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What is gnosis? I know that some people, perhaps many people who come to listen to Gnostic Insights, come here because of the word gnostic. And gnostic has come to be identified to a large extent with the ancient manuscripts that were dug up out of Nag Hammadi, and the Qumran scripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls. And indeed, a lot of what I teach here has come out of the Nag Hammadi book called the Tripartite Tractate, as well as from my own familiarity with the Bible, mostly the New Testament, but a passing familiarity with the Old Testament. And I’m very surprised when I get comments from people that Gnostic Insights is “provincial.” I really have to laugh at that because I think what they mean by provincial is old-fashioned or narrowly constrained, very biblical or scriptural. But really, it isn’t at all. The gnosis that I’m sharing with you is the gnosis that has come to me through an entire lifetime of deep contemplation and much reading of what would be called wisdom books or holy books from a variety of religions.
Provincialism, as I think of it, is very narrowly constrained, like a person who is a strong believer in one denomination of Christianity, for example. They only believe the things that they have been taught, and we know that is what I call a meme bundle, right? The meme bundle of their church or their holy book is all they are allowed to believe in. That’s what provincialism is. It’s belonging to a church or a philosophy that restrains the way that you are allowed to contemplate; restrains the things you are allowed to think because it wants to make sure that you stay on the straight and narrow. You believe X, Y and Z. You believe it just in this manner that we teach you. And that way you’re safe and you feel comforted because you know that you’re going to heaven. It doesn’t matter what the other people are going to do because they have their own lives to lead. But you’re going to take the straight and narrow path. That’s provincialism.
I am anything but provincial. I’ve always been one who has curiosity and asks why? And, why is that? But not in a challenging way. Not in a way to confront authority and bring them down, but in a way to examine truth. What is the truth of the situation? What is the Truth? Truth with a capital T. That is not a provincial way of thinking. Modern provincialism would be following one of the political parties so closely that you only know and advocate for what that current cause is. My PhD is in Rhetoric, mostly classical rhetoric, studying ancient manuscripts. Generally the Greeks and the Romans, people like Cicero or Socrates and Plato. But as part of my coursework in gaining a PhD in Rhetoric, I also study ideologies—modern ideologies as well as the methods of persuasion that you would employ in advertising or propaganda. So when I read a press release that is put out or a scientific paper or a book, I read it not only for what the message is that the writer is trying to put across, but I look at the method that they are using to sell that idea. The definition of rhetoric is persuasion. The method of persuading another person to agree with you. That’s the baseline concept of rhetoric.
As our political situation and worldwide current wave of distress came upon us, I thought it was just big talk. And when I noticed that my university students would refer to historical events as dead white men, I thought that was kind of a funny way to dismiss all of what went before. But it’s not so funny now that the people who were once my university students have grown up and taken the reins of power. And they want to pull down all of the statues; pull down all of the foundational beliefs of, for example, our nation or any nation. And they want to start over from scratch. I can see the rhetoric. I can see the methods of persuasion. And one of the methods of persuasion is to change the language—to change the basic definitions so that people can no longer be assured of what they are saying or what they read or what they hear. They do not know what is true because we are being told it’s not true. You know—the founding fathers are just the dead white men, and we need to pull down their memories and their statues and start from scratch. So let’s burn the Constitution. Let’s burn the Declaration of Independence. Let’s burn the Bible.
I can understand the passion of that kind of religious fervor amongst people today. But their religious fervor—and by religion, I mean the current political persuasions that people adhere to so strongly that it has become religion to them—the current political religions are no more true than any of the other previous religions, so you can’t necessarily believe what is being taught, what is coming over the airwaves, what is coming through the Internet, what is being published, what the approved narratives are. You can’t believe them any more than the things that they are attempting to pull down. All of the constructions of humanity, all of the reasoning that goes on down here that leads to fervor—fervor—that’s another word for intense emotion, right? Well, emotionality, passion, fervor, doesn’t necessarily correspond to truth in any way. In fact, it’s probably the case that the more passionately you believe something, the more likely you are to be led astray.
When your passion leads you to rape, pillage, and burn, when your passion leads you to use violence, actual violence, not words are violence but actual violence. Beating people up, killing people, burning buildings down, pillaging other people’s property, stealing other people’s possessions—that’s a bit of a hint that you’re not on the right path. Truth doesn’t come at the edge of a sword. Truth doesn’t arise out of the ashes of pulling down and burning down other people’s things. Passion arises from the human. Passion arises from your emotions. And passion is not a gauge of truth. Just because you believe in something so strongly that you’re willing to kill for it or die for it, well, that doesn’t necessarily make it True.
So I guess this portion of what I’m saying is to urge people to reconsider their strong passions, particularly the passions that have been stirred up in the last 3-4 years, eight years, 10 years, 20 years. The ideologies that want you to become inflamed, that want you to become angry, that want you to scream and cry out in rage. Because rage is not love.
What do we know to be True? We should start with what we know to be true, not with what is popular or au courant. You cannot take your marching orders from an app. You cannot take your marching orders from the Internet. You can’t take your marching orders from the news media. So then how do you discern what is true? How do you know where to put your beliefs? What meme bundles to embrace, and which meme bundles to reject?
One reason I go to ancient documents is because at least, at the very least, they aren’t coming out of popular media. One reason that people who are trying to conserve modernity as we know it turn to the Constitution is because it’s an old document. They turn to the Declaration of Independence because it’s an old document. And even older than that, they turn to ancient wisdom texts such as the Bible, such as the books of the Nag Hammadi, such as the Bhagavad Gita or the Tao te Ching. At the very least, those books take you out of the popular course of thinking so that you can wind down and begin to have a relationship with the old wisdom texts to see what they were thinking then. What did they think was good? What did they think was the way that people should live?
The dissertation I wrote for my PhD was about the trial of a midwife in California who was a traditional practitioner. She used ancient midwifery ways that have been with us since the dawn of humanity, because babies are always carried in the same way and babies all need to come out of the same place. So the practices of midwifery have changed very little over thousands of years. This midwife, whose trial I studied, she was a traditional practitioner. And she was being tried by the legal system for, ironically enough, she was tried and convicted of practicing medicine without a license. But of course the funny thing about it, the reason it’s ironic, is that midwifery is not medicine—it’s midwifery. It’s an entirely different set of ideologies, worldviews, skills. The locus of power isn’t with the midwife, it’s with the mother. Whereas the locus of power in a medical situation is with the physician. Or the hospital or the insurance company. And the locus of power, of course, in the courts is aligned with the powerful positions of the physicians. There’s no locus of power that is aligned with the midwives. Many of the witches that were burned during the Salem witch trials or even before Salem in the 1500s in Europe, these “witches” were midwives. They were herbalists. They were women who lived alone and had no power to protect them.
So what I learned from the midwife position while I was working on my dissertation was to trust intuition. The intuitive connection with the transcendent. Traditional midwives, non medical midwives, don’t look things up and make sure that you’re on schedule and you’re on time or that this or that or the other thing that is on page 578, paragraph 9 is being followed. That isn’t the way midwives work. Protocols of that sort isn’t midwifery. Midwifery is being in touch, is being present, and knowing what’s going on by laying on hands on the women’s belly. By listening to the baby inside with her ears. She is the instrument, not the medical measurement equipment used in the modern hospitals.
So of course the midwife was convicted on all counts because she couldn’t justify anything she did because there was no expert. There was no authority to back her up. All of the authority and power lay with the physicians and the courts. Now, a similar thing happens in the study of religion and spirituality. We look to the priests or the cardinals and bishops and the authorities. With gnosis we do not look to the outside. We certainly don’t look laterally at other people, so don’t turn to teachers. Don’t take my word for anything; I’m a teacher. Don’t take your minister’s word for the truth. Don’t take your senator’s word for the truth. Don’t take your president’s word for the truth. Don’t take your anonymous word for the truth on the Internet. You have to turn your eyes upward and inward. Truth comes from Above. Truth with a capital T comes from Above with a capital A. Everybody can do that. You can do that.
All you need to do is sit quietly, turn off the rabble rousing, center yourself within yourself. Take the earphones out, turn off the electronics, sit up straight in a quiet place. Or take a walk in a meadow or by the river or in a park. Go into nature and look up figuratively or actually, but don’t burn your eyes by looking at the sun—that’s not a smart thing to do. And ask the universe. ask the Father who am I? What shall I do? How do I reach you? What is true? What can I believe in? And you will get the answer. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will open. Ask and it shall be given.
The way that the simple explanation of absolutely everything, as I call my theory of everything, the way it came to me was after I retired from teaching, we moved out into the woods and I spent most of my time down at the riverside with my dogs. And as I stood there with my feet in the mud, watching my dogs play in the water, I contemplated. All I did was contemplate What can I know myself to be true? How do we figure this out? And the very simple answer first came to me. It’s just a two point answer: Mud up Spirit down. That was the beginning of all of this. So, as my feet were standing literally in the mud of the river, I understood that my body, that I, was standing between the mud and eternality above. And that I am made up of an eternal spirit and I am made up of the mud of the riverbank. And then, once you start with that kind of simple understanding, how does that combine? How is it that the spirit melds to the mud? How can I be eternal spirit walking around in mud?
And then everything else flowed from that. But not immediately. I sat with that idea for a while, and then when I had my bed and breakfast, I did a lot of contemplating while I was making breakfast, especially when I was working with fruit and making these gorgeous fruit salads. And I saw all the commonalities amongst the fruit. That all of the fruit, no matter what kind it is, whether it’s an apple, an orange, a pineapple, a watermelon, a tomato—whatever the fruit is, it always has a torus shape. It’s always in the shape of a torus. If you cut a piece of fruit in half, you will see the looping around structure of the doughnut of coming around the outside of the skin and going down through the middle of the core and looping around the outside and going through the middle of the core.
This is the toroidal pattern of creation, fractally replicating as an apple. The straight stem follows the pattern of the toroidal pole. The skin takes the shape of the outside of the torus, wrapping over the lip and falling into the gravity well of the stem. The seed explosion at the middle resembles the ananda/joy point of individual manifestation, carrying forward the next iteration of fractal expressions of the torus.
The Simple Explanation’s basic toroidal forces: yellow arrows = love, coherence, gravity pressing inward; white arrows cycle around the outside, up, over, and straight down through the center = constantly recycling protoenergy, karma; arrows out from the middle = ananda, joy, expansion, energetic and material manifestation into our apparent universe.
And after dealing with the fruit for a couple of years, just noticing it, not trying to come to any conclusion, I went over on my break to the owner’s quarters at the bed and breakfast, and I stood before my typewriter. And I wanted to write a novelization, a popular book based upon my experience with the midwife and the midwife’s trial. And as I stood there with a blank and open mind and my fingers on the keys of the computer, instead of writing the midwife’s book, out came A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything from beginning to end. The whole book, page after page after page. Fully illustrated. I do not ascribe that to channeling. I don’t think that some departed ghost led me along, or demon or an angel. I do think that decades of cogitating on these simple thoughts finally coalesced in the background of my mind and came out on the page.
So, begin with the simple. Begin by simply being quiet and asking what is True? I do recommend that you read my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. I’ll put the link to the books in this episode transcript. And it was many years later that I came upon the Nag Hammadi and the Tripartite Tractate. I put them down for several years because it’s heresy. This is flat out not Christian Orthodoxy, and that disturbed me. Then, after putting it down, leaving it alone, not working on it, not thinking about it, when I came back to it, boom, boom, boom, the next book came out. So it’s my subconscious doing the work. And that next book was called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated.
And then several years after that—see, this all takes time, and this is why it helps to be an old codger like myself now. Wisdom comes with age. If you pursue wisdom, it will come. If you don’t pursue wisdom, if you stay enmeshed in the world, if you are a materialist, if you only believe what you read from experts or the talking heads on tv, you’re not going to mine wisdom. You’re mired down in the mud. So turn inward, turn upward.
Then my latest book, of course, is A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, which is my subconscious melding together The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated with A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.
We are here to bring love into this world. We’re to love each other. We’re even to show love to those we don’t get along with and to those that threaten us and disappoint us and break our hearts. We’re only to forgive so that we can love, and that can also take years.
Thank you for spending this time with me. Onward and upward and God bless us all.
