{"id":11738,"date":"2025-10-19T18:59:51","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T22:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-gnostic-field-guide-to-wholeness-and-hearing-the-voice-of-truth-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T18:59:51","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T22:59:51","slug":"the-gnostic-field-guide-to-wholeness-and-hearing-the-voice-of-truth-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-gnostic-field-guide-to-wholeness-and-hearing-the-voice-of-truth-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gnostic Field Guide to Wholeness and Hearing the Voice of Truth \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\"Perfect<\/a><\/p>\n

We aren\u2019t just a sum of parts but the product of constant division and multiplication, constantly denying the erratic arithmetic and calling our denial self. The parts we live with<\/a> are who we are, and those we cannot live with are the turbine of our suffering. The most difficult decisions in life are difficult precisely because we are unsummed, too divided to reconcile the desires of one part with those of another. We watch ourselves undergo overnight phase transitions of feeling as a different part seizes the dials of pleasure and pain that govern all human behavior, then pull the quilt of time and thinking over our head to maintain the illusion of coherence, disavowing entire regions of our own experience as if someone else lived them. \u201cDo I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.),\u201d wrote Whitman, knowing that we are each \u201cof one phase and of all phases,\u201d that within us each live the slaveholder and the slave, the woman being burned at the stake and the man striking the match.<\/p>\n

Perhaps \u201cgod\u201d is just how we name our yearning for a single truth, for an integrating voice to conciliate the contradictions, for something large and total to hold what we cannot hold. <\/p>\n

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Detail from the art in Cueva de las Manos, Argentina, created between 7,300 BC and 700 AD.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Sixteen centuries before Whitman, the Gnostics \u2014 those spiritual visionaries who saw the wholeness of being before modern Christianity partitioned the body and the soul \u2014 channeled that voice in \u201cThe Thunder: Perfect Mind,\u201d part of what is now known as the Nag Hammadi Library: a set of ancient texts discovered in a jar at the foot of a cliff by two illiterate Muslim brothers in 1945. The long poem of contrasts and conciliation \u201cappears to derive from the female-centered Isis worship preceding Christianity,\u201d writes poet and ordained Buddhist Jane Hirshfield<\/a> in introducing her translation of it in Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Heart Thunder,\u201d spoken word artist Kim Rosen<\/a> brings this immortal abacus of the soul to life in a breathtaking performance, fusing the Gnostic gospel with the concluding mantra of the Buddhist Heart Sutra to the pulse-beat of a multi-instrumental orchestra \u2014 cello, percussion, piano, guitar, and vocals by musicians Jami Sieber, Wayne P. Sheehy, and Chloe Goodchild:<\/p>\n