Gnostic Insights

Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.
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  • SPIRITUALITY
  • WEEKLY SERIES

Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained

  1. 02/03/2024

    Consciousness–It’s a no-brainer

    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I read a very interesting article this week from Scientific American, February 1st, 2024 edition. It’s a brand new article by a science writer called Rowan Jacobson. It was interesting to me because it just so happens to uphold—finally prove, in essence—one of the hypotheses of the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. You know, my Simple Explanation theory of everything was written over 15 years ago. The blog‘s been up that long, and there’s a book by the same name. If you haven’t gotten it yet, it’s a secular version of what we talk about here at Gnostic Insights. But it is gnosis nonetheless, because I believe that the universe was setting up for me in the Simple Explanation theory of everything, a way that I would then be able to read and interpret the gnostic gospel. That’s why the latest book is A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, whereas the first book was A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. And, in the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which was pre-gnostic gospel for me, I didn’t have a clear way to separate non-living material from living material. In my early diagrams, the hierarchy is a straight flow upward from the subatomic particles, on up through life, on up through cells. But, whereas in the gnostic gospel interpretation, there is a clear break provided to us by the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, there’s a clear break between the mud—that being the material that is not alive—and the meat—that being all of us animals, all of us creatures, everything that’s alive. Whether it’s a plant or a single celled organism or a human, every living creature is different in kind than the purely material objects. And the material objects are the subatomic particles, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the aggregates of minerals on up to the hard rocky bodies, like comets and planets. According to the Tripartite Tractate, these are not alive. The bodies themselves are part of the Fall. They are the dead byproduct of the Fall. They don’t think; they have no consciousness. What does have consciousness is the ego of the Demiurge, and so, at least here in our cosmos that we are familiar with, every material object that is not considered living, such as rocks and sand, well, those are extensions of the Demiurge. Those are extensions like a puppet master and strings, right? They are the Demiurge’s extensions of its consciousness, and it is not fully conscious because it is lacking the One’s Self that comes from above. Its One Self fled, that being the Aeon known as Logos. So, Logos and its ego have become separated and it’s its ego that has constructed this material cosmos in which we dwell. Whereas Logos itself, the Aeon Logos, fled back up to the Fullness. Anyway, this is a long preamble to what we’re trying to actually get to here, and if all of this was just gobbledygook to you, you need to back up and become familiar with some of the terminology from the gnostic gospel that I present here. So I will put a link to a more basic type of introduction to these concepts right here in the transcript to this podcast. Back to the Scientific American article. It’s called Brains Are Not Required When It Comes to Thinking and Solving Problems, Simple Cells Can Do It. And the subtitle is Tiny clumps of cells show basic cognitive abilities, and some animals can remember things after losing their heads. So, what this article is about is a new branch of cognitive science called basal cognition, and they are coming to believe that the brain is not required for thinking. Well, that has been a tenet of the Simple Explanation going back 15 to 20 years now. The brain is not the origin of thought or consciousness, it’s merely like a radio that tunes it in. Your neurons are not where memories live. The memories are outside of us. What the neurons do is grow in response to the stimulus of those externalized thoughts, and some scientists are coming to recognize that fact now. They fought this all along. Most scientists, including most cognitive scientists who study the brain, keep looking for places in the brain where the memories live. But these basal cognition scientists now realize that the memory doesn’t live in the brain. And by the way, to skip to the conclusion of the article—where the memories reside as far as they are concerned is in the electromagnetic grid that the creature emits or dwells in. Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist who has for a long time been an outcast in the scientific community because he’s been saying that all along. His research and his books are about how our thoughts and our relationships with one another exist in a field around us and a field in between us. Like between two people who have love for each other, there’s a sort of a rubber band, I think he described it. A rubber band stretching between them, which is an electromagnetic field that keeps them connected. So, let me read you some of the main points out of this article, and then I’ll make comments on it as we go by. The article begins with a description of the research that a scientist named Michael Levin has done, and he studies planaria worms. The neat thing about planaria worms is that if you cut them in half, the head half will grow a new tail and the tail half will grow a new head. And, they are genetically identical to one another as clones. Now the interesting thing is that even though you chop off the head and the tail grows a new head, that new head knows everything that the old head knew. And this is a form of proof that the memories and knowledge that were contained in that planaria worm didn’t live in the head. They were somehow living in the entire worm. That’s groundbreaking research, believe it or not. Quoting from the article, “Until recently, most scientists held that true cognition arrived with the first brains half a billion years ago. Without intricate clusters of neurons, behavior was merely a kind of reflex, [and that is what most people still think]. But Levin and several other researchers believe otherwise. He doesn’t deny that brains are awesome paragons of computational speed, and power. But he sees the differences between cell clumps and brains as ones of degree, not kind. In fact, Levin suspects that cognition probably evolved as cells started to collaborate and carry out the incredibly difficult task of building complex organisms, and then got souped up into brains to allow animals to move and think faster.” OK, pause now. I’ll rerun, soon, my episodes concerning evolution because I don’t think evolution works that way. Evolution clearly does not work by things happening in the way that Darwinian evolution says they happen, that this works out well for an organism, so more of that organism survives, and then they breed, and now all of that organism is like that one that was successful. That’s the way Darwinism works. What I claim is that the patterns are inherent. The patterns come from above. They are in fact from the Aeons of the Fullness. They are aeonic that way, and these patterns are brought down with the creatures that instantiate them. We are all born with our aeonic pattern intact, and it has nothing to do with evolution down here. And, by the way, it can look like things are evolving, but that’s simply because we 2nd Order Powers were sent down one by one, from the simplest to the more complex. It even says that in the Tripartite Tractate. You know, that book is over 2,000 years old and how it can describe such things is really phenomenal. So yes, maybe the oceans were populated with single celled animals at first and then the jellyfish and whatnot, but then that’s because they were the ones that were first sent down from the Fullness. In my opinion, they did not evolve from each other. There’s no clear links between species and types of organisms in the way that Darwinism claimed, and they still haven’t found any. So, although Levin is working with these planaria to show that the thoughts don’t reside in the brain, he still thinks that they evolve from clumps of cells. I don’t think so. Back to the article. “That position is being embraced by researchers in a variety of disciplines, including roboticists such as Josh Bongard, a frequent Levin collaborator who runs the Morphology, Evolution and Cognition Laboratory at the University of Vermont. Quoting Bongard, ‘Well, brains were one of the most recent inventions of Mother Nature, the thing that came last,’ says Bongard, who hopes to build deeply intelligent machines from the bottom up. He says, ‘it’s clear that the body matters, and then somehow you add neuronal cognition on top. It’s the cherry on the sundae, it’s not the sundae.’” OK. Well, isn’t that funny? They even used the expression bottom up. Now, if you’ve been with Gnostic Insights for any amount of time, you realize that the bottom up is demiurgic. The bottom up is what I was describing in my preamble there. That’s your particles, atoms, molecules, elements, etcetera. Bongard still thinks that the cognition grows out of the bottom up development. And since he is a roboticist, he’s going to build clever enough machinery out of molecules and elements that’s going to pop out cognition. It’s not going to happen, because cognition and consciousness comes from the top down. And you see, he said in this paragraph I just read you that somehow you had neuronal cognition on top. Well, yeah, on top somehow. That is the Holy Spirit of God coming down and attaching to the material. But it’s not going to happen at the whim of a roboticist. Carrying on now, “In recent years, interest in basal cognition has exploded as researchers have recognized example after example of surprisingly sophisticated intelligence at work across life’s kingdoms, no brain required. For artificial intelli

    28 min

  2. 02/10/2024

    The Gnostic Christ

    What we call Christianity today, the religion of Christianity, may not be exactly what the Christ had in mind. It may be a human interpretation and institutional package of the religion that Jesus promoted, but there is no reason to throw out the baby with the bath water. When I was about four years old, I recognized the difference between Baby Jesus in the manger and Santa Claus. There was the religious iconography of baby Jesus in the manger and the Christian Christmas story. And even at a very young age before I started school, I’m like, yeah, Santa Claus is a kid’s story, but this is baby Jesus in a manger being sent down from God to redeem humankind. Well, I could relate to that. That was clearly a difference in kind from Santa Claus. It seems to me that people who don’t recognize Jesus and who don’t accept the whole notion that there is a God above and that there can be a Christ who is a very special etherical character that was sent into this cosmos in order to help us out—that’s a sad thing. I recognized Jesus when I was very, very young. Anyway, I want you to realize that I have been a follower of Jesus for over 60 years now, and during that time I’ve been a very active student of the Bible and of Jesus in particular. I’ve been taking most of my spiritual notes from the red letter editions of the Bible, listening to Jesus himself. Yes, I’ve been in and out of churches, particularly in my teenage years and early 20s, but after I was married, my husband didn’t enjoy church, and so I stopped going. Nowadays I’m able to devote most of my time to spiritual pursuits (as a widow), but my spiritual pursuits are not what most people’s are who currently follow either Christianity or Gnosticism. And yet I’m calling myself a Gnostic Christian. So, I’m following the Bible. And I am very happy that this new edition of the Bible came out—The New Testament by David Bentley Hart—which is a fresh interpretation of the New Testament from the original Greek. Most of the editions of the Bible that people read in church or that you have on your bookshelves at home are derivative of an old Latin translation hundreds of years old that has been Anglicized ever since, so the original meaning of the words are often lost or misrepresented. And those are the Bibles that people are following in what is now called the Christian religion. There are a lot of errors in Christianity, but I find myself in a peculiar situation of being what I would call a true Christian. I know Jesus; I was baptized. In the past couple of years, I’ve been listening more to radio preachers again, like I used to in the old days, and I often find myself agreeing with what they say. I agree with 90% of what is taught in the Christian Church. It’s that 10% that’s the problem. For example, a very important issue is that all Christian churches believe that you need to right now accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, period, because if you die before accepting Jesus, you aren’t going to heaven. And this causes much anxiety and much angst amongst Christians whose relatives, children, husbands, friends haven’t accepted the Christ—will not pray the sinner’s prayer and ask Jesus into their hearts. Because they’ve been taught, and therefore they believe, that all those people are going to hell, and they are anxious about it. Yesterday I went to church. I don’t often go, I must say, but it was a Communion day and someone asked me to go. I think it’s a good thing to ask people to go to church and so I honored her by going with her. And I accepted Communion. Now one of the interesting things about Communion is that you are recapitulating the fractal of the Last Supper where Jesus broke bread, blessed it, and said, “This is my body which is broken for you. Eat this in remembrance of me.” And then he takes the cup of wine and he says, “This is my blood that is spilled out for you. Drink this in remembrance of me.” And that is what is called the Sacrament of Communion. And Christians take that sacrament fairly often to remember Christ. But only Christians are allowed to take Communion. So, before the Communion is served, the minister will say something like, Now we ask that only those people who have accepted Christ come forward for Communion. And if you have not yet accepted Christ, one of the elders would like to meet with you and pray with you to accept Christ. But for now, please don’t come forward to take the Communion because it’s only for Christians. I can kind of see the point in that, but once again, it’s creating a divide between those who have acknowledged the power of the Christ here on Earth and those who have not, and presumably all those people that don’t go back and talk with the elders at the end of the service are going to go to hell if they die that night. But the Bible doesn’t really say that. In the New Testament, and particularly the New Testament as translated from the original Greek by David Bentley Hart, this newest translation published by Yale University Press, doesn’t say that. Yeah. It says that Christ came for everyone. For everyone. Christ came to redeem everyone. That’s what it says. Now, as we have discussed in previous episodes here at Gnostic Insights, if your physical body dies, (because you never die, we are eternal spirit, so we are not dying). but if your hylic part, (that means your physical body, the demiurgic molecular part of your body), will die and stay behind because there is no material above. It’s all ethereal. It’s all spirit. Down here it is material or apparently material. That part won’t go up with you, so it seems to die. But when I say die, that’s just your material, because your spirit is eternal. So, if your body dies before you have acknowledged the redemption of the Christ and the actuality and presence of the Father from which we all come, and the Aeons whose children we are, if you do not accept that now while you’re alive, you’re going to have a difficult passage after death. I’ll put the link here into the transcript for the episode called Overcoming Death, and that’s where you get into the various bardos such as are spoken of in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, or the purgatories of hell that the Catholics talk about. Because the ethereal plane is the reality. This is why I’ve been sharing episodes with you of near death experiences that thousands of people by now have shared on YouTube. Watch some of these near death experiences. Now, if someone has a near death experience and they’re dead—by the way, it’s only near death because they come back. That’s why it’s called near death. But they were dead. They just came back because it wasn’t their time. So, if you have one of these types of afterlife experiences and you survived to come back to talk about, even if you were a staunch atheist before you passed away, you have to come to a reckoning once you become ethereal and it turns out you’re still alive. You go, What? I thought I was gonna be dead! I thought it was all over with! And those people sometimes have very difficult passages. Very difficult. There’s 14 layers of bardos in the Tibetan tradition, and if you already believe in the Christ or the Buddha, if you already believe in the Father, you recognize it right off the bat, and you are more than willing to bathe in the love and warmth and light of the afterlife. But if you don’t, then each phase—the longer you stay in that post-life place, which I call a bardo—the more difficult it becomes until it becomes absolutely hellacious. And I believe that these are the depictions of hell that are now and then glimpsed throughout the Bible. The people reaching up from hell going, Oh, please, Lazarus, save me! I didn’t believe it, but now I do. Please pull me out. Pull me out! That is an afterlife experience of someone who staunchly refuses to believe in the Father or the spiritual existence after this life. But please be aware that this misery is not punishment by the Father or the Son. The reckoning is self reflexive—from your ego for the benefit of your Self. It is your own egoic consciousness feeling regret for its past deeds. And the point of the reckoning and repentance isn’t punishment—it’s not a spanking by God. It’s for you to realize the harm you have done to yourself and others during this sojourn in material life, in order to strip off those egoic memes and rejoin the Aeons in the Fullness. Remember, the ethereal plane is separated from the darkness below by a Boundary. We need to leave the darkness behind in order to rise above. We don’t strip off our egos—we retain our identities—but we do strip off the pernicious lies and memes that have kept us bound to the cosmos. But if you do believe in the Father, and I say the Father because Jesus came to point the way to the Father. He didn’t say, “worship me, worship me, worship me. I’m hanging on the cross forever. Now worship the cross.” And that seems to be the focus of church all the time. When I go to a church, even yesterday when I went to the Communion service, the minister kept pointing to the cross behind him. And they are limiting the power of the Christ to the action and death on the cross, and then the resurrection from the grave. But the Christ is way more than that. The Christ came to save all 2nd order powers, not just the people who accept the Christ before they pass away from this body. It gives much more power to the Christ to believe that Christ came to save you even if you reject Christ. Jesus said, “I and my Father are one. I came to represent my Father.” One of the most often quoted Bible verses is John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever would believe on him would not perish but have everlasting life.” That’s how it reads in our most common translations. So in that verse,

    29 min

  3. 02/17/2024

    The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated

    Here’s a treat for you. This is the entire Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book read by the author, Cyd Ropp. This is the little book published in 2019 that was the springboard for all of the gnostic work that followed, including this podcast and the new, much longer, book that is about to be released. This is the simplest presentation of gnosis that you will ever find. Only the essential gnosis was included. It is all based upon the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi texts. The gnosis you will find here is the type of gnosis that proceeds from an initial thought–the first thought of the Originating Source. That thought then flows outward and through a few levels downward until it manifests within all of us living creatures here in the cosmos. There are no fables in this gnosis–only the reasonable outflow of the path of consciousness. This is the story of consciousness. I’m taking all of the illustrations out of The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated and putting them in order as the transcript to go along with this episode. I’m not reprinting the text. For that, you should buy the book, but you can follow along with the illustrations. And, as I’m putting together these illustrations in order of their appearance, I’m discovering that this episode transcript with the illustrations and the captions of each illustration turns out to be the very, very simplest presentation of this gnosis of The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. It’s even simpler than the very simple book that you’re going to listen to now as the audio, because it’s just the illustrations and just the captions. So, if you find the words confusing, look at the pictures. They ought to resonate with you; you ought to be able to recognize their meaning. And remember, I’m not teaching this to you. I’m hoping to stimulate your own remembrance that you were born with. The reason I emphasize simplicity is that I like to imagine how it is that the Father can transmit information to us down here. How does this information actually come to us? The Father wants to be known and this is the information that he wants to be known. It’s like if you were trying to explain something to a leaf or to a worm. What is it you can tell them that they’re going to understand? This is why the information is very simple. It doesn’t have a lot of details. It’s a very simple transmission, directly, of consciousness. And that’s why it is so pared down from the information that you can generally find out there that passes for what they’re calling gnosis. Because remember, every living thing in the cosmos remembers the Father and the Son; remembers the Origin and the Fullness. So, the information has to be simple enough that any creature, any plant, any insect, any little squirrel can realize it. We are all second order powers. Onward and upward! And, enjoy the episode. I am not going to reprint the text of the book here. For that, please purchase the book: You may purchase the original Gnostic Gospel Illuminated at gnosticinsights.com. Here are my illustrations of the concepts presented in this book. These will illuminate the meaning of the text. The Son is the first and only emanation of the Father. It is a monad. It is called the First Glory. The moment the Son was formed, the ALL emerged. The ALL wears the Son like a garment, and the Son wears the ALL. They are co-existent. The ALL is the Second Glory. The Aeons of the ALL awakened to themselves in fulfillment of the Father’s desire for innumerable points of view. The awakened Aeons sorted themselves into a cooperative colony of names, stations, ranks, duties, and locations. The Aeons of the Fullness provide the Master Pattern of our inherited consciousness. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. Logos crowned the top of the Fullness. Logos mistakes himself for the Fullness. Logos stumbles and Falls while reaching for Glory. The small fractals that once formed the pleroma of Logos lost themselves during the Fall and rolled out into chaos. The Father and the Fullness were repelled by the Fallen, and a Boundary was formed to rein in the Deficiency. The values of the Demiurge lead to isolation and despair. The values of the Fullness lead to peace and joy. The restored pleroma of Logos and the Hierarchy of the Fullness conceive a new fruit called 2nd Order Powers. The Fullness is the 1st Order of Powers. The shadows of the deficiency that emerged from the Fall are small, dead, and ignorant of what came before. The Second Order Powers are emanations of the restored Logos, fitted into the Boundary. They come one by one to populate the cosmos with life. We Second Order Powers continually battle the archons of the Fall. We are a mixed creation of life from above and death from below. We Second Order Powers find ourselves locked into an endless war with the Deficiency. Gnosis is for those with eyes to see. Simply remember the Father and gnosis will follow. The Christ comes in a form that every Second Order Power can recognize. Those of the Remembrance were given chariots that could traverse all realms, great and small, establishing order. The Third Order of Powers are the Pleroma of the Christ. While the Second Order Powers are caught up in endless war with the deficiency, the Third Order Powers bring redemption and remembrance to this economy. Jesus the Christ bridges the Deficiency and brings redemption to all Second Order Powers. The Final Economy will come after this cosmos passes away. The First Economy is the Fullness. The Second Economy is the fallen cosmos. The Third Economy is the redeemed result. Amen

    39 min

  4. 02/24/2024

    Our Awesome Origin

    Hello there and welcome back to Gnostic Insights. There have been a few things on my mind I would like to share with you today. You know, I’ve mentioned in the past that I do listen to the radio preachers because I want to hear what they’re teaching. I want to see what is the current state of Christian belief and knowledge. By now you realize that this Gnostic Gospel is definitely Christian, because salvation and redemption revolves around the Christ. But the thing that is difficult for me is that there are a few basic principles in this Gnostic Gospel that are in disagreement with what is taught out there generally as Christianity, and I believe that those differences were hardwired into the Bible when the Nicene Council sat down around 330 AD and decided what books to keep and what books to throw out. And, among the books that they threw out was the Tripartite Tractate, which is the primary source that I am deriving my Christian knowledge from in addition to the New Testament. Christians are taught not to seek external sources of truth—that the truth is entirely captured and relayed to us through the Bible. And, if you accept what are called extra-biblical, which means outside of the Bible, sources such as the Nag Hammadi or the Qumran scrolls, the Tripartite Tractate that I am sharing with you, then you will be led astray. You’ll come to wrong opinions, and you are part of the problem and not part of the solution. I don’t want to be part of the problem; I want to be part of the solution. That’s why I do not give up the basic idea that the Savior that we call the Christ is a special, ethereal character that was designed and sent down to us to help us here. Now, ordinary Christian belief states that Christ is the original Son of God that was made at the beginning—was the first emanation of thought from God, and I disagree with that. In the Tripartite Tractate there seems to be a distinct difference between the Son, who is the first emanation of the thought of the Father, and the Christ, who was produced after we 2nd order powers were sent to Earth. The specific mission of the Christ is to help us out. So the Christ figure has, I like to say, all the mojo of the Father and the Son and the Fullness of God, as well as the things that Logos learned from falling to earth and then returning back to the Fullness, such as how to operate within the Boundary and the existence of the Demiurge and the archons. The Christ was designed to overcome all of that. We also disagree about what happens to you if you don’t accept the Christ here on Earth before you die. Conventional teaching is that you will go to Hell and be tortured forever. That’s absurd. That’s absolutely absurd on the face of it, because the nature of the Father is love; the nature of the Son is love. The consciousness of the Father and love are intertwined inextricably together. More than that, we are emanations from the Father and the Son through the hierarchical pattern of what is called the Fullness of God. We come from above. How on earth—how in this cosmos—would all of us not return to the Fullness above? If we did not go back because we ignorantly or stubbornly or through misguided overblown egos believe that we’re the be-all and end-all, and that’s what sends you to Hell for an eternity of torture? Well, there’s two basic principles that are being violated there. One—how does a loving God punish someone eternally? It is not consistent with the nature of God. Now, I was looking up what it means to fear God because one of the radio preachers this week said, Oh, you better fear God! That’s the problem with culture nowadays—people don’t fear God. And the Bible says why do you fear men whose punishment only lasts for a short period but you don’t fear God whose punishment is eternal?  That’s entirely incorrect in my opinion. First off, the word fear is a translation of a Hebrew word yirah, YIRAH, and it is just as properly or even more properly interpreted as awe. As in awesome—awe. Which means beholding or seeing something that is so completely beyond our ability to understand and to grasp that we drop our jaws open and our knees tremble because it’s so incredible. That’s what it means to be awesome. And by the way, as a kind of humorous aside, it really bugs me that on the iPhone with the auto fill words, when someone texts me back and they mean to say, Ah, isn’t that cute! or Ah, I’m so sorry! that iPhone autofill types in Awe. Because that isn’t the word. The word for Ah, isn’t that cute. Ah, that’s so neat, that’s A H. Ah. It’s just a sound. It’s an interjection. And I’m not so sure that this isn’t on purpose by some archon that’s in charge of the iPhone as a means of degrading the magnificence of the word, AWE. When you say, Ah, that was really thoughtful of you, it’s not AWE. AWE means you have come face to face with the transcendent God or you’ve visited heaven and come back. That’s all AWE. That’s the kind of fear you would have. So, as I share with you now and then, the main heresy in this Gnostic Gospel as far as Christians, contemporary Christians, are concerned is that God is all loving and forgiving. Gee, isn’t that an awful thing to think? [sarcasm] Of course God is all loving! Of course God is all forgiving! And, of course everyone is going home at the end of time. Because if we didn’t go back up, the Fullness would no longer be full. We come from the Fullness. We are their children. We are the fruit of the Fullness. That’s why people in their near death experiences are greeted by all sorts of figures who seem to know them and who seem to gather around them to surround them with love and Ohh, we’re so glad that you’re home!  That’s because we’re their children. They know us. We don’t remember them, but they know us. It’s the same fractal as the story of the prodigal son. In the New Testament, there’s a story about a young man who was rebellious and he didn’t want to stay on the farm. And so he left his father and his brother behind. He cashed out his inheritance and he split to have a good time. Well, things didn’t go so well out there in the world, and he eventually found himself completely at the end of all of his money. And he had no friends out there. He had no family. He was completely cut off. And there he was slopping a pig stye. He was shoveling manure out of a herd of pigs. And he looked around and he said, What the heck, man? I should just go home. This is ridiculous. It was actually a lot better at home. So he gives up his worldly excursions, and he goes home. And he is nervous because he’s worried that his father will reject him for having run away and squandered his inheritance. And his brother is extremely angry at him because the brother stayed home and he’s been taking care of the farm without his brother’s help. So he’s really angry at him. But the father holds a big banquet and they kill—what is it?  A goat or something? They have a big barbecue and invite everyone to welcome the prodigal (prodigal means he recklessly lost his money) the prodigal son. Well, if this earthly father feels that way about his son that stumbled and went away, of course our Heavenly Father is going to feel that way about us for having stumbled and gone away. And how many of you, I wonder, are out there in some pigsty shoveling sh*t? This world that we live in, this culture that is the norm, it’s kind of creepy and it’s getting worse and worse, in my opinion. These things that you’re supposed to be open minded about– (Ohh sadism is cool. Ohh all these sadomasochistic scenes in movies—ohh that’s cool. I just have to be open. Ohh it’s cool to cheat on your husband or wife—don’t be such a square. I like to take drugs every day, and the more I take, the better I feel.)  You know that’s not true. None of that is true. That is the world leading you astray. The Father is the ground state (the black background); The Son emerges as the first monad of consciousness (the cloud); the Son differentiates into the infinite variables of the ALL; the ALL becomes self aware fractals and sorts itself into the Hierarchy of the Fullness; the Fullness dreams of Paradise. Of course you’re desperate. Of course you feel lousy. Of course things aren’t going well, because that culture is not what the Fullness had in mind and this version of our world down here is an imitation. It’s a deficiency, is what the Tripartite Tractate calls it. It’s the Deficiency of the Imitation of the Fullness, because the Fullness is in their hierarchy up there, dreaming of Paradise. They dreamed of this world, basically, and all of us populating it, like a Star Trek holodeck. It’s a dream. It’s a holodeck projection that they all share. And everything was cool until Logos jettisoned out and tried to set up the reality down here on Earth. And things have been going very poorly ever since because, unless you have the guidance of the Fullness and the Aeons, unless you’re plugged in to the Son and the Father, everything you come up with to do is wrong. It’s a mistake. It’s wrong headed. The only way to have a joyful and glorious life, full of knowledge and gnosis, full of love, is to plug in to the source—the One source from which we come. And all of the people down here, which is most of the people who have gone astray, who lead their lives in anger and lying and cheating and backstabbing and betrayal—all of the things that make you so sad when you run across them, or if you’re the victim of them—that’s  all wrong headed. That’s all bad stuff. And that is the bad stuff that the Christ, the Anointed One, came to rectify for us down here, because we have all gone astray, as it says. You can’t pull yourself up by the bootstraps. You need help. The Christ is just there to help. If you didn’t, deep in your soul, believ

    21 min

  5. 03/02/2024

    Gnosis or Not Gnosis?

    We Gnostic Christians are in a very funny position as far as Gnostics and Christians go, because we fall into neither camp and we fall into both camps. And this is what I mean. I realize that the last couple of episodes have been very, what people would call, Christian, except the Christians don’t call it Christian. It’s a funny, funny position to be in. Those of us who call ourselves Gnostics believe in the Father. We believe in the Aeons of the Fullness. We believe that one of the Aeons “fell” out of the Fullness and, for most Gnostics, they call that Aeon Sophia, and Sophia is considered to be a female character. For those of us who are interested in the Tripartite Tractate we call that fallen Aeon Logos. And, Logos is neither female nor male, because in the Gnosticism according to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, there are no females and males. Or, there may be females and males, but their gender is not important. Gender is irrelevant. The folks who follow what is called Sethian Gnosticism, as I understand it—who prefer to follow Sophia rather than Logos—believe in a system of male-female bonding. They’re called syzygies, and for every male Aeon there’s a female Aeon and they are like a married couple. And that between the two of them there is balance. Well, now that’s kind of a funny thing at this point in our social development, don’t you think? All of this idea that genders are unimportant or that you can change the gender you were born with—this transgenderism that’s going on in society. Now, I am a female. I was born a female. I remain a female. And yet I have always felt within myself that gender was unimportant. It’s irrelevant other than our reproductive functions. But as far as my actions on the social stage, as far as my actions on the academic stage, as far as the way I read and interpret material, gender has nothing to do with that. I’m a Libertarian. I believe in freedom and personal responsibility and liberty to be able to make the decisions we want to make. I don’t believe in power and control. I think that power and control, particularly centralized authority, is demiurgic because that’s the way the Demiurge operates. The Demiurge is the puppet master. It has always been said, even in conventional Christianity, that every person must come to God for themselves. Every person must make their own decisions regarding whom they will follow, and I don’t think that has anything to do with gender. I think it has to do with the Demiurge versus the Father, or the Son, or the Fullness, or Logos.  Bob Dylan had a song—remember back in his evangelical phase? The lyrics had to do with you have to choose somebody. “It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to choose somebody.” That is a black and white decision that is a bilateral decision. You’re either going this way or you’re going that way, you’re going in or you’re going out, you’re going up or you’re going down. The Demiurge controls through strings of power. Now, the culture that we’re living in, it’s mostly demiurgic. It’s mostly being controlled by centralized authority. And whether that is political, corporate, media led, or religion led, it is centralized authority that takes away your freedom of choice. It says, No. You have to believe this. You have to believe the way we believe. And if you don’t, you’re an outsider. You’re bad. That isn’t the way true choice works. That’s not the way liberty works. Liberty says, Here are all the facts of all the matter, and you can choose this or choose that, or choose that. That is up to each and every person. And indeed, we all are responsible for our own karma, for our own lives. We can’t shuffle that responsibility onto another person or onto a religion or onto a corporation, or onto a political system. We have to make our own decision for ourselves, because it’s only us that’s going up or down. So, the past couple of episodes have been very Christian. If you’re not familiar with Christ and Jesus, you’re gonna think it’s very Christian. Here, I’ll read you a letter that I got off of Substack this week from one of my paid supporters. He has unsubscribed. He is no longer paying to listen to the Gnostic Reformation. And here’s what he says: “I’ve really enjoyed getting your take on gnosticism. What I’ve enjoyed most is just how different your perspective is from my own—mine, alas, being increasingly un-Christianized and more focused on Sophia. Of course, to paraphrase Shaw’s quote about economists, If you laid 1000 gnostics end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. Such is the nature of heretics, I think. Gnosis is, imo, different for each of us. It was my honor to help support your work for a time. Best wishes!” So that was very kind of him. He said it in as kind a manner as he could say. And yet it points out the divide within Gnosticism of those who consider themselves followers of Sophia and those who consider themselves to be Christianized. So he’s rejecting the Gnostic Reformation because it revolves around Christ’s redemption. Now here’s another one, also from Substack. And this listener says: “Another inspirational podcast Cyd. Please keep them coming. It seems like such simplicity , but in your introduction the words to ” fear not, we are known and we are loved ” when taken to heart and truly believed states such a significant thing. That belief can cut through much darkness with the purest light—that we are all known , are equally loved , and all are destined for the journey home to be in the fullness. Blessings.” Now, these are both people that are following a Gnostic path, and one accepts the notion of assistance directly from the Fullness in this our fallen state in the material world and the other one doesn’t. What I have noticed about the followers of Sophia is that they are also into things like astrology, alchemy, magic, good magic, of course—only for the good. I’m not into any of those things. Those are old systems from antiquity, and they’re very occult and very hidden. Occult means hidden. Now, you tell me if the Father wants to be known, and was this not the purpose of the originating consciousness breaking into individual points of view that would then have their own will and their own experiences, and then feed that information back upstream to the Father? That’s the basic flowing out and flowing in of consciousness—to the Originating Source, out from the Original Source–breaking up into individual points of view having a variety of experiences and then that information coming back up to the Originating Source. It always says in the Bible, for example, that the Father wanted to be known.** The Christians think that Jesus of Nazareth was the Father walking around on Earth—was the Son of God who fully reflected the Father, and that he wanted to be known. “If you know me, you know the Father,” he said (John 8:19). And the fractal archetype of Jesus of Nazareth walked around his region preaching and teaching about the Father and about virtue and leading a virtuous life and the importance of aligning yourself with the virtuous forces and distancing yourself from the vice. He didn’t hide himself away in a cloister and study manuscripts and write manuscripts, and then hide them deep in the darkest recesses, like the Vatican basement. He didn’t do that. He spoke openly and taught. And he said, We are to love each other and we’re to love ourselves. And we are to love God. This is the highest commandment. This is all that we need to do: Love, love, and love. And then he exemplified that love by loving people he didn’t know; by loving his enemies; by forgiving his enemies; by healing people; by feeding people. The occultists study their gnosis in labyrinthine ways. They believe that the gnosis was meant to be hidden. They believe that you have to learn, learn, learn, and go deeper, deeper, deeper into secret societies and into secret libraries to pull out this gnosis and study it and learn it and master it. And mastery is a big deal because you need to master alchemy in order to change the base metal into gold. You need to master astrology in order to properly read someone’s chart. You need to master augury in order to properly read the entrails. It all has to do with personal mastery, and they’re confusing that or conflating that with gnosis. I don’t think that is gnosis. I think for the most part that, at best, it’s interesting worldly knowledge. It’s a hobby, at best. But, on the darker side, it may be demiurgic rather than from the Father, because the Demiurge is all about power, control, and mastery, and the Demiurge only allows power to humans who have agreed to serve it, him or it. On the other side of the Gnostic ledger—the side that I am promoting—it’s open. It’s known. It’s personally accessible and, very importantly, it does not have anything to do with mastery or power. It has to do with letting go and letting God. It has to do with relinquishing personal control—taking your ego, your astrologer ego, your alchemist ego, your grandmaster ego off of the throne of your soul and allowing the singular One, the Self that we all share, our fractal of the Fullness of God, to control our lives. For now I just want you to realize that this type of Gnostic Christianity that I’m sharing with you—it’s not about me. It’s about you. And it’s not about you mastering anything. It’s not about you having to learn anything. You don’t even have to learn all these steps of the Gnostic Gospel that I lay out here—the Father to the Son; the Son to the Fullness; the Fullness creates Logos; Logos Falls and creates the world; the Fullness and Logos send down us 2nd order powers to populate the world and remind the fallen Demiurge that there is a life beyond

    20 min

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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

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Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained

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  • Creator
    Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2024
  • Episodes
    101
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    Explicit
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    Gnostic Insights

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