Gnostic Fields

A good deal has been written about PKS -- postulated knowledge structures -- those fields of Knowing in which experience is made manifest as the total of postulated knowings within which consciousness locates itself.

These gnostic fields can readily include a gnostic field that denies knowing itself. In other words, let us postulate a field which states that we are brain-bound mechanisms, nothing more. Therefore thought is a recursive signal relayed through subsystems. No knowing actually occurs -- thought is a reaction. Initialization of the sequence is itself part of the program.

The spectrum of gnosis then has as its two poles the understandings that all experience is variations on the theme of 'knowing'; and that NO knowing actually occurs anywhere -- that all experience is a variation in mechanics only.

The logical implications of the first pole are that materiality, mass, energy, solidity, space, speed and distance are manifestations of postulated knowing which includes the intricate creation of knowing that a knowing-limited 'I' exists which can know but do so within limits only.

The implications of the other pole are that a system of signals endlessly devolves through various mathematical patterns, ending with a subsystem being the knower and another subsystem being the rationale and another being the content known. Creation and Knowing are not included. This is a perfectly rational consequence of the assumption that the brain is the device which generates mind, or in some way that the two are identical.

It is almost as absurd to say that all mind is matter as it is to say that all matter is mind. Neither set of assumptions can possibly clarify. Therapies that devolve from one assumption (psychiatry, for example)are painfully inept; those that derive from the other (Christian Science, for example) miss badly. But in the final reduction it has to be confronted that ONE of these primary assumptions can contain and explain the other; and the reverse is not true. That is, P can explain Q but Q cannot account for P. As a courtesy to independent thought I will leave it to you to examine which contains which.

# # #

Previous Essay / Next Essay / Table of Contents