All basic religious ideas can be expressed in two forms: one personal and the other existential. In the first case the result is obnoxious, ...

G.I. Gurdjieff George Gurdjieff (d. 1947) was a mystic who believed in the possibility of a higher state of consciousness, and who tried to ...

In the Eastern Orthodox Church, a key idea is that man should become God, and that the universe will become deified with him. Here are som...

Maurice Bucke was a Canadian psychiatrist and a contemporary of the American psychologist William James. In 1901, Bucke published a book abo...

In the standard Gospels it is often necessary to make rather extreme substitutions for anything that makes sense to emerge. None of the Gosp...

Fresco by Giotto, Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi According to the Synoptic Gospels, the risen Jesus who was seen by his disciples w...

detail from: Hieronymus Bosch (attrib), Temptation of St Anthony St Anthony of Egypt is considered to be the first of the ‘Desert Fathe...

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and ...

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860) copy of a letter to a philosopher Someone recently suggested that I am more cynical about society th...

There is a quotation ascribed in various forms to Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States of America (although it may in fact...

Mary said to Jesus: Whom are thy disciples like? He said: They are like little children who have installed themselves in a field which is no...

Among the departments which should be productive in my suppressed and unrecognised university is one for the History of Religion. Informatio...

The concept of the “alien God” is an important element of Gnostic Christianity. The following extract from Hans Jonas provides an introduct...

The Eastern Orthodox Church seems to be closer to the Gnostic traditions of early Christianity than the Western is. In particular, it seems...

Recently I watched a film about the Gospel of Thomas called Stigmata (released in 1999). It was apparently quite successful commercially a...

At the last seminar I got six people, but I am afraid this may be only because the title ‘Gnosticism and Existential psychology’ contained n...

In an article in the Daily Mail (8 July) Peter Lewis, referring to the recent books The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and God Is Not Gr...

Whether or not descriptions are turned into injunctions, the only psychological allusions in Christianity are to psychological events in cen...

(copy of a letter) You asked why any bits of psychology in the Gospels (even Thomas) are almost always turned into injunctions . Well, a ...

The despair of society, or other people, comes before the despair of finiteness and, I would suppose, inevitably so, as the illusion of the ...