Gnostic Insights

Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.

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SPIRITUALITY
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Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained

03/09/2024

The 23rd Psalm

I’m going to read you some excerpts this morning from one of the listeners. She says a lot of people look at her as if she’s speaking Chinese when she talks about the things she’s learned. She says, “I don’t think the point is who is right versus wrong. But if we can come to a universal understanding that is about love, particularly the Father’s love, the Son’s love, and the Pleroma, the ALL and the Totalities—it’s all love.” And, indeed, it’s about rising above the memes, the particularities, to find the essence that is being conveyed, no matter what people are talking about. Is it love or is it anger and hate? That is a dichotomy. Is it life or is it ignorance and death? Those are dichotomies that cannot be overcome, because they are either/or. But as far as the particularities, those are not as important as where your heart lies. She says, “I see so many people who have podcasts, YouTube channels, and two week $300.00 classes that promise spiritual enlightening,” and it causes her to shake her head. “Other people seem to want to focus on things that don’t have much substance and then try to fill in the lines.” She asks me if there are any, “specific prayers that I would suggest to give glory to the Father, the Son, and the Pleroma. Are there specific prayers for that?” Well, I don’t have a particular litany of prayers. There are really only two prayers that I repeat pretty much daily. [Those two prayers are “The Lord’s Prayer,” and the 23rd Psalm.] Usually when I go to bed, or in the middle of the night if I wake up, if I say the 23rd Psalm, I immediately feel peaceful. It causes me to have a deep and relaxing breath when I’m beginning the very first stanza, and then I’m able to relax. I picture all of the events taking place in the 23rd Psalm, and then I often fall asleep before I even reach the end. So let me go ahead and recite the 23rd Psalm for you. And it’s a good one to memorize, because it’s pretty much all there and it’s very comforting. Here’s how it goes: The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I pass through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of my enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the House of the Lord forever. That’s the 23rd Psalm. And it’s not a ritualistic thing. It’s not a thing like repeat this 20 times in a certain cadence and all will be well with you. It’s more a matter of putting yourself into the place that’s being discussed. Picture yourself. So, when I say the 23rd Psalm to myself, I do think of myself as a sheep because it’s talking about the Good Shepherd. “The Lord is my shepherd.” So I picture Jesus looking like a shepherd and I’m one of the sheep lying down in the pastures. And it’s a beautiful pasture. I picture it in my mind. And I can stay there for a long time if I want to and look around the pasture at how beautiful it is. There’s a park near here that I call up in my mind because there’s a river that runs through it. And so the green pasture is at that park. And, “He leadeth me beside the still waters.” It’s peaceful water. It’s not a raging storm going on so that river is not flowing fast, but it’s very calm and wonderful. A good, safe place to bathe or to drink. And, symbolically, still waters represent calm. Calm emotions, not being in turmoil, but peaceful and calm. And it says, “He restoreth my soul.” So, whatever is bothering me or troubling me that happened during the day or that caused me to wake up in the night, there’s no need to lie there and to play it over in my mind. That is never helpful. That’s backward and down. You don’t want to replay bad things in the backward direction, which is history, and down, which is the demiurgic direction that stirs you up and makes you feel bad. So, “He restoreth my soul.” “He leadeth me down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” The paths of righteousness—another black and white choice is virtue or vice. We don’t dwell in the gray areas. Those cause turmoil. Those cause confusion. There isn’t any gray area between evil and righteousness. Evil is evil. Evil is a lack of knowledge, a lack of life and love. Evil is rooting for death and division. That is not a gray area. That is a bad area to wander through, so my Good Shepherd leads me down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Now, that sometimes used to throw me. What does this mean? Why am I going down paths of righteousness for his name’s sake and not for my sake? Because when we go down paths of righteousness, of course it’s onward and upward. It’s virtues. It’s dwelling on love, forgiveness, charity—the good side of the Ledger. But we are representatives of the Father. We are representatives of the Fullness of God. We represent here in this fallen plane the glorious Father above, and so it’s for His name’s sake that we reflect that righteousness because, well, first off, it’s for his sake he doesn’t want us to suffer. He doesn’t want us dwelling in the darkness. He wants us to walk with him. So it’s for his sake that we are with him. But it’s for our sake and it’s for the world’s sake because we’re reflecting the glory of God when we dwell in righteousness—when we spread love and not hate. When we’re kind and not angry. Then, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…” See a lot of the people who explain the Bible to us like to look backward at history. I’m not that much into history. I know a lot of you folks are, but there’s really no point in it for my life. I dwell in the here and now. The here and now is all that we have. The history, particularly the history of 500 years, 1000 years, 2000 years, 3000 years ago, that is not going to lift you. That doesn’t help you, does it? So when people talk about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, yes, there was this place that the Hebrews referred to near Jerusalem as the valley of the shadow of death, or whatever. That’s a fractal of the story. It’s not the story. It’s an archetypal vision of the shadow of death, but the actual valley of the shadow of death is the fallen world—is material existence. We live in the shadow of death. It overhangs us at all times. At any minute you can lose this material existence. And the great fear of death that people have is not knowing that we go on after this material existence passes away. That’s the fear of death. People are paranoid and neurotic about death, about fearing death. Particularly in the middle of the night. So, even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, which is this material body that we are yoked to, we need not fear it. We will “fear no evil” because, and now we switch from talking about ourselves walking through the valley or through the pastures and near the still waters, now we start talking to the Good Shepherd himself. “I will fear no evil for thou art with me.” And now we switch from whatever dark vision we had of the fear, get off of it, and turn around. That’s what repentance means. It means to turn around, turn around and face the Lord, turn around and face the Good Shepherd who’s taking care of the flock. Who’s taking care of us, me, the little sheep? The Good Shepherd is with us. He’s with us at all times, so I need not fear death. I need not fear passing away or the terrible things that happen to me in this valley of the shadow of death where we now dwell. Because “Thou art with me,” and now you’re establishing a relationship with the Christ, with the Good Shepherd. So we’re taking our eyes off of the valley and we’re looking at the shepherd. And he loves us. And it’s his job—it’s the shepherd’s job to care for the sheep and to lead us to safe places, and to protect us from the wolves that come to try to nab us. “For thou art with me,” and I’m looking right on the face of the Christ—right on the face of Jesus. Now, it says in the Tripartite Tractate that the Father has no countenance. Countenance is another word for face. The Father has no face. We cannot look directly upon the Father. He’s too large and inscrutable, and invisible, as a matter of fact. We can’t look upon the Father. But what can we look at? We can look upon the Son. We can look upon the Christ. We can look upon Jesus. He has a face. He’s a person. So it says, “For thou art with me,” and, looking upon the face of the Christ, now I’m talking to him. And now I’m feeling reassured, because I’m beholding the Christ; I’m beholding the glory. And then it says, “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” So then I had to think about, well, what does this mean? Thy rod and thy staff? Well, it turns out that shepherds carry two instruments with them. They carry a rod and a staff. OK, I think we’re more familiar with the Shepherd’s staff, right? That’s that long tall stick with a crook on the end of it. And the shepherd can use that staff for rescuing sheep that have fallen in a hole, for rescuing lambs, pulling them out of places he puts the crook around them and pulls them out. He can use that long staff to corral the herd, to keep them from falling over a cliff or keep them from going into a dangerous place or into a ditch. So he uses the staff to help guide us and protect us and rescue us. So what’s the rod? Well, the rod is a weapon. The rod is a heavy stick. It’s like a billy club that he wears, and he pulls it out when he nee

28 min
03/16/2024

The Gnostic Lord’s Prayer

Last week I started reading a letter from a podcast listener and I didn’t get very far. I got as far as the 23rd Psalm basically, and that was it, right? So last week I said there were two prayers that I pray. She asked what prayers do I engage in and how can I give honor to the Father, the Son, and the Fullness in those prayers. So, the other prayer that I say daily or nightly, if I’m going to bed or if I wake up in the middle of the night, is what’s called the Lord’s Prayer. And technically that’s from chapter six of the book of Matthew. I prefer reciting the Lord’s Prayer in King James language because I think it’s beautiful. So I’ll first let you hear what it sounds like in King James, and then we’ll look at a more modern translation and talk about the energy and the flow and whatnot of the prayer. This prayer was suggested by Jesus as he was talking to his disciples and they asked him, how should we pray? Same question as the listener’s. And he said this: “After this manner therefore, pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen. That’s the way I learned it as a kid, and I really like the poetic nature of the Ye’s and the Thou’s and whatnot, so that’s why I speak that way in prayer. But it isn’t necessary, and it’s not even necessary to use these exact words. There are many New Testament translations now, and they all have slightly different takes on exactly which words to use, but the meaning is always the same. And remember, it’s not the particular words that we use with each other. It’s the meaning behind them that’s important. The meta level means to step up and see what is being communicated. It’s not the particularities of memes themselves. Here’s the most modern translation that I know of, and that is David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament. And his is a fresh translation of the New Testament, not reworking old translations like most Bibles are, but he actually went to the original Greek and retranslated it in the most precise manner he could. And this is what David Bentley Hart’s version sounds like. Our Father, who are in the heavens, let your name be held holy; Let your Kingdom come; Let your will come to pass, as in heaven so also upon earth; Give us today bread for the day ahead; And excuses our debts, just as we have excused our debtors; And do not bring us to trial, but rescue us from him who is wicked. [For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory unto the ages.] Now again, I’ve noticed that the word ages in these translations can also be translated as Aeons, and I think of Aeons as units of consciousness, not as units of time. So when it says, For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory unto the ages, in my own mind, I think For yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory unto the Aeons. And finally, we’re pulling the Aeons and the Fullness of God into the prayers, because they’re usually left out. Note, in this Gnostic Christianity, the Fullness is an actual entity. It’s a location where the Aeons live. And the Aeons are infinite in number because they are expressions of the Son of God, and the Son is infinite in scope, power, and size. So it stands to reason that the particularities of the Son of God would also be infinite. So, the Fullness of God is where they live. That’s what it means to be the Fullness of God—the place where the Aeons dwell. And the Fullness and the Son and the what’s called the Totalities of the ALL, which are like the parents of the Aeons, they are coexistent; they’re equal in scope and power with the Son. Normally in Christianity, the Fullness of God is just used as a an adverbial expression of how great and big and grand God is. But it’s actually quite a bit more than that. It’s a description of all the individual traits of the Son of God. OK, let’s go back for a minute and talk about prayer. Jesus said, “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.” And that’s what makes them hypocrites, because they’re actually looking for recognition and brownie points from other people. He goes on to say, “Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.” That is, from the other people, the brownie points. “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” And I think of the Father not as this big eye in the sky who watches everything that everybody does. The Father is within us because we all carry the Fullness of God inside of us. So the Father is as close to us as we are standing here. We wear this body on us and we also wear the Fullness of God within all the parts of our body. That is how the Father sees us. He’s inside of us. He sees everything because he’s going along with us. We take him along with us everywhere we go. Continuing, Jesus says, “Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like the pagans do, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.” So the idea of having to repeat, to sit and repeat and repeat and repeat, as monks do in various religions, to sit all day and repeat the same prayers out loud, hundreds and thousands of times—that isn’t necessary. Jesus says do not be like them, “For your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” And personally I am not what’s called a prayer warrior. Some Christians call themselves prayer warriors, and they are moved to pray for people constantly. And that, I suppose, is a good thing because it’s a method of expressing love. But Jesus said your Father knows what you need before you ask him. So asking him over and over and over for these things doesn’t help. I think what the prayer for other people does is it helps you focus that the answer will come to them from the Father above. And it opens you up to see if there’s some way that you can help the Father bring it into practice here on Earth. The simplest prayer would simply be, “Thank you for the Christ. May Christ’s will be done.” That’s all you need to say because the Christ knows what everybody needs. OK. So let’s look at what I’m thinking when I’m going through the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” Hallowed means separate because of glory. It’s a hallowed place that only the Father occupies, because the Father is so infinitely glorious, we can’t even begin to imagine it. And it says in the Tripartite Tractate, as it says throughout the Bible, that we cannot look upon the face of God the Father, the God Above All Gods, because he’s too great. In the Tripartite Tractate it says anyone looking upon him would be annihilated. And that goes for the Aeons and the angels as well as us down here below. The only one that can look upon the face of the God Above All Gods, the origin of consciousness, is the Son. And that’s because the Son is an encapsulation in a monad form of the Father’s traits, but it’s a particularity—an infinitely large, particularly. And also when we say, “Our Father in heaven,” in the Tripartite Tractate it says that we have the God Above All Gods as the ultimate Father of consciousness—that’s where the consciousness begins and that’s where it resides, and the Son is his offspring. That’s why it’s called the Son. And let me remind you that the only reason we use a male designation of Father and Son is because it has to do with the direction of the energetic flow. The male is the outward projection of the flow. The female is the receptive projection of the flow. So the Father and the Son are male figures. The Cosmos is a female figure because it receives the emanations of the Son. But as soon as the Son was formed, being in the exact image of the Father, he also became a Father. And he gave birth to the Totalities. And so it says in the Tripartite Tractate that as soon as the Son was formed, he also became a Father. So we are emanations of the Son of God and then we are emanations of the Fullness of God, because this consciousness is coming downstream to us. So, the listener’s original question was, “How can we pray to the Fullness of God and the Aeons?” When we pray to the Father, it’s not only to the God Above All Gods. The Father also includes the Son who has become a Father. We don’t pray to individual Aeons. The Aeon that we can pray to directly would be the Christ. So we pray to the God Above All Gods and his designate, which is the Son who also is called Father, and then we can pray to the Christ because it’s his job to help us. The rest of the Aeons have other jobs—they’ve got tons of other jobs, including the way physics and chemistry runs, and the way cells work in our bodies and how bodies go together and all of the things that make up the living creatures of the Earth. Those are particularities of those particular Aeons–Aeons in charge of blood, Aeons in charge of personalities, Aeons in charge of everything. The Christ puts it all together. So the Aeon that we can pray to is the Christ, and the Christ is represented by Jesus in Christianity. You can pray directly to the Christ, or you can pray to Jesus if you like to personify Jesus, as many of us do. And I’m thinking that in that Hart’s version of the Lord’s Prayer that I read you, it started by saying, “Our Father, who are in the heavens, let your name be held holy.” That’s a plural, isn’t it? Who are? And so I’m thinki

26 min
03/23/2024

Is the Gnostic Son of God the same as the Biblical Son of God

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I would like to compare the Son from the Bible to the Son of the Tripartite Tractate. A couple of days ago, I was listening to a radio preacher who was railing against people like me and you who are trying to understand Christianity in its most fundamental sense—the original Christianity of the first 300 years after Jesus talked about himself and the Father and Heaven. I want you to realize that the last thing I want to be is a “false prophet” or a “false teacher.” And, of course, that’s what he was railing against. And he said that the only way you can be sure that you’re not falling into heresy and going to hell is if you follow Orthodox Christianity as presented in the Bible. So, I thought it would be interesting to look at a very important passage in the New Testament that talks about the Son of God, and to compare the Son of God of the New Testament to the Son of God of ancient Christian, what we could call, Gnosticism. But I think it was actual Christianity before the Pope and the Emperor of Rome changed it to become a means of wielding power and keeping the people under their control. Well, if you’ve listened to many of the episodes here at Gnostic Insights or to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack, you will see that some of the terms that we use, although they sound like the same exact terms, have different meanings. And this was something else that the radio preacher pointed out—Oh, don’t believe them when they talk about the Son or the Christ or God the Father, because that isn’t the God, the Christ, and the Son that we know, he said. And that’s the tragedy of the situation, because there is only one originating source. There is only one Father by definition, and I often talk about that. The Son in this Gnostic Christianity that I’m presenting is the first encapsulation or the first breakout. It’s the first emanation of the Father. The Father, it says in the Tripartite Tractate, stretched himself out, and it was this stretching out that is the Son that made a space for the heavens and the cosmos and the Earth and all of creation to unfold. Here’s what it says in the Tripartite Tractate, part one, verse 64. It says, “The Father, in accordance with his exalted position over the Totalities”… let’s stop here a minute before we go further. The Totalities are also called the Aeons of the Aeons. The Totalities, what I generally call the ALL, and I use capital letters to show that this is a particular type of entity; it’s not just a word like the totality of God. No, the Totality, the Totalities, the ALL, is the Son’s complete Self. He wears them like a cloak and they wear him like a cloak. They are, in other words, coexistent. Just like yourself, if someone sees you and they say, Oh, there’s Mary, right? Well, Mary’s not just a big giant thing. Just like the Son isn’t just the Son. When you see Mary, you see she has brown hair and she is a 5 feet tall and she it looks like this, she has two arms, two legs. She’s got all of this within her. That’s the Totality of Mary. So, Mary’s right foot would be one of the Totalities of Mary. You see what I’m trying to say? So, the Totalities of the Son is a place and it’s an entity, and they all are together in one unity. As the Son is a unity, the Totalities are the Son’s unity, although they’re all broken out and distinguished. But they don’t realize themselves because they sit in perfect coexistence with the Son, who is a unity. So, back to reading from the Tripartite Tractate. It says, “The Father, in accordance with his exalted position over the Totalities, being an unknown and incomprehensible one, has such greatness and magnitude, that, if he had revealed himself suddenly, quickly, to all the exalted ones among the Aeons who had come forth from him, they would have perished.” So, the Father couldn’t reveal himself in all of his greatness, because they would just burst. They would explode because they can’t fit him in. So the Father always held back his true incomprehensibility. He held it back because the Totalities and Aeons could not comprehend it. He held it back in order to protect them. It says, “if he had revealed himself suddenly, quickly, to all the exalted ones among the Aeons and those of the Totalities who had come forth from him, they would have perished. Therefore, he withheld his power and his inexhaustibility within that in which he is.” And we’re talking about the Father. What is, that in which the Father is? because the Father is everything. He’s the ground state, so he can’t reside in something else. Nothing came before him. He doesn’t exist within something. But what has all the Father in it? That’s the Son. That’s the encapsulation. That’s the monad. That’s the bucket dipped into the sea of consciousness. The bucket is the Son. Inside the bucket it’s the same exact character of God the Father, but it’s in a place now. It’s inside the bucket. It’s still infinitely large because there is no space. There’s no distance, there’s no measurability. It’s all infinite to us, but it’s in a particular place. It’s now what’s called a monad, and that is the Son. It goes on to say, “The Father is ineffable and unnameable and exalted above every mind and every word. This one, [the Father], however, stretched himself out, and it was that which he stretched out, which gave a foundation and a space and a dwelling place for the universe, a name of his being the one through whom, since he is the Father of the ALL, out of his laboring for those who exist, having sown into their thought that they might seek after him.” And, stopping here, a moment earlier in the Tripartite it says that although the ALL, the Totalities of the ALL, could not grasp the Father because he was too great for them to grasp, the Father left in them, through a seed sown in their thoughts, that they should seek after the Father, that they should seek after the one who created them; that they should look for the consciousness from which they came. So, even though they weren’t given the ability to grasp it, they were given the desire to find it. And that’s what keeps the Totalities constantly looking towards the Father and glorifying the Father, even though they can’t see the Father. They know he’s out there and they’re giving him glory. It goes on to say, “The abundance of their” (and there’s a missing word, but I think the missing word is probably the abundance of their love or the abundance of their praise) “consists in the fact that they understand that he exists and in the fact that they ask what it is that was existing.” Now we’re switching to talk about the Son: “The one that was given to them for enjoyment and nourishment and joy and an abundance of illumination, which consists in his fellow laboring, his knowledge, and his mingling with them, that is the one who is called, and is in fact, the Son, since he is the Totalities and the one of whom they know both who he is and that it is he who clothes.” Because I often say the Son wears the ALL and the ALL wears the Son as clothing, as skin; they’re co-existent. They’re together. And so, therefore, the Son labors alongside the ALL because he clothes them, just like our skin labors alongside us because it “clothes” us. The Tripartite goes on to say, “This is the one who is called Son and of whom they understand that he exists and they were seeking after him. This other is the one who exists as Father and as the one about whom they cannot speak, and the one of whom they do not conceive. This is the one who first came into being.” So you see, the difference between the Father and the Son, even though the Son is made up of exactly the same stuff as the Father, is that the Son is conceivable, he is knowable by the Totalities of the ALL because he’s with them. He’s walking with them. The Father they don’t know, but they know he’s out there and they love him anyway. The ALL don’t know the Father because they can’t know the Father. He’s too big. They know the Son because they can know the Son. So, speaking now of the Father, the Tripartite Tractate goes on to say, “It is impossible for anyone to conceive of him or think of him. Or can anyone approach there, toward the exalted one, toward the pre-existent in the proper sense? But all the names conceived or spoken about him are presented in honor, as a trace of him,” (and in another place in the Tripartite it likens the trace to an aroma, to a beautiful fragrance. It’s like you can smell the bread baking; you don’t see the bread baking, but you can smell it, so you know it’s there. In the same way, the Totalities metaphorically smell the trace of the Father’s beautiful fragrance.) “But all the names conceived or spoken about him are presented in honor, as a trace of him, according to the ability of each one of those who glorify him.” Father is the ground state of consciousness–the black background; Son first monad of consciousness–the cloud emerging from the background; the ALL is the Son’s constituent sub-selves, co-existent with the Son–the starburst; the ALL becomes self-aware and sorts itself into the hierarchy of the Fullness–the Pleroma; the Fullness dreams of Paradise And again, those who glorify him—those are the Totalities. Those are the Aeon of the Aeons. So, this is before the next emanation, the next generation. These are the Totalities of the ALL. This is not the Fullness of God. These are the Totalities of the ALL—it’s a different place. Then it goes on to say, “Now he who arose from him when he stretched himself out for begetting and for knowledge on the part of the Totalities,” (again, the Father wants to be known, so he’s stretching himself out). “He,” and now we’re talking of the Son, and there

25 min
03/29/2024

Gnostic Easter—He and We Are Risen!

The Son, The Christ, and Jesus Explained Welcome back to Gnostic Insights, and Happy Easter! Last week, we spoke about the characteristics of the Son of God and whether the Son of the Gnostic faith is the same as the Son of the Christian faith. And my answer was, Yes, definitely it is, and Well, there are some differences. You may wish to back up to last week’s episode to listen to that in-depth discussion of the Gnostic Son compared to the Christian Son. Today, we’re going to look at some of those differences. And then, stay tuned until the end of this episode for an Easter message from me to you. Now, when the scriptures say that the Son is “the only begotten Son of the Father,” this means that the Son is the only consciousness to have emerged directly from the Father. All other units of consciousness emanate from the Son. The Tripartite Tractate says, “Just as the Father exists in the proper sense, the one before whom there was no one else and the one apart from whom there is no other unbegotten one, so too the Son exists in the proper sense, the one before whom there was no other and after whom no other Son exists. Therefore, he is a first born and an only one. First born because no one exists before him, and only Son because no one is after him.” That’s from verse 57 of the Tripartite Tractate. And, because he carries all of the characteristics of the Father, as soon as the Son emanated from within the Father, the Son began to generate offspring of his own. And so the Son became a Father. And the immediate generation of the Son is called the Totalities of the ALL, which are coexistent with the Son. And then the Totalities gave glory to the Father and the Son, and in their giving of glory they generated their own emanations. And those are called the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And these Aeons of the Fullness became self aware, and they sorted themselves into a hierarchy based upon position, rank, duties, or jobs. They all had names, so therefore they had an ego. Each Aeons has an ego, whereas the Totalities have no ego—their consciousness is entirely subsumed to the Son. And the Aeons continued to generate more emanations of the Spirit of God. When the Aeons look upon each other with love and devotion, and the Father and the glory reflected through them, their union produces another Aeon, and that’s how Aeons procreate—have babies, so to speak. The Third Glory that is the offspring of the Aeons, “was produced in accordance with the free will and the power they had been born with, enabling them to give glory in unison, while at the same time independently of one another according to the will of each.” That’s verse 69 of the Tripartite. So the Fullness of God is not just a one and done thing. They continue to emanate units of consciousness called the Third Glory. Now, in the cosmogeny or cosmology of Gnostic Christianity, the original Christianity, the Aeons continued to produce their own generation of offspring until all combinations, all possible, infinite combinations, of Aeons were produced. The final Aeon was named Logos, and he carried fractal images of all the other Aeons of the Fullness of God. He was a package, a fractal package, of the entire Fullness. And here is when we have the Fall. When Logos tried to reunite with the Father and produce the world—produce the Paradise that they had all been dreaming of—all by himself, without the Fullness because he could do it. He had all of the characteristics. But instead, he fell because it was unauthorized. The other Fullnesses were not joined in giving glory with him, and so the Fall produces our material existence here, down below. And then, once he fell, Logos split into two and what’s called the best part of Logos—that would be his one true Self that reflects the Fullness—fled back up into the Fullness and his ego stayed behind. The ego of the fallen Aeon did not remember the Fullness, did not remember the Father, or the Son. Didn’t remember anything that came before. That’s why the Demiurge is called the amnesiac God. He did, however, still contain all of the patterns and blueprints for Paradise, but without the life and love flowing down through the Son, through the Father, into him. That is why the material is dense and heavy. It’s not ethereal anymore. It has heft and weight to it, and we can’t pass through objects because we are no longer ethereal. I say we, but we haven’t been created yet. We are called the Second Order of Powers. The Fullnesses are the First Order of Powers. The Aeons and Logos together prayed for a solution for this dense and heavy Paradise down below that was being formed and run by the Demiurge without any life or love. And so, we were created. All living creatures and all of our soft, squishy, meaty parts were created in order to be carriers of the consciousness of the Father, because the Demiurge had forgotten about it. The ultimate aim at that point was to bring love and life to the Demiurge, so he would remember the Fullness above. And so, all of the Second Order Powers, “from the smallest to the largest,” the Tripartite Tractate says, were sent down into this world. And we’re in that process right now. We’re still in that stage of creation. We’re supposed to be carrying love and life and harmony and the Golden Rule of cooperation down here. But, instead, we get all jammed up with the material, and then we begin fighting with each other and we begin fighting with the Demiurge rather than showing love, and forgiveness, and compassion. And so that’s what’s called the never-ending war. We can’t seem to get out of fighting and start to loving instead. So another solution was required. And that next solution in Gnostic Christianity is called the Son. In most of Christianity, it is the Christ. The Christ is not exactly the same as the Son of God. In conventional Christianity, they have conflated the Son of God with the Christ and then with Jesus. They’ve put all three of these separate individuals into one unit. But we would say that the Son is the original monad out of the Father, from whence all consciousness emanates. But the Christ—he’s something else. We Second Order Powers are the children of the Aeons. We are representations of the living images above. We’ve not been abandoned down here below, for, a new agreement among the Son, the Fullnesses, and Logos gave rise to a Third Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the Aeons of the Fullness. We’re the Second Order of Powers. The Third Order of Powers is the Christ. And the Christ was created by the Son, the Fullnesses, and Logos altogether, in order to come and rescue us. The Third Order Powers are the Pleroma of the Christ that comes from the ethereal plane to rescue us, and along with us, the Demiurge, since we Second Order Powers were not able to pull it off. So, the Totalities of the ALL and the Aeons of the Fullness of God—those are two different entities–they both constitute the Pleroma of the Son-who-has-become-a-Father, the original Son. And Aeon stepped up joyously and willingly, it says, with the thought of being helpful to the deficient ones by bringing awareness of the Father’s glory and love to us. The Tripartite Tractate says, “Then, from the harmony in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father,” (that is, the face of the Father), “of whom the Aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother, with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus it was willingly and gladly that they bring forth the fruit.” That’s verse 86. And, this new fruit is the Christ. The Pleroma of the Christ is the Third Order of Powers, endowed with more capabilities than the First and Second Orders, because the Christ embodies the entirety of the ALL and the particularity of the consciousness of each of the individual Aeons of the Fullness, along with the full power of the Holy Spirit and the Son’s entire knowledge and remembrance of the ethereal plane. Through this “agreement,” (it’s called the agreement), the Third Order of Powers is fully equipped to bring remembrance and redemption to the Second Order Powers living in this fallen world, as well as to the Demiurge. And, this is cool—listen to this from verse 87. “Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father,” (and by the way, countenance means face and the originating consciousness, what we call the Father, has no face. He’s that illimitable, invisible entity that has no face. But the Son has a face. So when they say that—the Father’s countenance—that is always speaking of the Son, because the Father does not have a countenance, he is invisible. But the Son does have a face, a countenance.) So, it says, “Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise,” (which is the Son) “which was written previously, but they also generated their own; for the Aeons who give Glory generated their countenances and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony.” I take this to mean that there is a Third Order Power for each and every Second Order Power. And there’s a Second Order Power for each and every shadow of the original Fall. Each Third Order Power has the face of the Aeons as well as the face of the Son—the Father to whom they gave praise. “They came in a multifaceted form in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help.” And this is why Christians have such a personal relationship with Jesus, because they see the face of Jesus—the countenance of Jesus—in the Christ, but they also s

23 min
04/06/2024

Spirit, Mind, Body: Spirit down, mud up

Earlier this week I was a guest on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio and was interviewed by Miguel Conner about my new book—A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. The interview was about an hour and a half—very extensive. So, I hope that you will catch it. It’s on YouTube, but he’s also posted it to audio-only podcast platforms. The name of the episode on Aeon Byte was The Gnostic Myth Simplified. So that’s what you would look for. This week we’re going to look at the three-part nature of humankind, as presented by the Tripartite Tractate. We humans and all other creatures are called the second order of powers. The first order of powers are the Aeons of the Fullness, and we are their fruit. We have a three-part nature. This is why it’s called the Tripartite Tractate: tripartite, meaning three parts, tractate, book. It’s not just because this book is divided into three sections, which it happens to be, but it is because it describes the three-part nature of God, the three-in-one, and we humans are fractals of that tripartite system. And, by the way, I talk a lot about fractals in that Aeon Byte interview. The first part of our nature is our version of the monad of the Father, the Son, what is called our Self, with the big S. Self is what we call it here at Gnostic Insights; other people often refer to that as your spiritual aspect. The second part of the 3-part structure is called the psychical, our association with the Aeons of the Fullness, because we are representations of the Aeons of the Fullness; we are fractals of them. The psychical part is our psychological nature. It’s the part of us that thinks. Our third part is associated with the ego of Logos after the Fall. And our third part is the material level—the hylic. So, reading from the Tripartite Tractate, “To those who belong to the remembrance…” and those are the second order powers, because we are of the good thought, the remembrance, whereas the material world is of the presumptuous thought—the Fall. The material world is based upon egoic strivings of Logos in particular, and we all carry that ego forward through our material aspect, and so that’s why it’s called “those of the presumptuous thought,” because it was presumptuous of Logos to think that he could reach the Father and reunite without the Fullness. So, the presumptuous thought is the material level, whereas “those of the remembrance” is the psychical, or psychological level—our thinking, our thoughts and the fact that we can remember that there is a Father above. We remember we were pre-existent consciousness because we are all of the remembrance. But, of course, we forget it. We get all tangled up with the material and we forget our higher nature. Again, “To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material.” So let’s think about that sentence. We second order powers, we humans in particular, we belong to the remembrance, and all of the second order powers belong to the remembrance. The flowers remember the Father, the dogs and cats remember the Father. All the creatures on Earth, even the cells of your body, remember that we come from the Fullness and from the Father, because we all have to remember in order to instantiate the Golden Rule of cooperation, and it is cooperation that builds our bodies up from single celled, fertilized eggs, all the way up to whatever creatures we become. That’s the remembrance of the Father. So, we second order powers belong to the Father, but we also belong to Logos because we’re fractals of Logos himself. And, remember, Logos himself was a fractal of the Fullness of God, so he was already one iteration down from the entire Fullness. And we are a second iteration down because we’re fractals of Logos and the Fullness down here below. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God dreams of Paradise. Logos crowns the hierarchy and contains fractals of all the other Aeons. “He revealed the thought of that which he had stripped from himself…” And what is that thought that he had stripped from himself? It’s his ego, it’s his presumptuous thought. Logos, after the Fall, finds himself down here below in another dimension and he goes, what the heck did I do? He then stripped himself of the imitations of the likenesses. And the imitations of the likeness are imitations of the Fullness; imitations of the broken open fractals that Logos carried within him when he Fell into this dimension. That’s why they’re called imitations; they’re not true fractals. They’re the shadows, the imitations, the phantoms of those fractals that Logos carried along with him. He stripped himself of the presumptuous thought. That presumptuous thought was his over-reaching ego. He left that behind and Logos, “the best part of him,” that would be his noble thought, that would be his representations of all the images of the Fullness of God—his true Self—he fled back up to the Fullness. He deserted the material plane and retreated back to the ethereal plane to go back home to his brethren in the Fullness of God. Quoting the sentence again, “To those who belong to the remembrance.” That’s us. “He,” that’s Logos, “revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself.” So he gave us the egos. When we second order powers came down, we came not only with the good thoughts of the Fullness of God, but we came down with the presumptuous thought that Logos had peeled off of himself, that being his over-reaching ego. And that is why we have both the higher Self and we have an egoic structure, the ego. Our ego is a reflection of the Fall. All of the Aeons, the first order of powers, also have egos. But their egos are simply their position, place, name, rank, and duties. It’s the thing that defines them as individuals, and their relationship with neighbors. Down here below, our egos also reflect the over-reaching, presumptuous thought, and that’s how we second order power egos differ from the first order power egos. It’s not just who we are—our sense of identity—it’s also a drive for power, a striving to be on top. “He revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention…” So why did he do that? Why did Logo saddle us with that ego? “… with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material.” If we didn’t have the ego making us want to cling to these material bodies, to this material instantiation, we wouldn’t have been able to meld ourselves to the material world. Our bodies are made up of the mud from the bottom up. Our bodies, the hard parts of our bodies, the subatomic particles, the particles, the atoms and the molecules, that is the material part of the Demiurge. That is demiurgic. It’s not evil, it’s just material, whereas up above it’s ethereal. And it was given to in order for us to be able to stick the landing when we are born here into the world when we exit the ethereal plane and are literally born into this material world. All living creatures carry the consciousness and love of the Father into this material dimension. You know, we begin at the cellular level. Life comes in at the cellular level. The Demiurge has the power from the mud up through the molecules. But the creatures, living creatures, all living creatures, from the bacteria on up—all the soft, squishy parts that coat the hard, rocky parts—that is the second order of powers. That is “those of the remembrance” at conception, coming in to that molecular level, coming on top of it and then through the pattern of the Fullness above, as directed by Logos, because we are the actual fractals of Logos, not the fallen fractals of the Demiurge. All living things bring consciousness and love into the Fallen world at conception. Our consciousness flows from the top down; not from the molecules up. The Fallen fractals of the ego of Logos is the material level only, but we of the remembrance, the psychical, that is the psychological, the thought-filled part—we come from the top down. So material is from the bottom up and it is demiurgic, but life and consciousness and love is from the top down. And that is aeonic—in particular, coming through the fractal of Logos. So, all of the variabilities of life, even our very structure, when the material to which my psychical part is melded begins to develop from that original zygote and then becomes a creature, it is the Hierarchy of the Fullness, it’s the patterns of the Hierarchy. It’s the consciousness of the Fullness of God coming along through, right down through our cellular level, and that’s what builds us up. It is indeed a form of intelligent design, and the intelligence is in Fullness, and we are brought up above the molecular level, at the cellular level on up, forming ourselves, forming our organ systems, forming our organisms, even then forming our communities outside of our bodies, our larger communities. It’s all according to the Simple Golden Rule, which is how the Aeons work. And this also reminds me of Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenic fields. And the morphogenetic field that forms us comes in with that first spark of life from the Fullness, and then we grow into what we already were designed to be. It’s there from the beginning; we grow up into it. Kind of like the air filling a balloon and pushing it out into its full balloon shape. The Simple Golden Rule We reach out to others at the living level to hold hands through free will and we cooperate with each other to build something bigger and better than ourselves. We come in as that single-cell and we have to build ourselves up into these organisms, and we do that by holding hands with others like ourselves and sharing information, sharing physical assist

25 min
04/13/2024

In the Origin, there was Logos

Greetings, and welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I imagine that some people who tune into this broadcast or read my writing, when they see the word Gnostic, they’re hoping it’s going to be more exotic than it turns out to be, because there are many ancient myths and stories that are labeled as Gnostic and Gnostic scriptures that don’t much resemble what is taught in the Judeo-Christian line of religions. But when you read the New Testament afresh with this new translation by David Bentley Hart, you see that many of the phrases and concepts that we’ve become accustomed to in the standard translations of the Bible are not entirely accurate to the original ancient Greek writing. The New Testament as recently translated by David Bentley Hart sounds very much like the Tripartite Tractate in its speech and in its allegories. Hart has translated the New Testament afresh from the ancient Greek without reference to what we have come to believe the words mean—doctrinal expectations, you could say. Quoting from his preface, he says, “The relation between Christian theology and scriptural translation has a long and complicated history; theology has not only influenced translation, but particular translations have had enormous consequences for the development of theology (it would be almost impossible, for instance, to exaggerate how consequential the Latin Vulgate’s inept rendering of a single verse, Romans 5:12, proved for the development of the Western Christian understanding of original sin).” He says that, “In the end, even the most conscientious translations tend at certain crucial junctures to use language determined as much by theological and dogmatic tradition as by the plain meaning of the words on the page.” He says that what happens as a consequence often verges on a kind of “pious fraudulence.” So, in this translation, he has elected to produce an “almost pitilessly literal translation.” Many of his departures from received practices are Hart’s efforts to “make the original text as visible as possible, through the palimpsest of its translation.” Palimpsest? I paused a moment to look up palimpsest, and it means something reused or altered, but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form. This morning I want to share with you some important passages out of the New Testament from Hart’s translation, which demonstrates the compatibility between this Gnostic Christianity that I talk about, and more conventional Christianity, although few people have noticed or care to draw these similarities. So let’s begin with a passage from John, chapter one, verses 1-6. And, it’s a very familiar passage for us. It usually reads, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Well, the actual Word is Logos, and we talk about Logos a lot here. And so it reads like this: “In the origin, there was the Logos and the Logos was present with GOD.” And, by the way, when Hart is referring to the highest character of God—The God Above All Gods, as we would say—he uses GOD in all capital letters. And when he refers to God in the more usual way that we refer to God—the God that is involving itself in our human existence—it’s god or God. And those differences are all indicated in the original Greek, but they don’t ever translate through into our modern Bibles. So, “In the origin there was the Logos and the Logos was present with GOD (the God Above All Gods) and the Logos was god.” God meaning, then, that the Logos incorporated all of the attributes of the God Above All Gods, but in a place in a particularity. Going on, “This one was present with GOD (the God Above All Gods) in the origin. All things came to be through him (Logos) and without him came not a single thing that has come to be. In him was life and this life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it.” Carrying on, “It was the true light which illuminates everyone, that was coming into the cosmos. He was in the cosmos, and through him the cosmos came to be. And the cosmos did not recognize him. He came to those that were his own, and they who were his own did not accept him. But as many as did accept him, to them, he gave the power to become GOD’s children (the God Above All Gods’ children)—to those having faith in his name. Those born not from blood, nor from a man’s desire, but of GOD. And the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of the Father’s only one, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:9-14.) Now, of course, this is usually meant to refer to Jesus Christ coming to Earth in fleshly form. And that “he came to those who were his own” is usually thought to mean to the Jews, but the Jews did not recognize him as the Messiah and did not accept him. And, in conventional Christianity, “but as many of the Jews that did accept him, he gave the power to become the originating source’s children, (the God Above All God’s children), to those having faith in his name.” That name generally is considered to be Jesus. “Logos became flesh” (that is being born into the human body) “and pitched a tent among us.” (He came to dwell with us, but not permanently, so he didn’t build a cathedral; he didn’t build a synagogue, but rather he just pitched a tent because he wasn’t going to be here that long.) “And we saw his glory, glory as of the Father’s only one, full of grace and truth.” Now, in the sense that we often talk about here, all of these truths that we speak are fractals, and they all begin above in the ethereal realm. That’s where the grand fractals, the archetypal stories, are written and dreamed of by the Aeons. And they are played out over and over again, down here on Earth. So we can take the story that comes to Earth—the story of Jesus coming to his own and his own not knowing him—but we can also back that story back up. We can go upstream with it, back into the Fullness. So let’s look at this John 1:9-14 again in that sense. Logos was the true light which illuminates everyone that was coming into the cosmos. Well, we realize from our Gnostic myth, that Logos fell out of the Fullness and it was the falling out that traversed into a new dimension, this material dimension. And so he came into the cosmos, and the cosmos is down here. The cosmos is what was formed after the Fall. So, Logos was in the cosmos and through Logos, the Cosmos came to be. And we call that the result of the Fall. “But the Cosmos did not recognize him.” So here is that familiar story where Logos falls, he breaks open, and this material cosmos rolls out of them and does not recognize that it came from Logos. The Tripartite Tractate says that Logos was horrified at the things that came out of him and they refused to recognize him. They did not see him. They went their own way. So that’s a description of the Fall—that was his own that did not accept him. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God dreams of Paradise. Logos crowns the hierarchy and contains fractals of all the other Aeons. Logos stumbles and Falls while reaching for Glory. Fallen Logos splats into a lower dimension, creating our material cosmos. The small fractals that once formed the pleroma of Logos lost themselves during the Fall and rolled out into chaos. So, what was existent just immediately prior to the Fall? This is where I’ve put together, so forgive me if I am taking license here, but I’ve put together that Logos, who was himself a fractal of the Fullness of God, remember, was sitting right up there on top of the hierarchy of God (so he is a small hierarchy consisting of fractals of all the originating Aeons). What existed then, just prior to his overreach, prior to the Fall? Well, there’s Logos. There’s his fractals. OK, those are those of his own. They are part of his sub- selves. And then he also had his name, Logos. He had his position at the top of the hierarchy—his place. He had his duty, which was to replicate the Fullness as a Whole. And his job was to be the head, the capstone, of the Fullness of God. So that is what existed. And, splitting them out from the fractals that he contains within his body, which are true fractal replications, (and, we can say in this newspeak that we like to do, of the formula of the Fullness of God). All of the Fullnesses were contained within Logos, but one fractal iteration down, removed. So that is what belonged to him. And it was his position, place, and name, and job that was his identifier, right? His name—his identifier. What do you do for a living? Well, I’m the capstone of the Fullness of God. That’s his ego. That’s his identity, his egoic identity. So, what Logos consisted of just prior to the Fall was the fractal iterations of all the formulas of the Fullness of God and his ego designation of who he was and what he was. When that fell, in the Gnostic tradition of the Tripartite Tractate, it broke apart down here into this material cosmos, forming space, time, distance. And all of the hierarchy that existed within Logos lost its hierarchical arrangement. It was no longer a hierarchy; it was a splat. It was, I think, quantum foam. Chaotic small, bubbling, not knowing who or what it was, not having any particular job, just chaotic boiling. And so, “He came to the things that were his own and they who were his own did not accept him,” that being his egoic quantum foam self didn’t recognize him as the organizing principle of their existence. So Logos fled back up to the Fullness and abandoned it down here below, and that quantum chaos became the foundation of our cosmos, the foundation of our existence down here. I take that all out of John 1:9-14 in combination with the Tripartite Tractate myth. Carrying on, John 1:15-18, says, “John (and that would be John the Baptist) testifies concerning him and ha

25 min
04/20/2024

The Logos of Life

Last week we looked at David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament, and compared some of the verses to verses out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. And we see that when the ancient Greek, which was the language that the New Testament was written in originally, when it is correctly translated from the original text rather than simply anglicized out of old Latin editions that had been put out by the Catholic Church, we find that the similarities between this Gnostic Christian gospel and the gospel as presented in the New Testament of the Bible are very, very close. There is actually no distinction. Of course it is my opinion that the Tripartite and other Valentinian texts of the Gnostic Gospels were stripped out of the Bible on purpose by the Catholic Church and by the Emperor of Rome. Now, most of us are no longer Catholics and we’re certainly not Roman subjects, so I believe we have no allegiance in particular to the Council of Nicaea, which was set up around 300 AD and that was responsible for taking these books out of the New Testament. The only reason these books were taken out of the New Testament—it’s true they have a slightly different take on the origin story, on the pre-Genesis story, but as far as the New Testament goes, as far as the nature of Heaven, the nature of the Son, the nature of the Father, the nature of the Fullness of God—that all belongs back in the New Testament because it is not at all at odds with what Jesus taught. So, we’re going to look again this week at one of the books of the New Testament, the 1st letter of John, which is attributed to John the Elder, and we’re going to look at it with a Gnostic mindset and see how it is that it is not conflicting with the New Testament. I want to share with you that it grieves me deeply that Christians would consider this Gnostic Gospel to be heresy because I believe it is the true Christian gospel, and that the reworking of it by the Catholic Church and the Emperor of Rome is what the heresy was. So let’s take a look at this first letter of John. And right off the bat, we’re going to see that David Bentley Hart translates the Word “Logos” as Logos, who is a major character in this Gnostic Gospel that we learn about here on Gnostic Insights and at the Gnostic Reformation. This personifies the Logos. It’s not simply the Word of God, as if when God speaks, things happen, and of course they do. But the Logos of God was an actual character, one of the Aeons. And if you’re new to us here, if you go to the gnosticinsights.com website, there on the landing page, the homepage for Gnostic Insights, you’ll find 21 episodes that teach this Gnostic Gospel with great clarity so that you can understand it. I refer to the concepts in those first 21 episodes continually, because that is the basic teaching of the Gnostic Gospel. So, from 1John 1:1-4: “What was from the origin… concerning the Logos of Life—And the Life was made manifest, and we have seen, and bear witness to, and announce to you the Life of the Aeon which was present with the Father and which was made manifest to us—What we have seen and heard we also announce to you, so that you may also have communion with us. And our communion is indeed with the Father and with his Son Jesus the Anointed…” And this is why I say it saddens me that conventional Christians think that what we’re teaching here is heresy, designed to lead you astray because it isn’t. And actually, if you are a contented Christian that has a home within the conventional church, you’re not my intended listening audience. The people I think that most resonate to this Gnostic Gospel message are, first of all I’ve noticed, fallen-away Catholics who love Jesus, love the Father, but do not like the Catholic church and all of its extra doctrines that come along with it. Any fallen-away Christian—if you’ve fallen away because certain things don’t resonate well with you, such as universal salvation, well then, you will find a home here at Gnostic Insights because part of the Gnostic Reformation is that, yes, you have to believe in Jesus to be saved. But guess what? You can do that after death. And that is a big no no in the conventional church because they want to seal the deal. They want to make sure you come forward and confess Christ while you’re here on Earth. And I also agree that’s way better—that’s the best thing. Ask the Christ into your heart today, really, because it will turn around your life. It will put you in touch with your true mission here on Earth. The world—our cultural space that we live in—is really screwed up, and it always has been because it isn’t run by God. It’s run by what the Bible calls the God of this world, and they call that Satan. But we call that the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the fallen nature of Logos. That was the Fall, and it happened before Adam and Eve. It’s not the fault of human beings that the world fell out of grace. It happened before us. It’s above our pay grade. Our material cosmos is the Fall and we simply came up into it. And the purpose—by the way, I know I’m off track here from 1 John, but in case you’re new here, I want you to hear that the purpose of our life here on Earth is to bring love and knowledge of the Father to all of the 2nd Order Powers, and even to the fallen Demiurge, so that everyone can go home. We were sent here by our parents, the Aeons of the Fullness of God, to spread the knowledge of the Father, to spread the love of God, and, through the demonstration of our love, that people would want to join us. And, having joined us, that they would be able to spread love. True love. Remember, love can’t come from anger. So if you happen to be one of the angry people that is so riled up against everything—that is not coming from the Father. That is from the Demiurge because the Demiurge and the Archons want you to be angry. They want you to be riled up. They want you to cause destruction and to block other people and to slander them in the way of the Slanderer. If that is happening with you and you’re doing it in the name of righteous indignation put there by the Demiurge to keep us angry, to put things between us, to break us apart—it’s not true. The only force from above is love. And you know you have love if you not only love your brethren and you love all of the 2nd Order Powers, which are all of the living things on the planet, but that you are helpful and kind and have empathy; that you are virtuous and righteous. And, if those types of words really disturb you and you think it’s all a bunch of BS, then guess what? You’re on the wrong side of the Ledger there, and you know it. So, carrying on with First John: “And this is the message that we heard from him” (and the him is unspecified in the translation, so it could be the message from the Father, it could be the message from the Son, or it could be the message from Logos. The translation is unclear.) “And this is the message that we heard from him and announce to you: that God is light and in him is no darkness whatsoever. If we say we have communion with him, yet walk in darkness, we are lying and not practicing the truth; If we walk in the light, as he himself is in the light, we have communion with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son purges us of all sins.” In last week’s episode, In the Origin there was Logos, we discussed that the blood of Jesus that purges us of all sins is the correcting algorithm, you could say, the correcting algorithm for our messed up code. Jesus represents the Aeon of Man, and his perfection is complete. He walks fully in the light of God without error, without any shadow or darkness. And what we do when we ask for the Christ to help us, when we say, OK, I guess I believe in Jesus. Please help me. I want to be righteous. I want to know the truth. Just tell me the truth—when you do that, the correcting algorithm is allowed to rewrite your code. It can’t happen if you are resistant. If you’re living within a hardened shell of ego, the Christ cannot enter you. That’s your barrier. But if you let down your barrier earnestly and ask for help, ask for correction, then you will be helped lovingly, kindly, and gently. And then you will be able to be a conduit for the love of the Father and the knowledge of the Father. So, returning back to the text of First John again: “If we say we have no sin, we lead ourselves astray and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, so that he may forgive us our sins and purge us of all iniquity. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his Logos is not in us. “My little children, I write these things so that you do not sin. And if anyone sins we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus the Anointed, the righteous one; And he is an atonement for our sins, and not only for ours, but for those of the whole cosmos. And, by this, we know that we have known him: if we keep his commandments… But whosoever should keep his word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we are in him: Whoever says that he abides in him ought himself to walk just as he walked.” (1John 2:1-6) Now, none of us walk in perfection at all times. There was only one perfect human being, and that is Jesus. Jesus never sinned from birth onward because he was fully instantiated as the Christ from the get-go and his perfection was melded on to this material body that we all occupy. Yet, that didn’t ever bring him down the way it brings us down. Our physical bodies are made of demiurgic material, and the Demiurge controls material through strings of power—through bonds, chemical bonds, the bonds of physics, and through emotional bonds and the Demiurge’s willpower. The Demiurge wants to control his creation. The cosmos is the creation of the Demiurge. Demiurge wants t

23 min
04/27/2024

You, Your Body, and All of the Pleromas of God

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This morning we’re going to hear an episode that was recorded in 2022 that bears repeating. It’s called Heavenly Pleromas. And if you’re fairly new to Gnostic Insights, or even if you’ve been with us for a while, all of this information about the various nested pleromas of consciousness bears repeating. You’ll even learn what the word pleroma means. Before we hear that, I’d like to mention something that came to me during a walk this week, and it has to do with this: Is it selfish to be kind to your body? Many people mistreat their bodies, and that’s a terrible thing to do because your body isn’t just you. You are like the Raja sitting on top of the elephant of the consciousness of your soul and of your body. You are the god of this universe that you ride upon. Not the big God, not the God Above All Gods, but a little miniature copy of a God. And this episode of Heavenly Pleromas will explain why it is that I’m saying that our bodies exist to support us, to keep us alive. That unit of consciousness that’s sitting on top, that you think of as you, that’s your Self and your ego, but it’s also the countless billions of units of consciousness that make up all of the living flesh of your body. Each of those little organs, each of those little cells, is alive and devoted to you. They are selfless in their devotion to keeping you alive. And it seems that the least that we can do is be kind to them—is to go ahead and separate that egoic self; that you sit up on the top of the mountain like Logos sat up on top of the Fullness. You need to be kind and respectful to everyone below you, to the Fullness of the pleroma of your body that’s keeping you alive, and to remember that each one of those little units of consciousness, each one of those little cells and organs and processes that make up your physical body are fractal emanations of the Aeons of the Fullness above. They each came down as you were being formed from the egg on up. The molecules belong to the Demiurge, but all of the living parts belong to the Fullness of God. And so, when you are bad to your body, if you mistreat your body, if you poison your body, if you deny your body the needs that it has for sleep and nourishment, then you are being unkind to the Fullness of God. You are spitting in the eye of the Aeons that entirely make you up. So just think of that the next time—don’t think that it’s your body and you can do whatever you want. It actually belongs to the Fullness of God, and we’re kept alive through grace. So be a kind ruler of those elements that make up your body. Now, here’s Heavenly Pleromas. “Pleroma” is a common word in gnostic scriptures, and it has a particular meaning that only relates to the Gnostic Gospels. In fact, we gnostics are expecting to wind up at the end of days in a Pleroma that others usually call “Heaven.” Today, I’d like to take a closer look at Pleromas in order to discover where we all came from and where we will wind up at the end of days. Pleroma is a Greek word for “all that which is contained within a body or organization.” The Pleroma of the Fullness of God is the Pleroma we most often refer to here at Gnostic Insights. The Pleroma of the Fullness of God is the sum total of all the individual characteristics and powers of the originating consciousness of the Father as manifested in the monad known as the Son. Here is how the Pleroma of the Fullness is described in the Tripartite Tractate: “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. It is possible to speak of him because of the wealth of speech, just as the Father is a single name, because he is a unity, yet is innumerable in his properties and names…” This first differentiation of the properties contained in the Son is known as the ALL or the Totalities. The Pleroma of the ALL is pictured as a central star with rays going out in all directions, yet unified without personal identity within the single body and will of the Son. When the Totalities of the ALL become self-aware, they name themselves and sort themselves into the Pleroma of the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. “… the aeon of the Truth, since it is a unity and multiplicity, receives honor in the small and the great names according to the power of each to grasp it – by way of analogy – like a spring which is what it is, yet flows into streams and lakes and canals and branches, or like a root spread out beneath trees and branches with its fruit, or like a human body, which is partitioned in an indivisible way into members of members, primary members and secondary, great and small.” The Fullness of God is the Holy Spirit of the Father bursting out into individualized, fractal units of consciousness. The Fullness of God is pictured as a stack of golden cannon balls, exemplifying “the higher the fewer.” This passage tells us that the aeon of the Truth—which is another word for the Fullness, or Pleroma, of God goes forth by way of fractal branching. You may review the concept of fractals by looking back to the Gnostic Insights episode called, “A Fractal Model of Human Nature,” posted May 18, 2021. which you can find at gnostic insights dot com under the tab, “Complete Episodes Library.” The Pleroma of Logos is the sum total of all of the fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness that exist as fractal iterations within the body of the Aeon known as Logos. “This aeon was among those to whom was given wisdom, so that he could become pre-existent in each one’s thought. By that which he wills, will they be produced. Therefore, he received a wise nature in order to examine the hidden basis, since he is a wise fruit; for, the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one, such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him.” The aeons name themselves and sort themselves into a hierarchy. Logos crowns the Fullness. My illustration for the Pleroma of Logos is to show Logos as a miniature copy of the Fullness of God, sitting at the top of the Fullness. “This aeon was last to have brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude. And before he begot anything else for the glory of the will and in agreement with the Totalities, he acted, magnanimously, from an abundant love, and set out toward that which surrounds the perfect glory…” So, this wise fruit called Logos left the Fullness and Fell out of harmony with the other Aeons, creating this apparently material world. “The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows and copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted. Out of this there was a division – he became deeply troubled – and a turning away because of his self-doubt and division, forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and which is.” The small fractals that once formed the pleroma of Logos lost themselves during the Fall and rolled out into chaos. The Pleroma of the Demiurge consists of the inversions of the Pleroma of Logos, broken out of the hierarchical pattern and scattered willy-nilly throughout the cosmos. The Pleroma of the Demiurge is not an orderly pyramidal stack, but rather a chaotic jumble of dark shadows. “Like the Pleromas are the things which came into being from the arrogant thought, which are their (the Pleromas’) likenesses, copies, shadows, and phantasms, lacking reason and the light, these which belong to the vain thought, since they are not products of anything. Therefore, their end will be like their beginning: from that which did not exist (they are) to return once again to that which will not be…” “They thought of themselves that they are beings existing by themselves and are without a source, since they do not see anything else existing before them. Therefore, they lived in disobedience and acts of rebellion, without having humbled themselves before the one because of whom they came into being. They wanted to command one another, overcoming one another in their vain ambition, while the glory which they possess contains a cause of the system which was to be.” So, even though they fell out of the fallen Logos, they still possessed a reflection of the original glory of the Aeons of which they were imitations. And, it is that glory which is the Economy that was to be, that being our apparently material universe. “They are likenesses of the things which are exalted. They were brought to a lust for power in each one of them, according to the greatness of the name of which each is a shadow, each one imagining that it is superior to his fellows.” Logos was horrified by what he had produced because they would not recognize his authority. Logos abandoned the deficiency below and quickly returned to the Pleroma of the Fullness. “The one whom he himself brought forth as a unitary Aeon rushed up to that which is his, and this kin of his in the Pleroma abandoned him who came to be in the defect along with those who had come forth from him in an imaginary way, since they are not his.” “Him who came to be in the defect” is the name we call the Demiurge and it is the authority that rules the defect. Those who came forth from him in an imaginary way are the archons of the deficiency as well as the inert material world, or what I refer to as the “hard and rocky places.” The reason we focus so much on the Aeons of the Fullness and Logos in particular here at Gnostic Insights is because the Pleroma of any living creature is the sum total of the Pleroma of the Demiurge—our material or hylic pa

30 min

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Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained

Creator

Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.
Years Active

2021 - 2024
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101
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Clean
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Gnostic Insights