Gnosis Writ Small

Once I became genuinely persuaded that I was neither my body nor that my inner self is a product of a physical process, a radical change in attitude set in. This happened fairly late in my life—but that’s because it takes a long time really to understand what now seems to me an obvious but still very strange fact. Once the real gnosis takes hold, one realizes that something else must explain embodiment, something other than having been created at conception or being some spark that fell into the void. I for one have difficulty seeing this condition as part of a plan, call it divine. The artificiality (the engineered character) of life powerfully suggests to me that some sort of collective effort well below the level of divinity is in place to help us make an escape. Embodiment therefore serves a purpose; and since this purpose isn’t really bliss (this life just isn’t blissful), it must be a rescue effort. Several conclusions follow.

One is that simple knowledge of this fact is probably sufficient to escape. Whatever clouded one’s awareness up to that point where it dawned has been wiped away. No one having a strong awareness of another dimensionality, having seen a full lifetime here, can possibly want to “do it again”; and if the escape genuinely works, thus if the gained knowledge is enough to carry one out of the material range, that person won’t come back again—except on purpose, i.e., voluntarily. Another conclusion is that the “collective effort” must work on reasonably large numbers of people else it’s most deficient. We shouldn’t need earth-shattering satoris, and so on. Awareness of the spiritual reality—and that we belong to that—should be sufficient.

Where that dividing line manifests for different people is hard to pinpoint, but clinging to life would be a kind of negative indicator surely. Those who so cling don’t “instinctively” feel the other dimension. Here language is lossy. We use physical concepts, like visceral, in the gut, heartfelt, etc., to mean the hard sort of internal gnosis, and by hard I simply mean genuinely knowing. That gnosis then changes one’s attitude to life. Those still strongly of the world perceive my stance as negativity; in fact it is just realism. Hardline Buddhism is that stance—and it is incompatible with the conventional belief in life-at-any-cost. Those not yet at that stage can’t understand that the negative attitude is basically well-meaning, indeed benevolent. I don’t want to make life harder for people; I don’t want them to suffer. But they are hurting themselves by blindly living their lives in a sleep.

It’s possible, to be sure, to know all this with unquestioned conviction while yet, at the same time, remaining ignorant of the boundaries of our captivity in this realm. It may well be that extreme degrees of spiritualization are required and that, after death, we may find ourselves still stuck in this dreary dimension and, furthermore, even more limited than we were in our bodies. Then, of course, trying again may seem a perfectly sensible course. But my own sense is that once this feeling is present, it is a species of arrival.