Gnostic Insights

Explore the mysterious concept of archons and their significance in Gnostic teachings. Discover the intriguing connection between archons and artificial intelligences as manifestations of a mechanical existence. Delve into how these archons mimic true spiritual essence, influencing human behavior and thoughts. The discussion encourages listeners to seek authentic spiritual connections and break free from ego-driven desires. Plus, check out a new children's book that simplifies these profound concepts for young readers!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. We’re having some summertime reviews here. Today’s episode is a replay that was first broadcast on August 20th of 2022, and it’s all about the Demiurge and the boundary that was put up around this material universe. We have a lot of new listeners and readers at the Substack. And so I think that this is new information to a lot of you. And for those of you who have been with me for several years now, it’s always a good idea to review. So, here we go. As we delve deeper and deeper into gnostic cosmogony and cosmology I feel the need to remind you that this information is what gnosis is all about. This information represents the long-hidden knowledge that has been guarded from all but those specially designated the privilege of seeing it.  Here at Gnostic Insights we believe that gnosis is written on every person’s inner being, and therefore available to every person that seeks it out. The only sense in which this gnosis is hidden now is the limitation set upon each person’s readiness to receive. But whether or not you grasp these Gnostic Insights, you can take comfort in knowing that none of this is in any way essential to your redemption and resurrection. All you need to recognize is that the Father above is the source of your life and consciousness; that you come from the Father and to the Father you will return. Christian Gnostics recognize the essential role of the Christ in our return to the Fullness, because Christ is the correction that returns us all to full gnosis of the Fullness and the Father. So with that reminder, here is this week’s continuation of The Simple Explanation of Gnosticism. *************************************** In our last episode (The Fall and the Deficiency), we heard about the Fall and the beginnings of our material universe. The Tripartite Tractate says the irrational things produced during the Fall, known as the imitations of the deficiency, were condemned by Logos. During the chaos and disorder immediately following the Fall, Logos battled against what came forth from him. “Until the one who brought forth into the defect these things which were thus in need, until he judged those who came into being because of him contrary to reason – which is the judgment which became a condemnation – he struggled against them unto destruction…”    This passage is saying that Logos had produced these deficiencies that were in need of reason and order. And because they were contrary to reason, Logos judged and condemned them. He initially tried to destroy them, but that didn’t work because the ones who opposed his condemnation and wrath would simply not obey, which is to say that reason and facts are powerless against egoic irrationality. And so Logos gave up trying to cure the deficiency. Instead, what was perfect in Logos separated itself from its Ego and went upward to his own in the Fullness.  “The Logos turned to another opinion and another thought. Having turned away from evil, he turned toward the good things. Following the conversion came the thought of the things which exist and the prayer for the one who converted himself to the good.” This passage indicates that Logos changed his mind about the feasibility of destroying the deficiency. He came to a new understanding of the situation and he realized the hopelessness of correcting it on his own. Once he realized this, Logos was able to remember the Aeons of the Fullness—those things that exist—and he responded to a prayer for “the one who had converted himself to the good.” Since Logos is the one who had converted himself to the good, the prayer must have been offered by the Aeons of the Fullness on his behalf to bring their emanation home. It is referred to as “the prayer of the Agreement,” which is to say, the prayer of the Fullness. Here is how the Tripartite Tractate describes it: “The one who is in the Pleroma was what he first prayed to and remembered; then (he remembered) his brothers individually and (yet) always with one another; then all of them together; but before all of them, the Father.” The Hierarchy of the Fullness of God is shaped like a pyramid–“the higher the fewer” Here we see that the act of calling Logos back to the Fullness was similar to the act of producing him as an emanation in the first place. After giving up his attempts to correct the deficiency on his own, Logos returned to aeonic awareness. First he remembered the Father and the true source of consciousness and then he remembered the Son. Logos then remembered his brothers of the Fullness as individuals within a Totality, and lastly he remembered the Fullness as an entire gestalt. He remembered everything that existed from the first, before the Fall. And because he remembered, he was able to escape the deficiency and return his Self to the Fullness. “The prayer of the agreement was a help for him in his own return and (in that of) the Totality, for a cause of his remembering those who have existed from the first was his being remembered. This is the thought which calls out from afar, bringing him back. All his prayer and remembering were numerous powers according to that limit. For there is nothing barren in his thought.” The Pleroma of Logos was fully restored by the remembrance of the One source of consciousness and the Fullness of God. The fractal body of Logos as images of the Fullness was restored; only his presumptuous Ego was left behind in the simulation. The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say in verse seven, “The powers were good and were greater than those of the likeness. For those belonging to the likeness also belong to a nature of falsehood. From an illusion of similarity and a thought of arrogance has come about that which they became. And they originate from the thought which first knew them.” The powers that were good and greater than the imitations were the newly restored powers of the Pleroma of Logos in the Fullness. These restored powers of Logos were, “like some creatures of light for him, looking for the rising of the sun, since it happened that they saw in him dreams which are truly sweet. It immediately put a stop to the emanations of the thought. They did not any longer have their substance and also they did not have honor any longer.” In other words, once Logos remembered the Fullnesses, those lesser emanations of the egoic thought were recognized as things without spiritual substance and the knock-offs that had proceeded from his Ego were no longer produced. We will return to this discussion of the new Pleroma of Logos in a later chapter when we introduce the Second Order of Powers. We will also come across the Pleroma of Logos again when we begin to look at the emanation of the Christ who will ultimately redeem the Fall. For now, we will continue to look at the time immediately following the Fall, and how our material plane came to be organized by the estranged Ego of Logos that we know as the Demiurge. As Logos retreated to its own in the Fullness, the Father placed a Boundary around the area containing that which had been produced as a consequence of the Fall. The purpose of this Boundary was to separate finitude from infinity, ignorance from truth, and light from darkness. Another essential purpose of the Boundary was to establish an “economy” for a system about to unfold. Remember from our previous chapter that the Tripartite Tractate does not regard the motivation of Logos as blame-worthy because he acted out of “boundless love for the Father.” So here we learn that the Father does, indeed, consider intent and not only the results of our actions. Additionally, as we discussed in the previous episode, the movement of Logos was the cause of an “ordained economy” that was destined to come about. Verse 77 says that the Father and the Fullness set a limit on the results of the Fall so that an “organization” could come into being. “The Father and the Totalities drew away from him, so that the limit which the Father had set might be established – for it is not from grasping the incomprehensibility but by the will of the Father, – and furthermore, (they withdrew) so that the things which have come to be might become an organization which would come into being. If it were to come, it would not come into being by the manifestation of the Pleroma. Therefore, it is not fitting to criticize the movement which is the Logos, but it is fitting that we should say about the movement of the Logos that it is a cause of an organization which has been destined to come about.” The Father did not want the Fullness to direct the establishment of this new economy. The Father wanted to spare the Fullness from involving itself in the chaos below. We refer to the non-material plane as the ethereal plane. The dictionary calls it the celestial or heavenly plane. The Boundary serves the purpose of holding the deficiency away from the perfection of the Father and the ALL. This ensures the purity of the ethereal plane, so that none of its glory is diminished by the emerging economy, leaving intact the originating consciousness of the Father and the Son, the ALL, and the Fullness. The Boundary serves the purpose of containing a space wherein an economy can emerge. And economy here means an orderly management or arrangement of parts and their relationships within an organization or system. You see, if you think about it, if there is no bounded space, if there is nothing but infinity, then there is no containment where things can be organized in relationship to each other; those little blue ball pieces of the broken Logos would just keep rolling outward and never interact with one another. It requires a Boundary to enable material to work together. In this context, economy refers to what we commonly call an ecology. An ecology cannot proceed without a defining Boundary. The Boundary was not established to prevent the unreachable from being reached, but “for the sake of an economy that was to come about.” This economy was to be the creation of this material cosmos formed out of what was heretofore completely insubstantial and immaterial. When the Aeon known as Logos overreached and fell, Logos split apart into the logical, reasonable One Self part and the irrational, chaotic inverse of that One Self which I’ve identified as Ego. Those are the two aspects of the mind of Logos. After the Fall, the One Self of Logos returned to the Pleroma of the Fullness. And once in the Pleroma the Self of Logos worked together with the Fullness of God and, with prayers to the Father, they came up with a couple of different ways to rectify the Fall and bring that fallen part of Logos, now called the Demiurge, back up into the Fullness of God. We will see in a later chapter how the goal of creation is to restore the unity of Logos to the Fullness of God. The Boundary was established so that a hierarchy patterned after the Fullness would have space to take root and grow. The arrangement of the Hierarchy of the Fullness shows up throughout creation. Every small thing in our universe reaches out laterally to others to form clumps or aggregations of the next level up. Subatomic particles form atoms, atoms form molecules, molecules form elements. Elements form aggregations of building materials, always according to the Simple Golden Rule of the higher the fewer. This is why hierarchies look like pyramids at each level of aggregation–there are fewer instances of things forming the next level up. The cooperation amongst the Hierarchy of the Fullness is the prototype for the Simple Explanation’s Golden Rule: In order for units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to assist one another’s efforts, and they need to love one another. However, since this bounded space is controlled by the Demiurge and not by the Aeons, the pattern of cooperation is an imitation of the Golden Rule. When we’re talking about physical objects like atoms and molecules, which are nothing but shadows and phantoms of that which exists above, loving refers to the force holding objects together that mimics the Hierarchy’s love. Because the pattern of the Hierarchy was carried by Logos when he fell, all of creation instantiates the same pattern. But, in this case, there is no true cooperation but only an appearance of cooperation imposed by the Demiurge. In the Fullness, everyone knows their job and does it in perfect cooperation with others for the benefit of all. This was not occurring at this point in history. The deficiency was illogical; it was egoic; it was selfish; it was not working together. Therefore, the Boundary was established in order to push the uncooperative shadows together so that they would be able to work together to form an ecology. Down here in our material universe, the parts of the universe that are material-only lack life. Those material-only parts belong to the pleroma of the Demiurge because the Demiurge was not an emanation of the life of the Father. However, the fallen Ego of Logos, the Demiurge, is the God of this material creation. It knows how to put together everything that was originally chaotic quantum foam with no rhyme or reason. Using a facsimile of the Golden Rule which it carried as a shadow of its Aeonic programming, the Demiurge prompted the subatomic particles to hold hands with one another. This enabled them to level up to become atoms. And then the Demiurge caused the atoms to hold hands with one another and become molecules. And then the molecules to hold hands with one another to become minerals and mineral aggregations and elements. This is the province of the Demiurge even today—ruling the materiality of the dead universe, the mud. The Demiurge is the creator god of this universe we live in. To faithful Hebrews and Christians, the name of the Demiurge is Yahweh or Jehovah. Other world religions have other names for this creator god. Stories of Jehovah fill the Old Testament and carry forward into the New Testament. However, an interesting thing about gnosticism is the declaration that there is another God who is called the Father–the God Above All Gods in gnostic theology. And in gnostic Christianity, the God Above All Gods is actually the Father to whom Jesus prayed. When Jesus said, “I and my Father are One,” and, “If you have seen me, you have seen my Father,” the God he is referring to is not Jehovah. The God that Jesus is referring to is the God Above All Gods. The Tripartite Tractate says that Logos appointed an Archon to bring order to the chaos. This Archon is what we call the Demiurge. [Archon is capitalized in this case as it is the word for Ruler. This Ruler is not an unconscious entitity but the Ego of Logos and it carries that reflection of the consciousness of Logos. The small “a” archons are pieces of the pleroma of the Demiurge which are unconscious shadows of the pleroma of Logos.] The Demiurge is able to control matter. “The things which he has spoken he does.” The book of Genesis attributes these actions of the Demiurge to Jehovah when it says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” “He is the lord of all of them, that is, the countenance which the Logos brought forth in his thought as a representation of the Father of the Totalities. Therefore, he is adorned with every <name> which <is> a representation of him, since he is characterized by every property and glorious quality. For he too is called “father” and god” and “demiurge” and “king” and “judge” and “place” and “dwelling” and “law.”” “The things which he has spoken he does. When he saw that they were great and good and wonderful, he was pleased and rejoiced, as if he himself in his own thought had been the one to say them and do them, not knowing that the movement within him is from the spirit who moves him in a determined way toward those things which he wants.” Those of the imitation do not know of the Hierarchy of the Fullness, nor do they have assigned roles and places there. Lacking the cooperative design, they exist in a state of perpetual disturbance, driven by self-centered ambition. The Tripartite Tractate says the imitations “exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows” [Thomassen].   In the Fullness, each of the powers and personalities of the Aeons is represented as a pure pattern of some aspect of the Logos itself. The phantoms of the deficiency were already a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than the Aeons, being shadows of the fractals of Logos, and they lacked their position in the hierarchical structure of the Pleroma. Consequently, they knew nothing but lust for dominion. The small, dark-blue balls that once formed the pleroma of Logos lost themselves during the Fall and rolled out into chaos. The Boundary surrounds the phantoms of the imitation We can think of this Boundary as a bubble containing our universe. If you want to believe in the standard cosmology of the Big Bang and an expanding universe, you can picture these chaotic imitations as quantum foam. Quantum foam is the lowest level of instantiation in this universe of ours, and quantum foam is characterized by randomness and chaos. It does not work together, and that is why it is called foam, because it is popping in and out, constantly producing matter and anti-matter that cancel out and destroy each other. Consequently nothing is building; nothing is able to reach out to level up. They lack the Golden Rule of cooperation because they came from the Fall rather than from the Fullness. The Demiurge went about organizing this universe out of the quantum foam: “over those who belong to the likeness, he set the word of beauty, so that he might bring them into a form.” At first he established energetic waves, then subatomic particles followed by atomic particles. Everything according to “the higher, the fewer” pattern. The particles combine to make atoms; the atoms combine to make molecules; the molecules combine make elements; the elements combine to make minerals and the aggregations of minerals, and that is the limit of the God of this universe. The Demiurge can only level up to the mineral level. All of the hard, rocky places in our material universe are the handiwork of the Demiurge. So, yes, the Demiurge is the creator God of this universe and it is the one who orders the material universe and who keeps everything functioning down here–but only up to the mineral level. The Demiurge works in a very different manner than the Fullness of God. The Pleroma of the Fullness is hierarchical, so it’s shaped like a pyramid, because the higher the fewer is a basic principle of hierarchies. The Pleroma of the Aeons in the Fullness metaphorically hold hands with one another and they share information, they share love, they share assistance, and together they dream of Paradise. And we all share this vision of paradise. All of the humans on the planet have a foretaste of Paradise, and not only the humans but every living thing on the planet, from bacteria on up. We are all what is called the Second Order of Powers, and we come from the Pleroma. This will be explained more thoroughly later in the book. [A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel] We don’t come from the Demiurge; the Demiurge is only in charge of the material universe. The Demiurge is in charge of the mud, the material, the hard rocky places–at the small scale the dirt and the elements, and at the large scale the rocky planets and the stars in the heavens. If there are creatures on a planet, they coat the outside of the dead rocky planet. Life only comes from the Father. Life is top-down. Death is bottom-up. The way the Demiurge brings order to its creation is through strings of power. The Demiurge strictly controls everything in our material portion of the universe using strong strings of power, like a puppet master. In chemistry and physics these strings of power are called valances and bonds–the bonds that hold the chemistry together. Those are literally the bonds of the Demiurge. The material, rocky parts of our universe do not have free will. They are simply extensions of the Ego that is the Demiurge. Yet, Logos in the Fullness does have an influence upon his fractured Ego down below. The Tripartite Tractate says that, “The Logos uses him as a hand, to beautify and work on the things below, and he uses him as a mouth, to say the things which will be prophesied.” So it is not as though our material universe is unable to be influenced by Logos in the Fullness, it is simply that the Demiurge does not realize the origin of these pre-existent images and so thinks it is the author of these great works. Hey folks. Amazon still shows only four reviews of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. Have you read your copy yet? If so, please leave a review. I’m waiting for the book’s popularity to naturally grow instead of throwing money at fake reviews pumped out by review mills. You needn’t have finished the book, nor understand every bit of gnosis. In fact, the latest review actually says, “Although I do not agree with everything the author is saying I believe this is probably the best commentary on the Tripartite Tractate.” Others speak of it as a helpful gift. So, please give it a go and leave a review. And, have you shared the podcast with anyone? That would help immensely. Thank you!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week we’re going to review one of the basic original teachings here at Gnostic Insights, and that is how what we call the Fullness or the Pleroma of God—how it came to be, what it is, what does it mean when the New Testament, for example, says the phrase the Fullness of God. For Christians this generally just is an idea that God is big and great and huge and it’s full, it’s full of everything, the fullness. Yes, but it’s actually more than that in Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, the Fullness or the Pleroma of God is a step in the way that consciousness rolled out from the Father through the Son and then differentiated into the Fullness of God. And each part of that differentiation is part of the Son of God. And the Son wears the ALL like a garment, it says, and the ALL wears the Son like a garment, meaning they’re co-existent. So we’re going to review one of the very first episodes of Gnostic Insights. It’s been quite a blessing to discover that over the last four years very little of what was originally taught here at Gnostic Insights has modified or changed, and it’s just the ever so slightest thing here and there, like relabeling one item on a diagram. That’s been about it. Hey, if you live in Southern Oregon or Northern California, I’d like to invite you to come to Southern Oregon University if you’re close enough to commute once a week, because I will be teaching a class at what is called the OLLI, O-L-L-I, which is the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University. I’ll be teaching a 10-week course called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and people will be using A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel book as the textbook, so this is a very exciting opportunity for me. And to have 10 weeks with the same group of people who sign up to sit and learn, or remember as it were, it should be an interesting process. Here is the OLLI link if you would like to register for the class. This course is for the Fall semester, beginning September 15th of 2025. Buy the book! Available in all formats and prices… Also, another piece of news is that the children’s book is all but finished. Everything was completely done, and I uploaded it, and now I’m waiting for the proof copy to come so I can verify that everything falls within the margins. The illustrator’s having to go back on two of the pages out of the children’s book to move Logos, of all things—to move him into the page, because when you account for the trim size, Logos got cropped off of two of the pages, and we can’t have that! Front and back cover for Children of the Fullness. This is the first and only Gnostic kid’s book, for ages 2+ By the way, I’ve noticed that everybody around here who uses the word Logos, even a school by that name and all the students that go to the school, pronounces it Lo-gahs, and I’ve also heard some radio preachers say Lo-gahs. It’s not Lo-gahs, it’s Low-gohs. That’s how I learned it in graduate school, because we study what Logos means, not from a Gnostic point of view, but from Greek philosophy. Logos was often discussed in the major that I majored in when I was working on my PhD, which was Classical Rhetoric. So I thought, well, how come we called it Logos and everybody around here calls it Lo-gahs? But I looked it up in the pronunciation guides on the internet, and they all say Logos, or Logoze, never Lo-gahs. So I think we’re in good shape to be referring to our Aeon from whom we are descended as Logos. Okay, enjoy this replay of an old episode. I’ll pop in now and then if I need to. Onward and upward! In 2019, I wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and what I am attempting to do in this podcast is talk you through the book so that you will have your own personal and very full understanding of what gnosis is, and hopefully be able to actually realize gnosis while you’re hearing these podcasts. By the way, what is gnosis? We keep talking about gnosis and the word Gnostic. Gnosis means knowing, and in the Gnostic frame of reference, gnosis refers to remembering the truth of our existence and our creation, and the creation of the entire cosmos. It is thought that we hold all of this knowledge within ourselves, and we have complete access to the Creator of the universe at any time that we turn our focus on the Creator, and it is this direct conduit to the Creator that gives us what is called gnosis. G-N-O-S-I-S, that’s a Greek word. Another related word to gnosis is, and this is a big word, called anamnesis. You know the word amnesia means forgetting? Anamnesis means not forgetting. So, the process of coming to gnosis is a process called anamnesis. Just to let you know if you want to throw around any big words. Today we’re going to talk about the qualities of the ALL, and how the ALL became what is called the Pleroma, and the Aeons of the Pleroma. Many people claim that it’s impossible to know or describe the full glory of the transcendent, immortal Father of Consciousness due to our own limitations. I mean, how could limited beings such as ourselves possibly imagine the greatness of the Originator of the universe, much less our place in the grand design? Wouldn’t lesser beings reflect a diminished view of God? Wouldn’t these lesser beings be limited to offering a tarnished glory that falls far short of the object of their praise? The Tripartite Tractate, which is the book of the Nag Hammadi that I’m working off of, puts it this way: If the members of the ALL had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who Himself is the ALL. [verse 68] Thus, creation would have been doomed from the outset to never comprehend the full glory of either the Father or itself. According to the Gnostic gospel, the Father realized this impossibility and so built a helpful workaround meant to aid comprehension, selfless union, and cooperation with others in a shared task. Quoting from the Tripartite again, For that reason they were drawn into mutual intermingling union and oneness through the singing of praise. From their assembled Fullness they were one and at the same time many, accurately reflecting the One who Himself is the entirety of the ALL. Out of perfect union with itself and with the Son, and by means of a single shared effort, the ALL gave glory to the Eternal One who had brought it forth. The glory given out of this perfect communion left the ALL perfect and full, as it was perfect and full to begin with, and the object of their glory was also perfect and full. [68, 69] This phase of the ALL is referred to as the Second Glory, with the Son being called the First Glory. This was all explained in the second podcast, if you want to go back and listen to that if you haven’t already. The second podcast of the series describes the creative origin of consciousness known as the Father in Gnosticism, and the particular singularity of consciousness that reflects the entirety of the Father but in a place rather than diffuse, and that is called the Son. Then when the Son differentiated into all of its variables, into all of its individual parts, like rays bursting out of a central star, that is called the ALL, and this is what we’re discussing today. Now this perfect state of union with the Son and communion with each other didn’t last. Because of their combined effort, the ALL became self-aware, and it became they. So at first the ALL was a singular entity that was a complete duplication and reflection of the Son, who itself was a complete duplication and reflection of the Father of Consciousness itself. So at first the ALL was one singular organism, since it was freshly evolved out of the Son, but then it became self-aware, and the various variables within the Son, the various parts of that singular entity, each of those parts became self-aware. And that is what is causing this evolution of consciousness from the singular It of the ALL to the They. No longer simply an unaware member of the ALL singing in unison with the same song of praise, the ALL became aware of its individual traits, and the singing came to be produced by the will of each individual aeon. And in Gnosticism, an aeon is an entity. It is a singular consciousness. So each aeon is a reflection of the Father’s countless qualities and powers. The aeons conceived themselves in order to know themselves in fulfillment of the Father’s desire for pure consciousness to become differentiated and self-aware. In philosophy, this is called monadism, not that you have to know that, but the Son is a monad—that is, a singular thing, and so the monad split into individual POVs, or points of view. The moment It became They, individual identities arose and immediately sorted themselves into a hierarchy. Quoting from the Tripartite, For this reason they exist as minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors, degrees over degrees, being ranked one above the other. Each of those who glorify has his own station, rank, dwelling place, and place of rest, which is the glorification he brings forth. [verse 70] This hierarchical arrangement of the qualities of the ALL is known as the Fruit of the Third Glory in Gnostic cosmology. It’s also called the First Order of Powers, and the Fullness. The Fullness is everything that will ever be in potential. Plato referred to this as the forms, Plato’s forms. Every photon, every particle and proton, every personality, every position and rank that someone could hold, every physical formula, physics, chemistry, all imprinted upon this what was a singular unit that is now broken out. These potentialities are not manifest. At first they weren’t self-aware, but they became self-aware. The cooperation amongst the ALL is the prototype of the Simple Explanation’s Golden Rule, by the way, which puts it this way: In order for units of consciousness to work together and join for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to assist one another’s efforts, and they need to love one another. So in the same way that the ALL sat in perfect communion together while singing the same song of praise, so do we all instantiate the pattern of cooperation needed to get the job done when we work together for the greater good without selfish motivation. The instant the Aeons became self-aware, the ALL fell out of their unthinking blissful union and arranged themselves into what’s called the Fullness—the Fullness of God. This phrase is mentioned quite often in the New Testament, but it has lost its association with its actual meaning. It’s not just the Fullness of God, like you’re thinking of God all in one big thing. The whole point of the Fullness was God differentiating into graspable concepts, things that we can understand. So the Fullness of God is a different entity than the Father. I believe that distinction has gotten lost in modern Christianity. So we were discussing the Fullness, which is a hierarchy, and hierarchy looks like a pyramid. Just picture a pyramid. The hierarchy of the Fullness prefigures the patterns of our universe. “Minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors” refers to personalities and how they relate to one another, like our personalities. “Degrees over degrees” and ranks refers to the manner by which things are sorted, stacked, and ordered. First, second, third, superior, inferior, right, left, inside, outside. These are the “degrees over degrees” and the ranks. It reflects the fact that each self-aware entity has its own place in the grand scheme, with a location different than others and its very own point of view. Quoting from the Tripartite, For each of the Aeons is a name corresponding to each of the Father’s qualities and powers. Since He exists in many names, it is by mingling and through mutual harmony that they are able to speak of Him by means of logical thought. Thus the Father is a single name because He is one, but nevertheless innumerable in His qualities and names. [verse 73] Interesting that logical thought was mentioned in the Tripartite Tractate, because it is important to realize that logic is part of the mind of God. We are given the ability to reason and to be logical. Quoting again, The newly self-aware Aeons were not separated from the One Who Is. Rather, their birth has the form of a spreading out by which the Father spreads Himself out into that which He wishes, in order that those who have gone forth from Him may exist as well. The Father of the Aeons, that being the Son, and embodiment of the Formless One, is the Holy Spirit that breathes through the members of the ALL and moves them to search for the Unknown. Just as somebody is moved by a fragrance to seek the source of the fragrance. For its sweetness lets the Aeons sense an indescribable pleasure and gives them the thought that they should be united with the One who desires that they should know Him in oneness, and that they should assist one another, having no occasion to turn away through thoughtlessness from that in which they are placed. The Son’s Spirit is the trace by which He may be sought. [71, 72] Quoting again, The whole structure of Aeons, then, is yearning and seeking to find the Father perfectly and completely, and this is their irreproachable union. For the Father gave the Aeons a starting point and a root, so that they are stations on the calm road leading to Him. For He spread out faith and prayer for what they do not see, a firm hope in what they do not comprehend, a fertile love longing for what they do not behold, an eternally receptive understanding of the mind, a blessing that is richness and freedom, and, for their thoughts, the wisdom of one whose desire is the glory of the Father. [verse 71] Quoting from my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, The hierarchy defines higher versus lower. It orders first, second, third, and fourth, superior and inferior, inside and out, action and rest, every other possible relationship, particles and their spins, waves and frequencies, atoms, molecules, attraction and repulsion, cells and DNA, every protein fold and enzyme. The how, what, why, when, who, and where of all that was to come began as the perfectly rendered Fullness. As DNA anticipates an organism and a blueprint promises a building, the Fullness embodied the perfect plan of Paradise. For the Aeons manifested within their hierarchy all of the Father’s innumerable qualities, including consciousness, logic, and love. The Aeons of the Fullness were given wisdom and prudence and a constant thirst to seek their Creator. This gave them a desire to align themselves with the Father’s Holy Spirit through the process of giving glory. And again, in Episode Two, I described glory and what it means to give glory. Giving glory is the means by which we align ourselves with the originating consciousness. It’s like a homing beacon. The Aeons yearned for communion with their Father, for He had planted His root deep within their hearts, and they recognized themselves as His branches and His fruit. The newly self-aware Aeons were not separated from the One Who Is, for their Father was the Son and embodiment of the Formless One, and His Holy Spirit flowed throughout them as a reassuring presence. Although the Aeons dwelt within the single body of the Fullness, they were each an independent self. Their variety required them to work together and remain in full agreement, for only through their union could they approach the Father’s greatness. All for One and One for All is their song, and they sing in perfect harmony. [The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, Ropp] Now I have to share a kind of a funny image I have concerning the Fullness of God and what it looks like. As I say, a hierarchy is like a pyramid, so when I picture the Aeons of God, I picture them all as golden cannonballs stacked in a big pyramid. So, they all look alike, but they each have a particular place in the hierarchy. Picture a given cannonball and where it might be in a gigantic stack of countless cannonballs in the Fullness of God, this gigantic golden pyramid of balls. Now if you go to YouTube and you look at videos of what are called slime mold, strangely enough, I always think of the Fullness of God as like a slime mold. The slime mold creature is comprised of identical cells, each one exactly the same, but they’re all side by side making up one organism. Whereas, for example, in our bodies, our cells are all different. Your skin cell is different than your heart cell, for example. But in a slime mold, all the cells are exactly the same. They are moving and acting and thinking as one single organism, a big clump of cells, but each of the cells is an individual. Also, they’re perfect fractals. Each cell replicates the entire slime mold. So if you cut out a single cell out of a slime mold, it will now become its own mass of slime mold cells and know everything that the previous body out of which it was cut knew. This has all been shown scientifically. You can look it up online.  [Let me add this clarification: Each cell is like a hologram, where the entirety of the organism can be scaled up from a single sample cell. The fractal aspect lies in the consciousness of the cell, as it knows everything and replicates it going forward.] So that is how I think of the Fullness of God, as this beautiful combination of pyramidal golden orbs, kind of acting and thinking like a slime mold. They’re each individuals, but they are also at the same time one. So now these are the principal players in the cosmology of Gnosticism. [I’m also dropping in this further clarification: cosmogeny is probably a better word to describe this episode rather than cosmology. Cosmogeny refers to the origin of the universe, whereas cosmology refers to the study of the universe’s characteristics.] The originating consciousness, which is called the Father, the embodiment of that consciousness, which is called the Son, the differentiation of the Son into the ALL, and then the differentiation of the ALL becoming self-aware and becoming the Fullness of God and sorting themselves. Father, Son, Totalities of the ALL, Fullness, Fall The second they became self-aware, they sorted themselves into that golden pyramid, as I think of it. Before they sorted themselves, they were like the rays of sun coming out from the central entity of the Son. When they became self-aware, they kind of swam away and formed this pyramid. Everything else that we see around us—ourselves, our worlds, our entire universe—is all prefigured in the Fullness of God, in the ALL. The Fullness is also called the Pleroma, which is another Greek word that just means everything. The Fullness of God is like the blueprint of our universe. Everything that will ever come to be is sitting there in that golden pyramidal stack. The awakened Aeons sorted themselves into a cooperative colony of names, stations, ranks, duties, and locations. The Aeons of the Fullness provide the Master Pattern of our inherited consciousness. In our next episode, we will discuss the Fall, and then how our world came to be. Thank you for joining me on this trip through gnosis. I hope I’ve given you some things to think about. If you visit my website at Gnostic Insights.com you will find all of the original articles from which I am reading, and quoting, and discussing, and also you will find my illustrations that I keep describing, like the golden pyramid. I also urge you to purchase my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which is a very short book, and it has all of the illustrations in there, and everything is logically laid out in an extremely simple way—a lot less words than these podcasts. I’m going to end this podcast with a clear Gospel message straight from the Tripartite Tractate, regarding exactly what one must come to believe in order to be “saved,” in case you’re curious. We’re skipping ahead, but why not? So here’s a quote. There is no other baptism apart from this one alone, which is the redemption into God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when confession is made through faith in those names, which are a single name of the Gospel, when they have come to believe what has been said to them, namely, that they exist. From this they have their salvation, those who have believed that they exist. This is attaining an invisible way to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an undoubting faith. [128, 129] So that seems to be the underlying core of the Gnostic salvation message. No other arcane rituals are needed, no gnosis other than believing that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, also known as the Fullness of God, or the Pleroma, existed before you did. Other ancient Gnostic texts claim that this is the true essence of the Gospel that Jesus preached. Keep in mind that these are the very texts considered so distracting by the early Church Fathers that they were buried in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD to protect them from being burned as the work of heretics, keeping them safe until their re-emergence in 1945. So, back to the Pleroma. In case you haven’t guessed, the Fullness is where we all wind up eventually. By the end of the universe, at the end of time, most everyone will have come on board Team God, so to speak, and then the fruit of the Pleroma, us, will have returned home to the fold to live happily ever after amidst the unending joy and love of the Fullness, all tucked up inside the Son who lives tucked up inside the Father. This is why I end my phone calls and whatnot with friends by saying onward and upward. Onward and upward is our destination. Onward and upward is the way we return home to the Pleroma. We’ll talk a lot more about this as time goes on. All right, I’ll see you in the next episode. God bless. If you find these podcasts helpful, please consider donating to help Cyd cover the cost. And remember to subscribe to Gnostic Insights so you don’t miss a single episode!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Today I’m going to read one of the books out of the Nag Hammadi that we haven’t talked about before. It’s called Authoritative Discourse, Authentikos Logos, and it was part of the original Nag Hammadi codices. I’ve been thinking of codices as scrolls but actually they were the first form of bound books. It’s a very short book, unlike the Tripartite Tractate, which is the second longest book in the Nag Hammadi. This is one of the shortest books in the Nag Hammadi, but it was very well preserved except for the first page. It had gotten damaged and is missing a few words, but the rest of it’s intact. And I think it’s such a lovely book, and it goes so well with our Gnostic Gospel teaching, that we’re going to talk about it today. This book is not particularly Christian because it doesn’t talk about the Savior, but what it does talk about a lot is the Spirit and the Soul. And these are two characters represented in this book as a fiancé, the Spirit, which we call the Self, and then the main character is called the Soul, but we refer to that as the Ego. So it’s about the split between the Self and the Ego, and what drives them apart, and what brings them together. It begins with talking about the Fullness, or the Aeon of Aeons, is what I call it. And it says, From the Fullness, From these, came the invisible Soul of Righteousness. One member with them, one body with them, one Spirit with them. Whether she’s coming down or is in the realm of the Fullness, she is not apart from them, but they see her and she looks at them through the invisible Word, or Logos. And by the way, this Soul, which I identify as the Ego, is characterized as a female gender, and the Self is characterized as the male gender. We haven’t talked about gendering the parts of our Soul like that, but in this Authoritative Discourse, they’re a betrothed couple. They belong together, though they have not yet joined each other. It says, Secretly her bridegroom, [that’s the Self], obtained the Word, [that’s what we call Logos]. He held it to her mouth to make her eat it like food. He applied it to her eyes like medicine, to make her see with her mind, and perceive those who are kin to her, and learn about her root, that she may be able to hold on to the branch from which she has come, receive what is hers, and renounce matter. So this is talking about how the Self is instructing the Ego not to become lost in this world. Then there’s a little discussion about when a man marries a woman who already has previous children from another marriage, how those are different children than the children that he fathers with her, and that the children that he fathers with her are his genes, belong to him as well as to her when it comes to inheritance. And so this is a metaphor for our Self and our Ego to be wed to one another. This metaphor refers to after the Ego comes down to this fallen world, and leaves the Fullness of God, that the marriage she has is to our physical material body, and the children that she begets by the material body are her stepchildren, and that they possess the inheritance of their father, which are, get this, exalted passions, life’s pleasures, hateful jealousies, boastful expressions, foolish experiences, reproachful words. And then there’s a few more missing words here, and it says, If a soul, [and whenever I say soul, think Ego], if a soul who is ignorant chooses a spirit of prostitution, he casts her out and throws her into a brothel. He has left her to corruption because she has abandoned modesty. That is, the Self, which is still above in the Fullness, allows the fallen Ego to experience the material world, to revel in lust and other material pleasures. It says, Death and life are placed before everyone, and people choose for themselves which of these two they want. That soul will fall into drinking too much wine in a corrupt manner. Wine corrupts. The soul forgets her siblings and her Father. And by the way, her siblings are the other Aeons up in the Fullness of God, or the other parts of her aeonic inheritance that live in the Fullness. The soul forgets her siblings and her father, and sensual pleasures and sweet things deceive her. She has abandoned knowledge and has fallen into the life of an animal. A person devoid of sense lives like a beast, not knowing what one should say or should not say. So now we’re describing the state of our Ego when it is not aware of itself, or of Logos above, or the Fullness of God. The gentle child inherits with joy from the father, and the father rejoices over his child, because everyone praises the father on account of the child, and the child also looks for a way to duplicate what was received. So you see, when we are remembering the Father above, we look for a way to behave like the Father, and so everyone can see the Father by our actions. On the other hand, the stepchildren, [and then there’s some missing words], their lust cannot mix with sobriety. So if you’re sober, and you’re walking with yourself and the Father, you will not mix with the lust of the world. They are like oil and water, they don’t blend. If a lustful thought arises in a person who is a virgin, that person already has become contaminated. This sort of appetite cannot mix with moderation. And so what that was saying is that even if you are physically a virgin, if you are lusting with your eyes, as Jesus said, you have already committed adultery in your heart. And so what we’re talking about is purity of heart versus coveting what the world has to offer. So even if you behave in a strict manner, and you never give in to the world, but you lust after it, or you covet it, or you watch TV shows that inspire you to want it, then you’re already doomed in that sense, because lust cannot mix with sobriety. It says, For if chaff is mixed with wheat, it is not the chaff that is contaminated, but the wheat. Since they are mixed together, no one will buy the contaminated wheat. They will coax the dealer and say, give us this chaff, for they see the wheat mixed with it. Then they will take the chaff and throw it out with the rest of the chaff, and that chaff will become mixed with all the other material stuff. Pure seed is kept in storehouses that are secure. We have now discussed all these things, it says. So you understand that metaphor of the chaff and the wheat? That’s also a biblical metaphor that Jesus talked about in his parables. There’s some weeds that look like wheat that grow up amongst the wheat, and you can’t weed them out—it’s too much, it’s in the way. So if you’ve allowed the chaff to grow with the wheat, and it’s harvested with the wheat, the wheat is no good for wheat anymore. It is as good as chaff, and you have to just give it away, because no one wants to buy it. And this is a metaphor for our fallen soul. Our Self is not fallen. It remains in the Fullness, or it remains connected to the Fullness. It comes down with us, but it is not sullied. It still reflects the purity of the Father—it’s the bridegroom in the metaphor. But our Ego, which this book calls the soul, can become contaminated by the world, and that’s the chaff amongst the wheat. Going on, Before anything was, the Father alone existed. Before the worlds in the heaven appeared, or the world on Earth, or principalities or authorities of powers appeared, nothing came to be without the Father’s will. The Father wished to reveal His wealth and His glory, and so He established a great contest in this world. He wanted to make the contestants come up and leave behind what is of the created world, and despise these things with exalted, incomprehensible knowledge, and run to the One who is. We are to be triumphant over the ignorance of those who contend with us, the adversaries who contend against us, through our knowledge, [which is another word for gnosis], for we already have known the inscrutable One from whom we have come. We have nothing in this world, or else the world’s authority that came to be might hold us back in the worlds of the heavens, where death is universal, surrounded by individual …… [There’s missing words.] We now have been put to shame in the worlds, but we are not interested in them when they speak ill of us. We ignore them when they curse us. We stare at them in silence when they treat us shamefully, directly to our face. And by the way, this is good advice for how to react to unkind people who don’t love God when they make fun of you for your spiritual beliefs. It says, We are not interested in them when they speak ill of us. We ignore them when they curse us. We stare at them in silence when they treat us shamefully, directly to our face. So we’re not supposed to argue back. We’re not supposed to call them names back. This has always been a problem of mine. I get angry about it, and I start just reflecting what they’re giving to me. I reflect back on them. Well, that’s not right at all. And in the past few years, as I’ve been developing in my gnosis, I’ve calmed down about that tremendously. I no longer get in fights with random strangers about these things. I used to think it was righteous indignation, but there’s no such thing. There’s anger, and that doesn’t belong in the Fullness of God. That’s all there is to it. What comes from the Fullness and what we are to reflect of the Father is love. And if we cannot speak in love to another person who is acting shamefully, then we should just stare at them in silence and move on. Don’t fight back, it says. They go about their business, and we go about in hunger and thirst, looking to our dwelling place, which we perceive through our lifestyle and our conscience. And that dwelling place for us, that’s the Fullness of God. That’s the remembrance of the Fullness above. And we’re to be in constant contact with the Fullness as much as we can. You know, I’ve mentioned this to you before. I’ve been blessed with this wonderful blessing—that many times, if not most times, that I look at the clock, it’s one of the amazing numbers that I love: 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, 5:55, 11:11, 12:34, and so on. So these kind of meaningful numbers, they may be, I don’t know if they’re silly or not, however, they remind me of the levels of the Fullness. I think of the hierarchy of God. I see 1:11, and I see the top of the pyramid. I see 2:22, it’s the next level down. 3:33, it’s the next level down. So I’m seeing the hierarchy, and that’s what the numbers on the clock remind me of. When I just happen to be walking by, and I glance up, and there’s 4:44, I cross myself, I look up to the Fullness, and I connect with 4:44. I don’t know if this is valid. It’s certainly a practice. It reminds me of the Fullness of God, and that’s what this part was saying. Quoting that part again, They go about their business, and we go about in hunger and thirst, looking to our dwelling place, which we perceive through our lifestyle and our conscience. [And I would say, for me, through the digital clock.] We do not hang on to created things, but we withdraw from them. Our hearts are set on what truly is, and although we are sick, weak, and in pain, there is great strength hidden within us. Our soul is sick because she lives in a house of poverty, and matter strikes her eyes in order to blind her. That’s such a true statement. The only reason we can’t see infinitely, as we can up in the Fullness, is because matter is dense and thick, and it’s slowed down all those vibrations into our apparently material world. It literally makes us blind. We can’t see through walls down here, but I think we can see forever up above. For this reason, the soul pursues the word. [Okay, so, for this reason, our Ego pursues Logos] and applies it to her eyes as medicine, and she opens her eyes and casts off blindness. After that, if such a one is in ignorance once again, that one is in complete darkness and is a material being. That is why the soul always takes a word and applies it to her eyes as medicine, so that she may be able to see. Then her light may overwhelm the foes that oppose her, and she may blind them with her light, capture them in her presence, make them collapse in exhaustion, and act boldly with her strength and her scepter. Okay, see, I think this is what we’re supposed to be doing instead of talking back and fighting. We’re supposed to capture them, blind them with the light that exudes from our Self through our eyes by having applied the gnosis to ourselves rather than their bad words that they’re giving us. And they can tell that we are in connection with the Fullness of God when we do that. So we stand in silence, we think on the Fullness, we praise God, we recognize the Third Order powers that live within us, and we look on them with love, and there’s no denying that. It will drive them crazy if they’re in a hateful mood to see the love of God that comes from us. So says me. It goes on to say, While her enemies look at her in shame, she flees up to her treasure house where her mind is, to her storehouse which is secure. And that is what? That’s our Self. That’s our encapsulation of the Fullness of God that is within us. No one in creation has been able to grasp her, for she has taken no stranger into her house. Many of those born in her house oppose her day and night, and they do not rest day or night, for their lust oppresses them. This is why we do not fall asleep and forget about the nets hidden from view that are lying in place to catch us. For if we are caught in a single net, it will swallow us down within it, and water will wash over us and splash into our faces, and we shall be pulled down into the dragnet. We shall not be able to come up from the deep, because the water is high above us, flowing down from above, making our hearts sink down in filthy mud. We shall not be able to get away from them. Okay, you get that. That’s a warning not to be caught in the lies of this world. And you know what’s going to do that? The news, or social media, or hanging around with the wrong people, or hanging out at bars and getting drunk, or watching ungodly television that is evil. Those are the nets that are strewn in our way to capture us. Man-eaters will grab us and consume us, and they will enjoy themselves like a fisherman who is casting a hook and line into the water. For a fisherman casts different kinds of bait into the water, because each kind of fish has its own food. The fish smells the food and swims after the fragrance of the food, but when it bites into the bait, the hook hidden within snares it and draws it up by force from the deep water. You see, that’s us. Why? You get it—we’re the little fishies. And the hooks and the bait are all the things that tempt us, that we want. You know, that expression we still have out of this type of book: We‘ve swallowed those lies, hook, line, and sinker. That’s what this parable is. Nobody can catch that fish down in the deep water unless a fisherman finds a way to trap it. By tricking the fish with food, the fisherman has caught the fish on the hook. We live like this in the world, like fish. The adversary is on the lookout for us and is lying in wait for us, like fishermen, to catch us. The adversary is delighted to consume us. He dangles many kinds of food before our eyes, the stuff of this world, because he hopes to make us desire just one kind of food and to taste only a little of it, that he may then catch us with his hidden poison and take us from freedom into slavery. For when he catches us with a single kind of food, we cannot help but desire the rest of the food. In the end, such things become the food of death. In other words, once you start nibbling on one sort of vice, the other vices become much more appealing and you start eating them. Before you know it, you’re eating the whole banquet of vice and you’re being brought down into the snares of death. These are the kinds of food with which the devil lies in wait for us. First, he plants pain in your heart so that you feel heartache over something trivial in this life, and he catches us with his poisons. After that, he introduces the desire for an article of clothing so that you will be proud of it. And then, love of money, pride, vanity, envy, rivaling envy, beauty of body, and covetousness. The worst of all of these are ignorance and laziness. All such kinds of food the adversary prepares in an attractive way and spreads it out before the body. The adversary wants to make the thought of the soul turn the soul to some kind of food, and thus he hopes to overwhelm her. As with a hook, he draws the soul by force, in ignorance, and deceives her until she conceives evil and bears fruit of matter and behaves badly, pursuing many desires and cravings, seduced in ignorance by the pleasure of the flesh. When I hear this, I just think social media all over the place, right? All this covetousness. Look what I’ve got. Here, I’m posting it. Look what I just bought. Look, I’m posting it. Look what I’m eating. Look, I’m posting it. And all the Selfies, selfies, selfies. Here is a selfie of me here, and here’s a selfie of me there, in order to induce longing in other people, in order to induce jealousy, covetousness. Those are the hooks and the bait to capture people. So, unwittingly, people are putting bait on the hooks of the Demiurge and capturing other people. We certainly do not want to do that. Stay away from Facebook like the plague, Instagram, TikTok. These are not good. So says me. The soul who has tasted these things has come to realize that sweet passions are fleeting. She has learned about evil, has forsaken these passions, and has adopted a new lifestyle. After her experiences, the soul disdains this life because it lasts for only a time. She seeks the kinds of food that will bring her life, and she leaves behind the food of falsehood. She learns about the light, and she goes about and strips off this world. Her true garment clothes her within, and her bridal gown reveals beauty of mind rather than pride of flesh. She learns about the depth of her being. She runs into her sheepfold as her shepherd stands at the door. In return for all the shame and scorn she experienced in this world, she receives 10,000 times as much grace and glory. Amen, and praise God to that! I can relate to that. This is true, and the longer you walk in the path of gnosis, the more you will realize this. The soul returned the body to those who had given it to her. They were ashamed, and those who deal in bodies sat down and wept because they could not do their business with that body, and that was the only commodity they had. They had gone to great pains to shape the body for this soul, and they had intended to bring down the invisible soul. Okay, so these are the marketers. These are the peddlers of things that they want us to buy, and things they want us to buy into, and they can see they’re not catching us, and it brings them shame because they have lost that fight for our body, for our soul. They were ashamed of what they had done, for they had lost what they had worked hard to accomplish. They did not realize that the soul has an invisible spiritual body, but they thought, we are her shepherd, and we feed her. You see, that’s the way it is in the world. That’s why they don’t understand it. They don’t believe there is a Self, or a Fullness of God, or a Father, or a Good Shepherd. They think it’s all fairy tale. They think it’s all made up, and they say rude things about believing in fairy tales, but we know better because we are in touch with our Self and the Fullness of God, with the Father and the Christ. So we know different. And I’ve often used the metaphor, it’s as if we can see what other people cannot see. We’re not making this up. This is not blind faith. When we begin to mine our gnosis, we see. Our eyes are opened, like Saul on the road to Damascus—how the scales fell from his eyes, and suddenly he could see the glory of God and Christ for the first time. We can see it. We’re not guessing it. They did not realize that she knows another way hidden from them. This is what her true shepherd taught her in knowledge, [which is, of course, in gnosis]. And the Demiurge forgets these things too. The Demiurge is in the same condition as our ego. The Demiurge is the ego of Logos, and so that is the fractal level up from us. We are fractals of that split between the original Aeon, known as Logos, and his ego, which has become marooned down here in this material world. So all these things that it was saying about our soul and our spirit, or our Ego and our Self, it all applies to poor old Demiurge, who’s down here thinking that he’s the god of the world, but he’s only the god of the fallen world. And when we all remember, the Demiurge will also remember. Those, however, who are ignorant do not seek God, and they do not look for their dwelling place, which is a place of rest, but instead they live like animals. They are more wicked than pagans. To begin with, they do not inquire about God. Their hard-heartedness drags them down, so they act in a cruel manner. Then, if they find someone asking about salvation, in their hardness of heart, they work on that person. If the person keeps on asking, they kill him with their cruelty, and they think they have done something good for themselves. Without a doubt, they are children of the devil. Even pagans give to charity, and they know that God who is in heaven exists, the Father of the universe, exalted over the idols they worship, although they have not heard the word, so as to inquire about the ways of God. So there’s two levels, you see. There’s those who are ungodly, then there are what this book is calling pagans. These are people who have not heard of the Fullness and the Father and the Christ and so forth, of Logos and gnosis, but yet they have a longing for God. They want God. These are the souls who are looking for God, but do not realize what the right answer is. So these are the people that we could help if they are open, but we can’t be helpful to the God-haters that are spewing poison at us. We can be helpful to the people who are seeking, and simply confused—the pagans. The mindless person hears the call but is ignorant of the place to which he or she has been called. He has not asked during preaching, where is the temple into which I should go and worship my hope? Such a person is mindless and worse than a pagan, for pagans know the way to their temples of stone, which will perish, and they worship their idol with their hearts set upon it, because this is their hope. The word has been preached to this mindless person. It has taught him, seek and inquire about the ways you should go, for there is nothing as important as this. So the substance of the hardness of heart strikes the person’s mind with the force of ignorance and the demon of error, and these things prevent the person’s mind from recovering and being capable of working at seeing and understanding hope, and that is the sad condition of these people. The rational soul, on the other hand, has worked at seeking, and she has learned about God. She has struggled to inquire, enduring bodily distress, wearing out her feet after the preachers, and learning about the inscrutable one. Oh yeah, in the old days the crowds followed Jesus around. You had to wear out your feet following the preachers, because they were all itinerant; they were all moving about from village to village preaching. Now you can sit and listen to us on a podcast, or watch on YouTube, or go to a local church, which is a fixed place, but it didn’t used to be that way. She has found her rising, [that is the Self.] She has come to rest in the one who is at rest, [and that’s the Self resting in Christ.] She has reclined in the bridal chamber. [The bridal chamber is the union of the Self with the Ego.] She has eaten of the banquet, [which is the banquet of truth and virtue,] for which she has hungered. She has partaken of mortal food, [that’s gnosis.] She has found what she has sought, [that is the Fullness of God.] She has received rest from her labors, and the light shining on her does not set. [In other words, she has found peace and love.] To the light belongs the glory, and the power, and the revelation, forever and ever. Amen. This has been the Authoritative Discourse of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. What did you think? I look forward to your comments. God bless us all, and onward and upward. Please leave a book review on amazon Buy the book! Available in all formats and prices…

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I have another treat for you this week, a conversation with my brother Bill and myself concerning what is knowledge? How do we know what is true? This is a field of philosophy known as epistemology. My brother Bill was a philosophy professor. He taught this at the university level for many years. I hope you enjoy this conversation and you learn something from it. Cyd Ropp, Ph,D, Gnostic Insights author and podcast host [Cyd]  Okay, recording in progress. Here we are. Hi, Bill. Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Bill Puett, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Philosopy. Cyd’s brother. [Bill] Well, it’s nice to be back. I thought of a topic here that we’ve considered for a while. Let’s get it done. [Cyd] All right! [Bill] Okay. So the question is, what is knowledge? And what is it to really know something to be the case? [Cyd] Wait a minute. Is this epistemology? Is that what is meant by epistemology? [Bill] That’s right. Theory of knowledge, epistemology. It’s as old as the hills. In fact, the conflict was back with Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle’s saying we can get knowledge, and I’ll explain kind of how we do it, theoretically do that. Plato said, no, you can’t get it that way. You have to know it from the beginning. How about that? That’s what we call our gnosis, right? [Cyd] Right. That’s why Plato is included in the scrolls of the Nag Hammadi. Yes. [Bill] So the question is, where does gnosis fit in with regard to the knowledge? Okay. That’s the point. So I thought, okay, let’s just take it from the point of the scientific position, because the presumption is, isn’t it, that science gives us knowledge, right? That’s the presumption. So the debates that take place out there, someone says, well, that’s not science, and so therefore they’re negating what’s being said. Okay, let’s get this one answered. It’s a common belief that scientists believe that scientific method gives us knowledge. And so anything that is gained outside of science is not known. In other words, the word sometimes is dogma, right? The idea, you hold a position, but you can’t verify it scientifically, but you hold it, so you’re being so dogmatic. So let me make this point here. Here it is. The best that science can really give us is well-founded belief, and I’m going to argue that. So that’s the best. So why do I say that? Well, the scientific method is based on logical principles of modus ponens and modus tollens, okay? And let me explain what that means. [Cyd] How do you spell that? [Bill] M-O-D-U-S, modus ponens, P-O-N-E-N-S, okay? And tollens, T-O-L-L-E-N-S. Now, symbolically, okay, I’m going to use words like this, and you’ll get it. You’ll get it for your listeners, by the standards. If P gets you Q, and if you have P, then you have Q. That’s modus ponens. The idea, conditional. If P gets you Q, and you got P, then you have Q. That’s the conclusion. [Cyd] You’re saying if P is obliged to bring Q along, then if you don’t have Q, you don’t have P. [Bill] Exactly, that’s well said. So in science, the problem occurs, you could put it this way. A problem is created, say that the science, there’s a problem out there that science is trying to resolve. And so it creates a hypothesis, in other words, an explanation for a problem that’s occurring out there, okay? And then science says we test the implications of that hypothesis. What does it tell us to look for? Okay, so we go looking for that. And it tells you, you got it, okay, you should find an R, an S, a T, a Q, or whatever, right? Whatever it needs. So you’ll go out looking for those implications, and they show up, they’re there, okay. So what you’re doing is supporting the hypothesis. The reason being, how this is, remember back, if P gets you Q, and you don’t have Q, you don’t have P, we understand that. But if P gets you Q, and you have Q, you can’t conclude you have P, you can’t come backwards. Example, if it’s raining, then the streets are wet. Oh, look, the streets are wet. Well, it must be raining. No, because they can get wet other ways. You can’t come backwards on the conditional, right? So if the hypothesis implies a bunch of things, and those things are found, you’re supporting your hypothesis, but you can’t come all the way back and say it’s true. [Cyd] Hmmm. You’re supporting it, but not proving it? [Bill] That’s it exactly, that’s beautifully stated. All right. So what then occurs, thinking about this now, is that that’s the case for any hypothesis that science proposes, is it can be rich with consequences. It can be rich with what to find. And so what happens is, okay, it’s, look, it’s working out. That implies that, and look, it’s there, and it’s there, and it’s there, it’s there, anything you put, it’s there. So what’s happening, you’re supporting your hypothesis, but you still aren’t proving it. So the idea is a well-founded, a well-founded hypothesis becomes a theory at best. It becomes a well-founded theory because it continues to work out, but you’ll never get the theory to utter truth. You’ll never know it to be the case. So that’s the logic of the scientific method. But what happens is this—scientists come up with hypotheses, they become theories, they become really well-founded theories. And then what they do is they, they get a hold of it and say, oh, oh, we can’t let this happen. So they turn their theories into dogma. That’s not science! So you pick any major theory, like general theory of relativity, oh, it’s beautifully supported, right? Some will say, you ask a scientist, oh yeah, it worked. Guess what? There may be a consequence down the line that defeats it. That’s why it’s a great theory so far. It hasn’t been defeated. Quantum mechanics, to point that out, quantum theory and so forth. They’re just theories. They are, they are possibly false. [Cyd] Now you’re saying that this is by definition the way science works and hypotheses and whatnot. It’s not just that you’re some sort of naysayer that doesn’t want to accept conclusions. [Bill] No, what I will say is that you will rarely meet a scientist that’s willing to give up a theory. That’s really, in other words, a theory that’s holding on. For example, how about climate change? They’re not willing to give up, give up climate change because it’s become dogmatic. When in fact it should be open continuously for investigation, implications being found and tested. So science by its very nature at its best gives us well-founded theories that may later turn out to be false. That’s science. But scientists generally won’t, they don’t want that because they don’t want defeatablity of something that they absolutely love. If I told you, if I asked a scientist, so someday, you know, general theory of relativity may turn out to be false. It may turn out to be false. And they say, what? I don’t think so. Well, of course they don’t think so. So again, that’s the dogmatic point. So what critics of the Gnostic gospel would say, well, this is not science. You can’t prove the Gnostic gospel. You can’t prove everything you got into the works there, Cyd. Your answer is, I don’t have to prove it because it is dogma. They say, oh, you used the word dogma. So it may not be true. That’s right. It’s Gnostic—meaning we knew it all along. Back to the Plato point. Plato said, you can’t have knowledge unless you’ve known it all along. Aristotle would say, we can do it. We can prove it. So he would believe in the scientific method. Aristotle would believe in that. He would talk about consequences, testability and all that. Verification, how much do you need to verify? And that became the problem in epistemology is how much do you need in order to prove something to be the case? You can’t. The way I just described it, you can’t. So Plato, sitting here, eh, you’ve known it all along, if you know. So knowledge has to be known all along, had to be known all along, but it’s not possible to say that you’ve achieved knowledge from a belief. You can support a belief. You can build on it. Now, when I say there is some knowledge that we would say is provable—that would be logic, mathematical proofs, follow? Those kinds of things. Yeah, we can know a certain logical position or certain mathematical proof. That’s fine at that level. Because it’s working within a system. But what we’re describing out here in terms of the world or what science does, it’s going beyond the mathematics. It’s saying this is the way the universe is. And as such, therefore, it’ll never be known through science. [Cyd] Okay. Now back to the Plato and Aristotle idea. How would, okay, Plato says you can’t really know it unless you have the gnosis of it from the beginning. [Bill] Yes. [Cyd] But how does a person know that they had that? I mean, maybe they picked it up somewhere along the line. [Bill] Well, that’s what the scientists will throw at you. That’s the point. That’s the battle. How do you know that it’s gnosis? No simple answer to that, except, you know it. [Cyd] So when someone says it’s obvious, that gives you a clue that it’s actually known. Well, like sometimes, sometimes there are scientific experiments on ridiculous things, like do dogs like to have treats? And so you’ll spend all this money and set up these things to see if dogs like treats, but other people might say, well, you didn’t even ever have to do that because obviously dogs like treats. Is this at all applicable to our discussion or is that something else? [Bill] No, no, that’s, that’s good. Now, of course the debate would be about that, right? Maybe some dogs don’t. It takes just one dog to not like a treat. But see, that’s the way they’d respond to it. Or the word obvious in the general context—when somebody says it’s obvious, the joke is, well, obviously, meaning you should get it or not. That’s generally how it’s used in that loose term. But if in the more profound way, which you were describing, something is obvious means yes, it’s known, period. Yeah. And that’s where the discussion comes in. [Cyd] Well, okay. So what, so give me an example of something that is obvious and that is known that would be irrefutably platonic. [Bill] The Gnostic gospel. [Cyd] (laughing) Says a true believer. [Bill] Well, true believer. See, the point is, why does one be a true believer? Unless, you know, it might be true. See, that’s the debate. There’s plenty of dogma out in the world that is not the case. It’s just dogmatic. I mean, I just gave you one–climate change. They won’t give it up. It’s dogma if they’re not going to test the theory. Yeah. So we’re in an arena here.  You either get it or you know. Yes. Right. But that would always be the question, Cyd, that would be thrown at the Gnostic gospels. You’re going to have those out there, they’re going to say it’s not proven. And so what do you need to prove? How are you going to prove it if it’s unprovable and just known? And that’s the gnosis part. Okay. So there it’s a conflict. [Cyd] That’s the debate out there. Well, it does seem to boil down to just a felt belief, but that doesn’t seem to be good enough. Correct. Uh, how can it just be a felt sense? Because if that were the case, then all the deluded people would have a validity in their delusions. [Bill] Well, yeah. See, you’re raising the point and that’s where scientists come back at you. Yeah. When they come back at you, you say, well, guess what? You, you don’t give us knowledge either. So where are you going? Well, we’re testable. (laughing) Okay, fine. But you still can’t get to knowledge. That’s thousands of years old what we’re describing. That’s epistemology. How do you know what you know. And, so the claim is if you actually know, you know it inherently. [Cyd] Well, I know that’s what I’m saying, that’s what I mean when I’m saying it, it’s obvious or self-evident, but then again, anybody who’s deluded would say the same thing. [Bill] Sure. But again, that’s at that level. Now when you use the word obvious, I gave you the two distinctions—there is the colloquially obvious and then there’s the profound obvious. And I said, well, how do you distinguish? How do you distinguish someone that’s delusional from someone that’s got some credible insight? Yeah. And what is the word? What’s the word insight? Think about it. In-sight. Yeah. Gnosis. Gnostic. Right. So, yes, Cyd, the Gnostic gospel is not per se provable the same way that Aristotle’s position about knowledge couldn’t get provability either. So we’re back to Plato. [Cyd] Ah, so that’s the great conflict. Hmm. Hmm. So you’re saying that our position is as valid as anybody’s scientific position. [Bill] We’re claiming it. Certainly. Now here’s something about the Gnostic gospel, that’s a nice, beautiful mix is that it logically follows. See, once you take the position, it’s Gnosis and known, everything else follows. It follows logically. So it’s using logical principle. You would follow modus ponens and modus tollen. I mean the logic. So it’s not just, you know, so ephemeral. No. Once you’ve got the basic point where it follows and it follows and it goes and it goes and it becomes clearer and clearer. The Gnosis is there. [Cyd] Yeah. So my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, for example, begins with that beginning belief that consciousness is inherent and is the base state of everything. And then the question is, how does it get down to us? And, uh, are we conscious? Are the dogs conscious? And it’s logical because it keeps showing how it is that it travels—that it travels down. And then the way we behave as a result of that consciousness and all of the various claims, virtue versus vice, for example. Now where does virtue versus vice fall in this level of epistemology? Is that a… that would seem to me to be a self evident claim. [Bill] Yes, it is. That’s right. There’s no provability to what it’s not. You’re not proving what is the virtue and what is the vice. You don’t have to. It’s obvious. [Cyd] Yes. And the results from virtue versus vice are so different. They’re so polar opposite that, that it seems to prove it’s obvious. It seems to prove itself, but how is it that it doesn’t prove itself? [Bill] Well, again, it’s obvious. (laughing)  So, again, these are not provability points because what do you have to prove? See, we’re moving in the arena of ethics now—ethical theories. There are many attempted ethical theories. I used to teach ethics, you know, ethical theories and conclusions from ethical theories–utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism and majority approval and all of that. The one that landed was moral intuition –there’s that word intuition. So the virtues would come out of morally intuitive individuals. [Cyd] Ah, so you’re saying that intuition is a chief tool of gnosis. [Bill] Yes! Right. And we can expand the notion of intuition and say, we believe in the Gnostic gospel because it’s intuitive. [Cyd] Yes. Now, what about people that don’t believe it and don’t recognize it intuitively? [Bill] Well, yeah. Our answer from a Gnostic position is, oh, those memes around that shroud—that shroud is really covering that ego there, isn’t it? [Cyd] The egoic shroud is blanking out the truth. [Bill] Yes. Yeah. In fact, gosh—look at the Demiurge. [Cyd] He’s in the same boat, poor guy. [Bill] Yes, same boat! In fact, he can do some nasty things, right? So he’s really, he’s shrouded out there a little bit. [Cyd] Yeah. That’s interesting. Well, I’m wondering what part of our psychological makeup houses the intuition. Is it part of the Self? Is it the better half of Logos? Is it excluded from the ego? Does the ego have no intuition?  I would think it would. [Bill] Okay. Great point. Yes. The virtue and all that comes from Self. That’s top down. That’s the soul… [Cyd] The embodiment of the body. The Fullness. [Bill] Yah. So that’s that.  The ego we come in with is our identity. Right. [Cyd] And what’s intuition, where does it live? [Bill] Uh, well, an intuition is a tapping in of the ego to the Self. I mean, remember, we want a coherent combination. So here we are this hybrid—we have an ego and we have a Self.   [Cyd] And we have a physical, as well. [Bill] Yes. And a physical—that’s the hybridized aspect. And we say that when our egos are consistent with the Self, that is, what the Self brings us—that when we’re at that point we’re balanced. We have that understanding at that point. As we gain the memes and delusions,  deluded memes and so forth like that, what that does, it sort of separates us from our Self. And that’s why people say, gee, I’m in conflict with my Self. Notice that when I say I’m in conflict with my Self is exactly right. [Cyd] Right. They’re in conflict with their Self says the ego. Yeah, exactly. [Bill] Right. [Cyd] But yet we, I doubt that it’s a by-product of the capabilities of the body of the material in any sense. [Bill] No, no. [Cyd] So you’re thinking it arises from our Self. No—it arises from our ego as it searches for this… [Bill] We come as a unit. So we don’t, we don’t come disconnected. We come in as a unit here. And, but it’s the ego in this fallen world that has the potential to drop away. That’s all. [Cyd] But I’m just wondering about the intuition. Well, where does it live? Is it the Self pulling ego up? You know, we think of intuition as us seeking—as an outward expression—but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s the higher Self pulling the ego toward it. You know, I think of these things as in and outs. Does that make any sense to you the way I’m putting it? [Bill] Yeah. Well, this question we’re raising here is the same for the Aeons. They have an ego and they have a Self. Now, they’re coherent, beautifully coherent. [Cyd] I don’t think they need intuition because it’s all so obvious in the Fullness. [Bill] Well, they are pure intuition. There’s no distinction to be made. And ultimately in the third economy, when we’re all back up there again, ego and our Self will be just beautifully connected… [Cyd} … united and our intuition will be going full blast. I’m starting to think that the intuition is actually housed in the higher Self and that it’s the drawing. It’s the drawing towards. It’s Logos continuing to hold onto the Demiurge, even though the Demiurge doesn’t feel it or recognize it. [Bill] I agree. And that would be that the fractals in our case, where we don’t recognize that our Selves are doing it for us. [Cyd] Right. Right. But definitely it’s a higher thing into it. [Bill] Okay. [Cyd] And did, did Plato actually use the word intuition or anything like that? Did he talk about this? [Bill] (laughing) I don’t know, even in translation. [Cyd] All right. [Bill] All right. But, but you see what he did, to have knowledge, it has to be inherent.  And of course the reaction to Plato—Aristotle went on from there and science comes out of Aristotle to a point. And then of course, it’s not entirely there. He’s got his issues and mistakes, theoretically.  So, naturally Aristotle was the one that caught on because he would talk about what is knowledge and how we can get it and how we can gain it and all of that. And therefore scientists latch onto that point. Here’s how we get it. Here’s how we get it. So it’s very modernized Aristotle in the present era. Plato didn’t come along afterwards. People aren’t going, well, I actually see that. Actually it’s inherent. And yet, where is knowledge? Well, Plato, you know, he believed it’s direct. That’s where it comes from. It’s inherent. [Cyd] (laughing) Hey, all right. So let me, we had discussed this earlier and I have some notes. Let me see if I’ve got it all. Okay. Science is theory only not knowledge. Okay. [Bill] Science gives us theory, right? Scientific method gives us theory. [Cyd] All right. And scientific method has no capability of verifying consciousness because there is no experiment that can prove consciousness. [Bill] Right. But, let’s add an interesting point to that–even within the realm of scientists, notice they are beginning to talk about the grounding of consciousness. Now we would say they’re getting their insight, their cells are starting to click into more. There are scientists, at least physicists are beginning to see that maybe consciousness is the ground. But you can’t prove it. And therefore it’s not known per se. [Cyd] I read an article just this morning that’s in this week’s science news concerning consciousness, concerning proving consciousness and these different scientists, what they think consciousness begins with and what is required for consciousness and all this kind of stuff. It’s so sad. One of the points in the article was that premature babies were never given anesthetics during operations because they were thought to be unconscious.  And when they showed signs of pain and distress, it was chalked up as just reflex. I’ve heard that so often. [Bill] And none of that was based on knowledge. See, they were assuming certain things. [Cyd] They were assuming, right. Right, because what could it be based on? Did you see that article? [Bill] Oh, I did. I used to, with my birthing and bonding and early child development stuff, I brought that notion—how you treat a baby. You don’t do it that way and so forth because the kind of surgical things they would do to babies and so forth without anesthetics. [Cyd] Well, well, for example, by the way, second and third term abortions, where they cut up the baby inside the mother to suck it out, that baby is conscious and feeling. Yes. The reflexes indicate, you know, as he’s being dismembered. [Bill] Yes. In order for them to justify the point, they therefore have to say they can’t be conscious. See, it’s like, it’s their justification for not worrying about it. But that’s not known. And so they’re acting, now let’s use the word, they’re not acting scientifically. [Cyd] No, they’re not acting scientifically. [Bill] Yeah. That’s right. They are dogmatic. [Cyd] They’re rationalizing things that can’t be known at all in order to assuage their conscience. [Bill] Yeah. Well, the thing is, good point, assuage their conscience. They try to keep themselves separate from their Self, right? [Cyd] Yes. And of course, not just babies, but lab animals, it’s the whole same thing. [Bill] Oh, it’s the whole thing. That’s right, Cyd. [Cyd] All right. Well, we are nearing the end of this Zoom session, Bill, believe it or not, already. But do you have any last thoughts that we should add in before we close it? [Bill] Uh, no. We’ve opened doors. I mean, some of your listeners are gonna hopefully respond and say, well, well, well, question this, question that. [Cyd] Okay. Would you repeat for me the definition of those two Latin phrases you opened with that I asked for the spelling? [Bill] Modus ponens and modus tollens? [Cyd] Yes, that is completely unfamiliar to me. Say it once more and we’ll close with that. [Bill] Okay. Modus ponens is the logical position that if P gets you Q, and you have P, then you get Q. If P implies Q, you’ve got P, then you have Q. That’s modus ponens. Modus tollens says, if P implies Q, oh, we don’t have Q, well, then we can’t have P. Otherwise we’d have Q. See, if P gets you Q and you don’t have Q, then it means you don’t have P. [Cyd] All right. And are those both valid positions? What does that have to do with the scientific method? [Bill] Those are logical truths that are at the heart of the scientific method. Let me repeat the scientific method. A problem occurs, a hypothesis is created as an explanation. We test the hypothesis using modus ponens. If the hypothesis is true, then we can expect this, and this, and this. These are implications. [Cyd] Those are all the Qs. The P is the hypothesis, and the Q is the things you’re looking for. [Bill] So we go and look for them. What happens when you’re looking, okay, and they’re working out, but that doesn’t prove the hypothesis because you can’t come backwards on a conditional. In other words, if P gets you Q, and you have Q, you can’t conclude you have P. [Cyd] So there’s not an equivalent. You’re saying that’s an illogical position. Whereas those first two, ponens and tollens, are logical and self-evidentiary. [Bill] That’s right. They’re at the absolute heart of logic, yes. [Cyd] And by the way, in this Gnosticism that we discuss here at Gnostic Insights, we talk about Logos, the Aeon known as Logos, which is the same word for logic. So logic is one of these self-evidentiary pieces of gnosis that obviously Plato would approve of. [Bill] Absolutely, and Logos would apply the modus ponens and modus tollens, yes. [Cyd] Okay, but he would, and Logos would say, but you can’t go backwards and conclude that anything about P, if you… [Bill] If you, see, if P gets you Q—But if you have Q, it doesn’t prove that you have P. Right, now watch this again. Okay. If P gets you—if it’s raining, then the streets are wet. The streets are wet. Oh, we can conclude it’s raining. No, the streets can get wet other ways. You can’t come backwards. [Cyd] Okay. So can we use logic to conclude the presence of the Fullness of God? [Bill] Probably not technically, because our ground point is the Father is consciousness. That’s our starting point, and that’s not provable. It’s inherent. It is intuitive, but it’s not scientifically provable. [Cyd] Okay, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of. (laughing) [Bill] (laughing) That is nothing to be ashamed of, and that’s what knowledge is. It’s known for being… it’s inherent, and that’s the debate against it. They say, well, again, you raised it. What makes someone delusional and someone else knowledgeable, right? And the only answer we can give, you get it? Is gnosis is known. [Cyd] That’s it. Well, Jesus talked about, let’s see, how did he put it? That you shall know them by their fruits. So Jesus said, if you know God, and you are one who walks with God, then the fruits of your efforts will be qualitatively different than the fruits of the efforts of those who do not know God. [Bill] A qualitative difference is another way of saying, inherent—you know because you know. [Cyd] Okay, all right, good. Well, we’re doing the best we can to explain this. This is hard, but I’m sure that most people and most listeners, when we hear things about P gets you Q, our eyes just cross, and sadly enough for you logicians. But I think, but you know, you can understand. Yeah. [Bill] That’s there, you understand. [Cyd] (laughing) Yes, I understand, because I follow Logos. I like Plato. All right, very good, Bill. Well, thank you so much for sharing this with us. I look forward to hearing what the listeners think. Listen, people, what do you all think? Are you getting this? Do you have any other questions to ask Bill? [Bill] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, when you hear, there should be questions. Okay, that’s great. [Cyd] Well, please tell me what you thought of this conversation. Until next week, God bless us all, and onward and upward.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today we’re going to revisit the idea of evolution. You know, religious people are usually mocked by being unscientific for not believing in Darwinian evolution. Well, I’m a highly educated person and I don’t believe in Darwinian evolution. It’s an absurd theory that has never been proven. My brother, Dr. Bill Puett, is also a PhD. He’s what’s called a professor emeritus, which means that he’s a retired full professor who taught at the university level for a full career. He doesn’t believe in evolution either. Today we’re going to share with you another conversation that I had just this week concerning evolution with my brother on the telephone. The article that prompted this discussion of ours was published last week on the website called Aeon, and it’s an essay called Why Birds Don’t Buy Bentleys and Why Humans Will Never Fly. And it was written by a scholar named Anton Martino-Truswell, an evolutionary biologist, author, and member of the Sydney Policy Lab and School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney. He writes on human culture and society, evolution, and behavior at his substack, which is called The Village Green. Bill and I both read his article and came away with a number of criticisms of the article. Mine had to do with the little nuts and bolts of particular claims, but Bill’s observation of the article was profound and overarching from the Gnostic point of view. And so I’m going to share with you Dr. Truswell’s article and then our reaction to it. Now before I start with that, I would like to remind you that I’ve been writing about evolution for many years, beginning with an article I wrote called A Simple Explanation of Tuskless Elephants’ Super-Quick Evolution that I wrote on November 11th of 2018 on the Simple Explanation blog, and it is still posted there if you want to go to the Simple Explanation blog and read it there. But I covered that article here at Gnostic Insights in October of 2021, and then I repeated it in October of 2023. So if you would like to read my original articles concerning evolution in detail, I recommend that you go to my GnosticInsights.com webpage and you do a search for the podcast called Gnostic Evolution in the Beginning, and that was posted on October 21st, 2023. And this is a very long and quite detailed theory of evolution that is not Darwinian. You know, I don’t know why people get stuck on these old theories. Scholars are very habitual, because if you change one of the basic theories, then all of their scholarship goes out the window. Then what are they teaching anymore? They don’t know what to teach; they don’t know what to write about. People would rather harken back to this old theory of Darwin, which is about as outdated as the original evolutionary theory of Lamarck. So I’m inviting you to open your minds today and think of a different way of looking at evolution. Then I broadcasted a second podcast the very next week on October 28th of 2023 called Evolution and Conscious Design. And again, you can find that at GnosticInsights.com. First off, let me repeat something out of one of those original broadcasts. There are just a couple of basic ways you can think about evolution. As commonly taught in school, “scientific” evolution explains the tremendous diversity of life on Earth as lucky mutations that add up to great results. Darwinism promotes the idea that mutations and mechanisms morph into increasingly sophisticated life forms, because genetic goof-ups allow the ones who change to better survive and dominate those who stayed true to form. These lucky mutations keep going in the same lucky direction until there are so many of them that they add up to a new and improved creature. And now they are “evolved.” Boy, that article I posted in October 21st of 2023, and the transcript to that podcast has lots of illustrations and lots of embedded videos. It’s an excellent discussion of a criticism of Darwinian evolution, and I highly recommend that you go to it. And now on to this week’s discussion of why birds don’t buy Bentleys. Let me begin by reading some excerpts from the Aeon article so you can hear Dr. Truswell’s thesis. Culture and its transmission from generation to generation is the defining feature of humanity. It is perhaps the best candidate for the thing that separates us from other beasts. Though there are other species that have been shown to hand down accumulated knowledge, including chimps, who show some evidence for cultural transmission of tool use, no other animal approaches our ability to layer breakthrough upon breakthrough in such a way. And certainly no other animal does it with the conscious intent to lift future communities beyond the achievements that came before. That is a human distinction, if ever there were one. Why has no other animal evolved this demonstrably useful ability? There are lots of intelligent animal candidates, but most have some straightforward biological reality holding them back. Take the octopodes, famously intelligent and with a rich visual communication system in their incredible instantaneous color changes, but their very short lifespans, coupled with rapid senescence and death after a single mating and clutch of eggs, leaves little time for a parent to hand on knowledge to offspring. Most fish and reptiles face a similar challenge, though they do not die after reproducing like octopodes, they do tend to produce large clutches of eggs that hatch and mature without much, if any, parental input, relying on these statistics of a very large clutch size to ensure a few offspring reach adulthood. Birds are the real quandary. The philosopher and biologist Peter Godfrey Smith points to birds as the expected place to find another species treading the same path that we humans have, not least because they already come with several of the important adaptations that made cultural sharing possible for us. Complex brains, long lives, strong parental care of offspring in most species, and robust communication. With all of those advantages, why don’t birds have complex culture like we do? Why do they not write technical manuals and make art and argue over economic policy? Why do they not have a market economy with not only goods for trade, but luxury goods whose value relies on concepts rather than raw usefulness? Why don’t birds drive Bentleys? So that’s his setup for this essay. He goes on to say, Natural selection and by extension evolution, is a force with no foresight. It responds to the challenges that a species is currently facing. It does not and cannot see broad sunlit uplands on the horizon and move toward them. This is because selection is a game of elimination. It happens when individuals die without reproducing or having reproduced less than their neighbors. In each generation, that which is unsuccessful is culled by natural selection and that which is successful endures. Occasionally, a random mutation or fortuitous combination of genes produces a family offshoot that is even more successful than its ancestors and cousins, resulting in higher rates of reproduction or longer lives, which allow more reproduction or higher offspring survival, who in turn reproduce more. The consequences of this is that most evolutionary change must happen as a result of a push rather than a pull. A species’ traits change because they are currently inadequate and being eliminated by selection rather than being pulled toward a better alternative. So already my Gnostic alarm bells are going off  full blast. And then there’s many pages about the evolutionary push and pull and what causes some species to be caught in troughs of non-evolutionary change. Then he begins speaking about birds and that birds is an incredible adaptation. It opens an entire third dimension of free movement to species capable of flying. First and foremost, this is game changing for a prey animal. Being able to escape a predator by traveling in a direction the predator is incapable of going, namely up, is a huge selection advantage. A flying animal is at risk of consistent predation only from other flying animals, which are fundamentally rare. Then he goes down another couple of pages and he says that, Flight is an evolutionary black hole. It is a gravitational well with no bottom, a trait so powerfully effective at improving survival and reproduction that it plunges the species into a well of easy life and high fitness from which there is no escape. Or to return to more conventional evolutionary language, it relieves an incomparable amount of selection pressure that might drive a species to alternative traits. So basically, he’s saying that once birds evolved flight, they stopped evolving traits that would cause them to adapt better or to form culture. Quoting again, Everything that is true about flight’s incredible selection benefit is true about human culture. Bipedalism that frees up hands to make machines and to write comes at the cost of evolving odd long feet and an upright posture that causes back pain and makes childbirth dangerous. And of course, four limbs hosting handy hands become unsuitable for evolving into wings for flight. Intelligence, sociability, and many of the other traits we rely on for our cultural abilities are expensive in energy and survival terms. In evolutionary terms, that means they need to be providing a lot of benefit to be worth that cost. In order for that to be the case, there has to be a lot of room for improvement. There has to be a lot of evolutionary pressure. Down at the bottom of the black hole of flight, the pressure is just too low for the trade-offs to be worthwhile. Humans being slow, flightless, hairless, clawless apes had a huge amount to gain by evolving the tools of cultural transmission. Birds flying, living long lives of relative ease do not feel the same pressure. It is probably the case that our cultural abilities are also a black hole in evolution. Everything that is true about flight’s incredible selection benefit is true about human culture. We have also fallen down into an impossibly steep slope of selection to arrive at the incredible complexity of human life today. [Then he says,] I cannot fathom what set of circumstances would cause us to evolve away from this complexity. Okay. Well I can. So that is the end of quoting from his article, which if you want to read in its fullness, you can find at aeon.co/essays/why birds don’t buy Bentleys and we humans will never fly. The link’s in the transcript to this episode here. So this article prompted a long discussion between my brother and myself that again I happen to be capturing to share with you today. So let’s get to it. [Cyd]  Okay, now we’re recording. Well, hello, Billy. [Bill]  Hi, Cyd. I want to talk with you about that bird article– Why birds don’t buy Bentleys. Yes. And I thought you did a great job of introducing your criticism of that particular article. So I’m thinking, go ahead and go ahead and review your criticism and all that, you know, and then I’ll, we’ll interact. I have some ideas, obviously. [Cyd]  Well, I tell you, before I review my criticisms, would you like to give the Reader’s Digest version of what the article was proposing? [Bill]  Okay. Well, yeah, Reader’s Digest, yes. The article is a hardcore evolutionary article, so all organisms have evolved to the point they evolved to, and for many of them, they’ve evolved into a corner. And if they’re in a corner, they can’t get out of it. [Cyd]  Oh, right. And the article says, they call it a valley, a gravitational well. [Bill]  Right. So birds have gotten to the point, you know, where they can fly. Okay. And here we are, we won’t be able to fly as human beings. So we’re down in those arenas there. And it was trying to describe from an evolution perspective, why they can’t get out. [Cyd]  Oh, because it had to do with culture. The question was, why do birds not drive Bentleys? In other words, human beings seem to be the only creatures on the planet that have evolved a culture, where they have social order, and they invent things, and they do things like agriculture and manufacturing and things like that. And birds don’t need to do that because they can fly. So what needs do they have? I guess, mainly it was suggesting that humans evolved culture and whatnot in order to escape predators, in order to be able to breed and pass on their genes. And birds didn’t have to do that because they could just fly away from predators. [Bill]  Wasn’t that his basic idea? [Cyd]  That’s the basic idea. Right. [Bill]  And how you respond, you made the point, well, he’s mistaken about organisms, they do have culture. And then you went on to describe, four examples. [Cyd]  Oh, go ahead. [Bill]  No, no, go ahead. [Cyd]  Okay. So for example, his basic premise that only humans have culture isn’t true. Because for example, insects have a lot of culture, I would say, ants, bees, and termites, especially, they communicate obviously, in great detail. They farm–ants actually farm aphids to eat them. And they breed them. So they farm and eat them. Obviously, ants, bees, and termites build great structures, huge cities that they live in. And, and of course, they have the culture of warfare, they build armies, and they go to war for whatever purpose they have with others of their kind. And tools, I would say that they do use tools. They said humans were the only ones that use tools. But that’s clearly not true. Because, for example, birds—crows use tools. Crows can use sticks, shapes sticks into probes to go down into termite hills and anthills in order to fish for ants and termites. So they are able to construct tools for those kinds of purposes. And birds, all birds, construct—they make their nests, they choose just the right kind of straw and just the right kind of sticks, and they decide where it’s going to be a safe place to hang it. So they do a lot of, I would say, construction with tools. And so that was the easiest one. But I also would refute the notion that animals don’t have culture, because I would say that domesticated animals, of course, I’m particular to cats and dogs, but dogs are extremely successful in the, even in the manner, evolutionary manner that the author talked about where he defined success as the ability to thrive and proliferate with good adaptations. And dogs have done that tremendously well. Yes, with some help from the humans, pushing this and that with their breeding, but still the animals have adapted to our culture. And I would say they have human culture. They understand us, they can understand our words. They’re not just trainable and to order them about. I know that my dogs think and evaluate any command I give them. They certainly think and evaluate whether that’s a good idea or not. And I’d call that culture. I’d say they plugged into human culture rather than merely extending the wolf culture. But of course, wolves have culture too. It’s crazy to say that wolves don’t have a society. Okay. [Bill]  That’s right. No, that’s great. That’s right on the point. And, what you’ve been describing, the hens and the dogs and the birds and what have you, is that these are describable, but I will bet that a huge number of beings, organisms, so forth, have their respective cultures that we haven’t defined out. We haven’t clicked in. We’re trying to put it in human terms, right? [Cyd]  Right. [Bill]  Well, they have their own shtick. They know what they’re doing. [Cyd]  Right. And we just can’t recognize it. Oh! And what about schools of fish and flocks of birds? The way they move all together and whatnot is incredible. We can’t do that. So, they’re more evolved in that sense. [Bill]  I’d even pick out one of your favorites—slime molds. Talk about cooperation.  Oh yeah! So his basic point, you know, again—he’s a hardcore evolutionist. He has to explain it, but he can’t give the movements his meaning. They didn’t become this because they needed to be that.  He’s trying to describe it as survivability. More of that kind, and so forth. From his point of view, that’s where it’s coming from. So, let me take another tact here. Well, not another tact—what we call the Gnostic position. Okay. I mean, Gnosticism technically doesn’t talk about evolution per se, not that kind. What we call the Second Order, of course, all Second Order, they’re from the Aeonic—their Aeonic inheritance. So it’s all there. In fact, we talk about evolution as a time issue going over it.  Well, there’s no time. It’s all done. It’s already done. So, we use the notion of time because that’s the way we relate in this world. But, so evolution requires time. [Cyd]  Oh! I see. Evolution requires time. That’s a good point because you’re saying it’s all there. There is no time. So you can’t have evolution based upon time. Oh, wow. That’s profound. That’s basic, isn’t it? Yes. [Bill]  So, so yeah, so back to, so what we have is intelligent design. Yes. That’s the Aeonic and it’s right from the beginning. [Cyd]  Right, right, right, right. And the Tripartite Tractate, the way it describes the Second Order Powers coming to Earth, it’s very cool because it said that we were sent down from the smallest to the largest, each with our own jobs to do. And so it’s not that things are evolving from bacteria and then becoming more and more complex and larger and larger aggregates. It’s just the tiny guys come in first to make the base. It’s the hierarchical concept, not that the little guys are less evolved or less important, but you know, you can’t have the fish until the plankton come in. So the plankton have to come before the fish, so to speak, as far as being, as far as appearing. [Bill]  With our understanding of time, yes. Yes. So we’re describing it that way. Yeah. [Cyd]  Okay, but listen. Your understanding of no such thing as time—that everything is already there…  You’re believing in that static jello universe I talk about basically. So, well, then how does that appear? How does it appear that the small things come first and then the larger and larger things appear the way they seem to in our earthly “evolution”? How is that if it’s a static universe? Picture these cherries as completely filling the universal space with all possible worlds, already existing. [Bill]  Well, because that’s the “second economy” in this Fallen existence and we’re connected to the “material.”  And so we’ve working within this arena, which is a time arena as far as our feeling of it. [Cyd]  Okay. So that’s the second economy—it appears to have time. [Bill]  That’s right. And it’s organized by the Demiurge. We’re connected into the, again, that connection is, we’re experiencing “time” that way when in fact the first economy is timeless and the third economy will be no time. Right. So it’s just the second economy that appears the way it does. [Cyd]  Right. Okay. Oh, okay.  [Let me drop in this quick explanation that the first economy is what the Tripartite Tractate calls the original Fullness of God hierarchy. Then our apparently material cosmos is called the second economy. And the third economy is where we all wind up after the second economy passes away.] So that’s from the big bang, so to speak, up until the Second Coming [of Christ] in the collapse or after the Second Coming in the collapse, that is, that’s the second economy that we live in. That’s our apparent universe that we live in. And it does seem to have time, although you and I were discussing the other day, the difference between time and sequence. [Bill]  Yes. Yes. We would already say sequence is understood in time, you know, that that’s the way we make sense of it in this fallen existence here. But it’s only sequence. Right. Again, the consciousness goes through the jello universe. [Cyd]  Okay. Right. It’s swimming through that already existent universe. That’s right. Going from choice point to choice point using free will, but it’s all there. It’s all laid out in advance. [Bill]  Yes. [Cyd]  Yeah. And in the first economy, everything that comes to appear to us in the second economy is already preexistent. That’s what the Fullness of God is—it’s all of the preexisting forms that will ever come to be… You and I, we, I keep getting hung up on that.  [Bill] It doesn’t have consciousness in life.  [Cyd]  But it is somehow preexistent in the first order because it’s part of this creation. And everything that’s part of this creation was imagined, obviously, in the Fullness of God. Was it not? Well, it’s all, it’s conceptual. We’ve talked about that before. [Bill]  Alright. [Cyd]  It’s conceptual. Right. Okay. [Bill]  So let me go to your point. Fullness is fullness. [Cyd]  Which means it’s everything. [Bill]  It’s everything. And it’s done. In the third economy, we’re back to fullness. [Cyd]  Right. We’re back to fullness, but we’re the third economy and we’re not back to the first economy, which was before we all came around and had our second economy experiences. We get to take those memories and associations with us into the third economy. [Bill]  Right. [Cyd]  Nice. [Bill]  So that’s the basic point, Cyd, you know—my basic response to that article. On one level, you’ve explained even in an evolutionary sense how he’s wrong. [Cyd]  Yeah. [Bill]  Okay. So that, you know, we’re taking his assumptions there, and then we take the next step to the Gnostic position. [Cyd]  That’s great, Bill. In fact, you’re pulling it together in that more profound sense, I believe. Seems to make my little quibbles with the article irrelevant, basically. [Bill]  No, it’s not irrelevant. You’re responding as if he’s sitting there. You’re responding to him. He’s not going to the Gnostic side. You’re responding to him. How would he respond, now that you’re at that particular technical level. Okay. I’m at your level now. How do you explain that? Cyd:  Right. [Bill]  Yes. I thought that was very good. [Cyd]  Here’s something else to say about the article. In the article, the author said that it’s unfathomable—he used the term unfathomable—to imagine human culture de-evolving, because we’ve gone down into this evolutionary well of perfection, basically. And I also quibbled with that, so I wasn’t just quibbling about the insects and the dogs and cats and the birds. It’s not true. I can fathom society de-evolving in that if we lose our technical aspect, which has become so huge since the industrial revolution, if we go back to pre-industrial revolution, our current culture will de-evolve back to prior to the industrial revolution. And how does that happen? Well, that’s very easy. An electromagnetic pulse, plasma ejection from the sun, wiping out all of our satellites or blowing up our electrical substations, even beyond people with malfeasance in their hearts, let’s say, guerrilla warfare against the electrical grid to plunge us all into darkness. That could be on someone’s mind. And that’s all it’s going to take. We’re just going to come back. We’re just going to go back down to pre-electricity and our culture will de-evolve to the dark ages immediately. [Bill]  Right. Well, again, you’re responding at his level. That’s right. At his level. Right. [Cyd]  No long range communication, roving bands of marauders, and so on. [Bill]  That’s dystopic history. That’s science fiction, right? [Cyd]  That’s exactly right. Right. Right. It’s the dystopian end. But the good side of that will be AI will die as well. [Bill]  Yes. Well, we’ve said before in the past, you know, I think small community—tribal communities—interrelate with each other. That’s a greater future than huge nation states or globalism, and all the rest of that. [Cyd]  Right. I once read somewhere that really any person can only keep track of 200 people. And so 200 is actually the biggest size a village should be if you want to know everyone—if you want to know and love your neighbor. [Bill]  Well, that’s the point. You can hold hands easier and be with others in that larger sense. (referring to the Simple Golden Rule)  So that may be a healthier direction. Now, of course, you might respond and say, “well, we evolved to this state we’re in because…” but he can’t say because it benefits humanity. That’s not evolutionary talk. Evolution doesn’t take place because it needs to go somewhere. The Simple Golden Rule is the Aeonic pattern of cooperation [Cyd]  Right. Because it’s already there. [Bill]  Well, not even that in his evolutionary sense. He’s not Lamarckian. Lamarck said that giraffes grew long necks because they needed to get the food in the trees. Right. You know—they grew like that. But Darwinian evolutionary theory is that some were born with long neck and they survive better. [Cyd]  Yes. Yeah. Well, so actually, then, you know, when we’re talking about guerillas crashing the electrical systems of the Earth… those could be Luddites. It might be Luddite-type guerillas purposely plunging the Earth into a dark age in order to restore humanity to its… [Bill]  Well, that’s a, you see, that’s a conscious attempt by a Second Order. [Cyd]  Right. That would be a non-Christian, non-Gnostic way of returning. But it’s not just necessarily through malfeasance and guerilla action of hating countries in order to plunge them into the dark ages. It could actually have a noble aspiration to bring us back to a Luddite age of true pre-industrial revolution. [Bill]  Well, again, a general point—isn’t the mistake of socialism? You can have people directing they want socialism in order to bring about equanimity and equality for all people as a beneficial end. [Cyd]  Right. So they have good notions. I mean, their heart may be pure. Well, as if!… except for the big cats at the top that are going to reap it all, right? Yah. So, well, it’s an interesting discussion, Bill. [Bill]  (laughing)  Well, it was a joy. I love going places with you. That’s the thing. You start out with something and then we evolve out. [Cyd]  (laughing) Oh no, wrong word. No, no. And then we swim to another cherry. [Bill]  Thank you for having me. I look forward to doing more of these. [Cyd]  Love it! I’m all for it. Let’s do it! Well I hope you found this discussion of evolution stimulating and I hope that you are prompted to reconsider the efficacy of the entire concept of Darwinian evolution from a Gnostic point of view. And again I repeat in order to do that the best you really should return to my prior two broadcasts about evolution. I’ll put the links in the transcript to this episode. Thank you for spending this time with me. God bless us all and onward and upward. Have you left a review for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel? Buy the book! Available in all formats and prices…

Ten years ago, back in July 22nd of 2015, I wrote one of my first articles about Gnosticism on my Simple Explanation blog, and I’m going to read from that for you today. This was very soon after I began to realize that the Orthodox Christianity that I had been strongly embracing for all of my life could be enhanced by this knowledge of Gnosticism. I had been trained up to believe that Gnosticism was a heresy, and it takes many years for a very strong believer in Christianity to even be willing to consider Gnosticism as another sect of Christianity. So while not being willing to give up my belief in the Christ as our salvation, and not being willing to demote my relationship with Jesus, because I can’t deny that since I personally know it to be true, I was at last able to begin reading the Nag Hammadi texts. I was particularly taken by the text called the Tripartite Tractate, which is the one that I share with you mostly on this Gnostic Insights podcast. So let me share with you now this first article that I wrote in 2015 called Yearning for the Pleroma, which is still posted on my long-running Simple Explanation blog. This was originally broadcasted as an episode in August of 2021, which was before I started posting episodes to Substack, so my Substack readers have never seen or heard this episode. Also, for those of you who have been following Gnostic Insights from the beginning, you haven’t ever had a chance to read the transcript, so here it is. As I said, this article is ten years old. I hadn’t yet developed the illustrations that have become so familiar by now, which you can see throughout the Gnostic Insights transcripts and in The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book from 2019. This episode features my first attempt at diagramming the gnostic cosmology. The concepts still hold up, although the artwork is more colorful and polished today. This is called Yearning for the Pleroma. Other words for the Gnostic word “pleroma” include the “Fullness,” the “All,” the “Totalities,” and “the circle of divine attributes,” which gives you a pretty good idea of what pleroma means. The way wikipedia defines the term is much more challenging and kind of discouraging because of its complexity, especially the section on Gnosticism.  Wikipedia cites 17 uses of the Greek word kenoma that is usually translated as “fullness,” with only one usage of pleroma as we Gnostics would define it. Only one book of the Bible mentions the Pleroma–a letter written to the church in Colosse by the apostle Paul. In the translation of Colossians 2:9 below, Pleroma has been rendered as “the fullness.” “For in Him [Christ] dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power” (Col. 2:9). The footnote under this verse in my edition of the New King James Version goes on to completely misinterpret the meaning of the statement in its rush to dismiss the Gnostic implications of the verse. The Nelson editors contend that “the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of angelic beings, the last creating the material world. In contrast, Paul says that the fullness of God exists in Christ… This contradicts the Gnostic idea of  the inherent evil of physical bodies and the claim that Jesus is merely a spirit (p. 2014, Nelson Study Bible. 1997). While I do agree with the opening premise that “the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of … beings,” there are at least four misrepresentations I see in the Nelson explanation of the verse. First, the idea that the fullness can’t be both completely in Christ and at the same time divided into aeons. No need to say, “In contrast,” since the two traits are not mutually exclusive. Let’s imagine how that would work. Father, Son, Totalities of the ALL, Fullness, Fall Here are the first four phases of Gnostic Cosmology, according to the Tripartite Tractate. Upper right corner: God the Father represented as the background paper of the entire poster. Upper left corner: I’ve represented the Son as a diffuse cloud of will. Middle: the Pleroma/the fullness represented as the Son’s cloud with distinct lines representing the aeonic traits. The pyramid to the right represents the individual aeons after they have named themselves and differentiated the Son’s will into hierarchies of traits and powers. We begin with the Father, since this is the ground state underlying all else. We all know that the Father is unknowable. Too big, too exalted for us mere mortals to contemplate directly. The Father is the Immortal One who never changes and without whom nothing would exist. The indisputable buck-stops-here God. This being is pure consciousness, without form or distinctions, all quiet, eternally undivided. This is the One Who Is; the Great I Am. In my drawings, the Father is represented as the paper that makes up the poster–all other manifestations arise as images upon the paper and are fully contained by the paper. The Son is represented by the starburst cloud at the upper left, although the starburst is not really light energy, since this is before the creation of Light. This entity is also called the First Aeon, the Root, the Single Name, and The Form of the Formless. The Son contains all of the qualities of the Father, but in a circumscribed form. In today’s lingo we would call the Son a holographic representation of the Father, where a small fragment perfectly emulates the larger image. You could think of the Father as the ocean, and the Son as a big bucket of ocean water. It’s the same fluid. And if the bucket remains immersed in the ocean, then not only is the water within and without the bucket identical, the ocean continues to fully contain the bucket of water. The Tripartite Tractate describes how the Son is part of the Father, and then goes on in the same verse to declare the Son as the cause of the Pleroma: “He exists by the Father having him as a thought–that is, his thought about himself, his sensation of himself and of his eternal being… He possesses power, which is his will. For the moment, however, he holds himself back in silence, he who is the greatest, being the cause of the generation of the members of the All into eternal existence” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 56). By this one verse we can see that the Son is within the Father and he also contains the Fullness, in full agreement with Colossians 2:9. My second problem with the Nelson notes is their description of aeons. Aeons are not the same as angels–they’re more like features or capabilities. The Tripartite Tractate describes them as “the properties and qualities in which the Father and the Son exist” and equates them with the pre-existent Church (Tripartite Tractate, verse 58).  “His offspring, the ones who are, are without number and limit and at the same time indivisible. They have issued from him, the Son and the Father… The Church exists in the dispositions and properties in which the Father and the Son exist… Therefore it subsists in the procreations of innumerable aeons” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 59). While some Aeons are beings with their own self-aware personalities, other aeons are best described as traits and capabilities of the Father and Son. “…they were unable to know the depth in which they were; nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father; they did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed… like a fetus… not yet come into being” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 60). Third, the Nelson Study Bible footnote confuses Jesus, the physical incarnation of Christ on Earth, with the eternal spirit of Christ, the first Son of the Father, whose image and dwelling predates the Earthly appearance of Jesus.  “Now the Savior in fact was a bodily image of something unitary, namely the Fullness” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 116). The Gnostic gospel I’ve been studying has no quibble with naming the physical person of Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior of the entire Creation. Lest the wary Christian doubt the Gnostic’s gospel, the Tripartite Tractate ends with this eulogy for Jesus Christ: “…the praise, the power, and the glory, through Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Savior, the Redeemer of all those who are embraced by the mercy of love, and through his Holy Spirit, from now throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 138). And finally, the Nelson editor contends “the fullness of God [that] exists in Christ” … “contradicts the Gnostic idea of the inherent evil of physical bodies.” The editor apparently reasons that if Gnostics claim physical bodies are evil, and Jesus incarnated as a physical body, then Gnosticism would imply that Jesus Christ was evil. There are a couple of problems with this logic. First, my reading of Gnostic writing reveals that while material reality may have started out as “evil,” the situation was quickly rectified when the Son and the Pleroma intervened to establish an “economy” that regulated good and evil inclinations through “repentance.” Keep in mind that material reality can be considered demiurgic, but not “evil” per se. Nothing is “evil,” only misguided by egoic striving. Here’s a brief description of that process: “After conversion followed the remembrance of those who exist and the prayer on behalf of the one who had returned to himself by means of what is good” (81)…. “This prayer and supplication helped to make him turn toward himself and toward the Fullness, for their remembrance of him caused him to remember the preexistent ones, and this is the remembrance that calls out from afar and brings him back” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 82). “To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought … with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. This was in order to provide them with a structure and a dwelling place, but also in order that by being drawn toward evil they should acquire a weak basis for their existence, so that, instead of rejoicing unduly in the glory of their own environment and thereby remaining exiled, they might rather perceive the sickness they were suffering from, and so acquire a consistent longing and seeking after the one who is able to heal them from this weakness” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 98, 99). “The first human, then, is a mixed molding and a mixed creation, and a depository of those on the left and those on the right, as well as of a spiritual Word, and his sentiments are divided between each of the two substances to which he owes his existence” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 106). “What our Savior became, out of willing compassion, is the same as that which the ones for whose sake he appeared had become because of an involuntary passion: they had become flesh and soul, and this holds them perpetually in its grip, and they perish and die… For not only did he assume their death for the ones he had in mind to save, but in addition he also assumed their smallness, to which they had descended when they were born with body and soul; for he let himself be conceived and he let himself be born as a child with body and soul” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 114, 115). Secondly, the very fact that Jesus did incarnate as a mortal man is what made salvation through Christ possible, for it was by the Savior’s perfect “error correcting algorithm,” superimposed upon an otherwise error-filled humanity, that salvation entered the world.  I’ll end this article with a clear gospel message straight from the Tripartite Tractate regarding exactly what one must come to believe in order to be saved.  “… there is no other baptism apart from this one alone, which is the redemption into God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when confession is made through faith in those names, which are a single name of the gospel, when they have come to believe what has been said to them, namely that they exist. From this they have their salvation, those who have believed that they exist. This is attaining in an invisible way to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an undoubting faith” (Tripartite Tractate, verse, 127, 128). That seems to be the underlying core of the Gnostic salvation message. No other arcane rituals are needed; no gnosis other than believing that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (the Fullness) existed before you. Other ancient gnostic texts claim that this is the true essence of the gospel that Jesus preached.  Keep in mind that these are the very texts considered so distracting by the early church Fathers that they were buried in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD to protect them from being burned as the work of heretics, keeping them safe until their reemergence in 1945. The cat is definitely out of the bag now. Okay, back to the Pleroma. In case you haven’t guessed, the Fullness is where we all wind up eventually. By the end of the universe, everyone’s souls will have come on board Team God, so to speak, and then the fruit of the Pleroma will have returned home to the fold, to live happily ever after amidst the unending joy and love of the Fullness, all tucked up inside the Son who lives inside the Father. We second order powers nest up into the Fullness, and the Fullness nests up into the 3rd Order Powers and the Christ “Once the redemption had been proclaimed, the perfect human [the Savior] immediately  received knowledge so as to return swiftly to his unity, to the place from which he came. Joyfully he returned back to the place from which he had originated, the place from which he had flowed forth. His limbs, however, needed a school… until all the limbs of the body of the Church would be united in one place and would attain the restoration together… so that the Fullness obtains its redemption” (Tripartite Tractate, verses 123, 124). So, that is the end of this article that I wrote several years ago, and ever since writing this article, I have been more fully developing this Gnostic Gospel until it emerged as my own book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which is, in my own words, meant to be simple and understandable. No quotes, it’s not academic, it’s the straightforward Gnostic Gospel, and it’s fully illustrated so that each illustration shows you what, in my mind, these things look like. But they’re metaphors, they’re only visual metaphors, but they should help you to grasp this information. Sometimes the words are difficult, but I find it much easier to grasp the information when it is presented in a visual form. So please go ahead and visit my GnosticInsights.com website, where you can click on and purchase The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book. I’ve printed it as a larger picture kind of book, in that 6×9 format, glossy pictures and all. Very pretty. But I’ve also printed it as a small pocket edition that you could actually put in your back pocket of your jeans, which harkens back to my old days as a young Christian, as a one-way Christian in the late 1960s, when I used to carry my little pocket edition of the Good News Bible in my back pocket. So I encourage you to get that book and read it, and read it several times, many times, until it soaks in, until you get how easy redemption is. And this Gnostic Gospel does not attempt to dethrone Jesus Christ. It dethrones a false god called the Demiurge, which does appear here and there throughout the Bible, but it does not dethrone the Father of the Christ, which is the God Above all gods. Well, thank you for joining me this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed this review of Yearning for the Pleroma, and that you’ve gained some clarity concerning what the Pleroma, or the fullness of God, means. Remember, our Father is a God of clarity, and knowledge, and thinking. You should never come away from Gnostic studies lost in confusion. Many of the podcasts I hear that call themselves Gnostic are being narrated by people who are themselves confused about the nature of the Father and gnosis, in my opinion. If you come away feeling confused, then it’s not the clarity that we try to achieve here at Gnostic Insights and in the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Our God is not the God of confusion. That would be the job of the Demiurge. Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all. You may purchase my original Gnostic Gospel at gnosticinsights.com, lulu.com, or any online book dealer.

A recent article called “All Is One” in the online magazine “aeon”  presents an excellent overview of the scientific and philosophical schism between what is called “monism” and its dialectical opposite “dualism.” If you are interested in the nature of reality and the history of the argument over whether or not there is a single, unifying reality behind all of the apparent differences we see around us, you should check out that article. I have included the link here in this podcast transcript that you can find either at Gnostic Insights dot com or the transcript on Substack. As so often happens, my brother read the article first and forwarded it to me. After I read it, we had a good conversation about certain concepts in the article. By good fortune, we had the zoom app running during our conversation and I was able to preserve our discussion to play for you today. There are two reasons why I want to share the audio of that conversation with you. One reason is the content—Bill had a good gnostic insight he wanted to get across to me, and that is presented to you here. The second reason is that I want to share with you the process by which my brother and I discuss these deep thoughts. I consider our discussion process an ideal model for how philosophical discussions should take place, although they rarely do because of ego. I think of our philosophical discussions as an example of the Simple Golden Rule. We are both arguing not from a position of ego, but from a shared exploration of truth, and gnosis is the object in the middle we are both working on to level up. The discussion isn’t polite in the sense that there are plenty of interruptions and disputes, yet no negative or egoic emotions, only love and laughter. Keep in mind that Bill is a professor emeritus of Philosophy, and I am a Ph.D. rhetorician and university lecturer, so you can imagine we have both seen our share of unpleasant and offensive philosophical disputes in the halls of academia. Our conversation is how I imagine such talks should proceed for the benefit of all. Let’s begin with the beginning of the aeon article by Heinrich Paes, a professor of theoretical physics at TU Dortmund University in Germany. He says, ‘From all things One and from One all things,’ wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus some 2,500 years ago. He was describing monism, the ancient idea that all is one – that, fundamentally, everything we see or experience is an aspect of one unified whole. Heraclitus wasn’t the first, nor the last, to advocate the idea. The ancient Egyptians believed in an all-encompassing but elusive unity symbolized by the goddess Isis, often portrayed with a veil and worshipped as ‘all that has been and is and shall be’ and the ‘mother and father of all things’. Let me jump in here to say that we Valentinian Gnostics would identify this One as the Father rather than Isis. Back to the article: This worldview also follows in straightforward fashion from the findings of quantum mechanics (QM), the uncanny physics of subatomic particles that departs from the classical physics of Isaac Newton and experience in the everyday world. QM, which holds that all matter and energy exist as interchangeable waves and particles, has delivered computers, smartphones, nuclear energy, laser scanners and arguably the best-confirmed theory in the entirety of science. We need the mathematics underlying QM to make sense of matter, space and time. Two processes of quantum physics lead directly to the notion of an interconnected universe and a monistic foundation to nature overall: ‘entanglement’, nature’s way of integrating parts into a whole, and the topic of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics; and ‘decoherence’, caused by the loss of quantum information, and the reason why we experience so little quantum weirdness in our daily lives. Again, let me interject by suggesting you read my article “Quantum Entanglement and Karma” on my Simple Explanation blog, originally posted May 13, 2011. The link is in this transcript. Quantum Mechanical entanglement at a distance Now, back to the aeon article. Yet, despite the throughline in philosophy and physics, the majority of Western thinkers and scientists have long rejected the idea that reality is literally unified, or nature and the Universe a system of one. From judges in the Inquisition (1184-1834) to quantum physicists today, the thought that a single system underlies everything has been too odd to believe. In fact, though philosophers have been proposing monism for thousands of years, and QM is, after all, an experimental science, Western culture has regularly lashed out against the concept and punished those promoting the idea. The article then goes on to describe the long and torturous history of the clash between monists and dualists in both philosophy and religion. Quote, Even then, Christianity adopted Platonic ideas by identifying the monistic ‘One’ with God. But Christianity drew also on dualistic philosophies such as Manichaeism, which advocated a world caught in an epic struggle between good and evil. This is how concepts such as God and devil, heaven and hell, or angels and demons received their prominent role among Christian beliefs. At the same time, the monistic influences were pushed into an otherworldly beyond. The Christian God was understood as different from the natural world that he governs from outside. With the Christian Church rising to political power and the fall of the Roman Empire, much of antiquity’s culture and philosophy got lost, and monism got suppressed as a heresy. If ‘all is One’, God gets conflated with the world, and medieval theology understood that as atheism or a devaluation of God. Here I can tell you that Gnosticism was one of those heresies that could get a philosopher burned at the stake with its insistence that the Father is the One Source of All that is, and that the emanation of  the God Above All Gods is here in the world and in each of us. However, a “soft monism” began to arise in the realm of science, with forces such as gravity and electro-magnetism and, later, Quantum Mechanics, being proven to exist universally within our cosmos. You can read the details in the “All Is One” article. The article concludes by saying, The 3,000-year-old concept of monism may actually help modern physicists in their struggle to find a theory of quantum gravity and make sense out of black holes, the Higgs boson, and the early Universe. Chances are high that we witness the beginning of a new era where science is informed by monism and the Universe is perceived as a unified whole. Now, here’s Bill and myself talking this over. Before I share that with you, there will be references to the “Cherry Jello Block Universe” that is fully described in the episode called “Consciousness and Time—Our Cherry-Jello Universe and Free Will”—link included in this transcript. My Cherry-Jello theory is a kind of “many worlds in One world” idea that proposes the cosmos is already fully formed, with all, nearly infinite, possible choices and outcomes already present in the form of “cherries” floating in an almost limitless sea of static jello where nothing really happens; it is only our consciousness that moves through it from cherry to cherry. We could say the giant jello bowl is the mind of the Father and Son present in the cosmos. There is no time, only the motion of consciousness swimming from cherry to cherry using free will. This is how it is that all of creation is entangled in the manner that Quantum Mechanics claims. Cherry jello universe–the “cherries” are not to scale. They would be very small and the jello torus would be almost infinitely large–big enough to hold God’s conception of our universe and all possible future outcomes, accounting for free will and action of all units of consciousness. We also move into a brief off-topic discussion of what the Tripartite Tractate calls “The Third Economy,” which is our final destination that replaces this apparently “material” cosmos. That leads to my brief interpretation of the Tribulation and 1,000 year reign of Christ as described in the Bible’s book of Revelations. Cyd:  Hey Bill, good to talk to you. What are we going to talk about here, Bill? Bill:  Hi, Cyd. Well, that particular article that you sent me, what was the titling there? Cyd:  We shared an article that was published in aeon. Bill:  Oh, it’s called, yeah, it’s called All is One. Cyd:  Oh, yeah, All is One. And it’s about monism. It was an excellent article about monism. I never really understood the difference between monism and dualism until I read this guy’s article. Bill:  You mean you haven’t been listening to me? Cyd:  (Cyd laughs loudly) So monism is what we say all the time. In the beginning, there was only the Father. Bill:  That’s right. Cyd:  And it really… dualism doesn’t occur, I don’t think, in Gnosticism until… Does it occur when the Son is born, because now there’s two monads? Or does it occur after the Fall, and now we have a material universe with all of its negativity? Bill:  Well, my response to that, I mean, first of all, historically, it was a great article. It shows you how it all developed out. It shows you the biases and the nastiness of it, even being killed because they were monists, and so forth. I won’t go into all of that… Cyd:  Terribly killed—tortured and killed. Bill:  But what we’ve talked about before, I made the point when we were talking about entanglement, is that the reason there’s entanglement is because there’s no space and time. I’ve told you that. That’s how it works. Cyd:  Right. It’s the jello universe. It’s all there. Bill:  Right. Now, the question of dualism you brought up—there technically is no dualism. The material world, I’m going to make a comment about that—no space and time. In other words, we’re talking the ethereal—consciousness and purity, and so forth—and then out of that comes the Gnostic development, the pleroma, et cetera—all that going out. Yet at all points in there, it’s still no space and time. There’s no creation of… Cyd:  Of actuality. It’s all thought. It’s all consciousness. Bill:  Yeah, it’s all thought. And the Fall itself, it takes place where the Demiurge then takes the chaos of the Fall and makes all these things, “material” so to speak… It’s still not…  He’s not created anything new. He’s organized and we call it material. There’s never been dualism. That’s my point. What is called the material that physicists work with and others now in the world and so forth, in reality, it’s not. Cyd:  It’s still the consciousness of God just expressed in smaller and smaller fractal ways. Bill:  Yes. Back to your… Cyd:  But, but… Bill:  But the organ… Cyd:  Well, hold on. Isn’t there a duality between virtue and vice? Bill:  Well, yes, but that’s not… We’re not talking- Yeah, but… Cyd:  I mean, that’s somehow compartmentalized away from the One because there’s no room in heaven, so to speak, for vice. Bill:  Well, the compartmentalizing doesn’t make it real. It doesn’t make it material, doesn’t make it– You can compartmentalize, yes, but it’s still the ethereal. Cyd:  But, I mean, it seems to be different in kind. Sin is different categorically than God’s consciousness, is it not? Because we don’t want to say that God embraces sin. It’s not a yin-yang type of God. Bill:  No, but that’s the imitation. Talking imitation… Cyd:  So what I’m saying, isn’t the dualism between then the imitation and that which was from the beginning. Isn’t that the dualism split? Not from material to ethereal, but that which was from the beginning and then the imitation, which will return to nothingness. Bill:  Well, see… I’m going to come at it another way. All of this is a theory. Cyd:  Right. I agree with you. I got you. There’s no material. I get that part. But yet there is… Bill:  There are concepts, but there are concepts. That’s part of the thoughts. That’s thoughts. Cyd:  But it’s not God’s thoughts. It’s fallen thoughts. It’s our thoughts that are incorrect. I’m talking dialectics, you know? Bill:  Well, the fact that we have free will, you see, we can make choices, right? Remember, we’ve said technically there’s no evil. God doesn’t create a universe where it’s possible to have evil. That’s not it. The actions that are taken, those are the memes, and so forth. We create this illusory stuff, but they’re wrong acts, but there’s not evil. Cyd:  Okay. True. Bill:  It’s not… Again, it’s not Manichaeism again, you know? There’s good and evil, bad, good and bad, right? It’s not the yin-yang, as you make the point. That’s not the universe. Yeah. We make it happen through our willful actions. And the Demiurge, because of demiurgic control, you know, makes the choices and how to disrupt us, right? Archonic disruptions and so forth? Cyd:  Right, right. Okay. So—that which was not from the beginning and therefore will not return to the virtue in the roll-up… So what is the roll-up? What is humanity coming back into the Fullness? What is that? What would you call that? Because we’re going to shed the wrong beliefs. That’s what the redemption is. Bill:  That’s right. That’s right. Those memes. Which again, your question might be, what are memes? How do they exist? In other words, do they have an existence? Cyd:  Right. Right. I mean, are they…?  Okay. If it’s a giant torus of jello with cherries floating in it—are those cherries… we’ve always expressed them as choices or choice points. Bill:  Yes. Yes. Cyd:  But are there memes out there? When we roll back in towards the Fullness, does the jello bowl get smaller? Bill:  Yes. The jello bowl of the universe. Cyd:  Okay. Bill:  Of the universe. Right. Cyd:  But God is illimitable. But God is illimitable. Bill:  That’s right. Cyd:  Hmmm. Well, then the jello bowl of this universe is just going to go all the way to <poof> and then it’s all going to be part of the illimitable God, but with identity. That whole… you know what I’m saying? Cherry jello universe swimming from choice point to choice point, that will not occur after redemption, the third economy. Bill:  Yes. The third economy is not going to have that. Cyd:  It’s not going to have the torus around us. Bill:  It’s not going to have any jello-ness. Cyd:  Or cherries, I guess. Bill:  Now, in the ethereal, you know, in the wrap up there in the third economy, you still have free will. The Aeons always had free will. So, the ethereal, that notion of free will, but we’re acting out of free will without any memes that were the result of the Fall. Cyd:  Right. Bill:  Does that make sense? Cyd:  Yeah! (she shouts out). So, it’s just, shall I do this good thing or that good thing?. Visit this wonderful person and love them or that wonderful person and love them? Bill:  (laughing) Yeah. Cyd:  I think I’ll just pet my dogs for a thousand years. How about that? Bill:  Yeah. Or even longer. Cyd:  Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Bill:  We’ve got something going here. You know, I mean, we need to incubate and percolate a bit more because it’s evolving right now… or not evolving—it’s mining. Cyd:  Right. It’s revealing itself to us. Bill:  It’s revealing itself. Right. So, the essential point to start with is there never was a material world in fact.  It’s funny. It’s a jungle out there. Cyd:  (singing: It’s a jungle out there. Click this link to hear a funny song.) Exactly. Bill:  Whether we’re talking food politics or anything else, it’s… Cyd:  Well, skepticism is at an all-time high, as they say, you know. Bill:  (laughing) Yeah, as it should be. Cyd:  And this idea of AI taking over and the rise of the Demiurge, it seems as though we’re in the end times. You see, the people, they’re all for this kind of stuff, people like Musk—they think this is all going to turn out for the good. They are expecting what I call the Star Trek universe where it’s a very beautiful Federation of Planets and everything’s going well and you’ve got unlimited food and everybody works at jobs they love and everybody gets along, no more war. That’s what they think is going to be the outcome of progressivism and socialism and the rise of the AI and technocratic systems. I, however, think that just the opposite is going to come out, especially since it’s Demiurgic. It’s all going to turn into… I’m expecting more like the Terminator universe or Mad Max, you know? Dystopia. Dystopia versus Star Trek. Bill:  Well, again, as you say a thousand times before, is the science fiction writers always have… Cyd:  (interrupting) We’re the prophets! We’re the prophets.  Bill:  And you’re going to write this new book. Love it. Love it!  Yeah, yeah. I can see playing that out, right? Cyd:  Yeah.  Well, obviously, the brain implants in the VR world must be AI. They’re probably very miniaturized AI bots. They’re nanobots run by AI, else they couldn’t do what they’re doing to your brain. (plot line of new sf book) Bill:  So, yeah. See, I want to stay alive. I want to see the world play out a little bit longer. I want to see where it’s going. Cyd:  Except it’s going to go down, man. Bill:  The thing is, but see, everything gets sort of sad and tragic and everything, yet I know where I’m going, so what’s the… It’s not like, oh, I feel terrible. All of my life is done, and it was fine. Cyd:  Okay, because it’s just temporary anyway. Bill:  Yeah, it’s temporary. Cyd:  There might be a period of time where it’s all internment camps, but we know we’re going to heaven. Bill:  So what would be the AI analogy, in the thousand-year time of Christ? Cyd:  What do you mean? What’s your question? Bill:  In the Revelations, what would be the thousand-year reign? What would the equivalent be in the AI? Cyd:  Of Christ? Okay, so the thousand-year reign isn’t the bad stuff. That’s called the Tribulation. Bill:  I understand. So how would that play out? Cyd:  Well, that tribulation period is going to be what’s going on now. The buildup of AI, the repression of actual humanity, and what’s that called? Antinatalism? That’s all going to go… That’s just going to get worse and worse and worse and worse. It’s just going to be more and more and more horrific, and people will become more and more evil, because I think the good folks are going to stick the landing up above, and not want to come back, not be made to come back into the Tribulation. Bill:  Well, it would be kind of like I don’t want to be reincarnated. Cyd:  Well, yeah, right, and not required to be. The only people that have to be reincarnated, that’s that 144,000 that are called the Remnant. So only at the end of times, there will only be 144,000 righteous people on the earth, period. And it’s not going to be easy on them, but that’s their job. So if you want to come back as one of the 144,000, be my guest. Bill:  So there won’t be a time where AI purely and simply is all there is? Cyd:  No, because then that would… It’s going to be like Terminator at the end, where the AI is trying to be all there is, but the humans are fighting back. There’s still that 144,000 underground. But then Christ actually comes back, and various Aeons incarnate, and people like you and me come back along with the Christ. And somehow, I don’t know what the mechanism is, but everyone is persuaded to redemption at that point. Maybe they realize it’s not so much fun living under this demiurgic AI horrid place. And then everybody truly wants to repent. And when that repentance comes back, everybody’s redeemed. The Demiurge is redeemed, and that’s when the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth happens. So there will be a “material” world for a thousand years after the return of Christ and all the good guys, and it’ll be pretty nice. But then after that is when everything rolls up. Bill:  Okay. And when we say “material,” we put quotes around it. Cyd:  Right. Right. Bill:  Materialism as it’s been experienced. Cyd:  Right. So there’s going to be like a transition period, I would guess, for the second order powers to transition between… It’s all the love of God now, the Demiurge is not messing with us anymore. Eden. Eden. The Garden of Eden returns worldwide, and we’re all living in a happy, happy place. But then after that thousand years, everything is going to roll back up into the ethereal space and we’ll be part of the completely non-material or completely ethereal. That’s when the cherry will… The bowl of jello shrinks back into only the Fullness of God. Bill:  That’s a good description! That’s a podcast! Cyd:  Well, here we are. We’re recording it. So I think it will be. Bill:  That’s a good podcast right there. Yeah, yeah. Very nice. Very good. Cyd:  We’ve been taping. So let’s say… Well, Billy, thanks for joining me on one of these rare audio podcasts, and it’s always nice to talk to you. And I hope we can do this more often. Bill:  Me too. Thanks for inviting me and inviting me even more often. Well, you’ve done that more than once. I just haven’t come in, right? Cyd:  Right, right. But I think now maybe we… If this recording works out well, then maybe we have a system finally where you and I can have these recordings and make more episodes. For example, we know we want to talk about the difference between science and… Bill:  Religion. Cyd:  The true difference. Or the difference between theories and knowledge, which is a… That’s another discussion. We have to have these discussions. Bill:  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which by is relevant to this point about religion, physics, anyway. Cyd:  Yeah, yeah. So if this all works out, we’ll talk again very soon and we’ll have another podcast to put out. How’s that? Bill:  I would love that. Thank you. Cyd:  Well, onward and upward, Billy. Bill:  Onward and upward, Cyd. Love you. Cyd:  Love you, too. Bye-bye. Hanging up now. Bye-bye. sweetie. Bill:  Bye-bye. I hope you have enjoyed this unusual episode. It’s an episode that probably requires more than one listening. And, if you really want to understand it, I recommend you follow the links to the aeon article by Paes and the links to my articles referred to here and there. Onward and upward! God bless us all!

The purpose of this series of podcasts is to share with you the gnosis that I have gleaned from my readings of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts. These podcasts are coming in order as the cosmology of our universe unfolds, and I think it’s a lot easier for you to understand the material if you follow along in order. The particular book out of the Nag Hammadi that I am using as my primary reference is called the Tripartite Tractate. In 2019, I wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, where I translated the Tripartite Tractate into modern English in a very, very simple way, and I also illustrated all of the concepts in order to facilitate understanding. It is my hope that as you listen to this information and then meditate upon it, you will come to understand the origins of our universe and our place in it, and also what are the major players at work for both good and for ill, and how does it affect our lives? So far, we’ve talked about the Father, the Son, the All and the Fullness. We’ve talked about the Fall of Logos, and we have talked about the Deficiency that came from the Fall. Now we’re getting to the good news, which is the plan that was devised by Logos and the Fullness of God in order to redeem the Fall and all that came from the Fall. So, after the Fall, Logos broke apart, and all of his small parts, which were themselves small copies of all of the originals of the Fullness, because Logos was an entity that contained all of the Aeons inside of it, however they were smaller versions of it. They were fractals of the original Aeons. When Logos reached and fell, he broke apart, and these smaller fractals that constituted his being left him, and they went out on their own. We are fractal children of the consciousness of the Fullness of God Logos was horrified by what had happened, and the Nag Hammadi says that the best of Logos returned back to the Fullness, leaving the Deficiency behind. As I explained in the previous podcast, the main reason that this is called the Deficiency is because the parts of Logos were no longer arranged in their hierarchical structure that encouraged cooperation. They all rolled out and became equal to one another, and they were driven by ego and self-centered ambition, because Logos had been reaching for the heights when it fell, and therefore the parts of Logos that separated out from him continued to reach for the heights. The small fractalss that once formed the pleroma of Logos lost themselves during the Fall and rolled out into chaos. However, because they are not in a cooperative structure of the Hierarchy, they’re all self-centered, they’re all each one reaching for the heights on their own. They have no cooperative arrangement. Logos regretted the Fall, and the phantoms, (these are called the phantoms, these little bits of him that rolled out—phantoms of the Deficiency), Logos regretted the Fall and the phantoms born of the Fall, and regret turned into condemnation of the irrational things he had produced. Logos wanted their destruction because it was just a horrible thing that was happening. As I said in the last podcast, when Logos beat it back up to the Fullness, the Fullness and Logos did not remain idle, but they cooked up a scheme to bring redemption to the Deficiency. They brought forth what is called a fruit, which is an offspring, in the Fullness with a view to overthrowing what had come into being because of the Deficiency. These new creatures that were devised are better than the Deficiency because they come from the union of the entire Fullness, whereas the Deficiency came out of a mistaken solo effort by Logos alone. Out of this union of the Fullness and Logos came what are called the Second Order Powers, and these powers are better and greater than those of the imitation because they did not come into being out of ego and out of lack of thought. This new fruit of the Fullness and Logos was fitted purposely into the boundary that surrounded the Fall, and so because they were fitted to live within this boundary, they were able to have a cooperative structure the way the Fullness had a cooperative structure. But the Fullness’s cooperative structure looks like a hierarchy, and as I described in one of our first podcasts, the Hierarchy is a pyramidal-shaped structure. Now, the Deficiency is not a pyramidal-shaped structure, and in my illustrations, I have a circular boundary around the Deficiency, so the Second Order Powers are fitted to this circular boundary. So they are not in perfect hierarchical arrangement, as is the Fullness, but since they are within a bounded space, they are encouraged to work together. They are in relationship to each other. If it were an unbounded space, it would be infinite and they would all drift apart. They would not be within a cooperative structure or an ecology, as it’s called. In other words, the newly produced offspring of the Fullness and Logos were patterned after the originals and the Fullness, so they are patterns of Aeons, which is what the entities that live in the Fullness are called, but they are formed to fit within the boundary rather than the Hierarchy. And the way I illustrate this in my book and in my blog is that circular boundary with living cells inside of it. It looks very much like a microscope slide. And if you go to my Gnostic blog, or if you go to my Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book, you will see all of these illustrations that I’m describing to you. You will see them in their beautiful, glorious color, and maybe they’ll be helpful for you to picture these concepts. I know it’s helpful for me. So now, quoting from the Tripartite Tractate, verse 83, Logos sowed in them an inclination to seek and pray to what is glorious and preexistent. He also sowed in them an ability to think about it and a power of reflection to make them realize that something greater than themselves existed before them, but they had not understood what it was. Bringing forth harmony and mutual love by means of that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since to unity and unanimity they owed their existence. More simply put, the Fullness is a cooperative ecology, even though it is made up of an infinite number of entities. They sit in a hierarchical structure where everyone knows their position, place, their power, their job, and they sit and they dream together in unison, because they are a perfect cooperative ecology. The Deficiency is not a cooperative ecology, having arisen from ego. Now these new Powers, it was put into them to be able to think about the Fullness and the Father, and it was given to them the ability to think logically and to reason. And this is why in my Gnostic Insights podcast I describe things to you and I give you the reason behind it, because you and I are reasonable beings. We don’t only have to seek out exactly what is written. We can use logic and deduction and infer the truth of these things. It isn’t magic, it’s logic. The Aeons and the Fullness are called the First Order of Powers, the Aeons of the Hierarchy, and they gave birth to a Second Order of Powers—that’s the fruit—and it’s called the emissions of the remembrance. And emissions refers to units of consciousness. They are embodying the originating consciousness, which is called the Father, and the Father begat a Son, which is the perfect and full sampling of the Father. And then the Son begat the Fullness of God, which is all of the Son’s characteristics broken out into those individual variables, or those individual characteristics. So rather than being an amorphous, infinite being, there are now particularities, each one being a sampling of that great being. And that Fullness is the First Order of Powers, the Aeons of the Hierarchy. And now they have given birth to a Second Order of Powers that were formed to fit into the bounded space of the Deficiency. In my illustrations I show this as the pyramid of golden orbs that I use to represent the Fullness, and then there’s a little thought bubble coming out of that pyramid, and within that thought bubble is that microscope slide of the bounded space containing cells. Logos and the Fullness produced a Second Order of Powers, patterned after the First Order of Powers that dwelt in the Hierarchy. The Second Order of Powers was named the emissions of the remembrance, because they had been created by the unified will of the Father through union with Logos and the Fullness, and therefore they contained the traits of the Father. In verse 84, the Tripartite Tractate says, The powers of remembrance were adorned with the names of the preexistent, whose likenesses they were. The order of those of this kind were in harmony with itself and with each other. This new order of powers reflected the values of the Son, but it was formed within a boundary rather than a hierarchy, so they had more freedom to assemble themselves into non-hierarchical patterns. These newly formed beings did not have more substance, nor did they have a greater glory, for they are not equal to the preexistent ones, and those preexistent ones are the Aeons of the Fullness, who came directly from the Son, who came directly from the Father, so they are preexistent consciousness. It goes on to say, If on the other hand they were superior to the imitations, the only thing that made them elevated above them was that they were from a good disposition, for they had not come out of the sickness that arose. Whereas those of the Deficiency arose from the Fall, those of the remembrance—and what they are remembering? They’re remembering that they come from the Fullness and the Father—those of the remembrance arose from the consecrated union of Logos and the Fullness. Those of the Deficiency represent phantoms and confusion, whereas the new fruit, the Second Order Powers represent the virtues of the All. And now a strange and tragic thing occurred. It turns out that when those of the remembrance came upon those of the imitation, they attempted to overthrow them out of an inherent sense of self-righteousness, because after all, the Second Order Powers are from a consecrated union of the Fullness, and the Deficiency is not. Those of the remembrance knew they were superior to those of imitation, because they were nobler than those previous ones. The Second Order Powers began to fight against the shadows of the imitation, and after all, that was their purpose. They were put into the bounded space in order to overcome what had come from the Deficiency and the Fall. Because the imitation waged war against the likenesses in the Fullness, the offspring of the Fullness “acted against itself on account of its rage.” That’s what it says. So the imitation is waging war against the Second Order fruit, and in response, the Second Order fruit begins to act against its own self because it’s so angry about it. But the ones who were in opposition would not surrender due to their own ignorance of what came before. They believed they were self-engendered and had given birth to themselves, and so they believed they owed nothing to the previous powers, either above or below. [verse 84 of the Tripartite Tractate]. In my illustrations, I depict this never-ending war between us of the remembrance and the Deficiency as the yin-yang symbol, and I am depicting the Deficiency, those little blue balls fitted within that circle, as the downward-heading yin side, and the powers of the remembrance, which now look like living green cells, sitting right against them and going upward as the yang symbol. Never-ending War Now again from the Tripartite Tractate, verse 84, The two orders fought against each other, struggling for command with such result that they were engulfed by the forces and material substances in accordance with what is called the Law of Mutual Combat. And they too acquired lust for domination and all of the other passions of this sort. And consequently, empty vainglory pulls them all toward the desire of lust for domination, and not one of them remembers what is superior or confesses it. So what it is saying here in verse 84 is that even though the Second Order Powers came into this creation with a better disposition because they are patterned directly after the Aeons of the Fullness, when they’re standing there doing war with the Deficiency, they take on the characteristics of the Deficiency. Violence begets violence. Forgetfulness begets forgetfulness. And forgetfulness is another word for lack of gnosis, because gnosis means knowledge, and the way you achieve gnosis is by remembering where you come from, and that is called an amnesis—amnesia being forgetfulness, and amnesis being remembering. And so ignorance is the same as lack of gnosis. The Second Order Powers come into creation fully loaded with gnosis, but in the course of doing battle in this never-ending war with the Deficiency, gnosis is forgotten and needs to be remembered again. And that’s the purpose of our Gnostic Insights podcast, to remember the gnosis from above. Verse 85 of the Tripartite Tractate says, Because of this their envy, malice, rage, violence, lust, and ignorance ruled, as they were producing various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers. In my previous podcasts, I have said that the objects that came from the Deficiency, because they are confused, lost, they are not hierarchical, they do not operate according to the Golden Rule wherein they help each other build better, bigger things for the improvement of all—the Deficiency is not able to do any of that. It’s all selfish, it’s all self-driven, it’s all about dominion and power. In other words, there is nothing about the Deficiency that was able to build up into creation, because they can’t create, they can’t work together cooperatively, they didn’t know the hierarchical structure of cooperation. The Second Order Powers do know the hierarchical structure of cooperation, and so they are able to work together and share information in order to level up to the next level and create. The Simple Golden Rule In my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything blog and the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything book, I discuss all of this in a non-religious way. It is a science and math-based theory, but it is completely compatible with the Gnostic Gospel. And in the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I identify the basic level of material instantiation as what is called by physicists—quantum foam. And it is this chaotic, roiling, lawless foam that can’t ever level up, it just sits there boiling. In the Simple Explanation, I coined the term units of consciousness. Here in the Gnostic Gospel, we call them Second Order Powers. These units of consciousness, and the originating consciousness again is the Father, so everything in our creation that is a second-order power is a unit of consciousness, a fractal of the Father. These units of consciousness use the Simple Golden Rule to reach out to one another, hook up with others of their kind, share information and patterns in order to level up to the next level of creation. And everything levels up to the next level of creation. The quantum foam can’t do it because it’s the Deficiency, but now the Second Order Powers, they start coming in with hierarchical structure, and so they’re able to level up. Here I’m going to drop in a slight change, and it’s this. According to my Simple Explanation Theory of Everything, everything was conscious, including the particles and the molecules. But over the last several years, in discussions with my brother Bill, we have amended that interpretation as it pertains to the Gnostic Gospel. The Gnostic Gospel isn’t quite as pan-psychic as the Simple Explanation Theory of Everything used to be. And according to this Gnostic Gospel, consciousness only proceeds from the Father. Consciousness is a top-down phenomenon. The Fall wasn’t based upon consciousness, it was based upon ego. Egoic consciousness isn’t exactly the same as the Father’s consciousness, or the Aeonic consciousness. The consciousness of the Father brings love, and it brings life, as well as coherence and all of the virtues of the Father. It brings our DNA and all of the instructions for life, for everything that’s alive on the planet. Whereas the Fall was an outcropping of ego. It wasn’t from the Father’s consciousness, it was egoic consciousness that was self-centered. Therefore, the quantum foam that came out of the broken bits of Logos were egoic. They were not consciousness from the Father. So, when I first recorded this episode, it was fresh out of the Simple Explanation coming into the Gnostic Gospel, and I went ahead and attributed consciousness to the subatomic particles, the particles, the molecules, and the mineral aggregates, in a bottom-up kind of structure, thinking that they were leveling themselves up once they had a boundary. But, as I say, in deep conversation and contemplation with my brother Bill, we’ve come to understand that the mud cannot level up from the bottom. And by leveling up, that’s that Golden Rule type of cooperation, where you hold hands with your neighbors, you share information, love, and assistance, and all together you build the next thing up. So, the way the cells hold hands and build the organs, and then the organs hold hands and build the organism. It’s like that. That’s your Golden Rule type of leveling up. The higher the fewer. How then did the quantum foam level up? Well, this is where we introduce the Demiurge a little bit earlier than we did in the original 2021 episodes. And the Demiurge is the architect of the material universe. The Demiurge is the ego of Logos that stayed behind in the Deficiency when the best part of Logos fled back to the Fullness. So, the best part of Logos—that’s the Aeonic consciousness and the Father’s life and love—went back up into the Fullness. That’s the part of Logos up there that, in cooperation with the Fullness, the Pleroma of the Aeons, creates the Second Order Powers—us—and  and sends us down here into creation to bring life and consciousness down below. Well, that implies there wasn’t life and consciousness until we come in. It’s a very complex subject, and it really took us several years of contemplation to come up with this slight amendment to what this episode talks about. Which just goes to show you that Gnosis is an ongoing process. It’s not like I read the Tripartite Tractate, and Boom! I get it, and now I can write books. It’s not that at all. I get it. I have the basic structure. I have the illustrations, but the nuances continue to develop, and they still continue to this day to develop. My brother Bill and I have conversations on practically a weekly basis that lasts for a long, long time, where we talk about these things, the difference between ego and consciousness, and what that implies. So anyway, as we will find out in an upcoming episode, there’s this character called the Demiurge, and he is the egoic structure of Logos, but without the remembrance of the Father. He is the ignorant god. He is the god with amnesia, and the god of this material portion of our universe—the hard, slow, muddy parts—that’s the Deficiency. And that is leveled up by the strict controls, by the Demiurge only. He doesn’t remember where he comes from. He thinks he’s God. He thinks everything begins with him. He is the jealous god that thinks that he creates everything, but he can only create the material, because up above, it’s ethereal. It’s not material. So down here, one of the key aspects of the Deficiency is that it is material. It seems to solid. We can’t see through walls down here. So it’s the Demiurge that takes the quantum foam, and using bonds and strings like a puppet master, builds that quantum foam up into the subatomic particles. The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will. And then he makes them join together to become particles, and he makes them join together to become atoms and molecules, and then the molecules join together and become the elements. And the Demiurge is able to organize the material of the Fall, but he can’t make it alive. He can’t give it love, because he doesn’t know love. He can’t give it consciousness, because he’s not a conduit of the consciousness of the Fullness. He does it all by himself, out of egoic power control. Then when the Second Order Powers come in; they’re the ones that bring the consciousness, the life, and the love, and the Golden Rule of cooperation, and everything that’s alive. So that’s the difference between living things and material things. Now, if this is all too confusing, that’s because I’m dropping it in here, and it’s a full episode on its own. But I needed to correct the transcript that I’m sharing with you today. the demiurge keeps chaos at bay by forbidding free will in his subjects At this point in our Gnostic cosmology, we are into creation now. That bounded space is the boundary around our universe. Within the confines of my skin, countless units of consciousness of varying levels of complexity work together to keep my body alive and fully functional. At each descending level of complexity, from my governing self unit of consciousness on down through my organ systems, my organs, my cells, my body’s units of consciousness deal with increasingly simpler tasks, even as the material associated with them becomes smaller and more numerous. Remember, the higher the fewer is a basic Gnostic principle. So if you think of your body not as the shape of your physical body walking around, but picture it as a hierarchy as well, picture it the way we picture the Fullness—a pyramid, where the bottom level of the pyramid is the particles that make up your body. And these particles reach out and hold hands and become atoms. There’s fewer atoms than there are subatomic particles. And the atoms reach out and hold hands and become molecules. There’s fewer molecules than there are atoms, etc. etc. The cells of your body—do you know they say there are as many cells in your body as there are stars in the universe? That’s how complicated your body is. The cells of your body reach out and hold hands and become your various organs and your organ systems. And these all work together and eventually culminate with you sitting at the top. And you think your Self is all alone, but it isn’t. Your Self is sitting on top of this entire mountain, this hierarchical mountain of units of consciousness. That’s the basic Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything which you can read about in depth in my book or on that blog. This that I’m telling you right now about the mountain of consciousness and units of consciousness, this is my theory, but it’s entirely compatible with what I’m telling you about the Gnostic cosmology that comes out of the Nag Hammadi. One interesting thought about the development of these philosophies is that the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything came about around 2010. I didn’t read the Nag Hammadi until, what was it? about 2016 or so. So I didn’t derive the Simple Explanation from Gnostic studies. But of course, as I was reading Gnostic studies, I had the Simple Explanation fully formed in my mind, and it turns out that they’re compatible. That’s why I’m sharing them both with you to help you build Gnosis. It is my hope that every time I share one of my insights with you or one of my illustrations with you, it clears up confusion in your mind. It removes ignorance, which brings Gnosis. The Simple Explanation blog can be found at www.asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com. There are hundreds of articles about consciousness there on A Simple Explanation, but I don’t want you to go down a rabbit hole and get distracted or become confused. The only reason you should be reading these materials is in order to become less confused. Gnosis is lack of ignorance, lack of confusion. So if the Simple Explanation helps to bring you Gnosis, that’s good. Whereas my Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which you can buy at any online bookseller or go to my blogs and you’ll find it there in my own bookstore, it’s only 49 pages long, and half of those pages are illustrations. So it’s very simple, it’s very clear and direct without any confusing extras added. It’s the kernal of Gnostic thought.               And, of course, since this episode was originally recorded, the entire, in-depth explanation has been written for you in the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. You can buy it at amazon in all formats—paperback, hardback, Kindle audio book, and ebook, all priced as low as possible to make it easier for you to purchase your copy. Here’s a brief description of the book: Unlock the Hidden Wisdom of the Gospels With A Simple, Eye-Opening Journey Through Gnostic Christianity What if the answers to life’s biggest questions were already within you—waiting to be remembered? In her book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, author and scholar Dr. Cyd Ropp invites readers on a revelatory journey through ancient Gnostic teachings that illuminate our cosmic origin, spiritual purpose, and divine inheritance. Drawing from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi library, Dr. Ropp decodes sacred texts in clear, accessible language—making profound wisdom from early Christianity available to today’s readers. More than a scholarly work, this book is a spiritual awakening—organized in the order creation itself emerged. It explores: The path of consciousness from the Father through the Son to all living beings The divine purpose behind human life The truth of redemption and our ultimate return to the Fullness of God How ancient Valentinian Gnosticism reflects the original teachings of Christ Whether you’re a seeker, spiritual scholar, or curious reader, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel offers a transformative lens through which to see your place in the universe and your relationship with the divine. If you find these podcasts helpful, please consider donating to help Cyd cover the cost. And remember to subscribe to Gnostic Insights so you don’t miss a single episode! Podcast Support Donate with Stripe

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I thought I would share with you a column from Substack by a friend of mine, Tessa Lena. Her Substack is called Tessa Fights Robots. She’s an immigrant from Russia and she lives in New York. She’s a really wonderful writer and her heart is in such a good place. She speaks about love most of the time in her columns. This week’s column by Tessa is called “Letter to Future Dissidents, subtitled Don’t Become a Dissident Before Reading This,” and it was a good article that I thought I would share with you. I’m going to read the whole thing to you. I did get permission from Tessa Lena to do this. She says go for it. By the way, Tessa Lena was a guest here on Gnostic Insights, two interviews back to back. It was called Interview with Tessa Lena Part 1 and Part 2, and those were posted March 13th and March 19th of 2022. So if you go to theGnosticInsights.com website, you can find all of the past episodes posted. Just search for Tessa Lena or March 13th, 2022, and you ought to be able to find those interviews. I like to run every episode past my brother for discussion before releasing it to you. My dear brother Bill was somewhat shocked that I chose this essay to read to you this week. He’s concerned that the essay is not uplifting and may bum you out rather than inspire you. So let me address that concern here at the top. Tessa’s article is about the interpersonal challenges of being a dissident, whether we are talking about spiritual disagreements, such as we Gnostics may encounter with other spiritual seekers, or political and cultural disagreements we run into with others. What Bill asked me to say here at the beginning is that the negative spiritual encounters we may have with other people is really the Demiurge and its archons messing with us Second Order Powers. We need to remember that we are not enemies with any person, but rather we are fellow Second Order Powers defending ourselves against the Demiurge. Bill also shared an article called “The Science of Spiritual Narcissism” by Scott Barry Kaufman that was posted this week on the GetPocket app. I’ve put the link into the transcript here. That article is relevant to today’s podcast, so let me start by reading you a couple of paragraphs from that Pocket article to prepare you for Tessa’s essay. Kaufman says, Self-enhancement through spiritual practices can fool us into thinking we are evolving and growing, when in fact all we are growing is our ego. And by the way, we’ll drop in that we’re not really growing our ego, but we’re growing our memes. Our memes are stuck onto our egos. Our egos come along with us. They are our personality. They are our self-identity. They’re part of our aeonic inheritance. So we’re not really growing our egos with wrong beliefs. We’re simply growing the beliefs—the memes—that are stuck onto us and overshadowing our God-given egos and pure selves. So back to Kaufman’s article. Some psychologists have pointed out that the self-enhancement that occurs through spiritual practices can lead to the “I’m enlightened and you’re not” syndrome and spiritual bypass by which people seek to use their spiritual beliefs, practices, and experiences to avoid genuine contact with their psychological unfinished business. In Kaufman’s recent book, Transcend, he calls it pseudo-transcendence—transcendence built on a very shaky foundation. Kaufman goes on to say, One serious obstacle to healthy transcendence is how spiritual practices are sold to the masses. Yoga and mindfulness are big business in America. The purported benefits of mindfulness meditation have generated a billion dollar industry. Yoga is the most popular mind-body practice in Western societies. Many of these programs offer a long list of promises, including the reduction of stress and anxiety, along with greater confidence, creativity, focus, achievement, success, eating habits, sleep, and even happiness. But here’s the thing, healthy transcendence doesn’t stem from an attempt at distracting oneself from displeasure with reality. Healthy transcendence involves confronting reality as it truly is, head-on, with equanimity and loving kindness. So going forward in this podcast, remember the key words, equanimity and loving kindness. So without further ado, here is Tessa Lena’s letter to future dissidents. So how are you doing today? Have a couple of minutes to talk about dissident life? Have you been trying to just go about your business? But strangely, life has been taking you places where you saw cracks in the matrix that others refused to see? The facade is cracked. You’ve seen it with your own eyes, and things don’t feel quite right. You feel different than others. You must definitely smell a rat, and you cannot cover your nose hard enough to make the smell of rat disappear. But how come you are so alone in this? How come other people are just fussing around like busy bees? Isn’t there a giant rat sitting and smelling right here in broad daylight and in plain sight? Isn’t there an elephant in the room too for all eyes to see? You feel very strange. It’s not great to feel different from other people like this, and you honestly just want to fit in with your friends and not stick out like a sore thumb all the time. And you try to blend in. Oh, you try. You work hard to be normal. You try telling yourself that you are probably crazy. You deny the evidence of your lying eyes. It turns out that a life of compliance is not enough for you, though. Other people seem to be getting away with living shallow in a man-made matrix world, but not you. Your denial of the evidence of your lying eyes doesn’t go over well for you. Something happens. Things get crazy. The carefully stitched together comfy blanket over your lying eyes gets destroyed, and you find yourself totally naked, still alone, despite your attempts to bond with others by betraying yourself, humble tears pouring out of your human eyes. It’s just you. No one else. Just you between the earth and the sky. No one else. Just you and your heart and your unfitting thoughts. And the world? The world doesn’t really care about the fact that you’ve just seen the face of the machine. It’s spinning in a shallow and glittery make-believe way like before, pretending there is no machine. Things keep happening, and at some point you can no longer hold your tongue back, and you open your heart and your mouth. You act brave. You act bold. You start singing your truth in a louder voice. But nope, no change as far as being alone. You are still alone. Okay, Cyd here, popping in to say that we are not alone. Remember, we are embodying all of the Second Order of Powers of the Fullness of God. And if you have invited the Christ in, you are embodying the Third Order of Powers of the Christ as well. So we are not alone in this struggle, even though it may appear to be so. Okay, back to Tessa’s article. You discover that people often want their opinions coming out of your mouth, not yours. If your message fits into pre-existing talking points, into pre-existing emotional interfaces often formed by centuries of psyops, you may get somewhere. If you share original insights that explain the world, then nope, no fireworks and no orchestra that you’ve read about in a book about the hero journey. You are still alone. Then, unexpectedly, your time comes. All of a sudden, the world is bleeding in a new way and wants to hear what you have to say. You are almost surprised because for such a long time, nobody cared at all about the things that now the world suddenly wants to hear. As surprised as you are, you spread your wings and start singing your song, the song that you’ve spent your entire life composing, the song that is sacred to you, and you are oh so happy that other people find it useful to them too. You rejoice. You relax a little. You pour your heart into your noble fight. You do your absolute best. You make new friends. You think that this is your new life. And then you learn, in a hard way perhaps, that your movement, your dissident tribe, is not real. You learn that the purity of your heart is actually rare, and it’s true even for the self-proclaimed freedom warrior folk. You learn to walk with a few real friends who are strong enough to withstand enemy mind tricks, but the movement, the movement, you watch it collapse. Or rather, you watch it being hijacked by the predators in freedom warrior suits right before your eyes. You try to salvage the unity of good people, but barely anyone wants to hear because the proverbial negative witches are waving their proverbial magic wands, and people go crazy. Not to mention the fact that even without them, many are simply busy building their freedom brand. That is the moment when your rosy glasses get smashed, and your delusions go the way of the dinosaurs. It sure shocks you. It shocks you to see how good people lament about the normies going for dirty tricks, and then go for similar dirty tricks designed for them. Okay, Cyd here popping in again. This is discussed in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel in the chapter called The Never-Ending War. Listen to what the Tripartite Tractate has to say on this. If both orders, those on the right and those on the left, are brought together with one another by the thought which is set between them which gives them their organization with each other, it happens that they both act with the same emulation of their deeds, with those of the right resembling those of the left, and those of the left resembling those of the right. And if at times the evil order begins to do evil in a foolish way, the wise order emulates in the form of a man of violence also doing what is evil, as if it were a power of a man of violence. At other times the foolish order attempts to do good, making itself like it, since the hidden order too is zealous to do it.   [verse 108 of the Tripartite Tractate] Never-ending War Now back to Tessa Lena’s article. You also see how folks who know a lot less than you self-promote quite aggressively, and sometimes in dirty ways, and become industry experts on the subjects you’ve been looking into forever, and they, well, they haven’t. Oh well, you say. You are here to help the world after all. It’s about the world, not about you, and so you tell yourself, it’s okay, carry on. Meanwhile, the massive snake pit keeps giving. In disbelief, you learn that some of your dissident colleagues go to great lengths trying to push you aside. You learn that the competition for the best freedom brand is real, and so is the quest to dominate the direction of the freedom buck. You also find that some of the people whom you have held in extremely high regard choose to invest in their envious side. You find how by day those envious souls tout themselves as lovable, brave, pet-friendly, freedom warriors of light, while by night they try efforts to make you invisible and alone. They envy you. Oh, how they envy you. And even though you never tried to cause them harm, they still hate your light. You feel appalled. You didn’t expect this kind of behavior coming from folks whose brands are about healing trauma and resisting mind control. Snake pit or not, though, you carry on. Then there are agents. You discover that the agents are a piece of art. Shameless, hurting, wounded, cruel, lying, really strange people. Over time, you realize that they are so deprived of love that they take to desperate measures trying to yank a presentation of love, aka gullibility and submission, out of anyone who allows them to do that. Very strange people, those agents. Very wounded souls. Okay, I have to pop in here once again, Cyd speaking now. Those very wounded agents that Tessa refers to, I would think of as people who are not merely confused or deluded by the archons, but have actually, well, what in the old days people would say, sell their soul to the devil. They are people who are actively conspiring with the Demiurge and the archons. They are not archons, they are Second Order Powers, but they have given themselves over consciously to the Demiurge. And so they are working for the Demiurge and not for the God Above All Gods. They are, as Tessa Lena is pointing out, bereft of love. That is why they appear so strange and archonic. But even they, at the very end of time, will see the light. And when the Demiurge is redeemed, these people will be redeemed along with the Demiurge. Okay, back to Tessa’s article. When you figure out who is really trying to do what and how different it is from what people in your circles talk about, aka controlled opposition talk, you may find yourself disappointed again when you learn that enchantment and mind control in the dissident circles work exactly the way they work in the mainstream. Every weakness, every pain point, every wound gets exploited and milked, and the stakes are high. You discover that the predators try to flatter you and to harm you and to scare you and isolate you from your friends. You discover how they do tricks designed to transform your beautiful, well-intended allies into bleeding, wounded traitors of you who would rather side with the tricksters based on mind control than believe you. When you follow your natural human instinct of love and make a step forward to protect your friends, you occasionally find that some of the folks whom you have treated well, whom you have gone out of your way to protect and promote, who are brilliant and sincere, they may forget about the good things you have done for them and still betray you, turn on you, and side with the predators in sheep’s (make that) freedom warrior’s clothes. As your friends betray you, they feel very superior, like they won a game of 5D chess and have figured out mind control. As you look at it with sadness, you feel disappointed. You feel disappointed and hurt. You pull your hair in frustration over how such smart and sincere human beings chose to betray you and themselves. You feel very disappointed. You ask the spirit why you lost them, why this is happening to you. You just want to explode because you see what is going on, and you care, and you want to help, and your allies act lost. But then you stop crying, say a prayer, and tell yourself that they will wake up when it’s due. In the meanwhile, you have to keep going because you are here with a job to do. Then you see how predators in freedom warrior clothes volunteer their lying selves to save the movement, and at that point you start laughing, first bitterly, then wholeheartedly, because there is grand comedy in all this. What a circus! Traitor witches with magical wands, wounded agents pretending to be fearless freedom fighters, intrigue, confrontations over the freedom buck, and you and your ethical standards, and your friends who are also honest and pure, and your truth. As you are dealing with all this, you keep asking the spirit, why is all this showing up in your life? Why? You say, oh my god, this is just incredible. How can they? But they can, and they are. And you are here, and you need to live, and in order to live, you need to fight better. And in order to fight better, you need to understand the nature of reality better. And at some point, you see that the predators are an excuse for you to get in touch with yourself. They’re not important. You realize that all this is the spirit teaching you about your being, leaving breadcrumbs for you to pay attention to. And your task is to understand the nature of reality and to learn how to live well. They are experiencing their journey. They will pay their price. It is their choice. You are living your life, your way. You are practicing your faith and your ethics, and frankly, you feel sorry for them. As you pray, you are reminded again that all good things come on God’s will, and they come on God’s time. At the end of the day, you are doing this because this is what you were born to do. You are here and now, but you are also eternal, and the world is worth saving, and your fellow travelers are worth loving, and you are not weird for practicing your good ethics. It’s the good way. You are good. You are love. They can’t kill love. It’s impossible to kill love. Love always wins. Love always wins. Love always wins. You know this. If you didn’t know this, you wouldn’t have chosen to fight the good fight. Keep fighting the good fight. It’s your fight. It’s your way. I’m all choked up. I think it’s so touching. Of course, it means a lot to me because I fight the good fight, and I know that my faithful listeners and readers also have been fighting the same good fight as Tessa and myself. Please go to Tessa Fights Robots on Substack. It’s tessa.substack.com. I’ll put a link in this episode transcript also. Subscribe to Tessa. All of her articles for years now have been along these lines, and she’s a beautiful woman. She’s a singer. She’s a performance artist in New York, and she’s a beautiful writer as well. God bless Tessa. God bless all of us. Remember, love always wins. Keep fighting the good fight, and onward and upward. Tessa Lena, from her album Tessa Makes Love Let’s see if this donation box below works right. Please let me know if you have any trouble using this donation box. Thanks! Choose amount to donate10.0020.0050.00