Tim Boucher on “Saving the Gnostic Body”
Tim really hits one out of the park!
So this is how you defeat the archons: you hit them where it hurts. You consciously face your habits & shortcuts (sins and shortcomings?) and you do it all the time. You make it a habit. You do this multiple times a day, every day. No particular schedule need be followed, other than just to practice “conscious pain” (the Way of the Samurai, Rilke’s embracing of solitude) whenever you have a chance. Constantly be trying to master a new physical skill. This is the simplest way to do it. It is absolutely fool-proof. It keeps your mind occupied with new calculations, considerations and connections. It gives you a physical outlet for pent up thoughts who have been lacking in a connection to concrete reality (which all thoughts crave: being touched). And it forces you to replace old habits with consciously chosen new habits.
MAKE THIS A LIFESTYLE. Do not just practice this for a week or two, but for five years, for the rest of your life. That is all. It is so simple. Gnosis is total self-mastery, gradually, daily. It is the experience of Jesus dying upon the cross (Golgotha, the place of the skull), dying to his former experience of his self, body and identity, and being reborn to not another spiritual ghostly body, but a physical body which allowed him to bodily “ascend to Heaven.”
I’ll have more of a response a bit later, but this one is well worth reading.
Mr.Psiko said,
Well, that approaches to te conception of martal arts ,in the east as a path to develop personality. Practice it without doing this is seen like something wrong.
Br. Jay said,
Wow. This is wonderfully powerful. I would push his thought farther and use the body to do what we can to fill what is lacking. So many have fallen between the cracks in this world. Use this mind as Tim said to face one’s sins and shortcomings, use the body to reach out to love those who have been crushed by the powers of this world. Fantastic post!
adam said,
Yeah Brilliant post, bizarrely I read it last just before I went to teach a Tai-Chi class, and it gave me a few ideas to incorporate into it!
One thing I would disagree on though is the term ’self-mastery’, I think I’d prefer the term ’self-awareness’ or ’self-realisation’.
I think from my own experience Self-mastery, if taken too literally, can lead to a sort of self-masking of negative character traits in a mislead attempt to control or suppress them, best optimised and taken to an illogical extreme by the incredibly rigid and ‘I’m so in control I might fucking explode’ body language of scientologists.
Also Self-mastery indicates an end state, a destination that you will achieve, where as I think any form of learning is in essence an ongoing process of refinement and exploration. I think it’s possible to achieve self-realisation and still be a neurotic fuck-up, you’re just a neurotic fuck-up who can see his neurosis (and all patterns of behaviour) for what they really are.
I don’t think Tim nessercarily sees it this way (as he indicated with the Lao-Tsu quote) but for me it’s a term that has only lead to confusion.