Gnostic Insights

Last week I started reading a letter from a podcast listener and I didn’t get very far. I got as far as the 23rd Psalm basically, and that was it, right? So last week I said there were two prayers that I pray. She asked what prayers do I engage in and how can I give honor to the Father, the Son, and the Fullness in those prayers. So, the other prayer that I say daily or nightly, if I’m going to bed or if I wake up in the middle of the night, is what’s called the Lord’s Prayer. And technically that’s from chapter six of the book of Matthew. I prefer reciting the Lord’s Prayer in King James language because I think it’s beautiful. So I’ll first let you hear what it sounds like in King James, and then we’ll look at a more modern translation and talk about the energy and the flow and whatnot of the prayer. This prayer was suggested by Jesus as he was talking to his disciples and they asked him, how should we pray? Same question as the listener’s. And he said this: “After this manner therefore, pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen. That’s the way I learned it as a kid, and I really like the poetic nature of the Ye’s and the Thou’s and whatnot, so that’s why I speak that way in prayer. But it isn’t necessary, and it’s not even necessary to use these exact words. There are many New Testament translations now, and they all have slightly different takes on exactly which words to use, but the meaning is always the same. And remember, it’s not the particular words that we use with each other. It’s the meaning behind them that’s important. The meta level means to step up and see what is being communicated. It’s not the particularities of memes themselves. Here’s the most modern translation that I know of, and that is David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament. And his is a fresh translation of the New Testament, not reworking old translations like most Bibles are, but he actually went to the original Greek and retranslated it in the most precise manner he could. And this is what David Bentley Hart’s version sounds like. Our Father, who are in the heavens, let your name be held holy; Let your Kingdom come; Let your will come to pass, as in heaven so also upon earth; Give us today bread for the day ahead; And excuses our debts, just as we have excused our debtors; And do not bring us to trial, but rescue us from him who is wicked. [For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory unto the ages.] Now again, I’ve noticed that the word ages in these translations can also be translated as Aeons, and I think of Aeons as units of consciousness, not as units of time. So when it says, For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory unto the ages, in my own mind, I think For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory unto the Aeons. And finally, we’re pulling the Aeons and the Fullness of God into the prayers, because they’re usually left out. Note, in this Gnostic Christianity, the Fullness is an actual entity. It’s a location where the Aeons live. And the Aeons are infinite in number because they are expressions of the Son of God, and the Son is infinite in scope, power, and size. So it stands to reason that the particularities of the Son of God would also be infinite. So, the Fullness of God is where they live. That’s what it means to be the Fullness of God—the place where the Aeons dwell. And the Fullness and the Son and the what’s called the Totalities of the ALL, which are like the parents of the Aeons, they are coexistent; they’re equal in scope and power with the Son. Normally in Christianity, the Fullness of God is just used as a an adverbial expression of how great and big and grand God is. But it’s actually quite a bit more than that. It’s a description of all the individual traits of the Son of God. OK, let’s go back for a minute and talk about prayer. Jesus said, “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.” And that’s what makes them hypocrites, because they’re actually looking for recognition and brownie points from other people. He goes on to say, “Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.” That is, from the other people, the brownie points. “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” And I think of the Father not as this big eye in the sky who watches everything that everybody does. The Father is within us because we all carry the Fullness of God inside of us. So the Father is as close to us as we are standing here. We wear this body on us and we also wear the Fullness of God within all the parts of our body. That is how the Father sees us. He’s inside of us. He sees everything because he’s going along with us. We take him along with us everywhere we go. Continuing, Jesus says, “Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like the pagans do, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.” So the idea of having to repeat, to sit and repeat and repeat and repeat, as monks do in various religions, to sit all day and repeat the same prayers out loud, hundreds and thousands of times—that isn’t necessary. Jesus says do not be like them, “For your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” And personally I am not what’s called a prayer warrior. Some Christians call themselves prayer warriors, and they are moved to pray for people constantly. And that, I suppose, is a good thing because it’s a method of expressing love. But Jesus said your Father knows what you need before you ask him. So asking him over and over and over for these things doesn’t help. I think what the prayer for other people does is it helps you focus that the answer will come to them from the Father above. And it opens you up to see if there’s some way that you can help the Father bring it into practice here on Earth. The simplest prayer would simply be, “Thank you for the Christ. May Christ’s will be done.” That’s all you need to say because the Christ knows what everybody needs. OK. So let’s look at what I’m thinking when I’m going through the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” Hallowed means separate because of glory. It’s a hallowed place that only the Father occupies, because the Father is so infinitely glorious, we can’t even begin to imagine it. And it says in the Tripartite Tractate, as it says throughout the Bible, that we cannot look upon the face of God the Father, the God Above All Gods, because he’s too great. In the Tripartite Tractate it says anyone looking upon him would be annihilated. And that goes for the Aeons and the angels as well as us down here below. The only one that can look upon the face of the God Above All Gods, the origin of consciousness, is the Son. And that’s because the Son is an encapsulation in a monad form of the Father’s traits, but it’s a particularity—an infinitely large, particularly. And also when we say, “Our Father in heaven,” in the Tripartite Tractate it says that we have the God Above All Gods as the ultimate Father of consciousness—that’s where the consciousness begins and that’s where it resides, and the Son is his offspring. That’s why it’s called the Son. And let me remind you that the only reason we use a male designation of Father and Son is because it has to do with the direction of the energetic flow. The male is the outward projection of the flow. The female is the receptive projection of the flow. So the Father and the Son are male figures. The Cosmos is a female figure because it receives the emanations of the Son. But as soon as the Son was formed, being in the exact image of the Father, he also became a Father. And he gave birth to the Totalities. And so it says in the Tripartite Tractate that as soon as the Son was formed, he also became a Father. So we are emanations of the Son of God and then we are emanations of the Fullness of God, because this consciousness is coming downstream to us. So, the listener’s original question was, “How can we pray to the Fullness of God and the Aeons?” When we pray to the Father, it’s not only to the God Above All Gods. The Father also includes the Son who has become a Father. We don’t pray to individual Aeons. The Aeon that we can pray to directly would be the Christ. So we pray to the God Above All Gods and his designate, which is the Son who also is called Father, and then we can pray to the Christ because it’s his job to help us. The rest of the Aeons have other jobs—they’ve got tons of other jobs, including the way physics and chemistry runs, and the way cells work in our bodies and how bodies go together and all of the things that make up the living creatures of the Earth. Those are particularities of those particular Aeons–Aeons in charge of blood, Aeons in charge of personalities, Aeons in charge of everything. The Christ puts it all together. So the Aeon that we can pray to is the Christ, and the Christ is represented by Jesus in Christianity. You can pray directly to the Christ, or you can pray to Jesus if you like to personify Jesus, as many of us do. And I’m thinking that in that Hart’s version of the Lord’s Prayer that I read you, it started by saying, “Our Father, who are in the heavens, let your name be held holy.” That’s a plural, isn’t it? Who are? And so I’m thinking that Jesus recognized that the Father had many parts. And, of course, in traditional Christian religion he’s called a triune God, and they recognize him as the Father and the Son, (OK, we agree with that), and the Holy Spirit. And that those are the three parts who would be the “are” in heaven. In Gnostic Christianity, the Holy Spirit is the spirit flowing down from the Fullness of God, which is infinitely complex. It’s not a singular thing. So, the prayer goes on to say, “Your Kingdom come,” and when I say Kingdom, I’m picturing the Kingdom of God. And, a Kingdom is a place, isn’t it? And it’s a place where someone is in charge. There’s a King. And so we are saying that we want the Kingdom of God to come. And you can picture the Kingdom as, you know, really neat. It can be that castle on a hill kind of thing, with pennants, waving flags, and all that. So, “Your Kingdom come; Your will be done.” Now, part of the characteristics and traits of God, of the originating consciousness, is willpower. We also have willpower. Now, there’s a long running argument in theology about whether God’s will blanks out our will. But that isn’t true. Every expression of the Fullness of God carries all of the expressions of the Fullness of God. And, the Fullness of God carries that willpower that begins with the originating consciousness, flows down through the Son, flows down through the Fullness, and on into us. So we have that same exact characteristic of willpower as the Father, the Son, and the Fullness. That is why it is that at any given moment in time, you can make a decision for this or that. You are not powerless. You are not helpless. You are not a pawn in a bigger game, and, is the bigger game gonna be God? Or is the bigger game gonna be the Demiurge? No. You have the willpower of the Fullness of God within you, and so you choose to be in the Kingdom of your Father or you choose to be in the Kingdom of the Demiurge. So, in this prayer, Jesus suggests that we pray for the Father’s will to be done on Earth as it is in heaven. So here we are trying to bring the perfection and the love and all of the virtues and the knowledge, the true knowledge, onto the Earth. That’s the job of the 2nd order powers. We embody the Fullness of God on this fallen plane. That’s what it means: “Your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.” And that will is expressed through us. Then it says, “Give us today our daily bread,” or “Give us the bread we need for the day ahead.” So, we don’t need to worry long scale about things. We’re praying for today’s manna, today’s provisions, to be given to us or to find them. And we recognize that all provisions come from above. Now the next part, which is chapter 6, verse 12 of Matthew, says, “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” And that is a tit-for-tat kind of quid pro quo expression. Excuse us our debts just as we have excused our debtors. This means that unless we have a forgiving heart, we cannot accept the forgiveness of God in the same way. There’s no way that you can expect to be forgiven for your shortcomings by the Christ, by the Father, by other people, if you are not willing to forgive others in exactly the same way. So we are forgiven to the extent that we forgive others. And it’s not just because of the balance of the scales of justice. It’s because, unless we can embrace the concept of forgiveness, we won’t believe that we are forgiven. If our hearts are hard and we carry grudges, well, how can we expect to be forgiven? We will project that same kind of grudge carrying and condemnation and punishment onto God. But God is all forgiving. And if God is willing to forgive us, we need to be willing to forgive each other. The next line is, “And lead us not into temptation,” which I’ve always thought was a strange translation because the Father wouldn’t lead us into temptation. It’s not the Father or the Fullness or the Son that is dangling temptation in front of our eyes, although it’s all around us at all times. The one who leads us into temptation is the Demiurge and the archons of the Demiurge, so if we keep our eyes on heaven rather than on the world, we will not be led into temptation. In Hart’s translation, he says, “Do not bring us to trial, but rescue us from him who is wicked.” So, him who is wicked, that’s the Demiurge and those who work for the Demiurge. And we’re just praying that we don’t come to trial. But trials come to us, don’t they? All the time. So we’re asking for mercy. We’re asking that things would be easy and good. And, you won’t be truly tempted if you’re staying on the right side of the Ledger, the side of virtues rather than vices. If you live on the side of vice, you’re always tempted, because that’s all about temptation. And then it wraps up by saying, “For yours is the Kingdom.” And so, when I say Yours is the Kingdom, in my mind, my spirit, my energy looks upward towards the heavenly realms, towards the Kingdom. So I picture again the Kingdom. And it’s not just picturing it. I’m moving my energy in an upward direction, onward and upward to be with the Father in the Kingdom. “Yours is the Kingdom and the power.” So then we picture power in its most abstract form. Power. When I say power, I’ve got my fist closed and I’m moving it forward. It’s a motion. And so it’s the power that helps me pull onward and upward into the Kingdom. It’s the power that moves up for me, but it’s also the power that flows down from the Father. So, true power comes up towards the Father and comes down to us from the Father. “And the glory.” We praise the Father. We praise the Son. They are glorious. Glorious means wonderful, indescribably wonderful, beautiful. The best thing ever. That’s the glory. [For me, glory is associated with the color of gold.] And then, in Hart’s translation, he says, “the glory into the ages,” which allows me to fold the Fullness into there, and the Aeons. So, they’re glorious as well, because they are part of the Son. They’re not as glorious as the Son. And, by the way, to remind you of how this gnostic cosmogeny works—the way the Totalities of the ALL were birthed was by the Son and the Father giving glory to each other. They had this reflected glory and love for each other, and it’s the process of giving glory that gives birth to new creation. So when the Son and the Father gave glory to one another, the Totalities were birthed, which is all of the breakout variables of the Son. And, the Totalities’ entire job is to give glory to the Son and the Father. They don’t do anything else. Their full time job is to give glory to the Son and glory to the Father. That’s all they do. They sing and they give glory in harmony, perfect harmony, all together. The way the Aeons were birthed was, as the Totalities gave glory to the Father, they became aware of themselves. They broke out from their melded-together unity and became individuated pieces of consciousness. And that next step is the Aeons of the Fullness of God. They were birthed by the Totalities giving glory upstream; and it’s the process of giving glory to God that creates our true Self nature. The cloud of the consciousness of the Son emerges from the background consciousness of the Father. The Son gives rise to his differentiations, known as the Totalitities of the ALL. The ALL becomes individuated self-aware units of consciousness through giving glory to the Father. The Units of Consciousness sort themselves into the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. Also, as soon as the Aeons were birthed, as soon as the Fullnesses were realized by the Totalities giving glory to the Father—as soon as the Fullnesses realized themselves—they immediately sorted themselves into the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. Everyone has a name, everyone has an address, a place, a position, a rank, and a purpose, a job, and that’s what I identify as the Ego, the birth of the Ego of the Aeons. But it’s not a negative thing, it’s simply awareness of one’s Self as an individual consciousness. And that’s the Lord’s prayer. Usually you end it by saying “Amen.” And Amen means let it be so. So be it. Here-here. But if you forget to say Amen or you don’t say Amen, it’s not a magic word. This isn’t magic, people. So you don’t have to say incantations in any particular way and make sure you don’t skip any words. It’s all a matter of reflecting where your heart is. And, if your heart gives glory to the Father, that’s all that matters. You can even do it without words at all, as I’m sure the other 2nd order powers do. What do you think the rabbits are doing and the cats and the dogs and the cows all day long when they just seem to be dozing off, standing there in the sunshine or lying there? They’re giving glory. They know that they are loved. Even those that aren’t pets that have humans to love them, they know that they are loved by the Father, and by the Fullness, because it’s inside of all of them as well. And they probably aren’t reciting the Lord’s prayer; they’re just communing with the spirit of God. And you can do that as well, often called meditation. Okay. Well, I guess this episode is going to be called the Lord’s Prayer because I didn’t get any further in the listener’s letter, but I did describe prayer and how I pray. p.s. I do have particular prayers now and then. OK. If you’re in desperate situation, if I’m in a desperate situation, I will issue an emergency prayer just because that’s what my heart needs to do, and I have belief that issuing that emergency prayer will do the job for me. But it’s not any particular words that I have to say. For example, many years ago, 40 years ago, my husband and my dog and I were in a huge car crash where our van flipped end over end over end several times. I was belted in, but of course the poor dog was thrown around. But, during the end over end over end over crash period, I was praying to Christ. You better believe it, I was praying! Because it’s spontaneous, it’s automatic. Oh Lord rescue me! Oh Lord, help me! Oh dear God, save us! That’s an emergency prayer. And I’ll say that, yeah, that’s another prayer. So that is a third type of prayer that I do. Now it’s usually reserved for some pet emergency. Oh, dear Lord, help my poor Kitty. Oh, dear Lord, help this dog. It’s like that. Onward and upward! And God bless. Announcement! I am being interviewed on the Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio podcast April 1st at 10:00 AM Pacific coast time. This will be a live stream video podcast with opportunities to submit questions during the show. I’ll be talking about the new book, which is about to be released. Please put it on your calendar. It would be great to have some people in the audience who follow the Gnostic Insights podcast! Hope to see you there.

I’m going to read you some excerpts this morning from one of the listeners. She says a lot of people look at her as if she’s speaking Chinese when she talks about the things she’s learned. She says, “I don’t think the point is who is right versus wrong. But if we can come to a universal understanding that is about love, particularly the Father’s love, the Son’s love, and the Pleroma, the ALL and the Totalities—it’s all love.” And, indeed, it’s about rising above the memes, the particularities, to find the essence that is being conveyed, no matter what people are talking about. Is it love or is it anger and hate? That is a dichotomy. Is it life or is it ignorance and death? Those are dichotomies that cannot be overcome, because they are either/or. But as far as the particularities, those are not as important as where your heart lies. She says, “I see so many people who have podcasts, YouTube channels, and two week $300.00 classes that promise spiritual enlightening,” and it causes her to shake her head. “Other people seem to want to focus on things that don’t have much substance and then try to fill in the lines.” She asks me if there are any, “specific prayers that I would suggest to give glory to the Father, the Son, and the Pleroma. Are there specific prayers for that?” Well, I don’t have a particular litany of prayers. There are really only two prayers that I repeat pretty much daily. [Those two prayers are “The Lord’s Prayer,” and the 23rd Psalm.] Usually when I go to bed, or in the middle of the night if I wake up, if I say the 23rd Psalm, I immediately feel peaceful. It causes me to have a deep and relaxing breath when I’m beginning the very first stanza, and then I’m able to relax. I picture all of the events taking place in the 23rd Psalm, and then I often fall asleep before I even reach the end. So let me go ahead and recite the 23rd Psalm for you. And it’s a good one to memorize, because it’s pretty much all there and it’s very comforting. Here’s how it goes: The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I pass through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of my enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the House of the Lord forever. That’s the 23rd Psalm. And it’s not a ritualistic thing. It’s not a thing like repeat this 20 times in a certain cadence and all will be well with you. It’s more a matter of putting yourself into the place that’s being discussed. Picture yourself. So, when I say the 23rd Psalm to myself, I do think of myself as a sheep because it’s talking about the Good Shepherd. “The Lord is my shepherd.” So I picture Jesus looking like a shepherd and I’m one of the sheep lying down in the pastures. And it’s a beautiful pasture. I picture it in my mind. And I can stay there for a long time if I want to and look around the pasture at how beautiful it is. There’s a park near here that I call up in my mind because there’s a river that runs through it. And so the green pasture is at that park. And, “He leadeth me beside the still waters.” It’s peaceful water. It’s not a raging storm going on so that river is not flowing fast, but it’s very calm and wonderful. A good, safe place to bathe or to drink. And, symbolically, still waters represent calm. Calm emotions, not being in turmoil, but peaceful and calm. And it says, “He restoreth my soul.” So, whatever is bothering me or troubling me that happened during the day or that caused me to wake up in the night, there’s no need to lie there and to play it over in my mind. That is never helpful. That’s backward and down. You don’t want to replay bad things in the backward direction, which is history, and down, which is the demiurgic direction that stirs you up and makes you feel bad. So, “He restoreth my soul.” “He leadeth me down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” The paths of righteousness—another black and white choice is virtue or vice. We don’t dwell in the gray areas. Those cause turmoil. Those cause confusion. There isn’t any gray area between evil and righteousness. Evil is evil. Evil is a lack of knowledge, a lack of life and love. Evil is rooting for death and division. That is not a gray area. That is a bad area to wander through, so my Good Shepherd leads me down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Now, that sometimes used to throw me. What does this mean? Why am I going down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake and not for my sake? Because when we go down paths of righteousness, of course it’s onward and upward. It’s virtues. It’s dwelling on love, forgiveness, charity—the good side of the Ledger. But we are representatives of the Father. We are representatives of the Fullness of God. We represent here in this fallen plane the glorious Father above, and so it’s for His name’s sake that we reflect that righteousness because, well, first off, it’s for his sake he doesn’t want us to suffer. He doesn’t want us dwelling in the darkness. He wants us to walk with him. So it’s for his sake that we are with him. But it’s for our sake and it’s for the world’s sake because we’re reflecting the glory of God when we dwell in righteousness—when we spread love and not hate. When we’re kind and not angry. Then, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…” See a lot of the people who explain the Bible to us like to look backward at history. I’m not that much into history. I know a lot of you folks are, but there’s really no point in it for my life. I dwell in the here and now. The here and now is all that we have. The history, particularly the history of 500 years, 1000 years, 2000 years, 3000 years ago, that is not going to lift you. That doesn’t help you, does it? So when people talk about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, yes, there was this place that the Hebrews referred to near Jerusalem as the valley of the shadow of death, or whatever. That’s a fractal of the story. It’s not the story. It’s an archetypal vision of the shadow of death, but the actual valley of the shadow of death is the fallen world—is material existence. We live in the shadow of death. It overhangs us at all times. At any minute you can lose this material existence. And the great fear of death that people have is not knowing that we go on after this material existence passes away. That’s the fear of death. People are paranoid and neurotic about death, about fearing death. Particularly in the middle of the night. So, even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, which is this material body that we are yoked to, we need not fear it. We will “fear no evil” because, and now we switch from talking about ourselves walking through the valley or through the pastures and near the still waters, now we start talking to the Good Shepherd himself. “I will fear no evil for thou art with me.” And now we switch from whatever dark vision we had of the fear, get off of it, and turn around. That’s what repentance means. It means to turn around, turn around and face the Lord, turn around and face the Good Shepherd who’s taking care of the flock. Who’s taking care of us, me, the little sheep? The Good Shepherd is with us. He’s with us at all times, so I need not fear death. I need not fear passing away or the terrible things that happen to me in this valley of the shadow of death where we now dwell. Because “Thou art with me,” and now you’re establishing a relationship with the Christ, with the Good Shepherd. So we’re taking our eyes off of the valley and we’re looking at the shepherd. And he loves us. And it’s his job—it’s the shepherd’s job to care for the sheep and to lead us to safe places, and to protect us from the wolves that come to try to nab us. “For thou art with me,” and I’m looking right on the face of the Christ—right on the face of Jesus. Now, it says in the Tripartite Tractate that the Father has no countenance. Countenance is another word for face. The Father has no face. We cannot look directly upon the Father. He’s too large and inscrutable, and invisible, as a matter of fact. We can’t look upon the Father. But what can we look at? We can look upon the Son. We can look upon the Christ. We can look upon Jesus. He has a face. He’s a person. So it says, “For thou art with me,” and, looking upon the face of the Christ, now I’m talking to him. And now I’m feeling reassured, because I’m beholding the Christ; I’m beholding the glory. And then it says, “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” So then I had to think about, well, what does this mean? Thy rod and thy staff? Well, it turns out that shepherds carry two instruments with them. They carry a rod and a staff. OK, I think we’re more familiar with the Shepherd’s staff, right? That’s that long tall stick with a crook on the end of it. And the shepherd can use that staff for rescuing sheep that have fallen in a hole, for rescuing lambs, pulling them out of places he puts the crook around them and pulls them out. He can use that long staff to corral the herd, to keep them from falling over a cliff or keep them from going into a dangerous place or into a ditch. So he uses the staff to help guide us and protect us and rescue us. So what’s the rod? Well, the rod is a weapon. The rod is a heavy stick. It’s like a billy club that he wears, and he pulls it out when he needs to beat off some predator, or he can use it as a hammer when he needs to hammer something anytime he needs a good, heavy object that he can control. That is the rod. He never uses the rod to hit the sheep. He does not beat the sheep with the rod or the staff. That is a misconception that many legalistic people have about God and about the Christ—punishment. God doesn’t punish. Yes, God loves us. He takes care of us. He’s the Good Shepherd. The Lord is the Good Shepherd that protects us and takes care of us and threatens away the predators and keeps the flocks safe and together and close to him. So you picture all of these things as you’re reciting the 23rd Psalm. I recommend that you memorize this. It’s not long. It’s only 6 stanzas. So, “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” And then the next verse jumps to me now as a human. Now suddenly I’m no longer a sheep. Because it says, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” Well, I don’t know that the shepherd prepares a table for sheep, so I’m thinking it’s a banquet table and that he’s laying out all these wonderful things for me. That he “prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies.” So now it’s comparing me and the favor and grace and care that the Christ is taking of me as one of his sheep with my enemies, and the enemies are whoever you think are your enemies. We tend to think of other people that we don’t get along with as our enemies. That isn’t exactly correct, because we’re all brothers and sisters from the Fullness of God, we are all second order powers. And it’s part of the sadness and part of the Fall that there is a schism amongst us second order powers—that there are people who think of themselves as on that political party and they are the enemies of the people of the other political party or people who think of themselves as part of that religion and they are enemies of people of the other religion. Or maybe I have a neighbor that’s really nasty and mean and says awful things to me when I walk by with my dog. Maybe I think of that person as my enemy, but these are not really our enemies. And I’m only just now learning this, because I shared with you a couple of years ago that I have been known to have a quick temper myself. And when people are nasty to me, it’s my natural reaction to whip around and be nasty back. Now and finally, finally, after let’s say two and a half years of this podcast and 10 years of the Gnostic gospel and 20 years of the Simple Explanation, I am finally working it into my heart, after all of this time. Because it has to dwell in your heart in order to come out authentically. We want to be authentic through and through. We want to feel the love for these people. And so the thing to feel for these nasty people is not anger and vitriol and payback. It’s compassion, it’s charity, it’s forgiveness, it’s love. And I’m starting to understand that. I’ve known intellectually, but it’s starting to work its way into my heart that the way this world is redeemed—the way the world as a whole is going to be redeemed and be able to be freed from the bonds of this material existence and to return to the Fullness above and to the immortal realm of glory and love, which is where we all want to go—is to show that glory and love here on the material realm. So I don’t show anger, I don’t show hatred, I don’t scream at people. What I show them is true love—is true forgiveness. The Demiurge wants us to hate each other. The Demiurge sows division and hatred amongst people, and if you’re feeling angry and divisive, that’s demiurgic—that’s not righteous. That isn’t coming from God. It doesn’t make the world a better place. We think it does. We think that righteous indignation—I used to be full of righteous indignation—no, that’s actually demiurgic. It’s not righteous. There’s no such thing as righteous indignation. There’s only love. There’s only care, forgiveness, concern, charity. And so we need to be on that side of the Ledger in order for them to see that there’s no need to be mean and nasty and angry. Love is the way out. I used to hear people say that, you know, talk about love, love, love and it’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah, love, love, love. Love is an actual force. Love is the most powerful energy force down here in this universe. And guess what? It rides along with us. It comes along with the life from above. If there were no second order powers here on Earth—and everything that’s alive, every creature, every soft piece of flesh, every cell, everything that’s soft and squishy—carries life, carries love, carries the Fullness of God, the entire Fullness of God. We have fractal replications of the Fullness of God, billions of them throughout our body, and those are called cells. All creatures do. That’s where the love comes from. It has to emanate out of us. There’s no more beautiful emanation and expression of love than parents loving their newborn child—than a mother giving birth to a new emanation of the Fullness of God, and the way she looks on that baby and the way she holds that baby and kisses that baby and says beautiful, loving things to that baby—that is love. That’s a demonstration of love. I was never blessed with children. I don’t have that particular demonstration of love, but I tell you what, my cats and my dogs are well loved, and love is love. So love comes in the form of care and loving and concern; just adoration. And we are first to love God the way that the Son and the Father, before there was anything else, loved each other. That’s all they did. That’s all there was. There was the Father and then his monad emanation, which is called the Son. And they loved each other, it says. They gave glory to one another because the Father is glorious. And then the Son immediately gave birth to the Fullness, to all of the Totalities, which are his variables. It’s ALL the components of the Son. The Father doesn’t have components. The only component out of this Father is the Son, but once the Son emerged from the Father, he realized himself by giving glory back to the Father in a kind of reflective, glorious way. And then, having all the attributes of the Father, he also gave birth to emanations of himself, just as the Father had given birth to his emanation, which is called the Son. And his emanations are called the Totalities of the ALL. And then they give glory and they birth what is called the Fullness of God [these are the Aeons]. And those are all the steps of the ethereal creatures. Those few steps take care of all of the emanations of God. So, back to the 23rd Psalm. “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil,” which is a blessing, see? And it’s God—it’s the shepherd anointing us. Caring for us, blessing us. So, we are blessed by the Father, by the Son, by the Good Shepherd. “My cup runneth over.” So then I picture I’m holding this goblet, this old fashioned goblet of wine that was on the table that the Good Shepherd prepared for me. And it’s overflowing with wine. It’s overflowing with love. “My cup runneth over.” Cups represent love. And it goes on. “Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” OK, so now if I’m spreading love, I’m living close to the shepherd within the reach of his staff and eating from his table of love. My head has been anointed with oil by the Good Shepherd; my cup is running over with love and provisions because that was a table—it was a banquet table—laid out for me. I often picture this huge banquet table. Then “surely,” it says, surely. So like, believe it. “Surely, goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.” Well, that’s very reassuring. So the rest of my life here, all the days of my life that I have left in this material world, I’ll be followed by, I’ll be near to, goodness and mercy all along. Something might happen to me. I might stumble, I might stub my toe. I might run into some snafu, which we do pretty much every day. But goodness and mercy follow me there. Right there. I can quickly, the minute I realize what I’ve done, I can repent. I can pull back, turn back to the shepherd, and goodness and mercy are right there because they’re following me. They’re stuck to me like glue all the days of my life. I’ll never be alone. I’ll never be separated from the love of God. “And I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.” So this is your promise of eternal life. We don’t go to blackness, we don’t blink out into nothingness. We dwell in the House of the Lord. And now, as part of my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I think of these things as nested fractals. We are part of the new Pleroma of Logos after he returned from the Fall. The Demiurge is stuck down below here with us. The Demiurge is the God of this world. He’s a great and powerful God and he made all the dead things on the earth. So, the earth itself, or the planets, the hard and rocky places—the minerals, the elements, the molecules, the hard and rocky places. They are not love. They do not emanate love because they are emanations of the Demiurge, and the Demiurge is separated from the love of God. The Demiurge fell away from the Fullness of God. The Demiurge does not embody life or love. The Demiurge is the egoic broken fractal of Logos and the Fullness of God. So you can say that the House of the Demiurge is our material creation, and we are sent down into the House of the Demiurge to demonstrate love. We are here to demonstrate love so that the Demiurge can wake up and remember. Oh oh, that’s love. Oh, I remember love. And the minute he does, the minute the love outweighs the ignorance, the death and the separation that characterize this material world, that’s the time this material cosmos will pass away, because the Demiurge will return to the Fullness above and reunite with his “better Self,” the Self of Logos. That’s why the hard and rocky places are hard and rocky. It’s why that the stones don’t walk around and talk. They’re dead. They’re of the body of the Demiurge. The life, the knowledge, the love, the glory is on the eternal plane. It’s on the immaterial plane. It’s up there with Logos and the Fullness and the Aeons and the Totalities and the Son and the Father. 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 House of the Lord.” We belong to the House of Logos, and the House of Logos belongs to the House of the Fullness of God, the Pleroma of God, which is all of the Aeons. And the House of the Fullness of God belongs to the Totalities of the ALL, and the Totalities of the ALL belong to the House of the Son. They are coexistent with the Son. See, these are nesting fractals—up, up, up, up, up, and all of us are tucked up under that wing, that dove of peace, known as the Son of God. Ohh, and the very top of the Fullness of God now is no longer Logos, but the Christ. We belong to the Christ. The Christ is our King. So when it says “the Lord,” that’s the Christ. And He is at the top now of the Pleroma of the Fullness of God. It used to be Logos was at the top, but he fell. He wasn’t up to the job. So Christ came and took over that job. So Christ is at the top, and they’re all together. The Son of God. My goodness. Look at the time. And I only just got through the 23rd Psalm. It’s good news. So maybe your homework this week would be to memorize it. If you want to. Once the Demiurge remembers and repents, it will reunite with Logos and this material cosmos will pass away. God loves us all. Onward and upward.

We Gnostic Christians are in a very funny position as far as Gnostics and Christians go, because we fall into neither camp and we fall into both camps. And this is what I mean. I realize that the last couple of episodes have been very, what people would call, Christian, except the Christians don’t call it Christian. It’s a funny, funny position to be in. Those of us who call ourselves Gnostics believe in the Father. We believe in the Aeons of the Fullness. We believe that one of the Aeons “fell” out of the Fullness and, for most Gnostics, they call that Aeon Sophia, and Sophia is considered to be a female character. For those of us who are interested in the Tripartite Tractate we call that fallen Aeon Logos. And, Logos is neither female nor male, because in the Gnosticism according to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, there are no females and males. Or, there may be females and males, but their gender is not important. Gender is irrelevant. The folks who follow what is called Sethian Gnosticism, as I understand it—who prefer to follow Sophia rather than Logos—believe in a system of male-female bonding. They’re called syzygies, and for every male Aeon there’s a female Aeon and they are like a married couple. And that between the two of them there is balance. Well, now that’s kind of a funny thing at this point in our social development, don’t you think? All of this idea that genders are unimportant or that you can change the gender you were born with—this transgenderism that’s going on in society. Now, I am a female. I was born a female. I remain a female. And yet I have always felt within myself that gender was unimportant. It’s irrelevant other than our reproductive functions. But as far as my actions on the social stage, as far as my actions on the academic stage, as far as the way I read and interpret material, gender has nothing to do with that. I’m a Libertarian. I believe in freedom and personal responsibility and liberty to be able to make the decisions we want to make. I don’t believe in power and control. I think that power and control, particularly centralized authority, is demiurgic because that’s the way the Demiurge operates. The Demiurge is the puppet master. It has always been said, even in conventional Christianity, that every person must come to God for themselves. Every person must make their own decisions regarding whom they will follow, and I don’t think that has anything to do with gender. I think it has to do with the Demiurge versus the Father, or the Son, or the Fullness, or Logos.  Bob Dylan had a song—remember back in his evangelical phase? The lyrics had to do with you have to choose somebody. “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to choose somebody.” That is a black and white decision that is a bilateral decision. You’re either going this way or you’re going that way, you’re going in or you’re going out, you’re going up or you’re going down. The Demiurge controls through strings of power. Now, the culture that we’re living in, it’s mostly demiurgic. It’s mostly being controlled by centralized authority. And whether that is political, corporate, media led, or religion led, it is centralized authority that takes away your freedom of choice. It says, No. You have to believe this. You have to believe the way we believe. And if you don’t, you’re an outsider. You’re bad. That isn’t the way true choice works. That’s not the way liberty works. Liberty says, Here are all the facts of all the matter, and you can choose this or choose that, or choose that. That is up to each and every person. And indeed, we all are responsible for our own karma, for our own lives. We can’t shuffle that responsibility onto another person or onto a religion or onto a corporation, or onto a political system. We have to make our own decision for ourselves, because it’s only us that’s going up or down. So, the past couple of episodes have been very Christian. If you’re not familiar with Christ and Jesus, you’re gonna think it’s very Christian. Here, I’ll read you a letter that I got off of Substack this week from one of my paid supporters. He has unsubscribed. He is no longer paying to listen to the Gnostic Reformation. And here’s what he says: “I’ve really enjoyed getting your take on gnosticism. What I’ve enjoyed most is just how different your perspective is from my own—mine, alas, being increasingly un-Christianized and more focused on Sophia. Of course, to paraphrase Shaw’s quote about economists, If you laid 1000 gnostics end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. Such is the nature of heretics, I think. Gnosis is, imo, different for each of us. It was my honor to help support your work for a time. Best wishes!” So that was very kind of him. He said it in as kind a manner as he could say. And yet it points out the divide within Gnosticism of those who consider themselves followers of Sophia and those who consider themselves to be Christianized. So he’s rejecting the Gnostic Reformation because it revolves around Christ’s redemption. Now here’s another one, also from Substack. And this listener says: “Another inspirational podcast Cyd. Please keep them coming. It seems like such simplicity , but in your introduction the words to ” fear not, we are known and we are loved ” when taken to heart and truly believed states such a significant thing. That belief can cut through much darkness with the purest light—that we are all known , are equally loved , and all are destined for the journey home to be in the fullness. Blessings.” Now, these are both people that are following a Gnostic path, and one accepts the notion of assistance directly from the Fullness in this our fallen state in the material world and the other one doesn’t. What I have noticed about the followers of Sophia is that they are also into things like astrology, alchemy, magic, good magic, of course—only for the good. I’m not into any of those things. Those are old systems from antiquity, and they’re very occult and very hidden. Occult means hidden. Now, you tell me if the Father wants to be known, and was this not the purpose of the originating consciousness breaking into individual points of view that would then have their own will and their own experiences, and then feed that information back upstream to the Father? That’s the basic flowing out and flowing in of consciousness—to the Originating Source, out from the Original Source–breaking up into individual points of view having a variety of experiences and then that information coming back up to the Originating Source. It always says in the Bible, for example, that the Father wanted to be known.** The Christians think that Jesus of Nazareth was the Father walking around on Earth—was the Son of God who fully reflected the Father, and that he wanted to be known. “If you know me, you know the Father,” he said (John 8:19). And the fractal archetype of Jesus of Nazareth walked around his region preaching and teaching about the Father and about virtue and leading a virtuous life and the importance of aligning yourself with the virtuous forces and distancing yourself from the vice. He didn’t hide himself away in a cloister and study manuscripts and write manuscripts, and then hide them deep in the darkest recesses, like the Vatican basement. He didn’t do that. He spoke openly and taught. And he said, We are to love each other and we’re to love ourselves. And we are to love God. This is the highest commandment. This is all that we need to do: Love, love, and love. And then he exemplified that love by loving people he didn’t know; by loving his enemies; by forgiving his enemies; by healing people; by feeding people. The occultists study their gnosis in labyrinthine ways. They believe that the gnosis was meant to be hidden. They believe that you have to learn, learn, learn, and go deeper, deeper, deeper into secret societies and into secret libraries to pull out this gnosis and study it and learn it and master it. And mastery is a big deal because you need to master alchemy in order to change the base metal into gold. You need to master astrology in order to properly read someone’s chart. You need to master augury in order to properly read the entrails. It all has to do with personal mastery, and they’re confusing that or conflating that with gnosis. I don’t think that is gnosis. I think for the most part that, at best, it’s interesting worldly knowledge. It’s a hobby, at best. But, on the darker side, it may be demiurgic rather than from the Father, because the Demiurge is all about power, control, and mastery, and the Demiurge only allows power to humans who have agreed to serve it, him or it. On the other side of the Gnostic ledger—the side that I am promoting—it’s open. It’s known. It’s personally accessible and, very importantly, it does not have anything to do with mastery or power. It has to do with letting go and letting God. It has to do with relinquishing personal control—taking your ego, your astrologer ego, your alchemist ego, your grandmaster ego off of the throne of your soul and allowing the singular One, the Self that we all share, our fractal of the Fullness of God, to control our lives. For now I just want you to realize that this type of Gnostic Christianity that I’m sharing with you—it’s not about me. It’s about you. And it’s not about you mastering anything. It’s not about you having to learn anything. You don’t even have to learn all these steps of the Gnostic Gospel that I lay out here—the Father to the Son; the Son to the Fullness; the Fullness creates Logos; Logos Falls and creates the world; the Fullness and Logos send down us 2nd order powers to populate the world and remind the fallen Demiurge that there is a life beyond this earth; and then us getting all gummed up down here and the Christ being created to save us. Believe me, folks, that is not conventional Christianity. I have to laugh when I say that because it’s enough to get a person burned at the stake. And then this notion that we are all saved, that we are all going back home to the Fullness. That we are all going back home to the Son; that we are all eternally loved by the Father and the Son and the Fullness and our home is Above. We are their children. We’re just on a temporary sojourn down here in the material world, and that this material world is going to pass away. Now, I don’t see that any of the more base forms of Gnosticism, I will call it,  promote that. They promote personal mastery. They promote control over this material world. Well, the way we get control over this material world isn’t through our power, it’s through the power of the Son. It’s through the power of the Father. It’s through the power of the Fullness. It’s through the power of the Christ, ultimately. Speaking of the Christ, here is another heresy for you that shows that this teaching is not conventional Christianity. The Christ is a different entity, it’s a different thing than Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is a human who fully incorporated the Fullness, the One true Self always sat on the seat or throne of his soul. His ego was not the ruler of Jesus. And that’s what Jesus means to us. Jesus is our archetypal virtuous human. Jesus of Nazareth overcame the world through love and through allowing the Christ to sit on the throne of his walking around self. I read a large article this week from a philosophical website about whether or not there was a historical Jesus. You know, the scholars like to say there’s no such thing as Jesus of Nazareth—that there’s no historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. The Jesus Project says there’s no historicity; we can’t prove it through contemporaneous historical sources other than biblical accounts. Well, I don’t know about that because every once in a while I do run across historical sources, Roman sources, for example. But, you know, I believe in Jesus because I know Jesus, you see, and that’s… a Christian, let’s say, who’s born again or who’s baptized in the Holy Spirit—an evangelical conservative Christian, has a personal relationship with Jesus. If they don’t, then they are being hypocritical. They may claim to be a good Christian. They may claim to be part of this denomination or that denomination, but if they don’t really have Jesus sitting in their heart and know him intimately in the sense of what would Jesus do? Remember that? What would Jesus do? Have you ever heard that statement? It helps you to figure out, in any confusing situation—you don’t know what to do… oh,should I do this or that? But then you stop a minute. You go, Well, what would Jesus do in this situation? And the answer comes. At least, it’s always come for me because I have a relationship with Jesus, so I can ask. And, of course, Jesus always makes the right decisions. That Jesus could just as easily, in the Jungian sense, be an archetype of the Redeemed Human. I’m not sure, but it’s possible that even if Jesus of Nazareth did not walk this physical material plane, Jesus of Nazareth certainly lives in the Fullness. Jesus is certainly the archetype of the Redeemed Human. So, whether that be in the Fullness above or be on the earth below is pretty irrelevant, because as long as we can look upon that archetype of our Savior, the Anointed One who came to lead us and give us good advice, and to ultimately lead us back into the Fullness and lead us back in the direction of the Father–that’s the important part. And the Christ is larger than Jesus. The Christ exists independently and above. The Christ is one of the ascended, most powerful entities above. And the Christ’s mission is to bring us 2nd order powers back home. And he did that, in my opinion, by being born into the body of Jesus on Earth to a human mother, and then he exemplified that life and the path back to the Father. But the Christ has always been up above. Ever since we 2nd order powers were created, the Christ was formed in order to assist us, and the Christ is the King of the 3rd order powers. We’re second order, they’re third order. And there’s a 3rd order power for every one of us—our Christ that comes to us. 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 and every Second Order creature. Now, this is very confusing, very mumbo jumbo stuff. But what I wanted to get across to you today is that this fellow who had found he had to quit the Gnostic Reformation is not right about this being a conventional Christian slot because I’ll tell you what—the evangelical Christians who listen, who are still in the church, they don’t think so. They think that this is pure Satan. This is purely of the Devil—stay away from here. But that isn’t my mission. My mission here isn’t to lure Christians away from the church. The reason I share this material with you is because there are people out there who are seeking, who are looking for the truth, and this is the truth as I know it. And the truth that I am teaching will not lead these lost people, whether you’re fallen away from the church, whether you’re a lapsed Catholic, whether you were never even raised with any religious sensibilities but you know something’s missing—whether you’re lost in the throes of some vice, some addiction—this is a way out. This is, in my opinion, the way out. Gnosis you can trust ought to be on a bumper sticker. So remember: move your ego off of the throne of your decision-making. It’s leading you astray. It’s in love with the world. Allow the Father to be at the heart of your soul. Allow the virtuous Christ to replace the ego in your soul and you will be at one in yourself with the Fullness, with the Father, with the Son, and with the Christ. Onward and upward. And God bless. ** “This is eternal life that they may know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3). “Let him who glories glory in this – that he understands and knows Me” (Jer. 9:24).  “That I may know Him” (Phil 3:10). Other key verses include Daniel 11:32, John 14:7, Phil 3:8, Col 1:10, 2 Peter3:18, and 1 John 5:20.

Hello there and welcome back to Gnostic Insights. There have been a few things on my mind I would like to share with you today. You know, I’ve mentioned in the past that I do listen to the radio preachers because I want to hear what they’re teaching. I want to see what is the current state of Christian belief and knowledge. By now you realize that this Gnostic Gospel is definitely Christian, because salvation and redemption revolves around the Christ. But the thing that is difficult for me is that there are a few basic principles in this Gnostic Gospel that are in disagreement with what is taught out there generally as Christianity, and I believe that those differences were hardwired into the Bible when the Nicene Council sat down around 330 AD and decided what books to keep and what books to throw out. And, among the books that they threw out was the Tripartite Tractate, which is the primary source that I am deriving my Christian knowledge from in addition to the New Testament. Christians are taught not to seek external sources of truth—that the truth is entirely captured and relayed to us through the Bible. And, if you accept what are called extra-biblical, which means outside of the Bible, sources such as the Nag Hammadi or the Qumran scrolls, the Tripartite Tractate that I am sharing with you, then you will be led astray. You’ll come to wrong opinions, and you are part of the problem and not part of the solution. I don’t want to be part of the problem; I want to be part of the solution. That’s why I do not give up the basic idea that the Savior that we call the Christ is a special, ethereal character that was designed and sent down to us to help us here. Now, ordinary Christian belief states that Christ is the original Son of God that was made at the beginning—was the first emanation of thought from God, and I disagree with that. In the Tripartite Tractate there seems to be a distinct difference between the Son, who is the first emanation of the thought of the Father, and the Christ, who was produced after we 2nd order powers were sent to Earth. The specific mission of the Christ is to help us out. So the Christ figure has, I like to say, all the mojo of the Father and the Son and the Fullness of God, as well as the things that Logos learned from falling to earth and then returning back to the Fullness, such as how to operate within the Boundary and the existence of the Demiurge and the archons. The Christ was designed to overcome all of that. We also disagree about what happens to you if you don’t accept the Christ here on Earth before you die. Conventional teaching is that you will go to Hell and be tortured forever. That’s absurd. That’s absolutely absurd on the face of it, because the nature of the Father is love; the nature of the Son is love. The consciousness of the Father and love are intertwined inextricably together. More than that, we are emanations from the Father and the Son through the hierarchical pattern of what is called the Fullness of God. We come from above. How on earth—how in this cosmos—would all of us not return to the Fullness above? If we did not go back because we ignorantly or stubbornly or through misguided overblown egos believe that we’re the be-all and end-all, and that’s what sends you to Hell for an eternity of torture? Well, there’s two basic principles that are being violated there. One—how does a loving God punish someone eternally? It is not consistent with the nature of God. Now, I was looking up what it means to fear God because one of the radio preachers this week said, Oh, you better fear God! That’s the problem with culture nowadays—people don’t fear God. And the Bible says why do you fear men whose punishment only lasts for a short period but you don’t fear God whose punishment is eternal?  That’s entirely incorrect in my opinion. First off, the word fear is a translation of a Hebrew word yirah, YIRAH, and it is just as properly or even more properly interpreted as awe. As in awesome—awe. Which means beholding or seeing something that is so completely beyond our ability to understand and to grasp that we drop our jaws open and our knees tremble because it’s so incredible. That’s what it means to be awesome. And by the way, as a kind of humorous aside, it really bugs me that on the iPhone with the auto fill words, when someone texts me back and they mean to say, Ah, isn’t that cute! or Ah, I’m so sorry! that iPhone autofill types in Awe. Because that isn’t the word. The word for Ah, isn’t that cute. Ah, that’s so neat, that’s A H. Ah. It’s just a sound. It’s an interjection. And I’m not so sure that this isn’t on purpose by some archon that’s in charge of the iPhone as a means of degrading the magnificence of the word, AWE. When you say, Ah, that was really thoughtful of you, it’s not AWE. AWE means you have come face to face with the transcendent God or you’ve visited heaven and come back. That’s all AWE. That’s the kind of fear you would have. So, as I share with you now and then, the main heresy in this Gnostic Gospel as far as Christians, contemporary Christians, are concerned is that God is all loving and forgiving. Gee, isn’t that an awful thing to think? [sarcasm] Of course God is all loving! Of course God is all forgiving! And, of course everyone is going home at the end of time. Because if we didn’t go back up, the Fullness would no longer be full. We come from the Fullness. We are their children. We are the fruit of the Fullness. That’s why people in their near death experiences are greeted by all sorts of figures who seem to know them and who seem to gather around them to surround them with love and Ohh, we’re so glad that you’re home!  That’s because we’re their children. They know us. We don’t remember them, but they know us. It’s the same fractal as the story of the prodigal son. In the New Testament, there’s a story about a young man who was rebellious and he didn’t want to stay on the farm. And so he left his father and his brother behind. He cashed out his inheritance and he split to have a good time. Well, things didn’t go so well out there in the world, and he eventually found himself completely at the end of all of his money. And he had no friends out there. He had no family. He was completely cut off. And there he was slopping a pig stye. He was shoveling manure out of a herd of pigs. And he looked around and he said, What the heck, man? I should just go home. This is ridiculous. It was actually a lot better at home. So he gives up his worldly excursions, and he goes home. And he is nervous because he’s worried that his father will reject him for having run away and squandered his inheritance. And his brother is extremely angry at him because the brother stayed home and he’s been taking care of the farm without his brother’s help. So he’s really angry at him. But the father holds a big banquet and they kill—what is it?  A goat or something? They have a big barbecue and invite everyone to welcome the prodigal (prodigal means he recklessly lost his money) the prodigal son. Well, if this earthly father feels that way about his son that stumbled and went away, of course our Heavenly Father is going to feel that way about us for having stumbled and gone away. And how many of you, I wonder, are out there in some pigsty shoveling sh*t? This world that we live in, this culture that is the norm, it’s kind of creepy and it’s getting worse and worse, in my opinion. These things that you’re supposed to be open minded about– (Ohh sadism is cool. Ohh all these sadomasochistic scenes in movies—ohh that’s cool. I just have to be open. Ohh it’s cool to cheat on your husband or wife—don’t be such a square. I like to take drugs every day, and the more I take, the better I feel.)  You know that’s not true. None of that is true. That is the world leading you astray. The Father is the ground state (the black background); The Son emerges as the first monad of consciousness (the cloud); the Son differentiates into the infinite variables of the ALL; the ALL becomes self aware fractals and sorts itself into the Hierarchy of the Fullness; the Fullness dreams of Paradise. Of course you’re desperate. Of course you feel lousy. Of course things aren’t going well, because that culture is not what the Fullness had in mind and this version of our world down here is an imitation. It’s a deficiency, is what the Tripartite Tractate calls it. It’s the Deficiency of the Imitation of the Fullness, because the Fullness is in their hierarchy up there, dreaming of Paradise. They dreamed of this world, basically, and all of us populating it, like a Star Trek holodeck. It’s a dream. It’s a holodeck projection that they all share. And everything was cool until Logos jettisoned out and tried to set up the reality down here on Earth. And things have been going very poorly ever since because, unless you have the guidance of the Fullness and the Aeons, unless you’re plugged in to the Son and the Father, everything you come up with to do is wrong. It’s a mistake. It’s wrong headed. The only way to have a joyful and glorious life, full of knowledge and gnosis, full of love, is to plug in to the source—the One source from which we come. And all of the people down here, which is most of the people who have gone astray, who lead their lives in anger and lying and cheating and backstabbing and betrayal—all of the things that make you so sad when you run across them, or if you’re the victim of them—that’s  all wrong headed. That’s all bad stuff. And that is the bad stuff that the Christ, the Anointed One, came to rectify for us down here, because we have all gone astray, as it says. You can’t pull yourself up by the bootstraps. You need help. The Christ is just there to help. If you didn’t, deep in your soul, believe that the Savior was there to help you, why did you cry out in your distress? Why do you say, Ohh. Ohh man, I’m so screwed. Ohh man, how am I gonna get out of this? Please help. Oh, my God. What am I gonna do? That’s how people feel when they’re hitting bottom. And that’s when you can put your hand up and Christ said, All you have to do is knock and the door will open that very second that you give it up. Give up trying to be in control and reach up for the Fullness. Reach up for Christ’s hand. He’ll pull you out of that and set you on the road, back on the path to the way things are supposed to be. You’ve heard this kind of testimony a thousand times, or maybe you haven’t but the testimonies are out there, of people who were deep in the throes of error, deep in the throes of everything going wrong. Usually it’s related to drugs and alcohol, but not necessarily. It could be related to pornography. It could be related to a habit of lying. Whatever vice you find yourself a victim of, it was cool at first, but now you are bleeding out of every orifice. That’s not God’s doing. That’s not punishment. That’s the world’s doing. That’s the Demiurge or that’s the archons who are keeping you down because they don’t like us. They don’t like any of us 2nd order powers because they’re not in control. It’s people who are in control. But, if you don’t let God in, then they’re in control if you just let it go and plug into the culture because the culture is controlled by the archons. So, one point I wanted to make is that as soon as you accept the Christ, you’re going to be pulled out of that. You are going to begin going upward, and you probably will need to plug into some conventional Christian Church or some wise and loving religious body who is not interested in their own, like, grandness, right? But are interested in literally helping God to instantiate down here, helping the God Above All Gods to instantiate through us. I asked my sister-in-law the other day, and she’s a very good Christian and she loves this Gnostic Gospel so I’m so happy for her, I’m so glad and thankful. So I asked her, What do you think our job is down here? What do you think your job is? Why were you instantiated on the planet? What is the task? What is the job? Because every emanation of the Father has a job to do. That’s what the hierarchy of the Fullness is—it’s the distinct way that all the different jobs go together. It’s the job of the Christ to bring us all the redemption and salvation. What’s your job? So, she kind of thought, Well, your job is to love God. I’m supposed to love God and realize that I come from God. That’s a good, almost answer. But as Jesus said, Love God as you love yourself and love your neighbor as you love God. In other words, it’s all about love. Our job down here, Ladies and Gentlemen, is to love one another and thereby awaken love in the Demiurge so he can reunite with his better Self. Our job is to show love and that’s because when Logos fell and the better part of him that is the love, returned to the Fullness, the broken part of him, the ego, stayed behind. And this is the God of this world. It’s the egoic God. He doesn’t run on love. He runs on control and power. So one way to tell who’s running on God and who’s running on the Demiurge is control and power. Control and power is demiurgic, which is pretty much just about every politician, isn’t it? It’s just about every corporate head, isn’t it? Anyone who gains great power and control is probably running off of the Demiurge, and they seem to be doing well. They seem to be having a good time. They seem to be in control, and who needs God? But there will be a reckoning. Our purpose, and this may be why some of us never do rise to positions of power, our job is only to spread love—to demonstrate love. And love comes from above, you see? That’s why it counters this demiurgic culture. Love conquers all. In the short term, you might lose; in the long term, we all win. Even if you are martyred with love in your heart, Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do. This extreme act, there is no greater love than that a man should lay down his life for his friends, showing love up to the bitter end, showing love, not anger, showing love, not recrimination, not punishment. But showing love is what demonstrates to the fallen Demiurge. It’s what’s supposed to wake him up. It’s supposed to go, Wow. Ohh, what is this love? What’s all this love BS? Where’s this coming from? This is why he hates us—because he’s resisting the notion of love. The other point I wanted to make was this. Something I heard this week on the radio and something you hear all the time is someone exclaiming, I can’t believe God loves me! I can’t believe that this great and powerful God even knows who I am, even cares about me. Even says that he knows me and loves me and wants to save me! People continually exclaim that and it’s part of so many songs in hymns and popular Christian music. Of course God loves us! We are of God. We’re on loan down here in the material world. We’re temporarily bonded to this dead material. But that is a temporary condition. And when we loose this mortal coil upon the death of that body, we go up. We go straight up. We don’t go to Hell. We go straight up because they love us. The Fullnesses love us—we are their children. Christ loves us. He came and died and suffered for us. It’s his job to remind us of God. We were in the mind of the Son and the Father since the beginning. So of course he knows us. And not only that, but he’s inside of every part of our living body. We are imminent with the presence of God—every cell, every organ, every person, every bee and flower and squirrel and cat and dog, every living thing on the planet or even beyond this planet in the cosmos is a manifestation of the Fullness of God, so of course they know us. That shouldn’t even be the major focus of salvation. Oh, God loves me and knows me. Of course they do. And that’s why we’re going up. Onward and upward. God bless us all. 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. 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Here’s a treat for you. This is the entire Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book read by the author, Cyd Ropp. This is the little book published in 2019 that was the springboard for all of the gnostic work that followed, including this podcast and the new, much longer, book that is about to be released. This is the simplest presentation of gnosis that you will ever find. Only the essential gnosis was included. It is all based upon the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi texts. The gnosis you will find here is the type of gnosis that proceeds from an initial thought–the first thought of the Originating Source. That thought then flows outward and through a few levels downward until it manifests within all of us living creatures here in the cosmos. There are no fables in this gnosis–only the reasonable outflow of the path of consciousness. This is the story of consciousness. I’m taking all of the illustrations out of The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated and putting them in order as the transcript to go along with this episode. I’m not reprinting the text. For that, you should buy the book, but you can follow along with the illustrations. And, as I’m putting together these illustrations in order of their appearance, I’m discovering that this episode transcript with the illustrations and the captions of each illustration turns out to be the very, very simplest presentation of this gnosis of The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. It’s even simpler than the very simple book that you’re going to listen to now as the audio, because it’s just the illustrations and just the captions. So, if you find the words confusing, look at the pictures. They ought to resonate with you; you ought to be able to recognize their meaning. And remember, I’m not teaching this to you. I’m hoping to stimulate your own remembrance that you were born with. The reason I emphasize simplicity is that I like to imagine how it is that the Father can transmit information to us down here. How does this information actually come to us? The Father wants to be known and this is the information that he wants to be known. It’s like if you were trying to explain something to a leaf or to a worm. What is it you can tell them that they’re going to understand? This is why the information is very simple. It doesn’t have a lot of details. It’s a very simple transmission, directly, of consciousness. And that’s why it is so pared down from the information that you can generally find out there that passes for what they’re calling gnosis. Because remember, every living thing in the cosmos remembers the Father and the Son; remembers the Origin and the Fullness. So, the information has to be simple enough that any creature, any plant, any insect, any little squirrel can realize it. We are all second order powers. Onward and upward! And, enjoy the episode. I am not going to reprint the text of the book here. For that, please purchase the book: You may purchase the original Gnostic Gospel Illuminated at gnosticinsights.com. Here are my illustrations of the concepts presented in this book. These will illuminate the meaning of the text. The Son is the first and only emanation of the Father. It is a monad. It is called the First Glory. 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 ALL is the Second Glory. The Aeons of the ALL awakened to themselves in fulfillment of the Father’s desire for innumerable points of view. 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. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. Logos crowned the top of the Fullness. Logos mistakes himself for the Fullness. Logos stumbles and Falls while reaching for Glory. The small fractals that once formed the pleroma of Logos lost themselves during the Fall and rolled out into chaos. The Father and the Fullness were repelled by the Fallen, and a Boundary was formed to rein in the Deficiency. The values of the Demiurge lead to isolation and despair. The values of the Fullness lead to peace and joy. The restored pleroma of Logos and the Hierarchy of the Fullness conceive a new fruit called 2nd Order Powers. The Fullness is the 1st Order of Powers. The shadows of the deficiency that emerged from the Fall are small, dead, and ignorant of what came before. The Second Order Powers are emanations of the restored Logos, fitted into the Boundary. They come one by one to populate the cosmos with life. We Second Order Powers continually battle the archons of the Fall. We are a mixed creation of life from above and death from below. We Second Order Powers find ourselves locked into an endless war with the Deficiency. Gnosis is for those with eyes to see. Simply remember the Father and gnosis will follow. The Christ comes in a form that every Second Order Power can recognize. Those of the Remembrance were given chariots that could traverse all realms, great and small, establishing order. The Third Order of Powers are the Pleroma of the Christ. While the Second Order Powers are caught up in endless war with the deficiency, the Third Order Powers bring redemption and remembrance to this economy. Jesus the Christ bridges the Deficiency and brings redemption to all Second Order Powers. The Final Economy will come after this cosmos passes away. The First Economy is the Fullness. The Second Economy is the fallen cosmos. The Third Economy is the redeemed result. Amen

What we call Christianity today, the religion of Christianity, may not be exactly what the Christ had in mind. It may be a human interpretation and institutional package of the religion that Jesus promoted, but there is no reason to throw out the baby with the bath water. When I was about four years old, I recognized the difference between Baby Jesus in the manger and Santa Claus. There was the religious iconography of baby Jesus in the manger and the Christian Christmas story. And even at a very young age before I started school, I’m like, yeah, Santa Claus is a kid’s story, but this is baby Jesus in a manger being sent down from God to redeem humankind. Well, I could relate to that. That was clearly a difference in kind from Santa Claus. It seems to me that people who don’t recognize Jesus and who don’t accept the whole notion that there is a God above and that there can be a Christ who is a very special etherical character that was sent into this cosmos in order to help us out—that’s a sad thing. I recognized Jesus when I was very, very young. Anyway, I want you to realize that I have been a follower of Jesus for over 60 years now, and during that time I’ve been a very active student of the Bible and of Jesus in particular. I’ve been taking most of my spiritual notes from the red letter editions of the Bible, listening to Jesus himself. Yes, I’ve been in and out of churches, particularly in my teenage years and early 20s, but after I was married, my husband didn’t enjoy church, and so I stopped going. Nowadays I’m able to devote most of my time to spiritual pursuits (as a widow), but my spiritual pursuits are not what most people’s are who currently follow either Christianity or Gnosticism. And yet I’m calling myself a Gnostic Christian. So, I’m following the Bible. And I am very happy that this new edition of the Bible came out—The New Testament by David Bentley Hart—which is a fresh interpretation of the New Testament from the original Greek. Most of the editions of the Bible that people read in church or that you have on your bookshelves at home are derivative of an old Latin translation hundreds of years old that has been Anglicized ever since, so the original meaning of the words are often lost or misrepresented. And those are the Bibles that people are following in what is now called the Christian religion. There are a lot of errors in Christianity, but I find myself in a peculiar situation of being what I would call a true Christian. I know Jesus; I was baptized. In the past couple of years, I’ve been listening more to radio preachers again, like I used to in the old days, and I often find myself agreeing with what they say. I agree with 90% of what is taught in the Christian Church. It’s that 10% that’s the problem. For example, a very important issue is that all Christian churches believe that you need to right now accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, period, because if you die before accepting Jesus, you aren’t going to heaven. And this causes much anxiety and much angst amongst Christians whose relatives, children, husbands, friends haven’t accepted the Christ—will not pray the sinner’s prayer and ask Jesus into their hearts. Because they’ve been taught, and therefore they believe, that all those people are going to hell, and they are anxious about it. Yesterday I went to church. I don’t often go, I must say, but it was a Communion day and someone asked me to go. I think it’s a good thing to ask people to go to church and so I honored her by going with her. And I accepted Communion. Now one of the interesting things about Communion is that you are recapitulating the fractal of the Last Supper where Jesus broke bread, blessed it, and said, “This is my body which is broken for you. Eat this in remembrance of me.” And then he takes the cup of wine and he says, “This is my blood that is spilled out for you. Drink this in remembrance of me.” And that is what is called the Sacrament of Communion. And Christians take that sacrament fairly often to remember Christ. But only Christians are allowed to take Communion. So, before the Communion is served, the minister will say something like, Now we ask that only those people who have accepted Christ come forward for Communion. And if you have not yet accepted Christ, one of the elders would like to meet with you and pray with you to accept Christ. But for now, please don’t come forward to take the Communion because it’s only for Christians. I can kind of see the point in that, but once again, it’s creating a divide between those who have acknowledged the power of the Christ here on Earth and those who have not, and presumably all those people that don’t go back and talk with the elders at the end of the service are going to go to hell if they die that night. But the Bible doesn’t really say that. In the New Testament, and particularly the New Testament as translated from the original Greek by David Bentley Hart, this newest translation published by Yale University Press, doesn’t say that. Yeah. It says that Christ came for everyone. For everyone. Christ came to redeem everyone. That’s what it says. Now, as we have discussed in previous episodes here at Gnostic Insights, if your physical body dies, (because you never die, we are eternal spirit, so we are not dying). but if your hylic part, (that means your physical body, the demiurgic molecular part of your body), will die and stay behind because there is no material above. It’s all ethereal. It’s all spirit. Down here it is material or apparently material. That part won’t go up with you, so it seems to die. But when I say die, that’s just your material, because your spirit is eternal. So, if your body dies before you have acknowledged the redemption of the Christ and the actuality and presence of the Father from which we all come, and the Aeons whose children we are, if you do not accept that now while you’re alive, you’re going to have a difficult passage after death. I’ll put the link here into the transcript for the episode called Overcoming Death, and that’s where you get into the various bardos such as are spoken of in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, or the purgatories of hell that the Catholics talk about. Because the ethereal plane is the reality. This is why I’ve been sharing episodes with you of near death experiences that thousands of people by now have shared on YouTube. Watch some of these near death experiences. Now, if someone has a near death experience and they’re dead—by the way, it’s only near death because they come back. That’s why it’s called near death. But they were dead. They just came back because it wasn’t their time. So, if you have one of these types of afterlife experiences and you survived to come back to talk about, even if you were a staunch atheist before you passed away, you have to come to a reckoning once you become ethereal and it turns out you’re still alive. You go, What? I thought I was gonna be dead! I thought it was all over with! And those people sometimes have very difficult passages. Very difficult. There’s 14 layers of bardos in the Tibetan tradition, and if you already believe in the Christ or the Buddha, if you already believe in the Father, you recognize it right off the bat, and you are more than willing to bathe in the love and warmth and light of the afterlife. But if you don’t, then each phase—the longer you stay in that post-life place, which I call a bardo—the more difficult it becomes until it becomes absolutely hellacious. And I believe that these are the depictions of hell that are now and then glimpsed throughout the Bible. The people reaching up from hell going, Oh, please, Lazarus, save me! I didn’t believe it, but now I do. Please pull me out. Pull me out! That is an afterlife experience of someone who staunchly refuses to believe in the Father or the spiritual existence after this life. But please be aware that this misery is not punishment by the Father or the Son. The reckoning is self reflexive—from your ego for the benefit of your Self. It is your own egoic consciousness feeling regret for its past deeds. And the point of the reckoning and repentance isn’t punishment—it’s not a spanking by God. It’s for you to realize the harm you have done to yourself and others during this sojourn in material life, in order to strip off those egoic memes and rejoin the Aeons in the Fullness. Remember, the ethereal plane is separated from the darkness below by a Boundary. We need to leave the darkness behind in order to rise above. We don’t strip off our egos—we retain our identities—but we do strip off the pernicious lies and memes that have kept us bound to the cosmos. But if you do believe in the Father, and I say the Father because Jesus came to point the way to the Father. He didn’t say, “worship me, worship me, worship me. I’m hanging on the cross forever. Now worship the cross.” And that seems to be the focus of church all the time. When I go to a church, even yesterday when I went to the Communion service, the minister kept pointing to the cross behind him. And they are limiting the power of the Christ to the action and death on the cross, and then the resurrection from the grave. But the Christ is way more than that. The Christ came to save all 2nd order powers, not just the people who accept the Christ before they pass away from this body. It gives much more power to the Christ to believe that Christ came to save you even if you reject Christ. Jesus said, “I and my Father are one. I came to represent my Father.” One of the most often quoted Bible verses is John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever would believe on him would not perish but have everlasting life.” That’s how it reads in our most common translations. So in that verse, it is conflating the Christ with the Son. And the Son is a different entity. The Son is the first breakout of the Father, who coexists with the Father as a monad and has all of the attributes of the Father. The Christ was formed after we 2nd order powers were formed in order to help us 2nd order powers. The Christ has all of the mojo of the Son and the Fullness and the Father. They’re all packed into this creature called the Christ, and Jesus is the human instantiation of the Christ on the planet who came to Israel two thousand and twenty-some years ago. Now let me read to you from John 3:16. Actually, let’s look at the whole chapter 3 of the book of John in the translation by David Bentley Hart. Quoting now, “There was a man, one of the Pharisees whose name was Nicodemus, a ruler of the Judeans. This man came to him at night and said to him, (he came to Jesus at night—he sneaked in). He said, ‘Rabbi, we know that you have come as a teacher from God, for no one can produce these signs you perform, unless God is with him.’ (And this was after Jesus had already been healing people and doing miracles, like multiplying enough food that was in one basket to feed thousands of people at a time). In reply, Jesus said to him, ‘Amen. Amen. I tell you, unless someone is born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.’ Nicodemus says to him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old?’ Jesus replied, ‘Amen. Amen. I tell you, unless a man is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh. And that which is born of the spirit is spirit.’” OK, now let me pop in here. I think soon I’ll go over another episode concerning the three-part nature of humankind, or of all creatures, really. We have a spiritual portion that comes directly from above and still dwells above. That is the One, capital One or the S, capital Self that is coexistent with the Fullness of God, and also is reproduced in every one of our cells and in our entire body as a fractal of the Fullness of God. That’s the spiritual part, and it lives above, and it lives in us. We have the psychical part which is our psychological aspect, which is all that thinking and talking that people like to do. It’s this reasoning part. Animals and plants have it too. And then there’s the physical part. And, the physical is our molecular material structure that only came into existence as a result of the Fall, the original Fall that created the cosmos, not the Fall of Adam and Eve. That’s a whole different error that we’ll get into again at some other point. So, Jesus is saying you have to be born of both water and spirit. You know, when a woman goes into labor, her water breaks and a baby is born in a gush of water. That’s the amniotic fluid. But we are also born of the spirit, the One true Self that we embody, and people need to realize that and recognize that. Materialists don’t recognize the spiritual aspect of humankind. They only recognize the material and possibly psychological; not even necessarily the psychological. They only recognize the material. The material is demiurgic. It is the creation and the domain of the Demiurge and the Archons. The psychological is your egoic self. And the spiritual is your One that is bringing the love and the life of God. So, back to this Bible here: “That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed because I have told you it is necessary for you to be born from above.” And, when we’re talking about above, we’re talking about up there with the Fullness and the Son, the Aeons, the Totalities, the Father. We call that above. It’s a different plane of existence, a different dimension, if you will. “The spirit respires where it will” (or the spirit breathes, the wind blows. It’s a Greek word.) “’The spirit respires where it will and you hear its sound. But you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; such is everyone born of the spirit.’ Nicodemus answered and said to him, ‘How can this happen?’ Jesus replied and said to him, ‘You are a teacher of Israel and you do not know these things? Amen. Amen. I tell you that we speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen. And you people do not accept our witness. If you do not believe what I have told you of things upon the earth, how will you believe if I tell you of things of heaven? And no one has gone up into heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man.’” And by the way, I think maybe a lot of these people with near death experiences, well, they haven’t gone up into the highest heaven, they haven’t rejoined the Fullness, but they’ve gone to that in-between place, which is a dimension right between heaven and earth. “’And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, (that’s an Old Testament reference) so it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up.’” And Jesus is called the Son of Man. It’s an aeonic designation. There are also Sons of Dogs, Sons of Cats, Sons of Birds, etc. But we are humans, and that’s who we’re talking about. So Jesus was the Son of Man, embodying the Christ. It’s a designation of the Aeons. Quoting again, “’that everyone having faith in him, might have the life of the Age.’” Hart translates the word Aeon as Age, as if it were a period of time. I believe that’s an error. It can just as easily be translated as an ethereal being that is eternal. You know it works to say the Age, because that’s going to be the Age of Heaven, and here we are in the Age of Earth. But there’s no need to say that. We could just as easily say, “everyone having faith in the Son of Man might have the life of the Aeons.” Because we’re from the Aeons and we’re going to return to the Aeons. OK, now here comes John 3:16: “For God so loved the cosmos as to give the Son, the only one, so that every one having faith in him might not perish but have the life of the Age.” (or the life of the Aeons.) “For God sent the Son into the cosmos not that he might pass judgment on the cosmos, but that the cosmos might be saved through him. Whoever has faith in him is not judged. Whoever has not had faith has already been judged because he has not had faith in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: that the light has come into the cosmos and men loved the darkness rather than the light, for their deeds were wicked. For everyone who does evil things hates the light and does not approach the light for fear his deeds will be exposed. But whoever acts in truth approaches the light, so that his deeds might be made manifest—that that they have been worked in God.” It doesn’t say whoever professes faith in Jesus the Christ will be saved. It says, “whoever acts in truth approaches the light so that his deeds might be made manifest.” Either you want to live on the side of virtue and the Aeons, or you want to live on the side of vice and sin and the Demiurge and darkness. The light, the truth, the life, comes from above and sits at the top of our Self and everyone is born with it. We are all called those of the remembrance. And what is it we are remembering? We remember the Father above and the fact that we are 2nd order powers that are sent down into this fallen place in order to bring life and remembrance to the fallen material of this world. That’s all. And if you don’t remember that now, you remember it as soon as you die. And the people who’ve had near death experiences, even if they’re not Christians, even if they never accepted Jesus, even if they thought they were an agnostic but were trying to do good in the world—were do-gooders. I know quite a few do-gooders—agnostics or people who call themselves atheists, who are do-gooders. That means they love virtue. They don’t remember God; they’re rejecting God. They’re rejecting Jesus. They’re rejecting the Christ. They’re rejecting the Christian religion. They’re rejecting the church. That’s all mistakes. That’s ignorance; that’s not evil. But they do good. They love virtue. They tell the truth. They help others. That’s the side of virtue. And so when they pass away, they will immediately recognize the love and life that envelops them there in the in-between place. And they’ll go,  Oh, wow! I was wrong about that, wasn’t I? But ohh man, I’m so glad it’s true. Take me away. Here we go! That is quite a different thing than people who embrace the darkness—who love evil, who love vice. Being a victim of vice; being a victim of archons—that’s not the same thing as embracing it. The evil-doers are the people that tell us lies, knowing they’re telling lies. I don’t care if they’re politicians or religious leaders or your spouse. If they’re telling lies and they know they’re telling lies, that’s evil-doing. If they kill people, murderers, rapists. These are things that never make it onto the side of virtue. There’s no excuse for rape. There’s no excuse for murder. Period. But even those people are going to heaven. They’re going to have a reckoning when they get to the other side. Remember, we’re going to have that 360 degree life review where everyone you have harmed, you’ll feel their pain. You’ll re-experience the harm that you did through their eyes and their hearts and their suffering. And that’s a hard thing to experience. But we will all experience that and you come out the other side cleansed because of the Christ. Because the Christ came and took all that pain upon itself on our behalf. Now, if you pass away and you already love Christ, or you already love the Father—let’s say you’re not a Christian, but you’re of some other religion and you worship the true God or a vision of the Father. There’s only one God Above All Gods. So if you’re worshipping the God Above All Gods in your heart, you have been redeemed already, and your bardo experience will be glorious, and you will be taken in. But everyone’s going to be redeemed because that’s the Christ’s job. The Christ came to redeem us all. I’ll leave you with one final quote. This is from the book of Romans—the letter to the Romans in the New Testament, chapter 3, verse 19. “And we know that the Law, whatsoever it says, speaks to those within the Law so that every mouth may be stopped up and all the cosmos might become accountable to God.” (and that’s the Old Testament Law, all the thou Shalts) “For all flesh will be vindicated before him, not by observances. For through law—full knowledge of sin. But now God’s justice has been manifested apart from the Law. Being attested by the Law and the prophets, And by the faithfulness of [Jesus], the Anointed, God’s justice is for everyone [as well as upon everyone] keeping faith; for there is no distinction: For all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, Being made upright as a gift by his grace through the manumission fee paid in the Anointed One, Jesus: Whom God sent forth as a place of atonement through faith in his blood, as a demonstration of his justice through the dismissal of past sins. In God’s clemency—for the demonstration of his justice in the present season—that he might be just and show him who is of Jesus’s faith to be upright. Where, therefore, the boasting? It has been excluded. By what law? That of observances? No, rather by faith’s law. For we reckon a man is vindicated by faithfulness, apart from observances of Law. The God of Judeans only, and not also of Gentiles? Yes, of Gentiles also, Since the God who both vindicates ‘Circumcision’ from faith and ‘Foreskin’ by faith is one. Do we then abolish Law through faith? Let it not be so! Rather, we establish it.” By the way, this talk of circumcision and foreskins is odd to our modern ears. But it was a source of contention in the early church because the Jews were required to be circumcised as a display of faith in God and a metaphor of cutting worldly memes away from the soul. When Gentiles joined the Jews as followers of Jesus, some elders felt they also needed to be circumcised according to Old Testament Law, but other elders argued that Christians are freed from the Law since the Christ had paid the price for  their shortcomings. And that’s religious talk, isn’t it? But it means we are not vindicated, i.e. we are not reconciled to the purity of God—(for you know, only the pure to go to heaven)—it is not through our doing, but Christ’s alone, that we are purified. That’s all that means. We are not vindicated through the Law, which means through observances, through rituals; we are pardoned through faith. And either you have that faith now or you’ll discover the faith one way or another—the easy way or the hard way—after you pass away. I actually invite you to join me, now, in faith. Well, that’s all for today. God bless us all. God blesses us all. Onward and upward. We’re nearing completion of the publication process for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. This will be a large, fully explanatory edition that lays out the gnostic cosmology from start to finish, with full color illustrations throughout. They have set the price around $30. I’m keeping my royalties to a minimum in order to lower the sales price for you. There is currently an inexpensive, black and white edition that I published myself that is available here if you can’t afford $30 or don’t want to wait to read it. The color edition will be available very soon.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I read a very interesting article this week from Scientific American, February 1st, 2024 edition. It’s a brand new article by a science writer called Rowan Jacobson. It was interesting to me because it just so happens to uphold—finally prove, in essence—one of the hypotheses of the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. You know, my Simple Explanation theory of everything was written over 15 years ago. The blog‘s been up that long, and there’s a book by the same name. If you haven’t gotten it yet, it’s a secular version of what we talk about here at Gnostic Insights. But it is gnosis nonetheless, because I believe that the universe was setting up for me in the Simple Explanation theory of everything, a way that I would then be able to read and interpret the gnostic gospel. That’s why the latest book is A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, whereas the first book was A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. And, in the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which was pre-gnostic gospel for me, I didn’t have a clear way to separate non-living material from living material. In my early diagrams, the hierarchy is a straight flow upward from the subatomic particles, on up through life, on up through cells. But, whereas in the gnostic gospel interpretation, there is a clear break provided to us by the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, there’s a clear break between the mud—that being the material that is not alive—and the meat—that being all of us animals, all of us creatures, everything that’s alive. Whether it’s a plant or a single celled organism or a human, every living creature is different in kind than the purely material objects. And the material objects are the subatomic particles, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the aggregates of minerals on up to the hard rocky bodies, like comets and planets. According to the Tripartite Tractate, these are not alive. The bodies themselves are part of the Fall. They are the dead byproduct of the Fall. They don’t think; they have no consciousness. What does have consciousness is the ego of the Demiurge, and so, at least here in our cosmos that we are familiar with, every material object that is not considered living, such as rocks and sand, well, those are extensions of the Demiurge. Those are extensions like a puppet master and strings, right? They are the Demiurge’s extensions of its consciousness, and it is not fully conscious because it is lacking the One’s Self that comes from above. Its One Self fled, that being the Aeon known as Logos. So, Logos and its ego have become separated and it’s its ego that has constructed this material cosmos in which we dwell. Whereas Logos itself, the Aeon Logos, fled back up to the Fullness. Anyway, this is a long preamble to what we’re trying to actually get to here, and if all of this was just gobbledygook to you, you need to back up and become familiar with some of the terminology from the gnostic gospel that I present here. So I will put a link to a more basic type of introduction to these concepts right here in the transcript to this podcast. Back to the Scientific American article. It’s called Brains Are Not Required When It Comes to Thinking and Solving Problems, Simple Cells Can Do It. And the subtitle is Tiny clumps of cells show basic cognitive abilities, and some animals can remember things after losing their heads. So, what this article is about is a new branch of cognitive science called basal cognition, and they are coming to believe that the brain is not required for thinking. Well, that has been a tenet of the Simple Explanation going back 15 to 20 years now. The brain is not the origin of thought or consciousness, it’s merely like a radio that tunes it in. Your neurons are not where memories live. The memories are outside of us. What the neurons do is grow in response to the stimulus of those externalized thoughts, and some scientists are coming to recognize that fact now. They fought this all along. Most scientists, including most cognitive scientists who study the brain, keep looking for places in the brain where the memories live. But these basal cognition scientists now realize that the memory doesn’t live in the brain. And by the way, to skip to the conclusion of the article—where the memories reside as far as they are concerned is in the electromagnetic grid that the creature emits or dwells in. Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist who has for a long time been an outcast in the scientific community because he’s been saying that all along. His research and his books are about how our thoughts and our relationships with one another exist in a field around us and a field in between us. Like between two people who have love for each other, there’s a sort of a rubber band, I think he described it. A rubber band stretching between them, which is an electromagnetic field that keeps them connected. So, let me read you some of the main points out of this article, and then I’ll make comments on it as we go by. The article begins with a description of the research that a scientist named Michael Levin has done, and he studies planaria worms. The neat thing about planaria worms is that if you cut them in half, the head half will grow a new tail and the tail half will grow a new head. And, they are genetically identical to one another as clones. Now the interesting thing is that even though you chop off the head and the tail grows a new head, that new head knows everything that the old head knew. And this is a form of proof that the memories and knowledge that were contained in that planaria worm didn’t live in the head. They were somehow living in the entire worm. That’s groundbreaking research, believe it or not. Quoting from the article, “Until recently, most scientists held that true cognition arrived with the first brains half a billion years ago. Without intricate clusters of neurons, behavior was merely a kind of reflex, [and that is what most people still think]. But Levin and several other researchers believe otherwise. He doesn’t deny that brains are awesome paragons of computational speed, and power. But he sees the differences between cell clumps and brains as ones of degree, not kind. In fact, Levin suspects that cognition probably evolved as cells started to collaborate and carry out the incredibly difficult task of building complex organisms, and then got souped up into brains to allow animals to move and think faster.” OK, pause now. I’ll rerun, soon, my episodes concerning evolution because I don’t think evolution works that way. Evolution clearly does not work by things happening in the way that Darwinian evolution says they happen, that this works out well for an organism, so more of that organism survives, and then they breed, and now all of that organism is like that one that was successful. That’s the way Darwinism works. What I claim is that the patterns are inherent. The patterns come from above. They are in fact from the Aeons of the Fullness. They are aeonic that way, and these patterns are brought down with the creatures that instantiate them. We are all born with our aeonic pattern intact, and it has nothing to do with evolution down here. And, by the way, it can look like things are evolving, but that’s simply because we 2nd Order Powers were sent down one by one, from the simplest to the more complex. It even says that in the Tripartite Tractate. You know, that book is over 2,000 years old and how it can describe such things is really phenomenal. So yes, maybe the oceans were populated with single celled animals at first and then the jellyfish and whatnot, but then that’s because they were the ones that were first sent down from the Fullness. In my opinion, they did not evolve from each other. There’s no clear links between species and types of organisms in the way that Darwinism claimed, and they still haven’t found any. So, although Levin is working with these planaria to show that the thoughts don’t reside in the brain, he still thinks that they evolve from clumps of cells. I don’t think so. Back to the article. “That position is being embraced by researchers in a variety of disciplines, including roboticists such as Josh Bongard, a frequent Levin collaborator who runs the Morphology, Evolution and Cognition Laboratory at the University of Vermont. Quoting Bongard, ‘Well, brains were one of the most recent inventions of Mother Nature, the thing that came last,’ says Bongard, who hopes to build deeply intelligent machines from the bottom up. He says, ‘it’s clear that the body matters, and then somehow you add neuronal cognition on top. It’s the cherry on the sundae, it’s not the sundae.’” OK. Well, isn’t that funny? They even used the expression bottom up. Now, if you’ve been with Gnostic Insights for any amount of time, you realize that the bottom up is demiurgic. The bottom up is what I was describing in my preamble there. That’s your particles, atoms, molecules, elements, etcetera. Bongard still thinks that the cognition grows out of the bottom up development. And since he is a roboticist, he’s going to build clever enough machinery out of molecules and elements that’s going to pop out cognition. It’s not going to happen, because cognition and consciousness comes from the top down. And you see, he said in this paragraph I just read you that somehow you had neuronal cognition on top. Well, yeah, on top somehow. That is the Holy Spirit of God coming down and attaching to the material. But it’s not going to happen at the whim of a roboticist. Carrying on now, “In recent years, interest in basal cognition has exploded as researchers have recognized example after example of surprisingly sophisticated intelligence at work across life’s kingdoms, no brain required. For artificial intelligence scientists such as Bongard, basal cognition offers an escape from the trap of assuming that future intelligences must mimic the brain-centric human model. For medical specialists, there are tantalizing hints of ways to awaken cells’ innate powers of healing and regeneration.” And, yeah, I’ll give them that. On the medical side, and again, jumping to the big conclusion at the end of the Scientific American article—the patterns reside more in the electromagnetic sphere than they do in the material. We can rule out the material; they do not exist in the atoms themselves, but the pattern of electricity that surrounds a cell does contain its aeonic memory. It’s possible that the DNA double Helix is the basic antenna that brings in the cognition from the Fullness. But what they are discovering is that, and this is coming from the end of the Scientific American article, if you stimulate tissue with even a digitally copied “memory” or electromagnetic pattern and apply it to tissue that never had that electromagnetic pattern, the tissue will take on that pattern. It will become cognitively identical, you could say, to the thing that was copied. But you see, we’re still talking about imitations, aren’t we? The Tripartite Tractate refers to the fallen world as the imitation and the deficiency. And so, if you take a living cell and you copy its electromagnetic signature and then apply it to a dead cell, what do you have? You don’t have a living cell. What you have is a zombie. Right? A ghoul. It’ll be moving around and replicating that first cell, but it’s not a truly living creature because it has not come down from the Fullness. It doesn’t have the spark of the life of God in it. It is a copy. It’s an imitation in the manner of a reflection—a very good one at the electromagnetic scale. Now, what I’m saying  is scriptural according to the Tripartite Tractate, I’m not just spinning theories here. And if you read my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, it’s all laid out step by step very carefully. The book is almost 300 pages long. It’s as careful and logical and simple, though complex, as you could want it to be, and I do explain everything fully. Back to the article. “And for the philosophically minded,” it says, and that would be us, “basal cognition casts the world in a sparkling new light. Maybe thinking builds from a simple start. Maybe it is happening all around us every day in forms we haven’t recognized because we don’t know what to look for. Maybe minds are everywhere.” And we would say, yes, of course they are. All 2nd Order creatures embody the Fullness of God. Back to the article. I’m jumping; this is not the entire article. It’s in order, but I’m skipping. “Plants can sense their surroundings surprisingly well. They know whether they are being shaded by part of themselves or by something else. They can detect the sound of running water (and will grow toward it) and of bees’ wings (and will produce nectar in preparation). They know when they are being eaten by bugs and will produce nasty defense chemicals in response. They even know when their neighbors are under attack: when scientists played a recording of munching caterpillars to a cress plant, that was enough for the plant to send a surge of mustard oil into its leaves. Plants’ most remarkable behavior tends to get underappreciated because we see it every day. They seem to know exactly what form they have and plan their future growth based on the sights, sounds, and smells around them, making complicated decisions about where future resources and dangers might be located in ways that can’t be boiled down to simple formulas. As Paco Calvo, director of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Murcia in Spain and author of Planta Sapiens, puts it, “Plants have to plan ahead to achieve goals, and to do so, they need to integrate vast pools of data. They need to engage with their surroundings adaptively and proactively, and they need to think about the future. They just couldn’t afford to do otherwise.” And, of course, you realize that me saying plants are 2nd Order creatures—all living things are 2nd Order creatures—so plants embody the Fullness of God, just like we do. They’re Aeons. Quoting the article again, “The orthodox view of memory is that it is stored as a stable network of synaptic connections among neurons in the brain. That view is clearly cracking. Levine says some of the demolition work has come from the lab of neuroscientist David Glanzman of the University of California, Los Angeles. Glanzman was able to transfer a memory of an electric shock from one sea slug to another by extracting RNA from the brains of shocked slugs and injecting it into the brains of new slugs. The recipients then remembered to recoil from the touch that preceded the shock. If RNA can be a medium of memory storage, any cell might have the ability, not just neurons.” OK, time out a second. Let’s hope this doesn’t get us banned. However, RNA and mNRA, anyone? Let’s just leave it at this: don’t believe the line that says that mNRA do not carry inherent changes to your DNA and to your hylic structure, to your body. People are being amended. Let’s leave it at that. Back to the article, “Levin’s research has always had tangible applications such as cancer therapy, limb regeneration, and wound healing. But over the past few years he’s allowed a philosophical current to enter his papers and talks. ‘It’s been a sort of slow rollout,’ he confesses. ‘I’ve had these ideas for decades, but it wasn’t the right time to talk about it,’ he says.” [Of course, I’ve had these ideas too, and I’ve been talking about them for decades.] Quoting the article, “That began to change with the celebrated 2019 paper entitled The Computational Boundary of a Self in which he harnessed the results of his experiments to argue that we are all collective intelligences built out of smaller, highly competent problem-solving agents. As Vermont’s Bongard told the New York Times, ‘What we are is intelligent machines made of intelligent machines made of intelligent machines all the way right down.’” OK, I’m going to stop quoting here now because I think it’s leading people astray at this point. Now, as you can hear, they’re still making the basic error that materialist scientists make, and that is equating our consciousness now to machines. Oh yeah, we’re no longer consciousness in neuronal structures. Now we’re machines. That’s right, but we’re not machines. Machines are demiurgic. Machines are built by the Demiurge. You see, the Demiurge cannot control living matter, it is out of his purview. Try as the Demiurge might, it cannot bring things to life. It can only, at the closest, make simulations and imitations of living things. Living things are called the 2nd Order of Powers. We are a Power that comes from the Aeons above. All living things—whether it’s these planaria or whether it’s the slime molds, whether it’s plants, whether it’s animals, whether it’s us—we are living creatures that embody the Aeons of the Fullness. We have aeonic inheritance. We are not imitations of the Aeons. We are the embodiment of the Aeons, just as Jesus was not an imitation of the Christ, Jesus was an embodiment of the Christ Aeon, fully and completely. Life comes into the universe at the cellular level, not the atomic. The Demiurge has the power to dispel the quantum chaos and bring order to the mud, but much to its chagrin it cannot control the meat. That’s why the Demiurge, who is the God of the Old Testament stories, the Demiurge controls through laws and edicts, and demands absolute and strict adherence to the law. When Jesus came, he said he did not come to dispel the law, he came to fulfill it. We are no longer under the law. Those who believe in the Judeo-Christian lineage are no longer under the law of the Demiurge, is what it’s saying. We get our inspiration directly from the Fullness of God, directly from above. And because we are 2nd Order Powers that are sent down from the Fullness, we carry within us a perfect fractal of the Fullness of God. That is what, in other circles, even New Age circles and those outside of New Age, because this is not New Age, folks, this is thousands of years old—they call that the One, this fractal of the Fullness of God that we carry within us. That’s what’s referred to as the One with a capital O. We also, in Gnostic Insights, call it the Self with a capital S.  And we use the capital letters to indicate the holiness and reverence we have for the Father above. Living organisms develop through the pattern of the Fullness above, as directed by Logos because we are actual fractals of Logos and our powers do not come from the Fall or fractals of the Demiurge. The fallen fractals of the ego of Logos comprise the material level only—from the bottom up. But we of the remembrance, what is called the psychical, psyche for psychological, for mind—we are the psychical. We are the thought-filled part. We come from the top down. Therefore, we can conclude that the roboticists are not going to be able to stimulate, even if it’s made from cells, even if they take cells away from a creature; they’ve been using frog cells for this purpose—they take the cells out of the creature, which removes it from the overall structure of the frog. Now it only has the overall structure of the cell of the frog, and this is why what are called organoids can’t be stimulated to become frogs again. Once you remove a cell from the creature that you removed it from, as scientists have been trying to take, let’s say, brain or heart cells out of living creatures, the heart cell may still beat because it’s inherent in the heart cell to contract and expand. That is something a heart cell knows how to do without being embedded in the larger heart. But when you take that heart cell away from the heart or that brain cell away from the brain, you’ve decreased their scope of influence to the cellular level. And no matter how many of those removed cells you put in a Petri dish or you smear across the surface of a 3D printout of a brain or 3D printout of a heart, they never do level up to the organ or to the organism. All they can do is just be gigantic clumps of beating heart cells or gigantic clumps of, God bless them, brain cells that have cognition but they’re just pinging around amongst themselves, probably saying, What the Hell’s going on here? And they are to be pitied like lab rats. They are to be pitied, these organoids, but they’re not going to level up. They’re not going to become walking around homunculi. (A Homunculus is a man-like creature, a thing that looks like a human.) The robots are not going to come to life. In Battlestar Galactica, remember, the Cylons had developed living Cylons that were cellular overlays on top of machinery. That isn’t going to make them humans. I don’t even think they’ll become Cylons in the future. OK, I’ve been pinging all over the place. This might seem like a very disjointed episode, but if you’ve been with me for a while, I think you’ll follow. Please leave me some comments, saying, Oh my God Cyd, this was over the top, or whatever. OK, tell me that you get it or not. I’ll put links in here to important previous episodes and articles on organoids leveling up and whether or not robots can become alive or AI will ever gain true consciousness. I’ve discussed all this at length previously, and also it can all be found in the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. The official Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel should be available in its full color, glorious form any day now. OK. Thanks for spending this time with me. God bless us all. Onward and upward. We’re nearing completion of the publication process for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. This will be a large, fully explanatory edition that lays out the gnostic cosmology from start to finish, with full color illustrations throughout. They have set the price around $30. I’m keeping my royalties to a minimum in order to lower the sales price for you. There is currently an inexpensive, black and white edition that I published myself that is available here if you can’t afford $30 or don’t want to wait to read it. The color edition will be available very soon.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today’s episode is an interview with one of your fellow listeners to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Her name is Hathaway Jane. Hathaway wrote to me saying how much the Gnostic Insights episodes have meant to her. She’s also purchased and read A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything and A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, and she has some very kind words to say about how meaningful they have been to her. She said she’d like to talk to me on the phone and I suggested that we go ahead and do it as a public interview so that we can share her growth and her path with everyone else here. Hathaway has studied Jungian analysis independently for many years now. For the past 15 years, she’s studied Carl Jung’s writing, particularly the Red Book and the Black Book, and then all of the other books that Jung wrote, as she says in the interview. And I find this remarkable because Jung is not easy to read, and Hathaway did this with a high school education at the time. She’s now attending university and she is in her last year of college studies. After she graduates from the university she wants to attend the Pacifica Graduate Institute in order to become a Jungian analyst. She studied Carl Jung independently through the Center for Applied Jungian Studies, which you can find on the Internet, and she’s also part of the Philemon Foundation. So let’s hear Hathaway’s journey. <giggles> Cyd: Hey, Hathaway. Hathaway: Yes, how are you? Cyd: I’m just fine this morning. How are you? Hathaway: I’m good. Cyd: It’s so nice to hear your voice. Welcome to the program. Thank you so much for being here. Hathaway: Oh, no problem. I think your book is incredible. I’m not kidding. I mean, I have told you in my life I lived through my ego self 100% and I definitely had different personas that I put on for my family, so-called friends, people I thought were my friends. And it’s strange because I think I told you from 16 to about 29 I was an addict. And every day I wake up and I feel so incredibly blessed, just because, seriously, I mean, I know how hard it is. I know that. I honestly I shouldn’t be here—like there were a few times that came real close to not being here. And, my life was such a crazy mess, I can’t even explain. I got sober and I still was just in something inside me. Just was like this child that—this is what I’ve always felt this way—I’ve always felt like off. I don’t know to explain it really. Like I wasn’t like the other kids. I was an only child and spent a lot of time alone, and just went through some experiences that I would never wish upon anybody. Jung’s , in Bollingen, Switzerland https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ And I made it out and I see so many people who don’t. I mean, right now our country is in the middle of an opiate crisis, which nobody talks about. And it’s just like, what is going on here? And I honestly do believe that everything that’s going on here is a spiritual matter. And so I started with Carl Jung. And I don’t know if you know a lot about Jung, but Carl Jung, his whole life—he started writing the Red Book, and this was his own personal notes and all these beautiful mandalas that he drew. And then he built himself like little—it wasn’t that little, but it’s quite big. It’s at Bollingen. They called the Little Castle. And this castle, it’s so symbolic. He built it because of his dream. Because one day Jung said to himself, I’m 40 years old. He’s like, what is this? I don’t want to go to cocktail parties. This is stupid. He’s like, I have everything I need. I have more money than I could ever want. I’m successful. I’ve known. He’s like, this isn’t life. There has to be something beyond this. And he started asking himself, do I know my soul? And he went through this whole transformation where he literally was, like, begging his soul to speak to him. And his soul did in his dreams. Now I don’t have dreams like that. So Jung has another way of doing it, which is called active imagination. I do mine through a learnt meditation, where I go to a trance level. But, after reading the Red Book I got very involved in CAJS—which the Center for Applied Jungian Studies. And my first teacher was a man by the name of Shane Eynon. He’s a psychoanalyst. He’s incredible. Like, I was so blessed. And for the first time in my life, I was just, like, it just, it really did, it smacked me in the face. And I was like, Oh my gosh. And then I was like, Oh my gosh! Because then I thought, I am out here racking up credit card debt to buy stuff I don’t need. Like, I am living in this illusion, and that’s a very weird thing to experience. Cyd: Now, how long after you had become sober did you discover the Jungians? Hathaway: Probably about 10 years after I’d been sober. And, during those 10 years, I wasn’t a nice person. I judged people—the friends I hung out with. It was just like there was this narrative and nobody knew any different. And so we just all followed this narrative. And I grew up in a very small town. So all those 10 years, I always felt there has to be something more than this. Like, this can’t be life. I have to grow old talking about this kind of stuff. And doing the same thing every weekend. I mean, don’t get me wrong—if that’s what you love to do, go do it. But it just wasn’t for me. And I picked up Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche.  And Nietzsche, he mentioned Jung and some further reading. And I was like, who’s Jung? And so, I like Jung. And I was reading about this man. And I’m like, oh, my gosh, this man thinks like I do. And I bought the Red Book, the Black Book, and every book Jung ever wrote. And that’s all of them. Cyd: So, right off the bat, you jumped straight into Jung. Wow. Because, you didn’t go to college, right? Hathaway: I didn’t. No, not at that time. I have three years of college now; I only have one year left. And this is why—I think you called it synchronicity. And it definitely applies at that time to your book. Because I just was like, oh, my gosh! When I read your book, I immediately called my husband and I was like, Steven, I don’t think you understand how important this book is, I said to him. And he cannot get enough of it. He is just, like, blown away. Cyd: Well, well, that that’s really great to hear. Hathaway: I mean really, Cyd, how? I don’t know how you did it. I mean, I feel like God went right through you and just let you write away. Cyd: Well, I kind of think that’s how it happens because 15 or 20 years ago, when I discovered my theory of everything, which is the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, that’s the secular version, that’s the sciency mathy version. And then, it was like 15 years after that, I discovered the gnostic, the Nag Hammadi, and the Tripartite Tractate. And I already had my superstructure in my mind, really firmly by that time. The Simple Explanation is a really nice frame to interpret just everything. That’s why it’s called: of Absolutely Everything. And by the way, when I wrote the Simple Explanation, I didn’t sit down to write it. Now, I don’t necessarily believe in channeling and that kind of thing, but what I sat down to write was a play based upon my dissertation, which is the trial of the California midwife. And instead of writing the California midwife play, boom, here come the principles from the Simple Explanation. I wrote the Simple Explanation in about two days, so obviously it was led by God. Hathaway: That is all amazing. That is so amazing. And that’s when I picked up your book. I was like, you know, the Red Book is basically another version of your book. But it’s very, very difficult. Jung did this on purpose because you gotta remember back when—he was born in 1875. So back in that time, his biggest fear was being called a mystic. Yeah, I mean, it would have destroyed him. People back then had a very different mindset. And, you know, Jung’s Red Book did not come out till 2009. And when he was dying, he said, this book is not for this age. And when I die, he said don’t you dare publish it. He’s like, at least wait 20-30 years. If somebody wouldn’t have wrote it down, I would be in such a different place. And I really do believe that life is supposed to be enjoyed, and I feel like the narrative out there is so opposite. I mean, honestly, I stopped watching TV eight years ago. And ever since I’ve been back at my mom’s, and she has that TV on. It’s like looking through 20 veils. And I’m like, oh my gosh, you can really see what and how they push it and the biases and everything. And I’m just like—that box is called the Idiot box. But I think it’s funny that it’s called tell a vision. Because it’s telling you a vision. Cyd: Right. And it’s not a nice vision. Hathaway: No, and a lot of it is very controlled. It’s like it’s just the same regurgitation of everything that’s always been there. I see the dumbing-down of America. And I see friends whom I have, who work themselves to near death to buy all these things that they don’t end up using. I mean, it’s about literally what neighbor’s, you know, boat’s bigger; who has a nicer car. And I’m just like, I can’t play that game. Like, there’s so much more out there. You know, I did notice that my mom had that television on. I was like, mom, just look at what they’re like. She was like, ohh, my gosh. She’s like, I never really realized it that way. It’s just interesting. I don’t know. It’s the narrative. It really is. It’s the collective unconscious you don’t talk a lot about. You have your consciousness, and then there’s the collective unconscious. And the collective unconscious has been around since man has been around. And that’s in our DNA. Neil deGrasse Tyson—you know I love how he always says we’re all made of Stardust, but I wish he would elaborate on that. Because I think people don’t really understand or pick that up or really are able to picture it—that all are connected through energy in a very serious way. Yeah. And it’s not recognized. I mean, it is in some religions in some countries, but not in this country. Cyd: Well, now, do you think that there is a malevolent force that is purposely enslaving people? Hathaway: I do. Our government’s one of them. Cyd: Everybody’s government. Government. Hathaway: I know, I said, every government is one of them. I do believe that. Gosh, I’ve traveled a lot and I’m glad I did that when I was younger. Going to other countries and seeing how other people live was probably one of the best things I ever did. Just because, when you grow up in America, you take your piece of clay and you just get formed very easily into this mindset of this is life. And this is how you do it. And this is where you go and what you do. And I just was like, this isn’t. My sister and I met up in Tibet, and when I was there those monks just blew my mind. It really showed me a different side of life—that there was nothing material and they were probably some of the happiest people I’ve ever met. And, you know, and it’s like they’re very isolated but fascinating. I remember one of them said to me, he’s like, you have so many superpowers that have been taken away from you. He’s like, you don’t even know how many powers you actually have. And, at the time, I was kind of like, I kind of get it. You know, I’m like, OK. And what I’m wondering, is what does he mean by that? And then, when I met a specific group of people who… I have a very, very good teacher who has taught Eastern and Western mysteries by two Masters in the East and two Masters in the West. And there is actually kind of a playbook. And the thing that’s really hard about the Western mysteries and the Eastern mysteries is there’s kind of a belief in that community that they don’t ever find you. You find them. And if you find them then then it’s meant to be. Cyd: Yeah, seek and ye shall find. Hathaway: Yes, that’s a very hard belief. So like once I found my teacher, I was taught how to do Ascension prayer, which is a specific kind of prayer. And at first he doesn’t tell you why. Or he’s like here, this is what you just need to do. But now, after a year and a half, I understand fully why. But he never tells you the answers to anything because you have to find it. You have to find it for yourself, because if he tells you, then you’re, you know, it’s biased. He’s like, my experiences aren’t going to be your experiences. He’s like, so he’s like, he’s very cut and dry. Like I’ll give you, you know, the stuff to do and you do it and that’s when things really changed. For about a year and a half ago, because I had just come out of this situation that was really—I just had a really bad experience with the people in my neighborhood. I had two pit bulls and they all hated my dogs and thought they were just these vicious dogs and they weren’t. One was a service dog for my husband, a federal service dog. And my husband has been gone and I had the both dogs myself and the neighborhood—I didn’t know had, like, a gossip little page or whatever, and they were saying some of the dogs got attacked or whatever. And I found this page and I think that’s why everybody left and right was calling Animal Control on me. And I’m like, what’s going on? And so I found this page and then it was too late. Because the guy who was the Animal Patrol officer was so persistent that he ended up telling me, if you don’t kill those dogs, I am, and he just marked them as extremely dangerous dogs. He’s like, now you have to go to court and all this stuff. And I had to move out and I was like in a situation and I had to put my dogs down. Cyd: No! By the way, were they running wild or were they out of the yard? I mean, what? What was their claim against them? Hathaway: No, no, no, no, no. Pitbulls. They didn’t like them. Yep. Just the breed. Period. Period. Lady’s dog got attacked in the neighborhood and some gossip started and for six months, and I have screenshots of this, that she erased it the minute I found it. Because we’re taking you all to court. The office was like, that’s not a service dog. And I showed him all the military papers. I’m, this is my husband’s service dog. I’m like, this dog has been, I think this dog is like, seriously, a $20,000 dog who’s been trained to, on command, to sit and stay in one spot. And we can walk away and for an hour he’ll be sitting there. Like, yeah. Your service dogs are trained. You can’t have a wild service dog. Cyd: Yeah, of course. Hathaway: They were so insistent, and this lady’s like, my dogs got attacked. And somebody in the neighborhood was like, it had to have been those pit bulls. And I found their little website. And I said, I went on there and I said, I’m so sorry you think it was my dogs. Unfortunately, that evening I was in Hutchinson, Minnesota, and I have it on the phone. And I mean that was really traumatizing. Cyd: Oh, I’ll say. Hathaway: I mean, our dogs are our kids. Cyd: Well, absolutely, I love my animals so much. Hathaway: Oh my gosh, I know. Cyd: I love animals. My whole life, I’ve always preferred animals to people to tell you the truth, yeah. Hathaway: I agree. Mark Twain said that, too. I remember he was like, I think I prefer my dogs to my friends. Yeah. That was a period in life where I could make a choice. I could either break down, freak out. Yeah, do all the things that I used to do, or I could sit down with my self and say, I don’t know why this is happening, but it’s happening for a reason and I don’t know why. And that’s exactly what happened. It doesn’t excuse what they did, but I understand now. I don’t believe that there’s coincidences in life. I just don’t. I don’t believe that. You know, people are like, why does bad stuff happen? And I’m like, I don’t think bad stuff happens. I just think we look at it as bad. And we handle it that way. And we don’t ever look into the future at all. Like, why. You know? And I didn’t. I reached into my soul and I at that time I did not believe in God. I came from a Lutheran family. My grandma was very religious. But I never believed in a higher power. And I’ll never forget, as I had to put my dogs down, one night, my heart hurt so bad. And I just said, I was like, God, please forgive me for all the things I’ve done in life. And I was like, I need to know you’re here and that you’re real. And all of a sudden I saw God and the most overwhelming feeling of love and light and warmth filled my body. This is an experience I will never forget. And I saw God. And I didn’t see him like standing there. It wasn’t like my eyes were seeing, but I could see in my mind this presence, and it was thick. And it was so warm. And it was so loving. And it was just pure love. And at that very moment my entire life changed drastically. I was already into Jung. I had already worked on myself. But that was real. That was so real. I mean, I remember I called my mom and my dad the next day, and my dad hadn’t passed away yet. And I was like, Dad, I saw God. I’m like, Dad, I said. I’m like, Dad, Dad, Dad! And my dad was, like, so happy because he’s—my whole life I always would joke around. I’d be, like, some hippie smoking somewhere wrote the Bible. You know, I was like, who knows who wrote that thing, you know? And I used to joke around about it, sarcastic with my dad. And he was like, you really don’t believe? And I was like, no. And I didn’t. I wanted to. It’s just I felt like my life had had so much tragedy in it and so much chaos. And then I realized, yeah, it did. But all of that needed to happen in order for me to be able to know God on a personal level. Or Christ. I don’t really have like names that I put to them. I know some people have a really big problem with the word God because they’ve had bad experiences. So I will tell people sometimes, so like they’re, I don’t know if I can go there. And I’ll be like, don’t go there. I’m like, think of something that has loved you unconditionally, even it’s with a pet, which most people end up picking. And I say to them, now, take that pet’s name and make a little name for that pet. And just for now, we’ll call that your star word. And take your star word and that’s God. And pray to that because you are praying to God. He doesn’t have to have the name God. And I found out that that really helps a lot of people because like I said, the word God has been just shoved into so many different areas and… Cyd: Well the definition of God—it’s memes. Those are human memes. Those aren’t God. And so people have negative associations to all of these memes that they’ve been taught is God. But it’s not God. So it’s just fine to peel off that label and just be open to the transcendent, to the highest. I was talking to a lady yesterday and she calls it the Source. Hathaway: Yeah. And a lot of people I know call it the Source. So I did. And my name was Zoabi because my dog’s names were Zoe and Abi. Cyd: Your dog’s name was Zoe? Hathaway: Zoe. Yeah. Zoe. It’s Zoe and Abi. Yeah. Cyd: One of my dog’s names is Zoe! Hathaway: Are you kidding me? Oh my gosh. Do you know in Hebrew that means river? Cyd: I think it means life. Hathaway: It’s that river, like life, totally. The running river of life. Cyd: Yes, and now that we’re Gnostic, it’s the river of life that’s flowing down from the Source and through the Fullness and into us. Hathaway: That is so crazy that our dogs have the same name, and Abi means the Father like, you know, in Hebrew it’s, you know, Abraham. Father like. So our dogs have the same name. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And when I do talk to people and people are like, well, I don’t get it; explain Jung to me. And I’m like, you got 10 hours? You know, it’s hard. It’s hard sometimes when people ask me, what are you doing? Like, what are you going to school for? And when I tell them I’m going to school to be a Jungian analyst. So, like, what is that? And I’m like, well, you know what therapy is right? And they’re like, yeah. And I’m like, well, it’s like that. But it’s totally not that. I mean, it’s a commitment. It’s a four year commitment. When you have had trauma in your life, it messes with everything. It messes down to your cells. Down to the atoms in your body, all the way to the way you think and function and see life. And I see so many people who have been so traumatized that most of them either drink themselves out of it or they use some kind of substance. They got some kind of niche that just belongs to them. Anything to not feel that or think about it, or even address it. And I think we really believe in this country that a lot of people have suffered a lot of trauma and it’s not spoken about. Cyd: Well, you know, it’s not only the trauma of your family or your relationships that you know in life. It’s the trauma of this fake culture that we were talking about. This uh, well, I don’t know what to call it other than this fake culture that we’re being programmed into and it’s trying to… Hathaway: Keeping up with the Jones thing. Cyd: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it’s jamming a square peg into our round holes. And it that is not what it’s meant to be and that’s why people are so unhappy, because you can’t replace the spirit with materialism. Hathaway: No, no. I know people who are millionaires and they’re miserable. And I know people are like, ohh, if I had money. I’m like, no, it wouldn’t be better. You would have the same problems. Like, that doesn’t solve anything, you know? And I remember—so, growing up, I was huge into hip hop and rap and my sister worked for BMG in Chicago at the time. And Notorious BIG had just been killed. And I’ll never forget that era. And then into the years 2006, especially 2006. In the African American community, there was so much chaos going on and there was so much being pushed. And it was done by the record companies and they were like, hey, if you’re not gangster rapping, we don’t wanna hear about. For real, they were like, I mean, cause when rap first came out, there was a lot of like tribal, and Quest is very positive rap. But literally, they had a huge executive meeting with like five of the biggest labels and they were like, look, you weren’t gangster rapping. We don’t want to hear it. Cyd: Oh, wow. So let’s just spread negativity as far and wide as we can. Hathaway: Yeah, let’s push, you know, gangs and bloods and crypts. And, you know, because I hung out with a lot of those people were my friends, I watched it. And now I can look and be like, oh my gosh. To witness that. To witness how something so small, how something as beautiful as poetry, right? And for executives to take it and literally say, well, it better be gangster, you know, it better be hard. Or we’re just gonna ignore you. And for a long time, it was that way. I want to say until Kanye West came out. Leave it to Kanye to bridge more. Cyd: Yeah, Kanye, right. And of course, by the way, the same thing is happening, you don’t watch television. I happen to watch too much television, but the streaming services—that they are becoming more and more perverse with, you know, pretty much with every show that they issue. It’s just going down and down and down. It’s awful. Hathaway: See, that’s why I just can’t watch. Like, seriously, I can’t watch it. Like, my mom watches the soap opera. I mean, I get it. She likes it. Whatever. But I’m just like, yeah, Mom, you do know that this is, like, the farthest thing from reality, right? She’s like, yes, I do. But I even see it, you know, sometimes when I do see the TV, if I’m at somebody’s house and like a politician is on, I just am aghast at like, what? The things that come out of their mouths cause I’m, like, oh my gosh. I’m like, really? I just, I don’t know. Cyd: Well, politicians are special class of human. I mean, they have to be power driven. Obviously they’re power driven and so that’s just that’s the baseline of that. It’s all ego. Hey, so… Hathaway. Yeah, all ego. Cyd: You were talking about in the first part of your life, you were driven by ego, and now I imagine the inverse of that, just that you’re being driven by or seeking or being guided by, let’s say, love and compassion and spirit. Hathaway: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Every day, I mean, I wake up every day and I never… you know, Jung said something that resonated with me. And I’ll never forget it when I read it and this was like five years ago. He was like, the moment a patient walks in the door, if I have any judgment, I might as well tell them to walk out and go away. And I’m like, oh, my God, he’s right. And, you know, humans judge in three seconds. That’s how long we take to judge somebody. It just blows your mind—in three seconds, like psychologically, that’s how quickly we judge someone. So I’ve had to train my brain. And it’s strange. But, when I meet people. I don’t take that approach. And I can’t take it because I’ve trained myself out of it. So it doesn’t matter what you look like or where you come from. That’s not it. It’s your soul that I care about. Cyd: Yeah, but do  you judge their soul? I mean, do you think, ohh they’re spiritual or ohh, they’re lost in ego. I mean, is that a form of judgment? Hathaway: No, because I don’t know. Honestly. In reality, unless I can sit down with that person and get to know them, I don’t know if that’s just their persona—one one of their personas they’re putting it on, and deep inside, they’re doing it for their family or they’re doing it to impress friends. But deep inside, you know, I’m miserable and I pray to God every day for something and stuff. Like, I just, I can’t judge people. I just can’t do it. It’s really hard for me to. I mean, even when I see somebody is doing something that is not very nice. The first thing that’s going through my head is, what happened to them to make them want to project that onto others? Cyd: Yeah, that’s very wonderful reaction. I need to get to that place. I’m very judgmental in a negative way. And it’s not a good thing. I am loving. I want to be loving, and when I know the person, I fully love them. But strangers—boom, boom, boom–it just, you know, rubs me the wrong way. Hathaway: And it’s not an easy thing to do. I mean, when I first started and I was like, really like, I cannot do what I am meant to do if I have that mindset of mind. And so, you know, when somebody’s super rude to you, you want it like this right away. It’s like it’s automatic. Cyd: It’s like, right. It’s boom right back at him. Hathaeway: Yeah, it’s like, pow! right back. It’s like that fight or flight thing. And it’s like, I had to literally shut that down and just be like, hey, I know you maybe think I cut you off, and if I did, I am so sorry. I hope you have a great day. And I’m sorry that you’re angry. And I really wish you the best. And I’ve had literally people break down crying, because nobody’s ever been nice to them. It’s not always easy, but I know that. I feel like if God was watching me, He’s like, you already know what to do. So I’m like, OK, got it. Cyd: Well, that’s wonderful. Hathaway: Yeah. So that’s a little bit of my story. Cyd: Oh, I’m so glad to have talked with you, Hathaway, and that you’ve talked with us. I think that what you’re sharing with us today is going to be so helpful to many people. Can you give anyone a first step or anything they should do or a website they should visit or anything like this? Hathaway: They should definitely get your book and I tell everybody to get the Red Book. And you better get a dictionary. Cyd: For the Red Book, but not for my books, right? My book is simple. Hathaway: Yep. Nope, the Red Book. Yeah, because Jung was a scholar and he wrote in his time in the way they wrote. Which is, yeah, very confusing. But even if you don’t do the Red Book, you know, just plenty of YouTube channels. I mean, in South America and in South Korea, Jung is huge. I mean, there’s a K-pop band who just wrote a record about him. And it’s kind of interesting because nobody knew who Jung was like 10 years ago. And I’ve got to watch this, like, huge wave and people saying, oh, Carl Jung, I know who you’re talking about. And I’m like, really? Cyd: Wow. That’s interesting. Hathaway: Yeah, I’ve got to see that, which is really cool. And I’ve seen it in people. I’ve seen it and definitely in different cultures. I mean, the K-pop thing just shocked me. Yeah. Like, what? Like these teenagers are making a record about individuation and finding their souls. Cyd: So you think my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, would be helpful? Hathaway: Ohh gosh, Cyd. When I read your book, I was just ecstatic. My husband said, he’s like, I’ve never seen anybody write so just blunt and honestly. And yet, so clearly. And yet, I do have to go back and read each chapter, he’s like, because I’m not used to the narrative. And I’m like, exactly. I do, Cyd, I think I think your book is for the ages to come. And the ages here. Cyd: That’s nice. OK, Gee—a perfect note to end on. Well, that’s our interview with Hathaway Jane. Here’s a postscript to the interview that Hathaway mailed me today. She says, “After speaking with you, I told my teacher that I appreciated everything he had taught me, but I know it’s time to move on. Most of the teaching was directions on ascending to the other realms, but I don’t feel that is my path. I cannot explain it and I don’t know if I ever will, but your book changed my thought process. I told you of the experience of the process Jung wrote about and how it’s close to your book, just very long and extremely difficult to read. I read your book at least a few times a week and I have to study it in order to soak in everything. “I told you about my experience of feeling and seeing God when I read your book. It feels like I’m going over knowledge I used to know and forgotten, but I feel a fraction of the same overwhelming love I felt that night. I’m not sure what is next, but I hope we remain friends and get your book into more hands. I know so many people who are lost and I feel like they can’t get basic answers or they have to pay some guru or hope they discover a cult-like setting by chance. I know that usually leads to more confusion. I’m sure I will have more questions. All I know is that the more I read and listen to the gnostic gospel, your book and your podcast, the more synchronicities become clear. Much love, Hathaway. And that’s exactly it. I’ve always said that A Simple Explanation is a paradigm-shifting theory of everything, because it has a whole different way of looking at the way the physics and chemistry and everything goes together. And this Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is also paradigm shifting of conventional Christianity. But I believe in a better way. It helps us to know the Father better and deeper. It helps us to understand the difference between the Son, the Christ, and Jesus, and they’re all important, and they’re all glorious. So let’s give more glory to God. That’s the goal here. If any of you listeners would like to have a discussion with me that we would then possibly broadcast for other people’s edification, I think it’s important to share our gnostic journeys with each other, because everyone comes to gnosis in their own way and through their own insights. So if you feel as though you have something that you’d like to share with others, please write to me using the Comments form here at Gnostic Insights. Or you can leave a comment directly at the Substack Gnostic Reformation page. God bless us all, onward and upward. My book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, is still available now as an advance, black and white edition. However, the good news is that the color edition is finally out of pre-publication and at the printers. So copies will be available very soon, if you want to wait for the color edition. And, on another note, I found an illustrator for the children’s gnostic gospel book I’ve most recently written. She is a terrific artist and a self-identified gnostic for many years, so she really knows what she’s doing. I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as it is finished.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m your host. I’m really glad that you’re with me and that we are exploring these topics together. Today I want to share with you an article that was first printed in the UNT Digital Library. That’s the university library system. It’s by Bruce Greyson, and it’s called Near Death Experiences and Claims of Past Life Memories. This was printed in autumn of 2021 and it is accessed through the University of North Texas Library system. My brother looked this up for us because of our topic last week on near death experiences. And, you know my brother, Bill Puett, is a hypnotherapist. He is a retired philosophy professor. Nowadays he helps people through therapeutic hypnosis. Bill often has experiences with his clients of that in between place that one experiences between lives. Many times Bill asks a client to go back and remember when an upsetting trigger first occurred in their lives, and sometimes these people jump back into a previous life. That is how Bill has become so familiar with the idea and working with people’s past life experiences. Bill had raised the question with me after last week’s episode, Well, what about the in between place? How do these near death experiences comport with the place that Bill and his clients are so familiar with—that being the in between place where they work on past life issues. And, the in between place is where a soul is prior to being reincarnated. At least that’s the therapeutic metaphor that seems to be going on in these situations. So let’s look at this article together, Near Death Experiences and Claims of Past Life Memories, and we’ll see if we can make sense of it in a gnostic way. Let’s begin with reading the abstract. An abstract on an academic article is the overview, the summation, of what the article is going to be about. So let’s see what Dr. Greyson has to say. “Some features of near death experiences suggest that consciousness may continue to function after death of the body. The life reviews of some NDEs [that’s near death experiences] include what seemed to be memories of a past lifetime, some of which involve verifiable details suggesting that the experiencer has lived more than one life and can recall events from successive lives. These apparent past life memories parallel the claims of young children who remember past lives. Furthermore, some children’s past life memories include scenes from the period between lives that parallel descriptions of the realm in which NDEs occur. Some children’s past life memories include anomalous features that contradict common beliefs about reincarnation. In addition, the idea that humans reincarnate into a new earthly body seems to contradict the common NDE feature of encountering deceased persons in a non-earthly realm. However, those apparent contradictions can be resolved by reconceptualization of prevailing ideas about time and about what aspects of human consciousness may survive bodily death.” So, the article goes into what is a near death experience, and we don’t have to redescribe that because we covered it in depth in last week’s episode. And then the next section is called The Life Review, which also presents examples of that 360° life review that we covered in the last episode. Well, this is interesting. He cites an example from 1791, “When British Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort was only a 17 year old midshipman he fell off the boat into Portsmouth Harbour. Unfortunately, he had not yet learned to swim. After exhausting himself in his struggle to breathe, he lost consciousness and immediately experienced a feeling of calmness and noticed changes in his thinking. He later described it in this way. ‘From the moment that all exertions ceased, which I imagine was the immediate consequence of complete suffocation, thought rose above thought with the rapidity of succession. It is not only indescribable, but probably inconceivable by anyone who has not himself been in a similar situation. The course of those thoughts I can, even now in great measure, retrace the event which had just taken place. The awkwardness that had produced it were the first series of reflections that occurred.’”  He talks about remembering his childhood, another shipwreck… “’travelling backwards, every past incident of my life seemed to glance across my recollection in retrograde succession. Not, however, in mere outline as here stated, but the picture filled up with every minute and collateral feature. In short, the whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or its consequences. Indeed, many trifling events, which had been long forgotten then crowded into my imagination with the character of recent familiarity.’” This was printed in Beaufort’s papers of 1858. The article then goes on to share many of the aspects of this near death experience that we talked about in last week’s episode. “Such that many near death experiencers reported their life review not only helped them cope with losses, guilt and conflict, and find meaning in their lives, but also helped them make changes in their behavior based on what they had learned… 76% of those who reported re-experiencing their life events said they did so not only through their own eyes, but also from the perspective of others, feeling those other people’s emotions as well as their own. They reported this kind of empathic life review helped them understand the pain they may have caused others and the reasons for the pain they may have suffered at the hands of others.” The article says that some life reviews additionally include mental impressions or images that did not seem to relate to the experiencer’s current lifetime. In these cases, experiencers reported apparent memories that they believed related to a previous earthly lifetime. Dr. Greyson then cites a case of a woman who believed she had had a previous life experience during her life review. But her recollections could not be proven as evidence because there was no way to compare it with the previous life. But then he goes on to quote another experiencer named David Moquin. “When he was hospitalized with double pneumonia at age 48, he described visions of past lives during his near death experience as he was in and out of coma for several days. Quoting David Moquin’s NDE: ‘during that time I experienced at least two events that felt like past lifetimes. The one that has haunted me for the past 24 years was that of burning to death in an airplane crash. I kept seeing myself on fire and trying to reach a field just past a line of trees in a barbed wire type fence. I crashed, hit my head and tried to crawl out as I was engulfed in fire and couldn’t breathe. Many years later, a psychic told me that in my past lifetime I died landing a fighter plane on an odd single digit day in November 1944. I was born December 21st, 1940. My daughter, hearing the recording of the reading, googled and found that Captain Fryer was the only pilot that died on an odd single digit day that November, and that he died trying to land his burning P-51 Mustang. My favorite plane was always the P-51. The model sits on my desk. My daughter asked me questions and I seem to know the names of my Wing Commander, Squadron Commander, mother and father.’” That was recorded as personal communication in 2018. So, unlike the previous women’s apparent memories of a past life, Moquin’s NDE included verifiable details that were subsequently corroborated as true for a particular person who died a month before Moquin was born. Dr. Nelson quotes a Pew Research Center finding that “one third of all Americans, even 1/3 of mainline Protestants and 1/3 of Roman Catholics whose contemporary religious orthodoxy excludes belief in reincarnation, believe that humans may at some point after death return to another life here on Earth.” That’s from (www.pewresearch.org /fact-tank/2018/10/01/new-age-beliefs- common-among-both-religious-and-nonreligious-americans/). The article is called New Age Beliefs Common Among Both Religious and Non-religious Americans. Now, by the way, I don’t think that new age beliefs is a proper way to characterize belief in reincarnation. Reincarnation is a central idea in many Asian religions and it goes back thousands of years, at least as far back as our Christian and Jewish heritage. We’ve discussed reincarnation at depth in a couple of prior episodes here at Gnostic Insights, and I will include the link to those previous episodes in the transcript to this article so that you can go back and listen to them if you’d like. “Researchers at the University of Virginia and at other universities around the globe have studied more than 2000 cases of very young children prior to school age who claim to recall details of the past life [I’ll include the citations at the end of the podcast article]. As well, in about 2/3 of those cases of young children, they’ve been able to identify the person the child claimed to have been in the past life based on the child’s memories, matching specific details of the claimed past life.” Now, as an aside, my brother Bill and I have been discussing the veracity of reincarnation for decades literally by now. And I always resisted the notion because of my more Orthodox Christian beliefs. Bill has always thought that reincarnation was likely, and I generally have said that it was more likely to be a useful therapeutic metaphor; that when a person is apparently recalling a past life incident where this or that happened it was the way that their subconscious was accessing as an allegory their emotional troubles. Or another way to write off memories of reincarnation would be that, for example, these young children or the man that died in the burning plane weren’t remembering their past life, but these were memories that were lodged in the transpersonal memory, or the transpersonal consciousness of the entire planet. Transpersonal is a Jungian term. It’s the meme bundle, in the way we’ve been talking about in the Simple Explanation. The meme bundle of everyone is clinging to our planet the way our personal meme bundle shrouds our self identity. However, when I came to my realization of my theory of everything that’s called the Simple Explanation or the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, reincarnation was necessarily part of that philosophy. Because of the—and I don’t want to get into the weeds here, but—because of the toroidal nature of time, that time isn’t just linear, it wraps around, it keeps repeating over and over again. And a torus—toroidal means based on a torus—is like a doughnut shape. So the way I conceive of time is that all potentiality comes down through the top funnel of that doughnut here and now is at the center of the doughnut and where the potentials collapse into one singularity here and now. And then what comes out to the bottom after the collapse is linear time because the potentials have collapsed and now it’s just time history of what happened during the previous string of collapse potential. I don’t want to confuse you with that. Anyway, reincarnation and the repetition the cycles of time is part of the Simple Explanation. And, you know, I have taken the Simple Explanation theory of everything and applied it to the Gnostic Gospel, to the gnostic doctrines. And that’s my addition to what was written a couple of thousand years ago in the Tripartite Tractate that was part of the Nag Hammadi scriptures uncovered in 1945. So, back to this article by Dr. Greyson. He says that the researcher who did most of the research in the beginning with the children, Ian Stevenson, beginning in the 1960s, limited his investigation to very young children between the ages of two and five before they had learned to read so that it would eliminate the claim that they had read something or that they have come across it, and that they were just reiterating what they had learned. “He also limited his studies to memories that came to the children spontaneously. The research avoided memories that were recovered in hypnotic past life regressions because of the increased suggestibility of people who are hypnotized.” Now, of course, my own brother Bill’s experience with these types of stories is through hypnotic regression, so Bill’s clients would have been eliminated right off the bat. The article says, “The issue is not that information acquired in hypnosis is never accurate, but rather that it is not reliable enough to be trusted as scientific evidence without additional verification. Greyson’s article says that the young children that Stephenson and other researchers have investigated not only have memories of past lives, but also often show behaviors such as phobias or preferences that are unusual within the context of their own families and are not explained by any current life events. However, these unexplained behaviors are usually consistent with the child’s statements about a previous life. For example, a young child who remembers a life that ended in drowning may show an unnatural fear of water or a young child in a Hindu family who remembers life as a devout Muslim may refuse to eat food not prepared according to Islamic law.” And so on. And by the way, it’s these types of memory traumas or memes clinging to a persons soul, to their ego, that my brother Bill works with in his hypnotic therapy. A person comes to him with a complaint of a phobia, and they explore when that phobia occurred. Sometimes it’s a past life and they address it in the past life. And then when they come out of hypnosis, that phobia has been relieved because the meme was peeled off of them and discarded. On the other hand, the article says that there are some cases in the University of Virginia collection that suggests that “their interpretation is not as straightforward as our common conceptions of reincarnation would suggest. For example, in some cases, researchers have investigated two or more children who recall the same past life.” [So that kind of throws a monkey wrench into our easy interpretation of this phenomenon, doesn’t it?] Another troublesome finding is that a child can “remember the past lives of two different people who lived at the same time.” And there are a small number of such purported cases from the files at the University of Virginia. The University of Virginia files include 37 such cases, “which raised questions about how to interpret the children’s knowledge of someone else’s life.” Because of these inconsistencies, Stephenson, who initiated this line of research, never claimed that these cases were proof of reincarnation. “Instead, he referred to them as cases suggestive of reincarnation and cases of the reincarnation type.” The article goes on to say both claimed memories of past lives and near death experiences have been controversial topics in academia because they challenge contemporary models of the mind brain relationship and may be open to multiple interpretations. He goes on to say, “several researchers have reported, anecdotally, that near death experiences became more open to the idea of reincarnation after their near death experiences.” As I said, I’m going to include these citations for this article at the end of this episode, so you can look all of this up yourself if you want to delve into it. Dr. Greyson says that among more than 200 near death experiencers who have participated in his research, “1/3 said they believed that after death they will be recycled and reincarnated or reborn in the physical world. Another third reportedly believed that reincarnation is possible. Those are the same percentages of belief in reincarnation that the Pew Research Center found among the American population as a whole. However, some near death experiencers related their belief in reincarnation to specific events in their NDEs. As a gnostic aside, here it is a funny thing: that it keeps being one third, one third, one third, isn’t it? You know, the Tripartite Tractate is called the three-part book, not only because the codex had three sections, but because it describes the three parts of humans—that being our spirit, our psychological, or what we might call soul, and our physical bodies. Another set of thirds. But it also has humans divided into three parts as well. The spiritual types which would be me, I hope to say, and you who are listening to this Gnostic podcast. And then there are the psychological types. They work out of their emotional centers, their psychological centers, rather than their spiritual centers. And then there are the physical types who only believe in the tangible, not even the psychological. Materialists. Most scientists are materialists. They only believe in what they can measure and weigh. So it’s very difficult to have a science of psychology, for example, because it all so subjective. You can’t measure it and weigh it, except by asking people subjective questions and then putting  that into various categories. But it’s subjective. One problem that scientifically minded researchers have with the near death experiences and the past life memories is that the mind appears to be separate from the brain. They always want to equate our awareness and our consciousness with the brain and the brain’s activities—that consciousness is a byproduct of the brain. But we Gnostics realize that consciousness is not a byproduct of the brain. It’s more the other way around. The mind—consciousness—preexists the brain. It’s the foundation: consciousness. We begin with consciousness, and then we see how creation rolls out and builds up to become us with brains. That is not a scientific concept. Now the article gets to what my brother Bill’s particular question was when he looked up this research. Let’s read it: “In an apparent contradiction to the idea of reincarnation, many near death experiencers report having met deceased loved ones in some seemingly otherworldly environment in their NDEs. The question arises how it might be possible for deceased people to continue existing in some otherworldly realm after death if they have been reborn into a new earthly life.” Greyson says, “The simplest resolution this apparent contradiction might be that deceased individuals might reside in some afterlife environment while awaiting reincarnation on Earth. Alternatively, one might speculate that different people may have different afterlife scenarios, some being reborn and others remaining in some other worldly realm. Or that one person might have several different afterlife scenarios, including both rebirth and continued existence in an otherworldly realm. This latter possibility is compatible with reported cases of mediumistic communication [that is, having a psychic reading], allegedly from deceased individuals who claim to have been already reincarnated but are able to leave their new bodies and present to the medium as discarnate spirits, and cases of apparitions of deceased individuals that appear after they have been born. Furthermore, given the claim of many near death experiences that the familiar concept of time as a linear progression doesn’t apply in the afterlife, it might be possible both to continue to exist in some other worldly realm and also simultaneously to be reborn on Earth.” Now that is what my brother Bill and I have discussed: time. We know that the heavenly realm is eternal and that the Father itself is infinite. But we are eternal. In any case, we are not trapped in linear time. So, things that happen to us here in this material world happen one after another after another; they don’t all happen at once, at least not that we can tell. As I mentioned earlier in this episode, my idea of time has to do with potentiality wrapping around, coming down through the funnel, collapsing into here and now, and then coming out as history. That’s a cyclical version of time. Here in our earthly existence, we experience that collapse as always here, now. We’re always in the here and now. We aren’t in the future. We aren’t in the past. We’re here, now. But what happened in the past happened. That is the collapsed potentiality. So, Bill and I have discussed that time in the other place. Time in the in between place and certainly time in the heavenly realm doesn’t present itself linearly. That’s the 360° life review that people experience. It can all happen at once, in an instant. We can sense it all, and we know that for the Father, time is completely nonlinear. The Father knows everything all at once. That’s what it means to be omniscient. It all happens at once. Omniscient, omnipresent, everywhere at once. All knowing at once. So time, once we are out of this material realm, is not the same as we experience it here. Let’s see what Dr. Greyson has to say about this. “Many experiencers report that in their NDE’s they had not only an altered sense of time, but also a sense of complete timelessness.” And he cites a 36-year-old policeman who almost bled to death after surgery and what that man said was, “I knew what it was like to experience eternity, where there was no time. It’s the hardest thing to try to describe to someone. How do you describe a state of timelessness where there’s nothing progressing from one point to another, where it’s all there and you’re totally immersed in it?” Greyson reports that among the 698 people who shared their NDEs with him, 59 percent, 415, said that they had a sense of timelessness in their NDEs. “Some of these experiencers said that time may still have existed on Earth, but that the realm of the NDE seemed to be outside of the flow of time. Everything in their NDE seemed to be happening at once, or they seemed to move forward and backward in time. Others said they realized in the NDE that time as humans know it was only ever an artificial construct of the brain and never really existed. That is, that the very concept of time had no independent reality.” Here is how that was experienced by one of the people that he interviewed. She says that, “Before my NDE I used to think that the purpose of life was to evolve beyond the reincarnation cycle of birth and death. But after my NDE, I feel differently. This is primarily because the concept of reincarnation in its conventional form is a progression of lifetimes running sequentially, one after the other, and it wasn’t supported by my NDE. I realized that time doesn’t move in a linear fashion unless we’re using the filter of our bodies and minds. Once we’re no longer limited by our earthly senses, every moment exists simultaneously. I’ve come to think that the concept of reincarnation is really just an interpretation, a way for our intellect to make sense of all experiences happening at once.” So Dr. Greyson’s article concludes, “NDEs that include apparent past-life memories in the life review suggest that humans can live on this Earthly plane more than once, and memories of past lives that include descriptions of the period between lives support the validity of NDEs. But little of that cross-validation between NDEs and apparent memories of past lives can be considered scientific evidence. At this point it appears that the question of reincarnation is a matter for which NDEs provide tantalizing directions for further research rather than definitive answers. “ He says, “ In particular, the temporal inconsistencies between encounters with deceased persons in NDEs and rebirth into subsequent Earthly lives, like so many ineffable features of NDEs, are challenging for scientists. These apparent contradictions and ineffability call for the identification of different methodologies or different means of expression to investigate them.” Yeah. Well, I don’t think that’s going to happen. As I say, science is very materialistic. It really begins by looking very, very closely at material. When scientists study consciousness and the mind, they want to look at neuronal connections. They want to measure the speed of the synapse transmission of data. They want to measure the voltage of the electricity flowing through the synapses. This is the way science looks into these things that we look into from the other direction. Spiritual types and Gnostics start with consciousness and look how it manifests through material. We don’t look at material trying to find consciousness. I cannot imagine a scientific experiment that will ever prove reincarnation somehow arises from something that can be measured and weighed. The closest they can come to it is what they call anecdotal evidence. Anecdotes are stories. Anecdotal evidences of past lives is where someone remembers a past life or recognizes objects in their previous home and the people of their previous family. We’ve had that kind of research and it still doesn’t count as “scientific” because it’s only, as they like to say, only anecdotal. So there is always going to be a schism, at least in our ordinary modalities, that this current age has. These are not going to be reconcilable through science. We can, from the gnostic point of view, we can reconcile science to us. We can reconcile science to the spiritual by showing that the material is a creation of the spiritual, and that is why Gnostic Insights continually restates that Gnostic cosmology of how consciousness flows from the Father through the Son, through the Fullness. From the Fullness, through the material existence of this plane. But you’re never going to be able to look at the material existence of this plane of existence and see consciousness flowing back upwards unless you accept the fact that all of consciousness is carried in life—life and love and thought. Life, love, and logos is what exists. I mean, if scientists can’t even agree that life begins at conception, how are they ever going to get backward prior to conception? OK, we’ve run out of time. Take a look at the transcript of this episode. You can find links within the transcript to previous episodes where this has all been discussed, and I will include the citations from Dr. Greyson’s article and the link to his article in the transcript at the end. Thanks so much for spending this time with me. God bless us all and onward and upward. Greyson, Bruce. Near-Death Experiences and Claims of Past-Life Memories, article, Autumn 2021; Durham, North Carolina. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2017035/: accessed January 20, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu . Hold your phone’s camera up to the donorbox above and then click on the website that appears on your phone if you care to donate. Thank you! Your support is needed. References Baker, R. A. (1982). The effect of suggestion on past-lives regression. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 25, 71–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/00029157.19 82.10404067 Beaufort, F. (1858). Notice of Rear-Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, K. C. B. J. D. Potter. Gallup, G., & Proctor, W. (1982). Adventures in immortality: A look beyond the threshold of death. McGraw-Hill. Greyson, B. (2021). After: A doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond. St. Martin’s Essentials. Greyson, B., Kelly, E. W., & Kelly, E. F. (2009). Explanatory models for near-death experiences. In J. M. Holden, B. Greyson, B., & D. James (Eds.), The handbook of near- death experiences: Thirty years of investigation (pp. 213–234). Praeger/ABC-CLIO. Haraldsson, E., & Matlock, J. G. (2016). I saw a light and came here: Children’s experiences of reincarnation. Hove, UK: White Crow Books. Holden, J. M., Greyson, B., & James, D. (2009). The field of near-death studies: Past, present, and future. In J. M. Holden, B. Greyson, & D. James (Eds.), The handbook of near-death experiences: Thirty years of investigation (pp. 1–16). Praeger/ABC-CLIO. Kampman, R, & Hirvenoja, R. (1978). Dynamic relation of the secondary person-ality induced by hypnosis to the present personality. In F. H. Frankel & H. S. Zamansky (Eds.), Hypnosis at its bicentennial (pp. 183–188). Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2859-9_17 Keil, J. (2010). Questions of the reincarnation type. Journal of Scientific Exploration 24, 79–99. Matlock, J. G., & Giesler-Petersen, I. (2016). Asian versus Western intermission memories: Universal features and cultural variations. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 35, 3–19. https://doi.org/10.17514/JNDS-2016-35-1-p3-29. Matlock, J. G., & Mishlove, J. (2019). Signs of reincarnation: Exploring beliefs, cases, and theory. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Mills, A. (1988). A preliminary investigation of cases of reincarnation among the Beaver and Gitksan Indians. Anthropologica, 30, 23–59. https://doi.org /10.2307/25605246 Noyes, R., & Kletti, R. (1977). Panoramic memory: A response to the threat of death. Omega, 8, 181–194. http://dx.doi.org/10.2190/0UD7-H3WR-1ENN-57CN Ring, K. (1980). Life at death: A scientific investigation of the near-death experience. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. Sharma, P., & Tucker, J. (2004). Cases of the reincarnation type with memories from the intermission between lives. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 23, 101–118. https:// doi.org/10.17514/JNDS-2004-23-2-p101-118. Spanos, N. P., Menary, E., Gabora, N. J., DuBreuil, S. C., & Dewhirst, B. (1991). Secondary identity enactments during hypnotic past-life regression: A socio 226 JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES cognitive perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 308–320. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022–3514.61.2.308 Stevenson, I. (1966). Twenty cases suggestive of reincarnation. University of Virginia Press. Stevenson, I. (1969). The belief in reincarnation and related cases among the Eskimos of Alaska. Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association, 6, 53–55. Stevenson, I. (1985). The belief in reincarnation among the Igbo of Nigeria. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 20, 13–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/002190 968502000102 Stevenson, I. (1986). Characteristics of cases of the reincarnation type among the Igbo of Nigeria. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 21, 204–216. https://doi.org/10.1177/002190968602100305 Stevenson, I. (1997). Reincarnation and biology: A contribution to the etiology of birthmarks and birth defects, Volumes I and II. Praeger. Stevenson, I. (2001). Children who remember previous lives: A question of reincarnation (rev. ed.). McFarland. Stevenson, I. (2003). European cases of the reincarnation type. McFarland. Stevenson, I., & Cook, E. W. (1995). Involuntary memories during severe physical illness or injury. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 183, 452–458. https://doi.org/10.1097/00005053-199507000-00005 Sutherland, C. (1992). Transformed by the light: Life after near-death experiences. Bantam. Tucker, J. (2012). Before: Children’s memories of previous lives. St. Martin’s Essentials. Wells, A. (1993). Reincarnation beliefs among near-death experiencers. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 12, 17–34. https://doi.org/10.17514/JNDS-1993-12- 1-p17-34. Zolik, E. (1962). “Reincarnation” phenomena in hypnotic states. International Journal of Parapsychology, 4(3), 66–78.

Welcome back to Gnostic insights. Lately I’ve been watching a lot of near death experience videos on YouTube. Have you been watching those? They really are fascinating. You can see that people have personalized experiences in their near death episodes. And by the way, in case you don’t even know what near death experience is, it’s when a person is clinically dead—no brain waves, no heartbeat—they can be dead for several minutes. They could be in a deep coma, a vegetative state, for months. However they get to be on the other side, it’s called a near death experience. And it’s not being mediated by the physical body because the physical body is shut down. And that’s a provable event by heart monitors, brain monitors—all of that. And by now there have been thousands and thousands and thousands of people who have had near death experiences. There are many commonalities to everyone’s near death experiences, but then again, there are also personalized viewpoints of what their experience was for them and then what it means to them, just as all of us have our points of view in our walking around life. If I’m standing right next to you, you and I can both witness an event and yet we will tell it in our own words and in our own ways, perhaps even using our own metaphors if it’s a difficult thing to explain to someone else. And it’s no different with these near death experiences. In fact, the near death experiences are so unusual and so out of the realm of our ordinary waking experience that people often have a difficult time even putting words to what they’ve witnessed. Some people come out of their near death experience all prepared to talk about it, but other people take years before they can put it to words and explain it. So, I started watching these new death experiences on YouTube, and I’m making notes and whatnot. Then I decided, well, why reinvent the wheel? Why not look up a book where someone has already cataloged the near death experiences and written down their similarities and their differences, and written down some examples? So I went to a book called Evidence of the Afterlife. That was published in 2010 by Jeffrey Long and Paul Perry, if you want to look it up yourself. And so I made notes out of that book. First let me share with you a description of what I believe are Aeons by a 13- year-old who had just died. And it says she rose and found herself inside a bright white soft cloud type of thing. She felt the total embrace of love and felt great safety and warmth. Within and attached to the cloud were three Angel-type of beings. They had great peace about them and were part of this cloud as if attached directly to it. She felt their grandness and their joy. She felt happy, peaceful, and a desire to stay amongst them. Suddenly, a large hand came toward her, not threatening, glowing with overpowering light. A voice said, my child, go back for you have much work left to do, and she was instantly back in her body. She felt angry that she had to return. And the condition that had caused her to pass away was healed upon her awakening. When I read this, I think that this bright white soft cloud type of thing is what we call the Fullness of God, which is where the Aeons dwell. That is a total embrace of love, safety, and warmth, because the Fullness of God is a direct emanation from the Father. The Fullness of God, the Aeons of God, are directly attached to the Son of God, and the Son is the first manifestation. That is what it means by being the only begotten Son of the God Above All Gods of the origin of consciousness. And we know that the God Above All Gods isn’t merely consciousness—this God is love. Our sensation of loving and being loved is a direct emanation of the Father of consciousness. So, this 13-year-old girl found herself embedded within this cloud of love and consciousness. And she saw three Angel type of beings. It doesn’t say in the Tripartite Tractate that Angels is a synonym for Aeons, but I think it is. Angels are perhaps a certain subclass of Aeons, but when someone describes an Angel or an Angelic type of being, this is one of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. So she saw three of these Aeons. Now, it’s also my thought that all of us humans, all of us Second Order Powers, are particular combinations of Aeons or unique combinations of various Aeons. Your combination of Aeons is slightly different than mine. We overlap for the most part because we’re humans. However, my talents are slightly different than your talents, and our talents come from the Aeons. Also, if we are reincarnated beings, we are also slightly different because of our past life experiences and the meme bundle that we carry forward with us from life to life. So, speaking of this girl’s miraculous healing of the illness that caused her to die, people are often healed out of the deadly condition that led to their near death experience. They have out of body experiences where they observe the events going on around their bodies while their body is lying there dead or unconscious. One near death experiencer was born with cerebral palsy and had never used his hand. After his near death experience, he was able to open and use his hand for the first time in his life. And of course there is a story in the New Testament that’s just like that. Jesus healed a man who had been paralyzed in his hand and had never been able to open his hand, and Jesus told him that his sins were forgiven and to go ahead and open his hand, which he did. That story can be found in Mark 3 verses one through 6, in Matthew 12, verses 9 through 14, and in the book of Luke, verses 6 through 11. 45% of the people who have had near death experiences report psychic, paranormal, or other special gifts following their near death experience. Basically, they report that when you are having a near death experience and you’re on the other side, you’re in this place. We all have these extrasensory perception type of experiences–that that’s the way communication is carried on when we’re out of the material world. When we’re down here in this material world, we have to use our senses—our ears, our vision, our smell, our touch—to perceive the world around us. It’s very difficult to just have a pure experience, although people who do have second sight or who are able to have out of body experiences or remote viewing, they’re able to harness these types of abilities. Well, when you’re out of your body and you are pure consciousness, you’re pure spirit form—it’s all like that. There aren’t any senses because you don’t have your body to sense reality through. So people report unusual ways of perceiving the Fullness of God, or this other place that they are. And they talk about a 360° vision where you can see all the way around. They talk about being in the company of others and being able to know what the others are seeing and feeling and thinking all at once, without confusion. So when they come back into their bodies, and they’re revived, about 45% of them carry some of this ability forward with them. Another commonality is a complete loss of fear of death. And that’s because they have a conviction that death is not final and that there is a wonderful afterlife and it’s real. And they believe this because they have experienced this. It’s impossible for me to think that these are demonic visions—that these are evil. Satan, the devil, and also the Demiurge, being a different being but on that side—they are not able to manifest love. They do not know love because they came from that egoic side of Logos when he fell. The love and consciousness returned back to the Fullness and that which stayed behind here in this material world, which includes that split off side—the dark side, the negative side, the side of Logos that does not remember the Father or the Fullness—I’ve been identifying that as the ego of Logos—it stayed behind. It doesn’t remember the Father. It doesn’t remember the love and the consciousness of the Father or its brothers up in the Fullness. Now, we Second Order Powers, which is every living thing in this cosmos—every  living thing is called a Second Order of Powers—the First Order of Powers are the Aeons of the Fullness. We are their fruit, which is another way of saying that we are their children. They do remember the Father. The Second Order Powers have a dim remembrance of the Father and the Fullness. We know where we come from. That’s why all cultures around the world have a hope of Paradise. It’s not a cultural artifact of where they live and how they were brought up. It’s an inherent peace that’s deep within us. Satan doesn’t know that. Satan is not of the remembrance. Satan is not a Second Order Power, so it can’t replicate the love of the Father. Satan’s version of replicating the love of Father is pampering the ego. Is pornography. Is rampant sex instead of love. Is satiety through overeating or through wonderful possessions and wonderful food. Good drugs. The high from heavy drugs is part of the Deficiency—Satan’s imitation of the Fullness above. These near death experiences, when you watch the videos on YouTube or you hear me talking about it here, they don’t have the same flavor. They don’t have the same tinge as the evil. I realize that Fundamentalist religionists, including Fundamentalist Christians, may think that what I’m speaking about is evil—is a deception of the lies of Satan. But if you have discernment of the love of the Father and belief in the saving power of the Christ, this is the same feeling as these near death experiences. It’s the right side of the Ledger, the virtuous side of the Ledger. It’s not the vice side of the Ledger. As an aside, when I ran this episode by my brother Bill, he thought it odd that I dropped in the word Satan, since Satan doesn’t appear in the Tripartite Tractate. And that was because I was talking to Christians at the time that I made the reference to Satan here in this episode. But he’s right, Satan is not named in the Tripartite Tractate. However, there are Archons which are deputies, let’s say, of the Demiurge, and I’ve always thought of Satan as the chief deputy of the Demiurge. But you don’t have to be concerned about that right now. I think very soon I should have an episode about archons and the power structures of the archons. Now, even people who are very deeply embedded in their fundamentalist religions can be deceived by Satan. They can be deceived by Archons. And the basic way you know that you’re being deceived by Satan or the Archons, or the Demiurge, is the lack of love. When you are motivated by anger, even if you call it righteous anger, even if you call it righteous indignation, that is not the love of God. The love of God is all forgiving. All embracing. “For while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us,” not, for once we killed the bad guys, Christ died for us. That’s wrong. It’s not your righteousness and it’s not your anger with the sword that brings you into the Heavenly realms. It’s not through our deeds at all. These people who died and had their near death experiences weren’t earning a glimpse of Heaven. They just died in the middle of whatever they were doing, the way we all do. And yet they were taken directly into the Heavenly realm, and these people were sent back because it wasn’t time for them to be dead yet. And when they come back, they bring the peace, love, joy, the conviction that death is not final. They have felt themselves in the warm embrace of the Father, or of Jesus, or of Angels. There was no anger there. There is no judgment there. They see beautiful meadows or prairies and each blade of grass is a unique creature and happy. There are butterflies, birds, rivers. It’s wonderfully tranquil, is how they describe it. They report the light is beautiful, and we know that God is often described as light. “And in him there is no darkness at all”. This is this place we’re talking about and that’s why the light itself feels like love. Golden sunshine. The bright white light, scintillating and warm. It smells sweet and inviting, like cupcakes it’s described, or warm vanilla sugar. The light smells delicious. And in the Tripartite Tractate there is a fragrance of the Father that is described and the fragrance of God is sweet and inviting. It’s part of the homing beacon back to the Father. They describe unearthly beings. Not extraterrestrial aliens from another planet. If there are extraterrestrial beings from another planet, these are not them. You can’t conflate the Aeons of the Fullness or the Angels with extraterrestrial aliens because they have a different way of operating; they have a different feel about them. Now, pretty much everyone describes what is called a life review. Just like the stories, just like in the movies or in the books—you  hear about people’s life passing before their eyes. So the life review is described in much the same terms no matter who undergoes it, and pretty much everyone undergoes it if they stay dead long enough. And their life review is very interesting because it’s done in this 360° way of knowing. It’s not like watching a movie screen, it’s more like being there. But it’s not just you being there, reliving the experience through your own point of view and your own eyes as you did when it first happened, because you see it through everyone’s point of view and through everyone’s eyes who was in the scene at the same time. Not only that, but you feel it emotionally through everyone’s feelings. So if you had said something harsh to a loved one—maybe you’re aware you were overly harsh, or maybe you’re not aware of the effect you had upon the loved one–well, during your life review, you feel what the loved one felt. You feel their pain. And this is why the life review can be an extremely painful event. But, if you were repentant of it here on Earth before you die, it won’t be painful like that because you did repent of it. That’s the purpose of repentance—you recognize and learn from your mistakes. And if you don’t do it during your life, then you will have to do it when you pass over. One of the episodes here on Gnostic Insights is called Overcoming Death. In that episode, I described the near death experience or the after death experience in terms of Tibetan Buddhism and what they call the bardos of death. And that’s an in-depth description in that episode of what people who are unrepentant experience after they die. So, if you repent of it, if you know you goofed up, best to give it to Christ. That way those Third Order Powers can come in and replace  Second Order anger with Third Order love. This is how this works in terms of this Gnostic Gospel that I’m sharing with you. Anyway, that’s the life review that goes on and everyone has the life review. And by the time you go all the way through your life review, you come out cleansed. You come out the other side purged. And then you move on. Remember, it is said that in Heaven, there is no darkness at all, so our negative emotionality and our mean spirits don’t go forward into Heaven. When we find ourselves up there after this material Earth, it’s all onward and upward. It’s all good. It’s all beautiful. It’s all bright and lovely. So these life experiences that are clinging to us, they have to be purged before we get up there. Makes sense? Then people reunite with their lost loved ones, and there’s no more bitterness or anger if there was when they passed away. It’s gone now. It’s purged and it’s all love. Jesus hanging on the cross probably had one of these near death experiences that we’re talking about. And when he had his 360° life review, the only sins that needed to be corrected was all of our sins. This is what is meant to say that Christ took on the sins of the world. I’ll bet you his 360° review was all of our errors and regrets, and the Christ took care of all of them on behalf of Jesus in his 360° life review. This is an idea of how it is that Jesus on the cross took away the sins of the world. These people who returned from their near death experiences report that the afterlife is for everyone. Not just for near death experiencers. And of course, I say that’s true too. And this is why I think this is a proof of life after death. And it’s a proof of universal salvation. We can go through the New Testament and point out everywhere that it says that we’re all going to Heaven. That we’re all forgiven and Christ came to die for our sins, period. Not just for the people who go forward and profess Christ while they’re alive, but for everyone. Because remember—we’re all from the Fullness of God, and if we don’t return to the Fullness, then God is no longer full. Do you see that? If God were shedding 80% of the people down here who have sinned and didn’t profess Christ before they died, God wouldn’t be full anymore. He’s not going to lose us. We are the Fruit of the Fullness of God. We are taken care of by the Father and by the Christ. It’s their job to save us. People report that the experience they have in their near death experience is realistic and it is greater than ordinary perception. It’s consistent and logical, by the way. People who have been blind, even blind from birth, can see in the afterlife. Well, of course they can, because they’re no longer attached to their material eyeballs in their body that don’t work. The life reviews include long forgotten events, so it’s not like they’re dredging them up and working on it. It’s coming to them. Boom, boom, boom. The relatives and friends they encounter on the other side are all deceased; you don’t run into live people up there. They are consistent across all cultures and all locations and children have the same near death experiences as adults. And the powerful after-effects of the near death experience consistently change people’s lives for the better. They come back being better people, which to me is another proof that this is not a demonic lie. This is not a deception of Satan, because Satan doesn’t make people better. Satan doesn’t make people more loving. Satan makes people more egoic, more self-centered. More me, me, me. That’s what Satan wants you to be. True love—the love of the Father, the love of the Christ, the love of the Fullness of God—causes you to be open and giving and loving to other people. To be self-sacrificial. To want their good as much or more so than your good. So this evidence seems to point to an afterlife and a universe that is guided by a vastly loving intelligence, and we are part of that intelligence. We are fruits of the Fullness of God and the Fullness of God is a direct emanation of the Father, the God Above All Gods. Before we finish up this topic, let me read from a list of bullet points I made concerning the transformative changes that people carry through when they come back to life after their near death experiences. Transformative Changes from Near Death Experiences Stronger sense of spirituality More self-confidence Reduced interest in material gain or status Greater appreciation of life Belief in the sacredness of life Sense of God’s presence Awareness of meaning and purpose in life Increasingly aware of the needs of others and willingness to reach out to them Live life more fully and joyfully More religious, increasingly committed to preexisting religious practices Or less interested in traditional religious practices Most find their aftereffects to be positive and life-enhancing A change in values may lead them to re-evaluate their occupations and to leave cut throat jobs. Or to emphasize positive interpersonal interactions and serving others. They may end negative and unloving relationships. They often seek out positive and loving relationships more in line with new values Increasing loving and compassionate interaction with others results in stronger marriages and relationships Aftereffects increase over time No fear of death. Strong belief in afterlife. Love and compassion for self, others, and nature What you do to others will come back to you, whether hatred and violence or love and compassion Increased intuition Increased value of loving interactions. Being kind and courteous. Patience, empathy, discernment. Increased love for Self. No more suicide attempts. Miraculous physical healing. Rapid recovery from deadly disease. Realization we are loved. Suffering is not necessary.  Wow. Sounds like it’s from the afterlife to me. Sounds like that is a message from the God Above All Gods. What do you think? Until next week—onward and upward, and God Bless Us All. Heaven is a beautiful, loving, place 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. We’re nearing completion of the publication process for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. This will be a large, fully explanatory edition that lays out the gnostic cosmology from start to finish, with full color illustrations throughout. They have set the price around $30. I’m keeping my royalties to a minimum in order to lower the sales price for you. There is currently an inexpensive, black and white edition that I published myself that is available here if you can’t afford $30 or don’t want to wait to read it. The color edition will be available very soon.