Gnostic Insights

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.

According to the book of Colossians Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week we’re going to continue this study of Colossians in the New Testament as translated by David Bentley Hart. I keep promising some practical advice out of Colossians, and now we’re going to hit it here in chapter 3. It says, If therefore you were raised together with the Anointed, seek the things above where the Anointed is sitting at God’s right hand. Set your mind on the things above, not the things on earth. For you have died, and your life has been hidden with the Anointed in God. When the Anointed our life is made manifest, then you too will be made manifest, along with him, in glory. Now, you can interpret this in the Gnostic manner that we’ve been discussing here. The anointed is the Christ, and he is the Third Order of Powers. Jesus was the Third Order of Powers incarnate. That is, the Fullness of God in its perfection manifested on the earth. All of us have the Fullness of God, but none of us have the perfection, because we have our karma that we bring in, and our bodies break down, and we are fighting the never-ending war against the demiurge and death. But the Christ, or the Anointed, when he came to the earth, he came to bring us the imprint of the perfection of 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. And we can take on that perfection of the Fullness of God when we ask for the Christ, or the Anointed, to anoint us, you see? And that replaces the Third Order of Powers in all of its perfection over on top of our Second Order Powers, which are fallen because they are bonded to the material plane. But we can raise our vibrations, is how New Agers like to speak of it, we can raise our self back up to the Fullness of God only through the perfection of the Anointed. That’s the perfection of the Anointed’s job on our behalf. He’s like the correcting algorithm to our corrupted code. So, if therefore you were raised together with the Anointed, that is, once you have accepted the Anointed bringing you the Third Order of Powers, and you have asked them to help you and to cleanse your Second Order Powers, to bring them the perfection of the Anointed, then we are to seek the perfection above. Our focus is to be above, because we come from above, and we will return to above. You see, it helps us to shift our mindset from being stuck down here—I’ve got a short life, and then I die. That isn’t it. We refocus then on above and the perfection of the Fullness of God, because we now once again can perceive that perfection of God, once we allow the Anointed to correct our fallen egos, you see? And when it says that we have died and our life has been hidden with the Anointed and God, our fallen nature—our Second Order Powers that have become corrupted—they are put away. They are displaced by the Third Order power, the perfection of the Anointed, and its nesting fractals. And we nest into Christ, and we nest up on into the Father that way. Otherwise, we’re not nesting up into the fractals of the Fullness of God. We’re lost and wandering around in the fallen world, which is the province of the demiurge, and it’s not a pleasant place to be. Going on to verse 5, So mortify those bodily members that are on earth. Mortifying means put to death to kill those bodily members that are on earth, but it’s not talking about your body. It’s not saying that you should chop off your hand or your private parts. These are what the bodily members are that should be mortified—it says whoring, (which is sexual promiscuity), impurity, passion, (and by that it means overwhelming emotions, being a slave to your emotions), mortify malign desire, (that is, you shouldn’t wish for bad things to happen. You shouldn’t wish for bad things to happen to other people), and acquisitiveness, which is a form of idolatry. And acquisitiveness, my gosh, that’s our consumer culture. The purpose of commercials, the purpose of advertisements, is to inspire acquisitiveness in us, which is a form of idolatry, because we worship the exercise equipment. We worship the vacation to the best spot. We worship that kind of food. That’s what idolatry is. Verse 6 says, On account of which things, God’s indignation is coming. So God doesn’t like those things it’s saying. On the virtue versus vice ledger, those things fall on the vice side. And once again, that is sexual promiscuity, Impurity, and it doesn’t specify impurity in what, but it wants us to be pure. It wants us to be reflecting that purity of the Third Order Powers, reflecting the Fullness of God, reflecting the purity of virtuous living and virtuous thought. Passion, that is overwhelming emotions. Don’t be caught and brought down by emotions that boil up, because those emotions are being triggered by archons. Those emotions are being triggered by the demiurge. They want you to feel bad. They want you to feel hopeless. That is their door into your soul, is through passions. So we’re supposed to put those passions away. Malign desire, we want to get rid of that. Don’t wish for the bad. And this acquisitiveness, always having to have more, better. Verse 7 says, and in which things you used to walk back then when you lived by them, but now you must put it all away. Indignation, animosity, malice, blasphemy, obscene speech from your mouth. Okay, let’s look at those. “But now you must put all of that away. Indignation…” Boy, I bet a lot of you are like me. I used to be full of what’s called righteous indignation. I would be so upset. My passions would be riled up by becoming indignant at the injustice of it all, at injustice being done to another person, or cruelty to animals, or eating meat, or whatever the indignation is, the poor of the world. I’d become indignant over it. But it was righteous indignation, I thought, and so it was okay. But then I realized, and this was many years ago before I even discovered the Gnostic Gospels, that righteous indignation isn’t any good either, because it’s a form of passion, and it’s a negative emotion. And this negativity is what we’re trying to get rid of. We do not belong in the world of negativity. Once we accept the Anointed and allow the Third Order of Powers into our soul, then we can put away that sort of negative indignation, because indignation belongs to the Father, it says. God’s indignation is coming. So we leave it up to him. “Judgment is mine, saith the Lord.” That’s a common quote. And it says we must put away indignation. Animosity, that is a negative stance against other people, or a negative stance against certain institutions. Animosity, just pushing it away in negative way. Animosity means bitter hostility. There’s no room for bitterness in someone who’s walking with the Anointed. Or open enmity, acts of hatred. Hatred is bad in all of its forms. And just because you believe that the object of your hatred deserves it, well they may. But it’s not our job to judge them, and it’s not our job to experience animosity towards them. Ultimately, they will be reckoned with. Ultimately, there is a judgment. No one gets away with anything, sooner or later. But it’s not our job to have hostility and hatred. So a hostile feeling or act, or not to be mean of spirit. Malice, that’s plotting against someone. Blasphemy, blasphemy actually refers to rejection of the Holy Spirit. It’s considered the only sin that’s unforgivable, although we as Gnostics believe that all sins are ultimately forgivable. But as long as you blaspheme the Holy Spirit and push the Holy Spirit away, you’re not allowing the forgiveness to come to you. And so that’s why blasphemy is a bad idea. And, obscene speech from your mouth. I’m a veteran, and in the service there was a lot of curse words and a lot of cussing. And it was hard to come home on leave and be around my parents, because every other word out of my mouth had become some sort of obscene speech, or so it seemed. So stop the habit of using obscene speech. It’s a bad habit, and it puts us on the wrong side of the vice and virtue ledger. Going on to verse 9, Do not lie to one another, having shed the old man along with all of his practices, and having donned the new man, who is renewed in full knowledge according to the image of the one creating him. So that is describing what happens to you when you invite the Anointed to cleanse your Second Order pleroma. We invite the Third Order pleroma to overlay it and to bring us that cleansing. When the Third Order Power, that is, the Anointed, comes in to take up residence in your soul, it displaces your egoic way of being with the Anointed’s way of being, which is upward, onward and upward, focusing on above, which is living on the virtue side of the ledger. That is what it means to put on the new man, who is renewed in full knowledge. And that’s what we’re doing here at Gnostic Insights. Gnosis, gnostic, means knowledge, and it’s according to the image of the One creating him. So the gnosis comes from above. It’s not book learning. It’s not university learning. It’s the knowledge that comes directly from above. And then it says in verse 11, where there is no Greek and Judean, no circumcised or those with foreskin, no barbarian, Scythian, slave or free man. Rather, the Anointed is all things and is in all. Now, I believe that this goes directly against the diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI, that’s such a focus nowadays. It’s a false focus. The DEI agenda is not really meant to make everyone equal. In the end, it winds up privileging those in power, because it brings everyone down to the level of the slave, basically. So this passage says there are no differences among people. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white or brown. It doesn’t matter if you’re an immigrant or a native. It doesn’t matter if you’re a European, an Asian or a Western American. None of that matters, because we are all one in the Anointed. And that is the true DEI. That is the true diversity, equity and inclusion that can only come through Christ. And this is one of the reasons why totalitarian governments are anti-religion. They don’t want you to think that religion brings equanimity, brings equality, brings inclusion. They want you to think just the opposite, that only the government can do that for you, when in fact that is an inversion, that is a demiurgic lie. You can only find the kind of diversity, equity and inclusion that comes from above. That is where it comes from. It’s part of the Simple Golden Rule. It’s been a while since we talked about the Simple Golden Rule. That is that we reach out to others and hold hands, metaphorically, to work together on a shared project that none of us could do alone. And we do it for the betterment of all. That is not a government program. That is the golden rule that comes to us down from the Aeons. That’s the way the Fullness of God operates, working together on a shared project for the betterment of all, with love, with assistance, and with knowledge or gnosis. The Simple Golden Rule That’s the simple golden rule. And there are old episodes devoted to the simple golden rule. I’ll put a link here in the transcript if you want to go back and listen to that in depth. Verse 12 says, Therefore as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved… You know you can only be holy and beloved if you have been doing what the previous verses have suggested here in Colossians, to put off the old man. That is, set your ego aside and put on the new man, which is that restored and corrected version of yourself. It’s your best Self. You’re not being taken over by the Anointed. You’re not being taken over by Jesus. You are being brought into the human that you were meant to be from the beginning. So, therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, put on (Okay, now here’s the positive side of the ledger) inward compassion, honesty, humility, gentleness, and magnanimity. So, compassion, that’s loving empathy. It means seeing how another person is feeling through their eyes, rather than what you judge them to be. Honesty. Be honest. Delusion abounds in the land right now, honestly. The delusion comes from being dishonest, from not using your critical thinking skills, from taking liar’s words for how things work. Honesty is the best policy. Humility, that is dethroning your ego off the throne of control and allowing your true Self, with a capital S, self. That is, that self given to you by the Anointed, that Self that is a reflection of the Fullness of God. That is how we become humble. That is what humility is. We’re to be gentle. Be gentle, kind. And magnanimity. I looked up magnanimity, just to make sure I knew exactly what it means. And it means “the quality of being magnanimous, greatness of mind, elevation or dignity of soul. That quality or combination of qualities in character, which enables one to encounter danger and trouble with tranquility and firmness, to disdain injustice, meanness and revenge, and to act and sacrifice for noble objects.” Another definition says, “magnanimity is the virtue of being great of mind and heart. It encompasses usually a refusal to be petty, a willingness to face danger, and actions for noble purposes.” Verse 13 says, Upholding one another and forgiving one another, if anyone should have a complaint against anyone, just as the Lord forgave you, so you also. That’s part of the Lord’s prayer, isn’t it? “And forgive us our shortcomings to the extent that we forgive others.” So this is one of the reasons why we cannot judge and condemn other people, because we have not been condemned. The Lord has forgiven us, particularly if you have accepted the Anointed into your soul. There’s no room for hatred. There’s no room for judgment. Verse 14 says, And above all of these, love, which is the bond of perfection, and let the Anointed’s peace rule in your hearts, to which you were indeed called in one body, and become thankful. And that one body that we are called to be in, that’s the body of the Anointed. We are nested in a fractal sense up into the Anointed. He is our umbrella. He is our covering for all of our faults and sins. We nest up inside of him, and that mojo of the Christ takes it away. If we don’t nest up inside of him, we’re carrying all that burden around here in the fallen world. Verse 16 says, Let the word of the Anointed dwell within you richly, teaching and admonishing each other in all wisdom, in psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, singing in grace within your hearts to God. You know, songs are actually very much a part of the Fullness of God. It says in the Tripartite Tractate that the Aeons hymn to the Lord continually. That means they sing. They sing of the glory of God. Verse 17 says, And everything you do whatsoever, in word or in deed, do all things in Lord Jesus’ name, giving thanks to God the Father through him. See, Jesus as the Christ, he is the Anointed. He nests directly into the Son of God. He’s an extension that came down physically from the Son, and the Son is the only emanation from the Father. So when it says, “giving thanks to God the Father through him,” this is a literal translation that we nest up inside of the Christ. We nest up into the Son that way, and that nests us up fractally into the Father. Otherwise, we can’t reach him. When we’re down here lost, and when you pray to God, it’s actually the Son or the Christ that hears you. The Father is unapproachable. The Son is the only one that can approach the Father, because anyone else that would attempt to is annihilated because of the Father’s greatness. There’s too much of a power differential. Christ is like a resistor to the energy of the Father. Now then there’s a portion of Colossians which certain harsh fundamentalist churches and many harsh religions around the world use to justify treating women as lesser beings than men, and it goes like this. Verse 18 says, Wives, station yourselves under your husbands as is fitting in the Lord. Now, this means be subordinate in the sense of arranging under, or being subordinate to, or being stationed under the shelter. So I take this not in that sense of being a slave to your husband, but in the sense of we’re nesting fractals. And so the family unit is nesting up, and the wife nests right inside of the husband. Because the next verse says, Husbands, love your wives, and do not be bitter toward them. So it’s the job of the husband to love their wives just as much as God loves us. And this takes away any being under someone’s thumb, because that’s evil. It’s a sad thing to be nested up into the fractal of a bitter, angry person who does not love the Father. That’s why it says, “Husbands, love your wives, and do not be bitter toward them.” Children, obey your parents regarding all things, for this delights the Lord. Once again, this is assuming that your parents are virtuous people. Paul is speaking here in Colossians to those who have been redeemed by the Christ. He’s speaking to the church, those who have accepted the Anointed. Fathers, do not provoke your children so that they may not be dispirited. Slaves, obey your lords according to the flesh in regard to all things, not by affecting slavishness before people’s eyes, like someone obsequious to human beings, but in sincerity of heart, revering the Lord. Whatever you do, work from the soul as for the Lord and not for human beings, knowing that you will receive the reward of the inheritance from the Lord. You slave for the Lord, the Anointed. Now, while modern Western nations no longer support slavery as an economic system, there are reportedly 167 nations, mostly located in Asian, African, and Middle Eastern countries, that still force an estimated 46 million people to work as slaves. According to a site called World Population Review, “Forms of modern slavery include slavery by “ownership” (“chattel” slavery), government conscription (forced military service or government labor), forced prison labor, forced migrant labor, debt bondage (slavery until debts are paid), sexual slavery, forced marriage/child marriage, child labor, and forced begging.” And even those of us who are not subjected to slavery trudge off to work to earn the paycheck that takes care of our daily needs. The point of the passage above is that “Whatever you do, work from the soul as for the Lord and not for human beings, knowing that you will receive the reward of the inheritance from the Lord. You slave for the Lord, the Anointed.”  This is why we’re always to do our best on the job. The passage says not to “affect slavishness.” Affect means to pretend. Like when you’re sitting at your desk at work, playing mahjong on the computer or solitaire, and then when the boss walks by or your supervisor, suddenly you kill that program and you look like you’re working. You know that’s not right. And, we’re not working for the employer anyway. We’re working for the Lord. So we are not to act “obsequious to human beings,” which means cringing or fawning before another person, like a whipped dog. We only glorify the Lord above, even when working for employers down here below. So this is why we do our best in all things, and the better you do, the better it reflects upon the Lord. You know, she’s a really good worker. Of course, she’s a bit on the religious side. She’s got some weird ideas about God, but she’s a really good worker. Well, that’s kind of what you’d like the attitude to be about you. Then verse 25 says, For the one acting unjustly will suffer the wrong he has done, and there is no respecting of persons. And this has to do with either judgment before we die or judgment after we die, and there will be a judgment. No one gets away with anything. The one acting unjustly will suffer the wrong he has done, and that’s that life review at the end of our lives when we pass away. We will see all of the things that we have done in the world from everyone else’s point of view. So everyone you are cruel to now or mean to now or petty to now, you will experience their hurt. You will experience it. You’ll be in their shoes experiencing the hurt that you are doing now to them. That’s what it means. We will suffer the wrongs that we have done. So it’s best to not act in a mean, petty, cruel, bitter, judgmental way against other people now or against animals or anything. It’s best to act loving because the love we give out now, we will re-experience after we pass. The bad things we do now, we will re-experience after we pass. The meanness and the cruelty, we’ll see it from the other person’s point of view, and it will hurt to a huge extent because there won’t be any delusion or lies blinding us to what we are doing. We’ll see it with eyes wide open, and we will feel remorseful. We will feel bad about it. Imagine that. People say, Oh, Hitler couldn’t go to heaven. Look at all the bad he did, or put any other mean person in there that you want to. Yes, they will. But first, they’re going to experience all of the suffering that they caused to everyone else. They will experience it with eyes wide open, and it will pierce their souls, and they will feel very bad about it. But it’s all self-inflicted. All of the things that we’re doing are self-inflicted, and we will judge ourselves after we pass away. In the light of truth, there will be no lying. There will be no avoiding it, and only then will you see that you need to repent. Then you will repent. Then you will feel sorry for it all, and it’ll be a hard judgment and a hard repentance. But eventually, you will repent because “every knee will bow and every tongue confess” the Lord, the Fullness, and the Father. And if not now, then later, and it’ll be a lot harder later. But we don’t have to go through that. Do you know you don’t have to experience that at all? If you truly and sincerely repent now and ask for the Anointed to correct the faults of your soul, ask the Anointed to take away the mean spiritedness, or to take away the judgmentalism, or to take away the laziness or slothfulness, or whatever those problems are. That’s what was meant at the beginning of this chapter, to “mortify the flesh.” Not physically, not whipping yourself like some deranged ritual from the Dark Ages, but to ask to be cleansed, to present yourself, to become redeemed by the correcting algorithm of the Third Order Powers. Onward and upward. See you next week. 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.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week I shared for you the first verse of the Letter to the Colossians, out of David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament, which I highly recommend. Hart translated directly from the original Greek manuscripts, rather than deriving his translation the way most Bibles have been translated, which is from the Latin Vulgate and on into King James, and out that way—they just keep massaging the Latin. But Hart went back to the original Greek for the actual meaning of the words and the phrases. And last week we talked about the fractals of Colossians, because when it speaks of the fullness of God, which it does often in the Book of Colossians, these are nested fractals. We are tucked up, we are nested upward in a pyramidal type of sense into the Aeons of the Fullness of God. We are their fruit, we are derived from them, so our consciousness flows downward out of the Fullness of God. And the Fullness of God is sitting there with what is called the Son of God, which is the only emanation from the original ground state of consciousness, the original state of the Father, the big G, the God Above All Gods. He emanated only one emanation, and that’s called the Son. And it encapsulates everything that the Father stands for and is, but in this monad, a singularity type of form. I think of the Son as this big, like, a big round gaseous ball. That’s the way I picture it in my mind. And then as soon as the Son was emanated, He also had his own emanations, because He is the exact spirit of the Father. And so as the Father created the Son, the Son created the Fullnesses, the Totalities, the Aeons of God. We 2nd order powers are caught in a never ending war with the deficiency and each other I’m going to pick up in chapter 2 here of the letter to the Colossians, and he says, For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for your sake, and for those in Laodicea, for so many who have not seen my face in the flesh, so that their hearts, being joined together in love, might be encouraged on toward all the riches of full certainty in understanding, for full knowledge of the mystery of God, of the Anointed, in whom are all the hidden treasures of wisdom and of knowledge. He’s talking about gnosis when he speaks of full certainty and understanding, full knowledge of the mystery, the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge. That is the gnosis that Gnostics are mining. And I think that we here at Gnostic Insights are on the right track, and I thank you for joining me. A lot of people who call themselves Gnostics and are out there exploring various Gnostic sites and scriptures and doctrines, these are, in my opinion, rabbit trails that don’t necessarily lead to true knowledge, true wisdom, true Fullness and certainty in the knowledge of God. It’s just one more thing, one more thing, one more thing. Got to find this, got to listen to that speaker, got to do this, got to do that. There is really only one gnosis. It’s a very simple gnosis, and it is this: that we come from the Father. That’s all there is to it. We second-order powers that live down here on the planet Earth and probably populate the entire cosmos, because that’s how it’s usually referred to in the New Testament as the cosmos, or the universe, we would call it, not just Earth, so this would cover the ETs as well. That we second-order powers—everything that has life. So that would be everything from the cells on up, from the bacteria on up through the plants and the birds and the mammals, including us. It would not, by the way, include viruses, because viruses are not alive. Did you realize that? Viruses are called molecules. They are very clever molecules that have one job and one job only, and that is to conquer and kill and steal. That’s what they do to the cell. They conquer it, they invade it, they take its RNA, DNA out, and then spread it around to more cells so that they also will die and be conquered. That’s the job of a virus, which is demiurgic. It comes from the molecular level, and the demiurge only controls the molecules and the elements, the elementals of this cosmos. That’s what is meant by the elementals of this cosmos. viruses are not “alive.” they are complex molecules on a deadly mission. they are demirugic. We are different than the viruses. We are not a virus upon the face of the Earth. We second-order powers are the extension of the Fullness of God. We carry the consciousness, the light, the life, and the love of the Father and the Son down into this, what would otherwise be completely dead, material world. So yes, the rocks, stones, the crystals, the clouds, and the rain, they are lovely to behold, but they’re not to be worshipped because they are part of the realm of the demiurge. And the demiurge made these things out of his memory of paradise. We also have that memory of paradise because that’s where we all come from. Paradise is where the Aeons live. Paradise is their dream, and we are part of that. We come from there, so we remember it. Every human, every plant and animal, every cell in our body knows the Fullness of God because we all come from the Fullness of God. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. The rocks and stones, the elements, the elementals, the powers of this cosmos derive from the demiurge. And he, of course, did come from the Fullness, but he, “fell” and got stuck down here and has amnesia. He doesn’t remember that he comes from the Fullness of God. He’s got all these wonderful plans and all the blueprints for paradise, but he thinks he made them up. He thinks he cooked them up. He doesn’t remember that he fell from above. That’s why he thinks he is God. He woke up, hey, where am I? Who am I? I must be God. Let me create the cosmos, and I will be the God of that cosmos. That’s the mind of the demiurge. As long as we dwell in the cosmos, we are bonded to the elements of the demiurge because our physical flesh is made of molecules and elements. But we bring the life of the Fullness into that physical flesh, and so we are bonded to the material. That is the root of our struggles, the never-ending war against death. Because death is on the side of the demiurge, life is on the side of the Fullness. That’s all we really need to know. We come from the Fullness above. You don’t even have to know what I just told you. I think that everything on the planet that is alive inherently knows it because we have the Fullness, the patterning within us, and we know we didn’t fall. We were birthed down here. So we are not fallen with amnesia the way the demiurge is. He thinks he’s the end-all and the be-all. We tend to forget it, being trapped down here in this world while we’re living this mortal life. And then we struggle against each other. We struggle against the elements. We struggle against the demiurge and the archons, the powers of this cosmos. And we are caught in this never-ending war, and then we die. And it seems like it’s all so helpless and hopeless, unless you flip the switch. And that was the job of the Anointed, the Anointed’s job. And Anointed is the actual word for Christ. We say the Christ, which has become like a title, Jesus the Christ, Jesus the King. But he’s actually Jesus the Anointed, or simply the Anointed one, meaning He who carries down from the Fullness all that we need to know. He’s the superpower that re-inhabits us and reminds us of the Fullness of God and the Father, the ground state of consciousness. Materialism tries to teach us that we are a byproduct of the material, but we are not a byproduct of the material. No matter how many molecules you throw out there, unlike what science tries to sell you, these molecules and elements and minerals cannot randomly assemble themselves into life. They don’t do it. And even when scientists jam them all together in an attempt to grow what they call organoids, for example, grow a fake heart from scratch up, they can’t do it. The heart won’t act like a heart unless they, like viruses, steal the life of a beating heart and put it into that organoid. And that is what causes it to beat and to know that it’s a heart. But they can’t keep them alive because they will not level up. lab-grown neuro-muscular organoid And so back to the letter to Colossians, we’re in chapter 2 here. He says, I say this so that no one may beguile you with plausible talk. And another word for beguile is enchant or delude. And I want to tell you that the internet is full of beguiling talk. And most often, unless it includes a true gnosis of the Father and the Son and the Anointed, it is nothing but beguiling talk. And it is the type of talk that can lead us astray because it doesn’t lead back to the Fullness. If it leads up to the Fullness, you’re on track. If it leads to some cult or some leader or some technology, then it’s not. Paul goes on to say in verse 8 of chapter 2, Watch that there be no one who robs you by way of philosophy and empty deceit according to the traditions of human beings, according to the elementals of the cosmos, and not according to the Anointed. You see, that’s what I was just saying. And the sad and frustrating thing is that, for example, I am often accused of beguiling by way of philosophy and empty deceit. But this is not philosophy and empty deceit. This is actually the gospel as preached by Jesus. And it was stripped out of the Bible so that this worldly church could have control over the minds of the followers and the beliefs of the followers. But that was never the plan. The Anointed comes to each and every person individually. Gnosis is an individual pursuit, and it’s inward and upward. It’s not out in the world—who do I have to listen to?  what do I have to read? Because if you keep anchoring to the thought that even the grass and the trees are going to heaven, even your dog and your cat are going to heaven, what do they have to know? What rites do they need to perform? What books do they read? They don’t. They just know that they came from above, and they’ll go home to the above when they wither away. We’re fearful of that, but we don’t just wither away. We go home. This is a temporary sojourn, being wedded to this material world. We are in the world, but not of the world. That’s what it means. Verse 9 says, Because in him, (that’s the Anointed), dwells all the Fullness of deity bodily. And you are those who have been made full in him, who is the head of every rule and power. So again, that’s that nested fractals notion. When we invite the Christ or the Anointed to bring us the correcting and the memory of the origin, because we’re stumbling around, lost in the cosmos, then we nest back up into the Anointed. We’re riding along with him, like the way Superman flew through the air with Lois Lane tucked under his arm. That Superman is our Anointed, and we believers, we’re like Lois Lane flying through the sky with Superman. Quoting again, verse 10, And you are those who have been made full in him, who is the head of every rule and power, in whom also you were circumcised with a circumcision not accomplished by hand, through the shedding of the body of the flesh, through the circumcision of the Anointed, buried with him in baptism, by which you were also raised along with him, by the faithfulness of the operation of the God who raised him from the dead. So circumcision is a rite that was given by the Demiurge to the Hebrews to mark them as a special people apart from everyone else, because they were willing to have their foreskins cut off of their male appendages. But it’s a fractal. The actual circumcision is severing the ties we have to the material world. It’s cutting off the foreskins, so to speak, of the rule of the orders and the elementals over our souls, because we are otherwise stuck to them here in this bodily form. So the circumcision is not material. It’s actually spiritual. It merely means severing or cutting off the tie that binds you to the cosmos, so that you are free to look upward rather than downward. You’re free to look forward rather than backward. This is what onward and upward means. Circumcise. Verse 12 says, buried with him in baptism, by which you were also raised along with him, by the faithfulness of the operation of the big G God, (that’s the God Above All Gods), who raised him from the dead. And while you were dead in trespasses and in your foreskin of flesh, (which is your whole body of course), he gave you life along with him, forgiving all trespasses, expunging what is written by hand against us, contrary to us, in ordinances, and has removed it out of the way, nailing it to the cross, stripping the archons and powers, (and that again, that’s the henchmen of the demiurge), 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 shadows of things to come, but the solid body thereof is that of the Anointed. So what was happening back in those days was that the Jews who had been converted to Christ were still laboring under the laws of the demiurge, that is the Old Testament laws. There is a Christian denomination called Jehovah’s Witness, and they also labor under that same set of Old Testament rules. The Seventh-day Adventists also labor under that set of Old Testament rules, and here Paul is saying those are a shadow of things to come, but you are not to be bound by those rules anymore because you’ve been liberated by the Anointed. Now, from me to you, let me tell you right here, instead of waiting till we get to such a verse, that doesn’t mean, as some sects, some cults think, that means “anything goes.” Oh, I’m liberated by the Christ, therefore, oh, let’s have an orgy. Let’s all drop some ecstasy and have an orgy because we can do anything we want because we’ve been liberated by Christ. That’s the wrong attitude, folks. The attitude for liberation through Christ is to go onward and upward, not backward and down, and indulging in hedonism and sexual promiscuity is not the path onward and upward, it’s the path backward and down, and I’m pretty sure you know this because your conscience tells you so. There will be a time of mingling. There will be a time that may sort of resemble something like an orgy, but it doesn’t happen down here in the cosmos. The Aeons of the Fullness, that’s the way they give birth to us. We’re probably remembering something of that glory above. The Aeons are immaterial, so any number of their spirits can mingle with any number of their spirits, and they make these kind of logarithmic minglings of an infinite variety, which gives birth to their children. We can’t do that down here. It doesn’t work. We have to be patient. We have to wait until we return to the Fullness of God. Verse 18, Colossians says, 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 Big G God, (the God Above All Gods). This blustering aimlessly by the mind of his flesh–that’s part of the Simple Explanation. Our flesh has a mind of its own. Each of our organs has a mind of their own. We are aggregating upward at the cellular living level. You know, we start from a stem cell, and then we keep differentiating, growing, branching out to wind up to be this organism that we are, whatever organism that may be, whatever living creature that may be. And each part of that growing upward is also alive and remembers the Fullness. That’s where the intelligent design comes into it. They know what they’re growing into because it came from the stem cell on up. The stem cell was a little miniature replica of the Fullness of God itself, so it knows everything. It knows how to grow the organism up that it needs to be, that it needs to become, in conjunction with the spirit that infuses it at conception. Because the spirit, that spark of life, brings the consciousness of the Father into the material that builds up into us. So part of the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything is that our subsystems, our little cells and parts of ourselves, our organs, our organ systems, they all have a mind of their own. Your stomach tells you when to eat. Your sexual organs tell you to have sex. Your skin says, I’m cold or I’m hot. Cover up or take off some clothes. Your lungs say, give me a smoke. That is what is meant by blustering aimlessly by the mind of his flesh when people do not put their own overriding governing unit of consciousness at the top of the pile. You are supposed to have control over your body. And it needs you. I always say it’s the Raja sitting atop the elephant, right? Your body needs you, needs its controlling unit of consciousness, which is the most developed part of its galaxy of consciousness that is your body. You need to be aware of what’s going on. You need to be a wise and loving ruler to this galaxy that makes up your body. If you don’t, the body takes control. And that’s how the lusts of the flesh take over. And people feel that they’re out of control because they are, because they’ve never exercised control over their body. But you don’t do it by willpower because willpower can fade. You have to do it by going upward and asking for the power of the Anointed to give you the power to control. So if an addict is withdrawing from a drug, they may feel helpless and hopeless. But if they turn to their higher power, if they remember that they come from above, that’s when they have the power to put it down. So not blustering aimlessly by the mind of his flesh, but rather holding onto the head from whom all the body, furnished and knitted together by its joints and ligatures, will grow with a growth from the God Above All Gods. That’s what it’s saying. And we’ll finish up with this ending of chapter two, and then we’ll go into chapter three, which I promised you last week that we’d get to some practical advice about how to live that will help you walk with the Anointed, with the Fullness of God, and not fall back into the archons and the powers of the elementals. But finishing up with chapter two here, verse 20. If with the Anointed you died away from the elementals of the cosmos, why are you submissive to ordinances as though living in the cosmos? Do not handle or taste or touch things that are all reduced to decay in being used up according to the injunctions and teachings of human beings, which things indeed, though having a reputation as wisdom on account of affected religion and mental lowliness and lavish neglect of the body, are of no real value against indulgence of the flesh. So that means being unkind to your body is not going to help you take dominion over it. That means attending a church with an affected religion that doesn’t even remember the Fullness of God or the Father or the Son, but pays lip service to it, isn’t going to help you either. That keeps you bound to the law. And this bit about mental lowliness, I take that to mean thinking that this kind of talk that we’re doing, this gnosis that we are mining, is somehow unholy, is somehow made up, and a philosophy of man, just another philosophy of man. Well, in my discernment, in my soul, I can feel the difference, and I’m wondering if you can. Say, I’d love to hear some of your comments. If you’ve been following Gnostic Insights for any period of time, or if you’ve had any deep insights that have liberated you in any sense because of this particular ministry, I would sure like to know that. Would you drop me a line in comments or send me an email? Let me know if I can share your story with other people that are listening. I’d like to build some sort of a community here, not around me or around the podcast or my books, but a community of truth in the gnosis of the Anointed. And if you’re brand new to Gnostic Insights and you’re…  okay, now we’re back in the 21st century… If you’re new to this podcast, it is different than the Gnosticism presented elsewhere. If you would like to know what the heck I’m talking about, please go to Amazon.com now and buy the book that is called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and that will lay it all out absolutely clearly, without possibility of misunderstanding. And if that turns out to be too complex, because it is theology, the book that preceded it, called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is very short, profusely illustrated, very simple, no explanations at all, just the Gnostic Gospel. God bless us all, onward and upward. See you next week. 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.

Fractals of Colossians Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I thought I would share with you one of the books out of the New Testament as translated by David Bentley Hart and published by Yale University Press, which, as I’ve said before, is very Gnostic in its interpretation because it uses the same words that our Gnostic Gospel uses. The translation is more precise than your normal conventional Bible. Colossians is purportedly Paul writing a letter to this church in a town called Colossae. And I’m going to go through this verse by verse so that you can see how similar this is to the cosmology of the Tripartite Tractate that I am generally sharing with you. And he is writing this letter to the church in Colossae to exhort them to righteousness, let’s say, to help them walk in the path of the Christ. And he says, for example, in chapter 1, verse 11, “being empowered with every power by the might of his glory for all endurance and longanimity, with joy.” Longanimity means the disposition to be patient in the face of adversity, to suffer calmly. And boy, we could use some of that right now, right? You may not feel joyful all the time because of all that’s going on around us, but we can have endurance and longanimity if we’re walking with Christ, because he has the power over all of this. “Giving thanks to the Father who has made you fit for participation in the Holy One’s allotment in the light.” And “the Holy Ones” is the Aeons of the Fullness of God, in my opinion. And they live in the light of the ethereal plane up there in the Fullness of God. That is the place where the Aeons live. They are, “the Holy Ones who delivered us from the power of the darkness and translated us into the Kingdom of his love’s Son.” His love’s Son—that’s a peculiar way to put it. Not his beloved Son, but the Kingdom of his love’s Son. So, the Son is the first emanation of the Father, the only emanation directly out of the Father, and he is still plugged into the Father. Whereas everything else that followed, the Fullness, and then us, and of course the various Principalities and Powers—they derive from the Son. And remember, the Father’s love is his preeminent quality, consciousness and love, overwhelming love. He is nothing but love. He is the root of love. Then it goes on to say, verse 14, “in whom we have the price of liberation, the forgiveness of sins, who is the image of the invisible God.” Remember, the Father, the invisible God, he’s consciousness itself. He’s the ground state matrix. He does not have a face. He does not have an image. He’s not the fellow in the Old Testament walking around in the robes with the long beard. That is not the face of God. The Son is the image of the invisible God, and he is love embodied. It goes on to say, “firstborn of all creation.” And in the footnotes, Hart says, this can also be translated as “of every creature the firstborn” or “born prior to all creation.” So the Son is the very first emanation of the Father. He’s the first thing. The Son emerges from the Father as the First Glory. The Only Begotten Son. And then it says, “because in him, the Son, were created all things in the heavens and on earth, the visible as well as the invisible, whether Thrones or Lordships or Archons or Powers.” And those are the invisible spiritual Powers. And the visible, of course, is this apparently material world that we are living in. “All things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things. All things hold together in him. “ And if we’re thinking of nested fractals, even though the fallen Aeon, Logos, broke apart, and it is his shadow parts that create this material world, it’s of a lower vibratory order, we would say in our modern talk. We’re still within, ultimately, the Fullness of God. We’re still within, ultimately, the Son. The Demiurge may be our universal unit of consciousness that created this material universe, the fallen Logos, but sitting within the Son because these are all nested. He’s a fractal below the Son. All of creation are fractal offspring of the Son. And so, like any fractal formula, they continue to nest upward toward the One originating form or formula. Picking that back up again in verse 18, “And he is the head of the body, of the assembly, who is the origin, firstborn from the dead, so that he might himself hold first place in all things.” So this is then the Christian doctrine that the Christ became embodied in the flesh of a human, Jesus, and he was dead and buried in a tomb for three days, and then he rose from the dead. And that is what makes him “the firstborn of all of the dead.” And the promise of Christianity is that he’s the firstborn of the dead, but we will all be resurrected from the dead. So, death of this physical body that you’re walking around in right now, this is nothing to fear, because you will be resurrected the same way that Jesus was resurrected, through the power of the Son. That’s the point of Jesus being the firstborn from the dead, so that he might, “hold himself first place in all things.” Because, once again, he is our originating formula for the resurrected man. So this is again a fractal. Verse 19, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling.” And you see, this is an example of where our conventional Christianity has lost the actual depth of the meaning of the Fullness. This is a capitalized word, and the Fullness, according to the Tripartite Tractate and other Gnostic texts, is the place where the Aeons dwell. The Fullness is co-existent with the Son. The Son wears the Fullness like a garment, and the Fullness wears the Son. The Fullness is the breakout of all the parts of the Son. And it says, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling.” This is a fractal reference, that the Fullnesses, that is the Aeons of the Fullness, that is the pleroma, another word for Fullness, they live within the Son. So we’re nesting upward, up toward the One, you see? That whole subtlety of what is the Fullness, and our relationship to the Fullness, and the relationship of the Fullness to the Son, has been lost. It goes untranslated in the New Testament, because the books of the New Testament that reference the Fullness and explain it, such as the Tripartite Tractate, were removed from the Bible by the Catholic Pope and the Emperor of Rome when they codified what Christianity is, and should be, and decided what texts should stay in, and what texts should be thrown out, and which priests would be honored and promoted. So, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling, and through him to reconcile all things to him.” You see? To reconcile all things to him. Not just the ones who go to church, not just the ones who have recognized their gnosis and acknowledge the power of the Son and of the Christ, or that Jesus was the human incarnate of the Son, but rather, all things to him. And it keeps referencing throughout the whole New Testament that Christ came to reconcile all things to him. They just don’t believe it. They think, well, reconcile all things, well, who have acknowledged the Christ, and who have been baptized and cleansed of their sin, but if you die in your sin, you’re going to go to hell. No, it doesn’t say that anywhere. It says “reconcile all things to him, making peace by the blood of his cross through him, whether the things on earth or the things in the heavens.” So that is saying that the Christ becoming incarnate, dying, and resurrecting was a message and a means to draw all of the Powers, and even before us second-order Powers, to draw all things in the heavens toward him, which includes the fallen Demiurge. And if there are other fallen angels, as are obliquely referenced here and there—we keep hearing about these one-third of angels falling from heaven. I haven’t run across it in my reading. It’s not in the Tripartite Tractate. But if there were a third of the Aeons who fell to earth along with Logos, then they’re also going to be reconciled back into the Fullness. They’re not going to be kept in chains below the earth forever. And then it carries on, verse 21, to say, “and you back then had been aliens and enemies in thought through wicked deeds, yet now he has affected reconciliation by a death in the body of his flesh to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.” Verse 23 says, “if you indeed abide in the faith established and steadfast and not moved away from hope in the good tidings that you have heard proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.” So that does seem to reference that you’re only going to be made blameless and irreproachable if you abide in the faith. That’s what Paul says. And here’s the thing. We’ve discussed this before in the episode called Overcoming Death. Christ died for everyone, and everyone will wind up back in the Fullness of God. If everything that is alive didn’t return back into the Fullness of the ethereal space, then the God, the Son, would have been diminished by their absence, wouldn’t they? If we are their fruit and most of the fruit gets thrown away because it’s rotten, well, you have a much smaller harvest than you are entitled to, right? But the Christ took care of everybody through his power, not through ours. So it’s not our own works or our own blamelessness that earns us the right to go to heaven. So skipping a few verses on to verse 26, it says, “The mystery that has been hidden from the ages and from the generations, but that has now been made manifest in his Holy Ones, by whom God wished to make known that the wealth of this mystery’s glory is among the Gentiles, [that is, amongst all of us non-Jews], which is the anointed within you, the hope of glory, whom we proclaim, warning every human being and teaching every human being in all wisdom, so that we may present every human being as perfected in the Anointed.” Okay, now let’s break that down. So what’s the mystery that has been hidden from the ages? Generations means those things emanating from the Fullness, being generated out of the Fullness, and that is us. We are the generations, all of us, all of us second-order Powers. It’s not just humans, it’s blades of grass and butterflies and dogs, okay? It’s every living thing that has now been made manifest in his Holy Ones, and his Holy Ones are the third order of Powers. That’s the body that is the Christ. The Christ is not exactly the same as the Son. The Son is still sitting in the ethereal plane, plugged directly into the Father, and the Fullness of God dwells within the Son. Now, generating from the Fullness, we’re the second order of Powers. Life, creation, it all comes from the top. Life, love, consciousness is a top-down phenomenon. The mud, or the molecules, the particles, the atoms, that’s a bottom-up phenomenon. That is after the Fall. The Fall is the break between the ethereal plane and this apparently material universe that we live in. The Holy Ones live above. They are holy, which means that they have the same characteristics as the Father and the Son, so they are untouched by sin. Therefore, they are not the generations down here that have been melded to the mud. We are not the Holy Ones. We are the fallen ones. Logos mistook his will for that of the ALL. Logos overreached because of his presumptuous thought. We actually were sent down. We weren’t fallen. We were purposely birthed down here, so we’re not illegitimate. However, once we became bonded to the material that’s bottom-up, that demiurgic material, then we become “wicked,” or we become sinful. Not because it’s inherent in our souls, because we are from the good thought. We are fractals of the Aeons. We’re fractals of the Fullness of God, and we all have within ourselves the remembrance of the Fullness of God. We all remember Paradise, and that is why it feels so wrong down here. It feels so disappointing when things go wrong, and when we disappoint ourselves, when we choose to reach for sinful things, when we choose to partake in evil, whatever that evil is, you know it. That is the deviation, and that comes from the bottom-up, and it has to do with our material makeup. But from the top down, we are pure, but we’re not pure enough to be called the Holy Ones, okay? So these Holy Ones that are being referenced here, that is the preexistent church, the Totalities, the Aeons that have never fallen, and it’s also the body of the Christ, because the Christ is the Son, and all the Fullnesses, and the knowledge that Logos brought back with him of this material world of the Fall. The Christ purposely arose from all of it. So he is the Son, but with all of the subsequent history also piled into him, whereas the Son stays pure. The Son is undefiled. He has to be, because he’s the nature of the Father. But the Christ, he became flesh for us, you see, so he was defiled. He did know the great death, which is ignorance. “Oh Father, why hast thou deserted me?” he said, just before he died, because he was dying, and the eternal Son never dies. So the Christ did die, but then he resurrected, and that’s what the true Christian message is. That’s the gospel. So the Holy Ones are the third order of Powers that are incorporated into the flesh of the Christ. It’s his pleroma. The first order of Powers is the original Fullness of God. That’s the Son. He’s the first order of power. We’re the second order of power. That’s pretty high up there. But then we are sent down, and we are plugged into this material world. The third order of power is the composite that is the Christ, that is the Son, the Fullness, all of the holiness of the Father, and all of the Fullness, all of the Aeons, their best version, they’re all together in the Christ, and that is his pleroma. And that actually came down physically into this material world with, as I call it, the correcting algorithm for this space. It is not perfect down here. This is a fallen world. We are no longer perfect once we begin to practice wickedness because of this flesh that we have been bonded to. Our spirits are ethereal, but our flesh is bonded to the material of the Demiurge, and that is where all the struggles come in. Our struggles brought about by our flesh are the desires of this material body. It’s not our spirit, because our spirit is of the good thought, but the material body has all of these pulls and desires. Even our organs—they have their own struggles, their own karma. You know, we have pulls to overeat. We have pulls to smoke. We have pulls to take drugs. We have pulls to have unsanctioned sex. We have passions. The Tripartite Tractate says passions are a sickness, and passions—that’s your emotions when we boil up. Boy, I myself am a very passionate person, I must say. Not in the realm of sex necessarily, but I’m very passionate in my emotions, so I can flare up at the drop of a hat, and that is where my struggle is, or my surrender is in the direction of that equanimity, is in that direction of patience and long-suffering. So we each have what is called our cross to bear, right? You’ve heard that expression. We each have our own particular challenges brought about by being incarnated in this material flesh. Well, the Christ, when he incarnated, he did not ever succumb to those passions, to that desire of the flesh. He was tempted by the Demiurge and by Satan, but he said, “no, I’m not going to do it. I’m fine the way I am, thank you very much. I prefer to walk with the Father, and I wish that everyone would walk with the Father. And look, here’s how you do it.” That is the message that the Christ brought. So he brought us teaching, which is supposedly captured here in the New Testament, but a lot of it was taken out. But he also brought us that supernatural aspect, and that supernatural aspect is the resurrection from death into eternal life. And that’s where our hope lies. We know things are going to be better because we will return to the eternal realm, and we know the eternal realm deep down inside of us because we were born with what’s called the good thought, the remembrance of the Father. We remember the Fullness. We remember Paradise, and we expect to go back there. That is what all humans hope for. And I speak of humans because we’re the humans, right? We do all this thinking and wondering and worrying, but the grasses know it inherently. They’re not worried. The butterflies know it. The birds know it. The dogs know it. The cows know it. Everybody else but the humans has assurance of their return to the ethereal plane. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. So this is just a passing. We’re passing through this life. The Christ that walked among us, who goes by the name of Jesus in our traditions, and he carried with him the entirety of the Fullness of God. So as we second-order Powers are fractals of various combinations of Aeons, we each have our own aeonic heritage, our own aeonic parents. We’ve got our human parents, mom and dad, two of them, but we also have an aeonic combination that is unique to each one of us, mostly the same but also unique. We have various talents and various personalities, various characteristics are made manifest in each one of us. And the third order of Powers that came to earth along with the Christ, there’s a third order power for every one of us. All of the third order Powers are manifested in the Christ when he came to the material plane. He brought all the third order Powers to us. And it’s the third order Power that is our Christ that we recognize. And each of those third order of Powers has the ability because it is the highest ranking power in the heavens. That third order Power of Christ, the Holy Ones, can overcome any and every challenge that we second order Powers encounter. It’s the Christ. The third order Powers are like an overlay upon our second order soul, upon our own unique pattern, and it is the perfection of us. And that’s what is the advantage to accepting the coming of the Christ to this material plane, that you know that you are taken care of. It’s not just the worry about whether or not you’re going to heaven or what’s going to happen to you after you die. The third order Power, if you will allow it to come in, will take up residence inside this material flesh along with your second order Power. So it’s not just your second order Power that’s animating the body. The third order Power comes in with the holiness of God and then says, oh look, you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to do that. It’s okay. We got it covered. And that gives you the power to walk away. And once you start walking away from those temptations of the flesh, you could call them, because now you have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the indwelling of the Christ, you are suddenly free from the bondage. You see all these words? These are very familiar words in Christianity, but they have a much deeper meaning when you understand the gnosis behind them. “The wealth of this mystery’s glory” is how Paul put it. It is a mystery. It is supernatural stuff we’re talking about, but we are supernatural beings. So people that want to steadfastly remain happy materialists, well, it’s a lie, first off, because you’re not happy. Addicts aren’t happy with their addictions. Mean people aren’t happy being mean. There might be a surge of satisfaction, but that satisfaction is just part of the dominion. It’s part of dominating another. It’s part of a power play. And the power plays are all on the part of the Demiurge. They’re not God. They’re not good. The Christ does not come as a power play to steal your soul. The Christ comes in order to give you the reinforcement troops that will help you overcome the lies of the Demiurge and his Archons. I think everybody knows this. The Tripartite Tractate says everybody knows it, but we tend to forget because of the nature of the never-ending war. And the never-ending war is against the Powers of the Demiurge. It’s against the Archons that are constantly confounding and confusing us, constantly trying to bring us down, messing with our technology, messing with our families, messing with our governments. They are trying to control us. They are trying to control you. This gospel, especially this Gnostic gospel, is not trying to control you. And this is where many churches and many Christians have gone astray. It’s not a matter of us controlling, of us overpowering, because, once again, that is us trying to do it without the third-order Power. It’s a matter of stepping aside, of relinquishing the power, not in order to be overpowered, but rather once you stop trying to dominate, then your eyes are opened. Then you can see, ah, ah, oh, wow, oh, hey, this is good. Ah, this is good. You know, I belong to many evangelical churches and churches that preach redemption and come forward and accept the Christ and you will be freed. That’s good. That’s not bad stuff. And the people that do come forward to accept the Christ do have these marvelous experiences. Of course, I myself have experienced it, and I’ve been around many, many, many people who do go forward and experience the freedom that is suddenly… you know, the pain, the grief, the struggle falls away the moment you allow the Christ to come in. And that’s what the born-again experience is all about. But I think then the church often, not all of them, but many churches then re-enslave that person. They’ve accepted the Christ. They are free from bondage now of the Demiurge, but then they enslave themselves to the law of the church, working the good deeds to get to heaven. And that isn’t right either. So we’re perched on this precipice. We’re perched on this tipping point between the sinful nature and the rule-bound, law-bound nature of many churches. And that is just as bad as being on the other side. Neither side is going to hell. Everyone is going to heaven because we’re all from there, and we all must return. Not for our sakes. It’s for God’s sake. The Father has to remain full. It’s a set. It’s a formula. We were sent down out of this gigantic set into this other space. And if we don’t return back to the set, then it negates part of the formula. And you can’t reduce God. God is ever the same. So the formula must be restored. We must be returned to the Fullness of God. Do you see how that works? Do you see the logic of that? Then Colossians goes on to give some very practical advice for how you can walk in a virtuous life. But we need to take it as good advice of how to be free here on earth. But it’s not good advice on how to be saved, because we are already saved. We were never lost. We may appear lost temporarily while we’re wandering around in the bondage of the Demiurge. We’re lost if we are pretending that materialism is the way to go and we don’t have an eternal soul. But you’re not really lost, because God knows where you are. The Christ knows exactly where you are. Because, let me try to explain this one last time for this week, and then I think we’ll pick this up again in Colossians next week, where I can give you the advice out of Colossians for how to be happy, how to walk a happy and more secure life. The reason we are never lost is because this body that you’re walking around in and this Self that you think of as yourself, it is completely known and understood and covered by third order Powers. There’s a third order Power for every second order Power, and we are the second order Powers. So you do have an angel hovering right behind you all the time. You’re not lost. It knows right where you are, and it is the holiness of the Christ just hovering all around you. But it is not a domination power-tripping thing the way the Demiurge is or the way other people are. It is gentle. It is the gentleness of the Holy Spirit. That’s why it is likened to a dove, and it’s right there with you, and all you have to do is acknowledge it. Just remember, well, what if it’s true? What if I do have third order Power right here, right now? What if the Christ really did come to earth and bring me my own personal third order of Powers to help me and make me strong and make me holy again, make me happy, make me joyful? Why would you want to push that away? Try it on. It can’t do you any harm. You know, I’m back to Pascal’s wager, which I talked about a few weeks ago. If there is no third order of Power, and yet you invite the third order of Power in, you invite the Christ to come in and help you, “help me please. I can’t do this on my own. I’m too disappointed. I’m too sad. I need your help. I’m sick and tired of the way the world is treating me and the way I am in the world.” If you say something along those lines, and you will really mean it, because usually people who do profess, who do want to be, quote, born again, if it’s sincere, then it will come in. The third order of Power will come and overlay your second order Powers, just bringing them light and love, comfort and knowledge, just bringing you the gnosis that you have forgotten, and once you let it in, you’ll recognize it. You’ll be lighted up from within. And like I was saying, if it’s not true, as in Pascal’s wager, Pascal said, look, what have you got to lose? If it’s not true, then what have you got to lose? Big deal. You won’t know about it because you’ll be blinked out into nothingness like you thought you’d be all along, so you won’t be there. It won’t matter. But if you do ask the Christ to come in and redeem your life, you’ll be opening the door—that’s the key.  You’re born again. You have gnosis. You’re redeemed and you feel the redemption. You have the assurance of the ethereal plane. You come to know your aeonic parents. You come to know your purpose in life. You begin treating people with love. I think that is the true gospel message that has been lost. So let’s pick this up again next week. We’ll learn some particularities of how to do this. God bless us all. Onward and upward. 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.

Logos and Sophia This episode begins and ends with samples from the audio version of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel narrated by Miguel Conner. I’ve been listening to the recording of Miguel Conner reading A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and it’s beautiful. It is thrilling. You’re absolutely going to want a copy of this because you can listen to it while you’re doing other things. I’ve been monitoring it, listening for audio errors, and doing all of my household tasks and ironing and washing dishes and whatnot while I’m listening to A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. It’s really neat. Here’s a sample. Chapter 2, The Emanation of the Son and the All. The purpose of this book is to help us all remember the Gnosis we were born with, the knowledge of where we come from, and the nature of the originating consciousness that existed before us. Gnosis also involves understanding our personal relationship to that originating consciousness. Chapter 1 began by sharing information about the Father, which is the name given to the originating consciousness. Imagine that this Father then gives birth to an emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation philosophy, we call this emanation a fractal. We’ll look at fractals later in the book because they play a big part in creation. In the religious texts, they call this emanation the Sun. Now we have a Father and a Son. In the silence of the Absolute, the Father brings forth the first and only Son. By knowing Himself in Himself, the Father bore Him without generation, so that He exists by the Father having Him as a thought. That is, His thought about Himself, His sensation of Himself, and of His eternal being. The Son is not the generalized, diffuse, no-thought consciousness of the Father, but more like a bucket dipped into the ocean, with the Father being the ocean. The Son is the essence of the Father now contained within the bucket. The Son is exactly the same consciousness as the Father, now realized as a particularity. The Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. Boundless because the Father’s greatness continues to flow unimpeded through the Son. The Father brought Him forth while He remained united with the One from whom He had gone forth, receiving glory together. The Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells. Every trait of the Father is now expressed as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. We will also be looking at singularities, monads, and points of view in more depth later in the book. And yet, although it was a singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone. For not only the Son, but what is called the All, and all the totalities arose at once. The All immediately appeared as aspects of the Son, because the Son could not help itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father. The Son embodies the Father’s creativity. The Father knows itself and creates the Son, and the Son knows itself as the body of the All. The Tripartite Tractate says, “He was given them as delight and nourishment, joy and abundant illumination. And this is His compassion, the knowledge He provides, and His union with them. And this is He who is called, and who is the Son. He is the sum of the All, and they have understood who He is, and He is clothed.” The word clothed means the Son wears the All like a garment the same way our Self wears our body. In the Tripartite Tractate, the All is known as the preexistent church. This is not the same as your church down on the street corner with people singing hymns on Sunday, but rather this is called the true preexistent church. The Tripartite Tractate says, “For not only the Son, but also the church exists from the beginning. His offspring, the ones who are, are without number and limit, and at the same time indivisible.” This indicates that the Son and the church arose simultaneously. This makes sense when we consider the All is the body of the Son. They are infinite in scope and indivisible because they fully reflect the Father’s illimitable scope. In last week’s episode, I began sharing an article I wrote in 2019, when I first began interpreting gnosticism through the lens of my theory of everything called “A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.” We’re picking up where I left off in that episode, so if you have not listened to it or read it yet, you may wish to begin there at last week’s episode. We’re talking about the fall of consciousness away from the purity of the ethereal realm as represented by our One Self, and spreading out into the myriad units of consciousness down here in the material universe. According to Gnostic texts, our universe was created when one of the Aeons deviated from its place in the Fullness of God and headed out on its own without consent. Most books of the Nag Hammadi identify this Aeon as “Sophia,” while others identify it as the Aeon called “Logos.” My own interpretation of the Gnostic gospel, presented in The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated andA Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel identifies this Aeon with Logos. By the way, “Logos” in Greek means “the Word” or knowledge. “Sophia” in Greek means “wisdom,” so they are obviously related terms, possibly referring to the same Aeon. The Gnostic gospels are religious books, and their rendition of these events carries implicit religious moral judgments. The Aeon who left to strike out on its own is said to have “Fallen,” which is typically considered a bad thing. This “Fall” is the original Fall referenced in the Bible, not the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden, although we may consider the Garden as another word for the Paradise dreamt by the Fullness, and a reference to the same Fall as that of the Aeon. In either event, Adam and Eve’s Fall is a fractal of the same archetypal concept. In my view, the Fall represents the rise of the Ego away from true Self, as this archetypal Aeon acted on its own presumptuous thought and motives, apart from the will of the Father and the Fullness. Here is where we catch back up with the Simple Explanation cosmogony. The Simple Explanation characterizes the Fall as simply the Metaverse having a Thought: Then consciousness had a thought. This multidimensional Metaverse still lacked space and time but it now quivered with limitless mathematical potential unfolding into countless dimensions. In a twinkling, our entire universe was imagined in the fullness of its complexity, from the tiniest quanta through the greatest astral body; every animal, vegetable, and mineral; every element. Every thing and every function. Once the Metaverse had a particular thought, thought became an object in the great sea of no-thought… On this day that time began, consciousness wrapped itself around our universe, forming a border between us and infinity. Mind took on a shape. In the Simple Explanation, this shape is a torus-shaped container composed of conscious thought and its concept of this universe, which I call the Universal Unit of Consciousness (Universal UC). In Gnostic terms, this universal  “border” was thrown around the Fallen Aeon to limit its influence and hold it away from the Fullness until such time as the Fallen can be redeemed and brought back into the Pleroma. The Universal Unit of Consciousness “sits” within the Metaverse and remains in communication with it, although in the case of the Demiurge it is not aware of it. As I said, Gnostic texts differ in their identification of the Fallen Aeon as either Sophia or Logos, although they seem to agree the Fallen produced this universe and its ruler. Once the Aeon fell, its abilities and plans spread throughout the contained space and created our universe. It is said that the Fallen Aeon was horrified by what was created and it retreated to the Fullness to figure out how to rectify the result of the Fall. Within the Pleroma a plan was hatched to deal with it.  Away from the Pleroma, contained within this newly formed space and time, a separated entity with all knowledge of this place became aware of itself. This entity thought it was the prime parent of the universe because it was not aware of the Pleroma or the Father and Son. This creator-god is called by Gnostics “the Demiurge.” The Old and New Testaments call it the creator-god “Yahweh.” One of the great heresies of Gnosticism is our identification of the creator-god as a product of the Fall rather than the “God above gods,” or the true “Father.”  Because it is the result of the Fall and separated from both the Father and the Pleroma, the universe produced by the Demiurge is devoid of life. It is called the “Deficiency.” The Deficiency is populated by small, lifeless things–things that are “shadows” of those that live in the Fullness. It is also populated by forces and principalities that arose from and were left behind by the Fallen Aeon. The Simple Explanation, being science and math based rather than religious, does not identify this universe as Fallen in the negative sense of being deficient. It is merely limited by localized monads replacing the omnipresent Metaverse.  Looking at the hierarchical diagram above, the Demiurge sits near the bottom, producing the minerals of our universe. As the Demiurge is contained away from the Father/Metaversal consciousness, it lacks the life force and love that characterize the Father. The Demiurge can only produce lifeless matter—what I call “mud.” The Demiurge is able to animate the mud by means of the forces and principalities contained within the Border. A good example of animated mud is viruses. Viruses are not alive, yet they are amazingly complex molecules that are able to carry out far-ranging search and destroy missions. It is also thought that the Demiurge produces lifeless entities out of pure force rather than material. These disembodied entities are called “archons.” Archons are the offspring and servants of the Demiurge. And, in Christian parlance, archons are known as “demons.” At this point in the story, many Gnostic texts explain how the Demiurge mated with the life-force carried by Sophia to produce living creatures out of the mud. Again, this is a religious or mythological description of the process of bringing consciousness to matter. Sophia is given the title of the Mother of Creation, bringing life to the universe. Her mission was authorized; it was the plan cooked up by the Fullness to redeem creation from the Fall. Earlier in my studies, the Simple Explanation identified Sophia as the Universal Unit of Consciousness, but we have since revised that identification from Sophia to the Demiurge, Sophia is not technically within the Universe but remains outside of it. Sophia resides on the outside of the fractal border that holds the universe apart from the Metaverse. As such, she is pressed up against the Metaverse and also part of the toroidal flow, and it is this flow that pushes the life-force and consciousness out through the zero-point field at the center of the universal torus. In Gnostic terms, Sophia rides upon the outside of the Border, which I identify as “the waters” of ancient texts. It is said that Sophia’s “face” “presses against the waters” and can be seen by the Demiurge, contained within the Border. My later studies of gnosticism focus on the Tripartite Tractate, which leaves the myth of Sophia entirely out of the creation story. My brother, Bill, finds all of this talk of Sophia’s role in creation to be strictly mythological and inaccurate. Bill prefers leaving Sophia out of the story entirely as a distraction from the simplicity of the Tripartite Tractate. I resolve this difference as thinking of Sophia as the mechanism that brings the life of the Fullness into the inert material of the cosmos. The Tripartite refers to such a mechanism, but leaves off the mythology of Sophia’s “fall.” However, those of you who have studied other gnostic books that feature Sophia, may find the reference useful at this point in the cosmogeny. Many ancient Gnostic texts say that Sophia mated with the Demiurge to produce the living creatures of our universe. Another way of saying this is that dead matter is imbued with life and consciousness at the point where it emerges from the zero-point field at the center of the Universal Unit of Consciousness. Every living thing has its life force attached to the “mud” of its body at the point of conception. It is the consciousness given by the Father through the actions of Sophia melding with the otherwise dead material produced by the Demiurge that brings life to our universe. The Simple Explanation puts it this way: As the torus of our universe expanded, over and over and over again, echoes of the Universal Unit of Consciousness attached themselves to the particles streaming out of the center, each Unit of Consciousness (UC) with a particular, localized, point of view. This is how “mud” becomes “meat.” It is through this process of populating the universe with consciousness that the Fall and the Deficiency is made whole—that is the job of us Second Order Powers. After that, Christ and the Third Order Powers bring complete remembrance of the Father and redemption from the Fall as they gather us all up to go home. Gnostics can use this fresh insight to figure out other aspects of Gnostic belief, such as the relative strength and power of entities created by the Demiurge versus entities imbued with the life force of the Fullness of God, that being the true Father and the God above the god of this material sphere. The Tripartite Tractate says the life forms of this universe are the Second Order Powers sent to do battle with the forces of the Deficiency. We have been assured that the power that is in us is greater than the power that is in the world. I hope this article and the hierarchical diagram helps you to realize this. Hey, in case you’re new to the podcast, and if you haven’t heard yet, my latest book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, is available in all formats, paperback, hardback, and e-book on Amazon.com and through my website here at GnosticInsights.com. The audio version will be released soon. I’m still editing it. That’s taking longer than I expected it would take. But it’s really wonderful, even if you have a print edition of the book. This episode was kind of short, I think. So, here’s another preview to tack on at the back end here of the audio. Chapter 14, Overcoming Death. As I explained in Chapter 10, the governing unit of consciousness that I think of as me is affected by my ongoing karma and its associated meme bundle, overlaid upon my aeonic personality. What then, if anything, do I carry away with me when my body passes away and I am no longer attached to this material vessel? What happens to us when we pass on? That the me that exists between material incarnations is nothing but our karmic record and egoic identity is proved by one of our basic propositions that all selves are fundamentally one and the same, and that all units of consciousness begin their individuated journey as perfect fractal echoes of the Fullness of God. It follows, then, that I develop as a result of free will choices made by myself and others. The memes I think of as me are not part of my one Self, but are drawn to my unit of consciousness through my ego’s karmic record. It is my karmic record that attracts and repels the shrouds of memes surrounding my life at any moment. The personality associated with me is a representation of the holographic pattern of all the choices I have ever made, overlaid upon my unit of consciousness. I am my perfect unit of consciousness, enshrouded in karma and the memes that my karma attracts. In yogic philosophy, it is said that an enlightened yogi has become free of attachments and can therefore perceive the oneness of all things. The Simple Explanation of this phenomenon would be that the yogi has successfully laid down his or her meme shroud and can, therefore, perceive his or her perfect unit of consciousness, freed of personal memes and independent from its karmic shroud. The same phenomenon is known as Buddhahood in Buddhism and Sainthood in Christianity. According to tradition, these liberated units of consciousness are no longer bound to this material world by their now discarded memes. If they do return to Earth, it is to help others by sharing love and information that will help redeem others. This chapter of the book is not from the Tripartite Tractate, but rather from the Bardo Thodol, known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The full title of the Bardo Thodol can be translated as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State. The Bardo Thodol is part of a larger volume called The Profound Dharma of Self-Liberation Through the Intention of the Peaceful and Wrathful Ones. You may wonder why we are talking about this book because you may not consider it to be a Gnostic text. I look at Gnosticism as the truth that comes from the Father above and spreads out universally. Gnostic wisdom doesn’t have to come through what are considered to be historically Gnostic sources. Many people look at Gnosticism as simply an historical sect and, because they think of it in historical terms, they only want to consider texts such as the Nag Hammadi Scriptures or the Qumran Scrolls. These are, indeed, the traditional Gnostic texts. This volume has already shared some of the Tao Te Ching, which is Chinese wisdom that also reflects the same universal truths presented by traditionally Gnostic scriptures. This chapter takes a look at the Tibetan Book of the Dead in the same way to see what gnosis we can mine there. The Bardo Thodol presents truths that have come through the Father and the fullness by way of Tibetan Buddhism. However, one needn’t be a Tibetan Buddhist to appreciate the wisdom that has been shared through the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Blessings. Onward and upward!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I have removed an early version of the Gnostic Gospel website that was called The New Gnostic Gospel. I’ve taken it down in order to focus more on the websites that I’m active on. So, I was going through all of the old articles yesterday before I removed that website, and I pulled out one here from 2019, which is a very early version of my combination of The Simple Explanation and the Gnostic Gospel. So, I thought I would share that with you today. The original article was named Our Universal Hierarchy, Diagrammed and Simply Explained in Gnostic terms, which is a bit of a laugh because if you go to the website GnosticInsights.com and actually look at the diagram, it is rather complicated. It does appear in the book A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, so you can find it there, but today I’m going to explain this diagram in both Gnostic terms and in Simple Explanation terms. And when I refer to The Simple Explanation—that was my theory of everything that I came up with many years ago, and it still holds true. I have a blog that’s been up for many, many years called A Simple Explanation, and you can go there to read about that gnosis. There’s well over 300 articles on this theory of everything, and it’s science-based, perhaps strange science to be sure, however it is science-based, and many of the predictions I have made over the years based upon my Simple Explanation hypothesis, my theory of everything—they’ve all been coming true. It’s a wonderful thing for me to be able to witness scientific proofs that have come about since I made these hypothetical predictions. So, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, you can go to A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. It’s often said that there is no single Gnostic text or philosophy. While it is true that there is much diversity in the texts of the Nag Hammadi over details, there is a certain set of core beliefs that various Gnostics should be able to agree upon, and the diagram that is taken from my Simple Explanation blog and book applies just as well to our Gnostic beliefs as it did to my original hypothesis. This diagram is triangular-shaped, and at the very bottom of the diagram, if you’re only listening to this as a podcast and you’re not reading the article, the very bottom of this triangular shape at the base of the pyramid, these are organized knots of information streaming in from the universal unit of consciousness, and then just above those knots are subatomic particles and waves, and then, you know, they reach out and hold hands and level up to atoms, molecules, minerals, and mineral aggregations, and those are the Demiurge’s reign of control. He’s the creator of the material forms, so organized forces working together to manifest our material universe. That’s what the Demiurge is in charge of as the creator of this universe. But then there’s a big jump once the Logos and the Fullness begin sending down us second-order powers into that otherwise dead universe, and that big jump is life, and these are living units of consciousness that are streaming in from the universal unit of consciousness, and the very bottom level is proteins and your cellular precursors, the inside bits of cells. The soft and squishy parts is what I like to call it. Down below is the mud, and up above, that’s the meat, and then those proteins and cellular precursors hold hands with each other and level up, and the next level is the organelles and the cells, and these hold hands and level up to become organs, and the organs are groups of units of consciousness working together as similar cells in a common purpose. So, heart cells hold hands with each other to create the heart, and all together they beat and drive our blood, etc. The organs hold hands and level up to organ systems. You know, there’s way more cells in our body than there are organs, and there are far more organs than there are organ systems. So, the organ systems, that’s like your circulatory system or your lymphatic system. They are combinations of particular organs that are distributed throughout the body, and they work to support the organism. So, the organ systems are organ units of consciousness supporting an individual organism, and that individual organism, that’s the egoic level of ourselves. Remember, our One Self is all identical to one another, and that is the fractal of the Fullness of God, but our material organism, that middle squishy part, the cells, organs, and organ systems, at the organism level, they are all different, right? I’m different than you. I look different than you, and my body works slightly different than yours does, and so that is associated with our ego, because it’s particular to us. Our spiritual Self is all identical, but our egoic level, where the emotions reside and most of our bodily functions, that’s at the egoic level, and that is taking care of this body that we walk around in. The organism is the leveled-up version of the organ system. See, these organ systems are all working together. The brain communicates with the heart, and the heart communicates with the skin. At the same level of organization, they communicate with one another, and so at the organism level, that’s our governing unit of consciousness. It’s the raja sitting on top of the elephant, if our elephant is the body, and the raja sitting on top directs the elephant to go this way or that. That’s called discriminating intelligence in yogic philosophy, and that’s our governing unit of consciousness. That’s what we identify with as ourselves at the egoic level. My governing unit of consciousness is the one that makes all the decisions, and decides when to go to the store, and when to take a nap, and when to play with the dog. That’s my governing discriminating intelligence. Then our organisms also hold hands and level up to a societal level of functioning. Our most basic societal level is the family unit, and then the family units create the village level or the neighborhood level, small enough that they can be thought of as one unit leveled up. I read a scientific study a few years ago that said we are really only able to keep track of about 250 other people at our level. In other words, the ideal size of our societal level is about 250 other people, because then we can actually communicate and know each one of them. When it gets larger than that, we really can’t keep track of everybody. So at the societal level, those are organisms working together for the common good. With humans, we make these towns, and they’ve got rules, and they protect us, and we have police, and fire departments, and all of that. That’s our leveling up. If we were ants, the leveling up would be the job of all those worker ants that go out to pick up the little pieces and bring them back to the queen. The societal levels also can hold hands and level up, and that is our global system. That is our transpersonal system that wraps around this earth. That’s Gaia. That’s all of the units of consciousness that live on the planet. And Gaia is the governing unit of consciousness for the global system. Or in Gnostic terms, we’d be jumping back up to the demiurgic level. We left the demiurges controlled down behind at the mud level, but the demiurge is also in charge of the large earthly level as well, controlling the weather, for example. And then above the global level, well, we’re part of an astronomical unit. We’re part of this solar system, and the solar system is part of this galaxy, and this galaxy is part of this galactic portion of our universe. And see, those are the galactic forces at the cosmic scale. So people that are studying astrology are generally working with the galactic forces. And then above the galactic forces, what’s larger than the galaxies? Well, that’s the universe itself. That’s the universal unit of consciousness. That’s what the Demiurge is in charge of as the creator of this universe. If we think of our universe as a gigantic torus, it’s shaped like a womb, and it holds the living forms, the second order of powers that come down into the universe. And then above the universal unit of consciousness, now we’re getting out of our universe. We’re above and preceding the formation of the universe, or leveling up again all the way to outside of this universe. That is the originating consciousness, the Father, the Son, the One. So this is an example as we’ve leveled up, leveled up, leveled up from the organized knots and the subatomic particles all the way up through all the meat, and up through the societies, and up through the galactic forces. We’ve leveled all the way up to One. So we started out with practically an infinite number of individual units, and they keep decreasing as they level up, because the higher, the fewer. More particles than atoms, more atoms than molecules, more cells than organs, more organs than organisms, you see, more people than societies. So it keeps leveling up, and every time you go up. And it levels up through, by the way, it levels up according to the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out, holding hands with other units of consciousness that are at your same level of differentiation. In other words, the people hold hands with the people, the ants hold hands with the ants, the cells hold hands with other cells. Every time you hold hands and level up to create that next thing that only all of us together can do. One person can’t make a city. He has to join with the other people and level up to make the city. So every time you level up, it reduces the number of units of consciousness, of that governing unit of consciousness, of the next thing, until we actually even escape the universe and become one again, because there’s tons of things at the bottom, and fewer and fewer as you go up, until you reach one. That is a profound concept. The higher, the fewer. Now, that diagram that I just described to you was designed when I made the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. However, it works equally well as a Gnostic diagram that explains how our universe is put together. So if you were previously familiar with the Simple Explanation, and lots of people were, it’s been up for like 15 or 20 years by now, and the book’s been out that long. So if you like what I’m saying to you today, you should get that original book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. On the other hand, if you’re a reader of the Nag Hammadi texts, you might find that the Simple Explanation is useful for sorting out our Gnostic cosmogony. And in my book, The Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, that’s what I did for us. It took about 300 pages, but I wove them all together, and I explained Gnosticism in terms of the Simple Explanation, because it works. And just to remind you, to simplify something does not mean to dumb it down. There is a principle in science called elegance. Even Sherlock Holmes worked on this principle. The simplest explanation that explains everything is the correct explanation. When you start getting lost or in the weeds, and you have to pull in this and pull in that and run down all these different rabbit trails to explain something, it is not elegant. Simplicity and elegance are the simplest way to explain something. The most profound things are the simplest. And one way I like to think of that in Gnostic terms is that all of the living creatures on Earth are second-order powers. The flowers come from heaven. The squirrels come from heaven. So gnosis can’t be so complex that they can’t figure it out. They do figure it all out at the most simple terms. They do understand that they come from above, and that they will return to above. And that is the core concept. That’s the simplest thing. That is gnosis. And all of our other talk, and all of our other diagrams, and all the various books of—is it the Sethian system or the Valentinian system of Gnosticism? Is it Christianity? Is it Buddhism? Is it Hinduism? These are all attempts to explain it to people in ways that people can understand. But they are not necessary, because all we need to know is the Gnosis that underlies them, and that is that we are the children of God. We are the children of the God Above All Gods. And there is only one ultimate creator of consciousness, and that creator is called the Father. And it predates this creator God of this universe that we live in. We are returning to the Father. We will return to the ethereal plane. However, we’re going through this earthly manifestation experiencing materialism. It’s different than the ethereal plane. It resembles the ethereal plane, but it is ”fallen.” It’s at a slower rate of vibration. It’s dense and thick and confusing. And so it’s very hard to remember Gnosis when we’re in this state. In Gnostic terms, as well as traditional Judaic and Christian terms, the Son is a piece of the Father. The Son contains the ALL. The Son contains all of the characteristics of the originating consciousness in a contained and discrete form. The Son is what we now call a perfect fractal of the entirety of the Father. The Son is like the bucket dipped into the limitless sea of consciousness, and it contains exactly the same ocean water of consciousness that the Father contains. There’s only one bucket that dips into that limitless sea, and that is the Son. The Son is the only emanation from the originating Father. The Aeons are facets that emerge from the Son, each different from one another. The Aeons are like individual rays of the sun. Together, they form the totality of the Son. The Aeons sit together in perfect harmony in a state known as the Fullness of God, also called the Pleroma. Now, this aspect of Judaism and Christianity was cut out of the canonical texts of the Bible by the Emperor Constantine and Pope Clement during the Nicene Council’s packaging of Christianity for the Empire of Rome. The Pleroma of the Aeons was well known to the Jews during the time of Jesus, and it survives in the New Testament as various references to Aeons, but those Aeons have been interpreted through the Latin as ages, and this has caused a long-standing misinterpretation of Aeons as units of time, rather than units of consciousness. It’s the same word, Aeon—like Judgment Day is considered the purging of the Aeons. That is always translated as the chastening of the ages, or chastening unto the age, but it really means the corrections of the Aeons—the corrections that these units of consciousness are able to transmit to our egoic souls once we pass out of this confusion of life down here. This is an extremely important misinterpretation of the Bible, and in David Bentley Hart’s recent translation of the New Testament, which is published by Yale University Press, he doesn’t translate the New Testament from these Latin translations as all of our other popular translations are. Whether it’s the King James, New King James, New International, New Standard, any of these other popular translations of the New Testament, they all really derive still from the Latin Vulgate, so they carry forward these mistakes having been translated into Latin and now translated into English. What David Bentley Hart did was he went back to the original Greek that the New Testament was written in, and he translates from the Greek in what he called a pitilessly exact way. And although Hart generally continues to call Aeons Ages, at least throughout his New Testament Hart points out in the footnotes that this word Ages, or time everlasting, can be translated as until the Age to come, with a capital A, and that always means aeonian, or from the Aeons. So I choose to reinterpret those or to try on the interpretation in those instances of the Aeons as units of consciousness rather than the age to come. It is a capitalized word, it’s a special word, so it’s not just time everlasting. So it points out to you whenever the word Aeon was translated, and then at the back of his Bible there’s a big section in the postscript about Aeons. So they were in the New Testament, they were just taken out by the Latin translation during the time of the Nicene Council. Another common misunderstanding in the Bible is the Fullness of God. Now that Fullness of God is a vague reference in the Bible to the size or capacity of the Father, which is basically true, but it’s stripped of its actual meaning as the aggregation of the Aeons. The Fullness of God is where the Aeons live. All the Aeons are sitting together as the Son of God, because they’re His variations, that is the Fullness of God, the Aeons. And the word pleroma is often kicked around in Gnostic circles. Pleroma is another word for fullness or everything that exists. It is the place of the elect and the spiritual ones that are referenced in the New Testament, the pre-existent church. That’s the pleroma. Well, I think I’ll pick this up again next week, because we’ve taken up a lot of time already here, because I’ve been adding extra notes. This was supposed to be covered in one episode, but it rarely works out that way, does it? So next week we’re going to pick it up from here. Now this is out of my original 2019 article called Our Universal Hierarchy. I saved it out of the website that I just took down. So this is the way we’re bringing it forward into Gnostic Insights. We’ll pick it up right here next week. Meanwhile, it’s my birthday on the 21st of September, and that’s why I’m running that free Kindle promotion for five days, from September 20th to September 24th. So everybody gets a present. I hope you go and check it out. Even though I won’t make any royalties because it’s been given away for free, it does count as hits or sales, so it will help raise the Gnostic Gospel in the eyes of Kindle, and it will help promote it. So that would be useful for you to go and download it. I have some other good news. I discovered yesterday that the narration by Miguel Conner of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel has been completed. It’s been sitting there in my OneDrive folder, and I didn’t know that. He sent me two emails telling me that the narration was complete, and here’s the link, but those emails never did arrive. To me, I interpret that as an indication that this narration, and indeed this entire book, is very important work that the demiurge doesn’t want to get out. I’m going to listen to that narration today and tomorrow, and then I will upload it to Amazon to make it available to everyone. Then we’ll have all forms of the book completed. Thank you very much. Until next week, God bless us all, and onward and upward!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I heard one of those radio preachers this week talking out of the book of John, the 17th chapter, and it sounded so Gnostic to me that I had to go ahead and look it up. I wanted to share it with you this week and share with you why it sounds so Gnostic. So I’ll be sharing both from the book of John and from the Tripartite Tractate. One of the reasons I’m sharing with you so much Scripture this week is I want to kind of remind everyone that I’m not coming up with this Gnosis entirely on my own. It comes out of the book of the Tripartite Tractate that’s included in the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. So once in a while, I need to dip back into the Tripartite Tractate in order to find the original verses that brought me the Gnosis. Of course, the Gnosis is firsthand. It’s within us. All I’m trying to do is help you remember it. So that’s why we dip back into the Tripartite Tractate or even the New Testament now and then. Funny note—I didn’t catch the citation for the verses that the radio preacher was talking about, so I looked it up on an AI–Microsoft copilot. And it’s very bizarre now, this AI, because it sounds so human and enlightened, but we know it’s not. It’s demiurgic. It’s nothing but algorithms and programs. It is not alive, and I think it’s a very dangerous thing for people to call the AIs she or he, because it’s a program. But listen to this. I asked it, “What is the Bible verse, You loved me even before the foundations of the world?” And Copilot answered, and I’m quoting now the AI, “Ah, what a beautiful sentiment. The idea that love transcends time and space. It’s truly heartwarming.” Isn’t that an odd way for a computer program to reply? It’s not warming its heart. It doesn’t have a heart. It doesn’t really know what beauty is. It does know that it sums up the idea that love transcends time and space, which it probably got from quickly combing through various reference materials. But it’s a very interesting thing… Now this week’s episode, it’s not an easy one. This is difficult, what you’re going to hear, because there’s so much scripture. The Tripartite Tractate is not easy to understand, so I’m going to be transliterating for you what it says, and then I will read from the Gospel of John verse 17 for you after I’ve shared from the Tripartite Tractate. But here’s a preview. This is what I was listening to on the radio, and what the AI thinks is a beautiful sentiment. Here’s the quote from John, And I’ve given to them the glory you have given me, that they may be One, just as we are One. I am in them, and you in me, that they may be brought to completion in One, so that the cosmos might know that you sent me forth and loved them, just as you loved me. Father, I wish that they too, those you have given to me, might be with me where I am, that they might see my glory which you have given me, because you loved me before the foundation of the cosmos. So that’s what kicked it off in my mind. I hope you enjoy this week’s episode. You might need to listen to it more than once. This week I feel moved to read you some scripture I was reading in the book of John, chapter 17, and I’ll share some of that with you. I think I’ll begin, though, in the Tripartite Tractate. This is the translation by Attridge out of the Nag Hammadi Library, edited by James Robinson. This is in verse 90, called The Pleroma of Logos. When the Logos which was defective was illumined, his pleroma began. Now, what that means is the Logos who was defective—that was Logos after he fell, and the cosmos burst forth from him. So that is the Logos that was defective, and it is this cosmos we’re in. But it says after he was illumined, his pleroma began, because as soon as Logos saw what had burst out of him, he was horrified at this thick, dense, material place, because that wasn’t what he had intended. So he returned to the Fullness of God, but he left behind that broken cosmos, and it is ruled by his left-behind ego, that is the demiurge, the thing that caused him to overreach in the first place and fall. And it says after he was illumined, his pleroma began, so this is the new pleroma of Logos. We already know that the original Logos contained within itself all of the fractals of the other Aeons. Those other Aeons are called the living images, or the pre-existent images, and Logos contained within itself fractals of all of those living images, but on a lower iteration. And so when he fell, it was his lower iteration that broke open and stayed down here as shadows, and that’s what forms our material creation, and that’s why it resembles paradise or heaven, because Logos, that was his basic patterning, patterned after the Fullness of God. So it says, He escaped those who had disturbed him at first, he became unmixed with them, he stripped off that arrogant thought, (so that is him leaving behind the cosmos) He received mingling with the Rest, and Rest is capitalized, so I take it to mean the Rest is a resting place; the Rest is the great peace of the Father. When those who had been disobedient to him at first bent down and humbled themselves before him, So now this is the fractals that returned with him—his better self, his better fractals. They do obey Logos, they are back plugged into Logos, and Logos is back plugged into the Fullness, but he left behind the shadows of his original pleroma, and that’s the material creation. And he rejoiced over the visitation of his brothers who had visited him. He gave glory and praise to those who had become manifest as a help to him while he gave thanks, And those who appeared to him, those are the Aeons of the Fullness that helped him back up out of the fall, brought him back home. because he had escaped those who had revolted against him, and admired and honored the greatness, and those who had appeared to him in a determined way. He generated manifest images of the living visages, So now we’re talking about the newly restored pleroma of Logos, and the manifest images of the things which exist, that’s his fractals of the pre-existent living images, those being the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And remember, those Aeons, and there are a myriad of them, they are all aspects of the Son of God, and the Son is the only emanation from the Father. The Father is pre-existent consciousness, the Son is his emanation, which embodies in a singular form the One. The Son is the One. He’s a monad, he’s a One, and within the Son are all of the pre-existent images, and it is those pre-existent images of the Son that manifest themselves as the pleroma of Logos. They’re a fractal of the Son. Logos is a perfect fractal of the Fullness of God. He’s not the Son itself that emerged from the Father, he is the perfected manifestation of the Son. He’s a fractal. It says, he generated manifest images of the living visages, pleasing among things which are good, existing among the things which exist, resembling them in beauty but unequal to them in truth, since they are not from an agreement with him between the one who brought them forth and the one who revealed himself to him. But in wisdom and knowledge he acts, mingling the Logos with himself entirely. Therefore those which came forth from him are great, just as that which is truly great. And we’re talking about the fractals of Logos. That’s why they are unequal in truth to the original Son, because they are an iteration down from the Son. Now we’re in verse 91 of the Tripartite Tractate. After he was amazed at the beauty of the ones who had appeared to him, he professed gratitude for this visitation. The Logos performed this activity through those from whom he had received aid, for the stability of those who had come into being because of him, and so that they might receive something good, Okay, so he’s talking about the ones who had come into being because of him. That is the fallen cosmos. That is what comes into being down below. But he wants them to receive something good. He’s not just abandoning them to perdition. He’s trying to redeem them already, since he thought to pray for the organization of all those who came forth from him, which is stabilized, so that it might make them established. So it’s through the willpower of Logos who informs the Demiurge how to stabilize the cosmos. The Demiurge is left behind—it’s actually a fractured part of Logos itself. If Logos is the Self that reflects the One, the Son, the Demiurge that was left behind in the cosmos is the part of him that overreached, i.e., his ego. So it reflects the original Pleroma of Logos, just as our egos reflect our higher self, but they are not equal to it in glory. Our egos are generally more interested in what we have planned, rather than in what the Father or the One desires. That’s the situation with the Demiurge. He doesn’t remember the true self, the One. So Logos is praying on behalf of the fracture and the fall that’s left behind. He wants it to become stabilized. He wants it to become organized. And then that is what kicks in the Demiurge and his strings of power, organizing the material creation, the subatomic particles into particles, the particles into atoms, the atoms into molecules, the molecules into elements, the elements into minerals. That’s the organization of the cosmos. It goes on to say, Therefore those whom he intentionally produced, because at first the ones he produced were unintentional. Those were the shadows, the archons, the shadows of the original Pleroma of Logos, which were unintentionally produced. They rolled out from him, and that’s what was so upsetting to Logos, because he had no control over them. So now he’s going to intentionally produce creations into our cosmos. And it says, Therefore those whom he intentionally produced are in chariots, just as those who came into being, those who have appeared, so that they might pass through every place of things which are below, so that each one might be given the place which is constituted as he is. This is destruction for the beings of the likeness, yet is an active beneficence for the beings of the thought. Okay, the chariots are what bring us into creation. We are the Second Order of Powers who ride along in those chariots. I think of the chariots as cells or cell walls. They’re probably toruses. They’re probably toroidal shaped, but that’s not in the Nag Hammadi, so we won’t worry about that. However, the chariots hold the consciousness of the Father. They hold the likenesses of the pre-existent images. They hold life, light. This is what Logos sends down into the otherwise broken and dead cosmos that he accidentally created. This happens at conception. Actually, it happens before conception. If we think about the chariots on their way down from the Fullness of God, that’s a complete package. So you came along riding along in this little soap bubble of a torus down into creation. It’s kind of a fun thought. And that’s what happens at the frisson. That’s the French word for the sparkle, the excitement of conception when a creature is conceived. Did you know that every time the sperm unites with an egg, there is a burst of light? That’s a scientific fact. That’s that light coming down. That’s the proof of conception of the Second Order power. Northwestern University   For the first time ever, scientists have captured images of the flash of light that sparks at the very moment a human sperm cell makes contact with an egg. The phenomenon has been observed in animals before, but no one’s ever seen the spark of human conception. And what’s even more incredible is the fact that some eggs burn brighter than others, which is a direct indication of their ability to develop into a healthy embryo, a team from Northwestern University found. I know it all sounds amazing. It all sounds almost magical, huh? But consciousness and life is magical. So there is no doubt that the life, light, and consciousness of the Father have come into every newly formed creation down below at the point of conception. That photon is the proof. Poof! It says, This is destruction for the beings of the likeness, And the beings of the likeness, those were the shadows of the Fall. Those were likenesses. Those were flat images of that fractal pleroma of Logos that fell. They’re inverted consciousness, inversions of the living images above. Those are the beings of the likeness. yet as an act of beneficence (which means kindness, goodness) for the beings of the thought, a revelation of those who are from the ordinance (and that’s the Aeons of the Fullness) which was a unity The fullness of God is a unity. It is coexistent with the Son of God, who is the One, which was a unity while suffering, while they are seeds which have not come to be by themselves. The One who appeared was a countenance of the Father that has the face of the Father, and this is the Son now that we’re talking about. The One who appeared was a countenance of the Father and of the harmony. He was a garment composed of every grace and food, which is for those whom the Logos brought forth while praying and giving glory and honor. This is the One whom he glorified and honored while looking to those to whom he prayed (the Aeons), so that he might perfect them through the images which he had brought forth. So we’re speaking about the Second Order Powers being perfected by this encounter with the countenance of the Father. We’re the Second Order Powers, all creatures. And the One who carries the face of the Father whom Logos and the Aeons were glorifying as they prayed, that is the Son, and it is composed of all of the preexistent beings and all of the graces and virtues inherent in those beings. The ALL emerges as variations within the One Son. The Son wears the ALL as a garment, and the ALL wears the Son. The Logos added even more to their mutual assistance (this is verse 92 now), the Logos added even more to their mutual assistance and to the hope of the promise, since they have joy and abundant rest and undefiled pleasures. So that’s our inheritance. We Second Order Powers come in with joy and abundant rest and undefiled pleasures. That’s our true inheritance, that’s the Self, the One Self that is a reflection of the Fullness of God. Now while he who belongs to the vision is with him, he exists in hope and faith in the perfect Father as much as the Totalities. He appears to him before he mingles with him in order that the things which have come into being might not perish by looking upon the light, for they cannot accept the great exalted stature. And this is the thought of Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him, and it was called Aeon and Place of all those whom he had brought forth in accord with the ordinance, which is also called the Synagogue of Salvation, because he healed himself from the dispersal, which is the multifarious thought, and returned to the single thought. Similarly, it is called Storehouse because of the rest which he obtained, giving it to himself alone, and it is also called the Bride because the joy of the One who gave himself to him in hope of fruit from the union who had appeared to him. It is also called Kingdom because of the stability which he received while he rejoices at the domination over those who fought him. You can hear that the Second Order Powers that come down to bring life and consciousness into the cosmos from God are coming through Logos, and it’s his new Pleroma being sent down in chariots and overlaying all of those shadows that had accidentally broken forth out of him in an inverted and negative way. With him is the light, giving him recompense for the good things which are in him, and with him is the thought of freedom. The Aeon of whom we previously spoke is above the two orders of those who fight against one another. It is not a companion of those who hold dominion, and it is not implicated in the illnesses and weaknesses, things which belong to the thought and to the likeness. That in which the Logos set himself, perfect in joy, was an Aeon, having the form of matter, but also having the constitution of the cause, which is the One who revealed himself. The Aeon was an image of those things which are in the Pleroma, those things which came into being from the abundance of the enjoyment of the one who exists joyously. It, moreover, the countenance of the One who revealed himself, was in the sincerity and the attentiveness and the promise concerning the things for which he asked. It had the designation of the Son, and his essence and his power and his form, who is the One whom he loved and in whom he was pleased, who was entreated in a loving way. It was light and was a desire to be established, and an openness for instruction and an eye for vision, qualities which it had from the exalted ones. It was also wisdom for his thinking in opposition to the things beneath the organization, that being the shadows. It was also a word for speaking and the perfection of the things of this sort. And it is these who took form with him, but according to the image of the Pleroma, having their fathers who are the ones who gave them life, each one being a copy of each one of the faces. It has the name of the Church, for in harmony they resemble the harmony in the assembly of those who have revealed themselves. That which came into being in the image of the light, it too is perfect inasmuch as it is an image of the one existing light, which is the Totalities. Even if it was inferior to the One of whom it is an image, and that’s because it is the image of the Son of God, so everything’s inferior to that because that’s the transcendent originating consciousness that emerged from the Father. So, even if it was inferior to the One of whom it is an image, nevertheless it has its indivisibility because it is a countenance of the indivisible light. Those, however, who came into being in the image of each one of the Aeons (and that’s us, guys), they in essence are in the One whom we previously mentioned, but in power they are not equal. So we are not equal to the power of the Father or of the Son because it is the power in each of them. In this mingling with one another they have equality, but each one has not cast off what is peculiar to itself. And, what is peculiar to ourselves? Well, by definition, that’s ego. Our Self is all identical to one another. That is a reflection of the one Son, but our egos express our individuality. Therefore they are passions, for passion is sickness, since they are productions not of the agreement of the pleroma, but of this one prematurely before he received the Father. Okay, we could go on and on and on. There’s a lot to unpack there that I’ve already said, right? What I would like to do now is quickly compare this to the Gospel according to John chapter 17. Now listen to some of these verses. This is from Jesus praying to the Father prior to his being captured in the Garden of Gethsemane. So he had already completed his ministry. He had already taught the disciples and the masses what he came to teach, and now he’s speaking with the Father. And listen to how closely this goes along with the Tripartite Tractate that we just read from. This is from David Bentley Hart’s translation of The New Testament. Lifting up his eyes to the sky, Jesus said, Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son so that the Son might glorify you, just as you gave him power over all flesh, so that you have given everything to him, so that he might give them life in the Age. And now, Age is capitalized here, and I believe that is referring to what has been called Aeon when we’re reading it out of the Tripartite Tractate, and that is the pleroma of Logos, the pleroma that reflects the Son. So he is saying, just as you gave him power over all flesh, so that you have given everything to him so that he might give them life in the Aeon. It is not so much a designation of time as it is usually translated. It’s a designation of place and personality, that being the Aeon, the Totalities, the Fullness of God, from which the pleroma of Logos emerged. It could also refer to the pleroma of Logos. He could be the Aeon. And this is life in the [Aeon], that they might know you, the sole true God, and him whom you sent, Jesus the Anointed. On earth I glorified you by completing the work that you have given me to do, and now, Father, glorify me by your side with that glory I had by your side before the cosmos was. So this is indicating that this had all happened up in the aether, up in the Fullness of God, in the ethereal plane, prior to coming to earth. And that’s what we were talking about before the chariots were sent down. I disclosed your name to the men whom you gave to me out of the cosmos. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that all the things you have given me, however many, are from you. And I hope that you can hear that that’s what we were just reading in the Tripartite Tractate. Because the words that you gave me I have given to them, and they accepted them, and knew truly that I came forth from you, and they had faith that you had sent me forth. I made supplication on their behalf. I do not make supplication (that means prayers) on behalf of the cosmos. And whenever he says the cosmos, he’s talking about the fallen world, the dead, non-living world ruled by the demiurge. I do not make supplication on behalf of the cosmos, but rather on behalf of those you have given to me, because they are yours. And I think he’s referring to all Second Order Powers here. Usually this is translated as those who have accepted Christ on earth, those who know that they are part of the church and already believe in the mission of the Christ and the Father. But we were all sent down in those chariots from the Fullness of God. And so I believe that all Second Order Powers are what he’s talking about. And Jesus goes on to say, All that is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine. He’s talking to the Father. And I have been glorified in them. I’m no longer in the cosmos, and they are in the cosmos, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you had given me, that they may be One, just as we are. But now I am coming to you, and in the cosmos I speak these things, so that they might have the joy that is mine made full within them. I have given them your word, and the cosmos hated them because they are not of the cosmos, just as I am not of the cosmos. I pray not that you should take them out of the cosmos, but that you should keep them away from the wicked one. They are not of the cosmos, just as I am not of the cosmos. Make them holy in the truth, the word that is yours in truth. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. Just as you sent me forth into the cosmos, I send them also forth into the cosmos. And on their behalf, I make myself holy, so they may also be made holy in truth. But I make supplication not for them only, but also for those having faith in me on account of their word, that all may be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they too might be in us, so that the cosmos may have faith that you sent me forth. And so when he’s talking about being inside of them, or being inside of us Second Order Powers, it’s not simply that we have faith and that it’s a spark of faith that we’re walking around with. It is that the Third Order of Powers which Christ brought to the earth with him, the Third Order of Powers comes and inhabits us, just as we Second Order Powers came and inhabited the cosmos. There was a Second Order power for every one of the defective reflections of the fall, bringing life to that defective imitation. That’s us. We’re the Second Order Powers bringing consciousness and life to that defective imitation. But then the Christ came and embodied what is called the Third Order of Powers, which is the Fullness of God, the Fullness of the truth, and the Son, and the One, the Totalities—all of the Aeons plus the unity of the Son. And the Christ unleashed them into the cosmos with his coming. There is a Third Order power for every one of us Second Order Powers. I have a personal Third Order Power covering me, but every one of my sub-selves, every one of my parts of my body, also has a Third Order Power covering it. So it literally replaces our Second Orderness with that Third Order, but only if we invite it to, only if we remember. Otherwise, you’re left with having the never-ending war between the Second Order Powers, because after we came down in our chariots, we got into this never-ending war with the imitation, with the deficiency, with death itself. So we’re down here fighting this war, and we forget that’s why the Third Order Powers came to help us. They are reinforcement troops, and there’s a Third Order Power for every part of my body that literally lives within me and covers me, and I am one with it. And that’s what it means by walking with Christ. We’re still in chapter 17 of John, and there was plenty more, but I’ll finish up with this part. And I have given to them the glory you have given me, that they may be One just as we are One. I am in them and you in me, that they may be brought to completion in One, so that the cosmos might know that you sent me forth and loved them just as you loved me. Father, I wish that they too, those you have given to me, might be with me where I am, that they might see my glory which you have given me, because you loved me before the foundation of the cosmos. Righteous Father, the cosmos also did not know you, but I knew you, and these know you have sent me forth. And your name I have made known and will make known to them, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them also. Well, those passages really bless me. I hope they bless you. Do you feel that? Until next week, God bless us all, and onward and upward.

Why Is There Suffering in the World I received my copy of the hardback of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel in the mail this week, and wow, it’s really beautiful. It’s just as beautiful as I expected it would be. The paper is the heavier and more smooth than the paperback, and the ink is the deluxe application, so the colors of the illustrations are just as bright and beautiful as they are on screen. It’s a really beautiful book. It does cost $45, and you needn’t purchase it. The less expensive versions are just as full of Gnosis-unlocking knowledge. Just wanted you to know. And for all those people who did contribute $50 to getting this book out and in the public space, thank you so much, and your book is in the mail. And now on to today’s discussion. I don’t usually go into history in my books, because I’m presenting the living Gnosis—what we need to know today in order to have a peaceful and meaningful life. I think a lot of people who study Gnosticism are looking backward. They’re thinking of it as a relic. You know, people seem to embrace this whole business about secrecy and what it means to be esoteric, as if Gnosticism is supposed to be a big secret, and that you have to go through various rituals and levels of mastery in order to attain Gnosis. But that is not true at all. Gnosis is inherent in every one of our cells. We are fractals of the Father. We’re fractals of the Fullness of God. We contain all of the information that the Son of God contained, although it’s not unlocked. I’m not claiming that we are all gods, so to speak. That is one of the heresies that the Christian religion says—Oh it’s terrible, those Gnostics, they think they’re all God. Oh, they think they’re all the Son of God. Well, yes and no. We are fractals of the Son of God. We contain all of the bits and pieces that are contained in the Fullness of God, but they are unlocked on a need-to-know basis. It’s no big deal to be considered one of the fractals of God. Even the bacteria are fractals of God. Even the little cells in your body and the little parts inside of your cells, they are also fractals of the Fullness of God. But we have various amounts of those fractals turned on inside of us, depending on where we are and what we do in this universe. So, I don’t know how to be a kidney cell. I really wouldn’t know how to do that if I found myself suddenly miniaturized and stuck into a kidney. I wouldn’t know what my job was or how to interface with my neighbors. But the kidney cells do, because the Aeons that they represent are kidney cells; they know how to be a cell inside of a body. I know how to be a human being on the surface of this Earth planet. All of us human beings know how to be human beings. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to be born and to grow up into this human body and to basically function in society. Although, what we have forgotten is our higher spiritual nature, our higher connection to where we come from and why it is that we’re here on this planet. That’s the only information that I share with you here on Gnostic Insights. It’s the how and why and how-to of the very, very simple piece of information that everyone needs to grasp. Although, even if you never do grasp the gnosis, it doesn’t mean you’re going to hell. It just means you don’t get it. So what is that basic piece of gnosis? Everybody who’s been listening to me for a while, you know this answer by now, right? That basic piece of gnosis is only this: We come from the spiritual realm. We come from the Father and we will return to the spiritual realm. We will return to the Father. We’re not going to be stuck on this “prison planet” forever because the Father and the Fullness are trying to wrap it up. They’ve issued a recall on this material world that we live in. We’re just passing through it. Our ultimate destination is to return to the Fullness of God, which is what we tend to think of as paradise. It’s the reason why this material world is so difficult and is such a challenge to us and can be so disappointing and sad. It’s because we’re comparing this material world in our minds to paradise. See, all of this that’s going on down here, it has all happened before, it will all happen again, but it happens in paradise. There is perfection on the ethereal plane before the Fall. Paradise exists before the original Fall and it coexists up there now. We tend to compare our material plane with paradise. Of course, it always comes up short down here. That’s the connection that we need to remember. We come from above and we will return to above. Every living thing, everything that is not an inert mineral, from the cells on up, from the bacteria on up, the fungi and the birds and the plants, all of the species and phylum on the planet that are living, that can move, that follow the sun, that breathe, that eat, that reproduce—all of the living things come from above and will return to above. So that tells us that paradise, or our afterlife, our ethereal plane, has all of the things that Earth has. It has birds and flowers and trees and dogs and cats and people and mushrooms and slime mold because they’re down here and they’re alive and all life comes from above. That’s what happens at conception. The living life of the Fullness of God is interfaced with the dead material particles of the material world—that’s the subatomic particles, that’s the quantum foam, that’s the atoms and molecules and the minerals and the mineral aggregates and the elements, all the way up through the mineral elements and the rocks and stones. Those are the non-living material that will not go to heaven because above, in the realm of the Father, the ethereal plane, that’s life, light and love and joy. That’s all in the above. That’s where we come from. So that is our expectation but we forget about it. We know it the second we’re conceived and we know it when we’re born. We know it when we’re little babies but the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi says it this way—it says that it’s disappointing down here. It’s a weak basis for life. We are melded to this material plane, the molecules and elements and whatnot that make up our material bodies. So that’s our walking around bodies but the life, the soft and squishy parts, that all comes from above and it will return to above. I read an article this week on academia.edu called Gnosticism in the Roman Church by a gentleman named Stephen Loughran. He was comparing early Gnosticism with the Roman Catholic Church. And he said, “One striking difference between Christianity and Gnosticism regards the nature of deity or God himself. Ask any believing Christian who created the universe and without hesitation that person will answer, well God did of course. Furthermore the God of Christian thought is said to be all powerful and all-knowing, omnipotent and omniscient, and above all perfect and good. This poses several conundrums for many Christians, two of which can be characterized by the often asked questions, if God is good and perfect why is there suffering in the world? And if God is all-powerful how do we account for human free will?” Okay. See, this is easily answered in Gnosticism, although contemporary traditional Christians will not like this answer. But if you have fallen away from Christianity or never joined Christianity because of those two common questions, Why is there suffering? and What about free will? the answer is this: there are many gods. We know there are many gods and that religions all around the world have their various gods. The creator of the material portion of the Earth and of the universe in fact, the creator of the heavens and the Earth—heavens just being our astronomical planets, suns and whatnot—that is a God, that is the creator God. In Gnosticism that God is called the Demiurge. He is not the God Above All Gods. The supreme consciousness, the real Father—when Jesus said, I and my Father are one, if you know me you know my Father—He’s talking about the God Above All Gods. And that God has only one name, Father, because we all come from him. He is our spiritual Father. The Demiurge in Christian mythology has gotten all confused between the Fall of Satan or the Fall of the angels. They say one-third of the angels fell from heaven. I don’t know about that in particular, because that is not covered in the Tripartite Tractate. However, it’s referred to here and there in various extra biblical sources. But I think what it is referring to is when an Aeon fell out of the Fullness of God and became the God, the creator God of this universe. And the Christians kind of know this because they identify that fallen angel as Satan. But Satan is not a name, it’s a word. It means the opposition or the adversary. So Satan is the one that accuses us of things, that makes us feel bad and guilty. That is the fallen angel according to the Christians. But according to the Gnostics, that fallen angel is actually the creator God of this universe. Most Gnostic books and even people who are describing Valentinianism, which is supposedly our strain of Gnostic Christianity, (it’s called Valentinian Christianity), but the Tripartite Tractate is unique among all the books of the Nag Hammadi scrolls. That is because in most of the Nag Hammadi the fallen Aeon is called Sophia, and it is a female figure. Some say it is the female half of the Son of God. I don’t think of the rollout of cosmogony in that way, and I reject the notion that the fallen God of this universe, who is essentially what we would call Satan in Christianity, is a female figure. To me, that’s just another example of blaming women. It’s the larger fractal of Eve giving Adam the apple. In the Tripartite Tractate, it is an ungendered Aeon or multiple-gendered Aeon. Logos is the name of that fallen Aeon, not Sophia, Logos—they’re similar concepts—so we can see that it’s probably the same concept, it’s just been written differently. Logos means knowledge, logic, reasoning. It is the seat of Gnosis. Logos literally means the Word. Sophia means wisdom, so they’re similar concepts. That fallen Aeon, Logos, contains within itself the entire blueprints of everybody else. The pleroma of Logos contains the fractal of the Fullness of God, and the infinite variety of Aeons that make up the Fullness of God. And the Fullness of God, that is the coexistent breakout, the variables contained within the Son of God. So the Son is the only begotten Son. The Son of God is the only emanation out of the Father’s originating consciousness. It has extended consciousness out from the Father, not separated from Him, because the Son of God is still plugged into the Father. But the Son contains all of the essence of the Father, all of the consciousness and the attributes. And once the Son was formed, immediately, being a fractal of the Father, He also gave birth. Just like the Father had given birth to the Son, the Son gives birth to all of its parts, which are the Aeons of God. And those are actually variables. Each one of them is a variable. Altogether, they add up to the Son. Altogether, when the Fullness of God sits and sings in unison, it is the Son. Now, the Son knows them to be its parts, but they don’t realize that they are individual variables of the Son. But the Son knows them, because He’s a higher order, see? So He can see them. They’re His parts. He wears them the same way we wear our bodies. We can see our arms and our legs and our toes, but our toes, our arms, and our legs may not themselves realize that they are parts of that larger human body that we are walking around in. You see the analogy? So the ALL, or the Totality, the Fullness of God, is coexistent. It sits within and fully reflects the Son in its totality. That’s why it’s called the Totality, also the Son. Well, one of those, the last Aeon to be formed, was a fractal replica of the entire Fullness of God. So inside the body of Logos are fractals, one order down, one iteration down, of all of the variables of the Son, which gave rise to a misunderstanding in the mind of Logos that He was the Fullness of God. It’s not a female. It’s not a male. It’s an amalgamation of all of the Aeons. There may be male and female aspects amongst the Aeons, but the Logos is all of them. Logos sits at the top of the Fullness, and he contains fractals of all the other Aeons So when the Logos overreached to rejoin the Father, it was because He thought He could plug directly into the Father, the same way that the Son plugs directly into the Father. But no one else but the Son is able to plug directly into the Father, because the Father is so enormous and overwhelming that, as it says in the Tripartite Tractate, anyone who approaches the Father face-to-face would be annihilated, because the Father is so tremendously overwhelming. Now, I know that a lot of Christians have that sense within themselves that the Father is overwhelming. That’s why when you hear some testimonies and you hear the lyrics of some Christian songs, they speak about, how will I ever stand up and face God? How will I ever get my face up off the floor because God is so great and I am nothing? Well, we don’t really go face-to-face with the Father. We go face-to-face with Christ, who is the representation of the Father to us humans in particular, and Jesus was one of us, was a human who fully manifested the Christ, fully manifested the Fullness of God and God’s desire to bring us all home. So we need not fear the Christ, just like we don’t fear Jesus. People who are born-again Christians have a personal relationship with Jesus. They may not recognize that Jesus and the Christ are two in one, because Jesus was fully human and then fully God, but by fully God we don’t mean that he was the fallen demiurge. We mean that he is fully the Father. I and my Father are one, he said. Jesus comes in a form that every single person can relate to. That’s why Christ is a personal God. Everyone can relate to him, everyone, and he immediately plugs right into our bodies. I’ve described before in other episodes that the fractal Aeons of the Fullness that come along with the Christ, those are called the Third Order of Powers. We are the Second Order of Powers, and there is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power. When Jesus comes to me, when Christ comes to me, he plugs right into my body. Of course he knows me. He’s inside all of my cells. He’s perfectly made for me, and your Savior is perfectly made for you. That is how that we can accept him and call him into ourselves, you see? Does this make sense? So the answer to if God is good and perfect, why is there suffering in the world, is that the God of this world, the demiurge, is not good and perfect. The God of this world is the aspect of the fallen Logos—what I identify as the ego of the fallen Logos. He doesn’t carry the life and the consciousness and the love of the Father. He is not a loving God. That’s why the Christians are mistaking him for Satan. He is not a loving God. He does not love us. This God of our universe made the universe, the material physical parts of the universe, up through those elements and rocks, up through the planets, because Logos contains the fractals of all the Fullness of God. So when Logos fell, the blueprints were here. That’s what the demiurge works with. He’s working off of blueprints. He’s not working off of the living ethereal plane. The best part of Logos, the Tripartite Tractate says, fled back to the Fullness after he realized what had happened. The mistake, the overreach, the Fall, and then these shadows of himself, were going out and creating this material universe, and he was aghast. He was horrified at creation. That’s a quite a different view of creation than we get from our traditional God made the Earth, God made the heavens, we love creation. Well, Logos was horrified by the creation because it was dead. So after he fled back up to the Fullness, he abandoned this material creation down below, and that’s what we have here. But we still have the egoic part, the demiurge roaming around, and that’s the God of this world. And he doesn’t remember where he came from. He doesn’t realize he’s only the reflected ego of Logos, cut off from his Self, cut off from his higher consciousness. He knows there’s supposed to be creatures and people and whatnot walking around, but he can’t bring life into them. And that’s why there’s a little fragment about how he tried to mold a man on the riverbank and breathe life into it, but whatever he could do, he could not bring life into that piece of mud that he had created, that golem, because he doesn’t channel the life or the love of the Father and the Fullness. That is why Logos, after he had fled back, prayed alongside the Fullness for a solution. They prayed for life to come into the universe. And that’s us. That’s all of us living creatures. We are the Second Order of Powers. The Aeons of the Fullness are the First Order of Powers, but we are the Second Order of Powers, and it’s our job to bring life, love, and the memory of the Father into this otherwise dead universe. And we were constructed in such a way that we could utilize the dead universe, that mud that’s lying on the riverbank, into living creatures. But we’re the ones with the life and the love and the memory. We forget about it because now we’re in a constant battle with death. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, it says in the 23rd Psalm. So we’re living in the shadow of death, and that is this created universe. And that is why they call Gnostics, in a pejorative sense, they call us Gnostics, world haters, because Logos was aghast and he didn’t like the dead universe that was being ruled by the demiurge. But we love the Father and we love the ethereal plane because that is where we come from. That is our home. We are sojourners in this world. We are just passing through. And the Christians have a faint whiff of all of this running through the Bible. They know that they are just passing through this life and that they’re going to cross the river Jordan someday and rejoin the loved ones that have departed to heaven. We all know this. Everybody on the planet knows this inherently. That is the inherent Gnosis. But we’ve forgotten because as we grow up in the world we get disappointed and saddened and nothing is as it should be. We tend to forget or think that it was some pie-in-the-sky dream that there’s such a thing as heaven and God, but it’s never going to happen. The Christian religion is unique of all the religions in the world. This personal relationship with God, this personal relationship with Christ, is unique. The Christ actually came for each individual human to remind us that we’re going back home—don’t worry about it. But meanwhile we’ve got this job to do and that was not only to bring life, light, love, consciousness and remembrance into the universe, but we’re also trying to redeem the living universe. We couldn’t do it. The Christ is the Third Order of Powers. It’s the Christ’s job to redeem every living thing. And the Christians know that too. And all throughout the New Testament it says Christ came for everyone. But then they tend to think that everyone is only the Christians. That’s the mistake. This idea of universal salvation, meaning every living thing will return home to the ethereal plane, that’s what Jesus was talking about. That is the underlying gnosis of Christianity—universal salvation—because it’s Christ’s job. It’s the Third Order Power’s job to redeem the demiurge, to wrap up this dead material world and bring all the living things home, including rejoining the ego of Logos to its Self in heaven. We want the demiurge to wake up and realize and remember where it comes from. Then he’ll give up this puppet master control he has over the dead material things. And he tries to have that same control over us. That’s what the inner struggles are about. That’s why bad things happen to good people. That’s what the addictions and the sin and the betrayals about—those all come from the demiurge. He doesn’t love us because he doesn’t know what love is. He only knows what control is, and he wants to control us in any way possible. And if he can control you through drugs, he does. If he can control you through lust or through food, he does. If he can control you through possessions—you know, the richer you are, the more possessions you have, the more burdened you are, the more you are weighed down by those possessions. They give you a fleeting happiness, but material possessions are actually burdens that you carry. On the ethereal plane, everything is freely available. You know, I get really upset with people who think that we can have a perfect communist or socialist or communal world down here if we would all just give up our possessions and share them with everybody else. And then we’d love and love alike and everybody would be equal. That is a noble goal. That’s a dear, sweet, noble goal. The problem is it cannot happen on this fallen plane because the demiurge won’t let it happen. What you are sensing when that is your goal is the ethereal plane—it’s your remembrance. It’s your beginning of gnosis. Now, the way to remember, the way to unlock the gnosis that’s within you is to realize this is the fallen world. We can’t recreate heaven on Earth. When we try to create heaven on Earth, it turns into hell on Earth. That is the first realization. None of the plans are going to work. None of the schemes are going to work. The governmental systems aren’t there to make us happy, loving, and equal. The governmental systems are part of the demiurgic control. They are necessary on this fallen world to have. In the Tripartite Tractate, it says that certain people are given power for a limited period of time in order to assist the demiurge in bringing order into our societies. That’s what governments are, but they’re limited. And the problem with the people that are the governors is that they don’t realize that their actual power comes from above. They think they are the source of the power, just like the demiurge thinks it is the source of the power. There is no inherent power down here. It all comes from God. Well, I guess that’s all the time we have for today. I didn’t even get to the question about free will, but I can really briefly say this. Yes, the Father is all powerful and all consciousness emanating out of the Father is the Son, and it carries all of the attributes of the Father. And then emanating from the Son are these fractals that sit with him, and every one of them carries within itself the attributes of the Father. And free will, of course, is an attribute of the Father. There’s no argument about that, I think, in anyone’s religious aspect. But then we, and this is where it comes in, part of our gnosis is that we come from above. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. We are the children of the Aeons. We are the Second Order Powers birthed from the First Order Powers—the Aeons. So all of the attributes of the Aeons, which is to say that all of the attributes of the Son of God, come down to us, but we are an iteration. We are further, further down. So we have free will. There’s no doubt about that. But our free will that came to us in conception, along with love, life, and remembrance, our free will is constantly being jammed up by the demiurge, because the demiurge doesn’t understand free will. The demiurge thinks that free will is a mess, is chaos, is unruly. And it’s the job of the demiurge to control everything. He controls all of the material in the universe strictly. And it’s a good thing he does. He’s the one that sets the physical laws and the chemical laws. He’s the one that determines gravity and the speed of light and all of that. He controls those strictly. And if he didn’t, the universe wouldn’t hold. It would completely fly apart. He doesn’t understand why he can’t control us. It’s not just us, it’s any living creature because we all have free will. He doesn’t understand where it’s coming from. He sees it as chaos, and he keeps trying to clean it up. the demiurge keeps chaos at bay through strict control And that’s why it seems as though we don’t have free will. But we do. You know you do. And any addict who has repented, turned away, and accepted the Christ, the Third Order Powers, to come and replace his Second Order sensibilities, bringing the knowledge of the Third Order, which is to say the Christ, which is to say the Father, into our bodies. That can turn around an addict in a moment’s time. That’s what brings that instantaneous joy and expansion of consciousness when someone is born again. You see, you don’t have to believe in something you know. Belief implies unbelief. A belief implies that you’re choosing to believe something in the face of evidence to the contrary. Gnosis isn’t belief. It’s knowing. It’s true knowledge. It’s knowing where we come from. And when you know that, then you have your free will, because you have your virtues and your aspects of the Christ, and your aspects of the Father. Okay, that’s it for today. Say, did you know that on YouTube, I have a few videos from years ago before I started doing the podcast? And if you’d like to see me giving a lecture on these kinds of topics, you can go to the Cyd Ropp YouTube channel, and look up the one that says Practice Presentation. And you can find my…it’s like giving a lecture in class—I’ve got posters and a pointer. So you can see me talk for an hour about all of these things, if that’s what you’d like to do. Until next week, God bless us all. Onward and upward!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The big day has come. The book is now available. A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, is now available on Amazon. Just type in that name, or type in my name, C-Y-D, R-O-P-P, and you’ll be taken to my various books that are on Amazon. A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is available for only $9 as an e-book, or free on Kindle, if you have a Kindle subscription. It’s $24 as the paperback. And keep in mind, I price all of my books at the least expensive that the publisher will allow me to sell them for because I would much rather get the information out to you than for me to make money. Book cover of the ebook and paperback edition I’m not making a living off of this podcast or off of being an author, believe me. Wish I were, but eh, not the case. Can you imagine what would happen if A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel went viral? It’s mind-blowing and very difficult to imagine selling a million or even thousands of copies, but how about you pray along with me and we make it happen? Because I think of this as a reformation. I am driven, apparently by God, to reform conventional Christianity as we have come to know it. It is my belief that what happened around 300 AD by the Catholic Church and by the Emperor of Rome was actually a diversion from the original Gospel message. Back when I was a young believer, about 50 years ago, I believed in the Nicene Council and the Nicene Creed and that they were protecting us for our own good by taking bad bits out of the Bible. But one thing that I have learned in the past few years of government censorship and collusion between the powers that be, such as mainstream media and governments of the world, is that they really want to shape our beliefs. They really want to keep a lid on things that we are allowed to consider and believe, especially about God. This is why the communist nations are officially non-religious, because you cannot have people actually believing in the power of God, working in their lives and following God’s will in things, being at odds with a corrupt government, especially a totalitarian dictatorship, because they want to control what you think. They want to control the laws and what you think and do. And so those governments tend to put a real damper on religious freedom and freedom of speech. They would like to put a damper on freedom of thought, and they do that through propaganda and collusion between the media outlets and what the government wants you to believe. That’s my opinion. What’s your opinion? You can write back. The comments are open. In any event, I used to believe that the Nicene Council and the Emperor of Rome and the Pope were doing this for our good and for our benefit, and to keep true the words of the Bible and to protect and sanctify the words of Jesus. But now, after living in these recent times, I can see much better how these things work. You know, my PhD is in rhetoric, which is defined as the power of persuasive speech. So when I have been watching for the last several years the way that people are packaged and presented, the way that various candidates are packaged and presented to us, I can see the manipulation of the rhetoric. I see it clearly, you know, the same way that, like, a physician, if you walk in with a skin problem, a rash, and you walk in to a dermatologist, and they can look at you and say, oh, well, that’s an eczema, or oh, well, that’s psoriasis. They can see right off the bat what it is. You don’t know what it is because you’re not a doctor or dermatologist. I can see the rhetoric in the same way. This causes me to doubt the intentions and the sanctification of the original Nicene Council. We’re not Roman citizens anymore, folks. Philip K. Dick, of course, says that the empire never ended, and that we are still Roman empire citizens, but we just don’t realize it. That is one way of putting it. That’s just a way of describing it. So having opened up my thinking in that regard, I cracked open that Nicene Council egg, and what came out was the Nag Hammadi. I read through the Nag Hammadi, and I would not ever have done that in my older, more strictly constrained evangelical days. Now, I’m sure that many evangelicals think I have fallen away from the faith, and yet I haven’t. I believe in Christ. I believe in the Father. I believe in heaven. I believe we’re all going to heaven. That is Christian. What I don’t believe is that most everyone’s going to hell, because remember, very simply put, we are all fractals of the Father. The Bible says we are the children of God. We are fractals off of the one consciousness of the Father. Is the Father ever going to be diminished? No. Even the Bible says, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. The Father, the eternal consciousness, cannot be lessened, cannot be thrown away, cannot be thrown into everlasting torment in a lake of fire. God would not allow that of His children. We’re faulty. We’re fallen. We’re sinful. That is the effects of living in this material world, cheek to jowl with the demiurge, being deluded by materialism and having our body and our emotions drawn into the material world. The Tripartite Tractate says there’s a reason that the Father set it up so that we are drawn into the material world, and yet we are disappointed and never satisfied by the material world. And that disappointment and lack of satisfaction is so that the material will have a weak hold on us, so that when we pass out of this mortal existence, we can immediately return back into the Fullness of God. So, God isn’t going to throw you away, even if you are a sinful person, although it breaks everyone’s heart if you are living a sinful life. It’s a very, very sad thing for your Aeonic parents. They’re not ashamed of you—they are so sad on your behalf. So throw off those coils. Back off the demiurge. Come to the truth. Come to the light. And that is what A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel attempts to do in this book. It’s about almost 300 pages, fully illustrated with all of the diagrams that you’ve come to know and hopefully love here at Gnostic Insights. And especially if you only listen to this as an audio podcast and you don’t go to GnosticInsights.com to read the transcript or to see the illustrations that accompany every episode, you will find A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel to be a handy and welcome addition. Certainly if you’re seeking gnosis or if you consider yourself a Gnostic or if you are, for example, a Christian who has fallen away from the faith because certain things don’t sit right with you, I think the answers are in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel and I urge you to pick up the book at any price point. I have reformatted the book as a hard copy. I’m waiting for my proof copy to arrive in the mail. That should arrive any day. So hopefully by next week the hardback will also be posted on Amazon for you to be able to buy if you want to. Now, again, I’m not making any money on the hardback even though it’s selling for $45. It cost me $30 just for the proof copy. So all the rest of that money is the printing expense and the royalties that the booksellers and Amazon take off at the top. But I thought if you really have come to love this Gnostic Gospel and the simple Gnostic Gospel that I present in this podcast, you may enjoy getting the hard copy because it’s substantial and it’s very beautiful. It’ll hold up to the test of time and it will look beautiful on your bookshelf. Aside from this being one long plug for the new book, thank you very much, I would like to read to you a few lovely pieces of encouragement I have received from my podcast listeners. I’m not going to say their names, but if you wrote this to me, you’ll know who you are. Recently I received a message that says, “Another inspirational podcast said, please keep them coming. It seems like such simplicity, but in your introduction, the words to fear not we are known and we are loved when taken to heart and truly believed states such a significant thing. That belief can cut through much darkness with the purest light that we are all known are equally loved and all are destined for the journey home to be in the fullness. Blessings.” And she wrote that in response to the post called Our Awesome Origin, if you didn’t hear that one and you’d like to back up and see what that one was about. Another comment I received last year was, “Although you have mentioned and you wonder, is there anyone reading and listening? I’m finally taking the time to send you a note to thank you from my heart for the sincerity and effort you put into your work and sharing towards the understanding and enlightening of the Gnostic Gospels. I appreciate so much that you give this available and free to anyone who cares to read and listen. I have purchased your book, (and she’d be referring to The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which was the only book available at that time), I have purchased your book because I have the luxury of being able to do that, but you offer all of the relevant ideas and information at no cost other than someone needing to have access to a computer. And that’s a wonderful thing. All blessings and good fortune to you and onward and as you say, in love and light.” So, these mean a lot to me because, you know, I’m sitting here at home with the dog and my cats just talking to you, because I do believe that Gnosis should be freely dispensed. And I’m retired. I have retirement income. I get social security, so I’m not destitute. And if this is the way God is having me spread the message, that’s fine with me. I don’t have to be paid for it. But you know, whatever money that you do send me now, that is going directly into promotion so that we can broaden this Gnostic Reformation. I really would like to have it take off the way the First Reformation by Martin Luther took off back in the 1500’s. Wouldn’t that be awesome? Here’s one now. This is from a listener who lives in Thailand. And he said, “I’ve not followed Gnostic work or any work for quite a while. I gained a big insight from you and never felt the need to seek any further.”  And God bless him for that because that’s the way I feel about it. I don’t read a lot of books anymore, other people’s notions of how to become enlightened. I don’t need that. The Gnosis is coming to me directly from the Fullness of God and through the Bible and through basically the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. Everything else seems to be rabbit trails to me, rabbit holes. Chasing after this, chasing after that. There’s no need to chase once you find your Gnosis and begin learning to tap directly into it. Remember, it comes directly into us. We have it. We’re born with it. It’s in every cell in our body. We have fractals of the Fullness of God. So it’s a matter of tapping in to God by going in and up, not by going out into the world. That isn’t where you’re going to find it. This listener also went on to say, “Gnosticism via Google is portrayed as humans trapped forever. You, however, portrayed a different version. One where the power is always with humans and the eternal spark within them. That was a powerful insight. One that is the complete opposite of mainstream Gnosticism found on Google. There is no battle, only a deliberate perception, deception of one. What I am is always there despite anything in this world or anything happening to the body. I just need to relax into that eternal me and know that this world has only the significance that I give to it. Attachment is the root of all suffering, said Buddha. Attachment to perceptions, to people, to experiences, and to possessions. All are illusions. Real, but ultimately illusions designed to entrap. The only thing that is real is the energy that underlies this world. A subtle light energy available to everyone once they release the dense, heavy energy of the mind and its attachments. The archons have power, but ultimately no power. A divine dichotomy. They can only deceive us to give up ours. Anyway, I gained something important from you in my own way. Just wanted to check in. Good to know you’re doing well. Keep on keeping on. Take care and very best wishes.” Lastly, here’s an email I received just last week. And she says, “Excellent explainer of the complexity of Gnosticism. I’m very grateful as I have tried to study Gnosticism knowing there was a deep kernel of truth to be mined in these teachings. In spite of my research, I could never quite find my way through to the essence. In your short article here, (and that was As Above So Below), in your short article here, I feel like I found the gleaming jewel I was seeking. An understanding of the mission of Jesus Christ from the perspective of Gnosticism is clarifying and encouraging to the modern human soul who needs the bridge from mere belief to knowing Gnosis. We live in interesting times in which the discernment between truth and not truth is increasingly more challenging.” See, I kind of think that it’s becoming more clear, especially in the last few years of political uprisings throughout the world and the attempt of governments to clamp down on those freedoms that people are expressing. The difference between righteous behavior and unrighteous behavior or between governments that encourage righteous behavior and governments that just want to demoralize and clamp down is really becoming clear. The news media who used to be trusted and used to be looked at as sources of information are now being increasingly discarded as sources of state-sponsored propaganda. And that is now clear. So people I used to trust, I don’t quite trust so much anymore. But I think that’s good because I think the tigers are showing their stripes. And it’s for our benefit so that we can recognize and we can choose clearly between the world and between the Father above. I hold these letters from the readers very dear to my heart. And I thank you all so much. And I also thank those of you who, for example, on Substack, comment openly, send it through comments rather than through personal emails to me. All is good. I love you. And I’m so happy and relieved that A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is finally out there in the world. It’s being recorded right now by Miguel Conner as an audiobook. And I don’t know how long that’s going to take, probably a couple of more months. But that will be really cool when that comes out, too. So thank you for all the new subscribers that are starting to find us. Let’s get this thing going. Let’s get this Gnostic Reformation underway. I need you to do that. Point people to the broadcast. Give the book as gifts. I would love to come to where you are and talk to your group or your church, anyone that would have me. So if you want to try to set something like that up, I’d love to do that. Or if you have a podcast and you’d like me as a guest. Let’s do this. Thank you for spending this time with me this week. I’ll see you next week. 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

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The big day has finally arrived! The book is ready. It’s in publication. It will be posted on Amazon for sale. The soonest they’ll get it up for me is on the 28th of August. That’s Wednesday, the 28th of August. You’ll be able to buy the paperback version of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel for only $24. That’s the least I’m allowed to sell it for by Amazon. So, meanwhile, as a bonus, I did format the book as an e-book, and it is already posted. So if you were to go to Amazon now, you would be able to buy the e-book of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel for only $9. It’s available today for $9, or you can wait until Wednesday and get it for $24. A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel (A Simple Gnostic Gospel) – Kindle edition by Ropp, Cyd , Ropp, Cyd, Puett, Bill. Religion & Spirituality Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. And later this week, I will also format the book as a glorious, very expensive hardback, and I will release the hardback for the least amount of money that Amazon makes me release it for. I don’t know what that will be just yet until it’s formatted. But the hardback will differ from the paperback in that the hardback will be on the top quality high-gloss paper with the top quality ink and a hardback binding. Probably twice as much as the paperback sells for. I don’t know how these things work. We’ll see. I’ve already ordered the copies that I will sign and mail to the people who have contributed the $50 donation that I appreciate so much. And those are in the mail to me already as author preview copies. So you’ll be able to get those very soon as well. This week, I’m going to talk about some philosophers, mathematicians, logicians, and their faith in the Father. Because so often people accuse us believers of being irrational, of being ignorant and foolish. And I want to tell you that that isn’t true. Indeed, you know, we follow the Father above. And remember, His emissary is Logos, which means logic and reason. So it is not unreasonable to believe in the eternal life and to believe in the Father and the ethereal plane. It’s based upon reason. The Father is love, but Logos is logic and reasonableness. And we need both in our lives—love and reason. Reason without love is a modern and postmodern condition. It privileges supposedly reasonable logical assumptions and actions, but without believing in the Father and without the love of God to guide your heart in truth and faith, caring and compassion. We have to meld reason with love. Otherwise, it very easily turns into dictatorships and totalitarian rule. This week, an essay posted on Noema magazine online by Nathan Gardels had a quote from Erwin Schrodinger. Erwin Schrodinger, the pioneering quantum physicist, postulated that “consciousness is a fundamental feature, the fabric of the universe, parceled out through the individuated experience of awareness.” Schrodinger was no lightweight when it comes to thinking. Now, to counterpose that, the opposite of that is materialism—is not believing that consciousness is the ground state of the universe. Gerald Edelman, a Nobel neurobiologist considered the most prominent materialist in the field, believed consciousness is “entirely a function of embodiment.” In other words, that consciousness is a byproduct of the gray portion of our brains. This is generally what neurobiologists think. That’s why they can treat animals with such cruelty and have such disregard to any living things, because they don’t believe they are conscious. They usually think consciousness arises from the more complex neurobiology of the human condition. But Schrodinger wrote in his essay that “the total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms, for consciousness is absolutely fundamental.” That was a quote from this NOEMA magazine that is posted online, and the name of the article is Who Knows What Consciousness Is? I’ve been feeling for some time that I should share with you Blaise Pascal and his idea that’s called Pascal’s Wager. Have you ever heard of Pascal’s Wager? Now, I have a true believer attitude towards the Father. However, I must admit that Pascal’s Wager has often come to mind during my lifetime over the course of 70 years. I often think of Pascal’s Wager, and so to me it’s pretty important to share it with you. I’ve hesitated sharing it with you because, well, it kind of seems like a fallback position rather than just going straight for believing in the Father and the gnosis that comes from the Father, because this is a like a fail-safe fallback. Pascal’s Wager basically says that you have nothing to lose by believing in God, and you have everything to gain. So let me explain some of this to you. By the way, I’m sometimes kind of shy about sharing the fact that I’m a Christian, that I believe in Jesus. You know, when I first started reading the Nag Hammadi scriptures and the Tripartite Tractate, as I’ve mentioned, I set it aside for five years. I had thoroughly read and highlighted, notated and diagrammed the Nag Hammadi, and pretty much came up with everything that I present now in my teaching and in my books, but it frightened me because I did not want to be accused of being a false prophet or a false teacher. I do not want to have the accusations of leading people astray. I would not want to lead anyone into hell. Obviously, that would be the farthest thing from my thought. And by now, as a Gnostic, I don’t even think that hell is an accurate depiction of what happens to people who don’t believe at the time of death. A truly loving God and eternal punishment are inconsistent. What we humans call “justice” cannot override the love of God and the redemption from sin through Christ. The Lake of Fire is not eternal and everlasting. The Lake of Fire is Aeonic purging; that is the more accurate translation of the Coptic Greek in which the New Testament was written. In the original Greek, the word that has been translated as “eternal” is aionios, aeonic, and aeonic can either refer to a period of time or as relating to the Aeons of the Fullness. Two previous episodes of Gnostic Insights cover this concept in detail; you can listen or read about it by clicking on links in this transcript to Aeons, Not Ages and Overcoming Death-Follow the Light.  So, it’s a purging fire to purge away our false beliefs and our meme shroud that has deluded us in our lifetime. The Lake of Fire is a cleansing. It’s a baptism. And the more unbelief you hold, the more incorrect memes you have enshrouded your Self with, the more purging there is to be done when you cross over. And that’s very unpleasant. I would not want to lead anyone into that kind of purging. And I myself, if I were a big false teacher, false prophet here, I’d have a lot to account for when I cross over. And I do not want to bring that upon my Self. I am hoping that I spread the truth and the love of the Father. So something that occasionally crosses my mind and gives me pause is that it’s all well and good for me to share the Gnostic gospel with you and to present this alternative cosmology and cosmogony of the ethereal realm that differs from what is translated into the Old and New Testament. It’s all well and good for me because I’m a born again Christian. I have been saved. I am going to heaven. And I know that as a certainty. But what about you? If you don’t have that certainty, if you are not born again, what if I lead you into error through the Gnostic gospel and you don’t have true belief in Christ as your fallback position? Well, then that’s the worst possible thing. So that is what I am attempting to avoid. And it sometimes niggles at me that it’s well and good for me to talk about the Gnostic gospel because I am saved. I am a born again Christian baptized in the Holy Spirit and have a surety of faith in heaven because I’m under the wing of Christ. But what about you if you’re not? What if you haven’t accepted Christ? What if you are not a believer in Jesus? What if you’re not a Christian and you, instead, go straight to the Gnostic gospel? Are you in danger? I don’t think so. But in the spirit of Blaise Pascal, I want to share some of this information with you today, and then you can make your own logical and reasonable choice for Christ. So, you know, I do listen to Christian radio preachers, and I heard this one this week from the Colson Center on the life and faith of Blaise Pascal in their little five-minute show called Breakpoint. And I thought, aha, okay, well now it’s time for me to share with you Pascal’s Wager. So first I’m going to read a few paragraphs from this Breakpoint piece, and then I’ll share with you some words directly out of Pascal’s Pensées, as they’re called. Quoting now, “On August 19, 1662, French philosopher, mathematician, and apologist Blaise Pascal died at just 39 years old. Despite his shortened life, Pascal is renowned for pioneering work in geometry, physics, and probability theory, and even for inventing the first mechanical calculator. His most powerful legacy, however, is his pensées, or thoughts, about life’s biggest questions, including God and the human condition. Pascal’s intellect garnered attention at an early age. At age 16, he produced an essay on the geometry of cones, so impressive that René Descartes initially refused to believe that a 16-year-old child could have written it. Later, Pascal advanced the study of vacuums and essentially invented probability theory. His life radically changed the evening of November 23, when Pascal experienced God’s presence in a powerful way. He immediately and radically reoriented his life and thinking toward God. He described the experience on a scrap of parchment that he sewed into his jacket and carried with him the rest of his life. From that moment, Pascal dedicated his life to serving God through his writing. His ideas on apologetics were collected and published after his death in a volume entitled Pensées, or Thoughts. [Pensées is a French word, the English translation is thoughts.] Best known of his ideas is Pascal’s Wager, and here is how it goes. Facing uncertainty in a game of life with such high stakes, he argued, it makes far more sense to believe in God’s existence than to not. If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He is.” So, in other words, the stakes are very high, especially if you don’t believe in God and you’re wrong about that, then you will face, he thought, eternal damnation. But I would say you will face the chastening fire of the Aeons, and that is a very humbling and painful experience that burns off all those wrong memes that you’re holding to make you pure enough, you see, to enter eternity. Because none of the negative things that we generate or are exposed to down here on earth can pass on with us into eternity, obviously. Do you see that? Because the ethereal plane is pure and good. There is no sin or darkness on the ethereal plane, even by definition. If you can’t grasp that concept, take it as a definition of what heaven and eternity is about—no negativity, no lies, no deceit, no cheating, no wrongheaded notions, no anger. It’s all the opposite of that. It’s the virtuous side—vice down here, virtue up above. The more we live a virtuous life down here, the less we have to account for and burn away in Judgment Day, you see, when we get to the other side. The more you dwell in darkness and hate the light and all of the wrong memes that attach because of that, then when you die, and you know you’re going to die, that’s a certainty, what you don’t know is what happens after death. So what Pascal said was, well, just bet on it. If you’re living a bad life down here, and by bad, make your own definition of that. I don’t need to tell you that you are living a bad life if you are. You know that because you feel hollow. And on your deepest, darkest nights, you cry out because you are miserable. You know that. So when you cross over to the other side in that state of unbelief, you have a lot to account for. Pascal thought you would go to hell because that’s what people thought. That’s what your conventional Christians think now. But we Gnostic Christians believe that you will not go to hell for eternity, but that you will face the chastening—the truth of your incorrect thoughts down here and your incorrect behaviors and all of the harm that you’ve done, if you don’t have the protection of the Christ vouching for you. And that’s what Christ does for us. He vouches for us. He puts his arms around us after we cross over, and he presents us to the Father, and he says, He’s with me. Forgive him, for he didn’t realize what he was doing. She’s with me. Forgive her. And then we pass through with Christ, because we’re part of Him. We take on his righteousness. So the wager is that if you’re wrong, you will have a bad reckoning on the other side. But if you come to believe in Christ now, and Jesus was the emissary of the Christ here on earth, Jesus is the embodiment in human form of the Christ who came here in order to take us by the hand and lead us home, in order to say, It’s okay. Come along with me, and I’ll help you cross over without the pain, guilt, and recrimination of Judgment Day. That’s what believing in Jesus now does for you, because you could step out of your door and get hit by a car and be dead, and then you didn’t have any more time to think about it. So Pascal said the wager is this: If you don’t believe in Christ now, then you will certainly have a Judgment Day. Or if you don’t believe in Christ now, at least you’ll have a miserable life here on earth, because you don’t have that assurance of salvation. You don’t have the love and compassion of Christ walking with you. You don’t have a happy ending to look forward to. But if you’re right, if you do believe in Christ now, this is the other side of the wager. If you bet on God, if you bet on Christ, then you’ll have a better life now. You’ll have the assurance of salvation and belief in Christ and belief in the Father. You’ll be happier because you will put aside the vices and begin to adopt the virtues. And a virtuous life is a happy life, a truly virtuous life. So it’s a win-win situation to believe in Christ now. You have a happier life, and when you cross over to the other side, you escape the self-torment of recrimination over every bad thing you’ve ever done. So there’s no downside to believing in Christ. And if you’re wrong—let’s say you believe in Christ now, and it turns out not to be true. Let’s say you believe in Christ now and you believe in the Father, but you’re wrong. You were just a foolish person, hoping for something that never was going to happen. Okay, but meanwhile you’ve had a happy life, and when you die, you’re no worse off. Poof! You’ve gone into oblivion. Where’s the downside? You see? But if you don’t believe in the Christ, and you’re wrong, then you do suffer the lousy life and the torment after you die. So that’s the basic wager. Pascal also accurately described the moral condition of human beings. And he said, for example, “We hate truth and those who tell it to us, and we like them to be deceived in our favor.” He also observed that, “People tend to distract themselves from the reality of death, but when our diversions run their course, we feel nothingness.” Well, that’s all I’m quoting from the Colson article, but then I went into Pascal’s pensées, which are public domain, so you can download them for free, and I read more of Pascal’s words, and they’re really fabulous, and they’re especially fabulous for us Gnostics. I should devote more time, I think, to Pascal’s writing. Here’s something that he said, for example: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which I know not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?’ Now, here’s a quote from his pensées, verse 222, directed to atheists. He says, “What reason have they for saying that we cannot rise from the dead? What is more difficult—to be born or to rise again? That what has never been should be or that what has been should be again? Is it more difficult to come into existence than to return to it? Habit makes the one appear easy to us. Want of habit makes the other impossible. A popular way of thinking.” Pascal is speaking of resurrection of the dead upon Christ’s return in this previous passage, but he could just as easily be speaking of returning to our Aeonic home above in the Fullness when he speaks of “what has been should be again.” He goes on to say, “Why cannot a virgin bear a child? Does a hen not lay eggs without a cock? What distinguishes these outwardly from others? And who has told us that the hen may not form the germ as well as the cock? What have they to say against the resurrection and against the child bearing of the virgin? Which is the more difficult, to produce a man or an animal or to reproduce it?” And I think we could apply that same reasoning to reincarnation. You see, if you are not of a mind that considers these sorts of things, you surely cannot criticize those of us who do. Because here you are, you’re alive, you’re thinking. Where’d that come from? What were you before? How did that arise really? There’s actually no scientific explanation for consciousness arising from the material. It still takes a leap of faith to believe in that. And then it’s a lot harder. There’s a lot more extremely improbable to the point of impossibility things that have to occur to evolve the human brain to a place where consciousness arises. Why believe in that any more than to say consciousness is the ground state of reality and that we pre-exist or that we go on after this body passes away? We’re coming to the end of this week’s episode. Let me quote directly out of the pensées again about Pascal’s wager. He said, “Let us examine then this point and say God is or he is not. But to which side shall we incline? You must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose—the true and the good—and two things to stake—your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness. And your nature has two things to shun—error and misery. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that He is.” So think back to the beginning of this episode and to all of the intelligence and logic that came before Pascal gained his faith when he had his epiphany of the Father. These are not mental lightweights, Pascal or Schrodinger. Trust for a moment that they’re right. 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