A personal note from Bishop Mani.
Those of us involved in non-traditional spirituality often have a difficult time defining ourselves and our path. This is the issue of self-definition within the process of psychological and spiritual growth. I wish to speak to this issue. We have a need to acknowledge, define, and explain the level of spiritual growth where we find our-selves. This is a need that should be embraced, but embraced in a balanced, rational manner.
Let me explain:
Every level of spiritual growth requires a sometimes total reorientation of ourselves and our lives in relation to our own Self, God, and the rest of the world. Because of the dramatic nature spiritual growth, this often leads to the desire to take dramatic steps in our lives.
For example: some people will leave their families, or abandon jobs, or leave a church, or change religion. Some also often will begin to judge others in accordance with their new level of revelation and growth. “That person does not embrace my truth in the manner that I understand it, because of this, he is both wrong, and potentially dangerous and evil.” Or, “I can no longer associate with those people (sure some of them are good people) but I no longer agree with them, and I will only associate with people whom I agree with.”
These two examples are very prominent in the various communities of non-traditional spirituality, including the contemporary Gnostic movement. The dramatic (and sometimes traumatic) nature of spiritual growth will sometimes lead us to attack those who we once revered, or to attempt to reform them in the image of our own evolving beliefs.
The main problem with this is;
We had to change to get to where we are. If we are going to move forward, we will change to do so. We may be at a place where the changes do not cause a total reorientation of our world, but at this point, we don’t know this. But so many of us get to a new place, and believe this is the whole of our growth process. We believe that we are now at a place where we can stop and define ourselves for all time. We believed we have reached our limit, when in fact we have simply stepped into a new level of growth, or reached the end of a known level of growth. We believe that we can stop, and because we believe this, we resist anything that takes us beyond where we are now. We resist (sometimes violently) our own growth because it requires (once again) a reorientation and redefinition of ourselves.
So often when we get to this point of resistance, we project this resistance onto others. We will not allow them (not without our objection) to be or believe differently than us. God help them if they are in a place that we have grown beyond, because we see them as uninformed, simple, and stupid. Rather than giving them the grace and aide they need to grow past where they are. Rather than loving them and valuing them for who and what and where they are – we squash them, because they are nothing more to us than a representation of a lesson we learned a long time ago. We simply don’t see them, we see our-selves.
Let’s take this issue of the transitional nature of the involvement of a lot of people in the Contemporary Gnostic Movement. Let us say that a Christian who is raised in a liturgical tradition grows disenchanted with their tradition. They try a number of different traditions, and they get a lot out of these traditions (the newness of these traditions will allow for new levels of growth). Then they hear about Gnosticism.
They have been taught that it was a heresy that predated Christianity, and that it survived through the Middle Ages within the Cathars, and to today in the Freemasons and other Magickal type fraternities. It is mysterious to them and it represents the forbidden in their own tradition. It is attractive. There is a great deal of pleasure in embracing these “Gnostic” systems like Kabbalah, or Qabala, or Theurgy, or Theosophy, or Yoga, or Tarot, etc. They embrace these systems but it doesn’t lead them to a deeper understanding of God (that isn’t what they were after in the first place). But it might lead them to really looking into who and what the classical Gnostics actually were.
When they try to embrace classical Gnosticism they find at first reassurances and maybe even a road back to their own tradition. But when they look deeper into the people and organizations who are supposed to be Gnostic, they find nothing but controversy and they either realize that no one really knows what the classical Gnostics believed or taught (and abandon the whole thing right there), or they take sides. Once they take sides, they find something they can fight for, something they can invest in. Maybe even something they can believe, but what they don’t find is God. They fight to define Gnosis and Gnosticism, either as a heresy or as a definite system. They use the work of various historians to define these arguments for them, and they take these views on them-selves as if they were fact, and defend them in the face of all opposition. They have satisfied themselves because they weren’t looking for God in the first place. They were looking for a belief that they could defend.
On the other hand, there are those who come to the contemporary Gnostic path truly wanting to know God. They see Gnosis as nothing more than that process. But when they get involved in the community, they don’t see God, they see the same rehashing and fighting over controversial definitions. They see people pounding on others with those definitions, and beliefs. They don’t see God. So they leave. They try something else. They are simply trying to know God, and they have no one to aid them.
The sad thing is that all of this is avoidable. If we look at spiritual growth in the context of the individual, we will have no need to fight over the fundamental definition of this thing or that thing, and we won’t cast a tradition out, simply because it has some negative historical aspects.
As an individual, your personal, internal context is the spiritual level where you find yourself. You and I may be on different levels. Thus, I may have a totally different internal context. I may define something on my current level very differently than I did on any of my previous levels. I may also respond very differently to external or internal stimuli very differently on this level than on any other level.
I may take historical theories more seriously on this level than I did before. But my next level could very well lead me to devalue those same theories.
What I must not do, is to impose the values and lessons of one context on another. Each level builds on the others, and in that light, it is always informed by everything that has gone before, but to limit this level or to condemn a different level because my internal context has changed, is personally destructive. It is self-destructive as well as being condemning and destructive to others.
Spiritual growth is a process of relationship; it is not a system of belief.
We do need to define where we are when we are there. We also need to acknowledge and understand where we have been and what we have walked through. But we cannot allow ourselves to make life changing decisions based on our temporary spiritual context. We will continually redefine ourselves. That is okay. It is even healthy. But we must not take any of these self definitions as absolutely factual. They are simply a representation of your current context. They will evolve and change over time, even when you don’t change the labels, the meaning of those labels may change for you over time. It is unhealthy to limit your self-definition to any one thing, or any one understanding of a thing. And it is downright destructive and hateful to impose the limitations of that definition on another being. Allow the process. Do yourself no harm.
