A Deviance of Human Potential

Suppose, however, that individual transformation is valid but still leaves us facing the problem of how to face and overcome EVIL: that which defies innate human goodness, works against the symbiotic unity of life, and impedes our species' capacity to survive and thrive. By EVIL I mean, not a cosmic principle apart from or above us, but a self-destructive resistance rooted in human potential, which distorts that potential—a deviance of our potential that works against our capacity to live and love, both collectively and individually.

Gnostic seers called this deviance anomia, "abnormality," and attributed it to a default situation: if human beings do not recognize and cultivate the divine potential of nous, innate to the species, they will, one person at a time, become susceptible to the power of negative, anti-human suggestion insinuated into the human psyche by alien, non-human entities called Archons. Gnostics did not attribute the origin of evil to the Archon extraterrestrials. Not at all. Rather, they saw its origin in the purely humanm default situation. Without cultivating nous, divine intelligence, humans simply cannot see the source of their errors and correct them. Nous is the root of our self-correcting capacity, the basis of our abilitiy to learn and evolve. If we were to fail to actualize this capacity, that would already be a serious problem, both in terms of survival and spirituality. But there is more to the human condition than the risk of human error. The ancient seers detected that a particular species of extra-human entities, which is enmeshed with humanity due to the peculiar events described in the Sophia myth, can insinuate their mentation into our minds and exaggerate human error beyond the scale of correction.

As explained at length in Not in His Image, the split-source duality originating from Zoroastrianism can be distinghished from the dual-source duality of the telestai, teachers of the Mysteries who were experimental mystics and experts in cognitive science (noetics). Evil is not a overarching cosmic principle. In the view of the telestai, there is no evil in the Godhead or Pleroma of Aeonic divinities. Nor is evil a test introduced by superhuman powers to teach certain lessons to humanity. Evil is not integral to the cosmic process, not to evolution on this planet, nor to human experience in the social world, but the experience of evil, the act of confronting it in oneself and the world at large, does reflect certain verities in the human psyche. You can learn from facing evil, but it is not there purposefully for you to learn from. Evil has no purpose. Gnostic seers continually emphasized this point. The Archons have no plan. Their method is deception and senselessness.

To my informed understanding, the autonomy of evil and similar assumptions are not consistent with the Gnostic theory of error, which was the basis of their sophisticated notion of evil. This is a crucial point in introducing Rite Action with the word EVIL in the syntax of exposition.

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