Gnosis, Enlightenment, Salvation
Towards a New Understanding of Religion without Dogma
Encoded within religious traditions of the past millenia are systems which enable the human species to evolve and mutate our innate capacities.
Upon close analysis, they all seem to point towards similar realms or degrees of experience. Systems that were once the privelage of the few, learned and literate or specially gifted and tribally selected, have become accessible to all. Some of these systems compose what is popularly termed the New Age movement, while less public traditions maintain a strong bond with teachings that can literaly be described as ancient, maintaining secrecy through correspondently ancient prescriptions to Will, to Dare and to Keep Silent about it. While these prescriotions still have their place, for technical reasons if not for sheer convenience, many 'secrets' are now wide-open for public scrutiny, and with the advent of secularism and a distancing from the authority of Priest-centric religions, it's now possible for the general public to follow these ancient teachings, and become enmeshed in a Spiritual Path, a dialogue between the human and divine that goes beyond attending a place of worship once a week or following consumer -led festivals of remembrance two or three times a year .
Through the very term Spiritual Path, it is implied that to practice a spirituality is to be going somewhere. The following is a discussion towards the various goals described by different practices, what they have in common, and their impotant impact upon spiritual practices and beliefs in the New Age.
The Public and the Private
Organised religion has its own inner traditions: Judaism has its Kabbalah, Islam has Sufism, and Protestant Christinaity could be said to have Freemasonry, in it's genuine Gnostic and esoteric forms, while Catholicism has its monastic orders whose acolytes strive towards a deeper experience of God's presence. Buddhism also has its many different forms. Its most exoteric face could be interpreted as the Theravadan tradition, whereas the Mahayana and all of it's tantric offshoot's have a far more esoteric bent and often a much more Guru/Chela centred relationship, rather than Layman/Priest. The priest is a closed gateway to the Gods in exotericism, whereas the guru teaches the student how they may experience god or divinity directly and by their own steam.
The terms Gnosis, Enlightment and Salvation, while belonging to different traditions and using a vastly different symbology and terminology to represent themselves, all share in common the fundamental tennet that human consciousness lacks something vital to the effective perception of the true nature of reality. Or put another way, according to these terms we could all be experiencing a much better quality of sentience, ergo a better quality of life, through the prescribed methods embedded within their practices. While there are prescriptions within some traditions concerning who may be suitable to persue a path which brings one into direct experience of numinous realms, on close analysis we arrive at some core techniques, utilised by many different traditions and leading to certain states of consciousness, whether they be trance, annihilation of consciousness of the body, or the excitation of certain brain-chemicals which shift perception of space and time, if not obliterate cognisance of them entirely.
Experiencing the Other
With Gnosis, as discussed in other articles, the quest is for experiential knowledge of the divine. With Enlightenment, the acolyste is guided towards apprehension of a reality behind the one we experience everyday, which purports to be of an exceptionally higher quality and brings one, as with Gnosis, to a new persepctive or state of knowledge about the world we live in. With Salvation, though very often something to occur after death rather than in this life, the absolution from sin (error in thought and conduct) and the entitelment to God's grace is being saught. Though these are three terms of note, there do exist others within traditions that point towards the same error or misinformation inherent in ordinary percption and action. These three serve as pertinent examples of a certain message inherent and shared deep within the world's religious traditions. Action and sentience informed by divine knowledge or experience is a pre-requiste for being, perhaps not just fully human, but more than human. The terms and traditions they are a part of point to a wider scope of human experience than is allowed in common cultural discourse. What remains untapped perhaps, is understanding what 'the divine' is from a mundane level, and how or why regular human sentience is seperated from it, while many traditions prescribe that the divine is within everything. This will be explored in a further article. For now, as can perhaps be deducted, we can say that the mind and its limits and capacities holds the real key to these answers. Or more specifically the mind and what 'it' chooses to experience on a daily basis.
Why Religion?
One may well wonder whether the same effects, Enlightenment, Gnosis or Salvation can be generated without belief in the divine, or in gods and goddessess or superficially 'religious' ideologies and methods? This is something the New Age, catering to the emerging general secularism of society, could be said to accomodate. It's been observed that the succesful execution of these techniques lies within the secret of the excitation of bodily energy, or its subfusion into different parts of the nervous system through the stilling of the mind and the regulation of the breath. 'Bodily energy' is a vague term, and here we might hit our first hurdle, and gain some understanding towards the importance of using these different symbologies. First as maps, without one you'll never know where you are or where your going, but also, as mundane as it may sound, simply as a language with which to discuss and understand these things. We don't learn about Kundalini, or any equivelent power, within school, so why not use a five-thousand year old terminolgy, tried and tested, in order to describe it, understand it and work with it. Regarding the belief in various gods or goddesses, this is not necessary, as certain schools of Buddhism (eg. Zen) point out. What is necessary is a terminology, and we'll often find these absent from popular western discourse, hence the need to adopt one.
The other important ingrediant borrowed by esoteric traditions along with the religious terminology, is its communication of the mythic. As discussed before, how does one define 'the divine'? I used the term 'numinous' to indicate the expereinces of Gnosis, Enlightenment and Salvation. The term is useful precisely because it is vague. As anyone who has experienced the divine, or had peak experiences, expereinces which we can't locate in our regular cultural discourses, there are very few words available in the English language to desribe them, because they are not yet the foray of accademic study on a large, public basis, leaving the terminology required to describe them effectively 'esoteric', in other words specialised. While we rely on the academic world and the media to provide us with our language, that which is not broadcast or studied in tandem with public discourses, it remains an area of expereince that, while expereinced by many, is not yet fully understood by science, philosophy, or those things we rely on to provide us with our maps of reality. Therefore, using a map of reality which encompasses these realms of experience, such as trhe Kabbalah or Buddhist doctrine, lends one the advantage of firstly discovering that these things do happen, and secondly that there are ways of inducing them. Asides from that, as we mentioned at the begining of this discussion, there are also ways of knowing where one can go with them, and what their true function is.
