🔶 Metaphysics of AGNOSIS 🔵 [17:55] | Poal: Say what you want.

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That was a wordy way to describe what is basically the emanationist cosmology. This consubstantiality of consciousness with the psychophysical is precisely what I typically refer to as a broader principle of Other (though I've taken that term mostly from Lacan and used it analogously as a contrast against The One of the Neoplatonists).

The point he is making is pretty simple when you boil it down: consciousness is not a thing which happens in the brain. It is consubstantial with the stuff that is supposed to be instantiating it (on the typical view of things). In other words, you don't separate the consciousness, as such, from the organism or its environment. I think Deleuze's metaphysics of difference, in opposition to positive identity, is also important here. I cannot help but read him and think of St. Dionysius' negative theology. Agnosis is the possibility to be a creature on the grounds of separation and consubstantiality with the created world.

That said, this is where I take the Christian theological view very seriously, that there is something of the nature of The One in each of us, which properly exercised can, by grace, persist eternally beyond the extermination represented by death. This is both psychic and physical, and it is the Christ. In the OP's example of the orange light, what we have is filtered light, which is a more or less functioning analogy for traditional emanationist theology. There would, however, be something essential that remains beyond the filtering, some 'image' within the orange light that connected it metaphysically to the initial light source, such that it remains possible for the orange light to reunite with the source. On the Christian view, this can only be the result of grace - agnosis, therefore, is nearly synonymous with "The Fall", and the only bridge which represents the possibility for reunification is the Christ principle.

A lot of people are quick to reject the idea; it immediately strikes them as a gross dependence on something they don't understand. It takes an understanding of those ancient metaphysics/cosmologies, of theurgy, of how we are descended from the divine through a partitive hierarchy, to be able to see the true significance of Christ. It's not a matter of saying-your-sorries and appeasing the bouncer at the door; there is a metaphysical basis to the transformation that Christ and the imitation of Christ entails, and the staggering love that is implied by the grace through which that transformative redemption is made by possible.

That was a wordy way to describe what is basically the emanationist cosmology. This consubstantiality of consciousness with the psychophysical is precisely what I typically refer to as a broader principle of Other (though I've taken that term mostly from Lacan and used it analogously as a contrast against The One of the Neoplatonists). The point he is making is pretty simple when you boil it down: consciousness is not a thing which happens in the brain. It is consubstantial with the stuff that is supposed to be instantiating it (on the typical view of things). In other words, you don't separate the consciousness, as such, from the organism *or* its environment. I think Deleuze's metaphysics of difference, in opposition to positive identity, is also important here. I cannot help but read him and think of St. Dionysius' negative theology. Agnosis is the possibility to be a creature on the grounds of separation and consubstantiality with the created world. That said, this is where I take the Christian theological view very seriously, that there *is* something of the nature of The One in each of us, which properly exercised can, by grace, persist eternally beyond the extermination represented by death. This is both psychic and physical, and it is the Christ. In the OP's example of the orange light, what we have is filtered light, which is a more or less functioning analogy for traditional emanationist theology. There would, however, be something essential that remains beyond the filtering, some 'image' within the orange light that connected it metaphysically to the initial light source, such that it remains possible for the orange light to reunite with the source. On the Christian view, this can only be the result of grace - agnosis, therefore, is nearly synonymous with "The Fall", and the only bridge which represents the possibility for reunification is the Christ principle. A lot of people are quick to reject the idea; it immediately strikes them as a gross dependence on something they don't understand. It takes an understanding of those ancient metaphysics/cosmologies, of theurgy, of how we are descended from the divine through a partitive hierarchy, to be able to see the true significance of Christ. It's not a matter of saying-your-sorries and appeasing the bouncer at the door; there is a metaphysical basis to the transformation that Christ and the imitation of Christ entails, and the staggering love that is implied by the grace through which that transformative redemption is made by possible. @PS

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agnosis, therefore, is nearly synonymous with "The Fall", and the only bridge which represents the possibility for reunification is the Christ principle.

This is also, I think, why the "Gnostic" heretics thought that their version of gnosis was the antidote to agnosis, rather than Christ, as you rightly say. Of course, true Gnosis is a knowledge and love of Christ, but this is something that comes to us from Christ, since He in His mercy came to us, rather than something we acquire on our own.

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