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Its not you that I'm reacting to, but the year of trying to learn from the Eastern Orthodox and ultimately finding it lacking. I've made an assumption, but I think you are representing that worldview.

There is no Gnosticism. What the internet has settled on as gnostic beliefs is really just one group that was extreme enough to satisfy the internet's collective appetite for the weird. What is now all grouped together into the category of gnosticism is the many separate movements which eventually gave rise to the political church. Before 325 AD, there was no canon, the Trinity was much more loosely understood, and symbolism played a much greater role in Christianity. The EO church gradually tightened the interpretation of scripture allowed, labelling anything outside their momentary window of acceptability as anathema and heresy, until now their reading of the Greek right in front of their faces lacks the depth of meaning which those "gnostic" symbols retained. I am not saying all gnostic beliefs are correct. I am saying that the church pretending to be the straight path has lost meaning, which is to be expected in a political organization.

Backing up just a bit - although there is no Gnosticism, there is a gnosis. That's knowing Christ, knowing God, knowing what it means. Its this :

Where is Christ? Saying you bow to none but Christ is great, but its meaningless without knowing where Christ is, what "Christ" means, the history of the word... But most importantly, where. Within.

Okay, **_what_** is the kingdom of God? Its Jesus. As you pointed out the other day, Israel is Jesus. So, not a place. Its a process or a state of being. Look within.

The Bible uses dualism to teach you. But for there to be duality, there must be unity. Duality of what? Of what medium? Often you can see things presented in a polarity. One extreme is presented first, then the opposite extreme. Oftentimes these extremes are broken into two different stories by our Bibles - but their positioning can't be accidental, being so oft repeated. You are meant to meditate on these dualities. Seeing unity does not preclude duality or separation of created things. Seeing created things does not preclude unity. The goal is to achieve unity with God - in church they call it wearing the mantle of Christ. You don't gain magical powers... But you do gain calm. You came from God, which is symbolically the descent, and you return to God by knowing Christ. Knowing... Gnosis. One way to know a thing is via contradistinction from what it's not - here we're utilizing the descent, the fruit of knowledge - duality. If it worries you that coming from God is a conflation with God, consider that an infinite thing can never be diminished by its subtraction or division.

To give the pretender church a bit of credit, there is certainly merit in placing Christ outside of yourself. You literally can't know Christ without humility, and serving exoterically will require humility. But don't make an idol out of it! To serve Christ is not to make Jesus into an idol. It is by recognizing the separation between you and Truth, that you can attain Truth - but its not your choice - its a mutual recognition. There's no way to say these things without falling back on polarity. Truth/separation, Christ/antichrist, humility/pride, sight/blindness ... All the same. But you can't see that if you don't go within!

And... Sorry if I jumped to the wrong conclusion about your response to that discussion. A bit more humility would have prevented that, ironically.

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SuiGenerisJohn 1y ago

First I’ve got to recommend the new standard American version of the Bible 1995 version. Also this was a very interesting take considering we are often alone on this journey even in company. What my faith teaches me is that the duality is reconciling being of God but as a consequence not identical. His son given to death and surviving death in believing in the Christ and his descent and return tethers us to God like a rope in an underwater cavern put in place by our scout Christ for us to follow and therefore to believe in. What is the world hereafter is unknown to us but to annihilate the self completely whatever that self is there undoes the covenant. In other words there must remain a separation of our Father and our soul to give us the blessing of our justification in the world to come. Otherwise we are nothing and nihilism prevails.

The self didn't really exist in the first place. Its an adventure. Enjoy it. Nihilism is dumb, don't do it. Unity doesn't contradict separation. Separation is necessary to have forms ; forms are necessary to have story ; logos is I AM. Infinity can't be diminished - it can play forever, wearing all the masks. Love is being.

I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to write out that response. It helps give context to what you'd written, and brings us a bit closer to understanding one another. I will try to be concise.

- No, I am not Eastern Orthodox, but decisively of the Western, Reformed/Protestant type. (And no worries at all for a 'misidentification'!) That means that I believe Scripture to be the 'only rule for faith and obedience,' that it is 'the final arbiter' on all questions of doctrine (like the Bereans in Acts 14:11). So for any question, I will point back to Scripture for the answer.

- I get your point that 'Gnosticism' as it is known today is somewhat different from the many forms of it in the early church. But what it was, and what it still has echoes of, was rather decisively dealt with in the early church--for that I would refer you to Irenaeus' work. He showed that the general thrust of the gnosticism of his day was out of accord with right teaching (read: Scripture).

- In Luke 8:10, Jesus is speaking to the church, to those who had been 'born again from above,' who had been renewed by the gift of the Holy Spirit. The kingdom of God is not a place--yet (see The Revelation for that), but is now an ethic: it's in our hearts. It's in our hearts like it was in Rahab's heart before Joshua took Jericho. It is the ethical rule that precedes the geographical realm, when Christ comes to conquer all his and our enemies at the Last Day. We still pray to this day, "thy Kingdom come," as we can imagine Rahab did in her prayer closet. She was 'in' Jericho, but no longer 'of' Jericho--because she was 'of' the coming Kingdom of Joshua, but not yet 'in' the kingdom of Joshua. But he was at the gate.

- Where is Christ? He is seated in heaven (Eph. 2; Heb. 1), at the right hand of God, 'from thence he shall come to judge to quick and the dead.' The Christ of Scripture is a man (John 1), a particular man (Matthew 1), who lived on this earth, at a particular time and a particular place "under Pontius Pilate--it is all in order" (as CS Lewis put it). He hungered, he wept, he had arm hair, his feet got dirty. "Christ" is not a state of consciousness that any human can achieve with enough meditation, enlightenment, and ego death. I know that is the teaching of many flavors of gnosticism and even some flavors of theosophy, but it is not the teaching of Scripture. Christ is not a state of mind or of being--He is a single, unique, historical, individual person, "born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were subject to the curse of the law." (Gal. 4).

- Yes, God is infinite, but--having material bodies--we are finite. We are bound by both time and space while he is not. We are not emanations from him, we are uniquely created minds/hearts/wills, though created in his image and likeness. He is not made of body, parts, or passions--he does not suffer change. We are, and we do.

- Much of what you've written is known by many names, be it gnosticism, the 'ancient philosophy,' theosophy, etc. The 'reconciling of the opposites,' the 'As Above, So Below' ideas, etc. To get at why these ideas in general--monism, as a catch-all term--cannot be reconciled with the teaching of Scripture, see Peter Jones, _The Other Worldview_, or--if you're a deep-diver--Michael Horton's _The Divine Self: The Origins of 'Spiritual, Not Religious'_ (Volume 1).

- The real point of my objections to this is that if 'All is One,' if 'I am the universe experiencing itself' (to quote another version of these ideas), then all of this resolves into the worship of self (or, the Self). If All is One then I am All and All is Me, God is I and I am actually he--or more precisely, we all together with the rocks and trees and birds and bees are God and we only need to remember who we Really Are. But we merely collapse into ourselves, and then into oblivion. And that was the primal temptation of the Serpent, wasn't it? "Look within," he said to Eve: "what looks good *to you*? Don't you want to be God? Never mind his threats, shut your ears to his Word--he's lying to you. Listen, instead, to me." This is why many who go down this path end up deciding that the Serpent himself was the savior--that the Serpent himself was the one that 'gave us knowledge/gnosis'. It is the primal lie; the first murder. And we have been 'dying the death' ever since.

- There is nothing 'within' except sin, corruption, and self-worship, unless or until the Spirit of God grants us the new life 'from above' (John 3), our eyes are opened, our hearts are changed, and our polarity/ethical disposition reverses back toward God. Only by turning away from ourselves and toward God (who is external to us) can we find redemption. Before this, we are blind, dead, enemies, alienated from God, without hope in the world, unwilling to enter the kingdom and unable to even see it. We are not merely sick; we are spiritually dead. That's what's 'within'--death.

I do not necessarily write the above to persuade you to embrace more historically orthodox teaching (not to be confused with Eastern Orthodox as in the denomination)--though I certainly would love it if you did--but simply to point out that pantheism (or monism, or gnosticism, or whatever you want to call it) and Christian theism are incompatible. We can choose one or the other, but not both.

I failed miserably in my objective to be concise. Didn't have time to refine, my apologies. But hopefully the above lays out just a bit more of the reason why I said what I said above.

Its very difficult for me to continue reading when I see assumptions being made. My failing - but I am also not made of infinite time. If I knocked down every assumption, I would never have time for anything else, because there are hundreds of millions of people who take such a shallow view of scripture, reinforce their mythology with discombobulated cherry picking of verses, nod their heads in agreement with themselves, attack the people who are actually trying to understand what the scriptures mean, and in the end understand literally nothing that was the intention of the scripture. Do not peg me as a gnostic or theosophist or any kind of "ism" - I listen to anyone who is seeking, but don't stick around when I find assumptions.

The real problem which makes religious people so onerous is that their religion is so tied up with their ego. You will not take anything I say seriously, nor will you begin to look for deeper meaning, because in your mind its impossible for me to know anything because I'm not on your team, which is narrowly defined and can always be narrowed further via purity tests, so that the end result of your egoistic religion is that the only expression permissible is agreement and submission. As I've stated in the past - religion and spirituality cannot coexist. This is because religion is ego and spirituality begins with controlling the ego.

When you place God outside of yourself and you ignore all the symbolism, the result is thst you misunderstand everything in the bible and you believe in mythology. I AM NOT SAYING YOU SHOULD BELIEVE YOU'RE GOD. But you will never understand because you are committed to your exoteric misunderstanding. I'm wasting my time.

God, send someone else... I'm not the one to teach this guy. I don't want this job.

nobody 1y ago

That's a weak copout my friend. Calling you out publicly. Nobody gave you a deadline to answer by. Be better.

It's okay to say "I have my own assumptions that I'm not willing to change."

Don't call me friend, demon. Blocked.

> The secret things belong to the Lord or God, but the things that are revealed belongs to us, and to our children, forever... [Deut. 29:29](https://esv.org/Deut+29.29), ESV

> Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. -- [Hebrews 1:1–4](https://esv.org/Heb+1), ESV

God has spoken to us--in a language that we can understand-- _so that we can know_. As Schaeffer put it, [He is There and He is Not Silent](https://a.co/d/aCsq6xu).

This is my epistemological commitment, rooted in the metaphysical commitment that I am not God; he is the Creator and I am his creation. He is the Author, therefore He has the Authority--he gets to say 'right' or 'wrong' and "to him shall all flesh give an account." That's religion; that's the "death of ego" that we need: I am not God; I am not the source of Truth; I am not the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. "He is God in heaven, here am I on earth; and so I will let _my words_ be few."

These metaphysical and epistemological commitments also entail an ethical commitment: how shall I respond? [How Should We Then Live?](https://a.co/d/74CAgfp). For my part? I bow in awe, reverence, and gratitude.

If I, or my words, have offended you, then I do apologize. But if it's the words of Scripture that have offended you, then...friend, I do not. Be well.

I have ceased to care. You are not honest, I see that. I was foolish to trust you as much as I did. You began this thread to troll me, and the effect is that you taunt anyone who is genuinely searching the scripture. No more. We're done.

One must remove toxic people. I'm blocking you. I am usually not so ready to compromise, but I realized I was compromising with evil by allowing your voice to come to me over nostr. Demons present themselves thusly, via weakness that makes you think you can converse with them. I kindly ask that you block me as well - I doubt you will, but it would grant me some peace to know that you won't continue misinterpreting what I say and seeking validation of your wickedness from similarly misguided people. One such demon has already presented itself.

I'd hoped we could have a congenial disagreement, perhaps learn from one another. Truly sorry it went this way. We've had great back-and-forths in the past, and I've enjoyed your posts. No, I'm not going to block you--but I'll try to remember that you don't care to hear from me anymore. Honestly: be well.

the amount of energy they steal from you is incredible, and you really don't realise it until you start to actually shun this kind of behaviour, i discovered this in early 2022, and realised that everyone i was having regular contact with was abusing me

my life instantly changed because i had freed up energy that was no longer going to them

and you might be amused at the experience that snapped me out of it

i had a good friend, the only good friend i made while living in Bulgaria, who hooked me up with maybe the highest quality methamphetamine i have ever taken

i accidentally dosed too high on my fist time using it, i mixed up a solution with rice malt as this preserves it, and i had a vision during the experience of this entity that was attached to me, it sorta resemebled a cigarette, but it had a face like my father, and it scuttled away like a cockroach, but for a second or two i locked eyse with it and it was frozen, and as soon as i blinked it shrank away behind me

i started to seriously study how cult brain washing and mind control worked, as i had had the thought come to me that i needed to research this, while working for a company called Dusk Network... because there was something i could not put my finger on about how the guy, one of the founders, had charmed me when i was in the interview, and his humiliation ritual on our daily standups with the current whipping boy, and there was a seasonal meatspace gathering that was held in ... i forget, i think Porto, in portugal, oddly enough, and i refused to go because i didn't want to do yet another covid test or be forced to get a jab. This led to me being fired, and it was during this time that i had this experience about the demon/spirit thing that was attached to me

anyway, point was, shortly after that, i landed a job working for a subcontractor in Varna, and there i ended up wandering onto Twitter, got lightning-pilled and watched the Terra/Luna/Celsius fiasco unfolding and became a full blown bitcoin maxi

the job didn't last, and the war broke out in Ukraine just before i started (and i remember when what started that was on the news while i was in jail in, i forget when it was, maybe june 2014) and i eventually fled to Sarajevo and through my twitter experience came into contact with someone who wanted me to build a lightning-powered anonymity network protocol, and then spent almost a year in Cambridge working on that

so, yeah, anyway, my point was, the sooner you start to recognise cult style manipulation going on, people feeding off your attention, and wasting your time with bullshit, the sooner you will start to have a lot more things happen that could not have occurred without your energies beeing freed up

i expect there is more surprises around teh corner for me now but basically i don't have this problem of people getting their fangs into me... i'm extremly hostile to this kind of bullshit behaviour and attack it everywhere i see it now, and it's only benefiting me, if for nothing else than the catharsis of fighting the real evil

Meth is a bad idea... Sorry, I've only started reading, I'll make a proper response in a minute. Please don't take meth... It will only weaken you, rob you of energy, as you put it. Replace the urge with a different release until it stops.

i have had some extraordinary experiences due to this drug, but most of the stuff you ever find is utter shit, and i tried to find something decent on the dark web but it was all fake and bullshit, and after having the real thing for real, i just don't have the patience to even try it much more, and i don't want to get into trouble and the other thing is that it makes my cramps way worse so it's just not even on my list of things to do at all

but i will just tell you, that for some people, like me, it sometimes brings on a visionary experience, and it is a very important one, i've had it happen about 3 times in my life so far

this one i had in particular really made concrete the understandings i was building about the nature of evil and psychological manipulation, but it was too heavy on my body to use and i was in the early stages of kidney problems at that point, that didn't fully manifest until a bit over a year later with vision problems and other symptoms

so, don't mistake who i am, just because i told you that i had some very important experiences that were precipitated by this drug, i am not any different to teh person you talked to before, this was part of how i came to be like this

disrupting the parts of the brain that meth wakes up is a big part of how i became who i am, defines so many of my dreams and my life experiences, and of course, why i have a particular interest in the drug

i don't need it, it just made me feel some moments of health and gave me some insights that i had to go through to get there. i know that what it was doing was just limiting things that were causing me to live in a fog for a brief time and those moments helped me forwards

I understand, and can relate. Experiences make us who we are (or think we are, if the other guy didn't block me yet (oof, shouldn't have said that...)).

Visions come when your spiritual matrix is weakened. That terminology sounds clunky, but its my best stab at it for now. I had something similar after the covid vaccine, which nearly killed me. But, it also made me a Christian... and not a blind one. So I'm thankful, but also never want to go through that again.

If you're going to use substances to induce visions, which I don't think is a good idea, do it with preparation. There are rituals... Idk, never used them, but rituals are very useful. Spend a few years looking inside before trying that. Be able to recognize that parasite you mentioned without aide and figure out how to remove it. Be prepared. Strengthen yourself sufficiently that you're not flirting with death when you try it.

i wasn't taking it for visions, they just have happened on several occasions, one particular series of images that were from a dream i had as a child was really really frequent, almost a defining experience in my mid 20s when i was trying to cook it myself

this particular event was because i didn't realise what i had bought was the 100% most legit meth i had ever been in possession of in my life, 99.5% pure i would estimate, pure dextro methamphetamine, it is an amazing drug but it's extremely hard to find it anywhere, and i come from australia, where they deliberately started to contaminate medicines with carcinogenic plastics to obstruct small scale manufacturers and keep the supply under their control, made from imported chinese pure pseudoephedrine cooked up in chinese labs

i should also add that of the people i had some dealings with in those days was a straight up demon, he and his friend, who i met first, were pivotal in creating a market in MDMA where i lived (queensland/northern new south wales) and i also had a quite extraordinary experience on my birthday in 2003 due to the material the not evil of the pair gave me a bunch of his material from) and note that this all was contemporary to when i wrote the Elfspice Compleat Acacia Extraction Guide which you can find if you just copy and paste that text into a search engine, it's on tripod, i wrote that thing, it was one of my early attempts to do some neat stuff with CSS also btw

i had some pretty far out experiences with the drug underground in that part of the world in those times between 1995 and 2003, and out of all of them meth was the one i pinned my hopes on as a way to regain the ability to function and break through my huge problems with getting a regular income in my 20s, after i ... well, anyway, maybe you have heard the story about my friends and i prank on our school who introduced an early beta test of the modern chinese social credit score system

(you guys can remove me from the rest of this discussion, if you'd like, I'm not interested in Meth and having nothing more to contribute).

also, yeah... my personal return to christianity was a slow path, i started to see more and more of it as i bumbled into the bitcoin twitter and i'd had many visions also during my time homeless in 2015-2016, and probably one experience with PCP and a random person who bumped into me, connected to some weird person i met on facebook, who subsequently rapidly disappeared from my radar, he was some kind of jew apologist, lived in Tel Aviv and all, and another weird guy who spoke Esperanto and was into Bah'ai and connected to Soros' Open Society Foundation, which i quizzed him about at one point, because it had appeared on my radar and was very suspicious

so, idk... i guess you might say that i became convinced that i was being guided towards something, especially since said Bah'ai esperanto person dropped Phillipians 4:6-7 on me which precipitated a massive experience involving prayer, that probably this moment, in, of all places, an esoteric bookshop/teahouse next to the main market square of Rome nearby Termini train station, was probably the most pivotal moment, and that set me on the path of persuing social networks, i started a blog, and not long after that bumped into Steamit (and this connects me with nostr:npub1cxp3l03x20mkzezzr4takm8w8zuva7xwvacmcewp97z58hjt8xls3mexlq who still posts on that chain) where i had some unquestionably bizarre and prophetic experiences, especially one incident as i was travelling north out of Bologna and was told to wait a minute and then a helper appeared and gave me food that ran me for the next two days and made me convinced without any remaining doubt that when i spoke to God as per that verse in Phillipians, that i was being heard, and that answers would come, sometimes, and in this case, it was literally like a telepathic voice in my head

Interesting. I should have read the whole thing before responding the first time. I've heard of these psychic parasites, and wouldn't be surprised if they're on everyone. Tying it to the physical phenomenon of a cult is probably correct too - there's a correspondence between physical and spiritual action. Idk more than simply that there's a correspondence. For clarity, a correspondence is a catchall term for a clear link between events and events, or events and images, which is not causative.

Speaking of causative... The meth caused the vision of the parasite? Was it revealing the parasite or inviting it? When it scuttled off, did it leave entirely or only leave your awareness?

Anyways, I have no experience with those things. I just think you know when a vision is showing something you need to see.

Totally agree about cult mentality. This mentality is the same urge that gives rise to socialism. It's a mass surrender, where the surrender of reason of nearby people gives your own surrender validation, which amplifies and becomes a religious fervor. Removing religion doesn't stop the phenomenon - it might even make it more likely. But with religion, you can see it in the repeated "revivals" of Protestant sects. Only falsehoods require revivals. Truth remains, no matter what people believe, so if belief requires revival and goes in the direction of fervor, which short circuits the application of rationality, then that sect is false.

Did you just suddenly switch to enabling meth usage

Removing people is the best way to be a toxic person. Sadly, you're right, we have to remove people who remove people.

Thank you. Truly... Thank you. Farewell.

I meant watch where you're headed because any blood you're spilling could mean spilling your own.

if someone is pretending to help you, this is a key marker of them being fuckers, btw

i'm not here to help you, i'm just telling you what happened to me and my opinion of these asshats you have disrupting your mind here

...ouch, nostr:nprofile1qqsyeqqz27jc32pgf8gynqtu90d2mxztykj94k0kmttxu37nk3lrktcpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qg3waehxw309ahx7um5wghxcctwvshsz9nhwden5te0d4kx26m49eex2ctv0yhxcmmv9ume3twc

Don't mind mleku, he's fucked up mentally right now because I didn't have the heart to hold back on telling him what he deserves for his crimes against the children of Gaza

I value your opinion and thank you for your input, mleku.

And I think its funny that I can see someone already responded to you but I can't see it, because I've blocked 3 people in this thread. This is liberating. I won't be so shy about blocking people in the future.

I've noticed the pattern too - people presenting as helpful, but the subtext is a demand. I hope I never come across that way.

this is why i have continued to interact with you, i like what you say and feel like i have some part in the story and you continue to entertain me

i feel like i have been where you are and i just want to help confirm that you are hearing teh same things i heard

**_performs a grandiose bow, as if on stage_**

Us ornery people gotta stick together. And for confirming stuff, I'm an open book, except to the three people mentioned above.

SuiGenerisJohn 1y ago

Did I survive the blockening?

Yes

SuiGenerisJohn 1y ago

🤝