Gnostics and Armchairs

I meant to post this yesterday but hadn't finished with it. (I mention this because it was this post that actually led into the sex magick post that appeared here earlier. I was reading on gnostic stuff that led to magick stuff that led to that topic and I got opinionated.)

I don't much like labels when it comes to experiential things, like spirituality. I think as long as you're sitting in the armchair of intellectualism, as long as you're talking about theology or philosophy or whatever, then fine, we can wax poetic all day, and glue-stick labels onto things right and left. But the moment one gets into the genuine experience of the thing, it's another story. At that point, those labels aren't doorways, they are no longer marking the opening to the infinite one road at a time, but rather, stuffing into uniformity and expectation all truly creative and spontaneous experience.

From wiki:

Jung saw the Gnostics not as syncretic schools of mixed theological doctrines, but as genuine visionaries, and saw their imagery not as myths but as records of inner experience. He wrote that "The explanation of Gnostic ideas 'in terms of themselves,' i.e., in terms of their historical foundations, is futile, for in that way they are reduced only to their less developed forestages but not understood in their actual significance."

I would agree with that. Labeling and categorizing experiential-spirituality is like taking art, real art, the "it moved my soul through the night so I created this" art, and reducing it to an intellectual essay on the form and style, in such a convoluted, footnoted way that the artist themselves would be lucky to even recognize it from that perspective.

Yet if I don't use labels, it is difficult to communicate. Most people do not want an 'introduction' that requires reading a book's worth of material from someone's inner life. They expect a sound-bite.

OK, so:

• I am a Gnostic.
• I am a Thelemite.
• I have an experiential leaning toward Christian Mysticism, not related to the doctrines of Christianity, but related to the deities of such.

That is another way of saying I respect and have had experiences with 'identities', from Angels to Jesus, from Egyptian stuff to the Abramelin entities, from an 'inner soul-being' some might call HGA or Atman, to the conglomerate of Aspect Psychology that Roberts called Psychic Politics. From Kabbalah to Christianity, from Shamanism to Occult magick of a variety of traditions, I've had experiences, insights, and symbols, that seem to cover a little bit of it all. Frankly that has made it confusing that it seemed like "everything and nothing" was true -- no single model has seemed to contain my experiences, but most models contain room for some of them.

I have no serious interest in the various religious doctrines or histories which surround all those identities or models. If I have a vision or dream and I meet entity-X in environment-Y, and interact, then to me, that's XY. If someone later points me to stuff others have written about XY, I do find that mildly interesting sometimes, but only sometimes and only as food-for-thought or trivia, except in rare cases where -- like the Four and the Consortium -- I go out and search in an attempt to get an idea of whether someone's written this stuff down before and what "context" it was found in, if so.

I don't really feel that my experience with XY needs to be measured by, compared to, or evaluated against, anybody else's experience, or anybody's intellectual opinion or doctrine as written down throughout time. I will judge XY and our interaction based on my own experience and prayer. It is not particularly relevant to me whether this or that doctrine has assigned some entity or some activity to being holy, or to being black magick, or to being a 7th branch, French offshoot, of lineage-Z of some philosophy first recorded (that we know of) 140 years ago by someone I never heard of.

I'm not saying that education and study don't have value, because they do. It is that those are easy for me, and I have come to believe, due to my own weak tendency to 'think about living' more than 'living', that what matters if anything is that one most go 'through, not around' spiritual experience if it is to be anything more than armchair philosophy. I used to be so much more ... linear, than I am now. I've worked hard to shift.

I believe that sincere and regular prayer to God, whatever God might really be, that "genuinely good intentions", held with interest, a sense of humor, and a model of sharing and healing and joy, and the most minimum bias for or against or concerning 'the assumed value of a certain thing', that these will take a person through the experiences that provide "education from the inside" about oneself and spirit.

Moving on --

Trivia: I was skimming a tiny part of Tertium Organum (P.D. Ouspensky, 1922), a chart TABLE OF THE FOUR FORMS OF THE MANIFESTATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS. This wasn't any analogy to 'the Four' but rather, a sort of "four-stages-of-development". It was peripherally interesting, no big deal, and I speed-read. But there was this one line in it which for some reason felt like it reached out and slapped me upside the head and made me STOP and think. Under 'forms of consciousness', the third of four stages, one of the descriptions said:

The moment when further evolution can be conscious only.

(The fourth stage was then: The commencement of self-consciousness. Ecstatic states. Transitions to cosmic consciousness.) I felt like some part of me pulled out that line and emphasized it inside me, as if it arrived with the sound of a gong and the light of spirit and a logical typed-out business-report answer to some question.

I think this is "why." This is why the weird stuff. The Four, the Consortium of 12, even some of the confusion of my 'Bewilderness' period all those years ago. Because there comes a point in every energy-conglomerate's development when further evolution must be conscious. Where you are no longer able to unconsciously just drift along in oblivious darkness, when it no longer happens at a slow but automatic pace, where basically the escalator has come to an end and if you want to continue you've got to take the stairs.

And since it's new to 'conscious realization', it's just as confusing as the world is to a baby, in some respects. Learning how to even perceive, then how to remember, then how to correctly categorize, then how to understand, then how to consciously modify or interact with, each energy, thing, identity, dynamic, whatever, is a whole development of its own. 'Mysticism' is born and we spend a big chunk of our life then trying to accomplish one or more of these things in one or more areas.

Ironically the point is to get to where it's all a no-brainer background-info, because the larger focus is always communion-with-God, at least that is my perspective. All the rest is like... getting to know the culture and home of your soulmate.

So I was googling, as my friend L had done, trying to find any reference to the four, the twelve, a group soul, etc. I thought this following excerpt was a great left-brain description of The Four as I perceive them/us/etc. -- although I suspect it was not intended to be used for that. It even perfectly matches the bizarre but deep concept of "the tree of life in 3-D" that the Four once showed me we are, and that we "compose the universe", each of us a certain kind of energy that contributes to the makeup of things, although it was more person-based in my perception than... elemental, as it sounds here, but I can imagine that might have been a limit of my perception at the time. Check this out:

...Hasidic philosophy explains that the Merkaba is a multi-layered analogy...

...The four Chayot angels represent the basic archetypes that God used to create the current nature of the world. Ofannim, which means "ways", are the ways these archetypes combine to create actual entities that exist in the world. For instance, in the basic elements of the world, the lion represents fire, the ox/earth, the man/water, and the eagle/air. However, in practice, everything in the world is some combination of all four, and the particular combination of each element that exist in each thing are its particular Ofannim or ways. In another example, the four Chayot represent spring, summer, winter and fall. These four types of weather are the archetypal forms. The Ofannim would be the combination of weather that exists on a particular day, which may be a winter-like day within the summer or a summer like day within the winter.

For some reason this reminds me of the day that I had an 'insight' that Feng Shui is 'localized astrology' -- that wood in a fire region was like virgo in scorpio, an energy 'transit', or whatever.

...A person should strive to be like a Merkaba, that is to say, he should realize all the different qualities, talents and inclinations he has (his angels). They may seem to contradict, but when one directs his life to a higher goal such as doing God's will (the man on the chair driving the chariot) he will see how they all can work together and even complement each other. Ultimately, we should strive to realize how all of the forces in the world, though they may seem to conflict can unite when one knows how to use them all to fulfill a higher purpose, namely to serve God.

Cool. I am not-quite going to qualify as Hasidic though! If that does have some relationship to my experience, then the idea of some ignorant goya like me stumbling over the experientially-real spirituality of their occult philosophies would probably horrify all those serious hasidic scholars. (I remember being Jewish in another life. Does that count?? OK, probably not!)

In googling on 'the Four' I find (of course) many refs to the four elements. I wonder if I should work to find a way to incorporate this into something? Meditation?

Is there a way to apply Feng Shui to the soul? hahahaha!

This is a seemingly channeled page (feels that way to me) on 'soul clusters'. (Later: yes, it's channeled.) Though if I'm going to look at any channeling I would first prefer Seth via Jane Roberts, and I'm not fond of the topic in general and tend to dislike and distrust it (and yes I'm aware my conversations with Aeons sound very similar to exactly that. Sorry, that's just how it keeps working out).

"...A soul group is a circle with an eye, a soul, in the middle and four souls representing each direction. The direction is not necessarily that of nature as on earth, but as in the universe. In our reality as humans on earth it is the four directions with each responsible of the energy and power of the four directions. Each soul that occupies the position of a direction is also an eye or center of their own soul group as well. These soul groups are constantly moving and rotating around each other and through each other..."

Interesting they chose four, yeah? I mean, why that number, why not some other? I guess it doesn't prove anything (like why I get the Four or the Consortium), and I found some of the articles on the same site/source questionable, but I found it an interesting coincidence.

I wrote about the four and our 'pattern of four' and the 'larger patterns' back during my Bewilderness days, calling it "The Linoleum Theory" initially, then expanding it to "The Rainbow of Soul". My original TLT writings said something like:

When I look down at the square tiles in public buildings, I often see that every tile has a 'pattern'. It's all based on each tile being a singular pattern, one of four primary natures. Then, four tiles together are a pattern. And each of those four tiles is a part of yet-larger patterns that have it in different placements within those patterns. And the whole room is a larger, more complex pattern.

To me, 'The Linoleum Theory' described The Four pretty well. The Rainbow of Soul is better, though. I'm glad I came up with a less retarded name and model eventually.

PJ