Gnosticism

Last year I was sitting on the bus on the way home from town. I was at a very very low point. I was numbed. And this old woman came over and stood in front of me.

Through my numbed state, I thought nothing of it. It was just some old woman looking at an advertisement above my head. Before I knew it she had gone.

But something magical happened after that. I was standing outside in the back garden, smoking, looking up at stars. And I had this feeling of happiness. I felt ok, not deliriously happy, but just ok. To go from almost suicidal to 'ok' in such a short space of time, was pretty impressive. Then I felt the hairs on my back stand up. I felt a shiver throughout myself when I suddenly recalled the old woman on the bus. That night was the first night I slept, since the incident I was grieving about had occurred.

She cleansed my aura. I tried to rationalise it, make 'sense' of it. But there was no sense to be made. She cleansed my aura.

This is just one of many examples of the spiritual experiences I have had, and continue to have. Unfortunately I don't have time to write them all here, there just isn't room.

This leads me on to Gnosticism. Gnostic means 'Knowledge'. The DaVici Code began a resurgence in this mixture of Jewish, Christian and Pagan mysticism that was huge before Christianity intervened (Madonna's Kaballah is a branch of the Jewish section of this). The people who created the bible, in the form we know it today (Constantine and Co.) conventiently left out all the Gnostic scriptures,which shed a completely different light on Jesus and his teachings. One that Constantine and Co. decided to suppress

Gnosticism then died out as Christianity triumphed.

That was until 1945, when the Gnostic Gospels were found in a cave in Egypt. Since then the movement has come back.

Basically, Gnosticism believes that religion is not a dogma, of rules and punishments if you break those rules, but it is about coming to a knowledge of one's own spirituality through meditation, dreams, auras, sixth senses, and all that 'new-age malarky'

Gnosticism also brings the feminine to the centre of it's philosophy, after years of the purging of the feminine out of the Bible. Sophia (Greek for Wisdom) is embodied by a female, and it is only through knowing and understanding this wisdom that a person can achieve fulfillment.

Gnostics believe in Jesus, but that what we know of Jesus was heavily edited when the 'official' books of the Bible were chosen. The Gospel of Thomas, Mary and Judas (yes, Judas) were hidden away in a cave. But now they have been rediscovered and published, and anyone can read them (not just the powerful churchmen as before)

The world is an illusion, but in each of us is this 'spiritual spark' Lots of people suppress it, mostly as a result of disenfranchisement with the main religions and their blatant hypocrisy. But to get to a higher level of fulfillment we must embrace that spark, and come to a greater knowledge of our own spiritual identity.

Gnosticism does not believe in the rules and regulations of mainstream Christianity. For Gnostics, these rules and regulations are used to keep our spirituality at it's basest level, and to dull us from this 'spark' that gives us meaning.

Researching it, I am amazed at how many people have been 'Gnostics' Here are just a few:

William Blake
William Burroughs
WB Yeats
Herman Melville
Allan Ginsberg
Albert Camus
Jorge Luis Borges
Carl Jung
(Madonna) [!]

It's amazing stuff. Google it, and see what you find out.

I'm reading the Bible at the moment and I will be interested to see how these hidden biblical books change the meaning, and what these people where trying to suppress by expurging them from the official version of the good book...