The Nigerian Village Square - Gnostic Pespecitive on God and Human Existence

Gnostic Pespecitive on God and Human Existence

Written by Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Monday, 09 October 2006

If you are like me, you probably have heard the statement: God lives in the eternal present, in the eternal now. I have heard this statement and did not understand what it means and, frankly, did not think much about it until recently. It is like the old philosophical question: if a tree falls and there is no human being around to hear the sound of its falling or see it fall, did a tree fall?

I did not feel that any one could answer that philosophical question without committing himself to a perspective on life. I did not want to be boxed into a corner; my preference is pragmatism, whatever works is fine with me, philosophical rigor is damned.

If you said that a tree fell even if there are no human beings to acknowledge its falling, you are committing to materialistic monism (but look who is doing so, a human being!).

On the other hand, if you said that no tree fell since there was no human being to acknowledge its fall, you are denying the independence of the empirical world and saying, in effect, that the world is a dream in our minds, idealistic monism and solipsism.

I refused addressing the question and kept living my philosophically un- rigorous existence. However, it recently occurred to me that since the world is in our memory, which is a function of the nerves in our brains (?), that if the individual dies, and his brain decays and his memory ends, that, perhaps, the world no longer exists for him, since there must be a him for the world to exist?

If that is the case, did the world exist before the individual was born, since it doesn’t exist for him after he died? If the existence of the world is only provable to a living person, could it be existent if there are no living persons?

Could it be the case that the world exists because I (the individual) exist and does not exist if I do not exist?

At the psychological level, it recently dawned on me that it is I who says that what other people do or do not do matters to me. If I choose, I can tune out what other people do and they would not matter to me, not one bit. If an individual says that the external environment matters, it matters for him. But if he says that it does not matter, it does not matter.

If you went about killing other people, raping women, abusing children etc I can choose not to pay attention to what you are doing and therefore what you are doing does not matter to me. (As I write, Arabs are killing Africans in Sudan , raping African women and children and the rest of the world does not take this apparent genocide seriously and for all intents and purposes it does not matter. But if one white person is killed the world press, controlled by whites, makes much ado about it and the world is gaga over that killing. That is, human beings choose what they think matters to them and ignore others.)

The behavior of other people is relevant only if I say that it is. If you saw me as nothing and I acknowledge your negative perception of me, it matters to me, but if I did not acknowledge your view, it does not matter to me. In other words, it is I who makes what the world does real or not real to me.

If I choose to take what other people do seriously, my emotions respond accordingly; if not, I would be calm even if the entire world is burning!

If so, does the world exist apart from my reaction to it? Does the world exist if I do not exist to say that it exists? Apparently, one cannot escape the old philosophical question, after all? If so, one had better think about it and see if one can come to some sort of conclusion on it.

I heard somebody explain the eternal present of God as meaning that in God there is no space and time and that everything is happening now. The past, present and future are all happening now.

This explanation did not make sense to me until recently. I had a dream and the events of that dream led me to ask whether everything happens in the present?

In the dream, I found myself in a bus. It was day time. I then found myself in a hotel. I went to the hotel’s bathroom. When I got out of the bathroom, I was looking for my sandals, to put them on, and go do some sight seeing. I looked for my sandals and could not find them anywhere. A young fellow told me that he saw them somewhere and I asked him to go show me where. He led me along and suddenly we were now in a forested region, looking for my sandals. Eventually, we found two unmatched slippers and they were not mine. Nevertheless, I put them on. It was now dark. We walked on. It was now morning and a bunch of people sat around a table having breakfast. A very dark colored man came to us and asked us what we were doing there and asked us to move on. I thought that he was my brother, Eugene, but Eugene was almost white in color, so how come I equated him with a very dark complexioned man? ( Eugene is dead; the symbolism probably is that he did not want me to come to the land of the dead, which I did not want to go to the land of the dead and partake in their feasting?) At any rate, I got angry at him for asking us to leave. He tried to block our way and I pushed on him to get out of our way and woke up, with the dream still in my consciousness.

From the time I went to sleep and woke up, it was about fifteen minutes. So within a space of fifteen minutes I dream and in that dream was in (1) day time (2) night time and (3) morning time.

It occurred to me that since the dream took place in my mind, and was not real, that in my mind was day, night and morning.

So how do I know that what seems to me as day and night, and our world is also not in my mind?

I had another dream; one that I think may have a bearing on the subject, and so let me narrate it.

In this dream, I was visiting Lagos . Since I do not have Nigeria ’s identification cards, I decided to go get one, the equivalent of a social security number and went into the appropriate office and filled out the necessary forms. I was directed to another office to go take a picture that goes with the card. To get to the next office required taking a bus, thus many of us crammed into a minus van. The van driver was driving rather fast and, it seemed to me, recklessly. He would round a corner in a rather sharp manner that it seemed that the van could topple over. I became afraid that we might get into an accident, considering that Nigerian roads are reputed to be death traps. We passed by an apartment building and someone pointed out that “Awolowo lives in one of the apartments” and proceeded to say that the esteemed gentleman is sick; that the whole nation was apprehensive of what would happen if he died.

Finally, we got to the office where I was supposed to get my social security number. There was a line waiting to be served. My brother, Kinsley, was in that office and came to me and had me go sit somewhere while he went and talked to one of the clerical workers. The worker gave me a bunch of forms to identify my own form. I searched and could not locate it until he came by and looked for it and found it. He told me to follow him and we went to another part of the building where he took my picture and we came back into the room. He then gave me the social security card. I looked it at and the sides seemed uneven. I noticed the number but did not memorize it. I then tried to put the card into my wallet and leave the building. As I tried to slip the card into my wallet, I woke up.

I began thinking why I did not memorize the number and why I did not completely put the card into my wallet before I woke up. It occurred to me that if I had memorized the number and put it into my wallet I would have had a problem when awake and looking for the card in my wallet, for it would not be there, or remembered the number and not seeing a card with that number.

The conclusion is that it seems that a rational force was orchestrating the whole dream, giving me enough information but not all the information. I extrapolated that those who write about God, who say that they channel God/spirit probably are not frauds, say something from a different dimension but not everything there is to say about that dimension, because that dimension does not want them to say a lot about it, and does not want us to know all about it while we are still in the world of dream.

In the dreams I saw cities, people, offices, was in a bus, experienced day, night, morning; experienced space and time, past, present and future; experienced the world we experience it in the so-called wake world and, yet, none of those is real.

Could it be that we are in an eternal now and from there dream a dream where our minds, beginning from the Big Bang, invented space, time and matter and a world with past, present and future and we seem to be in it?

In my dream were people living in bodies but they weren’t real (according to the categories of our wake-day living). Could it be that our world in bodies is also a dream and not real? Could it be that our lives in bodies are not true?

In our world we see ourselves born in bodies, grow up, age and die. Could it be that all those are taking place in a dream? Could it be that we are immortal spirit that is not born in body, do not grow and do not die but see us in a dream living and dying?

Could it be that an eternal self, the experiencer is experiencing itself in the empirical world but is not that empirical world, for that world is a dream, an illusion?

Could it be that we just want to experience this world and do so while remaining our real self, spirit self?

EXTRAPOLATION FROM GNOSTICISM

Gnosticism is considered the Western intellectual’s religion. Like most religions, it has its own story of creation, a myth of how the world came into being. In fact, it has many such stories.

One of these mythologies said that the Demiurge is a proud angel that disobeyed God and left heaven to come set up its kingdom on earth. Another said that God’s loved chief angel, Lucifer, became proud and wanted to chase God out of his creatorship throne, usurp it and became God, and that a war was fought in heaven and those angels loyal to God chased Lucifer and his followers out of heaven and they came to earth to establish their kingdom. Yet another one, one proposed by Helen Schucman, a Jewish clinical psychologist, says that it is the Son of God, us, who rebelled against his father.

As Professor Schucman (she taught at Columbia University , New York ) saw it, God created his Son and is one with his son. The son wanted to separate from the father and go create his own kingdom. In reality, the father is in the son and the son is in the father, so the son could not separate from his father. The next best thing that the son could do is forget about his father’s existence. While his father is still in him, the son chose to not think about him, to forget him.

As it were, the son of God went to sleep and dreamed that he is now separated from his father. Our empirical world is said to be that dream of the Son of God, a dream where he sees himself as separated from his father. (The Son of God, apparently, is metaphor for the collective creation of God, is all of us: human beings, animals and all living things. We separated from God and from each other.)

Gnosticism sees haven as a unified state and the world as a separated state. Union is light, separation is darkness. (This view is scientifically valid, for luminosity is enhanced in a unified field and dimmed in separated fields).

Gnosticism sees our human selves, egos, and our world as a place of darkness (evil). Gnosticism, therefore, wants to return us, our world to light. It proposes to do so by overlooking our world, forgiving it. Jesus, the Gnostic, forgave the world; this means that he overlooked our world, ignored what is done in it, saw it as not real, as a dream. In overlooking our world he was able to resurrect to the world of God.

But, we who are still in the dream of separation, see the world as real, see what is done in it as real, see the attacks on us as real rather than dream attacks and defend ourselves; in Buddhist terms…by the way Buddha was a Gnostic…we are attached to the world of dreams, we live in illusion, and do not want to overcome it, as Jesus did.

In overcoming the ego separated self and its world, Jesus reclaimed his true identity as the son of God, the Christ. The Christ is our shared identity, the son of God who knows himself as one with his father and all his brothers. Because he knows that he is unified with all existence, he loves all existence to love himself.

Only the spiritual can unify; the material can only be in separation, for matter separates, rather than unifies. Thus, the Christ is spirit. Jesus, the human being who renounced his separated ego status, is now in spirit, unified spirit, and is in all of us and in God.

When our world is overlooked, forgiven its separation, evil we return to the awareness of unified light, heaven. The objective of Gnosticism is to awaken from our sleep-dream, our world and become aware of our real self and real world, unified state aka heaven.

To Gnosticism, to be in separation, to be on earth, is to be metaphorically dead (to ones true unified self) and to become aware of ones union with all creation and its creator is to be resurrected from death.

(Before you dismiss Gnosticism, please note that it is estimated that most of the first century CE Christians were Gnostic Christians before they were chased away and their more metaphoric view that Jesus was a mythological figure used to teach the perennial philosophy of mankind, not an actual person, was replaced by the literalist perception of Jesus as a real person. There is practically no historical evidence that an actual person called Jesus lived. Josephus’ lone paragraphical reference to a Jesus is believed to have been inserted into his writing by Christian apologists. See references.)

Gnosticism, Pagan or Christian, teaches that we are unified spirit that went to sleep and dream this world. It teaches that our real self is unified spirit (aka God) and that we forgot that self, and imagines ourselves as separated selves housed in bodies and identify as those separated selves, egos, human personalities. As ego, personality (the term persona is from Greek mask, meaning that the human personality is a mask, not who we, in fact, are) we see ourselves doing what we do on earth but we are not the selves doing those things. It is our false separated selves that do what we see us do on earth. It is our dream selves, figments in the imagination of the sleeping self that do what we do on earth. Our true self is one self. (Mani, one of the early Gnostic teachers, had influence from Rome to China .)

That one self is variously called God, Brahman. Each of us is said to be a part of that unified self, God. The part of unified self is variously called Atman, Christ, Krishna , Buddha, and Chi. The whole and the part are said to be the same, equal and one. God and his sons are one, with God being in his son and his son being in him and in other children of God. (A Course in Miracles cast Gnostic philosophy in Christian terms.)

Gnosticism is not asking us not to pay attention to the empirical world; it merely asks us to see it as a dream that is taking place inside our minds. While in the world, in the dream we must study it on its own terms, which is what science does.

We ought to study science and technology and use them to make the most of this world. But while doing so, we should also recognize that there is a different part to us, a part that is spirit and not this world, a part that is dreaming this world.

Gnosticism wants us to try to awaken to the awareness of that different aspect of us, so that we would then know that all people are parts of us. It teaches that that different us is one self; one self that is simultaneously the many of us.

That one self, a part of it, anyway, is the self dreaming this world. The dreamer of this world is not our earthly personalities; our earthly personalities are the dream selves, egos, the masks of God.

The idea is for us to recognize that we are all one self and, therefore, love each other, no matter what we do on earth. To the extent that it is possible to change evil persons, we ought to do so without hating them.

If a person is a murderer, obviously, he is a threat to other persons and ought to be taken away from civil society and jailed but while in jail he is to be helped to become a loving person. Should he persist in his anti social behaviors, killing him is probably the next best alternative thing to do.

In actual fact nobody is killed, for it is the murderer’s dream self and his dream body that seems killed in capital punishment. Thus there is no point feeling guilty that dream murderers are eliminated from the dream so as to make the dream pleasant for those in it.

The world is a dream but we ought to make it a happy dream where all have fun rather than make it a nightmare where some go about making life difficult for others.

A rational and compassionate person makes life as happy as is possible for all human beings, for all dream persons.

All human beings in eternity live in peace and joy, in bliss; their nature therefore is to seek joy, even in their dream world. People are here to seek peace and happiness and contributing to it is expected of all of us. Our true self is the eternal unified self and its state of union is a state of love, grace, peace and joy.

Union is love; love is union. Our eternal self is unified hence is love. Love is peace; union is peace. Our eternal state is unified hence is peaceful and joyous. Our natural state is one of union, love, peace and joy. We cannot feel happy in any situation that is not like our natural home.

In the world of separated self, we experience the opposite of love and ought to make it as loving as it is possible.

However, in as much as we live in separation and bodies, total love is not possible, for perfect love can only be found in the state of union, oneness. At best, our lives on earth can be made to approximate union/love but not totally unified/loving since our world is a separated world/self, which by definition is anti love.

GNOSTICISM AND ME

The term Gnosis is Greek for knowledge. Knowledge of what? Knowledge of the true self. As the Greeks see it, we are all unaware of our true self and must seek knowledge of our true self.

Early Greek philosophers like Plato were Gnostics, folks searching for knowledge of their true selves. Plato made his Socrates say that a man who did not search for his true self, know himself, wasted his existence. At the entrance to the Delphi Oracle was an inscription: Know thy self.

If you recall, Alexander the Great conquered what is now called Israel around 325 BC. The Greeks imposed their Greek culture on the Jewish barbarians. Most educated Jews took on Greek names and Greek culture. Thus, many educated Jews became Gnostics, including Jesus Christ himself.

The term Jesus is Greek for Jewish Joshua; the term Christ is Greek for the anointed one, the man who has renounced his separated self and reclaimed his oneness with all creation and its creator, God. Jesus Christ, two Greek names, means a man who renounced his human personality, his ego and the body that housed it, and reclaimed his true identity as the Christ, the son of God who is as his father created him, one with his father and all his brothers.

THE LAUGHING CHRIST

As the Gnostics see it, when Jesus was being crucified on the cross, he knew that it was not his true self that was being killed but his apparent self, his dream self, his image as a separated self. He was therefore having fun, laughing (Laughing Christ) at those who were so deluded, those who had forgotten their identity as immortal children of an eternal father, that they believed that they could crucify the immortal son of an immortal God.

Gnosticism is of Greek origin hence is a western concept. It is equivalent to Oriental Hinduism and Buddhism. Given its Western genesis, Gnosticism may appeal to the Western mind, the mind that accepts God while refusing to accept the religious dogmas folk live under.

Gnosticism appeals to the Western philosophical mind just as Vedanta (philosophical aspect of Hinduism) appeals to the Hindu Pundit (and Chinese Mandarin).

I find both Gnosticism and Hinduism interesting. However, I am an African and not a Western or Asian person. Therefore, I do not identify myself as Gnostic or Hindu or Buddhist (those three religions are the same).

I identify with a religion and or philosophy that are self evidently true. What is self evidently true has no name.

However, it can be somewhat explained, and I insist on my own explanation rather than swallowing explanations given to me by other people, people from other parts of the world. If my explanation happens to be similar to Gnosticism, Hinduism, Buddhism, the three religions that appeal to me, so be it.

Let me attempt a definition of my religion and philosophy.

There is one life force in the universe. That one life force is simultaneously itself and all living things. That intelligent life force is aware of itself as one and yet as each of us. That life force is in all of creation. In human beings it has a modicum of self awareness, but in animals less, and even less in trees. The average human being suspects that he is part of something greater than his separated ego self; what that is he may not know. Of course, some persons are more aware of that spirit force in us. Some human beings, those called normal persons, sadly, are closer to animals and really do not think about God; if they thought about God they would know that we are all one self and they would only love all people. How can a human being hate other people if he knows that all people are parts of his one joined self? Hate is impossible for the enlightened mind.

As each of us, that life force seems to have separated from others and from the whole life force. As a seeming separated self, it dreams this world.

The initial purpose of the world is to dream separation and do all the things we do in this world.

The second purpose of this world is for us to remember that we are one self and have common interests. The ultimate goal of existence on earth is for us to remember that the world is a dream, not our true self.

When we remember that the world is a dream, we then try to make it a happy dream by loving one another. In the happy dream, we still have individuality housed in bodies but we use our bodily selves, egos, to love one another, knowing that at base we are the same.

In the happy dream, when I see another person, I see me. It may seem that we are separated selves but I know that in spirit we are one shared self and one shared mind. Therefore, I love the seeming other person, not because I am doing him a favor but because I am doing me a favor.

In loving the seeming other person, I l truly love me. Love for the other is love for our whole, holy self.

This type of love, love for all selves, is the most satisfying love there is for it approximates our heavenly love. It gives us peace and joy, not the blissful peace of heaven, unified state, but it is close enough to it.

As it were, one is now at the gate of heaven/union while still living in separated state. Heaven is formless, spirit, oneness, so one is at heaven’s gate but not in it, for one still has forms and still sees space and time between one and other people.

Ultimately, one lets go of all identification with forms, with body and the separated self t houses and disappears into the state of oneness; not to die, not to disappears but to find ones whole self (contracted as holy self or Holy Spirit).

In spiritual oneness, one still has a seeming separated self except that one knows that all selves are one self. That unified self cannot be explicated in ego separated categories. It is a wordless self.

For our present purposes, it is critical for us to remember that it is the unified self, an aspect of it, any way that sees itself as separated selves and dream our world of seeming separated selves. In this world, we all see ourselves as apart from other selves and pursue what seems to us different interests. The empirical world was designed, by us, to give us the illusion of having separated selves with different interests.

It is one self that dreams that it is living in the world of separation, space, time and matter. One self, God, if you like, the son of God, that dreams that he is each of us, as separated selves.

It is not our dream selves, the human personality that does the dreaming. It is not the me that I know as me that does the dream of separation. The self I know as me is a fictional self pretending to be separated from other people, it is a dream figure.

The unified self, the son of God, dreams that it is our separated selves. The world of separation, space, time and matter is taking place in the mind of the dreaming son of God, is part of the whole that contains the entire whole.

What we think is taking place in our world is in fact not taking place out there. There is no out there. Nobody is born, suffers and dies. It is all a dream.

Look away from the dream and you do not see it. When you die, the dream no longer exists for you until you return to the dream as a different body and personality. (We do not remembers our past life times just we do not remember past dreams and do not remember the experiences of the first two years of our existence on earth, even though those did take place. We go through many dream times, life times, until we remember our unified nature and then no longer return to separated dreaming.)

In sum, one spirit self is in one place (which is everywhere), a place that is the opposite of our human place, a place where there is no space and time, no past, present and future, and no material objects. That place is pure thinking, pure mind; pure spirit.

While in that state of pure ideation we seem to sleep and in our sleep invent space and time and our world of past, present and future. Past, present and future are dreams, they do not exist in reality. The real self is always in the eternal now of God. The eternal world of God is a unified world, the world of love. We always live in that unified world, in love, and while there we seem to sleep and dream this world of separation and hate. We live in union, love, and dream that we are in its opposite, separation and hate. But the opposite of union and love is impossible. In truth, only union and love exists; all we need to do is remove the veil with which we mask the presence of love and we experience love. Remove the block to the awareness of love and you experience love.

Forgiveness, the Holy Spirit and his most manifest form in human body, Jesus, taught us, is the only means for removing the clouds preventing us from experiencing love. To forgive is to overlook the evils other people do to you, so as to see their true self, which is love. Love all people, including those you call your enemies and you have loved your whole self despite the evils you do to other people and thus you return to the awareness of God’s eternal love.

This does not mean that we should not study the world we find ourselves in, the world of space, time and mater, the world of past, present and future. We must study science and use its technology to improve our lot on earth, to make our dreaming pleasant. But we must not make the mistake of thinking that the dreamer is his dream, for a different self, spirit dreams our world.

It means loving the dreamer while over looking and ignoring his dreams. For example, we are all unified spirit. But in the here and now, I see folk who identify as Muslims. I see these Muslims kill each other and other people in their efforts to prove that their religion is the best religion there is.

I believe that these killers are having a dream where they believe that they can kill people and those who believe that they can be killed are killed by them. I wish that these folks did not kill but, but given that they are doing what they want to do and have the freedom to do so, for the children of God have the right to have whatever dream they wish to dream, I do not loose sleep that these dream persons are killing other dream persons. If my own dream calls for dream terrorists to murder me so it would occur.

ALL RELIGIONS ARE METAPHORS, NOT LITERALLY TRUE

Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and all religions are fictions. Not one of them is true. They are stories we made up to tell us how we came into being and where we are going. They are all false.

Judaism was the fictional novels written by nationalistic Jews two to three hundred years before our common era. But the writers claim that what they wrote took place thousands of years before them. That is to say that they deliberately told lies. They deliberately attempted to deceive people into thinking that their imaginary works of art is history.

(I have always wondered why Jews are hated and killed in Europe . Is it because they gave the world a whole bunch of lies as truth? The entire Old Testament is a bunch of hooey, made up stories that never happened and yet the world is given that rubbish. Do people hate the Jews for lying to them? I do not know. What I do know is that when I am relating to a Jew, generally, I am skeptical of whatever he tells me for I suspect that the clever bugger could lie to me! Please do understand me. Some of my best friends are Jews; I am not an anti Semitic person. I just do not like to be lied to. When, as a teenager, I learned that the bible is a made up story, fairy tale that was shoved down my throat I was furious at those who attempted to deceive me. I threw all religion out and satisfied my curiosity with science, particularly biology. It is only later that I gave religion another chance and was attracted by Gnosticism.)

There was no such person as Adam, Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Saul, David, Solomon and the other characters narrated in the Old Testament, they are all fictional figures.

There was no actual person called Jesus Christ. He was a fictional character written by early Christians. They transformed the old Osiris story of a God-man who was born in flesh by a virgin and suffered, and died for our sins etc. All that is quaint stories.

However, the story serves a purpose: to teach death and resurrection. We are dead if we are attached to the ego separated self. We resurrect from death when we return to identifying with our true self, unified spirit and subsequently love each other.

Islam is another religious fairy tale, this time, told by a man who was unabashedly interested in power, the power to dominate the world and force it to see him as the seal of the prophets. I could care less for what a man called himself, what matters is whether what he taught makes sense and Islam I am afraid makes the least sense of all the so-called universal religions. I do not know how many times I have read the Koran and the Hadith trying to make sense of it but each time I feel like I am reading stuff by a deluded schizophrenic. A man with twenty seven wives and countless concubines is not my ideal of a human being, no matter what he calls himself. One man one wife is good enough for me, thank you.

These religious stories are all works of fiction, as is Homer’s Odyssey and Illiad and Virgil’s Aenid. Nevertheless, they are metaphors for teaching folks to love one another, not to kill one another.

And, if people choose to kill themselves, that, too, are their legitimate, though misguided choice.

The person who dreams that he ought to be killed attracts a person who dreams that he is a killer; both enact their insane dream. Some dream that they are whites and are superior to others who are blacks. Some dream that they are blacks and are persecuted by others, who are whites. Some dream that they are women and are persecuted by some who are men. It is their mutual dream. They are having nightmares. What they do not like cannot happen to them because they are the ones doing the dreaming.

The individual’s personal responsibility is to have loving wishes/dreams, to love all the people in the world. He is not responsible for other people’s wishes and dream.

Nevertheless, I ask you to love all the people in the world, black and white, men and women, adults and children. If you do and I do, if we love one another, we have a lovely world.

But if you choose to hate other people, you generate a hateful, conflict ridden world and experience it. (And since we are all joined, you give it to all of us what you have given to you, hate.)

CONCLUSION

It seems to me that we live in the present while sleeping and dreaming a world that has space, time and matter; a world that has past, present and future in it. I employed what happens in our dreams and Gnostic religion to try to explain how the concept of eternal now works. I hope that this somewhat disjointed essay has explained how this works. If it has not satisfactorily explained it to you, I would appreciate your own explanation. Thanks.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

October 10, 2006