Flight from Experience 3: Gnosticism

Gnosticism, refers to a theory of human happiness, which in the ancient world was connected to a special knowledge about transcendence and the human soul, whose salvation lies in divine liberation from forces outside the individual. Gnosis today means an intuitive apprehension of spiritual truths or an esoteric form of knowledge. In the modern world transcendence has been replaced by an immanent source of healing. Happiness and salvation are achieved by means of the integration of conscious and unconscious drives or habits or the creation of a social order which provides a human solution to the problem of evil. In either case, human beings are themselves the sources of their own healing and happiness. Such ideas are alluring today, in part, because people commonly take experience to be equivalent to knowledge. However, to insist that happiness results either from the integration of unconscious drives or in the creation of social orders alone is to reject human experience in favor of some mythic version of experience.

I will start by pointing to a commonly debated point: Is it possible to love someone else until I love myself? Some people insist that we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. Others are not so sure. We may ask the parallel question: Can I really know anyone else unless I first know myself? Again there are different opinions. If anything brings knowing and loving together it’s relationship. And, of course, people often wonder how they can be in a healthy relationship without first becoming healthy individuals. If I do not know and love myself, how can I know and love my spouse, partner, family, friends, etc.?

Gnosticism offers a clear answer to each of these questions. You can’t! If we need the appreciation or approval of others to feel good about ourselves, we make them responsible for our mental health and well-being. If we look beyond ourselves to role models to learn out how to love and live responsibly, we are being untrue to ourselves. If we hope for someone, anyone, or the universe or God to save us, we will be waiting along time. No help is coming. Gnosticism offers the hope and promise of self-salvation and self-grace. This why we cannot know, love or be in genuine relationship with anyone else unless start with ourselves.

My first point is that this kind of self-salvation, self-knowledge and -love, rests on a certain forgetfulness of experience. Everything we learn, we learn by first experiencing something. This does not mean that experience is the same as knowing. Insights begin with experience and are verified by returning to experience. I have had many experiences of hearing people speak in foreign language. But I do not know what those speakers are saying. I have also been frightened when coming upon things in the dark that I perceive dimly but do not understand. I recall being startled in a dark and unfamiliar room when I saw a black figure which I took to be a crouching animal and that turned out upon further inspection to be a large throw-pillow.

So experiencing is not knowing. Experience together with ideas however insightful, appealing or well-expressed is not knowing. But knowing begins with an experience that is not understood and returns to verify, upon further investigation, an initial guess in experience. The sounds coming from foreign speakers and the confused outlines of obscure figures are the stuff about which we ask questions on the road to knowledge. Those same sounds and outlines are what we later use to assess our initial interpretations. When I saw the dim and frightening image in the dark room, my instinct was to run. My mind suggested a few further questions to test the original impression. Surely, what appears to be an animal would present additional information or data: shouldn’t I hear or smell something that supported the idea? If it were an animal, certainly its presence might be accounted for: did my hosts have a pet or was there a door or window open? Further questions along these lines may or may not have settled the issue, but in the end the simple act of turning on the light provided me with the final experience and information that I used to disconfirm my first guess about the nature of the figure. Knowledge involves a learning cycle that moves from experience through thinking and back to experience. The return to experience supports, corrects or disconfirms what I thought was going on. We build up our ideas about things, people, cultures, traditions, the world, God, and even ourselves piece by piece by being attentive and curious about our experiences and returning to experience to verify, challenge, correct or dismiss our first impressions.

Gnosticism supposes that knowledge involves only the first two moments of experience and interpretation, grasping the whole picture from just the initial encounter with experience. Since there is no return to experience to verify ideas, gnostic ideas are held to be true because they are invulnerable to challenge or further question. They are not subject to second-guessing because of their revelatory, self-evident or creative nature. They are closed to challenge or question as a revelation by those in the know, who communicate to us the impressive truths that government, media, your family or the church don’t want us to know. Or they need no verification because they are self-evidently what we discover within ourselves, perhaps by entering altered states of consciousness. Or they are closed to investigation as the aesthetic truths that we creatively invent for ourselves. Gnostic wisdom attempts to circumvent the long, slow process of self-discovery and self-correction by completing an end-around that avoids the return to real contact with everyday experience in the process of verification.

My second point about the kind of knowledge on offer is that it involves a flight from the process of social experience, understanding and verification that constitutes history. The process of knowledge that begins experience and ends with experience constitutes a social cycle of self-correction. There is a history to my knowledge of myself, others, my world and God that plays out as a virtuous cycle. There is also a history to our common knowledge that follows a similar path of experience, ideas or plans, implementation, re-evaluation, and self-correction. The re-evaluation and self-correction of plans and policies happen in a return to experience in light of which we judge whether or not things have actually gotten better or not. This is history in the sense of a personal or intellectual and communal autobiography. It is history as lived. But history means something else as well. We cannot avoid representing to ourselves this process of knowledge itself. Besides the history that we live, there is the history that we write about and try to explain to ourselves.

The importance of the second type of history and the way in which we think about the process of knowledge is that we learn to take control of the process of self-correction both personally and socially. If we represent knowledge to ourselves accurately we can collaborate authentically with own natural process of learning and loving. If we misrepresent the process of knowledge to ourselves, we inevitably fail to live responsibly. Gnosticism offers an explanation of knowledge, love and relationships that, as I say, involves a flight from experience. it prevents us from becoming active and responsible collaborators in our own personal and social growth.

Certainly, we can become better at loving others as we learn to know and love ourselves and correct our mistakes or the direction of our living. And we do this most effectively and efficiently if we consciously and deliberately commit to the cyclical path. But the commitment is one we make from wherever we happen to find ourselves. The process of living itself is one that we have already begun and we are already well on our way. We need not possess an invulnerable idea about ourselves before claiming that we are coming to know ourselves. We need not possess the ideal self-love before making improvements in our love of self or others.

Gnosticism claims that we do not really know and love ourselves or others until we know and love the whole thing that we are a part of. In reality, knowledge and love are the culmination of a long and cyclical process.We do not really wait for our lives to be explained to us before we start living them. We live a bit, stop and reflect on what we are doing, get some ideas, go on living, reflect some more and perhaps correct our first ideas, go on living perhaps putting some of the new ideas about the process into action, and gradually progress to a fuller and fuller sense of what it means to love self and others. It’s a beautiful cycle we call human growth. Learning to cooperate with this ongoing cycle is the challenge of adult living.