Gnostic Insights Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.

This episode transcript is also posted to A New Gnostic Gospel 7/3/2022







copyright held by Cyd Ropp; all rights reserved







The Father







As you know, we've been looking at the gnostic Gospel according to the Tripartite Tractate, which is one of the books in the Nag Hammadi scrolls. The Tripartite Tractate is a book that focuses on the origins of our universe and everything in it, including us. So I thought we would look around again today and revisit the Tripartite Tractate and what it has to say about the Father as the first principle of gnosticism.







Philosophers often speak of the hard problem of consciousness. Materialist scientists don't believe in consciousness. They believe in a thing called monism, which is that we are only our physical bodies and that any appearance of consciousness or of a soul is merely a by-product of physical mechanisms, hormones, atoms moving around--this sort of thing. The counterpoint to that view, often called dualism, is that, yes, we have a physical body and then we also have a soul and it's your soul that survives after death. This gnosticism that comes from the Nag Hammadi is a religious system that presupposes that there is a soul and there is a body.







It seems to me that the soul that people speak of surviving is the consciousness that began with the Father and derives from the Father. And that is why, whenever I discuss the system of consciousness, whether it's in the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, it always begins with the Father, because the Father is where consciousness resides. The Father is consciousness itself. The Father is another word for consciousness. Then this entire creation cosmology that's presented through the Tripartite Tractate and then re-presented again in my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is the path by which consciousness proceeds out from the Father through the Son, through the Totalities and the Pleroma of the Hierarchy, and on into the Second Order of Powers that populates the earth.







This is why we begin with the Father. The Father is the ground state of consciousness, and so this is why we begin to build out from the Father the flow of consciousness. My Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything book and blog are devoted to the notion of panpsychism, which suggests that consciousness resides in everything. In gnostic terms we say that the Father extends his consciousness throughout all living things that populate the cosmos.







I like to begin with the cosmos as it unfolded and rolled out. The word for that sort of study is “cosmogony,” which is defined as the study of the origins of the universe. This makes the most sense to me--to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are and then, after that is established, to see how that applies to our lives. Then we can ask, “Why are we here? Is there a purpose to our lives? How should we live?” After that, we can finally consider the termination of the universe and what happens after we die. All of these questions are answered very precisely in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This knowledge is known as “gnosis.”







Today we begin at the very beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. This story, this cosmogony, begins before the beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos existed.







I'm going to compare a couple of different versions of the Tripartite so that we have a fuller picture of the Father. One of the books I'm going to use is The Nag Hammadi Scriptures edited by Marvin Meyer; the translator in this case was a person named Einar Thomassen.

The Son and the ALL







Copyright by Cyd Ropp, Ph.D. All rights reserved.







Now imagine that this consciousness that we call Father gives birth to an emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation philosophy, we call this emanation a fractal. We’ll look at fractals later in the book because they play a big part in creation.







In the religious texts they call this emanation a Son. So now we have the Father and Son. 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 and having a realization 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. We will also be looking at singularities, monads, and points of view in more depth later in the book.







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, or the Totalities, arose at once.  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 the Son is an emanation of the Father, it mirrors the Father's creativity.







And so the Father knows itself and creates the Son, and the Son knows itself and creates the ALL. In the Tripartite Tractate the ALL is known as the pre-existent Church. This is not the same as your church down on the street corner with the people in it singing hymns on Sunday, but rather this is called ”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 they 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."







Which is to say, they exist as 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. The Totalities of the pre-existent Church are not yet self-aware. The way the Tripartite Tractate describes this, “because they were newly formed the Father concealed their perfection from them until they could grow into the knowledge.”







This is why the Father revealed the Son to them, so that 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. 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 too big and unknowable," that's true. But God formed 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.”







This can be a little confusing because you have the originating consciousness, the God Above All Gods, which is the originating consciousness we call the Father. The Father had a sense of itself and this was called the Son. The Son immediately produced itself as the form ...

The purpose of Gnostic Insights is to help us all remember the gnosis we were born with, which is knowledge of where we come from and who or what is the originating consciousness, as well as the nature of our relationship to that originating consciousness. So far, we have looked at the Father, which is what we call the originating consciousness, and the Son, which is that consciousness made into a particular entity that we call the Son.







The Son is not the generalized, diffuse, no-thought consciousness of the Father, but rather like a bucket dipped into the ocean, with the Father being the ocean. The Son is the essence of the Father, now contained within the bucket. So it's exactly the same as the Father, but it is a particularity. It is a singularity.







As soon as the Son was formed it immediately created more entities from its own Self in the same fashion that the Son came out of the Father. The distinct characteristics within the Son are variously referred to as the Totalities, the ALL, and the Fullness of God.







The ALL emerged from the Son, and it was said that this wasn't like a casting off in the manner that a fungus casts off spores which then grow into their own little fungi. This was more of a spreading out of the Son and, by extension, the Father through the Son. The Totalities of the ALL remain completely within and inhabiting the Son.







In my description of the Fullness, I picture rays of a star, with each of the rays being part of the ALL, and each one of them expressing a slightly different characteristic of the Son out of which they spread forth.







The moment the Son was formed, the ALL emerged. The ALL is the pre-existent Church.







My imagery for the Son is like a diffuse cloud sitting in this great inky blackness which is the Father, and out of this cloud comes a starburst, with each one of the rays of the star is one of the Totalities. At first the ALL was identical to Son, and all of these parts of the Son formed a unified Totality. As soon as the ALL came to know itself and to recognize its own individual consciousness, each one of the rays became its own singularity.







And once they did that the Totalties immediately recognized a self identity and formed themselves into what is called the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma. Pleroma simply means everything that is possible. All possible expressions of consciousness can be found in the Fullness of God. These Aeons of the Fullness of God quickly sorted themselves into what is called a hierarchy, which is like a pyramidal type of stack, with many more units located down at the bottom of the stack and fewer and fewer units as you go higher and higher.







In my illustrations, I picture the Hierarchy of the Fullness as a pyramidal stack of golden orbs, like cannon balls, with each orb being a particular Aeon. There are more cannon balls on the lower levels and fewer and fewer balls the higher you go up the pyramid, until finally at the top you have only a single golden orb.







The hierarchy of the Fullness of God is represented by a pyramidal structure of orbs that follows the principle of "the higher the fewer."







There is a principle in Gnosticism that I call “the higher the fewer.” Using that principle the awakened Aeons of the Fullness of God sorted themselves into positions, places, powers, ranks, stations, and names, indicating that they each had their own individual point-of-view and they each had their own place and duty in the hierarchy of heaven.







Last week’s episode was supposed to be about the Son. But we've hardly heard anything about the Son himself. We hear about the Father being indescribable and we hear about the infinite number of spirits of the Church that...

By Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.







Copyrighted. All rights reserved.







When I first conceived of my theory of everything named “A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything” back in 2008, I was unfamiliar with Gnosticism. A Simple Explanation is presented in secular terms, using common concepts from all fields of human endeavor from math and science on through religion, psychology, and sociology. In A Simple Explanation, God is usually referred to as Metaversal Consciousness, and we here on this plane carry that consciousness forward into this life as Units of Consciousness. A Simple Explanation was written to appeal to folks who usually don’t go in for religion but who, nonetheless, are seeking an overall structure for understanding the mysteries of life.







Had I been a philosophy major like my brother, Dr. Bill Puett, I would have known the names for various aspects of the Simple Explanation, like panpsychism and monadism. I would have been familiar with works such as Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. But I wasn't a philosophy major. I am instead a psychologist with a Ph.D. in Classical Rhetoric. My field of deep study is ancient texts and ideologies, and these are what influenced the development of my theory, not modern philosophers such as Leibniz or Kant. So rather than kludge together other people's ideas, which is the normal way that scholars work, I built the Simple Explanation from the ground up using my own observation and logic.







And then around 2016, I read a copy of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. At first I found the ideas shocking. These were the very heresies my conservative Christianity had warned me away from. According to Christians, these beliefs were excluded from our modern versions of the Bible to protect the church from theological misinformation. I discovered that radical repackaging had removed from the New Testament a type of spiritual belief that was well- known to Jesus and his followers. This belief system, commonly called Gnosticism, describes Christianity differently than does our modern Church. Gnosticism makes sense of most of the more mysterious aspects of Christianity, including humanity’s role in the great scheme of things, and common questions such as “why is there evil in the world?”







Many of these answers to longstanding theological problems were resurrected along with the Nag Hammadi scriptures when they were rediscovered and exhumed from the desert sands in 1945. I learned that the Nag Hammadi scriptures had been buried deep in the Egyptian desert around 350 AD, preserving them from the great Biblical purge conducted by the Council of Nicene at the behest of the Catholic Pope and the Emperor of Rome as they shaped and packaged Christianity to suit their needs. Keep in mind that these ancient teachings have been held back from almost 2000 years of formal study and Christian theology. So what you are about to learn from the Nag Hammadi scriptures is fresh, clean, and unsullied by centuries of scholastic and theological opinions.







Over the next couple of years I carefully picked up the Nag Hammadi and I set it back down numerous times, lest I be led astray by false beliefs. Eventually I narrowed my focus to one of the codices in particular that seemed to accord most closely with my understanding of the teachings of Jesus. This book is called The Tripartite Tractate, which simply means the 3-part book. The “3” also refers to the 3-part nature of humanity: spiritual, psychological, and material.







I spent time conducting a word study on the Tripartite Tractate, attempting to nail down some very confusing, archaic language. I also made diagrams and illustrations of the ideas presented in the book as I read. Then I put the material away for another year to let it rest and percolate. Finally, in 2019,

By Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.







Copyright 2022, All rights reserved







The instant the Aeons became self-aware, the ALL fell out of their unthinking, blissful union and arranged themselves into The Fullness. "Each one of the Aeons is a name, , each of the properties and powers of the Father, since he exists in many names, which are intermingled and harmonious with one another. … just as the Father is a single name, because he is a unity, yet is innumerable in his properties and names." 







By this point in the Tripartite Tractate, the Son comes to be referred to as the Father, because the Son is the Father of the Third Glory*—the Aeons of the Fullness. We see here that the Son, although a singular monad, is still a unity of many Aeons. The Son becomes knowable through the innumerable properties and names of the Aeons. What does it mean by names? I think that these names are the first appearance of what we would come to call ego. These disparate identities include names like flower, tree, dog, human, even parts of living bodies who themselves are alive, like kidney cells. They're not names like my name or like Frank or George. They are not those types of identities. These are functional identities. [*correction--I said the Father of the Second Glory but I should have said the the Father of the Third Glory]







The Aeons then arranged themselves into a hierarchy of “minds of minds, which are found to be words of words, elders of elders, degrees of degrees, which are exalted above one another. Each one of those who give glory has his place and his exaltation and his dwelling and his rest, which consists of the glory which he brings forth.”







The hierarchy of The Fullness prefigures the fractal patterns of our universe. "Minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors," as Thomassen’s translation puts it, refers to personalities and how they relate to one another. "Elders of elders and degrees of degrees" refers to the manner by which things are sorted, stacked, and ordered--first, second, third, superior, inferior, and so on. Each with its own place, exaltation, dwelling, and rest reflects the fact that each self-aware entity has its own unique place in the grand scheme, its own personal expression or exaltation, a location different than its neighbors, thus possessing its very own point of view. 







“It is he, the Father, who gave root impulses to the Aeons, since they are places on the path which leads toward him, as toward a school of behavior. He has extended to them faith in and prayer to him whom they do not see; and a firm hope in him of whom they do not conceive; and a fruitful love, which looks toward to that which it does not see; and an acceptable understanding of the eternal mind; and a blessing, which is riches and freedom; and a wisdom of the one who desires the glory of the Father for thought.”







The originating Father continually emanates a Holy Spirit out through the Son that entices its generations to seek out their source. The Tripartite Tractate says, "It is by virtue of his will that the Father, the one who is exalted, is known, that is, (by virtue of) the spirit which breathes in the Totalities and it gives them an idea of seeking after the unknown one,

By Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.







Copyright 2022, all rights reserved







Let’s review for a moment. In the last chapter, the Totalities of the ALL had  awakened to themselves in fulfillment of the Father's desire for innumerable points of view. Prior to their awakening, the Totalities of the ALL exist as unified facets of the Son. We can think of the shared consciousness of the Totalities of the ALL as the shared consciousness of the One Self of the Son. We refer to them as Totalities because they are parts of the One Totality of the monad we call the Son.







When the Totalities became conscious of themselves and their individuality they each became a singular monad with their own point of view. At this point we begin to refer to them as Aeons. The Aeons immediately sorted themselves into a hierarchy of names, places, powers, and duties based upon their unique points of view. This sorting is called the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma of the Fullness. The Tripartite Tractate says of these Aeons, “The aeons have brought themselves forth in accord with the Third Fruit by the freedom of the will and by the wisdom with which he favored them for their thought.” The First Fruit is the Son; the Second Fruit is the ALL; the Third Fruit is the Hierarchy of the Fullness.







It is important to note that at this stage of the Pleroma, each Aeon possesses a Self that reflects the full One consciousness of the Son. Its Self is identical to the Self of any other unit of consciousness. However, each Aeon now also possesses a newly-formed Ego that reflects its particular identity. This newly-minted Ego is a label that identifies a particular Aeon’s name, position, station and sphere of responsibility.







Ego is the designation of individual points of view. For Aeons, the Ego does not imply self-centeredness as we humans think of it, but simply the title for their names, stations, ranks, duties, and locations. Although the Aeons still dwelt within the single body of the Fullness, they were now each an independent Self with their own consciousness, identity, and will. Their variety required them to work together in order to remain in full agreement, for only through their union could they approach the Father's greatness. Here at Gnostic Insights and at  A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything blog and book, we call that cooperative spirit and pattern The Simple Golden Rule.







The Simple Golden Rule says that in order to build something greater than any of us can build on our own, we need to reach out to our neighbors with love, information, and assistance to work together on a common project for the betterment of all. This pattern of cooperation is part of the Aeonic order, and we here in this universe have inherited this ability as a fractal pattern from above. It is our common Self and the Holy Spirit of love that enables individual Egos to work together for the betterment of all.







In my mind I picture the location of this Aeonic Ego as the outside surface of the Aeon, because Ego's focus is outward looking, focusing as it does on the Aeon’s interaction with those outside of itself in the Hierarchy. Those outside of an Aeon’s Self would be its neighboring Aeons. The Ego does not come into play during introspection--that introspective awareness is toward the Self, not the Ego. So the Aeonic Ego’s focus is on its position, power, place, and sphere of responsibility relative to its Aeonic neighbors—not in order to lord it over them, but to discern their respective roles in cooperating with each other.







Egos are on the outside looking outward--the better to see how to relate and cooperate with neighbors. Everyone shares the same One Self that is a fractal of the Son.