[MD] Quality and The Gnostic Divine
ngriffis
ngriffis at bellsouth.net
Sun Aug 14 08:23:59 PDT 2016
Dear Members, Dan, John, and Tuukka:
Quality and The Gnostic Divine: Also, I should add: Guilty of Philology and
probably procrustean thinking.
Nick: The below quote came from "The Nag Hammadi Library" Edited by
James Robinson. It concerns the Gnostic texts found in 1945. The commentary
echoes with the idea of Quality and the ancient ideas of the Divine. One can
read of the concepts of Static Creed versus the Dynamic Quality of Creating.
The idea of duality and the idea of overcoming subject-object is also
therein. It points to the further idea that we, as humans, have a sacred
part in us that is the same as the Quality outside of us. In Pirsig's terms,
this mirrors that part of us that is able to recognize Quality, when we see
it. In teenager slang. "It takes one to know one."
One cannot be surprised at continuing to find overlays that fit
Pirsig's metaphor in the mythologies and their replacements: the world
religions and the Greek philosophies. That was his heritage and knowledge
base from which he drew. This library of resources continues to be ours as
well. The genius of Pirsig and his message comes within the art with which
he created and arranged the old knowledge into a new dynamic. That creation,
part of the Perennial Philosophy of Kerouac, Huxley and Campbell et al.,
couched in the human "Road Trip" or age-old "Adventure for the Holy Grail"
brought us again, a piece of the human mystery viewed dynamically so that we
all could benefit.
http://khazarzar.skeptik.net/books/nhl.pdf
""... Gnosticism asserts that
"direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic truths of
existence is accessible to
human beings," and that the attainment of such knowledge is the supreme
achievement of human
life. Gnosis, remember, is not a rational, propositional, logical
understanding, but a knowing
acquired by experience. The Gnostics were not much interested in dogma or
coherent, rational
theology--a fact which makes the study of Gnosticism particularly difficult
for individuals with
"bookkeeper mentalities". (Perhaps for this very same reason, consideration
of the Gnostic vision
is often a most gratifying undertaking for persons gifted with a poetic
ear.) One simply cannot
cipher up Gnosticism into syllogistic dogmatic affirmations. The Gnostics
cherished the ongoing
force of divine revelation--Gnosis was the creative experience of
revelation, a rushing progression
of understanding, and not a static creed. Carl Gustav Jung, the great Swiss
psychologist and a life-
long student of Gnosticism in its various historical permutations, affirms,
we find in Gnosticism what was lacking in the centuries that followed: a
belief in the efficacy
of individual revelation and individual knowledge. This belief was rooted in
the proud feeling
of man's affinity with the gods...
In his recent popular study, The American Religion, Harold Bloom suggests a
second characteristic
of Gnosticism that might help us conceptually circumscribe its mysterious
heart. Gnosticism, says
Bloom, "is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the self,
and [this] knowledge
leads to freedom...." Primary among all the revelatory perceptions a
Gnostic might reach was the
profound awakening that came with knowledge that something within him was
uncreated. The
Gnostics called this "uncreated self" the divine seed, the
pearl, the spark of knowing:
consciousness, intelligence, light. And this seed of intellect was the
self-same substance of God, it
was man's authentic reality; it was the glory of humankind and the divine
alike. If woman or man
truly came to gnosis of this spark, she understood that she was truly free:
Not contingent, not a
conception of sin, not a flawed crust of flesh, but the stuff of God, and
the conduit of God's
immanent realization. There was always a paradoxical cognizance of duality
in experiencing this
"self-within-a-self". How could it not be paradoxical: By all rational
perception, man clearly was
not God, and yet in essential truth, was Godly. This conundrum was a Gnostic
mystery, and its
knowing was their greatest treasure.""
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