This article orginated from:     http://egina2.blogspot.com/

written by Fr. Jordan Stratford+

The Gnostic World View

1. Who we really are is eternal and immortal; we’re not defined by our bodies or our gender or our horoscopes or our nationalities. Our responsibility is to be integral to this infinite core of being, in ourselves and others. The material universe is temporary and limited, but our real selves are ultimately unconstrained by it.

2. The system is not the world; the daily waking reality of economics and politics and bureaucracy, of cruelty and injustice, was not created by the Divine, but by the forces of ignorance and greed. We don’t reject rocks and trees and flowers and sex, we reject an unjust system imposed upon these things. This system forces us to feel separated from God, when the reality is that this separation is just an illusion. The system doesn’t like to be understood in this way; it thinks it should be in charge, and our divinity and our humanity should take a back seat to “the way of the world”. In this way the system is adversarial to the Gnostic. We see others “worshipping” this system, as though it were the true God.

3. Faith will not save us from the system; we have to first have gnosis – enlightenment – and then understand how our own Divine Spark relates to the world around us. Gnosticism is an experiential, not creedal, religion – you can’t simply announce that you agree with a list of ideas and be saved from the illusion of our separation from God. Real salvation requires a critical, inquisitive mind and a compassionate and accommodating heart. We need wit and sorrow and joy and silence and deep questions.

4. Wisdom is in the world and wants to be known; the gifts of our intuition and imagination are not secondary in our efforts to remember our connection to the Infinite Divine. So the practices and approaches of what has generally been referred to as “mysticism” are at the heart of the Gnostic’s journey. Dreams and fairy tales, myth and metaphor, secret and cypher, symbol and poetry comprise the language with which the Gnostic interprets the constant signal from the inbreaking Divine.

    • - Carl Gustav Jung

    • “Man’s consciousness was created to the end that it may (1) recognize its descent from a higher unity; (2) pay due and careful regard to this source; (3) execute its commands intelligently and resposibly and; (4) thereby afford the psyche as a whole the optimum degree of life and development.”