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Cognition and the Cult Experience

Cognition and the Cult Experience:

When gnosis appears to trump faith and reason

(re ICSA 2016, Dallas lecture)

Dedicated to the memory of Kevin Garvey, a colleague in cultic studies

Joseph Szimhart, February 2018

After presenting this topic at a conference in 2016, response was positive enough to consider a paper for publication.[1] The first draft met with salient criticism due to my lack of focus on the main themes with a need for clarification of terms and for more references. With that in mind, I hope a new writing brings something of value to this discussion of knowledge claims through gnosis and how former members of harmful cults might better grapple with such claims using philosophy, especially a pragmatic approach to epistemology. My purpose has been to explore questions about truth and being as known or cognized though transcendent experience—through gnosis—a quest often damaged or derailed by naive awareness, harmful group activity, and constricting social influence.

I speak from personal experience as well as decades of exploration. I will look to pragmatism as a means and not an end to resolve problematic claims to gnosis as primal cognition or deep knowledge about being and truth. Pragmatism uses science and empirical evidence when at all possible, but not as a final solution. I will question whether the experience of truth through gnosis is even possible, thus challenging an enduring theme in aesthetic and spiritual experience. I hope to convey that absolute, impeccable knowledge remains a chimera for the human species, yet that chimera, that re-emerges like the smiling Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, continues to bait us with a way out of our enigmatic existence.  

Knowing the unknowable: Occultism in psychology and art

When Carl Jung was asked during a television interview in 1959 whether he believed that God existed, he said he did not believe—he said, I know.[2] Jung later regretted his assertion of “I know” as it raised a minor furor among science-oriented peers. Jung explored behavioral science and psychology in his unique way that some scholars viewed as from a Gnostic position.[3] However, Jung was also keen about proof and evidence. He later qualified his statement by asserting that defining God remained a mystery to him despite evidence leading to the presence of an ultimate transcendent and omniscient presence.

Nevertheless, Jung dabbled seriously with occult themes of spirit mediumship, astrology, the I-Ching, and the dim reaches of human consciousness groping for evidence of what was cognitively real. Jung’s notion of a collective unconscious smacked of an imagined pan-psychism. Sigmund Freud, his mentor, warned Jung about abandoning the sex repression dogma that Freud believed would be a bulwark against the “black tide of the mud of occultism.”[4] Today, Jungian ideas are popular among New Age mystics, astrologers, and transpersonal psychologists, while Freudian theory remains a curious artifact thriving only in psychoanalytic circles. Behavioral sciences have moved on, although psychoanalysis coupled with neuroscience has been revisited for its efficacy.[5] Whether Freud or Jung had competing theories or even adequate theories in behavioral science aside, the “mud of occultism” never left us if we notice its popularity in film, video games, and Marvel Comics. We find occulted values that evade scientific verification in the continued resurgences of alternative medicines, psychic healing techniques, and enlightened guru cults. The urge to claim that we directly know ultimate reality and can cultivate extrasensory powers remains.

The problem, for this paper, is that our claims to occult knowledge can be power over people that believe we have occult knowledge or miraculous powers. Neo-gnostic cults invested in theosophy (god-wisdom) tend to believe in cultivating extra-sensory and mental healing powers, as if these were available to the human species, and if available, then purportedly responsive to cult techniques offered to acquire and improve them. Gnosis bottled in techniques of divine connection or self-realization in many cults is the commodity that I call metaphysical snake oil. The pun will be apparent when we look at the myth of the Garden of Eden.

This problem of gnosis in religion and self-awareness schemes first occurred to me as a student in university where I took an honors course in theology in 1969. I read Modern Man in Search of a Soul by Jung, but my concentration for a final paper was William Blake (1757-1827) and his quirky, mythic and Romantic poetry. Blake was a member for a time of the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem that had some hallmarks of a neo-Gnostic religion. Its founder, scientist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) experienced radical visions in 1745 with a new “spiritual” or direct way to interpret the Bible. Blake’s poetry also borrowed heavily from Gnostic themes. For example, Blake’s legalistic deity Urizen paralleled the role of the Demiurge or creator-god viewed as evil or materialistic (self-centered or spiritually ignorant) by many early Gnostic sects.

According to the myth, the Demiurge formed the material universe that entangles and traps individual spirits—the spirits of divine creation. Because of this entanglement, the pure spirits forget their divine origins. Greek philosophy and religion, one and the same when we consider Plato (especially in Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium) and his debt to Pythagoras, instructs the soul within to strive for beauty through ethics, wisdom, and a harmonious life to rise or awaken from the degradation of common existence. In other words, Beauty in pure form will burst into consciousness and seize us in ecstasy forever when we are readied.

However, two themes emerge that remain at odds in all mystical and religious traditions: Do we strive through great effort and austerity to arrive at or ascend to this pure form of Self or selflessness or do we take a via negativa (meditation and contemplation) to retreat from the world and the bodily senses to make way for the eternal reality within? The solution seems to be in both themes if the quality of the quest avoids the pitfalls so prevalent in controversial cult movements. For example, one saint in the early Christian tradition put it this way:

“Let perfected action follow me, informed by the example of my Passion: but let contemplation that has been begun, tarry till I come, to be perfected when I come.” (from St. Augustine’s last homily on St. John’s gospel, CXXIV.5)[6]

In Gnostic lore, the individual spirits come from a Pleroma or collection of gods called Aeons in a core of sacred, eternal luminescence. Neo-Gnostics including Madame Blavatsky and L. Ron Hubbard would borrow and sell this concept of individual spirits as monads or thetans. These sparks of light are trapped in Maya or an illusion of MEST (the matter, energy, space, and time universe). A popular 1999 film, The Matrix, exploited this Gnostic theme to great effect. Theosophy sects including the Summit Lighthouse (that I rejected in 1980) employ the monad concept liberally. Summit Lighthouse, an off-shoot of the “I AM” Activity sect, called our eternal soul the Magic Presence.

The monad as an independent “substance” was discussed by the math genius Gottfried Leibniz in his 1714 essay Monadology.[7] Leibniz borrowed the monad concept from occultists John Dee,[8] Giordano Bruno, and others. Basically, he surmised that every monad, infinite in number, both contains and mirrors the entire universe. However, each monad is limited by relationships that appear to it as real. God in the Leibniz view is the harmony that guides the entire realm of monads.

We find this monad view expressed in the first verses of “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand, 

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, 

And Eternity in an hour…

Blake’s mythology heralded later motifs in psychology (Jung’s archetypes, for example) that view the human being through aspects of self: creative, paternal, nurturing, vindictive, shy, angry, legislative, punishing, etc. Gnosticism was in part a psychological approach to religion notwithstanding mythic narratives that speculated far beyond the early Roman Christian formulations of Gospel. Taken literally, Gnostic myths are rich with cosmic symbolism, but the logic within the myriad Gnostic movements made more sense to more philosophical Christians than what was to become the standard Roman testament by the time of Constantine in the 4rth Century.[9] Gnostic myth made more sense because the myths supplied rational frameworks that explained the human condition. Christianity’s Satan or the devil never developed into a sophisticated cause for evil because an all-powerful, all-knowing God should have seen it coming and stopped it. Christian tradition affirmed the good creator of this world, whereas most Gnostics viewed the creator of this flawed, mysterious world and our bodies as a flawed and selfish Lord. Gnostics tended to be radical dualists, emphasizing the good-spirit/bad-body divide. We find echoes of radical dualism in current fundamentalist religious movements—Opus Dei in Catholicism is a case in point.

Blake’s illustrations to his poems were populated with energetic and expressive figures captured in etching and watercolor techniques. One of his famous quips defined him: I must create my own system of be enslaved by another man’s. However, his idiosyncratic mythology and style did reflect a host of other systems including Swedenborg’s spiritualism and Neo-Platonism. Blake borrowed from and built on other systems. In drawing, Blake imitated his hero Michelangelo by creating hard outlines to define his figures as ideal forms. If we could cleanse our doors of perception (our senses), Blake felt we would see clearly into reality the way God does. We would experience gnosis as what is true directly with no need for faith or reason. As an aside, after studying Blake’s work for decades, I have no reason to believe that he achieved the gnosis that he alluded to.  But he did allude to it mightily and with a distinct style. In other words, Blake’s aesthetics both limited and revealed the gnosis that he handed to us.

Artist and aesthetic theoretician Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) had a significant influence on the expressions of mid to late 20th Century Modern artists. Hofmann was a Modernist in the true sense because he viewed his aesthetics as scientific, or reality based. Whether Hoffman was scientific, depends on your definition of science—spiritual science as gnosis has been with us since Pythagoras and reiterated by many New Thought religions including Christian Science. Search for the Real, an essay by Hofmann, explored the dynamics of the picture plane as both object (the rectangular canvas with paint on it) and a mirror helping to reflect our spiritual process of perception. Hofmann enhanced modernist painting theory by emphasizing the integrity of the flat plane and imitating the process of nature and not merely representing nature. The extremes of Hofmann’s influence can be seen in canvases and sculptures that are minimal expressions, for example, a black cube or a monochrome canvas. “The creative process lies is not in imitating, but in paralleling nature...every work of art should be alive…The real in art never dies because its nature is predominantly spiritual.” [10]

In Hofmann’s view, high quality art is always a spiritual revelation or experience and a means to gnosis for the artist and the viewer. In his own productions, Hofmann struggled to portray his pure ideas, yet believed that the viewer would grasp its meaning spiritually or intuitively. The common viewer of a Hofmann might see echoes of works by Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Rothko, or Arshile Gorky. The non-connoisseur would need an explanation to grasp why his work was and is important.[11] Today, a medium-sized canvas by the artist can fetch $200,000 or more at auction. Works by his students including Helen Frankenthaler and Larry Rivers sell in the millions of dollars. Clearly, someone is buying this notion that inscrutable modern artwork carries deep meaning, thus has high value. Sharing in the aesthetics of gnosis can be a good investment, but what will you be investing in? Gnosis, as we will see, is non-communicable.

Before Hofmann’s effort to define art as a parallel process to nature, the effort to spiritualize art began in the late 19th century or during the infamous Fin de siècle. One cult figure with a significant if short-lived following was Joséphin Péladan who died in 1918. He began an aesthetic movement based on his occult revelations. Inspired by the Rosicrucian movement, Péladan inspired and attracted Symbolist artists known for mixing the saintly with the decadent. Péladan formed the Order of the Catholic Rose + Croix of the Temple and the Grail. His was one of many sects promoting occult themes and the lost arts of magic that emerged in the 1890s.

There was a Dionysian impulse to occult activity that dared to revel in dangerous and immoral behaviors, dispensing with sanity, while purporting to reveal divine secrets hitherto taboo in civilized culture. Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) later became an embodiment of debauched guru behavior in occult circles. Famous works including The Scream by Edvard Munch (in four versions from 1893 through 1910) emerged from the decadent Symbolist milieu, but few admirers of The Scream have inclination to appreciate its creepy roots. Péladan was forgotten and his unstable cult dispersed or found new leaders before he died at age sixty, but his impact as a self-proclaimed magus was a model to be repeated many times over in aesthetic and religious circles.[12]

During his lifetime, Péladan’s critics wrote him off as either a charlatan or a lunatic with a vivid imagination. Today’s cult leaders often fall under the same criticism, but the edges of known reality make us pause to be certain of what is really going on:

“In a sublimely daft portrait by Delville, Péladan hovers before us in priestly white garb, his eyes rolled back, his index finger pointing heavenward. He is the failed prophet of a nonexistent faith. Nonetheless, his conviction is unnerving. Entire religions, entire empires, have been founded on much less.[13] Much less? Perhaps, but why did Péladan’s movement fail? In general, movements succeed if they are adequately skilled at self-governance within the wider social context; Péladan was not.

Suprematism emerged as an art movement after 1913 with a manifesto indicating that human beings were “becoming a new species” or evolving. Stimulated by the Russian poet Alexei Kruchenykh who invented a universal language called zaum in Russian (literally, beyond reason) based on sounds emitted by religious persons in trance—speaking in tongues—the Supremacists invented a new language in art. Kazimir Malevich, a core founder of Suprematism, wrote to painter and musician Mikhail Matiushin in 1913:

“We have come as far as the rejection of reason, but we rejected reason because another kind of reason has grown in us, which in comparison with what we have rejected can be called beyond reason, which also has law, construction and sense, and only by learning this shall we have work based on the law of the truly new ‘beyond reason.’”[14]

A pure expression of Supremacist art that featured geometric shapes and colors was the Black Square (1915). That is exactly what the viewer sees—a square canvas painted black. The painter Matiushin believed that “the avant-garde artist’s eye itself was evolving” to encompass a “broader” or mystical field of vision that he called zorved (see-know).[15]

This discussion of art value and theory brings me to the crux of this paper that will ask why we are attracted to transcendence in cognition in any venue. Is this yearning inherent in human nature? Have we become overly reliant on rapid (in this lifetime) evolution as a way out of the human condition?  Why all the interest in Zen, Self-realization, yoga, charismatic renewal, ecstasy, and mindfulness? Why pay over fifty million dollars for a Jackson Pollok canvas layered with random drips and splashes of color? Did Pollock tap into an awareness of primal cognition or gnosis as Hofmann imagined should be the function of art? Why pay thousands of dollars to attend emotionally distressing workshops in the quest for a harmonious self? How is it that we think we can know with certainty without faith or reason? Is zorved real? Was Blake correct when he claimed that we will see as God sees when we cleanse the doors of perception?

Tree of Gnosis

The roots of Gnosticism, according to Ioan Couliano (1950-1991), have more to do with the nature of the human mind than any revelation from founding prophets, psychoactive plants, philosophers, ancient Atlantis, or aliens from distant star systems. Couliano calls all formulations of religion, science, politics, and art “mind games” that produce systems of thought or “bricks,” (some more useful or brilliant than others) to build viable sciences, communities, or a civilization. Couliano’s bricks echo a similar concept called “memes” by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Bricks and memes can be imitated and copied or altered. To illustrate what he means by “brick,” Couliano traces the formations of metensomatosis (popularly known as reincarnation) in dozens of disparate cultures worldwide, thus demonstrating that the reincarnation brick in the mind did not “originate” in India or anywhere:

“Metensomatosis, creationism [a deity started and maintains it all], and traducianism (souls do not pre-exist the body and souls are not created; souls emerge naturally from parents] are not only the three main doctrines the scholar stumbles upon all over late antiquity, they are necessarily three of the most common logical solutions to the question of the relation between mind and body. As such, they are atemporal and ubiquitous…. [T]hey are present in all human minds that contemplate them by contemplating the problem. May this serve as a clear illustration of our view of “genesis” and “cognitive transmission” of ideas, as opposed to the view of a certain elementary historicism.”[16] When these bricks or ideas emerged is the task of the historian.

With an awareness of cognitive sciences, Couliano concludes that research should consider “that mind games have necessarily similar mechanisms (because the way the mind works, and its capacity have remained unchanged for at least sixty thousand years) …[17] That latter statement may come as a shock to progressive and New Age thinkers who view human consciousness as somehow evolving or moving into a new paradigm. However, it makes sense when we observe how easily Aboriginals in Australia could, if given the proper contexts, adapt to the language and sciences of their conquerors. By the 18th century, Australian aboriginal cultures had not significantly improved technology and survival skills in 40,000 years, yet the cognitive capacity to grasp and imitate British culture was already there. We can also say that the capacity if not the will to adapt to Aboriginal culture existed in the first European settlers in Australia.

Aboriginals and Europeans in the 18th Century shared the same modern human genetic line from the same chromosomal Y Adam and the same mitochondrial DNA Eve.[18] The capacity for human gnosis in primal cognition was the same but expressed through distinct faith statements and divergent reasoning structures. Aboriginals and Englishmen were and are of the same species.

Cognitive capacity has not evolved significantly, but we have managed to manipulate how we use that capacity for better and for worse. Couliano shows that plausibility structures or mind games have nearly infinite variations—we note this simply by examining religious, aesthetic, political, and scientific developments through history. However, given enough time, we will find considerable “overlap” between systems of thought due to the mechanisms inherent in our capacity to know anything. Buddhism and Christianity are not the same, but similarities in their cosmologies and ethics do exist. That is Couliano’s thesis and one that I will sustain in this paper. No cult is entirely unique or new in the history of ideas. Neither is bad behavior. The new religious movement meme favored by sociologists over cult is nothing more than a variation of an inherent religious impulse and not necessarily new at all.

Gnosis, Faith, and Reason

The initial stimulus for this project came when I read a paper by Wouter J. Hanegraaff (2008) titled “Reason, Faith, and Gnosis:  Potentials and Problematics of a Typological Construct.” The essay was included in a collection of articles published in Clashes of Knowledge: Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Science and Religion (2010).[19]

To help this discussion along, I will refer to the following typology offered by W. J. Hanegraaff.[20]   

Three basic areas of knowledge: reason, faith, and gnosis:

Reason: communicable and verifiable or falsifiable (the scientific method, logic, reality testing)

Faith: communicable; not verifiable or falsifiable (creed, foundation myth, doctrine, manifesto)

Gnosis: not communicable, not verifiable (prehension of being, primitive awareness, direct apprehension, primal cognition)

Gnosis is typically overlooked in the battle between or discussions about faith and reason. Gnosis as a category of cognition is often lumped in with faith by skeptics as well as believers. Science, however, depends as much on gnosis as does any faith religion, in this view.

Let us consider two definitions, one more secular, the other leaning toward Theology:

Cognitive science approach: “Gnosis is not communicable and not verifiable. Utterly beyond words. Requires the suppression of all bodily senses.” (W. J. Hanegraaff, 2008) [21]

Common definition: “Direct knowledge of God (or Being) expressed in complicated myths created by Gnostic movements.” (David Brakke, 2015) [22]

As we can see above, Hanegraaff secularizes gnosis, placing this category of cognition in a scientific area, whereas in the Brakke definition, gnosis as “direct knowledge” occurs through myth and Gnostic religion. The religious memes or “bricks” of Gnostic sects draw from the secular foundation of primal cognition as a category of knowledge from which faith and reason emerge. How and when these categories emerge may be as mysterious as the Trinitarian doctrine of Christianity. Literally, as story, the Holy Spirit of God announced the birth of Jesus the man, so Jesus emerged later in time, but cosmically the Gospel of John proclaimed that Jesus as The Word was there “in the beginning.” Evidence from evolutionary science indicates the earliest forms of cognitive existence in sentient animals already had the potential to produce the capacity for human mental cognition that produced faith and reason. Another way of saying this is that evolution funded our human cognitive capacities. Which brings up this question: Is the universe pan-psychic or pan-theistic? Are we participating in a mysterious cosmic ocean of consciousness defined best by emergent sciences, or is there an omniscient, revealed deity in our midst that communes with special mystics, prophets, and seers?

Does science recognize gnosis?

From a science-based perspective, cognition by any name including gnosis and imagination was funded by evolution. The capacity to reflect systematically through mathematics, mythmaking, and other cognitive strategies distinguishes the human species, but some aspects of animal cognition appear in human cognition. Sara Shettleworth, an evolutionary biologist, does not name gnosis, but she does align herself with cognitive ethologists who “claim that much behavior suggests that animals have conscious intentions, beliefs, and self-awareness, and that they consciously think about alternative courses of action and make plans.”[23] This is not to say biologists are anthropomorphizing animals, although they may employ terms about fear or delight when we induce these behaviors in experiment with animals. “…it is difficult to find a situation for which the notion that an animal has a conscious belief or intention or is consciously manipulating information unambiguously predicts what it does.”[24] Gnosis may be a product of the keen human awareness of mortality that non-human mammals lack, but we cannot know for sure. If we define gnosis as non-communicable and non-verifiable, every option is open for gnosis in all sentient beings, and perhaps even in rocks.

What I just wrote will drive the average skeptic crazy, but that is my point: There is no scientific method to test for gnosis. Even charlatan gurus recognize that “It just is” and never cease to attract seekers who want to align with “It.” A knife cannot cut itself, but we know how to sharpen a knife and we can wield it for cooking and for killing. In other words, a knife only knows (is) its nature by doing what knives do. Gnosis is the knife that every scientist wields to express what is believable and reasonable. How we use “it” or how well and how ethically we wield “it” is what I am getting at here. Claiming to know or experience "it" is always false. But let me proceed. 

Experion    

Recent research in this area of cognition and evolution among an array of disciplines including biology and psychology has re-examined why we avoided projecting human values onto animals: “Anthropomorphism has been turned on its head as studies of animal tool using, theory of mind, cultural transmission of skills, episodic memory and other capacities traditionally thought to be unique to humans are seen as relevant to understanding human cognitive evolution and development.”[25] Intelligence may be problematic too in describing animal IQ, but “an alternative view assumes that different intelligences or factors are employed in different situations by different individuals, groups, and species.”[26] This is to say in my proposal that gnosis is species specific in its expression and limits—an idea that makes sense to me—gnosis for a butterfly is different than it would be for a zebra or for a Buddhist nun in a London ashram.

Employing neuroscience with evolutionary biology, Oscar Vilarroya argues that cognition functions through “primal cognitive units” that he calls experion.[27] His idea means that our ways of knowing “couple” with the environment to form what he calls experion. Knowledge is neither from within or without but it is always an integration of sense and sensed. “Every situation in which an individual is involved engages an adaptive action by the neural system,” (and) “An experion is an event bounded within a temporal frame of reference.”[28] In this view, we cannot properly emphasize gnosis as somehow special or sperate from belief and reason.

Wild animals appear closer to God or to a more immediate (less complicated by reason) relation to being than humans—animals instinctively appear to know what to do and how to behave. Animals are better “coupled” with the environment than I am. Bees do not study analytical geometry to learn to build hexagon units for hives. Animals obey a way of being passed down genetically that we as humans can only envy. What it means to be “passed down genetically” is a quest we have only begun to explore, if I read The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee ((2016) correctly. We seem far more vulnerable than most animals from birth to not survive without extensive care, without clothing, without education, without symbolic language and without technology. We are thus further removed from knowing instinctual life. We project god-like attributes onto animals. Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge, was a baboon-faced or ibis-faced humanoid. The great god that removes all obstacles is the elephant-headed Ganesh in Indian lore.

Reason has been the defining characteristic of cognition that separates humans from all other creatures, reason and the ability to imitate (have faith in) what is passed down through tradition. Homo sapiens is the “wise” hominid.  Ancient Greeks had a saying that we are controlled by the gods like puppets on strings, but we retain one string that we control, and that string is reason, a trait that allows for more choice and independent judgment, for wisdom and imitation.

“Animal traditions are homologous but not analogous to human culture because the processes that perpetuate them do not include the key component of human cultural transmission, namely imitation. Human culture is indeed unique because across generations it “ratchets up”: changes introduced in one generation are adopted and further elaborated in the next in a process of cumulative change.”[29] 

We can easily note how imitation and improvement drives the growth of the sciences and the arts in cultures, but an opposite tendency occurs in religion which means to bind back to a set of beliefs and behaviors. Religion as such wants revelation of truth to remain the same, as if what the prophet or guru reveals is from eternity or from an ideal mythic time called in illo tempore. The act of cognition as direct knowledge of truth is gnosis. However, we find stodgy religions groaning to not change belief when sciences challenge overvalued and false beliefs. Virgin birth stories remain in illo tempore, not in literal history, yet literalists make exceptions called miracles to accommodate traditional stories. These accommodations are not mere faith claims, but a certain knowledge or gnosis. Unlike animal cognition, human gnosis can be derailed into literal nonsense when the valid function of myth is mistaken or denied.  

Gnosticism has re-emerged in many ways in the modern age if we accept what Hans Jonas keenly observed in The Gnostic Religion: “Gnostic man is thrown into an antagonistic, anti-divine, and therefore anti-human nature; modern man into an indifferent one. Only the latter case represents an absolute vacuum, the really bottomless pit.”[30] In other words, dualist strategies that draw us out of ignorance of our true natures into the truth of why we exist continue to emerge in new movements and revivals of ancient ones to stave off the existentialist dilemmas presented by modern sciences, arts, and philosophies. Modern existentialism that informs much of the secular world sees no transcendent point to life. The universe seems like a vast, cold, grinding thing without a caring creator. Gnostics agreed that the material world is wrong, pointless, or evil, but they held to the position that there is an alien God in an eternal realm (pleroma) of spiritual being that is our true source. In popular parlance, neo-Gnostics romantically claim to be spiritual while avoiding the bounds of being religious or bound to something in this world. Romanticism arose in the 19th century as a reaction to Classicism that was bound in this world of beauty and harmony. Romantics tapped values of intuition, wild nature, imagination, and individualism.

In some ways, Existentialists like Gnostics rejected transcendent meaning in this world, but with a basic difference: “Like Romanticism, existentialism closely resembles Gnosticism, yet it is the obverse thereof: Whereas Gnosticism is the champion of transcendence, existentialism is the final acknowledgment of its absence.”[31]  To reiterate what I mentioned above, Ioan Couliano also wrote about “mind games” upon which all human cognition depends to form religions, sciences, arts, and social contracts. Mind games are necessary and, according to Couliano, human beings began using the mechanisms behind mind games early in evolution. “Mind games have necessarily similar mechanisms (because the way the mind works and its capacity have remained unchanged for at least sixty thousand years), and therefore systems that have been sufficiently run in time would tend to overlap not only in shape but in substance.”[32]  For example, due to the infinite possibilities of extension of major systems like Christianity, Buddhism, and science “their maps of reality would certainly coincide.”[33]    

One fringe area considered unprovable by science is panpsychism (mentioned above as related to Jung’s collective unconscious) or consciousness that pervades the universe. Variations on this theme range from vitalism or a universal life-force to Monism that sees the universe as well as mind as one in various levels of manifestation. If we grant that there may be truth in all panpsychism claims, the questions remain how aware are we of what that is and how well do we use it? (The knife of cognition exists). It is one thing for a prophet to claim God speaks through him, but quite another to assess what is spoken and put it into action. The fallibilistic argument here is that all prophets are flawed; how flawed, is the question. Testing prophets and shamans has mainly been about their fruits—ends justify the means. But science seeks answers another way, through evidence to be tested and the means must be repeatable. Prophets, like artists, never repeat the same story from the cosmic mind even if they use the same drug or tradition. However, sciences vary according to what is being studied. Physicist Roger Penrose puts it this way, noting emergent values in complex systems:

“The laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.” 

The implication is that consciousness includes will or volitional behavior. The universe knows itself through itself: an ouroboros of Gnosis that eats itself while generating itself. We live in a universe that produces knowledge, that appears to care for being through ordered systems and the success of complex, self-generating systems called life. God by any name is that apparent caring aspect of being. Cultus means to care for. We are driven by nature to care or we fail in our humanness. Even Heidegger the atheist saw it that way: Our nature is to shepherd being.

Modern biologists might argue differently that we have no free will, that all our thoughts and actions are influenced by genes, environment, and chance. The implications for legal judgments are profound if science can convince the courts that no one is responsible for crimes, that no group or enlightened cult leader should be held accountable for anything. The eternal flaw in this claim of reductionist biological behaviorism remains in the reality of history and why cultures thrive or fail. Even biologists must admit that biologists that steal research and sell it as their own harm the ability of the individual biologist to flourish. We turn to Aristotle who pointed to flourishing as the reason we sustain rules and ethics in civil societies. To flourish in beauty and truth is the purpose of human existence, and we must protect the ability to flourish if we are to remain fully human is the argument.

Religious Experience: Emic and Etic

Professor of religious studies, Ann Taves, in her groundbreaking approach in Religious Experience Reconsidered (2011 edition), proposed a theory that combines neurology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology to explore the relationship between (special) experience and consciousness.[34] She is careful to avoid “errors in decontextualized essentialist analysis” (etic; from the outside) and “extremes of particularism” (emic; from the inside of a cultural experience).[35] I reference her theory to alert the reader that knowledge claims, whether through reason as scientific method, faith as creed construction, or gnosis as numinous cognitive apprehension have points of view that can bias interpretation.

From an etic view, “decontextualized” analysis can be scholarly or antagonist and non-participatory. Sociologists tend to view means of cognition in group behavior without making value judgments about how evil or holy a group may be, whereas a Fundamentalist may feel antagonism toward religion outside of their personal or emic frame: Their miracles come from the devil, but ours come from God. From a participatory, devotional, or emic view cognitive functions tend to support a positive view of group experience. The question to explore concerns the probability that the sciences (reason) can offer perspectives that satisfy both emic and etic cognition.

I will try to recognize both emic and etic approaches to the value of gnosis in any context, or viewing from within (emic) as a member or without (etic) as an observer.[36] Also, using Taves’s theory as a guide, I propose no theory of my own; I propose only that human cognition must struggle to avoid misperception and that any technique that promises a way to pure cognition of inner truth is already flawed.  

As a former follower of neo-Gnostic sects (Agni Yoga, Theosophy, and Summit Lighthouse, to name a few) and the kind of unhinged or self-sealing social system that interests me here, I have a keen grasp of how the quest for gnosis can negatively impact a person. The way we know and the quality of our knowledge claims are influenced for better or for worse within the social, intellectual, and political environments in which we dwell. The Summit Lighthouse system assaulted my sense of reason with special gnosis claims that appealed to me at the time. During my relatively brief tenure of less than two years, the group promoted a host of unreasonable health and reality claims that demanded suspense of doubt and scientific method: High colonics to purify the intestines, drinking distilled water, and a raw food or vegan diet emerged as the standard among core devotees in the late 1970s. Leadership relied on a form of astrology to predict future trends including economic collapse in the 1970s and nuclear attack by post-Soviet forces on America by 1990. Black, red, and brown were spiritually harmful colors and not to be worn in clothing. No silver jewelry was to be worn. Members believed that the leader could see and interpret human auras or mystical energy around the body. The leaders (for a time) promoted the hoaxed anti-Semitic document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as real.[37]  The female leader co-opted the titles Vicar of Christ and Mother of the Universe. The group willed to alter the course of history and the weather by chanting magic phrases or decrees. And those are only a few examples. The Summit Lighthouse, as an offshoot of the Theosophical Society and the “I AM” Activity fits the definition of a neo-Gnostic sect.

I am not disputing the (emic) right of groups or people in cults to value or overvalue special ideas based on an experience of deep knowing, nor am I totally dismissing benefits self-reported by participants in unreasonable rituals and techniques. I am questioning the value of denigrating reason and a well-articulated faith statement to shield those ideas, especially when there is evidence of deceit and harm perpetrated from those ideas. History tells us that cognitive behaviors flourish best when following well-reasoned rules or a code of conduct that benefits the tribe as a whole.

Cultus

Cult comes from the Latin cultus which simply means to foster, maintain, or to care for.[38] Agriculture means to care for the soil, as in cultivation of a field. Difficult means hard to do or resistant to caring for. My 1994 American Heritage Dictionary defined cult: First, as a “system of religious worship and ritual,” and second, as “a religion or sect considered extremist or false.” [39] Cult for my purposes means a devotional activity that cares for a person, idea, belief system, or object while making it special. “Making special” carries over into aesthetics as well as religion—we revere objects of art because they make something special. According to Ellen Dissanayake in her book Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, art production has a biological basis as well, and aesthetic behaviors helped drive the evolution of the human being: “The reader should try to remember, however, that henceforth in this book, reference to a ‘behavior of art’ means ‘aesthetic making special’…which is a broader concept of ‘art’ than is usual.”[40] Taves, also incorporating biological and neurological contexts for religious experience, points to “the process of singularization by means of which people deem some things special and set them apart from others.”[41] Taves and Dissanayake see emergent properties in the religious experience and the aesthetic experience that require a science built on what we know from other sciences. Specialness in an object, idea, or person easily leads to caring for it in a special way and setting it apart.

How we care for something matters. Knowing how and what to care for also matters. We can use a basic sense of karma from Hindu tradition to emphasize the problem. Karma means action, all action causes reaction, and proper action involves ethics and morals as revealed in tradition and law.[42] Precise rituals of behavior and sacrifice developed in ancient Indian culture to not invite negative future reaction or to end having to do something over again until we got it right. Right action through ritual toward gods and natural forces became cultural protocols worldwide among ancient peoples—ancient peoples naturally formed cults.

In my view, cult behavior (properly defined as systems and rituals that care for special things) has driven human social evolution. Any plausible strategy for making sense of mystery may have been better to try than no strategy. How to farm or use fire developed over time through observation and experiment, but how to relate to metaphysical forces or gods that controlled weather and fate needed art as well as reason or science. Rituals that care for the god Agni (Agni’s cult) in the Agnihotra ceremony, for example, must be done precisely lest we insult the god or cosmic principle of fire symbolized by the god, thus engendering more karma and more suffering in Maya. Maya in Advaita (nondualist school) tradition meant the magical spell that the gods or evolutionary forces weave, creating what we experience as the world and our bodies.[43] Strategies to mitigate our unknowing in our mysterious environments have included ways of knowing with ways of engaging the gods and natural forces.

Gnosis

How can we know how to behave properly if the information the world or God gives us is an illusion? Who or what can we rely on beyond personal experience, which we should know is often misleading? Is science good enough? One answer is to turn to caring for the god, so the god or force of nature cares for us and releases to us its knowledge: “Agni is the essence of the knowledge of Existence. Agni destroys ignorance and all delusions, removes nescience.”[44]

Numinous awareness (gnosis) in the soul or essence of self may be at the core of the religious quest. But primal cognition needs guidance and expression to mean anything in a human sense. One of the earliest catechisms of Christianity, The Didache (The Teaching, around 110 CE) reappeared in the 19th century after its discovery in a monastery in Constantinople (Istanbul).[45] The first part of The Didache, “The Two Ways (of Life and of Death),” has roots in ethical and moral teachings from the first millennium BCE of unknown origin.[46] Part 1 has the feel of the multicultural wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible.[47] Part 2 of The Didache is distinctly Christian with guidelines for baptism, worship, good conduct, and how to determine who is a true prophet or “charismatic.”[48]

Charismatics in early Christianity were itinerant preachers with gifts of prophecy and could go into a trance as if possessed by the deity. Questioning or testing a charismatic in trance was considered blasphemy lest you be challenging the deity directly. However, afterwards, the message could be parsed for edification or dismissal: “While a charismatic is in trance, you are on no account to subject him to any tests or verifications; every sin shall be forgiven, but this shall not be forgiven. Nevertheless, not all who speak in trances are charismatics, unless they also exhibit the manners and conduct of the Lord.”[49]

Christians in that early context believed because they knew (experienced as gnosis) and trusted truth in the Gospel from contact with Apostles. They recognized the God they already “know:” “Though He has existed from the beginning, He came as one appearing newly; though we know Him to be from old, He is born anew in the hearts of His saints.”[50] In ancient metaphor, the sheep knew the voice of their shepherd. Sheep, instinctively wise, would not follow a false shepherd—or would they, given time to adjust to a new and seemingly kind voice? The Didache asked the early believers to respect prophecy (direct knowledge from God through a man in trance) but cautioned to explore whether revelation from a charismatic source squared with their faith and rules of conduct. In other words, they reasoned as well as they could with the cognitive tools at hand. This shepherd sounds good, but is he from God? Heretical Gnostic movements emerged from the same principle that the deity could possess a charismatic or visionary to offer direct revelation, however, many new and private revelations did not square well with the four-gospel tradition. Thus, Christian heresies, good or bad, were born.

Divine gnosis as the goal for soul liberation has a long tradition in Indian philosophy and religion. Two of the most refined schools of Indian tradition that explore ways to deep knowledge are the Samkhya and Yoga. The latter needs little introduction due to its popularity, but Samkhya, which means to reckon, enumerate, or reason is not nearly as familiar. Samkhya informed yogic philosophy, especially around the 1st Century CE.[51] This not the place to elaborate on Samkhya (or Yoga), which is a sophisticated philosophy that developed over centuries. Essentially atheistic, Samkhya exercised strong influence on Jain and Buddhist philosophy as well. Despite its rational use of three ways to knowledge (perception, inference, and word through reliable source), Samkhya stops at claims to absolute knowledge. The last two stanzas of a famous hymn from the ancient Rig Veda encapsulated the atheistic spirit of Samkhya:

“Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it?

Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?

Gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.

Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whether God's will created it, or whether He was mute;

Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not;

Only He who is its overseer in highest heaven knows,

Only He knows, or perhaps He does not know.”[52]

That theme from the Vedic hymn, that we ultimately do not know and maybe nothing knows, resonates with modern science and the limits of mystical experience. For the latter, note The Cloud of Unknowing by an anonymous 14th Century Christian mystic:

“And therefore, it was that Saint Denis said, the most goodly knowing of God is that, the which is known by unknowing.”[53]

So, here we have statements from two major traditions that gnosis, though of great value, cannot be grasped with certainty. In the end game of high or low consciousness, we must let go of all reason, faith, and gnosis as well. Paradoxically, can we know that we do not know? Perhaps, but we cannot say it, if we follow the logic in the Rig Vedic hymn. Jesus in the Gospel proclaimed, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”[54] St. Paul recognized this moment of total emptiness in his master’s career as key to grasping how God takes on all sin for humankind.[55] The crucifixion is a two-way instant in the eternal clash of life and death, however, even faith is crucified in a careful reading of this passage. Jesus could not express that he knew, only that he felt abandoned, as he abandoned all.

Zen teachers revel in quickening enlightened awareness of the no-self or empty mind, which is a Buddhist concept of Anatta meaning there is no eternal soul or Atman. Mindfulness in the moment brings awareness of impermanence of being in the world in Zen. Techniques for mindfulness have gained enormous popularity since Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh introduced his teachings to the West in the 1970s.[56] “In Zen, the soul we perceive as a self is an illusion, if a necessary one.”[57] Soul or no soul, this is a delicious challenge, a truly radical quest that monks and nuns in many traditions live and die for. Cognition may end at death, but while we live the struggle to exercise cognition remains.

Returning to pure gnosis at the source of human consciousness is the Everest of the seeker’s path. The foundation text for one Theosophical sect that I followed in the late 1970s, Church Universal and Triumphant (or Summit Lighthouse), was Climb the Highest Mountain: The Path of the Higher Self.[58] Ex-cult members from neo-gnostic groups, in my experiences with them, were inadvertently attracted to this possibility of an enlightened state like moths to a flame. The cost in intellectual sacrifice, personal finances, family relationships, and sometimes physical and mental health could be very high for something that proves baseless in the end.

Nevertheless, the way to certain gnosis remains for sale among a host of modern movements with leaders that claim to embody the source of truth with techniques to aid you to experience and sustain the same. When ascension (Christianity’s not of this world) or extinction (Buddhism’s no-self) is the prize, what have you gained after enormous effort to give up the material world and close relationships? When nothing is for sale, you may end up with nothing after spending a hell of a lot of time, effort, and money. The point is, though we may never know the answers, we can always be more careful during the process of living with the questions.

Zen wisdom tells us what to do if we find enlightenment while chopping wood and carrying water: Keep on chopping wood and carrying water. No need to climb the highest mountains, join a yoga commune, or attend a life coach’s expensive workshops to prance barefoot over burning coals. If your life is about raising children and being a good spouse, raise your children and be a good spouse. Enlightenment means nothing if you abandon your dharma: That is the wisdom in the Upanishads and in the Bhagavad Gita. That is the wisdom in the Jewish proverbs and in The Sermon on the Mount by Jesus. This is not to disparage mountain climbers, but in this enlightenment game it appears to me that yogis and extreme performers are no more likely to sustain enlightenment than common carpenters and housemaids with learning disabilities.

This principle of using every cognitive tool (epistemology, neuroscience) at our disposal is at the core of my discussion about how to approach the gnosis claims of new spiritual teachers and cult leaders. I emphasize that knowing truth is meaningless without expressing it through language, symbol, observable ritual, or rational discourse. Following the advice of the Didache above, it remains important to use reasonable, aesthetic, ethical, and moral guidelines to determine whether a prophet or charismatic has value no matter what knowledge source he or she claims.    

Ritual and ceremony can have deep meaning and value for the culture in context, but an overbearing priesthood can pile on requirements for sanctity and social order. In a long discussion, The Vedic Origins of Karma by Herman W. Tull, we learn that a several hundred-year period beginning in 900 BCE represents an increase in authoritarian priest craft among the Brahmins, as indicated in the Brahmanas or sacred literature. Some 19th century critics viewed this period as a decline in how common believers were influenced: “…the age is overcast, not only with a thick cloud of ritualism, but also with an unpleasant mask of phariseeism.”[59] In other words, without performing endless rituals, time in embodiments, thus suffering, will increase.

We can compare that ancient Brahmin “phariseeism” to a similarly authoritarian Catholic Church that sold time off in purgatory with the infamous Indulgences (among other insults to devotion). In the era of a former Catholic monk, Martin Luther (1483-1546), we observe how knowledge of what to do and what is real in devotional matters can be manipulated by those in power.[60] Transcending our anxiety over living and dying can cost us dearly if we believe we must follow prescriptions from those who claim to know the way to truth. The manipulation of our faith and reason by someone who claims deeper knowledge from gnosis by way of their training and experience goes a long way back in human social development. The Torah warns about false prophets around the recording of Deuteronomy in the 8th Century BCE.[61] Cults and belief systems gone badly are nothing new. We will discuss the vagaries of gnosis as primal cognition, mysticism, and an untestable knowledge claim below. We will also explore the question of caring for knowledge, as if knowledge as such is the goal.   

Transcendence and Gnosis

A common attraction to good or bad belief systems involves a path to transcendent experiences and deep awareness of the human quest for meaning, for what is ultimately worthwhile, true, and real. To attain such lofty goals in any special social arrangement (self-help group, new religion, sect, or cult) typically requires a degree of re-socialization and reorientation on many levels including residential (if only temporary, as in workshops), financial, intellectual, spiritual, psychological, political, and relational. To some degree, even totally, it requires submission to those who know or know how to interpret a source text or narrative about transcendence for us. A transcendent belief system (path) is one component of a potentially self-sealing social system with a charismatic leader who manages members with overt and covert techniques of influence and control.[62]

Transcendent belief systems can be positive and negative. According to sociologist Janja Lalich in her book Bounded Choice, a “higher calling” might become “overly righteous,” “a sense of purpose” might end in dogmatism, something “special” may become “exclusive,” and “hope for the future” can become sealed in a “closed world view; a dead end.”[63] In other words, an aberrant leader can bait a seeker with wonderful and rational ideas to get on the path, then switch with higher demands to stay on the path. Staying on the defined path becomes the ultimate sign that one has gnosis.

An old canard in many cult legacies goes like this: To cure the world, you must first cure yourself. The self-cure part can be excruciatingly long, demanding, and expensive, and so much so that the initial calling to transcendence and world cure becomes obscured. When you discovered that the leader and his best disciples could never levitate, why did you spend over ten years and one million dollars trying to fly according to his instructions? The promised world-cure part is at best dubious in the self-sealing organizations in question. 

Upon emerging from a harmful cult experience after months or decades, any quest for meaning can feel wrong. As with some divorced spouses, some ex-members will avoid commitment to a lofty goal (marrying again), while others might inadvertently explore another unhealthy relationship or path too soon. In any case, I am addressing those who feel ready to revisit the quest using better tools of reference than were offered in a cult, a transformational event, or a new religious movement.

What interests me here is the transcendence that attracts seekers, where or what we believe that experience comes from, and how we describe and explain it. Why do some groups call it gnosis or call gnosis, “it” or “that”? How do we assess the source of what is transcendent? Does someone or some text have to tell us? Is it through experience alone or experience coupled with intuitive factors? Is it possible to know vicariously? Do we touch permanent transcendence during ecstasy or dissociative episodes attended by utter joy? Is it that quiet whisper of awe when we encounter a special person, idea, or object? Do we really experience imaginary beings or gods? Or do we apply what I am suggesting as aspects of knowledge claims using gnosis, faith, and reason as an integrated cognitive activity to inform our responses?

Faith and belief need some clarification here, as they are often interchangeable. Faith is trust or confidence in a person, thing, or idea. A faith refers to a system of belief. Belief is acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists. Belief is also trust or confidence in someone or something. We will use faith to mean trust or confidence in something without testable evidence. Faith in this sense does not require verification, thus may be unreasonable however compelling. Many Buddhist factions feel compelled to believe that the Lotus Sutra, one of the most popular Buddhist scriptures, came directly from the teachings of the Buddha, yet we cannot verify that Buddha had anything directly to do with the content.[64]

Overvalued ideas

Beliefs like ideas can be overvalued. An overvalued idea is part of a mental status report to determine whether a patient is not choosing well. “An overvalued idea is an acceptable, comprehensible idea pursued by the patient beyond the bounds of reason. It is usually associated with abnormal personality…An overvalued idea is an isolated notion associated with strong affect and abnormal personality, and similar in quality to passionate political, religious or ethical conviction.”[65] It may be acceptable and reasonable to go to church every Sunday, but believing that going everyday makes one a holier person may be overvalued. It is acceptable (despite lack of testable evidence) to pay $300 for a two-pound quartz crystal to bring harmonious energy into your house, but it is overvalued to claim that a $10,000 crystal of the same color and size replaces your insurance to save your house from a tornado. Overvalued ideas that persist despite disconfirmation can develop into delusions. “A delusion is a false, unshakeable idea or belief which is out of keeping with the patient’s educational, cultural and social background; it is held with extraordinary conviction and subjective certainty.” [66]

Reason is understood as cognition that conforms to logic or the scientific method that seeks to verify with scientific tools. Reason tends to employ empirical approaches along with mathematics and testable theories. Reason deals with knowledge claims that can be tested and tells us when claims cannot be tested. Faith and reason are easy enough to define and at times are used as opposites. Skeptics claim to avoid faith in favor of reason, but in my argument faith cannot be ignored or avoided as a knowledge claim. For example, science students attend classes trusting in the value of what they paid for to learn. If they were students of Copernicus in the early 16th Century, they would have had to change some wrong ideas he taught regarding his heliocentric model of the solar system. Copernicus did not discover that planets orbit in ellipses.

Gnosis claims

This brings us to gnosis and all its vagaries. Gnosis comes from the Greek for knowledge, and more so knowledge that is not expressed as faith or through reason. I will call it primal cognition, whereas faith is expressed as formulated cognition, and reason is testable cognition. Gnosis is in the realm of mystery or mysticism and is beyond words, so to speak, whereas faith is manifested in speech with a rational language, as in a manifesto, iconography, or dogma. Gnosis is immediate awareness of being or the divine through direct experience. Gnosis relates to instinct as well as awareness of transcendence. Throughout history, we find indications of gnosis claims through the visions of seers and their symbol-laden revelations about the reality behind what our senses can perceive. The visions of Ezekiel in the Torah, Hildegard von Bingen, O.S.B. (1098-1179), and Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1722), who revealed that Christ’s second coming occurred in 1757, are examples.

Knowledge as such has been the object of devotion among Sant Mat groups out of India.[67] In the early 1970s, Americans were introduced to a version of Sant Mat (a 19th Century movement based on Sikhism) by the Divine Light Mission. The DLM was delivered through Prem Rawat (born 1957), once known as Marajiji, who as a child-guru at age thirteen was brought to America to spread Sant Mat teachings that he called “Knowledge.”[68] Rawat’s cult following (Premies) grew quickly to perhaps ten thousand members. He later married a Westerner, divested himself and his movement of Indian trappings, and changed his movement to the superficially secular Elan Vital. Thousands of his original Premies shifted allegiance with their guru to Elan Vital.  Rawat now claims, like Hubbard with Scientology, that Elan Vital is not an exclusive religion—it is perhaps the basis of all religion—and that any one from any walk of life can benefit from the teachings.

According to Rawat:

"Peace needs to be in everyone's life. Of all the things we have tried in this world, there is one thing we have never given a chance. That one thing is peace. If we want to hope for something, maybe we could hope that peace will come into our life. The peace that we are looking for is within. It is in the heart, waiting to be felt, and I can help you get in touch with it. It is not the world that needs peace; it is people. When people in the world are at peace within, the world will be at peace."[69]

Herein is a common cult and occult prejudice: If we cure ourselves, we can cure the world.

I quoted Rawat from a Christian site that draws a seeker into the debate, then offers a comparison to what the site authors believe is not only the true Christianity, but the true religion for all of humanity.[70] The purpose of the website is to show that other cults are not of God. The first tenet of this website’s faith statement is this:

“The Bible is the inerrant, inspired Word of God - a supernaturally integrated set of 66 books, written by 40 authors, over nearly 2,000 years.”[71]

Rawat’s statement as quoted is accurate, but it comes from a fundamentalist Christian site that touts a constricted and overvalued version of its Gospel. This becomes an example of cult verses cult, or, in my context, gnosis claim verses gnosis claim. Stating that the Bible is “inerrant” and that it is “supernaturally integrated” goes against the very document in question.[72] The belief is an overvalued idea. If we were to accept inerrancy as possible based on fundamentalist Christian standards, then we must accept that all claims to divine gnosis, including Rawat’s, are equally valid. The standard is an inner knowing, an instinct that the sheep will know their shepherd. The problem enters when the shepherd is a flawed, simplistic version of a richly endowed and complex book or tradition.

In any case, Rawat has lived in luxury from donations from devotees for his simple and “free” techniques that have not changed since Divine Light Mission existed.[73] “What I offer is more than words. I offer the know-how to access the experience of peace and fulfillment within. I call it Knowledge.”[74] The “know-how” are four, simple techniques that are forms of meditation while sitting still. They include ways to access the divine light and sound and to access the divine nectar within by drawing the tongue far back under the upper palette to taste it.[75] I attended an Elan Vital rally in New York in the early 1990s. It was a major production with large video screens and Rawat dressed in an expensive businessman’s suit. He was alone and on stage lecturing in scripted fashion, not unlike an evangelical preacher. The large auditorium was full of transfixed followers, most approaching middle age, appearing to feel the power of Knowledge from their master.

Banality of gnosis

Gnosis claims including those by Prem Rawat above ae so commonplace among inspired gurus and new religious leaders that banality becomes the common denominator. Ancient cultures including the Israelites resisted the temptation to allow any prophet to equate themselves to G-d for this very reason. The Christian revelation of Jesus as God has been problematic with Islam providing a correction by viewing Jesus as a prophet in the Abrahamic tradition and not as God. No expression of the deity through creatures or matter rises to the rank of ineffable, unknowable, infinite, or behaving with inexhaustible power and wisdom. Jesus could not heal every sick person he met, and he could not avoid death. Father M. J. Divine (1876-1965) was an example of a preacher who combined Black church sensibility with a keen brand of socialism and a claim that he was the personification of God, thus God incarnate. His second wife, Mother Divine (Edna Rose Ritchings, 1925-2017) became the personification of a living deity also. Fr. Divine proclaimed that the individual is “the personification of the pre-personification of God Almighty.”[76] The thorny distinction between knowing God and being God may be at the heart of all reasonable discussion in theology.

The banality of claiming to be God was personified by actor Shirley MacLaine in her film Out on a Limb in a poignant scene on a beach. MacLaine has a gnostic epiphany about her divine self, proclaiming to the ocean, “I am God, I am God, I am God.” [77] This is not to demean MacLaine’s intent—she was not claiming to have the powers of Zeus or Wonder Woman, although some of her over-valued leanings were common occult claims involving extrasensory perception. What MacLaine was doing, perhaps unwittingly, was a form of psychotherapy. Her mentor in the film, David, who is on the beach instructing her. David makes the spurious claim that reincarnation should have been in the Gospel, implying that the Emperor Justinian influenced church councils to ban metempsychosis to avoid the possibility that an emperor could be reborn as a common servant.[78] David teaches that if we all knew we are divine manifestations as souls, we would be less anxious about who we are and how to behave because we would “know” that we are holding ourselves karmically responsible for everything we do.

That advice works very well for a rock on the beach where it can passively accept the motion of the waves that eventually grind it into sand, but it cannot work for creatures struggling with moral and ethical choices in human social interaction. Knowing that we reincarnate God or not solves nothing in any one incarnation. It has the same banal impact of a cosmologist claiming that we are nothing but stardust.

Trump gnosis

Lately, the problem of knowledge in American politics has approached comic proportions, especially when we consider pundit George Will’s critique (5/3/2017) of President Donald Trump’s mental status: “As this column has said before, the problem isn’t that he [Trump] does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.”[79]

George Will may be hinting at something that is at the core of what I am trying to explain. Trump does little on his own (without a script from a speechwriter) to articulate a point of view well. He is known for shifting syntax and direction in mid-sentence, while offering brief, slogan-like responses that end a conversation. What we see with Trump and other politicians, as well as with many cult leaders, aberrant preachers, and New Age seers, is a proclivity to speak from raw gnosis ungoverned by a clear statement of faith or a verifiable source with facts that can be vetted. The confidence that Trump speaks from some deep well of instinct for truth is both in his mind as well as in the minds of his devoted followers. Of course, this is not absolute—Trump can and will articulate rational thoughts on some topics—but Mr. Will wants us to realize that Trump seems driven to articulate certainty on topics far beyond his capability or knowledge base, as if he knows mystically.

To some extent, every presidential nominee has a cult following or those who care so deeply that rational debate falls to an enthusiastic mind-set of cheerleading. Trust in Trump is not faith that can be articulated as faith in a scripture tradition or a tax code. Critics including George Will say Trump is not principled enough to be held to a point of view. Trust in Trump is more primal, and it comes from that inner connection to truth in being that we all feel that we have. Just the other day (around 5/20/17 on Fox News TV) Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich describe President Trump as “a force of nature,” or someone who acts from a deep inner impulse, from gnosis.

Claude and the Elohim

Our Constitution guarantees this connection: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights…”[80] The spirit of the Constitution of the United States is based on gnosis, not faith or reason. The articulation of faith in the testament and the reasoning behind it are, however, elegant, reasonable, and brilliant. Which is more than we can say about what comes out of many gnosis-oriented, cult leader’s teachings. I could choose any of hundreds, but a good example is the utterly self-inflated testament of Claude “Rael” Vorihon (born 1946), founder of the Raelian movement:[81] The following are words from the Elohim or creator gods to Claude Vorihon around 1974:

“You, Claude Rael, you are our ambassador on Earth, and the people who believe in you must provide you with the means to accomplish your mission. You are the last of the prophets before the Judgement; You are the prophet of the religion of religions, the demystifier and the shepherd of shepherds. You are the one whose coming was announced in all the religions by ancient prophets, our representatives.” [82]  

Trump’s role as a United States President severely compromises his ability to create a self-sealing system like that around Rael, but like Rael (Vorihon), Trump has managed to override both faith and reason (both are still there but quite overpowered) in favor of a pretense to a gnostic connection to people that cheer for him. At least a few Republicans that ran against him were far more qualified for the position, so what explains his success? He wants people to trust him implicitly, as if his will to power will satisfy the workingman’s needs and desires. In other words, he desires people to accept his connection to that mysterious knowing (or what L. Ron Hubbard called “Knowingness” [83]) in his very being that will get things done. This is a trait of narcissism to expect people to believe in us, pay attention to our special, staged reality and to not look behind the curtain or off stage.[84] In other words, the cult devotee is not inclined to reason thoroughly, on or off stage, to manage their faith because she or he already knows.

Back to Gnostics

Gnosis, then, is that unspeakable knowing that does not necessarily connect us to religion. Hanegraaff points to gnosis without Christ to bring the discussion beyond the traditional Christian heresies labelled Gnosticism since the 17th Century.[85] The Gnostic sects or early Christian heresies coexisted with what scholars call proto-Christianity (located mainly in Rome) from the 1st through the 4rth centuries in the Common Era.[86] Among them were Ophites, Sethians, Marcionites, Manicheans, and the Valentinian Neo-Platonists. A common thread among Gnostic sects was this emphasis on salvation through awareness or knowing. Gnostics viewed themselves as pneumatics (from pneuma meaning breath, spirit or soul) or the elite and few among us who knew they were of God and not of this world. The mythic characters in Gnostic narratives may have been different, as were the rituals from sect to sect, but recognizing the truth of a cosmic drama in the Christ event and how one’s soul connects to it were common themes. The cosmic drama as gnosis among the proto-Christians was seen more so in the Gospel of John, the one most influenced by Greek philosophy, especially Platonism.[87]

Another common theme among the Gnostics was the rejection of the Creator God or Demiurge of the Old Testament. Theosophy-inspired groups have taken up this theme since the 19th century.[88] Recognizing the divine within rather than having faith in a savior’s promise set Gnostics apart from what became Christian doctrine by the time of Constantine in the 4rth Century. Hanegraaff expands Gnostic approaches to include Hermeticism and western esotericism, especially citing a purportedly ancient Egyptian compendium of writings, the Corpus Hermeticum by Hermes Trismegistus (The name meant Thrice Great Hermes and was a code for deep knowledge inspired by Hermes or the god’s tradition—the author(s) remain unknown). Scholars point to the 2nd or 3rd Century as the origin of these writings that re-emerged as influential during the 15th century in European culture.[89] “These texts…represent a current of religious philosophy that sought salvation in the attainment of true gnosis about God, the human self, and the world.[90]

Since the oddly named Age of Reason with the rise of the scientific method and advances in industry in 18th Century England and Europe, esoteric texts and traditions became increasingly marginalized by both heterodox theologians and secular intellectuals. Hanegraaf argues that marginalization did not eliminate the importance of gnosis, its meaning, or its practice. However, the marginalization did create a lack of serious study of why “gnosis” persisted in human pursuits of wisdom. I recall noting in the 1980s that New Age, Eastern religion, and alternative spirituality books began outselling Christian titles in America. Knowing the true self and the true path through numinous experiences are common themes in New Age literature. Hanegraaf notes that only as late as 2005 has the prestigious American Academy of Religion (AAR) “granted protected group status to the same field [Western esotericism].[91]

The AAR has recognized that the “secularization thesis” that assumed that “rationality and scientific progress inevitably lead to an increasing marginalization of religion” has been in decline since the 1980s.[92] The secularists and skeptics in the last centuries assumed wrongly that reliance on gnosis and faith will go away with emphasis on reason. How we rely on faith and gnosis is the problem, not whether. Ridiculing believers in religion, occultism, astrology, Kabbalah, spirit channeling, chiropractic, Reiki, sympathetic magic, and extrasensory activities has not prevented an enduring subculture of self-proclaimed mystics, alternative healers, and their cults. The use and misuse of gnosis and faith endures, even in developed nations. The appeal to techniques for direct knowledge of being and self remains strong because gnosis remains an integral part of human cognition. Skeptics cannot scrub the spots off this leopard. They are there for a reason.

Pseudo-science in the name of gnosis

New ideas in science can inspire grandiose schemes about the nature of reality among modern pseudo-mystics. Quantum theory inadvertently inspired a host of misleading books including The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra (1975) and The Dancing Wu LI Masters by Gary Zukav (1979). Likewise, Vilarroya’s experion concept might stimulate conversation about how we and the world are one, when in fact, the concept of coupling includes nothing of the sort. We are one only in our capacity to grasp what the experion offers. If we are science-dumb about evolution or about quantum physics, we will be one with our dumbness in our experion of evolution or quantum theory. The Ramtha cult, a neo-gnostic movement, for example, was behind the production of the documentary, What the (Bleep) Do We Know!? in which quantum theory is horribly represented, yet it delighted hundreds of thousands of viewers who believe in extrasensory powers of mind.[93]   

Again, I am not arguing for any conclusion here, but only indicating where some of the science is leading regarding how we know. When primal cognition comes together and begins as an experion, as a primal cognitive unit, it becomes a biological foundation for gnosis and by extension faith and reason. There is no dualism in this model, and no higher self to turn to. Spirit becomes a language turn to express the experion informed with what we find plausible in our meaning world and how this world operates. There are no extrasensory powers, but there may be extraordinary applications of sense, some saner than others.

In a way, gnosis is to cognition as feeling is to touch, seeing is to color, and hearing is to sound. Knowing like seeing, hearing, and feeling depends on the proper functioning of our senses and brains as well as our wills to use reason well and ethically. There is nothing inherently wrong or mistaken about gnosis as a factor in cognition, no less is there about faith or reason. We are not going to get rid of gnosis or evolve past it, at least not when we consider this model proposed by Hanegraaff. How we express and use gnosis is where the problem emerges. We can look at the ancient myth of the Garden of Eden for a clue that human beings have been aware of this problem since our origins.  

Tree of knowledge of good and evil and (possibly) the dawn of epistemology: A snake in the grass

And the LORD God said, the man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever. Genesis 3:22 (New International Version).

The insight here is that limited man or woman cannot judge or decide and live forever in sin (mistaken judgment or wrong action, willful or not). Only perfection can exist in an eternal life.

Eden, Original sin, “the fall”

As I mentioned above, neo-Gnostic movements, Theosophists, and many New Agers interpret the Edenic myth of the fall of man differently than traditional believers do. According to Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine: “For [the serpent] taught Adam that if he ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he would raise his being immensely by the learning and wisdom he would thus acquire.”[94] Among Gnostics, the talking serpent in the Eden garden is a symbol of wisdom and the true Christ. The fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil would not cause death, rather the fruit was an entheogen that enabled enlightenment. Alternatively, the serpent functioned as a symbol of divine knowledge, the knowledge that man is God and is an eternal spirit trapped in a material world created by a lesser god.

The traditional interpretation is that disobedience caused the fall. Original sin signifies humans taking on God’s role as the judge of good and evil but not doing a very good job of it.[95] Man decided that exposing genitals was immoral, not God. This Genesis myth means that man must obey God to eat of the tree of life to live forever. Living forever has a metaphorical meaning about awareness. Prior to acting as judge, man was unaware of the meaning of death. A fundamentalist interpretation suggests removal from Eden was a mercy from God who realized that man would suffer forever in his bad judgments (in sin) if man lived forever. Death terminates suffering, but it does not terminate the need for judgment of the eternal soul; thus, the problem of life after death continues in Biblical lore.

For Christians, the formula is simple: If you love Christ, you keep his commandments; do not play God. Salvation is a gift, and not one you can earn. For Buddhists, it is similar: Follow the Eight-fold Path. Do not speculate about metaphysical matters. Common human life however continues to speculate about metaphysics and continues to believe that hard work and right living will get you somewhere better and that some divine grace will come upon the worthy. We play God continually with our strong opinions and in judgment in our court systems. Islam recognizes this need for effort in the greater jihad or the struggle within against bad judgment or sin.[96] The conflict here is between knowing we are saved and behaving as if we are saved. Too often we find enlightened leaders and their cults who behave as if they have no idea what it means to be enlightened, yet claim they are.

Metaphysics proper, however, is unavoidable to reasonable people. Metaphysics exists to address aesthetics, ontology, theology, and epistemology. The metaphysics that concerned the Buddha involved questions about reincarnation, the nature of the gods, and miracles. Like Jesus, Buddha was said to have paranormal powers, but Buddha taught disciples not to demonstrate them. Among these powers were walking through walls, levitation, bi-location, reading minds, and ability “to guide people according to their mental development, for their own good, using suitable methods to fit these people.”[97] The last supernormal power is more about influence through mind-power and trickery than normal education. Buddhist teachers in the West have called this skillful means, and that meant the right to trick the pupil or whatever it took because enlightenment was worth it. The misapplication of skillful means as an overvalued idea is notorious among fringe Buddhist and Eastern-hybrid gurus.[98]

Georg Feuerstein in Holy Madness recounts the experience in 1982 of a cult member with his guru, Da Love Ananda (Franklin Jones, 1939-2008), who was known for application of skillful means and “crazy wisdom” to shock disciples into enlightenment: “In front of me, my wife was being sexually prepared for the guru. I coped with my violently irrational feelings by going into emotional numbness. Happily, I did not have to witness my teacher bedding my wife.”[99] Submission to Da Love Ananda was submission to his gnosis. It had nothing to do with faith or reason.

Feuerstein passes no moral or ethical judgment on such behavior because adults submitted willingly to what outsiders viewed as abuse or criminal behavior in the name of seeking gnosis. The guru let them know that the path was dangerous, and followers all signed the legal waiver. Years later, the disciple, whose wife submitted to sex on demand with the guru, was yet ambivalent: “I have often wondered whether that crazy-wisdom episode was really necessary, or whether I could have learned the same lessons in another way. There was one thing that has persistently bothered me about the incident, and that was the pressure on me to drink alcohol … to get me drunk.”[100] Such is the power of reliance on gnosis and not using reason to realize that this was willful manipulation by a pathological male. Enlightenment had nothing to do with it. The invitation to shepherd being with gnosis was merely the bait, not the goal. The goal was to control and abuse disciples to satiate the dark delusions of an insecure narcissist.  

Martin Heidegger was one of the two or three most influential philosophers in the last century. Heidegger’s influence on Existentialism was as great as that of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Heidegger’s concept of Dasein (being there) has a deeper meaning than the common German usage of Dasein for existence. “Dasein for Heidegger can be a way of being involved with and caring for the immediate world in which one lives, while always remaining aware of the contingent element of that involvement, of the priority of the world to the self, and of the evolving nature of the self itself.”[101] Heidegger saw caring for the immediate world as the shepherd cares for his flock—this is the purpose of Dasein. Recall that cultus means to care for, to maintain. We have meaning when we “shepherd being” (Heidegger) or the manifestation of being in which we find ourselves. The good shepherd of Christian tradition finds a parallel here. Da Love Ananda (Adi Da) was not a good shepherd whether you turn to the atheist Heidegger or to Jesus for how to achieve meaning.   

Heidegger’s sense of Dasein cares for being and it is motivated by anxiety as a self in process of maintaining existence. Anxiety here is a necessary trait. Motivated by Heidegger’s philosophy and advances in neuroscience, the interaction of being-there in the world is explored by Enactivism which “argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment.”[102] I mention this connection to Enactivism merely to offer another path to educating oneself about advances in cognitive science. There are more productive ways to approach gnosis, faith, and reason than attending workshops by popular spiritual teachers.

If we accept that neuroscience is a key component for our approach to cognition, there may be an evolutionary meaning to the Genesis story.  Ingesting the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil symbolizes the evolution of the human brain’s neo-cortex and executive function that emerged from the mammalian ape brain. We came to judge reality through reason and express cognition in elaborate symbolic and imaginary ways with faith statements that animals cannot. No animal but man thought of covering itself with fabricated skirts to hide its genitals and to tell moral tales concerning modest behavior.

In this sense of brain development, the Gnostic sect or Theosophist view is partially scientific by recognizing that the Fall was a leap in consciousness, but that view becomes pseudo-science with the claim that mankind devolved from an angelic, non-corporeal state. According to Helena Blavatsky in her Secret Doctrine, “In the common acceptation of the term [religion], neither the Lemurians, nor yet their progeny, the Lemuro-Atlanteans, had any [religion], as they knew no dogma, nor had they to believe on faith.[103] In other words, the Lemurians just knew and acted without mistake or moral self-judgement. The earliest proto-humans as gods in Theosophy had no corporeal existence: “As to Enoch, Thoth or Hermes, Orpheus and Kadmus, these are all generic names, branches and offshoots of the seven primordial sages (incarnated Dhyan Chohans or Devas, in illusive, not mortal bodies) who taught Humanity all it knew, and whose earliest disciples assumed their master's names.”[104]

As beings evolving, Blavatsky revealed that we moved from planet to planet and that our earth was first populated by ethereal proto-humans that came from our Moon:

“Theosophy says that each planet has its own beings – pass on together from globe to globe of their own planetary chain in an extremely slow and gradual but nevertheless definite and cyclic process of inner unfoldment and advancement. And they go round [sic] the whole chain of globes seven times and that’s called the Seven Rounds…. The Earth was to be populated by the beings from its parent – the Moon. When this was, we do not know.“ (Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine)[105]

You can make this up.

Pragmatism and science

I mentioned that Theosophists who are devoted to Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine may be “partially scientific” (in prior paragraph). Especially since the 19th Century, science has been coopted by various new religious and self-awareness movements, including many New Thought movements such as Christian Science, Science of the Mind, Church of Divine Science, Scientology, and A Course In Miracles. Theosophists believe that H. P. Blavatsky revealed an evolutionary model of mankind’s emergence that upended Darwin’s theory. Blavatsky’s exotic flat in New York around 1880 displayed a stuffed baboon dressed like Darwin holding a copy of The Origin of Species, thus inspiring Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon by Peter Washington (1996).[106] Blavatsky, through her alter-identity Koot Hoomi (Master KH) wrote, “Our [Theosophy’s] laws are as immutable as those of Nature, and they were known to man and eternity before this strutting game cock, modern science, was hatched”[107] Occult, New Thought and Theosophy sects dragged gnosis into what became the New Age Movement by the 1980s, with this same turn to the eternal truth within.

Science, which means, primarily, the state of knowing, can easily be confused with gnosis which is never science proper in our modern meaning until tested by the scientific method. Therein is the crux of my discussion. How do we approach knowledge outside the realm of empirical verification?  Pragmatism has emerged since the 19th century as a philosophy that seeks ways to use philosophy and science proper to find practical solutions to sometimes endless debate over truth or what is real. The touch and go, self-corrective ways of science and philosophy can be frustrating for people who want a more immediate way of knowing. Wittgenstein once quipped, “Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.” [108]

Early Wittgenstein was a promoter of Positivism, but his philosophy, in the end, relied on a form of pragmatism.[109] Charles S. Peirce (pronounced purse; 1839-1914) has been credited by William James, his friend and student, as the father of pragmatism. “James presented pragmatism, after all, not as a philosophy but as a way of doing philosophy, and Peirce, in the beginning (for his pragmatism became in later years quite technical), described it as a method for making ideas clear and not as a place to look for ideas themselves. Pragmatism, in the basic sense, is about how we think, not what we think.”[110]  

Since the heady days of Positivism,[111] how we think about science has moved away from foundationalism or that effort to alchemically boil down (reduce) reality to its essence in physics, astronomy, and maths. We need multiple sciences to deal with layers of reality and not merely one science that explains everything. Quantum physics science is not appropriate for explanations in biology and biology is not an appropriate science for history or sociology. We cannot claim that quantum physics and the uncertainty principle suddenly prove that holistic healing magic, homeopathy, Reiki, chiropractic, and acupuncture have a verifiable basis.[112] This is not to say that skeptics deny the intimate human connection as a positive healing value with most alternative and holistic therapies. “However, if conventional science remains unconvinced about the existence of a true homeopathic effect, conventional doctors have a lot to learn from their homeopathic colleagues’ interpersonal skills.”[113]

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) introduced his Process Philosophy around one hundred years ago.[114] Whitehead’s philosophy and contributions to mathematics have intrigued me since I first studied him in a philosophy course in the late 1960s, when I was in college and was yet an engineering major. Whitehead with Bertrand Russell compiled their seminal Principia Mathematica that defined Positivism or Logical Positivism at the time.[115] In his Process Philosophy, Whitehead viewed our experience of reality as a flowing series of “slabs” of awareness. His idea offers some support for the experion of Vilarroyo mentioned above. Imagine looking at a photograph as a slab or listening to a movement in a symphony as a slab or experion.[116]  

Russell and Whitehead both moved past the Logical Positivist or reductionist approach to science; Russell, after recognizing the essential role of qualities instead of only quantities in solving series problems in mathematics and geometry, and Whitehead, in his efforts to not ignore metaphysics or ontology as a reality that also required a science. Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose early work (The Tractatus, 1921) reinforced the Positivist agenda in how we use language, turned toward a notion of metaphysics (much to the chagrin of reductionists) in his mature writing, Philosophical Investigations.[117] Wittgenstein pointed to context for meaning or how language is being used in a human activity for what we say to have any sane meaning. He was basically saying that there is no private language in a meaningful universe. Again, Wittgenstein’s insight relates to Vilarroyo’s work with evolutionary biology. I am merely going to mention this loosening up of a rigid analytic reductionism in the history of philosophy of science here, as any elaboration, even with footnotes, would be far beyond the intent of this paper or the capacity of its writer. But Wittgenstein’s insight that private language is not meaningful, extends both to schizophrenia and to self-sealing cult activity.[118]

Schizophrenia as private language

Schizophrenia means “a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.”[119] At times during cult interventions with families, I encountered cases of schizophrenia in the cult member. Several families sent me to visit cult members in mental hospitals where they were admitted against their wills after local authorities and family members noted a serious breakdown in mental function. These unfortunate folks lost their ability to behave as deployable agents for their groups and were abandoned by the groups. I have worked in emergency mental hospitals for over two decades, so I have an intimate knowledge and experience-base regarding this spectrum of disorders under the schizophrenia label.

On the spectrum of schizophreniform traits, I have noted that certain cult leaders behave as if they have these traits. However, unlike the lonely and withdrawn street person with the diagnosis, the narcissistic person in charge of a group shares paranoia and overvalued ideas or delusions, thus creating a relationship resembling a folie a deux[120] between herself or himself and a following. The disorder of schizophrenia is an awful one with patients often denying they are sick, yet unable to sustain a reasonable connection to society. Observing this disorder has given me insight into group craziness in cults and what sustains them. Overvalued beliefs tend to inform the shared experience within self-sealing social systems.

Leader’s with a full-on psychotic disorder tend not to function well enough to manage a group. In those cases, as in the group Miracle of Love, the cult object’s wife, Kalindi (Carole Seldman, died 2010), managed the organization. The cult object was Gourasana and his pithy pronouncements. God as Gourasana took possession of the body of David Swanson, a former Hare Krishna sect member, in 1987. Gourasana, who was apparently unable to function well enough to survive on his own, was intimately tended to by core group members that believed that Swanson’s body was possessed by a deity. For example, group members brought him food and drink. Swanson did not tend to his fingernails.[121] Swanson as Gourasana died in 1995 from unknown causes.[122] Managed under Kalindi, the MoL became a mass training business. MoL modelled its training after the large group awareness trainings (LGATs) inspired by the legally embattled Leadership Dynamics, formed by William Penn Patrick (1930-1973) who founded Holiday Magic, a multilevel marketing company.[123] Several of Patrick’s trainers in Leadership Dynamics started their own LGATs including Lifespring, est, and Psi World. MoL gave mass training a different spin by introducing the Vedic concept of moksha as the goal, namely, to set the soul free from rebirth. 

Penn Patrick’s model brings uninformed clients (telling someone what will happen could ruin it) into a several-days to weeks-long process that claims to help you get rid of all the bad beliefs you acquired that are holding you back. The process could be brutal as clients are taken through droning lectures, subjected to high and low arousal sessions that increase suggestibility, and are put on a hot seat to be challenged about what they think or believe. The idea is to strip the self of a false ego with cumbersome beliefs and enable a fresh start with positive self-esteem. The goal of LGATs is to engineer a psychological breakthrough that often appears as a breakdown with tears or ecstasy or both. Successful clients get “it” (an est term) that means an awareness of immediate being (gnosis) and that “everything is perfect in the moment.”[124] The unbridled self is purportedly prepared to act freely with personal passion. From the emic point of view, the you who you really are shines through!

Consistent with all LGATs, the “epistemology” of Werner Erhard’s est explores self: “Three aspects of self are presented: self as concept, self as experience and self as self.”[125] This narcissistic philosophy geared toward stripping away the barriers to experience gnosis is present in all LGATs that I have encountered. It presents the problem of misdirection to a false gnosis through overvalued beliefs and unregulated techniques that reinforce them. Recall that achieving pure gnosis or self-awareness in my model is impossible for a living human being who, by definition, must struggle to reason. Getting “It” is easy for a rock and natural for an amoeba. Zebras are closer to “it” through instinct endowed by evolution. By nature, human cognitive function resides in gnosis, faith, and reason simultaneously—how well we integrate these in the environment is the key to a healthy or functional epistemology. If the environment is a weekend at a LGAT, then we will integrate the limited faith and reason of that LGAT. Gnosis will be polluted by the LGAT informational environment, so to speak. By extension, gnosis (as knowingness) takes on the limts of faith and reason offered by any social environment. 

Beyond anecdotes and group-generated studies, I have found no solid scientific evidence that these ephemeral and expensive self-awareness trainings make people into a better or more successful anything. Independent studies confirm that character or personality, the clear target of LGATs, does not change or improve months after a training.[126] The change yourself, change the world motto falls flat. Money is wasted along with time, and in most cases of ex-members I have interviewed, recovery can take years to rid oneself of the indoctrination (bullshit in est terminology) gained during any unregulated LGAT training.       

Back to Pragmatism

If philosophy left reductionism behind, it does not mean that it left science and the scientific method behind. This is the genius of pragmatism: To employ science and philosophy with their best methods as much as possible to solve a problem. Wittgenstein said the role of philosophy was not to find the truth; it was rather “to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.”[127] Philosophy, then, can function more as an epistemological therapy than as an ultimate truth-seeking tool. It is in that spirit of a therapy that I use epistemology in this paper.

Some fringe movements that we call cults (again, Ramtha School of Enlightenment) and spiritual teachers (for example, Deepak Chopra) will try to argue that quantum physics and the uncertainty principle have demonstrated that materialist solutions for reality are limited and that the world is truly a metaphysical reality or mind stuff that we can influence through will and thought. The corollary to this claim is that their magical way to truth is vindicated by this insight in science. Their way often hints or downright shouts that mind through will can dominate matter or the manifested worlds—what L. Ron Hubbard called MEST (matter, energy, space, time). By attaining gnosis, enlightenment, or samadhi, seeming miracles will be at our beck and call. Hubbard’s OT or Operating Thetan at the highest level can act freely as a spirit without limit at will.[128] Variations on Hubbard’s OT existed long before he was born and continue to be re-invented long after he died. We could go back to Pythagoras 2500 years ago to find similar claims of a god-like inner spirit, but let us revisit one from the last century, one from which thousands of neo-occultists including Hubbard and New Agers have borrowed or unwittingly copied.

The source was most likely Madame Blavatsky’s pen through which the colorful occultist produced voluminous writings on the occult and spiritual “sciences” before she died in 1891. I will quote from Mahatma Letter 90, sent to her student in 1882:

“Yes, there is a Force as limitless as thought, as potent as boundless will, as subtile [sic] as the essence of life are men who have learned the secret subjecting it to their will when necessary, look around you and see the myriad manifestations of life, so infinitely multiform; of life of motion, of changes. What caused these? ...It was Force.

“A current of air brings to me from the lake near which, with my fingers half frozen I now write to you this letter — I change by a certain combination of electrical magnetic odyllic [sic] or other influences the current of air which benumbs my fingers into a warmer breeze; I have thwarted the intention of the Almighty, and dethroned him at my will! I can do that, or when I do not want Nature to produce strange and too visible phenomena, I force my nature-seeing, nature-influencing self within me, to suddenly awake to new perceptions and feelings and thus am my own Creator and ruler.”[129]

Blavatsky was a voracious consumer of occult and esoteric books from an early age. Interest in these topics pervaded all levels of society in Europe and Britain at the time, so books in that genre of spiritual adventure or occult mystery sold well. One of Blavatsky’s favorite authors was Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a Rosicrucian whose novels were often infused with his beliefs. The mysterious origins of Rosicrucianism in the 1600s added to the notion of a mysterious brotherhood of advanced adepts that secretly influenced the progress of human history. Blavatsky reinvented this hidden lodge of adepts with her Masters in the White Brotherhood, one of whom was her KH or Koot Hoomi, the named author of the quote above. Bulwer-Lytton published The Coming Race in 1871, also titled Vril, the Power of the Coming Race, vril being the Force later mentioned by Blavatsky.[130] May the Force be with you should be familiar to all as the blessing made popular in Star Wars films produced by George Lucas, known to mine ideas freely from old occult and mythic writings.

Bulwer-Lytton’s vril echoes the Christian Prosperity Gospel notion that prayer can act magically if the praying believer aligns with the will of God.[131] Vril reflected an idea based on vitalism or the God power within, whereas the Prosperity Gospel ostensibly relies on the covenant with God’s promise that God will act on our behalf if we command Him (Isaiah 45:11 is often invoked incorrectly).[132] Commanding God and exercising vril amount to the same thing and both depend on a magical notion of human will to power. Prayer power linked to God went a long way to influence the emerging New Thought sects from the 19th Century onward that produced affirmations, decrees, and treatment slogans to heal people and the planet. Lately this cult of thought power sold well, as it recycled with The Secret by Rhonda Byrne in 2006.[133] Around twenty million people purchased the text and many more millions saw or purchased the film. Byrne prefaced her book with an occult maxim: As above, so below. As within, so without. She attributes this maxim to “The Emerald Tablet, circa 3000 BC.” Be aware, The Emerald Tablet in the Corpus Hermeticum is attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (included above by Hanegraaff as an example of a gnosis-based testament). It was produced in Greek around the 7th Century AD, though originating around the 3rd Century AD.[134]

Why Byrne follows New Age populism in dating The Emerald Tablet to the dawn of civilization answers why gnosis has become so weird and full of woo. Occultists tend to react mythically to history by favoring Hesiod’s Greek model of ages: Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroes, and Iron with the last representing a rather fallen state and the first a god-like era that produced humans.[135] We like to believe we have divine origins, so we mythologize our origins with gods or an advanced race of aliens that had a lot to do with our apparent superiority over animals. One of the most famous occultists who was also a great scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, translated The Emerald Tablet. Newton studied alchemy—not an uncommon pursuit in his era among scientists. Robert Boyle (1627-1691), one of the leading figures in the scientific revolution, also spent an enormous amount of effort in an alchemical quest.[136] The urge to re-discover the god-self or source of being was as strong among science’s geniuses as among common seekers.  

The secrets of alchemy if discovered promised gnosis as an enlightened soul with powers to transmute dark or base matter into gold and to heal maladies, as if by miracle. The key in alchemy has always been in the promise that a ritual or a special state of mind might reveal secrets to get the philosopher’s stone. The latter had layers of meaning from a magical substance to a metaphor for divine knowledge, and knowledge was power. Byrne in The Secret hints at the same alchemical allures that drew Newton and Boyle to decades of serious if fruitless occult pursuits.[137] Byrne, however, baits readers into the promise that “the secret” really works by quoting an array of popular life coaches, success gurus, and spiritual guides including the disgraced motivational speaker, James Arthur Ray: “When you feel love for your pet, that great state of love will bring goodness into your life.”[138]

Pseudo-science reinforces the mind-power approach in New Thought belief systems like The Secret. One example is The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles by Bruce H. Lipton, a book I critically reviewed for its blatant misuse of science.[139] Lipton writes, “Cells and organ transplants offer a model not only for immortality but also for reincarnation. Consider the possibility that an embryo in the future displays the same set of identity receptors that I now possess. That embryo will be turned into my “self.” …We all represent a small part of the whole…a small part of God.”[140] To remedy Lipton’s unhinged metaphysical impositions on biology and genetics, I recommend you read GENE: A History by Siddhartha Mukherjee, whose grasp of science and its social implications meets a more rigorous test of reality.[141] 

Misuse of science to explain or defend spiritual ideas and magical therapies has been challenged with good articles for decades in the Skeptical Inquirer bi-monthly periodicals and in Skeptic, a quarterly magazine.[142] Skeptics do not always get things right, but they consistently self-correct if they do not. That is the difference between claims that come from conviction as if from God alone without applying reasonable inquiry and scientific method.  

Claims by the New Thought cult of positive thinking enthusiasts tend to not change over time. The ideas become frozen in testaments that are treated as absolute. For example, the unscientific writings of Mary Baker Eddy in Christian Science remain fixed as scriptures with no corrections over time. Remarkably, the voluminous ramblings, polices, and personal gnosis of L. Ron Hubbard are inscribed onto inert metal plates to be stored in perpetuity in two caves.[143] A Course in Miracles published in 1975 claims that its “Voice” was that of Jesus inspiring psychologist Helen Schucman (1909-1981) to write for seven years. ACIM insists that all of humanity must take the Course someday, that it is a “required” course and that the end-times are near. ACIM has had a wide following including celebrities John Denver and Oprah Winfrey, who once called the Course her “bible.”[144]

Scientology and the New Thought derivative Christian Science claim to use a scientific approach, but “science” in the religious context simply means “a state of knowing” (gnosis without faith and reason). Science and gnosis are alike in basic etymology, thus get confused in religions that hijack the term science when what they mean is more mystical—they mean gnosis without the scientific methods of verification and falsification. 

Notwithstanding the personal security of knowing through experience, faith in frozen belief systems too often becomes a slave to fixation and not a means to sustain belief until better evidence arrives. The inclination to further inquiry in frozen faith becomes a fault or a sin. Better evidence invites change of mind and that can be painful. Cognitive dissonance can drive people back to the familiar security of claiming absolute knowledge through gnosis alone and to ignore or deny inconsistencies in a belief system. When systems of belief become frozen in absolutes, the tendency to look down on and to eliminate infidels increases. This occurs in politics when we hear popular conservative talk show hosts rage on and on about liberals (typically a straw man concept called “they”) who need to be eliminated from American culture. On the far left in liberal America, we have an unrealistic fixation (overvalued idea) that a benign government can spread wealth and care for everyone equally at the expense of the super wealthy and of hardworking people. There is no sane middle when people are divided by what they want to believe and ignore evidence for better solutions. The solution is the will by all involved to move beyond bad knowledge and frozen creeds to reason better. Pragmatism suggests that we apply good science methods when we can and should.  

Summary

The market for means to gnosis without faith or reason is huge in developed countries. We can look at one more example of this trend to help rehearse what has been said in this paper.

Eckhart Tolle (toe-lee) was born in Canada in 1948. His books including The Power of Now (1999) and
A New Earth (2006) have sold in the tens of millions. Eckhart Tolle is a public speaker and not a cult leader, per se, but has a huge cult following of spiritual seekers in the celebrity sense. He has been promoted by Deepak Chopra and Oprah Winfrey. Lately, his organization has a new center at Huntington Beach, CA that hosts rather expensive sessions and workshops with the “spiritual teacher,” as he calls himself in his memoir, The Power of Now. [145] I will quote him to offer taste of why he fits this discussion so well:

 “Until my thirtieth year [1978], I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression.”[146]

“What was left then was my true nature as the ever present I Am: consciousness in its pure state prior to identification with form… I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.”[147]

“Later [around 1980], people would come up to me and say I want what you have…Before I knew it, I had an external identity again. I had become a spiritual teacher.”[148]

In my proposed model, the epistemological impoverishment of Tolle’s teaching stems from his emphasis on self-generated truth or gnosis alone where “mind” is the enemy.

“Intellectual agreement is just another belief and won’t make much difference to your life.”[149]

The goal is to align with spiritual evolution as an existentialist—Tolle turns us “From DesCartres’s [sic] error to Sartre’s Insight”:

“When you are aware of thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness…If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn’t even know you are thinking. Many people live like that, like sleepwalkers, trapped in old dysfunctional mind-sets that continuously re-create the same nightmarish reality… Sartre…was still too identified with thinking to realize the full significance of what he had discovered: an emerging new dimension of consciousness.”[150]

“The ultimate truth of who you are is not I am this or I am that, but I Am.”[151]

I hope you get the idea from these few quotes that Tolle in his insight chides reason at every turn—Jean Paul Sartre (no matter what you think of him, and I am not a fan) thinks too much, according to Tolle. Here Tolle merges with former and current neo-gnostics in his insistence on removing reason and faith from the enlightenment game. He is not the first nor will he be the last to make a mint off this limiting insight. People crave to escape from suffering and life can be hell—we all get that—some movements developed strategies to stay in that state of grace or joy, as if it were possible without dissociating from full participation in this world. And that is my key point: Concentrating on sustaining enlightenment is not possible without removing oneself from distractions and duties in this world. That was the reason for monasteries, but as any monk will tell you, living in a monastery can be its own drudgery and hell despite the moments of feeling the bliss.

My take on Tolle is that he is the kind of guru who found relief from an illness (depression) by slipping into a dissociative state or mild mania. Recall, he remained in this latter state for years. This is not a bad thing in itself—William James spoke of a similar change in mental status after years of depression—but unlike James who added to our progress in psychology, Tolle merely reverted to an old gnostic strategy of mental escapism that has no proven track record for effective change of character or life management. Fame is not proof of a balanced, fertile mind. The fact that this unconscious strategy made him feel better has no bearing on the reality of cognition and when it works well. I have known many people who emerged from depression as if spontaneously without help from medical interventions, yoga, mindfulness, or return to knowing they are God. Tolle, like L. Ron Hubbard, believes that his ideas can bring us back to the essence of self as a God-being:

“All that is real is beingness itself. Consciousness is all there is, pure consciousness.” And, “No mind is consciousness without thought...All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from an inner stillness. The mind then gives form to the creative impulse or insight.”[152]

People who know me know me know that I have been active as an artist, creating and selling paintings and drawings (or struggling to) since the late 1960s. Since my student days at a university and later at a major art academy, the art world and its ideas have been a part of my life. Tolle’s naïve prejudice, the cliché that all art creation comes from a kind of “no-mind” gnosis, was heralded a century earlier in a small booklet called Thought Forms by the controversial psychic Charles Leadbeater and Theosophical Society leader, Annie Besant in 1906. Thought Forms directly influenced abstract art or non-objective painting (Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kupka).[153] Moreover, Tolle’s way of thinking found far more sophisticated expression among Neo-Platonists, especially in the Enneads by Plotinus (204-270 CE) which introduced “this exalted praise of the formless form.”[154] Tolle’s mysticism is nothing new, but there have been far better expressions of it, in my opinion.

If Tolle would have gone to Heidegger instead of the later Sartre, he may have learned that nothing comes from within, but that we exist as human beings when we care for what is at hand and how we care for it matters. Perhaps it is semantics, but words matter here. I think it goes far deeper than semantics. As Wittgenstein reminds us, there is no private language, and the social environment informs how we interpret our (emic) reality. The great I AM as gnosis does not exist separate from reason or mind in living beings—my model states that cognition with gnosis remains an integrated whole and that it does no good to diminish “the mind” as faith and reason at any event.

Tolle wants us to believe that scientists somehow tap this eternal now when they come up with their seemingly sudden insights into physics or genetics. “The surmising result of a nationwide inquiry among America’s most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself.”[155] That “brief, decisive phase” can only emerge after a hell of a lot of thinking, experiment, and faith in theories that came before. Even Mozart had to learn and practice for years as a young prodigy before he composed his first brilliant symphony—his music did not merely drop out of the great I AM sky!

In my reading of Ann Taves and Ellen Dissanayake, we cannot split our worlds into the Great I AM with no-mind (pure gnosis) and the lesser monkey-mind (faith and reason) the way Tolle, Hubbard, Rael, the Ramtha cult, and other neo-Gnostics insist on doing. We will not be “one” or alone as I AM (beingness) not matter how many times we get audited by a Scientologist or attend a workshop with Tolle. (Tickets were $1,497 to attend the inaugural Tolle event, Living a Life of Presence, in California in 2016, unless you purchased early, then $1, 197). The best we will achieve when we strip away all prior beliefs and reason to accept the gnosis of Tolle or Hubbard is a gnosis imprinted by Tolle or Hubbard. I. M. Lewis was not the first or last to note that we absorb the psychological environments in which we experience primal cognition:

“The psychedelic litany—turn on, tune in, drop out—asserts the primacy of mystical experience and proclaims the widely held view that every transcendent encounter is unique and can be apprehended only by direct, personal experience. At an individual level this of course as always true. But it does not alter the fact that mystical experience, like any other experience is grounded in and must relate to the social environment in which it is achieved. It thus inevitably bears the stamp of the culture and society in which it arises.”[156]

I.M. Lewis studied shamanism as it views itself (emic) and with modern science perspectives (etic) about spirit possession and religious ecstasy. His discussion brings up the clash of modernism and scientific progress with old religious behavior and belief. Appeals to gnosis alone have shrunk considerably, and as I mentioned, the 19th Century moved modern man into paroxysms regarding the value of occult knowledge and faith systems. The Catholic Church policies have slowly embraced evolution as a valid theory, but that took until post-Vatican 2 in the 1970s and an encyclical by Pope John-Paul 2nd in 1996.[157] Fundamentalism grew in the early 20th Century as a reaction to modernism in science, so much so, that there are radical factions among all religions that refuse to accept knowledge from scientific reason. In other words, gnosis limited by unyielding faith has locked out reason in Fundamentalist systems.

Ancient shamanism in its native context was wholly reasonable as a plausibility construct for social organization and function. Neo-Shamanism, however, strives to shove the toothpaste back into the tube, so to speak, by purporting to return modern man and woman back to the origins of gnosis through sweat lodges, spirit channeling, self-realization, entheogen ingestion, and other strategies. The irony here is that ancient shaman-led villages were not trying to return to anything—they merely lived as well as they could and did apply faith and reason as well as they could. This was their way of life until something more reasonable, useful or powerful came along to challenge it. Why we in the modern world think that we can retrieve that Edenic state is the question asked here. Why we would desire Edenic harmony is understandable, but that enlightened harmony is the bait that flawed gurus use to attract customers.

The reason so many controversial religious movements and therapies encourage you to let go of old beliefs about yourself and your history while denigrating reason as the monkey mind or worse (Understanding is the booby prize, said Werner Erhard)[158] is elegantly stated by I. M. Lewis above. The engineers of consciousness know that you will inevitably absorb the bounded faith and reason surrounding you at the time of influence after the religious experience of inner knowing. This, of course, will not apply to everyone equally, but for those who engage the charismatic relationship, the absorption works like a charm. Like a sponge, your personality going through any mind-cleansing ritual (that squeezes your self-concept to a purported emptiness or primal knowing) will upon expansion soak in the information from the surrounding social environment. Once absorbed, the renewed self remains in that context through identification. Brain-squeezing is not the problem: What occurs when you begin to think again and when you formulate what you will trust—brain-expansion—is. The engineers of gnosis will joyfully watch as you appear to absorb their limiting environment of information in the illusion of choice. The motivating force is the experience of numinous knowledge, the illusion that entering the primal state of cognition will automatically guide you to choose well.

After you have finished a workshop with Eckhart Tolle (or anyone touting gnosis), do not merely believe him regarding the “the power of now,” the instant (Holy Instant in A Course in Miracles) when the eternal god-self is present. Think about it and think about how much of his jargon, his language is now in your head directing your beliefs and behaviors. And think about this: There is no gnosis by itself if you are alive. Every expression of gnosis, that driving, teleological and ontological ground of being, finds limits in expression through languages and sciences of faith and reason. Knowing you are in the river is nothing if you cannot flow with the river, and less than nothing if you do not negotiate with the river to find a better flow. How useful is your faith? How brilliant is your reason? Gnosis only flourishes in those aspects of knowledge, because, as this paper argues along with Hanegraaff, gnosis alone cannot be tested or expressed.

As argued above, as a species we have not budged on the evolutionary scale much in 60,000 years or so. Thousands of years ago when language gained sophisticated form in ancient Sanskrit, humans were already contemplating the ultimate ground of being and called this Brahman. Brahman, literally “That which makes great,” remains unknown and unknowable.[159] Brahman transcends all human categories and images. It is nirguna, without qualities. Because its only quality is that of not having qualities, Brahman is often discussed by referring to what it is not, an approach known as negative theology, or via negativa.” [160]

As soon as any teacher of gnosis confirms gnosis, he is lying in some fashion. How good or bad are the lies? Plato called this the need for humans to produce pious frauds to manage social life, to have a matrix or mediator between what we cannot know and the knowable. Accepting this reality is the path of the wise man, or so it appears, but the temptation to drink metaphysical preparations (snake oil) remains as a potion to reduce our anxiety over not knowing. Some of these preparations become toxic when limited faith or constricted reason lock in as self-sealing systems that no longer breathe or flow in the infinite possibilities of Hinduism’s Brahman or the Chinese Tao or the Mosaic “I AM That I AM.”

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

The name can be named is not the eternal name.

And with that paraphrase of Lao Tzu, I have nothing more to say here.   

[1] International Cultic Studies Association annual conference in Dallas, TX (June29 – July 2, 2016) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4dmoPK1tYNjTUx5enB6aVFLTVU/view

[2] http://steve.myers.co/jungs-regret-over-i-dont-need-to-believe-i-know/

[3]C. G. Jung (edited by Robert A. Segal), The Gnostic Jung: Selections From The Writings of C.G. Jung and His Critics (Princeton University Press, 1992)

[4]http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/books/in-the-jung-archives.html

[5] http://www.brockpress.com/2016/01/psychoanalysis-seeing-rapid-rise-in-popularity/

[6]Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) 204

[7] http://sqapo.com/leibniz.htm

[8] http://www.esotericarchives.com/dee/monad.htm

[9]Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (New York: HarperCollins, 1992)

[10]Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real and Other Essays, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1967) back jacket notes  

[11]Tom Wolfe, The Panted Word, 1976.

[12] Alex Ross, “The Occult Roots of Modernism” (The New Yorker, June 26,2017 issue)  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/26/the-occult-roots-of-modernism

[13]IBID quoting the writer, Alex Ross.

[14] Lynn Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible: Art, science, and the Spiritual (Princeton University Press, 2002) 107

[15]IBID, 108

[16]Alex Ross, 58-59

[17]IBID, 268

[18]Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2007) 52-56

[19] Peter Meusburger, Michael Welker, and Edgar Wunder, editors, Clashes of Knowledge: Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Science and Religion (Klaus Tschira Stiftung with Springer Science and Business Media, 2010) See Chapter 7, “Reason, Faith, and Gnosis: Potentials and Problematics of a Typological Construct” by Wouter J. Hanegraaff

[20]IBID

[21]IBID, p. 140

[22]David Brakke, Gnosticism: From Nag Hammadi to the Gospel of Judas, (Chantilly, Virginia: The Great Courses, 2015).

[23] Sara J. Shettleworth, Cognition, Evolution, and Behavior (Oxford University Press, 2010)

[24]IBID, 8 (quoting Dawkins 1993; but see Griffin 2001)

[25]IBID, 22

[26]IBID, , 8 (quoting Vickrey & Neuringer, 2009, 291)

[27]Oscar Vilarroya: https//experiondotme.wordpress.com/experion-definition/

[28]IBID

[29]IBID, 506

[30]Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963) 338

[31]Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis, 262

[32]IBID, 268

[33]IBID

[34]Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011 edition)

[35]IBID, back jacket note.

[36]I pursued the teachings of several Theosophical sects from 1975 through 1981—primarily Agni Yoga—but was most affected negatively from 1978 to 1980 by one led by the psychic medium, Elizabeth Clare Prophet. See https://www.summitlighthouse.org/. My membership level was Keeper of the Flame. 

[37] http://www.icsahome.com/articles/denouement-of-the-prophets--cult-the-church-universal-and-triumphant-in-decline (See endnote 20)

[38]http://www.latin-dictionary.net/search/latin/cultus

[39] Cult. 1. A system of religious worship and ritual. 2. A religion or sect considered extremist or false. 3.a. Obsessive devotion to a person or principle; b. The object of such devotion. (The American Heritage Dictionary, 1994)

[40]Ellen Dissanayake, Home Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (University of Washington Press edition, 1999) p. 57

[41]Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered, p. 10

[42] https://www.britannica.com/topic/karma

[43] https://www.britannica.com/topic/maya-Indian-philosophy

[44] The Kanvasatpathabrahmanam (SB.IV.i.iv.11), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agni#Rituals:_Agnihotra

[45]The actual title was “The Teaching of the Lord to the Gentiles, through the Twelve Apostles.” Maxwell Staniforth, translator, Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers (New York, NY: Dorset Press, 1968) p. 225

[46]IBID

[47] http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/biblical-wisdom-literature/

[48]Maxwell Staniforth, pp. 230-235

[49]IBID, p. 233

[50]IBID, p. 183. Quoted from The Epistle to Diognetus, an early 2nd Century treatise on Christian teaching from an anonymous writer to a high-ranking pagan.

[51]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya; https://www.britannica.com/topic/Samkhya

[52]IBID, sidebar

[53] https://www.catholicspiritualdirection.org/cloudunknowing.pdf

[54]Matthew 27:46 (New International Version of Christian Bible) This is the famous “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani,” quoting Psalm 22:1, wherein the psalmist bemoans his silent deity.

[55]2 Corinthians, 5:21 (English Standard Version: For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.)

[56]Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracles of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987 revised edition)

[57] http://www.buddhanet.net/nutshell09.htm

[58]Mark Prophet and Elizabeth Prophet, Climb the Highest Mountain: The Path of the Higher Self (Summit University Press, 1972, 1978)

[59]Herman W. Tull, The Vedic Origins of Karma: Cosmos as Man in Ancient Indian Myth and Ritual, p. 17: Quoting David Knipe (1977) “Sapindikarana: The Hindu Rite of Entry into Heaven.” (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989).

[60]http://courses.wcupa.edu/jones/his101/web/37luther.htm

[61] Deuteronomy 18:22 (If the prophet speaks in the LORD‘s name but his prediction does not happen or come true, you will know that the LORD did not give that message. That prophet has spoken without my authority and need not be feared).

[62]Janja Lalich, Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2004). Lalich proposed “four structural dimensions (charismatic authority, transcendent belief system, systems of control, and systems of influence) [that are] interlocked and interdependent [to create] the self-sealing system,” p. 255.

[63]IBID. See Table 2, p. 266

[64]  “The Lotus Sutra was probably compiled in the first century C.E. in Kashmir, during the fourth Buddhist Council of the newly founded Mahayana sect of Buddhism, more than 500 years after the death of Sakyamuni Buddha. It is thus not included in the more ancient Agamas of Mahayana Buddhism, nor in the Sutta Pitaka of the Theravada Buddhists, both of which represent the older Buddhist scriptures that can be historically linked to Sakyamuni Buddha himself.” http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Lotus_Sutra  

[65]Andrew Sims, Symptoms in the Mind: An Introduction to descriptive psychopathology (London, England: Bailliere Tindall, 1988) p. 92

[66]IBID, p. 82

[67] Wikipedia is certainly not the final word on Divine Light Mission, but it is a useful sketch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Light_Mission#Beliefs_and_practices

[68] https://www.wopg.org/the-keys/

[69]http://www.allaboutspirituality.org/elan-vital.htm (The quote is accurate but from a fundamentalist Christian site that touts a constricted version of Christianity; an example of cult vs cult.

[70] http://www.allaboutgod.com/

[71] http://www.allaboutgod.com/faith-statement.htm

[72]Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (New York: NY: Harper and Collins, 2009)

[73] http://www.ex-premie.org/pages/finance1.htm

[74] https://www.wopg.org/the-keys/

[75]IBID

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/us/mother-divine-dead-peace-mission-leader.html[76]

[77] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccb2GsnOoBM

[78] https://www.catholic.com/tract/reincarnation

[79]https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-a-dangerous-disability/2017/05/03/56ca6118-2f6b-11e7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story.html?utm_term=.7d77d0cf7ccc

[80] http://famguardian.org/subjects/politics/thomasjefferson/jeff0100.htm

[81]http://www.rael.org

[82]Rael, Intelligent Design -Message from the Designers (Nova Distributors, 2005) p. 176 (http://www.rael.org/message, Intelligent Design -Message from the Designers for PDF version on this page) Original testament by Rael

[83]https://www.amazon.com/Knowingness-Scientology-One-Lecture-Hubbard/dp/1403111995. “In one of his thousands of lectures, L. Ron Hubbard once said, “Knowingness would be self-determined knowledge,” key-noting one of the first goals in SCIENTOLOGY: the ability of an individual to freely determine his or her own life. http://legacyimgs.lronhubbard.org/book/html/rl17.htm 

[84]Erving Goffman (1922-1960) developed a sociological model called Dramaturgy to help explain the dynamics of how we present self through theater metaphorically through groups and as persons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy_(sociology)

[85]David Brakke, p. 3: “The English word Gnosticism was invented by an English scholar in the 17th Century, but he based it on the Greek word gnosis, meaning personal, direct, and immediate knowledge. The ancient Gnostics claimed to have direct knowledge of God.”

[86]Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battle over Authentication. Lecture 21 or pp. 90-93 in the guide book (Chantilly, Virginia: The Great Courses, 2002)

[87]https://infidels.org/library/modern/james_still/gospel_john.html

[88]One such group was Ariosophy that influenced Nazi anti-Semitism and that borrowed Gnostic ideas as revealed through The Secret Doctrine by Helena Blavatsky, a co-founder in 1875 of the Theosophical Society. Another occurred through the writings of Alice A. Bailey (1880-1949) and her New Group of World Servers, an offshoot Theosophy movement that influenced many New Age groups and teachers. Bailey taught that the Jews were an old form of devotional religion that was being phased out by the new era of “love-wisdom.” Another was a Theosophical sect, Church Universal and Triumphant (to which I was devoted around 1978-80) that secretly promoted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a real indictment of Jews. The Protocols have been proven to be an anti-Semitic hoax. See: Nicholas Goodrick-Clark (1985) The Occult Roots of Nazism, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/742868.The_Occult_Roots_of_Nazism.

[89]Peter Meusberger, et al, Clashes of Knowledge, p. 134

[90]IBID

[91]IBID, 137

[92]IBID

[93]http://www.whatthebleep.com/ (for critical review: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=83)

[94]H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vol.1, p. 404 (original 1888) http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sd/sd1-2-10.htm

[95]To be a judge meant to act as God or be a god that judges impartially, that gets it right: “Let’s start with a look at Psalm 82, the psalm that Jesus quotes in John 10:34. The Hebrew word translated “gods” in Psalm 82:6 is Elohim. It usually refers to the one true God, but it does have other uses. Psalm 82:1 says, “God presides in the great assembly; he gives judgment among the gods.”” https://www.gotquestions.org/you-are-gods.html [Elohim is both singular and plural depending on context]

[96] http://islamicsupremecouncil.org/understanding-islam/legal-rulings/5-jihad-a-misunderstood-concept-from-islam.html?start=9

[97] http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/lifebuddha/2_26lbud.htm

[98]Georg Feuerstein, Holy Madness: the shock tactics and radical teachings of crazy-wise adepts, holy fools, and rascal gurus (New York, NY: Arkana of Penguin Books, 1991)

[99]IBID, p. 91.

[100]IBID

[101]J. Childers and G. Hentzi eds., The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) p. 70; See: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927

[102]Evan Thompson, "Chapter 1: The enactive approach". Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind (Harvard University Press, 2010)

[103] “What was the religion of the Third and Fourth Races? In the common acceptation of the term, neither the Lemurians, nor yet their progeny, the Lemuro-Atlanteans, had any, as they knew no dogma, nor had they to [continued] believe on faith. No sooner had the mental eye of man been opened to understanding, than the Third Race felt itself one with the ever-present as the ever to be unknown and invisible ALL, the One Universal Deity. (continued) „Endowed with divine powers, and feeling in himself his inner God, each felt he was a Man-God in his nature, though an animal in his physical Self. The struggle between the two began from the very day they tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Wisdom; a struggle for life between the spiritual and the psychic, the psychic and the physical. Those who conquered the lower principles by obtaining mastery over the body, joined the “Sons of Light.” Those who fell victims to their lower natures, became the slaves of Matter. From “Sons of Light and Wisdom” they ended by becoming the “Sons of Darkness.” They had fallen in the battle of mortal life with Life immortal, and all those so fallen became the seed of the future generations of Atlanteans.” https://blavatskytheosophy.com/the-religion-of-the-lemurians-and-atlanteans/

[104]Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, p. 267: “A Panoramic View of the Early Races” (http://www.sacred-texts.com/the/sd/sd2-1-15.htm)

[105] https://blavatskytheosophy.com/human-evolution-in-the-secret-doctrine/

[106]Peter Washington (1996) Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America

[107] A. Trevor Barker, comp., The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett (Pasadena Calif.: Theosophical University Press, 1923, reprint 1975), Letter XXII, p. 144.

[108] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York and London: Macmillan, 1953), pt. 1, sec. 261.

[109]“Richard Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Consequences of Pragmatism (1992), used it to show what people like Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jacques Derrida have in common.” Louis Menand, editor, Pragmatism: A Reader (New York: Vintage Books of random House, 1997, p. xxvi.

[110] Louis Menand, editor, Pragmatism: A Reader (New York: Vintage Books of random House, 1997, p. xxvi

[111]“…generally, any system that confines itself to the data of experience and excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations. More narrowly, the term designates the thought of the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857).” https://www.britannica.com/topic/positivism

[112]Douglas Stalker and Clark Glymour, editors, Examining Holistic Medicine (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989), “Quantum Medicine, p. 107-125 

[113] Dr. Robert Buckman and Karl Sabbagh, Magic or Medicine?: An Investigation of Healing and Healers (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995) p. 197

[114]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/;

[115] Logical Positivism was a movement in Analytic Philosophy which strove to prove an assumption that metaphysics (ontology, teleology) is not verifiable, therefore as having no meaning. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_logical_positivism.html

[116]See: Michael Weber and Phil Desmond, Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, Vol. 1 (Ontos, 2008)

[117] Wittgenstein, like Heidegger, Kant, and most famous philosophers, is famously complex, so I refer the reader to Spark Notes as an introduction. http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/investigations/ 

[118] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/

[119]https://www.google.com/#q=schizophrenia+definition

[120]http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=83

[121]I knew this from an original member who told me during an intervention.

[122] I conducted interventions to help members of this group, MOL, exit since the early days of its founding in the latter 1980s. https://www.culteducation.com/group/1271-miracle-of-love/13646-the-goose-is-out-of-miracle-of-love.html; http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/denverpost/obituary.aspx?n=kalindi-la-gourasana&pid=142120694

[123]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Penn_Patrick; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_Dynamics

[124] “The format of the est standard training is described. Relationships which participants develop in the training are: to the trainer, to the group, and to self. Three aspects of self are presented: self as concept, self as experience and self as self. Relation of these three aspects of self to the epistemology of est are discussed, as are the experiences of aliveness and responsibility.”  http://www.wernererhard.net/standardtraining.html

[125]IBID

[126]John Gastil, The Group in Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2010) p. 228-229

[127] http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/41347-wittgenstein-s-metaphilosophy/

[128] “An Operating Thetan, then, is one who can handle things without having to use a body of physical means…According to those who have achieved OT, the spiritual benefits obtained surpass description.”

 http://www.scientology.org/faq/operating-thetan/what-is-ot.html

[129]http://theosophy.wiki/en/Mahatma_Letter_No._90 (The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett (original in 1882), pp. 11 and 13-14. The author in the text is Koot Hoomi (KH) who purportedly sent it by mystical means to O.A. Home. All research indicates that KH was no more than an alter personality or nom-de-plume of Madame Blavatsky and that the letters were delivered by a person.

[130]Anonymously penned by Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (London: William Blackwell and Sons, 1871) https://archive.org/details/comingrace00lytt

[131] http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/topics/p/prosperity-gospel/

[132]http://www.houseoftherighteous.org/Pages/Topics/Prosperity_Gospel/0_Prosperity_Gospel.html

[133]Rhonda Byrne, The Secret (New York: Atria Books, 2006)

[134]Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1990) p. 8;  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Tablet

[135]“The Golden Age was populated by men who did not grow old, and lived during an era of endless abundance and prosperity. Since they were mortals, however, in time the members of the golden race died peaceful deaths. After death, the golden race continued to wander the earth as benevolent spirits.” Hesiod. http://www.mythography.com/myth/mythology-five-ages-of-man-according-to-hesiod/

[136]Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998)

[137] Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (Great Britain: Fourth Estate Ltd, 1997)

[138]Rhonda Byrne, p. 38. James A. Ray used native American style sweats as tools for high-paying customers, but several died in extreme sweat conditions governed by Ray. Ray was convicted of homicide for his negligence. http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/01/us/sweat-lodge-james-arthur-ray-victims/.

[139]Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, Inc., 2008) http://jszimhart.com/book_and_film_reviews/biology_of_belief_by_bruce_lipton

[140]IBID, p. 162.

[141]Siddhartha Mukherjee, The GENE: A History (New York, NY: Scribner, 2016)

[142] http://www.csicop.org/si/archive; http://www.skeptic.com/

[143]http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2395235/EXCLUSIVE-Pictured-close-time-Scientologys-secret-alien-space-cathedral-landing-pad-New-Mexico-desert-return-followers-Armageddon-Earth.html

[144]http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/newageoprah.asp

[145]Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (Novato, CA: Namaste Publications and New World Library, 1999)

[146]IBID, p.3

[147]IBID, p.5

[148]IBID, p.6

[149]IBID, p.71

[150]Eckhart Tolle, The New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (New York, NY: A Plume Book, 2005) p. 55

[151]IBID, p.57

[152]Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p. 25

[153]Maurice Tuchman, et al, organizers, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (catalogue for exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York, NY: Abbeville Press, 1986)

[154]IBID, p.132

[155]Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, p.24

[156]I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, 2nd edition (London and New York: Routledge, 1989) p. 5

[157] https://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP961022.HTM

[158]https://quotationstreasury.wordpress.com/2016/11/06/understanding-is-the-booby-prize-werner-erhard/

[159]Mark W. Muesse, Great World Religions: Hinduism (The Teaching Company: Course Guidebook, 2003) 30

[160] IBID, 28