Hip Gnosis

Secret knowledge. Hidden wisdom. Keys to enlightenment.

From the first century to the 21st, there's been a stream of these ideas bubbling underneath popular culture and mainstream religion. Rarely with big box-office popularity ("Rocky"), but with more of a devoted cult following ("Rocky Horror").

And, if you run with a certain crowd that values the esoteric and obscure just because they are esoteric and obscure, a good working knowledge of Gnostic literature adds to one's hipness quotient. If you can quote from the Gospel of Thomas or Judas and converse about it for a few minutes, your literati coolness factor goes way up. (I've read them, by the way. Not in the original Coptic, but still - I'm hip.)

I want to talk about the ancient Gnostics and where they are alive and well today in mainstream America, but you might not recognize them right away. But before I get there (maybe in part 2 of this post, as I think about it...), let's consider just for a bit the concept of Gnosticism and how it actually works out in real life situations.

First, gnosis is just the Greek word for knowledge.

Gnosticism is the notion that knowledge leads one to ... oh, pick one: self-fulfillment, higher consciousness, connection with the divine spark within, the next stage in evolution, transcendence... and so the pursuit of knowledge becomes the highest purpose for humankind. The more knowledge, the more advancement, etc.

Secret or hidden knowledge is more highly prized in this arena because it isn't as easily accessed or understood as is mainstream "popular" wisdom. And obviously if what *everyone* knows was good enough, we wouldn't have all the problems we have today, right? So... there must be other wisdom that less people know, and the less people that know it, the further from the mainstream and therefore the more valuable it probably is.

Okay, with that as backdrop, let me shift gears a minute and talk about the way our personalities work. I'll start by using another Greek word, psuche, most often translated as "soul" in the New Testament. We know almost instinctively that body and soul are separate, that the body stops at death, but the soul doesn't necessarily stop, depending on your view of the afterlife.

I'll show later (I think) that one's soul and one's spirit are not synonymous either. For now, let's say that the spirit is that part of us that is innately searching for some kind of meaning in life, some connection with eternity or with something greater than us.

So I think of a person as being in three parts, body, soul and spirit. I'll leave out the body and spirit parts of this discussion for now. For simplicity's sake let me equate the soul to that part of us that goes on into the next life, however you want to think of that, as well as what makes us who we are in this life - our personality.

It seems that the personality or soul is also made up of three parts: reason, emotion and volition. Said in other words: mind, heart and will. We sometimes refer to the will as "drive" or "strength of character" or "inner strength". The collective operation of those parts makes us who we are as human beings. It reminds me of the Great Commandment: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, strength. In other words, with all of who you are.

Life is lived experientially, not theoretically. So, when we go through our days, we gather information and encounter stimuli. The information and stimuli come in through a sort of experience funnel where they interact with our emotions and our reason. We think about some of the stuff and have emotional reactions to some of the stuff. Both our mind and our heart then inform our will. Our reason and our emotions move upon the will until we make a volitional choice to act or not act in some way.

Once we make a choice to act (or not), it comes out the bottom of the funnel, and then we begin to experience the outcome of that decision as it ripples into our daily life. The consequences go back into the top of the funnel as information to think about or stimuli to react to, and the process continues. It's a feedback loop of sorts, supplemented by additional experiences (related or unrelated) that happen continuously to us or around us.

Sometimes this feedback happens instantaneously, as in getting involved a parking lot fender-bender, deciding to jump out and holler at the other person, and then deciding NOT to retaliate after they've just hit you, but apologize instead. Or... any one of a dozen other permutations of that incident.

Other times the feedback loop is loooooong. Like reluctantly moving to take a new job and then finding after a year that it's not a good fit for you, and then deciding to return the recruiter's phone call this time when she calls, which several months later leads to a better job than you could have ever imagined would come your way 2 years earlier. It even moves you back sort of where you came from. Or something like that. Maybe. If you're lucky.

Now, I don't think that reason ever informs the emotions very much, or vice versa. I don't think they communicate much at all, except through the consequence feedback loop described above. They are like Mars and Venus, Cats and Dogs, Spaghetti and Waffles, Men and... well, you get my meaning. When's the last time your anger or lust or grief helped you slow down and think straight? When's the last time that thinking sensibly about the quality of your presentation in front of the Board of Directors made your palms stop sweating? They don't really help each other much.

So, if we get more knowledge, are we really any better off on a day to day basis, if we don't also give equal time to expanding our emotional capacity and range of emotional experience? *Some* people think we are. They are the modern-day Gnostics. More on who they are in the next part.

Oh, they have counterparts, too - people who think that getting in touch with and working out our feelings is the most important thing we can do to be better human beings. I'll identify them in the next part, too. Maybe you already know who these folks are. :) Hint: they're all certified and credentialed in their various fields. Or... they're wanna-bes who have cocktail-party theories (or blog posts!) to share with whomever will listen. ;)