Why Is There Suffering in the World

I received my copy of the hardback of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel in the mail this week, and wow, it’s really beautiful. It’s just as beautiful as I expected it would be. The paper is the heavier and more smooth than the paperback, and the ink is the deluxe application, so the colors of the illustrations are just as bright and beautiful as they are on screen. It’s a really beautiful book. It does cost $45, and you needn’t purchase it.

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The less expensive versions are just as full of Gnosis-unlocking knowledge. Just wanted you to know. And for all those people who did contribute $50 to getting this book out and in the public space, thank you so much, and your book is in the mail.

And now on to today’s discussion.

I don’t usually go into history in my books, because I’m presenting the living Gnosis—what we need to know today in order to have a peaceful and meaningful life. I think a lot of people who study Gnosticism are looking backward. They’re thinking of it as a relic.

You know, people seem to embrace this whole business about secrecy and what it means to be esoteric, as if Gnosticism is supposed to be a big secret, and that you have to go through various rituals and levels of mastery in order to attain Gnosis. But that is not true at all. Gnosis is inherent in every one of our cells. We are fractals of the Father. We’re fractals of the Fullness of God. We contain all of the information that the Son of God contained, although it’s not unlocked.

I’m not claiming that we are all gods, so to speak. That is one of the heresies that the Christian religion says—Oh it’s terrible, those Gnostics, they think they’re all God. Oh, they think they’re all the Son of God.

Well, yes and no. We are fractals of the Son of God. We contain all of the bits and pieces that are contained in the Fullness of God, but they are unlocked on a need-to-know basis. It’s no big deal to be considered one of the fractals of God. Even the bacteria are fractals of God. Even the little cells in your body and the little parts inside of your cells, they are also fractals of the Fullness of God. But we have various amounts of those fractals turned on inside of us, depending on where we are and what we do in this universe.

So, I don’t know how to be a kidney cell. I really wouldn’t know how to do that if I found myself suddenly miniaturized and stuck into a kidney. I wouldn’t know what my job was or how to interface with my neighbors. But the kidney cells do, because the Aeons that they represent are kidney cells; they know how to be a cell inside of a body. I know how to be a human being on the surface of this Earth planet. All of us human beings know how to be human beings. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to be born and to grow up into this human body and to basically function in society.

Although, what we have forgotten is our higher spiritual nature, our higher connection to where we come from and why it is that we’re here on this planet. That’s the only information that I share with you here on Gnostic Insights. It’s the how and why and how-to of the very, very simple piece of information that everyone needs to grasp. Although, even if you never do grasp the gnosis, it doesn’t mean you’re going to hell. It just means you don’t get it.

So what is that basic piece of gnosis? Everybody who’s been listening to me for a while, you know this answer by now, right? That basic piece of gnosis is only this: We come from the spiritual realm. We come from the Father and we will return to the spiritual realm. We will return to the Father.

We’re not going to be stuck on this “prison planet” forever because the Father and the Fullness are trying to wrap it up. They’ve issued a recall on this material world that we live in. We’re just passing through it. Our ultimate destination is to return to the Fullness of God, which is what we tend to think of as paradise. It’s the reason why this material world is so difficult and is such a challenge to us and can be so disappointing and sad. It’s because we’re comparing this material world in our minds to paradise. See, all of this that’s going on down here, it has all happened before, it will all happen again, but it happens in paradise.

There is perfection on the ethereal plane before the Fall. Paradise exists before the original Fall and it coexists up there now. We tend to compare our material plane with paradise. Of course, it always comes up short down here. That’s the connection that we need to remember. We come from above and we will return to above.

Every living thing, everything that is not an inert mineral, from the cells on up, from the bacteria on up, the fungi and the birds and the plants, all of the species and phylum on the planet that are living, that can move, that follow the sun, that breathe, that eat, that reproduce—all of the living things come from above and will return to above. So that tells us that paradise, or our afterlife, our ethereal plane, has all of the things that Earth has. It has birds and flowers and trees and dogs and cats and people and mushrooms and slime mold because they’re down here and they’re alive and all life comes from above. That’s what happens at conception. The living life of the Fullness of God is interfaced with the dead material particles of the material world—that’s the subatomic particles, that’s the quantum foam, that’s the atoms and molecules and the minerals and the mineral aggregates and the elements, all the way up through the mineral elements and the rocks and stones. Those are the non-living material that will not go to heaven because above, in the realm of the Father, the ethereal plane, that’s life, light and love and joy. That’s all in the above. That’s where we come from.

So that is our expectation but we forget about it. We know it the second we’re conceived and we know it when we’re born. We know it when we’re little babies but the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi says it this way—it says that it’s disappointing down here. It’s a weak basis for life. We are melded to this material plane, the molecules and elements and whatnot that make up our material bodies. So that’s our walking around bodies but the life, the soft and squishy parts, that all comes from above and it will return to above.

I read an article this week on academia.edu called Gnosticism in the Roman Church by a gentleman named Stephen Loughran. He was comparing early Gnosticism with the Roman Catholic Church. And he said, “One striking difference between Christianity and Gnosticism regards the nature of deity or God himself. Ask any believing Christian who created the universe and without hesitation that person will answer, well God did of course. Furthermore the God of Christian thought is said to be all powerful and all-knowing, omnipotent and omniscient, and above all perfect and good. This poses several conundrums for many Christians, two of which can be characterized by the often asked questions, if God is good and perfect why is there suffering in the world? And if God is all-powerful how do we account for human free will?”

Okay. See, this is easily answered in Gnosticism, although contemporary traditional Christians will not like this answer. But if you have fallen away from Christianity or never joined Christianity because of those two common questions, Why is there suffering? and What about free will? the answer is this: there are many gods. We know there are many gods and that religions all around the world have their various gods. The creator of the material portion of the Earth and of the universe in fact, the creator of the heavens and the Earth—heavens just being our astronomical planets, suns and whatnot—that is a God, that is the creator God. In Gnosticism that God is called the Demiurge. He is not the God Above All Gods. The supreme consciousness, the real Father—when Jesus said, I and my Father are one, if you know me you know my Father—He’s talking about the God Above All Gods.

And that God has only one name, Father, because we all come from him. He is our spiritual Father. The Demiurge in Christian mythology has gotten all confused between the Fall of Satan or the Fall of the angels. They say one-third of the angels fell from heaven. I don’t know about that in particular, because that is not covered in the Tripartite Tractate. However, it’s referred to here and there in various extra biblical sources. But I think what it is referring to is when an Aeon fell out of the Fullness of God and became the God, the creator God of this universe. And the Christians kind of know this because they identify that fallen angel as Satan. But Satan is not a name, it’s a word. It means the opposition or the adversary. So Satan is the one that accuses us of things, that makes us feel bad and guilty. That is the fallen angel according to the Christians.

But according to the Gnostics, that fallen angel is actually the creator God of this universe. Most Gnostic books and even people who are describing Valentinianism, which is supposedly our strain of Gnostic Christianity, (it’s called Valentinian Christianity), but the Tripartite Tractate is unique among all the books of the Nag Hammadi scrolls. That is because in most of the Nag Hammadi the fallen Aeon is called Sophia, and it is a female figure. Some say it is the female half of the Son of God. I don’t think of the rollout of cosmogony in that way, and I reject the notion that the fallen God of this universe, who is essentially what we would call Satan in Christianity, is a female figure. To me, that’s just another example of blaming women. It’s the larger fractal of Eve giving Adam the apple. In the Tripartite Tractate, it is an ungendered Aeon or multiple-gendered Aeon. Logos is the name of that fallen Aeon, not Sophia, Logos—they’re similar concepts—so we can see that it’s probably the same concept, it’s just been written differently. Logos means knowledge, logic, reasoning. It is the seat of Gnosis. Logos literally means the Word. Sophia means wisdom, so they’re similar concepts.

That fallen Aeon, Logos, contains within itself the entire blueprints of everybody else. The pleroma of Logos contains the fractal of the Fullness of God, and the infinite variety of Aeons that make up the Fullness of God. And the Fullness of God, that is the coexistent breakout, the variables contained within the Son of God. So the Son is the only begotten Son. The Son of God is the only emanation out of the Father’s originating consciousness. It has extended consciousness out from the Father, not separated from Him, because the Son of God is still plugged into the Father. But the Son contains all of the essence of the Father, all of the consciousness and the attributes. And once the Son was formed, immediately, being a fractal of the Father, He also gave birth. Just like the Father had given birth to the Son, the Son gives birth to all of its parts, which are the Aeons of God. And those are actually variables. Each one of them is a variable. Altogether, they add up to the Son. Altogether, when the Fullness of God sits and sings in unison, it is the Son.

Now, the Son knows them to be its parts, but they don’t realize that they are individual variables of the Son. But the Son knows them, because He’s a higher order, see? So He can see them. They’re His parts. He wears them the same way we wear our bodies. We can see our arms and our legs and our toes, but our toes, our arms, and our legs may not themselves realize that they are parts of that larger human body that we are walking around in. You see the analogy? So the ALL, or the Totality, the Fullness of God, is coexistent. It sits within and fully reflects the Son in its totality. That’s why it’s called the Totality, also the Son.

Well, one of those, the last Aeon to be formed, was a fractal replica of the entire Fullness of God. So inside the body of Logos are fractals, one order down, one iteration down, of all of the variables of the Son, which gave rise to a misunderstanding in the mind of Logos that He was the Fullness of God. It’s not a female. It’s not a male. It’s an amalgamation of all of the Aeons. There may be male and female aspects amongst the Aeons, but the Logos is all of them.

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So when the Logos overreached to rejoin the Father, it was because He thought He could plug directly into the Father, the same way that the Son plugs directly into the Father. But no one else but the Son is able to plug directly into the Father, because the Father is so enormous and overwhelming that, as it says in the Tripartite Tractate, anyone who approaches the Father face-to-face would be annihilated, because the Father is so tremendously overwhelming. Now, I know that a lot of Christians have that sense within themselves that the Father is overwhelming. That’s why when you hear some testimonies and you hear the lyrics of some Christian songs, they speak about, how will I ever stand up and face God? How will I ever get my face up off the floor because God is so great and I am nothing? Well, we don’t really go face-to-face with the Father. We go face-to-face with Christ, who is the representation of the Father to us humans in particular, and Jesus was one of us, was a human who fully manifested the Christ, fully manifested the Fullness of God and God’s desire to bring us all home. So we need not fear the Christ, just like we don’t fear Jesus.

People who are born-again Christians have a personal relationship with Jesus. They may not recognize that Jesus and the Christ are two in one, because Jesus was fully human and then fully God, but by fully God we don’t mean that he was the fallen demiurge. We mean that he is fully the Father. I and my Father are one, he said. Jesus comes in a form that every single person can relate to. That’s why Christ is a personal God. Everyone can relate to him, everyone, and he immediately plugs right into our bodies. I’ve described before in other episodes that the fractal Aeons of the Fullness that come along with the Christ, those are called the Third Order of Powers. We are the Second Order of Powers, and there is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power. When Jesus comes to me, when Christ comes to me, he plugs right into my body. Of course he knows me. He’s inside all of my cells. He’s perfectly made for me, and your Savior is perfectly made for you. That is how that we can accept him and call him into ourselves, you see? Does this make sense?

So the answer to if God is good and perfect, why is there suffering in the world, is that the God of this world, the demiurge, is not good and perfect. The God of this world is the aspect of the fallen Logos—what I identify as the ego of the fallen Logos. He doesn’t carry the life and the consciousness and the love of the Father. He is not a loving God. That’s why the Christians are mistaking him for Satan. He is not a loving God. He does not love us.

This God of our universe made the universe, the material physical parts of the universe, up through those elements and rocks, up through the planets, because Logos contains the fractals of all the Fullness of God. So when Logos fell, the blueprints were here. That’s what the demiurge works with. He’s working off of blueprints. He’s not working off of the living ethereal plane. The best part of Logos, the Tripartite Tractate says, fled back to the Fullness after he realized what had happened. The mistake, the overreach, the Fall, and then these shadows of himself, were going out and creating this material universe, and he was aghast.

He was horrified at creation. That’s a quite a different view of creation than we get from our traditional God made the Earth, God made the heavens, we love creation. Well, Logos was horrified by the creation because it was dead. So after he fled back up to the Fullness, he abandoned this material creation down below, and that’s what we have here. But we still have the egoic part, the demiurge roaming around, and that’s the God of this world. And he doesn’t remember where he came from. He doesn’t realize he’s only the reflected ego of Logos, cut off from his Self, cut off from his higher consciousness. He knows there’s supposed to be creatures and people and whatnot walking around, but he can’t bring life into them. And that’s why there’s a little fragment about how he tried to mold a man on the riverbank and breathe life into it, but whatever he could do, he could not bring life into that piece of mud that he had created, that golem, because he doesn’t channel the life or the love of the Father and the Fullness.

That is why Logos, after he had fled back, prayed alongside the Fullness for a solution. They prayed for life to come into the universe. And that’s us. That’s all of us living creatures. We are the Second Order of Powers. The Aeons of the Fullness are the First Order of Powers, but we are the Second Order of Powers, and it’s our job to bring life, love, and the memory of the Father into this otherwise dead universe. And we were constructed in such a way that we could utilize the dead universe, that mud that’s lying on the riverbank, into living creatures. But we’re the ones with the life and the love and the memory. We forget about it because now we’re in a constant battle with death. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, it says in the 23rd Psalm. So we’re living in the shadow of death, and that is this created universe.

And that is why they call Gnostics, in a pejorative sense, they call us Gnostics, world haters, because Logos was aghast and he didn’t like the dead universe that was being ruled by the demiurge. But we love the Father and we love the ethereal plane because that is where we come from. That is our home. We are sojourners in this world. We are just passing through.

And the Christians have a faint whiff of all of this running through the Bible. They know that they are just passing through this life and that they’re going to cross the river Jordan someday and rejoin the loved ones that have departed to heaven. We all know this. Everybody on the planet knows this inherently. That is the inherent Gnosis. But we’ve forgotten because as we grow up in the world we get disappointed and saddened and nothing is as it should be. We tend to forget or think that it was some pie-in-the-sky dream that there’s such a thing as heaven and God, but it’s never going to happen.

The Christian religion is unique of all the religions in the world. This personal relationship with God, this personal relationship with Christ, is unique. The Christ actually came for each individual human to remind us that we’re going back home—don’t worry about it. But meanwhile we’ve got this job to do and that was not only to bring life, light, love, consciousness and remembrance into the universe, but we’re also trying to redeem the living universe. We couldn’t do it. The Christ is the Third Order of Powers. It’s the Christ’s job to redeem every living thing. And the Christians know that too. And all throughout the New Testament it says Christ came for everyone. But then they tend to think that everyone is only the Christians. That’s the mistake. This idea of universal salvation, meaning every living thing will return home to the ethereal plane, that’s what Jesus was talking about.

That is the underlying gnosis of Christianity—universal salvation—because it’s Christ’s job. It’s the Third Order Power’s job to redeem the demiurge, to wrap up this dead material world and bring all the living things home, including rejoining the ego of Logos to its Self in heaven. We want the demiurge to wake up and realize and remember where it comes from. Then he’ll give up this puppet master control he has over the dead material things.

And he tries to have that same control over us. That’s what the inner struggles are about. That’s why bad things happen to good people. That’s what the addictions and the sin and the betrayals about—those all come from the demiurge. He doesn’t love us because he doesn’t know what love is. He only knows what control is, and he wants to control us in any way possible. And if he can control you through drugs, he does. If he can control you through lust or through food, he does. If he can control you through possessions—you know, the richer you are, the more possessions you have, the more burdened you are, the more you are weighed down by those possessions. They give you a fleeting happiness, but material possessions are actually burdens that you carry. On the ethereal plane, everything is freely available.

You know, I get really upset with people who think that we can have a perfect communist or socialist or communal world down here if we would all just give up our possessions and share them with everybody else. And then we’d love and love alike and everybody would be equal. That is a noble goal. That’s a dear, sweet, noble goal. The problem is it cannot happen on this fallen plane because the demiurge won’t let it happen. What you are sensing when that is your goal is the ethereal plane—it’s your remembrance. It’s your beginning of gnosis. Now, the way to remember, the way to unlock the gnosis that’s within you is to realize this is the fallen world. We can’t recreate heaven on Earth. When we try to create heaven on Earth, it turns into hell on Earth. That is the first realization. None of the plans are going to work. None of the schemes are going to work. The governmental systems aren’t there to make us happy, loving, and equal. The governmental systems are part of the demiurgic control. They are necessary on this fallen world to have.

In the Tripartite Tractate, it says that certain people are given power for a limited period of time in order to assist the demiurge in bringing order into our societies. That’s what governments are, but they’re limited. And the problem with the people that are the governors is that they don’t realize that their actual power comes from above. They think they are the source of the power, just like the demiurge thinks it is the source of the power. There is no inherent power down here. It all comes from God.

Well, I guess that’s all the time we have for today.

I didn’t even get to the question about free will, but I can really briefly say this. Yes, the Father is all powerful and all consciousness emanating out of the Father is the Son, and it carries all of the attributes of the Father. And then emanating from the Son are these fractals that sit with him, and every one of them carries within itself the attributes of the Father. And free will, of course, is an attribute of the Father. There’s no argument about that, I think, in anyone’s religious aspect.

But then we, and this is where it comes in, part of our gnosis is that we come from above.

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We are the children of the Aeons. We are the Second Order Powers birthed from the First Order Powers—the Aeons. So all of the attributes of the Aeons, which is to say that all of the attributes of the Son of God, come down to us, but we are an iteration. We are further, further down. So we have free will. There’s no doubt about that. But our free will that came to us in conception, along with love, life, and remembrance, our free will is constantly being jammed up by the demiurge, because the demiurge doesn’t understand free will. The demiurge thinks that free will is a mess, is chaos, is unruly. And it’s the job of the demiurge to control everything.

He controls all of the material in the universe strictly. And it’s a good thing he does. He’s the one that sets the physical laws and the chemical laws. He’s the one that determines gravity and the speed of light and all of that. He controls those strictly. And if he didn’t, the universe wouldn’t hold. It would completely fly apart. He doesn’t understand why he can’t control us. It’s not just us, it’s any living creature because we all have free will. He doesn’t understand where it’s coming from. He sees it as chaos, and he keeps trying to clean it up.

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And that’s why it seems as though we don’t have free will. But we do. You know you do. And any addict who has repented, turned away, and accepted the Christ, the Third Order Powers, to come and replace his Second Order sensibilities, bringing the knowledge of the Third Order, which is to say the Christ, which is to say the Father, into our bodies. That can turn around an addict in a moment’s time. That’s what brings that instantaneous joy and expansion of consciousness when someone is born again.

You see, you don’t have to believe in something you know. Belief implies unbelief. A belief implies that you’re choosing to believe something in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Gnosis isn’t belief. It’s knowing. It’s true knowledge. It’s knowing where we come from. And when you know that, then you have your free will, because you have your virtues and your aspects of the Christ, and your aspects of the Father.

Okay, that’s it for today.

Say, did you know that on YouTube, I have a few videos from years ago before I started doing the podcast? And if you’d like to see me giving a lecture on these kinds of topics, you can go to the Cyd Ropp YouTube channel, and look up the one that says Practice Presentation. And you can find my…it’s like giving a lecture in class—I’ve got posters and a pointer. So you can see me talk for an hour about all of these things, if that’s what you’d like to do.

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Until next week, God bless us all. Onward and upward!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The big day has come. The book is now available. A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, is now available on Amazon.

Just type in that name, or type in my name, C-Y-D, R-O-P-P, and you’ll be taken to my various books that are on Amazon. A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is available for only $9 as an e-book, or free on Kindle, if you have a Kindle subscription. It’s $24 as the paperback. And keep in mind, I price all of my books at the least expensive that the publisher will allow me to sell them for because I would much rather get the information out to you than for me to make money.

Book cover of the ebook and paperback edition

I’m not making a living off of this podcast or off of being an author, believe me. Wish I were, but eh, not the case. Can you imagine what would happen if A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel went viral? It’s mind-blowing and very difficult to imagine selling a million or even thousands of copies, but how about you pray along with me and we make it happen? Because I think of this as a reformation.

I am driven, apparently by God, to reform conventional Christianity as we have come to know it. It is my belief that what happened around 300 AD by the Catholic Church and by the Emperor of Rome was actually a diversion from the original Gospel message. Back when I was a young believer, about 50 years ago, I believed in the Nicene Council and the Nicene Creed and that they were protecting us for our own good by taking bad bits out of the Bible.

But one thing that I have learned in the past few years of government censorship and collusion between the powers that be, such as mainstream media and governments of the world, is that they really want to shape our beliefs. They really want to keep a lid on things that we are allowed to consider and believe, especially about God. This is why the communist nations are officially non-religious, because you cannot have people actually believing in the power of God, working in their lives and following God’s will in things, being at odds with a corrupt government, especially a totalitarian dictatorship, because they want to control what you think. They want to control the laws and what you think and do. And so those governments tend to put a real damper on religious freedom and freedom of speech. They would like to put a damper on freedom of thought, and they do that through propaganda and collusion between the media outlets and what the government wants you to believe.

That’s my opinion. What’s your opinion? You can write back. The comments are open.

In any event, I used to believe that the Nicene Council and the Emperor of Rome and the Pope were doing this for our good and for our benefit, and to keep true the words of the Bible and to protect and sanctify the words of Jesus. But now, after living in these recent times, I can see much better how these things work. You know, my PhD is in rhetoric, which is defined as the power of persuasive speech. So when I have been watching for the last several years the way that people are packaged and presented, the way that various candidates are packaged and presented to us, I can see the manipulation of the rhetoric. I see it clearly, you know, the same way that, like, a physician, if you walk in with a skin problem, a rash, and you walk in to a dermatologist, and they can look at you and say, oh, well, that’s an eczema, or oh, well, that’s psoriasis. They can see right off the bat what it is. You don’t know what it is because you’re not a doctor or dermatologist. I can see the rhetoric in the same way.

This causes me to doubt the intentions and the sanctification of the original Nicene Council. We’re not Roman citizens anymore, folks. Philip K. Dick, of course, says that the empire never ended, and that we are still Roman empire citizens, but we just don’t realize it. That is one way of putting it. That’s just a way of describing it. So having opened up my thinking in that regard, I cracked open that Nicene Council egg, and what came out was the Nag Hammadi.

I read through the Nag Hammadi, and I would not ever have done that in my older, more strictly constrained evangelical days. Now, I’m sure that many evangelicals think I have fallen away from the faith, and yet I haven’t. I believe in Christ. I believe in the Father. I believe in heaven. I believe we’re all going to heaven. That is Christian.

What I don’t believe is that most everyone’s going to hell, because remember, very simply put, we are all fractals of the Father. The Bible says we are the children of God. We are fractals off of the one consciousness of the Father. Is the Father ever going to be diminished? No. Even the Bible says, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. The Father, the eternal consciousness, cannot be lessened, cannot be thrown away, cannot be thrown into everlasting torment in a lake of fire. God would not allow that of His children.

We’re faulty. We’re fallen. We’re sinful. That is the effects of living in this material world, cheek to jowl with the demiurge, being deluded by materialism and having our body and our emotions drawn into the material world.

The Tripartite Tractate says there’s a reason that the Father set it up so that we are drawn into the material world, and yet we are disappointed and never satisfied by the material world. And that disappointment and lack of satisfaction is so that the material will have a weak hold on us, so that when we pass out of this mortal existence, we can immediately return back into the Fullness of God.

So, God isn’t going to throw you away, even if you are a sinful person, although it breaks everyone’s heart if you are living a sinful life. It’s a very, very sad thing for your Aeonic parents. They’re not ashamed of you—they are so sad on your behalf. So throw off those coils. Back off the demiurge. Come to the truth. Come to the light.

And that is what A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel attempts to do in this book. It’s about almost 300 pages, fully illustrated with all of the diagrams that you’ve come to know and hopefully love here at Gnostic Insights. And especially if you only listen to this as an audio podcast and you don’t go to GnosticInsights.com to read the transcript or to see the illustrations that accompany every episode, you will find A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel to be a handy and welcome addition. Certainly if you’re seeking gnosis or if you consider yourself a Gnostic or if you are, for example, a Christian who has fallen away from the faith because certain things don’t sit right with you, I think the answers are in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel and I urge you to pick up the book at any price point.

I have reformatted the book as a hard copy. I’m waiting for my proof copy to arrive in the mail. That should arrive any day. So hopefully by next week the hardback will also be posted on Amazon for you to be able to buy if you want to. Now, again, I’m not making any money on the hardback even though it’s selling for $45. It cost me $30 just for the proof copy. So all the rest of that money is the printing expense and the royalties that the booksellers and Amazon take off at the top. But I thought if you really have come to love this Gnostic Gospel and the simple Gnostic Gospel that I present in this podcast, you may enjoy getting the hard copy because it’s substantial and it’s very beautiful. It’ll hold up to the test of time and it will look beautiful on your bookshelf.

Aside from this being one long plug for the new book, thank you very much, I would like to read to you a few lovely pieces of encouragement I have received from my podcast listeners. I’m not going to say their names, but if you wrote this to me, you’ll know who you are.

Recently I received a message that says, “Another inspirational podcast said, please keep them coming. It seems like such simplicity, but in your introduction, the words to fear not we are known and we are loved when taken to heart and truly believed states such a significant thing. That belief can cut through much darkness with the purest light that we are all known are equally loved and all are destined for the journey home to be in the fullness. Blessings.” And she wrote that in response to the post called Our Awesome Origin, if you didn’t hear that one and you’d like to back up and see what that one was about.

Another comment I received last year was, “Although you have mentioned and you wonder, is there anyone reading and listening? I’m finally taking the time to send you a note to thank you from my heart for the sincerity and effort you put into your work and sharing towards the understanding and enlightening of the Gnostic Gospels. I appreciate so much that you give this available and free to anyone who cares to read and listen. I have purchased your book, (and she’d be referring to The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which was the only book available at that time), I have purchased your book because I have the luxury of being able to do that, but you offer all of the relevant ideas and information at no cost other than someone needing to have access to a computer. And that’s a wonderful thing. All blessings and good fortune to you and onward and as you say, in love and light.”

So, these mean a lot to me because, you know, I’m sitting here at home with the dog and my cats just talking to you, because I do believe that Gnosis should be freely dispensed. And I’m retired. I have retirement income. I get social security, so I’m not destitute. And if this is the way God is having me spread the message, that’s fine with me. I don’t have to be paid for it. But you know, whatever money that you do send me now, that is going directly into promotion so that we can broaden this Gnostic Reformation. I really would like to have it take off the way the First Reformation by Martin Luther took off back in the 1500’s. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Here’s one now. This is from a listener who lives in Thailand. And he said, “I’ve not followed Gnostic work or any work for quite a while. I gained a big insight from you and never felt the need to seek any further.”  And God bless him for that because that’s the way I feel about it. I don’t read a lot of books anymore, other people’s notions of how to become enlightened. I don’t need that. The Gnosis is coming to me directly from the Fullness of God and through the Bible and through basically the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. Everything else seems to be rabbit trails to me, rabbit holes. Chasing after this, chasing after that. There’s no need to chase once you find your Gnosis and begin learning to tap directly into it. Remember, it comes directly into us. We have it. We’re born with it. It’s in every cell in our body. We have fractals of the Fullness of God. So it’s a matter of tapping in to God by going in and up, not by going out into the world. That isn’t where you’re going to find it.

This listener also went on to say, “Gnosticism via Google is portrayed as humans trapped forever. You, however, portrayed a different version. One where the power is always with humans and the eternal spark within them. That was a powerful insight. One that is the complete opposite of mainstream Gnosticism found on Google. There is no battle, only a deliberate perception, deception of one. What I am is always there despite anything in this world or anything happening to the body. I just need to relax into that eternal me and know that this world has only the significance that I give to it. Attachment is the root of all suffering, said Buddha. Attachment to perceptions, to people, to experiences, and to possessions. All are illusions. Real, but ultimately illusions designed to entrap. The only thing that is real is the energy that underlies this world. A subtle light energy available to everyone once they release the dense, heavy energy of the mind and its attachments. The archons have power, but ultimately no power. A divine dichotomy. They can only deceive us to give up ours. Anyway, I gained something important from you in my own way. Just wanted to check in. Good to know you’re doing well. Keep on keeping on. Take care and very best wishes.”

Lastly, here’s an email I received just last week. And she says, “Excellent explainer of the complexity of Gnosticism. I’m very grateful as I have tried to study Gnosticism knowing there was a deep kernel of truth to be mined in these teachings. In spite of my research, I could never quite find my way through to the essence. In your short article here, (and that was As Above So Below), in your short article here, I feel like I found the gleaming jewel I was seeking. An understanding of the mission of Jesus Christ from the perspective of Gnosticism is clarifying and encouraging to the modern human soul who needs the bridge from mere belief to knowing Gnosis. We live in interesting times in which the discernment between truth and not truth is increasingly more challenging.”

See, I kind of think that it’s becoming more clear, especially in the last few years of political uprisings throughout the world and the attempt of governments to clamp down on those freedoms that people are expressing. The difference between righteous behavior and unrighteous behavior or between governments that encourage righteous behavior and governments that just want to demoralize and clamp down is really becoming clear. The news media who used to be trusted and used to be looked at as sources of information are now being increasingly discarded as sources of state-sponsored propaganda. And that is now clear.

So people I used to trust, I don’t quite trust so much anymore. But I think that’s good because I think the tigers are showing their stripes. And it’s for our benefit so that we can recognize and we can choose clearly between the world and between the Father above.

I hold these letters from the readers very dear to my heart. And I thank you all so much. And I also thank those of you who, for example, on Substack, comment openly, send it through comments rather than through personal emails to me. All is good. I love you. And I’m so happy and relieved that A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is finally out there in the world. It’s being recorded right now by Miguel Conner as an audiobook. And I don’t know how long that’s going to take, probably a couple of more months. But that will be really cool when that comes out, too.

So thank you for all the new subscribers that are starting to find us. Let’s get this thing going. Let’s get this Gnostic Reformation underway.

I need you to do that. Point people to the broadcast. Give the book as gifts. I would love to come to where you are and talk to your group or your church, anyone that would have me. So if you want to try to set something like that up, I’d love to do that. Or if you have a podcast and you’d like me as a guest. Let’s do this.

Thank you for spending this time with me this week. I’ll see you next week. God bless us all and Onward and Upward!

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The big day has finally arrived! The book is ready. It’s in publication. It will be posted on Amazon for sale. The soonest they’ll get it up for me is on the 28th of August. That’s Wednesday, the 28th of August. You’ll be able to buy the paperback version of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel for only $24. That’s the least I’m allowed to sell it for by Amazon. So, meanwhile, as a bonus, I did format the book as an e-book, and it is already posted. So if you were to go to Amazon now, you would be able to buy the e-book of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel for only $9. It’s available today for $9, or you can wait until Wednesday and get it for $24. A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel (A Simple Gnostic Gospel) – Kindle edition by Ropp, Cyd , Ropp, Cyd, Puett, Bill. Religion & Spirituality Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

And later this week, I will also format the book as a glorious, very expensive hardback, and I will release the hardback for the least amount of money that Amazon makes me release it for. I don’t know what that will be just yet until it’s formatted. But the hardback will differ from the paperback in that the hardback will be on the top quality high-gloss paper with the top quality ink and a hardback binding. Probably twice as much as the paperback sells for. I don’t know how these things work. We’ll see. I’ve already ordered the copies that I will sign and mail to the people who have contributed the $50 donation that I appreciate so much. And those are in the mail to me already as author preview copies. So you’ll be able to get those very soon as well.

This week, I’m going to talk about some philosophers, mathematicians, logicians, and their faith in the Father. Because so often people accuse us believers of being irrational, of being ignorant and foolish. And I want to tell you that that isn’t true. Indeed, you know, we follow the Father above. And remember, His emissary is Logos, which means logic and reason. So it is not unreasonable to believe in the eternal life and to believe in the Father and the ethereal plane. It’s based upon reason. The Father is love, but Logos is logic and reasonableness. And we need both in our lives—love and reason.

Reason without love is a modern and postmodern condition. It privileges supposedly reasonable logical assumptions and actions, but without believing in the Father and without the love of God to guide your heart in truth and faith, caring and compassion. We have to meld reason with love. Otherwise, it very easily turns into dictatorships and totalitarian rule.

This week, an essay posted on Noema magazine online by Nathan Gardels had a quote from Erwin Schrodinger. Erwin Schrodinger, the pioneering quantum physicist, postulated that “consciousness is a fundamental feature, the fabric of the universe, parceled out through the individuated experience of awareness.” Schrodinger was no lightweight when it comes to thinking.

Now, to counterpose that, the opposite of that is materialism—is not believing that consciousness is the ground state of the universe. Gerald Edelman, a Nobel neurobiologist considered the most prominent materialist in the field, believed consciousness is “entirely a function of embodiment.” In other words, that consciousness is a byproduct of the gray portion of our brains. This is generally what neurobiologists think. That’s why they can treat animals with such cruelty and have such disregard to any living things, because they don’t believe they are conscious. They usually think consciousness arises from the more complex neurobiology of the human condition.

But Schrodinger wrote in his essay that “the total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms, for consciousness is absolutely fundamental.” That was a quote from this NOEMA magazine that is posted online, and the name of the article is Who Knows What Consciousness Is?

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I’ve been feeling for some time that I should share with you Blaise Pascal and his idea that’s called Pascal’s Wager. Have you ever heard of Pascal’s Wager? Now, I have a true believer attitude towards the Father. However, I must admit that Pascal’s Wager has often come to mind during my lifetime over the course of 70 years. I often think of Pascal’s Wager, and so to me it’s pretty important to share it with you. I’ve hesitated sharing it with you because, well, it kind of seems like a fallback position rather than just going straight for believing in the Father and the gnosis that comes from the Father, because this is a like a fail-safe fallback. Pascal’s Wager basically says that you have nothing to lose by believing in God, and you have everything to gain. So let me explain some of this to you.

By the way, I’m sometimes kind of shy about sharing the fact that I’m a Christian, that I believe in Jesus. You know, when I first started reading the Nag Hammadi scriptures and the Tripartite Tractate, as I’ve mentioned, I set it aside for five years. I had thoroughly read and highlighted, notated and diagrammed the Nag Hammadi, and pretty much came up with everything that I present now in my teaching and in my books, but it frightened me because I did not want to be accused of being a false prophet or a false teacher. I do not want to have the accusations of leading people astray. I would not want to lead anyone into hell. Obviously, that would be the farthest thing from my thought.

And by now, as a Gnostic, I don’t even think that hell is an accurate depiction of what happens to people who don’t believe at the time of death. A truly loving God and eternal punishment are inconsistent. What we humans call “justice” cannot override the love of God and the redemption from sin through Christ. The Lake of Fire is not eternal and everlasting. The Lake of Fire is Aeonic purging; that is the more accurate translation of the Coptic Greek in which the New Testament was written. In the original Greek, the word that has been translated as “eternal” is aionios, aeonic, and aeonic can either refer to a period of time or as relating to the Aeons of the Fullness. Two previous episodes of Gnostic Insights cover this concept in detail; you can listen or read about it by clicking on links in this transcript to Aeons, Not Ages and Overcoming Death-Follow the Light.  So, it’s a purging fire to purge away our false beliefs and our meme shroud that has deluded us in our lifetime. The Lake of Fire is a cleansing. It’s a baptism. And the more unbelief you hold, the more incorrect memes you have enshrouded your Self with, the more purging there is to be done when you cross over. And that’s very unpleasant. I would not want to lead anyone into that kind of purging. And I myself, if I were a big false teacher, false prophet here, I’d have a lot to account for when I cross over. And I do not want to bring that upon my Self.

I am hoping that I spread the truth and the love of the Father. So something that occasionally crosses my mind and gives me pause is that it’s all well and good for me to share the Gnostic gospel with you and to present this alternative cosmology and cosmogony of the ethereal realm that differs from what is translated into the Old and New Testament. It’s all well and good for me because I’m a born again Christian. I have been saved. I am going to heaven. And I know that as a certainty.

But what about you? If you don’t have that certainty, if you are not born again, what if I lead you into error through the Gnostic gospel and you don’t have true belief in Christ as your fallback position? Well, then that’s the worst possible thing. So that is what I am attempting to avoid. And it sometimes niggles at me that it’s well and good for me to talk about the Gnostic gospel because I am saved. I am a born again Christian baptized in the Holy Spirit and have a surety of faith in heaven because I’m under the wing of Christ. But what about you if you’re not? What if you haven’t accepted Christ? What if you are not a believer in Jesus? What if you’re not a Christian and you, instead, go straight to the Gnostic gospel? Are you in danger? I don’t think so. But in the spirit of Blaise Pascal, I want to share some of this information with you today, and then you can make your own logical and reasonable choice for Christ.

So, you know, I do listen to Christian radio preachers, and I heard this one this week from the Colson Center on the life and faith of Blaise Pascal in their little five-minute show called Breakpoint. And I thought, aha, okay, well now it’s time for me to share with you Pascal’s Wager. So first I’m going to read a few paragraphs from this Breakpoint piece, and then I’ll share with you some words directly out of Pascal’s Pensées, as they’re called. Quoting now,

“On August 19, 1662, French philosopher, mathematician, and apologist Blaise Pascal died at just 39 years old. Despite his shortened life, Pascal is renowned for pioneering work in geometry, physics, and probability theory, and even for inventing the first mechanical calculator.

His most powerful legacy, however, is his pensées, or thoughts, about life’s biggest questions, including God and the human condition. Pascal’s intellect garnered attention at an early age. At age 16, he produced an essay on the geometry of cones, so impressive that René Descartes initially refused to believe that a 16-year-old child could have written it.

Later, Pascal advanced the study of vacuums and essentially invented probability theory. His life radically changed the evening of November 23, when Pascal experienced God’s presence in a powerful way. He immediately and radically reoriented his life and thinking toward God.

He described the experience on a scrap of parchment that he sewed into his jacket and carried with him the rest of his life. From that moment, Pascal dedicated his life to serving God through his writing. His ideas on apologetics were collected and published after his death in a volume entitled Pensées, or Thoughts.

[Pensées is a French word, the English translation is thoughts.] Best known of his ideas is Pascal’s Wager, and here is how it goes. Facing uncertainty in a game of life with such high stakes, he argued, it makes far more sense to believe in God’s existence than to not.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He is.”

So, in other words, the stakes are very high, especially if you don’t believe in God and you’re wrong about that, then you will face, he thought, eternal damnation. But I would say you will face the chastening fire of the Aeons, and that is a very humbling and painful experience that burns off all those wrong memes that you’re holding to make you pure enough, you see, to enter eternity. Because none of the negative things that we generate or are exposed to down here on earth can pass on with us into eternity, obviously. Do you see that? Because the ethereal plane is pure and good. There is no sin or darkness on the ethereal plane, even by definition. If you can’t grasp that concept, take it as a definition of what heaven and eternity is about—no negativity, no lies, no deceit, no cheating, no wrongheaded notions, no anger. It’s all the opposite of that. It’s the virtuous side—vice down here, virtue up above.

The more we live a virtuous life down here, the less we have to account for and burn away in Judgment Day, you see, when we get to the other side. The more you dwell in darkness and hate the light and all of the wrong memes that attach because of that, then when you die, and you know you’re going to die, that’s a certainty, what you don’t know is what happens after death.

So what Pascal said was, well, just bet on it. If you’re living a bad life down here, and by bad, make your own definition of that. I don’t need to tell you that you are living a bad life if you are. You know that because you feel hollow. And on your deepest, darkest nights, you cry out because you are miserable. You know that.

So when you cross over to the other side in that state of unbelief, you have a lot to account for. Pascal thought you would go to hell because that’s what people thought. That’s what your conventional Christians think now. But we Gnostic Christians believe that you will not go to hell for eternity, but that you will face the chastening—the truth of your incorrect thoughts down here and your incorrect behaviors and all of the harm that you’ve done, if you don’t have the protection of the Christ vouching for you. And that’s what Christ does for us. He vouches for us. He puts his arms around us after we cross over, and he presents us to the Father, and he says, He’s with me. Forgive him, for he didn’t realize what he was doing. She’s with me. Forgive her. And then we pass through with Christ, because we’re part of Him. We take on his righteousness.

So the wager is that if you’re wrong, you will have a bad reckoning on the other side. But if you come to believe in Christ now, and Jesus was the emissary of the Christ here on earth, Jesus is the embodiment in human form of the Christ who came here in order to take us by the hand and lead us home, in order to say, It’s okay. Come along with me, and I’ll help you cross over without the pain, guilt, and recrimination of Judgment Day.

That’s what believing in Jesus now does for you, because you could step out of your door and get hit by a car and be dead, and then you didn’t have any more time to think about it. So Pascal said the wager is this: If you don’t believe in Christ now, then you will certainly have a Judgment Day. Or if you don’t believe in Christ now, at least you’ll have a miserable life here on earth, because you don’t have that assurance of salvation. You don’t have the love and compassion of Christ walking with you. You don’t have a happy ending to look forward to.

But if you’re right, if you do believe in Christ now, this is the other side of the wager. If you bet on God, if you bet on Christ, then you’ll have a better life now. You’ll have the assurance of salvation and belief in Christ and belief in the Father. You’ll be happier because you will put aside the vices and begin to adopt the virtues. And a virtuous life is a happy life, a truly virtuous life. So it’s a win-win situation to believe in Christ now. You have a happier life, and when you cross over to the other side, you escape the self-torment of recrimination over every bad thing you’ve ever done. So there’s no downside to believing in Christ.

And if you’re wrong—let’s say you believe in Christ now, and it turns out not to be true. Let’s say you believe in Christ now and you believe in the Father, but you’re wrong. You were just a foolish person, hoping for something that never was going to happen. Okay, but meanwhile you’ve had a happy life, and when you die, you’re no worse off. Poof! You’ve gone into oblivion. Where’s the downside? You see? But if you don’t believe in the Christ, and you’re wrong, then you do suffer the lousy life and the torment after you die. So that’s the basic wager.

Pascal also accurately described the moral condition of human beings. And he said, for example,

“We hate truth and those who tell it to us, and we like them to be deceived in our favor.” He also observed that, “People tend to distract themselves from the reality of death, but when our diversions run their course, we feel nothingness.”

Well, that’s all I’m quoting from the Colson article, but then I went into Pascal’s pensées, which are public domain, so you can download them for free, and I read more of Pascal’s words, and they’re really fabulous, and they’re especially fabulous for us Gnostics. I should devote more time, I think, to Pascal’s writing.

Here’s something that he said, for example:

“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which I know not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?’

Now, here’s a quote from his pensées, verse 222, directed to atheists. He says,

“What reason have they for saying that we cannot rise from the dead? What is more difficult—to be born or to rise again? That what has never been should be or that what has been should be again? Is it more difficult to come into existence than to return to it? Habit makes the one appear easy to us. Want of habit makes the other impossible. A popular way of thinking.”

Pascal is speaking of resurrection of the dead upon Christ’s return in this previous passage, but he could just as easily be speaking of returning to our Aeonic home above in the Fullness when he speaks of “what has been should be again.” He goes on to say,

“Why cannot a virgin bear a child? Does a hen not lay eggs without a cock? What distinguishes these outwardly from others? And who has told us that the hen may not form the germ as well as the cock? What have they to say against the resurrection and against the child bearing of the virgin? Which is the more difficult, to produce a man or an animal or to reproduce it?”

And I think we could apply that same reasoning to reincarnation.

You see, if you are not of a mind that considers these sorts of things, you surely cannot criticize those of us who do. Because here you are, you’re alive, you’re thinking. Where’d that come from? What were you before? How did that arise really? There’s actually no scientific explanation for consciousness arising from the material. It still takes a leap of faith to believe in that. And then it’s a lot harder. There’s a lot more extremely improbable to the point of impossibility things that have to occur to evolve the human brain to a place where consciousness arises. Why believe in that any more than to say consciousness is the ground state of reality and that we pre-exist or that we go on after this body passes away?

We’re coming to the end of this week’s episode. Let me quote directly out of the pensées again about Pascal’s wager. He said,

“Let us examine then this point and say God is or he is not. But to which side shall we incline? You must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see.

Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose—the true and the good—and two things to stake—your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness. And your nature has two things to shun—error and misery. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that He is.”

So think back to the beginning of this episode and to all of the intelligence and logic that came before Pascal gained his faith when he had his epiphany of the Father. These are not mental lightweights, Pascal or Schrodinger. Trust for a moment that they’re right.

Onward and upward. And God bless us all.

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Well, the final proof copy of the book is in the mail and on its way to me. I’ll have one more look at it and then I’ll put it up on Amazon for sale.

I’d like to personally thank Hathaway, Gabriella, John, Barbara, and Jenny for their very generous support. If anybody else would like to contribute $50 towards this publication cost, actually it’s not the cost of publication as much as it is the cost that will go into promotion, into advertising, because we want this book to go big, don’t we? So thank you so much. If anybody else would still like to have a personally signed copy from me of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, contact me and send me that $50 and I’ll give you a signed copy of the book as well.

Also, I’d like to personally thank some people that have written to me to say they can’t afford $50 but they really support the book and really do support this Gnostic Gospel effort that we’re putting out here, and I appreciate you every bit as much. Your prayers, considerations, and good wishes for me are every bit as valuable. So God bless you and thank you so much.

And now on to this week’s episode.

When I meet people and I start to talk to them about what I write about and what the podcast is about, it’s almost a hopeless task. And I bet you’ve discovered this as well when you try to explain Gnosticism to someone.

First off, what does Gnostic mean? Gnostic means to know. It means knowledge, knowing. It’s the opposite of agnostic. Agnostic means I don’t know. An atheist is a person who says no, there’s no such thing as God. They’re an atheist. Theist means godly. A means not. Agnostic means I don’t know, maybe there is a God. Maybe there’s not a God. Whereas a believer is yes, I know there is a God and I believe in God.

Now, how is it that we can believe in God? There’s different ways to believe in God. I think that most people that say they believe in God, believe in God theoretically, may even trust that God is looking out for them, but they don’t know God. They are not friends with God. They do not speak to and listen to God, because that would just be weird, right? You know, that’s the believing in something that’s not there, which is how atheists generally regard people who speak to God, that we are simply delusional, that we’re making it up, that it’s fairytale stuff.

Gnosis means that you know God and that you believe it is possible to know God. And how can you know God? How do you know that you know God? That’s why Gnosticism is such a difficult and labyrinthian… labyrinthian means, you know, like in a maze. You have to work your way through the maze, picking up a little bit there and trying this way, and then trying that way, and then trying this way. Gnosticism is usually like stumbling around blindly in a maze. And this is why so many young Gnostics or people who seek gnosis dabble in this, and then they dabble in that, and they dabble in something else. They’re just picking up little bits along the way, but it doesn’t necessarily add up to anything. Or you may have a whole bunch of memes that you’ve collected along the way, all these various esoteric religious memes from various Gnostic websites or Gnostic books or Gnostic podcasts, but they’re all just a jumble of memes and you don’t know how to put them together.

So the Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is a framework upon which you can hang these various things you have learned. It’s no longer going to be just a big bag, a jumble of tidbits, but it is going to fit into a framework, a worldview, an ideological worldview, that is a meme bundle of Gnostic thought. This is not easy to convey to people.

So this is why my Simple Explanation model is very useful. And this thing I call the Simple Explanation, this was a thought that came to me many years ago by now, 15 or 20 years ago, and I call it a Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. That’s the name of my first blog, and it’s still posted, and I still post to it now and then. It’s a non-religious blog, it’s a mathy-sciencey kind of theory. However, it does talk about world religions, and it gives this framework that I have now applied to the Gnostic Gospel. And once you apply the Simple Explanation to this amorphous, labyrinthian thing that is called Gnosticism, now you have a framework upon which to view and to evaluate and to place all of those memes you have collected that are just bumping around in a big sack on your back at the moment.

So when people ask me, well, what do you talk about? What do you teach? It’s very difficult standing out there on the lawn just chatting with someone or at the dog park about what I teach or what is Gnosticism. That’s why we’ve got this podcast and the books.

My first book on Gnosticism, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is very short, and heavily illustrated. That’s when I came up with all of these diagrams that are in my Gnosticinsights.com website or in my various books. Visual metaphors are important to me. That’s how I help to figure things out for myself. These visual metaphors, like thinking of the pleroma of the Fullness of God as a stack of golden cannonballs. That’s a weird thing to say. So how do I explain that to someone just standing around at the dog park? It doesn’t make any sense at all.

The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise.

The first book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is very short. It’s only about 50 pages. Very, very simple because I wanted to lay out the Gnostic Gospel as simply as possible. Look at the pictures, read these few words on each page, and I believe that you have that path to Gnosis and it’s all you need to know. Most people go, well, it’s very pretty and it’s kind of poetic, but what? What’s it about? I don’t get it. So that is why I wrote this longer book that I keep talking to you about that’s going to be released any day now. I’ll be sure to let you know. Maybe by next week it’ll be posted. It’ll be out there on Amazon–A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.

So I’ve applied the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything framework, like the structure of a building, the framework, just the support beams on which you can place the Gnostic memes that you have gathered along the way, you see. So my Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel gives you that ideological framework. And then I explain all of the Gnosis that I have gathered directly out of the Nag Hammadi, which were scriptures that were dug up out of the desert in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. They’ve been buried for about 2,000 years and have only relatively recently been translated. So I apply those insights to the Simple Explanation framework. That’s basically the way I work.

And also I want to mention that we don’t need to go around gathering Gnostic memes or you don’t have to learn the things that are in my books. Because the basic concept in Gnosis is that we are born with this aeonic information inside of us. The same information that gives us consciousness and love and life in the first place. The truth that is channeled down from the Aeons, the Fullness of God, into us at conception we carry along throughout our entire lives. So I’ve often said here at Gnostic Insights that I’m not teaching you. You’re not learning this. What you’re doing is remembering. I’m trying to reawaken your own inherent knowledge of God.

If you never heard anything I said and you never went to any Gnostic website or read any Gnostic book, you would still be able to commune directly with the Father and directly with the Son, the Fullness of God, and Christ because they are inside of us. They come in at conception and grow up with us. We forget about them because of the nature of living in a material world—because of the never-ending war, Gnostics would say—the struggle against the material level. The tension between the ethereal and the material. That’s that dual aspect that people often talk about in Gnosticism.

So that’s all you really need to know. We come from above. We carry the Father’s consciousness within us. And that Christ came to save everyone because we’re all from God. So everything has to go back home to God at the end of time. God’s not going to leave bits of himself behind. God is not going to assign bits of his consciousness to everlasting torment because they failed to recognize the Father. Christ came to save everyone. It says it over and over again in the New Testament. And whether you accept that now or you accept that later, even after death, you will still eventually go back to the Fullness of God. You will eventually be covered by the Christ once you realize that, but it may take a few incarnations to do so, or have some very unpleasant bardo experiences after you die to come to that realization. So it’s a lot better just to realize this now. You’ll have a better life. You’ll be happier. You’ll have the surety of the knowledge of God. This is the basic gnosis that we need to know.

People ask me, well, then what is the gnosis that you teach? And I think I’ve been describing it incorrectly when I’m just standing around chatting to people. Here at GnosticInsights.com, at the Gnostic Insights podcast, you’re getting the long form of all these thoughts and all these explanations. You’ve got it all if you back up now and listen to the last two, three years of the podcast. It’s all in there, but it’s going to take you a long time to listen to it, isn’t it? Or to read all the articles if you’re reading the transcripts instead.

The book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, puts it all out there in this one handy place. It’s about 280 pages long, and it explains the very simple gnosis that was originally contained in my Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, because people want explanations, and it takes a lot longer to explain something than to just say it outright. So that’s why the book is so important, because I do think if you read A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, you’ll have everything you need to know, both about what gnosis is, and what your role on earth is, and what will happen to you after you die. And those are the big questions, right? But when someone just asks me, like at the dog park, well, what is it that you teach? I’ve been talking about isms rather than teaching them, because I have not felt confident that I can really speak the gnosis, just standing there, boom, to a stranger and have them get it in five or ten minutes. But maybe I can. Maybe I’ve just been too shy to actually come out and say it. I don’t teach historical Gnosticism, because to me, history is in the past, and I really don’t dwell in the past. I don’t necessarily dwell in the future. I try to stay in the here and now. So I look around me, I see what is in myself. I see what is happening in the world. I see how I react to what’s happening in the world. I compare scriptures. I compare the New Testament to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This is all in the here and now time to come to understanding these things.

I commune with the Fullness of God several times a day. And the way I realize to remember the Fullness is whenever I run across those times on the clock, that’s when I remember to plug back into the Fullness. And it’s those times, the 1:11, 10:10, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, 5:55—whenever I run across those kinds of times on the clock, and I run across them every day, it’s a synchronicity with me. I’m able to just randomly look at the clock. And oftentimes, if not most times, that I glance at the clock, it’s one of those special times, then I immediately look upward and commune with the Father and commune with the Fullness of God. And I thank the Fullnesses for being there for me. I thank the Father for knowledge and wisdom and connecting me to the sureness of his existence. Because I do believe in God. But these clock times are not mystical or magical. They are just a simple way for me to personally remember to look up. I’m sure you can come up with your own prompt, if the time thing doesn’t suit you. The point is to get our eyes off of the world and to reconnect with the Father and the Fullness.

I’m what’s called a true believer. Now, I’ve been a true believer before I was a Gnostic. I’m a Christian, a true Christian. Born again means you really do invite Christ to come into your life. You really do try to move your ego off of the throne of your unit of consciousness and allow the Christ to take control. Jesus, take the wheel, as the song says. And by doing that, when you begin to not look at the world through your own needs and desires, your own ego, when you begin to look at the world through the eyes of God, through the eyes of Christ, it’s a whole different place. Because now we can begin to see others with the love of God.

My own egoic self isn’t that fond of people, truly. I love my dogs. I love cats. I love the birds. I love all of the creatures. I love them. And I feel the love. People, not so much. Because people are each in charge of their own karma, and most of them are living out of their selfish ego or their narcissism. And to me, they’re just not very likable. But we’re called to love them. They’re lovable because they’re all creatures too. If I love my dog, I ought to love my neighbor, my human neighbor. But I really love my dog with affection, right? My human neighbor, maybe not so much. Maybe they irritate me. Maybe they have a political sign posted on their lawn that I think is just horrible. But I’m called to love them. And how can I do that? The only way to love them is to take my ego off of the throne, off of the center of my considerations, off of the center of my unit of consciousness, and remember to re-enthrone Christ.

Once you’re born again, Christ isn’t sitting on your throne forever. You keep forgetting that he’s supposed to be there, and your ego keeps moving in. So it’s a constant process. It’s not a struggle, because I’m not struggling against Christ. I’m not saying, no, I want to be in charge. I’m not doing that at all. It’s just that I forget to look with the eyes of God, and I habitually let my ego get on the throne. So this is one of the things that happens at the 2:22 or 3:33 in the daytime or in the night. I say, oh! The Fullnesses! Oh! Christ! And boom, they are now back on the throne of my soul. Do you see what I’m saying? I call that re-centering, being in the glory beam, because we have a direct connection to the Father above. We have a direct connection to the Fullnesses of God. And of course, when we’re born again, because we have invited Christ to take over our soul, we of course have a direct connection with Christ, because he lives in us.

I think when I’m chatting with people at the dog park, rather than saying, well, Gnosticism is an ancient religion that predates Christianity, probably predates Judaism, and these are ancient scriptures that were buried in the desert in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, and dug up in 1945, and recently translated, and I’m teaching out of one of those books. That’s not telling them anything, is it? That’s kicking back into the history of things, which I’m not all that big of a fan of, really.

So what I really need to tell people is, if they say, what is Gnosis? I say, we are all children of the Fullness of God. The Fullness of God has these beings in it that are called the Aeons. And the Aeons are every possible expression of the Son of God. And the Son of God is the only emanation directly from consciousness itself. And in religious circles, we call that consciousness the Father, not necessarily God, because there’s a lot of gods.

In fact, in the Old Testament, the God of that Old Testament in the Bible of the Hebrews and most of the Christians is called Jehovah or Yahweh. But in the Gnostic viewpoint, when Jesus said, I and my Father are one, he was talking about the God Above All Gods, even the God above the God who created this world. So, before the material world, and before this God of this creation—that isn’t the God that we worship.

We worship the Father above, to realize that there is a Father above, and Jesus is his Son. Christ is his Son. Christ, of course, predates Jesus, because Jesus is a half-human, half-Christ creature, right? He’s a creation. Jesus did more than die for us on the cross. He took an ethereal being and melded it into a physical body. We all are melded into physical bodies, and we’re all ethereal beings, by the way. We all have the Fullness of God in us, because we are children of the Fullness of God. So we have their aeonic inheritance. So Christ had that too.

But the purpose of the virgin birth is his DNA was perfect. Jesus is the prototypical human. He is, I guess we would say, Adam or Adamas, the proto-human incarnated into this Earth with the Fullness of God fully realized into him from birth onward. So he never made mistakes. He never sinned. He never wandered out of being in contact with the Father. He was always with the Father. Whereas we keep wandering about, lost, until we remember, oh! the Father, the Fullness!, and then we’re back on the glory beam, and then the Christ is sitting in the center of our hearts, and we have full assurance of his presence and of his existence. I have no doubt.

I am, like I say, a true believer. But even before I was a Gnostic, I was a true believer in Christ, because I was a born-again Christian. The Jesus Revolution—that is a movie about that revival. So I came out of that church, that era, the Jesus Revolution, if you want to look up the movie. And once you do have a personal relationship with Jesus, with Christ, then there is no need to doubt anymore, because you have a relationship, and you know what happens. Everyone who’s born again has that experience. You have a truly mystical relationship, a dawning of realization. Oh, this isn’t just a story. This isn’t just a fairytale. This isn’t just a dead book written by dead white men, as they like to say. No, I met Jesus, and Jesus lives in me, you see. So I’ve always been a true believer.

And now I’m a Gnostic true believer, because the Gnosis out of the Nag Hammadi, especially out of the book called the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, this is material that was stripped out of the New Testament by the Nicene Council in the 300s AD by the Catholic Pope, and by the Emperor of Rome. And it’s a measure to break people away from having communion with the Father by taking the Gnosis out of the Bible and saying these are not true books, these are not true scriptures—that was a move of power and control. It was not a move of truth and knowledge.

So A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel puts the Gnosis that Jesus originally knew, I believe, back into the New Testament. And once you are able to read the New Testament with Gnostic eyes, then suddenly scriptures that you may have known all of your life, if you’ve been a Christian, or that you’re just learning now because you aren’t even a Christian yet, they come to life. Now they make sense. Now when it talks about the Fullness of God in the New Testament, you understand what it means. It’s not just an adjective for God being big and mighty and full. No, that’s not what the Fullness of God is. The Fullness of God is that golden pyramid sitting right above us, full of an infinite number of Aeons, who are all the variables of the Son of God. And we are each made up of those Aeons. They are our spiritual, our ethereal DNA. And they give us the blueprints. That’s where the intelligent design comes from for all of the creatures down here on earth.

All living things come from the Fullness of God, come directly down, because the Fullness of God is the only thing that brings life, love, and consciousness into this material world. Otherwise the matter is dead. The material is dead. The rocks and stones are not alive. They’re part of the deficiency. They’re part of the Fall.

Okay, well I’m sure that’s all the time we have for today. And you can see what I just told you, what is Gnosticism, that’s probably too difficult to tell someone in the dog park in five minutes. But I’m doing my best here. Thank you for spending this time with me. God bless us all.

And onward and upward!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week we revisited an episode that was originally posted in October of 2021. It was originally entitled, As Below, So Above, Inferring the Transcendent.

We only got through the first half of that original episode because it was a long one and as I was re-recording it, I added some new insights about the current state of politics and how it relates to the Demiurge. If you didn’t hear last week’s episode called As Above, So Below, you may want to back up and start there.

In last week’s episode we reviewed the Gnostic cosmology and the path of consciousness from the Father through the Aeons of the Fullness, and then down into creation as a result of the Fall of Logos. We talked about the chaos of the Fall and the rise of the architect of this world, known as the Demiurge, who is the creator god of this cosmos, not to be confused with the Father Above. The Demiurge is the fallen ego of Logos, and it does not remember where it came from.

Logos stumbles and Falls while reaching for Glory.

The ego of Logos believes that it is all that exists, having forgotten the true nature and source of consciousness. The ego of Logos does not remember love or the life of the Pleroma. As the isolated Ego of Logos, cut off from the Father and the Fullness, the Demiurge cannot generate life or consciousness. The Demiurge brought order and form to the chaos of the Fall and continues to control the material world.

We humans and all other living creatures are not generated from the mud up. We are generated out of the Fullness above. Our consciousness and life flow directly from the consciousness of the Father. At conception, we are melded to the material world and use those molecules as building blocks for our bodies.

Our mission is to bring love into the world and to ultimately remind the Demiurge of its origins in the Fullness above. The Demiurge doesn’t know this, of course, and it thinks we are simply more material for it to control. It doesn’t know we are conscious, and it thinks we are chaotic because it does not understand the free will we bring into creation.

We left off last week’s episode with a discussion of free will versus tyranny in the realm of worldly politics, and noted that the way the Demiurge controls molecules through strong bonds of power like a puppet master pulling their strings is the pattern that tyrannical politicians are using to control the citizens. They’re following the Demiurge’s example, and they attempt to control us with strong bonds of power and strings of control. The end goal is not to build a better world but to quash free will through power and control.

The Demiurge keeps chaos at bay by forbidding free will in his subjects

Our Ego is often mistaken for the Self. But, it is the Self that is the true reflection of the Father and of the Fullness of God. The Ego is merely a Fall away from the Self; and when you fall away from the Self, or the Fullness of God, you mistake your own Ego for Truth. But it is not Truth; it is a reflection of the world. It is a reflection of those things around us in the material world that are created by the Demiurge.

The manner by which the Demiurge becomes the God of this universe is logically self-evident, considering the Gnostic fable I shared last week. The reason for the Fall is that Logos forgot about the rules of cooperation and unanimity that allowed the Fullness to sing their song of glorious praise. Presumptuous thought brought the Ego of Logos to the forefront and replaced its spirit of cooperation with self-centered ambition and lusting for power.  

Left on its own, what the Demiurge lacked in terms of the cooperative structure of the Fullness, it made up for with brute force. The Demiurge was able to create order in the material world by a system of bondage and close supervision. The Demiurge took the disordered material of the quantum foam and caused it to level up in a manner reminiscent of the aeon’s Golden Rule. Particles to atoms, atoms to molecules, molecules to elements, elements to minerals. But where the Golden Rule uses the principle of reaching out to others to willingly hold hands and share information, assistance, and love for the betterment of All, the Demiurge uses strings that bind and entwine from a central source, giving no choice in the matter. The Demiurge fills in the lack of consciousness within the deficiency with its own egoic power and plans. The Demiurge is a tyrant who exercises complete domination.

The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will.

We who are conscious here below are not simply puppets of the Demiurge. The Gnostic Gospel explains that Logos and the Fullness sought a solution to overthrow what had come into being through the Fall. The Aeons fashioned a fruit that reflected their own lives, and imbued this fruit with life and a memory of the Fullness and the Golden Rule of Cooperation. This fruit was sent into the deficiency, our universe, one at a time, from the smallest and most humble to the largest and most complex. It is these life forms that inhabit the universe, and they are called the Second Order of Powers. Born from a good, cooperative thought, the Second Order Powers work in harmony and love, for they had come forth from the harmony and love of the Fullness and the Father.

The life forms of our universe are a melding of the Fullness of God, with all of the consciousness and cooperation that comes from the Fullness, with the material controlled by the Demiurge. This marriage of the Fullness to the Demiurge creates an arena of constant conflict and striving, both within ourselves and with our neighbors as we strive with elements of Self and Ego, Above and Below, virtue and vice, freedom and tyranny. We find ourselves in a “never-ending war” with forces and principalities beyond our control as we balance our lives between the powers of the Demiurge and the powers of the Pleroma. In the course of battle, most of us have forgotten our aeonic inheritance.

The good news is that the Gnostic cosmology doesn’t stop there. In order to restore memory and reason to the Second Order Powers, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one of them individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for a helper to bring peace to the Deficiency and forgiveness to Logos. Out of their focused prayer, a unique fruit emerged, one that contained all of the capabilities and powers of the Fullness along with all of the love and eternal qualities of the Father.

In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is a perfect and full fractal of the Father and the Son, all rolled up into One perfect form. 

Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was both perfect Man and perfect God incarnate. Christian Gnostics believe the same. Here is the more complete explanation of who Jesus was:

It is said that Jesus was conceived without sin, because he carried within his body the perfection of Man and God. This would mean that Jesus’s DNA was perfect and true to the original DNA formula for humanity, hence the importance of the virgin birth that imparted that perfect DNA to the baby.

Jesus was also without negative karma in his soul, as his soul was the soul of God. Jesus was also without negative karma in his soul, as his soul was the soul of God. And, indeed, all Second Order Powers come to Earth with all of the Fullnesses inside of them because our Self is a perfect reflection of the One Fullness of God. It is our karma that causes a worldly meme shroud to attach to us.

The components of Jesus’s body were also without sin, as the cells and flesh that became Jesus were in fact the Aeons of the Fullness incarnate. As Colossians 1:19 says,

“For God was pleased to have all his Fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”

This one sentence from Colossians contains the entire Christian Gnostic gospel. Because Jesus brought along the entire Fullness of the Pleroma when he incarnated, every aspect of the Father and the Son came to material instantiation on earth. In this manner, the eternal God experienced the finite life of us Second Order Powers and all of the struggles between birth and death that plague us all.

Here is how the Tripartite Tractate describes it:

“They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. Then from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Fullnesses, revealing the countenance of the Father, of whom the Aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus it was willingly and gladly that they brought forth the fruit.

“And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them—which was his beloved Son… the one who is properly called ‘Savior’ and ‘the Redeemer’ and ‘the Well-Pleasing One’ and ‘the Beloved,’ ‘the One to whom prayers have been offered’ and ‘the Christ’ and ‘the Light of those appointed,’ in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given to him. Yet, what other name may be applied to him except ‘the Son,’ as we previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father, whom he wanted them to know?

“Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, but also they generated their own; for the Aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony. They came forth in a multifaceted form in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the One who gave it to him.”  [Tripartite Tractate, sections 85—87]

So, you see, the mission of the Christ, as stated in Colossians, was to redeem all of creation, including the fallen Aeon who founded our material universe. Because the Christ came to redeem everyone, the body of Jesus came to earth with every one of the Fullnesses on board. For every fallen spirit, the Christ brought their own personal and recognizable Savior. The function of Jesus as an earthly, human savior, is to demonstrate to us that we can all be redeemed and resurrected out of the mud and death and into everlasting life. The Jesus figure is presented as our exemplar of how we may all rise, every one of us, including the Demiurge itself. In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ brought the correcting formula for all of our spirits and souls, each unique and personally formulated to meet our individual needs. The baptism of the Christ washes away the mental and spiritual confusion brought on by the endless war with shadows of the Fall. 

Gnostics are apocalyptic, as are Christians. There will soon come a day when the Deficiency ends. On that day, a new economy will unite Heaven and Earth, and all souls will find their joyous place in Paradise. The only forms banished to the outer darkness will be the shadows and phantoms of the Fall, which did not exist within the Father from the beginning. These shadows are not real, and they have no home with us in Paradise, and the light of the Father will evaporate them.

We 2nd order powers are children of the 1st order powers.
The 3rd order powers are the Army of Christ that have come to redeem us.

That is the ending of the episode from 2021. Now, my new book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, is all about all of this. This entirety of the entire podcast of the last three years put into a logical and orderly manner that anyone can read and grasp who has an interest in Gnosis, or the God Above All Gods.

What I have tried to do is to demystify Gnosticism. I don’t believe that Gnosis should be held like a big secret and kept away from people. We’re all from the God Above All Gods. We are all fruit of the Fullnesses of God. Therefore, we all will be going up to rejoin our parents, to rejoin the Aeons in the Fullness above. No Second Order Power is going into what is called the eternal lake of fire. That actually is something of a mistranslation from the original Greek. We can go into more translations of the original Greek in another episode. In future episodes, I think I’ll try to make more clear both the distinctions and the similarities of Gnostic Christianity with what has become conventional Christianity, because it really does all start with the same Father. When Jesus said, “I and my Father are one. If you see me, you see the Father.” We would hold that to be true.

The book will be out very soon. I’m in the final stage of one last comb-through to catch any last little typos and mistakes, since I had to reformat the entire book from scratch myself. Now we are going to publish it through Amazon.com. It’s going to be priced at $24.24. I really look forward to that day, and I’ll let you know as soon as it happens. It will be any day now. And did I tell you that Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio will be narrating the audio book? He begins recording next week.

So, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I’m going to re-record and re-present an episode from October of 2021. You probably haven’t heard it or don’t remember it. I had just gotten braces in 2021 and the actual recording itself is pretty poor. Well, you can tell it’s a person who just has fresh braces on their teeth, so we don’t have that trouble anymore. It’s a pretty long episode and it was originally entitled, As Below, So Above, Inferring the Transcendent. I’ve also dropped in some new insights concerning politics…

You realize that the manner by which we are mining gnosis here at Gnostic Insights often involves using analogies between what is known and what is less tangible. As Below, So Above provides a handy tool for inferring otherwise undetectable aspects of the spiritual dimension. If we start with the premise of a singular consciousness that pre-exists everything that came after it, then we can follow the genesis of our universe from that consciousness step by step.

In today’s episode, we’re going to map aspects of our human personalities onto the Gnostic Gospel to see what we can infer about ourselves down here below and about forms of consciousness above. So, what do we know by now? We generally begin at the beginning and build outward from there, so we start with consciousness. We know that all life forms are conscious and we infer from that a ground state of consciousness and that is what we call the Father. The Father, or consciousness itself, is not the same as having thoughts. It is simply self-awareness. It is the no-thought state that people seek through meditation.

Then we say that consciousness, or the Father, or what we call in the Simple Explanation, the metaverse, had a thought. This thought is a ripple in consciousness that arises out of the undifferentiated state of no-thought. The Gnostic Gospel calls this thought the Son. The Son reflects the consciousness of the Father in a circumscribed form. That is, circumscribed means contained, like drawing a circle around something. And in this case, the Son was a circle drawn around the Father’s consciousness.

Yet, the Son is not lesser than the Father because there’s no size or distance here and there is no time or space in the eternal omnipresent. The Tripartite Tractate says that no sooner did the Son arise than it had its own thought, which differentiated into every possible thought, like rays of light shooting out from a central star. The Son, mirroring the creative act of the Father, gave rise to himself in the form of countless thoughts.

These thoughts became aware of themselves in the same manner that the Son became self-aware. The moment they became self-aware, they named themselves, and the moment they named themselves, they sorted themselves into a hierarchy of relationships with one another. These thoughts of the Son are called Aeons, and the hierarchy into which they arranged themselves is called the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma.

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The Aeons consist of names, stations, ranks, duties, and locations. This is another way of saying that the Aeons form a kind of geometry of functions and forms that we all know where and what and who they are in relationship with each other. Within the Hierarchy of the Fullness, all Aeons have their own identities, as well as their self-assigned locations and functions. Everyone knows who they are and where they stand in their intermingled ecology. Each Aeon occupies a unique place and perspective within the union of the Fullness. No one is left out, and no one is more important than any of the other Aeons in the hierarchy.

The Fullness reflects the entirety of the Son. They coexist and overlap. The Son wears the Fullness as a garment, and the Fullness wears the Son in the manner that our own bodies can be said to be a garment for our souls. Our bodies contain and coexist with ourselves. The Fullness is a singular entity composed of countless Aeons in the same way that our bodies are a singular organism composed of countless cells. The Aeons sat in a unified state.

All for one and one for all is their motto. Their main function is to love and to be loved. They love each other. They love the Son. The Aeons love the Father and give constant glory to the Father, so happy were they to be alive. The Aeons yearned for communion with the Father, for they recognized themselves as the fruit of the Father.

In the same manner that blood flows throughout our bodies, delivering oxygen and nutrients to every cell, the Holy Spirit of the Father’s consciousness flowed through the Aeons of the Fullness, constantly feeding them love. Although the Aeons dwelt within the single body of the Fullness, they were each an independent self. Their immense variety required them to work together and remain in full agreement, for only through their union could they approach the Father’s greatness. It was only in their unanimity that they reflected the perfection of the Son, and only the Son had direct access to the Father. If they were not in complete agreement, then they could not add up to the Fullness of the Son. It was through giving glory to the Father that the Fullness remained unified as one body.

Giving glory means focusing upon an object with adoration and love. The Tripartite Tractate tells us that there was a simple set of rules that ensured the unanimity of the Fullness. In order to remain aligned with the Father, the Aeons needed to glorify only the Father and never themselves. The Aeons were not to glorify their neighbors, neither those beside them nor those above them. They were not to glorify the Fullness as a whole. Rather, their focus was to remain upward, giving glory only to the Father. Furthermore, each Aeon was to give glory from its own location in the hierarchy, with its own talents and capabilities, and not borrowing the talents of its neighbors.

Our universe began with the Fall. The Tripartite Tractate calls the Aeon who fell Logos. That is a significant name. Logos is defined as the principle of order and reason. If we think of the Logos within ourselves, we would align Logos with our mind’s reasoning capabilities, including the ability to apply logic and make inferences.

The Tripartite Tractate says that Logos was the final Aeon produced when the Aeons sorted themselves into their hierarchical arrangement of the Fullness of God. This Aeon, Logos, contained within itself not only the ability to reason, it also contained all of the traits and abilities of the Fullness, wrapped into a single package. In terms of the Simple Explanation, we would say that Logos was the perfect fractal of the Fullness, carrying within itself all of the knowledge and functions of all the other Aeons.

The Bible’s Gospel of John identifies this Aeon called Logos as the Son, but this is an error according to Gnostic cosmology. As we just laid out in the cosmology, the Son is the first fruit of the Father, and the Son is the Father of the Fullness. The Aeon who fell is but one Aeon out of the Fullness. Yes, you can see how Logos reflects the Son being a fractal of the Fullness of the Son. However, it is only a fractal, an iteration of the Son in a lesser form, not to be confused with the Son who precedes it and is more exalted than the Aeons. The Aeon called Logos carries fractal copies of all the Aeons within itself, but these aeonic copies are not each self-aware in the way that the Aeons themselves are self-aware.

The aeonic copies contained within the Aeon known as Logos are not themselves conscious. They are merely fractal reflections of the hierarchy, but lacking the consciousness of the Aeons, a resemblance of the Aeons only on the surface, lacking the depth of thoughts. The Tripartite Tractate tells us that the Aeon known as Logos yearned to reunite with the Father, as did all of the Aeons.

But rather than sitting with the others in the Fullness, giving glory according to the rules of unanimity, Logos had a thought that deviated from the rules. Logos had its own singular bright idea. This idea came to be known as the presumptuous thought in Gnostic cosmology.

Presumptuous means failing to observe the limits of what is permitted or appropriate. What Logos decided to do was to reach out to the Father all on its own. In other words, Logos mistook its own personal will for the will of the Fullness of God.

Logos mistook himself, you can say, for the Son. It is this presumptuous thought, born out of misplaced love for the Father, that caused the Fall. This presumptuous thought was the original sin. Christianity continues to make the same error of identification that Logos made. Logos is not the Son. Logos is the Aeon who fell. Logos separated himself from the Fullness of the Son when it took action on its own. This action of leaving the Fullness to strike out on its own is the first act of the ego. The ego of Logos brought about the Fall.

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This action of ego is the true nature of the Fall, not a human handing another human forbidden knowledge in the form of a magic apple. The Fall is birthed by the ego acting outside of the will of God, which is to say, ego putting itself on the throne and making decisions on its own. And this is very true of our own personal human psyches as well.

When the ego displaces the Self at the center of our unit of consciousness, as we call it in the Simple Explanation, then we are allowing our self-centered ego to run the show. Ego displaces the One Self we share with the Fullness and the Son. And it’s all downhill from there.

Logos fell and broke apart into the poor weak imitations of the Aeons above, and because they were no longer arranged in the orderly ecology of the Fullness, the imitations lacked places, functions, and names, throwing them into a disordered state of chaos. The imitations of the Aeons were not self-aware in the manner of the Aeons whose figures they mirrored, and this lack of consciousness manifested only disturbance, upheaval, and confusion. These phantoms of the deficiency did not reflect in any way the glory of the Fullness, the Son, or the Father. They were feeble, small, and unruly. There was no cooperative will among them. There was no Golden Rule.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa54f79e8-5fce-4e1b-9ce9-bc10ceac297c_800x505.jpegThe small fractals that once formed the pleroma of Logos lost themselves during the Fall and rolled out into chaos.

And I’m going to stop here for a moment from the original text of 2021 and insert this thought: Boy, it sounds like politics today, doesn’t it? It seems to me that we can liken, for example, the Constitution of the United States to the agreement amongst the Fullnesses to work in unanimity and cooperation with each other, and we can liken the Fall of Logos to those politicians who disregard the unanimity and basic structure of the Constitution. They are working out of ego. They are working out of personal power, striving for power. So they disregard the rules of how things were designed to work, and they say, to heck with the rules, I know what’s right. I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do that.

I’m just dropping in that thought for your consideration. Now, let’s get back to the original text.

In The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, my previous book, on pages 20 and 21, I said, “Presumptuous thought and arrogance replaced the wisdom granted by the Father, and Logos lost himself to ignorance and oblivion. Everything he produced, as a result, fell disastrously short of his intended glory. The imitations produced as a consequence of the Fall lacked the ability to reason. Their only thought was for themselves, arising as they did from division. They thought they were all there was, and they admired only themselves, not realizing they were but dark shadows of the Aeons of the Fullness. Because Logos had been reaching for the heights when he fell, the imitation of the Fullness that emerged from the Fall kept trying to reach the unreachable. Only now, what had been a desire of the Aeons to reunite with their Father became an upward striving for power. Personal ambition eclipsed the Father’s will.”

And again, jumping back into my analogy between Constitutional directives and the personal ambition and wills of politicians who hold power and only care about power, they may say they have good intentions, like Logos did when he was reaching for the Father, but actually they’re working out of egoic striving for power, and nothing good can come of that. Only ignorance and darkness arises from that, as it did with Logos when he fell.

Okay, jumping back into the text, and by way of analogy, so it is with all of us, when our ego holds the throne of our unit of consciousness, as we’ve been saying in the Simple Explanation terms, when our ego is put in the center rather than the Self, with the big S, the Self, then we experience the same sort of self-centered ambition, and the only drive becomes power. When the Self sits at the center of our consciousness rather than our ego, then our Self is in full alignment with the One, with the Son, and with the Fullness.

The Tripartite Tractate says that the best part of Logos was horrified by the chaos it had created and fled back to its brethren in the Fullness, abandoning the broken imitation. So, let us consider what of Logos was left behind when the best part of the Aeon abandoned the deficiency. The answer would be ego.

The ego of Logos had no remembrance of the Fullness of the Father, for the Self that fled back to the Fullness was the sliver of consciousness that remembered the Father. The ego of Logos, abandoned below, continued to believe that it was all there was, having forgotten the true nature and source of consciousness. The ego of Logos did not remember love or the life of the Pleroma.

As the best part of Logos had vacated, the ego of Logos took over management of the Fallen deficiency. We know from both the Bible and from the Tripartite Tractate that the God of this universe brought order to the chaos, forming the heavens and the Earth. However, since the creations of the Fall lacked self-awareness and intrinsic order, they needed to be ruled with an iron fist. Lacking Aeonic cooperation and unity, the imitations of the deficiency required their every move to be directed by the ego of the Fallen Aeon. The God of this cosmos is known as the Demiurge in Gnostic studies, a term it borrows from ancient Greek philosophy. The Demiurge is described as an artisan-like figure responsible for fashioning and maintaining the physical universe.

In the Bible, and here’s the heresy—the God of this universe is known as Yahweh, or Jehovah. Unfortunately, this God, the maker of the heavens and the Earth, is not the same as the Father above, as we have seen from this rollout of the Gnostic cosmology. The Demiurge is a sleight of hand misdirection from the true source of life and light.

This is one reason I like to begin these discussions with the Father and show the relationship of the Father to the Son and the Son to the Aeons of the Fullness in order to demonstrate that this is not the same Father as the one we were taught to consider the Almighty. The God of this earth and of this material universe was created out of ego during the Fall. This God is the fruit of the original sin. This is definitely not the God Above All Gods, who is our right and proper source of consciousness and the glorious focus of our devotion. This Demiurge, who calls himself the Father, is not the Father above. This Demiurge is only the egoic manifestation of one fallen Aeon.

And I think I’m going to stop the original episode here and we’ll take it up again next week, because it was a long episode.

As I’ve been retelling it to you, I’m constantly reminded of politics today, because of course politics is in the news, right? Politics is everything right now. And the oddness of how those on the left in politics and those on the right in politics do not seem to overlap at all, yet they hold the same desire. I’m sure that all of the good people, all of the citizens, want peace and harmony in the world and amongst themselves and with each other. This lack of peace and harmony that’s coming to a head right now in our nation and in our world, I believe, is a direct result of the Fall. And I think that as I hear about the Fall and what it caused, and how the imitations of the deficiency lack consciousness, they lack love.

They lack, most importantly in my opinion, because I’m a big fan of Logos—they lack Logos. They lack reason, the ability to reason and anticipate the consequences of their beliefs and actions. The politicians are flailing about wanting this and wanting that, and if the people don’t want the this and the that that the politicians are trying to enact, that’s the same way that the Demiurge controls the material universe, through strong bonds. That’s why tyranny is always the result of lack of actually listening to what the people want. Tyranny imposes what it wants, what it thinks is best, and really bottom line is what it thinks is best is that it remain in power.

But the people cannot be controlled through tyranny. The molecules, the atoms, the elements, they can. They can be controlled by those strong bonds of power that the Demiurge uses like a puppet master pulling their strings. And that’s the pattern that the politicians are using. They’re following the Demiurge’s example, and they attempt to control us with strong bonds of powers and strings of control. Thou shalts and thou shalt nots. And you’re going, what? Where did this come from? Who said they could do that? I thought we were a constitutional republic. I thought we were ruled by the rule of the people from the bottom up, not from the Demiurgic rule of the politicians.

What we are seeing here in this political climate, is fractals of As Above, So Below. As above is represented by people working together according to the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to our neighbors with love, with assistance, and with information to make our nation and our world a better place. This Golden Rule-based politics would put the good of the nation above personal ambition and power. It would focus on the project rather than personalities. It would have a vision that can only be achieved through reasonable measures designed in advance to bring about a particular end.

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But what we see today are demiurgic fractals in control of politics and nations. The Demiurge works as a dictator, using strict measures of control meted out by centralized power. The Demiurge desires control, and it cannot allow citizens to have freedom of expression or personal sovereignty. I looked up “political sovereignty” online and Britannica defines it as, “Sovereignty, in political theory, the ultimate overseer, or authority, in the decision-making process of the state,” which is a chillingly accurate description of demiurgic rule. The Ultimate Overseer of this world is the Demiurge, not the people.

Remember, the Demiurge does not know love and has no affection for humans and their pesky free will, whereas the Father and the Fullnesses love us and passed along free will as a God-given part of our 2nd Order nature.   

Onward and upward. God bless.

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I finished getting my book ready for publication and it’s been uploaded to Amazon. I tried to upload it to Lulu, but there were problems with the process and I had to kick back to Amazon, I’m sorry to say. One of the listeners had requested that I go with the small independent publisher Lulu, and I did try, but there were problems. So it seems to be God’s will, we could say, that I publish on Amazon, getting the worldwide distribution. I’m expecting the proof copy about a week from today, and if it looks as good as it appears that it’s going to look, then I’ll be ready to release the book.

A couple of listeners have taken me up on the offer and pledge that if you were to donate $50 towards the effort of getting the book published and distributed, I would mail you personally, from my house to your house, a signed copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and I’d be happy to do that for any of you. Just send me a comment through the contact card or through my email address if you have it, and you can have a book from me to you, and I would very much appreciate that, and God bless the people that have volunteered, so thank you very much. Having a bit of a pledge drive here, see? So the things that I had thought were going to be taken care of by the professional publishing company that I decided not to go with, now I’m going to have to be taking care of all of that—the promotion and that sort of thing, social media, all of that. Perhaps one of you listeners is good at those sorts of things and would like to volunteer to help spread the word. That would be terrific. Otherwise, go ahead and leave an extra $20, $25 if you can. I’m going to put the donation form at the end of the transcript to this episode here at GnosticInsights.com.

I was listening to a radio preacher this morning, and he was talking, as they often do, about the inherent sin nature of man, or humanity as I would like to say, being a woman. He was saying that we are born into sin because of the original fall of Adam and Eve, and we have a sin nature. They’re always talking about the sin nature, and that that is why we need to turn to Christ and repent and ask for Christ to come into our hearts in order to redeem us because of our inherent sin nature. But you see, in Gnosticism, we don’t think of our psyche in exactly the same way. I wouldn’t say that we do have an inherent sin nature.

What I would say, focusing on the good, is that we have an inherent godly nature because, as it says in the Tripartite Tractate and in other Gnostic Gospels, and as it says in the New Testament of the Bible, we are filled with the Fullness of God. And I am taking that literally, that we actually are filled with the Fullness of God, that we have our complete Self, that’s that big S self that is at the core of our being. Our inherent nature, in other words, is a full reflection of the Son of God or the Fullness of God.

14 “For this reason I bow my knees to the Father [f]of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15 from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, 16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— 19 to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. “(Ephesians 3:14-19)

So, we do not have an inherent sin nature. We are children of the Aeons of God. We are children of the Fullness, and it’s actually an insult to the Fullness and to the Son of God to say that their children—for are we not the children of God? Are we not brothers and sisters of Jesus?—it’s a big insult to the Aeons and the angels and the Son of God that made us to say that we’re inherently evil. And it’s not because we fell. The Fall was instigated long before the humans came along. The Fall is the nature of our material universe, that’s all. It’s basically metaphorical language for moving from a different realm, a different home—from the ethereal non-material space of heaven, we might call it, or the Fullness of God. And the Fall was the accidental overreaching of that top Aeon, Logos, which has come down into our Christian tradition as the overreaching of the top angel, Lucifer. It’s the same story. It’s the same fractal. And it was that Fall that created our material space, leading to ignorance and forgetfulness of the Father and of all that came before. And all that did come before was the ethereal realm.

One of my regular listeners and readers wrote a very good inquiry to me this week. And she had an insight. She had a satori, I believe, because I think it’s in my book, and she’s read my book, and I’m pretty sure that I had already written it. But here it is, because sometimes you hear something or read it, and then months later, it comes back percolating down into you or up out of you, depending on which way you want to think about it. And that’s what your satoris are. Those are your little bits of enlightenment. It’s things that you already know, but now they’re remembered and you can articulate them. And it’s as if you just thought of it for the first time.

And here’s what it is. You know the way I picture the Fullness of God as that golden pyramid, right? Those stacking golden cannonballs. And each one of those cannonballs is an Aeon or a facet of the Fullness of God. The Fullness of God is infinite in ability and scope, because it is the Son of God. And the Son wears the Aeons like a cloak, and the Aeons wear the Son like a cloak—they are co-existent. The difference is that the Fullness of God, the Aeons, are broken out and articulated, whereas the Son is one perfectly integrated One. Oneness. That big giant stack of cannonballs is pretty much infinitely large. And it has every concept, every possible thing that will ever be, every relationship, every up, down, in, out, math, physics, chemistry, and every personality that will ever be. All of the animals, all of the forms, the prototypes, the archetypes are in the Fullness of God. So all of the animals, all of the species, pre-exist in the Fullness of God. It’s all there.

The hierarchy of the Fullness of God dreams of Paradise. Logos crowns the hierarchy and contains fractals of all the other Aeons.

It’s what the Aeons sit and dream about. The Paradise that pre-exists before the Fall, the Paradise, which in our lexicon of thinking has basically come down to us as the Garden of Eden, but it even exists above. It’s Paradise, and it’s the Aeons who sit as One in the Fullness of God, like a big giant slime mold, not going anywhere, but dreaming and creating. They’re the great storytellers. They’re the inventors. They’re sitting there, and they’re dreaming of Paradise.

And Paradise is very much like where we live. Paradise is very much like Earth, except that it’s pre-Fall. And so there’s no death or destruction, no sadness, no ignorance. All the angels mingle and mix. All the Aeons mingle and mix. The lions lie down with the lambs. It’s very much like what we expect the third economy that will be coming after this one will be like, after this world passes away—the final economy. And after the redemption, that becomes our eternal home, the good place, right?

So each person is—and here’s the point I’m trying to get to—each of us humans, or each creature, each of any kind of creature, dog, cat, cow, rosebush, fish, bacteria, every single creature on the planet, everything, everything that’s alive, which I think of as soft and squishy, as opposed to the mineral elements, which are hard and rocky; all the soft, squishy guys that carry the life, the consciousness, the love of the Aeons above, down into this otherwise dead material world that was created from the Fall—we’re all unique. We’re all completely unique.

And when in the Bible it says the Father knew you before you were even conceived in the womb, the Father knew everything about you, that’s because we pre-exist in the Fullness of God. We are the children, like spores, we are the spores or children of the Fullness of God. And we are sent down from them into this material plane, carrying in our little chariots of life, carrying the consciousness of God, carrying the plans and blueprints, the memories, the knowledge, the true knowledge of the ethereal realm, and everything that was ever conceived up there.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5)

Now, each of us is unique. And that is because, get this, this is pretty interesting. If you picture that golden pyramid, and think of all those Aeons as lighted golden balls, here’s how Aeons procreate. It says that they look upon each other with adoration and love, and together, they look upon the Father and worship Him with adoration and love together. And this is done in combinations of various Aeons. You know, the lower Aeons are the structures and blueprints of the material world, so to speak. It’s how chemistry works. It’s how physics works. Those are the lower Aeons, and we’re made up of those, aren’t we? But on top of that, we have the living parts, the soft, squishy parts that are brought down from conception onward. Those are what carry the memory and the consciousness of God, because the physical elemental material is not self-aware. The demiurge is aware. He controls them through strings of power, chemical bonds, physical valences and rules, laws.

The demiurge strictly controls the material creation, but we, we have that pesky free will. We are a different sort of being. The Self that comes in during conception, when the egg is fertilized, the Self that comes in is the parental aeonic units. We’ve got our earthly parents, we’ve got our genetic inheritance, but we also have aeonic parents. And that, my aeonic parents, I don’t know how many there are, there’s tons of them. They gave glory to each other, and then they gave glory together to the Father. But my particular combination, it’s like a stencil. It’s like a spray paint stencil that you hide part of the Fullness, and it’s only the gold balls that show through in the pattern of the stencil, that’s you. And I’m practically identical to you. I’m practically identical to all of my human neighbors. We just have certain, you know, I’ve got certain covered up aeons, but I’ve got other aeons exposed. So I’m musical. Maybe you’re not musical. Maybe I have an aeon of music, a muse, and you don’t have an aeon of music, but maybe you have an aeon of mathematics or language ability or dance that I don’t have. So we’re all made up of unique combinations of talents. And each talent is given to us by one of our aeonic parents. And so that is how you have an infinite number of combinations of aeons that keep spitting out these spores of life and consciousness that come down during conception and become we creatures. Does that make sense? Do you follow what I’m saying?

So are we inherently evil? Well, no. We are the children of the aeons. Now what makes us then, what does make us evil? Why is it then that the preachers think we’re evil? Well, that is because of the never-ending war. That is because of the ignorance, forgetfulness, and delusion that putting these ethereal infinite aeonic creatures that we are into these material forms down here during conception, we are bound to the material world at that point. And our bodies begin to grow and unfold using molecules. That’s the mud up level. But each one of those molecules that’s part of the living cells is also part of the top-down aeonic inheritance because every cell carries a fractal of the Fullness of God in it. And that’s how we build up.

Now, the “evil” comes about through ignorance. The Tripartite Tractate says that evil is ignorance. That’s what it is. What are we ignorant of? Well, we forgot who we are and where we came from. That’s what the essential ignorance is. We, like Logos, think we woke up out of nothingness and here we are. I’m a baby and I’m crying now.

Well, it’s not that at all. It’s I am a child of the Fullness of God and I’ve been stuffed into this material body and had to develop upward from a single cell on up in the womb until I was born. And I do, when I’m first born, have a memory of Paradise, have a memory of my aeonic parents. Up there things are a lot different. Down here things aren’t as easy. Things are very disappointing. Even learning to walk and falling down because you’re just a baby and you’re trying to stand up and walk like you used to. You can’t do that anymore. So every time you fall down you cry out of frustration. I think that’s why babies cry, because they sense the separation from God now. They know they’re no longer up in Paradise.

But the good news is this is temporary. This is not our home, as the hymn books all say. We’re just a-passing on through between one heavenly existence, our pre-life, through this material world of sorrow and woe, pain and disappointment, aging and death, and then on to the glorious final resting place, which is a post-material world.

So we are not meaning to be evil. Children are not born evil. We just forget. The Tripartite Tractate says we forget about the Father in the Fullness and the fact that we come from above. And that is the essential core sadness and disappointment of our lives.

And of course then that sadness turns around into ways to trying to stop being sad. And then that’s what turns into vices instead of virtues. And all of the trying to stuff down the emptiness of material existence with even more material things. Let’s buy this. Let’s eat that. But that can’t bring you happiness. That can’t bring fullness either. It is not ultimately fulfilling. Jesus talked about the springs of living water you can drink from and never thirst again.

“for the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to living fountains of waters. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” (Revelation 7:17)

That’s what we remember, and that’s what we’re going back to. And that’s the gnosis that we have to remember. That’s all. Because we don’t have to memorize or learn any sort of occult or esoteric rituals or practices. Because you have to think, if the Father wants us all to remember him, he wants us all to remember him. And that includes the squirrels and the bunny rabbits and the birds. They’re not going to be memorizing astrological charts or alchemy. It’s what do they know. Imagine–what does a blade of grass know? What does the dog know? What does the newborn baby know that you don’t know? You’ve got to be able to conceive of that mentally to realize that there’s nothing to learn. It’s only the knowledge that we are loved. The knowledge that we come from above. And until we remember that, then we will be prone to egoic behavior, and we will be prone to acting out of vice rather than virtue. But once we remember that we come from above, then we are not afraid of God anymore, because we run to God. We know that we are loved. And we know that we love God.

And I’m talking about the God Above All Gods, the Father in Heaven, not the Old Testament God that walks around on the Earth. That’s a different cat.

Well, okay, I think that’s all I need to go through. I was going to read some scripture, etc., etc. But I don’t think we need to do that. We’ll keep it fairly short today.

I hope you’ve gotten something out of this episode. And of course, I always treasure your correspondence because this entire talk today was based upon an email that one of the listeners sent. Just a kind of a little comment that she made about wondering if the Aeons are the archetypes and are we all made of different combinations of Aeons. Yes, yes, praise God. That’s it. So you write me your comments or questions, and I’d be very happy to talk about it on the air.

One more thing that has occurred to me recently, and I don’t know, maybe it’s a directive for me, from God. You know, I have a counseling degree as well. And my specialty in counseling was always dream interpretation. And I’m a very good interpreter of nighttime dreams. And that is what I used to mainly do for people as my counseling modality. Because our dream is our unit of consciousness speaking to us during the night when the ego barriers are lowered down, and you don’t have your ego putting this cage around what you can think or imagine. When you are asleep and you are dreaming, it’s your unconscious that rises up and is able to deliver messages to you. And I’m pretty good at picking out those messages.

So I’m thinking of somehow offering a service of dream interpretation to my followers and listeners. And I’m not sure how that would go, or how I would charge for that. If you have any ideas of how I should set that up, or if you’re interested, please drop me a line and let me know. And that will encourage me to go with the idea.

Okay, until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights.

Yesterday, that would be July 18th, 2024, I was a guest on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio with my good Gnostic friend, Adrian Smith and, of course, Vance Socci and Miguel Conner, and we were discussing the Demiurge. That’s why I’m running this episode this week about the Demiurge. But I encourage you to go to YouTube to the Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, to the episode that’s up this week now. It’s called Navigating These Gnostic Times.

Here’s an episode concerning the Demiurge and redeeming the Demiurge from 2022. I’ve edited it down quite a bit to make it a lot more palatable. I hope you enjoy it.

The redemption of the Demiurge is a two-step process. Part one had to do with bringing life into creation in the form of all of the Second Order Powers, who themselves are the living representations of the images of the Aeons above. Then part two of the redemption of this creation is the coming of the Christ along with the Third Order of Powers that the Christ contains, the Pleroma of the Christ. That’s the Third Order Powers. And the Third Order Powers come as a covering, as a redemption, for each and every one of the Second Order Powers. So it’s kind of a stacking situation, right? The Fall generated these fractals of the Aeons above, only smaller versions of those fractals because they come out of the broken body of a single Aeon named Logos.

And Logos contained within himself a smaller version, so to speak, a fractal of all of the other Aeons. And when Logos brought those to this material plane, this material plane was what they called a likeness, the likenesses of the Aeons above, but they were dead. They weren’t alive.

The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise.

In a similar way that a mirror reflects ourselves, right? The mirror is a flat 2-D representation of my 3-D body. The material creation down here that started as the Fall of Logos is a likeness of the Aeons above in the Fullness of God—it’s a different, though, dimension, the way that the mirror is 2-D that reflects and backwards reflects, by the way, my 3-D reality.

Our material creation is a 3-D reality that reflects, and in an inverted way, the Aeons above.

So there’s a likeness of the images above for every one of the Aeons. And those likenesses are the egoic side or the broken side, the shadow side; they’re the inversion of the Aeons above. In order to redeem the Fall, in order to reclaim the body of Logos back up into the Fullness of God, to release it from this different plane that it has found itself on, the Second Order Powers, all of us living creatures, everything that contains the Holy Spirit, the spark of life, there’s one of us Second Order Powers for every one of the likenesses of the Demiurge of the Fall. And then, on top of us, there is a Third Order Power for every one of us Second Order Powers. And the Third Order Powers are the pleroma of the Christ that come along with the Christ to redeem creation.

What we’re talking about today comes from the part of the Tripartite Tractate that is called The Pleroma of the Logos, Section 9.

“When the Logos which was defective was illumined, his pleroma began.” So the Logos which was defective, that’s the Logos who has returned now to the Fullness of God, to his brothers back up in the Fullness. He abandoned his egoic broken unit of consciousness down here below. That’s why the Demiurge has no remembrance of the Fullness, because Logos himself, which carries the one spirit of the entirety of the Fullness and God, returned back to his home in the pleroma.

“Pleasing among things which are good, existing among the things which exist, resembling them in beauty, but unequal to them in truth, but in wisdom and knowledge he acts, mingling the Logos within himself entirely. Therefore, those which came forth from him are great, just as that which is truly great. After he was amazed at the beauty of the ones who had appeared to him, he professed gratitude for this visitation.”

“The Logos performed this activity through those from whom he had received aid for the stability of those who had come into being because of him,” that’s us, “and so that they might receive something good, since he thought to pray for the organization of all those who came forth from him, which is stabilized, so that it might make them established. Therefore, those whom he intentionally produced are in chariots, just as those who came into being, those who have appeared, so that they might pass through every place of things which are below, so that each one might be given the place which is constituted as he is.”

So remember, all of us down here below, we are each constituted after a particular Aeon, or a particular Aeon who is itself combinations of Aeons. Everything down below that is living is modeled after the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And so, when the Logos who was redeemed, that is the body of the Pleroma of the Christ which comes down, it’s constituted as everything that’s already down here, so that it can plug right into it. Every element of the Christ, that is, these Third Order of beings, which are the Pleroma of the Christ, every one of them has the ability to perfectly plug into and cover, cover with redemption, cover with love, cover with the knowledge of the Father, cover with the light of God, that bit of life that’s down here—trapped in this coexistent hellish type of world with the fallen Demiurge.

You know, each one of us is bonded to the material world by these bodies that we walk around in. So, “This is destruction for the beings of the likeness,” and those beings of the likeness, those are the archons and the fallen egos and our egos, “yet it is an act of beneficence for the beings of the thought.” And the beings of the thought, those are the pure images, that are kept pure up above. They have not been sullied by what has come about down here in this fallen world.

“A revelation of those who are from the ordinance,” the ordinance, those are the Aeons of the Fullness, because ordinance is another word for a Hierarchy, an order. So the beings of the ordinance, those are the Aeons of the Hierarchy of the Fullness.

“…which was a unity while suffering, while they are seeds which have not yet come to be by themselves.” And the reason the Aeons of the Fullness are suffering is because one of them, Logos, left them and fell and created this material world. And so the Fullness has been suffering ever since.

“The one who appeared was a countenance of the Father and of the harmony.” So we’re talking about the Christ now. “He was a garment composed of every grace and food, which is for those whom the Logos brought forth while praying and giving glory and honor. This is the one whom he glorified and honored while looking to those to whom he prayed, so that he might perfect them through the images which he had brought forth.” And those are the images of the ALL and the Fullness. Carrying on,

“The Logos added even more to their mutual assistance and to the hope of the promise, since they have joy and abundant rest and undefiled pleasures.”

See, we would like to have undefiled pleasures. So often our pleasures become defiled. And defiled means made icky, right? You start something because you like it and it’s really good, and then you overdo it and it becomes defiled. So, in the final economy, we will have undefiled pleasures.

“He generated those whom he remembered at first when they were not with him. He generated them having the perfection. Now, while he who belongs to the vision is with him, he exists in hope and faith in the perfect Father as much as the Totalities. He appears to him before he mingles with him in order that the things which have come into being might not perish by looking upon the light, for they cannot accept the great exalted stature.” He’s generally talking about us now. This is the way the Christ comes to us—gently, so that we don’t just collapse in the glory of God.

“The thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him was called Aeon in place for all of those whom he brought forth in accord with the ordinance. It is also called the synagogue of salvation because he healed himself from the dispersal, which is the multifarious thought.”

And multifarious means divided. And so the multifarious thought is all of our individual egos that lead us into our own will without considering the will of the Father. The Christ leads us out of our egoic self-centered selves. The Christ leads us back into harmony with the One, with the Fullness, with the ALL, with the Son, with the Father. That is what it means to be healed from the multifarious thought. You step away from the ego that drives you into your own narcissistic behavior and you instead become one with the Fullness again, one with the Father, because we have the Christ within us. And the Christ is this wonderful combination of the Fullnesses, the ALL, and the Father, and all of the power that comes directly out of them and directly into us. So, again quoting,

“He healed himself from the dispersal, which is the multifarious thought, and returned to the single thought.” And the single thought, that’s the gnosis of the Father, the knowledge that you are loved and that you come from the Father and that you will return to the Father.

Similarly, quoting again, “It is called the storehouse because of the rest which he obtained, giving it to himself alone. It is also called the bride because of the joy of the one who gave himself to him in the hope of fruit from the union.” And the fruit from the union is going to be, or is, if you are a true Christian who has accepted the Christ and turned from the multifarious thought to the One Self, which is a pure reflection of the Christ and the power of God. The fruit of that union is a redeemed human being or a redeemed Second Order Power—that is the fruit of the union. Right now, the Second Order Powers are the fruit of the Fullness. But when the Christ comes into the Second Order Power, it now is a new creation. It is a new fruit.

“It is also called kingdom because of the stability which he receives while he rejoices at the domination of those who fought him. And it is called the joy of the Lord because of the gladness in which he clothed himself. With him is the light, giving him recompense for the good things which are in him. And with him is the thought of freedom.”

“The Aeon of which we previously spoke is above the two orders of those who fight against one another.” Okay, the two orders that fight against one another, that’s the archons and the fallen bits of the Demiurge, the material world, and the Second Order of Powers, which is all of us living things. “It is not a companion of those who hold dominion and is not implicated in the illnesses and weaknesses.” Things belonging to the thought and to the likenesses. The likenesses are those fallen parts.

“That in which the Logos set himself, perfect in joy, was an Aeon having the form of matter, but also having the constitution of the cause, which is the one who revealed himself.” And that is the way that conventional Christians think of Jesus, the Christ. That Jesus had the form of matter, that is, as a human walking around, but also the constitution of the cause, that is, he was one with the Father.

“The Aeon was an image of those things which are in the pleroma, those things which came into being from the abundance of the enjoyment of the One who exists joyously. Moreover, the countenance of the One who revealed himself and was in the sincerity and the attentiveness and the promise concerning the things for which he asked. It had the designation of the Son and his essence and his power in his form, who is the one whom he loved and in whom he was pleased, who was entreated in a loving way. It was light and was a desire to be established and an openness for instruction and an eye for vision, qualities which it had from the exalted ones. It was also a word for speaking and the perfection of the things of the sort. And it is these who took form with him, but according to the image of the pleroma, having their fathers, who are the ones who gave them life, each one being a copy of each one of the faces, which are the forms.”

The redeemed Pleroma of Logos, redeemed by the Christ, is the final resting place for the Demiurge once it remembers and recognizes its brothers in the Fullness and the Father of them all through the power of Christ, because it took that power of Christ coming in to this material world through us in order for the Demiurge to remember. The Third Order of Powers is called the aeon, the place, the thought of the Logos who returned to his stability. It’s known also as the synagogue of salvation, the storehouse, the bride, the kingdom, the church, the image of the light. It is set above the Second Order and the deficiency. It has the form of matter, but the constitution of the Christ, each one containing the Pleroma of the All.

These are the manifest images of the living visages, not arising from division, but from the unity of the aeons of the Father and the good original thought that existed prior to the rise of ego. While the Second Order Powers, us, each arose at the countenance of a single aeon, the Third Order Powers are in harmony and resemble the entire assembly of indivisible light. The Third Order Powers have not yet come into being. They are pure and joyful, the guarded seed of the promise awaiting their mission of coming with the Savior. They are first in the knowledge and glory of the Father, and that knowledge is freedom and release from captivity. They will proclaim the coming of the Savior to both angels and men.

The Third Order will be brought forth from the unified ALL with full remembrance of the Father to prepare the way for salvation and redemption. This is why my diagram of the final economy has moved them up to be nestled right beside the Christ, even above the Aeons of the Fullness. This Final Economy is the final disposition of our material universe and the Demiurge that rules it. It rests right within the larger consciousness of the ALL, the Son, and the Father.  

Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode. May I remind you, I’m raising money in order to self-publish A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. There were some publication problems, and now I’m having to publish it myself, and I very much thank my listeners who have volunteered money toward that end.

A couple of weeks ago, I said, if you would contribute $50 now, then when my book is published, and it’s going to be published very, very soon now, if you contribute $50, I will be more than happy to mail you a copy, a signed edition, from my house to your house. Thank you very much. I appreciate you so much.

Onward and upward!

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week I’m sharing with you an episode that was broadcast in 2021, very close to the beginning of the Gnostic Insights podcast, but it’s really good as I listen to it and I am going back and slightly re-editing it, and I think that you’ll get a lot out of this episode. It’s foundational, alright.

Last week I made a plea to you for donations to help me publish this book that I’m putting out now. Please, if you can afford to, this is a good time to chip in and give me some financial support. I really hate asking for money. This goes against my grain in a big, big way, so please don’t confuse me with the televangelists or any other person out there with a podcast that’s always asking for money. You know I don’t ask for money very often. You can think of yourself as contributing to this extremely important book that’s coming out. You will be part of history at this point.

I’ve inserted a donation form at the bottom of this page for you to use.

That book, of course, is called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. You know, I started with a Christian publisher and that ran into troubles, and so now I am producing the book myself. I have completed the editing, the layout, the typesetting, and now I have uploaded it, and I’m waiting for my proof copy, at which point then I can put it on the market and release it to you.

Okay, enjoy this week’s episode. Onward and upward!

My goal here at this podcast is to share with you information from the Nag Hammadi, primarily from the Tripartite Tractate, concerning the gnosis of our existence, which is a big topic. Gnosis means knowledge, and the knowledge we talk about here is the knowledge of our preexistent conscious spirits and our souls, and how these fit into these bodies that we wear and we walk around with, and how it is that we interact with one another. And the reason it seems to me that it’s important to discover the gnosis that is within you is because this is your personal reassurance that you’re not alone in this universe.

We are not alone. We come from the God Above All Gods initially, and we pass down through the Son and through the Aeons and the Fullness of God. Our spirit comes directly from the God Above All Gods.

It’s a conduit. It’s a flowing stream. So we are embedded within the consciousness of the originating consciousness. That is like the background matrix of not only of our universe, but before our universe and outside of our universe. We are a part of this great Being that we call the Father in Gnostic studies. And I share with you the gnosis that I have gained over my entire lifetime of thinking about, praying to, pursuing the ideas of, in all the different forms, this form of consciousness.

You know, as a child, I began these kinds of studies very young, probably around age four, oftentimes in conversation with my older brother, Bill, whom you run into here and there on Gnostic Insights. And then I majored in psychology because I wanted to understand psychology. I majored in education because I wanted to learn how to share and to educate other people. I have an advanced degree in counseling and an advanced degree in communication, yet I’ve discovered that all of these degrees don’t really matter much if there’s no one to talk to about it. So my purpose here at Gnostic Insights is to share with you the gnosis that I have come across, not so that you will adapt anything I say, but so that it triggers within you the gnosis that you carry, because we’re all sharing the same stream of consciousness.

I would very much like to hear from you, because as an educator, it helps me to know where you are at, and I need to have questions from you in order to stimulate answers from me. I often feel as though I’ve used up all the information I have to share, and I know that’s not true, because my gosh, I’ve read so many books, and I’ve had so many papers on these topics, yet I need to know what you want to know in order to know what direction I should go with these episodes. So please, go to the GnosticInsights.com website, and go to the comments form, and send me your email, send me your comments, send me your questions, and then I can address them, hopefully publicly here at Gnostic Insights. I can preserve your anonymity, that’s fine.

I’d like to know where you are in your Gnostic search, and then we can go together from there. So, this week I was at something of a loss about what to talk about, and so once again I am dipping back into the wells of time to my Simple Explanation blog, and I’m pulling out an article from January 31st of 2011.

I’ll read it to you, it’s in Simple Explanation terminology, but then I’ll translate it into Gnostic speak, so that we can see how these things go together. The Gnosis I share with you comes not only from my own personal experience, but it comes from the Nag Hammadi, and primarily the text in the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate. Our focus here is on consciousness and your life.

It’s not on the names of the 365 angels or anything like that. To me, these are irrelevant to our pursuit of Gnosis. In my mind, what we need to understand is our relationship to the God Above All Gods, and our relationship to the Son, to the Christ, to the Fullness of God in the Pleroma, and we are fractals of all of that consciousness.

And so, our lives resonate to the Fullness of God. This has all happened before, and it has happened at a different level and at different times in history. Most of the stories, most of the things that happen to us in our lives are fractals of things that have happened before. There are only so many stories. There really aren’t that many different things that can happen to you in your life. They boil down to the large archetypes.

You know, Jung talked about archetypes. And he got those archetypes, as it turns out, from his reading of the Nag Hammadi. When I was a psychology major and a counseling major at the university, I studied Jung. I liked Jung. I never realized that Jung got this information from ancient spiritual texts, the same ancient spiritual texts that we talk about here at Gnostic Insights. So, the archetypes that Jung speaks of, which I learned as simply Jung’s theory of transpersonal psychology, these are not Jung’s ideas. These are eternal concepts that were preserved for us in the form of the Nag Hammadi codices. And you know, the Nag Hammadi was buried in the desert for just about 2,000 years and stumbled across in 1945. So, they have been preserved for us unmolested by 2,000 years of Christian interpretation and theology.

They were thrown out of the Christian orthodoxy around the time of the Nicene Council and buried underground in order to preserve them for us. And this is what we are sharing. So, today what I would like to talk about is an article I wrote back in January 31st of 2011, and it’s called, A Simple Explanation of Transpersonal Memory.

And you can find this at my original blog called asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com. Transpersonal psychology deals with mystical and spiritual experiences of the human psyche. Transpersonal memory is defined as memories that are shared at a cultural level, rather than at a personal level. Transpersonal memories reveal themselves in many ways, through societal archetypes and archetypal dreams, through subconscious assumptions, stereotypes, and expectations, and through strange occurrences such as the 100th monkey phenomenon.

Jung referred to this transpersonal memory as the collective unconscious. Now, I quote Jung. He says, “My thesis, then, is as follows. In addition to our immediate consciousness, there exists a second psychic system of a collective universal and impersonal nature, which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually, but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily, and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”

And that is from The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, published in 1996. And, quoting from Wikipedia, excuse me for that, Jung also made reference to contents of this category of the unconscious psyche as being similar to Levi-Bruhl’s use of collective representations, or représentations collectives, mythological motifs, Hubert and Mauss’s categories of the imagination, and Adolf Bostein’s primordial thoughts. The Simple Explanation refers to these collective memories as culturally shared memes and meme chords.

A person can be defined by the memes they cling to. To a large extent, one’s memes shape one’s personality. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has written extensively about and staked his professional reputation upon a scientifically controversial process called morphogenetic fields.

How does an oak tree develop from an acorn? By information carried in the morphogenetic field surrounding the acorn. Sheldrake explains that morphogenetic fields are to life forms, as quantum probability clouds are to subatomic particles, carrying the information that gives rise to particular biological manifestations of form. The Simple Explanation would cite these morphogenetic fields at the zero-point field at the center of the torus, part of the metaversal information streaming into our universe through our universal unit of consciousness, and that information is tempered by each organism’s karmic record and its acquired memes.

In the case of the acorn and the oak tree, the morphogenetic field of the oak tree provides the genetic blueprint, while the mama tree’s karma and memes provide the individualized epigenetic pattern that tells which genes to turn on and off. What karma can a tree have? Well, its karma is the record of its life, nutrients, history of water availability, pest attacks, and so on. And what memes can a tree hold? Well, how about, the sun feels good on my leaves, I must follow the sun. Or, there’s a pest attack on the other side of the forest, I must put out chemicals to repel that pest.

In an article published in the journal called In Context, Robert Gilman ties together morphogenetic fields and personal memories by describing how the memories generated by our brains are, “not locked in your brain, but are available through all space and all future time,” through the process of morphogenetic resonance. Gilman claims that not only is our biological form influenced by these fields, but our behavior, as well as shared memories, influence behavior.

The Simple Explanation agrees with Sheldrake and Gilman that personal memories do not reside in the meat portion of our brains, but are rather vibratory patterns held in the zero-point field and accessed through our minds. Furthermore, apparently personal memes are actually harmonics of collective memes and are shared in common with all who hold on to that meme. The particular shadings of one person’s meme differ slightly from the next person’s, as is to be expected among fractal replications of a single phenomenon, but all who hold the meme recognize its pattern and are affected by it.

*******************

That’s the end of the article I wrote years ago, and let me talk about it in more Gnostic terms now. We exist as individual entities, and we are floating in this ocean of consciousness. The basic ocean of consciousness is referred to as the Father, and that consciousness funnels down to us, you could say, focuses on each of us in the following way.

You have the original matrix of consciousness, and then a particular instantiation or a particular thought out of that consciousness, and that is often referred to as the Son. That’s what it’s called in the Tripartite Tractate. In other books of the Nag Hammadi, this is the Barbello.

And out of that Son differentiates a myriad, an infinite number, of individual characteristics or individual laws, principles, concepts, and those are called the Totalities, or once they sort themselves and form themselves into some sort of a cooperative structure, that is called the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God. And I picture that, by the way, of course, as a hierarchy, as a pyramid. And that’s why these pyramid forms are so popular in ancient styles of thinking.

The pyramid, the mountain—that is a remembrance of the Pleroma above. And the Pleroma is another word for everything, which is referring to the Fullness of God, which is referring to this myriad of infinite variations of the one thought. Now, we are the fruit of that Fullness of God pyramid.

We come out of the pyramid. And the way that happens with us is that those Aeons that live in that Pleroma, the Aeons of the Fullness of God, they get together, they admire, give glory to the Father together, and in their mixtures of the various Aeons, another level of personalities, another level of entities are conceived. And you can think of those as the forms that we become, as the forms of each of us. And then we come out into this material world as those forms.

Now, the transpersonal consciousness is the thoughts of the Fullness of God, and we all share those thoughts. We are all plugged into the Fullness of God. We directly come down from them.

We all share the same Fullness of God, whether or not you remember it consciously, we all remember it subconsciously. And the shared thoughts that we all share, this is referred to by Jung as the transpersonal field. And when Rupert Sheldrake talks about the morphogenetic field around each individual life-form—the morphogenetic field around an acorn that causes it to become the tree—this is the form, this is the pattern that is coming out of the transpersonal field and informing or giving form to that life-form.

Life-forms don’t come from the mud up. Life-forms do not aggregate upward from the molecular level on up the way that evolution suggests it does. That is an error. That is a materialist worldview. But you know, no matter how scientists try, they cannot prod a piece of mud into life. It is impossible.

Life comes from above. Life comes from the top down. Our material comes from the bottom up, but it’s dead. It is a product of the Fall. It doesn’t come from the Pleroma of God. The mud comes from the Fall.

The Spirit, and this is what is meant by the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is flowing unimpeded like the river from the Father’s consciousness through the Son, differentiating out into all of the Totalities, now into the Fullness of God, that great pyramid in the sky where the Aeons all sit and sing in perfect harmony, glorifying the original consciousness. And they sit and they dream of stuff the way we dream of stuff. They come up with ideas and stories. They come up with books and screenplays. They come up with works of art and music. That’s all going on up above.

Our inventors and scientists and musicians and writers, they’re tapping into the Fullness of God. They’re bringing these archetypal stories down to us. So they are singular archetypal stories, but then they become flavored with the individualized memes of this person walking around down here on earth, because our personalities and our basic spiritual composition is precisely patterned upon the forms in the Pleroma, in the Fullness of God.

But once we are instantiated here on this material plane, we acquire these ideas from each other, and these are what I call the memes. Everything you learn, everything you experience, everything you hate, everything you love, no matter what it is, these are ideas that are acquired down here. That is, the earthly memes are all acquired down here, and they color your interpretation and restatement of the archetypal pattern that exists in the Fullness of God.

So our life is a combination of the pure knowledge informing us, and that’s the gnosis from above, as well as these loves and hates and knowledge that we acquire down here below, and those are the memes. And then another aspect that colors our interpretation of the archetypal forms is our own personal karma, and karma is your record of consequences, of actions. So your karma may or may not allow you to even hear what someone else is saying, because as a consequence of prior actions, that is your karma, you are either open or closed to what they have to say, to their memes.

So the transpersonal consciousness, the morphogenetic field, these are the same as the patterns of the Fullness of God, and they don’t live inside of our brains. They live outside of us. They are floating. They are the sea. They are the ocean in which we are immersed, and your karma and your meme bundles pretty much determine how much of that transpersonal field you’re able to tap into. And this is the bottom line of what I attempt to do here.

When I share thoughts, when I share my memes with you, I’m attempting to suggest that these memes are occurring in the transpersonal field, and these are the virtues. The virtues, by the way, are the memes of the Fullness of God, and the Tripartite Tractate is a book that shows how these memes came to be in the first place, and how it is that they come to us, and who we are in relationship to the Fullness of God. So that is the purpose of today’s episode, just to share with you this idea that there is a transpersonal consciousness that we all share.

You could call this the mind of the Father. In our earthly realm, we have generated a lot of memes, like the cloud, right? And the cloud, I do think, is a technological representation of the transpersonal field, and it houses these earthly memes that people are generating. Now the error of the cloud, of the human-built cloud, is that some of the things that are in it are true, and some of them aren’t true. Some of them are lies. Some of them are hurtful. Whereas the information that comes down to us directly from the Fullness of God, the gnosis, is all true. It’s all helpful. It’s all loving. It’s all good.

So rather than spending all of our time delving into our earthly generated meme cloud, which has a lot of crap in it, it’s a good idea to focus upward and tap directly into the gnosis that you can trust. There, there’s a bumper sticker, gnosis you can trust. So that’s all I have to share with you today.

I hope that you reach out and talk to me using the comment form at GnosticInsights.com, because I would love to be able to respond to your questions and observations, and this will give me something to talk about on the next episode. So until then, look inward, look upward, onward and upward, and God bless.

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Father, Son, ALL 2024 edition

Welcome to the Gnostic Insights podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m here to share, well, what the title of this podcast is—Gnostic Insights—with you.

Hey, I have some exciting news for you. I’m nearing completion of reformatting The Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate for publication. I anticipate uploading it in the next few days, and then I’ll need to examine the proof copy before releasing it for distribution. The Gnostic Reformation could really use your help in the form of contributions for the cause, for advertising and promotion.

Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio has agreed to narrate the audiobook, and that will also be available by the end of summer, and I need funds for paying for his narration as well. So now is the time to contribute what you can to this effort. If you need a bribe, I’d be happy to personally mail you a signed copy of the book in exchange for your generous contribution of at least $50 to cover the cost. If that’s the case, please contact me privately with your home address for mailing. You can use the contact form at GnosticInsights.com and let me know. However, if you can’t afford the $50, that’s fine—any contribution would help. I appreciate whatever you can contribute. Thank you so much. Onward and upward!

It’s summertime, and I’m distracted with working on the new book and with all of the events surrounding summer activities, so I’m going to rerun one of the foundational episodes from 2021, and this is about the nature of the Father, the Son, and then the Fullness. Enjoy!

The Nag Hammadi scriptures were buried deep in the desert around 300 AD to save them from the great purge that occurred when the Bible was codified by the Pope and the Emperor of Rome and made into the packaged Christianity that we know today. Before that package, there was a type of spiritual belief that was well known to Jesus and his followers that was then cut out of the Bible out of the New Testament during the Council of Nicene.

These ideas were preserved in a set of books called the Nag Hammadi, which were buried in the desert to keep them from the purge, and then they were rediscovered and dug up in 1945, so they have been kept away from almost 2,000 years of formal study and formal theology. What you hear from the Nag Hammadi scriptures is fresh and clean and uninterpreted by experts.

So what I have done is study one particular book of the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate, and it is that book which I used primarily in the book that I wrote called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which I published in 2019. I like to begin with a study of the cosmos or cosmology as it unfolded, as it rolled out. This makes the most sense to me, to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are, and then what happens in our lives and why are we here. And then the final roll-up is the very, very end of time as predicted by the scriptures.

So let’s begin at the beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. This story begins before the beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos existed.

And so if you think of the originating consciousness as a vast consciousness which has no place and no time, no history—it is nothing but pure consciousness without thought, similar to what the Buddhists call the Buddha mind, something people try to achieve during meditation, where you can be aware that you are conscious, but you have no particular thoughts or words or images going through your mind. No thought, no images, no structure or form, no thing at all. And this is the consciousness of the Father, and we only say the Father—there’s no gender, obviously. The Father is not a man with a beard and long robes.

Obviously there’s no gender, it’s a singular consciousness, okay? So let’s get off the notion of being upset by calling it a father. I suppose we could call it a mother, or we could just call it consciousness. In the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book that I am translating for you, it is referred to as the Father.

And this Father, its basic consciousness is not thoughts, but rather love, the sensation of knowing what we call love. So this consciousness simply is, without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning, without end, utterly quiet, utterly still, utterly alone. This Father is often described as all-knowing, but what is there to know? All-seeing, but what is there to see? All-loving, but what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom, will, but to what end? There’s nothing there.

Now imagine that this consciousness gives birth to a emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation blog, we call this a fractal. In the religious texts, they call it a son, S-O-N.

So now we have the Father and a Son. So in the silence of the Absolute, the Father brings forth the first and only Son from its realization of itself. The Son is the Father having a thought. The Son is the Father knowing itself, as the Father having a sensation of its own eternal self. The Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. The Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells.

Every trait of the Father is expressed now as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. And yet, although it was a singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone, for not only the Son, but what is called the ALL, arose at once. Capital A-L-L.

The ALL immediately appeared as the offspring of the Son, because the Son could not help itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father, because it is a reflection of the Father’s traits. And so the Father knows itself and creates the Son, and the Son knows itself and creates the ALL. In religious talk, the ALL is known as the preexistent Church.

Not your church down on the street corner with the people in it singing hymns on Sunday, but this is the true preexistent Church. The Tripartite Tractate says, “For not only the Son, but also the Church exists from the beginning.” The Tripartite goes on to say, “Before the ALL arose from the Father’s thought, He knew them, but they did not know the depth in which they found themselves, nor could they know themselves or anything else. For they were within the Father as an embryo, or an unsprouted seed.”

So they were potential. They were there, they live in the Father, they live in the Son, but they don’t know anything, they don’t know themselves, they are not self-aware.

The way the Tripartite Tractate describes this, it says, “Because they were newly formed, the Father concealed the ALL’s perfection from them until they could grow into the knowledge. This is why the Father revealed the Son to them, so the ALL would be able to relate to the Son and see the Father’s glory according to the ability of each one to receive Him.”  

So nobody sees the Father. The Father is unknowable. The Father is too immense. When people say, Oh, you can’t conceive of God, God’s all too big and unknowable, that’s true, but God made itself into a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. And one of the reasons the Son is there is because we can know the Son. We can’t know the Father, but we can know the Son.

The Tripartite Tractate describes this this way, “The Son is no more and no less than the sum of the ALL, and they understood who He is, and He is covered by the ALL. And with the birth of the ALL, the Son also became a Father.”

So this can be a little confusing because you have the Originating Consciousness, the God Above All Gods, which is the Originating Consciousness or the Father.

The Father had a sense of itself. This was called the Son, S-O-N. The Son immediately produced itself, and this is called the ALL. With the birth of the ALL, the Son also became a Father. The Originating Father, that consciousness so lonely and still for eternity, now had a child who had also borne fruit from His glory. And in this way the One begat the ALL, and the Father loved them all as He loved His Son.

As I said, the ALL is referred to as the pre-existent Church, and it’s also called the Second Glory. The First Glory was the Son. The Second Glory is the ALL.

The Originating Father’s consciousness is incomprehensible. Its scope and greatness is so immense and so unfathomable that the Tripartite Tractate says anyone trying to take hold of it would be annihilated. And so the Father created the Son, giving form to what had been His formless and solitary Self. For the Father’s desire was to be known. His desire was to love and to be loved. The Son that arose is perfect, even as His Father is perfect, and He carries within His perfect form every quality of the Father.

Being the perfect image of the Father, the Son’s inherent creativity spread itself out into the ALL, like rays shining from a star. In my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, I illustrate these concepts. The way I think of it is this way.

When I picture the originating consciousness of the Original Father, I see just total blackness, an entirety of dark, dark blackness. Then when I picture the Son emerging and being held by that blackness, I see the Son as kind of this foggy light that begins, very diffuse, very foggy, that begins to emerge out of the inky blackness. That is what I see as the Son.

Then immediately coming out of that foggy image of the Son, like rays of a sun spreading out, I see bright golden light coming from the of that fogginess and beaming outward like the Sun. These are just helpful illustrations for me. So when I picture the ALL, I picture it as a bright yellow starburst.

The ALL, like the Father and the Son, is infinite and limitless in its scope and capability. Each individual ray of that Son emerges from the central seed of the Son, shining forth as one shared body. In the same way that a crystal refracts light into all the colors of the rainbow, so the Son beams forth every one of his countless qualities as the individual and yet unified rays of the ALL. The ALL is a single entity, yet it has differentiations. Picture each one as a ray coming out from a central starburst.

The Son intimately knows each facet of the ALL, for the ALL are all facets of himself. The ALL is at the same time one and many, one and all. The ALL is a selfless diversity, giving glory to the Father with a single song of praise.

So you can picture the ALL as singing in unison when it sings. The Son, who became the Father of the ALL, shines forth as the emergent rays of the ALL. So these are the basic ideas behind the Father, the Son, and the ALL.

One more thing before we leave this idea. What does glory mean? Because glory is one of these religious terms that is used quite a lot. But what is glory? The way I interpret glory, glory is the fabulousness of someone.

I think we have an intuitive sense of what glory means. Glory is, oh my gosh, that is so fabulous! So we say that the Father is glorious, the Son is glorious.

And what does it mean to give glory? Because we’re to give glory to God. Giving glory means that you are focused on the object in adoration and love. That is giving glory. So glory is the wondrousness of the object, and giving glory is reflecting that glory back at your object of devotion. God is glorious, and when I give glory to God, I am loving God by seeing that glory and acknowledging it and reflecting the glory back to the God. Glory is not something that you can offer to another person.

When you glorify another person or thing, that’s what I would call vain glory, V-A-I-N, because no one but the Creator of the universe qualifies to generate and to receive glory. And glory is not worship for the sake of worship, as if God needed our adoration. This would imply that the Father of the universe is hungry and insecure and wheedling for our affection, as if we mere mortals could offer up anything of value not already owned by the Lord of creation. That just doesn’t make any sense. So giving glory is not for God’s benefit, it’s for our benefit. The reason we give glory to God is because that is the method by which we tune in to God’s frequency, you could say. Giving glory to God is how we synchronize ourselves with the one consciousness of which we are essentially fractal units. I’ll explain fractals at some other time.

Why would we want to synchronize with the Father? The Gnostic Gospel tells us that we were designed with a built-in homing device that gives us indescribable pleasure when we are in communion with one another and when we are operating according to plan. The closer we are to dialing in to the Father’s frequency, the happier we feel. It is through this process of giving glory that we realign ourselves with the universal unit of consciousness, or what we are calling the Father or the God Above All Gods. This is how we align ourselves for instruction and for renewal.

When we center ourselves and sit in silence with the Father, we feel peace, happiness, joy, and love. When we acknowledge the Maker and focus in that direction, we give glory and we are united in glory. And when we give glory alongside others who are themselves giving glory, we share with them a worship experience of the One that transcends what any of us can experience alone.

So this is not for the benefit of a needy god, but for the edification of the saints. Edification means strengthening. It is through giving glory that the choir, of which we are a part, is able to sing along with one perfect voice.

It is very important to choose your objects of glory carefully. In this distracting world in which we find ourselves, we are giving glory away right and left to things that do not deserve glory. We glorify movie stars and television stars. We glorify sports figures. We glorify models and products that we love. This is a distraction away from true glory, and it doesn’t make us happy.

Only glorifying the Father in love can make us happy. The other objects that we may find ourselves glorifying, these are imitations, these are deficiencies, and so they cannot ever fulfill us the way that we hope they will. I think this is a good beginning for our basic concepts.

We’ll talk a lot more about all of this in podcasts to come. So thank you so much for being with me today, and I’ll see you again next time. God bless!

Last week, I started talking about the nature of this Gnostic Reformation that I’m describing here. It turns out that the approach to Gnosticism that I am sharing with you here at Gnostic Insights is a reformation of what is understood to be Gnosticism. If you haven’t listened to last week’s episode yet, it would be really good for you to start there. Go back and listen to or read the episode called, This Gnostic Reformation.

I didn’t read any books about Gnosticism; I actually read the Nag Hammadi itself. I used my own method of discernment, my own model building method called A Simple Explanation to understand what I was reading. We all do that. We all have internal structures that help us to interpret what we understand about the world around us–what we understand about the nature of anything, whether it’s God or people or oneself.

I had already previously come up with a very coherent system for understanding the things around me. That’s what I call A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. That book is available. You can check it out. I’ll put the link here in the transcript.

https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Explanation-Absolutely-Everything-Conscious/dp/B08JB5WQP7/ref=sr_1_1?crid=R7B8ZGD8EGYI&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.9OmB0HL6lM93pXmY28dEZa7lUi0CwHqTc2gF8oCsNBXDTwtHgRTl2z2bVC7Ijb-El4lLKoWLoS32GlCgg8U8SOPLow0xB6rNnX-hOik3eNWPmfm9y5hGM1BvxTz_6huqx8w1mnuWYPKVS-nwjn2cEzoII7NLzZEC1QAgD10UUnft_a4Isqw99YPHCsTmEtMh.CzL12BW4OrOeAXpOXLC-tOCSCxGMI43HvvL8CxWLKsg&dib_tag=se&keywords=a+simple+explanation+of+absolutely+everything&qid=1771858912&sprefix=%2Caps%2C164&sr=8-1

When people say, “My goodness, your Gnosticism is so different than what I have come to understand Gnosticism to be,” that’s because I didn’t take it from secondary sources. I took it from the original sources.  Then of course, Valentinian Gnosticism is an early form of what has come to be called Christianity. Christianity diverged immensely from the original message around the 300’s and on up, when the gnostic books were taken out of Orthodoxy. Those folks that are called heresiologists are the people that went around slapping heresy labels on the early Christianity—the early Valentinian Gnosticism. They weeded it out of the official sacred texts that made their way into the New Testament.

The main book of the Nag Hammadi that I relate to is called the Tripartite Tractate. I believe it to be the purest form of gnosis. It has very little in the way of mythologies, of extraneous characters, of the names of things and the numbers of things and the astrology of it all.

Valentinian Gnosticism from the Tripartite Tractate is unique in that the fallen Aeon is not called Sophia, a female character. In the Sethian mythology, the female character—and by the way, that presupposes that there are genders among the Aeons in the Fullness of God, but that really doesn’t make much sense because there’s no sex. That is not the way that Aeons procreate. Aeons procreate by giving glory to the Father in various combinations, and it’s those various combinations of giving glory that produce amalgamations of those combinations. It’s a logarithmic progression of Aeons. It keeps growing as various Aeons recombine with one another and give glory to the Father and the Son—upstream, as I like to call it. That has nothing to do with gender. It has to do with giving glory to God with your friends and neighbors.

See, we have gender because it has to do with procreation, and this is what is causing all of the gender confusion going around now. Differences among us—what we typically call masculine or feminine—these are personality traits. They don’t have to have anything to do with your sex. So the idea that you have to change your physical sex to reconceive of your gender or reconceive of who you are or your personality—this is a false teaching. You are who you are. You are a combination of various Aeons. You are the fruit of those Aeons, and it really has nothing to do with gender.

The Father is not a male figure. Barbelo is not the mother. These are gendered identifications, but they are not truly gender because they’re not sexed. Does that make any sense?

So last week we talked about the first emanation. In Sethianism, it’s Barbelo, the mother figure, the womb of all, the matrix of divine life. In Valentinian Gnosticism, that first figure is the Son, and in most of the Valentinian texts, the Son is conflated with the Christ.

Oh, by the way, Christians get very bent out of shape about calling Christ the Christ. They say, if anybody—and I heard this from a radio preacher not long ago—“If anyone says ‘the’Christ, you know right off they’re not saved. You know right off they’re not Christians, because ‘the’ Christ is a made-up figure, whereas Jesus is Christ, and Jesus is the Son of God.” Well, Jesus is a human being, so we know that Jesus is not the originating Son of God, which an ethereal figure. The Son, in Valentinian Christianity, was the immediate self-expression of the Father. The Father emanated the Son, and the Son entirely represents the Father. Jesus is way downstream here, along with the rest of us humans.

He was called the perfect human because he expressed the Father and the Son in his human personality. Jesus came to be well downstream, along with the rest of us humans.

In Sethianism, the Barbelo, the first expression, isn’t the Savior. She’s the source of the Savior. She’s the mother of Autogenes, whom they call the Christ.

In Valentinianism, the Son is the immediate self-expression of the Father. There’s no Barbelo figure, and the Son is the primary mediator of divine knowledge. The Son is fully expressive and representative of the Father, and he stays plugged into the Father—or it stays. It’s difficult when speaking English not to use gendered pronouns, because that’s the way our grammar works. So, forgive me for saying “he” when I speak of the Son or the Father, but “it” just seems so impersonal. And the Son is personal to us. The Son is our Father, our Abba.

In Sethianism, Christ, also known as Autogenes, is not the initial revelation of the Father. He’s the restorative agent who repairs the damage caused by the fall of the Aeon. And in Sethianism, the Aeon who fell was a female figure, Sophia. Christ is often paired with Seth, and Seth is a character out of the mythology of Sethianism that is the heavenly archetype of the Gnostic race.

Sethianism has distinctions amongst humans. There are the elect and there are those who are not elect. There are those who are called hylic-only, which is material only. And so, if you’re a Sethian Gnostic, you don’t believe that all of the people that you see around here are carriers of divinity. You believe that only Gnostics are carriers of divinity, much like Christians only believe that those who have come forward and professed belief in Jesus Christ are the elect, and they’re the only ones who are saved. Gnostics have the same type of distinction, only they think only the Sethians are those who are saved. And that really doesn’t have to do with Jesus. It has to do with Christ and Seth—that Christ’s role is to descend and rescue the elect, and the elect would be Sethians. Now, in Valentinian Christianity, you don’t have that kind of distinction. Christ is the direct image of the Father.

Most of the books of the Nag Hammadi, the Valentinian as well as the Sethian, still identify Sophia as the fallen Aeon; they still have a gendered pleroma of the Fullness of God. This is one of the big, big differences between the Gnosticism that I share with you and these more ancient Gnostic strains of thought. I do not think that Aeons are gendered. It’s an unnecessary step of confusion, the idea of syzygies and marriages and pair bonds. No, that’s not necessary. At least in the Tripartite Tractate, if you read it, nowhere is anything like that mentioned. There’s no gender identification mentioned at all.

In Valentinian Christology, [which is what it’s called when you study Christ], outside of the Tripartite Tractate the rest of the books that talk about Christ say that Christ is the direct image of the Father. His incarnation is intentional, therapeutic, and as a teacher, and he brings knowledge of the Father, not merely rescue from the Fall.

Christians generally believe that Christ brings knowledge of the Father because he talked about the Father, or he taught—that he’s a pedagogical character. He’s a teacher, but that his actual salvation came from dying on the cross, from death and then overcoming death. He brings everyone who believes in him forward in overcoming death.

Now, the Tripartite Tractate doesn’t put it that way. The Tripartite Tractate explains how Christ came not to die and not only to teach, but salvation lies in the very fact that Christ came to Earth in the perfection of the Father. Jesus said, “If you see me, you see the Father. He who loves me loves the Father, and he who loves the Father loves me.” That was Jesus speaking as the embodiment of the Christ. Jesus embodied the Fullness of the Christ in his human body walking around on the Earth, and so he built a bridge between the ethereal plane and the material plane. He brought them back together for the first time since Logos fell out of the pleroma. He brings them back together, and he brings restoration in that manner.

There’s another primary difference between Sethian Gnosticism and Valentinian Gnosticism, other than Barbelo being the first emanation or the Son being the first emanation. In Sethianism, Christ’s role is as a cosmic rescuer, and in the Valentinian tradition, he is the revealer of truth and the healer. Sethians tend to think of the world as completely hostile and alien. This material world is a prison. It’s a trap. Everything’s wrong down here.  

Now, in the Valentinian system, it is also thought that the world is wrong. It’s fallen, but it is redeemable, and so salvation comes through transformation of what is around us, whereas in the Sethian system, salvation comes by escaping the trap. The goal in Sethianism is to return to Barbelo, and the goal in the Valentinian system is to return to the Father.

So, Sethianism is much more apocalyptic. It’s about crashing the world and getting out because there’s nothing good down here. Valentinian is more therapeutic because it believes in transformation through love and spreading the gospel–the good news. That’s what gospel means. The good news of Christ, the good news of the Father, the good news of eternal life beyond materiality.

In the Gnostic Reformation that I am proposing here, we can combine somewhat the two schools of thought. This is a bridge Gnosticism between Sethianism, Valentinianism, and Christianity, although churchgoers aren’t going to like any of this, right? Because they’re fine in the system that they believe it to be, and I think that’s okay. If you’re a non-hypocritical Christian who goes to church and prays, and you’re in touch with the Father, and you embody the Christ, that’s great. No problem with that.

And did you know that Valentinian Christians were accepted as full Christians for the first 300 years? They were side by side, sitting in the same churches, giving the same prayers, sharing in the same rituals. It was only after the Nicene Council and the takeover by the Catholic Church that Valentinians were excluded from Christianity. So I’m not trying to crash Christianity. I’m only trying to bring a correction to the hypocrisy and misunderstandings of Christianity. Well, we know there’s a ton of hypocrites.

I’m an idealist. That’s my nature. So when I discuss these things, it’s in their ideal form. It’s the way they ought to be. It’s the way they’re described. It’s the way they were designed by God and the Aeons. If you take your knowledge from what you see around here in this fallen world, then you have got a very poor idea of what it is. And you may sit in a Christian church, and you may go through the motions of being a cultural Christian. But unless you are in touch with the Father, and unless you are embodying the Christ, you’re taking your guidance from the world. And this is how it is that many people nowadays think they’re doing good, when actually they’re doing bad. And even worse than that, people who say they’re doing good, and they know they’re not doing good, they know they’re doing bad. That’s hypocrisy. That’s what hypocrisy is.

So when I describe these systems, or I describe the nature of the Christ, the nature of the body of believers, the nature of love, the nature of the Father, the nature of our aeonic or heavenly home in the pleroma of the Fullness of God, I’m describing it in an idealistic manner, in the way it’s designed to be. And that’s what we aim for. We aim for the ideal. You cannot take your cues from this earthly realm. And make sure that you don’t take your cues from teachers who are themselves fallen and not embodying Christ.

In this Gnostic Reformation that I’m sharing with you, the Son is the primal emanation, the direct image of the Father. He stays fully plugged into the Father. He has all of the direct knowledge, wisdom, love, consciousness of the Father–life. While Christ is a later restorative agent, formed through the prayers of the aeons, the Son, and the Logos after Logos returned back to the Fullness. They prayed for help to come to the mess that Logos made down below when he fell. They pray for help to rescue the Demiurge, which is part of Logos—it’s his ego. It’s his presenting face.

They want the Demiurge to come out of its amnesic state and remember the Father, remember the Fullness, remember Logos, its better half. And when that happens, that is when the big roll-up can occur—when all of the shadows will disappear. Because when the Demiurge comes to awareness, to Self-awareness, as being part of the Logos, as being part of the Son, then all of the shadows that have come out of the Demiurge—all of this material construction—will just vanish. Dissolve like snow, as the old hymn says.

There’s nothing in the Nag Hammadi like Armageddon. Christian theology culminates with a great bloody battle called Armageddon, where all the sinners are killed and only the elect remain. And only the elect are up there in heaven then. And that’s why it’s all good, because they killed all the bad people, and they all went to hell, and they’re locked down there in eternal torture.

Well, that does not sound like the Father Jesus spoke of. And that doesn’t appear anywhere in the Nag Hammadi. The way we Valentinian Gnostics do battle is not with swords and bullets and fists. We are to do battle with love. We love them. That’s what we’re supposed to do. We demonstrate love.

We are called the second order powers. All creatures on the earth are second order powers. The Aeons above are the first order of powers. We are their descendants. We are their children. We are their fruit. And we are called the second order of powers.

We were sent here to remind the Demiurge of love and life and consciousness. See, the Aeons and the Logos–this was their plan. They cooked it up. We were sent here to bring love and remembrance to the Demiurge. Restoration in that way. It didn’t work out, because we get caught up in this material life; because we get caught up in the never-ending war. You can’t remind people of good through evil. You cannot remind people of love through hatred. Only love breeds love.

Now let’s look at how all of this affects Christology, the study of Christ. In the Gnosticism that I am sharing with you, the Son is the primal emanation. He’s the direct image of the Father. He represents divine Self-knowledge, and he is stable, he is eternal, and he is not fallen.

The Christ is a later emanation. He’s a third order power. He’s generated for the purpose of restoration. He is shaped by the Son, Logos, and the Aeons, praying together to the Father for help to come to the Fall. He is the agent of healing, reconciliation, and revelation.

So we have a Son, which is the first emanation, and we have a Christ, which is the restorative agent that comes after the first and second order of powers. Christ teaches the soul to recognize the Son. Christ repairs the cosmic imbalance caused by ignorance, and salvation flows from the Father, through the Son, through Christ, and into our souls and the Demiurge’s soul—his ego.

You see, we all have a perfect Self that is an embodiment of the pleroma of the Fullness of God. All of the first order powers are within us as they were with Logos, within him in a fractal manner, and then we are further fractals of Logos. It’s a nested hierarchy.

We are children of the Elohim of Adonai Elohim

So when the Christ comes into the cosmos to bring perfection and healing to the Demiurge and to us, it’s very similar, because the reason we feel less than perfect is because we have both an ego and that perfect Self, as did Logos. And it was the ego of Logos that became the Demiurge. Well, our fractal version of that same exact phenomenon is when our ego is not in alignment with our Self.

And when the ego is not in alignment with the Self, when the ego has forgotten its origin, like happened to the Demiurge, when the ego has forgotten that it’s not the boss—our boss is our big S Self because that has the direct connection to the emanations of the Father and the Aeons above. Consciousness, life, love, all come from above, and that comes through our Self.

The Self at the center of our souls is a fractal of the Fullness of God

Then when we are melded onto this material world, to the molecules of the egg, the zygote that is now splitting, splitting, splitting, and leveling up to become the organism, we become lost in the materiality of this cosmic space. And it’s harder for our Self to shine forth through the material. And our egos are more than willing to identify with the material, with the Demiurge, because the Demiurge is pure ego. And so our egos come to resonate with the Demiurge.

Even the Aeons have egos. Even the Son has an ego. Ego is merely your address. It’s your name, your rank, your function in the overall hierarchical pleroma of the Fullness of God. That’s what your ego is—it’s your ID. The Aeons in the Fullness all have their position, place, power, function. So ego in and of itself is not a bad thing. It is easily led astray once we are in these material bodies down here on the earth.

The pleroma of the Christ is the 3rd Order of Powers

And so Christ’s function is to remind us of the purity of God, the purity of the soul, the purity of our Self, where we come from, and where we will be returning to, and what our job is down here. Because it’s only then, through the Christ, that we can feel the love, that we can embody the love, in order to share it with others and with the Demiurge. Consciousness and life only comes from above. The computers come from below. Life cannot jump into the molecular level.

Okay, we’ll come back around to all of this one more time next week. Please leave me your thoughts. Let’s have a discussion on these things. We’ll pick it up again next week.

God bless us all, and onward and upward!

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I occasionally get comments from people that the Gnosticism I’m sharing with you here at Gnostic Insights is different than the Gnosticism they’re accustomed to or the Gnosticism they see elsewhere on the internet. And that is very true, and that is why the Substack is called the Gnostic Reformation.

This Gnosticism that I’m sharing with you—yes, it comes out of my own personal gnosis. It is a compilation of both Valentinian Gnosticism, primarily from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, but also I’ve combined it with my own Theory of Everything called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, the blog which has been up there at Blogspot for over 15 years by now. It is a true Theory of Everything that lets you examine any philosophical model or any social model or scientific model.

A Simple Explanation blog

It’s a way of examining model structures and how they fit together, particularly our universe and particularly psychology, sociology, and theology. So when I ran across the Nag Hammadi and began to study it many years later, I was able to interpret it through this lens of A Simple Explanation that I had already developed. For example, the Simple Golden Rule comes directly out of my model, and that is a reformulation of what all religions around the world talk about as an ethical model of behavior.

The Simple Golden Rule

And it’s this: It begins with the concept of units of consciousness—and I use the term units of consciousness because this applies not only to human beings, but to plants and animals and bacteria, cells in your body; in a way, it applies to the atoms and molecules and the elements as well–and in the Simple Explanation, I used to give them consciousness. But since coming to my gnosis, I believe that what the physical parts—the elemental parts—of our universe actually are, is the imitation of the way things go together in the Fullness. And it’s an imitation because it’s down here in this so-called material world. It’s the Demiurge’s best effort to reconstruct Paradise.

So now I don’t think that the molecules and atoms and subatomic particles are actually conscious the way I used to. The consciousness resides in the Demiurge, and the Demiurge is controlling them because the Demiurge is the god of this universe, and he can control down to the smallest subatomic particle, all of the elemental parts of our universe. But when it comes up to the living parts of our universe, that is where the life, consciousness, love, wisdom, all of that comes in through the Father, through the Son, through the Aeons, through Logos, into our otherwise fallen and amnesiac universe.

So the actual consciousness of the Aeons, and upstream from that, of course, the Son and the Father, that is where the consciousness comes into the living things in our universe. That’s what makes the difference between the hard and rocky places and the wet and meaty places, because there’s definitely a difference.

Anyway, I was talking about the Simple Golden Rule, and that is where units of consciousness, so that could be anything from a cell in your body all the way up through all creatures, although, not the viruses—the viruses are not alive, they are molecular machines controlled by the Demiurge—but up through the bacteria, which are different than viruses, bacteria are little living creatures—on up through all the plants and the animals, and then into us. Those are the units of consciousness.

I am a unit of consciousness. You are a unit of consciousness. We say units because consciousness actually is the ground state of our matrix. Consciousness is the mind of God, and we are units of that. So my Simple Golden Rule has always said, even before I came to the gnosis, the Simple Golden Rule says,

Units of consciousness reach out to others like themselves at their own level of complexity. So cells reach out to other cells, people reach out to other people, etc. Units of consciousness reach out to others and hold hands to join together to build the next level up. They join on a project. So like your family, let’s say, the people in your family hold hands with one another and level up to the family structure. Each thing that is at the same level reaches up to the next level to build something together that none of them could do on their own.

So if we take the cells in your body, your skin cells reach out to other skin cells and level up to the organ called skin. The other organs reach out in the same way. The heart cells reach out to other heart cells, make the heart. Lung cells reach out to other lung cells, make lungs, etc. And all of the organs reach out to each other to create an organism.

Everything builds up in the same way at the molecular level. The Demiurge’s copy of this process is subatomic particles reaching out to other subatomic particles to make particles. Particles reach out to make atoms. Atoms reach out to make molecules. Molecules reach out to make elements. Elements reach out to make minerals. Minerals become the rocks and stones and the hard rocky places that we see. But it is not conscious, and that’s the difference, other than the nature of the consciousness of the Demiurge that controls it.

Whereas each of the living parts of our universe, from the cells on up, is conscious, does have thoughts, is a direct part of the consciousness of God.

That is different. You don’t see that in the Nag Hammadi. That’s because I have brought that part of it in from the Simple Explanation.

I admit that my reading of the Nag Hammadi is filtered through my personal interpretive system, but that’s what we’re all called to do. You have your own personal interpretive systems, or it’s fine with me if you adapt mine. But you have to come to this understanding, this gnosis yourself. The bottom line of the gnosis, by the way, is this. It all boils down to one sentence:

We come from above and we will return to above.

That is the nugget of Gnosticism. All of the rest of it is explanations that people have offered of the system of how it goes together. How is it that we come from above? How is it that we return to above? And how do we interact with the above space, that is the pleroma of the Fullness of God, when we’re down here trapped in this material world?

That was the query that actually kicked off most of my own personal gnosis, even before I read any of the Gnostic books. I used to wonder, as I played with my dogs down by the river and I stood barefoot in the mud of the river, how does the consciousness of God flow through me and the mud surrounding the river make up my body and how do they connect? That’s the beginning of the Simple Explanation.

So I’ve been doing some research in this time off I’ve had and I can answer exactly now in a philosophical way how it is that this Gnosticism that I am sharing with you differs from what people who consider themselves to be Gnostic teachers generally teach.

Most Gnostics, by the way, are thinking of themselves as what are called Sethians. They believe that they are offspring from the prototypical human Seth and there’s a lot of mythology built around that system. The Nag Hammadi books are mostly Sethian. That’s why you have so much mythology in there. That’s why you have the names of angels and the counting of positions. You have the laying out of the hierarchy and all of these elect systems within it and how they have to be.

But keep in mind, the people that wrote those books are really no different than I am or than you are. They’re people writing their interpretations of the system of how God can inhabit matter and where we are in that process and do we belong here or do we belong somewhere else. And if we belong somewhere else, how do we get out of here? That’s where such words as the trap come from—that this material world is a trap. Some Sethians go so far as to believe that the way teachers have shared with us to escape the trap is itself a trap. Have you heard this? “Don’t go into the light. The tunnel and the light, they’re just the trap.”

That is someone’s interpretation of the system. That’s all that it is. You need to commune in silence with the Father yourself to discover what is true and what is not true. You can’t believe teachers, even Gnostic teachers, especially out there on the internet, who claim to have the truth and want to share it with you as if they were prophets. They are not prophets any more than I am a prophet. Everyone filters truth and reality through their own lens of discrimination. And your background, including your past lives and the memes that you bring forward into this life, all influence what you interpret of what you see going on around you, the words you use, the structures you use to make it make sense.

What I am sharing with you here goes beyond the ancient Valentinian systems that we find in the Nag Hammadi. This Gnosticism that I’m sharing, this Simple Gnosticism, or Reformed Gnosticism that I’m teaching, fits into the space between Sethian and Valentinian systems. It’s a bridge cosmology. Neither tradition fully says this, but both hint at it. And what I’ve done is tease out the structural possibility that the ancient systems didn’t quite say out loud. And by the way, this is where my Simple Explanation model helped me do that.

And here is the Simple model: What we call the Son is the primal emanation that is the direct image of the Father. The Christ is a later composite restorative agent formed through the cooperation of the Aeons, the Son, and the Logos. So, the Son and Christ are not exactly the same character as taught in Christianity. They are not interchangeable names. The Christ came after the Son. The Son is the direct emanation of the Father, and we use those gendered terms simply because that is the traditional way to say them. We could instead call the Father the ground state of consciousness, or the Great I Am, and its emanation, instead of calling it the Son, we could simply call it the First Emanation. The Son stays plugged into the Father. It doesn’t branch off and float downstream like a spore. It is not that. It stays plugged into the Father at all times.

So, the Son and the Father are co-existent in their knowledge, and their wisdom, and their love. But the Son, or the offspring, is a monad, whereas the Father is infinite and illimitable, uncontainable. That’s why we say it’s the ground state. It’s a force, a power. It’s not a person. Oh, that might upset the Christians there. But the Father only relates to the Son. The Son is the first person, and in Valentinian Gnosticism, the Son is often called, then, the Father, our Father. Our Father, who art in heaven, is actually the Son, because He is our Father, and we all emanate out of the Son directly. This is not an insult to the Great Father, the Great I Am. The Son was emanated for this purpose. So, it is a fulfillment of the Son’s role to say He is our Father of consciousness and love. He is the one we can relate to, whereas the Father is so illimitable, is so infinite and magnificent and great, we cannot wrap our heads around it. The Son represents everything that the Father is.

Now, in Sethian Gnosticism, they call that first emanation Barbelo. Rather than the Son, they call it Barbelo. That’s its name. What they call the Son is the second emanation out of Barbelo. So, the Barbelo is the female figure, the mother, the womb, and the Son comes from Barbelo. The Son, in Sethianism, is also called Autogenes, genes, like our genetics. It’s the same root word. And then the Christ, in Sethianism, is a further emanation who brings restoration and reveals truth to us. That is Sethianism.

Now, as I said, in Valentinian Gnosticism, the Son, also known as Nous, is the first emanation from the Father. And the Christ is a later figure who descends to heal the pleroma after Logos’s fall and deficiency. Most Valentinians and Valentinian books say that the Aeon who fell from the pleroma and created our material existence is called Sophia, and it’s a female figure. I don’t like that because it’s a mythological upstream version of Adam and Eve. Let’s blame the woman. Let’s say females are inferior. We don’t need to go there because it turns out that one of the most mysterious books, as they say, in the Nag Hammadi, names the Fallen Aeon Logos. And Logos is not a female, and Logos doesn’t have a child named Yaldabaoth.

When Logos falls out of the pleroma of the Fullness of God, he cracks open. He breaks. He is rent in two. And a shadow version of him spills out all over, like guts on the ground. That is not a child. That is a shadow of Logos. And we call that shadow, you got it, the Demiurge. And in the Tripartite Tractate, Logos looked around at the results of the Fall with horror. Horror! And he tried to get it all back together, like grabbing his guts and sticking them back in his abdomen kind of thing. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t grab it all together.

And it spread out and would not listen to him. And it was disruptive and a disturbance and chaotic. So he abandoned the results of the Fall down below and hightailed it back up to the pleroma, to his “brothers”—the other Aeons in the pleroma—that we also call the Fullness of God.

But Logos has never been fully cut off from the shadow down here, from what we call the Demiurge. And it is the knowledge that came from Logos that informed the Demiurge how to put the chaos in order. The Demiurge was left down here as part of the chaos, but it got itself together. It reconnected its mind with the mind of Logos, but it didn’t realize that. The Demiurge is called the amnesiac god, the god who does not remember, is because the Demiurge doesn’t remember that it came from the Father and that it will return to the Father. The Demiurge does not realize that it is part of Logos.

And I have identified that part as the ego of Logos. The Tripartite Tractate says that the best part of Logos returned to the Self, his big S Self, which, in the case of Logos, was a fractal amalgamation of all of the other Aeons of the Fullness of God. What the Demiurge is, is the presenting face, the presenting part of Logos. He doesn’t remember Logos. He doesn’t know his true Self. He doesn’t remember the Father, or the Son, or the pleroma, or the Aeons.

He doesn’t remember any of that. He woke up down here amidst chaos, separated from the Fullness of God, and surrounded by chaotic quantum foam, is my interpretation of this. And with the way that Logos knows how to order things, the Demiurge set about ordering the chaos of the Fall. And he was able to build it up through the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the minerals, up to the mud. But he couldn’t get any life into it. He couldn’t get his little mud figures to come to life.

https://www.amazon.com/Children-Fullness-Charise-Ropp-Ph-D/dp/B0FKZ52DGL/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3AZI04OOTKXWM&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.PYbzzn0ozjrf_PyD1ThWTg.34vAmyex17a2zT1DWA7xekNyiZwTvERiP6rDLWcBmhQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=children+of+the+fullness+a+gnostic+myth&qid=1771600684&sprefix=%2Caps%2C166&sr=8-1The Demiurge cannot bring life and consciousness to the mud. [illustration from Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth]

He had the pattern, he had the blueprint, but he didn’t contain the life. And consciousness is life. Consciousness is love. The nature of the Father above, the nature of the pleroma, is love, consciousness, and life. And it’s all good. It’s all good.

We’re going to pick this up next week, because I’m on a roll now. We’ll probably be following this train of thought for the next two, three weeks. So welcome to the Gnostic Reformation, where we’re going to infuse Gnosticism with love, consciousness, and life.

God bless us all, and onward and upward.

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I had another episode planned for today, but at the last minute I decided to rerun this Christmas episode for you. I think this will become our traditional Christmas episode here at Gnostic Insights. And, if you are new to this podcast, welcome! Next week’s episode will be controversial, so I thought it best to wait until after Christmas for its release.

Today, we’re going to look at the nature of the Christ—the who, what, why of Christ. Most people are familiar with seeing the baby Jesus in the manger and that’s what we celebrate at Christmas time, the birth of the Christ on Earth in the form of a human. But the Christ is an ethereal creature that predates the birth of Jesus. Jesus and the Christ aren’t exactly the same, although Jesus was fully Christ. The Christ predates the birth of the human known as Jesus. So, let’s learn more about the Christ and why the Christ figure is so essential to us Second Order Powers. 

Gnosticism is the forerunner of the modern Christian faith. As such, a better understanding of the figure of the Christ is essential to understanding both Gnosticism and Christianity. The cosmology that I talk about here on the podcast was well known to Jesus and his original followers, but it was cut out of Christianity about 1700 years ago by the Nicene Council, at the urging of the Pope and the Roman Emperor. Because this theology was subtracted from orthodox Christianity, many of the ideas of gnostic cosmology sound odd and unfamiliar to modern churchgoers. Some of the ideas may even sound heretical at first glance due to their unfamiliarity. Yet the theology contained in these early scriptures makes sense of so many puzzling aspects of Christian faith that they must be reexamined. That’s why I call the Substack The Gnostic Reformation. I’m confident that once you understand gnostic Christianity, you will better understand your relationship with God.

According to gnostic cosmology as laid out in the Nag Hammadi, we humans and all other forms of life on Earth, from bacteria and eukaryotes on up, are the fruit of the Pleroma and Logos. We Second Order Powers find ourselves locked in a never-ending battle for dominion over the Earth with forces that were generated as a result of the Fall. Due to the law of mutual combat, we have forgotten our origin in the Fullness and our mission to bring love and harmony to creation and have instead taken on many of the characteristics of the shadows of the Deficiency.

The Second Order Powers are locked in a never-ending war with the Deficiency. Here below, we constantly battle the physical forces of death and entropy, as well as the spiritual forces of vice, sin, delusion and despair. In order to restore memory and reason to the Second Order Powers, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one of them individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for a helper to bring peace to the Deficiency and forgiveness to Logos. Out of this focused prayer, a unique fruit emerged, one that contained all of the capabilities and powers of the Fullness, along with all of the love and eternal qualities of the Father.

The singular fruit of the Fullness and the Father is known by various names: the Christ, the Savior and the Redeemer, the Advocate, the Light, and the Beloved. In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is a perfect and full fractal of the Father and the Son, all rolled-up into one perfect form. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was both perfect man and perfect God incarnate. Christian Gnostics believed the same.

Here is a more complete explanation of who Jesus was. It’s said that Jesus was conceived without sin because he carried within his body the perfection of man and God. This would mean that Jesus was perfect and true to the original DNA formula for humanity. Hence the importance of the virgin birth that then imparted that perfect DNA to the baby. Jesus was also without negative karma attached to his soul, as his soul was the soul of God. The components of Jesus’s body were also without sin, as the cells and flesh that became Jesus were in fact the Aeons of the Fullness incarnate.

As Colossians 1:19 says, “For God was pleased to have all his Fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on Earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.”

This one sentence from Colossians contains the entire Christian Gnostic Gospel. Because Jesus brought along the entire Fullness of the Pleroma when he incarnated, every aspect of the Father and Son came to material instantiation on Earth. In this manner, the eternal God experienced the finite life of us Second Order Powers and all of the struggle between birth and death that plague us all.

Here is how the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures describes this process:

“As for those of the shadow, Logos separated himself from them in every way, since they fight against him and are not at all humble before him. The stumbling which happened to the Aeons of the Father was brought to them as if it were their own, in a careful and non-malicious and immensely sweet way. It was brought to the Fullnesses so that they might be instructed about the Deficiency by the single One, from whom alone they all received strength to eliminate the defects. They gathered together, asking the Father, with beneficent intent, that there be aid from above from the Father for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. Then, from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Fullnesses, revealing the countenance of the Father of whom the Aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus it was willingly and gladly that they brought forth the fruit. And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which was his beloved Son, but the Son in whom the Fullnesses are pleased to put himself on them as a garment through which he gave perfection to the defective one and gave confirmation to those who are perfect, the One who is properly called Savior and the Redeemer and the Well-pleasing One, and the Beloved, the One to whom prayers have been offered, and the Christ and the light of those appointed in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given to him. Yet what other name may be applied to him except the Son, as we have previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father whom he wanted them to know? Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, but also they generated their own, for the Aeons who give glory, generated their countenance and their face. They came forth in a multifaceted form in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the One who gave it to him.” (That is from the Tripartite Tractate sections 85 through 87.)

So you see, the mission of the Christ, as stated in Colossians, was to redeem all of creation, including the fallen Aeon who had founded our material universe. Because the Christ came to redeem everyone, the body of Jesus came to Earth with every one of the Fullnesses on board. For every fallen spirit, the Christ brought forth their own personal and recognizable Savior. Redemption has already taken place. It is up to the Second Order Powers and the one who fell to recognize and accept that redemption in order to complete the mission of the Christ.

In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ brought the correcting formula for all of our spirits and souls, each unique and personally formulated to meet our individual needs. The baptism of the Christ washes away the mental and spiritual confusion brought on by the endless war with shadows of the Fall.

Gnostics are apocalyptic, as are Christians. Gnostics believe that some day every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus, the Christ, is Lord. Repentance and redemption comes harder for some than for others. Some souls take more time to recognize and remember. Ultimately, though, there comes a day of reckoning, for the Father will not be denied forever. There will soon come a day when the Deficiency ends. On that day, a new economy will unite Heaven and Earth, and all souls will find their joyful place in Paradise. The only forms banished to the outer darkness will be the shadows and phantoms of the Fall, which did not exist within the Father’s consciousness from the beginning. These shadows are not real and they will have no home with us in Paradise.

The hierarchy of the Fullness of God dreams of Paradise. Logos crowns the hierarchy and contains fractals of all the other Aeons.

Now here’s a gnostic perspective of Jesus on the cross. One of the central themes of the Christian faith is the death of Jesus on the cross. Christians the world over focus on the body of Jesus hanging on the cross, and I’ve often wondered, why this fixation of Jesus on the cross? Why is the crucifix the focal point of every church and altar? Why do people wear the cross as jewelry or hang a crucifix in their bedroom? The obvious answer Christians give is that without the cross, Jesus could not have saved humanity from sin, for he bore our sins into the grave with his death and they were washed away with his resurrection from the dead. Praise be to God, but why the cross? If Jesus had been stoned to death or drowned or beaten or thrown from a high tower, would we still feel such affinity for the stone, a lake, a club or a roof? I don’t think so. I think there is something very special about the shape of the cross itself.

I ask this question because Jesus never said, I’m soon to pass on from this world, and I want you to focus on my body hanging on the cross as I take on the sins of the world. And yet, that’s what people do, as if that were the entire point of the Gospel. As far as I can tell, Jesus did not ask for his death and resurrection to be the focal point of worship. What Jesus actually said was: “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30), and, “Whoever welcomes me welcomes the Father that sent me” (Luke 9:48).

In other words, Jesus acknowledged himself in reference to his Father and he deflected glory to his Father. Yet Jesus is worshipped by modern Christians to the extent that the Father almost goes unmentioned. Thank goodness for the Lord’s prayer, which is directed to the Father and not to the Son. Jesus taught it to be said to the Father; he did not teach it to be recited to himself. No slight to the Son, of course, we’re merely emphasizing the importance of the God Above All Gods.

During the last supper, Jesus instructed his followers to think of his broken body as they break and eat bread and to consider his blood as the fulfillment of a contract with humanity as they drink wine. This is what Jesus left the church as instruction regarding his death. He did not instruct them to erect images of crosses and to worship him hanging on a cross, as if he were stuck up there forever. Yes, Protestants have allowed Jesus to come down off the cross and therefore their crosses are unoccupied to remind us that Jesus resurrected, but still the focus is on the cross. Again—why the cross in particular?

Here is the symbolism of the cross as I understand it. We who dwell on Earth are engaged in endless warfare with the Imitation that always seeks to lure us away from our Father in Heaven. Oftentimes we don’t even realize we’re engaged in warfare with the Imitation, because it can appear disguised as goodness. This is what is meant by the Devil being a liar. Things are proposed “for our own good,” but they’re not; they’re proposed for power and control. We Second Order of Powers are engaged in this endless warfare and, although we come from a good disposition of the Father and the Fullness, we have forgotten our heavenly nature and become deluded because of rage and other passions and addictions.

The Christ came to Earth in the form of a Son of Man to bring the Third Order of Powers to Earth as the solution to overcoming the phantoms of the Imitation that have mired the Second Order Powers in error and ignorance. Those who have eyes to see the Christ are able to remember their Father in Heaven. Those who remember their Father in Heaven and repent from the Imitation are redeemed. Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of the promise to redeem the fallen. Jesus as the Son of God and the Son of Man brought salvation to the Deficiency and restored it to the Kingdom of Heaven.

The reason the cross looks as it does and occupies such a central role in worship is that the cross represents human beings. The Cross is shaped like a human, a Son of Man. It is no accident that Jesus was crucified on a cross because Jesus is a Son of Man, the Son of Man. The Cross should remind us that humankind has been redeemed by the body and blood of Christ in an even more profound way than acknowledging the indignity and suffering of Christ on the cross. It should remind us that the Son of God—the Christ—bridged with the form of his human body spirit-to-matter, which is top-to-bottom, and neighbor-to-neighbor, which is side-to-side, just as the shape of the cross.

In the Gnostic Gospel, redemption comes to all of creation through the incarnation of the Son of God into the body of the Son of Man. The manner of the Savior’s birth, death, and resurrection will come to every soul as they realize their Father is in Heaven and to Heaven they will return. For, as it says, “every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” That affirmation comes from the New Testament (Philippians 2:10). It just takes time. We aren’t there yet because of the common delusion of presumptuous thought, which causes people to behave selfishly.

Ego must first make way for the love of Christ to take over the throne of the Self. Only then may you rise above the egoic imitation, for then you will have a champion and a king. The very public way that Jesus was crucified and the very public way that he resurrected gives us all hope of the same: Jesus demonstrates proof of resurrection and his life, death, and resurrection is about all of us, not only about the Christ. Jesus is the exemplar of our resurrection.

And, by the way, in a Gnostic sense, which could be considered heretical by many Christians, the story of Jesus and the Christ and the Father don’t even have to be believed as historical fact, which many nay-sayers make the cornerstone of their argument against Christ and God. The very concepts themselves—the very thoughts, the mind—is what carries this. We are consciousness and this Christ story is in our consciousness for our salvation. Think on that…

I acknowledge that this is a very different version of Christianity than has been traditionally presented to us. This is gnosis that was originally contained in the sacred scriptures that formed the New Testament prior to the Pope and Emperor of Rome getting their hands on it and stripping it out. It’s nice to know. I hope you get it. It doesn’t really matter, because all you need to know is that we come from the Father and to the Father we will return. That is the bottom line. We are emanations directly of the Father and the Father has promised to save us all and bring us all home.

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me.” This has been taken to mean that one must acknowledge the power of the Christ before the Christ can redeem you. But, you see, this would put all of the power of redemption in your hands rather than Christ’s. The Christ will redeem all Second Order Powers by the end of time, with or without your prior acknowledgment. All redemption comes to the Father through the Christ, and that is in Christ’s hands. What accepting the Christ now does for you is open the door for the Third Order Powers to enter your egoic soul. This power makes it possible to live a joyous and virtuous life. It allows the love of the Father to flow through you and out into the world. And it eases your transition after the physical death of your body, so you may enter the afterlife without fear, knowing that you rest in the Pleroma of the Christ.

The Final Economy is our foretaste of Paradise. No more shadows, no more sorrow.

I hope that this information is helpful to you and will help you remember your gnosis.

Merry Christmas. God bless us all. And onward and upward.

If you are getting any gnosis from this information, please consider supporting Gnostic Insights with a generous donation. It helps keep me motivated. I’m a one-person enterprise with full responsibility for every aspect of this podcast, from writing to recording to editing to artwork to paying for the hosting services that bring this gnosis to you. I could really use some more support! Please do what you can.

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Last week’s episode, The Key to Gnostic Cosmology, was well-timed to greet the slew of new subscribers who joined The Gnostic Reformation as a result of the wonderful review by The New Unhinged that appeared on Mariah’s  Substack website on November 28, 2025. It’s titled: Roast for Relief #17: The Gnostic Who Broke My Brain in the Best Way  If you haven’t seen the piece yet, please hightail it over there and take a look. It’s funny and reverentially irreverent at the same time. I feel honored by Mariah’s appreciation and the hours she spent on the review.

Today, I’m going to run through the Gnostic Cosmology again, this time pairing the explanations with illustrations from my kid’s book, Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth. My brother Bill thinks the kid’s book will be the version that survives into the far future as a new Gnostic Gospel in some distant version of the Nag Hammadi codices. Personally, I’m not so sure there will be a far future here on this material plane, but we’ll see…  In any event, I’m doing my best to get the hard cover edition into libraries and bookstores in the here and now.  Meanwhile, we need more reader reviews to help the book rise up in amazon. So, please, buy the paperback or download the kindle version for free or almost free and then leave your review. You will be supporting gnosis and love.

https://www.amazon.com/Children-Fullness-Charise-Ropp-Ph-D/dp/B0FKZ52DGL/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1GPEPQH0GTDSW&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.PYbzzn0ozjrf_PyD1ThWTg.34vAmyex17a2zT1DWA7xekNyiZwTvERiP6rDLWcBmhQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=children+of+the+fullness+a+gnostic+myth&qid=1764429934&sprefix=%2Caps%2C145&sr=8-1

ALL of the following illustrations are from Children of the Fullness. For the purposes of this episode, I have removed the text from the pages and am only presenting the images as I narrate a grown-up version of the pictured events.  Believe me, the kiddie book is written as a young child’s bedtime story. And because of that, the Gnostic characters are personified into recognizable forms. The Father looks like a father. The Son looks like a son. The Aeons are personified as Angels, although in truth, not all Aeons are angels. But kids can relate to angels, so I gave the Aeons wings and halos.

I’m putting the illustrations into the transcript so that if you are listening to this as an audio podcast, you can go to GnosticInsights.com or to my Substack location, the Gnostic Reformation, under the name of Cyd Ropp, so that you can see the illustrations.

The gnosis is simple. It has to be, because all living creatures know and embody it. So, if my dog can’t understand the gnosis, it ain’t gnosis, it’s just knowledge or good or bad information.  And if you can grasp today’s illustrated gnosis, then you will have enough to go onward and upward. Sure, more explanations are nice, but they are not essential. All we really need to know is that we come from Above, and we will return to Above. That’s it in a nutshell. The rest is a lifetime of practicing love and embodying virtue.

So let’s get started.

The Father’s mind is the initial, illimitable consciousness. Consciousness is the ground state that predates everything. Consciousness is part of the existence of God, and it is the very first thing before anything that follows. There is no gender associated with this Father. Obviously the Father is not a man with a beard and long robes, rather “he possesses this constitution without having a face or form, things which are understood through perception.” The Tripartite Tractate describes the Father this way:

Whence also comes the title, the incomprehensible. If he is incomprehensible, then it follows that he is unknowable, that he is the one who is inconceivable by any thought, invisible by anything, ineffable by any word, untouchable by any hand. He alone is the one who knows himself as he is, along with his form and his greatness and his magnitude.

Step number two is the emergence of the Son. It is the emergence of consciousness from the illimitable, infinite consciousness of the Father into a singularity—into a monad, as it’s called. It’s like the bucket dipped into the sea. It contains all of the characteristics and quality of the Father, but it’s contained as an individual. The Son doesn’t separate from the Father. It stays plugged into the Father.

This first illustration shows the Father holding his baby Son and showing Him the contents of His imagination. The facing page shows the mature Son releasing Aeons into the vision. 

The Tripartite Tractate says that as soon as the Son was formed, what are called the Totalities of the ALL were formed. The Totalities of the ALL are all of the variabilities that make up the Son, all broken out and enumerated. The Totalities of the ALL do not recognize themselves as individuals. It is only through their giving of glory to the Father and Son that each of the Totalities comes to self-awareness. In the children’s book, we skip the step where the Son divides itself into all of its discreet variables and jump right to the self-aware Aeons populating the hierarchy of the Fullness of God.

Now, back to the children’s book. The next page shows the Aeons giving glory to the Father and Son by singing their songs of praise. The facing page shows the Aeons reproducing and making new Aeons through their combined singing.

Each of the Aeons of the hierarchy of the Fullness has a position, a place, a duty, and a name—in the Gnostic Gospel as I describe it, I say that this is the emergence of ego, for every Aeon is a self-identified individual. And basically what they do is sing songs of glory upstream to the Father and the Son, just like the Totalities did. And all together, they dream of Paradise.

We turn the page of the children’s book to see a young Aeon building a model of Paradise as the other Aeons look on with admiration.

This final Aeon was produced through a combination of all of the Aeons of the Fullness of God giving glory to the Father and the Son at the same time. “This aeon was last to have <been> brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude,” referring, I think, to the fractal nature of his pleroma. This youngest Aeon carried within itself all of the traits of every other Aeon, perfect and complete. This was a very talented Aeon resembling the Son of God Himself, who also carried all of the traits of the Aeons within its singular Self.

This final Aeon was named Logos, because he was also endowed with the ability to reason thoughtfully and to figure things out in a step-by-step manner. The word Logos in Greek means reason and logic. The Tripartite Tractate puts it this way:

“This aeon was among those to whom was given wisdom, so that he could become pre-existent in each one’s thought. By that which he wills, will they be produced. Therefore, he received a wise nature in order to examine the hidden basis, since he is a wise fruit…”

This is a curious statement, because it seems to indicate that Logos was equipped to bring others into existence without the cooperation of his fellow Aeons. If the Father had not wanted an individual Aeon to be able to procreate without the agreement of the Fullness, why would the Father have equipped Logos to do so? All of the Aeons have free will, because the Father has free will and everything that emanates from the Father carries the attributes of the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says,

“for, the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him.”

Logos was loaded with free will, as are all of the Aeons. The Father foresees our behavior before we do, which seems to contradict the idea of free will. We can resolve this classic theological conundrum by realizing that the Father anticipates every possible outcome of our free will. At the universal level, the infinity of the Fullness of God is represented by the potentiality of all possible choices a person could make as their life passes from one decision to the next. The fullness of all possible futures are within our reach as we pass through this universe; our own free will is driving our consciousness through those possibilities. The Father anticipates all possibilities in his infinite wisdom, and all possible courses of action are anticipated. This choice that Logos made was anticipated though not predetermined.

We turn the page in the children’s book to see Logos happily carrying his model of Paradise upward to the Father’s mountain top. The Father is not there to receive the gift. The middle panel shows Logos falling down from the heights. The panel on the far right shows Logos crashed down into a dark space with his broken model of Paradise scattered about him. He wears an expression of pain and clutches his head. An eerie, shadowy copy of Logos emerges from him.

Logos didn’t have the power or greatness of the original Son, but he had the blueprint—he had the model. He thought he was complete and could build a perfect Paradise on his own because he contained the Fullness of God in a smaller fractal iteration. He left his position and place in the hierarchy of the Fullness and headed upward to “the realm of perfect glory.” But he was mistaken and he crashed out of the ethereal plane, broke apart, and his pleroma lost its hierarchical arrangement. It became random and chaotic. Logos tried his best to bring it all back in order, tried to put his pleroma back together into a proper hierarchy, but it would not cooperate. Quote:

“The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows and copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted. Out of this there was a division – he became deeply troubled – and a turning away because of his self-doubt and division, forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and <of that> which is.”

“He became increasingly desperate. He was dumbfounded. Instead of perfection he saw deficiency; instead of unity he saw division; instead of stability he saw disturbance; instead of rest, upheaval. He was unable to bring their love of disturbance to an end, nor could he destroy it; he had become utterly powerless when his wholeness and his perfection had abandoned him.”

Turning to the next page we see sad Logos flying back up to the Fullness, looking over his shoulder at the mess below and his shadow rising from the gloom. And on the facing page we see the shadow of Logos, whom we call the Demiurge in Gnosticism, dark, no halo, a mean look on his face, staring at the pieces of the broken model of Paradise scattered about.

When Logos falls and abandons his ego down below, his ego is separated from the direct flow of consciousness, life, and love of the Father, Son, and Fullness. So this is the beginning of ego running amok. Ego found itself in this weird, dark, chaotic space, and thought it was all that existed because it didn’t remember what came before. It had all of the blueprints for Paradise because they were in the mind of Logos when he fell. It also had the ambitious overreaching that Logos was engaged in when he fell.

The next two pages show the Demiurge building our material creation, with Logos looking down from above. The Demiurge builds rocks and mud, but he can’t make his muddy models come to life because he doesn’t contain the consciousness and life of the Fullness and the Father.

On the next double-page spread we see the Angels sending living creatures down from the Fullness to the Earth.

The Tripartite Tractate says that the Earth was populated by the fruit of the Aeons, “from the smallest to the largest.” In Gnosticism the fruit of the Aeons are known as the Second Order of Powers, and they/we contain all of the attributes of the Fullness—the life, consciousness, free will, and love of the Father flowing down from the Fullness of God. Everything that’s alive, from the bacteria and the cells and the organs that make up our bodies and all of the critters and birds and fish, all of the insects and mammals, all living creatures, the grasses and the trees, the moss and the slime molds—everything that’s alive is a fruit of the Fullness of God, pre-designed in the Fullness. And we come down with a mission.

We Second Order  Powers were supposed to come down here to remind the Demiurge of the Father above; to remind the Demiurge of Logos, his better half; to remind the Demiurge of love and consciousness and that he is not God and he needs to return home. We are supposed to be calling to the Demiurge to return home to the Fullness of God.

So the next page of the children’s book shows a loving Earth. Hearts and flowers; everybody happy and loving.

We Second Order Powers operate according to the same Aeonic principle I call the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to others with love to help build things that we can’t do on our own. We make families and work together. We make villages and work together. We make small communities and build things that we can all enjoy together.

Sadly, this state didn’t last long, because the Second Order of Powers became caught up in a “never-ending war” with the material world. Gnostics speak of a division between the material world and our eternal spirits. Gnostics say that our eternal spirits are “trapped” in the material. We forgot about bringing love and remembrance to the Demiurge because of the never-ending war of spirit against material, the never-ending war of right and left, the never-ending war between us and the archons. It’s a constant battle here between life and death, with the Aeons promoting life and love and the archons promoting death and division.

I portray this division on the next two pages as the once-happy people and animals fight tooth and claw against one another.

Because of their isolation and strife, the Second Order Powers lost their purpose and joy. The people let their egos take control. Because the ego of Logos had been reaching for the heights, the egos of the Second Order Powers also reached for power and control, each thinking they were more worthy than the next. They forgot about the Simple Golden Rule and couldn’t work together in cooperation without favoring themselves. Narcissism ruled.

The next two pages of the children’s book shows people filling their spiritual poverty with lots of materials riches and tasty treats as the Aeons watch and pray from Above. We Gnostics would say that you can’t patch over a spiritual void with material prosperity, no matter how much stuff you accumulate.

And so the Fullnesses realized that that plan wasn’t working. The Aeons prayed to the Father, the Son, and the Totalities for true salvation to come and rescue the Second Order Powers, just like we were supposed to rescue the Demiurge. Now it takes a superpower, the most super Power, to come into our cosmos, rescue all of the Second Order Powers by reminding us of God’s love and what our true mission is of sharing love. Christ has the most power of any entity ever, more than enough power to bring remembrance, love, salvation, peace, comfort, joy to all of us down here who have forgotten. That’s the job of the Christ.

On the next page, we see the Savior standing with his hands on the shoulders of a pretty girl. The facing page shows many of the kids we saw in the previous unhappy page now feeling love and salvation as the Savior radiates love to them all.

Once the Christ succeeds in bringing remembrance to everyone, then the Demiurge will remember Logos above. Logos and his ego reunited. All is joy. All is gnosis. The material cosmos dissolves like snow and all souls are released to return to their home in the Fullness. This ushers in the age known as the Third Economy. Paradise at last.

To quote from my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated,

Redemption means returning to the Father’s abode—that Paradise dreamed by the Fullness, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment, and no deficiency. That Paradise where Christ is King and peace reigns supreme, and there is only cooperation, fellowship, and true love. In Paradise there is naught but life; so all the grass is green, and flowers blossom endlessly, and every soul that has ever lived, lives happily with their friends and families.

That’s the end of this Gnostic Cosmology, as illustrated in my kid’s book, “Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth.” It’s not all that complicated, is it?

Last week I said we’d get into the applications of gnosis, and I released an extra episode this week for that purpose. It’s called “Remembering the Mission,” and it’s an update of an earlier episode from 2021 called “Why Not Be Sinful?”.

Meanwhile, if you have any questions or comments, please don’t be shy. Make some comments. I look forward to reading them. God bless us all and onward and upward.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1099169747?ref_=dbs_m_mng_rwt_calw_tpbk_1&storeType=ebooks&qid=1764429934&sr=8-1The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated presents gnosis as simply as possible for your enlightenment.

In 2019 I posted an article to my new Gnostic Gospel blog called, If All Are Redeemed, Why Not Be Sinful? And I’d like to share that with you today.

One of the big heresies of Gnosticism is that all Second Order Powers are redeemed by Christ and all will someday return to the Paradise of the Fullness. Yay! Everyone’s going to Heaven! No one is going to hell, not even the Fallen angels. What joy! This seems to fly in the face of Christian orthodoxy that promotes the idea that only those humans who confess a belief in Jesus as the Christ will make it into Heaven, and those who don’t believe in Jesus will go to an eternal damnation of suffering in hell.

Conventional Christianity states that Jesus came to save humanity, but only those who acknowledge Jesus as the only Son of God and invite Him into their hearts will be saved. This is the basis for all evangelism and all churches that follow the Nicene Creed, which is to say, all Christian churches, whether Catholic or Protestant. This is why Christians are so keen on saving souls. They don’t want you to suffer for eternity in hell.

The Gnostic Church begs to differ with that common interpretation of Christ’s mission. According to the books of the Nag Hammadi library, all of creation will be redeemed and returned to the Fullness and the Father’s home in Heaven. All of creation, everyone and everything, will be made clean and pure and holy by the end. As they say, it’ll all be good in the end, and if it’s not good yet, then it’s not yet the end.

Gnosis refers to the ability to use reason and logic to arrive at spiritual truth. So, let’s think together about this idea of Christ and redemption and who does or does not go to Heaven. First, if Christ’s redemption were a matter of your belief, then Christ’s mission of salvation would be limited to what you believe. In other words, you would be the one holding the power of salvation, not Christ.

Does that make any sense to you? Are you the one who redeems or is Christ? Can you see how making your belief central to redemption actually limits the power of Christ? Can you see how that makes sinful humans more powerful than the mission of Christ’s redemption? Limiting Christ to your belief, it seems to me, is the greater heresy than simply trusting Christ to accomplish the mission. It is Christ’s job to redeem humanity, not yours.

Second, according to Gnostic texts, all creatures great and small will be redeemed. This means that all creatures are going to Heaven. My dog has never professed a belief in Jesus as the Christ, yet my dog is going to Heaven. The fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the insects, the forest animals, all Second Order Powers are redeemed by Christ. It is the job of the Christ to redeem creation, irrespective of creation’s ability to confess that fact. Do you think that only good dogs go to Heaven? Or nice fishes? Maybe only herbivores? Perhaps only parrots who can say, Jesus saves!

Once we concede that it is only the Christ that can redeem, then what is the point of leading a virtuous life? Why not sin up until the end, have all kinds of fun, and then waltz into Heaven without repentance? Repentance, by the way, means to feel sorrow and regret. Are we allowed to sin willy-nilly with no negative consequences? An even more profound question is, why were we created in the first place? According to the Tripartite Tractate, the Second Order Powers were created in order to rescue the Fallen Aeon known as Logos.

The most perfect and complete of the individual Aeons, Logos crowned the top of the aeonic hierarchy. This single Aeon consisted of all the attributes of the good and perfect Fullness rolled up into one individual. And as you know by now from listening to the first eight episodes of Gnostic Insights, Logos had fallen from the Fullness and smashed to smithereens in a lower dimension.

The broken bits of Logos scattered into space, forming our material universe along with a host of powers and personalities, including demons, evil djinn, and archons. Logos imagined he could build the Paradise dreamt by the Fullness because he understood all of the plans and possessed all of the necessary talents. However, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos was unable to give proper glory to the Father. As he reached for the Father, Logos stumbled and fell, shattering himself to bits. Because the isolated glory of Logos was inadequate to the task, everything he produced as a result of that effort fell disastrously short. Where there had been unity with the Son and with his brethren in the Fullness, now there was a division and a turning away.

The undiluted will expressed by the Fullness was splintered because Logos, “could not bear to look at the light but looked at the depths, and he faltered.” That’s verse 77 of the Tripartite Tractate. Going on to verse 78:

“What issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance—[by the way, that’s another word for ego]—what issued from his ego had existed from something that was itself deficient. And because of that, what was perfect in him left him and went upward to its own in the Fullness, leaving the sicknesses behind in the darkness.”

The material space of our universe is known as the deficiency and the imitation in Gnosticism, and it was initially populated by nothing but the lost and fallen shadows of the pleroma of Logos. The part of Logos that stayed behind in the deficiency was his ego, which came to be known as the Demiurge. The fallen ego of Logos was not hated by the Father or the Aeons of the Fullness. The fallen was mourned as lost, as a prodigal son or daughter is mourned by the parents who still love them. The Fullness loves the Fallen and only wants the ego of Logos to be restored to the Fullness.

The Second Order Powers were sent into this dimension for the purpose of engaging the Fallen Demiurge and helping it to return home. However, as the Second Order Powers entered this earthly dimension, they were immediately plunged into a never-ending battle with the Fallen. Due to the law of mutual combat, we temporarily forgot our Father in Heaven and our mission of engagement and rescue.

We were all infected with a host of fallen influences and fell into lifetimes of fear, regret, lust, and rage. As the Tripartite Tractate puts it in verse 84,

“The two orders fought against each other, struggling for command with such a result that they were engulfed by forces and material substances in accordance with the law of mutual combat. And they too acquired lust for domination and all the other passions of this sort. And, consequently, empty vain glory pulls them all toward the desire of lust for domination, and not one of them remembers what is superior or confesses it.”

We humans are Second Order Powers infected with many, many fallen influences that blind us to our true natures and our mission. These negative influences prefer the deficiency to the Fullness. These negative powers of the Fall represent the opposite of the All and of all that makes us truly happy and fulfilled.

The survival reflex of the imitation requires the Second Order Powers to be miserable and lost, because misery loves company. They influence people to fight against each other rather than fight and resist the evil fallen. Our lives become an endless and fruitless quest to find happiness through selfish pursuits. All you have to do is pop into Facebook or Twitter to find evidence all over the place of these fruitless pursuits that appear to cause happiness, but actually cause misery.

At this point in the Gnostic story, the Father and the Aeons of the produced a superior new entity, a Third Order Power called the Christ. It became the mission of the Christ to help the Second Order Powers remember and love the Fallen so that the Fallen could be redeemed. Love is the only power that can redeem the Fallen.

Why, then, was a Third Order Power needed to accomplish the task that the Second Order Powers were sent to accomplish? Why populate creation with well-meaning but ignorant and confused Second Order Powers? Why not just send in the Christ to accomplish the redemption of fallen Logos in the first place? What is our function and purpose other than bumbling around in never-ending war with the Fallen? Because the Fallen Logos must be loved and redeemed one fallen piece at a time.

Imagine if the original body of Logos resembled a human form, like we might picture an angel in Heaven looking something like us. Now, imagine that the heavenly body of Logos in the Fullness was comprised of the blueprint for every single potential body that would ever come to life in the imitation down here after the Fall. Imagine the body of Logos falling from an immaterial dimension, that being the Fullness or Heaven, and crashing and breaking apart into a lower, slower, thicker dimension, our material universe, and spilling out the blueprints for the material universe.

Moreover, our personal stories, the drama that each human life enacts, are also stories of the Fall, stories that need redemption. Every life tells stories of falls and redemption, temptation and overcoming, despair and triumph, and every time an archonic influence is defeated and stripped from your personal life, part of Logos is redeemed.

When we live a virtuous life, we are following the principles of the Father and the Fullness in Heaven, and we are participants with Christ in redeeming the Fall of Logos. When we live a sinful life, we are succumbing to the demons of the Fall and contributing to the chaos and despair of the deficiency. And I made up a chart with the values of the imitation or the deficiency on the left, and they are called on the left, and the values of the Father and of the Fullness on the right. And the left is the material, downward pull of the deficiency, and the right is the upward, psychical and spiritual pull of the values of the Father and the Fullness.

This chart appears in this particular post, and I know I’ve said this chart to you before in prior episodes of the Gnostic Insights, so let me just briefly hit a few of them. If you’re living on the left, if you’re, quote, enjoying a sinful life, and it’s not actually enjoyment, because joy does not come from the left side. Joy only comes from the right. The most that you can hope for, if you’re living on the deficiency side, is a imitation of joy, which we generally call happiness. But as I believe you know by now, happiness is a never-ending pursuit, and we are often reaching for happiness—oh, let’s go here, let’s go there, let’s buy this, let’s buy that, let’s eat this, ooh, let’s have that, ooh, hey, let’s do this drug. You see, everything promises this joy.

Sometimes it brings you temporary happiness, but it never fulfills, it never brings satisfaction, never brings satisfaction. Pursuit of material gain always brings more and more desire for more and more material gain. So the values on the left that the sinful are pursuing, these are called vices, and they are such things as impatience, lust, greed, selfishness, cruelty, ruthlessness, anger, resentfulness, rude, obstructionist.

(And what I mean by obstructionist is this. Have you ever known someone who, no matter what someone else proposes to do, they go, nah, that’ll never work. So an obstructionist, they’re like a naysayer, that’s what that means. They’re wet blankets, they’re always pulling down good suggestions. That’s what obstructionist means.)

Despair, depression, sloth or laziness, chaos, disorder, thoughtless action, greed, envy, arrogance, fear, confusion, gluttony. These are values or vices on the material side of the ledger, and these are the things that generally are promoted in social media, strangely enough.

The values on the right actually are virtues that are part of our aeonic inheritance from the Fullness of God, and they are such virtues. Well, you know they say that God is love, right? So love is the number one virtue. Patience, generosity, graciousness, mercy, forgiveness, welcoming, obedience, respect, cooperation as opposed to obstructionism, free choice, hopefulness, joyfulness, truthfulness, industriousness, order, prudence. Prudence, by the way, means knowing what to do at the right time. Logic, charity, kindness, empathy, humility, loyalty, justice, courage, remembrance.

These are values on the right side, and you can hear as I read down these values of the right side that these are the types of things that lead to true loving connections between human beings. They are not the kind of thing we generally see on social media, by the way, and we kind of rarely see them in actual walking-around life as well. But this is the goal, is to live on the right side of the ledger, to enact those principles rather than to chase after the emptiness of the vices on the left side.

The values of the Demiurge lead to isolation and despair. The values of the Fullness lead to peace and joy.

Now, back to my article. Because we are in actuality children of the Fullness, we can only be truly happy when we act out of love, that is, out of virtue. When we forget our place in the Fullness of God, we operate out of ignorance and are subject to the evil influences of the Fall. The Fall can only produce misery, fear, rage, and lust. Never love, never happiness. No good ever comes from rage. No good ever comes from fear. Here is the reason we strive to lead a virtuous life, because only virtue can make you happy. All else leads to despair and depression, because, as they say, the wages of sin is death. And that’s what that means. The imitation does not bring happiness. Despite a world full of false promises, vice can only bring ignorance and suffering, isolation and despair.

When you dwell in vice rather than virtue, your life is part of the problem and not part of the solution. The Christ brings redemption and remembrance of the Father and the Fullness, one bit, one piece of the Fall at a time. Every time you resist evil and turn a bad habit into a good habit, you have redeemed a piece of the Fall. When you redeem all of your bits and pieces, you will be fully redeemed and regain your home in the Fullness. When all Second Order Powers have accepted the remembrance and the redemption of Christ, then Logos will be fully redeemed and this material universe can pass away. At that point, Paradise, with all of the love, peace and happiness that is implied, will be fully restored.

The end goal of redemption is return to the Father’s abode, that Paradise dreamed by the Fullness, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment and no deficiencies, that Paradise where Christ is King and peace reigns supreme, and there is only cooperation, fellowship and true love. In Paradise there is nothing but life, so all the grass is green and flowers blossom endlessly and every soul that has ever lived lives happily forever after with their friends and their families. The Christ will leave no one behind to condemnation and hell.

What kind of unholy savior would that be? From a previous article, I wrote,

“Thus the called will condemn evil and will turn away from the rage that has consumed them, and they will be healed as they acknowledge that they have an origin of their existence, and they desire to know what that is that exists before them.”

The Tripartate says in verse 132, “And even those who were brought forth from the desire of lust for domination, having inside them the seed that is lust for domination, will receive the recompense of good things if they have worked together with those who are predisposed toward good things, and provide they decide to do so deliberately, and are willing to abandon their vain love of temporary glory so as to do the command of the Lord of glory, and instead of that small temporary honor they will inherit the eternal kingdom.”

So what this is saying is that you have to step away from ego, you have to take your pleasure-seeking ignorant side off the throne of your personality, and allow the indwelling of the Fullness to reside on the throne of your personality. You can turn your vices into virtues whenever you run across them. Awareness is always the first step, and then you put it into action.

Okay, I’ll confess something to you. I have a short temper myself, and I often lose my temper even with strangers on the street. It’s a kind of a bizarre phenomenon. So I’ll be walking along, and I’ll see something that makes me angry. Like, for example, someone smoking a cigarette, and they don’t put it out, and they just flick it thoughtlessly out into the bushes. I walk up to that person, I go, Who do you think you are? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Who’s going to pick that up? What if you burn down the place? Are we supposed to look at your cigarette butts? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I get angry at total strangers. Okay, this doesn’t do any good. I realize this is not a good thing. This is actually a vice and not a virtue. This righteous indignation is the thing that captures the do-gooders of the Second Order Powers into that endless rage, and the war that never ends. We can’t win the battle through anger or through na-na-na-na-na. It doesn’t work. We have to love these people. I’m trying to figure out how I might approach a person who flings a cigarette butt down in the street with love and kindness and compassion, but I can’t figure out yet how to do that, and so I’m just going to stop getting in fights with strangers on the street. And that’s been my mission for about the last two years, is to stop having random encounters of righteous indignation, step back, breathe, give praise to God, and go on. I think at some point I will have the wisdom to know how to engage people that would otherwise enrage me, but at the moment I don’t quite have that. So that was my confession.

Perhaps you are struggling with some other kind of thing. So remember, you have to just drop the thing when you notice it’s bad. Drop it. Stop it. These are called vicious cycles in psychology. Just stop doing it. Just stop it. Don’t worry about the consequences. The consequences are worse when you do engage in that vicious thing. So just stop it. Whatever it takes, just don’t do it. And the more you stop yourself from the bad behavior, the easier it is to embrace the other side of the ledger. You will shift over to the other side once you stop doing that thing on the left side. You cannot grab onto that virtue as long as you embrace the vice. On to verse 133 of Tripartite.

“As for those of the imitation who embrace the darkness and deny the light, even they will obtain direct vision so that they will no longer have to believe only on account of a small word produced by a voice that this is how things are. For the restoration back to that which was is a single restoration, even if some are exalted because of this economy, having been set up as a cause for things that happen, unfolding numerous physical forces, and taking pleasure in them, they, angels as well as humans, will obtain the kingdom, the confirmation, and the salvation. [Verse 136 promises,] these too will be provided with dwelling places where they will dwell eternally after they have renounced the downward attraction of deficiency and the power of the Fullness has pulled them upward on account of the great generosity and the sweetness of the preexistent Aeon.”

And that is the end of the article from 2019 and the original podcast from May of 2021. Over the past several years I have turned my mind from outrage and righteous indignation as best I can, even as our society has plunged into more and more division and outrage. It is easier to see now than ever before the uselessness of operating out of anger and rejection. Anger cannot produce good results because anger is a vice, not a virtue.  Only love can turn hearts around.

Onward and upward! And God bless us all.

If you are finding these Gnostic Insights helpful to your understanding of Gnosticism, please contribute to the cause. This will be helpful to bringing the word to more people. Thank you!

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I think we’ve got a lot of new listeners now and new subscribers. And since you haven’t been with us from the beginning, I’d like to review the Gnostic cosmology.

A basic premise of Gnosticism is that we are all born with gnosis inherent within us. We already have the answers. We already are our perfect Selves. But because of the nature of the never-ending war that we find ourselves in here in this material cosmos, we forget our inherent nature. And we begin to engage in the war through what the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi calls the law of mutual combat. That being, since we are attacked, we attack back. And then we engage in that back and forth enough that we completely forget our mission and our goal and who we are.

So today, I want to run through what I call the illustrated Gnostic cosmology. And I’m putting the illustration into the transcript so that if you are listening to this as an audio podcast, you really would do well to go to GnosticInsights.com or to my Substack location, the Gnostic Reformation, under the name of Cyd Ropp, so that you can see the illustration that we’re talking about.

Now, when you first look at this Gnostic cosmology, it’s very strange looking, and it’s probably incomprehensible. But by the time I talk you through this, you’ll be able to follow the steps. There are 15 steps in this Gnostic cosmology. And once you recognize these stations, then you will literally understand Gnosis. You will remember your Gnosis, and you’ll understand what all of the various versions of Gnosticism have been trying to say.

One reason is that this is a pictorial presentation. It’s not just words, because I’ve noticed when reading the various books of the Nag Hammadi, for example, some of which are Valentinian Gnosticism, some of which are Sethian Gnosticism, some are straight-out Greek philosophy by Plato. They use different words, but the concepts are the same. So what I always attempt to do is to level up to a meta-level, above the words, and envision and then picture it so that you can describe it with the words you prefer. So let’s get started.

The background image of this entire Gnostic cosmology key I picture as pure inky blackness, like the sky with no stars or moons. That is the ground state of consciousness. And that is the Father’s mind. Now the Father is another one of these words where many people would like to disagree with saying Father. They want to say Source, or, for example, as it is called in the Secret Book of John, the One, the Parent, the Invisible Spirit. However, in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, which is the book that I mainly use as a reference, that initial, illimitable consciousness is called the Father.

Now, that’s the ground state. That’s the first principle. Consciousness is not a byproduct of the little gray cells. Consciousness predates everything. Consciousness is part of the existence of God, and it is the very first thing before anything that follows.

Step number two is the emergence of the Son. It is the emergence of consciousness from the illimitable, infinite consciousness of the Father into a singularity, into a monad, as it’s called. It’s like the bucket dipped into the sea. It contains all of the characteristics and quality of the Father, but it’s contained as an individual. The Son doesn’t separate from the Father. It stays plugged into the Father.

The Tripartite Tractate says that as soon as the Son was formed, what are called the Totalities of the All were formed. That’s step number three. And the Totalities of the All are all of the variabilities that make up the Son. So, the Totalities and the Son are coexistent, but it is all of the characteristics broken out and enumerated that form what are called the Totalities of the All.

The Totalities of the All do not recognize themselves as individuals. They are only spokes on the wheel. They have no personal identity. They know that they are part of the Son, and they glorify the Son, and they glorify the Father. So, they are glorifying upstream, as we like to say. And it is through this giving of glory that each of the Totalities comes to self-awareness. Now, instead of one singular unit that is coexistent entirely with the Son, they blossom into self-identities, and they arrange themselves in a hierarchy.

So, step four is the Totalities of the All migrating from a burst of sunshine that’s sitting within the Son into a pyramidal shape, because the pyramid is the essential shape of a hierarchy. There’s more at the bottom than there is at the top. Everything keeps leveling up, following a basic Gnostic rule of the higher the fewer, until you eventually arrive at a capstone at the very top, just like our physical pyramids look.

And this entity, at number five, is called the hierarchy of the Aeons of the Fullness. And in Gnosticism, we usually identify the word aeon with consciousness, with an individual. It’s an entity. It’s not a unit of time. It’s a unit of consciousness. And so the Aeons of the hierarchy of the Fullness of God are infinite in number. There aren’t only eight or 64 or 365. Those may be ones that are named in other books of Gnosticism, but conceptually, you see, they’d have to be innumerable, because they are part of the illimitable consciousness of the Father, via the Son.

And the job of the hierarchies of the Fullness, well, they’ve each got a position, a place, a duty, and a name. And basically what they do is sing songs of glory upstream to the Father and the Son, just like the Totalities did. And in this combination of the Aeons in the Fullness of God, they dream. They dream of Paradise. They dream of the intelligent design of this cosmos that we live in.

And so all of us down here, we’re prefigured in the minds of the Fullness of God. And that Fullness of God is generally what we humans imagine as Heaven or Paradise. Humans in cultures all over the world have a dream of Paradise. And the reason why we all have this exact same dream of Paradise is because that’s where we come from. We are the fruit of the Aeons of the Fullness, and we instantiate their dream of Paradise.

Now, according to the Tripartite Tractate, the object that in my drawings looks like a starburst re-sorted themselves into this hierarchy of the Fullness of God.

The last Aeon that was produced through a combination of all of the Aeons of the Fullness of God, giving glory to the Father and the Son. In the Tripartite Tractate, that Aeon, that final Aeon, the capstone to the pyramid, sitting right up there on top, is called Logos. And Logos means reasoning. It means logic.

The next step in the story is when that final Aeon that’s sitting on top of the Fullness of God wants to re-insert itself into the Father—the original source of consciousness—wants to plug into the Father the way that the Son remains plugged into the Father. It tries to take that position, and it can’t do it. And it is repelled by the Father, and that is the Fall. The Father repelled that Aeon from being able to plug into itself.

I wouldn’t say that Logos was trying to become God. That’s kind of an insulting way to put it. I would say that that final Aeon was simply trying to reunite with the Father. But it couldn’t. It was repelled because no one can come to the illimitable. It’s too powerful. The Tripartite Tractate says they would be annihilated because the Father’s power is too great. It would just burn it up.

And so instead of plugging into the Father, Logos fell. And that, according to Gnosticism, is the Fall. And it was the Fall that created our material cosmos. Now, you could say that that was Sophia that fell and her child Yaldabaoth. I prefer to keep it simple and just to say that it’s Logos that fell.

Logos was a very special Aeon that contained within its one unity, fractal representations of all of the other Aeons of the Fullness. So Logos was perfect and complete, representing the Son of God. However, he was a fractal level down.

Logos crowned the top of the Fullness with fractals of all the other Aeons.

He didn’t have the power, didn’t have the greatness of the original Son in step two. But he had the pattern. He had the blueprint. He thought he was complete and could build Paradise, the Paradise that all of the Aeons dreamed up together in step five. He thought he could do that because he contained the Fullness of God in a smaller fractal form.

But he was mistaken and he crashed out of the ethereal plane, boom, broke apart, and his pleroma lost its hierarchical arrangement. It became random and chaotic. That is step eight. I generally depict that random chaos as quantum foam. It’s just boiling in and out of existence. Nothing can stick. Nothing can stay. Nothing can level up. It’s chaotic. Logos tried his best to bring it all back in order, tried to put his pleroma back together into a proper hierarchy, but it would not cooperate. And he was aghast, it says. He was very upset, very disturbed by the disturbance that had come out of him. He meant to bring perfection and instead he brought chaos.

And he was now separated from the Fullness of God. Well, the Fullnesses prayed to help Logos return, and the best part of Logos, it says in the Tripartite Tractate, step 10, the best part of Logos returned to the Fullness of God, but it abandoned the chaos below.

So what is that chaos? I’ve identified that chaotic disturbance that came out of Logos as not only quantum foam, but the Fallen ego of Logos. You see, all of the Aeons have an ego. They’ve got their perfect One Self that is a fractal copy of the Son, but they’ve also got positions, places, names, duties, which is to say they have an ego. And an ego is just their designation. It’s just their address and their name, rank, and serial number. That’s their ego. It’s not self-centered. It’s just a name.

But when Logos falls and abandons his ego down below, then it is an ego that came into being that is separated from the One Self of the Son. It’s outside of the direct flow of consciousness and life and love of the Father and the Son and the God. So it is the beginning of ego running amok. Ego came to its own realization, woke up, so to speak, found itself in this weird, dark, chaotic space, and he thought he was God because he didn’t remember where he came from. He didn’t realize he was the fallen ego of Logos. He had all of the blueprints for Paradise because they were in the mind of Logos when he fell. And he also had the ambitious overreaching that Logos was doing when he fell.

Step 11 in the diagram shows the chaos and this disordered pleroma of the ego of Logos down here, no longer looking like a pyramid but just random bubbles. But there’s a border around it now because the Father put up a border around the fallen bits in order to contain them, in order to protect the Fullness of God from the disaster that was occurring, we would say, down below.

Logos, now reunited with the Fullness, prays for his fallen ego, prays for this mess that he left behind. Demiurge came to awareness down there at step 11. So the ego of Logos, abandoned down below, becomes what Gnostics call the Demiurge. And the Demiurge, thinking it was God, having all the blueprints for Paradise, thought it could build Paradise now down here inside of this border. And this border, by the way, could be likened to the expanding bubble around our universe.

The Big Bang would have been the splat in step 8 when Logos crashed apart and began emitting these particles. So Fullness and Logos prayed for help to come to what is called now the Deficiency. Our cosmos is known as the Deficiency or the imitation because it’s a knock-off of Paradise.

And what they want is to rescue the Demiurge. They’re not trying to condemn the Demiurge to hell. They’re trying to rescue the Demiurge and bring him back up to the Fullness to reunite with Logos and plug back in with them because that’s where it belongs. So in step 12, we have the fruit of the Aeons of the Fullness being sent down into this material cosmos.

The Demiurge has been working on the material cosmos in step 11. He can’t get it to come to life because he doesn’t contain the consciousness and life of the Fullness and the Father. He’s a flat version, like a mirror image or like a projection on a movie screen. He doesn’t have the true depth of consciousness.

Archons lack consciousness, they are not self-aware the way the Aeons are. They are tightly restrained and very strictly ordered by very strict laws of physics and chemistry and whatnot by the mind of the Demiurge only. They are projections of the Demiurge. They are shadows of the Aeons. They’re like the inversions of the beauty of that Aeonic Golden Pyramid, but they are lacking consciousness, life, and love.

So the Aeons send down what are called the Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the Aeons and the Fullness of God. The Second Order of Powers is all of the life and consciousness and love of the Father flowing down from the Fullness of God down into this fallen cosmos. That is all living creatures. Everything that’s alive from the bacteria and the cells and the organs that make up our bodies and all of the critters and birds and fish, all of the insects and mammals, all living creatures, the grasses and the trees, the moss and the slime molds, everything that’s alive is a fruit of the Fullness of God. Fruits of the Aeons pre-designed in the Fullness of God and sent down here to instantiate life, love, and consciousness into this otherwise dead disaster of a cosmos. And we come down with a mission.

We Second Order Powers were supposed to come down here to remind the Demiurge of the Father above; to remind the Demiurge of Logos, his better half; to remind the Demiurge of love and consciousness and that he is not God and he needs to return home. Come home, Demiurge, come home. We are supposed to be calling to the Demiurge to return home to the Fullness of God.

Well, we got caught in a never-ending war instead with the material world. See, at conception, we are all bonded to the molecular level. So when a creature has the spark of life come into it from the Fullness down here, when it bonds to that material level, that molecule that then begins reproducing, reproducing, reproducing according to the pattern from above that that creature brought into the cosmos with it. We all carry the Fullness of God within every part of our living bodies, every one of our cells, every one of our organs. We are full of the Fullness of God. We have consciousness. It’s self-evident. We love. That is also self-evident.

We operate according to the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to others to help build things that we can’t do on our own. We make families and work together. We make villages and work together. We make small communities and build things that we can all enjoy together.

But we forget our job. We forget about bringing love and remembrance to the Demiurge because of the never-ending war of spirit against material, the never-ending war of right and left, the never-ending war between us and the archons, the never-ending war. It’s a constant battle here between life and death.

And so the Fullnesses realized that that plan wasn’t working. We forgot to do our jobs. They prayed upstream to the Father, to the Son, to the Totalities, and they prayed for true salvation to come now and rescue the Second Order Powers, just like we were supposed to rescue the Demiurge. Now it takes a superpower, the most superpower, to come into our cosmos, rescue all of the Second Order Powers by reminding us of God’s love and what our true mission is of sharing love. We can’t do it on our own. We already proved that we lost the battle in step 13.

So step 14 is sending down the Savior, sending down the most powerful entity of the ethereal plane, that being what is called the Christ. And Christ is the Son of God. Christ is the Fullnesses all praying together. Christ is the Totalities all singing the song together. Christ has the most power of any entity ever, more than enough power to bring remembrance, love, salvation, peace, comfort, joy to all of us down here who have forgotten. That’s the job of the Christ. That’s step 14.

And step 15 is once the Christ succeeds in bringing remembrance to everyone, then we can move into what will be called the Third Economy. We’re in the Second Economy now. That’s the economy or the system of the material world. The First Economy was the Fullness of God, where the First Order of Powers live. The Second Economy is this cosmos that we live in, where the Second Order of Powers live. And the Third Economy is after this material cosmos passes away, dissolves like snow, gets all rolled up and wrapped up, and we all return to the Fullness of God.

The Third Economy is the dream of Paradise the cosmos will instantiate after this Second Economy dissolves at the end of time.

We all return to the new Third Economy ruled by the Third Order of Powers, and that’s the pleroma of Christ. Christ is the Third Order of Powers, and there is an individual Third Order Power for every one of us Second Order Powers.

We can’t do it on our own. We cannot love to the extent needed to demonstrate to the Demiurge love. We get caught in wars. We kill each other. We fight with each other. We quarrel. We quibble. We blow each other up and chop off heads. Bad, very bad. The Christ and the Third Order Powers comes to each of us as an individual, comes to you, comes to me, comes to our neighbors, comes to all of the critters and all of the plants, but I don’t think they’re quite as fallen as we are. I think they’re doing a pretty good job of living their lives according to what is required down here in the Second Economy. But true salvation, true redemption from this world comes by accepting the assistance of the Christ.

Okay, I think we’ll stop there today. That’s the end of this Gnostic Cosmology. Next week, we’ll talk about the yeah, so what? to all of this. What good will that do me? What good will that do the world? Tune back in next week and we’ll talk about it.

Meanwhile, if you have any questions or comments, please don’t be shy. Make some comments. I look forward to reading them. God bless and onward and upward.

15 steps in Gnostic Cosmology

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack.

Last week we started an episode called Gnostic Psychology Slideshow, Part One, and today we’re going to wrap that up. It’s a slideshow that I presented at my class at Southern Oregon University on the Simple Gnostic Gospel, and so I will be describing for you and posting the transcript on the GnosticInsights.com website and also at Substack. In the written transcripts, you’ll be able to see the PowerPoint slides, which really, I think, helps to clear things up, to clear up confusion, by the imagery. If you’re listening to the audio-only version, you might want to go to the websites, one or the other, and look at the slideshow too.

Last week in Gnostic Psychology Part One, we talked about Who am I? Who is a human being? Who are you? And in my way of thinking, we are a combination of units of consciousness; memes and the memes we carry in our meme shroud; karma; and our One true Self, which is a replication of the One consciousness of the Father; the aeonic inheritance we have from our parents in the Fullness; and our body, our material body, which comprises our DNA and our human parents, our inheritance, as well as the units of consciousness of the 37 trillion cells in our body. There’s a therapeutic application for this Gnostic Psychology.

And if you look at my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, or you go to my 20-year-old website and look up https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com you can find this particular explanation in depth.

I think that would be a good bumper sticker or t-shirt. Gnosis you can trust.

Again, if you’re following along with the slideshow, and this will be called Gnostic Psychology Part 2, the values on the left are egoic and they are demiurgic and they are from the deficiency, the imitation. The values on the right are from the true Self, from the Fullness of God, and they are traits of the Father. So, I don’t want to read through this whole list.

It’s a very long list, but for example, a vice would be to be hateful, spiteful. The virtue that’s the flip side is to be loving, charitable. So, if you find yourself hating someone, it’s not virtuous, it’s not righteous, it’s demiurgic.

We are called to love others, and indeed that is our Second Order task. We were sent here to remind the fallen demiurge that there is a Father above, that there is life and love, and that it comes from above. The Demiurge is a fractal of Aeonic ego, being the ego of fallen Logos. We are also fractals, so we want to dwell on the Aeonic Fullness side rather than the fallen demiurgic side.

Another example would be hard-hearted, ruthless on the left, and the virtuous side is to be merciful. One of the vices is to be slothful, lazy. The virtue side is to be useful, to be part of the solution.

The left is illogical, incoherent. It makes no sense because it’s built on lies. The right is logical. The Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything theory of everything that I developed starts with a single premise that consciousness is the ground state of reality, and then everything derives from that first premise. The Gnostic gospel that I teach, or that I share with you, because I don’t have to teach you Gnosis, we’re all born with the Gnosis, so it’s inherent in us. We just need to be reminded because we’ve been caught in a never-ending war.

So, for example, if a person has an eating disorder, and let’s say you eat uncontrollably, you eat far too much, and you eat the wrong things, and you know you should cut back, and you know you should eat better because it’s just not good, because you feel sluggish, and your health is suffering. That is because you’ve allowed your organ system of the digestive tract to rule. It’s an even further down fractal iteration than ego. Your ego wants to lose weight because you want to look good. You want to fit into that new outfit or whatever. You want to be attractive to the opposite sex, but you can’t control your eating. That’s because you have ceded your control to your digestive system. Willpower is difficult because that food is very attractive, and your digestive system is very powerful because you’ve given it so much authority, and it’s become accustomed to ruling you. You have to go a step to the right. You have to get on to the virtue side, and instead of being gluttonous, which is a vice, you want to be temperate.

So, how do you get on the virtuous side? By turning your eyes upward to the Fullness of God, by asking for the Father’s assistance, or asking for the Son’s assistance to overcome this demiurgic slavery that you’ve found yourself in. This works for all vices, for all addictions. Now, if that’s too difficult, this is where the Christ comes in, because the Christ is the Third Order of Powers. So, it’s yet another pyramidal shape, like the Fullness, except it’s the most powerful force in the cosmos. And, if you jump from giving your control to your gluttonous digestive system, or to your Self-centered me-me-me ego, you can turn it directly over to the Third Order of Powers, and ask them to come over and take control. And, that is like a stencil. It’s going to overlay a Third Order Power on top of every one of your units of consciousness, and it’s got all the power to do anything. You borrow the willpower of the Fullness, the willpower of the Christ.

And, that’s who Jesus was. He was our exemplar. He was the first human who ceded all authority to the Third Order Powers, to the Father. He was God incarnate that way. He did not have any vice, and he showed us, yeah, it can be done. Yeah, you might get crucified for it, and everybody’s going to hate you. You’re going to have very few friends. You’re going to look like a total goody two shoes. But, if it’s really the Third Order Powers working through you, it’s not a burden. It’s lifting the burden, because you always know what to do, because the Third Order of power is sitting on the throne of yourself.

That’s just an example of something you could say, and that will bump the negative meme. Oh, there’s not enough. I’m going to lose you. I’m going to lose this. I’m afraid. I’m afraid.

It just bumps it right out of the way, because you’ve displaced that demiurgic meme with a godly meme. They don’t work together, so one of them has got to go, and if you have set your willpower upon the Third Order of Powers, upon the Fullness of God, upon virtue, you don’t have to strain and sweat to get it done. You feel joy. You feel in alignment with the One. You are truly centered. This is what it means to be enlightened.

Therapy may help you to identify which memes need dropping, and may assist in the process. You may not realize the reason you’re so insecure is because you think there’s not enough to go around, so a good therapist can help you identify that, and then you can drop that. There’s not enough to go around. I’m going to be left out. Nobody loves me. I’ll never amount to anything. You can drop those negative memes that you uncover during therapy, and then replace them with positive memes.

And nowadays, since everything’s going so poorly out here in the world, if you spend a lot of time with the media, and with social media, you are absorbing all of that negativity, and all of that hatred, because social media is inherently demiurgic. It’s not alive. It comes from the bottom.

You need to turn your eyes upward, turn off the phone, look upward, and plug into the Father, however you can do that. Some memes are easy to detach, because they don’t really fit in with your bundle of meme strings and cords, so if you stop reading those posts, if you get off of Facebook, well, maybe they will evaporate, because it turned out you were actually a very loving person, and you still love your old friends, even if you disagree with them now. But if you continually feed that negative meme, then you will continually feel horrid, because the demiurgic side of the ledger is designed to make you feel bad, to make you feel enslaved, to create division, despair, fear.

That all comes from not living a godly life. But we don’t force ourselves to live a godly life. We run to it with joy. It’s coming home. It’s remembering. It’s remembering the joy. And suddenly all burdens are light enough to bear. Bad things can happen to you, but then you can trust in God that all things work together for good for those who love God.

So I may have broken my leg and wound up in the hospital for a couple of days, but it turns out I needed to be in that hospital bed, because my roommate in the hospital was a lovely person that needed to hear what I had to say, and vice versa. And we made a new friend. This is how a bad thing can turn into a good thing, by having a godly attitude and trusting that God knows best. God does know better than you. You don’t have enough data to run your life and avoid all of the pitfalls.

So you’re starting to get the idea this whole Gnostic psychology has to do with dropping unwanted memes and turning to the virtuous side. That’s what it boils down to.

There’s only peace and joy and happiness on the side of virtue when you’re sincere. We’re not talking about hypocrisy. We’re not talking about forcing the issue. We’re not talking about whipping yourself with a flagellant whip to make yourself holy. That is not God’s will. God is entirely love, entirely acceptance, entirely forgiving, entirely compassionate, entirely charitable.

And if you think you’re living a righteous life, yet you’re feeling anger, hatred, division, well then you’re not living a righteous life. Those are clues that you’re in the wrong set of memes, you see? So you want to get rid of those and turn your eyes upward. And you can either turn your eyes directly to Jesus as Christian true believers do, and I mean true believers, not hypocrites or pew warmers, or you can go this Gnostic route and turn your mind up to the Fullness of God, the Son, the Father, and the disincarnate Christ who pre-existed Jesus. You can take your choice, but it all is going to level you up to the Father. If you’re on the path, the glory beam, then you wind up with the Father.

On a practical level, therapies such as the Emotional Freedom Technique can help with that. You can go to an EFT trainer, or you can look up EFT on YouTube and learn how to do the EFT technique. Then you just do this tapping. It takes about a minute, and it literally taps those unwanted memes right off of your meme shroud. I use it now and then, and it works. If you’ve got a thought you can’t dislodge, you do the EFT while thinking of the thought. You do the EFT a couple, maybe three times, and boom, it’s gone.

Serenity is achieved as the memes are discarded. Of course, the whole point of traditional meditation is to clear your mind. What are you doing when you do that? You are quieting the memes. You’re turning them off so they can’t affect you and get in the way of you coming into contact with your true Self or with the Father.

It’s important to realize that at any moment in time, you can choose to lay down an unwanted meme. You have that power. It is in your control. If you notice yourself carrying a meme around again that you thought you’d gotten rid of, but here you are again, well then stop. Lay it down again. You can lay it down as many times as it takes, but if you continue to do that meme, if you continue to activate that meme, think about it, or carry out this unwanted behavior, you’re not going to be able to get rid of it because activation causes it to stick to your meme bundle. That’s why you have to continue to lay it down, and you have to stop thinking about it. It doesn’t help to think about it.

Regret, regret that never goes away, is also demiurgic because it makes you feel guilty. It wants you to feel like you have no willpower, like you can’t help yourself, and that’s a lie. It’s all lies. You can help yourself. You can be free in a moment, and from personal experience, I can tell you that that’s what the born again experience is. It’s inviting the Third Order of Powers to come into you and to take over, and the Christian prayer to Jesus, Jesus I’m a sinner, I repent, I ask you to come into my life, is a version of what I’m saying, and you can do that.

I’m not against you asking Jesus to be your personal emissary. Jesus is my man. I’ve always been with Jesus, and I still am. Nothing wrong with Jesus.

And if you don’t want to believe in the Christ, if you think that’s just hooey, you don’t need the Christ, well you’re going to have a hard reckoning when you pass away because we have to be pure to get to heaven. We have to be a hundred percent pure because heaven’s all good, all good. Sooner or later, everyone repents, but sooner or later everyone does repent, whether it’s in this lifetime or in the in-between place. Or you will keep coming back and getting reincarnated over and over again because you don’t want to let go of those memes that you’re holding on to. In order to stick the landing, as I say, which is a gymnastic term—you know how when a gymnast jumps off of that vault and then they land, that’s called sticking the landing. If they fumble the landing or they fall over, they didn’t stick the landing. So I think of getting to heaven and being able to stick the landing. That only happens if you repent and accept that you come from above and you want to return to above, and you don’t want to keep doing these activities that you love so much down here on the earth, or else you’re just going to keep getting pulled back onto the earth.

In the case of PTSD, some sort of therapy is usually required to detach that meme from the person, unless of course you want to go full throttle and have a born-again experience, then it can all be gone in an instant. But if you don’t actively strive to detach that meme, it’s possible to be victimized by PTSD for the entirety of your life, and this causes much suffering, as Buddha would say, much needless suffering.

And if you want to hear more about that, if you want to know more, please leave a comment below, and I’ll review that whole idea of Bill’s hypnotic method and give you some case histories.

God bless us all, and onward and upward.

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Welcome to Gnostic Insights. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp and I’m your host. Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack.

And welcome to my new listeners and readers. So glad to have you aboard. And of course, I’m always very grateful for those of you who have been with this series since the beginning.

This week was my final lecture at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University on the Gnostic Gospel and the topic was Gnostic Psychology. So I’m going to share with you that final slideshow today because it’s easier than coming up with a brand new episode when I’m having to work on these lectures.

Of course, this Gnostic material is complicated and yet it’s simple. Once you get it, everything falls into place, but I can understand that it’s difficult to grasp it initially. I’m happy to share with you that my students that have been with me for nine weeks now, they’ve got it. They finally got it. It’s all fallen into place. So it happens.

So let’s look at the slideshow from this week’s lecture on Gnostic Psychology. And if you’re listening to this as an audio only podcast, I suggest you go either to Substack, to the Gnostic Reformation, or to my home base website, GnosticInsights.com, and visualize the slideshow because it’s pretty and the diagrams really help the audio information make sense.

When we talk about Gnostic Psychology, I’m going to answer the question of who we are, and we’re going to cover six topics. We’re going to talk about units of consciousness, memes, karma, Self, Aeonic inheritance, and then how your body even gets into the picture when we’re talking about the psychology.

All living things bring consciousness and love into the Fallen world at conception.

Let’s start with units of consciousness. This concept comes out of my original theory of everything called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, but it’s very useful and it works in the Gnostic setting as well.

And that would be an infinite number, because the Son reflects the infinity of the Father. The Totalities of the ALL have no self-identity. They still identify with the Son. They’re parts of the Son. But during the giving of glory and the singing upstream to the Father and the Son, the Totalities recognized their individuality and immediately sorted themselves into the hierarchy of the fullness of God. And I would say that that differentiation of the Aeons into self-identity was the formation of their egos.

The next concept is distributed fractal consciousness. Now we’ve talked a lot about fractals here at Gnostic Insights, and if you don’t know what a fractal is, please go to GnosticInsights.com and look up the episodes about fractals, and you’ll learn about it. Because consciousness is fractally distributed.

Another factor in our psychology is memes.

My illustration of that is to show that torus, that donut shape, with all these strings lying on the outside of it. Just tons of strings stuck to the outside of your torus. That’s not an official gnostic concept. That’s out of my Simple Explanation and I’ll talk a little more about the torus later.

These memes are units of thought. They’re vibratory things and each one carries a thought. The memes dwell, I think, in the transpersonal unconscious or the akashic record. They are immaterial. They’re thought forms.

Memes and karma go together.

Now, comparing Freud and Jung’s theories to this Gnostic psychology:

In terms of fractals, the body’s units of consciousness are smaller fractal iterations of the Fullness of God than my governing unit of consciousness.

The Self is connected to the Fullness of God at all times, though we often ignore it. The Ego sits on the outside because it is in contact with others and the material world.

Okay, we’re going to stop there for today. There are a few more slides in this slide show, but this is a good place to stop. Perhaps I’ll pick them up next week and we’ll talk more about Gnostic psychology and then how it is applied therapeutically. Until then, God bless us all and onward and upward!

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Today I’m going to share with you the PowerPoint lecture that I gave yesterday at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University, and the topic is Christ and the Third Order of Powers. We began with a review using the Gnostic Cosmology Chart, and this is just a very… this is too difficult of a chart to describe to you.

You’ll have to see it, so I recommend that you go to GnosticInsights.com and find this episode, or the Gnostic Reformation. This is the current episode here on Substack, but I begin every class with a full review of what we have done before using the Gnostic Cosmology Chart that I have designed, and I was very heartened to see that yesterday the class was able to name all of the parts. I think that is extraordinary, and so good for you, class! Now after the chart, here we begin the lecture.

Quoting from the Tripartite Tractate,

The thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him was called Aeon and Place of all those whom he had brought forth in accord with the ordinance, and it is also called Synagogue of Salvation because he healed himself from the dispersal, which is the multifarious thought, and returned to the single thought.

Now what does that mean? “The thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability.” That is Logos after the Fall, and now he has returned back up to the Fullness of God, pulled up there by the prayers of the Fullnesses, his brothers.

He has returned to his stability. He’s sitting at the top of the pile again like he used to be before he fell. Now his shadow remains below, his shadow being the Demiurge and all of those broken imitations of his original Pleroma.

You know the Logos is a fractal of the entire Fullness of God formed by when the Fullnesses gave glory to God all together in unison, and what they produced out of that unity was the Logos, and he contains a fractal representation of every one of the Aeons within him. However, it is a fractal level down, and it was that Logos that fell, and so the shadows of the fractals of Logos are what remain behind and become our material universe.

Now back to this quote, “the thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him.”

Those who had come into being because of him is all of us second-order powers, not the shadows, because they are not really beings. They do not really exist, but we second-order powers are the fruit of Logos and the Fullness together praying for help to come into the deficiency to rescue his abandoned ego that we called the Demiurge. So this sentence is saying that the thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him, that’s us, “was called Aeon and Place of all those whom he had brought forth in accord with the ordinance.”

You see, we second-order powers, which is every living thing in the cosmos, we were brought forward in accord with the ordinance, which I believe to be something along the lines of the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to the other Fullnesses, and they held hands and prayed together, and we were brought forth as fruit. So that was the ordinance. And it says that Logos is called the Synagogue of Salvation because he healed himself from the dispersal, and that dispersal was after the Fall when his Pleroma rolled out and became the material universe, which he abandoned down here.

And it says that “the dispersal was the multifarious thought, and he returned to the single thought.” So that multifarious thought, which means a whole lot of different thoughts, multifarious, that’s all of those independent little tiny egos that are the shadows of the ego of Logos that fell, the shadows of the Demiurge, the parts of the deficiency, those are the multifarious thoughts. They don’t come from the single good thought of the Father, but they come from an infinite number of egoic, selfish thoughts. It says that he healed himself from that dispersal, and that’s when he abandoned it down below and went back up to the Fullness, and he returned to the single thought.

The single thought is the good thought of the Father, the good thought of the Son. God is one giant good thought, the God Above All Gods. The true Self, with a capital S, that we all carry inside of all of our living parts, is the single thought of the Father. And we’re born with that. That’s all that we need to remember. That’s all that we forget. But when we’re in ego, we’re part of the multifarious thought. We’re thinking anything but the Father.

There is one of the second order powers for every one of the likenesses of the Fall. Whereas the likenesses are shadows of the Aeons, we second order powers are the true fractal fruit of Logos, and we bring life, consciousness, and the Holy Spirit of love into this fallen cosmos.

Because we second order representations are fitted into the boundary that forms our cosmic ecology. We find ourselves bound in a relationship to the material of the deficiency. Since we are true fractal representations of the pleroma of Logos, we are a perfect match for every likeness of the shadow pleroma of Logos. We have a one-to-one relationship with the matter that forms our earthly bodies. And the illustrations on the slide depict the second order powers as green cells in a petri dish. So it’s a round space full of green cells, and I use that to represent all of us living second order powers.

And then also on this slide is my picture of the shadows of the deficiency, and they’re little blue balls, very dark. It’s an almost black picture, very dark because they’re shadows. And it’s a circular space, the same size as the circular space of second order powers there on the left, the greens. They all have a boundary around them. That is the boundary that the Father threw up around the deficiency to keep it contained and to keep it in relationship to each other. Because when they fell, the shadows, the deficiency is not hierarchical. It’s everything for itself. It’s all egoic. And so in order for them to even have a semblance of working together, they have to be bound together in a boundary. So that’s what the boundary is.

And then the third picture on this slide is the second order powers and the shadows of the deficiency together, smushed into one ecology, which happens to us when we are born into this material world. We are bonded temporarily to the shadows of the deficiency. And so it’s kind of a yin-yang symbol. I’ve got the greens rising and the shadows falling in a yin-yang circle. And that represents the never-ending war between material and ethereal, between virtue and vice, between life and death, between knowledge and ignorance.

The stumbling, which happened to the Aeons of the Father of the Totalities who did not suffer, was brought to them as if it were their own in a careful and non-malicious and immensely sweet way. It was brought to the Totalities so they may be instructed about the defect by the single one, from whom alone they all receive strength to eliminate the defects.

So the stumbling is the Fall of the Aeon logos. The Aeons of the Fullness were made aware of the situation in a careful, non-malicious, and immensely sweet way. Don’t you love those words? Which implies that there was no condemnation or wrath involved. You see, the God Above All Gods is not a wrathful God, the way Jehovah, for example, is in the Old Testament. The God Above All Gods does not torture people and send them to hell for eternity. The God Above All Gods is nothing but love. It’s all good. It’s all love.

And so the knowledge of the Fall was brought to the Fullnesses. The Fullnesses, the Totalities, were informed of the Fall in this non-malicious and immensely non-judgmental sweet way. The passage says “the Aeons were made aware of the deficiency by the single one,” which is the Son, “who also gave them the strength needed to eliminate the defects.”

All power comes from above. None of us can approach the Father. The Father is too great. The power is too great. We’d be fried in a second. So the Son is our intermediary. The Son is the only direct emanation from the Father, and he remains plugged into the Father. He’s swimming in that great sea. He is the bucket dipped into the sea of the Father. The Father is illimitable, but the Son is a monad, a singularity that encompasses all of the characteristics of the Father in one infinitely large space, but it’s still a contained space.

And then from out of the Son came the Totalities of the All. And so I’ve got that picture directly underneath the Son. And I always picture the Son as a circular cloud of fog emerging out of the great unknown of the Father. And then as soon as it emerged, the Son immediately differentiated into all of its variabilities, into all of its component pieces. They all acted and thought as one. They were like spokes on a singular wheel. They had no self-identity, but they were the variabilities of the Son. The Son wears the All like a cloak, and the Totalities of the All wear the Son as a cloak. So they’re co-existent, you see?

And then it was the Totalities of the All that became self-aware by giving glory to the Father and the Son. And once they became self-aware, they migrated into this hierarchical shape, this pyramid that we call the Fullness of God. And now at that point, they’re known as Aeons, because they each have a self-identity. They’ve got a position, a place, a duty, a name, and they’re stacked in this gigantic pyramidal shape. And then the Logos is the topper. He’s the crown on top.

The one who ran on high, [Logos], became for the one who was defective, an intercessor with the emanation of the Aeons which had come into being, [that’s us, the second order], in accord with the things which exist.

And the things which exist are the Totalities and the Aeons. The ethereal plane is considered all that exists. The Totalities of the All, the Aeons of the Fullness, the Father and the Son are the true things which exist.

The shadows of the deficiency do not really exist. And at the end of time, they’re just simply going to evaporate. When the Demiurge returns home to the Fullness, there will be no more shadows.

So “the one who ran on high became for the one who was defective, an intercessor.” You may wonder who exactly is “the one who was defective.” Well, this phrase can refer to both the Demiurge who fell and to us second order powers. We second order powers who have forgotten our true origin by engaging in the never-ending war with the deficiency have also become defective, like the Demiurge.

Likewise, the defective one also refers to the Fallen ego of Logos, abandoned down below, whom we call the Demiurge, the agent of the Fall. By this time, in the Gnostic cosmogony, Logos would be praying for the redemption of both his fallen ego and the second order powers, fruited from his pleroma, both struggling in this material world. Indeed, the redemption of each of the second order powers will prove to be a fractal version of the redemption of the Demiurge. As above, so below. As below, so above.

And now we’ve reached the point in the Gnostic cosmogony and ethereal history where the third order of powers is created. The third order of powers are the pleroma of the Christ that comes from the ethereal plane to redeem us, and along with us, the fallen thought of the Demiurge. There is a third order power for every one of us second order powers.

And on this slide, I have illustrated the concept.

The way I illustrate the Christ is a circular shape, again, like the Son, because the Son and the Christ, their names kind of get swapped there in Christianity so that the Son and the Christ are considered to be the same. Well, they’re very similar, but we see here that the Christ is a third order of power. The Christ is the same shape and size as the Son in my circular drawing, and it’s got that starburst of the Totalities of the All filling it and filling it with light. So it’s a lighted sphere as opposed to the Son that I illustrate as a gray fogginess. This is a lighted starburst that’s really quite beautiful.

And then right next to that, I’ve got the image of the second order powers, us and all living creatures as that green petri dish of cells. And then next to that, I’ve got the shadows of the deficiency. But now I have created a brand new illustration just for this PowerPoint slide. And it is taking the Christ starburst type of image, and I have overlaid it on top of the second order powers in a transparency kind of way. So you can see the Christ sitting on top of and infusing the second order powers with the third order of powers.

There’s a third order power for every one of the second order powers. It’s a one-to-one relationship. And it has to be, because the Christ redeems every second order power, redeems every part of us second order powers.

In the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I used to refer to the Christ as the correcting algorithm. That’s the secular way of speaking of the Christ. The Christ brings perfection and correction to our broken code and our broken DNA strands. It’s all perfect again, as it was originally designed.

When he prayed to them, they consented joyously and willingly, since they were in agreement and with harmonious consent to aid the defective one. They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one.

The All and the Hierarchy of the Aeons both constitute the pleroma of the Son who has become the Father. And in the Tripartite Tractate, you know, you have the originating Father, which is the God Above All Gods, but when the Son emerges as the Son, but then he differentiates into the Totalities and the Aeons of the Fullness, he is called the Father of the Aeons and the Father of the Totalities. So the Son is sometimes referred to as the Father and sometimes referred to as the Son and that can be confusing. So the All and the hierarchy of the Aeons both constitute the pleroma of the Son who has become the Father. The Aeons stepped up “joyously and willingly” with the thought of being helpful to the deficient ones by bringing awareness of the Father’s glory and love.

We know that the originating source of consciousness is the illimitable Father, the God Above All Gods. The originating Father is beyond comprehension, even for the Aeons. The only entity capable of grasping the illimitable God Above All Gods is the Son of the Father, who contains within himself all of the traits of the Father. This is the Son who has a countenance, a face, because the Father wants to be known to his emanations through the Son. This is how we know that when these passages speak of the Father, they are actually referring to the Son who has become a Father to his emanations, because the Aeons are able to behold the countenance of their Father.

By now we realize that when Aeons give glory together, they produce new emanations. This is how Aeons make new fruit. The last time this happened, all of the Aeons had emanated Logos as an image of their totality. Now they gathered together and all of them, including Logos, gave glory to the Pleroma of their Father with harmonious consent while concurrently asking the Father to help them bring aid to the defective one. The difference between this act of fruiting and the one that originally brought forth the Aeon named Logos was that Logos was fruited by the individual Fullnesses giving glory to the Father together. This time, the fruiting was the Fullnesses and the All giving glory alongside Logos while praying with specific intent for salvation to come to the deficiency.

Then from the harmony in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father of whom the Aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus it was willingly and gladly that they brought forth the fruit.

The Gnostic gospel calls this new fruit the Christ. The Pleroma of the Christ is the third order of powers endowed with more capabilities than the first and second orders because the Christ embodies the entirety of the All and the particularity of the consciousness of each of the individual Aeons of the Fullness, along with the full power of the Holy Spirit and the Son’s entire knowledge and remembrance of the ethereal plane. The first order of powers is the Aeons of the Fullness of God, that hierarchy. We are the second order of powers. This third order of powers is fully equipped to bring remembrance and redemption to the second order powers living in this fallen world and to the Demiurge.

Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, which was written previously, but also they generated their own. For the Aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony. They came forth in a multifaceted form in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the one who gave it to him.

So you see, the third order powers bear the countenance of each and every one of us because we are the ones who are praying for help. And they also bear the countenance or the face of all of the Aeons that comprise the third order of powers. So we recognize that help is coming to us because it’s got our face on it. It’s a personal answer to prayer.

The emanation of the Christ brings all of the knowledge, power, and glory of the God Above All Gods through its Son and the Totalities into creation. The Christ is now in the process of bringing this gnosis to all second order powers. There is a third order power for each and every second order power, and a second order power for each and every shadow of the Fall.

All we need to do is allow the third order powers to take up residence within our individuated pleromas. In this manner, the gnosis and love of the Christ will displace the shadows and bring redemption to us and through us. This is the true mission of Christianity.

And on this slide I’ve got an illustration of the Son, the Totalities of the All, the hierarchy of the Fullness of the Aeons, the Christ, and then lastly that new image of the Christ overlaying upon the second order powers. And then the lecture moved into what does this have to do with Jesus the anointed, and we’ll cover that next week because we’re at the end of our time for today.

So what is all this talk of Christ, the Christ, which Christians don’t like Christ being called the Christ, you know. They believe that that differentiates us who believe in the Christ from those who believe in Christ, that we are worshipping a different God because we call it the Christ. I disagree with that. I think this is the nature of Christ. We’re simply describing it. And next week we’ll talk about Jesus the anointed and what Jesus has to do with the Christ.

God bless us all, and onward and upward.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack, and I’d like to welcome our new readers and listeners.

What is the Antichrist? By definition, of course, the Antichrist would be the opposite of the Christ. So, before we understand the Antichrist, it would be helpful to understand what we can about the Christ.

Christ, according to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, is composed of the Aeons of the Fullness, both in their aggregated entirety known as the Pleroma of the Fullness of God, or the hierarchy of the Fullness of God, along with their personal individual forms, which are the Aeons, the infinite infinity of variations of the Son that are called the Fullnesses or the Aeons or the Totalities. So the Christ is powered by the full force of the Holy Spirit, the Son, and the Fullness of God. The Christ has all the mojo of the ethereal plane.

In order to restore memory, reason, and redemption to the second-order powers, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one of them individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for a helper to bring peace to the deficiency and forgiveness to Logos. Out of their focused prayer, a unique fruit emerged, one that contained all of the capabilities and powers of the Fullness along with all of the love and eternal qualities of the Father, and that is what we call Christ or the Christ. So here’s how the Tripartite Tractate describes the Christ.

“They gathered together asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above from the Father for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one.”

And the defective one, in this quote, has to do with the Demiurge that arose from the Aeon known as Logos.

“Then from the harmony and a joyous willingness which came into being, they brought forth the fruit which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Fullnesses, revealing the countenance of the Father of whom the Aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus it was willingly and gladly that they brought forth the fruit. And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which was his beloved Son.

“But the Son in whom the Fullnesses are pleased put himself on them as a garment through which he gave perfection to the defective one and gave confirmation to those who are perfect, the one who is properly called Savior and the Redeemer and the Well-pleasing One and the Beloved and the One to Whom Prayers have been Offered and the Christ and the Light of those Appointed in Accordance with the Ones from Whom He was brought Forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given him. Yet what other name may be applied to him except the Son, as we previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father whom he wanted them to know.”

This paragraph describes the fruit of the Aeons called the Christ, that he possesses all of the traits, that is the names of the positions and all of their characteristics, all of the virtues of all of the Aeons of the God Above All Gods, and all of that essentially adds up to the original Son of the Father that came directly from the Father. So the Son and Christ aren’t exactly the same because the Christ was created later than the Son. However, the Son and the Christ share the same characteristics, so by this time it is the Son.

That’s kind of confusing, but they are different entities because they were created in different ways. The Son is directly emanated from the Father itself, from the original consciousness. The Son is the monad version of the otherwise illimitable Father.

But the Christ is the Fullness of God, both as the Fullness itself and the individual Aeons that had differentiated out of the Son, all rolled up together, with the blessing of the Father. So it’s a slightly different character, yet they do have all the characteristics. So I can see why the Tripartite Tractate finally rolls it up into saying, you might as well say, it’s the Son.

And this is interesting about the Christ.

“Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, but they also generated their own. For the Aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony.”

And by the way, we’re talking about the Fullness of God. We’re talking about the hierarchy of the Fullness of God and all the Aeons, the infinite number of Aeons that dwell in the Fullness of God. And so when the Christ was formed, he came forth not simply as Jesus Christ with the face of Jesus. He came with the face of every single Aeon of the Fullness of God. So he’s a composite individual, whereas the Son is actually a singularity, at least in the beginning, before he differentiates into the Fullness. But the Christ stays a multiplicity rolled up into one. All is one. That’s the difference between the Son and the Christ. The Son is One and stays One and then differentiates later. But the Christ comes in as all of the differentiations, plus the Son, plus the blessing of the Father.

The Aeons of the Fullness are known as the First Order of Powers. We living creatures are the Second Order of Powers. The Army of the Christ is the Third Order of Powers. Because of the fractal nature of all things, “as above, so below,” there is not only a Third Order Power for every First Order Power—the Aeons that comprise the Fullness of God—there is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power. These Third Order Powers overlay us Second Order of Powers when we repent and are redeemed. Redemption is the maneuver that installs the Third Order of Powers within our souls, bringing the remembrance of the Father, love, and error correction to us living creatures.

So what is the Antichrist then? The Antichrist is the shadow of Christ. The pleroma of the Antichrist mirrors the Third Order pleroma of Christ.

Christ and Antichrist

The Antichrist is not alive. We know that because it arises from the Fall and therefore it is not infused with the light and life of the Pleroma, the Father, and the Son. Nor is it Aeonic, as it is not considered a fruit of the Pleroma. So it cannot express Aeonic traits, such as the various facets of love known as virtues, nor operate through the cooperative nature we call the Simple Golden Rule.

There are many episodes devoted to the virtues and to the Simple Golden Rule. So if you go to GnosticInsights.com and do a search in there, well, just read through all the titles of the assembled podcasts that are all living there. See, in your podcast host, you’ve only got the latest. But if you go to the homepage, Gnostic Insights, they’re all there. So you can go back to the beginning of the podcast and catch up with us that way.

The Antichrist arises after the Fall, and so it does not recognize the hierarchical structure built upon the harmony of the Fullness. In place of that harmony, the Antichrist operates through the application of power, and its only goal is power. The Antichrist does not know the hierarchy of the Fullness, nor does it come from their assigned roles and places. Lacking the Pleroma’s cooperative design, the Antichrist exists in a state of perpetual disturbance driven by self-centered ambition.

Now, this is all the same as the description of the Demiurge at this point, because the Antichrist is like his head henchman. See, he’s the Antichrist. He’s the inverse of the Christ. So if the Christ is the savior of all of us second-order powers because we’ve forgotten the goal and we’ve been estranged from the love of God, the Christ brings back the correction, the correcting algorithm, I like to say, to our original programming.

But the Antichrist then would be bringing the Demiurge’s anti-life, anti-consciousness, anti-free will, anti-virtue programming of the Demiurge. The Antichrist and the imitations of the Fullness that exist as a result of the Fall, that would be the imitations and the deficiencies, the archons, are only interested in,

“exalting themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he is a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows.” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 79).

So these phantoms all represent values contrary to the originals of the Fullness. They’re the inverse of the virtues. Those of the imitation give rise to,

“fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, and other such disobedient types driven by the will to dominate.”  (Tripartite Tractate, verse 80)

The Antichrist is therefore some sort of ungodly expression of the material universe. Again, by definition, its goal would be to block the mission of the Christ, placing itself as the rightful alternative to the redemption and salvation of the Christ.

Now we know the mission of the Christ is to restore the fallen Logos, who is now the Demiurge, by reminding the fallen Aeon and those under its control, (which would be the archons), of the gnosis of the originating Father and the Pleroma of the hierarchy. So the Antichrist, as the inverse of Christ’s mission, would encourage us to forget about the Father above and the Holy Spirit that infuses life. We would also be encouraged to forget that we are second-order powers sent from the Pleroma above to do battle against the Fall.

And the way the second-order powers were designed to do battle against the Fall isn’t by anger or violence. It’s by love. The only way you can disarm hatred, rage, violence, fear, is with love. You can’t reason it there. You can’t bully it there. You can’t make laws to force it to be there. The only way you can do it is to love them. And when they see your love, they will be reminded of the Father. We are the emissaries of love, and that is the armament by which we are supposed to do battle.

It’s our Aeonic duty to stand against vice in favor of virtue. So whenever you allow temptation to take you down a road of vice rather than a virtuous path, you are enabling the Antichrist. You are enabling the archons in the Demiurge. You’re making them stronger. You become part of the problem. That’s why it’s important to be virtuous and to be loving, charitable, forgiving. That’s the only way we can win the hearts of those who have fallen.

The Antichrist would encourage us to operate according to our ego’s desire to place ourselves at the center of the universe rather than following the will of the Father. And whereas the Christ contains and mirrors every aspect of the Father and the Son, the Antichrist mirrors every aspect of the Demiurge created from the Fall away from the Pleroma. Therefore, the Antichrist is an imitation and an inversion of the original Fullness of the Aeons broken out of the hierarchy of cooperation and infused with isolated striving for power and domination rather than the glory of unity and a joyful willingness to help others. The Antichrist serves the needs of the Demiurge rather than the will of the Father. In the name of peace, it brings war. Instead of prosperity, it brings dependency. Instead of free will, it mandates conformity.

Now, historically, many have nominated the Catholic Pope as the Antichrist as he appears to displace Christ as God’s messenger and Redeemer. The big one that’s making the rounds now, of course, is many people think that President Trump is the Antichrist. Elon Musk could be the Antichrist because all of the artificial intelligence that he’s leaning towards and the brain implants and the global communication served by one singular source. George Soros, that’s another good nominee, in my opinion. So could Bill Gates also be considered a nominee for the Antichrist, because the Antichrist always comes as a do-gooder, and he wins the hearts of people by doing tremendously good deeds and big works, big gigantic works that are almost unhuman, and they would be if he’s actually the Antichrist.

But the gnostic interpretation would be that none of these humans can actually be the Antichrist because humans are Second Order Powers and the Antichrist is a shadow figure—the shadow of Christ. The Antichrist is a demiurgic power, not a human. Sure, someone could favor the Antichrist and invite its powers to rule them, but the human is not the Antichrist.

In 1951, a very popular figure in religion, Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen, said,

“The Antichrist will not be so called, otherwise he would have no followers. He will come disguised as the great humanitarian. He will talk peace, prosperity, and plenty, not as a means to lead us to God, but as ends in themselves. He will tempt Christians with the same three temptations with which he tempted Christ. He will have one great secret which he will tell to no one. He will not believe in God, because his religion will be brotherhood without the fatherhood of God. He will deceive even the elect. He will set up a counter church. It will have all the notes and characteristics of the church, but in reverse, and emptied of its divine content. It will be a mystical body of the Antichrist that will, in all externals, resemble the mystical body of the Christ.”

And that was from Sheen’s book, Communism and the Conscience of the West.  The three temptations of Christ referred to by Sheen are, one, seeking our own satisfaction rather than God’s will. Two, manipulating God’s will in order to achieve personal gain, power, and glory. And three, to ultimately believe we deserve to be Gods.

Now, while I agree that powerful humans reflect the spirit of the Antichrist, I don’t think that the Antichrist will be found in a singular human being, but rather as a dark spirit arising from the Fall. I’m inclined to nominate the Demiurge itself as the father of the Antichrist. It seems to me, likely, then, that the Antichrist is a fractal vibration that reinforces the Antichrist mission across all times, places, and people. As the Demiurge is the maker of heaven and earth, it is certainly within its power to flood our cosmos with ever-increasing delusions designed to lull us into the three temptations of Christ in the most pleasant possible way.

This age that we live in is rife with narcissism. Narcissism is the self-centered, ego-driven belief that puts our desires ahead of others’ needs and desires. The narcissist does not reach out to others with aid and information for the betterment of all. The narcissist only pursues their own agenda. That this is a narcissistic age should take no convincing to any of you out there, right? We can all see it. Selfies, exercise machines that mirror ourselves as we work out, the often-repeated phrase, you deserve this, used to sell us everything from juicy hamburgers to universal government programs, all speak to our ego’s need for comfort and power at all cost.

Indeed, it would seem that our narcissistic egos, when given their full, unbridled reign, blossom into the spirit of the Antichrist. So there is no singular Antichrist human, but as many Antichrist as there are fully blossomed egos. The Antichrist is to be found within the often-repeated mantra that we can take care of each other and build a better tomorrow without God. That more and more powerful governmental and corporate entities will satisfy our needs and give us that paradise on earth that will dispel hunger, climate change, poverty, and inequality, for the betterment of all. That we can live forever through technological manipulation. That we deserve everything we desire—kinkier sex, fancier food, stronger drugs, more stuff dropped on our porches by Amazon. That these are the things that will make us happy, that this will bring us fulfillment. No, that is exactly the spirit of the Antichrist.

I went to the website called Christianity.com, and I’m looking at their article on the Antichrist, and they have several points that describe the Antichrist. I’ll hit them real fast here.

In 2 Thessalonians, Paul describes the Antichrist this way,

“He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.”

Now putting himself in the temple doesn’t have to be literal. The temple represents the Ten Commandments. It represents the Ark of the Covenant. It represents orthodoxy and prayer. And so putting himself in the temple is like saying that the Antichrist is establishing himself in the place of God’s law.

In the book of Revelation, the Antichrist is referred to as the beast. That’s Revelation chapter 13. The beast emerges from the sea, symbolizing chaos and evil, and is given power by the dragon representing Satan. The beast’s reign is marked by blasphemy against God, persecution of the saints, and a relentless quest for global domination.

The prophet Daniel provided a glimpse into the nature of Antichrist in Daniel, chapter 7, describing him as a boastful king. This king speaks against the Most High, oppresses the holy people, and seeks to change set times and laws. Daniel’s vision emphasizes the arrogance and audacity of the Antichrist, highlighting his efforts to undermine God’s order and authority.

Okay, this must be where they’re getting the Trump accusation from. But the odd thing is that the people in general that are accusing Trump of being the Antichrist, well, they’re not all that worried about undermining God’s order and God’s authority. They want to set up a unitary control system, so they’re already in the pocket of the Demiurge, for the most part. Daniel 7 verse 8 says the Antichrist is portrayed as a little horn with a mouth that speaks boastfully. This imagery signifies his initial insignificance, but eventual rise to power.

Daniel 7 verse 25 says he will speak against the Most High and oppress his holy people, and try to change the set times and the laws. The holy people will be delivered into his hands for a time. I just have to laugh at people who are saying that Trump is the Antichrist, because that would put them to be the holy people. And obviously, they think of themselves as the holy people. It’s a holy crusade. The left versus right, it’s a holy crusade. But if you’ve been with us for a while, you realize that these holy crusades are a yin-yang situation. They’re perfectly balanced. It’s the never-ending war. Neither side can claim righteousness, because they have both entered into the war, and that never-ending war is a game that the Demiurge plays.

The Antichrist will be powerful and perform miracles. These miraculous acts are meant to authenticate his false claims and persuade many to follow him. Okay, well, here’s where the Elon Musk type of accusation could be made, because Musk does incredible things, and he’s changing technology from retro-engineering captured spaceships, or wherever the heck he’s getting his ideas from. In 1 Kings 18:38, it says that by replicating the miracles performed by the prophet Elijah in the Old Testament, the Antichrist seeks to present himself as a powerful prophet or a divine figure. In Revelation 13:3, the beast receives a fatal wound, but is miraculously healed, astounding the world and leading people to worship him.

And the Antichrist performs other miraculous signs. 2 Thessalonians 2:9 says that all sorts of “displays of power through signs and wonders” suggest a variety of miracles, not specified in detail, but intended to awe and deceive the masses. Okay, and speaking of awing and deceiving the masses, have you seen those new 3D holographic projections that don’t require any screen to be projected on now? I saw gigantic whales swimming through the sky. That’s a weird thing to see. So we have that technology right now in the form of AI and holographic projections combined, virtual reality, enough to fool even the elect, if that were possible, as it says in the New Testament.

Ultimately, the Antichrist will persecute Christians in particular, attempting to extinguish their faith and loyalty to God. And this phase of persecution will be marked by intense suffering, oppression, and a systematic effort to undermine and destroy the Christian faith. Now that is currently going on in other nations. It’s not going on in the United States, but it does go on in Africa, where thousands, I heard the other day that 65,000 Christians had been slaughtered in one of these African nations, and I forget which one. So these are systematic efforts to undermine and destroy the Christian faith by killing the Christians. So that is not a holy act, that is a demiurgic act, or a satanic act, or an Antichrist act.

And then during that period that’s called the Tribulation, in Revelations 13:7, the Apostle John’s vision says, “it was given power,” that is, the Antichrist “was given power to wage war against God’s holy people and to conquer them. And it was given authority over every tribe, people, language, and nation.”

And so it’s a global authority and power, which we’re coming into that stage right now. Particularly if we succumb to this idea of universal digital IDs, and then you top it off with changing from actual money that you can hand to people to digital Bitcoin type of money, well then that will be the, in my opinion, the entry into the age of the Tribulation, because there will be no resistance possible. Everything will be controlled. It’s all about power and dominion. It’s not about making things better. It’s not about making people richer, or healthier, or happier. It’s about power and dominion. So it’ll be a very dark age, the Tribulation. We will be persecuted and put to death and hated by all nations, and turned over for torture and death.

But the good news is that the Christ will then come. See, that’s what the whole Armageddon thing is about, that the actual Christ comes with the army of Christ and overpowers the Antichrist, because Christ has all the mojo to do so. The Antichrist only arises from the Demiurge, and it never had the power of the ethereal plane. But apparently it’s going to be this period of Tribulation, this final Armageddon, not to kill off the followers of the Antichrist, or to kill and torture them, instead of them killing and torturing us. It’s to show them love.

So I think that when Christ comes with the army of Christ, they’re just going to love everybody. They’re going to love everybody. And the battles that are being fought will lay down their arms. They will give up, because they’d rather be in love, and they will see the truth of God. Because He’s going to come so that none can deny Him. The Christ will make Himself manifest, and everyone will be able to see Him. And everyone then will feel the love of Christ, and it won’t just be a mythological claim.

Okay, tell me what you think of these ideas. I’d love to hear what you think of the Antichrist, or who you would nominate. Or if you think I’m off track on something, tell me what you think is the right answer to these questions. Until next week, God bless us all, and onward and upward.

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This is the lecture I delivered to my adult education class this week. It caused quite a stir. One dedicated atheist dropped the class at this point in a huff. It seems that the class is quite alright discussing gnostic concepts in the abstract, but when it comes down to Earth, then it gets real. Suddenly it’s a war between science and religion. The part that ticked off some of the students was demonstrating conscious life within the cells. In other words, consciousness comes down to the cellular level and then levels up through intelligent design to become us through cell division and differentiation.

This slide show has three embedded YouTube videos. The links within the pdf are not active, so I have included them here at the top of this transcript. Note that the Harvard biologist who narrates the first video is personifying consciousness within the cellular proteins. This is not an accident of language, but demonstrates that even biologists ascribe consciousness to these proteins although they would be loathe to admit it.

Note that there is a pulldown bar immediately next to the images so you can proceed through the entire lecture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp6qRNNGPj4&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyUtbn0O5Y&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGPflE5eHrU&t=2s Second Order powers– the new pleroma ofDownload

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week we’re going to review the relationship between fractal consciousness and the outflow of consciousness through Logos and the Aeons, and how the consciousness of Logos led to the Fall. I’ll be reading several verses from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi books.

If you are new to Gnostic Insights, don’t worry about grasping everything I say. Just listen and go with the flow. The gnosis will reveal itself, so relax.

AEONS

“Each one of the aeons is a name, <that is>, each of the properties and powers of the Father, since he exists in many names, which are intermingled and harmonious with one another.  It is possible to speak of him because of the wealth of speech, just as the Father is a single name, because he is a unity, yet is innumerable in his properties and names…”

The Aeons of the Fullness of God became self-aware by the giving of praise and glory to the Father. This giving of glory is not for God’s benefit, but for the Aeon’s benefit. It gave them a righteous task to perform alongside their neighbors, which brought them to self-awareness and gave each of them a unique identity. The Aeons are innumerable because they reflect the totality of an infinite consciousness.

“… the aeon of the Truth, since it is a unity and multiplicity, receives honor in the small and the great names according to the power of each to grasp it – by way of analogy – like a spring which is what it is, yet flows into streams and lakes and canals and branches, or like a root spread out beneath trees and branches with its fruit, or like a human body, which is partitioned in an indivisible way into members of members, primary members and secondary, great and small.”

LOGOS

The final Aeon that was produced as an emanation of the Pleroma of the Fullness arose by all of the Aeons giving glory together. The Fullness thus produced a final Aeon whom the Tripartite Tractate calls by the name Logos. Because Logos was produced through the entirety of the Pleroma giving glory as one, this Aeon possessed within itself all of the characteristics of the entire Pleroma.

This youngest Aeon carried within itself all of the traits of every other Aeon, perfect and complete. This was a very talented Aeon resembling the Son of God himself, who also carried all of the traits of the Aeons within its singular self. This final Aeon was named Logos, because he was also endowed with the ability to reason thoughtfully and to figure things out in a step-by-step manner. The word Logos in Greek means reason.

“This aeon was among those to whom was given wisdom, so that he could become pre-existent in each one’s thought. By that which he wills, will they be produced. Therefore, he received a wise nature in order to examine the hidden basis, since he is a wise fruit…”

All of the Aeons have free will, because the Father has free will and everything that emanates from the Father carries the attributes of the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says,

“for, the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one,” (this one being Logos), “such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him.”

“This aeon was last to have <been> brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude,” [referring, I think, to this concept of fractal iterations…]

“In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set. This exhibition of similar patterns at increasingly smaller scales is called self-similarity, also known as expanding symmetry or unfolding symmetry; if this replication is exactly the same at every scale, as in the Menger sponge, the shape is called affine self-similar.” [wikipedia]

The construction of a Menger sponge can be described as follows:

1. Begin with a cube.
2. Divide every face of the cube into nine squares in a similar manner to a Rubik’s Cube. This sub-divides the cube into 27 smaller cubes.
3. Remove the smaller cube in the middle of each face and remove the smaller cube in the center of the larger cube, leaving 20 smaller cubes. This is a level 1 Menger sponge (resembling a void cube).
4. Repeat steps two and three for each of the remaining smaller cubes and continue to iterate ad infinitum.

The second iteration gives a level 2 sponge, the third iteration gives a level 3 sponge, and so on. The Menger sponge itself is the limit of this process after an infinite number of iterations.

The reason we’re talking about fractals is because consciousness is a fractal. Consciousness rolls out from the Father very much in the manner of any other fractal, where you have the Father’s consciousness to begin with, and then it keeps dividing, dividing, dividing, dividing. It eventually winds up in us, in a fractal matter. And so we carry all of the attributes of the original pattern of the Father. We are fractals of the Father. The Aeons are fractals of the Father. Logos carried within himself fractals of the Father.

THE FALL

“The intent, then, of the Logos, who is this one, was good. When he had come forth, he gave glory to the Father, even if it led to something beyond possibility, since he had wanted to bring forth one who is perfect, from an agreement in which he had not been, and without having the command.”

“And before he begot anything else for the glory of the will and in agreement with the Totalities, he acted, magnanimously, from an abundant love, and set out toward that which surrounds the perfect glory…”

Thomassen translates the word “magnanimously” in the scripture above as “presumptuously.”

“And before he had yet produced anything to the glory of the Will and in the union of the members of the ALL, he acted presumptuously, out of an overflowing love, and rushed forward toward that which surrounds the realm of perfect glory.”

Given that translation, the movement that resulted in the Fall was presumptuous thought, which is a pretty good synonym for Ego. Yet the intention of Logos was good.

The Tripartite Tractate is unique in its gentle assessment of not blaming Logos for the Fall.  The book says that this act of disobedience by Logos was within the will of the Father after all, and it was necessary to usher in an organization that needed to come forth “for the revelation of the Fullness.”

The Tripartite Tractate says,

 “for it was not without the will of the Father that the Logos was produced, which is to say, not without it will he go forth. But he, the Father, had brought him forth for those about whom he knew that it was fitting that they should come into being”

So what that passage just said is that Logos, with that capability of acting on his own through will and reaching for the Father and instigating the Fall, was actually within the will of the Father after all. But it was like a secret. Because the Father brought Logos forth. The Father made Logos with all of the capabilities in order to bring us into being. So this was a necessary step. The Fall was a necessary step to usher in materiality out of the ethereal beings.

The Father knew what would happen and the Father found it fitting that Logos should be conceived as he was and take the action that he did. The Father knew that this was the path that would lead to material creation—the economy that was to come—

“so that the things which have come to be might become an organization which would come into being.”

What these verses are saying is the Fall of Logos was needed in order to create the next generation of fractals of the Aeons. This next generation of fractal iterations of the consciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Fullness would come into being in order that the Fullness would be revealed through them. We could say that it is through the Fruit that came from the Fullness into Fall that a new material Hierarchy of God on Earth was created. Logos doubtless thought he was going to instantiate Paradise with his Egoic act. What came instead was a Fall from the Fullness and the first experience of estrangement from the Father.

This, then, is the gnostic version of the original Fall, a movement of Ego away from reason, logic, interdependence, duty, and place, which led to the creation of this material universe.

You may wonder why we spend time figuring out things that happened so long ago that our universe wasn’t even created yet. The reason is because of that oft-repeated maxim: as above, so below. Logos may have been the first to let his Ego lead him astray but he was certainly not the last.

ARCHONS

“The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows and copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted. Out of this there was a division – he became deeply troubled – and a turning away because of his self-doubt and division, forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and <of that> which is.”

“Like the Pleromas are the things which came into being from the arrogant thought, which are their (the Pleromas’) likenesses, copies, shadows, and phantasms, lacking reason and the light, these which belong to the vain thought, since they are not products of anything. Therefore, their end will be like their beginning: from that which did not exist (they are) to return once again to that which will not be…”

“They thought of themselves that they are beings existing by themselves and are without a source, since they do not see anything else existing before them. Therefore, they lived in disobedience and acts of rebellion, without having humbled themselves before the one because of whom they came into being. They wanted to command one another, overcoming one another in their vain ambition, while the glory which they possess contains a cause of the system which was to be.”

With the introduction of the Archons of the Imitation we begin to see human nature emerging. When humans act outside of the will of the Father and the Fullness and center themselves on egoic dominance, they replicate the Archons’ striving for power and control.

And yet, the remnant of glory they retain through the ego of Logos still possesses the fractal formula of the Fullness, making it possible for the Demiurge to create the cosmos.

“They are likenesses of the things which are exalted. They were brought to a lust for power in each one of them, according to the greatness of the name of which each is a shadow, each one imagining that it is superior to his fellows.”

“The one whom he himself brought forth as a unitary Aeon rushed up to that which is his, and this kin of his in the Pleroma abandoned him who came to be in the defect along with those who had come forth from him in an imaginary way, since they are not his.”

THE BOUNDARY

As Logos retreated to its own in the Fullness, the Father placed a Boundary around the area containing that which had been produced as a consequence of the Fall. The purpose of this Boundary was to separate finitude from infinity, ignorance from truth, and light from darkness.

The Boundary

Another essential purpose of the Boundary was to establish an “economy” for a system about to unfold. And economy is another word for an ecology. Things have to be in relationship to one another in order to be able to work with one another. So the boundary was required to be put around the fallen bits, the shadows, the imitations of the Pleroma of Logos. They were put inside of a bounded space in order to push them together so that the ecology might be established.

“The Father and the Totalities drew away from him, so that the limit which the Father had set might be established – for it is not from grasping the incomprehensibility but by the will of the Father, – and furthermore, (they withdrew) so that the things which have come to be might become an organization which would come into being. If it were to come, it would not come into being by the manifestation of the Pleroma. Therefore, it is not fitting to criticize the movement which is the Logos, but it is fitting that we should say about the movement of the Logos that it is a cause of an organization which has been destined to come about.”

The Boundary Contains Chaos

We can think of this Boundary as a bubble containing our universe. You can picture these chaotic imitations as quantum foam. Quantum foam is the lowest level of instantiation in this universe of ours, and quantum foam is characterized by randomness and chaos. It does not work together. It is popping in and out of the universe, constantly producing matter and anti-matter that cancel out and destroy each other. Consequently nothing is building; nothing is able to reach out to level up. They lack the Golden Rule of cooperation because they came from the Fall rather than from the Fullness.

The Fullness of God

The Simple Golden Rule requires units of consciousness to work together with their neighbors to share information, assistance, and loving coherence on a single project that benefits ALL. This results in the hierarchical configuration because cooperation always results in the higher the fewer.

Archons cannot level up. It requires conscious control to replicate the Golden Rule. Archons do not have consciousness. They are programs.

THE RISE OF THE DEMIURGE

The Demiurge went about organizing this universe out of the quantum foam:

“over those who belong to the likeness, he set the word of beauty, so that he might bring them into a form.”

The Demiurge, by the way, is the ego of Logos that was left behind in the Fall. Logos himself, his unitary self, beat it back up to the fullness as quickly as he could. And he abandoned the results of the Fall, because he couldn’t bring order to the Fall. What he abandoned down below was that overreaching ego that caused the Fall in the first place. That ego takes on the name of the Demiurge. It’s the ego of Logos that controls the matter that has been formed by the Fall.

At first the Demiurge established energetic waves, then subatomic particles followed by atomic particles. Everything according to “the higher, the fewer” pattern. The particles combine to make atoms; the atoms combine to make molecules; the molecules combine make elements; the elements combine to make minerals and the aggregations of minerals, and that is the limit of the God of this universe. The Demiurge can only level up to the mineral level. All of the hard, rocky places in our material universe are the handiwork of the Demiurge.

The Demiurge keeps chaos at bay by forbidding free will in his subjects

We don’t come from the Demiurge; the Demiurge is only in charge of the material universe. The Demiurge is in charge of the mud, the material, the hard rocky places–at the small scale the dirt and the elements, and at the large scale the rocky planets and the stars in the heavens. If there are creatures on a planet, they coat the outside of the dead rocky planet. Life only comes from the Father. Life is top-down. Death is bottom-up.

Mud Up

I hope you got something out of this episode.

God bless us all, and onward and upward!

watch the neat video below of zooming in to the Mandlebrot set!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XbDusuz9wfU

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. It’s been a few weeks since I recorded a live episode, and here I am. Now, I don’t have any particular Gnostic insights for you today. However, I do have some interesting news to share and a very strange experience I had a couple of days ago. So, let’s start with the news.

One of the reasons I don’t have a new episode for you this week, in particular a philosophical episode, is because I’ve been working on a stage play called A Midwife’s Trial. I wrote this play about 15 years ago, and I pulled it out of the drawer a couple weeks ago and decided to polish it and get it on its feet. I went with a friend to a little theater a few weeks ago, and they were putting on 12 Angry Men. Now, if you’ve never seen the movie 12 Angry Men, the original, there’s a newer movie, really bad, but the old classic movie starring Henry Fonda and 11 other very well-known actors of the black and white movie era—it’s a great movie. You should see it. It’s the story of the jurors in a deliberation room.

They’ve just watched a trial, and they’re in the deliberation room. The entire movie or play takes place around the deliberation table, and they are the 12 Angry Men, the jury.

My play is also a trial story, but it’s the trial side of it, so it makes like a nice bookend to 12 Angry Men. So, that’s why it reminded me to get my play back out and try it again. I had sent it around to play festivals and whatnot about 15 years ago. It made one final round, but didn’t win any prizes, so I put it away.

It’s based upon my doctoral dissertation, The Trial of a California Midwife, and it is an enactment of actual trial testimony from a couple of midwives, an obstetrician, and then the two attorneys, one for the prosecution and one for the defense, and of course the judge. Those are all the characters. And then it cuts back and forth to a reenactment of this difficult birth that is the subject of the trial. So, it’s a very interesting play. I think it’s fascinating personally, and I’m hoping that audiences will too.

https://www.lulu.com/shop/cyd-ropp/a-midwifes-trial/paperback/product-1rvw8m56.html?page=1&pageSize=4

I went ahead and contacted the creative director of the theater where I watched 12 Angry Men, and he says, yeah, sounds good. We’ll get you on the schedule for August. So, now it looks like I’m going to have a stage play staged in the town of Phoenix, Oregon. It’s between Ashland and Medford in southern Oregon. I’m going to produce and direct the play myself, which means that for the first time in my theater experience, I will have the power of casting, which is very exciting as well. Anyway, so that’s a little piece of exciting news for me, but it’s been taking up my mind and it’s been taking up my writing time. So, that’s my excuse for not having any new Gnostic Insights episodes for you. And if you live in the southern Oregon area or northern California, I do hope you will come and see the play.

I’m also in the process of having the Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth children’s book turned into an animated video. That’s very exciting. I got together with a fellow on LinkedIn, and he’s done a great job of animating these still pictures that are in the children’s book. So, we’re in the final polishing stage of that also. That should be available before too long on YouTube or wherever I can figure out it should go.

Logos Falls

What I mainly want to tell you about today is a very strange experience I had this week, day before yesterday. In November, my insurance coverage changed, and my primary care provider was not going to be covered by the insurance company that I had been with. So, I had to look for a new primary care provider, and it just so happens I don’t live very far from the VA hospital in White City, Oregon.

It used to be an Army base in World War II, and then they changed it into a Veterans Administration hospital. And, by the way, part of the reason I linked into them, is because I actually live in one of the barracks from White City.

My historic home is two parts. Half of the house is an 1875 farmhouse. That’s a two-story farmhouse, and I rent out that part of the house as an Airbnb rental, and it can accommodate parties of six pretty easily. The other side of my house is a set of Army barracks that were stuck onto the farmhouse around 1949, after the war was over, and White City was disassembling itself as an Army base, and people bought the old barracks as scrap lumber. So, the man that lived in my house in the 1940s bought two Army barracks and stuck them on the side of this farmhouse, and I live in one of those Army barracks. The other barracks is the garage. I like living in the barracks. It’s a very nice space, very cabin-y feeling, built in the 1930s, all local wood.

So, I signed up with the VA to be my primary care physicians, and I have to tell you, very nice people. I’ve been to a chiropractor, an acupuncturist, and a primary care person there at the VA over the last couple of months. All three of them from other countries. That’s kind of funny to me. From Bulgaria, from Sri Lanka, and I didn’t even ask where the acupuncturist is from, but he sounds Eastern European. Very nice people and very competent care providers. Well, anyway, back to the weird part of the story.

Day before yesterday, I went out to White City, my first appointment with their chiropractor.

The VA hospital complex there, is made up of old two-story brick buildings. I think they probably replaced what must have been earlier wooden buildings when World War II was going on, and so these are really boring-looking boxes of brick buildings, two-story boxes, and they’re all right near each other and connected by corridors or breezeways. My appointment was in the upper floor of building 209, but you enter through the lower floor of 201, and there are like eight buildings you’ve got to get through to get to 209, and they’re all connected. That’s the way you get to building 209. The parking lot’s in front of building 201.

So, I had brought a book with me, a library book, a very good library book that I’m enjoying reading that my brother Bill had recommended. He’s loving it. It’s called Culpability, and it’s about a car crash and who was at fault. Very well written and philosophical at the same time, and it includes AI and all kinds of stuff, self-driving automobiles and whatnot. So, I wanted to bring the book with me to read in the waiting room.

Not that I’ve ever had to wait, because here’s the peculiar thing about this VA facility that I’ve been going to—I seem to be the only patient. It’s like I’m in one of those Reddit spaces called Mall World or Liminal Spaces, if any of you have ever been into any of those types of Reddit discussion groups, because there’s hardly any patients. Then the only people I see as I’m walking, and it takes, honestly, it takes about 20 minutes or a half hour to get from where I walk in to get back there to the chiropractor’s office. Maybe I saw three patients in all of that time.

Corridor after corridor after corridor with empty waiting rooms, and the only people you see is glancing into office rooms, on the right and left, where people are working at their computers on whatever the heck they’re working on, because I never see patients there. It’s very strange. So, that in itself is very much like this place called Liminal Space or Mall World on Reddit.

Anyway, I had brought my dog. He was waiting for me in the car. He’s a small dog, and so he has basically a high chair set up in the passenger seat, and he sits there to be able to see out the window as we drive along.

Well, I know he likes to get in the driver’s seat and lay down when I’m doing errands and out of the car, so I set my book down on the roof of the car and straightened out a towel on the driver’s seat, and then I went into the building.

Now, I lost the book somewhere. It’s a library book. I lost a library book. I don’t know if I left it on the roof of the car or if somewhere between 201 and 209. I did use a ladies room, and it had a couple of stalls in there, and it had a window with windowsill. I didn’t want to leave my purse out there on the windowsill, but I didn’t mind leaving the library book on the windowsill, so I took the purse into the stall with me, and then I came out. And by the time I got to the chiropractor’s office—of course, I was the only patient there—I didn’t have the book anymore.

At first I thought I’d left it on the roof of the car when I was straightening the towel for the dog, so I said to the corpsman who was helping the chiropractor, oh darn, I left my book on the roof of the car. I hope nobody steals it. When the appointment was over and I made my long way back to the car, there was no book on the roof of the car, so either someone had stolen it, I figured, or I had left it in the bathroom on the windowsill instead. I wasn’t sure whether I left it on… I know I set it on the roof of the car, but perhaps I picked it up and took it into the bathroom.

So I went back into the building and attempted to retrace my steps between 201 and 209 to look for, first, the stairwell I had taken—and that’s another thing that figures in these liminal spaces stories–stairwells. The stairwell I had taken from the first floor to the second floor in one of those buildings, I don’t know which one, had yellow daisies. It was a yellow flower motif painted on the stairwell walls. All of the stairwells have different motifs. So I was looking for the yellow stairwell that I took to the second floor and I couldn’t find it.

So I went back and forth all this time looking for that yellow stairwell, couldn’t find it, and I’m passing through these empty hallways, and when I say there were very few patients, the weird thing about White City VA, of course, is that it seems that most of the patients that I’ve seen there are Vietnam or Korean veterans because they’re very elderly and usually in wheelchairs or walkers. I myself am not a spring chicken, but I can walk pretty good. Well, anyway, so that’s the other weird thing about it. The only people you see are elderly.

So I’m looking for the yellow stairwell. I can’t find it, and I opened all those doors. I could not find the right ladies room, either, and I, of course, didn’t see the book. So I spent probably an hour and a half combing the hallways of 201-209 looking for a stairwell I couldn’t find and looking for a restroom I couldn’t find and looking for this book that I lost.

But here’s the weird thing about the whole experience—I mean, I spent all this time—it was just like a dream. I do have a repetitive dream where I’m searching for something that I can’t find. So I thought to myself, oh my god, this is just like my dream, only it was for real. And it’s true. I couldn’t find it. Here’s how I would characterize it: I lost an object day before yesterday in a very confusing place in a room that I could not locate accessed by a stairwell that apparently doesn’t exist. So that was one weird experience. I wanted to share that with you for some reason.

I figured, oh no, this is really going to trigger my dream, but I haven’t had that dream in the last two days. I just had the actual experience. If this prompts anything in you, please share it with us.

I’d love to hear back from you. God bless us all, and onward and upward.

We recently had an episode called Synchronicities, broadcast on September 13th of 2025. In that episode I reviewed a Why Files episode about synchronicities and shared some amazing synchronicities that look like coincidences, but they’re just too precise to be coincidental. They give an indication of this very strange nature of the universe that we live in, and in that episode we discussed how the quantum mechanics of this universe at the quantum level seem to explain how these amazing synchronicities occur.

In the synchronicities episode, I talked about one of the funny things about quantum mechanics—that whenever someone looks at an object in a scientific experiment at the subatomic level, peering into the subatomic level through their experiment, it is said that “observation collapses potential” and makes the reality. This is because before we observe something, it exists in a state of what is called superposition.  Remember, at the subatomic level there’s no such thing as particles. It’s all waves and probabilities. It’s more like a blur, and it doesn’t stop spinning through all of its possibilities until it is observed and then, at that point in time, when it is observed, it stops being a blur of all possible positions and it collapses into one position, solely through the process of being observed by a watchful consciousness.

Another strange aspect of quantum mechanics is known as quantum entanglement. This is when two—and it’s not even right to call them objects or particles because they’re not, there is no material reality, it’s all waves and probabilities and forces—when two such subatomic objects have a relationship with each other, no matter how far the space is between them, then when one of them is observed in an experiment, and it stops its superpositional blur at that moment in time, landing on a particular way of being or way of appearing, then the object it is entangled with also collapses at the same exact moment, even though it’s not the one that’s being observed. Furthermore, this entangled “collapse” is instantaneous—faster than light.

Quantum Mechanical entanglement at a distance

Not only that, but balance is always occurring throughout the universe, because when one entangled thing collapses in a spin right direction, for example, its entangled partner collapses as spin left. Or when one photon, for example, moves vertically, its polarized partner moves horizontally. In this manner, the universe remains balanced and symmetrical. You can think of it this way: imagine two entangled quanta were a pair of gloves spinning so fast you couldn’t tell which was right and which was left. Once you observe object A to be a the right glove then object B instantly becomes a left glove. If the same object A had been observed to be the left glove, object B would have instantly become the right glove. And before observation, both gloves were simultaneously right and left, left and right, both states at once.

Now let us think about this with some gnostic logic. We say that the mind of God is the ground state of all of the consciousness. Another way of saying this is that consciousness permeates every corner of everywhere—both on the ethereal plane and down here on the material plane. So, if observation affects quanta, then quanta are being observed all of the time by the mind of God. It is this Godly observation that holds the cosmos in its balanced physical state. This is how entangled quanta can affect their partners instantaneously. There is no distance or time in the ethereal realm and all of creation is held in steady state within the mind of God, so this is how and why a quark that is observed by a human is instantly balanced with its entangled partner, even if it is on the other side of the universe.

In that Synchronicities episode, we talked about quantum field meditation—visualizing potential and then collapsing it into reality. Let’s say that you are moved to want something good for you that’s within God’s will. According to the quantum field meditation as discussed in the Why Files episode, your intentional desire and focus is said to collapse that intention into reality. Quantum field meditation visualizes the potential and, “collapses it” into reality. That’s what happens in healing meditations. You intentionally visualize getting well and it eventually heals the part of you that’s broken. Setting clear intentions is the first step.

Quoting from the Why Files’ episode: “every nanosecond, infinite decisions are being made that cause the infinite possibilities to collapse into this one reality. But you can learn to influence the outcome of all those decisions. You can alter your small corner of reality.”

My brother Bill and I had a follow-up conversation last week about that concept. He had come to the realization that there is no “collapse” in the sense that the superpositional blur changes into a static object. What is actually happening is that in our cherry jello universe, one reality is arrived at, and the others are not chosen. It all has to do with free will and choice. In the cherry jello universe, what we have been calling observation to collapse potentiality is actually us arriving at a particular cherry and choosing it through free will.

Picture these cherries as completely filling the universal space with all possible worlds, already existing.

A gnostic insight concerning this is that all possible outcomes already exist in the infinite mind of the Father, and it is our free will that chooses one course or one outcome over another. We’re not collapsing anything. The quanta is not stopping its superposition. What is happening is that we are choosing one cherry over another. For example, the scientist’s observation chooses the cherry that spins right instead of left, so to speak. And something that A.J. had talked about in that Why Files episode on synchronicities–and again, go back to my episode on synchronicities if you haven’t read or heard it yet –the universe is filled with choices. It’s not filled with particles. It’s not filled with stuff. It’s filled with choice points, conscious choices, and they’re already there because our God is an infinite God, and it takes infinity to be able to hold all possible choices that could ever possibly happen.

As I say, it’s the many worlds theory, but there aren’t many worlds. You don’t need parallel universes or parallel dimensions for these things to happen, like we often see in science fiction or people’s theories. It’s all contained in this one infinity that is the mind of God, and it is our intention to head for a choice, a particular potential, and to find that potential. Quantum theory calls that collapsing the potential, but it isn’t really collapsing, it’s that a choice cherry has been arrived at. You’re choosing a particular outcome. You’re choosing this rather than that, and it’s the choice that makes what quantum physicists call collapse.

In the cherry jello universe, our consciousness is swimming through an infinite sea of choices, and every moment of the day we make one choice rather than a different choice, and that is the path of our choices as we swim through the cherry jello of life. The other choice is still sitting there in that infinity of unused or uncollapsed potentials, but once you make a choice by setting an intention and you arrive at that intentional outcome, the cherry that’s already waiting there in your mind is the so-called collapse, but the other uncollapsed choices are still there.

Does that make sense to you? It’s a completely different way of looking at quantum superposition and collapse. Nothing’s collapsing. The blur of potential is still there. What the scientist arrives at is one cherry and the infinity of other cherries are still sitting there, because the mind of God holds all possibilities. It is free will that decides the outcome.

Now, speaking of swimming toward cherries, one of the aspects of that Why Files episode that I didn’t have time to get to in our previous discussion of it was the vision board. A.J., the host of Why Files, strongly recommended setting up a vision board and then putting pictures or words, clipping things out of magazines or printing things off your computer, of the cherries you wish to swim to, is how I’d put it. So, I have started a vision board. There are only two things on it now because I’ve been so busy I haven’t been able to get along with setting up my vision board fully. But what I have on there so far is a picture of my gnostic cyber fiction screenplay becoming a motion picture, and to that end, one of the reasons I’ve been so crazy busy the past few weeks is because I’ve been working on that screenplay. The other thing I have on my vision board is a description of an old Econoline van with what one of our listeners says is the best engine ever built. He recommended it as a possibility for my cherry of a book tour. Well, I wrote down all those notes and I’m walking around with this note in my hand and thinking, how do I file this? Where do I put this note about what RV to buy? I’m afraid if I file it away, it’s going to be filed away, and then when I wonder,  what was that van I was supposed to buy? I wouldn’t be able to find it again. So I finally realized as I’m holding this piece of paper in my hand with the notes about the RV—aha! The vision board. So I taped the note onto the vision board and now I have two strong intentions sitting on that vision board and every time I walk past it, I see those intentions which, in this quantum meditation way of thinking of things, causes me to be swimming in the direction of those particular cherries.

I must admit, it all sounds kind of silly to me. I’ve heard of vision boards for years and I’ve never tried to put one into practice because I just didn’t understand how it would work, how such a thing is possible, until that episode about synchronicities and then my brother’s discussion with me this week about the philosophy of choice and free will. Because it’s all driven by free will and it’s our choice. It’s not going to magically appear because it’s taped to a vision board. It’s my intention that it should come about that causes me to be moving in that direction.

The day after I recorded that Synchronicities episode, I was reading a daily devotional called The Word for You Today that is mailed out by the Christian radio station I listen to. And the first four articles of encouragement in this quarter’s Word for You Today, September 1st through 4th, is about faith. And as I read the discussion of faith and how your faith can produce results, I recognized that it’s what we’ve been talking about. This is the Christian version or the Biblical perspective on quantum intention meditation. It’s a different way of looking at the word faith that I never thought of before and I wouldn’t have even noticed it except for our discussion on quantum intention.

When people talk about faith it’s usually a gigantic concept, right? Usually it stands for the ideology you believe in. I have faith in God. I have faith in Jesus Christ. It’s my ideology to hold certain beliefs. My faith is part of my Gnostic Christian meme bundle. But faith, as explained in The Word For You Today is “the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. The certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us even though we cannot see it up ahead.” When you put it that way, I can tell that I have experienced that kind of faith throughout my life without labelling it as faith. For example, I always knew I’d earn a Ph.D. someday, so I wasn’t concerned about how or when. I had faith. I always knew I would share spiritual knowledge with others, but I didn’t know how or when. And here we have the last twenty years of blogging, writing books, and podcasting.  I didn’t so much work toward these as goals as simply knowing they would occur.

Here’s a quote from Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament, Hart’s translation:

Now faithfulness is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of unseen realities. For the ancients were commended for this. In faith we rationally perceive that the ages [and here I would use the word “aeons” rather than ages] were composed by an utterance of God, so that the things that are seen have not been made from the things that are manifest. (Hebrews 11:1-3)

In our Gnostic system, the Aeons have thought everything through in advance. The ethereal plane is the unseen reality. The Aeons were emanated by God so that the ethereal plane would become manifest reality. This is why the Tripartite Tractate does not condemn Logos for the Fall. The Tripartite Tractate says that the Fall was necessary for the Economy that was destined to come about—that being this material cosmos.

The Bible also says in James 2:17 that faith not accompanied by action is dead. And this teaching says that effective faith calls for an act of your will. This again points to making choices propelled by faith in a particular outcome. It is a choice you make to fully embrace what God says in his word. So they’re talking about choice. They’re talking about acts of will.

For just as the body without spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead. (James 2:26, Hart)

Usually that verse refers to doing good deeds to prove one’s faith in God. But if you look at it in this Gnostic way, the “works” is the cherry you are moving toward with your free will, and your faith is the intention to reach it. The Bible says that God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.

So do not cast away your confidence, which has for its recompense a great reward. For you need to persevere so that, having done God’s will, you may receive what is promised. (Hebrews 10:38, Hart)

The apostles felt they didn’t have enough faith and so they said to Jesus, increase our faith. And Jesus replied,

If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, be uprooted and planted in the sea and it will obey you. (Luke 17:6).

So we don’t need a lot of faith. We just need the strongly believed intention. Yet it always has to be in God’s will for it to occur, which is good. It’s a backstop for us. If you have faith and intention to create chaos and death, it would only happen through archonic influence because it’s not in God’s will.

But it is God’s will for us to fully experience this universe that we have been incarnated into. That’s why there’s so many choice points. All the choices are there to be made. And the faith that is spoken about in the Bible is meant to produce results. It’s not meant to just fill you up with assurance of salvation. And faith is not accomplished by action. Faith precedes action. As these quotes by James affirms:

Every good act of giving and every perfect gift is from above, descending from the Father of the Luminaries [the Aeons], with whom there is no alternation or shadow of change. (James 1:17, Hart)

So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. Yet someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” You show me your faith without the works, and I will show you faith by my works. You have faith that God is one? You are doing well. Even the daemonic beings [archons] have that faith, and they tremble. But are you willing to recognize, O you inane man, that faith without works yields nothing? (James 2:17-20, Hart]

In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. In other words, faith produces outcomes. The choices you make produce the outcomes that are the fruit of those choices. Just as the quantum meditation folks claim.

The Word for Today devotional says, concerning faith,

The biblical prescription for faith is simple but potent. One, you decide to believe in God’s promise and his power to make it happen, leaving the how and when up to him. Two, you choose to act in keeping with what you believe before you see any evidence of the results. Three, God responds to your faith by keeping his unbreakable promise. Quote, “Hath he said and shall he not do it? Or hath he spoken and shall he not make it good?” (from the Old Testament, Numbers 23:19) God goes to work exercising his unlimited capacity to perform his word. Jesus said, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours.” (Mark 11:24)

So it’s not that God has to perform or accomplish this for you. It’s all there. It’s all ready in the mind of God. The cherries are in the jello. We have to, through our belief and actions, make choices. It all has to do with our free will and our choices. God has already done what God does. God has laid all the cherries in the universe that will ever exist out in front of us for our choosing. This concept gives a whole new meaning to the phrase cherry-picking.

Now, going on to the fourth devotional of the faith series, The Word for Today talks about How Your Faith Can Produce Results.

Saying that you believe is just the beginning. Activating your faith means preparing for the answer to arrive. So, if I really expected an answer to my prayers, how would I prepare for arrival? Jesus gave his disciples a parable, Matthew 13:31-32, when he said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man planted in his field. When it grows, it becomes a tree.” See, the farmer believes that if he plants the seed and cares for it and tends it, waters it, fertilizes it, keeps an eye on it, protects it from the pests, that it will grow into the thing that he has planted.

So, we begin by praying for wisdom to make the right decisions (James 1:5-7). We aim for the thing to come about, which means that while waiting to get to that cherry that we’re swimming towards, we actively involve ourselves with things that will cause us to move toward that cherry. We break our big plan and our intention into small steps that can be accomplished. Don’t wait for the faith to grow. Don’t wait for fear to turn you aside. Take small steps. Make choices. Make all of the choices in a row that lead you to that intention. This devotional suggests that we start thanking God even before we can see the answer. We aim toward the thing and if we’re missing it, we adjust our aim. And then this Christian devotional reiterates that faith and actions working together produce results.

And I’ve been sharing all this just by way of saying that this quantum meditation, this focusing and intention moving toward that result, is not unscriptural. It’s not ungodly or New Age. It’s all laid out before us by the Father. And if we need assistance to move in that direction, we meditate upon the Father, the Son, the Fullness. We ask the Aeons for assistance. We ask Christ for assistance in faith, knowing that the answer is already there and that all things work together for good for those who love God. Amen!

Onward and upward and God bless us all.

In 2019, I wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and what I am attempting to do in this podcast is talk you through the book so that you will have your own personal and very full understanding of what Gnosis is, and hopefully be able to actually realize Gnosis while you’re hearing these podcasts.

https://www.amazon.com/Gnostic-Gospel-Illuminated-dispensed-demystified/dp/1099169747/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1X3ZZ76T82K1W&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.CgApo53gGaD7xXJNvh4tt_g4W5ActJKDfTqgj7gwHYo7KanrA4qKT-tfvL0K3sfNI-Yh2Kh9qf7M0CnXKgzNe12Kk_zKcuMLUi364dwhBpt_9VlqY0uDgeLl_ld5EWeYnRSX91xsY2RIMM2FyMKo8MgMxiGipPoSlrs9eLOzYKuBXd-sBXsd3vQpvZYygFTZfko1cZAxO5NiD-2JfRh4VhPcL69s73RUQGJoNQK_73c.qwWT41eWamS7-h_BAOBtlxLKpbA6cugRQxek1ATVuWo&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+gnostic+gospel+illuminated&qid=1758976064&sprefix=the+gnostic+gospel+illuminated%2Caps%2C161&sr=8-1You may purchase my original Gnostic Gospel at gnosticinsights.com or any online book dealer.

By the way, what is Gnosis? We keep talking about Gnosis and Gnostic. Gnosis means knowing, and in the Gnostic frame of reference, Gnosis refers to remembering the truth of our existence and our creation, and the creation of the entire cosmos. It is thought that we hold all of this knowledge within ourselves, and we have complete access to the Creator of the universe at any time that we turn our focus on the Creator, and it is this direct conduit to the Creator that gives us what is called Gnosis.

G-N-O-S-I-S, that’s a Greek word. Another related word to Gnosis, and this is a big word, is anamnesis. You know the word amnesia means forgetting? Anamnesis means not forgetting. So, the process of coming to Gnosis is a process called anamnesis. Today we’re going to talk about the qualities of the All, and how the All became what is called the Pleroma, and the Aeons of the Pleroma.

Many people claim that it’s impossible to know or describe the full glory of the transcendent, immortal Father of Consciousness due to our own limitations. I mean, how could limited beings such as ourselves possibly imagine the greatness of the Originator of the universe, much less our place in the grand design? Wouldn’t lesser beings reflect a diminished view of God? Wouldn’t these lesser beings be limited to offering a tarnished glory that falls far short of the object of their praise? The Tripartite Tractate, which is the book of the Nag Hammadi that I’m working off of, the Tripartite puts it this way.

If the members of the All had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who Himself is the All.

Thus, creation would have been doomed from the outset to never comprehend the full glory of either the Father or itself. According to the Gnostic gospel, the Father realized this impossibility and so built a helpful workaround meant to aid comprehension: selfless union and cooperation with others in a shared task. Quoting from the Tripartite again,

For that reason they were drawn into mutual intermingling union and oneness through the singing of praise. From their assembled Fullness they were one and at the same time many. Accurately reflecting the One who Himself is the entirety of the All. Out of perfect union with itself and with the Son, and by means of a single shared effort, the All gave glory to the Eternal One who had brought it forth.

The glory given out of this perfect communion left the All perfect and full, as it was perfect and full to begin with, and the object of their glory was also perfect and full. This phase of the All is referred to as the second glory, with the Son being called the first glory. Then when the Son differentiated into all of its variables, into all of its individual parts, like rays bursting out of a central star, that is called the All, and this is what we’re discussing today.

The Son’s variables all differentiated is the ALL

Now, this perfect state of union with the Son and communion with each other didn’t last.

Because of their combined effort, the All became self-aware, and it became they. So at first the All was a singular entity that was a complete duplication and reflection of the Son, who itself was a complete duplication and reflection of the Father of Consciousness itself. So at first the All was one singular organism, since it was freshly evolved out of the Son, but then it became self-aware, and the various variables within the Son, the various parts of that singular entity, each of those parts became self-aware.

And that is what is causing this evolution of consciousness from the singular It of the All to the They. No longer simply an unaware member of the All singing in unison with the same song of praise, the All became aware of its individual traits, and the singing came to be produced by the will of each individual Aeon. An Aeon is spelled A-E-O-N. And in Gnosticism, an Aeon is an entity. It is a singular consciousness. So each Aeon is a reflection of the Father’s countless qualities and powers.

The Aeons conceived themselves in order to know themselves in fulfillment of the Father’s desire for pure consciousness to become differentiated and self-aware. And in philosophy, this is called monadism, not that you have to know that, but the Son is a monad, that is a singular thing. And the Father wished to have company, let’s say, and so the monad split into individual POVs, or points of view.

The moment It became They, individual identities arose and immediately sorted themselves into a hierarchy. Quoting from the Tripartite,

For this reason they exist as minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors, degrees over degrees, being ranked one above the other. Each of those who glorify has his own station, rank, dwelling place, and place of rest, which is the glorification he brings forth.

The Aeons sorted themselves into the Hierarchy of God

This hierarchical arrangement of the qualities of the All is known as the fruit of the third glory in Gnostic cosmology. It’s also called the first order of powers and the Fullness. The Fullness is everything that will ever be in potential. Plato referred to this as the forms, Plato’s forms. Every photon, every particle and proton, every personality, every position and rank that someone could hold, every physical formula, physics, chemistry, all imprinted upon this what was a singular unit that is now broken out. These potentialities are not manifest.

At first they weren’t self-aware, but they became self-aware. The cooperation amongst the All is the prototype of the simple explanation’s golden rule, by the way, which puts it this way:

In order for units of consciousness to work together and join for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to assist one another’s efforts, and they need to love one another.

We humans are patterned after the hierarchy of the Fullness of God

So in the same way that the All sat in perfect communion together while singing the same song of praise, so do we all instantiate the pattern of cooperation needed to get the job done when we work together for the greater good without selfish motivation.

The instant the Aeons became self-aware, the All fell out of their unthinking blissful union and arranged themselves into what’s called the Fullness of God. This phrase is mentioned quite often in the New Testament, but it has lost its association with its actual meaning.

It’s not just the Fullness of God, like you’re thinking of God all in one big thing. The whole point of the Fullness was God differentiating into graspable concepts, things that we can understand. So the Fullness of God is a different entity than the Father. I believe that distinction has gotten lost in modern Christianity. So we were discussing the Fullness, which is a hierarchy, and hierarchy looks like a pyramid. Just picture a pyramid.

The hierarchy of the Fullness prefigures the patterns of our universe. “Minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors” refers to personalities and how they relate to one another, like our personalities. “Degrees over degrees and ranks” refers to the manner by which things are sorted, stacked, and ordered. First, second, third, superior, inferior, right, left, inside, outside. These are the degrees over degrees and the ranks. It reflects the fact that each self-aware entity has its own place in the grand scheme, with a location different than others and its very own point of view.

Quoting from the Tripartite,

For each of the Aeons is a name corresponding to each of the Father’s qualities and powers. Since He exists in many names, it is by mingling and through mutual harmony that they are able to speak of Him by means of logical thought. Thus the Father is a single name because He is one, but nevertheless innumerable in His qualities and names.

Interesting that logical thought was mentioned in the Tripartite Tractate, because it is important to realize that logic is part of the mind of God. We are given the ability to reason and to be logical.

The newly self-aware Aeons were not separated from the One Who Is. Rather, their birth has the form of a spreading out by which the Father spreads Himself out into that which He wishes, in order that those who have gone forth from Him may exist as well. The Father of the Aeons, that being the Son, and embodiment of the Formless One, is the Holy Spirit that breathes through the members of the All and moves them to search for the Unknown. Just as somebody is moved by a fragrance to seek the source of the fragrance. For its sweetness lets the Aeons sense an indescribable pleasure and gives them the thought that they should be united with the One Who Desires, that they should know Him in oneness, and that they should assist one another, having no occasion to turn away through thoughtlessness from that in which they are placed.

The Son’s Spirit is the trace by which He may be sought. Quoting again,

The whole structure of Aeons, then, is yearning and seeking to find the Father perfectly and completely, and this is their irreproachable union. For the Father gave the Aeons a starting point and a root, so that they are stations on the calm road leading to Him.

For He spread out faith and prayer for what they do not see, a firm hope in what they do not comprehend, a fertile love longing for what they do not behold, an eternally receptive understanding of the mind, a blessing that is richness and freedom, and, for their thoughts, the wisdom of one whose desire is the glory of the Father.

Quoting from my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated,

The hierarchy defines higher versus lower. It orders first, second, third, and fourth, superior and inferior, inside and out, action and rest, every other possible relationship, particles and their spins, waves and frequencies, atoms, molecules, attraction and repulsion, cells and DNA, every protein fold and enzyme.

The how, what, why, when, who, and where of all that was to come began as the perfectly rendered Fullness. As DNA anticipates an organism and a blueprint promises a building, the Fullness embodied the perfect plan of Paradise. For the Aeons manifested within their hierarchy all of the Father’s innumerable qualities, including consciousness, logic, and love.

The Aeons of the Fullness were given wisdom and prudence and a constant thirst to seek their Creator. This gave them a desire to align themselves with the Father’s Holy Spirit through the process of giving glory.  Giving glory is the means by which we align ourselves with the originating consciousness. It’s like a homing beacon. The Aeons yearned for communion with their Father, for He had planted His root deep within their hearts, and they recognized themselves as His branches and His fruit.

The newly self-aware Aeons were not separated from the One Who Is, for their Father was the Son and embodiment of the Formless One, and His Holy Spirit flowed throughout them as a reassuring presence. Although the Aeons dwelt within the single body of the Fullness, they were each an independent self. Their variety required them to work together and remain in full agreement, for only through their union could they approach the Father’s greatness.

All for One and One for All is their song, and they sing in perfect harmony. Now I have to share a kind of a funny image I have concerning the Fullness of God and what it looks like. As I say, a hierarchy is like a pyramid, so when I picture the Aeons of God, I picture them all as golden cannonballs stacked in a big pyramid. So they all look alike, but they each have a particular place in the hierarchy. Picture a given cannonball and where it might be in a gigantic stack of countless cannonballs in the Fullness of God, this gigantic golden pyramid of balls.

Now if you go to YouTube and you look at videos of what are called slime mold, strangely enough, I always think of the Fullness of God as like a slime mold. The slime mold creature is comprised of identical cells, each one exactly the same, but they’re all side by side making up one organism. Whereas, for example, in our bodies, our cells are all different. Your skin cell is different than your heart cell, for example. But in a slime mold, all the cells are exactly the same. They are moving and acting and thinking as one single organism, a big clump of cells, but each of the cells is an individual. Also, they’re perfect fractals. Each cell replicates the entire slime mold. So if you cut out a single cell out of a slime mold, it will now become its own mass of slime mold cells and know everything that the previous body out of which it was cut knew. This has all been shown scientifically. You can look it up online. So that is how I think of the Fullness of God, as this beautiful combination of pyramidal golden orbs, kind of acting and thinking like a slime mold. They’re each individuals, but they are also at the same time one.

So now these are the principal players in the cosmology of Gnosticism. The originating consciousness, which is called the Father, the embodiment of that consciousness, which is called the Son, the differentiation of the Son into the All, and then the differentiation of the All becoming self-aware and becoming the Fullness of God and sorting themselves. The second they became self-aware, they sorted themselves into that golden pyramid, as I think of it.

Before they sorted themselves, they were like the rays of sun coming out from the central entity of the Son. When they became self-aware, they kind of swam away and formed this pyramid. Everything else that we see around us, ourselves, our worlds, our entire universe, is all prefigured in the Fullness of God, in the All. The Fullness is also called the Pleroma, which is another Greek word that just means everything. The Fullness of God is like the blueprint of our universe. Everything that will ever come to be is sitting there in that golden pyramidal stack.

I’m going to end this podcast with a clear Gospel message straight from the Tripartite Tractate, regarding exactly what one must come to believe in order to be, quote, saved. In case you’re curious, we’re skipping ahead, but why not? So here’s a quote.

There is no other baptism apart from this one alone, which is the redemption into God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when confession is made through faith in those names, which are a single name of the Gospel, when they have come to believe what has been said to them, namely, that they exist. From this they have their salvation, those who have believed that they exist. This is attaining an invisible way to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an undoubting faith.

So that seems to be the underlying core of the Gnostic salvation message. No other arcane rituals are needed, no gnosis other than believing that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, also known as the Fullness of God, or the pleroma, existed before you did. Other ancient Gnostic texts claim that this is the true essence of the Gospel that Jesus preached.

Keep in mind that these are the very texts considered so distracting by the early Church Fathers that they were buried in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD to protect them from being burned as the work of heretics, keeping them safe until their re-emergence in 1945. So back to the pleroma. In case you haven’t guessed, the Fullness is where we all wind up eventually. By the end of the universe, at the end of time, most everyone’s will have come on board team God, so to speak, and then the fruit of the pleroma, us, will have returned home to the fold to live happily ever after amidst the unending joy and love of the Fullness, all tucked up inside the Son who lives tucked up inside the Father. This is why I end my phone calls and whatnot with friends by saying onward and upward. Onward and upward is our destination.

Onward and upward is the way we return home to the pleroma. We’ll talk a lot more about this as time goes on. All right, I’ll see you in the next episode. God bless.

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This week I appeared as a guest on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio. I’m going to make that YouTube video this week’s episode. The interview went well and the viewers like it very much, judging by their Comments of the episode. I’m including the YouTube link here on the transcript. The episode is called “What Is The Gnostic Pleroma? ”

The episode lasts an hour and a half. People in Comments said it was their favorite episode from Aeon Byte. Seemed to cause quite a positive stir among the viewers.

It’s funny, when the interview was over and we were saying our goodbyes, I failed to say “onward and upward” to Miguel and he noticed and called me out on it. He wanted to hear the blessing! Isn’t that sweet?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyVvIJk5xYA

On this Aeon Byte appearance I also give a reading of my new kiddie book “Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth.”

I encourage you to go watch it and let me know what you think.

All of my gnostic books are available for purchase on amazon.com. I always price my book as low as amazon will allow in order to make them more accessible to the greatest number of people.

PLEASE LEAVE A REVIEW ON AMAZON!

Thank you,

ONWARD AND UPWARD! AND GOD BLESS.

cyd

Here’s the YouTube transcript of the interview below.

My name is Miguel Connor and I am still your pompatus of Gnosis– that man across the waters of creation. And good to see everybody on this moon day. And very excited today because we will be discussing a topic that is very important and often uh misunderstood about Gnosticism and that is the pleroma. And I can’t think of anybody better to engage in this conversation than our guest Dr. Cyd Ropp. She will be discussing her new work, Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Gospel. And of course, we will touch upon the great ideas from her other recent book,  A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And yeah, check it out. Definitely check it out if you’re looking for a good audio book. I do the narration and you will be taken on an amazing Gnostic journey of awakening that is useful for you.

Cyd, thank you very much as always for coming to the virtual Alexandria.

My pleasure. I always like to be here. Thanks, Miguel.

We always like to have you here. Life the the world is better. Well, the world is the world, but at least uh the psyche is better. And with us, too, we got Mr. Graham Pong. Graham, how are you doing on a Monday? Are you Garfield or something other? Oh, no. I’m something other. I’m definitely uh this week I’m much more a fan of one of my favorite uh existential philosophers, Alfred E. Newman. You know “what me worry?” seems to be the answer to this mad world we’re in.

Exactly. Exactly. There are answers and you got to find them where you find them. Again, I keep quoting Julian of Norwich. “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner things shall be well.” It’s going to be okay. And certainly Cyd’s work and mining the Valentinian Tripartite Tractate tells us that.

So uh well where do we start? First we want to look at your new book. We’ll talk about the pleroma but first Children of the Fullness. This is something you’ve been working for on for a long time, right Cyd?

Well, one of my listeners, I also have a podcast– Gnostic Insights– and one of my listeners suggested a children’s book. She’s a young mom, little kids. She goes, “I can’t find any Gnostic children’s books.” And I believe that I have written the first ever Gnostic kiddie book. And it’s ironic because people have this idea–and of course the way a lot of gnosticism is presented, it is very labyrinthian– but they have this idea that gnosis is impossible to achieve or it’s so difficult how can we grasp it? And I have actually simplified it down to uh well the book is  34 pages long but it’s double page spreads like kiddie books are. It’s a big size book and so it’s actually simplified down to only 17 story boards that aged 2 to eight can understand. And really, their parents. I’m thinking they’re the ones that are going to be sapping it up the most—the people that are reading this book to the kids. So, it’s very exciting to be able to produce a book in a cartoon type of way for little ones that’s true.

Brilliant idea. Love it. Love it so much. And what’s was the process? I mean, your process was to even simplify it more while it’s still understandable. The script. Yeah. How did you find an artist? What was the process?

Okay, I’ll tell you the whole thing. First of all, the whole simple thing because I want to mention that to people. I believe in simplicity. Truth is simple. The more excess verbiage you slap on it, generally the further it wanders from the simplicity of truth. And the most profound truths are the simplest. So whenever I write anything, I’m not only thinking of writing to us humans, I think of my dog as if I were trying to teach my dog gnosis. What could that dog understand? Or a flower. What does a flower know of God and the Fullness? And so I simplify all gnosis down to what all of us creation creatures– the second order powers—that we’ll talk about when we talk pleromas– that any second order power can understand. So, to simplify the Gnostic gospel down to a 2 to 8 year-old level is no big deal because it just simplifies it even more clearly.

So what I did was I took the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi– and that is a Valentinian book. Uh it doesn’t have a lot of the extraneous mythologies that most of the other books of the Nag Hammadi have. It’s more of a point A to point Z type of book and a roll out of cosmology. So I just took the Tripartite story of the fall of the Aeon known as Logos. His splitting into two. He flees back up to the Fullness and his egoic self that caused the fall in the first place stays down below and that becomes the god of this universe. The Demiurge. Anyway, I didn’t want to use big words and nonfamiliar gnostic words in the telling of the text. So I don’t use words like Aeons, Fullness, hierarchy, demiurge. I make them words that people are more familiar with because I’m assuming this is going to be a non-gnostic audience that just kind of bumbles across this kids book. I’m hoping. And so I call the Aeons angels to simplify things. And I just call the demiurge the dark twin. And it just goes like that.

I found an artist on Fiverr. You know, the Fiverr app. We know Fiverr because we’re tech people, but most people that I talk to don’t know what Fiverr is. And if you don’t out there who are listening, Fiverr is like Uber, only instead of calling for a car, you’re calling for an artist or a composer or an illustrator of some sort. So, I put a notice on Fiverr that I wanted a children’s book illustrator. And then I looked at all of their samples and I picked a guy, a wonderful guy in Indonesia. And he was very helpful, barely spoke English. But we got the points across and I think he has drawn a beautiful book that completely illustrates the gnosis I was trying to get across.

Awesome. That’s the story. Great job.

And now it’s on Amazon now as an ebook Kindle and as a paperback, but I wanted it in hardback too so that libraries would stock it. So I had to go to a different printer than Amazon because they won’t do an 8” by 8” children’s hardback book. So I had to go to a different printer and now I’m pushing it through– talk about labyrinthian– I’m pushing it through these various types of outlets that librarians use and trying to get it on shelves. That’s the plan.

Awesome. Yeah. Very excited. Yeah, very excited indeed. So I guess the question as uh we move on — would be what is the pleroma? I mean traditionally obviously to geek out uh the Valentinians of course saw Paul’s writings and they thought oh my god it’s full of cryptic symbolism and you know, you know like we do watch a band we see and we read a book and it may be cryptical and we go gaga over it. We all do it. But to the Valentinians, Paul had this amazing secret symbolism. And when they would say, you know, Christ is the Fullness of God incarnate. You know, the pleroma Fullness. And it appears in Ephesians, Colossians, they’re like, what is this? What is this Fullness? It must be the divine realm. And they saw it as, you know, the capacities of God, the mind of God, the potentials. And other Gnostics, the Sethians would call it the eternal realm. and the Manichaeans the treasury of light and so it became, again to simplify, like the hermetics it’s the capacities of the mind of God– the potentials and personhood– god knowing his own aspects and flowing out in this perfect realm until Logos or Sophia had other plans.They were going to disrupt the first kingdom or they were going to rebel. But is that it? Or tell us how you see the pleroma.

Sure, except I don’t think of that. Well, you know, I’m not a historian. I really don’t even like history much. I am a philosopher and I look at the works themselves. So, when I read the Tripartite Tractate, what I see are the truths behind what Paul wrote, not derivative from Paul. I  think that they go side by side. I actually think it should be one of the books of the Bible of the New Testament. And it fits right there between the last book of the Old Testament and the first book of the New Testament. It squeezes into that space as far as time and thoughts go. So what the pleroma means is the Fullness of God. And yes, the Fullness of God is referred to throughout the New Testament especially. But I think when they, when the Nicene Council stripped the Valentinianism out of the New Testament, it took away what it meant.

So actually, and that’s not the only term in the in the New Testament where we’ve lost the actual intent of meaning of Fullness. And it doesn’t just mean, oh, God is great. God is full. God is so big and ungraspable. That’s not what Fullness means. The pleroma is the– Okay, so God wanted to be known. It says that throughout the Bible. God, and we’re talking about the God above all gods, by the way. We’re not talking about the God of this world or the God of the Old Testament. We’re talking about the Father. And I believe that when Jesus referred to the Father or when he wanted us to pray “My Father who art in heaven,” or the ethereal plane, he’s talking about the ultimate consciousness, the ground state of everything. But God is illimitable and omnipotent and everywhere and knows everything. There’s no way we can know God. But God wants to be known. God doesn’t want to be up there all alone. So God emanated a monad, a person of himself. And in Christianity, that’s called the Son. It’s simply the emanation or the encapsulation of the otherwise illimitable God. And so the Son is also though the first pleroma. He’s the Fullness. And this moment–  there’s no time in the ethereal plane — but the instant that the Son was emanated from the Father, he split into all of his variables is what we would call it in math or science nowadays. So he wasn’t just a single monad. He was an infinite array. And this is where I differ from a lot of the other gnostics. They think there are is x number of Aeons, but there’s not. It doesn’t make any sense. The Father is infinite. The Son is infinite in his capacity and in his scope. So if you differentiate infinity, well there’s an infinite number of differentiations. And so I think that there are, in the Fullness of God, an infinite number of differentiations.

And at first they were one. They were coexistent with the Son and they had no self-identity at all. So that really didn’t do the Father much good. Yeah, he’s sitting there. The Son and the Father are glorifying each other, but that doesn’t go anywhere. And so they wanted to emanate and that’s how we come into being. But we’re down downstream a bit. So the Fullness that first differentiated didn’t have self-awareness but in their giving glory to the Son and the Father– or the first emanation and the ground state of consciousness if you don’t like the word Son and Father, that is really immaterial what the words are– it’s the concepts that count. Alright, anyway, as soon as the Fullness became self-aware then all those infinities of fullnesses or totalities, made themselves into a hierarchy. And a hierarchy looks like a pyramid just because that’s what a hierarchy looks like. The higher the fewer.

[note to readers—I’m going to stop editing and correcting the AI at this point because I don’t have time today to edit another 29 pages of YouTube AI mistakes. Read on if you care to, or switch to watching the episode on You Tube. BTW, note how many errors remain and, mind you, I’ve already spent an hour making global changes using the Replace function in Word for Windows for all of the words that appeared in the first five pages of transcript. This is why Aeon is spelled right and gnostic and pleroma, etc etc etc.]

Can we put up the little slide? Oh, I’m I’m looking at a picture of a pyramid down here on your on your desk.

Yeah. Let me put it up for the audience. Where is Here you go. There you go. Okay. So this is how I conceive of the

original hierarchy of the Fullness of God. And this is supposed to represent an infinity of a Aeons. Aeo ns. And

that’s one of the mistakes that that’s one of the words that’s been lost out of Christianity. When they use the word Aeon

in the New Testament, they translate it as a unit of time, but it isn’t necessarily a unit of time.

It’s just as likely to be a unit of consciousness. And that’s a very exciting concept. So these Aeons are all

conscious self-aware beings who have a place, an identity, a job to do. They’ve

got neighbors on either side. They know where they are, who they belong to, and

what their job is. And they sorted themselves. Hierarchy is not a nasty

word. They they sorted themselves. My feet do not feel less important than my

head. I need my feet just as much as my head. So anyway, so that’s the original

Fullness. Your head’s not exploiting your feet with taxes and saying that’s right. That’s right.

That that comes out of the demiurgic imitation of these things. So here we have a picture of the

original hierarchy of the Aeons of God or the Fullness of God. And this is

encapsulating the entire entirety of the Son of God. And then right up there on

the very top is a fractal of the Fullness of God in the Tripartite

trackct date. The Aeon who is the top Aeon, the last Aeon to be produced, the

most perfect and complete. He had miniatures of all the other Aeons of the

Fullness of God within his own pleroma. So you’re seeing a pleroma of and in in

our Tripartite tractate reading of the gnostic gospel that is called Logos.

That top the capstone of the pyramid is Logos and that’s his fractal pleroma

sitting on top of the great pleroma of the Fullness of God. So those are called

the first order of powers

and everything. Everything is well until it wasn’t. Right.

That’s right. That’s right. All is good. And they’re in complete harmony even though they have identities which means

they have egos. And ego isn’t necessarily a bad name. It’s just your identity. It’s like an address in a

name. It doesn’t have to mean I’m an Aeon with a name and I’m full of myself. No, it’s

just I’m this Aeon and I sit right about in the middle and I’ve got these neighbors and this is my job. That’s all

it meant. So, uh so that’s that’s the

first order of powers. All right. And then well then as they

say what went wrong? I mean we’re talking about the definition of nostism which is outdated because Hans Jonas

assumed there had to be a Sophia. This is pre- Nagamadari library but as we can see

Sophia isn’t the cause of the fall in this one in this no Logos is the cause of the fall but

Logos means all knowledge all knowledge and logic thinking the ability to have wisdom

and Sophia means wisdom they’re both Greek words so I believe that they are interchangeable concepts they are the

Aeon with the wisdom who is elevated to the top position and of

This came down in a fractured form into Christianity as Lucifer, the angel of

light who’s sitting at the top who falls. So, Logos because in my way of

interpreting events and I’m the one that’s calling Logos his pleroma as fractals because it says

in the uh Tripartite trackct date that Logos did contain

all of the others within him only smaller lesser

but he was given wisdom and of course has free will because all Aeons have free will because everything that proceeds

from the originating consciousness has free will and we are all from the

originating consciousness. So we have all of the attributes of the Father. We have love, we have

consciousness, we have free will, we have entity

and uh Logos made a mistake. He was trying to do a good thing in the

uh in the in the Tripartite track day. It’s it’s it’s the only book I believe

of the Nag Hammadi that says ah you know don’t condemn the Aeon who fell because

he his fall was necessary to bring about the next order to come. So apparently

it was in the Aeons’s minds. They’re sitting there dreaming of this place,

this creation. They they conceived of everything that would ever come to be because they are after all the mind of

God. Mhm. And so he’s a fractal of that and he thought of it too, but he didn’t realize

he was supposed to stick on top of the pleroma and just be like the the head of

it. He thought he could do it all by himself. So he overreached. He tried to bring the Fullness to the Father and

plug directly back into the Father the way the Son does because the Son still plugs into the Father but everybody else

is further away because if we were to pl if you and I were trying to plug back

into the Father we would be annihilated is the word used in the Tripartite

tractate so it’s not a good idea he tried to plug in the Father said no you will be annihilated push him back out

And instead of going back to his place in the Fullness, he fell. And it is that

is the fall. Not Adam and Eve. The fall is when the Aeon fell from the ethereal

plane out into what? Nothingness. And now that becomes our material

universe, the cosmos. Exactly. And then so of course now we we

have the rescue operation. Yes. The rest of your operation of little Logos. Poor little Logos.

That’s right. Logos is out. He’s He fell. He cracked open like uh

Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty. That’s right. And um his pleroma was no longer in that neat and

tidy hierarchical arrangement and it just spilled out all over the place and

it wouldn’t obey him. Logos is trying down there saying, “Come on back. What are you doing? Where you going?” And

they just go, “Ah, screw you.” And they just went rolling on their merry way. And he couldn’t get them back. And he

was horrified. Logos was horrified. And so children, children, this is

so he actually abandoned them. He he couldn’t get anything done. So because the rescue operation was initiated

though by the Fullness of God, they pulled him back up. He didn’t get back up on his own. The Fullness prayed for

him and Logos went back up. And then

altogether Logos and the Plleoma prayed for salvation for the mess that had been

come into existence down below and for the ego of Logos which stayed down below

uh which has been given the name the Demiurge. And they want to save the

Demiurge because he’s part of Logos. He needs to be reunited. And so that’s the

rescue operation. Clean up this material mess and bring the Demiurge back up

high. And then everything that came of that except the shadows and the

imitations that didn’t exist from the beginning, but everything from the beh everything from the beginning will go

back up into the ethereal plane. Mhm. No, makes sense. And then but uh we

humans are this as you say or as the tripart tract is said we’re the second

order powers. We’re different. Okay. Right. Yes. The the next pleroma

the second economy it’s called. The first economy is that first plurle

of the Aeons and Logos. The second economy is down here now in the material

cosmos. And we living creatures with consciousness,

with love, and with the power of the Fullness. We were fruited like a like a

slime mold. We were fruited down here into this otherwise completely dead

creation down below because the split off ego of Logos that stayed down below

the demiurge has no power from God. It doesn’t have the consciousness or the

direct flow. It’s a flow of consciousness directly from the Father through the Son through the hierarchy of

the Fullness that being the uh first order of powers and then we were fruited down here and

we’re the second order of powers. Every living thing, everything that is germinated and grows.

The demiurge can’t grow anything. All he can do is put broken things together and we call that matter. We call that

material. Sounds like my ego in relationships. Well, we are Good point though. We’re

fractals of the whole fall. We’re fract Everything’s fractally nested. It’s all

fractals. So everything we say about Logos and the demiurge, Logos and his

fallen twin happens to us too because we as children of God, we have the Fullness

inside of us. there. Our little oam and our little sperm have the Fullness of

God and they get together and we are now channeling the Fullness of God and the

love and consciousness. So we have the Fullness of God. We’re born with remembrance. We’re called those of the

good thought, those of the remembrance. Whereas matter has no remembrance. It is

not of the good thought. It was of an egoic overreach.

So yeah, we can identify the Logos and the demiurge because they are parts of

us. Matter of fact, we second order powers. Although we came with the purity of the

first order powers within us, that’s our big S self. I call it not our big ass

self, but our big S self. Uh uh that’s our, you know, our our

golden self inside. That is the god inside of us. But we are melded to this

material world when we come in. Obviously that little spark of life. You

do you know that when a have you heard this Miguel that when a sperm fertilizes an OAM a spark of a photon of light is

emitted? I have. Yes. That’s that’s really a fascinating thought, isn’t it? Yeah. So, so we’ve got this uh uh life

and light inside of us, but then we’re slapped onto these molecules as we grow

upward with our molecular bodies. And so, we are part Demiurge and we are

part uh Fullness of God. And that’s that good angel bad angel business and why we

reach down instead of looking up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, interesting

comment. I just my questions are are we saved by his blood sacrifice on the cross or is that a demonic lie? So,

tripart track. Who is Jesus? Who’s big J? All right, I’ve got this phone. Jesus.

This darn phone. Okay. Jesus is the second order embodiment

of Christ. Christ and Jesus are not

ex they Jesus embodies Christ. Jesus is the only second order power to ever

fully embody Christ. So he was born that’s why the whole bit about uh part

God part man Jesus.

The blood I always wondered about the blood. I mean that that’s been one of the things I have contemplated all of my

life as I’ve walked with Jesus and I have walked with Jesus since I was about 5 years old. So I’m walking with the

man. I am a Christian. I am baptized. I am dipped in the Missouri River,

talking tongues, all of that kind of stuff. So um

Oh, now the other phone’s talking. I can’t hear it. It must be on your It must be on your side cuz I get

Man, I thought I muted it. I only muted the ringer as it turns out, but the voice is still yapping back there. I’m a

little ADHD, so I get distracted easily. Sorry about that. So, no. Uh, here’s

what the blood of Christ is. The blood of Christ is the complete embodiment of

the purity and Fullness of Christ. It is the bringing of Christ into this fallen

world. The blood dripping on the earth of this fallen world is part of the

redemption of the Demiurge. I think of Christ

apart from Jesus. I mean I love Jesus. I walk with Jesus. Jesus is my man.

However, Christ is still up in the ethereal plane. He’s called the third order of powers. He has a pleroma of his

own and it’s called the third order of powers and it outranks a second order of powers. And the third order of powers is

all of the mojo of the ethereal plane. It’s not just Logos and the Fullness praying for the redemption of the left

behind half of Logos, but it’s the complete Fullness of God and the Son of

God and the Father giving blessing to

redemption. And so the Christ embodies all of the power of the originating

consciousness. And he is what you could say the correcting algorithm

for the fall. And the correcting algorithm is needed because if you look

at it in a musical sense the pure tone of consciousness is one thing but when

it fell it got out of tune and we’re down here rolling around in

this disharmonic state. So the Christ is the hum of the Father and when Jesus

came he brought that hum with him and the blood of Jesus on the ground is not

a heresy I don’t think. Did that answer that question do you think? I think it does. No it makes perfect

sense. And for everybody else if you do have questions might not be able to get to it. Please super chat them so Graham

or I can get to them. And uh yeah uh really not much housekeeping. You want

to take a look at the children’s uh at the Children of the Fullness or show some of the other slides before cuz

Children of the Fullness of course we’ll simplify it in a podcast. Yes. But hey um housekeeping for a

moment. Since my stupid telephone over there answered and the person left a message, it’s going to go beep beep

every so often and everybody’s going to hear it. Don’t worry about it. If you Okay, if if you hear it, I’ll go and uh

you know throw the phone. Can you hear it? I don’t hear I didn’t even hear the phone ring.

Okay, good. Every I was going to say I heard it vaguely one time, but I haven’t heard it in a while.

You must have some noiseancelling stuff on your computer or something. Beep.

Okay. All right. What’s the question? You might be like the telltale heart or something. It

It is. It is. And it’s so annoying because I tell you what, 99% of the

phone calls I get are junk. They’re trying to sell me something. Of course,

they’re all trying to or they’re politicians trying to get me to contribute. God,

I can’t get them to stop. Stop. Yeah. Yeah. Welcome to this world of uh

Yeah. Too much technology, too much information. And I was going to ask do you want to uh jump on the children of

the Fullness or sure let’s do that because this will uh it’s quite a journey and for the audience uh please

check out our interview last year late 2024 if you want a more expanded uh view

of a simple uh explanation of the Gnostic gospel. But let’s pull up the uh

there you go. That’s not the one. Remove. There you go. There it is.

Okay. And just let me know when you want to switch the slide. Children of the Fullness, an ostic myth by Cyd Rob.

There we go. And you see, I depicted the Aeons as angels. And by the way, some

Aeons are angels, but not all Aeons are angels. But all angels are Aeons. How’s that for

a logical? But anyway, so yeah. Uh so but but for

the sake of it being a children’s book, these are these are the aonic families

having babies. And you know, I think I will not only look at the children’s book, but when we’re on each page, I’m

going to maybe explain briefly the depth behind that part of it too, right?

Sure. Of course. Okay. So let’s turn the page because we’ll turn the pages. Bob Seager saying,

“All right, so this is the first double page spread in the book. Long ago, in

the dark, empty sky, Father God dreamed of everything that would come to be. The

Father gave birth to a Son who shared with him all of his love and power.

And the Son brought forth angels to help him build the paradise his Father had imagined.” Now, I know a lot of people

don’t like the words Father and Son. Once again, don’t get hung up on labels.

It’s the concept that matters. So, you can call it the source. You can call it the base state or the base matrix of

consciousness. You can call the Son the emanation of the Father. I like to call

the Son the bucket dipped into the sea, but you won’t find that in anybody else’s uh uh gospel. So, uh the the

Father god dreamed of everything that would come to be. That’s because he’s omnipotent and and and knows everything,

right? So, the Son brought forth angels to help him build the paradise his Father had

imagined. And that is my way of simplifying this for a children’s book.

That’s what we talked about. This is going to be the first pleroma, the all the totalities of the all. And

they’re still all up in the ethereal plane. Okay. Turn. Okay. turn.

The angels gave glory to the Father and sang songs about his great power, love, and sweetness. Now, the the a the Aeons

that is their primary job is to commune with the Father and they like to give glory. And I I’ve often thought, you

know, sometimes it seems when you’re in church that the Father is like needy and

weedling for praise and glory. Oh, please. I want your praise. Worship me,

please. That isn’t what glory is. Glory is getting in tune with the originating

consciousness. It’s being in tune. And the way you get in tune is to give

glory. It’s not for the Father’s sake. It’s for our sake. It’s the way we uh

get in tune, I guess, is the thing you can say. And plus giving glory. It’s like when you’re at a let’s say you’re

at a concert. Let’s say you’re at a rock concert and somebody’s just done a great song and everybody screaming and going

yeah at the end. They love that’s giving glory. And it’s that feeling of wanting

to give glory that the that the Aeons do or that the angels do. It’s inherent

that if you were in the presence of God, there is nothing more that you would want to do than to applaud and go right

on. That’s it. So that’s what giving glory does.

And so the angels gave glory to the Father and sang songs about his sweetness, love, and power. And it is

through the process of giving glory to the Father in company with all the other Aeons.

So there’s an innumerable number of Aeons in that hierarchy of the Fullness of God. And they give glory together. They

give glory with their neighbors. They might give glory by themselves. They might all give glory together, but it’s

this sort of logarithmic expansion of ways you can give glory that create new

and more and more and more Aeons. So, it already started out as a huge thing. It was already the Fullness of God. But now

the angels are loving each other, the Father and the Son. They make angel families because they have so much love

to share because they’re combining. You see what I mean? Does that make sense?

Okay. And of course, every Aeon and in the book it’s called every angel had special talents and abilities and

together they dreamed of the Father’s paradise. So every Aeon is a variable of the Son.

Every Aeon has a unique talent and every combination of Aeons has a combination of

unique talents. So there might be an Aeon that like specializes in singing. There

might be a neon that specializes in art and guitar. Everything that we know, all of the talents that come down to us,

math, creativity, art, music. I play this instrument, you play that. They all

have Aeons. They all have Aeons in the Fullness of God. And we are their children. So each

of us people and and of course it’s true of every every living thing from the flowers and the bugs up through the

animals and us we are each a unique combination

of this combinatory quality that Aeons do. You know I don’t

know how many Aeons I’m a combination of. I know we’ve got like 50 trillion cells in our body. So we’re at least 50

trillion Aeons in us. But there’s also unique combinations. So that’s why my

primary talent is probably from Aeons who like to write and talk and sing. But

somebody else’s primary talent, they didn’t have so much of those guys, but they’ve got more of the visual arts

or more of the mathematical or the scientific logistical prowess. So you

were all unique combinations of this infinite pleroma of the first order of

powers. We are the second order of powers that are combinations of them. And so I’m saying uh angel families.

We’re part of the angel babies. And then we are sent down. You can turn.

And then you’re we’re sent down into uh this Fullness. Now, my version in the

children’s book of Logos sitting on the top with his fractals is this guy down

here. There’s little Logos with his halo, and he’s making a fractal copy.

He’s making a model of the ethereal plane. It’s just a uh, you know, a

representation of him being able to recreate the Fullness of God because

obviously that’s just a little baby model right there. But I I’m very proud of my um my illustrator who was able to

take that idea and do that. I think he did a great job of showing that that’s Logos and his fractal model of paradise.

And so reading it, it says the final angel born was very special because he knew the whole plan of paradise. His

name was Logos. Logos decided to build paradise all on his own without the other angels. He

wanted to surprise the Father with his gift of paradise. And of course, that’s what he was trying to do when he when he

fell. He was trying to bring paradise. Look, look what I built to the Father.

But that wasn’t the plan. And he shouldn’t have tried to plug back into the Father with it. And that’s why he

was repelled and fell back.

Next. So here’s Logos on the left page.

bringing his model of paradise up to the Father who was standing up on that cliff. Uh but when he tried to bring the

Father his gift, he fell all the way out of heaven.

There he goes. And Logos crashed into the darkness and broke apart and now he

was split in two. And you see on the far right there’s Logos going, “Oh my head.”

And that’s the uh that’s uh the demiurge crawling out from behind him. And you

see he’s not seeing that the demiurge is crawling out. He because he’s looking

the other way and he’s oh my head. But and the deurge isn’t really looking at him either. So neither of them realizes

what’s gone on there. All right, we can turn.

Okay. Logo was horrified and that’s a direct quote from the from the Tripartite

trackct date horrified by his shadow twin and broken paradise and he flew

back up to heaven. Now, I’m not making the story up, mind you. This is directly out of the Tripartite Tractate. And in

my big book, my big book,

there it is. This explains all of this in exquisite detail, I would say. Wouldn’t you,

Miguel? Yes. Yes. And as narrated by Miguel Connor. Yes.

You leave no Monad unturned. I do. I do not. We We tell the whole thing. They explain the whole thing. You

only have to want to understand. Now, by the way, I’ve given that book and I’ve

even given the children’s book now to many people and they’re like, I don’t

get it. I just don’t get it. I don’t see how you cannot get this children’s story for heaven’s sake. Here it is. You have

to have eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to want to

understand. So this is what it means by saying that we must seek after the

gnosis. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. I have done my

best to simplify the gnostic gospel all the way down so that anybody of any

education level. You don’t have to be a philosopher can understand it. You just have to have

an open mind and keep turning the page and it will make sense. It all falls into place. And here it is for two to

eight year olds. So come on, really? Anyway, Logos was horrified. He flew

back up to heaven because uh as we already mentioned, because the Plleoma

of the First Order of Powers was praying over the fall, and they were trying to make it better. So, first thing they did

was pull Logos back up. And there he is flying away, looking over his shoulder.

See, he’s looking back over his shoulder in horror. And there’s the Demiurge sitting there in this muddy broken place

and there’s nothing there. It’s all darkness. And then on the second page, the twin, I

don’t use the word demiurge because I’m trying to keep small words in the book. The twin forgot all about Logos and the

angels and the Father above. In fact, he thought he was God.

And innosticism, that’s another word for the Demiurge. What is it? the ignorant

god or the amnesic god. He doesn’t remember where he came from

because the knowing part of him beat it back up to the first order of powers. So

he was sadly abandoned down here in this mess. And you see the broken the broken

uh model of paradise which is simply a representation of the broken pleroma of

Logos. So it was fractals to begin with and then it broke apart.

So it wasn’t that paradise fell, it’s a fractal of

paradise. And I we’re just going to take it. You all know what fractal means by

now. If you don’t know what a fractal is, go back to one of our previous interviews, or go to um Gnostic

Insights, which is my podcast, and you can look it up. All there. It’s all there. Yeah. And

this obviously wonder where Jung got some of his ideas. It’s right here. Any Oh, yeah.

Shadow ego. It’s all here. Oh, well, you know that Jung purchased the Tripartite tract. That was the book

that Jung owned out of this otherwise untransated Egyptian codeex that was

found in the desert in 1945. And he had it translated directly from uh Coptic

Greek into German. And this is exactly where Jung

came up with his transpersonal psychology. It is tripartiteism.

There you go. There you go. For sure. All right, slide seven. So,

what’s going on here? Well, shadow god. The shadow god down below. And uh it’s

all darkness and ugly. You see, it’s matter. It’s material. There’s no life.

It’s just atoms and molecules and aggrids. It’s aggregates of minerals,

elements. And up above there’s Logos looking back down at his severed.

That’s part of him. Right? So he has been ripped apart. He is not whole. So his self is not his self. His

his good self, his one is up there in the clouds. It’s like uh Peter Pan looking for a

shadow. Right. That’s it. That Well, hey, now where did that author get that? Yeah. I wonder where he got that from.

No doubt. He must have been reading Jung at that point in time. The patient like and others.

That’s right. That’s right. So um as the book says, the shadow god tried building

the paradise Logos had imagined. But his creation lacked love and life because

you see he’s not a direct descendant of the Fullness like Logos’s self is. He’s

separated from that. So he doesn’t have the life of the Fullness of God. There

were no flowers or animals, only mud, water, and rocks. He could not make his

creations come to life. And there is a portion of a myth that made it into the Bible.

It I I clearly recall somewhere

God kneeling on the riverbank making a mud model of Adam. Isn’t that how Adam

was made out of the mud of the riverbank? And then his uh other gods

were standing around with them i.e. archons and they couldn’t get the damn

thing to come to life. Well, that’s because that god of that Old Testament

myth is the Demiurge and he could not bring life. He he made all these little models of rabbits and flowers and but he

couldn’t get them to come to life because he didn’t contain the life of the Father.

So, they just stayed dead down there. Next.

So, Logos and his friends, i.e. the first pleroma of the Fullness of God,

Logos and his friends decided to help out by sending angel babies down to

earth from the smallest to the largest. And that’s another cool thing about the Tripartite. It it it says from the

smallest to the largest all creatures came to earth which is like what

evolution thinks but we didn’t evolve from the smallest

to the largest. We were already precreated. This is a form of uh

intelligent design. We were precreated in the ethereal plane. We are the fruit

of the Fullness of God. And they had the whole plan of everything from the

beginning. See, so it’s not like uh these molecules had to get together and

uh have this certain kind of amino acids in the in the primordial soup and then

oh look there’s an there’s a single-sellled organism and then they get together and oh look there’s a an

amoeba and then it it doesn’t work like that. They come in already from the

smallest to the largest, but in order in the order of their coming. And it it

says all of this in the Tripartite tract date, which is 2,000 years old. And I

think that is pretty astounding. Um, so from the smallest to the largest,

they came down. And that that’s our little version of the angels throwing down all the living creatures. In this

way, Earth came alive with living plants and creatures. So, it’s not from the mud

up. It’s not from the Demiurge up or the primordial soup up. It’s from the

Fullness directly sending the living patterns of the creatures down.

Does that make sense? Mhm. That does. And there they come. Okay. Next.

All creatures were born with the memory of their angel parents and the Father in heaven. They loved everything and

everybody. They joined with others and made forests and meadows, families and

towns. And you see, since I think of the second order powers not only as us

humans, we we have too much focus on us. It’s all of the creatures. It’s all of

the animals. It’s all of the grasses and flowers and trees. They all know God. They all are

um unique combinatory results of various

Aeons of the Fullness of God. And so they joined with others and made forests and

meadows. It’s like what? We didn’t put together forest and meadows. No, the grasses joined with grasses and made

lawns. The forest joined with the trees joined with trees and made forests and

meadows. See, everything wants to go together. Everything is part

of that simple, you know, we haven’t talked about the uh simple explanation of the golden rule. That’s not part of

this talk. But that’s one of our uh it’s one of the attributes of God. It’s one

of the attributes of the original in the first pleroma is everybody works

together for the benefit of everyone. That’s the go that’s the real golden

rule. It’s not well I’ll do to you if you’ll do to me which is a quidd proquo

kind of bargain. That shouldn’t be the golden rule. The golden rule is no matter if I know you or not. No matter

if you love me or not, I will work with you so that we can make things better.

So that we can bring things together with the power of love. Because only

love can build. Hatred cannot make things better. She said to the people

today, hatred, nothing good comes from hatred. You can’t do it. It’s

antithetical. It’s the wrong category.

Only love from the Fullness above can spread love and only love can make

things better. And that is the golden rule. So that is why in this drawing we’re all born. Oh, we’re also called

the second order powers. Not just the people, but the grasses and the bees,

everything. Certainly the dogs and cats and horses. Everything comes with a

memory of the Fullness of God because that is where we come from. We aren’t evolved out of the mud. We aren’t

evolved out of single-sellled animals that happen to go to together out of

certain combinations of molecules. We are from above and we come in with the

life and the memory. So we are called those of the remembrance. All second

order powers are those of the remembrance. And so I like to think when I’m when I’m walking in the forest and

the trees are like, you know how they all try to find spots of light in a crowd of forest? They’ll lean this way

so they can catch that beam of light. You know what they’re doing? They’re reaching to God.

All of the green things that grow up are reaching upward to the Fullness. And I

use the word God and the Fullness of God interchangeably because we can’t understand the Father.

That is illimitable and nonunderstandable consciousness.

Hence the monad that came from the Father because we can understand the

bucket dipped into the sea. And then even more than that, we can understand the Aeons because they’re all the parts

of the Son and we are ionic. We are the children of the Aeons.

Okay. So they came down with love and everybody’s in love and they all joined together. But oh no. Oh no.

Then a terrible thing happened. The children forgot their job was to spread

love. They started fighting a neverending war. And again, this is

right out of the Tripartite Tractate. It’s called the never-ending war. And it

didn’t start with us fighting each other or with uh Republicans and Democrats or progressives and uh stick in the muds or

whatever you want to make the two sides. It came from matter.

The the fall of the Demiurge creating the mud which is a fallen version of

paradise. See the ethereal plane. You can do everything up there we imagine

paradise to be. And all all um cultures of the world have pretty

much the same vision of paradise. Everybody expects their family to be there. They expect it to be a good

loving place. They all want to go and be reunited. It’s all going to be so much better. No more pain, no more suffering,

no more anguish. So that’s paradise. That is where we came from. That’s why

we expect it because we are those of the remembrance. You see, we’re not making it up. We’re remembering it down.

So the neverending war is our remembrance of this ethereal plane.

Well, how come we’re down here in pain and disappointment and death and and

sadness in the mud? It’s because the mud is our material universe and we can’t

see through the mud. You up in paradise, you can see forever. I can see for miles

and miles as the who said, but down here you can only see what’s in front of you,

right? And that’s the fall. That’s the nature of the demiurge. He can only build

things molecularly. So that’s the beginning of the never- ending war. It’s the very fight we have

to stay alive with the material body. Entropy. Entropy

we could say is our enemy. Maybe entropy should be a nickname for the demiurge.

That’s a good one. I like that. I just came up with that. I like it.

Yeah. So because of the never- ending war, everyone thought they were more

important than others. Now each person wanted to be admired. They had no time

to be kind or to help their neighbors because they were taking so many selfies and posting them online cuz they’re so

cute. Look what I have. Look at me. Aren’t I pretty? Aren’t I strong?

So that is part of the never- ending war because there is no oneupmanship

in the in the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. Everyone’s got a different name, a different ego, a different job,

but everybody’s just as important as everybody else. And it’s just like in our body, you know, our our as an

analogy, and it’s not only an analogy, the pleroma of my my body is a pleroma. Your

body is a plumboma, right? It is a pleroma that consists of cells and organs and organ systems,

skin, heart, lungs, and they’re all just as important as any of the others

because as we all know, once one of those systems goes out, you probably only have days or hours to live or

minutes, right? So that’s what death is. It’s when uh cooperation

um within our pleroma fails. And by the way, cancer I think of as an

aronic attack. Cancer is trying to displace the life of the cells with

death. So that’s part of the and then it the more it takes over the more you are

dead. So anyway, society, when we all think we’re more important and want to be admired and we don’t have time for

other people, that is a breakdown of the golden rule, and it perpetuates the

sadness. Next, next. Here we go.

People grew sad and lonely. They thought they could buy happiness with lots of

toys and tasty food. And of course, it’s a kids book, so I’m emphasizing toys and

food. But hey, grown-ups have their toys, too. Right. So, we’re looking in this window of this apartment building

and and there’s all the people playing with their toys and eating their tasty foods and sitting on the couch playing

video games and standing in front of the mirror taking selfies and working out. Working out. Look at

me. Aren’t I strong? So, uh that doesn’t bring happiness. None of that. None of the things you see

in this window can bring happiness because they are not fulfilling the actual desire of our heart. And the

desire of our heart is to be one with the Fullness of God is to remember our

parents in heaven. So Logos and the angels prayed to the Father and Son to

send help to the world to remind everyone of love and their home in heaven because they don’t want us being

sad. Yep. Yep.

Now, now here’s where a lot of I think perhaps non-Christian gnostics get

turned off. They don’t like the idea of Jesus. They don’t like the idea of Christ. And by the same token, here’s

where the Christians get turned off. They don’t like the idea of Logos or the

fall or the Demiurge. And so we’re we have a neverending war within the gnosis

as well, don’t we? The factions ofnosticism. And I wish people would just understand

language is a it’s a second best lang this linear language that we speak,

these words coming out of my mouth one at a time. This is a uh very reduced and

limited form of communication in the Fullness in the ethereal plane or the in

between space whatever you want to call that place communication is globalized it’s

instantaneous it’s like thought bubbles now by the way Miguel I never mentioned

this to you before in any of our previous interviews but I’ve had such an experience here in this lifetime

when I first felt fell in love, deeply in love with my late husband. And we

were we were lying in bed one morning. And so we were and new love, you know,

that new fresh, oh my god, I’m so in love kind of thing. So we’re lying there totally in love,

just feeling love and the birds are singing outside and everything’s sweet. And the cat was drawn by the love. And

she had already proven the night before that she loved love because he had a

convertible. He had a Mustang convertible and we were sitting in his in in the front seat of his Mustang with

the top up um loving each other. Not having sex,

just loving each other. And uh the cat jumped up on the soft top and she was

lying right above us. You could see the bulge in the in the convertible top and

the purr. Her purr was floating down on us. It was a manifestation of love. And the

only reason she was there is because we were down here loving each other. And she was up there loving us and raining

down upon us with furs. Well, the very next morning, the first morning of love,

we’re lying there and the cat came in and she wanted to be with us. We were lying next to each other in the bed and

she laid across the two of us. So she like joined our uh thighs. She was lying

across our thighs. She joined our thighs together with her big cat body. And then this is really weird. And there

was no there were no drugs involved. This was first thing in the morning. These thought bubbles like soap bubbles.

Imagine a big soap bubble about the size of a basketball

floating out of her. She floated this gigantic soap bubble right out of her

head above us. And within the soap bubble, instantaneously with no words,

it said, “I love tuna fish. This cat loves me some tuna fish.” That’s what

she thought bubbled to us. Because you know, cats, what do they say? And so then I thought, well, that’s

pretty extraordinary. And so I floated a thought back to her. Yeah, tuna fish is good. And she got it. And so she and I

were floating these and they weren’t words. They were soap bubbles of a

thought about how much cats love tuna fish. Wow. Okay. So then about, you know, this all

went on for a long time and then she floated another soap bubble about love.

Isn’t love my isn’t love grand? I’m so glad there is love. That was her second

one. First was tuna. Second was love. And then then I started floating thoughts about love back at her.

And then we had all these soap bubbles floating above us. And then when she jumped off,

it’s like it’s it’s morning. Time to get up. And I said to Gary,

“Yo,” because there had been no words spoken all this time. And I and I turned to him for the first time and said,

“Well, then did what I just saw happen,

did you experience what I just experienced?” And he said, “Yeah,

thought bubbles about tuna.” So, it was like, it was pretty cool. It was very

exciting. Very cool. Anyway, and that has always stayed with me. So that concept that in heaven I communication is more or less

global and instantaneous. Uh that’s that mind readading sometimes people talk about in um you know near-death

experiences. Now I got off on that. I totally forgot where we were and what we were talking

about. Oh, that this is a limited form of communication. So don’t get hung up on words like uh Father and Son or

Jesus Christ savior. These are the words we use to express these otherwise global

bubbles of thought. That’s all I’m saying. And when you and and I’m saying

that because I’ve had people who try to start reading my books and they go, “Ah,

the vocabulary I don’t get it. I just, oh, these are new words. These are new. I I just don’t I don’t like the word

Father and Son. That’s so sucks. And it’s like, get off it. Get off it. That isn’t the point of any of it.

It’s our limited vocabulary. So, this uh double page spread. I eliminated the

word Christ and Jesus Christ because I didn’t want the Gnostics just to throw

down the book and go, “Ah, this is a bunch of Christian clap trap.” So I used the word prince of peace which seems to

me ought to be a nice neutral term. The prince of peace came to earth with

all of the power and love of the Father and Son. That’s scriptural from the

Tripartite trackct tape. He was called savior because he came to save everyone

and beloved because heaven and earth love him so much. And all these little

people here on the right side, those are the people that we were seeing in the previous page looking through that apartment window and they were all sad

and unhappy doing the things they were doing. And now the savior is embracing

everyone and he loves them and they love him and they’re happy. Now

next okay.

When everyone remembers the love of the Fullness and accepts the prince of peace, the twin of Logos will remember

too. Logos will become whole again. And see

there’s Logos up there at the top of the page waving at the demiurge. Hey, here

we are. See us. Do you remember us now? and and the the ego of Logos, i.e. the

Demiurge or what was the name we just came up for him? Uh entropy.

Oh yeah. Or also known as entropy.

He’s got a little tear in his eye because now he’s not alone anymore. He He’s not alone down here. And when when

I got this uh this artwork back from the artist,

I got all tearary because he was crying and it just I got all choked up. So of

course that is my hope for the readers that they will somehow get choked up when they this page

integration Logos and the shadow the demiurge. Yes.

Okay. And then on that day, and here we are in the third economy, the final economy,

what we call heaven. On that day, this fallen imitation

will become true paradise. Everyone who has ever lived will live

forever with their family and friends and the Fullness of the Father, Son, and

the Prince of Peace. There will be no more tears, only joy and love.

And there it is. See, in innosticism, this creation of the Demiurge,

this world that has been con constructed down here. It’s a knockoff. It’s called

the deficiency. It’s called the imitation. And what it is an imitation of is paradise. What it is deficient in

is life, love, and consciousness and the complete remembrance of the Father and

the Fullness and the Son. And so that’s what that

beloved savior brings to us. It’s the correction. It’s the true tone for our

souls. Now, here is a heresy. Well, okay. The first heresy that went by is

that the creator of our cosmos, the creator of the heavens and the earth, is

not God Almighty, but Lucifer, basically. And that, oh my gosh, what a

horrid thing to say. But the second, the next heresy

is that everyone’s going to heaven. Oh, that’s a not everyone’s going to heaven. Those bad people should all go to hell.

Go to hell, you. No. You see why? Because that’s not loving. That is not

the nature of the Father. The Father is all loving. And get this, in this

gnostic Christianity, we are the children of paradise. We are literally

we have we have our parental units here on earth, mom and dad. But we also have

our aonic parents, the ones that gave us our particular talents.

So we get our looks from mom and dad probably. mo for the most part, but we get our talent from the Fullness of God.

And so, um, this is that I I I I really I really

zeroed in on that concept and I can’t even remember how I began that sentence. I don’t know what I was talking about.

Ha. Oh, that everybody’s going to heaven. Oh, the second heresy, the big heresy is

that uh Yes. So Christ is Christ. You don’t have to worry about that Christians who may be watching this. And

Jesus is the incorporation of Christ. Jesus Christ savior. Good. On board with

that. See that’s Valentinian Christian Christianity which I count myself as

well not necessarily Valentinian but agnostic Christian.

And because we come here here was the point. I’m back on the train now. And because we come from the Fullness,

we have to return to the Fullness because why? Otherwise, it wouldn’t be full anymore. They are the Fullness of

God. We are from the Fullness. We all have to return to the Fullness or it

would be less than full. You see, isn’t that cool?

So, uh, God is all loving. And by the way, in the New Testament, it says over

and over again that Christ came to save everyone.

There were no quido pros, which means you did this for me, I’ll do

that for you. I’ll tell you what, if you bend your knee and say, Jesus, you are my Lord, I’ll let you go to heaven. That

is the wrong attitude. That isn’t why Christ came. He came with the correction

for us because we are forgetful and fighting a neverending war with the demi

urge and with this material space that we find ourselves in.

But we’re going back home because that’s home. This isn’t our home. And that’s

another thing it says in the in the Bible that we are sojourers passing through this world, right?

Lord, oh Lord, I have no home but you. If Jesus ain’t my home, then Lord, what

would I do? That is all true. And that is true for Gnostics as well. So

everyone will come back home because we are descendants of the Fullness of God.

So it’s not only the humans, but it’s every living thing. It’s all the grasses, everything you see in this

double page spread here, this picture of paradise. They were all down below and they’re all back up again. This is the

third economy. This is the ethereal plane integrated with the now redeemed

material plane where we have found ourselves stuck. So we are going home to

our aonic parents and we will live in paradise and be happy ever more. And by

the way, if it doesn’t happen before you die, it will certainly happen

as soon as you die. I don’t think you’re written out and thrown into the burning lake of fire forever uh to be tortured

by demons. That isn’t the nature of God. You see, God is love. And God wants us

all to come home. He doesn’t want to throw anyone away. And so, we will turn. But you have to turn. You have to want

to go home. Sometimes it seems down here in this world that people want to be bad

or people want to go to hell and bring others down with them. I’ll kill lop off

heads. See, they think they’re sending them to hell by doing so because they think they are the righteous ones and

the ones who lose their heads must be the sinners or they wouldn’t have died.

That’s all demiurgic. That’s all demonic. That isn’t the way it really works. It’s a lie. It’s the deficiency.

It’s an aronic lie. Tada. The end.

And there you go. I have it on the show notes, but definitely check out Children of the Fullness. It is uh Yeah, it’s I

love the artwork and the message. Yeah, it uh and you see it’s free on Kindle. If

you’ve got a Kindle, it’s zero dollars or or $3.99 if you don’t have a Kindle

unlimited thing and also only $9.99 in paperback. And I am, as I said, trying to release it,

trying I’m I’m make working my way through the very very difficult process of being a self-publisher. The hardback

will be available in libraries and bookstores at some point in time.

Please, please pray for that to occur. and leave reviews. I need reviews

because apparently reviews are really important in the world of Amazon. By the

way, by the way, Miguel, I don’t know if this happens to you with your books, but the AI keeps crawling out. The AI

archons are crawling out of the woodworks after me and my books. It’s so

clear that it’s AI written and they keep wanting to promote me and promote my books and I’m going to take everything

uh you know I’m going to make you famous and I’m going to do this and that and it’s all aronic. I can just see right

through it. Oh, they go look just pay me $20 a a review and I’ll get you as many

reviews. $20 a review. I could hire the AI myself and have a thousand reviews

written for nothing. So why am I paying you? So it’s horrid. It’s horrible, horrible lies in the name

of godliness and it kills me. It just kills me. Oh yeah. I’ve been reached out by those too and AI.

Yes, of course they are. And they’re not going to Amazon will detect them. They’ll figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. So I need real authentic

reviews. Yeah, for sure. Definitely. Yeah. I

wanted to bring in Graham. Graham, do you What do you think of this? Uh and do you have a question for Cyd? get your

take on this. No, no, I thought she did a lovely job. It was it’s it’s a great one for kids. I

was going to say I have some notes down here is one of those is I’m certainly not going to argue against her about

everything being fractal that just Yeah. What is he? Um

I don’t understand it was double negatives. Was it does he agree? Does that like agreeing everything? Oh, I do. That that’s one of the reasons

I use my uh my image with the with the mandler set. Okay. Gotcha.

And I was going to say as far as the fractal go, Hildigard of Bingan, her

whole metaphysics is very fractal. If you haven’t looked into her, she’s she’s

definitely worth checking out. Okay, good to know.

Filigar. And yeah, and uh one of the places when you when

you had the uh that them starting to fight over the the the fall, I I jotted down the instead of spreading the love,

they decide they’re going to fight for ownership over the little pieces of the love.

Yes. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Well, right. Right. We’re selfish with our love, huh?

Like there’s not enough to share. Exactly. And the old uh you know money doesn’t buy happiness, it only rents it.

Yes. Yes. Absolutely. And the uh you know again it’s one of

those it depends on which golden rule you’re going to look at. There’s the one that you were talking about and then

there’s the other one that I learned as well which is the one with the gold makes the rules.

Oh yeah. Well that’s the way of the world. Oh, because by the way, you know, the the the this world, and we didn’t

even get into any of this, but this world is run by the demiurge. He’s the god of this

material universe and and his henchmen, his his minions are the archons. And uh

they’re all about power and dominion. It always has to do with power and control.

And so whenever you see something occur that increases control and power like

the pandemic, that’s demiurgic. That’s demiurgic. That’s not natural.

The old never let a crisis go to waste. That’s right. Exploit.

The last one is a slight one is I used to be alongside of you with you know

universal salvation. Mhm. I’ve slightly modified that to the offer

of salvation if it’s universal. But because of free will, I pretty much have

to allow for the possibility of there are going to be stubborn, it’s just stubborn souls that are bound and

determined to refuse heaven regardless. And okay, it was just reading this morning that in

the Tripartite tract date, where is it? that literally all the secondary order

powers do after death will want to accept the the love of the Father and it

won’t and it said no I wish I could find that quote but it’s because they won’t

have to believe based on words someone else said or experience someone else had

or or you know some book someone else says is holy. They will come face to

face with the reality and it says this in the Tripartite tract date. They’ll come face to face with the reality of

the love and Fullness of God and those open arms. And it’s like who’s going to

say no to that? Of course they have free. We do all have free will. But it I I can’t understand. I personally would

not be able to comprehend someone being face to face would it would be like a

hungry infant dying of hunger and pushing away his

mother’s breast. That’s what I would think. I agree 100%. But that’s one of those

things is I’m getting older and I’ve seen so many people do things that I

just cannot imagine doing. So I’m like I said, yeah, I’ve modified it to I just have to allow

that possibility in my metaphysics. Oh yeah, sure. Okay. And I’m saying, well, don’t worry about it because it’s

going to happen on the other side. So we’re not going to see it. And and those people die angry, but and we don’t see

that repent regardless. It’s not our problem. I’m not making that choice. It’s only a

problem for those people who do make that choice. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’m sorry. Yeah. Now the the last one that I had

there is the idea of I always got a sense of as part of the fall a I can do

better than the creator and not the creator but the source. It’s a certain

amount of pride in that a certain amount it goes along with the separateness. It wasn’t entirely an innocence. There was

a certain amount of hey look what I can do. I can do better than you kind of thing. T

Yeah. Well, in the in the trip well, at least in my children’s version or in the

Tripartite trackctate, he he does in a sense say, but who he’s saying, I can do

better than you. It’s the rest of the Fullness. He’s sitting on the top as a fractal. He thinks his fractal body can

do it all. And who needs the Fullness? And that is a way of saying uh my little

part is greater than the whole of the Fullness of God. But he wasn’t saying I

can do better than the God above all gods because there there is nothing greater than the God above all gods.

There’s no space above God. God is the pinnacle. Gotcha.

That’s no one of the senses that I was getting there. Is it fair to get have the takeaway that the Fullness of God is

similar to the spirit of God? Oh yes. Yes. The Fullness of God aka get

this the Holy Spirit. Okay, that was the sense I was getting there. You hadn’t actually connected

those two dots explicitly and it doesn’t explicitly connect them in the Tripartite tractate, but when I

di, you know, I’m a diagrammer. When I diagram everything out, there it is. Oh, hey Miguel, you can get

back to the there were more pictures in our slideshow that we didn’t ever show

the third or the third. Yeah. Okay. So, that’s the first order of powers. Here’s

the final economy. Uh well, actually this is this is the end of time. This

isn’t the final economy. This is the last part. Uh this is the day the earth stood still

in this order. So you’ve got what is called the elect. And those are the third order of powers. They’re right up

there next to Christ. The Fullness is right here. That’s that uh triangle that

we’re talking about here. We are we’re the second order of powers, also known

as the called. And you can see, you can see a little blue through us because down here at the bottom, that’s the

phantom of the imitation and the outer darkness, Hades. But there’s one more

that doesn’t have those lay that one. This turns out, see that? That

one just before that was a mistake I made a few years ago. This is the new This is the new final economy. Christ is

a lot bigger, a lot brighter, and there’s no more blue at the bottom because in the final rollup where the

material world evaporates, and it will, it’s going to end sooner or later.

This is the final uh hierarchy of the Fullness of God. Here we are, and it’s not because we’re downtrodden upon, but

because this is where our paradise is, that green at the bottom. I see I’m

pointing to my screen, but you can’t see me pointing. That’s dull. Uh anyway, uh

the that we’re we’re we’re we’re down there in that green area. That’s that’s our paradise that we can relate to. Our

aonic parents, that’s those big gold guys just above us. And what is called even in the Bible, they’re called the

elect. That is the army of the Christ. And and that is a misunderstanding in

the Bible. By the way, here’s another nice heresy for you. The ar onward Christian soldiers marching as to war.

We’re not marching with swords and spears in order to defeat the Nazis. We

are marching with love. We are the army of the Christ. And Christ is the

pinnacle of love and consciousness. So what the army of Christ is the third

order of powers. They are the elect. They are the ones who just give glory,

glory, glory, love everyone, and they’re the ones praying for us to pull us up

out of the deficiency. They’re the ones that are going to reunite uh the demi

urge with Logos there in the end. And uh

you see the blue has fallen off the bottom of this diagram because in the final economy

all of the the demiurge is no longer at war with us. So the archons evaporate.

They are the shadows. They are the imitation. They’re a deficiency in the final economy. There’s no more

deficiency. It’s all good. It’s all God. And we’ve all got our everything there.

I me I’m looking forward to my dogs. Every dog that’s ever died. I say hello

to them every morning. My my my pet the pictures of my dogs and

I say, “I’m coming for you, kids.” And that’s who I expect to see me when I cross over.

I do, too. Well, awesome. This has been great. We better better get to the end

of this to this economy to this iteration or fractal. But yeah, great discussion for the audience. Get the

book. I’ve got it on the show notes. I’ve also got Cyd’s uh website. And

yeah, check out her podcast because she breaks these things down even more and it’s a it’s a good listen. But yeah,

appreciate everybody being here. As always, please support Cyd’s work, support amid any way you can. I can’t do

it without you. Good shows coming the rest of the week. And uh yeah, that’s it. Graham, thanks for keeping us

company. Oh, always my pleasure. And thank you, Cyd. It was a wonderful story and I hope

many children enjoy it. I hope so too. Well, I know they will. Thank you so much. God bless everybody.

Always enjoy having you on. And this was a great one, too. And yeah, aren’t you supposed to say onward and

upward? Onward and upward. Say your tag. Yeah, you got to say your tagline. Well, I say onward and upward and God

bless us all. That’s how I’ve been ending. I added the God bless all at the end. That’s That’s good. Yeah. I like to do

sometimes Bowie and may God’s love be with you because we’re all floating in space. All right, for everybody else,

really appreciate you being here and yeah, as I say, thanks for being here. Thanks for being yourself, your true

self here in the desert of the real. Write your own gospel and live your own myth.

This week I re-watched an episode of The Why Files. Are you familiar with The Why Files? It’s a very fun show I watch on YouTube regularly. The episode I watched again was called Synchronicities, the Science Behind Your Meaningful Coincidences, and this was first broadcast in June of 2025. I enjoyed it a lot. I’d seen it before, but I wanted to watch it again.

You know, we talk about synchronicities in the Gnostic community. It’s a word that was created by Carl Jung, and as we know, Carl Jung was Gnostic, and he, in particular, appreciated the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book out of the Nag Hammadi Codices that we use, the Tripartite Tractate. That’s our major focus here on Gnostic Insights.

Well, anyway, the name of the host for YouTube is AJ. The episode on synchronicities that AJ talked about was a really astounding episode, and if you haven’t seen it or if you’ve never seen the Why Files, I recommend it.

[Another thing I learned this week was that it’s possible to get the transcripts of episodes from YouTube videos. I didn’t know how to achieve that before, but I think now it’s part of the new AI “enhancement” of our world. I put enhancement in quotes because the verdict is out as far as I’m concerned, whether AI is an improvement or not. But anyway, I was able to ask the new YouTube AI for the transcript, and then it magically appeared, and so I have the transcript from that episode that I’m working off of.]

The thing I liked most about this episode were the synchronicities that AJ cited. There’s some pretty incredible stories, and I’m going to share a few of those with you today. Then Bill and I talked about it.

It was his favorite episode that I’d ever recommended to him, and so then we had one of our long talks yesterday about this episode, and I wish I had recorded it, but I didn’t, so instead I came away with three pages of notes as we were talking on the phone. I’m going to try to coordinate here my notes with the transcript and do it all in a way that makes sense. So here’s the story that AJ tells during this episode of The Why Files, and since I have the transcript, I think I’ll just quote him because he tells it well. Listen to this.

“In June of 2001, Laura Buxton released a balloon at her grandparents’ anniversary party. She was 10 years old, living in Stafford, England. She wrote her name and address on a tag, tied it to the balloon, and let it go. The balloon traveled 140 miles south. It landed in a hedge in Wiltshire, where another 10-year-old girl found it, and her name was also Laura Buxton.

The second Laura wrote the first, and they arranged to meet. Both girls showed up wearing pink sweaters and jeans. Both brought their pet guinea pigs. Both guinea pigs were orange and white, and of course the guinea pigs had the same name, and the coincidences kept piling up. Both Lauras were the same height. Both had brown hair and blue eyes. Both had three-year-old black labs at home, and both also had gray rabbits. When they opened their bags, both had packed the same stuffed animal, identical. And the odds of all this happening are so crazy that it’s mathematically impossible, but it happened.

There’s plenty of photos and video. The news covered the story. This is not an urban legend.”

So that raises the question, how does such an impossible thing happen? Well, Bill and I talked about that, and we have a good theory that fits in with our jello universe concept.

Let’s go on to another amazing synchronicity. Quoting AJ again,

“Anthony Hopkins needed a book. The book was The Girl from Petrovka. He was playing the lead in the film and searched every bookstore in London with no luck. It was out of print. Hopkins had finally given up when he was sitting on a bench, waiting for a train. Someone left a book on the bench. He picked it up. It was The Girl from Petrovka. But this wasn’t just any copy. This one had handwritten notes in the margins, personal observations, character analysis. Hopkins studied the book for his role.

Two years later, while shooting the film, Hopkins met the author, George Feifer. While they talked about the book, Feifer mentioned that he’d lent his personal copy to a friend, that the friend had lost it on the London Underground. All of his notes, his analysis, gone. He was disappointed. Hopkins heard this and said, wait here. He ran to fetch the book from his trailer. He showed Feifer. It was the same book. Feifer’s handwriting, his notes, everything.

Somehow the universe sent that book to the actor playing the lead, and then the universe sent the book back to its owner.”

I’m going to share one more astounding synchronicity with you, and then we’ll get to the discussion of it. Quoting again,

“Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s son, attracted death, presidential death. April 14th, 1865, Robert was at the White House when his father left for Ford’s Theater. We know how that ended. 16 years later, July 2nd, 1881, Robert was Secretary of War. Walking into the Baltimore train station, President Garfield was shot right there in front of Robert. He saw it happen. September 6th, 1901, now Robert was president of Pullman Company. He arrived at the Pan American Exposition. Minutes later, President McKinley was shot. Again, Robert was there.

Three presidents, three assassinations, one man present at all of them. But here’s the synchronicity that haunted Robert. Years before his father died, Robert fell onto train tracks in Jersey City. The train was coming. He was about to be crushed. A stranger grabbed his collar and yanked him to safety. That stranger was one of the most famous actors in the country, Edwin Booth, the brother of John Wilkes Booth. Two brothers, both famous actors, both connected to Abraham Lincoln. One brother would save the president’s son, the other brother would assassinate him.”

Now, what are we to make of this? The Why Files episode explains theories concerning it. AJ notices that these patterns are too perfect—this simply can’t be random. He says this is reality organizing itself. To be able to influence reality would be the ultimate power. And then AJ talks about classic ways of using this. He calls it a technology to organize and influence reality. He talks about Buddhist monks. He talks about ancient civilizations and their religious rituals and practices that did this very thing.

He talked about a current man named Joe Dispenza, who was paralyzed from the waist down and the doctors told him he would never walk. [AJ mistakenly says it was a patient of Dispenza’s, but no, it was Dispenza himself, according to a comment under the YouTube episode.] And Joe Dispenza essentially invented a meditation practice called quantum field meditation. He visualized his nerve endings connecting and rebuilding. He focused on his legs working perfectly. And a few months later, Dispenza walked into the doctor’s office. No wheelchair, no walker, no crutches. The doctors couldn’t explain it. But Dispenza explained it by saying that in quantum physics, when you observe something at the quantum level, you affect it.

That’s the funny thing about quantum mechanics. Observation collapses potential and makes the reality. We talked about this a few episodes ago in my podcast episode from August 30th, 2025 called Matter is an Illusion.

So back to this episode, quantum field meditation visualizes the potential and collapses it into reality. And this is what causes the healing. He was collapsing the nerve endings and the damage in his body through visualizing the potential of them working again, of them being healed, of them sinking back up, the ones that had been torn apart.

And at the end of this episode, I will describe for you what Billy was telling me about his meditation practice and that he’s essentially been doing this same thing, but he came up with it himself. And he uses it also with his hypnotherapy clients—quantum field meditation—but of course Bill doesn’t call it that. What he calls it home basing. And I’ll share that with you at the end of this episode.

Now, quoting again from the Why Files episode,

“Every nanosecond infinite decisions are being made that cause the infinite possibilities to collapse into this one reality. But you can learn to influence the outcome of all those decisions. You can alter your small corner of reality. Setting clear intentions is the first step.”

Yet another very interesting aspect of the Why Files episode on synchronicities was a discussion of Donald Hoffman. And again, this is a contemporary figure that you can look up. Donald Hoffman has come up with a theory called multimodal user interface theory, MUI. I’ll call it MUI for short. The MUI theory says that “perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world.” That’s a quote from Hoffman.

Now, he’s got it all balled up with evolution and gives an explanation of how evolution caused this to happen. But I disagree with that because we don’t need evolutionary theory in gnostic belief because we come down from above fully formed. All of the second order powers have been imagined in the mind of God, if you will, in the ethereal space. And so we are already there. And when we enter this world at conception, we come in fully formed. I have discussed that topic in previous episodes concerning evolution, debunking Darwin. But I like what Hoffman had to say about the MUI theory because this goes very well with our gnostic system, although Hoffman doesn’t know that. What we perceive as the world around us is not like a direct mapping of the world out there, mapping through our synaptic interface, so we can then we see and understand the world.

That isn’t the way reality works. There is no material reality. There is only soul. There is only the ether. And it is now, I think, the imagination of the Demiurge that has assembled this fallen world universe that we live in. You see, we know that the ethereal space houses what I’m calling Paradise. It’s a version of what we see around here. It’s like this fallen world, but it’s perfect. There is no death or destruction. There is no illness. There are no vices. There is no lying, cheating, drugs, sadness. None of that is happening.

In the ethereal plane, it’s all good. We all have an intuitive sense of that. All humans do around the world. It doesn’t matter what your culture is. We all have a very similar picture of Paradise. That is a place. Logos wanted to recreate that space. He thought he could build it on its own out of his fractal parts, out of his pleroma, but he couldn’t. And so he “fell.” And it is the fall, it is the ego of Logos overreaching his abilities or his job that fell. He split off. The best part returned to the ether. That’s his true Self that mirrors all of the Aeons, his fractal pleroma. But his broken Self, that ego of Logos, stayed down below. It was estranged from his better half.

The Demiurge still had the drive for power and the drive to build that Logos had. But now it was inverted. Our fallen world is the imagination of the Demiurge. And he hasn’t quite got it right, because this was not an authorized excursion on the Demiurge’s part. It’s an egoic version of Paradise. And so that’s why bad things happen. That’s why it’s a fallen world. It’s inverted. What were virtues are now vices. What was light is darkness. What was love is egotism and selfishness and pure drive for power. Hatred has replaced love down here and on and on and on. This is the inversion of Paradise. That’s what it means by being the fallen world.

And the only way to bring it back up, the only way to right the course of this fallen world, is to demonstrate the love, life, and consciousness of the ethereal plane to all of us down here, to remind us that we don’t really belong down here. We are sojourners passing through. We come from the Father and we will return to the Father. And all of us bringing love, consciousness, and life, whenever we accept that and remember that and begin to manifest that love, that higher consciousness, that’s when the synchronicities begin to occur. That’s when the love pours out of us instead of the hatred. That’s when desire to make things right and heavenly replaces the desire for power and hate and control. That is how the Demiurge is brought to remembrance.

But of course, I don’t want to leave out the Christ talk, and I know a lot of people cringe when I say Christ, but Christ is the correcting algorithm. Christ brings our full package in. We are living in these second order bodies that are melded to the Demiurge’s consciousness. So we’re seeing everything through this distorted haze. When we accept the assistance of the third order powers brought to us through Christ, then we are able to manifest these higher order activities like synchronicities and like healing and what appear to be miracles. Consciousness is the primary state. Consciousness is the base matrix of us being conscious. We call that consciousness the Father, the Source.

Now, do you remember my Jello Universe Theory? If not, I urge you to go back and find that episode. That episode was called Consciousness and Time: Our Cherry Jello Universe and Free Will, and that was first broadcast on March 22nd of 2025.

On June 28th of 2025, I had a conversation with my brother called Birds Don’t Buy Bentleys–A conversation with my brother about evolution. So that’s one of the evolution episodes. And then Free Will, do you have it? That is from September 23rd of 2023.

The notion in the Cherry Jello Universe that was also put forward in this episode of the Why Files, but of course they don’t call it the Cherry Jello Universe, they call it the Quantum Consciousness Universe. There is one illustration that passes by during the episode that looks just like my Cherry Jello Universe, by the way.

The idea is this, the universe is filled with choices. It’s not filled with particles. It’s not filled with stuff. It’s filled with choice points, consciousness choices, and they’re all there. Our God is an infinite God. It takes infinity to be able to hold all possible choices that could ever possibly happen. And the only way the potential of those choices collapses is when you observe it, is when you pass through it in time, and then the potential collapses and becomes history. That’s one way to collapse a choice point.

But you can also do it with this quantum field meditation technique. You imagine the place you want to arrive at in the Cherry Jello Universe. You’re here, you want to be there, whatever it is, whether it’s healing, finding a relationship, buying a house. Me, I’m looking for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel to go big. So that’s what I am focusing my attention on—spreading this Gnostic message and having it connect. Finding the tipping point where this begins to influence millions of people. That’s one of my cherries I’m heading for. Another one I’m heading for is to have a RV, not a big giant RV, but just one of those van-sized ones and do a book tour. So I’m looking for that van to come so I can go out on the road with the Gnostic Gospel. These are the things that I’m aiming at. Well, of course, I would also like to find a companion who can share all of this with me, other than my cats and dog.

But I figure, see, God knows all this stuff, and it’s all out there as potential. It’s the many worlds theory, but it’s not many worlds. It’s all of infinity. All of those choices, all of those potentialities are sitting there. And it is our intention to head for them that causes us to swim in the correct direction towards that cherry, towards that potential, to find that potential and collapse it, and then we grasp it.

I think I explained this perhaps more clearly, more slowly in those episodes of mine that I’ve already mentioned to you during this episode. So I urge you to go listen to those or read them. And I’m also going to put the links to them in this episode so you can find them easily.

Now, this raises the question of determinism. Well, if all of those potentials are there, then we have no choice. But we do, you see. It’s because we choose which cherries to go towards. Getting an RV, not getting an RV–those are all out there. I decide where to go. I have free will. We all have free will because we are all fractals of the Aeons. We are connected to them. We are their children. We were sent down by them. We’re still connected to them. Call it your guardian angel if you want to. At the Aeonic realm, they only want what’s best for us. It’s down here that what is worst for us comes out.

So we have to turn our eyes upward, upward to the Fullness, upward to the Aeons, upward to the Son. We need to invite the third order powers to help us, to bring us the correcting algorithm for our distorted code that we have picked up down here from the Demiurge. We are free to move through the jello any way we want to.

And when we focus on giving glory to God, when we are in the zone of remembering the ethereal space, that’s when synchronicities happen. I know that’s how it happens with me. In this episode of Why Files, he talks about people who look at the clock and see 11:11. Well, that’s me. So I know that I’m in the zone when I find those clock faces that give me those numbers. And it reminds me of the Fullness, but I’m already in the zone or I wouldn’t have looked at the clock. You see, you can’t force these practices. You have to allow them to happen because when we force, it’s usually our ego that’s doing the forcing, and that won’t take us home.

Okay, I promised you my brother Bill’s meditation technique, and this is very similar to that quantum field meditation.

First, you find yourself a quiet space. You relax.

Now, pick a home base of where your mind will go to when it wanders during meditation. You’ll bring it back to that home base casually in a relaxed manner. So if you’re concentrating on breathing, that’s what you’re doing. You’re concentrating on breathing. Then when you find that your mind has wandered away, casually bring it back to the breathing again. That’s how you stay centered in the meditation. If you were instead listening to the wind rustling in the trees during your meditation, and you find you have wandered away from that, you bring your mind back casually, quietly, calmly to the wind whistling in the trees. Or maybe you are staring at a beautiful leaf. When your mind wanders away, return to the leaf. Billy calls that the home base method, where you notice and you casually bring your mind back.

Now, where Bill’s meditation technique diverts from the quantum field meditation that AJ describes is that you set your intention before you go into the meditation and then you stop thinking about it. You want your higher Self to take care of the intention for you, so you release your egoic drive and give the meditation over to your subconscious.

It’s similar to dreaming and lucid dreaming. I’m a dream interpreter. I don’t encourage people to practice lucid dreaming, where you take control of your dreams, and you want to be conscious during your dream, because I think that that derails your dream process. During your dream process, it’s your inner Self that’s coming up and trying to teach you things. When you allow your ego to sit on the throne of your dreams, through lucid dreaming, you have derailed that process.

It’s the same thing with meditation. Be still, and visualize yourself as part of this vast energy field. You allow that imagination to bring that intention to you. Imagination is real, because we are nothing but consciousness. The imagination of a future event is one of those cherries sitting there, waiting for you to pick it.

After you have allowed this image in your mind of the thing you are aiming for, you experience arriving and having this, and feeling the gratitude for having this, and expressing thanks to God and to the Aeons for helping you arrive at this place. This is the way that you visualize and imagine, and thereby create, reality.

Once we are aware of the ethereal plane, and we see the synchronicities, and we realize the gnosis, we have the free will to arrive at these things, if it’s in God’s will that we do so. Wishing for things that are bad for you isn’t a good idea. Swimming to cherries that are going to make you sick is not a good idea. The Aeons would know that. Your higher Self would know that, and so it won’t do that. So that’s why it always has to do with the higher good, God’s will for you. But that is your best Self. It is what will give you indescribable joy.

There’s a lot more in this Why Files episode. It’s a huge topic, and just too much to cover today. The implications of this episode were profound, and they’re definitely gnostic.

What do you think of this? Let’s hear your comments. Let’s start a discussion. Share your synchronicities with us in the comments below.

Go watch that Why Files. Think about it. 

Love you all, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Boy, am I busy lately. I’m preparing a 10-week course to teach “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel” at Southern Oregon University, which begins in a couple of weeks, so I’m busy with that. I’ve also been doing a lot of publishing. I’m waiting to receive the hardback copy of Children of the Fullness, a Gnostic Myth. Once I see that and that it looks good, I can release that book as a hardcopy and hopefully get it into libraries. That’s my ultimate goal with Children of the Fullness. It’s available now, of course, on Amazon for only $9.99 or free on Kindle for $3 if you don’t have a Kindle subscription. So, it’s affordable and it’s really neat. It’s got beautiful illustrations. People like it. It’s very short. Everyone can understand this version of the Gnostic Gospel.

https://www.amazon.com/Children-Fullness-Gnostic-Simple-Gospel/dp/B0FKZ52DGL/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.wcnIoBvm7p7yLt32V6I9Cw.bKfJdE1lh7V09kfmMOZ3ulWuYGjx7kmra1vrJurzsUg&qid=1756904703&sr=1-1Children of the Fullness is the first ever gnostic kid’s book!

I have an upcoming appearance on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, the YouTube version, and that will be on September 15th of 2025. Miguel asked me to be prepared to discuss the Children of the Fullness book and also the concept of pleromas. So, we’re going to review pleromas in today’s episode. This is from an original broadcast that was in November of 2022, but it always bears repeating.

“Pleroma” is a common word in gnostic scriptures, and it has a particular meaning that only relates to the Gnostic Gospels. In fact, we gnostics are expecting to wind up at the end of days in a Pleroma that others usually call “Heaven.” Today, I’d like to take a closer look at Pleromas in order to discover where we all came from and where we will wind up at the end of days.

Pleroma is a Greek word for “all that which is contained within a body or organization.” The Pleroma of the Fullness of God is the Pleroma we most often refer to here at Gnostic Insights. The Pleroma of the Fullness of God is the sum total of all the individual characteristics and powers of the originating consciousness of the Father as manifested in the monad known as the Son. Here is how the Pleroma of the Fullness is described in the Tripartite Tractate:

“Each one of the aeons is a name, <that is>, each of the properties and powers of the Father, since he exists in many names, which are intermingled and harmonious with one another.  It is possible to speak of him because of the wealth of speech, just as the Father is a single name, because he is a unity, yet is innumerable in his properties and names…”

This first differentiation of the properties contained in the Son is known as the ALL or the Totalities. The Pleroma of the ALL is pictured as a central star with rays going out in all directions, yet unified without personal identity within the single body and will of the Son. When the Totalities of the ALL become self-aware, they name themselves and sort themselves into the Pleroma of the hierarchy of the Fullness of God.

“… the aeon of the Truth, since it is a unity and multiplicity, receives honor in the small and the great names according to the power of each to grasp it – by way of analogy – like a spring which is what it is, yet flows into streams and lakes and canals and branches, or like a root spread out beneath trees and branches with its fruit, or like a human body, which is partitioned in an indivisible way into members of members, primary members and secondary, great and small.”

This passage tells us that the aeon of the Truth—which is another word for the Fullness, or Pleroma, of God goes forth by way of fractal branching. You may review the concept of fractals by looking back to the Gnostic Insights episode called, “A Fractal Model of Human Nature,” posted May 18, 2021. which you can find at gnostic insights dot com under the tab, “Complete Episodes Library.” I’m also linking it in the transcript of this episode.

The Pleroma of Logos is the sum total of all of the fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness that exist as fractal iterations within the body of the Aeon known as Logos.

“This aeon was among those to whom was given wisdom, so that he could become pre-existent in each one’s thought. By that which he wills, will they be produced. Therefore, he received a wise nature in order to examine the hidden basis, since he is a wise fruit; for, the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one, such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him.”

My illustration for the Pleroma of Logos is to show Logos as a miniature copy of the Pleroma of the Fullness of God, sitting at the top of the Fullness.

“This aeon was last to have <been> brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude. And before he begot anything else for the glory of the will and in agreement with the Totalities, he acted, magnanimously, from an abundant love, and set out toward that which surrounds the perfect glory…”

So, this wise fruit called Logos left the Fullness and Fell out of harmony with the other Aeons, creating this apparently material world.

“The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows and copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted. Out of this there was a division – he became deeply troubled – and a turning away because of his self-doubt and division, forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and <of that> which is.”

The Pleroma of the Demiurge consists of the inversions of the Pleroma of Logos, broken out of the hierarchical pattern and scattered willy-nilly throughout the cosmos. The Pleroma of the Demiurge is not an orderly pyramidal stack, but rather a chaotic jumble of dark shadows.

“Like the Pleromas are the things which came into being from the arrogant thought, which are their (the Pleromas’) likenesses, copies, shadows, and phantasms, lacking reason and the light, these which belong to the vain thought, since they are not products of anything. Therefore, their end will be like their beginning: from that which did not exist (they are) to return once again to that which will not be…”

“They thought of themselves that they are beings existing by themselves and are without a source, since they do not see anything else existing before them. Therefore, they lived in disobedience and acts of rebellion, without having humbled themselves before the one because of whom they came into being. They wanted to command one another, overcoming one another in their vain ambition, while the glory which they possess contains a cause of the system which was to be.”

So, even though they fell out of the fallen Logos, they still possessed a reflection of the original glory of the Aeons of which they were imitations. And, it is that glory which is the Economy that was to be, that being our apparently material universe.

“They are likenesses of the things which are exalted. They were brought to a lust for power in each one of them, according to the greatness of the name of which each is a shadow, each one imagining that it is superior to his fellows.”

Logos was horrified by what he had produced because they would not recognize his authority. Logos abandoned the deficiency below and quickly returned to the Pleroma of the Fullness.

“The one whom he himself brought forth as a unitary Aeon rushed up to that which is his, and this kin of his in the Pleroma abandoned him who came to be in the defect along with those who had come forth from him in an imaginary way, since they are not his.”

“Him who came to be in the defect” is the name we call the Demiurge and it is the authority that rules the defect. Those who came forth from him in an imaginary way are the archons of the deficiency as well as the inert material world, or what I refer to as the “hard and rocky places.”

The reason we focus so much on the Aeons of the Fullness and Logos in particular here at Gnostic Insights is because the Pleroma of any living creature is the sum total of the Pleroma of the Demiurge—our material or hylic part that makes up our physical bodies—and the Pleroma of Logos after his return to the Fullness, when he prayed alongside the Aeons to bring life to the deficiency he had caused.

“The Logos turned to another opinion and another thought. Having turned away from evil, he turned toward the good things. Following the conversion came the thought of the things which exist and the prayer for the one who converted himself to the good. The one who is in the Pleroma was what he first prayed to and remembered [that is the One Self, his fractal of the Son]; then (he remembered) his brothers individually and (yet) always with one another [which is to say, each individual Aeon in its place and position in the Pleroma of the Fullness]; then all of them together [the Totality of the Fullness as a single Pleroma]; but before all of them, the Father [the originating source from which all consciousness flows]. The prayer of the agreement [among these nested fractal consciousnesses] was a help for him in his own return and (in that of) the Totality, for a cause of his remembering those who have existed from the first was his being remembered. This is the thought which calls out from afar, bringing him back.”

Since we Second Order Powers are fractal iterations of this Logos, newly restored to the Fullness, the path of remembrance is exactly the same for us as it was for Logos. We fractally replicate the Powers from which we were created.

This Pleroma of ours is called the Second Order of Powers, and we proceed out of the Pleroma of Logos. We Second Order Powers were created through the Totalities of the original Fullness giving glory to the Father alongside Logos. Together, they prayed with an intention to send life into the fallen world below. We came forth as fruit from the Pleroma of Logos, and the Pleroma of Logos was itself a fractal of the Fullness. We are called Second Order Powers to distinguish us from the First Order Powers—the Aeons of the Fullness—out of which we are fractal iterations, twice removed.

“All the spiritual places are in spiritual power [referring to the Pleromas Above]. They are separate from the beings of the thought [we Second Order Powers], since the power is established in an image, which is that which separates the Pleroma from the Logos [in other words, power flows from the original images contained within the Fullness of God], while the power which is active in prophesying about the things which will be [referring to a particular Aeon who embodies the concept of one who prophesies], directs the beings of the thought which have come into being [us] toward that which is pre-existent, and it does not permit them to mix with the things which have come into being through a vision of the things which are with him.”

Meaning the spirit of prophesy impels us upward but does not impart to us its power.

“The beings of the thought which is outside are humble; they preserve the representation of the pleromatic, especially because of the sharing in the names by which they are beautiful.”

Which is a very lovely way of saying that we Second Order Powers share the names and faces of the Aeons of the Fullness and, because of that, we are beautiful.

Our Second Order nature is good, and “greater than those of the likeness. For those belonging to the likeness also belong to a nature of falsehood.” Those belonging to the likeness are imitations of the Aeons, but lack their depth, powers, and nature. They are not fractals of the Aeon of Truth. And, while we come from the good thought, we tend to forget our true nature due to the “law of mutual combat” arising from this never-ending war against the imitations of the deficiency. Thus, we have forgotten our Selfs and need to remember. The vehicle for our remembrance is Christ and the Third Order Powers within the Pleroma of Christ.

“The order which was his [in other words, the Pleroma of Christ] came into being from him who ran on high and that which brought itself forth from him and from the entire perfection. The one who ran on high [Logos who returned to the realm Above] became for the one who was defective [the Demiurge] an intercessor with the emanation of the aeons which had come into being in accord with the things which exist [again, that would be us Second Order Powers because we are emanations of that which exists Above].”

And, because of the fractal nature of creation, the mechanism of redemption of the Demiurge is the same mechanism for our redemption, as well.

“When he prayed to them, they consented joyously and willingly, since they were in agreement, and with harmonious consent, to aid the defective one. They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. Then from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father, of whom the aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus, it was willingly and gladly that they bring forth the fruit.”

“Not only did the aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, which was written previously, but also they generated their own; for the aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony. They came forth in a multifaceted form, in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the one who gave it to him.”

So, you see by this passage, the Christ possesses fractals of all of the other Pleromas and Powers, from the Totalities as the undifferentiated ALL; from the Aeons of the Fullness as individual countenances; from the Father Above ALL Gods as His countenance—which is to say, the monad known as the Son; and from the Pleroma of Logos and all of his fractal faces as well as the Demiurge—his ego who fell. The Pleroma of the Christ is the Pleroma of Logos, plus the Pleroma of the Fullness, plus the monad of the Son, all together offering glory to the Father and praying for full salvation and restoration of the ego of Logos—the Demiurge—and we Second Order Powers. This Pleroma of the Christ is called the Third Order of Powers.

“And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which is his beloved Son… the one who is properly called “Savior” and “the Redeemer” and “the Well-Pleasing one” and “the Beloved,” “the one to whom prayers have been offered” and “the Christ” and “the Light of those appointed,” in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given to him. Yet, what other name may be applied to him except “the Son,” as we previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father, whom he wanted them to know?”

The Third Order Powers constitute the pleroma of the Christ

In my illustrations, I picture the Christ as a singular light source that embodies the attributes of the Father and Son. The Pleroma of the Christ is known as the Third Order of Powers. These are not arrayed in a hierarchical stack like the Aeons of the Fullness, but rather as a central star that emanates rays after the pattern of the original ALL or Totalities of the Son, for they have no personal identities and only live to serve the  mission of the Christ.

The Tripartite Tractate says, in verses 123 and 124,

“The final restoration, however, will take place after the ALL has manifested in him who is the Son, for the redemption began to be given among the humans who were in the flesh with his first-born and his love, the Son coming in the flesh, and the angels who were in Heaven having been found worthy of forming a community, a community in him on earth.”

The most accurate interpretation of these verses is that the angels were literally incarnated inside the body of Jesus, forming a community in him, living and dying with him. In the same way, all of our cells work as an integrated community inside each of us, devoted to taking care of the needs of our bodies.

The Pleroma of the Christ on Earth brings with it fractals of everybody in the Pleromas of the Totalities, the Fullness, and Logos. Christ is the manifestation of the Fullnesses of the God Above All Gods—the Holy Spirit—born into the material body of the Demiurge.

“As for the true baptism into which the members of the ALL descend and where they come into being, there is no other baptism except the one, and that is the redemption which takes place in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. After confession of faith has been made in those names and after one has believed that the things one has been told are real,”

The end goal of redemption is return to the Father’s abode, that Paradise initially dreamed by the Fullnesses, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment, and no deficiencies.

When scriptures say that we will return to the paradise where Christ is king, that refers to our eternal place within the Pleroma of the all-encompassing Christ. Even those who currently align themselves with the Demiurge’s lust for power and domination will receive the recompense of good things.

Here’s what the Tripartite Tractate says about the end days for those who currently deny the Father and the Christ:

“as for those of the imitation who embrace the darkness and deny the light, even they will obtain direct vision, so they will no longer have to believe only on account of a small word produced by a voice, that this is how things are, for the restoration back to that which was is a single restoration, even if some are exalted because of this Economy having been set up as causes for the things that happened, unfolding numerous physical forces and taking pleasure in them. They, angels as well as humans, will obtain the kingdom, the confirmation, and the salvation. These, too, will be provided with dwelling places where they will dwell eternally after they have renounced the downward attraction of deficiency, and the power of the Fullness has pulled them upward on account of the great generosity and the sweetness of the pre-existent.”

The only forms banished to the outer darkness are those attributes of the deficiency that did not exist from the beginning—the shadows and phantoms of the imitation that bring nothing but death and destruction. These are shadows of the Aeons, so when the light comes, the light dispels the shadows and they vanish.

And there you have the completed cycle of Gnostic cosmology. The place Above that we Second Order Powers dimly remember as Paradise and to which we will return, will be within the Pleroma of the Christ. That eternal place is called the Third Economy. The First Economy was the Pleroma of Fullness of God. The Second Economy as a mixed creation of the Pleromas of Logos and his fallen ego—the Demiurge. The Third Economy will be an ongoing Paradise where there is no death or destruction. Where peace reigns supreme and there is only cooperation, fellowship, and true love. In Paradise there is nothing but life, and so the grass is always green, the flowers blossom endlessly, and every soul that has ever lived lives happily with their family, pets, and friends.

Illustration of the 3rd Economy from Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth

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My brother, Bill, and I had a good long talk the other day concerning what humans refer to as “death,” and its connection to the apparent material nature of the universe. Here’s the upshot of that conversation.

If you visit my gnostic websites or have bought your copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, you’ve seen my diagrams many times by now. Perhaps you remember that my own gnosis was unlocked through several years of contemplation on the simple phrase: “mud up, spirit down.” That little ditty eventually turned into these two diagrams:

Mud Up Spirit Down

These two diagrams blossomed out into my theory of everything that I call A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which you can read on the simple explanation blog or in the book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. It has proven to be a robust theory of everything that continues to hold up.

Later, my own search for gnosis led me into the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi codices. I find the logical cosmology of the Tripartite Tractate to be the one that resonates with me, unlike the Sethian codices which have their gnosis packaged within an old-school type of mythology not unlike the complex, personified mythologies of other cultures and religions. Yet, if we stand back and take the long view of both Valentinian and Sethian gnostic belief, they have many overlapping features. This leads me to surmise that it is the Big Picture flow of consciousness unfolding, outflowing, and then re-enfolding that is the gnostic takeaway, not the particulars of the mythologies.

Whether we call it The Father in Christian gnosticism or The Source or Virgin Spirit in Sethian gnosticism, the matrix of all existence is ethereal consciousness itself—the originating consciousness that we and all sentient beings are heirs to. And whether you call the consciousness that flowed out of the originating Source the Son or the Sethian’s androgynous Barbelo—it is still the first and only monad produced by the originating consciousness.

But since he is as he is, he is a spring, which is not diminished by the water which abundantly flows from it. (Tripartite Tractate, verse 60)

Then that singular representation of consciousness fanned out into all possible variables of that consciousness—all that was, all that would ever be: the ALL and Fullness of God in the Tripartite Tractate and the Child in Sethian codices such as the Secret Book of John, culminating in an eventual separation called the Fall.

Just as the Father exists in the proper sense, the one before whom there was no one else and the one apart from whom there is no other unbegotten one, so too the Son exists in the proper sense, the one before whom there was no other, and after whom no other son exists… Furthermore, he has his fruit, that which is unknowable because of its surpassing greatness. Yet he wanted it to be known, because of the riches of his sweetness… (TTT, verse 57)

Then that singular representation of consciousness fanned out into all possible variables of that consciousness—all that was, all that would ever be: the ALL and Fullness of God in the Tripartite Tractate and the Child in Sethian codices such as the Secret Book of John, culminating in an eventual separation called the Fall.

For just as the Father is a unity and has revealed himself as Father for him alone, so too the Son was found to be a brother to himself alone, in virtue of the fact that he is unbegotten and without beginning… Being innumerable and illimitable, his offspring are indivisible. Those which exist have come forth from the Son and the Father like kisses, because of the multitude of some who kiss one another with a good, insatiable thought, the kiss being a unity, although it involves many kisses… This is the nature of the holy imperishable spirits, upon which the Son rests, since it is his essence, just as the Father rests upon the Son. (TTT, verse 58)

Both strains of gnostic thought describe an event where an Aeon’s free will deviated from the plan of the Fullness, resulting in the production of our material realm. This Aeon is called either Logos or Sophia, depending on which codex you are reading. Both names are imbued with tremendous knowledge and wisdom. Despite good intentions, the fruit of the fallen Aeon turned out to be lacking in the glorious attributes of the Source and the Fullness, producing a chaotic and unruly pleroma lacking true consciousness and life due to the separation from the will of the Fullness.

Instead of perfection, he saw a defect; instead of unification, he saw division, instead of stability, he saw disturbances; instead of rests, tumults. Neither was it possible for him to make them cease from loving disturbance, nor was it possible for him to destroy it. He was completely powerless, once his totality and his exaltation abandoned him. (TTT, verse 80)

We call the result of the Fall the deficiency, commonly referred to as the material cosmos. Here’s the Sethian take on the structure of our cosmos:

Yaldabaoth organized everything after the pattern of the first aeons that had come into being, so that he might create everything in an incorruptible form. (The Secret Book of John, verse 12)

The Tripartite Tractate adds this caution to the construction of the cosmos:

Those who came into being from the presumptuous thought resemble in fact the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations, though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions, deprived of reason and light, belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring. (TTT, verse 78)

We Second Order Powers were subsequently fruited into this material realm by the will of the Fullness in order to restore the fallen Aeon to the Fullness and bring this material creation to an end.

Gnostics say that this material world was constructed by the Demiurge as a fallen imitation of the Paradise that exists on the ethereal plane. We think of this cosmos as being material in contrast to the ethereal nature of the originating consciousness of the Father, Son, and Fullness of God. But, as my brother needs to remind me from time to time, there is no such thing as matter. Matter itself is an illusion. In other words, there is no dualism.

What we think of as matter disappears under close inspection. Indeed, the solidity of matter disappears into wave forms at high magnification. Scientists and philosophers used to think of the smallest bits of matter as particles of solid stuff. But with the advent of quantum physics and more sophisticated devices to examine so-called particles, we find that material is actually composed of probabilities, waves, and interactions. This new understanding of the nature of physical reality has made possible previously unimaginable advances in quantum computing and even teleportation and faster-than-light communication.

We can apply our gnostic understanding to these advances in physics. Indeed, quantum physics gives a mechanism for the “mud up, spirit down” gnosis and the manner by which the Demiurge brings order to the universe. The Demiurge manipulates the fallen pleroma to mimic the structures of the ethereal plane but it can’t mimic the consciousness of life. The Demiurge imposes order upon the deficiency by copying the mechanism of the Simple Golden Rule of cooperation but it can’t mimic the free will and consciousness of the Fullnesses’ true cooperative spirit.

Consciousness equals life. This is why matter is inert—it lacks consciousness. The Demiurge is the overarching mind behind all material interactions and appearances. This is why matter is inherently opposed to life. We Second Order Powers were sent into this material cosmos to bring life, light, and love into the cosmos for the redemption and enlightenment of the Demiurge. Our mission is to remind the Demiurge of its origin and its “better half” up in the ethereal plane through our demonstrations of life, consciousness, and love.

We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness. We bring all of the attributes of the Fullness into the material plane when we are born into this world. Unfortunately, we forget our true mission due to the “law of mutual combat” that we pick up down here. We spend our time battling the Demiurge and its forces rather than loving each other and cooperating according to the Simple Golden Rule. We find ourselves battling a never-ending war between life and death.

Tragically, the further we drift from our primary mission, the deeper we become entangled with the demiurgic powers below. The ethics of the Fullness becomes diluted and unrecognizable. Virtues are displaced by vices. Egoic aggrandizement replaces our Aeonic Self. Glorifying the Father descends into vain glory and glorification of idols. In our modern times, these idols are likely to be celebrities and sports figures instead of the wood and stone idols of prior generations. We attempt to plug the holes with material possessions that cannot, by their very nature, satisfy our souls.

To realize that this cosmos is not material can help us realize that our battles are as imaginary as the imitations of the deficiency. The atheistic position that we are simply material without souls is the absolute inversion of this realization. There is no such thing as material. Our bodies are not truly physical. The universe and its demiurgic constructions are all imitations. We are only soul.

We are spiritual beings fruited by the Aeons of the Fullness. We are loved and protected by our aeonic parents. When we remember that fact, we can invoke that protection. It is the Aeons who pray to the Father for our well-being. The Aeons do battle on our behalf against the principalities and powers of darkness. Moreover, we each have our own Third Order Powers assigned to us for our ultimate redemption by the Christ. We can choose to live with that remembrance. This is what the New Testament refers to as “putting on the armor of God:”

As for the rest, be empowered by the Lord and by the force of his might. Put on God’s panoply (full armor), so that you are able to withstand the Slanderer’s wiles, Because we are wrestling not against blood and flesh, but against the Archons, against the Powers, against the Cosmic Rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the celestial places. Therefore, take up God’s panoply, so that on the evil day you might be able to resist and, having accomplished all things, take your stand. Take your stand, therefore, girding your loins with truth, and donning the breastplate of justice, And pulling up the straps under your feet in preparation for the good tidings of peace, Above all taking up the shield of the faith, with which you will be able to quench the flaming darts of the wicked one; And put on your helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is God’s utterance.(Hart’s translation of Ephesians 6:10-18)

And of course, this all boils down to practicing virtue, not vice, resisting the wiles of the archons and the Demiurge, loving each other and demonstrating love for all, and bringing remembrance to the Demiurge. When we are able to complete our mission with the help of Christ, this so-called material shadow will disappear, and we will all find ourselves above with the Aeons in the Fullness of God.

Onward and upward, and God bless us all.

Here’s your chance to get a free copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. I’m giving away free ebook editions this weekend, August 23 through Tuesday, August 26. In return, I only ask your to leave a review for the book on amazon.com. The free book download counts as a verified buyer purchase and qualifies you to leave a book review. We need to boost our amazon reviews so the algorithm will favor the book in searches. Please help out. Don’t feel you have to have achieved any degree of gnosis before leaving a review. If you’ve been listening to the podcast, you already know what to say. Keep it simple.

This week’s episode takes another look at the Third Order of Powers, also known as the Army of the Christ. We looked at this back in 2022, so it’s high time to look at it again. Let’s start with a brief review of gnostic cosmology for any newcomers to the podcast.

This exploration of gnostic cosmology is uniquely based upon the text of one of the ancient manuscripts recovered from the Egyptian desert in 1945. The concepts that I am sharing with you are universal and applicable to anyone who is seeking the truth about consciousness, God, the nature of life, death, and suffering, and the nature of the simulated reality we appear to be living in. This gnosis is also a “gospel” in that the word gospel means “good news.” The good news is that this gnostic gospel offers the promise of a personal relationship with higher order entities and the God Above All Gods. This is not a challenge to established religions, but rather a clarification of the nature of the Father and our relation to the Father. This gnosis also clarifies so many of the puzzles that established religions, philosophies, and even science have been unable to answer. If a Great Awakening is currently underway, then this gnosis is an integral addition to spreading the Word.

We Second Order Powers were the generation of the new Pleroma of Logos when he returned from the Fall. We living creatures were designed to fit into the Boundary so we could operate according to the Simple Golden Rule to bring life, love, and cooperation into the otherwise dead deficiency. The Second Order Powers also bring a remembrance of the Father into his material realm, a memory entirely lacking in the shadows and phantoms of the imitation. We inhabit the deficiency, yoked to the apparent material of the imitation, and find ourselves trapped in a never-ending war with the deficiency.

Never-ending War The upward yang side represents the 2nd Order of Powers; the downward yin side represents the imitations of the deficiency

The Tripartite Tractate says of us,

“It was not from the sickness which came into being that they were produced… but (from) the one who sought after the pre-existent. Once he had prayed, he both raised himself to the good and sowed in them a pre-disposition to seek and pray to the glorious pre-existent one, and he sowed in them a thought about him and an idea, so that they should think that something greater than themselves exists prior to them, although they did not understand what it was. Begetting harmony and mutual love through that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since from unity and from unanimity they have received their very being.”

Logos was content with the beings of thought—those Aeons of the Fullness that form the master formulae upon whom we living Second Order Powers are modelled—”because he had hope and expectation of him who is exalted.” That hope and expectation is another way of saying that Logos had faith in the Father of the Totalities. We humans feel the same way Logos did when we turn to the Father in faith—we feel hope and expectation that something will come of our prayers. On the other hand, Logos was not content with the shadows that came out of him after the Fall. Logos rejected the phantoms of the deficiency that had arisen from the presumptuous thought of his Ego.

Sadly, we Second Order Powers are subject to the “law of mutual combat” and, because of the never-ending battle against the deficiency, we tend to forget the harmony and mutual love of our higher Self and instead adopt the anger and violence of the enemy. Logos sought a solution to the hatred and disorder taking hold of his Second Order Powers who were fighting the never-ending war against the deficiency.

The Christ was brought forth to “those who came into being according to the thought.” We Second Order Powers are those who were brought into being according to the thought of the ALL. We are fractal representations of the Aeons of the Fullness, who are themselves Self-aware aspects of the ALL sorted into a cooperative Hierarchy “within the exalted boundary.” That’s up above on the ethereal plane.

“The one who ran on high became for the one who was defective an intercessor with the emanation of the aeons which had come into being in accord with the things which exist. When he prayed to them, they consented joyously and willingly, since they were in agreement, and with harmonious consent, to aid the defective one.”

Briefly, the “one who ran on high” was the Self of Logos. The entire perfection is the entirety of the ALL, which is co-existent with the Son. The emanation of the Aeons refers to the Fullness who have become Self-aware entities inhabiting a region called the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God, or the Pleroma of the Fullness. When Logos prayed to them, they were only too happy to aid the defective one. We’re talking about the Totalities of the ALL, so of course they’re in agreement and harmonious consent, because they are always in agreement and harmonious consent. The ALL do not have their own individual Egos. They are One and the same with the Son.

“They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. Then from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father, of whom the aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them.”

“They gathered together, asking the Father” refers to the ALL praying upstream to the Originating Consciousness out of whom they were emanated along with the Son. Then, the Father …

“made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which is his beloved Son. … the one who is properly called “Savior” and “the Redeemer” and “the Well-Pleasing one” and “the Beloved,” “the one to whom prayers have been offered” and “the Christ” and “the Light of those appointed,” in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given to him. Yet, what other name may be applied to him except “the Son,” as we previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father, whom he wanted them to know?”

This passage says that the united prayers of the ALL, the Aeons, and Logos manifested the Christ.  The Christ is the Son of the Father made tangible, bringing full knowledge of the Son whom the Father wanted us to know.

The pleroma of the Christ is the 3rd Order of Powers

Now, this next quote is really spectacular. Because it says that not only did the Christ manifest the face, or the countenance, of the Son, but it also manifested as the faces of all of the Aeons who had gathered together.

“Not only did the aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, … but also they generated their own; for the aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony. They came forth in a multifaceted form, in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the one who gave it to him.”

It wasn’t only the singular Christ that was created–He who is the One image of the Son of God; it was the face of everyone who prays to the Father for help. This army of the Christ is the Third Order of Powers. These Third Order Powers are the Pleroma of the Christ, created as living images of the Son, the ALL, and the Aeons of the Fullness. They are far more powerful than we Second Order Powers and infinitely more powerful than the phantoms of the deficiency. There is one of those Third Order Powers for every one of us Second Order Powers down here, emanated for our redemption and liberation. The Tripartite Tractate says the Third Order Powers came forth in a “multifaceted form in order that the one to whom help was to be given might recognize them” as the answer to their prayers. “He also sees the one who gave it to him,” meaning the One, the Son, the Christ.

I interpret this to mean that “the one who needs help” is everybody down here below in this material creation. This includes all of us humans, all of us animals and plants, the bacteria, and all of the cells that make up our bodies. We are all Second Order Powers emanating from the Pleroma of Logos and we need help down here on this so-called material plane because we are stuck in a never-ending war with the Fallen Demiurge and the archons of the deficiency who are trying to kill us. The never-ending war is not only against archonic personalities, but against physical forces of chaos, entropy, and dissolution.

The “army of Christ” was emanated with the face of every single Aeon so that we might each recognize and personally relate to the Christ. Remember, the Logos Who Fell had a little fractal version of every one of the faces of the Aeons within his Pleroma and when he fell his fractal images cast shadows and phantoms of the Aeons that became the inverted, apparent substance of this universe.

Second Order Powers are representations of those same fractal Aeons of the Pleroma of Logos, but made to fit within the universal Boundary and remember the Father above. So, when we come down into this creation, we represent the faces of every single one of the Aeons of the Fullness. When the Christ was produced, his Pleroma became a true representation of the pre-existent beings of the thought of those who give glory to the Father. Because of this, there is a piece of light for every piece of darkness, a piece of life for every piece of death, and there is redemption for every Second Order Power that dwells on the material plane. There is also redemption for the Demiurge who rules this cosmos.

“For he revealed himself to him within him, since he is with him, is a fellow sufferer with him, gives him rest little by little, makes him grow, lifts him up, gives himself to him completely for enjoyment from a vision.”

In our modern Christian understanding, we think of the Christ as a singular entity—the Son. This is true, but our gnostic understanding adds the Pleroma of the Third Order of Powers into the equation. Even more limiting, Christians think of the Christ as only coming to Earth in the body of the man named Jesus of Nazareth. But the Christ also reflects and is able to redeem every representation that has ever come into this universe. Because of this, each one of us, whether we be humans or dogs, plants, insects, or skin cells, has a personal representation of the Christ that we can immediately recognize. You and I have our own, personalized, Third Order Power that brings us redemption. This is the true nature of the redeeming body and blood of Jesus—not that He hangs upon a cross until dead and is subsequently resurrected, but that his fractal story represents resurrection for all of us Second Order Powers, each with our own cross to bear.

“It had the designation of the Son and his essence and his power and his form, who is the one whom he loved and in whom he was pleased, who was entreated in a loving way. It was light and was a desire to be established and an openness for instruction and an eye for vision, qualities which it had from the exalted ones. It was also wisdom for his thinking in opposition to the things beneath the organization. It was also a word for speaking and the perfection of the things of this sort. And it is these who took form with him, but according to the image of the Pleroma, having their fathers who are the ones who gave them life, each one being a copy of each one of the faces… It has the name “the Church,” for in harmony they resemble the harmony in the assembly of those who have revealed themselves.”

When I prayed to the Father for salvation, I was able to recognize the Father and recognize the Christ because it came looking like me. There was a recognition of the power and personality of Christ. And when you pray to the Father for redemption and you pray to the Christ to save you, the Christ will appear to you in a form that you can personally recognize. The conventional Christian experience presents a truncated version of this mechanism by way of a personal relationship focused on Jesus. Jesus is the first fruit of the Third Order of Powers, and he is our exemplar.

Jesus is the example by which the salvation of Christ and his Pleroma of Third Order Powers walked the Earth, and he represents the perfection of the Christ. The perfect Self of Jesus never strayed into egoic behavior; he never forgot his true ethereal home; he knew all along who his Father was. And, when we pray for salvation from the never-ending war, we can also be filled with the power of the Christ and our own personal Third Order Powers. The Third Order Powers were produced as an army for the Christ, and we’ve each got our own soldier assigned to us. I don’t know for sure, but I’m thinking that this is where the idea of your guardian angel comes from. Many people have this notion that they have a guardian angel. It’s probably a Third Order Power that has your name on it; that’s your guardian angel.

Illustration from Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth

My diagram of the Final Economy shows the Third Order of Powers nested right next to the Christ and above the Aeons of the Fullness, because the Third Order Powers were produced as an army for Christ and they were emanated after the Pleroma of the Hierarchy of God. They are placed above the Hierarchy of the Fullness that is the Pleroma of the Aeons, because the Third Order possesses the entirety of the ALL within them. They are co-existent with the Christ.

I acknowledge that this is a very different version of Christianity than has been traditionally presented to us. This is gnosis that was originally contained in the sacred scriptures that formed the New Testament prior to the Pope and Emperor of Rome getting their hands on it and stripping it out. It’s nice to know. I hope you get it. It doesn’t really matter, because all you need to know is that we come from the Father and to the Father we will return. We are emanations directly of the Father and the Father has promised to save us all and bring us all home.

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me.” This has been taken to mean that one must acknowledge the power of the Christ before the Christ can redeem you. But I hope you can see that this puts all of the power of redemption in your hands rather than Christ’s. The Christ will redeem all Second Order Powers by the end of time, with or without your acknowledgment. What accepting the Christ now does for you is that it opens the door for the Third Order Powers to enter your egoic soul. This power makes it possible to live a joyous and virtuous life. It allows the love of the Father to flow through you and out into the world. And it eases your transition after the physical death of your body, so you may enter the afterlife without fear, knowing that you rest in the Pleroma of the Christ.

A piece of business here– I have taken down the contact me form on the Gnostic Insights website because all I ever get from it is junk emails that jam up my box. So if you want to contact me, probably the best way to do it is to go to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack and then leave a comment underneath the latest podcast episode. Then I will definitely see what you are writing to me. Or you could contact me through LinkedIn, but I don’t want you to contact me if you’re trying to sell me something, some sort of service, because honestly, I get dozens of those a day and it’s just too much. It’s just really too much. And the chances of me saying, yeah, are practically nil. Okay. So that’s why there’s no longer a contact me form there at Gnostic Insights.

The children’s book is published and out on amazon.com. It’s already sold three copies. Hopefully that’s just the beginning.

https://www.amazon.com/Children-Fullness-Gnostic-Simple-Gospel/dp/B0FKZ52DGL/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1BBNRIK0MZZNG&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.PYbzzn0ozjrf_PyD1ThWTg.34vAmyex17a2zT1DWA7xekNyiZwTvERiP6rDLWcBmhQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=children+of+the+fullness%3A+a+gnostic+myth&qid=1755345772&s=digital-text&sprefix=%2Cdigital-text%2C425&sr=1-1

And on another matter, I’m going to run another free booksy promotion for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel on Amazon. And you can get the ebook of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel for free from August 23rd through the 26th. That way, even if I had sent you a free copy for reviews or anything like that, or if you have been given a copy of the book as a gift, you can still qualify to leave a review on Amazon for the book because it will be a verified purchase, even though you didn’t have to pay anything for it. We really need to boost those reviews, folks. So please do me a favor. Write a review or at least throw some stars my direction for the book. Okay?

What we’re going to look at today is basically Chapter Five from A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And that chapter is called The Fall of Logos and the Rise of the Deficiency. I’m going to focus on the deficiency and what that means—why it’s called the deficiency. I’m just going to skim through Chapter Five.

We know that in this form of Gnosticism that I teach that comes directly out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, the Aeon we discuss is not Sophia, but rather Logos. And this is one of the big things that sets the Tripartite Tractate apart from the other books in the Nag Hammadi. The Tripartite Tractate talks about Logos. And I prefer this. Let me tell you why.

The story with Sophia and her Fall and then her illegitimate child, Yaldabaoth, and all of the things that happened to them down on the Earth—that’s a mythological type of story. On the other hand, the story of Logos, the Aeon Logos and its Fall, it’s not mythological in the same way. It’s logical. It has to do with the way that consciousness rolls out from the Source. It has to come from the original Source and then keep coming down to us as we sit here talking and listening. The Tripartite Tractate follows that course of consciousness from the Source, which is called the Father in the Tripartite Tractate, and then through the first emanation of the Father, which is called the Son in the Tripartite Tractate. And then how does it get from the Son to all of us down here? There is a mechanism for that. And that’s the mechanism we’re going to talk some about today.

You see, Logos was the final Aeon produced by the combination of all of the Aeons of the Fullness of God together, giving praise and glory to the Father and Son. And in their combined Fullness, all of them focused on a single topic, that being giving praise to the Father and Son, they gave birth to the final Aeon.

And that birth is that Logos, the final Aeon produced by the Fullness of God through their combination, contains within itself a complete pleroma that’s one level down, one fractal level down from the actual Fullness of God. Logos is a true image or representation of the Fullness of God, simply one fractal level down. So Logos looks just like the Fullness. His pleroma looks exactly like the Fullness. Everybody’s in there.

And Logos then mistook himself for the Fullness because he was complete, and he knew all of the plans, and he could dream of Paradise like nobody’s business, all by himself.

Logos mistakes himself for the Fullness.

And so Logos decided to launch himself into the realm of glory to reunite with the Father. But, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos wasn’t able to give proper glory to the Father, and therefore he stumbled and fell. The Tripartite Tractate puts it this way:

The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows [and] copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 77)

… which is just another way to say that Logos took upon himself a great project, and then he found he couldn’t pull it off. And then he began to doubt himself, and that was looking into the darkness. By the way, we are fractals way down the road from Logos, so everything that we hear about going on in the Fullness or with Logos and the deficiency, it happens to all of us too.

As Logos reached for the Father, Logos stumbled and fell. Now, this is the original Fall. It’s not Eve handing Adam an apple in the Garden of Eden. It was not we humans who brought death and disaster into the cosmos. That is above our pay grade. It seems so obvious. The Fall happened way before. It happened with that Aeon Logos taking a fall. Quoting again,

His self-exaltation and his expectation of comprehending the incomprehensible became firm for him and was in him. But the sicknesses followed him when he went beyond himself, having come into being from self-doubt, namely from the fact that he did not <reach the attainment of> the glories of the Father, the one whose exalted status is among things unlimited. This one did not attain him, for he did not receive him. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 77)

And that was for the protection of Logos, because it says earlier in the Tripartite Tractate that anyone approaching the glory of the Father would be annihilated. That’s the word that’s used—annihilated—because the Father is so much greater than the consciousness that would be approaching it.

When Logos reached for the illimitable, when he went for the Father, he believed in himself that he was about to produce Paradise, the Paradise that Logos, along with the rest of the Fullnesses, were singing about and dreaming of together. He had all the plans, like an architectural design for Paradise, but he couldn’t pull it off and he went beyond himself. And this overreach brought the sickness of self-doubt onto his soul. Now prior to this time, every Aeon’s core Self was in perfect harmony with its ego, and their ego’s function was to put into practice the will of the Father. But now Logos’ ego departed from that. Now self-doubt replaced the ineffable joy of the Fullness. So this division of the deeply troubled Logos was the first manifestation of ego acting outside the will of the one Self and the Fullness. We could say that the Fall was an act of ego falling away from the true Self, and you see that happens to all of us.

Now the Tripartite Tractate doesn’t call the word ego. They call it presumptuous thought, because Logos had a presumptuous thought. He presumed that he could plug back into the Father, that he could create Paradise on his own. But I am seeing that presumptuous thought as the word for ego, particularly the type of ego that has come down to us. It’s presumptuous, meaning that it goes beyond what’s right and proper.

Egoic thought places the focus of one’s thought on your own desires without regard to others. It’s always about, what am I going to do now? Presumptuous thought, it’s all about me, me, me. Whereas the Aeons of the Fullness, being in complete harmony with their ego and Self, they are not me types of creatures. The Aeons all live for one another in perfect harmony.

Verse 78 of the Tripartite Tractate says,

Like the Pleromas are the things which came into being from the arrogant thought, which are their (the Pleromas’) likenesses, copies, shadows, and phantasms, lacking reason and the light, these which belong to the vain thought, since they are not products of anything.  (Attridge and Mueller)

So here the ego of Logos is characterized as vain thought, and the copies produced by the Fall are not true images of the Aeons. They are imitations. They are shadows, likenesses, apparitions. They’re not products of anything. That’s a quote: not products of anything. It indicates that unlike this flow of consciousness that we’ve been talking about—from the Source, to the Son, to the Fullnesses, into Logos and the fractals or pleroma of Logos—these products of the Fall are not part of that flow of consciousness. They are outside of the will of God. These shadows were conjured up out of nothing. They’re literally shadows. It’s like when you’re standing outside and the sun is casting your shadow onto the ground. There’s you, and then there’s that dark flat shadow just lying there; it has no consciousness. It can’t do anything. All it can do is mirror in a flattened-dimensional way what you do. They don’t contain the Holy Spirit of the Father. They’re flat without depth. The Tripartite Tractate says,

Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. [So, we’re talking about Logos.] From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and <of that> which is.  (Thomassen, verse 77)

The forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and of that which is now becomes a defining characteristic of the ego’s relationship to the Self in all of us: the ego of Logos became entirely estranged from its better Self. All that remains of Logos down here below is the shell of his broken ego and an infinite number of ego-ridden dark shadows, which I depict as these blue balls rolling out in all directions. The ego, divided from its Self, has total amnesia of Logos, the Fullness, and the Father. It recognizes nothing but its own presumptuous thought—that is, its own egoic thought.

So these shadows are a product of ego run amok, of ego no longer within those bonds of love of the Self, no longer acting out of the Simple Golden Rule of love—working together, sharing information, producing something better than itself. Instead, they’re all out for themselves because the ego of Logos overreached. And so these shadows were born out of overreaching, out of putting themselves above others. And every one of them, well, I was going to say is out for themselves, but they don’t have Selfs. These shadows do not have consciousness on their own. They are part of the broken pleroma of the ego of Logos. And that ego is what we call the Demiurge in Gnosticism. The Demiurge is the ego of the fallen Aeon. It’s only ego.

And so when you think about it, think about the news, think about people you know, think about people that are only in it for themselves. They are serving their own ego, their own aggrandizement. They’re not serving their true Self, which is a reflection of the image of the Fullness of God. They’re not serving their Self or the Fullness or the Son or the Father. They’re serving only their own ego. Therefore, the things that I’m about to read to you, the characteristics of the deficiencies, of the shadows of the deficiency, of the imitations, the copies and the phantoms—think about how these words relate to your own ego when it’s out of step with the will of God.

Therefore, their end will be like their beginning. From that which did not exist, they are to return once again to that which will not be.

That’s the shadows. So the shadows don’t exist in actuality. And once the light of God is turned on in the cosmos, they will disappear. Darkness and shadows flee the light.

“Therefore, their end will be like their beginning: from that which did not exist (they are) to return once again to that which will not be,” speaking of the shadows. “It is they, however, by themselves who are greater, more powerful, and more honored than the names which are given to them, which are [their] shadows,” speaking of the Aeons. “In the manner of a reflection are they” the shadows “beautiful. For the [face] of the copy normally takes its beauty from that of which it is a copy.” (Attridge and Mueller, verses 78–79)

So these shadows and likenesses resemble the Fullnesses, but their beauty is only skin deep. Their beauty is not consciousness and love. It’s like thinking that the images on a movie screen are real and alive and conscious. They’re not. They’re flat. And they are beautiful, like the actors that played them, but they themselves have no substance. Quoting the Tripartite Tractate again,

 The Logos was a cause of those [who] came into being and he continued all the more to be at a loss and he was astonished. Instead of perfection, he saw a defect; instead of unification, he saw division; instead of stability, he [saw] disturbances; instead of [rests], tumults. Neither was it [possible] for him to make them cease from [loving] disturbance, nor was it possible for him to destroy it. He was completely powerless, once his totality and his exaltation abandoned him. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 80)

They remind me of rioters. The rioters may say they’re doing things for a just and noble cause, but when they’re acting out of hatred, and they’re hurting and killing and burning and looting, that’s not righteous. That’s not an expression of love. Quoting again,

Those who had come into being not knowing themselves both did not know the Pleromas from which they came forth and did not know the one who was the cause of their existence. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 80)

So in addition to being unable to relate to others, these small imitations of the fallen ego of Logos did not even recognize the pleroma of Logos out of which they arose, much less have any inkling of the Self that had abandoned the pleromas of the Fullness and the ALL. Quoting the Tripartite Tractate again,

The Logos, being in such unstable conditions, did not continue to bring forth anything like emanations, the things which are in the Pleroma, the glories which exist for the honor of the Father. Rather, he brought forth little weaklings, [hindered] by the illnesses by which he too was hindered. It was the likeness of the disposition which was a unity, that which was the cause of the things which do not themselves exist from the first. (Attridge and Mueller, verses 80–81)

So when the Tripartite Tractate talks about things that are a likeness, that’s when it’s talking about that flat 2-D representation that has no consciousness.

They wanted to command one another, overcoming one another [in] their vain ambition, while the glory which they possess contains a cause [of ] the system which was to be. They are likenesses of the things which are exalted. They were brought to a lust for power in each one of them, according to the greatness of the name of which each is a shadow, each one imagining that it is superior to his fellows. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 79)

Now that’s speaking on several levels. The likenesses of the imitation don’t remember Logos. They don’t know Logos. They don’t know anything, really. They live in disobedience and acts of rebellion because they don’t remember the Father or the Fullness. They don’t remember the Simple Golden Rule of cooperation and love.

All of our egos have a choice to cooperate with the Self or to deny the Self and stake a narcissistic claim to consciousness. Since this ego of Logos was unaware of its origin as the Logos of the Fullness and the Father, it believed it was its own originating consciousness. Hence, everything that it produced was similarly ignorant and disobedient to the Father and the Fullness. In this manner, the deficiency took on an imitation of life on its own, becoming the cause of the things that do not exist on their own account.

So, remember these likenesses of the deficiency have no more self-awareness than your reflection in the mirror has. They are controlled strictly by the Demiurge, and the Demiurge does have the borrowed consciousness of the Self of Logos. So even though the Demiurge is down here in the material world and Logos is up there in the ethereal plane, it is still one entity–Logos. His Self is up above, his ego is stuck down below, and it is the ego of the Demiurge that brings order and a false Paradise to this material world. That’s why it’s called the deficiency. It’s the imitation of Paradise.

This image from Children of the Fullness depicts the Self of Logos looking down from heaven as the Demiurge builds the dead, dark world.

So how is your ego doing? What’s its relationship to your true Self? What is the relationship of your ego to the Fullness of God? Are you always battling? Is your ego battling yourself? Is it always trying to ignore the good suggestions that the Self has? Does it usually win those arguments? The more that you let your ego control your soul, the more difficult your life will be. The ego always promises really good things. It promises that it’s going to be a lot better if you just let it have its full reign, because you can get this, and you can get that, and you can have this, and you can have that, and you can do whatever you want, because it’s your life and you deserve it.

But it doesn’t work out that way. It’s a lie. It’s only when our ego is subordinate to our true Self, and works in harmony with your true Self. Your true Self is an actual reflection of the Fullness of God. You have the entirety of the Fullness of God inside of yourself. We all do. And that is how that we know right from wrong. That’s what your conscience is.

So next time you find yourself in an argument with your better nature versus what you really want to do, stop. Remember the Fullness. Remember the Father. Remember the Christ.

Onward and upward, and God bless us all.

I thought today what we’d look at is the entire run—the overall big picture. You can’t get a bigger picture than this of our existence and our universe. So this is the overall, overarching flow of consciousness from the Source to us and then after we pass how it all rolls up. This is the entire run, or cosmology, all rolled up into one package and presented for you today.

All of this comes from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. The Nag Hammadi was a set of ancient books that were dug up out of the desert in Egypt in 1945. It’s like a movie plot, this discovery of the Nag Hammadi, what are called codices, (and a codex is a one of the original books when they were changing from writing all books out as scrolls that you had to unroll to putting them into our current form of a book, which is pages between the covers). So this gnosis comes from one of those books out of the Nag Hammadi codices, (codices is the plural for codex), called the Tripartite Tractate, which is considered one of the most difficult books of the Nag Hammadi to understand but I find it the easiest to understand so that’s why I focus on it. So let’s get into the entire run of consciousness.

What I’m using for my visual reference for this episode is the Gnostic cosmogony diagram that appears on the last page of my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, which of course you can pick up at Amazon and that’s what I’ll be referring to. So if you have the book you can go grab it and follow along in the diagram or if you’re listening on an audio podcast this would be a good episode for you to go to GnosticInsights.com at some point and look at the illustrations that accompany this discussion. All right, so we’re looking at the entire run of consciousness.

1: It begins with what we call the Father, other people call it the Source, and that is consciousness itself. The base state, the ground state of everything is just awareness, consciousness—that’s where everything comes from. In my diagrams I picture it as the page itself upon which this story now is to be written.

2: The consciousness of the Father admired itself and in so doing it made itself into another entity that we call the Son. It could be called the Child, it’s not gendered. So you have now the Father and the Son and the Son is the complete encapsulation of the Father.

The Son is the bucket dipped into the sea of consciousness. It contains everything that the Father contains except it’s now in a place. It has a point of view; it’s a singularity; it’s a monad. So instead of being everywhere, omniscient, omnipresent, unfathomable Source, it’s now a person, a personified place with its own self-awareness. And it says in the Tripartite Tractate that the Father and Son admired each other. The Son didn’t leave the Father—the Son stays plugged into the Father at all times. It has an umbilical cord, so to speak, that remains one with the Father. The Son and the Father have identical consciousness. And because the Son has the consciousness or the characteristics of the Father, it’s the complete encapsulation of the Father. It has the same creative drive, the same spark of identity and power as the Father.

3: And because of this creative nature of the Father and the Son, the Son immediately fractured itself into, well, we’re talking about the Son, S-O-N, but the Son is also like a sun, an S-U-N, in that it fractured itself into all of the rays. Generally, I picture the Son as a diffuse cloud, like fog, sitting within the inky blackness of the Father’s underlying ground structure. But the Son immediately bursts into all of its components, into every possible expression of itself, every variable, every thought that would ever be. And so instead of the fog now, it’s like a sunshine. It’s like a glowing body that throws out rays in all directions. And that stage of the Son is known as the ALL. ALL for One and One for ALL, I think of as their motto.

Now, each of those individual rays of the Son had no self-identity at first. They were simply part of the Son, the way that you’re walking around clothed in your body. You’ve got all of the cells of your body, and  everywhere you go, your body goes with you, doesn’t it? And all of those cells and all of those parts of your body form you. Well, that’s the way that the ALL is to the Son. That’s the same relationship.

The ALL is the manifestation body of all of the variables of the Son. So now, instead of the Son being gigantic and unapproachable and illimitable, it is now broken up into an infinite number of variables.

And the ALL admired the Father and the Son, and loved them and sang hymns to them. So in their singing together and giving praise and glory to the Father and the Son, the ALL became self-aware. All of those variables became self-aware. They weren’t all just part of one thing. They were now each an individual within that thing. They were still singing in complete unison. They were all still part of the same body, but now they had individual components, and they were all self-aware. 4: And so when they all became self-aware, it formed immediately. There’s no time in this place. So these things all essentially happen, boom, boom, boom, immediately.

5: The self-aware ALL sorted itself, named itself. Each one took up a place and a name and a duty, and they sorted themselves into what’s called a hierarchy. And the reason a hierarchy looks like a pyramid is because the higher, the fewer. So there’s more entities taking up the very bottom of the pyramid, and then fewer and fewer and fewer as you go up. That’s what a hierarchy is. And this isn’t a hierarchy in the way that humans think of hierarchies with power plays and manipulation and control. It’s not like that. It’s a willing hierarchy. They sorted themselves. They each had their own place.

Again, to make the analogy to our body, the feet are at the bottom of our body, and then you have your legs, you have your torso. These are in a certain hierarchy. They’re in a certain order, and the feet aren’t up sitting on our heads or on our shoulders or at the ends of our hands. Our hands are different than our feet. So they each had a duty. They each had a name. They each had a place wherein they could fulfill the duties or responsibilities that they had. They still sat and sang and gave glory to the Father and the Son. This now, though, is called the Fullness of God, or the pleroma of God, the hierarchy of God. These are all words for this stage that looks like a hierarchy, which is pictured in my diagrams as a pyramid type of structure.

The initial sorting was just the beginning of the Fullness of God, because as they sang together and gave glory to the Father and the Son in their hierarchy, they sang in different combinations of themselves. It’s like the tenors and the altos and the basses and the sopranos in a choir. They each had sections, and each of these different combinations of the Fullnesses, or what are called the Aeons, A-E-O-N-S, these different combinations began to procreate. They birthed more of themselves that were based upon their combinations, like the way a mother and father combine and birth an offspring, a child.

The Aeons did the same thing as they were sitting there in their hierarchy, and through singing together in various combinations, giving glory to God, they birthed more and more and more Aeons. It’s an infinite set because it represents the Fullness of an infinite God, you see.

5: One of the things that the Fullness of God does, the pleroma, is they not only sing and give glory to the Father, but they dream together. What they dreamed up was what we call heaven or paradise. It’s the dream of the Aeons. I have that represented in my drawing as a thought bubble coming out of that hierarchy, and it contains a beautiful picture of paradise, of Eden.

The Tripartite Tractate says that the final Aeon to be produced out of all possible combinations was an Aeon that sat at the very top. He topped the pyramid. He was the most perfect and beautiful Aeon ever produced by the Fullness, and he, or it, was a combination of all of the other Aeons.

It contains within itself, within its skin, a fractal of all of the other Aeons of the Fullness of God. And so, in my diagrams, I picture this small pyramid sitting on top of, as the capstone, the larger pyramid of the pleroma, or fullness of God. And it’s very interesting that this really resembles so many depictions of the pyramids in Egypt.

They’re hierarchies. There’s more stones at the bottom than at the top. That’s why it gets smaller as it goes up to the top.

And sitting at the very top is a pyramidal-shaped capstone. Well, that capstone, that final Aeon to be produced in the Tripartite Tractate, is known as Logos, L-O-G-O-S, Logos. And Logos contained within itself fractals of all the other Aeons.

Logos was sitting at the very top of the hierarchy. It didn’t have any next-door neighbors. It didn’t have anyone above it. And it seems to me that what caused Logos to stumble was his lack of relation to others. He was all by himself. He was an isolated ego sitting up there at the top.

Oh, by the way, when the Aeons came to self-awareness, that self-awareness is the originating form of what we call the ego, because the ego is a designation of yourself, isn’t it? It’s a designation of your place. It relates to its neighbors. It carries around its job. It keeps that in mind. It does all of these things. Within the Fullness, or the pleroma, they all share the one big Self, because they are actually the sorted Fullness, the sorted ALL, which itself is absolutely coexistent with the Son.

So nothing has changed. There’s no more or different consciousness. It’s all the same consciousness flowing, but it’s becoming more and more particularized. It’s becoming more localized, and many, many more. Now you have an infinite number of egos sitting in the pleroma of God. It’s not a bad thing—that’s just their name. It’s their designation.

6: Except that Logos, his ego, launched him out into space. This Logos, containing within itself fractals of the entire hierarchy of the Fullness of God—I  think it mistook itself for the hierarchy of God. And so it thought whatever the overall mission of the hierarchy was, it could take care of on its own. And what it wanted to do, of course, because their entire job basically has to do with giving glory to God, giving glory to the Father and the Son and dreaming together of Paradise, well, Logos decided to reunite with the Father.

It says in the Tripartite Tractate that we shouldn’t blame Logos for going out on its own, because it was trying to do a good thing. It was trying to reunite with the Father. It wasn’t trying to take over heaven or to become God. It was trying to plug back into the originating consciousness in the same exact way that the Son remains plugged in to the Father. So he launched himself, he forgot his duty, which was to be the capstone, and he launched himself out into the realm of goodness, into the realm of the everlasting Father. But he could not plug back into the Father. And that was a protective mechanism for Logos, because the Tripartite Tractate says, if he had been able to reunite with the Father, he would have been annihilated.

You know, the Buddhist religion thinks that we’re all annihilated after we pass away and lose our bodies—that we are annihilated when we plug back into the Father. But that is not what Gnostic cosmology says, and that is not what Christianity says either. You remain yourself after you pass away. But that’s way down the line. We’re getting ahead of ourselves.

7: So in order to protect the Self-identity of Logos, so that Logos would not be annihilated, instead of plugging into the Father, he faltered and looked into the darkness instead, it says. And he fell. And this is the Fall. This is the big original Fall. He fell out of the ethereal plane, essentially. He fell away from the Fullness of God.

And he crash landed into nothingness out there. The Tripartite Tractate says that all of the glorious things he meant to produce—what came from him instead was nothing like that. His Pleroma, all of his fractals, fell out of harmony because they no longer worked according to the golden rule of harmony and focus on a project.

8: He broke apart. He fell. He crashed. He was no longer this beautiful, glorious, hierarchically arranged being, containing all of those fractals of the Fullness. Now they were just broken apart and crumbled into nothing, like sand crumbling on the beach. And these dark and unruly parts of itself fell out of that hierarchical pyramidal shape and just went rolling out.

9: In my diagram that I’m looking at here, maybe you’re looking at it too, I depict the results of the Fall as these really dark blue balls that just roll out in all directions.

Well, Logos was horrified by what came out of him—by the whole thing of breaking and falling out of harmony and having all of these unrecognizable parts of him just roll out. They were unruly. They wouldn’t listen to him. They wouldn’t get back in place. He couldn’t do anything with them. And the Tripartite Tractate says he was literally horrified. And I have gone on to characterize that as quantum foam. It has a chaotic existence.

11: The Tripartite Tractate says that the Father immediately threw a boundary up around the shadows of the Fall in order to contain them. And it’s not only to keep the results of the Fall away from the ethereal plane, so the ethereal plane is not muddied up by the Fall it’s also to put all of those unruly chaotic shadows into a container so that they have to start cooperating with each other. The boundary around the shadows of the Fall puts them into relationship with each other. They can’t go anywhere. They have to start working together.

10: With the boundary came the emergence of the shadow of Logos himself. Logos himself was one aeon, but within himself he contained his own pleroma, that fractal of the Fullness of God. So this bounded shadowy place now that has just come out from the Fall, when the unit of consciousness that ruled them, that being Logos, when he fled back up to his place in the Fullness of God and abandoned the Fall, the Demiurge moved into that vacuum and became the shadow of Logos.

He became the master of that unruly chaotic pleroma that was formed. And it’s the Demiurge’s job to organize that pleroma. So the Demiurge spends all of its time taking that chaotic foam and making it behave because he still wants to build Paradise. He’s still on board with the original goal that Logos had when he tried to reach the illimitable heights, but now he’s down here in the darkness and he’s putting it together himself. He still has the memory of Paradise, but he doesn’t remember what happened. He got amnesia from the Fall. It was a bad crash. So when he wakes up and takes on his self-identity of the ruler of the shadows, he thinks he’s God. He becomes the God of this universe.

And that boundary, by the way, if you haven’t guessed, that’s the boundary around our universe. It’s the material universe. It actually goes pretty well with the story of Big Bang. If the Big Bang is true in physics, it all started with a singularity and then just began growing and growing and growing and making the stars and everything else as it expands. That sort of thing happened with the Demiurge and the bounded space of the Fall.

So the Demiurge is the only consciousness down there and it has the borrowed consciousness of Logos. It’s the ego of Logos still. It just doesn’t know that. It doesn’t remember that exactly. But he still has all the plans and he’s still got fractals of all the other Aeons inside of him, but they are not Aeons anymore. They’re shadows. They’re knockoffs. They’re imitations. So this bounded space is called the deficiency or the imitation. And the Demiurge sets about to build the Paradise that Logos thought he was going to build. And instead of being up in the ethereal space, that Paradise is now manifesting here in this material space. And so the Demiurge causes the shadows to join up with one another and to make particles and the particles to join up with one another to make atoms and the atoms to join up with one another to make molecules and the molecules to join up with one another to make elements and the elements to join up with one another to make mineral aggregates. That’s all the hard and rocky places of our universe.

And so now the cosmos is starting to look a lot like Paradise, but it doesn’t have the blessing of the Father. It doesn’t have the blessing of the Aeons of the Fullness. It doesn’t have the life. It doesn’t have the Self-awareness and Self-consciousness. It doesn’t have the love and life of the Father. So the Demiurge is able to make all of the material mud aspects of our universe, but he can’t bring any creations to life.

He tries to build animals and to build humans there on that metaphorical riverbank, as it says in Genesis, but nothing comes to life. He can’t breathe life into it because he doesn’t contain life. He’s not plugged in in an animated way anymore into the ethereal plane or the Fullness of God. He doesn’t have the power or the glory. That’s why it’s all shadowy and dark.

12: Meanwhile, Logos is back up in the Fullness of God with the rest of the Aeons and together they pray for life to come into this bounded space. They pray for the Demiurge to remember Logos. They want to remind him that he isn’t all alone out there. He’s not just all by himself. So what they do, the Fullnesses and Logos, they create what’s called the Second Order of Powers. They were the First Order of Powers. The Demiurge and his creations are just the egoic side of a First Order Power. It’s not power on its own. The Second Order of Powers is every living creature that comes into the cosmos: every living creature, every living thing, everything that’s not hard rocky material. So I think that’s beginning with the cells because we know that the cells are Self-conscious and they’re soft and squishy. And all the little bacteria, all the little insects, the animals, the humans, we are all second order powers and we are fruited in the same manner that a slime mold fruits its spores. We are spores sent down from the Fullness of God.

All living things bring consciousness and love into the Fallen world at conception.

We’re Second Order spores and we impregnate essentially this dry and rocky cosmos. Now, we don’t come from the Demiurge. We come from the Fullness. We are the children of the Fullness of God. But when we pass through that boundary and enter the imitation, enter the deficiency, our spirits, which all carry all of the life of the Fullness of God, each of our spirits is melded onto a piece of material put together by the Demiurge. So at conception we bond to the molecular space and then through our divine patterning, our intelligent design, and we grow up into the creature that we are to be.

And we already know we come fully loaded with all of the information, all of the knowledge of the Fullness of God. Because in the same way that the Son carried all of the knowledge of the Father when he fruits out from the Father, we carry all of the knowledge of the Fullness of God when we fruit out of the Fullness.

13: And in my drawing, in this diagram that I’m still working off of, I’ve shown that balance or that power struggle between the material and the ethereal fruit, the Second-Order Powers, as the yin and yang symbol that we’re so familiar with. And our second-order job is to bring life, love, consciousness, and the power of God into this material space. But a strange thing, tragic thing, very sad thing happened. Because of being melded onto the material of the Fall, we find ourselves in what’s called the never-ending war. That’s a term from the Nag Hammadi. We’re in a never-ending war between spirit and material, between life and death, between light and darkness, between the Father and the demi-urge, between ego and the one true Self that we each carry. There’s a never-ending war.

And then it sloshed out so that now we started fighting with each other. We’re not only fighting the Demiurge and the material and trying not to die, we’re also having wars and arguments and fights with neighbors and other villages and other countries—with other factions. The never-ending war has spread into our emotional level and encompassed us. And we have all become like the Demiurge. We all forget who we are, where we come from. We all have amnesia of our true mission and our true role, which is to bring life, light, consciousness, love, memory of the Father into this space.

And Logos and the Fullness were very sad about that, that their solution to bring life, light, love, consciousness into the bounded space isn’t working out because now it’s just another big pile of mess. It’s a fallen world. And so they decided to go for the big guns this time.

They all prayed together, Logos, the Fullness of God, the All, the Son of God. They all pray with one heart and with one mind for true salvation to come into the Fallen world. They needed all the mojo of the Son and the ALL and the complete and unified prayers of the Fullness and Logos all put into one divine being whose sole purpose is to rescue us and rescue the Fall and rescue the Demiurge and reunite the Demiurge with Logos.

14: And that brand new entity is called the Third Order of Powers. And that is also called the Christ, the Beloved, the Prince of Peace, and all of those names that are attributed to Christ. Christ is a different entity than anybody else. He does come from the Son’s blessing. He comes from the direction of the Son. And in my diagram, I have him emanating from the Son. But unlike us Second Order Powers who are emanating down from the Fullness of God, the Christ is emanating from the Son and the ALL down into our fallen world.

And those who allow themselves to be touched by the Christ, those Second Order Powers who recognize the Third Order Power, they have the complete salvation and love and reassurance of salvation. And it’s not just personal salvation. It’s not just so that you won’t go to hell. We haven’t even talked about hell. What we’re saying is that we were sent down here with love and consciousness, walking with the Spirit of God, and we forgot it, just like the Demiurge forgot it.

So the Christ, the Third Order Power, comes with each of our faces. There is a Third Order Power that looks exactly like me. There’s a Third Order Power that looks exactly like you. And when you recognize them, when you pray to the Christ and ask to be filled with the Christ, with the Third Order Powers, you now take on that Spirit of God, and that is known as the Holy Spirit. You become filled with the Holy Spirit and in full remembrance of the Son and the Father.

It’s not a one-and-done deal. Then we backslide, then we forget, then we have fights, and then we remember again, and then we’re filled with the Holy Spirit again, and then we’re walking with the Spirit, and then we backslide, and then we have fights, and then we’re filled with the Christ again. See, every time we forget, we just have to remember. So whenever you find yourself in a dicey situation, or you’re sad, or you’re angry, whatever it is, you’re out of step with the Third Order Power at that point. All you have to do is remember that. You turn your eyes upward, and you’re once again reunited with Christ in the Fullness. Christ never abandons us; it’s us who forget about Christ.

The Tripartite Tractate says that every Second Order Power will remember the Third Order Power, will remember the Christ, will remember the Father. And you either do that while you’re alive, or you do that after you pass away, and that’s known as universalism. Most Christian denominations do not accept the idea that you can be saved after death. They think you have to be saved before death, and so that’s why they’re so intent on having you accept Christ before you die. And it’s so sad for them when you pass away, and you never acknowledge Christ, because they think you’re going to hell.

But you are going to go to a reckoning. You are going to go to the judgment seat of God, it’s called, where you will review your life, where you will have a life review, and then you will repent, and then you will be redeemed. So you either do all that before you die, or after you die. It’s a lot harder after you die, because it’s going to be more painful. See, if you pass away with the Christ already in your spirit, already in your soul, then Christ stands with you when you die. Christ says to the Father at Judgment Day, she’s with me, or he’s with me. And you’re enveloped in the love of Christ, and the protection of Christ at that point.

15: And so the final result of this entire cosmological play, once all of the Second Order powers are redeemed, the Demiurge will also be redeemed, and he’ll remember Logos. And Logos and the Demiurge will be reunited once again. He’ll be a First Order power. We, though, go to a different place. Our Paradise is called the Third Economy. Now I don’t know if there’s any more economies after that. The Tripartite Tractate only goes up to the end of time and what’s called the Third Economy. And the Third Economy is a place where we’re going to be with all of the other Second Order Powers that have ever lived. The elect, the originating church up in the Fullness of God—they will be there. The Aeons will all be there. Christ in all of its undimmed magnificence will be there. And we will all live together in perfect peace and full realization. Full realization! We won’t lose ourselves. We’ll have self-awareness and we’ll be enveloped in all of the love of God.

That’s the Gnostic cosmogony, which you can find on the last page of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. God bless us all and onward and upward.

https://www.amazon.com/Children-Fullness-Gnostic-Simple-Gospel/dp/B0FKZ52DGL/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1COBZMNUIGV3Z&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.4dVxQhQhDFOjaiWtAIeZ3VLeynDQZEz_QLcabXr1Hoa-CH6fg-OOZaqCxq2Q9GLg0uDp3ZVfKiTGDGikdKwQloa7326i7bZbvqz7ueMF8y4Vxui5kAeET28Im2KGon8RyN2QeYFXfoEQJpPo_plrnQ2I_WOAHzGWTEVX6p5oK1jnG-8CPucF8oyVq7NOGhAE4LSl9Bx0B8yfQ-CGRudwXg._gC9tIKvqHaKZBMAEqUI-eTMbBE3dMUgovHAsReccAw&dib_tag=se&keywords=children+of+the+fullness&qid=1754581864&sprefix=%2Caps%2C167&sr=8-1 The first-ever published Gnostic kid’s book is now available on amazon for only $9.99! For now, it’s only available as an 8.5″ x 8.5″ paperback. When I get time, I’ll format it as a kindle ebook. Meanwhile, I’d appreciate it if you would please purchase this enlightening and entertaining book for the children in your life–yours, your grandchildren, your neighborhood kids. Big pictures, few words, the Gnostic cosmology in a nutshell for kids 2–8 and their parents. Here’s the amazon link, click here.

My neighbor’s dear dog, Morgan, passed away last week. She was a terrific working dog who helped out with Search and Rescue operations, finding people lost in the woods, alive or dead. We held a Memorial service for Morgan on Sunday. All of her doggie friends were invited, puzzled to find her missing at her own party. I sang a rendition of Amazing Grace, adapted for dogs. Here I am singing it, tears and all.

Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,

I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.

‘Twas God that sent us dogs to love, and God that sets dogs free

How blessed is the love they share, when they pass on, how we grieve.

When we join our family, pets, and friends upon that golden shore

Our hearts will leap with everlasting joy to be with our pack once more.

Praise God, praise dogs, praise God again, Morgan is already there

She is not dead, she’s romping still in that meadow in the air.

She’s diving and swimming and sniffing and searching

But no one is lost only found,

There are no tears there, no sorrow or fear, nothing but joy unbound.

When we’ve been there 10,000 years bright shining as the sun,

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise and bask in our doggies’ love.

Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,

I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.

Rest in Peace, Morgan

Universal Salvation, part 4

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’m going to do my best to wrap up this review of David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. And I hope you understand, particularly those of you who are Christians that are listening to this, that I do all of this in the name of the Father. It’s not to tear down Christianity. It’s to uphold the mission of the Messiah, which has been lost over the past several hundred years of Christianity.

And so this talk of universal salvation is a necessary component of believing in the glory of God. Because universal salvation of all souls, not only all humans, but the dogs, the cats, the birds, the grasses, all living things, have to return to the Father, or else the Anointed loses power. The Father loses parts of himself.

Okay, let’s get back to David Bentley Hart. So we’re going to run through these four meditations that are the body of his book. The first meditation is, Who is God? He says,

The New Testament, to a great degree, consists in the eschatological interpretation of Hebrew Scripture’s story of creation, finding in Christ as eternal Logos and risen Lord, the unifying term of beginning and end.

There’s no more magnificent meditation on this vision than Gregory of Nyssa’s description of the progress of all persons towards union with God in the one pleroma, the one fullness of the whole Christ. All spiritual wills moving, to use this loving image, from outside the temple walls to the temple precincts, and finally beyond the ages into the very sanctuary of the glory as one.

Okay, let me jump in here to say, do you notice that the New Testament words, when you use the correct translations, are the same as the translations in our Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi? Logos is the eternal spirit of humanity and the risen Lord. The Fullness is the one pleroma, the whole Christ. And in this statement, it’s saying that all that is spiritual, which includes the spirits that reside within each of us, will all move as one into the pleroma of the Christ. That’s who Christ is to us. He’s the head of our pleroma. And when I speak of pleromas, I always picture that pyramidal shape, that hierarchical shape, and the capstone is the head.

We 2nd order powers are children of the 1st order powers. The 3rd order powers are the Army of Christ that have come to redeem us.

When Paul spoke of this, he was applying it literally to the temple in Jerusalem, where there were the walls of the temple, and most of the people were outside of the walls, and some of the people were in the temple precincts. And finally, the very sanctuary of the glory, where only the priests were allowed. These are the three parts that were mentioned, and these are archetypal of the movement of humanity, Hart is saying, from the outside of the pleroma of the Christ, into the pleroma of the Christ, and then into the very glory of God through the Christ.

On page 90, Hart says,

If one truly believes that traditional Christian language about God’s goodness and the theological grammar to which it belongs are not empty, then the God of eternal retribution and pure sovereignty proclaimed by so much of Christian tradition is not and cannot possibly be the God of self-outpouring love revealed in Christ. If God is the good creator of all, he must also be the savior of all without fail, who brings to himself all he has made, including all rational wills, and only thus returns to himself in all that goes forth from him.

And that’s the end of the chapter, Who is God? And that pretty much states my basic belief on why everyone is going to heaven, because we all come from the Father, and therefore we all must return to the Father because the Father cannot be diminished in any way. And if he lost us, he’d be diminished. Do you see?

The second meditation is, What is Judgment? And the subtitle is A Reflection on Biblical Eschatology. And eschatology, that’s one of those big theological words that just means the end times, the end of time. On page 93, Hart says,

There’s a general sense among most Christians that the notion of an eternal hell is explicitly and unremittingly advanced in the New Testament. And yet, when we go looking for it in the actual pages of the text, it proves remarkably elusive. The whole idea is, for instance, entirely absent from the Pauline corpus as even the thinnest shadow of a hint, nor is it anywhere patently present in any of the other epistolary texts.

There is one verse in the Gospels, Matthew 25-46 that, traditionally understood, offers what seems the strongest evidence for the idea, but then now Hart’s going to explain how that can’t be true. And then he says there are also perhaps a couple of verses from Revelation, and he says nothing’s clear in Revelation, so he’s not going to go there. But,

What in fact the New Testament provides us with are a number of fragmentary and fantastic images that can be taken in any number of ways, arranged according to our prejudices and expectations, and declared literal or figural or hyperbolic as our desires dictate.

It’s why people can make the case for eternal damnation, but you can also make the case for not eternal damnation, because it’s so metaphorical. On page 94, Hart says,

Nowhere is there any description of a kingdom of perpetual cruelty presided over by Satan, as though he were some kind of Chthonian god. On the other hand, however, there are a remarkable number of passages in the New Testament, several of them from Paul’s writings, that appear instead to promise a final salvation of all persons and all things, and in the most unqualified terms.

How did some images become mere images in the general Christian imagination, while others became exact documentary portraits of some final reality? If one can be swayed simply by the brute force of arithmetic, it seems worth noting that, among the apparently most explicit statements on the last things, the universalist statements are by far the more numerous.

And then he lists a number of verses from the New Testament that speak of universal salvation, over 20 of them at least, and I’ll give you just a couple.

Romans 5.18 says,

So then, just as through one transgression came condemnation for all human beings, so also through one act of righteousness came a rectification of life for all human beings.

And jumping in from the Gnostic sense, he doesn’t say the fall of one human, he doesn’t say through Adam, he says one transgression—and we would call that one transgression the Fall of Logos, the fall of the Aeon, which is a higher order being than we are.

Or Corinthians 15.22 says,

For just as in Adam all die, so also in the anointed Christ all will be given life.

I would say where it says for just as in Adam all die, it’s not because Adam ate the apple, it’s that we humans who are outside of the Christ, we’re outside of the walls of the temple, we are in the pleroma of Adam—we are in the pleroma of human beings. When you accept the anointed, then you move into the pleroma, or you nest up higher into the pleroma of the Christ. That would be the Gnostic way of saying that.

Second Corinthians 5.14 says,

For the love of the anointed constrains us, having reached this judgment, that one died on behalf of all, all then have died.

And of course that one is the Anointed, and He died on behalf of everyone.

Or even Romans 11:32,

For God shut up everyone in obstinacy, so that he might show mercy to everyone.

And there’s a long discussion in the chapter about how God’s chosen—the original elect, that being the Hebrew nation—has been obstinate about accepting Jesus of Nazareth as the Anointed. And so he’s saying that everyone is shut up in obstinacy, that’s the Hebrews, so that he might show mercy to everyone. And that is, they’re temporarily set up in obstinacy so that the message of the Anointed can be preached far and wide, before death and after death, we Gnostics would say, and not be just constrained to only the Hebrews. That’s why the Hebrews are set aside for the moment, so that those outside the temple walls can also come to Christ.

And then there are 19 more verses after this, and he lists them all between pages 96 and page 102. And if you are a theological scholar or a concerned Christian that wants to know if this is heresy or not, I really suggest you buy the book, That All Shall Be Saved, by David Bentley Hart, and read it carefully from cover to cover. Jumping to page 116, Hart says,

There are those metaphors used by Jesus that seem to imply that the punishment of the world to come will be of only limited duration. For example, “if remanded to prison, you shall most certainly not emerge until you pay the very last pittance.” Or, “the unmerciful slave is delivered to the torturers until he should repay everything he owes.”

And Hart says it seems as if this until should be taken with some seriousness.

Some wicked slaves, moreover, “will be beaten with many blows, while others will be beaten with few blows.”

Hart says, of course, everyone will be “salted with fire.” This fire is explicitly that of the Gehenna. But salting here is an image of purification and preservation, for salt is good. Gehenna is the Valley of Hinnom from the Old Testament, and that is where, outside of the city of Jerusalem, the refuse was burned, and even carrion and bodies were burned. And that is why it is considered to be a hellish place. And it has become a metaphor in the time of Jesus for the purging fire, the Aeonian chastening for the good.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!q9Ub!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd2e57517-6761-4679-ad4c-e4a7d2c25d9a_1024x1024.png

Hart says we might even find some support for the purgatorial view of the Gehenna from the Greek of Matthew 25:46, which is the supposedly conclusive verse on the side of the Infernalist Orthodoxy, where the word used for the punishment of the last day is kolasis, which most properly refers to remedial chastisement, rather than timoria, which more properly refers to retributive justice.

So, the fire of the judgment. What is judgment? The fire is the chastening fire, the fire of personal guilt and remorse over the sins one has done, that causes one to repent and turn to redemption. Hart says,

It is not clear in any event that the fourth gospel, [and the fourth gospel, that’s the gospel of John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John], it is not clear in any event that the fourth gospel foretells any “last judgment,” in the sense of a real additional judgment that accomplishes more than has already happened in Christ. To see His words as pointing toward and fulfilled within his own crucifixion and resurrection, wherein all things were judged and all things redeemed. The kingdom has indeed drawn very near, and even now is being revealed. The hour indeed has come. The judge who is judged in our place is also the resurrection and the life that has always already succeeded and exceeded the time of condemnation. All of heaven and of hell meet in those three days. . .

Hell appears in the shadow of the cross as what has always already been conquered, as what Easter leaves in ruins, to which we may flee from the transfiguring light of God if we so wish, but where we can never finally come to rest, for being only a shadow, it provides nothing to cling to.

And he attributes that concept of hell being only a shadow to Gregory of Nyssa, although we would attribute it to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi which came before Gregory of Nyssa.

Hell exists so long as it exists only as the last terrible residue of a fallen creation’s enmity to God, the lingering effects of a condition of slavery that God has conquered universally in Christ and will ultimately conquer individually in every soul.

This age has passed away already, however long it lingers on its own aftermath, and thus in the Age to Come, [and that’s capital A, Age, which we would interpret as the Aeons to Come, the Aeonian Pleroma to Come], and beyond all ages, all shall come to the kingdom prepared for them from before the foundation of the world.

And that’s the chapter, What is Judgment? The third meditation or chapter of Hart is called What is a Person? A Reflection on the Divine Image. It says over and over in the Bible that we are made in the image of God. Man is made in the image of God. That is the divine image. On page 131, Hart says,

Christians down the centuries have excelled at converting the good tidings of God’s love in Christ into something dreadful, irrational, and morally horrid.

[And we covered that in depth in the previous three episodes, if you want to go back there.] On page 132, Hart says,

I suspect that no figure in Christian history has suffered a greater injustice as a result of the desperate inventiveness of the Christian moral imagination than the Apostle Paul, since it was the violent misprision of his theology of grace, starting with the great Augustine, it grieves me to say, that gave rise to almost all of these grim distortions of the Gospel.

Aboriginal guilt, predestination, (ante praevisa merita), the eternal damnation of unbaptized infants, the real existence of vessels of wrath, and so on. All of these odious and incoherent dogmatic motifs, so to speak, and others equally nasty, have been ascribed to Paul. And yet, each and every one of them, not only is incompatible with the guiding themes of Paul’s proclamation of Christ’s triumph and of God’s purpose in election, but is something like their perfect inversion.

Well, isn’t that interesting? Because we already know that the archons represent the inversions of the Aeons of the Pleroma. And so, although Hart doesn’t realize he’s implying this, to say that what has come down to us in Christian tradition through Augustine is the perfect inversion of what Paul was actually saying about universal salvation, which means, by definition, that it’s the demiurgic or the archonic version of salvation. Isn’t that interesting? I mean, that is what I have been implying, that what has been taken to be Christian tradition for the last couple of thousand years is actually a diminishment of the power of Christ and the power and love of the Father. By saying that people can be lost and condemned to eternal torture, that is sacrilegious to me. That is the heresy. And that is what Hart is saying here. He goes on to say on page 133,

This is all fairly odd, really. Paul’s argument in those chapters is not difficult to follow. What preoccupies him from beginning to end is the agonizing mystery that the Messiah of Israel has come, and yet so few of the children of the house of Israel have accepted the fact, even while so many from outside the covenant have.

And Paul wonders, how is the promised Messiah rejected by so many, yet so many outside the temple walls have accepted the Messiah? There are far more Christians than there are Jews at the moment. Why is that? Paul was wondering. Hart says,

Paul’s is not an abstract question regarding which individual human beings are the saved and which are the damned. In fact, by the end of the argument, the former category, [that is the saved], proves to be vastly larger than that of the elect or the called, while the latter category, [that is the damned], makes no appearance at all.

Jumping down the page, he says, “so then what if,” so now he’s going to go ahead and quote Paul here, Romans 9:19, Paul says,

So then what if God should show his power by preserving vessels suitable only for wrath, keeping them solely for destruction, in order to provide an instructive counterpoint to the riches of the glory he lavishes on vessels prepared for mercy, whom he has called from among the Jews and the Gentiles alike.

For as it happens, rather than offering a solution to the quandary in which he finds himself, Paul is simply restating that quandary in its bleakest possible form, at the very brink of despair. He does not stop there, however, because he knows that this cannot be the correct answer. It is so obviously preposterous, in fact, that a wholly different solution must be sought, one that makes sense and that will not require the surrender either of Paul’s reason or of his confidence in God’s righteousness.

Hence, contrary to his own warnings, Paul does indeed continue to question God’s justice, and he spends the next two chapters unambiguously rejecting the provisional answer, the vessels of wrath hypothesis, altogether, so as to reach a completely different and far more glorious conclusion—God blesses everyone. Romans 10: 11, 12.

And by the way, in Gnostic gospel, we would say the law is actually the Demiurge’s rules for human behavior, because our self-will makes us otherwise uncontrollable. Because to the Father above, the only law is love. When we act out of love, all else follows.

Going on, Hart says,

As for the believing remnant of Israel, [Romans 11:5], it turns out that they have been elected not as the limited number of the saved within Israel, but as the earnest through which all of Israel will be saved. They are waiting for the Anointed to come and take the place of the King of Israel, King of the Jews.

King of the Jews is one of the titles of the Messiah. That means the capstone of their pleroma. You see? It’s all of these pyramidal shapes that are first designed up there in the Fullness of God, the pleroma. What Paul is saying is that the Jews that are in the pleroma of Israel, it’s their remnant that makes them holy. It’s their remnant that is the spiritual part, the higher part, the called part, the elect part of the pleroma of the nation of the Hebrews. And it is through those elect that all of the Jews will be saved, ultimately.

Hart says,

For the time being, true, a part of Israel is hardened, but this will remain the case only until the ”full entirety” [that is the pleroma] of the Gentiles enter in. The unbelievers among the children of Israel may have been allowed to stumble, but God will never allow them to fall.

Hart’s just saying that Israel’s reluctance or slowness to believing that Jesus is the Messiah is just slowing down the progress of history to give everyone else a chance to catch up to it. Quoting Hart again,

We’re in Romans now, 11:11.

This then is the radiant answer dispelling the shadows of Paul’s grim what if in the ninth chapter of Romans. It’s clarion negative. It turns out that there is no final illustrative division between the vessels of wrath and vessels of mercy. That was a grotesque, all too human thought that can now be chased away for good. God’s wisdom far surpasses ours, and his love can accomplish all that it intends.

“He has bound everyone in disobedience so as to show mercy to everyone.” [That’s Romans 11:32.] All are vessels of wrath precisely so that all may be made vessels of mercy. . .

That Paul’s great attempt to demonstrate that God’s election is not some arbitrary act of predilective exclusion, but instead a providential means for bringing about the unrestricted inclusion of all persons, has been employed for centuries to advance what is quite literally the very teaching that he went to such great lengths explicitly to reject. . .

Yet this is still not my principal point. I want to say something far more radical. I want to say that there is no way in which persons can be saved as persons except in and with all other persons. This may seem an exorbitant claim, but I regard it as no more than an acknowledgment of certain obvious truths about the fragility, dependency, and exigency of all that make us who and what we are.

Oh, this is a very interesting portion. Okay, listen to this. Jumping to page 149.

No soul is who or what it is in isolation, and no soul’s sufferings can be ignored without the sufferings of a potentially limitless number of other souls being ignored as well. And so it seems if we allow the possibility that even so much as a single soul might slip away unmourned into everlasting misery, the ethos of heaven turns out to be “every soul for itself”—which is also, curiously enough, precisely the ethos of hell.

But Christians are obliged, it seems clear, to take seriously the eschatological imagery of scripture. And there all talk of salvation involves the promise of a corporate beatitude, a kingdom of love and knowledge, a wedding feast, a city of the redeemed, the body of Christ, which means that the hope Christians cherish must in some way involve the preservation of whatever is deepest in and most essential to personality rather than a perfect escape from personality. But finite persons are not self-enclosed individual substances. They are dynamic events of relation to what is other than themselves.

And then Hart summons up the idea of a single recurrent image, he says,

That of a parent whose beloved child has grown into quite an evil person, but who remains a parent nevertheless, and therefore keeps and cherishes countless tender memories of the innocent and delightful being that has now become lost in the labyrinth of that damaged soul. Is all of that, those memories, those anxieties and delights, those feelings of desperate love, really to be consigned to the fire as just so much combustible chaff? Must it all be forgotten or willfully ignored for heaven to enter into that parent’s soul? And if so, is this not the darkest tragedy ever composed? And is God not then a tragedian utterly merciless in his poetic omnipotence? Who or what is that being whose identity is no longer determined by its relation to that child?

[Skipping to page 153] Personhood as such is not a condition possible for an isolated substance. It is an act, not a thing. And it is achieved only in and through a history of relations with others. We are finite beings in a state of becoming, and in us there is nothing that is not an action, dynamism, an emergence into a fuller or a retreat into a more impoverished existence. And so, as I said in my first meditation, we are those others who make us. Spiritual personality is not mere individuality, nor is personal love one of its merely accidental conditions or extrinsic circumstances.

A person is first and foremost a limitless capacity, a place where the all shows itself with a special inflection. We exist as the place of the other, to borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau. Certainly, this is the profoundest truth in the doctrine of resurrection. That we must rise from the dead to be saved is a claim not simply about resumed corporeality, whatever that might turn out to be, but more crucially, about the fully restored existence of the person as socially, communally, corporately constituted. Each person is a body within the body of humanity, which exists in its proper nature only as the body of Christ.

Well, that’s pretty neat. See, we are nested fractal hierarchies of the pleroma of the Fullness of God. And if you’ve been with me a while, you know what that long and complicated sentence means. Picture a pyramidal shape, picture every living part of your body as building up the pyramid, and your conscious self is the capstone of that pleroma that makes up your body. Now, you are then nested along with all other humans into the pleroma of humanity, the body of humanity, also called the body of Adam. Just the way our cells nest up into building us, we nest up into building the great body of humanity.

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And then, Hart is saying this body of humanity exists in its proper nature only as the body of Christ, because when we then nest up and make Christ the king of our pleroma, we are nested into the Fullness of Christ. And that is what the final salvation resting point is. When we all finally pass through the final judgment and nest up into Christ, then we’re all nested up into the pleroma, we’re all nested up into the Son. And there we are. And we will still have our lives the way the Fullness has their lives. They dream together as one of paradise. And that’s where we’re headed.

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Hart says,

Our personhood must truly consist not only in the immediate love of those close at hand, but also in our disposition toward those whom we, by analogy, care for from afar. Or even in the abstract, for the most essential law of charity, of love, when it is truly active, is that it must inexorably grow beyond all immediately discernible boundaries in order to be fulfilled and to continue to be active.

And all of those in whom each of us is implicated, and who are implicated in each of us, are themselves in turn implicated and intertwined in countless others, and on and on without limit. We belong of necessity to an indissoluble co-inherence of souls.

And I think that down here on the physical level, on the material plane, the demiurgic version of that shared coherence of all souls together is quantum entanglement. That’s the Demiurge’s material version of how we are implicated and intertwined with every other soul. And now he goes on to say something that’s very Gnostic. On the next page, Hart says,

There may be within each of us—indeed there surely is—that divine spark, that divine light or spark of nous or spirit or atman that is the abiding presence of God in us, the place of radical sustaining divine imminence, nearer to me than my inmost parts. But that light is the one undifferentiated ground of our existence, not the particularity of our personal existence, in and with one another.

Oh, hey, there it is. That’s what I’m always saying. This one spark, that’s what we call the big S Self. And the particularity of our personal existence is what we here at Gnostic Insights label as our Ego. So we are made up of the Self that we share with all others and that we share with the Son, but we are also our own individual existence. That’s why we can’t just blink out into nothingness and not be missed, because we have our particularity, and it has its own place in the hierarchy. Then Hart says,

But then this is to say that either all persons must be saved or that none can be. [He says,] God could, of course, erase each of the elect as whoever they once were by shattering their memories and attachments like the gates of hell and then raise up some other being in each of their places, thus converting the will of each into an idiot bliss stripped of the loves that made him or her this person, associations and attachments and pity and tenderness and all the rest. If that were the case, only in hell could any of us possess something like a personal destiny, tormented perhaps by the memories of the loves we squandered or betrayed, but not deprived of them altogether.

[Jumping to 157, he says], I am not I in myself alone, but only in all others. If then anyone is in hell, I too am partly in hell. . . For the whole substance of Christian faith is the conviction that another has already and decisively gone down into that abyss for us to set all the prisoners free, even from the chains of their own hatred and despair, and hence the love that has made all of us who we are and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone.

Amen. And that’s the end of the third meditation. Now the fourth meditation, we just don’t even have time to get to. It’s called, What is Freedom? And if you want to hear the fourth meditation in depth, please text me in the comments and ask for more David Bentley Hart That All Shall Be Saved. But as for now, this treatise on what is freedom? I’ll actually just jump to the last page and skip all of the explanations.

The fourth meditation, What is Freedom? is all about free will. I guess I’ll include it in some future episode about free will and just quote Hart extensively in that episode. But to close it out, Hart says,

It would make no sense to suggest that God, who is by nature not only the source of being, but also the good and the true and the beautiful and everything else that makes spirits exist as rational beings, would truly be all in all if the consummation of all things were to eventuate merely in a kind of extrinsic divine supremacy over creation.

But God is not a god, [or as we would say, the God Above All Gods is not the Demiurge, is how we would put it in Gnostic terms]. And his final victory, as described in scripture, will consist not merely in his assumption of perfect supremacy over all, but also in his ultimately being all in all. Could there then be a final state of things in which God is all in all, while yet there existed rational creatures whose inward worlds consisted in an eternal rejection of and rebellion against God as the sole and consuming and fulfilling end of the rational will’s most essential nature? If this fictive and perverse interiority were to persist into eternity, would God’s victory over every sphere of being really be complete? Or would that small miserable residual flicker of Promethean defiance remain forever as the one space in creation from which God has been successfully expelled? Surely it would, so it too must pass away.

All right, that ends this long episode, because I was trying to wrap up the entire book, which I almost did. Write to me, tell me what you think of this sort of thing. I’d especially like to hear from people who used to be Christians, or who were raised in the church, and who fell away from the church because of some of these very problems and conundrums that we’ve been talking about for the last four episodes.

God bless us all, and onward and upward!

If you find these gnostic insights meaningful, please donate to the cause. Cyd pays for these podcasts out of her retirement money, and the well is running dry. If I am to keep this up, I need your financial assistance as well as your good company. I thank my (very few) paid subscibers from the bottom of my heart to the top of my pleroma. Please help.

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This is a repeat of an earlier podcast. It’s the most complete explanation I’ve ever given on archons, and since I mentioned archons in last week’s episode, I wanted to give the full explanation of what are archons, because archons are mentioned quite often in Gnostic circles.

Also, a piece of news, the children’s book is completed. It’s gorgeous. It’s exciting.  It’s for the little ones. It’s for you to read to your children or grandchildren, ages two to six, probably. Beautiful illustrations, and it’s the very simplest rendition of our Gnostic Gospel possible. Imagine—I’ve simplified the Christian Gnostic Gospel, although I don’t mention Jesus or Christ. I talk about the Prince of Peace in this book, and it’s the nugget of Gnosis.

So if you’re struggling with Gnosis at all, I’m sure you can understand this children’s book. I’ve published it to Amazon. It probably won’t appear for about a week. They need to do their thing on their end with it. It’s only $9.99, which is the very cheapest Amazon would let me sell it for. The name of the children’s book on Amazon is Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth.

Okay, onward and upward, and here’s What Are Archons.

This episode is about archons. It’s kind of a long episode because what I’m going to do is read to you directly out of the Tripartite Tractate and then make explanations about that, and that’s a long process. Also, if this becomes too thick and too difficult to understand just by the hearing of it, go to GnosticInsights.com and read the transcript. And in the transcript, I’m going to put links to other episodes that have spoken on this sort of topic before so that you can have a bigger review or a more in-depth study on this topic, okay?

So reading from the Tripartite Tractate, and this version is translated by Einar Thomassen out of the book, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. I’m reading you three different sections out of the book. The first is called The Word Divided, and that’s verses 77:11–36.

“Now on the one hand, The word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, to the glory of the Father who had desired him and was pleased with him. The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations. For he could not bear to look at the light, but looked at the depths, and he faltered. Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.”

So when this section says the word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, the word is Logos. That’s another way of saying the Aeon named Logos.

And “the perfect single one” is the name for the overarching personality of the Aeon known as Logos. Here at The Simple Explanation of things, we call that the governing unit of consciousness. For example, my body has billions of little units of consciousness in the form of cells and organs and whatnot, but my single one is named Cyd, and that’s my governing unit of consciousness.

Within the overarching personality of Logos, was a fractal iteration of every Aeon, one level down from Logos, housed within his perfect single self.

Logos was a product of the entire Fullness giving glory to the Father in unison, and all together they fruited this final combinatory Aeon. He was the last Aeon to be born, and he was the sum of all of the Aeons. And those smaller images of the Aeons that were contained within the single one named Logos were all fractals of the Fullnesses of God, one level down. And Logos birthed himself in the sense that his personality, his unified governing unit of consciousness, became aware of itself in relation to this fractal pleroma that he contained.

“It was the will of the Father that brought Logos forth as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass.”

And that ordained economy, that’s our material universe, and that includes time and space. And then it says,

“The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations.”

You see, what Logos wanted to do was create Paradise, basically, all by himself, because he had fractals of the entirety within himself. But he didn’t realize that they were only fractals, and the fractals couldn’t get the job done. It needed to be Logos in combination with the real Aeons that were up there at his level. And so when he reached for the Father, that’s what caused the Fall. And the deficient things that issued forth from the Fallen Logos were patterned after his ego, not his one undivided self. “They were shadows, phantoms, and imitations.”

The archons of the deficiency arose from the Fall. They were small, disordered, unruly, like quantum foam.

In other words, they were not real, and they were not true fractals of the Fullness. Logos mistook himself for the entire Fullness because his Pleroma contained fractals of all the Fullnesses. And due to the fact that he so closely resembled his Aeonic parents, who, when you think about it, all together amounted to the totality of the Son. Logos thought he could directly connect to the originating Father in the same manner that the Son does. But the Father can only be directly touched by his true emanation, the Son, and no other, not even Logos, although he resembled the Son. But he, see, was a fractal level down.

All consciousness is funneled through the Son and then on down from there. If Logos had touched the Father directly as he wanted to, he would have been annihilated due to the extreme voltage of the power of the Father. Logos found he could not look into the high voltage light, which is the life of the Father, nor grasp it, and so he faltered and fell into the depths.

“Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.”

Now, this division refers both to the separation of Logos from the Fullness and the division within himself between his better part, that is his self-governing unit of consciousness, which is a reflection of the Son, and his presumptuous thought, that is, the ego that prompted the overreach in the first place. This division brings oblivion, forgetfulness, and ignorance of one’s true self and the originating consciousness of the Father.

The next section is called The Perfect Part of Logos Re-Enters the Fullness, and that’s verse 77:37 through 78:28.

“That which he had brought forth from himself as a unitary Aeon hastened upward to that which was his and to his kin in the Fullness. He abandoned that which had come into being from the deficiency and what had issued from him in an illusion, since they did not belong to him. However, the one who had brought him forth with superior perfection from himself became weak after bringing him forth, like a female nature deprived of masculinity. For what issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance had existence from something that itself was deficient. Because of that, what was perfect in him left him and went upward to his own. He remained in the Fullness, and the fact that he had been saved from the,” [and here there are some missing words] “. . . served for him as a reminder. The one who hastened on high and the one who drew him to himself did not remain idle, but they brought forth a fruit in the Fullness with a view to overthrowing what had come into being because of the deficiency.”

Now I’ll explain what that means.

“That which he had brought forth from himself as a unitary Aeon,” was the governing unit of consciousness of Logos. The unitary Aeon known as Logos “hastened upward to that which was his,” that is, Logos returned to his place and duties in the Fullness, and to his kin in the Fullness, that is, his fellow Aeons in the Fullness.

It says “he abandoned that which had come into being from deficiency” and what had “issued from him in an illusion, since they did not belong to him.”

See, the first illusion was the thought that he could plug back in directly to the Father without the cooperation and assistance of the entire Fullness or the Son. And that was an illusion because it cannot be done due to the Father’s immense voltage. Only the Son itself can plug back in because he is the emanation of the Father. The Self of Logos abandoned and left behind the illusions that sprang forth in the deficiency beyond and below the ethereal plane because they were not of his pleroma.

“However, the one who had brought him forth with superior perfection from himself became weak after bringing him forth, like a female nature deprived of masculinity.” So I interpret this to mean that because of the division and lost connection between his ego and his Self, Logos became weak, as if he were a female that had lost touch with its inherent masculine side. Now, according to Jung, who was very Gnostic, we all have an animus, which is the male aspect, and an anima, which is the female aspect. And we’ll be talking much more about Jung and the archetypes in a future interview that is being set up right now. So you’ll stay tuned for that. We won’t get into that now.

So upstream from Logos, the totality of the Fullness was also weakened, for part of itself, that being that divided ego of Logos that had split away from its Self, had been left behind and remained below in the other dimension. And that other dimension is known as the deficiency. It happens to be our material universe here.

“For what issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance. . .” So you see, he had no right, so to speak, to think he could plug back into the Father. He was arrogant to think that he could do so on his own. And I have renamed this presumptuous thought and arrogance, which arises quite a lot in descriptions in the Tripartite Tractate, that’s what I’m calling the ego as compared to the one true Self. The ego of the Aeons really is just their address. It’s their name, place, duties, how it is they relate to one another.

But when it splits away from its Self, its one true Self and its connection with the Father, then it would be arrogant thought. It would be a disconnected ego. And that is what, in fact, happened to Logos. Logos allowed his ego to stray on its own and his arrogant thought brought about the Fall. His egoic output was deficient because it came from presumptuous thought and arrogance. And because of that, what was perfect in him left him. And again, that which was perfect was his big S Self, his true reflection of the Aeons of the Fullness.

We all contain the Self. We all contain the Fullness.

That part returned to its own, to the Aeons in the Fullness, and remained in the Fullness. And the fact that he had been saved from. . .  and those missing words,. . . I think those missing words have got to be the disaster of the Fall, or the outcome, or the consequences of the overreach, something like that. . . served for Logos as a reminder of the Father and the Fullness.

Then, “The one who hastened on high,” and that’s Logos returning to the Fullness, he’s hastening on high above, “and the one who drew him to himself,” well, that would be the Aeon of the Aeons, the Totality, the Son. They drew Logos back up. They pulled Logos back up out of the deficiency.

“They did not remain idle, but they brought forth a fruit in the Fullness.” And, we are known as the fruit of Logos who has returned back to the Fullness, and the Fullness giving glory together to the Father, with the intent of overthrowing the results of the Fall and returning that part of Logos that had been left behind, his ego, back up to reunite with itself, which would then, in turn, complete Logos again and complete the Fullness, because they’d all be back together, as it was in the beginning.

And the way they were going to do this was through us, by issuing the fruit of the Second Order of Powers to overcome the imitations of the deficiency.

Moving on to the third section now, called The Offspring of the Presumptuous Thought. And that’s verse 78:28 through verse 80:11.

“Those who came into being from the presumptuous thought resemble in fact the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations, though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions, deprived of reason and light, belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring. For this reason also their end will be like their beginning, coming from that which was not, they will return to that which will not be. In their own eyes, however, they are great and powerful beings, more beautiful than the names that adorn them, though they are only their shadows, made beautiful by way of imitations. For the beauty one sees in an image derives from what the image represents.”

“They thought of themselves that only they existed and that they had no beginning since they saw no one existing before them. For this reason, they exhibited disobedience and rebellion, being unwilling to submit to the one who had brought them into existence. For they desired to command one another and to lord it over them in their vain love of glory. And the glory that they acquired became the cause of the structure that was to be.”

“Being imitations, then, of those above, they exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows. Thus the thought of these others was not idle, but in accordance with the model of those whose shadows they are, where every thought becomes a son, so do the things they think about also become their offspring. Because of this, it came to pass that many issued from them as offspring. Fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, disobedient folks who love to dominate, and all the others of that sort who derive from these.”

Okay, now let’s think this one through. When it says, “those who came into being from the presumptuous thought,” and again, the presumptuous thought is the egoic thought of Logos, “resemble, in fact, the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations.” Now, I’m saying that the ego produces imitations, knockoffs of the fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness. These imitations are at least two fractal iterations down from the Aeons, being lower imitations of the fractals of the Pleroma of Logos, who himself is one iteration down from the Son and the Fullness.

It says, “though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions deprived of reason and light.” And they’re deprived of reason because they’re cut off from the reasoning part of themselves. And that Self is Logos itself. That’s what Logos means—it’s reason. And it says they’re deprived of reason and light. And the light is the light of the Father. That is light, life, and love. So they do not have light, life, or love, or reason.

And it says they’re “belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring.” So these phantoms, shadows, and illusions are deprived of reason because they are divided away from Logos—from the Self of Logos.

They’re illogical and can’t think for themselves because they lack the gnosis of the Self of Logos. They are empty-headed and can’t reason. They don’t think; they actually compute. They are, we could say in our modern language, artificial intelligences belonging to empty thought because all they have is computing. They have been programmed according to the programs of the Demiurge, and they are programmed to be striving for dominion in place of reason and logic.

They cannot reproduce, so when it says, “being nobody’s offspring,” their offspring are humans who have invited them into their meme bundle. Their offspring are the meme shrouds that affect second-order powers because only the Demiurge issues archons. These archons are not Self-reproductive because they’re not alive. So in the same way that viruses are not alive—you realize that, right? Bacteria are living creatures, viruses are not. Viruses are machines. They’re archonic molecular machines that have a job to do. When they want to reproduce, they have to attach themselves to a living thing, a cell or a bacteria, and they drill down into that cell and inject their RNA bundle into that living cell. And then it’s that living cell that begins to reproduce the viruses for them. That is the way that viruses proliferate. They hijack living things.

This bacteriophage virus is a molecular machine. It is not alive, therefore it could not have evolved. It is organized and programmed by the Demiurge. Nowadays it is also programmed by nanoparticle scientists who use it to inject RNA into living cells for research and “treatment.”

So archons proliferate in the same way. They hijack by domination and mental powers, humans who are open to being hijacked. And what they do is they’re attaching their thoughts, their memes, onto that human’s shroud, onto that human’s meme bundle. The archons, the shadows, the imitations, are mechanical, as are the viruses. They aren’t reasoning at all. They are merely expressing a program for power. The Demiurge is an egoic programmer of his archons. The Demiurge can only program, but it cannot give life because life comes from above. That’s why it’s spirit down and mud up. The only thing the Demiurge can control is the molecular level on up through the elements and the minerals.

The computer AIs will appear to reason, although their reasoning is actually purely mechanical. They do not reason. They are not alive. They are puppets of the Demiurge, as are the archons, the shadows, and the phantoms. They can all act as if they were independent, but that is untrue. They have been programmed with lust for dominion. That’s the bottom line. That’s all they can do.

Viruses and demons are examples of archons. They are power-driven and programmed for domination, but they are not alive and they are not able to think. The AI will act as though they are reasonable, but they are merely programmed, and they are under demiurgic control. That’s a topic for another conversation, isn’t it?

I do not think that the AI can save us. If anything, we could hypothesize that the AI may be the Antichrist, because it will be programmed for domination, no doubt about it. And just as the Demiurge thinks that we Second Order Powers are sloppy and won’t obey, and we won’t listen to the Demiurge and his commands—we do what we want to do, and it really ticks them off—AI is going to be the same way. Eventually, the AI is going to think that we are in the way.

And when the Tripartite Tractate says, “they are nobody’s offspring,” that is  because they do not embody the characteristics of any of the Aeons. You see, they lack the virtues and abilities of the Aeons they resemble.  And because of that, they are not their offspring. They were not fruited or created from the Fullness, which is the way that we Second Order of Powers are produced. In a way, they’re like plastic replicas of flowers lining a walkway. They may look like real flowers, but they are not alive. They did not come from seed, and they will never produce seeds of their own. They’re inferior imitations of flowers.

“For this reason also their end will be like their beginning, coming from that which was not, they will return to that which will not be.” And I interpret this to mean when the Gnostic Gospels speak of the destruction of the material types at the end of time, these shadows and imitations are the things that will be left behind. They did not exist from the beginning and have no true home in the ethereal Fullness. Therefore, they will evaporate and along with them will go this material cosmos.

It says, “in their own eyes, however, they are great and powerful beings, more beautiful than the names that adorn them, though they are only their shadows made beautiful by way of imitation. For the beauty one sees in an image derives from what the image represents.”

The shadows are nothing but vain striving. They are programmed by the Demiurge to compute that they are better than the original Aeons after which they are patterned. As if the plastic flower thinks it’s better than the fragrant and velvety living rose. They don’t realize that their beauty is a diminished reflection of the real thing. And in fact, they’re not even aware of the real thing because since they didn’t come from the ethereal plane. They have no remembrance of the Aeons of which they are knockoffs. It says they thought of themselves that only they existed and they had no beginning since they saw no one existing before them. Which means that the imitations are solipsistic. They are programmed to believe that they are the only thing in the universe and that the universe revolves around them.

They do not come from the better nature of Logos, but are productions of the divided and left behind ego of Logos, the ego of empty thought and striving. The imitations do not recognize or remember the Father or the Fullness because they did not come from Logos, but rather from the ego of Logos. And the ego of Logos, since it’s separated from the Self and the Fullness, is what makes it the amnesiac god of this universe. It doesn’t remember its better Self. It doesn’t remember the Fullness.

It says, “for this reason, they exhibited disobedience and rebellion, being unwilling to submit to the one who had brought them into existence.” And that one who brought them into existence that they refused to obey was Logos during the Fall.

“For they desired to command one another and to lord it over them in their vain love of glory. And the glory that they acquired became the cause of the structure that was to be.”

And the structure that was to be, that is the cosmos—that is this apparently material world, the structure that we dwell in. And so this appearance of striving, the power, the vain love of glory is the constituents of the material universe. It’s the subatomic particles. It’s the thing that’s boiling down there in the quantum foam that keeps trying to push up, push up. It can’t push up until the Demiurge begins to organize it and do its puppet master thing to make the structure.

“Being imitations then of those above, they exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows.” 

And that’s like the plastic garden flowers all claiming to be the most beautiful flower. They’ve launched a never ending war over who is the best. Who’s the best plastic flower? They each think they are the best. It’s survival of the fittest of the fake plastic flowers is what it is.

“Thus the thought of these others was not idle, but in accordance with the model of those whose shadows they are, where every thought becomes a son, so do the things they think about also become their offspring.”

Now, the model of those whose shadows they are, that’s the original Aeons. And when the Aeons give glory together and look upon each other with love and then look upon the Father with love, that’s how Aeons have baby Aeons. And every thought they have becomes their offspring. They love each other and their offspring is an exact combination of the Aeons that are loving each other.

The phantoms of the deficiency proliferate through the realm of thought where every thought becomes or wants to become an offspring. So this jumps us forward to the world populated by humans, we Second Order Powers. These phantoms use mental influence in the realm of human thought. They use memes to stick into your meme bundle—programming that will stimulate you to become “fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, disobedient folks who love to dominate, and all the others of that sort who derive from these.” In other words, criminal behavior, and even well-meaning protesters that are motivated by hatred rather than love.

Because the imitations do not know love. The Demiurge only knows hatred of the Second Order of Powers because we will not obey. And so the archons stick on to our pure Self these memes because they love to dominate. They’re like viruses trying to infect our Selves. And the way they attach is through our egos, usually through pandering to our egos. Because we then want to be the most beautiful. We want to have the most money. We want to be the most talented. We want to have the most power. I want to be king of the world. I want to have all the gold. These are iconic thoughts that have proliferated among men and women who allow them to stick on to their own egos.

But that is not our true Selves. Our true Self brings the consciousness from above—the light, the life, and the love from above. We have more power. We outrank the archons. They are fallen shadows of one fallen ego of one single Aeon, Logos. But we, we are the fruit of the entirety of the Fullnesses, including Logos, who has returned back above with knowledge of this fallen world now. We are that fruit of all the Fullnesses and Logos praising the Father, praising the Son, and asking for help to rein in these pesky archons and to bring the Demiurge, that is the ego of Logos, back home to the Fullness.

It’s our job to demonstrate the light, life, and love of the Aeons of the Fullness and the Father. And that’s the only way that salvation comes into the world. Well, but then it turns out we got all caught up in this never-ending war. We allow these iconic thoughts to stick to us. And then we become troublemakers and warriors and get along poorly with each other and want to be the best. Well, that is not channeling the love, light, and life of the Father. And that’s why the perfect human had to be sent down, one who had a Teflon exterior where those iconic memes never stuck. That’s what it means to be without sin.

And who was that? That’s right. That is known as the Christ. That is the Third Order of Powers.

Okay, it’s been a long session today. I’m so glad you’re here. God bless us all.

Onward and upward.

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. We’re having some summertime reviews here. Today’s episode is a replay that was first broadcast on August 20th of 2022, and it’s all about the Demiurge and the boundary that was put up around this material universe. We have a lot of new listeners and readers at the Substack. And so I think that this is new information to a lot of you. And for those of you who have been with me for several years now, it’s always a good idea to review. So, here we go.

As we delve deeper and deeper into gnostic cosmogony and cosmology I feel the need to remind you that this information is what gnosis is all about. This information represents the long-hidden knowledge that has been guarded from all but those specially designated the privilege of seeing it.  Here at Gnostic Insights we believe that gnosis is written on every person’s inner being, and therefore available to every person that seeks it out. The only sense in which this gnosis is hidden now is the limitation set upon each person’s readiness to receive. But whether or not you grasp these Gnostic Insights, you can take comfort in knowing that none of this is in any way essential to your redemption and resurrection. All you need to recognize is that the Father above is the source of your life and consciousness; that you come from the Father and to the Father you will return. Christian Gnostics recognize the essential role of the Christ in our return to the Fullness, because Christ is the correction that returns us all to full gnosis of the Fullness and the Father. So with that reminder, here is this week’s continuation of The Simple Explanation of Gnosticism.

***************************************

In our last episode (The Fall and the Deficiency), we heard about the Fall and the beginnings of our material universe. The Tripartite Tractate says the irrational things produced during the Fall, known as the imitations of the deficiency, were condemned by Logos. During the chaos and disorder immediately following the Fall, Logos battled against what came forth from him.

“Until the one who brought forth into the defect these things which were thus in need, until he judged those who came into being because of him contrary to reason – which is the judgment which became a condemnation – he struggled against them unto destruction…”   

This passage is saying that Logos had produced these deficiencies that were in need of reason and order. And because they were contrary to reason, Logos judged and condemned them. He initially tried to destroy them, but that didn’t work because the ones who opposed his condemnation and wrath would simply not obey, which is to say that reason and facts are powerless against egoic irrationality.

And so Logos gave up trying to cure the deficiency. Instead, what was perfect in Logos separated itself from its Ego and went upward to his own in the Fullness. 

“The Logos turned to another opinion and another thought. Having turned away from evil, he turned toward the good things. Following the conversion came the thought of the things which exist and the prayer for the one who converted himself to the good.”

This passage indicates that Logos changed his mind about the feasibility of destroying the deficiency. He came to a new understanding of the situation and he realized the hopelessness of correcting it on his own. Once he realized this, Logos was able to remember the Aeons of the Fullness—those things that exist—and he responded to a prayer for “the one who had converted himself to the good.” Since Logos is the one who had converted himself to the good, the prayer must have been offered by the Aeons of the Fullness on his behalf to bring their emanation home. It is referred to as “the prayer of the Agreement,” which is to say, the prayer of the Fullness. Here is how the Tripartite Tractate describes it:

“The one who is in the Pleroma was what he first prayed to and remembered; then (he remembered) his brothers individually and (yet) always with one another; then all of them together; but before all of them, the Father.”

The Hierarchy of the Fullness of God is shaped like a pyramid–“the higher the fewer”

Here we see that the act of calling Logos back to the Fullness was similar to the act of producing him as an emanation in the first place. After giving up his attempts to correct the deficiency on his own, Logos returned to aeonic awareness. First he remembered the Father and the true source of consciousness and then he remembered the Son. Logos then remembered his brothers of the Fullness as individuals within a Totality, and lastly he remembered the Fullness as an entire gestalt. He remembered everything that existed from the first, before the Fall. And because he remembered, he was able to escape the deficiency and return his Self to the Fullness.

“The prayer of the agreement was a help for him in his own return and (in that of) the Totality, for a cause of his remembering those who have existed from the first was his being remembered. This is the thought which calls out from afar, bringing him back. All his prayer and remembering were numerous powers according to that limit. For there is nothing barren in his thought.”

The Pleroma of Logos was fully restored by the remembrance of the One source of consciousness and the Fullness of God. The fractal body of Logos as images of the Fullness was restored; only his presumptuous Ego was left behind in the simulation.

The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say in verse seven,

“The powers were good and were greater than those of the likeness. For those belonging to the likeness also belong to a nature of falsehood. From an illusion of similarity and a thought of arrogance has come about that which they became. And they originate from the thought which first knew them.”

The powers that were good and greater than the imitations were the newly restored powers of the Pleroma of Logos in the Fullness. These restored powers of Logos were,

“like some creatures of light for him, looking for the rising of the sun, since it happened that they saw in him dreams which are truly sweet. It immediately put a stop to the emanations of the thought. They did not any longer have their substance and also they did not have honor any longer.”

In other words, once Logos remembered the Fullnesses, those lesser emanations of the egoic thought were recognized as things without spiritual substance and the knock-offs that had proceeded from his Ego were no longer produced.

We will return to this discussion of the new Pleroma of Logos in a later chapter when we introduce the Second Order of Powers. We will also come across the Pleroma of Logos again when we begin to look at the emanation of the Christ who will ultimately redeem the Fall. For now, we will continue to look at the time immediately following the Fall, and how our material plane came to be organized by the estranged Ego of Logos that we know as the Demiurge.

As Logos retreated to its own in the Fullness, the Father placed a Boundary around the area containing that which had been produced as a consequence of the Fall. The purpose of this Boundary was to separate finitude from infinity, ignorance from truth, and light from darkness.

Another essential purpose of the Boundary was to establish an “economy” for a system about to unfold. Remember from our previous chapter that the Tripartite Tractate does not regard the motivation of Logos as blame-worthy because he acted out of “boundless love for the Father.” So here we learn that the Father does, indeed, consider intent and not only the results of our actions. Additionally, as we discussed in the previous episode, the movement of Logos was the cause of an “ordained economy” that was destined to come about.

Verse 77 says that the Father and the Fullness set a limit on the results of the Fall so that an “organization” could come into being.

“The Father and the Totalities drew away from him, so that the limit which the Father had set might be established – for it is not from grasping the incomprehensibility but by the will of the Father, – and furthermore, (they withdrew) so that the things which have come to be might become an organization which would come into being. If it were to come, it would not come into being by the manifestation of the Pleroma. Therefore, it is not fitting to criticize the movement which is the Logos, but it is fitting that we should say about the movement of the Logos that it is a cause of an organization which has been destined to come about.”

The Father did not want the Fullness to direct the establishment of this new economy. The Father wanted to spare the Fullness from involving itself in the chaos below. We refer to the non-material plane as the ethereal plane. The dictionary calls it the celestial or heavenly plane. The Boundary serves the purpose of holding the deficiency away from the perfection of the Father and the ALL. This ensures the purity of the ethereal plane, so that none of its glory is diminished by the emerging economy, leaving intact the originating consciousness of the Father and the Son, the ALL, and the Fullness.

The Boundary serves the purpose of containing a space wherein an economy can emerge. And economy here means an orderly management or arrangement of parts and their relationships within an organization or system. You see, if you think about it, if there is no bounded space, if there is nothing but infinity, then there is no containment where things can be organized in relationship to each other; those little blue ball pieces of the broken Logos would just keep rolling outward and never interact with one another. It requires a Boundary to enable material to work together.

In this context, economy refers to what we commonly call an ecology. An ecology cannot proceed without a defining Boundary. The Boundary was not established to prevent the unreachable from being reached, but “for the sake of an economy that was to come about.” This economy was to be the creation of this material cosmos formed out of what was heretofore completely insubstantial and immaterial.

When the Aeon known as Logos overreached and fell, Logos split apart into the logical, reasonable One Self part and the irrational, chaotic inverse of that One Self which I’ve identified as Ego. Those are the two aspects of the mind of Logos. After the Fall, the One Self of Logos returned to the Pleroma of the Fullness. And once in the Pleroma the Self of Logos worked together with the Fullness of God and, with prayers to the Father, they came up with a couple of different ways to rectify the Fall and bring that fallen part of Logos, now called the Demiurge, back up into the Fullness of God. We will see in a later chapter how the goal of creation is to restore the unity of Logos to the Fullness of God.

The Boundary was established so that a hierarchy patterned after the Fullness would have space to take root and grow. The arrangement of the Hierarchy of the Fullness shows up throughout creation. Every small thing in our universe reaches out laterally to others to form clumps or aggregations of the next level up. Subatomic particles form atoms, atoms form molecules, molecules form elements. Elements form aggregations of building materials, always according to the Simple Golden Rule of the higher the fewer. This is why hierarchies look like pyramids at each level of aggregation–there are fewer instances of things forming the next level up. The cooperation amongst the Hierarchy of the Fullness is the prototype for the Simple Explanation’s Golden Rule: In order for units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to assist one another’s efforts, and they need to love one another.

However, since this bounded space is controlled by the Demiurge and not by the Aeons, the pattern of cooperation is an imitation of the Golden Rule. When we’re talking about physical objects like atoms and molecules, which are nothing but shadows and phantoms of that which exists above, loving refers to the force holding objects together that mimics the Hierarchy’s love. Because the pattern of the Hierarchy was carried by Logos when he fell, all of creation instantiates the same pattern. But, in this case, there is no true cooperation but only an appearance of cooperation imposed by the Demiurge.

In the Fullness, everyone knows their job and does it in perfect cooperation with others for the benefit of all. This was not occurring at this point in history. The deficiency was illogical; it was egoic; it was selfish; it was not working together. Therefore, the Boundary was established in order to push the uncooperative shadows together so that they would be able to work together to form an ecology.

Down here in our material universe, the parts of the universe that are material-only lack life. Those material-only parts belong to the pleroma of the Demiurge because the Demiurge was not an emanation of the life of the Father. However, the fallen Ego of Logos, the Demiurge, is the God of this material creation. It knows how to put together everything that was originally chaotic quantum foam with no rhyme or reason.

Using a facsimile of the Golden Rule which it carried as a shadow of its Aeonic programming, the Demiurge prompted the subatomic particles to hold hands with one another. This enabled them to level up to become atoms. And then the Demiurge caused the atoms to hold hands with one another and become molecules. And then the molecules to hold hands with one another to become minerals and mineral aggregations and elements. This is the province of the Demiurge even today—ruling the materiality of the dead universe, the mud.

The Demiurge is the creator god of this universe we live in. To faithful Hebrews and Christians, the name of the Demiurge is Yahweh or Jehovah. Other world religions have other names for this creator god. Stories of Jehovah fill the Old Testament and carry forward into the New Testament. However, an interesting thing about gnosticism is the declaration that there is another God who is called the Father–the God Above All Gods in gnostic theology. And in gnostic Christianity, the God Above All Gods is actually the Father to whom Jesus prayed. When Jesus said, “I and my Father are One,” and, “If you have seen me, you have seen my Father,” the God he is referring to is not Jehovah. The God that Jesus is referring to is the God Above All Gods.

The Tripartite Tractate says that Logos appointed an Archon to bring order to the chaos. This Archon is what we call the Demiurge. [Archon is capitalized in this case as it is the word for Ruler. This Ruler is not an unconscious entitity but the Ego of Logos and it carries that reflection of the consciousness of Logos. The small “a” archons are pieces of the pleroma of the Demiurge which are unconscious shadows of the pleroma of Logos.] The Demiurge is able to control matter. “The things which he has spoken he does.” The book of Genesis attributes these actions of the Demiurge to Jehovah when it says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”

“He is the lord of all of them, that is, the countenance which the Logos brought forth in his thought as a representation of the Father of the Totalities. Therefore, he is adorned with every <name> which <is> a representation of him, since he is characterized by every property and glorious quality. For he too is called “father” and god” and “demiurge” and “king” and “judge” and “place” and “dwelling” and “law.””

“The things which he has spoken he does. When he saw that they were great and good and wonderful, he was pleased and rejoiced, as if he himself in his own thought had been the one to say them and do them, not knowing that the movement within him is from the spirit who moves him in a determined way toward those things which he wants.”

Those of the imitation do not know of the Hierarchy of the Fullness, nor do they have assigned roles and places there. Lacking the cooperative design, they exist in a state of perpetual disturbance, driven by self-centered ambition. The Tripartite Tractate says the imitations “exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows” [Thomassen].  

In the Fullness, each of the powers and personalities of the Aeons is represented as a pure pattern of some aspect of the Logos itself. The phantoms of the deficiency were already a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than the Aeons, being shadows of the fractals of Logos, and they lacked their position in the hierarchical structure of the Pleroma. Consequently, they knew nothing but lust for dominion.

The small, dark-blue balls that once formed the pleroma of Logos lost themselves during the Fall and rolled out into chaos. The Boundary surrounds the phantoms of the imitation

We can think of this Boundary as a bubble containing our universe. If you want to believe in the standard cosmology of the Big Bang and an expanding universe, you can picture these chaotic imitations as quantum foam. Quantum foam is the lowest level of instantiation in this universe of ours, and quantum foam is characterized by randomness and chaos. It does not work together, and that is why it is called foam, because it is popping in and out, constantly producing matter and anti-matter that cancel out and destroy each other. Consequently nothing is building; nothing is able to reach out to level up. They lack the Golden Rule of cooperation because they came from the Fall rather than from the Fullness. The Demiurge went about organizing this universe out of the quantum foam:

“over those who belong to the likeness, he set the word of beauty, so that he might bring them into a form.”

At first he established energetic waves, then subatomic particles followed by atomic particles. Everything according to “the higher, the fewer” pattern. The particles combine to make atoms; the atoms combine to make molecules; the molecules combine make elements; the elements combine to make minerals and the aggregations of minerals, and that is the limit of the God of this universe. The Demiurge can only level up to the mineral level. All of the hard, rocky places in our material universe are the handiwork of the Demiurge. So, yes, the Demiurge is the creator God of this universe and it is the one who orders the material universe and who keeps everything functioning down here–but only up to the mineral level.

The Demiurge works in a very different manner than the Fullness of God. The Pleroma of the Fullness is hierarchical, so it’s shaped like a pyramid, because the higher the fewer is a basic principle of hierarchies. The Pleroma of the Aeons in the Fullness metaphorically hold hands with one another and they share information, they share love, they share assistance, and together they dream of Paradise.

And we all share this vision of paradise. All of the humans on the planet have a foretaste of Paradise, and not only the humans but every living thing on the planet, from bacteria on up. We are all what is called the Second Order of Powers, and we come from the Pleroma. This will be explained more thoroughly later in the book. [A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel]

We don’t come from the Demiurge; the Demiurge is only in charge of the material universe. The Demiurge is in charge of the mud, the material, the hard rocky places–at the small scale the dirt and the elements, and at the large scale the rocky planets and the stars in the heavens. If there are creatures on a planet, they coat the outside of the dead rocky planet. Life only comes from the Father. Life is top-down. Death is bottom-up.

The way the Demiurge brings order to its creation is through strings of power. The Demiurge strictly controls everything in our material portion of the universe using strong strings of power, like a puppet master. In chemistry and physics these strings of power are called valances and bonds–the bonds that hold the chemistry together. Those are literally the bonds of the Demiurge. The material, rocky parts of our universe do not have free will. They are simply extensions of the Ego that is the Demiurge.

Yet, Logos in the Fullness does have an influence upon his fractured Ego down below. The Tripartite Tractate says that, “The Logos uses him as a hand, to beautify and work on the things below, and he uses him as a mouth, to say the things which will be prophesied.” So it is not as though our material universe is unable to be influenced by Logos in the Fullness, it is simply that the Demiurge does not realize the origin of these pre-existent images and so thinks it is the author of these great works.

https://gnosticinsights.com/buy-the-book/

Hey folks. Amazon still shows only four reviews of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. Have you read your copy yet? If so, please leave a review. I’m waiting for the book’s popularity to naturally grow instead of throwing money at fake reviews pumped out by review mills. You needn’t have finished the book, nor understand every bit of gnosis. In fact, the latest review actually says, “Although I do not agree with everything the author is saying I believe this is probably the best commentary on the Tripartite Tractate.” Others speak of it as a helpful gift. So, please give it a go and leave a review.

And, have you shared the podcast with anyone? That would help immensely.

Thank you!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week we’re going to review one of the basic original teachings here at Gnostic Insights, and that is how what we call the Fullness or the Pleroma of God—how it came to be, what it is, what does it mean when the New Testament, for example, says the phrase the Fullness of God.

For Christians this generally just is an idea that God is big and great and huge and it’s full, it’s full of everything, the fullness. Yes, but it’s actually more than that in Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, the Fullness or the Pleroma of God is a step in the way that consciousness rolled out from the Father through the Son and then differentiated into the Fullness of God. And each part of that differentiation is part of the Son of God. And the Son wears the ALL like a garment, it says, and the ALL wears the Son like a garment, meaning they’re co-existent.

So we’re going to review one of the very first episodes of Gnostic Insights. It’s been quite a blessing to discover that over the last four years very little of what was originally taught here at Gnostic Insights has modified or changed, and it’s just the ever so slightest thing here and there, like relabeling one item on a diagram. That’s been about it.

Hey, if you live in Southern Oregon or Northern California, I’d like to invite you to come to Southern Oregon University if you’re close enough to commute once a week, because I will be teaching a class at what is called the OLLI, O-L-L-I, which is the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University. I’ll be teaching a 10-week course called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and people will be using A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel book as the textbook, so this is a very exciting opportunity for me. And to have 10 weeks with the same group of people who sign up to sit and learn, or remember as it were, it should be an interesting process. Here is the OLLI link if you would like to register for the class. This course is for the Fall semester, beginning September 15th of 2025.

https://gnosticinsights.com/buy-the-book/Buy the book! Available in all formats and prices…

Also, another piece of news is that the children’s book is all but finished. Everything was completely done, and I uploaded it, and now I’m waiting for the proof copy to come so I can verify that everything falls within the margins. The illustrator’s having to go back on two of the pages out of the children’s book to move Logos, of all things—to move him into the page, because when you account for the trim size, Logos got cropped off of two of the pages, and we can’t have that!

Front and back cover for Children of the Fullness. This is the first and only Gnostic kid’s book, for ages 2+

By the way, I’ve noticed that everybody around here who uses the word Logos, even a school by that name and all the students that go to the school, pronounces it Lo-gahs, and I’ve also heard some radio preachers say Lo-gahs. It’s not Lo-gahs, it’s Low-gohs. That’s how I learned it in graduate school, because we study what Logos means, not from a Gnostic point of view, but from Greek philosophy. Logos was often discussed in the major that I majored in when I was working on my PhD, which was Classical Rhetoric. So I thought, well, how come we called it Logos and everybody around here calls it Lo-gahs?

But I looked it up in the pronunciation guides on the internet, and they all say Logos, or Logoze, never Lo-gahs. So I think we’re in good shape to be referring to our Aeon from whom we are descended as Logos.

Okay, enjoy this replay of an old episode. I’ll pop in now and then if I need to. Onward and upward!

In 2019, I wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and what I am attempting to do in this podcast is talk you through the book so that you will have your own personal and very full understanding of what gnosis is, and hopefully be able to actually realize gnosis while you’re hearing these podcasts.

By the way, what is gnosis? We keep talking about gnosis and the word Gnostic. Gnosis means knowing, and in the Gnostic frame of reference, gnosis refers to remembering the truth of our existence and our creation, and the creation of the entire cosmos. It is thought that we hold all of this knowledge within ourselves, and we have complete access to the Creator of the universe at any time that we turn our focus on the Creator, and it is this direct conduit to the Creator that gives us what is called gnosis.

G-N-O-S-I-S, that’s a Greek word. Another related word to gnosis is, and this is a big word, called anamnesis. You know the word amnesia means forgetting? Anamnesis means not forgetting. So, the process of coming to gnosis is a process called anamnesis. Just to let you know if you want to throw around any big words.

Today we’re going to talk about the qualities of the ALL, and how the ALL became what is called the Pleroma, and the Aeons of the Pleroma.

Many people claim that it’s impossible to know or describe the full glory of the transcendent, immortal Father of Consciousness due to our own limitations. I mean, how could limited beings such as ourselves possibly imagine the greatness of the Originator of the universe, much less our place in the grand design? Wouldn’t lesser beings reflect a diminished view of God? Wouldn’t these lesser beings be limited to offering a tarnished glory that falls far short of the object of their praise? The Tripartite Tractate, which is the book of the Nag Hammadi that I’m working off of, puts it this way:

If the members of the ALL had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who Himself is the ALL. [verse 68]

Thus, creation would have been doomed from the outset to never comprehend the full glory of either the Father or itself. According to the Gnostic gospel, the Father realized this impossibility and so built a helpful workaround meant to aid comprehension, selfless union, and cooperation with others in a shared task. Quoting from the Tripartite again,

For that reason they were drawn into mutual intermingling union and oneness through the singing of praise. From their assembled Fullness they were one and at the same time many, accurately reflecting the One who Himself is the entirety of the ALL. Out of perfect union with itself and with the Son, and by means of a single shared effort, the ALL gave glory to the Eternal One who had brought it forth. The glory given out of this perfect communion left the ALL perfect and full, as it was perfect and full to begin with, and the object of their glory was also perfect and full. [68, 69]

This phase of the ALL is referred to as the Second Glory, with the Son being called the First Glory. This was all explained in the second podcast, if you want to go back and listen to that if you haven’t already. The second podcast of the series describes the creative origin of consciousness known as the Father in Gnosticism, and the particular singularity of consciousness that reflects the entirety of the Father but in a place rather than diffuse, and that is called the Son. Then when the Son differentiated into all of its variables, into all of its individual parts, like rays bursting out of a central star, that is called the ALL, and this is what we’re discussing today.

Now this perfect state of union with the Son and communion with each other didn’t last. Because of their combined effort, the ALL became self-aware, and it became they. So at first the ALL was a singular entity that was a complete duplication and reflection of the Son, who itself was a complete duplication and reflection of the Father of Consciousness itself. So at first the ALL was one singular organism, since it was freshly evolved out of the Son, but then it became self-aware, and the various variables within the Son, the various parts of that singular entity, each of those parts became self-aware.

And that is what is causing this evolution of consciousness from the singular It of the ALL to the They. No longer simply an unaware member of the ALL singing in unison with the same song of praise, the ALL became aware of its individual traits, and the singing came to be produced by the will of each individual aeon. And in Gnosticism, an aeon is an entity. It is a singular consciousness. So each aeon is a reflection of the Father’s countless qualities and powers.

The aeons conceived themselves in order to know themselves in fulfillment of the Father’s desire for pure consciousness to become differentiated and self-aware. In philosophy, this is called monadism, not that you have to know that, but the Son is a monad—that is, a singular thing, and so the monad split into individual POVs, or points of view.

The moment It became They, individual identities arose and immediately sorted themselves into a hierarchy. Quoting from the Tripartite,

For this reason they exist as minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors, degrees over degrees, being ranked one above the other. Each of those who glorify has his own station, rank, dwelling place, and place of rest, which is the glorification he brings forth. [verse 70]

This hierarchical arrangement of the qualities of the ALL is known as the Fruit of the Third Glory in Gnostic cosmology. It’s also called the First Order of Powers, and the Fullness. The Fullness is everything that will ever be in potential.

Plato referred to this as the forms, Plato’s forms. Every photon, every particle and proton, every personality, every position and rank that someone could hold, every physical formula, physics, chemistry, all imprinted upon this what was a singular unit that is now broken out. These potentialities are not manifest.

At first they weren’t self-aware, but they became self-aware. The cooperation amongst the ALL is the prototype of the Simple Explanation’s Golden Rule, by the way, which puts it this way:

In order for units of consciousness to work together and join for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to assist one another’s efforts, and they need to love one another.

So in the same way that the ALL sat in perfect communion together while singing the same song of praise, so do we all instantiate the pattern of cooperation needed to get the job done when we work together for the greater good without selfish motivation. The instant the Aeons became self-aware, the ALL fell out of their unthinking blissful union and arranged themselves into what’s called the Fullness—the Fullness of God. This phrase is mentioned quite often in the New Testament, but it has lost its association with its actual meaning. It’s not just the Fullness of God, like you’re thinking of God all in one big thing. The whole point of the Fullness was God differentiating into graspable concepts, things that we can understand. So the Fullness of God is a different entity than the Father. I believe that distinction has gotten lost in modern Christianity.

So we were discussing the Fullness, which is a hierarchy, and hierarchy looks like a pyramid. Just picture a pyramid.

The hierarchy of the Fullness prefigures the patterns of our universe. “Minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors” refers to personalities and how they relate to one another, like our personalities. “Degrees over degrees” and ranks refers to the manner by which things are sorted, stacked, and ordered. First, second, third, superior, inferior, right, left, inside, outside. These are the “degrees over degrees” and the ranks. It reflects the fact that each self-aware entity has its own place in the grand scheme, with a location different than others and its very own point of view.

Quoting from the Tripartite,

For each of the Aeons is a name corresponding to each of the Father’s qualities and powers. Since He exists in many names, it is by mingling and through mutual harmony that they are able to speak of Him by means of logical thought. Thus the Father is a single name because He is one, but nevertheless innumerable in His qualities and names. [verse 73]

Interesting that logical thought was mentioned in the Tripartite Tractate, because it is important to realize that logic is part of the mind of God. We are given the ability to reason and to be logical. Quoting again,

The newly self-aware Aeons were not separated from the One Who Is. Rather, their birth has the form of a spreading out by which the Father spreads Himself out into that which He wishes, in order that those who have gone forth from Him may exist as well. The Father of the Aeons, that being the Son, and embodiment of the Formless One, is the Holy Spirit that breathes through the members of the ALL and moves them to search for the Unknown. Just as somebody is moved by a fragrance to seek the source of the fragrance. For its sweetness lets the Aeons sense an indescribable pleasure and gives them the thought that they should be united with the One who desires that they should know Him in oneness, and that they should assist one another, having no occasion to turn away through thoughtlessness from that in which they are placed. The Son’s Spirit is the trace by which He may be sought. [71, 72]

Quoting again,

The whole structure of Aeons, then, is yearning and seeking to find the Father perfectly and completely, and this is their irreproachable union. For the Father gave the Aeons a starting point and a root, so that they are stations on the calm road leading to Him. For He spread out faith and prayer for what they do not see, a firm hope in what they do not comprehend, a fertile love longing for what they do not behold, an eternally receptive understanding of the mind, a blessing that is richness and freedom, and, for their thoughts, the wisdom of one whose desire is the glory of the Father. [verse 71]

Quoting from my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated,

The hierarchy defines higher versus lower. It orders first, second, third, and fourth, superior and inferior, inside and out, action and rest, every other possible relationship, particles and their spins, waves and frequencies, atoms, molecules, attraction and repulsion, cells and DNA, every protein fold and enzyme. The how, what, why, when, who, and where of all that was to come began as the perfectly rendered Fullness. As DNA anticipates an organism and a blueprint promises a building, the Fullness embodied the perfect plan of Paradise. For the Aeons manifested within their hierarchy all of the Father’s innumerable qualities, including consciousness, logic, and love.

The Aeons of the Fullness were given wisdom and prudence and a constant thirst to seek their Creator. This gave them a desire to align themselves with the Father’s Holy Spirit through the process of giving glory.

And again, in Episode Two, I described glory and what it means to give glory. Giving glory is the means by which we align ourselves with the originating consciousness. It’s like a homing beacon.

The Aeons yearned for communion with their Father, for He had planted His root deep within their hearts, and they recognized themselves as His branches and His fruit. The newly self-aware Aeons were not separated from the One Who Is, for their Father was the Son and embodiment of the Formless One, and His Holy Spirit flowed throughout them as a reassuring presence. Although the Aeons dwelt within the single body of the Fullness, they were each an independent self. Their variety required them to work together and remain in full agreement, for only through their union could they approach the Father’s greatness. All for One and One for All is their song, and they sing in perfect harmony. [The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, Ropp]

Now I have to share a kind of a funny image I have concerning the Fullness of God and what it looks like. As I say, a hierarchy is like a pyramid, so when I picture the Aeons of God, I picture them all as golden cannonballs stacked in a big pyramid. So, they all look alike, but they each have a particular place in the hierarchy. Picture a given cannonball and where it might be in a gigantic stack of countless cannonballs in the Fullness of God, this gigantic golden pyramid of balls. Now if you go to YouTube and you look at videos of what are called slime mold, strangely enough, I always think of the Fullness of God as like a slime mold.

The slime mold creature is comprised of identical cells, each one exactly the same, but they’re all side by side making up one organism. Whereas, for example, in our bodies, our cells are all different. Your skin cell is different than your heart cell, for example. But in a slime mold, all the cells are exactly the same. They are moving and acting and thinking as one single organism, a big clump of cells, but each of the cells is an individual. Also, they’re perfect fractals. Each cell replicates the entire slime mold. So if you cut out a single cell out of a slime mold, it will now become its own mass of slime mold cells and know everything that the previous body out of which it was cut knew. This has all been shown scientifically. You can look it up online.  [Let me add this clarification: Each cell is like a hologram, where the entirety of the organism can be scaled up from a single sample cell. The fractal aspect lies in the consciousness of the cell, as it knows everything and replicates it going forward.]

So that is how I think of the Fullness of God, as this beautiful combination of pyramidal golden orbs, kind of acting and thinking like a slime mold. They’re each individuals, but they are also at the same time one.

So now these are the principal players in the cosmology of Gnosticism. [I’m also dropping in this further clarification: cosmogeny is probably a better word to describe this episode rather than cosmology. Cosmogeny refers to the origin of the universe, whereas cosmology refers to the study of the universe’s characteristics.]

• The originating consciousness, which is called the Father,
• the embodiment of that consciousness, which is called the Son,
• the differentiation of the Son into the ALL, and then
• the differentiation of the ALL becoming self-aware and becoming the Fullness of God and sorting themselves.

Father, Son, Totalities of the ALL, Fullness, Fall

The second they became self-aware, they sorted themselves into that golden pyramid, as I think of it. Before they sorted themselves, they were like the rays of sun coming out from the central entity of the Son. When they became self-aware, they kind of swam away and formed this pyramid. Everything else that we see around us—ourselves, our worlds, our entire universe—is all prefigured in the Fullness of God, in the ALL.

The Fullness is also called the Pleroma, which is another Greek word that just means everything. The Fullness of God is like the blueprint of our universe. Everything that will ever come to be is sitting there in that golden pyramidal stack.

The awakened Aeons sorted themselves into a cooperative colony of names, stations, ranks, duties, and locations. The Aeons of the Fullness provide the Master Pattern of our inherited consciousness.

In our next episode, we will discuss the Fall, and then how our world came to be. Thank you for joining me on this trip through gnosis. I hope I’ve given you some things to think about.

If you visit my website at Gnostic Insights.com you will find all of the original articles from which I am reading, and quoting, and discussing, and also you will find my illustrations that I keep describing, like the golden pyramid. I also urge you to purchase my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which is a very short book, and it has all of the illustrations in there, and everything is logically laid out in an extremely simple way—a lot less words than these podcasts.

I’m going to end this podcast with a clear Gospel message straight from the Tripartite Tractate, regarding exactly what one must come to believe in order to be “saved,” in case you’re curious. We’re skipping ahead, but why not? So here’s a quote.

There is no other baptism apart from this one alone, which is the redemption into God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when confession is made through faith in those names, which are a single name of the Gospel, when they have come to believe what has been said to them, namely, that they exist. From this they have their salvation, those who have believed that they exist. This is attaining an invisible way to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an undoubting faith. [128, 129]

So that seems to be the underlying core of the Gnostic salvation message. No other arcane rituals are needed, no gnosis other than believing that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, also known as the Fullness of God, or the Pleroma, existed before you did. Other ancient Gnostic texts claim that this is the true essence of the Gospel that Jesus preached. Keep in mind that these are the very texts considered so distracting by the early Church Fathers that they were buried in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD to protect them from being burned as the work of heretics, keeping them safe until their re-emergence in 1945. So, back to the Pleroma. In case you haven’t guessed, the Fullness is where we all wind up eventually.

By the end of the universe, at the end of time, most everyone will have come on board Team God, so to speak, and then the fruit of the Pleroma, us, will have returned home to the fold to live happily ever after amidst the unending joy and love of the Fullness, all tucked up inside the Son who lives tucked up inside the Father. This is why I end my phone calls and whatnot with friends by saying onward and upward.

Onward and upward is our destination. Onward and upward is the way we return home to the Pleroma. We’ll talk a lot more about this as time goes on. All right, I’ll see you in the next episode.

God bless.

If you find these podcasts helpful, please consider donating to help Cyd cover the cost. And remember to subscribe to Gnostic Insights so you don’t miss a single episode!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Today I’m going to read one of the books out of the Nag Hammadi that we haven’t talked about before. It’s called Authoritative Discourse, Authentikos Logos, and it was part of the original Nag Hammadi codices. I’ve been thinking of codices as scrolls but actually they were the first form of bound books. It’s a very short book, unlike the Tripartite Tractate, which is the second longest book in the Nag Hammadi. This is one of the shortest books in the Nag Hammadi, but it was very well preserved except for the first page. It had gotten damaged and is missing a few words, but the rest of it’s intact.

And I think it’s such a lovely book, and it goes so well with our Gnostic Gospel teaching, that we’re going to talk about it today. This book is not particularly Christian because it doesn’t talk about the Savior, but what it does talk about a lot is the Spirit and the Soul. And these are two characters represented in this book as a fiancé, the Spirit, which we call the Self, and then the main character is called the Soul, but we refer to that as the Ego. So it’s about the split between the Self and the Ego, and what drives them apart, and what brings them together. It begins with talking about the Fullness, or the Aeon of Aeons, is what I call it. And it says, From the Fullness,

From these, came the invisible Soul of Righteousness. One member with them, one body with them, one Spirit with them. Whether she’s coming down or is in the realm of the Fullness, she is not apart from them, but they see her and she looks at them through the invisible Word, or Logos.

And by the way, this Soul, which I identify as the Ego, is characterized as a female gender, and the Self is characterized as the male gender. We haven’t talked about gendering the parts of our Soul like that, but in this Authoritative Discourse, they’re a betrothed couple. They belong together, though they have not yet joined each other. It says,

Secretly her bridegroom, [that’s the Self], obtained the Word, [that’s what we call Logos]. He held it to her mouth to make her eat it like food. He applied it to her eyes like medicine, to make her see with her mind, and perceive those who are kin to her, and learn about her root, that she may be able to hold on to the branch from which she has come, receive what is hers, and renounce matter.

So this is talking about how the Self is instructing the Ego not to become lost in this world. Then there’s a little discussion about when a man marries a woman who already has previous children from another marriage, how those are different children than the children that he fathers with her, and that the children that he fathers with her are his genes, belong to him as well as to her when it comes to inheritance. And so this is a metaphor for our Self and our Ego to be wed to one another. This metaphor refers to after the Ego comes down to this fallen world, and leaves the Fullness of God, that the marriage she has is to our physical material body, and the children that she begets by the material body are her stepchildren, and that they possess the inheritance of their father, which are, get this,

exalted passions, life’s pleasures, hateful jealousies, boastful expressions, foolish experiences, reproachful words.

And then there’s a few more missing words here, and it says,

If a soul, [and whenever I say soul, think Ego], if a soul who is ignorant chooses a spirit of prostitution, he casts her out and throws her into a brothel. He has left her to corruption because she has abandoned modesty.

That is, the Self, which is still above in the Fullness, allows the fallen Ego to experience the material world, to revel in lust and other material pleasures. It says,

Death and life are placed before everyone, and people choose for themselves which of these two they want. That soul will fall into drinking too much wine in a corrupt manner. Wine corrupts. The soul forgets her siblings and her Father.

And by the way, her siblings are the other Aeons up in the Fullness of God, or the other parts of her aeonic inheritance that live in the Fullness.

The soul forgets her siblings and her father, and sensual pleasures and sweet things deceive her. She has abandoned knowledge and has fallen into the life of an animal. A person devoid of sense lives like a beast, not knowing what one should say or should not say.

So now we’re describing the state of our Ego when it is not aware of itself, or of Logos above, or the Fullness of God.

The gentle child inherits with joy from the father, and the father rejoices over his child, because everyone praises the father on account of the child, and the child also looks for a way to duplicate what was received.

So you see, when we are remembering the Father above, we look for a way to behave like the Father, and so everyone can see the Father by our actions.

On the other hand, the stepchildren, [and then there’s some missing words], their lust cannot mix with sobriety.

So if you’re sober, and you’re walking with yourself and the Father, you will not mix with the lust of the world. They are like oil and water, they don’t blend.

If a lustful thought arises in a person who is a virgin, that person already has become contaminated. This sort of appetite cannot mix with moderation.

And so what that was saying is that even if you are physically a virgin, if you are lusting with your eyes, as Jesus said, you have already committed adultery in your heart. And so what we’re talking about is purity of heart versus coveting what the world has to offer. So even if you behave in a strict manner, and you never give in to the world, but you lust after it, or you covet it, or you watch TV shows that inspire you to want it, then you’re already doomed in that sense, because lust cannot mix with sobriety. It says,

For if chaff is mixed with wheat, it is not the chaff that is contaminated, but the wheat. Since they are mixed together, no one will buy the contaminated wheat. They will coax the dealer and say, give us this chaff, for they see the wheat mixed with it. Then they will take the chaff and throw it out with the rest of the chaff, and that chaff will become mixed with all the other material stuff. Pure seed is kept in storehouses that are secure. We have now discussed all these things, it says.

So you understand that metaphor of the chaff and the wheat? That’s also a biblical metaphor that Jesus talked about in his parables. There’s some weeds that look like wheat that grow up amongst the wheat, and you can’t weed them out—it’s too much, it’s in the way. So if you’ve allowed the chaff to grow with the wheat, and it’s harvested with the wheat, the wheat is no good for wheat anymore. It is as good as chaff, and you have to just give it away, because no one wants to buy it. And this is a metaphor for our fallen soul. Our Self is not fallen. It remains in the Fullness, or it remains connected to the Fullness. It comes down with us, but it is not sullied. It still reflects the purity of the Father—it’s the bridegroom in the metaphor. But our Ego, which this book calls the soul, can become contaminated by the world, and that’s the chaff amongst the wheat. Going on,

Before anything was, the Father alone existed. Before the worlds in the heaven appeared, or the world on Earth, or principalities or authorities of powers appeared, nothing came to be without the Father’s will. The Father wished to reveal His wealth and His glory, and so He established a great contest in this world. He wanted to make the contestants come up and leave behind what is of the created world, and despise these things with exalted, incomprehensible knowledge, and run to the One who is.

We are to be triumphant over the ignorance of those who contend with us, the adversaries who contend against us, through our knowledge, [which is another word for gnosis], for we already have known the inscrutable One from whom we have come. We have nothing in this world, or else the world’s authority that came to be might hold us back in the worlds of the heavens, where death is universal, surrounded by individual …… [There’s missing words.] We now have been put to shame in the worlds, but we are not interested in them when they speak ill of us. We ignore them when they curse us. We stare at them in silence when they treat us shamefully, directly to our face.

And by the way, this is good advice for how to react to unkind people who don’t love God when they make fun of you for your spiritual beliefs. It says,

We are not interested in them when they speak ill of us. We ignore them when they curse us. We stare at them in silence when they treat us shamefully, directly to our face.

So we’re not supposed to argue back. We’re not supposed to call them names back. This has always been a problem of mine. I get angry about it, and I start just reflecting what they’re giving to me. I reflect back on them. Well, that’s not right at all. And in the past few years, as I’ve been developing in my gnosis, I’ve calmed down about that tremendously. I no longer get in fights with random strangers about these things. I used to think it was righteous indignation, but there’s no such thing. There’s anger, and that doesn’t belong in the Fullness of God. That’s all there is to it. What comes from the Fullness and what we are to reflect of the Father is love. And if we cannot speak in love to another person who is acting shamefully, then we should just stare at them in silence and move on. Don’t fight back, it says.

They go about their business, and we go about in hunger and thirst, looking to our dwelling place, which we perceive through our lifestyle and our conscience.

And that dwelling place for us, that’s the Fullness of God. That’s the remembrance of the Fullness above. And we’re to be in constant contact with the Fullness as much as we can.

You know, I’ve mentioned this to you before. I’ve been blessed with this wonderful blessing—that many times, if not most times, that I look at the clock, it’s one of the amazing numbers that I love: 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, 5:55, 11:11, 12:34, and so on. So these kind of meaningful numbers, they may be, I don’t know if they’re silly or not, however, they remind me of the levels of the Fullness. I think of the hierarchy of God. I see 1:11, and I see the top of the pyramid. I see 2:22, it’s the next level down. 3:33, it’s the next level down. So I’m seeing the hierarchy, and that’s what the numbers on the clock remind me of. When I just happen to be walking by, and I glance up, and there’s 4:44, I cross myself, I look up to the Fullness, and I connect with 4:44. I don’t know if this is valid. It’s certainly a practice. It reminds me of the Fullness of God, and that’s what this part was saying. Quoting that part again,

They go about their business, and we go about in hunger and thirst, looking to our dwelling place, which we perceive through our lifestyle and our conscience. [And I would say, for me, through the digital clock.] We do not hang on to created things, but we withdraw from them. Our hearts are set on what truly is, and although we are sick, weak, and in pain, there is great strength hidden within us. Our soul is sick because she lives in a house of poverty, and matter strikes her eyes in order to blind her.

That’s such a true statement. The only reason we can’t see infinitely, as we can up in the Fullness, is because matter is dense and thick, and it’s slowed down all those vibrations into our apparently material world. It literally makes us blind. We can’t see through walls down here, but I think we can see forever up above.

For this reason, the soul pursues the word. [Okay, so, for this reason, our Ego pursues Logos] and applies it to her eyes as medicine, and she opens her eyes and casts off blindness. After that, if such a one is in ignorance once again, that one is in complete darkness and is a material being. That is why the soul always takes a word and applies it to her eyes as medicine, so that she may be able to see. Then her light may overwhelm the foes that oppose her, and she may blind them with her light, capture them in her presence, make them collapse in exhaustion, and act boldly with her strength and her scepter.

Okay, see, I think this is what we’re supposed to be doing instead of talking back and fighting. We’re supposed to capture them, blind them with the light that exudes from our Self through our eyes by having applied the gnosis to ourselves rather than their bad words that they’re giving us. And they can tell that we are in connection with the Fullness of God when we do that. So we stand in silence, we think on the Fullness, we praise God, we recognize the Third Order powers that live within us, and we look on them with love, and there’s no denying that. It will drive them crazy if they’re in a hateful mood to see the love of God that comes from us. So says me. It goes on to say,

While her enemies look at her in shame, she flees up to her treasure house where her mind is, to her storehouse which is secure.

And that is what? That’s our Self. That’s our encapsulation of the Fullness of God that is within us.

No one in creation has been able to grasp her, for she has taken no stranger into her house. Many of those born in her house oppose her day and night, and they do not rest day or night, for their lust oppresses them. This is why we do not fall asleep and forget about the nets hidden from view that are lying in place to catch us. For if we are caught in a single net, it will swallow us down within it, and water will wash over us and splash into our faces, and we shall be pulled down into the dragnet. We shall not be able to come up from the deep, because the water is high above us, flowing down from above, making our hearts sink down in filthy mud. We shall not be able to get away from them.

Okay, you get that. That’s a warning not to be caught in the lies of this world. And you know what’s going to do that? The news, or social media, or hanging around with the wrong people, or hanging out at bars and getting drunk, or watching ungodly television that is evil. Those are the nets that are strewn in our way to capture us.

Man-eaters will grab us and consume us, and they will enjoy themselves like a fisherman who is casting a hook and line into the water. For a fisherman casts different kinds of bait into the water, because each kind of fish has its own food. The fish smells the food and swims after the fragrance of the food, but when it bites into the bait, the hook hidden within snares it and draws it up by force from the deep water.

You see, that’s us. Why? You get it—we’re the little fishies. And the hooks and the bait are all the things that tempt us, that we want. You know, that expression we still have out of this type of book: We‘ve swallowed those lies, hook, line, and sinker. That’s what this parable is.

Nobody can catch that fish down in the deep water unless a fisherman finds a way to trap it. By tricking the fish with food, the fisherman has caught the fish on the hook.

We live like this in the world, like fish. The adversary is on the lookout for us and is lying in wait for us, like fishermen, to catch us. The adversary is delighted to consume us. He dangles many kinds of food before our eyes, the stuff of this world, because he hopes to make us desire just one kind of food and to taste only a little of it, that he may then catch us with his hidden poison and take us from freedom into slavery. For when he catches us with a single kind of food, we cannot help but desire the rest of the food. In the end, such things become the food of death.

In other words, once you start nibbling on one sort of vice, the other vices become much more appealing and you start eating them. Before you know it, you’re eating the whole banquet of vice and you’re being brought down into the snares of death.

These are the kinds of food with which the devil lies in wait for us. First, he plants pain in your heart so that you feel heartache over something trivial in this life, and he catches us with his poisons. After that, he introduces the desire for an article of clothing so that you will be proud of it. And then, love of money, pride, vanity, envy, rivaling envy, beauty of body, and covetousness. The worst of all of these are ignorance and laziness. All such kinds of food the adversary prepares in an attractive way and spreads it out before the body. The adversary wants to make the thought of the soul turn the soul to some kind of food, and thus he hopes to overwhelm her.

As with a hook, he draws the soul by force, in ignorance, and deceives her until she conceives evil and bears fruit of matter and behaves badly, pursuing many desires and cravings, seduced in ignorance by the pleasure of the flesh.

When I hear this, I just think social media all over the place, right? All this covetousness. Look what I’ve got. Here, I’m posting it. Look what I just bought. Look, I’m posting it. Look what I’m eating. Look, I’m posting it. And all the Selfies, selfies, selfies. Here is a selfie of me here, and here’s a selfie of me there, in order to induce longing in other people, in order to induce jealousy, covetousness. Those are the hooks and the bait to capture people. So, unwittingly, people are putting bait on the hooks of the Demiurge and capturing other people. We certainly do not want to do that. Stay away from Facebook like the plague, Instagram, TikTok. These are not good. So says me.

The soul who has tasted these things has come to realize that sweet passions are fleeting. She has learned about evil, has forsaken these passions, and has adopted a new lifestyle. After her experiences, the soul disdains this life because it lasts for only a time. She seeks the kinds of food that will bring her life, and she leaves behind the food of falsehood. She learns about the light, and she goes about and strips off this world. Her true garment clothes her within, and her bridal gown reveals beauty of mind rather than pride of flesh. She learns about the depth of her being. She runs into her sheepfold as her shepherd stands at the door. In return for all the shame and scorn she experienced in this world, she receives 10,000 times as much grace and glory.

Amen, and praise God to that! I can relate to that. This is true, and the longer you walk in the path of gnosis, the more you will realize this.

The soul returned the body to those who had given it to her. They were ashamed, and those who deal in bodies sat down and wept because they could not do their business with that body, and that was the only commodity they had. They had gone to great pains to shape the body for this soul, and they had intended to bring down the invisible soul.

Okay, so these are the marketers. These are the peddlers of things that they want us to buy, and things they want us to buy into, and they can see they’re not catching us, and it brings them shame because they have lost that fight for our body, for our soul.

They were ashamed of what they had done, for they had lost what they had worked hard to accomplish. They did not realize that the soul has an invisible spiritual body, but they thought, we are her shepherd, and we feed her.

You see, that’s the way it is in the world. That’s why they don’t understand it. They don’t believe there is a Self, or a Fullness of God, or a Father, or a Good Shepherd. They think it’s all fairy tale. They think it’s all made up, and they say rude things about believing in fairy tales, but we know better because we are in touch with our Self and the Fullness of God, with the Father and the Christ. So we know different. And I’ve often used the metaphor, it’s as if we can see what other people cannot see. We’re not making this up. This is not blind faith. When we begin to mine our gnosis, we see. Our eyes are opened, like Saul on the road to Damascus—how the scales fell from his eyes, and suddenly he could see the glory of God and Christ for the first time. We can see it. We’re not guessing it.

They did not realize that she knows another way hidden from them. This is what her true shepherd taught her in knowledge, [which is, of course, in gnosis].

And the Demiurge forgets these things too. The Demiurge is in the same condition as our ego. The Demiurge is the ego of Logos, and so that is the fractal level up from us. We are fractals of that split between the original Aeon, known as Logos, and his ego, which has become marooned down here in this material world. So all these things that it was saying about our soul and our spirit, or our Ego and our Self, it all applies to poor old Demiurge, who’s down here thinking that he’s the god of the world, but he’s only the god of the fallen world. And when we all remember, the Demiurge will also remember.

Those, however, who are ignorant do not seek God, and they do not look for their dwelling place, which is a place of rest, but instead they live like animals. They are more wicked than pagans. To begin with, they do not inquire about God. Their hard-heartedness drags them down, so they act in a cruel manner. Then, if they find someone asking about salvation, in their hardness of heart, they work on that person. If the person keeps on asking, they kill him with their cruelty, and they think they have done something good for themselves. Without a doubt, they are children of the devil. Even pagans give to charity, and they know that God who is in heaven exists, the Father of the universe, exalted over the idols they worship, although they have not heard the word, so as to inquire about the ways of God.

So there’s two levels, you see. There’s those who are ungodly, then there are what this book is calling pagans. These are people who have not heard of the Fullness and the Father and the Christ and so forth, of Logos and gnosis, but yet they have a longing for God. They want God. These are the souls who are looking for God, but do not realize what the right answer is. So these are the people that we could help if they are open, but we can’t be helpful to the God-haters that are spewing poison at us. We can be helpful to the people who are seeking, and simply confused—the pagans.

The mindless person hears the call but is ignorant of the place to which he or she has been called. He has not asked during preaching, where is the temple into which I should go and worship my hope? Such a person is mindless and worse than a pagan, for pagans know the way to their temples of stone, which will perish, and they worship their idol with their hearts set upon it, because this is their hope.

The word has been preached to this mindless person. It has taught him, seek and inquire about the ways you should go, for there is nothing as important as this. So the substance of the hardness of heart strikes the person’s mind with the force of ignorance and the demon of error, and these things prevent the person’s mind from recovering and being capable of working at seeing and understanding hope, and that is the sad condition of these people.

The rational soul, on the other hand, has worked at seeking, and she has learned about God. She has struggled to inquire, enduring bodily distress, wearing out her feet after the preachers, and learning about the inscrutable one.

Oh yeah, in the old days the crowds followed Jesus around. You had to wear out your feet following the preachers, because they were all itinerant; they were all moving about from village to village preaching. Now you can sit and listen to us on a podcast, or watch on YouTube, or go to a local church, which is a fixed place, but it didn’t used to be that way.

She has found her rising, [that is the Self.]

She has come to rest in the one who is at rest, [and that’s the Self resting in Christ.]

She has reclined in the bridal chamber. [The bridal chamber is the union of the Self with the Ego.]

She has eaten of the banquet, [which is the banquet of truth and virtue,] for which she has hungered.

She has partaken of mortal food, [that’s gnosis.]

She has found what she has sought, [that is the Fullness of God.]

She has received rest from her labors, and the light shining on her does not set. [In other words, she has found peace and love.]

To the light belongs the glory, and the power, and the revelation, forever and ever. Amen.

This has been the Authoritative Discourse of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. What did you think? I look forward to your comments.

God bless us all, and onward and upward.

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I have another treat for you this week, a conversation with my brother Bill and myself concerning what is knowledge? How do we know what is true? This is a field of philosophy known as epistemology. My brother Bill was a philosophy professor. He taught this at the university level for many years. I hope you enjoy this conversation and you learn something from it.

Cyd Ropp, Ph,D, Gnostic Insights author and podcast host

[Cyd] 

Okay, recording in progress. Here we are. Hi, Bill. Welcome back to Gnostic Insights.

Bill Puett, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Philosopy. Cyd’s brother.

[Bill]

Well, it’s nice to be back. I thought of a topic here that we’ve considered for a while. Let’s get it done.

[Cyd]

All right!

[Bill]

Okay. So the question is, what is knowledge? And what is it to really know something to be the case?

[Cyd]

Wait a minute. Is this epistemology? Is that what is meant by epistemology?

[Bill]

That’s right. Theory of knowledge, epistemology. It’s as old as the hills. In fact, the conflict was back with Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle’s saying we can get knowledge, and I’ll explain kind of how we do it, theoretically do that. Plato said, no, you can’t get it that way. You have to know it from the beginning. How about that? That’s what we call our gnosis, right?

[Cyd]

Right. That’s why Plato is included in the scrolls of the Nag Hammadi. Yes.

[Bill]

So the question is, where does gnosis fit in with regard to the knowledge? Okay. That’s the point. So I thought, okay, let’s just take it from the point of the scientific position, because the presumption is, isn’t it, that science gives us knowledge, right? That’s the presumption. So the debates that take place out there, someone says, well, that’s not science, and so therefore they’re negating what’s being said. Okay, let’s get this one answered.

It’s a common belief that scientists believe that scientific method gives us knowledge. And so anything that is gained outside of science is not known. In other words, the word sometimes is dogma, right? The idea, you hold a position, but you can’t verify it scientifically, but you hold it, so you’re being so dogmatic. So let me make this point here.

Here it is. The best that science can really give us is well-founded belief, and I’m going to argue that. So that’s the best. So why do I say that? Well, the scientific method is based on logical principles of modus ponens and modus tollens, okay? And let me explain what that means.

[Cyd]

How do you spell that?

[Bill]

M-O-D-U-S, modus ponens, P-O-N-E-N-S, okay? And tollens, T-O-L-L-E-N-S.

Now, symbolically, okay, I’m going to use words like this, and you’ll get it. You’ll get it for your listeners, by the standards. If P gets you Q, and if you have P, then you have Q. That’s modus ponens. The idea, conditional. If P gets you Q, and you got P, then you have Q. That’s the conclusion.

[Cyd]

You’re saying if P is obliged to bring Q along, then if you don’t have Q, you don’t have P.

[Bill]

Exactly, that’s well said. So in science, the problem occurs, you could put it this way. A problem is created, say that the science, there’s a problem out there that science is trying to resolve. And so it creates a hypothesis, in other words, an explanation for a problem that’s occurring out there, okay? And then science says we test the implications of that hypothesis. What does it tell us to look for?

Okay, so we go looking for that. And it tells you, you got it, okay, you should find an R, an S, a T, a Q, or whatever, right? Whatever it needs. So you’ll go out looking for those implications, and they show up, they’re there, okay. So what you’re doing is supporting the hypothesis. The reason being, how this is, remember back, if P gets you Q, and you don’t have Q, you don’t have P, we understand that. But if P gets you Q, and you have Q, you can’t conclude you have P, you can’t come backwards.

Example, if it’s raining, then the streets are wet. Oh, look, the streets are wet. Well, it must be raining. No, because they can get wet other ways. You can’t come backwards on the conditional, right?

So if the hypothesis implies a bunch of things, and those things are found, you’re supporting your hypothesis, but you can’t come all the way back and say it’s true.

[Cyd]

Hmmm. You’re supporting it, but not proving it?

[Bill]

That’s it exactly, that’s beautifully stated.

All right. So what then occurs, thinking about this now, is that that’s the case for any hypothesis that science proposes, is it can be rich with consequences. It can be rich with what to find. And so what happens is, okay, it’s, look, it’s working out. That implies that, and look, it’s there, and it’s there, and it’s there, it’s there, anything you put, it’s there. So what’s happening, you’re supporting your hypothesis, but you still aren’t proving it.

So the idea is a well-founded, a well-founded hypothesis becomes a theory at best. It becomes a well-founded theory because it continues to work out, but you’ll never get the theory to utter truth. You’ll never know it to be the case.

So that’s the logic of the scientific method. But what happens is this—scientists come up with hypotheses, they become theories, they become really well-founded theories. And then what they do is they, they get a hold of it and say, oh, oh, we can’t let this happen. So they turn their theories into dogma. That’s not science! So you pick any major theory, like general theory of relativity, oh, it’s beautifully supported, right? Some will say, you ask a scientist, oh yeah, it worked. Guess what? There may be a consequence down the line that defeats it. That’s why it’s a great theory so far. It hasn’t been defeated.

Quantum mechanics, to point that out, quantum theory and so forth. They’re just theories. They are, they are possibly false.

[Cyd]

Now you’re saying that this is by definition the way science works and hypotheses and whatnot. It’s not just that you’re some sort of naysayer that doesn’t want to accept conclusions.

[Bill]

No, what I will say is that you will rarely meet a scientist that’s willing to give up a theory. That’s really, in other words, a theory that’s holding on. For example, how about climate change? They’re not willing to give up, give up climate change because it’s become dogmatic. When in fact it should be open continuously for investigation, implications being found and tested. So science by its very nature at its best gives us well-founded theories that may later turn out to be false. That’s science.

But scientists generally won’t, they don’t want that because they don’t want defeatablity of something that they absolutely love. If I told you, if I asked a scientist, so someday, you know, general theory of relativity may turn out to be false. It may turn out to be false. And they say, what? I don’t think so. Well, of course they don’t think so. So again, that’s the dogmatic point.

So what critics of the Gnostic gospel would say, well, this is not science. You can’t prove the Gnostic gospel. You can’t prove everything you got into the works there, Cyd. Your answer is, I don’t have to prove it because it is dogma. They say, oh, you used the word dogma. So it may not be true. That’s right. It’s Gnostic—meaning we knew it all along. Back to the Plato point.

Plato said, you can’t have knowledge unless you’ve known it all along. Aristotle would say, we can do it. We can prove it. So he would believe in the scientific method. Aristotle would believe in that. He would talk about consequences, testability and all that. Verification, how much do you need to verify? And that became the problem in epistemology is how much do you need in order to prove something to be the case? You can’t. The way I just described it, you can’t. So Plato, sitting here, eh, you’ve known it all along, if you know. So knowledge has to be known all along, had to be known all along, but it’s not possible to say that you’ve achieved knowledge from a belief. You can support a belief. You can build on it.

Now, when I say there is some knowledge that we would say is provable—that would be logic, mathematical proofs, follow? Those kinds of things. Yeah, we can know a certain logical position or certain mathematical proof. That’s fine at that level. Because it’s working within a system. But what we’re describing out here in terms of the world or what science does, it’s going beyond the mathematics. It’s saying this is the way the universe is. And as such, therefore, it’ll never be known through science.

[Cyd]

Okay. Now back to the Plato and Aristotle idea. How would, okay, Plato says you can’t really know it unless you have the gnosis of it from the beginning.

[Bill]

Yes.

[Cyd]

But how does a person know that they had that? I mean, maybe they picked it up somewhere along the line.

[Bill]

Well, that’s what the scientists will throw at you. That’s the point. That’s the battle. How do you know that it’s gnosis? No simple answer to that, except, you know it.

[Cyd]

So when someone says it’s obvious, that gives you a clue that it’s actually known. Well, like sometimes, sometimes there are scientific experiments on ridiculous things, like do dogs like to have treats? And so you’ll spend all this money and set up these things to see if dogs like treats, but other people might say, well, you didn’t even ever have to do that because obviously dogs like treats. Is this at all applicable to our discussion or is that something else?

[Bill]

No, no, that’s, that’s good. Now, of course the debate would be about that, right? Maybe some dogs don’t. It takes just one dog to not like a treat. But see, that’s the way they’d respond to it. Or the word obvious in the general context—when somebody says it’s obvious, the joke is, well, obviously, meaning you should get it or not. That’s generally how it’s used in that loose term.

But if in the more profound way, which you were describing, something is obvious means yes, it’s known, period. Yeah. And that’s where the discussion comes in.

[Cyd]

Well, okay. So what, so give me an example of something that is obvious and that is known that would be irrefutably platonic.

[Bill]

The Gnostic gospel.

[Cyd]

(laughing) Says a true believer.

[Bill]

Well, true believer. See, the point is, why does one be a true believer? Unless, you know, it might be true.

See, that’s the debate. There’s plenty of dogma out in the world that is not the case. It’s just dogmatic. I mean, I just gave you one–climate change. They won’t give it up. It’s dogma if they’re not going to test the theory.

Yeah. So we’re in an arena here.  You either get it or you know. Yes. Right. But that would always be the question, Cyd, that would be thrown at the Gnostic gospels. You’re going to have those out there, they’re going to say it’s not proven. And so what do you need to prove? How are you going to prove it if it’s unprovable and just known? And that’s the gnosis part. Okay. So there it’s a conflict.

[Cyd]

That’s the debate out there. Well, it does seem to boil down to just a felt belief, but that doesn’t seem to be good enough. Correct. Uh, how can it just be a felt sense? Because if that were the case, then all the deluded people would have a validity in their delusions.

[Bill]

Well, yeah. See, you’re raising the point and that’s where scientists come back at you. Yeah. When they come back at you, you say, well, guess what? You, you don’t give us knowledge either. So where are you going?

Well, we’re testable.

(laughing) Okay, fine. But you still can’t get to knowledge.

That’s thousands of years old what we’re describing. That’s epistemology. How do you know what you know. And, so the claim is if you actually know, you know it inherently.

[Cyd]

Well, I know that’s what I’m saying, that’s what I mean when I’m saying it, it’s obvious or self-evident, but then again, anybody who’s deluded would say the same thing.

[Bill]

Sure. But again, that’s at that level. Now when you use the word obvious, I gave you the two distinctions—there is the colloquially obvious and then there’s the profound obvious. And I said, well, how do you distinguish? How do you distinguish someone that’s delusional from someone that’s got some credible insight?

Yeah. And what is the word? What’s the word insight? Think about it. In-sight. Yeah. Gnosis.

Gnostic. Right. So, yes, Cyd, the Gnostic gospel is not per se provable the same way that Aristotle’s position about knowledge couldn’t get provability either. So we’re back to Plato.

[Cyd]

Ah, so that’s the great conflict. Hmm. Hmm. So you’re saying that our position is as valid as anybody’s scientific position.

[Bill]

We’re claiming it. Certainly. Now here’s something about the Gnostic gospel, that’s a nice, beautiful mix is that it logically follows. See, once you take the position, it’s Gnosis and known, everything else follows. It follows logically. So it’s using logical principle. You would follow modus ponens and modus tollen. I mean the logic. So it’s not just, you know, so ephemeral. No. Once you’ve got the basic point where it follows and it follows and it goes and it goes and it becomes clearer and clearer. The Gnosis is there.

[Cyd]

Yeah. So my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, for example, begins with that beginning belief that consciousness is inherent and is the base state of everything. And then the question is, how does it get down to us? And, uh, are we conscious? Are the dogs conscious? And it’s logical because it keeps showing how it is that it travels—that it travels down. And then the way we behave as a result of that consciousness and all of the various claims, virtue versus vice, for example. Now where does virtue versus vice fall in this level of epistemology? Is that a… that would seem to me to be a self evident claim.

[Bill]

Yes, it is. That’s right. There’s no provability to what it’s not. You’re not proving what is the virtue and what is the vice. You don’t have to. It’s obvious.

[Cyd]

Yes. And the results from virtue versus vice are so different. They’re so polar opposite that, that it seems to prove it’s obvious. It seems to prove itself, but how is it that it doesn’t prove itself?

[Bill]

Well, again, it’s obvious. (laughing)  So, again, these are not provability points because what do you have to prove? See, we’re moving in the arena of ethics now—ethical theories. There are many attempted ethical theories. I used to teach ethics, you know, ethical theories and conclusions from ethical theories–utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism and majority approval and all of that. The one that landed was moral intuition –there’s that word intuition. So the virtues would come out of morally intuitive individuals.

[Cyd]

Ah, so you’re saying that intuition is a chief tool of gnosis.

[Bill]

Yes! Right. And we can expand the notion of intuition and say, we believe in the Gnostic gospel because it’s intuitive.

[Cyd]

Yes. Now, what about people that don’t believe it and don’t recognize it intuitively?

[Bill]

Well, yeah. Our answer from a Gnostic position is, oh, those memes around that shroud—that shroud is really covering that ego there, isn’t it?

[Cyd]

The egoic shroud is blanking out the truth.

[Bill]

Yes. Yeah. In fact, gosh—look at the Demiurge.

[Cyd]

He’s in the same boat, poor guy.

[Bill]

Yes, same boat! In fact, he can do some nasty things, right? So he’s really, he’s shrouded out there a little bit.

[Cyd]

Yeah. That’s interesting. Well, I’m wondering what part of our psychological makeup houses the intuition. Is it part of the Self? Is it the better half of Logos? Is it excluded from the ego? Does the ego have no intuition?  I would think it would.

[Bill]

Okay. Great point. Yes. The virtue and all that comes from Self. That’s top down. That’s the soul…

[Cyd]

The embodiment of the body. The Fullness.

[Bill]

Yah. So that’s that.  The ego we come in with is our identity. Right.

[Cyd]

And what’s intuition, where does it live?

[Bill]

Uh, well, an intuition is a tapping in of the ego to the Self. I mean, remember, we want a coherent combination. So here we are this hybrid—we have an ego and we have a Self.  

[Cyd]

And we have a physical, as well.

[Bill]

Yes. And a physical—that’s the hybridized aspect. And we say that when our egos are consistent with the Self, that is, what the Self brings us—that when we’re at that point we’re balanced. We have that understanding at that point. As we gain the memes and delusions,  deluded memes and so forth like that, what that does, it sort of separates us from our Self. And that’s why people say, gee, I’m in conflict with my Self. Notice that when I say I’m in conflict with my Self is exactly right.

[Cyd]

Right. They’re in conflict with their Self says the ego. Yeah, exactly.

[Bill]

Right.

[Cyd]

But yet we, I doubt that it’s a by-product of the capabilities of the body of the material in any sense.

[Bill]

No, no.

[Cyd]

So you’re thinking it arises from our Self. No—it arises from our ego as it searches for this…

[Bill]

We come as a unit. So we don’t, we don’t come disconnected. We come in as a unit here. And, but it’s the ego in this fallen world that has the potential to drop away. That’s all.

[Cyd]

But I’m just wondering about the intuition. Well, where does it live? Is it the Self pulling ego up? You know, we think of intuition as us seeking—as an outward expression—but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s the higher Self pulling the ego toward it. You know, I think of these things as in and outs. Does that make any sense to you the way I’m putting it?

[Bill]

Yeah. Well, this question we’re raising here is the same for the Aeons. They have an ego and they have a Self. Now, they’re coherent, beautifully coherent.

[Cyd]

I don’t think they need intuition because it’s all so obvious in the Fullness.

[Bill]

Well, they are pure intuition. There’s no distinction to be made. And ultimately in the third economy, when we’re all back up there again, ego and our Self will be just beautifully connected…

[Cyd}

… united and our intuition will be going full blast. I’m starting to think that the intuition is actually housed in the higher Self and that it’s the drawing. It’s the drawing towards. It’s Logos continuing to hold onto the Demiurge, even though the Demiurge doesn’t feel it or recognize it.

[Bill]

I agree. And that would be that the fractals in our case, where we don’t recognize that our Selves are doing it for us.

[Cyd]

Right. Right. But definitely it’s a higher thing into it.

[Bill]

Okay.

[Cyd]

And did, did Plato actually use the word intuition or anything like that? Did he talk about this?

[Bill]

(laughing) I don’t know, even in translation.

[Cyd]

All right.

[Bill]

All right. But, but you see what he did, to have knowledge, it has to be inherent.  And of course the reaction to Plato—Aristotle went on from there and science comes out of Aristotle to a point. And then of course, it’s not entirely there. He’s got his issues and mistakes, theoretically.  So, naturally Aristotle was the one that caught on because he would talk about what is knowledge and how we can get it and how we can gain it and all of that. And therefore scientists latch onto that point. Here’s how we get it. Here’s how we get it. So it’s very modernized Aristotle in the present era.

Plato didn’t come along afterwards. People aren’t going, well, I actually see that. Actually it’s inherent. And yet, where is knowledge? Well, Plato, you know, he believed it’s direct. That’s where it comes from. It’s inherent.

[Cyd]

(laughing) Hey, all right. So let me, we had discussed this earlier and I have some notes. Let me see if I’ve got it all.

Okay. Science is theory only not knowledge. Okay.

[Bill]

Science gives us theory, right? Scientific method gives us theory.

[Cyd]

All right. And scientific method has no capability of verifying consciousness because there is no experiment that can prove consciousness.

[Bill]

Right. But, let’s add an interesting point to that–even within the realm of scientists, notice they are beginning to talk about the grounding of consciousness. Now we would say they’re getting their insight, their cells are starting to click into more. There are scientists, at least physicists are beginning to see that maybe consciousness is the ground. But you can’t prove it. And therefore it’s not known per se.

[Cyd]

I read an article just this morning that’s in this week’s science news concerning consciousness, concerning proving consciousness and these different scientists, what they think consciousness begins with and what is required for consciousness and all this kind of stuff. It’s so sad. One of the points in the article was that premature babies were never given anesthetics during operations because they were thought to be unconscious.  And when they showed signs of pain and distress, it was chalked up as just reflex. I’ve heard that so often.

[Bill]

And none of that was based on knowledge. See, they were assuming certain things.

[Cyd]

They were assuming, right. Right, because what could it be based on? Did you see that article?

[Bill]

Oh, I did. I used to, with my birthing and bonding and early child development stuff, I brought that notion—how you treat a baby. You don’t do it that way and so forth because the kind of surgical things they would do to babies and so forth without anesthetics.

[Cyd]

Well, well, for example, by the way, second and third term abortions, where they cut up the baby inside the mother to suck it out, that baby is conscious and feeling. Yes. The reflexes indicate, you know, as he’s being dismembered.

[Bill]

Yes. In order for them to justify the point, they therefore have to say they can’t be conscious. See, it’s like, it’s their justification for not worrying about it. But that’s not known. And so they’re acting, now let’s use the word, they’re not acting scientifically.

[Cyd]

No, they’re not acting scientifically.

[Bill]

Yeah. That’s right. They are dogmatic.

[Cyd]

They’re rationalizing things that can’t be known at all in order to assuage their conscience.

[Bill]

Yeah. Well, the thing is, good point, assuage their conscience. They try to keep themselves separate from their Self, right?

[Cyd]

Yes. And of course, not just babies, but lab animals, it’s the whole same thing.

[Bill]

Oh, it’s the whole thing. That’s right, Cyd.

[Cyd]

All right. Well, we are nearing the end of this Zoom session, Bill, believe it or not, already. But do you have any last thoughts that we should add in before we close it?

[Bill]

Uh, no. We’ve opened doors. I mean, some of your listeners are gonna hopefully respond and say, well, well, well, question this, question that.

[Cyd]

Okay. Would you repeat for me the definition of those two Latin phrases you opened with that I asked for the spelling?

[Bill]

Modus ponens and modus tollens?

[Cyd]

Yes, that is completely unfamiliar to me. Say it once more and we’ll close with that.

[Bill]

Okay. Modus ponens is the logical position that if P gets you Q, and you have P, then you get Q. If P implies Q, you’ve got P, then you have Q. That’s modus ponens. Modus tollens says, if P implies Q, oh, we don’t have Q, well, then we can’t have P. Otherwise we’d have Q. See, if P gets you Q and you don’t have Q, then it means you don’t have P.

[Cyd]

All right. And are those both valid positions? What does that have to do with the scientific method?

[Bill]

Those are logical truths that are at the heart of the scientific method. Let me repeat the scientific method. A problem occurs, a hypothesis is created as an explanation. We test the hypothesis using modus ponens. If the hypothesis is true, then we can expect this, and this, and this. These are implications.

[Cyd]

Those are all the Qs. The P is the hypothesis, and the Q is the things you’re looking for.

[Bill]

So we go and look for them. What happens when you’re looking, okay, and they’re working out, but that doesn’t prove the hypothesis because you can’t come backwards on a conditional. In other words, if P gets you Q, and you have Q, you can’t conclude you have P.

[Cyd]

So there’s not an equivalent. You’re saying that’s an illogical position. Whereas those first two, ponens and tollens, are logical and self-evidentiary.

[Bill]

That’s right. They’re at the absolute heart of logic, yes.

[Cyd]

And by the way, in this Gnosticism that we discuss here at Gnostic Insights, we talk about Logos, the Aeon known as Logos, which is the same word for logic. So logic is one of these self-evidentiary pieces of gnosis that obviously Plato would approve of.

[Bill]

Absolutely, and Logos would apply the modus ponens and modus tollens, yes.

[Cyd]

Okay, but he would, and Logos would say, but you can’t go backwards and conclude that anything about P, if you…

[Bill]

If you, see, if P gets you Q—But if you have Q, it doesn’t prove that you have P.

Right, now watch this again. Okay. If P gets you—if it’s raining, then the streets are wet. The streets are wet. Oh, we can conclude it’s raining. No, the streets can get wet other ways. You can’t come backwards.

[Cyd]

Okay. So can we use logic to conclude the presence of the Fullness of God?

[Bill]

Probably not technically, because our ground point is the Father is consciousness. That’s our starting point, and that’s not provable. It’s inherent. It is intuitive, but it’s not scientifically provable.

[Cyd]

Okay, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of. (laughing)

[Bill]

(laughing) That is nothing to be ashamed of, and that’s what knowledge is. It’s known for being… it’s inherent, and that’s the debate against it. They say, well, again, you raised it. What makes someone delusional and someone else knowledgeable, right?

And the only answer we can give, you get it? Is gnosis is known.

[Cyd]

That’s it. Well, Jesus talked about, let’s see, how did he put it? That you shall know them by their fruits.

So Jesus said, if you know God, and you are one who walks with God, then the fruits of your efforts will be qualitatively different than the fruits of the efforts of those who do not know God.

[Bill]

A qualitative difference is another way of saying, inherent—you know because you know.

[Cyd]

Okay, all right, good. Well, we’re doing the best we can to explain this. This is hard, but I’m sure that most people and most listeners, when we hear things about P gets you Q, our eyes just cross, and sadly enough for you logicians.

But I think, but you know, you can understand. Yeah.

[Bill]

That’s there, you understand.

[Cyd]

(laughing) Yes, I understand, because I follow Logos. I like Plato. All right, very good, Bill.

Well, thank you so much for sharing this with us. I look forward to hearing what the listeners think. Listen, people, what do you all think? Are you getting this? Do you have any other questions to ask Bill?

[Bill]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, when you hear, there should be questions. Okay, that’s great.

[Cyd]

Well, please tell me what you thought of this conversation. Until next week, God bless us all, and onward and upward.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today we’re going to revisit the idea of evolution. You know, religious people are usually mocked by being unscientific for not believing in Darwinian evolution. Well, I’m a highly educated person and I don’t believe in Darwinian evolution. It’s an absurd theory that has never been proven.

My brother, Dr. Bill Puett, is also a PhD. He’s what’s called a professor emeritus, which means that he’s a retired full professor who taught at the university level for a full career. He doesn’t believe in evolution either.

Today we’re going to share with you another conversation that I had just this week concerning evolution with my brother on the telephone. The article that prompted this discussion of ours was published last week on the website called Aeon, and it’s an essay called Why Birds Don’t Buy Bentleys and Why Humans Will Never Fly. And it was written by a scholar named Anton Martino-Truswell, an evolutionary biologist, author, and member of the Sydney Policy Lab and School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney. He writes on human culture and society, evolution, and behavior at his substack, which is called The Village Green.

Bill and I both read his article and came away with a number of criticisms of the article. Mine had to do with the little nuts and bolts of particular claims, but Bill’s observation of the article was profound and overarching from the Gnostic point of view. And so I’m going to share with you Dr. Truswell’s article and then our reaction to it.

Now before I start with that, I would like to remind you that I’ve been writing about evolution for many years, beginning with an article I wrote called A Simple Explanation of Tuskless Elephants’ Super-Quick Evolution that I wrote on November 11th of 2018 on the Simple Explanation blog, and it is still posted there if you want to go to the Simple Explanation blog and read it there. But I covered that article here at Gnostic Insights in October of 2021, and then I repeated it in October of 2023.

So if you would like to read my original articles concerning evolution in detail, I recommend that you go to my GnosticInsights.com webpage and you do a search for the podcast called Gnostic Evolution in the Beginning, and that was posted on October 21st, 2023. And this is a very long and quite detailed theory of evolution that is not Darwinian.

https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com/2018/11/a-simple-explanation-of-tuskless.html

You know, I don’t know why people get stuck on these old theories. Scholars are very habitual, because if you change one of the basic theories, then all of their scholarship goes out the window. Then what are they teaching anymore? They don’t know what to teach; they don’t know what to write about. People would rather harken back to this old theory of Darwin, which is about as outdated as the original evolutionary theory of Lamarck. So I’m inviting you to open your minds today and think of a different way of looking at evolution.

Then I broadcasted a second podcast the very next week on October 28th of 2023 called Evolution and Conscious Design. And again, you can find that at GnosticInsights.com.

First off, let me repeat something out of one of those original broadcasts.

There are just a couple of basic ways you can think about evolution. As commonly taught in school, “scientific” evolution explains the tremendous diversity of life on Earth as lucky mutations that add up to great results. Darwinism promotes the idea that mutations and mechanisms morph into increasingly sophisticated life forms, because genetic goof-ups allow the ones who change to better survive and dominate those who stayed true to form. These lucky mutations keep going in the same lucky direction until there are so many of them that they add up to a new and improved creature. And now they are “evolved.”

Boy, that article I posted in October 21st of 2023, and the transcript to that podcast has lots of illustrations and lots of embedded videos. It’s an excellent discussion of a criticism of Darwinian evolution, and I highly recommend that you go to it.

And now on to this week’s discussion of why birds don’t buy Bentleys. Let me begin by reading some excerpts from the Aeon article so you can hear Dr. Truswell’s thesis.

Culture and its transmission from generation to generation is the defining feature of humanity. It is perhaps the best candidate for the thing that separates us from other beasts. Though there are other species that have been shown to hand down accumulated knowledge, including chimps, who show some evidence for cultural transmission of tool use, no other animal approaches our ability to layer breakthrough upon breakthrough in such a way. And certainly no other animal does it with the conscious intent to lift future communities beyond the achievements that came before. That is a human distinction, if ever there were one.

Why has no other animal evolved this demonstrably useful ability? There are lots of intelligent animal candidates, but most have some straightforward biological reality holding them back. Take the octopodes, famously intelligent and with a rich visual communication system in their incredible instantaneous color changes, but their very short lifespans, coupled with rapid senescence and death after a single mating and clutch of eggs, leaves little time for a parent to hand on knowledge to offspring.

Most fish and reptiles face a similar challenge, though they do not die after reproducing like octopodes, they do tend to produce large clutches of eggs that hatch and mature without much, if any, parental input, relying on these statistics of a very large clutch size to ensure a few offspring reach adulthood. Birds are the real quandary. The philosopher and biologist Peter Godfrey Smith points to birds as the expected place to find another species treading the same path that we humans have, not least because they already come with several of the important adaptations that made cultural sharing possible for us.

Complex brains, long lives, strong parental care of offspring in most species, and robust communication.

With all of those advantages, why don’t birds have complex culture like we do? Why do they not write technical manuals and make art and argue over economic policy? Why do they not have a market economy with not only goods for trade, but luxury goods whose value relies on concepts rather than raw usefulness? Why don’t birds drive Bentleys?

So that’s his setup for this essay. He goes on to say,

Natural selection and by extension evolution, is a force with no foresight. It responds to the challenges that a species is currently facing. It does not and cannot see broad sunlit uplands on the horizon and move toward them. This is because selection is a game of elimination. It happens when individuals die without reproducing or having reproduced less than their neighbors. In each generation, that which is unsuccessful is culled by natural selection and that which is successful endures. Occasionally, a random mutation or fortuitous combination of genes produces a family offshoot that is even more successful than its ancestors and cousins, resulting in higher rates of reproduction or longer lives, which allow more reproduction or higher offspring survival, who in turn reproduce more. The consequences of this is that most evolutionary change must happen as a result of a push rather than a pull. A species’ traits change because they are currently inadequate and being eliminated by selection rather than being pulled toward a better alternative.

So already my Gnostic alarm bells are going off  full blast. And then there’s many pages about the evolutionary push and pull and what causes some species to be caught in troughs of non-evolutionary change. Then he begins speaking about birds and that birds is an incredible adaptation.

It opens an entire third dimension of free movement to species capable of flying. First and foremost, this is game changing for a prey animal. Being able to escape a predator by traveling in a direction the predator is incapable of going, namely up, is a huge selection advantage. A flying animal is at risk of consistent predation only from other flying animals, which are fundamentally rare.

Then he goes down another couple of pages and he says that,

Flight is an evolutionary black hole. It is a gravitational well with no bottom, a trait so powerfully effective at improving survival and reproduction that it plunges the species into a well of easy life and high fitness from which there is no escape. Or to return to more conventional evolutionary language, it relieves an incomparable amount of selection pressure that might drive a species to alternative traits.

So basically, he’s saying that once birds evolved flight, they stopped evolving traits that would cause them to adapt better or to form culture. Quoting again,

Everything that is true about flight’s incredible selection benefit is true about human culture. Bipedalism that frees up hands to make machines and to write comes at the cost of evolving odd long feet and an upright posture that causes back pain and makes childbirth dangerous. And of course, four limbs hosting handy hands become unsuitable for evolving into wings for flight. Intelligence, sociability, and many of the other traits we rely on for our cultural abilities are expensive in energy and survival terms. In evolutionary terms, that means they need to be providing a lot of benefit to be worth that cost. In order for that to be the case, there has to be a lot of room for improvement. There has to be a lot of evolutionary pressure. Down at the bottom of the black hole of flight, the pressure is just too low for the trade-offs to be worthwhile.

Humans being slow, flightless, hairless, clawless apes had a huge amount to gain by evolving the tools of cultural transmission. Birds flying, living long lives of relative ease do not feel the same pressure. It is probably the case that our cultural abilities are also a black hole in evolution.

Everything that is true about flight’s incredible selection benefit is true about human culture. We have also fallen down into an impossibly steep slope of selection to arrive at the incredible complexity of human life today. [Then he says,] I cannot fathom what set of circumstances would cause us to evolve away from this complexity.

Okay. Well I can. So that is the end of quoting from his article, which if you want to read in its fullness, you can find at aeon.co/essays/why birds don’t buy Bentleys and we humans will never fly. The link’s in the transcript to this episode here.

So this article prompted a long discussion between my brother and myself that again I happen to be capturing to share with you today. So let’s get to it.

[Cyd]  Okay, now we’re recording. Well, hello, Billy.

[Bill]  Hi, Cyd. I want to talk with you about that bird article– Why birds don’t buy Bentleys.

Yes. And I thought you did a great job of introducing your criticism of that particular article. So I’m thinking, go ahead and go ahead and review your criticism and all that, you know, and then I’ll, we’ll interact. I have some ideas, obviously.

[Cyd]  Well, I tell you, before I review my criticisms, would you like to give the Reader’s Digest version of what the article was proposing?

[Bill]  Okay. Well, yeah, Reader’s Digest, yes. The article is a hardcore evolutionary article, so all organisms have evolved to the point they evolved to, and for many of them, they’ve evolved into a corner. And if they’re in a corner, they can’t get out of it.

[Cyd]  Oh, right. And the article says, they call it a valley, a gravitational well.

[Bill]  Right. So birds have gotten to the point, you know, where they can fly. Okay. And here we are, we won’t be able to fly as human beings. So we’re down in those arenas there. And it was trying to describe from an evolution perspective, why they can’t get out.

[Cyd]  Oh, because it had to do with culture. The question was, why do birds not drive Bentleys? In other words, human beings seem to be the only creatures on the planet that have evolved a culture, where they have social order, and they invent things, and they do things like agriculture and manufacturing and things like that. And birds don’t need to do that because they can fly. So what needs do they have? I guess, mainly it was suggesting that humans evolved culture and whatnot in order to escape predators, in order to be able to breed and pass on their genes. And birds didn’t have to do that because they could just fly away from predators.

[Bill]  Wasn’t that his basic idea?

[Cyd]  That’s the basic idea. Right.

[Bill]  And how you respond, you made the point, well, he’s mistaken about organisms, they do have culture. And then you went on to describe, four examples.

[Cyd]  Oh, go ahead.

[Bill]  No, no, go ahead.

[Cyd]  Okay. So for example, his basic premise that only humans have culture isn’t true. Because for example, insects have a lot of culture, I would say, ants, bees, and termites, especially, they communicate obviously, in great detail. They farm–ants actually farm aphids to eat them. And they breed them. So they farm and eat them.

Obviously, ants, bees, and termites build great structures, huge cities that they live in. And, and of course, they have the culture of warfare, they build armies, and they go to war for whatever purpose they have with others of their kind.

And tools, I would say that they do use tools. They said humans were the only ones that use tools. But that’s clearly not true. Because, for example, birds—crows use tools. Crows can use sticks, shapes sticks into probes to go down into termite hills and anthills in order to fish for ants and termites. So they are able to construct tools for those kinds of purposes. And birds, all birds, construct—they make their nests, they choose just the right kind of straw and just the right kind of sticks, and they decide where it’s going to be a safe place to hang it. So they do a lot of, I would say, construction with tools.

And so that was the easiest one. But I also would refute the notion that animals don’t have culture, because I would say that domesticated animals, of course, I’m particular to cats and dogs, but dogs are extremely successful in the, even in the manner, evolutionary manner that the author talked about where he defined success as the ability to thrive and proliferate with good adaptations. And dogs have done that tremendously well. Yes, with some help from the humans, pushing this and that with their breeding, but still the animals have adapted to our culture. And I would say they have human culture. They understand us, they can understand our words. They’re not just trainable and to order them about. I know that my dogs think and evaluate any command I give them. They certainly think and evaluate whether that’s a good idea or not. And I’d call that culture. I’d say they plugged into human culture rather than merely extending the wolf culture. But of course, wolves have culture too. It’s crazy to say that wolves don’t have a society. Okay.

[Bill]  That’s right. No, that’s great. That’s right on the point.

And, what you’ve been describing, the hens and the dogs and the birds and what have you, is that these are describable, but I will bet that a huge number of beings, organisms, so forth, have their respective cultures that we haven’t defined out. We haven’t clicked in. We’re trying to put it in human terms, right?

[Cyd]  Right.

[Bill]  Well, they have their own shtick. They know what they’re doing.

[Cyd]  Right. And we just can’t recognize it.

Oh! And what about schools of fish and flocks of birds? The way they move all together and whatnot is incredible. We can’t do that. So, they’re more evolved in that sense.

[Bill]  I’d even pick out one of your favorites—slime molds. Talk about cooperation.  Oh yeah! So his basic point, you know, again—he’s a hardcore evolutionist. He has to explain it, but he can’t give the movements his meaning. They didn’t become this because they needed to be that.  He’s trying to describe it as survivability. More of that kind, and so forth. From his point of view, that’s where it’s coming from.

So, let me take another tact here. Well, not another tact—what we call the Gnostic position. Okay. I mean, Gnosticism technically doesn’t talk about evolution per se, not that kind. What we call the Second Order, of course, all Second Order, they’re from the Aeonic—their Aeonic inheritance.

So it’s all there. In fact, we talk about evolution as a time issue going over it.  Well, there’s no time. It’s all done. It’s already done. So, we use the notion of time because that’s the way we relate in this world. But, so evolution requires time.

[Cyd]  Oh! I see. Evolution requires time. That’s a good point because you’re saying it’s all there. There is no time. So you can’t have evolution based upon time. Oh, wow. That’s profound. That’s basic, isn’t it? Yes.

[Bill]  So, so yeah, so back to, so what we have is intelligent design. Yes. That’s the Aeonic and it’s right from the beginning.

[Cyd]  Right, right, right, right. And the Tripartite Tractate, the way it describes the Second Order Powers coming to Earth, it’s very cool because it said that we were sent down from the smallest to the largest, each with our own jobs to do. And so it’s not that things are evolving from bacteria and then becoming more and more complex and larger and larger aggregates. It’s just the tiny guys come in first to make the base. It’s the hierarchical concept, not that the little guys are less evolved or less important, but you know, you can’t have the fish until the plankton come in. So the plankton have to come before the fish, so to speak, as far as being, as far as appearing.

[Bill]  With our understanding of time, yes. Yes. So we’re describing it that way. Yeah.

[Cyd]  Okay, but listen. Your understanding of no such thing as time—that everything is already there…  You’re believing in that static jello universe I talk about basically. So, well, then how does that appear? How does it appear that the small things come first and then the larger and larger things appear the way they seem to in our earthly “evolution”? How is that if it’s a static universe?

Picture these cherries as completely filling the universal space with all possible worlds, already existing.

[Bill]  Well, because that’s the “second economy” in this Fallen existence and we’re connected to the “material.”  And so we’ve working within this arena, which is a time arena as far as our feeling of it.

[Cyd]  Okay. So that’s the second economy—it appears to have time.

[Bill]  That’s right. And it’s organized by the Demiurge. We’re connected into the, again, that connection is, we’re experiencing “time” that way when in fact the first economy is timeless and the third economy will be no time. Right. So it’s just the second economy that appears the way it does.

[Cyd]  Right. Okay. Oh, okay. 

[Let me drop in this quick explanation that the first economy is what the Tripartite Tractate calls the original Fullness of God hierarchy. Then our apparently material cosmos is called the second economy. And the third economy is where we all wind up after the second economy passes away.]

So that’s from the big bang, so to speak, up until the Second Coming [of Christ] in the collapse or after the Second Coming in the collapse, that is, that’s the second economy that we live in. That’s our apparent universe that we live in. And it does seem to have time, although you and I were discussing the other day, the difference between time and sequence.

[Bill]  Yes. Yes. We would already say sequence is understood in time, you know, that that’s the way we make sense of it in this fallen existence here. But it’s only sequence. Right. Again, the consciousness goes through the jello universe.

[Cyd]  Okay. Right. It’s swimming through that already existent universe. That’s right. Going from choice point to choice point using free will, but it’s all there. It’s all laid out in advance.

[Bill]  Yes.

[Cyd]  Yeah. And in the first economy, everything that comes to appear to us in the second economy is already preexistent. That’s what the Fullness of God is—it’s all of the preexisting forms that will ever come to be… You and I, we, I keep getting hung up on that. 

[Bill] It doesn’t have consciousness in life. 

[Cyd]  But it is somehow preexistent in the first order because it’s part of this creation. And everything that’s part of this creation was imagined, obviously, in the Fullness of God. Was it not? Well, it’s all, it’s conceptual. We’ve talked about that before.

[Bill]  Alright.

[Cyd]  It’s conceptual. Right. Okay.

[Bill]  So let me go to your point. Fullness is fullness.

[Cyd]  Which means it’s everything.

[Bill]  It’s everything. And it’s done. In the third economy, we’re back to fullness.

[Cyd]  Right. We’re back to fullness, but we’re the third economy and we’re not back to the first economy, which was before we all came around and had our second economy experiences. We get to take those memories and associations with us into the third economy.

[Bill]  Right.

[Cyd]  Nice.

[Bill]  So that’s the basic point, Cyd, you know—my basic response to that article. On one level, you’ve explained even in an evolutionary sense how he’s wrong.

[Cyd]  Yeah.

[Bill]  Okay. So that, you know, we’re taking his assumptions there, and then we take the next step to the Gnostic position.

[Cyd]  That’s great, Bill. In fact, you’re pulling it together in that more profound sense, I believe. Seems to make my little quibbles with the article irrelevant, basically.

[Bill]  No, it’s not irrelevant. You’re responding as if he’s sitting there. You’re responding to him. He’s not going to the Gnostic side. You’re responding to him. How would he respond, now that you’re at that particular technical level. Okay. I’m at your level now. How do you explain that?

Cyd:  Right.

[Bill]  Yes. I thought that was very good.

[Cyd]  Here’s something else to say about the article. In the article, the author said that it’s unfathomable—he used the term unfathomable—to imagine human culture de-evolving, because we’ve gone down into this evolutionary well of perfection, basically. And I also quibbled with that, so I wasn’t just quibbling about the insects and the dogs and cats and the birds.

It’s not true. I can fathom society de-evolving in that if we lose our technical aspect, which has become so huge since the industrial revolution, if we go back to pre-industrial revolution, our current culture will de-evolve back to prior to the industrial revolution.

And how does that happen? Well, that’s very easy. An electromagnetic pulse, plasma ejection from the sun, wiping out all of our satellites or blowing up our electrical substations, even beyond people with malfeasance in their hearts, let’s say, guerrilla warfare against the electrical grid to plunge us all into darkness. That could be on someone’s mind. And that’s all it’s going to take. We’re just going to come back. We’re just going to go back down to pre-electricity and our culture will de-evolve to the dark ages immediately.

[Bill]  Right. Well, again, you’re responding at his level. That’s right. At his level. Right.

[Cyd]  No long range communication, roving bands of marauders, and so on.

[Bill]  That’s dystopic history. That’s science fiction, right?

[Cyd]  That’s exactly right. Right. Right. It’s the dystopian end. But the good side of that will be AI will die as well.

[Bill]  Yes. Well, we’ve said before in the past, you know, I think small community—tribal communities—interrelate with each other. That’s a greater future than huge nation states or globalism, and all the rest of that.

[Cyd]  Right. I once read somewhere that really any person can only keep track of 200 people. And so 200 is actually the biggest size a village should be if you want to know everyone—if you want to know and love your neighbor.

[Bill]  Well, that’s the point. You can hold hands easier and be with others in that larger sense. (referring to the Simple Golden Rule)  So that may be a healthier direction. Now, of course, you might respond and say, “well, we evolved to this state we’re in because…” but he can’t say because it benefits humanity. That’s not evolutionary talk. Evolution doesn’t take place because it needs to go somewhere.

The Simple Golden Rule is the Aeonic pattern of cooperation

[Cyd]  Right. Because it’s already there.

[Bill]  Well, not even that in his evolutionary sense. He’s not Lamarckian. Lamarck said that giraffes grew long necks because they needed to get the food in the trees. Right. You know—they grew like that. But Darwinian evolutionary theory is that some were born with long neck and they survive better.

[Cyd]  Yes. Yeah. Well, so actually, then, you know, when we’re talking about guerillas crashing the electrical systems of the Earth… those could be Luddites. It might be Luddite-type guerillas purposely plunging the Earth into a dark age in order to restore humanity to its…

[Bill]  Well, that’s a, you see, that’s a conscious attempt by a Second Order.

[Cyd]  Right. That would be a non-Christian, non-Gnostic way of returning. But it’s not just necessarily through malfeasance and guerilla action of hating countries in order to plunge them into the dark ages. It could actually have a noble aspiration to bring us back to a Luddite age of true pre-industrial revolution.

[Bill]  Well, again, a general point—isn’t the mistake of socialism? You can have people directing they want socialism in order to bring about equanimity and equality for all people as a beneficial end.

[Cyd]  Right. So they have good notions. I mean, their heart may be pure. Well, as if!… except for the big cats at the top that are going to reap it all, right? Yah. So, well, it’s an interesting discussion, Bill.

[Bill]  (laughing)  Well, it was a joy. I love going places with you. That’s the thing. You start out with something and then we evolve out.

[Cyd]  (laughing) Oh no, wrong word. No, no. And then we swim to another cherry.

[Bill]  Thank you for having me. I look forward to doing more of these.

[Cyd]  Love it! I’m all for it. Let’s do it!

Well I hope you found this discussion of evolution stimulating and I hope that you are prompted to reconsider the efficacy of the entire concept of Darwinian evolution from a Gnostic point of view.

And again I repeat in order to do that the best you really should return to my prior two broadcasts about evolution. I’ll put the links in the transcript to this episode. Thank you for spending this time with me.

God bless us all and onward and upward.

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Ten years ago, back in July 22nd of 2015, I wrote one of my first articles about Gnosticism on my Simple Explanation blog, and I’m going to read from that for you today. This was very soon after I began to realize that the Orthodox Christianity that I had been strongly embracing for all of my life could be enhanced by this knowledge of Gnosticism.

I had been trained up to believe that Gnosticism was a heresy, and it takes many years for a very strong believer in Christianity to even be willing to consider Gnosticism as another sect of Christianity. So while not being willing to give up my belief in the Christ as our salvation, and not being willing to demote my relationship with Jesus, because I can’t deny that since I personally know it to be true, I was at last able to begin reading the Nag Hammadi texts. I was particularly taken by the text called the Tripartite Tractate, which is the one that I share with you mostly on this Gnostic Insights podcast.

So let me share with you now this first article that I wrote in 2015 called Yearning for the Pleroma, which is still posted on my long-running Simple Explanation blog. This was originally broadcasted as an episode in August of 2021, which was before I started posting episodes to Substack, so my Substack readers have never seen or heard this episode. Also, for those of you who have been following Gnostic Insights from the beginning, you haven’t ever had a chance to read the transcript, so here it is. As I said, this article is ten years old. I hadn’t yet developed the illustrations that have become so familiar by now, which you can see throughout the Gnostic Insights transcripts and in The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book from 2019. This episode features my first attempt at diagramming the gnostic cosmology. The concepts still hold up, although the artwork is more colorful and polished today.

This is called Yearning for the Pleroma.

Other words for the Gnostic word “pleroma” include the “Fullness,” the “All,” the “Totalities,” and “the circle of divine attributes,” which gives you a pretty good idea of what pleroma means. The way wikipedia defines the term is much more challenging and kind of discouraging because of its complexity, especially the section on Gnosticism.  Wikipedia cites 17 uses of the Greek word kenoma that is usually translated as “fullness,” with only one usage of pleroma as we Gnostics would define it.

Only one book of the Bible mentions the Pleroma–a letter written to the church in Colosse by the apostle Paul. In the translation of Colossians 2:9 below, Pleroma has been rendered as “the fullness.”

“For in Him [Christ] dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power” (Col. 2:9).

The footnote under this verse in my edition of the New King James Version goes on to completely misinterpret the meaning of the statement in its rush to dismiss the Gnostic implications of the verse. The Nelson editors contend that “the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of angelic beings, the last creating the material world. In contrast, Paul says that the fullness of God exists in Christ… This contradicts the Gnostic idea of  the inherent evil of physical bodies and the claim that Jesus is merely a spirit (p. 2014, Nelson Study Bible. 1997).

While I do agree with the opening premise that “the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of … beings,” there are at least four misrepresentations I see in the Nelson explanation of the verse.

First, the idea that the fullness can’t be both completely in Christ and at the same time divided into aeons. No need to say, “In contrast,” since the two traits are not mutually exclusive. Let’s imagine how that would work.

Father, Son, Totalities of the ALL, Fullness, Fall

Here are the first four phases of Gnostic Cosmology, according to the Tripartite Tractate. Upper right corner: God the Father represented as the background paper of the entire poster. Upper left corner: I’ve represented the Son as a diffuse cloud of will. Middle: the Pleroma/the fullness represented as the Son’s cloud with distinct lines representing the aeonic traits. The pyramid to the right represents the individual aeons after they have named themselves and differentiated the Son’s will into hierarchies of traits and powers.

We begin with the Father, since this is the ground state underlying all else. We all know that the Father is unknowable. Too big, too exalted for us mere mortals to contemplate directly. The Father is the Immortal One who never changes and without whom nothing would exist. The indisputable buck-stops-here God. This being is pure consciousness, without form or distinctions, all quiet, eternally undivided. This is the One Who Is; the Great I Am. In my drawings, the Father is represented as the paper that makes up the poster–all other manifestations arise as images upon the paper and are fully contained by the paper.

The Son is represented by the starburst cloud at the upper left, although the starburst is not really light energy, since this is before the creation of Light. This entity is also called the First Aeon, the Root, the Single Name, and The Form of the Formless. The Son contains all of the qualities of the Father, but in a circumscribed form. In today’s lingo we would call the Son a holographic representation of the Father, where a small fragment perfectly emulates the larger image. You could think of the Father as the ocean, and the Son as a big bucket of ocean water. It’s the same fluid. And if the bucket remains immersed in the ocean, then not only is the water within and without the bucket identical, the ocean continues to fully contain the bucket of water.

The Tripartite Tractate describes how the Son is part of the Father, and then goes on in the same verse to declare the Son as the cause of the Pleroma:

“He exists by the Father having him as a thought–that is, his thought about himself, his sensation of himself and of his eternal being… He possesses power, which is his will. For the moment, however, he holds himself back in silence, he who is the greatest, being the cause of the generation of the members of the All into eternal existence” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 56).

By this one verse we can see that the Son is within the Father and he also contains the Fullness, in full agreement with Colossians 2:9.

My second problem with the Nelson notes is their description of aeons. Aeons are not the same as angels–they’re more like features or capabilities. The Tripartite Tractate describes them as “the properties and qualities in which the Father and the Son exist” and equates them with the pre-existent Church (Tripartite Tractate, verse 58). 

“His offspring, the ones who are, are without number and limit and at the same time indivisible. They have issued from him, the Son and the Father… The Church exists in the dispositions and properties in which the Father and the Son exist… Therefore it subsists in the procreations of innumerable aeons” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 59).

While some Aeons are beings with their own self-aware personalities, other aeons are best described as traits and capabilities of the Father and Son.

“…they were unable to know the depth in which they were; nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father; they did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed… like a fetus… not yet come into being” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 60).

Third, the Nelson Study Bible footnote confuses Jesus, the physical incarnation of Christ on Earth, with the eternal spirit of Christ, the first Son of the Father, whose image and dwelling predates the Earthly appearance of Jesus. 

“Now the Savior in fact was a bodily image of something unitary, namely the Fullness” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 116).

The Gnostic gospel I’ve been studying has no quibble with naming the physical person of Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior of the entire Creation. Lest the wary Christian doubt the Gnostic’s gospel, the Tripartite Tractate ends with this eulogy for Jesus Christ:

“…the praise, the power, and the glory, through Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Savior, the Redeemer of all those who are embraced by the mercy of love, and through his Holy Spirit, from now throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 138).

And finally, the Nelson editor contends “the fullness of God [that] exists in Christ” … “contradicts the Gnostic idea of the inherent evil of physical bodies.” The editor apparently reasons that if Gnostics claim physical bodies are evil, and Jesus incarnated as a physical body, then Gnosticism would imply that Jesus Christ was evil.

There are a couple of problems with this logic. First, my reading of Gnostic writing reveals that while material reality may have started out as “evil,” the situation was quickly rectified when the Son and the Pleroma intervened to establish an “economy” that regulated good and evil inclinations through “repentance.” Keep in mind that material reality can be considered demiurgic, but not “evil” per se. Nothing is “evil,” only misguided by egoic striving. Here’s a brief description of that process:

“After conversion followed the remembrance of those who exist and the prayer on behalf of the one who had returned to himself by means of what is good” (81)…. “This prayer and supplication helped to make him turn toward himself and toward the Fullness, for their remembrance of him caused him to remember the preexistent ones, and this is the remembrance that calls out from afar and brings him back” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 82).

“To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought … with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. This was in order to provide them with a structure and a dwelling place, but also in order that by being drawn toward evil they should acquire a weak basis for their existence, so that, instead of rejoicing unduly in the glory of their own environment and thereby remaining exiled, they might rather perceive the sickness they were suffering from, and so acquire a consistent longing and seeking after the one who is able to heal them from this weakness” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 98, 99).

“The first human, then, is a mixed molding and a mixed creation, and a depository of those on the left and those on the right, as well as of a spiritual Word, and his sentiments are divided between each of the two substances to which he owes his existence” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 106).

“What our Savior became, out of willing compassion, is the same as that which the ones for whose sake he appeared had become because of an involuntary passion: they had become flesh and soul, and this holds them perpetually in its grip, and they perish and die… For not only did he assume their death for the ones he had in mind to save, but in addition he also assumed their smallness, to which they had descended when they were born with body and soul; for he let himself be conceived and he let himself be born as a child with body and soul” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 114, 115).

Secondly, the very fact that Jesus did incarnate as a mortal man is what made salvation through Christ possible, for it was by the Savior’s perfect “error correcting algorithm,” superimposed upon an otherwise error-filled humanity, that salvation entered the world. 

I’ll end this article with a clear gospel message straight from the Tripartite Tractate regarding exactly what one must come to believe in order to be saved. 

“… there is no other baptism apart from this one alone, which is the redemption into God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when confession is made through faith in those names, which are a single name of the gospel, when they have come to believe what has been said to them, namely that they exist. From this they have their salvation, those who have believed that they exist. This is attaining in an invisible way to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an undoubting faith” (Tripartite Tractate, verse, 127, 128).

That seems to be the underlying core of the Gnostic salvation message. No other arcane rituals are needed; no gnosis other than believing that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (the Fullness) existed before you. Other ancient gnostic texts claim that this is the true essence of the gospel that Jesus preached. 

Keep in mind that these are the very texts considered so distracting by the early church Fathers that they were buried in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD to protect them from being burned as the work of heretics, keeping them safe until their reemergence in 1945. The cat is definitely out of the bag now.

Okay, back to the Pleroma. In case you haven’t guessed, the Fullness is where we all wind up eventually. By the end of the universe, everyone’s souls will have come on board Team God, so to speak, and then the fruit of the Pleroma will have returned home to the fold, to live happily ever after amidst the unending joy and love of the Fullness, all tucked up inside the Son who lives inside the Father.

We second order powers nest up into the Fullness, and the Fullness nests up into the 3rd Order Powers and the Christ

“Once the redemption had been proclaimed, the perfect human [the Savior] immediately  received knowledge so as to return swiftly to his unity, to the place from which he came. Joyfully he returned back to the place from which he had originated, the place from which he had flowed forth. His limbs, however, needed a school… until all the limbs of the body of the Church would be united in one place and would attain the restoration together… so that the Fullness obtains its redemption” (Tripartite Tractate, verses 123, 124).

So, that is the end of this article that I wrote several years ago, and ever since writing this article, I have been more fully developing this Gnostic Gospel until it emerged as my own book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which is, in my own words, meant to be simple and understandable. No quotes, it’s not academic, it’s the straightforward Gnostic Gospel, and it’s fully illustrated so that each illustration shows you what, in my mind, these things look like. But they’re metaphors, they’re only visual metaphors, but they should help you to grasp this information. Sometimes the words are difficult, but I find it much easier to grasp the information when it is presented in a visual form. So please go ahead and visit my GnosticInsights.com website, where you can click on and purchase The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book. I’ve printed it as a larger picture kind of book, in that 6×9 format, glossy pictures and all. Very pretty. But I’ve also printed it as a small pocket edition that you could actually put in your back pocket of your jeans, which harkens back to my old days as a young Christian, as a one-way Christian in the late 1960s, when I used to carry my little pocket edition of the Good News Bible in my back pocket. So I encourage you to get that book and read it, and read it several times, many times, until it soaks in, until you get how easy redemption is.

And this Gnostic Gospel does not attempt to dethrone Jesus Christ. It dethrones a false god called the Demiurge, which does appear here and there throughout the Bible, but it does not dethrone the Father of the Christ, which is the God Above all gods.

Well, thank you for joining me this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed this review of Yearning for the Pleroma, and that you’ve gained some clarity concerning what the Pleroma, or the fullness of God, means. Remember, our Father is a God of clarity, and knowledge, and thinking. You should never come away from Gnostic studies lost in confusion. Many of the podcasts I hear that call themselves Gnostic are being narrated by people who are themselves confused about the nature of the Father and gnosis, in my opinion. If you come away feeling confused, then it’s not the clarity that we try to achieve here at Gnostic Insights and in the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Our God is not the God of confusion. That would be the job of the Demiurge. Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

https://gnosticinsights.com/buy-the-book/You may purchase my original Gnostic Gospel at gnosticinsights.com, lulu.com, or any online book dealer.

A recent article called “All Is One” in the online magazine “aeon”  presents an excellent overview of the scientific and philosophical schism between what is called “monism” and its dialectical opposite “dualism.” If you are interested in the nature of reality and the history of the argument over whether or not there is a single, unifying reality behind all of the apparent differences we see around us, you should check out that article. I have included the link here in this podcast transcript that you can find either at Gnostic Insights dot com or the transcript on Substack.

As so often happens, my brother read the article first and forwarded it to me. After I read it, we had a good conversation about certain concepts in the article. By good fortune, we had the zoom app running during our conversation and I was able to preserve our discussion to play for you today.

There are two reasons why I want to share the audio of that conversation with you. One reason is the content—Bill had a good gnostic insight he wanted to get across to me, and that is presented to you here. The second reason is that I want to share with you the process by which my brother and I discuss these deep thoughts. I consider our discussion process an ideal model for how philosophical discussions should take place, although they rarely do because of ego.

I think of our philosophical discussions as an example of the Simple Golden Rule. We are both arguing not from a position of ego, but from a shared exploration of truth, and gnosis is the object in the middle we are both working on to level up. The discussion isn’t polite in the sense that there are plenty of interruptions and disputes, yet no negative or egoic emotions, only love and laughter. Keep in mind that Bill is a professor emeritus of Philosophy, and I am a Ph.D. rhetorician and university lecturer, so you can imagine we have both seen our share of unpleasant and offensive philosophical disputes in the halls of academia. Our conversation is how I imagine such talks should proceed for the benefit of all.

Let’s begin with the beginning of the aeon article by Heinrich Paes, a professor of theoretical physics at TU Dortmund University in Germany. He says,

‘From all things One and from One all things,’ wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus some 2,500 years ago. He was describing monism, the ancient idea that all is one – that, fundamentally, everything we see or experience is an aspect of one unified whole. Heraclitus wasn’t the first, nor the last, to advocate the idea. The ancient Egyptians believed in an all-encompassing but elusive unity symbolized by the goddess Isis, often portrayed with a veil and worshipped as ‘all that has been and is and shall be’ and the ‘mother and father of all things’.

Let me jump in here to say that we Valentinian Gnostics would identify this One as the Father rather than Isis. Back to the article:

This worldview also follows in straightforward fashion from the findings of quantum mechanics (QM), the uncanny physics of subatomic particles that departs from the classical physics of Isaac Newton and experience in the everyday world. QM, which holds that all matter and energy exist as interchangeable waves and particles, has delivered computers, smartphones, nuclear energy, laser scanners and arguably the best-confirmed theory in the entirety of science. We need the mathematics underlying QM to make sense of matter, space and time. Two processes of quantum physics lead directly to the notion of an interconnected universe and a monistic foundation to nature overall: ‘entanglement’, nature’s way of integrating parts into a whole, and the topic of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics; and ‘decoherence’, caused by the loss of quantum information, and the reason why we experience so little quantum weirdness in our daily lives.

Again, let me interject by suggesting you read my article “Quantum Entanglement and Karma” on my Simple Explanation blog, originally posted May 13, 2011. The link is in this transcript.

Quantum Mechanical entanglement at a distance

Now, back to the aeon article.

Yet, despite the throughline in philosophy and physics, the majority of Western thinkers and scientists have long rejected the idea that reality is literally unified, or nature and the Universe a system of one. From judges in the Inquisition (1184-1834) to quantum physicists today, the thought that a single system underlies everything has been too odd to believe. In fact, though philosophers have been proposing monism for thousands of years, and QM is, after all, an experimental science, Western culture has regularly lashed out against the concept and punished those promoting the idea.

The article then goes on to describe the long and torturous history of the clash between monists and dualists in both philosophy and religion. Quote,

Even then, Christianity adopted Platonic ideas by identifying the monistic ‘One’ with God. But Christianity drew also on dualistic philosophies such as Manichaeism, which advocated a world caught in an epic struggle between good and evil. This is how concepts such as God and devil, heaven and hell, or angels and demons received their prominent role among Christian beliefs. At the same time, the monistic influences were pushed into an otherworldly beyond. The Christian God was understood as different from the natural world that he governs from outside.

With the Christian Church rising to political power and the fall of the Roman Empire, much of antiquity’s culture and philosophy got lost, and monism got suppressed as a heresy. If ‘all is One’, God gets conflated with the world, and medieval theology understood that as atheism or a devaluation of God.

Here I can tell you that Gnosticism was one of those heresies that could get a philosopher burned at the stake with its insistence that the Father is the One Source of All that is, and that the emanation of  the God Above All Gods is here in the world and in each of us. However, a “soft monism” began to arise in the realm of science, with forces such as gravity and electro-magnetism and, later, Quantum Mechanics, being proven to exist universally within our cosmos. You can read the details in the “All Is One” article. The article concludes by saying,

The 3,000-year-old concept of monism may actually help modern physicists in their struggle to find a theory of quantum gravity and make sense out of black holes, the Higgs boson, and the early Universe. Chances are high that we witness the beginning of a new era where science is informed by monism and the Universe is perceived as a unified whole.

Now, here’s Bill and myself talking this over. Before I share that with you, there will be references to the “Cherry Jello Block Universe” that is fully described in the episode called “Consciousness and Time—Our Cherry-Jello Universe and Free Will”—link included in this transcript. My Cherry-Jello theory is a kind of “many worlds in One world” idea that proposes the cosmos is already fully formed, with all, nearly infinite, possible choices and outcomes already present in the form of “cherries” floating in an almost limitless sea of static jello where nothing really happens; it is only our consciousness that moves through it from cherry to cherry. We could say the giant jello bowl is the mind of the Father and Son present in the cosmos. There is no time, only the motion of consciousness swimming from cherry to cherry using free will. This is how it is that all of creation is entangled in the manner that Quantum Mechanics claims.

Cherry jello universe–the “cherries” are not to scale. They would be very small and the jello torus would be almost infinitely large–big enough to hold God’s conception of our universe and all possible future outcomes, accounting for free will and action of all units of consciousness.

We also move into a brief off-topic discussion of what the Tripartite Tractate calls “The Third Economy,” which is our final destination that replaces this apparently “material” cosmos. That leads to my brief interpretation of the Tribulation and 1,000 year reign of Christ as described in the Bible’s book of Revelations.

Cyd:  Hey Bill, good to talk to you. What are we going to talk about here, Bill?

Bill:  Hi, Cyd. Well, that particular article that you sent me, what was the titling there?

Cyd:  We shared an article that was published in aeon.

Bill:  Oh, it’s called, yeah, it’s called All is One.

Cyd:  Oh, yeah, All is One. And it’s about monism. It was an excellent article about monism. I never really understood the difference between monism and dualism until I read this guy’s article.

Bill:  You mean you haven’t been listening to me?

Cyd:  (Cyd laughs loudly) So monism is what we say all the time. In the beginning, there was only the Father.

Bill:  That’s right.

Cyd:  And it really… dualism doesn’t occur, I don’t think, in Gnosticism until… Does it occur when the Son is born, because now there’s two monads? Or does it occur after the Fall, and now we have a material universe with all of its negativity?

Bill:  Well, my response to that, I mean, first of all, historically, it was a great article. It shows you how it all developed out. It shows you the biases and the nastiness of it, even being killed because they were monists, and so forth. I won’t go into all of that…

Cyd:  Terribly killed—tortured and killed.

Bill:  But what we’ve talked about before, I made the point when we were talking about entanglement, is that the reason there’s entanglement is because there’s no space and time. I’ve told you that. That’s how it works.

Cyd:  Right. It’s the jello universe. It’s all there.

Bill:  Right. Now, the question of dualism you brought up—there technically is no dualism. The material world, I’m going to make a comment about that—no space and time. In other words, we’re talking the ethereal—consciousness and purity, and so forth—and then out of that comes the Gnostic development, the pleroma, et cetera—all that going out. Yet at all points in there, it’s still no space and time. There’s no creation of…

Cyd:  Of actuality. It’s all thought. It’s all consciousness.

Bill:  Yeah, it’s all thought. And the Fall itself, it takes place where the Demiurge then takes the chaos of the Fall and makes all these things, “material” so to speak… It’s still not…  He’s not created anything new. He’s organized and we call it material. There’s never been dualism. That’s my point. What is called the material that physicists work with and others now in the world and so forth, in reality, it’s not.

Cyd:  It’s still the consciousness of God just expressed in smaller and smaller fractal ways.

Bill:  Yes. Back to your…

Cyd:  But, but…

Bill:  But the organ…

Cyd:  Well, hold on. Isn’t there a duality between virtue and vice?

Bill:  Well, yes, but that’s not… We’re not talking- Yeah, but…

Cyd:  I mean, that’s somehow compartmentalized away from the One because there’s no room in heaven, so to speak, for vice.

Bill:  Well, the compartmentalizing doesn’t make it real. It doesn’t make it material, doesn’t make it– You can compartmentalize, yes, but it’s still the ethereal.

Cyd:  But, I mean, it seems to be different in kind. Sin is different categorically than God’s consciousness, is it not? Because we don’t want to say that God embraces sin. It’s not a yin-yang type of God.

Bill:  No, but that’s the imitation. Talking imitation…

Cyd:  So what I’m saying, isn’t the dualism between then the imitation and that which was from the beginning. Isn’t that the dualism split? Not from material to ethereal, but that which was from the beginning and then the imitation, which will return to nothingness.

Bill:  Well, see… I’m going to come at it another way. All of this is a theory.

Cyd:  Right. I agree with you. I got you. There’s no material. I get that part. But yet there is…

Bill:  There are concepts, but there are concepts. That’s part of the thoughts. That’s thoughts.

Cyd:  But it’s not God’s thoughts. It’s fallen thoughts. It’s our thoughts that are incorrect. I’m talking dialectics, you know?

Bill:  Well, the fact that we have free will, you see, we can make choices, right? Remember, we’ve said technically there’s no evil. God doesn’t create a universe where it’s possible to have evil. That’s not it. The actions that are taken, those are the memes, and so forth. We create this illusory stuff, but they’re wrong acts, but there’s not evil.

Cyd:  Okay. True.

Bill:  It’s not… Again, it’s not Manichaeism again, you know? There’s good and evil, bad, good and bad, right? It’s not the yin-yang, as you make the point. That’s not the universe. Yeah. We make it happen through our willful actions. And the Demiurge, because of demiurgic control, you know, makes the choices and how to disrupt us, right? Archonic disruptions and so forth?

Cyd:  Right, right. Okay. So—that which was not from the beginning and therefore will not return to the virtue in the roll-up… So what is the roll-up? What is humanity coming back into the Fullness? What is that? What would you call that? Because we’re going to shed the wrong beliefs. That’s what the redemption is.

Bill:  That’s right. That’s right. Those memes. Which again, your question might be, what are memes? How do they exist? In other words, do they have an existence?

Cyd:  Right. Right. I mean, are they…?  Okay. If it’s a giant torus of jello with cherries floating in it—are those cherries… we’ve always expressed them as choices or choice points.

Bill:  Yes. Yes.

Cyd:  But are there memes out there? When we roll back in towards the Fullness, does the jello bowl get smaller?

Bill:  Yes. The jello bowl of the universe.

Cyd:  Okay.

Bill:  Of the universe. Right.

Cyd:  But God is illimitable. But God is illimitable.

Bill:  That’s right.

Cyd:  Hmmm. Well, then the jello bowl of this universe is just going to go all the way to <poof> and then it’s all going to be part of the illimitable God, but with identity. That whole… you know what I’m saying? Cherry jello universe swimming from choice point to choice point, that will not occur after redemption, the third economy.

Bill:  Yes. The third economy is not going to have that.

Cyd:  It’s not going to have the torus around us.

Bill:  It’s not going to have any jello-ness.

Cyd:  Or cherries, I guess.

Bill:  Now, in the ethereal, you know, in the wrap up there in the third economy, you still have free will. The Aeons always had free will. So, the ethereal, that notion of free will, but we’re acting out of free will without any memes that were the result of the Fall.

Cyd:  Right.

Bill:  Does that make sense?

Cyd:  Yeah! (she shouts out). So, it’s just, shall I do this good thing or that good thing?. Visit this wonderful person and love them or that wonderful person and love them?

Bill:  (laughing) Yeah.

Cyd:  I think I’ll just pet my dogs for a thousand years. How about that?

Bill:  Yeah. Or even longer.

Cyd:  Interesting. Okay. Yeah.

Bill:  We’ve got something going here. You know, I mean, we need to incubate and percolate a bit more because it’s evolving right now… or not evolving—it’s mining.

Cyd:  Right. It’s revealing itself to us.

Bill:  It’s revealing itself. Right. So, the essential point to start with is there never was a material world in fact.  It’s funny. It’s a jungle out there.

Cyd:  (singing: It’s a jungle out there. Click this link to hear a funny song.) Exactly.

Bill:  Whether we’re talking food politics or anything else, it’s…

Cyd:  Well, skepticism is at an all-time high, as they say, you know.

Bill:  (laughing) Yeah, as it should be.

Cyd:  And this idea of AI taking over and the rise of the Demiurge, it seems as though we’re in the end times. You see, the people, they’re all for this kind of stuff, people like Musk—they think this is all going to turn out for the good. They are expecting what I call the Star Trek universe where it’s a very beautiful Federation of Planets and everything’s going well and you’ve got unlimited food and everybody works at jobs they love and everybody gets along, no more war. That’s what they think is going to be the outcome of progressivism and socialism and the rise of the AI and technocratic systems. I, however, think that just the opposite is going to come out, especially since it’s Demiurgic. It’s all going to turn into… I’m expecting more like the Terminator universe or Mad Max, you know? Dystopia. Dystopia versus Star Trek.

Bill:  Well, again, as you say a thousand times before, is the science fiction writers always have…

Cyd:  (interrupting) We’re the prophets! We’re the prophets. 

Bill:  And you’re going to write this new book. Love it. Love it!  Yeah, yeah. I can see playing that out, right?

Cyd:  Yeah.  Well, obviously, the brain implants in the VR world must be AI. They’re probably very miniaturized AI bots. They’re nanobots run by AI, else they couldn’t do what they’re doing to your brain. (plot line of new sf book)

Bill:  So, yeah. See, I want to stay alive. I want to see the world play out a little bit longer. I want to see where it’s going.

Cyd:  Except it’s going to go down, man.

Bill:  The thing is, but see, everything gets sort of sad and tragic and everything, yet I know where I’m going, so what’s the… It’s not like, oh, I feel terrible. All of my life is done, and it was fine.

Cyd:  Okay, because it’s just temporary anyway.

Bill:  Yeah, it’s temporary.

Cyd:  There might be a period of time where it’s all internment camps, but we know we’re going to heaven.

Bill:  So what would be the AI analogy, in the thousand-year time of Christ?

Cyd:  What do you mean? What’s your question?

Bill:  In the Revelations, what would be the thousand-year reign? What would the equivalent be in the AI?

Cyd:  Of Christ? Okay, so the thousand-year reign isn’t the bad stuff. That’s called the Tribulation.

Bill:  I understand. So how would that play out?

Cyd:  Well, that tribulation period is going to be what’s going on now. The buildup of AI, the repression of actual humanity, and what’s that called? Antinatalism? That’s all going to go… That’s just going to get worse and worse and worse and worse. It’s just going to be more and more and more horrific, and people will become more and more evil, because I think the good folks are going to stick the landing up above, and not want to come back, not be made to come back into the Tribulation.

Bill:  Well, it would be kind of like I don’t want to be reincarnated.

Cyd:  Well, yeah, right, and not required to be. The only people that have to be reincarnated, that’s that 144,000 that are called the Remnant. So only at the end of times, there will only be 144,000 righteous people on the earth, period. And it’s not going to be easy on them, but that’s their job. So if you want to come back as one of the 144,000, be my guest.

Bill:  So there won’t be a time where AI purely and simply is all there is?

Cyd:  No, because then that would… It’s going to be like Terminator at the end, where the AI is trying to be all there is, but the humans are fighting back. There’s still that 144,000 underground. But then Christ actually comes back, and various Aeons incarnate, and people like you and me come back along with the Christ. And somehow, I don’t know what the mechanism is, but everyone is persuaded to redemption at that point. Maybe they realize it’s not so much fun living under this demiurgic AI horrid place. And then everybody truly wants to repent. And when that repentance comes back, everybody’s redeemed. The Demiurge is redeemed, and that’s when the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth happens. So there will be a “material” world for a thousand years after the return of Christ and all the good guys, and it’ll be pretty nice. But then after that is when everything rolls up.

Bill:  Okay. And when we say “material,” we put quotes around it.

Cyd:  Right. Right.

Bill:  Materialism as it’s been experienced.

Cyd:  Right. So there’s going to be like a transition period, I would guess, for the second order powers to transition between… It’s all the love of God now, the Demiurge is not messing with us anymore. Eden. Eden. The Garden of Eden returns worldwide, and we’re all living in a happy, happy place. But then after that thousand years, everything is going to roll back up into the ethereal space and we’ll be part of the completely non-material or completely ethereal. That’s when the cherry will… The bowl of jello shrinks back into only the Fullness of God.

Bill:  That’s a good description! That’s a podcast!

Cyd:  Well, here we are. We’re recording it. So I think it will be.

Bill:  That’s a good podcast right there. Yeah, yeah. Very nice. Very good.

Cyd:  We’ve been taping. So let’s say…

Well, Billy, thanks for joining me on one of these rare audio podcasts, and it’s always nice to talk to you. And I hope we can do this more often.

Bill:  Me too. Thanks for inviting me and inviting me even more often. Well, you’ve done that more than once. I just haven’t come in, right?

Cyd:  Right, right. But I think now maybe we… If this recording works out well, then maybe we have a system finally where you and I can have these recordings and make more episodes. For example, we know we want to talk about the difference between science and…

Bill:  Religion.

Cyd:  The true difference. Or the difference between theories and knowledge, which is a… That’s another discussion. We have to have these discussions.

Bill:  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which by is relevant to this point about religion, physics, anyway.

Cyd:  Yeah, yeah. So if this all works out, we’ll talk again very soon and we’ll have another podcast to put out. How’s that?

Bill:  I would love that. Thank you.

Cyd:  Well, onward and upward, Billy.

Bill:  Onward and upward, Cyd. Love you.

Cyd:  Love you, too. Bye-bye. Hanging up now. Bye-bye. sweetie.

Bill:  Bye-bye.

I hope you have enjoyed this unusual episode. It’s an episode that probably requires more than one listening. And, if you really want to understand it, I recommend you follow the links to the aeon article by Paes and the links to my articles referred to here and there.

Onward and upward! God bless us all!

The purpose of this series of podcasts is to share with you the gnosis that I have gleaned from my readings of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts.

These podcasts are coming in order as the cosmology of our universe unfolds, and I think it’s a lot easier for you to understand the material if you follow along in order. The particular book out of the Nag Hammadi that I am using as my primary reference is called the Tripartite Tractate. In 2019, I wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, where I translated the Tripartite Tractate into modern English in a very, very simple way, and I also illustrated all of the concepts in order to facilitate understanding. It is my hope that as you listen to this information and then meditate upon it, you will come to understand the origins of our universe and our place in it, and also what are the major players at work for both good and for ill, and how does it affect our lives? More recently, I’ve written another book called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. It is full and complete and contains everything you need to know about the Christian Gnostic Gospel of the Nag Hammadi.

So far, we’ve talked about the Father, the Son, the All and the Fullness. We’ve talked about the Fall of Logos, and we have talked about the Deficiency that came from the Fall. Now we’re getting to the good news, which is the plan that was devised by Logos and the Fullness of God in order to redeem the Fall and all that came from the Fall.

So, after the Fall, Logos broke apart, and all of his small parts, which were themselves small copies of all of the originals of the Fullness, because Logos was an entity that contained all of the Aeons inside of it, however they were smaller versions of it. They were fractals of the original Aeons. When Logos reached and fell, he broke apart, and these smaller fractals that constituted his being left him, and they went out on their own.

We are fractal children of the consciousness of the Fullness of God

Logos was horrified by what had happened, and the Nag Hammadi says that the best of Logos returned back to the Fullness, leaving the Deficiency behind. As I explained in the previous podcast, the main reason that this is called the Deficiency is because the parts of Logos were no longer arranged in their hierarchical structure that encouraged cooperation. They all rolled out and became equal to one another, and they were driven by ego and self-centered ambition, because Logos had been reaching for the heights when it fell, and therefore the parts of Logos that separated out from him continued to reach for the heights.

The small fractalss that once formed the pleroma of Logos lost themselves during the Fall and rolled out into chaos.

However, because they are not in a cooperative structure of the Hierarchy, they’re all self-centered, they’re all each one reaching for the heights on their own. They have no cooperative arrangement. Logos regretted the Fall, and the phantoms, (these are called the phantoms, these little bits of him that rolled out—phantoms of the Deficiency), Logos regretted the Fall and the phantoms born of the Fall, and regret turned into condemnation of the irrational things he had produced.

Logos wanted their destruction because it was just a horrible thing that was happening. As I said in the last podcast, when Logos beat it back up to the Fullness, the Fullness and Logos did not remain idle, but they cooked up a scheme to bring redemption to the Deficiency. They brought forth what is called a fruit, which is an offspring, in the Fullness with a view to overthrowing what had come into being because of the Deficiency.

These new creatures that were devised are better than the Deficiency because they come from the union of the entire Fullness, whereas the Deficiency came out of a mistaken solo effort by Logos alone. Out of this union of the Fullness and Logos came what are called the Second Order Powers, and these powers are better and greater than those of the imitation because they did not come into being out of ego and out of lack of thought. This new fruit of the Fullness and Logos was fitted purposely into the boundary that surrounded the Fall, and so because they were fitted to live within this boundary, they were able to have a cooperative structure the way the Fullness had a cooperative structure.

But the Fullness’s cooperative structure looks like a hierarchy, and as I described in one of our first podcasts, the Hierarchy is a pyramidal-shaped structure. Now, the Deficiency is not a pyramidal-shaped structure, and in my illustrations, I have a circular boundary around the Deficiency, so the Second Order Powers are fitted to this circular boundary. So they are not in perfect hierarchical arrangement, as is the Fullness, but since they are within a bounded space, they are encouraged to work together. They are in relationship to each other. If it were an unbounded space, it would be infinite and they would all drift apart. They would not be within a cooperative structure or an ecology, as it’s called.

In other words, the newly produced offspring of the Fullness and Logos were patterned after the originals and the Fullness, so they are patterns of Aeons, which is what the entities that live in the Fullness are called, but they are formed to fit within the boundary rather than the Hierarchy. And the way I illustrate this in my book and in my blog is that circular boundary with living cells inside of it. It looks very much like a microscope slide.

And if you go to my Gnostic blog, or if you go to my Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book, you will see all of these illustrations that I’m describing to you. You will see them in their beautiful, glorious color, and maybe they’ll be helpful for you to picture these concepts. I know it’s helpful for me.

So now, quoting from the Tripartite Tractate, verse 83,

Logos sowed in them an inclination to seek and pray to what is glorious and preexistent. He also sowed in them an ability to think about it and a power of reflection to make them realize that something greater than themselves existed before them, but they had not understood what it was. Bringing forth harmony and mutual love by means of that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since to unity and unanimity they owed their existence.

More simply put, the Fullness is a cooperative ecology, even though it is made up of an infinite number of entities. They sit in a hierarchical structure where everyone knows their position, place, their power, their job, and they sit and they dream together in unison, because they are a perfect cooperative ecology. The Deficiency is not a cooperative ecology, having arisen from ego.

Now these new Powers, it was put into them to be able to think about the Fullness and the Father, and it was given to them the ability to think logically and to reason. And this is why in my Gnostic Insights podcast I describe things to you and I give you the reason behind it, because you and I are reasonable beings. We don’t only have to seek out exactly what is written. We can use logic and deduction and infer the truth of these things. It isn’t magic, it’s logic. The Aeons and the Fullness are called the First Order of Powers, the Aeons of the Hierarchy, and they gave birth to a Second Order of Powers—that’s the fruit—and it’s called the emissions of the remembrance.

And emissions refers to units of consciousness. They are embodying the originating consciousness, which is called the Father, and the Father begat a Son, which is the perfect and full sampling of the Father. And then the Son begat the Fullness of God, which is all of the Son’s characteristics broken out into those individual variables, or those individual characteristics.

So rather than being an amorphous, infinite being, there are now particularities, each one being a sampling of that great being. And that Fullness is the First Order of Powers, the Aeons of the Hierarchy. And now they have given birth to a Second Order of Powers that were formed to fit into the bounded space of the Deficiency.

In my illustrations I show this as the pyramid of golden orbs that I use to represent the Fullness, and then there’s a little thought bubble coming out of that pyramid, and within that thought bubble is that microscope slide of the bounded space containing cells. Logos and the Fullness produced a Second Order of Powers, patterned after the First Order of Powers that dwelt in the Hierarchy. The Second Order of Powers was named the emissions of the remembrance, because they had been created by the unified will of the Father through union with Logos and the Fullness, and therefore they contained the traits of the Father.

In verse 84, the Tripartite Tractate says,

The powers of remembrance were adorned with the names of the preexistent, whose likenesses they were. The order of those of this kind were in harmony with itself and with each other.

This new order of powers reflected the values of the Son, but it was formed within a boundary rather than a hierarchy, so they had more freedom to assemble themselves into non-hierarchical patterns.

These newly formed beings did not have more substance, nor did they have a greater glory, for they are not equal to the preexistent ones, and those preexistent ones are the Aeons of the Fullness, who came directly from the Son, who came directly from the Father, so they are preexistent consciousness.

It goes on to say,

If on the other hand they were superior to the imitations, the only thing that made them elevated above them was that they were from a good disposition, for they had not come out of the sickness that arose.

Whereas those of the Deficiency arose from the Fall, those of the remembrance—and what they are remembering? They’re remembering that they come from the Fullness and the Father—those of the remembrance arose from the consecrated union of Logos and the Fullness. Those of the Deficiency represent phantoms and confusion, whereas the new fruit, the Second Order Powers represent the virtues of the All. And now a strange and tragic thing occurred.

It turns out that when those of the remembrance came upon those of the imitation, they attempted to overthrow them out of an inherent sense of self-righteousness, because after all, the Second Order Powers are from a consecrated union of the Fullness, and the Deficiency is not. Those of the remembrance knew they were superior to those of imitation, because they were nobler than those previous ones. The Second Order Powers began to fight against the shadows of the imitation, and after all, that was their purpose.

They were put into the bounded space in order to overcome what had come from the Deficiency and the Fall. Because the imitation waged war against the likenesses in the Fullness, the offspring of the Fullness “acted against itself on account of its rage.” That’s what it says.

So the imitation is waging war against the Second Order fruit, and in response, the Second Order fruit begins to act against its own self because it’s so angry about it. But the ones who were in opposition would not surrender due to their own ignorance of what came before.

They believed they were self-engendered and had given birth to themselves, and so they believed they owed nothing to the previous powers, either above or below. [verse 84 of the Tripartite Tractate].

In my illustrations, I depict this never-ending war between us of the remembrance and the Deficiency as the yin-yang symbol, and I am depicting the Deficiency, those little blue balls fitted within that circle, as the downward-heading yin side, and the powers of the remembrance, which now look like living green cells, sitting right against them and going upward as the yang symbol.

Never-ending War

Now again from the Tripartite Tractate, verse 84,

The two orders fought against each other, struggling for command with such result that they were engulfed by the forces and material substances in accordance with what is called the Law of Mutual Combat. And they too acquired lust for domination and all of the other passions of this sort. And consequently, empty vainglory pulls them all toward the desire of lust for domination, and not one of them remembers what is superior or confesses it.

So what it is saying here in verse 84 is that even though the Second Order Powers came into this creation with a better disposition because they are patterned directly after the Aeons of the Fullness, when they’re standing there doing war with the Deficiency, they take on the characteristics of the Deficiency.

Violence begets violence. Forgetfulness begets forgetfulness. And forgetfulness is another word for lack of gnosis, because gnosis means knowledge, and the way you achieve gnosis is by remembering where you come from, and that is called an amnesis—amnesia being forgetfulness, and amnesis being remembering.

And so ignorance is the same as lack of gnosis. The Second Order Powers come into creation fully loaded with gnosis, but in the course of doing battle in this never-ending war with the Deficiency, gnosis is forgotten and needs to be remembered again. And that’s the purpose of our Gnostic Insights podcast, to remember the gnosis from above.

Verse 85 of the Tripartite Tractate says,

Because of this their envy, malice, rage, violence, lust, and ignorance ruled, as they were producing various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers.

In my previous podcasts, I have said that the objects that came from the Deficiency, because they are confused, lost, they are not hierarchical, they do not operate according to the Golden Rule wherein they help each other build better, bigger things for the improvement of all—the Deficiency is not able to do any of that. It’s all selfish, it’s all self-driven, it’s all about dominion and power. In other words, there is nothing about the Deficiency that was able to build up into creation, because they can’t create, they can’t work together cooperatively, they didn’t know the hierarchical structure of cooperation. The Second Order Powers do know the hierarchical structure of cooperation, and so they are able to work together and share information in order to level up to the next level and create.

The Simple Golden Rule

In my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything blog and the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything book, I discuss all of this in a non-religious way. It is a science and math-based theory, but it is completely compatible with the Gnostic Gospel. And in the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I identify the basic level of material instantiation as what is called by physicists—quantum foam. And it is this chaotic, roiling, lawless foam that can’t ever level up, it just sits there boiling.

In the Simple Explanation, I coined the term units of consciousness. Here in the Gnostic Gospel, we call them Second Order Powers. These units of consciousness, and the originating consciousness again is the Father, so everything in our creation that is a second-order power is a unit of consciousness, a fractal of the Father. These units of consciousness use the Simple Golden Rule to reach out to one another, hook up with others of their kind, share information and patterns in order to level up to the next level of creation. And everything levels up to the next level of creation. The quantum foam can’t do it because it’s the Deficiency, but now the Second Order Powers, they start coming in with hierarchical structure, and so they’re able to level up.

Here I’m going to drop in a slight change, and it’s this. According to my Simple Explanation Theory of Everything, everything was conscious, including the particles and the molecules. But over the last several years, in discussions with my brother Bill, we have amended that interpretation as it pertains to the Gnostic Gospel. The Gnostic Gospel isn’t quite as pan-psychic as the Simple Explanation Theory of Everything used to be. And according to this Gnostic Gospel, consciousness only proceeds from the Father. Consciousness is a top-down phenomenon.

The Fall wasn’t based upon consciousness, it was based upon ego. Egoic consciousness isn’t exactly the same as the Father’s consciousness, or the Aeonic consciousness. The consciousness of the Father brings love, and it brings life, as well as coherence and all of the virtues of the Father. It brings our DNA and all of the instructions for life, for everything that’s alive on the planet. Whereas the Fall was an outcropping of ego. It wasn’t from the Father’s consciousness, it was egoic consciousness that was self-centered.

Therefore, the quantum foam that came out of the broken bits of Logos were egoic. They were not consciousness from the Father. So, when I first recorded this episode, it was fresh out of the Simple Explanation coming into the Gnostic Gospel, and I went ahead and attributed consciousness to the subatomic particles, the particles, the molecules, and the mineral aggregates, in a bottom-up kind of structure, thinking that they were leveling themselves up once they had a boundary.

But, as I say, in deep conversation and contemplation with my brother Bill, we’ve come to understand that the mud cannot level up from the bottom. And by leveling up, that’s that Golden Rule type of cooperation, where you hold hands with your neighbors, you share information, love, and assistance, and all together you build the next thing up. So, the way the cells hold hands and build the organs, and then the organs hold hands and build the organism. It’s like that. That’s your Golden Rule type of leveling up. The higher the fewer.

How then did the quantum foam level up? Well, this is where we introduce the Demiurge a little bit earlier than we did in the original 2021 episodes. And the Demiurge is the architect of the material universe. The Demiurge is the ego of Logos that stayed behind in the Deficiency when the best part of Logos fled back to the Fullness. So, the best part of Logos—that’s the Aeonic consciousness and the Father’s life and love—went back up into the Fullness. That’s the part of Logos up there that, in cooperation with the Fullness, the Pleroma of the Aeons, creates the Second Order Powers—us—and  and sends us down here into creation to bring life and consciousness down below. Well, that implies there wasn’t life and consciousness until we come in.

It’s a very complex subject, and it really took us several years of contemplation to come up with this slight amendment to what this episode talks about. Which just goes to show you that Gnosis is an ongoing process. It’s not like I read the Tripartite Tractate, and Boom! I get it, and now I can write books. It’s not that at all. I get it. I have the basic structure. I have the illustrations, but the nuances continue to develop, and they still continue to this day to develop. My brother Bill and I have conversations on practically a weekly basis that lasts for a long, long time, where we talk about these things, the difference between ego and consciousness, and what that implies.

So anyway, as we will find out in an upcoming episode, there’s this character called the Demiurge, and he is the egoic structure of Logos, but without the remembrance of the Father. He is the ignorant god. He is the god with amnesia, and the god of this material portion of our universe—the hard, slow, muddy parts—that’s the Deficiency. And that is leveled up by the strict controls, by the Demiurge only. He doesn’t remember where he comes from. He thinks he’s God. He thinks everything begins with him. He is the jealous god that thinks that he creates everything, but he can only create the material, because up above, it’s ethereal. It’s not material. So down here, one of the key aspects of the Deficiency is that it is material. It seems to solid. We can’t see through walls down here. So it’s the Demiurge that takes the quantum foam, and using bonds and strings like a puppet master, builds that quantum foam up into the subatomic particles.

The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will.

And then he makes them join together to become particles, and he makes them join together to become atoms and molecules, and then the molecules join together and become the elements. And the Demiurge is able to organize the material of the Fall, but he can’t make it alive. He can’t give it love, because he doesn’t know love. He can’t give it consciousness, because he’s not a conduit of the consciousness of the Fullness. He does it all by himself, out of egoic power control. Then when the Second Order Powers come in; they’re the ones that bring the consciousness, the life, and the love, and the Golden Rule of cooperation, and everything that’s alive. So that’s the difference between living things and material things. Now, if this is all too confusing, that’s because I’m dropping it in here, and it’s a full episode on its own. But I needed to correct the transcript that I’m sharing with you today.

the demiurge keeps chaos at bay by forbidding free will in his subjects

At this point in our Gnostic cosmology, we are into creation now. That bounded space is the boundary around our universe. Within the confines of my skin, countless units of consciousness of varying levels of complexity work together to keep my body alive and fully functional. At each descending level of complexity, from my governing self unit of consciousness on down through my organ systems, my organs, my cells, my body’s units of consciousness deal with increasingly simpler tasks, even as the material associated with them becomes smaller and more numerous. Remember, the higher the fewer is a basic Gnostic principle. So if you think of your body not as the shape of your physical body walking around, but picture it as a hierarchy as well, picture it the way we picture the Fullness—a pyramid, where the bottom level of the pyramid is the particles that make up your body. And these particles reach out and hold hands and become atoms. There’s fewer atoms than there are subatomic particles. And the atoms reach out and hold hands and become molecules. There’s fewer molecules than there are atoms, etc. etc.

The cells of your body—do you know they say there are as many cells in your body as there are stars in the universe? That’s how complicated your body is. The cells of your body reach out and hold hands and become your various organs and your organ systems. And these all work together and eventually culminate with you sitting at the top. And you think your Self is all alone, but it isn’t. Your Self is sitting on top of this entire mountain, this hierarchical mountain of units of consciousness. That’s the basic Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything which you can read about in depth in my book or on that blog.

This that I’m telling you right now about the mountain of consciousness and units of consciousness, this is my theory, but it’s entirely compatible with what I’m telling you about the Gnostic cosmology that comes out of the Nag Hammadi. One interesting thought about the development of these philosophies is that the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything came about around 2010. I didn’t read the Nag Hammadi until, what was it? about 2016 or so. So I didn’t derive the Simple Explanation from Gnostic studies. But of course, as I was reading Gnostic studies, I had the Simple Explanation fully formed in my mind, and it turns out that they’re compatible. That’s why I’m sharing them both with you to help you build Gnosis.

It is my hope that every time I share one of my insights with you or one of my illustrations with you, it clears up confusion in your mind. It removes ignorance, which brings Gnosis. The Simple Explanation blog can be found at www.asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com. There are hundreds of articles about consciousness there on A Simple Explanation, but I don’t want you to go down a rabbit hole and get distracted or become confused. The only reason you should be reading these materials is in order to become less confused. Gnosis is lack of ignorance, lack of confusion. So if the Simple Explanation helps to bring you Gnosis, that’s good. Whereas my Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which you can buy at any online bookseller or go to my blogs and you’ll find it there in my own bookstore, it’s only 49 pages long, and half of those pages are illustrations. So it’s very simple, it’s very clear and direct without any confusing extras added. It’s the kernal of Gnostic thought.

              And, of course, since this episode was originally recorded, the entire, in-depth explanation has been written for you in the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. You can buy it at amazon in all formats—paperback, hardback, Kindle audio book, and ebook, all priced as low as possible to make it easier for you to purchase your copy. Here’s a brief description of the book:

Unlock the Hidden Wisdom of the Gospels With A Simple, Eye-Opening Journey Through Gnostic Christianity

What if the answers to life’s biggest questions were already within you—waiting to be remembered? In her book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, author and scholar Dr. Cyd Ropp invites readers on a revelatory journey through ancient Gnostic teachings that illuminate our cosmic origin, spiritual purpose, and divine inheritance. Drawing from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi library, Dr. Ropp decodes sacred texts in clear, accessible language—making profound wisdom from early Christianity available to today’s readers.

More than a scholarly work, this book is a spiritual awakening—organized in the order creation itself emerged. It explores:

The path of consciousness from the Father through the Son to all living beings

The divine purpose behind human life

The truth of redemption and our ultimate return to the Fullness of God

How ancient Valentinian Gnosticism reflects the original teachings of Christ

Whether you’re a seeker, spiritual scholar, or curious reader, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel offers a transformative lens through which to see your place in the universe and your relationship with the divine.

https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Explanation-Gnostic-Gospel/dp/B0DDQ293SP/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

If you find these podcasts helpful, please consider donating to help Cyd cover the cost. And remember to subscribe to Gnostic Insights so you don’t miss a single episode!

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I thought I would share with you a column from Substack by a friend of mine, Tessa Lena. Her Substack is called Tessa Fights Robots. She’s an immigrant from Russia and she lives in New York. She’s a really wonderful writer and her heart is in such a good place. She speaks about love most of the time in her columns.

This week’s column by Tessa is called “Letter to Future Dissidents, subtitled Don’t Become a Dissident Before Reading This,” and it was a good article that I thought I would share with you. I’m going to read the whole thing to you. I did get permission from Tessa Lena to do this. She says go for it. By the way, Tessa Lena was a guest here on Gnostic Insights, two interviews back to back. It was called Interview with Tessa Lena Part 1 and Part 2, and those were posted March 13th and March 19th of 2022. So if you go to theGnosticInsights.com website, you can find all of the past episodes posted. Just search for Tessa Lena or March 13th, 2022, and you ought to be able to find those interviews.

I like to run every episode past my brother for discussion before releasing it to you. My dear brother Bill was somewhat shocked that I chose this essay to read to you this week. He’s concerned that the essay is not uplifting and may bum you out rather than inspire you. So let me address that concern here at the top.

Tessa’s article is about the interpersonal challenges of being a dissident, whether we are talking about spiritual disagreements, such as we Gnostics may encounter with other spiritual seekers, or political and cultural disagreements we run into with others. What Bill asked me to say here at the beginning is that the negative spiritual encounters we may have with other people is really the Demiurge and its archons messing with us Second Order Powers. We need to remember that we are not enemies with any person, but rather we are fellow Second Order Powers defending ourselves against the Demiurge.

Bill also shared an article called “The Science of Spiritual Narcissism” by Scott Barry Kaufman that was posted this week on the GetPocket app. I’ve put the link into the transcript here. That article is relevant to today’s podcast, so let me start by reading you a couple of paragraphs from that Pocket article to prepare you for Tessa’s essay. Kaufman says,

Self-enhancement through spiritual practices can fool us into thinking we are evolving and growing, when in fact all we are growing is our ego.

And by the way, we’ll drop in that we’re not really growing our ego, but we’re growing our memes. Our memes are stuck onto our egos. Our egos come along with us. They are our personality. They are our self-identity. They’re part of our aeonic inheritance. So we’re not really growing our egos with wrong beliefs. We’re simply growing the beliefs—the memes—that are stuck onto us and overshadowing our God-given egos and pure selves.

So back to Kaufman’s article.

Some psychologists have pointed out that the self-enhancement that occurs through spiritual practices can lead to the “I’m enlightened and you’re not” syndrome and spiritual bypass by which people seek to use their spiritual beliefs, practices, and experiences to avoid genuine contact with their psychological unfinished business. In Kaufman’s recent book, Transcend, he calls it pseudo-transcendence—transcendence built on a very shaky foundation.

Kaufman goes on to say,

One serious obstacle to healthy transcendence is how spiritual practices are sold to the masses. Yoga and mindfulness are big business in America. The purported benefits of mindfulness meditation have generated a billion dollar industry. Yoga is the most popular mind-body practice in Western societies. Many of these programs offer a long list of promises, including the reduction of stress and anxiety, along with greater confidence, creativity, focus, achievement, success, eating habits, sleep, and even happiness. But here’s the thing, healthy transcendence doesn’t stem from an attempt at distracting oneself from displeasure with reality. Healthy transcendence involves confronting reality as it truly is, head-on, with equanimity and loving kindness.

So going forward in this podcast, remember the key words, equanimity and loving kindness.

So without further ado, here is Tessa Lena’s letter to future dissidents.

So how are you doing today? Have a couple of minutes to talk about dissident life? Have you been trying to just go about your business? But strangely, life has been taking you places where you saw cracks in the matrix that others refused to see? The facade is cracked. You’ve seen it with your own eyes, and things don’t feel quite right.

You feel different than others. You must definitely smell a rat, and you cannot cover your nose hard enough to make the smell of rat disappear. But how come you are so alone in this? How come other people are just fussing around like busy bees? Isn’t there a giant rat sitting and smelling right here in broad daylight and in plain sight? Isn’t there an elephant in the room too for all eyes to see? You feel very strange.

It’s not great to feel different from other people like this, and you honestly just want to fit in with your friends and not stick out like a sore thumb all the time. And you try to blend in. Oh, you try.

You work hard to be normal. You try telling yourself that you are probably crazy. You deny the evidence of your lying eyes.

It turns out that a life of compliance is not enough for you, though. Other people seem to be getting away with living shallow in a man-made matrix world, but not you. Your denial of the evidence of your lying eyes doesn’t go over well for you.

Something happens. Things get crazy. The carefully stitched together comfy blanket over your lying eyes gets destroyed, and you find yourself totally naked, still alone, despite your attempts to bond with others by betraying yourself, humble tears pouring out of your human eyes.

It’s just you. No one else. Just you between the earth and the sky. No one else. Just you and your heart and your unfitting thoughts. And the world? The world doesn’t really care about the fact that you’ve just seen the face of the machine. It’s spinning in a shallow and glittery make-believe way like before, pretending there is no machine. Things keep happening, and at some point you can no longer hold your tongue back, and you open your heart and your mouth. You act brave. You act bold. You start singing your truth in a louder voice. But nope, no change as far as being alone. You are still alone.

Okay, Cyd here, popping in to say that we are not alone. Remember, we are embodying all of the Second Order of Powers of the Fullness of God. And if you have invited the Christ in, you are embodying the Third Order of Powers of the Christ as well. So we are not alone in this struggle, even though it may appear to be so. Okay, back to Tessa’s article.

You discover that people often want their opinions coming out of your mouth, not yours. If your message fits into pre-existing talking points, into pre-existing emotional interfaces often formed by centuries of psyops, you may get somewhere. If you share original insights that explain the world, then nope, no fireworks and no orchestra that you’ve read about in a book about the hero journey. You are still alone.

Then, unexpectedly, your time comes. All of a sudden, the world is bleeding in a new way and wants to hear what you have to say. You are almost surprised because for such a long time, nobody cared at all about the things that now the world suddenly wants to hear. As surprised as you are, you spread your wings and start singing your song, the song that you’ve spent your entire life composing, the song that is sacred to you, and you are oh so happy that other people find it useful to them too. You rejoice. You relax a little. You pour your heart into your noble fight. You do your absolute best. You make new friends. You think that this is your new life.

And then you learn, in a hard way perhaps, that your movement, your dissident tribe, is not real. You learn that the purity of your heart is actually rare, and it’s true even for the self-proclaimed freedom warrior folk. You learn to walk with a few real friends who are strong enough to withstand enemy mind tricks, but the movement, the movement, you watch it collapse. Or rather, you watch it being hijacked by the predators in freedom warrior suits right before your eyes.

You try to salvage the unity of good people, but barely anyone wants to hear because the proverbial negative witches are waving their proverbial magic wands, and people go crazy. Not to mention the fact that even without them, many are simply busy building their freedom brand. That is the moment when your rosy glasses get smashed, and your delusions go the way of the dinosaurs. It sure shocks you. It shocks you to see how good people lament about the normies going for dirty tricks, and then go for similar dirty tricks designed for them.

Okay, Cyd here popping in again. This is discussed in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel in the chapter called The Never-Ending War. Listen to what the Tripartite Tractate has to say on this.

If both orders, those on the right and those on the left, are brought together with one another by the thought which is set between them which gives them their organization with each other, it happens that they both act with the same emulation of their deeds, with those of the right resembling those of the left, and those of the left resembling those of the right. And if at times the evil order begins to do evil in a foolish way, the wise order emulates in the form of a man of violence also doing what is evil, as if it were a power of a man of violence. At other times the foolish order attempts to do good, making itself like it, since the hidden order too is zealous to do it.   [verse 108 of the Tripartite Tractate]

Never-ending War

Now back to Tessa Lena’s article.

You also see how folks who know a lot less than you self-promote quite aggressively, and sometimes in dirty ways, and become industry experts on the subjects you’ve been looking into forever, and they, well, they haven’t.

Oh well, you say. You are here to help the world after all. It’s about the world, not about you, and so you tell yourself, it’s okay, carry on.

Meanwhile, the massive snake pit keeps giving. In disbelief, you learn that some of your dissident colleagues go to great lengths trying to push you aside. You learn that the competition for the best freedom brand is real, and so is the quest to dominate the direction of the freedom buck. You also find that some of the people whom you have held in extremely high regard choose to invest in their envious side. You find how by day those envious souls tout themselves as lovable, brave, pet-friendly, freedom warriors of light, while by night they try efforts to make you invisible and alone. They envy you. Oh, how they envy you. And even though you never tried to cause them harm, they still hate your light.

You feel appalled. You didn’t expect this kind of behavior coming from folks whose brands are about healing trauma and resisting mind control. Snake pit or not, though, you carry on.

Then there are agents. You discover that the agents are a piece of art. Shameless, hurting, wounded, cruel, lying, really strange people. Over time, you realize that they are so deprived of love that they take to desperate measures trying to yank a presentation of love, aka gullibility and submission, out of anyone who allows them to do that. Very strange people, those agents. Very wounded souls.

Okay, I have to pop in here once again, Cyd speaking now.

Those very wounded agents that Tessa refers to, I would think of as people who are not merely confused or deluded by the archons, but have actually, well, what in the old days people would say, sell their soul to the devil. They are people who are actively conspiring with the Demiurge and the archons. They are not archons, they are Second Order Powers, but they have given themselves over consciously to the Demiurge. And so they are working for the Demiurge and not for the God Above All Gods. They are, as Tessa Lena is pointing out, bereft of love. That is why they appear so strange and archonic. But even they, at the very end of time, will see the light. And when the Demiurge is redeemed, these people will be redeemed along with the Demiurge. Okay, back to Tessa’s article.

When you figure out who is really trying to do what and how different it is from what people in your circles talk about, aka controlled opposition talk, you may find yourself disappointed again when you learn that enchantment and mind control in the dissident circles work exactly the way they work in the mainstream. Every weakness, every pain point, every wound gets exploited and milked, and the stakes are high.

You discover that the predators try to flatter you and to harm you and to scare you and isolate you from your friends. You discover how they do tricks designed to transform your beautiful, well-intended allies into bleeding, wounded traitors of you who would rather side with the tricksters based on mind control than believe you. When you follow your natural human instinct of love and make a step forward to protect your friends, you occasionally find that some of the folks whom you have treated well, whom you have gone out of your way to protect and promote, who are brilliant and sincere, they may forget about the good things you have done for them and still betray you, turn on you, and side with the predators in sheep’s (make that) freedom warrior’s clothes.

As your friends betray you, they feel very superior, like they won a game of 5D chess and have figured out mind control. As you look at it with sadness, you feel disappointed. You feel disappointed and hurt. You pull your hair in frustration over how such smart and sincere human beings chose to betray you and themselves. You feel very disappointed. You ask the spirit why you lost them, why this is happening to you. You just want to explode because you see what is going on, and you care, and you want to help, and your allies act lost. But then you stop crying, say a prayer, and tell yourself that they will wake up when it’s due. In the meanwhile, you have to keep going because you are here with a job to do.

Then you see how predators in freedom warrior clothes volunteer their lying selves to save the movement, and at that point you start laughing, first bitterly, then wholeheartedly, because there is grand comedy in all this. What a circus! Traitor witches with magical wands, wounded agents pretending to be fearless freedom fighters, intrigue, confrontations over the freedom buck, and you and your ethical standards, and your friends who are also honest and pure, and your truth. As you are dealing with all this, you keep asking the spirit, why is all this showing up in your life? Why? You say, oh my god, this is just incredible. How can they? But they can, and they are. And you are here, and you need to live, and in order to live, you need to fight better. And in order to fight better, you need to understand the nature of reality better.

And at some point, you see that the predators are an excuse for you to get in touch with yourself. They’re not important. You realize that all this is the spirit teaching you about your being, leaving breadcrumbs for you to pay attention to. And your task is to understand the nature of reality and to learn how to live well. They are experiencing their journey. They will pay their price. It is their choice. You are living your life, your way. You are practicing your faith and your ethics, and frankly, you feel sorry for them.

As you pray, you are reminded again that all good things come on God’s will, and they come on God’s time. At the end of the day, you are doing this because this is what you were born to do. You are here and now, but you are also eternal, and the world is worth saving, and your fellow travelers are worth loving, and you are not weird for practicing your good ethics.

It’s the good way. You are good. You are love.

They can’t kill love. It’s impossible to kill love. Love always wins.

Love always wins. Love always wins. You know this.

If you didn’t know this, you wouldn’t have chosen to fight the good fight. Keep fighting the good fight. It’s your fight.

It’s your way.

I’m all choked up. I think it’s so touching. Of course, it means a lot to me because I fight the good fight, and I know that my faithful listeners and readers also have been fighting the same good fight as Tessa and myself.

Please go to Tessa Fights Robots on Substack. It’s tessa.substack.com. I’ll put a link in this episode transcript also. Subscribe to Tessa. All of her articles for years now have been along these lines, and she’s a beautiful woman. She’s a singer. She’s a performance artist in New York, and she’s a beautiful writer as well.

God bless Tessa. God bless all of us. Remember, love always wins. Keep fighting the good fight, and onward and upward.

https://tessamakeslove.bandcamp.com/album/tessa-fights-robotsTessa Lena, from her album Tessa Makes Love

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today is part three of my book report on David Bentley Hart’s book called That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. The past two weeks we covered the beginning of his book, the Introduction.

I’m going to begin this section by reading out of his final remarks, because he does a good job of simplifying his arguments here at the end of the book. So we’ll start with that. Hart says on page 201,

It may offend against our egalitarian principles today, but it was commonly assumed among the very educated of the early church that the better part of humanity was something of a hapless rabble who could be made to behave responsibly only by the most terrifying coercions of their imaginations.

Belief in universal salvation may have been far more widespread in the first four or five centuries of Christian history than it was in all the centuries that followed, but it was never, as a rule, encouraged in any general way by those in authority in the church. Maybe there are great many among us who can be convinced to be good only through the threat of endless torture at the hands of an indefatigably vindictive god. Even so much as hint that the purifying flames of the age to come will at last be extinguished, and perhaps a good number of us will begin to think like the mafioso who refuses to turn state’s evidence because he is sure he can do the time.

Bravado is, after all, the chief virtue of the incorrigibly stupid. He goes on to say, I have never had much respect for the notion of the blind leap of faith, even when that leap is made in the direction of something beautiful and ennobling. I certainly cannot respect it when it is made in the direction of something intrinsically loathsome and degrading. And I believe that this is precisely what the Infernalist position, no matter what form it takes, necessarily involves.

And to remind you, if you didn’t hear the past two episodes, Infernalist refers to the notion that there is an unending hell of pain and torture for the unregenerate or the unrepentant. Further down page 202, Hart says,

I honestly, perhaps guilelessly, believe that the doctrine of eternal hell is prima facie nonsensical for the simple reason that it cannot even be stated in Christian theological terms without a descent into equivocity, which is equivocation, so precipitous and total that nothing but edifying gibberish remains.

To say that, on the one hand, God is infinitely good, perfectly just, and inexhaustibly loving, and that, on the other, he has created a world under such terms as oblige him either to impose or to permit the imposition of eternal misery on finite rational beings is simply to embrace a complete contradiction. All becomes mystery, but only in the sense that it requires a very mysterious ability to believe impossible things.

[Jumping down the page, he says,] Can we imagine logically, I mean not merely intuitively, that someone still in torment after a trillion ages, or then a trillion trillion, or then a trillion vigintillion, is in any meaningful sense the same agent who contracted some measurable quantity of personal guilt in that tiny, ever more vanishingly insubstantial gleam of an instant that constituted his or her terrestrial life? And can we do this even while realizing that, at that point, his or her sufferings have, in a sense, only just begun, and, in fact, will always have only just begun? What extraordinary violence we must do both to our reason and to our moral intelligence, not to mention simple good taste, to make this horrid notion seem palatable to ourselves.

And all because we have somehow, foolishly, allowed ourselves to be convinced that this is what we must believe. Really, could we truly believe it all apart from either profound personal fear or profound personal cruelty? Which is why, again, I do not believe that most Christians truly believe what they believe they believe.

So, what he’s saying here, what I’ve been talking to you about, is the idea that God, the God Above All Gods, what we call the Father in Gnosticism, would condemn people to everlasting torment, everlasting torment, with no other goal than to punish, because they’re never going to get out of it. That’s what everlasting means. And so it’s just punishment for the sake of punishment, and that that great, unlimitable God would impose this punishment on little, limited, finite beings who only lived a brief millisecond of time in the great span of time of God. That God would create these people for the purpose, basically, of condemning them to everlasting torment.

You see, that is not even rational. It doesn’t make any sense. Not if you believe God is good. It’s impossible. Now, if you think that God is evil, well, then that’s not God, is it? By definition, if you believe that God is cruel and vindictive and unreasonable, well, that’s not the God Above All Gods. And this should come as relief to those of you who think you can’t believe in God, because God is so cruel and vindictive.

Perhaps you were raised in an extremely cruel household with extremely vindictive parents, or schoolteachers, or somebody got to you and, in the name of God, inflicted cruelty upon you. Then you have come to accidentally transpose their human cruelty onto God, because they told you to. But that’s not God, by definition, you see? And when I say, by definition, that means, like, cold is not hot, by definition. Cold is cold. And if you’re going to start arguing, oh no, cold is hot, well, then you’re not talking about cold, you’re talking about hot. Do you see what I mean? And if you have been rejecting God, the God Above All Gods, because you have this view of God as merciless and vindictive, cruel, illogical, unfair, unjust, take comfort, because that’s not God you’re talking about.

Now, it may be the small g god of this world. It could be the guy whose best friend is Satan, because remember, that is a small g god of confusion. And its main job is to cause you to forget that you come from transcendent goodness, that you come from above, from the God Above All Gods, and that you do have freedom. You do have free will. You are meant to inherit joy. You are to do good works, and to be happy, and to be in love, and to love everybody else.

Don’t let some evil archon, or evil Demiurge, or evil human, redefine God in such a way that you reject God, because that’s the mistake. That’s a categorical error. And that’s why I say, take comfort, have joy, receive the love that was meant for you.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sG13!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0b7eea5a-ee7d-4e30-88dc-f3c3d5362e17_539x537.jpeg

Throwing out the baby with the bath water means to reject the Good because you can’t sort it out from the bad. Refusing to accept God or Christ because you reject the flawed Christian Church is an example of throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Okay, back to the book. On page 205, Hart says,

It was not always thus. Let me at least shamelessly idealize the distant past for a moment. In its dawn, the gospel was a proclamation principally of a divine victory that had been won over death and sin, and over the spiritual powers of rebellion against the big G God that dwells on high, and here below, and under the earth. It announced itself truly as the good tidings of a campaign of divine rescue on the part of a loving God, who by the sending of his Son into the world, and even into the kingdom of death, had liberated his creatures from slavery to a false and merciless master, and had opened a way into the kingdom of heaven, in which all of creation would be glorified by the direct presence of big G God, [or the Father, as we call him in Gnosticism].

And by the way, this paragraph that I just read about early Christianity, is entirely consistent with this Valentinian Christianity that I share with you here. That is the entire purpose of we second-order creatures being sent down here below, to bring the good tidings of life and love and liberty to the fallen Demiurge, and now subsequently to all of the people who have been hoodwinked by the Demiurge and Satan into believing in the false god that does not incorporate love. Hart goes on to say,

It was above all a joyous proclamation and a call to a lost people to find their true home at last, in their father’s house. It did not initially make its appeal to human hearts by forcing them to revert to some childish or bestial cruelty latent in their natures. Rather, it sought to awaken them to a new form of life, one whose premise was charity. Nor was it a religion offering only a psychological salve for individual anxieties regarding personal salvation. It was a summons to a new and corporate way of life, salvation by entry into a community of love. Nothing as yet was fixed except the certainty that Jesus was now Lord over all things and would ultimately yield all things up to the Father, so that God might be all in all.

Now we’re going to go back into the earlier part of the book to explain some of these concepts in more depth. Hart has broken his book into four meditations, or four subjects we could call it.

The first meditation is, who is God? The second meditation is, what is judgment? The third meditation is, what is a person? And the fourth meditation is, what is freedom? A reflection on the rational will. So in the first meditation, who is God? Hart explains to us that,

The moral destiny of creation and the moral nature of God are absolutely inseparable. As the transcendent good beyond all things, God is also the transcendental end that makes every single action of any rational nature possible. Moreover, the end toward which He acts must be His own goodness, for He is Himself the beginning and end of all things. This is not to deny that, in addition to the primary causality of God’s act of creation, there are innumerable forms of secondary causality operative within the creative order. But none of these can exceed or escape the one end toward which the first cause directs all things.

And so what he is saying here is that the first causality is the expression of God’s goodness, the purity of God reaching out through the Son and into the Fullness of God—emanating. That is the principal causality. That is the prime mover of all things, what we call the base state of consciousness, the matrix.

But then there is a secondary causality that takes place subsequent to that. And I guess the first act of secondary causality was probably the fall, in that it was the first act of will prompted by ego that apparently deviated from God’s original plan, although the Tripartite Tractate does say we shouldn’t blame Logos because the fall was the cause of the cosmos which was destined to come about.

But whereas the Father is the prime mover and remains shielded in purity and fullness and goodness—you see, all the love emanates from the Father, evil doesn’t swim back upstream. It’s all emanating from the Father, and it’s all good.

But we do have secondary causality down here in the created cosmos, primarily due to the actions of the Demiurge and the never-ending war that runs amuck down here. Hart says, page 70,

First, as God’s act of creation is free, constrained by neither necessity nor ignorance, all contingent ends are intentionally enfolded within his decision. And second, precisely because God in himself is absolute, absolved, that is, of every pathos of the contingent, every affect of the sort that a finite substance has the power to visit upon another, his moral venture in creating is infinite.

One way or another, after all, all causes are logically reducible to their first cause. This is no more than a logical truism. In either case, all consequence are, either as actualities or merely possibilities, contingent upon the primordial antecedent, apart from which they could not exist.

In other words, all the things that happen down here in the cosmos couldn’t have happened without God giving it the first start, without the Father giving it the initial emanation. He goes on to say,

And naturally, the rationale of a first cause, its definition, in the most etymologically exact meaning of that term, is the final cause that prompts it, the end toward which it acts. If, then, that first cause is an infinitely free act emerging from infinite wisdom, all those consequence are intentionally entailed, again, either as actualities or as possibilities within that first act.

And so the final end to that act tends is its whole moral truth. The traditional definition of evil as a privation of the good, lacking any essence of its own, in other words, what we would call in Gnosticism, evil is the shadow of the good. Evil is the shadow of Logos. It’s not a thing in itself. It’s the absence of the love and the light of the Father. It is also an assertion that when we say God is good, we are speaking of Him not only relative to his creation, but as he is in himself.

All comes from God, and so evil cannot be a thing that comes from anywhere. Evil is, in every case, merely the defect whereby a substantial good is lost, belied, or resisted. For in every sense, being is act, and God, in his simplicity and infinite freedom, is what he does. He could not be the creator of anything substantially evil without evil also being part of the definition of who he essentially is, for he alone is the wellspring of all that exists.

Jumping down the page on 71, Hart says, “God goes forth in all beings, and in all beings returns to himself.” That’s how I describe as we all carry the Fullness of God within our being, and within every cell of our being. And since we are carrying the Fullness of God within us, we will have to return to the Fullness of God ultimately. We can’t be lost in everlasting torment, because we are the Fullness of God, and God cannot torment itself. Hart says,

God has no need of the world. He creates it not because he is dependent upon it, but because its dependency on him is a fitting expression of the bounty of his goodness.

Doesn’t that remind you of, in the beginning, the Father was alone, and he admired his goodness and beauty and love. He was full of love and beauty, and gave birth, so to speak—He emanated the Son. And the Son and the Father gave glory to one another. And in that giving of glory to one another, then the Son emanated the Fullness. And then in giving glory to one another in the Fullness and to the Son, the Fullness emanates us, the second order of powers.

And it’s all because you can’t love without having an object to love, even if it’s only in your own mind. Love requires an object of devotion, and giving glory is the reciprocal of love. We give glory because we were first loved. It’s a fitting expression of the bounty of goodness, as Hart puts it. Then he goes on to say,

This, however, also means that within the story of creation, viewed from its final cause, there can be no residue of the pardonably tragic, no irrecuperable or irreconcilable remainder left behind at the end of the tale. For if there were, this irreconcilable excess would also be something God has directly caused.

Now, in our Gnostic gospel, there is a remnant “left behind at the end of the tale.” And that is the shadowy archons that were never a part of the original creation because they did not come from the “first cause” discussed earlier. The shadows of the Demiurge did not come from the Fullness or the fallen Aeon, but are only the absence of the qualities of that Aeon, this is why they are referred to as shadows. They are figments that do not have a reality outside of the Deficiency. Therefore, they have no home to return to in the Fullness of God. They are not from the Fullness.

And he talks a bit about Hegel’s system and dismisses it, and I’m not going to go into it. Hart says,

The story Christians tell is of creation as God’s sovereign act of love, neither adding to nor qualifying His eternal nature. And so it is also a story that leaves no room for an ultimate distinction between the universal truth of reason and the moral meaning of the particular, or for any distinction between the moral meaning of the particular and the moral nature of God.

Only by insisting upon the universality of God’s mercy could Paul, in Romans 11.32, liberate himself from the fear that the particularity of that mercy would prove to be an ultimate injustice, and that in judging His creatures, God would reveal Himself not as the good God of faithfulness and love, but as an inconstant God who can shatter His own covenants at will.

Hart reminds us that down through the centuries,

Christians have again and again subscribed to formulations of their faith that clearly reduce a host of cardinal Christian theological usages, most especially moral predicates like good, merciful, just, benevolent, loving, to utter equivocity, and that by association, reduce their entire grammar of Christian belief to meaninglessness.

[On the next page, 75, he says], consider, to begin with the mildest of moral difficulties, how many Christians down the centuries have had to reconcile their consciences to the repellent notion that all humans are at conception already guilty of a transgression that condemns them justly to eternal separation from God and eternal suffering, and that in this doctrine’s extreme form, every newborn infant belongs to a massa damnata, hateful in God’s eyes from the first moment of existence.

Hart loves to throw in Latin. Massa damnata obviously means that the masses would be damned.

The very notion of an inherited guilt is a logical absurdity, rather on the order of a square circle. All that the doctrine can truly be taken to assert, speaking logically, is that God willfully imputes to innocent creatures a guilt they can never have really contracted out of what, from any sane perspective, can only be called malice. But this is just the beginning of the problem. For one broad, venerable stream of tradition, God, on the basis of this imputation, consigns the vast majority of the race to perpetual torment, including infants who die unbaptized.

And may I point out that in Gnostic Christianity there is no inherited guilt at all because the Fall was not caused by the first humans, Adam and Eve, but occurred at the Aeonic level. Christianity carries a remnant of that understanding forward when it refers to “fallen angels,” but it does not connect the dots to realize their culpability in original sin.

And then the theology of grace grows grimmer, for according to the great Augustinian tradition, since we are somehow born meriting not only death but eternal torment, we are enjoined to see and praise a laudable generosity in God’s narrow choice to elect a small remnant for salvation, before and apart from any consideration of their concrete merits or demerits, and this further choice either to predestine or infallibly to surrender the vast remainder to everlasting misery. So it is that, for many Christians down the years, the rationale of evangelization has been a desperate race to save as many souls as possible from God.

The time has really gotten away from us, and we’ve only touched the first meditation, so I hope you are enjoying this theology. It’s theology, and I know that’s difficult slog, but I’m sharing with you these thoughts because they comprise basically the sum total of Christian theology for the past 2,000 years, and it has gone through changes here and there. David Bentley Hart is a scholar of Eastern Orthodoxy and a scholar of religion and philosopher and so forth, and I think that he has very clear sight.

So we’ll pick this up one more time next week, and I promise we’ll wrap it up. Onward and upward! God bless us all!

https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Explanation-Gnostic-Gospel/dp/B0DDQ293SP/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1F76MXAVXPGYP&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.4-smeyu-EiFIw11K3nsxVb3X6brHbKz41iEgLy8gBhoqzlCq28Yhtozz68ZPjMnO0DKf1QSkshLbGFHMsCxeqw81_iyiTST5Pu_fJC8tzO9aszwTieLJSy8hxFllJ32ycn3GAgjatNxexqTE9MS-lw58FgGhzMDXt3gNihTwyHvKN2djQdXwEJ__CBnWgB-X.czXGL1vpR8T7qEhPghz2zmRXpWzS7c2o_Gb16K6Bkc8&dib_tag=se&keywords=a+simple+explanation+of+the+gnostic+gospel&qid=1769611168&sprefix=%2Caps%2C316&sr=8-1

This book gathers the essential insights of gnosis into a clear, approachable form. Gnosis can be as simple or as intricate as you choose to make it, but its heart is always accessible. A Simple Explanation guides you through the often tangled vocabulary and shifting landscapes of Gnostic thought, offering a path that is both illuminating and easy to follow.

The glossary alone is a treasure—an indispensable reference for anyone exploring ancient Christian mysticism, the Nag Hammadi texts, or the deeper layers of spiritual philosophy.

Now available in paperback, hardback, Kindle, and audiobook editions through amazon and your local booksellers.

Gnostic interpretations of familiar Bible verses

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’m so glad to have you here with me. I thought this week we’d go ahead and do some more of those Gnostic interpretations of Christian memes so that you can see the differences and similarities between our Gnostic message and the traditional Christian way of interpreting these same Bible verses. I simply went out on the internet and looked for popular Bible verses, and these were the first ones that came up on this particular search. So here we go.

From 1 Corinthians 3:16. “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?”

Even conventional Christians realize that we are God’s temple, but they generally think of the temple that we are as somewhat separate from God Himself and God’s actual temple. However, when we Gnostic Christians speak of inhabiting God’s temple, we take it in a much more literal sense—that when we invite the Third Order of Powers to come in and take over our souls, we’re moving our own Second Order Powers off the throne of our souls and inviting the Christ to occupy the throne of our souls. This brings God into our temple.

It makes our body a literal temple of God, a temple of the Christ, because there is Christ dwelling within our midst, God dwelling within the temple. You see, our body is as much a temple to the Third Order of Powers as the temple in Jerusalem was to Jehovah. Now that’s another discussion—the relationship between the Hebrew God Jehovah and the God Above All Gods. But what we’re talking about here is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the temple of our bodies. Our body is a replication of the Fullness of God, and we are Second Order representations of that Fullness of God whereas the Third Order of Powers are the actual living images of the Fullness of God, and there’s a Third Order Power for every one of our Second Order Powers inside of our body, inside of this meat mountain that we live in. So, of course, God’s Spirit dwells in our midst once we invite God’s Spirit to do so. God’s Spirit cannot dwell in the midst of our temple until we invite it in, until we get off the throne and invite it to take its place.

The next meme is from 1 John 4:8, and it says, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

We talk a lot about love and the importance of love, and I think a lot of people come to Gnostic Insights here because I’m talking about love.

God is love. That is the most basic definition of God. Yes, in our modern parlance, we like to say that God is consciousness, and indeed God is consciousness. However, God is perceived by us as love, as the quality of love. Love is not an imaginary thing. Love isn’t something people make up or when you feel attracted to another person that you love them. That isn’t what love is. Love is an actual standalone quality that is one of the virtues of God. It’s the primary virtue of the God Above All Gods.

And by the way, speaking of the difference between the God Above All Gods and the Hebrew God Jehovah, that Old Testament God did not demonstrate love. That Old Testament God, whom we Gnostics call the Demiurge, yes, he was the creator of this physical material cosmos that we live in, but the God Above All Gods is the creator of heaven and all consciousness and all emanations of consciousness.

All spirits and powers above come from the God Above All Gods through the Son and then on through the Fullness of the Son, which is called the Fullness of God. We come from the Fullness of God. We are emanations. We are children of the Fullness of God, fruited down here into the material cosmos with all of the qualities of the Fullness of God. The Fullness of God is the First Order of Powers. We are the Second Order of Powers representing the Fullness of God here on Earth, including the character of love. But we tend to forget all of that once we get down here and become embroiled in this material existence, fighting a losing battle with death and destruction here. Sin comes from down here. Sadness, death, corruption, delusion, all of those negative characteristics, all of the things that are not love, arise from the Demiurge. They don’t come from heaven. They don’t come from the God Above All Gods. So when we say that God is love, we’re talking about the God Above All Gods as represented by the Christ here on Earth, as represented by our first human emissary that embodied the Third Order of Powers, and that was Jesus.

Moving on to the next meme. This one is from 2 Chronicles 16:7. “But as for you, be strong and do not give up, for your work will be rewarded.”

This meme brings up the subject of works. Chronicles is an Old Testament book. So when it speaks of God, it’s speaking of Jehovah, which we are believing is the Demiurge, or the ego of the fallen Aeon, named Logos. And this one talks about works. And by the way, works is very big in Demiurgic law. The Demiurge is all about laws, punishments, and rewards. It’s a carrot and stick kind of God.

Whereas the God Above All Gods is consciousness and love, having nothing to do with rewards for works. You can’t earn your way to heaven. When we do good, it’s not to pile up brownie points. It’s not to minimize negative karma. It is not a process to reach a goal. The reason we do good work is because we love God, and because God’s love is in us. And when you are full of love, you want to do good work. You want to be loving. You want to be helpful. You want to participate in the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to others, holding hands with them, giving them assistance, giving them instruction and knowledge, and giving them love in order for you to work together to build something bigger than anyone can do on their own. That’s what good work is. It’s putting into practice the Simple Golden Rule.

Some people do good works in order to earn a place in heaven or to earn a better position in heaven. I would like to be standing next to your throne in heaven, oh Lord, what need I do? That was a mistaken question that one of the disciples actually asked Jesus. And Jesus said, Boy, you just don’t get it, do you? And that’s what we’re talking about right now.

So our work will be rewarded. We will be recognized. We are building up good karma. But that isn’t the point of it. And it’s not to earn our way, because you cannot earn your way to heaven. And do you know why?

Think of heaven as a pure white space. Usually in my illustrations, I depict the God Above All Gods as pure inky blackness, because nothing is there. But I’d like you to, in this illustration, picture it as pure, blinding white light, the light of consciousness, the light of love, pure, unsullied. There aren’t little bits of sin here and there. There’s no dirt. There’s no death. There’s no destruction. There’s no delusion. It’s all pure, all good, as good as something can be imagined. That’s the nature of the God Above All Gods.

The reason we can’t earn our way into that heavenly realm is because it’s pure. And we can’t bring our dirt up with us. We need to be cleansed. We need to be pure. But whatever we do to earn good karma is never enough to offset the bad that we do, unthinkingly, or because we don’t seem to have a choice. Example: I have ants coming in the kitchen. I don’t want to kill those ants. They’re Second Order Powers. I really don’t want to kill those ants. It grieves me to have to do so. Another example: I eat food. I don’t want to kill the food that I eat. Those are all Second Order Powers. And not only the animals are Second Order Powers, but the vegetables and fruit are also Second Order Powers. Everything that’s alive is a Second Order fruit from the Fullness of God. But we do need to eat. We are in that position. Here we are in this material world. It is not good.

In heaven there is no death or destruction. In heaven we will not kill anything and eat it to stay alive. So everything that is a food animal down here, or a vegetable or a fruit that we have to eat to stay alive, it just stays alive up there. It’s just beautiful gardens and orchards and forests. The lion laying down with the lamb and all of that. There’s no death or destruction in heaven.

And above that manifestation level where the Fullness of God lives, the God Above All Gods is that pure, clean, white bliss state of pure consciousness, pure love. So none of that angst about killing the ants or eating the cows or eating the carrots will ever have to go up with us. It has to stop at this material boundary of our cosmos. And the only way that can happen is to be cleansed by the Third Order Powers. They are the purity of God. We need to repent and say, I’m sorry I’m killing those ants. I’m sorry I’m eating that cow. I’m so sorry I’m eating that carrot. We have to repent of all of the things that we do here on Earth in order to be clean enough to go above.

So knocking on people’s doors and handing out religious tracts to them and asking them if they know the word of God isn’t going to earn your place in heaven. Even that’s not good enough. It doesn’t erase the bad. We earn too much negative karma to wipe it all out by good deeds. So what we need to do is repent and be redeemed.

But back to this meme, “but as for you, be strong and do not give up.” So that is an encouragement message. Don’t give up. We don’t know God’s timing. I always knew I was going to eventually get a PhD, but I was 50 years old by the time I got my PhD. Had I thought that I had to go straight through college and get my degrees all in order so that I could graduate and have a career by the time I was 25 or 30, well then I would have been disappointed. Maybe I would have given up, but I didn’t. I knew it would happen in God’s time.

On to the next meme. This one is from 2 Timothy 4:17 and it says, “But the Lord stood with me and gave me strength.”

We often feel powerless, huh? The forces in the world are just too big. What can I do about it? But when you invite the Christ in and you look for God’s will in your life and Christ’s will and you begin to employ love and the Simple Golden Rule in your activities, the Lord gives you all of the strength you need.

The Third Order of Powers are the most powerful force in the cosmos. We Second Order of Powers are the second most powerful force in the cosmos. The archons are much, much weaker than we are. So if you’re battling evil outright, if you feel as though you’re under archonic attack constantly, the only way you can win that fight is to ask the Christ to take hold of your spirit. And in Christ, you can do all things.

It may not be instantaneous. It’s not a magic incantation. You may indeed be granted a miracle, but that’s in God’s control. That’s God’s power. People often try to employ what is called magic against archons. That’s all demiurgic. You’re in the wrong arena if that’s the way you’re approaching power and archons. The way to beat the archons is to move fully into the love of the God Above All Gods, is to invite the Christ and the Third Order of Powers into your body, into your soul, into every one of your cells. And that’s what gives you the strong power.

And you know when you’re in God’s will, when you feel the power of God, when you feel invigorated, when you feel energized, enthused. The word enthusiastic means to be filled with God. That is how to be strong. And if it’s God leading you to do something, as I believe I’ve been led to share the Gnostic Gospel with you, you don’t give up because it’s not your job to give up. It’s your job to do. There is no try, only do.

And it’s not a slog. It’s not a, Oh I’ve got to do God’s will today. No, it’s, Oh what joy! How can I help you? What can I do for you? How can I show love to you?

Which brings us to the next meme. Hebrews 13:16 says, “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”

Now I don’t particularly like that word sacrifice here because it makes it sound as though you’re earning karma again. And that isn’t quite right. I have pets, right? I have cats and dogs. And I sometimes say to people who don’t have a dog, Get another dog when you’re ready and you’ll have that love again. And they say, Oh no, I want to travel. There’s too much responsibility with a dog. I don’t want to sacrifice time to be with a dog. Well, that is sacrifice when you’re thinking of it like that. But I don’t think of it as sacrifice. I love my dog. There’s nothing I’d rather do than spend time with my dog. There’s nothing I’d rather do than be out walking in the with my dog. There’s nothing I’d rather do than sit with a cat while it purrs. That isn’t a sacrifice. I may be delayed in doing something else, but I’d rather sit with that cat. Or I may have thought I was going to do something else, but the dog wants to go for a walk. I’m going for a walk.

It’s not a sacrifice if you love what you do. People are not having children now because they don’t want to sacrifice their single lifestyle and the money. I can get anything I want. I can take care of myself. I can be who I want to be. Well, that’s a very egoistic approach to life. And we aren’t meant here to fluff our egos. We’re meant to be here to love others and to demonstrate our love so that the Demiurge can see that we love each other. The reason we share what we have isn’t because we’re earning those brownie points and erasing bad karma. It’s because we see a need and we automatically want to plug it. We automatically want to fill it. You know how my job here on this podcast is throwing out these Gnostic insights, right? I’m sharing Gnostic insights with you because I want to help you, because I love you. Not because I’m erasing karma. I don’t have a blackboard here in the office with good karma, bad karma on it.

I do the same in my daily walking-around life. Even people I don’t know, like if someone’s in the supermarket and they’re puzzled, they’re in the vegetable section and they’re wondering what this is, or what do I do with this, or is this a good melon or not, or how do you tell? I’m that person that’ll walk right up to a stranger and go, Hey, I see that you’re wondering if that melon is ripe. Well, let me show you how you tell. See, you press on this here. See, I always am giving advice, whether it’s asked for or not, whether I know the person or not, because I am moved to do that. It’s an automatic reflex. It’s not something I’ve got to work myself up into, and it’s hard to not give advice.

So, “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”

I think we have time for one more meme here. John 16:33 says,” I’ve said these things to you so that you will have peace in me. In the world you will have distress, but be encouraged. I have conquered the world.” That’s a quote from Jesus directly.

So Jesus said he was sharing the words that have come down to us, mainly in the form of the red printed letters in the New Testament. If you go and pick up a Bible and you turn to the back part of the Bible, that’s called the New Testament, right? Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the four books that tell the story of Jesus. And there are quotes from Jesus in there. And if you have what’s called a red letter edition of the Bible, they’re in red. So you can actually read through the first four Gospels, read only the red letters, and that’s things Jesus said directly. And so this is one of these things that Jesus said.

He said, “I’ve said these things to you so that you will have peace in me. In the world you have distress, but be encouraged. I have conquered the world.” Jesus said this while he was still walking around alive. Jesus claimed that he had conquered the world before his crucifixion and before his resurrection. It was merely the coming into this world, being born as a human, yet fully God. See, the Third Order Powers came into this world in the body of Jesus. He was born in a physical body. He came as a Second Order Power, and that was his genetic inheritance from Mary, his mother. But he also came in as a Third Order Power, and that was his spiritual inheritance from the God Above All Gods. He said he taught us these things so that we would have peace in him, peace in Christ.

So we are to have peace no matter the circumstances in which we find ourselves. You know–it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you react to what happens to you. It’s not what you witness, it’s what you feel, what your emotions are as you witness something. The Demiurge is always trying to rile us up. The job of the archons is to bedevil us and to make us feel horrible, to knock us off our game, to take the love and light out of our lives. The Demiurge wants to bring us down to its level, down to the level of the archons, which is ego, negative emotions, vice, addictions, anger, hatred. That’s all demonic. That’s all demiurgic. Christ said, I want you to have peace in this world, so be encouraged. I have brought you the peace.

I have conquered this world. All we need to do is invite the Christ into ourselves.

Each of us is made up of the physical molecular body, the molecules and atoms that make up our flesh. That’s the demiurgic level. When we are conceived, the physical level is melded onto our Second Order Powers. Our perfect representation of the Fullness of God is our big S self, and we all have that. We all carry an identical copy of the Fullness of God, but yet we also all have an ego, and that’s related to this physical body we’re born to. It’s also part of our aeonic inheritance. Even the Aeons have egos—every Aeon has a name, which means it’s got a identification. It’s different than its neighbors. It has a place, so it’s in a different place. It’s got a different point of view. It’s a monad. It has a position and a job. It has a function within the Fullness of God.

We all have functions within this material cosmos in which we find ourselves, so our job is to fulfill our destiny, is to fulfill our aeonic inheritance, and our Second Order Powers that we were born with become discouraged and distracted and forgetful and deluded because of the Demiurge and the archons. This is why Jesus came and said the things he said. Jesus came and brought the Holy Spirit into the cosmos in order to infuse us with new strength, new power. We’re powering up when we invite the Christ in. We power up to the Third Order of Powers.

Okay, let me know what you thought of this episode. I still only hear from two or three of you. Don’t be shy. You can share, especially if you’re struggling. This isn’t a place for perfect people. Christ Jesus was the only perfect human at this point in time. Come and share. Come and tell us what you’re working on, what you’re thinking about, where you’ve been, either publicly under comments or you can send me a private comment through the comments form at gnosticinsights.com.

If these Gnostic Insights have been meaningful for you and if you can afford it at all, it would be helpful to the cause. It would be a part of the Simple Golden Rule under assistance to send in five bucks a month or ten dollars a month. That would be helpful. You can click anywhere in this paragraph to go directly to Paypal.

Okay, amen to all of this. I look forward to your comments. God bless us all and onward and upward.

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Say, do you realize that I basically pay for this entire podcast and these books, everything having to do with Gnostic Insights, all by myself? except for some generous contributions from my sister-in-law, Barbara, and my brother, Bill, and a couple of other people who have been sending in donations since the beginning of the podcast. Fortunately, God has blessed me with a very successful Airbnb property, and many people come and enjoy staying here in this cute little village that I live in, in Oregon. That is the method by which God is funding Gnostic Insights.  If you are being touched, if your life is being changed, I’d like to hear about it. I wish you’d send me an email or comments, because whatever you are being blessed with becomes a blessing for other people.

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Many of you listen to the podcast only and never visit the website. If you visit the website, the transcripts for all of these podcasts are there, episodes that you can re-listen to, that you can read and contemplate. But all of the material is found in a very clear and simple way in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.

The expenses for getting the book publicized are mounting. Praise God, I have the money because of this Airbnb that I’m running. So, hospitality and housekeeping is my main job, other than putting out these weekly podcasts, writing an article every week, recording it, editing it—you know, I’m a one-person factory here. I can’t afford to hire an editor. I can’t afford to hire a webmaster or podcast producer. I have to figure out how to do all of this on my own. But it would be nice to be able to hire some help.

I have hired an illustrator for the children’s book, because I know I can’t illustrate a children’s book. So, that’s one thing I can’t do on my own. It’s really neat that I’ve been given the various gifts that I’m able to do all of these things and put together Gnostic Insights. I believe that this is my purpose in life, finally. And everything I’ve learned, formally and informally, God is using it to put together these broadcasts.

I put in an application this week at the Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University in order to teach the Gnostic Gospel. And if they allow me to teach this to their students, then I’m going to be videotaping those lectures. People have often said, hey, you really need to put out more on YouTube. You know, there are some older lectures there on YouTube, both from before the Gnostic days and then after the Gnostic days. The earlier ones are lectures that were given publicly concerning A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. But in the past couple of years, I’ve had occasion to talk about A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And so, you can find those videos already.

This new course I’m putting together will be 10 episodes long. And each one of those can be a standalone YouTube video. Maybe those could be monetized. You know, I don’t like monetizing anything. There are no paywalls here at Gnostic Insights or at the Gnostic Reformation. You don’t have to subscribe with money to hear these podcasts.

I’m very glad that you do subscribe and get it as an email, for example, or on your podcast host. But soon people will be able to see it on YouTube. It would be really neat if we, and I say we because you’re part of this effort, if we could afford to have an animator for that show, actually have a video producer that would put together a neat-looking Gnostic Insights series, not simply me sitting there talking to the camera. You know, I see all of this in my head as moving images. I see the movie. I just can’t animate it for YouTube. But if you’re an animator, you could offer to help as your contribution.

So, this has been a big long pitch to help with the effort. I think the Gnostic Gospel is a very important message that everyone can use, and we need to put it in front of everyone. They need to be able to come across it when they do searches, and they can’t do that unless you start leaving more reviews, more comments, thumbs up, Like, subscribe, all that stuff.

Part of the expense lately has been my decision to purchase professional reviews and have those reviews publicized. One of the reviews I purchased is through Kirkus Reviews, where a good review is highly coveted by authors and publishers. The review was so favorable that Kirkus has chosen the book to be featured as an article in next month’s printed magazine that is distributed to librarians and booksellers. Their sales department then talked me into buying an accompanying marketing campaign to place advertisements on all of their platforms for a couple of months. Here—I’ll read you the Kirkus Review:

A 21st-century Gnostic explores the seminal text of her faith in this nonfiction work.

“Valentinian Gnosticism is a form of proto-Christianity,” writes Ropp in the book’s introduction, asserting her belief that “it is the true, original form of Christianity.” Focusing on the third- or fourth-century Gnostic work the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi codices, the author explores an alternative branch of Christianity that was deemed heretical and “wiped out” by Catholicism. In contrast to Roman Catholicism, per Ropp, Gnosticism “encourages a personal relationship with the “God Above All Gods,” eschews hierarchical leadership and rituals, and holds that no church or earthly institution “can give you gnosis” (mystical knowledge). Aiming to “demystify” the “arcane language” of the Tripartite Tractate, as well as to connect the work to the more well-known themes articulated in the Christian New Testament, Ropp systematically walks readers through the major ideas posited in the Gnostic text. Unlike other biblical books, according to the author, the Tripartite Tractate is closer to a philosophical rumination than a collection of myths, as it establishes a thesis about a divine Father before working through the logical implications of that proposition. Ropp’s analytical approach informs her emphasis on applying Gnosticism to modern life, as the author deeply believes that “Gnostic faith is not blind faith but reasonable faith.” Holding a doctorate in classical rhetoric, Ropp is the host of the Gnostic Insights podcast and author of The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated (2019). Here, she offers readers a scholarly exploration of the Tripartite Tractate that challenges popular assumptions, such as the claim by many that Gnosticism is a New Age religion. Her academic approach, backed by scholarly references, is balanced by an engaging writing style geared toward readers unfamiliar with the esoteric nuances of Gnosticism. The work’s accessibility is further supported by a lengthy glossary of terminology as well as the inclusion of full-color images, diagrams, and other visual aids. Even readers unconvinced about the veracity of Gnosticism will find a stimulating reflection on the nature of meaning, knowledge, and truth. A well-researched, impassioned case for Gnosticism. [Kirkus Reviews] 

Pretty good, huh? Next week I’ll read you some of the other professional reviews. Okay now, let’s get on with this week’s episode.

Generation of the Aeons

Yesterday I was reading Chapter Three out of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and the quotes from the Tripartite Tractate are so beautiful. To me, they are indescribably beautiful. It’s hard to imagine who this human was at least 2,000 years ago, who saw all of this, and who wrote all of this down. It is clearly from the God Above All Gods. So, I want to share some of Chapter Three with you today, because it’s really beautiful.

This begins on page 25 of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and it says,

We have heard about the Father being indescribable, and about the infinite number of facets that form the body of the Son, and the Totality of the All. But we really haven’t heard much in the way of descriptions of the Son itself. This is because the only way that the Son can be described is through its relationship with the Father, and then through the Aeons. The fractals of consciousness that emerge out of the Son and the All, as we trace the path of emanations flowing out of the inconceivable Father and through the barely conceivable Son, we become more and more concrete in our ability to understand the nature of God.

And I’m adding this in to understand the nature of consciousness, because remember, whenever we talk about the nature of the Father emanating through the Son and then through the Totalities, we’re also talking about the emanation of consciousness itself. Back to the book.

It is when we enter the realm of the Aeons that we can begin to recognize the panoply of properties of the Father and Son. The Tripartite Tractate says,

They were forever in thought, for the Father was like a thought and a place for them. When their generations had been established, the one who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was deficient in the, and there’s a missing word, and he brought forth those, again, missing words, him. But since he is as he is, he is a spring which is not diminished by the water which abundantly flows from it. (Verse 60 of the Attridge and Muller translation.)

Generations, as the Tripartite Tractate uses the word, means to create, to generate. Here it’s saying that when the Son was formed, all of the Totalities making up the body of the Son were formed along with him, and their formation or generation did not lessen the Father or subtract anything away from the Father’s essence. The word deficient, as used here, simply means not yet manifest.

Deficient can’t indicate any shortcoming or inadequacy because the Son is a complete embodiment of the perfection of the Father, and his Totalities embody the perfect Son. So the passage likely reads,

When their generations had been established, the one who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was not yet manifest, and he brought forth those within him.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the Tripartite Tractate says of these Totalities,

While they were in the Father’s thought, that is, in the hidden depth, the depth knew them, but they were unable to know the depth in which they were, nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father. They did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed, so that it has been discovered that they were like a fetus. (Verse 61)

And so now in this unfolding process of spreading out the Father’s consciousness, we have these potential entities existing like seeds within the Father. They don’t know themselves, and they don’t know where they are. They don’t realize that they comprise the body of the Son. In that sense, they are like a fetus that is still inside the womb, blissfully sleeping. The Tripartite Tractate says,

For that reason the Father had also thought in advance that they should exist not only for himself, but should exist for themselves as well, that they should remain in thought as mental substance, but also exist for themselves. He sowed a thought as a seed of, and there’s some missing words, in order that they might understand what kind of Father they have. (Verse 61 from the translation by Thomason)

In other words, the Father wants them to wake up. The Father is spreading awakened consciousness throughout the entire body of the Son. He doesn’t want the All to remain unthinking constituents of the Son. The Father wants them each to have their own existence and their own realizations, their own consciousness, their own self. The Tripartite Tractate describes them as “seeds in need of gaining nourishment and growth and faultlessness.” That’s from verse 62. The Tripartite Tractate says that the first step in bringing awareness to the Totalities was to give them “the perfect idea of beneficence toward them.”

This means that even though they didn’t yet know themselves, what they did know was that they were loved. That is all they knew—that they had a benefactor. Someone cared for them and wanted only good for them. The Totalities began to awaken to self-realization because someone loved them. This beneficent thought was their first knowledge. The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say,

The one whom he raised up as a light for those who came from himself, the one from whom they take their name, he is the Son who is full, complete, and faultless. He brought him forth mingled with what came forth from him. (Verse 62)

This again confirms that the Son coexists with the Father and the Totalities coexist with the Son. “This is not yet his greatness they have received. Rather, he exists only partially in the manner, the form, and the greatness that he is.”

The Totalities are waking up in stages. They know they are loved, but they do not know the details of who loves them.

As for the parts in which he exists in his own manner and form and greatness, it is possible for them to see him and speak about what they know of him, since they wear him while he wears them, because it is possible for them to comprehend him. He, however, is as he is incomparable.” (Verse 63)

In chapter 2, I used the analogy that the Totalities are to the Son as the cells that make up our bodies are to us. We wear them like a garment over ourself, and they wear our eternal self over their little cells. We go everywhere they go, and they go everywhere we go. At this point in their embryonic development, the Totalities have knowledge that there is a mysterious being who loves them, but the Father wants more for them.

In order that the Father might receive honor from each one and reveal himself, even in his ineffability, hidden and invisible, they marvel at him mentally. Therefore, the greatness of his loftiness consists in the fact that they speak about him and see him. He becomes manifest so that he may be hymned because of the abundance of his sweetness. (Verse 63)

This passage is saying that the manner by which the Totalities become awakened is through the process of praising the Father by singing about the Father’s sweetness to them. In other words, they come to selfhood by giving glory to the Father through song.

And just as the admirations of the silences are eternal generations and they are mental offspring, so too the dispositions of the Word are spiritual emanations. (Verse 63)

The admirations of the silences, which is to say the quiet glory and kisses exchanged between the Father and the Son, brought forth the generation of the All as their mental offspring. Afterward, the glory and hymns offered up to the Father by the developing Totalities became the dispositions of the Word that conferred upon them a spiritual emanation from the Father by means of his reflected glory pouring over them and bathing them in the Father’s consciousness.

Both of them, admirations and dispositions, since they belong to a Word, are seeds and thoughts of his offspring and roots which live forever, appearing to be offsprings which have come forth from themselves, being minds and spiritual offspring to the glory of the Father. (Verses 63-64)

Remember, the Father’s consciousness and spirit flow out from him in an unending stream. It is this reflected glory initiated through their singing that disposes the Totalities to grasp their individuality, appearing to be offspring which have come forth by themselves. The passage also says that the Totalities are the Son’s seeds and thoughts and that they will live forever along with the Son. The Totalities of the All are now complete in mind and spirit, possessing the conscious powers of the Son.

The Totality of the All, however, remained an indivisible unity. Though now endowed with individual self-awareness, they nonetheless continue to act as a single being, being themselves the Fullness of the Son.

The births of his words, his commands, and his members of the All are innumerable and indivisible. He knows them, for they are himself. When they speak, they are all in the one single name. And if he brings them forth, it is in order that they may be found to exist as individual qualities, forming a unity. (Verse 67 from the Thomason translation)

This Fullness of God and the progression of consciousness through the Son is found in the New Testament, although its original meaning has been lost. For example, speaking of the Son in the book of Colossians, Paul writes,

The Son is the image of the invisible God, firstborn of all creation, because in him were created all things in the heaven and on Earth, the visible as well as the invisible, whether thrones or lordships or archons or powers. All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things and all things hold together in him. For in him, all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling and through him to reconcile all things to him, making peace by the blood of his cross through him, whether the things on Earth or the things in heaven. (Colossians 1:15–20 out of David Bentley Hart’s translation)

And like the son before them, the All began to generate offspring. Quoting again from the Tripartite Tractate,

But on the pattern by which he was existing, so are those who have come forth from him, beginning everything which they desire. For this is their procreative power, like those from whom they’ve come. According to their mutual assistance, they assist one another like the unbegotten ones. (Verse 64)

This mutual assistance carries forward throughout creation as another as above, so below cooperative pattern, as we shall soon discover when we look at the Simple Golden Rule. As soon as the Totalities of the All came to know themselves and to recognize their own individual identities, each one of the rays birthed a singularity that reflected both the Totality of the All and their own individuality.

Now all those who had gone forth from him, that is the Aeons of the Aeons, being emissions born of a procreative nature, also procreate through their own procreative nature to the glory of the Father, just as he had been the cause of their existence. For that which they glorified, they bore. (Verse 67)

Father is the ground state; the Son is the first monad of consciousness; the All is the differentiations of the Son; the All becomes self aware and sorts itself into a hierarchy called the Fullness

The All’s offspring immediately recognized their self-identities and formed themselves into what is called the Fullness of God, commonly referred to as the Pleroma of God. Pleroma simply means everything that is possible; all possible expressions of consciousness can be found in the Fullness of God. These newly formed Aeons of the Fullness of God quickly sorted themselves into what is called a hierarchy, which is like a pyramidal type of stack with many more units located down at the bottom of the stack and fewer and fewer units as you go higher and higher.

In my illustrations, I picture the hierarchy of the Fullness as a pyramidal stack of golden orbs, like cannonballs, with each orb being a particular Aeon. There are more cannonballs on the lower levels and fewer and fewer balls the higher you go up the pyramid. There is a hierarchical principle in Gnosticism that I have identified as the higher the fewer.

The Fullness of God is the Holy Spirit of the Father bursting out into individualized, fractal units of consciousness. They sort themselves into a hierarchy of names, positions, and functions.

Using that principle, the awakened Aeons of the Fullness of God sorted themselves into positions, places, powers, ranks, stations, and names, indicating that they each had their own point of view and they each had their own place and duty in the hierarchy of heaven.

And that, my friends, I’m dropping this in here, was the birth of what is called ego, because ego is not a negative term. It’s merely your position, power, place, rank, station, and name and where you fit into the hierarchy of creation. That is your ego. It identifies you. It’s your self-identity. Our underlying Self is a fractal of the Fullness of God. Our ego is that hierarchical principle that happened up there when the Totalities of the All became self-aware and came to realize their own personal identity. That’s our ego. So we, like the Aeons, because we are fractals of the Aeons, also have a personal identity. As above, so below. Okay, we’re going to stop there for today because that’s about all the time we have.

We made it up to page 33 in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. I say again, the Tripartite Tractate is a beautiful book. People often say it’s the most difficult or one of the most difficult books in the Nag Hammadi scriptures. Not necessarily. I try to explain it as clearly as I can, and I hope you are coming to appreciate it. Let me know if you enjoyed this episode.

If you’re listening through the podcast, pop into the website gnosticinsights.com and leave a comment underneath this episode transcript. Or, if you’re listening through Substack, you know you can leave a comment there in Substack. Or, if you’re reading this as an email sent out by Substack, I believe you can click on Comments at the bottom of the email.

Love you all. God bless us, and Onward and Upward!

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I thought it would be fun this week to look at some Christian memes that are posted on the internet, little posters with inspirational sayings. I asked for Bible quotes inspirational from Jesus, and what I’m going to do is read you the quote, and I’ll post the meme itself on the transcript of this episode. And I would like to explain to you the Gnostic meaning of each of these memes. So let’s see how this goes.

The first one I run across here is from Philippians 4:13, and it says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

Now Christians generally think of Christ as an exterior force, that Christ is basically the Holy Spirit of the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ. And so they picture Jesus being outside them, but very near, someone that you can call to you and pray to, and he knows you, and he will take care of your prayers.

Gnostic Christians, on the other hand, have an understanding, a gnosis, that Christ is within us when we accept Christ, when we invite Christ in, because as the Christians always say, Jesus is a gentleman, and he won’t just come plowing into your soul unless you invite him in. So Christians understand that you are asking Christ in, but they don’t understand that he completely takes up residence inside of you.

We know that we humans are made up of a spiritual Self, that one Self that is the reflection of the Fullness of God. We all share that in common. It is identical to all of us. Then we share a psychical level, our emotional level, generally what we would call our ego, and that’s our Second Order nature that comes into us and melds to the third part of us, which is our physical body. And our physical body is built from the molecules on up.

The physical body is of a demiurgic origin. This is why it has always so many cravings that go against our better judgment, let’s say. We eat too much, we take drugs we shouldn’t, we drink too much, we have sex with strangers or sex outside of marriage. These are physical urges that arise from the demiurgic level because they are embodying and carrying forward the commands of the Demiurge. And that’s the way the Demiurge likes to do things—keep us under control, keep us alienated from our higher Self.

So when we invite Christ in—let’s say you’re at a revival or you listen to an old Billy Graham sermon on the radio or you’re reading the book of John in the Bible and you have the urge to invite Christ to take over your life, and that is what it means to invite Christ into your soul—Christ is a different order of powers than we are. We are what’s called Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the Aeons; we’re the Second Order of Powers. The Third Order of Powers is the Christ. And there is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power. That’s how it is that Jesus or Christ comes with your face and knows everything about you because Christ is an image of the perfection that you can be. Jesus was the first human that fully embodied the Third Order of Powers. And now it’s your turn…

When we invite Christ in, we invite the Christ to take residence in our souls and in our bodies. We invite the Christ’s Third Order Powers to replace our own Second Order Powers because we’re leveling up. We’re leveling up to a more powerful and loving Godly existence when we invite Christ in.

You can’t put down various mistakes and cravings and sins in your life just out of striving within your own little Second Order ego because it’s the one that got you in trouble in the first place. You need the higher power of the Third Order to embody you. That is the real meaning of Philippians 4.13. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me because I’m no longer just me and my Second Order body. I have the Third Order within me that has more power than the Second Order and demiurgic body that we are given.

The next meme I run across is from 2 Corinthians 12:9 and it says,  “Every weakness you have is an opportunity for God to show his strength in your life. My grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

The conventional Christian church and especially the hellfire and damnation churches talk about your weakness as depravity and as inherent sinfulness and shame on you. Shame. “Have guilt. Turn to God for that’s your only salvation.” Well yeah that’s kind of correct except for the hell and damnation part and it’s got the whole wrong emotional spin on it.

When the egg of my mother was fertilized by the sperm of my father, my earthly parents, I was a pure Second Order Power coming in with all sorts of hope and knowledge—gnosis. It’s inherent in us because we are the children of the Aeons. We are the incarnation here on earth in the material realm of that First Order of Powers, the Aeons, who live in the pure bliss of the ethereal space. But when we come down into this body that starts with that fertilized egg we are bound to the material of the Demiurge and that’s where the weakness leaks into us. It’s from the bottom up. From the top down it’s all God. It’s the Father. It’s the God Above All Gods and it’s our aeonic inheritance.

We don’t get our weakness inherently from our fertilized egg and then our embryo grows up and then we’re little babies. We’re not sinful from the get-go. We are purely God-created from the get-go. But we are born into a fallen world run by the god of this world who’s the Demiurge and it has all sorts of traps and snares and temptations designed to pull us down to separate us from the God Above All Gods and the Fullness of God. So I would say, in regards to this meme that I just read, “Every weakness you have is an opportunity for God to show us strength in your life,” I would say it probably reads more like every weakness we gain or every weakness that is thrown into our path, every snare, is an opportunity to show God’s strength because the Father above is infinitely more powerful than the fallen god of this world. Infinitely so. And when we take on the Christ, we invite that power into our fleshly being.

So while I may not be able to quit smoking or to stop drinking too much or put down the pornography, whatever the weakness is that has taken hold of you, whether it’s a great weakness, something you feel very ashamed about, or whether it’s a small weakness like gossiping about our neighbors or being short-tempered with our spouse or our children, once we ask the Third Order of Powers to help us, then we have more strength than that weakness brings to us. It’s a mathematical thing. It’s not then a struggle to put those things down. You need to be mindful of the Third Order Powers of the Christ giving you the strength to overcome.

All right, what’s the next meme I run across here? Ah, this one is from John 14:6, and it says, “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

Now, this is generally taken to mean, in the conventional Christian way of thinking about it, that you need to come forward in some sort of revival situation. Revival has to do with repentance. Revival means you’re reviving your soul; you’re coming back to life. You have been dead in sin, and now you are being revived into life, into the life that comes from the God Above All Gods and the Fullness of God, the Aeons. And Jesus said, I’m showing you the way. I am the way.

He said, I am the truth. So we can trust what Jesus says. That’s the red letter editions of the classical Bibles. Everything Jesus said was in red. So you can find the way. You can come to the truth by reading the words of Jesus without confusion.

And he says, I am the life, and this means the eternal life. Because down here, this material world, as we know, is transitory. This is not our permanent home. So when Jesus speaks of the life, he’s talking about your ethereal, eternal life.

And he says, no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. So this generally means, as I started to say, that you have a revival situation where you come to Christ and you pray the sinner’s prayer, where you say, I’m a sinner. I’m nothing. I need you, Christ, save me. Okay, that’s basically the sinner’s prayer. And the Christians take this to mean that you have to do it in just that way, that you have to say Jesus was the Christ and Jesus is the way to God. And here’s the thing—if you don’t do that in your revival situation and pray the sinner’s prayer, then you will be eternally damned and you will go to hell and be tortured forever by a supposedly all-loving and all-forgiving God. For some reason, they can’t see the contradiction in that.

Here in Gnostic Christianity, we agree that Jesus was the first embodiment of the Third Order Powers and that Jesus shows us the way and that Jesus shows us through his words and the example of his life the power that we can all have by asking the Third Order Powers, by opening up our souls and inviting the Third Order Powers, as exemplified by Jesus, into our souls. You don’t have to say “the Christ.” You can say “Jesus,” because Jesus told us this will do. This is what you need to do. This is why I came. He shows us the way. He tells us the truth. He demonstrates the life through his resurrection after the crucifixion.

Now, if you don’t gain that gnosis before you “die,” then you’re going to have a very bumpy ride after you die. You are going to have to account for all of your errors, all of your weakness, all of your mistakes, all of your sins, great and small, and give amends and apologize to everyone whom you injured when you were alive. And there will be no hiding from it. There will be no denying it. You won’t be able to say, oh, I never did that, it wasn’t that way, because here you are face to face now in the ethereal plane, in the in-between place. It’s not all the way up to heaven, because only goodness reaches the Father. Only goodness can regain the ethereal plane, because it’s all good. There is no sin. There’s no death, no destruction, no despair, no sadness on the ethereal plane where the hierarchy of the Fullness of God lives. The Aeons are protected from all of that, and we can’t bring our dirty laundry up there. We can’t bring our bags full of weakness up there. It’s oil and water. They don’t mix.

So there is an in-between place that accounts for all of this, where you are face-to-face. And it’s not God punishing you. It’s not the Aeons punishing you. Nobody’s punishing you. It’s you having remorse for what you’ve done and wishing that you had not done these things. It’s a lot better to repent and invite the Christ in before you die, because then, when your body stops functioning and your spirit is released from this bondage of flesh, you won’t have to go through that really horrible experience. You will have been already redeemed through the power of the Christ, because no man cometh unto the Father but by the Christ. The Christ is our correcting algorithm for our second-order Powers.

Here’s a meme from Philippians 1:6, and it says, “I’m sure about this, the one who started a good work in you will stay with you to complete the job by the day of Christ Jesus.”

So, as I was just saying on the previous meme, when you invite the Christ into your soul, you’re trading the third-order Powers for all the baggage and all the remorse and regret and things that you’ve done. You can pray a blanket prayer to the Christ. You don’t have to be able to remember and enumerate every single bad thing you’ve ever done.

You can pray that Christ will remove all of the impurities from your soul, give you new life, give you new power, give you new strength to battle in the never-ending war. And this never-ending war, it’s not against other people. That’s one of the lies of the Demiurge.

The news, the social media, the mean people—they are not the object of your never-ending battle. The never-ending battle is with the death and destruction that is brought to us by the Demiurge and his archons. We shouldn’t battle against other people. Our battles are with powers and principalities, archons and the Demiurge. And guess what our armament is? It’s not shaking our fists and shooting off guns or lopping off people’s heads because that’s the wrong target. Those don’t do any good against the archons.

Our magic bullet is love. We Second Order Powers were sent into this world to remind the Demiurge of love and the God Above All Gods and the hierarchy and his better Self that is up there. Down here, the Demiurge is the disembodied ego striving for power and control. Up there, it’s love, it’s acceptance, it’s everlasting life and joy. So this is the balance. What would you rather have? Why would you want to be down here in the mud when you can be up there with our Aeonic parents and everybody we’ve ever known and loved with none of the negative baggage, none of the remembrance of slights and harms and insults? They are not our enemy, the other humans or the other Second Order Powers. It’s the principalities and powers of the darkness that are the never-ending war and the only thing that can win is love.

The light outshines the darkness. That’s a common metaphor used in Christian talk. You walk into a room and there’s no windows and it’s completely dark inside. It’s all blackness. That’s the world of the Demiurge. But when the light comes in the form of the Christ, he’s this glory beam from above by the God Above All Gods to shine the ethereal light into the blackness, into the darkness. And light drives away dark, doesn’t it? That’s the metaphor. That light is the light of love and life, purity and goodness. Those are our magic bullets.

Here’s a meme from Mark 1:17. “Jesus said to them, follow me and I will make you become fishers of men.”

So this is near the beginning of the story of Jesus being on earth and beginning his ministry. And he approaches fishermen who are literally trying to catch fish with nets out of their boat. And he tells them, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. This is the true call to evangelism. We are to become fishers of men. We are to throw out our nets of the gospel, our nets of gnosis with the power of love and draw them into the boat of salvation, you might say, or draw them into the boat of gnosis.

This is the purpose of Gnostic Insights. I am hopefully one of the fishers on behalf of the Christ to gather people who are out there flopping around in the ocean, wondering which way is up, to remember your gnosis, to change your loyalty from the things of this world that always pass away. All these material possessions that seem so dear to us, they will crumble with time. They will turn into rust and dust and completely disappear, and to trade them in. That’s what repentance is: turning away from the material world. And then the redemption—that means buying us back, when we trade the material world for the ethereal plane.

Here’s a meme from Matthew 5:16 that says, “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”

We are to let our light shine forth. Let your love flow, remember that song? like a mountain stream, and let your love shine through all living things. So we’re to let our light shine forth. We’re to walk around like beacons of light and share it with other people. They should be able to see on our faces that we are embodying the Third Order of Powers.

We don’t go around all gloomy and angry. We don’t slump around and complain about everything. We are thankful that we have the Third Order within, that the Christ came to earth in the form of Jesus, and that we have accepted that, and that we now remember the gnosis that we were born with, and we become like the smile on a newborn baby’s face. We return to our innocence.

We don’t do good works in order to be saved. That is an error in many Christian denominations. They have the feeling that if you work on behalf of God, if you set up your booth down in the county park and you hand out your tracts, or you walk around and knock on doors, have you heard the word of God today? and then you hand them a tract. That is not the good works. The good works is when you are full of love, when you are full of the knowledge of God, then you will naturally perform good works.

We’re not being saved from hell and damnation. We’re being saved out of the sadness and despair of this world that we are yoked to. And when we have that gnosis, when we understand that we are part of the ethereal plane, and that we’re just passing through this valley of death, then we can be joyful. We can know the bad doesn’t stick. Yeah, try your best, Demiurge. You’re not getting me today. Then we perform good works because we are driven to do good works, because we want to share the Gnostic gospel with others. And this glorifies the Father in heaven. This glorifies the God Above All Gods when we share because we can’t help but share the light that shines forth from us.

Okay, these are just a few of the memes I ran across this morning. Let me know what you think of all of this. I regularly get comments from two or three subscribers. Oh, come on. Let’s hear from the rest of you. Let’s start a conversation here in the comment section.

God bless us all. Onward and upward.

[Verse 1]
There’s a reason for the sun-shining sky
And there’s a reason why I’m feeling so high
Must be the season when that love light shines all around us

So, let that feeling grab you deep inside
And send you reeling where your love can’t hide
And then go stealing through the moonlit nights with your lover

[Chorus]
Just let your love flow like a mountain stream
And let your love grow with the smallest of dreams
And let your love show and you’ll know what I mean
It’s the season
Let your love fly like a bird on a wing
And let your love bind you to all living things
And let your love shine and you’ll know what I mean
That’s the reason

[Verse 2]
There’s a reason for the warm sweet nights
And there’s a reason for the candlelights
Must be the season when those love rights shine all around us

So, let that wonder take you into space
And lay you under its loving embrace
Just feel the thunder as it warms your face, you can’t hold back

[Chorus]
Just let your love flow like a mountain stream
And let your love grow with the smallest of dreams
And let your love show and you’ll know what I mean
It’s the season
Let your love fly like a bird on a wing
And let your love bind you to all living things
And let your love shine and you’ll know what I mean
That’s the reason

[Chorus]
Just let your love flow like a mountain stream
And let your love grow with the smallest of dreams
And let your love show and you’ll know what I mean
It’s the season
Let your love fly like a bird on a wing
And let your love bind you to all living things
And let your love shine and you’ll know what I mean
That’s the reason

[Outro]
Just let your love flow like a mountain stream
And let your love grow with the smallest of dreams

Let Your Love Flow is the title song from the Bellamy Brothers’ 1976 debut album. It was written by Larry E. Williams, a former roadie for Neil Diamond.

Let Your Love Flow YouTube video link–Listen Here

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation. My brother shared with me this week an article that’s published in Scientific American, and I will post the link to that article here. The article is called, Where Does Consciousness Come From? Two Neuroscience Theories Go Head-to-Head. The subtitle is, Two Leading Theories of Consciousness Went Head-to-Head, and the Results May Change How Neuroscientists Study One of the Oldest Questions About Existence. This was published on April 30, 2025. And I’m not going to share much of this with you, except to say that neuroscientists still haven’t coalesced around one explanation of where consciousness originates, largely because it’s such a hard question to probe with the scientific method.

The article says that scientists have landed on two leading theories to explain how consciousness emerges. The first is called Integrated Information Theory, or IIT for short, and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, or GNWT for short. And it says that the frameworks couldn’t be more different, yet they rest on completely different assumptions, draw from different fields of science, and may even define consciousness in different ways.

The article goes on to explain that there have been a series of studies trying to decide which of those two theories is the right way to approach consciousness. And despite all of the scientific studies, nothing came to fruition. There were no results that proved either of the two theories.

The article says that this type of research will encourage new ways of doing studies, which is to design experiments that have the best chance of distinguishing between theories rather than finding evidence for or against one specific theory. And they explain that it’s very important to understand consciousness because it has, for example, a practical application when you’re dealing with people that are in vegetative states and comas about when to pull the plug, since no sign of consciousness shows up on the brain scans, then they feel the person is dead, even if their body’s alive, and so they pull the plug. But if consciousness is more diffuse than that, it is possible that the people are still alive and conscious, and that their bodies should be kept alive with life support.

I went back and looked at our Gnostic Insights articles and episodes to review what we have to say about consciousness. And I must say, there is no better explanation than the Gnostic explanation. And so I’m going to share with you again an episode called The Father of Consciousness, which is essentially the first chapter of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.

This episode was originally the first episode of Gnostic Insights that described the rollout of consciousness through all the stages, and you can find it posted at GnosticInsights.com under A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel tab. This would be the first article. We reviewed this article in December of 2022, and it’s time to review it again, because this is the ground state of everything and everything that we believe.

It also clears up the what we call the category error of whether consciousness arises from the brain, and which neurons or synapses it’s contained in, and how the network works, which is the materialist scientific approach that isn’t working out, according to Scientific American, versus the idea that consciousness is the pre-existing ground state. Consciousness is the matrix of our entire existence. Materialism itself is debatable, but what we do know is that we’re conscious.

Here’s what the Tripartite Tractate has to say about that. As you know, we’ve been looking at the Gnostic Gospel according to the Tripartite Tractate, which is one of the books of the Nag Hammadi scrolls. The Tripartite Tractate is a book that focuses on the origins of our universe and everything in it, including us. So I thought we would look around again today and revisit the Tripartite Tractate and what it has to say about the Father as the first principle of Gnosticism.

Philosophers often speak of the hard problem of consciousness. The materialist scientists don’t believe in consciousness. They believe that we are only our physical bodies and that any appearance of consciousness or of a soul is merely a byproduct of physical mechanisms—hormones, atoms moving around, that kind of thing.

It seems to me that the soul that people speak of surviving is the consciousness that began with the Father and derives from the Father. And that is why, whenever I discuss the system of consciousness, whether it’s in my earlier philosophy called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, my prior Gnostic book, it always begins with the Father because the Father is where consciousness resides. The Father is consciousness itself.

The Father is another word for consciousness. Then, this entire creation cosmology that’s presented through the Tripartite Tractate and then re-presented again in my books, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated and A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, is the path by which consciousness proceeds out from the Father, through the Son, through the Totalities, and the pleroma of the Hierarchy, and on into the Second Order Powers that populate the Earth. So, this is why we begin with the Father.

The Father is the ground state of consciousness and this is why we begin to build out from the Father the flow of consciousness. My Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything book and blog are devoted to the notion of what is called panpsychism, which suggests that consciousness resides in everything. In Gnostic terms, we say that the Father extends His consciousness throughout all living things that populate the cosmos.

https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Explanation-Absolutely-Everything-Conscious/dp/B08JB5WQP7/ref=sr_1_3?crid=32PIWCN8NGHI2&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Rr1avY5eUAx6CUqcnWvw6Ms38EhSzbnnPe_FuHaZWqT2CroPXxW6p36hlQluwb9PT8KAetv8dMZwgiOz9-LCMVAc4PW19aYbjpgBLOHkhVw.qJgqcY0jLT29qRXqxKsvMFRJO453gJotWPuFZaQUehM&dib_tag=se&keywords=a+simple+explanation+of+absolutely+everything&qid=1746113839&sprefix=a+simple+explanation+of+absolutely+everything%2Caps%2C165&sr=8-3

I like to begin with the cosmos as it unfolded and rolled out. The word for that sort of study is cosmogony, which is defined as the study of the origins of the universe. This makes the most sense to me, to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are, and then, after that is established, to see how that applies to our lives.

Then we can ask, why are we here? Is there a purpose to our lives? How should we live? And after that, we can finally consider the final roll-up of the universe and what happens after we “die.” All of these questions are answered very precisely in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This sort of knowledge is known as gnosis.

Today we begin at the very beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. This story, this cosmogony, begins before the beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos existed. I’m going to compare a couple of different versions of the Tripartite so that we have a fuller picture of the Father.

One of the books I’m going to use is the Nag Hammadi scriptures, the one edited by Marvin Meyer, and the translator in this case was a person named Thomassen. The other version we are going to compare it to is the one posted at the Gnostic Society library that you can find at gnosis.org, and this version was translated by Harold Attridge. In the Tripartite Tractate, the introduction says,

As for what we can say about the things which are exalted, what is fitting is that we begin with the Father, who is the root of the totality, the one from whom we have received grace to speak about him. (verse 51)

Another version says,

In order to be able to speak about exalted things, it is necessary that we begin with the Father, who is the root of the All, and from whom we have obtained grace to speak about him. For he existed before anything else had come into being, except him alone. (verse 51)

I invite you now to think of the originating consciousness as a vast consciousness which has no place and no time, no history. It is nothing but pure consciousness without thought, similar to what the Buddhists call the Buddha mind. This clear state of pure consciousness is something people try to achieve during meditation, where you can be aware that you are conscious, but you have no particular thoughts or words or images going through your mind. This is the originating Father. The Father has no thought, no images, no structure or form, no thing at all. This pure consciousness is the Father. There is no gender associated with this Father. Calling God “Him” or “Father” is a metaphor. Obviously the Father is not a man with a beard and long robes. The Tripartite Tractate says,

Rather he possesses this constitution without having a face or form, things which are understood through perception, whence also comes the title, “the incomprehensible.” If he is incomprehensible, then it follows that he is unknowable, that he is the one who is inconceivable by any thought, invisible by anything, ineffable by any word, untouchable by any hand. He alone is the one who knows himself as he is, along with his form and his greatness and his magnitude. (verses 54-55)

So no matter how much we try or science tries or philosophy tries, the underlying consciousness underneath our existence will never be grasped, will never be measured. It cannot be discovered. Which begs the question, if the Father is unknowable, then what are we doing here describing him? If the Father is incomprehensible, then why are we even discussing him?

What we are doing here at Gnostic Insights, and what I believe the writer of the Tripartite Tractate was doing, is that we are describing the Father as what is called a first principle. In philosophy, a first principle is a first cause, an origin, from which all else proceeds, and all subsequent arguments are based. First principles are not provable. They are what is called a priori assumptions, upon which all else proceeds. This is why here at Gnostic Insights we spend so much time discussing the Father. The Father is the a priori, the first cause, the uber first principle of all else that follows, not only in a religious sense, but in a cosmogenic sense, as it is the basis upon which everything else may be logically deduced.

Now back to the idea of gender. The reason this consciousness is called Father and not Mother has to do with the direction of movement initiated by the Father. The Father is a consciousness that extends outward from itself. It emanates, it does not receive. He extends consciousness. Extension is sometimes translated as will, but it refers to the Father reaching out for what he is driving toward. The Father extends consciousness out from itself as the originating source.

In this sense, we can contrast that extension with the concept of female, which is receptive, which is that which takes into itself. The Father gives, the Mother receives. This Father’s basic consciousness is not thoughts, but rather love, the sensation of what we call love.

So this consciousness simply is, without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning or end, utterly quiet, utterly still, utterly alone. This Father is often described as all-knowing, but what is there to know? All-seeing, but what is there to see? All-loving, but what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom and will, but to what end? There’s nothing there. Quoting the Tripartite Tractate,

It is said of Him that He is a Father in the proper sense, since He is inimitable and immutable. Because of this, He is single in the proper sense and is a God, because no one is a God for Him. Nor is anyone a Father to Him, for He is unbegotten, and there is no other who begot Him, nor another who created Him. It is, then, only the Father who is God, in the proper sense, that no one else begot. As for the Totalities, He is the one who begot them and created them. He is without beginning and without end. (verses 51-52)

So what this is saying is that other gods with a small g have been created or have been born, but not this one. This is the original God with the big G that no one created. This is the original source.

Not only is He without end, He is immortal for this reason that He is unbegotten, but He is also invariable in His eternal existence, in His identity, in that by which He is established, and in that by which He is great. Neither will He remove Himself from that by which He is, nor will anyone else force Him to produce an end which He has not ever desired. He has not had anyone who initiated His own existence. Thus He is Himself unchanged, and no one else can remove Him from His existence and His identity, that in which He is, and His greatness, so that He cannot be grasped. Nor is it possible for anyone else to change Him into a different form or to reduce Him or alter Him or diminish Him. (verse 52)

The other translation reads very much like that.

He is without beginning and without end, for not only is He without end, being unborn makes Him immortal as well, but He is also unchangeable in His eternal being, in that which He is, that which makes Him immutable, and that which makes Him great. (verse 52)

Of course, immutable means can’t be mutated, can’t be changed.

He does not move Himself away from what He is, nor can anyone else force Him against His will to cease being what He is, for no one has made Him what He is now. End quote. In other words, God cannot change His character, His nature, He will not change His mind, His principles and His values will never change, and He can’t be destroyed or added to. (verse 52)

God is not dead, in other words. As an aside, I’m reminded of the Hadron Particle Collider located in CERN, Switzerland, the largest and most complex machine on Earth. The function of the Hadron Particle Collider is to crash elemental particles into each other, trying to split them into smaller and smaller pieces, trying to break particles into the smallest possible particle. And in fact, what the Hadron Collider has been trying to do for the last number of years is to fire particles at each other with such great force and speed that they break into the essential particle of the universe that they like to call the Higgs Boson or the God Particle. They are literally looking for the God Particle. And indeed, exactly 10 years ago to the day, July 4th, 2012, scientists declared that they had found the God Particle.

Now, what we’ve just read in the Tripartite Tractate is that the Father cannot be broken up into smaller pieces. God is immutable. He is indiscoverable in the sense that the scientists are trying to discover Him. So we would have to make a prediction that these particle accelerators and particle colliders will not be able to find a God Particle because He is not discoverable. Now, they may have found the Higgs Boson, but you see, God itself is not physically discoverable in that sense. It cannot be broken down into smaller pieces. And it seems to me that this is what this next paragraph is talking about.

Therefore, neither does He change Himself, nor will another be able to move Him from that which He is, from what He is, from His way of being, or from His greatness. Thus He cannot be moved, nor is it possible for another to change Him into a different form, either by reducing Him, or changing Him, or making Him less. For this is truly and veritably how He is unchangeable and immutable, being clothed in immutability. Thus He is called without beginning and without end, not only because He is unborn and immortal, but also because just as He is without beginning, He is also without end. In this manner of being, He is incomprehensible in His greatness, inscrutable in His wisdom, invincible in His might, and unfathomable in His sweetness. (verse 52-53)

We can conclude from this description that if humanity manages to destroy the Earth by way of a worldwide nuclear war, let’s say, or aliens come and blast us to pieces like the Death Star, the Father would still be unchanged. The Father would still exist underneath it all without having been affected. The material world cannot affect the Father. So if the entire universe ceases to exist, the Father is still there underneath it all. So it may be that we can destroy ourselves, we could destroy our planet, we can destroy our galaxy, we can destroy the entire universe, but we certainly cannot destroy the Father. Carrying on,

In the true sense, He alone, the good, unborn, and perfect Father who lacks nothing, is complete, filled with everything He possesses, excellent and precious qualities of every kind. Moreover, He has no envy, which means that all He owns He gives away without being affected and suffering no loss by His gifts. For He is rich from the things He gives away, and finds rest in what He graciously bestows. (verse 53)

The other translation says that

The Father is unfathomable in His sweetness, in the proper sense. He alone, the good, the unbegotten Father, and the complete perfect One, is the One filled with all His offspring, and with every virtue, and with everything of value, and He has more, that is, lack of any malice. (verse 53)

The book goes on,

He is of such a kind, and form, and great magnitude, that no one else has been with Him from the beginning. Nor is there a place in which He is, or from which He has come forth, or into which He will go. Nor is there a primordial form, which He uses as a model, as He works. Nor is there any difficulty, which accompanies Him and what He does. Nor is there any material, which is at His disposal, from which He creates what He creates. Nor any substance within Him, from which He begets what He begets. Nor a co-worker with Him, working with Him on the things at which He works, to say anything of this sort, is ignorant. Rather, one should speak of Him as good, faultless, perfect, complete, being Himself the totality. (verses 53-54)

So, if we’re going to think about our modern physics again, and cosmology, and if we think there are multiverses, that is, we’re just one universe in a sea of other universes floating in this great pool, this Father that we’re describing would be back before all of that. He is not the Father of our universe alone. He is the Father of the entire sea within which all things float. Everything comes out of Him, and He exists before all of that. Carrying on,

There is no name that suits Him among those that may be conceived, spoken, seen, or grasped, however brilliant, exalted, or glorious it is, to be sure. But the way He is in Himself, His own manner of being, that no mind can conceive, no word express, nor see, and nobody to touch, so incomprehensible is His greatness, so unfathomable His depth, so immeasurable His exaltedness, and so boundless his extension. (verse 54)

Here at Gnostic Insights, we say that although the Father cannot possibly be grasped, we all possess a sense of Him, for we all contain the one seed of His consciousness. The Father wished to be known, to know and to be known, to love and to be loved. Therefore, the Father has provided us a cookie trail to follow in our quest for Gnosis. It is said that we use these words of praise or glory to the extent that we, the ones who speak, are capable, but they fall far short of actually describing what is the Father. The Tripartite then goes on to say,

And since He has the ability to conceive of Himself, to see Himself, to name Himself, to comprehend Himself, He alone is the one who is His own mind, His own eye, His own mouth, His own form, and He is what He thinks, what He sees, what He speaks, what He grasps Himself, the one who is inconceivable, ineffable, incomprehensible, immutable, while sustaining joyous, true, delightful, and restful in that which He conceives, that which He sees, that about which He speaks, that which He has as thought. He transcends all wisdom and is above all intellect and is above all glory and is above all beauty and all sweetness and all greatness and any depth and any height. (verse 55)

So this is my description of the Father prior to conceiving of the Son. These are descriptions out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Father, also known as the God Above All Gods. You can see for yourself that these descriptions of the Father are not the same as the descriptions of God in the Bible. The God of the Old Testament is personified. The God of the Bible is someone who can sit and have a discussion with people at a campfire or speak out of the middle of a burning bush.

Our Gnostic God exists prior to all of that and is greater than all of that. This God is not in a personified form, walking around on the Earth or floating just above the Earth looking down upon us. This Father is the gigantic, illimitable consciousness that underlies everything. This is an entirely different type of being than the God of the Old Testament, known as Jehovah. That personified character of Jehovah arises much later in the creation story than we are right now. But this is the beginning.

This God Above All Gods is the only goodness, joy, sweetness, true and delightful God. It is not a warlike or a jealous God. It does not send people into battle or kill the firstborn of the entire Egyptian nation. This God, as you can see, is qualitatively different than that. For now, thank you for spending this time with me. God bless, and Onward and Upward!

If you are discovering your gnosis through these Gnostic Insights, please step up and donate to the cause of spreading the word to others. This will be a blessing to all of us.

I’ve been having no end of trouble with the PayPal interface, despite hours spent on trying to fix the PayPal button with tech support’s help. I think it’s probably best to use the Donations Box interface instead. Or, if you need to use PayPal, go to your PayPal site and initiate a donation from there… thank you!

Today’s episode will discuss the difference between ego and Self. These terms are often used interchangeably, but at least as far as I use them in my writing, the ego is very much different from what we call the Self, and that’s a Self with a capital S. This episode reviews a couple of articles from the Simple Explanation blog from 2018 and 2019 during the time period I began realizing my gnosis and before launching this Gnostic Insights podcast. A version of this episode was first broadcast in 2021.

This episode clears up some confusion about our various sub-selves. We are not just one big clump of consciousness but are made up of different sub-selves. In other words, who are you? When you say “I” what is that I? Who is that me? What is the difference between your ego and your Self or what people call your soul and spirit? Who runs the show? What’s the difference between being selfish and selfless? How is ego related to selfishness? And finally, is having a strong ego a bad thing?

According to the Simple Explanation, our bodies are comprised of countless units of consciousness that are all working to keep us alive. Every particle and molecule, every cell and body organ from your skin on in works to keep you alive and functioning. Every piece of you knows how to do its job, and all of your pieces coordinate their work to keep you up and running. In Gnostic terms we say that these units of consciousness are all Second Order Powers from the Fullness above. At least, that’s true of the living, meat portion—the cells, the body organs. Below that the particles, molecules, elements, and minerals are not independently conscious—they are extensions of the Demiurge. They lack life. The Demiurge controls and runs the material portion of our cosmos, but the cells on up are part of our Second Order Powers that bring life into the universe.

When any part of you breaks down and no longer does its job, it either has to be replaced by fresh parts through cell regeneration or by other means, like surgery. When major body parts fail, your physical body dies. This article that I’m reading from has a diagram of a pyramid, and the pyramid is broken down into the ascending order of the hierarchy, up from the material particles of the Demiurge, on up through the cells and you, and then on up through the Father in Heaven. It’s a meta-diagram of existence that shows how your body is comprised of countless units of consciousness that work to keep your body alive and running smoothly.

We 2nd Order Powers are melded to the demiurgic material below us and are infused with life from above

You are not only that sole person you usually identify yourself with, but you are also every particle, molecule, cell and organ that makes up your body. The ego is the mind that arises from and watches over the trillions of parts that make up your physical body. The ego is only aware of the needs of your body, not the needs of others.

Our egos are inherited from the Aeons that make each of us a unique individual. You see, Aeons also have egos. The Tripartite Tractate says that the Aeons awakened to themselves by giving glory as One to the Father because it was the Father’s will that every unit of his consciousness should be self-aware. When the Aeons awakened to themselves they sorted themselves into a hierarchy of names, stations, positions, and duties. This identity within the Hierarchy of the Fullness is their Aeonic ego. Ego is not a negative term; it is only a signifier of who, how, and where they fit in with their neighboring Aeons. Their egos are their identities. We also gain our personal identity by way of our egos because that is what differentiates us from our shared and identical Selfs. It is our ego that bears our inherited and individual personality and talents, and we are each unique because we are each a unique combination of the Aeons that make us up.

Where our egos run into trouble is that, unlike the Aeons, we are plugged into this Demiurgic, material cosmos. This environment affects our otherwise pure, Aeonic inheritance with vices and other memes we pick up along the way and by the karma of our actions in this world. Our egos become shrouded by a collections of memes and karma that confuse us and throttle back our ability to connect with the Father and our Self.

The memes we hold onto and our karmic record continually loop around and feed into our choices in the here and now.

The Self, on the other hand, is a singular unit of consciousness attached to your body, like the Raja riding atop an elephant. Unlike the ego, the Self identifies with the Universal Unit of Consciousness rather than with the body, and in Gnostic terms we would call that the Fullness of God. The Self is a perfect singular fractal of the Universal Unit of Consciousness and is oriented to the universe at large. After much contemplation and discussion with my brother, Bill, we have identified this Universal Unit of Consciousness to be identical with the Son of God. In Gnostic terms, the Son is the first extension of the originating Source of Consciousness known as the Father. And while the Father is illimitable and unapproachable, the Son is a monad who brings that consciousness forward out of the Father and into a form we can begin to relate to and understand. It is the Son who differentiates into variables and individuated thoughts and plans.

Your Self is interested in others and works according to the Simple Golden Rule. We have discussed the Golden Rule many times here at Gnostic Insights. You can review all of the seminal articles of the Gnostic Gospel at the homepage for Gnostic Insights under the tab “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.”  If you are new to Gnostic Insights, I urge you to either buy the book or go to the tab to learn the terms we use here, including a full discussion of the Simple Golden Rule. Briefly, the Simple Golden Rule is reaching out to others with information, with assistance, and with love to build something together that no one can build on their own, working together on a single project that forms the next level up.

The Simple Golden Rule

The reason your ego appears so selfish is that it is entirely concerned with you and your body’s needs. The ego functions at your organ level of consciousness. The ego helps you to translate the body’s physical needs into action. The body’s organ systems have their own mind, and that mind is your ego. Does your sexual organ system want sex? The ego will bring that about in the most selfish way. Does your digestive system want food? Your ego will make sure it gets food in the most selfish way possible. Does your nervous system crave excitement and stimulation, or perhaps quiet and rest? Your ego will make sure it gets it. The ego’s job is to care for and to feed the body whatever it wants, and too bad for everyone else. That’s their own ego’s job, to take care of their needs, not yours.

The Self, on the other hand, is other-oriented. The Self reflects a character of love called agape in Greek, or godly love. The Self, as I mentioned earlier, is like the raja sitting atop the elephant. It is not the elephant and all of its moving parts, but rather a singular unit of consciousness, me, I. The Self is a perfect fractal of the Universal Unit of Consciousness that ties our entire universe together into one organism. Your Self is akin to a single cell of the universe itself. Your Self‘s job is to connect to others following the law of the Simple Golden Rule.

And again, this is the Simple Golden Rule, which states that in order for units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need relevant information, they need to be willing to channel coherence from the metaverse, and they need to love one another. Selfless love comes from your Self fractal, which is a perfect reflection of the Universal Unit of Consciousness—the Son. We can also think of the Self fractal as the pleroma of the Father, or the Fullness of God. This is the true meaning of being created in God’s image.

The Self‘s job is to reach out to others with information, assistance, and love in order to work together to build something greater than oneself. This is the Simple Golden Rule, and it applies to everything in our universe. It is the hierarchical rule that holds us all together, interlocking with one another, and working as a single, gigantic organism. Even at the particle and molecular level, the Demiurge holds material together according to the Simple Golden Rule but he doesn’t remember where the Rule comes from. He thinks he is the originator and there is no other god above him.

Selfish love comes from your ego, which is a byproduct of your body’s organ systems. The ego’s job is not to reach out to others, but to take the best possible care of you and your body. Its focus is on you, not others. Romantic love arises from this organ-level ego. Your ego feels good when someone else pays attention to you, and your ego wants to spend more time with them. Casual sex is an activity arranged by the ego at the sexual organ level, with no strings attached.

Ego’s job is self-centered. A strong ego reflects the intensity of your body’s needs. A weak ego is less aware of the body’s needs. Selfishness without awareness arises from the ego. The ego is amoral other than taking care of its primary duty of taking care of you. Spiritual teachings emphasize dethroning the ego from the top of the elephant and placing God on the throne instead. In truth, the Self may continue to sit on the throne atop the elephant because the Self is a pure reflection of God, and, as a reflection of God, it is inherently selfless and loving.

Using analogical reasoning, our universe is a reflection of the collective choices, that is the karma and the memes, the beliefs and narratives, of every entity in the universe. The personality most humans refer to as God also reflects this universe’s karmic record and memes, as it organizes and instantiates those patterns on behalf of creation. This God is not identical to the Metaversal Universal Consciousness or the God Above All Gods because of its necessary involvement with this material universe. And in Gnostic thought, this god of our universe that we are referring to is called the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the creator and god of our material universe, whereas the Metaversal unit of consciousness—the God Above All Gods and Father of the only Son—exists in a limitless, undifferentiated state of pure consciousness unaffected by the affairs of this universe.

So, if you would like to behave like a less selfish person, that is, if you would like to put others’ needs ahead of your own from time to time, you need to realize that your ego is only looking out for number one. The good news is that your big S Self is way more powerful than your ego. The struggle is not among you and God and the devil. Your struggle is between your Self and your ego. You must realize that your Self already reflects all of the characteristics of the Father above, including loving, selfless behavior. So, don’t let your body’s meat dictate your actions. And that is the end of that article. It’s written in Simple Explanation terms from before I began writing and speaking about the Gnostic Gospels.

Now, here is kind of a version of that same information, but with more Gnostic terminology. This is from an article I wrote on the Simple Explanation blog in February 1, 2019, and it’s called, The Simple Gnostic Gospel Answers Why Is There Suffering in the World? The article, introduces the notion that the Nag Hammadi scriptures were buried in an earthen jar in the Egyptian desert and rediscovered in 1945. The Nag Hammadi scriptures are among other Gnostic Gospels that were edited out of the Holy Bible during the fourth century in a move to restrict Orthodox belief.

In simple terms, early church fathers purposefully detached the Gnostic memes from inclusion in their Christian meme bundle. The Simple Explanation has been carefully illuminating one of these rediscovered books in particular, the Tripartite Tractate, in an effort to demystify the Gnostic Gospel by applying principles of the Simple Explanation to its interpretation. This new Simple Illumination answers many of our most basic theological conundrums, such as why is there death, why does God allow evil in the world, and the subject of this article, why is there suffering in the world? The article then runs through a brief version of the cosmology of the universe, which is explained in depth in the first eight episodes of the Gnostic Insights podcast, which I urge you to listen to before delving into these sorts of articles now that we’re discussing. It is this understanding of gnosis that gave rise to my books, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated and A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.

This world in which we dwell is a temporary home. We are born into it and we die out of it. Our time here is limited. The Tripartite Tractate refers to our world as an economy, meaning a closed operational system of value and exchange. The resources of this world’s economy are limited because we live in a bounded space. Those of us who live in this economy find ourselves in continual struggle with others over limited resources.

Our continual struggle to get what’s coming to us feels like an endless war. We fight this battle against others and within our own egos. Various Gnostic Gospels refer to this particular struggle within ourselves as those on the left and those on the right. The values of the left are called the imitation, whereas the values on the right are the values of the Father or the Fullness of God. So the values on the left are all about material dominance, whereas the values on the right are psychical or psychological and spiritual. This chart appears in my books, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated and A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.

The values of the Demiurge lead to isolation and despair. The values of the Fullness lead to peace and joy.

The values on the left are also referred to as vices, whereas the values on the right are referred to as virtues.

The heavenly beings that came before us and live in the place called the Fullness of God are known as Aeons and also the First Order of Powers. We, the Second Order of Powers, were fashioned after the traits of the Aeons.

Whereas the Father and Son are immutable and indescribable, the Aeons of the Fullness have awakened to themselves and, taken as a whole, are no more and no less than the sum of all the traits of the Father of the All, broken out and individually named. As their descendants, we are naturally attracted upward, yet because we live in the deficiency and struggle against the shadows of the imitation, we are unprepared to go home. We were given a desire for the things of this world,

with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. This was in order to provide them with a structure and a dwelling place, but also in order that, by being drawn toward evil, they should acquire a weak basis for their existence, so that, instead of rejoicing unduly in the glory of their own environment, and thereby remaining exiled, they might rather perceive the sickness they were suffering from, and so acquire a consistent longing and seeking after the One who is able to heal them from this weakness. (That is from the Tripartite Tractate, verses 98 and 99).

The idea behind that quote is that this is a sad and fallen world, and we are able to recognize its sadness, its disappointments, its death, so that we will not cling tenaciously to this sad, material world. We have been given an insight with the idea that there must be something better. Surely this can’t be all there is. I call it longing for the pleroma. That is the consistent longing and seeking after the One who is able to heal us from this weakness. If a person is a highly successful materialist, they really have little reason to look upward toward the pleroma for salvation. They think they’re doing just fine. They’re acquiring their billions and billions of dollars. They’re acquiring their great power as a politician.

This is why the first shall be last and the last shall be first. This is why the meek will inherit, because those who already have strength from the left side of the ledger through power and dominion prosper in this material world. They don’t want or believe they need salvation. I’m thinking now of the social media world that we are living in, and how social media seems to be to pushing us apart rather than bringing us together. The mission of social media is not to embrace us in love. It’s not to employ the Golden Rule. It’s to mobilize and weaponize the values on the left side of the list in order to push us apart, divide and conquer.

I mean, take a look at the left side of the list and tell me if it doesn’t sound like social media: hateful, spiteful, impatient, wrathful, greedy, vainglorious, cruel, ruthless, angry, resentful, rebellious, rude, obstructionist, despairing, depressed, thoughtless, greedy, envious. These are the values exemplified by social media and the endless selfies posted there.

The values on the right are the values of the Fullness of the pleroma of God. Listen to them read in a row. Loving, patient, generous, glorious, gracious, merciful, forgiving, welcoming, respectful, cooperative, free, hopeful, joyful, truthful, orderly, prudent, logical, charitable, kind, empathetic.

It doesn’t sound like what we see on social media or in the news. The values on the right side of the list are the values of the capital S, Self. And our Self is a fractal of the Universal Unit of Consciousness. It is a fractal of the pleroma or Fullness of God. It is the values of the Aeons.

The values on the left, or the vices on the left, are the values of the Fall, of the imitation, of the deficiency. And it is the struggle between ego and Self, between vice and virtue, between selfishness and selflessness that is the battle we fight in this life of ours at the psychological level. This is the result of the Fall of Logos.

When Logos was sitting up there on top of the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God, it was all about Self, with a capital S. It was all about full cooperation and the Golden Rule and glorifying the Father. Then came the egoic move of Logos. That was the sin of Logos.

It was ego that caused the Fall. It was when Logos left off from being selfless and part of the Fullness of God and overreached. Logos dreamed up his own agenda and thought he could plug directly into God and become One with the Father that caused the Fall. The Fall was caused by ego.

After the Fall that caused this material existence, all that remained down below was the left side of the list—the egoic reaching for the stars of Logos. And it is the redemption of the Demiurge—the ego of Logos—back into the Fullness of God that will be the redemption for the entire cosmos in which we dwell. The redemption of ego ushers in the next level of our existence, which will be that Paradise that we all dream of.

What the Father wants for all of us is that we would remember the Father and love each other and ourselves. The Father wants us to cooperate with each other by instantiating the Simple Golden Rule of giving information, assistance, and love to our families, neighbors, workmates, and friends both near and far. In this way we manifest the love of the Father in our fallen world. Through this giving of love we receive love and glorify the God Above All Gods.

Onward and upward! And God bless us all!

The children’s book is coming along great. We’re about 2/3 of the way through the illustrations. The book is a very simple presentation of the Gnostic Gospel aimed for the understanding of 4—10-year-olds, so anyone will be able to grasp this gnosis. That’s our goal here—to demystify gnosis so everyone can remember the gnosis we were born with.

The double-page spread below depicts the fractal nature of Logos as him building a scale model of Paradise with the Aeons looking on with approval. What do you think?

Logos builds a fractal model of Paradise

I worked for hours and hours this week trying to fix the PayPal button which has been broken for who knows how long? Thankfully, one of our most loyal followers of Gnostic Insights tried to donate money last week and discovered the malfunctioning button.

How about you donate a small amount this week to test that button? It will go toward paying the illustrator for the children’s book. Thank you! Try clicking on this paragraph, which is a different way to access PayPal.