Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapter 17: Gnosis and Existential Inertia
This lecture focuses on the gnostic perspective of how agency is undermined, leading to suffering, and how that existential inertia can be transcended.
What is gnosis?
To understand gnosis, we must first understand the concept of sensibility transcendence.
Recall that a worldview is a mutual coupling of agent and arena. Imagine the experience of seeing someone in a new light such that your relationship with them changes, or of going from seeing what an author is saying to seeing things as the author. Just like an insight, the experience changes both how we view the world and how we view ourselves: it transforms our worldview. This kind of bidirectional transframing is basically anagoge.
How about the opposite scenario? Sometimes we deal with so-called “unthinkable” options; that is, options we can imagine and contemplate, but are unable to actually carry out in a viable way, e.g. hurting one’s dog. This kind of existential inertia often prevents us from carrying out immoral behaviors, but just as often keeps us stuck in undesirable behavioral patterns. One of the biggest reasons why people enter therapy is because they feel stuck. It’s often the case that the very thing one’s trying to change is what one’s not willing to let go of (“I’m persistent!”).
We sometimes confront decisions that propose to change our existential state: having a child, leaving a job, starting a relationship, growing up. In these cases, we don’t know how we’ll value the outcome until we actually experience it, because it is based on perspectival and participatory knowing, which is dependent on the state of being. Before making the decision, we don’t know what we’re missing or what we’re going to lose.
Sometimes we resolve this dilemma by role playing. Playing puts you in between the two states, allowing you to explore possibilities with low stakes (see also this post). This is sometimes why people get pets. The scenario must be similar enough to the actual choice yet familiar enough to the current state to allow one to effectively play: this is called enactive analogy. Ritual (in religion) is properly understood as play between the normal and the sacred world.
Gnosis, then, is the act of trying to bring about an altered state of consciousness in a ritual context, enacting anagoge, thus giving a sense of a greater reality and liberation from suffering.