The 2007 Gnostic Calendar is Here!

It's back!
The second year of the first Calendar specifically for Gnostics!
The calendar features the Liturgical Calendar of the Ecclesia Gnostica: the Sundays and Holy days/holidays of the year; with the liturgical color of the day in the upper right hand corner. This year's themes include: Abraxas, Philip K. Dick, the Logos, Philemon, Mary of Magdala, the Holy Sophia, the Ship of Light, the Templars, the Apostle Thomas, and more.

Printed on high-quality thick and durable acid-free paper, the Gnostic Calendar sells for only slightly more than you'd pay for a non-generic calendar at a retail outlet.

Learn more and order your copy at http://gnosis.org/calendar

Another Kind of Reality Thinking Through Us

We had to share some of the responsibility in the matter as through we, through our deeds of omission, where the accomplices we were fighting. Only by understanding how we were all a part, however opposite, of the same terrible contemporary medal could we defeat those dark forces with the true understanding of their nature and origin which was vital if they were to be over come in a manner to make us all free to embark on a way of peace that would not lead to a repetition of the vengeful past.

I had a feeling that even our capacity for thinking our own thoughts shrank into painfully humble proportions compared with another kind of reality that was, as it were, thinking through us. The typically French “As I think, so I am” seemed to me so much less true, and so static as to be petrified, after the Arabian axiom that as a man dreamt, so he was.

Yet even these reservations about human self-capacity for thinking were trivial against my conviction that we were utterly incapable of inventing the content of symbols, however much we helped to shape and express them, in the limited means available to us in our own little ration of reality. I was somehow convinced that issuing straight out of our deepest nature, like starlight out of the night, the material for symbols, whether we liked it or not was inflicted on us as a spur to a widening vision of ourselves. I had never seen so clearly as during this kind of war in which I was engaged how symbolism infected not only the human spirit and imagination, not only expressed something of itself in words, poetry, art, and religion, but when all these and other sources failed it, as our seemed to have done, how it compelled human beings to act it out in blind, ritualistic behaviour.

- Sir Laurens van der Post writing of his considerations during World War II in Jung and the Story of our Time (p 26)

Gnosticism is a genesis

Beneath the complexity, the tortuousness of the Gnostic myths lies hidden this obvious truth: we are all premature births.

I believe that the whole of the Gnostics' ulterior attitude to man, society, the human race, and the mechanism of the cosmos, is founded on this primary vision (one could even say this imago) of the origin of man, forever scarred by his inherent immaturity. We are chrysalids snatched prematurely from our protective cocoons. Besides, the very term Gnosticism—gnosis—is very close, in Greek, to genesis, which means birth and origin. Gnosticism is, in essence, a genesis, it restores to man his true birth, and overcomes his genetic and mental immaturity.

- Jacques Lacarrière, The Gnostics (p 35)

Thread by thread

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
- Leo Tolstoy

National Novel Writing Month

This came along right when I was considering writing some fiction again after quite a few years. Tens of thousands of people sign up to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. How cool/capricious/insane is that?

Line 1: "She had always been a dreamer, and it was terrifying."

Day 1: 1844/50000 words (Slightly ahead of quota, but lead probably won't last through tomorrow.)

Writing something just for fun (and possibly profit)—not quite priceless, but keen. ;)

Getting a Large Chunk of Life Back, (I hope)

One of the large banes of my existence have been frequent and long lasting infections in my sinus. They come at least two times a year and last for at least a month. It is sometimes hard to function at all physically when I have these. Simple tasks can become monumental. Projects have to be abandoned for the duration. They are the major reason for the closing of the Gnostic Shop. They have kept chapel related remodeling and construction at a near stand-still. They make it difficult to conduct serious mental work. Things get put on hold and I just want them to go away, but it always takes weeks and weeks. I am in week four of the current one.

I even took my last job at what can only be described as a corporate cult in order to get this taken care of. The initial consultation I had indicated another source of the problem. It was wrong. They continued. A more potentially serious problem was found, which then became my focus. Yet the sinus thing kept going. And as I look back it has indirectly exacerbated the other.

So, sick to death of being sick to death for months out of the year. I went in and kept pushing until I got the missing piece of information that put the puzzle of symptoms together and convinced the Doctor to do the surgery. I am going in November Ninth for out-patient surgery to clear out a sinus. I truly hope this will clear up a major reoccurring difficulty, a major bane of my existence. Because, there will be plenty left, but I will be able to at least work on the others without more than a month-long illness striking me down at any time.