Nice essay, thank you for writing and sharing it. It covers a lot of the themes that interest me. The matter/spirit dualism and the Demiurge are concepts that I feel comfortable with (and, to an extent, believe in) based upon intellectual observation of material reality, but I have some hesitation around the concept of "gnosis" -- you wrote in part 1 that "Essence of an Eternal God exists within Man; heaven is a state of rest and joy which man experiences in his mortal lifetime; one achieves this state through experience of the inner divine; this experience is called Gnosis" and "Gnosis is not a rational, propositional, logical understanding, but a knowing acquired by experience." And then in part 3, "I am telling you right now that I am not capable of telling you what it is that you need to know."
Yet how is such experience acquired if there is no specific path or parameters?
Are you defining "gnosis" as simple mindfulness which is practiced via meditation, perhaps via Vipassana (if you get a chance to attend a 10 day silent meditation retreat guided by a recorded S.N. Goenka they are quite interesting)? Or are we to define gnosis as "listening to the voice inside us, as opposed to doing what society tells us to do?" Is it a replacement word or synonym for a man's "purpose" (i.e. a combination of what he is fundamentally good at and interested in, no matter how popular or obscure the topic, perhaps so long as it is not a surrogate activity)? And if we engage with our purpose to the maximum extent we can, it provides soul satisfaction -- regardless of whether or not one "succeeds" -- or to ignore our purpose and feel a continual, nagging sense of dissatisfaction?
As Tolkien said in The Return of the King, p. 190, "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."
Anyway, the inexactness of the term and its vagueness are stumbling blocks to embracing the term, I think, along with (as you point out) its historical baggage.
Nice essay, thank you for writing and sharing it. It covers a lot of the themes that interest me. The matter/spirit dualism and the Demiurge are concepts that I feel comfortable with (and, to an extent, believe in) based upon intellectual observation of material reality, but I have some hesitation around the concept of "gnosis" -- you wrote in part 1 that "Essence of an Eternal God exists within Man; heaven is a state of rest and joy which man experiences in his mortal lifetime; one achieves this state through experience of the inner divine; this experience is called Gnosis" and "Gnosis is not a rational, propositional, logical understanding, but a knowing acquired by experience." And then in part 3, "I am telling you right now that I am not capable of telling you what it is that you need to know."
Yet how is such experience acquired if there is no specific path or parameters?
Are you defining "gnosis" as simple mindfulness which is practiced via meditation, perhaps via Vipassana (if you get a chance to attend a 10 day silent meditation retreat guided by a recorded S.N. Goenka they are quite interesting)? Or are we to define gnosis as "listening to the voice inside us, as opposed to doing what society tells us to do?" Is it a replacement word or synonym for a man's "purpose" (i.e. a combination of what he is fundamentally good at and interested in, no matter how popular or obscure the topic, perhaps so long as it is not a surrogate activity)? And if we engage with our purpose to the maximum extent we can, it provides soul satisfaction -- regardless of whether or not one "succeeds" -- or to ignore our purpose and feel a continual, nagging sense of dissatisfaction?
As Tolkien said in The Return of the King, p. 190, "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."
Anyway, the inexactness of the term and its vagueness are stumbling blocks to embracing the term, I think, along with (as you point out) its historical baggage.