Greetings, enlightened viewers, to Science and Spirituality for part one of a two-part program on American author and Gnostic Gospels expert Peter Canova. After an extraordinary career as an international businessman and luxury hotel developer, Mr. Canova began studying ancient mystical teachings, quantum physics and psychology. Today he’ll discuss his perspective on the mysteries of creation and the meaning of the Gnostic Gospels as well as other spiritual insights he’s gained from his research.

In Judaism, you have the Kabala, which is the mystical core of Judaism. In Islam, you have Sufism, which is the mystical core of Islam, and Gnosticism was the mystical core of Christianity.

Mr. Canova is author of the “First Souls” novel trilogy. Book one is called “Pope Annalisa” and has won seven national book awards in the US including the prestigious Nautilus Gold Medal Award and the Independent Publishers Award.

My name is Peter Canova. I’m from the United States and I’m an author. I had a series of, I guess what you call psychic experiences when I was younger. And it put me on the quest to understand the whole basis of how these types of phenomena happen to us. I sensed that we must all be connected in some sort of matrix or energy field. So just trying to really understand and answer those questions set the course of my later life.

I think what has been missing in organized religions for a long time is a flexibility that allows a person to determine their own spiritual experiences, their own images, their own dreams and things like that without being channeled into what is accepted by the particular religious group. When you have a spiritual perspective, but you don’t lock it into any particular type of creed, your ability to experience that spirit is a lot broader.

The modern world is rediscovering the mysteries of the East and the significance of yin, the female energy, and yang, the male energy, for spiritual advancement. Psychologist Carl Jung, known for his adept studies of Gnosticism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and other traditions, believed that the unification of the yin and yang polarities within the individual is an important step in achieving spiritual wholeness, or merging with the higher Self.

All of us are born with both male and female qualities within us. Now Carl Jung, the famous psychologist, would call it the anima and the animus, which is the male part in the female and the female in the male. And one’s ability to use those faculties simultaneously is what makes an outstanding human being. When we bring those faculties into balance, we have a person who can be both feeling and intuitive, a person who can be both logical and analytical. And I think that that is certainly a gateway to opening up to higher spiritual experience.

The sacred feminine was always the recognition that there are two faces of God, that God in this world expresses itself in terms of male and female qualities. The sacred feminine, in particular, was the belief of the ancients that it was the divine feminine faculty that led directly to the creation of the material world and the creation of material experience. And therefore in very early societies, you had a lot of worship of the goddess as opposed to the god, the male god image. And along with that worship of the goddess went a respect for these feminine faculties. People took a more intuitive approach and a heartfelt feeling approach towards their spirituality

When consciousness first came into physical form, the world must have been a very magical and intuitive place back then. The human being was closer to the source of the consciousness that had descended into the physical body. I think what happened was all of a sudden, the spirit in the human being woke up to the shock that it was in a physical body, and now it had survival issues.

They had to develop a more male type of analytical strategy to understand the things in the world and survive. And I think that worked but it went overboard. Now we’ve gone almost to an extreme on the male side, and I think the reason why real spirituality has become so obscured is because we have lost the ability to believe in our own imaginations and listen to our own intuition, and listen to the heart rather than just the head

You can follow any of those charts you see on the left brain and right brain faculties. Generally speaking, the male or the left brain faculties are logic, analysis, linear thinking, tend to be very verbal in orientation, and tend to want to classify things. The male orientation wants to break the whole into parts to understand it. Now the female, on the other hand, is more feeling and intuitive, and it looks at the whole rather than the parts. Now we all have each of them, but in most cases one side is more pronounced than the other. So, it's important to bring those two into balance.

We asked Mr. Canova to speak about his award-winning book and its message.

I’ve written a novel called “Pope Annalisa” about an African nun who becomes the first female pope, but in the book it deals with a lot of scientific, spiritual, and metaphysical themes. And it’s really about the origin, the destiny and the purpose of human beings here on Earth.

It’s about spirit transcending religion, quantum science transcending tradition, material science and consciousness transcending matter.

We haven’t seen a female priest before; we certainly haven’t seen a female Pope before. And so I started thinking what would it be like. What would a woman be like who would be able to become a Pope when that’s been an exclusively male occupation for 2,000 years, and what kind of a world would accept that? What kind of a world would allow that to happen?

So from those questions, I started to build the whole platform of the world that Pope Annalisa might live in. So I just kind of built on from that and then that vehicle just became an outpouring of my own spiritual expression of what I wanted to convey to people. I felt that the experiences I had were so vivid, I wanted a way to convey the knowledge that I’ve brought back from those experiences to other people in hopes that would help them in their own particular spiritual journey.

In 1945 some of the texts that are part of the Gnostic Gospels were discovered in Egypt, and their finding led to profound insights about the meaning of the spiritual teachings of past enlightened masters such as Jesus.

We see very clearly that Jesus was teaching two different things. He was teaching an inner mystery and he was teaching an outer set of guidelines and parables for the masses. Now in the book of Mark or Luke or Matthew, it’s very clear. He says to the disciples, “Unto you were given the mysteries in the Kingdom of Heaven, unto those without, these things were done in parables.” Christianity had two streams – one was an inner church of mystical teachings, and the other one was an outer church, which is pretty much what has evolved into the churches we know today. But through documents that have been unearthed in recent times, we begin to be able to construct the picture of what those teachings might have been.

What was the nature of these mystical teachings? Mr. Canova now explains his findings.

I’m going to try and simplify. The first thing would be that there was one and only one source for all existence, and that source they called the first consciousness. First consciousness was the ancient, first thought. I should say, first thought was the ancient word for consciousness, so the first precept of the mystical teachings was that there was one and only one consciousness that has created everything that we perceive and everything that we see.

The next important thing in that teaching would have been that this one consciousness divided itself up into numerous points of consciousness, so you could say Consciousness with a large ‘C’ broke itself up into consciousness with a small ‘c’ which would include human consciousness, and this happened through a process where the whole would limit knowledge of itself, almost like the whole would forget parts of itself that it was the whole and it was everything, because as it limited its own consciousness, that created the source of identity for individual consciousness, and the parts could only think of themselves as parts if they can’t recognize the whole.

A specific portion of the Gnostic texts says that the first of the spirit consciousness, you can call them angels in modern terminology, in the Gnostic texts they’re called aeons, but aeons and angels are really the same thing, when the first of these spiritual beings started to break away from the whole and started to think of the possibility of a separate existence, this was the original fall. The first was the fall from spirit into the thought of separation, and the thought of separation became soul or psyche or individual mind.

The second fall was the fall of psyche or soul into the physical body. And the second one would have been the one that we see in the Bible, Adam and Eve. When this first thought of separation started to congeal, it started to produce an effect, which led to the creation of matter. And it’s said that this matter could not vibrate at the same dimensional level as the spiritual vibration, and it was expelled in a great disturbance. Their word for Big Bang was "a great disturbance," and it was expelled from the Heavenly realm. They called it the Pleroma, what we would call the heavenly or spiritual realm. This thought that led to matter was expelled in a great disturbance into another dimension.

Our appreciation Peter Canova for discussing your book “Pope Annalisa” and speaking about the research you’ve done on a wide range of fascinating topics in the realm of ancient spirituality, including the Gnostic tradition. Harmonious viewers, please join us again next Monday on Science and Spirituality for the conclusion of our illuminating discussion with Mr. Canova.

For more information on Peter Canova, please visit www.PopeAnnalisa.com

Mr. Canova’s book “Pope Annalisa” is available at the same website. Thank you for joining us today on our program. Up next is Words of Wisdom, after Noteworthy News. May we always be in touch with the beauty of the Divine.