How to Move from Secondhand Theology to Firsthand Spiritual Experience

Last updated on: July 6, 2017 at 12:14 pm by Carl Gregg

How to Move from Secondhand Theology to Firsthand Spiritual Experience 2017-07-06T12:14:22-04:00 Carl Gregg

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(This post is a continuation from my post yesterday on Countercultural Spirituality, Then & Now.)

Long before the hippies of the 1960s, the ancient Gnostics were developing a counterculture, which one historian of the period has described as “any figure or movement that privileges non-intellective knowledge and personal visions of truth over cultural constitutions of knowledge” (283). But I don’t want to jump straight from the Gnostics to the hippies. DeConick has also traced four other major “Gnostic awakenings.”

During the medieval period, groups such as the Paulicians, Bogomils, and Cathars had a transgressive emphasis on trusting one’s personal spiritual experiences more than inherited orthodox teachings (347). Each flourished for a time, then faded in influence—although later Gnostic groups often drew inspiration from these earlier examples of Gnostic spirituality.

And just as a rediscovery of Greco-Roman philosophy and culture helped bring about the Renaissance, that same rediscovery of ancient text included some Gnostic texts, which led to a second Gnostic reawakening.

A third major Gnostic reawakening happened during the nineteenth century as figures from the Transcendentalist Movement—such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau —began reading widely in the world’s religious traditions as well as being attentive to their own firsthand experience. Consider this opening paragraph from Emerson’s breakout book, Nature:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? …Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

This third Gnostic awakening can be traced all the way through landmark modern figures such as Carl Jung, who wrote extensively about his firsthand spiritual experiences (348-349).

Finally, we can trace a fourth Gnostic awakening, starting with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts in 1945 and continuing through today. Polls continue to show the growing influence of the so-called “Spiritual But Not Religious,” who are seeking authentic spiritual experience, not merely secondhand theology. And in this day and age, one of the exciting promises of movements like Unitarian Universalism is the opportunity to build a beloved community that is both spiritual and religious—a religious institution that is committed to honoring the value of each person’s firsthand experience. Indeed, in good Transcendentalist fashion, the first of the UU Six Sources is “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life”—which we balance with our Fifth Source, “Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”

Before concluding, there is one other aspect of DeConick’s book that I particularly appreciate. She explores some of the ways that Gnostic themes are present in many popular films from Star Trek: The Final Frontier to Avatar to the more avant-garde cinema of Darren Aronofsky’s Pi. To briefly describe three examples in more detail, the 1999 film The Matrix has a classic Gnostic scene in which the protagonist Neo (an anagram for “One”) is offered a choice by a stranger named Morpheus:

You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth.

The red pill is an allusion to the red apple that the serpent offered Eve. And the “truth” to which Morpheus refers is a type of Gnostic knowledge. After swallowing the red pill, Neo wakes up

only to discover himself suffocating in a goo-lined pod. Like an infant struggling out of the womb, Neo pushes through the fluid and his cords are cut by Morpheus. He is the initiate faced with a new reality. The terms of this new birth are so immense that Neo immediately vomits. He is greeted by Morpheus and company, “Welcome to the real world.” (19-21, 50)

That scene is classic Gnosticism: discovering a deeper reality beneath the surface—the simulacrum—of what you thought was reality.

Another modern Gnostic parable is the Jim Carrey film The Truman Show. Just as the ancient Gnostics discovered “cracks” in the Bible that were clues about a larger reality behind “God” as described in the Bible, in the film Truman begins to notice clues that something is amiss about his life. Indeed, it turns out that he’s a reality tv star—and everyone is in on the deception except him. Discovering the truth allows him to escape from the TV set that he thought was reality into the larger real world (51-52, 67).

A final example is the film Pleasantville. This movie is particularly Gnostic because the mother in the show, Betty, begins to awaken from a “black & white” reality into the real world of full color when she suddenly becomes more conscious of her sexuality and realizes that she’s been following a lot of unnecessary rules. Likewise, “Mr. Johnson, the owner of the local soda shop [realizes that] what really brings him joy is painting…. He turns from black and white into color as he takes up some brushes and begins to paint oversized nudes of Betty in cubist style on his windows” (295-296).

Some of the Gnostic parallels here go back to Genesis 3, and the many layers of meaning around the word knowledge/gnosis/γνῶσις. You may have heard the phrase, “She knew him in the biblical sense,” meaning “carnal knowledge,” embodied knowledge. Note that immediately after Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden for eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we read in the next verse that, “the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain.” The same Hebrew word for knowledge (*yada/*דעת) is used both for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as well as for Adam knowing his wife Eve in such a way that a baby was born nine months later. There are deep linguistic, archetypal, and existential connections between knowledge and sexuality. Remember that Gnostic adage: “Eve Was Framed, the Serpent Was Right!“

The overall point is that Gnosticism—both ancient and modern—is an invitation to question secondhand religious traditions that have been handed down to you. It is a challenge to test religious claims in the crucible of your own firsthand experiences, critically examined. What do you know to be true because you have experienced it for yourself?

The Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg is a certified spiritual director, a D.Min. graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary, and the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, Maryland. Follow him on Facebook (facebook.com/carlgregg) and Twitter (@carlgregg).

Learn more about Unitarian Universalism: http://www.uua.org/beliefs/principles

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