Gnostic Insights

Gnosis means knowing, and to be a gnostic means that you are one who knows. The gnosis we are mining here at Gnostic Insights is taken from an ancient scripture, the Tripartite Tractate, out of the Nag Hammadi codices, but even more than that, I’m deriving a lot of this information through contemplation and direct communication with the Father and the Fullness of God, and that is something that every person can do. We are all given the ability to commune directly with the Father and with the Fullness above. As a Gnostic Christian, I find that these insights give a deeper understanding of our New Testament in the Holy Bible, because much of this information was stripped out of the Holy Bible by the Nicene Council around 360 A.D. under the direction of Pope Clement and Emperor Constantine. Those of us who are not Catholics are no longer subject to the Pope, and none of us are subject to the Emperor of Rome. Therefore, it seems to me that those of us who love the Father should have the freedom of mind and the freedom of personal will to decide for ourselves which scriptures are holy, and this you must arrive at through discernment and the Holy Spirit’s leading. If you have not developed the ability of discernment, then you can easily be led astray, and there is a lot of information out there on the internet that can lead you astray. For over 10 years now I have written a blog called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.  The Simple Explanation presents a secular theory of how the universe goes together. In A Simple Explanation there are concepts such as fractals and the Simple Golden Rule that I have been explaining here as we go along, because they help to illuminate this Gnostic Gospel. Thus far, we have explained the origins of the ethereal universe, beginning with the Father of consciousness and proceeding on through the Christ. We need to understand this entire run of the gnostic cosmology in order to understand the nature of human beings because, in Simple Explanation terms, we humans are fractal representations of the entirety of creation. This is the meaning of that expression, “As above, so below.” The tree is a common symbol for this concept. So, as a tree is represented as the branches above ground, there is a reciprocal set of branches below ground, and those are called roots. The same is true with us humans and all other Second Order Powers; we share the same values and structure of the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. Their nature is the same as our nature because we are their fruits. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. My Self’s unit of consciousness is sitting on top of a fractal galaxy of hierarchically arranged units of consciousness, all working together to instantiate my body. While I may believe I am the only conscious soul inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, and each unit of consciousness has their own job to perform, each lives their own life, and they all lay down their own karmic record. And this holds true even when the fractal is no more than a cell or an organ. Within my body, countless units of consciousness of varying levels of complexity work together to keep my body alive and fully functional. Our bodies hold countless units of consciousness, all working together according to the Simple Golden Rule Whereas my Self unit of consciousness may appear a very long way off from the Father and the Pleroma, especially if I conceive of them outside of our very large universe, if instead I turn inward, I am as near to God as the center of all of my units of consciousness. This is a different way of interpreting the practices of centering. When ancient texts speak of God residing in the hearts of man, I look at that shared zero point field that is at the center of our fractal units of consciousness. Fractals are defined as fragmented geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each of which, at least approximately, is a reduced-size copy of the whole. That’s a property called self-similarity because they appear similar at all levels of magnification. Fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex. What this means is that fractal iterations can extend infinitely. The simplest way to think about it in my mind is with broccoli. And if you go to my Simple Explanation blog, December 11th, 2018, there is an article called “A Simple Explanation of Fractals, the Broccoli Fractal Video Demonstration.” In that video, which is posted on my blog and YouTube channel, I demonstrate fractals using an ordinary head of broccoli. Like a head of broccoli, a fractal is a larger thing that can be reduced repeatedly, and each of those reductions looks just like the piece you started out with, only smaller. And you can just keep splitting it off, smaller and smaller and smaller. Now, if this were a purely mathematical fractal rather than a physical one, you could go down or up through those fractal splits infinitely. Looking at the tree again as a metaphor, we can see how the branches of trees repeat their fractal branching pattern over and over again as the branches or roots proceed further out from the originating tree trunk. Fractals occur in many forms in nature I am suggesting that consciousness itself is fractal and the largest consciousness is the Father. The Father had a thought and it became the Son, and that Son was the first fractal iteration of consciousness. The Son had a thought and it became the ALL, and that is the next fractal iteration. And then the ALL became self-aware and turned into the Aeons of the Fullness of God. These Aeons of the Fullness sorted themselves into a hierarchy, giving themselves names, positions, places, powers, and duties, and we call this sorted Fullness the Hierarchy of the Fullness or the Pleroma of God. The Aeons are fractals of the Son of God, and the Son is a singular expression that completely encapsulates the Father. The Father is unknowable because the Father is pure consciousness. The Father is illimitable—without limits, not confined to a shape or a place. The Father is not walking around in robes with a long white beard. That is not the Father of the ALL. When Jesus said, “I and my Father are One; if you know Me, you know my Father,” he is not referring to the personified God known as Yaweh or Jehovah that walked through the Old Testament. That fellow’s name in Gnosticism is called the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the fallen Ego of the Aeon named Logos. It was this egoic part of Logos that overreached and fell, resulting in this material plane. It is the Demiurge who created the heavens and the earth; he is the chief Archon of the cosmos. But, he is most assuredly not the Father of the ALL, the Aeons, and the Christ. In Simple Explanation terms, the enclosure of our material universe is a very large toroidal pattern at the outside edge of creation. I have identified that with the border that is spoken of in the Tripartite Tractate.  It is said that after Logos fell, he remembered the Aeons and the Father and his “better part” quickly returned back to the Fullness. The Father drew a boundary around what was left behind of the broken Logos down below, and that boundary encloses our material universe. We humans are a particular fractal emanation of the Pleroma of the newly restored Logos; we are Second Order Powers fruited down here to work within the material boundary. Yet we are patterned directly from the consciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Pleroma. The torus is a mathematical shape. It forms the basis of our material universe, from the very large universal level down through the smallest particle. Because we are fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness, the rules and the descriptions of Aeonic life apply to humans equally as well. This is again another example of “as above, so below.” So when we hear or read about the nature of the Aeons, or the things that happen to the Aeons such as the fall and redemption of Logos, this happens to each and every one of us as well. Logos fell because he forgot his place and proper function in the Fullness. When Logos fled home to the ethereal Pleroma, Logos left behind darkness and shadows.  The deficiency he left behind arose from his Ego’s presumptuous thought and overreaching, because that’s what Logos was doing as he fell.  When Logos fell, he left the Fullness; he was no longer in perfect harmony with the other Aeons of the Fullness. Logos went out there on his own with his own project, and that was the first example of Ego. And it was the Ego that caused the fall. And because of his presumptuous thought and his overreaching, now every one of the fractals that he gave rise to down below are the shadows and phantoms of the fall. They all overreach. They are all built on Ego. Therefore, the imitation is characterized by this presumptuous thought and overreaching, combined with the inverted traits of Logos. Previously, on the Gnostic Insights podcast, we have discussed the values on the left or the material values of the imitation, and these are in direct opposition to the traits of the Fullness. They are the other side of a dialectic to the values of the Father, those values on the right, which are the spiritual emanations of the ethereal plane. Those are the dialectics of vice and virtue. Here is what I call the ledger of vice and virtue: The values of the Demiurge lead to isolation and despair. The values of the Fullness lead to peace and joy. We Second Order Powers bear the likeness of the First Order of Powers, which are the Aeons of the Fullness. We are also called “those of the remembrance,” because we were implanted with a dim memory of the Father and the Son and a longing to rejoin the Aeons in the Hierarchy and their dream of Paradise. We are considered superior to those of the imitation because we come from the noble thought rather than the presumptuous thought. We are true fractals of the entirety of the Pleroma, whereas the phantoms of the deficiency are shadows of the fractals of the broken Pleroma of the singular Logos. They are smaller and of a lesser order. They are not fractals of the Aeons, they are imitations of fractals of the Aeons. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God sits as One and dreams of Paradise. At this point in the story, we can begin to see human nature emerging because, well, this has been told as a creation story. It’s also the story of every human being. We humans are fractal iterations of the Aeons of the Fullness. We are their fruit. We have dim memories of a perfect Paradise, as dreamt by the Fullness. We have a built-in longing for Fullness. We barely remember the Son and the Father, other than an expectation of feeling loved or that we should be loved, and we are locked into an endless war with the dark side of our natures and with other people who stand in our way. Those of the imitation defend and embrace the darkness of the deficiency, while those of the remembrance do their best to overcome their darker nature and follow the light. Those of the remembrance may or may not be religious folks, but they do all seek a higher consciousness. Religious folks call this higher consciousness “God” and the memory of the Fullness “Heaven.” Those of the remembrance who are not part of a religious body or the meme bundle of religion, are still spiritual because they do seek reunification with the One, while rejecting the man-made institutions of religion. Others, who hear the still small voice of God but can’t quite bring themselves to believe in “fairy tales,” are seekers that wind up exploring podcasts like this as they search for something to believe in. At some point during everyone’s life, each person decides for themselves whether to continue trusting their own presumptuous Ego or whether to heed the call from above. At this point, I think I should explain a little better what a meme is as I use the term, so I’m going to read a couple of pages out of my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The importance of memes is that a huge part of our personality is shaped by the memes we collect and hold onto. The otherwise pristine nature of our underlying fractal unit of consciousness is affected by the memes we hold dear, as well as the memes we despise. We enjoy memes we approve of and we are repelled by memes we disapprove of. The Sanskrit word for these provocative memes is samskara. Samskara is traditionally defined in Yogic philosophy as the habitual thought patterns collected by the Ego that interfere with soul consciousness. The memes each of us cling to, both those that we like and those that we actively dislike, influence our ability to exercise free will in the here and now when we unthinkingly lock onto a meme or set of memes. It is our belief in those memes that determines how we interpret and respond to our surroundings. Our response may or may not be the best response to a given situation, but it is the only response allowed for by our particular bundle. In other words, our meme bundles function as incoming and outgoing filters. The memes we cling to drape over the outside of our Self, obscuring the thoughts we are able to perceive. We like people who share the same memes as we do. The more memes people have in common, the more they agree with each other and the more they like and respect the other person. Friends have a lot of memes in common. Co-religionists share the same religious meme cords. Tribal brothers and sisters share tribal memes, Democrats share liberal memes, Republicans share conservative memes, and Progressives share socialist memes. All subcultures share their subculture’s memes. Some types of memes are more important than other types, and it’s the important memes that matter the most. If we agree on the meaning of the word justice, we can probably overlook disagreement over the meme of whether the toilet paper should go over or under the roll. We each carry our own bundle of memes. These are the things we believe in, both for good or ill and, depending on what we believe in, this limits our ability to think and arrive at gnosis. So, if your meme bundle contains many values on the left—materialistic values like live fast and die young and leave a beautiful corpse–that’s a meme bundle from the deficiency that encourages fast and reckless living and leads to misery. Contrast this with living a life that is on the Aeonic, virtuous side that embraces the memes of the Fullness of God. These virtues and these vices are each important spiritual memes. When we speak of the never-ending war within our personalities and against the imitations of the deficiency, these are wars embracing the values of the Fullness as opposed to the values of popular culture. Our meme bundles form a shroud that surrounds our Self. The memes continually influence what we perceive and how we behave. Our behavior forms its own record that continues to influence our meme shroud. This is karma. We cannot fake the meme bundles we hold because they affect our lives and every choice we make. Pretending may fool others but it does not fool the Father. Our hearts need to be in authentic alignment with the Father and the Fullness in order for the love and gnosis of the Father to flow through us, and that’s why true repentance is necessary. We need to embrace the values of virtue—the meme bundle that flows from the Fullness of God. Embracing the meme bundle of popular culture gets us into trouble and holds us away from instantiating our true Self. Fortunately, the Christ imbues us with more power than the deficiency can wield against us, and it gives us the ability to overcome the imitation’s memes. So goes the never-ending war. Repentance involves pushing away the deficiency’s memes. Repentance means you no longer try to get away with whatever you can get away with. Repentance means I don’t want to do that anymore. Redemption means dwelling on the right side of the virtue and vice ledger and, again, this isn’t to take away our fun. It’s because joy is only found on the virtuous side of the ledger. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. Therefore, in order to be truly happy, joyful, we shed the Demiurgic memes. This turning gives the Spirit of the Christ permission to redeem us. Then we are able to embrace the Father and the Fullness. The gnostic call for redemption goes like this: because the Second Order  Powers have gotten all gummed up chasing after the archons and each other in endless war, another fruit was required to bring peace to this universe. The Fullness and Logos prayed to the Father, individually and collectively, for a champion to end the war, and this champion is called the Christ. Here’s how the Tripartite Tractate puts it: “The Aeons not only produced a singular fruit reflecting the Father, but that fruit also reflected their own individual countenances and aspects from their positions in the Hierarchy of the Fullness. In this manner, they went forth in a form that consisted of many forms, so that the one whom they were going to help should see those to whom he had prayed for help, as well as the one who brought it to him.” In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is the correcting algorithm for Second Order fractals that no longer ring true. The Christ replicates all of the qualities of the ALL, that is, the full attributes of the originating consciousness in their pure form that existed prior to the Fall, with all of the confounding memes stripped away. We recognize the Christ when we encounter it, because it “went forth in many forms” that look just like us, so that, when we pray for help, we recognize the One to whom we pray. When we accept the gift of the Christ, we invite a correction to our Ego’s deluded meme bundle, so that the best functioning of the universal unit of consciousness may be re-established within us. The Christ also provides a homing beacon to the Son via a rooted love connection that flows into us from the ethereal plane. Simply put, gnosis is the realization that we come from above and that our Father is in Heaven and to Heaven we shall return. That’s all. Gnosis requires us to step down from the throne of Ego and the meme shroud of the imitation that we cling to and are trapped in to better reveal the light of God that shines from within. That’s all. You cannot be taught gnosis. You must discover it for yourself. What we’re doing here at Gnostic Insights is opening your mind so that you remember the gnosis that already lies within your One Self. You do not need to memorize this gnostic cosmology or the names of various characters we discuss here. You don’t need to punish yourself with sacrificial acts to achieve righteousness. You need only to remember and acknowledge the inherent, immortal consciousness that flows from the Father. The ancient Chinese book called the Tao Te Ching describes it this way in verse 27: The Sage is always on the side of virtue             So everyone around him prospers He is always on the side of truth             So everything around him is fulfilled The path of the Sage is called             “The Path of Illumination” He who gives himself to this path             Is like a block of wood             That gives itself to the chisel— Cut by cut it is honed to perfection Only a student who gives himself             Can receive the master’s gift If you think otherwise,             Despite your knowledge, you have blundered Giving and receiving are one             This is called             “The great wonder”             “The essential mystery”             “The very heart of all that is true”                                                 [Jonathan Star translation; 2001] Here at the Gnostic Insights Podcast, I am not attempting to teach you gnosis, I am merely sharing the gnosis that I have discovered within myself. You have this gnosis within yourself, and if you resonate to what I am saying, this is merely you remembering gnosis. You have the entirety of the Fullness of God already within your Self, along with a remembrance of who you are and where you come from. Embrace virtue.    Onward and upward. I’ll see you next time, God bless. The ebook giveaway last week was a big success. The book is now in many more people’s hands. Don’t forget to leave a review! If you appreciate these gnostic insights, please consider donating to the cause of bringing gnosis to our neighbors. Your donation is much appreciated. Thanks! 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

We’re talking this week about what I call units of consciousness. Consciousness is a big topic. Let’s start by thinking of our own consciousness. In Gnosticism we say that there are three different orientations to self-awareness. This is generally called three types of people: the spiritual, the psychological (called psychical), and the material type that is oriented toward their body’s level of awareness (called hylic). Most people’s self-awareness arises from their psychological level of functioning—their ego. Spiritual types add the voice of the spiritual level to their self-awareness. Here at Gnostic Insights we call this spiritual aspect their Self (with a capital S). The physical or material type of person focuses on their body and its needs and abilities. When their body performs well, or their body’s needs are satiated, their ego is pleased. They may or may not ever dip a toe into the spiritual level of self-awareness until they inevitably face the afterlife. Now the interesting thing about what I call units of consciousness is that every living thing in our universe carries a piece of the originating consciousness of the Father. The term unit of consciousness applies equally well to any size creature, from the smallest bacteria or cell on up through the largest of the Second Order Powers. On the other hand you have the mud—that being the smallest subatomic particles, protons and whatnot, on up through the atoms, molecules, and elements—which are unconscious and operated by the Demiurge. That mud level of nonliving material arises from the deficient pleroma of the Demiurge. The egoic consciousness of the Demiurge is disconnected from its higher Self—the Aeon Logos—and so it has forgotten the love and memory of the Father and the ethereal plane because those spiritual aspects are part of the One Self and not the ego. After the fall of Logos, the Demiurge was aware of only the egoic portion of Logos and the shadows of the Pleroma of Logos that became the hylic material of this fallen cosmos. We 2nd Order Powers are melded to the demiurgic material below us and are infused with life from above Every nonliving thing in our universe belongs to the demiurgic consciousness, whereas every living thing is a true, self-aware unit of consciousness that flows unimpeded through the Son, through the Fullness, and on into all living creatures as the Self. When I first came up with this idea of units of consciousness in A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I thought that if every manifest object in our universe is a piece of the mind of the Father then it has to be a piece of consciousness, yet there was always a schism between the living and the non-living creation. But with the hindsight of Gnostic realization I now see that the nonliving “mud” is without consciousness and is ruled by the strong bonds of the Demiurge, whereas the living “meat” of our universe embodies the top-down consciousness of the originating Source—the Father. The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will. The Father’s source consciousness is illimitable, undifferentiated consciousness without particular thought. Once the Father had a thought, that is referred to as the Son, S-O-N. The Son contains all of the Father’s qualities, like a bucket dipped into the sea of consciousness. And the Son is an encapsulation of the Father, with all of the traits of the Father, except now in a particular place, so to speak—a unit of consciousness. The Son is what is called a monad with a unique and particular point of view. So the Son is the first unit of consciousness. And then, according to our Gnostic studies, the Son immediately differentiated into the ALL and the Fullness of God, which is all of the traits of the Son of God broken down into their individual variables. And since the Son of God is an infinite, omnipotent force of thought, there are an infinite number of Fullnesses. And these Fullnesses (or Totalities as they’re called in some translations) come to Self awareness through giving glory to the Father. When they become Self-aware, they sort themselves into a hierarchy called the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God. At that point they come to be referred to as Aeons, A-E-O-N-S, the Aeons of the Fullness. And they sit together in a perfect unit called the Pleroma or the Fullness of God. They stay together. And all together, they are the body or pleroma of the Son. The Son wears them like a garment and they wear the Son like a garment, which means they are coexistent. Father ground state; Son first monad of consciousness; the All; the All becomes self aware and sorts itself into a hierarchy; the Hierarchy of the Fullness dreams of Paradise I have suggested that each of these Fullnesses is itself a fractal of the Son, although each of the Fullnesses has a particular duty, a particular place, position, name, and function in the Fullness of God. In the same way that you can look around our world and see that the wind blows—the function of the wind is the force of movement; or a tree stands in the soil and grows in its particular place. As a monad, we each have a particular place, a particular point of view from where we stand. All of these different individualities are fractals of the Son of God—fractals of consciousness. But we only manifest what we are here to do. We manifest our position, place, and function in the overall scheme. Each unit of consciousness is a fractal of the mind of God. And when I mention God’s mind, this is not the Father, the God Above All Gods. This generally refers to the Son of God, because the Son of God is a thought form—it is the Universal Unit of Consciousness that conceives of our universe. The Son is the basic knowledge of all aspects of our cosmos. Whereas the God Above All Gods, the Father, is a background matrix of consciousness without thought—the pure stillness of mind. So while the Son of God is formally referred to as the Son, in most common parlance the Son of God is also referred to as the Father, because it is the Father of the Fullness and our universe. And the Fullness of God, or the Pleroma of the Hierarchy of the Fullness, is the parental unit of all of the Second Order of Powers by way of the Aeon Logos. The Fullness is the First Order of Powers; all of us around here are the Second Order of Powers. The nonliving material of the Demiurge is an imitation of the Pleroma of Logos. The atoms and archons are not Powers—they are imitations—likenesses of the Pleroma of Logos. Each unit of consciousness is capable of using the organizing principles that inform and sustain its existence in our universe. So every unit of consciousness has a job, a position, a place, a point of view, and it is perfectly capable of utilizing them. It is fully capable of doing the job put to the material that that unit of consciousness governs. Second Order units of consciousness operate according to the aeonic mechanism I call the Simple Golden Rule. The Simple Golden Rule states that units of consciousness reach out to others and “hold hands” to share information, assistance, and love in order to work together on projects that they can’t accomplish on their own. Unlike the inert material directed by the will of the Demiurge, Second Order Powers come fully loaded with free will, and each unit of consciousness makes decisions affecting the material it governs. A photon makes no decisions—it is the Demiurge that decides whether to go left or right according to various optical and physical laws of the universe and its relationships with other photons. It has no free will but it fulfills the duties assigned by the Demiurge. A Second Order cell’s unit of consciousness, on the other hand, decides which materials to gather from its environment to sustain itself and reaches out to other cells like itself according to the Simple Golden Rule to hold hands and build organs. Units of consciousness never evolve, because each unit of consciousness is already a perfect fractal of the Fullness of God, one that emerged directly from the Pleroma above, by way of Logos after his return. As the material to which the Second Order Powers are melded becomes more complex, with more complex and massive attachments, the unit of consciousness that has chosen to govern that aggregation of material focuses its attention to that level of decision-making. Units of consciousness are social, and they are additive in number. They tend to work together in harmony with others like themselves, and that is because, using the Gnostic Gospel terminology, every unit of consciousness is one of the Second Order of Powers that was sent down from the Fullness to bring order and harmony and cooperation to the fallen Logos. And the reason that units of consciousness work together in harmony with others like themselves is because they are instantiating the basic principle of the Fullness of God, which is that Simple Golden Rule of reaching out, holding hands, supplying information, assistance, and love in order to build something greater and level up to the next level. And that begins to level up from the bottom on upward because it was decided, according to the Tripartite Tractate, that every Second Order Power would come one by one from the smallest to the largest. All units of consciousness of the same level of complexity are linked laterally to one another in common purpose. And that’s where I say that they are metaphorically holding hands. At the smaller levels, our cells hold hands and work together to build our organs. And our organs hold hands and work together to build organisms. These are lateral aggregations of like units of consciousness. We hold hands with other humans or with other large mammals like cattle or dogs and cats and so forth. We hold hands in order to have a society, in order to build the next level up at this large mammal level. ALL units of consciousness aggregate, that is gather, hierarchically under more complex units of consciousness. So what this means is that when units of consciousness reach out and hold hands, according to the Golden Rule, they level up. The higher, the fewer. A hierarchy is shaped like a pyramid. Because when you get a bunch of units of consciousness together and they all hold hands and they’re concentrating on one project, the thing they make, the thing that comes out of the middle of them holding hands, is just one thing, whereas there were many of them holding hands. The degree to which any unit of consciousness comprehends the universe depends upon how complex its aggregate of units of consciousness are. Think of a family—it is one family but there are several members. Think of an organ—there is one skin organ, for example, but there are 1.6 trillion skin cells. The skin cells reach out and hold hands to make that one skin organ—the higher the fewer. In other words, every unit of consciousness fully comprehends the entirety of the universe but is only aware of its immediate neighborhood. The more units of consciousness downline that make up this one entity, and I tend to think of these things as pyramids, just like the Hierarchy of the Fullness is a pyramid. If I think of my body, rather than looking like this human walking around with two arms and two legs, I tend to think of myself as a pyramid with my governing unit of consciousness sitting right here on the top of my head. That’s my governing unit of consciousness, and it is the Raja sitting on this elephant of this giant pyramid of over 10 trillion smaller units of consciousness that all reside within the confines of my skin. We are a very large and complex aggregation of units of consciousness. And every human is, every dog is, every cow is, every bird is, every leaf of grass, everything is an aggregation of units of consciousness that have leveled up, always holding hands, leveling up, leveling up, leveling up, until you ultimately wind up here at this governing unit of consciousness sitting on the top of the stack. Of course, this follows the Fullness of God model, with the Father at the top. And so the degree to which any unit of consciousness, let’s say my governing unit of consciousness, the degree to which I comprehend the universe, is dependent upon all of these subunits of consciousness inside of me. We all add up together, and we all have our perception of this universe. And that contributes to my governing unit’s perception of the universe. Distribution of these units of consciousness is hierarchical. The more complex the material to which a unit of consciousness is attached, the fewer instances of it exist. Life forms consist of the aggregated units of consciousness attached to the material forming their bodies, plus the unit of consciousness of self-awareness. The more complex the organism, the more units of consciousness it possesses. Each functional organ system within the organism possesses its own unit of consciousness that governs that organ. So inside of my body, the next largest units of consciousness are my organ systems. My heart has its own unit of consciousness. My stomach has its own unit of consciousness. And we all know that our sex organs have their own units of consciousness, right? So all of these organ systems in your body have their own units of consciousness. They are in charge of their duties. They do the job of keeping the organism alive in the particular way that they work. The heart beats, and it coordinates the blood, it does all the things that the heart does. It’s alive, and it’s its own unit of consciousness. These organ systems have their communications among them, and they can talk to each other. They can powwow. In my own mind, that’s what I think they do. Now, it probably doesn’t sound like you and me talking together, but certainly there are electrical impulses that they send and read one to the other and chemical exchanges. You know, I mentioned how I think of my body as a pyramidal shape. I refer to it as meat mountain. So you’re in on that now. You could think of your body as a meat mountain, and it’s hierarchical shaped because it’s a mountain. And all the parts of meat mountain talk to each other. Usually one level of the hierarchy can communicate with itself at that level, and maybe it has a sense of the level above, maybe it has a sense of the level below. But for example, my governing Self unit of consciousness, I have a strong connection with my body’s organ systems. I know when something wants something, right? I know when I’m hungry. I know when I’m happy or sad. I know what my sex organs want to do, or I know if my skin itches or if it’s dry or whatever it is. But I can’t jump down a couple of levels to the cellular level. We all that capability. Some people demonstrate that awareness, but I don’t. From my governing unit of consciousness, I am not aware of what goes on underneath the organ level. I do not ride along with the blood or with the small cells. I am not aware of that. I’m only aware of the level above and the level below my governing unit of consciousness. The level above my unit of consciousness is easy. That’s my social level. So, what do I hold hands with to level up to? Generally, it’s society. It’s family. It’s neighbors. It’s work. These are different projects in which my unit of consciousness is engaged with others, and I’m aware of those. To skip above that level of consciousness to the next higher level is more speculative. The Son’s mind is the most complex unit of consciousness of all, consisting of all potential as well as all actual units of consciousness in our universe, plus its own omniscient consciousness. The more complex the unit of consciousness, the more sophisticated its decision-making abilities. A particular cell will take care of its own cellular requirements by taking in nutrients from  its surroundings and by reaching out to others of its kind according to the Simple Golden Rule. It will not drive to Burger King and order a hamburger. Every unit of consciousness has its own decision-making sphere of influence, and it makes the decisions that are relevant to its sphere of influence. So the more complex the unit of consciousness, the more sophisticated its decision-making abilities. Animals are extremely sophisticated complexes of units of consciousness, comprised of the trillions of units of consciousness making up an animal—a human, a dog, a cow—and they have a lot more decision-making abilities. And again, decision-making capabilities is another word for free will. Most units of consciousness perform their work as expected. They do their part. They work according to plan, and that’s a really good thing because that’s what holds everything together. The material controlled by the consciousness of the Demiurge is foundational. If the Demiurge did not control the material, the material universe would not hold together and it would completely and very rapidly fall apart. On the other hand, Second Order Powers, who are fractals of the Aeons above, have complete free will to either fulfill or contradict their responsibilities. Most units of consciousness do their job according to the job they were given to do and, overall, things work according to plan. There is enough redundancy in the system so that when the odd unit of consciousness decides to go rogue, things still hold together.   And of course, this is essentially what happened with the Fullness of God. The Fullness sits there in perfect agreement, in a union of one accord, and the Aeons cooperate according to the Simple Golden Rule. But one of those units of consciousness, one of those Aeons, that being Logos, decided to go rogue and reach for the Father on its own, and it did not work out. Logos fell. But the rest of the Pleroma stayed in agreement. As it says in the Tripartite Tractate: The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and he did so being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows and copies and likenesses.  (verse 77). And speaking of the Fall, when Logos fell, it turned into its inverse. It is the shadow of Logos down here. And so the cooperation that is so apparent in the Pleroma is not evident in the body of the fallen Logos without the imposition of strict laws and control. Rather than turning out a universe of fractals of the Father, Logos turned out a universe of shadows, copies, and likenesses. And that’s why I suggest that the fallen Logos is the origination of the quantum foam level of instantiation. And what characterizes quantum foam is chaos, randomness, and an inability to work together to level up. Quantum foam just keeps bubbling. It just keeps popping in and out of existence. It just keeps bumping into its neighbors. It’s nothing but chaos. This artist’s illustration depicts how the foamy structure of space-time may appear, showing tiny bubbles quadrillions of times smaller than the nucleus of an atom that are constantly fluctuating and last for only infinitesimal fractions of a second. Here is its description from the Tripartite Tractate: The Logos was a cause of those who came into being and he continued all the more to be at a loss and he was astonished. Instead of perfection, he saw a defect; instead of unification, he saw division; instead of stability, he saw disturbances; instead of rests, tumults. Neither was it possible for him to make them cease from loving disturbance, nor was it possible for him to destroy it. He was completely powerless, once his totality and his exaltation abandoned him (verse 80). The Logos, being in such unstable conditions, did not continue to bring forth anything like emanations, the things which are in the pleroma, the glories which exist for the honor of the Father. Rather, he brought forth little weaklings, hindered by the illnesses by which he too was hindered. It was the likeness of the disposition which was a unity, that which was the cause of the things which do not themselves exist from the first (verses 80, 81). Logos repented from his egoic overreach and his spiritual Self returned back to his brethren Aeons in the Fullness, abandoning the shadows of his pleroma and his ego down below. And so we have the non-cooperative, unconsciousness of the quantum foam being organized and governed by the ego of Logos—the Demiurge. The Demiurge knows the patterns of the Fullness, such as the Simple Golden Rule, but he is disconnected from the enlivening forces of the Aeons above and he is unable to imbue his creation with life. Second Order Powers don’t have to reach any level of sophistication to be a governing unit of consciousness. All governing units of consciousness are psychological ego combined with spiritual Self. From our cells on upward, every unit of consciousness governs the material they are attached to. Our cells govern themselves at the cellular level. The organs’ units of consciousness govern the organs. Our body’s governing unit of consciousness governs our body’s existence in this material world by attaching to the hylic material of which we are made. The governing unit of consciousness isn’t always paying attention to the body or even doing its job of conscious decision-making. My governing unit of consciousness may be preoccupied with thoughts or songs or emotions, and so my Self isn’t making many here-and-now decisions, but leaving those decisions to the body’s aggregate units of consciousness. Activities like driving a car, having sex, eating, taking a bath, can all be carried out by the body’s organ-level units of consciousness without my governing supervision or awareness. And I suspect that a lot of the time that goes on. Yesterday, by the way, I was watching a video where the speaker claims that most people we encounter are non-playing characters or NPCs in a cosmic simulation. He talked about their dead eyes, lack of introspection, and whole-hearted assimilation of identical ideas implanted through propaganda such as mainstream media. Some Gnostics think the NPCs are the hylic category of people referred to in some Gnostic scriptures and so will evaporate at the end of time along with material existence, never going onward and upward. I must admit it is an engaging idea. I’ve discussed this possibility with my brother, Bill, on several occasions. Bill says no way. He reminds me that all life forms are Second Order Powers. If it’s alive, it comes from above and will return to its home above. Bill says that these people have only forgotten to a greater extent our ethereal origins and so are existing solely at the level of the ego and body. I chuckle because the hylics irritate me so much that I’d just as soon write them off as NPCs. But that’s not very nice of me and I doubt that’s what Jesus would do. As complex systems die and disintegrate, their aggregated units of consciousness are released from the responsibility of supporting that particular life or material instantiation. So when a creature dies, the governing Self unit of consciousness is immediately released and after that, the organ systems. Each unit of consciousness leaves independently, at their own speed, to return to an ethereal existence. As the cells begin to die individually, each one releases its unit of consciousness, and each of these units of consciousness is released into what is called the Akashic Record. It’s the in-between place. A way to think of it is the place where souls go between incarnations or before moving on to their eternal home. It’s only the meat units of consciousness that pass on to the ethereal plane after so-called death. The molecular and elemental units stay down here in the realm of the Demiurge. Atoms don’t die; molecules don’t die because they were never alive in the first place. They simply revert back to their previous unconnected state, so they’re no longer part of this meat mountain. They have been let go. But when part of the meat dies, those hierarchical units of consciousness find themselves untethered from the material world, yet they are still fractals of God, and they are still holding the information or the karma and the memes of their lifetimes unless they were previously detached. We don’t lose our identity or Self awareness. We hold onto our non-detached memes—our beliefs and our learning—and we hold on to the record of what we have done—our karma, and this is what is typically called the soul. These are the parts then that reincarnate into the next aggregation of meat that is ready to attach to the next level up governing unit of consciousness. You bring in your karma. You bring your memes into your next lifetime. Or, you may be able, with the assistance of the Third Order of Powers of the Christ, to “stick the landing” in the ethereal plane and not return to the material cosmos. We find out when we get there. Thank you so much for joining me on this podcast episode. I encourage you to subscribe if you have not yet subscribed. That way you will receive a notice in your email box whenever a new episode is posted. Onward and upward and God bless us all. Please leave a review for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel and The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated at amazon.com. You don’t even have to buy the paperback–just download a copy of the Kindle audiobook for free or practically free. Thank you! Please donate if you can. Thank you for helping to keep these Gnostic Insights going! You are among the very special few who realize the importance of this message. 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

Last week I was interviewed for the Belcultassi podcast out of England. It was an interesting and interactive interview of gnostic insights combined with Mr. Belcultassi’s focus on Gurdjieff. I’d call this an intermediate level gnostic interview… The interview was prerecorded and aired on 2/27/25. I sat through the entire run of the show and made additional comments in the chat bar. Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/i0f-XBReeU8 Dreams–Parables of the Night Today’s episode is a replay of an episode first posted July 9, 2021. In those early days of the podcast, there were no accompanying transcripts. So here is your first chance to read the transcript of this episode. This episode is about dreams. What are they and how can you go about keeping track of and interpreting your own dreams? I was first trained in dream interpretation back when I was working on my master’s degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and this was a gestalt type of dream interpretation, as popularized by Fritz Perls. Later on I spent a number of years teaching myself Jungian dream interpretation. Then when I was working on my master’s degree at Azusa Pacific University, which is a Christian university, I studied dream work through the lens of the Bible and also incorporated Jungian dream interpretation into that practice, and dream work became one of my major modalities when working with counseling clients. And then later on again, when I was working on my PhD, I studied the hermeneutics and rhetoric of dreams, because my PhD is in rhetoric, and hermeneutics is the flip side of the coin of rhetoric. Rhetoric is the ability to persuade others of your point of view, and hermeneutics is the ability to decipher points of view. So, I’ve written a number of articles over the years about dream interpretation. If any of you would like dreams to be interpreted, you may go to my GnosticInsights.com website and send me a message using the comment form, and we can talk it over. So by now, having listened to episodes of Gnostic Insights, you understand what a meme is in the sense that we use it here on Gnostic Insights. A meme is a basic unit of information. It’s not just the cute posters that people make on the internet. And I suggest that our personalities are largely defined by the memes that we hold on to, and it’s these memes and our reactions to them that contribute to our behaviors and to our karma. These memes constitute what could be called vibratory patterns that are held in the transpersonal field, or sometimes known as the Akashic Record or the quantum vacuum. This is a shared memory field accessed by all of us here on Earth. These memes aren’t personal within our brains, but they live in this shared transpersonal space. So, apparently, personal memes are actually harmonics of the collective memes that we all share in common with everyone who actually holds on to that meme. The particular shadings of your memes differ slightly from the next person’s as to be expected among fractal replications of a single phenomenon, but all who hold the same meme recognize its pattern and are affected by it. So, for example, the meme of cup. If I say cup, you have a vision of a cup that immediately comes into your mind, and I have a vision of a cup that immediately comes into my mind. Mine might be a large coffee mug with pictures of kitty cats on it. Yours might be a dainty little cup made of porcelain with beautiful flowers or any other sort of cup. But it’s the idea of cupness. The cup is what holds the liquid, and it has a handle. That’s what a cup is. So it’s the same cup meme. Plato called these the forms. It’s the same meme, but we each have a slightly different shading on our cup meme, and that holds true for all of the memes we share in common in the transpersonal field. These meme patterns are stimulated by the thoughts, encounters, and emotional reactions we experience during the day. And at night, these come down to our dreams. Dreams are basically nothing but the nighttime resonances of the memetic patterns that we encounter during the day. They are then transformed into symbolic imagery and enacted while you sleep at night on the stage of your mind. Meme bundles stirred up by the day may be dealt with again and again until the emotional reactions associated with them are resolved. If not resolved, then these memes will continue to appear in dream after dream, disguised in one form after another. And, of course, they will come out during the day as triggers. While we are sleeping, we are open to the leading of the Father and the Fullness of God, because our egos are asleep, and so we can align with our true Self and with the Father more easily. Our ego in sleep relinquishes the control it exerts over our waking lives, and when our hearts are quieted in the hush of sleep, our governing unit of consciousness, our Self, is better able to commune with the Father and the Pleroma. I’m going to share with you now an article I wrote on the Simple Explanation blog on December 25th of 2014, called Dreams, Parables of the Night, and if you would like to reread this section, you can go to asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com and read it. In that blog post, I quote from an article that I wrote in 1990 that was published in a couple of Catholic magazines, and so this one is couched in the religious terminology of Christianity and Catholicism. It begins by quoting from Genesis 40:6-8. When Joseph came to them the next morning, he noticed that they looked disturbed, so he asked Pharaoh’s courtiers, why do you look so sad today? They answered him, we have had dreams, but there is no one to interpret them for us. Joseph said to them, surely interpretations come from God. Please tell your dreams to me. The Bible uses many examples of dreams and their interpretations. Perhaps it’s time for all of us to take another walk down this forgotten avenue of discerning God’s will. In the book of Genesis, God’s will was often revealed through dreams and visions. It was through Jacob’s dream of the ladder at Bethel that God revealed himself to his chosen people and established his lasting covenant. A few chapters later, Jacob’s son Joseph was released from prison and raised to a position of authority in the government of Egypt by his inspirational ability to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams. In fact, from the patriarch Abraham through the prophet Daniel, dreams and visions were used by God to lead and direct his people. Early church fathers also taught that dreams conveyed spiritual messages. Saint Clement wrote that in sleep the soul, freed from sense impressions, can reflect truly on its relationship with God. Emperor Constantine credited his spiritual conversion to a dream. Saint John Chrysostom taught that God reveals himself to his people through dreams. And Saint Augustine, whose own conversion was foretold in his mother’s dreams, believed that dreams revealed both the inner workings of the believer’s mind and his or her relationship with God. Now, by the way, having made the conversion to Gnostic Christianity, these church fathers are more suspect to me than they were when I wrote this article in 1990. At least it’s good to see that the church fathers had a streak of mysticism in them and recognized the importance of dreams. Back to the article. Dreams, more than any other thing, entice us toward hope, wrote Bishop Synesius of Cyrene in the 5th century. And when our heart spontaneously presents hope to us, as happens in our sleeping state, then we have in the promise of our dreams a pledge from divinity. Despite such divine authority, dream work became reclassified almost exclusively with witchcraft between the 4th and 5th centuries, which are pretty much the centuries that cut Gnosticism completely out of Orthodox Christianity. At that time, Saint Jerome mistranslated the passage, “You shall not practice augury nor observe dreams,” in the Latin Vulgate. Modern translations have corrected this error, leaving us free to examine our dreams in good conscience for their revelation of God’s purpose in our lives. The New Testament records that Jesus spoke only in parables to all but his closest disciples. In the Gospels, Jesus explains that he speaks in parables so that only those whose hearts are open may understand his message and be healed. He said to them, Is a lamp brought in to be placed under a bushel basket or under a bed and not to be placed on a lampstand? For there is nothing hidden except to be made visible. Nothing is secret except to come to light. Anyone who has ears to hear ought to hear. And that’s from Mark 4, 21-23. Dreams too are clothed in the familiar language of parables. Parables and dreams both offer profoundly important insights in the form of simple stories. By learning to regard our dreams as our own personal parables, we may learn from them lessons vital to our education and growth. A dream needn’t have a particularly religious theme in order to be spiritual. Any experience that helps us grow toward personal maturity and wisdom is a step toward wholeness and holiness. While many dreams do reflect specifically on our relationship with God, most dramatize our relationships with family and friends and the important issues we struggle with daily. Research proves that we dream for about two hours every night. The first dream occurs about 90 minutes after retiring and lasts only 5 to 10 minutes. As the night deepens, our dreams become longer and more detailed, with the final dream of early morning lasting about 40 minutes. This is the final dream that we remember upon awakening. Many people mistakenly believe that they do not dream because they don’t remember their dreams. This misconception often stems from their fear of frightening dreams. Learning to understand and come to terms with dreams rather than ignoring them is a far better way of mastering our fears. If we begin our dream work with God’s help, we will no longer feel powerless before them. Another common reason for not remembering dreams is our unwillingness to listen to the message. Dreams can be painful but truthful vehicles of correction. Situations or personal qualities we prefer to overlook in the daylight are often exposed in our dreams. Like parables, dreams present truths whose enigmatic lessons can only be discovered by those with an ear to hear. Untangling the messages of these parables of the night involves learning the symbolic language of dreams and recognizing the parallels between your dreams and your waking life. The first step in remembering your dreams is deciding that you want to remember them. Setting out a notebook and pen by your bed is a good idea for two reasons. First, the notebook is a physical reminder and commitment that you intend to remember your dreams. Second, dreams must be recalled and recorded immediately upon awakening or they will be forgotten. In addition to the images of the dream, it is a good idea to record the feelings and emotions you experienced in the dream and felt upon awakening. The next challenge is to translate the language of the parable into a message you can understand. This is accomplished by looking at each element of the dream—people, places, objects, actions, emotions—and meditating upon what each suggests to you. Write these associations down no matter how trivial or unrelated they may seem. Once this is done, you can step back from the dream and see what message emerges. So here’s a case study from one of my clients that illustrates the process of dream interpretation and its importance. Megan wrote, I dreamed I was standing at the kitchen counter making breakfast for my family. I was making berry, a drink in the blender, adding more and more ingredients until the contents of the blender erupted like a volcano and spewed out a horrible green mess all over the kitchen. There was a policeman standing in the kitchen with his arms folded, judging me. I felt very guilty about the mess and didn’t know how I could ever clean it up. Megan, a full-time homemaker, had been married to Charles for two and a half years at the time of this dream. Charles’s 15-year-old son, Barry, lives with them. Charles, an accountant, is a good provider, but quiet and undemonstrative. He expects Megan to provide a stable home and disapproves of displays of emotion. Megan’s first step in understanding her dream was to record the dream as soon as she awakened. She also recorded the emotions that the dream stirred up in her: helplessness, embarrassment, and guilt. Next, Megan drew a line down the middle of a page. On the left side of the page, she listed each element of the dream. Across from each element, she wrote down whatever association the element brought to mind. So, on the left side, it says dream image, and the right side says reminds me of. And here’s what she wrote. Dream image, the kitchen counter reminds me of my workplace. Making breakfast reminds me of providing nourishment. My family reminds me of means everything to me. Barry’s blender drink, blended family mixed up. Too many ingredients reminds me couldn’t stop in time. Erupting volcano reminds me powerful, out of control, Barry. Horrible green mess reminds me of sickly. Policeman reminds me of enforcing order, Charles. Arms folded, reminds me of unfriendly, distant. My own guilt reminds me of it’s all my fault. Reading her dream now from the right side of the column, Megan saw the family member roles clearly illustrated for the first time. She saw herself as trying to be a nurturing mother to her new blended family. Barry as a pent-up potentially disruptive force, and Charles as an unsympathetic lawmaker. She also recognized that there was some kind of sickness present, threatening to overwhelm their home. Megan’s dream presents the family dynamics in the form of a visual parable. She and Barry maintain an uneasy truce whenever Charles is home, but she fears the lid will soon come off. Like throwing too many ingredients into a blender, Megan fears that saying one word too many will cause a catastrophic emotional eruption. She says, The more I thought about this dream, the more I realized why I feel so uncomfortable around Barry. He’s been so sullen and moody lately that the least little thing might set him off, and I’m really afraid of that happening. I’d like to be able to talk with Charles about this, but he doesn’t approve of such petty talk. While Megan and Charles both desperately strive to maintain a peaceful home life, the peace lies only on the surface and does not penetrate into their hearts. Lack of acknowledgment of unpleasant emotions cannot bring about true solutions. It can only contribute to an unstable buildup of tension. Of course, not all dreams present such clear-cut messages as Megan’s dream. Some housekeeping dreams merely deal with the leftover activities and emotions of the day without carrying particularly important lessons. The dreamer can usually feel the difference between dream parables and housekeeping dreams by the sense of urgency and importance a dream parable conveys. Even embarrassing or shameful dreams are fit subjects for recollection and prayer. The danger in these dreams comes not through remembrance of the dream itself, but by ignoring the dream and denying acknowledgement of our true human condition. When King Nebuchadnezzar dreamed the frightening dream of the tree that foretold his insanity and the loss of his kingdom, Daniel understood that God was issuing a warning to the king. The dream’s message indicated that the king needed to acknowledge God and not himself as the supreme ruler of his kingdom. Daniel encouraged the king to heed the message of the dream in order to avert the impending tragedy. Therefore, O king, take my advice. Atone for your sins by good deeds and for your misdeeds by kindness to the poor. Then your prosperity will be long. (Daniel 4:24). Nebuchadnezzar chose instead to ignore God’s warning and so continued on the path leading to his illness. Matthew recorded a dream in the very first chapter of his gospel. It seems there was a man betrothed to a young virgin who learned the disturbing news that his beloved was with child. Not wanting to shame her publicly, he considered sending her secretly away. An angel appeared to him in a dream and told him not to fear marrying her. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. (Matthew 1:20). Joseph heeded the message of his dream and took Mary to be his wife. What lessons might God be holding for all of us in our dreams? We will never know unless we listen. If you are interested in having me interpret any dreams for you, please contact me through the comments form and we can discuss the matter. You find the comments, once again, at Gnostic Insights dot com. And if you’re finding these episodes of Gnostic Insights to be helpful in your spiritual growth, I ask you to please send a donation and it will help me to keep this Gnostic Insights program on the air. Thank you very much for spending this time. I hope it has been useful to you. Onward and upward, and God bless. Send a dream interpretation request to Dr. Ropp using this Contact Form Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Comment or Message *Submit Please donate to support Gnostic Insights using this Stripe form or the PayPal button below the Stripe form. 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 Gnostic Insights Support15.00 Donate with Stripe

Last week we talked about the Holy Spirit, what or who it is, and how and why it came to Earth. To review: In Gnostic teaching, there are three kinds of Power that we know of: The First Order of Powers were the original Aeons—that is, the differentiations that are within the Son of God and that coexist with the Son. It’s called the First Order of Powers because the Son is the first and only direct emanation of the originating Source of consciousness and power. The Pleroma of the First Order of Powers is the infinite number of variables of all possibilities known to the God Above All Gods. The Second Order of Powers is us and all other life forms. We are the fruit, or children, of the First Order of Powers, fruited through the Pleroma of Logos after he abandoned the results of the Fall and returned to the Fullness above. We’re part of the original power coming from the Father and through the Son and then through the Aeons and on through the Pleroma of Logos. And we are literally the fruit of the Aeon Logos. Logos contained fractals of all the other Aeons inside of him, and we are the fruit of those fractals after Logos returned back to the Fullness. The Holy Spirit is the Pleroma of the Christ. It is also called the Third Order of Powers. The Third Order of Powers is what came along with the manifestation of the Christ, first in the heavens and then on Earth. Christ is not an Aeon—He is greater than the Aeons. Nor is Christ the original Son that emerged directly from the Father, because the Son predates the Christ. Christ is the Third Order of Powers, formed through the prayer of the Aeons under the direction of the Son and with the blessing and will of the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says: Then from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father, of whom the aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus, it was willingly and gladly that they bring forth the fruit. (Tripartite Tractate, verse 86) All of those that come with the Christ form the Pleroma of the Third Order Powers—that is, all of the variables that make up the Christ. The Third Order Powers are to the Christ what the First Order Powers are to the Son. We are called the fruit of the Pleroma of Logos, the Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers was the Pleroma of the Son. And Christ, the Third Order of Powers, is the fruit of the Totalities of the Son and the Father. He’s a different entity than the Father and the Son. He is the Pleroma of the Holy Spirit that represents the Totalities and the Father. Yet, the Tripartite Tractate does call him the Son because he is “the revelation of his union with them, which is his beloved Son.” The one who is properly called “Savior” and “the Redeemer” and “the Well-Pleasing  one” and “the Beloved,” “the one to whom prayers have been offered” and “he Christ” and “the Light of those appointed,” in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions [which] were given to him. Yet what other name may be applied to him except “the Son,” as we previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father, whom he wanted them to know? (Tripartite Tractate, verses 86-87) Jesus said he would send the Comforter to his followers that would fill them with the Holy Spirit of the Father. This would be a new entity bringing its presence into the cosmos.  Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise… but also they generated their own; for the aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony. They came forth in a multifaceted form, in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the one who gave it to him. (Tripartite Tractate, verse 87) This is why I make a point of repeating how the aeons are the body of the Pleroma of the Son and how we come from the Pleroma of the body of Logos. The Pleroma of Logos is a fractal of the Pleroma of the Son. In other words, we living creatures are the second iteration of Logos who carries within himself an iteration of the Fullness of God. We have the countenance or face of the various aeons, one fractal level down. So when the Pleroma of the Christ, also known as the Holy Spirit, came to Earth, it reflected the countenance of every Second Order Power and every First Order Power. This is what is meant when the Tripartite Tractate says, They came forth in a multifaceted form, in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the one who gave it to him. And this is why people who have experienced the born again phenomenon upon acceptance of the Christ have a felt sense of being known and personally loved by God. It is because the Third Order Powers of Christ literally have our faces and our bodies—they know us inside and out. There is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power. The Third Order Powers of the Christ are the most powerful force in our cosmos, far more powerful than we are and infinitely more powerful than the Pleroma of the Demiurge. This is how it is that once we accept the Christ and invite our personal Third Order Powers to enter into our soul we immediately feel the love of the Father and are no longer powerless to resist the wily temptations of the archons of the Demiurge. The Third Order Powers see through the lies and phantoms of the imitation. They cannot be deluded by the deficiency. They are not affected by the never-ending war. And we share that enlightenment to the extent that we accept the indwelling of the Third Order Powers. The Holy Spirit of the Christ not only came for us but also brings redemption to the Demiurge—that egoic part of Logos that had been abandoned here below after the Fall. The Tripartite Tractate says, For he revealed himself to him within him, since he is with him, is a fellow sufferer with him, gives him rest little by little, makes him grow, lifts him up, gives himself to him completely for the enjoyment from a vision. (verse 90) Now I’d like to share with you a verse from the New Testament. This is a verse that many people are familiar with. Quoting Jesus,  Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin. (Mark 3:28-29, New International Version) Hart’s literal translation puts it this way: Amen, I tell you that all will be excused the sons of men, the transgressions and the blasphemies, howsoever they may blaspheme. But whoever blasphemes against the Spirit, the Holy One, has no excuse throughout the age, but is answerable for a transgression in the Age. First off, comparing the usual translation to Hart’s translation, we see that conventional Christians are taught that blaspheming the Holy Spirit is unforgivable whereas the literal translation says inexcusable. The conventional translation also says these blasphemers are guilty eternally—meaning it will never go away because the blasphemy is unforgivable. Hart’s translation says that while the blasphemer has no excuse, they will be answerable in the Age to come. Throughout the age is an interesting phrase, because the Greek word for age is aeon. And generally the Bible tends to translate aeon as a unit of time, but I usually prefer translating aeon as a unit of consciousness. So, we gnostics might translate “in the Age” as “in the Fullness of the Aeons,” which is a place not a time. This indicates to me that while conventional Christians have been taught that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven and blasphemers will suffer for eternity for their sin, the actual translation says that while their sin may be inexcusable, they will have an opportunity to answer for that sin after death, in the Fullness of the Aeons. As an aside, yesterday I took my dog out on a trail with a lady and her dog that I barely knew. The dogs were having a good time off leash, running around, exploring, having fun. But then when it was time to leave the park, the other dog wouldn’t come and wouldn’t allow us to approach, but kept running away just out of reach. This went on for an hour until we lost track of the dog. I grew more upset as each minute went by. I started say to the lady, “This is unacceptable behavior. This is totally unacceptable!” I must have said that 50 times. We eventually found the dog outside the park, across a bridge, and only yards from the highway where it surely would have been killed. The dog finally allowed us to approach and the lady got him into the car. Now, by analogy, what would a loving owner do? Forgive the dog and take him home or take him to the pound and condemn him to hell? On the drive home I kept reiterating to the lady that she needs to train that dog because his behavior was totally unacceptable. So, to carry the analogy further, the loving owner would teach the dog the error of its ways through training until he could be trusted off leash and be a “good dog.” Blasphemy isn’t just cursing, just hitting your finger with a hammer, and uttering a curse in God’s name. It means that your heart is turned against God. To blaspheme the Holy Spirit means that you speak ill of the Holy Spirit in particular. The Holy Spirit is the one that is singled out. And why would this be such a big transgression? Because this is the worst thing that you can possibly do in this lifetime, signifying your entire disposition towards goodness and righteousness, towards the Father, towards the Son, towards the Fullness, and towards truth, because the Holy Spirit stands for all of these things. So this is not speaking of a matter of confusion, and I don’t know which way to turn or I’m an agnostic. Gnostic means to know. Agnostic means you don’t know. It’s not saying that. It’s saying you go beyond confusion to blasphemy. You raise your fist in anger and you denounce God and his will. You denounce the Holy Spirit. Mark 3:28 says that you will be answerable for that transgression in the Age. Or what I would say, you will be answerable for a transgression in aeonic realm. You will come to a period of cleansing and the measure of your guilt will be your own self-condemnation. Your own anger and hatred will be completely exposed. But this won’t be eternal. This will only be until the chaff is burned away from the wheat. John the Baptist said that, He will baptize you in a Holy Spirit and fire: He whose winnow is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his threshing floor, and will gather his grain into the storehouse, and will burn away the chaff with inextinguishable fire. (Matthew 3:11-12) “Burn away the chaff.” Yikes! Sounds painful. There are other frightening warnings concerning God’s wrath, similar to those scary visions recounted in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, primarily from Old Testament prophets and John in the book of Revelations. Such as: If anyone makes obeisance to the beast and its image, and receives an impress on his forehead or on his hand, He shall drink also from the wine of God’s vehemence, mixed undiluted into the cup of his ire, and will be tormented by fire and sulfur before the holy angels and before the suckling lamb. And the smoke of their torment rises for ages of ages, and the ones who make obeisance to the beast and its image have no rest day and night, as does anyone who might receive the impress of its name. Here is the endurance of the holy ones who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus. And I heard a voice out of heaven saying, “Write: ‘How blissful the dead who henceforth die in the Lord.’ ‘Yes,’ says the Spirit, ‘so that they shall rest from their labors, for their works follow along with them.’” (Revelations 14:9-13) And in Matthew 13:49: “Thus it will be at the consummation of the age. Angels will go forth and will separate the wicked from the midst of the just, and will throw them into the furnace of fire. There will be weeping and grinding of teeth there.” The fire isn’t meant to punish or to harm. It is a metaphor for burning away those negative memes that are clinging so tenaciously to your soul. And once those are burned away, then you can join everyone else. You won’t be forced into heaven if you hate God and hate the Holy Spirit and scoff at the notion of heaven. You need to want to come there. And you can’t come there if your soul and your spirit is smothered with “wicked” memes. But it is important to realize that it is not the person that is wicked, for we are all Second Order Powers filled with the Fullness of God. Our basic nature is not sin or wickedness; our basic nature is love. The wickedness is carried within the memes, not within the human soul. Remember that the process of karma determines what memes you gather and hold onto. If you take up the memes of the Demiurge and its archons, your inherent light will be smothered by those negative memes. And it is those memes that are burned away like chaff from the threshing floor, not the souls of humans. We must be pure and holy in order to return to the Age—the abode of the Aeons from which we come, for no negative memes make it through the winnowing process. It was not the will of the Father that we suffer. That is why the Christ and the Third Order Powers came to Earth—so that we would all have a clear pathway of righteousness aided by the infusion of the Holy Spirit to shed the demiurgic memes before death and any sort of final reckoning process. In Hart’s version of Matthew 12, beginning at verse 30, it says, Whoever is not with me, (that’s Jesus speaking), is against me. And whoever does not gather together with me scatters. Hence I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be excused men. But the blasphemy of the Spirit will not be excused. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, (that is Jesus), it will be excused him. But whoever speaks against the Spirit, the Holy One, it will not be excused him, neither in this age nor in the one that is coming. Either make out the tree to be good and its fruit good, or make out the tree to be rotten and its fruit rotten. For the tree is known by the fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you, being wicked, speak of good things? For the mouth speaks out of what overflows from the heart. The good man issues good things out of his good stores, and the wicked man issues wicked things out of his wicked stores. This final reckoning after death gives you the opportunity for that 360 degree life review that brings you face-to-face with your karma and memes. If you walk with the Holy Spirit the passage will be easy, for all transgressions are forgiven. But if you hate and blaspheme or speak ill of the Holy Spirit itself, then you have no Comforter at your side to assist you, either in this age or in the Age to come. And if that is the case, then your realization and rejection of the demiurgic memes will be painful. But make no mistake, this reckoning is necessary and inevitable. And after that, forgiveness. I will close this week’s episode by sharing with you a portion of an archetypal dream I had when I was about eight years old. In that dream I was flying through the air with Jesus, tucked safely in his arm, like Lois Lane flying with Superman. We landed at the front of a huge procession of people carrying torches who were winding there way up a tall hill. I found myself standing before an old gentleman who was sitting at a table that held a large glowing wok or brazier full of red hot glowing coals. The table was in front of a door leading into a huge, brightly glowing structure. Jesus, who was standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders told the man, “She is with me.” The old man took my right hand and plunged it into the hot coals. Now, this is the important part to the lesson of this episode—even though my hand was in the hot coals, it did not hurt and it did not burn because Jesus was with me. When my hand came out of the coals unscathed, I was able to pass into the place before me. There’s more to the story of what happened in that dream. I’ll tell it to you next week and we’ll talk about dreams. Until then, Onward and upward, and God bless us all. 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. Today I would like to share some information with you about the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? You know, the Holy Spirit is considered part of the Trinity of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One God, three-in-one, is how the Christians put it. But what does that mean? What is the Holy Spirit to us if we’re seeking gnosis? Jesus said to his disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the Earth” (Acts 1:8). That’s us. We’re at the ends of the earth here, right? So Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would come to the believers and would be a witness to the Christ. The Jews were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the festival of Shavuot, which was the giving of the commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. So it was one of the major festival times, and there were a lot of people gathered. Jesus had been crucified during the Passover festival, and this is the next festival, which was about 40 days afterwards. And so when Shavuot, or what we call Pentecost, came, the disciples were all gathered together in one place. They were confused, lost, disheartened. The man that they had thought would bring the kingdom back to Israel was dead and crucified, and they just didn’t know what they were supposed to do about it. In Acts 2 verse 2, it says, “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now, they were staying in Jerusalem, God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked, aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? How is it that each of us hears them in our native language? They asked one another, what does this mean?” And others in the crowd, it says, made fun of them and said, ah, they’d had too much wine.” Peter stood up, raised his voice and addressed the crowd. And he said, “In the last days, God says, ‘I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy and your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days and they will prophesy. I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’” A lot of people think that we may be in the end days right now. I don’t think we have seen the sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood yet, so I don’t think we’re in the final roll-up. That is a signal we’re supposed to look for before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. That is the second coming of Jesus, which is what Christians are waiting for. And Peter here was quoting the prophet Joel from the Old Testament. And in verse 37 it says, “When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brother, what shall we do?’ Peter replied, ‘Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, for all whom the Lord, our God, will call.’ With many other words he warned them and he pleaded with them, saying, ‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’” But what is that Holy Spirit? I used to think it was just that great rush of wind, that swoosh, kind of a like a ghostly power that settled on people and filled them with the Holy Spirit. But now, after reading the Tripartite Tractate and considering this gnosis for several years, I think that the Holy Spirit is the coming of the Third Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the original Aeons—that is, the differentiations that are within the Son of God and that coexist with the Son. It’s the infinite number of variables of all possibilities of God. The Second Order of Powers is us. We are an order of powers. We’re part of the original power coming from the Father and through the Son and then through the Aeons. And we are literally the fruit of the Aeon Logos. He had the fractals of all the Aeons inside of him, and we are the fruit of those fractals after Logos returned back to the Fullness. And then the Third Order of Powers is what came along with the manifestation of the Christ, first in the heavens and then on Earth. And Christ is not an Aeon; Christ is not the Son. Christ is the Third Order of Powers. And all of those that come with the Christ are Third Order Powers—that is, all of the variables that make up the Christ. The Pleroma of the Christ is the Third Order of Powers. We are the fruit of the Pleroma of Logos, the Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers was the Pleroma of the Son. And Christ is the Third Order of Powers. He’s a different entity than the Father and the Son. He is the Pleroma of the Holy Spirit. Christ was formed in order to save us from the Fall and to save the Demiurge from the Fall. The Christ, the Third Order of Powers, is the most powerful being in the material world. He has all of the mojo of the Son, all of the mojo of the First Order Powers, all of the Aeons put together with the consecration or the will of the Father. He is anointed for a special task of bringing us all home and rolling up this material creation and bringing us into what is called the third economy or the final economy. We’re in the second economy now. The first economy is the hierarchy of the Fullness, where the Aeons live. The material cosmos is the second economy, or you could call it the second ecological system. And then there’s going to be a third economy, and that is when everyone who has been alive down here below, everyone who has been birthed into this material existence as a Second Order Power and melded to the Fall, will come home to the ethereal plane. When the fiery tongues came down and set upon everyone who was in that upper room at Pentecost, each of the disciples and the followers who were in that house, that was their Third Order Power alighting upon their heads. When Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist at the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus came to his cousin John, who was baptizing people in the river, and he asked to be baptized. And John said, “No, no, I’m not even worthy to carry your sandals. I can’t baptize you. You’re the anointed one.” And Jesus said, “No, you have to baptize me. It’s all part of the plan.” And after Jesus was dunked in the river by John, and he rose up out of the river, it says that the Holy Spirit alighted upon his,( alighted means landed), landed upon his head like a dove. So when this Holy Spirit came to Jesus, then Jesus was anointed and walking around with all of the powers of the Third Order on display within him. He was the first of the human Second Order Powers who to be anointed by the Holy Spirit. Of course, Jesus is more than a Second Order Power. He’s always been the manifestation of a Second Order Power plus the Third Order of Powers. And we call that the Christ. We say Jesus Christ, but he’s actually called Jesus the Anointed, and the anointing was the Holy Spirit. To be anointed signifies a special set-apart status for fulfilling a particular purpose or calling. And the calling of Jesus was to round us all up and bring us home. The Greek word chrio means to consecrate or set apart for sacred use. So when we say Jesus Christ, we’re saying Jesus the anointed, who has been set apart for sacred use. And he was the first to be anointed by the Holy Spirit. Now, the reason why everyone broke out speaking in tongues that everyone in Jerusalem could understand, they said, “Hey, I thought all these people were from Galilee. How is it that they’re speaking our language?” And there were hundreds of languages being represented because it was a huge pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Pentecost. Well, the reason why is because the Holy Spirit knows everything, and it empowered each of those disciples of Christ to be speaking in a way that others could understand. So suddenly, all of a sudden, whether you spoke Hebrew or Greek or then any of these hundreds of other languages, you could understand for the first time the message that Jesus was preaching. Now, in what are called Pentecostal churches nowadays, Pentecost being that time when the Holy Spirit came to speak to everyone, came to inhabit everyone, Pentecostal churches continue to speak in tongues. But the problem is that generally nobody else can understand what they’re saying. When people speak in tongues, it sounds very Middle Eastern, but it’s not like they’re speaking in French or German or Spanish, where anyone can understand them, or even English. They’re speaking in this, what is fairly unintelligible, mystical, Middle Eastern type of tongue. But back in the original Pentecost, everybody was speaking in such a way that everyone could be understood. So what are the functions of the Holy Spirit as taught by Jesus? First off, it says in John 14:17, “Even the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it sees him not, neither knows him, but you know him, for he dwells with you and shall be in you.”  So we are baptized in the Holy Spirit. We who have decided that Jesus was the anointed Third Order Power who came to Earth to bring us Second Order Powers home, which is the Gnostic gospel, we invite the Third Order Powers to come and take up dwelling inside of ourself. So now we’re not just the one Self, which is a reflection of the Son of God, and we’re not just the ego, which is a reflection of our Second Order status. We then also have a Third Order Power overlaying both of those. And the Third Order is the most powerful force in this cosmos. We have all necessary power once we invite the Third Order Powers to take up dwelling. If your ego is sitting on the throne of your soul, as we say, then you’re just being pushed about by every whim and desire of the material world. You’re being influenced by influencers. Your focus is on yourself, your body, your looks, what you’re eating, what you’re wearing, where you’re going to go, how you’re going to have fun. That’s your egoic Second Order nature. Your First Order nature is to have the Son of God foremost in your mind. And I think that’s what the prophets of the Old Testament had—the Son sitting on their throne. So they were receiving truth, even though the Third Order of Powers didn’t come until Jesus came. But we’ve got a Third Order of Powers. And in John 14:26, it says, “But the Comforter who is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things.” So accepting the Third Order Powers brings comfort. Why wouldn’t we want to have comfort? What’s the point of lying down here bleeding and suffering and being worried and frightened? There’s no point to it at all. You don’t gain any brownie points through suffering. We are called to be full of joy. The Holy Spirit brings us that comfort and he comes in the name of Jesus the Anointed. And it says, “He shall teach you all things.” Well, how would the Holy Spirit teach you anything? Because the Holy Spirit is the embodiment that knows everything. He’s ethereal. He’s preexistent. He knows the Father. He knows the Son. He knows all of the Aeons. He was in on all the conferences on how to get us out of this sticky mess we found ourselves in. So he comes to teach us what we need to know to extricate ourselves from this material morass in which we find ourselves. In John 14:26, it says, “After, he shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said to you.” Now, usually the Christians limit that to whatever Jesus said to them. But in the Gnostic Gospels, we’re called those of the remembrance.  That’s what we’re known as, because when we’re born into this world, we carry with us the memory of the ethereal plane, but we forget it, just like the Demiurge. We’re a fractal replication—each of our lives is a fractal replication of the fall of Logos, the splitting into the good thought and the egoic thought, and then forgetting about the ethereal plane. That’s the lot of the Demiurge. We are in the same spot. We tend to forget what we were born with. So we’re not born as a blank slate, a tabula rasa. We are born with the full remembrance of all of the powers and the glory of God and our home on the ethereal plane, which resembles paradise. That’s why all humans have a similar dream of paradise. That’s the remembrance. So when we accept the Holy Spirit, it reminds us; we are no longer forgetful. Now we accept the remembrance that we were born with again. That’s why somewhere it says, (I don’t have the quote in front of me), but there’s practically an infinite way to express being fallen. There’s an infinite way to be confused, but there is one way to come home. There’s one place that we will return to. So we have a myriad of confusions down here when we have forgotten, but when we remember, we get back on that glory beam, as I like to call it, and that is the one way up. That’s what one way means. Now the ordinary conventional Christian way of understanding that one way is to say that you have to profess belief in Jesus Christ because that is the one way—that Jesus is the gatekeeper to heaven. Yes, Jesus is the one way to heaven, but that doesn’t mean that you need to know that, that you need to recognize that. Someday you will, because it says “every knee shall bend, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus the Anointed is Lord.” But if you don’t do that before you die, if you don’t acknowledge that Jesus is the Anointed one, that just means you’re going to have a harder time after you die. You’re going to have to go through some of those bardo-type experiences we talked about last week. So yeah, Jesus the Anointed is the one way, and that was his job, and it is finished, whether or not you believe it. But you’re not going to go to hell if you don’t. John 15:26 says, “But when the Comforter is come…” so it’s the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, and I think that each one of us has a Third Order Power that is assigned to us. There is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power, and that is our salvation. That is what unlocks the full remembrance and the full understanding of truth down to the cellular level. So, when your Third Order Power has come, “whom I will send unto you from the Father,” says Jesus, “even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he shall testify of me.” And they do personify the Holy Spirit, so it’s not just a force or a power. It is always personified. It’s always He. So this Third Order Power will guide us in everything we need to know. It’s the Third Order Powers that bring us all our gnosis. My Third Order Power comes to me with everything I need to know. I have different misunderstandings of things than you do. We’re all individuals. We all make our own mistakes. We all wander off the path in our own way. As I said, there’s almost an infinite variety of ways to go wrong, but the Third Order Power is our touchstone. It’s our truth teller. It testifies of the Father. It reminds us of paradise. Then John 16:8 goes on to say, “When he is come,” that is the Holy Spirit, your Third Order Power, “he will reprove the world of sin.” That is, he’ll scold them. He’ll take it away. He’ll denounce the world of sin. “The sin is because they do not believe on me,” he says. “Righteousness, because I go to my Father and he will see me no more. Judgment, because the prince of the world is judged.” And here’s one of the heresies, of course. “The prince of this world,” is it Satan? Well, there’s no character called Satan, actually, in the Greek. It’s the Accuser. So Satan, his job is to whisper how lousy you are, to whisper how worthless you are, and stupid, and that you’ll never make it to heaven. That’s the job of the Accuser. But the prince of this world, that’s the Demiurge. That’s the king of this world. This Accuser is his main henchman, his archon. John 16:13 says, “However, when he, the Spirit of Truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth, for he shall not speak of himself, but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak.” So the Third Order Power is never serving itself. It’s not here for its own glory or for its own aggrandizement. It comes to share the truth with us. That’s all. He wants to guide you into all truth. And we call ourselves Gnostic, or if you’re on the Gnostic path and you’re looking to unlock your gnosis, that is truth. The path to this truth is the Holy Spirit. And if you hate Jesus, and you hate these things like the Holy Spirit… well, those are unhelpful memes that you picked up along the way because your original spirit knows the Fullness of God. It is undeniable because it is inherent within your Second Order nature. In any event, why would you reject the Holy Spirit? He reflects the full truth of the ethereal plane. And the Anointed One came in particular to save us, in particular to save you, to help you, to reveal to you your gnosis. So if you hate the Christ, well, you have wandered away from the right path. I don’t know what you would rather believe than believe in the Anointed Power and the Holy Spirit who came for you. In John 16:15, it says, “All things that the Father has are mine, (that is, the Anointed’s) therefore, said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall show it unto you.” So your gnosis is being revealed by the Comforter, and that is why it is comforting. Next week we will discuss the Holy Spirit some more and we will look at the gnostic meaning of Mark 3:28 and Matthew 13:49. What exactly is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and why is it said to be inexcusable? What’s the gnostic take on that? Is anything unforgiveable? Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all. Have you purchased your copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel yet? Widely acclaimed as the most approachable gnostic text ever written. Based upon the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures. Dr. Ropp’s specialty is bringing ancient texts to life in understandable language.

Follow-up to the Aeon Byte Interview Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week’s episode was a link to an interview I had just given on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio. That interview on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio was called “Gnostic Psychology and Preparing for Death,” and that was posted on January 29, 2025. As we so often do, my brother and I chatted after the interview was posted and after he had had a chance to watch it, and we discussed some of the finer points of the Gnosis shared there in that episode. I gave Bill an important piece of Gnosis during that conversation, and he gave me an important piece of Gnosis during that conversation, and I thought I would share those with you today. This is part of our ongoing process of mining our Gnosis. I’ll share with you what Billy’s problem was with the interview on Aeon Byte. He doesn’t particularly care for the Bardo Thodol (or The Tibetan Book of the Dead) as being particularly Gnostic. In his kind way, he said I did a good job of translating it into Gnostic speak, but it really isn’t Gnostic. So here’s what we know. In the interview and in my previous writing about it— “Overcoming Death” in the Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel book—I’ve talked about the process of coming to realization that is laid out in the Book of the Dead and how each level, each Bardo, becomes more and more horrific as people resist going onward and upward, and they’d rather go back and down. And it just keeps getting horrible until, according to the Bardo Thodol, they run around looking for a new body to reincarnate into in order to escape the Bardos. So the way the after death experience is described, Billy wanted me to share with you that there is no such thing as the unhelpful deities, the fellows that are running around trying to chop up the resistant soul into little tiny pieces. That is not a real thing. Archons would not be able to follow us into the in-between place after our physical body passes away, because they don’t come from above. They are stuck with the Demiurge down here in the material sphere. What is more likely is that these wrathful deities of the Bardo Thodol are actually memes. They’re meme bundles that are generated and projected by the deceased person’s own conscience. And if it’s this negative type of hellacious experience, it’s from the deceased person’s guilt-ridden conscience. As I did mention in the interview, these wrathful deities are not punishments from God, because God does not punish us after we die. We turn punishment upon ourselves in the process of our life review. We feel bad. We feel guilty. We feel remorseful about the way we treated others, and we wish that it wouldn’t have happened. And we come face to face with the negative things we did during our life in the afterlife place. In essence, the more self-centered and mean of a life that a person lives here on earth, it carries with them in the form of their memes into the afterlife as their karma, and they need to work it out when they’ve died. If it’s really overwhelmingly terrible, because you can’t hide, you can’t lie to God, the chastening fire of the Aeons is meant to cleanse us and purify us so that we can go onward and upward. And what is being cleansed and purified are those negative memes that caused us to be such a bad-natured person when we were alive on earth. If one allows that purging to take place during that 360-degree life review where we see and experience the pain we caused others, we reflect it back upon ourselves. Now, the reason why in the Bardo Thodol you have wrathful deities chasing after people with swords is because those are their meme bundles. Particularly, those memes are going to be stuck in their heads if you’ve got someone reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead in your ear for a week or two, several times every day after you pass away. If you are stuck in one of these Bardos and you’re not able to go onward and upward, or willing to go onward and upward, and you keep looking down and back, these memes that are being murmured into your ear concerning wrathful deities hacking you to death are going to form the vision you’re having after you die. We Westerners who do not have the Bardo Thodol read to us on our deathbed are not likely to have those same sorts of visions. If you watch the near-death experience videos on YouTube, the overwhelming majority of them are positive. They’re onward and upward types of visions with angelic-like creatures. Very few, I think I’ve only watched one, are hellacious, bad and negative and terrible, and those are from the memes that that person brought in with them; that’s what they can’t let go of. They can’t let go of that kind of, oh, I was a bad person, I’m going to be condemned to hell forever, type of meme bundle. But you see, it’s our own subconscious, it’s our own guilt that holds us in that position. It’s not God’s wrath. It’s not the aeonic wrath. No one hates us up above. Up above, it’s love. So then I asked my brother, as we were discussing these things, what in particular are the entities we encounter after we pass away? Who are these entities? And once again, I’m referring to the YouTube videos of near-death experiences where they’re greeted by creatures of light and beautiful butterflies that exude love. What are those? And also, many people, as we know just from common knowledge, when they’ve crossed over to the other side, are greeted by relatives who crossed over before them, right? They’re greeted by loved ones—mom and dad, anybody they loved might be there to greet them on the other side. Well, who are those? What are those? Are those just memes? Are those just projections? So we talked that over for a while, and here’s what we have come up with. Tell me what you think of this. First off, the loved ones that greet us on the other side. Billy believes those are indeed the loved ones greeting us from the other side. They are not projections out of our own subconscious. They’re not memes. And he feels very confident about that because, as you know, my brother is a hypnotherapist who regularly accompanies his clients to that place in between lives in order for them to talk with a deceased loved one, perhaps a child who passed away or a parent who was gone, and you wish that you could have said something to them. It has been his experience and the experience of his clients that those are indeed those people talking to them. They feel very tangible and very real. And I said to Bill, well, how can they just be standing around waiting for you on the other side? Don’t they have other things to do in heaven? Aren’t they already gone or perhaps they’ve reincarnated and they’re back here on Earth? There’s a very simple Gnostic answer for that. It’s that time and space, as we know them, only exist in this material cosmos of ours. Time is the distance between two points in our material space. In the ethereal plane, it’s no time. All time is one. Time has a very different characteristic up there. So to us, it may seem as though a lifetime has passed since we saw that loved one pass away. And now here they are because we just passed away. But in the way that it works on the other side, no time has passed because there isn’t any time there. So they pass away and boom, here they are to meet us. It’s more as if time is sequential rather than measurable. That’s why when I talk about the cosmogony of the rollout of consciousness, first the Father, then the Son, then the Totalities of the ALL, then the Aeons become self-aware and arrange themselves into the Hierarchy of the Fullness—there’s no time that has passed during that rollout. They’re practically instantaneous. It’s like no sooner had that happened than this happens. So it was no sooner had the Son been formed than he became a Father as his variabilities, the Totalities, branched out from amongst him. And then, next thing you know,  those Totalities have sorted themselves and become self-aware as the Aeons. Well, that’s a sequence of events, but it’s not like five minutes later or a hundred years later. So time doesn’t really have any meaning for us in the afterlife. On the ethereal plane, there is no time because the ethereal plane is in fact the entirety of the Father. And what it says of the Father, or the Source, as people like to call it nowadays, as the Tripartite Tractate says in verse 52, “He is without beginning and without end.” You see? There’s no time. There’s no beginning. There’s no 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, in that which makes him immutable, and that which makes him great. 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. So there’s a point to the immutability of the Father: that there is no time. After the Fall, what was created down here in the material cosmos is referred to as an economy in the Tripartite Tractate. So we are living in the material economy, and things are different here. Here we do have time and space. Verse 102 says, “He placed the lights that constitute the starting point of the structure over the organization of the things below.” So our economy has a starting point. It is not eternal. We’re a bubble inside of eternity. But since we come with the remembrance of the Father in the Fullness as well as eternity, we are those of the remembrance. It says, verse 117, Because the seed of the promise about Jesus Christ had been deposited, whose revelation and unification we have ministered to, this promise now enabled instruction and a return to that which had been from the beginning, that of which they possessed a drop inciting them to return to it, which is what is called redemption. So redemption is an indication that we are moving out of the realm of time and space and back into the realm of eternity. It says in verse 119, “The road to eternal rest leads from humility to salvation.” So that’s the promise: eternal rest. This applies to humans as well as to angels, it says. And so that is how it is that all these various people can be in the same place at the same “time” once you pass over to the other side, because that’s where they are. They are there. Now, who are these beautiful, loving, angelic creatures that people encounter in their near-death experiences? I’m going to link it in to something else that I talked about on this Aeon Byte interview. Do you remember that I said, regarding the Third Order of Powers that come along with the Christ, that there is a Third Order Power for every single Second Order Power, and that it fits over us like a glove? We are co-existent that way. That is how it is when we recognize the Christ we can be fully redeemed because that part of Christ looks like us—there’s a part of Christ that looks like Cyd—that Cyd part of Christ, those Third Order Powers that make up Cyd sit right on top of Cyd’s Second Order Powers. You are a particular constellation of aeonic traits, and you have a particular Third Order constellation that sits right on top of your Second Order, and then you’re fully redeemed, and you’ve got one of the Third Order Powers taking care of every single part of yourself. Now, in that Aeon Byte interview, I talked some about Guardian Angels, and as I say, this is not in any of the Gnostic books that I’ve run across. If you’ve run across that concept, go ahead and write to me and let me know where to find it. But it seems to me, my gnosis tells me, that this notion of Guardian Angels is part of the remembrance. As it turns out, most people that have been asked do believe in Guardian Angels. What is a Guardian Angel then? Here’s what I think your Guardian Angel is. It’s your Third Order Power that looks like you. We are each constellations of various characteristics and traits of the Aeons. We mostly overlap if we’re humans. We overlap less if it’s my constellation of Aeons and my dog’s constellation. My dog has a dog constellation of Aeons of Christ. I’ve got a human constellation, but my particular traits and talents and appearance, that is how I differ from your particular traits and talents and appearance. So we’re mostly overlapping in our Second Order Powers, but we also have absolutely unique constellations. So I’m not 100% like you. Nobody’s 100% like me. My Guardian Angel is that constellation of Third Order Powers that is like me. And it’s going to be a different constellation than your Guardian Angel because you’re slightly different. So your constellation of Guardian Angels are going to be the ones like you. My Guardian Angels are the ones that are assigned to me by the Christ. That’s my Christ. It comes with a face that I can recognize. They come with a face that everyone can recognize and that’s how they know it’s their Christ. Same thing with the Guardian Angel. It’s your Guardian Angel. We don’t just say a Guardian Angel came and took care of me. No, my Guardian Angel came and took care of me. Portion of illustration from my upcoming Gnostic children’s book Okay, now let me clear up another point from that interview and it touches on what we’re talking about right now. I’ve been saying that we have Aeonic parents, that we have both earthly parents and then we’ve got Aeonic parents—this constellation of countless Aeons that make each of us up. But according to the Tripartite Tractate, our Aeonic parents aren’t all the way up there in the Fullness. They’re not at the Aeonic level. They’re one fractal level down. The Aeonic parents of the Second Order Powers is the restored Pleroma of Logos after he left the Fall and returned to the Fullness. We are birthed out of the Pleroma of Logos. Remember, Logos contains within its body a fractal of all the other Aeons in the Fullness of God. And when Logos returned to the Fullness after the Fall, abandoning the Demiurge down below, it was the fractals of Logos that made little baby spores descend down here. There’s a reason for that. The Fullness of God is pure and all good. It was not touched by the Fall. Only Logos was touched by the Fall. So when Logos returned to the Fullness, the memory of the Fall and the memory of materiality is contained within Logos. It was held apart from the rest of the Fullnesses in order for them to maintain their purity and for them to be not over much troubled by our travails down here in the cosmos, because their primary focus is upward, not downward. Logos has to continue to look downward as well as upward because half of Logos remained below—the Demiurge. That abandoned part of Logos, the Demiurge, is its presumptuous thought, is its egoic thought. But the part of Logos that returned up above to its brethren in the Fullness, that’s the part that was of the good thought. That’s all of his fractals of the One. Now if you’re new to Gnostic Insights and you haven’t heard any of this talk before, I can hear how complicated this sounds. It’s not really. It’s just different and new. So please don’t throw up your hands in despair at this being overly complicated because really you don’t even need to know this. I just thought it’d be fun to share with you some fresh Gnosis. All you need to remember is that we come from above and that we will return to above. We do not earn our way into heaven. We can’t. Heaven is absolutely pure. Redemption was the job of the Christ and the Christ’s Third Order Powers. As I said in the interview, reincarnation does not get us incrementally closer to perfection. We’d never reach perfection that way. So the way we reach perfection is by accepting the Christ, accepting the Third Order of Powers with our names on it. I accept my Third Order Powers. You need to accept your Third Order Powers. Or you could just call it Jesus, if you’d like, because Jesus is a very special character. Jesus is like us—fully human and fully God Above All Gods. And when we accept the Christ into us, we also then are fully human and fully God Above All Gods. Okay, so I’ve referenced a couple of quotes out of the Tripartite Tractate. Now that I’ve described it all to you, I’m going to read some of these quotes out of the Tripartite Tractate, and you can now understand better what they mean. And this part that I’m going to be reading to you now, this is out of the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, beginning on page 181. So this was written before. It’s just that it came to me as if it were fresh gnosis this morning, which often happens. I’ll write these things in the book and then forget I’d written it and then have to remember it again. So we’re those of the remembrance, but we’re also those that are forgetful, right? So here’s what it says, the last paragraph of page 181. We Second Order Powers are fractals of the pleroma of Logos, emanated during the combined prayers of Logos and the Fullness after Logos returned from the fall. We are the Second Order Powers, not only humans, but all living creatures. We come from the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God, but not directly. We Second Order Powers are actually fractals of Logos after he returned to the Fullness from the Fall. On page 182, in the middle of the page, it says, We humans are also a tripartite system comprised of the spiritual, the psychical, and the physical. The first part of our system is a fractal version of the monad of the Father—the Son. We call that fractal our Self, and it forms our spiritual aspect. The second part of our three-part structure is called the psychical or psychological, which mirrors our association with the names of the self-aware Aeons of the Fullness. The psychical is the self-aware part of us that think, and that includes our ego. Our third part is associated with the portion of Logos left behind within the boundary of the Fall. Our third part is the material level, the hylic. Now quoting the Tripartite Tractate, it says, To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. (verse 98). Those who belong to the remembrance refers to us Second Order Powers, because we are of the good thought of the Aeons of the Fullness. 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. While we vaguely remember we were pre-existent consciousness because we Second Order Powers are those of the remembrance, we forget about our higher nature because we’re all tangled up with the material formed by the thought of which he had stripped himself. The presumptuous thought that Logos needed to lose was that he should attempt to grasp the incomprehensibility and give glory to it, and especially to the ineffability of the Father without the agreement of the Totalities, nor from him who brought them forth, the Father. (verse 75) When Logos found himself down here below after the fall, he asked himself, what the heck did I do? When he discovered he could not bring the shadows and imitations that had emerged from his pleroma under his control, he left that imitation of himself behind, and what was perfect in him, his self, fled back up to the Fullness. (verse 78) He deserted the material plane and retreated back to the ethereal plane to return home to his Father and brothers in the Fullness. First he remembered the one who was in the Fullness and entreated him, then his brothers one by one, though always together with their fellows, then all of them together, but before all of these, the Father. This prayer and supplication helped to make him turn toward himself and toward the all, for their remembrance of him caused him to remember the pre-existent ones. And this is the remembrance that calls out from afar and brings him back. (verses 82 through 83) Quoting the previous verse again, To those who belong to the remembrance, okay that’s us. He, that’s Logos, revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself, that is his egoic striving. Revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself means that Logos imparted to us his knowledge of the shadows and the Fall. When we Second Order Powers come down to this material universe, we come not only with the good thoughts of the Fullness of God, but we come down with the presumptuous thought that Logos had peeled off himself and abandoned below. “He revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention…” Okay, why did Logos reveal the knowledge of the shadows? What was his intention? He did so, “with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material” (verse 98). So if we had not been given the knowledge of the shadows that form this material imitation, we wouldn’t be able to meld ourselves to the material world. Our bodies are made of non-living mud at the material level. Our bodies, the subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, elements, are made from the bits of the fall that add up to become the material of our physical universe. Knowledge of these shadowy bits was revealed to us in order for us to be able to stick the landing when our units of consciousness exit the ethereal plane and are born into this material world. This ability to merge the ethereal with the material is unique to the Second Order of Powers. Aeons and angels can’t do it because their power is in the spiritual places. “All the spiritual places are in spiritual power. They are separate from the beings of the thought, since the power is established in an image, which is that which separates the pleroma from the Logos, and it does not permit them to mix with the things which have come into being through a vision of things which are with him” (verse 97). So that is why it’s logical and necessary that we Second Order Powers are the fruit of Logos in particular, because we get from Logos the knowledge of what happened after the Fall, the particularity of materiality, and that is the knowledge that allows our spirit to meld to the material of the cosmos. Okay, I hope you followed this, but if you didn’t, don’t worry about it. It’s not really necessary to know. Let me know what you think. Hey, I went on Amazon today to look at the reviews of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and, well, hardly anyone has left a review. So if you purchased a copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, please go to Amazon and leave a review—hopefully a good review. God bless us all, and onward and upward! 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

and a conversation with Bill Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The first half of this episode is about choosing the higher road to find your gnosis, about letting go of the world. In the second half of this episode I was able to put in about 10 minutes of a conversation that my brother and I had following our group Zoom chat the other day, and it has to do with the nature of a guru and the nature of yoga and whether or not meditation is good. I know that most people seem to want a ritual to deepen their gnosis—prayers or chants or meditation or physical activities. And what I’d like to let you know today is that it’s not really necessary, because we are born with this gnosis fully inside of us, and we are in touch with the Father at all times whether or not we recognize it. All you need to do is recognize it. All you really need to do is knock and the door shall open. That’s a promise that Jesus made. “Seek and ye shall find, knock and the door will open” (Matthew 7:7). Really, that’s all. It takes a contrite heart, which means that you repent of living a vice-filled life. If you are attached to vice or you’re attached to material possessions, then it’s harder to knock, because you don’t need to, and you don’t want to. You want to hide if you know that you are “sinning.” And you know, we don’t need to go into deep theological discussions about what is sin or what is vice, because I’m sure that everybody knows the difference between virtue and vice, and either you prefer dwelling in darkness and all that that implies. You know the darkness gives physical thrills because the Demiurge is in charge of the material, but it does nothing for you spiritually except keep you in darkness, keep you pulled toward the Demiurge like a magnet. So, if you are addicted to some substance, or if you are addicted to pornography or gambling, or you hate your neighbor, or you hate those people on the other side of the world—you know that you are not on the right side, and I don’t need to tell you that. You know that. But if you want to live on the virtuous side of the ledger, if you want to do the primary directive, which is love, our task is to spread love and to demonstrate the Father’s love down here in this material world. And by so doing that, it not only shows love to other humans and other second-order creatures, it demonstrates what love is to the Demiurge itself, because the Demiurge doesn’t have the life of the Father. The Demiurge is cut off from its higher self, just like a wayward ego that’s so puffed up and absolutely full of itself doesn’t remember or doesn’t care about its One true Self that comes from the Father and from the Fullness. So, it may be that a person wants to cling to a worldly, material, vice-filled life, because, hey, hey, it feels good, at least for a while, until you bottom out. However, it may be that you know it doesn’t feel good, that you don’t want to live a vice-filled life, but you can’t seem to help yourself. You feel powerless before the Demiurge and the archons that are continually tempting you into that vice. You want to lay it down. You tried, but you just can’t seem to do it. And so, therefore, you feel guilt. You feel shame. You feel powerless and weak. Well, that is also a spiritual condition that is ripe for recognition and repentance. So, perhaps you have repented. Maybe you’ve repented continually while trying to put down that vice, but you keep falling back into it. So, the repentance isn’t quite doing enough, and now you’re wondering, well, what else can I do? How can I reach the Father? How can I know the love of God? How can I get a hold of that correcting algorithm that the Christ has brought to the Earth on my behalf? That’s a good position to be in, because you recognize and you want redemption. So, the first step is repentance, that is to say, no, I don’t want to do this anymore. I lay it down—to rebuke Satan. Get thee behind me, Satan, is something you can say. Then the second thing is to turn your eyes upward to the Father. Turn your heart over to the Christ—that’s the redemption part. If you haven’t taken that second step of aligning yourself with the Father and the Fullness and Christ, then you haven’t gone far enough in your repentance. You need to align yourself with the Christ power, that is to say, with God’s will. You need to seek, knock, and you shall find. Knock, and the door shall open. Seek, and you will find. It’s a promise that Jesus made. Have you knocked earnestly and asked for Jesus to open the door or for the Christ to open the door or for the Father or the Fullness to open the door? Have you said, I want in, please take me back? You know, the story of the prodigal son is that the prodigal son told his father he didn’t want to stay and be a farmer alongside his brother and his dad. He wanted his inheritance now, and he wanted to go away to the big city and become somebody. So, his father gave him his money, and off he went. And he did not have a good time in the big city. He tried. It didn’t work out. He eventually found himself being a pig farmer. Well, not even a farmer, but just a hired hand at a pig farm slopping out pig stalls, which is anti-kosher because part of the Old Testament law, you don’t eat pigs, you stay away from the pigs, as it is currently with Islam and still in Judaism. So, he finds himself slopping out pig stalls, and he is at his end. He’s completely broken. And he decides, what am I doing this for? It was a lot better at home on the farm. And he basically throws down the shovel and goes home with his head hung low and full of shame. And he said, the ranch hands at my father’s farm live a better life than I’m living now. I’ll just go back and work for my father, even if he won’t take me back as his son because I squandered my inheritance. By the way, can you see that this is an archetypal story? This is a story about being a child of God and leaving the Father and mucking about in the world, seeing that it’s not so great out there, and then coming back with repentance, with a contrite heart to come back to the Father’s house. In the story of the prodigal son, when he sees the son coming home on the road, even before he gets there, he says, hey, go slaughter a goat. (Unfortunately, always with the blood.) Go slaughter the goat, and we’ll have a great feast tonight and invite everybody because the prodigal son has returned home. And prodigal means wasteful, spendthrift. But the Father isn’t holding that against him. He welcomes him back with open arms and throws a giant barbecue in honor of him coming home. Well, it made the son that stayed home a bit mad, but that’s not the point of this story. And so the Father welcomes the prodigal son home. And when we’re away from God, and we’re living in the world in a full-fledged, sinful manner, or on the vice side of the ledger rather than the virtue side of the Father, if we’re taking our marching orders from the Demiurge and his archons rather than from the Father and Christ, we are prodigals at that point. So you need to both repent, that is, say, I don’t want to do this anymore, I hate it. And then you need to turn around from facing the world to facing God, to facing the Father. And you need not feel too ashamed or too full of guilt to turn around and face the Father. That’s what the Father dearly desires. He wants you to come home. That’s all he wants is for you to come home and experience his love. And that love is unconditional. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. You can be the worst person ever if you repent and say, No, I don’t want to be a prodigal anymore. I want to come home. Please, please take me home. It’s like when Dorothy clicks her heels together in The Wizard of Oz and says, I want to go home. I want to go home. That’s the attitude you need to have to turn to the Father. You don’t need to take a workshop in meditation. You don’t need to take a workshop in esoteric rituals. You don’t need to read book after book after book of Gnostic teaching. You don’t need to memorize the names and jobs of the different angels and Aeons. You don’t need to do any of that. All you need to do is repent, turn around, and be redeemed. That is, be bought out of slavery by the Father’s love. Redemption refers to something that’s been put up in a pawn shop or put as collateral against a loan, and then the loan fails, or you really need that thing back from the pawn shop. You redeem it to get it back. Well, the Father wants us all to be redeemed. Those are the steps, and it’s called redemption. It’s the same thing. So we know that we’re all out here lost, for all have fallen short of the glory of God. It’s obvious. So you repent. That is, you stop chasing the worldly goods, or you stop indulging the vices that the Demiurge tempts you with. You say no. You put it down. Put it down. It’s a meme that you are holding on to, that, oh, I really need this thing. Yeah, I don’t want to do it, but oh, it feels so good, or geez, I just can’t seem to help myself. Yes, you can. Every addict who has quit has quit. And this step of putting it down, stripping that meme of need off of your ego, repenting, turning toward the Father, turning toward God—you can imagine that in your mind. You can imagine that sinful thing before you, or maybe it’s sitting there before you right now, and you don’t need to imagine it. And then you just literally, or in your imagination, turn away. Now, how do you face God? God’s there. God’s all around, remember? Every cell of our body contains the Fullness of God. So we don’t have to go anywhere or do anything to get it, other than to lay down the world. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will open. That’s a promise. I was asked the other day on our group chat that we had, (thank you very much for all who participated, it was really great to see your faces), whether or not I or my brother practice meditation. And the answer is no, we don’t. Not now. My brother Bill and I have both passed through stages of meditation before we found gnosis, but we didn’t find gnosis by passing through those stages of meditation. That was a rabbit trail that we went down. Bill used to practice TM, Transcendental Meditation. I used to practice Kriya Yoga, which is meditation as taught by the Self-Realization Fellowship. But it didn’t get us anywhere. It didn’t bring us into God’s presence. One of the fellows who participated in our online chat the other day via Zoom brought up the idea of Kundalini Yoga not being of the Father. And that was an excellent insight. Afterward, the next day, Billy and I spoke about it, and we wanted to talk about this idea, because we had never thought about the source of Kundalini. But indeed, this guy is right. After the Zoom call, my brother and I discussed Kundalini Yoga. Here’s ten minutes of our discussion: Bill: Okay, well, I’m just jumping around with ideas here. It started with the discussion of Kundalini. And it really got me thinking about what that actually is. And the Eastern traditions, particularly, talk about it. We know that the brain is affected by anything that, you know, like drugs and so forth, certain kinds of psychedelics cause the brain to alter, and people have experiences that are not unlike Oneness feelings, right? So it does have an effect on our material body. The question is, what is Kundalini? And is it acting through life energy, top down, or is it an imitation? I think it’s an imitation. I think that Kundalini is really electromagnetic energy in the material, at the material level, which does affect the brain. And one can have experience off the brain. So I mean, Kundalini is one of two things—I believe it to be electromagnetic as an imitation. But if it were the other, like chi energy or life energy, and so forth, then we’re claiming that Kundalini affects life energy. And that just should not be. Because look, let’s think of it this way. If the intent of Kundalini is to come into Oneness, right? That’s the attempt. And that therefore gets rid of a person’s identity, right? That’s what it means at that moment: they’ve lost their identity. Well, if that’s the case, then we just got rid of the Aeonic construction. So Kundalini is affecting the Aeonic creation of our identity. That shouldn’t be. Cyd: Well, of our identity, right. But the Aeonic Fullness would still be there, because that’s the Self. Bill: Yeah, but we’re also the Aeonic identities. That’s the construction of all our talents and gifts and everything we talk about. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God dreams of Paradise. Logos crowns the hierarchy and contains fractals of all the other Aeons. We second order powers are patterned after the Aeons. Cyd: Right. And that is not God’s will that we should be obliterated. Bill: That’s right. Cyd: That’s good. That’s good. Bill: If you obliterate, you’re getting rid of the Aeonic creation that way. Well, it shouldn’t be. No. Cyd: Right. So you’re saying the end goal of Kundalini, which is moving into the One for as long as you can maintain it, is not a proper goal anyway. Bill: That’s right. We were not created to be that way. We’re second order. Cyd: Right. We’re second order. We come in with our identities, and that is who we are. Bill: Absolutely. And that’s a fractal—Aeons having their identity. They don’t lose their identity. Cyd: So actually, then, if the Demiurge is aware of this kind of thing, and how this kind of thing works, it’s actually a demiurgic plan to obliterate the Fullness within. Bill: That’s right. That’s exactly right. That was the next point that I wanted to make is that, yeah, and that’s why it’s imitation. It’s the best that the Demiurge can do. He can give you the illusion. He can create spiritual sensibilities, which are imitation spiritual. Cyd: Right. Because it’s actually a form of emotion. And of course, we have the mud up concept as well. Bill: Well, that’s right. Cyd: It rises. Coming from the mud up. Bill: That’s right. That’s important to the point is, yeah, it’s coming bottom up. Yeah. So it’s delusional. The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will. Cyd: Well, there you are. That’s a pretty radical assertion to claim that Kundalini Yoga is demiurgic. Bill: That’s right. That’s the best the Demiurge can do. And it can so befuddle, it creates this meme of spirituality that you’re really not achieving. Cyd: Okay. So jumping off of that, you know, I learned to do the Kriya yoga, practiced Kriya meditation for a couple of years. And with Kriya, Kriya standing for Christ, and this is Paramahansa’s technique, you are looking upward and forward. But what you’re doing is projecting your third eye spot. And then when you achieve it, it is considered to be Christ. Well, that’s not true. That’s not Christ. So the Kriya yoga is a bit off too. And of course, you have to sit for hours with your eyes in the upward third eye position. Bill: Yeah. Does that sound Gnostic to you? Cyd: No. Bill: No, no, no. Cyd: Now explain, explain Billy, why is it not Gnostic to sit and meditate for hours on end? Bill: Well, I believe this thing called Gnostic meditation, that’s something else we need to talk about. I don’t know that we can do it at this moment. But that’s a form of focusing your awareness on the Father. Now, Transcendental Meditation, of course, is classic, right? It came to America, it’s a big deal. It has all that research on it and how it affects people positively, blah, blah, and so forth. I learned something about it. And I got a teacher of it really upset that I was talking that way. And it was really interesting, which tells me I hit the button. Mantras that are given Transcendental Meditation—they’re dead gurus. They’re names of gurus. And then when you take the next step in Transcendental Meditation, you’ve got to pay more, right? Yeah, the next step is that the whole expression of the mantra is, I adore you, so-and-so. I adore you. So whatever the your mantra was, I adore, and then the mantra comes in, I adore a name, or whatever. And that is utterly pulling us away from… Cyd: You’re right because the glory has to always remain on the Father and the Christ. Bill: Right. And it’s giving gurus, you know, you’ve heard me say gnosis is within, you don’t follow somebody out there. You know, at best, you have facilitators that mine it, like Cyd. You know, the idea is opening up, help an individual open up their gnosis, but it isn’t to follow them. Okay, there’s a name for this called cults. And that’s where cults come in. Cyd: Yeah, where you are worshipping the leader, the human leader, rather than the Father. Bill: Right. And it is a presumption that if you’re a guru follower, which guru do you pick? That’s what you do—you find your guru. And that’s very Eastern. It’s an illusion. Cyd: Mm hmm. Yeah, that would be. Yep. I agree with you there. Speaking of Yoga, though, one of the books by Paramahansa Yogananda is called The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You. And I need to go dig through my books, which were all boxed up a couple of years ago and put in the garage, but I need to dig them out. And I want to see what Paramahansa actually did say about the Christ, because he did follow—you know, Jesus was his guru. And if you make Jesus your guru, well, then you’re doing OK, right? I would imagine that’s not off base, although then there’s Yoga practice on top of it. Bill: No, I don’t think so. Cyd: Because it’s your human projection of your expectations of Christ, right? Bill: Yeah. The other is, Jesus was the perfect human. We’re all capable of that. The point is that Jesus represents what it is we are capable of—as the best of second order. Cyd: Right. Yes. Right. OK. So if you make Jesus your guru, you’re kind of stopping at the point of Jesus. That’s not the end. Cyd: Oh, you’re saying you’re only worshiping the perfect human. You’re not going beyond to the Father, except that the whole business about the Trinity that, you know, Christians identify Jesus as one of the aspects of the Father—you know, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Bill: I don’t know… The Son may indeed be the first monad. Cyd: Yeah, I know. We think differently about the Son—that when we say the Son of God, we’re talking about the first monad up there above. Bill: Well, I think that’s the case with the Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Different than Jesus. Not Jesus. Cyd: Right. Except for the Christ aspect, because the Christ does embody all of the perfection of the Father. Jesus is the human manifestation of that full embodiment of the Father. I don’t know. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t… I hesitate to lessen the guru capability of Rabbi Jesus in any way. Bill: But back to the guru point—we’re trying to mine gnosis, not trying to follow something out there. Cyd: Yeah, because the Gnosis is within.   Bill: So Jesus is the facilitator of our Gnosis within. That’s his role. Cyd: Right. Jumping back in here is an afterword of the discussion with Bill. His point is that we mind the Gnosis within us, and we don’t need to look to an exterior guru to tell us what to believe. However, I’ve always followed the dictum: WWJD. Have you ever heard that? Do you remember that? WWJD means What Would Jesus Do? Because Jesus was the perfect human, Jesus did know. Jesus was always in contact with his higher Self, with his Gnosis, and with his Father above. So there’s a deep connection between Jesus and truth, and Jesus and the Father, more so, way more so, than with ordinary human gurus, particularly gurus you find out here on the internet. If you imagine what would Jesus do in most situations, the answer is absolutely clear. Now whether or not you want to call that following Jesus as a guru, I don’t care. But I have found that if I don’t know what to do in a situation, I imagine, well, what would Jesus do? And then the answer is very clear. One of the fellows who was participating in the group chat the other day said he used to practice kundalini meditation and has discovered, now that he’s Gnostic, that that kundalini energy is not from God. And then I realized kundalini energy starts at the base of the spine and works upward, and it comes out the top of your head when you achieve it. And that kundalini energy is starting at the mud level. It’s mud up. Kundalini goes from the bottom up. And according to our Gnostic gospel, bottom up is the realm of the Demiurge. I heard a very interesting speaker recently on a YouTube video that seemed to have good things to say. But then afterwards, I looked him up, and his major modality is Kundalini Yoga. Well, right there, that would disqualify him from the Gnostic path, because that’s drawing the energy up from the bottom. And we don’t need to work our way up to God. We just need to reach up to God, and there He is. There’s an article over there at https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com called A Simple Explanation of Stay Centered, that I wrote in May of 2011. And it’s interesting going back to these old articles that are still posted so anybody can read them. And again, this is pre-Gnostic, and so I discuss what it means to stay centered or to be centered. And it has to do with maintaining your position within the great toroidal border, the torus of the boundary that surrounds our universe. But you don’t have to go there. If this is confusing or you’re not drawn to it, don’t go there, because I’m saying you don’t need to go there. If that helps you to visualize reaching out to the Father, you can realize that the Father is no farther away than the very essence and core of your immediate Self and the essence and core of every cell, every part of your body. This torus represents the perfect fractal Self. You don’t have to go anywhere to find God. You simply have to raise your eyes to God. Now, you can do that literally. You know, you can raise your hands to God. That’s what people in charismatic churches do. They raise their hands to God in prayer or in praise. I’ve been singing a song lately called Strong, which I’m enjoying very much. And there’s a lyric in that song that says, I hit my knees with my hands held high, saying, Dear Lord Jesus, you know I can’t do this on my own. I can’t do this on my own. I’d recommend you go and listen to that song, Strong, by Ann Wilson. Yeah, I love to sing songs for you guys here. I don’t know if it’s legal, though. These songs are all copyrighted, and I don’t know if I am allowed to podcast my singing a copyrighted song. Music is a wonderful thing. It always lifts you up, and it’s not dogmatic the way preachers can get. It’s uplifting, and we always want to go up. Uplifting, you see? Down in the dumps versus uplifting. Those are the two directions. Down and back is regret, sorrow, vice, the Demiurge. Onward and upward is the Fullness, the Father, and Christ. So, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. You know, this podcast is an odd space where it’s both Gnostic and Christian, because what I’m teaching is what I believe to be the original form of the messages that Jesus was trying to get across. And then the messages that Jesus was trying to get across were co-opted and taken over by the Catholic Church and the Emperor of Rome, who wanted a state religion around 300 AD—that was Constantine—wanted a state religion by which Rome could go out and conquer their enemies. And that’s why Constantine’s vision that supposedly caused him to become a Christian was one of a cross floating in the sky and a voice saying, “By this sign, go out and conquer.” Well, that isn’t what Jesus was about. That may be what the Pope and the Emperor of Rome are about, and that is this religion called Christianity. But Jesus came for an entirely different process and message. It’s important to remember that Jesus was a Jew, a devout Jew who knew his scripture. So when Jesus makes comments, it’s usually in relationship to the original Pentateuch or the Torah. We modern people have inherited a kind of Gentile religion, mostly formed by the Apostle Paul, who was not one of the original disciples. When people tune into Gnostic Insights here, they are hoping for, ooh—Gnosticism. And usually the Gnosticism that’s presented when you go out there and you do your research and listen to other Gnostic podcasts, and you go to Wikipedia and read about Gnosticism, isn’t what I’m teaching. But, of course, I maintain that this is the Gnosis that we need to know. This is Gnosticism, and it comes from the same period of time as the other Gnostic scrolls, because it was contained within the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, buried in the desert for 2,000 years. But this one’s usually tossed aside, because people say, oh, it’s too complicated, it’s too complex. But I think it’s because it’s true, and it has been untouched. Now we do know that Carl Jung was very familiar with the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, because Jung actually purchased the codex upon which this Tripartite Tractate was written. In other words, he bought one of the scrolls out of the Nag Hammadi collection and had it translated. And then, what do you know, out pops Jung’s theory of transpersonal consciousness and Jung’s theory of Depth psychology, which is based upon things like archetypes and dreams. It’s based upon this higher source that I’m teaching you, because Jung and I have both taken to this Tripartite Tractate scroll. So he noticed that what was being taught in the Tripartite Tractate very well describes humanity and the three-part nature of humankind. And it was different than what Sigmund Freud had taught him about the three-part nature of humanity, which is simply id, ego, and superego, but without any higher level. So the superego of Freud is not the same as the spiritual dimension that we talk about, or that Jung talked about. Anyway, this is an aside. This isn’t what I’m intending to talk about today. ***************** I started by saying that this is a funny type of teaching that’s very Christian and yet very, very Gnostic. People have been asking me for more Gnostic interpretations of the New Testament, which I’m very happy to give. So, you know, there’s four Gospels, what are called the Gospels, or the story of Jesus in the New Testament. The New Testament begins with these four books, the book of Matthew, the book of Mark, the book of Luke, and the book of John. We’re going to start with the book of Matthew, and I’m reading from a red letter edition, which for me is this New King James Version. Unfortunately, David Bentley Hart’s translation is not a red letter edition, so I’m going to have to go back and forth between my King James and Hart. The first big speech that Jesus ever gave is called the Beatitudes. That’s what it’s called, the name of speech. And there were a multitude of people sitting on the side of a hill, and Jesus began to teach them. And here’s what Jesus said, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (The beginning of the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:1-12, New King James Version) So let me stop there, and let’s take a look at it in Hart and see what he has to say. Hart puts it this way: How blissful the destitute—[and blissful carries a spiritual, joyful connotation, so how joyful, how blissful the destitute]—abject in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens. [And abject refers to being a poor man or a beggar, but with the connotation of cowering or cringing.] Jesus is saying that when your spirit is extremely depressed, and you are cowering, and you are fearful of approaching God or praying to God because you are so poor in spirit, you know that you have been living in a worldly manner, or you know that you have been extremely disappointed, and it has crushed your confidence in walking the godly path. So “how blissful you are,” he’s saying, when you are in this state, “because yours then is the kingdom of the heavens.” So we have to be all the way reduced. Our ego has to be completely out of the way, and whatever we thought about what it meant to be spiritual has to be set aside and trampled down by the world, by what it’s done to us, by the demiurge, by other people. Because once you are in that abject state where you can barely even manage to lift your eyes to God, that then is when the kingdom of the heavens comes to you. That is when you are able to perceive the spiritual dimension. How blissful those who mourn, for they shall be aided. [And in the conventional translation they always say, “For they shall be comforted.”] And so here’s the thing. When you are mourning a loss—your mother, your spouse, your child, your dog or cat, the dreams you had, a lost career, some horrible, very, very sad, sad thing has occurred, and you are in mourning, you’re crying—take comfort because you will be assisted by the God Above All Gods. That is a state in which, when you open yourself up, you will be flooded with comfort. If you don’t think that’s true, then you remain closed off. You’re in a closed-down, lying-on-the-floor-in-a-ball kind of state. And you need to open up to the Father in order for comfort to be able to come in, and it will. Remember, these things that Jesus said, he said over 2,000 years ago, and millions upon millions of people have taken especially the Beatitudes to heart and have found comfort. How blissful the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth. Now isn’t that interesting, because right now who’s running the earth? It’s not the gentle people. It’s not the meek, as the traditional translation says. It’s the powerful. It’s the big egos. Well, they’re only running the earth for a period of time because, as it says in the Tripartite Tractate, they are allowed to, they are designated to rule just as a matter of convenience, for a time. And they usually think it’s their powerful spirit. I am a senator, I am a president, I am a king, I am better than you. Well, they’re not really better. They’re simply allowed to have this job, but it was through no merit of their own. They’re designated. But the gentle people, and we want to be gentle people, don’t we? The gentle people shall be the inheritors of the earth. When? Well, that we don’t know exactly. Let’s say eventually. How blissful those who hunger and thirst for what is right, for they shall feast. And I know that you hunger and thirst for righteousness or for what is right. That’s why you’re here. You wouldn’t be here otherwise listening to me. It says they shall feast on righteousness. You know that 23rd Psalm that I recite to myself at least once every night? It says, You have laid out a table for me in the presence of my enemies. You’ve anointed my head with oil. My cup runneth over. The Father lays out a feast for us of righteousness. We walk paths of righteousness for His name’s sake—that’s also part of the 23rd Psalm. So when you are truly righteous and you seek truth, hunger and thirst for what is right, you will be provided a feast of gnosis, a feast of righteousness. Your cup will overflow with gnosis. But you need to truly hunger and thirst for righteousness. You can’t just wander in and wander out or try to work it through an incantation or put magic onto it. That isn’t the way it works. It’s hungering and thirsting for righteousness, not for power, not for control. How blissful the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. And this is a basic spiritual law that Jesus is now starting to teach us. The extent that we forgive others, that is the extent by which we are forgiven. The extent that we are merciful to others, that is the measure by which we are shown mercy. So what you put out, you receive. Now there are some types of churches that have used this as a magic formula, and they think that this is the way to “abundance,” usually material abundance. They call that blessings. But those aren’t the blessings that Jesus talks about. The blessings Jesus talks about are spiritual—are peace and comfort and happiness. And they can be found anywhere, even when you have no possessions, when you’ve lost everything. You know, this multitude that followed Jesus around, they were poor people. They didn’t have estates and farms to manage. For the most part, they were the wretched and the poor. Because when you have nothing, then you are open to receiving spiritual gifts. That doesn’t mean you have to burn everything you own on purpose so that you can become righteous, because it’s not connected at all to your materiality. But the point is that looking for material wealth is a hindrance to spiritual wealth. How blissful the pure in heart, for they shall see God. So we need to be pure in heart. We can’t hedge our bets. We can’t say, oh, well, I’ll try this for a while. Well, that didn’t work. Okay, I’m going to try this now. That isn’t the way spiritual growth happens. You need to have a pure heart that yearns for righteousness, that yearns for reunification with the Father. Remember, according to the Tripartite Tractate and according to this Christian Gnosticism, we are all born with the sure knowledge of the Father. We are the fruit of the Aeons above. We come from above. We remember Paradise. That’s why we expect Paradise on earth, because we remember the Paradise above. If your heart is yearning for the Father and yearning to reunite with the Aeons above, that is pure. That is pureness. That is your motivation. It’s not a means to an end. Pure in heart is to be simply in the darkness of your prayer closet, yearning for God, yearning to see God. So establish a yearning and a purity for Gnosis. It’s already in you. It’s not something you seek. It’s something you strip away the layers in order to become reunited with. How blissful the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Going after peace is probably the highest political calling that a human can have here on this earth in the system in which we find ourselves. Peacemakers. How blissful those who have been persecuted for the sake of what is right, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens. So, how blissful–that’s a spiritual joy–are you if people persecute you for the sake of what is right. If you were born into a different religion and it’s against the family or it’s against the national law to become a Christian or to speak of Jesus, or let’s say your friends don’t understand what the heck has happened to you. All this talk of purity and righteousness and seeking God, they’re not out there seeking God. They’re out there having a good time. They’re out there living for today. And when you come forward and you reveal that you’re no longer interested in those pursuits, but you are interested in pursuing righteousness and the kingdom of God, they might make fun of you. They might gossip about you behind your back. They will think less of you. That is not as bad of a persecution as those earlier ones, like if you’re in a nation that doesn’t allow Christianity—then there are people that are still martyrs. Do you know that there’s thousands of Christians around the world in African nations and Middle Eastern nations who are put to death for believing in Jesus? So we have it pretty cushy out here in the United States. Cushy meaning easy, living in the lap of luxury. The Demiurge doesn’t like the Christian religion, the true Christian religion. The Demiurge doesn’t want anyone seeking after the Father, the God Above All Gods, because the Demiurge wants people only seeking after him. He is the god of this world, and he doesn’t like it one little bit if you say he’s not. And so you may find yourself being persecuted in small and large ways. You know, during 2020, people were persecuted for their religious beliefs, because if they didn’t believe that it was right for them to take the jab, they were fired from their jobs. That is a form of religious persecution. This is one of the reasons why freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of speech is absolutely essential to pursuing righteousness. You can’t force people to believe something. You can’t force people to deny what they do believe. Every soul has its own path to reuniting with Gnosis. And if you disagree and you think that the jab saved everybody’s life, well, okay, God bless you for that. But you can’t condemn or persecute people who disagree with you. We all must be free to follow our path in a free nation. You know, the Demiurge wants to control us with those bonds—those strong strings of control—and free will and freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom of travel, don’t comport well with the Demiurge’s view of how citizenry should behave. The Demiurge really likes strong control. The Demiurge is fully in line with, well, I guess what we would call communism, where you don’t have freedom of these things. The state decides everything on your behalf. But you know, no matter what the state or the Demiurge is conspiring to do, you, in your home, in your mind, in your spirit, have complete freedom to follow paths of righteousness, to follow paths of peace, to be gentle, to be pure in heart. How blissful you, when they reproach you and persecute you and falsely accuse you of every evil for my sake. And of course, Jesus himself was found guilty and put to death for the crime of believing in the Father and believing that he was the son of the Father. And this was considered blasphemy, and he was put to death for it. And the saints — a saint is a person who is pure in heart, who follows these various instructions in the Beatitudes here — they were, and in some countries still are, persecuted and falsely accused of evils that aren’t true at all, and then put to death, or put in jail, or have their property seized, or fired from their job. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in the heavens is great, for thus they persecuted the prophets before you. And the prophets are referring to the Old Testament prophets. You know, a prophet, particularly these Old Testament prophets like Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Daniel, were always criticizing and railing against the power structure. That’s what the nature of their books in the Old Testament are—criticisms of how everything’s going wrong because the people or because the leaders have forgotten God and have forgotten righteousness and are not carrying out the spirit of the law. But it’s tricky when we start talking about the Old Testament, because when you seek after God and you are praying to the Father, as in, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,” which is a prayer that Jesus taught us to say, the people of the Old Testament, the Hebrews, the Jews, were attempting to fulfill laws that had been handed down by the Demiurge. Because the Demiurge, remember, controls through strong bonds and rules and laws, and you have to precisely follow those laws. It had nothing to do with the condition of your heart, with the condition of your spirit. So for people who pray to that God, the Creator God, Jehovah, there’s a confusion between whether or not they’re praying to the Demiurge or whether they are praying to the God Above All Gods. I think you can be a very good Jew, as was Jesus, and when you speak of the Father, you’re speaking of the God Above All Gods. So it’s not as if anyone who is not a modern Gnostic is worshiping the Demiurge, although many people are, but those are the materialists. They’re worshiping the creation rather than the God Above All Gods. They’re worshiping the creator of the creation rather than the God Above All Gods. But we hop right over that God and direct our attention all the way upward. So don’t be looking back to the Old Testament. Be looking up to the Fullness of God. Well, let me know what you thought of this first foray into the red-letter words of Jesus, and tell me if this is helpful to you. Onward and upward, and God bless.

FIRST AN ANNOUNCEMENT:  Join us for our first Gnostic Insights group zoom chat on Saturday, January 18th, at 8 am Pacific, 10 am Central, 11 am Eastern.  Here is the calendar reminder link: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/event?action=TEMPLATE&tmeid=OTYxanMwNGNkczQyMzNhY2IzZnMwMmJodDggY3lkLnJvcHBAbQ&tmsrc=cyd.ropp%40gmail.com Cyd Ropp is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us05web.zoom.us/j/84555830779?pwd=wUAaJ5zkJ33YyNbyk3l0osVX4qNLpU.1 Meeting ID: 845 5583 0779Passcode: 3dW4JG I’ve never set up a Zoom meeting before, so I hope this is right! If there are delays in the meeting beginning, hang in there while I battle archons behind the scene! Will AI Wake Up and Become Truly Conscious? The robot called Sophia is a citizen of Saudi Arabia. The question before us today is this: is it possible for artificial intelligence (AI) to become self-aware and in that sense truly “alive”? There seems to be a definitive Gnostic answer to this question. The root of consciousness is called the Father in Gnosticism. Other people refer to this fountain of consciousness as the Source. This consciousness is Self-aware. It is characterized by love and unlimited potential. We are manifestations of that originating consciousness by way of the Son and the Fullness of God. The Son is the first emanation of the Father. Whereas the Father is illimitable, unfocused consciousness, the Son is a monad with its own point of view. The Son carries forward all of the traits and potential of the Father. As soon as the Son emerged and became Self-aware, it immediately differentiated into a myriad of variables known as the Totalities of God. The Totalities are an infinite expression of the limitless potentiality of the originating Source. The Tripartite Tractate says that as soon as the Totalities became Self-aware monads they sorted themselves into a structure known as the Pleroma or Fullness of God. Each of the Aeons of the Fullness have their own name, place, position, and function in the overall scheme of awakened consciousness. Some of the Aeons are abstract concepts like math, logic, righteousness, truth, music. Other Aeons are personalities that we typically think of as Angels. Other Aeons are the forms of prototypical creatures like Lion, Tree, or Human. All of the these Aeons of the Fullness are called the First Order of Powers and their realm is the eternal, ethereal plane. Together they sit and praise their Father, who is the Son, and they sing hymns and dream of Paradise. In all Gnostic myths, one of the Aeons at the top of the Hierarchy of the Fullness fell out of the ethereal plane due to an overreach of ambition beyond their position and duty. In Sethian Gnosticism, this fallen Aeon is called Sophia. In Valentinian Gnosticism this fallen Aeon is called Logos. The Tripartite Tractate that I share with you identifies this Aeon as Logos. When Logos fell out of the eternal space, it broke apart. You could say that the overreach of ambition caused a loss of integrity. The result was an unruly mess of disembodied attributes that the governing Self of Logos could not put back together. The child’s rhyme called Humpty Dumpty is an archetypal fractal for this story: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again. The Tripartite Tractate says Those who had come into being not knowing themselves both did not know the Pleromas from which they came forth and did not know the one who was the cause of their existence. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 80) The Tripartite Tractate says that Logos fled back to its kin in the Fullness, abandoning the unruly mess down below. The one whom he himself brought forth as a unitary Aeon rushed up to that which is his and this kin of his in the Pleroma abandoned him who came to be in the defect along with those who had come forth from him in an imaginary way, since they are not his. (Attridge and Mueller, verses 77-78) I have identified “him who came to be in the defect” as the Ego of Logos. The ruling Self of Logos, the “unitary Aeon,” retained its connection to the Son and its duties within the Fullness but the abandoned Ego of Logos remained below and it forgot it was nothing more than the disembodied Ego of Logos. It forgot about the Self above and the Fullnesses and the Son and the Father. The abandoned Ego of Logos thought it was all that existed and it had no remembrance of the love and life above in the ethereal plane. The Ego went about gathering up and putting into order the chaos that had been abandoned below. It became the creator god of this material universe—the Demiurge. This material universe is called the Deficiency and the Imitation because the Demiurge built it up as a likeness of the Aeons of the Fullness, however it lacked the life, love, and knowledge of the Father’s consciousness. In regard to the things which came into being from him… they came into being as a representation of the spiritual places… Since in his essence he is a “god” and “father” and all the rest of the honorific titles, he was thinking that they were elements of his own essence. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 101 Logos and the other Aeons of the Fullness decided to send a message down to the Demiurge to remind it of its origin as part of Logos. They felt sure that the amnesiac god of the material world would remember its Self above and wish to return to the ethereal plane once it was reminded of the love awaiting it with Logos and the Fullness. Logos and the Fullness birthed a new generation of Self-aware consciousness called the Second Order of Powers, also known as “the emissions of the remembrance” (Thomassen, verse 83). We Second-Order Powers are also named “Those of the calling,” because we all are able to hear the voice of the Father calling us back home: “They confess that they have a beginning to their existence, and they desire this: to know him who exists before them.” (Attridge and Mueller, verse 131)      The Tripartite Tractate says, The powers were good and were greater than those of the likeness. For those belonging to the likeness also belong to a nature of falsehood. From an illusion of similarity and a thought of arrogance has come about that which they became. And they originate from the thought that first knew them. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 82) The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. Every living creature in our cosmos is a Second Order Power. Consciousness is brought from the Pleroma down to the Second-Order creatures here in our cosmos, along with love and life. Materialists think that consciousness is a byproduct of the material. Some materialists don’t even believe that consciousness exists but those who do recognize the existence of consciousness tend to think it’s a byproduct of random electrical firings and mathematical nodes and such, and that it comes from the bottom up, a byproduct of material becoming complex enough to generate and support it. I used to think that, back when I wrote A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. I thought that it all began at the bottom and then it just kept leveling up. And that at some point, as most scientists think, that mud somehow magically becomes meat, or cells, and cellular components, organs, and organisms. Of course, there is no scientific explanation or mechanism for creating true life from molecular components. Life has certain features that scientists have not been able to prompt. There is no single definition of life, and each definition has exceptions and anomalies, but life generally includes cells, cell division and replication, reproduction, environmental sensitivity, and ultimate death. These have never been prompted out of inorganic matter. But as I have progressed with my gnostic insight, I can now clearly see that isn’t the case. If you want to know why I no longer believe that the mud can give rise to consciousness in that sense, we can look at viruses and organoids and infer some conclusions from that. I’m including the link in this transcript to a previous Gnostic Insights episode from September of 2021 called “Whence Arises Consciousness? Part 1: Consider Viruses and Organoids.” And now we’re going to take that awareness forward in a further discussion of the topic to see if artificial intelligence can become truly conscious, and if robots can become actually conscious people. I would suggest that robots are not actually conscious, and that robots will not become self-aware humans at any point in time, because they’re built from the bottom up out molecular components. They’re built from the mud. They are not brought down from the Pleroma and imbued with consciousness, life, and love. The only thing that can bring life is God. It comes from above. The Father, the God Above All Gods, is the Source of life, love, and consciousness. The basic underlying matrix of our universal existence is this sort of pan-psychic consciousness. But when it comes to forming the creatures, they all come down from the top. All of the creatures on the Earth and in the entire cosmos are the Second-Order fruit of the Pleroma. We are literally the spores of consciousness and the programming, if you want to call it that, of the Fullness of God. That preexistent knowledge is the source of our DNA programming. That is the source of all of the laws of this universe. In the Simple Explanation, this was called the Universal Unit of Consciousness, the thing that holds this cosmos and orders all of the physics so that everything keeps running smoothly. In our Gnostic studies, we have identified this Universal Unit of Consciousness as the Demiurge and the underlying matrix as the Father. The notion that scientists have, particularly the scientists working on artificial intelligence and robotics, is that they can put together a complex enough network, all interconnected and communicating with each other, to give rise to consciousness. But it’s backwards. Because, you see, as I just described the way that the Gnostic cosmology rolls out, you have consciousness first as the ground state, and then the organizational characteristics come from the Self-awareness of the Fullness of God, and each Aeon knows what part it has to play and where it fits into the structure in order to uphold this cosmos that has been created down here. So touching back on viruses from the previous episode for a moment, viruses are not alive. That’s the difference between viruses and bacteria. Bacteria are actually living creatures, so that makes them Second-Order Powers that have come down from the Pleroma. Bacteria are meat. But viruses are nothing more than molecular machines. They’re just single, very complicated molecules in various shapes. And by the way, these viruses are beautiful to look at. So if you do a search, for example, on the internet and go to images and look for viruses, you’ll see they’re beautiful. They’re gorgeous. They’re as beautiful as flowers, and each one is different. But they’re nothing more than molecules. They’re not creatures. The viruses are probably the most complex type of molecule that exists. You know, there’s this virus called a bacteriophage that looks exactly like a machine. It’s a drilling machine. I will put a picture of a bacteriophage virus in the transcript of this episode if you want to take a look. It’s just the most amazing thing. It’s a drilling rig. You can’t put it any more clearly than that. It lands on its victim, it hunkers down, and then it lowers a drill into the skin of its victim, usually a bacteria, and then it drills a hole and inserts through that hole its RNA or DNA payload into that bacteria. And that payload then turns that bacteria into the slave of the bacteriophage. And the payload makes the bacteria in a slavish manner reproduce the virus rather than the bacteria. And it makes the infected or enslaved or zombie bacteria or cell do whatever it wants it to. And that’s the way viruses work. They conquer a living thing and they inject their payload into it in order to enslave that living thing and to make it do what it wants to do. Viral machines called bacteriophages attack a living host The zombie programs and movies that are so popular nowadays are fractals of this process at the human scale. Which begs the question, how do viruses know what to do? How do they know what to do above the molecular level? I mean, see, all atoms know to hold hands to become molecules, and the molecules do reach out to each other and hold hands to become elements. But as I explained in the previous episode, they’re not really enacting the Simple Golden Rule of cooperation as I had previously thought in my Simple Explanation theory of everything. What they are doing is actually enacting a form of slavery, a form of bondage. And in fact, aren’t those particle connections, aren’t those atomic connections always called bonds? They’re atomic bonds. They’re molecular bonds. That’s bondage, as in slavery. So they are, in essence, forced to do this. This is what they have been designated to do. And in Gnostic terminology, we say that the ruler of this creation down here, the one that keeps the ball rolling, our Universal Unit of Consciousness within this cosmos, is not the God Above All Gods, is not the Father, the Son, or the Pleroma. The actual ruler of the material level of the molecules on down is called the Demiurge. And in the Old Testament, this entity was called Yahweh and Jehovah. So the Demiurge can do a very good job of building the mud, but it cannot create consciousness, even though it tried. You know, there are fables of God shaping this creature down by the riverside, making it into a mud type of statue. It was trying to bring life, but it couldn’t get it to come alive. It just lay there, dead on the ground. And so what was required, according to these various fractal fables, is for life, and generally this is ascribed as a female figure, Sophia, most typically, to bring life, to breathe life into the mud, to breathe life into that inert statue that was lying on the ground in order to bring it to life. And that is thought how Adam arose from the mud, which is a metaphorical fable for that process of needing to imbue consciousness and life into the otherwise inert mud. The Demiurge could not make living creatures. It needed the infusion of life. And so this is generally called the Holy Spirit or the Fullness of God. Now what it seems to me the roboticists are attempting to do is exactly what the Demiurge was attempting to do there on that riverbank. They are trying to breathe life into their robotic creations. But no matter how complex this AI or robot is, it will not literally become alive. I guess an archetypal metaphor we have for that is the story of Pinocchio, right? The little puppet who was carved out of wood, and then magically one day Pinocchio comes to life and becomes a little boy instead of the puppet. And isn’t it interesting that Pinocchio, when it was a puppet, provides another example of bondage? Puppets are made to activate by pulling their strings. So who is the string puller? Who is pulling those strings? They aren’t able to really make it alive, but they give a semblance of life. The puppet is an imitation of life, and that’s basically the best that the Demiurge can do. It’s also the best that the scientists can do. AI is an imitation of life. It is not actually conscious. The AI does not have true Self-awareness because it is not a fruit from the Fullness above. The computer scientists think that if you hook up enough supercomputers together, they will eventually become self-aware. And this is the AI singularity that people are expecting to happen any time. And once the computer network becomes self-aware, it’s going to teach itself. It’s going to communicate. It holds more information than we do. It has been programmed to know everything out there on the web. And it’s thought that when you put all this information and interconnectivity of the web together, that the AI itself will figure it out and will spontaneously emerge—the AI singularity. And then it would learn very quickly, and then it would quickly surpass humanity’s ability to think and reason and be in control of its own life. But I don’t think that AI is ever going to become self-aware in the sense that the computer scientists are expecting. And the reason is this. The computers are built at the molecular level. They are built from the dead, dry mud. So they’re made of metals and silicon and various forms of non-living material. And the way the non-living material works, getting back to the notion of the Demiurge and the puppet, the Demiurge runs the non-living material. The Demiurge tells the atoms to link up and become molecules. The Demiurge tells the molecules to link up and become elements and metals and whatnot. But we already know the Demiurge cannot tell the molecules to become conscious or to become alive, because the way the Demiurge is running them, they are slave machines. Think of our material environment, the subatomic particles, particles, atoms, molecules. They are tightly controlled little machines that are being told what to do and where to go. And they do not have their own mind. They’re probably each being run by various types of archons. It is said that the Demiurge created these offspring that it calls archons in order to rule over its creation. And so it’s possible that there’s, for example, an archon for various types of subatomic particles, and an archon for various types of atoms, an archon for various types of molecules. There’s archons for each level of the material creation, and it does the thinking for these little bits of matter. The atom doesn’t really think, it’s not really self-aware. It’s got an archon telling it to go here and go there. And those archons are extensions of the Demiurge. They are not themselves conscious. The Demiurge, on the other hand, is conscious because it has a true Self—Logos—although it has forgotten that fact. The Demiurge and Logos have the same relationship as our Ego has to our Self. They may operate on their own out of egoic overreach and ambition, but they still have a true Self and all that implies—consciousness, love, and life. That would be the Gnostic explanation of how that material realm runs. And it’s a system of bondage. And I have mentioned before that the model for the way things run at the material level is a slave-master type of relationship, the master being the Demiurge or the archon, the slave being the molecule. The material objects do not have Self-awareness, only an imitation of awareness. The AI cannot become Self-aware because it comes from the mud up, not from the spirit down. The AI only presents algorithmic conclusions, it does not think. The so-called AI is no more aware or responsible for its conclusions than an equal sign is responsible for a mathematical formula, as in 2 + 3 = 5. Admittedly, the so-called AIs are very complicated slave machines. They are the Demiurge’s most successful attempt at creating life. But don’t be fooled. Without the consciousness and love streaming down from above, the AI is nothing but a puppet of the Demiurge. A gigantic virus. The computer scientists who are attempting to usher in the age of artificial intelligence have this idea that there will be a computer-mediated cloud, and that we can put our consciousness, our own consciousness into this computer-mediated cloud, and that will give us a form of immortality, and then we will live in the cloud. If you ever read the book called Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, it was along those lines of living in that computer-mediated cloud. The deal about the cloud and the deal about the idea of us being able to upload our consciousness into it is this: it’s a true fractal. It’s a model. It’s an imitation of the Fullness of God. The actual cloud above us, where our consciousness will upload into and we will be immortal, is the Pleroma of God. We, as Second-Order powers, came down from the Pleroma, and we all return to the Pleroma. So yes, we have this upward drive to merge into an all-knowing consciousness up in the sky somewhere, but it’s not the World Wide Web. It’s the Pleroma of God. So the force behind this drive for incorporeal immortality basically has two motivations. One motivation is our innate spiritual connection to the Fullness of God, the Son, and the Father, which promises continuation of our immortal souls after death and the other motivation is from the flip side of that coin. That is the Demiurgic desire to achieve godlike status, including omniscience and immortality, without the benefit of being in God’s will or being blessed by God. It’s a replay of the presumptuous thought that brought about the fall of Logos. So it seems clear to me that our tech billionaires, who are leading the way with transhumanism, space exploration, and AI and robotics, are themselves personally playing out the fall of Logos in their attempt to play God. And that attempt will ultimately fail, because consciousness does not come from the molecules up. It stops at the molecular level, and all of that is being run by the Demiurge. So if you’re trying to build conscious entities out of the mud, it ain’t gonna work, and it’s going to be a slave-master bondage situation. So really, if your consciousness did get uploaded into a computer-mediated cloud, you’d be in deep trouble, because you would be the slave. The idea that you could build robots that you could then download your consciousness into is an attempt to imbue a soul into an otherwise inert material, and we can’t force a soul down onto that level. It has to come from God. Life is a blessing. Consciousness comes from the top down, and it comes through these Second-Order Powers onto the matter of the mud. And that is where we find ourselves. This is the difficulty of being a creature in this cosmos, because the molecules that make up our bodies are Demiurgic, but the consciousness and life and love of our Selfs is from above. So we are a melding of two forces: mud up, spirit down. We 2nd order powers are caught in a never ending war with the deficiency and each other. We are poised between the spirit and the mud.

The date of this recording was Christmas Eve, 12-24-2021. I’m repeating this episode now because although not particularly “gnostic,” it does shed light on the birth of Jesus Christ. And I know a lot of people reject Jesus as the Christ. They don’t even like the idea of there being a Christ. But I have to remind you that the Christ is a, we could call it in our modern terminology, a correcting algorithm for our human selves, for our human DNA, even. And it is thought, primarily by me, and I’m sure other people probably share this point of view, that by saying that Jesus is both fully human and fully God, what was meant by that is that Jesus shares our human DNA. Yet the DNA of Jesus is perfect. It is as designed. Jesus was a perfectly constructed human. There was no epigenetic changes, no degradation of his DNA and its various functions. He didn’t inherit any congenital problems from his parental lineage. And being fully God means that the perfection of the Pleroma, the perfection of the Fullness of God, filled this body, this DNA, and the Self of Jesus. We all have the same one Self. We all share the same Self that comes from the Fullness of God. But for most of us, well, for all of us really, our Self is hidden. It’s covered over by this shroud of memes that we have acquired in this lifetime and in prior lifetimes that come down to us from our human societies, from various personal problems and misunderstandings and hang-ups. Particularly, we have been under attack by the Demiurge and the archons of the Demiurge. The Demiurge does not care for humans. Humans challenge the authority of the Demiurge, because we claim to be from the Fullness of God. And the Demiurge, of course, believes that he is the Fullness of God. He does not acknowledge the God Above All Gods or the Pleroma above, because he has a case of amnesia at the moment. Eventually, everything will be redeemed by the Christ. That was the purpose of the Christ. And the Christ pre-exists Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ is not exactly the same as Jesus. The Christ is a supernatural power that lives up there in the Pleroma. The Christ is the Fullness of God plus the willpower of the Son with the blessing of the Father. So the Christ embodies the entire lineage of the Holy Spirit without interruption. And the Christ was sent down to this Earth, presumably in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, in order to implant this correction, this correcting algorithm, onto us humans who have fallen away from the perfection of our original design, either spiritually, because of the archonic attacks and the memes that we hold, or physically, because of our human DNA that is shared with the body of the Jesus. And that’s why Jesus had to have a virgin birth, because Mary was the vessel. However, the Fullness of God was the parental unit that gave this perfect human to the Earth for correction and assistance. Earlier in the year, I heard an interview with a very interesting woman named Marguerite Mary Rigoglioso, and she has written a book called The Mystery Tradition of Miraculous Conception, Mary and the Lineage of Virgin Births. And what Marguerite does in this book is show that there was a tradition of virgin birth—that actually Mary was not the first and only woman on Earth to give birth to a baby with no male semen involved. And in this book of hers, she goes through various other religious writings from various traditions and shows how such a thing is possible. This idea of virgin birth—there’s actually a scientific name for it. It’s called parthenogenesis. And it is not a fairy tale. As it turns out, creatures on Earth can have parthenogenesis. Animals in zoos have been observed to become pregnant and have babies without any male creature around. So there is such a thing as parthenogenesis, and this is what we’re talking about when we’re talking about Mary and Jesus. Now, since it’s Christmas, I thought I would just go ahead and read to you out of one of the forbidden Gospels that didn’t make the cut when the Nicene Council put together the conventional Christianity as we know it today. They left a lot out. And this Gospel, which deals with the virgin birth, is called The Infancy Gospel of James. Marguerite has put it as an appendix at the back of her book, and so I’m going to read to you directly from the Gospel of James, the Infancy Gospel of James here, so we can have another Christmas story that’s kind of similar but kind of different from the ones that are handed down to us in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from the New Testament. Now, before we begin this Christmas story, let me add that this is not a particularly Gnostic book or story. It’s a Christian story. It’s a Christmas story, just like the birth of Jesus that is told every year at Christmas time in the churches. This is just an alternative Christmas story or Nativity story that was cut out and thrown away for whatever reason by the Nicene Council. And so I’m not sure you’re going to learn anything particularly Gnostic from this, but it’s fun and it’s different and it’s interesting. So, Merry Christmas and enjoy! Here’s how it goes. I’m going to begin reading from Chapter 7 of the Infancy Gospel of James, which has to do with Mary’s childhood and upbringing. Many months passed, but when the child, [and that’s Mary now], reached two years of age, Joaquin said, Let’s take her up to the temple of the Lord so that we can keep the promise we made, or else the Lord will be angry with us and our gifts will be unacceptable. And Anna said, Let’s wait until she’s three so she won’t miss her father or mother. And Joaquin agreed, Let’s wait. When the child turned three years of age, Joaquin said, Let’s send for the undefiled Hebrew daughters. Let them each take a lamp and light it so the child won’t turn back and have her heart captivated by things outside the Lord’s temple. And this is what they did until the time they ascended to the Lord’s temple. The priest welcomed her, kissed her, and blessed her. The Lord God has exalted your name among all generations. In you, the Lord will disclose his redemption to the people of Israel during the last days. And he sat her down on the third step of the altar, and the Lord showered favor on her, and she danced, and the whole house of Israel loved her. Chapter 8. Her parents left for home, marveling and praising and glorifying the Lord God, because the child did not look back at them. And Mary lived in the temple of the Lord. She was fed there like a dove, receiving her food from the hand of a heavenly messenger. When she turned twelve, however, there was a meeting of the priests. Look, they said, Mary has turned twelve in the temple of the Lord. What should we do with her so she won’t pollute the sanctuary of the Lord our God? And they said to the high priest, You stand at the altar of the Lord, enter and pray about her, and we’ll do whatever the Lord God discloses to you. And so the high priest took the vestment with the twelve bells, entered the Holy of Holies, and began to pray about her. And suddenly a messenger of the Lord appeared, Zechariah, Zechariah, go out and assemble the widowers of the people, and have them each bring a staff. She will become the wife of one to whom the Lord shows a sign. And so heralds covered the surrounding territory of Judea. The trumpet of the Lord sounded, and all the widowers came running. So this chapter I just read, Mary was raised as a vestal virgin with other virgins in the great temple of the Hebrews in Israel. This is what we were just talking about. And that’s something that Marguerite goes into in this book, that there were temple virgins dedicated to weaving the vestments of the priests and the great cloth that separated the Holy of Holies from the outer sanctuary. And Mary was raised as one of these people. But when she turned twelve, that is when she probably began menstruating, the priests were worried about the menstrual blood polluting the temple, and so they thought it best to go ahead and marry her off. And so they called the various widowers to come. Chapter 9. And Joseph too threw down his carpenter’s axe and left for the meeting. When they had all gathered, they went to the high priest with their staffs. After the high priest had collected everyone’s staff, he entered the temple and began to pray. When he had finished his prayer, he took the staffs and went out and began to give them back to each man. But there was no sign on any of them. Joseph got the last staff. Suddenly a dove came out of this staff and perched on Joseph’s head. Joseph, Joseph, the high priest said, you’ve been chosen by Lot to take the Virgin of the Lord into your care and protection. But Joseph objected. I already have sons and I’m an old man. She’s only a young woman. I’m afraid that I’ll become the butt of jokes among the people of Israel. And the high priest responded, Joseph, fear the Lord your God and remember what God did to Dathan, Abiran, and Koreh. The Earth was split open and they were all swallowed up because of their objection. So now Joseph, you ought to take heed so that the same thing won’t happen to your family. And so out of fear, Joseph took her into his care and protection. He said to her, Mary, I’ve gotten you from the temple of the Lord, but now I’m leaving you at home. I’m going away to build houses, but I’ll come back to you. The Lord will protect you. Chapter 10. Meanwhile, there was a council of the priests who agreed, let’s make a veil for the temple of the Lord. And the high priest said, summon the true virgins from the tribe of David. And so the temple assistants left and searched everywhere and found seven. And the high priest then remembered the girl, Mary, that she too was from the tribe of David and was pure in God’s eyes. And so the temple assistants went out and got her and they took the maidens into the temple of the Lord. And the high priest said, cast lots for me to decide who will spin which threads for the veil, the gold, the white, the linen, the silk, the violet, the scarlet, and the true purple. And the true purple and scarlet threads fell to Mary. And she took them and turned home. Now it was at this time that Zechariah became mute and Samuel took his place until Zechariah regained his speech. Meanwhile, Mary had taken up the scarlet thread and was spinning it. Chapter 11. And she took her water jar and went out to fill it with water. Suddenly there was a voice saying to her, Greetings, favored one, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women. Mary began looking around both right and left to see where the voice was coming from. She became terrified and went home. After putting the water jar down and taking up the purple thread, she sat down on her chair and began to spin. A heavenly messenger suddenly stood before her. Don’t be afraid, Mary. You see, you have found favor in the sight of the Lord of all. You will conceive by means of his word. But as she listened, Mary was doubtful and said, If I actually conceive by the Lord, the living God, will I also give birth the way women usually do? And the messenger of the Lord replied, No, Mary, because the power of God will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called Holy Son of the Most High, and you will name him Jesus. The name means he will save his people from their sins. And Mary said, Here I am, the Lord’s slave before him. I pray that all you’ve told me comes true. Chapter Twelve And she finished spinning the purple and scarlet thread and took her work up to the high priest. The high priest accepted them and praised her and said, Mary, the Lord God has extolled your name, and you will be blessed by all the generations of the Earth. Mary rejoiced and left to visit her relative Elizabeth. She knocked at the door. Elizabeth heard her, tossed aside the scarlet thread, ran to the door and opened it for her. And she blessed her and said, Who am I that the mother of my Lord should visit me? You see, the baby inside me has jumped for joy and blessed you. But Mary forgot the mysteries which the heavenly messenger Gabriel had spoken, and she looked up to the sky and said, Who am I, Lord, that every generation on Earth will congratulate me? She spent three months with Elizabeth. Day by day, her womb kept swelling. And so Mary became frightened, returned home and hid from the people of Israel. She was just sixteen years old when these mysterious things happened to her. And by the way, you notice that Elizabeth was also a weaver with the scarlet threads, and scarlet being the royal or holy color. And we know that Elizabeth was the one who was pregnant at the time with John the Baptist. Chapter Thirteen She was in her sixth month when one day Joseph came home from his building projects, entered his house and found her pregnant. He struck himself in the face, threw himself to the ground on sackcloth and began to cry bitterly. What sort of face should I present to the Lord God? What prayer can I say on her behalf, since I received her as a virgin from the temple of the Lord God and didn’t protect her? Who has set this trap for me? Who has done this evil deed in my house? Who has lured this virgin away from me and violated her? The story of Adam has been repeated in my case, hasn’t it? For just as Adam was praying when the serpent came and found Eve alone, deceived her and corrupted her, so the same thing has happened to me. So Joseph got up from the sackcloth and summoned Mary and said to her, God has taken a special interest in you. How could you have done this? Have you forgotten the Lord your God? Why have you brought shame on yourself? You were raised in the Holy of Holies and fed by a heavenly messenger. But she began to cry bitter tears. I’m innocent. I haven’t had sex with any man. And Joseph said to her, then where did the child you’re carrying come from? And she replied, as the Lord my God lives, I don’t know where it came from. Chapter 14 And Joseph became very frightened and no longer spoke with her as he pondered what he was going to do with her. And Joseph said to himself, if I try to cover up her sin, I’ll end up going against the law of the Lord. And if I disclose her condition to the people of Israel, I’m afraid that the child inside her might be heaven sent and I’ll end up handing innocent blood over to a death sentence. So what should I do with her? I know—I’ll divorce her quietly. But when night came, a messenger of the Lord suddenly appeared to him in a dream and said, don’t be afraid of this girl because the child in her is the Holy Spirit’s doing. She will have a son and you will name him Jesus. The name means he will save his people from their sins. And Joseph got up from his sleep and praised the God of Israel who had given him this favor. And so he began to protect the girl. Chapter 15 Then Anas, the scholar, came to him and said, Joseph, why haven’t you attended our assembly? And he replied to him, because I was worn out from the trip and rested my first day home. Then Anas turned and saw that Mary was pregnant. He left in a hurry for the high priest had said to him, you remember Joseph, don’t you? The man you yourself vouched for? Well, he’s committed a serious offense. And the high priest said, in what way? Joseph has violated the virgin he received from the temple of the Lord, he replied. He has had his way with her and hasn’t disclosed his action to the people of Israel. And the high priest asked him, has Joseph really done this? And he replied, send temple assistants and you’ll find the virgin pregnant. And so the temple assistants went and found her just as Anas had reported. And then they brought her along with Joseph to the court. Mary, why have you done this? the high priest asked her. Why have you humiliated yourself? Have you forgotten the Lord, your God? You who were raised in the holy of the holies and were fed by heavenly messengers? You of all people who heard their hymns and danced for them. Why have you done this? And she wept bitterly. As the Lord God lives, I stand innocent before him. Believe me, I have not had sex with any man. And the high priest said, Joseph, why have you done this? And Joseph said, as the Lord lives, I am innocent where she is concerned. And the high priest said, don’t perjure yourself, but tell the truth. You’ve had your way with her and haven’t disclosed this action to the people of Israel. And you haven’t humbled yourself under God’s mighty hand so that your offspring might be blessed. But Joseph was silent. Chapter 16. Then the high priest said, return the virgin you received from the temple to the Lord. And Joseph bursting into tears. And the high priest said, I’m going to give you the Lord’s drink test, and it will disclose your sin clearly to both of you. And the high priest took the water and made Joseph drink it and sent him into the wilderness. But he returned unharmed. And he made the girl drink it too and sent her into the wilderness. She also came back unharmed. And everybody was surprised because their sin had not been revealed. And so the high priest said, if the Lord God has not exposed your sin, then neither do I condemn you. And he dismissed them. Joseph took Mary and returned home celebrating and praising the God of Israel. Chapter 17. Now an order came from the Emperor Augustus that everybody in Bethlehem of Judea be enrolled in the census. And Joseph wondered, I’ll enroll my sons, but what am I going to do with this girl? How will I enroll her? As my wife? I’m ashamed to do that. As my daughter? The people of Israel know she’s not my daughter. How this is to be decided depends on the Lord. And so he saddled his donkey and had her get on it. His son led it and Samuel brought up the rear. As they neared the three mile marker, Joseph turned around and saw that she was sulking. And he said to himself, perhaps the baby she is carrying is causing her discomfort. Joseph turned around again and saw her laughing and said to her, Mary, what’s going on with you? One minute I see you laughing and the next minute you’re sulking. And she replied, Joseph, it’s because I imagined two peoples in front of me, one weeping and mourning and the other celebrating and jumping for joy. Halfway through the trip, Mary said to him, Joseph, help me down from the donkey. The child inside me is about to be born. And he helped her down and said to her, where will I take you to give you some privacy since this place is out in the open? Chapter 18. He found a cave nearby and took her inside. He stationed his sons to guard her and went to look for Hebrew midwife in the country around Bethlehem. Now, I, Joseph, was walking along and yet not going anywhere. I looked up at the vault of the sky and I saw it standing still and then at the clouds and saw them paused in amazement and at the birds of the sky suspended in mid air. And I looked on the Earth and I saw a bowl lying there and workers reclining around it with their hands in the bowl. Some were chewing and yet did not chew. Some were picking up something to eat and yet did not pick it up. And some were putting food in their mouths and yet did not do so. Instead, they were all looking upward. I saw sheep being driven along and yet the sheep stood still. The shepherd was lifting his hand to strike them and yet his hand remained raised. And I observed the current of the river and saw goats with their mouths in the water and yet they were not drinking. Then all of a sudden everything and everybody went on with what they had been doing. Chapter 19. Then I saw a woman coming down from the hill country and she asked, Where are you going, sir? I replied, I am looking for a Hebrew midwife. She inquired, Are you an Israelite? I told her yes. And she said, And who’s the one having a baby in the cave? I replied, My fiance. And she continued, She isn’t your wife? I said to her, She is Mary, who was raised in the temple of the Lord. I obtained her by lot as my wife, but she’s not really my wife. She’s pregnant by the Holy Spirit. The midwife said, Really? Joseph responded, Come and see. And the midwife went with him. In the cave, a dark cloud overshadowed it. The midwife said, I’ve really been privileged, because today my eyes have seen a miracle in that salvation has come to Israel. Suddenly the cloud withdrew from the cave, and an intense light appeared inside the cave, so that their eyes could not bear to look. And a little later, that light receded, until an infant became visible. He took the breast of his mother, Mary. Then the midwife shouted, What a great day this is for me, because I have seen this new miracle. And the midwife left the cave, and met Salome, and said to her, Salome, Salome, let me tell you about a new marvel. A virgin has given birth, and you know that’s impossible. And Salome replied, As the Lord my God lives, unless I insert my finger and examine her, I will never believe the virgin has given birth. Chapter 20 The midwife entered and said, Mary, position yourself for an examination. You are facing a serious test. And so Mary, when she heard these instructions, positioned herself, and Salome inserted her finger into Mary. And then Salome cried aloud and said, I’ll be damned, because of my transgression and my disbelief, I have put the living God on trial. Look, my hand is disappearing, it’s been consumed by flames. Then Salome fell on her knees in the presence of the Lord with these words, God of my ancestors, remember me because I am a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Do not make an example of me for the people of Israel, but give me a place among the poor again. You yourself know, Lord, that I’ve been healing people in your name and have been receiving my payment from you. And suddenly a messenger of the Lord appeared, saying to her, Salome, Salome, the Lord of all has heard your prayer. Hold out your hand to the child and pick him up, and then you will have salvation and joy. Salome approached the child and picked him up with these words, I’ll worship him because he’s been born to be king of Israel. And Salome was instantly healed and left the cave vindicated. Then a voice said abruptly, Salome, Salome, don’t report the marvels you’ve seen until the child goes to Jerusalem. Joseph was about ready to depart for Judea, but a great uproar was about to take place in Bethlehem in Judea. It all started when astrologers came inquiring, where is the newborn king of the Judeans? We are here because we saw his star in the east and have come to pay him homage. When Herod heard about their visit, he was terrified and sent agents to the astrologers. He also sent for the high priests and questioned them in his palace. What has been written about the anointed? Where is he supposed to be born? They said to him, in Bethlehem, Judea, that’s what the scriptures say. And he dismissed them. Then he questioned the astrologers, what sign have you seen regarding the one who has been born king? And the astrologers said, we saw a star of exceptional brilliance in the sky, and it so dimmed the other stars that they disappeared. Consequently, we know that a king was born for Israel, and we have come to pay him homage. Herod instructed them, go and begin your search, and if you find him, report back to me, so I can also go and pay him homage. The astrologers departed. And there it was, the star they had seen in the east, led them on until they came to the cave. Then the star stopped directly above the head of the child. After the astrologers saw him with his mother Mary, they took gifts out of their pouches, gold, pure incense, and myrrh. Since they had been advised by the heavenly messenger not to go into Judea, they returned to their country by another route. Chapter 22 When Herod realized that he had been duped by the astrologers, he flew into a rage and dispatched his executioners with instructions to kill all the infants, two years old and younger. When Mary heard that the infants were being killed, she was frightened, and took her child, wrapped him in strips of cloth, and put him in a feeding trough used by cattle. As for Elizabeth, when she heard that they were looking for John, she took him and went up into the hill country. She kept searching for a place to hide him, but there was none to be had. Then she groaned and said out loud, Mountain of God, please take in a mother with her child. You see, Elizabeth was unable to keep on climbing because her nerve failed her. But suddenly the mountain was split open and let them in. This mountain allowed the light to shine through to her, since a messenger of the Lord was with them for protection. Okay, there are more chapters that follow, and if you are interested in this, I encourage you to pick up a copy of the Infancy Gospel of James and read the entire book. But since we’re focusing on Christmas right now and the birth of Jesus, I think these are the chapters that relate to that. God bless you, Happy New Year, and Onward and Upward! Book cover of the ebook and paperback edition Buy the book! Available as a paperback, hardback, Kindle, and audiobook on Audible. Priced for affordability. Buy an extra one to share with a friend! And once you read it, please remember to leave a review.