Gnostic Insights

Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.
  • 4.7 (20)
  • SPIRITUALITY
  • BIWEEKLY SERIES

Here you will find podcasts that explain gnosis, as simply as humanly possible. What is gnosis? Gnosis is knowing. Gnosis is not faith, or studying, or imagining. Gnosis is remembering. Remembering who you are, why you are here, what your mission on earth is, and where you will go when you die. Gnosis involves remembering the origin of consciousness and creation. The who, what, when, where, and why of everything.

  1. 05/20/2023

    Interview: Scott S. Smith, part 2

    Part Two of my interview with fellow Gnostic, Scott S. Smith. We discuss Scott’s pragmatic gnosticism and his books, “God Reconsidered: Searching for Truth in the Battle Between Atheism and Religion” and “The Soul of Your Pet: Evidence for the Survival of Animals After Death.” Scott is a much-published freelance journalist who specializes in travel and business articles. He attends the Ecclesia Gnostica Church in Los Angeles and has appeared many times on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, as well as a slew of other Gnostic podcasts. Scott’s understanding of Gnostic history and practice is extensive. In this portion of the interview, Scott explains why he doubts popular and historic notions of reincarnation, and Cyd gently disagrees. We also go into Scott's view of Gnostic Christianity, which he describes in pragamatic terms of ethics and compassion, ritual and service. His approach to living a spiritual life is quite different from the theology-based gnosis we mine here at Gnostic Insights, and from the Mormonism he learned as a child. Scott also shares some of the miracles and synchronicities he and his wife are regularly blessed with. Modern Gnostics are generally non-dogmatic, feeling that each person experiences their own path to gnosis. While I agree that each person needs to mine their own gnosis, I hasten to point out that doesn't mean there is no Absolute Truth. You can read more about Scott at his “God Reconsidered” facebook page. If you appreciate these Gnostic Insights podcasts, please consider contributing to the cause. This site does not support advertising, and your donations (and Cyd’s retirement pension) keep it afloat. I appreciate you!

    34 min

  2. 05/27/2023

    Not By Works

    Do you know that there is a difference between salvation through works and salvation through grace? People tend to think they can purify their souls to such an extent that they will be able to earn their ticket to heaven or, as I like to say, stick the landing in Paradise when they pass over. "The Prologue and the Promise" by Robert McCall was a popular image of Paradise that once graced the walls of Disney's Florida EPCOT Center. You know, according to this gospel I've been unfolding here at Gnostic Insights, we continually come back to Earth until we remember the Father and our home in Heaven with the Aeons. It is the memory of the Father, or gnosis, that enables us to leave this material plane and stay in the ethereal. The ethereal plane doesn't have any error; it doesn't contain any sin or misunderstandings. The ethereal plane of the Fullness of God is the Fullness of the Father and the Fullness is all of the possible expressions of the Son of the Father. The Son is the monad that encapsulates all of the qualities of the Father, like the bucket dipped into the sea. The Father, the Son, and the Fullness all possess the same qualities—that is why they are considered a 3-in-1 entity, and the Son and the Fullness flow from the Father as the originating source of consciousness. The Father is all good. The Father is not a black and white, some good, some bad, gotta be balanced, Yin/Yang kind of God--that is not what the Gnostic God is. The Gnostic God is love and light, and in him is no darkness at all. Our goal here on Earth isn't to perfectly straddle light and dark. Our goal here on Earth is to move into the light. And the only way we can follow the light is by giving glory to the God above all gods. We align ourselves with the will of God by giving glory to the Father, the Son, and the All. We can't move into the light by performing certain rituals. That was one of the mistakes that, for example, Martin Luther made when he was a young man. He was terrified of dying in sin and going to hell, as were all the Catholics of those days, because there wasn't any way to have a relationship with God on a one to one basis; all of the relationships with God were expected to go through the priesthood and the Pope, and it cost money to have your sins forgiven. Martin Luther spent hours every day in confession to his priest, just in case he overlooked any sin in his life that would send him to hell if he should happen to die that day. Paying money for redemption was a grift that the Catholic church was pulling in those days. What Martin Luther did was to recognize it as a grift, that is, to see it as a con game meant to convince people that, unless they gave the church money, they were going to go to hell. It was an extortion by Rome to raise money. But extortion is not faith. It’s not an expression of free will. It's coercion through fear, in much the same way that our current political masters attempt to coerce us through fear and intimidation to follow lock step in their demands. I just read an interesting biography of Martin Luther by Eric Metaxas, and it's a pretty good biography. In case you don’t know, Martin Luther was the person who pried Christianity from the clutches of the Catholic Church. The major branches of Christianity today are Catholic and Protestant. Protestant means “those who protest,” because it arose as a reaction to the overreach and abuses of the Catholic Church. The biography I read paints a clear picture of the pressure that Luther was under as he was a young priest and monk coming up in the ranks of Catholicism. In those days, people didn't read the Bible. Most had never even seen a Bible. Even monks and priests had never read the Bible. So that was the first thing that differentiated Martin Luther from his compatriots—he read the Bible and they didn’t. They didn't know what the gospel was.

    31 min

  3. 06/03/2023

    Consciousness and Categorical Errors

    My brother, Bill, recommended an article and a YouTube video to me this week that dealt with the subject of consciousness. Bill and I frequently pass articles and videos back and forth, as so many of us do nowadays. The article and video were both excellent, and they prompted a couple of marathon phone calls between us. Bill is a doctor of philosophy, and he knows all the jargon—he had to explain the concept of categorical errors to me. This week’s podcast deals with the insights I gained from all of this material. ****************** People talk about consciousness a lot. Everyone from scientists to philosophers to regular folks like you and me ask the question, what is consciousness? And most people don't have an answer. It's a shrug. Yesterday I was watching a YouTube video featuring the great physicist Roger Penrose, and this video is called “Consciousness must be beyond computable physics,” posted by New Scientist. And what Penrose is saying in this article is that consciousness is the closest thing we have to religious sensibility. He says he is not a religious man because he has never found a religion that suits him. But he does say that consciousness is not an accident, and that consciousness preexists humanity. Penrose thinks that universes are serial--that there's a Big Bang, and you have the life of your universe, and then it collapses. And then there's another Big Bang. And so he's actually searching for signals from advanced civilizations from the previous universal eon. And this is eon in the sense of ages, as opposed to the entities that we think of as Aeons in the Fullness. He thinks these messages may be encoded in gravitational waves. But he does believe, and here's a quote, that “consciousness is non computable.” And also that consciousness does not run along the lines of nerve transmissions. Consciousness is not a wave form that travels along our nerves in our neuronal system, but that consciousness is rather probably at the quantum level, and it probably is transmitted throughout our bodies in the form of microtubules which are down there at the quantum level—much, much smaller than nerves. In a related video that I watched from Penrose, called “Is mathematics invented or discovered?” if you want to go and listen to it yourself, is the idea that mathematics pre-exists outside of our ability to discover and describe it. Mathematics is a thing he calls a platonic form. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato had suggested that we have this world of physical appearances that we dwell in, but apart from and prior to this world of physical existence is a realm that houses everything possible that becomes our universe. It is the realm of the forms, and Penrose suggests that mathematics comes from the realm of form. He says that mathematics seems to have a reality independent of the ordinary reality of things like chairs and whatnot that we ordinarily think of as real. He calls it a platonic reality. That math is true and it preexists. The laws of math, the algorithms of math, the formulae of math—that humans rediscover them and they remember them essentially from out of the platonic forms, but that the human that discovers a formula is not inventing that formula, it preexists. You can hear a lot of what we talk about here at Gnostic Insights in this discussion by Roger Penrose of what he thinks, and he arrives at these ideas through math and physics rather than religion. Now I think that if Roger Penrose read my book, A Si...

    26 min

  4. 06/10/2023

    The Truth About Eternal Damnation

    A couple of weeks ago we looked at the idea that we are not saved by our own good works or by being a nice person because no matter how well-behaved we are, it is never going to be good enough to earn a ticket to the perfection of heaven. The name of that episode is Not By Works. I shared how the Tripartite Tractate and Hart’s translation of the New Testament make clear that we are not judged on our behavior but we are redeemed by the Messiah’s actions rather than our own. The question remains, what happens to people who do not accept the redemption of Christ? Are the unbelievers willingly choosing eternal damnation and the tortures of hell? One of the big heresies of Gnosticism is that all Second Order Powers, (and all living creatures, including us, are Second Order Powers), all Second Order Powers are redeemed by the Anointed emissary of the Father and all will someday return to the paradise of the Fullness. In other words, everyone's going to heaven. No one is going to hell, not even the fallen angels. The idea that everyone will be redeemed in the end is called Universal Salvation and it directly contradicts what has become Christian orthodoxy. This week as I was driving in the car, I listened to a radio preacher speak on this very topic. He was preaching a real fire and brimstone sermon and quoting from a passage out of the book of Matthew in the New Testament designed to put the fear of hell and damnation into his unsaved listeners. The set-up for the passage is: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left” (Matthew 25:31, New International Version). First off, do you recognize the left and right reference? In the Gnostic Gospels the left represents the kingdom of the demiurge and the right is the kingdom of the Fullness of God. The left represents vice and the right represents virtue. The left represents the bottom-up material cosmos, and the right represents the top-down emanations of the Father. The separating of the left from the right is a common theme that runs throughout the Gnostic Gospel. It is gnosis that Jesus would have known. In the verse that follows, the King says to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world” (Matthew 25:34). The kingdom spoken of by Jesus is the home of the Second Order of Powers, the place from which we came forth. The King is the governing unit of consciousness of our particular location within the Fullness of the Aeons. Our King is our governing Aeon: this Aeon is called the Son of Man because it is the governing consciousness of the emanations of the Aeons of the Fullness that take the form of us humans. The passage goes on to describe the virtuous activities of those on the right—feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, offering hospitality to strangers, visiting the sick and those in prison. These activities all fall under the purview of the Simple Golden Rule of assisting one another in the same manner as the cooperative spirit of the Aeons of the Fullness. As a reminder, or in case you haven’t heard this because you are a newcomer to Gnostic Insights, the Simple Golden Rule states that units of consciousness reach out to hold hands with their neighbors, offering information, assistance, and love in order to build something greater than any of them could make on their own. You can read all about this principle in my new book, a href="https://www.lulu.com/shop/cyd-ropp/a-simple-explanation-of-the-gnostic-gospel-of...

    22 min

  5. 06/17/2023

    There’s too much confusion

    This week's episode is about confusion versus simplicity. Our God is not a god of confusion, but of peace. If you find yourself becoming more and more confused when studying gnostic scriptures and books about gnosticism, it's possible you are heading down the wrong rabbit trails. The simplest explanation that works to answer the question is usually the best explanation. That's known as Occam's Razor. The gnosis presented by the Tripartite Tractate is extraordinary in its simplicity. It also explains gnosis in reasonable and logical terms. We don't need to learn how historical gnostics practiced their religion. We don't need to memorize arcane diagrams and rituals. All we need to do is remember the gnosis that is already within us. Anything more than that may be leading to confusion rather than clarity. And if you find yourself becoming disillusioned and disheartened, then what you're learning is likely demiurgic and not gnosis. Remember, the Father's consciousness flows outward through the Son, and from the Son through the Aeons, and through the Aeons into us Second Order Powers birthed into the cosmos here below. We need to remember where we come from and whose consciousness we are a part of. We need to develop the discernment to be able to tell left from right, vice from virtue, demiurgic machinations from divine inspiration, and ego-centered willpower from God's will. We come from Above and we return to Above. Repent; be redeemed so you can return to your home Above. And remember when you pass over to the other side to head onward and upward; don't look back. You may purchase an advance copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate The official, full-color version of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel will be back from the publisher in a few months. Meanwhile, the version above is in black and white but the text is the same. This book is 265 pages long. You may purchase my original Gnostic Gospel here or at any online book dealer. The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated is a simple 50 pages long and profusely illustrated. This is the simplest possible presentation of the Tripartite Tractate, with no extra explanations or big, theological words. If you find these podcasts helpful, please consider donating to help Cyd cover the cost. The Donor box can be set up for one-time or recurring contributions. And, remember to subscribe to Gnostic Insights so you don't miss a single episode! a class="dbox-donation-button" style="background: #41a2d8 url(https://donorbox.org/images/red_logo.png) no-repeat 37px;color: #fff;text-decoration: none;font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;display: inline-block;font-size: 16px;padding: 15px 38px;padding-left: 75px;-webkit-border-radius: 2px;-moz-border-radius: 2px;border-radius: 2px;box-shadow: 0 1px 0 0 #1f5a89;text-shadow: 0 1px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3);" href="https://donorbox.

    35 min

  6. 06/24/2023

    Birth of the Demiurge

    This episode looks at the origin of the Demiurge and our material universe. What is the Demiurge and how did it come about? What was the presumptuous thought that led the youngest Aeon to overreach and fall and how does that relate to Self and Ego? Why would the Father set things up so that this Aeon could make a unilateral decision that resulted in the Fall? Was it a mistake? Did God cause this Aeon to create evil? How is such a thing even possible? Was it God's will that it should fall? These are timeless questions. We take a deep dive into verses 75 through 78 of the Tripartite Tractate of the books of the Nag Hammadi in search of answers. This is gnosis presented clearly so you can understand.

    31 min

  7. 07/01/2023

    Demiurgic Justice

    A podcast listener recently asked me to amend my categorization of the Demiurge as a malevolent force. He asked me to read the "Epistle to Flora" from The Gnostic Scriptures to see that the Demiurge is a force for good on the right hand side of the ledger. In other words, is the Demiurge evil or good? Turns out it's a controversial subject in the Gnostic community. That is what we consider on today's podcast. For the past couple of weeks, we've been talking more about the Demiurge because one of the Gnostic Insights listeners wrote to me and asked me to clarify this business about the Demiurge because he feels that I'm too hard on the Demiurge and I shouldn't think of the Demiurge as evil but as just. He recommended that I read the “Book of Flora” which is contained in Layton and Brakke’s book called The Gnostic Scriptures. It's by a Greek philosopher named Ptolemy who wrote around 150 AD. And so for the past few weeks I've been reconsidering my position on the Demiurge, and I've reread parts of my book to see if I got it wrong. And I don't think so. I think that indeed, the creator of this earth that we live on and all of the dead things—that would be the mud, the particles, the molecules up through the elemental level and the aggregations of rocks—Demiurge means architect, it means builder, and so Demiurge is a fine word for the creator of this universe. But is this creator the ultimate God? The God that we think of as Father in Christianity, for example. And that answer is no. This God is a lesser God, an intermediate God. And when we look at the Old Testament and we look at the stories of how God interacts with humans, that God is very wrathful, is very angry and seems to have no problem with wiping out large patches of humans. So it's hard to think of this as a loving God, but can we think of the Demiurge as justice as a just God? And this is what our listener was attempting to convey to me—that the Demiurge is not evil. The Demiurge is not Satan. The Demiurge, this blind justice. So let's think about that. Jumping out of that train of thought for just a moment, I wanted to bring you up to date on an interesting archaeological find. I read this this week in the news that the earliest original Hebrew writing was discovered by archaeologists recently. It's a 3200 year old amulet. The oldest example of Hebrew writing, and it carries the name of Yahweh written out. And it's called a curse tablet. This was found on Mount Ebal, near the biblical city of Shechem, and it's what's called a curse tablet. Apparently Mount Ebal was known from Deuteronomy 11:29 as a place of curses, and there was a big debris pile, which the archaeologists think is an altar, and within this pile of rubble they found this curse tablet. It was perfectly preserved. It was actually a metallic object and the curses were written in the metal itself and that's why it survived. And according to this book of the Old Testament, Deuteronomy, priests and Levites were instructed to send curses in the direction of Mount Ebal. They're supposed to stand in the valley between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, and send curses in the direction of Mount Ebal. So this object is lead and it had curses written in lead on the inside of it, and they used a CT scanner to bring up the letters because it was too delicate to actually open up this little amulet where the curses were written. But here's what the phrase says inside in Hebrew: “Cursed, cursed, cursed, cursed by the God Yahweh. You will die. You will surely die, cursed by Yahweh, cursed, cursed, cursed.” OK, so this is an extremely important historical find because it dates Hebrew writing to these Old Testament days so that they actually could have been writing their history, that it wasn't just oral traditions passed down. 500 years older than any other previous appearance of the word Yahweh,

    29 min

  8. 07/08/2023

    The Ecstasy of Another–John Munter Interview Part 1

    This week's episode presents part 1 of an interview with a fellow gnostic, John Munter. John is among the first people to read A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate--he contributed an "advanced praise" blurb for the front of the book. John shares his early background as a philosopher and divinity school graduate. He then tells a story of his relationship with a friend that transcends her physical death. In this episode, John tells us about his unique method of interpreting the Gospel of Thomas. We will continue that train of thought next week. His book, The Integral Book of Thomas Made Easy, is available on amazon. John also touches on material from another book of his, The Samaritan Jesus.

    32 min
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    About

    Here you will find podcasts that explain gnosis, as simply as humanly possible. What is gnosis? Gnosis is knowing. Gnosis is not faith, or studying, or imagining. Gnosis is remembering. Remembering who you are, why you are here, what your mission on earth is, and where you will go when you die. Gnosis involves remembering the origin of consciousness and creation. The who, what, when, where, and why of everything.

    Information

    • Creator
      Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.
    • Years Active
      2021 - 2023
    • Episodes
      100
    • Rating
      Clean
    • Show Website
      Gnostic Insights

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