In this day and age, with channeled gospels, channeled apostles and seemingly never ending lines of people lined up to tell us how to be spiritual, it helps to step back and make one simple assumption. That the True God, the God above God, is not insane. It doesn’t matter how well organized or how large the organization of lunatics claim to be, if it sounds insane, it probably is.
There are a lot of charlatans, in this religious world, in it for fame, books sales, sex, money, ego strokes, or all of the above. They will play on the human propensity to grasp anything that sounds reasonable and comforting, but slip in a little self serving insanity. I repeat, God is not insane. If it’s insane, it’s not of God. ( If you think it’s all one, check with your mental health professional)
One of my favorite ancient text, is the “Teachings of Sylvanus”, because the author speaks about the divinity of reason. Stop. Think. If someone could really manifest an angel, in this world of video, it would be on Youtube by now. Chanting will not cause money to magically appear in anyones pocket except the person who has convinced you it will.
Gnosis,seperate from the divine, is knowing what is, and you know what is, because you have genuinely experienced it. It’s not a one time shot, but a process of accumulating knowledge. And that knowledge is repeatable, and makes sense because it is based in truth. If it’s not based in truth, it may be a lot of things, but it’s not gnosis. Gnosis doesn’t come in a jar of pills, it doesn’t sexually liberate you, (though it might free you from sex), and it doesn’t give you magical powers. It allows you to see what is. What is, uncolored by tradition, opinion, or superstition. It seems to the unlearned, to give wisdom. However, that wisdom is the ability to see what is. It’s not supernatural. What is supernatural, is the human ability to project desire onto what is, to the point that genuinely seeing what is, appears supernatural. What is, once the projections are removed, is seldom insane.
Insanity is not of the True God, though there are a tremendous amount of Apostles for the insane god. Make it part of your daily practice to examine everything you think you know, everything you believe. Is it reasonable? Is it sane? If you can let it go, you are on the way to gnosis.
Something that Judas says in Cosani’s The Flight of the Feathered Serpent really adds to this… He says “Doubt, and also doubt the doubt.” Reason away reason until only the reasonable is left.
For instance, very recently on the way to university, I had this feeling to pull into a parking lot I normally don’t park in. But I didn’t listen to that feeling. I continued into the normal parking lot. Then I parked, and I sat there thinking (i.e. reasoning) with my intuition. Intuition pulled up something about flooding. “Well,” reasoned my reason, “actually this is the higher ground so it would be better in the case of a flood anyway.” And so, reason having won that argument, I got out of the car and went to class. After class, I went back outside and a water main had busted at the higher end of that parking lot. It was gushing (according to one of the maintenance guys) water out at 1000 gal/min. A number of cars in that parking lot had a few inches of muddy water constantly flowing under them where the owners of said cars would have to walk through just to get in their vehicles! I was fortunately about 20 feet or so from any running water, so I walked around the busted main, and I re-parked further away.
But anyway, reason failed in this instant while intuition was right all along. So, true reason should also have the ability to reason itself away, in my opinion, until only Truth is left which is beyond intellectual reason or knowledge and exists only in an unadulterated experience of this moment.
http://youtu.be/XXLjvAY_3Pg