I, Golgafrinchan
Ah the setback, leaving you so far behind, which is only where we’ve always been. Help us take a stand here, do it cheaper, faster, better. Refine, and cease ceaseless engraving, no new channels, just new content. Better content. Made by all of us. The best will still rise to the top without the middle managers.
UPG?
UPG, unverified personal gnosis, is a term that strikes me as funny because it’s mostly redundant. Gnosis, as I understand it, is usually both unverifiable and personal. Jung seems to have blessed us with the idea of a collective symbolic canon, which has evolved into the notion that only dreams and visions that line up with books are true. This leads to all sorts of tomfoolery, most of which just leads to people missing the point as usual. UPG as a term, in it’s main effect, only serves to shield people who would otherwise be drawn out of being literal interpreters of symbolic truths. How so? By setting the focus on the text as arbiter of canon, we are limited to two choices, reject or accept the book. However, when the focus is pulled back from historical concerns, perhaps by recognizing that spirituality and/or faith are equally useful in their social and moral functions, we can see that there are gradients of belief, beyond mere acceptance or rejection. In summary, I feel the very term UPG puts the focus of the gnosis experience on the source of verification and decouples it from person-hood, making it a somewhat problematic meme.
