the timboucher experience

I came across a passage which is from Elaine Pagel’s, The Gnostic Gospels, which is very interesting. It’s on something called the Trimorphic Protennoia:

[I] am [Protennoia the] Thought that [dwells] in [the Light] . . . [she who exists] before the All . . .I move in every creature . . . I am the Invisible One within the All. ”

… “I am perception and knowledge, uttering a Voice by means of Thought. [I] am the real Voice. I cry out in everyone, and they know that a seed dwells within.”

You can read the whole thing here, or else a varying interpretation of the same text over at this site.

Supposedly, this is from one of those old school Christian documents which were recovered in the Nag Hammadi library in the Egyptian desert in 1945. The documents sealed therein were apocryphal gnostic Christian texts. The thought is that they were being preserved by a monk who didn’t want them to be destroyed by the established Christian church as it tried to purge itself of anything that didn’t support it’s official doctrines.

That in and of itself is a very interesting topic, as is the legend that when these documents resurfaced in 1945, the Roman Catholic Church supposedly went to great aims to make sure these documents were suppressed forever. Some people say they threaten to reveal the illegitimacy of the Church, and expose how much they distorted Christ’s original teachings.

Even more interesting than that to me at the moment though is the extremely close similarity to the above passage to Philip K. Dick’s gnostic-tinged sci-fi novel, VALIS. In this book, he goes into a bunch of different whacked out theories about being contacted by a divine intelligence, which he calls Zebra or VALIS. He also refers to it as the plasmate, as living information, which can bond with people to form a homoplasmate. Also, he goes into this whole thing about how all the original homoplasmates were killed off, and the plasmate was lost - that is, until 1945 when the Nag Hammadi library was unearthed, and the plasmate escaped, and started bonding with humans again, in order to bring about God’s reign on earth.

Here’s a good overview of Dick’s novel, VALIS, from a much larger essay on gnostic cosmology:

Throughout the Valis trilogy Dick explores the question of how the wisdom of Sophia can assert itself in the fallen world She has produced, thus liberating humans from their distorted perception of reality. Dick was convinced that gnosis is special knowledge of our delusional state, revealing how we are deviated. In Valis he attempts to show that only Gnosis can save us from being victims, if not accessories, to the evil and insane patterns of behavior that arise in and around us, not because we are sinful by nature, but because we are ignorant of our true nature.

It’s all actually really cool, although it’s especially dense and confusing to the newcomer. I just came across what looks to be an interesting site on gnostic thought, which offers the following excellent introductory paragraph:

One thing I would say about Gnostic cosmology — May this comment be helpful to those who struggle with its density and difficulty — is that the stranger it gets, the more sense it makes. Such, as least, has been my experience over 30 odd years of delving into these recondite materials. Gnosticism has been called science fiction theology, and I cannot think of a more apt characterization.

It’s sort of like this weird complex mystery that the longer you follow it, the more your mind ends up being radically modified by it. In quite a useful way, if I say so myself. The adventurous among you might also enjoy checking out Philip K. Dick’s extremely dense essay, Cosmogony & Cosmology, which I was only recently able to finally finish in it’s entirety.

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