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Heretical Christianity
Originally, Gnosticism was just seen as a heretical branch of Christianity, but other evidence points at it having had a different origin and a viral tendency. It infiltrated not only Christianity, but Judaism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism also. It was sort of a novel idea for the time. Sort of like the religious equivalent of the…
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Gnostic Reality
The different schools of Gnosis have differing attitudes about reality and the creator. From Jehovah being genuinely evil to just being fallible, and from any partaking of reality as being damning of yourself to the problem being misperception of reality. Asceticism? Yes. To a most meditative attitude, mostly. Some say you can’t achieve gnosis without…
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Individual Emanation
The Gnostic divinities are in the realm of the emanation, in the realm of self knowledge. Gnosis is a quality of the individual emanation, and not a body of knowledge that is fixed and must be accepted. Mandean and Manichean Gnosticism even reached China. To know yourself is to know God, i.e. all divinities? Yes,…
Category: Gnosticism
There was at first a formless and undefined (for being infinite) divinity, and in a process of self realization/revelation other divinities arose by a process of emanation. The process of gnosis can free one from the entrapment of being caught up in Jehovah solipsism. They did not respect the law of Jehovah, but their morality has a reference in the Bible. “The word of God is written upon the human heart.” They believed strongly in gnosis/knowledge and conscience. This is maybe why Gnosticism was so viral and wide spread.
“The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21)
“Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s spirit lives in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16)
“But the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you, when you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living father. But if you don’t know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty and you are poverty.” Gospel of Thomas