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.
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