Advanced Study Areas
Gnostic Studies
Continuing the Interdisciplinary Tradition of Gnostic Studies: honoring spiritual experience in the study and practice of religion, honoring human experience in the study and practice of life.
Our hope ... is that the field of Religious Studies may take guidance from the field of Consciousness Studies. This will entail a renewed emphasis on religious experience in the study of religion, which seems only appropriate considering the significant degree to which traditions themselves stress the importance of these experiences. The meditative schools of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, not to mention Kabbalah and mystical Christianity, all stress direct experience of the profound. Figures such as Sankara, Meister Eckhart, Nagarjuna and countless others all have stressed the necessity of integrating experience along side conceptuality, and using it to sharpen one's views. To do justice to these traditions and inspirational figures, we must give full attention to the description and analysis of experiential realities.
It is time for the field of scholarship to remove the barriers that have constrained our vision. A range of approaches illuminate reality, which itself reflects interactive and reflexive causes, requiring a range of methodological glasses. It is time to look through all of them, and to see religion and human life in the richly complex hues that they are. (Andresen & Forman, 2000)
Andresen, J. & Forman, R. K. C. (eds.) (2000). Cognitive models and spiritual maps. Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic.
. Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic.A book reprinting the Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7, No. 11-12, 2000
Living Philosophy
“Socrates neither set out benches for his students, nor sat on a platform, nor set hours for his lectures. He was philosophizing all the time—while he was joking, while he was drinking, while he was soldiering, whenever he met you on the street, and at the end when he was in prison and drinking the poison. He was the first to show that all your life, all the time, in everything you do, whatever you are doing, is the time for philosophy.” -Plutarch
Jung observed that "philosophy is no longer a way of life as it was in antiquity; it has turned into an exclusively intellectual and academic affair." The Gnosis Institute will strive to reverse this course with a focus on Living Philosophy.
Living Philosophy focuses on philosophy as a vital tool for living. The Philosophy Programs in Academia might more accurately be referred to as “philosophology,” or the study of philosophy, rather than the practice of philosophy. The American Philosophical Practitioners Association compares the difference to that of studying paintings and actually painting. While the study of paintings is an important part of an artist's education, it would be very strange to think that it was the whole of it.
Not only was Ancient Philosophy a way of life and of transformative spiritual practices, but the association of philosophy with the early mysteries practices demonstrates that they were also very deeply , early philosophers, particularly Plato, had strong influence across the Hellenistic world.
"There is only one permanent remedy for any critical situation: We must outgrow it. The moment we are bigger than the problem, it ceases, and can never return." -Manly P. Hall
Story and Symbol
Help Grow the Wings of Humanity. - Nicolas Roerich
Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases. - Grant Morrison
There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth. - Alan Moore
The study of stories and symbols using the tools of the humanities and of the human sciences, with an emphasis on the insights of depth psychology. Story and symbol studies encompass visual arts, myths, legends, folktales, scriptures, poetry, theater, film, fiction and non-fiction narratives.