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The Gnosis Institute
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Introduction -
Overview
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Have a monthly no or low agenda meetings to connect with other participants, become better acquainted, and build support for different areas of study or practice.
Organize presenters/lecturers with expertise on a topic of broad interest at a regular time.
Start one for now. Scheduled weekly or biweekly so all participants can attend.
Start a Mindfulness Meditation group meeting two or more times a week.
Start a group with goals oriented to doing an introductory study of groups central to the Gnostic tradition, and related areas of interest to the group.
Start a group with learning goals oriented to learning how to better use research methods and techniques, and/or to improve use of critical thinking and argumentation to critique research reports and construct better arguments
For the study of the ancient Greek language.
Start one Writer & Researcher Circle to connect Writers and researchers in a collegial community for mutual support from those working in related areas.
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Last Updated on Monday, 21 February 2011 19:14 |
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Introduction -
Overview
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Aims of the Gnosis Institute (with some Means, Methods, & Reasons)
The Gnosis Institute (TGI) is a secular nonprofit educational organization.
The ultimate aims of TGI always remain the same, the activities of TGI are experiments in what we can do to move towards the aims – within the rather restrictive bounds of the resources available.
These goals can be broadly seen in two main categories, with the second dependent on the first:
1. Individual Emancipatory & Community Development:
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Foster a broad community engaged in transformative emancipatory learning and practice.
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Provide means of connecting and aiding those engaged in study & research for mutual support in a collegial environment.
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Provide means of connecting Gnostic practitioners for fellowship and spiritual friendship in a supportive environment.
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Provide resources and assistance aimed to help individuals assess and critique research reports.
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Provide resources and assistance aimed to help individuals to conduct original scholarly research.
2. Engage with the External Community.
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Engage with the academic scholarly community. With the larger goal of bringing a practitioner's approach (i.e., a Gnostic approach) to Gnosticism. (More below.)
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Develop means of academic training that can provide recognition of achievement.
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At first, the goal was to develop an accredited Graduate School. Early optimism yielded to the realization that this goal could not be achieved. Hope is still held out for a low-priority attempt to slow-grow advanced studies programs patterned on TGI-GS programs. Should TGI-AS offer the means of completing certificate or degree programs, these will be awarded under Utah law, which requires all degree-granting programs be equivalent to accredited programs.
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Provide accessible scholarly information to the broader public. This will not to present a unified view, but rather to show diverse views using diverse methods and modes of inquiry. Essentially, showing the issues and interpretations derived through various means in the field of Gnostic studies, written in an accessible style.
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Last Updated on Saturday, 12 February 2011 15:46 |
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Introduction -
Overview
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“Be Excellent to Each Other.”
Individual behavior is the sole criteria that can result in an individual being barred from participation for a length of time. The conditions for initial and continued participation consist of providing the basic environment required to reach towards our goals.
Barring from Participation:
If necessary, an individual may need to be barred to protect the required environment and to give individual time to make adjustments/changes. If these are pursued and result in significant improvement, the barred individual can apply to be reinstated early. Conversely, should it be necessary for an individual to be barred for the same pattern of behavior, it will be for a longer term. If this occurs after an appeal has been granted, further appeals are unlikely to be granted.
We don't expect participants to have mastered these requirements over night, rather a commitment to engaging with others in the following ways and learning habits and skills to be able to live up to that commitment. Initial slip ups are expected, occasional slip ups will happen.
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Civility: treat each other with respect. (more below.)
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Collegiality: treat each other as colleagues. (more below.)
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Authenticity: authentic self-representation and expression. (more below.)
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Cooperative Engagement: following accepted standards of scholarly engagement such as following Critical Thinking criteria, and Universal Intellectual Standards in general, and utilizing accepted (or developing) methods and forms of inquiry. In a cooperative helpful environment. (more below.)
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Do Not Seek to Harm: No matter the nature of difference or disagreement, actively attacking another to cause them harm whether through direct confrontation or through indirect undermining of their relationships with others, is not acceptable.
- This is part of the bare minimum for participation at any level, and will usually result in being barred from participation for a significant period.
Civility & Collegiality:
- Etiquette: act with awareness of the needs of others. (Basic elementary school etiquette of equality. Raise you hand, wait your turn, queue up, etc.)
- Collegiality: Treating others as colleagues, which includes respectful and friendly treatment. While real collegiality (becoming colleagues) takes time to develop, one sign of it will be to address each other by first names, except in formal introductions.
- Individuality: Treat each person as the unique individual and spark of divinity that they are. Only individuals join and participate in TGI, not organizations or traditions. Group identification is a serious source of bias, and identifying someone with a group in effect is an attempt to bind them, as is proselytizing. This includes theoretical groups from stereotyping and sweeping generalizations..
- At TGI we criticize the position or argument not the person.
Authenticity:
Speak from the heart, for you are the perfect day and within you dwells the light that does not fail.- The Gospel of Truth
- Strive to act in accord with the authentic core inner self, not the whims of ego identification.
- This can be confusing in a “be yourself” culture where “yourself” merely refers to your current ego-identity or state.
- In view of the many difficult identity and emotional issues involved in late-teen and early adulthood, and other considerations, minors will not be able to participate. The minimum age for participation may be raised based on experience and/or research.
- Actual names (meaning legal names including acceptable variations/diminutives) will be used by group participants. Some proof of identity will be required in most cases, such as appearing on web cam holding a picture ID with your name on it (all other info can be covered).
- This is done to foster an environment more conducive to collegial interaction, and also to remove a common internet means of acting inauthentically and tools for acting inappropriately.
- Permission to use an alternate name will be given for serious reasons such as personal safety or employment. You will still need to provide proof of actual identity that will remain confidential.
Cooperative Engagement
People quarrel because they cannot argue. - GK Chesterton
To assess the natural quality of even the cleverest heads ... one should take note of how they interpret and reproduce the opinions of their opponents: for how this is done betrays the natural measure of every intellect. – The perfect sage without knowing it elevates his opponent into the ideal and purifies his contradictory opinion of every blemish and extraneous element: only when his opponent has by this means become a god with shining weapons does the sage oppose him. (FN, DB:V.431)
Never keep back or bury in silence that which can be thought against your thoughts! Give it praise! It is among the foremost requirements of honesty of thought. Every day you must conduct your campaign also against yourself. ...your concern is truth... (FN, DB:IV.370)
Where does the ego cease? – Most people take a thing that they know under their protection, as if knowledge of it sufficed to make it their property. The ego's desire for appropriation is boundless... (FN, DB:IV.285)
Egos can get over-invested and become overly defensive very easily, identify with a position or idea and be drawn into an ego-driven all-out fight. Aspects of internet communication can significantly exacerbate this problem.
Gnostics view the human ego as a psychological analogy/interpretation of the demiurge. So entering an ego-driven fight results in being at the mercy of, in bondage to, your own personal demiurge.
Both caution and assistance from others who can recognize the beginning of such a situation are invaluable.
We move towards liberation by not being trapped in, or blind to our many inherent biases and ego-identifications. Researchers in all fields need to carefully reduce and/or account for them in their particular line of inquiry.
All of this occurs with a community. Colleagues are repeatedly consulted throughout the research process. To seriously engage in research whether for personal or wider use – we must become a community of colleagues.
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Last Updated on Saturday, 19 February 2011 19:39 |
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In recent decades a developmental approach to spirituality has emerged from work in different research areas of adult development. “When investigators of human development have written about 'higher' or more adult stages of development they often indicate that such development is spiritual” (Irwin, 2002, p. 3). Due to these being emergent findings from research that was not aimed at measuring spiritual development, the developmental theories involved do not include recognizably spiritual aspects until the higher stages of development. The theories have yet to adapt their understandings of earlier stages to include this aspect of development that emerges strongly at later stages (Irwin, 2002).
 These stage-based developmental theories are sometimes termed “neo-piagetian” because they are extensions of the work done by Piaget on cognitive development in children. Piaget (1950) found that children move through specific stages in how they understand the world around them in the course of their development. The general process of development he described as a process of “decentralization,” a shifting from an egocentric perspective, in which the approach to reality is inseparable from the perspective of the individual, to a more objective perspective.
While Piaget's work ended with the transition into a recognizably adult level of cognition, others have continued to research development into adulthood. Looking at a spectrum of this work, Irwin (2000) summarizes:
Whether we examine moral development or psychosocial development or midlife individuation, the descriptions of higher stages involve characteristics that we can agree are spiritual. It is as if development 'naturally' tends toward spiritual development. That is, spirituality is part of normal or optimal development, and not something unusual or even pathological. In fact, because these stages typically occur in the latter years of life, coming after the earlier stages, spirituality may be considered a higher or more evolved aspect of normal development. We may regard developmental psychology as an emerging psychology, revealing something about spirituality from a new perspective (p. 290)
 Even though the higher stages of developmental theories are recognizably spiritual, there is no need to follow Wilber (2000) in treating spirituality according to various definitions as either consisting of these levels or as separate from them. Just as we do not think of cognition as consisting of various stages, nor of developing irrespective of stages, but rather as being expressed within or through the framework of a given stage. At this point in developmental theory, we may not have a term that applies to the same element across all of the stages. For example, Irwin (2002) uses the term “awareness” in the earliest stages, and in later stages the term “consciousness.” For the definition of “consciousness” does not apply in the earliest stages of development (p. 6). We must also bear in mind that developmental stages represent not so much growth, as transformation. This is in fact the distinction between development within a stage, and development to a further stage. The passive state of awareness may grow indefinitely and never attain the active properties of consciousness. If consciousness develops from awareness, then that development is a transformation from one type into another. This transformational aspect may apply to spirituality. It may be that what is readily recognizable as spirituality in later stages, is not recognizable or definable as spirituality in earlier stages. However, in the range of stages we will be considering, we will be treating spirituality in much the same way as cognition, as something that is expressed within or through a stage, not dependent on it.
Spiritual and Ego Development
Stages are generally considered in three major categories: preconventional, the stages identified in child development by Piaget; conventional, stages that represent psychosocial development within the range of normal adult function; and postconventional, that describe further development in awareness of the systems involved in the construction of meaning and their innate limitations. Hewlett (2002) includes a further category of transcendent stages. “In this final tier, the separate ego is simply the vehicle through which this deeper reality flows” (p. 34-35). While there are some differences in the theories of ego development, these can largely be accounted for by differences in the focuses of the theories. For example: Loevinger (1976) and Cook-Greutner (1994, 1999, 2004) worked from measures of meaning-making such as self-understanding; Kegan (1994) focused more on unconscious epistemologies; and Washburn (2003) considered intrapsychic relations and structure as well as relations to body and world. These developmental theories, and the less-encompassing theories of reflective judgment development (King & Kitchner, 1994), moral development (Kohlberg, in King & Kitchner, 1994; & in Irwin, 2002), and faith development (Fowler, 1981), all follow the same structure of “an invariant, hierarchical sequence of distinct views of reality and subject-object integrations which comprise operative, cognitive, and emotional aspects of living” (Cook-Greuter, 1994, p. 121). These stages are not merely progressive, subsequent stages include and increase the perspectives of prior stages. Growth is not only associated with transitioning to a higher stage. As Cook-Greuter has pointed out, most growth seems to occur within a given stage, “The current ways of viewing reality is refined, enriched, and modified” (p. 120). We can distinguish between growth as change within the framework of a stage, and as transformation in a transition from the current framework to a higher-stage framework. ---- References:
Cook-Greuter, S. (1994). Rare forms of self-understanding in mature adults. In M. Miller & S. Cook-Greuter (Eds.), Transcendence and mature thought in adulthood: Further reaches of adult development. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Cook-Greuter, S. R. (1999) Postautonomous ego development: A study of its nature and measurement. Ed.D. dissertation, Harvard University, United States -- Massachusetts.
Cook-Greuter, S. (2004). Making the case for a developmental perspective. Industrial and Commercial Training, 36(6/7), 275-281.
Fowler, J. (1981). Stages of faith: The psychology of human development and the quest for meaning. New York: Harper Collins.
Hewlett, D. C. (2004). A qualitative study of postautonomous ego development: The bridge between postconventional and transcendent ways of being. Ph.D. dissertation, Fielding Graduate Institute, United States -- California.
Irwin, R. (2000). Meditation and the evolution of consciousness in M. Miller & A. West (Eds.), Spirituality, ethics, and relationships in adulthood: Clinical and theoretical explorations. Madison, CT: Psychosocial Press.
Irwin, R. (2002). Human development and the spiritual life: How consciousness grows toward transformation. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
Kegan, R. (1994). In over our heads: The mental demands of modern life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
King, P. & Kitchner, K. (1994). Developing reflective judgment: Understanding and promoting intellectual growth and critical thinking in adolescents and adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Loevinger, J. (1976). Ego development: Conceptions and theories. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Piaget, J. (1950). The psychology of intelligence. New York: Routledge.
Washburn, M. (2003). Embodied spirituality in a sacred world. Albany: SUNY Press.
Wilber, K. (2000). Integral psychology: Consciousness, spirit, psychology, therapy. Boston: Shambhala.
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Last Updated on Saturday, 12 February 2011 17:29 |
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News -
Latest
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Gnosis is not what you think. It is not an idea, not a doctrine. It is not objective. It is not definable. It is not found inside of rigid limits, nor outside of all considerations. It is not yours. It is not ours. It is something attained, and is a quickening of what we already have. It is a knowledge that you are, not a knowledge that you have.
If you are looking for a label, Gnosis is not it. If you are seeking a path with answers, Gnosis is not it. If you are looking for a path that fits you, Gnosis is not it. If you are seeking what is real beyond yourself and your ideas, then you may already be on the path of Gnosis.
We do not seek to propagate a set of beliefs or doctrines, nor to spread one set of teachings or one perspective. We seek to follow the injunction from the Gospel of Thomas: “If you see what is before your face, there is nothing that will not be revealed to you.” We seek to know what is real, and to follow that beyond our current notions, ideas, and understandings. We stand apart from mainstream culture only in that we do not prejudge the real to exclude the spiritual. We do not exclude what has always been a part of human experience, what has always been a part of human culture. For to do that would be to veer from the path of Gnosis towards mere ideas.
Gnosis is not what you think. And it is not something you will understand quickly. It is something you will come to know, and grow in that knowing. You may know someone to a large extent after a few years, but you cannot know someone entirely in the span of a lifetime. If you think you have hold of it, you have not. It is in the living, in the growing—it is never complete.
Scriptures tell us that the truth shall make us free. In Greek, the word for “truth” is “un-hidden.” The un-hidden, the unveiled, the examined shall set us free. This requires discipline and commitment, training and work. It requires an allegiance to the real that is higher than the allegiance to the ideal.
How seriously do you take your spiritual path? How committed are you to your liberation?
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Last Updated on Saturday, 12 February 2011 18:56 |
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