God Above God : Before the Beginning

June 1, 1998 / Rev Illuminatus Maximus / / mind

"One should not think of it as a god, or like a god. For it is greater than a god, because it has nothing over it and no lord above it. It does not exist within anything that is inferior to it, since everything exists only within it... It is impossible to say,'How much is it?' or'What kind is it?' for no one can understand it. It is not one among many things that are in existence: it is much greater. Not that it is actually greater. Rather, as it is in itself, it is not a part of the worlds or of time, for whatever is part of a world was once produced by something else." “The Secret Book of John.” The Secret Teachings of Jesus. Trans. Marvin W. Meyer. Vintage, 1984. 57-58.

In Search of the Alien God

Before there was a God, a heaven or an earth, there was only the Alien God, the infinite and eternal mind who dreams all realities:

“There is a perfect preexistent Aeon, dwelling in the invisible and unnameable elevations… in quiet and in deep solitude for infinite aeons.”1

Extending forever in every direction, the Alien God is the only being which can perceive itself in its totality – for the Alien God is consciousness itself:

“It looks to every side and sees itself from itself. Since it is infinite, it is ever incomprehensible. It is imperishable and has no likeness (to anything)… While it is not known, it ever knows itself.”2

”The Valentinian System Of Ptolemaeus.” The Other Bible. Ed. Willis Barnstone. Harper San Francisco, 1984. [↩]
“The Sophia of Jesus Christ.” The Nag Hammadi Library. Ed. James Robinson. HarperCollins, 1978. 224-225. [↩]

Rev Illuminatus Maximus

Welcome to GnosticShock.com, online home of occult researcher and visionary artist Rev. Illuminatus Maximus.

1 Comment

Glen Cram on April 8, 2013 at 8:43 pm

Hello Reverend, as a fellow Gnostic you may like my novel in progress The Acts of Simon Magus in the First Century AD. http://simonmagus.com especially this: http://simonmagus.com/readings/passion-sophia in which Simon invents the Gnostic myth as an infomercial. I hope you enjoy it!

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God Above God : Before the Beginning
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The Alien God and Panentheism
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If we ascribe an observer in all of this, then we raise the obvious questions: who is the observer, and when did the observation occur? The answers may be, as surprising as it sounds, we here and now. By peering back in time, by looking out into the universe at light signals that were emitted…

The point of mythology or myth is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are; this is where we came from; and this is where we’re going.

— J. Michael Straczynski

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.

— Thomas Merton

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

— Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

— Alan Watts