What is Gnosis?

Throughout history, we can find records of mystics—people that have had personal experience of the divine or of spiritual truths.

These mystics often described their experiences as “visions,” in which they spoke to God or to spiritual beings and received divine guidance. We can find descriptions of such visions in the writings of the Old Testament prophets or in the statements of Joan of Arc.

Other times, these spiritual experiences were presented as allegories, often in the form of literary texts. For example, Dante’s Divine Comedy describes the poet’s descent into the lower worlds and his rise into the heavens, presented in the form of an epic poem.

In many other cases, mystics describe experiences of spiritual states of enlightenment—states of peace, bliss, and understanding.

If we examine the experiences of the Sufis, the ancient Zen Buddhists, the Jewish Kabbalists, or the mystic figures of Christianity throughout history, we find an incredible diversity of people, all claiming to experience something very similar.

These similarities have made many people wonder: is there a common element to all these experiences?

Even though these people are in some cases separated by continents and by thousands of years, could they be experiencing the same spiritual reality? And are they using the same mystical techniques?

At their roots, these different mystical traditions do come from a common spiritual knowledge, which is called Gnosis.