Cyd Ropp, Ph.D. Copyright 2022; all rights reserved Having completed, for now, our look at Gnostic Psychology, this week we will continue looking at the tripartite nature of the second order of powers, with a particular focus on our material bodies. The Tripartite Tractate says that, “Those who belong to the arrogant thought and those of the likeness are called ‘the Left,’ ‘Hylic,’ ‘the Dark Ones,’ and ‘the Last.’” As we covered in the last episode, “After the Logos established each one in his order, both the images and the representations and the likenesses, he kept the Aeon of the images pure from all those who fight against it, since it is a place of joy. However, to those of the thought he revealed the thought which he had stripped from himself, desiring to draw them into a material union, for the sake of their system and dwelling place and in order that they might not any more rejoice in the glory of their environment and be dissolved, but might rather see their sickness in which they suffer, so that they might beget love and continuous searching after the one who is able to heal them of the inferiority.” My previous theory of everything, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, gives material particles personalities and souls. We haven't been able to do that with the Gnostic Gospel for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it doesn’t say anything like that in the Tripartite Tractate from which Gnostic Insights derives the cosmogeny of how everything works. What the Tripartite Tractate says is that the material is a likeness of the Aeon of the images, projected by the arrogant thought of the Fallen Demiurge. When Logos Fell, his pattern replicated down here below, but on a slower, thicker, mud level. The Demiurge only projects a shadow of Logos. In this manner, the Demiurge replicates, to the best of its ability, the Hierarchy of God as likenesses. These likenesses are the material particles. The second reason the hylic can’t be considered to have conscious selves is a deduction from our first principle that consciousness comes from above, and the material that forms this cosmos originates from below. Matter arises from the Fall, from the presumptuous efforts of the Demiurge. Therefore, the particles, atoms, and molecules can’t be alive, because they lack consciousness. So now we need to understand why matter is dead in the Gnostic Gospel and yet seemingly alive in the Simple Explanation. Here is the answer: in this universe, the material particles do not have conscious souls because they are reconstructions of the Demiurge, out of his memory of what the lower level Aeons and forces were like in his original home—the Pleroma of Logos. The matter is not a fractal of either the Fullness or of Logos; it is a memory from the imagination of the Demiurge. The material particles are not units of consciousness because they come from below, not above. The Demiurge itself did not arise from the Fullness. The Demiurge is the overreaching ego of the Pleroma of Logos, and Logos is the blueprint from which he attempts to reconstruct the world. The Demiurge has to reconstruct those lower levels of the Pleroma entirely from his admittedly faulty memory. The hylic particles are not a fractal of the originating consciousness—they are an extension directly from the imagination of the Demiurge. The material level—the subatomic particles, atoms, molecules—are likenesses that the Demiurge created of how he should put things together. If the Fullness is viewed as a pyramid and we apply the maxim of “as above, so below” and “as below, so above,” we can logically infer where the original images must reside. The images from which the hylic portion of this universe are copies must be those lower parts ...
