What is Gnosis?
The term gnosis, is a Greek word derived from the Old Greek gignskein meaning higher or spiritual or Intuitive or Divine knowledge, as opposed to episteme, which is knowledge in the more mundane sense. Although Gnosis is usually thought of as an aspect of “religion”, it in fact differs from religion or “Faith” in one extremely important respect. With Religion, knowledge of higher things is not realized intuitively, but rather enforced as a body of knowledge – a dogma or revelation – imposed from without, e.g. Bible, Koran, Gita, etc. In the more extreme forms of religion, the so-called “fundamentalist” tendency, the believer is expected to accept this revelation without question. With Gnosis, one may indeed be inspired or stimulated by external teachings and revelations, but the essential knowledge comes from within. What this means basically is that there are as many Gnostic teachings as there are Gnostics, and vice-versa. A modern-day Gnostic may be (and in fact usually is) a part of
