there's ever any need to do good instead of evil in that system
It's a good question, same can be said about the Christian church. The famous question: Can a truly converted Christian ever lose his salvation? regardless how much sin he/she commits afterwards. This discussion has been ongoing for centuries in the church. According to the Gnostics, the archons are distortions of consciousness, echoes born when divine light entered the realm of matter and fragmented. They exist in the unseen layers of thought, emotion, and energy.
IMO, doing good instead of evil negates archons influence on you and me and helps us with our struggle for spiritual liberation. The Gospel of Mary describes this as the kingdom of the flesh, a world where false powers, the archons, stir desire and confusion until the soul forgets its own light. The desire (money, sex, etc.) and confusion help the archons exercise influence over us. Their influence doesn't come from force, but from forgetting. Because when you forget what you are, pure divine awareness, unbound by form, you fall asleep inside their dream.
Why would the church story contradict the new-evidence story?
The Catholic Church was not born from Jesus, but from the Roman Empire using his name to maintain control.
Why would life-and-death matters be based on manuscripts hidden from humanity for 1,500 years, how would that be fair to those who came before?
We have already discussed the last part of your question. Time is infinite. This one lifetime is just one experiment, one attempt.
The Christianity you and I know today emerged from a brutal ideological war that lasted centuries. The Roman Church won the war. In the first few hundred years after Jesus's death, dozens of Christian movements flourished across the Mediterranean. Among them were the Gnostics, communities that believed something revolutionary. You don't need priests, churches, or salvation from anyone else because the divine spark already lives within you. This wasn't just a theological disagreement. It was an existential threat to religious authority itself. Now, using critical thinking, if people can access the true God directly through inner knowledge, what happens to the entire power structure of organized religion? The early church fathers understood this danger perfectly. They didn't just argue against Gnostic ideas. They systematically destroyed them. Entire libraries burned, communities scattered, teachers executed. For over 1500 years, we only knew Gnosticism through the writings of its enemies. Until 1945, when an Egyptian farmer discovered 13 buried cottices near Nag Hammadi. Suddenly, we could hear the Gnostics speak for themselves. And what they revealed changes everything we thought we knew about early Christianity.
What is satan the adversary of?
I'm still not sure I understand your concern/question about Satan or Samael. Perhaps you could be more specific which tradition you are referring to. For instance in Hebrew, the term Satan is usually translated as "opponent" or "adversary," and he is often understood to represent the sinful impulse (in Hebrew, yetzer hara) or, more generally, the forces that prevents human beings from submitting to divine will.
As I mentioned before we live in a duality physical world, where there is light and there is dark. The world is full of people radiating love, light, and nonviolence and the world is also full of people radiating hate, darkness, violence, and fear. We both can see that, to think otherwise is naive. You can choose to call the duality: black & white, good & evil, yin & yang, or god & satan. And you can choose to call god: Yahweh, Jehovah, LORD, Elohim, Adonai, or Sabaoth. You can also choose to call evil: satan, samael, abaddon, or lucifer.
It's a good question, same can be said about the Christian church. The famous question: Can a truly converted Christian ever lose his salvation? regardless how much sin he/she commits afterwards.
Touche! I should have said everyone needs to do good like everyone needs to breathe. Some people deny the need, and end up lacking; some recognize the need and engage it. Doing good includes ensuring full coverage for how one's past sins have harmed oneself and others, so the end result answers the question in each case.
IMO, doing good instead of evil negates archons influence on you and me and helps us with our struggle for spiritual liberation.
Okay ....
Because when you forget what you are, pure divine awareness, unbound by form, you fall asleep inside their dream.
How does the awoken live in this physical world then? Isn't it how Jesus lived, master of every situation, always down to earth remaining above it all?
Anyway, my point was eschatological so less important. If there is present motivation as you describe then there is always fruit and no doubt about whether any question will persist infinitely.
Why would life-and-death matters be based on manuscripts hidden from humanity for 1,500 years, how would that be fair to those who came before?
They aren't, they are based on matters accessible generally to all people and specially via echoes in all cultures. The recent phenomenon of a "complete Bible" is merely systematization of that eternal accessibility. Proof, the Bible never existed as one set of manuscripts in the same place at the same time, copies (even very poor ones) always work like the originals.
Among them were the Gnostics, communities that believed something revolutionary. You don't need priests, churches, or salvation from anyone else because the divine spark already lives within you. This wasn't just a theological disagreement. It was an existential threat to religious authority itself.
I don't understand. The divine spark makes anyone in very real senses a priest, church, and saviour. Therefore there should be no problem with letting anyone else be priest, church, or saviour too. Gnostics, or Orthodox, who would live and let live wouldn't have a problem with this. When a Gnostic, or an Orthodox, forgets the divine spark in another and declares separation that's when the war starts. So the aspect of gnosis you describe doesn't logically constitute an existential threat IMHO.
A little bit. This is a community that likes sources for sweeping claims like this. Gnostics executed, trying to recall any, nothing comes to mind. Libraries burned, doesn't sound like when the gnostics were alive. Yeah, a couple people were exiled as far as I know for "scattered communities". What physical facts did you have in mind?
For over 1500 years, we only knew Gnosticism through the writings of its enemies. Until 1945, when an Egyptian farmer discovered 13 buried co[d]ices near Nag Hammadi. Suddenly, we could hear the Gnostics speak for themselves. And what they revealed changes everything we thought we knew about early Christianity.
Thanks, James, but this doesn't sound like your own voice. When I discovered Nag Hammadi it didn't change anything I thought I knew.
I'm still not sure I understand your concern/question about Satan or Samael. Perhaps you could be more specific which tradition you are referring to.
I'm not referring to tradition but to actual beings. Is there not a single extant, conscious, sentient, communicative, spiritual being that currently answers to "Samael" and the title "satan"? Or do you not mean an entity at all but merely a cluster of abstract concepts like "Evil"?
he is often understood to represent the sinful impulse (in Hebrew, yetzer hara) or, more generally, the forces that prevents human beings from submitting to divine will.
Yeah, not what I'm talking about at all. Yetzer hara and forces are human or cosmic functions that can be instantiated, they're not abstract like evil. Similarly, spirit entities are personal beings like we are, and if they weren't then we should stop personifying them and just speak about them abstractly like evil.
the world is also full of people radiating hate, darkness, violence, and fear.
Or, these things are lack of radiation ....
And you can choose to call god: Yahweh, Jehovah, LORD, Elohim, Adonai, or Sabaoth. You can also choose to call evil: satan, samael, abaddon, or lucifer.
This sounds like you want to take the personality of both Monad and adversary out of the question. I'm focusing on persons.
I'm a person. I answer to the highest person that exists. If the Monad is a person, I answer to it; if not, I ask who is the highest person. Evil is not a person. There exists a most evil person (unless all humans and devils will be personally purified without exception). If there are no evil people, there is no point attributing personal titles to satan; if there is a most evil person, there is no point attributing him titles beyond what his evil deserves. HTH and thank you for the great counterpoint.
Doing good includes ensuring full coverage for how one's past sins have harmed oneself and others
IMO, it all comes down to foregiveness. This is what Jesus is telling us: I know the world is evil. I know that the rich and the powerful oppress us and we hate them. But, use your heart, have empathy and look into their minds and you will see how tormented they are. See how every day they live with demons that haunt them. How they can't ever rest. How they hate themselves and they hate the world around them. And when you see that for yourself, what you'll realize is they're more pitiful than you are. You may be poor, you may be a slave, but at least you're not haunted by demons. At least your soul is still alive. At least you still have the capacity for love and joy and connection. So if you really want to do good in the world, you have to forgive your enemy.
If there is present motivation as you describe then there is always fruit
I don't think it's the kind of fruit you have in mind. When you awaken to the source within, no illusion can touch you. Not the false lights of this world, not the noise of fear, not even the weight of your past. This is the secret Jesus revealed. That you could see through the illusion and realize you were never a prisoner, that the walls of the cage were made of thought. And the key has always been attention. Every time you choose awareness over reaction, truth over confusion, stillness over fear, you reclaim your divine inheritance. Maybe another way to look at your awakening capability is to compare it to a muscle. The more you work it, the stronger it gets. Pleroma, the fullness, is the realm beyond illusion. And that is the goal.
copies (even very poor ones) always work like the originals
But, they all require translation, copies and originals. Every single word you've read in the Bible is a translation. And every translation is an interpretation. And many are mistranslations. The question I ask is why were these mistransations allowed to stand? Why, when scholars knew better, did the institutional church
continue to promote translations that led to guilt, fear, and dependency rather than liberation, trust, and empowerment.
Therefore there should be no problem with letting anyone else be priest, church, or saviour too
I totally agree with you on this. But, unfortunatelly it was a problem.
So the aspect of gnosis you describe doesn't logically constitute an existential threat IMHO
Tell that to the Cathars. It was during the 13th century that organized persecution of the Cathars and their faith reached a climax. Cathar teaching regarding Jesus Christ was very different from that espoused by the medieval Catholic Church. For instance they didn't believe Christ was resurrected (something you don't find in Gnosticism either). They also rejected the cross as a holy symbol, for the Cathars, it was no more than a torture device, and therefore a symbol of evil. I can't say I disagree with that. Cathars caught by inquisitors who refused to recant were executed, often by being burned at the stake. The Church also burned their religious texts so they can't recruit new members. And in 1321 the last known Cathar Perfect in the Languedoc was burned at the stake.
Entire libraries burned, communities scattered, teachers executed. What physical facts did you have in mind?
When I discovered Nag Hammadi it didn't change anything I thought I knew
It was an important discovery for me. The first thing I did is read the Gospel of Thomas. Immediately I realized that it fundamentally differs from key
teachings of mainstream Christianity. The first saying in the gospel goes like this "and he said whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death". And then I said that's me, I will discover... and I finished all 114 sayings, and then I started to explore the rest of the manuscripts.
I'm a person. I answer to the highest person that exists. If the Monad is a person, I answer to it;
Well, Monad is not a person. It is the true source. The consciousness behind all consciousness. Monad doesn't want anything from you, it doesn't need you to answer to anyone. It does not communicate to you through words. It does not require priests to interpret its will. The Monad communicates through frequency, through vibration, through direct energetic transmission that bypasses the physical senses entirely. And the symptom of receiving this transmission, the sign that the signal is reaching you is a sound that seems to come from inside your own head.
if there is a most evil person
That reminds me of Aleister Crowley the self-proclaimed Magus of the Aeon, "The most wicked man in the World.". Crowley was also a heroin addict, and he was the self-proclaimed ‘Great Beast’. To say that Aleister Crowley was an evil man would be an understatement.
'There is academic controversy about whether Catharism was an organized religion or whether the medieval Church imagined or exaggerated it. The lack of any central organisation among Cathars and regional differences in beliefs and practices has prompted some scholars to question whether the Church exaggerated its threat while others wonder whether it even existed.'
'Several times in history the term "Cathar" was used to different groups that were deemed as heretics rather than a specific one .... It is certain that these "Cathars" were not the same as the self-designated The Perfecti of the Albigenses, however reflects the historical usage of the term in orthodox circles as a term to designate "heretics".'
So, yeah, neither the Cathars nor the Catholics needed to accommodate the extremists among them who perceived an existential threat, it always comes from extremism (declaration of separation) as I said.
It sounds like you're lumping together the entire history of churches against heretics with a small subset of it composed of churches against gnostics, that's why I got confused.
I appreciate the Deschner link, which I read with interest as it's always important to know the sordid history of people you work with.
Well, Monad is not a person
You say it's a consciousness. Who is the first person then? Serious question. It would be more accurate to say the Monad is beyond personality, resolving everything we can positively postulate about personality and nonpersonality.
And the symptom of receiving this transmission, the sign that the signal is reaching you is a sound that seems to come from inside your own head.
Can you distinguish this signal from other signals that have similar characteristics? Serious question.
It's a good question, same can be said about the Christian church. The famous question: Can a truly converted Christian ever lose his salvation? regardless how much sin he/she commits afterwards. This discussion has been ongoing for centuries in the church. According to the Gnostics, the archons are distortions of consciousness, echoes born when divine light entered the realm of matter and fragmented. They exist in the unseen layers of thought, emotion, and energy.
IMO, doing good instead of evil negates archons influence on you and me and helps us with our struggle for spiritual liberation. The Gospel of Mary describes this as the kingdom of the flesh, a world where false powers, the archons, stir desire and confusion until the soul forgets its own light. The desire (money, sex, etc.) and confusion help the archons exercise influence over us. Their influence doesn't come from force, but from forgetting. Because when you forget what you are, pure divine awareness, unbound by form, you fall asleep inside their dream.
The Catholic Church was not born from Jesus, but from the Roman Empire using his name to maintain control.
We have already discussed the last part of your question. Time is infinite. This one lifetime is just one experiment, one attempt.
The Christianity you and I know today emerged from a brutal ideological war that lasted centuries. The Roman Church won the war. In the first few hundred years after Jesus's death, dozens of Christian movements flourished across the Mediterranean. Among them were the Gnostics, communities that believed something revolutionary. You don't need priests, churches, or salvation from anyone else because the divine spark already lives within you. This wasn't just a theological disagreement. It was an existential threat to religious authority itself. Now, using critical thinking, if people can access the true God directly through inner knowledge, what happens to the entire power structure of organized religion? The early church fathers understood this danger perfectly. They didn't just argue against Gnostic ideas. They systematically destroyed them. Entire libraries burned, communities scattered, teachers executed. For over 1500 years, we only knew Gnosticism through the writings of its enemies. Until 1945, when an Egyptian farmer discovered 13 buried cottices near Nag Hammadi. Suddenly, we could hear the Gnostics speak for themselves. And what they revealed changes everything we thought we knew about early Christianity.
I'm still not sure I understand your concern/question about Satan or Samael. Perhaps you could be more specific which tradition you are referring to. For instance in Hebrew, the term Satan is usually translated as "opponent" or "adversary," and he is often understood to represent the sinful impulse (in Hebrew, yetzer hara) or, more generally, the forces that prevents human beings from submitting to divine will.
As I mentioned before we live in a duality physical world, where there is light and there is dark. The world is full of people radiating love, light, and nonviolence and the world is also full of people radiating hate, darkness, violence, and fear. We both can see that, to think otherwise is naive. You can choose to call the duality: black & white, good & evil, yin & yang, or god & satan. And you can choose to call god: Yahweh, Jehovah, LORD, Elohim, Adonai, or Sabaoth. You can also choose to call evil: satan, samael, abaddon, or lucifer.
Touche! I should have said everyone needs to do good like everyone needs to breathe. Some people deny the need, and end up lacking; some recognize the need and engage it. Doing good includes ensuring full coverage for how one's past sins have harmed oneself and others, so the end result answers the question in each case.
Okay ....
How does the awoken live in this physical world then? Isn't it how Jesus lived, master of every situation, always down to earth remaining above it all?
Anyway, my point was eschatological so less important. If there is present motivation as you describe then there is always fruit and no doubt about whether any question will persist infinitely.
They aren't, they are based on matters accessible generally to all people and specially via echoes in all cultures. The recent phenomenon of a "complete Bible" is merely systematization of that eternal accessibility. Proof, the Bible never existed as one set of manuscripts in the same place at the same time, copies (even very poor ones) always work like the originals.
I don't understand. The divine spark makes anyone in very real senses a priest, church, and saviour. Therefore there should be no problem with letting anyone else be priest, church, or saviour too. Gnostics, or Orthodox, who would live and let live wouldn't have a problem with this. When a Gnostic, or an Orthodox, forgets the divine spark in another and declares separation that's when the war starts. So the aspect of gnosis you describe doesn't logically constitute an existential threat IMHO.
A little bit. This is a community that likes sources for sweeping claims like this. Gnostics executed, trying to recall any, nothing comes to mind. Libraries burned, doesn't sound like when the gnostics were alive. Yeah, a couple people were exiled as far as I know for "scattered communities". What physical facts did you have in mind?
Thanks, James, but this doesn't sound like your own voice. When I discovered Nag Hammadi it didn't change anything I thought I knew.
I'm not referring to tradition but to actual beings. Is there not a single extant, conscious, sentient, communicative, spiritual being that currently answers to "Samael" and the title "satan"? Or do you not mean an entity at all but merely a cluster of abstract concepts like "Evil"?
Yeah, not what I'm talking about at all. Yetzer hara and forces are human or cosmic functions that can be instantiated, they're not abstract like evil. Similarly, spirit entities are personal beings like we are, and if they weren't then we should stop personifying them and just speak about them abstractly like evil.
Or, these things are lack of radiation ....
This sounds like you want to take the personality of both Monad and adversary out of the question. I'm focusing on persons.
I'm a person. I answer to the highest person that exists. If the Monad is a person, I answer to it; if not, I ask who is the highest person. Evil is not a person. There exists a most evil person (unless all humans and devils will be personally purified without exception). If there are no evil people, there is no point attributing personal titles to satan; if there is a most evil person, there is no point attributing him titles beyond what his evil deserves. HTH and thank you for the great counterpoint.
IMO, it all comes down to foregiveness. This is what Jesus is telling us: I know the world is evil. I know that the rich and the powerful oppress us and we hate them. But, use your heart, have empathy and look into their minds and you will see how tormented they are. See how every day they live with demons that haunt them. How they can't ever rest. How they hate themselves and they hate the world around them. And when you see that for yourself, what you'll realize is they're more pitiful than you are. You may be poor, you may be a slave, but at least you're not haunted by demons. At least your soul is still alive. At least you still have the capacity for love and joy and connection. So if you really want to do good in the world, you have to forgive your enemy.
I don't think it's the kind of fruit you have in mind. When you awaken to the source within, no illusion can touch you. Not the false lights of this world, not the noise of fear, not even the weight of your past. This is the secret Jesus revealed. That you could see through the illusion and realize you were never a prisoner, that the walls of the cage were made of thought. And the key has always been attention. Every time you choose awareness over reaction, truth over confusion, stillness over fear, you reclaim your divine inheritance. Maybe another way to look at your awakening capability is to compare it to a muscle. The more you work it, the stronger it gets. Pleroma, the fullness, is the realm beyond illusion. And that is the goal.
But, they all require translation, copies and originals. Every single word you've read in the Bible is a translation. And every translation is an interpretation. And many are mistranslations. The question I ask is why were these mistransations allowed to stand? Why, when scholars knew better, did the institutional church continue to promote translations that led to guilt, fear, and dependency rather than liberation, trust, and empowerment.
I totally agree with you on this. But, unfortunatelly it was a problem.
Tell that to the Cathars. It was during the 13th century that organized persecution of the Cathars and their faith reached a climax. Cathar teaching regarding Jesus Christ was very different from that espoused by the medieval Catholic Church. For instance they didn't believe Christ was resurrected (something you don't find in Gnosticism either). They also rejected the cross as a holy symbol, for the Cathars, it was no more than a torture device, and therefore a symbol of evil. I can't say I disagree with that. Cathars caught by inquisitors who refused to recant were executed, often by being burned at the stake. The Church also burned their religious texts so they can't recruit new members. And in 1321 the last known Cathar Perfect in the Languedoc was burned at the stake.
Do you expect me to list all the atrocities committed by the Church? I could write a book, but I won't. Karlheinz Deschner and many others already did. Here is a Wikipedia link to "Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (In English Criminal History of Christianity)": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriminalgeschichte_des_Christentums?ysclid=mkl1vkukso874162662
It was an important discovery for me. The first thing I did is read the Gospel of Thomas. Immediately I realized that it fundamentally differs from key teachings of mainstream Christianity. The first saying in the gospel goes like this "and he said whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death". And then I said that's me, I will discover... and I finished all 114 sayings, and then I started to explore the rest of the manuscripts.
Well, Monad is not a person. It is the true source. The consciousness behind all consciousness. Monad doesn't want anything from you, it doesn't need you to answer to anyone. It does not communicate to you through words. It does not require priests to interpret its will. The Monad communicates through frequency, through vibration, through direct energetic transmission that bypasses the physical senses entirely. And the symptom of receiving this transmission, the sign that the signal is reaching you is a sound that seems to come from inside your own head.
That reminds me of Aleister Crowley the self-proclaimed Magus of the Aeon, "The most wicked man in the World.". Crowley was also a heroin addict, and he was the self-proclaimed ‘Great Beast’. To say that Aleister Crowley was an evil man would be an understatement.
So, yeah, neither the Cathars nor the Catholics needed to accommodate the extremists among them who perceived an existential threat, it always comes from extremism (declaration of separation) as I said.
It sounds like you're lumping together the entire history of churches against heretics with a small subset of it composed of churches against gnostics, that's why I got confused.
I appreciate the Deschner link, which I read with interest as it's always important to know the sordid history of people you work with.
You say it's a consciousness. Who is the first person then? Serious question. It would be more accurate to say the Monad is beyond personality, resolving everything we can positively postulate about personality and nonpersonality.
Can you distinguish this signal from other signals that have similar characteristics? Serious question.