Gnosticism is from the Greek word gnosis, “knowledge.” Gnostic texts such as the Nag Hammadi manuscripts “proclaim a completely good and transcendent God, whose enlightened greatness is utterly unfathomable and essentially indescribable. Yet this divine Other can be experienced [inner wisdom or “feeling”] in a person’s inner life, for the spirit within is actually the divine self [True self].”[i]
The term Gnosticism means knowledge; but what kind of knowledge? “The Gnostics understood this mortal world, with all its evils and distractions, to be a deadly trap for one who seeks knowledge. Moreover, the divine spirit is imprisoned by the passions of the sensual soul and the elements of the fleshly body. Gnostic texts employ various figures of speech to depict the sorry fate of the entrapped spirit: it is asleep, drunk, sick, ignorant, and in darkness. For Gnostic Christians, the source of the divine call is Christ.”[ii] The identity of and experience of Christ Consciousness is identical to that of the True self.
“Gnostic Christians castigated the orthodox for making the mistake of reading the Scriptures—and especially Genesis—literally, and thereby missing its ‘deeper meaning.’ And when the Jewish theologian Martin Buber sought to explore the sources of religious experience, he characterized the Jewish devotee’s relationship to God as ‘I and Thou’; but no orthodox Jew, any more than an orthodox Christian, could say, with the Hindu devotee, ‘I am Thou.’ But Gnostic interpreters share with the Hindu that very conviction—that the divine being is hidden deep within human nature, as well as outside it, and, although often unperceived, is a spiritual potential latent in the human psyche.”[iii] In P-A, this could be understood to mean our connection to and expression of the Implicate Order, to Simple Reality itself.
[i] Meyer, Marvin W. The Secret Teachings of Jesus. New York: Random House, 1984, p. xvi.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Random House, 1998, pp. 63-65.
