DeConick A.D

193
GNOSTIC ALTERED STATES
In all cases, the virtual ceremonies that the Gnostics performed were
believed to bring initiates into ecstasy, to alter their normal state of consciousness,
to bring them into feelings of disembodiment, the loss of
their souls or egos, and unification with the transcendent. Gnostics used
incubatory and chanting techniques to prompt these altered states of
consciousness.
Given what neuroscientists are discovering about the effect of stillness
and of repetitive rituals such as chanting on the parasympathetic system,
it is reasonable to think that the culture of silence and chanting that the
Gnostics mastered had powerful biological effects that altered levels of
serotonin and dopamine in their brains. It is no coincidence that these
are the very neurotransmitters that are implicated in virtually every major
neuropsychiatric disorder, including depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar
disorder. Long before modern psychologists and psychiatrists, before
medicines like Prozac and Zoloft, the Gnostics sought to heal through
religious initiation the psychological trauma that, in their opinion, inescapably
forms the basis of all human existence. Healing the physical body,
they believed, had a fortunate correspondence to psychological wholeness.
Gnostics trace this psychological trauma to the moment when transcendent
being differentiated and dispersed as spirit into denser realms
of existence, where the alienated spirit lodged deep in the psyche suffers
from a primordial case of separation anxiety. This condition plagues all
humans from birth, because the spirit is the ultimate ground of the human
self. The Gnostics teach that people need to become attentive to
this deep, traumatized, spiritual self, to purge it of its fears, to grow its
immense capacities, to love it, and to consciously integrate it into our
reality. Its integration is profoundly transformative because it enables us
to see one another empathetically, as infused with the divine potential and
impulse yet all suffering alienation. It allows us to see how much we all are
suffering and in need of compassion and love.
In the film Altered States , Eddie Jessup comes to face-to-face with this
primal trauma of the self. Although Eddie had given up the idea of God,
he did come to understand the primal terror of the deep human self coming
into being. In the final scenes of Chayefsky’s film, Eddie has made
enough trips in his isolation tank that he regresses all the way back to
the big bang, to the moment when the first thought came into existence.