Unverified Personal Gnosis (UPG) is a way distinguishing between historical fact and what a person feels is true from their personal spiritual experiences. The word originates from reconstructionist Pagan circles. It describes a gnostic, mystical or spiritual experience which has no basis in historical fact.
My friend Circe found that when she offered Strawberries to Freya, they were really appreciated by the goddess. There was no basis for this appreciation in historical documents, but she experienced it none the less. Someone once pointed out that beer might be a normal offering to the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet which might be corroborated by typical offerings imaged in Egyptian art and it would also be commonplace in Egypt. If someone founds that Sekhmet enjoyed Terri’s chocolate orange that would be UPG, because chocolate has no place in the
Egyptian period when that goddess was worshiped.
Similar words
PCPG(Peer Corroborated Personal Gnosis)
This is where Unverified Person Gnosis is shared with others and found that other people have experienced the same. For example if, in my meditations, I found that Hekate wanted to be worshiped with her name repeated over and over like a chant then I spoke to my friends Joan who said that’s how she has always felt most connected to the same goddess. Then our UPG, that one could connect to Hekate through saying her name would be corroborated through our peers and would be PCPG.
RCPG(Reality-Confirmed Personal Gnosis) / VPG (Verified Personal Gnosis)
This is like when something is not corroborated by a peer, but by something else that exists. If for example you had a past life experience of living in a distant town and upon attending the town you find a gravestone with your past-life name next to a gravestone with your past-life partner’s name and the dates matched, your past life experience would be considered RCPG.
UPG is a principle used to describe one’s personal experience and distinguish it from something which is proven but without denigrating or ridiculing the experience a person might have had. The UPG is often real and true for the person who experienced it. Circe’s experience of Hekate is true for her.
For me, Hadron, it is important to spend my time exploring VPG and historical evidence, as I deem this more valuable than other people’s UPG and both take the same amount of time to explore / consider. I have a limited amount of time on earth and there is a limited amount of historical evidence / VPG, but new UPG is made up every day by millions of spiritual practitioners on the planet and there is certainly not enough time to explore it all. I also prefer to explore something which has some existence in the reality that I live in. Some UPG might be simply a person’s dream and take place in a reality that I have never set foot in, so to speak. Recognising that other people might not be interested in exploring your dreams or a story you wrote in your mind, you can focus a form of gnosis that does share some reality with your audience when talking to others.
This is not to devalue UPG. It is an essential part of any personal spiritual practice and should be shared with people with whom you are working on similar rituals / working with similar entities such that you can convert some UPG to PCPG.
If you want to be respected for your beliefs then you should subject all belief to scrutiny, the application of logic and any form of testing and discernment that is relevant. If however you have truly alleviated the ego, be happy to be the rambling mad nutter who can focus on little bit his own UPG (or as other people might perceive them, delusions).
Other relevant views of reality
Consensus Reality
A reality which is agreed with at least one other person. With our subjective experiences of reality, something might be a part of one person’s reality, but not another. For example, one person might accept there is a ghost, but another might not allow for this. It is like they live in different worlds.
Some aspects of these two people’s worlds might overlap. They might both agree that a person can experience something and think it is a ghost, but the second person does not believe that could actually be a ghost. Many Christians believe that upon death the spirit and soul go straight to heaven or hell and do not exist on earth. In this Christian’s reality there’s no such thing as ghosts on earth, but they might believe that a demon or Satan could cause a person to experience a ghost to lead them away from God. The experience that seems like a ghost is part of consensus reality, but the ghost isn’t.
Objectivity
This is the view that I often take. This is the idea that different people have perceptions of reality, for example one might see a ghost in a hallway and another might just see the hallway, but there is only one true reality. One person is simply perceiving it differently from the other. In this example, the objective reality is either that the ghost exists and one person cannot perceive it or that the ghost does not exist one person is perceiving nothing but his own mind mentally projecting the idea of the ghost into his reality.
Subjective Reality
This is the idea that reality is based on the subjective view of the perceiver. The idea is that there is no reality but our own perceptions of it. Truth be told we only behold our perceptions and do not experience reality directly, but instead through our “senses”. So it is reasonable to conclude no-one has experienced Objective reality, ever! They have only experienced their perception of reality subjected to their own perspective. As such there is no way to ever prove that Objective reality actually exists.
More on this later when I study more Buddhism. See Solipsism and Descartes’ “cognito ergo sum”.