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Creating Bridges: The Spiritual & Philosophical |
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Teachings from the Western Mystery Traditions:
The Esoteric "Paths of Return"
Christian Gnosticism
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by Jacquelyn Small
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Nicolas Notovich, a Russian writer, wrote The Aquarain Gospel of Jesus the Christ. He traveled throughout India, Afghanistan and Tibet during the 1800’s, and winding up in an accident in Tibet was forced to remain at a monastery called Himis in Leh, Ledak. There, he was shown a copy of a manuscript describing verses written by a Saint known as Issa, who these Tibetan Buddhists say was Jesus. He was told that the original manuscript was located in a monastery on Mt. Marbour near Lhasa, set down in the Pali language shortly after Jesus’ crucifixion. The manuscript began with this paragraph:
“The earth trembled and the heavens wept because
of the great crime committed in the land of Israel. For
there was tortured and murdered the great and just
Issa, in whom was manifest the soul of the universe.”
The Soul of the Universe referred to here is the Christ Consciousness that Jesus manifested during the last 3 years of his life. The manuscript does not conflict with the Bible, but adds the 18 years of Jesus’ life that is omitted from the Bible. Not until 35 years later did anyone go in search of this manuscript, but by then the monasteries in Tibet had been destroyed by the Chinese invasion.
Then, later, in a monastery in Mar Saba in the Judean desert, Morton Smith discovered another manuscript that also told of these lost years of Jesus. He found Bishop Clements’ untranscribed testimony of a Secret Gospel written by Mark that explains the secret teachings of Jesus he gave only to his most devoted disciples. He taught the crowds in parables only.
Jesus was a manifestation of the Christ Soul who comes to humankind to show man how to master all conditions and influences here, to teach that we are not simply balls to be tossed around by Fate, but are endowed with the power of oneness with the God-force and the keys and powers to come fully into ourselves as sons and daughters of God. The Christ Soul comes to teach that we are all divine… that we are here to manifest the Divine Life in each of our individual lives. We are to be here until we learn all our lessons in love and wisdom and have mastered the conditions here, at which time we attain what Jesus did and can say “It is finished.” He modeled this for us as the first and greatest of all illumined souls who reached his divine Sonship. He opened up the trail that shows us the Way back to our divine heritage.
Today we find ourselves at differing stages of this holy journey back to our Source, and are required to help others as our archetypal guide, Jesus the Christ, has helped us. The Way has always been shown through the esoteric, or inner, teachings of the religious paths. The Bible is full of references to the fundamental hidden truths of the Ages, even numerology and astrology, but these esoteric references are seldom interpreted as such.
Knowledge is power, however, so in 325 AD, during the Nicene Council, the Roman church leaders made it impossible for us to reach God without going through a priest of the Church. We were allowed to have a soul, but to be one with God, we needed the Church; otherwise, our souls were lost. And interestingly, according to religious historians and researchers, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, Constantine so feared the rise of pagan spirituality with their many gods, that he decided to make Jesus the one and only divine son of God, a cut above the Egyptian, Coptic, Celtic, and Greek gods. The Nicene Council voted on whether or not to do this, and it only won by a slim majority. Consequently, it has come down through the history of Christianity that Jesus is the one and only divine Son of God, and a blasphemy for any of us to claim this same lineage.
The original Christians were Gnostics, which means “Knowers,” possessors of inner wisdom, guardians of the sacred mysteries, and inheritors of the Western mystery schools. Gnosticism is none other than the words and works of the first Christians. These seekers of the knowledge of good and evil were never proselytizers, believing everyone had a right to view God and Jesus in one’s own way, and therefore Gnostic Christianity never grew in volume as did the Roman church whose motive was dominance over the masses. They were a lone voice in a sea of discontent at the time Jesus was on this planet.
What was Gnosticism that still, to this day, has the power to override orthodoxy in a minority of thoughtful people? It centers upon the infinity and divinity of the individual psyche. They explained sacramental rituals as the externalization of an inner alchemical process that produces the awakening of the psyche to who it truly is. They were mystical Christians, regarding the Bible not as history, but as sublime mythology rich in sacred symbolic meaning. However, if you were a literalist and believed in the physical story of the Jesus’ life, the Gnostic priests gave you that right and discussed him in your language. Or, if you believed he was the Jewish god in the mythic sense, like Dionysis, Adonis, or Osiris were for the Greeks and the Egyptians, they spoke to you in mythic language.
The mythical Jesus was more valid for those who were familiar with the Pagan mysteries and who recognized Jesus as the god of the Jews, with the same “life story” as that of the other Pagan gods: Adonis, Dionysus, Attis, Osiris, Serapis, Mithras, and Krishna, are all examples. All were born of a virgin, visited by “three wisemen,” rode into towns on the back of a donkey bearing palm leaves, were sacrificed and rose from the dead. Mithras was called “The Son of God” and “The Light of the World.” December 25 was the birthday of Mithras, Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysis. Baby Krishna was given gold, frankinsense and myrrh.
The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are obvious. Egyptian sun discs became halos of Catholic saints. Pictograms of Isis show her nursing Horus in similar fashion as those depicted of the Virgin Mary with Jesus. Communion, or “God-eating” was a pagan mystery ritual. Sunday was the day to worship the Sun God.
Or, you may have viewed Jesus’ life in the mystical sense, advocating the symbolic meaning of death/rebirth, of the descending and ascending soul, then they considered you an Initiate and shared with you in the esoteric Mysteries. The main teachings of true Gnosticism invite an experiential knowing of the descent of the soul into matter and its return to its Source through stages of initiation, the journey we all must travel to know ourselves and be whole.
None of this takes away from the power and beauty of Jesus, know as Iesous, the prophet. He did walk the earth, modeling for us how to be a perfected (one with Initiate consciousness) human, inspiring millions to lead better lives.
There were also religious fanatics among these early Gnostics, however, which gave Gnosticism a bad name. They were the ones who envisioned humanity as souls entrapped in matter, and viewed matter as “evil.” Consequently, these extremists believed creation was the handiwork of a false god, or Demiurge, and lived in the hope of rejoining God in their true home, the Pleroma, or heaven. Because of this fanatical hatred of human flesh, they lived as either rigid aesthetics, denying themselves any of the human pleasures, or a life of licentiousness where all spirituality was denied as simply false. Living in these extremes heaped censure upon them, some of which is still felt today about Gnosticism in general.
The suppression of Gnosticism has left the true Christian tradition poorer, much of it completely misunderstood and its teachings misinterpreted. Much of its written wisdom wound up in Alexandria Library and was destroyed by the fire in 391. Yet today, Gnosticism is rising again through the Western esoteric schools of thought to haunt orthodox religion. But Gnosticism is not today what it was back then: it has become a melting pot of esoteric knowledge, synthesized from Persian, Egyptian, Hellenic, Christian, and Jewish teachings.
The chief features of Gnosticism were rooted in Zoroastrianism and the early work of the Essenes, both of which were in place before the onset of Christianity. Christian Gnosticism flourished from the first to the seventh century, then died. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library in 1945 has revived it, enabling scholars to piece together fragments of the teachings they found in 13 leather-bound papyrus volumes in jars in a cliffside in a ruined tomb near Hag Hamadi, Upper Egypt. So these teachings have survived miraculously for our present generation. Then, in 1947, the Qumram texts of the Essenes, known as the “Dead Sea Scrolls,” validated much of these lost teachings.
Included in these earlier texts are the Gospels of Thomas, Philip, and Mary Magdalene that contain the genuineness of sayings attributed to Jesus but otherwise unknown. These secret teachings of Jesus to his disciples were about going inward and knowing ourselves, not about worshipping him or any external authority. The Gospel of Philip tells us Jesus said we are not to seek becoming a Christian, but a Christ. We are all to be “christed” just as Jesus modeled for us. Jesus honored the fact that as sons and daughters of God, we have the wisdom of the Ages within us. He was the shower of the Way by his moment-by-moment way of being, not by what he taught as dogma. He modeled undergoing the five initiations we must all take to return to our original identity as spiritual beings. Here are some of Jesus’ exact words according to the scholars of the Gospel of Thomas:
“The Kingdom is within you and it is without you. If you will know yourselves, then you will be known and you will know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty and you are poverty.”
“Whoever knows the All but fails to know himself lacks everything.”
“If you bring forth that (which is) within yourselves, that which you have will save you. If you do not have that within yourselves, that which you do not have will kill you.”
“When you make the two one and the inner as the outer, and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one,….then shall you enter the Kingdom.”
Though Solomon’s Temple was headlined by the saying: “Man, Know Thyself,” seeking the Kingdom within oneself was lost, even denied as blasphemy, in dogmatic orthodoxy throughout the history of the Church. Humanity was made to seek salvation from external authorities that held the key to our salvation. This deliberate misdirection by the Church fathers has caused us to lose ourselves in seeking external validation and fulfillment. This is the seedbed for addiction and depression, and a devastating lost sense of meaning and purpose to one’s human life.
Jesus, as bearer of the Christ Consciousness for 3 years, reminded us that we, as humanity in creation, are microcosmic reflectors of the macrocosm, the eternal reality of Light, or the realm of God. This has been the theme of all the mystery teachings of all Ages. We, as fragments of the one Light, are scattered throughout the universe, most of us forgetting our original condition.
Yet, some do remember, and become walkers-between-the-worlds and help reassemble the Body of Light. Through religious and esoteric means, a number of dedicated people form a launching pad for such an enterprise. These people do not necessarily know each other, but each go about his or her own unique way of study and demonstration of this great venture into conscious awakening, and this work has a cumulative effect upon humanity. This is known as the Great Work.
These people live by their bigger story – the rending of a god, the apportioning of a goddess who, by her sacrifice, brings creation back to its original Source of Oneness. Unfortunately, like Humpty Dumpty, we have become so fragmented, it seems impossible to put us back together again. And for some, this realization that we are all sparks of the divine trapped in flesh causes them to deny the body itself.
The obvious splitting of the great mystery traditions with Christianity originates in a mistaken notion that the esoteric knowledge disturbed or destroyed Christianity. This view has blinded many to the fact that the mystery traditions took seed within Christianity itself and grew to maturity there. And most of its proponents were Christian, although usually hiding that fact due to the fear of persecution. The Church became suspicious of its own mystical origins back then, due to a division between the ways of faith and the ways of knowledge, or gnosis.
Neither faith nor knowledge can, in itself, gain us entry into the kingdom of God; we require the gift of wisdom to bind faith and knowledge into harmonious traveling companions. Those who yearn for eternal things and seek knowledge of God’s Kingdom learn to speak the language of wisdom that transcends human speech. It is the language of the mystics and esotericists of all Ages.
Gnostics were obsessed with the need to know: Who am I? Why was I born? What is my purpose in life? What is evil and from whence does it come? Gnostic Christianity blended knowledge and faith, which puts heart into the knowledge that we are the pearl buried in the mire of our human struggle. Not only does this balanced form of the Gnostic tradition seek out the hair-splitting questions about spirituality; it also has faith in a hidden and unknown God and knows we are living out the mystery of existence. The Gnostic prefigures alchemy in one’s ability to believe in the transformation of the self. The interpenetration of the microcosm and the macrocosm, of both Anthropos and Sophia, reminds us without a doubt that we are both human and divine.
The Gnostic influence on early Christianity is intriguing to those of us who continue to search out Christ’s real and true message. Forgetting our heritage is our only “sin” as sons and daughters of a Living God, the early Gnostics believed. As we correct this core widespread misunderstanding of our nature, we remember who we truly are, so beautifully stated in the Gnostic Pistis Sophia :
“Know you not...that ye and all angels and archangels and the gods are out of one and the same
Paste and the same matter and the same substance, and that ye all are out of the same mixture.”
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Jacquelin Small,
Spiritualist, Clairvoyant Psychologist
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JACQUELYN SMALL, LMSW, is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with degrees in human psychology and clinical social work. She is a licensed non-denominational minister and a licensed psychotherapist who works with both spiritual and psychological concerns.
Jacquelyn is a popular presenter and consultant in academic settings, new-thought churches and new paradigm conferences and mental health settings, known for her easy-going, self-disclosing, humorous style of intimate relating with her audiences.
She has a long history in addiction counselor training, consulting and counseling, and trains all kinds of health professionals in the emerging field of spiritual psychology. She is one of the teachers who has been selected by Unity Church for their national TV ministry. She served as the Director of Training for the Texas Commission on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse for nine years, and served on the adjunct faculty of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Stanford, California for four years.
Jacquelyn has authored eight books about soul-based psychology and the process of personal transformation, some of which have become classics in the counseling and consciousness fields. She is represented by the Tom Grady Agency. She has many audio tapes as well through Eupsychia's publishing company, Eupsychian Press.
Her published books are:
* Becoming Naturally
Therapeutic (Bantam)
* Transformers, the
Artists of Self-Creation
(DeVorss & Co.)
* Awakening in Time
(Eupsychian Press)
* Embodying Spirit (HarperSanFrancisco
/Eupsychian)
* Rising to the Call with
co-author Mary Yovino (DeVorss & Co.)
* Becoming a Practical Mystic (Quest Books)
* Psyche's Seeds-The 12 Sacred Principles of Soul-Based Psychology (Tarcher/Putnam
/Penguin)
Jacquelyn is a regular columnist for Science of Mind Magazine and is featured often in other magazines. Among the many conferences and programs for which Jacquelyn has keynoted or presented programs, include:
* The Association for Humanistic Psychology
* Association for Transpersonal Psychology
* Omega Institute
including their Body &
Soul Conferences
* Tracor and Texaco, Inc.
* Church of Religious Science Annual
Conference
* Great Lakes Addiction Conference
* Whole Life Expo
* The College of William & Mary's Annual Addictions Conference
* Most major universities
in the United States
* U.S. Department of Heath, Education and Welfare
* Omega Institute's
Body & Soul Conferences
* New Age Magazine's Bahama Teaching Cruise
The ConferenceWorks!
She has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, America's Talking, Wisdom Television and Radio, New Dimensions Radio, NPR's People's Pharmacy and a CNN's series on Alternative Healing and continues to make regular guest appearances for radio and television.
Jacquelyn Small serves on the Advisory Board of the International Psychosynthesis Association, the National Council on Codependence, and The Holistic Alliance of Professional Practitioners, Entrepreneurs and Networkers, Inc.
She is the Founding Director of Eupsychia (pronounced u-si'-ki-a) Institute which means "good psyche" or "well being" in Greek, a not-for-profit professional training and healing program in Soul-Based Psychology and Integrative Breathwork. With her staff of dedicated, experienced spiritual therapists, she conducts workshop intensives throughout North America on a regular basis.
Eupsychia Institute
PO Box 151960
Austin, TX 78715-1960
(800) 546-2795
Local (512) 327-2795
Fax (512) 327-6043
eupsychia1@aol.com
Contact Webmistress
www.eupsychia.com
New Event!
Healing Into Wholeness:10 Day Wellness retreat For Emotional Healing and Spiritual Awakening with Jacquelyn Small
June 16- 26
Central Texas Hill Country (near Austin)
Contact:
Eupsychia 800-546-2795
eupsychia.com/well.html
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