Are you in a gnostic state of mind?

Gnosticism was an ancient form of spirituality arising from the religious ideas of certain Jewish and early Christian factions in the later years of the first century CE. Deemed narrowly to be a Christian heresy, Gnosticism had faded away, as such, by the second century.

But, in its emphasis on a personal spiritual knowledge, gnosis, it was much more than a Christian phenomenon for, in actuality, it was both non-Christian and pre-Christian, and embraced the entire ancient world (the Hermetica is an example), having enveloped Christianity rather than Christianity having enveloped it.

It was the belief in an antithetical dualism of the non-material, regarded as good, and matter, regarded as evil; in a thoroughgoing dualism in humans, the universe and divinity; in the primordial unity of all immateriality, and the longing to restore that unity; and in the need for knowledge to reveal the ensnarement of an element of immateriality in the human body.

If defined broadly, Gnosticism never went away. It has prevailed in the belief in the alienation of people from their true selves, and many writers of recent centuries have been characterised as Gnostic — to name a few: Hegel, Blake, Shelley, Yeats, Hesse, Conrad, Heidegger, Conrad, Lessing, Kerouac and Pynchon.