The Sleeping Soul — Awakening as the Gnostic Task
The Gnostic diagnosis of the unawakened human condition is spiritual sleep — a forgetting of divine origin so thorough that the soul is unaware of what it has lost and what it truly is.
Sleep (and its associated metaphors: drunkenness, forgetfulness, death) is the Gnostic characterization of the unawakened spiritual condition. The Gospel of Truth describes the condition of the ignorant as 'a nightmare, as if they were fleeing somewhere, or without strength, beating others, or being beaten themselves, or killing others, or being killed — until the moment they wake up.' This sleep is not the ordinary biological sleep but the spiritual somnambulism of a being who has forgotten their divine origin and lives as if the material world were the only reality. The Gnostic teacher's primary function is to awaken sleeping souls — to pierce the fog of forgetting (Lethe — forgetfulness) and restore the soul's awareness of its Pleroma-origin. This is why Christ in Gnostic texts is primarily a revealer and awakener rather than a sacrifice — his function is to call the sleeping to wake: 'Wake up! Remember!' The soul awakened from this spiritual sleep experiences the shock of recognition.
Wake up! Remember! Follow your root — that is Me, the merciful One — and fortify yourself against the angels of poverty and the demons of chaos.
Psychologist John Welwood's concept of 'spiritual bypassing' — using spiritual practice to avoid rather than awaken to one's actual condition — describes precisely what the Gnostic sleep is NOT: genuine Gnostic awakening involves full recognition of the painful reality of one's current condition rather than its avoidance.
Nag Hammadi Library