Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)
Enlightenment through Canonical Christianity
Contents
Guidelines for "scripture-based" revelation
Jesus Mysteries, Jesus and the
Goddess Fail to Engage Canonical Esotericism
Must recognize esoteric present in
official religious writings
"Esoteric Christianity"
is more relevant to decode than Gnosticism
Gnostic vs. corrected mystery orthodox Christianity
Low Religion sometimes resorts to outright lies and sheer force of assertion to protect itself against the threat that High Religion poses to it. For example, most of the New Testament is truth disguised in allegory, but some New Testament scriptures are outright lies, such as insistence, without any higher allegorical meaning, in the bodily Literalist Historical Jesus. Such scriptures are neither literally true nor allegorically true.
Even mainstream scholars refrain from treating all Pauline letters as equally authentic. Some scriptures are more inerrant than others -- that's not a highly disputed principle. Scholars have always wrestled with "difficult" passages of one sort or another, and have distinguished between the inerrancy of the whole versus the parts. The inerrant Latin Vulgate translation used for centuries as a source of authority was seriously mistranslated in many passages.
High Religion is positioned to judge the truth-claims of the scriptures which remain after the long battles between Low/Literalist and High/Allegorical religion. I am committed to extracting High Religion from the canonical scriptures essentially as they stand, in a way that is true to the spirit of the scriptures without dragging in exotic alien elements -- however, this requires discernment: some scriptures are neither allegorically nor literally true and it must be remembered that the scriptures were written by inspired yet imperfect humans, both Low Religionists and High Religionists.
Given the political realities of the battle between low and high religion, it is too much to expect that all the scriptures be allegorically true. However, I maintain that my Christian revelation is, in essence, absolutely true to and native to the canon without introducing alien elements. Mine is a revelation that comes from the canon; it is the canonical revelation, as opposed to, for example, an astrological or exotic Gnostic myth-cycle revealing of the meaning.
I grew up in the canonical scriptures and with an emphatically Bible- based orientation, and have always been concerned to reveal the mysteries of the Bible as we know it, hidden in Bible-only-based Christianity as we know it. Mine is the revelation that is hidden in Bible-based Christianity, even though some scriptures were revealed by the scriptural revelation to be false.
When the Bible blew itself open before my eyes, some scriptures were negated and cast out. This is understandable, and the whole can still be called "allegorically inerrant". This is not a revelation of select parts of the Bible, nor of a distortion of the Bible, nor of some apocryphal or suppressed books, but of the Bible itself, on the whole.
Concerning alternative Christianities, I have comparatively little interest in a revelation that is not from the Bible or from Bible- based Christianity as we know it, for such would not be very relevant to such a society. It is important that the entheogenic, cybernetic- determinist, Christ-myth revelation be true to the tradition that carries it.
Entheogens are allowable in a "revelation from the Bible" because they connect with the forbidden fruit and with Jesus' declaration of cleanness of all foods, and with the Eucharist. It makes too good sense to disallow. The Christ-myth is allowable in a "revelation from the Bible" because there are hints about it and it empowers allegorical exegesis, and Paul doesn't write about Literalist Historical Jesus. Determinism is allowable in a revelation from the Bible for reasons the Reformed scholars have put forth, and it is the essence of the revelation about moral culpability.
These three seeming deviations from scripture are actually just deviations from the usual way Christians read scripture -- and for Protestants, scripture dominates over tradition. Thus my technique is more scripture-based than tradition-based, because most tradition is Literalist (Low Religion). Even here the scriptures help my case: "Many say they follow me, but they don't" (because they are freewillists).
The decoding {"Jews" means freewillist moralists, "Greeks" means determinists} is fully legitimate in a revelation that deserves to be called "Bible-based". I would not introduce all the other elements from the books The Jesus Mysteries or The Gnostic Paul -- that would be too exotic and alien -- but if I could pick just a couple keys, this would be one of them, and anyway I derived it, rather than simply taking it, from The Gnostic Paul.
This Revelation, despite coming out of the Bible and Protestant tradition, is fully relevant to Catholic Christianity, which is the best exemplar of Low Religion, being based on precisely the futile moral-cleansing for profit that provides the reason Jesus threw out the moneychangers and the Jewish temple priests, in the story, had him killed for disrupting their financially profitable system of moral futility and strategic delusion.
The Jesus figure participates in the war between the freewillist demons and determinist angels. He as God dies to allow our seeming sovereignty; he by acting as moral cleanser reifies the delusion or morality -- yet he also reveals, in the swoon reading of his premature removal from the cross, that the supernatural and miraculous is only allegorical and in the end he reveals our non- sovereignty. He supports us both in our egoic, freewillist, moral delusion and in our transcendent, determinist, trans-moral enlightenment.
The Jesus figure is evidently edifying and supportive for both ways of thinking: freewillist morality and determinist morality. He supports conventional moral decency and also reveals the metaphysical truth about the illusory aspect of moral agency, but in such a way as to still preserve and support conventional morality, but never with a claim that we are genuine moral agents of the type that can be cleansed magically via temple sacrifices.
The temple sacrifices or Catholic masses go through the motions of Abraham's obedient, reconciling lamb sacrifice, without the mental transformation that lay behind it. The purpose and mode of efficacy of Abraham's (allegorical) sacrifice was to fully demonstrate his understanding of determinism and acknowledge that it rendered him metaphysically a puppet/slave in his relationship to the Ground, God, or Fate.
From a metaphysical point of view, Abraham knew that his power-over-his-future depended entirely on God and in principle not at all on himself, because metaphysically there is no power-wielding egoic agent, but only a semblance of such sovereign power.
Low Christianity is simple and 1-level. High Christianity is compound and 2-level -- it provisionally justifies Low Christianity; it forgives and cherishes delusion of egoic individuality and freewill; it even marries the determinist and freewillist mental modes without smashing them together into undifferentiation. High Religion, High Christianity differentiates yet unites the low and high ways of thinking.
Perhaps ego hadn't a chance in late antiquity until the threat of High Religion was removed. In any case, we now fully know how to think egoically -- the egoic worldmodel is no longer seriously threatened by the deterministic revelation. Now humanity can fully develop the egoic and transcendent, freewillist and determinist, ways of thinking, coherently so as to successfully transcend both.
The price of the final Christian revelation:
o Stop taking Christian allegory literally, stop considering it important in the traditional way; treat it as a mere clever game.
o Sacrifice allegiance to freewillist worldmodel; accept determinism with its psychological limitations of a sort.
You *can* have enlightenment and heaven, but it will cost you your Literalist religious beliefs, your entheogen-taboo morality, and your freewillist moral assumptions, and your eternal heavenly reward and punitive hellish everlasting ego-reification, and your sense of importance and value of the revelation. It's just the revelation and apocalypse; it's just the last judgement and second coming and end of the world. Didn't you know that the end of the world is merely an existentialist situation? We hope you enjoyed your ride on the Ultimate Revelation of Profundity.
The principle "religion is the use of loose cognition to transform from the freewillist worldmodel to the determinist worldmodel" is supported by various non-Christian religions such as Zen Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, or Islam. That principle provides the ultimate Christian revelation, and thus immediately suggests how to apply the principle to various religions. These all look like freewillist moral systems, on the exoteric level, but as you look closer you see the high, esoteric form of the religion, which is inevitably determinist.
The books
The Jesus Mysteries and Jesus & the Goddess: the first book focuses on the
negative project (proving there was no historical Jesus; no single lone
individual who was the kernel for the later built-up Jesus figure), while the
second book focuses on the positive project (explaining what the mythic-only
Jesus figure actually meant in earliest Christianity).
I am
concerned with Freke & Gandy's theory of true Christian origins, which is
explained across these two books -- it is not explained in the book Jesus
Mysteries alone. The negative project
(disproving the historicity of Jesus) can never really succeed without
comprehending the positive reality of what the Jesus figure actually meant.
The Jesus
figure was originally a personification of core religious, mystic-state
initiation including various mystic-state phenomena, and was soon combined with
a lifestory based on Hellenistic Ruler Cult and Jewish Messiah.
Per
Hermeticism, Thoth represented mystic-state experiential insight -- Wisdom or
transcendent knowledge; a functional patron of ecstatic mystic revelation,
first of all, including the awakening to and then transcendence of cosmic
determinism.
The canon
portrays Jesus as becoming transfigured and a different kind of being after the
resurrection. Gnostics (a highly
diverse group) didn't complain Jesus was a poor figure because he was the same,
unchanged person before and after the Passion.
Canaanite
symbolism was used by Rome in the third and fourth century, after
"invincible" Mithras was militarily disproven and delegitimated. That symbolism was not simply Canaanite
symbolism; it had heavy addition of blatant Caesar-cult elements.
Today's
simplistic theories are reductionist in that they don't even attempt to explain
how the various threads and theories interconnected. The Jesus figure was not just allegory for mystic-state experiences,
and was not just a sociopolitical resistance symbol. He was both, and any theory to be even half decent must explain
how it was that he was both.
As much as
scholars need to finally comprehend that Jesus was mystic-state allegory, that
is the least distinctive aspect of the Christian religion in the Hellenistic
milieu. What was distinctive was that
this version of the standard godman also incorporated the divinized human ruler
such as Caesar, "our rescuer present on earth in the flesh", as a uniquely
sociopolitical styled version of the standard godman.
Christianity
was "unique" among the mystery cults in that it was distinctively
characterized by its sociopolitical resistance theme... but that theme was not
original; it was an incorporation and co-optation of Ruler Cult. The Christian mystery cult was, first of
all, a synthesis of the godman cults (Dionysus/Osirus) and Ruler Cult (Julius
Caesar).
This
godman-human was both a godman coming down, and a human going up: he *had* to
be both, to be competitive and to sweep up together all the types of religious
cult: that of the godmen and that of the divinized ruler.
Rodney
wrote:
>>Pneuman,
thank you for your insightful treatment of Job. I have been hoping that someone
would be willing to (eventually) look at an "Old Testament" work from
a Gnostic perspective. In that regard you stand in good company, as witness
Ptolemy, Theodotus, and the like. It has been my contention that the documents
that Orthodoxy views as sacred are our sacred documents as well, not only the
Nag Hammadi corpus, askew codex, etc., and fully deserving our attention and
careful interpretation.
>>The
fact that they weren't written by "gnostics" should be no more a
barrier to us than it was to Valentinus or any of his brilliant students. ...
None of Ptolemy's [scriptural] quotations [supporting esotericism] are from
"Gnostic sources" (certainly not Nag Hammadi, etc); he doesn't quote
e.g. Thomas' gospel, or the Apocryphon of John. ... there is certainly a
difference between our "esoteric" and "exoteric"
presentations, but I think we do well to consider that *both* exist.
>>Before
anyone jumps to the conclusion that I take a dim view of the gnostic sources
I've mentioned above let me assure that while I think their value to us is
inestimable I do not think that they are the "be all and end all" in
gnostic discussion. ... what you've attempted [in covering Job esoterically] is
in keeping with that notion. Please, do more of it.
In posting
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gnosticism2/message/8169
Rodney
wrote:
>>One
thing I've noticed about my gnostic fellow-seekers is an almost palpable
excitement regarding the Gnostic scriptures, especially the Nag Hammadi corpus.
>>While
I think this fascination is understandable, I find in studying the extant
material from our forebears (especially those of the Valentinian school) that
they were quite obviously deeply in love with what we now refer to as the
"New Testament", or at least the greater part of it, especially the
four gospels and most of the letters attributed to Paul and that they commented
at great length on it *and* the Old Testament. To say the least I find their
exegesis breathtaking.
>>When
I first read Heracleon's treatment of Christ's encounter with the woman at the
well in St. John's gospel, I found it so beautiful I was moved to tears
(literally!!! ha!).
>>I
just wonder if there are any of you out there who are skilled in either Hebrew
or Greek who are ready to take up the ancient task of commenting on the sacred
texts, especially those found in the "Old" and "New"
testaments. It seems to me that Gnostics were, in those early days of the
Church the true "pathbreakers". Heracleon, for example, wrote, so far
as anyone knows, the first commentary on any of the gospels.
>>I
have a copy of Adolph Harnack's "Outlines of the History of Dogma"
wherein he refers to the Gnostics as the Church's first theologians. Just some
thoughts on the subject; I suppose I was just wondering if it was just me or if
anyone else would like to read something similar? Maybe there are works like
this available by living, breathing Gnostics and I've just missed them. If
anyone knows of any, please let me know!
Religion
is far more thoroughly influenced by its esoteric aspect than has been
recognized by modern scholarship. A
true mystic must fully recognize the rich presence of esotericism within the
official scriptures that happen to be embraced by the exoteric version of a
religion. Mystic esotericists are the
temporally *first* theologians and are the perennially *core* theologians. Straight, literalist theology is a
degenerated form of true, Gnostic, mystic, purely allegorical theology.
I'm
studying Scholem's examination of how religion is formed through an ongoing
tension between esoteric and exoteric, mystics in-the-know and clueless
exoteric literalists.
On the
Kabbalah and Its Symbolism
Gershom
Scholem
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805210512
1960
I'm
forming a maximal *entheogen* theory of religion, but in any case whether or
not visionary plants are the predominant source and basis of religion, one can
equivalently form a maximal esotericism/mystical/Gnostic (in Freke &
Gandy's general sense) theory of religion -- the "maximal esoteric theory
of religion", which holds that the predominant source and basis of
religion has always been mystic/Gnostic esotericism, which is *not* restricted
to a few deviant isolated subcultures, but which is in some important sense the
main and normal type of religion, even though literalist misunderstanding of
purely allegorical mystic-state description is widespread among the
uninitiated, particularly in modernity (the "rational",
"enlightened" era) due to overall reduction of all modes of religion
below the threshold required for true, mystic-state religion to break through.
If one
cannot recognize and perceive the esoteric richly present in official writings
that are embraced by the exoteric literalist version of the religion, then one
isn't really attuned to esoteric religion.
To
entheogen scholars I can word that essential idea thus: If one cannot recognize
and perceive allusions to visionary plants present in official writings that
are embraced by the exoteric literalist version of the religion, then one isn't
really attuned to visionary plants and the allegorical description of their
effects and experiential insights, and will thus perpetuate a clueless
misreading of the overall religion and its scriptures, resulting in a gross
underestimation of the *extent* and *influence* of visionary plants throughout
religion in all eras, all religions, all regions.
The basic
idea remains: "the maximal esoteric theory of religion", whether or
not one believes that the essence of esotericism is visionary plants. In some important ways, religion is first
and foremost esoteric, *not* exoteric; religion is *not* first and foremost
exoteric, with rare deviant esotericism "reinterpreting" the official
scriptures. A reliable red flag for a
bad, backwards scholarly theory is the word "reinterpret"; that word
is used to assert the wrong, modern scholarly fallacy: the "minimal
esotericism" fallacy.
"Religion
and its scriptures is really exoteric and literalist, but occasionally a mystic
comes along and invents a deviant forced reinterpretation." Such a position absurdly and cluelessly
denies that the scriptures in fact have rich esotericism densely packed
throughout them, deliberately, which is the only warrant any writing or poetry
or literature can possibly have to warrant its status and authority as *sacred*
writing.
No truly
sacred writing exists, that lacks densely packed allusions and descriptive
allegorization of the phenomena and experiential insights of the intense mystic
altered state. Mystics perfom an
ongoing filtering function and sorting function: they continually and
repeatedly promote and embrace the portion of presumably sacred writings which
most reflects and resonates with the mystic, esoteric, purely allegorical true,
core version of religion. Religion as
received is a product of ongoing tension between clueful esoteric mystics and
clueless exoteric literalists.
___________________
There are
modern attempts to create New Testament translations that are more true to the
original intent.
The Complete
Gospels: Annotated Scholar's Version (3rd ed.)
Robert
Miller (Editor)
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0944344496
1992-1995,
Current rank: 4K (very popular)
The
Unvarnished New Testament
Andy
Gaus, George Witterschein (Translators)
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0933999992
1991,
Rank: 192K
The New
Covenant: The Four Gospels and Apocalypse
Willis
Barnstone (translator)
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1573229369
2001,
Current rank 244K/539K
The Gospel
as a Spiritual Path
Rogier
van Vlissingen
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/094318505X
2003
Rogier
wrote (paraphrased):
>This
book is an introduction to Jan Willem Kaiser and a tool for people on a
spiritual path, and those working with A Course in Miracles in particular, to
sort out their relationship with the Christian influences in our culture. My upcoming book will have my own
translation of the Gospel of Mark. My
above book contains Kaiser's introduction to his translation/commentary of
Mark, and explanations of specific words and terms from the Judaeo-Christian
context, which offer food for thought.
Freke and
Gandy's books Jesus Mysteries and Jesus & The Goddess give the impression
that only the heavily gnostic, rejected version of Christianity, such as Gospel
of Thomas and ascent-mysticism, was valuable to the ancients as a spiritual
canon, while the canonical scriptures were chosen to be those which had no
spiritual/mystic value to the ancients.
That errs
too much toward drawing a sharp division between the canon and rejected
writings; in the effort to offer a corrective through stressing the relatively
clearer presence of mystery-religion in extracanonical versions of writings,
Freke & Gandy swing too far away from the canon as received (in Greek), and
seem to assert that the received canon is useless for a mystic, gnostic, mystery
type of salvation and regeneration experience.
In the
process of revealing explicitly gnostic-mystic variants from which the
canonical writings were derived, the view put forth by Freke & Gandy and
the chasers-after-Thomas such as the recent Pagels often seem to assert or
imply that there is no mystic-mystery substance present in the canon.
The
historical unlikely problem with such a view is that, if the canon were *so
completely* emptied of mystic-mystery substance for its audience, the ancients,
the intended audience would have laughed at it and tossed it into the rubbish
bin, and gone their own independent way, whether considering such (supposedly)
neutered and emptied writings as literature, poetry, or historical-styled
religion.
After
learning about the type of writings Freke & Gandy and Pagels lately have
been focusing on, and Ehrman in Lost Christianities, we can return, with a
fresh way of looking, to ask anew, much like Robert Alter, "What sort of
writings are the New Testament canonical writings, *as received*, and what are
the themes revealed through literary analysis, putting aside the complex chain
of their redactive derivation?" In
searching for the earlier redaction layers, we must not completely forget to
come back again to the canonical versions as received, as one of the main
touchpoints of reference.
The
received canon was a product of a tug-of-war *compromise* that neither handed
all power to the hierarchical Rome-centered church, nor to the
dualist-yet-egalitarian gnostic eucharistic meal gatherings. The gnostic Christians had to be coerced,
but could not have been effectively coerced into absorption into the
hierarchical ecclesiastical structure, if the gnostic writings had been
completely neutered and stripped of mystery-religion content and allusions.
In the
desire to positively perceive and discover gnostic meaning and enlightenment in
the extracanonical writings, in the effort to make their point, there is an
inadvertent, unconscious, mirror push-back effect of effectively wanting to *not*
perceive and discover nonliteralist meaning in the canonical writings. It is too easy a mistake to make an
exaggerated black-and-white dichotomy of "The canonical New Testament
writings are literalist, nonmystical, and bereft of and against gnosis, while
the non-canonical writings are metaphorical/allegorical, mystical, and replete
with gnosis."
Books and
authors mentioned above:
The Jesus
Mysteries: How the Pagan Mysteries of Osiris-Dionysus Were Rewritten as the
Gospel of Jesus Christ
Peter
Gandy, Timothy Freke
http://www.egodeath.com/jesusmysterieschapsumm.htm
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0609807986
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0722536763
1999,
Current rank: 13K (very popular)
Jesus and
the Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians
Peter
Gandy, Timothy Freke
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1400045940
http://www.amazon.co.uk/o/ASIN/0007145454
2001,
Current U.S. rank: 8K (very popular)
Beyond
Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas
Elaine
Pagels
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0375703160
2003,
Current rank: 5K (very popular)
The Art of
Biblical Narrative
Robert
Alter
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/046500427X
1981,
Current rank: 39K (popular)
The
Literary Guide to the Bible
Robert
Alter, Frank Kermode (Editors)
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0674875311
1987,
Current rank: 59K (somewhat popular)
Lost
Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
Bart
Ehrman
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0195141830
2003,
current rank: 807 (extremely popular)
Esoteric
Christianity considers the canonical Bible scriptures to contain a mythic set
of stories, a set that is profoundly effective at conveying enlightenment and
reconciliation of personhood with metaphysical truth. Esoteric Christianity is the higher part of a proposed 2-level
Christianity that is evident in the scriptures.
"Esoteric
Christianity" is all the rage for me now, as opposed to Gnosticism, which
is noxious as it introduces one set of distasteful ridiculous tales to replace
those of Literalist Christianity. I
want a clear explanation of Literalist myths, not a new set of myths. The new book The Lost Goddess does the best
job of explaining the Gnostic myths, but still, it's not an explanation or
discovery of the enlightenment that is indeed residing in the received
Literalist stories.
Watts page
54, Behold the Spirit, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394717619 --
Jesus may as well not have existed, as far as Esoteric Christianity goes.
I'm also reading
Andrew Welburn's book I mentioned --
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0863152090 - The Beginnings of
Christianity: Essene Mystery, Gnostic Revelation and the Christian Vision.
I also am
looking over http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0880104368 -- Christianity
As Mystical Fact, by Rudolf Steiner, Andrew Welburn (Translator).
Other
books about 2-level Christianity, including a higher, esoteric level and set of
beliefs, are The Jesus Mysteries and Pagels' The Gnostic Paul.
I'm
collecting books about reading scriptures as mythic literature, including the
Old Testament.
The
quality of Christianity books I've been adding to my shelves has skyrocketed
recently. I survey many books at Amazon
and the bookstores.
I am
reviewing Buddhism, to explicitly connect my core theory to it, at least a
little bit. Buddhism explainers are
inept at semantic subtleties -- I'm constantly noting sloppy wordings that fall
short of the ideals of clarity of expression that are held in the field of
Philosophy. So I may need to best
address Buddhism by showing how to tighten up the explanatory statements made
about it.
The main
problem in Christianity books is Literalism instead of esoteric reading. The angel HBWR explained this to me, so I
realized that being rescued from control-death by some thought about Christ
said alot about mental construct dynamics in my mind but was wholly independent
from the actual existence of Jesus; if some Christ thought caused mental
stability to return, credit the Christ thought, or Christ consciousness, not
some supposed 2000-year removed, rumored historical man. Eliminating the actual-Jesus hypothesis
makes it so much easier to construct a comprehensible model of spiritual
resurrection from ego death.
Introducing
a historical Jesus adds immense confusion, difficulties, and philosophical
problems. But if it's all purely myth,
that's *easy* to explain (about as easy as Buddhism); there are no longer
conundrums like "how could Jesus have done x, what did he mean by saying y
and yet z? How can Jesus be the only
incarnation?"
The main
problem in Buddhism books is clumsy, inept, incompetent handling of semantic
subtleties. That's been my conclusion
since I first broke through in making sense of Alan Watts' book The Way of Zen
on December 12, 1987.
Both
religions as studied by scholars sorely lack entheogen-theory awareness.
Esoteric
Christianity avoids Gnostic dualism, which says that the material world is
bad. Esoteric Christianity integrates
lower and higher thinking in a harmonious relationship. It in some way embraces, accepts, and
affirms, even loves, the Literalist fairy tales, loving lower-level
Christianity while rejecting it without condemning it as evil. The higher makes peace with the lower -- not
*believing* the lower, but perhaps accommodating it as adults do children.
Should we value Gnostic Christianity more than a revealed 2-level version of orthodox Christianity?
In the book Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost its Way (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195135091, March 2001), Philip Jenkins shows how we hope to find some lost scriptures that drastically transform Christianity to make it conform to what we wish it were.
Various groups want Jesus to help their cause. Jenkins points out how unsatisfying most of these lost scriptures are for such causes. The book made me glad to have firmly committed to revealing the mystery-meaning of Christianity as we know it rather than running after astrological or Gnostic foundations.
Pagels' The Gnostic Paul (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1563380390) claims that Valentinian Gnosticism is the school of Gnosticism that is most closely concerned with Pauline teachings; her book emphasizes a two- level system of meaning or initiation in Valentinian Pauline Christianity.
In the book Rethinking Gnosticism (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691005427, April 1999), Michael Williams claims that there is really only one commonality that defines "Gnosticism": the idea of the demiurge. In my definition, formed in light of The Gnostic Paul, the demiurge is the low God reigning over freewill morality, in distinction from the high God that is associated with awareness of the moral ramifications of determinism.
The demiurge is the god of freewill moral agents; the high god is the god of deterministic sovereignty, with whom the initiate can identify in order to, in a sense, "transcend" determinism.
We should understand the Gnostic systems but reject them for a modified version of orthodox Christianity, just as the church fathers rejected them as "not real Christianity". Neither should we simply accept orthodox 1-level Literalism as "real Christianity". We ought to bring orthodox Christianity to completion and repair it as a brilliant 2-level mystery system, rather than accept the overcomplicated and explicitly mythic Gnostic systems.
The books The Jesus Mysteries and The Gnostic Paul suggest that the real and most fascinating Christianity is indeed a *mystery religion*, with the lower level being supernaturalist Literalism *with freewill moral thinking*, and the higher level being purely allegorical myth *with deterministic trans-moral thinking*. (This low-freewill and high-determinist distinction is my original idea that I first found and posted on Nov. 14, 2001.)
Orthodox Christianity is not so much "wrong" as simply "half- complete" or lacking insight, the Holy Spirit, inspiration, or the revelation. I do not advocate heresy. I do not simply reject orthodox theology. Rather, I reveal true Christian mystery and bring orthodox Christianity to maturity.
Orthodox Christianity is the real and proper *lower* half of real Christianity. The Christian mystery was designed from its inception to include, in its lower half, the ideas which have been taken up sincerely in orthodox Christianity.
Orthodox Christianity is false, yet is an authentic, original part of the system of Mystery Christianity. If you accept an explicitly mythic system of Gnostic Christianity, then you reject the *mystery* aspect of Christianity. In this sense, Gnostic Christianity and Mystery Christianity are mutually exclusive.
What is more of a mystery religion: Gnostic Christianity or Mystery Christianity? Some forms of Gnosticism retain more of a mystery-then- revelation pattern than others. Valentinian Gnosticism might be the closest to the extreme 2-level mystery system of corrected-orthodox Christianity, but I suppose Valentinian Gnosticism still openly emphasizes the demiurge, and doesn't hide the mystery as much as orthodoxy does.
The orthodox made the Christian Mystery far more hidden away and deceptive, with a much more extreme break and outright conflict between the two levels of meaning. In this sense, the orthodox took the Christian "mystery" to its fullest extreme, even vehemently denying and striving to kill off the very existence of a higher, mystery, hidden level of meaning.
Given that orthodoxy is mistaken, can Christianity still be profoundly true?
Is orthodox theology wrong? It carries out the formal implications of accepting lower Christianity as literally true. If the lower Jesus is true, with miracles and atonement for "our" sins and all, then yes, all of orthodox theology follows reasonably enough. However, the lower Jesus is generally false, and orthodox theology generally collapses.
The lower Christianity frames us all as moral agents. The entheogenic Holy Spirit (the true flesh of God incarnate) reveals to us that we were framed; metaphysically, we were innocent the whole time.
Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)