Terje Dahl Bergersen.
Gnostic Christian Philosopher.

Motto:

He that Knows God, Knows His Mercy.

This (what follows below) was written in 1999, which is now 3 years past.
In the year 2002 I still consider myself a Gnostic and a Christian, but perhaps less of a philosopher by heart. I have had occasion to consider the truth of the Motto I chose back then many times in more recent times, and feel I subscribe to it as readily as I did then. I think I could add that experience often contribute a certain depth to observations made earlier on our voyage. I will let this stand, as if nothing else, a testimony associated with the first texts presented in the context of this anthology,
Terje D. Bergersen, Oslo 22.04.2002

I was born the 13th September 1972, in Oslo, Norway. It was an eventful year of which I remember nothing. I grew up in the end of the 7 decade of the 20th century, not without difficulty entering the 8th and the final decade, which as its end at the time I write this.

My spiritual journey into the difficult and challenging landscape of the Gnostic orientation begun an evening in the autumn of 1987, I had just turned 15 and gone through a rough but uneventful adolescence, or rather, to be specific about it, I was standing in that most dark nethermost circle of inferno called the teen-age. I dwelt in the shadow of a self disintegrated and fragmented, by pain and shame and a suffocating and acute awareness of my own limitations and lackings as a human being. In that condition, without preparation, I was approached by the face of Grace - and the doors slammed shut at us when we leave the innocence of nativity, opened.
Since then I have traveled in unfamiliar landscapes , my condition that of process and progress. The basis of my present orientation is the recognition of the precondition of Grace in all things; without it, no thing could stand, no Universe and no particle. Light shines through it, and with the interior presence of it as a spark in us, and the descent of salvific images and types, our vision is renewed and awakened, our lives quickened. I recognize the Real as the Essential Essence from which all things manifest in engendered existence has come, and in whom all possible things are at rest.

I am pleased to attest that I am far from alone in my quest and on my journey, and I am grateful unto God for the occasions this fact can be reaffirmed by way of communication between equals - the nature of this equality is that is we are lovers of Wisdom.

May we live in that Light, have glory in that Life, and remain in the embrace of that Grace. Amen!