Gnosis is the Greek word for “knowledge” or “insight”, an ancient idea that seems relevant to spirituality as it exists in today's world. Insight and knowledge, if they come to us, usually lack context and are left to be interpreted. I see these experiences of deep intuitive knowing, of information being downloaded into one's brain from some ancestral source, as an unforgetting of sorts. A reverse amnesia.
Why do we forget in the first place? The gift of forgetting may be a license to play the game of life in its fullest expression. To partake as a fully invested individual, mostly unconscious of one's belonging to the whole, is an infinitely entertaining field trip into chaos. If our inherent divinity is the cosmic riddle, then our lives are slow-burning answers.
Our DNA, like coiled snakes storing millions of years of experience and knowledge, unfolds patiently. The birth process is the trauma that causes the individual to forget, and death brings us all back home.
This is almost pointless to attempt to communicate. Almost is the keyword here, though. It isn't useless to try and talk about ineffable experiences because they can very well be shared. And so to hint at them through language is not only the best we can do, it bridges the gap between minds. We can accept that words only bring us halfway. Trust in one another allows us to participate in the unnamable experience together, regardless of whether it is being ascribed to a certain logic.
This is probably the basis of religion and I can see how this kind of thinking can lead to disastrous results. To ask people for faith is to insult their critical mind because it's a tactic that's been used so much throughout history for control. The mythic person on whom the Christian church is based, Jesus, allegedly performed miracles. Now this seems like a better way to get people's attention than telling them to just trust your word.
So how does one make miracles happen? By definition, I think it would have to involve a positive event for which there are no causal explanation, like spontaneous remission. The thing only has to defy our current understanding of the laws of reality, though, and those change all the time. Any technology advanced enough would seem like magic to those who haven't discovered it. And technology isn't limited to science, nor does it follow a linear progress.
Plant medicines and shamanism are technologies. Shaolin monks who smash through bricks are employing a technology. Whether they name it spirit or chi doesn't really matter. These things are unquantifiable by our instruments so we either refute them or, if they make their truth impossible to question, see them as miracles.
My impression is that if enough people are dumbstruck by a particular aspect of reality that puts in question their assumption of its functioning, then reality changes. We accept emerging technologies in the narrative, our brains adapt to a new normal, and there's no need to ask anyone for faith anymore.
So to remember our forgotten tools, to become archeologists of the mind, requires a willingness to let the new information that emerges from our unconscious pierce through the cover of skepticism and into this waking life. No individual mind is big enough to do it on its own. Clearly, if a person brings too much back too fast it has been our society's response to silence or kill them. But to gradually wake up as one organism might be possible. Anamnesia is a group activity.
Put me to work. Take the raw potential of my unformed yearning for the world and direct it toward something creative. For fuck's sake please channel me. I want to lose control like I'm being tied in bondage, and forced not to waste this precious life force.
he intricate functionings of this organic machine were revealed to me, as they are to anyone who's willing to drink some plants. Such are the gifts of our planet. But the character of the truth is so overwhelming that I don't dare look at it now
Stripped of its protective layers it is absolutely unbearable. I spend my days contorting to avoid its gaze. Ironically it's also the thing I love the most in the world... it is the world. It's the caring and abusive parent who puts us through war, love, famine, abundance, addiction, bliss.
It's the strange play we're in, the creation of a trickster child-god, who decided to explode into an infinity of pieces to get to know itself better. I like to think it's succeeding.
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