Day-to-Day Gnosis

Everyone's journey is different but there are key insights which all gnostics can agree on:

1) Make love not war, it's so much more fun. *wink*
2) There is no One Way toward gnosis. There is no certified Correct way which will earn you points in Heaven and you're not damned to hellfire and brimstone if you 'screw it up' a few times. Those bumps in the road on your path toward gnosis are all lessons learned and have far more worth than what you may see right now. Consider them the 'flavor' in your pot of gumbo you call Life.
3) We take ourselves far too seriously- LAUGH! Life is the most hilarious rollercoaster ride we could ever imagine experiencing. We're all imagining it together and that is what makes it more fun.
4) Live lucidly; minute by minute and hour by hour. This lifetime is fleeting so live life in the moment and enjoy whatever we can whenever we can. Count your blessings by the ounce, not the pound.
5) Living is not the same thing as learning. Learning takes effort and mindfulness to the task. Just because you see something happening doesn't mean you've learned from it. Seeing and doing is not the same thing as retention.
6) All living creatures are connected through pleroma(the fullness/the totality). Respect ourselves and one another. We are one another. If we remember this and live like this then we can truly be at peace with ourselves and one another. Big Love is the answer.
7) There is no such thing as a coincidence. Irony, yes. Comedy and poetic justice, most definitely. The All does have a wicked sense of humor. But there is no such thing as a coincidence.
8) Everyone talks to themselves and when we do we are reinforcing our own innate wisdom. It's something we do by instinct. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that we are wise beings so we don't get bogged down in the day-to-day crap that we forget our divine heritage.
9) Past is not prologue! We can learn from our mistakes and our bright sparks will shine all the more brightly for it. Dare to break the mold of what your friends/family members may tell you is your fate. It's your life. So live it!
10) Dream. And then share those dreams with others. Communicate your visions so that others can know they are not alone.
11) And if you're really depressed take a look around at Nature. It'll always give you a good chuckle. Take this cat for example:



See, you're laughing and already further on your path toward gnosis than you were five minute ago!

If we can't laugh at life and the quirky creatures and situations we're surrounded with then truly, what can we laugh at? We tend to get angry with other human beings but animals.... animals show us what we need to see. Like for example: the not-so-subtle hint that you're out of toilet paper; a priceless lesson in humility.

Beautiful Heavens

In the Boötes constellation there is a celestial reminder that grammar counts: VV 340. Beautiful, yes?

Infinity takes a backseat

When you read this article think about all the possibilities which could have existed in the past two thousand years but didn't. Think of the technological death which occurred (several times, in fact!) due to literalist religions stamping down any new ideas and stringing people up in a noose, tossing them on a bonfire, crucifying them, or pulling them between two horses(or trees) until their bodies fell apart.

It is sobering to see just how far the human mind pushed itself, willingly, testing boundaries of the physical world on paper or animal skins because we had no other way to do so physically. So naturally now that we have the ability to test the physical world the majority of us sit on our asses and play XBox360 numbing ourselves to the infinite possibilities which exist all around.

We need more Archimedes and Einsteins to wake us up.

Idea of Infinity Stretched Back to Third Century B.C.By: Robin Lloyd

Date: 17 February 2009 Time: 05:49 AM ET

CHICAGO - The first mathematical use of the concept of actual infinity has been pushed back some 2,000 years via a new analysis of a tattered page of parchment on which a medieval monk in Constantinople copied the third century B.C. work of the Greek mathematician Archimedes.

Infinity is one of the most fundamental questions in mathematics and still remains an unsolved riddle. For instance, if you add or subtract a number from infinity, the remaining value is still infinity, some Indian philosophers said. Mathematicians today refer to actual infinity as an uncountable set of numbers such as the number of points existing on a line at the same time, while a potential infinity is an endless sequence that unfolds consecutively over time.

The parchment page comes from the 348-page Archimedes Palimpsest, the oldest copy of some of the Greek genius' writings, which were hidden for centuries because a monk partly scraped them off the animal-skin parchment in the 13th century A.D. to clear the pages to print a prayer book. Also, a forger painted pictures over the prayer book hundreds of years after that.

A scholar named Johan Ludvig Heiberg in 1906 studied the written remnants behind the religious words to discover the Palimpsest, finding evidence of Archimedes' systematic use of the concept of infinity in a portion of the document called the Method of Mechanical Theorems. In the past few years, the Palimpsest was re-examined at a far higher level of detail using multispectral imaging and also a hair-thin X-ray scanning technique at Stanford University's Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource in California. The scanner can image a million pixels in less than one hour.

With one of the X-ray images, Stanford classicist Reviel Netz made out the edge of a torn page, where Heiberg had figured just one line of text was missing. The X-rays produced images of iron from the ink used on the document.

Netz examined the scan and was able to deduce the presence of previously unseen Greek letters, kappa and alpha, which were likely followed by an iota to spell the Greek word for "and." This led Netz to conclude that two lines were missing, rather than one and to arrive at a new reading of the passage, physicist Uwe Bergmann of the Synchrotron facility told a small group of reporters here Sunday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"Scholars are now talking about some new words which are emerging in the reconstruction of the evidence in introduction to the Method, that Archimedes' concept of infinity was rather different from what was previously thought," Bergmann said.

In fact, the new reading reveals that Archimedes was engaged in math that made conceptual use of actual infinity, as Netz describes on the Web site ArchimedesPalimpsest.org. The calculations involved adding infinite numbers of sums, such as the number of triangles inside a prism, as well as the number of lines inside a rectangle. Archimedes tried to argue that these values are equal to each other, making a statement about actual infinity, not just potential infinity, Nets writes.

The Palimpsest resides at the Walters Museum of Art in Baltimore.

The Archimedes Palimpsest project forced researchers to come up with a new system to scan large objects, Bergmann said. A commercial-grade X-ray scanning machine might take a year to complete a scan that the Stanford Synchrotron now can complete in half a day, he said.

"It is now taking milliseconds rather than seconds to get each pixel — that has been for us the great novelty," he said.

Thunder - Introduction & Evolution

Thunder is a one of the most perplexing gnostic texts and worth its weight in gold. A worthy read and an even more worthy collection of verses to meditate on. Because its verses contain such contradictory descriptions(sometimes in the same line!) it is necessary to nibble on it instead of trying to digest it in one sitting. It really will give you a splitting headache. I've been 'nibbling' at it for a few months now and finally have a grasp of most of the broad concepts explored therein.

Among Nag Hammadi experts it is most commonly thought that Sophia herself speaks through the voice of an author(unknown) to create a powerful but complicated feminine persona who traverses a thousand years of ancient literary equivalents. There are parallels in Thunder's literary styles with Sanskrit, Egyptian, and Jewish literature devices and forms. Thunder as a historical religious text and Sophia's mystery aren't that mysterious when taken into those contexts, then. The poetic form is timeless.

A few related verses from Thunder has fired my imagination to blog today. In no particular order:

"I am silence incomprehensible
and an idea remembered often."

"I am the utterance of my name."

"I am hearing for all,
and my speech is indeciperable.
I am an unspeaking mute
and enormous in my many words."

"Those unconnected to me are unfamiliar with me,
and those in my substance know me.
Those close to me are ignorant of me,
and those far away have known me.
On the day I am close to you, you are far,
and on the day I am far, I am close to you."

"Hear me, hearers,
and find out about my words, you who know me.
I am the hearing all can reach;
I am speech undecipherable.
I am the name of the sound
and the sound of the name.
I am the sign of the letter
and the designation of the division."

also

"Come to childhood and don't despise it, because it is small and tiny."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The last line seems to be the icing on the cake, for me anyway. The punctuation at the end of a sentence. A gentle hug after a good long cry. Because you know we all royally pissed off our parents during childhood. It's not easy being a parent. It's hard to know whether to let your child suffer for a bit in order to learn or to help them right up after a fall.

And along the lines of Night Reflection's post concerning FEELING and recognizing that divine connection to God in our lives, how can we write about these conversations with the All? At times I am so stumped for words I cannot even think of where to begin. This is why having eloquent verses like Thunder available in print is so vitally important for those of us who strive to learn and feel more than what is available for common consumption on CNN and MSN.com with our cup of coffee.

In my own struggle to come up with an adequate description of what this divine connection and communion feels... I feel inept and not up to the task. My conclusion is that this is because I am such a visual person. And my relationship with Pleroma seems to be one of fewer words and more emotional surges. There's only so many words in a thesaurus to describe warm, fuzzy, loving, adoring, universal, all encompassing, endlessly compassionate, endlessly forgiving...

And I have arrived at a solution while writing out that paragraph. In one word. My search has ended.

Endless.

Now of course I can come up with a dozen more synonyms for that. Boundless. Eternal. Infinite. Unceasing. Etc.

But endless seems to cover it.

Like an endlessly overflowing cup of joy. When I was a child I recognized this. Instinctively. And it was terrifying! I didn't know what this visualization was(cup of overflowing substance) or what it represented. I had nothing to hang onto. There was no edge to that cup. It was just me in my little bitty body floundering in that emotion. All I knew was that I felt too much, knew too little, and had no one to help me with such a thing.

It took me another twenty years of living to discover what it was. Him. Her. Them. The All. Everything!

Picture a continually overflowing cup. Our very analytical human minds will constantly try to grasp at ideas of where the substance is being sourced from. But here's the answer to the riddle: there is no Place where it resides. There is no Beginning to find. It simply is. And that is what we find so unfathomable. And outrageous in our narrow human view, therefore we make up and even accept the most absurd allegorical stories to be fact to stop us from being faced with that endlessness. It terrifies us. Deep down, it terrifies us. We don't see an edge to that great big swimming pool. There are no life rafts for us to grab onto.

Occam's razor isn't just a mathematical term. And we shouldn't believe myths to be facts simply because it's easier to bear. We cannot evolve as truly responsible adults in the eyes of the All if we shackle ourselves to these literal interpretations. By releasing our bonds we are letting go of the edge we have superficially created and float free in His substance; content and liberated in our spiritual growth. Endlessness doesn't make us tremble anymore. We dive into that tranquil sea and don't touch bottom.

The Gnostic Universe At A Glance

This article is an addition to the Gnostic Definitions segment on the side column. I've put together a few diagrams to assist in this. Please forgive the small format of these pictures as they were created using Microsoft Paint. Simply double click on the images to bring up the details closer to you. You can even right click and select "Open in new window(or tab)" so you can flip back here to the definitions as you examine the diagram.

This first diagram depicts the more common "onion" gnostic universe scheme. Humans(and other sentient creatures in the universe) being the center focus and moving outward we have the Archons, the Demiurge, Sophia, the Aeons, and finally the All which is everywhere and in everything, including humans. In depth definitions of these personalities are further down.


Next, we have a depiction of the Gnostic Universe but with a variation commonly seen in the Cathar sect. In it, the All is on equal footing with the Demiurge and equal space is occupied by them. Humans, Archons, Sophia, and the Aeons are all found within the center overlapping design.


There is a slightly more rare design of the Cathars which depicts a triune of the All, the Demiurge, and Sophia in three large interconnected and overlapping circles. The Aeons, Archons, and Humans would be in the very center.

Moving from the outer to the inner circles, here are definitions:

The All/Pleroma: Greek, meaning "the fullness." The totality of divine powers. The Divine Principal. The good god. The one who is incomparable and incomprehensible. The All. The one who made the elements that the universe is made from but not the one who made the universe itself. He did not give it form. He simply exists as The All.

Aeons: emanations of The All. In the various systems these emanations are differently named, classified, and described, but the emanation theory itself is common to all forms of Gnosticism. They are described as existing in layers(like an onion) between human beings and The All. Complex hierarchies of Aeons are thus produced, sometimes to the number of thirty. These Aeons belong to the purely ideal, noumenal, intelligible, or supersensible world; they are immaterial, they are hypostatic ideas. Together with the source from which they emanate they form the Pleroma ("region of light"). The lowest regions of the Pleroma are closest to the darkness—that is, the physical world.

Sophia: Greek for "wisdom." This female personality is a bit tricky to pin down. In some Eastern Orthodox Christian sects she is seen as the Virgin Mary. In some gnostic texts she is also known as Eve, in that she was duped or made a mistake which lead to the flaws and separation of man from God. In others she is described as the female child of the Divine Principal. There are correlations between these variations but some are subtle while others are more blatant. The cross over from the Christian tradition into the Gnostic tradition is that "Eve" was the first female child of a god and so was Sophia. Both gave birth. Sophia's childbirth was virginal whereas Eve's was not. So this calling Sophia "Eve" is more of a half-truth based descriptive, merely letting readers know that Sophia was The First of her kind.

The gnostic Sophia was formed out of the mind of The All. Sophia then makes a decision to do some action(text explanations vary widely) and in the process of attempting this, she creates the demiurge(God/Yahweh). Embarrassed, and fearing reprisals from The All, she hides Him away in a void all by himself. God, thinking he's all alone and the only god in existence creates the earth and heavens as well as human beings to worship Him. That's the extremely short and sweet version.

Yahweh/God/Jehovah/demiurge/the arrogant one: the Judeo-Christian God described in the New Testament who said in Exodus, "for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God." The child of Sophia. The one who formed the universe from the elements pleroma made. Also known as the "half-maker" because he had taken the divine substance and fashioned out of it a world. He is the spiritual being who had become forgetful of his origins, even of the ultimate God. He thinks that he is the totality and there is no other God before him.

Archons: servants of the demiurge. False rulers. The angels and demons of the Old Testament. The lures and distractions of this material world.