DeConick A.D

66
THE GNOSTIC TRUE MAN
that humanity consisted of a number of classes of people—or races , as they
preferred to call them.
The ancient Gnostics were no more enlightened on this front than
the people who lived around them. Observation taught them that not
everyone acted like their true nature was a piece of God the Good. Some
people were downright evil. Others rejected the truth. So, various Gnostic
groups developed different strategies to deal with these facts.
Some Gnostics thought that they themselves were a special race of
humanity. The God nature was exclusive to them. Everything was about
the salvation of the God nature that they possessed singularly. Destruction
would be the fate of all else.
Other Gnostics developed more complex and nuanced systems, which
explained that every human was planted with the God nature, but that it
was only a tiny seed. It was the job of the psyche or soul to cultivate it.
The Gnostics claimed that they had an easier time with its cultivation because
they possessed seeds that were more mature than those possessed by
the rest of humanity. Although everyone had a divine seed and everyone
was part of the system of its liberation and restoration, the Gnostic human
possessed a superior form of the seed, which made it easier to cultivate.
That said, the Gnostic innovation in spirituality was their conviction
that the human being is bigger than the body and the soul. The human
being is also nous, or as the Gnostics preferred to call it, pneuma or spirit.
This transcendent dimension is nothing less than the supreme God’s own
life essence, his own life breath or spirit, captured deep within the human
psyche. The Gnostics were convinced that there is a spiritualness, a
pneumatic flux of the supreme God, that enlivens us. It is uncreated. It
is Other. It is captured in a human physicality of many layers, buried in
our psyche, blanketed with our emotions, imprisoned in our flesh, where
it exists dormant, unexpressed, and forgotten. So deeply is it embedded
that we do not even know it is there. For most people, it is submerged
or unconscious. It suffers in this state of isolation, latency, and stupor. It
lies there pained, waiting to be awakened, cultivated, and reunited with
its source, the supreme God.
This reunion is the ultimate goal of the Gnostic quest, an experience
that the Gnostic calls gnosis or knowledge. This direct initiatory experience
catapults the person back to the source of all, refreshing and regenerating
the spirit as it is reintegrated within the depth itself, the supreme