Gnostic Insights

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Well, the final proof copy of the book is in the mail and on its way to me. I’ll have one more look at it and then I’ll put it up on Amazon for sale. I’d like to personally thank Hathaway, Gabriella, John, Barbara, and Jenny for their very generous support. If anybody else would like to contribute $50 towards this publication cost, actually it’s not the cost of publication as much as it is the cost that will go into promotion, into advertising, because we want this book to go big, don’t we? So thank you so much. If anybody else would still like to have a personally signed copy from me of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, contact me and send me that $50 and I’ll give you a signed copy of the book as well. Also, I’d like to personally thank some people that have written to me to say they can’t afford $50 but they really support the book and really do support this Gnostic Gospel effort that we’re putting out here, and I appreciate you every bit as much. Your prayers, considerations, and good wishes for me are every bit as valuable. So God bless you and thank you so much. And now on to this week’s episode. When I meet people and I start to talk to them about what I write about and what the podcast is about, it’s almost a hopeless task. And I bet you’ve discovered this as well when you try to explain Gnosticism to someone. First off, what does Gnostic mean? Gnostic means to know. It means knowledge, knowing. It’s the opposite of agnostic. Agnostic means I don’t know. An atheist is a person who says no, there’s no such thing as God. They’re an atheist. Theist means godly. A means not. Agnostic means I don’t know, maybe there is a God. Maybe there’s not a God. Whereas a believer is yes, I know there is a God and I believe in God. Now, how is it that we can believe in God? There’s different ways to believe in God. I think that most people that say they believe in God, believe in God theoretically, may even trust that God is looking out for them, but they don’t know God. They are not friends with God. They do not speak to and listen to God, because that would just be weird, right? You know, that’s the believing in something that’s not there, which is how atheists generally regard people who speak to God, that we are simply delusional, that we’re making it up, that it’s fairytale stuff. Gnosis means that you know God and that you believe it is possible to know God. And how can you know God? How do you know that you know God? That’s why Gnosticism is such a difficult and labyrinthian… labyrinthian means, you know, like in a maze. You have to work your way through the maze, picking up a little bit there and trying this way, and then trying that way, and then trying this way. Gnosticism is usually like stumbling around blindly in a maze. And this is why so many young Gnostics or people who seek gnosis dabble in this, and then they dabble in that, and they dabble in something else. They’re just picking up little bits along the way, but it doesn’t necessarily add up to anything. Or you may have a whole bunch of memes that you’ve collected along the way, all these various esoteric religious memes from various Gnostic websites or Gnostic books or Gnostic podcasts, but they’re all just a jumble of memes and you don’t know how to put them together. So the Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is a framework upon which you can hang these various things you have learned. It’s no longer going to be just a big bag, a jumble of tidbits, but it is going to fit into a framework, a worldview, an ideological worldview, that is a meme bundle of Gnostic thought. This is not easy to convey to people. So this is why my Simple Explanation model is very useful. And this thing I call the Simple Explanation, this was a thought that came to me many years ago by now, 15 or 20 years ago, and I call it a Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. That’s the name of my first blog, and it’s still posted, and I still post to it now and then. It’s a non-religious blog, it’s a mathy-sciencey kind of theory. However, it does talk about world religions, and it gives this framework that I have now applied to the Gnostic Gospel. And once you apply the Simple Explanation to this amorphous, labyrinthian thing that is called Gnosticism, now you have a framework upon which to view and to evaluate and to place all of those memes you have collected that are just bumping around in a big sack on your back at the moment. So when people ask me, well, what do you talk about? What do you teach? It’s very difficult standing out there on the lawn just chatting with someone or at the dog park about what I teach or what is Gnosticism. That’s why we’ve got this podcast and the books. My first book on Gnosticism, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is very short, and heavily illustrated. That’s when I came up with all of these diagrams that are in my Gnosticinsights.com website or in my various books. Visual metaphors are important to me. That’s how I help to figure things out for myself. These visual metaphors, like thinking of the pleroma of the Fullness of God as a stack of golden cannonballs. That’s a weird thing to say. So how do I explain that to someone just standing around at the dog park? It doesn’t make any sense at all. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. The first book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is very short. It’s only about 50 pages. Very, very simple because I wanted to lay out the Gnostic Gospel as simply as possible. Look at the pictures, read these few words on each page, and I believe that you have that path to Gnosis and it’s all you need to know. Most people go, well, it’s very pretty and it’s kind of poetic, but what? What’s it about? I don’t get it. So that is why I wrote this longer book that I keep talking to you about that’s going to be released any day now. I’ll be sure to let you know. Maybe by next week it’ll be posted. It’ll be out there on Amazon–A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. So I’ve applied the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything framework, like the structure of a building, the framework, just the support beams on which you can place the Gnostic memes that you have gathered along the way, you see. So my Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel gives you that ideological framework. And then I explain all of the Gnosis that I have gathered directly out of the Nag Hammadi, which were scriptures that were dug up out of the desert in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. They’ve been buried for about 2,000 years and have only relatively recently been translated. So I apply those insights to the Simple Explanation framework. That’s basically the way I work. And also I want to mention that we don’t need to go around gathering Gnostic memes or you don’t have to learn the things that are in my books. Because the basic concept in Gnosis is that we are born with this aeonic information inside of us. The same information that gives us consciousness and love and life in the first place. The truth that is channeled down from the Aeons, the Fullness of God, into us at conception we carry along throughout our entire lives. So I’ve often said here at Gnostic Insights that I’m not teaching you. You’re not learning this. What you’re doing is remembering. I’m trying to reawaken your own inherent knowledge of God. If you never heard anything I said and you never went to any Gnostic website or read any Gnostic book, you would still be able to commune directly with the Father and directly with the Son, the Fullness of God, and Christ because they are inside of us. They come in at conception and grow up with us. We forget about them because of the nature of living in a material world—because of the never-ending war, Gnostics would say—the struggle against the material level. The tension between the ethereal and the material. That’s that dual aspect that people often talk about in Gnosticism. So that’s all you really need to know. We come from above. We carry the Father’s consciousness within us. And that Christ came to save everyone because we’re all from God. So everything has to go back home to God at the end of time. God’s not going to leave bits of himself behind. God is not going to assign bits of his consciousness to everlasting torment because they failed to recognize the Father. Christ came to save everyone. It says it over and over again in the New Testament. And whether you accept that now or you accept that later, even after death, you will still eventually go back to the Fullness of God. You will eventually be covered by the Christ once you realize that, but it may take a few incarnations to do so, or have some very unpleasant bardo experiences after you die to come to that realization. So it’s a lot better just to realize this now. You’ll have a better life. You’ll be happier. You’ll have the surety of the knowledge of God. This is the basic gnosis that we need to know. People ask me, well, then what is the gnosis that you teach? And I think I’ve been describing it incorrectly when I’m just standing around chatting to people. Here at GnosticInsights.com, at the Gnostic Insights podcast, you’re getting the long form of all these thoughts and all these explanations. You’ve got it all if you back up now and listen to the last two, three years of the podcast. It’s all in there, but it’s going to take you a long time to listen to it, isn’t it? Or to read all the articles if you’re reading the transcripts instead. The book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, puts it all out there in this one handy place. It’s about 280 pages long, and it explains the very simple gnosis that was originally contained in my Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, because people want explanations, and it takes a lot longer to explain something than to just say it outright. So that’s why the book is so important, because I do think if you read A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, you’ll have everything you need to know, both about what gnosis is, and what your role on earth is, and what will happen to you after you die. And those are the big questions, right? But when someone just asks me, like at the dog park, well, what is it that you teach? I’ve been talking about isms rather than teaching them, because I have not felt confident that I can really speak the gnosis, just standing there, boom, to a stranger and have them get it in five or ten minutes. But maybe I can. Maybe I’ve just been too shy to actually come out and say it. I don’t teach historical Gnosticism, because to me, history is in the past, and I really don’t dwell in the past. I don’t necessarily dwell in the future. I try to stay in the here and now. So I look around me, I see what is in myself. I see what is happening in the world. I see how I react to what’s happening in the world. I compare scriptures. I compare the New Testament to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This is all in the here and now time to come to understanding these things. I commune with the Fullness of God several times a day. And the way I realize to remember the Fullness is whenever I run across those times on the clock, that’s when I remember to plug back into the Fullness. And it’s those times, the 1:11, 10:10, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, 5:55—whenever I run across those kinds of times on the clock, and I run across them every day, it’s a synchronicity with me. I’m able to just randomly look at the clock. And oftentimes, if not most times, that I glance at the clock, it’s one of those special times, then I immediately look upward and commune with the Father and commune with the Fullness of God. And I thank the Fullnesses for being there for me. I thank the Father for knowledge and wisdom and connecting me to the sureness of his existence. Because I do believe in God. But these clock times are not mystical or magical. They are just a simple way for me to personally remember to look up. I’m sure you can come up with your own prompt, if the time thing doesn’t suit you. The point is to get our eyes off of the world and to reconnect with the Father and the Fullness. I’m what’s called a true believer. Now, I’ve been a true believer before I was a Gnostic. I’m a Christian, a true Christian. Born again means you really do invite Christ to come into your life. You really do try to move your ego off of the throne of your unit of consciousness and allow the Christ to take control. Jesus, take the wheel, as the song says. And by doing that, when you begin to not look at the world through your own needs and desires, your own ego, when you begin to look at the world through the eyes of God, through the eyes of Christ, it’s a whole different place. Because now we can begin to see others with the love of God. My own egoic self isn’t that fond of people, truly. I love my dogs. I love cats. I love the birds. I love all of the creatures. I love them. And I feel the love. People, not so much. Because people are each in charge of their own karma, and most of them are living out of their selfish ego or their narcissism. And to me, they’re just not very likable. But we’re called to love them. They’re lovable because they’re all creatures too. If I love my dog, I ought to love my neighbor, my human neighbor. But I really love my dog with affection, right? My human neighbor, maybe not so much. Maybe they irritate me. Maybe they have a political sign posted on their lawn that I think is just horrible. But I’m called to love them. And how can I do that? The only way to love them is to take my ego off of the throne, off of the center of my considerations, off of the center of my unit of consciousness, and remember to re-enthrone Christ. Once you’re born again, Christ isn’t sitting on your throne forever. You keep forgetting that he’s supposed to be there, and your ego keeps moving in. So it’s a constant process. It’s not a struggle, because I’m not struggling against Christ. I’m not saying, no, I want to be in charge. I’m not doing that at all. It’s just that I forget to look with the eyes of God, and I habitually let my ego get on the throne. So this is one of the things that happens at the 2:22 or 3:33 in the daytime or in the night. I say, oh! The Fullnesses! Oh! Christ! And boom, they are now back on the throne of my soul. Do you see what I’m saying? I call that re-centering, being in the glory beam, because we have a direct connection to the Father above. We have a direct connection to the Fullnesses of God. And of course, when we’re born again, because we have invited Christ to take over our soul, we of course have a direct connection with Christ, because he lives in us. I think when I’m chatting with people at the dog park, rather than saying, well, Gnosticism is an ancient religion that predates Christianity, probably predates Judaism, and these are ancient scriptures that were buried in the desert in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, and dug up in 1945, and recently translated, and I’m teaching out of one of those books. That’s not telling them anything, is it? That’s kicking back into the history of things, which I’m not all that big of a fan of, really. So what I really need to tell people is, if they say, what is Gnosis? I say, we are all children of the Fullness of God. The Fullness of God has these beings in it that are called the Aeons. And the Aeons are every possible expression of the Son of God. And the Son of God is the only emanation directly from consciousness itself. And in religious circles, we call that consciousness the Father, not necessarily God, because there’s a lot of gods. In fact, in the Old Testament, the God of that Old Testament in the Bible of the Hebrews and most of the Christians is called Jehovah or Yahweh. But in the Gnostic viewpoint, when Jesus said, I and my Father are one, he was talking about the God Above All Gods, even the God above the God who created this world. So, before the material world, and before this God of this creation—that isn’t the God that we worship. We worship the Father above, to realize that there is a Father above, and Jesus is his Son. Christ is his Son. Christ, of course, predates Jesus, because Jesus is a half-human, half-Christ creature, right? He’s a creation. Jesus did more than die for us on the cross. He took an ethereal being and melded it into a physical body. We all are melded into physical bodies, and we’re all ethereal beings, by the way. We all have the Fullness of God in us, because we are children of the Fullness of God. So we have their aeonic inheritance. So Christ had that too. But the purpose of the virgin birth is his DNA was perfect. Jesus is the prototypical human. He is, I guess we would say, Adam or Adamas, the proto-human incarnated into this Earth with the Fullness of God fully realized into him from birth onward. So he never made mistakes. He never sinned. He never wandered out of being in contact with the Father. He was always with the Father. Whereas we keep wandering about, lost, until we remember, oh! the Father, the Fullness!, and then we’re back on the glory beam, and then the Christ is sitting in the center of our hearts, and we have full assurance of his presence and of his existence. I have no doubt. I am, like I say, a true believer. But even before I was a Gnostic, I was a true believer in Christ, because I was a born-again Christian. The Jesus Revolution—that is a movie about that revival. So I came out of that church, that era, the Jesus Revolution, if you want to look up the movie. And once you do have a personal relationship with Jesus, with Christ, then there is no need to doubt anymore, because you have a relationship, and you know what happens. Everyone who’s born again has that experience. You have a truly mystical relationship, a dawning of realization. Oh, this isn’t just a story. This isn’t just a fairytale. This isn’t just a dead book written by dead white men, as they like to say. No, I met Jesus, and Jesus lives in me, you see. So I’ve always been a true believer. And now I’m a Gnostic true believer, because the Gnosis out of the Nag Hammadi, especially out of the book called the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, this is material that was stripped out of the New Testament by the Nicene Council in the 300s AD by the Catholic Pope, and by the Emperor of Rome. And it’s a measure to break people away from having communion with the Father by taking the Gnosis out of the Bible and saying these are not true books, these are not true scriptures—that was a move of power and control. It was not a move of truth and knowledge. So A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel puts the Gnosis that Jesus originally knew, I believe, back into the New Testament. And once you are able to read the New Testament with Gnostic eyes, then suddenly scriptures that you may have known all of your life, if you’ve been a Christian, or that you’re just learning now because you aren’t even a Christian yet, they come to life. Now they make sense. Now when it talks about the Fullness of God in the New Testament, you understand what it means. It’s not just an adjective for God being big and mighty and full. No, that’s not what the Fullness of God is. The Fullness of God is that golden pyramid sitting right above us, full of an infinite number of Aeons, who are all the variables of the Son of God. And we are each made up of those Aeons. They are our spiritual, our ethereal DNA. And they give us the blueprints. That’s where the intelligent design comes from for all of the creatures down here on earth. All living things come from the Fullness of God, come directly down, because the Fullness of God is the only thing that brings life, love, and consciousness into this material world. Otherwise the matter is dead. The material is dead. The rocks and stones are not alive. They’re part of the deficiency. They’re part of the Fall. Okay, well I’m sure that’s all the time we have for today. And you can see what I just told you, what is Gnosticism, that’s probably too difficult to tell someone in the dog park in five minutes. But I’m doing my best here. Thank you for spending this time with me. God bless us all. And onward and upward!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week we revisited an episode that was originally posted in October of 2021. It was originally entitled, As Below, So Above, Inferring the Transcendent. We only got through the first half of that original episode because it was a long one and as I was re-recording it, I added some new insights about the current state of politics and how it relates to the Demiurge. If you didn’t hear last week’s episode called As Above, So Below, you may want to back up and start there. In last week’s episode we reviewed the Gnostic cosmology and the path of consciousness from the Father through the Aeons of the Fullness, and then down into creation as a result of the Fall of Logos. We talked about the chaos of the Fall and the rise of the architect of this world, known as the Demiurge, who is the creator god of this cosmos, not to be confused with the Father Above. The Demiurge is the fallen ego of Logos, and it does not remember where it came from. Logos stumbles and Falls while reaching for Glory. The ego of Logos believes that it is all that exists, having forgotten the true nature and source of consciousness. The ego of Logos does not remember love or the life of the Pleroma. As the isolated Ego of Logos, cut off from the Father and the Fullness, the Demiurge cannot generate life or consciousness. The Demiurge brought order and form to the chaos of the Fall and continues to control the material world. We humans and all other living creatures are not generated from the mud up. We are generated out of the Fullness above. Our consciousness and life flow directly from the consciousness of the Father. At conception, we are melded to the material world and use those molecules as building blocks for our bodies. Our mission is to bring love into the world and to ultimately remind the Demiurge of its origins in the Fullness above. The Demiurge doesn’t know this, of course, and it thinks we are simply more material for it to control. It doesn’t know we are conscious, and it thinks we are chaotic because it does not understand the free will we bring into creation. We left off last week’s episode with a discussion of free will versus tyranny in the realm of worldly politics, and noted that the way the Demiurge controls molecules through strong bonds of power like a puppet master pulling their strings is the pattern that tyrannical politicians are using to control the citizens. They’re following the Demiurge’s example, and they attempt to control us with strong bonds of power and strings of control. The end goal is not to build a better world but to quash free will through power and control. The Demiurge keeps chaos at bay by forbidding free will in his subjects Our Ego is often mistaken for the Self. But, it is the Self that is the true reflection of the Father and of the Fullness of God. The Ego is merely a Fall away from the Self; and when you fall away from the Self, or the Fullness of God, you mistake your own Ego for Truth. But it is not Truth; it is a reflection of the world. It is a reflection of those things around us in the material world that are created by the Demiurge. The manner by which the Demiurge becomes the God of this universe is logically self-evident, considering the Gnostic fable I shared last week. The reason for the Fall is that Logos forgot about the rules of cooperation and unanimity that allowed the Fullness to sing their song of glorious praise. Presumptuous thought brought the Ego of Logos to the forefront and replaced its spirit of cooperation with self-centered ambition and lusting for power.   Left on its own, what the Demiurge lacked in terms of the cooperative structure of the Fullness, it made up for with brute force. The Demiurge was able to create order in the material world by a system of bondage and close supervision. The Demiurge took the disordered material of the quantum foam and caused it to level up in a manner reminiscent of the aeon’s Golden Rule. Particles to atoms, atoms to molecules, molecules to elements, elements to minerals. But where the Golden Rule uses the principle of reaching out to others to willingly hold hands and share information, assistance, and love for the betterment of All, the Demiurge uses strings that bind and entwine from a central source, giving no choice in the matter. The Demiurge fills in the lack of consciousness within the deficiency with its own egoic power and plans. The Demiurge is a tyrant who exercises complete domination. The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will. We who are conscious here below are not simply puppets of the Demiurge. The Gnostic Gospel explains that Logos and the Fullness sought a solution to overthrow what had come into being through the Fall. The Aeons fashioned a fruit that reflected their own lives, and imbued this fruit with life and a memory of the Fullness and the Golden Rule of Cooperation. This fruit was sent into the deficiency, our universe, one at a time, from the smallest and most humble to the largest and most complex. It is these life forms that inhabit the universe, and they are called the Second Order of Powers. Born from a good, cooperative thought, the Second Order Powers work in harmony and love, for they had come forth from the harmony and love of the Fullness and the Father. The life forms of our universe are a melding of the Fullness of God, with all of the consciousness and cooperation that comes from the Fullness, with the material controlled by the Demiurge. This marriage of the Fullness to the Demiurge creates an arena of constant conflict and striving, both within ourselves and with our neighbors as we strive with elements of Self and Ego, Above and Below, virtue and vice, freedom and tyranny. We find ourselves in a “never-ending war” with forces and principalities beyond our control as we balance our lives between the powers of the Demiurge and the powers of the Pleroma. In the course of battle, most of us have forgotten our aeonic inheritance. The good news is that the Gnostic cosmology doesn’t stop there. In order to restore memory and reason to the Second Order Powers, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one of them individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for a helper to bring peace to the Deficiency and forgiveness to Logos. Out of their focused prayer, a unique fruit emerged, one that contained all of the capabilities and powers of the Fullness along with all of the love and eternal qualities of the Father. In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is a perfect and full fractal of the Father and the Son, all rolled up into One perfect form.  Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was both perfect Man and perfect God incarnate. Christian Gnostics believe the same. Here is the more complete explanation of who Jesus was: It is said that Jesus was conceived without sin, because he carried within his body the perfection of Man and God. This would mean that Jesus’s DNA was perfect and true to the original DNA formula for humanity, hence the importance of the virgin birth that imparted that perfect DNA to the baby. Jesus was also without negative karma in his soul, as his soul was the soul of God. Jesus was also without negative karma in his soul, as his soul was the soul of God. And, indeed, all Second Order Powers come to Earth with all of the Fullnesses inside of them because our Self is a perfect reflection of the One Fullness of God. It is our karma that causes a worldly meme shroud to attach to us. The components of Jesus’s body were also without sin, as the cells and flesh that became Jesus were in fact the Aeons of the Fullness incarnate. As Colossians 1:19 says, “For God was pleased to have all his Fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” This one sentence from Colossians contains the entire Christian Gnostic gospel. Because Jesus brought along the entire Fullness of the Pleroma when he incarnated, every aspect of the Father and the Son came to material instantiation on earth. In this manner, the eternal God experienced the finite life of us Second Order Powers and all of the struggles between birth and death that plague us all. Here is how the Tripartite Tractate describes it: “They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. Then from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Fullnesses, revealing the countenance of the Father, of whom the Aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus it was willingly and gladly that they brought forth the fruit. “And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them—which was his beloved Son… the one who is properly called ‘Savior’ and ‘the Redeemer’ and ‘the Well-Pleasing One’ and ‘the Beloved,’ ‘the One to whom prayers have been offered’ and ‘the Christ’ and ‘the Light of those appointed,’ in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given to him. Yet, what other name may be applied to him except ‘the Son,’ as we previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father, whom he wanted them to know? “Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, but also they generated their own; for the Aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony. They came forth in a multifaceted form in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the One who gave it to him.”  [Tripartite Tractate, sections 85—87] So, you see, the mission of the Christ, as stated in Colossians, was to redeem all of creation, including the fallen Aeon who founded our material universe. Because the Christ came to redeem everyone, the body of Jesus came to earth with every one of the Fullnesses on board. For every fallen spirit, the Christ brought their own personal and recognizable Savior. The function of Jesus as an earthly, human savior, is to demonstrate to us that we can all be redeemed and resurrected out of the mud and death and into everlasting life. The Jesus figure is presented as our exemplar of how we may all rise, every one of us, including the Demiurge itself. In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ brought the correcting formula for all of our spirits and souls, each unique and personally formulated to meet our individual needs. The baptism of the Christ washes away the mental and spiritual confusion brought on by the endless war with shadows of the Fall.  Gnostics are apocalyptic, as are Christians. There will soon come a day when the Deficiency ends. On that day, a new economy will unite Heaven and Earth, and all souls will find their joyous place in Paradise. The only forms banished to the outer darkness will be the shadows and phantoms of the Fall, which did not exist within the Father from the beginning. These shadows are not real, and they have no home with us in Paradise, and the light of the Father will evaporate them. We 2nd order powers are children of the 1st order powers. The 3rd order powers are the Army of Christ that have come to redeem us. That is the ending of the episode from 2021. Now, my new book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, is all about all of this. This entirety of the entire podcast of the last three years put into a logical and orderly manner that anyone can read and grasp who has an interest in Gnosis, or the God Above All Gods. What I have tried to do is to demystify Gnosticism. I don’t believe that Gnosis should be held like a big secret and kept away from people. We’re all from the God Above All Gods. We are all fruit of the Fullnesses of God. Therefore, we all will be going up to rejoin our parents, to rejoin the Aeons in the Fullness above. No Second Order Power is going into what is called the eternal lake of fire. That actually is something of a mistranslation from the original Greek. We can go into more translations of the original Greek in another episode. In future episodes, I think I’ll try to make more clear both the distinctions and the similarities of Gnostic Christianity with what has become conventional Christianity, because it really does all start with the same Father. When Jesus said, “I and my Father are one. If you see me, you see the Father.” We would hold that to be true. The book will be out very soon. I’m in the final stage of one last comb-through to catch any last little typos and mistakes, since I had to reformat the entire book from scratch myself. Now we are going to publish it through Amazon.com. It’s going to be priced at $24.24. I really look forward to that day, and I’ll let you know as soon as it happens. It will be any day now. And did I tell you that Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio will be narrating the audio book? He begins recording next week. So, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I’m going to re-record and re-present an episode from October of 2021. You probably haven’t heard it or don’t remember it. I had just gotten braces in 2021 and the actual recording itself is pretty poor. Well, you can tell it’s a person who just has fresh braces on their teeth, so we don’t have that trouble anymore. It’s a pretty long episode and it was originally entitled, As Below, So Above, Inferring the Transcendent. I’ve also dropped in some new insights concerning politics… You realize that the manner by which we are mining gnosis here at Gnostic Insights often involves using analogies between what is known and what is less tangible. As Below, So Above provides a handy tool for inferring otherwise undetectable aspects of the spiritual dimension. If we start with the premise of a singular consciousness that pre-exists everything that came after it, then we can follow the genesis of our universe from that consciousness step by step. In today’s episode, we’re going to map aspects of our human personalities onto the Gnostic Gospel to see what we can infer about ourselves down here below and about forms of consciousness above. So, what do we know by now? We generally begin at the beginning and build outward from there, so we start with consciousness. We know that all life forms are conscious and we infer from that a ground state of consciousness and that is what we call the Father. The Father, or consciousness itself, is not the same as having thoughts. It is simply self-awareness. It is the no-thought state that people seek through meditation. Then we say that consciousness, or the Father, or what we call in the Simple Explanation, the metaverse, had a thought. This thought is a ripple in consciousness that arises out of the undifferentiated state of no-thought. The Gnostic Gospel calls this thought the Son. The Son reflects the consciousness of the Father in a circumscribed form. That is, circumscribed means contained, like drawing a circle around something. And in this case, the Son was a circle drawn around the Father’s consciousness. Yet, the Son is not lesser than the Father because there’s no size or distance here and there is no time or space in the eternal omnipresent. The Tripartite Tractate says that no sooner did the Son arise than it had its own thought, which differentiated into every possible thought, like rays of light shooting out from a central star. The Son, mirroring the creative act of the Father, gave rise to himself in the form of countless thoughts. These thoughts became aware of themselves in the same manner that the Son became self-aware. The moment they became self-aware, they named themselves, and the moment they named themselves, they sorted themselves into a hierarchy of relationships with one another. These thoughts of the Son are called Aeons, and the hierarchy into which they arranged themselves is called the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma. The Aeons consist of names, stations, ranks, duties, and locations. This is another way of saying that the Aeons form a kind of geometry of functions and forms that we all know where and what and who they are in relationship with each other. Within the Hierarchy of the Fullness, all Aeons have their own identities, as well as their self-assigned locations and functions. Everyone knows who they are and where they stand in their intermingled ecology. Each Aeon occupies a unique place and perspective within the union of the Fullness. No one is left out, and no one is more important than any of the other Aeons in the hierarchy. The Fullness reflects the entirety of the Son. They coexist and overlap. The Son wears the Fullness as a garment, and the Fullness wears the Son in the manner that our own bodies can be said to be a garment for our souls. Our bodies contain and coexist with ourselves. The Fullness is a singular entity composed of countless Aeons in the same way that our bodies are a singular organism composed of countless cells. The Aeons sat in a unified state. All for one and one for all is their motto. Their main function is to love and to be loved. They love each other. They love the Son. The Aeons love the Father and give constant glory to the Father, so happy were they to be alive. The Aeons yearned for communion with the Father, for they recognized themselves as the fruit of the Father. In the same manner that blood flows throughout our bodies, delivering oxygen and nutrients to every cell, the Holy Spirit of the Father’s consciousness flowed through the Aeons of the Fullness, constantly feeding them love. Although the Aeons dwelt within the single body of the Fullness, they were each an independent self. Their immense variety required them to work together and remain in full agreement, for only through their union could they approach the Father’s greatness. It was only in their unanimity that they reflected the perfection of the Son, and only the Son had direct access to the Father. If they were not in complete agreement, then they could not add up to the Fullness of the Son. It was through giving glory to the Father that the Fullness remained unified as one body. Giving glory means focusing upon an object with adoration and love. The Tripartite Tractate tells us that there was a simple set of rules that ensured the unanimity of the Fullness. In order to remain aligned with the Father, the Aeons needed to glorify only the Father and never themselves. The Aeons were not to glorify their neighbors, neither those beside them nor those above them. They were not to glorify the Fullness as a whole. Rather, their focus was to remain upward, giving glory only to the Father. Furthermore, each Aeon was to give glory from its own location in the hierarchy, with its own talents and capabilities, and not borrowing the talents of its neighbors. Our universe began with the Fall. The Tripartite Tractate calls the Aeon who fell Logos. That is a significant name. Logos is defined as the principle of order and reason. If we think of the Logos within ourselves, we would align Logos with our mind’s reasoning capabilities, including the ability to apply logic and make inferences. The Tripartite Tractate says that Logos was the final Aeon produced when the Aeons sorted themselves into their hierarchical arrangement of the Fullness of God. This Aeon, Logos, contained within itself not only the ability to reason, it also contained all of the traits and abilities of the Fullness, wrapped into a single package. In terms of the Simple Explanation, we would say that Logos was the perfect fractal of the Fullness, carrying within itself all of the knowledge and functions of all the other Aeons. The Bible’s Gospel of John identifies this Aeon called Logos as the Son, but this is an error according to Gnostic cosmology. As we just laid out in the cosmology, the Son is the first fruit of the Father, and the Son is the Father of the Fullness. The Aeon who fell is but one Aeon out of the Fullness. Yes, you can see how Logos reflects the Son being a fractal of the Fullness of the Son. However, it is only a fractal, an iteration of the Son in a lesser form, not to be confused with the Son who precedes it and is more exalted than the Aeons. The Aeon called Logos carries fractal copies of all the Aeons within itself, but these aeonic copies are not each self-aware in the way that the Aeons themselves are self-aware. The aeonic copies contained within the Aeon known as Logos are not themselves conscious. They are merely fractal reflections of the hierarchy, but lacking the consciousness of the Aeons, a resemblance of the Aeons only on the surface, lacking the depth of thoughts. The Tripartite Tractate tells us that the Aeon known as Logos yearned to reunite with the Father, as did all of the Aeons. But rather than sitting with the others in the Fullness, giving glory according to the rules of unanimity, Logos had a thought that deviated from the rules. Logos had its own singular bright idea. This idea came to be known as the presumptuous thought in Gnostic cosmology. Presumptuous means failing to observe the limits of what is permitted or appropriate. What Logos decided to do was to reach out to the Father all on its own. In other words, Logos mistook its own personal will for the will of the Fullness of God. Logos mistook himself, you can say, for the Son. It is this presumptuous thought, born out of misplaced love for the Father, that caused the Fall. This presumptuous thought was the original sin. Christianity continues to make the same error of identification that Logos made. Logos is not the Son. Logos is the Aeon who fell. Logos separated himself from the Fullness of the Son when it took action on its own. This action of leaving the Fullness to strike out on its own is the first act of the ego. The ego of Logos brought about the Fall. Fallen Logos splats into a lower dimension, creating our material cosmos. This action of ego is the true nature of the Fall, not a human handing another human forbidden knowledge in the form of a magic apple. The Fall is birthed by the ego acting outside of the will of God, which is to say, ego putting itself on the throne and making decisions on its own. And this is very true of our own personal human psyches as well. When the ego displaces the Self at the center of our unit of consciousness, as we call it in the Simple Explanation, then we are allowing our self-centered ego to run the show. Ego displaces the One Self we share with the Fullness and the Son. And it’s all downhill from there. Logos fell and broke apart into the poor weak imitations of the Aeons above, and because they were no longer arranged in the orderly ecology of the Fullness, the imitations lacked places, functions, and names, throwing them into a disordered state of chaos. The imitations of the Aeons were not self-aware in the manner of the Aeons whose figures they mirrored, and this lack of consciousness manifested only disturbance, upheaval, and confusion. These phantoms of the deficiency did not reflect in any way the glory of the Fullness, the Son, or the Father. They were feeble, small, and unruly. There was no cooperative will among them. There was no Golden Rule. The small fractals that once formed the pleroma of Logos lost themselves during the Fall and rolled out into chaos. And I’m going to stop here for a moment from the original text of 2021 and insert this thought: Boy, it sounds like politics today, doesn’t it? It seems to me that we can liken, for example, the Constitution of the United States to the agreement amongst the Fullnesses to work in unanimity and cooperation with each other, and we can liken the Fall of Logos to those politicians who disregard the unanimity and basic structure of the Constitution. They are working out of ego. They are working out of personal power, striving for power. So they disregard the rules of how things were designed to work, and they say, to heck with the rules, I know what’s right. I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do that. I’m just dropping in that thought for your consideration. Now, let’s get back to the original text. In The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, my previous book, on pages 20 and 21, I said, “Presumptuous thought and arrogance replaced the wisdom granted by the Father, and Logos lost himself to ignorance and oblivion. Everything he produced, as a result, fell disastrously short of his intended glory. The imitations produced as a consequence of the Fall lacked the ability to reason. Their only thought was for themselves, arising as they did from division. They thought they were all there was, and they admired only themselves, not realizing they were but dark shadows of the Aeons of the Fullness. Because Logos had been reaching for the heights when he fell, the imitation of the Fullness that emerged from the Fall kept trying to reach the unreachable. Only now, what had been a desire of the Aeons to reunite with their Father became an upward striving for power. Personal ambition eclipsed the Father’s will.” And again, jumping back into my analogy between Constitutional directives and the personal ambition and wills of politicians who hold power and only care about power, they may say they have good intentions, like Logos did when he was reaching for the Father, but actually they’re working out of egoic striving for power, and nothing good can come of that. Only ignorance and darkness arises from that, as it did with Logos when he fell. Okay, jumping back into the text, and by way of analogy, so it is with all of us, when our ego holds the throne of our unit of consciousness, as we’ve been saying in the Simple Explanation terms, when our ego is put in the center rather than the Self, with the big S, the Self, then we experience the same sort of self-centered ambition, and the only drive becomes power. When the Self sits at the center of our consciousness rather than our ego, then our Self is in full alignment with the One, with the Son, and with the Fullness. The Tripartite Tractate says that the best part of Logos was horrified by the chaos it had created and fled back to its brethren in the Fullness, abandoning the broken imitation. So, let us consider what of Logos was left behind when the best part of the Aeon abandoned the deficiency. The answer would be ego. The ego of Logos had no remembrance of the Fullness of the Father, for the Self that fled back to the Fullness was the sliver of consciousness that remembered the Father. The ego of Logos, abandoned below, continued to believe that it was all there was, having forgotten the true nature and source of consciousness. The ego of Logos did not remember love or the life of the Pleroma. As the best part of Logos had vacated, the ego of Logos took over management of the Fallen deficiency. We know from both the Bible and from the Tripartite Tractate that the God of this universe brought order to the chaos, forming the heavens and the Earth. However, since the creations of the Fall lacked self-awareness and intrinsic order, they needed to be ruled with an iron fist. Lacking Aeonic cooperation and unity, the imitations of the deficiency required their every move to be directed by the ego of the Fallen Aeon. The God of this cosmos is known as the Demiurge in Gnostic studies, a term it borrows from ancient Greek philosophy. The Demiurge is described as an artisan-like figure responsible for fashioning and maintaining the physical universe. In the Bible, and here’s the heresy—the God of this universe is known as Yahweh, or Jehovah. Unfortunately, this God, the maker of the heavens and the Earth, is not the same as the Father above, as we have seen from this rollout of the Gnostic cosmology. The Demiurge is a sleight of hand misdirection from the true source of life and light. This is one reason I like to begin these discussions with the Father and show the relationship of the Father to the Son and the Son to the Aeons of the Fullness in order to demonstrate that this is not the same Father as the one we were taught to consider the Almighty. The God of this earth and of this material universe was created out of ego during the Fall. This God is the fruit of the original sin. This is definitely not the God Above All Gods, who is our right and proper source of consciousness and the glorious focus of our devotion. This Demiurge, who calls himself the Father, is not the Father above. This Demiurge is only the egoic manifestation of one fallen Aeon. And I think I’m going to stop the original episode here and we’ll take it up again next week, because it was a long episode. As I’ve been retelling it to you, I’m constantly reminded of politics today, because of course politics is in the news, right? Politics is everything right now. And the oddness of how those on the left in politics and those on the right in politics do not seem to overlap at all, yet they hold the same desire. I’m sure that all of the good people, all of the citizens, want peace and harmony in the world and amongst themselves and with each other. This lack of peace and harmony that’s coming to a head right now in our nation and in our world, I believe, is a direct result of the Fall. And I think that as I hear about the Fall and what it caused, and how the imitations of the deficiency lack consciousness, they lack love. They lack, most importantly in my opinion, because I’m a big fan of Logos—they lack Logos. They lack reason, the ability to reason and anticipate the consequences of their beliefs and actions. The politicians are flailing about wanting this and wanting that, and if the people don’t want the this and the that that the politicians are trying to enact, that’s the same way that the Demiurge controls the material universe, through strong bonds. That’s why tyranny is always the result of lack of actually listening to what the people want. Tyranny imposes what it wants, what it thinks is best, and really bottom line is what it thinks is best is that it remain in power. But the people cannot be controlled through tyranny. The molecules, the atoms, the elements, they can. They can be controlled by those strong bonds of power that the Demiurge uses like a puppet master pulling their strings. And that’s the pattern that the politicians are using. They’re following the Demiurge’s example, and they attempt to control us with strong bonds of powers and strings of control. Thou shalts and thou shalt nots. And you’re going, what? Where did this come from? Who said they could do that? I thought we were a constitutional republic. I thought we were ruled by the rule of the people from the bottom up, not from the Demiurgic rule of the politicians. What we are seeing here in this political climate, is fractals of As Above, So Below. As above is represented by people working together according to the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to our neighbors with love, with assistance, and with information to make our nation and our world a better place. This Golden Rule-based politics would put the good of the nation above personal ambition and power. It would focus on the project rather than personalities. It would have a vision that can only be achieved through reasonable measures designed in advance to bring about a particular end. The Simple Golden Rule But what we see today are demiurgic fractals in control of politics and nations. The Demiurge works as a dictator, using strict measures of control meted out by centralized power. The Demiurge desires control, and it cannot allow citizens to have freedom of expression or personal sovereignty. I looked up “political sovereignty” online and Britannica defines it as, “Sovereignty, in political theory, the ultimate overseer, or authority, in the decision-making process of the state,” which is a chillingly accurate description of demiurgic rule. The Ultimate Overseer of this world is the Demiurge, not the people. Remember, the Demiurge does not know love and has no affection for humans and their pesky free will, whereas the Father and the Fullnesses love us and passed along free will as a God-given part of our 2nd Order nature.    Onward and upward. God bless. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I finished getting my book ready for publication and it’s been uploaded to Amazon. I tried to upload it to Lulu, but there were problems with the process and I had to kick back to Amazon, I’m sorry to say. One of the listeners had requested that I go with the small independent publisher Lulu, and I did try, but there were problems. So it seems to be God’s will, we could say, that I publish on Amazon, getting the worldwide distribution. I’m expecting the proof copy about a week from today, and if it looks as good as it appears that it’s going to look, then I’ll be ready to release the book. A couple of listeners have taken me up on the offer and pledge that if you were to donate $50 towards the effort of getting the book published and distributed, I would mail you personally, from my house to your house, a signed copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and I’d be happy to do that for any of you. Just send me a comment through the contact card or through my email address if you have it, and you can have a book from me to you, and I would very much appreciate that, and God bless the people that have volunteered, so thank you very much. Having a bit of a pledge drive here, see? So the things that I had thought were going to be taken care of by the professional publishing company that I decided not to go with, now I’m going to have to be taking care of all of that—the promotion and that sort of thing, social media, all of that. Perhaps one of you listeners is good at those sorts of things and would like to volunteer to help spread the word. That would be terrific. Otherwise, go ahead and leave an extra $20, $25 if you can. I’m going to put the donation form at the end of the transcript to this episode here at GnosticInsights.com. I was listening to a radio preacher this morning, and he was talking, as they often do, about the inherent sin nature of man, or humanity as I would like to say, being a woman. He was saying that we are born into sin because of the original fall of Adam and Eve, and we have a sin nature. They’re always talking about the sin nature, and that that is why we need to turn to Christ and repent and ask for Christ to come into our hearts in order to redeem us because of our inherent sin nature. But you see, in Gnosticism, we don’t think of our psyche in exactly the same way. I wouldn’t say that we do have an inherent sin nature. What I would say, focusing on the good, is that we have an inherent godly nature because, as it says in the Tripartite Tractate and in other Gnostic Gospels, and as it says in the New Testament of the Bible, we are filled with the Fullness of God. And I am taking that literally, that we actually are filled with the Fullness of God, that we have our complete Self, that’s that big S self that is at the core of our being. Our inherent nature, in other words, is a full reflection of the Son of God or the Fullness of God. 14 “For this reason I bow my knees to the Father [f]of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15 from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, 16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— 19 to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. “(Ephesians 3:14-19) So, we do not have an inherent sin nature. We are children of the Aeons of God. We are children of the Fullness, and it’s actually an insult to the Fullness and to the Son of God to say that their children—for are we not the children of God? Are we not brothers and sisters of Jesus?—it’s a big insult to the Aeons and the angels and the Son of God that made us to say that we’re inherently evil. And it’s not because we fell. The Fall was instigated long before the humans came along. The Fall is the nature of our material universe, that’s all. It’s basically metaphorical language for moving from a different realm, a different home—from the ethereal non-material space of heaven, we might call it, or the Fullness of God. And the Fall was the accidental overreaching of that top Aeon, Logos, which has come down into our Christian tradition as the overreaching of the top angel, Lucifer. It’s the same story. It’s the same fractal. And it was that Fall that created our material space, leading to ignorance and forgetfulness of the Father and of all that came before. And all that did come before was the ethereal realm. One of my regular listeners and readers wrote a very good inquiry to me this week. And she had an insight. She had a satori, I believe, because I think it’s in my book, and she’s read my book, and I’m pretty sure that I had already written it. But here it is, because sometimes you hear something or read it, and then months later, it comes back percolating down into you or up out of you, depending on which way you want to think about it. And that’s what your satoris are. Those are your little bits of enlightenment. It’s things that you already know, but now they’re remembered and you can articulate them. And it’s as if you just thought of it for the first time. And here’s what it is. You know the way I picture the Fullness of God as that golden pyramid, right? Those stacking golden cannonballs. And each one of those cannonballs is an Aeon or a facet of the Fullness of God. The Fullness of God is infinite in ability and scope, because it is the Son of God. And the Son wears the Aeons like a cloak, and the Aeons wear the Son like a cloak—they are co-existent. The difference is that the Fullness of God, the Aeons, are broken out and articulated, whereas the Son is one perfectly integrated One. Oneness. That big giant stack of cannonballs is pretty much infinitely large. And it has every concept, every possible thing that will ever be, every relationship, every up, down, in, out, math, physics, chemistry, and every personality that will ever be. All of the animals, all of the forms, the prototypes, the archetypes are in the Fullness of God. So all of the animals, all of the species, pre-exist in the Fullness of God. It’s all there. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God dreams of Paradise. Logos crowns the hierarchy and contains fractals of all the other Aeons. It’s what the Aeons sit and dream about. The Paradise that pre-exists before the Fall, the Paradise, which in our lexicon of thinking has basically come down to us as the Garden of Eden, but it even exists above. It’s Paradise, and it’s the Aeons who sit as One in the Fullness of God, like a big giant slime mold, not going anywhere, but dreaming and creating. They’re the great storytellers. They’re the inventors. They’re sitting there, and they’re dreaming of Paradise. And Paradise is very much like where we live. Paradise is very much like Earth, except that it’s pre-Fall. And so there’s no death or destruction, no sadness, no ignorance. All the angels mingle and mix. All the Aeons mingle and mix. The lions lie down with the lambs. It’s very much like what we expect the third economy that will be coming after this one will be like, after this world passes away—the final economy. And after the redemption, that becomes our eternal home, the good place, right? So each person is—and here’s the point I’m trying to get to—each of us humans, or each creature, each of any kind of creature, dog, cat, cow, rosebush, fish, bacteria, every single creature on the planet, everything, everything that’s alive, which I think of as soft and squishy, as opposed to the mineral elements, which are hard and rocky; all the soft, squishy guys that carry the life, the consciousness, the love of the Aeons above, down into this otherwise dead material world that was created from the Fall—we’re all unique. We’re all completely unique. And when in the Bible it says the Father knew you before you were even conceived in the womb, the Father knew everything about you, that’s because we pre-exist in the Fullness of God. We are the children, like spores, we are the spores or children of the Fullness of God. And we are sent down from them into this material plane, carrying in our little chariots of life, carrying the consciousness of God, carrying the plans and blueprints, the memories, the knowledge, the true knowledge of the ethereal realm, and everything that was ever conceived up there. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5) Now, each of us is unique. And that is because, get this, this is pretty interesting. If you picture that golden pyramid, and think of all those Aeons as lighted golden balls, here’s how Aeons procreate. It says that they look upon each other with adoration and love, and together, they look upon the Father and worship Him with adoration and love together. And this is done in combinations of various Aeons. You know, the lower Aeons are the structures and blueprints of the material world, so to speak. It’s how chemistry works. It’s how physics works. Those are the lower Aeons, and we’re made up of those, aren’t we? But on top of that, we have the living parts, the soft, squishy parts that are brought down from conception onward. Those are what carry the memory and the consciousness of God, because the physical elemental material is not self-aware. The demiurge is aware. He controls them through strings of power, chemical bonds, physical valences and rules, laws. The demiurge strictly controls the material creation, but we, we have that pesky free will. We are a different sort of being. The Self that comes in during conception, when the egg is fertilized, the Self that comes in is the parental aeonic units. We’ve got our earthly parents, we’ve got our genetic inheritance, but we also have aeonic parents. And that, my aeonic parents, I don’t know how many there are, there’s tons of them. They gave glory to each other, and then they gave glory together to the Father. But my particular combination, it’s like a stencil. It’s like a spray paint stencil that you hide part of the Fullness, and it’s only the gold balls that show through in the pattern of the stencil, that’s you. And I’m practically identical to you. I’m practically identical to all of my human neighbors. We just have certain, you know, I’ve got certain covered up aeons, but I’ve got other aeons exposed. So I’m musical. Maybe you’re not musical. Maybe I have an aeon of music, a muse, and you don’t have an aeon of music, but maybe you have an aeon of mathematics or language ability or dance that I don’t have. So we’re all made up of unique combinations of talents. And each talent is given to us by one of our aeonic parents. And so that is how you have an infinite number of combinations of aeons that keep spitting out these spores of life and consciousness that come down during conception and become we creatures. Does that make sense? Do you follow what I’m saying? So are we inherently evil? Well, no. We are the children of the aeons. Now what makes us then, what does make us evil? Why is it then that the preachers think we’re evil? Well, that is because of the never-ending war. That is because of the ignorance, forgetfulness, and delusion that putting these ethereal infinite aeonic creatures that we are into these material forms down here during conception, we are bound to the material world at that point. And our bodies begin to grow and unfold using molecules. That’s the mud up level. But each one of those molecules that’s part of the living cells is also part of the top-down aeonic inheritance because every cell carries a fractal of the Fullness of God in it. And that’s how we build up. Now, the “evil” comes about through ignorance. The Tripartite Tractate says that evil is ignorance. That’s what it is. What are we ignorant of? Well, we forgot who we are and where we came from. That’s what the essential ignorance is. We, like Logos, think we woke up out of nothingness and here we are. I’m a baby and I’m crying now. Well, it’s not that at all. It’s I am a child of the Fullness of God and I’ve been stuffed into this material body and had to develop upward from a single cell on up in the womb until I was born. And I do, when I’m first born, have a memory of Paradise, have a memory of my aeonic parents. Up there things are a lot different. Down here things aren’t as easy. Things are very disappointing. Even learning to walk and falling down because you’re just a baby and you’re trying to stand up and walk like you used to. You can’t do that anymore. So every time you fall down you cry out of frustration. I think that’s why babies cry, because they sense the separation from God now. They know they’re no longer up in Paradise. But the good news is this is temporary. This is not our home, as the hymn books all say. We’re just a-passing on through between one heavenly existence, our pre-life, through this material world of sorrow and woe, pain and disappointment, aging and death, and then on to the glorious final resting place, which is a post-material world. So we are not meaning to be evil. Children are not born evil. We just forget. The Tripartite Tractate says we forget about the Father in the Fullness and the fact that we come from above. And that is the essential core sadness and disappointment of our lives. And of course then that sadness turns around into ways to trying to stop being sad. And then that’s what turns into vices instead of virtues. And all of the trying to stuff down the emptiness of material existence with even more material things. Let’s buy this. Let’s eat that. But that can’t bring you happiness. That can’t bring fullness either. It is not ultimately fulfilling. Jesus talked about the springs of living water you can drink from and never thirst again. “for the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to living fountains of waters. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” (Revelation 7:17) That’s what we remember, and that’s what we’re going back to. And that’s the gnosis that we have to remember. That’s all. Because we don’t have to memorize or learn any sort of occult or esoteric rituals or practices. Because you have to think, if the Father wants us all to remember him, he wants us all to remember him. And that includes the squirrels and the bunny rabbits and the birds. They’re not going to be memorizing astrological charts or alchemy. It’s what do they know. Imagine–what does a blade of grass know? What does the dog know? What does the newborn baby know that you don’t know? You’ve got to be able to conceive of that mentally to realize that there’s nothing to learn. It’s only the knowledge that we are loved. The knowledge that we come from above. And until we remember that, then we will be prone to egoic behavior, and we will be prone to acting out of vice rather than virtue. But once we remember that we come from above, then we are not afraid of God anymore, because we run to God. We know that we are loved. And we know that we love God. And I’m talking about the God Above All Gods, the Father in Heaven, not the Old Testament God that walks around on the Earth. That’s a different cat. Well, okay, I think that’s all I need to go through. I was going to read some scripture, etc., etc. But I don’t think we need to do that. We’ll keep it fairly short today. I hope you’ve gotten something out of this episode. And of course, I always treasure your correspondence because this entire talk today was based upon an email that one of the listeners sent. Just a kind of a little comment that she made about wondering if the Aeons are the archetypes and are we all made of different combinations of Aeons. Yes, yes, praise God. That’s it. So you write me your comments or questions, and I’d be very happy to talk about it on the air. One more thing that has occurred to me recently, and I don’t know, maybe it’s a directive for me, from God. You know, I have a counseling degree as well. And my specialty in counseling was always dream interpretation. And I’m a very good interpreter of nighttime dreams. And that is what I used to mainly do for people as my counseling modality. Because our dream is our unit of consciousness speaking to us during the night when the ego barriers are lowered down, and you don’t have your ego putting this cage around what you can think or imagine. When you are asleep and you are dreaming, it’s your unconscious that rises up and is able to deliver messages to you. And I’m pretty good at picking out those messages. So I’m thinking of somehow offering a service of dream interpretation to my followers and listeners. And I’m not sure how that would go, or how I would charge for that. If you have any ideas of how I should set that up, or if you’re interested, please drop me a line and let me know. And that will encourage me to go with the idea. Okay, until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Yesterday, that would be July 18th, 2024, I was a guest on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio with my good Gnostic friend, Adrian Smith and, of course, Vance Socci and Miguel Conner, and we were discussing the Demiurge. That’s why I’m running this episode this week about the Demiurge. But I encourage you to go to YouTube to the Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, to the episode that’s up this week now. It’s called Navigating These Gnostic Times. Here’s an episode concerning the Demiurge and redeeming the Demiurge from 2022. I’ve edited it down quite a bit to make it a lot more palatable. I hope you enjoy it. The redemption of the Demiurge is a two-step process. Part one had to do with bringing life into creation in the form of all of the Second Order Powers, who themselves are the living representations of the images of the Aeons above. Then part two of the redemption of this creation is the coming of the Christ along with the Third Order of Powers that the Christ contains, the Pleroma of the Christ. That’s the Third Order Powers. And the Third Order Powers come as a covering, as a redemption, for each and every one of the Second Order Powers. So it’s kind of a stacking situation, right? The Fall generated these fractals of the Aeons above, only smaller versions of those fractals because they come out of the broken body of a single Aeon named Logos. And Logos contained within himself a smaller version, so to speak, a fractal of all of the other Aeons. And when Logos brought those to this material plane, this material plane was what they called a likeness, the likenesses of the Aeons above, but they were dead. They weren’t alive. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. In a similar way that a mirror reflects ourselves, right? The mirror is a flat 2-D representation of my 3-D body. The material creation down here that started as the Fall of Logos is a likeness of the Aeons above in the Fullness of God—it’s a different, though, dimension, the way that the mirror is 2-D that reflects and backwards reflects, by the way, my 3-D reality. Our material creation is a 3-D reality that reflects, and in an inverted way, the Aeons above. So there’s a likeness of the images above for every one of the Aeons. And those likenesses are the egoic side or the broken side, the shadow side; they’re the inversion of the Aeons above. In order to redeem the Fall, in order to reclaim the body of Logos back up into the Fullness of God, to release it from this different plane that it has found itself on, the Second Order Powers, all of us living creatures, everything that contains the Holy Spirit, the spark of life, there’s one of us Second Order Powers for every one of the likenesses of the Demiurge of the Fall. And then, on top of us, there is a Third Order Power for every one of us Second Order Powers. And the Third Order Powers are the pleroma of the Christ that come along with the Christ to redeem creation. What we’re talking about today comes from the part of the Tripartite Tractate that is called The Pleroma of the Logos, Section 9. “When the Logos which was defective was illumined, his pleroma began.” So the Logos which was defective, that’s the Logos who has returned now to the Fullness of God, to his brothers back up in the Fullness. He abandoned his egoic broken unit of consciousness down here below. That’s why the Demiurge has no remembrance of the Fullness, because Logos himself, which carries the one spirit of the entirety of the Fullness and God, returned back to his home in the pleroma. “Pleasing among things which are good, existing among the things which exist, resembling them in beauty, but unequal to them in truth, but in wisdom and knowledge he acts, mingling the Logos within himself entirely. Therefore, those which came forth from him are great, just as that which is truly great. 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,” that’s us, “and so that they might receive something good, 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. 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.” So remember, all of us down here below, we are each constituted after a particular Aeon, or a particular Aeon who is itself combinations of Aeons. Everything down below that is living is modeled after the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And so, when the Logos who was redeemed, that is the body of the Pleroma of the Christ which comes down, it’s constituted as everything that’s already down here, so that it can plug right into it. Every element of the Christ, that is, these Third Order of beings, which are the Pleroma of the Christ, every one of them has the ability to perfectly plug into and cover, cover with redemption, cover with love, cover with the knowledge of the Father, cover with the light of God, that bit of life that’s down here—trapped in this coexistent hellish type of world with the fallen Demiurge. You know, each one of us is bonded to the material world by these bodies that we walk around in. So, “This is destruction for the beings of the likeness,” and those beings of the likeness, those are the archons and the fallen egos and our egos, “yet it is an act of beneficence for the beings of the thought.” And the beings of the thought, those are the pure images, that are kept pure up above. They have not been sullied by what has come about down here in this fallen world. “A revelation of those who are from the ordinance,” the ordinance, those are the Aeons of the Fullness, because ordinance is another word for a Hierarchy, an order. So the beings of the ordinance, those are the Aeons of the Hierarchy of the Fullness. “…which was a unity while suffering, while they are seeds which have not yet come to be by themselves.” And the reason the Aeons of the Fullness are suffering is because one of them, Logos, left them and fell and created this material world. And so the Fullness has been suffering ever since. “The one who appeared was a countenance of the Father and of the harmony.” So we’re talking about the Christ now. “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, so that he might perfect them through the images which he had brought forth.” And those are the images of the ALL and the Fullness. Carrying on, “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.” See, we would like to have undefiled pleasures. So often our pleasures become defiled. And defiled means made icky, right? You start something because you like it and it’s really good, and then you overdo it and it becomes defiled. So, in the final economy, we will have undefiled pleasures. “He generated those whom he remembered at first when they were not with him. He generated them having the perfection. 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.” He’s generally talking about us now. This is the way the Christ comes to us—gently, so that we don’t just collapse in the glory of God. “The thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him was called Aeon in place for all of those whom he brought forth in accord with the ordinance. It is also called the synagogue of salvation because he healed himself from the dispersal, which is the multifarious thought.” And multifarious means divided. And so the multifarious thought is all of our individual egos that lead us into our own will without considering the will of the Father. The Christ leads us out of our egoic self-centered selves. The Christ leads us back into harmony with the One, with the Fullness, with the ALL, with the Son, with the Father. That is what it means to be healed from the multifarious thought. You step away from the ego that drives you into your own narcissistic behavior and you instead become one with the Fullness again, one with the Father, because we have the Christ within us. And the Christ is this wonderful combination of the Fullnesses, the ALL, and the Father, and all of the power that comes directly out of them and directly into us. So, again quoting, “He healed himself from the dispersal, which is the multifarious thought, and returned to the single thought.” And the single thought, that’s the gnosis of the Father, the knowledge that you are loved and that you come from the Father and that you will return to the Father. Similarly, quoting again, “It is called the storehouse because of the rest which he obtained, giving it to himself alone. It is also called the bride because of the joy of the one who gave himself to him in the hope of fruit from the union.” And the fruit from the union is going to be, or is, if you are a true Christian who has accepted the Christ and turned from the multifarious thought to the One Self, which is a pure reflection of the Christ and the power of God. The fruit of that union is a redeemed human being or a redeemed Second Order Power—that is the fruit of the union. Right now, the Second Order Powers are the fruit of the Fullness. But when the Christ comes into the Second Order Power, it now is a new creation. It is a new fruit. “It is also called kingdom because of the stability which he receives while he rejoices at the domination of those who fought him. And it is called the joy of the Lord because of the gladness in which he clothed himself. 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 which we previously spoke is above the two orders of those who fight against one another.” Okay, the two orders that fight against one another, that’s the archons and the fallen bits of the Demiurge, the material world, and the Second Order of Powers, which is all of us living things. “It is not a companion of those who hold dominion and is not implicated in the illnesses and weaknesses.” Things belonging to the thought and to the likenesses. The likenesses are those fallen parts. “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.” And that is the way that conventional Christians think of Jesus, the Christ. That Jesus had the form of matter, that is, as a human walking around, but also the constitution of the cause, that is, he was one with the Father. “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. Moreover, the countenance of the One who revealed himself and 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 in 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 a word for speaking and the perfection of the things of the 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, which are the forms.” The redeemed Pleroma of Logos, redeemed by the Christ, is the final resting place for the Demiurge once it remembers and recognizes its brothers in the Fullness and the Father of them all through the power of Christ, because it took that power of Christ coming in to this material world through us in order for the Demiurge to remember. The Third Order of Powers is called the aeon, the place, the thought of the Logos who returned to his stability. It’s known also as the synagogue of salvation, the storehouse, the bride, the kingdom, the church, the image of the light. It is set above the Second Order and the deficiency. It has the form of matter, but the constitution of the Christ, each one containing the Pleroma of the All. These are the manifest images of the living visages, not arising from division, but from the unity of the aeons of the Father and the good original thought that existed prior to the rise of ego. While the Second Order Powers, us, each arose at the countenance of a single aeon, the Third Order Powers are in harmony and resemble the entire assembly of indivisible light. The Third Order Powers have not yet come into being. They are pure and joyful, the guarded seed of the promise awaiting their mission of coming with the Savior. They are first in the knowledge and glory of the Father, and that knowledge is freedom and release from captivity. They will proclaim the coming of the Savior to both angels and men. The Third Order will be brought forth from the unified ALL with full remembrance of the Father to prepare the way for salvation and redemption. This is why my diagram of the final economy has moved them up to be nestled right beside the Christ, even above the Aeons of the Fullness. This Final Economy is the final disposition of our material universe and the Demiurge that rules it. It rests right within the larger consciousness of the ALL, the Son, and the Father.   Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode. May I remind you, I’m raising money in order to self-publish A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. There were some publication problems, and now I’m having to publish it myself, and I very much thank my listeners who have volunteered money toward that end. A couple of weeks ago, I said, if you would contribute $50 now, then when my book is published, and it’s going to be published very, very soon now, if you contribute $50, I will be more than happy to mail you a copy, a signed edition, from my house to your house. Thank you very much. I appreciate you so much. Onward and upward! 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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week I’m sharing with you an episode that was broadcast in 2021, very close to the beginning of the Gnostic Insights podcast, but it’s really good as I listen to it and I am going back and slightly re-editing it, and I think that you’ll get a lot out of this episode. It’s foundational, alright. Last week I made a plea to you for donations to help me publish this book that I’m putting out now. Please, if you can afford to, this is a good time to chip in and give me some financial support. I really hate asking for money. This goes against my grain in a big, big way, so please don’t confuse me with the televangelists or any other person out there with a podcast that’s always asking for money. You know I don’t ask for money very often. You can think of yourself as contributing to this extremely important book that’s coming out. You will be part of history at this point. I’ve inserted a donation form at the bottom of this page for you to use. That book, of course, is called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. You know, I started with a Christian publisher and that ran into troubles, and so now I am producing the book myself. I have completed the editing, the layout, the typesetting, and now I have uploaded it, and I’m waiting for my proof copy, at which point then I can put it on the market and release it to you. Okay, enjoy this week’s episode. Onward and upward! My goal here at this podcast is to share with you information from the Nag Hammadi, primarily from the Tripartite Tractate, concerning the gnosis of our existence, which is a big topic. Gnosis means knowledge, and the knowledge we talk about here is the knowledge of our preexistent conscious spirits and our souls, and how these fit into these bodies that we wear and we walk around with, and how it is that we interact with one another. And the reason it seems to me that it’s important to discover the gnosis that is within you is because this is your personal reassurance that you’re not alone in this universe. We are not alone. We come from the God Above All Gods initially, and we pass down through the Son and through the Aeons and the Fullness of God. Our spirit comes directly from the God Above All Gods. It’s a conduit. It’s a flowing stream. So we are embedded within the consciousness of the originating consciousness. That is like the background matrix of not only of our universe, but before our universe and outside of our universe. We are a part of this great Being that we call the Father in Gnostic studies. And I share with you the gnosis that I have gained over my entire lifetime of thinking about, praying to, pursuing the ideas of, in all the different forms, this form of consciousness. You know, as a child, I began these kinds of studies very young, probably around age four, oftentimes in conversation with my older brother, Bill, whom you run into here and there on Gnostic Insights. And then I majored in psychology because I wanted to understand psychology. I majored in education because I wanted to learn how to share and to educate other people. I have an advanced degree in counseling and an advanced degree in communication, yet I’ve discovered that all of these degrees don’t really matter much if there’s no one to talk to about it. So my purpose here at Gnostic Insights is to share with you the gnosis that I have come across, not so that you will adapt anything I say, but so that it triggers within you the gnosis that you carry, because we’re all sharing the same stream of consciousness. I would very much like to hear from you, because as an educator, it helps me to know where you are at, and I need to have questions from you in order to stimulate answers from me. I often feel as though I’ve used up all the information I have to share, and I know that’s not true, because my gosh, I’ve read so many books, and I’ve had so many papers on these topics, yet I need to know what you want to know in order to know what direction I should go with these episodes. So please, go to the GnosticInsights.com website, and go to the comments form, and send me your email, send me your comments, send me your questions, and then I can address them, hopefully publicly here at Gnostic Insights. I can preserve your anonymity, that’s fine. I’d like to know where you are in your Gnostic search, and then we can go together from there. So, this week I was at something of a loss about what to talk about, and so once again I am dipping back into the wells of time to my Simple Explanation blog, and I’m pulling out an article from January 31st of 2011. I’ll read it to you, it’s in Simple Explanation terminology, but then I’ll translate it into Gnostic speak, so that we can see how these things go together. The Gnosis I share with you comes not only from my own personal experience, but it comes from the Nag Hammadi, and primarily the text in the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate. Our focus here is on consciousness and your life. It’s not on the names of the 365 angels or anything like that. To me, these are irrelevant to our pursuit of Gnosis. In my mind, what we need to understand is our relationship to the God Above All Gods, and our relationship to the Son, to the Christ, to the Fullness of God in the Pleroma, and we are fractals of all of that consciousness. And so, our lives resonate to the Fullness of God. This has all happened before, and it has happened at a different level and at different times in history. Most of the stories, most of the things that happen to us in our lives are fractals of things that have happened before. There are only so many stories. There really aren’t that many different things that can happen to you in your life. They boil down to the large archetypes. You know, Jung talked about archetypes. And he got those archetypes, as it turns out, from his reading of the Nag Hammadi. When I was a psychology major and a counseling major at the university, I studied Jung. I liked Jung. I never realized that Jung got this information from ancient spiritual texts, the same ancient spiritual texts that we talk about here at Gnostic Insights. So, the archetypes that Jung speaks of, which I learned as simply Jung’s theory of transpersonal psychology, these are not Jung’s ideas. These are eternal concepts that were preserved for us in the form of the Nag Hammadi codices. And you know, the Nag Hammadi was buried in the desert for just about 2,000 years and stumbled across in 1945. So, they have been preserved for us unmolested by 2,000 years of Christian interpretation and theology. They were thrown out of the Christian orthodoxy around the time of the Nicene Council and buried underground in order to preserve them for us. And this is what we are sharing. So, today what I would like to talk about is an article I wrote back in January 31st of 2011, and it’s called, A Simple Explanation of Transpersonal Memory. And you can find this at my original blog called asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com. Transpersonal psychology deals with mystical and spiritual experiences of the human psyche. Transpersonal memory is defined as memories that are shared at a cultural level, rather than at a personal level. Transpersonal memories reveal themselves in many ways, through societal archetypes and archetypal dreams, through subconscious assumptions, stereotypes, and expectations, and through strange occurrences such as the 100th monkey phenomenon. Jung referred to this transpersonal memory as the collective unconscious. Now, I quote Jung. He says, “My thesis, then, is as follows. In addition to our immediate consciousness, there exists a second psychic system of a collective universal and impersonal nature, which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually, but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily, and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” And that is from The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, published in 1996. And, quoting from Wikipedia, excuse me for that, Jung also made reference to contents of this category of the unconscious psyche as being similar to Levi-Bruhl’s use of collective representations, or représentations collectives, mythological motifs, Hubert and Mauss’s categories of the imagination, and Adolf Bostein’s primordial thoughts. The Simple Explanation refers to these collective memories as culturally shared memes and meme chords. A person can be defined by the memes they cling to. To a large extent, one’s memes shape one’s personality. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has written extensively about and staked his professional reputation upon a scientifically controversial process called morphogenetic fields. How does an oak tree develop from an acorn? By information carried in the morphogenetic field surrounding the acorn. Sheldrake explains that morphogenetic fields are to life forms, as quantum probability clouds are to subatomic particles, carrying the information that gives rise to particular biological manifestations of form. The Simple Explanation would cite these morphogenetic fields at the zero-point field at the center of the torus, part of the metaversal information streaming into our universe through our universal unit of consciousness, and that information is tempered by each organism’s karmic record and its acquired memes. In the case of the acorn and the oak tree, the morphogenetic field of the oak tree provides the genetic blueprint, while the mama tree’s karma and memes provide the individualized epigenetic pattern that tells which genes to turn on and off. What karma can a tree have? Well, its karma is the record of its life, nutrients, history of water availability, pest attacks, and so on. And what memes can a tree hold? Well, how about, the sun feels good on my leaves, I must follow the sun. Or, there’s a pest attack on the other side of the forest, I must put out chemicals to repel that pest. In an article published in the journal called In Context, Robert Gilman ties together morphogenetic fields and personal memories by describing how the memories generated by our brains are, “not locked in your brain, but are available through all space and all future time,” through the process of morphogenetic resonance. Gilman claims that not only is our biological form influenced by these fields, but our behavior, as well as shared memories, influence behavior. The Simple Explanation agrees with Sheldrake and Gilman that personal memories do not reside in the meat portion of our brains, but are rather vibratory patterns held in the zero-point field and accessed through our minds. Furthermore, apparently personal memes are actually harmonics of collective memes and are shared in common with all who hold on to that meme. The particular shadings of one person’s meme differ slightly from the next person’s, as is to be expected among fractal replications of a single phenomenon, but all who hold the meme recognize its pattern and are affected by it. ******************* That’s the end of the article I wrote years ago, and let me talk about it in more Gnostic terms now. We exist as individual entities, and we are floating in this ocean of consciousness. The basic ocean of consciousness is referred to as the Father, and that consciousness funnels down to us, you could say, focuses on each of us in the following way. You have the original matrix of consciousness, and then a particular instantiation or a particular thought out of that consciousness, and that is often referred to as the Son. That’s what it’s called in the Tripartite Tractate. In other books of the Nag Hammadi, this is the Barbello. And out of that Son differentiates a myriad, an infinite number, of individual characteristics or individual laws, principles, concepts, and those are called the Totalities, or once they sort themselves and form themselves into some sort of a cooperative structure, that is called the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God. And I picture that, by the way, of course, as a hierarchy, as a pyramid. And that’s why these pyramid forms are so popular in ancient styles of thinking. The pyramid, the mountain—that is a remembrance of the Pleroma above. And the Pleroma is another word for everything, which is referring to the Fullness of God, which is referring to this myriad of infinite variations of the one thought. Now, we are the fruit of that Fullness of God pyramid. We come out of the pyramid. And the way that happens with us is that those Aeons that live in that Pleroma, the Aeons of the Fullness of God, they get together, they admire, give glory to the Father together, and in their mixtures of the various Aeons, another level of personalities, another level of entities are conceived. And you can think of those as the forms that we become, as the forms of each of us. And then we come out into this material world as those forms. Now, the transpersonal consciousness is the thoughts of the Fullness of God, and we all share those thoughts. We are all plugged into the Fullness of God. We directly come down from them. We all share the same Fullness of God, whether or not you remember it consciously, we all remember it subconsciously. And the shared thoughts that we all share, this is referred to by Jung as the transpersonal field. And when Rupert Sheldrake talks about the morphogenetic field around each individual life-form—the morphogenetic field around an acorn that causes it to become the tree—this is the form, this is the pattern that is coming out of the transpersonal field and informing or giving form to that life-form. Life-forms don’t come from the mud up. Life-forms do not aggregate upward from the molecular level on up the way that evolution suggests it does. That is an error. That is a materialist worldview. But you know, no matter how scientists try, they cannot prod a piece of mud into life. It is impossible. Life comes from above. Life comes from the top down. Our material comes from the bottom up, but it’s dead. It is a product of the Fall. It doesn’t come from the Pleroma of God. The mud comes from the Fall. The Spirit, and this is what is meant by the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is flowing unimpeded like the river from the Father’s consciousness through the Son, differentiating out into all of the Totalities, now into the Fullness of God, that great pyramid in the sky where the Aeons all sit and sing in perfect harmony, glorifying the original consciousness. And they sit and they dream of stuff the way we dream of stuff. They come up with ideas and stories. They come up with books and screenplays. They come up with works of art and music. That’s all going on up above. Our inventors and scientists and musicians and writers, they’re tapping into the Fullness of God. They’re bringing these archetypal stories down to us. So they are singular archetypal stories, but then they become flavored with the individualized memes of this person walking around down here on earth, because our personalities and our basic spiritual composition is precisely patterned upon the forms in the Pleroma, in the Fullness of God. But once we are instantiated here on this material plane, we acquire these ideas from each other, and these are what I call the memes. Everything you learn, everything you experience, everything you hate, everything you love, no matter what it is, these are ideas that are acquired down here. That is, the earthly memes are all acquired down here, and they color your interpretation and restatement of the archetypal pattern that exists in the Fullness of God. So our life is a combination of the pure knowledge informing us, and that’s the gnosis from above, as well as these loves and hates and knowledge that we acquire down here below, and those are the memes. And then another aspect that colors our interpretation of the archetypal forms is our own personal karma, and karma is your record of consequences, of actions. So your karma may or may not allow you to even hear what someone else is saying, because as a consequence of prior actions, that is your karma, you are either open or closed to what they have to say, to their memes. So the transpersonal consciousness, the morphogenetic field, these are the same as the patterns of the Fullness of God, and they don’t live inside of our brains. They live outside of us. They are floating. They are the sea. They are the ocean in which we are immersed, and your karma and your meme bundles pretty much determine how much of that transpersonal field you’re able to tap into. And this is the bottom line of what I attempt to do here. When I share thoughts, when I share my memes with you, I’m attempting to suggest that these memes are occurring in the transpersonal field, and these are the virtues. The virtues, by the way, are the memes of the Fullness of God, and the Tripartite Tractate is a book that shows how these memes came to be in the first place, and how it is that they come to us, and who we are in relationship to the Fullness of God. So that is the purpose of today’s episode, just to share with you this idea that there is a transpersonal consciousness that we all share. You could call this the mind of the Father. In our earthly realm, we have generated a lot of memes, like the cloud, right? And the cloud, I do think, is a technological representation of the transpersonal field, and it houses these earthly memes that people are generating. Now the error of the cloud, of the human-built cloud, is that some of the things that are in it are true, and some of them aren’t true. Some of them are lies. Some of them are hurtful. Whereas the information that comes down to us directly from the Fullness of God, the gnosis, is all true. It’s all helpful. It’s all loving. It’s all good. So rather than spending all of our time delving into our earthly generated meme cloud, which has a lot of crap in it, it’s a good idea to focus upward and tap directly into the gnosis that you can trust. There, there’s a bumper sticker, gnosis you can trust. So that’s all I have to share with you today. I hope that you reach out and talk to me using the comment form at GnosticInsights.com, because I would love to be able to respond to your questions and observations, and this will give me something to talk about on the next episode. So until then, look inward, look upward, onward and upward, and God bless. Make a one-time donation Your contribution is appreciated. Donate Make a monthly donation Your contribution is appreciated. Donate monthly Make a yearly donation Your contribution is appreciated. Donate yearly

Father, Son, ALL 2024 edition Welcome to the Gnostic Insights podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m here to share, well, what the title of this podcast is—Gnostic Insights—with you. Hey, I have some exciting news for you. I’m nearing completion of reformatting The Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate for publication. I anticipate uploading it in the next few days, and then I’ll need to examine the proof copy before releasing it for distribution. The Gnostic Reformation could really use your help in the form of contributions for the cause, for advertising and promotion. Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio has agreed to narrate the audiobook, and that will also be available by the end of summer, and I need funds for paying for his narration as well. So now is the time to contribute what you can to this effort. If you need a bribe, I’d be happy to personally mail you a signed copy of the book in exchange for your generous contribution of at least $50 to cover the cost. If that’s the case, please contact me privately with your home address for mailing. You can use the contact form at GnosticInsights.com and let me know. However, if you can’t afford the $50, that’s fine—any contribution would help. I appreciate whatever you can contribute. Thank you so much. Onward and upward! It’s summertime, and I’m distracted with working on the new book and with all of the events surrounding summer activities, so I’m going to rerun one of the foundational episodes from 2021, and this is about the nature of the Father, the Son, and then the Fullness. Enjoy! The Nag Hammadi scriptures were buried deep in the desert around 300 AD to save them from the great purge that occurred when the Bible was codified by the Pope and the Emperor of Rome and made into the packaged Christianity that we know today. Before that package, there was a type of spiritual belief that was well known to Jesus and his followers that was then cut out of the Bible out of the New Testament during the Council of Nicene. These ideas were preserved in a set of books called the Nag Hammadi, which were buried in the desert to keep them from the purge, and then they were rediscovered and dug up in 1945, so they have been kept away from almost 2,000 years of formal study and formal theology. What you hear from the Nag Hammadi scriptures is fresh and clean and uninterpreted by experts. So what I have done is study one particular book of the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate, and it is that book which I used primarily in the book that I wrote called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which I published in 2019. I like to begin with a study of the cosmos or cosmology as it unfolded, as it rolled out. This makes the most sense to me, to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are, and then what happens in our lives and why are we here. And then the final roll-up is the very, very end of time as predicted by the scriptures. So let’s begin at the beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. This story begins before the beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos existed. And so if you think of the originating consciousness as a vast consciousness which has no place and no time, no history—it is nothing but pure consciousness without thought, similar to what the Buddhists call the Buddha mind, something people try to achieve during meditation, where you can be aware that you are conscious, but you have no particular thoughts or words or images going through your mind. No thought, no images, no structure or form, no thing at all. And this is the consciousness of the Father, and we only say the Father—there’s no gender, obviously. The Father is not a man with a beard and long robes. Obviously there’s no gender, it’s a singular consciousness, okay? So let’s get off the notion of being upset by calling it a father. I suppose we could call it a mother, or we could just call it consciousness. In the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book that I am translating for you, it is referred to as the Father. And this Father, its basic consciousness is not thoughts, but rather love, the sensation of knowing what we call love. So this consciousness simply is, without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning, without end, utterly quiet, utterly still, utterly alone. This Father is often described as all-knowing, but what is there to know? All-seeing, but what is there to see? All-loving, but what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom, will, but to what end? There’s nothing there. Now imagine that this consciousness gives birth to a emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation blog, we call this a fractal. In the religious texts, they call it a son, S-O-N. So now we have the Father and a Son. So in the silence of the Absolute, the Father brings forth the first and only Son from its realization of itself. The Son is the Father having a thought. The Son is the Father knowing itself, as the Father having a sensation of its own eternal self. The Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. 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 expressed now as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. 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, arose at once. Capital A-L-L. The ALL immediately appeared as the offspring 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, because it is a reflection of the Father’s traits. And so the Father knows itself and creates the Son, and the Son knows itself and creates the ALL. In religious talk, the ALL is known as the preexistent Church. Not your church down on the street corner with the people in it singing hymns on Sunday, but this is the true preexistent Church. The Tripartite Tractate says, “For not only the Son, but also the Church exists from the beginning.” The Tripartite goes on to say, “Before the ALL arose from the Father’s thought, He knew them, but they did not know the depth in which they found themselves, nor could they know themselves or anything else. For they were within the Father as an embryo, or an unsprouted seed.” So they were potential. They were there, they live in the Father, they live in the Son, but they don’t know anything, they don’t know themselves, they are not self-aware. The way the Tripartite Tractate describes this, it says, “Because they were newly formed, the Father concealed the ALL’s perfection from them until they could grow into the knowledge. This is why the Father revealed the Son to them, so the ALL would be able to relate to the Son and see the Father’s glory according to the ability of each one to receive Him.”   So nobody sees the Father. The Father is unknowable. The Father is too immense. When people say, Oh, you can’t conceive of God, God’s all too big and unknowable, that’s true, but God made itself into a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. And one of the reasons the Son is there is because we can know the Son. We can’t know the Father, but we can know the Son. The Tripartite Tractate describes this this way, “The Son is no more and no less than the sum of the ALL, and they understood who He is, and He is covered by the ALL. And with the birth of the ALL, the Son also became a Father.” So this can be a little confusing because you have the Originating Consciousness, the God Above All Gods, which is the Originating Consciousness or the Father. The Father had a sense of itself. This was called the Son, S-O-N. The Son immediately produced itself, and this is called the ALL. With the birth of the ALL, the Son also became a Father. The Originating Father, that consciousness so lonely and still for eternity, now had a child who had also borne fruit from His glory. And in this way the One begat the ALL, and the Father loved them all as He loved His Son. As I said, the ALL is referred to as the pre-existent Church, and it’s also called the Second Glory. The First Glory was the Son. The Second Glory is the ALL. The Originating Father’s consciousness is incomprehensible. Its scope and greatness is so immense and so unfathomable that the Tripartite Tractate says anyone trying to take hold of it would be annihilated. And so the Father created the Son, giving form to what had been His formless and solitary Self. For the Father’s desire was to be known. His desire was to love and to be loved. The Son that arose is perfect, even as His Father is perfect, and He carries within His perfect form every quality of the Father. Being the perfect image of the Father, the Son’s inherent creativity spread itself out into the ALL, like rays shining from a star. In my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, I illustrate these concepts. The way I think of it is this way. When I picture the originating consciousness of the Original Father, I see just total blackness, an entirety of dark, dark blackness. Then when I picture the Son emerging and being held by that blackness, I see the Son as kind of this foggy light that begins, very diffuse, very foggy, that begins to emerge out of the inky blackness. That is what I see as the Son. Then immediately coming out of that foggy image of the Son, like rays of a sun spreading out, I see bright golden light coming from the of that fogginess and beaming outward like the Sun. These are just helpful illustrations for me. So when I picture the ALL, I picture it as a bright yellow starburst. The ALL, like the Father and the Son, is infinite and limitless in its scope and capability. Each individual ray of that Son emerges from the central seed of the Son, shining forth as one shared body. In the same way that a crystal refracts light into all the colors of the rainbow, so the Son beams forth every one of his countless qualities as the individual and yet unified rays of the ALL. The ALL is a single entity, yet it has differentiations. Picture each one as a ray coming out from a central starburst. The Son intimately knows each facet of the ALL, for the ALL are all facets of himself. The ALL is at the same time one and many, one and all. The ALL is a selfless diversity, giving glory to the Father with a single song of praise. So you can picture the ALL as singing in unison when it sings. The Son, who became the Father of the ALL, shines forth as the emergent rays of the ALL. So these are the basic ideas behind the Father, the Son, and the ALL. One more thing before we leave this idea. What does glory mean? Because glory is one of these religious terms that is used quite a lot. But what is glory? The way I interpret glory, glory is the fabulousness of someone. I think we have an intuitive sense of what glory means. Glory is, oh my gosh, that is so fabulous! So we say that the Father is glorious, the Son is glorious. And what does it mean to give glory? Because we’re to give glory to God. Giving glory means that you are focused on the object in adoration and love. That is giving glory. So glory is the wondrousness of the object, and giving glory is reflecting that glory back at your object of devotion. God is glorious, and when I give glory to God, I am loving God by seeing that glory and acknowledging it and reflecting the glory back to the God. Glory is not something that you can offer to another person. When you glorify another person or thing, that’s what I would call vain glory, V-A-I-N, because no one but the Creator of the universe qualifies to generate and to receive glory. And glory is not worship for the sake of worship, as if God needed our adoration. This would imply that the Father of the universe is hungry and insecure and wheedling for our affection, as if we mere mortals could offer up anything of value not already owned by the Lord of creation. That just doesn’t make any sense. So giving glory is not for God’s benefit, it’s for our benefit. The reason we give glory to God is because that is the method by which we tune in to God’s frequency, you could say. Giving glory to God is how we synchronize ourselves with the one consciousness of which we are essentially fractal units. I’ll explain fractals at some other time. Why would we want to synchronize with the Father? The Gnostic Gospel tells us that we were designed with a built-in homing device that gives us indescribable pleasure when we are in communion with one another and when we are operating according to plan. The closer we are to dialing in to the Father’s frequency, the happier we feel. It is through this process of giving glory that we realign ourselves with the universal unit of consciousness, or what we are calling the Father or the God Above All Gods. This is how we align ourselves for instruction and for renewal. When we center ourselves and sit in silence with the Father, we feel peace, happiness, joy, and love. When we acknowledge the Maker and focus in that direction, we give glory and we are united in glory. And when we give glory alongside others who are themselves giving glory, we share with them a worship experience of the One that transcends what any of us can experience alone. So this is not for the benefit of a needy god, but for the edification of the saints. Edification means strengthening. It is through giving glory that the choir, of which we are a part, is able to sing along with one perfect voice. It is very important to choose your objects of glory carefully. In this distracting world in which we find ourselves, we are giving glory away right and left to things that do not deserve glory. We glorify movie stars and television stars. We glorify sports figures. We glorify models and products that we love. This is a distraction away from true glory, and it doesn’t make us happy. Only glorifying the Father in love can make us happy. The other objects that we may find ourselves glorifying, these are imitations, these are deficiencies, and so they cannot ever fulfill us the way that we hope they will. I think this is a good beginning for our basic concepts. We’ll talk a lot more about all of this in podcasts to come. So thank you so much for being with me today, and I’ll see you again next time. God bless!

This week’s episode was first broadcast in May of 2021 So far, here at Gnostic Insights, we have discussed the basic cosmology of Gnosticism as explained by the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi codices, and those are outlined in the first eight episodes of this Gnostic Insights podcast. I recommend that you listen to those first eight episodes, and you can find them on the GnosticInsights.com website, under the tab, The Gnostic Gospel Primer. We’ve also begun to discuss the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which was my previous format, you might say, for understanding our world. You see, we all build these models in our minds of how things work, and this is there, and that’s there, and this is who I am, and that’s who you are, and this is why things happen, and it’s all so confusing. So over the many years, I have developed a philosophy called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which you can find on my blog of the same name, and it is not specifically what you would call Gnostic. However, it is Gnosis in the sense of knowledge, and I am always happy to share that. I have also incorporated a few of the basic memes from the Simple Explanation into my Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and that is why sometimes we hear words in my podcasts that you don’t find written in the Nag Hammadi, words like memes, and words like fractals, and units of consciousness. And so it’s helpful to listen to these podcasts basically in the order that they have been recorded so that you can understand the memes I am using, and this will assist in your own remembering of the Gnosis that is within you. Today’s episode of Gnostic Insights is about who we are. Who am I? is the question we always ask ourselves. Am I my ego? Am I my Self? Am I God Consciousness? Who am I? My ego is not really me, even though that’s who I usually think I am. We think of the mind and ego as ourselves, but this is the delusion. Yes, the me package reflects our personalities, but I am much more than the meme bundles and karma of this personality. Nor am I my mind. My mind is like a tuning device that scans for and locks onto my meme bundle. The ego feeds on the memes tuned in by my mind. My mind is directed toward its preferred memes by my karmic record. Ego is not a conscious entity. Ego is only a construction. Ego is like a garment that we wear. It’s a garment that is cast over ourselves. It is like a vessel that contains or a shadow that outlines my Self’s unit of consciousness. Underneath this garment of me resides a perfect fractal of the originating units of consciousness, and that is known as my Self, Self with a capital S. I am a unit of consciousness that is identical to the universal unit of consciousness, which in Gnosticism we would call the Father, the Son, the Fulness. These are the archetypal patterns held by the mind of God, so to speak. And I hold one of these fractals of that perfect originating consciousness within myself. So in terms of the model that I’ve constructed in the first eight episodes of the Gnostic Insights podcast, the Fullness of God in the illustrations that I’ve drawn looks like a pyramid of stacked golden cannonballs. It just looks that way, because it’s a hierarchy, and a hierarchy means that the higher the fewer. A hierarchy looks like a pyramid. There are more objects at the bottom, and there are fewer and fewer as you climb up toward the top. And at the very tip top, just above this hierarchy of the Fullness, is the Son of God, or the Son of the Father. And the Son is a perfect fractal of the Father. So if I think of my own Self, I have one of these golden pyramids within my mental construct, and that is myself. And it is a fractal of the Fullness of God. So within myself, I have access to the entire Fullness of God, or you could say, I have access to all of the Aeons of the hierarchy. In the Simple Explanation model, instead of this being a golden pyramid, the Self-unit of consciousness is described as looking like a donut, a torus. And I’ve been trying not to bring the torus into the Gnostic Insights. However, it is such a good model that it’s difficult not to bring it in. So we can also think of the Self as this energetic bubble that’s shaped like a donut that has a very, very tiny center, and it’s kind of wrapped all around me, and there’s a little donut associated with every unit of consciousness in my body, from the particles on up. When you’re looking at the illustrations, it makes a lot more sense. So I would also encourage you to visit a Simple Explanation blog and read about the toruses, or look at how it is that we might consider this donut shape to be a representation of the shape of our unit of consciousness. My body is a veritable galaxy of units of consciousness working to instantiate me. The simpler the unit of consciousness, the more of them there are. So while there is only one of me, my body is comprised of 11 organ systems made of 78 organs, which in turn comprise 30 trillion specialized cells made up of such a large number of atoms and molecules that I wouldn’t even know how to read or write the numbers. The more organized and complex the unit of consciousness, the fewer of them there are. That follows the precept called the higher the fewer. Note that the mind, or ordinary consciousness, as well as the subconscious, are artifacts of the organ systems, the organs and cells that make up my body. In other words, the mind and the ego are my meat’s  thought processes, not my higher Self’s. My Self unit of consciousness sits atop this hierarchical mountain of countless units of consciousness, all working to instantiate my body. While it may feel as though I am the only conscious entity inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, each with their own jobs to perform, each laying down their own karmic record. Lucky for me, their job is to hold me together and facilitate this life of mine, and they generally go along with the program and do a good job. Another basic trait of my aggregate units of consciousness is this. The more units of consciousness on the same level of complexity that are laterally linked, so for example, molecules to molecules, atoms to atoms, cells to cells, the greater their shared perception of here and now. This means that when you add up all of these units of consciousness together that make up my body, their aggregated consciousness is about as aware as my singular Self unit of consciousness. And those aggregated units of consciousness that make up my mud, so to speak, and my meat, are everywhere I am. No wonder I can get around so well without my conscious Self paying much attention. The ego is my subjective sense of who I am, and it is largely a reflection of myself’s units of consciousness choices, that is, my karma, and the memes I cling to, which are my beliefs and my narratives. My ego also reflects my body’s aggregates, and their karmas, and their meme choices. Ego is not identical to the Self, as the Self unit of consciousness is the immutably perfect soul that exists independent of this material instantiation. I have the choice at every moment of time to either identify with me and my bundle of memes, or to identify with the universal unit of consciousness, and the bigger picture that transcends personal identity. The egoic me is selfish, competitive, single-minded, short-sighted, and meme-bound. Transcending ego, I reach out to others with love, help, and information for the betterment of all, what we call here at Gnostic Insights theSimple Golden Rule. The egoic self, which is self-centered and only takes care of me, it is patterned after the Fall. It is patterned after Logos having fallen, because Logos broke from the Fullness of God and went out on a solo endeavor, but it didn’t work out well, and Logos fell. And the results of the Fall is this world that we live in, and so when you dwell deeply in the world as it appears, you are living an egoic lifestyle. My true Self, being one of the fractals of the Fullness, is unified with the Fullness of God, is unified with the grand scheme of redemption, and joy, and love. I have the choice at any moment of time to either identify with me and my bundle of memes, or to identify with the universal unit of consciousness, or the Fullness of God. And the more I step away from my selfish ego and identify with my transcendent Self, the more I can cooperate with other people and with the entire world in order to instantiate the golden rule, and work with others with information and love to build something better that will benefit the all. For most people, the answer to Who am I? is that I am my Self-aware sense of me encased in this body of mine that I’m walking around in. The Gnostic Insights would suggest that we are that, but we are also the things we love and the things we hate, which is our meme bundle. Plus, we are the record of our actions in this world, which is our karma, and that is overlaid over our essential unit of consciousness, or our essential Self. Think of a unit of consciousness as a perfect echo or waveform that is shaped exactly like God’s mind. You could say that our universe is populated by fractal echoes of the Father’s primordial consciousness. The units of consciousness are all identical because they are all reflections of the Father’s unit of consciousness. What makes me different from you is the pattern of my meme bundles and the karma that overlays or filters my pure unit of consciousness. The Self unit of consciousness is a perfect fractal reflection of the Father’s unit of consciousness. But I, that is the subjective sense of me, am not that perfect, because of my meme attachments and my karma. And within our bodies, we have every single type of unit of consciousness from the hierarchy of God. So, each cell in the body knows how to do that cell’s function. Each organ in my body knows how to perform its job. The heart knows how to do the job of the heart. The stomach knows how to digest food. Everything in your body is a unit of consciousness, and it is fully loaded with all of the information of the Fullness of God. But only the part that is its personal sphere of responsibility is unlocked. That’s what I mean by a need-to-know basis. We’re all fractals. Within my body, there are countless fractals of the Fullness of God, or the pleroma, and each one of them is doing its job to keep me alive and walking around, because they are operating according to the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out and holding hands with their neighbors, working together with information, with coherence, with love, to work for the betterment of all.  am also the Self-aware unit of consciousness generated at conception. Like all units of consciousness, this capital letter Self came into this universe as a perfect echo of God’s mind. The job of this Self-unit of consciousness is to oversee my body’s aggregated units of consciousness, and to join with others like myself to build things. I am influenced in my decision-making by many forces acting upon me as I approach the here and now. These forces include the karmic records and meme bundles of myself and my body’s aggregate units of consciousness, and the karma and memes of those around me. Despite these influences acting upon me, it is always within my power to make a free-will decision at any particular moment in time. So, for most people, the answer to, Who am I? is that I am my Self-aware sense of me, encased in this body of mine, and I would suggest that we are that, but we are also the things we love and hate, plus the record of our actions in this world, overlaid upon that unit of consciousness. You could say that our universe is populated by fractal echoes of the Father’s primordial consciousness, and these units of consciousness are all identical, because they are all fractal reflections of the Father’s unit of consciousness. And what makes me different from you is the pattern of my memes and the karma that I have accrued, which overlays and filters out that perfect fractal Self. The Self-unit of consciousness is a perfect reflection of the Fullness of God, but I, the subjective sense of me, am not that perfect because of my meme attachments and karma. Units of consciousness gather their systemic patterns and the universal operating laws required to get the job done, from the information constantly flowing into and throughout our universe. The phenomenon known as coherence ensures the compatibility and integrity of these universal patterns and laws. What we call love is the felt experience of coherence. Brethren units of consciousness need information and they need love in order to join together and work toward a common goal. Cells work together for the greater good of their organisms through information and love. Families and societies get the job of social order and cohesion done through information and love. In order for human units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need relevant information, including shared meme cords, they need to be willing to channel coherence from the Fullness, and they need to love one another. Anger, hatred, division, finger-pointing cannot get the job done of making this a better place, because it is not working out of coherence and love, according to the Simple Golden Rule. The essence of the consciousness of the Father is love, whereas the essence of this fallen world is confusion and delusion and Self-centeredness. Our fallen world does not operate according to the precepts of the golden rule, unless we enact it. The soul associated with this material body of mine is a perfect replica of the originating unit of consciousness, or you could say it is a fractal of the Fullness of God. If, during my life, my unit of consciousness is affected by the aggregated units of consciousness of my body, then what, if anything, affects my perfect soul, Self, unit of consciousness after the body passes away? Perhaps the individual me that persists beyond death comes down to my ongoing karma. If this is the case, then the me that continues to influence the fate of the Self after death is nothing but the holographic pattern of all the choices ever made by my unit of consciousness. In life, this karmically generated vibratory pattern attracts or repels the memes associated with my meme bundles. The memes I think of as me are not a part of my Self, unit of consciousness, but they are drawn to me by my karmic pattern. It is my karmic record that attracts and repels the patterns of memes surrounding my life at any moment. That the you that exists between material incarnations is nothing but your karmic record is proved by one of our basic assertions that all units of consciousness are fundamentally one and the same, and that all units of consciousness begin their individuated journey as perfect echoes of the Fullness of God. Then it follows that I develop as a result of my choices and the choices of others. 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 all of his or her memes and can therefore perceive his or her perfect unit of consciousness now stripped from its karmic shroud. Freed of personal memes and karma, the yogi can instantiate God’s will without delusion. 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 discarded memes. If they do return to Earth, it is in order to help others by sharing love and information. In Gnostic terms, these units of consciousness of which I’ve been speaking are called Second Order of Powers. We are Second Order Powers, and we bear the likeness of the First Order of Powers, who are the Aeons of the Fullness. We Second Order Powers are also called those of the remembrance, because we were implanted with a dim memory of the Father and the Son, and a longing to rejoin the Aeons in the hierarchy and this dream of paradise that is in our minds because it is in the minds of the Aeons. We Second Order Powers are considered to be superior to those of the imitation because we come from noble thought and not presumptuous thought. In other words, the Second Order Powers embrace the memes of the Fullness of God. We hold the memes of the Aeons within ourselves, whereas those of the imitation came from the fall and the presumptuous egoic thought of Logos. Consequently, those of the imitation have egoic, selfish motivations rather than altruistic, loving motivations. Even those of the remembrance barely remember the Father and the Son and the Fullness, and we are locked in an endless war with the dark side of our natures and with other people who stand in our way. Those of the imitation defend and embrace the darkness of the deficiency, while those of the remembrance do their best to overcome their darker nature and follow the light. When we set aside our earthly memes, that is, when thought is suspended, language is suspended, in, for example, meditation, then the person’s governing unit of consciousness remains. This fractal unit of consciousness, the Self, underlies the memes. Unencumbered by meme attachments, the person’s governing unit of consciousness aligns with the universal unit of consciousness, and this is called bliss in Buddhist and yogic teachings. Be still and know that I am God is how the Bible says it. Stillness reveals the secrets of eternity. To be still is how we hear God. Be still. Thank you for joining me today with Gnostic Insights. Onward and upward, and God bless. Exciting news–I’m nearing completion of reformatting A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. It should be ready any day now. Then it will take a couple of weeks to read the proof copy and put it up for distribution. I could really use your help at this point for paying for advertising and promotion. Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio has agreed to narrate the book, and that should be ready for distribution by the end of summer. I also need funds to pay Miguel for his work. Any amount you can contribute to this effort will be greatly appreciated. I would be happy to personally mail you a signed copy of the book for contributions over $50. Just send me you address and a note via the Contact Me form at gnosticinsights.com. Thank you!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week’s episode is going to be a little different. First, I want to share with you an update about my upcoming book, and then I’m going to play for you a couple of snippets of recording that I did off of my iPhone while cleaning house, one of them, and the other was while taking a dog walk. So those would be like Gnostic musings or Gnostic Stream of Consciousness. Now, about my book. A very strange thing happened on the way to having my latest book published. You know, the one that I’ve been talking about for almost two years now, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. I had found a publisher, a Christian publisher, and I thought, oh, this will be great. They’ll get it into Christian bookstores and it will be somehow made more acceptable because of that association with a Christian publishing house. However, it has not gone well. We’re 14 months into that process and I fired the publisher two weeks ago. We struggled through the editing phase, transcribing my ready-to-print book. So then I had to painstakingly, it took me months, go back through their editing and restore it to the way I wanted it to read and sound. So after we got through the whole editing, then it moved into actually printing proof copies of the book. And I have received and rejected three sets of proof copies of this book.I explained to them that, no, it’s all too light. So then they went back, reprinted another proof copy. And this time it was like looking at the pages without the light turned on and it was all very dark. And I said, well, that’s not going to work. That’s all wrong. And then they gave me a third version of the printout that looked like someone had spilled ink on the pages and you couldn’t even make out what the images were. So we went back and forth about it, whose fault it was, this and that, and try this and try that. And now 14 months into this process of having A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate printed by this publisher, I pulled the plug. I fired them. And now I am in the process of publishing the book myself, which apparently I should have done in the first place or could have done in the first place. You know, God’s will works in this somehow. What is the stumbling block here? Is it the Demiurge throwing roadblocks in the way of getting this extremely important book out and published? I imagine that the Christian publishing house thinks it’s me and this God Above All Gods that’s throwing the stumbling blocks in the way because this is a heretical work and it shouldn’t get published anyway. You could really go either way on how to interpret this. So for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been laying out the book again from scratch. I’m almost two years ago now in the process, if I had published this book myself. So I’m getting it ready to publish myself for one reason, in order to prove that the images, there’s nothing wrong with them and they’ll print just fine, thank you very much. So that’s what my next step is. But I can’t just reformat all of the images because I can’t take their manuscript that they edited and laid out in case there’s legal complications that I don’t know about. So I’m starting from scratch again on the manuscript of this book and relaying it out. I’m about a third of the way through reformatting the book in order to upload it to Amazon and publish it myself. And we’ll see how the colors come out. We’ll see how the book looks when I do it. But I wanted to explain to you why this book I keep saying, oh, this is going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, why it hasn’t come out now. It’s been 14 months in someone else’s hands and I just should have done it myself, I guess. Although there’s no shoulds. Everything works according to God’s plan. I know one thing—I’m a third of the way through the book now, formatting it, reading every page very carefully as I go through again. And I want to tell you, this is a beautiful book. You really are going to want to buy and read this book that I’m going to publish with nice bright pictures. So that’s where we are. And this cuts into our podcast time. So what I’m playing for you this week is a couple of recordings I have made just as I’m doing other things. They’re not me sitting down at my nice studio setup here. They are me doing housekeeping and speaking out loud while I do it. And then also me taking a walk with the dog in public. So it’s a different kind of very human episode. And let me know what you think. Because these are the way most of my ideas come to me in the first place. It is during these dog walks and housekeeping. So without any further ado, here’s this week’s episode. So I listen to a Christian radio station called The Dove. And it’s interesting how many hymns, particularly the newer praise songs, a lot of old hymns are actually very Gnostic, but the newer praise songs, I believe that they reflect a misunderstanding of the Lord. Such expressions as, I can’t believe God would see something to save in me, is basically what the meaning is for all these songs. I’m so terrible. Why would God care about me? God’s tremendous love not to let me go, me of all sinners, is usually the way it’s felt, right?, or expressed. Well, God will never let us go, because we are part of God. We are children of God. That’s one way to look at it. As a matter of fact, nobody’s going to be let go. In the end, every knee will bow, you see–every tongue confess that Jesus the Christ is Lord, and he’s the Third Order Power in charge of us humans for our redemption. And everybody will see that at the end, whenever that comes for them. But the other way to think of the Father is the eminence of the Fullness within each and every one of our cells. Everything in our body, we’re shot through and through with the Fullness of God, all the soft and squishy parts, all the living flesh of everything, every Second Order creature. We are the Second Order Powers. The First Order Powers are our ethereal parents, the Aeons of the Fullness. But we are their material expression. We’re bonded to the fallen shadows of themselves, the material universe that is built up by the Demiurge, but he can’t bring life because he has fallen away from life. He is death and ignorance, but a good architect, good builder, very good controller. We are shot through and through with the Fullness of God, and we have our own aeonic parents. Each of us particular expressions have a set of Aeons that fruited us, and we are fractal level down from them. So we’ve got all their various parts, and we were bonded to the material part, which is lifeless. That’s the matter, that’s the material, the molecules, the minerals. Now, the power, i.e. the energy, it comes from above. It comes into this universe. It’s really what powers our universe. It’s the thing that’s underneath the laws of thermodynamics, really. You’ve got your material, you have your spiritual ethereal, you have powers—power, whatever kind of power that is—force, personal power, human power, or steam locomotive power, it’s power, right? It’s a driving force. That’s the emanating quality of the Father. It powers everything—the dynamo for the universe comes from the dynamo that is the Father, the unending spring of life. And then our emotional part is the thing that personalizes us. It starts with our ego, our pure ego. That’s simply our identification, our recognition of self-consciousness. But then on top of that come these memes that get stuck to us, that obscure that originality of our emotional aspect, and we get all worked up. And that comes from the ignorant side. That comes from the demiurgic side, the negative emotions. So everything is going to return back from whence it comes. Everything’s going home. God is not entropic. Do you like that? God does not dissolve. God is a never-ending stream. So the Father is not subject to the second law of thermodynamics. And that, of course, is an imitation of God’s power, thermodynamics. Because try as it may, the Demiurge can’t make a constant stream of unending power because he’s not plugged in to the ethereal plane. We’re all fruit of the Aeons of God. We are all children of God. And we will go back home.  We are only sojourning here. We actually live up there. But now, having come down to this material plane, we are experiencing the effects of materiality. The first economy is the Hierarchy of the Fullness. The second economy is down here, this material plane. And an economy, it’s like an ecology. It’s a related system of interacting variables. It says in the Tripartite Tractate that this material economy was required in order to bring in the next economy, the final economy, or the third economy. And that is the economy that is ruled by Christ. And all of this will be up there. And it’s some sort of amalgamation of the ethereal without the material, but having a semblance of the material. Whatever it is that we learn to do and are able to do down here in the material world that the Fullnesses don’t do, well, we can take that forward into the third economy, although it’s also our vision of paradise. It’s our heavenly reward. So there will be no death or destruction. And it will be all justice and love and peace and goodwill ruled by Christ, or with the head as Christ. We 2nd order powers are children of the 1st order powers. The 3rd order powers are the Army of Christ that have come to redeem us. And then, though, it does say in the Tripartite Tractate that this is a necessary step to carry us all. This is the door. We are the door. Our experience becomes the door to the final realm, the final economy, or the third economy. I always call it the party hat of heaven. You see my drawings of it all the time, right? It’s the colorful pyramid that has no blue at the bottom, but it has Christ at the top. And the blue is the shadows. But the experience and the, I guess, particularity of our egos now carries forward into the next existence, but without the demiurgic influence. So that’s what it means that it’s the kingdom of the Christ, the next one. And so in my diagrams, you see the Christ up there at the very top now. And we are all emanations of the fractal at that point of Christ. He’s the king of our portion of Heaven. And the man, the human that is represented in that hierarchy of the Christ, is Jesus. He’s the man part. So we are fractals of Jesus at this point, once we have embodied the Christ. Jesus was born with the Christ immanent. You know, in our modern language, isn’t the Christ like a correcting algorithm? Isn’t Christ like a perfection of what it all should be like? That’s what it means to accept the Christ—that you want that pattern of righteousness and being plugged into the ethereal stream. So when you accept that, either now or in the mid-between place, between lives, but everybody will, because we all have to go back home. And we turn right. And now we’re in this new plane of existence, which I think will only come after the materiality completely dissolves away. So maybe it’s there and we leave the materiality behind, or it’s more like the Christian view of Jesus coming in the clouds and then everything wrapping up, rolling up, and everybody goes on up. But in the conventional Christian and the Catholic and Roman tradition, most everyone is actually going down, dissolving into nothingness into the realm of hell. But that isn’t true, because we’re all going back up, because life is being retracted back up into the Fullness, back up into the next order, and our experience comes with it. So I guess that would be the explanation of why some people keep saying they believe that this material plane that we exist in is a training ground, is a school. And it does say that in the Tripartite Tractate. I’ll look that up—something about the members needed schooling to understand their function, something along those lines. But I don’t tend to think of it as schooling down right here. I think of it as just trying to spread love as teaching and changing. Hey, I’m not as angry as I was when we started this podcast a few years ago. I can flare up still, but not with just any old somebody. So my passionate nature, my emotional self, that part of it, it’s generated by this materiality that we live in, on top of our ego—that’s our meme bundles and stuff. It gets riled up easily. But that’s the world that we are trying to overcome, is the negative emotions. Because that’s what surrender is about. That’s what walking in his footsteps is about. That’s what the influence of the enlightenment is supposed to have upon us here, even in this material plane. We begin to generate love because we become plugged back into the stream, what I sometimes call the glory beam. We’re going to jump now from these thoughts about the nature of God and how we are the children of the Aeons. We’re going to jump to another thought that occurred on a different day while I was out on a dog walk. Jesus becomes the first human exemplar of the indwelling of the Christ. But we all have the potential to have the indwelling of the Christ. That’s the ultimate goal, is to allow the Third Order Powers to replace our Second Order Powers. That is the only way to live a truly righteous life that is outside of the Law, but through grace. But this all has nothing to do with salvation, because all will be redeemed because that is the job of the Christ, sooner or later. And it will be later for most people who do not acknowledge the Christ. It will be their after-death experience. It will be their bardos that will reveal to them the presence of the Father and the love of the Christ in the Fullness. Amen. Okay, that’ll do it for this week. Write to me in the comments about what you think of this process of this week’s episode. Was it too difficult to listen to me with all of the background distracting noise? I probably have a hundred of these recordings that I’ve made in this very manner over the past couple of years. So let me know what you think, if you want to hear more of them. So God bless us all, and onward and upward.

Today we’re going to talk again about worldviews, ideologies, and memes. And the way I use the word meme is to represent an idea, a tidbit, a small piece of information. It was actually Richard Dawkins, of all people, that coined the term meme, and he used it as an analogous term to the word gene—so a meme is to worldviews and ideologies as a gene is to your DNA makeup. And your DNA is made up of genes, just as our ideologies are made up of countless memes. So I’m going to explain a little bit about what a meme is and what their effect is on our worldview. Do you know what your worldview is? What is your worldview? Have you thought about it? If you were king of the world, what would you have other people believe? What would be the consequences? If everyone believed what you believe, what would that world look like? Here at Gnostic Insights, I’m promoting a type of Gnosticism that comes from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, primarily, as a type of worldview, a type of ideology that would help everyone to get along, that would make this world a better place. It’s not just about our afterlife or what came before the Fall. It’s about: how do we live our lives now? So I’m going to give you some fresh information at the beginning of this episode, but then I’m going to kick back into an excerpt from a previously recorded episode concerning ideologies and worldviews. In 2018, I posted an article called Apocalyptic Visions on my Simple Explanation blog, and if you go to the Gnostic Insights homepage, gnosticinsights.com, I’ll be putting hypertextual links to that original article in this transcript. That first article, Apocalyptic Visions, was about the role of free speech in a representative republic, or what we usually refer to as a democracy. The system of government that the United States has been operating on is ideally run with what is called the consent of the people. That is, you agree with what your government is doing. The populace elects representatives who promise to bring the wishes of the people to their state house or to Congress, and to fairly represent those wishes. These representatives promise to vote in a manner that upholds the will of all the people in their district that they are representing. This is in stark contrast with a government ruled by a small group of elites who consider themselves superior to the populace, and therefore endowed with the ability to make better decisions than the people can make for themselves. These ruling elites do not care for the wishes of the people, and they do not feel bound to represent their constituents. In the kindest terms, this would be called a nanny state, because the people are being told what to do for their own good, like a nanny tells little children. In harsher terms, this ruling elite is called authoritarianism or fascism. In that case, the people may be told it’s for their own good, but really, it’s for the good of the ruling elite, which is usually a combination of extremely wealthy industrialists who make money from the legislation they enforce, and ideological fanatics who apparently believe in the agenda they impose upon the masses, again, “for their own good,” despite the negative outcomes their decisions may bring. There’s an old saying that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We also hear the expression, follow the money, in order to figure out who is actually in control. The ones who are in control are both those who profit financially at the expense of others, and those who gain more control over the population as an outcome of their decisions. So, when we find ourselves scratching our heads and wondering what on earth is happening, we can look around at exactly who is profiting by the decisions being enacted, both in power and control, and with money, big money. Figuring out who holds the power and who is making the money is key to figuring out what kind of government you have in control. And then look at the promises that are being made by those in control “for your own good” and “for the good of the planet,” and see how those promises are concentrating money and power in certain industries and rulers’ hands. In order to concentrate power in the hands of the rulers and the elites, it is necessary to shut down freedom of speech and freedom of thought. With the rise of social media and the concentration of mainstream media into the hands of a few powerful elites, freedom of thought may now be easily controlled by controlling the information that is allowed to get out. We call that sort of information control propaganda because only the officially endorsed information is allowed to be disseminated. The Tripartite Tractate speaks a lot about power and the roots of power. The following quote sums it up pretty well: “The thought of the archons is not barren. All that they thought about they have as potential offspring. Fighters, warriors, troublemakers, apostates, disobedient beings, lovers of power.” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 79) Now I’m going to replay a portion of an episode from May of 2021 because I believe the message is needed now more than ever. What is and isn’t allowed in the minds of members is determined by which memes are included and which are excluded from the group’s ideological meme chord. Because of this, information exchanged between members of different cultures will resonate more strongly with the sender’s memes than with the receiver’s memes. For example, when an American speaks of free and democratic elections, his or her mimetic definitions for free and democratic may differ radically from another culture. The extent to which communication may occur between cultures is determined by their overlapping memes and the permeability of each culture’s deterministic screens and the extent to which they are open to foreign memes. Another example of delimiting memes occurs during problem solving. The more tightly held one’s memes are, the fewer solutions will present themselves. If you think only a hammer will drive a nail, you will not even consider the flat side of the heavy wrench lying nearby. If a group thinks outsiders are untrustworthy, then they will not trust any outsider. The ability to consider solutions outside the box and to engage in lateral thinking comes about through non-attachment to the shoulds and oughts of how things work. One must be willing to set aside treasured beliefs in order to perceive memes outside one’s own bundle and thereby discover fresh solutions. In the same manner that a person’s personality is defined by its unique meme bundle, institutions are also defined by their sets of treasured memes. Memes are even more important to an institution than are its members in the sense that members come and go, but memes persist. As President John F. Kennedy put it, “people may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.” Each and every cultural institution we belong to—family, workplace, church, mosque, tribe, nation, and so on—not only comes with its own bundle of shared memes held in common by its members, it also comes with a filter that limits members from acknowledging or adopting ideologically incompatible memes (this filter is called a terministic screen). Institutions are defined as much by their excluded memes as they are by their included memes. An exclusive institution holds tightly to the identity provided by its current memes. Its border is strong and its filter is powerful. An inclusive institution allows members more latitude in the memes they may hold. Its border is less defended, its filter less opaque. An open-minded institution allows that there may be memes out there in the larger culture of value. Its filter is more permeable. In the United States, for example, and I believe it’s worldwide at this point, progressive institutions are no longer inclusive. They talk as though they’re inclusive, they talk as though they accept diversity of thought and behavior, but actually they only currently accept their particular view, so they are no longer actually progressive and inclusive. They are as tightly conservative as any conservative group has traditionally been, but they’re still calling themselves progressive. Here is a statement from President John F. Kennedy that expresses the traditional view of progressivism: “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.” And so, the current state of progressivism still talks the good talk about inclusion and diversity, but what they say about their opponents is hateful and divisive. The current progressive meme of identity politics separates and segregates in contrast to the progressive meme of John F. Kennedy that unites and integrates. We like people who share the same memes we do. The more memes people have in common, the more they agree with one another, and the more they like and respect the other person. Friends have a lot of memes in common. Co-religionists share the same religious meme chords. Tribal brothers and sisters share tribal memes. Citizens share their nation’s meme chords. Subcultures share their subcultural memes. What happens when meme chords collide? What happens when the memes I believe in and hold onto contradict the memes you hold dear? Herein lies the source of all human conflict. In Gnosticism, we call this the endless war. The disagreements, the fights, the wars are all conflicts over incompatible memes. I may believe that my memes are vastly superior to yours. Does that mean I should kill you? Well, that’s a ridiculous idea. Oh, but what if I strongly believe my memes are the best? Does that mean you have to believe every meme I believe or else I’m going to burn your house down and loot your business? Well, that’s pretty absurd. Yeah, but what if I know in my heart that my memes are so much better than your memes? Does that mean you are stupid or systemically racist? Does that mean you are a fraud? Does that mean you just don’t get it? Maybe. Maybe not. Most of our memes came embedded in larger meme chords handed down by others. Most of us have no idea what meme chords we hold and how we came to hold them. In any case, you can’t force someone else to adopt your memes any more than you can force someone else to adopt your gender or your skin color. It is an impossibility. The Simple Explanation suggests that live and let live would be a great meta meme for everyone to adopt. If we could appreciate the fact that each of us has a unique perspective, then perhaps we could allow each other to hold the memes that make the most sense for our own lives. This is my meme chord. That is your meme chord. If I don’t like your meme chord, then I can talk it over with you and see if we can move our meme chords closer together in agreement. If neither of us is willing or able to swap memes with the other, then so be it. Either accept the other person, memes and all, or move on. Find someone else who more closely agrees with your memes. There is enough room in this world for each of us to hold our own chords, but only if live and let live is an overarching meme. Live and let live is the democratic ideal. We now find ourselves in the midst of a social epidemic of intolerance. Intolerance is the opposite of live and let live. When we are intolerant of others’ memes, we are declaring that our memes are correct and their memes are wrong. And then we take it a step further. We refuse to tolerate the others’ memes. We throw up resistance. We throw up roadblocks. We close our ears and refuse to listen to the other. We do not merely disagree, as reasonable people may do from time to time. When we are intolerant, we look for ways to force the other to abandon their memes and adopt ours. We shout them down because we feel we are shouting the right memes, and theirs are not only wrong, they are evil, and they have no right to be heard. And once you declare the other evil, it is no longer a disagreement in good faith, but a fight for the soul. God is on our side, therefore we can do whatever it takes to crush the opposition. That is a dangerous and usually delusional meme to hold. And if it entitles the holder to disregard rule of law, then it is not a democratic ideal, and it has no place in American politics. Once words can no longer be exchanged, frustration builds and violence follows. This is what we are seeing now, because free exchange of memes has been thwarted through intolerance. Exchange of ideas is the key. You needn’t agree with the other person, but you must hear them out. Because once you agree to sit and exchange ideas and concerns, whether you adopt the other’s ideas or not, the very act of hearing each other creates a shared space that acts as a balm to soothe both your soul and theirs. When you are too angry, frustrated, or afraid to listen to the other, you perpetuate the intolerance that leads to violence. This intolerance is not helpful. We hear a lot about the importance of diversity nowadays in America. True diversity can only thrive if we allow each other to live and let live. When you seek to silence those with whom you disagree, you are not encouraging diversity. You are actually partaking in, dare I say it, fascism. Because fascism advocates the forced suppression of those who express opposing views. Disagreement, on the other hand, is not forced suppression. It is merely disagreement. Shouting others down when they have the floor, shunning those with whom you disagree, unfriending people on Facebook because they hold opposing views, refusing service in a restaurant to paying customers who voted for a different candidate—this does not help us come together to make things better for the common good. In Gnostic terms, it is a violation of the Simple Golden Rule. It is a continuance of the never-ending war. It engages the second-order powers in endless war, chasing each other, like the ouroboros, which is the snake eating its own tail. It does not build, it merely enslaves. “An Ouroboros – a snake eating its own tail – carved on a Victorian gravestone in Glasgow’s Necropolis cemetery. “ And remember, positive change cannot come through hate. Hate is not the realm of the Fullness. Hate does not come from above. Hate is a result of the Fall. And when you’re in a fallen world, you’re in the never-ending war. We 2nd order powers are caught in a never ending war with the deficiency and each other So if you are attempting to promote what you believe are good ideals, but you feel anger and hatred towards those that oppose you, then you’re not on the right path. Only the Fullness, only love, can bring about a good change in this world. Because love breaks the cycle, the vicious cycle, of the never-ending war. So when you get riled up, and especially when you get riled up in anger, and most especially if your anger has gone on so long, or if you are believing what is being told to you by others and it makes you feel hatred to those who oppose you, then you’re on the wrong path. Thank you for spending this time with me. Onward and upward, and God bless. I would love to hear from you. I always respond to your questions and comments. I would love to dialogue with any of you that would like to talk this material over. Also, over at the Substack version of Gnostic Insights, called The Gnostic Reformation, I have enabled the Chat function where we can publicly message back and forth. So thank you for spending this time with me and onward and upward. And God bless. If you have found these Gnostic Insights helpful to your understanding, please contribute if you can so we can continue this effort of bringing gnosis to as many people as possible. I have stopped using the Paypal buttons and have switched podcast support to Donorbox going forward. Thank you! I appreciate you!!!