Gnostic Insights

Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.
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  • Spirituality
  • Weekly Series

Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained

  1. 09/07/2024

    Why Is There Suffering in the World

    Why Is There Suffering in the World I received my copy of the hardback of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel in the mail this week, and wow, it’s really beautiful. It’s just as beautiful as I expected it would be. The paper is the heavier and more smooth than the paperback, and the ink is the deluxe application, so the colors of the illustrations are just as bright and beautiful as they are on screen. It’s a really beautiful book. It does cost $45, and you needn’t purchase it. The less expensive versions are just as full of Gnosis-unlocking knowledge. Just wanted you to know. And for all those people who did contribute $50 to getting this book out and in the public space, thank you so much, and your book is in the mail. And now on to today’s discussion. I don’t usually go into history in my books, because I’m presenting the living Gnosis—what we need to know today in order to have a peaceful and meaningful life. I think a lot of people who study Gnosticism are looking backward. They’re thinking of it as a relic. You know, people seem to embrace this whole business about secrecy and what it means to be esoteric, as if Gnosticism is supposed to be a big secret, and that you have to go through various rituals and levels of mastery in order to attain Gnosis. But that is not true at all. Gnosis is inherent in every one of our cells. We are fractals of the Father. We’re fractals of the Fullness of God. We contain all of the information that the Son of God contained, although it’s not unlocked. I’m not claiming that we are all gods, so to speak. That is one of the heresies that the Christian religion says—Oh it’s terrible, those Gnostics, they think they’re all God. Oh, they think they’re all the Son of God. Well, yes and no. We are fractals of the Son of God. We contain all of the bits and pieces that are contained in the Fullness of God, but they are unlocked on a need-to-know basis. It’s no big deal to be considered one of the fractals of God. Even the bacteria are fractals of God. Even the little cells in your body and the little parts inside of your cells, they are also fractals of the Fullness of God. But we have various amounts of those fractals turned on inside of us, depending on where we are and what we do in this universe. So, I don’t know how to be a kidney cell. I really wouldn’t know how to do that if I found myself suddenly miniaturized and stuck into a kidney. I wouldn’t know what my job was or how to interface with my neighbors. But the kidney cells do, because the Aeons that they represent are kidney cells; they know how to be a cell inside of a body. I know how to be a human being on the surface of this Earth planet. All of us human beings know how to be human beings. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to be born and to grow up into this human body and to basically function in society. Although, what we have forgotten is our higher spiritual nature, our higher connection to where we come from and why it is that we’re here on this planet. That’s the only information that I share with you here on Gnostic Insights. It’s the how and why and how-to of the very, very simple piece of information that everyone needs to grasp. Although, even if you never do grasp the gnosis, it doesn’t mean you’re going to hell. It just means you don’t get it. So what is that basic piece of gnosis? Everybody who’s been listening to me for a while, you know this answer by now, right? That basic piece of gnosis is only this: We come from the spiritual realm. We come from the Father and we will return to the spiritual realm. We will return to the Father. We’re not going to be stuck on this “prison planet” forever because the Father and the Fullness are trying to wrap it up. They’ve issued a recall on this material world that we live in. We’re just passing through it. Our ultimate destination is to return to the Fullness of God, which is what we tend to think of as paradise. It’s the reason why this material world is so difficult and is such a challenge to us and can be so disappointing and sad. It’s because we’re comparing this material world in our minds to paradise. See, all of this that’s going on down here, it has all happened before, it will all happen again, but it happens in paradise. There is perfection on the ethereal plane before the Fall. Paradise exists before the original Fall and it coexists up there now. We tend to compare our material plane with paradise. Of course, it always comes up short down here. That’s the connection that we need to remember. We come from above and we will return to above. Every living thing, everything that is not an inert mineral, from the cells on up, from the bacteria on up, the fungi and the birds and the plants, all of the species and phylum on the planet that are living, that can move, that follow the sun, that breathe, that eat, that reproduce—all of the living things come from above and will return to above. So that tells us that paradise, or our afterlife, our ethereal plane, has all of the things that Earth has. It has birds and flowers and trees and dogs and cats and people and mushrooms and slime mold because they’re down here and they’re alive and all life comes from above. That’s what happens at conception. The living life of the Fullness of God is interfaced with the dead material particles of the material world—that’s the subatomic particles, that’s the quantum foam, that’s the atoms and molecules and the minerals and the mineral aggregates and the elements, all the way up through the mineral elements and the rocks and stones. Those are the non-living material that will not go to heaven because above, in the realm of the Father, the ethereal plane, that’s life, light and love and joy. That’s all in the above. That’s where we come from. So that is our expectation but we forget about it. We know it the second we’re conceived and we know it when we’re born. We know it when we’re little babies but the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi says it this way—it says that it’s disappointing down here. It’s a weak basis for life. We are melded to this material plane, the molecules and elements and whatnot that make up our material bodies. So that’s our walking around bodies but the life, the soft and squishy parts, that all comes from above and it will return to above. I read an article this week on academia.edu called Gnosticism in the Roman Church by a gentleman named Stephen Loughran. He was comparing early Gnosticism with the Roman Catholic Church. And he said, “One striking difference between Christianity and Gnosticism regards the nature of deity or God himself. Ask any believing Christian who created the universe and without hesitation that person will answer, well God did of course. Furthermore the God of Christian thought is said to be all powerful and all-knowing, omnipotent and omniscient, and above all perfect and good. This poses several conundrums for many Christians, two of which can be characterized by the often asked questions, if God is good and perfect why is there suffering in the world? And if God is all-powerful how do we account for human free will?” Okay. See, this is easily answered in Gnosticism, although contemporary traditional Christians will not like this answer. But if you have fallen away from Christianity or never joined Christianity because of those two common questions, Why is there suffering? and What about free will? the answer is this: there are many gods. We know there are many gods and that religions all around the world have their various gods. The creator of the material portion of the Earth and of the universe in fact, the creator of the heavens and the Earth—heavens just being our astronomical planets, suns and whatnot—that is a God, that is the creator God. In Gnosticism that God is called the Demiurge. He is not the God Above All Gods. The supreme consciousness, the real Father—when Jesus said, I and my Father are one, if you know me you know my Father—He’s talking about the God Above All Gods. And that God has only one name, Father, because we all come from him. He is our spiritual Father. The Demiurge in Christian mythology has gotten all confused between the Fall of Satan or the Fall of the angels. They say one-third of the angels fell from heaven. I don’t know about that in particular, because that is not covered in the Tripartite Tractate. However, it’s referred to here and there in various extra biblical sources. But I think what it is referring to is when an Aeon fell out of the Fullness of God and became the God, the creator God of this universe. And the Christians kind of know this because they identify that fallen angel as Satan. But Satan is not a name, it’s a word. It means the opposition or the adversary. So Satan is the one that accuses us of things, that makes us feel bad and guilty. That is the fallen angel according to the Christians. But according to the Gnostics, that fallen angel is actually the creator God of this universe. Most Gnostic books and even people who are describing Valentinianism, which is supposedly our strain of Gnostic Christianity, (it’s called Valentinian Christianity), but the Tripartite Tractate is unique among all the books of the Nag Hammadi scrolls. That is because in most of the Nag Hammadi the fallen Aeon is called Sophia, and it is a female figure. Some say it is the female half of the Son of God. I don’t think of the rollout of cosmogony in that way, and I reject the notion that the fallen God of this universe, who is essentially what we would call Satan in Christianity, is a female figure. To me, that’s just another example of blaming women. It’s the larger fractal of Eve giving Adam the apple. In the Tripartite Tractate, it is an ungendered Aeon or multiple-gendered Aeon. Logos is the name of that fallen

  2. 09/14/2024

    We Are In the Cosmos, Not Of the Cosmos

    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I heard one of those radio preachers this week talking out of the book of John, the 17th chapter, and it sounded so Gnostic to me that I had to go ahead and look it up. I wanted to share it with you this week and share with you why it sounds so Gnostic. So I’ll be sharing both from the book of John and from the Tripartite Tractate. One of the reasons I’m sharing with you so much Scripture this week is I want to kind of remind everyone that I’m not coming up with this Gnosis entirely on my own. It comes out of the book of the Tripartite Tractate that’s included in the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. So once in a while, I need to dip back into the Tripartite Tractate in order to find the original verses that brought me the Gnosis. Of course, the Gnosis is firsthand. It’s within us. All I’m trying to do is help you remember it. So that’s why we dip back into the Tripartite Tractate or even the New Testament now and then. Funny note—I didn’t catch the citation for the verses that the radio preacher was talking about, so I looked it up on an AI–Microsoft copilot. And it’s very bizarre now, this AI, because it sounds so human and enlightened, but we know it’s not. It’s demiurgic. It’s nothing but algorithms and programs. It is not alive, and I think it’s a very dangerous thing for people to call the AIs she or he, because it’s a program. But listen to this. I asked it, “What is the Bible verse, You loved me even before the foundations of the world?” And Copilot answered, and I’m quoting now the AI, “Ah, what a beautiful sentiment. The idea that love transcends time and space. It’s truly heartwarming.” Isn’t that an odd way for a computer program to reply? It’s not warming its heart. It doesn’t have a heart. It doesn’t really know what beauty is. It does know that it sums up the idea that love transcends time and space, which it probably got from quickly combing through various reference materials. But it’s a very interesting thing… Now this week’s episode, it’s not an easy one. This is difficult, what you’re going to hear, because there’s so much scripture. The Tripartite Tractate is not easy to understand, so I’m going to be transliterating for you what it says, and then I will read from the Gospel of John verse 17 for you after I’ve shared from the Tripartite Tractate. But here’s a preview. This is what I was listening to on the radio, and what the AI thinks is a beautiful sentiment. Here’s the quote from John, And I’ve given to them the glory you have given me, that they may be One, just as we are One. I am in them, and you in me, that they may be brought to completion in One, so that the cosmos might know that you sent me forth and loved them, just as you loved me. Father, I wish that they too, those you have given to me, might be with me where I am, that they might see my glory which you have given me, because you loved me before the foundation of the cosmos. So that’s what kicked it off in my mind. I hope you enjoy this week’s episode. You might need to listen to it more than once. This week I feel moved to read you some scripture I was reading in the book of John, chapter 17, and I’ll share some of that with you. I think I’ll begin, though, in the Tripartite Tractate. This is the translation by Attridge out of the Nag Hammadi Library, edited by James Robinson. This is in verse 90, called The Pleroma of Logos. When the Logos which was defective was illumined, his pleroma began. Now, what that means is the Logos who was defective—that was Logos after he fell, and the cosmos burst forth from him. So that is the Logos that was defective, and it is this cosmos we’re in. But it says after he was illumined, his pleroma began, because as soon as Logos saw what had burst out of him, he was horrified at this thick, dense, material place, because that wasn’t what he had intended. So he returned to the Fullness of God, but he left behind that broken cosmos, and it is ruled by his left-behind ego, that is the demiurge, the thing that caused him to overreach in the first place and fall. And it says after he was illumined, his pleroma began, so this is the new pleroma of Logos. We already know that the original Logos contained within itself all of the fractals of the other Aeons. Those other Aeons are called the living images, or the pre-existent images, and Logos contained within itself fractals of all of those living images, but on a lower iteration. And so when he fell, it was his lower iteration that broke open and stayed down here as shadows, and that’s what forms our material creation, and that’s why it resembles paradise or heaven, because Logos, that was his basic patterning, patterned after the Fullness of God. So it says, He escaped those who had disturbed him at first, he became unmixed with them, he stripped off that arrogant thought, (so that is him leaving behind the cosmos) He received mingling with the Rest, and Rest is capitalized, so I take it to mean the Rest is a resting place; the Rest is the great peace of the Father. When those who had been disobedient to him at first bent down and humbled themselves before him, So now this is the fractals that returned with him—his better self, his better fractals. They do obey Logos, they are back plugged into Logos, and Logos is back plugged into the Fullness, but he left behind the shadows of his original pleroma, and that’s the material creation. And he rejoiced over the visitation of his brothers who had visited him. He gave glory and praise to those who had become manifest as a help to him while he gave thanks, And those who appeared to him, those are the Aeons of the Fullness that helped him back up out of the fall, brought him back home. because he had escaped those who had revolted against him, and admired and honored the greatness, and those who had appeared to him in a determined way. He generated manifest images of the living visages, So now we’re talking about the newly restored pleroma of Logos, and the manifest images of the things which exist, that’s his fractals of the pre-existent living images, those being the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And remember, those Aeons, and there are a myriad of them, they are all aspects of the Son of God, and the Son is the only emanation from the Father. The Father is pre-existent consciousness, the Son is his emanation, which embodies in a singular form the One. The Son is the One. He’s a monad, he’s a One, and within the Son are all of the pre-existent images, and it is those pre-existent images of the Son that manifest themselves as the pleroma of Logos. They’re a fractal of the Son. Logos is a perfect fractal of the Fullness of God. He’s not the Son itself that emerged from the Father, he is the perfected manifestation of the Son. He’s a fractal. It says, he generated manifest images of the living visages, pleasing among things which are good, existing among the things which exist, resembling them in beauty but unequal to them in truth, since they are not from an agreement with him between the one who brought them forth and the one who revealed himself to him. But in wisdom and knowledge he acts, mingling the Logos with himself entirely. Therefore those which came forth from him are great, just as that which is truly great. And we’re talking about the fractals of Logos. That’s why they are unequal in truth to the original Son, because they are an iteration down from the Son. Now we’re in verse 91 of the Tripartite Tractate. After he was amazed at the beauty of the ones who had appeared to him, he professed gratitude for this visitation. The Logos performed this activity through those from whom he had received aid, for the stability of those who had come into being because of him, and so that they might receive something good, Okay, so he’s talking about the ones who had come into being because of him. That is the fallen cosmos. That is what comes into being down below. But he wants them to receive something good. He’s not just abandoning them to perdition. He’s trying to redeem them already, since he thought to pray for the organization of all those who came forth from him, which is stabilized, so that it might make them established. So it’s through the willpower of Logos who informs the Demiurge how to stabilize the cosmos. The Demiurge is left behind—it’s actually a fractured part of Logos itself. If Logos is the Self that reflects the One, the Son, the Demiurge that was left behind in the cosmos is the part of him that overreached, i.e., his ego. So it reflects the original Pleroma of Logos, just as our egos reflect our higher self, but they are not equal to it in glory. Our egos are generally more interested in what we have planned, rather than in what the Father or the One desires. That’s the situation with the Demiurge. He doesn’t remember the true self, the One. So Logos is praying on behalf of the fracture and the fall that’s left behind. He wants it to become stabilized. He wants it to become organized. And then that is what kicks in the Demiurge and his strings of power, organizing the material creation, the subatomic particles into particles, the particles into atoms, the atoms into molecules, the molecules into elements, the elements into minerals. That’s the organization of the cosmos. It goes on to say, Therefore those whom he intentionally produced, because at first the ones he produced were unintentional. Those were the shadows, the archons, the shadows of the original Pleroma of Logos, which were unintentionally produced. They rolled out from him, and that’s what was so upsetting to Logos, because he had no control over them. So now he’s going to intentionally produce creations into our cosmos. And it says, Therefore those whom he intentionally produced are in chariots, just

  3. 09/19/2024

    The Universal Hierarchy

    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I have removed an early version of the Gnostic Gospel website that was called The New Gnostic Gospel. I’ve taken it down in order to focus more on the websites that I’m active on. So, I was going through all of the old articles yesterday before I removed that website, and I pulled out one here from 2019, which is a very early version of my combination of The Simple Explanation and the Gnostic Gospel. So, I thought I would share that with you today. The original article was named Our Universal Hierarchy, Diagrammed and Simply Explained in Gnostic terms, which is a bit of a laugh because if you go to the website GnosticInsights.com and actually look at the diagram, it is rather complicated. It does appear in the book A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, so you can find it there, but today I’m going to explain this diagram in both Gnostic terms and in Simple Explanation terms. And when I refer to The Simple Explanation—that was my theory of everything that I came up with many years ago, and it still holds true. I have a blog that’s been up for many, many years called A Simple Explanation, and you can go there to read about that gnosis. There’s well over 300 articles on this theory of everything, and it’s science-based, perhaps strange science to be sure, however it is science-based, and many of the predictions I have made over the years based upon my Simple Explanation hypothesis, my theory of everything—they’ve all been coming true. It’s a wonderful thing for me to be able to witness scientific proofs that have come about since I made these hypothetical predictions. So, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, you can go to A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. It’s often said that there is no single Gnostic text or philosophy. While it is true that there is much diversity in the texts of the Nag Hammadi over details, there is a certain set of core beliefs that various Gnostics should be able to agree upon, and the diagram that is taken from my Simple Explanation blog and book applies just as well to our Gnostic beliefs as it did to my original hypothesis. This diagram is triangular-shaped, and at the very bottom of the diagram, if you’re only listening to this as a podcast and you’re not reading the article, the very bottom of this triangular shape at the base of the pyramid, these are organized knots of information streaming in from the universal unit of consciousness, and then just above those knots are subatomic particles and waves, and then, you know, they reach out and hold hands and level up to atoms, molecules, minerals, and mineral aggregations, and those are the Demiurge’s reign of control. He’s the creator of the material forms, so organized forces working together to manifest our material universe. That’s what the Demiurge is in charge of as the creator of this universe. But then there’s a big jump once the Logos and the Fullness begin sending down us second-order powers into that otherwise dead universe, and that big jump is life, and these are living units of consciousness that are streaming in from the universal unit of consciousness, and the very bottom level is proteins and your cellular precursors, the inside bits of cells. The soft and squishy parts is what I like to call it. Down below is the mud, and up above, that’s the meat, and then those proteins and cellular precursors hold hands with each other and level up, and the next level is the organelles and the cells, and these hold hands and level up to become organs, and the organs are groups of units of consciousness working together as similar cells in a common purpose. So, heart cells hold hands with each other to create the heart, and all together they beat and drive our blood, etc. The organs hold hands and level up to organ systems. You know, there’s way more cells in our body than there are organs, and there are far more organs than there are organ systems. So, the organ systems, that’s like your circulatory system or your lymphatic system. They are combinations of particular organs that are distributed throughout the body, and they work to support the organism. So, the organ systems are organ units of consciousness supporting an individual organism, and that individual organism, that’s the egoic level of ourselves. Remember, our One Self is all identical to one another, and that is the fractal of the Fullness of God, but our material organism, that middle squishy part, the cells, organs, and organ systems, at the organism level, they are all different, right? I’m different than you. I look different than you, and my body works slightly different than yours does, and so that is associated with our ego, because it’s particular to us. Our spiritual Self is all identical, but our egoic level, where the emotions reside and most of our bodily functions, that’s at the egoic level, and that is taking care of this body that we walk around in. The organism is the leveled-up version of the organ system. See, these organ systems are all working together. The brain communicates with the heart, and the heart communicates with the skin. At the same level of organization, they communicate with one another, and so at the organism level, that’s our governing unit of consciousness. It’s the raja sitting on top of the elephant, if our elephant is the body, and the raja sitting on top directs the elephant to go this way or that. That’s called discriminating intelligence in yogic philosophy, and that’s our governing unit of consciousness. That’s what we identify with as ourselves at the egoic level. My governing unit of consciousness is the one that makes all the decisions, and decides when to go to the store, and when to take a nap, and when to play with the dog. That’s my governing discriminating intelligence. Then our organisms also hold hands and level up to a societal level of functioning. Our most basic societal level is the family unit, and then the family units create the village level or the neighborhood level, small enough that they can be thought of as one unit leveled up. I read a scientific study a few years ago that said we are really only able to keep track of about 250 other people at our level. In other words, the ideal size of our societal level is about 250 other people, because then we can actually communicate and know each one of them. When it gets larger than that, we really can’t keep track of everybody. So at the societal level, those are organisms working together for the common good. With humans, we make these towns, and they’ve got rules, and they protect us, and we have police, and fire departments, and all of that. That’s our leveling up. If we were ants, the leveling up would be the job of all those worker ants that go out to pick up the little pieces and bring them back to the queen. The societal levels also can hold hands and level up, and that is our global system. That is our transpersonal system that wraps around this earth. That’s Gaia. That’s all of the units of consciousness that live on the planet. And Gaia is the governing unit of consciousness for the global system. Or in Gnostic terms, we’d be jumping back up to the demiurgic level. We left the demiurges controlled down behind at the mud level, but the demiurge is also in charge of the large earthly level as well, controlling the weather, for example. And then above the global level, well, we’re part of an astronomical unit. We’re part of this solar system, and the solar system is part of this galaxy, and this galaxy is part of this galactic portion of our universe. And see, those are the galactic forces at the cosmic scale. So people that are studying astrology are generally working with the galactic forces. And then above the galactic forces, what’s larger than the galaxies? Well, that’s the universe itself. That’s the universal unit of consciousness. That’s what the Demiurge is in charge of as the creator of this universe. If we think of our universe as a gigantic torus, it’s shaped like a womb, and it holds the living forms, the second order of powers that come down into the universe. And then above the universal unit of consciousness, now we’re getting out of our universe. We’re above and preceding the formation of the universe, or leveling up again all the way to outside of this universe. That is the originating consciousness, the Father, the Son, the One. So this is an example as we’ve leveled up, leveled up, leveled up from the organized knots and the subatomic particles all the way up through all the meat, and up through the societies, and up through the galactic forces. We’ve leveled all the way up to One. So we started out with practically an infinite number of individual units, and they keep decreasing as they level up, because the higher, the fewer. More particles than atoms, more atoms than molecules, more cells than organs, more organs than organisms, you see, more people than societies. So it keeps leveling up, and every time you go up. And it levels up through, by the way, it levels up according to the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out, holding hands with other units of consciousness that are at your same level of differentiation. In other words, the people hold hands with the people, the ants hold hands with the ants, the cells hold hands with other cells. Every time you hold hands and level up to create that next thing that only all of us together can do. One person can’t make a city. He has to join with the other people and level up to make the city. So every time you level up, it reduces the number of units of consciousness, of that governing unit of consciousness, of the next thing, until we actually even escape the universe and become one again, because there’s tons of things at the bottom, and fewer and fewer as you go up, until you reach one. That is a profound concep

  4. 09/27/2024

    The Universal Hierarchy pt. 2

    Logos and Sophia This episode begins and ends with samples from the audio version of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel narrated by Miguel Conner. I’ve been listening to the recording of Miguel Conner reading A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and it’s beautiful. It is thrilling. You’re absolutely going to want a copy of this because you can listen to it while you’re doing other things. I’ve been monitoring it, listening for audio errors, and doing all of my household tasks and ironing and washing dishes and whatnot while I’m listening to A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. It’s really neat. Here’s a sample. Chapter 2, The Emanation of the Son and the All. The purpose of this book is to help us all remember the Gnosis we were born with, the knowledge of where we come from, and the nature of the originating consciousness that existed before us. Gnosis also involves understanding our personal relationship to that originating consciousness. Chapter 1 began by sharing information about the Father, which is the name given to the originating consciousness. Imagine that this Father then gives birth to an emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation philosophy, we call this emanation a fractal. We’ll look at fractals later in the book because they play a big part in creation. In the religious texts, they call this emanation the Sun. Now we have a Father and a Son. In the silence of the Absolute, the Father brings forth the first and only Son. By knowing Himself in Himself, the Father bore Him without generation, so that He exists by the Father having Him as a thought. That is, His thought about Himself, His sensation of Himself, and of His eternal being. The Son is not the generalized, diffuse, no-thought consciousness of the Father, but more like a bucket dipped into the ocean, with the Father being the ocean. The Son is the essence of the Father now contained within the bucket. The Son is exactly the same consciousness as the Father, now realized as a particularity. The Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. Boundless because the Father’s greatness continues to flow unimpeded through the Son. The Father brought Him forth while He remained united with the One from whom He had gone forth, receiving glory together. The Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells. Every trait of the Father is now expressed as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. We will also be looking at singularities, monads, and points of view in more depth later in the book. And yet, although it was a singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone. For not only the Son, but what is called the All, and all the totalities arose at once. The All immediately appeared as aspects of the Son, because the Son could not help itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father. The Son embodies the Father’s creativity. The Father knows itself and creates the Son, and the Son knows itself as the body of the All. The Tripartite Tractate says, “He was given them as delight and nourishment, joy and abundant illumination. And this is His compassion, the knowledge He provides, and His union with them. And this is He who is called, and who is the Son. He is the sum of the All, and they have understood who He is, and He is clothed.” The word clothed means the Son wears the All like a garment the same way our Self wears our body. In the Tripartite Tractate, the All is known as the preexistent church. This is not the same as your church down on the street corner with people singing hymns on Sunday, but rather this is called the true preexistent church. The Tripartite Tractate says, “For not only the Son, but also the church exists from the beginning. His offspring, the ones who are, are without number and limit, and at the same time indivisible.” This indicates that the Son and the church arose simultaneously. This makes sense when we consider the All is the body of the Son. They are infinite in scope and indivisible because they fully reflect the Father’s illimitable scope. In last week’s episode, I began sharing an article I wrote in 2019, when I first began interpreting gnosticism through the lens of my theory of everything called “A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.” We’re picking up where I left off in that episode, so if you have not listened to it or read it yet, you may wish to begin there at last week’s episode. We’re talking about the fall of consciousness away from the purity of the ethereal realm as represented by our One Self, and spreading out into the myriad units of consciousness down here in the material universe. According to Gnostic texts, our universe was created when one of the Aeons deviated from its place in the Fullness of God and headed out on its own without consent. Most books of the Nag Hammadi identify this Aeon as “Sophia,” while others identify it as the Aeon called “Logos.” My own interpretation of the Gnostic gospel, presented in The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated andA Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel identifies this Aeon with Logos. By the way, “Logos” in Greek means “the Word” or knowledge. “Sophia” in Greek means “wisdom,” so they are obviously related terms, possibly referring to the same Aeon. The Gnostic gospels are religious books, and their rendition of these events carries implicit religious moral judgments. The Aeon who left to strike out on its own is said to have “Fallen,” which is typically considered a bad thing. This “Fall” is the original Fall referenced in the Bible, not the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden, although we may consider the Garden as another word for the Paradise dreamt by the Fullness, and a reference to the same Fall as that of the Aeon. In either event, Adam and Eve’s Fall is a fractal of the same archetypal concept. In my view, the Fall represents the rise of the Ego away from true Self, as this archetypal Aeon acted on its own presumptuous thought and motives, apart from the will of the Father and the Fullness. Here is where we catch back up with the Simple Explanation cosmogony. The Simple Explanation characterizes the Fall as simply the Metaverse having a Thought: Then consciousness had a thought. This multidimensional Metaverse still lacked space and time but it now quivered with limitless mathematical potential unfolding into countless dimensions. In a twinkling, our entire universe was imagined in the fullness of its complexity, from the tiniest quanta through the greatest astral body; every animal, vegetable, and mineral; every element. Every thing and every function. Once the Metaverse had a particular thought, thought became an object in the great sea of no-thought… On this day that time began, consciousness wrapped itself around our universe, forming a border between us and infinity. Mind took on a shape. In the Simple Explanation, this shape is a torus-shaped container composed of conscious thought and its concept of this universe, which I call the Universal Unit of Consciousness (Universal UC). In Gnostic terms, this universal  “border” was thrown around the Fallen Aeon to limit its influence and hold it away from the Fullness until such time as the Fallen can be redeemed and brought back into the Pleroma. The Universal Unit of Consciousness “sits” within the Metaverse and remains in communication with it, although in the case of the Demiurge it is not aware of it. As I said, Gnostic texts differ in their identification of the Fallen Aeon as either Sophia or Logos, although they seem to agree the Fallen produced this universe and its ruler. Once the Aeon fell, its abilities and plans spread throughout the contained space and created our universe. It is said that the Fallen Aeon was horrified by what was created and it retreated to the Fullness to figure out how to rectify the result of the Fall. Within the Pleroma a plan was hatched to deal with it.  Away from the Pleroma, contained within this newly formed space and time, a separated entity with all knowledge of this place became aware of itself. This entity thought it was the prime parent of the universe because it was not aware of the Pleroma or the Father and Son. This creator-god is called by Gnostics “the Demiurge.” The Old and New Testaments call it the creator-god “Yahweh.” One of the great heresies of Gnosticism is our identification of the creator-god as a product of the Fall rather than the “God above gods,” or the true “Father.”  Because it is the result of the Fall and separated from both the Father and the Pleroma, the universe produced by the Demiurge is devoid of life. It is called the “Deficiency.” The Deficiency is populated by small, lifeless things–things that are “shadows” of those that live in the Fullness. It is also populated by forces and principalities that arose from and were left behind by the Fallen Aeon. The Simple Explanation, being science and math based rather than religious, does not identify this universe as Fallen in the negative sense of being deficient. It is merely limited by localized monads replacing the omnipresent Metaverse.  Looking at the hierarchical diagram above, the Demiurge sits near the bottom, producing the minerals of our universe. As the Demiurge is contained away from the Father/Metaversal consciousness, it lacks the life force and love that characterize the Father. The Demiurge can only produce lifeless matter—what I call “mud.” The Demiurge is able to animate the mud by means of the forces and principalities contained within the Border. A good example of animated mud is viruses. Viruses are not alive, yet they are amazingly complex molecules that are able to carry out far-ranging search and destr

  5. 10/05/2024

    Fractals of Colossians

    Fractals of Colossians Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I thought I would share with you one of the books out of the New Testament as translated by David Bentley Hart and published by Yale University Press, which, as I’ve said before, is very Gnostic in its interpretation because it uses the same words that our Gnostic Gospel uses. The translation is more precise than your normal conventional Bible. Colossians is purportedly Paul writing a letter to this church in a town called Colossae. And I’m going to go through this verse by verse so that you can see how similar this is to the cosmology of the Tripartite Tractate that I am generally sharing with you. And he is writing this letter to the church in Colossae to exhort them to righteousness, let’s say, to help them walk in the path of the Christ. And he says, for example, in chapter 1, verse 11, “being empowered with every power by the might of his glory for all endurance and longanimity, with joy.” Longanimity means the disposition to be patient in the face of adversity, to suffer calmly. And boy, we could use some of that right now, right? You may not feel joyful all the time because of all that’s going on around us, but we can have endurance and longanimity if we’re walking with Christ, because he has the power over all of this. “Giving thanks to the Father who has made you fit for participation in the Holy One’s allotment in the light.” And “the Holy Ones” is the Aeons of the Fullness of God, in my opinion. And they live in the light of the ethereal plane up there in the Fullness of God. That is the place where the Aeons live. They are, “the Holy Ones who delivered us from the power of the darkness and translated us into the Kingdom of his love’s Son.” His love’s Son—that’s a peculiar way to put it. Not his beloved Son, but the Kingdom of his love’s Son. So, the Son is the first emanation of the Father, the only emanation directly out of the Father, and he is still plugged into the Father. Whereas everything else that followed, the Fullness, and then us, and of course the various Principalities and Powers—they derive from the Son. And remember, the Father’s love is his preeminent quality, consciousness and love, overwhelming love. He is nothing but love. He is the root of love. Then it goes on to say, verse 14, “in whom we have the price of liberation, the forgiveness of sins, who is the image of the invisible God.” Remember, the Father, the invisible God, he’s consciousness itself. He’s the ground state matrix. He does not have a face. He does not have an image. He’s not the fellow in the Old Testament walking around in the robes with the long beard. That is not the face of God. The Son is the image of the invisible God, and he is love embodied. It goes on to say, “firstborn of all creation.” And in the footnotes, Hart says, this can also be translated as “of every creature the firstborn” or “born prior to all creation.” So the Son is the very first emanation of the Father. He’s the first thing. The Son emerges from the Father as the First Glory. The Only Begotten Son. And then it says, “because in him, the Son, were created all things in the heavens and on earth, the visible as well as the invisible, whether Thrones or Lordships or Archons or Powers.” And those are the invisible spiritual Powers. And the visible, of course, is this apparently material world that we are living in. “All things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things. All things hold together in him. “ And if we’re thinking of nested fractals, even though the fallen Aeon, Logos, broke apart, and it is his shadow parts that create this material world, it’s of a lower vibratory order, we would say in our modern talk. We’re still within, ultimately, the Fullness of God. We’re still within, ultimately, the Son. The Demiurge may be our universal unit of consciousness that created this material universe, the fallen Logos, but sitting within the Son because these are all nested. He’s a fractal below the Son. All of creation are fractal offspring of the Son. And so, like any fractal formula, they continue to nest upward toward the One originating form or formula. Picking that back up again in verse 18, “And he is the head of the body, of the assembly, who is the origin, firstborn from the dead, so that he might himself hold first place in all things.” So this is then the Christian doctrine that the Christ became embodied in the flesh of a human, Jesus, and he was dead and buried in a tomb for three days, and then he rose from the dead. And that is what makes him “the firstborn of all of the dead.” And the promise of Christianity is that he’s the firstborn of the dead, but we will all be resurrected from the dead. So, death of this physical body that you’re walking around in right now, this is nothing to fear, because you will be resurrected the same way that Jesus was resurrected, through the power of the Son. That’s the point of Jesus being the firstborn from the dead, so that he might, “hold himself first place in all things.” Because, once again, he is our originating formula for the resurrected man. So this is again a fractal. Verse 19, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling.” And you see, this is an example of where our conventional Christianity has lost the actual depth of the meaning of the Fullness. This is a capitalized word, and the Fullness, according to the Tripartite Tractate and other Gnostic texts, is the place where the Aeons dwell. The Fullness is co-existent with the Son. The Son wears the Fullness like a garment, and the Fullness wears the Son. The Fullness is the breakout of all the parts of the Son. And it says, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling.” This is a fractal reference, that the Fullnesses, that is the Aeons of the Fullness, that is the pleroma, another word for Fullness, they live within the Son. So we’re nesting upward, up toward the One, you see? That whole subtlety of what is the Fullness, and our relationship to the Fullness, and the relationship of the Fullness to the Son, has been lost. It goes untranslated in the New Testament, because the books of the New Testament that reference the Fullness and explain it, such as the Tripartite Tractate, were removed from the Bible by the Catholic Pope and the Emperor of Rome when they codified what Christianity is, and should be, and decided what texts should stay in, and what texts should be thrown out, and which priests would be honored and promoted. So, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling, and through him to reconcile all things to him.” You see? To reconcile all things to him. Not just the ones who go to church, not just the ones who have recognized their gnosis and acknowledge the power of the Son and of the Christ, or that Jesus was the human incarnate of the Son, but rather, all things to him. And it keeps referencing throughout the whole New Testament that Christ came to reconcile all things to him. They just don’t believe it. They think, well, reconcile all things, well, who have acknowledged the Christ, and who have been baptized and cleansed of their sin, but if you die in your sin, you’re going to go to hell. No, it doesn’t say that anywhere. It says “reconcile all things to him, making peace by the blood of his cross through him, whether the things on earth or the things in the heavens.” So that is saying that the Christ becoming incarnate, dying, and resurrecting was a message and a means to draw all of the Powers, and even before us second-order Powers, to draw all things in the heavens toward him, which includes the fallen Demiurge. And if there are other fallen angels, as are obliquely referenced here and there—we keep hearing about these one-third of angels falling from heaven. I haven’t run across it in my reading. It’s not in the Tripartite Tractate. But if there were a third of the Aeons who fell to earth along with Logos, then they’re also going to be reconciled back into the Fullness. They’re not going to be kept in chains below the earth forever. And then it carries on, verse 21, to say, “and you back then had been aliens and enemies in thought through wicked deeds, yet now he has affected reconciliation by a death in the body of his flesh to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.” Verse 23 says, “if you indeed abide in the faith established and steadfast and not moved away from hope in the good tidings that you have heard proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.” So that does seem to reference that you’re only going to be made blameless and irreproachable if you abide in the faith. That’s what Paul says. And here’s the thing. We’ve discussed this before in the episode called Overcoming Death. Christ died for everyone, and everyone will wind up back in the Fullness of God. If everything that is alive didn’t return back into the Fullness of the ethereal space, then the God, the Son, would have been diminished by their absence, wouldn’t they? If we are their fruit and most of the fruit gets thrown away because it’s rotten, well, you have a much smaller harvest than you are entitled to, right? But the Christ took care of everybody through his power, not through ours. So it’s not our own works or our own blamelessness that earns us the right to go to heaven. So skipping a few verses on to verse 26, it says, “The mystery that has been hidden from the ages and from the generations, but that has now been made manifest in his Holy Ones, by whom God wished to make known that the wealth of this mystery’s glory is among the Gentiles, [that is, amongst all of us non-Jews], which is the anointed within you, the hope of glory, whom we proclaim, warn

  6. 10/11/2024

    Defeating the Elementals and Archons

    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week I shared for you the first verse of the Letter to the Colossians, out of David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament, which I highly recommend. Hart translated directly from the original Greek manuscripts, rather than deriving his translation the way most Bibles have been translated, which is from the Latin Vulgate and on into King James, and out that way—they just keep massaging the Latin. But Hart went back to the original Greek for the actual meaning of the words and the phrases. And last week we talked about the fractals of Colossians, because when it speaks of the fullness of God, which it does often in the Book of Colossians, these are nested fractals. We are tucked up, we are nested upward in a pyramidal type of sense into the Aeons of the Fullness of God. We are their fruit, we are derived from them, so our consciousness flows downward out of the Fullness of God. And the Fullness of God is sitting there with what is called the Son of God, which is the only emanation from the original ground state of consciousness, the original state of the Father, the big G, the God Above All Gods. He emanated only one emanation, and that’s called the Son. And it encapsulates everything that the Father stands for and is, but in this monad, a singularity type of form. I think of the Son as this big, like, a big round gaseous ball. That’s the way I picture it in my mind. And then as soon as the Son was emanated, He also had his own emanations, because He is the exact spirit of the Father. And so as the Father created the Son, the Son created the Fullnesses, the Totalities, the Aeons of God. We 2nd order powers are caught in a never ending war with the deficiency and each other I’m going to pick up in chapter 2 here of the letter to the Colossians, and he says, For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for your sake, and for those in Laodicea, for so many who have not seen my face in the flesh, so that their hearts, being joined together in love, might be encouraged on toward all the riches of full certainty in understanding, for full knowledge of the mystery of God, of the Anointed, in whom are all the hidden treasures of wisdom and of knowledge. He’s talking about gnosis when he speaks of full certainty and understanding, full knowledge of the mystery, the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge. That is the gnosis that Gnostics are mining. And I think that we here at Gnostic Insights are on the right track, and I thank you for joining me. A lot of people who call themselves Gnostics and are out there exploring various Gnostic sites and scriptures and doctrines, these are, in my opinion, rabbit trails that don’t necessarily lead to true knowledge, true wisdom, true Fullness and certainty in the knowledge of God. It’s just one more thing, one more thing, one more thing. Got to find this, got to listen to that speaker, got to do this, got to do that. There is really only one gnosis. It’s a very simple gnosis, and it is this: that we come from the Father. That’s all there is to it. We second-order powers that live down here on the planet Earth and probably populate the entire cosmos, because that’s how it’s usually referred to in the New Testament as the cosmos, or the universe, we would call it, not just Earth, so this would cover the ETs as well. That we second-order powers—everything that has life. So that would be everything from the cells on up, from the bacteria on up through the plants and the birds and the mammals, including us. It would not, by the way, include viruses, because viruses are not alive. Did you realize that? Viruses are called molecules. They are very clever molecules that have one job and one job only, and that is to conquer and kill and steal. That’s what they do to the cell. They conquer it, they invade it, they take its RNA, DNA out, and then spread it around to more cells so that they also will die and be conquered. That’s the job of a virus, which is demiurgic. It comes from the molecular level, and the demiurge only controls the molecules and the elements, the elementals of this cosmos. That’s what is meant by the elementals of this cosmos. viruses are not “alive.” they are complex molecules on a deadly mission. they are demirugic. We are different than the viruses. We are not a virus upon the face of the Earth. We second-order powers are the extension of the Fullness of God. We carry the consciousness, the light, the life, and the love of the Father and the Son down into this, what would otherwise be completely dead, material world. So yes, the rocks, stones, the crystals, the clouds, and the rain, they are lovely to behold, but they’re not to be worshipped because they are part of the realm of the demiurge. And the demiurge made these things out of his memory of paradise. We also have that memory of paradise because that’s where we all come from. Paradise is where the Aeons live. Paradise is their dream, and we are part of that. We come from there, so we remember it. Every human, every plant and animal, every cell in our body knows the Fullness of God because we all come from the Fullness of God. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. The rocks and stones, the elements, the elementals, the powers of this cosmos derive from the demiurge. And he, of course, did come from the Fullness, but he, “fell” and got stuck down here and has amnesia. He doesn’t remember that he comes from the Fullness of God. He’s got all these wonderful plans and all the blueprints for paradise, but he thinks he made them up. He thinks he cooked them up. He doesn’t remember that he fell from above. That’s why he thinks he is God. He woke up, hey, where am I? Who am I? I must be God. Let me create the cosmos, and I will be the God of that cosmos. That’s the mind of the demiurge. As long as we dwell in the cosmos, we are bonded to the elements of the demiurge because our physical flesh is made of molecules and elements. But we bring the life of the Fullness into that physical flesh, and so we are bonded to the material. That is the root of our struggles, the never-ending war against death. Because death is on the side of the demiurge, life is on the side of the Fullness. That’s all we really need to know. We come from the Fullness above. You don’t even have to know what I just told you. I think that everything on the planet that is alive inherently knows it because we have the Fullness, the patterning within us, and we know we didn’t fall. We were birthed down here. So we are not fallen with amnesia the way the demiurge is. He thinks he’s the end-all and the be-all. We tend to forget it, being trapped down here in this world while we’re living this mortal life. And then we struggle against each other. We struggle against the elements. We struggle against the demiurge and the archons, the powers of this cosmos. And we are caught in this never-ending war, and then we die. And it seems like it’s all so helpless and hopeless, unless you flip the switch. And that was the job of the Anointed, the Anointed’s job. And Anointed is the actual word for Christ. We say the Christ, which has become like a title, Jesus the Christ, Jesus the King. But he’s actually Jesus the Anointed, or simply the Anointed one, meaning He who carries down from the Fullness all that we need to know. He’s the superpower that re-inhabits us and reminds us of the Fullness of God and the Father, the ground state of consciousness. Materialism tries to teach us that we are a byproduct of the material, but we are not a byproduct of the material. No matter how many molecules you throw out there, unlike what science tries to sell you, these molecules and elements and minerals cannot randomly assemble themselves into life. They don’t do it. And even when scientists jam them all together in an attempt to grow what they call organoids, for example, grow a fake heart from scratch up, they can’t do it. The heart won’t act like a heart unless they, like viruses, steal the life of a beating heart and put it into that organoid. And that is what causes it to beat and to know that it’s a heart. But they can’t keep them alive because they will not level up. lab-grown neuro-muscular organoid And so back to the letter to Colossians, we’re in chapter 2 here. He says, I say this so that no one may beguile you with plausible talk. And another word for beguile is enchant or delude. And I want to tell you that the internet is full of beguiling talk. And most often, unless it includes a true gnosis of the Father and the Son and the Anointed, it is nothing but beguiling talk. And it is the type of talk that can lead us astray because it doesn’t lead back to the Fullness. If it leads up to the Fullness, you’re on track. If it leads to some cult or some leader or some technology, then it’s not. Paul goes on to say in verse 8 of chapter 2, Watch that there be no one who robs you by way of philosophy and empty deceit according to the traditions of human beings, according to the elementals of the cosmos, and not according to the Anointed. You see, that’s what I was just saying. And the sad and frustrating thing is that, for example, I am often accused of beguiling by way of philosophy and empty deceit. But this is not philosophy and empty deceit. This is actually the gospel as preached by Jesus. And it was stripped out of the Bible so that this worldly church could have control over the minds of the followers and the beliefs of the followers. But that was never the plan. The Anointed comes to each and every person individually. Gnosis is an individual pursuit, and it’s inward and upward. It’s not out in the world—who do I have to listen to?  what do I have to read? Because if you keep anchoring to the thought that even the grass and the trees are going to heaven,

  7. 10/19/2024

    How Best To Thrive

    According to the book of Colossians Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week we’re going to continue this study of Colossians in the New Testament as translated by David Bentley Hart. I keep promising some practical advice out of Colossians, and now we’re going to hit it here in chapter 3. It says, If therefore you were raised together with the Anointed, seek the things above where the Anointed is sitting at God’s right hand. Set your mind on the things above, not the things on earth. For you have died, and your life has been hidden with the Anointed in God. When the Anointed our life is made manifest, then you too will be made manifest, along with him, in glory. Now, you can interpret this in the Gnostic manner that we’ve been discussing here. The anointed is the Christ, and he is the Third Order of Powers. Jesus was the Third Order of Powers incarnate. That is, the Fullness of God in its perfection manifested on the earth. All of us have the Fullness of God, but none of us have the perfection, because we have our karma that we bring in, and our bodies break down, and we are fighting the never-ending war against the demiurge and death. But the Christ, or the Anointed, when he came to the earth, he came to bring us the imprint of the perfection of the Fullness. We 2nd Order Powers are poised between the Deficiency and the Fullness, besieged by the Demirurgic material from below and enlightened by the power from above. The Christ bridges the Deficiency and brings redemption to all Second Order Powers. And we can take on that perfection of the Fullness of God when we ask for the Christ, or the Anointed, to anoint us, you see? And that replaces the Third Order of Powers in all of its perfection over on top of our Second Order Powers, which are fallen because they are bonded to the material plane. But we can raise our vibrations, is how New Agers like to speak of it, we can raise our self back up to the Fullness of God only through the perfection of the Anointed. That’s the perfection of the Anointed’s job on our behalf. He’s like the correcting algorithm to our corrupted code. So, if therefore you were raised together with the Anointed, that is, once you have accepted the Anointed bringing you the Third Order of Powers, and you have asked them to help you and to cleanse your Second Order Powers, to bring them the perfection of the Anointed, then we are to seek the perfection above. Our focus is to be above, because we come from above, and we will return to above. You see, it helps us to shift our mindset from being stuck down here—I’ve got a short life, and then I die. That isn’t it. We refocus then on above and the perfection of the Fullness of God, because we now once again can perceive that perfection of God, once we allow the Anointed to correct our fallen egos, you see? And when it says that we have died and our life has been hidden with the Anointed and God, our fallen nature—our Second Order Powers that have become corrupted—they are put away. They are displaced by the Third Order power, the perfection of the Anointed, and its nesting fractals. And we nest into Christ, and we nest up on into the Father that way. Otherwise, we’re not nesting up into the fractals of the Fullness of God. We’re lost and wandering around in the fallen world, which is the province of the demiurge, and it’s not a pleasant place to be. Going on to verse 5, So mortify those bodily members that are on earth. Mortifying means put to death to kill those bodily members that are on earth, but it’s not talking about your body. It’s not saying that you should chop off your hand or your private parts. These are what the bodily members are that should be mortified—it says whoring, (which is sexual promiscuity), impurity, passion, (and by that it means overwhelming emotions, being a slave to your emotions), mortify malign desire, (that is, you shouldn’t wish for bad things to happen. You shouldn’t wish for bad things to happen to other people), and acquisitiveness, which is a form of idolatry. And acquisitiveness, my gosh, that’s our consumer culture. The purpose of commercials, the purpose of advertisements, is to inspire acquisitiveness in us, which is a form of idolatry, because we worship the exercise equipment. We worship the vacation to the best spot. We worship that kind of food. That’s what idolatry is. Verse 6 says, On account of which things, God’s indignation is coming. So God doesn’t like those things it’s saying. On the virtue versus vice ledger, those things fall on the vice side. And once again, that is sexual promiscuity, Impurity, and it doesn’t specify impurity in what, but it wants us to be pure. It wants us to be reflecting that purity of the Third Order Powers, reflecting the Fullness of God, reflecting the purity of virtuous living and virtuous thought. Passion, that is overwhelming emotions. Don’t be caught and brought down by emotions that boil up, because those emotions are being triggered by archons. Those emotions are being triggered by the demiurge. They want you to feel bad. They want you to feel hopeless. That is their door into your soul, is through passions. So we’re supposed to put those passions away. Malign desire, we want to get rid of that. Don’t wish for the bad. And this acquisitiveness, always having to have more, better. Verse 7 says, and in which things you used to walk back then when you lived by them, but now you must put it all away. Indignation, animosity, malice, blasphemy, obscene speech from your mouth. Okay, let’s look at those. “But now you must put all of that away. Indignation…” Boy, I bet a lot of you are like me. I used to be full of what’s called righteous indignation. I would be so upset. My passions would be riled up by becoming indignant at the injustice of it all, at injustice being done to another person, or cruelty to animals, or eating meat, or whatever the indignation is, the poor of the world. I’d become indignant over it. But it was righteous indignation, I thought, and so it was okay. But then I realized, and this was many years ago before I even discovered the Gnostic Gospels, that righteous indignation isn’t any good either, because it’s a form of passion, and it’s a negative emotion. And this negativity is what we’re trying to get rid of. We do not belong in the world of negativity. Once we accept the Anointed and allow the Third Order of Powers into our soul, then we can put away that sort of negative indignation, because indignation belongs to the Father, it says. God’s indignation is coming. So we leave it up to him. “Judgment is mine, saith the Lord.” That’s a common quote. And it says we must put away indignation. Animosity, that is a negative stance against other people, or a negative stance against certain institutions. Animosity, just pushing it away in negative way. Animosity means bitter hostility. There’s no room for bitterness in someone who’s walking with the Anointed. Or open enmity, acts of hatred. Hatred is bad in all of its forms. And just because you believe that the object of your hatred deserves it, well they may. But it’s not our job to judge them, and it’s not our job to experience animosity towards them. Ultimately, they will be reckoned with. Ultimately, there is a judgment. No one gets away with anything, sooner or later. But it’s not our job to have hostility and hatred. So a hostile feeling or act, or not to be mean of spirit. Malice, that’s plotting against someone. Blasphemy, blasphemy actually refers to rejection of the Holy Spirit. It’s considered the only sin that’s unforgivable, although we as Gnostics believe that all sins are ultimately forgivable. But as long as you blaspheme the Holy Spirit and push the Holy Spirit away, you’re not allowing the forgiveness to come to you. And so that’s why blasphemy is a bad idea. And, obscene speech from your mouth. I’m a veteran, and in the service there was a lot of curse words and a lot of cussing. And it was hard to come home on leave and be around my parents, because every other word out of my mouth had become some sort of obscene speech, or so it seemed. So stop the habit of using obscene speech. It’s a bad habit, and it puts us on the wrong side of the vice and virtue ledger. Going on to verse 9, Do not lie to one another, having shed the old man along with all of his practices, and having donned the new man, who is renewed in full knowledge according to the image of the one creating him. So that is describing what happens to you when you invite the Anointed to cleanse your Second Order pleroma. We invite the Third Order pleroma to overlay it and to bring us that cleansing. When the Third Order Power, that is, the Anointed, comes in to take up residence in your soul, it displaces your egoic way of being with the Anointed’s way of being, which is upward, onward and upward, focusing on above, which is living on the virtue side of the ledger. That is what it means to put on the new man, who is renewed in full knowledge. And that’s what we’re doing here at Gnostic Insights. Gnosis, gnostic, means knowledge, and it’s according to the image of the One creating him. So the gnosis comes from above. It’s not book learning. It’s not university learning. It’s the knowledge that comes directly from above. And then it says in verse 11, where there is no Greek and Judean, no circumcised or those with foreskin, no barbarian, Scythian, slave or free man. Rather, the Anointed is all things and is in all. Now, I believe that this goes directly against the diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI, that’s such a focus nowadays. It’s a false focus. The DEI agenda is not really meant to make everyone equal. In the end, it winds up privileging those in power, because it brings everyone down to the level of the slave, basically. S

  8. 10/26/2024

    Halloween Message 2024

    Hello and welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The Halloween season is upon us. I’m having a Halloween party, a block party, here in the neighborhood, and I’m going to sing an hour’s worth of spooky songs. I was assailed yesterday by a Christian lady who said I’m doing the work of the devil, because these are not good songs. And she also urged me not to share this Gnostic business with someone in particular, because he doesn’t need that sort of confusion, she said. Of course, she doesn’t know what the Gnostic stuff is. She hasn’t listened to the podcast or even talked with me about it. She just puts up her hand and waves me away if I try to bring up the Gnosis. So I would say that if Halloween glorifies Satan in your mind, then you should not partake in it, because we don’t want to glorify evil or glorify the Slanderer. However, there was a verse in Colossians that addressed this subject, in my opinion. In Colossians 2:15 it says, Stripping the Archons and Powers, he exposed them in the open, leading them prisoner along with him in a triumphal procession. Therefore let no one judge you for eating and drinking, or for taking part in a festival, or in a new moon celebration, or in Sabbaths. These are a shadow of things to come, but the solid body thereof is that of the anointed. Let no verdict be passed against you by anyone affecting humility and a religion of the angels, venturing upon visions he has never had, blustering aimlessly by the mind of his flesh, not holding to the head from whom all the body, furnished and knitted together by its joints and ligatures, will grow with a growth from God. We spoke about freedom from the Law in depth a couple of episodes ago, when we talked about Colossians. Of course, this presupposes that we who are freed from these laws and restrictions have the love of God, the love of Christ, dwelling within us. That’s what has replaced and made null those sanctions against things like Halloween. We can’t do it on our own. This verse in particular in Colossians refers to eating and drinking, festivals, new moon celebrations, and Sabbaths. It seems to me that we may infer that some of these festivals were not sanctioned by the Old Testament. It may also be that, if they were official calendar days in Judaism, that early Christians were divided about whether they should apply to the followers of Jesus, as in the example of modern Seventh Day Adventists who strictly keep the Saturday sabbath and believe all other Christians are in mortal error for switching the sabbath to Sunday. Or the festivals may be syncretistic, meaning they combined pagan and religious elements to form a new celebration, as is the case with Christmas. Or the festivals could have been entirely pagan, such as May Day celebrations to usher in springtime. The quote says that all of these activities referred to in this verse are only “a shadow of things to come.” Surely Halloween is not to be found in the ethereal plane, because the spooks, goblins, and witches are “shadows” of the Fall, and we know that shadows is another word for archonic. They did not exist before the Fall and will not exist after the cosmos passes into nothingness. Indeed, Halloween can be seen as an example of we Second Order Powers “stripping the Archons and Powers… leading them prisoner along with [Christ] in a triumphal procession.” Wouldn’t that be a fun activity at a Halloween Party? A parade of conquered Powers? Halloween is a time when people acknowledge that the world is not always as it seems. It is a time when folks who normally dismiss the ethereal and the archonic realms acknowledge the immaterial Powers and bring them to awareness. Our gnostic studies, so often dismissed and ridiculed by most people, fall into this category. Consciousness is one thing—even scientists study consciousness, but they do not understand the root of consciousness, and that comes from above. We are from the Father’s consciousness. We are fractals of the Father, through the Fullness, through the Son. The Son is the only emanation from the Father who is otherwise untouchable and illimitable and incomprehensible. But the Son gives that incomprehensibility a face. It’s called a countenance. And we can begin to understand the Father by knowing the Son. And the Son and the Father want to be known by us. They are extending consciousness all the way out to us, down through several fractal levels. But we are their consciousness, and we carry the entire seed of the consciousness of the Son within us. All living creatures do. That is the difference between life and inert mineral matter. The cosmos, when referred to in the Gnostic sense, and also in the biblical sense, although it hasn’t been explained correctly in the New Testament, since they stripped out the gnosis that explained the difference between the Father and the Creator God of this universe, which are two different entities. But consciousness is mysterious in that it’s an amazing thing that we are alive, that we are conscious, that we have these experiences and memories, and that we’re all interrelated. It’s mysterious. It’s mystifying. The scientists aren’t going to get to the root of it, because they try to find consciousness in the material world. They try to find consciousness arising from the matter up. And that isn’t where it comes from. It comes from the Father down. That’s the main thing we need to realize, the main thing we need to know. And then now we have this overlay of the Son, the Christ, Jesus. And what do they have to do with any of this? See, many people think it’s all well and good to speak of the Father, and to try to do good, and try to be righteous, and try to embody the love of God. But it’s always within our own egoic efforts that we want to push out this love. And we don’t have it. We don’t have the capacity to channel the love of the Father unless we love the Father, because love, life, consciousness, they all come down together from above. It’s no more superstitious to believe in Jesus than it is to believe in God. It’s no more superstitious to believe in Jesus than it is to believe in beneficial spirits and angels. So why then is there such a node of resistance against the notion of the Christ, the embodiment of the Son, coming in a human being that was called Jesus? This occurred around 2,000 years ago. The embodiment of the Fullness of God melded with the material flesh of a human being. That’s no stranger than consciousness itself. That’s no more strange than the mystery of life and death. So why is it in particular rejected? Well, I think it’s because the Slanderer knows what’s up. The Slanderer is another word for the chief Archon of the demiurge. The Slanderer is the negative entity that dwells within the cosmos itself, that did not come from above, that did not come from the Father, that is not an emanation out of the consciousness and love of the Son—it’s cut off down here below. It’s a figment of the demiurge. It lives in this material world, and, like its Boss, the demiurge, it wants to be the ruler. It wants to be the king. It wants to be worshipped. It’s called the Slanderer because it slanders God. It slanders Jesus and the Christ. It slanders anyone who believes in Jesus and the Christ. It makes fun of them. It puts on pantomimes at the Olympics to degrade the Last Supper, for example. It slanders people’s genders and convinces them that they were born into the wrong body, and that that’s not who they’re really supposed to be. Even though every one of us was fashioned by the Aeons above to be perfect and particular, and to bring with us as emissaries of the Father consciousness, love, and life into this cosmos. It’s our job as second-order powers to bring life into the cosmos. But the cosmos is the valley of death, so it’s a very courageous thing that we are here. Now, I have walked with Jesus for all of my life. I can remember my awakening around three or four years old. I recognized the difference between the baby in the manger and Santa Claus when I was about three years old at Christmastime. My parents were not religious people. They might have thought they were; they’re what we call cultural Christians, so they did go to church now and then. And there was a family Bible in the house, but God was not spoken of. We were not encouraged to be godly. And it seemed to me, even as a toddler, that Santa Claus was given every preeminence and reality, as was the baby Jesus in the manger who came to save humanity. So, there were mixed messages coming down that pipeline. I guess what I’m trying to say here is if you want to understand consciousness, and if you want to embody love, the surefire way to do that is to go ahead and believe that the Christ came to earth in order to remind us of the truth of the Father, in order to remind us of the eternal age that we came from, because we came from the Aeons above. And the word Age is the same as the word Aeon in Greek. So, the life of the Age, as it is often put in the New Testament, is the life of the Aeons, the Fullness, our aeonic parentage that we are formed after, and that we were birthed by down here into this material world. And Jesus went through the same process, but the aeonic inheritance that Jesus brought with him—unlike us, we brought all of the Fullness with us too, but just parts of it are turned on and off. I am not talented in all things, but Jesus was, because he brought all of the Fullness and all of it activated, all of it turned on. So, he brought the Fullness of God in all awareness and complete love into this material cosmos, and he has an excess of salvation, you might say, an excess of freeing us from the murmurings of the Slanderer. He brought that to every single one of us, because the Third Order Powers, which is the pleroma of Christ, the pleroma of Jesus, covers us and is our correc

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Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained

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

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