You know the feeling. You’ve decided to meditate, to read something meaningful, to finally start that practice you’ve been putting off. And then something else happens. You reach for your phone. You scroll. You tell yourself you’ll start tomorrow.
One part of you wants to grow. Another part wants to stay comfortable. One voice calls you toward the light. Another whispers that the light can wait.
The ancient Gnostic teachers had a name for this experience. They called it the war between the light-power and the counterfeit spirit.
The Three Components of the Human Being
According to the Pistis Sophia, a Gnostic text preserving extended dialogues between Jesus and his disciples, human beings contain three distinct elements locked in constant tension:
The Power (or Light-Power): This is the divine spark, the fragment of light that descended from the realm of the true God and became trapped in matter. It remembers its origin. It yearns to return. The text says it “stirreth the soul to seek after the region of the Light.”
The Soul: The intermediate element, capable of being influenced in either direction. The soul is the battlefield where the war takes place. It can be drawn upward by the power or dragged downward by the counterfeit spirit.
The Counterfeit Spirit (Antimimon Pneuma): A false self, installed by the cosmic powers who created the material world. It mimics the soul’s own desires while redirecting them toward forgetfulness, distraction, and attachment to material existence.
The Pistis Sophia describes the counterfeit spirit as “the foe of the soul” that “goadeth on… in dreams and lusts.” It doesn’t announce itself as an enemy. It speaks in your own voice, using your own desires, making its suggestions feel like your own thoughts.
How the Counterfeit Spirit Works
The Apocryphon of John, another foundational Gnostic text, explains how this internal adversary operates. When the cosmic rulers realized that humanity contained a spark of divine light, they devised a strategy to keep that light trapped and forgetful.
They created the counterfeit spirit and attached it to each human being. Its job is simple: keep you asleep.
The counterfeit spirit accomplishes this through several mechanisms:
Forgetfulness: It makes you forget who you really are and where you came from. You become absorbed in immediate concerns, losing sight of the larger picture.
Desire and Distraction: It amplifies desires that keep you focused on material existence. Not just obvious vices, but anything that prevents you from turning inward.
Inversion of Values: As scholar Max Pulver observed, the counterfeit spirit “effects an inversion of value, transforming truth to falsehood and falsehood to truth.” What actually harms you feels attractive. What would liberate you feels like too much work.
Imitation: The word antimimon means “counterfeit” or “imitation.” This spirit doesn’t present itself as foreign. It speaks as if it were you. Its suggestions feel like your own preferences, your own reasoning, your own voice.
Recognizing the Two Voices
How do you tell the difference between the light-power calling you upward and the counterfeit spirit pulling you down?
The Pistis Sophia offers a clue in how it describes their effects:
The light-power “stirreth the soul to seek after the region of the Light.” It creates longing, aspiration, a sense that there’s something more. When you feel drawn toward truth, toward understanding, toward practices that might genuinely transform you, that’s the power speaking.
The counterfeit spirit “goadeth on… in dreams and lusts.” It operates through compulsion rather than invitation. It promises satisfaction while delivering emptiness. When you feel driven toward something that leaves you more fragmented, more forgetful, more disconnected from your depths, that’s the counterfeit spirit at work.
Here’s a practical test: After following a particular impulse, do you feel more whole or more scattered? More awake or more asleep? More connected to what matters or more lost in distraction?
The counterfeit spirit’s suggestions always lead toward fragmentation. The light-power’s promptings always lead toward integration.
The Cosmic Context
To understand why this battle exists, the Gnostic texts offer a story about cosmic origins.
The material world, in this view, was not created by the highest God. It was fashioned by an ignorant power called the Demiurge, who mistakenly believed himself to be the only deity. The rulers under his authority wanted to keep humanity under control, serving their cosmic order rather than awakening to their divine origins.
The counterfeit spirit is their tool for maintaining this control. By keeping humans absorbed in material concerns, forgetful of their true nature, and distracted from the inner light, the rulers ensure their continued dominion.
But here’s the crucial point: the system has a flaw. The light-power within you is stronger than the counterfeit spirit. It just needs to be awakened.
As the Apocryphon of John teaches, souls dominated by the counterfeit spirit continue cycling through existence “until the soul wakes up from the sleep of forgetfulness and obtains gnosis.” The system is patient. The light does not abandon its own. But the awakening requires your participation.
The Mystery of Separation
The Pistis Sophia describes how the spiritual mysteries work to liberate the soul from the counterfeit spirit’s grip. The mechanism is revealing:
“The mystery of them becometh a great, exceedingly violent, wise fire and it burneth up the sins and entereth into the soul secretly and consumeth all the sins which the counterfeiting spirit hath made fast on to it.”
The mystery then pursues the counterfeit spirit and destiny, separating them from the power and soul. It creates a division: “Three will be divided against two, and two against three.”
On one side: counterfeit spirit, destiny, and body.
On the other: soul and power.
The mystery “remaineth in the midst of the two, continually separating them.”
This is profound psychology, even if wrapped in ancient language. Transformation doesn’t happen by destroying the counterfeit spirit (which remains with the body) but by separating your essential self from its influence. You learn to recognize its voice as other than your true self. You create distance. You stop automatically obeying.
Modern Applications
The ancient teachers didn’t have access to modern psychology, but their observations map remarkably well onto contemporary understanding.
The counterfeit spirit resembles what psychologists call automatic negative patterns, conditioned responses, or what addiction specialists describe as the “addictive voice.” It’s the part of us that operates on autopilot, following established grooves of behavior regardless of whether they serve our actual wellbeing.
The experience of “two minds” that Paul describes in Romans 7 (“For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”) echoes the Gnostic teaching precisely. There’s a self that wants liberation and a pattern that keeps choosing bondage.
Recovery traditions recognize this duality. The idea that we contain both a “higher self” and a “lower self,” and that freedom comes through aligning with the higher, appears across therapeutic and spiritual frameworks.
What the Gnostic perspective adds is a name, a story, and a strategy.
Five Practices for the Battle
Based on these teachings, here are practices for strengthening the light-power against the counterfeit spirit:
1. Cultivate Awareness of the Two Voices
Start noticing when you’re being drawn toward something versus driven toward it. The light-power invites. The counterfeit spirit compels. Pay attention to the quality of your impulses, not just their content.
Try this: When you feel pulled toward a particular action, pause and ask, “Is this arising from aspiration or from compulsion? Will this leave me more awake or more asleep?”
2. Practice Remembrance
The counterfeit spirit’s primary tool is forgetfulness. Counter it by deliberately remembering who you are and what you’re here for.
Set reminders throughout your day. Three times, pause and recall: “I am not just this body, these habits, these automatic patterns. I carry a spark of light that remembers its origin.”
3. Fast From What Feeds the Counterfeit Spirit
Just as the light-power grows through spiritual nourishment, the counterfeit spirit grows through its own kind of food: distraction, compulsive consumption, anything that keeps you asleep.
Identify what feeds your counterfeit spirit. For most people today, this includes mindless scrolling, constant entertainment, and the dopamine hits of notifications. Create regular fasts from these inputs.
4. Feed the Light-Power
The inner light strengthens through attention, contemplation, study of wisdom, meditation, and genuine connection with others who are also awakening.
What practices, when you engage them, leave you feeling more connected to your depths? Do more of that. The counterfeit spirit will resist. That resistance is confirmation you’re on the right track.
5. Don’t Expect Final Victory
The Pistis Sophia doesn’t promise that you’ll destroy the counterfeit spirit in this life. It remains attached to the body. What changes is your relationship to it.
You learn to recognize its voice as other. You learn to pause before obeying. You learn to choose the light-power’s invitation over the counterfeit spirit’s compulsion, again and again, building a new pattern through repetition.
The battle itself is the path. The fact that you’re fighting proves you haven’t surrendered.
A Word of Encouragement
If you feel internally divided, if you experience a constant tug-of-war between your aspirations and your habits, if you sometimes wonder why you keep choosing what you know doesn’t serve you: this is not evidence that something is wrong with you.
This is the human condition.
Everyone in a body experiences this war. The question isn’t whether you’ll face the counterfeit spirit, but whether you’ll recognize it for what it is and keep turning toward the light.
The Apocryphon of John promises that even souls who seem completely dominated by the counterfeit spirit continue their journey “until the soul wakes up from the sleep of forgetfulness and obtains gnosis.”
The system is patient. The light does not give up on its own.
Your very awareness of this battle is a sign of awakening. The counterfeit spirit prefers you asleep, unaware that any war is happening at all. When you notice the conflict, you’ve already taken the first step toward freedom.
When you fall, rise. When you forget, remember. When the counterfeit spirit wins a battle, do not surrender the war.
The light-power within you is stronger than the shadow that mimics you. It just needs you to keep choosing it.
This post draws from the Pistis Sophia, the Apocryphon of John (Secret Book of John), and scholarly analysis by Hans Jonas, Erin Evans, and M. David Litwa. These texts are available in translation in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (Marvin Meyer, ed.) and in G.R.S. Mead’s 1921 translation of Pistis Sophia.