.

 

Too much so.
To be fair, I am not 100% sure of Hoeller's final position and his catholic mimicry.
I sometimes see him as having sold out to belief in the supernatural and ignoring our true beliefs for more pockets to pick and is likely hoping that literalists and idol worshipers just change idols. Again, I am not sure.

I like how he begins in this link, but then he seems to be talking in terms I would not support. His # 16, for instance, is pure garbage and smacks of knowledge of what cannot be known. The supernatural.

Basic Beliefs of a True Gnostic

Regards
DL

 

As a universalist creed, I think it is superior to the (us and them creeds), that are splitting politics and religions into belligerent right wing and left wing camps.

We have to include all of society into our thinking and use the 80 20 rule when thinking.

Regards
DL

 

I said nothing of if you spoke the truth in that post or not.
I am sure you think it true while I do not and will not derail into a longer issue than what the O.P. leads to.

Regards
DL

 

Because the thing is amorphous and not a long standing tradition it's open to anyone to reinvent as they see fit I suppose. Hoeller has his take on it, you have yours.

Philip K Dick too.

As I said, I wish you luck with it.

 

There is no point in discussing what Cathars or Gnostic Christian believed if you are going to think we believed our myths in a literal way.

Gnostic, dualism. Yin;real logic and reason, Yang; unreal and imaginary supernatural thinking.

Talk of our beliefs or our myths. I gave you what we believed about matter and where heaven is to dispel what our myths say, yet you are putting one against the other.

They are to compliment each other. Not put Yin against Yang as they are compliments to each other. Think reality and goal.

John 6 ; 63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.

Flesh= political person, security and matter issues. IOW. Reality. Spirit/life = motivating force of matter and it's perceptions. IOW. A different wish for reality. Always impossible to obtain as Yin nor Yang can ever consume the other.

In humans, love creates hate. Kill one, you kill the other.

Humans can self destroy and die. God did and that is why we seek. Idol worshipers instead of seeking as Jesus teaches.

Luke 11:52 Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.

Mark 7:13 Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye.

Regards
DL

 

Reinvent to improve.

I am God as all of us are Gods. Independent yet connected minds. Reality is a collective hunch and in a real sense, we all create our own reality. That is why we all end in intercourse with others. We all seek confirmation bias. A good trait in the vast majority of cases. Without it we would all be doing our own thing and that would kill the security we collectively have created through playing our collective hunches and following the positive aspects of that bias and not it's negative side.

You cannot say any ideology is right or wrong. You can only accept what is the status quo and raise the bar of excellence.. We can only judge what it produces. War or peace. Religions equal war. Non-religion equals peace, yet most claim religious affiliation which indicates that more of us want war instead of peace. It is a good thing we are all such hypocrites. It is the unfits way to try to look like one of the fittest. Ego. Gotta love it.

Regards
DL

 

To me it seems likely that the Cathars did indeed believe in their system literally. But really it's pretty much impossible for any modern person to put themself into the mind set of a person in 13th century France.

There are millions in India who believe literally in reincarnation even today. I myself have met Hindus who definitely believe in it - so why not the Cathars?

 

No actual denomination of progressive Christians. They're scattered among a wide range of liberal and mainline Protestant denominations. Some churches of the United Church of Christ (UCC) and Uniting Churches, the Unity Church and some denominations of the New Thought movement would qualify. More typically, these progressive Christians operate within liberal or moderate mainline churches, much as Valentinian Gnostics did back in the day. Bishop Spong and the late Marcus Borg are Episcopalian examples of Progressive Christians, J.D. Crossan is a Catholic example, and the Jesus Seminar generally had this point of view. I attend a progressive Sunday School in the First United Methodist Church and informal Christian discussion/support groups with members of the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the Unitarian Universalists. I believe Jesus was a real, literal man, and the Christ (Annointed One) was a status attained by Hebrew Kings, priests and prophets, and a title given to the Messiah, which I associate with "Christ consciousness"--a higher level of spiritual awareness exemplifed in the life and teachings of Jesus. The latter concept has much in common with Gnosticism and the Hindu/Buddhist concept of samadhi, or enlightenment, but the goal for Christians is not just to relieve personal suffering but, like the Buddhist bodhisattva, to bring the message of Christ's love to others. But note that in raja yoga, the highest sages involve loss of self when the meditator realizes oneness of god. That's quite different from the narcissistic arrogance of the Alex Baldwin/Dr.Ted Hill "I am God" complex. It smacks of Simon Magus' interest in buying the secret of miracles as a way of enhancing his own power and prestige. (I share BlackBilie's suspicions about that attitude.