As anyone who has been paying attention has probably caught onto by now, one thing Gehenna and I share is that neither of us have any use for the concept of reverence. We had a great discussion about this and decided to put our thoughts into a two-part rant article (Gehenna’s post can be found here).

Reverence is regarded as a requirement in most forms of spirituality. People revere their deities, their holy books, their clergy, their buildings of worship, their iconography and symbols.

With all this reverence going on, you would think it serves a valuable and necessary purpose in our lives! Right? Riiiiight?!

It doesn’t. In fact, when it comes to genuine spirituality and development, reverence does more harm than good. It moves us away from genuine spirituality more than anything else.

The reason for this is that reverence is a form of ritualized social distance.

That which we revere, we acknowledge our separation from, we put it in a special category somewhere “above” ourselves. In doing so we give away our own personal power.

So remind me, what was our goal again? Was it to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and others; between ourselves and the divine?

Hell no! The truth is that the divine is closer to us than our own skin! If there’s any separation, it’s because we have put it there; it’s just another illusion that has been created to rob us of our personal power, and we uphold it ourselves in order to maintain our own comfort zones. Reverence is an artificial human construct, it is just another form of ego-worship. It’s fear-based, and it’s idolatry. When we have the courage to smash our false idols, we get closer to truth, closer to the divine, and closer to our true selves. And then we realize how redundant that last sentence is.

On that note one of the more ridiculous ideas I’ve come across was mentioned by Gehenna already — in many of the tutorials for connecting with one’s Higher Self they recommend doing so “with the utmost reverence.” Why?! All your wacky theatrics might provide your Higher Self with some amusement, and sure, if you feel you need that, s/he will play along in the interest of “speaking your language” to strengthen the connection between you. This probably sheds some light on why Christians receive Christian-themed visions, Buddhists see the Buddha and so forth. But the fact remains that this is an aspect of YOU, and at some point the time will come when, in order to keep evolving in his direction, you’re going to need to give the subservience a rest. I mean, I’m sure I have aspects of myself that are less evolved than I am at my current frame of reference, but if they were to start bowing down and licking my boots, I’d be a bit creeped out. I’d probably have to give them a swift whack on the head and tell ‘em to knock that crap off!

Apparently I haven’t changed much at the Higher Self level in that regard. Since Gehenna is sensitive enough to get visuals and more specific info and I’m still workin’ on it, she sometimes connects to my HS and we compare notes. One of our favorite HS stories is the first time she did this — my HS was posing as the stereotypical guru, sitting in the lotus position and trying to look pious… but not quite pulling it off. The exchange went something like: “Whoooo is it that speaks to meeee?” “…You know who I am! *indignant*” “Oh. Err… yeah. Hiiii Gehenna. *snicker*”

There have been many similarly amusing encounters since with our HS’s and others, but the point is that these beings don’t consider themselves to be high and mighty. They don’t put themselves on a pedestal, and they don’t expect us to either. They’re just as diverse as we are; maybe even moreso, since they’re under no pressure of social conformity and enjoy the freedom to just BE. They have their own personalities, likes and dislikes, their own personal “style”… it’s all just on a scale that, to us, seems very expansive. They’re completely secure in who and what they are; how presumptuous to think they need any validation of their position from us! If anything, what has helped me most in being able to connect more fully with divinity is not my ability to be subservient (which is a bit lacking if you haven’t guessed)… it’s a healthy appreciation for the absurd.

Don’t even get me started on reverence toward other humans like ourselves. That’s just another wall between you and the divine. All the spiffy titles and special treatment might give your priest an ego-wank to help make up for the action he’s not getting, but I can promise it isn’t going to get you, or him for that matter, any closer to God.

–His Most Holy Pontifex Maximus Palehorse Redivivus XIII

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I get angry reading much of what I find online regarding interactions with the Higher Self (HS) and other Divine beings: God, Gaia, Jesus, various Archangels or your Ascended Hamster. Most everything I read reminds me of that idealised Heaven that is presented in church; drugged serene-looking Angels sitting around on fluffy white clouds, playing harps and radiating boredom love.

Tutorials I’ve seen for contacting these entities speak of “approach(ing) them with the utmost reverence”. Then of course there’s an imperial fuckton of “channeled” material to wade through which makes all these entities sound like the typical spiritual cliche. (Insert rainbow, unicorn, fairies and glitter here.)

In my experience, the HS is just You ..albeit You unbound by Earthly dimensions. The HS: evolved You, who has mastered internal issues. Does it seem reasonable that this You would demand your obsequiousness? That they would be snobby and look down on you as a lesser being? That sure doesnt show mastery of anything! That’s the same old rigid social structure that is deeply artificial, that so many put value to down here on Earth! Imagine a healthy relationship, where you approach your HS as you would a friend, for love, guidance and to share a joke. Much like an afterlife of joy, experience, fun, and freedom appeals to me a lot more than eternally static, fluffy-white-harp-Heaven, so an approachable HS mentor and friend appeals a lot more than a stuck up prig with a God-complex. In the same vein, a loving, listening and approachable deity resonates..an implacable, silent, worship-sucking one does not.

Think of Gaia.. Mother Earth. How do you talk to your own mother? Maybe you sit down together and share a coffee and a chat. She offers her experience and love; the bond you share enables you to feel comfortable asking questions and sharing a joke. How very different from the “audience with Gaia” scenario of a sacred space, hushed tones and perfectly phrased, “approved” questions. Uncondition love? Yes. But, just as Mom gets angry if you piss her off, hey, so does Gaia! How would Mom take you throwing trash all over the yard? I doubt she’d sit there all sweetness, light and “bounteous love.”

To further illustrate my point I’ve included an excerpt from some “channeled” material I found online, followed by my blogged response at the time.

I JUST FOUND THIS ON THE INTERNET>> supposedly a letter from “Gaia”

A letter from our Planet Gaea

Gaia, the Consciousness of Earth

Gaaaah what a load of toss.. fucking “Gaia channelers”..seriously, you are so far off the mark its untrue! “Mummy Earth” DOES not think that .. “Mummy Earth” is thinking more like this:

Being a good person doesnt mean denying your humanity. Remember kids, saints have one thing in common: they’re all DEAD.

It seems that the wider meta-community is suckered into the “goal” of serenity and perfect, bland, indistinguishabe order.

I put forth the idea that on a dizzingly high level we are all part of a whole, yet within that whole we are unique ..the goal here isn’t oblivious union, people! It is simply to BE, enjoy who we are, and realise that social, and higher-up hierarchies are unnecessary in the giving and receiving of respect, wisdom,help and love. In the same way our many feelings, thoughts and experiences combine to make us who we are, we make God/the Source what It is ..an infinitely complex Being, composed of all possible facets ..separate yet harmonious. The Ego isn’t evil..but that’s another blog

Im annoyed that every Seeker is bombarded with the tunnel-visioned mindset to higher interaction that I’ve spoken of ..and I give thanks that I have my own approach, which works for me far BETTER than being told by some prissy lightworker how to tread my spiritual path. Spirituality should be accessible for all, and that demands flexibility. So, if the “popular” method isn’t working for you, try mine ..or come up with your own.

Taking the Divine to encompass the higher self and other entities, my closing thoughts are that the Divine is not intimidating, a doormat, or on a pedestal. The Divine is the best parent, friend, teacher and company you could want ..and fun to hang out with too!

–Gehenna

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In Two Worlds — As the name suggests, this site is for those who have been questioning what we think of as everyday reality and now feel like they’re living “in two worlds.” Touches on lots of strange phenomena as well as the darker aspects of “what’s out there,” but the tone is anything but bleak. If I had to summarize the overall message of I2W I would say it’s “learn what’s out there, and what’s truly influencing us so that we can become fully conscious and free in our thoughts and actions.” This site has had a major influence on my thinking and writing, and Carissa has been nothing but supportive of Beyond Within as well, so it’s only fitting to share the lurve!

Noble Dreams — A forum that covers similar subject matter. This is another one that I’ve gotten a lot of inspiration from, and has also supported Beyond Within. Thanks guys!

Divine Cosmos — Divine Cosmos is a great resource on subjects I’m extremely interested in but don’t cover as often: the mystery of 2012, the concept of ascension and the mass shift in consciousness. David Wilcock makes a very well researched and well presented case that we may be on the verge of something big, and it’s anything but the same doom-and-gloom we usually hear about.

Thought / Word / Deed — A blog on “thought, word and deed,” or in other words, achieving balance and consistency, internally and externally. This is something I’ve been focusing a lot on, and Korey covers the subject matter in a way I’ve really resonated with and found personally useful.

That’s all for this week!

–Palehorse

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Fear not the flesh nor love it. If you fear it, it will gain mastery over you. If you love it, it will swallow and paralyze you. –Gospel of Philip

The Gnostics are often portrayed as extremists. Not religious extremists as we think of them today, but extreme in how they regarded the body. As the popular conception has it, all groups believed the physical world doesn’t matter, and in their quest to become free of its constraints different groups were led in one of two directions. Some renounced the body and chose a life of rigid asceticism, while others viewed life as a hedonistic free-for-all.

While this may or may not be the case with some groups, I posit that this belief comes partly from the exaggerated claims of their ancient opponents, and partly from projecting common modern views of what it means to be “free.” A fundamentalist of most faiths would tell you that we have to renounce the body and its “carnal urges” in order to earn our freedom. (Yes I know, “salvation by faith alone!” some will exclaim — but in my experience, if you answer “so my actions don’t matter then!” the discussion gets either very quiet, or very loud, but either way a clear and sensible answer is rarely forthcoming.) And then there are the “free spirits” who take the opposite approach, believing that freedom is found in indulgence.

From the quote above we can see that the group who produced the Gospel of Philip (likely the Valentinians) would beg to differ with both parties, instead advocating a philosophy of balance and moderation. When it comes to the question of personal freedom, I have found no better advice than this. I’ll explain.

“Fear not the flesh nor love it.” “Fear” refers to those who renounce the body and the trappings of the material world. “Love” in this instance refers not to a healthy self-love, but rather to identification, and indulgence, possibly to the point of obsession. What happens when we renounce or identify with the body?

“If you fear it, it will gain mastery over you.”

Try an experiment. For the next ten seconds, don’t think about sex. Ready? GO!

…

What happens the second I tell you to stop thinking about sex? That’s right — your mind goes “sexsexsex!” because the subconscious mind doesn’t register “don’t” and “don’t think about sex” is still a thought about sex. If you were to try this for a day, a week, or longer, suddenly you would find references to sex popping up everywhere you looked; it’d be inescapable! This is because of the basic truth that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you push something away by force, it boomerangs back at you with equal force. If you deny part of natural material existence, you put the mind and body, two aspects of yourself, into conflict… and the rejected aspect will simply begin expressing itself some other way, with or without your conscious consent. The Roman Catholic church continues to give us many tragic examples of the “fruits” of denying the body, and freedom has no part in the equation. Many of us have also seen examples of overprotective parents whose kids go absolutely nuts and indulge in all the things they were denied with reckless abandon the minute they leave home. These are all examples of what I call “forbidden fruit syndrome” — the quickest way to create a demand for something is to restrict or forbid it. If you define part of your identity as being against something, that thing is still defining you. It has gained mastery over you.

“If you love it, it will swallow and paralyze you.”

Identifying with and obsessing over the body and the things of this world is the source of much misery, because the only thing about them we can depend on is change. Change is guaranteed, and loss is a certainty; yet fear of change and loss are two of the biggest negative driving forces of this world. Where’s the sense in fearing the inevitable? If we base our identity on anything temporary, our very identity can be stripped from us. Energy we spend on trying to cling to “the way things are” is energy wasted. Our efforts to resist change consume us and cause us to stagnate. Change is like a river that’s going to flow with or without your consent; try to swim against it and you might be able to fight it for a little while. But once your strength runs out, you’re swept along at its mercy; you lose all ability to direct your course and may smash into a rock or two. If you make more efficient use of your energy by treading water and allowing yourself to flow with the current rather than pushing against it, you put yourself in a better position to consciously navigate a smoother path.

How then should we regard the body and the material world?

In between the extremes of renunciation and indulgence lies the narrow, middle path of balance and moderation. We should regard the body and world for what they are — temporary tools that provide us the ability to have experiences and learn a set of lessons about ourselves. That meat-suit you’re wearing is not “you;” it’s an entire collection of organisms that have come together for the purpose of giving you the experience of interaction with the physical world. When is the last time you said thanks? Physical pleasure is neither the ultimate goal nor something to be shunned; it is simply to be experienced, appreciated and learned from. When we can see change as a set of opportunities rather than threats; when we can experience what the physical world has to offer us with honesty and integrity, neither fearing, identifying with or claiming it as a need, we find ourselves on the narrow path. When we find this balance, we move without tension or conflict. When we can move and act out of our own nature and will, without clinging to objects or expectations, we become free.

–Palehorse

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Over the course of my developing interaction with the divine figure Sophia, I’ve dug up some of my favorite sources and have been taking a fresh look at Gnosticism. I have long cited Gnostic thought as one of my main influences, though as with a lot of systems, I stop short of calling myself a Gnostic because I don’t identify with a lot of things that people typically associate with the term.

Nonetheless, I take a lot of inspiration and insight from various Gnostic scriptures, and more recently I’ve had the idea to incorporate this in my writing. This piece marks the beginning of a new category for the blog, “Gnosis.” Mixed in with my regular articles I will periodically be taking a passage and writing up an exposition of the meaning I get out of it. Before I start that, I figured it would be useful to give it some context by explaining what Gnosticism is, and what it is to me. At least a basic knowledge of Gnosticism is important for anyone who is a seeker or otherwise interested in religion and spirituality though, as many commonly held beliefs and ideas are influenced or directly taken from it, often without knowing where that influence originated. …I’ve got a thing for the underdogs, okay?

What Do We Know About Gnosticism?

As simply as I can put it, Gnosticism is practiced by those seeking Gnosis, or subjective, experiential revealed knowledge.

Beyond that, Gnosticism is hard to define or categorize for a number of reasons. Much like early proto-orthodox Christianity, Gnosticism was not a single movement with a specific body of beliefs and practices; it is a modern umbrella term which covers a diverse range of belief systems.

It factors in signficantly that the Gnostics were heavily persecuted. The developing and later increasingly militarized proto-orthodox church worked to stamp out the Gnostic movements, and by about the 6th century, had done a pretty good job of it; forcing those who remained further underground. As a result, until more recently most of what we knew of the Gnostics were from the writings of their theological opponents. Needless to say much of this material is openly slanderous and its factual accuracy largely suspect, save for when it quotes Gnostic sources directly. This changed with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, a large collection of well preserved Gnostic scriptures unearthed in northern Egypt in 1945. Even still, due to deterioration as well as the long road from being discovered (and partially destroyed in the process) to being translated, published and finally released to the public decades later, many of those scriptures are incomplete, missing sections ranging from a few words to several pages of material.

Additionally the Gnostics were deliberately obscure, and made extensive use of metaphor and symbolism in their writings. Whereas mainline Christianity was otensibly a movement for the masses, Gnosticism was not meant to be for everyone. Many of their beliefs and practices were kept in strict secrecy until one became an initiate. More literal minded orthodox detractors often made the mistake of taking Gnostic writings at face value and criticizing them based on these faulty interpretations. While the results were often amusing, the misconceptions perpetuated by these practices certainly don’t help those of us trying to piece together a more accurate picture of what these movements were all about.

All that nonwithstanding, there are commonalities between the various Gnostic groups that can be pointed out and discussed in order to get a generalized feel for what they represented.

Gnostic cosmologies begin with a single unknowable Source, from which comes a series of emanations, divine figures called Aeons. Of these Aeons, Sophia is generally seen as the lowest, meaning the closest to our third-dimensional reality. Central to Gnostic belief is the idea that the world is inherently flawed, not because of any “fall” on the part of mankind, but because it was created that way from the beginning by a flawed deity who falsely believes “I am god, before me there is no other.” This creator, known as the Demiurge and often associated with the god of the Old Testament, is ignorant of the higher realities and divinity above himself. Man contains a “spark” of true divinity, but has likewise forgotten who he is and where he came from. “Salvation” then is not from punishment after death, but from ignorance, and the prison of materiality. It comes not through faith in an external savior, but through gnosis. Jesus is seen as a teacher of gnosis, who came not to save man from sin, but rather to show us how we might free ourselves. It becomes easy to see why the Gnostics were persecuted by the Roman church — since, if we’re all sovereign beings who can connect to God at any time via direct personal experience, then what need is there for a priestly class, a church hierarchy, or an ever-present collection plate?

What Does Gnosticism Mean to Me?

For my part, I’ve seen a lot of discussion in various forums of what makes one a “True Gnostic™”, which I find almost laughably ironic and more well suited to a discussion of evangelical fundamentalism. The fact that this goes on, and that many Gnostic groups today seem to have taken on roughly the same structure and function of the mainline churches that reject them, are big reasons why I don’t call myself one. Another reason is that we simply don’t know for sure what went on at those initiations, or exactly how the Gnostics interpreted their scriptures behind closed doors. Needless to say I’m less concerned about coming up with a bullet pointed list of True Gnostic Beliefs™ and more interested in exploring and discussing where my seeking after gnosis is leading me.

This concept that man carries a spark of the divine is at the heart of my own spirituality; most if not all other truths stem from this. We are simultaneously and paradoxically more sovereign as individuals and more interconnected as a collective whole than we could imagine. To me Gnosticism is a rejection of any authority higher than the self, while at the same time impelling us to be impeccable, to represent our highest ideal selves, which is where our authority lies. I don’t subscribe to the strict dualism, but as far as I’m concerned it follows that this concept has been misrepresented in many common portrayals of the Gnostics. Even if the world is a good few steps removed from the Source, relatively speaking, it’s all still from the same Source as everything “higher.” The physical world is not evil, bad or the enemy — spiritual ignorance is. This is simply a system with its own set of parameters that makes a certain range of experiences, and lessons, possible. The system has been hijacked by those who would turn it into a prison, but the creation itself is not at fault; it just IS.

Thus I am not necessarily in favor of escaping the material world, but rather transforming myself and becoming free within it. But freedom is not found by either of the usual extremes: renunciation, or unbridled hedonism, which are two sides of the same coin, and equally unbalanced. And with that statement I may be the only person on earth who’s in danger of getting beaten up by LaVeyans and Buddhists alike. The ego, represented by the false creator, or Demiurge, is not something to be defeated, destroyed, relinquished, killed or otherwise done away with, but we are also not meant to indulge in or be ruled by its false beliefs about itself. The ego is an aspect of the self, a tool used for having experiences and interacting with the material world — but when we go to war within ourselves, who wins? No, the ego is to be transmuted by the purifying, alchemichal flames of gnosis; to be balanced and shown its true form by Spirit. This catalyzing process is every individual’s apocolypse, which literally means “unveiling”; a trial by fire that brings forth a whole new creation.

For further reading:

The Gnostic Gospels by Elain Pagels (aff.)

Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew by Bart D Ehrman (aff.)

The Nag Hammadi Library by James L. Robinson and Marvin Meyer

The Other Bible by Willis Barnstone (aff.)

The Gnostic Bible by Willis Barnstone (aff.)

–Palehorse

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