Your Life is a Dream in Which God is Learning to Dance

Inner Gnosis Episode 4 - The Afterlife

In this episode of "Inner Gnosis" I talk about what I have come to believe regarding the Afterlife.

If you like the show don't forget to fall it at:
www.innergnosis.com

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"For me, to live in Christ and to die is gain!"

-Philippians 1:21

 (There is an unexpected volume issue with this episode that I will do my utmost to prevent in the future. If you turn up your volume its more than loud enough but I apologize for the inconvenience.)

Inner Gnosis Episode 3 - Methods for Raising Consciousness

In this episode of "Inner Gnosis" I talk about methods for gaining self-knowledge, waking from deep sleep, and realizing our higher self.

"I know there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life."
-Ecclesiastes 3:12

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Time?

"Jesus said, "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will be troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All."
-Gospel of Thomas,2

I'm fond of saying that there is no past or future just this moment but in fact as I said that that "moment" ceased to be. The truth is time does not exist at all.

Because we can not comprehend this imagining that it is forever present works better for illustration.

Imagine your entire life being played out all at once. Every action,every word,every thought,every reaction,birth and death.

Imagine that you are simultaneously at every location you have ever been to and will be at right now.

That is actual reality.

Now realize that its all maya,its all illusion. We are perfect thoughts in the mind of God and we are one in eternity not past or present or future.

Inner Gnosis Episode 2 - Jesus Christ and Perfect Thought

In this episode of "Inner Gnosis" I talk about Jesus Christ, the Way, and Infinity.

"Jesus said, "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will be troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All."
-Gospel of Thomas,2

If you like the show don't forget to subscribe and follow it at: www.innergnosis.com

Inner Gnosis Episode 1 - Universal Mind

I'm not as happy with my performance in this episode as the last but its an interesting and important topic!
If you like these shows please follow me on www.innergnosis.com...

Inner Gnosis Episode 0

Been secretly working on putting a podcast together for awhile now and the first episode is up!

Its a little loud (turn your volume down if you have headphones on) and could have used another rewrite but perfection is the enemy of progress for it is impossible.

Give my new show a listen,follow, and subscribe. I can only get better with practice. Its been a long time since I've done radio and I'm rusty.

We Are All Asleep

 Though what follows is far from a perfect summary it transmits the most important concept I learned from Gurdjieff by recently reading "In Search of the Miraculous," pretty well. It is of course best to read the book for yourself but be warned its a challenging read.

 People don't do evil things for the sake of evil. At best when they do evil things they do them for what they perceive to be a good reason which is lunacy and worse more often they do evil things without thinking at all.

  This is a law and it extends well beyond what is perceived as evil actions. Most of the time we do everything without thinking. That is we do things without intention and without
a definitive aim.

  Our moving center which for the sake of explanation we shall call our learned instincts (They are not strictly speaking instincts because they were not born in us but they are learned and we perform them unconsciously like instincts) controls our movements,our actions,even our speech and all the time we are lost in our mind thinking about this and that or more often dreaming about something pleasant or agonizing over an imagined nightmare. We do not DO anything really things just HAPPEN and we REACT unconsciously.

  This is a SLEEP and its epidemic,it effects all of us. It makes us machines.

  To be AWAKE,to be truly HUMAN we must learn to know ourselves always. To remember what we are doing,what we are saying, what we are thinking,what is actually going on inside and all around us in this moment. If we can learn to do that we can truly change ourselves and conquer the world!

  "He who knows others is wise; He who knows himself is enlightened!"
-Lao Tzu

Admit it and Change Everything

"Define and narrow me, you starve yourself of yourself.
Nail me down in a box of cold words, that box is your
 coffin.
I do not know who I am.
I am astounded lucid confusion.
I am not a Christian, I am not a Jew, I am not a Zoroastrian,
And I am not even a Muslim.
I do not belong to the land, or to any known or unknown
 sea.
Nature cannot own or claim me, nor can heaven,
Nor can India, China, Bulgaria,
My birthplace is placelessness,
My sign to have and give no sign,
You say you see my mouth, ears, eyes, nose-they are not
 mine.
I am the life of life.
I am that cat, this stone, no one.
I have thrown duality away like an old dishrag,
I see and know all times and worlds,
As one, one, always one.
So what do I have to do to get you to admit who is
 speaking?
Admit it and change everything!
This is your own voice echoing off the walls of God."

-Rumi

Wholeness

When I started out on my journey I believed that there were two natures,the darkness and the light and indeed in a symbolic way there are but I have come to know that it is only an illusion. Multiplicity is the demiurges illusion.
 The great evil I see in others is my ego projecting my own faults on to them.
To experience the true reality I must learn to transmutate my two natures into one,I must become whole.
 All things emanate from the Source,the One,the Monad,the Unknown Father of all and as Jesus said,

"When you make the two one, and when you
make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside,
and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the
female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the
female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye,
and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and
a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter [the
Kingdom]."
-Gospel of Thomas,22

As the great Valentinian writer elaborated:

"Light and darkness, life and death, right and left are mutually dependent; it is impossible for them to separate. Accordingly the 'good' are not good, the 'bad' are not bad, 'life' is not life, 'death' is not death."

-Gospel of Philip

Remember,

"Jesus said, "When you make the two one, you will become the
sons of man, and when you say, 'Mountain, move away,' it will
move away."

-Gospel of Thomas,106

 "Jesus said, "He who will drink from my mouth will become
like Me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden
will become revealed to him."

-Gospel of Thomas,108

Something to be Truly Thankful for

"Jesus said, "He who will drink from my mouth will become
like Me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden
will become revealed to him."

"His disciples said to Him, "When will the Kingdom come?"
<Jesus said,> "It will not come by waiting for it. It will
not be a matter of saying 'Here it is' or 'There it is.' Rather,
the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and me

do not see it."

-Gospel of Thomas 108,113

I believe my lord Jesus Christ is talking about a higher state of consciousness. That is he is talking about union with our higher self which is fully Divine.

You see each of our spirits is a pure spark of Divine consciousness and of the same essence as the God of All.

God wants us to unite with him as much as we want to unite with him.

As the great sufi mystic Rumi said,

"What you seek is seeking you!"

The Divine oneness will never be whole until every last human is liberated from the cycle of death and rebirth and unites with God!

To tie this into thanksgiving a bit understand that your highest self is divine and of immeasurable value. You matter,you are important, no matter how blessed or cursed your life in the material universe seems to be every part of you is of the gods.

Rejoice and give thanks!

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Mystic Way

We are Strangers

Each of our spirits is a pure spark of Divine consciousness and of the same essence as the God of All.

We are not merely animals or minds.

We are strangers in a strange land.

God can not be whole while we remain trapped in the illusion of material reality so He calls to us. He calls always in our dreams and imaginings. He calls and we only need learn how to listen to hear His Holy Voice.

Do not be discouraged by past or even present misdeeds. According to the secret revelation of St.John the God of All,the Monad,the One,the Unknown Father,the Pleroma,the Light freely gives mercy and love. He is not these things but he freely gives them.

As we are engulfed in the darkness of ignorance the Light does not judge. He is forever calling us home like the father who when he saw his son coming from afar prepared a great feast and welcomed his return with open arms even though the son had stolen from him.

Our God is not a god of second chances. Hes a God of infinite chances until we get it right!

Carl Jung's Prophecy of the New Age

The term "New Age" has come to mean many things that it is not. While both the newager and Carl Jung are talking about the Age of Aquarius when they are referring to a new age (or aeon as he preferred) Jung's prophecy goes well beyond the vague pronouncements of the new age devotee.
 This mandala which appears before the "Seven Sermons to the Dead" in Jung's Red Book represents that prophecy. For a clear understanding of it I encourage you to download and listen to a free lecture by the prominent Gnostic and Jungian Scholar Stephan Hoeller entitled,
"C.G. Jung's Prophecy of the New Aeon".

Ignorance

We have to stop denying that we are fools
otherwise we will remain spiritually dead.

I hated Gnosticism once.

Why did I hate it?

I can't say really outside of a general sense from my conservative christian upbringing that such things were evil.

 How could there be other books of the bible? How could I believe such heresy?

I didn't even ask myself these questions. I just ignored or made fun of it.

I made fun of what I did not understand and never tried to learn.

That is called ignorance my friends. Willful ignorance.

In fairness to myself let me add that I was so propagandized to believe that anything different, anything with even the veneer of "paganism" must be evil and the work of satan.

In other words I was afraid.

I was a blind fool because I was afraid to know.

Not unlike Adam in the garden of Eden I wanted to remain in a perfect prison of ignorance forever but my better nature convinced me to eat the fruit and my eyes were opened.

After an existential crisis no doubt caused by Holy Wisdom herself I began to detest jehovah but I still loved Jesus so I searched through christian history and found Marcions work. Then finally I came to Gnosticism only this time I actually read and meditated on what the ancient "heretical" church fathers had to say.

My life has never been the same since.

We all let the ego get the better of us much to often. We fight,we argue, we think ourselves wise but the truth is such things are the way of the fool,the blind fool.

Only when we realize we are fools,when we come to understand that we don't understand,when we open our mind to things we once thought wrong will the light be able to get in.

However it is comforting to know that we all start out as blind fools when we first make our way on the fools journey towards the Crown.

You and I are not alone.

Fear of Enlightenment

My only disagreement is one of language. We are part of the One,not the whole. Though for a number of reasons I am more attracted to the western mysteries there is much Gnosis in the east.

The Unity of Opposites

"The One is the all."

I use to think I had a fractured personality but I know now that the illness is in thinking that the shadow and the light are separate.

There can be no light without darkness.

They must merge,there must be an alchemical transmutation.

We are flux and we are constant. We do good and bad and we are both. We regress and progress and are always doing both.

We are a unity of opposites or else we are completely broken.

"Light and darkness, life and death, right and left are mutually dependent; it is impossible for them to separate. Accordingly the 'good' are not good, the 'bad' are not bad, 'life' is not life, 'death' is not death."

-Gospel of Philip

"What am I telling you?
All at once the living die.
How do they live in illusion?
The rich become poor,
kings are overthrown,
everything changes.
The world is illusion."

-The Treatise on Resurrection

The illusion (or in my case delusion) of multiplicity shall completely vanish once I come to KNOW the true reality.

The very moment the black head of the snake eats his white tail individuation and eternity has come.

We are all part of the One,All things emanate from the One but I only believe that now. I will KNOW it one day through experience with the help of Christos and Sophia.

Kabbalistic Meditations on the Tarot: The Moon

My meditation for this week from "The Fool's Pilgrimage: Kabbalistic Meditations on the Tarot" is on the Moon card and the 29th path on the Tree of Life from Malkuth to Netzach,

"May I hear the call from on high! Through the tumult and confusion of  the lower worlds, the voice of my Father calls to me from afar. May I never cease to heed this call and rally to the banner of my inward Lord, as the battle of life rages. The Lord of my soul reigns above the waterfloods: He will remove all delusion and confusion from me. I shall stop, listen, and be silent, in order to hear the voice. Louder than the thunder of the falling waters is the still, small voice that resounds from the distant place. I hear thee, O voice above all voices! I heed thee, O call before all calls!"

 Now while I'm sharing these meditations with you the book has a lot more including a great beginners guide to the history,meaning,and use of both the Tarot and the Kabbalah plus card descriptions, illustrations,key phrases,and mottos with every meditation. Also included is a CD of the meditations set to music which I ripped and put on my mp3 player for further reflection.

 Its really an excellent book that when meditated on I know leads to Gnosis. I can't recommend it enough!

We All Need Some Light

"...We all need some light now
We all need some light now
Yes, we all need some light now
Turn on your light and wash the darkness away!"

I am the Walrus

 Zen Koans and contradictory Gnostic statements like those found in "The Thunder,Perfect Mind" try to knock us out of our linear naturalistic thinking and if they do we at least temporarily reach a higher state of consciousness.

Absurdities found in Discordianism might also serve a similar function.

Paradoxical statements (and possibly absurdism) offer a way to get a glimpse of God for He* is incomprehensible.

On the Fool's journey the blind  fool slowly becomes the Holy Fool. The Holy fool ,a mystic who has reached a high level of union with God which I personally equate with a higher level of consciousness, often speaks in paradoxes that the uninitiated consider foolish.

 We Gnostics give God titles and describe his lower emanations but we can not comprehend the Unknown Father. At best we can call him the light and describe his many gifts to us like love,mercy,happiness, and knowledge but none of these things are the Unknown Father.

We recognize that if we describe him and give him a name we limit him and our God is beyond limits.

 Our feeble material minds don't have the power to comprehend these things rationally but the wonder of our religion is that we can reach higher states of consciousness and experience him by listening to our Divine Spark within!

Try reading and mediating on some of these works yourself:

"The Thunder,Perfect Mind"

99 Zen Koans

Discordian Quotes

Now maybe I'm wrong about all this but if I am then I'm right!



*Remember that even the male descriptions that we give our God such as "he","father",and "him" are merely titles. God is beyond sex. The ancient Gnostics described "him" as androgynous for this reason.