This "something wrong," whatever it is, dogs us in our daily lives, troubles our sleep, and sours our entertainments. Each morning, picking up the newspaper or turning on the television, we blame it on something new. Deep down inside, however, we aren’t fooled: we know that if the current crises or our favorite villains suddenly vanished, this "something wrong" would still be nagging at us.

We decide that the fault lies in our circumstances, so we change jobs or houses or families, only to discover that the problem has come along. We make money or pursue pleasures, but these too turn out to be vanity and vexation of spirit. Fearing that we may be emotionally ill, we pursue the consolations of psychotherapy, only to find that even if therapy does help us function better in daily life, in the long run it fails to strike at the heart of this deeper anxiety.

Casting our gaze wider, we may seek the cause of our discomfort in the social order, but if we look across the span of history, we see that practically all possible social and political systems have been tried. Some are certainly better or worse than others, yet none in itself seems to be capable of curing this unease at the center of the human heart. Turning our backs on modern civilization itself, if need be, to escape our discomfort, we may long for the simpler ways of primitive peoples and then discover that their anxieties and distresses bear a suspicious resemblance to our own.

Finally, there is religion. Here we find at least some acknowledgment of the problem, for all the great religions have this in common: they view the world as deeply flawed, and they see this flaw as lying at the center of the human condition. Some regard the issue as a moral one, saying we have sinned against God. Others use cognitive terms, telling us, as both Socrates and the Buddha did, that all evil is merely ignorance. And each of the great faiths offers its own form of salvation.

Yet even here, within the sacred precincts of religion, the matter is not so simple. In search of lost certainties, we may return to the religions we knew in youth. Although the death knell has often been sounded for conventional religion, it persists and provides consolation for many. How can we say that Christianity is dead when the Christian denominations alone boast approximately two billion adherents worldwide? Nor is this kind of faith inevitably hollow. Educated skeptics who mock "fundamentalists" or "born-again" types frequently discover that such people have an inner strength and peace that even the cleverest sophisticates may lack.

We must indeed be cautious about dismissing the answers others have found. On the other hand we may not be able to force ourselves to accept these answers. Perhaps we have, as true believers sometimes charge, talked to too many people or read too many books. Our lives can’t be undone; we can’t unlearn what we have learned. But if we turn to conventional religion, we often find either that it asks us to do exactly this or, in the case of more liberal creeds, that they share our own uncertainties too fully to offer much help.

There’s one more thing to consider. The conceptual world we inhabit is in its way as rigid and constrained as that of medieval Europe. What constrains us today, though, is science. The only reality is what can be proved empirically. All authority often including that of science itself must constantly be challenged to make sure it is true. Yet the triumph of empiricism has had an unintended consequence. Although for many people it has driven away any hope of taking comfort in venerable creeds, it has by no means led us to abandon the quest for meaning in our lives. Instead it has made us want to test religious dogmas for ourselves. We read of the enlightenment of Buddhist sages or the wonders worked by tribal shamans, and we wonder if such miracles aren’t somehow possible for us too.

Hence today’s unslakable thirst for the mystical, the occult, the paranormal, for "channeled entities" and living masters from the East. It’s true that such manifestations often seem improbable if not comic, better suited to the extravagances of tabloid journalism than to the sober pursuit of a spiritual discipline. What are we to make, after all, of this jumble of crystal skulls, interminable New Age scriptures, and messages from outer space?

We laugh, but there’s a hint of discomfort in our laughter, for even the wilder fringes of "alternative spirituality" are marked by a strange integrity. They seem to be urging us to find our own way, even at the risk of making ridiculous mistakes, instead of trusting in worn-out truths and secondhand beliefs.

One of the central concepts in human religious experience is the idea of gnosis. Gnosis is Greek for "knowledge," but it is knowledge of a very specific kind, neither "knowing about" nor "knowing how." Rather it is something more direct, more immediate, when not so much as a thought comes between you and what you know, as a character says in Meetings with Remarkable Men, Peter Brook’s film of the life of G. I. Gurdjieff. Gnosis enables us not only to experience higher realities but also to see more deeply into ordinary reality. Moreover it transforms us, changing our essential nature as yeast changes flour into bread.

Knowledge of this kind is often described as esoteric. Usually we associate the word esoteric with some abstruse subject, like the neurochemical responses of invertebrates or the grammar of extinct Anatolian languages. The esoteric often seems far out. But its original meaning is just the opposite, for it comes from the Greek esotero, which means further in. Thus we have to go further in, into ourselves, to catch a glimpse of what gnosis is.




Copyright © 1999 by Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney

From Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions by Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney (New York: Penguin Arkana, 1999). Used by arrangement with Penguin Arkana, a division of Penguin Putnam Publishers, Inc.