For if you walk on this road, it is impossible to go astray.
"The sage Valentinus gives the central Gnostic teaching, which is the same perennial wisdom taught by all Christian mystics and, indeed, all other mystical traditions: 'Knock on yourself as upon a door and walk upon yourself as on a straight road. For if you walk on this road, it is impossible to go astray. Open the 'door for yourself that you may know.' For as Jesus himself says in the New Testament, 'the kingdom of Heaven is within you.'"
“For the Gnostics, Jesus is not the son of a partisan Jewish god, but
the son of the true God who is the oneness that underlies all. He
comes not to save people from offending against the rules laid down
by an autocratic creator, but directly to reveal the transcendent
truth. The true God of Jesus is beyond all ideas, and so can be
equally pictured as both father and mother. A Gnostic text has God
declaring:
I am the Thought that dwells in the Light. She who exists above all,
I move in every creature. I am the Invisible One within the All. I am
perfection. I am knowledge. I cry out in everyone and they know a
seed dwells within them. I am androgynous. I am both Mother and
Father, since I make love with myself. I am the womb that gives shape
to All. I am the Glorious Mother....
The Gnostic mystics believed that Jesus had come as a spiritual guide
with the power to transform his followers into his equals. In the
same way that after 'enlightenment' a Buddhist becomes a Buddha, when
a mystic achieved gnosis he was 'no longer a Christian, but
a 'Christ'. The purpose of spiritual authority is to outgrow it. The
Gospel of Philip has Jesus teaching: "You saw the spirit, you become
the spirit. You saw Christ, you become Christ. You saw the Father,
you shall become the Father. You see your Self, and what you see you
will become.' In the Apocalypse of Peter, the disciple relates how he
was initiated by Jesus: 'the Saviour said to me," Put your hands over
your eyes and tell me what you see.”But when I had done it, I saw
nothing. I said," No one see this way.”He told me," Do it again",
and there came into me fear with joy, for I saw a Light, greater than
the light of day.'
Simon Magus, who knew Jesus, describes each human being as a place in
which 'dwells an infinite power ... the root of the universe'. The
Gnostic master Valentinus, echoing the teaching of the Mystery
Schools, says that it is a person's guardian angel which conveys
gnosis to him, but that this angelic being is actually the seeker's
higher Self. He writes: "When the human self and the divine"I"Are
interconnected they can achieve perfection and eternity.' The master
Monoimus instructs:
Abandon the search for God and the creation and other similar
matters. Look for Him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn
who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, 'My God,
my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.' Learn the source of sorrow,
joy, love, hate.... If you carefully investigate these matters you will
find God in your Self.
In the Dialogue of the Saviour, the disciple Matthew asks Jesus where
the 'place of life, the pure light' is. Jesus replies, 'Every one of
you who has known himself has seen it.' His disciples question: 'Who
is the one who seeks, and who is the one who reveals?' Like a Zen
master, Jesus answers that 'the one who seeks is also the one who
reveals.' In the Testimony of Truth, Jesus advises a follower to
become a disciple of his own mind because it is the 'Father of Truth'.
The sage Valentinus gives the central Gnostic teaching, which is the
same perennial wisdom taught by all Christian mystics and, indeed,
all other mystical traditions: 'Knock on yourself as upon a door and
walk upon yourself as on a straight road. For if you walk on this
road, it is impossible to go astray. Open the 'door for yourself that
you may know.' For as Jesus himself says in the New Testament, 'the kingdom of Heaven is within you.'"
The Complete Guide to World Mysticism
by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, page 104-6
Publisher: Piatkus Books; New Ed edition (October 1998)
For the mystics, Jesus was a living embodiment of the possibility of union with God, who could lead them to the same spiritual realization
"Jesus was a Jewish heretic who was put to death by the religious status quo of his day. He preached a radical mysticism that emphasized a complete surrender of the self to God, through love, forgiveness and humility — a message that he embodied in his life and death. An extraordinary influential figure whose nature is shrouded in mystery and overlaid with myth, he is pictured in many different ways by the different Christian sects which claim him as their inspiration. Like the great yogis of India, he was not confined by the 'laws' of nature that so tightly bind the rest of us. He walked on water, turned water into wine and raised the dead. For most of his followers he is an incarnation of God, comparable to the avatars of India. Whatever else Jesus may or may not have been, his wisdom shows him to have been a remarkable sage who taught with the simple authority that comes from direct knowledge of God.
From its roots in the teachings of an enlightened Jewish carpenter from Galilee, Christianity expanded via St. Paul, who had previously been a prosecutor of the new heretical Jewish sect but was converted by a mystical vision of divine light. By the fourth century Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman empire, which focused on making it a dogmatic faith capable of holding an empire together rather than a personal path to knowledge of God. The Romans ruthlessly suppressed all the other forms of Christianity that still flourished at this time, such as the Gnostics, a highly mystical sect of mainly Jewish Christians largely based in Egypt...
In the fifth century the Roman Church split into a more mystical Eastern Church based in Constantinople, and an authoritarian Western Church based in Rome — both of which proceeded to excommunicate each other. In the West, Christian mystics existed always on the edge of acceptability, often persecuted and excommunicated for their individualistic ways and heretical ideas. Despite this many great mystics still emerged, for instance the thirteen-century Italian ascetic St. Francis of Assisi. As the authoritarianism and corruption of the official Church became more and more unbearable, many groups of mystic Christians began breaking away from the suffocating power of religious dogma, to find their own direct relationship with Christ and God...
Later, however, when Protestantism itself became a religious orthodoxy, mystical ideas were once again seen as heretical and unacceptable. Protestant mystics such as the sixteenth-century German Jacob Boehm found the new religious establishment as intolerant as its precursor.
The mystics claim a direct relationship with God, which the leaders of the Christian religion have always feared as a threat to their position as the sole repositories of divine knowledge. Because of this, much of Christian mysticism has existed outside the mainstream of the Church. To find the real mystical riches of the Christian tradition we have to look to its hidden history, which has been deliberately obscured by the establishment. Some of its greatest mystics are hardly known. Meister Eckhart, for example, an extraordinarily clear spokesman for the perennial mystic philosophy, was generally unheard of until a few decades ago. Whether they existed within the official Church or in the many heretical groups, however, the great Christian mystics have all pointed to the same essential mystic truths. Today, despite an upsurge in Christian fundamentalism, the spirit of mysticism is re-emerging. Christians such as William Johnson, Thomas Merton and Bede Griffiths have sought to incorporate elements of Eastern mysticism into the Christian faith, both to enhance their own tradition, and to find a common, multicultural understanding of God.
The teaching of the Christian religion has generally been that Jesus was God made flesh, who suffered and died for the sins of the world, and that by believing in this a Christian is freed from sin and will go to heaven when he dies. Up until the Reformation in the sixteenth century, ordinary Christians were expected to accept such dogmas and the Inquisition even forbade them to read the Bible for themselves. For the mystics, however, Jesus' message was one of personal salvation through the direct experience of God. In the words of Angelus Silesius, a seventeenth-century Protestant poet who in four days of ecstatic illumination wrote the 302 verses of the mystic masterpiece The Cherubinic Wanderer:
Christ could be born a thousand times in Galilee —
But all in vain, until he is born in me.
For the mystics, Jesus was a living embodiment of the possibility of union with God, who could lead them to the same spiritual realization. In the Gnostic scripture called the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus tells his disciples: 'I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out. He who will drink out of my mouth will become as I am; I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.'"
The Complete Guide to World Mysticism
Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, page 86-90
Piatkus Books; New Ed edition (October 1998)
Question: What is God, for you, and is God a separate entity?
“Yeah, He is. He is, and God for me is the one who is witnessing everything. But He has His Power which is the Primordial Mother, which is the Holy Ghost, which is reflected within you as the kundalini, and God is reflected within you as the Spirit in your heart. At this point they meet, and that's how you get your Self-realization. But such a wide subject it is, so you have to have more patience for such a wider subject.”
The Paraclete Shri Mataji
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