Apocatastasis Revisited

We are stardust
We are golden
We are caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden...

After considerable reflection on this issue, I returned to the event of my own gnosis in the summer of 1986. Restless and unable to sleep, I went for a midnight walk along Sunset Beach in Vancouver. I remember the reflection of the stars on the water, people crabbing in the gentle Pacific surf, trousers rolled like eliot. A large heron, alighting to the grey sand, glided past my head, wingtip missing by millimetres. And in that sound that was not a sound, more a simple compression of warm night air, I heard the Voice of the Divine, and I knew. For me it was Basho's frog, or the clack of a broom against a wooden chair. I heard the tumblers of the universe roll and click into place.

What I knew in that moment is the suddenness, the immediacy of magic in the world; constant, present, incessant, infinite and luminous.

Of course we are all reconciled with the Divine, of course we are all reunited with the Pleroma – we none of us have ever left the Father, the Fullness. Our anxiety, our separation, is merely dokos, the veil of deception that is the kosmic work of archonic forces. The Kingdom of God is within you.. Lift a stone and I am there; split a piece of wood and you will find Me there. The moving power of Gnosticism has always been the freedom – the artist's freedom, the lovers' freedom, the freedom of rebels and heretics – that derives from such intimate insight; perhaps epiphany is realizing that something is wrong, whereas gnosis is understanding that something is entirely right.