He began with "Our Father" indicating the Monad as the source of all consciousness. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" - here, the kingdom is not a distant thing to hope for but the fullness of consciousness to be realized. Which is Pleroma. Prayer in the context of Gnostic philosophy is recognition, declaration, and alignment. Jesus thanked the Father for outcomes as if they had already occurred.
Very nice, a fair summary of a well-taken point. Prayers are indeed alignment work (albeit culturally there are ways to frame that in imperative voices). To me what's missing is how to resolve statements of theology, and what difference it makes. For instance, we could argue that it's significant that manuscripts about addressing God are few and disputed, but then decide to agree that it doesn't matter because the church's language isn't so wrong that it requires our opposition. Alternately, we could argue there's a binary tension there and a side must be taken, and then we'd need a path for resolution.
If the Monad is Father and Pleroma, what difference does it make if we call it our El or Theos as well, or if we don't? There are several Scriptures I could ask your opinion about, but I would hold on those since I'm still working on getting the foundational understandings.
church's language isn't so wrong that it requires our opposition
With the Church is not about right or wrong. Just think about, you can't pray (how religion teaches) to the Monad because it's not separate from you to receive prayers. You can't disappoint it because it has no expectations. You can't be judged by it because it's not a judge. It's the very awareness within which the concepts of judgment arise and pass away. This understanding was and is absolutely terrifying to church authorities. And they should be scared. If ultimate reality has no personality, no commands, no specific will that needs interpreting, then what's the point of priests and religious institutions? What's the purpose of institutions claiming to speak for God? The entire structure of religious authority collapses when people realize that the deepest truth isn't a being you need intermediaries to reach, but the very awareness you already are. The political implications are staggering.
A personal god, Yawheh or El or Theos, who gives commands requires interpreters, hierarchies, institutions to manage divine will. But the Monad, it's not giving commands because it's not separate from what is. It's not ruling the universe. It's the consciousness within which the universe appears like a dream in an infinite mind. So, it's not about the language Church uses... it's about people waking up from their sleep. Once that happens the Power (church & empire) fall apart.
If the Monad is Father and Pleroma, what difference does it make if we call it our El or Theos as well, or if we don't?
IMO, the difference is by association. In the Apocryphon of John I shared with you what John revealed, there exists a reality so fundamental that even Yahweh, the biblical creator, is merely a distant shadow of it. The text calls this ultimate source the Monad, describing it as the invisible spirit that stands infinitely above every deity, every spiritual hierarchy ever recorded. Now, let's take a look at the Gospel of the Egyptians which goes further, explaining that all creator gods, including the one who made our physical universe, are just source. There exists a hierarchy, God at the top, angels below, humans at the bottom. Even those exploring ancient wisdom and the church accept this basic hierarchy.
John reveals "before anything existed, the Monad was.". Not in the beginning, God created... But before beginning itself, before existence, before the very possibility of creation, there was this. Because the Monad isn't a being at all. It's not a person, not a deity, not some cosmic grandfather with beard. Genesis gives us a God who speaks, who walks in the garden, who gets angry, who makes plans. But, the Monad doesn't speak because it's the silence from which all words emerge. It doesn't create because it is the space within which all creation unfolds. Are you beginning to see the difference between the Monad and El?
Let me go a bit further; have you ever questioned how thoughts arise in your mind? Where do they come from? many would say there is this aware, infinite space. I would argue this is consciousness that's present before any thought appears, during the thought and after it disappears. Thoughts don't create this awareness. They manifest within it. Now imagine that awareness without any thoughts at all, without any content whatsoever, infinite and eternal. That is the Monad. It is invisible, it is infinite (not just big, but beyond any boundaries), illimitable since there is nothing before it to limit it. But, the most important characteristic of the Monad, it's unknowable. Furthermore The gospel of the Egyptians states it's not something we can or will ever know. In other words it is the invisible light. Not darkness, not ordinary light, but the light that makes all seeing possible while remaining itself unseen. It's the awareness within which all experiences of light and dark appear.
Imagine yourself looking into a perfectly still pond. And for the first time, you see your own reflection. But imagine that reflection isn't separate from you. It's you becoming aware of yourself in a completely new way. You just discovered the Monad yet it's still unknowable. There's no divine command, no big bang, no let there be light moment. Instead, something far more mysterious occurs. You realize that you don't serve the Monad in the way a created being serves a creator. Not the way the Church and every religion on earth teaches. We're witnessing the natural overflow of infinite consciousness recognizing itself in ever-expanding ways.
it's not separate from you to receive prayers. You can't disappoint it because it has no expectations. You can't be judged by it because it's not a judge. It's the very awareness within which the concepts of judgment arise and pass away.
This is very close to "apophatic theology", which I define as talking about Being via what it is not. There's a second way of talking about Being ("cataphatic"), namely how it reconciles spectra of things that are. In the first way, the Monad isn't even a monad or a plurality because those are words for emanated things: it is both undivided and unmixed. It's not separate from us, and it's not joined to us. It's not expecting, and it's not failing either. It's not judging and it's not judged. It's not awareness and it's not lethe. In the second way of talking, we do use words like this recognizing that they describe aspects that are transcended and harmonized, and that form of speech is common and valid as well.
What bothers churchmen is that speaking of the attribute of impersonality carries a risk that we demote the attribute of personality. Ultimately this need not be done, but so many have created an impersonal god in their own imaginations and gone far astray in everyone else's judgment that there is a warning against it. Francis Schaeffer took the bull by the horns by writing Beyond Personality to awaken Christians to this reality; he might interest you!
What's the purpose of institutions claiming to speak for God? The entire structure of religious authority collapses when people realize that the deepest truth isn't a being you need intermediaries to reach, but the very awareness you already are. The political implications are staggering.
Good human institutions only survive because they humbly refuse to speak for God. "Nature" speaks for itself, though we call it impersonal, and all revelation works the same way. Yet people who can't get the experience of monism right ("general revelation") need not to be too assertive when describing an experience of "special revelation".
there exists a reality so fundamental that even Yahweh, the biblical creator, is merely a distant shadow of it.
I would say instead that "Creator" and "Yahweh" and "Reality" and "Fundament" and "Distance" are all shadows that only approximate; no merely human word is final. Our always striving to know reality better allows our words to be sufficient and actionable without being exhaustive. But what's happened (and it started with Jews inventing "Ein Sof" or "Infinity" IMHO) is that people who find one label insufficient for one purpose then put their trust in ... another label. I kept seeking the root of it all and realized I could never apprehend the root and remain myself. I then started using all the words as shadows of various states of being, and I recognized that they fit together into many different isomorphic structures. In the structure you posit above, "Reality" is Fundamental and "Yahweh" and "Creator" are Distant, which might be true in many applications, but the words could be rearranged several ways to yield many truths in other applications, and all the arrangements have nuanced meaning and value without contradiction.
Now, let's take a look at the Gospel of the Egyptians which goes further, explaining that all creator gods, including the one who made our physical universe, are just source. There exists a hierarchy, God at the top, angels below, humans at the bottom.
That is indeed Near East divine-council theory, but it seems like it cuts against the idea that we never use the word "God" for the "Top". Whatever is revealed to us is mediated by our incompleteness and so in one sense we can never know what is beyond and in another sense we can know "God" or any "Thing" with sufficient, actionable substance.
John reveals "before anything existed, the Monad was.". Not in the beginning, God created.
I don't see a contradiction, they both sound like John 1:1-3.
Genesis gives us a God who speaks, who walks in the garden, who gets angry, who makes plans. But, the Monad doesn't speak because it's the silence from which all words emerge. It doesn't create because it is the space within which all creation unfolds. Are you beginning to see the difference between the Monad and El?
No, in the fundamentals I don't. By calling it Monad and Silence and Space you're applying labels that simply put it at a different pole of the spectrum of being than calling it God and Speaker and Creator. Genesis uses a lot of personal language (because personality came from somewhere and isn't a power that creatures have over the Monad), but it doesn't lead to contradiction, but paradox (i.e. something resolvable via nuance). For instance after the general introduction we are told that the Spirit broods (silently) before a Word is said (audibly). But the word for brooding and the word for speaking both come down to the same phenomenon, vibration in waves, expressed differently. So silence and speech are set by the text as a paradox, and we now have a scientific ("gnostic") way of resolving the paradox with nuance.
I would argue this is consciousness that's present before any thought appears, during the thought and after it disappears. Thoughts don't create this awareness. They manifest within it. Now imagine that awareness without any thoughts at all, without any content whatsoever, infinite and eternal. That is the Monad.
Okay, the experience is real, and the imaginative extrapolation is useful to a point, but not to all points. To say the Monad "is" awareness without thoughts is merely to apply a perceived experience to the whole of reality, which falls short because the map is never the territory.
beyond any boundaries
Yeah, I discovered that if there are boundaries they are indiscernible.
the invisible light
Use of paradox then, which is not monad but dyad and synthesis.
There's no divine command, no big bang, no let there be light moment.
Well, when we look at history there's an origin to spacetime, but there are still lots of views about that (including denying it).
you don't serve the Monad in the way a created being serves a creator. Not the way the Church and every religion on earth teaches. We're witnessing the natural overflow of infinite consciousness recognizing itself in ever-expanding ways.
Here the paradox is that if we were to teach how the Monad is served we would be just another religion. So in one sense the Monad cannot be served, but in another sense you truly imply we do serve the Monad somewhere between the Me (experience) and the Myself (reflection). That is because we could say the Monad "is" the Me and "is" the Myself and "is" the service. That gets us back to all relative words having a natural pattern of active, inactive, action (lover, beloved, love). That pattern is, however, isomorphic with the pattern of All being One. So, having beheld the Monad, and having beheld the Other (reflection) that is Self that have a relationship (reflective surface), we rejoice in the beholding, but when we come back to speaking English to our fellow man we end up using words that are like those already spoken, sometimes better and often worse. And all those words have sufficiency and substantiality without needing perfection or exhaustiveness. And that's what we build bridges on.
New cascade for u/jamesbillison (maximum depth reached).
Very nice, a fair summary of a well-taken point. Prayers are indeed alignment work (albeit culturally there are ways to frame that in imperative voices). To me what's missing is how to resolve statements of theology, and what difference it makes. For instance, we could argue that it's significant that manuscripts about addressing God are few and disputed, but then decide to agree that it doesn't matter because the church's language isn't so wrong that it requires our opposition. Alternately, we could argue there's a binary tension there and a side must be taken, and then we'd need a path for resolution.
If the Monad is Father and Pleroma, what difference does it make if we call it our El or Theos as well, or if we don't? There are several Scriptures I could ask your opinion about, but I would hold on those since I'm still working on getting the foundational understandings.
With the Church is not about right or wrong. Just think about, you can't pray (how religion teaches) to the Monad because it's not separate from you to receive prayers. You can't disappoint it because it has no expectations. You can't be judged by it because it's not a judge. It's the very awareness within which the concepts of judgment arise and pass away. This understanding was and is absolutely terrifying to church authorities. And they should be scared. If ultimate reality has no personality, no commands, no specific will that needs interpreting, then what's the point of priests and religious institutions? What's the purpose of institutions claiming to speak for God? The entire structure of religious authority collapses when people realize that the deepest truth isn't a being you need intermediaries to reach, but the very awareness you already are. The political implications are staggering.
A personal god, Yawheh or El or Theos, who gives commands requires interpreters, hierarchies, institutions to manage divine will. But the Monad, it's not giving commands because it's not separate from what is. It's not ruling the universe. It's the consciousness within which the universe appears like a dream in an infinite mind. So, it's not about the language Church uses... it's about people waking up from their sleep. Once that happens the Power (church & empire) fall apart.
IMO, the difference is by association. In the Apocryphon of John I shared with you what John revealed, there exists a reality so fundamental that even Yahweh, the biblical creator, is merely a distant shadow of it. The text calls this ultimate source the Monad, describing it as the invisible spirit that stands infinitely above every deity, every spiritual hierarchy ever recorded. Now, let's take a look at the Gospel of the Egyptians which goes further, explaining that all creator gods, including the one who made our physical universe, are just source. There exists a hierarchy, God at the top, angels below, humans at the bottom. Even those exploring ancient wisdom and the church accept this basic hierarchy.
John reveals "before anything existed, the Monad was.". Not in the beginning, God created... But before beginning itself, before existence, before the very possibility of creation, there was this. Because the Monad isn't a being at all. It's not a person, not a deity, not some cosmic grandfather with beard. Genesis gives us a God who speaks, who walks in the garden, who gets angry, who makes plans. But, the Monad doesn't speak because it's the silence from which all words emerge. It doesn't create because it is the space within which all creation unfolds. Are you beginning to see the difference between the Monad and El?
Let me go a bit further; have you ever questioned how thoughts arise in your mind? Where do they come from? many would say there is this aware, infinite space. I would argue this is consciousness that's present before any thought appears, during the thought and after it disappears. Thoughts don't create this awareness. They manifest within it. Now imagine that awareness without any thoughts at all, without any content whatsoever, infinite and eternal. That is the Monad. It is invisible, it is infinite (not just big, but beyond any boundaries), illimitable since there is nothing before it to limit it. But, the most important characteristic of the Monad, it's unknowable. Furthermore The gospel of the Egyptians states it's not something we can or will ever know. In other words it is the invisible light. Not darkness, not ordinary light, but the light that makes all seeing possible while remaining itself unseen. It's the awareness within which all experiences of light and dark appear.
Imagine yourself looking into a perfectly still pond. And for the first time, you see your own reflection. But imagine that reflection isn't separate from you. It's you becoming aware of yourself in a completely new way. You just discovered the Monad yet it's still unknowable. There's no divine command, no big bang, no let there be light moment. Instead, something far more mysterious occurs. You realize that you don't serve the Monad in the way a created being serves a creator. Not the way the Church and every religion on earth teaches. We're witnessing the natural overflow of infinite consciousness recognizing itself in ever-expanding ways.
Good! That allows bridge-building.
This is very close to "apophatic theology", which I define as talking about Being via what it is not. There's a second way of talking about Being ("cataphatic"), namely how it reconciles spectra of things that are. In the first way, the Monad isn't even a monad or a plurality because those are words for emanated things: it is both undivided and unmixed. It's not separate from us, and it's not joined to us. It's not expecting, and it's not failing either. It's not judging and it's not judged. It's not awareness and it's not lethe. In the second way of talking, we do use words like this recognizing that they describe aspects that are transcended and harmonized, and that form of speech is common and valid as well.
What bothers churchmen is that speaking of the attribute of impersonality carries a risk that we demote the attribute of personality. Ultimately this need not be done, but so many have created an impersonal god in their own imaginations and gone far astray in everyone else's judgment that there is a warning against it. Francis Schaeffer took the bull by the horns by writing Beyond Personality to awaken Christians to this reality; he might interest you!
Good human institutions only survive because they humbly refuse to speak for God. "Nature" speaks for itself, though we call it impersonal, and all revelation works the same way. Yet people who can't get the experience of monism right ("general revelation") need not to be too assertive when describing an experience of "special revelation".
I would say instead that "Creator" and "Yahweh" and "Reality" and "Fundament" and "Distance" are all shadows that only approximate; no merely human word is final. Our always striving to know reality better allows our words to be sufficient and actionable without being exhaustive. But what's happened (and it started with Jews inventing "Ein Sof" or "Infinity" IMHO) is that people who find one label insufficient for one purpose then put their trust in ... another label. I kept seeking the root of it all and realized I could never apprehend the root and remain myself. I then started using all the words as shadows of various states of being, and I recognized that they fit together into many different isomorphic structures. In the structure you posit above, "Reality" is Fundamental and "Yahweh" and "Creator" are Distant, which might be true in many applications, but the words could be rearranged several ways to yield many truths in other applications, and all the arrangements have nuanced meaning and value without contradiction.
That is indeed Near East divine-council theory, but it seems like it cuts against the idea that we never use the word "God" for the "Top". Whatever is revealed to us is mediated by our incompleteness and so in one sense we can never know what is beyond and in another sense we can know "God" or any "Thing" with sufficient, actionable substance.
I don't see a contradiction, they both sound like John 1:1-3.
No, in the fundamentals I don't. By calling it Monad and Silence and Space you're applying labels that simply put it at a different pole of the spectrum of being than calling it God and Speaker and Creator. Genesis uses a lot of personal language (because personality came from somewhere and isn't a power that creatures have over the Monad), but it doesn't lead to contradiction, but paradox (i.e. something resolvable via nuance). For instance after the general introduction we are told that the Spirit broods (silently) before a Word is said (audibly). But the word for brooding and the word for speaking both come down to the same phenomenon, vibration in waves, expressed differently. So silence and speech are set by the text as a paradox, and we now have a scientific ("gnostic") way of resolving the paradox with nuance.
Okay, the experience is real, and the imaginative extrapolation is useful to a point, but not to all points. To say the Monad "is" awareness without thoughts is merely to apply a perceived experience to the whole of reality, which falls short because the map is never the territory.
Yeah, I discovered that if there are boundaries they are indiscernible.
Use of paradox then, which is not monad but dyad and synthesis.
Well, when we look at history there's an origin to spacetime, but there are still lots of views about that (including denying it).
Here the paradox is that if we were to teach how the Monad is served we would be just another religion. So in one sense the Monad cannot be served, but in another sense you truly imply we do serve the Monad somewhere between the Me (experience) and the Myself (reflection). That is because we could say the Monad "is" the Me and "is" the Myself and "is" the service. That gets us back to all relative words having a natural pattern of active, inactive, action (lover, beloved, love). That pattern is, however, isomorphic with the pattern of All being One. So, having beheld the Monad, and having beheld the Other (reflection) that is Self that have a relationship (reflective surface), we rejoice in the beholding, but when we come back to speaking English to our fellow man we end up using words that are like those already spoken, sometimes better and often worse. And all those words have sufficiency and substantiality without needing perfection or exhaustiveness. And that's what we build bridges on.