I can understand what all of you are saying, but I feel there is an often untold sentiment that most of us feel at times. The gnostics were famous for it...dualism.
For me to be really, fully honest, I cant go around just saying its all good, or it is all just how you see it. On one level, I feel that is true..and if I was to take up a realist perspective, I would say that things are what they are, and it is up to us to make the best of them, however making the best of something is subjective..which begs idealist philosophies to cast they're shadow down from the spirit into the world of what is.
...and I am an essentially an idealist...perhaps at my realist core. When I look around I see a world in a state of perpetual competition..everything killing and eating everything else..war..slavery..starvation. It is not pessimism, it is just honest observation. I am an idealist, and my ideals I hold dear, and they transcend this dualist world.
It's not wrong to honestly discern what you feel to be apparent about this world. It is not to say that the world is wrong..the world really IS what it is...and one must know thyself to know thy world. It is however, within the dreaming mind of the self that we find transcendence and liberation, the freedom to stand alone, or together, without the imposition unto or of another. Idealist philosophy has been the highest manifestation of western thought in my opinion. Art, music and poetry extend from the first light of the imagination, beyond the flesh, incarnating out into the world of matter as mirrors we then gaze back into towards the divine. For the artist and the mystic, this gnosis becomes the spark that lights the murky path back home.
The gods of man have been cruel, and war has ruled earth..and yet they themselves are simple reflections of man, silently grasping in blind darkness at our own excrement for validation of something greater.
It is not wrong to yearn for the transcendent
or to seek liberation from the dualism of the flesh
or to request sanctuary from suffering
for we have fallen into forgetfulness..and god is unknowable. In the clear light, nothing is said, nothing is known.
The gnostics said, that god was an abortion. A blind demi-urge premature god of a lesser god, not the true unknowable god who cannot be called a god...we are but emanations..divine sparks of the source with which we seek reunion.
It is through our own internal alchemy that we find liberation..not through the good, or the bad of the world of emanation. That world, is secondary.
" A Crisis that Became the World
It happened that the realm (aeon) Wisdom (Sophia)
Of conceptual thought (Epinoia),
Began to think for herself,
She used the thinking (enthymesis)
And the foreknowledge (prognosis)
Of the Invisible Spirit.
She intended to reveal an image from herself
To do so without the consent of the Spirit,
Who did not approve,
Without the thoughtful assistance of her masculine counterpart,
Who did not approve.
Without the Invisible Spirit’s consent
Without the knowledge of her partner
She brought it into being.
Because she had unconquerable Power
Her thought was not unproductive.
Something imperfect came out of her
Different in appearance from her.
Because she had created it without her masculine counterpart
She gave rise to a misshapen being unlike herself.
Sophia saw what her desire produced.
It changed into the form of a dragon with a lion’s head
And eyes flashing lightning bolts.
She cast him far from her,
Outside of the realm of the immortal beings
So that they could not see him.
[She had created him in ignorance.]
Sophia surrounded him with a brilliant cloud,
Put a throne in the center part of the cloud
So that no one would see it.
[Except for the Holy Spirit called the Mother of the Living]
She named him Yaldabaoth.
Yaldabaoth is the chief ruler.
He took great Power (dynamis) from his mother,
Left her, and moved away from his birthplace.
He assumed command,
Created realms for himself
With a brilliant flame that continues to exist even now."
- The Secret Book of John
A hard path to walk indeed, but step by step is all we can do.
