The Mystery Teachings

According to Gnostic theology, a series of "falling away" from the Whole that is God occurred in eternity which resulted in all that there is today. After the first "fall", the divine consciousness descended to the level of the divided consciousness; now after another "fall", it has fallen even further, into the depths of the unconscious; it has been "forgotten". It is now humanity's privilege to discover the potential dimensions of human existence and face the great challenge of the "ascension of consciousness" through the Man-God-Spirit transformation.

Once souls fell into the lower levels of consciousness, they became enamoured of it and burned with the desire to experience the pleasures of matter. The souls then no longer wanted to disengage itself from these lower levels. Thus the world was born. From that moment souls forgot themselves. They forgot they original habitation, their true center and eternal being.

All Gnosticism proceeds from one fundamental existential insight: this world in which we find ourselves is thoroughly and irretrievably evil. The soul is trapped in the prison of matter, and matter is intrinsically evil. According to Gnostic theology, the creation of the cosmos came about as the result of a tragicomic mistake: the fall of the Soul. Thanks to the advent of Christ in the lower dimensions of consciousness, the power of reconciling the fallen souls has been given to rebalance the Godhead and issue in the kingdom of Light over the kingdom of matter. The safety of the Godhead is assured thanks to the introduction of the new uniting force, the Christ.

Humanity does not comprehend the omnipotent power created for us until we utilize the Christ power. When we effectively use the omnipotent Christ power, the Savior, who is our advocate, provides wisdom over our world of negative and demi-god characters. Humanity has the power to help in this great process of redemption. He is able, through his prayers and mental labor to bring forth certain types of "Christ awareness" - to liberate the imprisoned sparks of divinity and rejoin them to their source. Thus the divine plan of creation will be restored, the divine outpouring will descend from on high in the form of the messianic Christ "gnosis" - bringing knowledge and salvation to the embodied forms of ignorance within man. Through all of this, the world will be redeemed.

Christ can only save the soul by his call "awake, remember who you are and where you come from!" and then by his revelation of the Gnosis. But since the soul cannot by itself hear the Gnosis, Christ has to resort to the elaborate stratagem of creating the cosmos of ideas, setting in motion a chain of events which open the corridor of the Mid-Heavens and eventually create the conditions by which all souls will be saved.

Christian Gnostics felt that initiation into the cosmic Logos is inseparable from "the Light which lighteth every person coming into the world," - the higher Self that is one with the Source. It is this higher Self which each individual must be at one with if he would be saved through the cosmic Logos, namely, brought back to his original spirit, consciousness and glory.

As more and more people hear the call "wake up!", attain the Gnosis and are liberated, their souls are received back into the bosom of Universal Divine Consciousness. The soul shall thus be freed from matter, and this world shall cease to be. There is nothing to be done for this world except end it, and Gnostics are the active workers seeking to achieve this by cultivating their higher selves to seek reunification with the Godhead. But each soul returning to its divine source has to pass through the various levels of consciousness. Usually there were seven of these, other times ten, and they were planetary realms. On one hand, they were conceived of as the "seven heavens", and on the other as seven demonic barriers between humanity and God.  It was possible to pass each of these barriers through divine Gnosis. Through this higher knowledge, a gnosis of salvation, can the divine be directly experienced.

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