God Beyond Boxes: A Loving Roast of Joseph Keel (with Gnostic Fire)

Because sometimes even well-meaning mystics build prettier cages—and someone’s gotta knock politely with a sledgehammer.

Joseph Keel recently offered a bold reframe of God—not as a noun, but as energy. In his words:

"The reframing of God from a noun to an energy also creates a dichotomy between those who are mere believers and those who are true knowers. Believers often align themselves with organized religions, subscribing to doctrines that may limit their understanding of the divine. They may find comfort in the certainty of religious narratives, but this can also confine their spiritual growth.

On the other hand, knowers engage in a personal exploration of spirituality, actively seeking to understand their connection with the divine consciousness. By focusing on experience rather than conformity, they foster a relationship with God that is deeply personal, allowing for the evolution of their spiritual beliefs and practices. The knowers recognize that spirituality is not static; it is a journey of consciousness that continuously evolves."

It's a poetic vision, an invitation to encounter the sacred in a more immediate, living way. And yet...

With robes swaying in amused reverence, I must ask:

Has he simply traded one gilded cage for another?

Yes, he’s released God from the doctrinal zoo of organized religion, but he’s swiftly locked Her into a crystal-encrusted terrarium labeled “evolving divine consciousness.” It's still a box, my friend—just with better lighting and mood music.

He speaks of believers versus knowers, of personal exploration and spiritual evolution. Admirable, yes—but still steeped in affirmation, in identification, in the language of this is what God is.

But what if God isn’t?

What if God is not a noun, a verb, or an energy? Not form or formlessness, not belief or knowing, not an experience to be felt or a consciousness to be expanded?

What if God is the great unsaying?

This is what the Gnostics of “The Thunder, Perfect Mind” understood—not as poetic flourish, but as ontological dynamite.

“I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.”

These aren’t just contradictions. They’re invitations to spiritual annihilation. The Gnostic didn’t climb toward God—they unpeeled every layer of self until there was nothing left to reach with. They didn’t evolve—they unbecame.

Where Keel seeks clarity through experience, the Gnostics danced in the holy bewilderment.
Where he draws lines between believers and knowers, they blurred the whole map.

They whispered: The moment you define the Divine, you’ve already betrayed it.

So with humble irreverence, I say—his spirituality may be fluid, but it still swims in a fishbowl of affirmations. The apophatic mystic drinks the sea dry and finds only silence. This approach to God is not unique to the Gnostics. It pulses at the heart of Eastern Orthodox mysticism, where God’s essence is said to be unknowable and language is surrendered at the edge of the holy. It echoes through the halls of Mahayana Buddhism, where even emptiness must be emptied, and Nirvana is not a destination, but the unraveling of all concepts.

Negation is not nihilism—it is reverence so profound that it dares not speak prematurely. It is devotion dressed in silence.

Meister Eckhart, the Christian mystic who once said, "I pray God to rid me of God," knew this dance well. For him, the Divine was not a being to be grasped but a ground beyond being, where the soul must become nothing to touch the Infinite. He would have no trouble sitting beside the Gnostics in the void, sipping paradox and smirking at sermons.

Likewise, Dzogchen—the crown jewel of Tibetan Buddhism—points not to refining the mind, but to recognizing its already-pure, empty nature. Here, even the urge to know is seen as a veil. The goal is not spiritual evolution, but direct recognition of what is always and already so—before thought, beyond effort, prior to belief. Pure awareness, unadorned and ungraspable.

Across traditions, the wisest often end up saying the same thing: shut up, get still, and stop trying to name the wind.

Let us not crown ourselves as knowers. Let us kneel in the dark, where even knowing dissolves. Let us remember: true God does not evolve—She evades.

With deepest unknowing,
🖤 Virgin Monk Boy
("Now with 87% less certainty and 100% more paradox")

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