The spiritual world models the material one. Spirit includes reflections of materiality; like your daughter’s doll house is a model of an actual one. The Spirit's Reality-Model contains three most important dimensions: (1) Consciousness, (2) The Persona of Consciousness and (3) Spiritual Phenomena that models external objective and internal subjective phenomena of reality. These are some of Gnostic philosophy teachings, which we'll explore some more.
Gnostic philosophy
The Gnostics will tell you consciousness is the designer of the screen within the spiritual landscape as well as the creator of the spiritual landscape. On this subjective screen it renders its modeling designs of objective reality as well as its original imaginative subjective reality creations. Consciousness both admires its designs and more times than not plays the starring roles in its masterpieces. When you open your mind's eyes and look around, what is looking through your eyes is a consciousness witnessing the live play it has created and , as the persona, Fred, the leading man, experiencing the Broadway play it has scripted. Like a member of the audience watching a performance, consciousness scrutinizes and enjoys the dramatizations. Like a character in a play, consciousness participates in the objective and subjective reality landscapes. The persona is consciousness experiencing the reality it is creating. Consciousness is the essence; the myriad varieties of appearances within reality are its unique forms of expression. The spiritualized human being is an aware biological body embedded in a dynamically alive consciousness dramatically partaking in that consciousness's stage plays.
The Gnostics will tell you having mind and soul give a sentient being, who in reality is a part of a consciousness, awareness and self awareness. Each sentient biological body is embedded in a consciousness experiencing the material and spiritual worlds. What Fred sees in his minds eye is an objective biological body out there that he identifies with as himself. The Gnostic says: Yes, we know: Fred does not identify with consciousness, he firmly believes that the 'Fred' in the mirror is a real biological body out there; outside of consciousness. Fred might surmise that what makes a Homo sapiens a special animal is that he is a human being living and experiencing life with exceptional self awareness. Few if any other animals possess very little of what could pass as conscious awareness and self awareness (it is believed that chimps, dolphins, whales and octopuses might possess a respectable amount of self awareness).
The Gnostic Philosophy would say the Fred persona is a consciousness living life most times in a deep-sleep state, and may need gnosis to “wake up!”. The Gnostics would surmise the Fred persona is a human being who knows that he is a self aware biological body. The Gnostic could conclude Fred might not really believe he is a a biological body embedded in a conscious spirit . It is rational to draw the conclusion that just as an organism like a falcon possesses unique flying organs called wings and feathers to fly, Homo sapiens may regard themselves as possessing specialized spirit organs call consciousness, persona and mind that allow them to have flights of fancy, awareness, self awareness, understanding of their subjective and objective reality environments, and the ability to reason and think.
The Gnostic teaching says that, as the persona of consciousness, Fred may experience the play. Consciousness contemplates both Fred and the play of life. However, it is impossible for the Fred persona to sense consciousness in any physical way. The Fred persona is a character being portrayed within the scenery of consciousness’s screen. It’s like the screen in a movie theater: the character on the screen cannot see the watching audience member (consciousness). However, without conscious awareness, the persona cannot even see, even though he has eyes. Without conscious awareness he would be like a zombie or a robot who cannot perceive what he is doing or really see or hear what's going on. Though he has eyes to see and ears to hear the robot does not have any awareness of what it is doing and why it did what it did. As the audience member, consciousness watches and enjoys the movie. However, consciousness is simultaneously an active entity within the movie; the essential part of Fred, providing the seeming miracle of a sentience that can be aware of himself and his surroundings. Consciousness animates the persona, brings creativity into Fred's life and gives him purpose. Consciousness is the screen writer, director and the star, Fred, in the movie being played out on its spiritual screen. The Gnostic Philosophy says, even though the persona may not experience consciousness nor witness consciousness, as she starts to know herself better, ultimately she will sense, spiritually, through her intuitive wisdom, that she is far more than "This Body"; the Gnostic would say: “Through Gnosis she will know, sooner or later, that she is a part consciousness”.
Cosmologists
Another school of
thought, Cosmologists mainly, would strongly disagree. For these scientists, it’s
a moot point. They claim that the evidence of the Big Bang evolution of the universe coupled with the evolution of our Darwinian Tree of Life is
overwhelming. This 'overwhelming evidence' has convinced them that spiritual
reality is an emergent phenomenon of developing evolving material reality. Their conclusion stands the Gnostic's on its head: consciousness, the spiritual world, the human soul, thought and mind are embedded in the material world. For evolutionists, the human spirit is an organ for adaptive
survival that our peculiar life form has evolved to better succeed at living
just like we evolved arms, legs, an upright stance of walking and lungs in
order to better adapt and survive in a land-living environment. There is a caveat. Their scientific methods can neither prove nor disprove that there is a spiritual realm. Furthermore, these scientists will sometimes confess that their scientific theories are at a loss to explain consciousness.
Gnostic school
Then you have another branch of the Gnostic school
of thought with the perspective that the world is a duality. There exists out there, a
physical landscape reality with living animals, plants and physical bodies
including humans. However, they insist that what we perceive as the physical world
that we call Reality is not the material one at all, but a parallel spirit one that contains models of the other material one. There are two worlds, and these other Gnostics contend that other, physical world, can never be directly observed. They insist that when we look around what we are really looking at is a projection of a model on our spiritual screen of that material existence that is not directly accessible. And more shockingly, what would be reflected without seeing it through a consciousness is a rather gray world. The colorful, sound-filled, tasty, smelly world we think is the physical external world we are feeling, actually only exists within the spiritual. Within the external world there are no colors, no ringing, smells or taste sensations out there; sensations are phantasmagorias conjured up in that other spiritual world. In this view, the stuff of the spiritual and material worlds, their essences, are opposites in fact. One is stuff that can be felt and be said to have weight, while the other stuff is purely thought-information. Just like a computer processes the information of 1's & 0's and uses it to manipulate the Windows Word word processor I am right now using to transform its blank pages into a blog essay, the spirit-body-information that is me manipulates, mold and transform material phenomena. Both may be similar in many ways such that the spirit world with its intelligence can capture the laws governing that other, and mold it to create arts, science and technology that is used to further radically transform both worlds. Because certain material phenomena are not directly accessible to the spiritual plane, argues the Gnostic, if you returned to the past in a time machine and declared that there are microscopic life forms called bacteria and viruses, your great granddad would probably say ‘show me the money’, you may not have been able to because the spirit world did not invent as yet, as part of its technological inventory, the microscope, back then. We cannot see bacteria just with our naked eyes or discern them only with consciousness. However, today, with the microscope as part of the spiritual world's tool kit, we, spiritual beings, are able to magnify the senses of our consciousness. Now our technologically augmented consciousness has allowed us irrefutable evidence for the existence of viruses. And our consciously engineered atom smashing technologies can prove the existence of atomic and subatomic particles too.
Sound, for the Gnostics, is one of the 'paint-sensations' splashed upon the screen of subjectivity by the individual's consciousness itself. There is no 'Sound' out there. The external world is a physical composite without color & Sound. Some subjective phenomena like taste and scent are not part of external reality. They only exist within consciousness. The subjective model of a physical sentient being lying in a meadow with colorful birds chirping, displayed on the screen of consciousness, is a true but incomplete reflection; the missing parts like the Nightingale's song and the Robin's crimson decorative plumage, and the other holes in that incomplete physical reality, are filled in afterwards by consciousness. The fact of the matter is, conscious awareness is the real you. The fact of the matter is, you, consciousness, complete the colorless, soundless and tasteless world out there. You, spirit, complement the incomplete world out there with creativity, imagination, bountiful culture and transformative science & technological know-how. Without consciousness, Fred would experience the material world projected on his subjective screen with holes in it. So filled with holes, so devoid of the richness of positive progressive knowledge, creative imaginings, scientific wonderworks and sensations. Without his consciousness, materiality would present itself to Fred a reality that is all together colorless, soundless, tasteless and dull.
The Gnostics say it is true:
If a tree
falls in the forest and there is no consciousness to hear it, it cannot
make any sound whatsoever.
Some philosophers would concur with some superstring physicists that an unreasonable amount
of "fine tuning" of the laws of the universe is required to make the universe
so perfectly life friendly and livable for us. They insist there are just too
many unlikely coincidences too perfectly lined up without some
"Intelligence" being responsible.
Within the scientific and philosophic communities, the jury is still out. M-theory String Theorists, Cosmologists, Superstring Theorists, Quantum Mechanics Physicists and Darwinist biologists say we need to collect a lot more evidence a while longer to convince us one way or the other.
Stay (finely) tuned. . .
