Reddit mentions of On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah

In some ways you could still say I'm a Gnostic, but I'm also an atheist. I didn't used to be. I used to be really into religion. I studied various religions for 10 or so years, and I believed that there was a link between them all, some half-understood glimpse into a supernatural world. Initiation never ends, though, so one day I came to see the emptiness in that as I'd seen emptiness in everything else. There's truth in the metaphors of mysticism, but it's not truth about the world, it's truth about human beings and what they are.

Ein Sof is the unmanifest complete nature of "God", right? Well really that's just your deepest self, the part that isn't your petty emotions and worldviews, the part that fuels the Logos of the manifest self, yet sits and watches in stillness as the storm churns around it. Identification of self with thoughts is deficiency, as Sophia, who is wisdom, tries to understand the world without that concept of a quiet inner self, but of one that partakes in emotional turmoil fully and feels as though that's where it is, bringing about a false self. This is the Demi-urge and its Archons, our controlling and hostile self-imposed restrictions and our deficient interpretation of our relationship to the world. Gnosis is a realization of unity, not with the deficiency, but with the Pleroma and Logos, the manifestation of Ein Sof. It's identification with that stillness and quietness at the heart of the self, the place that the storm doesn't touch. Whether or not there's more to that stillness is, well, open to interpretation.

Some good books to take a look at, if you want to know about the cosmology of Gnosticism, are Gnosis of the Cosmic Christ by Tau Malachi, and On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead by Gershom Scholem. Also, really, if you just want a basic outline of some of the cosmology, take a look at Wikipedia. Look at the capitalized letters in these last couple of posts and see what they have to say about them. As far as just addressing the ideas, they're pretty good.

Really, though, cosmology isn't that important, what's important is what the cosmology is trying to reflect. You should also read the story of Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield, which is in the Bhagavad Gita, and basically the entirety of the Tao Te Ching. The Heart of Understanding by Thich Nhat Hanh is another good read that gets into some of this stuff that's really the core of the point of it all.

The thing is, a lot of this stuff is non-verbal. You can learn as much from extended periods of mindfulness meditation as you can from reading about it, and, really, if you're going to actually understand it, you have to do some work within yourself. If you can't ever differentiate the cloud of your emotions from the self that you are, you're not going to see the sign posts in the text in front of you. Eventually their shape might sort of point you in the right direction, though, and that is, presumably, the hope. Like a Zen koan, it's a finger pointing at the moon. Try not to get caught up in the finger. Along that line of thinking, take a look at the introduction to Magick in Theory and Practice by Aleister Crowley, but first, read this quote from Liber O.

>In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.

There are many ways to interpret the things Crowley says. He definitely seems to have had some delusional periods in his life, but he is an excellent representation of a finger pointing at the moon.

Personally, I think religion needs to fade into the darkness of history and take as much ignorance and woo with it as possible. There are, however, valuable transmissions of non-verbal information going on, but I think they can be secularized. Crowley managed to get his students to play with the stuff while supposedly not expressly believing in its literal validity or the literal truth of the cosmologies related to it, so there ought to be other ways of doing that.

Anyway, that's just me. I couldn't tell you whether most Gnostics today or ~300CE believed the cosmology literally or believed it in the context of their experience of themselves and their connection with the world. I don't know of any studies regarding it. I'm pretty sure there aren't that many Gnostics.

I don't know of any services or anything. I certainly don't go to any. If you have any questions about Gnosticism or whatever you can certainly ask, though. It seems that I still enjoy typing about it.

Probably not here though, because this has nothing at all to do with physics.