“Gnosis” is the perfect word around which I hear many Gnostics direct their conversations around "knowing". When they call themselves “Gnostics”, they begin to help re-define our modern understanding of knowledge, what it is, and what it means to know.

“Knowledge” according to society and culture today is centered on the book, and objective “knowing”. One knows a thing is true because someone with “authority” wrote about it, and we read about it and cite our source, sharing in that “authority”, generating our own. Knowledge here is rote knowledge, it is an ability to recall information read accurately, and to quote and cite our sources accurately. Yet this notion of “authority” is never drawn into question. “Authority” within this concept is very amorphous when we examine it more closely.

In today’s society, “authority” can be granted by a University, usually a Masters or Doctorate. Those who receive such diplomas are granted them because they have demonstrated their capacity to enact this style of knowing effectively. Once receiving these diplomas and receiving acknowledgement by their peers, these people are able to use their authority to grant “authority” to particular documents and deny them to others. Old texts, or old documents, as a result typically possess more “authority” than newer texts simply because anything modern is a part of an ongoing debate between different "authorities."

What we often fail to recognize is that all of our definitions and understanding of “knowing” is based upon this system of “authority.” This is not inherently bad, and it is a generally useful process to prevent some half-baked ideas from taking over mass consciousness and generating mass hysteria. It was very useful at dissolving mass hysteria surrounding many superstitions that took over humanity during the medieval period. But mystics operate from a different paradigm of “knowledge”. We may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in our whole-hearted approach to this new way of thinking about knowledge. We assume that mystics from the past considered “knowing” to be a book-centered, authority-approved affair much as we do. We presume that mystics were scholars, and that they thought of “knowing” in the same objective, print-dependent way that we do. We fail to recognize that mystical traditions were primarily oral, with mystical practices, discourses, and rituals all of which wove together for the purpose of facilitating an experience in an initiate.

We often assume that such sects had a “religious” structure based on dogma and common ways of thinking about God, akin to our current concepts surrounding religion, not recognizing that this way of thinking about religion was a paradigm shift generated by our scientific process, by “authority-based” ways of knowing and all of the tangents connected to this (ommunicating, technology, school, & etc). We often don’t take into account that the mystic’s way of thinking and “knowing” in relation to God/Goddess is very different than modern soceity’s paradigm.

So “knowing” in terms of a mystical tradition places far more value on the subjective experience than our modern definition. Phenomena that is immediate to one’s being is given more value. This doesn’t de-value our more objective ways of knowing, it merely considers the two in dynamic balance. Knowledge gained from a book and from the scientific method have great value, but the tendency to value only that which is gained by a book, or from the scientific method is very limited. This kind of knowing strictly negates the reality of the internal experience, which makes up the larger part of our being.

Only a very small portion of what we experience of ourselves to be “real” is observable and measurable by the standards of the scientific method. In our very being, we are primarily subjective phenomena. Yet would we say that we are therefore not real? Perhaps, mystically speaking, we are not “real” in the way we think we are, but there is certainly a very substantial reality that the objective ways of knowing cannot measure, and we know this because it is immediate to each of our most basic experiences. We feel, we think, we intuit, we dream, we have insights, and none of these experiences can be objectively observed, and each occurs in a realm we can’t locate objectively. For each portion of these experiences that is measurable in the brain or body, there is a larger portion that is not.

We have even found with our objective ways of “knowing” that the observer alters a scientific experiment. Light, photons, the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos alter their very nature according to who is observing them. They appear as a particle to those who believe they are a particle, and a wave to those who believe they are a wave. So with all of our modern ways of knowing the most sophisticated tool ever devised to measure and make sense of reality may not be man-made. Being itself may be the most sophisticated tool to reveal the nature of reality to us. Our bodies, our senses, our experience of these, our thoughts, our dreams, our visualizations, our intuition, our insights, the phenomena of mind itself may be the most sophisticated tool that even scientists use and have always used to observe this reality-display and generate every theory about this reality-display. But in many ways, our modern definition of “knowledge” has drawn us away from this most effective and intrinsic tool for knowing, the mind and being itself.

Gnosticism seems to draw us back to this most fundamental practice of knowing, and trains in methods to help develop and hone this tool to perceive the most sublime and profound qualities of reality. This does not negate modern developments and tools for knowing reality, for all ways of knowing are an evolution and a perfection of this process. But in this work, Gnosticism remembers that of all the ways of knowing the tool best devised to generate Gnosis (knowledge) is the mind and being itself, for this is made by the hands of Goddess/God for this very purpose. All we must do is open to the inward journey.