Gnostic Insights

In evangelical Christian circles, people have had a born-again experience where they have asked Jesus into their hearts to take over their lives. In our Gnostic terminology, we would say that this is a person’s acknowledgement of the Christ, and an invitation that invites the Third Order of Powers—the pleroma of the Christ—to come into ourselves to correct the mistakes that we have gained through the memes of the culture that surround us and clutter up our souls. Now, I know this all sounds like funny talk. It’s a little different than how we normally speak of Jesus Christ in evangelical circles, but I hope that if you’ve been following Gnostic Insights for any period of time, or if you’ve read the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, that you will understand what I’m saying. All I’m saying is exactly what is said in Christian doctrine about asking Jesus to come into your heart. It’s just a deeper explanation of how the process works. It is not necessary to understand all of the steps in the Gnostic Gospel, because the only thing you really need to know is that we come from the Father and we will return to the Father. Christ is the mechanism by which that is accomplished. The Bible puts it this way: 11 For it is written: “As I live, says the Lord,Every knee shall bow to Me,And every tongue shall confess to God.” 12 So then each of us shall give account of himself to God. (Romans 14:10-12) On the one hand, Christians acknowledge that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Yet, on the other hand, church doctrine says that only those people who, before death, have repented and invited Jesus into their hearts will be saved. And to them, being saved only refers to being saved from damnation, being saved from hell. I’m safe. But that is not really the goal of inviting the Christ to dwell in your heart. We Gnostics say that the purpose of asking the Christ in is to replace your flawed Second Order pleroma with your redeemed Third Order pleroma. That is, you ask the Fullness of God to wipe away all of the misunderstandings, all of the doubts, all of the sin. Sin simply means straying from the path of virtue. When you invite the Christ in, you’re asking for the correcting algorithm of the Christ, we might say,  to remove confusion from your life so that you only operate out of truth and love rather than ego. Being saved by Christ means that every moment of your waking life, until the time that you pass away and move on from this life to the next, will be for the glory of God, in order to demonstrate God’s love to the world and this cosmos. Therefore, thinking that being saved from hell is the goal and stopping there, entirely misses the point of salvation. Going to church on Sunday mornings yet acting unloving the rest of the time is not what Jesus meant by salvation. Salvation is meant to bring you back into alignment with the glory of God. Jesus is our exemplar of a blameless life. Jesus is the first of the Second Order Powers that came fully loaded with the Third Order of Powers. That’s why he’s called Jesus the Anointed. He walked with the truth and spirit and love of the Father at all times, and through the power of the Christ we are to emulate Jesus. It’s become popular in academic circles, such as the Jesus Project, to say that there was no such human being on the planet as Jesus of Nazareth. But more and more evidence is actually arising that it’s true. There are both Jewish and non-Judaic historians of the period of time when Jesus was on the planet that testify to his presence. The presence of Jesus is not simply a fairy tale as so many people claim, plugging Jesus into history in the creation of a false religion. It’s really not even possible in my mind because there’s too much truth and beauty in the New Testament to be a fable constructed by a pack of religious liars. There is also much truth and beauty in the Old Testament, although I have reservations about the character of God presented in Old Testament. We Gnostics think that the God of the Old Testament is not the God Above All Gods but the Demiurge. There is a definite split between Judaism and Christianity, between the Old and the New Testament and the old and new covenant between God and humankind. When Jesus was crucified, the New Testament says that the great curtain that hung in the Temple in Jerusalem that separated the Holy of Holies section of the Temple from the more public aspect of the Temple was torn in half, was rent in two from the top to the bottom when Jesus was crucified. Now that symbolically symbolizes that there is a tear, a break, between the Judaism of the Temple and Christ crucified, and a whole new way of walking with God from then on, based upon the principles that Jesus shared, based upon his example. Last week I researched the movement called the deconstruction of Christianity. Although as a PhD in rhetoric, I certainly learned what deconstruction was, I didn’t realize that Christianity was one of the big targets of deconstruction. This was a concept invented by one of the founders of what’s called post-modernism, Jacques Derrida. Derrida said that meaning is always mediated by language, and that we need to deconstruct the meaning of the words, because what the person who originally said it meant is probably not what we interpret it to mean. Well, I actually say that quite a bit. I always point out that we speak from our own point of view. We’re born in a particular place and time, we have particular lifestyles and lives and experiences. And therefore, when you say something, I hear it through my lens, and vice versa. So the Gnostic gospel that I am teaching is a form of the deconstruction of modern Christianity, but I don’t think it’s a deconstruction of what Jesus meant to bring into the world, or what I would call true Christianity or proto-Christianity. I think that the Nicene Council which institutionalized and repackaged Christianity to serve the needs of the Roman Empire in the 300s AD, was the first deconstruction of Jesus and that what we have learned as the religion of Christianity presents a complete misunderstanding of the purpose and mission of Christ because the gnosis was stripped from the gospel by the Council of Nicaea, as they were tasked with putting together the Christian religion. So while I would, let’s say, advocate deconstruction of modern Christianity, I’m only trying to deconstruct it back to the original meaning that Jesus left with the disciples and with the early followers of the church. On the other hand, atheists and academics who deconstruct Christianity have a different goal in mind. Their goal is to, in a sense, prove that there is no such thing as God or Jesus or Christ. They want to deconstruct it all the way back to atheism. They sometimes call themselves naturalist religionists, or religion without God. They worship creation, or they don’t worship at all, or they worship the good intent of humanity, and that is what humanism is. So I can understand a certain mistrust of deconstructing Christianity because it means different things to different people and their goals are quite different than our Gnostic deconstruction. Is the goal to remove belief in the higher Power and take everything back to atheism? Is it to take everything back to worshiping the creation rather than the creator? As a Gnostic, my goal is not to lessen people’s faith in God or to lessen people’s acceptance of the Christ. It’s just exactly the opposite. I would like the people that listen to my podcast and that read my books to have a deeper, broader, wiser relationship with the Father and with Christ. If what I’m teaching leads to what is called a crisis of faith, well that’s okay, because many, many spiritual people have had a crisis of faith, particularly if they are confronted with some reality about the fallibility of the church they attend, perhaps a church split or some scandal within the church that causes them to doubt everything that they have known and believed before. The first year of this podcast, I interviewed Adrian Smith, who has written a book called A Prison for the Mind, Reflections of a Disappointed Fundamentalist. Adrian had a crisis of faith because he was a member of a very strict church that could even possibly be considered a cult. And so when he fell away from that church, he had his crisis of faith. But he came to Gnosticism, and that’s my highest goal for all of us, because what we need to have is a personal relationship with the Father above, the God Above All Gods, and with the Christ as represented by Jesus. Here is the beginning of the Gospel according to John, from Hart’s translation. In the origin there was the Logos, and Logos was present with God, and the Logos was God (John 1:1). Now, okay, let’s stop there a second. “In the origin” refers to the ethereal plane. “There was the Logos,” and that is a capital L, so it’s a person, it’s a name, and it’s the Logos that we talk about all the time here at Gnostic Insights. “And Logos was present with God,” and this is capital G-O-D, so this is the God Above All Gods. “And the Logos was god,” but that is lowercase g, so the Logos was an elohim, an Aeon. Quoting again, This one was present with God in the origin. All things came to be through him, and without him came to be not a single thing that has come to be. In him was life, and this life was the light of men (John 1:2-4). Normally it’s translated as the Son of God, and I would agree that the Son was present with God in the origin, and all things came through the Son, beginning with the Totalities and the Hierarchy of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. They’re the parts, the pleroma, of the Son. But remember, Logos was one of these Aeons who within himself at the fractal level also possessed all of the elements of life in this cosmos. So Logos is not exactly the same as the Son of God, but he is the Son of the Son. He has the pleroma of the Son of God as a fractal within himself, and it was this Logos who fell out of the Hierarchy of the Aeons and created the material out of which our cosmos was fashioned. When I first read this in the Tripartite Tractate, I found it so shocking that I set the Nag Hammadi down for a few years. This didn’t cause a crisis of faith in my Christianity when I first read this, but it more likely caused a crisis of faith in my gnosis because of this equation of Logos with the Son in the Gospel of John. So when John says “All things came to be through him,” and that’s a lowercase him, we’re not talking about the Son, and we’re not talking about the Father, we’re talking about that elohim, Logos. “And without him came to be not a single thing that has come to be,” points to the Fall of Logos that created this cosmos. And so identifying Logos as the one who fell rather than Lucifer or Satan, well, you see, that is a very strange deconstruction of our normal Christian doctrine, but it’s only an inversion because that part was taken out by the Nicene Council. The Roman Pope wanted a clean, straight throughline that wouldn’t confuse the “simpletons” too much, and I put quotes around simpletons because faith is to be simple. So in a sense, being a simpleton is not an insult. We’re to have faith like a child—to be innocent. Again, quoting from the Gospel according to John, chapter 1, verse 4, “In him was life, and this life was the light of men.” You see, as I understand the Gnostic Gospel, it’s the Pleroma of Logos along with the Fullness of God that sends down the life. The “life and the light of men” comes from the Father, through the Son, through the Fullness, and then down through Logos. Logos is our first emissary into this cosmos. Logos provides the means by which “the light of men” entered and continues to enter our cosmos. Quoting John again, And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it (John 1:5). So what was the darkness? That was the space of the other dimension resulting from the Fall away from the luminosity of the ethereal plane, representing an encompassing ignorance of the Father. The original cosmos was all dark. It lacked consciousness, it lacked life, and then Logos sent life, light, and consciousness into the primordial cosmos, displacing the ignorance with the gnosis of the Father. And that light is a great Power that displaces the darkness—“darkness did not conquer it.” All of us Second Order powers bring life and consciousness into this cosmos. All of us, from the bacterium on up, from each of our cells on up, are part of the Pleroma of the redeemed Logos after his return from the Fall to the Fullness. That’s how it is that we’re alive, and we are conscious. We didn’t arise from the mud of the Demiurge who is the shaper of the bits and pieces of the Fall. We didn’t come through the Fall and we are not fallen. We come from the light of God and so the darkness cannot conquer us. We came through Logos. We came through the Fullness. We came through the Son. So that is why whenever I speak of these things and I give praise to God, I can start with the God Above All Gods, but it always flows down through the Son, the Fullness, and Logos. Or I can start with Logos and flow up through the Aeons of the Fullness and the Son in praise and giving glory to the God Above All Gods. This gnostic glory road may appear to be just another deconstruction of Christianity, but it seems to me a very reverential approach. I revere God. I give glory to God. I love God, and I love every part of the steps of the Gnostic Gospel, from Logos up through the Aeons of the Fullness, up through the Son, all the way to the God Above All Gods. My praise of the Father doesn’t stop at the walls of the church. It doesn’t stop at the body of Jesus hanging bloody and beaten on the cross. It permeates every cell of my Second Order being. Carrying on with this chapter 1 of John, it says, There came a man sent by GOD whose name was John. [That’s John the Baptist, not John who wrote the book of John, and GOD written in all capital letters, indicating the God Above All Gods]. “This man came in witness that he might testify about the light so that through him all might have faith—but only that he might testify about the light; he was not that light” (John 1:6-7). So John came to testify about the Christ and he was saying no I am NOT the Christ. It was the true light which illuminates everyone that was coming into the cosmos.  He was in the cosmos and through him the cosmos came to be and the cosmos did not recognize him. He came to those things that were his own and they who were his own did not accept him (John 1:9-10).   The Third Order Powers constitute the pleroma of the Christ. Third Order Powers have the perfection of the Christ; one for every Second Order Power, and they carry the countenance of every Aeon. John the Baptist was saying that the Christ brought the true, ethereal light from above to illuminate “everyone that was coming into the cosmos.” Not only the church, not only the elect, not only the special few, but everyone. He says that Christ came to his own but they did not accept him. This is usually interpreted as saying that since Jesus was a Jew, his own were the Jewish people. I would broaden that definition to mean that Christ’s “own” are all of the Second Order Powers that were sent down through Logos to populate the cosmos. But as many as did accept him, to them he gave the power to become God’s children, to those having faith in his name. Those born not from blood nor from man’s desire but of GOD [again written in all capital letters to indicate the God Above All Gods](John 1:12-13). This part of the passage indicates that we need to have faith in the name of the Father—the God Above All Gods, not Jesus in particular: “he gave the power to become God’s children to those having faith in his name,” i.e. “GOD.” And the second part of the passage, verse  13, spiritualizes the fact that by “God’s children,” he is not speaking of merely being born through passion and sex, but born into the desire for GOD. And how is one born into the desire for GOD? By identifying with the Christ and inviting the Third Order Powers to take up residence inside your soul. This passage is one of the foundational passages that encourages Christian evangelism and conversion—the “born again” experience, and it seems an airtight statement for the need to repent and ask the Christ to come in and redeem us in order to be “saved.” The conventional church has taken this to mean that everyone who doesn’t repent before their death will be condemned and tortured for eternity in hell. This is the evangelistic coercion by which many a person has converted to the Christian religion. We spent three full episodes in November of 2024 devoted to this topic. To summarize, all Second Order Powers will indeed remember the Father and repent and will gladly return to their everlasting home above, sooner or later. And later may involve numerous reincarnations or repentance after death during one’s 360 degree life review. I’ll put the links to those episodes in the transcript of this episode: Universal Salvation–an Introduction – Gnostic Insights  Universal Salvation pt. 2 – Gnostic Insights  Universal Salvation pt 3 – Gnostic Insights And the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us and we saw his glory. Glory as of the Father’s only one, full of grace and truth (John 1:14). So, “the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us” speaks of the ephemerality of Christ’s appearance on the world stage. We spoke of what ephemerality means last week. In this case it’s the fact that when Jesus Christ came through this cosmos and pitched his tent in Nazareth and in Jerusalem and all the lands thereabout, it was a temporary stay. He was just passing through this material cosmos, as are all of us. Christ didn’t build a Temple or a Cathedral in GOD’s name, he pitched a temporary tent. Now to wrap this up, the point of the coming of Jesus Christ was not to die on the cross. The atheistic strain of deconstructionists like to say that Christianity is a religion based upon a cult of child sacrifice and that Jesus was the ultimate child sacrifice—that God was willing to sacrifice his only begotten Son in the most horrendous type of bloody death by crucifixion—and who wants to worship a bloodthirsty God like that? The deconstructionists like to say that Christianity is a modern cult of child sacrifice. But it’s not. That is a complete misunderstanding of the passion of Christ. The point of the incarnation of Jesus the Christ was not so that he could become a blood sacrifice to take away our sins in the same manner that the Jews were instructed to bring a sacrifice of a dove or the sacrifice of a sheep, ox, or goat to the priests of the Temple when they came to worship and beg forgiveness of sins. Ancient Judaism, like the earlier religions of the area prior to Judaism, did practice blood sacrifice. But, unlike the neighboring tribes, the Jews substituted the doves, sheep, oxen, and goats for child sacrifice. The substitutes would be slaughtered in front of them. Gigantic gallons of blood flowed out of the Temple every day during sacrificial observances. The Temple era of animal sacrifice was a very bloody religion, as were all of the religions in the land of Canaan at the time. And so the Jews brought that element into their religion. There is, of course, a Demiurgic aspect to blood sacrifice, in that the Demiurge hates the life and light we Second Order Powers bring into this world. The Demiurge is the King of Death and we Second Order Powers all fight a lifelong, never-ending battle with death. But Jesus came as a sharp break, ripping that curtain of the Temple where the sacrifices took place. He went into the marketplace of the Temple where the vendors were selling goats and sheep and doves to be used as sacrificial substitutes. Those were the people whose tables Jesus overturned—the money changers of the people who were selling sacrificial animals. In the New Testament we read, And Jesus entered the Temple and threw out all those selling and buying in the Temple, and overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those selling doves, And he says to them, “It has been written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a robbers’ den.’” (Matthew 21:12-13).  Jesus came to take away blood sacrifice, and not in a magical way through his substitutional sacrifice on the cross, which is the event that Christians observe on Good Friday. Jesus hanging on the cross and then he dies, “to take away our sins.” Jesus is then resurrected on Easter Sunday. The sacrificial substitution of Jesus is the heart of Christianity, but it is a carryover from the old days of Temple sacrifice that Jesus clearly and physically overturned. Jesus the Christ came so that we would see his life, hear his teachings, invite him into our hearts, and ask his Pleroma to replace the Pleroma of Logos with the Pleroma of Love. This is the meaning of the Christ. This is what Jesus came to do, and he loves us so much more than we love ourselves and way more than we love other people in the world. Christ would never send any of us to hell and punishment for eternity, for we are all the children of GOD, capital G O D. He came that we might be saved, not condemned. This is the true message of Easter and it’s all about love and forgiveness. When Jesus was hoisted onto the cross he said, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” Then a darkness came over the land and the Temple veil was torn in two. Jesus’s final words were “It is finished,” followed by, “Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit.” Having said this, He breathed his last (Luke  23:45 ; John 19:30). This is the good news of the Gnostic Gospel. Christ will connect with you on a personal level, for he came with your face and he knows you intimately. He brought with him an army of Third Order Powers to lovingly walk beside you through the Demiurge’s valley of the shadow of death and He will guide you back to your heavenly home. So, Happy Easter, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I’d like to share with you an essay that David Bentley Hart recently posted to his Substack site. His Substack site is called Leaves in the Wind by David Bentley Hart. And you know we use Hart’s translation of the New Testament here frequently. He’s a brilliant man, a wonderful writer. So I’m going to read for you a very good essay that he calls The Story of the Nameless, The Use and Abuse of History for Theology. This was posted on April 9, 2025. It was a lecture that he had delivered at Duke University in September of 2017 to theology graduate students. So if you find this deep and difficult to follow, well just imagine that you’re a Duke theology graduate student and they probably didn’t follow it any better than you do. So don’t worry about that because he writes in a very highbrow manner. Also I’m only reading portions of this essay. I’m leaving out most of the small details that historians love so much. Hart cites many different philosophers—European philosophers, German philosophers, historians from all ages, from Eusebius on up. And I’m leaving all of those details out. So if you like those sorts of details, because I don’t—I get lost amongst the names, I’m not really good at sticking in names–I like concepts. That’s where I dwell. And so I’m giving you the conceptual level of this essay. But if you want the details, go and look up Hart there on Substack and read for yourself. Even subscribe. He’s always amazing. So here goes. Most of the history we read and write is a lie, though often a lie told in earnest. We fabricate the past as much as we recall it, if not more so, and almost invariably in ways that reflect an ideology that we either consciously seek to promote or unconsciously absorb from the society surrounding us. For the most part, this is nothing to lament as long as we remember to think of written history primarily as a species of literature. In truth, the greater the historian, the vaster and more ingenious his or her misrepresentations are likely to be. And the greatest of all, those who are the most accomplished masters of detail and style need not distort a single fact in order to produce an entirely fantastic image of the past. Let me pop in here and say that there’s a difference between facts—choice points in history—observable phenomena that occurred—and the narrative or the story that weaves those facts together. Narrative is not truth. Narrative is the story you tell around the facts and it is your truth. It’s usually ideologically centered. So you can see this clearly in our political situation where you have a certain set of facts and then half of the people say blah blah blah blah blah as they weave together the facts into the narrative that they promote and the other half of the people say no no blah blah blah blah blah that’s their narrative around the same exact facts. So do you see how that works? It’s not that what you hear reported is true or false. It’s the story that people have woven around the facts as they stand. And of course, all of the news outlets and certainly the social media influencers are all about narrative. People tell the story from their point of view because we each have a unique and personal point of view and we always think that our version of what we see is the correct one because it’s our point of view, see? So when we share that with others, we try to convince them to accept our narrative. So that is why the media outlets on the left have different narratives than the media outlets on the right, even though the facts may be the same. And by the way, the facts aren’t always there. Sometimes opinions or guesswork is promoted as if it were a fact, but it’s not. Sometimes people lie to fill in the blanks of the narrative and so those are just outright lies. When we read history then, what are we reading? We are reading the narratives that the historians wrote, right? Sometimes we’re reading lies. It is said that history is written by the victors because they’re the ones that survived to tell the story. Okay, so getting back to Hart now, skipping ahead, he says, Moreover, we deceive ourselves if we imagine that there is such a thing as a specific and constant moral imperative that governs and animates the writing of history. Yes, on the one hand, we must never forget. But yes, also on the other, we must learn to forget. Historical memory can ideally make us aware of and so responsible for the sins of the past, the crimes of our countries and our forebears, all the wars and spoilations and enslavements that have marked the births and deaths of tribes and nations and empires. By the same token, however, it can also entrap us in a ceaseless cycle of impotent mourning whose emotional intoxications can relieve us of any real attention to the concrete moral demands of the present. At its most perfidious, historical recollection can become a support for an aggrandizement of our prejudices, a reinforcement of the myths of racial pedigree or national destiny or imperial grandeur, or can soothe us with sweet sickly nostalgias for past glories and lost honors. We see this also happening quite a bit in discussions of politics and what is currently going on. You know, a few years ago, the movement away from American history in the manner that we were taught it in the 40s, 50s, 60s, let’s say, to change the year that the nation was founded and by whom–these are conscious attempts to remold the thinking of people here and now. I imagine that we people who are looking into Gnosticism think that quite often. We often think to ourselves, oh well, it surely couldn’t have happened that way. As a Christian Gnostic, one rewriting of history that I constantly indulge in is the notion that the Gnostic gospel was embedded within original Christianity—the original people of the first 300 years after Jesus—and that it was purposely stripped out of the religious and historical narrative by those who wielded power at the time, the Roman emperor and the pope of the Roman Catholic Church, in order to mold Christianity into a kingdom that they could control and that they could be the head of, the leader of. So as a Gnostic Christian, I will say no, that was not right that they did that because they were wiping out the true history. And the true history from my point of view is that this was originally part of what Jesus taught and has been purposely stripped out and muffled so that only now, after the rediscovery of the Nag Hammadi scriptures and the Qumran scripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, can these original teachings be rediscovered and reabsorbed into Christianity. That is what this Gnostic Insights attempts to do in a Christian way. But we know, just observing our modern culture, that people on the left and people on the right describe history entirely differently from each other in order to support their narrative, which then supports their belief structure. Okay, getting back to Hart, he says, Even so, if we can keep the fact in mind, we can at least apply ourselves to historical studies with enough ironic detachment to be capable of discerning where what we really know of the past, which is always far less than we think, can be distinguished from the fabulations and interpretations in which the record is always inevitably wrapped. Then, when we choose to write or rewrite the past responsibly, or simply in reading consider what we are reading with sufficient diffidence, we can recognize the ephemerality and cultural contingency of past interpretations. Let me jump in here to interpret some words. What Hart is suggesting is that we need to be able to tell the difference between what is being made up and what is merely interpretations of the facts when we write or even read. And that’s what responsible or discerning reading is—that we can recognize ephemerality. Ephemerality means passing, it’s gone with the wind, it doesn’t last long. And the cultural contingency of past interpretations, that is what I was talking about a minute ago, that where you stand within the culture always determines how you interpret the pattern of events. Back to Hart now, No doubt we are also in that very process imposing new equally ephemeral and contingent interpretations on what we think we know. But that too we can learn to do with some degree of critical distance from our own prejudices. So Hart is suggesting that we need to have self-awareness enough to realize that the way we are interpreting events or the way we are interpreting what we see on social media, what we see from the talking heads, the influencers—we have to be able to not just absorb everything we hear, but have sufficient critical distance to discern what people are saying. Even if we tend to agree with that person, we still have to maintain some sort of distance. See, what people often do is they have a point of view and they seek out other people who reinforce their point of view. And if you turn on some social media and this person is talking about things that you don’t agree with, well, you just want to turn them off immediately or you want to say rude things back to them on the screen. But if you can sit with it and truly consider it, you’d be closer to the truth. Podcast host and comedian Bill Maher visits with President Trump and singer Kid Rock at the White House on March 31, 2025. Maher was surprised that Trump was so funny and congenial at the private dinner, and he left with a new understanding and appreciation for his political foe. (Image via X/@billmaher) At least consider what their point of view must be for them to be saying these things. What assumptions are they making versus the assumptions you are making? And where do they conflict? And does it have to do with fact or does it have to do with opinions? So back to Hart, he says, And we cannot really avoid the task because despite all I’ve just said, historical thinking is not a choice for us, but an irresistible call, a vocation as old as our consciousness of ourselves as human beings. Skipping a little down, he asks, what is history after all? And I skip… History is the consequence of an original alienation, a departure from the natural order of repetition and return. And no reconciliation with the world we left behind is possible in this life. It is a state of spirit knowing itself now as posed over against the organic substrate of its being in the world, which has become something separate, objective, other. Okay, now that’s a very Gnostic statement. What he’s saying in the language as I interpret it is that our spiritual Self with a capital S is by its very nature alienated from the what he calls the organic substrate of being in the world. I would call it being melded to the mud level. Our self is melded to the material of the Demiurge and to its requirements and its memes. But we have the Self of our original spirit to show us what is true. Quoting Hart again, And so we cannot help but reflect on this schism under the forms provided by philosophy or art or natural religion, even though we are generally too immediately engaged in history as an unavoidable and external problem to be solved to allow much time for deep contemplation of history. And yeah, when certain historical events overwhelm us, such as the COVID pandemic, one side against another side and the claims of their narratives conflicting with each other, that would be the unavoidable and external problem to be solved. When we’re caught up in that, when we’re watching the news and reading the news feeds constantly and getting all worked up about it, well, now we can step back from that as a Gnostic and realize that that is part of the never ending war. That’s the never ending war. The Demiurge wants us to be constantly balled up and upset and shaking our fists at other human beings for what they believe in. Whichever side you’re on, that is a Demiurgic plot. The Demiurge wants us to be immediately engaged in history, you see, caught up in it and impassioned by it and being all angry or righteous and virtuous against those fools. That’s part of the never ending war and we’re being played. We’re being played like puppets when that happens. This is where reasonable detachment comes in. Think of it as a play. Think of it as here we are at a very interesting point in history. Look at this drama unfolding. It’s Shakespearean. It’s of biblical proportion. It’s an amazing drama that we’re watching and a part of. But don’t let it bring you down because then you are succumbing to archonic influences. Then you are being used as a puppet by the Demiurge. That’s what I would say. Back to Hart, And it seems to me, he says, there is a special calling of theological reflection with regard to historical memory, one that Christian thought has reliably betrayed throughout most of its existence. For one thing, the call to contemplate the meaning of history is not merely an invitation to engage with an archive of discrete facts in isolation, but an imperative to attend to specific narratives, specific diegetic orderings of facts and memories. For another, every attempt to interpret the past is either, tacitly or explicitly, also an attempt to interpret the present and determine what is to come. In a sense, every significant historian is engaged in writing the future. And in the case of Christian historians, it is a matter of extraordinary theological moment. Jumping down, he says, To me, it remains a source of wonder that most histories of Christianity remain little more than attempts to tell the story of the church in such a way as to defend or advocate the reconstitution of this or that institutional practice, this or that style of confessional adherence, this or that doctrinal ideology, and little more. It is surprising how often, even if inadvertently, these histories are nothing more than the same old tales of pedigree, further recitations of the narratives of those blessed with enduring names by virtue of their having occupied stations of social power. Rarely ever do they seem to emerge from an historical consciousness shaped by the radically different story told by the Gospels, which should be retold in every age regarding those nameless and disenfranchised souls whose world was invaded by the call of God in Christ, the crucified slave. This is a problem. See, I really liked that section, because he’s saying that what Christianity has become by virtue of the histories written by it is another tale of those in power—those in power wielding Christianity this way or that, whereas the way Christianity started was a different story that needs to be retold in every age, because it’s about nameless people and disenfranchised people whose world has been invaded by Christ. We don’t hear from those disenfranchised people in history. We only hear about the big people. We only hear from the famous historians, the famous theologians, this king or that king, Emperor Constantine taking Gnosticism out of the Gospel for the sake of power. Back to Hart. We have to remember also that the peculiar form of the entrance of God’s kingdom into time was not an integration of God’s story into ours, but rather a shattering act of judgment, of damnation, and of resurrection in a spiritual body untouched by time and death. It is, in short, history as history’s overthrow. Christianity first entered the world of late antiquity not as an institution, nor as a fully developed creed, but first and foremost as an event that was without any known precedent and without any immediately obvious sequel. At its dawning, the Gospel appeared within history as a proclamation regarding the sudden and irrevocable disruption of history, one that necessarily entailed, for those who believed that proclamation, a subversion or rejection of many of the most venerable cultic, social, and philosophical wisdoms of the ancient world. And the central event within the event that the Gospel proclaimed was the resurrection of Christ. All at once, according to Paul, for instance, all the firm configurations and demarcations that gave shape to reality had been altered, or transgressed, or erased. All religious, social, racial, and national boundaries had been effaced. All of natural history had been delivered over to the rule of Christ. All the spiritual and human agencies governing the cosmos, powers, principalities, thrones, dominions, the god of this age, had been subdued by the crucified and risen Lord. Let me pop in there to say that the god of this age—that is the Demiurge, and the spiritual agencies that are overthrown—the powers, principalities, thrones, dominions—those are the archons in the rule of the Demiurge. And the human agencies governing, that’s the kings and emperors who were appointed by the Demiurge to bring order to these unruly humans. Well, he’s saying that was all completely overthrown with the coming of Christ. Quoting again, The language of the book of Galatians is especially uncompromising with regard to the implications of this interruption. There Paul states that the event of salvation in Christ was a complete liberation not only from the elemental powers, and that would the archons, to which all peoples had been subject, but even from the power of the law of Moses. For holy though that law was, it could not save and was itself rendered defective by having been delivered under the angelic dispensations of the present age, revealed first through a mere angel and then further through a mere human mediator, and operating therefore only as a kind of provisional disciplinarian. He’s talking about the giving of the Ten Commandments and bringing it down the mountain by Moses. Moses and the Ten Commandments. (Gustave Dore, Getty Images) In Christ, however, a new age of liberty from all government but God’s had arrived. In this sense, Christianity entered human consciousness not primarily as an alternative religious practice or creed, but rather as an apocalyptic annunciation of the sudden invasion of historical and natural time alike by a kingdom not of this cosmos. Well, amen, I say to that. That is exactly the Gnostic gospel here. He’s saying that Christianity is not a displacement of Judaism or of other religions. Its purpose isn’t to have established, as it has by now in our modern Christian churches, a different set of creeds to recite every Sunday, a different set of hymns to sing, a different practice of dining together and what prayers to say. That was never the point that Jesus was making. That is merely substituting one set of ritualistic practices for another. But he’s saying that Christ actually came and destroyed all of that, that it was an apocalyptic annunciation by a kingdom not of this cosmos. It is an apocalyptic narrative that is wholly incompatible with what modern Christianity has become. It was wild, you might say, and we domesticated it and put it into corrals, this kingdom that is not of the cosmos. Quoting Hart, It was above all a profanation of sacred truths, the elevation of a crucified slave over all those duly appointed offices of religious and social order that had justly condemned him, and the blasphemous misconstrual of this criminal, not merely as an innocent victim, but as God’s only son. The pattern established in Christ, especially for me, Hart says, in the inexhaustibly suggestive story of Christ’s confrontation with Pilate in John’s gospel, was one of martyrdom as victory. Of power as the willingness to become powerless before the violence of the state, and thereby to reveal the latter’s arbitrariness, injustice, and spiritual falsehood. And how strange the gospel is here, for Pilate is precisely the sort of man about whom history is meant to be written. He has a name, has a face before the law, stands in a station given him by the sacred authority of the empire, yet his story vanishes in the light of Easter. He is remembered today only insofar as he is written into the margins of the story of the slave and peasant God. Pilate washes his hands to cleanse himself after condemning Jesus. Christ before Pilate by Ludovico Mazzolino, painting by Lodovico Mazzolino, 1530 (Museum: Fitzwilliam Museum) Even in its most redoubtable and enduring historical forms, Christianity is filled with an indomitable and subversive ferment, an inner force of disillusion that refuses to crystallize into something inert or stable, but that instead insists upon dispersing itself into the future ever again, to destroy what confines it and to start anew, to begin again in the formless realm of spirit rather than of flesh, of spirit rather than of the letter. There is, simply said, a distinct element of the ungovernable and seditious within the gospel’s power to persuade, one that we ignore only at the cost of fundamentally misunderstanding the character of the gospel. And hey, popping in here again, I say amen. That is exactly why I call this Gnostic gospel that I teach the Gnostic Gospel, and why I don’t shy away from saying that it is the basic form of Christianity. What we are teaching here at Gnostic Insights, and what I’ve written in my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and in the other book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is to bring Christianity again into the formless realm of spirit rather than of flesh, of spirit rather than of the letter, the ungovernable and seditious within the gospel’s power to persuade. And of course, this is what irritates conventional Christians who are constrained very narrowly by the narrative of the modern Christian church and what they’re allowed to believe and not believe. When we become so wedded to the inerrancy of the scripture, as they say, we are only allowed to read and believe exactly word for word the New Testament as it has been translated over the last 2,000 years, after the Nicene Council had already stripped out the Gnostic gospel. But that holds us within these corrals, like I say, as if we were wild horses that have been penned now and domesticated. But we’re not. The freedom to run free through the eternal spirit of the Father and the Son, the Aeons, the Fullness, and the Christ–this is who we really are. This is the spirit that we’re all born with, that we forget, and that we need to come back to. We’ll stop here today because this is going long. If you would like to read this in its entirety, I remind you again to go to the Substack app and look up David Bentley Hart’s site called Leaves in the Wind. I’ll probably pick up some more of this again next week. I’m putting together a new Easter message, so I’ll see you next week. God bless us all, and onward and upward! Please contribute what you can to spreading this Gnostic Gospel message. Speak to your friends, forward posts, buy the books, donate as God leads. Thank you! Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

“Elohim” is a Hebrew word that is commonly used in the Bible to refer to God. It is a plural form of the word “Eloah,” which means “god” or “deity.” Despite its plural form, “Elohim” is often used with singular verbs and adjectives when referring to the God of Israel, indicating a singular divine being. The term emphasizes God’s majesty, power, and sovereignty. In the context of the Hebrew Bible, “Elohim” is used in various passages to denote God’s role as the creator and ruler of the universe.” (GBT 4.o) “In some Gnostic and mystical traditions, the term “Elohim” can be associated with a variety of divine beings or emanations, including aeons. Aeons are often considered to be divine entities or aspects of the divine that represent different attributes or aspects of God in Gnostic cosmology. In this context, “Elohim” may be used to refer to a group of these divine beings rather than the singular God of traditional Judaism and Christianity. However, in the traditional Hebrew Bible context, “Elohim” primarily refers to the singular God of Israel and does not typically encompass the concept of aeons. The interpretation of “Elohim” can vary significantly depending on the theological framework and tradition being considered.” (GPT 4.o) This is the story of “mud up, spirit down.” I’ve mentioned before that my gnosis began to blossom about 20 years ago whenever I’d be walking in the woods or standing by the river with the dogs. The phrase mud up, spirit down would come to mind. That’s it. I pondered the phrase mud up, spirit down for a few years, but I didn’t worry about it. I usually trust my subconscious to work out big ideas for me while I am busy with other things. I used to think that the subconscious was just ordinary consciousness that we aren’t paying particular attention to. It’s usually depicted as an iceberg, with our aware consciousness peeking out of the ocean at the top with the majority of the subconscious iceberg below the surface of the water. Now I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. Now I would say that there are different types of subconscious thought that represent the unconscious aspect of the three different aspects of our being. The three aspects of our being, also known as the tripartite nature of humanity, are these: We have the big S Self, which is the spiritual aspect that is always in communion with the Father; then we have our ordinary consciousness that is called the psychical or psychological part; and finally we have the thoughts that arise from the material, physical aspects of our body. These three levels of our nature are able to function independently of each other, and one or the other is in conscious control at any given time. For example, when I’m walking in the woods my physical awareness may be on my feet and immediate surroundings so I can navigate the trail without tripping over things, but my subconscious physical aspect is probably thinking about food or avoiding getting bitten by bugs or scratched by brambles or things of that nature. At the same time, my psychological self may be replaying a recent conversation in my head, or singing a song, or even remembering some incident that provoked an emotional response earlier in the day. And of course the subconscious psychological self has a whole list of things I’m not aware of that it runs through—triggers from family or friends or the media, or constellations of similar incidents from the past that resonate with whatever I’m consciously thinking about, or subconscious emotional reactions to what is going on around me at the moment, and so on. This is the “mind chatter” that continually runs through most people’s heads. And then there is the spiritual Self, which is always in subconscious communion with the Father and the Fullness. At the conscious level, this is the voice that gives good advice and offers commentary on the things being thought about by the material and psychological levels—virtuous suggestions for feeling better or being more loving or helpful. It is the voice of the Holy Spirit that reminds us of scriptural quotes and suggests uplifting hymns to sing. So you see, the unconscious is not simply a single, monolithic unconscious—it has different origins and responds to different prompts. When I am walking in the woods, I am able to hear my spiritual Self loud and clear. Much of the gnosis I share with you here at Gnostic Insights has come from walks in the woods. The other time my spiritual Self speaks loudly is when I am writing articles such as this one. These gnostic insights are not coming from my material or psychical aspects, but from the Holy Spirit flowing through my spiritual Self. I notice that my spiritual Self’s voice is a different and more reasonable voice than my ordinary consciousness and qualitatively different than my egoic, psychical talking voice. In Gnosticism we say we come into this world with all of this spiritual knowledge inside of us because we’re fractals of the Father. We are born with the Fullness of God in every one of our cells. From the egg on up, we are full and complete fractals of the Father, which religious people misunderstand us as claiming to say, “I am God,” as if that’s a big heresy. Well, it is not truly heresy because we are not saying that we are God; it says so in Psalm 82:6 and again by Jesus in the New Testament when he makes reference to Psalm 82:6. Let’s look at Psalm 82. It’s very relevant to these times we are living in because it speaks of a wicked ruling class that mistreats the common people. Pay particular note to the word elohim. The Hebrew word elohim is plural, and is usually translated as either multiple gods or as a single God with a capital G. It is noteworthy that the word elohim can also be translated as Aeons—which we Gnostics know to be the self-aware Totalities of the Fullness of God and co-existent with the Son of God. Here is how Psalm 82 reads out of the Complete Jewish Bible translation: 82 A psalm of Asaf: (1) Elohim [God] stands in the divine assembly;there with the elohim [judges], he judges:2 “How long will you go on judging unfairly,favoring the wicked? (Selah)3 Give justice to the weak and fatherless!Uphold the rights of the wretched and poor!4 Rescue the destitute and needy;deliver them from the power of the wicked!” 5 They don’t know, they don’t understand,they wander about in darkness;meanwhile, all the foundations of the earthare being undermined. 6 “My decree is: ‘You are elohim [gods, judges],sons of the Most High all of you.7 Nevertheless, you will die like mortals;like any prince, you will fall.’” 8 Rise up, Elohim, and judge the earth;for all the nations are yours. Psalm 82 speaks a powerful Gnostic truth. Written by a prophet who was also a poet and musician called Asaph during the time of King David and Solomon, this psalm appears to be written about the Son of the God Above All Gods. Our gnosis tells us that this psalm is not written about the Demiurge because it places Elohim (God) above, among the elohim (the Aeons of the Fullness). In Gnostic cosmology we know this God that stands amid the Aeons is the Son, because the Father is otherwise unapproachable whereas the Son is co-existent with the Aeons of the Fullness. The divine assembly clearly refers to the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God. Listen again: “(1) Elohim [**The Son] stands in the divine assembly [**the Fullness of the Aeons]; there with the elohim [**Aeons], he judges.” After decrying the unfairness of the powerful, wicked elites over the wretched and powerless, he reminds the elite that they, too, are elohim, and sons of the most high, yet they will fall and die like any other mortal. Verse 6 says, 6 “My decree is: ‘You are elohim [gods, judges**Aeons],sons of the Most High all of you.” Asaph then pleads with Elohim [**the Son] to rise up and judge the earth. Moving on to the New Testament, John 10 speaks of an incident where Jesus, here called by his Hebrew name, Yeshua, healed a man who was blind from birth. Jesus healed him on the Sabbath, which the rabbis said was against the law regarding Sabbath. They accuse Yeshua of blasphemy when he claims that he is doing the work of his Father. The Judeans pick up rocks to stone him for “making himself out to be God.” Jesus then quotes Psalm 82 at them and points out that the Torah calls the people being addressed “elohim.”  Here is the entire passage in context, using some Hebrew words rather than the English translation we are accustomed to: Then came Hanukkah in Yerushalayim. It was winter,  and Yeshua was walking around inside the Temple area, in Shlomo’s Colonnade.  So the Judeans surrounded him and said to him, “How much longer are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us publicly!”  Yeshua answered them, “I have already told you, and you don’t trust me. The works I do in my Father’s name testify on my behalf,  but the reason you don’t trust is that you are not included among my sheep.  My sheep listen to my voice, I recognize them, they follow me, and I give them eternal life. They will absolutely never be destroyed, and no one will snatch them from my hands.  My Father, who gave them to me, is greater than all; and no one can snatch them from the Father’s hands.  I and the Father are one.”  Once again the Judeans picked up rocks in order to stone him.  Yeshua answered them, “You have seen me do many good deeds that reflect the Father’s power; for which one of these deeds are you stoning me?”  The Judeans replied, “We are not stoning you for any good deed, but for blasphemy — because you, who are only a man, are making yourself out to be God.” Yeshua answered them, “Isn’t it written in your Torah, ‘I have said, “You people are Elohim’ ”? If he called ‘elohim’ the people to whom the word of Elohim was addressed (and the Tanakh cannot be broken), then are you telling the one whom the Father set apart as holy and sent into the world, ‘You are committing blasphemy,’ just because I said, ‘I am a son of Elohim’? (Complete Jewish Bible, John 10:22-36)            In the verses above, Yeshua (the Hebrew version of the name Jesus), quotes from the Torah and the Tanakh to declare himself Elohim. (Tanakh is a Hebrew acronym that uses the first letter of the three parts of the Jewish Bible, or what Christians call the Old Testament. The Tanakh consists of the Torah (the Law or Writings, or Pentateuch—the 5 books of Moses), the Nevi’im (the Prophets), and the Ketuvim (the Writings-Poetry, Theology, and Drama). Because Jesus said, “I and the Father are One,” the people picked up rocks to stone him for blasphemy. But Jesus reminded them that he was only quoting Psalm 82:6, and that all of the people who were referenced in the psalm were also elohim. And this is an odd thing about Christians and the New Testament. There are many things that managed to slip by the Nicene Council when they were purging the gnosis from scripture. There’s plenty of gnosis still in the New Testament, but Christians kind of skip over that part. The Bible says we are the “sons of Elohim,” usually translated as “children of God.” In the modern vernacular I use in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, we are the fractals of the Spirit of God. We are the fruit of the elohim above, who are themselves the divisions of the Adonai Elohim (Lord of the Fullness and Son of the Father God Above All Gods). So when Jesus said we are elohim, sons of God, he was saying we, too, are the fractal elohim of God. Jesus was not the only son of God. We are all the sons of God, or the children of the Elohim. Because we are the fruit of the Fullness, as was Jesus, we also have its characteristics inside of us but we forget it. In Gnosticism, we say this forgetfulness is brought about by the never-ending war. The never-ending war is not just wars on Earth or disagreements with our friends or our spouses or fights we have. It’s also the never-ending war against death and destruction, because we are melded to this material level, and that matter is controlled by an entity that Gnostics always talk about yet has been entirely cut out of Christianity. That entity is called the Demiurge. And he was actually the creator of the mud. So while the Demiurge is the creator God of the Old Testament, he’s not the ultimate Elohim. The god of the Old Testament is actually—and this is another huge, huge heresy—the ego of the Aeon that fell from heaven. The fallen god of this world is not Satan; it’s Jehovah. The Demiurge contained all of the blueprints for creation. He knew it all. He knew everything because he was the ego of an Eloah–a fractal of the Son. And while the other Aeons, or elohim, were particular monads with singular functions, names, and places, the Aeon named Logos uniquely contained within himself a pleroma of fractals of all of the other Aeons of the Fullness. So when Logos fell, it was his fractal pleroma that broke open and formed the material out of which our cosmos was created. Logos sits at the top of the Fullness, and he contains fractals of all the other Aeons Before the fall of Logos, all was in harmony in the Pleroma of the Hierarchy of the elohim. The Aeons had their self-awareness and identities, but they all were in perfect harmony and only worked according to the Simple Golden Rule. The Fall of Logos is the first act of ego apart from the body of the Fullness. Our Christian tradition retains a faint memory of the original Fall, but we errantly think that it was an Aeon called Lucifer, the Star of Light, who fell. The Simple Golden Rule When Logos fell, his ego forgot about its origins, forgot about the Fullness and the Simple Golden Rule. It didn’t even remember that it was only the ego of an Aeon named Logos. It woke up and thought it was all alone, which it was, because there wasn’t anything other than the ethereal plane until Logos crashed and burned and deserted the newly formed cosmos in favor of returning to the Fullness. So when the ego was estranged from the Self, it believed it was the be all and end all and the egoic personality we call the Demiurge set about putting the fallen mess into order. This is our material universe. He’s the one that put the particles together in the atoms, and the atoms into the molecules, but he can’t get the life into it because he didn’t come down with the life or the love of the Fullness of Elohim. The Aeons took pity upon the Demiurge. They wanted life to come into this dead universe and they wanted the ego of Logos to return home to its proper position and place above. They wanted to reclaim this lifeless universe that had been caused by the Fall. So they breathed life directly into the mud. (The Sethian myth presented in The Apocryphon of John features Sophia as the Aeon rather than Logos.) And that’s how life began. So the life is melded onto the mud, and we have a constant, never-ending war between our life and light and the mud and the Fall of darkness. We 2nd order powers are caught in a never ending war with the deficiency and each other Logos is the only Aeon to have experienced the material world. The other Aeons remain ignorant of the material cosmos because they are established in the spiritual realm and their eyes remain upward toward the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says that the “remembrance” that the Second Order Powers carried with them as they incarnated down into this material cosmos included not only the love of the Father and the ability to cooperate with each other using the Simple Golden Rule of the Elohim, but it also included the intimate knowledge of matter that Logos learned during the brief time he spent down below in the Deficiency. “To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he (Logos) revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention that is should draw them into a communion with the material.” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 98) “Those who belong to the remembrance” refers to us Second Order Powers who dwell here below because we are of the “good thought.” The “thought of which he had stripped himself” is the egoic striving of Logos that brought about the Fall. We all carry the fallen ego of Logos forward through our material aspect. So that’s how that works. This is the story of “mud up, spirit down.” We are the direct offspring of the Aeons of that eternal Fullness of God. The Fullness is not simply a description of God—it is a particular state of the Son of God—it is the elohim of Adonai Elohim. We, too, are elohim of Adonai Elohim. Jesus said so. I made this nice little advertisement in a program called “canva.” It looks spectacular within the canva space, but when I export it the image loses resolution. <sigh> I’ve been praying for a Gnostic Insights or Reformation follower to step forward and make a significant financial contribution to this gnostic ministry. If you are that person, please pay attention to the leading of the Holy Spirit and make a contribution today to help me defray mounting podcast and book-related expenses. Thank you.

I have recently taken down my older “New Gnostic Gospel” blog in favor of focusing on GnosticInsights.com and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Before taking down the old blog I saved this one article that was first printed in June of 2015. I’m going to go through it with you today to see how this gnosis has held up over the past 10 years. The obvious improvement is the quality of my illustrations. I thought it would be a treat for you to see how they have evolved.  This was the original mapping of the new Gnostic Gospel. These concepts have been more colorfully illustrated, although the original mapping still holds up. You may find all of this in its most simple form in my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. For a more detailed explanation, pick up a copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel at amazon. Monday, June 15, 2015 These diagrams are my visual representations of the “Tripartite Tractate.” The Tripartite Tractate is one book of the collection known as the Nag Hammadi scriptures that were discovered buried in the Egyptian desert in 1945. The Nag Hammadi texts were buried sometime in the 3rd century by monks who sought to preserve and protect them from those who wanted to weed them out as heresies as they designed the official shape of the Christian religion.  After studying the Tripartite Tractate, I can see why the early Pope did not want this to make it into the Bible.  For one thing, the Christ figure, the “Son of God,” is not all perfect and all powerful, as portrayed in the Christian Bible; matter of fact, Logos is directly implicated in the Fall. For another thing, salvation is a personal, mystical affair conferred directly by the Father through Logos, not something conferred by preaching or baptism. Thirdly, the cosmology presented here makes clear that those who, shall we say, struggle for righteousness against a sinful world are not necessarily doing God’s work, but are caught in an endless war against the “evil doers,” and have themselves fallen into some sort of earthly death trap.  Okay. Let’s quickly amend that first concept about the Son of God. The Christian religion has lumped three distinct characters together into one Son of God. In the Gnostic Gospel, these three are broken out by their sequential appearance in the rollout of the Gnostic cosmogeny. 1: The Son of God is indeed the all-perfect “only begotten Son” of the Father’s originating consciousness. Because of His perfection and proximity to the Father, the Son is the only entity that can link directly up with the Source without the risk of annihilation. The Son is the bucket dipped into the Sea, reflecting every characteristic of the originating Father. All subsequent entities, life, consciousness, laws and power come through the Son.  2: Logos is not the Son after all. My confusion arose from John 1:1-5 where it states, “in the beginning was the Logos [Word], and Logos was with God, and Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” The church teaches this passage as describing the Son.  Upon further reflection, the Aeon we call Logos fulfills the description in John 1, once we consider the earlier Gnostic cosmogeny—Logos, one of the Aeons of the Fullness—was with God prior to the Fall. After the Fall and the abandonment of the Demiurge, life, light, and consciousness was sent down into the otherwise dead material universe in the form of all of us 2nd Order Powers. We are the fruit of Logos. 3: The Christ is the 3rd Order of Powers, formed through the united prayer of the Fullness and the Son, with the approval of the Father. The Christ contains all of the power and majesty of the Son. The Christ presents Himself as the Redeemer of every 2nd Order Power to bring us back home to the ethereal plane after our sojourn here in the material cosmos.Back to the 2015 article:  As I said, the complete article is underway. Meanwhile, for those of you who want to get started, here it is in picture form. Gnostic Cosmology according to the Tripartite Tractate, by Cyd Ropp, Ph.D. 2015 On the big poster above, start at the upper left corner and read clockwise. Our earthly situation is portrayed in the middle of the diagram. Salvation and the end of the world comes in the form of the pyramid at the lower left. Below are various sections of the diagram presented on their own. If you have already been studying Gnostic cosmology, these diagrams will clarify various terms and activities. If you haven’t already been studying this, then these diagrams will be super confusing so don’t worry about it. All will be revealed in good time.  In terms of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, [which my readers in 2015 were all familiar with] this cosmology begins prior to “in the beginning…” and proceeds through the formation of Units of Consciousness and the appearance of our physical universe, and concludes with the final collapse of the universe.  It also takes place during the life cycle of each and every Unit of Consciousness, as it is a Fractal Pattern that repeats itself over and over again. Those of you who have read A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything will recognize the role of the hierarchical distribution and the role of toroidal flow in the final reorganization of creation.  [updated edition of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything is available through amazon] The Son emerges from the Father The First Glory, The Son of the Father. First differentiation after the Undifferentiated Unity of the Metaversal Father. The Second Glory. The Son has realized it is comprised of many traits of the Father. These traits are called “aeons” in Gnostic terminology. When they’re all grouped together they are called the Fullness, or the All. Many differentiations but total harmony. Once these traits are named, they fall out of undifferentiated harmony and rearrange themselves into the pyramidal hierarchy depicted below. The Fruit of the Third Glory is the offspring of the All in a perfectly arranged hierarchy. This stage in creation is known as the First Order of Powers. Everyone and everything knows its place and is happy.  The final Aeon to arrive at the top of the pyramid, known in the Tripartite Tractate as “Presumptuous Thought,” looks down at the hierarchy and sees them all arranged underneath him. This gives that Aeon the idea that he is in charge of the pyramid. He reaches upward to reinsert the pyramid into the Metaverse. This is done without authorization or position. This results in The Fall.   Update: Now, that’s a surprise. I originally identified Logos as “presumptuous thought.” That thought is more specifically the Ego of Logos. The Self of Logos continues to reflect the entirety of the Fullness as a complete, fractal Pleroma. And it looks as though this diagram shows the entire Fullness Falling, but it is only the fractal Pleroma of Logos that Falls. The original Fullness is untouched by the Fall. They remain behind and pray for their fellow Aeon Logos to return safely. The Fall tumbles the pyramid of Aeons out of arrangement. They Fall into confusion, Chaos. They are dispersed and alone for the first time, cut off from each other and the All. This is now called the Deficiency, and t he Imitation. Logos panics and abandons the Imitation and retreats back to the All. God the Father also retreats in horror from the Deficiency, which throws up a Boundary containing the Imitation. Logos and the All try to rescue their abandoned children by praying for them and thus giving them the Remembrance of Who and What they used to be, before the Fall.   Update:  when Logos and the All pray for the rescue of the Deficiency, that is when the 2nd Orderof Powers is fruited down here below. We are those of the Remembrance. The prayers of Logos and the All results in the Second Order of Powers. There are now two types of creatures: those of the Deficiency who have no belief in who or what came before, and those of the Remembrance, who have come to themselves through “Repentance” and “Conversion” and recall their fellow Aeons and their place with the Father in the Fullness. Rather than rejoining Logos and the All, those of the Remembrance choose to do battle with those of the Imitation. They are locked in an endless righteous War where no one can win.   Update: this part of the cosmogeny has taken a few years of discussion with my brother to mine our gnosis. Those of the imitation are not to be referred to as “creatures” because they were not created as 2nd Order Powers. Only the 2nd Order are living creatures. Those of the imitation are archons generated by the Demiurge. They are shadows. They are not living.  Release from the Endless War comes by intervention of the Father and the Fullness working together. They produce the Living Image of the All and the Father–the Christ. The Christ places himself upon the Lost like a garment that restores perfection and fills the Lost with inexpressible Joy, giving them the Logos that enables them to detach and dispel delusion. This results in the Third Order of Powers–the Aeons of the Images–that now carry within themselves the Seed of the Word. The final Order of Creation is called The Economy and The Consolidation. All three types of creatures are represented: those of the imitation, those of the remembrance, and those who have been redeemed by Christ. This drawing is a pyramidal shaped “core sample” of creation. The small figure at the lower right is a cutaway view of creation, with the center of the donut mapping to the top of the pyramid. Update: Those of the imitation are not Second Order Powers; they are archons of the Demiurge. At this point, when all Second Orders are redeemed through the Power of the Christ, only the imitations of the deficiency are left out of the new Economy. The New Economy consists of everything that existed from the beginning, prior to the material cosmos, plus us Second Order Powers. The Demiurge is also redeemed at this point and Logos is reunited with his wandering Ego. This brings the Fullness to completion. Posted by cyd at 1:11 PM    Labels: aeons, Cyd Ropp, First Glory, Gnostic cosmology, Gnostic Gospels, Logos, Nag Hammadi, pleroma, Second Glory, The All, The Economy, Third Glory, Tripartite Tractate How neat! The original article was posted at 1:11 PM—one of my favorite times of day! The Labels links are to vestigal articles posted over at the original Simple Explanation Blog. Below is the Gnostic Gospel Cosmology map as it now appears in A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel: Gnostic Cosmogeny from the Father to the Cosmos and back again The children’s Gnostic Gospel book is slowly but surely coming along. The illustrator has completed the first 10 pages, so we’re about 1/3 of the way through the book. Your contribution to this effort would help immensely. You can be a part of this newest book by submitting a contribution earmarked for the illustrator’s fee. Here’s what the Fall looks like: p. 7 “But when Logos tried to bring the Father his gift, he fell all the way out of Heaven!” p. 8 “Logos crashed into the darkness and broke apart. Now he was split in two!” Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week’s episode is an unusual treat for you. It’s not particularly “gnostic” if you only peg gnosticism onto ancient manuscripts. But if you realize that understanding the nature of space and time is itself gnosis, then you will understand why this week’s episode is important. So, put on your thinking cap and open up your mind because we’re going to look at some interesting facets of quantum mechanics and how, exactly, it relates to consciousness and free will. It’s a short episode–you have time to listen to it twice if needed. Here goes… My brother, Bill, and I love to ponder the nature of time, space, and reality. This week we discussed an article printed in The Essential List newsletter put out by the BBC called “The bizarre quantum paradox of ‘negative time‘. We recognized that the theory called “block universe” described in the article is exactly what I have been calling the Cherry-Jello-universe. I’ve written about this block universe in two previous articles and one podcast episode. Here’s the original blog post: A Simple Explanation of Consciousness and Time: Our Cherry-Jello Universe It’s been a very long time since I developed any new concepts to add to A Simple Explanation, spending the past couple of years concentrating instead on the Gnostic Gospel. So my longtime readers may be very happy to see this new posting featuring the torus, consciousness, and Jello? Yesterday my brother and I were musing over the nature of time–what is it exactly? It isn’t a thing, it is nowhere to be located. Is it therefore a force? This was my response. I have long thought of the universe in this fashion, but I had never written it down or even shared it with my brother until after our phone call. He flipped out over it. Let’s see what you think… A Giant Bowl of Jello Here is how I picture time, space, and consciousness — We live in a Jello universe–a gigantic, torus-shaped, bowl of gelatin, studded with an infinite number of cherries. The Jello is the matrix that holds everything that ever was or will be. It is the ground state. The cherries are every thing that ever were or will be–all potential events, all potential objects. An infinite array of cherries already laid out as unrealized potential. Consciousness is each spark of life/consciousness making its free will way through this vast ocean of Jello. Time can only be apprehended through consciousness; time is nowhere to be found if there is no observer. The cherries are the full panoply of choices we could make along the way. Our free will chooses to swim this way and that as it moves toward the next cherry of choice. This free will is swimming from the middle of the torus in the direction of the outside boundary of the giant torus. All of these cherries are being held within the shape of the torus—the doughy part of the donut. Every lifetime is the trace of the worm-like path our consciousness chooses as it travels through the universe of cherries. In a real sense, the entirety of all of our lives is already conceived in potential. It is our self-awareness and free will that plod along at the speed of matter as we live our lives out as a linearity of passing time. My brother, the professor of Philosophy, notes that this way of looking at time and consciousness may have just solved one of the longstanding conundrums of philosophy. That is, how can we reconcile the concept of an all-knowing God if we subjects have free will? The answer presented by this model is that the all-knowing God has pre-placed all possible choices before us, but it is our individual free will that plots the course through these choices. This combination of potential versus choice reflects our free will. That’s it. Of course, the Jello salad pictured above is not to scale. The gelatin donut would be infinitely large, and the cherries very very small–probably zero-point fields. I asked the Copilot AI to illustrate a torus with a tiny center hole studded with small red dots throughout. It couldn’t make the small hole torus, and the dots are outside rather than inside, but it’s a start. Imagine these choice-cherries distributed throughout the interior of the torus. Here are the new thoughts prompted by the article in The Essential List newsletter put out by the BBC called “The bizarre quantum paradox of ‘negative time‘. According to the article, Emily Adlam of Chapman University says: “retrocausality is a hypothetical (and philosophically controversial) model of existence, where all moments in time–past, present, and future–exist in a four-dimensional object. “If this block is filled with every event that ever has or will happen, then it’s easier to see how some hypothetical influence could pass between particles within it, says Adlam. To explain the spooky actions of entangled particles, information would not need to travel backward on some alternative retrocausal timeline. ‘There’s no temporal flow,’ she says. ‘Time is just another dimension within the block, rather than being a material thing that moves.’ “If that is the case, we have arrived at what may be the most troubling implication of all about quantum mechanics and its weird temporal behaviour.” What is this most troubling implication? The article comes to the conclusion that the block universe implies that we have no free will because, while we experience time as linear, all possible decisions have already been recorded in the block universe. Well, yours truly here and brother Bill disagree with that conclusion because it leaps to an unwarranted conclusion that the decisions within the block have already been written and we have no free will. In my Jello universe hypothesis, while the block may be studded with all potential occurrences, the path traced between collapsed potential is not written until conscious observance passes through it. You see, in the quantum universe, everything exists as potential until it is observed. It is the observation that collapses its state of existence from limitless potential to a singularity. Hence the ever-popular quantum fable of Schrodinger’s cat. The fable instructs us to imagine that there is a cat inside of a box. The cat may be either dead or alive and we cannot determine whether or not it is dead or alive until we lift the lid and peek inside the box. Until we peek inside, the cat is both dead and alive, but once it is observed as one or the other it will never revert back to the undetermined state of both dead and alive–it will only be dead or alive. We hypothesize that until consciousness traces a path through the block of Jello, all potential choices remain uncollapsed. But, once we have made a choice to go this way or that, our consciousness collapses those chosen potentials and leaves a trace of our passing. We could liken it to driving across a country where there are many roads to choose from but we choose this highway or that back road as our route. The unchosen roads remain, but we have taken one particular route to reach our destination. Through free will we chose that route. There is no logical reason to assume that our choice of route proves determinism rather than free will. Yes, you may say, but it can only be God that mapped the potential roads, God that made the Jello and studded it with cherries, therefore God has determined the route you will take. No, that is not the case. The God Above All Gods (as we affectionately call it in Gnostic philosophy) is illimitable and infinite. Therefore it has plenty of “room” to imagine the block of all possibilities–all possible worlds. That does not at all imply that the route from here to there through those possibilities is predetermined by God. Nor does it imply that we construct reality from nothing. We don’t make up reality because it was always there in potential within the block universe of God’s imagination. What we do, is make our way through this universe of choices, one choice at a time, collapsing potential into history as we pass by. In Gnostic theology, the Tripartite Tractate states that the Father wanted all of his emanations to be self-aware and to exhibit free will. It was free will that caused the Fall. How would the Fall have occurred if Logos did not have free will? “For this aeon was one of those who had been given wisdom, with ideas first existing independently in his mind so as to be brought forth when he wanted it. Because of that, he had received a natural wisdom enabling him to inquire into the hidden order, being a fruit of wisdom. Thus, the free will with which the members of the All had been born caused this one to do what he wanted, with no one holding him back.” (Tripartite Tractate, verses 75-76) And as far as quantum entanglement goes, and spooky action at a distance, there is no distance at all because all potential exists in state within the consciousness of the Father. The block is completely entangled because it exists within the mind of God. The spooky action at a distance is only an appearance of distance but is actually held continually within the block as potential awaiting our observation to collapse it. Now, here is the Gnostic Gospel explanation of this jello universe, reprinted from a 9-23-2023 Gnostic Insights episode called “Free will, what is it? Do you have it?” : There’s a famous and long-standing conundrum in philosophy that says, how can we reconcile the concept of an all knowing God, if we subjects have free will? How is it that our actions aren’t controlled by destiny if God already knows what’s going to happen? Well, the way I answer that is that the All- knowing God Above All Gods has pre placed all possible choices in front of us. It’s like that multiverse theory in quantum mechanics. He has placed all possible choices before us, but it’s our individual free will that navigates the course between all of these choices. I’ve made the analogy that it’s like a gigantic bowl of jello. This universe of ours with all possibilities in that bowl of jello and that bowl of jello is studded with an infinite number of cherries, and in our lifetime we swim from cherry to cherry to cherry. Those cherries represent choices. I think that time is an illusion. The universe is static, but infinitely large, studded with all of these cherries. Time is our awareness of swimming from one choice using our own free will to the next choice, using our own free will. So in a real sense, the entirety of our lives is already conceived in the Fullness of God. It’s our self-awareness and free will that plod along at the speed of matter as we live our lives out as a linearity, a line of passing time. That’s my theory. At the universal level, the infinity of the Fullness of God is represented by the potential of all possible choices a person could make as their life passes from one decision to the next. The fullness of all possible futures are represented within the universe. Free will is driving our consciousness through these potentialities and leaving behind the collapsed potential of history. So it’s open in front of us, but behind us it’s collapsed because we made those choices. So the line from one cherry to the next was already drawn. But in front of us, all that infinity of choices is available to us.  (In my brother’s past life therapy, the client actually goes backward down the history trail and chooses a different cherry then turns around and goes forward from there.) Of course, where we have found ourselves in the bowl of jello determines what our possible choices are in the next choice. We can’t jump from this cherry all the way across the universe to another cherry. We are pretty well confined to the here and now of our immediate surroundings, which we have come to through our free will. But you always have the choice to repent from that line you’ve been drawing and deviate your course to go upward and onward in the direction of the glory of the God Above All Gods. And that is what we call redemption. Repentance and redemption. It’s the Christ’s job to strew those glorifying cherries all in front of us and make sure we always have a choice to choose a righteous cherry. Please leave a review on amazon.com for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. Don’t think you have to understand it all first–if that were the case, I’d never get any reviews!! It’s common to understand this gnosis in small drips and drabs. Thanks!

Gnosis means knowing, and to be a gnostic means that you are one who knows. The gnosis we are mining here at Gnostic Insights is taken from an ancient scripture, the Tripartite Tractate, out of the Nag Hammadi codices, but even more than that, I’m deriving a lot of this information through contemplation and direct communication with the Father and the Fullness of God, and that is something that every person can do. We are all given the ability to commune directly with the Father and with the Fullness above. As a Gnostic Christian, I find that these insights give a deeper understanding of our New Testament in the Holy Bible, because much of this information was stripped out of the Holy Bible by the Nicene Council around 360 A.D. under the direction of Pope Clement and Emperor Constantine. Those of us who are not Catholics are no longer subject to the Pope, and none of us are subject to the Emperor of Rome. Therefore, it seems to me that those of us who love the Father should have the freedom of mind and the freedom of personal will to decide for ourselves which scriptures are holy, and this you must arrive at through discernment and the Holy Spirit’s leading. If you have not developed the ability of discernment, then you can easily be led astray, and there is a lot of information out there on the internet that can lead you astray. For over 10 years now I have written a blog called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.  The Simple Explanation presents a secular theory of how the universe goes together. In A Simple Explanation there are concepts such as fractals and the Simple Golden Rule that I have been explaining here as we go along, because they help to illuminate this Gnostic Gospel. Thus far, we have explained the origins of the ethereal universe, beginning with the Father of consciousness and proceeding on through the Christ. We need to understand this entire run of the gnostic cosmology in order to understand the nature of human beings because, in Simple Explanation terms, we humans are fractal representations of the entirety of creation. This is the meaning of that expression, “As above, so below.” The tree is a common symbol for this concept. So, as a tree is represented as the branches above ground, there is a reciprocal set of branches below ground, and those are called roots. The same is true with us humans and all other Second Order Powers; we share the same values and structure of the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. Their nature is the same as our nature because we are their fruits. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. My Self’s unit of consciousness is sitting on top of a fractal galaxy of hierarchically arranged units of consciousness, all working together to instantiate my body. While I may believe I am the only conscious soul inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, and each unit of consciousness has their own job to perform, each lives their own life, and they all lay down their own karmic record. And this holds true even when the fractal is no more than a cell or an organ. Within my body, countless units of consciousness of varying levels of complexity work together to keep my body alive and fully functional. Our bodies hold countless units of consciousness, all working together according to the Simple Golden Rule Whereas my Self unit of consciousness may appear a very long way off from the Father and the Pleroma, especially if I conceive of them outside of our very large universe, if instead I turn inward, I am as near to God as the center of all of my units of consciousness. This is a different way of interpreting the practices of centering. When ancient texts speak of God residing in the hearts of man, I look at that shared zero point field that is at the center of our fractal units of consciousness. Fractals are defined as fragmented geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each of which, at least approximately, is a reduced-size copy of the whole. That’s a property called self-similarity because they appear similar at all levels of magnification. Fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex. What this means is that fractal iterations can extend infinitely. The simplest way to think about it in my mind is with broccoli. And if you go to my Simple Explanation blog, December 11th, 2018, there is an article called “A Simple Explanation of Fractals, the Broccoli Fractal Video Demonstration.” In that video, which is posted on my blog and YouTube channel, I demonstrate fractals using an ordinary head of broccoli. Like a head of broccoli, a fractal is a larger thing that can be reduced repeatedly, and each of those reductions looks just like the piece you started out with, only smaller. And you can just keep splitting it off, smaller and smaller and smaller. Now, if this were a purely mathematical fractal rather than a physical one, you could go down or up through those fractal splits infinitely. Looking at the tree again as a metaphor, we can see how the branches of trees repeat their fractal branching pattern over and over again as the branches or roots proceed further out from the originating tree trunk. Fractals occur in many forms in nature I am suggesting that consciousness itself is fractal and the largest consciousness is the Father. The Father had a thought and it became the Son, and that Son was the first fractal iteration of consciousness. The Son had a thought and it became the ALL, and that is the next fractal iteration. And then the ALL became self-aware and turned into the Aeons of the Fullness of God. These Aeons of the Fullness sorted themselves into a hierarchy, giving themselves names, positions, places, powers, and duties, and we call this sorted Fullness the Hierarchy of the Fullness or the Pleroma of God. The Aeons are fractals of the Son of God, and the Son is a singular expression that completely encapsulates the Father. The Father is unknowable because the Father is pure consciousness. The Father is illimitable—without limits, not confined to a shape or a place. The Father is not walking around in robes with a long white beard. That is not the Father of the ALL. When Jesus said, “I and my Father are One; if you know Me, you know my Father,” he is not referring to the personified God known as Yaweh or Jehovah that walked through the Old Testament. That fellow’s name in Gnosticism is called the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the fallen Ego of the Aeon named Logos. It was this egoic part of Logos that overreached and fell, resulting in this material plane. It is the Demiurge who created the heavens and the earth; he is the chief Archon of the cosmos. But, he is most assuredly not the Father of the ALL, the Aeons, and the Christ. In Simple Explanation terms, the enclosure of our material universe is a very large toroidal pattern at the outside edge of creation. I have identified that with the border that is spoken of in the Tripartite Tractate.  It is said that after Logos fell, he remembered the Aeons and the Father and his “better part” quickly returned back to the Fullness. The Father drew a boundary around what was left behind of the broken Logos down below, and that boundary encloses our material universe. We humans are a particular fractal emanation of the Pleroma of the newly restored Logos; we are Second Order Powers fruited down here to work within the material boundary. Yet we are patterned directly from the consciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Pleroma. The torus is a mathematical shape. It forms the basis of our material universe, from the very large universal level down through the smallest particle. Because we are fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness, the rules and the descriptions of Aeonic life apply to humans equally as well. This is again another example of “as above, so below.” So when we hear or read about the nature of the Aeons, or the things that happen to the Aeons such as the fall and redemption of Logos, this happens to each and every one of us as well. Logos fell because he forgot his place and proper function in the Fullness. When Logos fled home to the ethereal Pleroma, Logos left behind darkness and shadows.  The deficiency he left behind arose from his Ego’s presumptuous thought and overreaching, because that’s what Logos was doing as he fell.  When Logos fell, he left the Fullness; he was no longer in perfect harmony with the other Aeons of the Fullness. Logos went out there on his own with his own project, and that was the first example of Ego. And it was the Ego that caused the fall. And because of his presumptuous thought and his overreaching, now every one of the fractals that he gave rise to down below are the shadows and phantoms of the fall. They all overreach. They are all built on Ego. Therefore, the imitation is characterized by this presumptuous thought and overreaching, combined with the inverted traits of Logos. Previously, on the Gnostic Insights podcast, we have discussed the values on the left or the material values of the imitation, and these are in direct opposition to the traits of the Fullness. They are the other side of a dialectic to the values of the Father, those values on the right, which are the spiritual emanations of the ethereal plane. Those are the dialectics of vice and virtue. Here is what I call the ledger of vice and virtue: The values of the Demiurge lead to isolation and despair. The values of the Fullness lead to peace and joy. We Second Order Powers bear the likeness of the First Order of Powers, which are the Aeons of the Fullness. We are also called “those of the remembrance,” because we were implanted with a dim memory of the Father and the Son and a longing to rejoin the Aeons in the Hierarchy and their dream of Paradise. We are considered superior to those of the imitation because we come from the noble thought rather than the presumptuous thought. We are true fractals of the entirety of the Pleroma, whereas the phantoms of the deficiency are shadows of the fractals of the broken Pleroma of the singular Logos. They are smaller and of a lesser order. They are not fractals of the Aeons, they are imitations of fractals of the Aeons. The hierarchy of the Fullness of God sits as One and dreams of Paradise. At this point in the story, we can begin to see human nature emerging because, well, this has been told as a creation story. It’s also the story of every human being. We humans are fractal iterations of the Aeons of the Fullness. We are their fruit. We have dim memories of a perfect Paradise, as dreamt by the Fullness. We have a built-in longing for Fullness. We barely remember the Son and the Father, other than an expectation of feeling loved or that we should be loved, and we are locked into an endless war with the dark side of our natures and with other people who stand in our way. Those of the imitation defend and embrace the darkness of the deficiency, while those of the remembrance do their best to overcome their darker nature and follow the light. Those of the remembrance may or may not be religious folks, but they do all seek a higher consciousness. Religious folks call this higher consciousness “God” and the memory of the Fullness “Heaven.” Those of the remembrance who are not part of a religious body or the meme bundle of religion, are still spiritual because they do seek reunification with the One, while rejecting the man-made institutions of religion. Others, who hear the still small voice of God but can’t quite bring themselves to believe in “fairy tales,” are seekers that wind up exploring podcasts like this as they search for something to believe in. At some point during everyone’s life, each person decides for themselves whether to continue trusting their own presumptuous Ego or whether to heed the call from above. At this point, I think I should explain a little better what a meme is as I use the term, so I’m going to read a couple of pages out of my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The importance of memes is that a huge part of our personality is shaped by the memes we collect and hold onto. The otherwise pristine nature of our underlying fractal unit of consciousness is affected by the memes we hold dear, as well as the memes we despise. We enjoy memes we approve of and we are repelled by memes we disapprove of. The Sanskrit word for these provocative memes is samskara. Samskara is traditionally defined in Yogic philosophy as the habitual thought patterns collected by the Ego that interfere with soul consciousness. The memes each of us cling to, both those that we like and those that we actively dislike, influence our ability to exercise free will in the here and now when we unthinkingly lock onto a meme or set of memes. It is our belief in those memes that determines how we interpret and respond to our surroundings. Our response may or may not be the best response to a given situation, but it is the only response allowed for by our particular bundle. In other words, our meme bundles function as incoming and outgoing filters. The memes we cling to drape over the outside of our Self, obscuring the thoughts we are able to perceive. We like people who share the same memes as we do. The more memes people have in common, the more they agree with each other and the more they like and respect the other person. Friends have a lot of memes in common. Co-religionists share the same religious meme cords. Tribal brothers and sisters share tribal memes, Democrats share liberal memes, Republicans share conservative memes, and Progressives share socialist memes. All subcultures share their subculture’s memes. Some types of memes are more important than other types, and it’s the important memes that matter the most. If we agree on the meaning of the word justice, we can probably overlook disagreement over the meme of whether the toilet paper should go over or under the roll. We each carry our own bundle of memes. These are the things we believe in, both for good or ill and, depending on what we believe in, this limits our ability to think and arrive at gnosis. So, if your meme bundle contains many values on the left—materialistic values like live fast and die young and leave a beautiful corpse–that’s a meme bundle from the deficiency that encourages fast and reckless living and leads to misery. Contrast this with living a life that is on the Aeonic, virtuous side that embraces the memes of the Fullness of God. These virtues and these vices are each important spiritual memes. When we speak of the never-ending war within our personalities and against the imitations of the deficiency, these are wars embracing the values of the Fullness as opposed to the values of popular culture. Our meme bundles form a shroud that surrounds our Self. The memes continually influence what we perceive and how we behave. Our behavior forms its own record that continues to influence our meme shroud. This is karma. We cannot fake the meme bundles we hold because they affect our lives and every choice we make. Pretending may fool others but it does not fool the Father. Our hearts need to be in authentic alignment with the Father and the Fullness in order for the love and gnosis of the Father to flow through us, and that’s why true repentance is necessary. We need to embrace the values of virtue—the meme bundle that flows from the Fullness of God. Embracing the meme bundle of popular culture gets us into trouble and holds us away from instantiating our true Self. Fortunately, the Christ imbues us with more power than the deficiency can wield against us, and it gives us the ability to overcome the imitation’s memes. So goes the never-ending war. Repentance involves pushing away the deficiency’s memes. Repentance means you no longer try to get away with whatever you can get away with. Repentance means I don’t want to do that anymore. Redemption means dwelling on the right side of the virtue and vice ledger and, again, this isn’t to take away our fun. It’s because joy is only found on the virtuous side of the ledger. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. Therefore, in order to be truly happy, joyful, we shed the Demiurgic memes. This turning gives the Spirit of the Christ permission to redeem us. Then we are able to embrace the Father and the Fullness. The gnostic call for redemption goes like this: because the Second Order  Powers have gotten all gummed up chasing after the archons and each other in endless war, another fruit was required to bring peace to this universe. The Fullness and Logos prayed to the Father, individually and collectively, for a champion to end the war, and this champion is called the Christ. Here’s how the Tripartite Tractate puts it: “The Aeons not only produced a singular fruit reflecting the Father, but that fruit also reflected their own individual countenances and aspects from their positions in the Hierarchy of the Fullness. 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.” In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is the correcting algorithm for Second Order fractals that no longer ring true. The Christ replicates all of the qualities of the ALL, that is, the full attributes of the originating consciousness in their pure form that existed prior to the Fall, with all of the confounding memes stripped away. We recognize the Christ when we encounter it, because it “went forth in many forms” that look just like us, so that, when we pray for help, we recognize the One to whom we pray. When we accept the gift of the Christ, we invite a correction to our Ego’s deluded meme bundle, so that the best functioning of the universal unit of consciousness may be re-established within us. The Christ also provides a homing beacon to the Son via a rooted love connection that flows into us from the ethereal plane. Simply put, gnosis is the realization that we come from above and that our Father is in Heaven and to Heaven we shall return. That’s all. Gnosis requires us to step down from the throne of Ego and the meme shroud of the imitation that we cling to and are trapped in to better reveal the light of God that shines from within. That’s all. You cannot be taught gnosis. You must discover it for yourself. What we’re doing here at Gnostic Insights is opening your mind so that you remember the gnosis that already lies within your One Self. You do not need to memorize this gnostic cosmology or the names of various characters we discuss here. You don’t need to punish yourself with sacrificial acts to achieve righteousness. You need only to remember and acknowledge the inherent, immortal consciousness that flows from the Father. The ancient Chinese book called the Tao Te Ching describes it this way in verse 27: The Sage is always on the side of virtue             So everyone around him prospers He is always on the side of truth             So everything around him is fulfilled The path of the Sage is called             “The Path of Illumination” He who gives himself to this path             Is like a block of wood             That gives itself to the chisel— Cut by cut it is honed to perfection Only a student who gives himself             Can receive the master’s gift If you think otherwise,             Despite your knowledge, you have blundered Giving and receiving are one             This is called             “The great wonder”             “The essential mystery”             “The very heart of all that is true”                                                 [Jonathan Star translation; 2001] Here at the Gnostic Insights Podcast, I am not attempting to teach you gnosis, I am merely sharing the gnosis that I have discovered within myself. You have this gnosis within yourself, and if you resonate to what I am saying, this is merely you remembering gnosis. You have the entirety of the Fullness of God already within your Self, along with a remembrance of who you are and where you come from. Embrace virtue.    Onward and upward. I’ll see you next time, God bless. The ebook giveaway last week was a big success. The book is now in many more people’s hands. Don’t forget to leave a review! If you appreciate these gnostic insights, please consider donating to the cause of bringing gnosis to our neighbors. Your donation is much appreciated. Thanks! Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

We’re talking this week about what I call units of consciousness. Consciousness is a big topic. Let’s start by thinking of our own consciousness. In Gnosticism we say that there are three different orientations to self-awareness. This is generally called three types of people: the spiritual, the psychological (called psychical), and the material type that is oriented toward their body’s level of awareness (called hylic). Most people’s self-awareness arises from their psychological level of functioning—their ego. Spiritual types add the voice of the spiritual level to their self-awareness. Here at Gnostic Insights we call this spiritual aspect their Self (with a capital S). The physical or material type of person focuses on their body and its needs and abilities. When their body performs well, or their body’s needs are satiated, their ego is pleased. They may or may not ever dip a toe into the spiritual level of self-awareness until they inevitably face the afterlife. Now the interesting thing about what I call units of consciousness is that every living thing in our universe carries a piece of the originating consciousness of the Father. The term unit of consciousness applies equally well to any size creature, from the smallest bacteria or cell on up through the largest of the Second Order Powers. On the other hand you have the mud—that being the smallest subatomic particles, protons and whatnot, on up through the atoms, molecules, and elements—which are unconscious and operated by the Demiurge. That mud level of nonliving material arises from the deficient pleroma of the Demiurge. The egoic consciousness of the Demiurge is disconnected from its higher Self—the Aeon Logos—and so it has forgotten the love and memory of the Father and the ethereal plane because those spiritual aspects are part of the One Self and not the ego. After the fall of Logos, the Demiurge was aware of only the egoic portion of Logos and the shadows of the Pleroma of Logos that became the hylic material of this fallen cosmos. We 2nd Order Powers are melded to the demiurgic material below us and are infused with life from above Every nonliving thing in our universe belongs to the demiurgic consciousness, whereas every living thing is a true, self-aware unit of consciousness that flows unimpeded through the Son, through the Fullness, and on into all living creatures as the Self. When I first came up with this idea of units of consciousness in A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I thought that if every manifest object in our universe is a piece of the mind of the Father then it has to be a piece of consciousness, yet there was always a schism between the living and the non-living creation. But with the hindsight of Gnostic realization I now see that the nonliving “mud” is without consciousness and is ruled by the strong bonds of the Demiurge, whereas the living “meat” of our universe embodies the top-down consciousness of the originating Source—the Father. The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will. The Father’s source consciousness is illimitable, undifferentiated consciousness without particular thought. Once the Father had a thought, that is referred to as the Son, S-O-N. The Son contains all of the Father’s qualities, like a bucket dipped into the sea of consciousness. And the Son is an encapsulation of the Father, with all of the traits of the Father, except now in a particular place, so to speak—a unit of consciousness. The Son is what is called a monad with a unique and particular point of view. So the Son is the first unit of consciousness. And then, according to our Gnostic studies, the Son immediately differentiated into the ALL and the Fullness of God, which is all of the traits of the Son of God broken down into their individual variables. And since the Son of God is an infinite, omnipotent force of thought, there are an infinite number of Fullnesses. And these Fullnesses (or Totalities as they’re called in some translations) come to Self awareness through giving glory to the Father. When they become Self-aware, they sort themselves into a hierarchy called the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God. At that point they come to be referred to as Aeons, A-E-O-N-S, the Aeons of the Fullness. And they sit together in a perfect unit called the Pleroma or the Fullness of God. They stay together. And all together, they are the body or pleroma of the Son. The Son wears them like a garment and they wear the Son like a garment, which means they are coexistent. Father ground state; Son first monad of consciousness; the All; the All becomes self aware and sorts itself into a hierarchy; the Hierarchy of the Fullness dreams of Paradise I have suggested that each of these Fullnesses is itself a fractal of the Son, although each of the Fullnesses has a particular duty, a particular place, position, name, and function in the Fullness of God. In the same way that you can look around our world and see that the wind blows—the function of the wind is the force of movement; or a tree stands in the soil and grows in its particular place. As a monad, we each have a particular place, a particular point of view from where we stand. All of these different individualities are fractals of the Son of God—fractals of consciousness. But we only manifest what we are here to do. We manifest our position, place, and function in the overall scheme. Each unit of consciousness is a fractal of the mind of God. And when I mention God’s mind, this is not the Father, the God Above All Gods. This generally refers to the Son of God, because the Son of God is a thought form—it is the Universal Unit of Consciousness that conceives of our universe. The Son is the basic knowledge of all aspects of our cosmos. Whereas the God Above All Gods, the Father, is a background matrix of consciousness without thought—the pure stillness of mind. So while the Son of God is formally referred to as the Son, in most common parlance the Son of God is also referred to as the Father, because it is the Father of the Fullness and our universe. And the Fullness of God, or the Pleroma of the Hierarchy of the Fullness, is the parental unit of all of the Second Order of Powers by way of the Aeon Logos. The Fullness is the First Order of Powers; all of us around here are the Second Order of Powers. The nonliving material of the Demiurge is an imitation of the Pleroma of Logos. The atoms and archons are not Powers—they are imitations—likenesses of the Pleroma of Logos. Each unit of consciousness is capable of using the organizing principles that inform and sustain its existence in our universe. So every unit of consciousness has a job, a position, a place, a point of view, and it is perfectly capable of utilizing them. It is fully capable of doing the job put to the material that that unit of consciousness governs. Second Order units of consciousness operate according to the aeonic mechanism I call the Simple Golden Rule. The Simple Golden Rule states that units of consciousness reach out to others and “hold hands” to share information, assistance, and love in order to work together on projects that they can’t accomplish on their own. Unlike the inert material directed by the will of the Demiurge, Second Order Powers come fully loaded with free will, and each unit of consciousness makes decisions affecting the material it governs. A photon makes no decisions—it is the Demiurge that decides whether to go left or right according to various optical and physical laws of the universe and its relationships with other photons. It has no free will but it fulfills the duties assigned by the Demiurge. A Second Order cell’s unit of consciousness, on the other hand, decides which materials to gather from its environment to sustain itself and reaches out to other cells like itself according to the Simple Golden Rule to hold hands and build organs. Units of consciousness never evolve, because each unit of consciousness is already a perfect fractal of the Fullness of God, one that emerged directly from the Pleroma above, by way of Logos after his return. As the material to which the Second Order Powers are melded becomes more complex, with more complex and massive attachments, the unit of consciousness that has chosen to govern that aggregation of material focuses its attention to that level of decision-making. Units of consciousness are social, and they are additive in number. They tend to work together in harmony with others like themselves, and that is because, using the Gnostic Gospel terminology, every unit of consciousness is one of the Second Order of Powers that was sent down from the Fullness to bring order and harmony and cooperation to the fallen Logos. And the reason that units of consciousness work together in harmony with others like themselves is because they are instantiating the basic principle of the Fullness of God, which is that Simple Golden Rule of reaching out, holding hands, supplying information, assistance, and love in order to build something greater and level up to the next level. And that begins to level up from the bottom on upward because it was decided, according to the Tripartite Tractate, that every Second Order Power would come one by one from the smallest to the largest. All units of consciousness of the same level of complexity are linked laterally to one another in common purpose. And that’s where I say that they are metaphorically holding hands. At the smaller levels, our cells hold hands and work together to build our organs. And our organs hold hands and work together to build organisms. These are lateral aggregations of like units of consciousness. We hold hands with other humans or with other large mammals like cattle or dogs and cats and so forth. We hold hands in order to have a society, in order to build the next level up at this large mammal level. ALL units of consciousness aggregate, that is gather, hierarchically under more complex units of consciousness. So what this means is that when units of consciousness reach out and hold hands, according to the Golden Rule, they level up. The higher, the fewer. A hierarchy is shaped like a pyramid. Because when you get a bunch of units of consciousness together and they all hold hands and they’re concentrating on one project, the thing they make, the thing that comes out of the middle of them holding hands, is just one thing, whereas there were many of them holding hands. The degree to which any unit of consciousness comprehends the universe depends upon how complex its aggregate of units of consciousness are. Think of a family—it is one family but there are several members. Think of an organ—there is one skin organ, for example, but there are 1.6 trillion skin cells. The skin cells reach out and hold hands to make that one skin organ—the higher the fewer. In other words, every unit of consciousness fully comprehends the entirety of the universe but is only aware of its immediate neighborhood. The more units of consciousness downline that make up this one entity, and I tend to think of these things as pyramids, just like the Hierarchy of the Fullness is a pyramid. If I think of my body, rather than looking like this human walking around with two arms and two legs, I tend to think of myself as a pyramid with my governing unit of consciousness sitting right here on the top of my head. That’s my governing unit of consciousness, and it is the Raja sitting on this elephant of this giant pyramid of over 10 trillion smaller units of consciousness that all reside within the confines of my skin. We are a very large and complex aggregation of units of consciousness. And every human is, every dog is, every cow is, every bird is, every leaf of grass, everything is an aggregation of units of consciousness that have leveled up, always holding hands, leveling up, leveling up, leveling up, until you ultimately wind up here at this governing unit of consciousness sitting on the top of the stack. Of course, this follows the Fullness of God model, with the Father at the top. And so the degree to which any unit of consciousness, let’s say my governing unit of consciousness, the degree to which I comprehend the universe, is dependent upon all of these subunits of consciousness inside of me. We all add up together, and we all have our perception of this universe. And that contributes to my governing unit’s perception of the universe. Distribution of these units of consciousness is hierarchical. The more complex the material to which a unit of consciousness is attached, the fewer instances of it exist. Life forms consist of the aggregated units of consciousness attached to the material forming their bodies, plus the unit of consciousness of self-awareness. The more complex the organism, the more units of consciousness it possesses. Each functional organ system within the organism possesses its own unit of consciousness that governs that organ. So inside of my body, the next largest units of consciousness are my organ systems. My heart has its own unit of consciousness. My stomach has its own unit of consciousness. And we all know that our sex organs have their own units of consciousness, right? So all of these organ systems in your body have their own units of consciousness. They are in charge of their duties. They do the job of keeping the organism alive in the particular way that they work. The heart beats, and it coordinates the blood, it does all the things that the heart does. It’s alive, and it’s its own unit of consciousness. These organ systems have their communications among them, and they can talk to each other. They can powwow. In my own mind, that’s what I think they do. Now, it probably doesn’t sound like you and me talking together, but certainly there are electrical impulses that they send and read one to the other and chemical exchanges. You know, I mentioned how I think of my body as a pyramidal shape. I refer to it as meat mountain. So you’re in on that now. You could think of your body as a meat mountain, and it’s hierarchical shaped because it’s a mountain. And all the parts of meat mountain talk to each other. Usually one level of the hierarchy can communicate with itself at that level, and maybe it has a sense of the level above, maybe it has a sense of the level below. But for example, my governing Self unit of consciousness, I have a strong connection with my body’s organ systems. I know when something wants something, right? I know when I’m hungry. I know when I’m happy or sad. I know what my sex organs want to do, or I know if my skin itches or if it’s dry or whatever it is. But I can’t jump down a couple of levels to the cellular level. We all that capability. Some people demonstrate that awareness, but I don’t. From my governing unit of consciousness, I am not aware of what goes on underneath the organ level. I do not ride along with the blood or with the small cells. I am not aware of that. I’m only aware of the level above and the level below my governing unit of consciousness. The level above my unit of consciousness is easy. That’s my social level. So, what do I hold hands with to level up to? Generally, it’s society. It’s family. It’s neighbors. It’s work. These are different projects in which my unit of consciousness is engaged with others, and I’m aware of those. To skip above that level of consciousness to the next higher level is more speculative. The Son’s mind is the most complex unit of consciousness of all, consisting of all potential as well as all actual units of consciousness in our universe, plus its own omniscient consciousness. The more complex the unit of consciousness, the more sophisticated its decision-making abilities. A particular cell will take care of its own cellular requirements by taking in nutrients from  its surroundings and by reaching out to others of its kind according to the Simple Golden Rule. It will not drive to Burger King and order a hamburger. Every unit of consciousness has its own decision-making sphere of influence, and it makes the decisions that are relevant to its sphere of influence. So the more complex the unit of consciousness, the more sophisticated its decision-making abilities. Animals are extremely sophisticated complexes of units of consciousness, comprised of the trillions of units of consciousness making up an animal—a human, a dog, a cow—and they have a lot more decision-making abilities. And again, decision-making capabilities is another word for free will. Most units of consciousness perform their work as expected. They do their part. They work according to plan, and that’s a really good thing because that’s what holds everything together. The material controlled by the consciousness of the Demiurge is foundational. If the Demiurge did not control the material, the material universe would not hold together and it would completely and very rapidly fall apart. On the other hand, Second Order Powers, who are fractals of the Aeons above, have complete free will to either fulfill or contradict their responsibilities. Most units of consciousness do their job according to the job they were given to do and, overall, things work according to plan. There is enough redundancy in the system so that when the odd unit of consciousness decides to go rogue, things still hold together.   And of course, this is essentially what happened with the Fullness of God. The Fullness sits there in perfect agreement, in a union of one accord, and the Aeons cooperate according to the Simple Golden Rule. But one of those units of consciousness, one of those Aeons, that being Logos, decided to go rogue and reach for the Father on its own, and it did not work out. Logos fell. But the rest of the Pleroma stayed in agreement. As it says in the Tripartite Tractate: The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and he did so being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows and copies and likenesses.  (verse 77). And speaking of the Fall, when Logos fell, it turned into its inverse. It is the shadow of Logos down here. And so the cooperation that is so apparent in the Pleroma is not evident in the body of the fallen Logos without the imposition of strict laws and control. Rather than turning out a universe of fractals of the Father, Logos turned out a universe of shadows, copies, and likenesses. And that’s why I suggest that the fallen Logos is the origination of the quantum foam level of instantiation. And what characterizes quantum foam is chaos, randomness, and an inability to work together to level up. Quantum foam just keeps bubbling. It just keeps popping in and out of existence. It just keeps bumping into its neighbors. It’s nothing but chaos. This artist’s illustration depicts how the foamy structure of space-time may appear, showing tiny bubbles quadrillions of times smaller than the nucleus of an atom that are constantly fluctuating and last for only infinitesimal fractions of a second. Here is its description from the Tripartite Tractate: The Logos was a cause of those who came into being and he continued all the more to be at a loss and he was astonished. Instead of perfection, he saw a defect; instead of unification, he saw division; instead of stability, he saw disturbances; instead of rests, tumults. Neither was it possible for him to make them cease from loving disturbance, nor was it possible for him to destroy it. He was completely powerless, once his totality and his exaltation abandoned him (verse 80). The Logos, being in such unstable conditions, did not continue to bring forth anything like emanations, the things which are in the pleroma, the glories which exist for the honor of the Father. Rather, he brought forth little weaklings, hindered by the illnesses by which he too was hindered. It was the likeness of the disposition which was a unity, that which was the cause of the things which do not themselves exist from the first (verses 80, 81). Logos repented from his egoic overreach and his spiritual Self returned back to his brethren Aeons in the Fullness, abandoning the shadows of his pleroma and his ego down below. And so we have the non-cooperative, unconsciousness of the quantum foam being organized and governed by the ego of Logos—the Demiurge. The Demiurge knows the patterns of the Fullness, such as the Simple Golden Rule, but he is disconnected from the enlivening forces of the Aeons above and he is unable to imbue his creation with life. Second Order Powers don’t have to reach any level of sophistication to be a governing unit of consciousness. All governing units of consciousness are psychological ego combined with spiritual Self. From our cells on upward, every unit of consciousness governs the material they are attached to. Our cells govern themselves at the cellular level. The organs’ units of consciousness govern the organs. Our body’s governing unit of consciousness governs our body’s existence in this material world by attaching to the hylic material of which we are made. The governing unit of consciousness isn’t always paying attention to the body or even doing its job of conscious decision-making. My governing unit of consciousness may be preoccupied with thoughts or songs or emotions, and so my Self isn’t making many here-and-now decisions, but leaving those decisions to the body’s aggregate units of consciousness. Activities like driving a car, having sex, eating, taking a bath, can all be carried out by the body’s organ-level units of consciousness without my governing supervision or awareness. And I suspect that a lot of the time that goes on. Yesterday, by the way, I was watching a video where the speaker claims that most people we encounter are non-playing characters or NPCs in a cosmic simulation. He talked about their dead eyes, lack of introspection, and whole-hearted assimilation of identical ideas implanted through propaganda such as mainstream media. Some Gnostics think the NPCs are the hylic category of people referred to in some Gnostic scriptures and so will evaporate at the end of time along with material existence, never going onward and upward. I must admit it is an engaging idea. I’ve discussed this possibility with my brother, Bill, on several occasions. Bill says no way. He reminds me that all life forms are Second Order Powers. If it’s alive, it comes from above and will return to its home above. Bill says that these people have only forgotten to a greater extent our ethereal origins and so are existing solely at the level of the ego and body. I chuckle because the hylics irritate me so much that I’d just as soon write them off as NPCs. But that’s not very nice of me and I doubt that’s what Jesus would do. As complex systems die and disintegrate, their aggregated units of consciousness are released from the responsibility of supporting that particular life or material instantiation. So when a creature dies, the governing Self unit of consciousness is immediately released and after that, the organ systems. Each unit of consciousness leaves independently, at their own speed, to return to an ethereal existence. As the cells begin to die individually, each one releases its unit of consciousness, and each of these units of consciousness is released into what is called the Akashic Record. It’s the in-between place. A way to think of it is the place where souls go between incarnations or before moving on to their eternal home. It’s only the meat units of consciousness that pass on to the ethereal plane after so-called death. The molecular and elemental units stay down here in the realm of the Demiurge. Atoms don’t die; molecules don’t die because they were never alive in the first place. They simply revert back to their previous unconnected state, so they’re no longer part of this meat mountain. They have been let go. But when part of the meat dies, those hierarchical units of consciousness find themselves untethered from the material world, yet they are still fractals of God, and they are still holding the information or the karma and the memes of their lifetimes unless they were previously detached. We don’t lose our identity or Self awareness. We hold onto our non-detached memes—our beliefs and our learning—and we hold on to the record of what we have done—our karma, and this is what is typically called the soul. These are the parts then that reincarnate into the next aggregation of meat that is ready to attach to the next level up governing unit of consciousness. You bring in your karma. You bring your memes into your next lifetime. Or, you may be able, with the assistance of the Third Order of Powers of the Christ, to “stick the landing” in the ethereal plane and not return to the material cosmos. We find out when we get there. Thank you so much for joining me on this podcast episode. I encourage you to subscribe if you have not yet subscribed. That way you will receive a notice in your email box whenever a new episode is posted. Onward and upward and God bless us all. Please leave a review for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel and The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated at amazon.com. You don’t even have to buy the paperback–just download a copy of the Kindle audiobook for free or practically free. Thank you! Please donate if you can. Thank you for helping to keep these Gnostic Insights going! You are among the very special few who realize the importance of this message. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

Last week I was interviewed for the Belcultassi podcast out of England. It was an interesting and interactive interview of gnostic insights combined with Mr. Belcultassi’s focus on Gurdjieff. I’d call this an intermediate level gnostic interview… The interview was prerecorded and aired on 2/27/25. I sat through the entire run of the show and made additional comments in the chat bar. Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/i0f-XBReeU8 Dreams–Parables of the Night Today’s episode is a replay of an episode first posted July 9, 2021. In those early days of the podcast, there were no accompanying transcripts. So here is your first chance to read the transcript of this episode. This episode is about dreams. What are they and how can you go about keeping track of and interpreting your own dreams? I was first trained in dream interpretation back when I was working on my master’s degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and this was a gestalt type of dream interpretation, as popularized by Fritz Perls. Later on I spent a number of years teaching myself Jungian dream interpretation. Then when I was working on my master’s degree at Azusa Pacific University, which is a Christian university, I studied dream work through the lens of the Bible and also incorporated Jungian dream interpretation into that practice, and dream work became one of my major modalities when working with counseling clients. And then later on again, when I was working on my PhD, I studied the hermeneutics and rhetoric of dreams, because my PhD is in rhetoric, and hermeneutics is the flip side of the coin of rhetoric. Rhetoric is the ability to persuade others of your point of view, and hermeneutics is the ability to decipher points of view. So, I’ve written a number of articles over the years about dream interpretation. If any of you would like dreams to be interpreted, you may go to my GnosticInsights.com website and send me a message using the comment form, and we can talk it over. So by now, having listened to episodes of Gnostic Insights, you understand what a meme is in the sense that we use it here on Gnostic Insights. A meme is a basic unit of information. It’s not just the cute posters that people make on the internet. And I suggest that our personalities are largely defined by the memes that we hold on to, and it’s these memes and our reactions to them that contribute to our behaviors and to our karma. These memes constitute what could be called vibratory patterns that are held in the transpersonal field, or sometimes known as the Akashic Record or the quantum vacuum. This is a shared memory field accessed by all of us here on Earth. These memes aren’t personal within our brains, but they live in this shared transpersonal space. So, apparently, personal memes are actually harmonics of the collective memes that we all share in common with everyone who actually holds on to that meme. The particular shadings of your memes differ slightly from the next person’s as to be expected among fractal replications of a single phenomenon, but all who hold the same meme recognize its pattern and are affected by it. So, for example, the meme of cup. If I say cup, you have a vision of a cup that immediately comes into your mind, and I have a vision of a cup that immediately comes into my mind. Mine might be a large coffee mug with pictures of kitty cats on it. Yours might be a dainty little cup made of porcelain with beautiful flowers or any other sort of cup. But it’s the idea of cupness. The cup is what holds the liquid, and it has a handle. That’s what a cup is. So it’s the same cup meme. Plato called these the forms. It’s the same meme, but we each have a slightly different shading on our cup meme, and that holds true for all of the memes we share in common in the transpersonal field. These meme patterns are stimulated by the thoughts, encounters, and emotional reactions we experience during the day. And at night, these come down to our dreams. Dreams are basically nothing but the nighttime resonances of the memetic patterns that we encounter during the day. They are then transformed into symbolic imagery and enacted while you sleep at night on the stage of your mind. Meme bundles stirred up by the day may be dealt with again and again until the emotional reactions associated with them are resolved. If not resolved, then these memes will continue to appear in dream after dream, disguised in one form after another. And, of course, they will come out during the day as triggers. While we are sleeping, we are open to the leading of the Father and the Fullness of God, because our egos are asleep, and so we can align with our true Self and with the Father more easily. Our ego in sleep relinquishes the control it exerts over our waking lives, and when our hearts are quieted in the hush of sleep, our governing unit of consciousness, our Self, is better able to commune with the Father and the Pleroma. I’m going to share with you now an article I wrote on the Simple Explanation blog on December 25th of 2014, called Dreams, Parables of the Night, and if you would like to reread this section, you can go to asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com and read it. In that blog post, I quote from an article that I wrote in 1990 that was published in a couple of Catholic magazines, and so this one is couched in the religious terminology of Christianity and Catholicism. It begins by quoting from Genesis 40:6-8. When Joseph came to them the next morning, he noticed that they looked disturbed, so he asked Pharaoh’s courtiers, why do you look so sad today? They answered him, we have had dreams, but there is no one to interpret them for us. Joseph said to them, surely interpretations come from God. Please tell your dreams to me. The Bible uses many examples of dreams and their interpretations. Perhaps it’s time for all of us to take another walk down this forgotten avenue of discerning God’s will. In the book of Genesis, God’s will was often revealed through dreams and visions. It was through Jacob’s dream of the ladder at Bethel that God revealed himself to his chosen people and established his lasting covenant. A few chapters later, Jacob’s son Joseph was released from prison and raised to a position of authority in the government of Egypt by his inspirational ability to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams. In fact, from the patriarch Abraham through the prophet Daniel, dreams and visions were used by God to lead and direct his people. Early church fathers also taught that dreams conveyed spiritual messages. Saint Clement wrote that in sleep the soul, freed from sense impressions, can reflect truly on its relationship with God. Emperor Constantine credited his spiritual conversion to a dream. Saint John Chrysostom taught that God reveals himself to his people through dreams. And Saint Augustine, whose own conversion was foretold in his mother’s dreams, believed that dreams revealed both the inner workings of the believer’s mind and his or her relationship with God. Now, by the way, having made the conversion to Gnostic Christianity, these church fathers are more suspect to me than they were when I wrote this article in 1990. At least it’s good to see that the church fathers had a streak of mysticism in them and recognized the importance of dreams. Back to the article. Dreams, more than any other thing, entice us toward hope, wrote Bishop Synesius of Cyrene in the 5th century. And when our heart spontaneously presents hope to us, as happens in our sleeping state, then we have in the promise of our dreams a pledge from divinity. Despite such divine authority, dream work became reclassified almost exclusively with witchcraft between the 4th and 5th centuries, which are pretty much the centuries that cut Gnosticism completely out of Orthodox Christianity. At that time, Saint Jerome mistranslated the passage, “You shall not practice augury nor observe dreams,” in the Latin Vulgate. Modern translations have corrected this error, leaving us free to examine our dreams in good conscience for their revelation of God’s purpose in our lives. The New Testament records that Jesus spoke only in parables to all but his closest disciples. In the Gospels, Jesus explains that he speaks in parables so that only those whose hearts are open may understand his message and be healed. He said to them, Is a lamp brought in to be placed under a bushel basket or under a bed and not to be placed on a lampstand? For there is nothing hidden except to be made visible. Nothing is secret except to come to light. Anyone who has ears to hear ought to hear. And that’s from Mark 4, 21-23. Dreams too are clothed in the familiar language of parables. Parables and dreams both offer profoundly important insights in the form of simple stories. By learning to regard our dreams as our own personal parables, we may learn from them lessons vital to our education and growth. A dream needn’t have a particularly religious theme in order to be spiritual. Any experience that helps us grow toward personal maturity and wisdom is a step toward wholeness and holiness. While many dreams do reflect specifically on our relationship with God, most dramatize our relationships with family and friends and the important issues we struggle with daily. Research proves that we dream for about two hours every night. The first dream occurs about 90 minutes after retiring and lasts only 5 to 10 minutes. As the night deepens, our dreams become longer and more detailed, with the final dream of early morning lasting about 40 minutes. This is the final dream that we remember upon awakening. Many people mistakenly believe that they do not dream because they don’t remember their dreams. This misconception often stems from their fear of frightening dreams. Learning to understand and come to terms with dreams rather than ignoring them is a far better way of mastering our fears. If we begin our dream work with God’s help, we will no longer feel powerless before them. Another common reason for not remembering dreams is our unwillingness to listen to the message. Dreams can be painful but truthful vehicles of correction. Situations or personal qualities we prefer to overlook in the daylight are often exposed in our dreams. Like parables, dreams present truths whose enigmatic lessons can only be discovered by those with an ear to hear. Untangling the messages of these parables of the night involves learning the symbolic language of dreams and recognizing the parallels between your dreams and your waking life. The first step in remembering your dreams is deciding that you want to remember them. Setting out a notebook and pen by your bed is a good idea for two reasons. First, the notebook is a physical reminder and commitment that you intend to remember your dreams. Second, dreams must be recalled and recorded immediately upon awakening or they will be forgotten. In addition to the images of the dream, it is a good idea to record the feelings and emotions you experienced in the dream and felt upon awakening. The next challenge is to translate the language of the parable into a message you can understand. This is accomplished by looking at each element of the dream—people, places, objects, actions, emotions—and meditating upon what each suggests to you. Write these associations down no matter how trivial or unrelated they may seem. Once this is done, you can step back from the dream and see what message emerges. So here’s a case study from one of my clients that illustrates the process of dream interpretation and its importance. Megan wrote, I dreamed I was standing at the kitchen counter making breakfast for my family. I was making berry, a drink in the blender, adding more and more ingredients until the contents of the blender erupted like a volcano and spewed out a horrible green mess all over the kitchen. There was a policeman standing in the kitchen with his arms folded, judging me. I felt very guilty about the mess and didn’t know how I could ever clean it up. Megan, a full-time homemaker, had been married to Charles for two and a half years at the time of this dream. Charles’s 15-year-old son, Barry, lives with them. Charles, an accountant, is a good provider, but quiet and undemonstrative. He expects Megan to provide a stable home and disapproves of displays of emotion. Megan’s first step in understanding her dream was to record the dream as soon as she awakened. She also recorded the emotions that the dream stirred up in her: helplessness, embarrassment, and guilt. Next, Megan drew a line down the middle of a page. On the left side of the page, she listed each element of the dream. Across from each element, she wrote down whatever association the element brought to mind. So, on the left side, it says dream image, and the right side says reminds me of. And here’s what she wrote. Dream image, the kitchen counter reminds me of my workplace. Making breakfast reminds me of providing nourishment. My family reminds me of means everything to me. Barry’s blender drink, blended family mixed up. Too many ingredients reminds me couldn’t stop in time. Erupting volcano reminds me powerful, out of control, Barry. Horrible green mess reminds me of sickly. Policeman reminds me of enforcing order, Charles. Arms folded, reminds me of unfriendly, distant. My own guilt reminds me of it’s all my fault. Reading her dream now from the right side of the column, Megan saw the family member roles clearly illustrated for the first time. She saw herself as trying to be a nurturing mother to her new blended family. Barry as a pent-up potentially disruptive force, and Charles as an unsympathetic lawmaker. She also recognized that there was some kind of sickness present, threatening to overwhelm their home. Megan’s dream presents the family dynamics in the form of a visual parable. She and Barry maintain an uneasy truce whenever Charles is home, but she fears the lid will soon come off. Like throwing too many ingredients into a blender, Megan fears that saying one word too many will cause a catastrophic emotional eruption. She says, The more I thought about this dream, the more I realized why I feel so uncomfortable around Barry. He’s been so sullen and moody lately that the least little thing might set him off, and I’m really afraid of that happening. I’d like to be able to talk with Charles about this, but he doesn’t approve of such petty talk. While Megan and Charles both desperately strive to maintain a peaceful home life, the peace lies only on the surface and does not penetrate into their hearts. Lack of acknowledgment of unpleasant emotions cannot bring about true solutions. It can only contribute to an unstable buildup of tension. Of course, not all dreams present such clear-cut messages as Megan’s dream. Some housekeeping dreams merely deal with the leftover activities and emotions of the day without carrying particularly important lessons. The dreamer can usually feel the difference between dream parables and housekeeping dreams by the sense of urgency and importance a dream parable conveys. Even embarrassing or shameful dreams are fit subjects for recollection and prayer. The danger in these dreams comes not through remembrance of the dream itself, but by ignoring the dream and denying acknowledgement of our true human condition. When King Nebuchadnezzar dreamed the frightening dream of the tree that foretold his insanity and the loss of his kingdom, Daniel understood that God was issuing a warning to the king. The dream’s message indicated that the king needed to acknowledge God and not himself as the supreme ruler of his kingdom. Daniel encouraged the king to heed the message of the dream in order to avert the impending tragedy. Therefore, O king, take my advice. Atone for your sins by good deeds and for your misdeeds by kindness to the poor. Then your prosperity will be long. (Daniel 4:24). Nebuchadnezzar chose instead to ignore God’s warning and so continued on the path leading to his illness. Matthew recorded a dream in the very first chapter of his gospel. It seems there was a man betrothed to a young virgin who learned the disturbing news that his beloved was with child. Not wanting to shame her publicly, he considered sending her secretly away. An angel appeared to him in a dream and told him not to fear marrying her. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. (Matthew 1:20). Joseph heeded the message of his dream and took Mary to be his wife. What lessons might God be holding for all of us in our dreams? We will never know unless we listen. If you are interested in having me interpret any dreams for you, please contact me through the comments form and we can discuss the matter. You find the comments, once again, at Gnostic Insights dot com. And if you’re finding these episodes of Gnostic Insights to be helpful in your spiritual growth, I ask you to please send a donation and it will help me to keep this Gnostic Insights program on the air. Thank you very much for spending this time. I hope it has been useful to you. Onward and upward, and God bless. Send a dream interpretation request to Dr. Ropp using this Contact Form Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Comment or Message *Submit Please donate to support Gnostic Insights using this Stripe form or the PayPal button below the Stripe form. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit Gnostic Insights Support15.00 Donate with Stripe

Last week we talked about the Holy Spirit, what or who it is, and how and why it came to Earth. To review: In Gnostic teaching, there are three kinds of Power that we know of: The First Order of Powers were the original Aeons—that is, the differentiations that are within the Son of God and that coexist with the Son. It’s called the First Order of Powers because the Son is the first and only direct emanation of the originating Source of consciousness and power. The Pleroma of the First Order of Powers is the infinite number of variables of all possibilities known to the God Above All Gods. The Second Order of Powers is us and all other life forms. We are the fruit, or children, of the First Order of Powers, fruited through the Pleroma of Logos after he abandoned the results of the Fall and returned to the Fullness above. We’re part of the original power coming from the Father and through the Son and then through the Aeons and on through the Pleroma of Logos. And we are literally the fruit of the Aeon Logos. Logos contained fractals of all the other Aeons inside of him, and we are the fruit of those fractals after Logos returned back to the Fullness. The Holy Spirit is the Pleroma of the Christ. It is also called the Third Order of Powers. The Third Order of Powers is what came along with the manifestation of the Christ, first in the heavens and then on Earth. Christ is not an Aeon—He is greater than the Aeons. Nor is Christ the original Son that emerged directly from the Father, because the Son predates the Christ. Christ is the Third Order of Powers, formed through the prayer of the Aeons under the direction of the Son and with the blessing and will of the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says: 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 Totalities, 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 bring forth the fruit. (Tripartite Tractate, verse 86) All of those that come with the Christ form the Pleroma of the Third Order Powers—that is, all of the variables that make up the Christ. The Third Order Powers are to the Christ what the First Order Powers are to the Son. We are called the fruit of the Pleroma of Logos, the Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers was the Pleroma of the Son. And Christ, the Third Order of Powers, is the fruit of the Totalities of the Son and the Father. He’s a different entity than the Father and the Son. He is the Pleroma of the Holy Spirit that represents the Totalities and the Father. Yet, the Tripartite Tractate does call him the Son because he is “the revelation of his union with them, which is his beloved Son.” 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 “he 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 previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father, whom he wanted them to know? (Tripartite Tractate, verses 86-87) Jesus said he would send the Comforter to his followers that would fill them with the Holy Spirit of the Father. This would be a new entity bringing its presence into the cosmos.  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 were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony. 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. (Tripartite Tractate, verse 87) This is why I make a point of repeating how the aeons are the body of the Pleroma of the Son and how we come from the Pleroma of the body of Logos. The Pleroma of Logos is a fractal of the Pleroma of the Son. In other words, we living creatures are the second iteration of Logos who carries within himself an iteration of the Fullness of God. We have the countenance or face of the various aeons, one fractal level down. So when the Pleroma of the Christ, also known as the Holy Spirit, came to Earth, it reflected the countenance of every Second Order Power and every First Order Power. This is what is meant when the Tripartite Tractate says, 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. And this is why people who have experienced the born again phenomenon upon acceptance of the Christ have a felt sense of being known and personally loved by God. It is because the Third Order Powers of Christ literally have our faces and our bodies—they know us inside and out. There is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power. The Third Order Powers of the Christ are the most powerful force in our cosmos, far more powerful than we are and infinitely more powerful than the Pleroma of the Demiurge. This is how it is that once we accept the Christ and invite our personal Third Order Powers to enter into our soul we immediately feel the love of the Father and are no longer powerless to resist the wily temptations of the archons of the Demiurge. The Third Order Powers see through the lies and phantoms of the imitation. They cannot be deluded by the deficiency. They are not affected by the never-ending war. And we share that enlightenment to the extent that we accept the indwelling of the Third Order Powers. The Holy Spirit of the Christ not only came for us but also brings redemption to the Demiurge—that egoic part of Logos that had been abandoned here below after the Fall. The Tripartite Tractate says, For he revealed himself to him within him, since he is with him, is a fellow sufferer with him, gives him rest little by little, makes him grow, lifts him up, gives himself to him completely for the enjoyment from a vision. (verse 90) Now I’d like to share with you a verse from the New Testament. This is a verse that many people are familiar with. Quoting Jesus,  Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin. (Mark 3:28-29, New International Version) Hart’s literal translation puts it this way: Amen, I tell you that all will be excused the sons of men, the transgressions and the blasphemies, howsoever they may blaspheme. But whoever blasphemes against the Spirit, the Holy One, has no excuse throughout the age, but is answerable for a transgression in the Age. First off, comparing the usual translation to Hart’s translation, we see that conventional Christians are taught that blaspheming the Holy Spirit is unforgivable whereas the literal translation says inexcusable. The conventional translation also says these blasphemers are guilty eternally—meaning it will never go away because the blasphemy is unforgivable. Hart’s translation says that while the blasphemer has no excuse, they will be answerable in the Age to come. Throughout the age is an interesting phrase, because the Greek word for age is aeon. And generally the Bible tends to translate aeon as a unit of time, but I usually prefer translating aeon as a unit of consciousness. So, we gnostics might translate “in the Age” as “in the Fullness of the Aeons,” which is a place not a time. This indicates to me that while conventional Christians have been taught that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven and blasphemers will suffer for eternity for their sin, the actual translation says that while their sin may be inexcusable, they will have an opportunity to answer for that sin after death, in the Fullness of the Aeons. As an aside, yesterday I took my dog out on a trail with a lady and her dog that I barely knew. The dogs were having a good time off leash, running around, exploring, having fun. But then when it was time to leave the park, the other dog wouldn’t come and wouldn’t allow us to approach, but kept running away just out of reach. This went on for an hour until we lost track of the dog. I grew more upset as each minute went by. I started say to the lady, “This is unacceptable behavior. This is totally unacceptable!” I must have said that 50 times. We eventually found the dog outside the park, across a bridge, and only yards from the highway where it surely would have been killed. The dog finally allowed us to approach and the lady got him into the car. Now, by analogy, what would a loving owner do? Forgive the dog and take him home or take him to the pound and condemn him to hell? On the drive home I kept reiterating to the lady that she needs to train that dog because his behavior was totally unacceptable. So, to carry the analogy further, the loving owner would teach the dog the error of its ways through training until he could be trusted off leash and be a “good dog.” Blasphemy isn’t just cursing, just hitting your finger with a hammer, and uttering a curse in God’s name. It means that your heart is turned against God. To blaspheme the Holy Spirit means that you speak ill of the Holy Spirit in particular. The Holy Spirit is the one that is singled out. And why would this be such a big transgression? Because this is the worst thing that you can possibly do in this lifetime, signifying your entire disposition towards goodness and righteousness, towards the Father, towards the Son, towards the Fullness, and towards truth, because the Holy Spirit stands for all of these things. So this is not speaking of a matter of confusion, and I don’t know which way to turn or I’m an agnostic. Gnostic means to know. Agnostic means you don’t know. It’s not saying that. It’s saying you go beyond confusion to blasphemy. You raise your fist in anger and you denounce God and his will. You denounce the Holy Spirit. Mark 3:28 says that you will be answerable for that transgression in the Age. Or what I would say, you will be answerable for a transgression in aeonic realm. You will come to a period of cleansing and the measure of your guilt will be your own self-condemnation. Your own anger and hatred will be completely exposed. But this won’t be eternal. This will only be until the chaff is burned away from the wheat. John the Baptist said that, He will baptize you in a Holy Spirit and fire: He whose winnow is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his threshing floor, and will gather his grain into the storehouse, and will burn away the chaff with inextinguishable fire. (Matthew 3:11-12) “Burn away the chaff.” Yikes! Sounds painful. There are other frightening warnings concerning God’s wrath, similar to those scary visions recounted in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, primarily from Old Testament prophets and John in the book of Revelations. Such as: If anyone makes obeisance to the beast and its image, and receives an impress on his forehead or on his hand, He shall drink also from the wine of God’s vehemence, mixed undiluted into the cup of his ire, and will be tormented by fire and sulfur before the holy angels and before the suckling lamb. And the smoke of their torment rises for ages of ages, and the ones who make obeisance to the beast and its image have no rest day and night, as does anyone who might receive the impress of its name. Here is the endurance of the holy ones who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus. And I heard a voice out of heaven saying, “Write: ‘How blissful the dead who henceforth die in the Lord.’ ‘Yes,’ says the Spirit, ‘so that they shall rest from their labors, for their works follow along with them.’” (Revelations 14:9-13) And in Matthew 13:49: “Thus it will be at the consummation of the age. Angels will go forth and will separate the wicked from the midst of the just, and will throw them into the furnace of fire. There will be weeping and grinding of teeth there.” The fire isn’t meant to punish or to harm. It is a metaphor for burning away those negative memes that are clinging so tenaciously to your soul. And once those are burned away, then you can join everyone else. You won’t be forced into heaven if you hate God and hate the Holy Spirit and scoff at the notion of heaven. You need to want to come there. And you can’t come there if your soul and your spirit is smothered with “wicked” memes. But it is important to realize that it is not the person that is wicked, for we are all Second Order Powers filled with the Fullness of God. Our basic nature is not sin or wickedness; our basic nature is love. The wickedness is carried within the memes, not within the human soul. Remember that the process of karma determines what memes you gather and hold onto. If you take up the memes of the Demiurge and its archons, your inherent light will be smothered by those negative memes. And it is those memes that are burned away like chaff from the threshing floor, not the souls of humans. We must be pure and holy in order to return to the Age—the abode of the Aeons from which we come, for no negative memes make it through the winnowing process. It was not the will of the Father that we suffer. That is why the Christ and the Third Order Powers came to Earth—so that we would all have a clear pathway of righteousness aided by the infusion of the Holy Spirit to shed the demiurgic memes before death and any sort of final reckoning process. In Hart’s version of Matthew 12, beginning at verse 30, it says, Whoever is not with me, (that’s Jesus speaking), is against me. And whoever does not gather together with me scatters. Hence I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be excused men. But the blasphemy of the Spirit will not be excused. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, (that is Jesus), it will be excused him. But whoever speaks against the Spirit, the Holy One, it will not be excused him, neither in this age nor in the one that is coming. Either make out the tree to be good and its fruit good, or make out the tree to be rotten and its fruit rotten. For the tree is known by the fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you, being wicked, speak of good things? For the mouth speaks out of what overflows from the heart. The good man issues good things out of his good stores, and the wicked man issues wicked things out of his wicked stores. This final reckoning after death gives you the opportunity for that 360 degree life review that brings you face-to-face with your karma and memes. If you walk with the Holy Spirit the passage will be easy, for all transgressions are forgiven. But if you hate and blaspheme or speak ill of the Holy Spirit itself, then you have no Comforter at your side to assist you, either in this age or in the Age to come. And if that is the case, then your realization and rejection of the demiurgic memes will be painful. But make no mistake, this reckoning is necessary and inevitable. And after that, forgiveness. I will close this week’s episode by sharing with you a portion of an archetypal dream I had when I was about eight years old. In that dream I was flying through the air with Jesus, tucked safely in his arm, like Lois Lane flying with Superman. We landed at the front of a huge procession of people carrying torches who were winding there way up a tall hill. I found myself standing before an old gentleman who was sitting at a table that held a large glowing wok or brazier full of red hot glowing coals. The table was in front of a door leading into a huge, brightly glowing structure. Jesus, who was standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders told the man, “She is with me.” The old man took my right hand and plunged it into the hot coals. Now, this is the important part to the lesson of this episode—even though my hand was in the hot coals, it did not hurt and it did not burn because Jesus was with me. When my hand came out of the coals unscathed, I was able to pass into the place before me. There’s more to the story of what happened in that dream. I’ll tell it to you next week and we’ll talk about dreams. Until then, Onward and upward, and God bless us all. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Stripe Credit Card *Choose your item *Item A - $10.00Item B - $25.00Item C - $50.00Total$0.00Submit

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I would like to share some information with you about the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? You know, the Holy Spirit is considered part of the Trinity of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One God, three-in-one, is how the Christians put it. But what does that mean? What is the Holy Spirit to us if we’re seeking gnosis? Jesus said to his disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the Earth” (Acts 1:8). That’s us. We’re at the ends of the earth here, right? So Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would come to the believers and would be a witness to the Christ. The Jews were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the festival of Shavuot, which was the giving of the commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. So it was one of the major festival times, and there were a lot of people gathered. Jesus had been crucified during the Passover festival, and this is the next festival, which was about 40 days afterwards. And so when Shavuot, or what we call Pentecost, came, the disciples were all gathered together in one place. They were confused, lost, disheartened. The man that they had thought would bring the kingdom back to Israel was dead and crucified, and they just didn’t know what they were supposed to do about it. In Acts 2 verse 2, it says, “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now, they were staying in Jerusalem, God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked, aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? How is it that each of us hears them in our native language? They asked one another, what does this mean?” And others in the crowd, it says, made fun of them and said, ah, they’d had too much wine.” Peter stood up, raised his voice and addressed the crowd. And he said, “In the last days, God says, ‘I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy and your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days and they will prophesy. I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’” A lot of people think that we may be in the end days right now. I don’t think we have seen the sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood yet, so I don’t think we’re in the final roll-up. That is a signal we’re supposed to look for before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. That is the second coming of Jesus, which is what Christians are waiting for. And Peter here was quoting the prophet Joel from the Old Testament. And in verse 37 it says, “When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brother, what shall we do?’ Peter replied, ‘Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, for all whom the Lord, our God, will call.’ With many other words he warned them and he pleaded with them, saying, ‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’” But what is that Holy Spirit? I used to think it was just that great rush of wind, that swoosh, kind of a like a ghostly power that settled on people and filled them with the Holy Spirit. But now, after reading the Tripartite Tractate and considering this gnosis for several years, I think that the Holy Spirit is the coming of the Third Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the original Aeons—that is, the differentiations that are within the Son of God and that coexist with the Son. It’s the infinite number of variables of all possibilities of God. The Second Order of Powers is us. We are an order of powers. We’re part of the original power coming from the Father and through the Son and then through the Aeons. And we are literally the fruit of the Aeon Logos. He had the fractals of all the Aeons inside of him, and we are the fruit of those fractals after Logos returned back to the Fullness. And then the Third Order of Powers is what came along with the manifestation of the Christ, first in the heavens and then on Earth. And Christ is not an Aeon; Christ is not the Son. Christ is the Third Order of Powers. And all of those that come with the Christ are Third Order Powers—that is, all of the variables that make up the Christ. The Pleroma of the Christ is the Third Order of Powers. We are the fruit of the Pleroma of Logos, the Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers was the Pleroma of the Son. And Christ is the Third Order of Powers. He’s a different entity than the Father and the Son. He is the Pleroma of the Holy Spirit. Christ was formed in order to save us from the Fall and to save the Demiurge from the Fall. The Christ, the Third Order of Powers, is the most powerful being in the material world. He has all of the mojo of the Son, all of the mojo of the First Order Powers, all of the Aeons put together with the consecration or the will of the Father. He is anointed for a special task of bringing us all home and rolling up this material creation and bringing us into what is called the third economy or the final economy. We’re in the second economy now. The first economy is the hierarchy of the Fullness, where the Aeons live. The material cosmos is the second economy, or you could call it the second ecological system. And then there’s going to be a third economy, and that is when everyone who has been alive down here below, everyone who has been birthed into this material existence as a Second Order Power and melded to the Fall, will come home to the ethereal plane. When the fiery tongues came down and set upon everyone who was in that upper room at Pentecost, each of the disciples and the followers who were in that house, that was their Third Order Power alighting upon their heads. When Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist at the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus came to his cousin John, who was baptizing people in the river, and he asked to be baptized. And John said, “No, no, I’m not even worthy to carry your sandals. I can’t baptize you. You’re the anointed one.” And Jesus said, “No, you have to baptize me. It’s all part of the plan.” And after Jesus was dunked in the river by John, and he rose up out of the river, it says that the Holy Spirit alighted upon his,( alighted means landed), landed upon his head like a dove. So when this Holy Spirit came to Jesus, then Jesus was anointed and walking around with all of the powers of the Third Order on display within him. He was the first of the human Second Order Powers who to be anointed by the Holy Spirit. Of course, Jesus is more than a Second Order Power. He’s always been the manifestation of a Second Order Power plus the Third Order of Powers. And we call that the Christ. We say Jesus Christ, but he’s actually called Jesus the Anointed, and the anointing was the Holy Spirit. To be anointed signifies a special set-apart status for fulfilling a particular purpose or calling. And the calling of Jesus was to round us all up and bring us home. The Greek word chrio means to consecrate or set apart for sacred use. So when we say Jesus Christ, we’re saying Jesus the anointed, who has been set apart for sacred use. And he was the first to be anointed by the Holy Spirit. Now, the reason why everyone broke out speaking in tongues that everyone in Jerusalem could understand, they said, “Hey, I thought all these people were from Galilee. How is it that they’re speaking our language?” And there were hundreds of languages being represented because it was a huge pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Pentecost. Well, the reason why is because the Holy Spirit knows everything, and it empowered each of those disciples of Christ to be speaking in a way that others could understand. So suddenly, all of a sudden, whether you spoke Hebrew or Greek or then any of these hundreds of other languages, you could understand for the first time the message that Jesus was preaching. Now, in what are called Pentecostal churches nowadays, Pentecost being that time when the Holy Spirit came to speak to everyone, came to inhabit everyone, Pentecostal churches continue to speak in tongues. But the problem is that generally nobody else can understand what they’re saying. When people speak in tongues, it sounds very Middle Eastern, but it’s not like they’re speaking in French or German or Spanish, where anyone can understand them, or even English. They’re speaking in this, what is fairly unintelligible, mystical, Middle Eastern type of tongue. But back in the original Pentecost, everybody was speaking in such a way that everyone could be understood. So what are the functions of the Holy Spirit as taught by Jesus? First off, it says in John 14:17, “Even the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it sees him not, neither knows him, but you know him, for he dwells with you and shall be in you.”  So we are baptized in the Holy Spirit. We who have decided that Jesus was the anointed Third Order Power who came to Earth to bring us Second Order Powers home, which is the Gnostic gospel, we invite the Third Order Powers to come and take up dwelling inside of ourself. So now we’re not just the one Self, which is a reflection of the Son of God, and we’re not just the ego, which is a reflection of our Second Order status. We then also have a Third Order Power overlaying both of those. And the Third Order is the most powerful force in this cosmos. We have all necessary power once we invite the Third Order Powers to take up dwelling. If your ego is sitting on the throne of your soul, as we say, then you’re just being pushed about by every whim and desire of the material world. You’re being influenced by influencers. Your focus is on yourself, your body, your looks, what you’re eating, what you’re wearing, where you’re going to go, how you’re going to have fun. That’s your egoic Second Order nature. Your First Order nature is to have the Son of God foremost in your mind. And I think that’s what the prophets of the Old Testament had—the Son sitting on their throne. So they were receiving truth, even though the Third Order of Powers didn’t come until Jesus came. But we’ve got a Third Order of Powers. And in John 14:26, it says, “But the Comforter who is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things.” So accepting the Third Order Powers brings comfort. Why wouldn’t we want to have comfort? What’s the point of lying down here bleeding and suffering and being worried and frightened? There’s no point to it at all. You don’t gain any brownie points through suffering. We are called to be full of joy. The Holy Spirit brings us that comfort and he comes in the name of Jesus the Anointed. And it says, “He shall teach you all things.” Well, how would the Holy Spirit teach you anything? Because the Holy Spirit is the embodiment that knows everything. He’s ethereal. He’s preexistent. He knows the Father. He knows the Son. He knows all of the Aeons. He was in on all the conferences on how to get us out of this sticky mess we found ourselves in. So he comes to teach us what we need to know to extricate ourselves from this material morass in which we find ourselves. In John 14:26, it says, “After, he shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said to you.” Now, usually the Christians limit that to whatever Jesus said to them. But in the Gnostic Gospels, we’re called those of the remembrance.  That’s what we’re known as, because when we’re born into this world, we carry with us the memory of the ethereal plane, but we forget it, just like the Demiurge. We’re a fractal replication—each of our lives is a fractal replication of the fall of Logos, the splitting into the good thought and the egoic thought, and then forgetting about the ethereal plane. That’s the lot of the Demiurge. We are in the same spot. We tend to forget what we were born with. So we’re not born as a blank slate, a tabula rasa. We are born with the full remembrance of all of the powers and the glory of God and our home on the ethereal plane, which resembles paradise. That’s why all humans have a similar dream of paradise. That’s the remembrance. So when we accept the Holy Spirit, it reminds us; we are no longer forgetful. Now we accept the remembrance that we were born with again. That’s why somewhere it says, (I don’t have the quote in front of me), but there’s practically an infinite way to express being fallen. There’s an infinite way to be confused, but there is one way to come home. There’s one place that we will return to. So we have a myriad of confusions down here when we have forgotten, but when we remember, we get back on that glory beam, as I like to call it, and that is the one way up. That’s what one way means. Now the ordinary conventional Christian way of understanding that one way is to say that you have to profess belief in Jesus Christ because that is the one way—that Jesus is the gatekeeper to heaven. Yes, Jesus is the one way to heaven, but that doesn’t mean that you need to know that, that you need to recognize that. Someday you will, because it says “every knee shall bend, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus the Anointed is Lord.” But if you don’t do that before you die, if you don’t acknowledge that Jesus is the Anointed one, that just means you’re going to have a harder time after you die. You’re going to have to go through some of those bardo-type experiences we talked about last week. So yeah, Jesus the Anointed is the one way, and that was his job, and it is finished, whether or not you believe it. But you’re not going to go to hell if you don’t. John 15:26 says, “But when the Comforter is come…” so it’s the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, and I think that each one of us has a Third Order Power that is assigned to us. There is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power, and that is our salvation. That is what unlocks the full remembrance and the full understanding of truth down to the cellular level. So, when your Third Order Power has come, “whom I will send unto you from the Father,” says Jesus, “even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he shall testify of me.” And they do personify the Holy Spirit, so it’s not just a force or a power. It is always personified. It’s always He. So this Third Order Power will guide us in everything we need to know. It’s the Third Order Powers that bring us all our gnosis. My Third Order Power comes to me with everything I need to know. I have different misunderstandings of things than you do. We’re all individuals. We all make our own mistakes. We all wander off the path in our own way. As I said, there’s almost an infinite variety of ways to go wrong, but the Third Order Power is our touchstone. It’s our truth teller. It testifies of the Father. It reminds us of paradise. Then John 16:8 goes on to say, “When he is come,” that is the Holy Spirit, your Third Order Power, “he will reprove the world of sin.” That is, he’ll scold them. He’ll take it away. He’ll denounce the world of sin. “The sin is because they do not believe on me,” he says. “Righteousness, because I go to my Father and he will see me no more. Judgment, because the prince of the world is judged.” And here’s one of the heresies, of course. “The prince of this world,” is it Satan? Well, there’s no character called Satan, actually, in the Greek. It’s the Accuser. So Satan, his job is to whisper how lousy you are, to whisper how worthless you are, and stupid, and that you’ll never make it to heaven. That’s the job of the Accuser. But the prince of this world, that’s the Demiurge. That’s the king of this world. This Accuser is his main henchman, his archon. John 16:13 says, “However, when he, the Spirit of Truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth, for he shall not speak of himself, but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak.” So the Third Order Power is never serving itself. It’s not here for its own glory or for its own aggrandizement. It comes to share the truth with us. That’s all. He wants to guide you into all truth. And we call ourselves Gnostic, or if you’re on the Gnostic path and you’re looking to unlock your gnosis, that is truth. The path to this truth is the Holy Spirit. And if you hate Jesus, and you hate these things like the Holy Spirit… well, those are unhelpful memes that you picked up along the way because your original spirit knows the Fullness of God. It is undeniable because it is inherent within your Second Order nature. In any event, why would you reject the Holy Spirit? He reflects the full truth of the ethereal plane. And the Anointed One came in particular to save us, in particular to save you, to help you, to reveal to you your gnosis. So if you hate the Christ, well, you have wandered away from the right path. I don’t know what you would rather believe than believe in the Anointed Power and the Holy Spirit who came for you. In John 16:15, it says, “All things that the Father has are mine, (that is, the Anointed’s) therefore, said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall show it unto you.” So your gnosis is being revealed by the Comforter, and that is why it is comforting. Next week we will discuss the Holy Spirit some more and we will look at the gnostic meaning of Mark 3:28 and Matthew 13:49. What exactly is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and why is it said to be inexcusable? What’s the gnostic take on that? Is anything unforgiveable? Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all. Have you purchased your copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel yet? Widely acclaimed as the most approachable gnostic text ever written. Based upon the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures. Dr. Ropp’s specialty is bringing ancient texts to life in understandable language.