In with the good, out with the bad. But it’s not air of which the teacher speaks. Something more valuable. Essence. Out with ignorance, in with wisdom. Knowledge of the self means knowledge of things hidden in plain sight. When you can see what’s in front of you these hidden things will be revealed. Because when you let out what is in you, that is creative. Held inside (which does not mean withhold from say another person but from existence) these uncreated forms living in darkness will consume you like the fires of hell. Speaks a lot about consuming, and fire. Equating fire with bodily lusts, whether for food or sex or material possessions. That is the hell that will destroy you. Ignorance of that causes madness — you can see that our world is becoming more and more mad, driving more and more ignorant souls mad, because it is a push in the wrong direction.

The aspirant must work in solitude, because only then comes the ability to know yourself. Without distraction. Without guidance, except that which answers the bell of the mind. Word the teacher used was gnosis, but which seems mistranslated merely as knowledge, because some knowledge is empty learning, whose purpose is empty because not aimed correctly. Hamartia the Hebrew word for sin — derived from archery: missing the mark. Who sets the mark? The archer. The two words which interest us most are therefore gnosis and logos. Gnosis better translated as insight or vision, and logos as proclaimed by the teacher (who reserves the term for himself, and thus represents the highest form of being): truth.

To uncover, to disclose, to reveal: apocalypse. When I shed my clothes I am an apocalypt. Every moment has that potential, of showing something hidden. Every person carries his apocalypse within, every person his logos. These are neither subject to nor subjective of, but connected strands of the same unity. Who can through hard work of the spirit achieve true insight will be greatly troubled, and astonished, tells the teacher, but will never die. Much confusion over the use of that word: death. In some accounts does not exist, in others a condition of ignorance to which most are condemned. Talks a great deal about light, as representative of the true condition of anthropos. We are the sons of the Anthropos. Or of the source of the source of the source, higher than any source.

His usage of light distinguishes between even the light of the sun, which is an artificial light, because made by the maker. And the maker himself made, in some versions, by those he made. Did we create the sun or did the sun create us? Or did something else create both, or have we always existed, but in different, possibly less cumbrous, form and content? Or — do we exist in different form even now but lack the means to see? Willful ignorance, everything returns to that. If you do not know the manner of your coming you cannot know how to go.

Painting: Paul Nash, Totes Mere