ORT (Only Read Title) There's a riddle in the Gospel of Thomas[1]: "Make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside." Here's an interpretati

ORT (Only Read Title) There's a riddle in the Gospel of Thomas[1]: "Make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside." Here's an interpretation: "inside" and "outside" refer to the inner world and the outer world. These share some qualities or aspects, both are known only subjectively, and there's a similarity of form (there are e.g. red triangles in both worlds) and susceptibility to will (we can move our bodies and we can affect what we imagine, aka the faculty of imagination. Both of these abilities present the same problem: what is intention and how does it relate to will to cause changes in perception?) Otherwise they are very different. The outer world is made of matter/energy in various configurations and, while we don't (yet) know what the inner world is made of, it's obviously very different than matter/energy. Perhaps the main difference is that you can more-or-less manipulate the contents of imagination (I'm using the word here as a proxy for the whole of internal world) "at will" but the contents of the real world obey a physics that dictates that you more-or-less have to push things with other things to get anything in particular to happen (please forgive my gross simplification.) Now consider the subjective experience of an omnipotent, omniscient being. If you can know and alter the "outer" world just as easily as you can know and alter the "inner" world, wouldn't they effectively be the same? In the context of a Gnostic tradition, I think it means that, when one unifies the self with the Self the "real" world and the "imaginary" world also become one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas