“This was a terrible place, a haunted place fixed between the memory of a dead universe and the birth of a new reality.” So what does one really say about a book like “Corpus Gnostica?” It is the first blatant, serious, post-modern attempt to write new Gnostic scriptures for the modern era. Others have written screenplays or books with Gnostic themes. Obviously they have influenced me. But “Corpus Gnostica” is an in your face, post-modern, deconstructionist gospel, that doesn’t even make a silly claim of divine authorship. Indeed not, I wrote it on my Mac, on my back patio, in the summer heat of an endless summer. OK, given. And then what? One choice is to toss it in the flames, but really... my Mac! The other is put it out there... to see if the ground is ripe. And who am I to judge, I’m a poor farmer. I’m not a guru, and I do not need your money. Instead, I really want to know what you think. Call it, scrolling my name on the temple wall, if you will. Kilroy was here! Perhaps this is my omega point. I wrote the preamble to Burden of Poimandres nearly five years ago. Although it appears as the first chapter of the “Corpus,” it was not the first section written. The original “Corpus Gnostica” is over nine hundred pages long, and it originally began with the preamble to the Architect’s tale. But this is neither here nor there. What is important, and what I was striving to convey, was a mood. It is a mood that is as alien to the average human, as the ability to jump up and take flight. And yet, I sensed that it is a feeling that hides beneath the conscious surface of each of us. We are all familiar with the preeminent Gnostic work of our generation, The Matrix. Morpheus puts it best when he was offering Neo the blue or the red pill: “I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?” In the “Corpus Gnostica,” Poimandres is the ancient witness. He is in each of us. He (she) is not just within you, like an appendix or a spleen. Poimandres is you. The ancient witness is none other than your immortal self. But the word immortal must itself be explained, if we are to really understand what the witness is. Immortality does not begin one day. An immortal being is not simply born one day, and from there they live out eternity. Indeed not. For the nature of eternity means that it has no beginning and no ending. So an immortal being has no birth point in time, no point of origin, no omega point, no reference for when or where it all began. An immortal being, by logical definition, has always been, and shall always be. It follows therefore, that by definition, immortality brings with it, godhood. It is the nature of the beast... if one is immortal, one is also God. If one is limited by any phenomenal or dimensional constraint, one is mortal and therefore not God. Our minds are immortal, although it is damn hard to remember our infinitely long lives. Hell, I forgot what I did last Thursday. Memory is a function of matter, constrained by the physical properties of our fleshy brains, bio-chemistry... neuro-electric transmitters, serotonin reuptake inhibitors, neurotransmitters firing on the axon terminals of neuronic dendrites... you know, all that stuff. But mind is something completely different. It is the actual processor of the input data; it is not the magnetic storage space in your memory stick key fob. We are both immortal, you and I. And so Poimandres stands in our shoes in the “Corpus Gnostica.” You may say, and rightly so, that the Matrix’s establishment religions have already taught you that you are immortal. And that if you are good, and pray to the establishment gods, that when you die you will go to Heaven. And of course, if you are nasty, you’ll land in that ugly and brutish place called Hell. And you may also say, that you have rejected this story as so much crap. That you are too educated to buy into these ancient and silly myths. In fact, you may smile, and tell me that you are an atheist, that everything related to the gods and goddesses is so much superstitious hogwash. Or you may be even more refined, and over a glass of wine, you may confide to me that you are agnostic; you are an intellectual, after all. Perhaps there is some evidence to support the claims of religion that has yet to be discovered. Fine and well spoken. But Poimandres does not care. When I created the character of Poimandres, I wanted a persona that had already argued all of these fine and intellectual points. Argued them to sheer exhaustion. The first characterization of Poimandres appears in the ancient hermetic literature. He first appears as the shepherd of men and gods, in a fantastic classical Alexandrian work known as the “Corpus Hermetica.” In this work, Poimandres knows and sees all. He acts as a tutor to a lesser Egyptian god, Thoth, who eagerly listens to his wisdom. I chose Poimandres to represent you and me for a reason. Each of us is following the watcher’s path. Like a cat or dog, or some smelly bug or bacteria, we have spent endless lives... Watching. Witnessing. Acting. And as the Buddhist are so very well aware... Suffering. At some point, I barely remember when, but at some point, we all became self-aware. If you are not self-aware, you are not reading this exegesis; you’re like your fine Persian cat, enjoying the moment as she licks your toe. So we accept the fact that we are self-aware. “Cogito ergo sum,” and we nod to Illuminatus brother Descartes. But really now, doesn’t that lead to some awfully bothersome questions? For now, lets skip the whole ‘why am I here?’ and ‘who created me?’ paradoxes. After all, we have already determined that we have always been here... right? And therefore, the second question is like demanding an answer from a mountain... Why are you lying there? (Mohammed, please stay out of this. That mountain is not going to move!) Philosophers ask too many silly questions, without ever getting to the geist of the matter. (No, I did not misspell gist, you’ll get used to my word play.) “This was a terrible place, a haunted place fixed between the memory of a dead universe and the birth of a new reality.” Where is Poimandres? On one level in the narrative, he is between the death of one universe, at the end of an age, in a cosmic black hole, waiting for matter to be spewed out in another great bang. He is in a place without time, a dimension without space, a realm of pure mind, of pure and boundless potential. But there is another deeper way of looking at this problem. (Deeper! Just how deep does this rabbit hole go? But we’ll talk about the ancient hare or rabbit in another part of this exegesis. I promise.) On a deeper, and perhaps more meaningful level, Poimandres is in the endless summer. The summer that you and I both remember quite well. You may have suppressed your memories; life may have been truly tragic for you. You may be carrying traumas that I cannot even imagine, that I could never withstand with the dignity that you possess. But you still remember your endless summer. It may have been a season, a year, or a day. But you still remember. We need to be honest with one another if there is to be any point in all of this. “Poimandres, had been awake for so long. Watching everything as it rose only to pass away. He was exhausted and weary, forever walking the path of oblivion. He kept his eyes fixed on the star as it rose in alignment with an old water tower, rusted and abandoned. The tower sat on a grassy hill enclosed by a bent metal fence, now long forgotten, in the place of origins.” What is the place of origins? Be honest, we all know where it is. It is that place that you first woke up. You realized something that a child should not realize. It is logically impossible that a child would recognize this, but you did anyway. You realized that you were a child. Everything was ok. Whatever had been troubling you in the past was forgotten. You were back... reborn. The thought or recognition may have flashed for only a moment. (Recognition, Latin “recognitio,” to re-know. The form of memory that consists in knowing or feeling that a present object has been met before. Now honestly, as we shall read in Codex XIII, hasn’t all of this happened before? And won’t it all happen again?) But that was all that it took, you were awake again in a new body. This had happened to Poimandres so many times before, that he knew the whole routine by heart. And he was dejected, he wanted to burn away his eyes, so that he would never again have to witness the pain and suffering that he knew was just around the corner. But we have both read the first chapter of the “Corpus.” We both know that he goes on, he does turn the corner on the path that he is following. There is nothing else that he can do. He can scheme, he can refuse to participate, but ultimately there is no real choice in the matter, not even for the gods... not even for us. And whom does Poimandres meet when he turns the corner? Who do we all meet when we turn that corner in our lives? Poimandres finds the Architect, just as he has always been, sitting in the threshold of the little white church, built on top of a mountain, a mystical place, in that timeless place, that summer which seemed to never end. The Architect and Poimandres are at first, awkward with one another. They are clearly well acquainted, and they are clearly estranged. What has come between these two that have known one another for so long? Something painful to be sure. Nothing less than the loss of a dearest loved one can provoke such bitterness. There is only one anecdote to bitterness, and we all know it. Forgiveness, isn’t just asking someone to say they forgive you. That is what the silly churches have gotten so messed up in our minds. Forgiveness is the hardest work on our plane of existence. It can take many lifetimes. But it is mandatory, if you wish to leave this realm of half-dreams. The only ones that will ever cross your dusty path are those that have forgiven you, or those that you still must forgive. It is in the nature of God to present us with these trials. And when Poimandres turned on that dusty path, in the first chapter of the “Corpus Gnostica,” he knew that he had a choice. The Architect tells him that his choice is to free the Ancient One, to release it into the new universe. To spark a new creation, or to keep the beast within the shoebox... to opt out of the act of creation. At least this is one metaphysical way to interpret what is actually transpiring between the Architect and Poimandres. But there is another level of interpretation. Poimandres has another, and perhaps more important choice to make. He can hold on to his anger, his sorrow about the death of Sophia, or he can pick a more difficult path. (Hint: Always take the more difficult path) Poimandres chooses to listen to the Architect’s tale, not because he wonders what the Architect has to say. Remember, the eternal witness has already seen the Architect’s story played out a billion infinite times before. No, Poimandres wants to find that one thing about the Architect for which he can feel empathy. That one sliver of the Architect’s persona for which he can feel pity. And ultimately, that one part of the Architect’s soul that is also part of Poimandres. By finding that one common ground, their mutual lover for Sophia... perhaps Poimandres can forgive. Perhaps he can have faith in the boundless potential.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 06:53:10 +0000
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