I used to think gnostic means "unknown", and it originates from their belief "God is unknown".
No, it means the opposite , a derivative of gnosis - knowledge ; Gnosis is the common Greek noun for knowledge (in the nominative case γνῶσις ).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosis
In some sense, this life is quite depressing, when you think of it frankly.
I tend to avoid Frank nowadays ... life is too short to listen to his depressive outlook
Even the richest, most powerful, famous, and clever people, they all have to get old through time sooner or later, and must die in the end.
Yes, but that is part of life and part of the joy. Getting old isnt bad at all
And death ? Well, you have to get used to that. White school is about acceptance not fear and denial.
And no one knows where they are heading to, and will end up after the deaths.
Well, thank goodness there is still at least ONE great mystery left. Where you will end up ? Doesnt matter, that will take of itself. You can practice for it if you want, with some Tibetan or Egyptian system ... or whatever .
And we all know that it will be also our own fate, and your off-springs', their off-springs .....
And all of life ... and eventually the planet ... and the Sun . Is all of life being inexorably sucked down into a back hole of inescapable gloom .... or is it all spiraling up to the centre of all to burst forth again in myriad and wonderful forms ?
It is up to you how you see it.
If you are still attached to this viewpoint - the 'trance of sorrow' - then Buddhism may well be for you.
Sometimes you feel, nothing in life is very meaningful from that respect,
Everything in life and every moment is meaningful , dont miss out on any of it. Otherwise, you might become like the man that takes a journey with wonderful scenery and experiences , but remains depressed throughout it as he knows that it will come to end at some stage.
hence some of us seek for meanings of life, God (who could answer and save us to / from all these mysteries and tragedies in life) and seek immortality through Religion.
Yes, some of us do. My meaning for life is to live it, enjoy it, learn from it, experience it, DISSOLVE into it ......
In this respect, the gnostics are quite realistic about life and the world, I would feel. They are not buttering up anything as if all is well and good, and everyone will live happily forever, and life is hunky dory affair no matter what like some other religions do.
Alright then ... its perfectly okay for you to choose 'black school' ... if it is really your choice , and not conditioning, guilt, family pressure, etc .
But dont misinterpret things ... I aint buttering up nuthin . Actually its 6:14 am, I have been up since 4:30 as I cant sleep due to the pain or do much of anything right now (this might reveal to some why I can rave so much here at times
) ... I have it every day now, tonight was worse than usual . I am not feeling good about life because I live on a pillow. Its a hard place to describe.
The idea behind Buddhism, really is to break free of the cycle of sorrow and come to joy ... or 'a samadhi ' , like the higher aspects of some Hindu systems . After years of right practice, it gradually comes . Yeah ... I know, talk is cheap. But more than once I have come very close to death and felt content and even "Well, I have had a good life, and this seems a pretty good place to die. " But I didnt . Later I realised that is what came up for me ; I was lying on the road. immobilized after a motorcycle smash, out alone on a country road, I couldnt move or drag myself off the road, I was just around a blind corner, any moment a car could come around the corner and pickup me and the motorcycle under it and grind us along the road together.
And I was looking out at the mountains and the sky and feeling 'This is a good place to die " ..... later, that really surprised me ( obviously a car didnt come, eventually I got feeling back to my body and dragged myself off the road.. a bit later I dragged the bike off too. Still another half hour before help came.
I havent seen real horror though, that may change my view. I have worked volunteer for A.I and helped relocate refugees and worked with torture victims ... horrible, I would never deem to tell them how they should deal with that. But some had a similar attitude, and they were surviving and shining .... but then again , they are not trapped in some camp somewhere .
If things get too painfull, then I will act to end iot, simple. I had a young beautiful friend that had to do that ... years back and it still wrenches my heart .... but that doesnt change my view. Part of her life was great ! Other parts were not so great , but I was able to help there a bit.
We do what we can .... even without 'Buddhist sorrow' we must show compassion.
After the end of the ancient Greco Roman era, somehow the main stream religions failed to give answers to all these questions and problems of general public, hence some of them started looking into under world religion such as gnostics.
I think they did well up to the advent of Christianity ... which was firstly a gnostic Mithriac type of mystery religion. The the church got hold of it ... the hierarchy of priests.
Swinburne has an excellent piece on it
' Hymn to Proserpine (After the Proclamation in Rome of the Christian Faith) '
( " Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the pæan, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake; " )
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174559
Rather than going with the priests and vicars and the establishments of the temples, churches and systems, they have seek to meet the God via more direct methods - ritual magics under the gnostic beliefs.
You need to be reunited with God, get enlightened with true knowledge, and be saved from all the troubles in this world, and gain immortality, they would say. So after all they are not all that negative bunch, as one might think.
Anti sex? - well some of them perhaps, but not all of them were, I believe.
No, there are both white and black school gnostics. This 'school' concept is about underlying philosophy, not whether if one was a gnostic or not.
Was it Crowley who termed it?
I dont know. It was from Crowley where I first read the terms.
If so, it sounds contradictory, because a few of his Magickal rituals originate from gnostics, I was told.
I dont understand your perception of contradiction here ?
He has classified some religions, systems of magic, philosophies and viewpoints according to their underlying concepts about life ... life affirming or life denying. He also recommends some Buddhist meditations .
How is it 'contradictory ' ?