First Contemplation: the What Ifs...

First Thessalonians 5:21 tells us, “test (or prove) all things; hold fast to that which is good.”

One of the hallmarks of the discipline of Doing Gnosis is the active personal testing of faith assumptions. One of the reasons for this is to discover how much of our lives and our faith is built on a series of assumptions that we may not even know we have. This discipline is progressive in that we will only be able to see in a limited way the ramifications of the removal of faith assumptions.

This discipline is best embraced after a session of centering meditation.

So, let’s begin.

What if there was no God?

We are not just talking about the classic anthropomorphic idea of God. This is any concept of God as loving or God as judgmental. What if there was no God?

What if there was not even a Higher Being?

What if there is no divine pattern to the universe? What if there is no “Spirit?” What if there is no Tao? What if there is no Chi? What if there is nothing but chance in the universe? This would imply that we have no control over anything – except maybe our-selves, or our responses.

What if there was no Internal Divine Presence?

What if there was no Higher Self, no True Will…? Nothing but our personal psyche – nothing divine that gives us guidance – nothing even greater, or wiser than our everyday intelligence that guides our lives?

How does this make you feel? Scared, alone, angry – why is this important for this discipline? Why would I even consider such a thing?

There is a statement I want you to embrace fully – remember and grow from this:

An untested faith is a weak and potentially worthless faith. An unjustified belief is a weak, unreasonable, and potentially destructive belief.

And there is a concept I want you to embrace – this concept is core for this discipline, and answers the above questions – This concept is also our most difficult discipline –

Radical, Personal Integrity…

Years ago, I began to see that what I had been taught, and what I claimed to believe, was not what I had come to actually believe. I realized I had been lying to my-self, based on what I was told to believe, what I wanted to believe. When I recognized this, I began to turn inward, and question… everything. I was ruthless in my questioning. I began with the assumptions of the tradition I was raised with. I began by testing these assumptions by the only source I respected, the source that my tradition claimed to express – The Bible. And I embraced the bible in the manner that I had come to believe was the only way to see its truth. I talked to God about everything. Even those things I thought I understood, I was not willing to assume that I was right.

I started with the letters of Paul; from there I went back to the Gospels, and worked through the whole of the New Testament. And I did so in constant companionship with God. I was 18 when I began this process.

Over the following months, the Christianity I began to see was very different than the Christianity I knew. So, I began to look at other forms of the tradition, and found nothing that echoed the core teachings of the New Testament. They all claimed to do so, but none of them actually did.

I began to look at the history of the development of Christian tradition, and I discovered that every form of Christianity that I knew of was developed on the foundation of traditions later than, and other than the New Testament. In most cases these traditions directly or subtly contradicted the very scripture they claimed to revere. They interpreted the New Testament in the light of their tradition, rather than interpreting their tradition in the Light of scripture. And I came to the conclusion that almost every event in history that has given Christianity a bad name was because of this miss-interpretation of scripture.

This process was complicated primarily by my need for community. The only community I knew, the only community I trusted was Christian. So, I swallowed the truth I discovered, compromised my personal integrity for community. This led to my first two marriages and divorces. I embraced illusion in the face of truth. I chose ignorance instead of enlightenment, because I was afraid to be alone. And that choice has shaped my life to this day.

It wasn’t until the end of my second marriage that I discovered how much I had grown in the midst of my chosen ignorance. Throughout this time, God and I still had relationship, but I had drawn away from God to embrace my tradition. But God remained faithful. I found that I had grown more than could have imagined.

I embraced a solitary life when my second marriage ended. And the questioning began in earnest. I was determined to be honest with my-self, and with God. I was determined never to lie to my-self again.

I found that my consciousness had to play catch up to my growth. I passed through a series of levels of spiritual growth at maximum speed. And eventually had a total shift of perspective from the psyche to the nous. I had my enlightenment shift (it’s not just an experience, because the change is still constant – it is a total shift of perspective of being).

After this occurred my challenges to my assumptions became even more ruthless. I challenged everything I encountered – reincarnation, life after death, the existence of Chi, the Tao, on and on. And at every turn I could not justify belief beyond subjective experience.

I had a lot of that. I had grown up seeing things that could be called paranormal or even miracle. But was there another explanation? Was there an explanation that did not require flights of fantasy?

You have to understand how difficult this was for me. In asking these questions, I was challenging the validity of my entire life. I was a massage therapist at this time who worked with Chi. I was a martial arts instructor who taught several martial systems that were based on theories of the Tao. I had a whole lot of experience to challenge.

Finally, I had to face my relationship with God. As real as this was, as personal as this was, it needed to be challenged. So, I tested the existence of God. Every idea of God; I put these ideas on like a cloak and walked around in them, looking for the truth. I found many truths, but they were always truths about us, humans, not about God.

So, from there I had to challenge something that was a breaking point for me; my own worth.

Did I have any inherent worth? Did anything have any inherent worth? What if nothing has any inherent worth? What if, the only worth anything has is the worth you invest into it?

How does this make you feel? If this were true, would it change the way you live your life?

Why is this necessary? Why do we ask these questions?

There are many reasons why this discipline is necessary. I will give you one major reason. In the tradition I was raised in, we were encouraged to cultivate divine revelation, visions, and direct relationship with God, but we were taught that our revelations and even our new convictions were to be taken as truth, if not literally. It is this lack of caution and total indulgence that led to most of the mistakes in my life where others were harmed.

Those of us, who are involved in spiritually focused practice, give revelation and intuition an almost divine importance. Channeled material is to be accepted whole, without challenge. Intuitive understanding is to be lived without weighing it against reason and intellect. In fact, most systems that cultivate intuition do so with an anti-intellectual attitude. I tell you from experience that this is a mistake.

Just as the intellect should be balanced with intuition, so should intuition be balanced with the intellect. There is a key to embrace in this statement. If you grow in your intellect, you should cultivate equal growth in your intuition. If you grow in your intuition, you should cultivate equal growth in your intellect. They work together, and if one outweighs the other, your conclusions and convictions will be inherently unbalanced.

But this does not fully answer the above question. Why?

To answer this, I must refer you back to the idea of radical personal integrity. In order to have this level of integrity, you must fully know yourself. Many of us believe things that we are not aware of believing. When these things are brought into the light of awareness we are often surprised at how unreasonable our beliefs are. We find, sometimes, that what we actually believe is different than what we want to believe. We must know and understand our-selves.

It is a challenge to consider your-self and your life without the belief systems you are attached to. When we consider the “what if” and follow our responses we come closer to discovering the truth of our-selves and our belief. We then have the opportunity to ask our-selves whether or not the integrity of our belief system really matters.

Why do you believe what you do? Do you believe what you hope? If your belief is wrong, does it matter? Are you still the same person if your belief system is proven wrong? Will you still make the same choices in life? Would it change who you are, or who you think you are?

Testing your faith may reveal beliefs or practices that you may be attached to for the wrong reasons, or that you have outgrown and no longer need. You may also realize that certain beliefs and practices are essential to your spiritual health and growth and need to remain in your life no matter what the answer to the What if… is. Then, with the full realization that it simply doesn’t matter if the beliefs and practices that work for you are factual, you can move forward with them in place knowing they are serving a purpose in your life and that is all that matters.

This process will help you in realizing that truth and fact is not the same thing. Something can be true and not factual. This process might even help you realize that most (if not all) of what we believe as truth is subjective in nature, and may not apply to everyone all the time. This realization can work to remove the need to impose your truth on anyone else.

Finally, this process leads to an understanding of the superfluous “stuff” that we put between us and God. These things are our Idols, even if we don’t recognize them as such. Our goal as Gnostics is to fully know ourselves and to have a direct, personal, and intimate relationship with God. This relationship needs to be unimpaired by preconceived notions and beliefs. We cannot know what we believe, and whether or not these beliefs impede or impair our relationship with God unless we ruthlessly test them.

They key, ultimately is not to believe something because we want to or are told to; but to understand belief itself and transcend belief into relationship. This is the only way to true, pure union with God. You may not understand this now, but within the depths of our soul, where soul merges with spirit, belief creates barriers to our experience of God. If we do not know what we believe, we will not know what needs to be left behind when we dive into the depths of our soul.

Egg Model of the Soul

Vocabulary of the Soul: Part One - the Ego

We need to start our journey through the vocabulary of the soul with an understanding of the Ego – Consciousness.

It will become clear that our approach to the Ego and the Consciousness is quite different than what you may be used to. The Ego has received a bad rap over the last century. I believe this is due to an inadequate translation of Eastern concepts into Western Spirituality. We have condemned the Ego to something that needs to be destroyed or killed. This action has a devastating effect on the individual. Rather than killing the Ego, the Ego needs to be cultivated, and balanced. As we will see, it is the Ego that is the source of individuality. It is the Ego that is the key to personal freedom. To kill the Ego is to make the consciousness subject to the explosions of the personal unconscious. This removes any function of free thought. But, the Ego we are speaking of here is different than the idea of the Ego that is present in Western expressions of Eastern thought.

Ego is a term that has its root in the Latin word that means “I.” Consciousness is simply the state of being awake. Ego is the core of the consciousness, and the heart of all awareness. Thus, to train the awareness is to train the Ego. Think of the Ego as the spot-light of awareness. At the same time, we can see Ego as the primary Tool of Awareness.

If we are aware of having knowledge of anything, it is an act of the Ego. If we are to have accurate knowledge of anything, we need to have a strong Ego function. It must be said, however, that the Ego is often subject to the biases of the personal unconscious. Even though the Ego is the core of awareness, it is still a tool for the Soul.

Jung seems to have seen the Ego as representative of our personality as we experience it. The Ego is like a mirror that allows us to view ourselves, and our responses to both internal and external stimuli. In it we can experience our individuality as a center of the will, and of desire, and of action.

It can also be seen as the door to the consciousness. In this way anything that arises out of the unconscious or impacts us through external stimuli, and enters fully into our consciousness must do so through the Ego. Because of this, the content of our unconscious can only enter fully into the consciousness through the Ego. This is why the eruption of the contents of the personal unconscious is directed at, and will often overcome the Ego – function. The only way to withstand this type of eruption is to have cultivated a strong Ego, and mature consciousness. Said in another way – Self Control is the action of a Strong Ego and mature consciousness.

To understand the development of the Ego we need to address another term; the Self. We will cover the Self in detail another time, but for now understand this – the Self is both an archetype that is synonymous with our individual Spirit, as well as containing and interpenetrating the whole of the psyche and the soma.

Think of it this way – the Self (our Spiritual Self) transcends, contains, and interpenetrates every aspect of our individual lives. In a healthy Soul, the whole of the psyche, from the collective unconscious to the soma to the Ego acts as a tool for the Spiritual Self.

The maintenance of this state of healthy being is determined by what is called the Ego/Self Axis. The Ego/Self Axis is the mechanism whereby the Self communicates with the Ego. This mechanism can be damaged, and even collapsed, however. If this damage occurs, another part of the soul (usually in the form of a mediating and healing principle called the Anima/Animus – which I call the Mediator) is needed to clear the way. But this principle can be resisted and even shut down. If this occurs then the individual lives their life confined to the conscious and the personal unconscious. As we will see in a moment, this is a very small part of the individual soul. And such confinement leads to a very empty and often damaged life.

Individuation is the term used to describe the process of the growth and maturity of the Ego – consciousness. We can see this process as several stages of growth.

The first stage is characterized by an absence of awareness of the differences between the internal and external worlds, as well as the lack of awareness of being in that state. This is an initial state of wholeness, but it is un-evolved and ignorant wholeness. The person in this stage projects their own feelings onto the outside world, and is deeply affected by what occurs in the outside world because they experience the external as if it is internal. There is no differentiation between subject and object.

As much as this is an infantile stage of awareness, it can (and often is) carried into adulthood. The almost obsessive projection onto a valued object is an example of the continuation of this stage of growth. In this type of projection, damage to that object can be sympathetically felt by the subject. When the object has been threatened, mishandled, or damaged this can even manifest as sickness or physical pain. It can result in a form of trauma if the object is destroyed.

The second stage of the growth of consciousness there is a certain level of differentiation of objects. Some objects become more important, and more closely identified with the inner world. The best example of this type of projection is that of a child on a parent. In this state, Mother is the source of all that is good, and Father is indomitable hero. Both are infallible. In the later years of youth, reality proves to the individual that mom and dad are just people and fallible. Like all collisions between the ideal of the projection and the reality of life, this is potentially traumatic.

In this second stage, there are a lot of objects that receive our projections. Because differentiation and individuation is so limited, these objects have a free hand in investing ideas, opinions, and knowledge directly within our consciousness. This is what occurs in childhood, where the child identifies and adopts the beliefs, habits, and opinions of the culture/group. At this point, it is the group that is infallible. Again, growing out of this stage is painful, and often traumatic.

It is important to note that groups which hold to inflexible ideas of the world will automatically attempt to arrest the development of the individual to this stage. This is the hallmark of all forms of fundamentalism. The transcendence of this stage is again often traumatic.

It is also at this stage where we tend to fall in love. It is not the person we fall in love with, rather it tends to be a projection of the anima/animus that we adore. Most of us have experienced this to one degree or another when the reality of the person we love collides with the projected ideal. This difference between the reality and the ideal is often the cause of divorce. “I don’t know you anymore,” is the refrain of someone who has experienced psychic trauma at the collision of the reality of their partner with the ideal. In fact, they never knew the other person to begin with. Rather, the other person was a fitting recipient for the projection of an ideal.

This type of projection also occurs with a parent for a child, especially a first child. The parent will project the archetype of the divine child onto their own child. This dynamic is fascinating, in that the child is susceptible to their own projections which are focused on the parent. What occurs is a mutually supported fantasy life. This can delay or damage the development of the child into adulthood, and the parent remains in the projected state.

In the third stage of development a level of distance between the subject and the object is attained. In this stage the individual starts to understand that the object is different than the projection, and the contents of the soul become abstract and symbolic.

At this point projections move from a concrete object to an abstract ideal. God, truth, law, political ideals become the new objects for projections. It is here that the physical world becomes less threatening, and less enchanting. There is a distance that grows between the experiences of the external world and the experiences of the internal world.

This is the stage of the inviolability of the rule of law, or the ideals of the group, rather than the group itself. The group – or rather the members of the group can be imperfect, but the ideal is perfect. This is often manifested in the idea of scripture or creed as infallible. This is a more advanced state of religious expression than the primitive projections of the second stage, but it too, lends itself to a fundamentalist ideology. In some sense this is a more negative fundamentalism, since the individual has no value in the face of the principle.

If the idea of a vengeful God is part of this stage of growth, then transcending this stage of growth is incredibly difficult. This difficulty is the product of the deep fear generated by the individual’s lack of value in the face of an unattainable ideal. The application of mercy or grace at this stage is only partially successful. The reason for this is that the simple idea of grace or mercy is either deficient (less than) or transcendent (greater than) of the current stage of growth, and thus has little actual impact on the individual’s internal world.

The fourth stage can be called the agnostic or atheistic stage. This is the practical stage, where external projections are almost non-existent. Everything that is part of the group is devalued as a construct of man. This includes Creeds and Scripture. This stage can often lead to depression, since everything that used to give the individual value no longer has any value to the individual. This is also the stage of moral relativism. Everything is a “maybe” or an “I’m not sure.”

What is actually occurring at this stage of growth is that the Ego itself becomes the object of the projections. This is a state of massive Ego inflation. It must be understood that Ego inflation is necessary for the growth of Ego – consciousness. The inflation at this stage, however, is extreme.

In this state of inflation, it is the Ego that determines what is right and wrong, and what is good and evil. In extreme cases of this stage of growth, megalomania occurs. This is the stage where, “I am God,” becomes the mantra, and the core of the personal belief system. This is where the structure of the world seems to be determined by the thoughts of the Ego, and life gives way to the creative power of the individual.

As intense as this stage of growth is, it is also fragile. It doesn’t take a whole lot of collisions with the external to challenge or damage the assumptions of this stage of growth. This is where self-deception will often manifest. The individual thinks that if the world does not change in accordance with his thoughts, then he is simply not thinking hard enough to impact the world.

Because of the nature of this stage of growth, it is often demonized by the more fundamentalist ideologies of stages two and three. At the same time, the lack of enchantment is often difficult for people to accept. Resistance to growth is common at this stage.

A healthy individual should reach the fourth stage of growth in the first half of life (prior to age forty). This is why many mystical traditions (especially when they are socially engaged) have an age limit on initiation into their mysteries. The levels of growth after the fourth stage are all primarily spiritual in nature.

At the end of the fourth stage and the beginning of the fifth stage the individual becomes increasingly aware of how little control they have over their own thoughts and actions. Even with a strong Ego, we begin to understand that the Ego is the door keeper to the Soul. A strong Ego will be able to contain a constellated complex to a limited degree, but the Ego, without further unification with the power-house elements of the psyche (the archetypes of the collective unconscious), will never gain ground. Prior to the fruition of the fifth stage, the ego is imprisoned to contents of the unconscious. It requires a conscious, determined unification of all aspects of the psyche with the core of awareness (which remember, is the Ego) in order to shift the rulers of the psyche from limitations to elements of focus.

The fifth stage begins the process of reconciliation of the archetypes. This will almost always begin with the contents of the shadow, then move to the complexes of the personal unconscious. Because of the state of projection in the fourth stage, the archetypes are seen as “other” since they were being projected onto the Ego. The fifth stage (the stage of initial descent, and subsequent ascent to the Father) is where the separation between the awareness of the “I” and the contents of the unconscious is bridged.

This stage of ascent requires the re – unification of the Ego with the Archetypes of the collective unconscious. The primary difference between this stage and the initial infantile state of wholeness is the recognition of the differentiation between the parts of the soul. This is a Unity rather than a Singularity. The infantile state can be seen as an initial, un-evolved Singularity. The fifth stage of growth is the evolved state of Unity. There are several more stages of the growth of consciousness, but those are beyond the scope of this discussion.

By the time of the fifth stage of growth a healthy Ego will seem to touch every aspect of the being in some way. It can be seen as a web that anchors itself throughout the whole of the being. It is in on and through the Web of the Ego that we can interact with the whole of the conscious, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. In this way we can bring true awareness to our Spiritual Self. In fact, most spiritual growth at this stage and beyond can be seen as bringing the Ego to the Spirit, saturating the Ego in the Spirit, and allowing the Ego to shine the “Light of Anointed Awareness” onto all other aspects of the being.

One of the ways to guarantee that the Ego develops in a balanced manner is to keep in mind the two modes and four functions of the Ego. The two modes are introversion (focusing inward), and extroversion (focusing outward). The four functions are sensation (a response to external stimuli), intuition (a response to internal stimuli), feeling (the emotional response to sensation and/or intuition), and thinking (the intellectual response to sensation and/or intuition).

In the two modes we have a tendency of focus, as well as a source of psychic energy. Generally, someone who is introverted will find that they “recharge their batteries” while being alone and focusing inward. They will also tend to find that their resources are taxed by being around a large group of people. The extrovert will find that they “recharge their batteries” through social interaction. They tend to have difficulty being alone for long periods of time.

Sensation and intuition are uncontrolled reactions to stimuli. While feeling and thinking can be cultivated and balanced. Feeling can be cultivated through an observational or experiential understanding of sensation and intuition. This is primarily developed through various forms of mindfulness training. Thinking can be effectively cultivated through a full understanding and embrace of the disciplines of philosophy, and their application to sensation and intuition. The combination of these disciplines provides a method of balanced development. This balanced development lends itself to a level of stability throughout the developmental process. And this balanced development can be embraced early, at least to a limited degree. This becomes very important as we move into the realm of the complexes and the shadow.

A Structure of the Person

Structure of the Person

The Pneuma (Pure Spirit)

The Spirit – Self

Pneuma-Psyche Boundary

Superior Veil (Waters Above)

Psyche-Pneuma Boundary

Nous (Mind)

(This is the primary connection of the Pneuma with the Psyche. This is the Spirit reaching into the Soul. This is also referred to as the Higher Intellect)

Collective Unconscious

(This is the deep area of our souls, where the content is common. This is the area of archetypes and the realm of the Greater Aions)

{Psyche (Soul)

(This is the where most “work” is done. This includes the Soma, the Inferior Veil, the Ego – Consciousness, the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious, the superior veil and into, but the whole of the Pneuma)}

Personal Unconscious

(This is comprised of complexes. This is the realm of the archons – or once redeemed, the lower aions.)

Shadow

(Those elements of consciousness that are rejected from the consciousness for any reason)

Ego – Consciousness

(Think of this as a spider web of awareness that is anchored in every significant aspect of the person – Consciousness, personal unconscious, collective unconscious, Soma, and Pneuma)

Persona

Psyche-Soma Boundary

Inferior Veil (Waters Bellow)

Soma-Psyche Boundary

Soma (Soul Enlivened Body)

Hyle (Pure Body)