The Premiseless Imperative: In the Beginning was the Question
Intro: Jump Back, Break It Down! | Part I: If You Want To be Saved, First Admit You Are A Sinner | Part II: Achtung, Baby! | Part III: Shooting for the Existential Buzz | Part IV: The Perfect Home In Just An Hour | Part V: Scattered Brains Are Better Brains
“The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.”
– Erich Fromm
If you’ve been following this series, by now you’re probably wondering where it’s going. When, you may be asking, do I get to have this gnosis thing (if, of course, you haven’t yet experienced it by doing the previous exercises)?
If not, if you don’t have any questions about this process, congratulations! You’re either already enlightened, or you’re so content being unenlightened that you don’t need it. Or, you’re dead. Regardless, you should probably stop reading this and get back to work, especially if you’re dead.
Of course you have questions, though. So far, each of these posts has been designed to get you to ask questions– that’s been my ultimate purpose here all along. Don’t get me wrong; it’s imperative that you do the exercises, but the methodology I’m trying to employ is the Path of Radical Inquiry, the Via Paradoxa, salvation through the Double Bind (as we’ve recently been discussing over at Pop Occulture (funny how these ideas, these informational lifeforms, converge).
I’ve named this series “The Premiseless Imperative” because to succeed, to experience gnosis, we absolutely must try to cultivate an absence of premise, an absence of assumption. We must try to approach every situation, every interaction with the world of forms, without premise. We must try to experience pure Being, communion with the Great Objective Deity (GOD!), but to do so, we must eliminate all prior states of individuation by constantly and deliberately asking questions.
An example: we might think, “such-and-such a politician is evil. Therefore I hate him.” But, if he’s acting according to his concept of good, is he still evil? What are the circumstances surronding him that may have made him evil? Without knowing experiencing every single circumstance surrounding him, does anything other than our own mind make him evil? What about this “mind” thing? What exactly is “mind”? Does “mind” exist as an ideal, or simply as a series of chemical reactions? If it’s the latter, what caused the reactions that made me think so-and-so is evil?
Is it ever possible for us to know something, definitively? And, isn’t there a danger of falling into the error of solipsism, in which we consider ourselves the only mind that exists? Yes, and yes, but the answer to either of these questions is the answer to both. This Answer, a Great and Terrible Secret Mystery, is Gnosis itself, and has been transmitted throughout history by individuals who encourage questions.
The act of inquiry is the single definitive act of conciousness. Every great thought, every great philosophy, spirituality, movement, etc. began with a question. Asking questions is also the most radical act one can perform, and the most essential skill needed to live within the confines of the world of forms. Many of the great teachers of enlightenment– Jesus, Socrates, Gautama Buddha and their adherents, for example– chose the dialectic form, question and answer, to impart information to their students. Information doesn’t “stick” if it doesn’t come in response to honest questions.
The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us, how will our end come?”
Jesus said, “Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end?
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Mayo: “What is Zen?”
Patriarch: “What is your original face before you were born?”
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Socrates: And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?
According to Gnostic creation mythology, Existence began when the God asked itself a question, which we might express as “So?” In asking, the God began the process of creating distinctions between objective and subjective, self and other. This act of questioning led the God to continue investigating itself, researching itself, learning about itself. Asking questions is Godlike. When we ask questions we fulfill our roles as sensory organs of God in its eternal quest to come to know itself.
In Gnostic tradition, the Path of Radical Inquiry can be summarized by the second saying from the Gospel of Thomas: “Jesus said, “He or she who seeks should not stop seeking until he or she finds what he or she is seeking. When they find what they are seeking, they will be troubled. When they are troubled, they will be amazed, and will become king over the All.”
Your exercise: read the Gnostic text “The Interpretation of Knowledge.” You’ll notice that the section beginning, “But he was being pursued in that place….” and ending with “…destroyed the arrogant teacher by teaching her to die” contains tons of those little lacunae […] indicating an area in which the text was destroyed.
Once you’ve read through the text, fill in each of the lacunae with a possible reconstruction of what might have been there originally. This probably seems like a crazy and impossible task, but don’t worry about that. Instead, for each lacuna, ask yourself questions, writing your questions as you go. Take the questions as far as you can. You might ask, what should go here? What might this have said? How does this fit into Gnostic doctrine? What is meant here? Who is filling in these lacunae? Try to come up with a dozen or so core questions you can ask about each one.
Up Next: Follow the ugly, brown, broken-down, littered and nasty-smelling brick road!
