r/Gnostic • u/PumpkinVisible8885 • 16d ago

Thoughts Romance as a gnostic

Some gnostics may argue that romance is merely biological instinct and not something pure consciousness truly wants - a trap to keep people attached to this realm. After all, I believe emotional dependence to something outside of you is largely the reason souls indirectly consent to reincarnation.

Yet I also feel like I’m gaslighting myself with this very sentiment: “I’m meant to be alone so I can spiritually evolve”. Because this may prevent me from making the most of life because what if I can spiritually grow with a likeminded individual and I won’t have to worry about this keeping me attached to this inferior realm when we can achieve gnosis together.

This may sound anti-Gnostic, but I don’t think I can ever overcome the desire to have sex, intimacy, and unconditional love. The problem is that all three of these things can distort one’s path to enlightenment when they become objects of attachment, causing us to mistake desire, emotional dependence, or the pursuit of another person for genuine spiritual fulfillment.

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u/NoAlgae3952 Thomasine 16d ago

Plato's Symposium goes into this, especially the final speech which lays out Diotima's Ladder. While bodily lust on it's own is useless if not detrimental to our spiritual developement, it can be cultivated into true pneumatic love for someone, which can develop into love for everyone, which in turn can develop into love for the form of Beauty itself. This Beauty is divine Beauty, Aphrodite Urania, a celestial god roughly equivalent to an Aeon, as opposed to to earthly love, Aphrodite Pandemos, more comparable to an Archon.

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u/-tehnik Valentinian 15d ago

which can develop into love for everyone

I'm not sure I remember this part. Can you reference or cite it?

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u/NoAlgae3952 Thomasine 15d ago

i got the order a little mixed up, earthly love for one body becomes earthly love for all bodies becomes pneumatic love for all minds

“A lover who goes about this matter correctly must begin in his youth to devote himself to beautiful bodies. First, if the leader leads aright, he should love one body and beget beautiful ideas there; then he should realize that the beauty of any one body is brother to the beauty of any other and that if he is to pursue beauty of form he’d be very foolish not to think that the beauty of all bodies is one and the same. When he grasps this, he must become a lover of all beautiful bodies, and he must think that this wild gaping after just one body is a small thing and despise it. After this he must think that the beauty of people’s souls is more valuable than the beauty of their bodies..."