When I first read Elaine Pagels' book about the Gnostic Gospels I knew immediately that I had previously experienced what she was describing a state of being called gnosis. At first, I did not associate the subjective event she wrote about called "gnosis" as the same sort of event that serendipitously happened to me that I call my remembering vision. I've deliberately sought out unusual emotional experiences as if seeking them out was my call to adventure.
When I first wandered into the way of conducting my affairs I didn't realize that the manner in which I'd chosen to live my life was a fairly common way for some people to act if they had certain goals in mind. The most familiar expression of this goal was weakly known by me as the quest to find the holy grail. I was a huge fan of the stories and adventures of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table at a very young age. I was a rabid fanboi of the comic strip about Prince Valiant. When i grew up I wanted to be an adventurer.
Nobody in the world could convince me that my own way of taking a chance with my life was impractical. It made for living a fair to middling domestic life of married with children impossible. Nobody could convince me for very long that I was throwing my life away by abandoning all sense of ethics or moral values to pursue a passing fancy. As far as I was concerned I was being polite to them by taking it on the road to live as a stranger in strange lands. I knew I would survive no matter what. I was promised.
Death is a nothingness I didn't create or justify by just saying no. To have consciousness requires actively, unceasingly denying the Other is me. What? I had to ask, didn't I?
If I had believed them I would still be where they first befuddled me. Maybe the only way to be more stubborn than a double Taurus is to be a triple Taurus. Sun, Moon, and Rising signs. I'll be seventy in a couple of months and I still haven't changed my mind. I honestly expected people to see the sense of what I was saying and praise me for my stick-to-it-ness. Naive. Extremely naive. So naive it hurt/s.
I never thought about creating adventures for myself to be the same as what others called a vision quest. A vision quest. the specific experience that provided me with what gnosis actually is. In less than 15 minutes I remembered everything I had ever made myself into since my arrival on Earth several billion years ago.
Whether I realized my remembering vision was what shamed-men call gnosis or not at the time of it's occurrence, when that extended database was revealed to my me, I-am-is started consciously using it immediately. I didn't know what it was doing. It didn't matter if I did or didn't because the results obtained from including it in my regular way of interpreting the world IS seemed more emotionally met than previously. My conclusions about how the world IS made me happier.
This new-found happiness came with a price tag. I couldn't share my sources without having to deal with a lotta disbelief about the state of my sanity. Sanity, in my gestalt, depends not on how well I explain myself to my accusers, but how well I explain myself to me. It's not what the world does that yanks my chain. It's the way i react to what the world does that yanks my chain. I can be very hard on myself. Candidly, if a stranger came up to me and started telling me that they had a sacred vision in which they "saw" themselves arrive on this planet billions of years ago, I might think they were nuts too. No blame.
The interesting aspect of this to me recently is to realize that I didn't start studying any of the occult systems until after this vision happened. It's almost as if having my extended past revealed to me acted as an impetus to study those systems to find a medium of expression. Using these systems made many people believe the systems I used were unbelievable, but not me. It was as if they saw me as some sort of victim for whom they felt compassion. None of that mattered as long as it allowed me to tell somebody what had happened to me. Classical psychoanalysis wasn't working for me. Years. Probably because I'm such a miser. Avarice is my chief feature. I can turn anybody I want to into an oracle, and nothing makes them happier than to be thought of that way. All because I'm just cheap.
I started studying hypnosis six years before my remembering vision occurred in late summer after my first Saturn Return. I saw an advertisement in the local paper about Harry Aaron's Hypnosis School in Irvington, New Jersey and felt driven to attend. At the time I thought I was taking hypnosis classes in order to facilitate impregnating as many females as I could before I croaked. By that statement i mean to imply that I thought I was taking hypnosis classes because I was "young, dumb, and fulla cum." It turned out to represent a lot more than using hypnosis to seduce women.
I think taking that night course in hypnosis was one of the most fatalistic events of my life. In reflection, I don't think I had much choice but to do it. I don't remember at all where the money to do it came from. I do remember where the money to attend the initial seminar at the Monroe Institute come from. I worked for it fair and square. I paid for the seminar with money I got for unemployment.
The dreams I've had for a long time now about being lost, either inside a chain-linked fenced industrial complex or a series of ante-bellum houses of grand size seems to have gone away for a while. I haven't satisfied myself that I understand them. Even though they take place in two completely different settings they seem connected. As if they both have the same source.
It has come to my attention that I never read the science fiction works of Philip K. Dick. I am familiar with a popular movie entitled Blade Runner that was based on one of his books, and another movie called Total Recall, but I never read the books. I'm pretty sure I never will.
The only scifi novels I ever read, I read to please somebody else. I don't know why these kinds of books didn't appeal to me. It's not like i didn't enjoy the stories. I liked adventure stories about knights of the round table. I stopped reading novels so much after I got out of the Navy.
I still read more than most people seemed to, but after I started using the sacraments in my latter twenties, fiction in general was not interesting to me so much. I read a bunch of non-fiction to support the development of my interest in the occult. Using that for a source allowed me to make up any kind of story that brought me the attention I wanted in real time.
After I got online in the early '90s in the last century and started writing a lot of prose instead of poetry I could publish anything I wanted to on the internet, and that changed everything about writing for me. I didn't have to write to please anybody, and as I'm often told, I never did anyway.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
