“Instructions Before Visiting Earth” and the Taming of Gnosticism

“In the event that you wake up and find your soul separated from source and manifest into material form, don’t panic. Your condition is only temporary.”

So begins “Instructions Before Visiting Earth,” a poem by James McCrae that recently went viral on Instagram and even showed up in Vogue Magazine. The poem, McCrae notes, has been “read, watched and shared by over 100 million people, . . . translated into many languages, turned into songs, and even performed at churches and funerals.”

It also unmistakably channels the themes of ancient Gnosticism—though taming and subduing them, like much of contemporary spirituality, within an immanent frame.

Much of the poem consists of inoffensive and even inspiring nuggets of spiritual truth: “Slow down your busy mind. . . . Nothing is permanent. . . . Listen more than you speak. . . . Don’t keep your soft heart locked inside a glass cage.” But these insights pivot off a sharp divide between the spiritual and the physical. The world, human nature, and especially the body are in a transient condition, masking our true selves.

“You have been selected for the opportunity,” McCrae goes on, “of human incarnation”:

This 3D simulation is designed
to break up the monotony of eternity
by giving you a fully immersive experience
as a distinct ego identity.

Your body will serve
as your physical avatar
as you navigate a dense and dramatic reality.
There will be many distractions
causing you to forget your true nature and origin.

After the poem, we see a photo of McCrae holding a sign: “The homesick alien in me recognizes the homesick alien you.”

McCrae has also announced a new book bearing the same title: Instructions Before Visiting Earth: Poems for Souls Having a Human Experience. The subtitle refers, likely, to a line that has been falsely attributed to the Jesuit priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (and that actually comes from self-help author Wayne W. Dyer): “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human expe­rience.”

This Gnostic thread also appears on his Substack notes. “Reminders for your visit to Earth,” he says in one. “You are a holy spirit wearing a human costume.” “Earth is a place where souls vacation,” he muses in another, “a rustic retreat a little south of heaven.”

Of course, the whole trajectory of modern spirituality—from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “transcendentalism” through the New Age up to the “spiritual but not religious”—is thoroughly immanentized. It is immersed in, and enamored with, the very things that the Gnostic rejects as temporary and illusory: the body, nature, the world itself.

Thus, even as he talks of being an alien spirit in human costume, McCrae finds “spirituality” within the material world, which offers it “a dense and dramatic reality” in which to discover itself. “I used to strive to be ‘spiritual,’” he writes in one note, “then I realized that everyone is equally spiritual because our bodies are literally animated by the life force of creation.” And in the poem “I Went Looking for God,” he begins, “I felt claustrophobic inside the stuffy church walls so I stepped outside in the open air to look for God,” concluding, “Searching for God is like a fish searching for water. We don’t notice that which is everywhere.”

Even the physical body is, for McCrae, a kind of temple: “It is important to remember that you are a soul,” he writes (echoing the famous line “You are a soul; you have a body”—another common misquote, this time of C. S. Lewis). “But don’t forget that you are also an animal. While your body is temporary, it is your only vessel on Earth, so care for it like a precious home. . . . Be sensitive to what your body needs. Tension or fear in the body sows disharmony in your mind, emotions, and spirit.”

In the ancient Gnostics—read, for example, the philosopher Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity—one finds something quite different. The Gnostics were not a single group but a large constellation of movements; yet they shared in common one thing: a dualistic disgust with this world. They held it to be the product of a battle between the forces of good and evil (with the latter running the show here) or at least of a divine fall from grace.

For the Manicheans, humanity was literally the spawn of Satan—the product of demonic copulation—and the waxing and waning moon was a kind of celestial ship bearing spiritual light back to its true source. The nadir of created reality was the body, the holding cell of the spirit in the dungeon of the world: “Why have you carried me away from my place into captivity,” cries one Gnostic text, “and cast me into the stinking body?”

In short, the Gnostics took the idea that we’re really “homesick aliens” with the utmost seriousness and metaphysical consistency.

This resulted, too, in a horrifying moral and practical consistency. The Gnostics were often fierce ascetics, refusing the delights of wine, meat, and especially sex, which risked perpetuating the curse of life through procreation. (“The cause of death is love,” declares the Poimandres, and anyone “who was cherished the body issued from the error of love, remains in the darkness erring.”) But others became transgressive libertines, flouting sexual and dietary norms; some even believed that the soul would remain captive until it committed every kind of action possible. The world of nature, particularly human nature—especially the body—was either a snare to be scrupulously avoided at all costs, or otherwise a kind of plaything to be used and abused with the utmost disrespect for the evil forces behind it.

How do we explain this dramatic taming of Gnostic dualism? The only possible answer is Christianity.

Gnosticism has been called the first great Christian heresy, but its roots stretch deep into the pre-Christian past, combining elements of both Greek philosophy and Eastern mysticism. It was the ultimate “verticalized” worldview, born of what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. And while it latched onto the revelation of Christ in the early centuries of the Church—and persisted well into the Middle Ages—it was gradually weakened by the doctrines of creation, incarnation, and resurrection, reenacted again and again in the Eucharistic liturgy. Christ was the coming together of heavenly and earthly reality—God and man, the world above and this world below, the spiritual and the physical, the spirit and the body—and the Church was the extension of this Way into eternity. As Christ and the Church claimed more and more of the world, the “alien God” of Gnosticism became alien to us.

McCrae admits he was raised in the Christian tradition: “Growing up, my family attended church each Sunday,” he reflects in one post. “We sang, prayed, took communion, and read from The Bible, trying to decipher translated words written thousands of years ago. I am grateful for these rituals. Christianity gave me a spiritual foundation and made me feel like I had a direct relationship with the divine mystery we call God.”

He goes on to lament his church’s “dogmatic thinking” and “subjective” and literal interpretations of scripture—habits that drove him to look for “a more expansive, inclusive approach to spirituality” and to find “God in the church of life”—but it seems that this foundation not only remains but keeps that “expansive” spirituality in check. Indeed, even those who grow up unchurched are shaped—indirectly via Western culture, which itself hinges on Christian beliefs and principles—by the Christian worldview.

Of course, the spiritual instinct to cut loose from the world and the body hasn’t gone away, and this side of the eschaton, it never will. But we now experience—because of the revelation of the God-man and his staggering influence on history—a simultaneous gravitational pull toward the world and the body. The best “the spiritual” can do is incoherently flit back and forth between extremes, embracing transcendentalism one moment and pantheism the next. The body is at once false and true, unnecessary and necessary—something to be rejected as “not really me” but also somehow expressive of and having to conform to that inner light.

One might even go so far as to say that, in the wake of Christ, none of us can fully inhabit a genuinely Gnostic worldview. We’re too invested in the world—too conditioned by the God who created it, entered it, and died for it out of love—to turn our backs on it so completely again.

That’s not to say that we can make ourselves at home. We know that this life is not all there is, and that we remain “visitors” here—pilgrims and wayfarers, in the traditional Christian language. The ancient Gnostics caught this deep truth about human life. Contemporary Gnostics—drawing on their premises but pulling back from their conclusions—catch a further truth: that this life really is beautiful and worthy of our attention. But both instincts—both good and true—are finally reconciled only in Christ, in whom all things in heaven and earth hold together.