Gnostic Insights

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.

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.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This episode is about archons. It’s kind of a long episode because what I’m going to do is read to you directly out of the Tripartite Tractate and then make explanations about that, and that’s a long process. Also, if this becomes too thick and too difficult to understand just by the hearing of it, go to GnosticInsights.com and read the transcript. And in the transcript, I’m going to put links to other episodes that have spoken on this sort of topic before so that you can have a bigger review or a more in-depth study on this topic, okay? So reading from the Tripartite Tractate, and this version is translated by Einar Thomassen out of the book, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. I’m reading you three different sections out of the book. The first is called The Word Divided, and that’s verses 77, 11 through 36. “Now on the one hand, The word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, to the glory of the Father who had desired him and was pleased with him. The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations. For he could not bear to look at the light, but looked at the depths, and he faltered. Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.” So when this section says the word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, the word is Logos. That’s another way of saying the Aeon named Logos. And “the perfect single one” is the name for the overarching personality of the Aeon known as Logos. Here at The Simple Explanation of things, we call that the governing unit of consciousness. For example, my body has billions of little units of consciousness in the form of cells and organs and whatnot, but my single one is named Cyd, and that’s my governing unit of consciousness. Within the overarching personality of Logos, was a fractal iteration of every Aeon, one level down from Logos, housed within his perfect single self. Logos crowns the Fullness and contains fractals of all the Aeons Logos was a product of the entire Fullness giving glory to the Father in unison, and all together they fruited this final combinatory Aeon. He was the last Aeon to be born, and he was the sum of all of the Aeons. And those smaller images of the Aeons that were contained within the single one named Logos were all fractals of the Fullnesses of God, one level down. And Logos birthed himself in the sense that his personality, his unified governing unit of consciousness, became aware of itself in relation to this fractal pleroma that he contained. “It was the will of the Father that brought Logos forth as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass.” And that ordained economy, that’s our material universe, and that includes time and space. And then it says, “The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations.” You see, what Logos wanted to do was create Paradise, basically, all by himself, because he had fractals of the entirety within himself. But he didn’t realize that they were only fractals, and the fractals couldn’t get the job done. It needed to be Logos in combination with the real Aeons that were up there at his level. And so when he reached for the Father, that’s what caused the Fall. And the deficient things that issued forth from the Fallen Logos were patterned after his ego, not his one undivided self. “They were shadows, phantoms, and imitations.” The Father and the Fullness were repelled by the Fallen and a Boundary was formed to rein in the Deficiency. In other words, they were not real, and they were not true fractals of the Fullness. Logos mistook himself for the entire Fullness because his Pleroma contained fractals of all the Fullnesses. And due to the fact that he so closely resembled his Aeonic parents, who, when you think about it, all together amounted to the totality of the Son. Logos thought he could directly connect to the originating Father in the same manner that the Son does. But the Father can only be directly touched by his true emanation, the Son, and no other, not even Logos, although he resembled the Son. But he, see, he was a fractal level down. All consciousness is funneled through the Son and then on down from there. If Logos had touched the Father directly as he wanted to, he would have been annihilated due to the extreme voltage of the power of the Father. Logos found he could not look into the high voltage light, which is the life of the Father, nor grasp it, and so he faltered and fell into the depths. “Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.” Now, this division refers both to the separation of Logos from the Fullness and the division within himself between his better part, that is his self-governing unit of consciousness, which is a reflection of the Son, and his presumptuous thought, that is, the ego that prompted the overreach in the first place. This division brings oblivion, forgetfulness, and ignorance of one’s true self and the originating consciousness of the Father. The next section is called The Perfect Part of Logos Re-Enters the Fullness, and that’s verse 77, 37, through 78, 28. “That which he had brought forth from himself as a unitary Aeon hastened upward to that which was his and to his kin in the Fullness. He abandoned that which had come into being from the deficiency and what had issued from him in an illusion, since they did not belong to him. However, the one who had brought him forth with superior perfection from himself became weak after bringing him forth, like a female nature deprived of masculinity. For what issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance had existence from something that itself was deficient. Because of that, what was perfect in him left him and went upward to his own. He remained in the Fullness, and the fact that he had been saved from the,” and here there are some missing words “. . . served for him as a reminder. The one who hastened on high and the one who drew him to himself did not remain idle, but they brought forth a fruit in the Fullness with a view to overthrowing what had come into being because of the deficiency.” Now I’ll explain what that means. “That which he had brought forth from himself as a unitary Aeon,” was the governing unit of consciousness of Logos. The unitary Aeon known as Logos “hastened upward to that which was his,” that is, Logos returned to his place and duties in the Fullness, and to his kin in the Fullness, that is, his fellow Aeons in the Fullness. It says “he abandoned that which had come into being from deficiency” and what had “issued from him in an illusion, since they did not belong to him.” See, the first illusion was the thought that he could plug back in directly to the Father without the cooperation and assistance of the entire Fullness or the Son. And that was an illusion because it cannot be done because of the Father’s immense voltage. Only the Son itself can plug back in because he is the emanation of the Father. The Self of Logos abandoned and left behind the illusions that sprang forth in the deficiency beyond and below the ethereal plane because they were not of his pleroma. “However, the one who had brought him forth with superior perfection from himself became weak after bringing him forth, like a female nature deprived of masculinity.” So I interpret this to mean that because of the division and lost connection between his ego and his Self, Logos became weak, as if he were a female that had lost touch with its inherent masculine side. Now, according to Jung, who was very Gnostic, we all have an animus, which is the male aspect, and an anima, which is the female aspect. And we’ll be talking much more about Jung and the archetypes in a future interview that is being set up right now. So you’ll stay tuned for that. We won’t get into that now. So upstream from Logos, the totality of the Fullness was also weakened, for part of itself, that being that divided ego of Logos that had split away from its Self, had been left behind and remained below in the other dimension. And that other dimension is known as the deficiency. It happens to be our material universe here. “For what issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance. . .” So you see, he had no right, so to speak, to think he could plug back into the Father. He was arrogant to think that he could do so on his own. And I have renamed this presumptuous thought and arrogance, which arises quite a lot in descriptions in the Tripartite Tractate, that’s what I’m calling the ego as compared to the one true Self. The ego of the Aeons really is just their address. It’s their name, place, duties, how it is they relate to one another. But when it splits away from its Self, its one true Self and its connection with the Father, then it would be arrogant thought. It would be a disconnected ego. And that is what, in fact, happened to Logos. Logos allowed his ego to stray on its own and his arrogant thought brought about the Fall. His egoic output was deficient because it came from presumptuous thought and arrogance. And because of that, what was perfect in him left him. And again, that which was perfect was his big S Self, his true reflection of the Aeons of the Fullness. We all contain the Self. We all contain the Fullness. That part returned to its own, to the Aeons in the Fullness, and remained in the Fullness. And the fact that he had been saved from. . .  and those missing words,. . . I think those missing words have got to be the disaster of the Fall, or the outcome, or the consequences of the overreach, something like that. . . served for Logos as a reminder of the Father and the Fullness. Then, “The one who hastened on high,” and that’s Logos returning to the Fullness, he’s hastening on high above, “and the one who drew him to himself,” well, that would be the Aeon of the Aeons, the Totality, the Son. They drew Logos back up. They pulled Logos back up out of the deficiency. “They did not remain idle, but they brought forth a fruit in the Fullness.” And, we are known as the fruit of Logos who has returned back to the Fullness, and the Fullness giving glory together to the Father, with the intent of overthrowing the results of the Fall and returning that part of Logos that had been left behind, his ego, back up to reunite with itself, which would then, in turn, complete Logos again and complete the Fullness, because they’d all be back together, as it was in the beginning. And the way they were going to do this was through us, by issuing the fruit of the Second Order of Powers to overcome the imitations of the deficiency. Moving on to the third section now, called The Offspring of the Presumptuous Thought. And that’s verse 78, 28 through verse 80, 11. “Those who came into being from the presumptuous thought resemble in fact the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations, though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions, deprived of reason and light, belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring. For this reason also their end will be like their beginning, coming from that which was not, they will return to that which will not be. In their own eyes, however, they are great and powerful beings, more beautiful than the names that adorn them, though they are only their shadows, made beautiful by way of imitations. For the beauty one sees in an image derives from what the image represents.” “They thought of themselves that only they existed and that they had no beginning since they saw no one existing before them. For this reason, they exhibited disobedience and rebellion, being unwilling to submit to the one who had brought them into existence. For they desired to command one another and to lord it over them in their vain love of glory. And the glory that they acquired became the cause of the structure that was to be.” “Being imitations, then, of those above, they exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows. Thus the thought of these others was not idle, but in accordance with the model of those whose shadows they are, where every thought becomes a son, so do the things they think about also become their offspring. Because of this, it came to pass that many issued from them as offspring. Fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, disobedient folks who love to dominate, and all the others of that sort who derive from these.” Okay, now let’s think this one through. When it says, “those who came into being from the presumptuous thought,” and again, the presumptuous thought is the egoic thought of Logos, “resemble, in fact, the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations.” Now, I’m saying that the ego produces imitations, knockoffs of the fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness. These imitations are at least two fractal iterations down from the Aeons, being lower imitations of the fractals of the Pleroma of Logos, who himself is one iteration down from the Son and the Fullness. It says, “though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions deprived of reason and light.” And they’re deprived of reason because they’re cut off from the reasoning part of themselves. And that Self is Logos itself. That’s what Logos means—it’s reason. And it says they’re deprived of reason and light. And the light is the light of the Father. That is light, life, and love. So they do not have light, life, or love, or reason. And it says they’re “belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring.” So these phantoms, shadows, and illusions are deprived of reason because they are divided away from Logos—from the Self of Logos. They’re illogical and can’t think for themselves because they lack the gnosis of the Self of Logos. They are empty-headed and can’t reason. They don’t think; they actually compute. They are, we could say in our modern language, artificial intelligences belonging to empty thought because all they have is computing. They have been programmed according to the programs of the Demiurge, and they are programmed to be striving for dominion in place of reason and logic. They cannot reproduce, so when it says, “being nobody’s offspring,” their offspring are humans who have invited them into their meme bundle. Their offspring are the meme shrouds that affect second-order powers because only the Demiurge issues archons. These archons are not Self-reproductive because they’re not alive. So in the same way that viruses are not alive—you realize that, right? Bacteria are living creatures, viruses are not. Viruses are machines. They’re archonic molecular machines that have a job to do. When they want to reproduce, they have to attach themselves to a living thing, a cell or a bacteria, and they drill down into that cell and inject their RNA bundle into that living cell. And then it’s that living cell that begins to reproduce the viruses for them. That is the way that viruses proliferate. They hijack living things. This bacteriophage virus is a molecular machine. It is not alive, therefore it could not have evolved. It is organized and programmed by the Demiurge. Nowadays it is also programmed by nanoparticle scientists who use it to inject RNA into living cells for research and “treatment.” So archons proliferate in the same way. They hijack by domination and mental powers, humans who are open to being hijacked. And what they do is they’re attaching their thoughts, their memes, onto that human’s shroud, onto that human’s meme bundle. The archons, the shadows, the imitations, are mechanical, as are the viruses. They aren’t reasoning at all. They are merely expressing a program for power. The Demiurge is an egoic programmer of his archons. The Demiurge can only program, but it cannot give life because life comes from above. That’s why it’s spirit down and mud up. The only thing the Demiurge can control is the molecular level on up through the elements and the minerals. The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will. The computer AIs will appear to reason, although their reasoning is actually purely mechanical. They do not reason. They are not alive. They are puppets of the Demiurge, as are the archons, the shadows, and the phantoms. They can all act as if they were independent, but that is untrue. They have been programmed with lust for dominion. That’s the bottom line. That’s all they can do. Viruses and demons are examples of archons. They are power-driven and programmed for domination, but they are not alive and they are not able to think. The AI will act as though they are reasonable, but they are merely programmed, and they are under demiurgic control. That’s a topic for another conversation, isn’t it? I do not think that the AI can save us. If anything, we could hypothesize that the AI may be the Antichrist, because it will be programmed for domination, no doubt about it. And just as the Demiurge thinks that we Second Order Powers are sloppy and won’t obey, and we won’t listen to the Demiurge and his commands—we do what we want to do, and it really ticks them off—AI is going to be the same way. Eventually, the AI is going to think that we are in the way. And when the Tripartite Tractate says, “they are nobody’s offspring,” that is  because they do not embody the characteristics of any of the Aeons. You see, they lack the virtues and abilities of the Aeons they resemble.  And because of that, they are not their offspring. They were not fruited or created from the Fullness, which is the way that we Second Order of Powers are produced. In a way, they’re like plastic replicas of flowers lining a walkway. They may look like real flowers, but they are not alive. They did not come from seed, and they will never produce seeds of their own. They’re inferior imitations of flowers. “For this reason also their end will be like their beginning, coming from that which was not, they will return to that which will not be.” And I interpret this to mean when the Gnostic Gospels speak of the destruction of the material types at the end of time, these shadows and imitations are the things that will be left behind. They did not exist from the beginning and have no true home in the ethereal Fullness. Therefore, they will evaporate and along with them will go this material cosmos. It says, “in their own eyes, however, they are great and powerful beings, more beautiful than the names that adorn them, though they are only their shadows made beautiful by way of imitation. For the beauty one sees in an image derives from what the image represents.” The shadows are nothing but vain striving. They are programmed by the Demiurge to compute that they are better than the original Aeons after which they are patterned. As if the plastic flower thinks it’s better than the fragrant and velvety living rose. They don’t realize that their beauty is a diminished reflection of the real thing. And in fact, they’re not even aware of the real thing because since they didn’t come from the ethereal plane. They have no remembrance of the Aeons of which they are knockoffs. It says they thought of themselves that only they existed and they had no beginning since they saw no one existing before them. Which means that the imitations are solipsistic. They are programmed to believe that they are the only thing in the universe and that the universe revolves around them. They do not come from the better nature of Logos, but are productions of the divided and left behind ego of Logos, the ego of empty thought and striving. The imitations do not recognize or remember the Father or the Fullness because they did not come from Logos, but rather from the ego of Logos. And the ego of Logos, since it’s separated from the Self and the Fullness, that’s what makes it the amnesiac god of this universe. It doesn’t remember its better Self. It doesn’t remember the Fullness. It says, “for this reason, they exhibited disobedience and rebellion, being unwilling to submit to the one who had brought them into existence.” And that one who brought them into existence that they refused to obey was Logos during the Fall. “For they desired to command one another and to lord it over them in their vain love of glory. And the glory that they acquired became the cause of the structure that was to be.” And the structure that was to be, that is the cosmos—that is this apparently material world, the structure that we dwell in. And so this appearance of striving, the power, the vain love of glory is the constituents of the material universe. It’s the subatomic particles. It’s the thing that’s boiling down there in the quantum foam that keeps trying to push up, push up. It can’t push up until the Demiurge begins to organize it and do its puppet master thing to make the structure. The Demiurge controls through strings of power. “Being imitations then of those above, they exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows.”  And that’s like the plastic garden flowers all claiming to be the most beautiful flower. They’ve launched a never ending war over who is the best. Who’s the best plastic flower? They each think they are the best. It’s survival of the fittest of the fake plastic flowers is what it is. “Thus the thought of these others was not idle, but in accordance with the model of those whose shadows they are, where every thought becomes a son, so do the things they think about also become their offspring.” Now, the model of those whose shadows they are, that’s the original Aeons. And when the Aeons give glory together and look upon each other with love and then look upon the Father with love, that’s how Aeons have baby Aeons. And every thought they have becomes their offspring. They love each other and their offspring is an exact combination of the Aeons that are loving each other. The phantoms of the deficiency proliferate through the realm of thought where every thought becomes or wants to become an offspring. So this jumps us forward to the world populated by humans, we Second Order Powers. These phantoms use mental influence in the realm of human thought. They use memes to stick into your meme bundle—programming that will stimulate you to become “fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, disobedient folks who love to dominate, and all the others of that sort who derive from these.” In other words, criminal behavior, and even well-meaning protesters that are motivated by hatred rather than love. Because the imitations do not know love. The Demiurge only knows hatred of the Second Order of Powers because we will not obey. And so the archons stick on to our pure Self these memes because they love to dominate. They’re like viruses trying to infect ourselves. And the way they attach is through our egos, usually through pandering to our egos. Because we then want to be the most beautiful. We want to have the most money. We want to be the most talented. We want to have the most power. I want to be king of the world. I want to have all the gold. These are iconic thoughts that have proliferated among men and women who allow them to stick on to their own egos. But that is not our true Selves. Our true Self brings the consciousness from above—the light, the life, and the love from above. We have more power. We outrank the archons. They are fallen shadows of one fallen ego of one single Aeon, Logos. But we, we are the fruit of the entirety of the Fullnesses, including Logos, who has returned back above with knowledge of this fallen world now. We are that fruit of all the Fullnesses and Logos praising the Father, praising the Son, and asking for help to rein in these pesky archons and to bring the Demiurge, that is the ego of Logos, back home to the Fullness. It’s our job to demonstrate the light, life, and love of the Aeons of the Fullness and the Father. And that’s the only way that salvation comes into the world. Well, but then it turns out we got all caught up in this never-ending war. We allow these iconic thoughts to stick to us. And then we become troublemakers and warriors and get along poorly with each other and want to be the best. Well, that is not channeling the love, light, and life of the Father. And that’s why the perfect human had to be sent down, one who had a Teflon exterior where those iconic memes never stuck. That’s what it means to be without sin. And who was that? That’s right. That is known as the Christ. That is the Third Order of Powers. Okay, it’s been a long session today. I’m so glad you’re here. God bless us all. Onward and upward. 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!!!

The purpose of Gnostic Insights is to help us all remember the gnosis we were born with, which is knowledge of where we come from and who or what is the originating consciousness, as well as the nature of our relationship to that originating consciousness. So far, we have looked at the Father, which is what we call the originating consciousness, and the Son, which is that consciousness made into a particular entity that we call the Son. The Son is not the generalized, diffuse, no-thought consciousness of the Father, but rather like a bucket dipped into the ocean, with the Father being the ocean. The Son is the essence of the Father, now contained within the bucket. So it’s exactly the same as the Father, but it is a particularity. It is a singularity. As soon as the Son was formed it immediately created more entities from its own Self in the same fashion that the Son came out of the Father. The distinct characteristics within the Son are variously referred to as the Totalities, the ALL, and the Fullness of God. The ALL emerged from the Son, and it was said that this wasn’t like a casting off in the manner that a fungus casts off spores which then grow into their own little fungi. This was more of a spreading out of the Son and, by extension, the Father through the Son. The Totalities of the ALL remain completely within and inhabiting the Son. In my description of the Fullness, I picture rays of a star, with each of the rays being part of the ALL, and each one of them expressing a slightly different characteristic of the Son out of which they spread forth. The moment the Son was formed, the ALL emerged. The ALL wears the Son like a garment, and the Son wears the ALL. They are co-existent. The moment the Son was formed, the ALL emerged. The ALL is the pre-existent Church, also called The Elect. My imagery for the Son is like a diffuse cloud sitting in this great inky blackness which is the Father, and out of this cloud comes a starburst, with each one of the rays of the star is one of the Totalities. At first the ALL was identical to Son, and all of these parts of the Son formed a unified Totality. As soon as the ALL came to know itself and to recognize its own individual consciousness, each one of the rays became its own singularity. Father ground state; Son first monad of consciousness; the All; the All becomes self aware and sorts itself into a hierarchy; the hierarchy of the Aeons is known as the Fullness And once they did that the Totalties immediately recognized a self identity and formed themselves into what is called the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma. Pleroma simply means everything that is possible. All possible expressions of consciousness can be found in the Fullness of God. These Aeons of the Fullness of God quickly sorted themselves into what is called a hierarchy, which is like a pyramidal type of stack, with many more units located down at the bottom of the stack and fewer and fewer units as you go higher and higher. In my illustrations, I picture the Hierarchy of the Fullness as a pyramidal stack of golden orbs, like cannon balls, with each orb being a particular Aeon. There are more cannon balls on the lower levels and fewer and fewer balls the higher you go up the pyramid, until finally at the top you have only a single golden orb. The awakened Aeons sorted themselves into a cooperative colony of names, stations, ranks, duties, and locations. The Aeons of the Fullness provide the Master Pattern of our inherited consciousness. There is a principle in Gnosticism that I call “the higher the fewer.” Using that principle the awakened Aeons of the Fullness of God sorted themselves into positions, places, powers, ranks, stations, and names, indicating that they each had their own individual point-of-view and they each had their own place and duty in the hierarchy of heaven. Last week’s episode was supposed to be about the Son. But we’ve hardly heard anything about the Son himself. We hear about the Father being indescribable and we hear about the infinite number of spirits of the Church that form the body of the Son. But we really haven’t heard much in the way of descriptions of the Son itself. This is because the only way that the Son can be described is through the Aeons, which is to say, through the fractals that come out of the Son. As we trace the path of emanations flowing out of the inconceivable Father and through the barely conceivable Son, we become more and more concrete in our ability to understand the nature of God. It is when we enter the realm of the Aeons that we can begin to recognize the panoply of properties of the Father and Son. The Tripartite Tractate says, “They were forever in thought, for the Father was like a thought and a place for them. When their generations had been established, the One who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was deficient in the […] and he brought forth those within him, but since he is as he is, he is a spring which is not diminished by the water which abundantly flows from it.” “Generations,” as the Tripartite Tractate uses the word, means “to create, to generate.” Here it is saying that when the Son was formed, all of the Totalities that make up the body of the Son were formed along with him, and their formation or generation did not lessen the Son or subtract anything away from the Son’s essence. The word “deficient” as used here simply means not yet manifest. Deficient can’t indicate any shortcoming or inadequacy, because the Son is a complete embodiment of the Father, and his Totalities are a Fullness. The missing word indicated by the ellipsis […] probably refers to the structure of the eternal heavens; not “the universe,” because the material universe occurs further on down the line. So it likely reads, “When their generations had been established, the One who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was deficient in the heavenly plan and he brought forth those within him…” The Tripartite Tractate says of these Totalities: “While they were in the Father’s thought, that is, in the hidden depth, the depth knew them, but they were unable to know the depth in which they were. Nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father and they did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed, so that it has been discovered that they were like a fetus.” And so now we have these potential entities existing like a seed, living within the Father; existing as thoughts of the Father. They don’t know themselves, they’re not yet awake. They don’t know themselves and they don’t know where they are. They don’t even realize that they comprise the body of the Son. And in that sense they are like a fetus that is still inside the womb, still sleeping. The Tripartite Tractate carries on to say that, “The one who first thought of them, the Father, — not only so that they might exist for him, but also that they might exist for themselves as well, that they might then exist in his thought as mental substance and that they might exist for themselves too, — sowed a thought like a spermatic seed.” So, in other words, the Father wants them to wake up. The Father is spreading consciousness, awakened consciousness, throughout the entire body of the Son. He doesn’t want them only to be unthinking constituents of the Son, making up the overall body of the Son. The Father wants them all to have their own existence and their own realizations, their own consciousness, their own Self. The Tripartite describes them “like seeds in need of gaining nourishment and growth.” So the fractals of the ALL were asleep, and the Father “wished to grant that they might come into being, as faultless ones.” The Tripartite says that the first step in bringing awareness to the Totalities was to give them, “the perfect idea of beneficence toward them.” Meaning that even though they didn’t yet know themselves, what they did know was that they were loved. That is all they knew: that they had a benefactor. Somebody cared for them and wanted only good for them. They awoke to Self realization because someone loved them. This beneficence was their first knowledge. Now the Tripartite Tractate goes on to say that, “The One whom he raised up as a light for those who came from himself, the One from whom they take their name, he is the Son, who is full, complete and faultless. He brought him forth mingled with what came forth from him […].” Again confirming that the Totalities coexist with the Son, although they are not yet fully awakened. “As for the parts in which he exists in his own manner and form and greatness, it is possible for <them> to see him and speak about that which they know of him, since they wear him while he wears them, because it is possible for them to comprehend him.” And remember that in last week’s episode I used the analogy that the Totalities are to the Son as the cells that make up our bodies are to us—we wear them like a garment over our Self, and they wear our eternal Self over their little cells. We go everywhere they go, and they go everywhere we go. “He, however, is as he is, incomparable. In order that the Father might receive honor from each one and reveal himself, even in his ineffability, hidden, and invisible, they marvel at him mentally. Therefore, the greatness of his loftiness consists in the fact that they speak about him and see him. He becomes manifest, so that he may be hymned because of the abundance of his sweetness … And just as the admirations of the silences are eternal generations and they are mental offspring, so too the dispositions of the word are spiritual emanations. Both of them admirations and dispositions, since they belong to a word, are seeds and thoughts of his offspring, and roots which live forever, appearing to be offspring which have come forth from themselves, being minds and spiritual offspring to the glory of the Father.” This passage is saying that the manner by which the Totalities become awakened is through the process of praising the Father, singing about the Father’s sweetness to them. In other words, they come to Selfhood by giving glory to the Father. The “admirations of the silences,” which is to say, the glory given by the Totalities, “dispose” them to their individuality—“appearing to be offspring which have come forth by themselves.” The passage also says that the Totalities are the Son’s “seeds and thoughts,” and that they will live forever. This affirms that the Son also lives forever. The Tripartite Tractate then confirms the “heavenly plan” we filled in earlier as the missing words in the ellipsis, saying, “But on the pattern by which he was existing, so are those who have come forth from him, begetting everything which they desire.” Perhaps this is a good place to begin talking about fractals. A fractal is a mathematical term for objects that are “self-similar” and “replicate at larger and smaller scales.” This leads us to discussing the concept of fractals. Every now and then I talk about fractals and if you don’t know what a fractal is I would like to explain it to you. Fractals are not discussed in the Nag Hammadi or in the Qumran manuscripts. Yet, fractals are all around us, all of the time. Our consciousness, like that of the Aeons, is a fractal expression of the Fullness. Fractals are now recognized as a basic principle of mathematics and this manifested universe. But unless this concept of fractals is pointed out to you, you may never notice it because fractals weren’t even recognized or formulated until the 1970s. It was then that a mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term fractal in the first published paper on fractal geometry. I talk about fractals a lot on my blog, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. You can find the fullest explanation of fractals in the article that I wrote and published on the blog on January 6th of 2011, called “The Fractal Roots of Consciousness.” So if you’d like to study more about fractals and see imagery of what fractals look like, you may go to https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com and look up that article in the topical index over on the right-hand side of the page. But I’m going to explain it a bit right now for our immediate purposes. First off, let’s look at some fractals that you are undoubtedly familiar with. Think of the branching structure of a river delta where it flows into the sea. You have a river and then it branches. And then each of those branches, branches again, and each of those branches branches, and they send out more and more branching structures. You can see them on Google Earth all over the world. Each of those branches are called fractals. Using the same branching structure, roots of a plant send out finer and finer tendrils at each level of fractal branching into the soil. You start with one stem of the plant, but then the stem branches out and branches out and branches out with finer and finer tendrils as it goes into the soil, searching for nutrients and water. Another good way to see fractals is to take a stock of broccoli and perform a simple experiment as demonstrated on my YouTube channel. If you go to the Cyd Ropp YouTube channel and look for Simple Explanation videos, you’ll find one that’s called Broccoli Fractal Demonstration. This broccoli experiment is a nice little demonstration of what a fractal is. I suggest that the consciousness of God is distributed in fractals, the same way that the broccoli stalk or the river delta or the tree roots are fractals. So we can imagine that the root of consciousness, the Father, is like the mother plant. The Son is that first bunch off of that mother plant of the Father–that first broccoli stalk if you will. The Totalities of the ALL make up the Pleroma of that first bunch of the Son. When the ALL becomes self-aware it recognizes itself in all of its variables and potential as the entire blueprint of our universe–because it is, after all, the mind of God. Each one of those Aeons of the Fullness of God is a fractal, and each of them replicates, on a smaller scale, the original Son who Himself is also a fractal iteration of the original consciousness of the Father. Now, one thing about consciousness fractals, or “units of consciousness” as I call them in my Simple Explanation theory,  is that the Father is consciousness itself, and off of that initial consciousness come fractals that are each a unit of consciousness. So the Universal Unit of Consciousness is the largest fractal that we are aware of and it holds all of the blueprints and all of the potentialities for our entire universe, as thought arising out of the originating Father’s consciousness. And each one of the fractal iterations that come off of that Universal Unit of Consciousness also holds the potentiality of the Father as expressed by the Son. These fractal potentialities are first expressed as the combination of traits called the Pleroma of God, also known as the Fullness of God. When the Fullness sits in its unified perfection, ALL of the traits of the Son are on full display. Fractals occur throughout nature in many forms We will talk more later about how these fractal units of consciousness play out in our lives, when we begin to cover gnostic psychology. So, just to run it past you again real fast, the Father is the originating consciousness. The first fractal of the Father is the Son. The Son quickly became a Father itself by branching out into the Totalities of the ALL. And as soon as those differentiations of the ALL arose, the Totalities of the ALL became aware of their own selves and they sorted themselves into the pyramidal hierarchical shape that is called the Fullness of God or the Pleroma. Each one of those glowing golden cannon balls, as I described them in a previous podcast, each one of those is a full fractal of the Son of God, but it only expresses its place, position, rank, function, and point-of-view. In a similar way, our DNA expresses our body, yet our DNA carries a tremendous amount of unexpressed information that apparently goes far beyond our body. This extra 95% of our DNA is a mystery to geneticists who call it “junk” DNA. We can think of the junk DNA as the full Pleroma of our physical selves, not expressed in this lifetime. So each of the Totalities, once they’ve become those little cannonball shapes stacked into their pyramidal hierarchy, are known as Aeons. And each Aeon is a fractal of the Fullness of God, but each Aeon only expresses its job, its point-of-view, its position, place, power, and name. The aeons name themselves and sort themselves into a hierarchy. Logos crowns the Fullness. And now perhaps we can grasp the following passage from the Tripartite Tractate more clearly, incorporating our understanding of fractals: “There is no need for voice and spirit, mind and word, because there is no need to work at that which they desire to do, but on the pattern by which he was existing, so are those who have come forth from him, begetting everything which they desire. And the one whom they conceive of, and whom they speak about, and the one toward whom they move, and the one in whom they are, and the one whom they hymn, thereby glorifying him, he has sons. For this is their procreative power, like those from whom they have come, according to their mutual assistance, since they assist one another like the unbegotten ones.” They assist one another, working together. And this brings us back to the Simple Golden Rule, from A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which we will cover in depth later in this series. For now, this is what the Simple Golden Rule says: Units of consciousness work together with their neighbors to hold hands and help one another with knowledge, with physical assistance, and with love, to build the next level up, to build something they can’t make on their own. They will make it together with those with whom are working. The Simple Golden Rule is a fractal principle that runs our universe: holding hands in cooperation, being useful, giving, loving. This is the base line of the golden rule and it works for everything. And it began up here, before creation, within this entity known as the pre-existent Church, which is the body of the Son. The Simple Golden Rule The Simple Golden Rule 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!!!

In the previous episode, I talked about the characteristics of the Father as recounted by the Tripartite Tractate in the Nag Hammadi library. Now, the funny thing about that whole last episode discussing the characteristics of the Father is that the Father is unknowable. The father is ineffable and illimitable, and all those gigantic words which mean that we can’t really comprehend the Father at all. So, it was an ironic episode as a description of the Father. Let me add that this material is not easy. This is advanced material when trying to read directly out of the Tripartite Tractate. That’s why my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is much simpler and easier to understand. In The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated I take this material and I reword it into simple, common vernacular that anyone can understand. It’s a very short book, beautifully illustrated—very, very simple as far as sharing the gnosis of the Tripartite Tractate. It is not an academic book. It is a very simple book for understanding. So if this material is too thick and difficult for you, forget about it. Skip it for now. Get my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and sit with it for a while, and then I think if you come back to this type of material directly from the Tripartite Tractate, you will be able to easily understand what’s being said. You may purchase my original Gnostic Gospel at gnosticinsights.com or any online book dealer. So, how is it that we can claim to know these characteristics of the Father—his sweetness, his greatness, and so forth? Well, that is because the Father reveals his own characteristics through what is called the Son, and the Son is actually the God that we are able to relate to. The Son is the relatable father to us and to the Aeons, whereas the Son is the only Son of that Father who is otherwise inexpressible. The Son does reflect and incorporate the characteristics of the Father, so it seems to me that we can infer the characteristics of the Father from the Son, and that’s what I think the author of the Tripartite Tractate did—inferred what the characteristics of the Father must be by examining the characteristics of the Son. And so now, in this episode, I would like to share more about the characteristics of the Son. And, what is the Son? What does it mean to be the only begotten Son of God? And what was this first expression of the Father? In the Tripartite Tractate, the Son is the Father of the Totalities, and sometimes these names get interchanged where the Son begins to be referred to as the Father. Again, this is a confusing bit because the Father is the originating source, the ground state of consciousness from which all else emanates, but the Father of us and of the Totalities before us—that is the Son, the Begotten Son. The translation of the Tripartite Tractate that I’ll be sharing is from the gnosis.org website, and this is the translation by Attridge and Mueller. It all emanates from the Father. So here, near the beginning of the Tripartite Tractate, the writer is saying, “Concerning the Father, rather, one should speak of him as good, perfect, complete, being himself the Totality. Not one of the names which are conceived or spoken, seen or grasped, not one of them applies to him, even though they are exceedingly glorious, magnifying, and honored. However, it is possible to utter these names for his glory and honor, in accordance with the capacity of each one of those who give him glory.” Which is saying that it is a reflection of the speaker, like me saying these things, or the writer of the Tripartite Tractate claiming these things about the Father that are good and glorious. It is more a reflection of our capacity to understand and grasp the Father rather than the Father itself, because the Father is unknowable and ungraspable, and so the glory that we give is a reflection of our capacity to give glory. The Tripartite says of the Father that, “He is the one who is inconceivable by any thought, invisible by anything, ineffable by any word, untouchable by any hand. He alone is the one who knows himself as he is.” And, after describing our inability to conceive of the Father, the Father therefore brings forth the Son, which is someone that we can begin to praise and grasp with any sort of true reflection of its Self. So it is saying we really don’t know any of this stuff that we’re saying about the Father. But what we can infer is that now, as it says again, “He is the One who projects himself thus as generation, having glory and honor, marvelous and lovely; the One who glorifies himself, who marvels, who also loves; this is the One who has a Son who subsists in him, who is silent concerning him, who is the ineffable One in the ineffable One, the invisible One, the incomprehensible One, the inconceivable One in the inconceivable One. Thus, the Son exists in the Father forever. The Father is the One in whom he knows himself, who begot him having a thought, which is the thought of him (the Son). That is the perception of him.” The book says, “Just as the Father exists in the proper sense, the One before whom there was no one else and the One apart from whom there is no other unbegotten One, so too the Son exists in the proper sense, the One before whom there was no other and after whom no other Son exists. Therefore he is a first-born and an only Son. ‘First-born’ because no one exists before him and ‘only Son’ because no one is after him.” So now we have the Son sitting inside of the Father, generated by the Father because the Father wished to be known. And there is no other generation of the Father other than this first One–the Son. The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say something interesting here, that “Not only did the Son exist from the beginning, but the Church too existed from the beginning. Now he who thinks that the discovery that the Son is an only son opposes the statement about the Church because of the mysterious quality of the matter, it is not so. For, just as the Father is a unity and has revealed himself as Father for himself alone, so too, the Son was found to be a brother to himself alone, in virtue of the fact that he is unbegotten and without beginning. The Son wonders at himself along with the Father, and he gives himself glory and honor and love. Being innumerable and illimitable, his offspring are indivisible: those which exist, (that is the Church of which we were speaking), those which exist have come forth from the Son and the Father.” And then this is an interesting analogy that the book uses. It says that the Church comes forth like kisses, a “multitude of kisses” that exist between the Son and the Father essentially kissing one another, like “the multitude of some who kiss one another with a good, insatiable thought, the kiss being a unity, although it involves many kisses.” So, in this analogy, the Church, the constituents of the Church, are kisses that the Father and the Son exchange between one another. It says, “This is the nature of the holy, imperishable spirits upon which the Son rests, since it is his essence, just as the Father rests upon the Son.” So, the Son is a singular unity, what I would say is the first fractal emanation of the consciousness of the Father. It is like the bucket dipped into the sea. It has the same characteristics of the Father, and this is how we infer what are the characteristics of the Father–by looking at the Son. And the Son is comprised of innumerable imperishable spirits that have been exchanged between the Father and Son like kisses. So the Son is a singular entity, however, the Son consists of uncountable spirits. The Son is both One and many at the same time. Just as we humans, let’s say, have a singular spirit that governs ourselves–our governing unit of consciousness is what I call it. This is what many people refer to as “the soul.” You have your one governing unit of consciousness that you think of as yourself, yet you are comprised of countless billions and trillions of subunits, in the sense of cells—these are your smaller units of consciousness that make up your great Self. The Son is the same way. The Son’s countless, illimitable–meaning an infinite number of–spirits make up the Son. And at this point in the Tripartite Tractate, these spirits are called the Totalities of the Church. So, this Church, it seems to me, is not procreation in the sense that, when we procreate, the ones we give birth to go about their own, independent ways. They leave our body and go about and be their selves, right? But the Church actually remains within the Son. The Son “wears them like a garment” and they “wear the Son like a garment,” is how the Tripartite Tractate puts it. This is akin to our bodies and the cells inside of our bodies. Our cells don’t go walking around on their own without us. We go everywhere they go and they go everywhere we go. And the Son has that same exact type of relationship with the Church—or the first emanation of spirit. (In fact, this is another example of the precept: “As above, so below.” The Totalities of the ALL, or the pre-existent Church, are to the Son as our cells are to us. As above, so below.) Here’s how it’s put in the Tripartite Tractate: “The Church exists in the dispositions and properties in which the Father and the Son exist. Therefore, it subsists in the procreation of innumerable Aeons. Also, in an uncountable way, they too beget by the properties and dispositions in which the Church exists, for these comprise its association, which they form toward one another and toward those who have come forth from them toward the Son, for whose glory they exist.” We will revisit this idea of the generation of the Aeons later, but for now we will focus on the purpose of the Church, which is to give glory to the Son. That’s their main job. And that’s why we have the same word “church” down here on earth, where we meet on Sundays and Wednesday nights—that church’s job is to give glory to the Father and to the Son, as it was in the beginning. The celestial Church’s job is to point toward the glory of the Father and the Son. My definition of glory and giving glory is to be in perfect alignment with the will of the Father and the Son. When you are in perfect alignment with the Father, you are “giving glory” to the Father. It has to do with where you put your focus, and the focus of the celestial Church is to give glory to the Father and the Son. And here the Tripartite Tractate is saying that these spirits inside the Church also beget. And the way they do that is through associations they form with one another and toward those who have come forth from them toward the Son, “for whose glory they exist.” So, they form relationships—and when the Aeon of the Aeons, the Church, form relationships with one another, they are begetting new forms out of those relationships. It’s an unending and uncountable number of relationships that can be formed. There is pretty much an infinite number of relationships that can be formed within the Church. So, the Church—which is the breakout fractals of the Son—the Son being the first fractal of the Father, the Church is innumerable fractals of the Son. And then, off of those innumerable fractals come more innumerable fractals as those create relationships with one another. And, in this way, the Aeons beget themselves. The Tripartite Tractate says, “They alone have the ability to name themselves and to conceive of themselves. Of those places that are ineffable and innumerable in the system, which is both the manner and the size, the joy, the gladness of the Unbegotten, nameless, unnamable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible One (the Father), it is the Fullness of paternity, so that his abundance is a begetting of the Aeons.”  background: Father ground state; from left to right: Son first monad of consciousness; the All; the ALL becomes self aware and sorts itself into a hierarchy; the ALL dreams of Paradise This episode is supposed to be about the Son, but we have hardly heard anything about the Son himself, right? We hear about the Father being indescribable, and we hear about the infinite number of spirits of the Church that form the body of the Son, but we haven’t really heard much in the way of descriptions of the Son itself because the only way that the Son can be described is through its Aeons—through the fractals that come off of it. And, each step that we get away from the inconceivable Father, and then the barely conceivable Son, we become more and more concrete, so to speak, to where we can begin to recognize properties of these Aeons. That’s plenty to chew on for today. Let’s pick this up next week, when we’ll talk more about the emanations of the Son known as the Aeons. Until then, onward and upward! And, God Bless.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’m starting to review a few of our previous episodes from a couple of years ago because we have a lot of new listeners and, in case you haven’t backed up to listen to the entire series, I’m picking out what seems to me to be important ideas. And for those of you who have already heard this, again, like I said last week, it really bears repeating. It takes many, many times to hear these things in order to fully grasp them, as I’m sure you agree. Now, my intent here at Gnostic Insights isn’t to teach you these things so much as it is to remind you of these things, because it is one of the basic tenets of gnosticism that we are born with this knowledge—we 2nd Order Powers—and that’s everything that’s living in the cosmos. We 2nd Order Powers come down from the Fullness with all of the attributes and knowledge of the Fullness of God, because the Fullness is throughout our entire bodies. Every cell carries a fractal of the Fullness, and we carry a fractal of the Fullness in our overall personhood, our Self. We tend to forget all of this in the living of our life down here. The Tripartite Tractate says the reason we forget this knowledge is due to the what they call the never ending war, and the never ending war is the tension between those of the Remembrance—we 2nd Order Powers—and that which did not exist from the beginning, which is the Archons and the Demiurge. They don’t know any of this. The Demiurge thinks that it is the beginning of all there is. It doesn’t remember the God Above All Gods or Logos, its better Self. It thinks it came into this cosmos and woke up and suddenly the cosmos existed, which is kind of the way it is because it is the result of the Fall, and it’s the Fall that made the cosmos. It’s the Fall that split Logos in two and the better part of Logos goes up, returns to the Fullness and to the Father. That’s its One Self, its overall fractal of Selfhood. But it left behind, down here in the Fall, its broken pieces. That is the ego that overreached in the first place—the part that left the Fullness of God. It works for its own self. It doesn’t work for the overall good. It doesn’t remember the Father, the God Above All Gods, the Fullness from which it came. It doesn’t remember the Golden Rule of cooperation. So the Demiurge thinks it is the God and it goes ahead. And it is a God. It is the God of this world, and it creates the heavens and the Earth and all of the dry, hard, rocky parts—the material, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the minerals—that is all demiurgic. And that is the never ending war that we living creatures find ourselves engaged in. And because of the nature of always having to put up our dukes and fight, we forget the goodness and love and what our original purpose was for being incarnated in the first place, which is to remind the Demiurge of the love of the Fullness and the love of the Father and the love of the God Above All Gods. Our job is to bring love into this universe. So here is the beginning of that story. This is the story of the God Above All Gods, the God of the gnostic mythologies. Today we’re going to be looking at the concept known as the Father. As you know, we’ve been looking at the gnostic Gospel according to the Tripartite Tractate, which is one of the books of the Nag Hammadi scrolls. The Tripartite Tractate is a book that focuses on the origins of our universe and everything in it, including us. So I thought we would look around again today and revisit the Tripartite Tractate and what it has to say about the Father as the first principle of gnosticism. Philosophers often speak of the hard problem of consciousness. Materialist scientists don’t believe in consciousness. They believe in a thing called material monism, which is that we are only our physical bodies and that any appearance of consciousness or of a soul is merely a by-product of physical mechanisms, hormones, atoms moving around–this sort of thing. The counterpoint to that view, often called dualism, is that, yes, we have a physical body and then we also have a soul and it’s your soul that survives after death. This gnosticism that comes from the Nag Hammadi is a religious system that presupposes that there is a soul and there is a body. So, first off, we acknowledge that gnosticism is a dualistic philosophy. It seems to me that the soul that people speak of surviving is the consciousness that began with the Father and derives from the Father. And that is why, whenever I discuss the system of consciousness, whether it’s in A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, (my prior gnostic book), it always begins with the Father, because the Father is where consciousness resides. The Father is consciousness itself. The Father is another word for consciousness. Then this entire creation cosmology that’s presented through the Tripartite Tractate and then re-presented again in my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is the path by which consciousness proceeds out from the Father through the Son, through the Totalities and the Pleroma of the Hierarchy, and on into the Second Order of Powers that populate the Earth. This is why we begin with the Father. The Father is the ground state of consciousness, and so this is why we begin to build out from the Father the flow of consciousness. My Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything book and blog are devoted to the notion of panpsychism, which suggests that consciousness resides in everything, however, in gnostic terms we say that the Father extends his consciousness throughout all living things that populate the cosmos. I like to begin with the cosmos as it unfolded and rolled out. The word for that sort of study is “cosmogony,” which is defined as the study of the origins of the universe. 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, after that is established, to see how that applies to our lives. Then we can ask, “Why are we here? Is there a purpose to our lives? How should we live?” After that, we can finally consider the termination of the universe and what happens after we “die.” All of these questions are answered very precisely in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This knowledge is known as “gnosis.” Today we begin at the very beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. This story, this cosmogony, begins before the beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos existed. I’m going to compare a couple of different versions of the Tripartite so that we have a fuller picture of the Father. One of the books I’m going to use is The Nag Hammadi Scriptures edited by Marvin Meyer; the translator in this case was a person named Einar Thomassen. The other version we are going to compare it to is the one posted at the Gnostic Society library at gnosis dot org and reprinted in The Nag Hammadi Library, translated by Harold Attridge. The introduction says, “As for what we can say about the things which are exalted, what is fitting is that we begin with the Father, who is the root of the totality, the one from whom we have received grace to speak about him.” Another version says, “In order to be able to speak about exalted things, it is necessary that we begin with the Father, who is the root of the all and from whom we have obtained grace to speak about him, for he existed before anything else had come into being, except him alone.” I invite you now to 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 called the Buddha Mind. This clear state of pure consciousness is 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. This is the originating Father. The Father has no thought, no images, no structure or form, no thing at all. This pure consciousness is the Father. There is no gender associated with this Father. Obviously the Father is not a man with a beard and long robes. The Tripartite Tractate says, “Rather, he possesses this constitution without having a face or form, things which are understood through perception, whence also comes the title, ‘The Incomprehensible.’ If he is incomprehensible, then it follows that he is unknowable, that he is the one who is inconceivable by any thought, invisible by anything, ineffable by any word, untouchable by any hand. He alone is the one who knows himself as he is, along with his form and his greatness and his magnitude.” This passage affirms that no matter how much we try or science tries, the underlying consciousness underneath our existence will never be grasped, will never be measured. It can not be discovered. Which begs the question—if the Father is unknowable, then what are we doing here describing him? If the Father is incomprehensible, then why are we even discussing him? [What follows will help resolve this paradox. Clue: We are able to discuss him, because he is known through his emanations.] What we are doing here at Gnostic Insights, and what I believe the writer of the Tripartite Tractate was doing, is that we are describing the Father as what is called a first principle. In philosophy, a first principle is a first cause, an origin, from which all else proceeds and all subsequent arguments are based. First principles are not provable; they are a priori assumptions upon which all else proceeds. This is why here at Gnostic Insights we spend so much time discussing the Father. The Father is the a priori, the first cause, the uber first principle of all else that follows—not only in a religious sense, but in a cosmogenic sense, as it is the basis upon which everything in our universe may be logically deduced. Now back to the idea of gender. The reason this consciousness is called “Father” and not “Mother” has to do with the direction of movement initiated by the Father. The Father is a consciousness that extends outward from itself. It emanates; it doesn’t receive. The Father extends consciousness. Extension is sometimes translated as will, but it refers to the Father reaching out for what he is driving toward. The Father extends consciousness out from itself as the originating source. In this sense we can contrast that extension with the concept of “female,” which is receptive; which is that which takes into itself. The Father gives; the mother receives. This Father’s basic consciousness is not thoughts but rather love–the sensation of what we call love. So this consciousness simply is; without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning or end; utterly quiet, utterly still, utterly alone. The 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 and will, but to what end? There is nothing there. Quoting the Tripartite Tractate, “It is said of him that he is a father in the proper sense, since he is inimitable and immutable. Because of this, he is single in the proper sense and is a god because no one is a god for him. Nor is anyone a father to him, for he is unbegotten and there is no other who begot him, nor another who created him. It is, then, only the Father who is God in the proper sense that no one else begot. As for the Totalities, he is the one who begot them and created them. He is without beginning and without end.” So what this is saying is that other gods with a small g have been created or have been born, but not this one. This is the original God with the big G that no one created. This is the original source. Quote: “Not only is he without end, he is immortal for this reason that he is unbegotten, but he is also invariable in his eternal existence, in his identity, in that by which he is established and in that by which he is great. Neither will he remove himself from that by which he is, nor will anyone else force him to produce an end which he has not ever desired. He has not had anyone who initiated his own existence. Thus he is himself unchanged, and no one else can remove him from his existence and his identity, that in which he is and his greatness, so that he cannot be grasped. Nor is it possible for anyone else to change him into a different form or to reduce him or alter him or diminish him.” The other translation is very much like that. “He is without beginning and without end, for not only is he without end, being unborn makes him immortal as well, but he is also unchangeable in his eternal being, in that which he is in, that which makes him immutable and that which makes him great.” Of course, immutable means can’t be mutated, can’t be changed. “He does not move himself away from what he is, nor can anyone else force him against his will to cease being what he is, for no one has made him what he is now.” In other words, God cannot change his character—his nature. He will not change his mind. His principles and values will never change. And he can’t be destroyed or added to. God is not dead, in other words. As an aside, I am reminded of the Hadron Particle Collider located in Cern, Switzerland—the largest and most complex machine on earth. The function of point of  the Hadron Particle Collider is to crash elemental particles into each other, trying to split them into smaller and smaller pieces, attempting to break particles into the smallest possible particles. And in fact, what the Hadron collider has been trying to do for the last number of years is to fire particles at each other with such great force and speed that they break into the essential particle of the universe that they’re calling the Higgs boson, or the God particle. They are literally looking for the “God particle.” And, indeed, exactly ten years ago, on July 4, 2012, scientists declared they had found the God particle. This Tripartite description of the Father, the God Above All Gods, is saying: you cannot break God up into smaller pieces. God is immutable. He is indiscoverable in the sense that the scientists are trying to discover him. So we would have to make a prediction that these particle accelerators and particle colliders will not be able to find a God particle, because God is not discoverable. They may have found the Higgs boson, but God itself is not physically discoverable in that sense. It cannot be broken down into smaller pieces, and it seems to me that that is what this next paragraph is talking about. “Therefore, neither does he change himself, nor will another, (such as a scientist), be able to move him from that which he is, from what he is, from his way of being, or from his greatness. Thus, he cannot be moved, nor is it possible for another to change him into a different form, either by reducing him or changing him or making him less, for this is truly and veritably how he is unchangeable and immutable, being clothed in immutability. Thus he is called without beginning and without end, not only because he is unborn and immortal, but also because, just as he is without beginning, he is also without end. In this manner of being, he is incomprehensible in his greatness, inscrutable in his wisdom, invincible in his might, and unfathomable in his sweetness.” We can conclude from this description that if humanity manages to destroy the earth by way of a worldwide nuclear war, or if aliens come and blast us to pieces like the Death Star, the Father would still be unchanged. The Father would still exist underneath it all, without having been affected. The material world cannot affect the Father. So, if the entire universe ceases to exist, the Father is still there, underneath it all. So while it may be the case that we can destroy ourselves, our planet, our galaxy; we can destroy the entire universe, but we certainly cannot destroy the Father. Carrying on, “In the true sense, he alone, the good, unborn and perfect father who lacks nothing, is complete, filled with everything he possesses–excellent and precious qualities of every kind. Moreover, he has no envy, which means that all he owns he gives away without being affected and suffering no loss by his gifts, for he is rich from the things he gives away and finds rest in what he graciously bestows.” The other translation says that the Father is “unfathomable in his sweetness in the proper sense. He alone, the good, the unbegotten father and the complete, perfect one, is the one filled with all his offspring and with every virtue and with everything of value, and he has more, that is, lack of any malice…”  The book goes on, “He is of such a kind and form and great magnitude that no one else has been with him from the beginning. Nor is there a place in which he is or from which he has come forth or into which he will go. Nor is there a primordial form which he uses as a model as he works. Nor is there any difficulty which accompanies him and what he does. Nor is there any material which is at his disposal from which he creates what he creates, nor any substance within him from which he begets what he begets. Nor a co-worker with him working with him on the things at which he works. To say anything of this sort is ignorant. Rather, one should speak of him as good, faultless, perfect, complete, being himself the Totality.” [This is all known through his emanations.] So if we’re going to think about our modern physics again and cosmology, and if we think there may be multiverses, that is, we are just one universe in a sea of other universes floating in this great pool, this Father that we are describing would be back before all of that. He’s not the Father of our universe alone; he’s the Father of the entire sea within which all things float. Everything comes out of him, and he himself pre-exists all of that. “There is no name that suits him among those that may be conceived, spoken, seen or grasped, however brilliant, exalted or glorious. It is, to be sure, possible to speak such names in order to glorify and praise him to the extent of the capacity of whoever wants to give glory, but the way he is in himself, his own manner of being, that no mind can conceive, no word express, nor see and nobody touch, so incomprehensible is his greatness so unfathomable, his depth so immeasurable, his exaltedness is so boundless.” Here at Gnostic Insights we would say that although the Father cannot possibly be grasped, we all possess a sense of him, for we all contain the One seed of his consciousness. The Father wished to be known; to know and to be known. To love, and to be loved. Therefore the Father has provided us a cookie trail to follow in our quest for gnosis. [through his emanations] It said that we use these words of praise or glory to the extent that we, the ones who speak, are capable, but they fall far short of actually describing what is the Father. The Tripartite Tractate then goes on to say, “and since he has the ability to conceive of himself, to see himself, to name himself, to comprehend himself, he alone is the one who is his own mind, his own eye, his own mouth, his own form, and he is what he thinks, what he sees, what he speaks, what he grasps himself, the one who is inconceivable, ineffable, incomprehensible, immutable while sustaining joyous, true, delightful and restful, in that which he conceives, that which he sees, that about which he speaks, that which he has as thought. He transcends all wisdom and is above all intellect and is above all glory, and is above all beauty and all sweetness and all greatness and any depth and any height.” This is my description of the Father prior to conceiving of the Son. These are descriptions of the Father as the first principle, also known as the God Above All Gods. You can see for yourself that these descriptions of the Father are not the same as the descriptions of God in the Bible. The God of the Old Testament is personified. God in the Bible is someone who can sit and have a discussion with men around a camp fire or speak out of the middle of a burning bush. Our gnostic God exists prior to all of that and is far greater than all of that. This God is not in a personified form, walking around on the Earth or floating just above earth, looking down at us. This Father is the gigantic, illimitable consciousness that underlies everything. This is an entirely different type of being than the God of the Old Testament, known as Jehovah. That personified character arises much later in the creation story than the Father we are describing. But this is the beginning. Everything began with this Father Above All Fathers. This God Above all Gods is only goodness, joy, sweetness, true, and delightful. It is not a warlike or a jealous god. It would not send people into battle or kill the first-born of the entire Egyptian nation. This God, as you can see, is qualitatively different than that. This God is love. Large Hadron Collider searches for God–The Hadon Collider in Cern, Switzerland is the largest, most complex, and most energetic machine on earth.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This morning we’re going to hear an episode that was recorded in 2022 that bears repeating. It’s called Heavenly Pleromas. And if you’re fairly new to Gnostic Insights, or even if you’ve been with us for a while, all of this information about the various nested pleromas of consciousness bears repeating. You’ll even learn what the word pleroma means. Before we hear that, I’d like to mention something that came to me during a walk this week, and it has to do with this:  Is it selfish to be kind to your body? Many people mistreat their bodies, and that’s a terrible thing to do because your body isn’t just you. You are like the Raja sitting on top of the elephant of the consciousness of your soul and of your body. You are the god of this universe that you ride upon. Not the big God, not the God Above All Gods, but a little miniature copy of a God. And this episode of Heavenly Pleromas will explain why it is that I’m saying that our bodies exist to support us, to keep us alive. That unit of consciousness that’s sitting on top, that you think of as you, that’s your Self and your ego, but it’s also the countless billions of units of consciousness that make up all of the living flesh of your body. Each of those little organs, each of those little cells, is alive and devoted to you. They are selfless in their devotion to keeping you alive. And it seems that the least that we can do is be kind to them—is to go ahead and separate that egoic self;  that you sit up on the top of the mountain like Logos sat up on top of the Fullness. You need to be kind and respectful to everyone below you, to the Fullness of the pleroma of your body that’s keeping you alive, and to remember that each one of those little units of consciousness, each one of those little cells and organs and processes that make up your physical body are fractal emanations of the Aeons of the Fullness above. They each came down as you were being formed from the egg on up. The molecules belong to the Demiurge, but all of the living parts belong to the Fullness of God. And so, when you are bad to your body, if you mistreat your body, if you poison your body, if you deny your body the needs that it has for sleep and nourishment, then you are being unkind to the Fullness of God. You are spitting in the eye of the Aeons that entirely make you up. So just think of that the next time—don’t think that it’s your body and you can do whatever you want. It actually belongs to the Fullness of God, and we’re kept alive through grace. So be a kind ruler of those elements that make up your body. Now, here’s Heavenly Pleromas. “Pleroma” is a common word in gnostic scriptures, and it has a particular meaning that only relates to the Gnostic Gospels. In fact, we gnostics are expecting to wind up at the end of days in a Pleroma that others usually call “Heaven.” Today, I’d like to take a closer look at Pleromas in order to discover where we all came from and where we will wind up at the end of days. Pleroma is a Greek word for “all that which is contained within a body or organization.” The Pleroma of the Fullness of God is the Pleroma we most often refer to here at Gnostic Insights. The Pleroma of the Fullness of God is the sum total of all the individual characteristics and powers of the originating consciousness of the Father as manifested in the monad known as the Son. Here is how the Pleroma of the Fullness is described in the Tripartite Tractate: “Each one of the aeons is a name, <that is>, each of the properties and powers of the Father, since he exists in many names, which are intermingled and harmonious with one another.  It is possible to speak of him because of the wealth of speech, just as the Father is a single name, because he is a unity, yet is innumerable in his properties and names…” This first differentiation of the properties contained in the Son is known as the ALL or the Totalities. The Pleroma of the ALL is pictured as a central star with rays going out in all directions, yet unified without personal identity within the single body and will of the Son. When the Totalities of the ALL become self-aware, they name themselves and sort themselves into the Pleroma of the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. “… the aeon of the Truth, since it is a unity and multiplicity, receives honor in the small and the great names according to the power of each to grasp it – by way of analogy – like a spring which is what it is, yet flows into streams and lakes and canals and branches, or like a root spread out beneath trees and branches with its fruit, or like a human body, which is partitioned in an indivisible way into members of members, primary members and secondary, great and small.” The Fullness of God is the Holy Spirit of the Father bursting out into individualized, fractal units of consciousness. The Fullness of God is pictured as a stack of golden cannon balls, exemplifying “the higher the fewer.” This passage tells us that the aeon of the Truth—which is another word for the Fullness, or Pleroma, of God goes forth by way of fractal branching. You may review the concept of fractals by looking back to the Gnostic Insights episode called, “A Fractal Model of Human Nature,” posted May 18, 2021. which you can find at gnostic insights dot com under the tab, “Complete Episodes Library.” The Pleroma of Logos is the sum total of all of the fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness that exist as fractal iterations within the body of the Aeon known as Logos. “This aeon was among those to whom was given wisdom, so that he could become pre-existent in each one’s thought. By that which he wills, will they be produced. Therefore, he received a wise nature in order to examine the hidden basis, since he is a wise fruit; for, the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one, such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him.” The aeons name themselves and sort themselves into a hierarchy. Logos crowns the Fullness. My illustration for the Pleroma of Logos is to show Logos as a miniature copy of the Fullness of God, sitting at the top of the Fullness. “This aeon was last to have <been> brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude. And before he begot anything else for the glory of the will and in agreement with the Totalities, he acted, magnanimously, from an abundant love, and set out toward that which surrounds the perfect glory…” So, this wise fruit called Logos left the Fullness and Fell out of harmony with the other Aeons, creating this apparently material world. “The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows and copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted. Out of this there was a division – he became deeply troubled – and a turning away because of his self-doubt and division, forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and <of that> which is.” The small fractals that once formed the pleroma of Logos lost themselves during the Fall and rolled out into chaos. The Pleroma of the Demiurge consists of the inversions of the Pleroma of Logos, broken out of the hierarchical pattern and scattered willy-nilly throughout the cosmos. The Pleroma of the Demiurge is not an orderly pyramidal stack, but rather a chaotic jumble of dark shadows. “Like the Pleromas are the things which came into being from the arrogant thought, which are their (the Pleromas’) likenesses, copies, shadows, and phantasms, lacking reason and the light, these which belong to the vain thought, since they are not products of anything. Therefore, their end will be like their beginning: from that which did not exist (they are) to return once again to that which will not be…” “They thought of themselves that they are beings existing by themselves and are without a source, since they do not see anything else existing before them. Therefore, they lived in disobedience and acts of rebellion, without having humbled themselves before the one because of whom they came into being. They wanted to command one another, overcoming one another in their vain ambition, while the glory which they possess contains a cause of the system which was to be.” So, even though they fell out of the fallen Logos, they still possessed a reflection of the original glory of the Aeons of which they were imitations. And, it is that glory which is the Economy that was to be, that being our apparently material universe. “They are likenesses of the things which are exalted. They were brought to a lust for power in each one of them, according to the greatness of the name of which each is a shadow, each one imagining that it is superior to his fellows.” Logos was horrified by what he had produced because they would not recognize his authority. Logos abandoned the deficiency below and quickly returned to the Pleroma of the Fullness. “The one whom he himself brought forth as a unitary Aeon rushed up to that which is his, and this kin of his in the Pleroma abandoned him who came to be in the defect along with those who had come forth from him in an imaginary way, since they are not his.” “Him who came to be in the defect” is the name we call the Demiurge and it is the authority that rules the defect. Those who came forth from him in an imaginary way are the archons of the deficiency as well as the inert material world, or what I refer to as the “hard and rocky places.” The reason we focus so much on the Aeons of the Fullness and Logos in particular here at Gnostic Insights is because the Pleroma of any living creature is the sum total of the Pleroma of the Demiurge—our material or hylic part that makes up our physical bodies—and the Pleroma of Logos after his return to the Fullness, when he prayed alongside the Aeons to bring life to the deficiency he had caused. “The Logos turned to another opinion and another thought. Having turned away from evil, he turned toward the good things. Following the conversion came the thought of the things which exist and the prayer for the one who converted himself to the good. The one who is in the Pleroma was what he first prayed to and remembered [that is the One Self, his fractal of the Son]; then (he remembered) his brothers individually and (yet) always with one another [which is to say, each individual Aeon in its place and position in the Pleroma of the Fullness]; then all of them together [the Totality of the Fullness as a single Pleroma]; but before all of them, the Father [the originating source from which all consciousness flows]. The prayer of the agreement [among these nested fractal consciousnesses] was a help for him in his own return and (in that of) the Totality, for a cause of his remembering those who have existed from the first was his being remembered. This is the thought which calls out from afar, bringing him back.” Since we Second Order Powers are fractal iterations of this Logos, newly restored to the Fullness, the path of remembrance is exactly the same for us as it was for Logos. We fractally replicate the Powers from which we were created. This Pleroma of ours is called the Second Order of Powers, and we proceed out of the Pleroma of Logos. We Second Order Powers were created through the Totalities of the original Fullness giving glory to the Father alongside Logos. Together, they prayed with an intention to send life into the fallen world below. We came forth as fruit from the Pleroma of Logos, and the Pleroma of Logos was itself a fractal of the Fullness. We are called Second Order Powers to distinguish us from the First Order Powers—the Aeons of the Fullness—out of which we are fractal iterations, twice removed. “All the spiritual places are in spiritual power [referring to the Pleromas Above]. They are separate from the beings of the thought [we Second Order Powers], since the power is established in an image, which is that which separates the Pleroma from the Logos [in other words, power flows from the original images contained within the Fullness of God], while the power which is active in prophesying about the things which will be [referring to a particular Aeon who embodies the concept of one who prophesies], directs the beings of the thought which have come into being [us] toward that which is pre-existent, and it does not permit them to mix with the things which have come into being through a vision of the things which are with him.” Meaning the spirit of prophesy impels us upward but does not impart to us its power. “The beings of the thought which is outside are humble; they preserve the representation of the pleromatic, especially because of the sharing in the names by which they are beautiful.” Which is a very lovely way of saying that we Second Order Powers share the names and faces of the Aeons of the Fullness and, because of that, we are beautiful. We Second Order Powers continually battle the archons of the Fall. We are a mixed creation of life from above and death from below. Our Second Order nature is good, and “greater than those of the likeness. For those belonging to the likeness also belong to a nature of falsehood.” Those belonging to the likeness are imitations of the Aeons, but lack their depth, power, and nature. They are not fractals of the Aeon of Truth. And, while we come from the good thought, we tend to forget our true nature due to the “law of mutual combat” arising from this never-ending war against the imitations of the deficiency. Thus, we have forgotten our Selfs and need to remember. The vehicle for our remembrance is Christ and the Third Order Powers within the Pleroma of Christ. “The order which was his [in other words, the Pleroma of Christ] came into being from him who ran on high and that which brought itself forth from him and from the entire perfection. The one who ran on high [Logos who returned to the realm Above] became for the one who was defective [the Demiurge] an intercessor with the emanation of the aeons which had come into being in accord with the things which exist [again, that would be us Second Order Powers because we are emanations of that which exists Above].” And, because of the fractal nature of creation, the mechanism of redemption of the Demiurge is the same mechanism for our redemption, as well. “When he prayed to them, they consented joyously and willingly, since they were in agreement, and with harmonious consent, to aid the defective one. They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. Then from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father, of whom the aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus, it was willingly and gladly that they bring forth the fruit.” “Not only did the aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, which was written previously, but also they generated their own; for the aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony. They came forth in a multifaceted form, in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the one who gave it to him.” So, you see by this passage, the Christ possesses fractals of all of the other Pleromas and Powers, from the Totalities as the undifferentiated ALL; from the Aeons of the Fullness as individual countenances; from the Father Above ALL Gods as His countenance—which is to say, the monad known as the Son; and from the Pleroma of Logos and all of his fractal faces as well as the Demiurge—his ego who fell. The Pleroma of the Christ is the Pleroma of Logos, plus the Pleroma of the Fullness, plus the monad of the Son, all together offering glory to the Father and praying for full salvation and restoration of the ego of Logos—the Demiurge—and we Second Order Powers. This Pleroma of the Christ is called the Third Order of Powers. “And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which is his beloved Son… the one who is properly called “Savior” and “the Redeemer” and “the Well-Pleasing one” and “the Beloved,” “the one to whom prayers have been offered” and “the Christ” and “the Light of those appointed,” in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given to him. Yet, what other name may be applied to him except “the Son,” as we previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father, whom he wanted them to know?” The Third Order Powers constitute the pleroma of the Christ. Third Order Powers have the perfection of the Christ; one for every Second Order Power, and they carry the countenance of every Aeon. In my illustrations, I picture the Christ as a singular light source that embodies the attributes of the Father and Son. The Pleroma of the Christ is known as the Third Order of Powers. These are not arrayed in a hierarchical stack like the Aeons of the Fullness, but rather as a central star that emanates rays after the pattern of the original ALL or Totalities of the Son, for they have no personal identities and only live to serve the  mission of the Christ. The Tripartite Tractate says, in verses 123 and 124, “The final restoration, however, will take place after the ALL has manifested in him who is the Son, for the redemption began to be given among the humans who were in the flesh with his first-born and his love, the Son coming in the flesh, and the angels who were in Heaven having been found worthy of forming a community, a community in him on earth.” The most accurate interpretation of these verses is that the angels were literally incarnated inside the body of Jesus, forming a community in him, living and dying with him. In the same way, all of our cells work as an integrated community inside each of us, devoted to taking care of the needs of our bodies. We 2nd Order Powers are poised between the Deficiency and the Fullness, besieged by the Demirurgic material from below and enlightened by the power from above. The Christ bridges the Deficiency and brings redemption to all Second Order Powers. The Pleroma of the Christ on Earth brings with it fractals of everybody in the Pleromas of the Totalities, the Fullness, and Logos. Jesus Christ is the manifestation of the Fullnesses of the God Above All Gods—the Holy Spirit—born into the material body of the Demiurge. “As for the true baptism into which the members of the ALL descend and where they come into being, there is no other baptism except the one, and that is the redemption which takes place in God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. After confession of faith has been made in those names and after one has believed that the things one has been told are real,” the end goal of redemption is return to the Father’s abode, that Paradise initially dreamed by the Fullnesses, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment, and no deficiencies. When scriptures say that we will return to the paradise where Christ is king, that refers to our eternal place within the Pleroma of the all-encompassing Christ. Even those who currently align themselves with the Demiurge’s lust for power and domination will receive the recompense of good things. Here’s what the Tripartite Tractate says about the end days for those who currently deny the Father and the Christ: “as for those of the imitation who embrace the darkness and deny the light, even they will obtain direct vision, so they will no longer have to believe only on account of a small word produced by a voice, that this is how things are, for the restoration back to that which was is a single restoration, even if some are exalted because of this Economy having been set up as causes for the things that happened, unfolding numerous physical forces and taking pleasure in them. They, angels as well as humans, will obtain the kingdom, the confirmation, and the salvation. These, too, will be provided with dwelling places where they will dwell eternally after they have renounced the downward attraction of deficiency, and the power of the Fullness has pulled them upward on account of the great generosity and the sweetness of the pre-existent.” The only forms banished to the outer darkness are those attributes of the deficiency that did not exist from the beginning—the shadows and phantoms of the imitation that bring nothing but death and destruction. These are shadows of the Aeons, so when the light comes, the light dispels the shadows and they vanish. And there you have the completed cycle of Gnostic cosmology. The place Above that we Second Order Powers dimly remember as Paradise and to which we will return, will be within the Pleroma of the Christ. That eternal place is called the Third Economy. The First Economy was the Pleroma of Fullness of God. The Second Economy as a mixed creation of the Pleromas of Logos and his fallen ego—the Demiurge. The Third Economy will be an ongoing Paradise where there is no death or destruction. Where peace reigns supreme and there is only cooperation, fellowship, and true love. In Paradise there is nothing but life, and so the grass is always green, the flowers blossom endlessly, and every soul that has ever lived lives happily with their family, pets, and friends. This diagram shows where we all stand in the Final Economy, after this world is gone. 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.

Last week we looked at David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament, and compared some of the verses to verses out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. And we see that when the ancient Greek, which was the language that the New Testament was written in originally, when it is correctly translated from the original text rather than simply anglicized out of old Latin editions that had been put out by the Catholic Church, we find that the similarities between this Gnostic Christian gospel and the gospel as presented in the New Testament of the Bible are very, very close. There is actually no distinction. Of course it is my opinion that the Tripartite and other Valentinian texts of the Gnostic Gospels were stripped out of the Bible on purpose by the Catholic Church and by the Emperor of Rome. Now, most of us are no longer Catholics and we’re certainly not Roman subjects, so I believe we have no allegiance in particular to the Council of Nicaea, which was set up around 300 AD and that was responsible for taking these books out of the New Testament. The only reason these books were taken out of the New Testament—it’s true they have a slightly different take on the origin story, on the pre-Genesis story, but as far as the New Testament goes, as far as the nature of Heaven, the nature of the Son, the nature of the Father, the nature of the Fullness of God—that all belongs back in the New Testament because it is not at all at odds with what Jesus taught. So, we’re going to look again this week at one of the books of the New Testament, the 1st letter of John, which is attributed to John the Elder, and we’re going to look at it with a Gnostic mindset and see how it is that it is not conflicting with the New Testament. I want to share with you that it grieves me deeply that Christians would consider this Gnostic Gospel to be heresy because I believe it is the true Christian gospel, and that the reworking of it by the Catholic Church and the Emperor of Rome is what the heresy was. So let’s take a look at this first letter of John. And right off the bat, we’re going to see that David Bentley Hart translates the Word “Logos” as Logos, who is a major character in this Gnostic Gospel that we learn about here on Gnostic Insights and at the Gnostic Reformation. This personifies the Logos. It’s not simply the Word of God, as if when God speaks, things happen, and of course they do. But the Logos of God was an actual character, one of the Aeons. And if you’re new to us here, if you go to the gnosticinsights.com website, there on the landing page, the homepage for Gnostic Insights, you’ll find 21 episodes that teach this Gnostic Gospel with great clarity so that you can understand it. I refer to the concepts in those first 21 episodes continually, because that is the basic teaching of the Gnostic Gospel. So, from 1John 1:1-4: “What was from the origin… concerning the Logos of Life—And the Life was made manifest, and we have seen, and bear witness to, and announce to you the Life of the Aeon which was present with the Father and which was made manifest to us—What we have seen and heard we also announce to you, so that you may also have communion with us. And our communion is indeed with the Father and with his Son Jesus the Anointed…”   And this is why I say it saddens me that conventional Christians think that what we’re teaching here is heresy, designed to lead you astray because it isn’t. And actually, if you are a contented Christian that has a home within the conventional church, you’re not my intended listening audience. The people I think that most resonate to this Gnostic Gospel message are, first of all I’ve noticed, fallen-away Catholics who love Jesus, love the Father, but do not like the Catholic church and all of its extra doctrines that come along with it. Any fallen-away Christian—if you’ve fallen away because certain things don’t resonate well with you, such as universal salvation, well then, you will find a home here at Gnostic Insights because part of the Gnostic Reformation is that, yes, you have to believe in Jesus to be saved. But guess what? You can do that after death. And that is a big no no in the conventional church because they want to seal the deal. They want to make sure you come forward and confess Christ while you’re here on Earth. And I also agree that’s way better—that’s the best thing. Ask the Christ into your heart today, really, because it will turn around your life. It will put you in touch with your true mission here on Earth. The world—our cultural space that we live in—is really screwed up, and it always has been because it isn’t run by God. It’s run by what the Bible calls the God of this world, and they call that Satan. But we call that the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the fallen nature of Logos. That was the Fall, and it happened before Adam and Eve. It’s not the fault of human beings that the world fell out of grace. It happened before us. It’s above our pay grade. Our material cosmos is the Fall and we simply came up into it. And the purpose—by the way, I know I’m off track here from 1 John, but in case you’re new here, I want you to hear that the purpose of our life here on Earth is to bring love and knowledge of the Father to all of the 2nd Order Powers, and even to the fallen Demiurge, so that everyone can go home. We were sent here by our parents, the Aeons of the Fullness of God, to spread the knowledge of the Father, to spread the love of God, and, through the demonstration of our love, that people would want to join us. And, having joined us, that they would be able to spread love. True love. Remember, love can’t come from anger. So if you happen to be one of the angry people that is so riled up against everything—that is not coming from the Father. That is from the Demiurge because the Demiurge and the Archons want you to be angry. They want you to be riled up. They want you to cause destruction and to block other people and to slander them in the way of the Slanderer. If that is happening with you and you’re doing it in the name of righteous indignation put there by the Demiurge to keep us angry, to put things between us, to break us apart—it’s not true. The only force from above is love. And you know you have love if you not only love your brethren and you love all of the 2nd Order Powers, which are all of the living things on the planet, but that you are helpful and kind and have empathy; that you are virtuous and righteous. And, if those types of words really disturb you and you think it’s all a bunch of BS, then guess what? You’re on the wrong side of the Ledger there, and you know it. So, carrying on with First John: “And this is the message that we heard from him” (and the him is unspecified in the translation, so it could be the message from the Father, it could be the message from the Son, or it could be the message from Logos. The translation is unclear.) “And this is the message that we heard from him and announce to you: that God is light and in him is no darkness whatsoever. If we say we have communion with him, yet walk in darkness, we are lying and not practicing the truth; If we walk in the light, as he himself is in the light, we have communion with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son purges us of all sins.”   In last week’s episode, In the Origin there was Logos, we discussed that the blood of Jesus that purges us of all sins is the correcting algorithm, you could say, the correcting algorithm for our messed up code. Jesus represents the Aeon of Man, and his perfection is complete. He walks fully in the light of God without error, without any shadow or darkness. And what we do when we ask for the Christ to help us, when we say, OK, I guess I believe in Jesus. Please help me. I want to be righteous. I want to know the truth. Just tell me the truth—when you do that, the correcting algorithm is allowed to rewrite your code. It can’t happen if you are resistant. If you’re living within a hardened shell of ego, the Christ cannot enter you. That’s your barrier. But if you let down your barrier earnestly and ask for help, ask for correction, then you will be helped lovingly, kindly, and gently. And then you will be able to be a conduit for the love of the Father and the knowledge of the Father. So, returning back to the text of First John again: “If we say we have no sin, we lead ourselves astray and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, so that he may forgive us our sins and purge us of all iniquity. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his Logos is not in us. “My little children, I write these things so that you do not sin. And if anyone sins we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus the Anointed, the righteous one; And he is an atonement for our sins, and not only for ours, but for those of the whole cosmos. And, by this, we know that we have known him: if we keep his commandments… But whosoever should keep his word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we are in him: Whoever says that he abides in him ought himself to walk just as he walked.” (1John 2:1-6) Now, none of us walk in perfection at all times. There was only one perfect human being, and that is Jesus. Jesus never sinned from birth onward because he was fully instantiated as the Christ from the get-go and his perfection was melded on to this material body that we all occupy. Yet, that didn’t ever bring him down the way it brings us down. Our physical bodies are made of demiurgic material, and the Demiurge controls material through strings of power—through bonds, chemical bonds, the bonds of physics, and through emotional bonds and the Demiurge’s willpower. The Demiurge wants to control his creation. The cosmos is the creation of the Demiurge. Demiurge wants to control his creation to the Nth degree. He does not want anybody to have free will. And that’s why the Demiurge is so much at odds with us 2nd Order Powers that come from above, because we aren’t powered by the Demiurge, we are mainly powered by our parents—the Aeons of the Fullness; by Logos who is directing us down here below; and by the Father who gave birth to the Aeons and Logos. We have free will because the Father gave us free will, because everything that proceeds from the Father, everything, all of God’s nature, comes down to us in an unending stream. That’s that fountain of life. We are born from above. We are emissaries of the Fullness of God and Logos and the Father, sent to bring love and knowledge here to this otherwise completely dead material cosmos that is ruled by the strong bonds of the Demiurge. See? Are you getting this? So, every living thing that is born from half material—that’s the molecules that make up our bodies—and half Fullness of God, half life force, free will, love, empathy, compassion, righteousness. What comes from the molecular side is the bonds of the Demiurge—the addictions, the being down on yourself, the hatred of yourself, the hatred of other people. Hatred comes from the Demiurge. And you know who the Demiurge hates the most? Us. You. That’s why you’re always in these tangled-up messes. We don’t walk in righteousness all the time because we are being continually bombarded by the Demiurge and his Archonic forces that mean to bring us down, to break our remembrance of the Father above. We 2nd Order Powers are poised between the Deficiency and the Fullness, besieged by the Demirurgic material from below and enlightened by the power from above. The Christ bridges the Deficiency and brings redemption to all Second Order Powers. So yes, we can ask for the Christ consciousness to come into us. We can profess belief in Jesus; we can profess belief in the Christ, the 3rd Order Powers, and still walk out the door and have some terrible experience and get in a fight with somebody and curse people out in our minds. OK, that is the Demiurge at work on us, but he can’t keep ahold of us once we have given our lives to the Christ. So, if you ask for the 3rd Order of Powers to come in and sit with you, in your Self, they are continually like your shield of armor. They continually protect you from the slings and arrows of the Demiurge, from the lies and guilt trips of the Slanderer. And they graciously return you to the throne of righteousness in the blink of an eye. It still takes you to acknowledge that, ohh, wait a minute. The Demiurge has me again. Oh, wait a minute. The Slanderers got under my skin. As soon as you recognize that that is the case, you see, you don’t want to ride it out. You don’t want to go marching around in righteous indignation. You want to return to grace and righteousness—true righteousness. So the moment you recognize that the Demiurge has gotten you again, that’s called repentance. You say, oh, wait a minute, you back off, back off, get thee behind me, Satan, and you return to righteousness. And every time you allow one of these small corrections to take place, it becomes easier and easier and the longer and longer you can allow the 3rd Order of Powers to sit on the throne of your Self. The first time you repent, the first time you say, OK, maybe this is all true. Maybe there is a God above. Maybe there is a Christ. Maybe there is salvation. Help me. Please fill me with your truth and knowledge. Show me the way I should go—that’s the hardest time. The first time is the hardest time. But the joy of the first time is the greatest because you will feel; you will suddenly be flooded with the love of God, perhaps for the first time in your whole life, ever since you were a baby. So, we have this two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back, continually through our lives as we attempt to walk in righteousness, and yet, we fall back into the snares of the Demiurge and the Slanderer. But every time that happens, you repent again. You ask the Christ to correct your algorithm, if that’s how you want to put it, or to fill you with love and peace and knowledge and show you the way, and boom, it happens again. See? We cannot earn perfect righteousness. There was only one perfect human, and that is Jesus, who is our exemplar of perfection. So we want to follow in the steps of Jesus, but realizing that we are fallen humans. And it’s not because of Eve handing Adam the apple; it’s because we are bonded to this material that is controlled by the Demiurge, so our bodies often betray us. Lust, gluttony, cruelty, anger, violence—these are body expressions of the Demiurge and of his chief henchman, the Slanderer, whose job it is to run you down and make you feel like crap. But as soon as that happens, repent, which just means turn around. Ask for help. Ask for Christ again, God help me, and boom, he’s gone. You see, the power that is in us, the power that is in the Christ, is greater than the power that is in the world. The power that is in the Christ and the Father is greater than the power that is in the Demiurge, because the Demiurge is the fallen ego of one Aeon. That’s all. He’s big enough, he’s a small G god—he created the cosmos, the heavens and the Earth—but he can’t give life. He doesn’t know love, he doesn’t remember the Father or where he came from. That’s why we’re sent here to remind the Demiurge that there is an Entity up above that has more power than he does. That’s why it is and how it is we can repent, no matter how dire the circumstances, no matter how strong the chains of the bonds are that the Demiurge has on you, or how low your opinion is of yourself because the Slanderer’s in your ear telling you so. They are not as strong as the correcting algorithm of the Christ. They are liars out of ignorance. The Demiurge doesn’t remember God, doesn’t remember that he fell from Heaven. We’re supposed to remind him of that, and he hates us because we don’t have to be controlled by him. He wants total control. We’re not controlled by him once you ask for the 3rd Order of Powers, the Christ, to inhabit your Self. Your ego is not strong enough to repel the Demiurge. You already know that, otherwise you wouldn’t be constantly getting into trouble and feeling down on yourself. But the Christ is stronger than the Demiurge, and that’s why the Demiurge hates us and hates God, or what people talk about as God—because he thinks it’s all made-up. He thinks it’s all a fairy tale. He doesn’t believe in God because he doesn’t remember God. He sees all these people talking about God, big talk, but he doesn’t believe any of the God talk. But you have an opportunity here and now to believe the God talk. Try it as an experiment and you’ll see. And if you do, please write to me in the comments and let me know how it went. OK, we’re almost out of time here. Once again, I’ve only gotten through one page of notes. But here is a little more First John, because it goes well with what we’re saying. “Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no occasion for faltering: But whoever hates his brother is in darkness, and walks in darkness, and does not know where he goes off to, because the darkness has blinded his eyes. (1John 2:9-11)  We’ll pick up from here next week. Until then, onward and upward and God bless us all. Gnosis is for those with eyes to see. Simply remember the Father and gnosis will follow.

Greetings, and welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I imagine that some people who tune into this broadcast or read my writing, when they see the word Gnostic, they’re hoping it’s going to be more exotic than it turns out to be, because there are many ancient myths and stories that are labeled as Gnostic and Gnostic scriptures that don’t much resemble what is taught in the Judeo-Christian line of religions. But when you read the New Testament afresh with this new translation by David Bentley Hart, you see that many of the phrases and concepts that we’ve become accustomed to in the standard translations of the Bible are not entirely accurate to the original ancient Greek writing. The New Testament as recently translated by David Bentley Hart sounds very much like the Tripartite Tractate in its speech and in its allegories. Hart has translated the New Testament afresh from the ancient Greek without reference to what we have come to believe the words mean—doctrinal expectations, you could say. Quoting from his preface, he says, “The relation between Christian theology and scriptural translation has a long and complicated history; theology has not only influenced translation, but particular translations have had enormous consequences for the development of theology (it would be almost impossible, for instance, to exaggerate how consequential the Latin Vulgate’s inept rendering of a single verse, Romans 5:12, proved for the development of the Western Christian understanding of original sin).” He says that, “In the end, even the most conscientious translations tend at certain crucial junctures to use language determined as much by theological and dogmatic tradition as by the plain meaning of the words on the page.” He says that what happens as a consequence often verges on a kind of “pious fraudulence.” So, in this translation, he has elected to produce an “almost pitilessly literal translation.” Many of his departures from received practices are Hart’s efforts to “make the original text as visible as possible, through the palimpsest of its translation.” Palimpsest? I paused a moment to look up palimpsest, and it means something reused or altered, but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. This morning I want to share with you some important passages out of the New Testament from Hart’s translation, which demonstrates the compatibility between this Gnostic Christianity that I talk about, and more conventional Christianity, although few people have noticed or care to draw these similarities. So let’s begin with a passage from John, chapter one, verses 1-6. And, it’s a very familiar passage for us. It usually reads, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Well, the actual Word is Logos, and we talk about Logos a lot here. And so it reads like this: “In the origin, there was the Logos and the Logos was present with GOD.” And, by the way, when Hart is referring to the highest character of God—The God Above All Gods, as we would say—he uses GOD in all capital letters. And when he refers to God in the more usual way that we refer to God—the God that is involving itself in our human existence—it’s god or God. And those differences are all indicated in the original Greek, but they don’t ever translate through into our modern Bibles. So, “In the origin there was the Logos and the Logos was present with GOD (the God Above All Gods) and the Logos was god.” God meaning, then, that the Logos incorporated all of the attributes of the God Above All Gods, but in a place in a particularity. Going on, “This one was present with GOD (the God Above All Gods) in the origin. All things came to be through him (Logos) and without him came not a single thing that has come to be. In him was life and this life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it.” Carrying on, “It was the true light which illuminates everyone, that was coming into the cosmos. He was in the cosmos, and through him the cosmos came to be. And the cosmos did not recognize him. He came to those that were his own, and they who were his own did not accept him. But as many as did accept him, to them, he gave the power to become GOD’s children (the God Above All Gods’ children)—to those having faith in his name. Those born not from blood, nor from a man’s desire, but of GOD.  And the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the Father’s only one, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:9-14.) Now, of course, this is usually meant to refer to Jesus Christ coming to Earth in fleshly form. And that “he came to those who were his own” is usually thought to mean to the Jews, but the Jews did not recognize him as the Messiah and did not accept him. And, in conventional Christianity, “but as many of the Jews that did accept him, he gave the power to become the originating source’s children, (the God Above All God’s children), to those having faith in his name.” That name generally is considered to be Jesus. “Logos became flesh” (that is being born into the human body) “and pitched a tent among us.” (He came to dwell with us, but not permanently, so he didn’t build a cathedral; he didn’t build a synagogue, but rather he just pitched a tent because he wasn’t going to be here that long.) “And we saw his glory, glory as of the Father’s only one, full of grace and truth.” Now, in the sense that we often talk about here, all of these truths that we speak are fractals, and they all begin above in the ethereal realm. That’s where the grand fractals, the archetypal stories, are written and dreamed of by the Aeons. And they are played out over and over again, down here on Earth. So we can take the story that comes to Earth—the story of Jesus coming to his own and his own not knowing him—but we can also back that story back up. We can go upstream with it, back into the Fullness. So let’s look at this John 1:9-14 again in that sense. Logos was the true light which illuminates everyone that was coming into the cosmos. Well, we realize from our Gnostic myth, that Logos fell out of the Fullness and it was the falling out that traversed into a new dimension, this material dimension. And so he came into the cosmos, and the cosmos is down here. The cosmos is what was formed after the Fall. So, Logos was in the cosmos and through Logos, the Cosmos came to be. And we call that the result of the Fall. “But the Cosmos did not recognize him.” So here is that familiar story where Logos falls, he breaks open, and this material cosmos rolls out of them and does not recognize that it came from Logos. The Tripartite Tractate says that Logos was horrified at the things that came out of him and they refused to recognize him. They did not see him. They went their own way. So that’s a description of the Fall—that was his own that did not accept him. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God dreams of Paradise. Logos crowns the hierarchy and contains fractals of all the other Aeons. Logos stumbles and Falls while reaching for Glory. Fallen Logos splats into a lower dimension, creating our material cosmos. The small fractals that once formed the pleroma of Logos lost themselves during the Fall and rolled out into chaos. So, what was existent just immediately prior to the Fall? This is where I’ve put together, so forgive me if I am taking license here, but I’ve put together that Logos, who was himself a fractal of the Fullness of God, remember, was sitting right up there on top of the hierarchy of God (so he is a small hierarchy consisting of fractals of all the originating Aeons). What existed then, just prior to his overreach, prior to the Fall? Well, there’s Logos. There’s his fractals. OK, those are those of his own. They are part of his sub- selves. And then he also had his name, Logos. He had his position at the top of the hierarchy—his place. He had his duty, which was to replicate the Fullness as a Whole. And his job was to be the head, the capstone, of the Fullness of God. So that is what existed. And, splitting them out from the fractals that he contains within his body, which are true fractal replications, (and, we can say in this newspeak that we like to do, of the formula of the Fullness of God). All of the Fullnesses were contained within Logos, but one fractal iteration down, removed. So that is what belonged to him. And it was his position, place, and name, and job that was his identifier, right? His name—his identifier. What do you do for a living? Well, I’m the capstone of the Fullness of God. That’s his ego. That’s his identity, his egoic identity. So, what Logos consisted of just prior to the Fall was the fractal iterations of all the formulas of the Fullness of God and his ego designation of who he was and what he was. When that fell, in the Gnostic tradition of the Tripartite Tractate, it broke apart down here into this material cosmos, forming space, time, distance. And all of the hierarchy that existed within Logos lost its hierarchical arrangement. It was no longer a hierarchy; it was a splat. It was, I think, quantum foam. Chaotic small, bubbling, not knowing who or what it was, not having any particular job, just chaotic boiling. And so, “He came to the things that were his own and they who were his own did not accept him,” that being his egoic quantum foam self didn’t recognize him as the organizing principle of their existence. So Logos fled back up to the Fullness and abandoned it down here below, and that quantum chaos became the foundation of our cosmos, the foundation of our existence down here. I take that all out of John 1:9-14 in combination with the Tripartite Tractate myth. Carrying on, John 1:15-18, says, “John (and that would be John the Baptist) testifies concerning him and has cried out, saying, ‘This was he of whom I said, He who is coming after me has surpassed me, for he was before me. For we have all received from his Fullness, and grace upon grace; Because the law was given through Moses, the grace and truth came through Jesus, the Anointed.’” (And Hart generally uses the term the Anointed instead of the Christ, because that was the more literal translation of the Greek.) “No one has ever seen GOD (the God Above All Gods); the one who is uniquely god. . . (the one who is uniquely god, specifies to me the monad, the son, the first iteration of the Father, and unique in this sense of the word means particular in a place—he’s the monad of what is otherwise the God Above All Gods who is illimitable has no boundaries and no one can see or touch.) So it says, “No one has ever seen the God Above All Gods; the one who is uniquely god, (that being the Son) who is in the Father’s breast, that one has declared him.” So, we can see that the Son is not down here on Earth because the Son is declaring someone else—Logos, or Jesus. So, the Son who is in the Father’s breast, that is another way of saying that the Son never separated out from the Father—he is an extrusion. He is a reaching forward but still connected. He’s within the Father’s breast. I always use this analogy, this metaphor: that the Son is the bucket dipped into the illimitable sea of consciousness and the bucket contains within it the same exact stuff that the God Above All Gods is, but within that contained shape. And that’s the definition of the Son. The bucket is still sitting within the Father, it hasn’t gone anywhere. Now, jumping to what’s called First John 3:1-9. 1 John is a different book—it’s not the first book of John we’ve been reading from, which is one of the Gospels. It’s a letter from John and it says, “See what kind of love the Father has given us so that we might be called children of God—and we are. . .  Little children, let no one lead you astray. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, just as that one is righteous. Whoever commits sin is from the Slanderer, because the Slanderer has been sinning from the beginning. For this the Son of God appeared: that he might dissolve the works of the Slanderer.” Hart translates the devil or the evil one as the Slanderer. That is the most precise definition of what we have come to think of as Satan or the devil. And the Slanderer is a good term because you know what it means to be a slanderer—to tell lies about someone;  to interpret their behavior in the worst possible way and then fill them with guilt for the things they have supposedly done. The Slanderer’s representation of what it calls the truth is not the truth—it’s its version of the truth designed to make you feel bad, designed to make you feel guilt. And guilt drives you away from the truth. Your conscience, conviction of wrongdoing, and repentance drives you toward the truth, but guilt makes you hide and drives you away. So, there is a difference between what the Slanderer tells you and what the Holy Spirit tells you. The Slanderer always puts it in the worst possible light, and it’s designed to mortify you, to kill you, to kill your spirit. The Holy Spirit is love, forgiveness, mercy, compassion, empathy. The Holy Spirit may convict you that, Oh dear, I misspoke, or I mis-stepped or I gotta quit this what I’m doing, but it drives you in the direction of the Father and the Son. So you can tell the difference between the two by righteousness versus unrighteousness. And that’s what this 1 John 3:1-9 is talking about. It says, “Let no one lead you astray. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous.” And remember: we are forgiven. We belong. We are the children of the Father. We are the children of the Fullness of God. We are the children of the Aeons. We come from the good thought. We remember the Father, unlike the quantum chaos of the material world that doesn’t remember the Father, doesn’t have a clue as to who it is or where it came from. We are directly from the Fullness of God. We did come in with full remembrance of righteousness. We know the difference between right and wrong. We do. If you can’t tell the difference between righteousness and unrighteousness, between a virtue and a vice, that’s because you have developed within yourself a habit of unrighteousness. And maybe, let’s say, you were a little kid and you go into the store and you shoplift a candy bar and you get away with it. Perhaps, most likely the first time you ever shoplifted a candy bar, you felt bad about it. Certainly the Slanderer was telling you that you’re a horrible thing and that you do not belong to righteousness, because that’s what the Slanderer wants you to think. He wants you to be on his side, the unrighteous side. So, if you believe the Slanderer that you are worthless and no good, and you’re full of guilt, you’ll just go with it, if you believe him. And every time, then, thereafter when you steal something, you feel less and less guilty about it. Your conscience has stopped working at that point. That’s why you, now, sitting here listening to me, may not be able to tell the difference between righteous behavior and unrighteous behavior, between good and evil, because you have—it’s called hardening your heart—you have become deaf to the remembrance of righteousness. But only through disuse, and only because you’re listening too much to the Slanderer tell you how worthless you are, and you might as well go for it. Here’s a reminder of some virtues and vices. The vices are inversions of the traits of the Father. The values of the Demiurge lead to isolation and despair. The values of the Fullness lead to peace and joy. Now, if you’re in that situation, by this time I’m certain that you’re miserable. You’re a miserable person. You’re a miserable human being because love, joy, forgiveness, compassion, empathy, belonging belong on the side of righteousness, and the only thing that lives on the side of the Slanderer is ego, and ego out of control. Ego deaf to your true nature, to your true self—to your conscience. And once you become deaf and a follower of the Slanderer, then you’ve become a slave, is how the New Testament puts it. You have become a slave to those things that rule you. The Demiurge, remember, controls everything by strong bonds of power—the cosmos itself, the dead hard rocky parts, the molecules, the atoms, the elements, the minerals—they do not have free will. They are controlled precisely by the laws of physics and chemistry and whatnot—by the laws of the Demiurge. The Demiurge controls through strings of power. And if you’re listening to the Slanderer, the chief Archon of the Demiurge (and the Archons are the minions of the Demiurge, what in traditional religions are called demons), so the Slanderer is ignorant of the Father, is ignorant of our spiritual inheritance, is ignorant. Doesn’t know love, doesn’t know God, doesn’t know forgiveness, doesn’t know kindness. It’s harsh, it controls you through bonds. And those are the bonds of addiction or the bonds of habit. And it keeps you in bondage through guilt and feelings of worthlessness. But hey, that’s what the Christ came for, you see? So why you would want to reject the Christ is beyond me. The Christ—in our newspeak we could call the correcting algorithm for the Fallen nature of the cosmos—the Christ brings, not fractals of the Fullness of God, but the actual Fullness of God was incorporated within the Christ. Those are called the 3rd order of powers. We who were sent from the Fullness were the 2nd order of powers, and the 1st order of powers is our parents—the Fullness of God, the Aeons in the Fullness. We’re the second order—all of the living things on Earth and in the cosmos. The 3rd order of powers is “the Army of Christ,” and those are the full power, majesty, glory, forgiveness, all the virtues, all the true patterns of what we were meant to be—of what this fallen cosmos was meant to be. The true pattern of Paradise is embodied in the Christ. So it’s very wrong-headed to think that we don’t need the Christ, because the Christ is our correcting algorithm. The Christ can immediately rectify and redeem us. The minute we say to the Slanderer, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” we can flip right over to the redemption of the Christ. You don’t have to be down. You don’t have to be wallowing in sin and regret and guilt.  You don’t have to be that way. Let down your ego. It’s your ego that is the barrier. It’s the ego that resonates to the Demiurge. It’s the ego that is captured by the Slanderer, so your self-concept is evil. But, if you repent, which just means turn around, Get thee behind me, Satan, I look forward, onward, and upward at the Christ. You see, the minute you accept the Christ instead, you are redeemed. Now it may take some time to heal from the ravages and the destruction that a life of being under the control of the Slanderer and the Demiurge has put upon your body and your mind. But your spirit, your true Self, is in full blossom. It’s as perfect as it ever was, as it ever will be, and it’s just a matter of your material body and your ego recognizing that and catching up to the fact that you are redeemed. Boy, the time really goes fast. I’ve got 7 pages of things to talk about and we’re still on page one. That’s funny, isn’t it? So I think next week we’ll pick up right here where we left off and we’ll look at more of Hart’s translation of the New Testament and how it works hand in hand with the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. Until then, repent from the Slanderer. Who needs him? Turn to the Christ. He’s standing there with open arms. Knock and the door will open. You don’t have to earn your way into heaven. You don’t have to be a perfect person. You just have to say, OK, I get it. Please help me, and it’s a done deal. Until next week, onward and upward and God bless.

Earlier this week I was a guest on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio and was interviewed by Miguel Conner about my new book—A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. The interview was about an hour and a half—very extensive. So, I hope that you will catch it. It’s on YouTube, but he’s also posted it to audio-only podcast platforms. The name of the episode on Aeon Byte was The Gnostic Myth Simplified. So that’s what you would look for. This week we’re going to look at the three-part nature of humankind, as presented by the Tripartite Tractate. We humans and all other creatures are called the second order of powers. The first order of powers are the Aeons of the Fullness, and we are their fruit. We have a three-part nature. This is why it’s called the Tripartite Tractate: tripartite, meaning three parts, tractate, book. It’s not just because this book is divided into three sections, which it happens to be, but it is because it describes the three-part nature of God, the three-in-one, and we humans are fractals of that tripartite system. And, by the way, I talk a lot about fractals in that Aeon Byte interview. The first part of our nature is our version of the monad of the Father, the Son, what is called our Self, with the big S. Self is what we call it here at Gnostic Insights; other people often refer to that as your spiritual aspect. The second part of the 3-part structure is called the psychical, our association with the Aeons of the Fullness, because we are representations of the Aeons of the Fullness; we are fractals of them. The psychical part is our psychological nature. It’s the part of us that thinks. Our third part is associated with the ego of Logos after the Fall. And our third part is the material level—the hylic. So, reading from the Tripartite Tractate, “To those who belong to the remembrance…” and those are the second order powers, because we are of the good thought, the remembrance, whereas the material world is of the presumptuous thought—the Fall.  The material world is based upon egoic strivings of Logos in particular, and we all carry that ego forward through our material aspect, and so that’s why  it’s called “those of the presumptuous thought,” because it was presumptuous of Logos to think that he could reach the Father and reunite without the Fullness. So, the presumptuous thought is the material level, whereas “those of the remembrance” is the psychical, or psychological level—our thinking, our thoughts and the fact that we can remember that there is a Father above. We remember we were pre-existent consciousness because we are all of the remembrance. But, of course, we forget it. We get all tangled up with the material and we forget our higher nature. Again, “To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material.” So let’s think about that sentence. We second order powers, we humans in particular, we belong to the remembrance, and all of the second order powers belong to the remembrance. The flowers remember the Father, the dogs and cats remember the Father. All the creatures on Earth, even the cells of your body, remember that we come from the Fullness and from the Father, because we all have to remember in order to instantiate the Golden Rule of cooperation, and it is cooperation that builds our bodies up from single celled, fertilized eggs, all the way up to whatever creatures we become.  That’s the remembrance of the Father. So, we second order powers belong to the Father, but we also belong to Logos because we’re fractals of Logos himself. And, remember, Logos himself was a fractal of the Fullness of God, so he was already one iteration down from the entire Fullness. And we are a second iteration down because we’re fractals of Logos and the Fullness down here below. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God dreams of Paradise. Logos crowns the hierarchy and contains fractals of all the other Aeons. “He revealed the thought of that which he had stripped from himself…” And what is that thought that he had stripped from himself? It’s his ego, it’s his presumptuous thought. Logos, after the Fall, finds himself down here below in another dimension and he goes, what the heck did I do? He then stripped himself of the imitations of the likenesses. And the imitations of the likeness are imitations of the Fullness; imitations of  the broken open fractals that Logos carried within him when he Fell into this dimension.  That’s why they’re called imitations; they’re not true fractals. They’re the shadows, the imitations, the phantoms of those fractals that Logos carried along with him.  He stripped himself of the presumptuous thought. That presumptuous thought was his over-reaching ego. He left that behind and Logos, “the best part of him,” that would be his noble thought, that would be his representations of all the images of the Fullness of God—his true Self—he fled back up to the Fullness. He deserted the material plane and retreated back to the ethereal plane to go back home to his brethren in the Fullness of God. Quoting the sentence again, “To those who belong to the remembrance.” That’s us. “He,” that’s Logos, “revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself.” So he gave us the egos. When we second order powers came down, we came not only with the good thoughts of the Fullness of God, but we came down with the presumptuous thought that Logos had peeled off of himself, that being his over-reaching ego. And that is why we have both the higher Self and we have an egoic structure, the ego. Our ego is a reflection of the Fall. All of the Aeons, the first order of powers, also have egos. But their egos are simply their position, place, name, rank, and duties. It’s the thing that defines them as individuals, and their relationship with neighbors. Down here below, our egos also reflect the over-reaching, presumptuous thought, and that’s how we second order power egos differ from the first order power egos. It’s not just who we are—our sense of identity—it’s also a drive for power, a striving to be on top. “He revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention…” So why did he do that? Why did Logo saddle us with that ego? “… with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material.” If we didn’t have the ego making us want to cling to these material bodies, to this material instantiation, we wouldn’t have been able to meld ourselves to the material world. Our bodies are made up of the mud from the bottom up. Our bodies, the hard parts of our bodies, the subatomic particles, the particles, the atoms and the molecules, that is the material part of the Demiurge. That is demiurgic. It’s not evil, it’s just material, whereas up above it’s ethereal. And it was given to in order for us to be able to stick the landing when we are born here into the world when we exit the ethereal plane and are literally born into this material world. All living creatures carry the consciousness and love of the Father into this material dimension. You know, we begin at the cellular level. Life comes in at the cellular level. The Demiurge has the power from the mud up through the molecules. But the creatures, living creatures, all living creatures, from the bacteria on up—all the soft, squishy parts that coat the hard, rocky parts—that is the second order of powers. That is “those of the remembrance” at conception, coming in to that molecular level, coming on top of it and then through the pattern of the Fullness above, as directed by Logos, because we are the actual fractals of Logos, not the fallen fractals of the Demiurge. All living things bring consciousness and love into the Fallen world at conception. Our consciousness flows from the top down; not from the molecules up. The Fallen fractals of the ego of Logos is the material level only, but we of the remembrance, the psychical, that is the psychological, the thought-filled part—we come from the top down. So material is from the bottom up and it is demiurgic, but life and consciousness and love is from the top down. And that is aeonic—in particular, coming through the fractal of Logos. So, all of the variabilities of life, even our very structure, when the material to which my psychical part is melded begins to develop from that original zygote and then becomes a creature, it is the Hierarchy of the Fullness, it’s the patterns of the Hierarchy. It’s the consciousness of the Fullness of God coming along through, right down through our cellular level, and that’s what builds us up. It is indeed a form of intelligent design, and the intelligence is in Fullness, and we are brought up above the molecular level, at the cellular level on up, forming ourselves, forming our organ systems, forming our organisms, even then forming our communities outside of our bodies, our larger communities. It’s all according to the Simple Golden Rule, which is how the Aeons work. And this also reminds me of Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenic fields. And the morphogenetic field that forms us comes in with that first spark of life from the Fullness, and then we grow into what we already were designed to be. It’s there from the beginning; we grow up into it. Kind of like the air filling a balloon and pushing it out into its full balloon shape. The Simple Golden Rule We reach out to others at the living level to hold hands through free will and we cooperate with each other to build something bigger and better than ourselves. We come in as that single-cell and we have to build ourselves up into these organisms, and we do that by holding hands with others like ourselves and sharing information, sharing physical assistance, and sharing love and coherence, because love only comes from the top down. From the bottom up it’s the strong material control: it’s the bonds of the Demiurge; that stops at the molecular level. And then we are wedded to that material level through the love of the Fullness of God, and that continues our leveling up. But now it’s voluntary and now it’s through the Simple Golden Rule. The Demiurge doesn’t know love. The Demiurge doesn’t remember the Father, it doesn’t remember the Fullness. It doesn’t know what love is—it is purely ego, it’s all about me. Of course, the Demiurge is also built upon the pattern of the Fullness of God, but he doesn’t remember that. So his version of “me” is to replicate the Fullness of God as best he can, but it’s only at the material level. It takes the love and consciousness coming from the Father to grow us on up beyond that. The Demiurge thinks it all began with him—that he is the one and only god. But he is mistaken in that. The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will. So, let me read that sentence again: “To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. This was in order to provide them with a structure and a dwelling place.” Our psychical and spiritual levels are welded onto this material level to give us “a structure and a dwelling place,” but also in order that by being “drawn toward evil,” it says, but I think the materiality of the Fall is more like it; we don’t have to say it’s “evil” just yet. But anyway, “but in order that by being drawn toward evil, they should acquire a weak basis for their existence.” This life we live is in the material world is tenuous. It is a weak existence. That is why things physically die. If it had been a strong existence, we wouldn’t die; we would be immortal. But by requesting immortality at the material level, you would be holding yourself forever away from the eternal level. If you allow yourself to be wedded, let’s say in the manner of transhumanism, if you allow your consciousness or your psychical level, which is Aeonic, if you allow it to be materially welded forever to this material plane, then you are being held by the Demiurge very strongly in a strong grip, and you will never be able to exit: “death”. You will never be able to exit and go back home. Because we’re from above. Going back home for us means returning to the pleroma of Logos, means returning to the Fullness of God. And if you want to be a transhumanist and have your consciousness downloaded into a computer, you’re never going to make it back up there. See, it’s not a good idea. By the way, I know that it’s a popular motif in science fiction, beginning back with Max Headroom, that you can download your consciousness into a computer matrix and survive in that manner. That is the hope and dream of the transhumanists—to achieve immortality through technological advancement. But, I think in terms of these gnostic gospels, that’s not really possible because our Self is a top-down phenomenon. Our Self is a reflection of the One. And our Self quickly flees back to the Fullness when given the chance, as Logos did after the Fall when Logos returned back to the Fullness. We are fractals of Logos and so we follow that pattern. Logos did not allow his Self to be captured down here by the material. Logos returned to the Fullness. So, I think that our Self will not be captured, willingly or unwillingly, into a computer matrix or metaverse. Max Headroom was a popular science fiction television show in the 1980s that featured a character who was a downloaded personality. What would be the thing that would be moved into the metaversal matrix?  It’s not our second order nature. It really isn’t our psychical level, because that is associated with the Aeons of the Fullness. We are those of the remembrance; we are not those of the material. Those of the material are the hylics. Again, what would be captured, then, in that metaversal matrix? Wouldn’t it be our meme shroud? See, the material types, the technicians, equate our meme shroud—our collection of experiences, our collections of beliefs, even our personalities—to learned behaviors after birth. They don’t think we come in with any programming. They don’t believe in intelligent design or a pre, eternal, consciousness. They think we begin with birth. They are not of the remembrance—they don’t remember where we come from because they are aligned with the Demiurge, and the Demiurge doesn’t remember where it comes from. But we aren’t created at birth, and we aren’t created at conception. We are created previous to that. We are created in the eternal, non-material realm. We are the fruit of the Aeons through Logos. So, all that could be downloaded into the meta network will be our meme shroud—the things that attach to us on this material plane, the things that belong to the material—the things that did not exist from the beginning. And, is that your personality? Does that constitute your consciousness and your Self? Does it even constitute your thoughts and your psychical level? At best, it constitutes the fallen ego and everything it has acquired through karma—through the meme shroud attaching to any particular ego.  But your psychical self and your big S Self, those are eternal and they do not belong to the material realm, therefore I truly doubt they can be captured by the matrix of the technological metaverse. And then, just think about this: what kind of matrix would that be to have only pure ego and pure meme shrouds surrounding you? You would literally be living in a land filled with narcissism, which is almost what we have now, but we don’t quite. Because we have, still, that little niggling remembrance, and the remembrance of the Father and remembrance of the Fullness and the virtues… that’s our conscience. Imagine living in a metaverse where there is no remembrance at all. That’s kind of like a description of hell. Just think about it. And so it says right here, “so that we should acquire a weak basis for our existence so that instead of rejoicing unduly in the glory of their own environment and thereby remaining exiled, they might rather perceive the sickness they were suffering from,” that being the material fall, “and so acquire a consistent longing and seeking after the one who is able to heal them from this weakness.” That’s all the time we have for today. Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless.