Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes 24

A lot of fatuous nonsense gets devoted to Gnosticism, especially nowadays with so many people going all New-Agey about their enlightenment. Here is the official definition of the word, courtesy of Uncle Google: "a prominent heretical movement of the 2nd-century Christian Church, partly of pre-Christian origin. Gnostic doctrine taught that the world was created and ruled by a lesser divinity, the demiurge, and that Christ was an emissary of the remote supreme divine being, esoteric knowledge (gnosis) of whom enabled the redemption of the human spirit." I will follow this up with my paraphrase of a verse from the First Epistle of John in the Christian New Testament: "There is no fear in love, because perfect love casts out all fear. God is love." This has been one of the most elemental battles over the Christian faith, love and knowledge duking it out with each other. Tree of Life vs Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But can't we have it both ways? Yes, but hold onto your petticoats, Hortense! We're not finished yet. First, a word about the Judeo-Christian Creation Myth. Whether or not there were a real Adam and Eve, and whether or not there was a for real Garden of Eden, and whether or not there ever were those two amazing trees with a talking snake entwined in the limbs of one of them, or whether this is just one great fable to help keep us all in line, I neither know nor do I care. Or, don't ask me, I wasn't there. I am even quite prepared to believe, accommodate and integrate both, the Biblical and the Darwinian myths: that our earliest ancestors were ape-like creatures descending from trees in Africa, and who knows, maybe two of them were named Adam and Eve (nowhere near as good-looking as the ones in the Bible, being all covered with hair, kind of stooped and with protruding jaws and brow ridges and absurdly tiny craniums.) Whatever happened, deep in the dawn of our species' existence, some kind of choice was made: we could become godlike and intelligent beings and absolute masters (Ha!) of our own destiny, or one could say, like the very clever yet militaristic and bloodthirsty violent chimpanzees; or we could be joyous lovers living in harmony and peace, if not necessarily the smartest simian on the block, like the make-love-not-war bonobos. And here I would like to return to the New Jerusalem, or the mythic City of Thebes of Ancient Greece. Whether it is a black Gargoyle-Shadow or a fearsome Sphinx guarding the gate, they demand of us an answer to their riddles if we wish to enter in through the gates, or at least if we want to get in there alive. Who are we? What are we? And what is it that truly makes us who and what we are? Here are my answers: We are humans; we are human beings; and it is love that truly makes us who and what we are. The account of creation in Genesis states that God created us in his image. The apostle in the New Testament famously wrote that "God is love." Could it get more obvious, Gentle Reader? If we eat the wrong apple, then we will certainly become clever and god-like, we will master our own destiny, and we will build cities, develop writings], culture and literature, develop the sciences, make ever new and sophisticated instruments of mass destruction, and very possibly eliminate our own species and drag much of the earth's biosphere with us. Or, we could eat the other fruit, and become loving, benevolent, kind, compassionate and gentle beings. We will also become incredibly intelligent, redolent with creative beauty and spiritual power and grace, vastly more intelligent and more godlike than the wrong apple could have guaranteed, because our growth, development and evolution will be governed and guided by love and for love, making us like angels and thus shall we fling wide the gates of the Heavenly City and enter in to claim our sacred inheritance.