One of the reasons I love the source western tradition, particularly the gnostic tradition as I find myself recovering it – perhaps in isolation – but the real root of the western tradition and not the garbled and corrupted – the institutionalized – version handed down to us, can be summarized in this single, wonderful word: hypocrisy.

             The western prophetic tradition recognizes the ungovernable depths of our hypocrisy. This arises out of our addiction to self. The addiction to self is so deep that it takes the mask of not-self. To assert non-self, for example, is self-assertion. That is, we are imposing our hypocritical understanding on another. The truly abusive aspect of this imposition is that it already has built into it its own denial, the pretense that it is an essential non-assertion.

             Since the beginnings of ‘objectivity’ this has become the increasingly pervasive intellectual disease in our culture, because ‘objectivity’ allows us to pretend that we can purvey subjectively determined value as if no subject were involved. ‘Objectivity’ has become equated with ‘not-self’ or ‘non-self’. But to assert ‘objective value’ is just as much self-assertion as to assert non-self. It is an intellectual and moral imposition of our subjective bias on another.

             This assertion of the non-self, intellectually, aesthetically and morally, is precisely the hypocrisy which has destroyed contemporary intellectuality, aesthetics and morals.

             Every moment, we deal in value. Experience cannot arise without value judgment, whether the experience is absolutely immediate, as in the case of the infant or the animal, or mediated through reflection, as in the case of the ‘normal’ adult human. But reflection necessarily involves the reflex. Once the reflex is in place, we have to deal with the functional, addictive imposition of the self. To pretend that the self does not exist is not just hypocrisy, it is an abusive misrepresentation. The only way to ‘transcend’ the self is through the self. We have to find the core of value, and while this involves the death of the self, it is the self dying into the self, even at the deepest level, the moment of the Great Death. If we die the Great Death, what is handed back to us is the immediacy of the ‘I’, the value of this moment of subjective existence. We may acquire great power or great insight, an ongoing moment of awareness into the nature of other people’s motives, beyond any logical understanding of perception, but this is still just a moment of the value of ‘I’.

             We do not transcend our subjective experience except through our subjective experience. This moment is the value of ‘I’. If I embrace it totally, the ‘I’ dissolves into the value. But the value retains all the uniqueness of the ‘I’. There is no other source of value in the universe. Any pretension that there is is hypocrisy.

             When we understand value in this light, we know the true impersonality of value, the necessity of God. But that moment is intimate, a moment of Presence. And the next moment, I have to recognize that that moment, as an ‘experience’ is just ‘I’. Although now I ‘know’ God insofar as God can be ‘known’.

             Hence the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas apparently denies all standard ‘practices’ of religion, prayer, fasting, alms and diet. Anything we do that consciously takes us away from this moment of value in the name of a ‘higher’ value is hypocrisy. It is precisely, a self-assertion in the name of the denial of self.

             The problem with argument today is the pervasive disease of hypocrisy. Everyone has his or her self-assertion within the frame of some contemporary artifice of self-denial. Yet the depth of the disease suggests that we are on the verge of a great outbreak of legitimate spiritual and religious awakening.
 
            When the darkness is complete, the light is about to dawn.