Excerpt from Hoeller's "Gnosticism"

Gnosticism begins with the recognition that earthly life is filled with suffering and impermanence. "Life is hard and then you die" is an adage that Gnostics agree with, although they might modify and thus offset the first part. All forms of life consume other forms to nourish themselves, thereby visiting pain, fear, and death upon one another. This truth pertains even to herbivorous animals, who live by destroying the life of plants. In addition, so-called natural catastrophes--earthquakes, floods, fires, droughts, volcanic eruptions, plagues--bring suffering and death in their wake. The more complex an organism is, the keener is its sense of suffering and distress.

To face these alarming facts squarely is no easy. Most human beings have a strong psychological need to perceive life as in some sense benign and potentially happy. Gnostics (and Buddhists) have often been labeled pessimists and world haters because of their willingness to look the dark face of the world in the eye. Yet, both of these traditions affirm that there is a way out of suffering and ignorance, and that this way out involves an essential, salvific change in consciousness.

As long as a person will not raise his or her consciousness beyond the physical world to higher, spiritual realities, the soul's enslavement in darkness-whether darkness in the outer, physical world or in the world of the mind--continues. It is as though the body and the mind were bars of a cage in which the soul (or spirit) is trapped. When the captive entity exits the cage and flies aloft, it rises to spiritual realms where ultimate meaning and happiness abide. Soaring through these regions, it finally reaches its primordial home, the Divine.

Describing Gnostics as pessimists is valid only if one maintains that the physical and personal psychological realms are the only realities. Regrettably, this view underlies much contemporary secular thought in our culture. In contrast to this view, the Gnostics assign a high value to the self-liberating potential of transcendental consciousness.