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
