Red-Pilled in Disneyland

The true meaning of Gnostic liberation, or: Escaping this world is not about shutting out the world.

Nostalgia is a strange thing.

Even the straight-forward longing for the times of our youth and childhood seems weird: this intense, overpowering feeling that back then, something was fundamentally different, and fundamentally better—despite that we hopefully have become more mature since when we were young, and wouldn’t want to live our childhood or teenage years again.

But it gets even weirder when we are longing for times we have never seen.

I often feel profoundly nostalgic about the 1950s, 1960s, or even the 19th century.

Whether that’s because of past lives, or because my brain just throws up a fantasy based on books and movies, I do not know. What I do know, however, is that ultimately, nostalgia doesn’t cut it.

For example, I can long for the archetypical 50s experience of being a family dad among other happy family dads in a homogenous community, working some office job with relatively high pay and few weekly hours, having lots of spare time for a nerdy hobby or two, while being active in my local community. Or some 19th century variation thereof: a world without all that technological overkill, the ideological madness, the destruction of nature, beauty, and society….

And yet, I know that all of this is in vain. Whatever it is I don’t like about this world or that I’m struggling with: living a life in the past would entail other things I don't like, other problems I would have to wrestle with. I probably wouldn’t like it, either.

Even if we assume things had been better before, from a personal perspective, life always features mayhem, difficulties, and suffering. There is no way around it.

How to Get the Hell Out

If there is no escape from personal suffering and mayhem, no matter how favorable the conditions, the question naturally arises: how to get out?

This is the question that fuels religion, as well as many secular theories. It is also the question that is behind various esoteric and Gnostic schools and ideas.

But it is a dangerous question, and one that can easily lead to dangerous answers. Among them are worldly theories that aim at radically changing society and its systems to eradicate all danger and suffering, therefore abolishing life itself; but also misguided mystical ideas that loudly proclaim the material world is just an illusion, and that we can just think a better world into existence, discarding and ignoring reality entirely.

This danger of esoteric ideas is also present in Gnosticism: clearly, some gnostically inclined folks have taken all of that way too far. Escapism is not the solution, and neither is waging war against reality itself, dreaming up an utopia of eternal bliss instead of engaging with the world as it is, suffering and all.

Transcendence means seeing the unseen as reflected in the material world, not overcoming the material world by declaring it irrelevant. It means paying more attention to reality, not less, with the mind firmly oriented towards the higher and the lower worlds simultaneously.

As irrational as nostalgia may seem, I believe it serves a purpose: it shows us on a visceral level that a better world is possible, that our longing might have a real object. Nostalgia can be understood as a form of inspiration, a communion with the higher: pointing towards a possible future of enlightenment that goes beyond the current constraints of our malaise.

But the way to it is through it—not out of it.

When we are in a dark tunnel, laying down and dreaming of the light won’t do: we must actually move towards the light, which means we must pay strict attention to the tunnel’s topography.

Mainstream Religion’s Job

All things esoteric are dangerous. It’s all-too easy to lose the plot and go off the rails, as so much nonsense in the New Age department and other cultist delusions over the course of history have shown, including parts of the so-called Gnostic movements.

Hence, it is understandable, at least to a degree, why the church has always considered Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and all kinds of other mystic movements as heretic abominations.

Religion plays the role of a guardian, a protector that keeps people from plunging headlong into dangerous terrain that might turn them into madmen and, ultimately, throw them into the arms of the Devil. The scientism of our age has played a similar role: it has kept the masses from exploring fringe ideas that might threaten the fabric of society and their personal sanity.

The thing is, though, that some of us will never be content with this sort of “protection.” In our search for truth, we are willing to face the danger. Our longing tells us that there must be more out there than meets the eye.

And so, we are not afraid to keep on searching, for “we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,” in the words of the apostle Paul. That is, we have the power of discernment: the inner light that the Gnostics talked about. It is this inner light, this spirit-fueled discernment, that can help us avoid falling off the deep end or making Faustian pacts. We know there are no shortcuts, only prolonged labor.

We need no dogmatic mainstream church for that. If that’s heresy, then I’m proud of calling myself a heretic.

The Analogy of the Adventure Park

To better understand the esoteric search for enlightenment, and the Gnostic rejection of the material world that has caused so much anger and misunderstanding, consider this analogy.

We live in an adventure park, with all kinds of cool attractions. There is so much to do, so much to try, so much fun to have. We all love it, really.

But if you spend enough time in an adventure park, and you have “done” your favorite attractions repeatedly, at some point you will tire of it. If you tell that to those who just arrived, of course, they will not believe you and consider you crazy. They are having a ball. But you realize that there must be more, that you want to move beyond all that.

This doesn’t mean that the adventure park is evil through and through, or even that using some of its attractions is evil, or that those new arrivals who still are entirely focused on trying everything out are evil. It just means you have outgrown a certain stage, and that you are ready to look further.

Perhaps you want to take on a job as a technician to help keep the park running. Perhaps you begin to wonder who has built this park in the first place and why. Perhaps you want to know what lies beyond the gates of the park.

But then you realize that you can’t just walk right out, and you begin to wonder why that is. Every time you make progress, you seem to face some unholy resistance that tries to put you right back where you came from. Could it be that whoever created the park might not be entirely trustworthy?

Red-pilled in Disneyland!

You then realize that if you really want to get out, you must smart up. You must learn everything you can, you must observe, discern, understand, and read the dynamics. You must study your own reactions, deal with your fears and emotions, put yourself in the shoes of others to expand your horizon, and so on.

You must learn the topology of the tunnel inside out.

In other words, escaping the Matrix is about an inner transformation based on observing reality and yourself, not about bolting through the door, still less about substituting the outside world you are longing for, but that you are only dimly aware of, with a childish dream that has nothing to do with reality.

When talking about Gnosticism and other esoteric ideas, there are countless subtleties involved. Sometimes, the line between delusional madness and enlightenment is so thin that it seems almost impossible to perceive.

Yes, there have been many silly New Age gurus and questionable mystical cults. Pseudo-spiritual word salad abounds. And yet, many true seekers like Goethe, William Blake, Franz Kafka, and many more were knee-deep into esoteric or Gnostic ideas.

Some people want to know.

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What, then, is the relationship between spirit and matter? One author summarizes a Gnostic take on the human condition as follows:

The earth is created as an alchemical vessel of purification and transformation where the Light can be extracted from dark matter.¹

What’s so difficult to understand about such ideas? In today’s Clown World, it should be fairly obvious: somebody has created a pretty strange place where suffering abounds, and which goes through periods of hell on earth repeatedly. We live in such a period. But at the same time, look around—look at the spark that is lit in so many people because they are faced with this hell.

Through paying attention, learning, and bringing higher principles to the material world, those of us who stopped seeing life as just an adventure park contribute to the purification and transformation that’s happening here on earth. We extract light from darkness. We can do it everywhere and in many ways. It’s our job. It’s part of our inner transformation, as well as the purification of the earth.

Realizing this and doing it alone brings a huge sense of liberation. And who knows, if we keep on doing it, we might one day experience full-blown Gnostic liberation, whatever that might mean.

Maybe our nostalgia points to a real possibility, after all.

And even if, after doing everything we can to get to the bottom of all of this, extracting light from darkness, we outwardly end up where we started—just doing our jobs and having some fun, inwardly we will be transformed.

Plus, we can look back one day and say: at least we were part of an exciting adventure. An adventure that goes beyond just trying out all those attractions the world has to offer. And that’s cool.

1. Stephan A. Hoeller, Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing, Quest Books, 2002