Well, I’m a newbie to chaos magick so I’m still practicing being able to get into gnosis. The last time I tried it, I more or less managed to clear my mind of almost all my thoughts, I think the only thing that remained was the awareness of what I’m doing at the moment (that is, there was only the “wow, I’m not thinking anything except this”) and I assumed that when that little remnant of awareness disappears, I would have fully entered gnosis (It works like that right?), the problem is that, even if I could make that disappear, my unconscious mind (I think) was still alert to external stimuli, i.e. I was still processing the barking of the dogs in the street, the singing of the birds outside or the footsteps of my relatives walking around the house. Is it normal that a part of my mind is still paying attention to all that during gnosis or should I try to make my subconscious ignore it completely? I must also say that from time to time I started to feel my head lighter and I guess that is because of the lack of thoughts. Is it normal for that to happen when trying to enter gnosis?
I think you mean trance state? Also called Theta Gamma State (TGS) or shamanic trance.
Gnosis means “knowledge”.
This sounds like Zen meditation.
It depends what you’re trying to do. If you’re looking to do Zen meditation where you have no thoughts, then you’d great but not think about them. I don’t do zen meditation so not sure though.
When I meditate, I usually do work. I may be cultivating energy, astral traveling, visualizing outcomes, performing rituals or having telepathic conversations with entities, but my mind is never without thoughts.
Yes, but in chaos magick gnosis is the term they use to refer to an altered state. It’s not necessarily trance but any brainwave state that is not the usual waking beta level of consciousness.
Ah. That’s confusing.
In that case sounds like yes @Burgel you were in gnosis. You’re in gnosis driving a car though, because you’re in an altered state doing that too. It’s the quality of the sported state that’s hard to control. You’re sort of looking for your body to be sleep while you mind stays awake. You may lose proprioception, or feel tingles of energy moving.
Yep lol
I don’t know why the pioneers of that particular modality decided to use that word for an altered states but I guess they wanted it to sound more mystical and special than it is.
Rajneesh Osho in his famous “Book of Secrets” gives 101 methods of entering altered states. He states one of these methods will work for everyone. I have found his methods useful simply because they remove the humdrum of trying to think yourself into a state of gnosis.