Who and What We Are According To The Mutant Gnostic Cabal
If we are going to create what we want in life we need to understand what we really are. We need to know who we are and where we came from. This is the purpose of Gnosticism as defined by the Mutant Gnostic Cabal - self knowledge!
Classic Gnosticism is richly varied and no general consensus existed, but it did agree on one point. The world of matter was evil. Our real essence was a spark imprisoned by the body. Students and scholars pore over extant texts and the polemical writings against these heterodox teachers by their Orthodox foes as they try to make sense of the strange symbolism and mythologies encoded in their texts.
Carl Jung - the 20th century pioneer of depth psychology - referred to these wonderful heretics as the world’s first depth psychologists. There is much to be learned by Jung’s efforts and the efforts of others. They are the fodder for advanced study. But, in the beginning we need simpler tasks. That is, if we are on a spiritual journey. Otherwise it is just an intellectual pursuit of a historical curiosity.
Self-knowledge is not as simple as it sounds. At every turn in the road and hiding in the shadows of every corner are the ogres of self-delusion and fantasy. These ego monsters can fool us into believing we are self aware or that we have even a minimal understanding of the truth. This is what makes spiritual growth so challenging.
We spend a lot of time focusing on ethical questions. A sure fire sign of a truly spiritual person is how they account for themselves before God and men. How do they behave toward their fellow human beings? A self interested person has no hope of being spiritual. You can pray, chant, meditate or do path working exercises but unless you live a life of ethics you’re activities mean nothing. Fortunately, a true meditation practice often brings us to the realizations that lead to ethical behavior.
Our form of neo-Gnosticism teaches that the ego is an empty vessel designed to carry or transport knowledge of the transpersonal into the personal. There are two basic ego states - the expanded ego and the inflated ego. Ego expansion occurs in a healthy soul moving toward self-knowledge and enlightenment. Ego inflation is a sign of soul debasement or egoism. Every negative trait of the human animal can be found in this state of inflation. Expansion is natural; inflation is unnatural, artificial and forced on the soul by the mortal mind desperately blinded to the truth.
So who are we? Each of us is a divine spark emanated from the supreme godhead destined to be reconstituted to our state of wholeness once we have allowed the truth to be birthed in us. We must awake to the truth. This occurs in an instant. But it may take years or even lifetimes to achieve. Does that mean we teach reincarnation? Not necessarily. We posit that you can’t know the truth of being through the rational mind easily and therefore it is improbable that we can ever prove the basic truths of many our cherished beliefs - reincarnation, heaven, hell and others are concepts that lend to the mystery. So we keep our minds open to these possibilities. We cherish faith without certainty. We hold to uncertainty because we value the rational mind and respect reason.
We tend to look at Gnosticism as following an archetypal map of the unconscious. They myths and symbols we value have merit because the larger or greater truth is encoded in them. By breaking off a piece of them at a time we are able to follow the map as we journey back home.
Unlike our predecessors we do not view the material world as bad or evil. We do not blame it on a demiurge - real or archetypal - but see it as just another level of reality that is subject to the constant flow of change and our free will choice. What we see of good or evil is often how we choose to interpret things. The world is not an illusion but just another expression of reality. The Gnostic must simply awake to the world if he or she wishes to see things as they really are.
The world is subject to change. Life itself is always changing. Death is nothing more than the change from one form of consciousness to another. Whether we exist or survive beyond that mortal veil is for us to discover as we draw our last breath. Any knowledge before hand may simply be nothing more than conjecture based on wishful thinking.
Live in the moment and you will find enlightenment. Worry about the life to come and you may find yourself depressed and in a state of anxiety over the “meaning of it all.”
Change brings pain. But neither the change nor the pain you experience is necessarily evil. They are simply states of being to be embraced and learned from.
Evil exists not because of some supernatural entity or predisposition to evil as supposed by the doctrine of original sin. Evil exists because humans exercising their free will choose to respond in ways that allow it to exist. Evil is a human creation and it is brought about by the actions of people. The devil never made anyone do anything that they didn’t want to do already. He just provides an excuse - someone else to blame it on so we can avoid taking responsibility for our actions and our lives.
So what are we? We are born into the world as human animals. We all contain a divine imprint - a spark of the one true reality, but we cannot call ourselves human beings yet. We must strive to become human beings through the acquisition of self - knowledge and living an ethical life toward all sentient beings.
By the end of our lives the majority of us are some combination between human animal and human beings. However, a great many still remain nothing more than highly cognitive bi pedal animals with no real spiritual depth or integrity.
At another level we can be said to really live a life of mind. But the mind is a tool. As we become self-aware we can use it to help create the experiences that we want to have in our lives.