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The first ten minutes of this week’s episode begins with sharing some correspondence from a longtime listener, followed by a couple of questions from a newbie. After that, we’ll move on to an interview with my brother, Bill. The audio quality with my brother’s interview isn’t the greatest, even though it was conducted through the zoom app. I’m sending Bill a microphone/headphone set that will hopefully improve future recordings. Meanwhile, here’s the complete transcript below so you don’t miss a word.
Here we are in 1958. Billy, Cyd, and David
Bill Puett Interview, 08/24/23
Cyd
We welcome my brother, Dr. Bill Puett, back to Gnostic Insights. Bill is going to help clarify some issues with us between information versus knowledge, and what is a meme? Welcome, Bill.
Bill
Well, thank you, Cyd. It’s fun to be back on here.
Cyd
It’s great to have you on. You’ve become a mythical character on my Gnostic podcast because I refer to you so often, but we are so rarely graced with your presence.
Bill
Well, you kindly say that and glad to be part of it and work with my sister who does remarkable, remarkable work.
Cyd
Ohh well, flattery. Flattery will get you everywhere, right? OK, so. So we’re going to be discussing the previous episode where we were talking about memes versus karma, right?
Bill
And you know, you had mentioned in there the point that a meme is a unit of information, and that leads into what we’re talking about now, because units of information are not always facts.
Cyd
Right.
Bill
In fact, in my hypnotherapy practice, I help my clients drop memes that are false memes. You know, memes cover the ego. They create a shroud as you’ve stated many times before. And when a client says they want to change some behavior, I tell them that they really want to find their true selves. And by doing so, they make the changes that they hope for.
Cyd
So by their true selves. You’re not talking about their ego then, huh? Obviously.
Bills
That’s actually a great question. The Self—we understand the S Self. Yes, that’s the real Self. And then we have the ego operating in this world—the combo there. So what we’re doing is we’re dropping off the illusions that surround the ego that get in the way of connecting with our true inner self and we’re removing memes.
Cyd
So the ego is surrounding the true Self and then the memes are clinging to that ego.
Bill
That’s right.
Cyd
OK, got it. Go ahead.
Bill
And over a period of time, you know, to one’s life, we accumulate these memes. Because I make the claim that the majority memes are illusions. And so when we try to understand ourselves or we’re trying to understand our life and so forth is that we’re looking through a glass darkly. So in therapy then I want to remove or the illusions so that we get closer to who we are.
Cyd
But that sounds kind of Buddhist, doesn’t it? They’re always talking about illusions.
Bill
Well, the their type of the illusion is the illusion of Self. But we’re talking about the illusion of memes. That is a different point.
Cyd
Ohh. So this isn’t that Buddhist notion of illusions, then.
Bill
Oh, no, it’s the false memes that are illusions.
Cyd
OK.
Bill
Now we’re removing from their shroud these false memes. For instance, if a child is told by their parent that they would grow up not to amount to anything, that meme could be attached to the other person in the future. Now in therapy, we will drop that meme shroud and then the healing follows. You can take my therapeutic approach may be a way of mining gnosis to bring about healing. I have something more to say about the gnosis point here.
Cyd
OK.
Bill
I said since these may be false units of information, that raises the question of what we know to be true and how we know. Philosophers examine that question under the heading of epistemology, the question of what knowledge is.
Cyd
Right. That’s what gnosis means: knowing.
Bill
Right, so the Gnostics believe that knowing comes from within and you have talked about mining gnosis in order to recall truth from within. Now, Plato would have appreciated the concept of gnosis. You believe that what is known isn’t in the world, that is, we are born with it in our souls.
Cyd
By the way, let me pop in here a second to mention that the Nag Hammadi scriptures include Plato. So even back when that Big Jar was buried in the desert and dug up out of Nag Hammadi that has now formed these scriptures, (and the Tripartite Tractate is just one of the books that was contained in that big earthenware jug), Plato was in there as well. So the early Gnostics recognized Plato as in agreement with gnosis.
Bill
Oh, I love that. Yes. OK. So now that there is coherence there, yeah. Plato did state that knowledge is justified true belief. But what is it for belief to be justified as true? Now going to our memes—a meme to be known must be believed by the holder, must be true, and must have sufficient evidence for its truth. Now the question of what counts as evidence, and how much evidence is sufficient, are the prime issues of epistemology. So this problem of sufficiency has never been resolved. A proposed solution by Plato is that what is known is known innately, and that idea is, of course, not accepted by most philosophers. In other words, innateness is not accepted by most philosophers, scientists, and academics in general.
Cyd
And again, what do you mean by innateness?
Bill
That is being born with it. That is, it comes with the soul.
Cyd
Ah, So what we are calling the Self, the Fullness of God that we carry around within us. That is innate.
Bill
Yes, that’s exactly right. We are born with it. It’s from above.
Cyd
OK. OK, so the innate nature of the human comes from above, and that is the gnosis.
Bill
Exactly. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Again, again, most philosophers, scientists, and academics wouldn’t accept this notion that we’re born with that. Right.
Cyd
OK.
Bill
You see, they still have no explanation of what counts as knowledge. Now Plato did say justified true belief, but the issue is what do they mean by justify? What is the best that they can expect? That is, the scientists and philosophers and others, the best they can expect are well founded beliefs.
Cyd
Well founded beliefs, OK.
Bill
But even well founded beliefs can later be found false. That has happened over and over and over again in the history science. What are examples of beliefs that were held by scientists and philosophers and otherwise?
Cyd
All right.
Bill
There are so many. But let me throw a few little cuties at you. Alright. That in the universe our world is at the center. The earth is the center of the solar system. OK, OK. Phlogiston–have you ever heard of that? That is, that’s the combustible part of the material. When something is burned, phlogiston is released. Miasmas was once considered the poisonous gas that caused disease. Disease was caused by miasmas. Or here, this is getting a little more updated—the fish stage of human development and embryos, was passing stages that look like simpler beings like fish and reptiles. Not true. How about in contemporary sense? The atomic model. The idea of a nucleus with electrons orbiting it. Ohh no, no. Electrons are not particles. They’re waves. They’re like clouds that are centered around the nucleus. How did light travel? Well, it traveled through the medium called the luminiferous aether. Lumen travels through aether. Or that the universe is static, that is, it remains the same size. Cyd, yes, and who presented that view that the universe as static? Not expanding? Einstein himself!
Cyd
Ohh really?
Bill
Or here’s a classic: spontaneous generation believes that complex life comes from inanimate matter. Right. Throw that away, but it was held at one time.
Cyd
So they were considered to be well founded beliefs, you’re saying. And even scientific. OK.
Bill
They were considered well founded beliefs. Now let me take it a bit further. This is a little bit of philosophy of science. People don’t really understand that the scientific method does not give us knowledge. Scientific method says that if a hypothesis they’re coming up with to try to explain something, you know something’s occurring out in the universe, and you need to explain it–so you create a possible answer. That’s called a hypothesis. That hypothesis tells you what else to look for. So we go looking for it and we if we find what it’s looking for, that supports the hypothesis. But it doesn’t guarantee it. It doesn’t bring us truth. Why? Let me give you a little logic point. If P gets you Q, and if you have Q, you can’t conclude you have P. It is, if it’s raining, then the streets are wet. Ohh, the streets are wet, therefore it’s raining. No, because the streets could get wet by other ways, right? Scientific method is like that. It says that if its hypothesis is true, then you can expect these things to happen. Yet, because they happen doesn’t mean that the hypothesis is correct. Because it may predict something that is not the case. Well then, if it predicts something that’s not the case, then the hypothesis is false. In other words, if P gets you Q and you don’t have Q, well, you don’t have P. So you can always falsify a hypothesis, but you cannot verify it as true. That’s the scientific method. The scientific method can only establish well founded belief. As long as the predictions are occurring as stated, then it is supported, and at best only becomes a theory.
Cyd
OK.
Bill
Theories never become facts. So theories get well founded and they get more well founded. They get even more well founded. They become really, really good. And then something happens. One of the predictions didn’t work out. So the theory is not true.
Cyd
Ohh, right, OK, I hear what you’re saying. So you can’t prove a theory to be true, but you can prove a theory to be false. Can’t prove a theory to be true, but, but you can disprove it.
Bill
You can disprove it.
Cyd
Yeah, that’s science, right?
Bill
That’s right. So science never gives us knowledge, just well founded belief. Isn’t that amazing?
Cyd
Yeah. OK. So because you’re saying that knowledge is different well founded beliefs?
Bill
OK, knowledge is a justified belief, it’s true, but it’s justified. We don’t know what or by how much, but we have evidence. But how much makes it true? And so if that’s the problem in the theory now, what happens is Plato would say, well, you see, you’re never going to get truth out in the world and experience that way. It’s not out here in the world as such. Knowledge only comes from within and Above. That’s why Plato would say it is innate.
Cyd
So that’s kind of indicating that a Mystic might be more in touch with knowledge than a scientist.
Bill
Yes, or a philosopher or a, you know, an academic. The presumption in the academic community is that we’re developing knowledge. But all the best we can do is to develop well founded beliefs according to Plato and for the reasons that I’ve just argued for. Plato believed that learning, properly conducted, was a way of recalling what is already known by a person. So those who attended Plato’s Academy were hoping to recall the forms in the ethereal world and therefore have knowledge. So in Plato’s Academy, they weren’t strictly scholastic. They were trying to recall, because that’s the only way we can know.
Cyd
Right. And that word is anamnesis—not forgetting.
Bill
Right. That’s good. The Platonists would find common ground with the Gnostics. You already indicated that. So gnosis is innate from the ethereal, cannot later be found to be false, therefore it is knowledge. It is through the mining of gnosis that truth is revealed.
Cyd
OK. So, you know that people say that the Bible is inerrant. In other words, that the Bible is knowledge from cover to cover basically right? That’s what infallible belief in the Bible is, right? That’s what fundamentalism is, that it’s inerrant and inerrant means not capable of error. But we gnostics, we have some disagreements with aspects of the Bible. So does that indicate that the Bible is information and not knowledge? What does that indicate? Or. Are we going to assume that the Bible was written by people who only wrote the truth of God? That’s what people are saying. That’s what the claim is.
Bill
But that is the claim. There are a number of problems that occur. Now, we might make the statement that there are a number of statements in the Bible that are gnostic—they resonate, they are there, are knowledge.
Cyd
They are gnosis, right? We can tell when the Bible is speaking gnosis because it resonates truth, OK. And that’s activating that innate knowledge, OK.
Bill
It also indicates that you know, and fundamentalism doesn’t like to hear this. There are a lot of illogical points in the Bible that don’t work together. They contradict each other. An inconsistency, for instance, is that God is all loving and people who don’t accept Christ as savior will go to hell forever.
Cyd
Ah, that’s a contradiction. So how could they both be true? OK.
Bill
We know from Gnosticism, and beautifully developed in your podcast, is that it’s logically developed. Doesn’t have inconsistencies in it. And so a difference between, say, a gnostic interpretation of Scripture versus that of the standard fundamentalist or the standard biblical notion is that the difference is the biblical stuff has contradictions and the gnostic interpretations do not.
Cyd
Right. And that’s why in this Christian gnosticism, it’s Logos, the major figure is Logos, which is logic. It’s got to be logical to be true.
Bill
Yes. And you develop this in the understanding of the Tripartite Tractate. It’s beautiful. You said it logically follows. But see, that’s a way of mining the gnosis.
Cyd
Right. It’s interesting how many spiritual or religious people do not even consider logic to be an essential characteristic of the Father, but we would say it is.
Bill
It is essential.
Cyd
So it’s love and it’s logic. The Father is love and logic and life. Hey, the three L’s. I like that. Love, logic and life, that’s a good one.
Bill
That’s right. This and the idea of the Gnostics, they were very individualistic in the sense that they’re mining their gnosis rather than developing out here. The church and theological development of others follow that. With Gnosticism, they want each individual to recognize their gnosis. And again, back to the Plato point. That was the purpose of the Plato’s Academy—is that each individual student was learning, would mine and understand forms.
Cyd
Ohh listen this is very important point. It’s something people often misunderstand. They think that I have my truth and you have your truth. But there is only one truth. That’s it, people go, it’s even that line out of Jesus Christ Superstar, we all have our truths. My truth is different than yours. No. Truth is. There is one truth, and Plato said that the eternal forms are one thing—a cup, a cup is a cup, is a cup. It’s not a cup to me and a dog to you. It’s a cup. So.
Bill
And so what we se are not different truths when we mine gnosis. We’re all recognizing the same truth.
Cyd
So we’re mining the same exact truth. So when I talk about the Fullness of God, it’s not one thing to me and a different thing to you. The Father is the Father, and the Father has certain immutable characteristics, and we acknowledge this to be true. So when I mine my gnosis and you mine your gnosis, we are literally mining the same exact gnosis.
Bill
That’s right.
Cyd
So it’s not this mysticism where I’m going to drop some drug and you’re going to drop some drug and we each have this wonderful experience and then we go to write it down and we come up with different things and different concepts and it’s all different. If it’s truth, it won’t resolve in differentness, it resolves in all being the same. All being One in the end. That’s pretty important. Hey, there’s a little satori.
Bill
Very good.
Cyd
OK, good. Well, thank you, my brother. I love you so much.
Bill
Thank you, Cyd. I love you and thank you for the invitation. This was fun.
Cyd
OK. All right. Onward and upward, we’ll. See you later. OK. Bye bye.
Bill
Bye bye.