Stephan Hoeller Quotes

A pearl is a beautiful thing that is produced by an injured life. It is the tear [that results] from the injury of the oyster. The treasure of our being in this world is also produced by an injured life. If we had not been wounded, if we had not been injured, then we will not produce the pearl.

Gnosticism is a system of thought based on interior, psychospiritual experience. This being the case, it is not surprising that Gnosticism emphasizes states of mind and regards actions as secondary in nature and importance. Gnostics have always held that consciousness, rather than external action, is the true indicator of moral worth.

A pearl is a beautiful thing produced by an injured life. - Stephan Hoeller

When desire is killed out by a variety of methods of meditation and contemplation, what remains is a psychic corpse from which the libidinal cosmic force of the vital surge has been artificially removed.

Among philosophical tendencies, existentialism owes much to Gnosticism, and today an increasing number of folk in many walks of life profess to being Gnostic.

long as a person will not raise his or her consciousness beyond the physical world to higher, spiritual realities, the soul's enslavement in darkness—whether darkness in the outer, physical world or in

According to Gnostic teaching, the world is a mixture of the seeds of light and of darkness. Though it is impossible to distinguish between them now, in the fullness of time they will separate naturally, as ordained.

Gnosticism has always been difficult to define, largely because it is a system of thought based upon and frequently amended by experiences of nonordinary states of consciousness, and thus it is resistant to theological rigidity.

man sows good wheat seed in his field, but later finds that an enemy has sown weeds among the wheat. When the workers ask if they should pull the weeds out, the farmer tells them to allow both wheat and weeds to grow until the time of the harvest, when the two can be more easily separated.

Gnostics (and Buddhists) have often been labeled pessimists and world haters because of their willingness to look the dark face of the world in the eye. Yet, both of these traditions affirm that there is a way out of suffering and ignorance, and that this way out involves an essential, salvific change in consciousness.

Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, a fierce opponent of the Gnostics, attacked them for their spiritual and literary creativity, accusing them of producing a new gospel every day. Implicit in his statements was the view that where such a wealth of diverse imagery, myth, and teaching exists there can be no coherent doctrine equivalent to the dogma and canon of the mainstream Christian church. What critics from Irenaeus to contemporary scholars lose sight of is that Gnostic teaching is the direct result of the experience of gnosis.

One of the towering figures of the age of Enlightenment was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, known to this day in German-speaking lands as the poet of princes and prince of poets. Unlike Voltaire, he openly practiced esoteric disciplines, particularly alchemy. He wrote a famous verse about the Cathars, which translated says: “There were those who knew the Father. What became of them? Oh, they took them and burned them!” Goethe's chief work, of course, is his Faust. As noted in chapter 8, the figure of Faust was inspired by the image of the early Gnostic teacher Simon Magus, one of whose honorific names was Faustus. While in Christopher Marlowe's sixteenth-century play,

Historically and geographically speaking, Gnosticism developed at the same time and in the same places as early Christianity, with which it was, and remained, entwined—Palestine, Syria, Samaria, and Anatolia, and later, Ptolemaic Egypt.

Gnostic teachings speak of the reality and power of evil and its fundamental presence throughout manifest existence. They declare that while we may not be able to rid the world or ourselves of evil, we may, and indeed will, rise above it through gnosis.

suggested that Gnosticism expressed a specific religious experience, which was frequently turned into a myth. . . . It seems clear that at least some of the major Gnostic systems were inspired by vivid emotions and personal experience. And it is now generally accepted that Gnosticism was not a philosophy, or even a Christian heresy, but a religion with its own specific views about God, the world, and man. (“Gnosticism,” in Cavendish, Man, Myth, and Magic 1115) And, we might add, Gnosticism is a religion replete with sacraments that liberate the soul.

All of us are in desperate need of the restoration of our wholeness through union with our inmost self.

The created world, including a major portion of the human mind, is seen as evil by the Gnostic primarily because it distracts consciousness away from knowledge of the Divine.

To sum up, salvation to the Gnostic means not reconciliation with an angry God by way of the death of his son, but rather liberation from the stupor induced by earthly existence and an awakening by way of gnosis.

Marcion did not accept Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John as trustworthy, for he saw many corruptions, interpolations, and falsifications in them. And if Marcion was critical of the New Testament, he was downright hostile toward the Old Testament, even suggesting that it should not be included in the canon of the Christian church.

In all instances, there occurs a significant altering of consciousness that transports the knower beyond the limitations of personal consciousness and, indeed, beyond the limitations of the very world we live in. Bloom aptly characterizes the principal disclosures of the experience of gnosis as (1) acquaintance with a God who is unknown to and remote from the world, a God in exile from a false creation and (2) recognition that one's deeper nature was no part of creation (or the Fall) but was and still is part of the fullness that is God. This God is more human and also more divine than any worshipped in the world.

The Tree of Life may also be said to reveal four great laws of universal being that apply as well to the human soul: (1) the Law of Emanation, which declares that all things are the successively emanated portions of the same divine essence; (2) the Law of Balance and Equilibrium, which states that life and growth imply balance, while imbalance leads to death and/or stagnation; (3) the Law of Unity in Diversity, reconciling the multiple emanations of the Tree with the monotheistic concept by stating that the essence is one, while its outpourings are many; and (4) the Law of the Ability to Return, according to which any manifestation of the emanated essence is capable of ascending to its own original source by climbing the paths and traversing the emanational centers (sephiroth) of the Tree. Kabbalistic meditation consists of effectively traveling along the branches of the Tree, up to and perhaps beyond the highest or crowning emanational center, the Sephira Kether.

From the vantage point of the spirit, all earthly gain is of no account; the road to earthly attainment leads nowhere, means nothing, and ends in nothing. The wisdom of the world is foolish­ ness in the sight of the gods, and, conversely, the Divine Wisdom appears as foolishness in the sight of men, who, having become for­getful of their own divine heritage, have become mere men, instead of sons of the gods. It is quite easy to comprehend why to the uninitiated the Fool, or original spiritual potency, would appear as the embodiment of uselessness, silliness, and stupidity. All appearance is deception, and only at the center of the great circular dance of creation, where the Fool stands in still, motionless serenity, do we find that which no longer deceives by appearances, because it no longer appears, but is.

From the mysterious point of original and final unity, sym­bolized by the zero card, or the Fool, there proceed three streams, or spokes, each consisting of seven cards of the Major Arcana, together adding up to twenty-one. The first of these (one through seven, or from Magician to Chariot) stands for the area of creative powers, or of causes within the collective unconscious. The sec­ ond septenary (eight through fourteen, or Strength through Temperance) consists of representations of the laws by which the primordial powers of the first septenary are channeled toward manifestation. Third, the last septenary (fifteen through twenty- one, or Devil through World) symbolizes the results or finalized concrete manifestations of the first seven powers, as they appear in their actualized or differentiated condition.

Divination is not mere fortune-telling or superstition. Rather, it is an exceedingly subtle psychological technique whereby the secrets of the unconscious can be discovered, its powers (extrasensory and others) can be made accessible, and guidance for our confused and disordered lives can be obtained. The most important fact to fix in one’s mind is that there is nothing haphazard or accidental in the universe, and that external events—no matter how seemingly trivial—are intimately related to happenings within the human psyche. Thus, if we learn the art of discovering and interpreting the external signs, we may thereby gain access to the world of inward realities in our own souls and in the soul of the cosmos. The magic of Tarot divination is not in the cards but in ourselves. The cards can and do act as instrumentalities whereby the subjective reality within the unconscious becomes able to project a portion of itself into objective existence. Through this projection, a meaningful and useful relationship or a creative dialogue between the subjective and objective sides of our lives may be established, which is a great accomplishment. Thus divi­nation by means of the Tarot may be defined as a practical way in which a bridge is built between the temporal world of physical events, on the one hand, and the timeless world of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, on the other. It may be useful to recall that divination was considered an important part of the cur­riculum of certain mystery schools, not primarily in order to teach how to foretell the future, but in order to construct a psychic mechanism within the initiate whereby a source of guidance and insight might be made accessible to his conscious self.

implications of gnosis: What makes us free is the gnosis of who we were of what we have become of where we were of wherein we have been cast of whereto we are hastening of what we are being freed of what birth really is of what rebirth really is. (Excerpta de Theodoto)