Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I thought I would share with you a column from Substack by a friend of mine, Tessa Lena. Her Substack is called Tessa Fights Robots. She’s an immigrant from Russia and she lives in New York. She’s a really wonderful writer and her heart is in such a good place. She speaks about love most of the time in her columns. This week’s column by Tessa is called “ Letter to Future Dissidents, subtitled Don’t Become a Dissident Before Reading This ,” and it was a good article that I thought I would share with you. I’m going to read the whole thing to you. I did get permission from Tessa Lena to do this. She says go for it. By the way, Tessa Lena was a guest here on Gnostic Insights, two interviews back to back. It was called Interview with Tessa Lena Part 1 and Part 2, and those were posted March 13th and March 19th of 2022. So if you go to the GnosticInsights.com website, you can find all of the past episodes posted. Just search for Tessa Lena or March 13th, 2022 , and you ought to be able to find those interviews. I like to run every episode past my brother for discussion before releasing it to you. My dear brother Bill was somewhat shocked that I chose this essay to read to you this week. He’s concerned that the essay is not uplifting and may bum you out rather than inspire you. So let me address that concern here at the top. Tessa’s article is about the interpersonal challenges of being a dissident, whether we are talking about spiritual disagreements, such as we Gnostics may encounter with other spiritual seekers, or political and cultural disagreements we run into with others. What Bill asked me to say here at the beginning is that the negative spiritual encounters we may have with other people is really the Demiurge and its archons messing with us Second Order Powers. We need to remember that we are not enemies with any person, but rather we are fellow Second Order Powers defending ourselves against the Demiurge. Bill also shared an article called “ The Science of Spiritual Narcissism ” by Scott Barry Kaufman that was posted this week on the GetPocket app. I’ve put the link into the transcript here. That article is relevant to today’s podcast, so let me start by reading you a couple of paragraphs from that Pocket article to prepare you for Tessa’s essay. Kaufman says, Self-enhancement through spiritual practices can fool us into thinking we are evolving and growing, when in fact all we are growing is our ego. And by the way, we’ll drop in that we’re not really growing our ego , but we’re growing our memes . Our memes are stuck onto our egos. Our egos come along with us. They are our personality. They are our self-identity. They’re part of our aeonic inheritance. So we’re not really growing our egos with wrong beliefs. We’re simply growing the beliefs—the memes—that are stuck onto us and overshadowing our God-given egos and pure selves. So back to Kaufman’s article. Some psychologists have pointed out that the self-enhancement that occurs through spiritual practices can lead to the “ I’m enlightened and you’re not ” syndrome and spiritual bypass by which people seek to use their spiritual beliefs, practices, and experiences to avoid genuine contact with their psychological unfinished business. In Kaufman’s recent book, Transcend, he calls it pseudo-transcendence—transcendence built on a very shaky foundation. Kaufman goes on to say, One serious obstacle to healthy transcendence is how spiritual practices are sold to the masses. Yoga and mindfulness are big business in America. The purported benefits of mindfulness meditation have generated a billion dollar industry. Yoga is the most popular mind-body practice in Western societies. Many of these programs offer a long list of promises, including the reduction of stress and anxiety, along with greater confidence, creativity, focus, achievement, success, eating habits, sleep, and even happiness. But here’s the thing, healthy transcendence doesn’t stem from an attempt at distracting oneself from displeasure with reality. Healthy transcendence involves confronting reality as it truly is, head-on, with equanimity and loving kindness. So going forward in this podcast, remember the key words, equanimity and loving kindness . So without further ado, here is Tessa Lena’s letter to future dissidents. So how are you doing today? Have a couple of minutes to talk about dissident life? Have you been trying to just go about your business? But strangely, life has been taking you places where you saw cracks in the matrix that others refused to see? The facade is cracked. You’ve seen it with your own eyes, and things don’t feel quite right. You feel different than others. You must definitely smell a rat, and you cannot cover your nose hard enough to make the smell of rat disappear. But how come
