Born in England of mixed Aryan-German and German-Jewish origins, I have always felt a profound sense of alienation from the beliefs systems and cultures of both orthodox Judaism and Anglicised or Romanised Christianity. Instead I found my first ‘religion’ in the writings of Karl Marx. Like Freud and Einstein, he was German of Jewish ancestry, one whose revolutionary thinking expressed the spiritual values of what Isaac Deutscher would later call the ‘non-Jewish Jew’ - the prototype of whom was none other than Christ himself. But forget ‘Jews for Jesus’. For the ‘Christ’ I speak of here is the Christ of the gnostics, the incarnation of an iconoclastic spiritual tradition of inner knowing or gnosis that preceded the birth of the historic Jesus, and will survive the collapse of all the institutionalised Judaeo-Christian religions, including Islam. This tradition was above all kept alive in the anti-Roman, anti-enlightenment and anti-materialistic spirit of German mystical theology, music and romantic art. It was the deep values of this Theologia Deutsch and the subversive underground tradition it guarded and preserved that I have always felt the most intense kinship with. In the first centuries after Christ this spiritual tradition traced itself back to Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve – "beyond good and evil" – and to his source and namesake, a spiritual entity or ‘aeon’ called Seth. Like the Eastern Tantric spiritual traditions in which it found its first and most joyful historic expression, this tradition acknowledged the feminine aspect of the divine, not under the name of Shakti but of Sophia – a name which means ‘wisdom’ and from which the word philosophia (‘loving wisdom’) is derived. As a 'gnostic' and a 'philosopher', I sense a deep inner connection between the so-called ‘Sethian’ stream of ancient ‘gnosticism’ and its contemporary equivalent - the SETH books of Jane Roberts and their no less subversive spiritual message or ‘gospel’. Both offer a wisdom of inwardness and depth - the central values too, of the Teutonic gnostic tradition - one in which the divine is felt as "within, not above."

In my view the teachings of the SETH transmitted by Jane Roberts are truly the most powerful ‘Gnostic Gospels’ of our times. At the same time they are the potential source of a revolutionary new philosophy of science and religion, physics and psychology, medicine and mystical experience. I see myself as a pioneer of this new philosophy – one already anticipated by such great theologians and thinkers, poets and painters as Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Anna Ovena Hoyers, Friedrich Scheirmacher, Caspar David Friedrich, Rainer Maria Rilke, Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Klages, Karl Marx, Stefan George, Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Steiner. I see my task as one of guarding the wisdom-tradition or gnosis of these great Germanic and German-Jewish teachers, in order to forge the philosophical foundations of the ‘New Gnosis’ - one firmly grounded not only in the depths of my own inner knowing but in the inner truth of the new SETHIAN gospels that Jane Roberts has bequeathed us. The avatars of The New Gnosis in this age of the Kali Yuga are not the ‘New Age’ sort, but rather those whom Heidegger described in the late 1930’s as ‘The Ones to Come’ ....

I am beginning to wonder whether I was actually born a Gnostic. And I am beginning to wonder whether in the end we all are. And I am also beginning to wonder whether the question is not so much whether we actually are Gnostic from birth or not, but whether along the way we can withstand the clamour from those who seek to label us heretic.

I first knew what it was to be a heretic when I was eight or perhaps it was even before then. I stood halfway up the stairs and wondered aloud to my mother, "If Jesus was just a man and yet he knew everything he did, then couldn’t I also know everything in the ways that Jesus does? Couldn’t I also be just like Jesus Christ?" I felt my mother’s outrage as she instilled in me that I must never repeat such things to anyone. At times I did try to phrase that same question in different ways – "If all religions think they are the right one, then isn’t there perhaps a "right" that is beyond on them all? … a "right" from which they all come?" - but I never found any satisfactory answers.

As I grew through my teens, my questions became lived ones and by necessity that hunger to find a path that most truly fit with what I somehow "knew" inside went underground. But it never disappeared. It was always there. Behind everything.

I had already put together a web site (www.meaningofdepression.com) of my own in which I wished to convey the journey to my Self and to my Knowing through those lived questions. In my site I also wished to convey the profound influence of the writing and work of both Peter Wilberg and Andrew Gara on that journey. When Peter Wilberg asked me to put together a web site for The New Gnosis it seemed the next logical step, for it is in The New Gnosis of Peter Wilberg that I have found the answers to the questions of my childhood and of every step in between. And it is in The Inner Connection that my "heresies" have found a family.

The New Gnosis is a path to a Knowing of myself and other. It is an acknowledgment of the unbounded inwardness and depth of my reality and experience as a human being. And it is a relinking with a God that, divested of its chains to religious rites and symbols, makes complete sense to me. So it is that I can also live a life that makes sense to me.