MattCarney::FictionWriter

Q: Use the Gnos­tic texts as provo­ca­tion and Philip K. Dick as inspi­ra­tion in explor­ing your view of the human sit­u­a­tion. What is the truth of our con­di­tion? (from Camille Roy)

Our con­di­tion is a per­pet­ual quest for an impos­si­ble truth: the first-hand under­stand­ing of the universe’s total­ity and ori­gin, and to make sense of our present, his­toric, and future con­nec­tion to it.

Gnosticism—and to an extent a read­ing of the con­se­quences phys­i­cal cosmology—stresses that our being is divided but per­pet­u­ally seek­ing out its other parts.

Thomas quotes Christ in his gospels as say­ing “I am not your mas­ter. Because you have drunk, you have become intox­i­cated from the bub­bling spring which I am mea­sured out.” I.e., Christ says he and Thomas are one-and-the-same, a state­ment of cos­mic unity. The impli­ca­tion is that all beings are derived from iter­ated lay­ers of cre­ation by a dis­tant god, that cre­ators cre­ation (“demiour­gos”), the demiougros’ cre­ation (the world), life, and so on, with each iter­a­tion being more flawed and alien­ated. But the key may be that our ideal state is whole­ness with our ori­gin, the begin­ning in the chain of cre­ation. Christ reit­er­ates this later in Thomas’s gospel: “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the out­side and the out­side like the inside…and when you make the male the female and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female, and when you fashion…a like­ness in place of a like­ness; then you will enter the king­dom.” We are divided now, but “the king­dom,” our ideal and total state, will be achieved when whole again—as we were before.

The root of Gnos­ti­cism, in terms of its expla­na­tion for our ori­gins, seems anal­o­gous to the most cur­rently accepted sec­u­lar the­ory of the universe’s ori­gin. The big bang the­ory observes that because galax­ies are con­sis­tently mov­ing apart from one another, they must have orig­i­nated as a per­fect sin­gu­lar­ity. The consequence–which I am posit­ing as a kind of sec­u­lar universalism–is that, in the most inti­mately phys­i­cal sense, all mat­ter and energy in the uni­verse was orig­i­nally one entity. We truly are all one in this sense. All that we are, mat­ter and energy, is united in a linked chain span­ning eons. All was united, but has under­gone con­stant macro and micro evo­lu­tion and diver­si­fi­ca­tion through­out the universe’s his­tory; sin­gu­lar­ity to sub­atomic par­ti­cles to atoms to mol­e­cules; galax­ies, stars, solar sys­tems, atmos­phere, micro­bial life, advanced life, sen­tient life, and the imi­ta­tive cre­ations of sen­tience. The intel­li­gence of sen­tient life sets it even fur­ther apart from its ori­gin by way of false cat­e­go­riza­tion of its own expe­ri­ence as being more dis­tinct from nature than it is.

And that brings us squarely to our con­di­tion, the entan­gle­ment of sen­tience: the quest to rec­og­nize our ori­gin and rec­on­cile our­selves with it, to know what came before it, and to seek com­fort with ori­gin and the fate of finite existence.