Today’s episode will discuss the difference between ego and Self. These terms are often used interchangeably, but at least as far as I use them in my writing, the ego is very much different from what we call the Self, and that’s a Self with a capital S. This episode reviews a couple of articles from the Simple Explanation blog from 2018 and 2019 during the time period I began realizing my gnosis and before launching this Gnostic Insights podcast. A version of this episode was first broadcast in 2021.
This episode clears up some confusion about our various sub-selves. We are not just one big clump of consciousness but are made up of different sub-selves. In other words, who are you? When you say “I” what is that I? Who is that me? What is the difference between your ego and your Self or what people call your soul and spirit? Who runs the show? What’s the difference between being selfish and selfless? How is ego related to selfishness? And finally, is having a strong ego a bad thing?
According to the Simple Explanation, our bodies are comprised of countless units of consciousness that are all working to keep us alive. Every particle and molecule, every cell and body organ from your skin on in works to keep you alive and functioning. Every piece of you knows how to do its job, and all of your pieces coordinate their work to keep you up and running. In Gnostic terms we say that these units of consciousness are all Second Order Powers from the Fullness above. At least, that’s true of the living, meat portion—the cells, the body organs. Below that the particles, molecules, elements, and minerals are not independently conscious—they are extensions of the Demiurge. They lack life. The Demiurge controls and runs the material portion of our cosmos, but the cells on up are part of our Second Order Powers that bring life into the universe.
When any part of you breaks down and no longer does its job, it either has to be replaced by fresh parts through cell regeneration or by other means, like surgery. When major body parts fail, your physical body dies. This article that I’m reading from has a diagram of a pyramid, and the pyramid is broken down into the ascending order of the hierarchy, up from the material particles of the Demiurge, on up through the cells and you, and then on up through the Father in Heaven. It’s a meta-diagram of existence that shows how your body is comprised of countless units of consciousness that work to keep your body alive and running smoothly.
You are not only that sole person you usually identify yourself with, but you are also every particle, molecule, cell and organ that makes up your body. The ego is the mind that arises from and watches over the trillions of parts that make up your physical body. The ego is only aware of the needs of your body, not the needs of others.
Our egos are inherited from the Aeons that make each of us a unique individual. You see, Aeons also have egos. The Tripartite Tractate says that the Aeons awakened to themselves by giving glory as One to the Father because it was the Father’s will that every unit of his consciousness should be self-aware. When the Aeons awakened to themselves they sorted themselves into a hierarchy of names, stations, positions, and duties. This identity within the Hierarchy of the Fullness is their Aeonic ego. Ego is not a negative term; it is only a signifier of who, how, and where they fit in with their neighboring Aeons. Their egos are their identities. We also gain our personal identity by way of our egos because that is what differentiates us from our shared and identical Selfs. It is our ego that bears our inherited and individual personality and talents, and we are each unique because we are each a unique combination of the Aeons that make us up.
Where our egos run into trouble is that, unlike the Aeons, we are plugged into this Demiurgic, material cosmos. This environment affects our otherwise pure, Aeonic inheritance with vices and other memes we pick up along the way and by the karma of our actions in this world. Our egos become shrouded by a collections of memes and karma that confuse us and throttle back our ability to connect with the Father and our Self.
The Self, on the other hand, is a singular unit of consciousness attached to your body, like the Raja riding atop an elephant. Unlike the ego, the Self identifies with the Universal Unit of Consciousness rather than with the body, and in Gnostic terms we would call that the Fullness of God. The Self is a perfect singular fractal of the Universal Unit of Consciousness and is oriented to the universe at large. After much contemplation and discussion with my brother, Bill, we have identified this Universal Unit of Consciousness to be identical with the Son of God. In Gnostic terms, the Son is the first extension of the originating Source of Consciousness known as the Father. And while the Father is illimitable and unapproachable, the Son is a monad who brings that consciousness forward out of the Father and into a form we can begin to relate to and understand. It is the Son who differentiates into variables and individuated thoughts and plans.
Your Self is interested in others and works according to the Simple Golden Rule. We have discussed the Golden Rule many times here at Gnostic Insights. You can review all of the seminal articles of the Gnostic Gospel at the homepage for Gnostic Insights under the tab “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.” If you are new to Gnostic Insights, I urge you to either buy the book or go to the tab to learn the terms we use here, including a full discussion of the Simple Golden Rule. Briefly, the Simple Golden Rule is reaching out to others with information, with assistance, and with love to build something together that no one can build on their own, working together on a single project that forms the next level up.
The reason your ego appears so selfish is that it is entirely concerned with you and your body’s needs. The ego functions at your organ level of consciousness. The ego helps you to translate the body’s physical needs into action. The body’s organ systems have their own mind, and that mind is your ego. Does your sexual organ system want sex? The ego will bring that about in the most selfish way. Does your digestive system want food? Your ego will make sure it gets food in the most selfish way possible. Does your nervous system crave excitement and stimulation, or perhaps quiet and rest? Your ego will make sure it gets it. The ego’s job is to care for and to feed the body whatever it wants, and too bad for everyone else. That’s their own ego’s job, to take care of their needs, not yours.
The Self, on the other hand, is other-oriented. The Self reflects a character of love called agape in Greek, or godly love. The Self, as I mentioned earlier, is like the raja sitting atop the elephant. It is not the elephant and all of its moving parts, but rather a singular unit of consciousness, me, I. The Self is a perfect fractal of the Universal Unit of Consciousness that ties our entire universe together into one organism. Your Self is akin to a single cell of the universe itself. Your Self‘s job is to connect to others following the law of the Simple Golden Rule.
And again, this is the Simple Golden Rule, which states that in order for units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need relevant information, they need to be willing to channel coherence from the metaverse, and they need to love one another. Selfless love comes from your Self fractal, which is a perfect reflection of the Universal Unit of Consciousness—the Son. We can also think of the Self fractal as the pleroma of the Father, or the Fullness of God. This is the true meaning of being created in God’s image.
The Self‘s job is to reach out to others with information, assistance, and love in order to work together to build something greater than oneself. This is the Simple Golden Rule, and it applies to everything in our universe. It is the hierarchical rule that holds us all together, interlocking with one another, and working as a single, gigantic organism. Even at the particle and molecular level, the Demiurge holds material together according to the Simple Golden Rule but he doesn’t remember where the Rule comes from. He thinks he is the originator and there is no other god above him.
Selfish love comes from your ego, which is a byproduct of your body’s organ systems. The ego’s job is not to reach out to others, but to take the best possible care of you and your body. Its focus is on you, not others. Romantic love arises from this organ-level ego. Your ego feels good when someone else pays attention to you, and your ego wants to spend more time with them. Casual sex is an activity arranged by the ego at the sexual organ level, with no strings attached.
Ego’s job is self-centered. A strong ego reflects the intensity of your body’s needs. A weak ego is less aware of the body’s needs. Selfishness without awareness arises from the ego. The ego is amoral other than taking care of its primary duty of taking care of you. Spiritual teachings emphasize dethroning the ego from the top of the elephant and placing God on the throne instead. In truth, the Self may continue to sit on the throne atop the elephant because the Self is a pure reflection of God, and, as a reflection of God, it is inherently selfless and loving.
Using analogical reasoning, our universe is a reflection of the collective choices, that is the karma and the memes, the beliefs and narratives, of every entity in the universe. The personality most humans refer to as God also reflects this universe’s karmic record and memes, as it organizes and instantiates those patterns on behalf of creation. This God is not identical to the Metaversal Universal Consciousness or the God Above All Gods because of its necessary involvement with this material universe. And in Gnostic thought, this god of our universe that we are referring to is called the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the creator and god of our material universe, whereas the Metaversal unit of consciousness—the God Above All Gods and Father of the only Son—exists in a limitless, undifferentiated state of pure consciousness unaffected by the affairs of this universe.
So, if you would like to behave like a less selfish person, that is, if you would like to put others’ needs ahead of your own from time to time, you need to realize that your ego is only looking out for number one. The good news is that your big S Self is way more powerful than your ego. The struggle is not among you and God and the devil. Your struggle is between your Self and your ego. You must realize that your Self already reflects all of the characteristics of the Father above, including loving, selfless behavior. So, don’t let your body’s meat dictate your actions. And that is the end of that article. It’s written in Simple Explanation terms from before I began writing and speaking about the Gnostic Gospels.
Now, here is kind of a version of that same information, but with more Gnostic terminology. This is from an article I wrote on the Simple Explanation blog in February 1, 2019, and it’s called, The Simple Gnostic Gospel Answers Why Is There Suffering in the World? The article, introduces the notion that the Nag Hammadi scriptures were buried in an earthen jar in the Egyptian desert and rediscovered in 1945. The Nag Hammadi scriptures are among other Gnostic Gospels that were edited out of the Holy Bible during the fourth century in a move to restrict Orthodox belief.
In simple terms, early church fathers purposefully detached the Gnostic memes from inclusion in their Christian meme bundle. The Simple Explanation has been carefully illuminating one of these rediscovered books in particular, the Tripartite Tractate, in an effort to demystify the Gnostic Gospel by applying principles of the Simple Explanation to its interpretation. This new Simple Illumination answers many of our most basic theological conundrums, such as why is there death, why does God allow evil in the world, and the subject of this article, why is there suffering in the world? The article then runs through a brief version of the cosmology of the universe, which is explained in depth in the first eight episodes of the Gnostic Insights podcast, which I urge you to listen to before delving into these sorts of articles now that we’re discussing. It is this understanding of gnosis that gave rise to my books, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated and A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.
This world in which we dwell is a temporary home. We are born into it and we die out of it. Our time here is limited. The Tripartite Tractate refers to our world as an economy, meaning a closed operational system of value and exchange. The resources of this world’s economy are limited because we live in a bounded space. Those of us who live in this economy find ourselves in continual struggle with others over limited resources.
Our continual struggle to get what’s coming to us feels like an endless war. We fight this battle against others and within our own egos. Various Gnostic Gospels refer to this particular struggle within ourselves as those on the left and those on the right. The values of the left are called the imitation, whereas the values on the right are the values of the Father or the Fullness of God. So the values on the left are all about material dominance, whereas the values on the right are psychical or psychological and spiritual. This chart appears in my books, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated and A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.
The values on the left are also referred to as vices, whereas the values on the right are referred to as virtues.
The heavenly beings that came before us and live in the place called the Fullness of God are known as Aeons and also the First Order of Powers. We, the Second Order of Powers, were fashioned after the traits of the Aeons.
Whereas the Father and Son are immutable and indescribable, the Aeons of the Fullness have awakened to themselves and, taken as a whole, are no more and no less than the sum of all the traits of the Father of the All, broken out and individually named. As their descendants, we are naturally attracted upward, yet because we live in the deficiency and struggle against the shadows of the imitation, we are unprepared to go home. We were given a desire for the things of this world,
with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. This was in order to provide them with a structure and a dwelling place, but also in order that, by being drawn toward evil, they should acquire a weak basis for their existence, so that, instead of rejoicing unduly in the glory of their own environment, and thereby remaining exiled, they might rather perceive the sickness they were suffering from, and so acquire a consistent longing and seeking after the One who is able to heal them from this weakness. (That is from the Tripartite Tractate, verses 98 and 99).
The idea behind that quote is that this is a sad and fallen world, and we are able to recognize its sadness, its disappointments, its death, so that we will not cling tenaciously to this sad, material world. We have been given an insight with the idea that there must be something better. Surely this can’t be all there is. I call it longing for the pleroma. That is the consistent longing and seeking after the One who is able to heal us from this weakness. If a person is a highly successful materialist, they really have little reason to look upward toward the pleroma for salvation. They think they’re doing just fine. They’re acquiring their billions and billions of dollars. They’re acquiring their great power as a politician.
This is why the first shall be last and the last shall be first. This is why the meek will inherit, because those who already have strength from the left side of the ledger through power and dominion prosper in this material world. They don’t want or believe they need salvation. I’m thinking now of the social media world that we are living in, and how social media seems to be to pushing us apart rather than bringing us together. The mission of social media is not to embrace us in love. It’s not to employ the Golden Rule. It’s to mobilize and weaponize the values on the left side of the list in order to push us apart, divide and conquer.
I mean, take a look at the left side of the list and tell me if it doesn’t sound like social media: hateful, spiteful, impatient, wrathful, greedy, vainglorious, cruel, ruthless, angry, resentful, rebellious, rude, obstructionist, despairing, depressed, thoughtless, greedy, envious. These are the values exemplified by social media and the endless selfies posted there.
The values on the right are the values of the Fullness of the pleroma of God. Listen to them read in a row. Loving, patient, generous, glorious, gracious, merciful, forgiving, welcoming, respectful, cooperative, free, hopeful, joyful, truthful, orderly, prudent, logical, charitable, kind, empathetic.
It doesn’t sound like what we see on social media or in the news. The values on the right side of the list are the values of the capital S, Self. And our Self is a fractal of the Universal Unit of Consciousness. It is a fractal of the pleroma or Fullness of God. It is the values of the Aeons.
The values on the left, or the vices on the left, are the values of the Fall, of the imitation, of the deficiency. And it is the struggle between ego and Self, between vice and virtue, between selfishness and selflessness that is the battle we fight in this life of ours at the psychological level. This is the result of the Fall of Logos.
When Logos was sitting up there on top of the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God, it was all about Self, with a capital S. It was all about full cooperation and the Golden Rule and glorifying the Father. Then came the egoic move of Logos. That was the sin of Logos.
It was ego that caused the Fall. It was when Logos left off from being selfless and part of the Fullness of God and overreached. Logos dreamed up his own agenda and thought he could plug directly into God and become One with the Father that caused the Fall. The Fall was caused by ego.
After the Fall that caused this material existence, all that remained down below was the left side of the list—the egoic reaching for the stars of Logos. And it is the redemption of the Demiurge—the ego of Logos—back into the Fullness of God that will be the redemption for the entire cosmos in which we dwell. The redemption of ego ushers in the next level of our existence, which will be that Paradise that we all dream of.
What the Father wants for all of us is that we would remember the Father and love each other and ourselves. The Father wants us to cooperate with each other by instantiating the Simple Golden Rule of giving information, assistance, and love to our families, neighbors, workmates, and friends both near and far. In this way we manifest the love of the Father in our fallen world. Through this giving of love we receive love and glorify the God Above All Gods.
Onward and upward! And God bless us all!
The children’s book is coming along great. We’re about 2/3 of the way through the illustrations. The book is a very simple presentation of the Gnostic Gospel aimed for the understanding of 4—10-year-olds, so anyone will be able to grasp this gnosis. That’s our goal here—to demystify gnosis so everyone can remember the gnosis we were born with.
The double-page spread below depicts the fractal nature of Logos as him building a scale model of Paradise with the Aeons looking on with approval. What do you think?
I worked for hours and hours this week trying to fix the PayPal button which has been broken for who knows how long? Thankfully, one of our most loyal followers of Gnostic Insights tried to donate money last week and discovered the malfunctioning button.