tom o'brien's List: gnosticism

• An old and esoteric religious tradition, Gnosticism proclaims that human souls are incarnate expressions of the Godhead. According to the Gnostic account, at birth each of us emerges from eternity to become a finite, embodied, and separate consciousness. In Harpur's words: 

   

   The vitalizing item of ancient knowledge was the prime datum that man is himself, in his real being, a spark of divine fire struck off like the flint flash from the Eternal Rock of Being, and buried in the flesh of body to support its existence with an unquenchable radiant energy. On this indestructible fire the organism and its functions were 'suspended,' as the Greek Orphictheology phrased it, and all their modes and activities were the expression of this ultimate divine principle of spiritual intelligence, energizing in matter."
• The Pagan Christ reminds us that beneath our political and economic systems, beneath both culture and character, lies the spiritual imagination. This is the faculty that connects the mundane periphery of our existence to its sacred core, the faculty that informs our deepest yearnings and illuminates our ethical pathways.

• 24 His disciples said, "Show us the place where you are, for we must seek it."

    He said to them, "Anyone here with two ears had better listen!  There is light within a person of light, and it shines on the whole world. If it does not shine, it is dark."

• 28 Jesus said, "I took my stand in the midst of the world, and in flesh I appeared to them. I found them all drunk, and I did not find any of them thirsty. My soul ached for the children of humanity, because they are blind in their hearts and do not see, for they came into the world empty, and they also seek to depart from the world empty.

    But meanwhile they are drunk. When they shake off their wine, then they will change their ways."
• 29 Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
• He said to them, "You have disregarded the living one who is in your presence, and have spoken of the dead."

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• (109) Jesus said : "The Kingdom is like a man who had a treasure hidden in his field without knowing it. And after he died, he left it to his son. The son did not know about the treasure. He accepted the field and sold it. And the one who bought it went plowing and found the treasure. He began to lend money at interest to those who wanted it."

• • his form is not something that can be seen,
    no one beholds him with the eye -
    by heart and mind and soul is he conceived of:
    whoso knows this becomes immortal.
• Towards a Science of Consciousness

  • the marriage of the sciences
• Since the dawn of pre-history the scattered tribes of man have walked about in all the lands under the sun and contemplated, both individually and collectively the nature of the skies above their heads

• Today, the scientist and the layman ask - How has this been possible? What is the nature of matter and energy? What is the nature of life? What is the nature of consciousness? The emergence of the western scientific program has, for the last three centuries, sought the detailed specifications of the phenomena of nature in the outer world. And today - in the closing decade of the second milenium - it would appear that the quest of the sciences has been turned, at least by way of conferences of scientific and interdisciplinary researchers, towards a focusing on the nature of the inner world of (the cosmos known to) man.

   

    Scientists with unimpeachable credentials in a wide range of fields,  from psychology to molecular biology to mathematical physics,  have begun to assert that understanding the nature of  consciousness is an important scientific goal, perhaps the  most important question that science faces at the present  time. But how to begin?
• "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart
    and mind and soul and spirit"
• As the mathematician Poincare has shown, there cannot exist any integrable or finite analytical solution to the movement of three bodies, so I am not therefore coming from any philosophy of scientific determinism. Rather I am outlining an attempt at the synthesis of the evolving (natural) scientific tradition and the evolving mystic traditions which share their source with the individuals who also are viewed (often quite separately), as the individuals upon whom the global religions are based.

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