Anarchy and Gnosticism [Repost]
by Sandy,  youelart@netscape.net, 8:35pm Sat Jan 18 '03

Since Ashcroft is invoking Christianity [circa 2003], I thought this synopsis of the philosophy of early Christians, the Gnostics, might be useful. This mystic message of Jesus's teachings has nothing to do with warmongering.

Anarchy and Gnosticism (Gathered from Carl Jung's Sermons to the Dead)

When Jesus said that the kingdom of God is within, he meant gnosis, the knowledge of the heart. The Gnostics of the early Christian era never hoped that any political or economic revolution could, or even should, do away with all the iniquitous elements within the system wherein the human is entrapped. Their rejection was not of one government or form of ownership in favor of another: rather it concerned the entire prevailing systematization of life and experience.

The Gnostics were persecuted out of existence because they knew something: that human life does not fulfill its promise within the structures and establishments of society. No one comes to his or her true selfhood by being or doing what society wants.

Churches and governments could not afford to have this secret known. That is why Jesus was killed, and that is why anyone since who knows with his or her heart is persecuted. One cannot free oneself by bowing to the yoke but only by breaking it.

When the Gnostics said that the system around them was evil and that one had to get away from it in order to know truth and discover meaning, they acted, not only as the forerunners of innumerable alienated dropouts, but they also stated a psychological fact since rediscovered by modern depth psychology.

Gnosis is formless, since ultimate reality is always beyond conceptual grasp. Experience itself is always individual and can never be adequately expressed or interpreted by arranging sets of concepts and doctrines, for concepts are only indications of similarities within experience. We must not mistake formulae for wisdom.

Churches have substituted faith for knowing. To know, one must have experience. The growth of a human has as its goal a state of integrated wholeness rather than a condition of moral perfection. Even at best goodness is no substitute for wholeness.

Thinking alienates us from our true nature. Ambrose Bierce defined philosophy as a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing. Happiness and contentment, equability of spirit and meaningfulness of life -- these can be experienced only by the individual and not by a State. As long as vast numbers of individuals expect all problems to be solved and all ills to be remedied outside themselves, they will be beset by inhumanity upon inhumanity, holocaust upon holocaust. Not your thinking but your being is differentiation.

Anyone who has insight into his or her own action, and has thus found access to the unconscious, involuntarily exercises an influence on the environment. This deepening and broadening of consciousness produces an unintentional influence on the unconscious of others, and its effect lasts only so long as it is not disturbed by conscious intention.

*****

TechGnosis
 http://www.techgnosis.com/

Greetings weary surfer. Perhaps your roving eyeballs are drawn to the dinosaur technology of text, to what the suits call content, to what some of us think of as the point of it all. If so, you might enjoy this humble page of Figments and Inklings, penned -- or rather QWERTYed -- by Erik Davis. They are Figments because they are generally inbetwixt and inbetween -- not quite journalism, not quite cultural criticism, not quite flights of fancy. They are Inklings because they gesture forward and beyond: to other worlds, other concepts, other possible selves. Most of all, I suppose they are essays, if you recall that essay means an attempt, a perpetual weighing of things, always on the fly.

Written over the years for a variety of publications, the texts are loosely organized by category. You can also check out excerpts from my book TECHGNOSIS: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information.


Headmap (Augmented-Reality Project)
 http://www.headmap.org/

Location Aware Devices - The headmap manifesto is a sequence of text fragments dealing with the social and cultural implications of location aware devices (handheld computers/cell-phones with GPS and wireless capability).

Headmap argues a move from the 'inside' view that developed after the failure of the space programme, the closure of the frontiers, the rise of television, early computing, interiorised simulation and drug culture..

..towards an 'outside' view - a recolonisation of the real world, computers becoming invisible, mobile, networked and location aware, the real world augmented rather than simulated. People finding more outside than inside and developing sophisticated information based relationships to exterior spaces, computer games moving outside, technologies facilitating the tagging and annotating of spaces, places, people, animals and things, the emergence of new forms of spontaneous externalised real social interaction, constructs drawn from dreams and myth shape the outside more tangibly than ever before.

New forms of collective, network organised dissent are emerging. Collectively constructive rather than oppositional. Now capable of augmenting, reorganising, and colonising real spaces without altering what is already there or notifying those being colonised.

The internet has already started leaking into the real world. Headmap argues that when it gets truly loose the world will be new again.


Technoetic Arts Journal
 http://www.intellectbooks.com/journals/technoetic/index.htm

This peer-reviewed journal presents the cutting edge of ideas, projects and practices arising from the confluence of art, science, technology and consciousness research. It has a special interest in matters of mind and the extension of the senses through technologies of cognition and perception. It documents accounts of transdisciplinary research, collaboration and innovation in the design, theory and production of new systems and structures for life in the 21st century, while inviting a re-evaluation of older worldviews, esoteric knowledge and arcane cultural practices. Artificial life, the promise of nanotechnology, the ecology of mixed reality environments, the reach of telematic media, and the effect generally of a post-biological culture on human values and identity, are issues central to the journal's focus.


CAiiA-STAR
 http://caiia-star.net/

CAiiA-STAR has a transdisciplinary perspective which seeks the integration of art, science, technology, and consciousness research within a post-biological culture, and is involved in advancing the parameters of this emergent field (e.g. telematics, immersive VR, Mixed Reality, Alife, architecture, hypermedia, telepresence and agent technology, transgenics, data imaging, intelligent environments, generative music, technoetics). It is a community of closely connected doctoral candidates and graduates, post-doctoral researchers, advisors, associates and supervisors. These high level professionals are committed, through collaboration and shared discourse, to pushing the boundaries of their art. For these reasons the level of research is extremely high and the methodologies employed are extensive and rigorous.

*****

"All around us, there are daemons of evil just as there are daemons of good, and I believe that we live and act in an unknown world, a place filled with caves, shadows, and creatures at the beginning of their evolutionary process. Perhaps human beings will some day find the path to ancient knowledge, and I am certain that the most overwhelming knowledge still survives."
- Arthur Machen