1. The Philosophical Character of Gnosticism
Everyone should read who Gnostics are but because of typical religious beliefs where people make up their own rules for a belief about a god, or some here have three of them, and mind you beliefs are not real they are speculation and go as far to make laws to govern their beliefs and anything outside their finite understanding actually accuse Jesus who was gnostic, a liar. One can believe anything about a god.
Some here who say gnostics are not of God and His ways is a lie, dont know God. Here is the bases of Gnosis. It is the same thing Jesus taught. We are in this world but not of it.
1. The Philosophical Character of Gnosticism
Gnosticism, as an intellectual product, is grounded firmly in the general human act of reflecting upon existence. The Gnostics were concerned with the basic questions of existence or “being-in-the-world” (Dasein)—that is: who we are (as human beings), where we have come from, and where we are heading, historically and spiritually (cf. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion 1958, p. 334). These questions lie at the very root of philosophical thinking; but the answers provided by the Gnostics go beyond philosophical speculation toward the realm of religious doctrine and mysticism. However, it is impossible to understand fully the meaning of Gnosticism without beginning at the philosophical level, and orienting oneself accordingly. Since any orientation toward an ancient phenomenon must always proceed by way of contemporary ideas and habits of mind, an interpretative discussion of Gnostic thinking as it applies to Psychology, Existentialism, and Hermeneutics, is not amiss here. Once we have understood, to the extent of our ability, the philosophical import of Gnostic ideas, and how they relate to contemporary philosophical issues, then we may enter into the historical milieu of the Gnostics with some degree of confidence—a confidence devoid, to the extent that this is possible, of tainting exegetical presuppositions.
a. Psychology
Who are we? The answer to this question involves an account (logos) of the nature of the soul (psukhê or psyche); and the attempt to provide an answer has accordingly been dubbed the science or practice of “psychology”—an account of the soul or mind (psukhê, in ancient Greek, denoted both soul, as the principle of life, and mind, as the principle of intellect). Carl Jung, drawing upon Gnostic mythical schemas, identified the objectively oriented
consciousness with the material or “fleshly” part of humankind—that is, with the part of the human being that is, according to the Gnostics, bound up in the cosmic cycle of generation and decay, and subject to the bonds of fate and time (cf. Apocryphon of John [Codex II] 28:30). The human being who identifies him/herself with the objectively existing world comes to construct a personality, a sense of self, that is, at base, fully dependent upon the ever-changing structures of temporal existence. The resulting lack of any sense of permanence, of autonomy, leads such an individual to experience anxieties of all kinds, and eventually to shun the mysterious and collectively meaningful patterns of human existence in favor of a private and stifling subjective context, in the confines of which life plays itself out in the absence of any reference to a greater plan or scheme. Hopelessness,
atheism, despair, are the results of such an existence. This is not the natural end of the human being, though; for, according to Jung (and the Gnostics) the temporally constructed self is not the true self. The true self is the supreme consciousness existing and persisting beyond all space and time. Jung calls this the pure consciousness or Self, in contradistinction to the “ego consciousness” which is the temporally constructed and maintained form of a discrete existent (cf. C.G. Jung, “Gnostic Symbols of the Self,” in The Gnostic Jung 1992, pp. 55-92). This latter form of “worldly” consciousness the Gnostics identified with soul (psukhê), while the pure or true Self they identified with spirit (pneuma)—that is, mind relieved of its temporal contacts and context. This distinction had an important career in Gnostic thought, and was adopted by St. Paul, most notably in his doctrine of the spiritual resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:44). The psychological or empirical basis of this view, which soon turns into a metaphysical or onto-theological attitude, is the recognized inability of the human mind to achieve its grandest designs while remaining subject to the rigid law and order of a disinterested and aloof cosmos. The spirit-soul distinction (which of course translates into, or perhaps presupposes, the more fundamental mind-body distinction) marks the beginning of a transcendentalist and soteriological attitude toward the cosmos and temporal existence in general.
Not many here actually know what Jesus taught because they have their own beliefs, putting themselves about the teacher that God sent to show you what it is to have the same as Jesus had from God as gnostics know to be true through the same experience Jesus went though with his God in Matt 3:16. We can identify with the very same. If you are not as Jesus was in the Father then we all can understand how you would think that the ways of Jesus as a gnostic is a lie because you have created yopuor own gods, and even denomination has different laws to govern their gods in a belief about a god with noting in realty.
Just ask any of these if God is come to them as He came to Jesus and opened up who He is ands all of His heaven in that ma -- which is pure Gnosticism. His way is evil for many here. That is why most put Jesus on ignore in his day and had him crucified for blaspheme just as many here accuse his ways of, and even treat me the same way Jesus was treated and put me on ignore for the very same reason they did Jesus, only difference is they were able to crucify him, just as here in this forum they had, and have today, a different belief from the reality of God that Jesus received in Matt 3:16.
