Episode 17: Gnosis and Existential Inertia

So last time we were taking a look at a group of people: the Gnostics. They shouldn't be understood as forming a community or group, although there might have been some Gnostic churches; we should think of them more like we think of existentialism or fundamentalism. You can be a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim or Jew etc.; it's more about a style, a way of being, a way of understanding and interpreting. It was pervasive during the same period as early Christianity and the two are interacting with each other. In fact, as we will see, many Gnostics thought of themselves as Christians.

So we were taking a look at how to go about interpreting Gnosticism. Why are we doing this? We're doing this because I'm presenting the Gnostic movement as the Axial Revolution within the Axial Revolution. It's taking the revolution to its culmination in many important ways that I think have direct relevance for us today. In order to do that I'm presenting to you something like the cognitive science of what gnosis actually is, and in order to do that we've been making use of some important work by Harry Frankfurt and L. A. Paul. The basic idea is that we can talk about people being existentially trapped and that that is a result of them being existentially stuck, they have inertia, they do not know how to engage the anagoge in order to make a worldview viable to them.

They are existentially indecisive. They are existentially stupefied because they're facing deep transformative experience and they don't know how to reason their way through it. They don't know if they should do it and that existential entrapment can be very, very damaging. It can fragment your world and tear apart your agency and so people can suffer from this in a profound way, which means Gnosticism as Hans Jonas and other people have seen is directly related to a lot of the modern confrontation with meaninglessness and nihilism, because in the meaning crisis people also similarly feel deeply existentially trapped.

So what is needed is a recovery of serious play through the engagement in ritual behavior. This ritual play affords an individual to engage in enactive analogy, so that they can get into that liminal state in which they can, in a perspectival and participatory manner, bridge in a way apt way between 'the world and the self that they are now' and 'the world and the self that want to viably become'. That enacted ritual should also afford anagoge. It should afford the transframing, the reciprocal anagogic process by which self and world are transformed such that we can go through the sensibility transcendence which will make a worldview viable to us.

That ritual combination--that enacted analogy and enactive anagoge--is empowered by the cognitive flexibility brought on by an altered state of consciousness. Hopefully a higher state of consciousness that gives us a sense of the increased realness of the world that we are trying to move into. So that higher state of consciousness motivates us to go through this radical transformative experience. 

Now, of course, there are dangers associated with all of this. When we are engaging in these kinds of radical transformation of our salience landscape, when we are putting ourselves and our world at risk, when we are inducing altered states of consciousness, there is a significant chance that we will fall prey to parasitic processing, to bullshitting ourselves, to deceiving ourselves, and therefore it is very important, and this is also part of what was going on with Gnosticism, to build up a community shared mythology, a shared set of psychotechnological practices, a shared social network of distributed cognition to provide sapiential feedback, guidance, correction, and encouragement for people when they are endeavoring to go through the kind of transformation that will release them from this existential entrapment. So you have some higher state of consciousness (hopefully) that has some aspects of being a higher state of consciousness and that is going to be set within a ritual framing that I've been talking about, and then you want that in turn set within an important sapiential and supportive community that is teaching you all kinds of the relevant skills by which one can bring wisdom, the ability to overcome self-deceptive self-destructive behavior, to bear upon this transformation. When all of that is the case, this is what gnosis is. It's this kind of deeply transformative, deeply respectable participatory knowing that is ritually enframed and embedded within a sapiential and supportive community.