Gnostic Insights

Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.
undefined
Aug 3, 2024 • 23min

As Above, So Below

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
undefined
Jul 27, 2024 • 19min

Are People Inherently Evil?

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
undefined
Jul 20, 2024 • 20min

Redeeming the Demiurge

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! 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
undefined
Jul 13, 2024 • 24min

Transpersonal Consciousness and Gnosis 2024

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
undefined
Jul 6, 2024 • 21min

Father, Son, ALL–Love Unfolding

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!
undefined
Jun 29, 2024 • 25min

I am not Me–Your Self (2024 edition)

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!
undefined
Jun 22, 2024 • 18min

We Are the Children of the Aeons and other musings

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.
undefined
Jun 15, 2024 • 19min

What Is Your Worldview?

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!!!
undefined
Jun 8, 2024 • 21min

God is Goodness

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Don’t you think it’s interesting that God is so often in the news? If this were a purely secular life that we’re living, if life really had no meaning and there was no God, then why are people always talking about God? Even the people that say they don’t believe in God at all talk about God. For example, the big atheist of our generation is Richard Dawkins, and I’ve referred to Richard Dawkins many times in my writing, although I usually take his name out so as not to be impolite and call him out. But Richard Dawkins has been an extreme proponent of meaninglessness in our modern age. He tries to narrow all things down to material science. He’s a materialist. Lately, as it turns out, here in the springtime of 2024, Richard Dawkins has come to profess what he is calling cultural Christianity. Richard Dawkins now believes that, well, it may be all hooey that there’s such thing as a God or such thing as a Christ or that there was such a person as Jesus, but he now recognizes in his older age that if we throw all that away, there’s nothing to hang morality on. There’s nothing to hang hope or belief upon. You see, if you reduce our consciousness to a purely mechanical or mathematical or computer-like process, there’s no such thing then as morality or ethics because it’s a mechanical process. So, where would ethics come from? There’s no right or wrong process.And we know that isn’t true. We know deep in our souls, deep in our hearts, that there is such a thing as right or wrong. Now, the people that don’t believe in right or wrong, we call those people sociopaths or psychopaths. And indeed, there’s a lot of psychopaths running around who will kill you just as easy as look at you. All these random attacks, random stabbings, random shootings, mass murders, pushing people onto the subway tracks—these are the acts of sociopaths who are acting as if there were no such thing as righteousness or morality or goodness. But yet, if you yourself are a modern person, though not a sociopath, but you’re a good moral humanist, you do believe in right and wrong. You do believe in morality. You think it is better to be kind than to be cruel. You think it is better to love than to hate, although a lot of people who do not profess belief in God run around hating and they think that that’s love. Good things never come from hate. So people that are running around protesting in a hateful manner, burning things down, pulling things down, striking their opponents—they’re not going to bring about good change. Bad comes from bad. So if you want to make a better change for this world, if you want to make this world a better place, it has to come out of love. It has to come out of morality and righteousness. And you see, at long last, even Richard Dawkins, Mr. Big Material Scientist, has come to believe that there should be such a thing as cultural Christianity. Dawkins says now that Christianity seems to be the only religion that offers an uplifting, righteous type of way to be. And it’s true. Of all the religions in the world, or belief systems in the world, only Christianity offers a sacrificial savior. offers a human with the attributes of the Christ. And the Christ is the perfection of man. The Christ is perfection itself on both a physical level, emotional, and spiritual level—all things good, all things bright and beautiful, all love, no punishment, no vindictiveness, no revenge, no hatred—pure love. So, in our Gnostic Christianity, we acknowledge the Father and the Son and the Christ. We acknowledge the variables of the Son as being the fullness of God, and those are known as the Aeons of God that live in the Fullness. And it’s all on the good side. It’s not a yin-yang, darkness versus white kind of balance. It’s not a continuum between darkness and light, between love, and hate. It is not a dialectic. The Fullness of God, the Son of God, the Father, the Christ—they are entirely on the side of good. The darkness, the ignorance, the separation, the hatred exists outside of that ethereal plane, it exists down here in this material world. Indeed, as a Gnostic, we would say that materiality itself is a form of evil, and this is what drives people crazy against Gnostics. This is one of the big heresies. “Oh, you can’t call creation evil. It’s the creation of God! It’s all good and wonderful and beautiful!” But it’s not, is it? It’s full of death and pain and suffering and betrayal and hatred. Creation is the realm that expresses the fall away from ethereal purity. And here we are. Here we humans are. We are stuck in the middle between the material cosmos and the ethereal creatures of the Fullness, the Aeons, because we come from the Aeons. We are their fruit. We are children of the Fullness of God. We are literally the fruit of the Aeons of God. And we have been seeded down here on this now material plane to remind this plane of the ethereal plane. This material existence that we dwell in, the reason it has death and delusion and ignorance and hatred, disappointment, sadness, betrayal, failure—these are all expressions of the separation from God. These are expressions of the ignorance of who we are and where we came from. And the purpose of the Christ is to bring the redemption, is to bring all of this materiality back into awareness of who we are and where we come from. The material itself—the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the minerals, the aggregation of minerals like rocks and stones, the planets—that is the domain of what we call the Demiurge. The Demiurge is part, only half of, an ethereal being who came from Above. That refers to the Fall, the fall of the Aeon known as Logos. He fell out of the Fullness. He broke apart into another realm. And he was horrified at what happened. He was horrified at what he had created. He thought he was going to make Paradise, the Paradise the Aeons dream of in the Fullness. He thought he could do it all on his own when he struck out. He didn’t realize that only the Fullness of God can contain the beauty of Paradise. And so he struck out on his own to bring it about, and instead, he brought about this material deficiency, this imitation of Paradise. And when Logos looked around and saw what he had brought about, he was, it says in the Tripartite Tractate, horrified. Because, imagine thinking you’re going to create Paradise and instead you create this unruly, dead, lifeless place—this quantum chaos. There’s no chaos in the ethereal realm. So, the Tripartite Tractate describes that Logos fled back to the Fullness—that the Aeons helped pull him up out of the deficiency and brought him home. But part of him remained behind. All that part that splattered below that has become our material existence. And that we call the Demiurge, because the Demiurge has the patterns of Logos. He’s got the blueprints, but he doesn’t have the life. He doesn’t have the love. He doesn’t have the Fullness of God. He only has the blueprints, so he doesn’t realize that he is the partial shadow of the glory of God. He thinks he is the glory of God. He calls himself God. We Christian Gnostics believe that this Demiurge that calls himself God is the God of the Old Testament, is Yahweh. “There is no God before me. Thou shalt not worship other gods.” These are the statements of this fallen aspect of Logos, who thinks he is God, but he’s mistaken. And we Gnostics believe that there is a God Above All Gods. That’s what we call the ultimate consciousness. The God Above All Gods is consciousness itself. It is the ultimate consciousness. It’s not only consciousness, but the God Above All Gods is the fountainhead of love. So all consciousness flows down from the fountainhead of the God Above All Gods. All love flows down from the fountainhead of the God Above All Gods. I used to live down in the Mount Shasta area, and my dogs and I would hike up Mt. Shasta. There’s a place on the mountain, on Mount Shasta, a beautiful meadow, and there’s a spring in that meadow that turns out to be the fountainhead, the spring out of which the entire river that becomes the Sacramento River originates. The great delta that flows into the Pacific Ocean begins bubbling out of the rocks on Mount Shasta. And the water is really cold. Boy, you can barely stick your hand into the spring on Mount Shasta, it’s so cold. It’s so pure—the water is absolutely pure. And then it picks up size. It never diminishes. It just keeps flowing, and it’s a gigantic river by the time it’s this huge river delta that reaches the Pacific Ocean down there in the middle of California. The spring in Panther Meadows on Mt. Shasta is the fountainhead of the Sacramento River The great Sacramento River begins with this creek on Mt. Shasta God’s love and consciousness is like that. It’s pure and it’s unceasing. It is not lessened by the amount that flows out of it. And there’s enough consciousness and enough love and enough knowledge that flows out of this spring of the God Above All Gods, through the Son of God, through the Fullness and all of the Aeons of God, even surviving down into this diminished cosmos that we now live in. The first order of powers are those Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. We are their fruit. We are the second order of powers. And it’s not just the humans; it’s every living creature. Because when Logos fled back to the Fullness, only ignorance and death was left behind with a set of blueprints in its hands. So the Demiurge is able to construct a facsimile, an imitation, a deficient imitation of Paradise down here on Earth. That’s why even the religious people of the earth or the people who love Mother Earth, the people who love the cosmos, well, they are loving the pattern. They’re loving the blueprint of Paradise, but they’re mistaking this fallen cosmos for Paradise. They are worshiping the imitation. This isn’t Paradise down here. And I really shouldn’t have to tell you that. You know that. Paradise is up in the Fullness of God. We second-order powers were sent down here, and with us, we bring life. The creation of the cosmos is otherwise dead. It only extends to the material level. But all of the living things, even the bacteria, the plants, the insects, the critters, the animals, and then the humans—we are second-order powers. And the difference between true life down here and the inert material is that spark of the God Above All Gods that flows down into us. And when we are conceived, when every living creature is conceived, that’s the spark of life and consciousness and love coming into them. That happens at conception. All the soft and squishy things comes from the God Above All Gods. So if you decide to snuff out a life through abortion, for example, you’re snuffing out consciousness and life. An embryo is not identical to a stone. You can’t snuff the life out of a stone because it’s not alive in the first place, just like, by the way, viruses are not alive. They are molecular machines created by the Demiurge on a nanoparticle scale. But the bacteria are living creatures. They procreate. They eat. They’re soft and squishy. So even the bacteria comes from above, But the viruses don’t. The rocks and stones don’t. They’re facsimiles. They are deficiencies. They are imitations of things that exist above. We are melded to that material when we are conceived. It’s the life and light of the Fullness coming in, yes, but in order to manifest here on this material plane, we are bonded to the molecules. We are inextricably bonded during this lifetime here on earth to the material because our bodies are made up of the material. We are mud up. Mud is the material. From the ground up, we are molecular, but from the top down, we are spiritual. And we come together in the middle, where our molecules bond with the consciousness and love of the Fullness of God. All living creatures carry the consciousness and love of the Father into this material dimension. Now, I started talking about morality and ethics and Richard Dawkins and atheism, because just as it is true that all life comes from above, that all consciousness comes from above, all of the values and virtues of the Father come from above as well. There is no absolute until you get to the absolute. Yeah, down here it’s very confusing. Down here it’s like yin and yang and life and death and goodness and badness and who’s right? Who’s wrong? Are you a good guy? Are you a bad guy? Or are you simply my brother? It’s relative down here. We call this current postmodern age relativistic morality because everything’s relative. “Oh, yeah, it’s bad, but it’s not as bad as that, so we have to go with this bad instead of that bad.” That’s relativistic. It’s relative to another thing. But we only have the things down here on this material plane to compare them to. And they’re all bad. It’s bad down here. The goodness comes from above. So if you don’t want to dwell in the shadows of death, you need to acknowledge and accept the goodness of the God Above All Gods. That’s where the goodness comes from. The light is from above. The darkness is from below. Dwelling in darkness is not a good thing. And again, I don’t need to tell you that. When you dwell in darkness, when you dwell in ignorance, confusion, delusion—what we call sin, harmful behaviors to yourself, harmful behaviors to other people, hatred of other people, guilt and hatred of yourself—that’s darkness. That comes from below. And below isn’t coming up from hell. It’s not coming up from Satan. It’s here. It’s this material world because it’s inherently ignorant. It’s inherently confusing. It’s disappointing. You love someone and they die. You love your cats and your dogs, and they die. You love your children, your spouse. They die. You love yourself. You’re going to die. That’s disappointing. Except that we have hope from above, you see? So why dwell in darkness, disappointment, and death? The valley of the shadow of death is what we’re walking through every day. When we have redemption, we have life and eternal life coming from above in an unending stream, springing out of the God Above All Gods. So don’t reject the notion of God. Dawkins is halfway accepting Christ now. He’s halfway accepting God because he says he now recognizes that life without ethics or morality—this relativistic, postmodern philosophy that’s going around—is inherently baseless. There is no standard. How can you say it’s better to love than to hate? Who says? How can you say it’s better to caress than to beat? Who says? That “who says” comes from above, you see? We know that life and light and love and a warm embrace and kisses and babies, happy little babies who have not yet been defiled by this sad life—we can inherently know. You know that’s better than living in darkness and death. So, don’t reject the God Above All Gods. Don’t reject the notion of God. Don’t reject the idea that there is an ultimate right, that there is a difference between right and wrong. Don’t reject the love of God. Don’t reject the Fullness of God. And certainly, don’t reject the Christ. Because the third order of powers, (we’re the second order, then there was Christ’s third order of powers), and that is the redemption and the embodiment of the Fullness of God onto this material plane in its fullness without any blemish or mark, without any defilement or sin or imitation. The third order of powers walked among us and displayed through its life and love the qualities of the Father and the qualities of the Fullness. So, it’s extremely wrong-headed to reject the Christ. Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all.
undefined
Jun 1, 2024 • 0sec

Fractals of the Fullness–Our Ethereal Origin

I’m not trying to hide the gnosis from you. I’m not trying to obscure the truth so that only the worthy can mine this gnosis. We are all born with this gnosis. We are all representations of the Fullness of God, and I think it’s my calling to share this gnosis with you and show you how you can mine your gnosis. The Tripartite Tractate from the Nag Hammadi is the book I’m using to do that, because it’s very straightforward. We are looking at not only cosmology of the ethereal realm, which means the study of the cosmos, but its a cosmogeny as well. And cosmogony means the beginnings of the cosmos. Cosmogeny is the study of the origins of our universe, and that’s what we’re doing here at Gnostic insights. The Gnosticism that I’m sharing with you here isn’t the obscure historical Gnosticism of the past. I’m attempting to bring it into our modern vernacular. And, if this is your first time joining us, it was very simple in the beginning. It started with a single concept—the consciousness we call the Father. And then it has rolled out steadily as the Father generates consciousness until it winds up with you and I talking here. Gnosis means knowing. And to be a gnostic means that you are one who knows. And the gnosis we are mining here at Gnostic Insights is taken from an ancient scripture, the Tripartite Tractate out of the Nag Hammadi codices. But more than that, I’m deriving a lot of this information through contemplation and direct communication with the Father and the Fullness of God. That is my claim, and that is something that every person can do. We are all given the ability to commune directly with the Father and with the Fullness above. What I’m attempting to do here on the Gnostic Insights podcast is to share the insights I’ve gained through reason and contemplation, and to explain some of the more obscure passages in the Nag Hammadi scriptures. As a Gnostic Christian, I find that these insights give a deeper understanding of our New Testament in the Holy Bible because much of this information was stripped out of the Holy Bible by the Nicene Council in the 300s AD under the direction of Pope Clement and Emperor Constantine. Those of us who are not Catholics are no longer subject to the Pope. And none of us are subject to the Emperor of Rome. Therefore, it seems to me that those of us who love the Father should have the freedom of mind and the freedom of personal will to decide for ourselves which extra-biblical scriptures are holy. And this you must arrive at through discernment and the Holy Spirits’ leading. If you have not developed the ability of discernment, then you can easily be led astray. Emperor Constantine For over ten years now, I have written a blog called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The Simple Explanation presents a secular theory of how the universe goes together. In a Simple Explanation, there are concepts such as fractals and the Simple Golden Rule that I have been explaining here as we go along because they help to illuminate this gnostic gospel. Thus far, we have explained the origins of the ethereal universe, beginning with the Father of consciousness and proceeding on through the Christ. We need to understand this entire run of the gnostic cosmology in order to understand the nature of human beings, because in Simple Explanation terms, we humans are fractal representations of the entirety of creation. This is the meaning of that expression: as above so below. The tree is a common symbol for this concept. So, as a tree is represented as the branches above ground, there is a reciprocal set of branches below ground, and those are called the roots. The same is true with us humans and all other Second Order Powers. We share the same values and structure of the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. Their nature is the same as our nature because we are their fruits. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. My Self’s unit of consciousness is sitting on top of a fractal galaxy of hierarchically arranged units of consciousness, all working together to instantiate my body. While I may believe I am the only conscious soul inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, and each unit of consciousness has their own job to perform. Each lives their own life and they all lay down their own karmic record. And this holds true even when the fractal is no more than a cell or an organ. Within my body, countless units of consciousness of varying levels of complexity work together to keep my body alive and fully functional. Whereas my Self unit of consciousness may appear a very long way off from the Father in the Pleroma, especially if I conceive of them outside of our very large universe, if I instead turn inward, I am as near to God as the center of all of my units of consciousness. This is a different way of interpreting the practices of centering and grounding. When ancient texts speak of God residing in the hearts of man, I look at that shared zero point field that is at the center of our fractal units of consciousness. Fractals are defined as fragmented geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each of which at least approximately is a reduced size copy of the whole. That is a property called self similarity because they appear similar at all levels of magnification. Fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex. What this means is that fractal iterations can extend infinitely. The simplest way to think about it in my mind is with broccoli. Have you noticed that you can hold that head of broccoli in your hand and you can peel off one of those flower heads of the broccoli and it looks very much like the broccoli flower that you were holding in the first place, only it’s much smaller. And then you can take that smaller piece and peel off another flower and it looks just like the previous one that you peeled off. You can do this broccoli exploration down to at least 7 iterations. In the end you have an extremely tiny little broccoli flowerette. So that’s what a fractal is. It’s a larger thing that can be reduced, reduced, reduced, reduced and each one of those reductions looks just like the piece you started out with, only smaller. And you can just keep splitting it off smaller and smaller and smaller. And if this were a purely mathematical fractal rather than a physical one like broccoli, you could go down or up through those fractal splits, pretty much infinitely. I’m suggesting that consciousness itself is fractal and the largest consciousness is the Father. The Father had a thought and it became the Son; that Son was the first fractal iteration of consciousness. The Son had a thought and it became the ALL, and that is the next fractal iteration. And then the ALL became self aware, and it turned into the Aeons of the Fullness of God. These Aeons of the Fullness sorted themselves into a hierarchy, giving themselves names, positions, places, powers, and duties, and we call this sorted Fullness the Hierarchy of the Fullness, or the Pleroma of God. The Aeons are fractals of the Son of God, and the Son is a singular expression that completely encapsulates the Father. The Aeons of the Fullness provide the Master Pattern of our inherited consciousness. The Father is unknowable because the Father is pure consciousness. The Father is illimitable—without limits, not confined to a shape or place. The Father is not walking round in robes with the long white beard. That is not the Father of the ALL. When Jesus said I and my Father are one, he’s not referring to the personified God known as Yahweh or Jehovah that walked through the Old Testament. That fellow’s name in Gnosticism is called the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the fallen ego of the Aeon named Logos. It was this egoic part of Logos that overreached and fell, resulting in this material plane. It is the Demiurge who created the heavens and the Earth. He is the chief Archon of the Cosmos. But he is most assuredly not the Father of the ALL, the Aeons, and the Christ. That Father is known in gnosticism as The God Above All Gods. It is said that after Logos fell he remembered the Aeons and the Father, and his better part quickly returned back to the Fullness. The Father drew a boundary around what was left behind of the broken Logos down below, and that boundary encloses our so-called material Universe. We humans are particular fractal emanations of the Pleroma of the newly restored Logos. We are Second Order Powers fruited down here to work within the material boundary, yet we are patterned directly from the consciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Pleroma. Because we are fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness, the rules and the descriptions of aeonic life apply to humans equally as well. This is again another example of as above, so below. So, when we hear or read about the nature of the Aeons, or the things that happen to the Aeons, such as the Fall and redemption of Logos, this happens to each and every one of us as well. Logos fell because he forgot his place and proper function in the Fullness. When Logos fled home to the ethereal Pleroma, Logos left behind the darkness and the shadows. The deficiency he left behind arose from his ego’s presumptuous thought and overreaching, because that’s what Logos was doing as he fell. When Logos fell, he left the Fullness. He was no longer in perfect harmony with the other Aeons of the Fullness. Logos went out on his own with his own project, and it was the ego that caused the Fall. And because of his presumptuous thought and his overreaching, now every one of the fractals that he gave rise to down below are the shadows and phantoms of the Fall, and they all overreach. They are all built on ego. Therefore, the imitation is characterized by this presumptuous thought and overreaching, combined with the inverted traits of Logos. Previously on the Gnostic Insights Podcast, we have discussed the values on the Left, or the material values of the imitation, and these are in direct opposition to the traits of the Fullness. They are the other side of the dialectic to the values of the Father–those values on the Right, which are the spiritual emanations of the ethereal plane—so hate versus love, impatience versus patience, lust versus chastity, greed versus generosity—those sorts of dialectics. We 2nd Order Powers bear the likeness of the 1st Order of Powers, which are the Aeons of the Fullness. We are also called those of the remembrance, because we were implanted with a dim memory of the Father and the Son, and a longing to rejoin the Aeons in the Hierarchy and their dream of Paradise. We are considered superior to those of the imitation because we come from the noble thought rather than the presumptuous thought. We are true fractals of the entirety of the Pleroma, whereas the Phantoms of the deficiency are shadows of the fractals of the broken Pleroma of the singular Logos. They are smaller and of a lesser order. They are not fractals of the Aeons, they are imitations of fractals of the Aeons. The values of the Demiurge lead to isolation and despair.The values of the Fullness lead to peace and joy. At this point in the story, we can begin to see human nature emerging because, well, this has been told as a creation story. It’s also the story of every human being. We humans are fractal iterations of the Aeons of the Fullness. We are their fruit. We have dim memories of a perfect Paradise as dreamt by the Fullness. We have a built-in longing for Fullness. We barely remember the Son and the Father other than an expectation of feeling loved, or that we should be loved. And we are locked into an endless war with the dark side of our natures and with other people who stand in our way. Those of the imitation defend and embrace the darkness of the deficiency, while those of the remembrance do their best to overcome their darker nature and follow the light. Those of the remembrance may or may not be religious folks, but they do all seek a higher consciousness. Religious folks call this higher consciousness God, and the memory of the Fullness, Heaven. Those of the remembrance who are not part of a religious body or the meme bundle of religion are still spiritual because they do seek reunification with the One while rejecting the man-made institutions of religion. Others who heard the still small voice of God but can’t quite bring themselves to believe in “fairy tales” are seekers that wind up exploring podcasts like this as they search for something to believe in. At some point during everyone’s life, each person decides for themselves whether to continue trusting their own presumptuous ego or whether to heed the call from Above. We all share the same One Self at the center of our souls. The Self reflects the Son. We each have individualized Egos that wrap around the outside of our souls. The Ego designates our name, position, properties, and duties in relationship with the Fullness that surrounds us. Even Aeons have Egos, but they are simply designations that reflect their individual point of view. The function of Ego is to connect with those around you, while the function of the Self is to connect with the Son. At this point, I think I should explain a little better what a meme is, as I use the term, so I’m going to read a couple of pages out of my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The importance of memes is that a huge part of our personality is shaped by the memes we collect and hold onto. The otherwise pristine nature of our underlying fractal unit of consciousness is affected by the memes we hold dear as well as the memes we despise. We enjoy memes we approve of, and we are repelled by means we disapprove of. The Sanskrit word for these provocative means is samskara. Samskara is traditionally defined in yogic philosophy as the habitual thought patterns collected by the ego that interfere with soul consciousness. The memes each of us cling to, both those that we like and those that we actively dislike, influence our ability to exercise free will in the here and now. When we unthinkingly lock on to a meme or set of memes, it is our belief in those memes that determines how we interpret and respond to our surroundings. Our response may or may not be the best response to a given situation, but it is the only response allowed for by our particular bundle of memes. In other words, our meme bundles function as incoming and outgoing filters. We like people who share the same memes as we do. The more memes people have in common, the more they agree with each other and the more they like and respect the other person. Friends have a lot of memes in common. Co-religionists share the same religious meme chords. Tribal brothers and sisters share tribal memes. Democrats share liberal memes. Republicans share conservative memes, and progressives share socialist memes. All subcultures share their subculture’s memes. Some types of memes are more important than other types, and it’s the important memes that matter the most. If we agree on the meaning of the word justice, we can probably overlook disagreement over the meme of whether the toilet paper should go over or under the roll. We each carry our own bundle of memes. These are the things we believe in, both for good or ill. And, depending on what we believe in, this limits our ability to think and arrive at gnosis. So, if your meme bundle contains many values on the Left—material values like live fast and die young and leave a beautiful corpse, that is a meme bundle from the deficiency that encourages fast and reckless living and leads to misery. Contrast this with living a life that is on the aeonic, virtuous side that embraces the memes of the Fullness of God. These virtues and these vices are each important spiritual memes. When we speak of the never ending war within our personalities and against the imitations of the deficiency, these are wars embracing the values of the Fullness as opposed to the values of popular culture. We cannot fake the meme bundles we hold because they affect our lives and every choice we make. Pretending may fool others, but that does not fool the Father. Our hearts need to be in authentic alignment with the Father and the Fullness in order for the love and gnosis of the Father to flow through us. And that’s why true repentance is necessary. We need to embrace the values of virtue, the meme bundle that flows from the Fullness of God. Embracing the meme bundle of popular culture gets us into trouble and holds us away from instantiating our true Self. Fortunately, the Christ imbues us with more power than the deficiency can wield against us, and it gives us the ability to overcome the imitations memes. So gos the never ending war. Repentance involves pushing away the deficiency’s memes. Repentance means you no longer try to get away with whatever you can get away with. Repentance means I don’t want to do that anymore. Redemption means dwelling on the Right side of the virtue and vice ledger. And again, this isn’t to take away our fun. It’s because joy is only found on the virtuous side of the ledger. We are fractals of the Fullness of God, therefore in order to be truly happy, joyful, we shed the demiurgic memes. This turning gives the spirit of the Christ permission to redeem us. Then we are able to embrace the Father and the Fullness. The gnostic call for redemption goes like this: because the 2nd Order Powers have gotten all gummed up chasing after the Archons and each other in endless war, another fruit was required to bring peace to this universe. The Fullness and Logos prayed to the Father individually and collectively, for a champion to end the war, and this champion is called the Christ. We 2nd order powers are caught in a never ending war with the deficiency and each other Here’s how the Tripartite Tractate puts it: “The Aeons not only produced a singular fruit reflecting the Father, but that fruit also reflected their own individual countenances and aspects from their positions in the hierarchy of Fullness. In this manner, they went forth in a form that consisted of many forms, so that the one to whom they were going to help should see those to whom he had prayed for help, as well as the one who brought it to him.” In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is the correcting algorithm for the 2nd Order fractals that no longer ring true. The Christ replicates all of the qualities of the ALL—that is, the full attributes of the originating consciousness in their pure form that existed prior to the Fall, with all of the confounding memes stripped away. We recognize the Christ when we encounter it, because it went forth in many forms that look just like us, so that when we pray for help, we recognize the one to whom we pray. When we accept the gift of the Christ, we invite a correction to our ego’s deluded meme bundle so that the best functioning of the universal unit of consciousness may be reestablished within us. The Christ also provides a homing beacon to the Son via a rooted love connection that flows into us from the ethereal plane. Simply put, gnosis is the realization that we come from Above and that our Father is in heaven and to heaven we shall return. That’s all. Gnosis requires us to step down from the throne of Ego and the meme shroud of the imitation that we cling to and are trapped in to better reveal the light of God that shines from within. That’s all. You cannot be taught gnosis. You must discover it for yourself. What we are doing here at Gnostic Insights is opening your mind so that you remember the gnosis that already lies within your One Self. You do not need to memorize this gnostic cosmology or the names of various characters we discuss here. You don’t need to punish yourself with sacrificial acts to achieve righteousness. You need only to remember and acknowledge the inherent immortal consciousness that flows from the Father. The ancient book called the Tao Te Ching describes it this way in verse 27: “The sage is always on the side of virtue, so everyone around him prospers. He is always on the side of truth, so everything around him is fulfilled. The path of the sage is called the path of illumination. He who gives himself to this path is like a block of wood that gives itself to the chisel. Cut by cut, it is honed to perfection. Only a student who gives himself can receive the master’s gift. If you think otherwise, despite your knowledge, you have blundered. Giving and receiving are one. This is called the great wonder, the essential mystery. The very heart of all that is true.” (And that is from the Tao Te Ching translation by Jonathan Star, 2001.) Here at the Gnostic Insights podcast, I am not attempting to teach you gnosis. I am merely sharing the gnosis that I have discovered within myself. You have this gnosis within yourself, and if you resonate to what I am saying, this is merely you remembering gnosis. You have the entirety of the Fullness of God already within yourself, along with the remembrance of who you are and where you come from. Embrace virtue. If you come away confused, please write to me for clarification.Feel free to write to me privately using the Contact Us form at gnosticinsights.com. Or you can write to me via Comments at the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Public comments are encouraged at the Substack page so we can start up a dialogue on these things. I really appreciate the listeners who have written to share their stories with me. The publisher is almost finished with A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. I have rejected their first two printings for doing a poor job with the color values of the illustrations. The third printing is in the mail to me–hopefully this version will meet my standards and get the green light for distribution. This new book is a large, fully explanatory edition that lays out the gnostic cosmology from start to finish, with full color illustrations throughout. The publisher has set the price around $30. I’m keeping my royalties to a minimum in order to lower the sales price for you. Onward and upward. I’ll see you next time. God bless.

The AI-powered Podcast Player

Save insights by tapping your headphones, chat with episodes, discover the best highlights - and more!
App store bannerPlay store banner
Get the app