"Perhaps you are one of those remarkable people who experience an overpowering realization of the divinity of existence. You suddenly know that everything is divine and that within you lies an ocean of God. Will you know this all of the time and every day? No. You will crest and fall and submerge again into the mundane. The realization of divinity as the be-all and end-all, as the substance of your very self—that within which you live and move and have your being—does not dominate every day, although you wish it would. The ordinary world of aches and pains and approaching death, of trouble, temptation, sin, stress, and loss seems to rule almost all the time. And yet, sometimes you can seize what you seek and see glory everywhere and know yourself to be divine.
If you are one of those people, you are one with the Gnostics. You know what you truly are, that you are God, just as everyone else is. But, as a Gnostic, your existence in this ordinary and difficult world puzzles you. You ask, “How did I come to be here?”You don’t seem to belong here. You belong in a world, a realm, of divinity. And it certainly seems that that divine realm is not everyday reality. But if, in full reality, everything that exists is God, why don’t we always know this? Why do some people never even think it possible to be what, in their depths, they really are? Why don’t we know who we are? How did we come to forget? What holds us back from perpetual realization of our divinity and what traps so many people into denying that their own divinity is even conceivable? These are the Gnostics’questions. The Secret Book of John is the Gnostics’answer.
Gnostics know that God is all and that they themselves are God. They experience this knowledge, this realization, and know that everyone else could share their experience. But they are continually thrown back into the seemingly hard material reality that tells them that they are merely flawed humans, kin to apes, doomed to die, ruled by a judgmental creator god who often does not show a fondness for people at all. Gnostics rebel against their churches and their priests, their Bible-based pastors whose obsession with God’s supposed desire to control behavior seems not to be what true religion is about. To Gnostics, true religion, elite spirituality, is a realization of the divinity of every person, an experience of ascent to the divine homeland. It is a knowledge of the way we once were as God and of the processes by which God came to be so self-forgetful as to become us, mere human beings under the control of another lesser god. Those are the lessons taught in the Gnostic Gospel, the Secret Book of John.
Gnosticism is a religion of rebels: creative thinkers whose works were systematically destroyed by orthodox Christianity between the second and the sixth centuries CE. Gnostics were the “other”to the growth of orthodoxy; they lived in the home of heresy for they were the source of self-assertiveness against the episcopal demand for sameness. They persisted in the shadows, in certain Sufi sects, in the Christian Cathar movement, and perhaps even among the Knights Templar and the Rosicrucian orders. Only recently have the old Gnostics spoken aloud again. Their speech resounds in the documents of the Nag Hammadi Library buried seventeen hundred years ago in Upper Egypt, discovered again in 1945, and read today by spiritual seekers throughout the world. Their main document, their central myth, their theory of the origin and structure of reality is a text called the Secret Book of John. In this text we learn how God fell and became us and how, through knowing that story, we can return to glory and be absorbed again into God. This new annotated edition of the Secret Book of John will help you take up the challenge of reading the primary Gnostic myth. It discusses the principal themes of the Secret Book of John and explains the historical and spiritual contexts as they arise. The general reader and the spiritual seeker will come away from reading it with good insight into the fundamental ideas of the Gnostic religion...
The Secret Book of John tells the history of God, beginning with passages that stress God’s incomprehensible nature. At first we hear that God, “the One,”cannot be discussed in words, but as we move along in the myth, the One becomes increasingly comprehensible.
Soon we hear that the Godhead apprehends itself in the surrounding supernal light and twoness emerges: God and God Aware of God or God and the self-consciousness of God. As the myth continues, the self-consciousness of God asks for and receives a set of mental faculties that appear to be structured in the manner of mandalas, circular diagrams with four different quadrants surrounding a more important central element. These mental faculties are described as if they constitute the royal court of heaven. We are reading about the gradual emergence of God’s mind, a set of interacting capacities that come into being below, as it were, the ultimate level of the Incomprehensible One.
This is a developmental psychology, a descriptive Middle-Platonic philosophy, and most importantly, a cosmic mythology all rolled into one. After the full development of the mind of God—a fullness called pleroma in Greek—has been outlined, a crisis occurs. One aspect of God’s mind, its wisdom—Sophia in Greek—seeks to know an image of herself apart from the fullness. Sophia’s individual effort has disastrous results. She discovers an image that is not the full mind of God at all, but a monster named Yaldabaoth who appears to exist outside of God. This is a mistake on God’s part (for God’s wisdom is part of God at all times) and is perhaps even God going insane and imagining reality outside of God that cannot be. The consequences of this mistake occupy the rest of the Secret Book of John.
We hear that Yaldabaoth, the being brought into existence by Sophia, begins to construct a world based on his inadequate, half-witted knowledge of the higher realms of God’s mind. This is an artificial world, a bad imitation of the real world, a world that becomes our world. Yaldabaoth brings beings into existence who are his subordinate rulers: demons who dominate this lower, artificial world. The divine powers of the wisdom of God, without whom nothing could exist, also act within this lower world.
To return Wisdom’s stolen power to God, a plan comes down from the whole fullness of the mind of God. Yaldabaoth will be deceived so that he blows his power into a creature who will in turn restore that power to the higher realms. The divine realms are clearly revealed to Yaldabaoth and his demons, and they decide to construct a being modeled on that revelation. That being is Adam; he gains life and mobility only after Yaldabaoth’s power is blown into him..."
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