The Understanding and Description of Gnosis

[Jiva]

It's a generality, but the language used by philosophers and occultists to describe gnosis/knowledge/whatever over the last 2 millennia has broadly changed from considering gnosis as something impossible to truly comprehend to something understandable but impossible to accurately describe.

How do people here see this general development and formulations of knowledge? As humans, it is possible to truly know and, if so, can it be described?

[Wyrmfang]

The meaning of knowledge has indeed changed a lot. I think Heidegger has caught the main story well when he says that at least since Descartes knowledge has been more and more been equated with certainty. And if knowledge is associated with certainty, then there cannot be absolute knowledge since subject´s capabilities are always limited - in the end the world can always be different from how the subject conceives it to be. Today´s paradigm of knowledge is scientific knowledge - knowledge of facts. And it is always virtually possible that we get wrong with the facts, even the most basic ones.

Gnosis, how I understand it, is instead the idea of absolute knowledge. A clear example for those who know Kant is the knowledge of the moral law; it is immediately given and cannot be doubted. Gnosis is based on the idea that there is no ultimate difference between subject and object, and consequently, the question of facts simply never arises. My moral duty or my experience of the meaning of life do not concern facts, something out there which can be measured.

I think it would be very important for today´s thinking to realize these different meanings of knowledge. It seems very much to be more a rule than an exception that people, both religious and secular, confuse these different senses of knowledge, and I think this is pretty much the reason why they don´t understand each other in general.

[Nefastos]

As humans, it is possible to truly know and, if so, can it be described?

Personally I think that it is precisely this quest for (absolute) knowledge that makes a human being. Man (English), manas (Sanskrit), mens (Latin), all come from this same root that holds the meaning of Thinking. A human being who does not think therefore exists not.

I believe it is truly possible to know, to achieve knowledge beyond relations and changing caleidoscopic realities, but paradoxically when - or, to the extent - one reaches that true knowledge, one is no longer a man, but god. This "living process of gnosis" is wisdom, ability to use knowledge to attain more knowledge in a world that is one whole and not made of separate entities without interconnection.

I am also fully convinved that there is no end to the benefit of this wisdom, daughter of philosophy: It grants both immortality and imminent, i.e. magical, power. The most miraculous part in the world is where the abstract knowledge of the uncreated touches the created genius of a living man, creating this immense experience of cosmic structure.