Knowledge, Gnosis, and Jñāna
The Path to God
“It is only when the real man has become bound that his will comes into existence, and not before.”
— Vivekananda
In the end, there is but one path to God: knowledge. Without knowledge, actions are empty; without knowledge, devotion is meaningless. Knowledge has lost its history, mystery, and, for that, its luster in modernity. Shorn of its history, the word reeks of the thoughtless drivel that passes for contemporary education—if the cost is paid, authorized institutions grant formal certificates, and one is “educated,” one can declare “knowledge.” Absent its mystery, knowledge is a godless, weightless mass pressing man into a mold of production and consumption.
Man is a spiritual being; and if not this, he is only a tool, a rapid fulfilling of an enslaving will-to-machine.1
To be spiritual is to seek God—in everything; to seek God is to tread the lustrous path; and to walk the lustrous path is to be aware of the cost one pays amidst the godless. This awareness is not peripheral, but pervading: it is insight. To see inward is to see God, and to see God is to know.
A strange word—know. It is older than the godless now; it is the unspoken silence before the now that reminds us of what precedes. We can get a sense for how far we have fallen into the noise of now by realizing that knowledge has none of the luster of gnosis and jñāna (pronounced GYA-nuh, with a hard “g”). When we want to lend weight to our discussion of spiritual matters, we opt for weightier words: the “foreign” gnosis, or even more “alien” jñāna. But there is nothing strange about an antecedent silence; it is more native to us than the noise of our truly alienating now. Nor is there anything strange about these other words for knowledge: gnosis and jñāna.
All three words share a history—namely, an Aryan2 history. Their oldest root is ǵnō (or ǵneh-), meaning to know, recognize, or understand; and from this root, which is one of the best preserved Aryan roots, sprung not just gnōsis (Greek) and jñāna (Sanskrit), but also cnāwan (Old English), gnōscere (Latin), gnāth (Celtic), znati (Slavic), kennen (German), kenna (Old Norse), and zaena (Avestan). The meaning of this shared root is not only a shared history, but also a shared culture and understanding. The time lost to history is the silence preceding the now that seeks—not God—but to godlessly crush all into one conforming mold.3 Modernity’s inherent and inhuman alienation springs from its erasure of this shared understanding, which is the path of knowledge, the path to God.
While not as widespread as the root that lingers in language, this path to God is yet preserved in Gnosticism and Vedanta. Gnosticism, often interpreted as a Christian sect (or sects), is anything but orthodox, and thus anything but what one might know as Christian today. Vedanta comes from two words, Veda and enta (end); so Vedanta literally means “end [or culmination] of the Vedas.” The Vedas are the oldest sacred spiritual texts in the world; and more than this, they are the oldest Aryan texts known to man. The final part of each of the four Vedas was the Upanishad(s), or the philosophical portion of the Veda. The Upanishads were dedicated to the path of knowledge (jñāna), the search for wisdom (sophia). Both Gnosticism and Vedanta preserve the quite Aryan and inborn desire for knowledge, i.e., for God, albeit according to their own traditions.
Given its antiquity, it will be instructive to look first at Vedanta; its parallels with Gnosticism will then be more pronounced, and their meaning for modern man will become clearer. Before this, however, a brief but closer survey of ancient migration will help provide context for linguistic-cultural roots.
Aryan Migration
In The Arctic Home in the Vedas, Tilak4 notes that “there is enough positive evidence in the most ancient books of the Aryan race, the Vedas and the Avesta5, to prove that the oldest home of the Aryan people was somewhere in regions round about the North Pole.”6 These ancient texts
disclose the Polar attributes of the Vedic deities [and] the traces of an ancient Arctic calendar; while the Avesta … tells us that the happy land of Airyana Vaêjo, or the Aryan Paradise, was located in a region where the sun shone but once a year, and that it was destroyed by the invasion of snow and ice, which rendered its climate inclement and necessitated a migration southward.7
Indeed, as Tilak affirmed, “comparative mythology ... fully supports the view of an original Arctic home of the Aryan races”:
and there is nothing surprising if the traditions about a day and a night of six months are found not only in the Vedic and the Iranian, but also in the Greek and the Norse literature. It seems to have been an idea traditionally inherited by all the branches of the Aryan race, and, as it is distinctly Polar in character, it is alone enough to establish the existence of an Arctic home.8
While Tilak and the ancient literature he cites make a convincing cultural case for the Far-North origin of Aryan peoples, modern genetic and archaeological records suggest a more central-European steppe home. However, it is difficult to dismiss so many far-flung ancestral voices, whether they call to us in linguistic vestiges or through fully coherent scriptures. Positivistic science cannot tell us what our prehistoric ancestors did, where they lived, or what they might have experienced. Some suggest that both climate and poles were drastically different in the past; inference and hypothesis are all we have to fill in what to prehistoric peoples were nothing more than mundanities. Perhaps as a compromise, if not a synthesis, it is offered here that European-steppe peoples had absorbed cultural and cosmological elements from higher latitude populations; that Indo-Aryans, ancient Greeks, and northern Europeans are all descendants of these steppe peoples, and their myths—preserved throughout Aryan literature and traditions—contain a deep memory of seasonal and solar conditions that can be interpreted as “Arctic.” If, at the time of their being recorded, the literal home of the Vedas was not the Far North, the written word might keep for us a mythic echo of far older Northern experiences.
These experiences, spanning Aryan cultural offshoots, tell us of struggle, cyclicality, and profound introspection. We look, then, to the best-preserved remnants of our ancestors’ grappling with these experiences, which point directly to the path of knowledge.
READ MORE:
The quest to recollect and revitalize the Indo-European heritage is carried on throughout many of the unique works brought to you by Arktos, such as Alain de Benoist’s excellent introduction and original contribution, The Indo-Europeans: In Search of the Homeland…
… as well as in numerous contributions to be found on the pages of Arktos Journal, the most recent being “The Indo-European Fact (and Choice)” by Marco Romano:
Jñāna and Vedanta
At its core, jñāna is concerned with recognizing that Brahman is the source of all. Brahman is only a name; what it indicates is something beyond names, something beyond even thought. Nirguna Brahman is attributeless Brahman; it is impossible that this “thing” gave rise to anything beyond itself, for it is only one. And yet—there is “more” than Brahman. This “more” is misperception, maya. In Vedantic literature, this point is illustrated by a man misperceiving a rope as a snake; the man is convinced that a snake exists, though it never has. Fear and concomitant action arise from this misperception—but the rope never stops being a rope. It is only when ignorance of the snake’s true reality (i.e., being not-a-snake) falls away that one communes with truth, the ultimate reality. The truth is that maya was never there to begin with, that there was only ever a veiled reality, and that this reality is beyond our everyday means of perception. Vedanta teaches that knowledge—jñāna—is the means to move beyond perception.
While some might see jñāna as an intellectual process, it is important to understand that this is not wholly the case. Certainly, one begins on an intellectual path—studying sacred texts, contemplating their meaning, meditating on the divine—but the goal is to take this path to its limit, to know and embody the limit of reason and perception. Knowledge, then, is the deep awareness that reason cannot carry one to God; knowledge is spiritual. We see something of a profound residue of this path in Western thinkers like Vico, Nietzsche, Berdyaev, and Heidegger: Western philosophy must be at an end because reason has exhausted itself; the next step is moving beyond mere reason to divine knowledge. This is jñāna.
Such knowledge is liberation (moksha): One is freed from the bonds of maya, from the torpor of banal pondering. Liberation elevates one to the heights of self-realization, wherein Brahman (the all and only) is seen as the kernel within and beyond the chaos—then the chaos dissolves, like an illusory snake. Illustrious Advaita swami Vivekananda (d. 1902), following the eminent Adi Shankara (d. 750 CE), beautifully tells of the self:
There is no individuality except in the Infinite. That is the only condition which does not change.... We are not individuals yet. We are struggling toward individuality; and that is the Infinite. That is the real nature of man. He alone lives whose life is in the whole universe.9
Here both knowledge and struggle, two elemental Aryan foci, are emphasized. Vivekananda expresses the monumental task so casually; yet even when most hear and say the words—All is Brahman—they cannot but imagine the false self against the backdrop of the Infinite. The all is ever the (false) self, it seems. So incredible is the struggle.
“So incredible is the struggle…”
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Adding to the struggle are the conditions for its endurance: Even when maya is seen as the causeless cause it is, one tends to see it as a “thing,” as something outside of and afflicting oneself. But this is not so: We perpetuate the illusion, or rather, the “I” does. Thus we afflict ourselves. Arising from self-imposed unreality, the conditions of our enslavement emanate even from those with the best intentions; for even these cannot see beyond the suffering-masked-as-righteousness they impose on the world: “In these days,” taught Vivekananda,
we have to measure everything by utility—by how many pounds, shillings, and pence it represents. What right has a person to ask that truth should be judged by the standard of utility or money? Suppose there is no utility, will it be less true? Utility is not the test of truth. Nevertheless, there is the highest utility in this. Happiness, we see, is what everyone is seeking for; but the majority seek it in things which are evanescent and not real.10
Indeed, it is the world that causes us so much suffering—but we are the cause of the world. The Vedas teach that there is no worse punishment than having to be born again, then having to return to yet another miserable human life. And even if that life is “good,” then all the worse; for then the stakes are still higher for the false self, and one is seemingly impossibly stuck in the clutches of a life so difficult to abandon.
Thus to overcome such suffering cyclicality, the postulant—the Aryan—turns to jñāna, the path of knowledge. He reflects on the true nature of his being and existence itself. The swami continues:
It seems that man can know everything if he only wants to know; but before he has gone a few steps he finds an adamantine wall which he cannot pass. All his work is in a circle, and he cannot go beyond that circle. The problems which are nearest and dearest to him are impelling him on and calling, day and night, for a solution; but he cannot solve them, because he cannot go beyond the intellect.11
This is almost certainly his fate, locked as he is behind the wall of self.12 But all that remains is to overcome the false self, so that we might see the end of the reason (maya) keeping us and the world we seek to save forever in bondage.
This standing between knowledge and ignorance, in this mysterious twilight, the mingling of truth and falsehood ... is the fate of every one of us. We are walking in the midst of a dream, half sleeping, half waking, passing all our lives in a haze. This is the fate of all philosophy, of all our boasted science, of all our boasted human knowledge. This is the universe.13
This “fate of all philosophy” is an end—not of maya, not of illusion, but of our chance at liberation from the cycle of birth and death (samsara). Only if one seeks jñāna—the end of reason and intellect—with his entire being does one have freedom in view. Until such time, we are but biological flecks in the twilight.
Gnosis and Gnosticism
We follow the Aryans on their trek through ancient Europa to what is now the Balkan Peninsula. They carried with them the primal seed that sprouted gnosis—the inner revelation. If logos is the structure that allows for the revelation, then gnosis is that revelation—just as intellect is the structure that allows for the advent of knowledge, jñāna.
Gnosis did not arise with Gnosticism (a label the “orthodox” gave to the “heretics”—when the new were claiming to be old). It existed in the living word of the Aryan soul. Plato spoke of the Gnostics’ Dēmiurgos long before the heretics were persecuted—i.e., long before the Levantine desert parched the verdant North; Plato was instructed by teachers of the cultural soul and the memory in his blood.
This was the same memory that informed the Vedas. Gnostics generally believed in three physio-spiritual types: pneumatics (i.e., Gnostics, those of the inner spirit), psychics (i.e., Christians, those of the soul), and hylics (i.e., all others, those of base matter).14 This parallels the Indo-Aryan gunas: sattvic (i.e., purity, those of pure spirit), rajasic (i.e., passion, the enflamed), and tamasic (i.e., somnolence and turpitude, those of mass distraction). It is important to note that these categories are not exclusive or distinct, and that each consciousness possesses something of each; the distinction lies in the proportion of possession. On their sattvic-pneumatic path, Gnostics often eschewed carnal pleasures and sought asceticism; this was meant to keep them insulated from the world, which, as mentioned, was the product of an ignorant, if not wicked, Demiurge. This is hardly different from the Advaita sannyasis, who renounce the world for spiritual transcendence.
Valentinus (d. 180 CE), who with Marcion (d. 160 CE) codified the dominant threads of Gnosticism, taught that escaping materiality was a deeply human urge and that we are sparks of the Divine. Thus, gnosis is simply the realization of this derivation. This gnosis was available through Christ. Some echo of this reverberates even in the orthodox New Testament canon, most prominently in the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word (λογος), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Here, logos is the Christ, the means by which one attains gnosis. The intimate connection between logos and gnosis cannot be denied—much like the connection between intellect and jñāna cannot be denied. In short, gnosis was an inextricable, though latent, part of being, accessible to those who struggle to activate it through the revelation of Christ (logos). Memorably, Valentinus’ cosmology put Bythos (“the unfathomable One”) as the primal source whose supremacy was adulterated by the inferior Demiurge. Man, as the utmost manifestation of being/will (Bythos) in the world,15 must comprehend the logos (Christ), recognize the limits of logos in the confines of base materiality, and thereby commune with the ineffable source through a transcendent gnosis. This is the path of knowledge, and its Vedic counterpart is the same: Nirguna Brahman is mysteriously “adulterated” through maya, and man, as the utmost spark of Brahman, must use the intellect to identify misperception—and identify the intellect as the source of misperception—thereby transcending ignorance through apparently irrational jñāna.
Concomitant with the path of knowledge is improved well-being and behavior. In The Elements of Gnosticism, Holroyd writes, “the attainment of knowledge by the human individual has positive consequences within the universal order, [and] in fact contributes to restoring that order to its primordial condition of wholeness and unity.”16 Moving beyond this sordid world, as was the Gnostics’ goal (and the goal of any worthy postulant), enables one to see beyond it, which generally lessens suffering. If one is not “part of” a lesser being’s creation, then one does not contribute to it—i.e., one does not add to the inherent suffering of a fallen order. Vedanta also acknowledges that, while not the aim, individual and collective well-being improves when action is shorn of desire, or when one sees beyond the illusory “real world.” How, for instance, could one possibly seek to dominate another when one realizes the fundamental void of the action? Restoration of order—or communion with the source—is fostered by one’s actions, which, when knowledge is attained, cannot but undermine the false order of a fallen creator: “The candidate learns to reject the creator’s authority and all his demands as foolishness,” Pagels writes in The Gnostic Gospels, and—
Achieving gnosis involves coming to recognize the true source of divine power—namely, “the depth” of all being. Whoever has come to know that source simultaneously comes to know himself and discovers his spiritual origin: he has come to know his true Father and Mother.17
This creator is the Demiurge, which many Gnostics saw as Jehovah, the Old Testament manifestation of hate and evil incessantly harassing its “beloved” creation. Surmounting this spiteful world is done only through knowledge, which naturally brings sparks of truth into a false and wicked “reality.”
No Gnostic sect was as radically gnostic as the Cathars. Catholic Christendom deemed them so insidious as to have them condemned over centuries and eradicated in a final, fanatical crusade. As part of their bearing the pivotal Aryan concern (i.e., the struggle to attain knowledge) out of the Balkans, the Cathars taught the essentialness of an individual’s direct relationship to God. While a semblance of this concern endured through Luther, it was too much of a threat to be ignored by and too unsupported to resist the machinational prowess of sanctioned (i.e., politically entwined) Christianity. And so the powerful brought to Catharism death and destruction—to mirror the conduct of Jealous Jehovah. Far from fallen materiality being rejected today, the Church manages its billions in global finances via the Istituto per le Opere di Religione. Killing indeed leads to big business, so why miss an opportunity to annihilate heterodox views?
Nevertheless, the Cathars themselves were influenced by many antecedent gnostic traditions, flowering as they did from the Balkan Bogomils, who themselves were philosophical descendants of the Manichaeans. Interestingly, one of the earliest Church schismatics, Arius (d. 336 CE), echoed some very gnostic ideas—intentionally or not. Only fragments of Arius’ writing remain today, and these are largely preserved in the works of his rivals. Arius’ Thalia promotes many gnostic (not “Gnostic”) themes, and it is instructive to read him directly:
1. God Himself ... is inexpressible to all. He alone has no equal, no one similar, and no one of the same glory....
16. So there is a Triad, not in equal glories.... The Father in his essence is foreign to the Son, because he exists without beginning.
32. God is inexpressible to the Son. For he is in himself what he is, that is, indescribable, So that the son does not comprehend any of these things or have the understanding to explain them. For it is impossible for him to fathom the Father, who is by himself....
47. The Logos is not true God. For although he is called God, he is not true [God], But through the participation of grace, just as all others, he is called God only in name.
51. And whereas all beings are foreign and different from God in essence, so too is the Logos alien and unlike in all things to the Father’s essence...
55. The Father is even inexpressible/invisible to the Son, and the Logos cannot perfectly and exactly either see or know His own Father...
63. The essences of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, are separate in nature, and estranged, and disconnected, and alien, and without participation of each other and [they are] utterly unlike from each other in essence and glory, unto infinity.18
Notably, Arianism found a lasting foothold in Europe, being especially accepted among the Germanic people.
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In any case, the notion that God (the Father, Bythos, Brahman) is essentially incomprehensible, unbegotten, and supreme resonates with and attests to the preservation of primeval Aryan philosophy, persisting in gnosis, jñāna, and knowledge.
“Knowledge is freedom,” says the Gospel of Philip (c. 200s CE), and “the light by which we [ripen].”19 This Gospel continues:
Those who say [there is a heavenly person and] one that is higher are wrong, for they call the visible heavenly person “lower” and the one to whom the hidden realm belongs “higher.” It would be better for them to speak of the inner, the outer, and the outermost.
This evokes the false dichotomy, so to speak, of Brahman-Ātman, with Brahman being the “outermost” and Ātman being “inner.” Likewise, in the Gospel of Truth (c. 150 CE) Valentinus professes that the error of “reality” has no root, thus corresponding to the Vedic position that Maya (proper) is a causeless “emanation.” We find additional similarities among Gnosticism, Vedanta, and, now, Arianism with the “unbegotten” nature of the One. Here is the Gospel of Truth again: “For the name [of the Father] is not drawn from lexicons nor is [it] derived from common name-giving, But it is invisible.”20 This is akin to the primordial “sound” in Vedic literature: AUM—a symbol of the divine All, the unity of all existence, the unspoken end of which is the holy silence of being.21 The unfathomable One, the Father, Brahman, pure consciousness—this remains unknown and inaccessible to the products of creation until the mysterious pathway is revealed. The Gospel of Truth:
But it remained unnamed, unuttered, until the moment when he, who is perfect, pronounced it himself; and it was he alone who was able to pronounce his name and to see it. When it pleased him, then, that his son should be his pronounced name and when he gave this name to him, he who has come from the depth spoke of his secrets, because he knew that the Father was absolute goodness.
So we return to the fascinating case of Christ as logos: The advent of logos revealed to man the structure of gnosis, which is the means for self-realization—i.e., “the All,” “the Father,” “Brahman” realizing itself via “the error” or “maya.” “For what is it that the All lacked,” asks the Gospel of Truth, “if not the knowledge of the Father?” Self-realization, in the end, has nothing to do with “you”—the “I”—and everything to do with the All realizing itself through causeless imperfection.
This imperfection is the disruption of the eternal, sacred silence—the soundless AUM. The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit (c. 200s CE) anticipates Arius in summoning the “living silence” of the “unknown Father[—]self-begotten, self-producing, alien...”22 What makes the book “holy” is its reverence for the sacred Unknown and the intimate path of the known that leads to it. The “Son of the silent silence” is the “glory of the Father” and lights the way to the unknowable source: this source is the silence of a transcendent “reality”—a beyond that can scarcely be imagined. Shankara, in his commentary on the Brahma Sutras, explained that Brahman can only be understood by silence—Silence is that Self.23 To summon the “living silence” requires an inward fanaticism (asceticism) that the Cathars, those most radical of Gnostics, embodied:
The Cathars made their final stand on Montségur to defend their ambition to abstinence—their will to cease willing. By not enduring in unreality, the Catharist legacy persists—it is the treasure that disappeared from the fold for being antithetical, which is the purity of the first man, the first rebellion against enslavement.24
“The reign of Satan ceases not in this world,” attests John in the Book of the Secret Supper (c. 1100s CE).25 So why in God’s name would one act so as to perpetuate it? Why would one act indomitably? One must only be deluded—far afield from gnosis, jñāna, and the unfathomable All, which can only be nothing. It is the self that deludes: “The self, however, can only be the act to end itself.”26 The Secret Supper continues:
Should a man of thirty years pick up a stone and let it drop, it would scarcely strike the bottom within the space of three years, so great is the depth of the pool of fire wherein dwell the sinners. Then Satan shall be bound and all his host, and he shall be cast into the pool of fire.
For the Cathars, one needed more than mere logos to conquer the indomitable will of the world. Even if, in their Docetism, the Cathars believed Christ to be a mere phantom, a spiritual hologram of the Unknown All, the unquenchable fire of the abyssal biological-rational will demanded the severest action. But despite their detestation of the error of creation, the Cathars must have appreciated the fated loss of man in this world, and respected the fact that to commune with the Absolute in gnosis required the continuation of the mysterious error of the broken silence, ad infinitum.
Epilogue
Having surveyed the struggle to attain knowledge through various Aryan offshoots, we come to a final assessment. Though I am neither Gnostic nor Vedantist, I have complete conviction in the spirit of their sacred efforts—for their efforts are one and the same, born as they are in the ancestral heart of the Aryan soul.
The New Colossus (2025), The Electric Will (2026), and Supreme Being (2026, forthcoming) — this Arktos trilogy represents my exhaustive attempt to carry the sacred effort to a new generation of seekers dissatisfied with the wicked tyranny of the present and future human condition.
I leave the last word to the author of the Apocryphon of James (c. 100 CE):
Be like those who are not, that you may be with those who are not.
***
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J. R. Sommer, The New Colossus: Heidegger and the Will-to-Machine (Arktos, 2025).
In liberal-Marxist modernity, “Aryan” is called “Proto-Indo-European.”
Sommer, The New Colossus.
Bâl Gangâdhar Tilak (d. 1920) was an Indian author and freedom fighter. Nikhilananda, one of the most renowned Vedantic scholars, considered Tilak “an eminent Indian scholar” (Upanishads, vol. I, 7).
The Avesta is the sacred text of Zoroastrianism.
Tilak, The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903), 18.
Ibid., vi.
Ibid., 72-73.
Vivekananda, Jñāna-Yoga (Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1955), Nikhilananda translation, 13.
Ibid., 17.
Ibid., 28.
J. R. Sommer, The Electric Will (Arktos, 2026).
Vivekananda, Jñāna-Yoga, 53.
F. K. Flinn, “Gnosticism,” Encyclopedia of Catholicism (2007).
Cf. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation.
Stuart Holroyd, The Elements of Gnosticism (Element Books, 1994), 37.
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979), 37.
From Athanasius, De synodis 15.3, Or. c. Ar. I, 5-6, 9, 11; Aaron West and G. Thompson translation [https://www.fourthcentury.com/arius-thalia-intro/] (accessed January 2026).
Marvin Meyer translation.
Robert M. Grant translation.
Mandukya Upanishad; see also J. R. Sommer, “Thought: Hindu-Aryanism and Germania,” Arktos Journal (August 2025).
Bohlig and Wisse translation, Gnostic Society Library.
Bādhva responded with this to Bāshkalin’s query about Brahman.
Sommer, The Electric Will, 95.
Wakefield and Evans translation.
Sommer, The Electric Will, 104.
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