Gnostic Insights

Matthew 6:19 Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Lately, people have been asking me to translate Bible verses—to give my Gnostic Gospel version of familiar Bible verses. And, boy, I would love to do that. I mean, I could read for you the entire New Testament from end to end and translate it into the Gnostic Gospel, and perhaps that would be a good book project to do. I have hesitated doing such a thing here on Gnostic Insights because I don’t want people to misunderstand and think that this is just another Christian radio program. There are particular differences between the Gnostic Gospel and conventional Christianity, yet there is more in common with Christianity when you read it with an open heart and an open mind. So this morning I’ll look at some very famous Bible verses out of the book of Matthew, and this is when Jesus was preaching to the multitude. This is out of a long speech by Jesus. By the way, I really have been enjoying that television series called The Chosen. If you’ve never seen The Chosen, they have their own app. You can download it, for example, on Roku, the Chosen app, and then you can watch all of the episodes. You can catch episodes here and there on various platforms. They’re all really good, and it is yet another depiction of the life of Jesus and the disciples. But this television series, which has four seasons so far, and I think they’re going to go to five seasons, they have a lot of backstory and a lot of historical settings and things that aren’t particularly quoted out of the Bible, yet they are true. And like any screenplay that has been adapted from a book, the narrative isn’t exactly the same as the books. Sometimes characters are deepened or collapsed with other characters in order to carry the story forward, and that is the spirit by which The Chosen has been written, which brings criticism from some evangelical Christians. They don’t like the fact that The Chosen “makes up stuff.” But I feel that that is actually immaterial, because the important part carries on. The important truth of the Scripture is in there and brought to life in such a way that you can relate to it, or you can watch it like a television show or a movie. It’s a very gripping story. So I recommend that you look up The Chosen. You might enjoy it. Now let’s look at some Bible verses out of the book of Matthew, and as I like to do, I am using the translation by David Bentley Hart, which is what he calls a pitilessly accurate translation. He doesn’t change the translation of the New Testament the way so many versions of the Bible do. So let’s look at this. This is out of chapter 6, verse 19. Do not store up treasures for yourself on the earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves penetrate by digging and stealing. Rather, store up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves neither penetrate by digging nor steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be. Now this verse contrasts materialism and spirituality on a practical level. We live in a very affluent age, particularly if you’re living in one of the western countries. We have, for the last 100, 200 years at least, been living very high on the hog, as if we’re all kings and queens. And we have treasures. We have to have this, and we have to have that. We see things advertised, and we immediately have to get it. We photograph those QR codes off the screen, and bingo, a week later we have the product. And people who don’t know God, people who are cut off from their spiritual aspect, which we here at Gnostic Insights call your Self, that’s the part of us that we all share in common. That is the Fullness of God that dwells within us, the Self. But we all also have an ego, and it’s our ego that’s particular to us—that’s our name and address and all of the memes we cling to that give us meaning in our life. And when we soak up advertising or soak up social media and become envious of what we think other people have or what other people are enjoying, and then we want it for ourselves, that’s egoic. That’s your ego taking care of your personal needs. But the ego overreaches. We don’t need all the things we think we need or want. So here we are living in our homes or our apartments, surrounded by all of this material wealth, by all these doodads and gadgets—buy this equipment and that clothing and this kind of makeup and that kind of food. We’re just surrounding ourselves with things that we have taken in because other people told us we need to. That’s the purpose of advertising, to build up desire in you, to build up a need and a desire so that you will eventually take it in. And that’s how people make money. That isn’t the way to acquire things. That is a wrong path. And the reason it’s the wrong path is because material objects can never fill the aching and the need that’s in the human heart. We are hardwired to seek the transcendent. People who do not realize this, who have not remembered any of their gnosis at this point, they think it’s all made up. They think it’s all fairy tales. So many times I’ve heard people tell me, oh, that’s just a fairy tale. That’s just what you think. You can’t prove that it’s true. Well, the thing is, all of us who have begun to walk through the path of gnosis to find the truth of the ethereal, we all are treading that same path. And that’s another famous Bible quote: The way is wide that leads to destruction, but the path to God is narrow. Now, that one’s often interpreted to mean that there’s only one way to God, one way, and that one way, the Christians say, is Jesus Christ. The Gnostic gospel also believes there’s only one path, one way, but that path is gnosis. And Jesus points the way to the gnosis, and eventually we will all accept the redemption of the Christ, because you can’t make it all the way back to the ethereal plane carrying around these bundles of memes that we’ve acquired here on Earth. These attachments, these material possessions, they weigh us down like Marley’s chains in The Christmas Carol by Dickens. There is only one way to the ethereal plane, and all of us who are on that Gnostic path, we find ourselves having the same experiences. We do share visions. We do have the same expectation of heaven. We begin to remember the place that we came from, because according to the Gnostic gospel, and it is my contention, that the reason we all have a foretaste—and when I say all, I mean all cultures—everyone around the Earth has a foretaste, an expectation of what we call heaven or paradise. Now, how could we all be sharing that same expectation? It’s because that’s where we come from. We are the children of the Aeons in the pleroma of the Fullness of God, also known as paradise. When you see the Fullness of God in the New Testament, it’s the pleroma of God, which is everything that’s possible. It’s not just that God’s a big, great guy, and he’s so huge and ungraspable—the fullness. That isn’t what fullness means. Fullness is differentiations of the Source. The Fullness is every variable that can possibly be that was ever imagined by that great, illimitable Source, by the Father, broken out into its distinctive parts. And those parts are the aeons, and the parts with the personalities are what we typically call angels. So we all have this foretaste of heaven because we came from heaven. We have earthly parents, but we also have what we could call heavenly parents, because we are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And they sent us down here into this material world in order to help redeem the world, in order to remind the world of paradise, particularly to remind the Demiurge of paradise, because it’s the Demiurge, the forgetful god of the Gnostics, the creator of this heaven and earth. By heaven, I mean the sky, I mean the stars. Everything that is within the envelope or the boundary of the cosmos was created by the Demiurge. And the Demiurge doesn’t remember where he came from or where it came from. And the idea was that the Fullness sent down and populated this otherwise dead cosmos, because the Demiurge only produces material, it can’t produce life because it doesn’t remember what the life is. All of the life, all of the light, all of the consciousness, all of the love comes down that narrow path into this material world from above. So that’s what it means by “the way is wide that leads to destruction.” That’s if you’re standing here looking around you from left to right, and through history of this material world—that’s all death and destruction because the life doesn’t come from the bottom up. Consciousness doesn’t bubble up out of the mud. It flows down from above, and we carry it into this material universe with ourselves when we’re born. So the tragedy, of course, is that given a few years here on earth, we forget that we are the emissaries of the Fullness of God, and we think that we are mud creatures rising up out of the material world. So we forget our mission, which was to bring consciousness, and love, and redemption to the Demiurge. We’re here to remind him of life, and love, and the Father, and the Source, and the Aeons above. We get all bogged down by these material possessions, by these treasures we store up for us on earth, and we think the meaning is in the treasure. We think, oh, I’ll only be happy if I just get a Bowflex. Oh, I’ll be so happy if I wear this particular color lipstick. Oh, look at my selfie. Look at my selfie. Oh, aren’t I cute? Aren’t I neat? That’s wrongheaded. That will not bring happiness. That’s a delusion. Happiness can’t come from the material because the material is void. The material is empty. The material cannot generate consciousness. This is why I doubt that artificial intelligence will actually rise to personhood. It’s going to be a very complicated and rich material object, but it can’t have true consciousness. It can only have, let’s say, egoic consciousness because it’s stuck on the material plane. It rose from the material plane. It’s put together with silicon, and metal, and objects mined from the earth, and information gathered from our informational output on the internet. That’s all lateral. That’s all down. It’s not from above. But consciousness, the true consciousness that predates this universe, comes from above, and it comes through living things. So, returning to this verse 19 of the sixth chapter of Matthew, Do not store up treasures for yourself on earth where moth and rust destroy. In other words, they’re impermanent. They will pass away. You might have a house fire. You might be robbed. There might be a flood that washes away everything you own. Does all your hope and happiness wash away with it? Well, it does if you consider those to be the purpose of your life. But if you store up treasure in heaven, it says in verse 20, rather store up for yourself treasure in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves neither penetrate by digging nor steal. Of course, remember these verses were written about 2,000 years ago. So, when it talks about moth or rust, obviously, that doesn’t have to be literally brought forward. If you were a nomad living in a tent, you’re worried about moths getting to your wool. If you have metallic objects for tools, you worry about rust. Now we worry about things like identity theft, and how about that electromagnetic pulse that’s going to wipe out all electrical appliances and all of the satellites? These are the kind of things we worry about in the modern age. They are equivalent to moth and rust, and where thieves neither penetrate by digging nor steal. So, I guess they used to dig under the city walls, or a lot of homes were fortified, and so the way you breach it is you dig under it. Of course, there’s still a lot of tunneling going on in war zones, or between nations, in order to smuggle people and contraband across borders. It says, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. So, if you have all of your hope and trust in these objects that you’ve acquired, then there’s no peace in that. You know, the richer a person is, the more they worry about losing their money. Have you ever done this thought experiment? How much money would you need to have in order to feel safe and wealthy? Would it be a million dollars? Would it be a billion dollars? Would it be $10,000? Maybe only $5,000. What do you need to feel safe? Well, you can’t ever feel safe because no matter what amount of money you select, if you ever reach that goal, if you become a millionaire or a billionaire, well, now you need more. The goalpost is always moving to more, more, more. That’s one of the attributes of this material world—aggregations. Things become larger and larger and larger, and you think the more, more, more you have, the bigger your house, the better you’ll feel. I live in a rather wealthy little village in Oregon. A lot of well-off retirees live here, and these are people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and they’ve worked their way up with their money and their savings and their investments, and they have these big, beautiful homes. You know, these big mansions. You’ve got one person or two people living in a huge mansion. I’ll bet you they’re not safe. They’re not happy. They’re rattling around in there. They’re lonely. The only way to find happiness and peace is to lay up your treasures in heaven. Verse 21 says, For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be. So, rather than looking outward, look upward. This is why I always say, onward and upward. We go forward. We don’t think about the past. We don’t mourn over the mistakes. We don’t hold on to grief and anger. Let the past go. Let it go. Ah, that feels good. Onward, that’s forward, and upward. Look to the heavens. Look to the Fullness of God. Look to your Aeonic parents. Look to Jesus. Look to the Christ. Look to the Source. Look to the Father. Those are the true treasures. And, you know, this life here on Earth, it’s very brief. The time we spend here on Earth is almost meaningless, it’s that brief. I read a very interesting essay this week that my brother shared with me out of the website called Aeon. The essay was about a set of letters that the famous philosopher, logician, mathematician named Kurt Gödel wrote back and forth to his mother as she was elderly and nearing her death. And she asked him about paradise, and she asked him if he really believed in heaven. And this is a very learned man. In fact, this is, well, one of the smartest guys that’s ever walked on the Earth. Gödel was a contemporary and a peer of Albert Einstein, and they worked together at Princeton. Einstein actually looked up to Gödel, so that tells you what a big thinker he was. And I only mention that because I think it is important to know who your sources are that you’re trusting. You know, when we trust people that are trying to sell us things, who are these people, and what are their credentials to be telling you anything? Or the talking heads on television, the pundits and the people who tell us what to think about things. Well, who the heck are they? Why do you trust them? So I look to big thinkers of the past. Gödel was one of the big thinkers, one of the geniuses. And this is what he had to say about heaven. In a letter in 1961 to his mother, he said, If the world is rationally organized and has meaning, then it must be the case. [he’s talking about an afterlife]. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being, the human being, with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationship to others, only then to let him achieve not even one one-thousandth of it? So why does Gödel think it’s a rational world? Well, it is rationally organized. You know, the laws of physics have to hold true or we wouldn’t have a universe. It would all fly apart. The laws of chemistry hold true. And by the way, they are rationally organized through the hand of the Demiurge, because the Demiurge had the blueprints. When Logos fell out of the Fullness and broke apart here, creating this material world, he left behind what we call the Demiurge, part of himself. That was the ego. And it’s the ego of Logos that stays down here to build the cosmos. And of course, it’s based upon logic and reason, cause and effect, laws, because, well, practically, we can see by hindsight, if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here. But in the Gnostic sense, it was Logos who fell. Logos—logic, rationality, reason. That’s part of the nature of the source. That was the Aeon who had all of the attributes of all the other Aeons and the wherewithal to put them all together into a package. And he thought that he alone could build a material paradise. He was going to make it a gift to the Father. So he took all of that knowledge and he launched himself out of the Fullness without being invited, let’s say. And instead of going up, he went down. And hence comes the material cosmos out of that. There’s more to that creation story. You can go back to the Gnostic Insights early primer, I call it. If you go to gnosticinsights.com, there’s a tab that’s the basic primer of the Gnostic Gospel. Start with the Father and work your way through. That’ll give you the entire cosmology and cosmogony of the Gnostic Gospel. It is a logical, rationally organized cosmos because it came out of the body of Logos. And so this brilliant mathematician and logician, Kurt Gödel, says, well, the world is rationally organized and it has meaning. Then there has to be an afterlife because why should we have all these capabilities and then never live long enough to develop it? In the fourth letter to his mother, he says, What I name a theological Weltanschauung [worldview]is the view that the world and everything in it has meaning and reason, and indeed a good and indubitable meaning. From this it follows immediately that our earthly existence, since it as such has at most a very doubtful meaning, can be a means to an end for another existence. He says in another letter to his mother, Does one have a reason to assume that the world is rationally organized? I think so, for it is absolutely not chaotic and arbitrary. Rather, as natural science demonstrates, there reigns in everything the greatest regularity and order. Order is indeed a form of rationality. Okay, that’s what we were saying. So good, Gödel agrees with me. Here, I’ll read you a paragraph out of the Aeon article itself, and you can go to GnosticInsights.com to read the transcript. I’ll have links to the full article if you’d like to read it. How does this connect with Gödel’s view that the world is rational and the soul survives death? The incompleteness theorems and their philosophical implications do not in any way prove or show that the soul survives death directly. However, Gödel thought the theorem’s results dealt a heavy blow to the materialistic worldview. If the mind is irreducible to the physical parts of the brain, and the mathematics reveals a rationally accessible structure beyond physical phenomena, then an alternative worldview should be sought that is more rationalistic and open to truths that cannot be tested by the senses. Such a perspective could endorse a rationally organized world and be open to the possibility of life after death. And I’m reading all of this to you out of an article by Alexander T. Englert, who is a research associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, which is where Einstein and Gödel also worked. And the name of the article is We’ll Meet Again. So there you go. We started with the New Testament, we worked our way through some of the Gnostic Gospel, and we wound up with a big brain philosopher mathematician, and we all seem to agree. Detach yourself from the materialistic world. At least, it’s okay to have the things that you have but don’t make them your treasures. Don’t put your heart and soul into them. Don’t think that buying things and showing them off will bring you happiness or peace, because it won’t. It simply can’t. And I think you know this. You don’t need me to tell you that. And having more and more just makes you more and more fearful of losing it. So that doesn’t work either. “Lay up rather treasures in heaven where neither moths nor rust doth corrupt,” as it said in the King James Version. Hey, if you are getting something out of these Gnostic gospel messages, please consider donating. You know, I really hate asking for money. I loathe it. However, if we’re going to get this Gnostic Reformation off the ground, the money that you donate will go into that. It will go into promotion, because we want to get this word out to more and more people. People are lonely. People are hurting. People are afraid. People don’t remember God. People don’t remember Gnosis. People are running down the wrong rabbit holes. Let’s bring them some truth, and some hope, and some life. Let’s point the way to the source. You can be a part of that, a very important part. Thank you very much. Happy New Year. 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

This post was very popular last year, so I’m repeating it for all of us. Merry Christmas! Today, we’re going to look at the nature of the Christ—the who, what, why of Christ. Most people are familiar with seeing the baby Jesus in the manger and that’s what we celebrate at Christmas time, the birth of the Christ on Earth in the form of a human. But the Christ is an ethereal creature that predates the birth of Jesus. Jesus and the Christ aren’t exactly the same, although Jesus was fully Christ. The Christ predates the birth of the human known as Jesus. So, let’s learn more about the Christ and why the Christ figure is so essential to us Second Order Powers.  Gnosticism is the forerunner of the modern Christian faith. As such, a better understanding of the figure of the Christ is essential to understanding both Gnosticism and Christianity. The cosmology that I talk about here on the podcast was well known to Jesus and his original followers, but it was cut out of Christianity about 1700 years ago by the Nicene Council, at the urging of the Pope and the Roman Emperor. Because this theology was subtracted from orthodox Christianity, many of the ideas of gnostic cosmology sound odd and unfamiliar to modern churchgoers. Some of the ideas may even sound heretical at first glance due to their unfamiliarity. Yet the theology contained in these early scriptures makes sense of so many puzzling aspects of Christian faith that they must be reexamined. I’m confident that once you understand gnostic Christianity, you will better understand your relationship with God. According to gnostic cosmology as laid out in the Nag Hammadi, we humans and all other forms of life on Earth, from bacteria and eukaryotes on up, are the fruit of the Pleroma and Logos. We Second Order Powers find ourselves locked in a never-ending battle for dominion over the Earth with forces that were generated as a result of the Fall. Due to the law of mutual combat, we have forgotten our origin in the Fullness and our mission to bring love and harmony to creation and have instead taken on many of the characteristics of the shadows of the Deficiency. The Second Order Powers are locked in a never-ending war with the Deficiency. Here below, we constantly battle the physical forces of death and entropy, as well as the spiritual forces of vice, sin, delusion and despair. In order to restore memory and reason to the Second Order Powers, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one of them individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for a helper to bring peace to the Deficiency and forgiveness to Logos. Out of this focused prayer, a unique fruit emerged, one that contained all of the capabilities and powers of the Fullness, along with all of the love and eternal qualities of the Father. The singular fruit of the Fullness and the Father is known by various names: the Christ, the Savior and the Redeemer, the Advocate, the Light, and the Beloved. In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is a perfect and full fractal of the Father and the Son, all rolled-up into one perfect form. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was both perfect man and perfect God incarnate. Christian Gnostics believed the same. Here is a more complete explanation of who Jesus was. It’s said that Jesus was conceived without sin because he carried within his body the perfection of man and God. This would mean that Jesus was perfect and true to the original DNA formula for humanity. Hence the importance of the virgin birth that then imparted that perfect DNA to the baby. Jesus was also without negative karma attached to his soul, as his soul was the soul of God. The components of Jesus’s body were also without sin, as the cells and flesh that became Jesus were in fact the Aeons of the Fullness incarnate. As Colossians 1:19 says, “For God was pleased to have all his Fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on Earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.” This one sentence from Colossians contains the entire Christian Gnostic Gospel. Because Jesus brought along the entire Fullness of the Pleroma when he incarnated, every aspect of the Father and Son came to material instantiation on Earth. In this manner, the eternal God experienced the finite life of us Second Order Powers and all of the struggle between birth and death that plague us all. Here is how the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures describes this process: “As for those of the shadow, Logos separated himself from them in every way, since they fight against him and are not at all humble before him. The stumbling which happened to the Aeons of the Father was brought to them as if it were their own, in a careful and non-malicious and immensely sweet way. It was brought to the Fullnesses so that they might be instructed about the Deficiency by the single One, from whom alone they all received strength to eliminate the defects. They gathered together, asking the Father, with beneficent intent, that there be aid from above from the Father for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. 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 Fullnesses, 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 brought forth the fruit. And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which was his beloved Son, but the Son in whom the Fullnesses are pleased to put himself on them as a garment through which he gave perfection to the defective one and gave confirmation to those who are perfect, 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 the 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 have previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father whom he wanted them to know? 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 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.” (That is from the Tripartite Tractate sections 85 through 87.) So you see, the mission of the Christ, as stated in Colossians, was to redeem all of creation, including the fallen Aeon who had founded our material universe. Because the Christ came to redeem everyone, the body of Jesus came to Earth with every one of the Fullnesses on board. For every fallen spirit, the Christ brought forth their own personal and recognizable Savior. Redemption has already taken place. It is up to the Second Order Powers and the one who fell to recognize and accept that redemption in order to complete the mission of the Christ. In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ brought the correcting formula for all of our spirits and souls, each unique and personally formulated to meet our individual needs. The baptism of the Christ washes away the mental and spiritual confusion brought on by the endless war with shadows of the Fall. Gnostics are apocalyptic, as are Christians. Gnostics believe that some day every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus, the Christ, is Lord. Repentance and redemption comes harder for some than for others. Some souls take more time to recognize and remember. Ultimately, though, there comes a day of reckoning, for the Father will not be denied forever. There will soon come a day when the Deficiency ends. On that day, a new economy will unite Heaven and Earth, and all souls will find their joyful place in Paradise. The only forms banished to the outer darkness will be the shadows and phantoms of the Fall, which did not exist within the Father’s consciousness from the beginning. These shadows are not real and they will have no home with us in Paradise. Now here’s a gnostic perspective of Jesus on the cross. One of the central themes of the Christian faith is the death of Jesus on the cross. Christians the world over focus on the body of Jesus hanging on the cross, and I’ve often wondered, why this fixation of Jesus on the cross? Why is the crucifix the focal point of every church and altar? Why do people wear the cross as jewelry or hang a crucifix in their bedroom? The obvious answer Christians give is that without the cross, Jesus could not have saved humanity from sin, for he bore our sins into the grave with his death and they were washed away with his resurrection from the dead. Praise be to God, but why the cross? If Jesus had been stoned to death or drowned or beaten or thrown from a high tower, would we still feel such affinity for the stone, a lake, a club or a roof? I don’t think so. I think there is something very special about the shape of the cross itself. I ask this question because Jesus never said, I’m soon to pass on from this world, and I want you to focus on my body hanging on the cross as I take on the sins of the world. And yet, that’s what people do, as if that were the entire point of the Gospel. As far as I can tell, Jesus did not ask for his death and resurrection to be the focal point of worship. What Jesus actually said was: “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30), and, “Whoever welcomes me welcomes the Father that sent me” (Luke 9:48). In other words, Jesus acknowledged himself in reference to his Father and he deflected glory to his Father. Yet Jesus is worshipped by modern Christians to the extent that the Father almost goes unmentioned. Thank goodness for the Lord’s prayer, which is directed to the Father and not to the Son. Jesus taught it to be said to the Father; he did not teach it to be recited to himself. No slight to the Son, of course, we’re merely emphasizing the importance of the Father. During the last supper, Jesus instructed his followers to think of his broken body as they break and eat bread and to consider his blood as the fulfillment of a contract with humanity as they drink wine. This is what Jesus left the church as instruction regarding his death. He did not instruct them to erect images of crosses and to worship him hanging on a cross, as if he were stuck up there forever. Yes, Protestants have allowed Jesus to come down off the cross and therefore their crosses are unoccupied to remind us that Jesus resurrected, but still the focus is on the cross. Again—why the cross in particular? Here is the symbolism of the cross as I understand it. We who dwell on Earth are engaged in endless warfare with the Imitation that always seeks to lure us away from our Father in Heaven. Oftentimes we don’t even realize we’re engaged in warfare with the Imitation, because it can appear disguised as goodness. This is what is meant by the Devil being a liar. We Second Order of Powers are engaged in this endless warfare and, although we come from a good disposition of the Father and the Fullness, we have forgotten our heavenly nature and become deluded because of rage and other passions and addictions. The Christ came to Earth in the form of a Son of Man to bring the Third Order of Powers to Earth as the solution to overcoming the phantoms of the Imitation that have mired the Second Order Powers in error and ignorance. Those who have eyes to see the Christ are able to remember their Father in Heaven. Those who remember their Father in Heaven and repent from the Imitation are redeemed. Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of the promise to redeem the fallen. Jesus as the Son of God and the Son of Man brought salvation to the Deficiency and restored it to the Kingdom of Heaven. The reason the cross looks as it does and occupies such a central role in worship is that the cross represents human beings. The Cross is shaped like a human, a Son of Man. It is no accident that Jesus was crucified on a cross because Jesus is a Son of Man, the Son of Man. If, hypothetically, humans looked like dogs, then the Son of Man would have come in the form of a dog, and the cross would look like that, too. But as it is, it is shaped as we are. The Cross should remind us that humankind has been redeemed by the body and blood of Christ in an even more profound way than acknowledging the indignity and suffering of Christ on the cross. It should remind us that the Son of God—the Christ—bridged with the form of his human body spirit-to-matter, which is top-to-bottom, and neighbor-to-neighbor, which is side-to-side. In the Gnostic Gospel, redemption comes to all of creation through the incarnation of the Son of God into the body of the Son of Man. The manner of the Savior’s birth, death, and resurrection will come to every soul as they realize their Father is in Heaven and to Heaven they will return. For, as it says, “every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:10). It just takes time. We aren’t there yet because of the common delusion of presumptuous thought, which causes people to behave selfishly. Ego must first make way for the love of Christ to take over the throne of the Self. Only then may you rise above the egoic imitation, for then you will have a champion and a king. The very public way that Jesus was crucified and the very public way that he resurrected gives us all hope of the same: Jesus demonstrates proof of resurrection and his life, death, and resurrection is about all of us, not only about the Christ. Jesus is the exemplar of our resurrection. I acknowledge that this is a very different version of Christianity than has been traditionally presented to us. This is gnosis that was originally contained in the sacred scriptures that formed the New Testament prior to the Pope and Emperor of Rome getting their hands on it and stripping it out. It’s nice to know. I hope you get it. It doesn’t really matter, because all you need to know is that we come from the Father and to the Father we will return. We are emanations directly of the Father and the Father has promised to save us all and bring us all home. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me.” This has been taken to mean that one must acknowledge the power of the Christ before the Christ can redeem you. But I hope you can see that this puts all of the power of redemption in your hands rather than Christ’s. The Christ will redeem all Second Order Powers by the end of time, with or without your acknowledgment. All redemption comes to the Father through the Christ, and that is in Christ’s hands. What accepting the Christ now does for you is open the door for the Third Order Powers to enter your egoic soul. This power makes it possible to live a joyous and virtuous life. It allows the love of the Father to flow through you and out into the world. And it eases your transition after the physical death of your body, so you may enter the afterlife without fear, knowing that you rest in the Pleroma of the Christ. I hope that this information is helpful to you and will help you remember. Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all. Merry Christmas!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week, we had part one of Correspondence with an Educated Atheist, and after posting that, I received an email from my correspondent, and it was very interesting because it turns out that all this time I thought I was corresponding with a female because this person’s name is one of those gender-neutral names, like my own name, Cyd. I was often miscategorized as a male coming into a new classroom or, like, going to summer camp I was put on the boy’s side and so forth because my name was unusual back in the 1950s. So this person has this sort of name that could be taken either as male or female, and I just assumed it was a female. That’s a funny thing to me.  Now, flip that whole conversation from last week, and every time I said she, please insert the word he, and now I’m re-recording part two so I can correctly identify my correspondent. He was very gracious about the misunderstanding, of course. Very, very nice person.  He had asked, “Is it possible that the truth of creation might be something difficult or even something unpalatable?” And I answer, well, that’s what a lot of people are saying, isn’t it? I think it is a message meant to dishearten us, meant to depress us. I notice that the people who believe that are not happy campers. In the end, it doesn’t matter what memes we cling to here on this material plane. All will be revealed when we pass over to the other side. He asks, “Is it too much to ask for some sort of indication or revelation or glimpse of the existence of the Fullness? What actions would you suggest should be the next step?” And I say, it’s not too much to ask. It’s what prayer is all about. If you have never prayed to the higher power, you simply find a quiet spot or maybe in the middle of the night when you’re lying in bed awake and you just ask the Source to reveal itself to you. “Ask and you will find. Knock and the door will open.” [Matthew 7:7] You can ask for revelation. You can ask for an unmistakable sign. When I was a young believer, I would ask for things expecting them to happen, and they did. Once as a teenager, I was hitchhiking up the California coast. I had no fear for myself because I was and still am an innocent, and I believe that Jesus walked everywhere with me and that he would protect me from all harm. One night I camped with strange men, but I preached to them and no harm came to me. In the morning, we were all hitchhiking together for the first ride of the day, and I prayed out loud for a red pickup truck to come and pick us all up. About a minute later, a red pickup truck came and picked us all up. It was quite a testimony to those men, like a real miracle. I realize that Christianity has gotten a bad rap lately in the progressive and atheist circles, but remember that the institution is not the Source. The map is not the territory. You can pray to Jesus or to the Father or to the Source or to the Fullness of God. They are all listening. If you pray for revelation with an open heart, your heart will be filled and you will know. Millions of people throughout the years have done just that and have come out the other side walking with God, walking with Jesus. This has nothing to do with salvation or church doctrine. This is going to the Source. I love you. I’m proud of you for opening up and exploring these spiritual depths—onward and upward. In our most recent correspondence, he says, Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions in some detail. I will take a while to read and reread your answers. I have found the Simple Explanation book on Audible, so I am going to download it and listen in the car as a starting point. Gnosticism is complex, he says, yet also appealing. There are a few things that don’t seem necessary, like a complex celestial hierarchy with different Aeons and their pre-assigned roles, rather like cogs in a great machine. As someone who has spent a lot of time with historical texts, this name and place function in a heavenly order feels like the product of an ancient worldview. As we know, the establishment church and the kings loved order and it was stressed for their own reasons. However, just as modern humans are all about individuality, at times overly, ancient societies were obsessed with kingship and order. So just as it is a feature of New Age religions that it’s all about individual Self-expression, does it follow that the writer of the Tripartite Tractate was reflecting the perception of a rigid order and hierarchy in heaven? This business of a complex organizational structure in heaven with angels, archangels and the rest of it kind of feels like the product of a human imagination. Is that a fair point? He goes on to say, however, putting that aside, all of the key questions that have made me rule out religions in the past, the cruel concept of original sin in Christianity and likewise karmic punishing people for past life mistakes in Hinduism, Buddhism are thankfully missing in your version of Gnosticism, which is a huge positive. It’s elegant to universal salvation, having a fall that explains suffering, but not a fall by humans. To my skeptical agnostic ears, key aspects of your Gnostic reformation have the ring of truth. The fractal stuff is fascinating, too. I don’t come from a science background, so I’ll probably take your word on that. So here’s a question that may put my mind at rest. Given that my spider senses are tingling, telling me some of the concepts in the Tripartite Tractate sound a bit historically located and hence man-made, would it be fair to say that the words of the Tripartite Tractate are a version of the universal truth, recorded by a fallible human hand, with possibly a few simplifications and misinterpretations? Or do you believe that every word in the book is divine and immutable? No need to answer in a hurry. Don’t let me distract you, but I’d be intrigued to find out at some point. Okay, so here’s my latest answer. The hierarchy isn’t about power, haves and have-nots. It’s about jobs that need to be done and the relationships among neighbors. Think of the Aeons as cells in your body or cells in a slime mold. Every function and every job is necessary and equally important. The brain is no more important than your skin, etc. However, the king of your body is your self-aware identity. You need to be in control of your body or else some other organ will attempt to take charge. It is the natural order of things. When people don’t pay attention to their body parts, the body parts take control, and the next thing you know, you’re addicted to something or another. And I didn’t put this in my email because I was in a hurry, but then I was thinking afterward of the best answer to the hierarchy question. Remember, the Aeons self-sorted themselves into this hierarchy. They were not placed there. They were not made subordinate to others or above others by some higher ruling power. They self-sorted. It makes a point of saying that in the Tripartite Tractate. And what they sorted themselves into were functions. Their place, their function, their duties, their neighbors, their names for themselves. They gave themselves their names. And the reason it’s hierarchical is because the higher the fewer. The higher the fewer is a basic Gnostic precept. And the reason is this. In my concept of how things go together and of how the Fullness of God works and how our bodies work, it’s part of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The most basic parts of the material universe are the subatomic particles and the particles. And they level up to make atoms. And the atoms hold hands with one another and they level up to make molecules. And the molecules hold hands with one another and they level up to make elements. Now, think it through. There’s more atoms than there are molecules. There’s more molecules than there are elements. And so every time you go up a level, there’s fewer. So it’s naturally building the higher the fewer. So if you think of your family and, say for example that you’ve got four brothers and sisters and a mom and dad—a nice big family. Well, there’s six of you, right? But you hold hands, cooperate with one another according to the Simple Golden Rule, and what do you make? You make one family. So there were six and now it’s leveled up to one. So the higher—that is the family—the fewer. And that is why a hierarchy looks like a hierarchy. It’s not a matter of thinking that the ones lower down are less important or not worthy. It’s that they are the basic foundations that make everything else possible. As a side note, the Demiurge is in charge of that material level, the subatomic particles up through the elements and the mineral aggregations. And then the life comes down from above. The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will. The life, love, and consciousness comes down from above during conception and creates the spark of life that then changes it from mud, mud up, that’s the material level of the Demiurge, the mud, to the spirit down. The spirit is what gives life and love and causes the molecules to be able to walk around in the form of our bodies. All living things bring consciousness and love into the Fallen world at conception. Finally he asks whether or not the Tripartite Tractate is sacred gospel or immutable truth, divine and immutable. I answered that obviously the Tripartite Tractate was written by a man who was historically contextually located. But I’ve found that the Tripartite Tractate is the best Gnostic text to explain these things. Now, I myself, Dr. Cyd Ropp, I am also historically contextually located as well. When I write The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, or A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, it is also my rewording the truth that has come to me. If once you discover the Gnosis inside of you and you feel fully comfortable and you can put all the pieces together, because I’ve been putting these pieces together my entire life, then you can also write a gospel. And let me mention this now as an addition to our conversation, when I write my gnostic insights, I only share what seems absolutely true to me. Then I run that gnosis past my brother, Bill, in conversation to see if the logic holds up. If I am unsure of something, I don’t write it. Sometimes Bill and I ponder an insight for months before the truth of the matter becomes clear. Some things we are still pondering. The last thing I want to do is lead people astray with false teaching. Perhaps the writer of the Tripartite Tractate had a similar process. I don’t channel this information from any spirit other than being informed by the Holy Spirit, and that often comes to me whilst I am in the process of writing or walking the dog. And the bottom line is there’s only one truth. There’s only one Father. There is only one originating consciousness. We carry that consciousness but we have forgotten the Source. We have forgotten that the most important expression of consciousness is the love of the Father. In Christian parlance, the Christ is the only infallible reminder of that Father and that Love. As long as we remain in ignorance and spiritual rebellion, we cannot access the Gnosis that we already carry within us. And it all comes down the pike logically. It all unfolds in a way that it must. So the reason I like the Tripartite Tractate is that it’s not just mythological stories that are random; it’s a logical progression from there to here and back again. And if my correspondent thought that the hierarchy of angels and archangels and the Fullness of God was extraneously complex, boy, don’t dip into any other of the Gnostic gospels that are out there in the Nag Hammadi or the Qumran scripts, because they’re full of extraneous information, in my opinion. You don’t have to memorize this and that. You don’t have to know these arcane relationships between gods and goddesses. You don’t need access to esoteric rituals or incantations. All I have ever wondered is how do we get from the Source, the spirit? We know that we’re down here standing in the dirt, literally. How does that ambulate this body of mine? And how is it that my body is conscious with consciousness that had to have come from the Source? He asked me whether or not the Tripartite Tractate, or the Bible, or the Koran is meant to be the infallible word of God. How might they have been handed down? He says, “I sense that the gnostic take is more about us already knowing the truth inside us rather than having to rely on an angel or a burning bush, etc. to dictate it to you.” My gnosis tells me these things I tell you here on the podcast. I am a human with a lifelong relationship with the ethereal plane in the form of Jesus, endowed with a sure knowledge of the ethereal plane and the capability to reason. The humans who wrote the holy books are no different in kind than me or you. They, like me, are simply writing down their experience with the numinous and its manifestations. We see the world from our point of view. Okay, finally, one more thing. I told him to read the 21st verse of the Tao Te Ching to answer the question of how do we know there’s anything like an originating consciousness? That is the verse that opens A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. Let me read it to you here, now. Listen to this. I think it’s fabulous. This is the 21st verse of the Tao te Ching, which is ancient Chinese, and it’s not anything to do with Hebrews and Christians or even Egyptians and Phoenicians. There are many translations of the Tao Te Ching. The original Tao Te Ching is ancient. It’s thousands of years old, and it’s written in pictograms. And you know, these pictograms aren’t words or letters. They’re open to interpretation because they are pictures. It’s like a dream—how do you interpret a house when you are in a house in your dream? What is the meaning of the house? So what I used is Jonathan Starr’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, the definitive edition. And what Starr has done is written out his interpretations of the verses because, by the way, if you read any popular translation of the Tao Te Ching, it’s that author’s interpretation of the pictograms or that author’s interpretation of someone else’s interpretation of the pictograms. Well, what Jonathan Starr did was literally translate, in the second half of his book, each pictogram in every verse—all the possible meanings of that pictogram. And then that way, you can read one of the verses by reading all possible translations of every word and see what falls into place for you. And this translation that I’m about to read to you was my translation via those literal translations by Jonathan Starr. And I wove my way through verse 21 in the Simple Explanation manner. If you wonder about my translation, go ahead and pick up any other popular translation and compare verse 21. I think you’ll find that the meanings are the same, but here it is in simple explanation terms: Highest virtue arises through total alignment with the originating source of consciousness. How to become one with this elusive source? By disregarding everything else. Oh, so elusive, so very indistinct. Yet within its dimensionless center, dimensions form. So uncertain, so intangible. Yet its middle contains the latent substance of all things. So profound, such a mystery. Housed deep within that mysterious middle, the seed of life is consciousness itself. The life force within is self-evident. Thus life itself provides trustworthy evidence of the originating source. From the first moment until now, the manifestations of consciousness remain ever the same. Thus do we all bear witness to the creator, the originator. This is accordingly how I know the ways of everything and the origin of all things, by observing what is within me. ************************************************************************** Well, I have time here at the end of this episode to add a postscript, because I did just get another correspondence this morning. Our dear Correspondent’s mother has passed away, and he found himself in church, and so he was thinking about the hymns and the readings in terms of our Gnostic Gospel. The reading, he says, was Psalm 23, and since I did a podcast on that one and I was positive about it, he said that he doesn’t like being thought of as a sheep, that atheists are a proud lot, and even giving it the benefit of the doubt, it’s hard to fill an affinity with being a sheep. He says that it’s a farming community here, and sheep, cute though they are, are remarkably stupid creatures, according to my friend Luke, who grew up on a farm herding them. Well, people are like sheep. In fact, during the pandemic and during the great hoaxes that were perpetrated against the people, the Americans came up with the term sheeple, not people, but sheeple, because people are like sheep, and I’m surprised that our educated atheist does not see them that way. People are very easily led and deceived, propagandized, convinced of whatever those in power want them to believe. With enough repetition, the sheep will believe that. So I don’t have a problem at all of thinking of people as sheep. Of course, some of us are not as sheeple as others. No problem with that. There are those sheep that wander off by themselves or that are always on the outside of the herd. It’s more dangerous on the outside. You can get picked off by predators that way. It’s more dangerous to wander off because you can fall into holes and traps. But to think of us as sheep and to think of Jesus as our shepherd or “the Lord is my shepherd,” I find that very comforting. Pride cometh before the fall, and I associate the word pride or being a proud lot as large ego, because in our one true Self, when we are in alignment with the Father or the Father’s will, we’re not being led by our pride. We’re being led by God’s will or by our shepherd. So it’s best, in my opinion, not to work from pride. It’s okay to take pride in your work or your output. I take pride in the things I do when I do them very well, and I always attempt to do things as well as I can. I work to the best of my ability. I don’t just try to skate by. But that’s different than being proud. I am not proud in my own egoic output. I am proud at being the best Cyd that Cyd can be. And that’s a gift from God. My talents are aonic in origin, so I am thankful rather than self-satisfied. But I do like to do a good job. He also mentioned the idea of giving glory. It really popped out in church that they were asked to give glory to God, and he was wondering, that seems like demiurgic, that it may be that the Demiurge wants people to worship and glorify him. But would the Father or Christ ask for glorification as if it was egoic praise? He said, I’ve always been a bit baffled about the whole concept of glory. Does this business of demanding praise and glory have a whiff of the Demiurge about it? An egotistical God ready to smite us if we do not praise him? Why would any supreme being be bothered about whether I was praising him or not, he asks. Perhaps this is being a bit unfair, he says. You’re using glory, not praise, but how does one give glory anyway? Isn’t the thing that you are meant to be giving the glory to, the all in all, already glorious enough without human contribution? And yes, I think it is. And I cover this—we’ve had previous episodes about giving glory, and it’s in the book. Because I remember saying, God doesn’t demand glory as if he were needy and wheedling for our praise. That isn’t the point of giving glory. When the Son and the Father exchange glory, when the ALL gives glory, yes, they are reflecting the light of the Father in the original meaning of the word. My friend here has sent me the definitions of glory, and in classical Greek, doxa often meant opinion or reputation, particularly in terms of how someone is perceived by others. And isn’t that interesting? Because they use the word doxa nowadays to expose a person in social media, right? So they’re using a classical Greek word there when they dox someone. But in biblical Greek, Hellenistic Greek, it says, by the time of the New Testament and early Christian writings, such as the Tripartite Tractate, doxa evolved to denote glory in a divine or transcendent sense, the honor, radiance, or majesty associated with God. Now, I think of giving glory as this. Imagine that you are parents, and the mother has just given birth to the baby, and you love that baby. You love that baby with all of your heart. With all of your heart. Can you imagine staring at your newborn child and the overflowing love that you feel toward that child? That is giving glory. It’s overflowing love and admiration. It’s not fear. It’s not trembling. It’s not, oh, you are so wonderful, oh, you are so wonderful, repeated 13 or 300 times. It’s appreciating the radiance and glory of the Father, appreciating the beauty of love, reflecting the love that’s being radiated outward. That’s what giving glory is. It’s reflecting the love that’s been radiated out in your direction, and you’re reflecting it back to the source because of love. It’s love. At least that’s how I look at it. Okay, that’s enough for today. Say, listen, I’m really feeling an urge to get this Gnostic Reformation expanding to more people. I have been reluctant to employ social media to that end. For one thing, it’s very difficult to capture gnosis in little sound bites. But you, having listened to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation now for weeks, months, or years, you are having this gnosis within you that you can share with other people and say, Hey, have you heard this Gnostic Insights podcast? Why don’t you tune into it? It’s very interesting. Or pick out an episode that you like very much and choose to share that one episode with one of your friends. So how about you encourage some other friends to listen to the podcast? Or if you’re on Substack, encourage other friends and family to subscribe to this Substack. I would be happy to repay you in kind by corresponding with you, answering your questions personally and privately or publicly, as these past two episodes have been. So, let’s get this Gnostic Reformation underway. So many people are needing this. So many people who have been alienated by the Church need to come back to the love of the Father. And this is one way to do that. p.p.s. no sooner had I recorded and written this plea yesterday, than a friend texted me requesting 15 copies of the pocket edition of The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated to share with friends. Wow! An immediate answer to prayer. 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. I’ve been having some good correspondence with a relatively recent listener who actually responded to my request for an illustrator of the children’s book. She had only just come across the podcast and had no knowledge of this Gnostic Gospel approach. She and I exchanged a series of correspondences during the month of November, and she’s been asking good questions, so I thought, why not share them with everybody? The conversations began by talking about the artistic concepts for the children’s book. I sent her the text of the book and my descriptions of the characters and the scenes. And she said, I’m not surprised your last artist had trouble. It’s quite a sophisticated and tricky project. One of the things that immediately came to mind when I saw the sample image of the Demiurge was the fact that he was coated in mud. Now I thought your allusion of mud up, spirit down was really clever, having a typically elegant and simple style. However, because this is a kid’s book, something you can give to a clever six to eight year old, I was wondering if the mud is the right way to go visually. For children, mud can carry the connotation of being dirty, unclean, and shameful. Whilst I guess there is an element of shameful dirty to the mud up illusion, would you say that the primary takeaway for kids is that the copy that Logos created is imperfect, not as amazing as the original, rather than being shameful, dirty, sinful? But maybe the mud is a key takeaway from the gospel and you feel you can’t take liberties with the ancient text. So first off, I want to mention, and I didn’t mention this in my reply to her, is that the mud up, spirit down metaphor is mine. It’s not out of the Tripartite Tractate. It is only my simple way of characterizing how the molecules bind to the spirit of life. Mud up, spirit down. That predates my reading of the Gnostic Gospels. That’s out of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. I’ve taken that metaphor and applied it to the Tripartite Tractate. She told me she had encountered Gnostic Insights during a 6-hour drive and that it was great to experience a dive into the world of Gnosticism. I dimly remember encountering it via my medieval history A-levels. It was a joy to hear your elegant and nuanced take on what is, let’s face it, a rather involved topic. I found it extremely insightful. I’m one of those people, you mentioned in an episode, who is not coming at it from a Christian background. Ever since the vicar told me I’d burn in hell when I was eight, I set my head against all things Christian and was a smug materialist for most of my life. Even as recently as 2019, I was a hardcore atheist along the lines of Sam Harris, et al. However, the pandemic and the frightening response to it from governments ripped holes in what a Gnostic might call my meme cloud. Worryingly, even superbrains like Mr. Harris seem to have lost their reason during COVID. During those dark days of compulsory jabs and masking, et al., I sensed a malevolent presence at work in the world. I can remember thinking that if this force I sensed, ruining small businesses, turning families against each other, ramping up fear, let alone the actual disease itself, was indeed something approaching genuine evil. But by rights there should be a parallel entity working for good out there. I’m yet to experience that directly, but who knows? At the time I considered the idea that there might be two gods, one good and one bad, and wondered if anyone had thought of that since the Manicheans. So I’ve been on a spare-time quest dipping into Buddhism, Hermeticism, and to some extent Christianity. In terms of the latter, I’ve never been able to get past the typical issues of how to explain the evil in the world, and the whole thing about the mentally ill being damned, or tiny children being damned, pets not going to heaven, and many other issues which you’ve addressed. As you rightly point out, the Old Testament God seems like a curlish type, ordering parents to sacrifice their kids to prove their faith, and sending down plagues and floods, etc., etc. From listening to your podcasts, Gnosticism seems to have a lot of answers. I also like the way you sidestepped the delicate Sophia issue. Woke Feminism may have overshot the mark, however. Eve, Sophia, Pandora, Medea, etc., have been unfairly treated. I look forward to learning more as I go through your amazing smorgasbord of recordings. And I wrote back and said, I was also struck hard by the pandemic fear-mongering. It seems as though society has divided itself into freethinkers who believe in personal liberty, and those who prefer to shelter under the wing of oppressive government coercion. My orientation has always been toward personal liberty, and I think this helped me to see through the lies from the get-go. Go ahead and buy A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel if you haven’t already, or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which is extremely simple and non-theological. That way you will have all of the gnosis in your hands, and you can re-read parts of it that catch your attention. I’m so glad you stumbled across my podcast and had such a good long time to listen in. Interesting that you do not have a Christian background. The same was the case with Ant Critchley, who interviewed me last week on his Stellify podcast. And, which, by the way, you can look up that interview on YouTube, everyone. Go to Stellify Podcast, Ant Critchley, because there’s more than one Stellify, and then type in Cyd Ropp, and you ought to be able to find my interview. My followers appear to be largely either fallen-away Catholics or Evangelicals, or non-religious people like you and Ant. Although you and Ant both had early church exposure that scared you away from the faith. I like to explain things as simply as humanly possible, unlike scholastics who like to write in such a high-minded fashion that no one can understand them. It appears as though most of the young Turks who call themselves Gnostic are actually Hermeticists who reject the very idea of the Christ, or redemption. I think the other Gnostic podcasts have much larger followings than mine, precisely because they hold no position of redemption and salvation, whereas I’m pretty clear about it. She wrote back and said, “Cool, I will read your book. But basically, in the kid’s version, does Logos fall and shatter and the broken part of him creates the Demiurge and our material realm, or is our dimension created separately?” And I answer, Logos falls and breaks open. His ego is the Demiurge, and it does not remember or recognize his own higher Self, which is the Aeon Logos. Logos flees back to the Fullness and abandons his errant ego down below. Hence the god of this material universe doesn’t realize that he came from above and that he is only the ego of Logos. It’s all fractal—as above, so below type of stuff. We are the same. We all have a higher Self patterned after the Aeons of the Fullness, and we also have our individual ego that relates to the world around us. Most people mistakenly believe they are their ego, but their ego is only a part of our consciousness. Our higher Self is a fractal of the Fullness of God, and we all share that higher Self. It is our ego that represents our individuality. The ego, the Demiurge, is all about me, me, me, totally narcissistic and consumed by power and control. And then I explain in the next email, the way I explain ego in Gnostic terms is this, when the Aeons came to Self-realization and recognize their individualities, they sorted themselves in a hierarchy called the Fullness of God. Their identities were comprised of their ranks, stations, duties, location, and names. They weren’t assigned those things, they realized them themselves and self-sorted. Those individual identities are their egos, and they are what makes them each different from each other. Everyone has a Self that is identical to the Son, so that doesn’t distinguish one from another. It is the ego that describes everyone’s individual identities and duties. The Aeons share identical Selfs that are fractals of the Son. It is their Egos that set them apart, each with an individual point of view. We are fractals of the Aeons. We also have identical Selves and individual egos. Our egos are our unique personalities and talents. Our egos take care of us and our bodies and make sure our own needs are met. Our egos interact with our neighbors socially. Ego is not a bad thing, it is part of us. Ego only becomes fallen in people when they forget about their higher Self and its relation to the Fullness. It works the same for us humans as it did for the fallen ego of Logos, which operates on its own as the Demiurge. Our own human egos are called narcissistic when the ego runs the show outside of the Self and God. A few days later, she replied, Hi Cyd, I’ve just been listening to your amazing May 5th podcast, The Nature of the Gnostic God, which was packed with enlightening ideas. In the episode, you say that the Father is called the Father, not Mother, because it has masculine impulse, expansive and not a receptive impulse. But you later say that for this immutable first being, there is no direction, no up or down, no before or after, and presumably no in and out? Not wanting to nitpick too much here, and this is a genuine question, to be expansive, doesn’t one necessarily need to be able to go in a direction? I don’t quite have the words to express it, but isn’t this a contradiction, and is it t consistent philosophically for one to argue that the Father is called the Father because of a direction, and simultaneously assert that he is beyond all physical directions? As I have a feeling that you are painfully aware, many of us coming from the atheist camp are rather hung up on the whole Father-Son naming convention thing. You address this by arguing that it is about masculine expansiveness and female receptiveness. I found this concept intriguing, and after pondering for quite a bit, a couple of questions came up. One, in the act of conception, the female is receptive, but during the act of giving birth, the female is expansive, the act of birth itself being an outward impulse. Thus, it may be argued that the female can be receptive during conception and expansive giving birth, whereas the Father can just be expansive without a receptive aspect. If the Mother has two aspects, but the Father has one, the Father is less than the Mother. Wouldn’t a complete female with two aspects point to a feminine first mover rather than a male one? She goes on to ask, are the concepts of expansive and receptive in the same sense we are using them here intrinsically rooted in human anatomy? I know you are not saying that the flesh is evil, but is there a problem taking something human and imperfect sexual reproduction and using it as the basis for naming conventions? Sure, we have to use some names, but why not go with something non-gendered, like the source or the universal or something along those lines? Wouldn’t that be an easier message to communicate to modern humanity? I reply, excellent question. Here are my thoughts. Yes, the Father could be called the Source. In my first theory of everything, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, this original force was called the metaverse. I also refer to it as the originating consciousness. In the Gnostic gospel, I call it the Father because of the religious precedent. I want the people who already know the Father to realize that this is what I am talking about. For them, metaverse or originating consciousness or the Source would carry too many New Age overtones and would cause them to reject the message too quickly. Now, on to the directions: When the Source is sitting there, just sitting there in its unlimited potential, there is no in or out, up or down, etc., because the Source is an ocean without shores, depth, or surface. It simply is. It was not birthed. It did not come in from another place, so it does not have a mother. This is textual; take my word for it. When the Source realized itself, it gave birth to a Son, the monad that expresses all of the Father but in a discrete package rather than the unlimitable space. So in that sense, I suppose we could call it the Mother, only that it goes against Western tradition to do so. The source’s birth process is not like ours in that the Son remains attached to the Source. It is an extrusion. Let me add an afterthought. In my original answer to her, I said that the Son was an extrusion like a penis, but actually, I think it could actually be more properly thought of as a baby still attached by the umbilical cord. The point being, it’s an extrusion from the source and it remains attached. And as I was just taking a shower, I was looking at my belly button and I thought, well, you know, we’re all connected to our mother through this umbilicus until it is severed. And in the case of what we call the Son, it has not been severed. So she does have a point there. I don’t think I can argue that the Father is a father because it remains connected to the Son because it could be a mother remaining connected to the Son by the umbilicus. However, when Jesus referred to the Source, he called it the Father. And so I’m going along with that. It is the Son who then goes on to produce all of the other beings of the celestial plane, they being fractals of the Son. So the Son is rightly a male character and therefore a Father to all of its fractal iterations. It is not a female character because it is the extrusion of the Source. It then produces its fractals like a slime mold throwing off spores. Those first spores are called the Fullness of God because they altogether equal the completion of the Son. The Son wears the Fullness like a garment, and the Fullness wears the Son. They are coexistent. The Fullness of God, that is the Aeons of the Fullness, send down their spores into an otherwise lifeless universe. The spores are fractals of the Aeons sent down to bring consciousness, life and love into a barren landscape. Mother Earth receives and nurtures the aeonic spores. All living creatures are second-order powers, children of the Aeons. We second-order powers are welded to the dead molecular universe at conception. The spark of life that occurs during conception is what animates the molecules to life from the egg and stem cells up through all living creatures. There’s a good long answer for you. I’m an old-school feminist, so I understand your reluctance to take on sexist language. I’m straddling my teaching between two quite different target audiences, New Agers and atheists on the one hand and fallen-away Christians and Jews on the other. You may appreciate my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which is not based upon Gnostic scriptures but rather science and math concepts, but still winds up in a remarkably similar location. And, as an aside, this was not in my correspondence, but it occurs to me to explain that even in A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything which predates my reading of any of the Gnostic scriptures, the most basic direction or movement, it seems to me, is expansive versus contraction. Expansive is explosion outward; it’s Ananda-joy is how I think of it in the Yogic literature. It starts with a spark and it goes outward. That’s the direction. That’s the first direction—expansion. In this 15-year-old diagram from A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, the expansive force was labelled as repulsion. The universal information flows down from the top of the torus like a funnel, then contracts to a singular point at the middle and explodes outward into our newly created cosmos, creating space, time, change, and position. From the outside, the Metaverse presses on the universal torus with coherence, attraction, and love. This diagram predates the Gnostic Cosmology explanation. Contraction is the opposite of expansion. So, in our universe, once it’s been expanded, we also have the opposing force, which is contraction. So, those are the two basic forces because I like to think, well, what can we think of as direction without having it based upon coordinates? What is the basic movement? And that, to me, must be expansion and then, after that, contraction. And that’s what sets up waveforms and quantum foam leaking in and out of existence and whatnot. So, expansion is counteracted by contraction and that carries through to us. It’s a fractal concept because when you are open and receptive, you are expansive. And when you are fearful and cringing, you are contracting. So, that’s the basic non-relativistic directions. Now, my next letter to her was on Thanksgiving. It says, Happy Thanksgiving. In my opinion, you have wandered into the perfect theological backwater by finding Gnostic insights. There are many reasons for me to say this. The Gnostic gospel that I’m sharing is uniquely centered around your relationship with the Source rather than my relationship with the Source. [and you notice I am now using Source instead of Father because that is her preferred language] That is because the nugget of truth here is your personal discovery and relationship with the Source, the Son, the Aeons of the Fullness. It’s an upward-to-them relationship and not outward-to-me or to some institution. You notice it’s not even focused on you as it is focused upon the ethereal entities above. So many teachings today are ego-centered, always saying that you need to love yourself first and foremost. I don’t think that’s quite true. I think we need to love the God Above All Gods first, and then other humans and creatures as much or more than ourselves. The Father, the Source, is the fount of love. Without tapping into that Source, the love we offer ourselves and others is merely a narcissistic exercise in gratification. Do acquire my books, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and the original A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The first two are religious in nature. The third is mathy-sciencey, but it reaches the same conclusions. They’re all available on Amazon for next to nothing, so don’t let cost hold you back. Alternately, all of The Simple Explanation is available for reading on the old blog that’s been there for over 15 years. The URL is asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com. A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything is a meta-philosophical approach you can apply to anything and everything. You may need to start there or you can just skip to A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. I only started writing about the Gnostic Gospel a few years ago and have only very recently applied the Simple Explanation to The Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This is unique theology, very explanatory and simple, very accessible. You can read all of those articles or listen to all of those podcasts at the Complete Episodes Library located at gnosticinsights.com. I’ve been pondering all of this for a lifetime, so it’s too large to share in an email. That’s the only reason I recommend the books and blogs, so you can explore the topics that touch you personally. I wrote the books in such a way to make rational, linear sense of the far-flung material without all the noodling around on the blog. You can trust the books to be the simplest way to comprehend the Gnostic Gospel in a clear and methodical way. She wrote to say, On a different note, I feel slightly uneasy about the fact that I appear to be shopping around for a bespoke theology that I can sign up to, one that has the right naming conventions and a God that isn’t spiteful and a rational explanation for both the good and the evil that is evident in the world. I answer, Yes, this Gnostic gospel that I am presenting is the only theology I know of that meets your quest. It explains both good and evil without blaming us humans for everything. Evil is the absence of the good. Good, a.k.a. God. Evil is not a thing that exists from the beginning. In other words, evil did not emanate from the Source, but represents the inversions of the values of the Source. Vices are the inversions of the virtues. Their end is always suffering and death. Alignment with virtues of the Source brings peace. She said, “This feels intuitively right.” I said, Exactly. The Gnostic gospel asserts that all creatures come into this world fully loaded with gnosis, the knowledge of and relationship with the Source. That is precisely the source of your spiritual intuition. We forget it because of the never-ending war with the material cosmos and other forces at play. This gospel points the way to remembrance, and that’s all we need to know. We only need to remember that our origin is from the ethereal plane and we will return to the ethereal plane, not to be snuffed out into nothingness or to be swallowed up inside pre-existing consciousness with no self-identity, but to exist within the ethereal plane again, freed of material obfuscation and confusion. And I say that you’re fortunate to have discovered this path of the Gnostic gospel in the way that I teach it, because out there on the internet it’s 99% misguided theology that either accidentally or on purpose leads people astray. Most of the people who are seeking the Gnostic truth are being led down paths of confusion instead. And I know that it may sound as if I’m full of myself, but I strive consciously to not work from ego, but from the one Self that comes from the Source. The simple truth of all the theology is this: We come from above and we all return to above. That’s really all you need to know. The rest of it is all superfluous. We come from the one source of truth, love, consciousness, life and virtue. That is our true nature and the only thing that can bring peace to us and to the world. She said, ”However, it also feels suspiciously centered around me as if I’m the wearer and the theology is the garment.” To which I replied, it’s fascinating that you choose that metaphor because it’s a direct quote out of the Tripartite Tractate. “The Son wears the Totality like a garment and the Totality wears the Son like a garment.”  They are co-existent. Many steps down the path, we are part of that garment. You are sensing Gnosis. You are also expressing a fractal truth. This wearing the theology like a garment is indeed a fractal of how the Totality feels in relation to the Son. We’re stopping here for this episode. Join us next week for the conclusion of this peek into my conversation with an educated atheist–agnostic?–on the path to gnosis. I’m always happy to correspond with any of you. If you have any questions, ask away. 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. Last week we finished up our four-part series on David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved, and I skipped over the Free Will chapter because we just ran out of time. But this week I’m going to re-record an episode that was first aired on April 29th of 2023, and this time I’ll include the transcript with the audio post so that you can read it as well as hear it. This week’s episode is called Free Will is Essential, and essential means necessary. It’s baseline, it’s foundational, it’s a must-have. All of us Second-Order Powers have free will. The Aeons have free will. That’s how it is that Logos was able to choose to fall. We’re not helpless puppets. We do become helpless puppets when we sign up with the Demiurge, rather than with the Father in the Fullness. The Fullness and the Father allow us free will because that is essential to God’s nature, and we are direct emanations as fractals of that nature. We are made in the image of God. The Demiurge does not want you to have free will. That’s what causes all the troubles with the Demiurge and these pesky humans in particular, because we have free will, and the Demiurge hates free will. The original economy was that of the hierarchy of the Fullness, where every Aeon knew its place, position, and duties for cooperative overall functioning. Each of the Fullnesses lived in a state of joy, benevolence, and harmonious agreement, giving glory to the Father and never to each other or to themselves, according to the Tripartite Tractate in verse 86. The Second Order of Powers was created in order to bring life and love into what is called the new economy or new organization. This new economy was in the mind of the Father all along, even before the Fall. It is a unique feature of the Tripartite Tractate that the book does not describe the Fall in terms of sin and blame, but rather as an event that was destined to come about in order to usher in a new economy that differed from the ethereal pleroma where the Aeons dwell. The Tripartite Tractate says, The free will which was begotten with the totalities was a cause for this one, such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him. The intent then of the Logos, who is this one, was good, and before he begot anything else for the glory of the will and in agreement with the totalities, he acted magnanimously from an abundant love and set out toward that which surrounds the perfect glory. Thomason translates the word magnanimously in the scripture above as presumptuously. Yet the intention of the Logos was good. The Tripartite Tractate is unique in its gentle assessment of not blaming Logos for the Fall. The Tripartite Tractate says that this act of disobedience by Logos was within the will of the Father after all, and it was necessary to usher in an organization that needed to come forth for the revelation of the Fullness. The Tripartite Tractate says, For it was not without the will of the Father that the Logos was produced, which is to say, not without the will will he go forth. But he, the Father, had brought him forth for those about whom he knew that it was fitting that they should come into being. The Father knew what would happen, and the Father found it fitting that Logos should be conceived as he was and take the action that he did. The Father knew that this was the path that would lead to material creation, the economy that was to come, “So that the things which have come to be might become an organization which would come into being.” Logos mistook his will for that of the ALL. Logos overreached because of his presumptuous thought but he was unable to reach the illimitable Father and he Fell. After the Fall, the Self of Logos rejoined his fellow Aeons above in the Fullness. Logos and the Totalities joined together to create a new fruit from their union that would bring life, love, and consciousness to the Deficiency below. Logos and the Fullness brought forth these little ones of the Second Order out of his newly restored pleroma, so that they could receive the life-giving light born from the thought of brotherly love of the preexistent Fullness, in contrast to the phantoms that had arisen from the Fall. These powers of remembrance resembled the Aeons whose likenesses they were, and they were in harmony with themselves and with others of their kind. And, as you know by now, the Second Order of Powers manifests as every living thing that is on this planet Earth, from the cells on up through the humans. The restored pleroma of Logos and the Hierarchy of the Fullness conceive a new fruit called 2nd Order Powers. The Fullness is the 1st Order. The new economy of the Second Order of Powers reflected a different method of doing business from their images in the Fullness. In the new economy, the powers vied for position and authority within a limited space known as the Boundary. Here, those of the imitation who continued to wholeheartedly embrace the shadows left over from the Fall actively fought against those of the remembrance. For their part, those of the remembrance forgot all about the values of the Fullness due to the law of mutual combat that they were enacting against the Deficiency. We Second Order Powers continually battle the archons of the Fall. We are a mixed creation of life from above and death from below. The new Powers—that’s us—acquired the same lust for domination and all of the other passions of this sort, and wound up acting against itself on account of its rage. It was during this endless war that a myriad of various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers were mixed with one another, and in great number. Clearly another solution was required if peace were to enter the Deficiency. The endless war reflects our battle with the hylic or material nature of our universe and our material bodies. The life within us does battle against the non-living material created by the Demiurge. As our Self descends into this economy, the first spark unites with the material of the molecules to make up the fertilized egg. And it is the Self, replicating the patterns of the Fullness of God, that directs each organism’s growth. It is also the overall plan that directs evolution. As the myriad of various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers become mixed with one another, and in great number, remember that none of this was due to an error of planning. Rather, these steps were all necessary to bring about an economy still to come. For this reason, then, it is wrong to condemn the movement of Logos as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass. The Aeons of the Fullness took upon themselves the Fall that had happened, as if it were their own, with concern, goodness, and great kindness. For the one who had become deficient could be made perfect in no other way except by the Fullness of the Father. Free will is the core of our being. It was the free will of Logos that caused him to leave the Fullness in the Fall. It was the free will of the restored Logos and the Totalities that created us Second-Order Powers. And it is the free will of the Powers, by way of our aeonic inheritance, that directs our lives here below. It is our own free will that causes us to forget about the Father and the Fullness of God from which we come. It is our own free will that allows us to bow to the rule of the Demiurge and dig our own graves. Because of the nature of free will, we turn to an outside source to assist us in our remembrance and salvation. This Aeon is known as the Christ. And so the Aeons of the Fullness, everyone individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for help for the Deficiency. They brought forth one that combined every attribute of the All, manifested in the image of the Father of whom they had been thinking while they gave glory and prayed for help. This one was called the Son of His Will and Of the Good Pleasure of the All. It is the knowledge of the Father who wished to become known. Christ was conceived in order to bring redemption and remembrance to the 2nd Order Powers. It is also described as holding authority vested in Him from the beginning and the power needed to execute it. The Aeons not only produced a singular fruit reflecting the Father, but that fruit, which is the Christ, also reflected their own individual countenances and aspects from their positions in the hierarchy of the Fullness. In other words, we each have a one-to-one relationship with a fruit that comes in the image of each one of us. We are able to recognize the Savior because it fits us and has our face. 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. Those redeemed by the Light were made whole and complete. Those who were now enlightened felt the power of the Redeemer inside themselves being together with Him, sharing His suffering, relieving Him little by little, making Him grow, raising Him up. The redeemed were produced as an army for Him, as for a king in which those who belong to this thought share the command and are united in agreement. He also sowed in them invisibly a word designed for understanding and gave Him the power to detach and dispel from Himself those who were disobedient to Him. Those of the imitation, on the other hand, were unprepared for the Light, for they had come into being out of darkness and could not comprehend it. To them the Light came as a brief and terrifying flash, a leap and a blow that drove them deeper into the shadows of the abyss. To them this utter darkness was home. [That was from verse 89 of the Tripartite Tractate.] Going into verse 91, The Logos who had fallen and then abandoned the Deficiency he created, decided to pray that the fixed economy might attain all those who had gone forth from him, including those still clinging to the imitation. In this manner Logos was also made right from the Fall, as those of the Deficiency attained the economy of the All, and the Second-Order Powers united with the knowledge that had been given to them. So those of the Deficiency were found worthy of becoming rulers over the unspeakable darkness as their own property and the lot that fell to them. This is what he granted them, so that they too might become useful for the economy that was to be, and of which they were oblivious. And so it came to pass that every grace and food was contemplated through prayer, and they all came to be, for the Word greatly increased mutual cooperation and expectant hope, and they all experienced happiness, deep rest, and undefiled pleasures to the extent each was able to embrace them. Now, what all of this is saying in Simple Explanation terms is that the fruit of the All and the Father becomes another fractal iteration of the Universal Unit of Consciousness. But this iteration is not a fractal deriving from us Second-Order Powers. The Christ principle would be a perfect fractal iteration of the original Son and His pleroma, the hierarchy of the Fullness of God, taking into account the new information brought to it by the redeemed Logos concerning the goings-on in our bounded space. The Third Order Powers constitute the pleroma of the Christ. Third Order Powers have the perfection of the Christ; one for every Second Order Power and they carry the countenance of every Aeon. You could say that Logos and the Fullness have now amended the primary algorithm of this universe to include up-to-date data specific to each individual unit of consciousness in our space-time continuum. This new code represents patches to the fragmentary error code of the Deficiency in order to end the stalemate and re-establish harmony and proper functioning of the economy. When the Tripartite Tractate speaks of forms consisting of many forms, this refers to the nested fractal hierarchies of our space that make up all of the normal matter of our universe. Our Universal Unit of Consciousness, the Holy Spirit of the Fullness of God, is continually pouring in information, values, love, and coherence. The Christ came into the world to redeem all of creation through His Body and His Blood literally, because His Body and His Blood instantiate the entire Fullness of the All. Redemption comes not only to those of us on Earth, but also to the Fullness above, and to Logos in particular, the Aeon whose fall brought creation into existence. Each redeemed Second-Order Power is unshackled from the ties that bind it to the material world. And in this manner, the creation of the Demiurge loses power to the Fullness. We 2nd Order Powers are poised between the Deficiency and the Fullness, besieged by the Demirurgic material from below and enlightened by the power from above. The Christ bridges the Deficiency and brings redemption to all Second Order Powers. The face of the revealed Christ possessed the Word of the Son together with His essence, His power, and His form. He was the one He desired and delighted in. He was the one who had been prayed for in love. This Aeon was light and a desire to set right, an openness for instruction and an eye designed for vision, qualities that it had from those above. Moreover, it was wisdom for His thought against the ones who were placed lower in the economy, a word for speech and other perfecting things of this kind. [That comes from verses 93 and 94 of the Tripartite Tractate.] Those who come along as the army of the Christ are unshackled from the chains that bind the material and psychical orders, or emotional parts of ourselves, to this world, and so much so, in fact, that they form a new Third Order of Powers, the spiritual ones. The Third Order are also known as the Assembly of Salvation, the Bride, the Church, and the Elect. The Tripartite Tractate mentions the name of Jesus only a couple of times, and the Savior and the Christ many more times than that. And, of course, the entire book begins with long discourses concerning the nature of the Father and the Son, but with no mention of Jesus, who comes later as an instantiation of the Christ. Here’s what it says about Jesus at this point in the story, from 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 they had been from the beginning, that of which they possessed a drop, inciting them to return to it, which is what is called redemption. And that means to be released from captivity and to obtain freedom. Freedom is the knowledge of the truth, which existed before the ignorance was ruling, forever without beginning and without end, being something good and a salvation of things and a release from the servile nature in which they have suffered. Here the Gnostic gospel claims that we humans and all of creation are children or fruit of the spiritual realm, the Fullness, and we are redeemed by the body and the blood of Christ in the form of a drop of remembrance, a seed of the promise that now enables instruction and a return to that which we were from the beginning. Humans were endowed with reason so that they could remember their true inheritance and repent of their tenacious claim to this material life. This redemption comes easier to some than to others. The Tripartite Tractate describes humanity as coming to exist as three types of people—a reflection of their readiness to accept the redemption of the Savior: a spiritual type, a psychological type, and a material type, reproducing the fractal pattern of the three kinds of dispositions of the Logos before, during, and after the Fall. These three dispositions of Logos are his original Self, which contained the fractal images of the Totality, his egoic thought that propelled the fall away from the Self and the Fullness, and his fallen bits and shadows that form the body of the Demiurge—this material world. The spiritual kind of human is like light from light and like spirit from spirit. It received knowledge straight away from the revelation when he remembered that which is superior and prayed for salvation. He has salvation without any uncertainty. [That’s verses 118 and 119.] The Tripartite Tractate identifies these types as, “the prophets, the evangelists, the teachers of the Word, whose job it is to help their brothers and sisters to remember the Father above.” Next comes the psychological type, the psychical kind, who, hesitated to accept the knowledge of him who appeared to it. It hesitated even more to run to him in faith. This type of person is content to have a pledge of assurance of things to come. They are satisfied to have a promise of a future heaven, although they are in no hurry to get there. These are most of us folks who feel we’re doing just fine, leading mostly moral and comparatively upright lives—good family people, good citizens, realizing nobody’s perfect. We try to enact the Simple Golden Rule by being helpful to our neighbors when needed. The material kind, on the other hand, is alien in every respect. The Tripartite Tractate describes them as being, like darkness that avoids the shining light because it is dissolved by its manifestation, for it did not accept his coming, and is even filled with hatred against the Lord because he revealed himself. Those who arrogantly pride themselves in their vainglorious lust, who love temporary glory, who are oblivious to the fact that the power that has been entrusted to them is only for a limited time and period, and for that reason have not acknowledged that the Son of God is the Lord of the All and the Savior, and who have failed to rid themselves either of their fury or of their way of imitating those who are evil. They will receive judgment for their ignorance and their senselessness, and that judgment is suffering. [That’s verses 120 and 121.] It is important to note that this verse describes the hylic humans as imitating those who are evil. It does not describe them as evil themselves. This is because every human being is a Second-Order Power that comes from above. Therefore, every person contains the fractal patterns of the Fullness of God, and we can’t call that fractal evil. Despite their lack of reason, which comes from ignorance arising out of their forgetfulness, they are essentially children of God. And as children of God, they will return to the paradisiacal realm eventually, but not until they remember and relinquish their egoic narcissism. I would describe these people as prideful materialists with no fear of God because they reject sober contemplation of God. Some proudly call themselves scientists, still others academics. Some may be politicians, industrialists, tech giants, entertainers, or philandering priests and clerics. They are successful materialists who have no inclination to dethrone their narcissistic egos in favor of their one Self or the God above all gods. They mock believers, believing themselves superior to these poor, deluded fools. On the national and world stages, they seek to dismantle all religions and replace them with a secular government and elitist ruling class, falsely believing that this will lead to paradise on Earth. Yet even these materialists, who have been given temporary power and authority through the Demiurge, will eventually recognize their need for the Savior, either through their experiences after death or within increasingly less satisfying reincarnations. The Tripartite Tractate says of their redemption that the church of the elect will pray for them especially. It says, As for the servants of the evil one, though evil is worthy of destruction, they are in—and then there’s a missing word—but because of the Fullness which is above all the worlds, which is their good thought and the fellowship, the Church will remember them as good friends and faithful servants once she has received redemption from the one who gives requital. She will give them requital for all that which the Aeons will think about. He is an emanation from them, so that, just as Christ did his will, which he brought forth and exalted the greatnesses of the Church and gave them to her, so will she be a thought for these. And to men he gives their eternal dwelling places in which they will dwell, leaving behind the attraction toward the defect, while the power of the pleroma pulls them up in the greatness of the generosity and the sweetness of the Aeon which pre-exists. The Tripartite Tractate is a Christian book in that it names Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnation of the Christ. Jesus taught about the kingdom of God and instructed his followers in the ways of virtue. Jesus did not ask to be worshipped or glorified, rather he continually redirected attention and praise to the Father. Jesus was both fully human, with human DNA inherited from his earthly mother, and fully God, entwined at conception with DNA inherited from his spiritual Father. Within the body and blood of Jesus flowed the perfect genomic instantiation of the Fullness of God and the Paradise dreamed by the Fullness. As do we all. We all instantiate the Fullness of God in our Second-Order bodies. Through the Christ, restoration comes to the Deficiency below, one fractal iteration at a time. I hope this explains about free will and the different types of humans. You may want to listen to this episode again or read the transcript. If you were only listening, go to gnosticinsights.com. And may I ask you to please contribute to this effort. Expenses are arising and I need your help in order to put out a children’s book. It’s already written. I’m just waiting for an illustrator, looking for an illustrator, needing the money to pay for an illustrator. Unless you yourself are an artist who would like to make that your contribution, that would be so appreciated. I would also like to promote the new book and this podcast. And I’m finally getting ready to put up a YouTube channel, so there will be visual YouTubes. Pray for me. Pray for Gnostic Insights. Pray for each other. God bless us all, and onward and upward! 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Universal Salvation–part 4 Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’m going to do my best to wrap up this review of David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. And I hope you understand, particularly those of you who are Christians that are listening to this, that I do all of this in the name of the Father. It’s not to tear down Christianity. It’s to uphold the mission of the Messiah, which has been lost over the past several hundred years of Christianity. And so this talk of universal salvation is a necessary component of believing in the glory of God. Because universal salvation of all souls, not only all humans, but the dogs, the cats, the birds, the grasses, all living things, have to return to the Father, or else the Anointed loses power. The Father loses parts of himself. Okay, let’s get back to David Bentley Hart. So we’re going to run through these four meditations that are the body of his book. The first meditation is, Who is God? He says, The New Testament, to a great degree, consists in the eschatological interpretation of Hebrew Scripture’s story of creation, finding in Christ as eternal Logos and risen Lord, the unifying term of beginning and end. There’s no more magnificent meditation on this vision than Gregory of Nyssa’s description of the progress of all persons towards union with God in the one pleroma, the one fullness of the whole Christ. All spiritual wills moving, to use this loving image, from outside the temple walls to the temple precincts, and finally beyond the ages into the very sanctuary of the glory as one. Okay, let me jump in here to say, do you notice that the New Testament words, when you use the correct translations, are the same as the translations in our Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi? Logos is the eternal spirit of humanity and the risen Lord. The Fullness is the one pleroma, the whole Christ. And in this statement, it’s saying that all that is spiritual, which includes the spirits that reside within each of us, will all move as one into the pleroma of the Christ. That’s who Christ is to us. He’s the head of our pleroma. And when I speak of pleromas, I always picture that pyramidal shape, that hierarchical shape, and the capstone is the head. We 2nd order powers are children of the 1st order powers. The 3rd order powers are the Army of Christ that have come to redeem us. When Paul spoke of this, he was applying it literally to the temple in Jerusalem, where there were the walls of the temple, and most of the people were outside of the walls, and some of the people were in the temple precincts. And finally, the very sanctuary of the glory, where only the priests were allowed. These are the three parts that were mentioned, and these are archetypal of the movement of humanity, Hart is saying, from the outside of the pleroma of the Christ, into the pleroma of the Christ, and then into the very glory of God through the Christ. On page 90, Hart says, If one truly believes that traditional Christian language about God’s goodness and the theological grammar to which it belongs are not empty, then the God of eternal retribution and pure sovereignty proclaimed by so much of Christian tradition is not and cannot possibly be the God of self-outpouring love revealed in Christ. If God is the good creator of all, he must also be the savior of all without fail, who brings to himself all he has made, including all rational wills, and only thus returns to himself in all that goes forth from him. And that’s the end of the chapter, Who is God? And that pretty much states my basic belief on why everyone is going to heaven, because we all come from the Father, and therefore we all must return to the Father, because the Father cannot be diminished in any way. And if he lost us, he’d be diminished. Do you see? The second meditation is, What is Judgment? And the subtitle is A Reflection on Biblical Eschatology. And eschatology, that’s one of those big theological words that just means the end times, the end of time. On page 93, Hart says, There’s a general sense among most Christians that the notion of an eternal hell is explicitly and unremittingly advanced in the New Testament. And yet, when we go looking for it in the actual pages of the text, it proves remarkably elusive. The whole idea is, for instance, entirely absent from the Pauline corpus as even the thinnest shadow of a hint, nor is it anywhere patently present in any of the other epistolary texts. There is one verse in the Gospels, Matthew 25-46 that, traditionally understood, offers what seems the strongest evidence for the idea, but then now Hart’s going to explain how that can’t be true. And then he says there are also perhaps a couple of verses from Revelation, and he says nothing’s clear in Revelation, so he’s not going to go there. But, What in fact the New Testament provides us with are a number of fragmentary and fantastic images that can be taken in any number of ways, arranged according to our prejudices and expectations, and declared literal or figural or hyperbolic as our desires dictate. It’s why people can make the case for eternal damnation, but you can also make the case for not eternal damnation, because it’s so metaphorical. On page 94, Hart says, Nowhere is there any description of a kingdom of perpetual cruelty presided over by Satan, as though he were some kind of Chthonian god. On the other hand, however, there are a remarkable number of passages in the New Testament, several of them from Paul’s writings, that appear instead to promise a final salvation of all persons and all things, and in the most unqualified terms. How did some images become mere images in the general Christian imagination, while others became exact documentary portraits of some final reality? If one can be swayed simply by the brute force of arithmetic, it seems worth noting that, among the apparently most explicit statements on the last things, the universalist statements are by far the more numerous. And then he lists a number of verses from the New Testament that speak of universal salvation, over 20 of them at least, and I’ll give you just a couple. Romans 5.18 says, So then, just as through one transgression came condemnation for all human beings, so also through one act of righteousness came a rectification of life for all human beings. And jumping in from the Gnostic sense, he doesn’t say the fall of one human, he doesn’t say through Adam, he says one transgression—and we would call that one transgression the Fall of Logos, the fall of the Aeon, which is a higher order being than we are. Or Corinthians 15.22 says, For just as in Adam all die, so also in the anointed Christ all will be given life. I would say where it says for just as in Adam all die, it’s not because Adam ate the apple, it’s that we humans who are outside of the Christ, we’re outside of the walls of the temple, we are in the pleroma of Adam—we are in the pleroma of human beings. When you accept the anointed, then you move into the pleroma, or you nest up higher into the pleroma of the Christ. That would be the Gnostic way of saying that. Second Corinthians 5.14 says, For the love of the anointed constrains us, having reached this judgment, that one died on behalf of all, all then have died. And of course that one is the Anointed, and He died on behalf of everyone. Or even Romans 11:32, For God shut up everyone in obstinacy, so that he might show mercy to everyone. And there’s a long discussion in the chapter about how God’s chosen—the original elect, that being the Hebrew nation—has been obstinate about accepting Jesus of Nazareth as the Anointed. And so he’s saying that everyone is shut up in obstinacy, that’s the Hebrews, so that he might show mercy to everyone. And that is, they’re temporarily set up in obstinacy so that the message of the Anointed can be preached far and wide, before death and after death, we Gnostics would say, and not be just constrained to only the Hebrews. That’s why the Hebrews are set aside for the moment, so that those outside the temple walls can also come to Christ. And then there are 19 more verses after this, and he lists them all between pages 96 and page 102. And if you are a theological scholar or a concerned Christian that wants to know if this is heresy or not, I really suggest you buy the book, That All Shall Be Saved, by David Bentley Hart, and read it carefully from cover to cover. Jumping to page 116, Hart says, There are those metaphors used by Jesus that seem to imply that the punishment of the world to come will be of only limited duration. For example, “if remanded to prison, you shall most certainly not emerge until you pay the very last pittance.” Or, “the unmerciful slave is delivered to the torturers until he should repay everything he owes.” And Hart says it seems as if this until should be taken with some seriousness. Some wicked slaves, moreover, “will be beaten with many blows, while others will be beaten with few blows.” Hart says, of course, everyone will be “salted with fire.” This fire is explicitly that of the Gehenna. But salting here is an image of purification and preservation, for salt is good. Gehenna is the Valley of Hinnom from the Old Testament, and that is where, outside of the city of Jerusalem, the refuse was burned, and even carrion and bodies were burned. And that is why it is considered to be a hellish place. And it has become a metaphor in the time of Jesus for the purging fire, the Aeonian chastening for the good. Hart says we might even find some support for the purgatorial view of the Gehenna from the Greek of Matthew 25:46, which is the supposedly conclusive verse on the side of the Infernalist Orthodoxy, where the word used for the punishment of the last day is kolasis, which most properly refers to remedial chastisement, rather than timoria, which more properly refers to retributive justice. So, the fire of the judgment. What is judgment? The fire is the chastening fire, the fire of personal guilt and remorse over the sins one has done, that causes one to repent and turn to redemption. Hart says, It is not clear in any event that the fourth gospel, [and the fourth gospel, that’s the gospel of John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John], it is not clear in any event that the fourth gospel foretells any last judgment, in the sense of a real additional judgment that accomplishes more than has already happened in Christ. To see His words as pointing toward and fulfilled within his own crucifixion and resurrection, wherein all things were judged and all things redeemed. The kingdom has indeed drawn very near, and even now is being revealed. The hour indeed has come. The judge who is judged in our place is also the resurrection and the life that has always already succeeded and exceeded the time of condemnation. All of heaven and of hell meet in those three days. . . Hell appears in the shadow of the cross as what has always already been conquered, as what Easter leaves in ruins, to which we may flee from the transfiguring light of God if we so wish, but where we can never finally come to rest, for being only a shadow, it provides nothing to cling to. And he attributes that concept of hell being only a shadow to Gregory of Nyssa, although we would attribute it to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scrolls which came before Gregory of Nyssa. Hell exists so long as it exists only as the last terrible residue of a fallen creation’s enmity to God, the lingering effects of a condition of slavery that God has conquered universally in Christ and will ultimately conquer individually in every soul. This age has passed away already, however long it lingers on its own aftermath, and thus in the Age to Come, [and that’s capital A, Age, which we would interpret as the Aeons to Come, the Aeonian Pleroma to Come], and beyond all ages, all shall come to the kingdom prepared for them from before the foundation of the world. And that’s the chapter, What is Judgment? The third meditation or chapter of Hart is called What is a Person? A Reflection on the Divine Image. It says over and over in the Bible that we are made in the image of God. Man is made in the image of God. That is the divine image. On page 131, Hart says, Christians down the centuries have excelled at converting the good tidings of God’s love in Christ into something dreadful, irrational, and morally horrid. [And we covered that in depth in the previous three episodes, if you want to go back there.] On page 132, Hart says, I suspect that no figure in Christian history has suffered a greater injustice as a result of the desperate inventiveness of the Christian moral imagination than the Apostle Paul, since it was the violent misprision of his theology of grace, starting with the great Augustine, it grieves me to say, that gave rise to almost all of these grim distortions of the Gospel. Aboriginal guilt, predestination, ante praevisa merita, the eternal damnation of unbaptized infants, the real existence of vessels of wrath, and so on. All of these odious and incoherent dogmatic motifs, so to speak, and others equally nasty, have been ascribed to Paul. And yet, each and every one of them, not only is incompatible with the guiding themes of Paul’s proclamation of Christ’s triumph and of God’s purpose in election, but is something like their perfect inversion. Well, isn’t that interesting? Because we already know that the archons represent the inversions of the Aeons of the Pleroma. And so, although Hart doesn’t realize he’s implying this, to say that what has come down to us in Christian tradition through Augustine is the perfect inversion of what Paul was actually saying about universal salvation, which means, by definition, that it’s the demiurgic or the archonic version of salvation. Isn’t that interesting? I mean, that is what I have been implying, that what has been taken to be Christian tradition for the last couple of thousand years is actually a diminishment of the power of Christ and the power and love of the Father. By saying that people can be lost and condemned to eternal torture, that is sacrilegious to me. That is the heresy. And that is what Hart is saying here. He goes on to say on page 133, This is all fairly odd, really. Paul’s argument in those chapters is not difficult to follow. What preoccupies him from beginning to end is the agonizing mystery that the Messiah of Israel has come, and yet so few of the children of the house of Israel have accepted the fact, even while so many from outside the covenant have. And Paul wonders, how is the promised Messiah rejected by so many, yet so many outside the temple walls have accepted the Messiah? Well, there’s far more Christians than there are Jews at the moment. Why is that? Paul was wondering. Hart says, Paul’s is not an abstract question regarding which individual human beings are the saved and which are the damned. In fact, by the end of the argument, the former category, [that is the saved], proves to be vastly larger than that of the elect or the called, while the latter category, [that is the damned], makes no appearance at all. Jumping down the page, he says, “so then what if,” so now he’s going to go ahead and quote Paul here, Romans 9:19, Paul says, So then what if God should show his power by preserving vessels suitable only for wrath, keeping them solely for destruction, in order to provide an instructive counterpoint to the riches of the glory he lavishes on vessels prepared for mercy, whom he has called from among the Jews and the Gentiles alike. For as it happens, rather than offering a solution to the quandary in which he finds himself, Paul is simply restating that quandary in its bleakest possible form, at the very brink of despair. He does not stop there, however, because he knows that this cannot be the correct answer. It is so obviously preposterous, in fact, that a wholly different solution must be sought, one that makes sense and that will not require the surrender either of Paul’s reason or of his confidence in God’s righteousness. Hence, contrary to his own warnings, Paul does indeed continue to question God’s justice, and he spends the next two chapters unambiguously rejecting the provisional answer, the vessels of wrath hypothesis, altogether, so as to reach a completely different and far more glorious conclusion—God blesses everyone.  Romans 10: 11, 12. And by the way, in Gnostic gospel, we would say the law is actually the Demiurge’s rules for human behavior, because we are uncontrollable through our self-will. Because to the Father above, the only law is love. When we act out of love, all else follows. Going on, Hart says, As for the believing remnant of Israel, [Romans 11:5], it turns out that they have been elected not as the limited number of the saved within Israel, but as the earnest through which all of Israel will be saved. They are waiting for the Anointed to come and take the place of the King of Israel, King of the Jews. That’s one of the titles of the Messiah. That means the capstone of their pleroma. You see? It’s all of these pyramidal shapes that are first designed up there in the Fullness of God, the pleroma. What Paul is saying is that the Jews that are in the pleroma of Israel, it’s their remnant that makes them holy. It’s their remnant that is the spiritual part, the higher part, the called part, the elect part of the pleroma of the nation of the Hebrews. And it is through those elect that all of the Jews will be saved, ultimately. [I am drawing a new diagram of nested pleromas to add to our understanding of the Gnostic gospel. Next week I will present it to you.] Hart says, For the time being, true, a part of Israel is hardened, but this will remain the case only until the ”full entirety” [that is the pleroma] of the Gentiles enter in. The unbelievers among the children of Israel may have been allowed to stumble, but God will never allow them to fall. Hart’s just saying that Israel’s reluctance or slowness to believing that Jesus is the Messiah is just slowing down the progress of history to give everyone else a chance to catch up to it. Quoting Hart again, We’re in Romans now, 11:11. This then is the radiant answer dispelling the shadows of Paul’s grim what if in the ninth chapter of Romans. It’s clarion negative. It turns out that there is no final illustrative division between the vessels of wrath and vessels of mercy. That was a grotesque, all too human thought that can now be chased away for good. God’s wisdom far surpasses ours, and his love can accomplish all that it intends. “He has bound everyone in disobedience so as to show mercy to everyone.” [That’s Romans 11:32.] All are vessels of wrath precisely so that all may be made vessels of mercy. . . That Paul’s great attempt to demonstrate that God’s election is not some arbitrary act of predilective exclusion, but instead a providential means for bringing about the unrestricted inclusion of all persons, has been employed for centuries to advance what is quite literally the very teaching that he went to such great lengths explicitly to reject. . . Yet this is still not my principal point. I want to say something far more radical. I want to say that there is no way in which persons can be saved as persons except in and with all other persons. This may seem an exorbitant claim, but I regard it as no more than an acknowledgment of certain obvious truths about the fragility, dependency, and exigency of all that make us who and what we are. Oh, this is a very interesting portion. Okay, listen to this. Jumping to page 149. No soul is who or what it is in isolation, and no soul’s sufferings can be ignored without the sufferings of a potentially limitless number of other souls being ignored as well. And so it seems if we allow the possibility that even so much as a single soul might slip away unmourned into everlasting misery, the ethos of heaven turns out to be “every soul for itself”—which is also, curiously enough, precisely the ethos of hell. But Christians are obliged, it seems clear, to take seriously the eschatological imagery of scripture. And there all talk of salvation involves the promise of a corporate beatitude, a kingdom of love and knowledge, a wedding feast, a city of the redeemed, the body of Christ, which means that the hope Christians cherish must in some way involve the preservation of whatever is deepest in and most essential to personality rather than a perfect escape from personality. But finite persons are not self-enclosed individual substances. They are dynamic events of relation to what is other than themselves. And then Hart summons up the idea of a single recurrent image, he says, That of a parent whose beloved child has grown into quite an evil person, but who remains a parent nevertheless, and therefore keeps and cherishes countless tender memories of the innocent and delightful being that has now become lost in the labyrinth of that damaged soul. Is all of that, those memories, those anxieties and delights, those feelings of desperate love, really to be consigned to the fire as just so much combustible chaff? Must it all be forgotten or willfully ignored for heaven to enter into that parent’s soul? And if so, is this not the darkest tragedy ever composed? And is God not then a tragedian utterly merciless in his poetic omnipotence? Who or what is that being whose identity is no longer determined by its relation to that child? [Skipping to page 153]  Personhood as such is not a condition possible for an isolated substance. It is an act, not a thing. And it is achieved only in and through a history of relations with others. We are finite beings in a state of becoming, and in us there is nothing that is not an action, dynamism, an emergence into a fuller or a retreat into a more impoverished existence. And so, as I said in my first meditation, we are those others who make us. Spiritual personality is not mere individuality, nor is personal love one of its merely accidental conditions or extrinsic circumstances. A person is first and foremost a limitless capacity, a place where the all shows itself with a special inflection. We exist as the place of the other, to borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau. Certainly, this is the profoundest truth in the doctrine of resurrection. That we must rise from the dead to be saved is a claim not simply about resumed corporeality, whatever that might turn out to be, but more crucially, about the fully restored existence of the person as socially, communally, corporately constituted. Each person is a body within the body of humanity, which exists in its proper nature only as the body of Christ. Well, that’s pretty neat. See, we are nested fractal hierarchies of the pleroma of the Fullness of God. And if you’ve been with me a while, you know what that long and complicated sentence means. Picture a pyramidal shape, picture every living part of your body as building up the pyramid, and your conscious self is the capstone of that pleroma that makes up your body. Now, you are then nested along with all other humans into the pleroma of humanity, the body of humanity, also called the body of Adam. Just the way our cells nest up into building us, we nest up into building the great body of humanity. And then, Hart is saying this body of humanity exists in its proper nature only as the body of Christ, because when we then nest up and make Christ the king of our pleroma, we are nested into the Fullness of Christ. And that is what the final salvation resting point is. When we all finally pass through the final judgment and nest up into Christ, then we’re all nested up into the pleroma, we’re all nested up into the Son. And there we are. And we will still have our lives the way the Fullness has their lives. They dream together as one of paradise. And that’s where we’re headed. Hart says, Our personhood must truly consist not only in the immediate love of those close at hand, but also in our disposition toward those whom we, by analogy, care for from afar. Or even in the abstract, for the most essential law of charity, of love, when it is truly active, is that it must inexorably grow beyond all immediately discernible boundaries in order to be fulfilled and to continue to be active. And all of those in whom each of us is implicated, and who are implicated in each of us, are themselves in turn implicated and intertwined in countless others, and on and on without limit. We belong of necessity to an indissoluble co-inherence of souls. And I think that down here on the physical level, on the material plane, the demiurgic version of that shared coherence of all souls together is quantum entanglement. That’s the Demiurge’s material version of how we are implicated and intertwined with every other soul. And now he goes on to say something that’s very Gnostic. On the next page, Hart says, There may be within each of us—indeed there surely is—that divine spark, that divine light or spark of nous or spirit or atman that is the abiding presence of God in us, the place of radical sustaining divine imminence, nearer to me than my inmost parts. But that light is the one undifferentiated ground of our existence, not the particularity of our personal existence, in and with one another. Oh, hey, there it is. That’s what I’m always saying. This one spark, that’s the what we call the big S Self. And the particularity of our personal existence is what we here at Gnostic Insights label as our Ego. So we are made up of the Self that we share with all others and that we share with the Son, but we are also our own individual existence. That’s why we can’t just blink out into nothingness and not be missed, because we have our particularity, and it has its own place in the hierarchy. Then Hart says, But then this is to say that either all persons must be saved or that none can be. He says, God could, of course, erase each of the elect as whoever they once were by shattering their memories and attachments like the gates of hell and then raise up some other being in each of their places, thus converting the will of each into an idiot bliss stripped of the loves that made him or her this person, associations and attachments and pity and tenderness and all the rest. If that were the case, only in hell could any of us possess something like a personal destiny, tormented perhaps by the memories of the loves we squandered or betrayed, but not deprived of them altogether. [Jumping to 157, he says], I am not I in myself alone, but only in all others. If then anyone is in hell, I too am partly in hell. . . For the whole substance of Christian faith is the conviction that another has already and decisively gone down into that abyss for us to set all the prisoners free, even from the chains of their own hatred and despair, and hence the love that has made all of us who we are and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone. Amen. And that’s the end of the third meditation. Now the fourth meditation, we just don’t even have time to get to. It’s called, What is Freedom? And if you want to hear the fourth meditation in depth, please text me in the comments and ask for more David Bentley Hart That All Shall Be Saved. But as for now, this treatise on what is freedom? I’ll actually just jump to the last page and skip all of the explanations. The fourth meditation, What is Freedom? is all about free will. I guess I’ll include it in some future episode about free will and just quote Hart extensively in that episode. But to close it out, Hart says, It would make no sense to suggest that God, who is by nature not only the source of being, but also the good and the true and the beautiful and everything else that makes spirits exist as rational beings, would truly be all in all if the consummation of all things were to eventuate merely in a kind of extrinsic divine supremacy over creation. But God is not a god, [or as we would say, the God Above All Gods is not the Demiurge, is how we would put it in Gnostic terms]. And his final victory, as described in scripture, will consist not merely in his assumption of perfect supremacy over all, but also in his ultimately being all in all. Could there then be a final state of things in which God is all in all, while yet there existed rational creatures whose inward worlds consisted in an eternal rejection of and rebellion against God as the sole and consuming and fulfilling end of the rational will’s most essential nature? If this fictive and perverse interiority were to persist into eternity, would God’s victory over every sphere of being really be complete? Or would that small miserable residual flicker of Promethean defiance remain forever as the one space in creation from which God has been successfully expelled? Surely it would, so it too must pass away. All right, that ends this long episode, because I was trying to wrap up the entire book, which I almost did. Write to me, tell me what you think of this sort of thing. I’d especially like to hear from people who used to be Christians, or who were raised in the church, and who fell away from the church because of some of these very problems and conundrums that we’ve been talking about for the last four episodes. God bless us all, and onward and upward! If you value this gnosis, please consider either a one-time donation or please pledge an ongoing donation. Funds are needed in order to promote this gospel. 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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today is part three of my book report on David Bentley Hart’s book called That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. The past two weeks we covered the beginning of his book, the Introduction. I’m going to begin this section by reading out of his final remarks, because he does a good job of simplifying his arguments here at the end of the book. So we’ll start with that. Hart says on page 201, It may offend against our egalitarian principles today, but it was commonly assumed among the very educated of the early church that the better part of humanity was something of a hapless rabble who could be made to behave responsibly only by the most terrifying coercions of their imaginations. Belief in universal salvation may have been far more widespread in the first four or five centuries of Christian history than it was in all the centuries that followed, but it was never, as a rule, encouraged in any general way by those in authority in the church. Maybe there are great many among us who can be convinced to be good only through the threat of endless torture at the hands of an indefatigably vindictive god. Even so much as hint that the purifying flames of the age to come will at last be extinguished, and perhaps a good number of us will begin to think like the mafioso who refuses to turn state’s evidence because he is sure he can do the time. Bravado is, after all, the chief virtue of the incorrigibly stupid. He goes on to say, I have never had much respect for the notion of the blind leap of faith, even when that leap is made in the direction of something beautiful and ennobling. I certainly cannot respect it when it is made in the direction of something intrinsically loathsome and degrading. And I believe that this is precisely what the Infernalist position, no matter what form it takes, necessarily involves. And to remind you, if you didn’t hear the past two episodes, Infernalist refers to the notion that there is an unending hell of pain and torture for the unregenerate or the unrepentant. Further down page 202, Hart says, I honestly, perhaps guilelessly, believe that the doctrine of eternal hell is prima facie nonsensical for the simple reason that it cannot even be stated in Christian theological terms without a descent into equivocity, which is equivocation, so precipitous and total that nothing but edifying gibberish remains. To say that, on the one hand, God is infinitely good, perfectly just, and inexhaustibly loving, and that, on the other, he has created a world under such terms as oblige him either to impose or to permit the imposition of eternal misery on finite rational beings is simply to embrace a complete contradiction. All becomes mystery, but only in the sense that it requires a very mysterious ability to believe impossible things. [Jumping down the page, he says,] Can we imagine logically, I mean not merely intuitively, that someone still in torment after a trillion ages, or then a trillion trillion, or then a trillion vigintillion, is in any meaningful sense the same agent who contracted some measurable quantity of personal guilt in that tiny, ever more vanishingly insubstantial gleam of an instant that constituted his or her terrestrial life? And can we do this even while realizing that, at that point, his or her sufferings have, in a sense, only just begun, and, in fact, will always have only just begun? What extraordinary violence we must do both to our reason and to our moral intelligence, not to mention simple good taste, to make this horrid notion seem palatable to ourselves. And all because we have somehow, foolishly, allowed ourselves to be convinced that this is what we must believe. Really, could we truly believe it all apart from either profound personal fear or profound personal cruelty? Which is why, again, I do not believe that most Christians truly believe what they believe they believe. So, what he’s saying here, what I’ve been talking to you about, is the idea that God, the God Above All Gods, what we call the Father in Gnosticism, would condemn people to everlasting torment, everlasting torment, with no other goal than to punish, because they’re never going to get out of it. That’s what everlasting means. And so it’s just punishment for the sake of punishment, and that that great, unlimitable God would impose this punishment on little, limited, finite beings who only lived a brief millisecond of time in the great span of time of God. That God would create these people for the purpose, basically, of condemning them to everlasting torment. You see, that is not even rational. It doesn’t make any sense. Not if you believe God is good. It’s impossible. Now, if you think that God is evil, well, then that’s not God, is it? By definition, if you believe that God is cruel and vindictive and unreasonable, well, that’s not the God Above All Gods. And this should come as relief to those of you who think you can’t believe in God, because God is so cruel and vindictive. Perhaps you were raised in an extremely cruel household with extremely vindictive parents, or schoolteachers, or somebody got to you and, in the name of God, inflicted cruelty upon you. Then you have come to accidentally transpose their human cruelty onto God, because they told you to. But that’s not God, by definition, you see? And when I say, by definition, that means, like, cold is not hot, by definition. Cold is cold. And if you’re going to start arguing, oh no, cold is hot, well, then you’re not talking about cold, you’re talking about hot. Do you see what I mean? And if you have been rejecting God, the God Above All Gods, because you have this view of God as merciless and vindictive, cruel, illogical, unfair, unjust, take comfort, because that’s not God you’re talking about. Now, it may be the small g god of this world. It could be the guy whose best friend is Satan, because remember, that is a small g god of confusion. And its main job is to cause you to forget that you come from transcendent goodness, that you come from above, from the God Above All Gods, and that you do have freedom. You do have free will. You are meant to inherit joy. You are to do good works, and to be happy, and to be in love, and to love everybody else. Don’t let some evil archon, or evil Demiurge, or evil human, redefine God in such a way that you reject God, because that’s the mistake. That’s a categorical error. And that’s why I say, take comfort, have joy, receive the love that was meant for you. Okay, back to the book. On page 205, Hart says, It was not always thus. Let me at least shamelessly idealize the distant past for a moment. In its dawn, the gospel was a proclamation principally of a divine victory that had been won over death and sin, and over the spiritual powers of rebellion against the big G God that dwells on high, and here below, and under the earth. It announced itself truly as the good tidings of a campaign of divine rescue on the part of a loving God, who by the sending of his Son into the world, and even into the kingdom of death, had liberated his creatures from slavery to a false and merciless master, and had opened a way into the kingdom of heaven, in which all of creation would be glorified by the direct presence of big G God, [or the Father, as we call him in Gnosticism]. And by the way, this paragraph that I just read about early Christianity, that entirely is consistent with this Valentinian Christianity that I share with you here. That is the entire purpose of we second-order creatures being sent down here below, to bring the good tidings of life and love and liberty to the fallen Demiurge, and now subsequently to all of the people who have been hoodwinked by the Demiurge and Satan into believing in the false god that does not incorporate love. Hart goes on to say, It was above all a joyous proclamation and a call to a lost people to find their true home at last, in their father’s house. It did not initially make its appeal to human hearts by forcing them to revert to some childish or bestial cruelty latent in their natures. Rather, it sought to awaken them to a new form of life, one whose premise was charity. Nor was it a religion offering only a psychological salve for individual anxieties regarding personal salvation. It was a summons to a new and corporate way of life, salvation by entry into a community of love. Nothing as yet was fixed except the certainty that Jesus was now Lord over all things and would ultimately yield all things up to the Father, so that God might be all in all. Now we’re going to go back into the earlier part of the book to explain some of these concepts in more depth. Hart has broken his book into four meditations, or four subjects we could call it. The first meditation is, who is God? The second meditation is, what is judgment? The third meditation is, what is a person? And the fourth meditation is, what is freedom? A reflection on the rational will. So in the first meditation, who is God? Hart explains to us that, The moral destiny of creation and the moral nature of God are absolutely inseparable. As the transcendent good beyond all things, God is also the transcendental end that makes every single action of any rational nature possible. Moreover, the end toward which He acts must be His own goodness, for He is Himself the beginning and end of all things. This is not to deny that, in addition to the primary causality of God’s act of creation, there are innumerable forms of secondary causality operative within the creative order. But none of these can exceed or escape the one end toward which the first cause directs all things. And so what he is saying here is that the first causality is the expression of God’s goodness, the purity of God reaching out through the Son and into the Fullness of God—emanating. That is the principal causality. That is the prime mover of all things, what we call the base state of consciousness, the matrix. But then there is a secondary causality that takes place subsequent to that. And I guess the first act of secondary causality was probably the fall, in that it was the first act of will prompted by ego that apparently deviated from God’s original plan, although the Tripartite Tractate does say we shouldn’t blame Logos because the fall was the cause of the cosmos which was destined to come about. But whereas the Father is the prime mover and remains shielded in purity and fullness and goodness—you see, all the love emanates from the Father, evil doesn’t swim back upstream. It’s all emanating from the Father, and it’s all good. But we do have secondary causality down here in the created cosmos, primarily due to the actions of the Demiurge and the never-ending war that runs amuck down here. Hart says, page 70, First, as God’s act of creation is free, constrained by neither necessity nor ignorance, all contingent ends are intentionally enfolded within his decision. And second, precisely because God in himself is absolute, absolved, that is, of every pathos of the contingent, every affect of the sort that a finite substance has the power to visit upon another, his moral venture in creating is infinite. One way or another, after all, all causes are logically reducible to their first cause. This is no more than a logical truism. In either case, all consequence are, either as actualities or merely possibilities, contingent upon the primordial antecedent, apart from which they could not exist. In other words, all the things that happen down here in the cosmos couldn’t have happened without God giving it the first start, without the Father giving it the initial emanation. He goes on to say, And naturally, the rationale of a first cause, its definition, in the most etymologically exact meaning of that term, is the final cause that prompts it, the end toward which it acts. If, then, that first cause is an infinitely free act emerging from infinite wisdom, all those consequence are intentionally entailed, again, either as actualities or as possibilities within that first act. And so the final end to that act tends is its whole moral truth. The traditional definition of evil as a privation of the good, lacking any essence of its own, in other words, what we would call in Gnosticism, evil is the shadow of the good. Evil is the shadow of Logos. It’s not a thing in itself. It’s the absence of the love and the light of the Father. It is also an assertion that when we say God is good, we are speaking of Him not only relative to his creation, but as he is in himself. All comes from God, and so evil cannot be a thing that comes from anywhere. Evil is, in every case, merely the defect whereby a substantial good is lost, belied, or resisted. For in every sense, being is act, and God, in his simplicity and infinite freedom, is what he does. He could not be the creator of anything substantially evil without evil also being part of the definition of who he essentially is, for he alone is the wellspring of all that exists. Jumping down the page on 71, Hart says, “God goes forth in all beings, and in all beings returns to himself.” That’s how I describe as we all carry the Fullness of God within our being, and within every cell of our being. And since we are carrying the Fullness of God within us, we will have to return to the Fullness of God ultimately. We can’t be lost in everlasting torment, because we are the Fullness of God, and God cannot torment itself. Hart says, God has no need of the world. He creates it not because he is dependent upon it, but because its dependency on him is a fitting expression of the bounty of his goodness. Doesn’t that remind you of, in the beginning, the Father was alone, and he admired his goodness and beauty and love. He was full of love and beauty, and gave birth, so to speak—He emanated the Son. And the Son and the Father gave glory to one another. And in that giving of glory to one another, then the Son emanated the Fullness. And then in giving glory to one another in the Fullness and to the Son, the Fullness emanates us, the second order of powers. And it’s all because you can’t love without having an object to love, even if it’s only in your own mind. Love requires an object of devotion, and giving glory is the reciprocal of love. We give glory because we were first loved. It’s a fitting expression of the bounty of goodness, as Hart puts it. Then he goes on to say, This, however, also means that within the story of creation, viewed from its final cause, there can be no residue of the pardonably tragic, no irrecuperable or irreconcilable remainder left behind at the end of the tale. For if there were, this irreconcilable excess would also be something God has directly caused. Now, in our Gnostic gospel, there is a remnant “left behind at the end of the tale.” And that is the shadowy archons that were never a part of the original creation because they did not come from the “first cause” discussed earlier. The shadows of the Demiurge did not come from the Fullness or the fallen Aeon, but are only the absence of the qualities of that Aeon, this is why they are referred to as shadows. They are figments that do not have a reality outside of the Deficiency.  Therefore, they have no home to return to in the Fullness of God. They are not from the Fullness. And he talks a bit about Hegel’s system and dismisses it, and I’m not going to go into it. Hart says, The story Christians tell is of creation as God’s sovereign act of love, neither adding to nor qualifying His eternal nature. And so it is also a story that leaves no room for an ultimate distinction between the universal truth of reason and the moral meaning of the particular, or for any distinction between the moral meaning of the particular and the moral nature of God. Only by insisting upon the universality of God’s mercy could Paul, in Romans 11.32, liberate himself from the fear that the particularity of that mercy would prove to be an ultimate injustice, and that in judging His creatures, God would reveal Himself not as the good God of faithfulness and love, but as an inconstant God who can shatter His own covenants at will. Hart reminds us that down through the centuries, Christians have again and again subscribed to formulations of their faith that clearly reduce a host of cardinal Christian theological usages, most especially moral predicates like good, merciful, just, benevolent, loving, to utter equivocity, and that by association, reduce their entire grammar of Christian belief to meaninglessness. [On the next page, 75, he says], consider, to begin with the mildest of moral difficulties, how many Christians down the centuries have had to reconcile their consciences to the repellent notion that all humans are at conception already guilty of a transgression that condemns them justly to eternal separation from God and eternal suffering, and that in this doctrine’s extreme form, every newborn infant belongs to a massa damnata, hateful in God’s eyes from the first moment of existence. Hart loves to throw in Latin. Massa damnata obviously means that the masses would be damned. The very notion of an inherited guilt is a logical absurdity, rather on the order of a square circle. All that the doctrine can truly be taken to assert, speaking logically, is that God willfully imputes to innocent creatures a guilt they can never have really contracted out of what, from any sane perspective, can only be called malice. But this is just the beginning of the problem. For one broad, venerable stream of tradition, God, on the basis of this imputation, consigns the vast majority of the race to perpetual torment, including infants who die unbaptized. And may I point out that in Gnostic Christianity there is no inherited guilt at all because the Fall was not caused by the first humans, Adam and Eve, but occurred at the Aeonic level. Christianity carries a remnant of that understanding forward when it refers to “fallen angels,” but it does not connect the dots to realize their culpability in original sin. And then the theology of grace grows grimmer, for according to the great Augustinian tradition, since we are somehow born meriting not only death but eternal torment, we are enjoined to see and praise a laudable generosity in God’s narrow choice to elect a small remnant for salvation, before and apart from any consideration of their concrete merits or demerits, and this further choice either to predestine or infallibly to surrender the vast remainder to everlasting misery. So it is that, for many Christians down the years, the rationale of evangelization has been a desperate race to save as many souls as possible from God. Okay, look at this time. The time has really gotten away from us, and we’ve only touched the first meditation, so I hope you are enjoying this theology. It’s theology, and I know that’s difficult slog, but I’m sharing with you these thoughts because they comprise basically the sum total of Christian theology for the past 2,000 years, and it has gone through changes here and there. David Bentley Hart is a scholar of Eastern Orthodoxy and a scholar of religion and philosopher and so forth, and I think that he has very clear sight. So we’ll pick this up one more time next week, and I promise we’ll wrap it up. Onward and upward! God bless us all! This book puts all of this gnosis together in a simplified form. Gnosis is as easy as you want it to be, or as complicated as you desire. This Simple Explanation will guide you through the often confusing terms and turns of gnostic thought and theology. The glossary alone is worth having on your bookshelf. Now available in paperback, hardback, and ebook/kindle. Soon to be released as an audio book.

God is loving and merciful, not judgmental and cruel Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week I began sharing with you what is essentially a book report on the book called That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart, and he’s the translator of the New Testament that I’ve been using. So, last week we got up to page 21 out of this book, and now I’m all the way up to page 85, so we’ll see what happened in this latest round of reading. Now, David Bentley Hart’s style of writing may not be for everyone. It’s very academic, very high-minded and educated and erudite—difficult to follow if you’re not accustomed to reading scholastic writing. But I believe his heart’s in the right place, and I agree with pretty much everything he says. I will do my best to reinterpret what he is saying in simpler words, in case you’re interested in the content, but not in its delivery method. So, picking it up on page 21, Hart says, And what could be more absurd than the claim that God’s ways so exceed comprehension, that we dare not presume even to distinguish benevolence from malevolence in the divine, inasmuch as either can result in the same endless excruciating despair? Here the docile believer is simply commanded to nod in acquiescence, quietly and submissively, to feel moved at a strange and stirring obscurity, and to accept that, if only he or she could sound the depths of this mystery, its essence would somehow be revealed as infinite beauty and love. A rational person capable of that assent, however, of believing all of this to be a paradox concealing a deeper, wholly coherent truth, rather than a gross contradiction, has probably suffered such chronic intellectual and moral malformation that he or she is no longer able to recognize certain very plain truths, such as the truth that he or she has been taught to approve of divine deeds that, were they reduced to a human scale of action, would immediately be recognizable as expressions of unalloyed spite. And he’s talking about the idea that most everyone and everything is going to hell and will suffer eternal torment. That is an interpretation or misinterpretation of the word brought about by incorrect translation of the original Coptic Greek. Most of our Bible translations come off of old Latin Vulgate translations, and then they’ve been modernized. But that’s how errors are brought forward. And what Hart has done in his New Testament translation is go back to the original, very oldest transcripts, still in Greek, before they were translated to Latin. And he did what he called a pitilessly accurate translation, where Hart was not trying to make the words that are being translated fit into a predetermined doctrine, like everyone going to hell, or like the Trinity, or eternal damnation. These things we’ve been taught to believe are in the Scripture, but when you actually go back to the original Scriptures prior to the Latin translations, they are not in the Scripture. And so this book that I’m doing the book report on here, That All Shall Be Saved, this is about universal salvation, and doing away with the idea. And he says in this section I just read you, that it is a malevolent idea, unalloyed spite, unalloyed meaning pure spite on the part of God, that’s going to send everyone to hell that doesn’t get it. And that we have been commanded by the Church over the last 2,000 years to just nod our heads and say, oh, well, it’s God’s will, or oh, well, how can I presume to distinguish benevolence from malevolence, good intention from bad intention on the part of God, because God is so great and good. We’re supposed to be docile believers, to acquiesce, that is, to go along with, to quietly and submissively accept that we don’t get it, that we don’t understand the depths of the mystery, and someday we will, and that God is good, and God is just, and therefore everyone’s going to hell, except for those few preordained elect from before time began. So this book is entirely against that proposition. So moving on, what I did was I read the book through, and I’ve highlighted the parts that seem worth sharing or very interesting. Now we’re jumping to page 35, where he says that certain people, of my acquaintance who are committed to what is often called an intellectualist model of human liberty, as I am myself, [he says], but who also insist that it is possible for a soul freely to reject God’s love with such perfect perpiscuity of understanding and intention as to merit eternal suffering. And we can tell from the context that perpiscuity means you get it. So he’s saying, how is it even possible for a soul to freely reject the love of God and consign oneself into eternal torment? It just doesn’t work. It’s not possible. He says, this is an altogether dizzying contradiction. In simplest terms, that is to say, they, [that is, the intellectualists], want to assert that all true freedom is an orientation of the rational will toward an end that the mind takes in some sense to be the good, and so takes also as the one end that can fulfill the mind’s nature and supply its desires. This means that the better the rational will knows the good, and that’s a capital G, good, for what it is, the more that is that the will is freed from those forces that distort reason and lead the soul toward improper ends. The more it will long for and seek after the true good in itself, and conversely, the more rationally it seeks the good, the freer it is. He says that in terms of the great Maximus the Confessor, who lived from 580 to 660, the natural will within us, which is the rational ground of our whole power of volition, must tend only toward God as its true end, for God is goodness as such, whereas our gnomic or deliberative will can stray from him, but only to the degree that it has been blinded to the truth of who he is and what we are, and as a result has come to seek a false end as the true end. In short, sin requires some degree of ignorance, and ignorance is by definition a diverting of the mind and will to an end they would not naturally pursue. So, in other words, we all want what’s best for ourself, even in the most selfish sense, even in the most egoic sense. The ego wants what is best for this person that it is part of, that that is the rational end of the ego’s striving, what is best, and that there is a thing called good in the absolute sense, and if we realize that, then we would strive toward the good, by definition. Carrying on, page 37, I’m not saying that we do not in some very significant sense make our own exceedingly substantial voluntary contributions to our estrangement from the good in this life. And, see, he’s just saying we all screw up. Even if we are seeking the good, we often fall backwards into the bad, okay? Up to a certain point, [he says], it is undeniable, but past that point it is manifest falsehood. There is no such thing as perfect freedom in this life, or perfect understanding, and it is sheer nonsense to suggest that we possess limitless or unqualified liberty. Therefore, we are incapable of contracting a limitless or unqualified guilt. There are always extenuating circumstances. Well, in a sense, that’s true of all of us and all of our circumstances. We are a product of our environment, to some extent. But don’t forget that in the Gnostic view, we also contain the pure goodness of God, the capital S Self, that reflects the Fullness of God. So we do know what goodness is, even if we are surrounded by badness. Quoting Hart again, page 40, Here though, I have to note that it is a thoroughly modern and wholly illogical notion that the power of absolutely unpremised liberty, obeying no rationale except its own spontaneous volition toward whatever end it might pose for itself, is either a real logical possibility or, in any meaningful sense, a proper definition of freedom. See? He’s saying it’s thoroughly modern and wholly illogical to think that we have complete freedom of will, and that we can choose to follow any unethical or immoral end that we wish to, because what’s it matter? One choice being pretty much the same as another, you see. He goes on to say, in page 40, A choice made without rationale is a contradiction in terms. At the same time, any movement of the will prompted by an entirely perverse rationale would be, by definition, wholly irrational. Insane, that is to say. And therefore, no more truly free than a psychotic episode. The more one is in one’s right mind, the more that is that one is conscious of God as the goodness that fulfills all beings. And the more one recognizes that one’s own nature can have its true completion and joy nowhere but in Him, and the more one is unfettered by distorting misperceptions, deranged passions, and the encumbrances of past mistakes, the more inevitable is one’s surrender to God, liberated from all ignorance, emancipated from all the adverse conditions of this life, the rational soul could freely will only its own union with God, and thereby its own supreme beatitude. We are, as it were, doomed to happiness, so long as our natures follow their healthiest impulses unhindered. And we cannot not will the satisfaction of our beings in our true final end, a transcendent good lying behind and beyond all the proximate ends we might be moved to pursue. This is no constraint upon the freedom of the will, coherently conceived. It is simply the consequence of possessing a nature produced by and for the transcendent good, a nature whose proper end has been fashioned in harmony with a supernatural purpose. God has made us for Himself, as Augustine would say, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Him. A rational nature seeks a rational end, truth, which is God Himself. The irresistibility of God for any soul that has been truly set free is no more a constraint placed upon its liberty than is the irresistible attraction of a flowing spring to fresh water in a desert place to a man who is dying of thirst. To choose not to drink in that circumstance would not be an act of freedom on his part, but only a manifestation of the delusions that enslave him and force him to inflict violence upon himself, contrary to his nature. Do you follow the reasoning there? That boils down to simply saying it is logical. Even Mr. Spock would find it logical for a human to pursue the good in its own best interests, and that it is illogical, illogical all the way to insanity, to refuse the good, to refuse what is best for you. It’s a manifestation of insanity, to refuse the love of God. How’s that for laying it out? I really appreciate logic, you know, because this is a logical universe. If the laws of physics and chemistry didn’t hold true to logic, and that includes math, you see, 2 plus 2 equals 4, etc., all the way through all the difficult math, the quantum physics, and the string theory, and so forth, this is a logical universe based upon the Aeon known as Logos, logic. And so, therefore, to reject logic, it’s not smart, it’s not clever, it’s not freedom. And, by the way, this is about the level of pushback I see in, for example, YouTube comments that reject the gospel. They’re pretty much on the order of, oh, yeah, I can die of thirst if I want to, so F off. Okay, well, good luck with that, right? Carrying on, page 43. None of this should need saying, to be honest. We should all already know that whenever the term justice and eternal punishment are set side by side as if they were logically compatible, the boundaries of the rational have been violated. If we were not so stupefied by the hoary and venerable myth that eternal damnation is an essential element of the original Christian message, and then he says in parentheses, which, not to spoil later plot developments here, it is not, we would not even waste our time on so preposterous a conjunction. From the perspective of Christian belief, the very notion of a punishment that is not intended ultimately to be remedial is morally dubious, and he says in parentheses, and I submit anyone who doubts this has never understood Christian teaching at all. But even if one believes that Christianity makes room for the condign imposition, [and condign means proper or fitting], imposition of purely retributive punishments, it remains the case that a retribution consisting in unending suffering, imposed as recompense for the actions of a finite intellect and will, must be by any sound definition disproportionate, unjust, and at the last, nothing more than an expression of sheer pointless cruelty. And of course, I do find that attitude on the part of Christians I talk to and try to explain the idea of universal salvation being Christ’s true mission, that all shall be redeemed, every knee shall bow. They’d much rather send people to hell, and when you see their faces as they’re saying it, it’s not, oh, you know, I’m so sorry that it’s this way and my heart breaks, but I’m afraid they’re all going to hell. It’s not like that at all. It’s like, damn straight, they deserve to go to hell. Now, you take that kind of anger and cruelty when you consider that they are advocating unending, excruciating pain and punishment, and then you try to say that that is God’s will, that goodness incorporates unending punishment. And Hart’s saying, indeed, especially unending punishment that isn’t for remediation, isn’t to make them a better person, but simply to make them hurt. And who are you punishing? Finite beings with limited time and intelligence and ability to reason with things that happened in their past. Maybe they were brought up by someone very cruel who taught them cruelty, and so they carry on cruelty. And then that the God of all love and the God of all justice would send them to hell for eternal torment. And up until quite recently, even babies who were unbaptized would be sent to hell for eternal torment. And then someone came up with the idea of a baby purgatory where unbaptized babies never get to go to heaven, but they’re not going to be eternally punished either. They’re just going to go to a baby land where they’re held apart from the rest of the redeemed. Well, really? That’s hardly any better. I mean, it’s somewhat better, but why shouldn’t these pure babies who pretty much incorporate the Fullness of the Self and love of God, why wouldn’t God want them back? You see, it doesn’t make any sense. And if you’re a Christian listening to me today who has had niggling doubts about certain things, and one of them being this idea of grandma being in hell and in the midst of eternal torture now because she wouldn’t listen to your preaching, you can relax about it. Because we are the sower of seeds, but we are not the harvester. It is Christ who harvests the souls, who brings them all home. Back to Hart here again. On page 47, he says, Once more, not a single one of these attempted justifications for the idea of an eternal hell actually improves the picture of God with which the infernalist orthodoxy presents us. And he uses the word infernalist for like the infernal torments of hell. So an infernalist is someone who believes folks are going to hell for eternity. So he says, Once more, not a single one of these attempted justifications for the idea of an eternal hell actually improves the picture of God with which the infernalist orthodoxy presents us. And it is this that should be the chief concern of any believer. All of these arguments still oblige one to believe that a benevolent and omnipotent God would willfully create rational beings destined for an endless torment that they could never, in any rational calculus of personal responsibility, earn for themselves. And to believe also that this somehow is essential to the good news Christianity brought into the world. Isn’t it true? When you’re in church and you hear the preacher preaching a very nice, very good message about relationships or about moral virtue, and then there is a plea and a threat at the end that if you are sitting in the congregation and you have not accepted Christ as your personal Savior, you may go out and die this afternoon and go to hell. It’s not right. It’s contradictory. It is not the pure will of God. Page 47 goes on to say, In the end, there is only one logical terminus toward which all these lines of reasoning can lead: When all the possible paths of evasion have tapered away among the weeds, one has to stop, turn around, retrace one’s steps back to the beginning of the journey, and finally admit that, if there really is an eternal hell for finite spirits, then it has to be the case that God condemns the damned to endless misery not on account of any sane proportion between what they are capable of meriting and how he chooses to requite them for their sins, but solely as a demonstration of his power to do as he wishes. Now, by the way, when I read the Old Testament, I see that that is often the attitude that Jehovah has towards his subjects. He commands things because he can, and he wants obedience because he wants obedience. Remember, the Demiurge controls through strong strings. He does not approve of willpower. Willpower is messy. Willpower means not obeying the will of God, and he wants to be the sayer of our souls. But the God Above All Gods, the Gnostic God, outranks the Old Testament God. The God Above All Gods is the Father who begat the Son. The Demiurge keeps chaos at bay by forbidding free will in his subjects And so when Jesus says, I and my Father are one, he’s not talking about the Old Testament God. He’s talking about the God Above All Gods, the originator of consciousness, of love, of life, of free will. And we are all fractals of that Father. Through the Son, through the Fullness of God, we are fractals of all of those powers of the Father–stepped down, because we’re smaller fractals. So we all have to return to the Father in the end. When we loose these mortal coils and we’re no longer bound to the material that deludes us, then we can finally return to the Father again. So onward and upward is not a trap. Onward and upward is freedom. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. So back to this idea of the Old Testament God enjoying his omnipotent sovereignty. On page 48, Hart is talking about Calvin and predestination. And he says in book three of Calvin’s Institutes, he even asserts that God predestined the human fall from grace, precisely because the whole of everything, creation, fall, redemption, judgment, the eternal bliss of heaven, the endless torments of hell, and whatever else, exists solely for the sake of a perfect display of the full range of God’s omnipotent sovereignty, which for some reason absolutely must be displayed. He goes on to say he doesn’t know how to respond to that, because, I know it to be based on a notoriously confused reading of Scripture, one whose history goes all the way back to the late Augustine, a towering genius whose inability to read Greek and consequent reliance on defective Latin translations turned out to be the single most tragically consequential case of linguistic incompetence in Christian history. In equal part, however, it is because I regard the picture of God thus produced to be a metaphysical absurdity, a God who is at once supposedly the source of all things, and yet also the one whose nature is necessarily thoroughly polluted by arbitrariness. And no matter how orthodox Calvinists might protest, there is no other way to understand the story of election and dereliction that Calvin tells, which would mean that in some sense he is a finite being, that is God, in whom possibility exceeds actuality, and the irrational exceeds the rational. A far greater concern than either of these theological defects, either the deeply misguided scriptural exegesis or the inept metaphysics of the divine, it is the moral horror in such language. So that’s as far as we’re going to go today. In next week’s continuance of this train of thought, Hart will talk about the difference between the God Above All Gods, essentially, even though Hart’s not calling himself a Gnostic. When he speaks of God, or goodness with capital G, he is speaking of the God Above All Gods. And when he contrasts it with the God of Calvin and Augustine in the Old Testament, that is the Demiurgic God. I’ve noticed that many modern people seem to think of God as a yin-yang type of completion, that is, where evil balances good, where darkness is necessary to balance light, where the purpose of humanity, or what happens here in humanity, is that we are instantiating strife and struggle and evil for the teaching of God, for the completion of God. That is not right. That’s wrong theology, folks. Our God is all goodness, and there is no evil that emanates from God. Well, where did evil come from then? It’s merely the absence of good. So evil is the absence of goodness. The archons are the shadows of the Aeons. And when the light fully comes and fills all of space, the shadows will disappear, and the light comes along with the love. And so that’s our job, to realize that universal and ethereal love, and to so let our light shine and our lives shine with love, that the Demiurge will be eventually won over. And as for the shadows, every time we bring light into the world, we’re diminishing the power of the Demiurge. We’re shining light onto a shadow and evaporating it. Next week, we’ll pick this up for part three of That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart. Let me know what you think of this. Send me some comments. Onward and upward. God bless us all. Please buy my latest book–A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. In this book you will find the original Christian theology as taught by Jesus before the Catholic Church and the Emperor of Rome got their hands on it. A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is for seekers and scholars alike. The language is as simple and accessible as I could make it, even though the subject matter is profoundly deep. The book is available in all formats, including paperback, hardcover, and kindle. The audio book narrated by Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, has been uploaded to ACX Audible and is awaiting their approval and release, so keep an eye out.

I thought today I would start sharing with you a book that I am reading by David Bentley Hart. Hart wrote that translation of the New Testament that I’m very much enjoying, because it mirrors the same language that the Gnostic gospel uses in the Nag Hammadi codices, particularly the Tripartite Tractate, which is what I share with you here at Gnostic Insights. David Bentley Hart is extremely eloquent and erudite. His prose puts me to shame. He is a great writer and a brilliant mind. He’s an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion and a philosopher. And the deal is, he does seem to love God. So his philosophy and his theology goes through what seems to me to be a very Gnostic heart and orientation on his part. So I’m reading this book now called, That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, because I could tell from reading the footnotes in his New Testament that he and I agree on this universal salvation. I seem to be coming at it from a different place than he does, but I must admit I’m only about 40 pages into the book, so I don’t know if he’s going to cover my orientation or not. My major reason why everyone and everything that’s living now will return to heaven is that everything comes from heaven. So if everything doesn’t return to heaven in the end, if most of it, as a matter of fact, was thrown into eternal fires of torment, well, God itself would be lessened. The Father would be less than he was at the beginning, and that’s an impossibility, because the Father was, is, and ever shall be the same. He is not diminished by the love and consciousness and life that flows out of him. But if that life, love, and consciousness winds up in a black hole at the bottom of an eternal pit of torment, well, there’s so many things wrong with that statement, just absolutely wrong. And that’s what David Bentley Hart’s book is all about, and he has several ways he’s going to explain why that can’t be so. The reason I say it can’t be so is that all consciousness, life, and love come from the Father. So in the big roll-up, if we accept the proposition that there will be an end to this material existence, which is what all Christians and Jews profess, and if everything that emanated from the Father in the beginning, beginning with the Son, which is the first and only direct emanation, and then everything else emanates through the Son, well, if it doesn’t return at the end of material time, then the Father and the ethereal plane would be diminished, because it poured out all of this love and consciousness into this material realm, and it all has to return. The Tripartite Tractate says that everything that existed from the beginning will return at the end of time. In verses 78 and 79 of the Tripartite Tractate, it’s speaking about the shadows that emerged from Logos after the Fall, and it says, Therefore their end will be like their beginning, from that which did not exist they are to return once again to the shadows. “Their end will be like their beginning,” in that they didn’t come from above—they were shadows of the fallen Logos. And so when the light comes and shines the light, the shadows disappear. Furthermore, in verses 80 and 81, the Tripartite Tractate says, The Logos, being in such unstable conditions, that is, after the Fall, 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 exist from the first. So these shadows didn’t exist in the Pleroma; they were shadows, they were imitations of the unity which existed from the first, and that unity is the Fullness of God—the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And it is only these shadows that will be evaporated at the end of time, that will not go to the ethereal plane. All living things will, because we’re not shadows of the Fall. We are actually sent down from the unity, from the Fullness of God, with life, consciousness, and love. And so all of that has to return to the Father. So that is where I’m coming from, that God can’t be lessened, made less than it was at the beginning. So everything will be redeemed and returned. And of course, practically all of Christianity nowadays believes that most everything that was emanated from the beginning will be destroyed, or put into a fire of torment for all eternity. Anyone who wasn’t baptized, or anyone who didn’t come forward to profess a belief in Christ. So that’s most of the other cultures, most of the world, and the conventional Christian church doesn’t even realize that animals are going to heaven. I often comfort people whose pet has just passed away, and they’re missing them so badly, and they love them so much, and it hurts so much, and I say to them in comfort, “Well, your pet is waiting for you in heaven, and you’ll be reunited when you cross over, and then you’ll have them again, and you’ll all be very happy forever together.” That’s my basic approach. As a matter of fact, I’m waiting for my pack—that’s who I expect to greet me. I’m not waiting for my dead relatives, or my late husband. I’m not expecting them on the other shore waiting for me, although perhaps they will be. But who I really am looking forward to seeing are my dogs and cats, every dog and cat I’ve ever had. And I figure they’re all up there together as a big pack, playing on the beach. So that’s what keeps me comforted, and keeps me looking forward. I’m very happy to imagine that that will be what greets me when I cross over. So this morning, what I’d like to share with you are some of Hart’s writing that he shares in his introduction that’s called, The Question of an Eternal Hell, Framing the Question. So this is before he even gets into his various apologetics of how it is that everyone will be saved. But I really wanted to share this with you. Hart writes in a very high-minded manner, so I’ll attempt to translate it for us all. So on page 16, Hart says, And as I continued to explore the Eastern Communions as an undergraduate, I learned at some point to take comfort from an idea that one finds liberally scattered throughout Eastern Christian contemplative tradition, from late antiquity to the present, and expressed with particular force by such saints of the East as Isaac of Nineveh, who lived between 613 and 700, and Silouan of Athos, who lived between 1866 and 1938. And the idea is this, that the fires of hell are nothing but the glory of God, which must at the last, when God brings about the final restoration of all things, pervade the whole of creation. For although that glory will transfigure the whole cosmos, it will inevitably be experienced as torment by any soul that willfully seals itself against love of God and neighbor. To such a perverse and obstinate nature, the divine light that should enter the soul and transform it from within must seem instead like the flames of an exterior chastisement. That’s pretty interesting. He’s saying that after the final roll-up, the glory of God, or the light of God, will fill all of space and eternity, and that we will be able to see it and experience it. We will stand before the glory of God. But anyone who is hiding from God, or that is a hateful person, will experience that same glory as flames of fire that torment. And so that will be their punishment. But it’s not coming from God. God’s bringing glory and love and light. But they, because they are resistant, they will experience it as those flames of hell. So Hart goes on to say, This I found not only comforting, but also extremely plausible at an emotional level. It is easy to believe in that version of hell, after all, if one considers it deeply enough, for the very simple reason that we all already know it to be real in this life, and dwell a good portion of our days confined within its walls. A hardened heart is already its own punishment. The refusal to love, or to be loved, makes the love of others, or even just their presence, a source of suffering and a goad to wrath. And isn’t that true? That a hateful person views everything that’s going on around them, and anything that someone else says, to be irritating, and worthy of punishment, or worthy of disdain, because it doesn’t agree with their own opinion. He goes on to say on page 17, and so perhaps it makes perfect sense to imagine that a will sufficiently intransigent in its selfishness and resentment and violence might be so damaged that, even when fully exposed to the divine glory for which all things were made, it will absolutely hate the invasion of that transfiguring love, and will be able to discover nothing in it but terror and pain. It is the soul, then, and not God, that lights hell’s fires, by interpreting the advent of divine love as a violent assault upon the jealous privacy of the self. Now, we’ve talked about that a lot here on Gnostic Insights, and I cover that in my discussions of Overcoming Death. My argument about Overcoming Death primarily comes from the Tibetan Buddhist book known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and in that book it describes this passage after life. And, by the way, it’s not only when the whole entire cosmos melts away, it’s every time we die. When your body passes away, suddenly you’re in that non-material state. Your ego goes forward without the attachment of the body, and in that state of not being attached to the material world, it is like, at the end of time, when the entire cosmos goes through the same process and is no longer attached to the material world. At that point, delusion drops away, the confusion of this cosmos and the confusion of our culture and the demiurgic culture that we are surrounded with, as well as the pulls of the material upon our bodies. It’s gone, it’s lifted, it’s no longer there, and your spirit is able to see with clear eyes. As Paul said in the first letter to Corinthians, chapter 13, For we know partially, and we prophesy partially. But when that which is complete comes, what is partial will be rendered futile. When I was an infant, I spoke like an infant, I thought like an infant, I reckoned like an infant. Having become a man, I did away with infantile things. For as yet we see by way of a mirror, in an enigma, but then we will see face to face. As yet I know partially, but then I shall know fully, just as I am fully known. But now abide faith, hope, and love, these three, and the greatest of these is love. And in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it talks about these things called bardos, which are levels of hell, basically, or levels of purgatory that people go through as they are learning to get rid of the mistaken notions that they picked up here during the lifetime. The samskara is stripped away. I would call the samskara the confounding memes that we cling to. We pick up these meme bundles from the people and from the things we read and learn and are indoctrinated into in school and then through the media. Those are memes, meme bundles, and they have to be let go of. You have to drop them in order to get past the ego that’s holding on to those memes and rediscover the purity of the Father and the Son in the ethereal plane—rediscover the purity of your true Self. And the longer someone holds on to those memes after death, the more difficult is their passage into purity. And that’s explained in depth in the Overcoming Death episode. Well, that Tibetan description of the fires of hell very much resemble the fires of hell that were talked about from these ancient saints of the Christian tradition. By the way, this idea that most everyone and everything is going to hell rather than going to heaven, that is a relatively recent addition to Christianity, but it has been grasped so firmly with the great assistance of the Catholic Church and their doctrines that by now most Christians think that most people won’t go to heaven. So even the Protestants who protest Catholicism—that’s what the word Protestant means, one who protests—they’ve lost the original thread of universal salvation that Jesus was teaching. The Anointed came to save everyone, it says, over and over in the New Testament. And in Hart’s translation, which comes directly from the original writing rather than down through the Latin that had already been filtered by the Catholics, you don’t find the eternal torment of hell. Remember, the word Aeon, which we in Gnostic belief generally translate as ethereal beings or part of the Fullness of God above, Aeon is also translated as a period of time, and throughout most of the translations of the New Testament, which derive from the Latin Vulgate, Aeon is translated as a period of time. And so when it says eternal torment, it’s really saying aeonic torment. And in my opinion, it’s the torment people bring upon themselves when they return to the aeonic realm. The Aeons aren’t the punishers. God is not the punisher. It’s our own grasping onto our past lives and the demiurgic culture and the demiurgic memes that we hold onto after death that are experienced like burning flames. But no one’s imposing it upon us. It’s our own lack of willing to give it up and turn and face the light. The eternal fires of hell are actually the aeonic reckoning that comes at the end of each lifetime and will come at the end of time itself when the material cosmos passes away. At least that’s what I think. So when Hart says on page 17 there that “a will, a personal will, sufficiently intransigent in its selfishness and resentment and violence,” intransigence means not giving up, stubbornness, “might be so damaged that even when it comes face to face with glory, it will experience it as torment.” Now, for those of us who have accepted the anointing of the Christ and have come to true gnosis, (that is a remembrance that we come from above and will happily return to the above, that’s all you need to know), we will not cling onto this material world. We will not be clinging onto those demiurgic memes that keep us from coming face to face with our aeonic parents in the Fullness of God. We will happily cross over. We will joyfully meet with those who are on the other side, be they family, spouses, or pets, because the grasses and the flowers, the butterflies, the birds, everything that is alive down here on earth will be alive in heaven because all life comes from above. We will not be experiencing that chastening fire—that coming to grips with the lies that we’ve been holding onto. That’s the painful part, coming to grips with our own lies and the harms we have done to other people. If we’re not repentant of those harms we have done to other people, we will have to come face to face with those harms after we cross over, and we will see from that other person’s point of view what we did to them and how much we hurt them, and that will come back to us. We will experience their pain, and that is the pain and suffering of death, but it’s not being imposed by the Father or the Son or our aeonic parents above. On page 18, Hart says, Because Christians have been trained at a very deep level of their thinking, to believe that the idea of an eternal hell is a clear and unambiguous element of their faith, and that therefore the idea must make perfect moral sense. They are in error on both counts, as it happens, but a sufficiently thorough conditioning can make an otherwise sound mind perceive even the most ostentatiously absurd proposition to be the very epitome of rational good sense. You know, there’s some big words in that sentence, but I think you can tell by the context what they mean, right? Ostentatiously means open, flaunting. Epitome means the highest. So he’s saying that because the Church has taught that everyone’s going to hell except those very few, which is an ostentatious point of view, you see, ostentatiously absurd proposition, yet they have been taught that it is the very highest of good sense, and you can’t go against it. And so people are conditioned not to question it. And what this book, That All Shall Be Saved, is, is a very thorough and deep description and rationale of how that cannot be true, of how everyone must be going to heaven. I covered my version of why everyone’s going to heaven in this episode. Further episodes, I think I’ll do a series here, further episodes will each cover chapters in Hart’s book, and we’ll hear what his rationale is for why everyone is going to heaven. But returning to this page 18 again, he says, In fact, where the absurdity proves only slight, the mind that has been trained most thoroughly will, as often as not, fabricate further and more extravagant absurdities in order to secure the initial offense against reason within a more encompassing and intoxicating atmosphere of corroborating nonsense. In other words, you’ll have to spin a bunch of nonsensical rationalizations and excuses about why everyone’s going to hell, just to make the story float. Quoting again, Sooner or later it will all seem to make sense, simply through ceaseless repetition and restatement and rhetorical reinforcement. As I’m reading this, of course he’s talking about religious ideologies here, but I’m seeing these mechanisms at play in media bias. Do you see that? Just through sheer repetition, over and over, it doesn’t matter if things are true or lies. If you say it often enough, people will begin to accept it unquestioningly. And you can see that going on in the politics, can’t you? Hart goes on to say, The most effective technique for subduing the moral imagination is to teach it to mistake the contradictory for the paradoxical, and thereby to accept incoherence as profundity or moral idiocy as spiritual subtlety. If this can be accomplished with sufficient nuance and delicacy, it can sustain even a very powerful intellect for an entire lifetime. In the end, with sufficient practice, one really can, like the White Queen (of Alice in Wonderland), learn to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. In my limited attempts to discuss Gnosticism face-to-face with people, I discover this continually, that if I present them with the absurdity of everyone going to hell, for example, they will say, Well, it’s a mystery. We can’t know the mind of God. It’s a mystery. Who are you to presume? And this is the way they cover up that it doesn’t work, by just shunting it off to God’s incomprehensibility. But our God is rational. Our God is logical. Our God doesn’t say one thing and do another. Our God doesn’t lie. Our God doesn’t say it’s all about life and living and love and then enslave and slaughter. That is not the God of Gnosticism. The Father that Jesus spoke of is not that God. Going on with page 19, Hart says, Not that I am accusing anyone of consciously or cynically seeking to manipulate the minds of faithful Christians. The conspiracy, so to speak, is an entirely open one, an unpremeditated corporate labor of communal self-deception, requiring us all to do our parts to sustain one another in our collective derangement. I regard the entire process as the unintentional effect of a long tradition of error, one in which a series of bad interpretations of Scripture produced various corruptions of theological reasoning, which were themselves then preserved as immemorial revealed truths and, at last, rendered impregnable to all critique by the indurated mental habits of generations, all despite the logical and conceptual incongruities that this required believers to ignore within their beliefs. He writes with big words. The gist of this entire paragraph was that the church didn’t set out to be deceptive. Well, it may have with the Nicene Council when they stripped the Gnosis out, but from about 600 A.D. onward, it’s just become such an ingrained thought that by now it’s unassailable. By now you can’t even question it. But that’s what we’re doing here at Gnostic Insights. So stay with me for the next few episodes, and we’ll go into depth concerning hell, resurrection, salvation, and the ultimate redemption of all living things by the Christ, the Anointed, that will return us all to that paradise above. With love, onward and upward, and God bless us all. This book puts all of this gnosis together in a simplified form. Gnosis is as easy as you want it to be, or as complicated as you desire. This Simple Explanation will guide you through the often confusing terms and turns of gnostic thought and theology. The glossary alone is worth having on your bookshelf. Now available in paperback, hardback, and ebook/kindle. Soon to be released as an audio book.

Hello and welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The Halloween season is upon us. I’m having a Halloween party, a block party, here in the neighborhood, and I’m going to sing an hour’s worth of spooky songs. I was assailed yesterday by a Christian lady who said I’m doing the work of the devil, because these are not good songs. And she also urged me not to share this Gnostic business with someone in particular, because he doesn’t need that sort of confusion, she said. Of course, she doesn’t know what the Gnostic stuff is. She hasn’t listened to the podcast or even talked with me about it. She just puts up her hand and waves me away if I try to bring up the Gnosis. So I would say that if Halloween glorifies Satan in your mind, then you should not partake in it, because we don’t want to glorify evil or glorify the Slanderer. However, there was a verse in Colossians that addressed this subject, in my opinion. In Colossians 2:15 it says, Stripping the Archons and Powers, he exposed them in the open, leading them prisoner along with him in a triumphal procession. Therefore let no one judge you for eating and drinking, or for taking part in a festival, or in a new moon celebration, or in Sabbaths. These are a shadow of things to come, but the solid body thereof is that of the anointed. Let no verdict be passed against you by anyone affecting humility and a religion of the angels, venturing upon visions he has never had, blustering aimlessly by the mind of his flesh, not holding to the head from whom all the body, furnished and knitted together by its joints and ligatures, will grow with a growth from God. We spoke about freedom from the Law in depth a couple of episodes ago, when we talked about Colossians. Of course, this presupposes that we who are freed from these laws and restrictions have the love of God, the love of Christ, dwelling within us. That’s what has replaced and made null those sanctions against things like Halloween. We can’t do it on our own. This verse in particular in Colossians refers to eating and drinking, festivals, new moon celebrations, and Sabbaths. It seems to me that we may infer that some of these festivals were not sanctioned by the Old Testament. It may also be that, if they were official calendar days in Judaism, that early Christians were divided about whether they should apply to the followers of Jesus, as in the example of modern Seventh Day Adventists who strictly keep the Saturday sabbath and believe all other Christians are in mortal error for switching the sabbath to Sunday. Or the festivals may be syncretistic, meaning they combined pagan and religious elements to form a new celebration, as is the case with Christmas. Or the festivals could have been entirely pagan, such as May Day celebrations to usher in springtime. The quote says that all of these activities referred to in this verse are only “a shadow of things to come.” Surely Halloween is not to be found in the ethereal plane, because the spooks, goblins, and witches are “shadows” of the Fall, and we know that shadows is another word for archonic. They did not exist before the Fall and will not exist after the cosmos passes into nothingness. Indeed, Halloween can be seen as an example of we Second Order Powers “stripping the Archons and Powers… leading them prisoner along with [Christ] in a triumphal procession.” Wouldn’t that be a fun activity at a Halloween Party? A parade of conquered Powers? Halloween is a time when people acknowledge that the world is not always as it seems. It is a time when folks who normally dismiss the ethereal and the archonic realms acknowledge the immaterial Powers and bring them to awareness. Our gnostic studies, so often dismissed and ridiculed by most people, fall into this category. Consciousness is one thing—even scientists study consciousness, but they do not understand the root of consciousness, and that comes from above. We are from the Father’s consciousness. We are fractals of the Father, through the Fullness, through the Son. The Son is the only emanation from the Father who is otherwise untouchable and illimitable and incomprehensible. But the Son gives that incomprehensibility a face. It’s called a countenance. And we can begin to understand the Father by knowing the Son. And the Son and the Father want to be known by us. They are extending consciousness all the way out to us, down through several fractal levels. But we are their consciousness, and we carry the entire seed of the consciousness of the Son within us. All living creatures do. That is the difference between life and inert mineral matter. The cosmos, when referred to in the Gnostic sense, and also in the biblical sense, although it hasn’t been explained correctly in the New Testament, since they stripped out the gnosis that explained the difference between the Father and the Creator God of this universe, which are two different entities. But consciousness is mysterious in that it’s an amazing thing that we are alive, that we are conscious, that we have these experiences and memories, and that we’re all interrelated. It’s mysterious. It’s mystifying. The scientists aren’t going to get to the root of it, because they try to find consciousness in the material world. They try to find consciousness arising from the matter up. And that isn’t where it comes from. It comes from the Father down. That’s the main thing we need to realize, the main thing we need to know. And then now we have this overlay of the Son, the Christ, Jesus. And what do they have to do with any of this? See, many people think it’s all well and good to speak of the Father, and to try to do good, and try to be righteous, and try to embody the love of God. But it’s always within our own egoic efforts that we want to push out this love. And we don’t have it. We don’t have the capacity to channel the love of the Father unless we love the Father, because love, life, consciousness, they all come down together from above. It’s no more superstitious to believe in Jesus than it is to believe in God. It’s no more superstitious to believe in Jesus than it is to believe in beneficial spirits and angels. So why then is there such a node of resistance against the notion of the Christ, the embodiment of the Son, coming in a human being that was called Jesus? This occurred around 2,000 years ago. The embodiment of the Fullness of God melded with the material flesh of a human being. That’s no stranger than consciousness itself. That’s no more strange than the mystery of life and death. So why is it in particular rejected? Well, I think it’s because the Slanderer knows what’s up. The Slanderer is another word for the chief Archon of the demiurge. The Slanderer is the negative entity that dwells within the cosmos itself, that did not come from above, that did not come from the Father, that is not an emanation out of the consciousness and love of the Son—it’s cut off down here below. It’s a figment of the demiurge. It lives in this material world, and, like its Boss, the demiurge, it wants to be the ruler. It wants to be the king. It wants to be worshipped. It’s called the Slanderer because it slanders God. It slanders Jesus and the Christ. It slanders anyone who believes in Jesus and the Christ. It makes fun of them. It puts on pantomimes at the Olympics to degrade the Last Supper, for example. It slanders people’s genders and convinces them that they were born into the wrong body, and that that’s not who they’re really supposed to be. Even though every one of us was fashioned by the Aeons above to be perfect and particular, and to bring with us as emissaries of the Father consciousness, love, and life into this cosmos. It’s our job as second-order powers to bring life into the cosmos. But the cosmos is the valley of death, so it’s a very courageous thing that we are here. Now, I have walked with Jesus for all of my life. I can remember my awakening around three or four years old. I recognized the difference between the baby in the manger and Santa Claus when I was about three years old at Christmastime. My parents were not religious people. They might have thought they were; they’re what we call cultural Christians, so they did go to church now and then. And there was a family Bible in the house, but God was not spoken of. We were not encouraged to be godly. And it seemed to me, even as a toddler, that Santa Claus was given every preeminence and reality, as was the baby Jesus in the manger who came to save humanity. So, there were mixed messages coming down that pipeline. I guess what I’m trying to say here is if you want to understand consciousness, and if you want to embody love, the surefire way to do that is to go ahead and believe that the Christ came to earth in order to remind us of the truth of the Father, in order to remind us of the eternal age that we came from, because we came from the Aeons above. And the word Age is the same as the word Aeon in Greek. So, the life of the Age, as it is often put in the New Testament, is the life of the Aeons, the Fullness, our aeonic parentage that we are formed after, and that we were birthed by down here into this material world. And Jesus went through the same process, but the aeonic inheritance that Jesus brought with him—unlike us, we brought all of the Fullness with us too, but just parts of it are turned on and off. I am not talented in all things, but Jesus was, because he brought all of the Fullness and all of it activated, all of it turned on. So, he brought the Fullness of God in all awareness and complete love into this material cosmos, and he has an excess of salvation, you might say, an excess of freeing us from the murmurings of the Slanderer. He brought that to every single one of us, because the Third Order Powers, which is the pleroma of Christ, the pleroma of Jesus, covers us and is our correction for our misunderstandings and our straying away from the Fullness of God. But we forgot. We don’t realize it. We don’t remember where we come from. And the surefire way to remember where you come from, to remember the Fullness of God, to experience the complete love of the Father through the Son and the Fullness of God, is to accept the gift of incarnation that Christ brought to us. It was a mission, a rescue mission for us. Jumping over here into what is called the first letter of John in the New Testament, chapter 2, verse 14, it says, The Logos of God, (the Logos, that’s the Aeon Logos we know), the Logos of God abides in you, and you have vanquished the wicked one. Do not love the cosmos or the things within the cosmos. If anyone loves the cosmos, (and that, when he speaks of the cosmos, that’s the material world, that’s our universe, whatever came after the Big Bang, the molecules, the particles, the minerals, everything that is not inherently alive, the hard rocky places, that’s the cosmos.) Do not love the cosmos or the things within the cosmos. If anyone loves the cosmos, the love of the Father is not within him, because all that is in the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the vainglory of living is not from the Father, but from the cosmos. And the cosmos is passing away as well as its desire, but whoever does the Father’s Will will abide unto the age of the Aeons. Now, when John refers to hating the cosmos, he is only referring to the dead, dry demiurgic mud and demiurgic culture’s inverted values. He is not referring to the living elements that come from above—all of us Second Order Powers who bring the life, consciousness, and love into this cosmos. It is good and natural to love our fellow Second Order Powers—all of the plants, animals and people and the living cells that make them up. Jumping to verse 20, And you have an unction from the Holy One, and you all have knowledge. Now the translator, which is David Bentley Hart here, concerning the word unction explains in a footnote. The word is chrisma, and he says it’s probably anointing, but perhaps an oil, unguent, or a balm. So he just wrote the word unction because it covers all of those words. You have a unction, (so that’s a soothing, a soothing application, let’s say, from the Holy One), and you all have knowledge. And this is that knowledge I’m saying that we’re all born with, that’s the knowledge of the Fullness of God. It’s the inherent knowledge of the Son of God, because our life and our consciousness is the proof of that, because it comes from above, life, consciousness. So therefore, we all have the knowledge of the Fullness within us, but we forget because of the never-ending war with the material, and with the Slanderer, and with death and destruction, and with each other. All of this war, all of this striving and egoic posturing puts a barrier between us and love. Love doesn’t arise out of ego. Narcissism arises out of ego. Self-love projected onto another person, and lapped up from another person to build our ego. But that isn’t true love. True love comes from above. That is the love of the Father, the love of the Son, the love of the Aeons, and the love that comes along with us when we’re first conceived and born. And that’s what we tend to forget because of the never-ending war. So the writer of this first letter of John, who is apparently John, says, I have written to you not because you do not know the truth, because you do know it. And you see, that’s a very Gnostic opinion. We all know the truth deep inside, but we have forgotten it. But we can remember it. It’s just the flipping of a switch, and it will all come flooding back in. He says, I have written to you not because you do not know the truth, because you do know it. And no lie comes from the truth. Who is the liar except the one that denies that Jesus is the Anointed? This is the Antichrist, one who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. The one who confesses the Son has the Father also. And this is the promise that he has promised us, the life of the Age (or the life of the Aeons). And he says, And as for you, the unction that you had received from him remains within you, and you have no need for anyone to teach you. Rather, as his unction teaches you about all things and is true and is no lie, you must abide in him just as it has taught you. In other words, just as it has taught you the knowledge that abides in you, the knowledge that we were born with. And that is the gnostic message, that is the full knowledge of God, the full revelation of the Father and of the mystery. You know, as I say again, consciousness and life itself is a mystery. So to want to wonder about God or what is the truth of God, that’s not silly. It’s no more mysterious than wondering about consciousness or being alive or what keeps your heart beating when you’re asleep. It’s all wrapped up in this singular package. We are fractals of the Father. We are fractals of his emissary, the Son, who became flesh and dwelt among us, not simply to teach the few thousand people who actually heard him at the time 2,000 years ago, but to serve for us as an example of a human being who knew the Father intimately and walked among us and never wavered in his knowledge and belief in the Father, never once succumbed to the lies of the Slanderer and the lusts of the flesh, and then who was put to death as an innocent man, having done no wrong. He didn’t murder anyone or steal from anyone. His crime was to profess knowledge of the Father. And this was the death sentence. And then he was buried for three days, and then he arose again in a non-material form. But he was seen by many, many people afterwards, and then he ascended in full view of hundreds or thousands of people. So this was the job of the Christ, to do all of that. And that’s what you believe in when you believe in Jesus, that such a thing is even possible, that there is a Father above. And this man said so, and look, he was innocently sacrificed. He was buried and rose again. That’s no more fairytale than us being alive. It’s no more fairytale than anything else. And by the way, many people who say this whole story about Jesus is just a fairytale, they believe in a lot of silly things themselves, I must say. They believe in fairytales. It’s somehow acceptable to believe in astrology, alchemy, ghosts, spirits, luck, destiny, transpersonal consciousness, ETs and AI. But not the redeeming Power of the Anointed. Chapter three of the first letter of John says, See what kind of love the Father has given us, so that we might be called the children of God. And we are. Therefore the cosmos does not know us, because it did not know him. Do not be amazed, brothers, if the cosmos hates you. We know that we have passed over from death into life, because we love our brothers. And whoever does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has the life of the Aeons abiding in him. In this we have known what love is, that one laid down his soul on our behalf, and we ought to lay down our soul on behalf of our brothers. But should anyone have the means of living in this cosmos and see his brother in need, and inwardly close himself off from him, in what way does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let our love be not in talk or on the tongue, but in action and in truth. By this we shall know that we belong to the truth, and assure our heart before him, that if our heart should offer condemnation, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things. Now, as a matter of gnostic theology, John seems to have been a bit hyperbolic in declaring that a hateful person does not have the love of God living in him. Hate is the inversion of love. Hate is the demiurgic shadow of love. Yes, the hateful person does not display or even acknowledge the Holy Spirit that animates his life, but he is surely animated by the Fullness of God or else he would not be conscious or alive. The spiritual problem the hateful person has is being cut off from his higher Self, in the same manner that the demiurge is cut off from his higher Self—Logos—and the Fullness above. This leaves them unaware of God’s love and the Anointed’s mission of redemption, but it does not nullify the unseen presence of God and the Anointed in their souls. See, you may be angry at other people. You may think that half of the people in the nation are wrong and deluded and evil, and you just hate them by now. But God is greater than our heart, and that’s the reason we have to have a larger perspective. God loves all of the people on both sides of the political divides and the religious divides. God loves everybody. We are all fractals of the love of God, and the love of God abides in all of us if we will just open the door and let it out. It says in verse 21, Beloved ones, if our heart offers no condemnation, we have confidence toward God, because we receive from him whatever we might ask, because we keep his commandments and do the things that are pleasing in his sight. And this is his commandment, that we should have faith in the name of his Son, Jesus the Anointed, and should love one another, just as he gave us a command to do. And whoever keeps his commandments abides in him, and he in that one. And by this we know that he abides in us from the Holy Spirit that he has given us. So when we’re speaking of commandments here, it’s not the rules and regulations. It’s not all the laws of the Old Testament. Those are demiurgic laws. They do reflect what God would wish for us. Indeed, these laws may be true, but you won’t go to hell if you don’t do it. The more important thing is to believe in the Father and believe in the Son. And you can do this best by believing in Christ and the emissary Jesus who came to us to remind us of that. Closing out the first letter of John here, chapter 5, it says, verse 18, We know that no one who has been born out of God sins. Rather, whoever is born out of God keeps watch over himself, and the wicked one does not touch him. We know that we are of God, and that the whole cosmos rests entirely upon the wicked one. And we know that the Son of God has come and given us understanding, so that we may know the one who is true. And we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus the Anointed. This is the one true God and the life in the Age, (or the life of the Aeons). It closes by saying, Little children, guard yourselves against the idols. And that’s the end of the book. And okay, I’m bringing all this up because it is Halloween. So, know whom you love, put on the armor of God, and then you can walk through the cosmos untouched by the spooky things. If you’re going to believe in spooky things, it doesn’t make sense not to believe in the Son of God. Onward and upward. God bless us all.