Gnostic Insights

Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.
  • 0.0 (0)
  • SPIRITUALITY
  • EVERY-TWO-WEEKS SERIES

Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained

  1. 18/05/2024

    Awakening Consciousness

    The purpose of Gnostic Insights is to help us all remember the gnosis we were born with, which is knowledge of where we come from and who or what is the originating consciousness, as well as the nature of our relationship to that originating consciousness. So far, we have looked at the Father, which is what we call the originating consciousness, and the Son, which is that consciousness made into a particular entity that we call the Son. The Son is not the generalized, diffuse, no-thought consciousness of the Father, but rather like a bucket dipped into the ocean, with the Father being the ocean. The Son is the essence of the Father, now contained within the bucket. So it’s exactly the same as the Father, but it is a particularity. It is a singularity. As soon as the Son was formed it immediately created more entities from its own Self in the same fashion that the Son came out of the Father. The distinct characteristics within the Son are variously referred to as the Totalities, the ALL, and the Fullness of God. The ALL emerged from the Son, and it was said that this wasn’t like a casting off in the manner that a fungus casts off spores which then grow into their own little fungi. This was more of a spreading out of the Son and, by extension, the Father through the Son. The Totalities of the ALL remain completely within and inhabiting the Son. In my description of the Fullness, I picture rays of a star, with each of the rays being part of the ALL, and each one of them expressing a slightly different characteristic of the Son out of which they spread forth. The moment the Son was formed, the ALL emerged. The ALL wears the Son like a garment, and the Son wears the ALL. They are co-existent. The moment the Son was formed, the ALL emerged. The ALL is the pre-existent Church, also called The Elect. My imagery for the Son is like a diffuse cloud sitting in this great inky blackness which is the Father, and out of this cloud comes a starburst, with each one of the rays of the star is one of the Totalities. At first the ALL was identical to Son, and all of these parts of the Son formed a unified Totality. As soon as the ALL came to know itself and to recognize its own individual consciousness, each one of the rays became its own singularity. Father ground state; Son first monad of consciousness; the All; the All becomes self aware and sorts itself into a hierarchy; the hierarchy of the Aeons is known as the Fullness And once they did that the Totalties immediately recognized a self identity and formed themselves into what is called the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma. Pleroma simply means everything that is possible. All possible expressions of consciousness can be found in the Fullness of God. These Aeons of the Fullness of God quickly sorted themselves into what is called a hierarchy, which is like a pyramidal type of stack, with many more units located down at the bottom of the stack and fewer and fewer units as you go higher and higher. In my illustrations, I picture the Hierarchy of the Fullness as a pyramidal stack of golden orbs, like cannon balls, with each orb being a particular Aeon. There are more cannon balls on the lower levels and fewer and fewer balls the higher you go up the pyramid, until finally at the top you have only a single golden orb. The awakened Aeons sorted themselves into a cooperative colony of names, stations, ranks, duties, and locations. The Aeons of the Fullness provide the Master Pattern of our inherited consciousness. There is a principle in Gnosticism that I call “the higher the fewer.” Using that principle the awakened Aeons of the Fullness of God sorted themselves into positions, places, powers, ranks, stations, and names, indicating that they each had their own individual point-of-view and they each had their own place and duty in the hierarchy of heaven. Last week’s episode was supposed to be about the Son. But we’ve hardly heard anything about the Son himself. We hear about the Father being indescribable and we hear about the infinite number of spirits of the Church that form the body of the Son. But we really haven’t heard much in the way of descriptions of the Son itself. This is because the only way that the Son can be described is through the Aeons, which is to say, through the fractals that come out of the Son. As we trace the path of emanations flowing out of the inconceivable Father and through the barely conceivable Son, we become more and more concrete in our ability to understand the nature of God. It is when we enter the realm of the Aeons that we can begin to recognize the panoply of properties of the Father and Son. The Tripartite Tractate says, “They were forever in thought, for the Father was like a thought and a place for them. When their generations had been established, the One who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was deficient in the […] and he brought forth those within him, but since he is as he is, he is a spring which is not diminished by the water which abundantly flows from it.” “Generations,” as the Tripartite Tractate uses the word, means “to create, to generate.” Here it is saying that when the Son was formed, all of the Totalities that make up the body of the Son were formed along with him, and their formation or generation did not lessen the Son or subtract anything away from the Son’s essence. The word “deficient” as used here simply means not yet manifest. Deficient can’t indicate any shortcoming or inadequacy, because the Son is a complete embodiment of the Father, and his Totalities are a Fullness. The missing word indicated by the ellipsis […] probably refers to the structure of the eternal heavens; not “the universe,” because the material universe occurs further on down the line. So it likely reads, “When their generations had been established, the One who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was deficient in the heavenly plan and he brought forth those within him…” The Tripartite Tractate says of these Totalities: “While they were in the Father’s thought, that is, in the hidden depth, the depth knew them, but they were unable to know the depth in which they were. Nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father and they did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed, so that it has been discovered that they were like a fetus.” And so now we have these potential entities existing like a seed, living within the Father; existing as thoughts of the Father. They don’t know themselves, they’re not yet awake. They don’t know themselves and they don’t know where they are. They don’t even realize that they comprise the body of the Son. And in that sense they are like a fetus that is still inside the womb, still sleeping. The Tripartite Tractate carries on to say that, “The one who first thought of them, the Father, — not only so that they might exist for him, but also that they might exist for themselves as well, that they might then exist in his thought as mental substance and that they might exist for themselves too, — sowed a thought like a spermatic seed.” So, in other words, the Father wants them to wake up. The Father is spreading consciousness, awakened consciousness, throughout the entire body of the Son. He doesn’t want them only to be unthinking constituents of the Son, making up the overall body of the Son. The Father wants them all to have their own existence and their own realizations, their own consciousness, their own Self. The Tripartite describes them “like seeds in need of gaining nourishment and growth.” So the fractals of the ALL were asleep, and the Father “wished to grant that they might come into being, as faultless ones.” The Tripartite says that the first step in bringing awareness to the Totalities was to give them, “the perfect idea of beneficence toward them.” Meaning that even though they didn’t yet know themselves, what they did know was that they were loved. That is all they knew: that they had a benefactor. Somebody cared for them and wanted only good for them. They awoke to Self realization because someone loved them. This beneficence was their first knowledge. Now the Tripartite Tractate goes on to say that, “The One whom he raised up as a light for those who came from himself, the One from whom they take their name, he is the Son, who is full, complete and faultless. He brought him forth mingled with what came forth from him […].” Again confirming that the Totalities coexist with the Son, although they are not yet fully awakened. “As for the parts in which he exists in his own manner and form and greatness, it is possible for to see him and speak about that which they know of him, since they wear him while he wears them, because it is possible for them to comprehend him.” And remember that in last week’s episode I used the analogy that the Totalities are to the Son as the cells that make up our bodies are to us—we wear them like a garment over our Self, and they wear our eternal Self over their little cells. We go everywhere they go, and they go everywhere we go. “He, however, is as he is, incomparable. In order that the Father might receive honor from each one and reveal himself, even in his ineffability, hidden, and invisible, they marvel at him mentally. Therefore, the greatness of his loftiness consists in the fact that they speak about him and see him. He becomes manifest, so that he may be hymned because of the abundance of his sweetness … And just as the admirations of the silences are eternal generations and they are mental offspring, so too the dispositions of the word are spiritual emanations. Both of them admirations and dispositions, since they belong to a word, are seeds and thoughts of his

  2. 26/05/2024

    Archons–What Are They?

    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This episode is about archons. It’s kind of a long episode because what I’m going to do is read to you directly out of the Tripartite Tractate and then make explanations about that, and that’s a long process. Also, if this becomes too thick and too difficult to understand just by the hearing of it, go to GnosticInsights.com and read the transcript. And in the transcript, I’m going to put links to other episodes that have spoken on this sort of topic before so that you can have a bigger review or a more in-depth study on this topic, okay? So reading from the Tripartite Tractate, and this version is translated by Einar Thomassen out of the book, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. I’m reading you three different sections out of the book. The first is called The Word Divided, and that’s verses 77, 11 through 36. “Now on the one hand, The word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, to the glory of the Father who had desired him and was pleased with him. The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations. For he could not bear to look at the light, but looked at the depths, and he faltered. Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.” So when this section says the word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, the word is Logos. That’s another way of saying the Aeon named Logos. And “the perfect single one” is the name for the overarching personality of the Aeon known as Logos. Here at The Simple Explanation of things, we call that the governing unit of consciousness. For example, my body has billions of little units of consciousness in the form of cells and organs and whatnot, but my single one is named Cyd, and that’s my governing unit of consciousness. Within the overarching personality of Logos, was a fractal iteration of every Aeon, one level down from Logos, housed within his perfect single self. Logos crowns the Fullness and contains fractals of all the Aeons Logos was a product of the entire Fullness giving glory to the Father in unison, and all together they fruited this final combinatory Aeon. He was the last Aeon to be born, and he was the sum of all of the Aeons. And those smaller images of the Aeons that were contained within the single one named Logos were all fractals of the Fullnesses of God, one level down. And Logos birthed himself in the sense that his personality, his unified governing unit of consciousness, became aware of itself in relation to this fractal pleroma that he contained. “It was the will of the Father that brought Logos forth as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass.” And that ordained economy, that’s our material universe, and that includes time and space. And then it says, “The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations.” You see, what Logos wanted to do was create Paradise, basically, all by himself, because he had fractals of the entirety within himself. But he didn’t realize that they were only fractals, and the fractals couldn’t get the job done. It needed to be Logos in combination with the real Aeons that were up there at his level. And so when he reached for the Father, that’s what caused the Fall. And the deficient things that issued forth from the Fallen Logos were patterned after his ego, not his one undivided self. “They were shadows, phantoms, and imitations.” The Father and the Fullness were repelled by the Fallen and a Boundary was formed to rein in the Deficiency. In other words, they were not real, and they were not true fractals of the Fullness. Logos mistook himself for the entire Fullness because his Pleroma contained fractals of all the Fullnesses. And due to the fact that he so closely resembled his Aeonic parents, who, when you think about it, all together amounted to the totality of the Son. Logos thought he could directly connect to the originating Father in the same manner that the Son does. But the Father can only be directly touched by his true emanation, the Son, and no other, not even Logos, although he resembled the Son. But he, see, he was a fractal level down. All consciousness is funneled through the Son and then on down from there. If Logos had touched the Father directly as he wanted to, he would have been annihilated due to the extreme voltage of the power of the Father. Logos found he could not look into the high voltage light, which is the life of the Father, nor grasp it, and so he faltered and fell into the depths. “Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.” Now, this division refers both to the separation of Logos from the Fullness and the division within himself between his better part, that is his self-governing unit of consciousness, which is a reflection of the Son, and his presumptuous thought, that is, the ego that prompted the overreach in the first place. This division brings oblivion, forgetfulness, and ignorance of one’s true self and the originating consciousness of the Father. The next section is called The Perfect Part of Logos Re-Enters the Fullness, and that’s verse 77, 37, through 78, 28. “That which he had brought forth from himself as a unitary Aeon hastened upward to that which was his and to his kin in the Fullness. He abandoned that which had come into being from the deficiency and what had issued from him in an illusion, since they did not belong to him. However, the one who had brought him forth with superior perfection from himself became weak after bringing him forth, like a female nature deprived of masculinity. For what issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance had existence from something that itself was deficient. Because of that, what was perfect in him left him and went upward to his own. He remained in the Fullness, and the fact that he had been saved from the,” and here there are some missing words “. . . served for him as a reminder. The one who hastened on high and the one who drew him to himself did not remain idle, but they brought forth a fruit in the Fullness with a view to overthrowing what had come into being because of the deficiency.” Now I’ll explain what that means. “That which he had brought forth from himself as a unitary Aeon,” was the governing unit of consciousness of Logos. The unitary Aeon known as Logos “hastened upward to that which was his,” that is, Logos returned to his place and duties in the Fullness, and to his kin in the Fullness, that is, his fellow Aeons in the Fullness. It says “he abandoned that which had come into being from deficiency” and what had “issued from him in an illusion, since they did not belong to him.” See, the first illusion was the thought that he could plug back in directly to the Father without the cooperation and assistance of the entire Fullness or the Son. And that was an illusion because it cannot be done because of the Father’s immense voltage. Only the Son itself can plug back in because he is the emanation of the Father. The Self of Logos abandoned and left behind the illusions that sprang forth in the deficiency beyond and below the ethereal plane because they were not of his pleroma. “However, the one who had brought him forth with superior perfection from himself became weak after bringing him forth, like a female nature deprived of masculinity.” So I interpret this to mean that because of the division and lost connection between his ego and his Self, Logos became weak, as if he were a female that had lost touch with its inherent masculine side. Now, according to Jung, who was very Gnostic, we all have an animus, which is the male aspect, and an anima, which is the female aspect. And we’ll be talking much more about Jung and the archetypes in a future interview that is being set up right now. So you’ll stay tuned for that. We won’t get into that now. So upstream from Logos, the totality of the Fullness was also weakened, for part of itself, that being that divided ego of Logos that had split away from its Self, had been left behind and remained below in the other dimension. And that other dimension is known as the deficiency. It happens to be our material universe here. “For what issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance. . .” So you see, he had no right, so to speak, to think he could plug back into the Father. He was arrogant to think that he could do so on his own. And I have renamed this presumptuous thought and arrogance, which arises quite a lot in descriptions in the Tripartite Tractate, that’s what I’m calling the ego as compared to the one true Self. The ego of the Aeons really is just their address. It’s their name, place, duties, how it is they relate to one another. But when it splits away from its Self, its one true Self and its connection with the Father, then it would be arrogant thought. It would be a disconnected ego. And that is what, in fact, happened to Logos. Logos allowed his ego to stray on its own and his arrogant thought brought about the Fall. His egoic output was deficient because it came from presumptuous thought and arrogance. And because of that, what was perfect in him left him. And again, that which was perfect was his big S Self, his true reflection of the Aeons of the Fullness. We all contain the Self. We all contain the Fullness. That part returned to its own, to the Aeons in the Fullness, and remained in the Fullness. And the fact that he had been saved from. . .  and those missing words,. . . I think those missing words have got to be the disaster of the Fall, or the outcome, or the consequences of the overreach, something like that. . . served for

  3. 01/06/2024

    Fractals of the Fullness–Our Ethereal Origin

    I’m not trying to hide the gnosis from you. I’m not trying to obscure the truth so that only the worthy can mine this gnosis. We are all born with this gnosis. We are all representations of the Fullness of God, and I think it’s my calling to share this gnosis with you and show you how you can mine your gnosis. The Tripartite Tractate from the Nag Hammadi is the book I’m using to do that, because it’s very straightforward. We are looking at not only cosmology of the ethereal realm, which means the study of the cosmos, but its a cosmogeny as well. And cosmogony means the beginnings of the cosmos. Cosmogeny is the study of the origins of our universe, and that’s what we’re doing here at Gnostic insights. The Gnosticism that I’m sharing with you here isn’t the obscure historical Gnosticism of the past. I’m attempting to bring it into our modern vernacular. And, if this is your first time joining us, it was very simple in the beginning. It started with a single concept—the consciousness we call the Father. And then it has rolled out steadily as the Father generates consciousness until it winds up with you and I talking here. Gnosis means knowing. And to be a gnostic means that you are one who knows. And the gnosis we are mining here at Gnostic Insights is taken from an ancient scripture, the Tripartite Tractate out of the Nag Hammadi codices. But more than that, I’m deriving a lot of this information through contemplation and direct communication with the Father and the Fullness of God. That is my claim, and that is something that every person can do. We are all given the ability to commune directly with the Father and with the Fullness above. What I’m attempting to do here on the Gnostic Insights podcast is to share the insights I’ve gained through reason and contemplation, and to explain some of the more obscure passages in the Nag Hammadi scriptures. As a Gnostic Christian, I find that these insights give a deeper understanding of our New Testament in the Holy Bible because much of this information was stripped out of the Holy Bible by the Nicene Council in the 300s AD under the direction of Pope Clement and Emperor Constantine. Those of us who are not Catholics are no longer subject to the Pope. And none of us are subject to the Emperor of Rome. Therefore, it seems to me that those of us who love the Father should have the freedom of mind and the freedom of personal will to decide for ourselves which extra-biblical scriptures are holy. And this you must arrive at through discernment and the Holy Spirits’ leading. If you have not developed the ability of discernment, then you can easily be led astray. Emperor Constantine For over ten years now, I have written a blog called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The Simple Explanation presents a secular theory of how the universe goes together. In a Simple Explanation, there are concepts such as fractals and the Simple Golden Rule that I have been explaining here as we go along because they help to illuminate this gnostic gospel. Thus far, we have explained the origins of the ethereal universe, beginning with the Father of consciousness and proceeding on through the Christ. We need to understand this entire run of the gnostic cosmology in order to understand the nature of human beings, because in Simple Explanation terms, we humans are fractal representations of the entirety of creation. This is the meaning of that expression: as above so below. The tree is a common symbol for this concept. So, as a tree is represented as the branches above ground, there is a reciprocal set of branches below ground, and those are called the roots. The same is true with us humans and all other Second Order Powers. We share the same values and structure of the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. Their nature is the same as our nature because we are their fruits. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. My Self’s unit of consciousness is sitting on top of a fractal galaxy of hierarchically arranged units of consciousness, all working together to instantiate my body. While I may believe I am the only conscious soul inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, and each unit of consciousness has their own job to perform. Each lives their own life and they all lay down their own karmic record. And this holds true even when the fractal is no more than a cell or an organ. Within my body, countless units of consciousness of varying levels of complexity work together to keep my body alive and fully functional. Whereas my Self unit of consciousness may appear a very long way off from the Father in the Pleroma, especially if I conceive of them outside of our very large universe, if I instead turn inward, I am as near to God as the center of all of my units of consciousness. This is a different way of interpreting the practices of centering and grounding. When ancient texts speak of God residing in the hearts of man, I look at that shared zero point field that is at the center of our fractal units of consciousness. Fractals are defined as fragmented geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each of which at least approximately is a reduced size copy of the whole. That is a property called self similarity because they appear similar at all levels of magnification. Fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex. What this means is that fractal iterations can extend infinitely. The simplest way to think about it in my mind is with broccoli. Have you noticed that you can hold that head of broccoli in your hand and you can peel off one of those flower heads of the broccoli and it looks very much like the broccoli flower that you were holding in the first place, only it’s much smaller. And then you can take that smaller piece and peel off another flower and it looks just like the previous one that you peeled off. You can do this broccoli exploration down to at least 7 iterations. In the end you have an extremely tiny little broccoli flowerette. So that’s what a fractal is. It’s a larger thing that can be reduced, reduced, reduced, reduced and each one of those reductions looks just like the piece you started out with, only smaller. And you can just keep splitting it off smaller and smaller and smaller. And if this were a purely mathematical fractal rather than a physical one like broccoli, you could go down or up through those fractal splits, pretty much infinitely. I’m suggesting that consciousness itself is fractal and the largest consciousness is the Father. The Father had a thought and it became the Son; that Son was the first fractal iteration of consciousness. The Son had a thought and it became the ALL, and that is the next fractal iteration. And then the ALL became self aware, and it turned into the Aeons of the Fullness of God. These Aeons of the Fullness sorted themselves into a hierarchy, giving themselves names, positions, places, powers, and duties, and we call this sorted Fullness the Hierarchy of the Fullness, or the Pleroma of God. The Aeons are fractals of the Son of God, and the Son is a singular expression that completely encapsulates the Father. The Aeons of the Fullness provide the Master Pattern of our inherited consciousness. The Father is unknowable because the Father is pure consciousness. The Father is illimitable—without limits, not confined to a shape or place. The Father is not walking round in robes with the long white beard. That is not the Father of the ALL. When Jesus said I and my Father are one, he’s not referring to the personified God known as Yahweh or Jehovah that walked through the Old Testament. That fellow’s name in Gnosticism is called the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the fallen ego of the Aeon named Logos. It was this egoic part of Logos that overreached and fell, resulting in this material plane. It is the Demiurge who created the heavens and the Earth. He is the chief Archon of the Cosmos. But he is most assuredly not the Father of the ALL, the Aeons, and the Christ. That Father is known in gnosticism as The God Above All Gods. It is said that after Logos fell he remembered the Aeons and the Father, and his better part quickly returned back to the Fullness. The Father drew a boundary around what was left behind of the broken Logos down below, and that boundary encloses our so-called material Universe. We humans are particular fractal emanations of the Pleroma of the newly restored Logos. We are Second Order Powers fruited down here to work within the material boundary, yet we are patterned directly from the consciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Pleroma. Because we are fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness, the rules and the descriptions of aeonic life apply to humans equally as well. This is again another example of as above, so below. So, when we hear or read about the nature of the Aeons, or the things that happen to the Aeons, such as the Fall and redemption of Logos, this happens to each and every one of us as well. Logos fell because he forgot his place and proper function in the Fullness. When Logos fled home to the ethereal Pleroma, Logos left behind the darkness and the shadows. The deficiency he left behind arose from his ego’s presumptuous thought and overreaching, because that’s what Logos was doing as he fell. When Logos fell, he left the Fullness. He was no longer in perfect harmony with the other Aeons of the Fullness. Logos went out on his own with his own project, and it was the ego that caused the Fall. And because of his presumptuous thought and his overreaching, now every one of the fractals that he gave rise to down below are the shadows and phantoms of the Fall, and they all overreach. They are all built on ego. Therefore, the imitation is characterized by this presumptuous thought and overreaching, combined with the inverted traits of Logos. Previously o

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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
See All (99)

About

Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained

Information

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

You Might Also Like