Atlantis

What has Atlantis to do with the Gnostic Way? On the surface, nothing, however, the story of Atlantis is a powerful metaphor for the aspirations of human beings; so too are Camelot and the Garden of Eden. It is an open question whether any of these places existed in real time, or if they did, whether they were the places that we think that they were. In our reveries these places were all magical. Great powers or great actions took place here, and the people who inhabited these places were leading charmed lives. You might say that Heaven is also such a place, and in a negative sense, Hell. In comparison, our own lives appear to be drab and common place. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are magical and don't seem to recognize it. Just look at the context of our lives. The universe has been around billions of years. The earth has been around a few billion years as well. Both the universe and the earth are likely to be around some billions of years more. On the earth at this moment, there are many more billions of human beings. This is not counting the countless other forms of life that share the planet with us. Yet here we are, watching television, reading books, sharing our lives with our loved ones, and living in one of the most advanced countries in the world. Simply by existing, you have won a lottery bigger than any that could be produced on earth by men, and against odds too great to calculate. Why is this so? I submit, it is so because the game is rigged. You are here as you are, because your parentage is not confined to your mother and father. Your ultimate parent is God and you are here, privileged as you are, because of that parentage. Just as you carry the DNA of your two parents, so you also carry the DNA of your ultimate parent. To my knowledge, there is no biological form of life that does not have DNA, or some portion of it. And what is DNA? Like the musical score that Beethoven wrote for the Ninth Symphony, DNA is the composers score, only in this case the composer is God; the ultimate composer. It is an open question whether we have a soul. Science has never identified the substance or existence of the soul. For this reason, many of the scientific community hold that the physical brain is all there is or ever will be of us. No evidence exists for the presence of a soul in a human body. There is a reason, I believe that one will never be found. This reason is that God has no substance, hence the soul which reflects God within us, has no substance as well. Both God and the soul are ideas. An idea is powerful in and of itself, but is the framework rather than the reality. It is the combination of an idea coupled with energy that makes up all reality. If you could reduce yourself to the size of a quark, what would you find? You would discover that in the quantum world, energy in the form of atoms is all that exists. In addition, you would also discover that the energy is not without direction. Direction from whom and from where? It is all random and chaotic, or is it under an active control of laws that cannot be broken. If they could be broken and if they were chaotic, would we be here at this precise moment, living our lives? I will let you answer that question for yourselves, but I know that the answer creates itself. The mere fact that we can propose the question is enough to point out the logic behind the answer. Everything including ourselves is encompassed in the idea we call God and everything including ourselves owe our very existence to it. This is why the search for God is so important. It is the search for the heart of our very existence. This is the Gnostic Way.