Gnostic Insights

Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.

5.0 (2)
Spirituality
Biweekly Series

Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained

11/09/2024

Universal Salvation pt. 2

God is loving and merciful, not judgmental and cruel Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week I began sharing with you what is essentially a book report on the book called That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart, and he’s the translator of the New Testament that I’ve been using. So, last week we got up to page 21 out of this book, and now I’m all the way up to page 85, so we’ll see what happened in this latest round of reading. Now, David Bentley Hart’s style of writing may not be for everyone. It’s very academic, very high-minded and educated and erudite—difficult to follow if you’re not accustomed to reading scholastic writing. But I believe his heart’s in the right place, and I agree with pretty much everything he says. I will do my best to reinterpret what he is saying in simpler words, in case you’re interested in the content, but not in its delivery method. So, picking it up on page 21, Hart says, And what could be more absurd than the claim that God’s ways so exceed comprehension, that we dare not presume even to distinguish benevolence from malevolence in the divine, inasmuch as either can result in the same endless excruciating despair? Here the docile believer is simply commanded to nod in acquiescence, quietly and submissively, to feel moved at a strange and stirring obscurity, and to accept that, if only he or she could sound the depths of this mystery, its essence would somehow be revealed as infinite beauty and love. A rational person capable of that assent, however, of believing all of this to be a paradox concealing a deeper, wholly coherent truth, rather than a gross contradiction, has probably suffered such chronic intellectual and moral malformation that he or she is no longer able to recognize certain very plain truths, such as the truth that he or she has been taught to approve of divine deeds that, were they reduced to a human scale of action, would immediately be recognizable as expressions of unalloyed spite. And he’s talking about the idea that most everyone and everything is going to hell and will suffer eternal torment. That is an interpretation or misinterpretation of the word brought about by incorrect translation of the original Coptic Greek. Most of our Bible translations come off of old Latin Vulgate translations, and then they’ve been modernized. But that’s how errors are brought forward. And what Hart has done in his New Testament translation is go back to the original, very oldest transcripts, still in Greek, before they were translated to Latin. And he did what he called a pitilessly accurate translation, where Hart was not trying to make the words that are being translated fit into a predetermined doctrine, like everyone going to hell, or like the Trinity, or eternal damnation. These things we’ve been taught to believe are in the Scripture, but when you actually go back to the original Scriptures prior to the Latin translations, they are not in the Scripture. And so this book that I’m doing the book report on here, That All Shall Be Saved, this is about universal salvation, and doing away with the idea. And he says in this section I just read you, that it is a malevolent idea, unalloyed spite, unalloyed meaning pure spite on the part of God, that’s going to send everyone to hell that doesn’t get it. And that we have been commanded by the Church over the last 2,000 years to just nod our heads and say, oh, well, it’s God’s will, or oh, well, how can I presume to distinguish benevolence from malevolence, good intention from bad intention on the part of God, because God is so great and good. We’re supposed to be docile believers, to acquiesce, that is, to go along with, to quietly and submissively accept that we don’t get it, that we don’t understand the depths of the mystery, and someday we will, and that God is good, and God is just, and therefore everyone’s going to hell, except for those few preordained elect from before time began. So this book is entirely against that proposition. So moving on, what I did was I read the book through, and I’ve highlighted the parts that seem worth sharing or very interesting. Now we’re jumping to page 35, where he says that certain people, of my acquaintance who are committed to what is often called an intellectualist model of human liberty, as I am myself, [he says], but who also insist that it is possible for a soul freely to reject God’s love with such perfect perpiscuity of understanding and intention as to merit eternal suffering. And we can tell from the context that perpiscuity means you get it. So he’s saying, how is it even possible for a soul to freely reject the love of God and consign oneself into eternal torment? It just doesn’t work. It’s not possible. He says, this is an altogether dizzying contradiction. In simplest terms, that is to say, they, [that is, the intellectualists], want to assert that all true freedom is an orientation of the rational will toward an end that the mind takes in some sense to be the good, and so takes also as the one end that can fulfill the mind’s nature and supply its desires. This means that the better the rational will knows the good, and that’s a capital G, good, for what it is, the more that is that the will is freed from those forces that distort reason and lead the soul toward improper ends. The more it will long for and seek after the true good in itself, and conversely, the more rationally it seeks the good, the freer it is. He says that in terms of the great Maximus the Confessor, who lived from 580 to 660, the natural will within us, which is the rational ground of our whole power of volition, must tend only toward God as its true end, for God is goodness as such, whereas our gnomic or deliberative will can stray from him, but only to the degree that it has been blinded to the truth of who he is and what we are, and as a result has come to seek a false end as the true end. In short, sin requires some degree of ignorance, and ignorance is by definition a diverting of the mind and will to an end they would not naturally pursue. So, in other words, we all want what’s best for ourself, even in the most selfish sense, even in the most egoic sense. The ego wants what is best for this person that it is part of, that that is the rational end of the ego’s striving, what is best, and that there is a thing called good in the absolute sense, and if we realize that, then we would strive toward the good, by definition. Carrying on, page 37, I’m not saying that we do not in some very significant sense make our own exceedingly substantial voluntary contributions to our estrangement from the good in this life. And, see, he’s just saying we all screw up. Even if we are seeking the good, we often fall backwards into the bad, okay? Up to a certain point, [he says], it is undeniable, but past that point it is manifest falsehood. There is no such thing as perfect freedom in this life, or perfect understanding, and it is sheer nonsense to suggest that we possess limitless or unqualified liberty. Therefore, we are incapable of contracting a limitless or unqualified guilt. There are always extenuating circumstances. Well, in a sense, that’s true of all of us and all of our circumstances. We are a product of our environment, to some extent. But don’t forget that in the Gnostic view, we also contain the pure goodness of God, the capital S Self, that reflects the Fullness of God. So we do know what goodness is, even if we are surrounded by badness. Quoting Hart again, page 40, Here though, I have to note that it is a thoroughly modern and wholly illogical notion that the power of absolutely unpremised liberty, obeying no rationale except its own spontaneous volition toward whatever end it might pose for itself, is either a real logical possibility or, in any meaningful sense, a proper definition of freedom. See? He’s saying it’s thoroughly modern and wholly illogical to think that we have complete freedom of will, and that we can choose to follow any unethical or immoral end that we wish to, because what’s it matter? One choice being pretty much the same as another, you see. He goes on to say, in page 40, A choice made without rationale is a contradiction in terms. At the same time, any movement of the will prompted by an entirely perverse rationale would be, by definition, wholly irrational. Insane, that is to say. And therefore, no more truly free than a psychotic episode. The more one is in one’s right mind, the more that is that one is conscious of God as the goodness that fulfills all beings. And the more one recognizes that one’s own nature can have its true completion and joy nowhere but in Him, and the more one is unfettered by distorting misperceptions, deranged passions, and the encumbrances of past mistakes, the more inevitable is one’s surrender to God, liberated from all ignorance, emancipated from all the adverse conditions of this life, the rational soul could freely will only its own union with God, and thereby its own supreme beatitude. We are, as it were, doomed to happiness, so long as our natures follow their healthiest impulses unhindered. And we cannot not will the satisfaction of our beings in our true final end, a transcendent good lying behind and beyond all the proximate ends we might be moved to pursue. This is no constraint upon the freedom of the will, coherently conceived. It is simply the consequence of possessing a nature produced by and for the transcendent good, a nature whose proper end has been fashioned in harmony with a supernatural purpose. God has made us for Himself, as Augustine would say, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Him. A rational nature seeks a rational end, truth, which is God Himself. The irresistibility of God for any soul that has been truly set free is no more a const
11/16/2024

Universal Salvation pt 3

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today is part three of my book report on David Bentley Hart’s book called That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. The past two weeks we covered the beginning of his book, the Introduction. I’m going to begin this section by reading out of his final remarks, because he does a good job of simplifying his arguments here at the end of the book. So we’ll start with that. Hart says on page 201, It may offend against our egalitarian principles today, but it was commonly assumed among the very educated of the early church that the better part of humanity was something of a hapless rabble who could be made to behave responsibly only by the most terrifying coercions of their imaginations. Belief in universal salvation may have been far more widespread in the first four or five centuries of Christian history than it was in all the centuries that followed, but it was never, as a rule, encouraged in any general way by those in authority in the church. Maybe there are great many among us who can be convinced to be good only through the threat of endless torture at the hands of an indefatigably vindictive god. Even so much as hint that the purifying flames of the age to come will at last be extinguished, and perhaps a good number of us will begin to think like the mafioso who refuses to turn state’s evidence because he is sure he can do the time. Bravado is, after all, the chief virtue of the incorrigibly stupid. He goes on to say, I have never had much respect for the notion of the blind leap of faith, even when that leap is made in the direction of something beautiful and ennobling. I certainly cannot respect it when it is made in the direction of something intrinsically loathsome and degrading. And I believe that this is precisely what the Infernalist position, no matter what form it takes, necessarily involves. And to remind you, if you didn’t hear the past two episodes, Infernalist refers to the notion that there is an unending hell of pain and torture for the unregenerate or the unrepentant. Further down page 202, Hart says, I honestly, perhaps guilelessly, believe that the doctrine of eternal hell is prima facie nonsensical for the simple reason that it cannot even be stated in Christian theological terms without a descent into equivocity, which is equivocation, so precipitous and total that nothing but edifying gibberish remains. To say that, on the one hand, God is infinitely good, perfectly just, and inexhaustibly loving, and that, on the other, he has created a world under such terms as oblige him either to impose or to permit the imposition of eternal misery on finite rational beings is simply to embrace a complete contradiction. All becomes mystery, but only in the sense that it requires a very mysterious ability to believe impossible things. [Jumping down the page, he says,] Can we imagine logically, I mean not merely intuitively, that someone still in torment after a trillion ages, or then a trillion trillion, or then a trillion vigintillion, is in any meaningful sense the same agent who contracted some measurable quantity of personal guilt in that tiny, ever more vanishingly insubstantial gleam of an instant that constituted his or her terrestrial life? And can we do this even while realizing that, at that point, his or her sufferings have, in a sense, only just begun, and, in fact, will always have only just begun? What extraordinary violence we must do both to our reason and to our moral intelligence, not to mention simple good taste, to make this horrid notion seem palatable to ourselves. And all because we have somehow, foolishly, allowed ourselves to be convinced that this is what we must believe. Really, could we truly believe it all apart from either profound personal fear or profound personal cruelty? Which is why, again, I do not believe that most Christians truly believe what they believe they believe. So, what he’s saying here, what I’ve been talking to you about, is the idea that God, the God Above All Gods, what we call the Father in Gnosticism, would condemn people to everlasting torment, everlasting torment, with no other goal than to punish, because they’re never going to get out of it. That’s what everlasting means. And so it’s just punishment for the sake of punishment, and that that great, unlimitable God would impose this punishment on little, limited, finite beings who only lived a brief millisecond of time in the great span of time of God. That God would create these people for the purpose, basically, of condemning them to everlasting torment. You see, that is not even rational. It doesn’t make any sense. Not if you believe God is good. It’s impossible. Now, if you think that God is evil, well, then that’s not God, is it? By definition, if you believe that God is cruel and vindictive and unreasonable, well, that’s not the God Above All Gods. And this should come as relief to those of you who think you can’t believe in God, because God is so cruel and vindictive. Perhaps you were raised in an extremely cruel household with extremely vindictive parents, or schoolteachers, or somebody got to you and, in the name of God, inflicted cruelty upon you. Then you have come to accidentally transpose their human cruelty onto God, because they told you to. But that’s not God, by definition, you see? And when I say, by definition, that means, like, cold is not hot, by definition. Cold is cold. And if you’re going to start arguing, oh no, cold is hot, well, then you’re not talking about cold, you’re talking about hot. Do you see what I mean? And if you have been rejecting God, the God Above All Gods, because you have this view of God as merciless and vindictive, cruel, illogical, unfair, unjust, take comfort, because that’s not God you’re talking about. Now, it may be the small g god of this world. It could be the guy whose best friend is Satan, because remember, that is a small g god of confusion. And its main job is to cause you to forget that you come from transcendent goodness, that you come from above, from the God Above All Gods, and that you do have freedom. You do have free will. You are meant to inherit joy. You are to do good works, and to be happy, and to be in love, and to love everybody else. Don’t let some evil archon, or evil Demiurge, or evil human, redefine God in such a way that you reject God, because that’s the mistake. That’s a categorical error. And that’s why I say, take comfort, have joy, receive the love that was meant for you. Okay, back to the book. On page 205, Hart says, It was not always thus. Let me at least shamelessly idealize the distant past for a moment. In its dawn, the gospel was a proclamation principally of a divine victory that had been won over death and sin, and over the spiritual powers of rebellion against the big G God that dwells on high, and here below, and under the earth. It announced itself truly as the good tidings of a campaign of divine rescue on the part of a loving God, who by the sending of his Son into the world, and even into the kingdom of death, had liberated his creatures from slavery to a false and merciless master, and had opened a way into the kingdom of heaven, in which all of creation would be glorified by the direct presence of big G God, [or the Father, as we call him in Gnosticism]. And by the way, this paragraph that I just read about early Christianity, that entirely is consistent with this Valentinian Christianity that I share with you here. That is the entire purpose of we second-order creatures being sent down here below, to bring the good tidings of life and love and liberty to the fallen Demiurge, and now subsequently to all of the people who have been hoodwinked by the Demiurge and Satan into believing in the false god that does not incorporate love. Hart goes on to say, It was above all a joyous proclamation and a call to a lost people to find their true home at last, in their father’s house. It did not initially make its appeal to human hearts by forcing them to revert to some childish or bestial cruelty latent in their natures. Rather, it sought to awaken them to a new form of life, one whose premise was charity. Nor was it a religion offering only a psychological salve for individual anxieties regarding personal salvation. It was a summons to a new and corporate way of life, salvation by entry into a community of love. Nothing as yet was fixed except the certainty that Jesus was now Lord over all things and would ultimately yield all things up to the Father, so that God might be all in all. Now we’re going to go back into the earlier part of the book to explain some of these concepts in more depth. Hart has broken his book into four meditations, or four subjects we could call it. The first meditation is, who is God? The second meditation is, what is judgment? The third meditation is, what is a person? And the fourth meditation is, what is freedom? A reflection on the rational will. So in the first meditation, who is God? Hart explains to us that, The moral destiny of creation and the moral nature of God are absolutely inseparable. As the transcendent good beyond all things, God is also the transcendental end that makes every single action of any rational nature possible. Moreover, the end toward which He acts must be His own goodness, for He is Himself the beginning and end of all things. This is not to deny that, in addition to the primary causality of God’s act of creation, there are innumerable forms of secondary causality operative within the creative order. But none of these can exceed or escape the one end toward which the first cause directs all things. And so what he is saying here is that the first causality is the expression of God’s goodness, the purity of God reaching out through the Son and into the Fullness of God—emanating. That is the principal causal
11/23/2024

We are all in ALL

Universal Salvation–part 4 Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’m going to do my best to wrap up this review of David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. And I hope you understand, particularly those of you who are Christians that are listening to this, that I do all of this in the name of the Father. It’s not to tear down Christianity. It’s to uphold the mission of the Messiah, which has been lost over the past several hundred years of Christianity. And so this talk of universal salvation is a necessary component of believing in the glory of God. Because universal salvation of all souls, not only all humans, but the dogs, the cats, the birds, the grasses, all living things, have to return to the Father, or else the Anointed loses power. The Father loses parts of himself. Okay, let’s get back to David Bentley Hart. So we’re going to run through these four meditations that are the body of his book. The first meditation is, Who is God? He says, The New Testament, to a great degree, consists in the eschatological interpretation of Hebrew Scripture’s story of creation, finding in Christ as eternal Logos and risen Lord, the unifying term of beginning and end. There’s no more magnificent meditation on this vision than Gregory of Nyssa’s description of the progress of all persons towards union with God in the one pleroma, the one fullness of the whole Christ. All spiritual wills moving, to use this loving image, from outside the temple walls to the temple precincts, and finally beyond the ages into the very sanctuary of the glory as one. Okay, let me jump in here to say, do you notice that the New Testament words, when you use the correct translations, are the same as the translations in our Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi? Logos is the eternal spirit of humanity and the risen Lord. The Fullness is the one pleroma, the whole Christ. And in this statement, it’s saying that all that is spiritual, which includes the spirits that reside within each of us, will all move as one into the pleroma of the Christ. That’s who Christ is to us. He’s the head of our pleroma. And when I speak of pleromas, I always picture that pyramidal shape, that hierarchical shape, and the capstone is the head. We 2nd order powers are children of the 1st order powers. The 3rd order powers are the Army of Christ that have come to redeem us. When Paul spoke of this, he was applying it literally to the temple in Jerusalem, where there were the walls of the temple, and most of the people were outside of the walls, and some of the people were in the temple precincts. And finally, the very sanctuary of the glory, where only the priests were allowed. These are the three parts that were mentioned, and these are archetypal of the movement of humanity, Hart is saying, from the outside of the pleroma of the Christ, into the pleroma of the Christ, and then into the very glory of God through the Christ. On page 90, Hart says, If one truly believes that traditional Christian language about God’s goodness and the theological grammar to which it belongs are not empty, then the God of eternal retribution and pure sovereignty proclaimed by so much of Christian tradition is not and cannot possibly be the God of self-outpouring love revealed in Christ. If God is the good creator of all, he must also be the savior of all without fail, who brings to himself all he has made, including all rational wills, and only thus returns to himself in all that goes forth from him. And that’s the end of the chapter, Who is God? And that pretty much states my basic belief on why everyone is going to heaven, because we all come from the Father, and therefore we all must return to the Father, because the Father cannot be diminished in any way. And if he lost us, he’d be diminished. Do you see? The second meditation is, What is Judgment? And the subtitle is A Reflection on Biblical Eschatology. And eschatology, that’s one of those big theological words that just means the end times, the end of time. On page 93, Hart says, There’s a general sense among most Christians that the notion of an eternal hell is explicitly and unremittingly advanced in the New Testament. And yet, when we go looking for it in the actual pages of the text, it proves remarkably elusive. The whole idea is, for instance, entirely absent from the Pauline corpus as even the thinnest shadow of a hint, nor is it anywhere patently present in any of the other epistolary texts. There is one verse in the Gospels, Matthew 25-46 that, traditionally understood, offers what seems the strongest evidence for the idea, but then now Hart’s going to explain how that can’t be true. And then he says there are also perhaps a couple of verses from Revelation, and he says nothing’s clear in Revelation, so he’s not going to go there. But, What in fact the New Testament provides us with are a number of fragmentary and fantastic images that can be taken in any number of ways, arranged according to our prejudices and expectations, and declared literal or figural or hyperbolic as our desires dictate. It’s why people can make the case for eternal damnation, but you can also make the case for not eternal damnation, because it’s so metaphorical. On page 94, Hart says, Nowhere is there any description of a kingdom of perpetual cruelty presided over by Satan, as though he were some kind of Chthonian god. On the other hand, however, there are a remarkable number of passages in the New Testament, several of them from Paul’s writings, that appear instead to promise a final salvation of all persons and all things, and in the most unqualified terms. How did some images become mere images in the general Christian imagination, while others became exact documentary portraits of some final reality? If one can be swayed simply by the brute force of arithmetic, it seems worth noting that, among the apparently most explicit statements on the last things, the universalist statements are by far the more numerous. And then he lists a number of verses from the New Testament that speak of universal salvation, over 20 of them at least, and I’ll give you just a couple. Romans 5.18 says, So then, just as through one transgression came condemnation for all human beings, so also through one act of righteousness came a rectification of life for all human beings. And jumping in from the Gnostic sense, he doesn’t say the fall of one human, he doesn’t say through Adam, he says one transgression—and we would call that one transgression the Fall of Logos, the fall of the Aeon, which is a higher order being than we are. Or Corinthians 15.22 says, For just as in Adam all die, so also in the anointed Christ all will be given life. I would say where it says for just as in Adam all die, it’s not because Adam ate the apple, it’s that we humans who are outside of the Christ, we’re outside of the walls of the temple, we are in the pleroma of Adam—we are in the pleroma of human beings. When you accept the anointed, then you move into the pleroma, or you nest up higher into the pleroma of the Christ. That would be the Gnostic way of saying that. Second Corinthians 5.14 says, For the love of the anointed constrains us, having reached this judgment, that one died on behalf of all, all then have died. And of course that one is the Anointed, and He died on behalf of everyone. Or even Romans 11:32, For God shut up everyone in obstinacy, so that he might show mercy to everyone. And there’s a long discussion in the chapter about how God’s chosen—the original elect, that being the Hebrew nation—has been obstinate about accepting Jesus of Nazareth as the Anointed. And so he’s saying that everyone is shut up in obstinacy, that’s the Hebrews, so that he might show mercy to everyone. And that is, they’re temporarily set up in obstinacy so that the message of the Anointed can be preached far and wide, before death and after death, we Gnostics would say, and not be just constrained to only the Hebrews. That’s why the Hebrews are set aside for the moment, so that those outside the temple walls can also come to Christ. And then there are 19 more verses after this, and he lists them all between pages 96 and page 102. And if you are a theological scholar or a concerned Christian that wants to know if this is heresy or not, I really suggest you buy the book, That All Shall Be Saved, by David Bentley Hart, and read it carefully from cover to cover. Jumping to page 116, Hart says, There are those metaphors used by Jesus that seem to imply that the punishment of the world to come will be of only limited duration. For example, “if remanded to prison, you shall most certainly not emerge until you pay the very last pittance.” Or, “the unmerciful slave is delivered to the torturers until he should repay everything he owes.” And Hart says it seems as if this until should be taken with some seriousness. Some wicked slaves, moreover, “will be beaten with many blows, while others will be beaten with few blows.” Hart says, of course, everyone will be “salted with fire.” This fire is explicitly that of the Gehenna. But salting here is an image of purification and preservation, for salt is good. Gehenna is the Valley of Hinnom from the Old Testament, and that is where, outside of the city of Jerusalem, the refuse was burned, and even carrion and bodies were burned. And that is why it is considered to be a hellish place. And it has become a metaphor in the time of Jesus for the purging fire, the Aeonian chastening for the good. Hart says we might even find some support for the purgatorial view of the Gehenna from the Greek of Matthew 25:46, which is the supposedly conclusive verse on the side of the Infernalist Orthodoxy, where the word used for the punishment of the last day is kolasis, which most properly re
11/30/2024

Free Will Is Essential 2024

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week we finished up our four-part series on David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved, and I skipped over the Free Will chapter because we just ran out of time. But this week I’m going to re-record an episode that was first aired on April 29th of 2023, and this time I’ll include the transcript with the audio post so that you can read it as well as hear it. This week’s episode is called Free Will is Essential, and essential means necessary. It’s baseline, it’s foundational, it’s a must-have. All of us Second-Order Powers have free will. The Aeons have free will. That’s how it is that Logos was able to choose to fall. We’re not helpless puppets. We do become helpless puppets when we sign up with the Demiurge, rather than with the Father in the Fullness. The Fullness and the Father allow us free will because that is essential to God’s nature, and we are direct emanations as fractals of that nature. We are made in the image of God. The Demiurge does not want you to have free will. That’s what causes all the troubles with the Demiurge and these pesky humans in particular, because we have free will, and the Demiurge hates free will. The original economy was that of the hierarchy of the Fullness, where every Aeon knew its place, position, and duties for cooperative overall functioning. Each of the Fullnesses lived in a state of joy, benevolence, and harmonious agreement, giving glory to the Father and never to each other or to themselves, according to the Tripartite Tractate in verse 86. The Second Order of Powers was created in order to bring life and love into what is called the new economy or new organization. This new economy was in the mind of the Father all along, even before the Fall. It is a unique feature of the Tripartite Tractate that the book does not describe the Fall in terms of sin and blame, but rather as an event that was destined to come about in order to usher in a new economy that differed from the ethereal pleroma where the Aeons dwell. The Tripartite Tractate says, The free will which was begotten with the totalities was a cause for this one, such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him. The intent then of the Logos, who is this one, was good, and before he begot anything else for the glory of the will and in agreement with the totalities, he acted magnanimously from an abundant love and set out toward that which surrounds the perfect glory. Thomason translates the word magnanimously in the scripture above as presumptuously. Yet the intention of the Logos was good. The Tripartite Tractate is unique in its gentle assessment of not blaming Logos for the Fall. The Tripartite Tractate says that this act of disobedience by Logos was within the will of the Father after all, and it was necessary to usher in an organization that needed to come forth for the revelation of the Fullness. The Tripartite Tractate says, For it was not without the will of the Father that the Logos was produced, which is to say, not without the will will he go forth. But he, the Father, had brought him forth for those about whom he knew that it was fitting that they should come into being. The Father knew what would happen, and the Father found it fitting that Logos should be conceived as he was and take the action that he did. The Father knew that this was the path that would lead to material creation, the economy that was to come, “So that the things which have come to be might become an organization which would come into being.” Logos mistook his will for that of the ALL. Logos overreached because of his presumptuous thought but he was unable to reach the illimitable Father and he Fell. After the Fall, the Self of Logos rejoined his fellow Aeons above in the Fullness. Logos and the Totalities joined together to create a new fruit from their union that would bring life, love, and consciousness to the Deficiency below. Logos and the Fullness brought forth these little ones of the Second Order out of his newly restored pleroma, so that they could receive the life-giving light born from the thought of brotherly love of the preexistent Fullness, in contrast to the phantoms that had arisen from the Fall. These powers of remembrance resembled the Aeons whose likenesses they were, and they were in harmony with themselves and with others of their kind. And, as you know by now, the Second Order of Powers manifests as every living thing that is on this planet Earth, from the cells on up through the humans. 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. The new economy of the Second Order of Powers reflected a different method of doing business from their images in the Fullness. In the new economy, the powers vied for position and authority within a limited space known as the Boundary. Here, those of the imitation who continued to wholeheartedly embrace the shadows left over from the Fall actively fought against those of the remembrance. For their part, those of the remembrance forgot all about the values of the Fullness due to the law of mutual combat that they were enacting against the Deficiency. We Second Order Powers continually battle the archons of the Fall. We are a mixed creation of life from above and death from below. The new Powers—that’s us—acquired the same lust for domination and all of the other passions of this sort, and wound up acting against itself on account of its rage. It was during this endless war that a myriad of various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers were mixed with one another, and in great number. Clearly another solution was required if peace were to enter the Deficiency. The endless war reflects our battle with the hylic or material nature of our universe and our material bodies. The life within us does battle against the non-living material created by the Demiurge. As our Self descends into this economy, the first spark unites with the material of the molecules to make up the fertilized egg. And it is the Self, replicating the patterns of the Fullness of God, that directs each organism’s growth. It is also the overall plan that directs evolution. As the myriad of various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers become mixed with one another, and in great number, remember that none of this was due to an error of planning. Rather, these steps were all necessary to bring about an economy still to come. For this reason, then, it is wrong to condemn the movement of Logos as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass. The Aeons of the Fullness took upon themselves the Fall that had happened, as if it were their own, with concern, goodness, and great kindness. For the one who had become deficient could be made perfect in no other way except by the Fullness of the Father. Free will is the core of our being. It was the free will of Logos that caused him to leave the Fullness in the Fall. It was the free will of the restored Logos and the Totalities that created us Second-Order Powers. And it is the free will of the Powers, by way of our aeonic inheritance, that directs our lives here below. It is our own free will that causes us to forget about the Father and the Fullness of God from which we come. It is our own free will that allows us to bow to the rule of the Demiurge and dig our own graves. Because of the nature of free will, we turn to an outside source to assist us in our remembrance and salvation. This Aeon is known as the Christ. And so the Aeons of the Fullness, everyone individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for help for the Deficiency. They brought forth one that combined every attribute of the All, manifested in the image of the Father of whom they had been thinking while they gave glory and prayed for help. This one was called the Son of His Will and Of the Good Pleasure of the All. It is the knowledge of the Father who wished to become known. Christ was conceived in order to bring redemption and remembrance to the 2nd Order Powers. It is also described as holding authority vested in Him from the beginning and the power needed to execute it. The Aeons not only produced a singular fruit reflecting the Father, but that fruit, which is the Christ, also reflected their own individual countenances and aspects from their positions in the hierarchy of the Fullness. In other words, we each have a one-to-one relationship with a fruit that comes in the image of each one of us. We are able to recognize the Savior because it fits us and has our face. In this manner they went forth in a form that consisted of many forms, so that the one whom they were going to help should see those to whom he had prayed for help as well as the one who brought it to him. Those redeemed by the Light were made whole and complete. Those who were now enlightened felt the power of the Redeemer inside themselves being together with Him, sharing His suffering, relieving Him little by little, making Him grow, raising Him up. The redeemed were produced as an army for Him, as for a king in which those who belong to this thought share the command and are united in agreement. He also sowed in them invisibly a word designed for understanding and gave Him the power to detach and dispel from Himself those who were disobedient to Him. Those of the imitation, on the other hand, were unprepared for the Light, for they had come into being out of darkness and could not comprehend it. To them the Light came as a brief and terrifying flash, a leap and a blow that drove them deeper into the shadows of the abyss. To them this utter darkness was home. [That was from verse 89 of the Tripartite Tractate.] Going into verse 91, The Logos who had fallen and then abandoned the Deficiency he created, decided to pray that the fixed economy might attain
12/07/2024

My Correspondence with an Educated Atheist

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’ve been having some good correspondence with a relatively recent listener who actually responded to my request for an illustrator of the children’s book. She had only just come across the podcast and had no knowledge of this Gnostic Gospel approach. She and I exchanged a series of correspondences during the month of November, and she’s been asking good questions, so I thought, why not share them with everybody? The conversations began by talking about the artistic concepts for the children’s book. I sent her the text of the book and my descriptions of the characters and the scenes. And she said, I’m not surprised your last artist had trouble. It’s quite a sophisticated and tricky project. One of the things that immediately came to mind when I saw the sample image of the Demiurge was the fact that he was coated in mud. Now I thought your allusion of mud up, spirit down was really clever, having a typically elegant and simple style. However, because this is a kid’s book, something you can give to a clever six to eight year old, I was wondering if the mud is the right way to go visually. For children, mud can carry the connotation of being dirty, unclean, and shameful. Whilst I guess there is an element of shameful dirty to the mud up illusion, would you say that the primary takeaway for kids is that the copy that Logos created is imperfect, not as amazing as the original, rather than being shameful, dirty, sinful? But maybe the mud is a key takeaway from the gospel and you feel you can’t take liberties with the ancient text. So first off, I want to mention, and I didn’t mention this in my reply to her, is that the mud up, spirit down metaphor is mine. It’s not out of the Tripartite Tractate. It is only my simple way of characterizing how the molecules bind to the spirit of life. Mud up, spirit down. That predates my reading of the Gnostic Gospels. That’s out of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. I’ve taken that metaphor and applied it to the Tripartite Tractate. She told me she had encountered Gnostic Insights during a 6-hour drive and that it was great to experience a dive into the world of Gnosticism. I dimly remember encountering it via my medieval history A-levels. It was a joy to hear your elegant and nuanced take on what is, let’s face it, a rather involved topic. I found it extremely insightful. I’m one of those people, you mentioned in an episode, who is not coming at it from a Christian background. Ever since the vicar told me I’d burn in hell when I was eight, I set my head against all things Christian and was a smug materialist for most of my life. Even as recently as 2019, I was a hardcore atheist along the lines of Sam Harris, et al. However, the pandemic and the frightening response to it from governments ripped holes in what a Gnostic might call my meme cloud. Worryingly, even superbrains like Mr. Harris seem to have lost their reason during COVID. During those dark days of compulsory jabs and masking, et al., I sensed a malevolent presence at work in the world. I can remember thinking that if this force I sensed, ruining small businesses, turning families against each other, ramping up fear, let alone the actual disease itself, was indeed something approaching genuine evil. But by rights there should be a parallel entity working for good out there. I’m yet to experience that directly, but who knows? At the time I considered the idea that there might be two gods, one good and one bad, and wondered if anyone had thought of that since the Manicheans. So I’ve been on a spare-time quest dipping into Buddhism, Hermeticism, and to some extent Christianity. In terms of the latter, I’ve never been able to get past the typical issues of how to explain the evil in the world, and the whole thing about the mentally ill being damned, or tiny children being damned, pets not going to heaven, and many other issues which you’ve addressed. As you rightly point out, the Old Testament God seems like a curlish type, ordering parents to sacrifice their kids to prove their faith, and sending down plagues and floods, etc., etc. From listening to your podcasts, Gnosticism seems to have a lot of answers. I also like the way you sidestepped the delicate Sophia issue. Woke Feminism may have overshot the mark, however. Eve, Sophia, Pandora, Medea, etc., have been unfairly treated. I look forward to learning more as I go through your amazing smorgasbord of recordings. And I wrote back and said, I was also struck hard by the pandemic fear-mongering. It seems as though society has divided itself into freethinkers who believe in personal liberty, and those who prefer to shelter under the wing of oppressive government coercion. My orientation has always been toward personal liberty, and I think this helped me to see through the lies from the get-go. Go ahead and buy A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel if you haven’t already, or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which is extremely simple and non-theological. That way you will have all of the gnosis in your hands, and you can re-read parts of it that catch your attention. I’m so glad you stumbled across my podcast and had such a good long time to listen in. Interesting that you do not have a Christian background. The same was the case with Ant Critchley, who interviewed me last week on his Stellify podcast. And, which, by the way, you can look up that interview on YouTube, everyone. Go to Stellify Podcast, Ant Critchley, because there’s more than one Stellify, and then type in Cyd Ropp, and you ought to be able to find my interview. My followers appear to be largely either fallen-away Catholics or Evangelicals, or non-religious people like you and Ant. Although you and Ant both had early church exposure that scared you away from the faith. I like to explain things as simply as humanly possible, unlike scholastics who like to write in such a high-minded fashion that no one can understand them. It appears as though most of the young Turks who call themselves Gnostic are actually Hermeticists who reject the very idea of the Christ, or redemption. I think the other Gnostic podcasts have much larger followings than mine, precisely because they hold no position of redemption and salvation, whereas I’m pretty clear about it. She wrote back and said, “Cool, I will read your book. But basically, in the kid’s version, does Logos fall and shatter and the broken part of him creates the Demiurge and our material realm, or is our dimension created separately?” And I answer, Logos falls and breaks open. His ego is the Demiurge, and it does not remember or recognize his own higher Self, which is the Aeon Logos. Logos flees back to the Fullness and abandons his errant ego down below. Hence the god of this material universe doesn’t realize that he came from above and that he is only the ego of Logos. It’s all fractal—as above, so below type of stuff. We are the same. We all have a higher Self patterned after the Aeons of the Fullness, and we also have our individual ego that relates to the world around us. Most people mistakenly believe they are their ego, but their ego is only a part of our consciousness. Our higher Self is a fractal of the Fullness of God, and we all share that higher Self. It is our ego that represents our individuality. The ego, the Demiurge, is all about me, me, me, totally narcissistic and consumed by power and control. And then I explain in the next email, the way I explain ego in Gnostic terms is this, when the Aeons came to Self-realization and recognize their individualities, they sorted themselves in a hierarchy called the Fullness of God. Their identities were comprised of their ranks, stations, duties, location, and names. They weren’t assigned those things, they realized them themselves and self-sorted. Those individual identities are their egos, and they are what makes them each different from each other. Everyone has a Self that is identical to the Son, so that doesn’t distinguish one from another. It is the ego that describes everyone’s individual identities and duties. The Aeons share identical Selfs that are fractals of the Son. It is their Egos that set them apart, each with an individual point of view. We are fractals of the Aeons. We also have identical Selves and individual egos. Our egos are our unique personalities and talents. Our egos take care of us and our bodies and make sure our own needs are met. Our egos interact with our neighbors socially. Ego is not a bad thing, it is part of us. Ego only becomes fallen in people when they forget about their higher Self and its relation to the Fullness. It works the same for us humans as it did for the fallen ego of Logos, which operates on its own as the Demiurge. Our own human egos are called narcissistic when the ego runs the show outside of the Self and God. A few days later, she replied, Hi Cyd, I’ve just been listening to your amazing May 5th podcast, The Nature of the Gnostic God, which was packed with enlightening ideas. In the episode, you say that the Father is called the Father, not Mother, because it has masculine impulse, expansive and not a receptive impulse. But you later say that for this immutable first being, there is no direction, no up or down, no before or after, and presumably no in and out? Not wanting to nitpick too much here, and this is a genuine question, to be expansive, doesn’t one necessarily need to be able to go in a direction? I don’t quite have the words to express it, but isn’t this a contradiction, and is it t consistent philosophically for one to argue that the Father is called the Father because of a direction, and simultaneously assert that he is beyond all physical directions? As I have a feeling that you are painfully aware, many of us coming from the atheist camp are rather hung up on the whole Father-Son naming con
12/13/2024

Correspondence with an Educated Atheist pt.2

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week, we had part one of Correspondence with an Educated Atheist, and after posting that, I received an email from my correspondent, and it was very interesting because it turns out that all this time I thought I was corresponding with a female because this person’s name is one of those gender-neutral names, like my own name, Cyd. I was often miscategorized as a male coming into a new classroom or, like, going to summer camp I was put on the boy’s side and so forth because my name was unusual back in the 1950s. So this person has this sort of name that could be taken either as male or female, and I just assumed it was a female. That’s a funny thing to me. Now, flip that whole conversation from last week, and every time I said she, please insert the word he, and now I’m re-recording part two so I can correctly identify my correspondent. He was very gracious about the misunderstanding, of course. Very, very nice person. He had asked, “Is it possible that the truth of creation might be something difficult or even something unpalatable?” And I answer, well, that’s what a lot of people are saying, isn’t it? I think it is a message meant to dishearten us, meant to depress us. I notice that the people who believe that are not happy campers. In the end, it doesn’t matter what memes we cling to here on this material plane. All will be revealed when we pass over to the other side. He asks, “Is it too much to ask for some sort of indication or revelation or glimpse of the existence of the Fullness? What actions would you suggest should be the next step?” And I say, it’s not too much to ask. It’s what prayer is all about. If you have never prayed to the higher power, you simply find a quiet spot or maybe in the middle of the night when you’re lying in bed awake and you just ask the Source to reveal itself to you. “Ask and you will find. Knock and the door will open.” [Matthew 7:7] You can ask for revelation. You can ask for an unmistakable sign. When I was a young believer, I would ask for things expecting them to happen, and they did. Once as a teenager, I was hitchhiking up the California coast. I had no fear for myself because I was and still am an innocent, and I believe that Jesus walked everywhere with me and that he would protect me from all harm. One night I camped with strange men, but I preached to them and no harm came to me. In the morning, we were all hitchhiking together for the first ride of the day, and I prayed out loud for a red pickup truck to come and pick us all up. About a minute later, a red pickup truck came and picked us all up. It was quite a testimony to those men, like a real miracle. I realize that Christianity has gotten a bad rap lately in the progressive and atheist circles, but remember that the institution is not the Source. The map is not the territory. You can pray to Jesus or to the Father or to the Source or to the Fullness of God. They are all listening. If you pray for revelation with an open heart, your heart will be filled and you will know. Millions of people throughout the years have done just that and have come out the other side walking with God, walking with Jesus. This has nothing to do with salvation or church doctrine. This is going to the Source. I love you. I’m proud of you for opening up and exploring these spiritual depths—onward and upward. In our most recent correspondence, he says, Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions in some detail. I will take a while to read and reread your answers. I have found the Simple Explanation book on Audible, so I am going to download it and listen in the car as a starting point. Gnosticism is complex, he says, yet also appealing. There are a few things that don’t seem necessary, like a complex celestial hierarchy with different Aeons and their pre-assigned roles, rather like cogs in a great machine. As someone who has spent a lot of time with historical texts, this name and place function in a heavenly order feels like the product of an ancient worldview. As we know, the establishment church and the kings loved order and it was stressed for their own reasons. However, just as modern humans are all about individuality, at times overly, ancient societies were obsessed with kingship and order. So just as it is a feature of New Age religions that it’s all about individual Self-expression, does it follow that the writer of the Tripartite Tractate was reflecting the perception of a rigid order and hierarchy in heaven? This business of a complex organizational structure in heaven with angels, archangels and the rest of it kind of feels like the product of a human imagination. Is that a fair point? He goes on to say, however, putting that aside, all of the key questions that have made me rule out religions in the past, the cruel concept of original sin in Christianity and likewise karmic punishing people for past life mistakes in Hinduism, Buddhism are thankfully missing in your version of Gnosticism, which is a huge positive. It’s elegant to universal salvation, having a fall that explains suffering, but not a fall by humans. To my skeptical agnostic ears, key aspects of your Gnostic reformation have the ring of truth. The fractal stuff is fascinating, too. I don’t come from a science background, so I’ll probably take your word on that. So here’s a question that may put my mind at rest. Given that my spider senses are tingling, telling me some of the concepts in the Tripartite Tractate sound a bit historically located and hence man-made, would it be fair to say that the words of the Tripartite Tractate are a version of the universal truth, recorded by a fallible human hand, with possibly a few simplifications and misinterpretations? Or do you believe that every word in the book is divine and immutable? No need to answer in a hurry. Don’t let me distract you, but I’d be intrigued to find out at some point. Okay, so here’s my latest answer. The hierarchy isn’t about power, haves and have-nots. It’s about jobs that need to be done and the relationships among neighbors. Think of the Aeons as cells in your body or cells in a slime mold. Every function and every job is necessary and equally important. The brain is no more important than your skin, etc. However, the king of your body is your self-aware identity. You need to be in control of your body or else some other organ will attempt to take charge. It is the natural order of things. When people don’t pay attention to their body parts, the body parts take control, and the next thing you know, you’re addicted to something or another. And I didn’t put this in my email because I was in a hurry, but then I was thinking afterward of the best answer to the hierarchy question. Remember, the Aeons self-sorted themselves into this hierarchy. They were not placed there. They were not made subordinate to others or above others by some higher ruling power. They self-sorted. It makes a point of saying that in the Tripartite Tractate. And what they sorted themselves into were functions. Their place, their function, their duties, their neighbors, their names for themselves. They gave themselves their names. And the reason it’s hierarchical is because the higher the fewer. The higher the fewer is a basic Gnostic precept. And the reason is this. In my concept of how things go together and of how the Fullness of God works and how our bodies work, it’s part of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The most basic parts of the material universe are the subatomic particles and the particles. And they level up to make atoms. And the atoms hold hands with one another and they level up to make molecules. And the molecules hold hands with one another and they level up to make elements. Now, think it through. There’s more atoms than there are molecules. There’s more molecules than there are elements. And so every time you go up a level, there’s fewer. So it’s naturally building the higher the fewer. So if you think of your family and, say for example that you’ve got four brothers and sisters and a mom and dad—a nice big family. Well, there’s six of you, right? But you hold hands, cooperate with one another according to the Simple Golden Rule, and what do you make? You make one family. So there were six and now it’s leveled up to one. So the higher—that is the family—the fewer. And that is why a hierarchy looks like a hierarchy. It’s not a matter of thinking that the ones lower down are less important or not worthy. It’s that they are the basic foundations that make everything else possible. As a side note, the Demiurge is in charge of that material level, the subatomic particles up through the elements and the mineral aggregations. And then the life comes down from above. The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will. The life, love, and consciousness comes down from above during conception and creates the spark of life that then changes it from mud, mud up, that’s the material level of the Demiurge, the mud, to the spirit down. The spirit is what gives life and love and causes the molecules to be able to walk around in the form of our bodies. All living things bring consciousness and love into the Fallen world at conception. Finally he asks whether or not the Tripartite Tractate is sacred gospel or immutable truth, divine and immutable. I answered that obviously the Tripartite Tractate was written by a man who was historically contextually located. But I’ve found that the Tripartite Tractate is the best Gnostic text to explain these things. Now, I myself, Dr. Cyd Ropp, I am also historically contextually located as well. When I write The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, or A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, it is also my rewording the truth that has come to me. If once you discover the Gnosis
12/18/2024

Gnostic Christmas–Alleluia!

This post was very popular last year, so I’m repeating it for all of us. Merry Christmas! Today, we’re going to look at the nature of the Christ—the who, what, why of Christ. Most people are familiar with seeing the baby Jesus in the manger and that’s what we celebrate at Christmas time, the birth of the Christ on Earth in the form of a human. But the Christ is an ethereal creature that predates the birth of Jesus. Jesus and the Christ aren’t exactly the same, although Jesus was fully Christ. The Christ predates the birth of the human known as Jesus. So, let’s learn more about the Christ and why the Christ figure is so essential to us Second Order Powers. Gnosticism is the forerunner of the modern Christian faith. As such, a better understanding of the figure of the Christ is essential to understanding both Gnosticism and Christianity. The cosmology that I talk about here on the podcast was well known to Jesus and his original followers, but it was cut out of Christianity about 1700 years ago by the Nicene Council, at the urging of the Pope and the Roman Emperor. Because this theology was subtracted from orthodox Christianity, many of the ideas of gnostic cosmology sound odd and unfamiliar to modern churchgoers. Some of the ideas may even sound heretical at first glance due to their unfamiliarity. Yet the theology contained in these early scriptures makes sense of so many puzzling aspects of Christian faith that they must be reexamined. I’m confident that once you understand gnostic Christianity, you will better understand your relationship with God. According to gnostic cosmology as laid out in the Nag Hammadi, we humans and all other forms of life on Earth, from bacteria and eukaryotes on up, are the fruit of the Pleroma and Logos. We Second Order Powers find ourselves locked in a never-ending battle for dominion over the Earth with forces that were generated as a result of the Fall. Due to the law of mutual combat, we have forgotten our origin in the Fullness and our mission to bring love and harmony to creation and have instead taken on many of the characteristics of the shadows of the Deficiency. The Second Order Powers are locked in a never-ending war with the Deficiency. Here below, we constantly battle the physical forces of death and entropy, as well as the spiritual forces of vice, sin, delusion and despair. In order to restore memory and reason to the Second Order Powers, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one of them individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for a helper to bring peace to the Deficiency and forgiveness to Logos. Out of this focused prayer, a unique fruit emerged, one that contained all of the capabilities and powers of the Fullness, along with all of the love and eternal qualities of the Father. The singular fruit of the Fullness and the Father is known by various names: the Christ, the Savior and the Redeemer, the Advocate, the Light, and the Beloved. In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is a perfect and full fractal of the Father and the Son, all rolled-up into one perfect form. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was both perfect man and perfect God incarnate. Christian Gnostics believed the same. Here is a more complete explanation of who Jesus was. It’s said that Jesus was conceived without sin because he carried within his body the perfection of man and God. This would mean that Jesus was perfect and true to the original DNA formula for humanity. Hence the importance of the virgin birth that then imparted that perfect DNA to the baby. Jesus was also without negative karma attached to his soul, as his soul was the soul of God. The components of Jesus’s body were also without sin, as the cells and flesh that became Jesus were in fact the Aeons of the Fullness incarnate. As Colossians 1:19 says, “For God was pleased to have all his Fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on Earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.” This one sentence from Colossians contains the entire Christian Gnostic Gospel. Because Jesus brought along the entire Fullness of the Pleroma when he incarnated, every aspect of the Father and Son came to material instantiation on Earth. In this manner, the eternal God experienced the finite life of us Second Order Powers and all of the struggle between birth and death that plague us all. Here is how the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures describes this process: “As for those of the shadow, Logos separated himself from them in every way, since they fight against him and are not at all humble before him. The stumbling which happened to the Aeons of the Father was brought to them as if it were their own, in a careful and non-malicious and immensely sweet way. It was brought to the Fullnesses so that they might be instructed about the Deficiency by the single One, from whom alone they all received strength to eliminate the defects. They gathered together, asking the Father, with beneficent intent, that there be aid from above from the Father for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. Then, from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Fullnesses, revealing the countenance of the Father of whom the Aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus it was willingly and gladly that they brought forth the fruit. And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which was his beloved Son, but the Son in whom the Fullnesses are pleased to put himself on them as a garment through which he gave perfection to the defective one and gave confirmation to those who are perfect, the One who is properly called Savior and the Redeemer and the Well-pleasing One, and the Beloved, the One to whom prayers have been offered, and the Christ and the light of those appointed in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given to him. Yet what other name may be applied to him except the Son, as we have previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father whom he wanted them to know? Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, but also they generated their own, for the Aeons who give glory, generated their countenance and their face. They came forth in a multifaceted form in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the One who gave it to him.” (That is from the Tripartite Tractate sections 85 through 87.) So you see, the mission of the Christ, as stated in Colossians, was to redeem all of creation, including the fallen Aeon who had founded our material universe. Because the Christ came to redeem everyone, the body of Jesus came to Earth with every one of the Fullnesses on board. For every fallen spirit, the Christ brought forth their own personal and recognizable Savior. Redemption has already taken place. It is up to the Second Order Powers and the one who fell to recognize and accept that redemption in order to complete the mission of the Christ. In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ brought the correcting formula for all of our spirits and souls, each unique and personally formulated to meet our individual needs. The baptism of the Christ washes away the mental and spiritual confusion brought on by the endless war with shadows of the Fall. Gnostics are apocalyptic, as are Christians. Gnostics believe that some day every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus, the Christ, is Lord. Repentance and redemption comes harder for some than for others. Some souls take more time to recognize and remember. Ultimately, though, there comes a day of reckoning, for the Father will not be denied forever. There will soon come a day when the Deficiency ends. On that day, a new economy will unite Heaven and Earth, and all souls will find their joyful place in Paradise. The only forms banished to the outer darkness will be the shadows and phantoms of the Fall, which did not exist within the Father’s consciousness from the beginning. These shadows are not real and they will have no home with us in Paradise. Now here’s a gnostic perspective of Jesus on the cross. One of the central themes of the Christian faith is the death of Jesus on the cross. Christians the world over focus on the body of Jesus hanging on the cross, and I’ve often wondered, why this fixation of Jesus on the cross? Why is the crucifix the focal point of every church and altar? Why do people wear the cross as jewelry or hang a crucifix in their bedroom? The obvious answer Christians give is that without the cross, Jesus could not have saved humanity from sin, for he bore our sins into the grave with his death and they were washed away with his resurrection from the dead. Praise be to God, but why the cross? If Jesus had been stoned to death or drowned or beaten or thrown from a high tower, would we still feel such affinity for the stone, a lake, a club or a roof? I don’t think so. I think there is something very special about the shape of the cross itself. I ask this question because Jesus never said, I’m soon to pass on from this world, and I want you to focus on my body hanging on the cross as I take on the sins of the world. And yet, that’s what people do, as if that were the entire point of the Gospel. As far as I can tell, Jesus did not ask for his death and resurrection to be the focal point of worship. What Jesus actually said w
12/28/2024

Treasures of Heaven

Matthew 6:19 Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Lately, people have been asking me to translate Bible verses—to give my Gnostic Gospel version of familiar Bible verses. And, boy, I would love to do that. I mean, I could read for you the entire New Testament from end to end and translate it into the Gnostic Gospel, and perhaps that would be a good book project to do. I have hesitated doing such a thing here on Gnostic Insights because I don’t want people to misunderstand and think that this is just another Christian radio program. There are particular differences between the Gnostic Gospel and conventional Christianity, yet there is more in common with Christianity when you read it with an open heart and an open mind. So this morning I’ll look at some very famous Bible verses out of the book of Matthew, and this is when Jesus was preaching to the multitude. This is out of a long speech by Jesus. By the way, I really have been enjoying that television series called The Chosen. If you’ve never seen The Chosen, they have their own app. You can download it, for example, on Roku, the Chosen app, and then you can watch all of the episodes. You can catch episodes here and there on various platforms. They’re all really good, and it is yet another depiction of the life of Jesus and the disciples. But this television series, which has four seasons so far, and I think they’re going to go to five seasons, they have a lot of backstory and a lot of historical settings and things that aren’t particularly quoted out of the Bible, yet they are true. And like any screenplay that has been adapted from a book, the narrative isn’t exactly the same as the books. Sometimes characters are deepened or collapsed with other characters in order to carry the story forward, and that is the spirit by which The Chosen has been written, which brings criticism from some evangelical Christians. They don’t like the fact that The Chosen “makes up stuff.” But I feel that that is actually immaterial, because the important part carries on. The important truth of the Scripture is in there and brought to life in such a way that you can relate to it, or you can watch it like a television show or a movie. It’s a very gripping story. So I recommend that you look up The Chosen. You might enjoy it. Now let’s look at some Bible verses out of the book of Matthew, and as I like to do, I am using the translation by David Bentley Hart, which is what he calls a pitilessly accurate translation. He doesn’t change the translation of the New Testament the way so many versions of the Bible do. So let’s look at this. This is out of chapter 6, verse 19. Do not store up treasures for yourself on the earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves penetrate by digging and stealing. Rather, store up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves neither penetrate by digging nor steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be. Now this verse contrasts materialism and spirituality on a practical level. We live in a very affluent age, particularly if you’re living in one of the western countries. We have, for the last 100, 200 years at least, been living very high on the hog, as if we’re all kings and queens. And we have treasures. We have to have this, and we have to have that. We see things advertised, and we immediately have to get it. We photograph those QR codes off the screen, and bingo, a week later we have the product. And people who don’t know God, people who are cut off from their spiritual aspect, which we here at Gnostic Insights call your Self, that’s the part of us that we all share in common. That is the Fullness of God that dwells within us, the Self. But we all also have an ego, and it’s our ego that’s particular to us—that’s our name and address and all of the memes we cling to that give us meaning in our life. And when we soak up advertising or soak up social media and become envious of what we think other people have or what other people are enjoying, and then we want it for ourselves, that’s egoic. That’s your ego taking care of your personal needs. But the ego overreaches. We don’t need all the things we think we need or want. So here we are living in our homes or our apartments, surrounded by all of this material wealth, by all these doodads and gadgets—buy this equipment and that clothing and this kind of makeup and that kind of food. We’re just surrounding ourselves with things that we have taken in because other people told us we need to. That’s the purpose of advertising, to build up desire in you, to build up a need and a desire so that you will eventually take it in. And that’s how people make money. That isn’t the way to acquire things. That is a wrong path. And the reason it’s the wrong path is because material objects can never fill the aching and the need that’s in the human heart. We are hardwired to seek the transcendent. People who do not realize this, who have not remembered any of their gnosis at this point, they think it’s all made up. They think it’s all fairy tales. So many times I’ve heard people tell me, oh, that’s just a fairy tale. That’s just what you think. You can’t prove that it’s true. Well, the thing is, all of us who have begun to walk through the path of gnosis to find the truth of the ethereal, we all are treading that same path. And that’s another famous Bible quote: The way is wide that leads to destruction, but the path to God is narrow. Now, that one’s often interpreted to mean that there’s only one way to God, one way, and that one way, the Christians say, is Jesus Christ. The Gnostic gospel also believes there’s only one path, one way, but that path is gnosis. And Jesus points the way to the gnosis, and eventually we will all accept the redemption of the Christ, because you can’t make it all the way back to the ethereal plane carrying around these bundles of memes that we’ve acquired here on Earth. These attachments, these material possessions, they weigh us down like Marley’s chains in The Christmas Carol by Dickens. There is only one way to the ethereal plane, and all of us who are on that Gnostic path, we find ourselves having the same experiences. We do share visions. We do have the same expectation of heaven. We begin to remember the place that we came from, because according to the Gnostic gospel, and it is my contention, that the reason we all have a foretaste—and when I say all, I mean all cultures—everyone around the Earth has a foretaste, an expectation of what we call heaven or paradise. Now, how could we all be sharing that same expectation? It’s because that’s where we come from. We are the children of the Aeons in the pleroma of the Fullness of God, also known as paradise. When you see the Fullness of God in the New Testament, it’s the pleroma of God, which is everything that’s possible. It’s not just that God’s a big, great guy, and he’s so huge and ungraspable—the fullness. That isn’t what fullness means. Fullness is differentiations of the Source. The Fullness is every variable that can possibly be that was ever imagined by that great, illimitable Source, by the Father, broken out into its distinctive parts. And those parts are the aeons, and the parts with the personalities are what we typically call angels. So we all have this foretaste of heaven because we came from heaven. We have earthly parents, but we also have what we could call heavenly parents, because we are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And they sent us down here into this material world in order to help redeem the world, in order to remind the world of paradise, particularly to remind the Demiurge of paradise, because it’s the Demiurge, the forgetful god of the Gnostics, the creator of this heaven and earth. By heaven, I mean the sky, I mean the stars. Everything that is within the envelope or the boundary of the cosmos was created by the Demiurge. And the Demiurge doesn’t remember where he came from or where it came from. And the idea was that the Fullness sent down and populated this otherwise dead cosmos, because the Demiurge only produces material, it can’t produce life because it doesn’t remember what the life is. All of the life, all of the light, all of the consciousness, all of the love comes down that narrow path into this material world from above. So that’s what it means by “the way is wide that leads to destruction.” That’s if you’re standing here looking around you from left to right, and through history of this material world—that’s all death and destruction because the life doesn’t come from the bottom up. Consciousness doesn’t bubble up out of the mud. It flows down from above, and we carry it into this material universe with ourselves when we’re born. So the tragedy, of course, is that given a few years here on earth, we forget that we are the emissaries of the Fullness of God, and we think that we are mud creatures rising up out of the material world. So we forget our mission, which was to bring consciousness, and love, and redemption to the Demiurge. We’re here to remind him of life, and love, and the Father, and the Source, and the Aeons above. We get all bogged down by these material possessions, by these treasures we store up for us on earth, and we think the meaning is in the treasure. We think, oh, I’ll only be happy if I just get a Bowflex. Oh, I’ll be so happy if I wear this particular color lipstick. Oh, look at my selfie. Look at my selfie. Oh, aren’t I cute? Aren’t I neat? That’s wrongheaded. That will not bring happiness. That’s a delusion. Happiness can’t come from the material because the material is void. The material is empty. The material cannot generate consciousness. This is why I doubt that artificial intelligence will actually r

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Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.
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