Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The goal here at this Gnostic Insights podcast and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack is to share with you information from the Nag Hammadi, primarily from a book in the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate, concerning the gnosis of our existence.
The reason that it’s important to discover this gnosis is because gnosis is your personal reassurance that you are loved and not alone. Gnosis isn’t just about knowledge or arcane knowledge or mythologies or uncovering past histories of old religions. Gnosis is wisdom. It’s understanding. And primarily this gnosis will help us all live a better life in the here and now.
A lot of people are stuck in the muck. There are so many cravings and attachments down here. Cravings for sex, drugs, social media, whatever the thing is. Even popular culture is something that people get stuck in. You have to conform. You have to dress just so. Your hair has to be just so. These are all attempts at happiness, right?
I mean, most people want to be happy. And generally you feel that if only you got your point across, if people understood what you understand, then the world would be a better place. Then you could be happy because we’d all get along. Say, wouldn’t it be nice if, for example, the utopian vision was coming true here in our world? Wouldn’t it be oh so nice if we all were taken care of by the government, like our big mama, and that she’s going to wrap her arms around us. And they’re going to come and they’re going to give us free food. They’re going to make sure that we’re housed in nice places we like. They’re going to give us walking around money. And then everything will be nice and we’ll all get along. But this isn’t going to happen, folks. It can’t happen in this world because this is a fallen world.
The governments aren’t here to serve us. Ideally, they’re supposed to be here to serve us. You know, we’re the boss. They work for us. But no, because the people that go into this sort of political service are there to serve themselves primarily. They’re in there for power and control. I would think that most of them could care less about you and your happiness, seriously. But they want the world to be just so. And they think if the world were only here and like this and like this and like this and like this and we’ll make them do this and we’ll put them in this box and we’ll make them do that, then everything would be all right and we could all live happily ever after.
But it’s never going to happen through politics, folks. Jason Mraz is a singer I like a lot. And in his first album, he had a song that said, “in the order of the primates, all our politics are too late,” which means that we primate type of animals, we humans, can’t be controlled by the politics. So religions that say, Oh, yeah, politics may not be able to do it, but the religion can. Look, all you have to do is follow our rules, read our books, believe exactly what we believe, and march in time and sing with the choir, that then you’ll be happy. And then at least those in our religion will be the happy ones.
But it usually doesn’t work out there either, does it? Because of the same thing. People who are in control, people who crave power, are corrupted by power. For people who crave control, control becomes the end, not the means. And we can’t be controlled. The Demiurge learned this. You know, the Demiurge doesn’t like us. The Demiurge doesn’t love us.
By the way, for those of you who are new here, the Demiurge is the creator of this Earth that we live in, that we are occupying here. And according to Gnosticism, we are trapped here. This isn’t God’s world. This isn’t the world of love and the Aeons and everything’s fine, if only everyone would agree with us. No, this is the fallen world. This is the world that runs on power, control, and attraction to, and addiction to, various vices. And vices are the values of the Demiurge, the god of this world. So it’s always, I need, need, need more. And you shut up because you don’t agree with me. You shut up because you’re evil. You shut up or else I’m going to kill you or hurt you or take your things away from you. This is the never-ending war we’re engaged in down here. It’s a condition of this world.
So you can’t look to politics to save you. You can’t look to the government to take care of you. You can’t look to your religious authority, that particular human-led hierarchical control mechanism, to bring you the love and joy and peace and happiness. Because there’s a lot of miserable people sitting in church. I’ve got news for you—you know, I do listen to Christian radio. I do listen to a lot of Christian talk shows. And I can tell you, people are unhappy. People are messed up, no matter where they’re sitting, whether they’re sitting in a pew on Sundays and Wednesdays or not. Because it’s our culture, which is our collective meme structure, that influences more than anything else, unless you are plugged into the Father above. Unless you are redeemed by the Christ who came to redeem you. Unless you prefer virtue to vice.
I know I sound like a namby-pamby when I talk this way, but that’s only because if you think that is provincial, what I’m saying, it’s your worldview that is influencing you. And your worldview is mostly influenced by the culture in which you find yourself. So it’s a self-regulating mechanism. It’s a mechanism that feeds itself. The more we grab onto the culture—you know—how you should look, what you should eat, what your house should look like, what colors you wear, what you do for a living. That’s the culture. What you watch on TV, for crying out loud. What you watch incessantly on your handheld mobile devices. This is a sickness to me.
I can’t believe it when I go to the park with my dog and I see families there with little kids. And the mom and the dad are both looking at their cell phones. They aren’t looking at the kids. They aren’t playing with the kids. They aren’t watching to make sure their four-year-old doesn’t fall from the top of the climbing jungle. They’re working on their cell phones or they’re playing games on their cell phones.
We are in a culture that seeks to control us every minute of every day. And when you give in to the culture, when you give in to the Demiurge, when you give in to the vices, you’re lost. You’re lost. That will not bring you happiness. Happiness comes from above. Peace, love, happiness, like the old songs used to say in the hippie days. That’s what we’re all after. That’s what we crave because that’s what it is up above. The peace, love, and happiness exist on the ethereal plane, and we second-order powers, which includes us humans and all living creatures on the planet, come from above. We come from the land of peace, love, and happiness. And then we find ourselves in this material existence down here in the cosmos. And we want to bring that peace, love, and happiness back alive inside of us.
But you can’t find it out there in the culture, folks. You’re not going to find it out there. You have to find it by a personal connection between your spiritual Self, the Self you were born with—the personality of the Aeonic parents who formed you. The only connection to peace, love, and happiness is when your Self is in tune with the Father, the Son, the Christ, and the Fullness of God, that is, the Aeons above.
Now, if you’re not familiar with basic Gnostic concepts, what I’m telling you now is confusing. Because, hey, look, I just criticized religion, didn’t I? And now I’m saying you’ve got to be in tune with God and the Son and Christ? And the Fullness of God? Well, that seems like a bunch of malarkey. Am I contradicting myself? No, because the religions of the Earth are like the politics of the Earth—they’re constructed by humans. So it’s humanity that is corrupted down here, and it’s not our fault. I don’t think we are inherently sinful. That is where the gnosis splits from traditional religions. We do not come into the world born into sin, born into vice. We come down as pure spiritual beings, what I call here the Self, the big S Self. That’s your spiritual being.
And we also come down with our egos, which are formed above as well, because even the Aeons in the hierarchy of God have a Self and an ego. Everyone has their position, place, duties, powers, talents, and they’re all different. We come down as combinations. We are the children of those Aeons. And so we come down as various combinations of those Aeons with different degrees of talents according to our aeonic inheritance. That’s your Self. That’s your ego. We know who we are. We have a name in heaven before we’re born. We have talents. We have an assignment. We have a duty.
Now, all humans, all second order powers for that matter, are sent down into this fallen world in order to show the world, to demonstrate the purity of love, the fact that we come from above, the fact that we have a Father in heaven, the fact that we are loved by our aeonic parents, and all is perfect up there.
But down here, it’s a whole different matter, because this isn’t that. This world is ruled by the fallen Demiurge—the fallen ego of Logos, or if you’re coming from a different brand of Gnosticism, you’re accustomed to thinking of the fallen Aeon as Sophia. I prefer to call that fallen Aeon Logos, and that’s the one that is identified in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi as the Aeon who fell. And then after the fall, Logos’ ego separated from its pure aeonic Self, and Logos the Self went back up to the Fullness of God, whereas Logos the ego stayed down here, and Logos down here is a shadow of above. Everything that is the ego of Logos who is stuck down here, that Being called the Demiurge in Gnostic speak, is the inverse of the Logos above. It’s the shadow of the Aeons in the Fullness of God.
So everything that Logos produces is dark and heavy and a shadow. That’s our material existence. And what is a virtue up in heaven, such as loyalty, let’s say, becomes a vice down here, because it’s the inverse of it. So the inverse of the virtue of loyalty would be the vice of disloyalty or treachery, infidelity, unfaithfulness. So loyalty being a virtue, it makes us happy. It gives us a warm fuzzy. The opposite, which is the shadow of loyalty, always makes us feel horrible, right? Treachery, infidelity, unfaithfulness, those are not good. Those are not lifestyle choices. Those are bad things that come into our culture that we’re immersed in through the Demiurge and the inversion of the values of the Fullness.
Let me talk a minute about memes. Memes are units of information that people share. Usually they come in the form of words, discussions, but of course they can be pictures, they can be cartoons. We are swimming in a sea of memes, and we build a structure, a worldview out of the memes that we collect and hold on to. Every person is unique in the memes they hold on to. I call it your meme bundle. Think of it as a sack that you sling over your back, and all those memes are in there everywhere you walk around. If you’re carrying around a sack of worldly culture or demiurgic vices, then you are going to be weighed down and burdened by those memes. If you carry a sack full of virtues and belief and hope, love, and joy, you will be bouyed up by those memes that cling to your ego.
Your Self is that pure Self that you come into the world with when you’re born, and it is a fractal of the hierarchy of God. You have all of the gnosis of the hierarchy of God within yourself. And we’re also born with our ego.
Now, when we’re up above, our ego is just our name, our address, our duties, our talents. It’s the way that people recognize us. It’s that knowledge of who you are. That’s your pure ego. When you come down here, your ego begins to attract, like a magnet, the memes of the culture that you find yourself in. And if you go about attracting worldly memes that are actually bad for you, or that are actually vices, then you’re just going to be a miserable human being.
And no amount of government or religious law will make you obey, will make you happy, will make you love your neighbor. No, it’s all going to be about me, me, me. It’s funny that meme in English is made up of two me’s, right? Me, me.
So our goal, as we progress through this life and we mature, if we want to be happier, if we want to be more loving, if we want to become enlightened, you have to drop the earthly memes that come from the Demiurge and the culture, and you have to actually hold onto and believe in and put to use the godly memes that come from above, those being the virtues.
Let me run through a few of those virtues and vices so you can get the idea. In this transcript, I’m going to post a list that I came up with. I’m sure there’s a much more extensive list, I don’t know where it exists. But there’s a list that I have in my Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel book that you can find, and I’ll put that list here that compares virtues and vices. And you’ll see that when you look at the vice side of the list, it’s nothing but misery, yet it’s the thing that most people cling to out of a false idea that that’s the path to happiness. You know—the more things I acquire, the happier I’ll be. If only I had this, if only I could eat that, if only I could have sex with them, I’d be happy. No, no, that isn’t the way it works.
These vices bring you down. It’s only the virtues that lift you up. They lift you all the way up to heaven. You trade in your vices for the virtues. You flip the script. So let’s just hear what some of these vices and virtues are so you can get the gist of it. But I’d still like you to go and read the list that is posted in this transcript at Gnostic.com and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack.
Well, the first one, just to start off with, is the virtue of love, the loving. God is love. That is the Father’s primary characteristic. Love is our call. We can only be happy when we are loving.
And a lot of people down here mistake sexual attraction for love. Oh, if only I could have sex with that person and then marry them and have sex with them all the time. That’s love. That isn’t love, folks. The love you have for your dog is love. The love your dog has for you, that’s love. The love you have for a newborn baby is pure. That’s love. Yes, you can love your spouse. We are all called to have a loving family relationship. But don’t mistake sex for love. That’s the first thing.
Now the opposite, the vice side of love, true love, is hate, spite, spitefulness, hatefulness. So what I see when I look at the news, I see a lot of people who think that they’re going to usher in a utopia through their hatred for a political party or their hatred for a political figure such as a president. You cannot usher in utopia and a loving society beginning from the springboard of hatred. It isn’t going to work. It’s the opposite. So that’s the first major mistake.
Generosity, being generous, that’s a virtue. Sharing what you have. The opposite of generosity is greed, is greediness, wanting more and more and more. For whom? For me, me, me. Greed, acquisition of material possessions or people, cannot bring you happiness. It won’t work. Generosity, a loving attitude of generosity, being willing to share, that’s what brings you happiness. That’s what brings you love and shows love.
Worshiping the Father is a primary duty of the Aeons and of us Second Order Powers. That is, giving credit where credit is due—that it all comes from above.
All good things come from God. The word God is the same word as good. The opposite of having a worshipful attitude toward the Father is what’s called vainglory. It’s worshiping yourself or worshiping others, such as sports figures, such as musicians and actors. People go crazy in their presence. They worship them. No. That’s vainglory. You can’t worship other people or yourself. That doesn’t bring happiness.
All of the things on the vice side of the meme list might bring you a temporary pleasure. They bring you a temporary jolt of energy and excitement, but you can’t dwell there. It’s like a heavy drug. Obviously, taking a heavy drug gives people a rush of an excellent feeling, but it’s false. It’s not true. It’s demiurgic and it enslaves. It’s all about power and control.
Another virtue, for example, is to be useful, is to be part of making the world a better place in a useful way. That begins with the people around you holding hands with others, the Simple Golden Rule—holding hands with others to build something that none of you can build on your own. That’s for the betterment of all, for everyone. That’s the point of being a useful, a productive citizen. It’s to build a better society. It’s not useful to tear down society. It’s not useful to be anarchistic. The opposite of usefulness is destruction or sloth. Those are two opposites of being useful. Being lazy, being a couch potato, playing video games all day, that is not a useful use of your lifetime. We are called to be loving, caring, useful, good neighbors, good family members.
We are called to remember the Father and worship the Father. The Christ was sent to assist us because we forget our duty down here. We forget how to do everything because we get lost in the culture of the world and we buy into the power structures that seek to control you.
Don’t think that you can tear down what’s here through anger and wrath and violence, and then something wonderful will arise from it. No, if you tear down what exists here out of anger and hatred, it only will bring more hatred, violence, and anger. It can’t build up. It can only pull down. We make the world a better place by turning our eyes upward and remembering the Father, the Son, accepting the assistance of the Christ who is our vessel of knowledge and love.
Christ came to enlighten us, and to think you don’t need Christ, well, that’s vainglory, isn’t it? That’s worshiping yourself and your abilities. You’re not going to be able to change the world. So the Third Order of Powers was sent down in order to help us demonstrate love and the Simple Golden Rule of helping others and making the world a better place. And that’s the path to enlightenment. That’s the gnosis. Remember, we come from above.
Remember, we come from the Father. We’re part of the Father’s consciousness. We’re part of the Father’s love. And only by channeling and demonstrating that in truth, not in hypocrisy, not through slogans, but in truth, through action, this is the way we bring about a better world.
Until next week, God bless us all, and onward and upward.
