I need more gnostic tales. Not dry academic papers about it, but books that are actually engaging, compelling and visceral.
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Hymn of the Pearl
Voyage to Arcturus.
God I miss the gnostic-schizo threads of 2021
Same.
Why did they die out anyway? The Laruelle threads were so good, it might sound stupid but I've never had such insights about my own metaphysical positions as when discussing things back then.
Anons used to get it. Now the best I can seem to hope for is the occasional "how to break out of the matrix" threads on /x/ before it devolves into monistic screeching
I suppose because they were sustained by two people, with the occasional halo of schizoposters that any Gnosticism or Gnosticism-adjacent thread on this board tends to attract. Gnosticism without rigor or daily practice all too easily veers into kitsch. And articulating a White Gnosticism for the Clown Yuga is very much a DIY affair.
>rigor or daily practice
Lifestyle-wise perhaps, but as for a consistent praxis, there is nothing you can really do except try your best to navigate the world while keeping your mind on the objective. I've become disillusioned with systems of practice which always end up feeling like they're attempting to smuggle some metaphysical virus beneath practices touted as being able to stand on their own. Either you remove the religious backbone and it becomes meaningless, or you can't remove it, in which case it's fundamentally incompatible with gnosticism in pretty much all cases I've run across. When your best bet is some milquetoast "rerouting" of Theravada that's never been practiced anywhere as such, you know it's fricked. At this point I'm convinced there is no gnostic praxis, not anymore at least. There is, however, a gnostic experience, or impulse, which everyone has to varying extents but almost nobody acts on.
>White Gnosticism for the Clown Yuga
Who the frick cares anyway. Regardless of how strange this century is, deep down I don't believe this holds any kind of eschatological significance. That's how you get to tangents about archons actually being mantids from andromeda who genetically engineered israelites or whatever. Yeah sure maybe but that's not the point of it all.
Agreed, there are no "Gnostic breathing exercises", the practice just is the cultivation of the experience. And you articulate a DIY White Gnosticism for yourself, not for others. Becoming some kind of Gnostic Jay Dyer or internet personality is stupid. Gnostics shouldn't crave recognition. I'm as wary of slotting Gnosticism into the narcissism economy as you are of metaphysical viruses.
Ironically, I think early Christian monasticism boasts the only real model of Gnostic asceticism: praying to your inner light in a desert, far away from the world. St. Anthony talks about gnosis in his letters. Athanasius demeans him by his association with the world, but I don't trust Athanasius, anyways.
Why do you think there is a racial component to gnosticism? I've never really bothered with notions of spiritual race, racial soul and so on.
>for yourself, not for others
Of course, what I meant was, abrahamism as a whole has a linear perception of time, an evolution towards something, whereas dharma perceives time as cyclical, but I think gnosticism is neither, really. Time is a component of Yaldabaoth itself, and I don't think the struggle is really related to, constrained or affected by the progression of time.
>praying to your inner light in a desert, far away from the world
I think you're right. Contemporary eremitism is harder than ever to achieve, though.
Who said anything about race? I want a moratorium on the use of all culture war-adjacent concepts for the next few decades.
>Gnostic time
Look up Henry Corbin's "Man and Time", there's a chapter in their by Henri-Charles Peuch on Gnostic conceptions of time, your intuition is correct. In summary: pagan time is a circle, Abrahamic time is a line, Gnostic time is a broken/dotted line.
Also, pic related is a new translation of Sloterdijk's early work on world-flight. There are chapters on Gnosticism, Buddhism, and desert monasticism.
>I think you're right. Contemporary eremitism is harder than ever to achieve, though.
I am blessed to be in a position to practice it. I work from home and don't live in the West proper.
Oh, it's just that you said "white", so I just assumed you were referring to race. IQfy brain is real
>Henry Corbin's "Man and Time"
Definitely will, the subject of time especially as it relates to what is irrelevant to it (Pleroma) is very interesting to me. What is the implication of a dotted line?
"Broken" evokes Sophia's fall to me, implying that there was a linear time before the fall, and a "new" time after that. Would that imply that pleromatic time runs concurrently, so to speak, to kenomatic time? Like parallel lines that never cross? I know there is no such thing as a pleromatic notion of time, but I'm saying this for convenience's sake.
It's what I've always thought anyway, the idea of time only means something within the world, but I would assume it's more like a curve being created from individual foci. There are "times", we are within one "time" but there is an overarching plane from which time is instantiated, so to speak
>new translation of Sloterdijk's early work on world-flight
Nice, I liked After God
>I am blessed
Yeah, you are. I'm in that awkward place on the outskirts now as circumstances forced me out of neethood. I'm hoping to do the same as you and work from home eventually, I'm guessing you work in some kind of tech field?
Yes, a properly soteriological Gnosticism, not just Black (= diagnostic) Gnosticism which is limited by the horizon of the world.
The breaks in the dotted line are exits from time, just big enough to fit an individual, but never a collective. Since we started talking about Laruelle, his image of the particle that can pass through a mountain is basically it. Like a neutrino that is never impeded by matter (or massless particles in general: I'm still waiting on a scientific formalization of Gnosticism, Yaldabaoth as the Higgs Field, etc.)
Your intuitions are correct. Pic related is also from the article.
>tech field
Freelance writing jobs. If you live somewhere cheap, a twenty dollar project is food for a couple days. Miss me with the rest.
Ah, I see. I think that the subtlety here is that while soteriology in general tends to be praxis-oriented (do this -> achieve that) due to a transcendental fixation, gnosticism, due to being immanentist, cannot ever be so. It would then seem a bit contradictory to see gnosticism as anything practical; the gnostic salvation is not an action (it's not henosis, it's not Nirvana, etc) nor an inaction. I don't know what it can be called. An event? "Gnosis" implies a realization but really what I'm trying to say is that I feel like all manners of realizing or attaining anything are just completely antithetical to what the real escape is. When you "attain" something in a spiritual context, you're just tapping into the part of the world that produces that thing. It's just jumping from one pond to another when what you're really trying to do is to not get wet in the first place.
>exits from time
Yes, that's great. Literally holes in the grid as they'd put it over in /ppg/. I like your image though because there's a kind of inevitability to it, or inherent imperfection. Time "leaks" spirit by design, there is no way to keep us here.
I don't know shit about physics so I don't know how such a formalization could be done. Maybe a mathematical one would be more adapted, no?
>enthumesis
This really is the kenomatic fuel. Subsistence through decay. Makes these "gnostics think this is ugly" pictures of mountain ranges all the more irritating
>Freelance writing jobs
Sounds pretty stress-free, that's nice. Working towards autarky?
Good points, we can define Gnosticism or the Gnostic life negatively then. Gnosticism isn't about wanting to build schools and hospitals and doing missionary work. It isn't about becoming a Twitter Gnostic. It isn't about publishing a new book on Gnosticism that finally clears up the category crisis that is plaguing the field.
I get what you're saying that there's no such thing as a non-positional attainment, no such thing as an action that doesn't localize you. You're just swapping out one foreground for another, but the problem just is the persistence of a foreground - and of course, Manichaean demons are creatures that can perceive only foregrounds. Animals perceive mainly foregrounds with a very thin rind of peripheral reflection. Humans are maybe half-and-half.
If time as pure change is the pandemonium, then time as retroactivity must be the pleroma: so if we run up the scale, Angels/Aeons perceive only peripheries without foregrounds. In Buddhist terms, they can never turn off their perception of the repulsive which is the condition for the delightful. Subsistence through decay. I'm just sharing my own idiosyncratic ideas, these have no relation to any system that I know of beside Peuch's.
>negatively
It seems to be a necessity. Isn't it Laruelle's whole point with the One foreclosed to transcendence?
What you're saying about schools and hospitals makes me wonder: at what point does compassion become world affirming as opposed to being a reaction against evil? I have a cat, I want her to be free of suffering, so I do my best to create a good existence for her. Yet I'm aware that she probably suffers more than she enjoys her existence, even though her locus as an animal is probably too narrow to truly realize this. Is my compassion being used as a perverted way of turning me into a gear in the great demiurgic grinder?
>category crisis
Don't you think that for anyone who really gets it, there's not much of a crisis? Not to sound like a pretentious homosexual but academic quibbling is its own thing, understanding what the gnostic temperament stands for is another entirely.
>no such thing as an action that doesn't localize you
Exactly. Reminds me of an analogy from one of the past threads, about Saklas as the great librarian, the books as loci of existence. You can change the narrative, you can shift the tone as much as you'd like, you're still within his grasp. Even the strangest, esoteric and unconventional books still belong in a library.
What makes you say that humans are half-and-half foreground and reflection?
>time as retroactivity
I'm having a bit of trouble conceptualizing this as something else than run of the mill "time as a 4D space" holographic principle shit, which I'm sure is not what you mean at all. Could you elaborate?
Only peripheries without foregrounds, is that the same as an acontextual perception?
>2.5 million little particulate intelligences that toil, suffer, and die for every one full-fledged intellect that goons to anal gape porn
What an image.
The response you're always going to get to this, though, is "in spite of all, it's worth it anyway". i.e. some kind of purely anti-utilitarian romanticization of the struggle because that's the best the world affords you anyway. I think they're full of shit, and I think deep down they know it too, but I understand why they say it.
I suppose it becomes world-affirming when it becomes intentional, when you can't edify/heal by your presence but must act to heal and edify. I think you have to be a bit inhuman to want to leave this place. You have to love a little less. It's just the grammar of the world. The white light isn't some archontic thresher, it's just Love, or maybe I should say Care in the Heideggerian sense as an ontological comportment. Your grandma on the other side isn't some illusion projected by the Archons, your granny is in some sense THE archon - or your love for her is. But here with this formula I begin to lapse into the kind of kitschy gnostic 'look at me look at me' formulas I've become seriously disillusioned with.
I couldn't give a frick less about the category crisis. I will never understand the academic's penchant for studying something he doesn't believe in. It's kind of god-like, in a way, to study the theodicies of a fallen world, it's like something a God would do in some deva mansion for leisure. Except these scholars don't have that luxury. They're right down here with us.
>Saklas the great Librarian
Right, the khoric library and its algorithmics of connection. And I mean simply that human beings can reflect on their actions, but maybe half-and-half is being a bit too optimistic.
Maybe "retroactivity" isn't the right word, what I'm trying to convey is that an angelic being is in a permanent asubha meditation state. You know how they advise monks to imagine the guts of a beautiful woman? Like that: an angel can't turn off its perception of both skin-and-viscera, it isn't hypnotized by the immediacy or foreground perception of skin.
I believe higher beings possess a three-dimensional visual field, the way ours is a two-dimensional screen. An Angel could never mistake the rope in twilight for a snake, because an Angel does not perceive shapes set against a phenomenal screen. But I am rambling.
>in spite of it all, it's worth it anyway
For whom it is worth it, until it isn't. I don't believe that normies are all secretly unhappy. I believe those who enjoy this world and those who don't are mutually irrelevant to each other. But the discernment of suffering always grows in proportion with the limits of your cognitive horizon. Or maybe human/animal suffering is tiny blip in a placid sea of indifference and God's in his heaven, all's right with the world. I'll convert to paganism and renounce Gnosticism if that turns out to be the case, but until then...
Check'd. What are 3 books you would cite as among the most influential to your current thought?
>I don't believe that normies are all secretly unhappy.
To you, what makes them normies?
>To you, what makes them normies?
Their compulsive appropriation of the "human experience" - to them, the world and their desires are syntonic with who they take themselves to be. They are the people who go with the grain of themselves and the world, which actually doesn't commit me to believing they're automatically "NPC Black personcattle cucks".
>Their compulsive appropriation of the "human experience" - to them, the world and their desires are syntonic with who they take themselves to be.
I'm too moronic to understand what this means conclusively, sorry. Is it something along the lines of them having harmony and compatibility between the world, their desires, and their self-concept?
And therefore, they label any deviation from this as "abnormal", thus, appropriating the "human experience"?
Much appreciated.
They are those who attribute a sense of self and control to what has been given to them, and what they could have never given to themselves. On the one hand, society (which is why they are the carriers of its force), and on the other, their bodies and minds. You could say these things are... foreclosed to our will. The world is the sum total of investments in this order.
Ah so existentialists who have a dualistic worldview between themselves and the rest of humanity?
Voyage to Arcturus. Book of Thomas the Contender. Nyanamoli's books on Buddhist practice (incidentally, if we take a more mind-based view on Gnosticism (like the Gospel of Truth presumably does, as it identifies evil with ignorance) then the "pleroma" is nothing but the intrinsic luminosity of the mind, or the bliss of an experiential field relieved of the burden of objects of experience - a decoupling of Kant's formula)
>must act to heal and edify.
It's inevitable though isn't it? We're not Buddhas, our presence doesn't purify the world.
Maybe you're right. Inhuman, or simply disillusioned, I don't know, a variety of factors could lead to wanting out. It's interesting that you say love itself is the archon, I understand what you mean, but there is also a gnostic love in the dodecad. It all seems murky. I can't imagine escaping would require abandoning all love but maybe that's my wishful thinking. Because the luminous attractor made out of pure love being in fact your own love of the things of the world projected back to you, rather than some cartoony archontic machine, makes too much sense.
>the academic's penchant
They tend to aestheticize these things. I love Lacarrière precisely because he has the opposite attitude to this nonchalant "heh, they used to believe in some silly stuff didn't they?" smugness. I don't know if he believes, but at least he's truly engaging with it.
>algorithmics of connection
Makes me think that in a database of being, the only thing that would have you be automatically rejected would be to be connected to nothing at all. If you can't be described in relation to something that is anchored to this demiurgic spreadsheet, you're useless.
We can reflect, but even this reflection is tainted, I find. It's not "metareflective" enough to afford us any kind of truly clear vision. We can only intellectualize our predicament, but with the same level of helplessness as the chickens in battery cages.
>asubha
Basically, to see the world as what it truly is. No filters placed upon perception. You talk about a vision in three dimensions, but the way you bring up meditation on decay makes me think of the opposite, something like a dimensionless vision, something utterly decontextualized, where only the movement of the kenomatic maelström remains, and all of the illusory forms it takes are not even registered.
But perhaps we're talking about different things.
>I don't believe that normies are all secretly unhappy
No, but they can definitely intellectually acknowledge the flaw in this reasoning. They know that their enjoyment of the world is provisional, but they make the choice of throwing themselves into it nonetheless, as per pic related.
>placid sea of indifference
If that were the case, why would the mechanics of the world be so hell-bent on disintegrating everything?
I sometimes buy birds to release them. Am I, algorithmically speaking, breaking even? The birds are freed but I'm also handing cold hard cash to the man who is catching them in the first place so he can have a bite to eat to do so again in the future. The 'inhuman' responses are either cutting the knot and destroying his store (social suicide, possible imprisonment, he and others like him will just keep doing what they're doing), or relinquishing any obligation I might feel to these creatures and working on my own awakening (possibly selfish?). I'm asking you where my responsibility lies. We're not buddhas or heroes. Maybe the best option is to keep doing what I'm doing, acting as a leak in the system, siphoning off just what little of the pipe flow I can.
You should read Lacarriere's book on the Desert Fathers. It's on internet archive. He remains an avowed atheist but he is always charitable to who he's studying. As always he is a consummate storyteller.
The demiurgic spreadsheet is on the money. I think the Buddhists thematize it as Mara getting tired of leaving out traps for prey he know won't come. It's like that. It's like the world - or your own internal sensualized model of it - sends out little feelers that trigger responses in those who have the organs tuned to pick them up. the response is all that matters. Any kind of interactionism is binding, but not all bonds are necessarily unwholesome.
I don't know, this is very tricky. Perhaps the Jains have it right but simply by living, you're harming things anyway. The world is designed so that your existence is only made possible through evil. So there's no ideal move except maybe for immediately killing yourself, and even that I'm doubtful about.
>He remains an avowed atheist
Surprising considering his way of writing about the gnostics.
>leaving out traps for prey he know won't come
Yeah, exactly, the point may be to simply atrophy the parts of the world that hold a grasp on you. Whichever "descriptors" or elements of the database are currently linked to your individuality, discarding them one by one. Neuroplasticity on an ontological scale, the less you feed the world, the looser its hold becomes. Simple in theory as always, but neuroplasticity works by feeding one pathway while starving another. Which pathway is there to feed if what you're trying to do is eliminate interactionism?
>not all bonds are necessarily unwholesome
This seems somewhat contradictory with what you just said, no?
>Which pathway is there to feed if what you're trying to do is eliminate interactionism?
The pathway of non-interactionism, as far as it can be modeled or cloned by interactionism. Middle Way. Gotta immanentize the world in the end, if we're going to be immanentists to begin with. So it loosening its hold over you is you loosening your hold over it. So that's what I mean by wholesome binds, which are shed up the jhana scale, anyways.
>Gotta immanentize the world
The difference between being dreamt and dying with the dream, and separating yourself from the dreamer. It's hard to explain but it's like the other side of the coin to monistic idealism. The true duality. I'll try to formulate it more eloquently later because this probably sounds moronic.
>shed up the jhana scale
Do you think the jhanic realms hold any metaphysical value, and that they're not just another foreground? They are "attained", are they not?
I think the jhanas are successive purifications of the last stubborn bit of foreground. You're removing your capacity for dystonic reactions - your mind doing what you don't want it do. Which in your model is you shedding your "descriptors" in the system until the last bind left is blissful relief, and the most general conditions of experience - infinite space, infinite perception, etc.
I get what you're saying. In that case though, why not just become a Theravadin? The conclusion to the jhanas being the removal of descriptors is that Nibbana is, in effect, the soteriological goal.
>why not just become a Theravadin?
Because I think if you're a real "gnostic" your problems and their Solution has to be sui generis. Basically, writing the manual to your mind as you're happening to read it. The whole foreground thing is me wringing together the insights of different people into something that makes sense for me, like your descriptor model makes sense for you though I don't want to overstate our commitments to them.
Those insights we have are valuable insofar as they allow us to map out the prison, however I remain convinced that beyond everything else, death will be the frontier of experience where the real possibility of escape unfolds, as the trappings of conditioned existence become weaker. Our models are provisional in that sense.
Not unless Yaldabaoth is a voluntarist demon, and even the certainty of this knowledge is a deception on an angle we can't even conceive of, in which case lol. Conversely, the highest idea of the true God is a voluntarist light, who can unmake even the eternal truths of mathematics. This the frontier of speculation for me right now, but it's all pretty formulas and architectonics. At the end of the day I am just preparing for the moment of death
>Not unless Yaldabaoth is a voluntarist demon
As you say, in this case it's useless to even talk about. You might as well go the Marcion route and rely purely on grace.
>who can unmake even the eternal truths of mathematics
That's how I see it. It's not called an Alien God for nothing. Even mathematical platonism is within the realm of Saklas, the way I see it.
Weird list. Some really good choices and some real bad ones. I wonder if most people making lists even have read their own recommendations.
>laruelle threads
Hah. I memba schizo postin in those
I think he means white gnosticism as world affirming as opposed to anti cosmic black gnosticism. At least I've seen that usage on twitter before.
>christian gnosis
Side note: You should read Clement's Stromateis perhaps. Former saint. Then heretic. Think has been rehabilitated recently. Alexandrian school. Close relation to gnostics and neoplatonists therefore. But evaluates gnosis in terms of orthodoxy. And also critiques certain sects. Idk.
>I think he means white gnosticism as world affirming as opposed to anti cosmic black gnosticism. At least I've seen that usage on twitter before.
I don't. "world affirming gnosticism" is a contradiction.
I made part of the list and I've read nearly every book on it.
>world-affirming gnosticism is a contradiction
According to whom? I guess an intelligent gnostic is probably a contradiction too, amirite??? :p
I'd drop the leguin. She's pleb. Drop castaneda too. He's a scammer. Personally I found bloom's voyage quite weak. Gnostic world is good modern academia. But no other modern academia? Suppose the rest is alright tho. No clue on who Rosario is. Couple other no names on there. Commentary on pistis sophia but no pistis sophia itself? Weird choices wrt Laruelle too. Sloterdijk is based tho
Omelas is a Gnostic allegory, probably the purest there is, so long as we imagine Yaldabaoth as the ultimate inverse utilitarian (maximizing suffering for the good of the one, a formula repeated almost verbatim in Voyage to Arcturus). The Tiantai and Rainbow Body books are dubious, but not that dubious.
>yalbadoath
Yawn. I feel all these arguments about how the world is evil are driven more by pathos than logos. Take a break from the misery on the internet. Get laid. Or not. But I disagree with the basic premise. And not all gnostic sects believed in an evil creator/creation IIRC. Idk. I will leave thread to y'all since my position appears to be minority
>muh emotional argument
You can just go by sheer biomass. There are 2.5 million ants for each human being. 2.5 million little particulate intelligences that toil, suffer, and die for every one full-fledged intellect that goons to anal gape porn. Reality is very much in the negative. Suffering outweighs pleasure by a huge margin.
>just get laid bro
There's the door.
I think people who argue in this manner tend to not really get what gnosticism really means at its core. Evil is more than just an adjective used to describe things that produce suffering, it's a substance, a foundational mechanism that is as incompatible with spirit as water is with oil. It's not "the world is evil" as a qualitative description (though it can also be that), it's more like "the world is made of evil, it runs on evil". It goes farther than just moralism, it's evil as a mechanism that works against all you deem "worth it" in the world.
>Get laid.
FREE AT LAST
Case in point here. The existence of beauty is tarnished by the gears of evil, always. This doesn't mean beauty doesn't exist in the world, it just means that it doesn't belong there.
You say you disagree with the basic premise but I think you misconstrue it as some nondescript schopenhauerian scorn for everything.
>existence of beauty is tarnished
I said I'd leave but I wanted to comment one last time. Y'all seem like smarties. And I used to be a gnostic of sorts myself. Catholic now however.
Anyway, isn't it amazing that beauty exists at all? It seems like many of these arguments presume that one could do better than the demiurge or god or whathaveyou. But our universe is fine tuned for life. Our universe permits beauty. How would creatures emerge without evolution which yes includes struggle? How could life exist without decay which yes includes pain? I can't imagine a world without bugs. Even though bugs are kinda annoying.
On the modern front, Leibniz's theodicy is quite interesting. He says there is a compossibility (co or composite possibility for best world) of good and evil or harmony and chaos. God, in his (Leibniz's) opinion, included evil and chaos in order to make the world maximally good and harmonic world. Can't have one without the other as Lao Tzu would perhaps say. Even Buddhism, which calls dukkha all, seems to imply that the dharma is in fact a first principle above it. And when you get into theories like trikaya they quite resemble orthodox christology in their own way...
To get back to the ancients however, it seems existence is a good of sorts: and is best reconciled with suffering thru a more orthodox theology as opposed to a more anti cosmic gnosticism. There's a book by Perl called Thinking Being which explains the reasoning behind existence being a good quite well and traces it thru Aquinas and scholastics back to Aristotle and Plato and Parmenides et al. Parmenides is really best argument against life as an illusion or nothingness or evil. At least if you view evil as a privation. To use a more heretical pov: as Crowley says, "all sorrows are but shadows yet there is that which remains" (the bliss of samadhi as pure existence in itself). I enjoy life. Life is a gift. I do not feel like a prisoner. I feel like a lucky man.
Gnostic creation seems like a bunch of mental gymnastics. Everything is evil! But also somehow Sophia jumped into the mix and gave us wisdom and goodness with her divine sparks. Which is it? Sounds complicated. And unnecessary. A lot of it also seems born of antisemitism. Ohnoz! I don't like OT God.... But I think this is precisely part of paradox of Jesus. He incarnated into the most depraved ethnonational religion possible. Credo quam absurdum to quote Anselm.
Anyway. I stand by recommendation of Clement. And am quite a fan of Sloterdijk and Laruele. I remain sensitive to vertical tension and weird mysticism. Seems hard without allying yourself to a tradition. But am just a human. May be wrong.
Life could be more perfect. But it is also perfect as is. Paradox perhaps. But not contradiction. Perfection is a process and not a stasis according to some.
Bless y'all's hearts. Gnosticism gets dangerous once you enter Frankist/Sabbatean territory but I suppose that is more of a kabbalistic thing...
>isn't it amazing that beauty exists at all
This strikes me as another way of saying "just be content with the way things are, as shitty as it may be". I don't really see beauty as an integral part of the world, I see it as an incidental stranger, passing through, or a simulacrum of what could be.
The universe isn't fine-tuned for life, it's anti-life. Everything is in a constant state of decay. The universe is against you and is actively killing you.
This idea of "can't have one without the other" has always seemed short sighted to me. The logic of this existence has it that good has to coexist with evil, but who's to say that there cannot be another logic of existence, or rather, a "logic beyond existence", or non-ontology? This is the best we're going to get? I don't buy it.
>At least if you view evil as a privation
There's the issue. Privatio boni is the ultimate non-argument and Plotinus never made a single compelling argument in favor of it. It's just a way to handwave the problem of evil without having to think too hard about it. If the farthest emanations from the One are evil, what does that say about the One? Evil as a privation still has evil be the result, albeit indirect, of the One's existence.
>mental gymnastics
I would say the exact same thing about privatio boni. It simply makes no sense. Monism is metaphysical stockholm syndrome.
>Everything is evil
>But also somehow
You said you used to "be a gnostic of sorts" but you don't seem acquainted with the material. Have you read The Gnostics?
>antisemitism
Who fricking cares about this, how tedious, this reminds me of some radio show I heard once where a marcionist was being interviewed and the host just couldn't stop blabbering about how rejecting the OT was antisemitic. How dull do you have to be to see gnosticism and somehow boil it down to something as trivial, sterile and soulless as political quibbling?
The OT isn't being rejected like apocryphal literature is rejected in nicene christianity, it's seen for what it is, i.e. archontic.
I've read The Gnostics by LaCarriere. And the Nag Hammadi texts. I am actually very interested in LaCarriere's Desert Father book mentioned earlier too. Alas seems OOP.
Anyway. To each their own.
Quick retort:
>non-ontology
>logic beyond existence
Literally saying nothing IMO. You are on, to my mind, what Parmenides would call "the way of opinion" i.e., going nowhere
Also:
>emanationism
I believe in creatio ex nihilo so jot that down
Anyway. Headed off to work. May return in a couple hours. Just tossin in my two cents...
Last bit
>archontic
Everything has a beginning or arche! And arche as rules is not bad either
>Alas seems OOP.
Check internet archive. I bought a used copy of Amazon for 15 dollars.
>Literally saying nothing
Not to sound pretentious but I've found that people either get it or are absolutely incapable of fathoming it. No, it has nothing to do with Parmenides. You're referring as this particular ontological locus as the be all end all whereas I'm simply stating that it doesn't have to be.
>creatio ex nihilo
That's even worse.
>arche as rules
You're just being disingenuous now, as you're fully aware that this is not what I meant by archontic
Gnosticism isn't world affirming, maybe you mean life affirming. A pedantic distinction to make but a necessary one imo
Castaneda provides a great first-hand account of archontic influence in daily life. The actual practices don't really matter. And Omelas is pretty much the ultimate litmus test for actual Hylics, I say this completely unironically. Walking away is a prerequisite to being truly human.
>LeGuin
what does the Omelas story have to do with Gnosticism? The world is le good but has suffering at its root and you should exit the world? The connection to Gnosticism seems tenuous there. Don't put shit on there just to fill out the chart
>The world is le good but has suffering at its root and you should exit the world?
Yes. It's only as tenuous as it feels to the reader. I've read interpretations that Omelas is akshually about sociopolitical reform. Dreadful.
Thief of Always by Clive Barker has some of that and it's in his other books too probably but it's too well-written to be taken seriously by people who self-label as gnostics