The Ten Major Principles of the Gnostic Revelation

From Exegesis, by Philip K. Dick

The Gnostic Christians of the second century believed that only a special revelation of knowledge rather than faith could save a person. The contents of this revelation could not be received empirically or derived a priori. They considered this special gnosis so valuable that it must be kept secret. Here are the ten major principles of the gnostic revelation: 1. The creator of this world is demented. 2. The world is not as it appears, in order to hide the evil in it, a delusive veil obscuring it and the deranged deity. 3. There is another, better realm of God, and all our efforts are to be directed toward a. returning there b. bringing it here 4. Our actual lives stretch thousands of years back, and we can be made to remember our origin in the stars. 5. Each of us has a divine counterpart unfallen who can reach a hand down to us to awaken us. This other personality is the authentic waking self; the one we have now is asleep and minor. We are in fact asleep, and in the hands of a dangerous magician disguised as a good god, the deranged creator deity. The bleakness, the evil and pain in this world, the fact that it is a deterministic prison controlled by the demented creator causes us willingly to split with the reality principle early in life, and so to speak willingly fall asleep in delusion. 6. You can pass from the delusional prison world into the peaceful kingdom if the True Good God places you under His grace and allows you to see reality through His eyes. 7. Christ gave, rather than received, revelation; he taught his followers how to enter the kingdom while still alive, where other mystery religions only bring about amnesis: knowledge of it at the "other time" in "the other realm," not here. He causes it to come here, and is the living agency to the Sole Good God (i.e. the Logos). 8. Probably the real, secret Christian church still exists, long underground, with the living Corpus Christi as its head or ruler, the members absorbed into it. Through participation in it they probably have vast, seemingly magical powers.
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9. The division into "two times" (good and evil) and "two realms" (good and evil) will abruptly end with victory for the good time here, as the presently invisible kingdom separates and becomes visible. We cannot know the date. 10. During this time period we are on the sifting bridge being judged according to which power we give allegiance to, the deranged creator demiurge of this world or the One Good God and his kingdom, whom we know through Christ. To know these ten principles of Gnostic Christianity is to court disaster.
(now he tells us?)

pluriforms - outline - principles - tc

1978 Exegesis by Philip K. Dick

The belief that we are pluriforms of God voluntarily descended to this prison world, voluntarily losing our memory, identity and supernatural powers (faculties), all of which can be regained through anamnesis (or, sometimes, the mystical conjunction), is one of the most radical religious views known in the West. But it is known. It is regarded as the Great Blasphemy: replication of the original sin mentioned in the First Book of Adam and Eve and in Genesis. For this pride and aspiration (we are told by orthodoxy) our original fall and exile and punishment, our being taken from our home the gardenland and put into the prison, was inflicted on us. "They wish to be equal to - like - us," the Elohim say, and toss us down. Yet I have reason to believe that this, "the Great Satanic Blasphemy," is true. First, we are here voluntarily. We did not sin and we were not punished; we elected to descend. Why? To infuse the divine into the lowest strata of creation in order to halt its decomposing - the sinking of its lower realm. This points to a primordial crisis in creation in the total macrocosm (hexagram 12, as illustrated here). The yin form two (dark, deterministic) part was splitting away from the yang or form one. In conventional terms, heaven (upper realm) and earth (lower realm) were separating, carrying the lives within the lower away from their form one (upper) counterparts (this can be viewed as the Godhead itself falling apart, into its yang and yin two halves, with the lower form universe as God expressed physically in time and space). The solution was for the divine (yang, light, form one) to follow the lower realm down, permeating it and thus reuniting the cosmos into one totality. To do this, elements (in ancient terms, sparks) of light advanced (descended) into the dark kingdom, the immutable prison world; upon doing so they shed (and knew they would shed) their bright nature, memory, identity, faculties, and powers, and fell under the dominion of the delusion that the dark kingdom is real (which when severed from
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the upper realm it is not; i.e. the world we presently live in doesn't exist). There they have lived as prisoners of the master magician, lord of the dark realm who poses as the creator (and who may not know of the light god, the true creator, his other half). But the light god and his pluriforms, the descending (invading) sparks, have cunningly distributed clues in the dark realm to recall to the drugged and intoxicated sparks of light their true nature and mission (and true source of home). Upon encountering these cryptic clues the forgetful sparks of the upper realm, now prisoners in and of the lower realm, remember, regain their powers and faculties, and link back up with the upper realm and the light god; they are the light god in pluriform, his way of invading the lower realm in disguise. The light god (the divine) has now crucially occupied critical stations in the sinking lower realm, and begins the reannexing of it back into the totality composed of both realms. The sinking ceases; the master magician is stripped of his autonomy and assimilated to the yang part of the Godhead as its passive counterpart, and once more there is one macrocosm ruled by the yang or active (creative) light god assisted by the now receptive yin (dark) side. The divine has triumphed at all levels; the prison is burst, and the vast, light-filled garden kingdom restored as the home of all creatures. These now whole creatures, composed equally of yin and yang, are what I term homoplasmates: The yin part is home (as we know ourselves to be now, only), and the light or yang part is the plasmate or energy part (vs. the physical). Thus renewed and complete microcosms mirroring the renewed and complete macrocosm are achieved. Reality is imparted to the otherwise irreal lower realm, and the upper realm now extends physically into the realm of matter. The integrity of the Godhead is restored; its two halves function in harmony; and the primordial split (or crisis) is resolved - healed. This is a view compounded of Zoroastrianism, Brahmanism, Gnosticism, Taoism, the macro-microcosmos of Hermes Trismegistus and other mystery religions, and not very much of orthodox Christianity. Christianity can be added if the pluriform microsparks of light are considered plural saviors or Christs comprising a single mystical corpus that is distributed widely in time and space in the dark realm but possessing only one psyche that is somehow also God, the yang or light god. I have read the above cosmology over, and find no fault in it. In fact, I am amazed. It is in a sense acosmic, and certainly Gnostic, but the Taoist overlay is novel and pleasing; the Taoist overlay redeems it from the flaws of conventional dualist religions and the problems therein. Instead of stressing moral aspects ("good vs. bad"), it stresses epistemological ("real vs. irreal," which I can understand). The lower realm sinks not because it is corrupt or evil or somehow has rebelled but because, as shown in hexagram 12, it is the nature of yin to sink, as it is the nature of yang to rise. The preSocratics (and Plato in "Timaeus") were aware of this; v. the model of the winnowing fan and the concept of the vortex. Yang must assimilate yin to keep the totality intact; i.e. yang must renounce its natural tendency to rise and must descend. It cannot expect yin to rise, because yin is not wise; it is only noos
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that can understand that it must compensate against its own natural tendencies, and do what is unnatural to it. Yin is, so to speak, thick, unthinking, not noos [mind] but soma [body]; noos and soma (or psyche and soma) are the total universe organism. Descending into the yin realm is a sacrifice on yang's part, which through its bright or wise nature it realizes it must make, but it pays a great cost in terms of suffering: loss of memory and identity, abilities, and faculties: It becomes pseudoyin, literally disguised in the yin realm as if it were actually yin, even to the point of forgetting (until reminded), that it is not. This is the agony we face here in this irreal and dense yin realm, we yang traces: This is not our home. We are voluntary exiles here, alienated and alone, violating our own natures for a salvific purpose - a necessary purpose. Yin would not understand this, and until anamnesis sets in for us, we in our distress do not understand the reason either. Eventually it will be revealed to us; meanwhile we ache with longing for our proper home, dimly remembered but deeply felt for. Thus we suppose we are being punished; it feels like punishment, and we make the error of assuming we have sinned. On the contrary; we have renounced joy now, to produce greater joy later, for the good of all creation; we are the Godhead itself suffering the need to be what it is not, to ensure the ultimate stability of krasis (as Empedocles termed it): the unity of love. Lest any Christian reject this, let him now read the Fourth Gospel in connection with this, and see for himself the similarities. Lest any Taoist reject this, let him now see that hexagram 12

has turned to hexagram 11, Peace:

The upper trigram, in descending, has forced the lower trigram to rise. Disorder no longer reigns; heaven and earth are not pulling apart. There is harmony. Moral: It is the ethical requirement placed on the yang traces by their own bright nature to abandon their natural tendency to rise, to escape what is heavy and dark and sinking; they must go in pursuit of the falling part of the cosmos,
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for the benefit of those and that which otherwise would be lost. This is the highest law: to violate one's own nature for another's good. And the most difficult - and painful - law to fulfill. Because of this need there is distress in the cosmos, distress for the innocent especially. My cosmology simply presents it as a fact. To escape it we would have to allow the cosmos to decompose. Could we do that? The tragedy is that by the very nature of the sacrifice we make we are occluded from knowing why. This is part of our sacrifices: our yang understanding. We must take on the dullness of yin to save the cosmos; we sacrifice the knowledge of why we sacrifice, and assume guilt - spurious guilt - in its place. This is asking a lot. But consider who we really are. Or once were and will be again. Who else can do it? There is no one else. There is only yin, which does not know. The part of the organism that knows must help the part that doesn't know, but this means abandoning its own knowing. It becomes what it helps, a dreadful irony, one that hurts. But it is only temporary, just for a little while. And then we go home for all eternity. pluriforms - outline - principles - tc

Outline in Abstract Form of a New Model of Reality Updating Historic Models, in Particular Those of Gnosticism and Christianity
From Exegesis, by Philip K. Dick We appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computer-like thinking system that, although we have correctly recorded and stored thousands of years of experimental information (knowledge, gnosis), and each of us possesses a somewhat different deposit from all the other life forms, there is a malfunctiona failureof memory retrieval. There lies the trouble in our particular subcircuit. "Salvation" through gnosismore properly anamnesis (the loss of amnesia)although it has individual significance for each of usa quantum leap in perception, identity, cognition, understanding, worldand self-experience, including immortalityit has further and more truly ultimate importance for the system (structure) as a whole, inasmuch as these memories (data) are needed or valuable to it, and to its overall functioning.

Therefore it is in the process of self-repair, which includes: rebuilding our subcircuit (world) via linear and orthogonal time changes (sequences of events), as well as continual signaling to us both en masse and individually (to us received subliminally by the right brain hemisphere, which gestalts the constituents of the messages into meaningful entities), to stimulate blocked neural (memory) banks within us to fire and hence retrieve what is there. The adventitious information of gnosis, then, consists of disinhibiting messages (instructions), with the core (main) content actually intrinsic to us
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that is, already there (first observed by Plato, that learning is a form of remembering). The ancients possessed techniques (sacraments and rituals) used largely in the Greco-Roman mystery religions, including early Christianity, to induce firing and retrieval, mainly with a sense of its restorative (repairing) value to the individuals; the Gnostics, however, and Mani correctly saw the ontological value to what they called the Godhead Itself (i.e. the total entity).
(Note: While such "Enlightened" spiritual leaders as Zoroaster, Mani, Buddha, and Elijah can be regarded as receptors of the entity's total wisdom, Christ seems to have been an actual terminal of this computerlike entity, in which case he did not speak for it but was it. "Was," in this case, standing for "consisted of a microform of it.")

FROM TALKS WITH A DEVIL P. D. OUSPENSKY Well, yes. The descendants of Adam only vaguely understand, for instance, that it is possible to think of one thing, say another, and do a third. Their intellect is not capable of grasping such ideas, or seeing that a person can have completely different standards for himself and for others, whereby he can, for instance, allow and condone any act he performs himself, while forbidding and condemning the same thing in another. Essentially they wish everything to be constant, that a truth proved in one case should be equally true in all other cases. But the descendants of the animals rightly think that would make life very dull. There would be no variety More than anything else, it discourages the separation of the two. But the descendants of Adam are unable to carry such a load for long and they are constantly sinking under the weight of it and surrendering to those same descendants of animals. As a result the descendants of animals have taken possession of the earth and the descendants of Adam are serving them." The descendants of the animals understand perfectly that life is a raw deal and that sentiment has no place in it. They understand that in life, might is right, and they act accordingly. The descendants of animals always imagine that somebody wants to take away from them what they consider to be their property. Nine-tenths of their time, or sometimes all ten-tenths, is occupied with thoughts of how to keep intact what belongs to them, and how to acquire the belongings of their fellow-men. Mysticism is the most dangerous thing for the descendants of Adam to get hold of. It is on the basis of a shared mysticism that they can recognize one another. There is an old prophecy

that Adam's descendants will unite on a 'mystical quest', conquer the descendants of the animals, and rule the world." At first I thought that the disappearance of Leslie depended on the book he was reading, and I looked over his shoulder. I knew this book, even knew the author, whose views I had always found rather too narrow. However, when I took a look at Leslie, I understood that the clue lay not in the book, but in the way he was reading it. His whole being was immersed in the world of ideas, material reality did not exist for him. So that is the secret, I thought. To get away from reality means to get away from the devil, to become invisible to him. This is excellent, for it signifies, in reverse, that people of dull reality, practical work-a-day people, in general all ordinary sober people belong absolutely and completely to the devil. To be frank, I was delighted by this discovery.
"Somehow

I completely fail to understand you," I said. "Earlier you said that you cannot see people experiencing emotions of love. And now you say that the easiest way for you to influence people is from that direction. Which is the truth?" "Both," said the Devil, not in the least put out. "The emotions of sex disgust and alienate us when they give rise to so-called romantic moods in people. Herein lies the main evil. We spare no strength to fight it, but we can do nothing. These romantic moods surround a person like a wall and we lose him completely until the romance is over. Worse still, of course, is the connection of sex with the mystical: that much talked about sense of the miraculous, and feelings of immortality. These sensations take people completely away from us and make them inaccessible to our influence. On the other hand, the same emotion of sex can be beneficent from our point of view: when it is connected with even the slightest feeling of aversion, with a sense of guilt and shame, with furtiveness and a sense of wrongdoing, that is just what we need. You see, the same emotion in one man can manifest itself differently in others. It can be for us or against us. It is only those who have the capacity for romance or romantic moods, or who experience 'wonder' in the sensation of sex [the Devil pronounced these words with scarcely disguised irritation], who are completely inaccessible to us. But fortunately this happens very rarely. The majority of people, men and women, regard such things very realistically, without any romantic ideas. And it is very easy for us to deal with such people. This Leslie White was one of the difficult ones. So long as people believe that in the experience of sex the realm of fact is not real, that the real is something else, they are inaccessible to us. But as soon as they begin to take it all seriously, and as a result of this become afraid and jealous, begin to hate and suffer, they are ours. You see there are emotions of a material order through which people become accessible to us. These emotions are effected most easily through sex."