Blessed Night, Loves 😊

I Pray All Is Well With Everyone…And Your Hearts And Minds Are Full Of Love, Joy, And Compassion…For Yourselves And Everyone Else…All Over The World. And Since Every Day Comes With Its Own Blessings And Challenges…Never An Uneventful Moment In Any Of Our Lives – When Observing Through The Eyes Of Our “Mighty I AM Presence”; Let Us Remain Strengthened In Our Hearts And Minds…And Always Radiating Those Higher Qualities Of The Love Of The Living God – Whatever The Day Brings! For In Constantly Acknowledging The Power Of The Living God That Dwells Within Us…The Divine Power To Heal Us, Help Us, And Raise Us – Being Always In The Forefront Of Our Thinking And Existing – Is Forever Active! Amen…

Give Thanks And Praises For Love And Life…

And Y’all Be Love…

“…And just as this idea of the true God transcended the popular notions of deity, so did the true teaching of the Gnosis illumine the enigmatical sayings or parables. The ethical teachings, or “Words of the Lord,” and the parables, required interpretation; the literal meaning was sufficient for the people, but for the truly spiritual minded there was an infinite vista of inner meaning which could be revealed to the eye of the true Gnostic.

Thus the plain ethical teaching and the unintelligible dark sayings were for the uninstructed; but there was a further instruction, an esoteric or inner doctrine, which was imparted to the worthy alone. Many gospels and apocalypses were thus compiled under the inspiration of the “Spirit,” as it was claimed – all purporting to be the instruction vouchsafed by Jesus to His disciples after the “resurrection from the dead,” which mystical phrase they mostly represented as meaning the new birth or Gnostic illumination, the coming to life of the soul from its previous dead state. But even these Gnostic treatises did not reveal the whole matter; true, they explained many things in terms of internal states and spiritual processes; but they still left much unexplained, and the final revelation was only communicated by word of mouth in the body, and by vision out of the body.

Thus it was a custom with them to divide mankind into three classes: (a) the lowest, or “hylics,” were those who were so entirely dead to spiritual things that they were as the hylē, or unperceptive matter of the world; (b) the intermediate class were called “psychics,” for though believers in things spiritual, they were believers simply, and required miracles and signs to strengthen their faith; (c) whereas the “pneumatics,” or spiritual, the highest class, were those capable of knowledge of spiritual matters, those who could receive the Gnosis.

It is somewhat the custom in our days in extreme circles to claim that all men are “equal.” The modern theologian wisely qualifies this claim by the adverb “morally.” Thus stated, the idea is by no means a peculiarly Christian view – for the doctrine is common to all the great religions, seeing that it simply asserts the great principle of justice as one of the manifestations of Deity. The Gnostic view, however, is far clearer, and more in accord with the facts of evolution; it admits the “morally equal”, but it further asserts difference of degree, not only in body and soul, but also in spirit, in order to make the morality proportional, and so to carry out the inner meaning of the parable of the talents. This classification obtained not only among men, but also among powers; and the prophets of the Old Testament as instruments of such powers were, as stated above, thus sorted out into an order of dignity.

The personality of Jesus, the prophet of the new tidings proved, however, a very difficult problem for the Gnostic doctors, and we can find examples of every shade of opinion among them – from the original Ebionite view that he was simply a good and holy man, to the very antipodes of belief; that he was not only a descent of the Logos of God – a familiar idea to Oriental antiquity – but in deed and in his person, very God of every god, a necessity forced upon faith by the boastful spirit of an enthusiasm which sought to transcend the claims of every existing religion. The person of Jesus was thus made to bear the burden of every possibility of the occult world and every hidden power of human nature.

In their endeavors to reconcile the ideas of a suffering man and of a triumphant initiator and king of the universe (both sensible and intellectual), they had recourse to the expedient of Docetism, a theory which could cover every phase of contradiction in the sharp juxtaposition of the divine and human natures of their ideal. The docetic theory is the theory of “appearance.” A sharp distinction was made between Christ, the divine æon or perfected “man,” and Jesus the personality. The God, or rather God, in Christ, did not suffer, but appeared to suffer; the lower man, Jesus, alone suffered. Or again, Christ was not really incarnated in a man Jesus, but took to himself a phantasmal body called Jesus. But these were subsequent doctrinal developments on the ground of certain inner facts: (a) that a phantasmal body can be used by the “perfect”, be made to appear and disappear at will, and become dense or materialized, so as to be felt physically; and (b) that the physical body of another, usually a pupil, can be used by a master of wisdom as a medium for instruction. Such underlying ideas occur in Gnostic treatises and form an important part of their Christology, especially with regard to the period of instruction after the “resurrection.”

In fact no problem appeared too lofty for the intuition of the Gnostic philosopher; the whence, whither, why, and how of things, were searched into with amazing daring. Not only was their cosmogony of the most sublime and complex character, but the limits of the sensible world were too narrow to contain it, so that they sought for its origins in the intellectual and spiritual regions of the immanent mind of deity, wherein they postulated a transcendent æonology which portrayed the energizings of the divine ideation. Equally complex was their anthropogony, and equally sublime the potentialities which they postulated of the human soul and spirit.

As to their soteriology, or theory of the salvation or regeneration of mankind, they did not confine the idea to the crude and limited notion of a physical passion by a single individual, but expanded it into a stupendous cosmical process, wrought by the volition of the Logos in His own nature. Their eschatology, or doctrine of the “last things”, again painted for mankind at the end of the world-cycle, a future which gave “nirvaṇa” to the “spiritual” and æonian bliss to the “psychic,” while the “hylic” remained in the obscuration of matter until the end of the “Great Peace”, a picture somewhat different from the crude expectation of the good feasting time on earth of the “Poor Men,” which Harnack technically refers to as a “sensuous eudæmonistic eschatology.”

Finally, the whole of their doctrine revolved round the conception of cyclic law for both the universal and the individual soul. Thus we find the Gnostics invariably teaching the doctrine not only of the preëxistence, but also of the rebirth of human souls. And though a chief feature of their dogmas was the main doctrine of forgiveness of sins, they nevertheless held rigidly to the infallible working out of the great law of cause and effect.

It is somewhat curious that these two main doctrines, which explain so much in Gnosticism and throw light on so many dark places, have been either entirely overlooked, or, when not unintelligently slurred over, dispatched with a few hurried remarks, in which the critic is more at pains to apologize for touching on such ridiculous superstitions as “metempsychosis” and “fate,” than to elucidate tenets which are a key to the whole position.”

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, by G.R.S. Mead, 1900

Music: Big River – Telecasted