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.
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.
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 eachindividual 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.
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.
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.
Until next week, God bless us all. Onward and upward!
A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel Is Here
Saturday, August 31, 2024 • Duration 19:14
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 Gospelis 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.
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What Is Gnosis?
Saturday, August 17, 2024 • Duration 25:58
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.
The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise.
Reforming Gnosticism
Saturday, February 28, 2026 • Duration 23:59
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 ASimple 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 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.
The Demiurge cannot bring life and consciousness to the mud. [illustration from Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth]
Another Gnostic Christmas
Saturday, December 20, 2025 • Duration 21:57
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 hierarchy of the Fullness of God dreams of Paradise. Logos crowns the hierarchy and contains fractals of all the other Aeons.
The Final Economy is our foretaste of Paradise. No more shadows, no more sorrow.
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Children of the Fullness Gnostic Cosmology
Friday, December 5, 2025 • Duration 22:28
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.
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.
The values of the Demiurge lead to isolation and despair. The values of the Fullness lead to peace and joy.
The Key to Gnostic Cosmology
Friday, November 28, 2025 • Duration 25:31
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.
Logos crowned the top of the Fullness with fractals of all the other Aeons.
The Third Economy is the dream of Paradise the cosmos will instantiate after this Second Economy dissolves at the end of time.
15 steps in Gnostic Cosmology
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!
Item A - $10.00
Item B - $25.00
Item C - $50.00
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?
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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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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