James A. Lindsay is a popular online speaker, author, and X-Twitter influencer. He originally became somewhat well known when he and a few other academic types a few years back detailed their adventures in getting academic publishers to accept obvious hoax papers.
After that he and Helen Pluckrose rode their fame to publish a popular book proclaiming to expose identity politics called Cynical Theories.
Since then, James Lindsay has become a widely renowned speaker on the “dangers of identity politics” while theorizing its origin and purpose as Marxism. Which btw is not unique to him. But he also claims that Marxism and “wokeness” has its origin in “The Gnostic Heresy.” That is pretty unique to him. He has received criticism for that theorizing by people who say James Lindsay has stepped outside of his academic wheelhouse, and that he is promoting misconceptions about Gnosticism and the western esoteric traditions in general — which he expounds on in depth in books and his many online classes and recorded presentations.
His ideas on Gnosticism influencing Marxism and identity politics, aka wokeness, I will not be writing about. Anyone who is interested can find a lot of what he says about that online. What I will speak to is his basic misunderstanding of Gnosticism.
James Lindsay starts his grand unified theory of wokeness based on several commonly held incorrect assumptions about Gnostic teachings. The idea of Gnosticism as a heresy comes from the Roman Catholic traditions whose early fathers wrote quite a few polemics about Gnosticism, which in fact is where a lot of what is known about Gnosticism comes from. Not all that is known though. The early church fathers lived in a milieu where various competing teachers were vying for respect as authentic spiritual guides among a wide variety of spiritual teachings which included Gnostic sects, Neoplatonists, a variety of Christian sects, and many others.
A very common problem with people speaking critically about Gnosticism is due to why their teachings are called esoteric in the first place, i.e., if a tradition is esoteric that means the common understanding of their esoteric knowledge is usually wrong. Because it is only able to be understood by initiates into their system of thought due to their teachings being couched in metaphor and allegory, therefore people who are trying to analyze those teachings without an initiation into the hidden meanings, they will take the literal teachings as the true meaning. Since they are not meant to be taken literally any analysis that lacks an understanding of the actual teachings will be essentially useless.
An example of this is with the oldest manuscript ever found in Europe from around 340 BC in Greece, the time of Alexander the Great. It is mostly a commentary by an unknown author about the writings of the legendary prophet Orpheus for the Greek mystery schools. The author states that you should not take the literal meaning of Orpheus as the true meaning since Orpheus says to his audience to put doors to their ears:
His poetry is something strange and riddling for people. But Orpheus did not intend to tell them captious riddles, but momentous things in riddles. Indeed, he is telling a holy discourse from the first and up to his last word. As he also makes clear in the well-chosen verse: for having ordered them to put doors to their ears he says that he is not legislating for the many… but only for those pure in hearing…
If I write an article using as an allegory the noise made by crickets as a metaphor for the music of the Beatles, without ever mentioning the Beatles in the article, and someone than says my understanding of crickets is really about Marxism and identity politics, that is a useless critique since my actual purpose was to explain the real meaning of the lyrics to The Fool On The Hill. That is my problem with what James Lindsay has been promoting about Gnosticism being used for communist woke mind control. He starts off misunderstanding what Gnosticism is really about because of the esoteric metaphoric nature of the teachings and his lack of the initiatory knowledge of the tradition.
Let’s examine one of the main “heresies” that James Lindsay, a self-proclaimed atheist, focuses on in his theorizing, and which has also been paid a lot of interest to by many religious writers throughout the past few thousand years: the gnostic concept of the Demiurge. The Demiurge, as James states, is the supposed evil creator God of the Gnostics, by which we can escape through Gnosis, divine knowledge.
It is commonly accepted by scholars that the Gnostics got their idea of the Demiurge from Greek philosophers. The Greeks themselves said that their philosophy came from outside of the Greek world from somewhere to the east. In the 18th and 19th century many scholars of the Greek philosophers switched from believing that the original source was somewhere in the Near East or Persia, to the source being more likely India. That was right after Vedic books like the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita began to be translated for the first time into European languages — and lo and behold the same essential teachings as the Greeks were found therein.
Plato and the Neoplatonists taught about the idea of the Demiurge, which translates as “one who works for the people; a skilled workman, a handicraftsman,” who was taught as the active agency of the omnipotent and omnipresent supreme being aka The One, the single unified ground or source of everything. They also called the Demiurge the Nous, meaning the mind and intellect of The One, which is also the active agency of The One inherent in matter. In other words, to the Greeks, the world is not separate from God. God is not like an all-pervading spirit distinct from matter like many people believe today, where they see God as being like an invisible fog that co-exists everywhere with matter. Instead the Greeks taught that matter proceeds from, or is a development out of, the all-pervading supreme source aka the ground of existence aka the ground of being which exists in a prior state to our physical universe: The One, The Good, The Monad, The Absolute — is what they called the original source of the Demiurge aka Nous.
The Demiurge or Nous was taught as the active agency of God within all creatures in both our physical and subtle (mental) states. So, in that sense and that sense alone, is the Demiurge or Nous said to be a “secondary” creator God. It wasn’t meant to imply that the Demiurge or Nous was “a different being” than that which precedes it (The One, the Monad), it was just a concept to explain how that being worked within nature, and within our own lives, i.e., they taught that ultimately there is only one mind, God’s mind, that exists everywhere. It designed and created everything by its inherent power to manifest itself as matter, and to then design and create things (the natural world) out of its own selfsame matter. By that inherent presence and power over matter/nature, God’s mind aka the Demiurge or Nous, controls everything made out of matter/itself.
They also taught that it also controls all creatures, because we are dependent on the Demiurge or Nous, the mind and intellect of God, to function as our own mind and intellect — because we are simply unable to do that by ourselves. The purpose of our lives is to awaken, through this divine knowledge, to our inherently close relationship with the all-pervading source of and controller of our world — who also co-exists within us as our mind and intellect. That is the teaching of the Greek philosophers from the Orphic mysteries and Pythagoras, running through Platonism and then expounded upon by the Neoplatonists, all summed up.
That Greek philosophy would subsequently be the main influence on the western esoteric traditions of Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, as well as interacting with and strongly influencing the various Abrahamic based traditions. The Gnostic traditions that were popular in the early centuries of the common era retooled those teachings into a highly allegorical and metaphoric system, sometimes influenced by traditions coming from further east, e.g., Zoroastrianism, Vedism, etc. In fact, a very similar ancient teaching would be discovered centuries later when the ancient Sanskrit teachings of the Vedas were first translated and made widely available to the western world beginning in the latter 1700s. It was then realized that they taught essentially the same thing as the Greeks, which then inspired what was called “Indomania” among philosophers and scholars all over the western world, many of whom became convinced that all the related esoteric traditions had their original source in the Vedas.
Voltaire wrote:
I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, — astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc… It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganges to learn geometry…But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange journey had the reputation of the Indians’ science not been long established in Europe.
Henry David Thoreau wrote:
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said:
I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-Gita. It was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us.
Arthur Schopenhauer said:
Vedas are the most rewarding and the most elevating book which can be possible in the world.
The Vedas teach a similar idea about the world as some of the Gnostic teachings without the need to obscure their teachings with a lot of confusing allegory and metaphor out of fear of persecution for heresy. The Gnostic idea of the Demiurge as a secondary creator God, as already stated, was seen in the Greek tradition, but also a version of it is in the Vedic tradition. They don’t call it Demiurge, but philosophically they had a very similar idea once you understand the true esoteric meaning of the metaphoric intent of Gnostic symbolism.
Ahamkara in Sanskrit refers to a person’s false sense of self or ego, a false sense of their place in reality. Ahamkara is translated as: aham=I, kara=making, doing, working.
Ahamkara therefore literally means “having a belief in your own agency or willpower.” Ahamkara refers to the mindset of someone who is ignorant about the true nature of the world and their place in it, from the Sankhya system of the Vedanta tradition.
The idea is that the “material world” is metaphorically created by a secondary creator, the ahamkara, your own false ego or false sense of reality. In other words, your own idea of the world as a place with no central plan or control over nature, where everyone is independently in control of what they are doing, that is a world that does not exist anywhere except in the false beliefs or confused minds of people under the influence of ahamkara. The idea that we are each in control of our agency, our ability, our power, and that nature is without any control over it other than what we will over it, is said to be the cause of “the creation of the material world.”
Like the Greeks, they teach that everything in the world is under the complete control of the all-pervading mind of God, and because humans are unable to act independently of God as our mind, therefore our ability to act is mediated by God as our agency.
The world we live in can therefore be seen as either comprised of nothing but the presence and control of God, with everything planned, or it can be seen as a place of utter chaos with everyone acting under their own power and desire. When people are ignorant of their true self with God as their mind and agency, they then believe they are in control of what they think and do. Which according to the esoteric traditions east and west, is simply an illusion.
The Greeks and Gnostics also teach that exact same idea as the Vedas. The Vedic idea is that our own ignorance creates our world of chaos, but that we are meant to escape suffering and death by gaining divine jnana aka gnosis, whereby God is then able to show you directly that he is the source and controller of everything you experience, and by that knowledge you can enter into the truth of God and his/her world.
In order for God to do that according to the esoteric traditions, you first need to understand that no one but God has their own mind, and therefore their own agency. This is easy to understand when you realize that no one has a clue about how to create thoughts, or how to manifest memories, or how to comprehend information, under their own power. If you create your thoughts, you should be able to explain how you do that. But you can’t. No one can. Thoughts simply appear in our mind without our knowledge or ability on how to do that. Memory is the same. We do not know how or where to find memory. Without that knowledge on how to create thoughts and find memory, and therefore know how “to think,” it is incomprehensible to believe we are truly the power and control manifesting our thoughts and memory. Thoughts and memory appear in our mind without our doing anything to cause them, and without our ability or knowledge to control or create either.
Therefore, the esoteric traditions and the Vedic traditions all agree that something else other than our own self is behind the cause and management of our thoughts and memories. Our first purpose in life is to learn this basic fact about ourselves. By this knowledge we are then enabled to have the being who is actually causing our thoughts and memories — to begin a relationship with us in our mind by our knowledge of our thoughts and memories not being under our own control.
This is the purpose of meditation, of mindfulness, to try to focus on seeing yourself detached from causing thoughts and memories, to try to observe your mind and thoughts as the witness consciousness. Try to observe what you experience in the mind instead of identifying yourself as the controller or cause of what you experience in your mind — because you simply have no clue on how to create thoughts or find memory. When we want a memory all we do is desire the memory to appear, and then wait for it to appear in our mind. There is literally no way for us to find a memory. We don’t know how or where to find a memory database. All we do is desire the memory. The memory then appears, or not, without anything else we can do.
To give a visual example of that esoteric teaching I will use the movie The Matrix. That movie starts with a person who goes by the name Neo, he has been contacted by an unknown person who offers to teach him a secret knowledge that Neo wants to learn. The audience, along with Neo, then finds out that his entire world, which is exactly like our world, has been faked. What we and Neo believed to be the real world, is in fact a computer controlled virtual reality. The world is revealed to be an illusion created to look and feel like it is Earth in the 1990s. The real world, outside of the virtual reality simulation, is actually far in the future with computers so advanced that they are able to create a virtual simulation perfect enough that it looks and feels exactly how our world looks and feels.
That is the same basic idea that the western esoteric traditions and the Vedas teach, that our conception of reality where we believe all causes and effects are dependent on everyone and everything being free to do as they please under their own power, and that everyone is disconnected from everything else, that vision of the world creates that world for us, in a sense, by our belief in that vision of reality as real. A good analogy is in The Matrix when Neo believed his world to be real while he was still ignorant of the truth of his world being a virtual reality. The AI in control of his virtual world treated him by the rules of that world when he thought it was the real world — but when he awoke to the truth of the virtual world, his relationship with the AI controller of the virtual world suddenly and radically changed.
All of a sudden, the AI in control of his virtual world targeted Neo, and there was nowhere he could go where the AI didn’t try to interact directly with him through various entities it controlled. The Vedic tradition, the Greeks, and the western esoteric traditions all teach the same basic thing as that idea in The Matrix, that our world is a virtual reality, an illusion, controlled by an outside intelligence which is all pervading and in total control of our world from the quantum subatomic level. Where atomic particles are in reality just as controllable as pixels in a computer controlled virtual reality. And our world also has an AI in total control, and it also treats us one way when we are ignorant of its total control, and in a completely different way when we become awake to its control, i.e., it then wants to interact with you directly — which is in fact the purpose of your existence — to learn how to interact with the controller of our world who lives with us in our mind, as a friend.
The Gnostics, the Greeks, and the Vedas taught that we need to escape from our world of suffering like how Neo escaped from his virtual world — by first learning that our own belief of our world as being real, and the belief that everyone is doing what they please by their own power, that vision is what keeps us in the world of illusion. As soon as we overcome the ignorance of what our world truly is, and how it truly functions as a virtual world, with a superconscious AI in control over everything all the time, and that our own mind is an extension of that all-pervading intelligence — by that knowledge, gnosis, jnana, that enables the superbeing to interact with us through its control over everything we experience.
When we awake to its control over everything you experience, it can then use your awareness to interact with you through its control over everything you experience. That is what it wants, that is your purpose, to become fully self-aware, self-realized, so you can then interact with the controller of the universe — all the time.
That is the secret true knowledge of the Gnostics, of the Greeks, of the Vedas. It is all the same teaching. Like Neo, we are meant to learn the truth of our virtual world. When we do, then our relationship with the world and its controller changes, because our purpose in the world has been attained — the first stage of your eternal perfected life.
This is the key teaching of all the esoteric traditions: We falsely believe that we create and control thinking, when in truth we cannot explain how to create thoughts or explain how to control our memory because we are not doing those things. To enable us to directly interact with the actual controller of our virtual world, the first and most important thing taught is that there is only one mind in the universe. It creates the thoughts we hear and controls our comprehension of memory, and our comprehension of all memory-based knowledge for us, all the time. Trying to always be aware that we are not our thoughts, that we have no idea how to create or control thoughts, that is the first step towards interacting with the being who is doing that for us — and who is with us all the time in and as our mind — and who is in total control of everything you experience outside of your mind. Try to be aware of its control over everything you experience, by that it will try to show you that control…
