Quotes from Stephan A. Hoeller

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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