 Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy are internationally renowned authorities on world mysticism and ancient spirituality. They are authors of a number of popular titles available from Cygnus: The Jesus Mysteries, Jesus and the Goddess and The Laughing Jesus. Tim has also written Lucid Living, which has been in our top ten for more than a year! Visit www.timothyfreke.com
Dear Friends,
Some people dismiss all philosophy as abstract and irrelevant. But Gnostic philosophy can utterly transform our understanding of who we are and what it is to be alive. What could be more concrete and relevant that that?
The word gnosis is usually translated as ‘knowledge’, but it is better to think of it as a state of knowing. Gnosis is not information like the ‘knowledge’ you picked up at school. Gnosis is not a theory about life which you can learn. Gnosis is a state of awakening that arises when you examine the present moment and become conscious of what you are actually knowing right now.
Most of the things we claim to know are actually just opinions which we believe. To experience gnosis we need to differentiate believing from knowing. It is possible to doubt all our beliefs, but what we are knowing is self-evidently certain in the moment. We don’t have to give up our opinions to experience gnosis. They may be useful, beautiful, valid opinions. But we do need to discriminate them from what we actually are knowing now.
What are you knowing right now? If you pay attention to your immediate experience of reality and ask yourself this question you will realise that most of what you think you know you really don’t! Life is extremely mysterious. What is this moment? What is it to be alive? Completely focus on the now and you will feel a rush of excitement as you become conscious of the awesome mystery of existence. Step out of the world of your preconceptions and become conscious of reality for once. It is something most of us so rarely do, it can be a liberating surprise.
We are usually so engrossed in the stories we tell about life that we don’t notice something extremely important about our predicament. We don’t know what is going on! We are so busy pretending that we know who we are and what life is that we somehow manage to ignore the shocking truth. We don’t understand life at all. We are so lost in our concepts about life that we rarely give our open-minded attention to the mysterious experience of living here and now. We are eating the menu not the meal. No wonder we so often find life hard to swallow.
When we confront existence without our habitual assumptions, we see our beliefs for what they are. Stories. Concepts. Words. And we see that the stories we tell about life are not life itself. Life is infinitely enigmatic. The word reality is not reality. We don’t know what reality is. This radical not-knowing is the first step towards genuine knowing. This rejection of our theories about life in favour of becoming conscious of the mysterious experience of living in this moment is the prerequisite for gnosis.
Most people have experienced at least brief moments when they have found themselves catapulted into the mystery of the moment. Anything can trigger this. Often it is confronting death. Someone close to you dies, or you are diagnosed as seriously ill, and suddenly you are face-to-face with the fact that you really don’t know what life is. Let alone what death is! Or it may be a moment of exquisite beauty which does it. You fall in love or give birth to a child, and suddenly you remember the miracle of existence. It may be a walk in the mountains or the feeling of the sun warming your back. Or it may happen for no obvious reason at all. Whatever the apparent cause, most of us have had moments of overwhelming wonder or overpowering terror in which we have suddenly become conscious of the awesome mystery of existence.
If, whilst reading these words, you have been able to put your opinions on one side and become conscious of the mystery of this moment, you will have already experienced a radical shift in consciousness. It will feel as if you previously existed in some sort of semi-conscious trance, in which you were so mesmerised by your ideas about life that you hardly noticed how miraculously strange it is to be alive. How mind-blowing it is that you exist at all. The mystery of existence will be so obvious it will seem astonishing that you are usually oblivious to it. You will realise how unconscious you normally are!
If you become conscious of the mystery of this moment you will begin to understand why the original Gnostic Christians compared life to a dream and gnosis to waking up. Because you will feel as if you have awoken from some sort of unconscious stupor. You will have begun to rouse yourself from the collective coma we mistake for ‘real life’ by becoming conscious of reality itself.
With our love,
Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy
Text & photographs © Cygnus Books 21-Jul-2006
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