Gnostic Insights

Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.
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  • SPIRITUALITY
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Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained

  1. 08/06/2024

    God is Goodness

    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Don’t you think it’s interesting that God is so often in the news? If this were a purely secular life that we’re living, if life really had no meaning and there was no God, then why are people always talking about God? Even the people that say they don’t believe in God at all talk about God. For example, the big atheist of our generation is Richard Dawkins, and I’ve referred to Richard Dawkins many times in my writing, although I usually take his name out so as not to be impolite and call him out. But Richard Dawkins has been an extreme proponent of meaninglessness in our modern age. He tries to narrow all things down to material science. He’s a materialist. Lately, as it turns out, here in the springtime of 2024, Richard Dawkins has come to profess what he is calling cultural Christianity. Richard Dawkins now believes that, well, it may be all hooey that there’s such thing as a God or such thing as a Christ or that there was such a person as Jesus, but he now recognizes in his older age that if we throw all that away, there’s nothing to hang morality on. There’s nothing to hang hope or belief upon. You see, if you reduce our consciousness to a purely mechanical or mathematical or computer-like process, there’s no such thing then as morality or ethics because it’s a mechanical process. So, where would ethics come from? There’s no right or wrong process.And we know that isn’t true. We know deep in our souls, deep in our hearts, that there is such a thing as right or wrong. Now, the people that don’t believe in right or wrong, we call those people sociopaths or psychopaths. And indeed, there’s a lot of psychopaths running around who will kill you just as easy as look at you. All these random attacks, random stabbings, random shootings, mass murders, pushing people onto the subway tracks—these are the acts of sociopaths who are acting as if there were no such thing as righteousness or morality or goodness. But yet, if you yourself are a modern person, though not a sociopath, but you’re a good moral humanist, you do believe in right and wrong. You do believe in morality. You think it is better to be kind than to be cruel. You think it is better to love than to hate, although a lot of people who do not profess belief in God run around hating and they think that that’s love. Good things never come from hate. So people that are running around protesting in a hateful manner, burning things down, pulling things down, striking their opponents—they’re not going to bring about good change. Bad comes from bad. So if you want to make a better change for this world, if you want to make this world a better place, it has to come out of love. It has to come out of morality and righteousness. And you see, at long last, even Richard Dawkins, Mr. Big Material Scientist, has come to believe that there should be such a thing as cultural Christianity. Dawkins says now that Christianity seems to be the only religion that offers an uplifting, righteous type of way to be. And it’s true. Of all the religions in the world, or belief systems in the world, only Christianity offers a sacrificial savior. offers a human with the attributes of the Christ. And the Christ is the perfection of man. The Christ is perfection itself on both a physical level, emotional, and spiritual level—all things good, all things bright and beautiful, all love, no punishment, no vindictiveness, no revenge, no hatred—pure love. So, in our Gnostic Christianity, we acknowledge the Father and the Son and the Christ. We acknowledge the variables of the Son as being the fullness of God, and those are known as the Aeons of God that live in the Fullness. And it’s all on the good side. It’s not a yin-yang, darkness versus white kind of balance. It’s not a continuum between darkness and light, between love, and hate. It is not a dialectic. The Fullness of God, the Son of God, the Father, the Christ—they are entirely on the side of good. The darkness, the ignorance, the separation, the hatred exists outside of that ethereal plane, it exists down here in this material world. Indeed, as a Gnostic, we would say that materiality itself is a form of evil, and this is what drives people crazy against Gnostics. This is one of the big heresies. “Oh, you can’t call creation evil. It’s the creation of God! It’s all good and wonderful and beautiful!” But it’s not, is it? It’s full of death and pain and suffering and betrayal and hatred. Creation is the realm that expresses the fall away from ethereal purity. And here we are. Here we humans are. We are stuck in the middle between the material cosmos and the ethereal creatures of the Fullness, the Aeons, because we come from the Aeons. We are their fruit. We are children of the Fullness of God. We are literally the fruit of the Aeons of God. And we have been seeded down here on this now material plane to remind this plane of the ethereal plane. This material existence that we dwell in, the reason it has death and delusion and ignorance and hatred, disappointment, sadness, betrayal, failure—these are all expressions of the separation from God. These are expressions of the ignorance of who we are and where we came from. And the purpose of the Christ is to bring the redemption, is to bring all of this materiality back into awareness of who we are and where we come from. The material itself—the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the minerals, the aggregation of minerals like rocks and stones, the planets—that is the domain of what we call the Demiurge. The Demiurge is part, only half of, an ethereal being who came from Above. That refers to the Fall, the fall of the Aeon known as Logos. He fell out of the Fullness. He broke apart into another realm. And he was horrified at what happened. He was horrified at what he had created. He thought he was going to make Paradise, the Paradise the Aeons dream of in the Fullness. He thought he could do it all on his own when he struck out. He didn’t realize that only the Fullness of God can contain the beauty of Paradise. And so he struck out on his own to bring it about, and instead, he brought about this material deficiency, this imitation of Paradise. And when Logos looked around and saw what he had brought about, he was, it says in the Tripartite Tractate, horrified. Because, imagine thinking you’re going to create Paradise and instead you create this unruly, dead, lifeless place—this quantum chaos. There’s no chaos in the ethereal realm. So, the Tripartite Tractate describes that Logos fled back to the Fullness—that the Aeons helped pull him up out of the deficiency and brought him home. But part of him remained behind. All that part that splattered below that has become our material existence. And that we call the Demiurge, because the Demiurge has the patterns of Logos. He’s got the blueprints, but he doesn’t have the life. He doesn’t have the love. He doesn’t have the Fullness of God. He only has the blueprints, so he doesn’t realize that he is the partial shadow of the glory of God. He thinks he is the glory of God. He calls himself God. We Christian Gnostics believe that this Demiurge that calls himself God is the God of the Old Testament, is Yahweh. “There is no God before me. Thou shalt not worship other gods.” These are the statements of this fallen aspect of Logos, who thinks he is God, but he’s mistaken. And we Gnostics believe that there is a God Above All Gods. That’s what we call the ultimate consciousness. The God Above All Gods is consciousness itself. It is the ultimate consciousness. It’s not only consciousness, but the God Above All Gods is the fountainhead of love. So all consciousness flows down from the fountainhead of the God Above All Gods. All love flows down from the fountainhead of the God Above All Gods. I used to live down in the Mount Shasta area, and my dogs and I would hike up Mt. Shasta. There’s a place on the mountain, on Mount Shasta, a beautiful meadow, and there’s a spring in that meadow that turns out to be the fountainhead, the spring out of which the entire river that becomes the Sacramento River originates. The great delta that flows into the Pacific Ocean begins bubbling out of the rocks on Mount Shasta. And the water is really cold. Boy, you can barely stick your hand into the spring on Mount Shasta, it’s so cold. It’s so pure—the water is absolutely pure. And then it picks up size. It never diminishes. It just keeps flowing, and it’s a gigantic river by the time it’s this huge river delta that reaches the Pacific Ocean down there in the middle of California. The spring in Panther Meadows on Mt. Shasta is the fountainhead of the Sacramento River The great Sacramento River begins with this creek on Mt. Shasta God’s love and consciousness is like that. It’s pure and it’s unceasing. It is not lessened by the amount that flows out of it. And there’s enough consciousness and enough love and enough knowledge that flows out of this spring of the God Above All Gods, through the Son of God, through the Fullness and all of the Aeons of God, even surviving down into this diminished cosmos that we now live in. The first order of powers are those Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. We are their fruit. We are the second order of powers. And it’s not just the humans; it’s every living creature. Because when Logos fled back to the Fullness, only ignorance and death was left behind with a set of blueprints in its hands. So the Demiurge is able to construct a facsimile, an imitation, a deficient imitation of Paradise down here on Earth. That’s why even the religious people of the earth or the people who love Mother Earth, the people who love the cosmos, well, they are loving the pattern. They’re loving the blueprint of Paradise, but they’re mistaking this fallen cosmo

    21 min

  2. 15/06/2024

    What Is Your Worldview?

    Today we’re going to talk again about worldviews, ideologies, and memes. And the way I use the word meme is to represent an idea, a tidbit, a small piece of information. It was actually Richard Dawkins, of all people, that coined the term meme, and he used it as an analogous term to the word gene—so a meme is to worldviews and ideologies as a gene is to your DNA makeup. And your DNA is made up of genes, just as our ideologies are made up of countless memes. So I’m going to explain a little bit about what a meme is and what their effect is on our worldview. Do you know what your worldview is? What is your worldview? Have you thought about it? If you were king of the world, what would you have other people believe? What would be the consequences? If everyone believed what you believe, what would that world look like? Here at Gnostic Insights, I’m promoting a type of Gnosticism that comes from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, primarily, as a type of worldview, a type of ideology that would help everyone to get along, that would make this world a better place. It’s not just about our afterlife or what came before the Fall. It’s about: how do we live our lives now? So I’m going to give you some fresh information at the beginning of this episode, but then I’m going to kick back into an excerpt from a previously recorded episode concerning ideologies and worldviews. In 2018, I posted an article called Apocalyptic Visions on my Simple Explanation blog, and if you go to the Gnostic Insights homepage, gnosticinsights.com, I’ll be putting hypertextual links to that original article in this transcript. That first article, Apocalyptic Visions, was about the role of free speech in a representative republic, or what we usually refer to as a democracy. The system of government that the United States has been operating on is ideally run with what is called the consent of the people. That is, you agree with what your government is doing. The populace elects representatives who promise to bring the wishes of the people to their state house or to Congress, and to fairly represent those wishes. These representatives promise to vote in a manner that upholds the will of all the people in their district that they are representing. This is in stark contrast with a government ruled by a small group of elites who consider themselves superior to the populace, and therefore endowed with the ability to make better decisions than the people can make for themselves. These ruling elites do not care for the wishes of the people, and they do not feel bound to represent their constituents. In the kindest terms, this would be called a nanny state, because the people are being told what to do for their own good, like a nanny tells little children. In harsher terms, this ruling elite is called authoritarianism or fascism. In that case, the people may be told it’s for their own good, but really, it’s for the good of the ruling elite, which is usually a combination of extremely wealthy industrialists who make money from the legislation they enforce, and ideological fanatics who apparently believe in the agenda they impose upon the masses, again, “for their own good,” despite the negative outcomes their decisions may bring. There’s an old saying that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We also hear the expression, follow the money, in order to figure out who is actually in control. The ones who are in control are both those who profit financially at the expense of others, and those who gain more control over the population as an outcome of their decisions. So, when we find ourselves scratching our heads and wondering what on earth is happening, we can look around at exactly who is profiting by the decisions being enacted, both in power and control, and with money, big money. Figuring out who holds the power and who is making the money is key to figuring out what kind of government you have in control. And then look at the promises that are being made by those in control “for your own good” and “for the good of the planet,” and see how those promises are concentrating money and power in certain industries and rulers’ hands. In order to concentrate power in the hands of the rulers and the elites, it is necessary to shut down freedom of speech and freedom of thought. With the rise of social media and the concentration of mainstream media into the hands of a few powerful elites, freedom of thought may now be easily controlled by controlling the information that is allowed to get out. We call that sort of information control propaganda because only the officially endorsed information is allowed to be disseminated. The Tripartite Tractate speaks a lot about power and the roots of power. The following quote sums it up pretty well: “The thought of the archons is not barren. All that they thought about they have as potential offspring. Fighters, warriors, troublemakers, apostates, disobedient beings, lovers of power.” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 79) Now I’m going to replay a portion of an episode from May of 2021 because I believe the message is needed now more than ever. What is and isn’t allowed in the minds of members is determined by which memes are included and which are excluded from the group’s ideological meme chord. Because of this, information exchanged between members of different cultures will resonate more strongly with the sender’s memes than with the receiver’s memes. For example, when an American speaks of free and democratic elections, his or her mimetic definitions for free and democratic may differ radically from another culture. The extent to which communication may occur between cultures is determined by their overlapping memes and the permeability of each culture’s deterministic screens and the extent to which they are open to foreign memes. Another example of delimiting memes occurs during problem solving. The more tightly held one’s memes are, the fewer solutions will present themselves. If you think only a hammer will drive a nail, you will not even consider the flat side of the heavy wrench lying nearby. If a group thinks outsiders are untrustworthy, then they will not trust any outsider. The ability to consider solutions outside the box and to engage in lateral thinking comes about through non-attachment to the shoulds and oughts of how things work. One must be willing to set aside treasured beliefs in order to perceive memes outside one’s own bundle and thereby discover fresh solutions. In the same manner that a person’s personality is defined by its unique meme bundle, institutions are also defined by their sets of treasured memes. Memes are even more important to an institution than are its members in the sense that members come and go, but memes persist. As President John F. Kennedy put it, “people may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.” Each and every cultural institution we belong to—family, workplace, church, mosque, tribe, nation, and so on—not only comes with its own bundle of shared memes held in common by its members, it also comes with a filter that limits members from acknowledging or adopting ideologically incompatible memes (this filter is called a terministic screen). Institutions are defined as much by their excluded memes as they are by their included memes. An exclusive institution holds tightly to the identity provided by its current memes. Its border is strong and its filter is powerful. An inclusive institution allows members more latitude in the memes they may hold. Its border is less defended, its filter less opaque. An open-minded institution allows that there may be memes out there in the larger culture of value. Its filter is more permeable. In the United States, for example, and I believe it’s worldwide at this point, progressive institutions are no longer inclusive. They talk as though they’re inclusive, they talk as though they accept diversity of thought and behavior, but actually they only currently accept their particular view, so they are no longer actually progressive and inclusive. They are as tightly conservative as any conservative group has traditionally been, but they’re still calling themselves progressive. Here is a statement from President John F. Kennedy that expresses the traditional view of progressivism: “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.” And so, the current state of progressivism still talks the good talk about inclusion and diversity, but what they say about their opponents is hateful and divisive. The current progressive meme of identity politics separates and segregates in contrast to the progressive meme of John F. Kennedy that unites and integrates. We like people who share the same memes we do. The more memes people have in common, the more they agree with one another, and the more they like and respect the other person. Friends have a lot of memes in common. Co-religionists share the same religious meme chords. Tribal brothers and sisters share tribal memes. Citizens share their nation’s meme chords. Subcultures share their subcultural memes. What happens when meme chords collide? What happens when the memes I believe in and hold onto contradict the memes you hold dear? Herein lies the source of all human conflict. In Gnosticism, we call this the endless war. The disagreements, the fights, the wars are all conflicts over incompatible memes. I may believe that my memes are vastly superior

    19 min

  3. 22/06/2024

    We Are the Children of the Aeons and other musings

    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week’s episode is going to be a little different. First, I want to share with you an update about my upcoming book, and then I’m going to play for you a couple of snippets of recording that I did off of my iPhone while cleaning house, one of them, and the other was while taking a dog walk. So those would be like Gnostic musings or Gnostic Stream of Consciousness. Now, about my book. A very strange thing happened on the way to having my latest book published. You know, the one that I’ve been talking about for almost two years now, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. I had found a publisher, a Christian publisher, and I thought, oh, this will be great. They’ll get it into Christian bookstores and it will be somehow made more acceptable because of that association with a Christian publishing house. However, it has not gone well. We’re 14 months into that process and I fired the publisher two weeks ago. We struggled through the editing phase, transcribing my ready-to-print book. So then I had to painstakingly, it took me months, go back through their editing and restore it to the way I wanted it to read and sound. So after we got through the whole editing, then it moved into actually printing proof copies of the book. And I have received and rejected three sets of proof copies of this book.I explained to them that, no, it’s all too light. So then they went back, reprinted another proof copy. And this time it was like looking at the pages without the light turned on and it was all very dark. And I said, well, that’s not going to work. That’s all wrong. And then they gave me a third version of the printout that looked like someone had spilled ink on the pages and you couldn’t even make out what the images were. So we went back and forth about it, whose fault it was, this and that, and try this and try that. And now 14 months into this process of having A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate printed by this publisher, I pulled the plug. I fired them. And now I am in the process of publishing the book myself, which apparently I should have done in the first place or could have done in the first place. You know, God’s will works in this somehow. What is the stumbling block here? Is it the Demiurge throwing roadblocks in the way of getting this extremely important book out and published? I imagine that the Christian publishing house thinks it’s me and this God Above All Gods that’s throwing the stumbling blocks in the way because this is a heretical work and it shouldn’t get published anyway. You could really go either way on how to interpret this. So for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been laying out the book again from scratch. I’m almost two years ago now in the process, if I had published this book myself. So I’m getting it ready to publish myself for one reason, in order to prove that the images, there’s nothing wrong with them and they’ll print just fine, thank you very much. So that’s what my next step is. But I can’t just reformat all of the images because I can’t take their manuscript that they edited and laid out in case there’s legal complications that I don’t know about. So I’m starting from scratch again on the manuscript of this book and relaying it out. I’m about a third of the way through reformatting the book in order to upload it to Amazon and publish it myself. And we’ll see how the colors come out. We’ll see how the book looks when I do it. But I wanted to explain to you why this book I keep saying, oh, this is going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, why it hasn’t come out now. It’s been 14 months in someone else’s hands and I just should have done it myself, I guess. Although there’s no shoulds. Everything works according to God’s plan. I know one thing—I’m a third of the way through the book now, formatting it, reading every page very carefully as I go through again. And I want to tell you, this is a beautiful book. You really are going to want to buy and read this book that I’m going to publish with nice bright pictures. So that’s where we are. And this cuts into our podcast time. So what I’m playing for you this week is a couple of recordings I have made just as I’m doing other things. They’re not me sitting down at my nice studio setup here. They are me doing housekeeping and speaking out loud while I do it. And then also me taking a walk with the dog in public. So it’s a different kind of very human episode. And let me know what you think. Because these are the way most of my ideas come to me in the first place. It is during these dog walks and housekeeping. So without any further ado, here’s this week’s episode. So I listen to a Christian radio station called The Dove. And it’s interesting how many hymns, particularly the newer praise songs, a lot of old hymns are actually very Gnostic, but the newer praise songs, I believe that they reflect a misunderstanding of the Lord. Such expressions as, I can’t believe God would see something to save in me, is basically what the meaning is for all these songs. I’m so terrible. Why would God care about me? God’s tremendous love not to let me go, me of all sinners, is usually the way it’s felt, right?, or expressed. Well, God will never let us go, because we are part of God. We are children of God. That’s one way to look at it. As a matter of fact, nobody’s going to be let go. In the end, every knee will bow, you see–every tongue confess that Jesus the Christ is Lord, and he’s the Third Order Power in charge of us humans for our redemption. And everybody will see that at the end, whenever that comes for them. But the other way to think of the Father is the eminence of the Fullness within each and every one of our cells. Everything in our body, we’re shot through and through with the Fullness of God, all the soft and squishy parts, all the living flesh of everything, every Second Order creature. We are the Second Order Powers. The First Order Powers are our ethereal parents, the Aeons of the Fullness. But we are their material expression. We’re bonded to the fallen shadows of themselves, the material universe that is built up by the Demiurge, but he can’t bring life because he has fallen away from life. He is death and ignorance, but a good architect, good builder, very good controller. We are shot through and through with the Fullness of God, and we have our own aeonic parents. Each of us particular expressions have a set of Aeons that fruited us, and we are fractal level down from them. So we’ve got all their various parts, and we were bonded to the material part, which is lifeless. That’s the matter, that’s the material, the molecules, the minerals. Now, the power, i.e. the energy, it comes from above. It comes into this universe. It’s really what powers our universe. It’s the thing that’s underneath the laws of thermodynamics, really. You’ve got your material, you have your spiritual ethereal, you have powers—power, whatever kind of power that is—force, personal power, human power, or steam locomotive power, it’s power, right? It’s a driving force. That’s the emanating quality of the Father. It powers everything—the dynamo for the universe comes from the dynamo that is the Father, the unending spring of life. And then our emotional part is the thing that personalizes us. It starts with our ego, our pure ego. That’s simply our identification, our recognition of self-consciousness. But then on top of that come these memes that get stuck to us, that obscure that originality of our emotional aspect, and we get all worked up. And that comes from the ignorant side. That comes from the demiurgic side, the negative emotions. So everything is going to return back from whence it comes. Everything’s going home. God is not entropic. Do you like that? God does not dissolve. God is a never-ending stream. So the Father is not subject to the second law of thermodynamics. And that, of course, is an imitation of God’s power, thermodynamics. Because try as it may, the Demiurge can’t make a constant stream of unending power because he’s not plugged in to the ethereal plane. We’re all fruit of the Aeons of God. We are all children of God. And we will go back home.  We are only sojourning here. We actually live up there. But now, having come down to this material plane, we are experiencing the effects of materiality. The first economy is the Hierarchy of the Fullness. The second economy is down here, this material plane. And an economy, it’s like an ecology. It’s a related system of interacting variables. It says in the Tripartite Tractate that this material economy was required in order to bring in the next economy, the final economy, or the third economy. And that is the economy that is ruled by Christ. And all of this will be up there. And it’s some sort of amalgamation of the ethereal without the material, but having a semblance of the material. Whatever it is that we learn to do and are able to do down here in the material world that the Fullnesses don’t do, well, we can take that forward into the third economy, although it’s also our vision of paradise. It’s our heavenly reward. So there will be no death or destruction. And it will be all justice and love and peace and goodwill ruled by Christ, or with the head as Christ. We 2nd order powers are children of the 1st order powers. The 3rd order powers are the Army of Christ that have come to redeem us. And then, though, it does say in the Tripartite Tractate that this is a necessary step to carry us all. This is the door. We are the door. Our experience becomes the door to the final realm, the final economy, or the third economy. I always call it the party hat of heaven. You see my drawings of it all the time, right? It’s

    18 min

  4. 29/06/2024

    I am not Me–Your Self (2024 edition)

    This week’s episode was first broadcast in May of 2021 So far, here at Gnostic Insights, we have discussed the basic cosmology of Gnosticism as explained by the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi codices, and those are outlined in the first eight episodes of this Gnostic Insights podcast. I recommend that you listen to those first eight episodes, and you can find them on the GnosticInsights.com website, under the tab, The Gnostic Gospel Primer. We’ve also begun to discuss the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which was my previous format, you might say, for understanding our world. You see, we all build these models in our minds of how things work, and this is there, and that’s there, and this is who I am, and that’s who you are, and this is why things happen, and it’s all so confusing. So over the many years, I have developed a philosophy called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which you can find on my blog of the same name, and it is not specifically what you would call Gnostic. However, it is Gnosis in the sense of knowledge, and I am always happy to share that. I have also incorporated a few of the basic memes from the Simple Explanation into my Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and that is why sometimes we hear words in my podcasts that you don’t find written in the Nag Hammadi, words like memes, and words like fractals, and units of consciousness. And so it’s helpful to listen to these podcasts basically in the order that they have been recorded so that you can understand the memes I am using, and this will assist in your own remembering of the Gnosis that is within you. Today’s episode of Gnostic Insights is about who we are. Who am I? is the question we always ask ourselves. Am I my ego? Am I my Self? Am I God Consciousness? Who am I? My ego is not really me, even though that’s who I usually think I am. We think of the mind and ego as ourselves, but this is the delusion. Yes, the me package reflects our personalities, but I am much more than the meme bundles and karma of this personality. Nor am I my mind. My mind is like a tuning device that scans for and locks onto my meme bundle. The ego feeds on the memes tuned in by my mind. My mind is directed toward its preferred memes by my karmic record. Ego is not a conscious entity. Ego is only a construction. Ego is like a garment that we wear. It’s a garment that is cast over ourselves. It is like a vessel that contains or a shadow that outlines my Self’s unit of consciousness. Underneath this garment of me resides a perfect fractal of the originating units of consciousness, and that is known as my Self, Self with a capital S. I am a unit of consciousness that is identical to the universal unit of consciousness, which in Gnosticism we would call the Father, the Son, the Fulness. These are the archetypal patterns held by the mind of God, so to speak. And I hold one of these fractals of that perfect originating consciousness within myself. So in terms of the model that I’ve constructed in the first eight episodes of the Gnostic Insights podcast, the Fullness of God in the illustrations that I’ve drawn looks like a pyramid of stacked golden cannonballs. It just looks that way, because it’s a hierarchy, and a hierarchy means that the higher the fewer. A hierarchy looks like a pyramid. There are more objects at the bottom, and there are fewer and fewer as you climb up toward the top. And at the very tip top, just above this hierarchy of the Fullness, is the Son of God, or the Son of the Father. And the Son is a perfect fractal of the Father. So if I think of my own Self, I have one of these golden pyramids within my mental construct, and that is myself. And it is a fractal of the Fullness of God. So within myself, I have access to the entire Fullness of God, or you could say, I have access to all of the Aeons of the hierarchy. In the Simple Explanation model, instead of this being a golden pyramid, the Self-unit of consciousness is described as looking like a donut, a torus. And I’ve been trying not to bring the torus into the Gnostic Insights. However, it is such a good model that it’s difficult not to bring it in. So we can also think of the Self as this energetic bubble that’s shaped like a donut that has a very, very tiny center, and it’s kind of wrapped all around me, and there’s a little donut associated with every unit of consciousness in my body, from the particles on up. When you’re looking at the illustrations, it makes a lot more sense. So I would also encourage you to visit a Simple Explanation blog and read about the toruses, or look at how it is that we might consider this donut shape to be a representation of the shape of our unit of consciousness. My body is a veritable galaxy of units of consciousness working to instantiate me. The simpler the unit of consciousness, the more of them there are. So while there is only one of me, my body is comprised of 11 organ systems made of 78 organs, which in turn comprise 30 trillion specialized cells made up of such a large number of atoms and molecules that I wouldn’t even know how to read or write the numbers. The more organized and complex the unit of consciousness, the fewer of them there are. That follows the precept called the higher the fewer. Note that the mind, or ordinary consciousness, as well as the subconscious, are artifacts of the organ systems, the organs and cells that make up my body. In other words, the mind and the ego are my meat’s  thought processes, not my higher Self’s. My Self unit of consciousness sits atop this hierarchical mountain of countless units of consciousness, all working to instantiate my body. While it may feel as though I am the only conscious entity inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, each with their own jobs to perform, each laying down their own karmic record. Lucky for me, their job is to hold me together and facilitate this life of mine, and they generally go along with the program and do a good job. Another basic trait of my aggregate units of consciousness is this. The more units of consciousness on the same level of complexity that are laterally linked, so for example, molecules to molecules, atoms to atoms, cells to cells, the greater their shared perception of here and now. This means that when you add up all of these units of consciousness together that make up my body, their aggregated consciousness is about as aware as my singular Self unit of consciousness. And those aggregated units of consciousness that make up my mud, so to speak, and my meat, are everywhere I am. No wonder I can get around so well without my conscious Self paying much attention. The ego is my subjective sense of who I am, and it is largely a reflection of myself’s units of consciousness choices, that is, my karma, and the memes I cling to, which are my beliefs and my narratives. My ego also reflects my body’s aggregates, and their karmas, and their meme choices. Ego is not identical to the Self, as the Self unit of consciousness is the immutably perfect soul that exists independent of this material instantiation. I have the choice at every moment of time to either identify with me and my bundle of memes, or to identify with the universal unit of consciousness, and the bigger picture that transcends personal identity. The egoic me is selfish, competitive, single-minded, short-sighted, and meme-bound. Transcending ego, I reach out to others with love, help, and information for the betterment of all, what we call here at Gnostic Insights theSimple Golden Rule. The egoic self, which is self-centered and only takes care of me, it is patterned after the Fall. It is patterned after Logos having fallen, because Logos broke from the Fullness of God and went out on a solo endeavor, but it didn’t work out well, and Logos fell. And the results of the Fall is this world that we live in, and so when you dwell deeply in the world as it appears, you are living an egoic lifestyle. My true Self, being one of the fractals of the Fullness, is unified with the Fullness of God, is unified with the grand scheme of redemption, and joy, and love. I have the choice at any moment of time to either identify with me and my bundle of memes, or to identify with the universal unit of consciousness, or the Fullness of God. And the more I step away from my selfish ego and identify with my transcendent Self, the more I can cooperate with other people and with the entire world in order to instantiate the golden rule, and work with others with information and love to build something better that will benefit the all. For most people, the answer to Who am I? is that I am my Self-aware sense of me encased in this body of mine that I’m walking around in. The Gnostic Insights would suggest that we are that, but we are also the things we love and the things we hate, which is our meme bundle. Plus, we are the record of our actions in this world, which is our karma, and that is overlaid over our essential unit of consciousness, or our essential Self. Think of a unit of consciousness as a perfect echo or waveform that is shaped exactly like God’s mind. You could say that our universe is populated by fractal echoes of the Father’s primordial consciousness. The units of consciousness are all identical because they are all reflections of the Father’s unit of consciousness. What makes me different from you is the pattern of my meme bundles and the karma that overlays or filters my pure unit of consciousness. The Self unit of consciousness is a perfect fractal reflection of the Father’s unit of consciousness. But I, that is the subjective sense of me, am not that perfect, because of my meme attachments and my karma. And within our bodies, we have every single type of unit of consciousness from the hierarchy of God. So, each cell in

    25 min

  5. 06/07/2024

    Father, Son, ALL–Love Unfolding

    Father, Son, ALL 2024 edition Welcome to the Gnostic Insights podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m here to share, well, what the title of this podcast is—Gnostic Insights—with you. Hey, I have some exciting news for you. I’m nearing completion of reformatting The Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate for publication. I anticipate uploading it in the next few days, and then I’ll need to examine the proof copy before releasing it for distribution. The Gnostic Reformation could really use your help in the form of contributions for the cause, for advertising and promotion. Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio has agreed to narrate the audiobook, and that will also be available by the end of summer, and I need funds for paying for his narration as well. So now is the time to contribute what you can to this effort. If you need a bribe, I’d be happy to personally mail you a signed copy of the book in exchange for your generous contribution of at least $50 to cover the cost. If that’s the case, please contact me privately with your home address for mailing. You can use the contact form at GnosticInsights.com and let me know. However, if you can’t afford the $50, that’s fine—any contribution would help. I appreciate whatever you can contribute. Thank you so much. Onward and upward! It’s summertime, and I’m distracted with working on the new book and with all of the events surrounding summer activities, so I’m going to rerun one of the foundational episodes from 2021, and this is about the nature of the Father, the Son, and then the Fullness. Enjoy! The Nag Hammadi scriptures were buried deep in the desert around 300 AD to save them from the great purge that occurred when the Bible was codified by the Pope and the Emperor of Rome and made into the packaged Christianity that we know today. Before that package, there was a type of spiritual belief that was well known to Jesus and his followers that was then cut out of the Bible out of the New Testament during the Council of Nicene. These ideas were preserved in a set of books called the Nag Hammadi, which were buried in the desert to keep them from the purge, and then they were rediscovered and dug up in 1945, so they have been kept away from almost 2,000 years of formal study and formal theology. What you hear from the Nag Hammadi scriptures is fresh and clean and uninterpreted by experts. So what I have done is study one particular book of the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate, and it is that book which I used primarily in the book that I wrote called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which I published in 2019. I like to begin with a study of the cosmos or cosmology as it unfolded, as it rolled out. This makes the most sense to me, to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are, and then what happens in our lives and why are we here. And then the final roll-up is the very, very end of time as predicted by the scriptures. So let’s begin at the beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. This story begins before the beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos existed. And so if you think of the originating consciousness as a vast consciousness which has no place and no time, no history—it is nothing but pure consciousness without thought, similar to what the Buddhists call the Buddha mind, something people try to achieve during meditation, where you can be aware that you are conscious, but you have no particular thoughts or words or images going through your mind. No thought, no images, no structure or form, no thing at all. And this is the consciousness of the Father, and we only say the Father—there’s no gender, obviously. The Father is not a man with a beard and long robes. Obviously there’s no gender, it’s a singular consciousness, okay? So let’s get off the notion of being upset by calling it a father. I suppose we could call it a mother, or we could just call it consciousness. In the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book that I am translating for you, it is referred to as the Father. And this Father, its basic consciousness is not thoughts, but rather love, the sensation of knowing what we call love. So this consciousness simply is, without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning, without end, utterly quiet, utterly still, utterly alone. This Father is often described as all-knowing, but what is there to know? All-seeing, but what is there to see? All-loving, but what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom, will, but to what end? There’s nothing there. Now imagine that this consciousness gives birth to a emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation blog, we call this a fractal. In the religious texts, they call it a son, S-O-N. So now we have the Father and a Son. So in the silence of the Absolute, the Father brings forth the first and only Son from its realization of itself. The Son is the Father having a thought. The Son is the Father knowing itself, as the Father having a sensation of its own eternal self. The Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. The Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells. Every trait of the Father is expressed now as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. And yet, although it was a singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone, for not only the Son, but what is called the ALL, arose at once. Capital A-L-L. The ALL immediately appeared as the offspring of the Son, because the Son could not help itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father, because it is a reflection of the Father’s traits. And so the Father knows itself and creates the Son, and the Son knows itself and creates the ALL. In religious talk, the ALL is known as the preexistent Church. Not your church down on the street corner with the people in it singing hymns on Sunday, but this is the true preexistent Church. The Tripartite Tractate says, “For not only the Son, but also the Church exists from the beginning.” The Tripartite goes on to say, “Before the ALL arose from the Father’s thought, He knew them, but they did not know the depth in which they found themselves, nor could they know themselves or anything else. For they were within the Father as an embryo, or an unsprouted seed.” So they were potential. They were there, they live in the Father, they live in the Son, but they don’t know anything, they don’t know themselves, they are not self-aware. The way the Tripartite Tractate describes this, it says, “Because they were newly formed, the Father concealed the ALL’s perfection from them until they could grow into the knowledge. This is why the Father revealed the Son to them, so the ALL would be able to relate to the Son and see the Father’s glory according to the ability of each one to receive Him.”   So nobody sees the Father. The Father is unknowable. The Father is too immense. When people say, Oh, you can’t conceive of God, God’s all too big and unknowable, that’s true, but God made itself into a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. And one of the reasons the Son is there is because we can know the Son. We can’t know the Father, but we can know the Son. The Tripartite Tractate describes this this way, “The Son is no more and no less than the sum of the ALL, and they understood who He is, and He is covered by the ALL. And with the birth of the ALL, the Son also became a Father.” So this can be a little confusing because you have the Originating Consciousness, the God Above All Gods, which is the Originating Consciousness or the Father. The Father had a sense of itself. This was called the Son, S-O-N. The Son immediately produced itself, and this is called the ALL. With the birth of the ALL, the Son also became a Father. The Originating Father, that consciousness so lonely and still for eternity, now had a child who had also borne fruit from His glory. And in this way the One begat the ALL, and the Father loved them all as He loved His Son. As I said, the ALL is referred to as the pre-existent Church, and it’s also called the Second Glory. The First Glory was the Son. The Second Glory is the ALL. The Originating Father’s consciousness is incomprehensible. Its scope and greatness is so immense and so unfathomable that the Tripartite Tractate says anyone trying to take hold of it would be annihilated. And so the Father created the Son, giving form to what had been His formless and solitary Self. For the Father’s desire was to be known. His desire was to love and to be loved. The Son that arose is perfect, even as His Father is perfect, and He carries within His perfect form every quality of the Father. Being the perfect image of the Father, the Son’s inherent creativity spread itself out into the ALL, like rays shining from a star. In my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, I illustrate these concepts. The way I think of it is this way. When I picture the originating consciousness of the Original Father, I see just total blackness, an entirety of dark, dark blackness. Then when I picture the Son emerging and being held by that blackness, I see the Son as kind of this foggy light that begins, very diffuse, very foggy, that begins to emerge out of the inky blackness. That is what I see as the Son. Then immediately coming out of that foggy image of the Son, like rays of a sun spreading out, I see bright golden light coming from the of that fogginess and beaming outward like the Sun. These are just helpful illustrations for me. So when I picture the ALL, I picture it as a bright yellow starburst. The ALL, like the Father and

    21 min

  6. 13/07/2024

    Transpersonal Consciousness and Gnosis 2024

    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week I’m sharing with you an episode that was broadcast in 2021, very close to the beginning of the Gnostic Insights podcast, but it’s really good as I listen to it and I am going back and slightly re-editing it, and I think that you’ll get a lot out of this episode. It’s foundational, alright. Last week I made a plea to you for donations to help me publish this book that I’m putting out now. Please, if you can afford to, this is a good time to chip in and give me some financial support. I really hate asking for money. This goes against my grain in a big, big way, so please don’t confuse me with the televangelists or any other person out there with a podcast that’s always asking for money. You know I don’t ask for money very often. You can think of yourself as contributing to this extremely important book that’s coming out. You will be part of history at this point. I’ve inserted a donation form at the bottom of this page for you to use. That book, of course, is called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. You know, I started with a Christian publisher and that ran into troubles, and so now I am producing the book myself. I have completed the editing, the layout, the typesetting, and now I have uploaded it, and I’m waiting for my proof copy, at which point then I can put it on the market and release it to you. Okay, enjoy this week’s episode. Onward and upward! My goal here at this podcast is to share with you information from the Nag Hammadi, primarily from the Tripartite Tractate, concerning the gnosis of our existence, which is a big topic. Gnosis means knowledge, and the knowledge we talk about here is the knowledge of our preexistent conscious spirits and our souls, and how these fit into these bodies that we wear and we walk around with, and how it is that we interact with one another. And the reason it seems to me that it’s important to discover the gnosis that is within you is because this is your personal reassurance that you’re not alone in this universe. We are not alone. We come from the God Above All Gods initially, and we pass down through the Son and through the Aeons and the Fullness of God. Our spirit comes directly from the God Above All Gods. It’s a conduit. It’s a flowing stream. So we are embedded within the consciousness of the originating consciousness. That is like the background matrix of not only of our universe, but before our universe and outside of our universe. We are a part of this great Being that we call the Father in Gnostic studies. And I share with you the gnosis that I have gained over my entire lifetime of thinking about, praying to, pursuing the ideas of, in all the different forms, this form of consciousness. You know, as a child, I began these kinds of studies very young, probably around age four, oftentimes in conversation with my older brother, Bill, whom you run into here and there on Gnostic Insights. And then I majored in psychology because I wanted to understand psychology. I majored in education because I wanted to learn how to share and to educate other people. I have an advanced degree in counseling and an advanced degree in communication, yet I’ve discovered that all of these degrees don’t really matter much if there’s no one to talk to about it. So my purpose here at Gnostic Insights is to share with you the gnosis that I have come across, not so that you will adapt anything I say, but so that it triggers within you the gnosis that you carry, because we’re all sharing the same stream of consciousness. I would very much like to hear from you, because as an educator, it helps me to know where you are at, and I need to have questions from you in order to stimulate answers from me. I often feel as though I’ve used up all the information I have to share, and I know that’s not true, because my gosh, I’ve read so many books, and I’ve had so many papers on these topics, yet I need to know what you want to know in order to know what direction I should go with these episodes. So please, go to the GnosticInsights.com website, and go to the comments form, and send me your email, send me your comments, send me your questions, and then I can address them, hopefully publicly here at Gnostic Insights. I can preserve your anonymity, that’s fine. I’d like to know where you are in your Gnostic search, and then we can go together from there. So, this week I was at something of a loss about what to talk about, and so once again I am dipping back into the wells of time to my Simple Explanation blog, and I’m pulling out an article from January 31st of 2011. I’ll read it to you, it’s in Simple Explanation terminology, but then I’ll translate it into Gnostic speak, so that we can see how these things go together. The Gnosis I share with you comes not only from my own personal experience, but it comes from the Nag Hammadi, and primarily the text in the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate. Our focus here is on consciousness and your life. It’s not on the names of the 365 angels or anything like that. To me, these are irrelevant to our pursuit of Gnosis. In my mind, what we need to understand is our relationship to the God Above All Gods, and our relationship to the Son, to the Christ, to the Fullness of God in the Pleroma, and we are fractals of all of that consciousness. And so, our lives resonate to the Fullness of God. This has all happened before, and it has happened at a different level and at different times in history. Most of the stories, most of the things that happen to us in our lives are fractals of things that have happened before. There are only so many stories. There really aren’t that many different things that can happen to you in your life. They boil down to the large archetypes. You know, Jung talked about archetypes. And he got those archetypes, as it turns out, from his reading of the Nag Hammadi. When I was a psychology major and a counseling major at the university, I studied Jung. I liked Jung. I never realized that Jung got this information from ancient spiritual texts, the same ancient spiritual texts that we talk about here at Gnostic Insights. So, the archetypes that Jung speaks of, which I learned as simply Jung’s theory of transpersonal psychology, these are not Jung’s ideas. These are eternal concepts that were preserved for us in the form of the Nag Hammadi codices. And you know, the Nag Hammadi was buried in the desert for just about 2,000 years and stumbled across in 1945. So, they have been preserved for us unmolested by 2,000 years of Christian interpretation and theology. They were thrown out of the Christian orthodoxy around the time of the Nicene Council and buried underground in order to preserve them for us. And this is what we are sharing. So, today what I would like to talk about is an article I wrote back in January 31st of 2011, and it’s called, A Simple Explanation of Transpersonal Memory. And you can find this at my original blog called asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com. Transpersonal psychology deals with mystical and spiritual experiences of the human psyche. Transpersonal memory is defined as memories that are shared at a cultural level, rather than at a personal level. Transpersonal memories reveal themselves in many ways, through societal archetypes and archetypal dreams, through subconscious assumptions, stereotypes, and expectations, and through strange occurrences such as the 100th monkey phenomenon. Jung referred to this transpersonal memory as the collective unconscious. Now, I quote Jung. He says, “My thesis, then, is as follows. In addition to our immediate consciousness, there exists a second psychic system of a collective universal and impersonal nature, which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually, but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily, and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” And that is from The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, published in 1996. And, quoting from Wikipedia, excuse me for that, Jung also made reference to contents of this category of the unconscious psyche as being similar to Levi-Bruhl’s use of collective representations, or représentations collectives, mythological motifs, Hubert and Mauss’s categories of the imagination, and Adolf Bostein’s primordial thoughts. The Simple Explanation refers to these collective memories as culturally shared memes and meme chords. A person can be defined by the memes they cling to. To a large extent, one’s memes shape one’s personality. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has written extensively about and staked his professional reputation upon a scientifically controversial process called morphogenetic fields. How does an oak tree develop from an acorn? By information carried in the morphogenetic field surrounding the acorn. Sheldrake explains that morphogenetic fields are to life forms, as quantum probability clouds are to subatomic particles, carrying the information that gives rise to particular biological manifestations of form. The Simple Explanation would cite these morphogenetic fields at the zero-point field at the center of the torus, part of the metaversal information streaming into our universe through our universal unit of consciousness, and that information is tempered by each organism’s karmic record and its acquired memes. In the case of the acorn and the oak tree, the morphogenetic field of the oak tree provides the genetic blueprint, while the mama tree’s karma and memes provide the individualized epigenetic pattern that tells which genes to turn on and off. What karma can a tree have? Well, its karma is the record of its life, nutrients, history of water availability, pest attacks, and so on. And what memes can a tree hold

    24 min

  7. 20/07/2024

    Redeeming the Demiurge

    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Yesterday, that would be July 18th, 2024, I was a guest on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio with my good Gnostic friend, Adrian Smith and, of course, Vance Socci and Miguel Conner, and we were discussing the Demiurge. That’s why I’m running this episode this week about the Demiurge. But I encourage you to go to YouTube to the Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, to the episode that’s up this week now. It’s called Navigating These Gnostic Times. Here’s an episode concerning the Demiurge and redeeming the Demiurge from 2022. I’ve edited it down quite a bit to make it a lot more palatable. I hope you enjoy it. The redemption of the Demiurge is a two-step process. Part one had to do with bringing life into creation in the form of all of the Second Order Powers, who themselves are the living representations of the images of the Aeons above. Then part two of the redemption of this creation is the coming of the Christ along with the Third Order of Powers that the Christ contains, the Pleroma of the Christ. That’s the Third Order Powers. And the Third Order Powers come as a covering, as a redemption, for each and every one of the Second Order Powers. So it’s kind of a stacking situation, right? The Fall generated these fractals of the Aeons above, only smaller versions of those fractals because they come out of the broken body of a single Aeon named Logos. And Logos contained within himself a smaller version, so to speak, a fractal of all of the other Aeons. And when Logos brought those to this material plane, this material plane was what they called a likeness, the likenesses of the Aeons above, but they were dead. They weren’t alive. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. In a similar way that a mirror reflects ourselves, right? The mirror is a flat 2-D representation of my 3-D body. The material creation down here that started as the Fall of Logos is a likeness of the Aeons above in the Fullness of God—it’s a different, though, dimension, the way that the mirror is 2-D that reflects and backwards reflects, by the way, my 3-D reality. Our material creation is a 3-D reality that reflects, and in an inverted way, the Aeons above. So there’s a likeness of the images above for every one of the Aeons. And those likenesses are the egoic side or the broken side, the shadow side; they’re the inversion of the Aeons above. In order to redeem the Fall, in order to reclaim the body of Logos back up into the Fullness of God, to release it from this different plane that it has found itself on, the Second Order Powers, all of us living creatures, everything that contains the Holy Spirit, the spark of life, there’s one of us Second Order Powers for every one of the likenesses of the Demiurge of the Fall. And then, on top of us, there is a Third Order Power for every one of us Second Order Powers. And the Third Order Powers are the pleroma of the Christ that come along with the Christ to redeem creation. What we’re talking about today comes from the part of the Tripartite Tractate that is called The Pleroma of the Logos, Section 9. “When the Logos which was defective was illumined, his pleroma began.” So the Logos which was defective, that’s the Logos who has returned now to the Fullness of God, to his brothers back up in the Fullness. He abandoned his egoic broken unit of consciousness down here below. That’s why the Demiurge has no remembrance of the Fullness, because Logos himself, which carries the one spirit of the entirety of the Fullness and God, returned back to his home in the pleroma. “Pleasing among things which are good, existing among the things which exist, resembling them in beauty, but unequal to them in truth, but in wisdom and knowledge he acts, mingling the Logos within himself entirely. Therefore, those which came forth from him are great, just as that which is truly great. After he was amazed at the beauty of the ones who had appeared to him, he professed gratitude for this visitation.” “The Logos performed this activity through those from whom he had received aid for the stability of those who had come into being because of him,” that’s us, “and so that they might receive something good, since he thought to pray for the organization of all those who came forth from him, which is stabilized, so that it might make them established. Therefore, those whom he intentionally produced are in chariots, just as those who came into being, those who have appeared, so that they might pass through every place of things which are below, so that each one might be given the place which is constituted as he is.” So remember, all of us down here below, we are each constituted after a particular Aeon, or a particular Aeon who is itself combinations of Aeons. Everything down below that is living is modeled after the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And so, when the Logos who was redeemed, that is the body of the Pleroma of the Christ which comes down, it’s constituted as everything that’s already down here, so that it can plug right into it. Every element of the Christ, that is, these Third Order of beings, which are the Pleroma of the Christ, every one of them has the ability to perfectly plug into and cover, cover with redemption, cover with love, cover with the knowledge of the Father, cover with the light of God, that bit of life that’s down here—trapped in this coexistent hellish type of world with the fallen Demiurge. You know, each one of us is bonded to the material world by these bodies that we walk around in. So, “This is destruction for the beings of the likeness,” and those beings of the likeness, those are the archons and the fallen egos and our egos, “yet it is an act of beneficence for the beings of the thought.” And the beings of the thought, those are the pure images, that are kept pure up above. They have not been sullied by what has come about down here in this fallen world. “A revelation of those who are from the ordinance,” the ordinance, those are the Aeons of the Fullness, because ordinance is another word for a Hierarchy, an order. So the beings of the ordinance, those are the Aeons of the Hierarchy of the Fullness. “…which was a unity while suffering, while they are seeds which have not yet come to be by themselves.” And the reason the Aeons of the Fullness are suffering is because one of them, Logos, left them and fell and created this material world. And so the Fullness has been suffering ever since. “The one who appeared was a countenance of the Father and of the harmony.” So we’re talking about the Christ now. “He was a garment composed of every grace and food, which is for those whom the Logos brought forth while praying and giving glory and honor. This is the one whom he glorified and honored while looking to those to whom he prayed, so that he might perfect them through the images which he had brought forth.” And those are the images of the ALL and the Fullness. Carrying on, “The Logos added even more to their mutual assistance and to the hope of the promise, since they have joy and abundant rest and undefiled pleasures.” See, we would like to have undefiled pleasures. So often our pleasures become defiled. And defiled means made icky, right? You start something because you like it and it’s really good, and then you overdo it and it becomes defiled. So, in the final economy, we will have undefiled pleasures. “He generated those whom he remembered at first when they were not with him. He generated them having the perfection. Now, while he who belongs to the vision is with him, he exists in hope and faith in the perfect Father as much as the Totalities. He appears to him before he mingles with him in order that the things which have come into being might not perish by looking upon the light, for they cannot accept the great exalted stature.” He’s generally talking about us now. This is the way the Christ comes to us—gently, so that we don’t just collapse in the glory of God. “The thought of the Logos who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him was called Aeon in place for all of those whom he brought forth in accord with the ordinance. It is also called the synagogue of salvation because he healed himself from the dispersal, which is the multifarious thought.” And multifarious means divided. And so the multifarious thought is all of our individual egos that lead us into our own will without considering the will of the Father. The Christ leads us out of our egoic self-centered selves. The Christ leads us back into harmony with the One, with the Fullness, with the ALL, with the Son, with the Father. That is what it means to be healed from the multifarious thought. You step away from the ego that drives you into your own narcissistic behavior and you instead become one with the Fullness again, one with the Father, because we have the Christ within us. And the Christ is this wonderful combination of the Fullnesses, the ALL, and the Father, and all of the power that comes directly out of them and directly into us. So, again quoting, “He healed himself from the dispersal, which is the multifarious thought, and returned to the single thought.” And the single thought, that’s the gnosis of the Father, the knowledge that you are loved and that you come from the Father and that you will return to the Father. Similarly, quoting again, “It is called the storehouse because of the rest which he obtained, giving it to himself alone. It is also called the bride because of the joy of the one who gave himself to him in the hope of fruit from the union.” And the fruit from the union is going to be, or is, if you are a true Christian who has accepted the Christ and turned from the multifarious thought to the One Self, which is a pure reflection of the Christ and the power of God. The fruit of that union is a

    20 min

  8. 27/07/2024

    Are People Inherently Evil?

    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I finished getting my book ready for publication and it’s been uploaded to Amazon. I tried to upload it to Lulu, but there were problems with the process and I had to kick back to Amazon, I’m sorry to say. One of the listeners had requested that I go with the small independent publisher Lulu, and I did try, but there were problems. So it seems to be God’s will, we could say, that I publish on Amazon, getting the worldwide distribution. I’m expecting the proof copy about a week from today, and if it looks as good as it appears that it’s going to look, then I’ll be ready to release the book. A couple of listeners have taken me up on the offer and pledge that if you were to donate $50 towards the effort of getting the book published and distributed, I would mail you personally, from my house to your house, a signed copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and I’d be happy to do that for any of you. Just send me a comment through the contact card or through my email address if you have it, and you can have a book from me to you, and I would very much appreciate that, and God bless the people that have volunteered, so thank you very much. Having a bit of a pledge drive here, see? So the things that I had thought were going to be taken care of by the professional publishing company that I decided not to go with, now I’m going to have to be taking care of all of that—the promotion and that sort of thing, social media, all of that. Perhaps one of you listeners is good at those sorts of things and would like to volunteer to help spread the word. That would be terrific. Otherwise, go ahead and leave an extra $20, $25 if you can. I’m going to put the donation form at the end of the transcript to this episode here at GnosticInsights.com. I was listening to a radio preacher this morning, and he was talking, as they often do, about the inherent sin nature of man, or humanity as I would like to say, being a woman. He was saying that we are born into sin because of the original fall of Adam and Eve, and we have a sin nature. They’re always talking about the sin nature, and that that is why we need to turn to Christ and repent and ask for Christ to come into our hearts in order to redeem us because of our inherent sin nature. But you see, in Gnosticism, we don’t think of our psyche in exactly the same way. I wouldn’t say that we do have an inherent sin nature. What I would say, focusing on the good, is that we have an inherent godly nature because, as it says in the Tripartite Tractate and in other Gnostic Gospels, and as it says in the New Testament of the Bible, we are filled with the Fullness of God. And I am taking that literally, that we actually are filled with the Fullness of God, that we have our complete Self, that’s that big S self that is at the core of our being. Our inherent nature, in other words, is a full reflection of the Son of God or the Fullness of God. 14 “For this reason I bow my knees to the Father [f]of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15 from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, 16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— 19 to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. “(Ephesians 3:14-19) So, we do not have an inherent sin nature. We are children of the Aeons of God. We are children of the Fullness, and it’s actually an insult to the Fullness and to the Son of God to say that their children—for are we not the children of God? Are we not brothers and sisters of Jesus?—it’s a big insult to the Aeons and the angels and the Son of God that made us to say that we’re inherently evil. And it’s not because we fell. The Fall was instigated long before the humans came along. The Fall is the nature of our material universe, that’s all. It’s basically metaphorical language for moving from a different realm, a different home—from the ethereal non-material space of heaven, we might call it, or the Fullness of God. And the Fall was the accidental overreaching of that top Aeon, Logos, which has come down into our Christian tradition as the overreaching of the top angel, Lucifer. It’s the same story. It’s the same fractal. And it was that Fall that created our material space, leading to ignorance and forgetfulness of the Father and of all that came before. And all that did come before was the ethereal realm. One of my regular listeners and readers wrote a very good inquiry to me this week. And she had an insight. She had a satori, I believe, because I think it’s in my book, and she’s read my book, and I’m pretty sure that I had already written it. But here it is, because sometimes you hear something or read it, and then months later, it comes back percolating down into you or up out of you, depending on which way you want to think about it. And that’s what your satoris are. Those are your little bits of enlightenment. It’s things that you already know, but now they’re remembered and you can articulate them. And it’s as if you just thought of it for the first time. And here’s what it is. You know the way I picture the Fullness of God as that golden pyramid, right? Those stacking golden cannonballs. And each one of those cannonballs is an Aeon or a facet of the Fullness of God. The Fullness of God is infinite in ability and scope, because it is the Son of God. And the Son wears the Aeons like a cloak, and the Aeons wear the Son like a cloak—they are co-existent. The difference is that the Fullness of God, the Aeons, are broken out and articulated, whereas the Son is one perfectly integrated One. Oneness. That big giant stack of cannonballs is pretty much infinitely large. And it has every concept, every possible thing that will ever be, every relationship, every up, down, in, out, math, physics, chemistry, and every personality that will ever be. All of the animals, all of the forms, the prototypes, the archetypes are in the Fullness of God. So all of the animals, all of the species, pre-exist in the Fullness of God. It’s all there. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God dreams of Paradise. Logos crowns the hierarchy and contains fractals of all the other Aeons. It’s what the Aeons sit and dream about. The Paradise that pre-exists before the Fall, the Paradise, which in our lexicon of thinking has basically come down to us as the Garden of Eden, but it even exists above. It’s Paradise, and it’s the Aeons who sit as One in the Fullness of God, like a big giant slime mold, not going anywhere, but dreaming and creating. They’re the great storytellers. They’re the inventors. They’re sitting there, and they’re dreaming of Paradise. And Paradise is very much like where we live. Paradise is very much like Earth, except that it’s pre-Fall. And so there’s no death or destruction, no sadness, no ignorance. All the angels mingle and mix. All the Aeons mingle and mix. The lions lie down with the lambs. It’s very much like what we expect the third economy that will be coming after this one will be like, after this world passes away—the final economy. And after the redemption, that becomes our eternal home, the good place, right? So each person is—and here’s the point I’m trying to get to—each of us humans, or each creature, each of any kind of creature, dog, cat, cow, rosebush, fish, bacteria, every single creature on the planet, everything, everything that’s alive, which I think of as soft and squishy, as opposed to the mineral elements, which are hard and rocky; all the soft, squishy guys that carry the life, the consciousness, the love of the Aeons above, down into this otherwise dead material world that was created from the Fall—we’re all unique. We’re all completely unique. And when in the Bible it says the Father knew you before you were even conceived in the womb, the Father knew everything about you, that’s because we pre-exist in the Fullness of God. We are the children, like spores, we are the spores or children of the Fullness of God. And we are sent down from them into this material plane, carrying in our little chariots of life, carrying the consciousness of God, carrying the plans and blueprints, the memories, the knowledge, the true knowledge of the ethereal realm, and everything that was ever conceived up there. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5) Now, each of us is unique. And that is because, get this, this is pretty interesting. If you picture that golden pyramid, and think of all those Aeons as lighted golden balls, here’s how Aeons procreate. It says that they look upon each other with adoration and love, and together, they look upon the Father and worship Him with adoration and love together. And this is done in combinations of various Aeons. You know, the lower Aeons are the structures and blueprints of the material world, so to speak. It’s how chemistry works. It’s how physics works. Those are the lower Aeons, and we’re made up of those, aren’t we? But on top of that, we have the living parts, the soft, squishy parts that are brought down from conception onward. Those are what carry the memory and the consciousness of God, because the physical elemental material is not self-aware. The demiurge is aware. He controls them through strings of power, chemical bonds, physical valences and rules, laws. The demiurge strictly controls the material creation, but we, we have that pesky free will. We are a different sort of being. The Self that comes i

    19 min
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About

Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained

Information

  • Creator
    Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2024
  • Episodes
    99
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Show Website
    Gnostic Insights

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