Commentary On "The Ten Major Principles Of The Gnostic Revelation", Part 1

1. The creator of this world is demented.

The Demiurge. "Demented" implies that he is deluded, a bit mad, as it were. This falls in line with Gnostic teaching that the Demiurge is deluded enough, egotistical enough, to believe that he is God, that there is naught before, above, or beyond him, and that we are his Creation.

2. The world is not as it appears, in order to hide the evil in it, a delusive veil obscuring it and the deranged deity

Like in the Matrix, this is a false world, or as the Buddhists would say, an illusion. A veil obscures us from seeing anything spiritual or non-physical, let alone anything else. Spiritual practice begins the process of piercing this veil. In the Qabalah that are multiple veils - between Malkuth and Yesod, signifying the astral, between Yesod and Tiphareth (Paroketh), signifying the Higher Self (which is mentioned in a later part), and between Tiphareth and Kether (the Abyss), our Divine Spark, the Yechidah (and then three further Veils to the Unmanifest: God). We're living in a dream world, living dream lives, and, like all dreams, it's entirely illusory and entirely transitory. The goal is to wake up.

3. There is another, better realm of God, and all our efforts are to be directed toward
a. returning there
b. bringing it here

The God beyond "God" (the Demiurge). Not the caricature of the old white-bearded man sitting in the clouds, but the real indescribable nothingness of God beyond the Veil. We must strive to return to this realm of God (the Pleroma, the Fullness), which is where we came from; and this same process involves bring it here. We elevate the physical to the spiritual, but we also invoke the spiritual into the physical. This is the Kingdom of God on Earth, the New Jerusalem.

4. Our actual lives stretch thousands of years back, and we can be made to remember our origin in the stars.

We are older than we think. These physical bodies of ours are but imitations of our true form, which is inimitable. Our lives are eternal, and our origin is far from here, far in the depths of the Fullness of God. When Crowley said "Every man and woman is a star", what do you think he meant?

5. Each of us has a divine counterpart unfallen who can reach a hand down to us to awaken us. This other personality is the authentic waking self; the one we have now is asleep and minor. We are in fact asleep, and in the hands of a dangerous magician disguised as a good god, the deranged creator deity. The bleakness, the evil and pain in this world, the fact that it is a deterministic prison controlled by the demented creator causes us willingly to split with the reality principle early in life, and so to speak willingly fall asleep in delusion.

The Higher Self. We must elevate our consciousness from this sleepwalking state, puppets of circumstance, into the consciousness of our Higher Selves, who pull the strings. Then we are no longer sleeping, and no longer prisoner to this dangerous magician, this demented creator. The reunion with our Higher Selves is the remembrance of that which we've always had, and when we were born into this "reality" we were forced to forget it, forced to obey a set of rules that never should apply to God, and never should apply to us. These rules are: Death, decay, deception, and dumbness.

I'll explore the next five in another post another day.

Suffering & Deliverance From Suffering

"One thing only, brothers, do I proclaim, now as before. Suffering and deliverance from suffering."

- Buddha

Salvation

Salvation, like many words and topics, is very misunderstood. From a Gnostic viewpoint, Gnosis offers salvation. Gnosis is knowledge of the Divine, which is also simultaneously knowledge of the self (see here). Thus, it is in no way contradictory to the idea that your spiritual evolution is up to yourself. It is. And you are ultimately the one who "saves" yourself. What you save yourself from can depend on your tradition. It might be the prison of the Cosmos, the cycle of samsara, or simply: ignorance. In the end, they are all the same thing.

""Salvation" must be self-induced and self-devised."

-Israel Regardie, The Tree of Life

I think we may have inadvertently "tabooed" the word "save", since so many people want to "save our Souls". Only we can do that. A Gnostic does not see Christ (Soter, the Saviour) as an external agent, or would only see him thus in order to personify the Higher Self (as all traditions do). The Qabalistic assignation of Christ and similar mythological figures to Tiphareth is in accordance with this.

Salvation, as someone pointed out to me recently, implies that we have a debt to pay (original sin, etc.). In this modern age of reclaiming our authority over our own lives, this is not an acceptable notion. But in a sense, we do have a debt - a debt to ourselves. It's our failure to recognise the truth about ourselves, about our divinity, about the world around us (and how the physical isn't everything), that results in us being fallen. The Fall may only be a state of mind, an illusion, the product of ignorance, but this is what mythology is all about - describing these things. In the end, there's something wrong with us here - otherwise we'd all be enlightened. It's this lack of enlightenment that we need to be saved from, even if the Saviour is ourselves.

Sin, as so many of us Gnostics point out, did not originally mean "a spiritual crime", as it is often depicted today. It simply meant "missing the mark". We missed the mark. We took a leap and we fell. We do not have to throw out concepts; we can simply reinterpret them, as Gnostics have done for millennia. A Gnostic might also accuse the Demiurge of committing the original sin, the sin of ignorance, a sin against the true divinity of God beyond the Veil. See an old poem of mine for more on this potential interpretation.

Poetry: Demons

I wrote a new poem today on the topic of demons. You can check it out here:

Demons by Dean F. Wilson

We all have to face our demons some day. Indeed, the very phrase "face your demons" is ingrained in our modern psyche, but what exactly does it mean? In Jungian terms it is the Shadow, all the parts of ourselves we do not like, the parts we ignore and repress; and one day it rebels against us, like a child locked away in his bedroom. In the end we find we neglect our Shadow. But is it the same as our demons? Is our Shadow made up from our demons? It is the Nephesh of the Qabalah, our animal nature, and it does us the good service of taking all our unwanted junk. Its reward: we shun and ignore it. We must, of course, sacrifice our demons, our Lower Self, before the altar of the Higher. But we also need to open the locked door; we need to make amends for our neglect, for ultimately we find that the dog-face is merely a mask, and when we demask our demons we might be troubled at what we find. And when we become troubled we will be astonished, and we will rule over the All.

My New Blog...

I've created a new blog to deal with my more overtly occult topics, particularly within the stream of the Golden Dawn tradition. You can find it here:

Mishkan ha-Echad

Meanwhile, I'll continue to post my Gnostic musings here.

A Summary Of My Spiritual Beliefs

I was recently asked on my forum Occult Ireland what a summary of my religious/spiritual beliefs were. This is not an easy question to answer, as a synopsis of belief is often vague and lacking in the subtleties that a thoroug exposure, discussion, or debate might offer. However, it's also a good excercise, as it forces you to think about how you can communicate what you believe to others, especially in a short, simplified, and coherent manner. Below you will find my answer to their question (noting that they assumed that Enochian was my main spiritual interest from other posts of mine).

A Summary Of My Spiritual Beliefs

Enochian is only one of my three prime interests. These are:

Qabalah
Gnosticism
Enochian

I've spent the last four years, with the O.'.S.'.D.'.L.'., dedicated to studying Enochian, from Golden Dawn material to the original Dee material to more modern work like that of Benjamin Rowe.

I am, however, much more intrinsically fascinated by the Qabalah, and it meshes so well with my Gnostic beliefs (as does Enochian to a certain degree). It is difficult to summarise beliefs, but I will take a "stab" at it:

1) I believe in God, though I use the term merely for simplicity's sake. The true God is both immanent and transcendent (i.e. part of this world while also beyond it), so this can be characterised as panentheism. This God is also beyond description. We cannot say what he is, but more what he is not: illimitable, indescribable, etc. This type of unknowable God belongs to both Gnosticism and Qabalah (the Three Negative Veils).

2) In contrast to this, I believe in a lesser form of Deity - i.e. the Demiurge and Archons, who are the Creators and crafters of the physical universe (the Cosmos). Through a divine mistake, on behalf of Sophia, the forces of ignorance were created, as opposed to the emanation process which previously occurred with God (i.e. when God emanates his divinity, all is well. When something is created, however, something goes wrong). This emanationist cosmogony belongs to both Gnosticism and Qabalah (Aeons and Sephiroth).

3) I believe that God has fallen, to a certain degree, and is trapped in the physical world (not all of him, however, as he is also transcendent). This is Sophia of Gnosticism, the Shekinah of Qabalah. We are the Sparks of God (Yechidah in Qabalah), and our goal is to escape our physical prison (which is, like in Buddhism, an illusion), which is achieved through the Saviour, the Christ, who we become (in Tiphareth). This fallen state is known as Malkuth in Qabalah, which acts as a pendulum to the Tree. The goal, known as Tiqqun, the Repairing of the World, is to reunite Malkuth, the Kingdom, with the King, Tiphareth. This is frequently symbolised in Qabalistic teaching. Reincarnation is a form of entrapment that must be escaped to unify with God (this is essentially the same teaching as Buddhism's samsara).

4) I believe, like all Gnostics, that this salvation is only achieved through Gnosis, direct experiential knowledge of the Divine. Faith has its place as a pre-runner to Gnosis, but it is Gnosis alone, which is, in actuality, anamnesis, the act of remembering (such as remembering our divinity, our origin in God, our imprisonment, our ultimate knowing of all things, and our ability to save ourselves and, thereby, save God), which Plato taught about (which was thenceforth absorbed, like many Platonic teachings, into Gnosticism), that saves us. In the Qabalah, Knowledge is Da'ath, and thus it could be said that the goal of a Gnostic is to cross the Abyss into the Supernal Realm, the Garden of Eden. This is, in effect, the Tiqqun, for the Fall was us being thrown out of the Garden of Eden, and thus humanity's Rise is the re-entry of that Garden.

These are just my main beliefs, and don't explore all the subtleties, but I would have no problem describing myself with any of these terms:

Jewish
Gnostic
Christian

If we look at the early Gnosticism, we will note that it was both Jewish and Christian, and, indeed, the early Christians still considered themselves Jews. I would, in turn, follow suit. There is much of value in the Christian teachings, primarily that of the dying-and-resurrecting Godman, the Christian Rosenkreutz of Rosicrucianism, but, as a Qabalist, I have a very big soft-spot for Torah and the Hebrew bible (and language).

In comparison to the above, I only employ Enochian when I need to. It is a system of magick, and you can believe what you will and still practice it to great effect. I am actually more enamoured by the Qabalah, and have always been.

Why not try a summary of your own religious/spiritual beliefs?

Poetry: Revenge

I recently published a new poem on the topic of "Revenge" at Helium. You can check it out here:

Revenge

Vengeance is something all of us have to deal with, and it can be a hard one to manage. We all get angry, and anger is a healthy emotion, despite what we may think of it. Anger is the natural response to something or someone hurting us in some way. It may be trivial, or it may be epic in scope, depth, and application. Regardless, vengeance is the extreme end of anger, when we fail to forgive, which is not, admittedly, an easy thing to do. Vengeance brings us over the edge, and it can be hard to come back from the darkness that it leads to. I hope I have made this clear in my poem.

I pray that we all, myself included, learn how to forgive, and that when someone wrongs us, we do not wrong them in return, but express our dissatisfaction and, if necessary, remove ourselves from the situation. Let us not get caught up in the cycles of revenge, for they lead to no good places. Let us, instead, try to understand one another, and express our anger in a productive and healthy manner. Lord, in token of this, forgive us for all that we have done to anger others, and I ask for the forgiveness of these people, whether they feel ready to offer it or not. Let us also remember not to judge someone on their readiness to forgive, for we cannot understand the pain they may feel. Lord, grant us empathy and understanding, that we might live in a better world.

Amen.