Gnostic Insights The Big Picture–Gnostic Cosmology
I thought today what we’d look at is the entire run—the overall big picture. You can’t get a bigger picture than this of our existence and our universe. So this is the overall, overarching flow of consciousness from the Source to us and then after we pass how it all rolls up. This is the entire run, or cosmology, all rolled up into one package and presented for you today.
All of this comes from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. The Nag Hammadi was a set of ancient books that were dug up out of the desert in Egypt in 1945. It’s like a movie plot, this discovery of the Nag Hammadi, what are called codices, (and a codex is a one of the original books when they were changing from writing all books out as scrolls that you had to unroll to putting them into our current form of a book, which is pages between the covers). So this gnosis comes from one of those books out of the Nag Hammadi codices, (codices is the plural for codex), called the Tripartite Tractate, which is considered one of the most difficult books of the Nag Hammadi to understand but I find it the easiest to understand so that’s why I focus on it. So let’s get into the entire run of consciousness.
What I’m using for my visual reference for this episode is the Gnostic cosmogony diagram that appears on the last page of my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, which of course you can pick up at Amazon and that’s what I’ll be referring to. So if you have the book you can go grab it and follow along in the diagram or if you’re listening on an audio podcast this would be a good episode for you to go to GnosticInsights.com at some point and look at the illustrations that accompany this discussion. All right, so we’re looking at the entire run of consciousness.
1: It begins with what we call the Father, other people call it the Source, and that is consciousness itself. The base state, the ground state of everything is just awareness, consciousness—that’s where everything comes from. In my diagrams I picture it as the page itself upon which this story now is to be written.
2: The consciousness of the Father admired itself and in so doing it made itself into another entity that we call the Son. It could be called the Child, it’s not gendered. So you have now the Father and the Son and the Son is the complete encapsulation of the Father.
The Son is the bucket dipped into the sea of consciousness. It contains everything that the Father contains except it’s now in a place. It has a point of view; it’s a singularity; it’s a monad. So instead of being everywhere, omniscient, omnipresent, unfathomable Source, it’s now a person, a personified place with its own self-awareness. And it says in the Tripartite Tractate that the Father and Son admired each other. The Son didn’t leave the Father—the Son stays plugged into the Father at all times. It has an umbilical cord, so to speak, that remains one with the Father. The Son and the Father have identical consciousness. And because the Son has the consciousness or the characteristics of the Father, it’s the complete encapsulation of the Father. It has the same creative drive, the same spark of identity and power as the Father.
3: And because of this creative nature of the Father and the Son, the Son immediately fractured itself into, well, we’re talking about the Son, S-O-N, but the Son is also like a sun, an S-U-N, in that it fractured itself into all of the rays. Generally, I picture the Son as a diffuse cloud, like fog, sitting within the inky blackness of the Father’s underlying ground structure. But the Son immediately bursts into all of its components, into every possible expression of itself, every variable, every thought that would ever be. And so instead of the fog now, it’s like a sunshine. It’s like a glowing body that throws out rays in all directions. And that stage of the Son is known as the ALL. ALL for One and One for ALL, I think of as their motto.
Now, each of those individual rays of the Son had no self-identity at first. They were simply part of the Son, the way that you’re walking around clothed in your body. You’ve got all of the cells of your body, and everywhere you go, your body goes with you, doesn’t it? And all of those cells and all of those parts of your body form you. Well, that’s the way that the ALL is to the Son. That’s the same relationship.
The ALL is the manifestation body of all of the variables of the Son. So now, instead of the Son being gigantic and unapproachable and illimitable, it is now broken up into an infinite number of variables.
And the ALL admired the Father and the Son, and loved them and sang hymns to them. So in their singing together and giving praise and glory to the Father and the Son, the ALL became self-aware. All of those variables became self-aware. They weren’t all just part of one thing. They were now each an individual within that thing. They were still singing in complete unison. They were all still part of the same body, but now they had individual components, and they were all self-aware. 4: And so when they all became self-aware, it formed immediately. There’s no time in this place. So these things all essentially happen, boom, boom, boom, immediately.
5: The self-aware ALL sorted itself, named itself. Each one took up a place and a name and a duty, and they sorted themselves into what’s called a hierarchy. And the reason a hierarchy looks like a pyramid is because the higher, the fewer. So there’s more entities taking up the very bottom of the pyramid, and then fewer and fewer and fewer as you go up. That’s what a hierarchy is. And this isn’t a hierarchy in the way that humans think of hierarchies with power plays and manipulation and control. It’s not like that. It’s a willing hierarchy. They sorted themselves. They each had their own place.
Again, to make the analogy to our body, the feet are at the bottom of our body, and then you have your legs, you have your torso. These are in a certain hierarchy. They’re in a certain order, and the feet aren’t up sitting on our heads or on our shoulders or at the ends of our hands. Our hands are different than our feet. So they each had a duty. They each had a name. They each had a place wherein they could fulfill the duties or responsibilities that they had. They still sat and sang and gave glory to the Father and the Son. This now, though, is called the Fullness of God, or the pleroma of God, the hierarchy of God. These are all words for this stage that looks like a hierarchy, which is pictured in my diagrams as a pyramid type of structure.
The initial sorting was just the beginning of the Fullness of God, because as they sang together and gave glory to the Father and the Son in their hierarchy, they sang in different combinations of themselves. It’s like the tenors and the altos and the basses and the sopranos in a choir. They each had sections, and each of these different combinations of the Fullnesses, or what are called the Aeons, A-E-O-N-S, these different combinations began to procreate. They birthed more of themselves that were based upon their combinations, like the way a mother and father combine and birth an offspring, a child.
The Aeons did the same thing as they were sitting there in their hierarchy, and through singing together in various combinations, giving glory to God, they birthed more and more and more Aeons. It’s an infinite set because it represents the Fullness of an infinite God, you see.
5: One of the things that the Fullness of God does, the pleroma, is they not only sing and give glory to the Father, but they dream together. What they dreamed up was what we call heaven or paradise. It’s the dream of the Aeons. I have that represented in my drawing as a thought bubble coming out of that hierarchy, and it contains a beautiful picture of paradise, of Eden.
The Tripartite Tractate says that the final Aeon to be produced out of all possible combinations was an Aeon that sat at the very top. He topped the pyramid. He was the most perfect and beautiful Aeon ever produced by the Fullness, and he, or it, was a combination of all of the other Aeons.
It contains within itself, within its skin, a fractal of all of the other Aeons of the Fullness of God. And so, in my diagrams, I picture this small pyramid sitting on top of, as the capstone, the larger pyramid of the pleroma, or fullness of God. And it’s very interesting that this really resembles so many depictions of the pyramids in Egypt.
They’re hierarchies. There’s more stones at the bottom than at the top. That’s why it gets smaller as it goes up to the top.
And sitting at the very top is a pyramidal-shaped capstone. Well, that capstone, that final Aeon to be produced in the Tripartite Tractate, is known as Logos, L-O-G-O-S, Logos. And Logos contained within itself fractals of all the other Aeons.
Logos was sitting at the very top of the hierarchy. It didn’t have any next-door neighbors. It didn’t have anyone above it. And it seems to me that what caused Logos to stumble was his lack of relation to others. He was all by himself. He was an isolated ego sitting up there at the top.
Oh, by the way, when the Aeons came to self-awareness, that self-awareness is the originating form of what we call the ego, because the ego is a designation of yourself, isn’t it? It’s a designation of your place. It relates to its neighbors. It carries around its job. It keeps that in mind. It does all of these things. Within the Fullness, or the pleroma, they all share the one big Self, because they are actually the sorted Fullness, the sorted ALL, which itself is absolutely coexistent with the Son.
So nothing has changed. There’s no more or different consciousness. It’s all the same consciousness flowing, but it’s becoming more and more particularized. It’s becoming more localized, and many, many more. Now you have an infinite number of egos sitting in the pleroma of God. It’s not a bad thing—that’s just their name. It’s their designation.
6: Except that Logos, his ego, launched him out into space. This Logos, containing within itself fractals of the entire hierarchy of the Fullness of God—I think it mistook itself for the hierarchy of God. And so it thought whatever the overall mission of the hierarchy was, it could take care of on its own. And what it wanted to do, of course, because their entire job basically has to do with giving glory to God, giving glory to the Father and the Son and dreaming together of Paradise, well, Logos decided to reunite with the Father.
It says in the Tripartite Tractate that we shouldn’t blame Logos for going out on its own, because it was trying to do a good thing. It was trying to reunite with the Father. It wasn’t trying to take over heaven or to become God. It was trying to plug back into the originating consciousness in the same exact way that the Son remains plugged in to the Father. So he launched himself, he forgot his duty, which was to be the capstone, and he launched himself out into the realm of goodness, into the realm of the everlasting Father. But he could not plug back into the Father. And that was a protective mechanism for Logos, because the Tripartite Tractate says, if he had been able to reunite with the Father, he would have been annihilated.
You know, the Buddhist religion thinks that we’re all annihilated after we pass away and lose our bodies—that we are annihilated when we plug back into the Father. But that is not what Gnostic cosmology says, and that is not what Christianity says either. You remain yourself after you pass away. But that’s way down the line. We’re getting ahead of ourselves.
7: So in order to protect the Self-identity of Logos, so that Logos would not be annihilated, instead of plugging into the Father, he faltered and looked into the darkness instead, it says. And he fell. And this is the Fall. This is the big original Fall. He fell out of the ethereal plane, essentially. He fell away from the Fullness of God.
And he crash landed into nothingness out there. The Tripartite Tractate says that all of the glorious things he meant to produce—what came from him instead was nothing like that. His Pleroma, all of his fractals, fell out of harmony because they no longer worked according to the golden rule of harmony and focus on a project.
8: He broke apart. He fell. He crashed. He was no longer this beautiful, glorious, hierarchically arranged being, containing all of those fractals of the Fullness. Now they were just broken apart and crumbled into nothing, like sand crumbling on the beach. And these dark and unruly parts of itself fell out of that hierarchical pyramidal shape and just went rolling out.
9: In my diagram that I’m looking at here, maybe you’re looking at it too, I depict the results of the Fall as these really dark blue balls that just roll out in all directions.
Well, Logos was horrified by what came out of him—by the whole thing of breaking and falling out of harmony and having all of these unrecognizable parts of him just roll out. They were unruly. They wouldn’t listen to him. They wouldn’t get back in place. He couldn’t do anything with them. And the Tripartite Tractate says he was literally horrified. And I have gone on to characterize that as quantum foam. It has a chaotic existence.
11: The Tripartite Tractate says that the Father immediately threw a boundary up around the shadows of the Fall in order to contain them. And it’s not only to keep the results of the Fall away from the ethereal plane, so the ethereal plane is not muddied up by the Fall it’s also to put all of those unruly chaotic shadows into a container so that they have to start cooperating with each other. The boundary around the shadows of the Fall puts them into relationship with each other. They can’t go anywhere. They have to start working together.
10: With the boundary came the emergence of the shadow of Logos himself. Logos himself was one aeon, but within himself he contained his own pleroma, that fractal of the Fullness of God. So this bounded shadowy place now that has just come out from the Fall, when the unit of consciousness that ruled them, that being Logos, when he fled back up to his place in the Fullness of God and abandoned the Fall, the Demiurge moved into that vacuum and became the shadow of Logos.
He became the master of that unruly chaotic pleroma that was formed. And it’s the Demiurge’s job to organize that pleroma. So the Demiurge spends all of its time taking that chaotic foam and making it behave because he still wants to build Paradise. He’s still on board with the original goal that Logos had when he tried to reach the illimitable heights, but now he’s down here in the darkness and he’s putting it together himself. He still has the memory of Paradise, but he doesn’t remember what happened. He got amnesia from the Fall. It was a bad crash. So when he wakes up and takes on his self-identity of the ruler of the shadows, he thinks he’s God. He becomes the God of this universe.
And that boundary, by the way, if you haven’t guessed, that’s the boundary around our universe. It’s the material universe. It actually goes pretty well with the story of Big Bang. If the Big Bang is true in physics, it all started with a singularity and then just began growing and growing and growing and making the stars and everything else as it expands. That sort of thing happened with the Demiurge and the bounded space of the Fall.
So the Demiurge is the only consciousness down there and it has the borrowed consciousness of Logos. It’s the ego of Logos still. It just doesn’t know that. It doesn’t remember that exactly. But he still has all the plans and he’s still got fractals of all the other Aeons inside of him, but they are not Aeons anymore. They’re shadows. They’re knockoffs. They’re imitations. So this bounded space is called the deficiency or the imitation. And the Demiurge sets about to build the Paradise that Logos thought he was going to build. And instead of being up in the ethereal space, that Paradise is now manifesting here in this material space. And so the Demiurge causes the shadows to join up with one another and to make particles and the particles to join up with one another to make atoms and the atoms to join up with one another to make molecules and the molecules to join up with one another to make elements and the elements to join up with one another to make mineral aggregates. That’s all the hard and rocky places of our universe.
And so now the cosmos is starting to look a lot like Paradise, but it doesn’t have the blessing of the Father. It doesn’t have the blessing of the Aeons of the Fullness. It doesn’t have the life. It doesn’t have the Self-awareness and Self-consciousness. It doesn’t have the love and life of the Father. So the Demiurge is able to make all of the material mud aspects of our universe, but he can’t bring any creations to life.
He tries to build animals and to build humans there on that metaphorical riverbank, as it says in Genesis, but nothing comes to life. He can’t breathe life into it because he doesn’t contain life. He’s not plugged in in an animated way anymore into the ethereal plane or the Fullness of God. He doesn’t have the power or the glory. That’s why it’s all shadowy and dark.
12: Meanwhile, Logos is back up in the Fullness of God with the rest of the Aeons and together they pray for life to come into this bounded space. They pray for the Demiurge to remember Logos. They want to remind him that he isn’t all alone out there. He’s not just all by himself. So what they do, the Fullnesses and Logos, they create what’s called the Second Order of Powers. They were the First Order of Powers. The Demiurge and his creations are just the egoic side of a First Order Power. It’s not power on its own. The Second Order of Powers is every living creature that comes into the cosmos: every living creature, every living thing, everything that’s not hard rocky material. So I think that’s beginning with the cells because we know that the cells are Self-conscious and they’re soft and squishy. And all the little bacteria, all the little insects, the animals, the humans, we are all second order powers and we are fruited in the same manner that a slime mold fruits its spores. We are spores sent down from the Fullness of God.
We’re Second Order spores and we impregnate essentially this dry and rocky cosmos. Now, we don’t come from the Demiurge. We come from the Fullness. We are the children of the Fullness of God. But when we pass through that boundary and enter the imitation, enter the deficiency, our spirits, which all carry all of the life of the Fullness of God, each of our spirits is melded onto a piece of material put together by the Demiurge. So at conception we bond to the molecular space and then through our divine patterning, our intelligent design, and we grow up into the creature that we are to be.
And we already know we come fully loaded with all of the information, all of the knowledge of the Fullness of God. Because in the same way that the Son carried all of the knowledge of the Father when he fruits out from the Father, we carry all of the knowledge of the Fullness of God when we fruit out of the Fullness.
13: And in my drawing, in this diagram that I’m still working off of, I’ve shown that balance or that power struggle between the material and the ethereal fruit, the Second-Order Powers, as the yin and yang symbol that we’re so familiar with. And our second-order job is to bring life, love, consciousness, and the power of God into this material space. But a strange thing, tragic thing, very sad thing happened. Because of being melded onto the material of the Fall, we find ourselves in what’s called the never-ending war. That’s a term from the Nag Hammadi. We’re in a never-ending war between spirit and material, between life and death, between light and darkness, between the Father and the demi-urge, between ego and the one true Self that we each carry. There’s a never-ending war.
And then it sloshed out so that now we started fighting with each other. We’re not only fighting the Demiurge and the material and trying not to die, we’re also having wars and arguments and fights with neighbors and other villages and other countries—with other factions. The never-ending war has spread into our emotional level and encompassed us. And we have all become like the Demiurge. We all forget who we are, where we come from. We all have amnesia of our true mission and our true role, which is to bring life, light, consciousness, love, memory of the Father into this space.
And Logos and the Fullness were very sad about that, that their solution to bring life, light, love, consciousness into the bounded space isn’t working out because now it’s just another big pile of mess. It’s a fallen world. And so they decided to go for the big guns this time.
They all prayed together, Logos, the Fullness of God, the All, the Son of God. They all pray with one heart and with one mind for true salvation to come into the Fallen world. They needed all the mojo of the Son and the ALL and the complete and unified prayers of the Fullness and Logos all put into one divine being whose sole purpose is to rescue us and rescue the Fall and rescue the Demiurge and reunite the Demiurge with Logos.
14: And that brand new entity is called the Third Order of Powers. And that is also called the Christ, the Beloved, the Prince of Peace, and all of those names that are attributed to Christ. Christ is a different entity than anybody else. He does come from the Son’s blessing. He comes from the direction of the Son. And in my diagram, I have him emanating from the Son. But unlike us Second Order Powers who are emanating down from the Fullness of God, the Christ is emanating from the Son and the ALL down into our fallen world.
And those who allow themselves to be touched by the Christ, those Second Order Powers who recognize the Third Order Power, they have the complete salvation and love and reassurance of salvation. And it’s not just personal salvation. It’s not just so that you won’t go to hell. We haven’t even talked about hell. What we’re saying is that we were sent down here with love and consciousness, walking with the Spirit of God, and we forgot it, just like the Demiurge forgot it.
So the Christ, the Third Order Power, comes with each of our faces. There is a Third Order Power that looks exactly like me. There’s a Third Order Power that looks exactly like you. And when you recognize them, when you pray to the Christ and ask to be filled with the Christ, with the Third Order Powers, you now take on that Spirit of God, and that is known as the Holy Spirit. You become filled with the Holy Spirit and in full remembrance of the Son and the Father.
It’s not a one-and-done deal. Then we backslide, then we forget, then we have fights, and then we remember again, and then we’re filled with the Holy Spirit again, and then we’re walking with the Spirit, and then we backslide, and then we have fights, and then we’re filled with the Christ again. See, every time we forget, we just have to remember. So whenever you find yourself in a dicey situation, or you’re sad, or you’re angry, whatever it is, you’re out of step with the Third Order Power at that point. All you have to do is remember that. You turn your eyes upward, and you’re once again reunited with Christ in the Fullness. Christ never abandons us; it’s us who forget about Christ.
The Tripartite Tractate says that every Second Order Power will remember the Third Order Power, will remember the Christ, will remember the Father. And you either do that while you’re alive, or you do that after you pass away, and that’s known as universalism. Most Christian denominations do not accept the idea that you can be saved after death. They think you have to be saved before death, and so that’s why they’re so intent on having you accept Christ before you die. And it’s so sad for them when you pass away, and you never acknowledge Christ, because they think you’re going to hell.
But you are going to go to a reckoning. You are going to go to the judgment seat of God, it’s called, where you will review your life, where you will have a life review, and then you will repent, and then you will be redeemed. So you either do all that before you die, or after you die. It’s a lot harder after you die, because it’s going to be more painful. See, if you pass away with the Christ already in your spirit, already in your soul, then Christ stands with you when you die. Christ says to the Father at Judgment Day, she’s with me, or he’s with me. And you’re enveloped in the love of Christ, and the protection of Christ at that point.
15: And so the final result of this entire cosmological play, once all of the Second Order powers are redeemed, the Demiurge will also be redeemed, and he’ll remember Logos. And Logos and the Demiurge will be reunited once again. He’ll be a First Order power. We, though, go to a different place. Our Paradise is called the Third Economy. Now I don’t know if there’s any more economies after that. The Tripartite Tractate only goes up to the end of time and what’s called the Third Economy. And the Third Economy is a place where we’re going to be with all of the other Second Order Powers that have ever lived. The elect, the originating church up in the Fullness of God—they will be there. The Aeons will all be there. Christ in all of its undimmed magnificence will be there. And we will all live together in perfect peace and full realization. Full realization! We won’t lose ourselves. We’ll have self-awareness and we’ll be enveloped in all of the love of God.
That’s the Gnostic cosmogony, which you can find on the last page of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. God bless us all and onward and upward.
