What is Gnosis and Gnosticism?

Labels: Gnosis

Written by Website Administrator

The light of spiritual wisdom has expressed itself in many forms, according to the needs of any particular time and place. Those forms have been called "religions" but all spring from that one light: the one true religion. This essential knowledge awakens the consciousness and eliminates suffering, and must be known through our own direct experience. The Greek word Gnosis refers to the knowedge acquired through the experience of the awakened consciousness, as opposed to knowledge that we are told or might believe. Genuine Gnosis is the knowledge universal to all humanity that frees the consciousness from suffering. Gnosis - by whatever name in history or culture - is conscious, experiential knowledge, not merely intellectual or conceptual knowledge, belief or theory.

The Gnostic student seeks to acquire their own direct experience of the Truth by means of awakening the consciousness and eliminating obscurations to perception, otherwise called "egos" or "aggregates." The method to accomplish this task has been called Gnosis, the Way, the Dharma, Jnana, Daath, and many other names. By comparing them all, we can see that all religious forms have in their heart a science of Gnosticism: a method to arrive at personal knowledge of the Truth.

While many in these times associate the word Gnosis with a collection of texts found in the deserts of the Middle East (such as the Nag Hammdhi texts or Dead Sea Scrolls), or with long-lost groups of spiritual seekers (like the Essenes), the truth is that those writings and groups were but one fraction of a much older, more widespread movement, but one that cannot be tracked by physical evidence alone: it can only be truly known through awakened, conscious experience - not only here in the physical world, but also in the Internal Worlds, by means of techniques such as meditation, dream yoga, and more.

The evidence of this core religion can be found by any study of comparitive religion, in which the same themes and symbols are found to be ubiquitous. While some have argued that this is mere happenstance or unconscious symbolism, the truth is far more powerful: there is ubiquitous symbolism in religion because there is one ubiquitous religion, but whose true form and meaning is only hazily perceived by the sleeping consciousness of mankind. Due to this, messengers arrive from time to time to clarify the One True Religion: messengers such as Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Quetzalcoatl, Krishna, Moses, Fu Ji, and many more: all of them taught Gnosis, but according to the needs of the time and place.

We are not against any religion, school, sect, order or lodge because we know that all religious forms are manifestations of the great Cosmic Universal Infinite Religion latent in every atom of the Cosmos. We teach the synthesis of all religions, schools, orders, lodges and beliefs. Our doctrine is the Doctrine of the Synthesis. - Samael Aun Weor, The Perfect Matrimony