Gnosis in Practice

Practical tips on receiving embodied wisdom

This is Part II of my series on Gnosis, or how to find knowledge with our own experience and bodies.

Gnosis, for me, is the foundation of my spiritual, creative, magical and embodied practice. It is the first step to interacting with spirits, communing with plants and animals, feeling for yourself that the world is alive and speaking, though perhaps in a different tongue than we humans are used to.

In the privileging of the rational, logical mind over what we know intuitively or experience for ourselves, we lose our connection to our lives.

This newsletter is for anyone who wants to enhance their self trust, expand their knowledge of astrology, divination, the numinous, etc beyond what has been written about in books (which, I will remind you, only encompasses a fraction of the world’s wisdom).

This newsletter is for anyone who wants their very life to be a portal of deep knowing that cannot be taken away.

If you want to learn more about gnosis, check out part I.

Below you will find skills, tips and tricks for inviting the numinous into your daily life and making yourself open to the knowledge of another source.

We can’t make gnosis happen, really, as we are waiting for another being, be that a planet, plant, deity or daimon to speak back. But, “[i]f spiritual openings are accidents,” as John Tarrant puts it, “then the spiritual work of meditation makes us accident-prone, susceptible to the imagination of eternity, the wit of God”.¹ This wisdom of gnosis is a receptive sort of wisdom rather than the active process of gathering your reason and coming to a conclusion yourself. Consider these movements towards accident proneness and ways to invite new forms and methods of knowing into your life.

Meditation

I did not come to meditation knowingly. Simply heeding a certain call, I spent a month in between my sophomore and junior year of college at a Zen monastery where this practice, called zazen, is the foundation of the religion. We did it for hours a day, and once a month we held sesshin, weeklong silent retreats where whole days were devoted to the just sitting. It was maddening at times, and involved a lot of stepping through incessant thoughts and intrusive feelings, all while trying to keep the body still. One of my teachers once said that you haven’t really sat sesshin until you “cried a bucket of tears in the zendo,” our meditation hall. But after settling into the chaos which is yours, you also settle into a certain silence that is also yours as well.

From there can spring great insight as well as a deceptively simple-seeming noticing; our awareness, which, as my teacher reminds us, is where choice and freedom lie. It is in this space of flow that we encounter not our mind’s prefab view of the world but each moment as it actually is. From there, we can go beyond our habitual mind and meet the present anew.

This is the space of gnosis. It is sitting still with your breath day after day, even just for five minutes and witnessing the chatter and tumult inside until it changes into something else. I recommend doing just that to tune into what a plant, a moment, a star, could be trying to tell you. Let the silence and the pregnant waiting it distills become part of your routine. Perhaps words will arise from that place, perhaps pictures, memories, feelings. Note them all; gnosis speaks in many languages.