An Aberrant Gnostic

  If you follow UFOlogy at all, you might be familiar with the Betty and Barney Hill incident from 1961. There is a lot of “stuff” attached to this incident: Aleister Crowley, the television show “The Outer Limits,” possible psychological operations, or maybe, just maybe, a good old-fashioned encounter with extraterrestrials. If you aren’t familiar with the alleged incident, I asked my newfound friend, Gemini, to summarize it for those who might need a refresher course: In September 1961, Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple, were driving home to New Hampshire from vacation when they observed a strange, bright light following their car. They experienced a period of missing time and unsettling physical and emotional symptoms afterward. Troubled by the experience, they eventually sought help through hypnosis therapy. Under hypnosis, they recalled detailed memories of being abducted and taken onboard a disc-shaped craft. Within the craft, the Hills described encou...

  For some reason, my brain keeps going back to the 1957 that was run in various newspapers in the United States that had the following screeching headline :   The article was one of the earliest known discussions regarding Professor Henri C. Puech and his preliminary analysis of The Gospel of Thomas.  In that article, written by Manuel Komroff, five "sayings" recorded by the doubting Thomas of Jesus were highlighted in the article.  One of the sayings that caught my eye was this, as displayed in the article : What exactly does that mean?  So, with curiosity in my head, I went back to Google's Gemini to ask some questions.  Here is what I discovered, per the assistance of AI... Q : What is the ancient Gnostic symbolic interpretation of the saying "Jesus said : He that is near Me is near the fire.  He is that is far from Me is far from the fire."?   A: Within early Gnostic circles, "fire" often symbolized divine knowledge, or gnosis. It r...

  One of the first text titles mentioned in the early days of newspaper reporting on the Nag Hammadi Library was mention of The Book of the Great Invisible Spirit .  I wonder what that book might be about...so let's see what AI has to say about it, shall we? A Book With Three Themes to Digest For me, anyway!  My new friend in the Google Bard summarized the book as such.  The three main sections include: A Gnostic Cosmology : the universe was/is created by a series of emanations from the ultimate, unknowable God, or the Great Spirit.  The material world was/is created by lower divine beings and is seen as a place of ignorance and suffering A Gnostic Mythology : the text relates the story of the divine being Seth, and "his" three descents into the material world.  The first one occurred at the time of the Flood, the second at the time of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the third in the form of Jesus Christ. A Gnostic Set of Rituals :  The tex...