(originally posted @ 23ae)

The idea, put briefly, is to be able to see through the illusionary world we’re living in. You are already connected to the True Source, and when you realize that, you will have found the higher self, the slasher of veils, you will exhale God’s breath, and you will be living in the real world.

The first guys to write about Gnosticism were Ancient Greeks. That was a long time ago. Maybe they would have expressed it differently if they saw how the world looks today. So what do these old ideas mean in our strange new post-modern times?

Charles Tart offers us a way of understanding gnostic epiphany through a modern psychological model: hypnotic trance (& a tip of the hat to thirtyseven). He conceptualizes our contemporary state of consciousness as “consensus trance”, a sort of permanent hypnotic state which we all maintain by talking to each other and reenforcing it.  (You can read Tart’s essay here and more of his stuff there.)

This trance is consciousness running on autopilot, reacting to expectations and in turn creating new expectations. I think it is a consequence of living in one’s reactive mind. In The Gods Must Be Crazy, when a coke bottle (read: capitalism) falls from the sky, the peaceful collectivist tribe is introduced to the idea of property, and the logical consequences tear them apart. It’s like they’re in an altered state of consciousness. If only they could snap out of it!

The consensus trance is s a pattern of living. It keeps us focused on illusions, it makes us treat symbolic things like real things. Some Discordians describe this as The Machine – here’s one account of it from the Chao Te Ching, a Discordian reinterpretation of the Tao Te Ching:

Chapter 23
The Machine™ is built by our behaviors;
Our unconscious desires,
our conscious schemes.
Built by the expectations we create through our expectations,
the action we create through our actions,
the jobs we create with our jobs,
the world we create with our world.

But as a traffic jam does not last all morning,
nor a bad day lasts a lifetime,
a good mood is often fleeting,
and fortune does not always smile.
The Machine™ contains more than is apparent.

I wonder if there’s a way to snap people out of their trance, like how a hypnotist says “When I snap my fingers, you will be fully awake and alert.” I like this model for gnostic awakening. We have dispensed with the metaphors, we are talking concretely about how to transcend the illusion and see the world through fewer filters. Tart suggests that the cure to the trance is Mindfulness (vipassana, to the Buddhists). There are other ways too, like ego death, but that’s harder to practice.

This is what the Situationist International was on about. If we find new ways to relate to the space we live in, we divorce ourselves from our grayfaced culture and become new people. This is Project PosterGASM‘s goal too, to create a surprising, funny moment which snaps people out of autopilot and into a creative, humorous state of consciousness.

For now, the best shortcut to a gnostic awakening is merely awareness.  Be aware of the present moment. Be aware of your breath, of the thoughts in your head, the sensations you are experiencing, and the maddening cacophony of competing signals present inside you.