leo, yes, the gospel of thomas has cured many fears in me. and i see a very liberal/modern gnosticism in essentially the same light that i see pantheism. perhaps not the 2nd century gnosticism, with literalized archons and aeons and demiurges. but metaphorized understandings of what they naturally represent. although, that said, i am still unsure to what extent those early "gnostics" literalized those things. perhaps i am off base in assuming that because they came from an earlier time, that they saw it all literally.
james, while i'm here, i want to say that i like what you write in these topics. and i see what you are saying about "knowing" as an immediate intuition that is too immediate to intellectualize.
i see it like this: our consciousness is like a bubble around our head. as we expand our minds it grows in ever increasing abstraction and intellectualization, taking in things and arranging them in ever more complex ways. some psychologists actually think that consciousness is symbolism, and that the strongest of our sysmbol systems is language. but here we are limited in describing anything else, including the natural evolution of our symbol based, dualistic consciousness to a consciousness of being in the totality of the eternal moment. a place where intellectual understanding is stripped. or the bubble of one type of consciousness overflows into the next. from duality to being and oneness. and this is truly a speechless place. one cannot "learn" it per se. one must know it. and it happens in an instant. the only instant.
forgive me if i misrepresent you with that.
i think it's really cool that you stick to your guns so well. and it's well and good considering that this is where man is evolving, imho.
tetra
