Logos and Sophia
This episode begins and ends with samples from the audio version of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel narrated by Miguel Conner.
I’ve been listening to the recording of Miguel Conner reading A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and it’s beautiful. It is thrilling. You’re absolutely going to want a copy of this because you can listen to it while you’re doing other things. I’ve been monitoring it, listening for audio errors, and doing all of my household tasks and ironing and washing dishes and whatnot while I’m listening to A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. It’s really neat. Here’s a sample.
Chapter 2, The Emanation of the Son and the All. The purpose of this book is to help us all remember the Gnosis we were born with, the knowledge of where we come from, and the nature of the originating consciousness that existed before us. Gnosis also involves understanding our personal relationship to that originating consciousness.
Chapter 1 began by sharing information about the Father, which is the name given to the originating consciousness. Imagine that this Father then gives birth to an emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation philosophy, we call this emanation a fractal. We’ll look at fractals later in the book because they play a big part in creation. In the religious texts, they call this emanation the Sun. Now we have a Father and a Son.
In the silence of the Absolute, the Father brings forth the first and only Son. By knowing Himself in Himself, the Father bore Him without generation, so that He exists by the Father having Him as a thought. That is, His thought about Himself, His sensation of Himself, and of His eternal being.
The Son is not the generalized, diffuse, no-thought consciousness of the Father, but more like a bucket dipped into the ocean, with the Father being the ocean. The Son is the essence of the Father now contained within the bucket. The Son is exactly the same consciousness as the Father, now realized as a particularity. The Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. Boundless because the Father’s greatness continues to flow unimpeded through the Son. The Father brought Him forth while He remained united with the One from whom He had gone forth, receiving glory together. The Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells. Every trait of the Father is now expressed as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. We will also be looking at singularities, monads, and points of view in more depth later in the book.
And yet, although it was a singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone. For not only the Son, but what is called the All, and all the totalities arose at once. The All immediately appeared as aspects of the Son, because the Son could not help itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father.
The Son embodies the Father’s creativity. The Father knows itself and creates the Son, and the Son knows itself as the body of the All. The Tripartite Tractate says,
“He was given them as delight and nourishment, joy and abundant illumination. And this is His compassion, the knowledge He provides, and His union with them. And this is He who is called, and who is the Son. He is the sum of the All, and they have understood who He is, and He is clothed.”
The word clothed means the Son wears the All like a garment the same way our Self wears our body. In the Tripartite Tractate, the All is known as the preexistent church.
This is not the same as your church down on the street corner with people singing hymns on Sunday, but rather this is called the true preexistent church. The Tripartite Tractate says, “For not only the Son, but also the church exists from the beginning. His offspring, the ones who are, are without number and limit, and at the same time indivisible.” This indicates that the Son and the church arose simultaneously. This makes sense when we consider the All is the body of the Son. They are infinite in scope and indivisible because they fully reflect the Father’s illimitable scope.
In last week’s episode, I began sharing an article I wrote in 2019, when I first began interpreting gnosticism through the lens of my theory of everything called “A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.” We’re picking up where I left off in that episode, so if you have not listened to it or read it yet, you may wish to begin there at last week’s episode. We’re talking about the fall of consciousness away from the purity of the ethereal realm as represented by our One Self, and spreading out into the myriad units of consciousness down here in the material universe.
According to Gnostic texts, our universe was created when one of the Aeons deviated from its place in the Fullness of God and headed out on its own without consent. Most books of the Nag Hammadi identify this Aeon as “Sophia,” while others identify it as the Aeon called “Logos.” My own interpretation of the Gnostic gospel, presented in The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated andA Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel identifies this Aeon with Logos. By the way, “Logos” in Greek means “the Word” or knowledge. “Sophia” in Greek means “wisdom,” so they are obviously related terms, possibly referring to the same Aeon.
The Gnostic gospels are religious books, and their rendition of these events carries implicit religious moral judgments. The Aeon who left to strike out on its own is said to have “Fallen,” which is typically considered a bad thing. This “Fall” is the original Fall referenced in the Bible, not the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden, although we may consider the Garden as another word for the Paradise dreamt by the Fullness, and a reference to the same Fall as that of the Aeon. In either event, Adam and Eve’s Fall is a fractal of the same archetypal concept. In my view, the Fall represents the rise of the Ego away from true Self, as this archetypal Aeon acted on its own presumptuous thought and motives, apart from the will of the Father and the Fullness.
Here is where we catch back up with the Simple Explanation cosmogony. The Simple Explanation characterizes the Fall as simply the Metaverse having a Thought:
Then consciousness had a thought. This multidimensional Metaverse still lacked space and time but it now quivered with limitless mathematical potential unfolding into countless dimensions. In a twinkling, our entire universe was imagined in the fullness of its complexity, from the tiniest quanta through the greatest astral body; every animal, vegetable, and mineral; every element. Every thing and every function.
Once the Metaverse had a particular thought, thought became an object in the great sea of no-thought… On this day that time began, consciousness wrapped itself around our universe, forming a border between us and infinity. Mind took on a shape.
In the Simple Explanation, this shape is a torus-shaped container composed of conscious thought and its concept of this universe, which I call the Universal Unit of Consciousness (Universal UC). In Gnostic terms, this universal “border” was thrown around the Fallen Aeon to limit its influence and hold it away from the Fullness until such time as the Fallen can be redeemed and brought back into the Pleroma. The Universal Unit of Consciousness “sits” within the Metaverse and remains in communication with it, although in the case of the Demiurge it is not aware of it.
As I said, Gnostic texts differ in their identification of the Fallen Aeon as either Sophia or Logos, although they seem to agree the Fallen produced this universe and its ruler. Once the Aeon fell, its abilities and plans spread throughout the contained space and created our universe. It is said that the Fallen Aeon was horrified by what was created and it retreated to the Fullness to figure out how to rectify the result of the Fall. Within the Pleroma a plan was hatched to deal with it.
Away from the Pleroma, contained within this newly formed space and time, a separated entity with all knowledge of this place became aware of itself. This entity thought it was the prime parent of the universe because it was not aware of the Pleroma or the Father and Son. This creator-god is called by Gnostics “the Demiurge.” The Old and New Testaments call it the creator-god “Yahweh.” One of the great heresies of Gnosticism is our identification of the creator-god as a product of the Fall rather than the “God above gods,” or the true “Father.”
Because it is the result of the Fall and separated from both the Father and the Pleroma, the universe produced by the Demiurge is devoid of life. It is called the “Deficiency.” The Deficiency is populated by small, lifeless things–things that are “shadows” of those that live in the Fullness. It is also populated by forces and principalities that arose from and were left behind by the Fallen Aeon. The Simple Explanation, being science and math based rather than religious, does not identify this universe as Fallen in the negative sense of being deficient. It is merely limited by localized monads replacing the omnipresent Metaverse.
Looking at the hierarchical diagram above, the Demiurge sits near the bottom, producing the minerals of our universe. As the Demiurge is contained away from the Father/Metaversal consciousness, it lacks the life force and love that characterize the Father. The Demiurge can only produce lifeless matter—what I call “mud.” The Demiurge is able to animate the mud by means of the forces and principalities contained within the Border. A good example of animated mud is viruses. Viruses are not alive, yet they are amazingly complex molecules that are able to carry out far-ranging search and destroy missions. It is also thought that the Demiurge produces lifeless entities out of pure force rather than material. These disembodied entities are called “archons.” Archons are the offspring and servants of the Demiurge. And, in Christian parlance, archons are known as “demons.”
At this point in the story, many Gnostic texts explain how the Demiurge mated with the life-force carried by Sophia to produce living creatures out of the mud. Again, this is a religious or mythological description of the process of bringing consciousness to matter. Sophia is given the title of the Mother of Creation, bringing life to the universe. Her mission was authorized; it was the plan cooked up by the Fullness to redeem creation from the Fall.
Earlier in my studies, the Simple Explanation identified Sophia as the Universal Unit of Consciousness, but we have since revised that identification from Sophia to the Demiurge, Sophia is not technically within the Universe but remains outside of it. Sophia resides on the outside of the fractal border that holds the universe apart from the Metaverse. As such, she is pressed up against the Metaverse and also part of the toroidal flow, and it is this flow that pushes the life-force and consciousness out through the zero-point field at the center of the universal torus. In Gnostic terms, Sophia rides upon the outside of the Border, which I identify as “the waters” of ancient texts. It is said that Sophia’s “face” “presses against the waters” and can be seen by the Demiurge, contained within the Border.
My later studies of gnosticism focus on the Tripartite Tractate, which leaves the myth of Sophia entirely out of the creation story. My brother, Bill, finds all of this talk of Sophia’s role in creation to be strictly mythological and inaccurate. Bill prefers leaving Sophia out of the story entirely as a distraction from the simplicity of the Tripartite Tractate. I resolve this difference as thinking of Sophia as the mechanism that brings the life of the Fullness into the inert material of the cosmos. The Tripartite refers to such a mechanism, but leaves off the mythology of Sophia’s “fall.” However, those of you who have studied other gnostic books that feature Sophia, may find the reference useful at this point in the cosmogeny.
Many ancient Gnostic texts say that Sophia mated with the Demiurge to produce the living creatures of our universe. Another way of saying this is that dead matter is imbued with life and consciousness at the point where it emerges from the zero-point field at the center of the Universal Unit of Consciousness. Every living thing has its life force attached to the “mud” of its body at the point of conception. It is the consciousness given by the Father through the actions of Sophia melding with the otherwise dead material produced by the Demiurge that brings life to our universe.
The Simple Explanation puts it this way:
As the torus of our universe expanded, over and over and over again, echoes of the Universal Unit of Consciousness attached themselves to the particles streaming out of the center, each Unit of Consciousness (UC) with a particular, localized, point of view.
This is how “mud” becomes “meat.” It is through this process of populating the universe with consciousness that the Fall and the Deficiency is made whole—that is the job of us Second Order Powers. After that, Christ and the Third Order Powers bring complete remembrance of the Father and redemption from the Fall as they gather us all up to go home.
Gnostics can use this fresh insight to figure out other aspects of Gnostic belief, such as the relative strength and power of entities created by the Demiurge versus entities imbued with the life force of the Fullness of God, that being the true Father and the God above the god of this material sphere. The Tripartite Tractate says the life forms of this universe are the Second Order Powers sent to do battle with the forces of the Deficiency. We have been assured that the power that is in us is greater than the power that is in the world. I hope this article and the hierarchical diagram helps you to realize this.
Hey, in case you’re new to the podcast, and if you haven’t heard yet, my latest book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, is available in all formats, paperback, hardback, and e-book on Amazon.com and through my website here at GnosticInsights.com. The audio version will be released soon. I’m still editing it. That’s taking longer than I expected it would take. But it’s really wonderful, even if you have a print edition of the book. This episode was kind of short, I think. So, here’s another preview to tack on at the back end here of the audio.
Chapter 14, Overcoming Death. As I explained in Chapter 10, the governing unit of consciousness that I think of as me is affected by my ongoing karma and its associated meme bundle, overlaid upon my aeonic personality. What then, if anything, do I carry away with me when my body passes away and I am no longer attached to this material vessel? What happens to us when we pass on? That the me that exists between material incarnations is nothing but our karmic record and egoic identity is proved by one of our basic propositions that all selves are fundamentally one and the same, and that all units of consciousness begin their individuated journey as perfect fractal echoes of the Fullness of God. It follows, then, that I develop as a result of free will choices made by myself and others.
The memes I think of as me are not part of my one Self, but are drawn to my unit of consciousness through my ego’s karmic record. It is my karmic record that attracts and repels the shrouds of memes surrounding my life at any moment. The personality associated with me is a representation of the holographic pattern of all the choices I have ever made, overlaid upon my unit of consciousness.
I am my perfect unit of consciousness, enshrouded in karma and the memes that my karma attracts. In yogic philosophy, it is said that an enlightened yogi has become free of attachments and can therefore perceive the oneness of all things. The Simple Explanation of this phenomenon would be that the yogi has successfully laid down his or her meme shroud and can, therefore, perceive his or her perfect unit of consciousness, freed of personal memes and independent from its karmic shroud. The same phenomenon is known as Buddhahood in Buddhism and Sainthood in Christianity. According to tradition, these liberated units of consciousness are no longer bound to this material world by their now discarded memes. If they do return to Earth, it is to help others by sharing love and information that will help redeem others.
This chapter of the book is not from the Tripartite Tractate, but rather from the Bardo Thodol, known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The full title of the Bardo Thodol can be translated as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State. The Bardo Thodol is part of a larger volume called The Profound Dharma of Self-Liberation Through the Intention of the Peaceful and Wrathful Ones.
You may wonder why we are talking about this book because you may not consider it to be a Gnostic text. I look at Gnosticism as the truth that comes from the Father above and spreads out universally. Gnostic wisdom doesn’t have to come through what are considered to be historically Gnostic sources. Many people look at Gnosticism as simply an historical sect and, because they think of it in historical terms, they only want to consider texts such as the Nag Hammadi Scriptures or the Qumran Scrolls. These are, indeed, the traditional Gnostic texts. This volume has already shared some of the Tao Te Ching, which is Chinese wisdom that also reflects the same universal truths presented by traditionally Gnostic scriptures.
This chapter takes a look at the Tibetan Book of the Dead in the same way to see what gnosis we can mine there. The Bardo Thodol presents truths that have come through the Father and the fullness by way of Tibetan Buddhism. However, one needn’t be a Tibetan Buddhist to appreciate the wisdom that has been shared through the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Blessings. Onward and upward!