logicp_writings/queer/Queer Gnostic Cult.md

The Queer Gnostic Cult

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The father is the unbegotten God (not brought into the world) The son is the self-begotten God (brings himself into the world) Holy spirit is the begotten God (is what moves in the world)

The undifferentiated ONE/ALL The self-begotten is the Mind of God. God Begot his own mind. The mental principle: the son of God. The Redeemer. God thought and the thought of God begot the Mind of God. God Begot himself.

The Undifferentiated One: Unbegotten father The Son: The self-begotten mind Man: The begotten form (mind into matter)

In Hermeticism, man is the third person of the Godhead. All of us.

"The I is fulfilled through the We" - Paulo Freire

The One, Mind and Man.

Elevate through the levels of spiritual ascension within the begotten universe up to the level of remember that you are able to elevate yourself back up to the 2nd person of the Godhead and become self-begetting. The distinctions are an illusion - you are not distinct. You must elevate yourself spiritually up to the point of becoming self-begotten.

Becoming your own Christ. Salvific self-knowlege. You save yourself with your Gnosis.

And when Mankind remembers/realizes that he's the third person of the Godhead, and elevates himself spiritually to realizing he's his own saviour as the second person of the Godhead, then the end of history can arrive, things become perfect and we fold back into the undifferentiated One. We enter into the first person of the Godhead adn everything is made whole again.

You hear this with the Communists: We all have to adopt socialist consciousness and accelerate the contradictions until eventually we all have one Communist mind. We become a perfect Species Being at which point we've achieved the mind of God, the Utopia begins and we fold back into the perfect Kingdom.

That's the formula of Socialism or Marxist Communism. It's hermetic - the idea that Hegel saw through the Phenomenology of Spirit describing how spirit develops and, at the end, recognizes itself. How the Vertgeist becomes the Absolute Spirit. The spirit of the world that no longer sees itself as spirit. The perfect idea (absolute) is the perfected idea - no longer the objective idea and subjective idea separated - it is the perfect idea that knows itself to be the perfect idea.

This ascension through these spiritual levels is characterized as a process of becoming. Becoming what you already are but have forgotten because you've been trapped into a mundane body, flung into the mundane world and don't realize that you are not just like God but that you are God.

That sounds profoundly crazy - an introduction to Hermeticism.

The Corpus Hermeticum

Broken into 17 books - the magical number in Dialectical Thinking for Pythagorean mathematical reasons. The spiral of Theodorus - 17 times around makes 1 turn and then you overlap at a higher level. 17 is a transformational number 17 contradictions of capitalism in Marxism 17 generative themes necessary to Conscientize someone to a higher level of critical consciousness 17 Sustainable Goals for the United Nations.

The Poimandres

First book of the Corpus Hermeticum "You have taught me these things well as I wished, oh Nous. Now teach me how the way back is found". Hermes is being taught by the mind of God and he is referring to him as "Nous", meaning "Mind" - Capitalized and retained in the Greek in this translation because the publishers want it to be very clear that it's what's meant by the divine holy mind of God - the second person of the Godhead.

He knows he's trapped in a world that he is not of and he is awakened to the fact that he is the third person of the Godhead, so to speak. He asks what is the way back to God, or oneness, or wholeness. The response:

"First, in the dissolution of the material body, one gives the body itself up to change. The form you had becomes unseen and you surrender to the divine power your habitual character now inactive. The bodily senses return to their own sources, then they become parts again and rise for action while the seat of emotions and desire go to mechanical nature."

"Thus, a man starts to rise up through the harmony of the cosmos. To the first plane, he surrenders the activity of growth and diminution. To the second, the means of evil - trickery now being inactive. To the third, covetous deceit, now inactive. And to the fourth, the eminence pertaining to ruler, being now without averous. To the fifth, impious daring and reckless audacity. To the sixth, evil impulses for wealth, all these being now inactive. To the seventh plane, the falsehood which waits in ambush."

You have to elevate yourself through these 7 plans of existence. Give up on growing or shrinking, second on tricking and being evil, third on covet and deceit, fourth on greed and the power to rule, fifth you have to give up impulsiveness. Sixth, evil impulses for wealth have to go away. And then there is the seventh plane - the last falsehood which waits in ambush. How do you get rid of that, when you are a separate self?

The first step was to give up the body itself. Then you go through spiritual transformations. Finally, in the end, You have to overcome the self itself - the falsehood which waits in ambush - that you are you.

The first seven are the begotten realm, that you can ascend through, and then you can enter the self-begotten realm.

"Then, stripped of the activities of the cosmos, he enters the substance of the eighth plane with his own power and he sings praises to the father with those who are present. Those who are near rejoicing at his coming. Being made like to those who are there together, he also hears certain powers which were above the eighth sphere, singing praises to God with sweet voice. Then, in due order, they ascend to the father and they surrender themselves to the powers, and becoming the powers they are merged in God. This is the end - the supreme good - for those who have hade the higher knowledge to become God."

This is the end - the supreme good for those who have higher knowledge to become God.

Well then, why do you delay? Should you not, having received all, become the guide to those who are worthy so that the human race may be saved by God through you? You are in hermetic belief to become the saviour of humanity and yourself. You elevate yourself to the plane of the self-begotten at which point you have attained the mind of god, at which point you have the capacity to save humanity and a moral obligation to do all of this.

Reflecting

Doesn't this sound how Woke and Marxism operate? We all have to become Socialists, we have to give up all of our stuff, we have to own nothing and be happy, we have to give up all of our inequities so that we can ascend spiritually to being our species being, at which point the Utopia can begin to emerge and we will all be saved from ourselves and the world will be sustainable.

In Hermeticism, using the magical principles, you are to renounce your body, you are to renounce to world as it is and you are to Spiritually Ascend.

Become Zarathrusta - hide in a cave and then come down and tell everyone how to be the Superman.

Recap

First, you must realize that you are not distinct from God. Than you must go through stages to spiritually purify yourself to transform your essence - to recollect the mind of god and to remember that you have the mind of God and are thus the mind of God which will allow you to elevate yourself to the salvific status of self-begotten which is Mind itself and then use that to save yourself and all of Mankind - this is the religious duty of Hermeticism, Marxism and Queer Theory.

It's Unity - Criticism - Unity.

First, you have to have the desire for unity, then you have to criticize, and self-criticize, and struggle out all those 7 forms of world desire to purge them out of you so you can come together into a new form of unity on a new basis, which is Socialist-Gnosis, and once you have the higher knowledge, you can become God.

But it's not you individually, it's You Plural. That's the story of Marxism. Hermeticism driven by Gnosticism. It's a religion - ac ult religion - hundreds of millions of people have suffered and died as a result of us thinking it's an economic or social theory or political program when, in fact, it is a cult religion that will always result in civilization-scale Jonestown.

Woke is not different.

The sustainability crap, ESG, sustainable development goals of Agenda 2030 and their 17 sustainable development goals - not different. Same thing.

The reason that it's like this is because Hermeticism believs that God doesn't know he's God, because he's the undifferentiated all and cannot directly know he is God, so through Man and his place in creation, Man can realize his own divine nature and through that the illusion of all distinctions, which drive the spiritual failures that you have to ascend through. And in the mind of Man (as in the Mind of Man), so in the mind of God. Which are only distinct through illusion - the distinction isn't real anyway. Man is God. So when man realizes his true nature as God - as the undifferentiated All - God realizes that God is God and is actualized, at which point all becomes All - and All folds back into the All and all distinction is removed and thus all suffering/death etc are erased, because those things don't exist in God which is perfect and atemporal - always was and always is and always will be.

Man, therefore, makes God realize that God is God (in Hermeticism) and by realizing that God is God, and that all distinction is an illusion, the world is perfected - Man gets to go home to his spiritual origins / birthright.

Hegel, thus Marx, appropriated all of this machinery. Hegel was a hermeticist and he called his hermetic alchemy the dialectic. That's not particularly in doubt - it's worth checking out The Hermetic tradition. Hegel's big initiatory project is the phenomenology of spirit which is literally geared towards the idea that the spirit of the world - the socially constructed holy geist which is the point at which history unfolds through a dialectical process, until it finally realizes itself as the absolute spirit at teh end of history - the spirit that recognizes itself as itself. The Spirit that knows it's complete.

Man's role in this, for hermeticism and Hegel, is to be the philosopher who thinks and makes the opposites collide through the principle of polarity, in order to force a synthesis - the removal of distinctions in the Hermetic project.

The thing: Thesis The other: Antithesis

The thing and its other - the divine and the mundane - have to be seen not as opposed but as parts of the same whole from a higher perspective. In other words, aufheben - this is the dialectic. This is also the expression of principle of polarity in hermeticism. So man, therefore, moves the dialectic through his thought, his reflection and intentional conflict using the Hegelian system in the mirror through which it should be reflected so you can understand it correctly.

In other words, Hegel's system is the Vernunft - the higher level reason - that leads you to be able to understand what you're dealing with so that it all continues to point in the direction that it should go which is to the full understanding and actualization of spirit when all distinctions are removed.

Hermeticism retooled in modern-era language. The idea, then, becomes the Gnostic demiurge for him, and when the idea realizes itself and awakens, it becomes the absolute idea or the absolute spirit. The world spirit becomes this vehicle by which this is happening (Vertgeist) and the phenomenology of spirit is talking about the evolution of the Vertgeist and it becoems the absolute spirit when it completes itself and realizes that it has completed itself.

But what is the world spirit? It is the socially and culturally constructed phenomena around us. It's how we understand ourselves in the world as socially and culturally contingent beings. It's the spirit of the people of the world (what is the world? everything with all the conflicts contained within).

This Hegelian system is modern era spiritualism. The new age of middle ages, finally codified for the modern period by looking scientific. What we have, then, is that the Spirit (like by the Fetzer Institute) is social-spiritual. What is meant here is that what Hegel is saying is that the thing we consider to be the Holy Spirit is actually the World Spirit - he continues it in the dialectical hermetic way as a process-oriented thing. The collective manifestation of man and his social and cultural aspects. What he thinks and thinks about himself and what it manifests into the spirit of teh different cultures of the world. The spiritual is no longer a spooky transcendental thing, but is cultural - it's socially constructed, as was taken from Rousseau (concept of Social Contract theory - we are in chains through the social contract that binds us - perfect the social contract to free ourselves from the social strictures).

Hegel created Hermeticism, its Wizardry, but also takes from Rousseau and codifies the idea that the spiritual realm is socio-spiritual. Sociality of the universe of Man - what we would call social reality or cultural reality - to describe what's meant. That's where the spirit actually lives. Your soul - what you mean - is a piece of the undifferentiated Spirit - but that's the social constructions of social reality - so you're just a piece of social reality which is unfolding historically.

Marx took this and retooled it and stuck it in economic conditions. He relocated Hegel's project - made it more violent and more angrily gnostic. Gnosticism becomes the motivation to rebel against an unjust world in Hermeticism. The Dialectical Materialism becomes his method - and it should be strongly suspected that Marx heavily plagiarized the Corpus Hermeticum or through an intermediary. His Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 are the Religious or Theological basis for a lot of his thought. In other words, all this crap about Hermeticism and Gnosticism turns out to be relevant because Queer Theory is a derivative of Marxist thought and Marx got it from Hegel and Hegel is a Hermeticist.

Obvious in Queer Theory if we're honest about what's going on, especially with the trans aspects that are dealing not just with Gnostic - oh my god i'm trapped in my body and I have to escape the prison of my body - but we're also dealing with Hermetic aspects - my secret gender knowledge saves me - that's the Gnostic side. Hermetic aspects - taking on self-knowledge that will save yourself from Death, because your gender-Soul will actualize.

You are learning to ascend through layers of socially-constructed imprisonment of Gender until you can divorce Gender from your body. Gender and Sex become wholly fluid and wholly dependant on Mind - mental phenomenon - and also on phenomenal and experiential knowing. Then you can understand yourself as you truly are outside the social constructions and you get to self-beget. And with transition-stuff - transgender stuff - you get to transform yourself as a sexual being and physically. Undergoing a process of discovering who you really are - your true Soul absent the social conditioning of the social-spiritual world, and then ou are becoming who you truly are as you slowly uncover and start to realize what you are. This is a process of becoming Divine and aware that you are Divine, like the "I, Joan" performance at a Shakespeare Globe Theater with a little hairy-potter looking girl with a little haircut saying "trans-people are sacred!" - because you are actually becoming divine - awakening your gender soul and overcoming the strictures. Your sexual soul is undergoing a social and gender liberation. Overcoming the socialization that has confined you in the prison of being, but you are doing so by transforming the prison and yourself through Hermetic means.

The principle of correspondence is key to this - for Marx, what his cleverness was is the principle of correspondence, being "As above so below, as below so above" - Marx took it and said it was stated backwards - "We are the below. The proletariat, the worker, the everyman - these are below. Hegel was in the ideas -> above Marx said we have to take Hegel and stand him on his head - turn him upside down. Not "As Above so Below" but "As Below so Above" - that's what comes first. You start where we are - below - do activism (Praxis) to change society - that will, in turn: As Below -> Do Activism (Praxis) -> So Above (Society).

The point is not to understand the world, the point is to change it.

Change from the Bottom

Hitherto the philosophers have sought to understand the world - the point is to change it. To do Praxis. If you start below in the mundane fallen world, you do Praxis to change the world so the world that's bigger than you changes - that in turn causes society to get new norms (because you've done social activism to accept the new socialist norms, queer norms, critical race antiracist norms) and then people will be socialized into those new norms - Marx called this the Inversion of Praxis.

The state of society, the existing Geist, the state of the social-spiritual is conditioning people - the world soul is conditioning the individual source - through the Inversion of Praxis. That's as above so below.

If you grab the snake by the tail, starting at the bottom, and do activism to change society - the new society will change the next generation of men in the next turn of the screw.

You get to condition everybody by doing activism which changes society which leads to the inversion of Praxis which leads to the Snake eating its own tail in an endless cycle of transformation until you get to the final point where there's no need for change because everything's undifferentiated species being - Communism.

Transform society through Praxis - seize the means of production -> he doesn't mean economic production, he means production of human kind and society. Because you transform society through praxis to transform man in the next turn and then you repeat ad infinitum until liberation or Utopia from the bourgeois demiurge is at hand.

Queer Demiurge

Queer theory does the same thing -> liberation from normalcy and normativity as a demiurgic force. You're going to change yourself through transition by making yourself ugly, getting purple hair, blue hair, getting fat, demanding people want you, etc. Then you will are going to do moral extortion to force society to accept people for "who you are".

Why are so many leftist women intentionally sloppy and dirty and armpit hair and stinky and all this? Because it's a shit-test. You have to like the "real them". Why don't they dress up? Ask them - they'll tell you:

"You only like the socially-imposed images of femininity - you don't like the real me. If you don't like me at my worst, you can't have me at my best". Sorry, their goal is for their to be no best. There is no best. It's a shit test.

The goal of Praxis, in Queer Theory, is to change yourself so that you can force society into accepting you in your changed form. The new society that accepts those standards and obliterated standards will socialize people on the basis of inclusion and belonging and all of that. And then you do it again - pushing the envelope further - and eventually, through repetition, you land in Queer Liberation.

The same program the same project - Hermeticism done in the Marxist/Gnostic form.

This is done, as below, by positioning yourself as the Other to Normal Society. The Other enables the Thing to come to know itself.

Program Summary

The program works by changing yourself and forcing society to affirm and celebrate and participate in you and your transformation. When society affirms your, ultimately, gnostic-spiritualist claim - what's happening is the social spirit (the socio-spiritual realm) has transformed and now you have a new level of Queer understanding. A new Queer Horizon has been reached. The Prison of the "Here and Now" has been broken free of.

For Marx, you're becoming the Species Being or Communist Man or Social Man. In Queer Theory, Gender becomes a social construct - it becomes irrelevant, it becomes fluid - and eventually there is no gender and nobody's imprisoned by expectations about gender because there are no. Affirmation, acceptance, celebration, participation, and all of these things reify the cult belief and make it real. When society believes it in this gnostic nonsense it's "true" because that's what truth is for them: it's a socially-constructed concept. It's what society believes is true is what is true. So if you can convince society to believe that it's true - Queer Activism is to convince people that the abnormal has to subvert the normal until there is no exclusion by normalcy. Abolish the normal, as Bourgeois Private Property in Marxism.

We see this in some of the big players: Marcuse (Eros in Civilization), Wilhelm Reich (Sexual Liberation), John Money (Introduction of Gender Identity - maybe no as deeply boiled in theory, but was a creeper with a gnostic/dualistic idea of gender being divorced from sex where it exists on a spiritual realm and impose itself on the body - this informed people like Judith Butler).

Queer Theory

In some sense, the first Queer Theorist is not Gayle Rubin, Judith Butler or Eve Sedgwick. It's kind of Michel Foucault (who is maybe the progenitor of Queer Theory), but the first person who really points in the Queer Theory is the feminist Simone de Beauvoir.

This is why the feminists can't defend against Queer Theory or Trans. The gender constructivism as the heart of their project leads to Trans. They're just espousing a conservative political point - it's all they're doing - they can't stop at "Women are Biologically Women", because that's just a political point. Biology is just another form of politics (and this is what follows once you accept that gender is socially-constructed, as opposed to a statistically-varied derivative of sex / tertiary sex characteristic).

It is primarily Simone de Beauvoir's concept of the "Other" in a very hermetic way which becomes the key to the development of Queer Theory. Her most famous song is "The Second Sex" with women as the second sex.

Simone

Women are incomprehensible except as a dialectical other to men. In turn, men are incomprehensible without the other by which they define themselves. Everybody would otherwise simply be human - but we have men and women. Men understand themselves in terms of women, and women are the second sex because they're subordinated - they're the "fallen other" mundane where Man sets himself up to be divine.

Stanford Encyclopedia

Phenomenological account of womanhood - of what it means to become a woman and to enact womanhood. "One is not born but becomes woman".

This inaugurates a sex-gender distinction and the social constructivism of gender and its criticism.

Critical constructivism (woke) is inaugurated with regard to sex and gender (The Second Sex). What it says about her is:

"What is not a matter of dispute is that the second sex gives us a vocabulary for analyzing how societal notions of femininity are lived and a method for critiquing them (critical constructivism). In this sense, Beauvoir offers a critical phenomenological analysis of the socially-constituted meanings of woman, and how one comes to assume and negotiate those meanings experientially."

"For Beauvoir, one becomes a woman not just because others say so, but because she actively assumes her bodily existence in such a way."

The social constructions of what it means to be female are being imposed on you by the doctor and society, but you have to seize the bull by its horns - one way or the other, by rejecting or accepting those characterizations, you have to become a woman - you can do so on the terms set by society (reify the construction of Gender), or you can reject those and try to do so with true agency.

And, so, a person becomes his or her sex in the same way that one becomes a spiritual being. One realizes that one's nature is ultimately spiritual, but in this case it's one's sex that defines the relevant spiritual category. One's piece of the social spirit, or the social-spiritual realm of Hegel - and so you get to choose: are you going to go along with it, or reject it? Are you going to go along with it, or try to find true agency outside of those constructions?

This is the Critical Constructivist approach - Woke Feminism, 1949-style.

"Beauvoir's account of becoming is crucial to understanding how human beings called women come into existence. Beauvoir's target here is essentialist arguments that view woman as a biological fact."

What's happening, then, is that "mundane" biological reality, and its consequences, are the target - because she's angry at it - she's gnostic - she's angry that she was born into a body as a woman and that there are patriarchal demiurgic forces that force her to be a woman in a certain way. Being a woman must be understood in this social spiritual way. You must free that realm through the completion of that social spirit and that results in the process of intentionally becoming a woman.

"Beauvoir believes it to be faulty to accept the common sense idea that to be born with certain genitalia or reproductive capacities is to be born a woman. In rejecting this position, asserted in the most famous line of the second sex, she pursues the first rule of phenomenology: Identify your assumptions, treat them as prejudices and put them aside."

So everything you take for granted is a prejudice -> probably wrong and something that can be ignored. You can see how stupidly one would think based on this line of reasoning.

"Do not bring them back into play until and unless they have been validated by experience". (Universalized social-spiritual experience. Lived experience)

"Accordingly, she offers a descriptive account of how some human beings become women as a matter of living an imposed social identity routed in and generated by particular historical, economic and political conditions, as well as social and moral conventions." (in other words, Hegel's and Marx's social-spiritual gnosticism is the framing in which she's understanding the becoming of a woman. Queer Theory is Queer Gnosticism).

"On this view, "woman is an invention, but also a lived, embodied reality"". (Gnosis of what it means to be and become a woman is the experiential bridge between the material world and they social-spiritual world in which womanhood has true higher understanding and meaning")

"For Beauvoir, the social destiny - those who become women - are expected and often coerced to assume as bound up with heterosexism. Such that to become a woman is to be made and make oneself an object for men."

You're not being forced - you're being tricked into a false spirituality - a false consciousness - of what it means to be who you are - and, thus, you are actually becoming the puppet of the social spirit that's trapping you - the demiurge of society which, in this case, is Patriarchy. You're internalizing the misogyny/PAtriarchy and doing it to yourself. You're becoming a plaything for men because you're being conditioned by men to want to become the plaything for men - an object.

"The detriment of such self-making (self-begetting),Beauvoir shows, is that a woman comes to live in an existence relative to men. In doing so, a woman becomes the other (the lower subordinated and mundane form - In Hermeticism thats the way that the higher form can come to know what it is and realize that they're not different). Mother are usually accomplice to the self-making as being made the other, although a condition of oppression, also bestows recognition and self-justification in a Patriarchal milieu."

Women are fallen by accepting their status as the other to the divine male, which gives the whole binary and dynamic meaning, but they can be made conscious/gnostic to this fact and save themselves by intentionally reversing it - by resisting it and gaining one's own agency - in other words, saving yourself from the demiurge by becoming a woman on your own terms absent the patriarchy, which then becomes the puzzle.

"Beauvoir also sees becoming woman in accepting womanhood, though absent patriarchal constraint upon it."

Become a woman in a liberated fashion yb avoiding all of the subtleties of Patriarchy. Womanhood being liberated from its defining binary absent the patriarchal demiurge's influence is the true nature of womanhood, so you're going to self-beget as a woman. Knowing and pursuing this is the gnosticism.

The feminists's views on virtually everything follow from this, as does all of Queer Theory.

Abortion

The feminist view on abortion - that they have to be absolutely free from the reproductive capacities of the body they were born into by whatever technological intervention they can have. - is a gnostic position. They were flung into a woman's body and can be flung into a pregnancy by accident that they didn't choose - that means motherhood is forced upon them, forced birth, forced puberty, forced being into the world the flungness of being. This is how they think about abortion. There are 3 positions on abortion:

• One trying to understand it
• One that's socially conservative and completely against it
• One that believes it's an imprisoning imposition upon a woman's existence to possibly have been born with a uterus so they can possibly become pregnant.

If you think there are just 2 positions, you have nothing to add to that conversation. You understand the Right wing side and probably understand the middle side, but you have absolutely no idea what's going on with the radical left side, which is actually driving most of the dynamic between he Far Right and Far Left.

"Embodiment is central for Beauvoir. The body may imprison the soul unless we figure out how to liberate the soul through the fulfillment of it actually means to be embodied as such, but absent social expectation and patriarchal socialization."

Women are liberated by being able to become women as women, not as dialectical other to men. (This is literally a description of esoteric religion).

"This sets up Foucault for his contention that the soul actually, therefore, imprisons the body (thus Butler and all the rest later, even as at direction which necessarily refutes Beauvoir's intention)".

Foucault becomes the progenitor of Queer Theory, more so than Beauvoir, because she was so distinctly Feminist.

Foucault

David Halperin is a hagiographer of Foucault. He gave the first authoritative definition for "Queer", which is at the center of Queer Theory. Queer Theory got its name a few years earlier from Theresa De La Retis (branding of the new radical sexual theory -> Radical Politics of Sex by Gayle Rubin, for example).

Halperin wrote a book in 1995 called "St Foucault" where he defines "Queer". He answers what queer is in that book and uses Foucault as the lense (the canonization of Foucault as a Queer Saint). His answer is:

• It is an identity of pure resistance
• An identity of pure becoming
• An identity without an essence (he uses this phrase more than once)

For example, "Self-fashioning" (self-begetting).

Recommended reading by the Gospel Coalition.

We will skip the part of his book where he talks about anal yoga (anal fisting) as a transformative practice. Instead, we talk about the concept of Queer in his treatment of Foucault.

"To shift the position of the homosexual from that of object to subject is therefore to make available to Lesbians and Gay men a new kind of sexual identity - one that is characterized by its lack of a clear definitional content. The homosexual subject can now claim an identity without an essence. To do so is to reverse the logic of the supplement and to make use of the vacancy left by the evacuation of the contradictory and incoherent definitional content of the homosexual, in order to take up instead a position that is and always had been defined wholly relationally by its distance to and difference from the normative."

Queer means it's something defined in terms of its distance to and difference from the normative. In other words, we have that same other phenomenon we've just heard from Beauvoir, where woman is Other now Homosexual is Other, and it's being assumed within the concept of homosexuality as being other to heterosexuality. And Halperin says that what Queer does is shift outside/sidestep that dynamic, leaving a vacuum while doing so. By defining Queer absent the concept that gives it its meaning, its difference from heterosexuality, you sidestep the dynamic. Like defining woman absent Patriarchy on her own terms. That heterosexuality sets the standard for what heterosexuality means and now heterosexuality can be defined absent that demiurgic heteronormative force.

And so Gnosis would be the perception of this dynamic and the understanding that it is imposed and inscribed upon people so that you can sidestep it by being queer and thus being liberated from it by rejecting the hegemony of the binary itself.

"Homosexuality can now be constituted not substantively but oppositionally. Not by what it is, but by where it is and how it operates. Those who knowingly operate such a marginal location (intentional marginalization) to assume a de-essentialized identity that is purely positional in character (that which is outside of heterosexuality) are properly speaking not gay but queer".

So that's your first real definition of Queer in Queer Theory. Queer means knowingly opposing the so-called essentializing or demiurgic power of normativity that happens through sex/gender sexuality as a result of biology in society. It's literally defined in terms of a salvific knowledge, or gnosis, about the truly esoteric nature (not the exoteric nature of sex, gender and sexuality that we all understand and see and talk about, but an esoteric nature of what it really means to be that that's hidden - isn't availale within the prevailing oppressi and, thus, carceral framework).

Foucault

He thought everything was a Prison. Everything functions in terms of how it becomes a prison for Being. His decontruction was meant to expand the potentialities of Being, because you're breaking down the bars and walls of the prison of Being. The demiurge doesn't just build the wall - he builds the world as a prison - he's your prison warden. That's a carceral framework (like going to jail). You're incarcerated in your Beingness.

The goal here is to position yourself as the dissolver of the prison walls.

Queer oppositionalism, then, is precisely what a Queer Gnostic would do with themselves - to affect that social-spiritual jailbreak from heteronormativity (a prison of Being) built out of social norms and constructions around issues of sex gender and sexuality (the Closet).

Unlike gay identity which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object choice, Queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth, or in any stable reality.

You don't have to affirm yourself as queer, you just have to stop being "not queer". Gay identity affirms this demiurgic system. Gays against groomers? You're actually affirming the system (this is why gays are under attack by the Queer Theory. Why the T and the Q don't get along with the LGB). Because you are just occupying yourself as the Other in the same way as the woman who affirms herself as the plaything of men.

It's dead from a Gnostic or Activist perspective - it's not useful for you to be doing that. If you're coming out and affirming yourself as Gay or Lesbian - you're just saying "I'm imprisoned and I know it, and I love the bars. I love my prison warden". Queer, however, rejects the concept of the prison entirely (along with truth and stable reality, which is what those bars are).

Think for a moment about how destructive that is for a child. It'll destroy adult minds as well, but pause to imagine how destructive it is for a child to encounter.

"As the very word implies, Queer does not name some natural kind, or refer to some determinate object. It acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is, by definition, whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate and the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers - it is an identity without an essence."

In other words, Queer means you've gnostically awoken to the fact that you are in imprisoned by the realities of sex and sexuality, and you're in gnostic angry defiance of that prison and the facts of human sex and sexuality, because you see and resent those things as a demonic constructor that's portraying itself as good and natural. It is a rebellion against reality for the crime of being in a body that is inherently sexed and sexual.

"Queer, then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-a-vis the normative. A positionality that is not restricted to Lesbians and Gay men but is, in fact, available to anyone who is or feels marginalized because of his or her sexual practices".

In other words, perverts. To pull people, especially kids, into this cult, they will sell it as though anyone who has specialist or different or peculiar sexual practices, interests or desires. And they can convince kids and teenagers that that's anyone: you're demisexual, you're graysexual, you're amorphous asexual, whatever. A million different sexualities, romantic identities, gender identities, etc and whatever the QUIRKS of your personality are, as a teenager just starting to see this stuff and figure this stuff out - they can convince you that that's YOU! There's an identity for that! and it has a FLAG!! and All of these cool symbols and a secret language to go along with it. They can convince kids that everyone is queer because tehy have marginalized sexual practices - because they can take the finest details of a personality and say "that's a sexuality that the world doesn't yet recognize!" And convince them they're queer and pull them into the cult.

He gives some examples: "It could include some married couples without children, for example. Or even, who knows, some married couples with children. With, perhaps, very naughty children"

"Queer, in any case, does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions. Rather, it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise content and heterogenous scope cannot, in principle, be delimited in advance".

Queer theory has no bottom point. THere is no end to how perverse it can be, how far it can twist, how much it can destroy. Anything that becomes normative has to become Queer and destroyed. Anything accepted has to be challenged with queer theory further.

"Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizone imbued with potentiality. We have nevr been Queer, yet Queerness exists as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and is used to imagine a future. The future is Queerness' domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house."

Esteban Munoz 2009 Cruising Utopia as quoted by Dragqueen Pedagogy paper.

"It is from the eccentric positionality occupied by the queer subject that it may become possible to envision a variety of possibilities for reordering the relations among sexual behaviours, erotic identities, constructions of gender, forms of knowledge, regimes of enunciation, modes of self-constitution in practices of community for restructuring, that is, the relation among power, truth and desire."

What he's saying is that Queer Gnosis becomes a platform from which Queer transformation can be launched - designed to change the social-spiritual dimension, as Hegel had it, of human existence with regard to sex, gender and sexuality under the auspices of modern and postmodern esotericism. This is a perverse pagan religion visited on your kids and being called liberation.

How does he bring Foucault into this?

"Homosexuality, for Foucault, is a spiritual exercise, insofar as it consists in an art or style of life in which individuals transform their modes of existence and ultimately themselves."

In other words, Foucault is a Queer Hermeticist in practice. He is motivated by a raw, deconstructive, Queer, gnostic belief. Gnosticism is the motivation, hermeticism is the means, and what we're dealing with in Queer Theory is Queer Gnosticism.

"Homosexuality is not a psychological condition that we discover but a way of Being that we practice in order to redefine the meaning of who we are and what we do, in order to make ourselves and our world more gay! As such, it constitutes a modern form of ascesis."

Exactly like you saw with the Hermeticist and Gnostics 2000 years ago. Pulling intentionally away from the existing world. Being gay, as ascesis, according to Foucault. Here you're not physically pulling out by meditating in a cave. You're doing it morally by adopting Queer morals - Queer ways of being and living, etc, as a spiritual awakening. But not just as a spiritual awakening for yourself, but for the purposes of transforming yourself and the world around you. For Queer hermetic alchemy, the quote is:

Why do you become homosexual? To make ourselves and the world more Gay.

Ascetics, like Buddhists, often believe that they can go off and withdraw into a cave and meditate on the spiritual advancement of humanity overall, and that makes the whole world advance spiritually - making it more peaceful, and so on. This is the same thing, but you're doing it by being Queer.

"By withdrawing from sexual norms in society, you thus therefore can make the world more gay."

It's undeniably a social spiritual practice, then. It's undeniably a cult religion. Put it into your head that we're reading a Buddhist tract - talking about a bodhisattva that's been enlightened and remains in the world so he can transform the world and save others from the cycle of samsara.

"Foucault proposes to us, then, instead of treating homosexuality as an occasion to articulate the secret truth of our own desires, we might ask ourselves: “What sorts of relations can be established, invented, multiplied, modulated through our homosexuality. The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one's sex, but rather to use, from now on, one's sexuality to achieve a multiplicity of types of relations”"

Homosexuality is not about saving yourself from the gnostic prison of being, alone, but it's actually about saving the world from its own suffering through that same set of social relations. So we can transform and end all the suffering caused through the demiurge's power of establishing norms that are built around the physical realities of sex and sexuality that they deny. (They deny biology, btw).

"Expanding on this theme, Foucault expressed himself as follows: It's up to us to advance into a homosexual aesthesis, a transformative Queer Practice of the Self. We might be able to define and develop a way of life that, in turn, can yield a culture and an ethics and "new forms of relationship, new forms of knowledge, new modes of creativity and new possibilities of love"."

"Foucault insisted that homosexuality did not name an already existing form of desire but was rather something to be desired. Our task is therefore to become homosexual, not to persist in acknowledging that we are."

One is not born but becomes (woman/homosexual/queer).

"To put it more precisely, what Foucault meant was that our task is to become Queer.".

Having achieved spiritual awakening and gnosis - a saving self-knowledge that allows you to break jail in a prison of Being in a world that functions like a prison full of unnecessary suffering through norms and expectations about sex and sexuality. it is religious awakening to become Queer, so you can transform teh world and end that situation.

"For his remarks make sense only if he understood his term homosexuality according to my definition of Queer. As an identity without an essence not a given condition but a horizon of possibility, an opportunity for self-transformation, a Queer potential."

Just like Beauvoir - you become queer increasingly by rejecting the "Demiurge's" power of expectations, norms, normativity or, for her, patriarchy, and defining what it means to Be. So, defining Queer as the Other set against an illegitimate standard as the necessary step to be able to break the idea of the illegitimate standard in the first place.

Queer Hermetic alchemy happens just like with Beauvoir's alchemical feminism. You deliberately occupy a self-begotten identity. You ascend through levels of rejection of what's given and socially-expected in the world to arrive at your self-begotten position that is actually the 2nd person of the Queer Hermetic Godhead (Trans people are sacred). There, you have agency, because your mind, your nous, is fully gnostically awakened and, only then, you have agency.

You're not becoming a woman according to men, you're not becoming homosexual according to straight, you are just becoming Queer, as Halperin says, because "One can't become homosexual, strictly speaking, either one is or one isn't, but one can marginalize oneself, one can transform onself, one can become Queer. Indeed, Queer marks the very site of gay-becoming."

What we are dealing with, yet again, is Queer alchemy which is Queer Hermeticism, which is the actionable form of Queer Gnosticism, and this is the cult religion of Queer Theory.

"I think it is politically important that sexuality be able to function the way it functions in the saunas. Where, without having to submit to the condition of being imprisoned in one's own identity, in one's own past, in one's own face. One can meet people who are, to you, what one is to them: nothing else but bodies with which combinations, fabrications of pleasure, will be possible. These places afford an exceptional possibility of de-subjectivization, or de-subjection. Perhaps not the most radical but, in any case, sufficiently intense to be worth taking note of. Anonymity iw important because of the intensity of the pleasure that follows from it. It's not the affirmation of identity that is important. It's the affirmation of non-identity. It's an important experience in which one invents, for as long as one wants, pleasure which one fabricated together with others."

And what Halpering says is Foucault's treatment of homosexuality is a strategic position, instead of as a psychological essence, opens up the possibility of a gay science without objects. Of a Queer Studies founded not on the positive fact of homosexuality, and therefore not possessed of conventional claim to legitimate authority grounded ina privileged access to truth, but in an ongoing process of self gay knowing and self formation (self-begetting). Foucault's approach also opens up, correspondingly, the possibility of a Queer politics defined not only bt he struggle to liberate a common, repressed, pre-existing nature, but by an ongoing process of self-constitution and self-transformation. A queer politics anchored in the perilous and shifting sands of non-identity, positionality, discursive reversibility, and collective self-invention."