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The Trickery of Words
“People nowadays tend to talk about ancient Gnostics without having a clue who they are. For thousands of years Gnostic tradition has been persecuted as a terrible heretical deviation from Christian orthodoxy. But orthodox Christianity with all its beliefs and codes and creeds is the heresy — and the supposedly heretical Gnostics with their direct knowledge of who the Christ was, of what he is, were the original orthodox Christians.
With their inner gnosis or knowing they were part of a tradition weaving through every outer tradition and stretching straight back, in the West, to ancient Greek mystics such as Empedocles. But with the arrival of all the priests and bishops and popes who get attracted to anything real like flies, soon the official Gospels were carefully being manufactured to cover over the original knowing of the Gnostics.
And Christianity, as we know it, became an elaborate curtain drawn over the Christ in the same way that Buddhists -cluttering the nothingness by filling our world with their words and thoughts about emptiness- have drawn their curtains over the Buddha.
We still have a few old Gnostic texts that describe the appalling mess created by so-called Christians with their fancy distinctions between Holy Spirit and Father and Son: that explain how the moment you start throwing words around without knowing what they mean you’ve completely deceived yourself, not to mention everyone else.
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The truth…