It has been more than a little tempting for me recently to retreat totally into myself and go full-on solipsist. If you’ve been reading this blog I’m sure this will come as no surprise to you. I’ve talked before about the experience filter that translates the universe for us, and I’d like to bang that around again.
You experience the world. You see the trees and you hear the traffic and you taste the ice cream. But what is the “you” that is having these experiences? There are some significantly strong arguments that your brain is “you”, but I’m not so sure.
When I was 16 I was preparing to be confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church. I had been an altar boy for years, since that’s what my parents said that Catholic boys do. I never had cause to question my faith, or to even wonder why I was going to church every Sunday to wear the robes and pour the wine. That’s why I was surprised when the pastor of my church came to speak to us at Sunday Scool about our confirmation. He told us that we needed to think about why we wanted to be confirmed as a full member of the Roman Catholic Church. I had never done this before, but I was determined to be sure I knew that answer when I knelt before the bishop at my confirmation.
I spent weeks thinking about things I had never considered before. I thought about god, about religion, about the nature of reality, about blind faith in Jesus, and many other things that were very new to me. Suddenly all of the things I had taken for granted in my life were gone. It was, as I have come to realize, my first “dark night of the soul” as they speak about in mysticism and alchemy circles, and it lasted for nearly a month.
The Gospel of Thomas also warns about the dark night for those who search for Gnosis:
2. Jesus said, “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all.”
The time when you discover the truth is accompanied by great sadness. For me it was the loss of certainty that I had developed over my first 16 years. I was no longer certain that what I knew as real was, in fact, real. The moment that has been most formative in my life came at the end of this period of darkness. I was lying on the hood of my mother’s car in the parking lot of my high school after a marching band practice. I was staring at the stars and thinking about what my role is in the universe. I was suddenly aware that “I” was floating about six feet over the car, and my body was still lying on it. I was so startled by the experience that I quickly rejoined my body and I sat there for several minutes and wondered what the hell had just happened. My dark night was over and I felt a joy that I have only been able to dream about since.
Over the next several years I tried to make some sense of what happenend that night. I went ahead with the confirmation anyway to keep my parents happy. The most important thing I took away from that experience was that the “self” and the “body” were not as strictly bound as I had been led to believe. That moment opened a world of possibility to me that I have been exploring ever since. Author Philip K. Dick had an experience something like this when he was in a great deal of pain after oral surgery. He saw a pink beam of light eminating from an ichthys necklace and he suddenly became aware of a different version of reality. He spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of what he had experienced, writing and rewriting his exegesis as new theories came to him. I see some very striking similarities.
Since the self (observer, IAM, consciousness) does not seem to be linked to the body in anything more than a superficial way, then what is it like to experience reality without the filter of the body? What is it like to experience the implicate order directly? Our bodies as a microcosm and the universe as a macrocosm seem to act as filters, translating reality in a way that convinces almost everybody that this is all there is. The anamnesis that comes with Gnosis is the experience of the diving implicate order. This is what we need to do in order to become truly enlightened.
Until we truly know the truth about reality, solipsism seems to be the only path that can guide us through the universe. We can’t know anything for certain that does not directly happen to us. In Gnosis, the only thing that matters is the personal experiential knowledge of the divine. Anything that makes us forget that, if only for a moment, is a trick used by the archons to keep us trapped in our prison with widely-spaced bars. We are manipulated like puppets to think that things like politics, business, economics, and other “real world” or “down-to-earth” things are truly important. They’re not. If it is not happening to you then it might as well not even be happening. Gnosis is the only goal.
For your consideration,
