Nowadays there are many people becoming more interested in spirituality than in religion and many of those are interested in what the original followers of the teachings of Jesus practiced before they were persecuted almost out of existence by the intolerant and power hungry Church of Rome.
The earliest followers of the teachings of Jesus were called Nazoreans and in modern terms would be classified as Gnostics, because they worked to ‘experience’ the vital truths of the teachings rather than just ‘believe’ what someone else said.
The gospels used by those followers were nearly all destroyed by the Church. The discovery of a collection of them at Nag Hammadi was a great day for those who just knew that the early followers of the teachings of Jesus considered women to be equal to men in spiritual stature, and that what subsequently became known as the Holy Spirit was a feminine energy.
The hostile, all male, celibate Catholic hierarchy solved the problem that ‘spirit’ is a feminine word in Hebrew by translating the scriptures into Latin and Greek. In Latin the word for spirit is masculine in gender and in Greek it is neutral. So She became He or It and paved the way for removing female influence from the Church hierarchy. Even in the 21st century that Church has no women priests or priestesses. All the older religions did.
The Gnostic scriptures were destroyed by the Church with the thoroughness which it has displayed in destroying libraries and scriptures of other religions through the centuries. But they missed some. These were discovered at Nag Hammadi as I mentioned and showed those who had known for eons that their view of the role of women in the earliest Nazorean church was correct; that Jesus, if he actually existed as an historical figure was married with children, and that his consort was very likely Mary Magdalene.
I am always interested when some NEW, cutting edge technology just discovered, and breathlessly reported on NPR and in Science magazines, validates what people in the know have been reporting into deaf ears for centuries. Quantum physics and sub-atomic physics just keep right on discovering things that the mystics talked about milennia ago.
Even materialistic medicine, one of the latest and most intolerant of religions, is finally coming to terms with the facts of subtle energies, the aura and the etheric bodies, and the validity of medical intuitives, not to mention acupuncture practiced elsewhere for thousands of years, and the virtues of (Gasp!) yoga, treated here by the media in the 20’s as a root cause of the white slave traffic. It only became feasible for physicians to confess that they meditated when Dr. Stevens renamed it ‘the relaxation syndrome.’
But it isn't often that modern electronic research produces an item by item validation of ancient maps of the spirit realm that the modern materialists didn't, and don’t even know existed. It started a few years ago when a sound engineer, Robert Monroe began playing with his frequency generator and a new set of hi-fi earphones to put them through their paces. He had done this many times of course, but this time was unique. He put different frequencies into the ear pieces and suddenly found himself outside his body, watching himself playing with his equipment. He was so freaked out by this that his fright jolted him back in his body like a quick retreat from a bad dream.
This out of body experience (OBE) has been shared by millions of people over the centuries and has been scoffed at by even more millions who couldn't fit it into their comfort zone and so denied it. But this was different, because Monroe was a professional sound engineer, not a mystical flake given to visions, and he knew exactly what he did, and what the frequencies were. And when he recovered from the shock he found that the process was repeatable. With the right equipment and the correct set of frequencies just about anyone could have an out of body experience (OBE), if they wanted. The Monroe Institute in Virginia http://monroeinstitute.org/ was founded to investigate OBE's, and the experiences of the high-tech astral travelers who came there to explore inner space was thoroughly recorded.
In reading about the different planes or levels experienced by the travelers I noticed an eerie familiarity, amounting almost to that of comparing a good sketch map of an area to the final surveyed version. Monroe's people were having many of the same experiences and meeting the same kinds of entities, in the same terrain, as was written about in the first and second century manuscripts of the Gnostic books found in the desert at Nag Hammadi.
As the Monroe travelers had their brain waves altered to enable previously dormant areas of their brains to access different territories in the astral planes, they almost always encountered intelligent beings. Sometimes these beings communicated and sometimes they didn't, but they were always alien and superhumanly capable, regarding humans as humans regard cabbages, as a source of food.
The old Gnostics had met the same beings in their ritual worship of Sophia, the goddess of Wisdom. She knew the terrain perfectly from outside inwards according to her scriptures. The Gnostics did their inner research like the yogis, in the laboratory of their own bodies, without the benefit of high tech short cuts.
They found that these beings were very subtle in form, more ethereal than water vapor is to us, roughly of the same texture as the images in dreams. The Gnostics, like all good explorers made maps of where you would find which kind, a sort of ‘Here there be dragons’ of the old medieval maps. Their descriptions tally with the Monroe Institute 'discoveries,' and raise all sorts of leads about ancient sciences and astronomy/astrology.
They describe the beings as living round planet Earth in seven consecutive spheres of subtler and subtler energies, corresponding to the seven planets known by sight to the ancients. These acted as barriers to the Gnostic spirit as it tried to reach the sphere beyond the seventh, the realm of the original creator of the cosmos, who had been helped in his job by Sophia, as described in Proverbs 9, where she takes on her English name, Wisdom. Here we get references to the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which even yuppies are familiar with as the seven chakras.
Those of you who know the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah will see the same concept in the position of the Sephiroth Chokmah. It is the last point on the Tree before reaching the godhead in Kether. And Chokmah means Wisdom, and is the realm of Sophia. The doctrine of the Seven Gates and the Seven Paths and the Seven Veils and the Seven...you name it, seem to be based on such experiences by the meditators among the ancients.
The Gnostics figured that Earth was the ultimate dungeon of the universe and that humans were trying to get back to where they came from before they were put here in their dense bodies. And the goddess Sophia, the original feminine Holy Spirit of the earliest followers of the teachings of Jesus, knew the way that allowed spirits to travel back.
Until the ultra modern hemi synch equipment of Monroe was used these concepts were of interest only to students of comparative religion, who shared only the words and none of the experiences of the Gnostics. They compared them with very similar reports from Greece, Egypt, India, and every shaman culture right up to the present day. And now, the ancient Gnostics, whose maps are shown to be viable, may have some advice for us.
They say that the entities at different levels live off energies at different levels. The lowest level entities were attracted by the energies of lust, anger, and murder. They incited these acts in programmable humans so as to feed off the energies thus generated.
Whatever is worshiped by humans becomes attracted to them because that level of energy is food for the entity worshiped. Low level entities stop coming round people who never offer them low level energies. The worshiper of a high level entity does not produce a gourmet meal for an entity that prefers the energy around genocide or rape, for example. The psychics among the Gnostics noticed energies clustering around those humans who were providing them with their favorite level of energy.
It is interesting to look at our world today in the light of these ancient/modern discoveries. Money, power, drugs and sex seem to be the four things most worshiped in the world today. The world as a whole seems to be doing what the Gnostics said; constantly producing and reproducing situations that encourage the feeding and clustering of the lowest four entity types.
Entities that would enjoy the energy from activities of the Big Four provide the impetus for more of the same. This is how the Gnostics explained the effect of bad companions and why to avoid them. The Gnostic concepts give us an immediate reason as to why a positive mental attitude seems to produce a happier life than a negative attitude.
Entities that love misery energy don't come round positive people. Even the insensitive can feel them hovering around prisons and asylums. They say that the 'atmosphere' is depressing.
Being among dishonest people can blunt the ethical standards of the most careful. Just check what happens to idealistic politicians when they make it to Washington, or to those who join the current crop of CEO felons, or to medical students hoping to be in a career that helps people, when they encounter the continuous propaganda and corruption of the pharmaceutical industry.
Those of you who have looked at the reports of the Desert Fathers in that masterpiece of a collection of practical psychology called The Philokalia, and valued by the Eastern Orthodox Church , and their descriptions of demons encountered when they tried to perform their spiritual practices, will hear familiar material.
Just equate the Philokalia term of 'demon' for 'entity' and you will see that the Desert Yogis were also encountering these beings. But since their religious philosophy was different their methods of dealing with them were different and the words they used to describe them were different. You can learn more at http://orthodoxwiki.org/Philokalia
The Gnostics who ‘experienced’ were persecuted into virtual extinction by the intolerant Church that insisted on ‘believing.’ The discovery of the Nag Hammadi scriptures, including Pistis Sophia and quotations from many other forbidden gospels generated an interest that allowed the closet Gnostics to emerge again. Now the Gnostics have their own churches and priests and bishops. If you want to know anything more about them you can check anything written by the Jungian scholar, a bishop in the Gnostic Church, Stephan Hoeller. You can listen to his excellent Gnostic Society lectures on every aspect of Gnostic matters at http://www.gnosis.org/lectures.html
It is a salutary and highly recommended discipline to stop at random during the day and ask yourself this Gnostic question:
“Would I be glad to meet the kind of entity that would want to feed on the energy of my current thoughts, words, and deeds?"
Or, to use a catch phrase that is ever present in Ministry of Sophia training, We are what we feed. Catch yourself frequently during the day and see what you are feeding with your current attitude. Doing it often and consciously helps obey the apparently impossible pilgrim’s task to ‘pray without ceasing,’ and the rewards in cheerfulness and lightheartedness are obvious as the lower level stuff fades away under scrutiny, and outer circumstances change to mirror the new levels.
