A Religion, or at Least a Philosophy, for Our Fractured Times?

About ten years ago, Lee and Steven Hager, wife and husband, published a remarkable book whose title tells us plainly what it comprises -- Understanding Gnosis -- Inside and Outside the Gnostic Gospels.  

As far as I know, the Hagers are not credentialed academics in the field of the history of religion, in contrast to, say, Elaine Pagels of Princeton, who brought the alternative gospels into fashion decades ago.  And yet they have written a most comprehensive and highly literate deep introduction to Gnostic thought that draws on many and disparate sources.  

They begin by admitting that there are various strands of Gnosticism that often are in tension, sometimes extreme tension, with each other.  The most important division is between an exclusionary and dualistic strain, where the elect can expect to find and experience the One, the Source, the Godhead, but others may expect not endless reincarnation, nor even the fires of hell, but not to exist at all after this brief life is over!  In the contrasting strain, every man and woman is one with the Divine and destined to partake in the Divine because, foundationally, the One is All There Is.  What makes it appropriate to characterize both of these schools of thought as "Gnostic" is that in both systems the knowledge that we are seeking is direct, experiential knowledge of God, not anything we can learn from books.  (The Hagers readily admit the paradox that notwithstanding they have devoted 400-odd pages to the task of at least pointing us in the direction of this experiential knowledge!)

Next, the Hagers examine the so-called "Nag Hammadi texts" that are the principal historical Gnostic sources, from a big-picture point of view.  Then they do a deep dive into those same texts, including the Book of Thomas, the Secret Book of John, and the Gospel of Mary, as well as sources that we may know only because they are referenced in texts that have survived, as they have not.

With this extensive background, the Hagers then explain the various formal schools of thought that we think of as Gnostic, including, for example, Hermeticism and Manichaeism, and how these schools, or most of them, came to be considered heretical deviations from Orthodox Christianity.

The next and penultimate major section of Understanding Gnosis highlights the extent to which non-Gnostic traditions share Gnostic insights, most especially the concept of oneness with the Divine, achieved via direct knowledge and experience.  This to me is the most interesting part of the book.  It draws into the discussion everything from the Greek/Egyptian philosopher Plotinus, to alchemists, to devotees of Carl Jung, to the Hindu Upanishads, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, Sufi mysticism and even mainstream Christianity itself!

A subtle realization comes over one incrementally as one encounters through this part of the book the Gnostic resonances in all of these ancient and modern traditions -- Lee and Steven Hager are not just enthusiastic autodidact scholars of Gnosticism; they are adherents, devotees of the "Oneness" branch of it, eager for us to work it into our own lives as an all-encompassing personal philosophy and cosmology!  Indeed, the final section of the book makes this rallying of our spirits to the cause explicit.

What do I find personally appealing in the Hagers' Oneness Gnosticism?  Among other things:

• Its simplicity.  It needs and relies on virtually nothing by way of dogma.
• Its lack of judgment, rewards and punishments.  Like Roger Daltrey of The Who, we can embrace it and still proclaim "I've no need to be forgiven!"
• Its recognition, whether or not explicit, that the Christ embodies a higher level of divinity than that of Yaldabaoth or Jehovah, which are two names for the same flawed Being who is said to have made us, and made us in His image and likeness!  This is in contrast to Orthodox Christianity, which via various forms of sophistry attempts to obscure the obvious and fundamental differences between God the Father and God the Son as they are portrayed in the texts.
• A point closely related to the last.  My research into UFOs and related "paranormal" phenomena has led me to a place that seems to be populated by hyper-intelligent beings that are not uniformly benevolent.  These can be called "demi-gods," and they can rightly be called "demons" as well, so long as that word is not meant to imply a wholesale importation of the Biblical notion of Satan and his minions into ufology.  This in turn has led me to fear that upon our deaths we do not enter a land of light and love, but rather a realm of chaos and hostility (this, incidentally, not inconsistent with the visions we are said to encounter in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, except that for the Buddhists the demons are not real but illusory).  But the "Oneness Gnosticism" seems to say that we need not battle the demons for eons as part of our journey to the Source, because we partake of the Source even now, "mourning and weeping in this Valley of Tears."  According to this cosmology, we can, we do, leapfrog the Devil!
• A point made explicitly by the Hagers towards the end of the book.  The Eastern traditions often insist that when we graduate from the cycle of death and rebirth, we reunite with the Source as a raindrop falls into the ocean.  We lose every aspect of our individuality, what makes "us" us.  But further, the ocean into which we fall is an Ocean of Complete Nothingness.  This has always struck me as a terrifying conception of immortality, not less terrifying than the annihilation that comes with death according to our friends the strict materialists.  The Hagers plainly insist that in Oneness Gnosticism we partake of the Divine and and in the process relinquish our lower-case selves, but an upper-case Self, unique to us, always survives in communion with the One.

Here I should acknowledge the obvious.  We may choose our cosmology in part on the basis of its congeniality, but a cosmology is not more likely to be true just because it entails a happy ending for us; otherwise we might as well construct a new religion based on the experience of Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz!"

In any case, the Hagers do us a great service.  I now walk away from Understanding Gnosis convinced that Gnostic Christianity deserves to be considered canonical, and the New Testament as offered to us in our churches heretical, not the other way round.

 

Herzog's Chicken

No, not a recipe.  Rather, the famed and eccentric German film director Werner Herzog admonishes us to find an opportunity to stare directly into the eyes of a chicken, a live chicken, for in them as perhaps nowhere else one discovers an astonishing and terrible stupidity.

 

What Is Left, After That Which Is Ephemeral Has Been Permitted to Pass Away

 

The Same Fervor Under the Same Firmament

1.  80,000 at Fatima turn their eyes to an apparition in the sky and plead with God to have mercy on the people.

2.  More than 80,000, knowing not how otherwise to express their grief and their despair, spontaneously gather in the streets of Moscow when they learn of the death of Joseph V. Stalin.

 

Am I Finally Getting the Message?

Am I beginning at last accurately to penetrate the cryptic philosophy of C. J. Jung?

Jung reminds us in his Red Book that between crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus descended into Hell for three days.  The Bible is quite clear about this, though the sojourn seems to have been swept under the rug in most traditions.

But why this interlude in the depths?  Jung explains it in rather Taoist terms.  There can be no Light without Darkness.  If He hadn't descended into Hell, He could not have risen into Heaven.  Likewise, Jung himself never would have become an integrated, "individuated" man but for a long journey, recounted in the Red Book, into a hell that I cannot call "private" because it resides in the collective unconscious.

How does this tie to my own experience? 

The narrative contents of my dream are trivial, stupid even.  I am a lawyer.  I have been tasked with arranging to have a broken washing machine fixed, one that services a hospital where two of my friends, also clients, are confined.  I go down into the basement of the hospital and crawl inside of the tub of the machine, which is very large.  From within I can move the contraption, but only a little bit before it seems to hit an obstacle.  It becomes clear to me that no one in a position to help me get it fixed will ever raise a finger.  It is permanently broken and will not be replaced.  I have failed in my task.

Worse, when my boss and mentor, who is named David, interrogates me about the job, I tell him that I am making good progress and that all will soon be well.  From the first words out of my mouth, David can see that I am lying, and he holds me in contempt for it.

When I awaken from the dream, it seems to me on a visceral level that it has captured my dilemma and also my contemptible spirit.

What I don't understand, to now, is how individuation is supposed to give rise to contentment, and in particular how it arms one against the terror of death, if indeed it does so.

By contrast, consider the work of another sage who has just come to my attention via the podcast world -- Prof. John Vervaeke of the University of Toronto.  His field of study is cognition and consciousness.  He argues at length, based very much on a Buddhist perspective, that none of us should wish to be immortal, that immortality would soon become a hell of its own, as we run out of goals and our true journey of exploration grinds to a halt.  In his mid-sixties, he says emphatically that he does not wish to live more than an additional 20 years.  "So the blackness of Death does not terrify you?" asks his interlocutor.  "There is no blackness" he replies.  "You need an experiencer for there to be blackness.  The experiencer has been annihilated."

 

Yaldabaoth (or the "Child of Chaos")

Have you worshiped this false god, even as you do not know his name?  Like the Chaldeans, have you committed the grave sin of polytheism, tricked into it by the very Scriptures that you hold dear?

According to the Gnostics, or at least according to one significant strain of Gnosticism (see The Secret Book of John), the Source, the Ultimate Godhead, permitted visions to pass through His head, more out of passive amusement than out of intention.  His power was such that these visions took form. The visionary process begat a pair of demi-gods, and this pair begat another, and so on, until there were 182 pairs.  But there was also one last demi-god who was formed unpaired and whose name was Sophia, or Wisdom.  In her loneliness, Sophia decided to create a child companion for herself, using her own lesser, and derivative, divine powers.  According to the Book, "something came out of her that was imperfect and different in appearance from her, ... it was misshapen ... an abomination."  This abomination was called Yaldabaoth, the son of Sophia and the "Child of Chaos."

Sophia forsook her defective son, but he was able to steal some of her divine power, and with it he created Archons, angels that were counterfeit versions of true divine realities.  The Book says that "he mated with the mindlessness in him and produced authorities for himself."

And then, crucially, Yaldabaoth created an entire material universe -- one that was fatally flawed and irredeemable.  And yet in his arrogance, and once again according to the Book, echoing Genesis 20:3 and 5, he said "you shall have no other gods before me ... for I the Lord your God am a jealous God."

It is no accident that Yaldabaoth echoed the words of Jehovah in Genesis because, in Gnostic belief, our Creator, the one portrayed in the Old Testament, was Yaldabaoth.  

While this entire narrative sounds to us today like a fringe heresy, we need to remind ourselves that the Gnostic texts had as much currency in certain early Christian circles as the books that much later made it into the King James Version of the Bible, and that these texts were ruthlessly suppressed by the early bishops at around the time of Constantine's conversion and the development and promulgation of the Nicene Creed, which is recited still, routinely, in modern Christian churches.  "We believe in One God, the Father Almighty, the Maker of all things visible and invisible."

And if we are able to drop from our minds for a moment the literal "indoctrination" to which we were subjected in childhood Judeo-Christian classrooms, we see plainly that the God of Abraham was indeed petty, vindictive and often arbitrary.

And so, in the Gnostic version of things (which resonates deeply with the kabbalistic, but that's another story), this god whom we have been taught to worship from childhood should be viewed by us as an unfortunate cosmic speedbump around whom we must navigate in our quest to find union with the One True Divine.

 

Another Random Childhood Memory Arisen at the Hour of the Wolf

In the dark basement, my father's professional-grade whetstone. (He was a professional carpenter and shipwright after all.)  It sat in something that looked a bit like a dirty butter dish.

The whetstone became wet only when he spat on it, after which he would use a forefinger to spread the spittle all around the top surface as, perhaps, his own father taught him to do.