"Show Me Your Gnosis, Felix!"

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A pen pal writes:

"Show me your gnosis Felix."

felix answers:

Why bother? My gnosis is not for-you. It's not to demonstrate some superior path to anybody. My gnosis is the one wholeness that can't be preserved on papyrus or paper by papists. That's why the papacy ousted it as the way. It shows what can be done without writing it down. Without going on a paper chase.

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Writing this paragraph has been a long ti-me co-me-ing. My father was a papist not because he was Catholic (God Forbid!), but because he advocated the paper chase. He was an advocate of the scientific method, but scared of ghosts, yet not of the dark. He was a possum and coon hunter. Being out in the woods at night with the hounds of Baskerville was his most natural environment. Yet, after he married at the age of thirty-three, he pretty much retired to the classroom, and from there to being a "gentleman farmer".

There are a lot of people around the world even today that despise the paper chase and their sophist pursuit. The paper chasers are always the first to go in the killing fields. No blame. It's just yin and yang taking their turns chasing paper and then dragons. What a drag-on, man. '-)

In my opinion that's the basis of gnosis. It's the opposite of the paper chase. It means that you've decided to take your own life into your own hands, and by doing so, you thus run the risk of enraging the passengers of a ship of fools that you're merely a crew member on, and where even the Captain has to pay heed to the paying customers.

What can't be written down and thus imprisoned by the paper chasers is a hard row to hoe. You got no physical proof of your belief in nothingness, and the literate papists have millions of file cabinets and warehouses full. The numbers are staggering. All the power players are paper chasers, and all you got to defend your right to believe what you wanna is the living word of what the paper chasers like to point out is a spook. The word can be rather competitive though, and rather than learning to use it, it appears that you have to learn to let it use you.

I'm trying to write about two systematic approaches or world views. Both seem to be holistic constructions about how to conduct one's affairs as a homo sapiens. The difficulty for me has to do with choosing the right metaphors to get my points across to different types of people. The way of gnosis seems impossible to describe to someone who has not subjectively experienced visions.

For a lot of the people I've conversed with about having visions, they claim having visions are something the ancient people had because they didn't have a written language. This one guy I'm in a discussion group with totally believes that only the old prophets had visions, and contemporary peoples can no longer have them unless they're insane. Yet, this same guy claims to have been the copyist who transcribed the Coptic versions of the Gnostic Libraries found in Egypt in 1945.

My claim is that there is a body of knowledge that exists as a database of all the experiences an individual has had ever, and that the original entity concerned is immortal. I think what's called The Akashic Records is an metaphor for this individual experiential database that the pearl carries with it wherever it is. There are three elements that accompany this pearl-like entity. Curiosity, volition, and memory. The memory is the rest of the story. the flip side of the coin. It's the more-of-me-than-you-can-see.

The memory or universal record of the immortal core of all life is usually as unconscious to the individual as it is invisible to other individuals. It's a record of everything the pearl has made itself into as it progresses and evolves from nothingness to becoming a human being. Billions of years on Earth alone. A gazillion lifetimes as whatever the pearl makes itself into via be-co-me-ing. This database is not stored in a language either written or oral, and it's because it's not that it's difficult to access through reason or logic.

That's what my remembering vision was about. I re-experienced the contents of that universal memory system in a vision that lasted 15-20 minutes at best. An awareness of coming to Earth and making myself into all sorts of life forms by imitating the other pearls around me. I'm guessing those three elements of curiosity, volition, and memory are all that is needed to imitate and to create oneself by mimicry into any form of life provided by the local environment.

Having this experience provided me with an extended experiential database that acts as the source of my imaginings rather than merely the experiential database of my present ex-is-tense. Instead of reaching for solutions for the problems I encounter in my environment in the database of my limited experience in my present lifetime, I'm reaching for the experience of all the forms of life for my entire stay on Earth. If I'm "true to myself" I have no choice. I have to listen to my inner voice even if every other soul in the universe tells me it's the wrong way to go. Not listening to my inner voice is probably equivalent to blasphemy of the spirit. Lots of holy books say it is, but I can't be sure. I'd be crazy to feel like I had to be sure.

I have the muted television set on and there's a nature program on humming birds that I'm glancing at off to the side occasionally. I just now looked over there and they were showing slow-motion pictures of these magnificent flyers. The thing about seeing them control their bodies in slo-mo is that I feel like I'm in there with them. By the advent of my remembering vision I have lived thousands if not millions of lives as a hummingbird. In my opinion, if you're a homo sapiens, you have too.

This is why I'm not all that convinced that the results of life as a paper chase is all it could be. Yet, I don't think it harms anything as long as I realize it's not the main chance. My natal family appears to think that I've never made a commitment to the paper chase, and that's why my life is a failure. Maybe it's me that thinks that. I haven't always. I expect, however, as I progress in my dotage, that what's left of a paper chase mentality at seventy years of age will not fare well under the ravages of ti-me, and the me-mores of the more universal aspects of Being will co-me to the fore of my rotund groundedness.

An old acquaintance stopped by today to tell me that a couple of days ago he had died and left his body to hover beside it in order to bid it adieu. I immediately opened a door of sin he had gladly accepted in the past, and he told me "No." as if he didn't care whether I was impressed or not. That bodes well. This ol' boy has been preying for a healing conversion for most of his adult life. Maybe it's time, but it's not like it matters. Promises are made to be broken.

It's easy to tell that the really cold weather we've had for the last two weeks has eased up a little. It's been dark for at least an hour now, and I haven't turned the space heater on since around ten o'clock this morning. I'll be doing it anon.

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