Dustin’ off the Degree – Asceticism

noun – severe self-discipline and avoidance of all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons.: “acts of physical asceticism”.

In modern days you’ll mostly find asceticism practiced publicly in India, but it has a long history in Christianity as well.

Some of the early church fathers got into it and the gnostics really got into it. It is rooted it metaphysical dualism. Your spirit is good because of God’s grace, for mainstream Christianity at that time, or because you have the secret knowledge for the Gnostics, but the flesh is evil. The lowest levels are denying the flesh something, taking the form of fasting or abstaining from eating meat, drinking alcohol, or having sex for a while, or permanently abstaining in some of the more extreme cases. Next up is self-flagellation where you literally beat yourself with whips, which in the extreme cases may have glass shards, stones, or sharp metal embedded in them to tear the flesh. The final level, which is now almost exclusively found in India is exposure to the elements where you might spend months or even years sitting naked on top of a pole exposed to the sun, rain, wind, and cold. With in Christianity this was most common in Palestine and Egypt in the 2nd and 3rd century CE.

Hindu ascetics will even go as far as to permanently disable themselves, often through immobilizing a joint until it calcifies and is permanently immobile, and Hindu asceticism is practiced with the aim of paying for bad karma.

Back to Early Christian asceticism, it was common to some extent with the early Church fathers, especially Origen, but was really popular with Gnosticism. There were two main branches of Gnostics, the Libertine Gnostics and the Ascetic Gnostics. Both groups believed that the spirit was pure and the physical form was evil. Libertine Gnostics used this separation of the two to indulge the flesh through feasts and orgies, they never became a large group and were on the verge of dying out on their own. The Ascetic Gnosticism practiced extreme asceticism and strove to always abstain from sex, alcohol, meat, and anything else that might indulge the flesh. This group was so popular and growing so fast that the church had to get the Roman Empire involved in forcing them to go mainstream or die. Most merged back in with the church and with that strengthened the ascetic tendencies that you will still find in the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

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YouTube, Facebook, Apple Podcasts, Spotify boot Alex Jones and Infowars http://bit.ly/an263-jones

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