AN EXERCISE IN MYSTICAL SPECULATION
by Fr.Ur (Deacon), Synod 2006

[Note: This text is only an extract from a longer essay with the same title]

What I want to propose here is an experiment in mystical speculation, relating to some hypothesis about the destiny of man after death. The starting point could appear quite strange and maybe not very 'Gnostic' at all but according to me (and not only me) the basic aspect of Gnosticism as a whole is the ability to use every system, or more generally every starting point to conduct mystical research. If The Absolute manifests itself in everything, we can from everything trace back the path to The Absolute.

Here, I want to start from theories elaborated mainly by an Italian university researcher in organic chemistry, Professor Corrado Malanga, who in collaboration with an engineer, Luciano Pederzoli, founded a new theory, based on physics, called "Super Spin." Prof. Malanga came to this theory after 20 years of research in something that at first sight might appear totally absurd: alien abductions. You are probably asking yourselves now what alien abductions have in common with Gnosticism. Probably nothing - even if a lot of contemporary occultism makes use of the alien paradigm. But what is interesting for us right now is that Professor Malanga elaborated a theory of man and the universe that - even if starting from a point of view quite foreign to mystics and esotericists - came to conclusions absolutely compatible with ours and which are able to shed some more light on a lot of aspects of the esoteric doctrines. Moreover, the vision he elaborated of universe and man is very useful in order to do some mystical speculation - it is maybe able to shed light on some points (in particular about the life after death) about which there is a bit of confusion and uncertainty in contemporary esotericism.
I will now explain some of his theories and their history but only in so far as it is necessary for my specific aims here - leaving a deeper reasearch of the matter to the possible interest of the reader. So...
(...)

what has all this stuff to do with the destiny of man after death? We could say that people possessing a Soul are eternal because the Soul is eternal, not having the category of Time as its constituent. But, according to the theory, man does not possess the Soul but the Soul is possessing man for its own aims. At the beginning there was only Awareness, or God, but he was not able to know himself. So he decided to differentiate in manifestation in order to know himself, and so the Soul is a kind of eternal hard disk or memory, where all the experiences that the Soul itself has while incarnated in man are recorded. In some way the soul is the memory of God and we can consider God as the awareness of the Soul. This idea should sound familiar to you...

But what's the relation between the Soul as one and the Soul as it manifests in man? We could use the Cabbalistic image of the mirrors reflecting the same light - but another image, suggested to me by one of the assistants of Professor Malanga, is interesting: The Soul is like an octopus. Every tentacle is the soul of a man that enters his body at birth, sucking data to store it in his memory, i.e. the body of the octopus, and when the body of man dies, the tentacle leaves it to enter another body. Do hypnosis and physics give us a demonstration of reincarnation? No. According to Professor Malanga, who doesn't like ideas as 'eternal life', only the memories of man will remain recorded on the soul - not man itself. Exactly from this point we can begin our speculation.

First of all, we have to ask, "who is man?" or better, "who am I?" Not 'what' I am but 'who' - or: "in what consists the ultimate essence that I can't give up, without that I can't even conceive myself?" The answer is simple: I'm not Body, not Mind and not Spirit. And... I'm not Soul. I am the 'I am', or a 'pure centre of Awareness'. If we compare the four parts of the body to different kind of hard disks, I am the head that reads informations on them.
(...)

Which consequences has this in regards to the life after dead? We can hypothesize (with the blessing of esoteric traditions) that our destiny after death depends upon in which element we put our Awareness. If we let our Awareness inhabit only our brain, we will die with the death of the brain and plunge into nothingness: a head without hard disk. If we inhabit our Spirit, our afterlife existence will be longer but mortal as well. But if we succeed to inhabit the Soul, we will maybe obtain immortality and total knowledge because we will be able to read directly the hard disk of the universe. We can climb up on the tentacle of the octopus until we reach his body, and then stay there living forever in 'the heavens' or go down again to another body to live again in the world. Of course we need to obtain this ability by esoteric work unless there exists a mechanism somewhere in us which is able to shoot us up to the Soul automatically.

These are only some partial considerations - we could certainly go on with more speculations. The conclusions are not new but it is interesting how we are able to come to them from an 'unexpected' and somehow new way. And so it is a perfect example of how the Gnostic is able to use every idea (without forcing it but only following its implications) to arrive at that 'truth' that he is seeking in every single and partial aspect of the universe.

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