But the Kingdom of God here is something that you can enter when you attain gnosis, which means knowledge. But it doesn’t mean intellectual knowledge. The Greeks had two words for knowledge. One is intellectual knowledge, like the knowledge of physics or something like that. But this gnosis is personal, like “I know that person, or do you know so and so.” So this gnosis is self-knowledge; you could call it insight. It’s a question of knowing who you really are, not at the ordinary level of your name and your social class or your position. But knowing yourself at a deep level. The secret of gnosis is that when you know yourself at that level you will also come to know God, because you will discover that the divine is within you.

— Elaine Pagels