Happiness

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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Today's PPF Reading

Past

The Moon reminds me that my shadow had great prominence in my past because I refused to know it. When I began to know it it became less of a burden and I was able to live my life anew!





Present

The wheel of fortune is full of rich symbolism that reminds one of the Kabbalah and the Zodiac but at its heart the card tells me that right now is probably a very lucky time in my life.  I may even witness astonishing miracles but I must remeber that bad times are always going to come. The wonder is the wheel keeps on turning and after bad there is always good. Life is a natural cycle of ups and downs. The key to happiness is acceptance of that truth!


Future

In the future as a test of my resilience a new challenge will emerge but if I work through it using all I have learned I may come out injured but no less the victor!
  When life gives you lemons smile right back and make some lemonade!

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

What is a REAL Christian Anyway?

What is a real christian and who gets to decide? Do you? Do I?

Understand the implications of such a thought. If you say, "That women isn't a real christian because she is divorced!" or "That man isn't a real christian because he uses tarot cards!" or "That old man isn't a real christian because he drinks!" etc what are you really doing?

You are not judging others so much as you are

condemning yourself to such judgements and the circle of negativity never ends.

Jesus said,

"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."

-Matthew 7:1-2

 I think that the evil we see in others is the evil we fail to see in ourselves.

I know we have the capacity to be Christ not simply Christians but that comes from a higher state of consciousness that reflects out an inner love and inclusion not a lower state that is full of exclusion and arrogance. I try my best but I am not anywhere near that level and almost no one else is either so lets all open our hearts and try our best to be brothers and sisters IN Christ.

With hard work hopefully one day we won't have to TRY anymore and will instead just BE!

The Mystic Way by Rumi

Plug thy low sensual ear, which stuffs like cotton
Thy conscience and makes deaf thine inward ear.
Be without ear, without sense, without thought,
And hearken to the call of God, "Return!"
Our speech and action is the outer journey,
Our inner journey is above the sky
The body travels on its dusty way;
The spirit walks like Jesus, on the sea.

From the Inside out

I was taught to pray not listen, to read not feel,to accept not see.

Eventually I realized through studying the Gnostic Gospels that each of our spirits is of the same substance as the Divine so how could I learn to hear,feel,and see?

By following the advice of my lord Jesus Christ,

"...the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.
When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and
you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living
Father..."

-Gospel of Thomas,3

What I didn't know before is that God speaks from the inside out not from the outside in.

Though it may be obvious to you it wasn't to me. My understanding was stilted.

I looked everywhere else for God ,tried all kinds of practices, but I never found him because I didn't look inside. I was afraid too you see. I knew that inside me was great darkness.

A great and horrible darkness,the shadow.

But what I know now is that darkness is the illusion that encrusts the Divine Spark inside me and hides its light from my view.

Christ did not come into this world,he did not take on limited material form to save the righteous,

"I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners."
-Matthew 9:13

There is NOTHING so dark that it can not be illuminated,there is no one beyond redemption and enlightenment. Not even me and certainly not you!

"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

I am not bad and I am not good,I am both.

When I learned to see the good in me again not just the bad I could hear,feel,and see my Lord from within!

It came when I realized that I am just a fool on a journey. When I accepted that I could forgive myself and then the Light came!

Salvation

 The only horror awaiting you at death is rebirth should you not attain mystical Union in the here and now.

 Far from being an elitist religion this idea points to the universalism of Gnosticism. Taken to its logical conclusion it means all will be saved though some with less rebirths than others. This is in keeping with the belief that our Divine Spark is actually part of the Unknown Father and He can not be whole so long as we remain in the prison of material reality.

Now the Valentinian Gnostics taught that you must be resurrected in life if you are to be resurrected after death which is to say you have to reach Christ consciousness or Theosis as our eastern orthodox brothers call it.

"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."
-2 Corinthians 5:17

Jesus repeatedly talks about the two natures becoming one in the Gospel of Thomas. He further says quote,

"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."
(saying 108)

 My understanding of all this is far from perfect ,after all I am only a fool, so I do not believe I understand it fully but this concept has perhaps two stages,

1. Making the two natures of man,the Light and the darkness,one.

2. Experiencing the true reality which is that all multiplicity is an illusion. Coming to know that the universe of forms ,that is material reality, is an illusion and that all things are one. Forming a union with the Divine from which all things emanate and  are inseparably connected.

I believe this comes from knowing yourself and listening to your Divine Spark within. There are many methods one can use to do this. My chief methods at this point are study and meditation on the Gnostic Gospels,interpreting my dreams, and visualizations on a Kabbalistic interpretation of the Tarot along with readings.

It is my belief that those who attain Christ Consciousness in this life will break the cycle and upon material death ascend to the Pleroma,the heavenly realm of Light and Oneness!

I hope to one day KNOW it.

My Vision of the Light

Its been a few days so I shall try to retell it as best as I can but some of the glory may be lost.

There I was sat listening to music,it might have been "Within you without you," and as I sat I put my face down and let my mind go.

I was transported to the sky beyond the planets to a place that seemed to be only blanketed with far off stars and otherwise darkness.

 As I flew I began to change. How I can not say ,sometimes this vision was first person sometimes third, but at that moment I was seeing it all through my own eyes and I changed into a billion strands of blue white light like lightening or plasma.

Then it opened.

The blackness opened on both sides like it was a bubble of darkness being stabbed by an invisible finger of light.

It opened and on the other side of this door was white light. Pure white light.

I flew into it now out of this universe of forms into a light space beyond time and matter.

There seemed to be no floor or walls or roof in this place just pure bright whiteness yet I put my blue-white light strands on the solid air and transformed back into the semblance of the man I use to be.

There directly in front of me was a giant pillar of that same kind of manic electric light and I somehow knew that I was standing before the God of all sitting on his throne.

At that moment even though I seemed to be able to see through the light strands of the Unknown Fathers throne from behind the right hand side a man appeared and came towards me. His skin was as white as the snow as was his hair and he seemed naked.

Then I knew.

I knew it was Jesus himself and I saw him as he is depicted by man. With a beard and olive skin wearing a robe and sandals.

He opened his arms and I ran forward and hugged him. He returned the embrace and I cried.

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.

Today's Card: Eight of Cups

Today's card is the Eight of Cups. I need to walk away from old things,I need to move on and grow. Based on the other cards in my reading I know this has to do with my fear of relationships. I need to recognize that I have deep affection,I need to walk away from my fear,and I need to go for it as a happy fool believing that life is good and worthy of trust.

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.

Awaken!

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!