e Mind" or "Logos" manifesting
Himself through a Body of Universal Consciousness, represented
sacramentally (that is to say effectually) in the "physical world" by
the bodies of a body of believers. The rites of this body symbolised,
again "effectually," the modes and activities of the Body of Universal
Consciousness of which it was the outward sign, just as its doctrines
reflected on the plane of mentation and discourse the workings of the
Divine Mind, which are above mentation and discourse, though not
contrary to it. The acceptance of these ideas seems to have
constituted "Pistis"--"the Faith by which we believe in the Mysteries
of the Man"--a mode of the Divine Energy which resulted in good works.
"Gnosis" was the knowledge of the processes by which these ideas passed
from the life of formal belief and intellectual assent into the life of
realised consciousness. The "Hylics," men in Hyle or "Matter," were
"the children of this world," so absorbed in the life of the senses
five that they lived like "brute beasts without understanding." [Hyle
as a technical term was not always understood too literally by the
Gnostics and Platonists (see various passages in Codex Bruce), but
derived its importance as the symbol of a certain state of
consciousness.] "Psychics" were those whose consciousness was
sufficiently aroused to accept a formal belief in viewless Divine
Energies and to order their social conduct on the basis of that belief.
The "Spiritual," the "Perfect," those perfected in Gnosis, that is,
were those that were actually conscious of participating in a Mind in
common and in a Body of transcendental energy in common. This Mind
(Logos), Light-Spark, and Body (Monad) constituted a sole Being, Man,
or the Son of Man, neither male nor female, and yet both, who enveloped
all things, even those of Hyle (_v._ the Naasene Document) in His
Infinite Perfections, who manifested all things, who was concealed in
all things and who was above all things. An ideal Church or Community
of "Spiritual" men, conscious of the whole Man in each of its members,
could focus within itself, without any robbery, all the energies of the
Universe, and by concentrating and applying them in a certain manner
could give birth to the whole order within the consciousness of the
called and chosen candidate, who thus became a "Self-Knowing,"
"Self-Fathered," "Fore-Fathered" god, a "Race without a King in the
name God." His substance was "enformed