DeConick A.D

343
GNOSTICISM OUT ON A LIMB
that this seeker is Shirley and that the truth she seeks is in the books she
will find in the store.
Sure enough, Shirley enters the store, only to leave with another armload
of metaphysical titles, which she takes to her hotel room and continues
to read. As she directly engages the knowledge in these books, Shirley
links into a spiritual conversation that has survived since antiquity, that
goes back to the Gnostic New Age.
Meeting of the Minds
The title of this book, The Gnostic New Age , reflects my long-standing
observation that, when it comes to religion, ancient and modern minds
are not as different as we might like to believe. For years, I have been
aware of an uncanny similarity between Gnostic movements in antiquity
and New Age movements in our own time, and I have wondered what
might this mean.
Ancient Gnostic and modern New Age movements cultivate a form of
spirituality that is aggressively countercultural and highly critical of conventionally
organized religion (see Campbell 1972; Bloom 1996; Hanegraaff
1998; Roof 1999; Versluis 2014). They revel in exposing the errors
of conventional religions, which they believe to be ineffective. They delight
in upsetting the cart, in exposing the deceptions that they believe
traditional institutions maintain to control the masses.
At the center of their transgression is their disapproval of “talk religion”—religion
that tries to codify God or intellectualize spirituality. For
ancient Gnostics and modern New Agers, the heart of religion is the
subjective individual experience of meeting a transcendent or transpersonal
reality that is the source of all existence. Religion is about the God
experience, not God talk. This is how the contemporary spiritual leader
Eckhart Tolle (1999, 93) explains what God really is: “It’s not what you
think it is! You can’t think about presence, and the mind can’t understand
it. Understanding presence is being present.”
Both past and present movements have at their center a transcendent
or transpersonal reality that is believed to be the source of our existence.
All reality, including us, is derived from this source. So this divinity is
present within the human being and is recognized as the person’s true
self. Religion is marketed as a quest for wholeness or, in New Age terms,