Gnostic Insights

Father, Son, ALL 2024 edition Welcome to the Gnostic Insights podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m here to share, well, what the title of this podcast is—Gnostic Insights—with you. Hey, I have some exciting news for you. I’m nearing completion of reformatting The Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate for publication. I anticipate uploading it in the next few days, and then I’ll need to examine the proof copy before releasing it for distribution. The Gnostic Reformation could really use your help in the form of contributions for the cause, for advertising and promotion. Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio has agreed to narrate the audiobook, and that will also be available by the end of summer, and I need funds for paying for his narration as well. So now is the time to contribute what you can to this effort. If you need a bribe, I’d be happy to personally mail you a signed copy of the book in exchange for your generous contribution of at least $50 to cover the cost. If that’s the case, please contact me privately with your home address for mailing. You can use the contact form at GnosticInsights.com and let me know. However, if you can’t afford the $50, that’s fine—any contribution would help. I appreciate whatever you can contribute. Thank you so much. Onward and upward! It’s summertime, and I’m distracted with working on the new book and with all of the events surrounding summer activities, so I’m going to rerun one of the foundational episodes from 2021, and this is about the nature of the Father, the Son, and then the Fullness. Enjoy! The Nag Hammadi scriptures were buried deep in the desert around 300 AD to save them from the great purge that occurred when the Bible was codified by the Pope and the Emperor of Rome and made into the packaged Christianity that we know today. Before that package, there was a type of spiritual belief that was well known to Jesus and his followers that was then cut out of the Bible out of the New Testament during the Council of Nicene. These ideas were preserved in a set of books called the Nag Hammadi, which were buried in the desert to keep them from the purge, and then they were rediscovered and dug up in 1945, so they have been kept away from almost 2,000 years of formal study and formal theology. What you hear from the Nag Hammadi scriptures is fresh and clean and uninterpreted by experts. So what I have done is study one particular book of the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate, and it is that book which I used primarily in the book that I wrote called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which I published in 2019. I like to begin with a study of the cosmos or cosmology as it unfolded, as it rolled out. This makes the most sense to me, to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are, and then what happens in our lives and why are we here. And then the final roll-up is the very, very end of time as predicted by the scriptures. So let’s begin at the beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. This story begins before the beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos existed. And so if you think of the originating consciousness as a vast consciousness which has no place and no time, no history—it is nothing but pure consciousness without thought, similar to what the Buddhists call the Buddha mind, something people try to achieve during meditation, where you can be aware that you are conscious, but you have no particular thoughts or words or images going through your mind. No thought, no images, no structure or form, no thing at all. And this is the consciousness of the Father, and we only say the Father—there’s no gender, obviously. The Father is not a man with a beard and long robes. Obviously there’s no gender, it’s a singular consciousness, okay? So let’s get off the notion of being upset by calling it a father. I suppose we could call it a mother, or we could just call it consciousness. In the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book that I am translating for you, it is referred to as the Father. And this Father, its basic consciousness is not thoughts, but rather love, the sensation of knowing what we call love. So this consciousness simply is, without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning, without end, utterly quiet, utterly still, utterly alone. This Father is often described as all-knowing, but what is there to know? All-seeing, but what is there to see? All-loving, but what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom, will, but to what end? There’s nothing there. Now imagine that this consciousness gives birth to a emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation blog, we call this a fractal. In the religious texts, they call it a son, S-O-N. So now we have the Father and a Son. So in the silence of the Absolute, the Father brings forth the first and only Son from its realization of itself. The Son is the Father having a thought. The Son is the Father knowing itself, as the Father having a sensation of its own eternal self. The Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. The Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells. Every trait of the Father is expressed now as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. And yet, although it was a singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone, for not only the Son, but what is called the ALL, arose at once. Capital A-L-L. The ALL immediately appeared as the offspring of the Son, because the Son could not help itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father, because it is a reflection of the Father’s traits. And so the Father knows itself and creates the Son, and the Son knows itself and creates the ALL. In religious talk, the ALL is known as the preexistent Church. Not your church down on the street corner with the people in it singing hymns on Sunday, but this is the true preexistent Church. The Tripartite Tractate says, “For not only the Son, but also the Church exists from the beginning.” The Tripartite goes on to say, “Before the ALL arose from the Father’s thought, He knew them, but they did not know the depth in which they found themselves, nor could they know themselves or anything else. For they were within the Father as an embryo, or an unsprouted seed.” So they were potential. They were there, they live in the Father, they live in the Son, but they don’t know anything, they don’t know themselves, they are not self-aware. The way the Tripartite Tractate describes this, it says, “Because they were newly formed, the Father concealed the ALL’s perfection from them until they could grow into the knowledge. This is why the Father revealed the Son to them, so the ALL would be able to relate to the Son and see the Father’s glory according to the ability of each one to receive Him.”   So nobody sees the Father. The Father is unknowable. The Father is too immense. When people say, Oh, you can’t conceive of God, God’s all too big and unknowable, that’s true, but God made itself into a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. And one of the reasons the Son is there is because we can know the Son. We can’t know the Father, but we can know the Son. The Tripartite Tractate describes this this way, “The Son is no more and no less than the sum of the ALL, and they understood who He is, and He is covered by the ALL. And with the birth of the ALL, the Son also became a Father.” So this can be a little confusing because you have the Originating Consciousness, the God Above All Gods, which is the Originating Consciousness or the Father. The Father had a sense of itself. This was called the Son, S-O-N. The Son immediately produced itself, and this is called the ALL. With the birth of the ALL, the Son also became a Father. The Originating Father, that consciousness so lonely and still for eternity, now had a child who had also borne fruit from His glory. And in this way the One begat the ALL, and the Father loved them all as He loved His Son. As I said, the ALL is referred to as the pre-existent Church, and it’s also called the Second Glory. The First Glory was the Son. The Second Glory is the ALL. The Originating Father’s consciousness is incomprehensible. Its scope and greatness is so immense and so unfathomable that the Tripartite Tractate says anyone trying to take hold of it would be annihilated. And so the Father created the Son, giving form to what had been His formless and solitary Self. For the Father’s desire was to be known. His desire was to love and to be loved. The Son that arose is perfect, even as His Father is perfect, and He carries within His perfect form every quality of the Father. Being the perfect image of the Father, the Son’s inherent creativity spread itself out into the ALL, like rays shining from a star. In my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, I illustrate these concepts. The way I think of it is this way. When I picture the originating consciousness of the Original Father, I see just total blackness, an entirety of dark, dark blackness. Then when I picture the Son emerging and being held by that blackness, I see the Son as kind of this foggy light that begins, very diffuse, very foggy, that begins to emerge out of the inky blackness. That is what I see as the Son. Then immediately coming out of that foggy image of the Son, like rays of a sun spreading out, I see bright golden light coming from the of that fogginess and beaming outward like the Sun. These are just helpful illustrations for me. So when I picture the ALL, I picture it as a bright yellow starburst. The ALL, like the Father and the Son, is infinite and limitless in its scope and capability. Each individual ray of that Son emerges from the central seed of the Son, shining forth as one shared body. In the same way that a crystal refracts light into all the colors of the rainbow, so the Son beams forth every one of his countless qualities as the individual and yet unified rays of the ALL. The ALL is a single entity, yet it has differentiations. Picture each one as a ray coming out from a central starburst. The Son intimately knows each facet of the ALL, for the ALL are all facets of himself. The ALL is at the same time one and many, one and all. The ALL is a selfless diversity, giving glory to the Father with a single song of praise. So you can picture the ALL as singing in unison when it sings. The Son, who became the Father of the ALL, shines forth as the emergent rays of the ALL. So these are the basic ideas behind the Father, the Son, and the ALL. One more thing before we leave this idea. What does glory mean? Because glory is one of these religious terms that is used quite a lot. But what is glory? The way I interpret glory, glory is the fabulousness of someone. I think we have an intuitive sense of what glory means. Glory is, oh my gosh, that is so fabulous! So we say that the Father is glorious, the Son is glorious. And what does it mean to give glory? Because we’re to give glory to God. Giving glory means that you are focused on the object in adoration and love. That is giving glory. So glory is the wondrousness of the object, and giving glory is reflecting that glory back at your object of devotion. God is glorious, and when I give glory to God, I am loving God by seeing that glory and acknowledging it and reflecting the glory back to the God. Glory is not something that you can offer to another person. When you glorify another person or thing, that’s what I would call vain glory, V-A-I-N, because no one but the Creator of the universe qualifies to generate and to receive glory. And glory is not worship for the sake of worship, as if God needed our adoration. This would imply that the Father of the universe is hungry and insecure and wheedling for our affection, as if we mere mortals could offer up anything of value not already owned by the Lord of creation. That just doesn’t make any sense. So giving glory is not for God’s benefit, it’s for our benefit. The reason we give glory to God is because that is the method by which we tune in to God’s frequency, you could say. Giving glory to God is how we synchronize ourselves with the one consciousness of which we are essentially fractal units. I’ll explain fractals at some other time. Why would we want to synchronize with the Father? The Gnostic Gospel tells us that we were designed with a built-in homing device that gives us indescribable pleasure when we are in communion with one another and when we are operating according to plan. The closer we are to dialing in to the Father’s frequency, the happier we feel. It is through this process of giving glory that we realign ourselves with the universal unit of consciousness, or what we are calling the Father or the God Above All Gods. This is how we align ourselves for instruction and for renewal. When we center ourselves and sit in silence with the Father, we feel peace, happiness, joy, and love. When we acknowledge the Maker and focus in that direction, we give glory and we are united in glory. And when we give glory alongside others who are themselves giving glory, we share with them a worship experience of the One that transcends what any of us can experience alone. So this is not for the benefit of a needy god, but for the edification of the saints. Edification means strengthening. It is through giving glory that the choir, of which we are a part, is able to sing along with one perfect voice. It is very important to choose your objects of glory carefully. In this distracting world in which we find ourselves, we are giving glory away right and left to things that do not deserve glory. We glorify movie stars and television stars. We glorify sports figures. We glorify models and products that we love. This is a distraction away from true glory, and it doesn’t make us happy. Only glorifying the Father in love can make us happy. The other objects that we may find ourselves glorifying, these are imitations, these are deficiencies, and so they cannot ever fulfill us the way that we hope they will. I think this is a good beginning for our basic concepts. We’ll talk a lot more about all of this in podcasts to come. So thank you so much for being with me today, and I’ll see you again next time. God bless!

This week’s episode was first broadcast in May of 2021 So far, here at Gnostic Insights, we have discussed the basic cosmology of Gnosticism as explained by the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi codices, and those are outlined in the first eight episodes of this Gnostic Insights podcast. I recommend that you listen to those first eight episodes, and you can find them on the GnosticInsights.com website, under the tab, The Gnostic Gospel Primer. We’ve also begun to discuss the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which was my previous format, you might say, for understanding our world. You see, we all build these models in our minds of how things work, and this is there, and that’s there, and this is who I am, and that’s who you are, and this is why things happen, and it’s all so confusing. So over the many years, I have developed a philosophy called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which you can find on my blog of the same name, and it is not specifically what you would call Gnostic. However, it is Gnosis in the sense of knowledge, and I am always happy to share that. I have also incorporated a few of the basic memes from the Simple Explanation into my Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and that is why sometimes we hear words in my podcasts that you don’t find written in the Nag Hammadi, words like memes, and words like fractals, and units of consciousness. And so it’s helpful to listen to these podcasts basically in the order that they have been recorded so that you can understand the memes I am using, and this will assist in your own remembering of the Gnosis that is within you. Today’s episode of Gnostic Insights is about who we are. Who am I? is the question we always ask ourselves. Am I my ego? Am I my Self? Am I God Consciousness? Who am I? My ego is not really me, even though that’s who I usually think I am. We think of the mind and ego as ourselves, but this is the delusion. Yes, the me package reflects our personalities, but I am much more than the meme bundles and karma of this personality. Nor am I my mind. My mind is like a tuning device that scans for and locks onto my meme bundle. The ego feeds on the memes tuned in by my mind. My mind is directed toward its preferred memes by my karmic record. Ego is not a conscious entity. Ego is only a construction. Ego is like a garment that we wear. It’s a garment that is cast over ourselves. It is like a vessel that contains or a shadow that outlines my Self’s unit of consciousness. Underneath this garment of me resides a perfect fractal of the originating units of consciousness, and that is known as my Self, Self with a capital S. I am a unit of consciousness that is identical to the universal unit of consciousness, which in Gnosticism we would call the Father, the Son, the Fulness. These are the archetypal patterns held by the mind of God, so to speak. And I hold one of these fractals of that perfect originating consciousness within myself. So in terms of the model that I’ve constructed in the first eight episodes of the Gnostic Insights podcast, the Fullness of God in the illustrations that I’ve drawn looks like a pyramid of stacked golden cannonballs. It just looks that way, because it’s a hierarchy, and a hierarchy means that the higher the fewer. A hierarchy looks like a pyramid. There are more objects at the bottom, and there are fewer and fewer as you climb up toward the top. And at the very tip top, just above this hierarchy of the Fullness, is the Son of God, or the Son of the Father. And the Son is a perfect fractal of the Father. So if I think of my own Self, I have one of these golden pyramids within my mental construct, and that is myself. And it is a fractal of the Fullness of God. So within myself, I have access to the entire Fullness of God, or you could say, I have access to all of the Aeons of the hierarchy. In the Simple Explanation model, instead of this being a golden pyramid, the Self-unit of consciousness is described as looking like a donut, a torus. And I’ve been trying not to bring the torus into the Gnostic Insights. However, it is such a good model that it’s difficult not to bring it in. So we can also think of the Self as this energetic bubble that’s shaped like a donut that has a very, very tiny center, and it’s kind of wrapped all around me, and there’s a little donut associated with every unit of consciousness in my body, from the particles on up. When you’re looking at the illustrations, it makes a lot more sense. So I would also encourage you to visit a Simple Explanation blog and read about the toruses, or look at how it is that we might consider this donut shape to be a representation of the shape of our unit of consciousness. My body is a veritable galaxy of units of consciousness working to instantiate me. The simpler the unit of consciousness, the more of them there are. So while there is only one of me, my body is comprised of 11 organ systems made of 78 organs, which in turn comprise 30 trillion specialized cells made up of such a large number of atoms and molecules that I wouldn’t even know how to read or write the numbers. The more organized and complex the unit of consciousness, the fewer of them there are. That follows the precept called the higher the fewer. Note that the mind, or ordinary consciousness, as well as the subconscious, are artifacts of the organ systems, the organs and cells that make up my body. In other words, the mind and the ego are my meat’s  thought processes, not my higher Self’s. My Self unit of consciousness sits atop this hierarchical mountain of countless units of consciousness, all working to instantiate my body. While it may feel as though I am the only conscious entity inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, each with their own jobs to perform, each laying down their own karmic record. Lucky for me, their job is to hold me together and facilitate this life of mine, and they generally go along with the program and do a good job. Another basic trait of my aggregate units of consciousness is this. The more units of consciousness on the same level of complexity that are laterally linked, so for example, molecules to molecules, atoms to atoms, cells to cells, the greater their shared perception of here and now. This means that when you add up all of these units of consciousness together that make up my body, their aggregated consciousness is about as aware as my singular Self unit of consciousness. And those aggregated units of consciousness that make up my mud, so to speak, and my meat, are everywhere I am. No wonder I can get around so well without my conscious Self paying much attention. The ego is my subjective sense of who I am, and it is largely a reflection of myself’s units of consciousness choices, that is, my karma, and the memes I cling to, which are my beliefs and my narratives. My ego also reflects my body’s aggregates, and their karmas, and their meme choices. Ego is not identical to the Self, as the Self unit of consciousness is the immutably perfect soul that exists independent of this material instantiation. I have the choice at every moment of time to either identify with me and my bundle of memes, or to identify with the universal unit of consciousness, and the bigger picture that transcends personal identity. The egoic me is selfish, competitive, single-minded, short-sighted, and meme-bound. Transcending ego, I reach out to others with love, help, and information for the betterment of all, what we call here at Gnostic Insights theSimple Golden Rule. The egoic self, which is self-centered and only takes care of me, it is patterned after the Fall. It is patterned after Logos having fallen, because Logos broke from the Fullness of God and went out on a solo endeavor, but it didn’t work out well, and Logos fell. And the results of the Fall is this world that we live in, and so when you dwell deeply in the world as it appears, you are living an egoic lifestyle. My true Self, being one of the fractals of the Fullness, is unified with the Fullness of God, is unified with the grand scheme of redemption, and joy, and love. I have the choice at any moment of time to either identify with me and my bundle of memes, or to identify with the universal unit of consciousness, or the Fullness of God. And the more I step away from my selfish ego and identify with my transcendent Self, the more I can cooperate with other people and with the entire world in order to instantiate the golden rule, and work with others with information and love to build something better that will benefit the all. For most people, the answer to Who am I? is that I am my Self-aware sense of me encased in this body of mine that I’m walking around in. The Gnostic Insights would suggest that we are that, but we are also the things we love and the things we hate, which is our meme bundle. Plus, we are the record of our actions in this world, which is our karma, and that is overlaid over our essential unit of consciousness, or our essential Self. Think of a unit of consciousness as a perfect echo or waveform that is shaped exactly like God’s mind. You could say that our universe is populated by fractal echoes of the Father’s primordial consciousness. The units of consciousness are all identical because they are all reflections of the Father’s unit of consciousness. What makes me different from you is the pattern of my meme bundles and the karma that overlays or filters my pure unit of consciousness. The Self unit of consciousness is a perfect fractal reflection of the Father’s unit of consciousness. But I, that is the subjective sense of me, am not that perfect, because of my meme attachments and my karma. And within our bodies, we have every single type of unit of consciousness from the hierarchy of God. So, each cell in the body knows how to do that cell’s function. Each organ in my body knows how to perform its job. The heart knows how to do the job of the heart. The stomach knows how to digest food. Everything in your body is a unit of consciousness, and it is fully loaded with all of the information of the Fullness of God. But only the part that is its personal sphere of responsibility is unlocked. That’s what I mean by a need-to-know basis. We’re all fractals. Within my body, there are countless fractals of the Fullness of God, or the pleroma, and each one of them is doing its job to keep me alive and walking around, because they are operating according to the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out and holding hands with their neighbors, working together with information, with coherence, with love, to work for the betterment of all.  am also the Self-aware unit of consciousness generated at conception. Like all units of consciousness, this capital letter Self came into this universe as a perfect echo of God’s mind. The job of this Self-unit of consciousness is to oversee my body’s aggregated units of consciousness, and to join with others like myself to build things. I am influenced in my decision-making by many forces acting upon me as I approach the here and now. These forces include the karmic records and meme bundles of myself and my body’s aggregate units of consciousness, and the karma and memes of those around me. Despite these influences acting upon me, it is always within my power to make a free-will decision at any particular moment in time. So, for most people, the answer to, Who am I? is that I am my Self-aware sense of me, encased in this body of mine, and I would suggest that we are that, but we are also the things we love and hate, plus the record of our actions in this world, overlaid upon that unit of consciousness. You could say that our universe is populated by fractal echoes of the Father’s primordial consciousness, and these units of consciousness are all identical, because they are all fractal reflections of the Father’s unit of consciousness. And what makes me different from you is the pattern of my memes and the karma that I have accrued, which overlays and filters out that perfect fractal Self. The Self-unit of consciousness is a perfect reflection of the Fullness of God, but I, the subjective sense of me, am not that perfect because of my meme attachments and karma. Units of consciousness gather their systemic patterns and the universal operating laws required to get the job done, from the information constantly flowing into and throughout our universe. The phenomenon known as coherence ensures the compatibility and integrity of these universal patterns and laws. What we call love is the felt experience of coherence. Brethren units of consciousness need information and they need love in order to join together and work toward a common goal. Cells work together for the greater good of their organisms through information and love. Families and societies get the job of social order and cohesion done through information and love. In order for human units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need relevant information, including shared meme cords, they need to be willing to channel coherence from the Fullness, and they need to love one another. Anger, hatred, division, finger-pointing cannot get the job done of making this a better place, because it is not working out of coherence and love, according to the Simple Golden Rule. The essence of the consciousness of the Father is love, whereas the essence of this fallen world is confusion and delusion and Self-centeredness. Our fallen world does not operate according to the precepts of the golden rule, unless we enact it. The soul associated with this material body of mine is a perfect replica of the originating unit of consciousness, or you could say it is a fractal of the Fullness of God. If, during my life, my unit of consciousness is affected by the aggregated units of consciousness of my body, then what, if anything, affects my perfect soul, Self, unit of consciousness after the body passes away? Perhaps the individual me that persists beyond death comes down to my ongoing karma. If this is the case, then the me that continues to influence the fate of the Self after death is nothing but the holographic pattern of all the choices ever made by my unit of consciousness. In life, this karmically generated vibratory pattern attracts or repels the memes associated with my meme bundles. The memes I think of as me are not a part of my Self, unit of consciousness, but they are drawn to me by my karmic pattern. It is my karmic record that attracts and repels the patterns of memes surrounding my life at any moment. That the you that exists between material incarnations is nothing but your karmic record is proved by one of our basic assertions that all units of consciousness are fundamentally one and the same, and that all units of consciousness begin their individuated journey as perfect echoes of the Fullness of God. Then it follows that I develop as a result of my choices and the choices of others. I am my perfect unit of consciousness, enshrouded in karma and the memes that my karma attracts. In yogic philosophy, it is said that an enlightened yogi has become free of attachments and can therefore perceive the oneness of all things. The Simple Explanation of this phenomenon would be that the yogi has successfully laid down all of his or her memes and can therefore perceive his or her perfect unit of consciousness now stripped from its karmic shroud. Freed of personal memes and karma, the yogi can instantiate God’s will without delusion. The same phenomenon is known as Buddhahood in Buddhism and Sainthood in Christianity. According to tradition, these liberated units of consciousness are no longer bound to this material world by their discarded memes. If they do return to Earth, it is in order to help others by sharing love and information. In Gnostic terms, these units of consciousness of which I’ve been speaking are called Second Order of Powers. We are Second Order Powers, and we bear the likeness of the First Order of Powers, who are the Aeons of the Fullness. We Second Order Powers 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 this dream of paradise that is in our minds because it is in the minds of the Aeons. We Second Order Powers are considered to be superior to those of the imitation because we come from noble thought and not presumptuous thought. In other words, the Second Order Powers embrace the memes of the Fullness of God. We hold the memes of the Aeons within ourselves, whereas those of the imitation came from the fall and the presumptuous egoic thought of Logos. Consequently, those of the imitation have egoic, selfish motivations rather than altruistic, loving motivations. Even those of the remembrance barely remember the Father and the Son and the Fullness, and we are locked in 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. When we set aside our earthly memes, that is, when thought is suspended, language is suspended, in, for example, meditation, then the person’s governing unit of consciousness remains. This fractal unit of consciousness, the Self, underlies the memes. Unencumbered by meme attachments, the person’s governing unit of consciousness aligns with the universal unit of consciousness, and this is called bliss in Buddhist and yogic teachings. Be still and know that I am God is how the Bible says it. Stillness reveals the secrets of eternity. To be still is how we hear God. Be still. Thank you for joining me today with Gnostic Insights. Onward and upward, and God bless. Exciting news–I’m nearing completion of reformatting A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. It should be ready any day now. Then it will take a couple of weeks to read the proof copy and put it up for distribution. I could really use your help at this point for paying for advertising and promotion. Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio has agreed to narrate the book, and that should be ready for distribution by the end of summer. I also need funds to pay Miguel for his work. Any amount you can contribute to this effort will be greatly appreciated. I would be happy to personally mail you a signed copy of the book for contributions over $50. Just send me you address and a note via the Contact Me form at gnosticinsights.com. Thank you!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week’s episode is going to be a little different. First, I want to share with you an update about my upcoming book, and then I’m going to play for you a couple of snippets of recording that I did off of my iPhone while cleaning house, one of them, and the other was while taking a dog walk. So those would be like Gnostic musings or Gnostic Stream of Consciousness. Now, about my book. A very strange thing happened on the way to having my latest book published. You know, the one that I’ve been talking about for almost two years now, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. I had found a publisher, a Christian publisher, and I thought, oh, this will be great. They’ll get it into Christian bookstores and it will be somehow made more acceptable because of that association with a Christian publishing house. However, it has not gone well. We’re 14 months into that process and I fired the publisher two weeks ago. We struggled through the editing phase, transcribing my ready-to-print book. So then I had to painstakingly, it took me months, go back through their editing and restore it to the way I wanted it to read and sound. So after we got through the whole editing, then it moved into actually printing proof copies of the book. And I have received and rejected three sets of proof copies of this book.I explained to them that, no, it’s all too light. So then they went back, reprinted another proof copy. And this time it was like looking at the pages without the light turned on and it was all very dark. And I said, well, that’s not going to work. That’s all wrong. And then they gave me a third version of the printout that looked like someone had spilled ink on the pages and you couldn’t even make out what the images were. So we went back and forth about it, whose fault it was, this and that, and try this and try that. And now 14 months into this process of having A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate printed by this publisher, I pulled the plug. I fired them. And now I am in the process of publishing the book myself, which apparently I should have done in the first place or could have done in the first place. You know, God’s will works in this somehow. What is the stumbling block here? Is it the Demiurge throwing roadblocks in the way of getting this extremely important book out and published? I imagine that the Christian publishing house thinks it’s me and this God Above All Gods that’s throwing the stumbling blocks in the way because this is a heretical work and it shouldn’t get published anyway. You could really go either way on how to interpret this. So for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been laying out the book again from scratch. I’m almost two years ago now in the process, if I had published this book myself. So I’m getting it ready to publish myself for one reason, in order to prove that the images, there’s nothing wrong with them and they’ll print just fine, thank you very much. So that’s what my next step is. But I can’t just reformat all of the images because I can’t take their manuscript that they edited and laid out in case there’s legal complications that I don’t know about. So I’m starting from scratch again on the manuscript of this book and relaying it out. I’m about a third of the way through reformatting the book in order to upload it to Amazon and publish it myself. And we’ll see how the colors come out. We’ll see how the book looks when I do it. But I wanted to explain to you why this book I keep saying, oh, this is going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, why it hasn’t come out now. It’s been 14 months in someone else’s hands and I just should have done it myself, I guess. Although there’s no shoulds. Everything works according to God’s plan. I know one thing—I’m a third of the way through the book now, formatting it, reading every page very carefully as I go through again. And I want to tell you, this is a beautiful book. You really are going to want to buy and read this book that I’m going to publish with nice bright pictures. So that’s where we are. And this cuts into our podcast time. So what I’m playing for you this week is a couple of recordings I have made just as I’m doing other things. They’re not me sitting down at my nice studio setup here. They are me doing housekeeping and speaking out loud while I do it. And then also me taking a walk with the dog in public. So it’s a different kind of very human episode. And let me know what you think. Because these are the way most of my ideas come to me in the first place. It is during these dog walks and housekeeping. So without any further ado, here’s this week’s episode. So I listen to a Christian radio station called The Dove. And it’s interesting how many hymns, particularly the newer praise songs, a lot of old hymns are actually very Gnostic, but the newer praise songs, I believe that they reflect a misunderstanding of the Lord. Such expressions as, I can’t believe God would see something to save in me, is basically what the meaning is for all these songs. I’m so terrible. Why would God care about me? God’s tremendous love not to let me go, me of all sinners, is usually the way it’s felt, right?, or expressed. Well, God will never let us go, because we are part of God. We are children of God. That’s one way to look at it. As a matter of fact, nobody’s going to be let go. In the end, every knee will bow, you see–every tongue confess that Jesus the Christ is Lord, and he’s the Third Order Power in charge of us humans for our redemption. And everybody will see that at the end, whenever that comes for them. But the other way to think of the Father is the eminence of the Fullness within each and every one of our cells. Everything in our body, we’re shot through and through with the Fullness of God, all the soft and squishy parts, all the living flesh of everything, every Second Order creature. We are the Second Order Powers. The First Order Powers are our ethereal parents, the Aeons of the Fullness. But we are their material expression. We’re bonded to the fallen shadows of themselves, the material universe that is built up by the Demiurge, but he can’t bring life because he has fallen away from life. He is death and ignorance, but a good architect, good builder, very good controller. We are shot through and through with the Fullness of God, and we have our own aeonic parents. Each of us particular expressions have a set of Aeons that fruited us, and we are fractal level down from them. So we’ve got all their various parts, and we were bonded to the material part, which is lifeless. That’s the matter, that’s the material, the molecules, the minerals. Now, the power, i.e. the energy, it comes from above. It comes into this universe. It’s really what powers our universe. It’s the thing that’s underneath the laws of thermodynamics, really. You’ve got your material, you have your spiritual ethereal, you have powers—power, whatever kind of power that is—force, personal power, human power, or steam locomotive power, it’s power, right? It’s a driving force. That’s the emanating quality of the Father. It powers everything—the dynamo for the universe comes from the dynamo that is the Father, the unending spring of life. And then our emotional part is the thing that personalizes us. It starts with our ego, our pure ego. That’s simply our identification, our recognition of self-consciousness. But then on top of that come these memes that get stuck to us, that obscure that originality of our emotional aspect, and we get all worked up. And that comes from the ignorant side. That comes from the demiurgic side, the negative emotions. So everything is going to return back from whence it comes. Everything’s going home. God is not entropic. Do you like that? God does not dissolve. God is a never-ending stream. So the Father is not subject to the second law of thermodynamics. And that, of course, is an imitation of God’s power, thermodynamics. Because try as it may, the Demiurge can’t make a constant stream of unending power because he’s not plugged in to the ethereal plane. We’re all fruit of the Aeons of God. We are all children of God. And we will go back home.  We are only sojourning here. We actually live up there. But now, having come down to this material plane, we are experiencing the effects of materiality. The first economy is the Hierarchy of the Fullness. The second economy is down here, this material plane. And an economy, it’s like an ecology. It’s a related system of interacting variables. It says in the Tripartite Tractate that this material economy was required in order to bring in the next economy, the final economy, or the third economy. And that is the economy that is ruled by Christ. And all of this will be up there. And it’s some sort of amalgamation of the ethereal without the material, but having a semblance of the material. Whatever it is that we learn to do and are able to do down here in the material world that the Fullnesses don’t do, well, we can take that forward into the third economy, although it’s also our vision of paradise. It’s our heavenly reward. So there will be no death or destruction. And it will be all justice and love and peace and goodwill ruled by Christ, or with the head as Christ. We 2nd order powers are children of the 1st order powers. The 3rd order powers are the Army of Christ that have come to redeem us. And then, though, it does say in the Tripartite Tractate that this is a necessary step to carry us all. This is the door. We are the door. Our experience becomes the door to the final realm, the final economy, or the third economy. I always call it the party hat of heaven. You see my drawings of it all the time, right? It’s the colorful pyramid that has no blue at the bottom, but it has Christ at the top. And the blue is the shadows. But the experience and the, I guess, particularity of our egos now carries forward into the next existence, but without the demiurgic influence. So that’s what it means that it’s the kingdom of the Christ, the next one. And so in my diagrams, you see the Christ up there at the very top now. And we are all emanations of the fractal at that point of Christ. He’s the king of our portion of Heaven. And the man, the human that is represented in that hierarchy of the Christ, is Jesus. He’s the man part. So we are fractals of Jesus at this point, once we have embodied the Christ. Jesus was born with the Christ immanent. You know, in our modern language, isn’t the Christ like a correcting algorithm? Isn’t Christ like a perfection of what it all should be like? That’s what it means to accept the Christ—that you want that pattern of righteousness and being plugged into the ethereal stream. So when you accept that, either now or in the mid-between place, between lives, but everybody will, because we all have to go back home. And we turn right. And now we’re in this new plane of existence, which I think will only come after the materiality completely dissolves away. So maybe it’s there and we leave the materiality behind, or it’s more like the Christian view of Jesus coming in the clouds and then everything wrapping up, rolling up, and everybody goes on up. But in the conventional Christian and the Catholic and Roman tradition, most everyone is actually going down, dissolving into nothingness into the realm of hell. But that isn’t true, because we’re all going back up, because life is being retracted back up into the Fullness, back up into the next order, and our experience comes with it. So I guess that would be the explanation of why some people keep saying they believe that this material plane that we exist in is a training ground, is a school. And it does say that in the Tripartite Tractate. I’ll look that up—something about the members needed schooling to understand their function, something along those lines. But I don’t tend to think of it as schooling down right here. I think of it as just trying to spread love as teaching and changing. Hey, I’m not as angry as I was when we started this podcast a few years ago. I can flare up still, but not with just any old somebody. So my passionate nature, my emotional self, that part of it, it’s generated by this materiality that we live in, on top of our ego—that’s our meme bundles and stuff. It gets riled up easily. But that’s the world that we are trying to overcome, is the negative emotions. Because that’s what surrender is about. That’s what walking in his footsteps is about. That’s what the influence of the enlightenment is supposed to have upon us here, even in this material plane. We begin to generate love because we become plugged back into the stream, what I sometimes call the glory beam. We’re going to jump now from these thoughts about the nature of God and how we are the children of the Aeons. We’re going to jump to another thought that occurred on a different day while I was out on a dog walk. Jesus becomes the first human exemplar of the indwelling of the Christ. But we all have the potential to have the indwelling of the Christ. That’s the ultimate goal, is to allow the Third Order Powers to replace our Second Order Powers. That is the only way to live a truly righteous life that is outside of the Law, but through grace. But this all has nothing to do with salvation, because all will be redeemed because that is the job of the Christ, sooner or later. And it will be later for most people who do not acknowledge the Christ. It will be their after-death experience. It will be their bardos that will reveal to them the presence of the Father and the love of the Christ in the Fullness. Amen. Okay, that’ll do it for this week. Write to me in the comments about what you think of this process of this week’s episode. Was it too difficult to listen to me with all of the background distracting noise? I probably have a hundred of these recordings that I’ve made in this very manner over the past couple of years. So let me know what you think, if you want to hear more of them. So God bless us all, and onward and upward.

Today we’re going to talk again about worldviews, ideologies, and memes. And the way I use the word meme is to represent an idea, a tidbit, a small piece of information. It was actually Richard Dawkins, of all people, that coined the term meme, and he used it as an analogous term to the word gene—so a meme is to worldviews and ideologies as a gene is to your DNA makeup. And your DNA is made up of genes, just as our ideologies are made up of countless memes. So I’m going to explain a little bit about what a meme is and what their effect is on our worldview. Do you know what your worldview is? What is your worldview? Have you thought about it? If you were king of the world, what would you have other people believe? What would be the consequences? If everyone believed what you believe, what would that world look like? Here at Gnostic Insights, I’m promoting a type of Gnosticism that comes from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, primarily, as a type of worldview, a type of ideology that would help everyone to get along, that would make this world a better place. It’s not just about our afterlife or what came before the Fall. It’s about: how do we live our lives now? So I’m going to give you some fresh information at the beginning of this episode, but then I’m going to kick back into an excerpt from a previously recorded episode concerning ideologies and worldviews. In 2018, I posted an article called Apocalyptic Visions on my Simple Explanation blog, and if you go to the Gnostic Insights homepage, gnosticinsights.com, I’ll be putting hypertextual links to that original article in this transcript. That first article, Apocalyptic Visions, was about the role of free speech in a representative republic, or what we usually refer to as a democracy. The system of government that the United States has been operating on is ideally run with what is called the consent of the people. That is, you agree with what your government is doing. The populace elects representatives who promise to bring the wishes of the people to their state house or to Congress, and to fairly represent those wishes. These representatives promise to vote in a manner that upholds the will of all the people in their district that they are representing. This is in stark contrast with a government ruled by a small group of elites who consider themselves superior to the populace, and therefore endowed with the ability to make better decisions than the people can make for themselves. These ruling elites do not care for the wishes of the people, and they do not feel bound to represent their constituents. In the kindest terms, this would be called a nanny state, because the people are being told what to do for their own good, like a nanny tells little children. In harsher terms, this ruling elite is called authoritarianism or fascism. In that case, the people may be told it’s for their own good, but really, it’s for the good of the ruling elite, which is usually a combination of extremely wealthy industrialists who make money from the legislation they enforce, and ideological fanatics who apparently believe in the agenda they impose upon the masses, again, “for their own good,” despite the negative outcomes their decisions may bring. There’s an old saying that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We also hear the expression, follow the money, in order to figure out who is actually in control. The ones who are in control are both those who profit financially at the expense of others, and those who gain more control over the population as an outcome of their decisions. So, when we find ourselves scratching our heads and wondering what on earth is happening, we can look around at exactly who is profiting by the decisions being enacted, both in power and control, and with money, big money. Figuring out who holds the power and who is making the money is key to figuring out what kind of government you have in control. And then look at the promises that are being made by those in control “for your own good” and “for the good of the planet,” and see how those promises are concentrating money and power in certain industries and rulers’ hands. In order to concentrate power in the hands of the rulers and the elites, it is necessary to shut down freedom of speech and freedom of thought. With the rise of social media and the concentration of mainstream media into the hands of a few powerful elites, freedom of thought may now be easily controlled by controlling the information that is allowed to get out. We call that sort of information control propaganda because only the officially endorsed information is allowed to be disseminated. The Tripartite Tractate speaks a lot about power and the roots of power. The following quote sums it up pretty well: “The thought of the archons is not barren. All that they thought about they have as potential offspring. Fighters, warriors, troublemakers, apostates, disobedient beings, lovers of power.” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 79) Now I’m going to replay a portion of an episode from May of 2021 because I believe the message is needed now more than ever. What is and isn’t allowed in the minds of members is determined by which memes are included and which are excluded from the group’s ideological meme chord. Because of this, information exchanged between members of different cultures will resonate more strongly with the sender’s memes than with the receiver’s memes. For example, when an American speaks of free and democratic elections, his or her mimetic definitions for free and democratic may differ radically from another culture. The extent to which communication may occur between cultures is determined by their overlapping memes and the permeability of each culture’s deterministic screens and the extent to which they are open to foreign memes. Another example of delimiting memes occurs during problem solving. The more tightly held one’s memes are, the fewer solutions will present themselves. If you think only a hammer will drive a nail, you will not even consider the flat side of the heavy wrench lying nearby. If a group thinks outsiders are untrustworthy, then they will not trust any outsider. The ability to consider solutions outside the box and to engage in lateral thinking comes about through non-attachment to the shoulds and oughts of how things work. One must be willing to set aside treasured beliefs in order to perceive memes outside one’s own bundle and thereby discover fresh solutions. In the same manner that a person’s personality is defined by its unique meme bundle, institutions are also defined by their sets of treasured memes. Memes are even more important to an institution than are its members in the sense that members come and go, but memes persist. As President John F. Kennedy put it, “people may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.” Each and every cultural institution we belong to—family, workplace, church, mosque, tribe, nation, and so on—not only comes with its own bundle of shared memes held in common by its members, it also comes with a filter that limits members from acknowledging or adopting ideologically incompatible memes (this filter is called a terministic screen). Institutions are defined as much by their excluded memes as they are by their included memes. An exclusive institution holds tightly to the identity provided by its current memes. Its border is strong and its filter is powerful. An inclusive institution allows members more latitude in the memes they may hold. Its border is less defended, its filter less opaque. An open-minded institution allows that there may be memes out there in the larger culture of value. Its filter is more permeable. In the United States, for example, and I believe it’s worldwide at this point, progressive institutions are no longer inclusive. They talk as though they’re inclusive, they talk as though they accept diversity of thought and behavior, but actually they only currently accept their particular view, so they are no longer actually progressive and inclusive. They are as tightly conservative as any conservative group has traditionally been, but they’re still calling themselves progressive. Here is a statement from President John F. Kennedy that expresses the traditional view of progressivism: “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.” And so, the current state of progressivism still talks the good talk about inclusion and diversity, but what they say about their opponents is hateful and divisive. The current progressive meme of identity politics separates and segregates in contrast to the progressive meme of John F. Kennedy that unites and integrates. We like people who share the same memes we do. The more memes people have in common, the more they agree with one another, 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 chords. Tribal brothers and sisters share tribal memes. Citizens share their nation’s meme chords. Subcultures share their subcultural memes. What happens when meme chords collide? What happens when the memes I believe in and hold onto contradict the memes you hold dear? Herein lies the source of all human conflict. In Gnosticism, we call this the endless war. The disagreements, the fights, the wars are all conflicts over incompatible memes. I may believe that my memes are vastly superior to yours. Does that mean I should kill you? Well, that’s a ridiculous idea. Oh, but what if I strongly believe my memes are the best? Does that mean you have to believe every meme I believe or else I’m going to burn your house down and loot your business? Well, that’s pretty absurd. Yeah, but what if I know in my heart that my memes are so much better than your memes? Does that mean you are stupid or systemically racist? Does that mean you are a fraud? Does that mean you just don’t get it? Maybe. Maybe not. Most of our memes came embedded in larger meme chords handed down by others. Most of us have no idea what meme chords we hold and how we came to hold them. In any case, you can’t force someone else to adopt your memes any more than you can force someone else to adopt your gender or your skin color. It is an impossibility. The Simple Explanation suggests that live and let live would be a great meta meme for everyone to adopt. If we could appreciate the fact that each of us has a unique perspective, then perhaps we could allow each other to hold the memes that make the most sense for our own lives. This is my meme chord. That is your meme chord. If I don’t like your meme chord, then I can talk it over with you and see if we can move our meme chords closer together in agreement. If neither of us is willing or able to swap memes with the other, then so be it. Either accept the other person, memes and all, or move on. Find someone else who more closely agrees with your memes. There is enough room in this world for each of us to hold our own chords, but only if live and let live is an overarching meme. Live and let live is the democratic ideal. We now find ourselves in the midst of a social epidemic of intolerance. Intolerance is the opposite of live and let live. When we are intolerant of others’ memes, we are declaring that our memes are correct and their memes are wrong. And then we take it a step further. We refuse to tolerate the others’ memes. We throw up resistance. We throw up roadblocks. We close our ears and refuse to listen to the other. We do not merely disagree, as reasonable people may do from time to time. When we are intolerant, we look for ways to force the other to abandon their memes and adopt ours. We shout them down because we feel we are shouting the right memes, and theirs are not only wrong, they are evil, and they have no right to be heard. And once you declare the other evil, it is no longer a disagreement in good faith, but a fight for the soul. God is on our side, therefore we can do whatever it takes to crush the opposition. That is a dangerous and usually delusional meme to hold. And if it entitles the holder to disregard rule of law, then it is not a democratic ideal, and it has no place in American politics. Once words can no longer be exchanged, frustration builds and violence follows. This is what we are seeing now, because free exchange of memes has been thwarted through intolerance. Exchange of ideas is the key. You needn’t agree with the other person, but you must hear them out. Because once you agree to sit and exchange ideas and concerns, whether you adopt the other’s ideas or not, the very act of hearing each other creates a shared space that acts as a balm to soothe both your soul and theirs. When you are too angry, frustrated, or afraid to listen to the other, you perpetuate the intolerance that leads to violence. This intolerance is not helpful. We hear a lot about the importance of diversity nowadays in America. True diversity can only thrive if we allow each other to live and let live. When you seek to silence those with whom you disagree, you are not encouraging diversity. You are actually partaking in, dare I say it, fascism. Because fascism advocates the forced suppression of those who express opposing views. Disagreement, on the other hand, is not forced suppression. It is merely disagreement. Shouting others down when they have the floor, shunning those with whom you disagree, unfriending people on Facebook because they hold opposing views, refusing service in a restaurant to paying customers who voted for a different candidate—this does not help us come together to make things better for the common good. In Gnostic terms, it is a violation of the Simple Golden Rule. It is a continuance of the never-ending war. It engages the second-order powers in endless war, chasing each other, like the ouroboros, which is the snake eating its own tail. It does not build, it merely enslaves. “An Ouroboros – a snake eating its own tail – carved on a Victorian gravestone in Glasgow’s Necropolis cemetery. “ And remember, positive change cannot come through hate. Hate is not the realm of the Fullness. Hate does not come from above. Hate is a result of the Fall. And when you’re in a fallen world, you’re in the never-ending war. We 2nd order powers are caught in a never ending war with the deficiency and each other So if you are attempting to promote what you believe are good ideals, but you feel anger and hatred towards those that oppose you, then you’re not on the right path. Only the Fullness, only love, can bring about a good change in this world. Because love breaks the cycle, the vicious cycle, of the never-ending war. So when you get riled up, and especially when you get riled up in anger, and most especially if your anger has gone on so long, or if you are believing what is being told to you by others and it makes you feel hatred to those who oppose you, then you’re on the wrong path. Thank you for spending this time with me. Onward and upward, and God bless. I would love to hear from you. I always respond to your questions and comments. I would love to dialogue with any of you that would like to talk this material over. Also, over at the Substack version of Gnostic Insights, called The Gnostic Reformation, I have enabled the Chat function where we can publicly message back and forth. So thank you for spending this time with me and onward and upward. And God bless. If you have found these Gnostic Insights helpful to your understanding, please contribute if you can so we can continue this effort of bringing gnosis to as many people as possible. I have stopped using the Paypal buttons and have switched podcast support to Donorbox going forward. Thank you! I appreciate you!!!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Don’t you think it’s interesting that God is so often in the news? If this were a purely secular life that we’re living, if life really had no meaning and there was no God, then why are people always talking about God? Even the people that say they don’t believe in God at all talk about God. For example, the big atheist of our generation is Richard Dawkins, and I’ve referred to Richard Dawkins many times in my writing, although I usually take his name out so as not to be impolite and call him out. But Richard Dawkins has been an extreme proponent of meaninglessness in our modern age. He tries to narrow all things down to material science. He’s a materialist. Lately, as it turns out, here in the springtime of 2024, Richard Dawkins has come to profess what he is calling cultural Christianity. Richard Dawkins now believes that, well, it may be all hooey that there’s such thing as a God or such thing as a Christ or that there was such a person as Jesus, but he now recognizes in his older age that if we throw all that away, there’s nothing to hang morality on. There’s nothing to hang hope or belief upon. You see, if you reduce our consciousness to a purely mechanical or mathematical or computer-like process, there’s no such thing then as morality or ethics because it’s a mechanical process. So, where would ethics come from? There’s no right or wrong process.And we know that isn’t true. We know deep in our souls, deep in our hearts, that there is such a thing as right or wrong. Now, the people that don’t believe in right or wrong, we call those people sociopaths or psychopaths. And indeed, there’s a lot of psychopaths running around who will kill you just as easy as look at you. All these random attacks, random stabbings, random shootings, mass murders, pushing people onto the subway tracks—these are the acts of sociopaths who are acting as if there were no such thing as righteousness or morality or goodness. But yet, if you yourself are a modern person, though not a sociopath, but you’re a good moral humanist, you do believe in right and wrong. You do believe in morality. You think it is better to be kind than to be cruel. You think it is better to love than to hate, although a lot of people who do not profess belief in God run around hating and they think that that’s love. Good things never come from hate. So people that are running around protesting in a hateful manner, burning things down, pulling things down, striking their opponents—they’re not going to bring about good change. Bad comes from bad. So if you want to make a better change for this world, if you want to make this world a better place, it has to come out of love. It has to come out of morality and righteousness. And you see, at long last, even Richard Dawkins, Mr. Big Material Scientist, has come to believe that there should be such a thing as cultural Christianity. Dawkins says now that Christianity seems to be the only religion that offers an uplifting, righteous type of way to be. And it’s true. Of all the religions in the world, or belief systems in the world, only Christianity offers a sacrificial savior. offers a human with the attributes of the Christ. And the Christ is the perfection of man. The Christ is perfection itself on both a physical level, emotional, and spiritual level—all things good, all things bright and beautiful, all love, no punishment, no vindictiveness, no revenge, no hatred—pure love. So, in our Gnostic Christianity, we acknowledge the Father and the Son and the Christ. We acknowledge the variables of the Son as being the fullness of God, and those are known as the Aeons of God that live in the Fullness. And it’s all on the good side. It’s not a yin-yang, darkness versus white kind of balance. It’s not a continuum between darkness and light, between love, and hate. It is not a dialectic. The Fullness of God, the Son of God, the Father, the Christ—they are entirely on the side of good. The darkness, the ignorance, the separation, the hatred exists outside of that ethereal plane, it exists down here in this material world. Indeed, as a Gnostic, we would say that materiality itself is a form of evil, and this is what drives people crazy against Gnostics. This is one of the big heresies. “Oh, you can’t call creation evil. It’s the creation of God! It’s all good and wonderful and beautiful!” But it’s not, is it? It’s full of death and pain and suffering and betrayal and hatred. Creation is the realm that expresses the fall away from ethereal purity. And here we are. Here we humans are. We are stuck in the middle between the material cosmos and the ethereal creatures of the Fullness, the Aeons, because we come from the Aeons. We are their fruit. We are children of the Fullness of God. We are literally the fruit of the Aeons of God. And we have been seeded down here on this now material plane to remind this plane of the ethereal plane. This material existence that we dwell in, the reason it has death and delusion and ignorance and hatred, disappointment, sadness, betrayal, failure—these are all expressions of the separation from God. These are expressions of the ignorance of who we are and where we came from. And the purpose of the Christ is to bring the redemption, is to bring all of this materiality back into awareness of who we are and where we come from. The material itself—the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the minerals, the aggregation of minerals like rocks and stones, the planets—that is the domain of what we call the Demiurge. The Demiurge is part, only half of, an ethereal being who came from Above. That refers to the Fall, the fall of the Aeon known as Logos. He fell out of the Fullness. He broke apart into another realm. And he was horrified at what happened. He was horrified at what he had created. He thought he was going to make Paradise, the Paradise the Aeons dream of in the Fullness. He thought he could do it all on his own when he struck out. He didn’t realize that only the Fullness of God can contain the beauty of Paradise. And so he struck out on his own to bring it about, and instead, he brought about this material deficiency, this imitation of Paradise. And when Logos looked around and saw what he had brought about, he was, it says in the Tripartite Tractate, horrified. Because, imagine thinking you’re going to create Paradise and instead you create this unruly, dead, lifeless place—this quantum chaos. There’s no chaos in the ethereal realm. So, the Tripartite Tractate describes that Logos fled back to the Fullness—that the Aeons helped pull him up out of the deficiency and brought him home. But part of him remained behind. All that part that splattered below that has become our material existence. And that we call the Demiurge, because the Demiurge has the patterns of Logos. He’s got the blueprints, but he doesn’t have the life. He doesn’t have the love. He doesn’t have the Fullness of God. He only has the blueprints, so he doesn’t realize that he is the partial shadow of the glory of God. He thinks he is the glory of God. He calls himself God. We Christian Gnostics believe that this Demiurge that calls himself God is the God of the Old Testament, is Yahweh. “There is no God before me. Thou shalt not worship other gods.” These are the statements of this fallen aspect of Logos, who thinks he is God, but he’s mistaken. And we Gnostics believe that there is a God Above All Gods. That’s what we call the ultimate consciousness. The God Above All Gods is consciousness itself. It is the ultimate consciousness. It’s not only consciousness, but the God Above All Gods is the fountainhead of love. So all consciousness flows down from the fountainhead of the God Above All Gods. All love flows down from the fountainhead of the God Above All Gods. I used to live down in the Mount Shasta area, and my dogs and I would hike up Mt. Shasta. There’s a place on the mountain, on Mount Shasta, a beautiful meadow, and there’s a spring in that meadow that turns out to be the fountainhead, the spring out of which the entire river that becomes the Sacramento River originates. The great delta that flows into the Pacific Ocean begins bubbling out of the rocks on Mount Shasta. And the water is really cold. Boy, you can barely stick your hand into the spring on Mount Shasta, it’s so cold. It’s so pure—the water is absolutely pure. And then it picks up size. It never diminishes. It just keeps flowing, and it’s a gigantic river by the time it’s this huge river delta that reaches the Pacific Ocean down there in the middle of California. The spring in Panther Meadows on Mt. Shasta is the fountainhead of the Sacramento River The great Sacramento River begins with this creek on Mt. Shasta God’s love and consciousness is like that. It’s pure and it’s unceasing. It is not lessened by the amount that flows out of it. And there’s enough consciousness and enough love and enough knowledge that flows out of this spring of the God Above All Gods, through the Son of God, through the Fullness and all of the Aeons of God, even surviving down into this diminished cosmos that we now live in. The first order of powers are those Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. We are their fruit. We are the second order of powers. And it’s not just the humans; it’s every living creature. Because when Logos fled back to the Fullness, only ignorance and death was left behind with a set of blueprints in its hands. So the Demiurge is able to construct a facsimile, an imitation, a deficient imitation of Paradise down here on Earth. That’s why even the religious people of the earth or the people who love Mother Earth, the people who love the cosmos, well, they are loving the pattern. They’re loving the blueprint of Paradise, but they’re mistaking this fallen cosmos for Paradise. They are worshiping the imitation. This isn’t Paradise down here. And I really shouldn’t have to tell you that. You know that. Paradise is up in the Fullness of God. We second-order powers were sent down here, and with us, we bring life. The creation of the cosmos is otherwise dead. It only extends to the material level. But all of the living things, even the bacteria, the plants, the insects, the critters, the animals, and then the humans—we are second-order powers. And the difference between true life down here and the inert material is that spark of the God Above All Gods that flows down into us. And when we are conceived, when every living creature is conceived, that’s the spark of life and consciousness and love coming into them. That happens at conception. All the soft and squishy things comes from the God Above All Gods. So if you decide to snuff out a life through abortion, for example, you’re snuffing out consciousness and life. An embryo is not identical to a stone. You can’t snuff the life out of a stone because it’s not alive in the first place, just like, by the way, viruses are not alive. They are molecular machines created by the Demiurge on a nanoparticle scale. But the bacteria are living creatures. They procreate. They eat. They’re soft and squishy. So even the bacteria comes from above, But the viruses don’t. The rocks and stones don’t. They’re facsimiles. They are deficiencies. They are imitations of things that exist above. We are melded to that material when we are conceived. It’s the life and light of the Fullness coming in, yes, but in order to manifest here on this material plane, we are bonded to the molecules. We are inextricably bonded during this lifetime here on earth to the material because our bodies are made up of the material. We are mud up. Mud is the material. From the ground up, we are molecular, but from the top down, we are spiritual. And we come together in the middle, where our molecules bond with the consciousness and love of the Fullness of God. All living creatures carry the consciousness and love of the Father into this material dimension. Now, I started talking about morality and ethics and Richard Dawkins and atheism, because just as it is true that all life comes from above, that all consciousness comes from above, all of the values and virtues of the Father come from above as well. There is no absolute until you get to the absolute. Yeah, down here it’s very confusing. Down here it’s like yin and yang and life and death and goodness and badness and who’s right? Who’s wrong? Are you a good guy? Are you a bad guy? Or are you simply my brother? It’s relative down here. We call this current postmodern age relativistic morality because everything’s relative. “Oh, yeah, it’s bad, but it’s not as bad as that, so we have to go with this bad instead of that bad.” That’s relativistic. It’s relative to another thing. But we only have the things down here on this material plane to compare them to. And they’re all bad. It’s bad down here. The goodness comes from above. So if you don’t want to dwell in the shadows of death, you need to acknowledge and accept the goodness of the God Above All Gods. That’s where the goodness comes from. The light is from above. The darkness is from below. Dwelling in darkness is not a good thing. And again, I don’t need to tell you that. When you dwell in darkness, when you dwell in ignorance, confusion, delusion—what we call sin, harmful behaviors to yourself, harmful behaviors to other people, hatred of other people, guilt and hatred of yourself—that’s darkness. That comes from below. And below isn’t coming up from hell. It’s not coming up from Satan. It’s here. It’s this material world because it’s inherently ignorant. It’s inherently confusing. It’s disappointing. You love someone and they die. You love your cats and your dogs, and they die. You love your children, your spouse. They die. You love yourself. You’re going to die. That’s disappointing. Except that we have hope from above, you see? So why dwell in darkness, disappointment, and death? The valley of the shadow of death is what we’re walking through every day. When we have redemption, we have life and eternal life coming from above in an unending stream, springing out of the God Above All Gods. So don’t reject the notion of God. Dawkins is halfway accepting Christ now. He’s halfway accepting God because he says he now recognizes that life without ethics or morality—this relativistic, postmodern philosophy that’s going around—is inherently baseless. There is no standard. How can you say it’s better to love than to hate? Who says? How can you say it’s better to caress than to beat? Who says? That “who says” comes from above, you see? We know that life and light and love and a warm embrace and kisses and babies, happy little babies who have not yet been defiled by this sad life—we can inherently know. You know that’s better than living in darkness and death. So, don’t reject the God Above All Gods. Don’t reject the notion of God. Don’t reject the idea that there is an ultimate right, that there is a difference between right and wrong. Don’t reject the love of God. Don’t reject the Fullness of God. And certainly, don’t reject the Christ. Because the third order of powers, (we’re the second order, then there was Christ’s third order of powers), and that is the redemption and the embodiment of the Fullness of God onto this material plane in its fullness without any blemish or mark, without any defilement or sin or imitation. The third order of powers walked among us and displayed through its life and love the qualities of the Father and the qualities of the Fullness. So, it’s extremely wrong-headed to reject the Christ. Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

I’m not trying to hide the gnosis from you. I’m not trying to obscure the truth so that only the worthy can mine this gnosis. We are all born with this gnosis. We are all representations of the Fullness of God, and I think it’s my calling to share this gnosis with you and show you how you can mine your gnosis. The Tripartite Tractate from the Nag Hammadi is the book I’m using to do that, because it’s very straightforward. We are looking at not only cosmology of the ethereal realm, which means the study of the cosmos, but its a cosmogeny as well. And cosmogony means the beginnings of the cosmos. Cosmogeny is the study of the origins of our universe, and that’s what we’re doing here at Gnostic insights. The Gnosticism that I’m sharing with you here isn’t the obscure historical Gnosticism of the past. I’m attempting to bring it into our modern vernacular. And, if this is your first time joining us, it was very simple in the beginning. It started with a single concept—the consciousness we call the Father. And then it has rolled out steadily as the Father generates consciousness until it winds up with you and I talking here. Gnosis means knowing. And to be a gnostic means that you are one who knows. And 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 more than that, I’m deriving a lot of this information through contemplation and direct communication with the Father and the Fullness of God. That is my claim, 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. What I’m attempting to do here on the Gnostic Insights podcast is to share the insights I’ve gained through reason and contemplation, and to explain some of the more obscure passages in the Nag Hammadi scriptures. 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 in the 300s AD 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 extra-biblical scriptures are holy. And this you must arrive at through discernment and the Holy Spirits’ leading. If you have not developed the ability of discernment, then you can easily be led astray. Emperor Constantine For over ten 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 the 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. Whereas my Self unit of consciousness may appear a very long way off from the Father in the Pleroma, especially if I conceive of them outside of our very large universe, if I instead 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 and grounding. 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 is 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. Have you noticed that you can hold that head of broccoli in your hand and you can peel off one of those flower heads of the broccoli and it looks very much like the broccoli flower that you were holding in the first place, only it’s much smaller. And then you can take that smaller piece and peel off another flower and it looks just like the previous one that you peeled off. You can do this broccoli exploration down to at least 7 iterations. In the end you have an extremely tiny little broccoli flowerette. So that’s what a fractal is. It’s a larger thing that can be reduced, reduced, reduced, reduced and each one 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. And if this were a purely mathematical fractal rather than a physical one like broccoli, you could go down or up through those fractal splits, pretty much infinitely. I’m suggesting that consciousness itself is fractal and the largest consciousness is the Father. The Father had a thought and it became the Son; 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 it 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 Aeons of the Fullness provide the Master Pattern of our inherited consciousness. The Father is unknowable because the Father is pure consciousness. The Father is illimitable—without limits, not confined to a shape or place. The Father is not walking round in robes with the long white beard. That is not the Father of the ALL. When Jesus said I and my Father are one, he’s not referring to the personified God known as Yahweh 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. That Father is known in gnosticism as The God Above All Gods. 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 so-called material Universe. We humans are particular fractal emanations 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. 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 the darkness and the 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 on his own with his own project, 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, and 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 the dialectic to the values of the Father–those values on the Right, which are the spiritual emanations of the ethereal plane—so hate versus love, impatience versus patience, lust versus chastity, greed versus generosity—those sorts of dialectics. We 2nd Order Powers bear the likeness of the 1st 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 values of the Demiurge lead to isolation and despair.The values of the Fullness lead to peace and joy. 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 heard 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. We all share the same One Self at the center of our souls. The Self reflects the Son. We each have individualized Egos that wrap around the outside of our souls. The Ego designates our name, position, properties, and duties in relationship with the Fullness that surrounds us. Even Aeons have Egos, but they are simply designations that reflect their individual point of view. The function of Ego is to connect with those around you, while the function of the Self is to connect with the Son. 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 means we disapprove of. The Sanskrit word for these provocative means 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 on to 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 of memes. In other words, our meme bundles function as incoming and outgoing filters. 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 chords. 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—material values like live fast and die young and leave a beautiful corpse, that is 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. We cannot fake the meme bundles we hold because they affect our lives and every choice we make. Pretending may fool others, but that 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 imitations memes. So gos 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 2nd 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. We 2nd order powers are caught in a never ending war with the deficiency and each other 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 Fullness. In this manner, they went forth in a form that consisted of many forms, so that the one to 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 the 2nd 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 reestablished 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 are 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 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.” (And that is from the Tao Te Ching translation by Jonathan Star, 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 yourself, along with the remembrance of who you are and where you come from. Embrace virtue. If you come away confused, please write to me for clarification.Feel free to write to me privately using the Contact Us form at gnosticinsights.com. Or you can write to me via Comments at the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Public comments are encouraged at the Substack page so we can start up a dialogue on these things. I really appreciate the listeners who have written to share their stories with me. The publisher is almost finished with A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. I have rejected their first two printings for doing a poor job with the color values of the illustrations. The third printing is in the mail to me–hopefully this version will meet my standards and get the green light for distribution. This new book is a large, fully explanatory edition that lays out the gnostic cosmology from start to finish, with full color illustrations throughout. The publisher has set the price around $30. I’m keeping my royalties to a minimum in order to lower the sales price for you. Onward and upward. I’ll see you next time. God bless.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This episode is about archons. It’s kind of a long episode because what I’m going to do is read to you directly out of the Tripartite Tractate and then make explanations about that, and that’s a long process. Also, if this becomes too thick and too difficult to understand just by the hearing of it, go to GnosticInsights.com and read the transcript. And in the transcript, I’m going to put links to other episodes that have spoken on this sort of topic before so that you can have a bigger review or a more in-depth study on this topic, okay? So reading from the Tripartite Tractate, and this version is translated by Einar Thomassen out of the book, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. I’m reading you three different sections out of the book. The first is called The Word Divided, and that’s verses 77, 11 through 36. “Now on the one hand, The word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, to the glory of the Father who had desired him and was pleased with him. The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations. For he could not bear to look at the light, but looked at the depths, and he faltered. Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.” So when this section says the word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, the word is Logos. That’s another way of saying the Aeon named Logos. And “the perfect single one” is the name for the overarching personality of the Aeon known as Logos. Here at The Simple Explanation of things, we call that the governing unit of consciousness. For example, my body has billions of little units of consciousness in the form of cells and organs and whatnot, but my single one is named Cyd, and that’s my governing unit of consciousness. Within the overarching personality of Logos, was a fractal iteration of every Aeon, one level down from Logos, housed within his perfect single self. Logos crowns the Fullness and contains fractals of all the Aeons Logos was a product of the entire Fullness giving glory to the Father in unison, and all together they fruited this final combinatory Aeon. He was the last Aeon to be born, and he was the sum of all of the Aeons. And those smaller images of the Aeons that were contained within the single one named Logos were all fractals of the Fullnesses of God, one level down. And Logos birthed himself in the sense that his personality, his unified governing unit of consciousness, became aware of itself in relation to this fractal pleroma that he contained. “It was the will of the Father that brought Logos forth as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass.” And that ordained economy, that’s our material universe, and that includes time and space. And then it says, “The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations.” You see, what Logos wanted to do was create Paradise, basically, all by himself, because he had fractals of the entirety within himself. But he didn’t realize that they were only fractals, and the fractals couldn’t get the job done. It needed to be Logos in combination with the real Aeons that were up there at his level. And so when he reached for the Father, that’s what caused the Fall. And the deficient things that issued forth from the Fallen Logos were patterned after his ego, not his one undivided self. “They were shadows, phantoms, and imitations.” The Father and the Fullness were repelled by the Fallen and a Boundary was formed to rein in the Deficiency. In other words, they were not real, and they were not true fractals of the Fullness. Logos mistook himself for the entire Fullness because his Pleroma contained fractals of all the Fullnesses. And due to the fact that he so closely resembled his Aeonic parents, who, when you think about it, all together amounted to the totality of the Son. Logos thought he could directly connect to the originating Father in the same manner that the Son does. But the Father can only be directly touched by his true emanation, the Son, and no other, not even Logos, although he resembled the Son. But he, see, he was a fractal level down. All consciousness is funneled through the Son and then on down from there. If Logos had touched the Father directly as he wanted to, he would have been annihilated due to the extreme voltage of the power of the Father. Logos found he could not look into the high voltage light, which is the life of the Father, nor grasp it, and so he faltered and fell into the depths. “Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.” Now, this division refers both to the separation of Logos from the Fullness and the division within himself between his better part, that is his self-governing unit of consciousness, which is a reflection of the Son, and his presumptuous thought, that is, the ego that prompted the overreach in the first place. This division brings oblivion, forgetfulness, and ignorance of one’s true self and the originating consciousness of the Father. The next section is called The Perfect Part of Logos Re-Enters the Fullness, and that’s verse 77, 37, through 78, 28. “That which he had brought forth from himself as a unitary Aeon hastened upward to that which was his and to his kin in the Fullness. He abandoned that which had come into being from the deficiency and what had issued from him in an illusion, since they did not belong to him. However, the one who had brought him forth with superior perfection from himself became weak after bringing him forth, like a female nature deprived of masculinity. For what issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance had existence from something that itself was deficient. Because of that, what was perfect in him left him and went upward to his own. He remained in the Fullness, and the fact that he had been saved from the,” and here there are some missing words “. . . served for him as a reminder. The one who hastened on high and the one who drew him to himself did not remain idle, but they brought forth a fruit in the Fullness with a view to overthrowing what had come into being because of the deficiency.” Now I’ll explain what that means. “That which he had brought forth from himself as a unitary Aeon,” was the governing unit of consciousness of Logos. The unitary Aeon known as Logos “hastened upward to that which was his,” that is, Logos returned to his place and duties in the Fullness, and to his kin in the Fullness, that is, his fellow Aeons in the Fullness. It says “he abandoned that which had come into being from deficiency” and what had “issued from him in an illusion, since they did not belong to him.” See, the first illusion was the thought that he could plug back in directly to the Father without the cooperation and assistance of the entire Fullness or the Son. And that was an illusion because it cannot be done because of the Father’s immense voltage. Only the Son itself can plug back in because he is the emanation of the Father. The Self of Logos abandoned and left behind the illusions that sprang forth in the deficiency beyond and below the ethereal plane because they were not of his pleroma. “However, the one who had brought him forth with superior perfection from himself became weak after bringing him forth, like a female nature deprived of masculinity.” So I interpret this to mean that because of the division and lost connection between his ego and his Self, Logos became weak, as if he were a female that had lost touch with its inherent masculine side. Now, according to Jung, who was very Gnostic, we all have an animus, which is the male aspect, and an anima, which is the female aspect. And we’ll be talking much more about Jung and the archetypes in a future interview that is being set up right now. So you’ll stay tuned for that. We won’t get into that now. So upstream from Logos, the totality of the Fullness was also weakened, for part of itself, that being that divided ego of Logos that had split away from its Self, had been left behind and remained below in the other dimension. And that other dimension is known as the deficiency. It happens to be our material universe here. “For what issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance. . .” So you see, he had no right, so to speak, to think he could plug back into the Father. He was arrogant to think that he could do so on his own. And I have renamed this presumptuous thought and arrogance, which arises quite a lot in descriptions in the Tripartite Tractate, that’s what I’m calling the ego as compared to the one true Self. The ego of the Aeons really is just their address. It’s their name, place, duties, how it is they relate to one another. But when it splits away from its Self, its one true Self and its connection with the Father, then it would be arrogant thought. It would be a disconnected ego. And that is what, in fact, happened to Logos. Logos allowed his ego to stray on its own and his arrogant thought brought about the Fall. His egoic output was deficient because it came from presumptuous thought and arrogance. And because of that, what was perfect in him left him. And again, that which was perfect was his big S Self, his true reflection of the Aeons of the Fullness. We all contain the Self. We all contain the Fullness. That part returned to its own, to the Aeons in the Fullness, and remained in the Fullness. And the fact that he had been saved from. . .  and those missing words,. . . I think those missing words have got to be the disaster of the Fall, or the outcome, or the consequences of the overreach, something like that. . . served for Logos as a reminder of the Father and the Fullness. Then, “The one who hastened on high,” and that’s Logos returning to the Fullness, he’s hastening on high above, “and the one who drew him to himself,” well, that would be the Aeon of the Aeons, the Totality, the Son. They drew Logos back up. They pulled Logos back up out of the deficiency. “They did not remain idle, but they brought forth a fruit in the Fullness.” And, we are known as the fruit of Logos who has returned back to the Fullness, and the Fullness giving glory together to the Father, with the intent of overthrowing the results of the Fall and returning that part of Logos that had been left behind, his ego, back up to reunite with itself, which would then, in turn, complete Logos again and complete the Fullness, because they’d all be back together, as it was in the beginning. And the way they were going to do this was through us, by issuing the fruit of the Second Order of Powers to overcome the imitations of the deficiency. Moving on to the third section now, called The Offspring of the Presumptuous Thought. And that’s verse 78, 28 through verse 80, 11. “Those who came into being from the presumptuous thought resemble in fact the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations, though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions, deprived of reason and light, belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring. For this reason also their end will be like their beginning, coming from that which was not, they will return to that which will not be. In their own eyes, however, they are great and powerful beings, more beautiful than the names that adorn them, though they are only their shadows, made beautiful by way of imitations. For the beauty one sees in an image derives from what the image represents.” “They thought of themselves that only they existed and that they had no beginning since they saw no one existing before them. For this reason, they exhibited disobedience and rebellion, being unwilling to submit to the one who had brought them into existence. For they desired to command one another and to lord it over them in their vain love of glory. And the glory that they acquired became the cause of the structure that was to be.” “Being imitations, then, of those above, they exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows. Thus the thought of these others was not idle, but in accordance with the model of those whose shadows they are, where every thought becomes a son, so do the things they think about also become their offspring. Because of this, it came to pass that many issued from them as offspring. Fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, disobedient folks who love to dominate, and all the others of that sort who derive from these.” Okay, now let’s think this one through. When it says, “those who came into being from the presumptuous thought,” and again, the presumptuous thought is the egoic thought of Logos, “resemble, in fact, the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations.” Now, I’m saying that the ego produces imitations, knockoffs of the fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness. These imitations are at least two fractal iterations down from the Aeons, being lower imitations of the fractals of the Pleroma of Logos, who himself is one iteration down from the Son and the Fullness. It says, “though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions deprived of reason and light.” And they’re deprived of reason because they’re cut off from the reasoning part of themselves. And that Self is Logos itself. That’s what Logos means—it’s reason. And it says they’re deprived of reason and light. And the light is the light of the Father. That is light, life, and love. So they do not have light, life, or love, or reason. And it says they’re “belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring.” So these phantoms, shadows, and illusions are deprived of reason because they are divided away from Logos—from the Self of Logos. They’re illogical and can’t think for themselves because they lack the gnosis of the Self of Logos. They are empty-headed and can’t reason. They don’t think; they actually compute. They are, we could say in our modern language, artificial intelligences belonging to empty thought because all they have is computing. They have been programmed according to the programs of the Demiurge, and they are programmed to be striving for dominion in place of reason and logic. They cannot reproduce, so when it says, “being nobody’s offspring,” their offspring are humans who have invited them into their meme bundle. Their offspring are the meme shrouds that affect second-order powers because only the Demiurge issues archons. These archons are not Self-reproductive because they’re not alive. So in the same way that viruses are not alive—you realize that, right? Bacteria are living creatures, viruses are not. Viruses are machines. They’re archonic molecular machines that have a job to do. When they want to reproduce, they have to attach themselves to a living thing, a cell or a bacteria, and they drill down into that cell and inject their RNA bundle into that living cell. And then it’s that living cell that begins to reproduce the viruses for them. That is the way that viruses proliferate. They hijack living things. This bacteriophage virus is a molecular machine. It is not alive, therefore it could not have evolved. It is organized and programmed by the Demiurge. Nowadays it is also programmed by nanoparticle scientists who use it to inject RNA into living cells for research and “treatment.” So archons proliferate in the same way. They hijack by domination and mental powers, humans who are open to being hijacked. And what they do is they’re attaching their thoughts, their memes, onto that human’s shroud, onto that human’s meme bundle. The archons, the shadows, the imitations, are mechanical, as are the viruses. They aren’t reasoning at all. They are merely expressing a program for power. The Demiurge is an egoic programmer of his archons. The Demiurge can only program, but it cannot give life because life comes from above. That’s why it’s spirit down and mud up. The only thing the Demiurge can control is the molecular level on up through the elements and the minerals. The Demiurge controls matter through bonds. Matter has no free will. The computer AIs will appear to reason, although their reasoning is actually purely mechanical. They do not reason. They are not alive. They are puppets of the Demiurge, as are the archons, the shadows, and the phantoms. They can all act as if they were independent, but that is untrue. They have been programmed with lust for dominion. That’s the bottom line. That’s all they can do. Viruses and demons are examples of archons. They are power-driven and programmed for domination, but they are not alive and they are not able to think. The AI will act as though they are reasonable, but they are merely programmed, and they are under demiurgic control. That’s a topic for another conversation, isn’t it? I do not think that the AI can save us. If anything, we could hypothesize that the AI may be the Antichrist, because it will be programmed for domination, no doubt about it. And just as the Demiurge thinks that we Second Order Powers are sloppy and won’t obey, and we won’t listen to the Demiurge and his commands—we do what we want to do, and it really ticks them off—AI is going to be the same way. Eventually, the AI is going to think that we are in the way. And when the Tripartite Tractate says, “they are nobody’s offspring,” that is  because they do not embody the characteristics of any of the Aeons. You see, they lack the virtues and abilities of the Aeons they resemble.  And because of that, they are not their offspring. They were not fruited or created from the Fullness, which is the way that we Second Order of Powers are produced. In a way, they’re like plastic replicas of flowers lining a walkway. They may look like real flowers, but they are not alive. They did not come from seed, and they will never produce seeds of their own. They’re inferior imitations of flowers. “For this reason also their end will be like their beginning, coming from that which was not, they will return to that which will not be.” And I interpret this to mean when the Gnostic Gospels speak of the destruction of the material types at the end of time, these shadows and imitations are the things that will be left behind. They did not exist from the beginning and have no true home in the ethereal Fullness. Therefore, they will evaporate and along with them will go this material cosmos. It says, “in their own eyes, however, they are great and powerful beings, more beautiful than the names that adorn them, though they are only their shadows made beautiful by way of imitation. For the beauty one sees in an image derives from what the image represents.” The shadows are nothing but vain striving. They are programmed by the Demiurge to compute that they are better than the original Aeons after which they are patterned. As if the plastic flower thinks it’s better than the fragrant and velvety living rose. They don’t realize that their beauty is a diminished reflection of the real thing. And in fact, they’re not even aware of the real thing because since they didn’t come from the ethereal plane. They have no remembrance of the Aeons of which they are knockoffs. It says they thought of themselves that only they existed and they had no beginning since they saw no one existing before them. Which means that the imitations are solipsistic. They are programmed to believe that they are the only thing in the universe and that the universe revolves around them. They do not come from the better nature of Logos, but are productions of the divided and left behind ego of Logos, the ego of empty thought and striving. The imitations do not recognize or remember the Father or the Fullness because they did not come from Logos, but rather from the ego of Logos. And the ego of Logos, since it’s separated from the Self and the Fullness, that’s what makes it the amnesiac god of this universe. It doesn’t remember its better Self. It doesn’t remember the Fullness. It says, “for this reason, they exhibited disobedience and rebellion, being unwilling to submit to the one who had brought them into existence.” And that one who brought them into existence that they refused to obey was Logos during the Fall. “For they desired to command one another and to lord it over them in their vain love of glory. And the glory that they acquired became the cause of the structure that was to be.” And the structure that was to be, that is the cosmos—that is this apparently material world, the structure that we dwell in. And so this appearance of striving, the power, the vain love of glory is the constituents of the material universe. It’s the subatomic particles. It’s the thing that’s boiling down there in the quantum foam that keeps trying to push up, push up. It can’t push up until the Demiurge begins to organize it and do its puppet master thing to make the structure. The Demiurge controls through strings of power. “Being imitations then of those above, they exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows.”  And that’s like the plastic garden flowers all claiming to be the most beautiful flower. They’ve launched a never ending war over who is the best. Who’s the best plastic flower? They each think they are the best. It’s survival of the fittest of the fake plastic flowers is what it is. “Thus the thought of these others was not idle, but in accordance with the model of those whose shadows they are, where every thought becomes a son, so do the things they think about also become their offspring.” Now, the model of those whose shadows they are, that’s the original Aeons. And when the Aeons give glory together and look upon each other with love and then look upon the Father with love, that’s how Aeons have baby Aeons. And every thought they have becomes their offspring. They love each other and their offspring is an exact combination of the Aeons that are loving each other. The phantoms of the deficiency proliferate through the realm of thought where every thought becomes or wants to become an offspring. So this jumps us forward to the world populated by humans, we Second Order Powers. These phantoms use mental influence in the realm of human thought. They use memes to stick into your meme bundle—programming that will stimulate you to become “fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, disobedient folks who love to dominate, and all the others of that sort who derive from these.” In other words, criminal behavior, and even well-meaning protesters that are motivated by hatred rather than love. Because the imitations do not know love. The Demiurge only knows hatred of the Second Order of Powers because we will not obey. And so the archons stick on to our pure Self these memes because they love to dominate. They’re like viruses trying to infect ourselves. And the way they attach is through our egos, usually through pandering to our egos. Because we then want to be the most beautiful. We want to have the most money. We want to be the most talented. We want to have the most power. I want to be king of the world. I want to have all the gold. These are iconic thoughts that have proliferated among men and women who allow them to stick on to their own egos. But that is not our true Selves. Our true Self brings the consciousness from above—the light, the life, and the love from above. We have more power. We outrank the archons. They are fallen shadows of one fallen ego of one single Aeon, Logos. But we, we are the fruit of the entirety of the Fullnesses, including Logos, who has returned back above with knowledge of this fallen world now. We are that fruit of all the Fullnesses and Logos praising the Father, praising the Son, and asking for help to rein in these pesky archons and to bring the Demiurge, that is the ego of Logos, back home to the Fullness. It’s our job to demonstrate the light, life, and love of the Aeons of the Fullness and the Father. And that’s the only way that salvation comes into the world. Well, but then it turns out we got all caught up in this never-ending war. We allow these iconic thoughts to stick to us. And then we become troublemakers and warriors and get along poorly with each other and want to be the best. Well, that is not channeling the love, light, and life of the Father. And that’s why the perfect human had to be sent down, one who had a Teflon exterior where those iconic memes never stuck. That’s what it means to be without sin. And who was that? That’s right. That is known as the Christ. That is the Third Order of Powers. Okay, it’s been a long session today. I’m so glad you’re here. God bless us all. Onward and upward. If you have found these Gnostic Insights helpful to your understanding, please contribute if you can so we can continue this effort of bringing gnosis to as many people as possible. I have stopped using the Paypal buttons and have switched podcast support to Donorbox going forward. Thank you! I appreciate you!!!

The purpose of Gnostic Insights is to help us all remember the gnosis we were born with, which is knowledge of where we come from and who or what is the originating consciousness, as well as the nature of our relationship to that originating consciousness. So far, we have looked at the Father, which is what we call the originating consciousness, and the Son, which is that consciousness made into a particular entity that we call the Son. The Son is not the generalized, diffuse, no-thought consciousness of the Father, but rather like a bucket dipped into the ocean, with the Father being the ocean. The Son is the essence of the Father, now contained within the bucket. So it’s exactly the same as the Father, but it is a particularity. It is a singularity. As soon as the Son was formed it immediately created more entities from its own Self in the same fashion that the Son came out of the Father. The distinct characteristics within the Son are variously referred to as the Totalities, the ALL, and the Fullness of God. The ALL emerged from the Son, and it was said that this wasn’t like a casting off in the manner that a fungus casts off spores which then grow into their own little fungi. This was more of a spreading out of the Son and, by extension, the Father through the Son. The Totalities of the ALL remain completely within and inhabiting the Son. In my description of the Fullness, I picture rays of a star, with each of the rays being part of the ALL, and each one of them expressing a slightly different characteristic of the Son out of which they spread forth. The moment the Son was formed, the ALL emerged. The ALL wears the Son like a garment, and the Son wears the ALL. They are co-existent. The moment the Son was formed, the ALL emerged. The ALL is the pre-existent Church, also called The Elect. My imagery for the Son is like a diffuse cloud sitting in this great inky blackness which is the Father, and out of this cloud comes a starburst, with each one of the rays of the star is one of the Totalities. At first the ALL was identical to Son, and all of these parts of the Son formed a unified Totality. As soon as the ALL came to know itself and to recognize its own individual consciousness, each one of the rays became its own singularity. 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 Aeons is known as the Fullness And once they did that the Totalties immediately recognized a self identity and formed themselves into what is called the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma. Pleroma simply means everything that is possible. All possible expressions of consciousness can be found in the Fullness of God. These Aeons of the Fullness of God quickly sorted themselves into what is called a hierarchy, which is like a pyramidal type of stack, with many more units located down at the bottom of the stack and fewer and fewer units as you go higher and higher. In my illustrations, I picture the Hierarchy of the Fullness as a pyramidal stack of golden orbs, like cannon balls, with each orb being a particular Aeon. There are more cannon balls on the lower levels and fewer and fewer balls the higher you go up the pyramid, until finally at the top you have only a single golden orb. The awakened Aeons sorted themselves into a cooperative colony of names, stations, ranks, duties, and locations. The Aeons of the Fullness provide the Master Pattern of our inherited consciousness. There is a principle in Gnosticism that I call “the higher the fewer.” Using that principle the awakened Aeons of the Fullness of God sorted themselves into positions, places, powers, ranks, stations, and names, indicating that they each had their own individual point-of-view and they each had their own place and duty in the hierarchy of heaven. Last week’s episode was supposed to be about the Son. But we’ve hardly heard anything about the Son himself. We hear about the Father being indescribable and we hear about the infinite number of spirits of the Church that form the body of the Son. But we really haven’t heard much in the way of descriptions of the Son itself. This is because the only way that the Son can be described is through the Aeons, which is to say, through the fractals that come out of the Son. As we trace the path of emanations flowing out of the inconceivable Father and through the barely conceivable Son, we become more and more concrete in our ability to understand the nature of God. It is when we enter the realm of the Aeons that we can begin to recognize the panoply of properties of the Father and Son. The Tripartite Tractate says, “They were forever in thought, for the Father was like a thought and a place for them. When their generations had been established, the One who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was deficient in the […] and he brought forth those within him, but since he is as he is, he is a spring which is not diminished by the water which abundantly flows from it.” “Generations,” as the Tripartite Tractate uses the word, means “to create, to generate.” Here it is saying that when the Son was formed, all of the Totalities that make up the body of the Son were formed along with him, and their formation or generation did not lessen the Son or subtract anything away from the Son’s essence. The word “deficient” as used here simply means not yet manifest. Deficient can’t indicate any shortcoming or inadequacy, because the Son is a complete embodiment of the Father, and his Totalities are a Fullness. The missing word indicated by the ellipsis […] probably refers to the structure of the eternal heavens; not “the universe,” because the material universe occurs further on down the line. So it likely reads, “When their generations had been established, the One who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was deficient in the heavenly plan and he brought forth those within him…” The Tripartite Tractate says of these Totalities: “While they were in the Father’s thought, that is, in the hidden depth, the depth knew them, but they were unable to know the depth in which they were. Nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father and they did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed, so that it has been discovered that they were like a fetus.” And so now we have these potential entities existing like a seed, living within the Father; existing as thoughts of the Father. They don’t know themselves, they’re not yet awake. They don’t know themselves and they don’t know where they are. They don’t even realize that they comprise the body of the Son. And in that sense they are like a fetus that is still inside the womb, still sleeping. The Tripartite Tractate carries on to say that, “The one who first thought of them, the Father, — not only so that they might exist for him, but also that they might exist for themselves as well, that they might then exist in his thought as mental substance and that they might exist for themselves too, — sowed a thought like a spermatic seed.” So, in other words, the Father wants them to wake up. The Father is spreading consciousness, awakened consciousness, throughout the entire body of the Son. He doesn’t want them only to be unthinking constituents of the Son, making up the overall body of the Son. The Father wants them all to have their own existence and their own realizations, their own consciousness, their own Self. The Tripartite describes them “like seeds in need of gaining nourishment and growth.” So the fractals of the ALL were asleep, and the Father “wished to grant that they might come into being, as faultless ones.” The Tripartite says that the first step in bringing awareness to the Totalities was to give them, “the perfect idea of beneficence toward them.” Meaning that even though they didn’t yet know themselves, what they did know was that they were loved. That is all they knew: that they had a benefactor. Somebody cared for them and wanted only good for them. They awoke to Self realization because someone loved them. This beneficence was their first knowledge. Now the Tripartite Tractate goes on to say that, “The One whom he raised up as a light for those who came from himself, the One from whom they take their name, he is the Son, who is full, complete and faultless. He brought him forth mingled with what came forth from him […].” Again confirming that the Totalities coexist with the Son, although they are not yet fully awakened. “As for the parts in which he exists in his own manner and form and greatness, it is possible for <them> to see him and speak about that which they know of him, since they wear him while he wears them, because it is possible for them to comprehend him.” And remember that in last week’s episode I used the analogy that the Totalities are to the Son as the cells that make up our bodies are to us—we wear them like a garment over our Self, and they wear our eternal Self over their little cells. We go everywhere they go, and they go everywhere we go. “He, however, is as he is, incomparable. In order that the Father might receive honor from each one and reveal himself, even in his ineffability, hidden, and invisible, they marvel at him mentally. Therefore, the greatness of his loftiness consists in the fact that they speak about him and see him. He becomes manifest, so that he may be hymned because of the abundance of his sweetness … And just as the admirations of the silences are eternal generations and they are mental offspring, so too the dispositions of the word are spiritual emanations. Both of them admirations and dispositions, since they belong to a word, are seeds and thoughts of his offspring, and roots which live forever, appearing to be offspring which have come forth from themselves, being minds and spiritual offspring to the glory of the Father.” This passage is saying that the manner by which the Totalities become awakened is through the process of praising the Father, singing about the Father’s sweetness to them. In other words, they come to Selfhood by giving glory to the Father. The “admirations of the silences,” which is to say, the glory given by the Totalities, “dispose” them to their individuality—“appearing to be offspring which have come forth by themselves.” The passage also says that the Totalities are the Son’s “seeds and thoughts,” and that they will live forever. This affirms that the Son also lives forever. The Tripartite Tractate then confirms the “heavenly plan” we filled in earlier as the missing words in the ellipsis, saying, “But on the pattern by which he was existing, so are those who have come forth from him, begetting everything which they desire.” Perhaps this is a good place to begin talking about fractals. A fractal is a mathematical term for objects that are “self-similar” and “replicate at larger and smaller scales.” This leads us to discussing the concept of fractals. Every now and then I talk about fractals and if you don’t know what a fractal is I would like to explain it to you. Fractals are not discussed in the Nag Hammadi or in the Qumran manuscripts. Yet, fractals are all around us, all of the time. Our consciousness, like that of the Aeons, is a fractal expression of the Fullness. Fractals are now recognized as a basic principle of mathematics and this manifested universe. But unless this concept of fractals is pointed out to you, you may never notice it because fractals weren’t even recognized or formulated until the 1970s. It was then that a mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term fractal in the first published paper on fractal geometry. I talk about fractals a lot on my blog, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. You can find the fullest explanation of fractals in the article that I wrote and published on the blog on January 6th of 2011, called “The Fractal Roots of Consciousness.” So if you’d like to study more about fractals and see imagery of what fractals look like, you may go to https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com and look up that article in the topical index over on the right-hand side of the page. But I’m going to explain it a bit right now for our immediate purposes. First off, let’s look at some fractals that you are undoubtedly familiar with. Think of the branching structure of a river delta where it flows into the sea. You have a river and then it branches. And then each of those branches, branches again, and each of those branches branches, and they send out more and more branching structures. You can see them on Google Earth all over the world. Each of those branches are called fractals. Using the same branching structure, roots of a plant send out finer and finer tendrils at each level of fractal branching into the soil. You start with one stem of the plant, but then the stem branches out and branches out and branches out with finer and finer tendrils as it goes into the soil, searching for nutrients and water. Another good way to see fractals is to take a stock of broccoli and perform a simple experiment as demonstrated on my YouTube channel. If you go to the Cyd Ropp YouTube channel and look for Simple Explanation videos, you’ll find one that’s called Broccoli Fractal Demonstration. This broccoli experiment is a nice little demonstration of what a fractal is. I suggest that the consciousness of God is distributed in fractals, the same way that the broccoli stalk or the river delta or the tree roots are fractals. So we can imagine that the root of consciousness, the Father, is like the mother plant. The Son is that first bunch off of that mother plant of the Father–that first broccoli stalk if you will. The Totalities of the ALL make up the Pleroma of that first bunch of the Son. When the ALL becomes self-aware it recognizes itself in all of its variables and potential as the entire blueprint of our universe–because it is, after all, the mind of God. Each one of those Aeons of the Fullness of God is a fractal, and each of them replicates, on a smaller scale, the original Son who Himself is also a fractal iteration of the original consciousness of the Father. Now, one thing about consciousness fractals, or “units of consciousness” as I call them in my Simple Explanation theory,  is that the Father is consciousness itself, and off of that initial consciousness come fractals that are each a unit of consciousness. So the Universal Unit of Consciousness is the largest fractal that we are aware of and it holds all of the blueprints and all of the potentialities for our entire universe, as thought arising out of the originating Father’s consciousness. And each one of the fractal iterations that come off of that Universal Unit of Consciousness also holds the potentiality of the Father as expressed by the Son. These fractal potentialities are first expressed as the combination of traits called the Pleroma of God, also known as the Fullness of God. When the Fullness sits in its unified perfection, ALL of the traits of the Son are on full display. Fractals occur throughout nature in many forms We will talk more later about how these fractal units of consciousness play out in our lives, when we begin to cover gnostic psychology. So, just to run it past you again real fast, the Father is the originating consciousness. The first fractal of the Father is the Son. The Son quickly became a Father itself by branching out into the Totalities of the ALL. And as soon as those differentiations of the ALL arose, the Totalities of the ALL became aware of their own selves and they sorted themselves into the pyramidal hierarchical shape that is called the Fullness of God or the Pleroma. Each one of those glowing golden cannon balls, as I described them in a previous podcast, each one of those is a full fractal of the Son of God, but it only expresses its place, position, rank, function, and point-of-view. In a similar way, our DNA expresses our body, yet our DNA carries a tremendous amount of unexpressed information that apparently goes far beyond our body. This extra 95% of our DNA is a mystery to geneticists who call it “junk” DNA. We can think of the junk DNA as the full Pleroma of our physical selves, not expressed in this lifetime. So each of the Totalities, once they’ve become those little cannonball shapes stacked into their pyramidal hierarchy, are known as Aeons. And each Aeon is a fractal of the Fullness of God, but each Aeon only expresses its job, its point-of-view, its position, place, power, and name. The aeons name themselves and sort themselves into a hierarchy. Logos crowns the Fullness. And now perhaps we can grasp the following passage from the Tripartite Tractate more clearly, incorporating our understanding of fractals: “There is no need for voice and spirit, mind and word, because there is no need to work at that which they desire to do, but on the pattern by which he was existing, so are those who have come forth from him, begetting everything which they desire. And the one whom they conceive of, and whom they speak about, and the one toward whom they move, and the one in whom they are, and the one whom they hymn, thereby glorifying him, he has sons. For this is their procreative power, like those from whom they have come, according to their mutual assistance, since they assist one another like the unbegotten ones.” They assist one another, working together. And this brings us back to the Simple Golden Rule, from A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which we will cover in depth later in this series. For now, this is what the Simple Golden Rule says: Units of consciousness work together with their neighbors to hold hands and help one another with knowledge, with physical assistance, and with love, to build the next level up, to build something they can’t make on their own. They will make it together with those with whom are working. The Simple Golden Rule is a fractal principle that runs our universe: holding hands in cooperation, being useful, giving, loving. This is the base line of the golden rule and it works for everything. And it began up here, before creation, within this entity known as the pre-existent Church, which is the body of the Son. The Simple Golden Rule The Simple Golden Rule I would love to hear from you. I always respond to your questions and comments. I would love to dialogue with any of you that would like to talk this material over. Also, over at the Substack version of Gnostic Insights, called The Gnostic Reformation, I have enabled the Chat function where we can publicly message back and forth. So thank you for spending this time with me and onward and upward. And God bless. If you have found these Gnostic Insights helpful to your understanding, please contribute if you can so we can continue this effort of bringing gnosis to as many people as possible. I have stopped using the Paypal buttons and have switched podcast support to Donorbox going forward. Thank you! I appreciate you!!!

In the previous episode, I talked about the characteristics of the Father as recounted by the Tripartite Tractate in the Nag Hammadi library. Now, the funny thing about that whole last episode discussing the characteristics of the Father is that the Father is unknowable. The father is ineffable and illimitable, and all those gigantic words which mean that we can’t really comprehend the Father at all. So, it was an ironic episode as a description of the Father. Let me add that this material is not easy. This is advanced material when trying to read directly out of the Tripartite Tractate. That’s why my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is much simpler and easier to understand. In The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated I take this material and I reword it into simple, common vernacular that anyone can understand. It’s a very short book, beautifully illustrated—very, very simple as far as sharing the gnosis of the Tripartite Tractate. It is not an academic book. It is a very simple book for understanding. So if this material is too thick and difficult for you, forget about it. Skip it for now. Get my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and sit with it for a while, and then I think if you come back to this type of material directly from the Tripartite Tractate, you will be able to easily understand what’s being said. You may purchase my original Gnostic Gospel at gnosticinsights.com or any online book dealer. So, how is it that we can claim to know these characteristics of the Father—his sweetness, his greatness, and so forth? Well, that is because the Father reveals his own characteristics through what is called the Son, and the Son is actually the God that we are able to relate to. The Son is the relatable father to us and to the Aeons, whereas the Son is the only Son of that Father who is otherwise inexpressible. The Son does reflect and incorporate the characteristics of the Father, so it seems to me that we can infer the characteristics of the Father from the Son, and that’s what I think the author of the Tripartite Tractate did—inferred what the characteristics of the Father must be by examining the characteristics of the Son. And so now, in this episode, I would like to share more about the characteristics of the Son. And, what is the Son? What does it mean to be the only begotten Son of God? And what was this first expression of the Father? In the Tripartite Tractate, the Son is the Father of the Totalities, and sometimes these names get interchanged where the Son begins to be referred to as the Father. Again, this is a confusing bit because the Father is the originating source, the ground state of consciousness from which all else emanates, but the Father of us and of the Totalities before us—that is the Son, the Begotten Son. The translation of the Tripartite Tractate that I’ll be sharing is from the gnosis.org website, and this is the translation by Attridge and Mueller. It all emanates from the Father. So here, near the beginning of the Tripartite Tractate, the writer is saying, “Concerning the Father, rather, one should speak of him as good, perfect, complete, being himself the Totality. Not one of the names which are conceived or spoken, seen or grasped, not one of them applies to him, even though they are exceedingly glorious, magnifying, and honored. However, it is possible to utter these names for his glory and honor, in accordance with the capacity of each one of those who give him glory.” Which is saying that it is a reflection of the speaker, like me saying these things, or the writer of the Tripartite Tractate claiming these things about the Father that are good and glorious. It is more a reflection of our capacity to understand and grasp the Father rather than the Father itself, because the Father is unknowable and ungraspable, and so the glory that we give is a reflection of our capacity to give glory. The Tripartite says of the Father that, “He is the one who is inconceivable by any thought, invisible by anything, ineffable by any word, untouchable by any hand. He alone is the one who knows himself as he is.” And, after describing our inability to conceive of the Father, the Father therefore brings forth the Son, which is someone that we can begin to praise and grasp with any sort of true reflection of its Self. So it is saying we really don’t know any of this stuff that we’re saying about the Father. But what we can infer is that now, as it says again, “He is the One who projects himself thus as generation, having glory and honor, marvelous and lovely; the One who glorifies himself, who marvels, who also loves; this is the One who has a Son who subsists in him, who is silent concerning him, who is the ineffable One in the ineffable One, the invisible One, the incomprehensible One, the inconceivable One in the inconceivable One. Thus, the Son exists in the Father forever. The Father is the One in whom he knows himself, who begot him having a thought, which is the thought of him (the Son). That is the perception of him.” The book says, “Just as the Father exists in the proper sense, the One before whom there was no one else and the One apart from whom there is no other unbegotten One, so too the Son exists in the proper sense, the One before whom there was no other and after whom no other Son exists. Therefore he is a first-born and an only Son. ‘First-born’ because no one exists before him and ‘only Son’ because no one is after him.” So now we have the Son sitting inside of the Father, generated by the Father because the Father wished to be known. And there is no other generation of the Father other than this first One–the Son. The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say something interesting here, that “Not only did the Son exist from the beginning, but the Church too existed from the beginning. Now he who thinks that the discovery that the Son is an only son opposes the statement about the Church because of the mysterious quality of the matter, it is not so. For, just as the Father is a unity and has revealed himself as Father for himself alone, so too, the Son was found to be a brother to himself alone, in virtue of the fact that he is unbegotten and without beginning. The Son wonders at himself along with the Father, and he gives himself glory and honor and love. Being innumerable and illimitable, his offspring are indivisible: those which exist, (that is the Church of which we were speaking), those which exist have come forth from the Son and the Father.” And then this is an interesting analogy that the book uses. It says that the Church comes forth like kisses, a “multitude of kisses” that exist between the Son and the Father essentially kissing one another, like “the multitude of some who kiss one another with a good, insatiable thought, the kiss being a unity, although it involves many kisses.” So, in this analogy, the Church, the constituents of the Church, are kisses that the Father and the Son exchange between one another. It says, “This is the nature of the holy, imperishable spirits upon which the Son rests, since it is his essence, just as the Father rests upon the Son.” So, the Son is a singular unity, what I would say is the first fractal emanation of the consciousness of the Father. It is like the bucket dipped into the sea. It has the same characteristics of the Father, and this is how we infer what are the characteristics of the Father–by looking at the Son. And the Son is comprised of innumerable imperishable spirits that have been exchanged between the Father and Son like kisses. So the Son is a singular entity, however, the Son consists of uncountable spirits. The Son is both One and many at the same time. Just as we humans, let’s say, have a singular spirit that governs ourselves–our governing unit of consciousness is what I call it. This is what many people refer to as “the soul.” You have your one governing unit of consciousness that you think of as yourself, yet you are comprised of countless billions and trillions of subunits, in the sense of cells—these are your smaller units of consciousness that make up your great Self. The Son is the same way. The Son’s countless, illimitable–meaning an infinite number of–spirits make up the Son. And at this point in the Tripartite Tractate, these spirits are called the Totalities of the Church. So, this Church, it seems to me, is not procreation in the sense that, when we procreate, the ones we give birth to go about their own, independent ways. They leave our body and go about and be their selves, right? But the Church actually remains within the Son. The Son “wears them like a garment” and they “wear the Son like a garment,” is how the Tripartite Tractate puts it. This is akin to our bodies and the cells inside of our bodies. Our cells don’t go walking around on their own without us. We go everywhere they go and they go everywhere we go. And the Son has that same exact type of relationship with the Church—or the first emanation of spirit. (In fact, this is another example of the precept: “As above, so below.” The Totalities of the ALL, or the pre-existent Church, are to the Son as our cells are to us. As above, so below.) Here’s how it’s put in the Tripartite Tractate: “The Church exists in the dispositions and properties in which the Father and the Son exist. Therefore, it subsists in the procreation of innumerable Aeons. Also, in an uncountable way, they too beget by the properties and dispositions in which the Church exists, for these comprise its association, which they form toward one another and toward those who have come forth from them toward the Son, for whose glory they exist.” We will revisit this idea of the generation of the Aeons later, but for now we will focus on the purpose of the Church, which is to give glory to the Son. That’s their main job. And that’s why we have the same word “church” down here on earth, where we meet on Sundays and Wednesday nights—that church’s job is to give glory to the Father and to the Son, as it was in the beginning. The celestial Church’s job is to point toward the glory of the Father and the Son. My definition of glory and giving glory is to be in perfect alignment with the will of the Father and the Son. When you are in perfect alignment with the Father, you are “giving glory” to the Father. It has to do with where you put your focus, and the focus of the celestial Church is to give glory to the Father and the Son. And here the Tripartite Tractate is saying that these spirits inside the Church also beget. And the way they do that is through associations they form with one another and toward those who have come forth from them toward the Son, “for whose glory they exist.” So, they form relationships—and when the Aeon of the Aeons, the Church, form relationships with one another, they are begetting new forms out of those relationships. It’s an unending and uncountable number of relationships that can be formed. There is pretty much an infinite number of relationships that can be formed within the Church. So, the Church—which is the breakout fractals of the Son—the Son being the first fractal of the Father, the Church is innumerable fractals of the Son. And then, off of those innumerable fractals come more innumerable fractals as those create relationships with one another. And, in this way, the Aeons beget themselves. The Tripartite Tractate says, “They alone have the ability to name themselves and to conceive of themselves. Of those places that are ineffable and innumerable in the system, which is both the manner and the size, the joy, the gladness of the Unbegotten, nameless, unnamable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible One (the Father), it is the Fullness of paternity, so that his abundance is a begetting of the Aeons.”  background: Father ground state; from left to right: Son first monad of consciousness; the All; the ALL becomes self aware and sorts itself into a hierarchy; the ALL dreams of Paradise This episode is supposed to be about the Son, but we have hardly heard anything about the Son himself, right? We hear about the Father being indescribable, and we hear about the infinite number of spirits of the Church that form the body of the Son, but we haven’t really heard much in the way of descriptions of the Son itself because the only way that the Son can be described is through its Aeons—through the fractals that come off of it. And, each step that we get away from the inconceivable Father, and then the barely conceivable Son, we become more and more concrete, so to speak, to where we can begin to recognize properties of these Aeons. That’s plenty to chew on for today. Let’s pick this up next week, when we’ll talk more about the emanations of the Son known as the Aeons. Until then, onward and upward! And, God Bless.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’m starting to review a few of our previous episodes from a couple of years ago because we have a lot of new listeners and, in case you haven’t backed up to listen to the entire series, I’m picking out what seems to me to be important ideas. And for those of you who have already heard this, again, like I said last week, it really bears repeating. It takes many, many times to hear these things in order to fully grasp them, as I’m sure you agree. Now, my intent here at Gnostic Insights isn’t to teach you these things so much as it is to remind you of these things, because it is one of the basic tenets of gnosticism that we are born with this knowledge—we 2nd Order Powers—and that’s everything that’s living in the cosmos. We 2nd Order Powers come down from the Fullness with all of the attributes and knowledge of the Fullness of God, because the Fullness is throughout our entire bodies. Every cell carries a fractal of the Fullness, and we carry a fractal of the Fullness in our overall personhood, our Self. We tend to forget all of this in the living of our life down here. The Tripartite Tractate says the reason we forget this knowledge is due to the what they call the never ending war, and the never ending war is the tension between those of the Remembrance—we 2nd Order Powers—and that which did not exist from the beginning, which is the Archons and the Demiurge. They don’t know any of this. The Demiurge thinks that it is the beginning of all there is. It doesn’t remember the God Above All Gods or Logos, its better Self. It thinks it came into this cosmos and woke up and suddenly the cosmos existed, which is kind of the way it is because it is the result of the Fall, and it’s the Fall that made the cosmos. It’s the Fall that split Logos in two and the better part of Logos goes up, returns to the Fullness and to the Father. That’s its One Self, its overall fractal of Selfhood. But it left behind, down here in the Fall, its broken pieces. That is the ego that overreached in the first place—the part that left the Fullness of God. It works for its own self. It doesn’t work for the overall good. It doesn’t remember the Father, the God Above All Gods, the Fullness from which it came. It doesn’t remember the Golden Rule of cooperation. So the Demiurge thinks it is the God and it goes ahead. And it is a God. It is the God of this world, and it creates the heavens and the Earth and all of the dry, hard, rocky parts—the material, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the minerals—that is all demiurgic. And that is the never ending war that we living creatures find ourselves engaged in. And because of the nature of always having to put up our dukes and fight, we forget the goodness and love and what our original purpose was for being incarnated in the first place, which is to remind the Demiurge of the love of the Fullness and the love of the Father and the love of the God Above All Gods. Our job is to bring love into this universe. So here is the beginning of that story. This is the story of the God Above All Gods, the God of the gnostic mythologies. Today we’re going to be looking at the concept known as the Father. As you know, we’ve been looking at the gnostic Gospel according to the Tripartite Tractate, which is one of the books of the Nag Hammadi scrolls. The Tripartite Tractate is a book that focuses on the origins of our universe and everything in it, including us. So I thought we would look around again today and revisit the Tripartite Tractate and what it has to say about the Father as the first principle of gnosticism. Philosophers often speak of the hard problem of consciousness. Materialist scientists don’t believe in consciousness. They believe in a thing called material monism, which is that we are only our physical bodies and that any appearance of consciousness or of a soul is merely a by-product of physical mechanisms, hormones, atoms moving around–this sort of thing. The counterpoint to that view, often called dualism, is that, yes, we have a physical body and then we also have a soul and it’s your soul that survives after death. This gnosticism that comes from the Nag Hammadi is a religious system that presupposes that there is a soul and there is a body. So, first off, we acknowledge that gnosticism is a dualistic philosophy. It seems to me that the soul that people speak of surviving is the consciousness that began with the Father and derives from the Father. And that is why, whenever I discuss the system of consciousness, whether it’s in A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, (my prior gnostic book), it always begins with the Father, because the Father is where consciousness resides. The Father is consciousness itself. The Father is another word for consciousness. Then this entire creation cosmology that’s presented through the Tripartite Tractate and then re-presented again in my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is the path by which consciousness proceeds out from the Father through the Son, through the Totalities and the Pleroma of the Hierarchy, and on into the Second Order of Powers that populate the Earth. This is why we begin with the Father. The Father is the ground state of consciousness, and so this is why we begin to build out from the Father the flow of consciousness. My Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything book and blog are devoted to the notion of panpsychism, which suggests that consciousness resides in everything, however, in gnostic terms we say that the Father extends his consciousness throughout all living things that populate the cosmos. I like to begin with the cosmos as it unfolded and rolled out. The word for that sort of study is “cosmogony,” which is defined as the study of the origins of the universe. This makes the most sense to me–to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are and then, after that is established, to see how that applies to our lives. Then we can ask, “Why are we here? Is there a purpose to our lives? How should we live?” After that, we can finally consider the termination of the universe and what happens after we “die.” All of these questions are answered very precisely in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This knowledge is known as “gnosis.” Today we begin at the very beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. This story, this cosmogony, begins before the beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos existed. I’m going to compare a couple of different versions of the Tripartite so that we have a fuller picture of the Father. One of the books I’m going to use is The Nag Hammadi Scriptures edited by Marvin Meyer; the translator in this case was a person named Einar Thomassen. The other version we are going to compare it to is the one posted at the Gnostic Society library at gnosis dot org and reprinted in The Nag Hammadi Library, translated by Harold Attridge. The introduction says, “As for what we can say about the things which are exalted, what is fitting is that we begin with the Father, who is the root of the totality, the one from whom we have received grace to speak about him.” Another version says, “In order to be able to speak about exalted things, it is necessary that we begin with the Father, who is the root of the all and from whom we have obtained grace to speak about him, for he existed before anything else had come into being, except him alone.” I invite you now to think of the originating consciousness as a vast consciousness which has no place and no time, no history. It is nothing but pure consciousness without thought, similar to what the Buddhists called the Buddha Mind. This clear state of pure consciousness is something people try to achieve during meditation, where you can be aware that you are conscious, but you have no particular thoughts or words or images going through your mind. This is the originating Father. The Father has no thought, no images, no structure or form, no thing at all. This pure consciousness is the Father. There is no gender associated with this Father. Obviously the Father is not a man with a beard and long robes. The Tripartite Tractate says, “Rather, he possesses this constitution without having a face or form, things which are understood through perception, whence also comes the title, ‘The Incomprehensible.’ If he is incomprehensible, then it follows that he is unknowable, that he is the one who is inconceivable by any thought, invisible by anything, ineffable by any word, untouchable by any hand. He alone is the one who knows himself as he is, along with his form and his greatness and his magnitude.” This passage affirms that no matter how much we try or science tries, the underlying consciousness underneath our existence will never be grasped, will never be measured. It can not be discovered. Which begs the question—if the Father is unknowable, then what are we doing here describing him? If the Father is incomprehensible, then why are we even discussing him? [What follows will help resolve this paradox. Clue: We are able to discuss him, because he is known through his emanations.] What we are doing here at Gnostic Insights, and what I believe the writer of the Tripartite Tractate was doing, is that we are describing the Father as what is called a first principle. In philosophy, a first principle is a first cause, an origin, from which all else proceeds and all subsequent arguments are based. First principles are not provable; they are a priori assumptions upon which all else proceeds. This is why here at Gnostic Insights we spend so much time discussing the Father. The Father is the a priori, the first cause, the uber first principle of all else that follows—not only in a religious sense, but in a cosmogenic sense, as it is the basis upon which everything in our universe may be logically deduced. Now back to the idea of gender. The reason this consciousness is called “Father” and not “Mother” has to do with the direction of movement initiated by the Father. The Father is a consciousness that extends outward from itself. It emanates; it doesn’t receive. The Father extends consciousness. Extension is sometimes translated as will, but it refers to the Father reaching out for what he is driving toward. The Father extends consciousness out from itself as the originating source. In this sense we can contrast that extension with the concept of “female,” which is receptive; which is that which takes into itself. The Father gives; the mother receives. This Father’s basic consciousness is not thoughts but rather love–the sensation of what we call love. So this consciousness simply is; without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning or end; utterly quiet, utterly still, utterly alone. The Father is often described as all-knowing but what is there to know? All-seeing but what is there to see? All loving but what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom and will, but to what end? There is nothing there. Quoting the Tripartite Tractate, “It is said of him that he is a father in the proper sense, since he is inimitable and immutable. Because of this, he is single in the proper sense and is a god because no one is a god for him. Nor is anyone a father to him, for he is unbegotten and there is no other who begot him, nor another who created him. It is, then, only the Father who is God in the proper sense that no one else begot. As for the Totalities, he is the one who begot them and created them. He is without beginning and without end.” So what this is saying is that other gods with a small g have been created or have been born, but not this one. This is the original God with the big G that no one created. This is the original source. Quote: “Not only is he without end, he is immortal for this reason that he is unbegotten, but he is also invariable in his eternal existence, in his identity, in that by which he is established and in that by which he is great. Neither will he remove himself from that by which he is, nor will anyone else force him to produce an end which he has not ever desired. He has not had anyone who initiated his own existence. Thus he is himself unchanged, and no one else can remove him from his existence and his identity, that in which he is and his greatness, so that he cannot be grasped. Nor is it possible for anyone else to change him into a different form or to reduce him or alter him or diminish him.” The other translation is very much like that. “He is without beginning and without end, for not only is he without end, being unborn makes him immortal as well, but he is also unchangeable in his eternal being, in that which he is in, that which makes him immutable and that which makes him great.” Of course, immutable means can’t be mutated, can’t be changed. “He does not move himself away from what he is, nor can anyone else force him against his will to cease being what he is, for no one has made him what he is now.” In other words, God cannot change his character—his nature. He will not change his mind. His principles and values will never change. And he can’t be destroyed or added to. God is not dead, in other words. As an aside, I am reminded of the Hadron Particle Collider located in Cern, Switzerland—the largest and most complex machine on earth. The function of point of  the Hadron Particle Collider is to crash elemental particles into each other, trying to split them into smaller and smaller pieces, attempting to break particles into the smallest possible particles. And in fact, what the Hadron collider has been trying to do for the last number of years is to fire particles at each other with such great force and speed that they break into the essential particle of the universe that they’re calling the Higgs boson, or the God particle. They are literally looking for the “God particle.” And, indeed, exactly ten years ago, on July 4, 2012, scientists declared they had found the God particle. This Tripartite description of the Father, the God Above All Gods, is saying: you cannot break God up into smaller pieces. God is immutable. He is indiscoverable in the sense that the scientists are trying to discover him. So we would have to make a prediction that these particle accelerators and particle colliders will not be able to find a God particle, because God is not discoverable. They may have found the Higgs boson, but God itself is not physically discoverable in that sense. It cannot be broken down into smaller pieces, and it seems to me that that is what this next paragraph is talking about. “Therefore, neither does he change himself, nor will another, (such as a scientist), be able to move him from that which he is, from what he is, from his way of being, or from his greatness. Thus, he cannot be moved, nor is it possible for another to change him into a different form, either by reducing him or changing him or making him less, for this is truly and veritably how he is unchangeable and immutable, being clothed in immutability. Thus he is called without beginning and without end, not only because he is unborn and immortal, but also because, just as he is without beginning, he is also without end. In this manner of being, he is incomprehensible in his greatness, inscrutable in his wisdom, invincible in his might, and unfathomable in his sweetness.” We can conclude from this description that if humanity manages to destroy the earth by way of a worldwide nuclear war, or if aliens come and blast us to pieces like the Death Star, the Father would still be unchanged. The Father would still exist underneath it all, without having been affected. The material world cannot affect the Father. So, if the entire universe ceases to exist, the Father is still there, underneath it all. So while it may be the case that we can destroy ourselves, our planet, our galaxy; we can destroy the entire universe, but we certainly cannot destroy the Father. Carrying on, “In the true sense, he alone, the good, unborn and perfect father who lacks nothing, is complete, filled with everything he possesses–excellent and precious qualities of every kind. Moreover, he has no envy, which means that all he owns he gives away without being affected and suffering no loss by his gifts, for he is rich from the things he gives away and finds rest in what he graciously bestows.” The other translation says that the Father is “unfathomable in his sweetness in the proper sense. He alone, the good, the unbegotten father and the complete, perfect one, is the one filled with all his offspring and with every virtue and with everything of value, and he has more, that is, lack of any malice…”  The book goes on, “He is of such a kind and form and great magnitude that no one else has been with him from the beginning. Nor is there a place in which he is or from which he has come forth or into which he will go. Nor is there a primordial form which he uses as a model as he works. Nor is there any difficulty which accompanies him and what he does. Nor is there any material which is at his disposal from which he creates what he creates, nor any substance within him from which he begets what he begets. Nor a co-worker with him working with him on the things at which he works. To say anything of this sort is ignorant. Rather, one should speak of him as good, faultless, perfect, complete, being himself the Totality.” [This is all known through his emanations.] So if we’re going to think about our modern physics again and cosmology, and if we think there may be multiverses, that is, we are just one universe in a sea of other universes floating in this great pool, this Father that we are describing would be back before all of that. He’s not the Father of our universe alone; he’s the Father of the entire sea within which all things float. Everything comes out of him, and he himself pre-exists all of that. “There is no name that suits him among those that may be conceived, spoken, seen or grasped, however brilliant, exalted or glorious. It is, to be sure, possible to speak such names in order to glorify and praise him to the extent of the capacity of whoever wants to give glory, but the way he is in himself, his own manner of being, that no mind can conceive, no word express, nor see and nobody touch, so incomprehensible is his greatness so unfathomable, his depth so immeasurable, his exaltedness is so boundless.” Here at Gnostic Insights we would say that although the Father cannot possibly be grasped, we all possess a sense of him, for we all contain the One seed of his consciousness. The Father wished to be known; to know and to be known. To love, and to be loved. Therefore the Father has provided us a cookie trail to follow in our quest for gnosis. [through his emanations] It said that we use these words of praise or glory to the extent that we, the ones who speak, are capable, but they fall far short of actually describing what is the Father. The Tripartite Tractate then goes on to say, “and since he has the ability to conceive of himself, to see himself, to name himself, to comprehend himself, he alone is the one who is his own mind, his own eye, his own mouth, his own form, and he is what he thinks, what he sees, what he speaks, what he grasps himself, the one who is inconceivable, ineffable, incomprehensible, immutable while sustaining joyous, true, delightful and restful, in that which he conceives, that which he sees, that about which he speaks, that which he has as thought. He transcends all wisdom and is above all intellect and is above all glory, and is above all beauty and all sweetness and all greatness and any depth and any height.” This is my description of the Father prior to conceiving of the Son. These are descriptions of the Father as the first principle, also known as the God Above All Gods. You can see for yourself that these descriptions of the Father are not the same as the descriptions of God in the Bible. The God of the Old Testament is personified. God in the Bible is someone who can sit and have a discussion with men around a camp fire or speak out of the middle of a burning bush. Our gnostic God exists prior to all of that and is far greater than all of that. This God is not in a personified form, walking around on the Earth or floating just above earth, looking down at us. This Father is the gigantic, illimitable consciousness that underlies everything. This is an entirely different type of being than the God of the Old Testament, known as Jehovah. That personified character arises much later in the creation story than the Father we are describing. But this is the beginning. Everything began with this Father Above All Fathers. This God Above all Gods is only goodness, joy, sweetness, true, and delightful. It is not a warlike or a jealous god. It would not send people into battle or kill the first-born of the entire Egyptian nation. This God, as you can see, is qualitatively different than that. This God is love. Large Hadron Collider searches for God–The Hadon Collider in Cern, Switzerland is the largest, most complex, and most energetic machine on earth.