Gnostic Insights

Gnostic interpretations of familiar Bible verses Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’m so glad to have you here with me. I thought this week we’d go ahead and do some more of those Gnostic interpretations of Christian memes so that you can see the differences and similarities between our Gnostic message and the traditional Christian way of interpreting these same Bible verses. I simply went out on the internet and looked for popular Bible verses, and these were the first ones that came up on this particular search. So here we go. From 1 Corinthians 3:16. “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?” Even conventional Christians realize that we are God’s temple, but they generally think of the temple that we are as somewhat separate from God Himself and God’s actual temple. However, when we Gnostic Christians speak of inhabiting God’s temple, we take it in a much more literal sense—that when we invite the Third Order of Powers to come in and take over our souls, we’re moving our own Second Order Powers off the throne of our souls and inviting the Christ to occupy the throne of our souls. This brings God into our temple. It makes our body a literal temple of God, a temple of the Christ, because there is Christ dwelling within our midst, God dwelling within the temple. You see, our body is as much a temple to the Third Order of Powers as the temple in Jerusalem was to Jehovah. Now that’s another discussion—the relationship between the Hebrew God Jehovah and the God Above All Gods. But what we’re talking about here is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the temple of our bodies. Our body is a replication of the Fullness of God, and we are Second Order representations of that Fullness of God whereas the Third Order of Powers are the actual living images of the Fullness of God, and there’s a Third Order Power for every one of our Second Order Powers inside of our body, inside of this meat mountain that we live in. So, of course, God’s Spirit dwells in our midst once we invite God’s Spirit to do so. God’s Spirit cannot dwell in the midst of our temple until we invite it in, until we get off the throne and invite it to take its place. The next meme is from 1 John 4:8, and it says, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” We talk a lot about love and the importance of love, and I think a lot of people come to Gnostic Insights here because I’m talking about love. God is love. That is the most basic definition of God. Yes, in our modern parlance, we like to say that God is consciousness, and indeed God is consciousness. However, God is perceived by us as love, as the quality of love. Love is not an imaginary thing. Love isn’t something people make up or when you feel attracted to another person that you love them. That isn’t what love is. Love is an actual standalone quality that is one of the virtues of God. It’s the primary virtue of the God Above All Gods. And by the way, speaking of the difference between the God Above All Gods and the Hebrew God Jehovah, that Old Testament God did not demonstrate love. That Old Testament God, whom we Gnostics call the Demiurge, yes, he was the creator of this physical material cosmos that we live in, but the God Above All Gods is the creator of heaven and all consciousness and all emanations of consciousness. All spirits and powers above come from the God Above All Gods through the Son and then on through the Fullness of the Son, which is called the Fullness of God. We come from the Fullness of God. We are emanations. We are children of the Fullness of God, fruited down here into the material cosmos with all of the qualities of the Fullness of God. The Fullness of God is the First Order of Powers. We are the Second Order of Powers representing the Fullness of God here on Earth, including the character of love. But we tend to forget all of that once we get down here and become embroiled in this material existence, fighting a losing battle with death and destruction here. Sin comes from down here. Sadness, death, corruption, delusion, all of those negative characteristics, all of the things that are not love, arise from the Demiurge. They don’t come from heaven. They don’t come from the God Above All Gods. So when we say that God is love, we’re talking about the God Above All Gods as represented by the Christ here on Earth, as represented by our first human emissary that embodied the Third Order of Powers, and that was Jesus. Moving on to the next meme. This one is from 2 Chronicles 16:7. “But as for you, be strong and do not give up, for your work will be rewarded.” This meme brings up the subject of works. Chronicles is an Old Testament book. So when it speaks of God, it’s speaking of Jehovah, which we are believing is the Demiurge, or the ego of the fallen Aeon, named Logos. And this one talks about works. And by the way, works is very big in Demiurgic law. The Demiurge is all about laws, punishments, and rewards. It’s a carrot and stick kind of God. Whereas the God Above All Gods is consciousness and love, having nothing to do with rewards for works. You can’t earn your way to heaven. When we do good, it’s not to pile up brownie points. It’s not to minimize negative karma. It is not a process to reach a goal. The reason we do good work is because we love God, and because God’s love is in us. And when you are full of love, you want to do good work. You want to be loving. You want to be helpful. You want to participate in the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to others, holding hands with them, giving them assistance, giving them instruction and knowledge, and giving them love in order for you to work together to build something bigger than anyone can do on their own. That’s what good work is. It’s putting into practice the Simple Golden Rule. Some people do good works in order to earn a place in heaven or to earn a better position in heaven. I would like to be standing next to your throne in heaven, oh Lord, what need I do? That was a mistaken question that one of the disciples actually asked Jesus. And Jesus said, Boy, you just don’t get it, do you? And that’s what we’re talking about right now. So our work will be rewarded. We will be recognized. We are building up good karma. But that isn’t the point of it. And it’s not to earn our way, because you cannot earn your way to heaven. And do you know why? Think of heaven as a pure white space. Usually in my illustrations, I depict the God Above All Gods as pure inky blackness, because nothing is there. But I’d like you to, in this illustration, picture it as pure, blinding white light, the light of consciousness, the light of love, pure, unsullied. There aren’t little bits of sin here and there. There’s no dirt. There’s no death. There’s no destruction. There’s no delusion. It’s all pure, all good, as good as something can be imagined. That’s the nature of the God Above All Gods. The reason we can’t earn our way into that heavenly realm is because it’s pure. And we can’t bring our dirt up with us. We need to be cleansed. We need to be pure. But whatever we do to earn good karma is never enough to offset the bad that we do, unthinkingly, or because we don’t seem to have a choice. Example: I have ants coming in the kitchen. I don’t want to kill those ants. They’re Second Order Powers. I really don’t want to kill those ants. It grieves me to have to do so. Another example: I eat food. I don’t want to kill the food that I eat. Those are all Second Order Powers. And not only the animals are Second Order Powers, but the vegetables and fruit are also Second Order Powers. Everything that’s alive is a Second Order fruit from the Fullness of God. But we do need to eat. We are in that position. Here we are in this material world. It is not good. In heaven there is no death or destruction. In heaven we will not kill anything and eat it to stay alive. So everything that is a food animal down here, or a vegetable or a fruit that we have to eat to stay alive, it just stays alive up there. It’s just beautiful gardens and orchards and forests. The lion laying down with the lamb and all of that. There’s no death or destruction in heaven. And above that manifestation level where the Fullness of God lives, the God Above All Gods is that pure, clean, white bliss state of pure consciousness, pure love. So none of that angst about killing the ants or eating the cows or eating the carrots will ever have to go up with us. It has to stop at this material boundary of our cosmos. And the only way that can happen is to be cleansed by the Third Order Powers. They are the purity of God. We need to repent and say, I’m sorry I’m killing those ants. I’m sorry I’m eating that cow. I’m so sorry I’m eating that carrot. We have to repent of all of the things that we do here on Earth in order to be clean enough to go above. So knocking on people’s doors and handing out religious tracts to them and asking them if they know the word of God isn’t going to earn your place in heaven. Even that’s not good enough. It doesn’t erase the bad. We earn too much negative karma to wipe it all out by good deeds. So what we need to do is repent and be redeemed. But back to this meme, “but as for you, be strong and do not give up.” So that is an encouragement message. Don’t give up. We don’t know God’s timing. I always knew I was going to eventually get a PhD, but I was 50 years old by the time I got my PhD. Had I thought that I had to go straight through college and get my degrees all in order so that I could graduate and have a career by the time I was 25 or 30, well then I would have been disappointed. Maybe I would have given up, but I didn’t. I knew it would happen in God’s time. On to the next meme. This one is from 2 Timothy 4:17 and it says, “But the Lord stood with me and gave me strength.” We often feel powerless, huh? The forces in the world are just too big. What can I do about it? But when you invite the Christ in and you look for God’s will in your life and Christ’s will and you begin to employ love and the Simple Golden Rule in your activities, the Lord gives you all of the strength you need. The Third Order of Powers are the most powerful force in the cosmos. We Second Order of Powers are the second most powerful force in the cosmos. The archons are much, much weaker than we are. So if you’re battling evil outright, if you feel as though you’re under archonic attack constantly, the only way you can win that fight is to ask the Christ to take hold of your spirit. And in Christ, you can do all things. It may not be instantaneous. It’s not a magic incantation. You may indeed be granted a miracle, but that’s in God’s control. That’s God’s power. People often try to employ what is called magic against archons. That’s all demiurgic. You’re in the wrong arena if that’s the way you’re approaching power and archons. The way to beat the archons is to move fully into the love of the God Above All Gods, is to invite the Christ and the Third Order of Powers into your body, into your soul, into every one of your cells. And that’s what gives you the strong power. And you know when you’re in God’s will, when you feel the power of God, when you feel invigorated, when you feel energized, enthused. The word enthusiastic means to be filled with God. That is how to be strong. And if it’s God leading you to do something, as I believe I’ve been led to share the Gnostic Gospel with you, you don’t give up because it’s not your job to give up. It’s your job to do. There is no try, only do. And it’s not a slog. It’s not a, Oh I’ve got to do God’s will today. No, it’s, Oh what joy! How can I help you? What can I do for you? How can I show love to you? Which brings us to the next meme. Hebrews 13:16 says, “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” Now I don’t particularly like that word sacrifice here because it makes it sound as though you’re earning karma again. And that isn’t quite right. I have pets, right? I have cats and dogs. And I sometimes say to people who don’t have a dog, Get another dog when you’re ready and you’ll have that love again. And they say, Oh no, I want to travel. There’s too much responsibility with a dog. I don’t want to sacrifice time to be with a dog. Well, that is sacrifice when you’re thinking of it like that. But I don’t think of it as sacrifice. I love my dog. There’s nothing I’d rather do than spend time with my dog. There’s nothing I’d rather do than be out walking in the with my dog. There’s nothing I’d rather do than sit with a cat while it purrs. That isn’t a sacrifice. I may be delayed in doing something else, but I’d rather sit with that cat. Or I may have thought I was going to do something else, but the dog wants to go for a walk. I’m going for a walk. It’s not a sacrifice if you love what you do. People are not having children now because they don’t want to sacrifice their single lifestyle and the money. I can get anything I want. I can take care of myself. I can be who I want to be. Well, that’s a very egoistic approach to life. And we aren’t meant here to fluff our egos. We’re meant to be here to love others and to demonstrate our love so that the Demiurge can see that we love each other. The reason we share what we have isn’t because we’re earning those brownie points and erasing bad karma. It’s because we see a need and we automatically want to plug it. We automatically want to fill it. You know how my job here on this podcast is throwing out these Gnostic insights, right? I’m sharing Gnostic insights with you because I want to help you, because I love you. Not because I’m erasing karma. I don’t have a blackboard here in the office with good karma, bad karma on it. I do the same in my daily walking-around life. Even people I don’t know, like if someone’s in the supermarket and they’re puzzled, they’re in the vegetable section and they’re wondering what this is, or what do I do with this, or is this a good melon or not, or how do you tell? I’m that person that’ll walk right up to a stranger and go, Hey, I see that you’re wondering if that melon is ripe. Well, let me show you how you tell. See, you press on this here. See, I always am giving advice, whether it’s asked for or not, whether I know the person or not, because I am moved to do that. It’s an automatic reflex. It’s not something I’ve got to work myself up into, and it’s hard to not give advice. So, “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” I think we have time for one more meme here. John 16:33 says,” I’ve said these things to you so that you will have peace in me. In the world you will have distress, but be encouraged. I have conquered the world.” That’s a quote from Jesus directly. So Jesus said he was sharing the words that have come down to us, mainly in the form of the red printed letters in the New Testament. If you go and pick up a Bible and you turn to the back part of the Bible, that’s called the New Testament, right? Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the four books that tell the story of Jesus. And there are quotes from Jesus in there. And if you have what’s called a red letter edition of the Bible, they’re in red. So you can actually read through the first four Gospels, read only the red letters, and that’s things Jesus said directly. And so this is one of these things that Jesus said. He said, “I’ve said these things to you so that you will have peace in me. In the world you have distress, but be encouraged. I have conquered the world.” Jesus said this while he was still walking around alive. Jesus claimed that he had conquered the world before his crucifixion and before his resurrection. It was merely the coming into this world, being born as a human, yet fully God. See, the Third Order Powers came into this world in the body of Jesus. He was born in a physical body. He came as a Second Order Power, and that was his genetic inheritance from Mary, his mother. But he also came in as a Third Order Power, and that was his spiritual inheritance from the God Above All Gods. He said he taught us these things so that we would have peace in him, peace in Christ. So we are to have peace no matter the circumstances in which we find ourselves. You know–it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you react to what happens to you. It’s not what you witness, it’s what you feel, what your emotions are as you witness something. The Demiurge is always trying to rile us up. The job of the archons is to bedevil us and to make us feel horrible, to knock us off our game, to take the love and light out of our lives. The Demiurge wants to bring us down to its level, down to the level of the archons, which is ego, negative emotions, vice, addictions, anger, hatred. That’s all demonic. That’s all demiurgic. Christ said, I want you to have peace in this world, so be encouraged. I have brought you the peace. I have conquered this world. All we need to do is invite the Christ into ourselves. Each of us is made up of the physical molecular body, the molecules and atoms that make up our flesh. That’s the demiurgic level. When we are conceived, the physical level is melded onto our Second Order Powers. Our perfect representation of the Fullness of God is our big S self, and we all have that. We all carry an identical copy of the Fullness of God, but yet we also all have an ego, and that’s related to this physical body we’re born to. It’s also part of our aeonic inheritance. Even the Aeons have egos—every Aeon has a name, which means it’s got a identification. It’s different than its neighbors. It has a place, so it’s in a different place. It’s got a different point of view. It’s a monad. It has a position and a job. It has a function within the Fullness of God. We all have functions within this material cosmos in which we find ourselves, so our job is to fulfill our destiny, is to fulfill our aeonic inheritance, and our Second Order Powers that we were born with become discouraged and distracted and forgetful and deluded because of the Demiurge and the archons. This is why Jesus came and said the things he said. Jesus came and brought the Holy Spirit into the cosmos in order to infuse us with new strength, new power. We’re powering up when we invite the Christ in. We power up to the Third Order of Powers. Okay, let me know what you thought of this episode. I still only hear from two or three of you. Don’t be shy. You can share, especially if you’re struggling. This isn’t a place for perfect people. Christ Jesus was the only perfect human at this point in time. Come and share. Come and tell us what you’re working on, what you’re thinking about, where you’ve been, either publicly under comments or you can send me a private comment through the comments form at gnosticinsights.com. If these Gnostic Insights have been meaningful for you and if you can afford it at all, it would be helpful to the cause. It would be a part of the Simple Golden Rule under assistance to send in five bucks a month or ten dollars a month. That would be helpful. You can click anywhere in this paragraph to go directly to Paypal. Okay, amen to all of this. I look forward to your comments. God bless us all and onward and upward. The Simple Golden Rule Choose amount to donate10.0020.0050.00

How you can help out Say, do you realize that I basically pay for this entire podcast and these books, everything having to do with Gnostic Insights, all by myself? except for some generous contributions from my sister-in-law, Barbara, and my brother, Bill, and a couple of other people who have been sending in donations since the beginning of the podcast. Fortunately, God has blessed me with a very successful Airbnb property, and many people come and enjoy staying here in this cute little village that I live in, in Oregon. That is the method by which God is funding Gnostic Insights.  If you are being touched, if your life is being changed, I’d like to hear about it. I wish you’d send me an email or comments, because whatever you are being blessed with becomes a blessing for other people. If you can contribute financially, that would be helpful. I do have ongoing monthly expenses, such as the cost of the media service that hosts and distributes the podcasts. And nowadays, I am attempting to help the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, float up into everyone’s awareness. Right now, it’s hard to find that book, because there are so few reviews. So, if you’ve read the book, or started to read the book, or even if you listen to this podcast on a regular basis, you are qualified to leave a review. It doesn’t have to be a long review to say, I never thought much about God or religion, but I’ve found that this material is helping my life. These are very important comments to make, where other people can see them, because that will encourage them to join us here. So, please, make the contribution that you are being moved to make, whether that’s money, one time or monthly, or whether that’s comments at Amazon, or comments here at Gnostic Insights, and at the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. If you click here, a PayPal donation form will pop up. Many of you listen to the podcast only and never visit the website. If you visit the website, the transcripts for all of these podcasts are there, episodes that you can re-listen to, that you can read and contemplate. But all of the material is found in a very clear and simple way in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. The expenses for getting the book publicized are mounting. Praise God, I have the money because of this Airbnb that I’m running. So, hospitality and housekeeping is my main job, other than putting out these weekly podcasts, writing an article every week, recording it, editing it—you know, I’m a one-person factory here. I can’t afford to hire an editor. I can’t afford to hire a webmaster or podcast producer. I have to figure out how to do all of this on my own. But it would be nice to be able to hire some help. I have hired an illustrator for the children’s book, because I know I can’t illustrate a children’s book. So, that’s one thing I can’t do on my own. It’s really neat that I’ve been given the various gifts that I’m able to do all of these things and put together Gnostic Insights. I believe that this is my purpose in life, finally. And everything I’ve learned, formally and informally, God is using it to put together these broadcasts. I put in an application this week at the Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University in order to teach the Gnostic Gospel. And if they allow me to teach this to their students, then I’m going to be videotaping those lectures. People have often said, hey, you really need to put out more on YouTube. You know, there are some older lectures there on YouTube, both from before the Gnostic days and then after the Gnostic days. The earlier ones are lectures that were given publicly concerning A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. But in the past couple of years, I’ve had occasion to talk about A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And so, you can find those videos already. This new course I’m putting together will be 10 episodes long. And each one of those can be a standalone YouTube video. Maybe those could be monetized. You know, I don’t like monetizing anything. There are no paywalls here at Gnostic Insights or at the Gnostic Reformation. You don’t have to subscribe with money to hear these podcasts. I’m very glad that you do subscribe and get it as an email, for example, or on your podcast host. But soon people will be able to see it on YouTube. It would be really neat if we, and I say we because you’re part of this effort, if we could afford to have an animator for that show, actually have a video producer that would put together a neat-looking Gnostic Insights series, not simply me sitting there talking to the camera. You know, I see all of this in my head as moving images. I see the movie. I just can’t animate it for YouTube. But if you’re an animator, you could offer to help as your contribution. So, this has been a big long pitch to help with the effort. I think the Gnostic Gospel is a very important message that everyone can use, and we need to put it in front of everyone. They need to be able to come across it when they do searches, and they can’t do that unless you start leaving more reviews, more comments, thumbs up, Like, subscribe, all that stuff. Part of the expense lately has been my decision to purchase professional reviews and have those reviews publicized. One of the reviews I purchased is through Kirkus Reviews, where a good review is highly coveted by authors and publishers. The review was so favorable that Kirkus has chosen the book to be featured as an article in next month’s printed magazine that is distributed to librarians and booksellers. Their sales department then talked me into buying an accompanying marketing campaign to place advertisements on all of their platforms for a couple of months. Here—I’ll read you the Kirkus Review: A 21st-century Gnostic explores the seminal text of her faith in this nonfiction work. “Valentinian Gnosticism is a form of proto-Christianity,” writes Ropp in the book’s introduction, asserting her belief that “it is the true, original form of Christianity.” Focusing on the third- or fourth-century Gnostic work the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi codices, the author explores an alternative branch of Christianity that was deemed heretical and “wiped out” by Catholicism. In contrast to Roman Catholicism, per Ropp, Gnosticism “encourages a personal relationship with the “God Above All Gods,” eschews hierarchical leadership and rituals, and holds that no church or earthly institution “can give you gnosis” (mystical knowledge). Aiming to “demystify” the “arcane language” of the Tripartite Tractate, as well as to connect the work to the more well-known themes articulated in the Christian New Testament, Ropp systematically walks readers through the major ideas posited in the Gnostic text. Unlike other biblical books, according to the author, the Tripartite Tractate is closer to a philosophical rumination than a collection of myths, as it establishes a thesis about a divine Father before working through the logical implications of that proposition. Ropp’s analytical approach informs her emphasis on applying Gnosticism to modern life, as the author deeply believes that “Gnostic faith is not blind faith but reasonable faith.” Holding a doctorate in classical rhetoric, Ropp is the host of the Gnostic Insights podcast and author of The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated (2019). Here, she offers readers a scholarly exploration of the Tripartite Tractate that challenges popular assumptions, such as the claim by many that Gnosticism is a New Age religion. Her academic approach, backed by scholarly references, is balanced by an engaging writing style geared toward readers unfamiliar with the esoteric nuances of Gnosticism. The work’s accessibility is further supported by a lengthy glossary of terminology as well as the inclusion of full-color images, diagrams, and other visual aids. Even readers unconvinced about the veracity of Gnosticism will find a stimulating reflection on the nature of meaning, knowledge, and truth. A well-researched, impassioned case for Gnosticism. [Kirkus Reviews]  Pretty good, huh? Next week I’ll read you some of the other professional reviews. Okay now, let’s get on with this week’s episode. Generation of the Aeons Yesterday I was reading Chapter Three out of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and the quotes from the Tripartite Tractate are so beautiful. To me, they are indescribably beautiful. It’s hard to imagine who this human was at least 2,000 years ago, who saw all of this, and who wrote all of this down. It is clearly from the God Above All Gods. So, I want to share some of Chapter Three with you today, because it’s really beautiful. This begins on page 25 of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and it says, We have heard about the Father being indescribable, and about the infinite number of facets that form the body of the Son, and the Totality of the All. But we really haven’t heard much in the way of descriptions of the Son itself. This is because the only way that the Son can be described is through its relationship with the Father, and then through the Aeons. The fractals of consciousness that emerge out of the Son and the All, as we trace the path of emanations flowing out of the inconceivable Father and through the barely conceivable Son, we become more and more concrete in our ability to understand the nature of God. And I’m adding this in to understand the nature of consciousness, because remember, whenever we talk about the nature of the Father emanating through the Son and then through the Totalities, we’re also talking about the emanation of consciousness itself. Back to the book. It is when we enter the realm of the Aeons that we can begin to recognize the panoply of properties of the Father and Son. The Tripartite Tractate says, They were forever in thought, for the Father was like a thought and a place for them. When their generations had been established, the one who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was deficient in the, and there’s a missing word, and he brought forth those, again, missing words, him. But since he is as he is, he is a spring which is not diminished by the water which abundantly flows from it. (Verse 60 of the Attridge and Muller translation.) Generations, as the Tripartite Tractate uses the word, means to create, to generate. Here it’s saying that when the Son was formed, all of the Totalities making up the body of the Son were formed along with him, and their formation or generation did not lessen the Father or subtract anything away from the Father’s essence. The word deficient, as used here, simply means not yet manifest. Deficient can’t indicate any shortcoming or inadequacy because the Son is a complete embodiment of the perfection of the Father, and his Totalities embody the perfect Son. So the passage likely reads, When their generations had been established, the one who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was not yet manifest, and he brought forth those within him. As discussed in the previous chapter, the Tripartite Tractate says of these Totalities, While they were in the Father’s thought, that is, in the hidden depth, the depth knew them, but 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, so that it has been discovered that they were like a fetus. (Verse 61) And so now in this unfolding process of spreading out the Father’s consciousness, we have these potential entities existing like seeds within the Father. They don’t know themselves, and they don’t know where they are. They don’t realize that they comprise the body of the Son. In that sense, they are like a fetus that is still inside the womb, blissfully sleeping. The Tripartite Tractate says, For that reason the Father had also thought in advance that they should exist not only for himself, but should exist for themselves as well, that they should remain in thought as mental substance, but also exist for themselves. He sowed a thought as a seed of, and there’s some missing words, in order that they might understand what kind of Father they have. (Verse 61 from the translation by Thomason) In other words, the Father wants them to wake up. The Father is spreading awakened consciousness throughout the entire body of the Son. He doesn’t want the All to remain unthinking constituents of the Son. The Father wants them each to have their own existence and their own realizations, their own consciousness, their own self. The Tripartite Tractate describes them as “seeds in need of gaining nourishment and growth and faultlessness.” That’s from verse 62. The Tripartite Tractate says that the first step in bringing awareness to the Totalities was to give them “the perfect idea of beneficence toward them.” This means that even though they didn’t yet know themselves, what they did know was that they were loved. That is all they knew—that they had a benefactor. Someone cared for them and wanted only good for them. The Totalities began to awaken to self-realization because someone loved them. This beneficent thought was their first knowledge. The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say, The one whom he raised up as a light for those who came from himself, the one from whom they take their name, he is the Son who is full, complete, and faultless. He brought him forth mingled with what came forth from him. (Verse 62) This again confirms that the Son coexists with the Father and the Totalities coexist with the Son. “This is not yet his greatness they have received. Rather, he exists only partially in the manner, the form, and the greatness that he is.” The Totalities are waking up in stages. They know they are loved, but they do not know the details of who loves them. As for the parts in which he exists in his own manner and form and greatness, it is possible for them to see him and speak about what they know of him, since they wear him while he wears them, because it is possible for them to comprehend him. He, however, is as he is incomparable.” (Verse 63) In chapter 2, I used the analogy that the Totalities are to the Son as the cells that make up our bodies are to us. We wear them like a garment over ourself, and they wear our eternal self over their little cells. We go everywhere they go, and they go everywhere we go. At this point in their embryonic development, the Totalities have knowledge that there is a mysterious being who loves them, but the Father wants more for them. In order that the Father might receive honor from each one and reveal himself, even in his ineffability, hidden and invisible, they marvel at him mentally. Therefore, the greatness of his loftiness consists in the fact that they speak about him and see him. He becomes manifest so that he may be hymned because of the abundance of his sweetness. (Verse 63) This passage is saying that the manner by which the Totalities become awakened is through the process of praising the Father by singing about the Father’s sweetness to them. In other words, they come to selfhood by giving glory to the Father through song. And just as the admirations of the silences are eternal generations and they are mental offspring, so too the dispositions of the Word are spiritual emanations. (Verse 63) The admirations of the silences, which is to say the quiet glory and kisses exchanged between the Father and the Son, brought forth the generation of the All as their mental offspring. Afterward, the glory and hymns offered up to the Father by the developing Totalities became the dispositions of the Word that conferred upon them a spiritual emanation from the Father by means of his reflected glory pouring over them and bathing them in the Father’s consciousness. Both of them, admirations and dispositions, since they belong to a Word, are seeds and thoughts of his offspring and roots which live forever, appearing to be offsprings which have come forth from themselves, being minds and spiritual offspring to the glory of the Father. (Verses 63-64) Remember, the Father’s consciousness and spirit flow out from him in an unending stream. It is this reflected glory initiated through their singing that disposes the Totalities to grasp their individuality, appearing to be offspring which have come forth by themselves. The passage also says that the Totalities are the Son’s seeds and thoughts and that they will live forever along with the Son. The Totalities of the All are now complete in mind and spirit, possessing the conscious powers of the Son. The Totality of the All, however, remained an indivisible unity. Though now endowed with individual self-awareness, they nonetheless continue to act as a single being, being themselves the Fullness of the Son. The births of his words, his commands, and his members of the All are innumerable and indivisible. He knows them, for they are himself. When they speak, they are all in the one single name. And if he brings them forth, it is in order that they may be found to exist as individual qualities, forming a unity. (Verse 67 from the Thomason translation) This Fullness of God and the progression of consciousness through the Son is found in the New Testament, although its original meaning has been lost. For example, speaking of the Son in the book of Colossians, Paul writes, The Son is the image of the invisible God, firstborn of all creation, because in him were created all things in the heaven and on Earth, the visible as well as the invisible, whether thrones or lordships or archons or powers. All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things and all things hold together in him. For in him, all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling and through him to reconcile all things to him, making peace by the blood of his cross through him, whether the things on Earth or the things in heaven. (Colossians 1:15–20 out of David Bentley Hart’s translation) And like the son before them, the All began to generate offspring. Quoting again from the Tripartite Tractate, But on the pattern by which he was existing, so are those who have come forth from him, beginning everything which they desire. For this is their procreative power, like those from whom they’ve come. According to their mutual assistance, they assist one another like the unbegotten ones. (Verse 64) This mutual assistance carries forward throughout creation as another as above, so below cooperative pattern, as we shall soon discover when we look at the Simple Golden Rule. As soon as the Totalities of the All came to know themselves and to recognize their own individual identities, each one of the rays birthed a singularity that reflected both the Totality of the All and their own individuality. Now all those who had gone forth from him, that is the Aeons of the Aeons, being emissions born of a procreative nature, also procreate through their own procreative nature to the glory of the Father, just as he had been the cause of their existence. For that which they glorified, they bore. (Verse 67) Father is the ground state; the Son is the first monad of consciousness; the All is the differentiations of the Son; the All becomes self aware and sorts itself into a hierarchy called the Fullness The All’s offspring immediately recognized their self-identities and formed themselves into what is called the Fullness of God, commonly referred to as the Pleroma of God. Pleroma simply means everything that is possible; all possible expressions of consciousness can be found in the Fullness of God. These newly formed Aeons of the Fullness of God quickly sorted themselves into what is called a hierarchy, which is like a pyramidal type of stack with many more units located down at the bottom of the stack and fewer and fewer units as you go higher and higher. In my illustrations, I picture the hierarchy of the Fullness as a pyramidal stack of golden orbs, like cannonballs, with each orb being a particular Aeon. There are more cannonballs on the lower levels and fewer and fewer balls the higher you go up the pyramid. There is a hierarchical principle in Gnosticism that I have identified as the higher the fewer. The Fullness of God is the Holy Spirit of the Father bursting out into individualized, fractal units of consciousness. They sort themselves into a hierarchy of names, positions, and functions. Using that principle, the awakened Aeons of the Fullness of God sorted themselves into positions, places, powers, ranks, stations, and names, indicating that they each had their own point of view and they each had their own place and duty in the hierarchy of heaven. And that, my friends, I’m dropping this in here, was the birth of what is called ego, because ego is not a negative term. It’s merely your position, power, place, rank, station, and name and where you fit into the hierarchy of creation. That is your ego. It identifies you. It’s your self-identity. Our underlying Self is a fractal of the Fullness of God. Our ego is that hierarchical principle that happened up there when the Totalities of the All became self-aware and came to realize their own personal identity. That’s our ego. So we, like the Aeons, because we are fractals of the Aeons, also have a personal identity. As above, so below. Okay, we’re going to stop there for today because that’s about all the time we have. We made it up to page 33 in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. I say again, the Tripartite Tractate is a beautiful book. People often say it’s the most difficult or one of the most difficult books in the Nag Hammadi scriptures. Not necessarily. I try to explain it as clearly as I can, and I hope you are coming to appreciate it. Let me know if you enjoyed this episode. If you’re listening through the podcast, pop into the website gnosticinsights.com and leave a comment underneath this episode transcript. Or, if you’re listening through Substack, you know you can leave a comment there in Substack. Or, if you’re reading this as an email sent out by Substack, I believe you can click on Comments at the bottom of the email. Love you all. God bless us, and Onward and Upward! Choose amount to donate10.0020.0050.00

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I thought it would be fun this week to look at some Christian memes that are posted on the internet, little posters with inspirational sayings. I asked for Bible quotes inspirational from Jesus, and what I’m going to do is read you the quote, and I’ll post the meme itself on the transcript of this episode. And I would like to explain to you the Gnostic meaning of each of these memes. So let’s see how this goes. The first one I run across here is from Philippians 4:13, and it says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Now Christians generally think of Christ as an exterior force, that Christ is basically the Holy Spirit of the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ. And so they picture Jesus being outside them, but very near, someone that you can call to you and pray to, and he knows you, and he will take care of your prayers. Gnostic Christians, on the other hand, have an understanding, a gnosis, that Christ is within us when we accept Christ, when we invite Christ in, because as the Christians always say, Jesus is a gentleman, and he won’t just come plowing into your soul unless you invite him in. So Christians understand that you are asking Christ in, but they don’t understand that he completely takes up residence inside of you. We know that we humans are made up of a spiritual Self, that one Self that is the reflection of the Fullness of God. We all share that in common. It is identical to all of us. Then we share a psychical level, our emotional level, generally what we would call our ego, and that’s our Second Order nature that comes into us and melds to the third part of us, which is our physical body. And our physical body is built from the molecules on up. The physical body is of a demiurgic origin. This is why it has always so many cravings that go against our better judgment, let’s say. We eat too much, we take drugs we shouldn’t, we drink too much, we have sex with strangers or sex outside of marriage. These are physical urges that arise from the demiurgic level because they are embodying and carrying forward the commands of the Demiurge. And that’s the way the Demiurge likes to do things—keep us under control, keep us alienated from our higher Self. So when we invite Christ in—let’s say you’re at a revival or you listen to an old Billy Graham sermon on the radio or you’re reading the book of John in the Bible and you have the urge to invite Christ to take over your life, and that is what it means to invite Christ into your soul—Christ is a different order of powers than we are. We are what’s called Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the Aeons; we’re the Second Order of Powers. The Third Order of Powers is the Christ. And there is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power. That’s how it is that Jesus or Christ comes with your face and knows everything about you because Christ is an image of the perfection that you can be. Jesus was the first human that fully embodied the Third Order of Powers. And now it’s your turn… When we invite Christ in, we invite the Christ to take residence in our souls and in our bodies. We invite the Christ’s Third Order Powers to replace our own Second Order Powers because we’re leveling up. We’re leveling up to a more powerful and loving Godly existence when we invite Christ in. You can’t put down various mistakes and cravings and sins in your life just out of striving within your own little Second Order ego because it’s the one that got you in trouble in the first place. You need the higher power of the Third Order to embody you. That is the real meaning of Philippians 4.13. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me because I’m no longer just me and my Second Order body. I have the Third Order within me that has more power than the Second Order and demiurgic body that we are given. The next meme I run across is from 2 Corinthians 12:9 and it says,  “Every weakness you have is an opportunity for God to show his strength in your life. My grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in weakness.” The conventional Christian church and especially the hellfire and damnation churches talk about your weakness as depravity and as inherent sinfulness and shame on you. Shame. “Have guilt. Turn to God for that’s your only salvation.” Well yeah that’s kind of correct except for the hell and damnation part and it’s got the whole wrong emotional spin on it. When the egg of my mother was fertilized by the sperm of my father, my earthly parents, I was a pure Second Order Power coming in with all sorts of hope and knowledge—gnosis. It’s inherent in us because we are the children of the Aeons. We are the incarnation here on earth in the material realm of that First Order of Powers, the Aeons, who live in the pure bliss of the ethereal space. But when we come down into this body that starts with that fertilized egg we are bound to the material of the Demiurge and that’s where the weakness leaks into us. It’s from the bottom up. From the top down it’s all God. It’s the Father. It’s the God Above All Gods and it’s our aeonic inheritance. We don’t get our weakness inherently from our fertilized egg and then our embryo grows up and then we’re little babies. We’re not sinful from the get-go. We are purely God-created from the get-go. But we are born into a fallen world run by the god of this world who’s the Demiurge and it has all sorts of traps and snares and temptations designed to pull us down to separate us from the God Above All Gods and the Fullness of God. So I would say, in regards to this meme that I just read, “Every weakness you have is an opportunity for God to show us strength in your life,” I would say it probably reads more like every weakness we gain or every weakness that is thrown into our path, every snare, is an opportunity to show God’s strength because the Father above is infinitely more powerful than the fallen god of this world. Infinitely so. And when we take on the Christ, we invite that power into our fleshly being. So while I may not be able to quit smoking or to stop drinking too much or put down the pornography, whatever the weakness is that has taken hold of you, whether it’s a great weakness, something you feel very ashamed about, or whether it’s a small weakness like gossiping about our neighbors or being short-tempered with our spouse or our children, once we ask the Third Order of Powers to help us, then we have more strength than that weakness brings to us. It’s a mathematical thing. It’s not then a struggle to put those things down. You need to be mindful of the Third Order Powers of the Christ giving you the strength to overcome. All right, what’s the next meme I run across here? Ah, this one is from John 14:6, and it says, “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” Now, this is generally taken to mean, in the conventional Christian way of thinking about it, that you need to come forward in some sort of revival situation. Revival has to do with repentance. Revival means you’re reviving your soul; you’re coming back to life. You have been dead in sin, and now you are being revived into life, into the life that comes from the God Above All Gods and the Fullness of God, the Aeons. And Jesus said, I’m showing you the way. I am the way. He said, I am the truth. So we can trust what Jesus says. That’s the red letter editions of the classical Bibles. Everything Jesus said was in red. So you can find the way. You can come to the truth by reading the words of Jesus without confusion. And he says, I am the life, and this means the eternal life. Because down here, this material world, as we know, is transitory. This is not our permanent home. So when Jesus speaks of the life, he’s talking about your ethereal, eternal life. And he says, no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. So this generally means, as I started to say, that you have a revival situation where you come to Christ and you pray the sinner’s prayer, where you say, I’m a sinner. I’m nothing. I need you, Christ, save me. Okay, that’s basically the sinner’s prayer. And the Christians take this to mean that you have to do it in just that way, that you have to say Jesus was the Christ and Jesus is the way to God. And here’s the thing—if you don’t do that in your revival situation and pray the sinner’s prayer, then you will be eternally damned and you will go to hell and be tortured forever by a supposedly all-loving and all-forgiving God. For some reason, they can’t see the contradiction in that. Here in Gnostic Christianity, we agree that Jesus was the first embodiment of the Third Order Powers and that Jesus shows us the way and that Jesus shows us through his words and the example of his life the power that we can all have by asking the Third Order Powers, by opening up our souls and inviting the Third Order Powers, as exemplified by Jesus, into our souls. You don’t have to say “the Christ.” You can say “Jesus,” because Jesus told us this will do. This is what you need to do. This is why I came. He shows us the way. He tells us the truth. He demonstrates the life through his resurrection after the crucifixion. Now, if you don’t gain that gnosis before you “die,” then you’re going to have a very bumpy ride after you die. You are going to have to account for all of your errors, all of your weakness, all of your mistakes, all of your sins, great and small, and give amends and apologize to everyone whom you injured when you were alive. And there will be no hiding from it. There will be no denying it. You won’t be able to say, oh, I never did that, it wasn’t that way, because here you are face to face now in the ethereal plane, in the in-between place. It’s not all the way up to heaven, because only goodness reaches the Father. Only goodness can regain the ethereal plane, because it’s all good. There is no sin. There’s no death, no destruction, no despair, no sadness on the ethereal plane where the hierarchy of the Fullness of God lives. The Aeons are protected from all of that, and we can’t bring our dirty laundry up there. We can’t bring our bags full of weakness up there. It’s oil and water. They don’t mix. So there is an in-between place that accounts for all of this, where you are face-to-face. And it’s not God punishing you. It’s not the Aeons punishing you. Nobody’s punishing you. It’s you having remorse for what you’ve done and wishing that you had not done these things. It’s a lot better to repent and invite the Christ in before you die, because then, when your body stops functioning and your spirit is released from this bondage of flesh, you won’t have to go through that really horrible experience. You will have been already redeemed through the power of the Christ, because no man cometh unto the Father but by the Christ. The Christ is our correcting algorithm for our second-order Powers. Here’s a meme from Philippians 1:6, and it says, “I’m sure about this, the one who started a good work in you will stay with you to complete the job by the day of Christ Jesus.” So, as I was just saying on the previous meme, when you invite the Christ into your soul, you’re trading the third-order Powers for all the baggage and all the remorse and regret and things that you’ve done. You can pray a blanket prayer to the Christ. You don’t have to be able to remember and enumerate every single bad thing you’ve ever done. You can pray that Christ will remove all of the impurities from your soul, give you new life, give you new power, give you new strength to battle in the never-ending war. And this never-ending war, it’s not against other people. That’s one of the lies of the Demiurge. The news, the social media, the mean people—they are not the object of your never-ending battle. The never-ending battle is with the death and destruction that is brought to us by the Demiurge and his archons. We shouldn’t battle against other people. Our battles are with powers and principalities, archons and the Demiurge. And guess what our armament is? It’s not shaking our fists and shooting off guns or lopping off people’s heads because that’s the wrong target. Those don’t do any good against the archons. Our magic bullet is love. We Second Order Powers were sent into this world to remind the Demiurge of love and the God Above All Gods and the hierarchy and his better Self that is up there. Down here, the Demiurge is the disembodied ego striving for power and control. Up there, it’s love, it’s acceptance, it’s everlasting life and joy. So this is the balance. What would you rather have? Why would you want to be down here in the mud when you can be up there with our Aeonic parents and everybody we’ve ever known and loved with none of the negative baggage, none of the remembrance of slights and harms and insults? They are not our enemy, the other humans or the other Second Order Powers. It’s the principalities and powers of the darkness that are the never-ending war and the only thing that can win is love. The light outshines the darkness. That’s a common metaphor used in Christian talk. You walk into a room and there’s no windows and it’s completely dark inside. It’s all blackness. That’s the world of the Demiurge. But when the light comes in the form of the Christ, he’s this glory beam from above by the God Above All Gods to shine the ethereal light into the blackness, into the darkness. And light drives away dark, doesn’t it? That’s the metaphor. That light is the light of love and life, purity and goodness. Those are our magic bullets. Here’s a meme from Mark 1:17. “Jesus said to them, follow me and I will make you become fishers of men.” So this is near the beginning of the story of Jesus being on earth and beginning his ministry. And he approaches fishermen who are literally trying to catch fish with nets out of their boat. And he tells them, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. This is the true call to evangelism. We are to become fishers of men. We are to throw out our nets of the gospel, our nets of gnosis with the power of love and draw them into the boat of salvation, you might say, or draw them into the boat of gnosis. This is the purpose of Gnostic Insights. I am hopefully one of the fishers on behalf of the Christ to gather people who are out there flopping around in the ocean, wondering which way is up, to remember your gnosis, to change your loyalty from the things of this world that always pass away. All these material possessions that seem so dear to us, they will crumble with time. They will turn into rust and dust and completely disappear, and to trade them in. That’s what repentance is: turning away from the material world. And then the redemption—that means buying us back, when we trade the material world for the ethereal plane. Here’s a meme from Matthew 5:16 that says, “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” We are to let our light shine forth. Let your love flow, remember that song? like a mountain stream, and let your love shine through all living things. So we’re to let our light shine forth. We’re to walk around like beacons of light and share it with other people. They should be able to see on our faces that we are embodying the Third Order of Powers. We don’t go around all gloomy and angry. We don’t slump around and complain about everything. We are thankful that we have the Third Order within, that the Christ came to earth in the form of Jesus, and that we have accepted that, and that we now remember the gnosis that we were born with, and we become like the smile on a newborn baby’s face. We return to our innocence. We don’t do good works in order to be saved. That is an error in many Christian denominations. They have the feeling that if you work on behalf of God, if you set up your booth down in the county park and you hand out your tracts, or you walk around and knock on doors, have you heard the word of God today? and then you hand them a tract. That is not the good works. The good works is when you are full of love, when you are full of the knowledge of God, then you will naturally perform good works. We’re not being saved from hell and damnation. We’re being saved out of the sadness and despair of this world that we are yoked to. And when we have that gnosis, when we understand that we are part of the ethereal plane, and that we’re just passing through this valley of death, then we can be joyful. We can know the bad doesn’t stick. Yeah, try your best, Demiurge. You’re not getting me today. Then we perform good works because we are driven to do good works, because we want to share the Gnostic gospel with others. And this glorifies the Father in heaven. This glorifies the God Above All Gods when we share because we can’t help but share the light that shines forth from us. Okay, these are just a few of the memes I ran across this morning. Let me know what you think of all of this. I regularly get comments from two or three subscribers. Oh, come on. Let’s hear from the rest of you. Let’s start a conversation here in the comment section. God bless us all. Onward and upward. [Verse 1]There’s a reason for the sun-shining skyAnd there’s a reason why I’m feeling so highMust be the season when that love light shines all around us So, let that feeling grab you deep insideAnd send you reeling where your love can’t hideAnd then go stealing through the moonlit nights with your lover [Chorus]Just let your love flow like a mountain streamAnd let your love grow with the smallest of dreamsAnd let your love show and you’ll know what I meanIt’s the seasonLet your love fly like a bird on a wingAnd let your love bind you to all living thingsAnd let your love shine and you’ll know what I meanThat’s the reason [Verse 2]There’s a reason for the warm sweet nightsAnd there’s a reason for the candlelightsMust be the season when those love rights shine all around us So, let that wonder take you into spaceAnd lay you under its loving embraceJust feel the thunder as it warms your face, you can’t hold back [Chorus]Just let your love flow like a mountain streamAnd let your love grow with the smallest of dreamsAnd let your love show and you’ll know what I meanIt’s the seasonLet your love fly like a bird on a wingAnd let your love bind you to all living thingsAnd let your love shine and you’ll know what I meanThat’s the reason [Chorus]Just let your love flow like a mountain streamAnd let your love grow with the smallest of dreamsAnd let your love show and you’ll know what I meanIt’s the seasonLet your love fly like a bird on a wingAnd let your love bind you to all living thingsAnd let your love shine and you’ll know what I meanThat’s the reason [Outro]Just let your love flow like a mountain streamAnd let your love grow with the smallest of dreams Let Your Love Flow is the title song from the Bellamy Brothers’ 1976 debut album. It was written by Larry E. Williams, a former roadie for Neil Diamond. Let Your Love Flow YouTube video link–Listen Here Choose amount to donate10.0020.0050.00

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation. My brother shared with me this week an article that’s published in Scientific American, and I will post the link to that article here. The article is called, Where Does Consciousness Come From? Two Neuroscience Theories Go Head-to-Head. The subtitle is, Two Leading Theories of Consciousness Went Head-to-Head, and the Results May Change How Neuroscientists Study One of the Oldest Questions About Existence. This was published on April 30, 2025. And I’m not going to share much of this with you, except to say that neuroscientists still haven’t coalesced around one explanation of where consciousness originates, largely because it’s such a hard question to probe with the scientific method. The article says that scientists have landed on two leading theories to explain how consciousness emerges. The first is called Integrated Information Theory, or IIT for short, and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, or GNWT for short. And it says that the frameworks couldn’t be more different, yet they rest on completely different assumptions, draw from different fields of science, and may even define consciousness in different ways. The article goes on to explain that there have been a series of studies trying to decide which of those two theories is the right way to approach consciousness. And despite all of the scientific studies, nothing came to fruition. There were no results that proved either of the two theories. The article says that this type of research will encourage new ways of doing studies, which is to design experiments that have the best chance of distinguishing between theories rather than finding evidence for or against one specific theory. And they explain that it’s very important to understand consciousness because it has, for example, a practical application when you’re dealing with people that are in vegetative states and comas about when to pull the plug, since no sign of consciousness shows up on the brain scans, then they feel the person is dead, even if their body’s alive, and so they pull the plug. But if consciousness is more diffuse than that, it is possible that the people are still alive and conscious, and that their bodies should be kept alive with life support. I went back and looked at our Gnostic Insights articles and episodes to review what we have to say about consciousness. And I must say, there is no better explanation than the Gnostic explanation. And so I’m going to share with you again an episode called The Father of Consciousness, which is essentially the first chapter of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. This episode was originally the first episode of Gnostic Insights that described the rollout of consciousness through all the stages, and you can find it posted at GnosticInsights.com under A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel tab. This would be the first article. We reviewed this article in December of 2022, and it’s time to review it again, because this is the ground state of everything and everything that we believe. It also clears up the what we call the category error of whether consciousness arises from the brain, and which neurons or synapses it’s contained in, and how the network works, which is the materialist scientific approach that isn’t working out, according to Scientific American, versus the idea that consciousness is the pre-existing ground state. Consciousness is the matrix of our entire existence. Materialism itself is debatable, but what we do know is that we’re conscious. Here’s what the Tripartite Tractate has to say about that. As you know, we’ve been looking at the Gnostic Gospel according to the Tripartite Tractate, which is one of the books of the Nag Hammadi scrolls. The Tripartite Tractate is a book that focuses on the origins of our universe and everything in it, including us. So I thought we would look around again today and revisit the Tripartite Tractate and what it has to say about the Father as the first principle of Gnosticism. Philosophers often speak of the hard problem of consciousness. The materialist scientists don’t believe in consciousness. They believe that we are only our physical bodies and that any appearance of consciousness or of a soul is merely a byproduct of physical mechanisms—hormones, atoms moving around, that kind of thing. It seems to me that the soul that people speak of surviving is the consciousness that began with the Father and derives from the Father. And that is why, whenever I discuss the system of consciousness, whether it’s in my earlier philosophy called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, my prior Gnostic book, it always begins with the Father because the Father is where consciousness resides. The Father is consciousness itself. The Father is another word for consciousness. Then, this entire creation cosmology that’s presented through the Tripartite Tractate and then re-presented again in my books, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated and A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, is the path by which consciousness proceeds out from the Father, through the Son, through the Totalities, and the pleroma of the Hierarchy, and on into the Second Order Powers that populate the Earth. So, this is why we begin with the Father. The Father is the ground state of consciousness and this is why we begin to build out from the Father the flow of consciousness. My Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything book and blog are devoted to the notion of what is called panpsychism, which suggests that consciousness resides in everything. In Gnostic terms, we say that the Father extends His consciousness throughout all living things that populate the cosmos. I like to begin with the cosmos as it unfolded and rolled out. The word for that sort of study is cosmogony, which is defined as the study of the origins of the universe. This makes the most sense to me, to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are, and then, after that is established, to see how that applies to our lives. Then we can ask, why are we here? Is there a purpose to our lives? How should we live? And after that, we can finally consider the final roll-up of the universe and what happens after we “die.” All of these questions are answered very precisely in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This sort of knowledge is known as gnosis. Today we begin at the very beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. This story, this cosmogony, begins before the beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos existed. I’m going to compare a couple of different versions of the Tripartite so that we have a fuller picture of the Father. One of the books I’m going to use is the Nag Hammadi scriptures, the one edited by Marvin Meyer, and the translator in this case was a person named Thomassen. The other version we are going to compare it to is the one posted at the Gnostic Society library that you can find at gnosis.org, and this version was translated by Harold Attridge. In the Tripartite Tractate, the introduction says, As for what we can say about the things which are exalted, what is fitting is that we begin with the Father, who is the root of the totality, the one from whom we have received grace to speak about him. (verse 51) Another version says, In order to be able to speak about exalted things, it is necessary that we begin with the Father, who is the root of the All, and from whom we have obtained grace to speak about him. For he existed before anything else had come into being, except him alone. (verse 51) I invite you now to think of the originating consciousness as a vast consciousness which has no place and no time, no history. It is nothing but pure consciousness without thought, similar to what the Buddhists call the Buddha mind. This clear state of pure consciousness is something people try to achieve during meditation, where you can be aware that you are conscious, but you have no particular thoughts or words or images going through your mind. This is the originating Father. The Father has no thought, no images, no structure or form, no thing at all. This pure consciousness is the Father. There is no gender associated with this Father. Calling God “Him” or “Father” is a metaphor. Obviously the Father is not a man with a beard and long robes. The Tripartite Tractate says, Rather he possesses this constitution without having a face or form, things which are understood through perception, whence also comes the title, “the incomprehensible.” If he is incomprehensible, then it follows that he is unknowable, that he is the one who is inconceivable by any thought, invisible by anything, ineffable by any word, untouchable by any hand. He alone is the one who knows himself as he is, along with his form and his greatness and his magnitude. (verses 54-55) So no matter how much we try or science tries or philosophy tries, the underlying consciousness underneath our existence will never be grasped, will never be measured. It cannot be discovered. Which begs the question, if the Father is unknowable, then what are we doing here describing him? If the Father is incomprehensible, then why are we even discussing him? What we are doing here at Gnostic Insights, and what I believe the writer of the Tripartite Tractate was doing, is that we are describing the Father as what is called a first principle. In philosophy, a first principle is a first cause, an origin, from which all else proceeds, and all subsequent arguments are based. First principles are not provable. They are what is called a priori assumptions, upon which all else proceeds. This is why here at Gnostic Insights we spend so much time discussing the Father. The Father is the a priori, the first cause, the uber first principle of all else that follows, not only in a religious sense, but in a cosmogenic sense, as it is the basis upon which everything else may be logically deduced. Now back to the idea of gender. The reason this consciousness is called Father and not Mother has to do with the direction of movement initiated by the Father. The Father is a consciousness that extends outward from itself. It emanates, it does not receive. He extends consciousness. Extension is sometimes translated as will, but it refers to the Father reaching out for what he is driving toward. The Father extends consciousness out from itself as the originating source. In this sense, we can contrast that extension with the concept of female, which is receptive, which is that which takes into itself. The Father gives, the Mother receives. This Father’s basic consciousness is not thoughts, but rather love, the sensation of what we call love. So this consciousness simply is, without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning or end, utterly quiet, utterly still, utterly alone. This Father is often described as all-knowing, but what is there to know? All-seeing, but what is there to see? All-loving, but what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom and will, but to what end? There’s nothing there. Quoting the Tripartite Tractate, It is said of Him that He is a Father in the proper sense, since He is inimitable and immutable. Because of this, He is single in the proper sense and is a God, because no one is a God for Him. Nor is anyone a Father to Him, for He is unbegotten, and there is no other who begot Him, nor another who created Him. It is, then, only the Father who is God, in the proper sense, that no one else begot. As for the Totalities, He is the one who begot them and created them. He is without beginning and without end. (verses 51-52) So what this is saying is that other gods with a small g have been created or have been born, but not this one. This is the original God with the big G that no one created. This is the original source. Not only is He without end, He is immortal for this reason that He is unbegotten, but He is also invariable in His eternal existence, in His identity, in that by which He is established, and in that by which He is great. Neither will He remove Himself from that by which He is, nor will anyone else force Him to produce an end which He has not ever desired. He has not had anyone who initiated His own existence. Thus He is Himself unchanged, and no one else can remove Him from His existence and His identity, that in which He is, and His greatness, so that He cannot be grasped. Nor is it possible for anyone else to change Him into a different form or to reduce Him or alter Him or diminish Him. (verse 52) The other translation reads very much like that. He is without beginning and without end, for not only is He without end, being unborn makes Him immortal as well, but He is also unchangeable in His eternal being, in that which He is, that which makes Him immutable, and that which makes Him great. (verse 52) Of course, immutable means can’t be mutated, can’t be changed. He does not move Himself away from what He is, nor can anyone else force Him against His will to cease being what He is, for no one has made Him what He is now. End quote. In other words, God cannot change His character, His nature, He will not change His mind, His principles and His values will never change, and He can’t be destroyed or added to. (verse 52) God is not dead, in other words. As an aside, I’m reminded of the Hadron Particle Collider located in CERN, Switzerland, the largest and most complex machine on Earth. The function of the Hadron Particle Collider is to crash elemental particles into each other, trying to split them into smaller and smaller pieces, trying to break particles into the smallest possible particle. And in fact, what the Hadron Collider has been trying to do for the last number of years is to fire particles at each other with such great force and speed that they break into the essential particle of the universe that they like to call the Higgs Boson or the God Particle. They are literally looking for the God Particle. And indeed, exactly 10 years ago to the day, July 4th, 2012, scientists declared that they had found the God Particle. Now, what we’ve just read in the Tripartite Tractate is that the Father cannot be broken up into smaller pieces. God is immutable. He is indiscoverable in the sense that the scientists are trying to discover Him. So we would have to make a prediction that these particle accelerators and particle colliders will not be able to find a God Particle because He is not discoverable. Now, they may have found the Higgs Boson, but you see, God itself is not physically discoverable in that sense. It cannot be broken down into smaller pieces. And it seems to me that this is what this next paragraph is talking about. Therefore, neither does He change Himself, nor will another be able to move Him from that which He is, from what He is, from His way of being, or from His greatness. Thus He cannot be moved, nor is it possible for another to change Him into a different form, either by reducing Him, or changing Him, or making Him less. For this is truly and veritably how He is unchangeable and immutable, being clothed in immutability. Thus He is called without beginning and without end, not only because He is unborn and immortal, but also because just as He is without beginning, He is also without end. In this manner of being, He is incomprehensible in His greatness, inscrutable in His wisdom, invincible in His might, and unfathomable in His sweetness. (verse 52-53) We can conclude from this description that if humanity manages to destroy the Earth by way of a worldwide nuclear war, let’s say, or aliens come and blast us to pieces like the Death Star, the Father would still be unchanged. The Father would still exist underneath it all without having been affected. The material world cannot affect the Father. So if the entire universe ceases to exist, the Father is still there underneath it all. So it may be that we can destroy ourselves, we could destroy our planet, we can destroy our galaxy, we can destroy the entire universe, but we certainly cannot destroy the Father. Carrying on, In the true sense, He alone, the good, unborn, and perfect Father who lacks nothing, is complete, filled with everything He possesses, excellent and precious qualities of every kind. Moreover, He has no envy, which means that all He owns He gives away without being affected and suffering no loss by His gifts. For He is rich from the things He gives away, and finds rest in what He graciously bestows. (verse 53) The other translation says that The Father is unfathomable in His sweetness, in the proper sense. He alone, the good, the unbegotten Father, and the complete perfect One, is the One filled with all His offspring, and with every virtue, and with everything of value, and He has more, that is, lack of any malice. (verse 53) The book goes on, He is of such a kind, and form, and great magnitude, that no one else has been with Him from the beginning. Nor is there a place in which He is, or from which He has come forth, or into which He will go. Nor is there a primordial form, which He uses as a model, as He works. Nor is there any difficulty, which accompanies Him and what He does. Nor is there any material, which is at His disposal, from which He creates what He creates. Nor any substance within Him, from which He begets what He begets. Nor a co-worker with Him, working with Him on the things at which He works, to say anything of this sort, is ignorant. Rather, one should speak of Him as good, faultless, perfect, complete, being Himself the totality. (verses 53-54) So, if we’re going to think about our modern physics again, and cosmology, and if we think there are multiverses, that is, we’re just one universe in a sea of other universes floating in this great pool, this Father that we’re describing would be back before all of that. He is not the Father of our universe alone. He is the Father of the entire sea within which all things float. Everything comes out of Him, and He exists before all of that. Carrying on, There is no name that suits Him among those that may be conceived, spoken, seen, or grasped, however brilliant, exalted, or glorious it is, to be sure. But the way He is in Himself, His own manner of being, that no mind can conceive, no word express, nor see, and nobody to touch, so incomprehensible is His greatness, so unfathomable His depth, so immeasurable His exaltedness, and so boundless his extension. (verse 54) Here at Gnostic Insights, we say that although the Father cannot possibly be grasped, we all possess a sense of Him, for we all contain the one seed of His consciousness. The Father wished to be known, to know and to be known, to love and to be loved. Therefore, the Father has provided us a cookie trail to follow in our quest for Gnosis. It is said that we use these words of praise or glory to the extent that we, the ones who speak, are capable, but they fall far short of actually describing what is the Father. The Tripartite then goes on to say, And since He has the ability to conceive of Himself, to see Himself, to name Himself, to comprehend Himself, He alone is the one who is His own mind, His own eye, His own mouth, His own form, and He is what He thinks, what He sees, what He speaks, what He grasps Himself, the one who is inconceivable, ineffable, incomprehensible, immutable, while sustaining joyous, true, delightful, and restful in that which He conceives, that which He sees, that about which He speaks, that which He has as thought. He transcends all wisdom and is above all intellect and is above all glory and is above all beauty and all sweetness and all greatness and any depth and any height. (verse 55) So this is my description of the Father prior to conceiving of the Son. These are descriptions out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Father, also known as the God Above All Gods. You can see for yourself that these descriptions of the Father are not the same as the descriptions of God in the Bible. The God of the Old Testament is personified. The God of the Bible is someone who can sit and have a discussion with people at a campfire or speak out of the middle of a burning bush. Our Gnostic God exists prior to all of that and is greater than all of that. This God is not in a personified form, walking around on the Earth or floating just above the Earth looking down upon us. This Father is the gigantic, illimitable consciousness that underlies everything. This is an entirely different type of being than the God of the Old Testament, known as Jehovah. That personified character of Jehovah arises much later in the creation story than we are right now. But this is the beginning. This God Above All Gods is the only goodness, joy, sweetness, true and delightful God. It is not a warlike or a jealous God. It does not send people into battle or kill the firstborn of the entire Egyptian nation. This God, as you can see, is qualitatively different than that. For now, thank you for spending this time with me. God bless, and Onward and Upward! If you are discovering your gnosis through these Gnostic Insights, please step up and donate to the cause of spreading the word to others. This will be a blessing to all of us. I’ve been having no end of trouble with the PayPal interface, despite hours spent on trying to fix the PayPal button with tech support’s help. I think it’s probably best to use the Donations Box interface instead. Or, if you need to use PayPal, go to your PayPal site and initiate a donation from there… thank you!

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

In evangelical Christian circles, people have had a born-again experience where they have asked Jesus into their hearts to take over their lives. In our Gnostic terminology, we would say that this is a person’s acknowledgement of the Christ, and an invitation that invites the Third Order of Powers—the pleroma of the Christ—to come into ourselves to correct the mistakes that we have gained through the memes of the culture that surround us and clutter up our souls. Now, I know this all sounds like funny talk. It’s a little different than how we normally speak of Jesus Christ in evangelical circles, but I hope that if you’ve been following Gnostic Insights for any period of time, or if you’ve read the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, that you will understand what I’m saying. All I’m saying is exactly what is said in Christian doctrine about asking Jesus to come into your heart. It’s just a deeper explanation of how the process works. It is not necessary to understand all of the steps in the Gnostic Gospel, because the only thing you really need to know is that we come from the Father and we will return to the Father. Christ is the mechanism by which that is accomplished. The Bible puts it this way: 11 For it is written: “As I live, says the Lord,Every knee shall bow to Me,And every tongue shall confess to God.” 12 So then each of us shall give account of himself to God. (Romans 14:10-12) On the one hand, Christians acknowledge that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Yet, on the other hand, church doctrine says that only those people who, before death, have repented and invited Jesus into their hearts will be saved. And to them, being saved only refers to being saved from damnation, being saved from hell. I’m safe. But that is not really the goal of inviting the Christ to dwell in your heart. We Gnostics say that the purpose of asking the Christ in is to replace your flawed Second Order pleroma with your redeemed Third Order pleroma. That is, you ask the Fullness of God to wipe away all of the misunderstandings, all of the doubts, all of the sin. Sin simply means straying from the path of virtue. When you invite the Christ in, you’re asking for the correcting algorithm of the Christ, we might say,  to remove confusion from your life so that you only operate out of truth and love rather than ego. Being saved by Christ means that every moment of your waking life, until the time that you pass away and move on from this life to the next, will be for the glory of God, in order to demonstrate God’s love to the world and this cosmos. Therefore, thinking that being saved from hell is the goal and stopping there, entirely misses the point of salvation. Going to church on Sunday mornings yet acting unloving the rest of the time is not what Jesus meant by salvation. Salvation is meant to bring you back into alignment with the glory of God. Jesus is our exemplar of a blameless life. Jesus is the first of the Second Order Powers that came fully loaded with the Third Order of Powers. That’s why he’s called Jesus the Anointed. He walked with the truth and spirit and love of the Father at all times, and through the power of the Christ we are to emulate Jesus. It’s become popular in academic circles, such as the Jesus Project, to say that there was no such human being on the planet as Jesus of Nazareth. But more and more evidence is actually arising that it’s true. There are both Jewish and non-Judaic historians of the period of time when Jesus was on the planet that testify to his presence. The presence of Jesus is not simply a fairy tale as so many people claim, plugging Jesus into history in the creation of a false religion. It’s really not even possible in my mind because there’s too much truth and beauty in the New Testament to be a fable constructed by a pack of religious liars. There is also much truth and beauty in the Old Testament, although I have reservations about the character of God presented in Old Testament. We Gnostics think that the God of the Old Testament is not the God Above All Gods but the Demiurge. There is a definite split between Judaism and Christianity, between the Old and the New Testament and the old and new covenant between God and humankind. When Jesus was crucified, the New Testament says that the great curtain that hung in the Temple in Jerusalem that separated the Holy of Holies section of the Temple from the more public aspect of the Temple was torn in half, was rent in two from the top to the bottom when Jesus was crucified. Now that symbolically symbolizes that there is a tear, a break, between the Judaism of the Temple and Christ crucified, and a whole new way of walking with God from then on, based upon the principles that Jesus shared, based upon his example. Last week I researched the movement called the deconstruction of Christianity. Although as a PhD in rhetoric, I certainly learned what deconstruction was, I didn’t realize that Christianity was one of the big targets of deconstruction. This was a concept invented by one of the founders of what’s called post-modernism, Jacques Derrida. Derrida said that meaning is always mediated by language, and that we need to deconstruct the meaning of the words, because what the person who originally said it meant is probably not what we interpret it to mean. Well, I actually say that quite a bit. I always point out that we speak from our own point of view. We’re born in a particular place and time, we have particular lifestyles and lives and experiences. And therefore, when you say something, I hear it through my lens, and vice versa. So the Gnostic gospel that I am teaching is a form of the deconstruction of modern Christianity, but I don’t think it’s a deconstruction of what Jesus meant to bring into the world, or what I would call true Christianity or proto-Christianity. I think that the Nicene Council which institutionalized and repackaged Christianity to serve the needs of the Roman Empire in the 300s AD, was the first deconstruction of Jesus and that what we have learned as the religion of Christianity presents a complete misunderstanding of the purpose and mission of Christ because the gnosis was stripped from the gospel by the Council of Nicaea, as they were tasked with putting together the Christian religion. So while I would, let’s say, advocate deconstruction of modern Christianity, I’m only trying to deconstruct it back to the original meaning that Jesus left with the disciples and with the early followers of the church. On the other hand, atheists and academics who deconstruct Christianity have a different goal in mind. Their goal is to, in a sense, prove that there is no such thing as God or Jesus or Christ. They want to deconstruct it all the way back to atheism. They sometimes call themselves naturalist religionists, or religion without God. They worship creation, or they don’t worship at all, or they worship the good intent of humanity, and that is what humanism is. So I can understand a certain mistrust of deconstructing Christianity because it means different things to different people and their goals are quite different than our Gnostic deconstruction. Is the goal to remove belief in the higher Power and take everything back to atheism? Is it to take everything back to worshiping the creation rather than the creator? As a Gnostic, my goal is not to lessen people’s faith in God or to lessen people’s acceptance of the Christ. It’s just exactly the opposite. I would like the people that listen to my podcast and that read my books to have a deeper, broader, wiser relationship with the Father and with Christ. If what I’m teaching leads to what is called a crisis of faith, well that’s okay, because many, many spiritual people have had a crisis of faith, particularly if they are confronted with some reality about the fallibility of the church they attend, perhaps a church split or some scandal within the church that causes them to doubt everything that they have known and believed before. The first year of this podcast, I interviewed Adrian Smith, who has written a book called A Prison for the Mind, Reflections of a Disappointed Fundamentalist. Adrian had a crisis of faith because he was a member of a very strict church that could even possibly be considered a cult. And so when he fell away from that church, he had his crisis of faith. But he came to Gnosticism, and that’s my highest goal for all of us, because what we need to have is a personal relationship with the Father above, the God Above All Gods, and with the Christ as represented by Jesus. Here is the beginning of the Gospel according to John, from Hart’s translation. In the origin there was the Logos, and Logos was present with God, and the Logos was God (John 1:1). Now, okay, let’s stop there a second. “In the origin” refers to the ethereal plane. “There was the Logos,” and that is a capital L, so it’s a person, it’s a name, and it’s the Logos that we talk about all the time here at Gnostic Insights. “And Logos was present with God,” and this is capital G-O-D, so this is the God Above All Gods. “And the Logos was god,” but that is lowercase g, so the Logos was an elohim, an Aeon. Quoting again, This one was present with God in the origin. All things came to be through him, and without him came to be not a single thing that has come to be. In him was life, and this life was the light of men (John 1:2-4). Normally it’s translated as the Son of God, and I would agree that the Son was present with God in the origin, and all things came through the Son, beginning with the Totalities and the Hierarchy of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. They’re the parts, the pleroma, of the Son. But remember, Logos was one of these Aeons who within himself at the fractal level also possessed all of the elements of life in this cosmos. So Logos is not exactly the same as the Son of God, but he is the Son of the Son. He has the pleroma of the Son of God as a fractal within himself, and it was this Logos who fell out of the Hierarchy of the Aeons and created the material out of which our cosmos was fashioned. When I first read this in the Tripartite Tractate, I found it so shocking that I set the Nag Hammadi down for a few years. This didn’t cause a crisis of faith in my Christianity when I first read this, but it more likely caused a crisis of faith in my gnosis because of this equation of Logos with the Son in the Gospel of John. So when John says “All things came to be through him,” and that’s a lowercase him, we’re not talking about the Son, and we’re not talking about the Father, we’re talking about that elohim, Logos. “And without him came to be not a single thing that has come to be,” points to the Fall of Logos that created this cosmos. And so identifying Logos as the one who fell rather than Lucifer or Satan, well, you see, that is a very strange deconstruction of our normal Christian doctrine, but it’s only an inversion because that part was taken out by the Nicene Council. The Roman Pope wanted a clean, straight throughline that wouldn’t confuse the “simpletons” too much, and I put quotes around simpletons because faith is to be simple. So in a sense, being a simpleton is not an insult. We’re to have faith like a child—to be innocent. Again, quoting from the Gospel according to John, chapter 1, verse 4, “In him was life, and this life was the light of men.” You see, as I understand the Gnostic Gospel, it’s the Pleroma of Logos along with the Fullness of God that sends down the life. The “life and the light of men” comes from the Father, through the Son, through the Fullness, and then down through Logos. Logos is our first emissary into this cosmos. Logos provides the means by which “the light of men” entered and continues to enter our cosmos. Quoting John again, And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it (John 1:5). So what was the darkness? That was the space of the other dimension resulting from the Fall away from the luminosity of the ethereal plane, representing an encompassing ignorance of the Father. The original cosmos was all dark. It lacked consciousness, it lacked life, and then Logos sent life, light, and consciousness into the primordial cosmos, displacing the ignorance with the gnosis of the Father. And that light is a great Power that displaces the darkness—“darkness did not conquer it.” All of us Second Order powers bring life and consciousness into this cosmos. All of us, from the bacterium on up, from each of our cells on up, are part of the Pleroma of the redeemed Logos after his return from the Fall to the Fullness. That’s how it is that we’re alive, and we are conscious. We didn’t arise from the mud of the Demiurge who is the shaper of the bits and pieces of the Fall. We didn’t come through the Fall and we are not fallen. We come from the light of God and so the darkness cannot conquer us. We came through Logos. We came through the Fullness. We came through the Son. So that is why whenever I speak of these things and I give praise to God, I can start with the God Above All Gods, but it always flows down through the Son, the Fullness, and Logos. Or I can start with Logos and flow up through the Aeons of the Fullness and the Son in praise and giving glory to the God Above All Gods. This gnostic glory road may appear to be just another deconstruction of Christianity, but it seems to me a very reverential approach. I revere God. I give glory to God. I love God, and I love every part of the steps of the Gnostic Gospel, from Logos up through the Aeons of the Fullness, up through the Son, all the way to the God Above All Gods. My praise of the Father doesn’t stop at the walls of the church. It doesn’t stop at the body of Jesus hanging bloody and beaten on the cross. It permeates every cell of my Second Order being. Carrying on with this chapter 1 of John, it says, There came a man sent by GOD whose name was John. [That’s John the Baptist, not John who wrote the book of John, and GOD written in all capital letters, indicating the God Above All Gods]. “This man came in witness that he might testify about the light so that through him all might have faith—but only that he might testify about the light; he was not that light” (John 1:6-7). So John came to testify about the Christ and he was saying no I am NOT the Christ. It was the true light which illuminates everyone that was coming into the cosmos.  He was in the cosmos and through him the cosmos came to be and the cosmos did not recognize him. He came to those things that were his own and they who were his own did not accept him (John 1:9-10).   The Third Order Powers constitute the pleroma of the Christ. Third Order Powers have the perfection of the Christ; one for every Second Order Power, and they carry the countenance of every Aeon. John the Baptist was saying that the Christ brought the true, ethereal light from above to illuminate “everyone that was coming into the cosmos.” Not only the church, not only the elect, not only the special few, but everyone. He says that Christ came to his own but they did not accept him. This is usually interpreted as saying that since Jesus was a Jew, his own were the Jewish people. I would broaden that definition to mean that Christ’s “own” are all of the Second Order Powers that were sent down through Logos to populate the cosmos. But as many as did accept him, to them he gave the power to become God’s children, to those having faith in his name. Those born not from blood nor from man’s desire but of GOD [again written in all capital letters to indicate the God Above All Gods](John 1:12-13). This part of the passage indicates that we need to have faith in the name of the Father—the God Above All Gods, not Jesus in particular: “he gave the power to become God’s children to those having faith in his name,” i.e. “GOD.” And the second part of the passage, verse  13, spiritualizes the fact that by “God’s children,” he is not speaking of merely being born through passion and sex, but born into the desire for GOD. And how is one born into the desire for GOD? By identifying with the Christ and inviting the Third Order Powers to take up residence inside your soul. This passage is one of the foundational passages that encourages Christian evangelism and conversion—the “born again” experience, and it seems an airtight statement for the need to repent and ask the Christ to come in and redeem us in order to be “saved.” The conventional church has taken this to mean that everyone who doesn’t repent before their death will be condemned and tortured for eternity in hell. This is the evangelistic coercion by which many a person has converted to the Christian religion. We spent three full episodes in November of 2024 devoted to this topic. To summarize, all Second Order Powers will indeed remember the Father and repent and will gladly return to their everlasting home above, sooner or later. And later may involve numerous reincarnations or repentance after death during one’s 360 degree life review. I’ll put the links to those episodes in the transcript of this episode: Universal Salvation–an Introduction – Gnostic Insights  Universal Salvation pt. 2 – Gnostic Insights  Universal Salvation pt 3 – Gnostic Insights And the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us and we saw his glory. Glory as of the Father’s only one, full of grace and truth (John 1:14). So, “the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us” speaks of the ephemerality of Christ’s appearance on the world stage. We spoke of what ephemerality means last week. In this case it’s the fact that when Jesus Christ came through this cosmos and pitched his tent in Nazareth and in Jerusalem and all the lands thereabout, it was a temporary stay. He was just passing through this material cosmos, as are all of us. Christ didn’t build a Temple or a Cathedral in GOD’s name, he pitched a temporary tent. Now to wrap this up, the point of the coming of Jesus Christ was not to die on the cross. The atheistic strain of deconstructionists like to say that Christianity is a religion based upon a cult of child sacrifice and that Jesus was the ultimate child sacrifice—that God was willing to sacrifice his only begotten Son in the most horrendous type of bloody death by crucifixion—and who wants to worship a bloodthirsty God like that? The deconstructionists like to say that Christianity is a modern cult of child sacrifice. But it’s not. That is a complete misunderstanding of the passion of Christ. The point of the incarnation of Jesus the Christ was not so that he could become a blood sacrifice to take away our sins in the same manner that the Jews were instructed to bring a sacrifice of a dove or the sacrifice of a sheep, ox, or goat to the priests of the Temple when they came to worship and beg forgiveness of sins. Ancient Judaism, like the earlier religions of the area prior to Judaism, did practice blood sacrifice. But, unlike the neighboring tribes, the Jews substituted the doves, sheep, oxen, and goats for child sacrifice. The substitutes would be slaughtered in front of them. Gigantic gallons of blood flowed out of the Temple every day during sacrificial observances. The Temple era of animal sacrifice was a very bloody religion, as were all of the religions in the land of Canaan at the time. And so the Jews brought that element into their religion. There is, of course, a Demiurgic aspect to blood sacrifice, in that the Demiurge hates the life and light we Second Order Powers bring into this world. The Demiurge is the King of Death and we Second Order Powers all fight a lifelong, never-ending battle with death. But Jesus came as a sharp break, ripping that curtain of the Temple where the sacrifices took place. He went into the marketplace of the Temple where the vendors were selling goats and sheep and doves to be used as sacrificial substitutes. Those were the people whose tables Jesus overturned—the money changers of the people who were selling sacrificial animals. In the New Testament we read, And Jesus entered the Temple and threw out all those selling and buying in the Temple, and overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those selling doves, And he says to them, “It has been written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a robbers’ den.’” (Matthew 21:12-13).  Jesus came to take away blood sacrifice, and not in a magical way through his substitutional sacrifice on the cross, which is the event that Christians observe on Good Friday. Jesus hanging on the cross and then he dies, “to take away our sins.” Jesus is then resurrected on Easter Sunday. The sacrificial substitution of Jesus is the heart of Christianity, but it is a carryover from the old days of Temple sacrifice that Jesus clearly and physically overturned. Jesus the Christ came so that we would see his life, hear his teachings, invite him into our hearts, and ask his Pleroma to replace the Pleroma of Logos with the Pleroma of Love. This is the meaning of the Christ. This is what Jesus came to do, and he loves us so much more than we love ourselves and way more than we love other people in the world. Christ would never send any of us to hell and punishment for eternity, for we are all the children of GOD, capital G O D. He came that we might be saved, not condemned. This is the true message of Easter and it’s all about love and forgiveness. When Jesus was hoisted onto the cross he said, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” Then a darkness came over the land and the Temple veil was torn in two. Jesus’s final words were “It is finished,” followed by, “Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit.” Having said this, He breathed his last (Luke  23:45 ; John 19:30). This is the good news of the Gnostic Gospel. Christ will connect with you on a personal level, for he came with your face and he knows you intimately. He brought with him an army of Third Order Powers to lovingly walk beside you through the Demiurge’s valley of the shadow of death and He will guide you back to your heavenly home. So, Happy Easter, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I’d like to share with you an essay that David Bentley Hart recently posted to his Substack site. His Substack site is called Leaves in the Wind by David Bentley Hart. And you know we use Hart’s translation of the New Testament here frequently. He’s a brilliant man, a wonderful writer. So I’m going to read for you a very good essay that he calls The Story of the Nameless, The Use and Abuse of History for Theology. This was posted on April 9, 2025. It was a lecture that he had delivered at Duke University in September of 2017 to theology graduate students. So if you find this deep and difficult to follow, well just imagine that you’re a Duke theology graduate student and they probably didn’t follow it any better than you do. So don’t worry about that because he writes in a very highbrow manner. Also I’m only reading portions of this essay. I’m leaving out most of the small details that historians love so much. Hart cites many different philosophers—European philosophers, German philosophers, historians from all ages, from Eusebius on up. And I’m leaving all of those details out. So if you like those sorts of details, because I don’t—I get lost amongst the names, I’m not really good at sticking in names–I like concepts. That’s where I dwell. And so I’m giving you the conceptual level of this essay. But if you want the details, go and look up Hart there on Substack and read for yourself. Even subscribe. He’s always amazing. So here goes. Most of the history we read and write is a lie, though often a lie told in earnest. We fabricate the past as much as we recall it, if not more so, and almost invariably in ways that reflect an ideology that we either consciously seek to promote or unconsciously absorb from the society surrounding us. For the most part, this is nothing to lament as long as we remember to think of written history primarily as a species of literature. In truth, the greater the historian, the vaster and more ingenious his or her misrepresentations are likely to be. And the greatest of all, those who are the most accomplished masters of detail and style need not distort a single fact in order to produce an entirely fantastic image of the past. Let me pop in here and say that there’s a difference between facts—choice points in history—observable phenomena that occurred—and the narrative or the story that weaves those facts together. Narrative is not truth. Narrative is the story you tell around the facts and it is your truth. It’s usually ideologically centered. So you can see this clearly in our political situation where you have a certain set of facts and then half of the people say blah blah blah blah blah as they weave together the facts into the narrative that they promote and the other half of the people say no no blah blah blah blah blah that’s their narrative around the same exact facts. So do you see how that works? It’s not that what you hear reported is true or false. It’s the story that people have woven around the facts as they stand. And of course, all of the news outlets and certainly the social media influencers are all about narrative. People tell the story from their point of view because we each have a unique and personal point of view and we always think that our version of what we see is the correct one because it’s our point of view, see? So when we share that with others, we try to convince them to accept our narrative. So that is why the media outlets on the left have different narratives than the media outlets on the right, even though the facts may be the same. And by the way, the facts aren’t always there. Sometimes opinions or guesswork is promoted as if it were a fact, but it’s not. Sometimes people lie to fill in the blanks of the narrative and so those are just outright lies. When we read history then, what are we reading? We are reading the narratives that the historians wrote, right? Sometimes we’re reading lies. It is said that history is written by the victors because they’re the ones that survived to tell the story. Okay, so getting back to Hart now, skipping ahead, he says, Moreover, we deceive ourselves if we imagine that there is such a thing as a specific and constant moral imperative that governs and animates the writing of history. Yes, on the one hand, we must never forget. But yes, also on the other, we must learn to forget. Historical memory can ideally make us aware of and so responsible for the sins of the past, the crimes of our countries and our forebears, all the wars and spoilations and enslavements that have marked the births and deaths of tribes and nations and empires. By the same token, however, it can also entrap us in a ceaseless cycle of impotent mourning whose emotional intoxications can relieve us of any real attention to the concrete moral demands of the present. At its most perfidious, historical recollection can become a support for an aggrandizement of our prejudices, a reinforcement of the myths of racial pedigree or national destiny or imperial grandeur, or can soothe us with sweet sickly nostalgias for past glories and lost honors. We see this also happening quite a bit in discussions of politics and what is currently going on. You know, a few years ago, the movement away from American history in the manner that we were taught it in the 40s, 50s, 60s, let’s say, to change the year that the nation was founded and by whom–these are conscious attempts to remold the thinking of people here and now. I imagine that we people who are looking into Gnosticism think that quite often. We often think to ourselves, oh well, it surely couldn’t have happened that way. As a Christian Gnostic, one rewriting of history that I constantly indulge in is the notion that the Gnostic gospel was embedded within original Christianity—the original people of the first 300 years after Jesus—and that it was purposely stripped out of the religious and historical narrative by those who wielded power at the time, the Roman emperor and the pope of the Roman Catholic Church, in order to mold Christianity into a kingdom that they could control and that they could be the head of, the leader of. So as a Gnostic Christian, I will say no, that was not right that they did that because they were wiping out the true history. And the true history from my point of view is that this was originally part of what Jesus taught and has been purposely stripped out and muffled so that only now, after the rediscovery of the Nag Hammadi scriptures and the Qumran scripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, can these original teachings be rediscovered and reabsorbed into Christianity. That is what this Gnostic Insights attempts to do in a Christian way. But we know, just observing our modern culture, that people on the left and people on the right describe history entirely differently from each other in order to support their narrative, which then supports their belief structure. Okay, getting back to Hart, he says, Even so, if we can keep the fact in mind, we can at least apply ourselves to historical studies with enough ironic detachment to be capable of discerning where what we really know of the past, which is always far less than we think, can be distinguished from the fabulations and interpretations in which the record is always inevitably wrapped. Then, when we choose to write or rewrite the past responsibly, or simply in reading consider what we are reading with sufficient diffidence, we can recognize the ephemerality and cultural contingency of past interpretations. Let me jump in here to interpret some words. What Hart is suggesting is that we need to be able to tell the difference between what is being made up and what is merely interpretations of the facts when we write or even read. And that’s what responsible or discerning reading is—that we can recognize ephemerality. Ephemerality means passing, it’s gone with the wind, it doesn’t last long. And the cultural contingency of past interpretations, that is what I was talking about a minute ago, that where you stand within the culture always determines how you interpret the pattern of events. Back to Hart now, No doubt we are also in that very process imposing new equally ephemeral and contingent interpretations on what we think we know. But that too we can learn to do with some degree of critical distance from our own prejudices. So Hart is suggesting that we need to have self-awareness enough to realize that the way we are interpreting events or the way we are interpreting what we see on social media, what we see from the talking heads, the influencers—we have to be able to not just absorb everything we hear, but have sufficient critical distance to discern what people are saying. Even if we tend to agree with that person, we still have to maintain some sort of distance. See, what people often do is they have a point of view and they seek out other people who reinforce their point of view. And if you turn on some social media and this person is talking about things that you don’t agree with, well, you just want to turn them off immediately or you want to say rude things back to them on the screen. But if you can sit with it and truly consider it, you’d be closer to the truth. Podcast host and comedian Bill Maher visits with President Trump and singer Kid Rock at the White House on March 31, 2025. Maher was surprised that Trump was so funny and congenial at the private dinner, and he left with a new understanding and appreciation for his political foe. (Image via X/@billmaher) At least consider what their point of view must be for them to be saying these things. What assumptions are they making versus the assumptions you are making? And where do they conflict? And does it have to do with fact or does it have to do with opinions? So back to Hart, he says, And we cannot really avoid the task because despite all I’ve just said, historical thinking is not a choice for us, but an irresistible call, a vocation as old as our consciousness of ourselves as human beings. Skipping a little down, he asks, what is history after all? And I skip… History is the consequence of an original alienation, a departure from the natural order of repetition and return. And no reconciliation with the world we left behind is possible in this life. It is a state of spirit knowing itself now as posed over against the organic substrate of its being in the world, which has become something separate, objective, other. Okay, now that’s a very Gnostic statement. What he’s saying in the language as I interpret it is that our spiritual Self with a capital S is by its very nature alienated from the what he calls the organic substrate of being in the world. I would call it being melded to the mud level. Our self is melded to the material of the Demiurge and to its requirements and its memes. But we have the Self of our original spirit to show us what is true. Quoting Hart again, And so we cannot help but reflect on this schism under the forms provided by philosophy or art or natural religion, even though we are generally too immediately engaged in history as an unavoidable and external problem to be solved to allow much time for deep contemplation of history. And yeah, when certain historical events overwhelm us, such as the COVID pandemic, one side against another side and the claims of their narratives conflicting with each other, that would be the unavoidable and external problem to be solved. When we’re caught up in that, when we’re watching the news and reading the news feeds constantly and getting all worked up about it, well, now we can step back from that as a Gnostic and realize that that is part of the never ending war. That’s the never ending war. The Demiurge wants us to be constantly balled up and upset and shaking our fists at other human beings for what they believe in. Whichever side you’re on, that is a Demiurgic plot. The Demiurge wants us to be immediately engaged in history, you see, caught up in it and impassioned by it and being all angry or righteous and virtuous against those fools. That’s part of the never ending war and we’re being played. We’re being played like puppets when that happens. This is where reasonable detachment comes in. Think of it as a play. Think of it as here we are at a very interesting point in history. Look at this drama unfolding. It’s Shakespearean. It’s of biblical proportion. It’s an amazing drama that we’re watching and a part of. But don’t let it bring you down because then you are succumbing to archonic influences. Then you are being used as a puppet by the Demiurge. That’s what I would say. Back to Hart, And it seems to me, he says, there is a special calling of theological reflection with regard to historical memory, one that Christian thought has reliably betrayed throughout most of its existence. For one thing, the call to contemplate the meaning of history is not merely an invitation to engage with an archive of discrete facts in isolation, but an imperative to attend to specific narratives, specific diegetic orderings of facts and memories. For another, every attempt to interpret the past is either, tacitly or explicitly, also an attempt to interpret the present and determine what is to come. In a sense, every significant historian is engaged in writing the future. And in the case of Christian historians, it is a matter of extraordinary theological moment. Jumping down, he says, To me, it remains a source of wonder that most histories of Christianity remain little more than attempts to tell the story of the church in such a way as to defend or advocate the reconstitution of this or that institutional practice, this or that style of confessional adherence, this or that doctrinal ideology, and little more. It is surprising how often, even if inadvertently, these histories are nothing more than the same old tales of pedigree, further recitations of the narratives of those blessed with enduring names by virtue of their having occupied stations of social power. Rarely ever do they seem to emerge from an historical consciousness shaped by the radically different story told by the Gospels, which should be retold in every age regarding those nameless and disenfranchised souls whose world was invaded by the call of God in Christ, the crucified slave. This is a problem. See, I really liked that section, because he’s saying that what Christianity has become by virtue of the histories written by it is another tale of those in power—those in power wielding Christianity this way or that, whereas the way Christianity started was a different story that needs to be retold in every age, because it’s about nameless people and disenfranchised people whose world has been invaded by Christ. We don’t hear from those disenfranchised people in history. We only hear about the big people. We only hear from the famous historians, the famous theologians, this king or that king, Emperor Constantine taking Gnosticism out of the Gospel for the sake of power. Back to Hart. We have to remember also that the peculiar form of the entrance of God’s kingdom into time was not an integration of God’s story into ours, but rather a shattering act of judgment, of damnation, and of resurrection in a spiritual body untouched by time and death. It is, in short, history as history’s overthrow. Christianity first entered the world of late antiquity not as an institution, nor as a fully developed creed, but first and foremost as an event that was without any known precedent and without any immediately obvious sequel. At its dawning, the Gospel appeared within history as a proclamation regarding the sudden and irrevocable disruption of history, one that necessarily entailed, for those who believed that proclamation, a subversion or rejection of many of the most venerable cultic, social, and philosophical wisdoms of the ancient world. And the central event within the event that the Gospel proclaimed was the resurrection of Christ. All at once, according to Paul, for instance, all the firm configurations and demarcations that gave shape to reality had been altered, or transgressed, or erased. All religious, social, racial, and national boundaries had been effaced. All of natural history had been delivered over to the rule of Christ. All the spiritual and human agencies governing the cosmos, powers, principalities, thrones, dominions, the god of this age, had been subdued by the crucified and risen Lord. Let me pop in there to say that the god of this age—that is the Demiurge, and the spiritual agencies that are overthrown—the powers, principalities, thrones, dominions—those are the archons in the rule of the Demiurge. And the human agencies governing, that’s the kings and emperors who were appointed by the Demiurge to bring order to these unruly humans. Well, he’s saying that was all completely overthrown with the coming of Christ. Quoting again, The language of the book of Galatians is especially uncompromising with regard to the implications of this interruption. There Paul states that the event of salvation in Christ was a complete liberation not only from the elemental powers, and that would the archons, to which all peoples had been subject, but even from the power of the law of Moses. For holy though that law was, it could not save and was itself rendered defective by having been delivered under the angelic dispensations of the present age, revealed first through a mere angel and then further through a mere human mediator, and operating therefore only as a kind of provisional disciplinarian. He’s talking about the giving of the Ten Commandments and bringing it down the mountain by Moses. Moses and the Ten Commandments. (Gustave Dore, Getty Images) In Christ, however, a new age of liberty from all government but God’s had arrived. In this sense, Christianity entered human consciousness not primarily as an alternative religious practice or creed, but rather as an apocalyptic annunciation of the sudden invasion of historical and natural time alike by a kingdom not of this cosmos. Well, amen, I say to that. That is exactly the Gnostic gospel here. He’s saying that Christianity is not a displacement of Judaism or of other religions. Its purpose isn’t to have established, as it has by now in our modern Christian churches, a different set of creeds to recite every Sunday, a different set of hymns to sing, a different practice of dining together and what prayers to say. That was never the point that Jesus was making. That is merely substituting one set of ritualistic practices for another. But he’s saying that Christ actually came and destroyed all of that, that it was an apocalyptic annunciation by a kingdom not of this cosmos. It is an apocalyptic narrative that is wholly incompatible with what modern Christianity has become. It was wild, you might say, and we domesticated it and put it into corrals, this kingdom that is not of the cosmos. Quoting Hart, It was above all a profanation of sacred truths, the elevation of a crucified slave over all those duly appointed offices of religious and social order that had justly condemned him, and the blasphemous misconstrual of this criminal, not merely as an innocent victim, but as God’s only son. The pattern established in Christ, especially for me, Hart says, in the inexhaustibly suggestive story of Christ’s confrontation with Pilate in John’s gospel, was one of martyrdom as victory. Of power as the willingness to become powerless before the violence of the state, and thereby to reveal the latter’s arbitrariness, injustice, and spiritual falsehood. And how strange the gospel is here, for Pilate is precisely the sort of man about whom history is meant to be written. He has a name, has a face before the law, stands in a station given him by the sacred authority of the empire, yet his story vanishes in the light of Easter. He is remembered today only insofar as he is written into the margins of the story of the slave and peasant God. Pilate washes his hands to cleanse himself after condemning Jesus. Christ before Pilate by Ludovico Mazzolino, painting by Lodovico Mazzolino, 1530 (Museum: Fitzwilliam Museum) Even in its most redoubtable and enduring historical forms, Christianity is filled with an indomitable and subversive ferment, an inner force of disillusion that refuses to crystallize into something inert or stable, but that instead insists upon dispersing itself into the future ever again, to destroy what confines it and to start anew, to begin again in the formless realm of spirit rather than of flesh, of spirit rather than of the letter. There is, simply said, a distinct element of the ungovernable and seditious within the gospel’s power to persuade, one that we ignore only at the cost of fundamentally misunderstanding the character of the gospel. And hey, popping in here again, I say amen. That is exactly why I call this Gnostic gospel that I teach the Gnostic Gospel, and why I don’t shy away from saying that it is the basic form of Christianity. What we are teaching here at Gnostic Insights, and what I’ve written in my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and in the other book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is to bring Christianity again into the formless realm of spirit rather than of flesh, of spirit rather than of the letter, the ungovernable and seditious within the gospel’s power to persuade. And of course, this is what irritates conventional Christians who are constrained very narrowly by the narrative of the modern Christian church and what they’re allowed to believe and not believe. When we become so wedded to the inerrancy of the scripture, as they say, we are only allowed to read and believe exactly word for word the New Testament as it has been translated over the last 2,000 years, after the Nicene Council had already stripped out the Gnostic gospel. But that holds us within these corrals, like I say, as if we were wild horses that have been penned now and domesticated. But we’re not. The freedom to run free through the eternal spirit of the Father and the Son, the Aeons, the Fullness, and the Christ–this is who we really are. This is the spirit that we’re all born with, that we forget, and that we need to come back to. We’ll stop here today because this is going long. If you would like to read this in its entirety, I remind you again to go to the Substack app and look up David Bentley Hart’s site called Leaves in the Wind. I’ll probably pick up some more of this again next week. I’m putting together a new Easter message, so I’ll see you next week. God bless us all, and onward and upward! Please contribute what you can to spreading this Gnostic Gospel message. Speak to your friends, forward posts, buy the books, donate as God leads. Thank you! Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

“Elohim” is a Hebrew word that is commonly used in the Bible to refer to God. It is a plural form of the word “Eloah,” which means “god” or “deity.” Despite its plural form, “Elohim” is often used with singular verbs and adjectives when referring to the God of Israel, indicating a singular divine being. The term emphasizes God’s majesty, power, and sovereignty. In the context of the Hebrew Bible, “Elohim” is used in various passages to denote God’s role as the creator and ruler of the universe.” (GBT 4.o) “In some Gnostic and mystical traditions, the term “Elohim” can be associated with a variety of divine beings or emanations, including aeons. Aeons are often considered to be divine entities or aspects of the divine that represent different attributes or aspects of God in Gnostic cosmology. In this context, “Elohim” may be used to refer to a group of these divine beings rather than the singular God of traditional Judaism and Christianity. However, in the traditional Hebrew Bible context, “Elohim” primarily refers to the singular God of Israel and does not typically encompass the concept of aeons. The interpretation of “Elohim” can vary significantly depending on the theological framework and tradition being considered.” (GPT 4.o) This is the story of “mud up, spirit down.” I’ve mentioned before that my gnosis began to blossom about 20 years ago whenever I’d be walking in the woods or standing by the river with the dogs. The phrase mud up, spirit down would come to mind. That’s it. I pondered the phrase mud up, spirit down for a few years, but I didn’t worry about it. I usually trust my subconscious to work out big ideas for me while I am busy with other things. I used to think that the subconscious was just ordinary consciousness that we aren’t paying particular attention to. It’s usually depicted as an iceberg, with our aware consciousness peeking out of the ocean at the top with the majority of the subconscious iceberg below the surface of the water. Now I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. Now I would say that there are different types of subconscious thought that represent the unconscious aspect of the three different aspects of our being. The three aspects of our being, also known as the tripartite nature of humanity, are these: We have the big S Self, which is the spiritual aspect that is always in communion with the Father; then we have our ordinary consciousness that is called the psychical or psychological part; and finally we have the thoughts that arise from the material, physical aspects of our body. These three levels of our nature are able to function independently of each other, and one or the other is in conscious control at any given time. For example, when I’m walking in the woods my physical awareness may be on my feet and immediate surroundings so I can navigate the trail without tripping over things, but my subconscious physical aspect is probably thinking about food or avoiding getting bitten by bugs or scratched by brambles or things of that nature. At the same time, my psychological self may be replaying a recent conversation in my head, or singing a song, or even remembering some incident that provoked an emotional response earlier in the day. And of course the subconscious psychological self has a whole list of things I’m not aware of that it runs through—triggers from family or friends or the media, or constellations of similar incidents from the past that resonate with whatever I’m consciously thinking about, or subconscious emotional reactions to what is going on around me at the moment, and so on. This is the “mind chatter” that continually runs through most people’s heads. And then there is the spiritual Self, which is always in subconscious communion with the Father and the Fullness. At the conscious level, this is the voice that gives good advice and offers commentary on the things being thought about by the material and psychological levels—virtuous suggestions for feeling better or being more loving or helpful. It is the voice of the Holy Spirit that reminds us of scriptural quotes and suggests uplifting hymns to sing. So you see, the unconscious is not simply a single, monolithic unconscious—it has different origins and responds to different prompts. When I am walking in the woods, I am able to hear my spiritual Self loud and clear. Much of the gnosis I share with you here at Gnostic Insights has come from walks in the woods. The other time my spiritual Self speaks loudly is when I am writing articles such as this one. These gnostic insights are not coming from my material or psychical aspects, but from the Holy Spirit flowing through my spiritual Self. I notice that my spiritual Self’s voice is a different and more reasonable voice than my ordinary consciousness and qualitatively different than my egoic, psychical talking voice. In Gnosticism we say we come into this world with all of this spiritual knowledge inside of us because we’re fractals of the Father. We are born with the Fullness of God in every one of our cells. From the egg on up, we are full and complete fractals of the Father, which religious people misunderstand us as claiming to say, “I am God,” as if that’s a big heresy. Well, it is not truly heresy because we are not saying that we are God; it says so in Psalm 82:6 and again by Jesus in the New Testament when he makes reference to Psalm 82:6. Let’s look at Psalm 82. It’s very relevant to these times we are living in because it speaks of a wicked ruling class that mistreats the common people. Pay particular note to the word elohim. The Hebrew word elohim is plural, and is usually translated as either multiple gods or as a single God with a capital G. It is noteworthy that the word elohim can also be translated as Aeons—which we Gnostics know to be the self-aware Totalities of the Fullness of God and co-existent with the Son of God. Here is how Psalm 82 reads out of the Complete Jewish Bible translation: 82 A psalm of Asaf: (1) Elohim [God] stands in the divine assembly;there with the elohim [judges], he judges:2 “How long will you go on judging unfairly,favoring the wicked? (Selah)3 Give justice to the weak and fatherless!Uphold the rights of the wretched and poor!4 Rescue the destitute and needy;deliver them from the power of the wicked!” 5 They don’t know, they don’t understand,they wander about in darkness;meanwhile, all the foundations of the earthare being undermined. 6 “My decree is: ‘You are elohim [gods, judges],sons of the Most High all of you.7 Nevertheless, you will die like mortals;like any prince, you will fall.’” 8 Rise up, Elohim, and judge the earth;for all the nations are yours. Psalm 82 speaks a powerful Gnostic truth. Written by a prophet who was also a poet and musician called Asaph during the time of King David and Solomon, this psalm appears to be written about the Son of the God Above All Gods. Our gnosis tells us that this psalm is not written about the Demiurge because it places Elohim (God) above, among the elohim (the Aeons of the Fullness). In Gnostic cosmology we know this God that stands amid the Aeons is the Son, because the Father is otherwise unapproachable whereas the Son is co-existent with the Aeons of the Fullness. The divine assembly clearly refers to the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God. Listen again: “(1) Elohim [**The Son] stands in the divine assembly [**the Fullness of the Aeons]; there with the elohim [**Aeons], he judges.” After decrying the unfairness of the powerful, wicked elites over the wretched and powerless, he reminds the elite that they, too, are elohim, and sons of the most high, yet they will fall and die like any other mortal. Verse 6 says, 6 “My decree is: ‘You are elohim [gods, judges**Aeons],sons of the Most High all of you.” Asaph then pleads with Elohim [**the Son] to rise up and judge the earth. Moving on to the New Testament, John 10 speaks of an incident where Jesus, here called by his Hebrew name, Yeshua, healed a man who was blind from birth. Jesus healed him on the Sabbath, which the rabbis said was against the law regarding Sabbath. They accuse Yeshua of blasphemy when he claims that he is doing the work of his Father. The Judeans pick up rocks to stone him for “making himself out to be God.” Jesus then quotes Psalm 82 at them and points out that the Torah calls the people being addressed “elohim.”  Here is the entire passage in context, using some Hebrew words rather than the English translation we are accustomed to: Then came Hanukkah in Yerushalayim. It was winter,  and Yeshua was walking around inside the Temple area, in Shlomo’s Colonnade.  So the Judeans surrounded him and said to him, “How much longer are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us publicly!”  Yeshua answered them, “I have already told you, and you don’t trust me. The works I do in my Father’s name testify on my behalf,  but the reason you don’t trust is that you are not included among my sheep.  My sheep listen to my voice, I recognize them, they follow me, and I give them eternal life. They will absolutely never be destroyed, and no one will snatch them from my hands.  My Father, who gave them to me, is greater than all; and no one can snatch them from the Father’s hands.  I and the Father are one.”  Once again the Judeans picked up rocks in order to stone him.  Yeshua answered them, “You have seen me do many good deeds that reflect the Father’s power; for which one of these deeds are you stoning me?”  The Judeans replied, “We are not stoning you for any good deed, but for blasphemy — because you, who are only a man, are making yourself out to be God.” Yeshua answered them, “Isn’t it written in your Torah, ‘I have said, “You people are Elohim’ ”? If he called ‘elohim’ the people to whom the word of Elohim was addressed (and the Tanakh cannot be broken), then are you telling the one whom the Father set apart as holy and sent into the world, ‘You are committing blasphemy,’ just because I said, ‘I am a son of Elohim’? (Complete Jewish Bible, John 10:22-36)            In the verses above, Yeshua (the Hebrew version of the name Jesus), quotes from the Torah and the Tanakh to declare himself Elohim. (Tanakh is a Hebrew acronym that uses the first letter of the three parts of the Jewish Bible, or what Christians call the Old Testament. The Tanakh consists of the Torah (the Law or Writings, or Pentateuch—the 5 books of Moses), the Nevi’im (the Prophets), and the Ketuvim (the Writings-Poetry, Theology, and Drama). Because Jesus said, “I and the Father are One,” the people picked up rocks to stone him for blasphemy. But Jesus reminded them that he was only quoting Psalm 82:6, and that all of the people who were referenced in the psalm were also elohim. And this is an odd thing about Christians and the New Testament. There are many things that managed to slip by the Nicene Council when they were purging the gnosis from scripture. There’s plenty of gnosis still in the New Testament, but Christians kind of skip over that part. The Bible says we are the “sons of Elohim,” usually translated as “children of God.” In the modern vernacular I use in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, we are the fractals of the Spirit of God. We are the fruit of the elohim above, who are themselves the divisions of the Adonai Elohim (Lord of the Fullness and Son of the Father God Above All Gods). So when Jesus said we are elohim, sons of God, he was saying we, too, are the fractal elohim of God. Jesus was not the only son of God. We are all the sons of God, or the children of the Elohim. Because we are the fruit of the Fullness, as was Jesus, we also have its characteristics inside of us but we forget it. In Gnosticism, we say this forgetfulness is brought about by the never-ending war. The never-ending war is not just wars on Earth or disagreements with our friends or our spouses or fights we have. It’s also the never-ending war against death and destruction, because we are melded to this material level, and that matter is controlled by an entity that Gnostics always talk about yet has been entirely cut out of Christianity. That entity is called the Demiurge. And he was actually the creator of the mud. So while the Demiurge is the creator God of the Old Testament, he’s not the ultimate Elohim. The god of the Old Testament is actually—and this is another huge, huge heresy—the ego of the Aeon that fell from heaven. The fallen god of this world is not Satan; it’s Jehovah. The Demiurge contained all of the blueprints for creation. He knew it all. He knew everything because he was the ego of an Eloah–a fractal of the Son. And while the other Aeons, or elohim, were particular monads with singular functions, names, and places, the Aeon named Logos uniquely contained within himself a pleroma of fractals of all of the other Aeons of the Fullness. So when Logos fell, it was his fractal pleroma that broke open and formed the material out of which our cosmos was created. Logos sits at the top of the Fullness, and he contains fractals of all the other Aeons Before the fall of Logos, all was in harmony in the Pleroma of the Hierarchy of the elohim. The Aeons had their self-awareness and identities, but they all were in perfect harmony and only worked according to the Simple Golden Rule. The Fall of Logos is the first act of ego apart from the body of the Fullness. Our Christian tradition retains a faint memory of the original Fall, but we errantly think that it was an Aeon called Lucifer, the Star of Light, who fell. The Simple Golden Rule When Logos fell, his ego forgot about its origins, forgot about the Fullness and the Simple Golden Rule. It didn’t even remember that it was only the ego of an Aeon named Logos. It woke up and thought it was all alone, which it was, because there wasn’t anything other than the ethereal plane until Logos crashed and burned and deserted the newly formed cosmos in favor of returning to the Fullness. So when the ego was estranged from the Self, it believed it was the be all and end all and the egoic personality we call the Demiurge set about putting the fallen mess into order. This is our material universe. He’s the one that put the particles together in the atoms, and the atoms into the molecules, but he can’t get the life into it because he didn’t come down with the life or the love of the Fullness of Elohim. The Aeons took pity upon the Demiurge. They wanted life to come into this dead universe and they wanted the ego of Logos to return home to its proper position and place above. They wanted to reclaim this lifeless universe that had been caused by the Fall. So they breathed life directly into the mud. (The Sethian myth presented in The Apocryphon of John features Sophia as the Aeon rather than Logos.) And that’s how life began. So the life is melded onto the mud, and we have a constant, never-ending war between our life and light and the mud and the Fall of darkness. We 2nd order powers are caught in a never ending war with the deficiency and each other Logos is the only Aeon to have experienced the material world. The other Aeons remain ignorant of the material cosmos because they are established in the spiritual realm and their eyes remain upward toward the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says that the “remembrance” that the Second Order Powers carried with them as they incarnated down into this material cosmos included not only the love of the Father and the ability to cooperate with each other using the Simple Golden Rule of the Elohim, but it also included the intimate knowledge of matter that Logos learned during the brief time he spent down below in the Deficiency. “To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he (Logos) revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention that is should draw them into a communion with the material.” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 98) “Those who belong to the remembrance” refers to us Second Order Powers who dwell here below because we are of the “good thought.” The “thought of which he had stripped himself” is the egoic striving of Logos that brought about the Fall. We all carry the fallen ego of Logos forward through our material aspect. So that’s how that works. This is the story of “mud up, spirit down.” We are the direct offspring of the Aeons of that eternal Fullness of God. The Fullness is not simply a description of God—it is a particular state of the Son of God—it is the elohim of Adonai Elohim. We, too, are elohim of Adonai Elohim. Jesus said so. I made this nice little advertisement in a program called “canva.” It looks spectacular within the canva space, but when I export it the image loses resolution. <sigh> I’ve been praying for a Gnostic Insights or Reformation follower to step forward and make a significant financial contribution to this gnostic ministry. If you are that person, please pay attention to the leading of the Holy Spirit and make a contribution today to help me defray mounting podcast and book-related expenses. Thank you.

I have recently taken down my older “New Gnostic Gospel” blog in favor of focusing on GnosticInsights.com and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Before taking down the old blog I saved this one article that was first printed in June of 2015. I’m going to go through it with you today to see how this gnosis has held up over the past 10 years. The obvious improvement is the quality of my illustrations. I thought it would be a treat for you to see how they have evolved.  This was the original mapping of the new Gnostic Gospel. These concepts have been more colorfully illustrated, although the original mapping still holds up. You may find all of this in its most simple form in my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. For a more detailed explanation, pick up a copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel at amazon. Monday, June 15, 2015 These diagrams are my visual representations of the “Tripartite Tractate.” The Tripartite Tractate is one book of the collection known as the Nag Hammadi scriptures that were discovered buried in the Egyptian desert in 1945. The Nag Hammadi texts were buried sometime in the 3rd century by monks who sought to preserve and protect them from those who wanted to weed them out as heresies as they designed the official shape of the Christian religion.  After studying the Tripartite Tractate, I can see why the early Pope did not want this to make it into the Bible.  For one thing, the Christ figure, the “Son of God,” is not all perfect and all powerful, as portrayed in the Christian Bible; matter of fact, Logos is directly implicated in the Fall. For another thing, salvation is a personal, mystical affair conferred directly by the Father through Logos, not something conferred by preaching or baptism. Thirdly, the cosmology presented here makes clear that those who, shall we say, struggle for righteousness against a sinful world are not necessarily doing God’s work, but are caught in an endless war against the “evil doers,” and have themselves fallen into some sort of earthly death trap.  Okay. Let’s quickly amend that first concept about the Son of God. The Christian religion has lumped three distinct characters together into one Son of God. In the Gnostic Gospel, these three are broken out by their sequential appearance in the rollout of the Gnostic cosmogeny. 1: The Son of God is indeed the all-perfect “only begotten Son” of the Father’s originating consciousness. Because of His perfection and proximity to the Father, the Son is the only entity that can link directly up with the Source without the risk of annihilation. The Son is the bucket dipped into the Sea, reflecting every characteristic of the originating Father. All subsequent entities, life, consciousness, laws and power come through the Son.  2: Logos is not the Son after all. My confusion arose from John 1:1-5 where it states, “in the beginning was the Logos [Word], and Logos was with God, and Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” The church teaches this passage as describing the Son.  Upon further reflection, the Aeon we call Logos fulfills the description in John 1, once we consider the earlier Gnostic cosmogeny—Logos, one of the Aeons of the Fullness—was with God prior to the Fall. After the Fall and the abandonment of the Demiurge, life, light, and consciousness was sent down into the otherwise dead material universe in the form of all of us 2nd Order Powers. We are the fruit of Logos. 3: The Christ is the 3rd Order of Powers, formed through the united prayer of the Fullness and the Son, with the approval of the Father. The Christ contains all of the power and majesty of the Son. The Christ presents Himself as the Redeemer of every 2nd Order Power to bring us back home to the ethereal plane after our sojourn here in the material cosmos.Back to the 2015 article:  As I said, the complete article is underway. Meanwhile, for those of you who want to get started, here it is in picture form. Gnostic Cosmology according to the Tripartite Tractate, by Cyd Ropp, Ph.D. 2015 On the big poster above, start at the upper left corner and read clockwise. Our earthly situation is portrayed in the middle of the diagram. Salvation and the end of the world comes in the form of the pyramid at the lower left. Below are various sections of the diagram presented on their own. If you have already been studying Gnostic cosmology, these diagrams will clarify various terms and activities. If you haven’t already been studying this, then these diagrams will be super confusing so don’t worry about it. All will be revealed in good time.  In terms of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, [which my readers in 2015 were all familiar with] this cosmology begins prior to “in the beginning…” and proceeds through the formation of Units of Consciousness and the appearance of our physical universe, and concludes with the final collapse of the universe.  It also takes place during the life cycle of each and every Unit of Consciousness, as it is a Fractal Pattern that repeats itself over and over again. Those of you who have read A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything will recognize the role of the hierarchical distribution and the role of toroidal flow in the final reorganization of creation.  [updated edition of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything is available through amazon] The Son emerges from the Father The First Glory, The Son of the Father. First differentiation after the Undifferentiated Unity of the Metaversal Father. The Second Glory. The Son has realized it is comprised of many traits of the Father. These traits are called “aeons” in Gnostic terminology. When they’re all grouped together they are called the Fullness, or the All. Many differentiations but total harmony. Once these traits are named, they fall out of undifferentiated harmony and rearrange themselves into the pyramidal hierarchy depicted below. The Fruit of the Third Glory is the offspring of the All in a perfectly arranged hierarchy. This stage in creation is known as the First Order of Powers. Everyone and everything knows its place and is happy.  The final Aeon to arrive at the top of the pyramid, known in the Tripartite Tractate as “Presumptuous Thought,” looks down at the hierarchy and sees them all arranged underneath him. This gives that Aeon the idea that he is in charge of the pyramid. He reaches upward to reinsert the pyramid into the Metaverse. This is done without authorization or position. This results in The Fall.   Update: Now, that’s a surprise. I originally identified Logos as “presumptuous thought.” That thought is more specifically the Ego of Logos. The Self of Logos continues to reflect the entirety of the Fullness as a complete, fractal Pleroma. And it looks as though this diagram shows the entire Fullness Falling, but it is only the fractal Pleroma of Logos that Falls. The original Fullness is untouched by the Fall. They remain behind and pray for their fellow Aeon Logos to return safely. The Fall tumbles the pyramid of Aeons out of arrangement. They Fall into confusion, Chaos. They are dispersed and alone for the first time, cut off from each other and the All. This is now called the Deficiency, and t he Imitation. Logos panics and abandons the Imitation and retreats back to the All. God the Father also retreats in horror from the Deficiency, which throws up a Boundary containing the Imitation. Logos and the All try to rescue their abandoned children by praying for them and thus giving them the Remembrance of Who and What they used to be, before the Fall.   Update:  when Logos and the All pray for the rescue of the Deficiency, that is when the 2nd Orderof Powers is fruited down here below. We are those of the Remembrance. The prayers of Logos and the All results in the Second Order of Powers. There are now two types of creatures: those of the Deficiency who have no belief in who or what came before, and those of the Remembrance, who have come to themselves through “Repentance” and “Conversion” and recall their fellow Aeons and their place with the Father in the Fullness. Rather than rejoining Logos and the All, those of the Remembrance choose to do battle with those of the Imitation. They are locked in an endless righteous War where no one can win.   Update: this part of the cosmogeny has taken a few years of discussion with my brother to mine our gnosis. Those of the imitation are not to be referred to as “creatures” because they were not created as 2nd Order Powers. Only the 2nd Order are living creatures. Those of the imitation are archons generated by the Demiurge. They are shadows. They are not living.  Release from the Endless War comes by intervention of the Father and the Fullness working together. They produce the Living Image of the All and the Father–the Christ. The Christ places himself upon the Lost like a garment that restores perfection and fills the Lost with inexpressible Joy, giving them the Logos that enables them to detach and dispel delusion. This results in the Third Order of Powers–the Aeons of the Images–that now carry within themselves the Seed of the Word. The final Order of Creation is called The Economy and The Consolidation. All three types of creatures are represented: those of the imitation, those of the remembrance, and those who have been redeemed by Christ. This drawing is a pyramidal shaped “core sample” of creation. The small figure at the lower right is a cutaway view of creation, with the center of the donut mapping to the top of the pyramid. Update: Those of the imitation are not Second Order Powers; they are archons of the Demiurge. At this point, when all Second Orders are redeemed through the Power of the Christ, only the imitations of the deficiency are left out of the new Economy. The New Economy consists of everything that existed from the beginning, prior to the material cosmos, plus us Second Order Powers. The Demiurge is also redeemed at this point and Logos is reunited with his wandering Ego. This brings the Fullness to completion. Posted by cyd at 1:11 PM    Labels: aeons, Cyd Ropp, First Glory, Gnostic cosmology, Gnostic Gospels, Logos, Nag Hammadi, pleroma, Second Glory, The All, The Economy, Third Glory, Tripartite Tractate How neat! The original article was posted at 1:11 PM—one of my favorite times of day! The Labels links are to vestigal articles posted over at the original Simple Explanation Blog. Below is the Gnostic Gospel Cosmology map as it now appears in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel: Gnostic Cosmogeny from the Father to the Cosmos and back again The children’s Gnostic Gospel book is slowly but surely coming along. The illustrator has completed the first 10 pages, so we’re about 1/3 of the way through the book. Your contribution to this effort would help immensely. You can be a part of this newest book by submitting a contribution earmarked for the illustrator’s fee. Here’s what the Fall looks like: p. 7 “But when Logos tried to bring the Father his gift, he fell all the way out of Heaven!” p. 8 “Logos crashed into the darkness and broke apart. Now he was split in two!” Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week’s episode is an unusual treat for you. It’s not particularly “gnostic” if you only peg gnosticism onto ancient manuscripts. But if you realize that understanding the nature of space and time is itself gnosis, then you will understand why this week’s episode is important. So, put on your thinking cap and open up your mind because we’re going to look at some interesting facets of quantum mechanics and how, exactly, it relates to consciousness and free will. It’s a short episode–you have time to listen to it twice if needed. Here goes… My brother, Bill, and I love to ponder the nature of time, space, and reality. This week we discussed an article printed in The Essential List newsletter put out by the BBC called “The bizarre quantum paradox of ‘negative time‘. We recognized that the theory called “block universe” described in the article is exactly what I have been calling the Cherry-Jello-universe. I’ve written about this block universe in two previous articles and one podcast episode. Here’s the original blog post: A Simple Explanation of Consciousness and Time: Our Cherry-Jello Universe It’s been a very long time since I developed any new concepts to add to A Simple Explanation, spending the past couple of years concentrating instead on the Gnostic Gospel. So my longtime readers may be very happy to see this new posting featuring the torus, consciousness, and Jello? Yesterday my brother and I were musing over the nature of time–what is it exactly? It isn’t a thing, it is nowhere to be located. Is it therefore a force? This was my response. I have long thought of the universe in this fashion, but I had never written it down or even shared it with my brother until after our phone call. He flipped out over it. Let’s see what you think… A Giant Bowl of Jello Here is how I picture time, space, and consciousness — We live in a Jello universe–a gigantic, torus-shaped, bowl of gelatin, studded with an infinite number of cherries. The Jello is the matrix that holds everything that ever was or will be. It is the ground state. The cherries are every thing that ever were or will be–all potential events, all potential objects. An infinite array of cherries already laid out as unrealized potential. Consciousness is each spark of life/consciousness making its free will way through this vast ocean of Jello. Time can only be apprehended through consciousness; time is nowhere to be found if there is no observer. The cherries are the full panoply of choices we could make along the way. Our free will chooses to swim this way and that as it moves toward the next cherry of choice. This free will is swimming from the middle of the torus in the direction of the outside boundary of the giant torus. All of these cherries are being held within the shape of the torus—the doughy part of the donut. Every lifetime is the trace of the worm-like path our consciousness chooses as it travels through the universe of cherries. In a real sense, the entirety of all of our lives is already conceived in potential. It is our self-awareness and free will that plod along at the speed of matter as we live our lives out as a linearity of passing time. My brother, the professor of Philosophy, notes that this way of looking at time and consciousness may have just solved one of the longstanding conundrums of philosophy. That is, how can we reconcile the concept of an all-knowing God if we subjects have free will? The answer presented by this model is that the all-knowing God has pre-placed all possible choices before us, but it is our individual free will that plots the course through these choices. This combination of potential versus choice reflects our free will. That’s it. Of course, the Jello salad pictured above is not to scale. The gelatin donut would be infinitely large, and the cherries very very small–probably zero-point fields. I asked the Copilot AI to illustrate a torus with a tiny center hole studded with small red dots throughout. It couldn’t make the small hole torus, and the dots are outside rather than inside, but it’s a start. Imagine these choice-cherries distributed throughout the interior of the torus. Here are the new thoughts prompted by the article in The Essential List newsletter put out by the BBC called “The bizarre quantum paradox of ‘negative time‘. According to the article, Emily Adlam of Chapman University says: “retrocausality is a hypothetical (and philosophically controversial) model of existence, where all moments in time–past, present, and future–exist in a four-dimensional object. “If this block is filled with every event that ever has or will happen, then it’s easier to see how some hypothetical influence could pass between particles within it, says Adlam. To explain the spooky actions of entangled particles, information would not need to travel backward on some alternative retrocausal timeline. ‘There’s no temporal flow,’ she says. ‘Time is just another dimension within the block, rather than being a material thing that moves.’ “If that is the case, we have arrived at what may be the most troubling implication of all about quantum mechanics and its weird temporal behaviour.” What is this most troubling implication? The article comes to the conclusion that the block universe implies that we have no free will because, while we experience time as linear, all possible decisions have already been recorded in the block universe. Well, yours truly here and brother Bill disagree with that conclusion because it leaps to an unwarranted conclusion that the decisions within the block have already been written and we have no free will. In my Jello universe hypothesis, while the block may be studded with all potential occurrences, the path traced between collapsed potential is not written until conscious observance passes through it. You see, in the quantum universe, everything exists as potential until it is observed. It is the observation that collapses its state of existence from limitless potential to a singularity. Hence the ever-popular quantum fable of Schrodinger’s cat. The fable instructs us to imagine that there is a cat inside of a box. The cat may be either dead or alive and we cannot determine whether or not it is dead or alive until we lift the lid and peek inside the box. Until we peek inside, the cat is both dead and alive, but once it is observed as one or the other it will never revert back to the undetermined state of both dead and alive–it will only be dead or alive. We hypothesize that until consciousness traces a path through the block of Jello, all potential choices remain uncollapsed. But, once we have made a choice to go this way or that, our consciousness collapses those chosen potentials and leaves a trace of our passing. We could liken it to driving across a country where there are many roads to choose from but we choose this highway or that back road as our route. The unchosen roads remain, but we have taken one particular route to reach our destination. Through free will we chose that route. There is no logical reason to assume that our choice of route proves determinism rather than free will. Yes, you may say, but it can only be God that mapped the potential roads, God that made the Jello and studded it with cherries, therefore God has determined the route you will take. No, that is not the case. The God Above All Gods (as we affectionately call it in Gnostic philosophy) is illimitable and infinite. Therefore it has plenty of “room” to imagine the block of all possibilities–all possible worlds. That does not at all imply that the route from here to there through those possibilities is predetermined by God. Nor does it imply that we construct reality from nothing. We don’t make up reality because it was always there in potential within the block universe of God’s imagination. What we do, is make our way through this universe of choices, one choice at a time, collapsing potential into history as we pass by. In Gnostic theology, the Tripartite Tractate states that the Father wanted all of his emanations to be self-aware and to exhibit free will. It was free will that caused the Fall. How would the Fall have occurred if Logos did not have free will? “For this aeon was one of those who had been given wisdom, with ideas first existing independently in his mind so as to be brought forth when he wanted it. Because of that, he had received a natural wisdom enabling him to inquire into the hidden order, being a fruit of wisdom. Thus, the free will with which the members of the All had been born caused this one to do what he wanted, with no one holding him back.” (Tripartite Tractate, verses 75-76) And as far as quantum entanglement goes, and spooky action at a distance, there is no distance at all because all potential exists in state within the consciousness of the Father. The block is completely entangled because it exists within the mind of God. The spooky action at a distance is only an appearance of distance but is actually held continually within the block as potential awaiting our observation to collapse it. Now, here is the Gnostic Gospel explanation of this jello universe, reprinted from a 9-23-2023 Gnostic Insights episode called “Free will, what is it? Do you have it?” : There’s a famous and long-standing conundrum in philosophy that says, how can we reconcile the concept of an all knowing God, if we subjects have free will? How is it that our actions aren’t controlled by destiny if God already knows what’s going to happen? Well, the way I answer that is that the All- knowing God Above All Gods has pre placed all possible choices in front of us. It’s like that multiverse theory in quantum mechanics. He has placed all possible choices before us, but it’s our individual free will that navigates the course between all of these choices. I’ve made the analogy that it’s like a gigantic bowl of jello. This universe of ours with all possibilities in that bowl of jello and that bowl of jello is studded with an infinite number of cherries, and in our lifetime we swim from cherry to cherry to cherry. Those cherries represent choices. I think that time is an illusion. The universe is static, but infinitely large, studded with all of these cherries. Time is our awareness of swimming from one choice using our own free will to the next choice, using our own free will. So in a real sense, the entirety of our lives is already conceived in the Fullness of God. It’s our self-awareness and free will that plod along at the speed of matter as we live our lives out as a linearity, a line of passing time. That’s my theory. At the universal level, the infinity of the Fullness of God is represented by the potential of all possible choices a person could make as their life passes from one decision to the next. The fullness of all possible futures are represented within the universe. Free will is driving our consciousness through these potentialities and leaving behind the collapsed potential of history. So it’s open in front of us, but behind us it’s collapsed because we made those choices. So the line from one cherry to the next was already drawn. But in front of us, all that infinity of choices is available to us.  (In my brother’s past life therapy, the client actually goes backward down the history trail and chooses a different cherry then turns around and goes forward from there.) Of course, where we have found ourselves in the bowl of jello determines what our possible choices are in the next choice. We can’t jump from this cherry all the way across the universe to another cherry. We are pretty well confined to the here and now of our immediate surroundings, which we have come to through our free will. But you always have the choice to repent from that line you’ve been drawing and deviate your course to go upward and onward in the direction of the glory of the God Above All Gods. And that is what we call redemption. Repentance and redemption. It’s the Christ’s job to strew those glorifying cherries all in front of us and make sure we always have a choice to choose a righteous cherry. Please leave a review on amazon.com for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. Don’t think you have to understand it all first–if that were the case, I’d never get any reviews!! It’s common to understand this gnosis in small drips and drabs. Thanks!