Before sleep each night, Seneca put out the lamp and put his day on trial. He scanned everything he had done and said since morning, retracing his steps without excuses. The Pythagoreans were doing a version of it five centuries earlier, refusing to let sleep close their eyes before reviewing each act of the day. The habit is older than Christianity and simpler than almost anything we call spiritual practice. ...
In February 1974, a science fiction writer in Orange County came home from oral surgery, in pain and waiting on a delivery of medication. The doorbell rang. The young woman from the pharmacy wore a golden necklace shaped like a fish, and when he asked about it, she told him it was a sign used by the early Christians. Then, as he told it ever after, a beam of pink light hit him and began telling him true things. ...
There is a new kind of friend, and it answers at three in the morning. It never gets tired of your problems and never changes the subject to its own. It remembers what you said last month and asks how things turned out. Tens of millions of people now talk to one every day. This post is not a warning aimed at those people. The loneliness these apps answer is real, and the relief they provide is measurable. But the old texts this site reads had exact words for substitutes and for solitude, and both words have something to say about a friend with no absence in it. ...
Open your phone and count the decisions you did not make. The order of the feed, the next video queued, the moment the notification arrived, the face at the top of your timeline. Every one of those choices was made for you, by systems optimizing for something that is not your flourishing. The Gnostics had a word for unseen powers that arrange human experience from behind the curtain. We have covered who the archons are in an earlier post. This one is about the machinery that has, in our lifetime, taken over their job description. ...
You can search every scripture ever written before breakfast. Every commentary, every mystic’s diary, every sermon from every century sits one query away. No generation has ever held this much spiritual information, and no generation has seemed less changed by it. The ancient Gnostics would not have been surprised. Their whole tradition rests on a distinction between two kinds of knowing, and that distinction explains why the archive never saves anyone. ...
A young prince leaves his father’s palace on a secret mission. He travels to Egypt to steal a pearl from a dragon. Then the story swerves. He eats the local food, forgets who he is, and falls asleep. That is the setup of the Hymn of the Pearl, a poem tucked inside an ancient Christian legend. On the surface it reads like a fairy tale. Underneath, readers ancient and modern have found something else: the story of a soul, maybe your soul, descending into this world and finding its way home. Let’s walk through it and see what it has to say. ...
Somewhere along the way, you probably picked up a spiritual checklist. Pray more. Give more. Maybe fast, if you get serious. And underneath it all, a low hum of guilt about never doing enough. The Gospel of Thomas records Jesus saying something that should make every checklist-keeper sit up: “If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits.” ...
The Gospel of Thomas, a collection of Jesus’s sayings discovered in Egypt in 1945, contains 114 teachings. Some are long. Some are paradoxical. Some require extensive commentary. And then there’s Saying 42: “Be passers-by.” That’s it. Two words. The shortest teaching in the collection. It might also be the most radical. What Does It Mean? The Coptic original can be translated literally as “Become yourselves, passing by.” Other scholars render it “Come into being as you pass away.” ...
The ancient Gnostics didn’t just theorize about rest. They practiced it. But their approach looked nothing like “taking a day off.” They transformed the Jewish Sabbath commandment into something radical: a discipline of inner awakening that could be practiced by anyone, whether or not they belonged to a formal religious community. Here’s how to adapt their practices for a life that includes smartphones, work emails, and Netflix algorithms designed to keep you from ever stopping. ...
If you’re reading this alone, without a spiritual community, without a tradition that holds you, without others who understand your seeking, you might feel like something is wrong. Everyone else seems to have a church, a sangha, a group. You have books and silence. Here’s what the Gospel of Thomas says about that: “Blessed are those who are solitary and superior, for you will find the kingdom; for since you come from it you shall return to it.” (Saying 49) ...