Gnostic Insights

Universal Salvation–part 4

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’m going to do my best to wrap up this review of David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. And I hope you understand, particularly those of you who are Christians that are listening to this, that I do all of this in the name of the Father. It’s not to tear down Christianity. It’s to uphold the mission of the Messiah, which has been lost over the past several hundred years of Christianity.

And so this talk of universal salvation is a necessary component of believing in the glory of God. Because universal salvation of all souls, not only all humans, but the dogs, the cats, the birds, the grasses, all living things, have to return to the Father, or else the Anointed loses power. The Father loses parts of himself.

Okay, let’s get back to David Bentley Hart. So we’re going to run through these four meditations that are the body of his book. The first meditation is, Who is God? He says,

The New Testament, to a great degree, consists in the eschatological interpretation of Hebrew Scripture’s story of creation, finding in Christ as eternal Logos and risen Lord, the unifying term of beginning and end.

There’s no more magnificent meditation on this vision than Gregory of Nyssa’s description of the progress of all persons towards union with God in the one pleroma, the one fullness of the whole Christ. All spiritual wills moving, to use this loving image, from outside the temple walls to the temple precincts, and finally beyond the ages into the very sanctuary of the glory as one.

Okay, let me jump in here to say, do you notice that the New Testament words, when you use the correct translations, are the same as the translations in our Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi? Logos is the eternal spirit of humanity and the risen Lord. The Fullness is the one pleroma, the whole Christ. And in this statement, it’s saying that all that is spiritual, which includes the spirits that reside within each of us, will all move as one into the pleroma of the Christ. That’s who Christ is to us. He’s the head of our pleroma. And when I speak of pleromas, I always picture that pyramidal shape, that hierarchical shape, and the capstone is the head.

When Paul spoke of this, he was applying it literally to the temple in Jerusalem, where there were the walls of the temple, and most of the people were outside of the walls, and some of the people were in the temple precincts. And finally, the very sanctuary of the glory, where only the priests were allowed. These are the three parts that were mentioned, and these are archetypal of the movement of humanity, Hart is saying, from the outside of the pleroma of the Christ, into the pleroma of the Christ, and then into the very glory of God through the Christ.

On page 90, Hart says,

If one truly believes that traditional Christian language about God’s goodness and the theological grammar to which it belongs are not empty, then the God of eternal retribution and pure sovereignty proclaimed by so much of Christian tradition is not and cannot possibly be the God of self-outpouring love revealed in Christ. If God is the good creator of all, he must also be the savior of all without fail, who brings to himself all he has made, including all rational wills, and only thus returns to himself in all that goes forth from him.

And that’s the end of the chapter, Who is God? And that pretty much states my basic belief on why everyone is going to heaven, because we all come from the Father, and therefore we all must return to the Father, because the Father cannot be diminished in any way. And if he lost us, he’d be diminished. Do you see?

The second meditation is, What is Judgment? And the subtitle is A Reflection on Biblical Eschatology. And eschatology, that’s one of those big theological words that just means the end times, the end of time. On page 93, Hart says,

There’s a general sense among most Christians that the notion of an eternal hell is explicitly and unremittingly advanced in the New Testament. And yet, when we go looking for it in the actual pages of the text, it proves remarkably elusive. The whole idea is, for instance, entirely absent from the Pauline corpus as even the thinnest shadow of a hint, nor is it anywhere patently present in any of the other epistolary texts.

There is one verse in the Gospels, Matthew 25-46 that, traditionally understood, offers what seems the strongest evidence for the idea, but then now Hart’s going to explain how that can’t be true. And then he says there are also perhaps a couple of verses from Revelation, and he says nothing’s clear in Revelation, so he’s not going to go there. But,

What in fact the New Testament provides us with are a number of fragmentary and fantastic images that can be taken in any number of ways, arranged according to our prejudices and expectations, and declared literal or figural or hyperbolic as our desires dictate.

It’s why people can make the case for eternal damnation, but you can also make the case for not eternal damnation, because it’s so metaphorical. On page 94, Hart says,

Nowhere is there any description of a kingdom of perpetual cruelty presided over by Satan, as though he were some kind of Chthonian god. On the other hand, however, there are a remarkable number of passages in the New Testament, several of them from Paul’s writings, that appear instead to promise a final salvation of all persons and all things, and in the most unqualified terms.

How did some images become mere images in the general Christian imagination, while others became exact documentary portraits of some final reality? If one can be swayed simply by the brute force of arithmetic, it seems worth noting that, among the apparently most explicit statements on the last things, the universalist statements are by far the more numerous.

And then he lists a number of verses from the New Testament that speak of universal salvation, over 20 of them at least, and I’ll give you just a couple.

Romans 5.18 says, So then, just as through one transgression came condemnation for all human beings, so also through one act of righteousness came a rectification of life for all human beings.

And jumping in from the Gnostic sense, he doesn’t say the fall of one human, he doesn’t say through Adam, he says one transgression—and we would call that one transgression the Fall of Logos, the fall of the Aeon, which is a higher order being than we are.

Or Corinthians 15.22 says, For just as in Adam all die, so also in the anointed Christ all will be given life.

I would say where it says for just as in Adam all die, it’s not because Adam ate the apple, it’s that we humans who are outside of the Christ, we’re outside of the walls of the temple, we are in the pleroma of Adam—we are in the pleroma of human beings. When you accept the anointed, then you move into the pleroma, or you nest up higher into the pleroma of the Christ. That would be the Gnostic way of saying that.

Second Corinthians 5.14 says, For the love of the anointed constrains us, having reached this judgment, that one died on behalf of all, all then have died.

And of course that one is the Anointed, and He died on behalf of everyone.

Or even Romans 11:32, For God shut up everyone in obstinacy, so that he might show mercy to everyone.

And there’s a long discussion in the chapter about how God’s chosen—the original elect, that being the Hebrew nation—has been obstinate about accepting Jesus of Nazareth as the Anointed. And so he’s saying that everyone is shut up in obstinacy, that’s the Hebrews, so that he might show mercy to everyone. And that is, they’re temporarily set up in obstinacy so that the message of the Anointed can be preached far and wide, before death and after death, we Gnostics would say, and not be just constrained to only the Hebrews. That’s why the Hebrews are set aside for the moment, so that those outside the temple walls can also come to Christ.

And then there are 19 more verses after this, and he lists them all between pages 96 and page 102. And if you are a theological scholar or a concerned Christian that wants to know if this is heresy or not, I really suggest you buy the book, That All Shall Be Saved, by David Bentley Hart, and read it carefully from cover to cover. Jumping to page 116, Hart says,

There are those metaphors used by Jesus that seem to imply that the punishment of the world to come will be of only limited duration. For example, “if remanded to prison, you shall most certainly not emerge until you pay the very last pittance.” Or, “the unmerciful slave is delivered to the torturers until he should repay everything he owes.” And Hart says it seems as if this until should be taken with some seriousness.

Some wicked slaves, moreover, “will be beaten with many blows, while others will be beaten with few blows.”

Hart says, of course, everyone will be “salted with fire.” This fire is explicitly that of the Gehenna. But salting here is an image of purification and preservation, for salt is good.

Gehenna is the Valley of Hinnom from the Old Testament, and that is where, outside of the city of Jerusalem, the refuse was burned, and even carrion and bodies were burned. And that is why it is considered to be a hellish place. And it has become a metaphor in the time of Jesus for the purging fire, the Aeonian chastening for the good.

Hart says we might even find some support for the purgatorial view of the Gehenna from the Greek of Matthew 25:46, which is the supposedly conclusive verse on the side of the Infernalist Orthodoxy, where the word used for the punishment of the last day is kolasis, which most properly refers to remedial chastisement, rather than timoria, which more properly refers to retributive justice. So, the fire of the judgment. What is judgment? The fire is the chastening fire, the fire of personal guilt and remorse over the sins one has done, that causes one to repent and turn to redemption. Hart says,

It is not clear in any event that the fourth gospel, [and the fourth gospel, that’s the gospel of John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John], it is not clear in any event that the fourth gospel foretells any last judgment, in the sense of a real additional judgment that accomplishes more than has already happened in Christ. To see His words as pointing toward and fulfilled within his own crucifixion and resurrection, wherein all things were judged and all things redeemed. The kingdom has indeed drawn very near, and even now is being revealed. The hour indeed has come. The judge who is judged in our place is also the resurrection and the life that has always already succeeded and exceeded the time of condemnation. All of heaven and of hell meet in those three days. . .

Hell appears in the shadow of the cross as what has always already been conquered, as what Easter leaves in ruins, to which we may flee from the transfiguring light of God if we so wish, but where we can never finally come to rest, for being only a shadow, it provides nothing to cling to.

And he attributes that concept of hell being only a shadow to Gregory of Nyssa, although we would attribute it to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scrolls which came before Gregory of Nyssa.

Hell exists so long as it exists only as the last terrible residue of a fallen creation’s enmity to God, the lingering effects of a condition of slavery that God has conquered universally in Christ and will ultimately conquer individually in every soul.

This age has passed away already, however long it lingers on its own aftermath, and thus in the Age to Come, [and that’s capital A, Age, which we would interpret as the Aeons to Come, the Aeonian Pleroma to Come], and beyond all ages, all shall come to the kingdom prepared for them from before the foundation of the world.

And that’s the chapter, What is Judgment? The third meditation or chapter of Hart is called What is a Person? A Reflection on the Divine Image. It says over and over in the Bible that we are made in the image of God. Man is made in the image of God. That is the divine image. On page 131, Hart says,

Christians down the centuries have excelled at converting the good tidings of God’s love in Christ into something dreadful, irrational, and morally horrid.

[And we covered that in depth in the previous three episodes, if you want to go back there.] On page 132, Hart says,

I suspect that no figure in Christian history has suffered a greater injustice as a result of the desperate inventiveness of the Christian moral imagination than the Apostle Paul, since it was the violent misprision of his theology of grace, starting with the great Augustine, it grieves me to say, that gave rise to almost all of these grim distortions of the Gospel.

Aboriginal guilt, predestination, ante praevisa merita, the eternal damnation of unbaptized infants, the real existence of vessels of wrath, and so on. All of these odious and incoherent dogmatic motifs, so to speak, and others equally nasty, have been ascribed to Paul. And yet, each and every one of them, not only is incompatible with the guiding themes of Paul’s proclamation of Christ’s triumph and of God’s purpose in election, but is something like their perfect inversion.

Well, isn’t that interesting? Because we already know that the archons represent the inversions of the Aeons of the Pleroma. And so, although Hart doesn’t realize he’s implying this, to say that what has come down to us in Christian tradition through Augustine is the perfect inversion of what Paul was actually saying about universal salvation, which means, by definition, that it’s the demiurgic or the archonic version of salvation. Isn’t that interesting? I mean, that is what I have been implying, that what has been taken to be Christian tradition for the last couple of thousand years is actually a diminishment of the power of Christ and the power and love of the Father. By saying that people can be lost and condemned to eternal torture, that is sacrilegious to me. That is the heresy. And that is what Hart is saying here. He goes on to say on page 133,

This is all fairly odd, really. Paul’s argument in those chapters is not difficult to follow. What preoccupies him from beginning to end is the agonizing mystery that the Messiah of Israel has come, and yet so few of the children of the house of Israel have accepted the fact, even while so many from outside the covenant have.

And Paul wonders, how is the promised Messiah rejected by so many, yet so many outside the temple walls have accepted the Messiah? Well, there’s far more Christians than there are Jews at the moment. Why is that? Paul was wondering. Hart says,

Paul’s is not an abstract question regarding which individual human beings are the saved and which are the damned. In fact, by the end of the argument, the former category, [that is the saved], proves to be vastly larger than that of the elect or the called, while the latter category, [that is the damned], makes no appearance at all.

Jumping down the page, he says, “so then what if,” so now he’s going to go ahead and quote Paul here, Romans 9:19, Paul says,

So then what if God should show his power by preserving vessels suitable only for wrath, keeping them solely for destruction, in order to provide an instructive counterpoint to the riches of the glory he lavishes on vessels prepared for mercy, whom he has called from among the Jews and the Gentiles alike.

For as it happens, rather than offering a solution to the quandary in which he finds himself, Paul is simply restating that quandary in its bleakest possible form, at the very brink of despair. He does not stop there, however, because he knows that this cannot be the correct answer. It is so obviously preposterous, in fact, that a wholly different solution must be sought, one that makes sense and that will not require the surrender either of Paul’s reason or of his confidence in God’s righteousness.

Hence, contrary to his own warnings, Paul does indeed continue to question God’s justice, and he spends the next two chapters unambiguously rejecting the provisional answer, the vessels of wrath hypothesis, altogether, so as to reach a completely different and far more glorious conclusion—God blesses everyone.  Romans 10: 11, 12.

And by the way, in Gnostic gospel, we would say the law is actually the Demiurge’s rules for human behavior, because we are uncontrollable through our self-will. Because to the Father above, the only law is love. When we act out of love, all else follows.

Going on, Hart says,

As for the believing remnant of Israel, [Romans 11:5], it turns out that they have been elected not as the limited number of the saved within Israel, but as the earnest through which all of Israel will be saved.

They are waiting for the Anointed to come and take the place of the King of Israel, King of the Jews. That’s one of the titles of the Messiah. That means the capstone of their pleroma.

You see? It’s all of these pyramidal shapes that are first designed up there in the Fullness of God, the pleroma. What Paul is saying is that the Jews that are in the pleroma of Israel, it’s their remnant that makes them holy. It’s their remnant that is the spiritual part, the higher part, the called part, the elect part of the pleroma of the nation of the Hebrews. And it is through those elect that all of the Jews will be saved, ultimately.

[I am drawing a new diagram of nested pleromas to add to our understanding of the Gnostic gospel. Next week I will present it to you.]

Hart says,

For the time being, true, a part of Israel is hardened, but this will remain the case only until the ”full entirety” [that is the pleroma] of the Gentiles enter in. The unbelievers among the children of Israel may have been allowed to stumble, but God will never allow them to fall.

Hart’s just saying that Israel’s reluctance or slowness to believing that Jesus is the Messiah is just slowing down the progress of history to give everyone else a chance to catch up to it. Quoting Hart again,

We’re in Romans now, 11:11.

This then is the radiant answer dispelling the shadows of Paul’s grim what if in the ninth chapter of Romans. It’s clarion negative. It turns out that there is no final illustrative division between the vessels of wrath and vessels of mercy. That was a grotesque, all too human thought that can now be chased away for good. God’s wisdom far surpasses ours, and his love can accomplish all that it intends.

“He has bound everyone in disobedience so as to show mercy to everyone.” [That’s Romans 11:32.] All are vessels of wrath precisely so that all may be made vessels of mercy. . .

That Paul’s great attempt to demonstrate that God’s election is not some arbitrary act of predilective exclusion, but instead a providential means for bringing about the unrestricted inclusion of all persons, has been employed for centuries to advance what is quite literally the very teaching that he went to such great lengths explicitly to reject. . .

Yet this is still not my principal point. I want to say something far more radical. I want to say that there is no way in which persons can be saved as persons except in and with all other persons. This may seem an exorbitant claim, but I regard it as no more than an acknowledgment of certain obvious truths about the fragility, dependency, and exigency of all that make us who and what we are.

Oh, this is a very interesting portion. Okay, listen to this. Jumping to page 149.

No soul is who or what it is in isolation, and no soul’s sufferings can be ignored without the sufferings of a potentially limitless number of other souls being ignored as well. And so it seems if we allow the possibility that even so much as a single soul might slip away unmourned into everlasting misery, the ethos of heaven turns out to be “every soul for itself”—which is also, curiously enough, precisely the ethos of hell.

But Christians are obliged, it seems clear, to take seriously the eschatological imagery of scripture. And there all talk of salvation involves the promise of a corporate beatitude, a kingdom of love and knowledge, a wedding feast, a city of the redeemed, the body of Christ, which means that the hope Christians cherish must in some way involve the preservation of whatever is deepest in and most essential to personality rather than a perfect escape from personality. But finite persons are not self-enclosed individual substances. They are dynamic events of relation to what is other than themselves.

And then Hart summons up the idea of a single recurrent image, he says,

That of a parent whose beloved child has grown into quite an evil person, but who remains a parent nevertheless, and therefore keeps and cherishes countless tender memories of the innocent and delightful being that has now become lost in the labyrinth of that damaged soul. Is all of that, those memories, those anxieties and delights, those feelings of desperate love, really to be consigned to the fire as just so much combustible chaff? Must it all be forgotten or willfully ignored for heaven to enter into that parent’s soul? And if so, is this not the darkest tragedy ever composed? And is God not then a tragedian utterly merciless in his poetic omnipotence? Who or what is that being whose identity is no longer determined by its relation to that child?

[Skipping to page 153]  Personhood as such is not a condition possible for an isolated substance. It is an act, not a thing. And it is achieved only in and through a history of relations with others. We are finite beings in a state of becoming, and in us there is nothing that is not an action, dynamism, an emergence into a fuller or a retreat into a more impoverished existence. And so, as I said in my first meditation, we are those others who make us. Spiritual personality is not mere individuality, nor is personal love one of its merely accidental conditions or extrinsic circumstances.

A person is first and foremost a limitless capacity, a place where the all shows itself with a special inflection. We exist as the place of the other, to borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau. Certainly, this is the profoundest truth in the doctrine of resurrection. That we must rise from the dead to be saved is a claim not simply about resumed corporeality, whatever that might turn out to be, but more crucially, about the fully restored existence of the person as socially, communally, corporately constituted. Each person is a body within the body of humanity, which exists in its proper nature only as the body of Christ.

Well, that’s pretty neat. See, we are nested fractal hierarchies of the pleroma of the Fullness of God. And if you’ve been with me a while, you know what that long and complicated sentence means. Picture a pyramidal shape, picture every living part of your body as building up the pyramid, and your conscious self is the capstone of that pleroma that makes up your body. Now, you are then nested along with all other humans into the pleroma of humanity, the body of humanity, also called the body of Adam. Just the way our cells nest up into building us, we nest up into building the great body of humanity.

And then, Hart is saying this body of humanity exists in its proper nature only as the body of Christ, because when we then nest up and make Christ the king of our pleroma, we are nested into the Fullness of Christ. And that is what the final salvation resting point is. When we all finally pass through the final judgment and nest up into Christ, then we’re all nested up into the pleroma, we’re all nested up into the Son. And there we are. And we will still have our lives the way the Fullness has their lives. They dream together as one of paradise. And that’s where we’re headed. Hart says,

Our personhood must truly consist not only in the immediate love of those close at hand, but also in our disposition toward those whom we, by analogy, care for from afar. Or even in the abstract, for the most essential law of charity, of love, when it is truly active, is that it must inexorably grow beyond all immediately discernible boundaries in order to be fulfilled and to continue to be active.

And all of those in whom each of us is implicated, and who are implicated in each of us, are themselves in turn implicated and intertwined in countless others, and on and on without limit. We belong of necessity to an indissoluble co-inherence of souls.

And I think that down here on the physical level, on the material plane, the demiurgic version of that shared coherence of all souls together is quantum entanglement. That’s the Demiurge’s material version of how we are implicated and intertwined with every other soul. And now he goes on to say something that’s very Gnostic. On the next page, Hart says,

There may be within each of us—indeed there surely is—that divine spark, that divine light or spark of nous or spirit or atman that is the abiding presence of God in us, the place of radical sustaining divine imminence, nearer to me than my inmost parts. But that light is the one undifferentiated ground of our existence, not the particularity of our personal existence, in and with one another.

Oh, hey, there it is. That’s what I’m always saying. This one spark, that’s the what we call the big S Self. And the particularity of our personal existence is what we here at Gnostic Insights label as our Ego. So we are made up of the Self that we share with all others and that we share with the Son, but we are also our own individual existence. That’s why we can’t just blink out into nothingness and not be missed, because we have our particularity, and it has its own place in the hierarchy. Then Hart says,

But then this is to say that either all persons must be saved or that none can be. He says, God could, of course, erase each of the elect as whoever they once were by shattering their memories and attachments like the gates of hell and then raise up some other being in each of their places, thus converting the will of each into an idiot bliss stripped of the loves that made him or her this person, associations and attachments and pity and tenderness and all the rest. If that were the case, only in hell could any of us possess something like a personal destiny, tormented perhaps by the memories of the loves we squandered or betrayed, but not deprived of them altogether.

[Jumping to 157, he says], I am not I in myself alone, but only in all others. If then anyone is in hell, I too am partly in hell. . . For the whole substance of Christian faith is the conviction that another has already and decisively gone down into that abyss for us to set all the prisoners free, even from the chains of their own hatred and despair, and hence the love that has made all of us who we are and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone.

Amen. And that’s the end of the third meditation. Now the fourth meditation, we just don’t even have time to get to. It’s called, What is Freedom? And if you want to hear the fourth meditation in depth, please text me in the comments and ask for more David Bentley Hart That All Shall Be Saved. But as for now, this treatise on what is freedom? I’ll actually just jump to the last page and skip all of the explanations.

The fourth meditation, What is Freedom? is all about free will. I guess I’ll include it in some future episode about free will and just quote Hart extensively in that episode. But to close it out, Hart says,

It would make no sense to suggest that God, who is by nature not only the source of being, but also the good and the true and the beautiful and everything else that makes spirits exist as rational beings, would truly be all in all if the consummation of all things were to eventuate merely in a kind of extrinsic divine supremacy over creation.

But God is not a god, [or as we would say, the God Above All Gods is not the Demiurge, is how we would put it in Gnostic terms]. And his final victory, as described in scripture, will consist not merely in his assumption of perfect supremacy over all, but also in his ultimately being all in all. Could there then be a final state of things in which God is all in all, while yet there existed rational creatures whose inward worlds consisted in an eternal rejection of and rebellion against God as the sole and consuming and fulfilling end of the rational will’s most essential nature? If this fictive and perverse interiority were to persist into eternity, would God’s victory over every sphere of being really be complete? Or would that small miserable residual flicker of Promethean defiance remain forever as the one space in creation from which God has been successfully expelled? Surely it would, so it too must pass away.

All right, that ends this long episode, because I was trying to wrap up the entire book, which I almost did. Write to me, tell me what you think of this sort of thing. I’d especially like to hear from people who used to be Christians, or who were raised in the church, and who fell away from the church because of some of these very problems and conundrums that we’ve been talking about for the last four episodes.

God bless us all, and onward and upward!

If you value this gnosis, please consider either a one-time donation or please pledge an ongoing donation. Funds are needed in order to promote this gospel. I’m also about to hire an illustrator for the children’s book, and I need to pay her. Thank you so much.

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today is part three of my book report on David Bentley Hart’s book called That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. The past two weeks we covered the beginning of his book, the Introduction.

I’m going to begin this section by reading out of his final remarks, because he does a good job of simplifying his arguments here at the end of the book. So we’ll start with that. Hart says on page 201,

It may offend against our egalitarian principles today, but it was commonly assumed among the very educated of the early church that the better part of humanity was something of a hapless rabble who could be made to behave responsibly only by the most terrifying coercions of their imaginations.

Belief in universal salvation may have been far more widespread in the first four or five centuries of Christian history than it was in all the centuries that followed, but it was never, as a rule, encouraged in any general way by those in authority in the church. Maybe there are great many among us who can be convinced to be good only through the threat of endless torture at the hands of an indefatigably vindictive god. Even so much as hint that the purifying flames of the age to come will at last be extinguished, and perhaps a good number of us will begin to think like the mafioso who refuses to turn state’s evidence because he is sure he can do the time.

Bravado is, after all, the chief virtue of the incorrigibly stupid. He goes on to say, I have never had much respect for the notion of the blind leap of faith, even when that leap is made in the direction of something beautiful and ennobling. I certainly cannot respect it when it is made in the direction of something intrinsically loathsome and degrading. And I believe that this is precisely what the Infernalist position, no matter what form it takes, necessarily involves.

And to remind you, if you didn’t hear the past two episodes, Infernalist refers to the notion that there is an unending hell of pain and torture for the unregenerate or the unrepentant. Further down page 202, Hart says,

I honestly, perhaps guilelessly, believe that the doctrine of eternal hell is prima facie nonsensical for the simple reason that it cannot even be stated in Christian theological terms without a descent into equivocity, which is equivocation, so precipitous and total that nothing but edifying gibberish remains.

To say that, on the one hand, God is infinitely good, perfectly just, and inexhaustibly loving, and that, on the other, he has created a world under such terms as oblige him either to impose or to permit the imposition of eternal misery on finite rational beings is simply to embrace a complete contradiction. All becomes mystery, but only in the sense that it requires a very mysterious ability to believe impossible things.

[Jumping down the page, he says,] Can we imagine logically, I mean not merely intuitively, that someone still in torment after a trillion ages, or then a trillion trillion, or then a trillion vigintillion, is in any meaningful sense the same agent who contracted some measurable quantity of personal guilt in that tiny, ever more vanishingly insubstantial gleam of an instant that constituted his or her terrestrial life? And can we do this even while realizing that, at that point, his or her sufferings have, in a sense, only just begun, and, in fact, will always have only just begun? What extraordinary violence we must do both to our reason and to our moral intelligence, not to mention simple good taste, to make this horrid notion seem palatable to ourselves.

And all because we have somehow, foolishly, allowed ourselves to be convinced that this is what we must believe. Really, could we truly believe it all apart from either profound personal fear or profound personal cruelty? Which is why, again, I do not believe that most Christians truly believe what they believe they believe.

So, what he’s saying here, what I’ve been talking to you about, is the idea that God, the God Above All Gods, what we call the Father in Gnosticism, would condemn people to everlasting torment, everlasting torment, with no other goal than to punish, because they’re never going to get out of it. That’s what everlasting means. And so it’s just punishment for the sake of punishment, and that that great, unlimitable God would impose this punishment on little, limited, finite beings who only lived a brief millisecond of time in the great span of time of God. That God would create these people for the purpose, basically, of condemning them to everlasting torment.

You see, that is not even rational. It doesn’t make any sense. Not if you believe God is good. It’s impossible. Now, if you think that God is evil, well, then that’s not God, is it? By definition, if you believe that God is cruel and vindictive and unreasonable, well, that’s not the God Above All Gods. And this should come as relief to those of you who think you can’t believe in God, because God is so cruel and vindictive.

Perhaps you were raised in an extremely cruel household with extremely vindictive parents, or schoolteachers, or somebody got to you and, in the name of God, inflicted cruelty upon you. Then you have come to accidentally transpose their human cruelty onto God, because they told you to. But that’s not God, by definition, you see? And when I say, by definition, that means, like, cold is not hot, by definition. Cold is cold. And if you’re going to start arguing, oh no, cold is hot, well, then you’re not talking about cold, you’re talking about hot. Do you see what I mean? And if you have been rejecting God, the God Above All Gods, because you have this view of God as merciless and vindictive, cruel, illogical, unfair, unjust, take comfort, because that’s not God you’re talking about.

Now, it may be the small g god of this world. It could be the guy whose best friend is Satan, because remember, that is a small g god of confusion. And its main job is to cause you to forget that you come from transcendent goodness, that you come from above, from the God Above All Gods, and that you do have freedom. You do have free will. You are meant to inherit joy. You are to do good works, and to be happy, and to be in love, and to love everybody else.

Don’t let some evil archon, or evil Demiurge, or evil human, redefine God in such a way that you reject God, because that’s the mistake. That’s a categorical error. And that’s why I say, take comfort, have joy, receive the love that was meant for you.

Okay, back to the book. On page 205, Hart says,

It was not always thus. Let me at least shamelessly idealize the distant past for a moment. In its dawn, the gospel was a proclamation principally of a divine victory that had been won over death and sin, and over the spiritual powers of rebellion against the big G God that dwells on high, and here below, and under the earth. It announced itself truly as the good tidings of a campaign of divine rescue on the part of a loving God, who by the sending of his Son into the world, and even into the kingdom of death, had liberated his creatures from slavery to a false and merciless master, and had opened a way into the kingdom of heaven, in which all of creation would be glorified by the direct presence of big G God, [or the Father, as we call him in Gnosticism].

And by the way, this paragraph that I just read about early Christianity, that entirely is consistent with this Valentinian Christianity that I share with you here. That is the entire purpose of we second-order creatures being sent down here below, to bring the good tidings of life and love and liberty to the fallen Demiurge, and now subsequently to all of the people who have been hoodwinked by the Demiurge and Satan into believing in the false god that does not incorporate love. Hart goes on to say,

It was above all a joyous proclamation and a call to a lost people to find their true home at last, in their father’s house. It did not initially make its appeal to human hearts by forcing them to revert to some childish or bestial cruelty latent in their natures. Rather, it sought to awaken them to a new form of life, one whose premise was charity. Nor was it a religion offering only a psychological salve for individual anxieties regarding personal salvation. It was a summons to a new and corporate way of life, salvation by entry into a community of love. Nothing as yet was fixed except the certainty that Jesus was now Lord over all things and would ultimately yield all things up to the Father, so that God might be all in all.

Now we’re going to go back into the earlier part of the book to explain some of these concepts in more depth. Hart has broken his book into four meditations, or four subjects we could call it.

The first meditation is, who is God? The second meditation is, what is judgment? The third meditation is, what is a person? And the fourth meditation is, what is freedom? A reflection on the rational will. So in the first meditation, who is God? Hart explains to us that,

The moral destiny of creation and the moral nature of God are absolutely inseparable. As the transcendent good beyond all things, God is also the transcendental end that makes every single action of any rational nature possible. Moreover, the end toward which He acts must be His own goodness, for He is Himself the beginning and end of all things. This is not to deny that, in addition to the primary causality of God’s act of creation, there are innumerable forms of secondary causality operative within the creative order. But none of these can exceed or escape the one end toward which the first cause directs all things.

And so what he is saying here is that the first causality is the expression of God’s goodness, the purity of God reaching out through the Son and into the Fullness of God—emanating. That is the principal causality. That is the prime mover of all things, what we call the base state of consciousness, the matrix.

But then there is a secondary causality that takes place subsequent to that. And I guess the first act of secondary causality was probably the fall, in that it was the first act of will prompted by ego that apparently deviated from God’s original plan, although the Tripartite Tractate does say we shouldn’t blame Logos because the fall was the cause of the cosmos which was destined to come about.

But whereas the Father is the prime mover and remains shielded in purity and fullness and goodness—you see, all the love emanates from the Father, evil doesn’t swim back upstream. It’s all emanating from the Father, and it’s all good.

But we do have secondary causality down here in the created cosmos, primarily due to the actions of the Demiurge and the never-ending war that runs amuck down here. Hart says, page 70,

First, as God’s act of creation is free, constrained by neither necessity nor ignorance, all contingent ends are intentionally enfolded within his decision. And second, precisely because God in himself is absolute, absolved, that is, of every pathos of the contingent, every affect of the sort that a finite substance has the power to visit upon another, his moral venture in creating is infinite.

One way or another, after all, all causes are logically reducible to their first cause. This is no more than a logical truism. In either case, all consequence are, either as actualities or merely possibilities, contingent upon the primordial antecedent, apart from which they could not exist.

In other words, all the things that happen down here in the cosmos couldn’t have happened without God giving it the first start, without the Father giving it the initial emanation. He goes on to say,

And naturally, the rationale of a first cause, its definition, in the most etymologically exact meaning of that term, is the final cause that prompts it, the end toward which it acts. If, then, that first cause is an infinitely free act emerging from infinite wisdom, all those consequence are intentionally entailed, again, either as actualities or as possibilities within that first act.

And so the final end to that act tends is its whole moral truth. The traditional definition of evil as a privation of the good, lacking any essence of its own, in other words, what we would call in Gnosticism, evil is the shadow of the good. Evil is the shadow of Logos. It’s not a thing in itself. It’s the absence of the love and the light of the Father. It is also an assertion that when we say God is good, we are speaking of Him not only relative to his creation, but as he is in himself.

All comes from God, and so evil cannot be a thing that comes from anywhere. Evil is, in every case, merely the defect whereby a substantial good is lost, belied, or resisted. For in every sense, being is act, and God, in his simplicity and infinite freedom, is what he does. He could not be the creator of anything substantially evil without evil also being part of the definition of who he essentially is, for he alone is the wellspring of all that exists.

Jumping down the page on 71, Hart says, “God goes forth in all beings, and in all beings returns to himself.” That’s how I describe as we all carry the Fullness of God within our being, and within every cell of our being. And since we are carrying the Fullness of God within us, we will have to return to the Fullness of God ultimately. We can’t be lost in everlasting torment, because we are the Fullness of God, and God cannot torment itself. Hart says,

God has no need of the world. He creates it not because he is dependent upon it, but because its dependency on him is a fitting expression of the bounty of his goodness.

Doesn’t that remind you of, in the beginning, the Father was alone, and he admired his goodness and beauty and love. He was full of love and beauty, and gave birth, so to speak—He emanated the Son. And the Son and the Father gave glory to one another. And in that giving of glory to one another, then the Son emanated the Fullness. And then in giving glory to one another in the Fullness and to the Son, the Fullness emanates us, the second order of powers.

And it’s all because you can’t love without having an object to love, even if it’s only in your own mind. Love requires an object of devotion, and giving glory is the reciprocal of love. We give glory because we were first loved. It’s a fitting expression of the bounty of goodness, as Hart puts it. Then he goes on to say,

This, however, also means that within the story of creation, viewed from its final cause, there can be no residue of the pardonably tragic, no irrecuperable or irreconcilable remainder left behind at the end of the tale. For if there were, this irreconcilable excess would also be something God has directly caused.

Now, in our Gnostic gospel, there is a remnant “left behind at the end of the tale.” And that is the shadowy archons that were never a part of the original creation because they did not come from the “first cause” discussed earlier. The shadows of the Demiurge did not come from the Fullness or the fallen Aeon, but are only the absence of the qualities of that Aeon, this is why they are referred to as shadows. They are figments that do not have a reality outside of the Deficiency.  Therefore, they have no home to return to in the Fullness of God. They are not from the Fullness.

And he talks a bit about Hegel’s system and dismisses it, and I’m not going to go into it. Hart says,

The story Christians tell is of creation as God’s sovereign act of love, neither adding to nor qualifying His eternal nature. And so it is also a story that leaves no room for an ultimate distinction between the universal truth of reason and the moral meaning of the particular, or for any distinction between the moral meaning of the particular and the moral nature of God.

Only by insisting upon the universality of God’s mercy could Paul, in Romans 11.32, liberate himself from the fear that the particularity of that mercy would prove to be an ultimate injustice, and that in judging His creatures, God would reveal Himself not as the good God of faithfulness and love, but as an inconstant God who can shatter His own covenants at will.

Hart reminds us that down through the centuries,

Christians have again and again subscribed to formulations of their faith that clearly reduce a host of cardinal Christian theological usages, most especially moral predicates like good, merciful, just, benevolent, loving, to utter equivocity, and that by association, reduce their entire grammar of Christian belief to meaninglessness.

[On the next page, 75, he says], consider, to begin with the mildest of moral difficulties, how many Christians down the centuries have had to reconcile their consciences to the repellent notion that all humans are at conception already guilty of a transgression that condemns them justly to eternal separation from God and eternal suffering, and that in this doctrine’s extreme form, every newborn infant belongs to a massa damnata, hateful in God’s eyes from the first moment of existence.

Hart loves to throw in Latin. Massa damnata obviously means that the masses would be damned.

The very notion of an inherited guilt is a logical absurdity, rather on the order of a square circle. All that the doctrine can truly be taken to assert, speaking logically, is that God willfully imputes to innocent creatures a guilt they can never have really contracted out of what, from any sane perspective, can only be called malice. But this is just the beginning of the problem. For one broad, venerable stream of tradition, God, on the basis of this imputation, consigns the vast majority of the race to perpetual torment, including infants who die unbaptized.

And may I point out that in Gnostic Christianity there is no inherited guilt at all because the Fall was not caused by the first humans, Adam and Eve, but occurred at the Aeonic level. Christianity carries a remnant of that understanding forward when it refers to “fallen angels,” but it does not connect the dots to realize their culpability in original sin.

And then the theology of grace grows grimmer, for according to the great Augustinian tradition, since we are somehow born meriting not only death but eternal torment, we are enjoined to see and praise a laudable generosity in God’s narrow choice to elect a small remnant for salvation, before and apart from any consideration of their concrete merits or demerits, and this further choice either to predestine or infallibly to surrender the vast remainder to everlasting misery. So it is that, for many Christians down the years, the rationale of evangelization has been a desperate race to save as many souls as possible from God. Okay, look at this time.

The time has really gotten away from us, and we’ve only touched the first meditation, so I hope you are enjoying this theology. It’s theology, and I know that’s difficult slog, but I’m sharing with you these thoughts because they comprise basically the sum total of Christian theology for the past 2,000 years, and it has gone through changes here and there. David Bentley Hart is a scholar of Eastern Orthodoxy and a scholar of religion and philosopher and so forth, and I think that he has very clear sight.

So we’ll pick this up one more time next week, and I promise we’ll wrap it up. Onward and upward! God bless us all!

This book puts all of this gnosis together in a simplified form. Gnosis is as easy as you want it to be, or as complicated as you desire. This Simple Explanation will guide you through the often confusing terms and turns of gnostic thought and theology. The glossary alone is worth having on your bookshelf. Now available in paperback, hardback, and ebook/kindle. Soon to be released as an audio book.

God is loving and merciful, not judgmental and cruel

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week I began sharing with you what is essentially a book report on the book called That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart, and he’s the translator of the New Testament that I’ve been using. So, last week we got up to page 21 out of this book, and now I’m all the way up to page 85, so we’ll see what happened in this latest round of reading.

Now, David Bentley Hart’s style of writing may not be for everyone. It’s very academic, very high-minded and educated and erudite—difficult to follow if you’re not accustomed to reading scholastic writing. But I believe his heart’s in the right place, and I agree with pretty much everything he says. I will do my best to reinterpret what he is saying in simpler words, in case you’re interested in the content, but not in its delivery method.

So, picking it up on page 21, Hart says,

And what could be more absurd than the claim that God’s ways so exceed comprehension, that we dare not presume even to distinguish benevolence from malevolence in the divine, inasmuch as either can result in the same endless excruciating despair? Here the docile believer is simply commanded to nod in acquiescence, quietly and submissively, to feel moved at a strange and stirring obscurity, and to accept that, if only he or she could sound the depths of this mystery, its essence would somehow be revealed as infinite beauty and love. A rational person capable of that assent, however, of believing all of this to be a paradox concealing a deeper, wholly coherent truth, rather than a gross contradiction, has probably suffered such chronic intellectual and moral malformation that he or she is no longer able to recognize certain very plain truths, such as the truth that he or she has been taught to approve of divine deeds that, were they reduced to a human scale of action, would immediately be recognizable as expressions of unalloyed spite.

And he’s talking about the idea that most everyone and everything is going to hell and will suffer eternal torment. That is an interpretation or misinterpretation of the word brought about by incorrect translation of the original Coptic Greek. Most of our Bible translations come off of old Latin Vulgate translations, and then they’ve been modernized. But that’s how errors are brought forward. And what Hart has done in his New Testament translation is go back to the original, very oldest transcripts, still in Greek, before they were translated to Latin. And he did what he called a pitilessly accurate translation, where Hart was not trying to make the words that are being translated fit into a predetermined doctrine, like everyone going to hell, or like the Trinity, or eternal damnation.

These things we’ve been taught to believe are in the Scripture, but when you actually go back to the original Scriptures prior to the Latin translations, they are not in the Scripture. And so this book that I’m doing the book report on here, That All Shall Be Saved, this is about universal salvation, and doing away with the idea. And he says in this section I just read you, that it is a malevolent idea, unalloyed spite, unalloyed meaning pure spite on the part of God, that’s going to send everyone to hell that doesn’t get it.

And that we have been commanded by the Church over the last 2,000 years to just nod our heads and say, oh, well, it’s God’s will, or oh, well, how can I presume to distinguish benevolence from malevolence, good intention from bad intention on the part of God, because God is so great and good. We’re supposed to be docile believers, to acquiesce, that is, to go along with, to quietly and submissively accept that we don’t get it, that we don’t understand the depths of the mystery, and someday we will, and that God is good, and God is just, and therefore everyone’s going to hell, except for those few preordained elect from before time began. So this book is entirely against that proposition. So moving on, what I did was I read the book through, and I’ve highlighted the parts that seem worth sharing or very interesting.

Now we’re jumping to page 35, where he says that certain people,

of my acquaintance who are committed to what is often called an intellectualist model of human liberty, as I am myself, [he says], but who also insist that it is possible for a soul freely to reject God’s love with such perfect perpiscuity of understanding and intention as to merit eternal suffering.

And we can tell from the context that perpiscuity means you get it. So he’s saying, how is it even possible for a soul to freely reject the love of God and consign oneself into eternal torment? It just doesn’t work. It’s not possible. He says,

this is an altogether dizzying contradiction. In simplest terms, that is to say, they, [that is, the intellectualists], want to assert that all true freedom is an orientation of the rational will toward an end that the mind takes in some sense to be the good, and so takes also as the one end that can fulfill the mind’s nature and supply its desires. This means that the better the rational will knows the good, and that’s a capital G, good, for what it is, the more that is that the will is freed from those forces that distort reason and lead the soul toward improper ends. The more it will long for and seek after the true good in itself, and conversely, the more rationally it seeks the good, the freer it is.

He says that in terms of the great Maximus the Confessor, who lived from 580 to 660,

the natural will within us, which is the rational ground of our whole power of volition, must tend only toward God as its true end, for God is goodness as such, whereas our gnomic or deliberative will can stray from him, but only to the degree that it has been blinded to the truth of who he is and what we are, and as a result has come to seek a false end as the true end. In short, sin requires some degree of ignorance, and ignorance is by definition a diverting of the mind and will to an end they would not naturally pursue.

So, in other words, we all want what’s best for ourself, even in the most selfish sense, even in the most egoic sense. The ego wants what is best for this person that it is part of, that that is the rational end of the ego’s striving, what is best, and that there is a thing called good in the absolute sense, and if we realize that, then we would strive toward the good, by definition. Carrying on, page 37,

I’m not saying that we do not in some very significant sense make our own exceedingly substantial voluntary contributions to our estrangement from the good in this life.

And, see, he’s just saying we all screw up. Even if we are seeking the good, we often fall backwards into the bad, okay?

Up to a certain point, [he says], it is undeniable, but past that point it is manifest falsehood. There is no such thing as perfect freedom in this life, or perfect understanding, and it is sheer nonsense to suggest that we possess limitless or unqualified liberty. Therefore, we are incapable of contracting a limitless or unqualified guilt. There are always extenuating circumstances.

Well, in a sense, that’s true of all of us and all of our circumstances. We are a product of our environment, to some extent. But don’t forget that in the Gnostic view, we also contain the pure goodness of God, the capital S Self, that reflects the Fullness of God. So we do know what goodness is, even if we are surrounded by badness.

Quoting Hart again, page 40,

Here though, I have to note that it is a thoroughly modern and wholly illogical notion that the power of absolutely unpremised liberty, obeying no rationale except its own spontaneous volition toward whatever end it might pose for itself, is either a real logical possibility or, in any meaningful sense, a proper definition of freedom.

See? He’s saying it’s thoroughly modern and wholly illogical to think that we have complete freedom of will, and that we can choose to follow any unethical or immoral end that we wish to, because what’s it matter? One choice being pretty much the same as another, you see. He goes on to say, in page 40,

A choice made without rationale is a contradiction in terms. At the same time, any movement of the will prompted by an entirely perverse rationale would be, by definition, wholly irrational. Insane, that is to say. And therefore, no more truly free than a psychotic episode. The more one is in one’s right mind, the more that is that one is conscious of God as the goodness that fulfills all beings. And the more one recognizes that one’s own nature can have its true completion and joy nowhere but in Him, and the more one is unfettered by distorting misperceptions, deranged passions, and the encumbrances of past mistakes, the more inevitable is one’s surrender to God, liberated from all ignorance, emancipated from all the adverse conditions of this life, the rational soul could freely will only its own union with God, and thereby its own supreme beatitude.

We are, as it were, doomed to happiness, so long as our natures follow their healthiest impulses unhindered. And we cannot not will the satisfaction of our beings in our true final end, a transcendent good lying behind and beyond all the proximate ends we might be moved to pursue. This is no constraint upon the freedom of the will, coherently conceived. It is simply the consequence of possessing a nature produced by and for the transcendent good, a nature whose proper end has been fashioned in harmony with a supernatural purpose. God has made us for Himself, as Augustine would say, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Him. A rational nature seeks a rational end, truth, which is God Himself.

The irresistibility of God for any soul that has been truly set free is no more a constraint placed upon its liberty than is the irresistible attraction of a flowing spring to fresh water in a desert place to a man who is dying of thirst. To choose not to drink in that circumstance would not be an act of freedom on his part, but only a manifestation of the delusions that enslave him and force him to inflict violence upon himself, contrary to his nature.

Do you follow the reasoning there? That boils down to simply saying it is logical. Even Mr. Spock would find it logical for a human to pursue the good in its own best interests, and that it is illogical, illogical all the way to insanity, to refuse the good, to refuse what is best for you. It’s a manifestation of insanity, to refuse the love of God. How’s that for laying it out? I really appreciate logic, you know, because this is a logical universe.

If the laws of physics and chemistry didn’t hold true to logic, and that includes math, you see, 2 plus 2 equals 4, etc., all the way through all the difficult math, the quantum physics, and the string theory, and so forth, this is a logical universe based upon the Aeon known as Logos, logic. And so, therefore, to reject logic, it’s not smart, it’s not clever, it’s not freedom. And, by the way, this is about the level of pushback I see in, for example, YouTube comments that reject the gospel. They’re pretty much on the order of, oh, yeah, I can die of thirst if I want to, so F off. Okay, well, good luck with that, right? Carrying on, page 43.

None of this should need saying, to be honest. We should all already know that whenever the term justice and eternal punishment are set side by side as if they were logically compatible, the boundaries of the rational have been violated. If we were not so stupefied by the hoary and venerable myth that eternal damnation is an essential element of the original Christian message, and then he says in parentheses, which, not to spoil later plot developments here, it is not, we would not even waste our time on so preposterous a conjunction. From the perspective of Christian belief, the very notion of a punishment that is not intended ultimately to be remedial is morally dubious, and he says in parentheses, and I submit anyone who doubts this has never understood Christian teaching at all.

But even if one believes that Christianity makes room for the condign imposition, [and condign means proper or fitting], imposition of purely retributive punishments, it remains the case that a retribution consisting in unending suffering, imposed as recompense for the actions of a finite intellect and will, must be by any sound definition disproportionate, unjust, and at the last, nothing more than an expression of sheer pointless cruelty.

And of course, I do find that attitude on the part of Christians I talk to and try to explain the idea of universal salvation being Christ’s true mission, that all shall be redeemed, every knee shall bow. They’d much rather send people to hell, and when you see their faces as they’re saying it, it’s not, oh, you know, I’m so sorry that it’s this way and my heart breaks, but I’m afraid they’re all going to hell. It’s not like that at all. It’s like, damn straight, they deserve to go to hell. Now, you take that kind of anger and cruelty when you consider that they are advocating unending, excruciating pain and punishment, and then you try to say that that is God’s will, that goodness incorporates unending punishment.

And Hart’s saying, indeed, especially unending punishment that isn’t for remediation, isn’t to make them a better person, but simply to make them hurt. And who are you punishing? Finite beings with limited time and intelligence and ability to reason with things that happened in their past. Maybe they were brought up by someone very cruel who taught them cruelty, and so they carry on cruelty. And then that the God of all love and the God of all justice would send them to hell for eternal torment. And up until quite recently, even babies who were unbaptized would be sent to hell for eternal torment. And then someone came up with the idea of a baby purgatory where unbaptized babies never get to go to heaven, but they’re not going to be eternally punished either. They’re just going to go to a baby land where they’re held apart from the rest of the redeemed. Well, really? That’s hardly any better. I mean, it’s somewhat better, but why shouldn’t these pure babies who pretty much incorporate the Fullness of the Self and love of God, why wouldn’t God want them back? You see, it doesn’t make any sense.

And if you’re a Christian listening to me today who has had niggling doubts about certain things, and one of them being this idea of grandma being in hell and in the midst of eternal torture now because she wouldn’t listen to your preaching, you can relax about it. Because we are the sower of seeds, but we are not the harvester. It is Christ who harvests the souls, who brings them all home.

Back to Hart here again. On page 47, he says,

Once more, not a single one of these attempted justifications for the idea of an eternal hell actually improves the picture of God with which the infernalist orthodoxy presents us.

And he uses the word infernalist for like the infernal torments of hell. So an infernalist is someone who believes folks are going to hell for eternity. So he says,

Once more, not a single one of these attempted justifications for the idea of an eternal hell actually improves the picture of God with which the infernalist orthodoxy presents us. And it is this that should be the chief concern of any believer.

All of these arguments still oblige one to believe that a benevolent and omnipotent God would willfully create rational beings destined for an endless torment that they could never, in any rational calculus of personal responsibility, earn for themselves. And to believe also that this somehow is essential to the good news Christianity brought into the world.

Isn’t it true? When you’re in church and you hear the preacher preaching a very nice, very good message about relationships or about moral virtue, and then there is a plea and a threat at the end that if you are sitting in the congregation and you have not accepted Christ as your personal Savior, you may go out and die this afternoon and go to hell. It’s not right. It’s contradictory. It is not the pure will of God. Page 47 goes on to say,

In the end, there is only one logical terminus toward which all these lines of reasoning can lead: When all the possible paths of evasion have tapered away among the weeds, one has to stop, turn around, retrace one’s steps back to the beginning of the journey, and finally admit that, if there really is an eternal hell for finite spirits, then it has to be the case that God condemns the damned to endless misery not on account of any sane proportion between what they are capable of meriting and how he chooses to requite them for their sins, but solely as a demonstration of his power to do as he wishes.

Now, by the way, when I read the Old Testament, I see that that is often the attitude that Jehovah has towards his subjects. He commands things because he can, and he wants obedience because he wants obedience. Remember, the Demiurge controls through strong strings. He does not approve of willpower. Willpower is messy. Willpower means not obeying the will of God, and he wants to be the sayer of our souls. But the God Above All Gods, the Gnostic God, outranks the Old Testament God. The God Above All Gods is the Father who begat the Son.

And so when Jesus says, I and my Father are one, he’s not talking about the Old Testament God. He’s talking about the God Above All Gods, the originator of consciousness, of love, of life, of free will. And we are all fractals of that Father. Through the Son, through the Fullness of God, we are fractals of all of those powers of the Father–stepped down, because we’re smaller fractals. So we all have to return to the Father in the end.

When we loose these mortal coils and we’re no longer bound to the material that deludes us, then we can finally return to the Father again. So onward and upward is not a trap. Onward and upward is freedom. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. So back to this idea of the Old Testament God enjoying his omnipotent sovereignty. On page 48, Hart is talking about Calvin and predestination. And he says in book three of Calvin’s Institutes,

he even asserts that God predestined the human fall from grace, precisely because the whole of everything, creation, fall, redemption, judgment, the eternal bliss of heaven, the endless torments of hell, and whatever else, exists solely for the sake of a perfect display of the full range of God’s omnipotent sovereignty, which for some reason absolutely must be displayed.

He goes on to say he doesn’t know how to respond to that, because,

I know it to be based on a notoriously confused reading of Scripture, one whose history goes all the way back to the late Augustine, a towering genius whose inability to read Greek and consequent reliance on defective Latin translations turned out to be the single most tragically consequential case of linguistic incompetence in Christian history. In equal part, however, it is because I regard the picture of God thus produced to be a metaphysical absurdity, a God who is at once supposedly the source of all things, and yet also the one whose nature is necessarily thoroughly polluted by arbitrariness.

And no matter how orthodox Calvinists might protest, there is no other way to understand the story of election and dereliction that Calvin tells, which would mean that in some sense he is a finite being, that is God, in whom possibility exceeds actuality, and the irrational exceeds the rational. A far greater concern than either of these theological defects, either the deeply misguided scriptural exegesis or the inept metaphysics of the divine, it is the moral horror in such language.

So that’s as far as we’re going to go today. In next week’s continuance of this train of thought, Hart will talk about the difference between the God Above All Gods, essentially, even though Hart’s not calling himself a Gnostic. When he speaks of God, or goodness with capital G, he is speaking of the God Above All Gods. And when he contrasts it with the God of Calvin and Augustine in the Old Testament, that is the Demiurgic God.

I’ve noticed that many modern people seem to think of God as a yin-yang type of completion, that is, where evil balances good, where darkness is necessary to balance light, where the purpose of humanity, or what happens here in humanity, is that we are instantiating strife and struggle and evil for the teaching of God, for the completion of God. That is not right. That’s wrong theology, folks. Our God is all goodness, and there is no evil that emanates from God. Well, where did evil come from then? It’s merely the absence of good. So evil is the absence of goodness.

The archons are the shadows of the Aeons. And when the light fully comes and fills all of space, the shadows will disappear, and the light comes along with the love. And so that’s our job, to realize that universal and ethereal love, and to so let our light shine and our lives shine with love, that the Demiurge will be eventually won over. And as for the shadows, every time we bring light into the world, we’re diminishing the power of the Demiurge. We’re shining light onto a shadow and evaporating it.

Next week, we’ll pick this up for part three of That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart.

Let me know what you think of this. Send me some comments.

Onward and upward. God bless us all.

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The book is available in all formats, including paperback, hardcover, and kindle. The audio book narrated by Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, has been uploaded to ACX Audible and is awaiting their approval and release, so keep an eye out.

I thought today I would start sharing with you a book that I am reading by David Bentley Hart. Hart wrote that translation of the New Testament that I’m very much enjoying, because it mirrors the same language that the Gnostic gospel uses in the Nag Hammadi codices, particularly the Tripartite Tractate, which is what I share with you here at Gnostic Insights.

David Bentley Hart is extremely eloquent and erudite. His prose puts me to shame. He is a great writer and a brilliant mind. He’s an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion and a philosopher. And the deal is, he does seem to love God. So his philosophy and his theology goes through what seems to me to be a very Gnostic heart and orientation on his part. So I’m reading this book now called, That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, because I could tell from reading the footnotes in his New Testament that he and I agree on this universal salvation. I seem to be coming at it from a different place than he does, but I must admit I’m only about 40 pages into the book, so I don’t know if he’s going to cover my orientation or not.

My major reason why everyone and everything that’s living now will return to heaven is that everything comes from heaven. So if everything doesn’t return to heaven in the end, if most of it, as a matter of fact, was thrown into eternal fires of torment, well, God itself would be lessened. The Father would be less than he was at the beginning, and that’s an impossibility, because the Father was, is, and ever shall be the same. He is not diminished by the love and consciousness and life that flows out of him. But if that life, love, and consciousness winds up in a black hole at the bottom of an eternal pit of torment, well, there’s so many things wrong with that statement, just absolutely wrong.

And that’s what David Bentley Hart’s book is all about, and he has several ways he’s going to explain why that can’t be so. The reason I say it can’t be so is that all consciousness, life, and love come from the Father. So in the big roll-up, if we accept the proposition that there will be an end to this material existence, which is what all Christians and Jews profess, and if everything that emanated from the Father in the beginning, beginning with the Son, which is the first and only direct emanation, and then everything else emanates through the Son, well, if it doesn’t return at the end of material time, then the Father and the ethereal plane would be diminished, because it poured out all of this love and consciousness into this material realm, and it all has to return.

The Tripartite Tractate says that everything that existed from the beginning will return at the end of time. In verses 78 and 79 of the Tripartite Tractate, it’s speaking about the shadows that emerged from Logos after the Fall, and it says,

Therefore their end will be like their beginning, from that which did not exist they are to return once again to the shadows.

“Their end will be like their beginning,” in that they didn’t come from above—they were shadows of the fallen Logos. And so when the light comes and shines the light, the shadows disappear. Furthermore, in verses 80 and 81, the Tripartite Tractate says,

The Logos, being in such unstable conditions, that is, after the Fall, did not continue to bring forth anything like emanations, the things which are in the Pleroma, the glories which exist for the honor of the Father. Rather, he brought forth little weaklings, hindered by the illnesses by which he too was hindered. It was the likeness of the disposition which was a unity, that which was the cause of the things which do not exist from the first.

So these shadows didn’t exist in the Pleroma; they were shadows, they were imitations of the unity which existed from the first, and that unity is the Fullness of God—the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And it is only these shadows that will be evaporated at the end of time, that will not go to the ethereal plane. All living things will, because we’re not shadows of the Fall. We are actually sent down from the unity, from the Fullness of God, with life, consciousness, and love. And so all of that has to return to the Father.

So that is where I’m coming from, that God can’t be lessened, made less than it was at the beginning. So everything will be redeemed and returned. And of course, practically all of Christianity nowadays believes that most everything that was emanated from the beginning will be destroyed, or put into a fire of torment for all eternity. Anyone who wasn’t baptized, or anyone who didn’t come forward to profess a belief in Christ.

So that’s most of the other cultures, most of the world, and the conventional Christian church doesn’t even realize that animals are going to heaven. I often comfort people whose pet has just passed away, and they’re missing them so badly, and they love them so much, and it hurts so much, and I say to them in comfort, “Well, your pet is waiting for you in heaven, and you’ll be reunited when you cross over, and then you’ll have them again, and you’ll all be very happy forever together.” That’s my basic approach.

As a matter of fact, I’m waiting for my pack—that’s who I expect to greet me. I’m not waiting for my dead relatives, or my late husband. I’m not expecting them on the other shore waiting for me, although perhaps they will be. But who I really am looking forward to seeing are my dogs and cats, every dog and cat I’ve ever had. And I figure they’re all up there together as a big pack, playing on the beach. So that’s what keeps me comforted, and keeps me looking forward. I’m very happy to imagine that that will be what greets me when I cross over.

So this morning, what I’d like to share with you are some of Hart’s writing that he shares in his introduction that’s called, The Question of an Eternal Hell, Framing the Question. So this is before he even gets into his various apologetics of how it is that everyone will be saved. But I really wanted to share this with you. Hart writes in a very high-minded manner, so I’ll attempt to translate it for us all.

So on page 16, Hart says,

And as I continued to explore the Eastern Communions as an undergraduate, I learned at some point to take comfort from an idea that one finds liberally scattered throughout Eastern Christian contemplative tradition, from late antiquity to the present, and expressed with particular force by such saints of the East as Isaac of Nineveh, who lived between 613 and 700, and Silouan of Athos, who lived between 1866 and 1938. And the idea is this, that the fires of hell are nothing but the glory of God, which must at the last, when God brings about the final restoration of all things, pervade the whole of creation. For although that glory will transfigure the whole cosmos, it will inevitably be experienced as torment by any soul that willfully seals itself against love of God and neighbor. To such a perverse and obstinate nature, the divine light that should enter the soul and transform it from within must seem instead like the flames of an exterior chastisement.

That’s pretty interesting. He’s saying that after the final roll-up, the glory of God, or the light of God, will fill all of space and eternity, and that we will be able to see it and experience it. We will stand before the glory of God. But anyone who is hiding from God, or that is a hateful person, will experience that same glory as flames of fire that torment. And so that will be their punishment. But it’s not coming from God. God’s bringing glory and love and light. But they, because they are resistant, they will experience it as those flames of hell.

So Hart goes on to say,

This I found not only comforting, but also extremely plausible at an emotional level. It is easy to believe in that version of hell, after all, if one considers it deeply enough, for the very simple reason that we all already know it to be real in this life, and dwell a good portion of our days confined within its walls. A hardened heart is already its own punishment. The refusal to love, or to be loved, makes the love of others, or even just their presence, a source of suffering and a goad to wrath.

And isn’t that true? That a hateful person views everything that’s going on around them, and anything that someone else says, to be irritating, and worthy of punishment, or worthy of disdain, because it doesn’t agree with their own opinion. He goes on to say on page 17,

and so perhaps it makes perfect sense to imagine that a will sufficiently intransigent in its selfishness and resentment and violence might be so damaged that, even when fully exposed to the divine glory for which all things were made, it will absolutely hate the invasion of that transfiguring love, and will be able to discover nothing in it but terror and pain. It is the soul, then, and not God, that lights hell’s fires, by interpreting the advent of divine love as a violent assault upon the jealous privacy of the self.

Now, we’ve talked about that a lot here on Gnostic Insights, and I cover that in my discussions of Overcoming Death. My argument about Overcoming Death primarily comes from the Tibetan Buddhist book known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and in that book it describes this passage after life. And, by the way, it’s not only when the whole entire cosmos melts away, it’s every time we die. When your body passes away, suddenly you’re in that non-material state. Your ego goes forward without the attachment of the body, and in that state of not being attached to the material world, it is like, at the end of time, when the entire cosmos goes through the same process and is no longer attached to the material world. At that point, delusion drops away, the confusion of this cosmos and the confusion of our culture and the demiurgic culture that we are surrounded with, as well as the pulls of the material upon our bodies. It’s gone, it’s lifted, it’s no longer there, and your spirit is able to see with clear eyes. As Paul said in the first letter to Corinthians, chapter 13,

For we know partially, and we prophesy partially. But when that which is complete comes, what is partial will be rendered futile. When I was an infant, I spoke like an infant, I thought like an infant, I reckoned like an infant. Having become a man, I did away with infantile things. For as yet we see by way of a mirror, in an enigma, but then we will see face to face. As yet I know partially, but then I shall know fully, just as I am fully known. But now abide faith, hope, and love, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

And in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it talks about these things called bardos, which are levels of hell, basically, or levels of purgatory that people go through as they are learning to get rid of the mistaken notions that they picked up here during the lifetime. The samskara is stripped away. I would call the samskara the confounding memes that we cling to. We pick up these meme bundles from the people and from the things we read and learn and are indoctrinated into in school and then through the media.

Those are memes, meme bundles, and they have to be let go of. You have to drop them in order to get past the ego that’s holding on to those memes and rediscover the purity of the Father and the Son in the ethereal plane—rediscover the purity of your true Self. And the longer someone holds on to those memes after death, the more difficult is their passage into purity. And that’s explained in depth in the Overcoming Death episode. Well, that Tibetan description of the fires of hell very much resemble the fires of hell that were talked about from these ancient saints of the Christian tradition.

By the way, this idea that most everyone and everything is going to hell rather than going to heaven, that is a relatively recent addition to Christianity, but it has been grasped so firmly with the great assistance of the Catholic Church and their doctrines that by now most Christians think that most people won’t go to heaven. So even the Protestants who protest Catholicism—that’s what the word Protestant means, one who protests—they’ve lost the original thread of universal salvation that Jesus was teaching. The Anointed came to save everyone, it says, over and over in the New Testament.

And in Hart’s translation, which comes directly from the original writing rather than down through the Latin that had already been filtered by the Catholics, you don’t find the eternal torment of hell. Remember, the word Aeon, which we in Gnostic belief generally translate as ethereal beings or part of the Fullness of God above, Aeon is also translated as a period of time, and throughout most of the translations of the New Testament, which derive from the Latin Vulgate, Aeon is translated as a period of time.

And so when it says eternal torment, it’s really saying aeonic torment. And in my opinion, it’s the torment people bring upon themselves when they return to the aeonic realm. The Aeons aren’t the punishers. God is not the punisher. It’s our own grasping onto our past lives and the demiurgic culture and the demiurgic memes that we hold onto after death that are experienced like burning flames. But no one’s imposing it upon us. It’s our own lack of willing to give it up and turn and face the light. The eternal fires of hell are actually the aeonic reckoning that comes at the end of each lifetime and will come at the end of time itself when the material cosmos passes away. At least that’s what I think.

So when Hart says on page 17 there that “a will, a personal will, sufficiently intransigent in its selfishness and resentment and violence,” intransigence means not giving up, stubbornness, “might be so damaged that even when it comes face to face with glory, it will experience it as torment.” Now, for those of us who have accepted the anointing of the Christ and have come to true gnosis, (that is a remembrance that we come from above and will happily return to the above, that’s all you need to know), we will not cling onto this material world.

We will not be clinging onto those demiurgic memes that keep us from coming face to face with our aeonic parents in the Fullness of God. We will happily cross over. We will joyfully meet with those who are on the other side, be they family, spouses, or pets, because the grasses and the flowers, the butterflies, the birds, everything that is alive down here on earth will be alive in heaven because all life comes from above. We will not be experiencing that chastening fire—that coming to grips with the lies that we’ve been holding onto. That’s the painful part, coming to grips with our own lies and the harms we have done to other people. If we’re not repentant of those harms we have done to other people, we will have to come face to face with those harms after we cross over, and we will see from that other person’s point of view what we did to them and how much we hurt them, and that will come back to us. We will experience their pain, and that is the pain and suffering of death, but it’s not being imposed by the Father or the Son or our aeonic parents above.

On page 18, Hart says,

Because Christians have been trained at a very deep level of their thinking, to believe that the idea of an eternal hell is a clear and unambiguous element of their faith, and that therefore the idea must make perfect moral sense. They are in error on both counts, as it happens, but a sufficiently thorough conditioning can make an otherwise sound mind perceive even the most ostentatiously absurd proposition to be the very epitome of rational good sense.

You know, there’s some big words in that sentence, but I think you can tell by the context what they mean, right? Ostentatiously means open, flaunting. Epitome means the highest. So he’s saying that because the Church has taught that everyone’s going to hell except those very few, which is an ostentatious point of view, you see, ostentatiously absurd proposition, yet they have been taught that it is the very highest of good sense, and you can’t go against it.

And so people are conditioned not to question it. And what this book, That All Shall Be Saved, is, is a very thorough and deep description and rationale of how that cannot be true, of how everyone must be going to heaven. I covered my version of why everyone’s going to heaven in this episode. Further episodes, I think I’ll do a series here, further episodes will each cover chapters in Hart’s book, and we’ll hear what his rationale is for why everyone is going to heaven. But returning to this page 18 again, he says,

In fact, where the absurdity proves only slight, the mind that has been trained most thoroughly will, as often as not, fabricate further and more extravagant absurdities in order to secure the initial offense against reason within a more encompassing and intoxicating atmosphere of corroborating nonsense.

In other words, you’ll have to spin a bunch of nonsensical rationalizations and excuses about why everyone’s going to hell, just to make the story float. Quoting again,

Sooner or later it will all seem to make sense, simply through ceaseless repetition and restatement and rhetorical reinforcement.

As I’m reading this, of course he’s talking about religious ideologies here, but I’m seeing these mechanisms at play in media bias. Do you see that? Just through sheer repetition, over and over, it doesn’t matter if things are true or lies. If you say it often enough, people will begin to accept it unquestioningly. And you can see that going on in the politics, can’t you?

Hart goes on to say,

The most effective technique for subduing the moral imagination is to teach it to mistake the contradictory for the paradoxical, and thereby to accept incoherence as profundity or moral idiocy as spiritual subtlety. If this can be accomplished with sufficient nuance and delicacy, it can sustain even a very powerful intellect for an entire lifetime. In the end, with sufficient practice, one really can, like the White Queen (of Alice in Wonderland), learn to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

In my limited attempts to discuss Gnosticism face-to-face with people, I discover this continually, that if I present them with the absurdity of everyone going to hell, for example, they will say, Well, it’s a mystery. We can’t know the mind of God. It’s a mystery. Who are you to presume? And this is the way they cover up that it doesn’t work, by just shunting it off to God’s incomprehensibility. But our God is rational. Our God is logical. Our God doesn’t say one thing and do another. Our God doesn’t lie. Our God doesn’t say it’s all about life and living and love and then enslave and slaughter. That is not the God of Gnosticism. The Father that Jesus spoke of is not that God.

Going on with page 19, Hart says,

Not that I am accusing anyone of consciously or cynically seeking to manipulate the minds of faithful Christians. The conspiracy, so to speak, is an entirely open one, an unpremeditated corporate labor of communal self-deception, requiring us all to do our parts to sustain one another in our collective derangement. I regard the entire process as the unintentional effect of a long tradition of error, one in which a series of bad interpretations of Scripture produced various corruptions of theological reasoning, which were themselves then preserved as immemorial revealed truths and, at last, rendered impregnable to all critique by the indurated mental habits of generations, all despite the logical and conceptual incongruities that this required believers to ignore within their beliefs.

He writes with big words. The gist of this entire paragraph was that the church didn’t set out to be deceptive. Well, it may have with the Nicene Council when they stripped the Gnosis out, but from about 600 A.D. onward, it’s just become such an ingrained thought that by now it’s unassailable. By now you can’t even question it. But that’s what we’re doing here at Gnostic Insights.

So stay with me for the next few episodes, and we’ll go into depth concerning hell, resurrection, salvation, and the ultimate redemption of all living things by the Christ, the Anointed, that will return us all to that paradise above.

With love, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

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Hello and welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The Halloween season is upon us. I’m having a Halloween party, a block party, here in the neighborhood, and I’m going to sing an hour’s worth of spooky songs. I was assailed yesterday by a Christian lady who said I’m doing the work of the devil, because these are not good songs. And she also urged me not to share this Gnostic business with someone in particular, because he doesn’t need that sort of confusion, she said. Of course, she doesn’t know what the Gnostic stuff is. She hasn’t listened to the podcast or even talked with me about it. She just puts up her hand and waves me away if I try to bring up the Gnosis. So I would say that if Halloween glorifies Satan in your mind, then you should not partake in it, because we don’t want to glorify evil or glorify the Slanderer.

However, there was a verse in Colossians that addressed this subject, in my opinion. In Colossians 2:15 it says,

Stripping the Archons and Powers, he exposed them in the open, leading them prisoner along with him in a triumphal procession. Therefore let no one judge you for eating and drinking, or for taking part in a festival, or in a new moon celebration, or in Sabbaths. These are a shadow of things to come, but the solid body thereof is that of the anointed. Let no verdict be passed against you by anyone affecting humility and a religion of the angels, venturing upon visions he has never had, blustering aimlessly by the mind of his flesh, not holding to the head from whom all the body, furnished and knitted together by its joints and ligatures, will grow with a growth from God.

We spoke about freedom from the Law in depth a couple of episodes ago, when we talked about Colossians. Of course, this presupposes that we who are freed from these laws and restrictions have the love of God, the love of Christ, dwelling within us. That’s what has replaced and made null those sanctions against things like Halloween. We can’t do it on our own. This verse in particular in Colossians refers to eating and drinking, festivals, new moon celebrations, and Sabbaths. It seems to me that we may infer that some of these festivals were not sanctioned by the Old Testament. It may also be that, if they were official calendar days in Judaism, that early Christians were divided about whether they should apply to the followers of Jesus, as in the example of modern Seventh Day Adventists who strictly keep the Saturday sabbath and believe all other Christians are in mortal error for switching the sabbath to Sunday. Or the festivals may be syncretistic, meaning they combined pagan and religious elements to form a new celebration, as is the case with Christmas. Or the festivals could have been entirely pagan, such as May Day celebrations to usher in springtime.

The quote says that all of these activities referred to in this verse are only “a shadow of things to come.” Surely Halloween is not to be found in the ethereal plane, because the spooks, goblins, and witches are “shadows” of the Fall, and we know that shadows is another word for archonic. They did not exist before the Fall and will not exist after the cosmos passes into nothingness. Indeed, Halloween can be seen as an example of we Second Order Powers “stripping the Archons and Powers… leading them prisoner along with [Christ] in a triumphal procession.” Wouldn’t that be a fun activity at a Halloween Party? A parade of conquered Powers?

Halloween is a time when people acknowledge that the world is not always as it seems. It is a time when folks who normally dismiss the ethereal and the archonic realms acknowledge the immaterial Powers and bring them to awareness. Our gnostic studies, so often dismissed and ridiculed by most people, fall into this category.

Consciousness is one thing—even scientists study consciousness, but they do not understand the root of consciousness, and that comes from above. We are from the Father’s consciousness. We are fractals of the Father, through the Fullness, through the Son. The Son is the only emanation from the Father who is otherwise untouchable and illimitable and incomprehensible. But the Son gives that incomprehensibility a face. It’s called a countenance. And we can begin to understand the Father by knowing the Son. And the Son and the Father want to be known by us. They are extending consciousness all the way out to us, down through several fractal levels. But we are their consciousness, and we carry the entire seed of the consciousness of the Son within us. All living creatures do.

That is the difference between life and inert mineral matter. The cosmos, when referred to in the Gnostic sense, and also in the biblical sense, although it hasn’t been explained correctly in the New Testament, since they stripped out the gnosis that explained the difference between the Father and the Creator God of this universe, which are two different entities. But consciousness is mysterious in that it’s an amazing thing that we are alive, that we are conscious, that we have these experiences and memories, and that we’re all interrelated.

It’s mysterious. It’s mystifying. The scientists aren’t going to get to the root of it, because they try to find consciousness in the material world. They try to find consciousness arising from the matter up. And that isn’t where it comes from. It comes from the Father down. That’s the main thing we need to realize, the main thing we need to know.

And then now we have this overlay of the Son, the Christ, Jesus. And what do they have to do with any of this? See, many people think it’s all well and good to speak of the Father, and to try to do good, and try to be righteous, and try to embody the love of God. But it’s always within our own egoic efforts that we want to push out this love. And we don’t have it. We don’t have the capacity to channel the love of the Father unless we love the Father, because love, life, consciousness, they all come down together from above.

It’s no more superstitious to believe in Jesus than it is to believe in God. It’s no more superstitious to believe in Jesus than it is to believe in beneficial spirits and angels. So why then is there such a node of resistance against the notion of the Christ, the embodiment of the Son, coming in a human being that was called Jesus? This occurred around 2,000 years ago. The embodiment of the Fullness of God melded with the material flesh of a human being. That’s no stranger than consciousness itself. That’s no more strange than the mystery of life and death. So why is it in particular rejected?

Well, I think it’s because the Slanderer knows what’s up. The Slanderer is another word for the chief Archon of the demiurge. The Slanderer is the negative entity that dwells within the cosmos itself, that did not come from above, that did not come from the Father, that is not an emanation out of the consciousness and love of the Son—it’s cut off down here below. It’s a figment of the demiurge. It lives in this material world, and, like its Boss, the demiurge, it wants to be the ruler. It wants to be the king. It wants to be worshipped. It’s called the Slanderer because it slanders God. It slanders Jesus and the Christ. It slanders anyone who believes in Jesus and the Christ. It makes fun of them. It puts on pantomimes at the Olympics to degrade the Last Supper, for example. It slanders people’s genders and convinces them that they were born into the wrong body, and that that’s not who they’re really supposed to be. Even though every one of us was fashioned by the Aeons above to be perfect and particular, and to bring with us as emissaries of the Father consciousness, love, and life into this cosmos.

It’s our job as second-order powers to bring life into the cosmos. But the cosmos is the valley of death, so it’s a very courageous thing that we are here. Now, I have walked with Jesus for all of my life. I can remember my awakening around three or four years old. I recognized the difference between the baby in the manger and Santa Claus when I was about three years old at Christmastime. My parents were not religious people. They might have thought they were; they’re what we call cultural Christians, so they did go to church now and then. And there was a family Bible in the house, but God was not spoken of. We were not encouraged to be godly. And it seemed to me, even as a toddler, that Santa Claus was given every preeminence and reality, as was the baby Jesus in the manger who came to save humanity. So, there were mixed messages coming down that pipeline.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is if you want to understand consciousness, and if you want to embody love, the surefire way to do that is to go ahead and believe that the Christ came to earth in order to remind us of the truth of the Father, in order to remind us of the eternal age that we came from, because we came from the Aeons above. And the word Age is the same as the word Aeon in Greek. So, the life of the Age, as it is often put in the New Testament, is the life of the Aeons, the Fullness, our aeonic parentage that we are formed after, and that we were birthed by down here into this material world. And Jesus went through the same process, but the aeonic inheritance that Jesus brought with him—unlike us, we brought all of the Fullness with us too, but just parts of it are turned on and off. I am not talented in all things, but Jesus was, because he brought all of the Fullness and all of it activated, all of it turned on. So, he brought the Fullness of God in all awareness and complete love into this material cosmos, and he has an excess of salvation, you might say, an excess of freeing us from the murmurings of the Slanderer. He brought that to every single one of us, because the Third Order Powers, which is the pleroma of Christ, the pleroma of Jesus, covers us and is our correction for our misunderstandings and our straying away from the Fullness of God. But we forgot. We don’t realize it. We don’t remember where we come from. And the surefire way to remember where you come from, to remember the Fullness of God, to experience the complete love of the Father through the Son and the Fullness of God, is to accept the gift of incarnation that Christ brought to us. It was a mission, a rescue mission for us.

Jumping over here into what is called the first letter of John in the New Testament, chapter 2, verse 14, it says,

The Logos of God, (the Logos, that’s the Aeon Logos we know), the Logos of God abides in you, and you have vanquished the wicked one. Do not love the cosmos or the things within the cosmos. If anyone loves the cosmos, (and that, when he speaks of the cosmos, that’s the material world, that’s our universe, whatever came after the Big Bang, the molecules, the particles, the minerals, everything that is not inherently alive, the hard rocky places, that’s the cosmos.) Do not love the cosmos or the things within the cosmos. If anyone loves the cosmos, the love of the Father is not within him, because all that is in the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the vainglory of living is not from the Father, but from the cosmos. And the cosmos is passing away as well as its desire, but whoever does the Father’s Will will abide unto the age of the Aeons.

Now, when John refers to hating the cosmos, he is only referring to the dead, dry demiurgic mud and demiurgic culture’s inverted values. He is not referring to the living elements that come from above—all of us Second Order Powers who bring the life, consciousness, and love into this cosmos. It is good and natural to love our fellow Second Order Powers—all of the plants, animals and people and the living cells that make them up.

Jumping to verse 20,

And you have an unction from the Holy One, and you all have knowledge.

Now the translator, which is David Bentley Hart here, concerning the word unction explains in a footnote. The word is chrisma, and he says it’s probably anointing, but perhaps an oil, unguent, or a balm. So he just wrote the word unction because it covers all of those words.

You have a unction, (so that’s a soothing, a soothing application, let’s say, from the Holy One), and you all have knowledge.

And this is that knowledge I’m saying that we’re all born with, that’s the knowledge of the Fullness of God. It’s the inherent knowledge of the Son of God, because our life and our consciousness is the proof of that, because it comes from above, life, consciousness. So therefore, we all have the knowledge of the Fullness within us, but we forget because of the never-ending war with the material, and with the Slanderer, and with death and destruction, and with each other. All of this war, all of this striving and egoic posturing puts a barrier between us and love. Love doesn’t arise out of ego. Narcissism arises out of ego. Self-love projected onto another person, and lapped up from another person to build our ego. But that isn’t true love. True love comes from above. That is the love of the Father, the love of the Son, the love of the Aeons, and the love that comes along with us when we’re first conceived and born. And that’s what we tend to forget because of the never-ending war.

So the writer of this first letter of John, who is apparently John, says,

I have written to you not because you do not know the truth, because you do know it.

And you see, that’s a very Gnostic opinion. We all know the truth deep inside, but we have forgotten it. But we can remember it. It’s just the flipping of a switch, and it will all come flooding back in. He says,

I have written to you not because you do not know the truth, because you do know it. And no lie comes from the truth. Who is the liar except the one that denies that Jesus is the Anointed? This is the Antichrist, one who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. The one who confesses the Son has the Father also. And this is the promise that he has promised us, the life of the Age (or the life of the Aeons).

And he says,

And as for you, the unction that you had received from him remains within you, and you have no need for anyone to teach you. Rather, as his unction teaches you about all things and is true and is no lie, you must abide in him just as it has taught you.

In other words, just as it has taught you the knowledge that abides in you, the knowledge that we were born with. And that is the gnostic message, that is the full knowledge of God, the full revelation of the Father and of the mystery. You know, as I say again, consciousness and life itself is a mystery. So to want to wonder about God or what is the truth of God, that’s not silly. It’s no more mysterious than wondering about consciousness or being alive or what keeps your heart beating when you’re asleep.

It’s all wrapped up in this singular package. We are fractals of the Father. We are fractals of his emissary, the Son, who became flesh and dwelt among us, not simply to teach the few thousand people who actually heard him at the time 2,000 years ago, but to serve for us as an example of a human being who knew the Father intimately and walked among us and never wavered in his knowledge and belief in the Father, never once succumbed to the lies of the Slanderer and the lusts of the flesh, and then who was put to death as an innocent man, having done no wrong. He didn’t murder anyone or steal from anyone. His crime was to profess knowledge of the Father. And this was the death sentence. And then he was buried for three days, and then he arose again in a non-material form. But he was seen by many, many people afterwards, and then he ascended in full view of hundreds or thousands of people. So this was the job of the Christ, to do all of that. And that’s what you believe in when you believe in Jesus, that such a thing is even possible, that there is a Father above. And this man said so, and look, he was innocently sacrificed. He was buried and rose again.

That’s no more fairytale than us being alive. It’s no more fairytale than anything else. And by the way, many people who say this whole story about Jesus is just a fairytale, they believe in a lot of silly things themselves, I must say. They believe in fairytales. It’s somehow acceptable to believe in astrology, alchemy, ghosts, spirits, luck, destiny, transpersonal consciousness, ETs and AI. But not the redeeming Power of the Anointed.

Chapter three of the first letter of John says,

See what kind of love the Father has given us, so that we might be called the children of God. And we are. Therefore the cosmos does not know us, because it did not know him. Do not be amazed, brothers, if the cosmos hates you. We know that we have passed over from death into life, because we love our brothers. And whoever does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has the life of the Aeons abiding in him. In this we have known what love is, that one laid down his soul on our behalf, and we ought to lay down our soul on behalf of our brothers. But should anyone have the means of living in this cosmos and see his brother in need, and inwardly close himself off from him, in what way does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let our love be not in talk or on the tongue, but in action and in truth. By this we shall know that we belong to the truth, and assure our heart before him, that if our heart should offer condemnation, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things.

Now, as a matter of gnostic theology, John seems to have been a bit hyperbolic in declaring that a hateful person does not have the love of God living in him. Hate is the inversion of love. Hate is the demiurgic shadow of love. Yes, the hateful person does not display or even acknowledge the Holy Spirit that animates his life, but he is surely animated by the Fullness of God or else he would not be conscious or alive. The spiritual problem the hateful person has is being cut off from his higher Self, in the same manner that the demiurge is cut off from his higher Self—Logos—and the Fullness above. This leaves them unaware of God’s love and the Anointed’s mission of redemption, but it does not nullify the unseen presence of God and the Anointed in their souls.

See, you may be angry at other people. You may think that half of the people in the nation are wrong and deluded and evil, and you just hate them by now. But God is greater than our heart, and that’s the reason we have to have a larger perspective. God loves all of the people on both sides of the political divides and the religious divides. God loves everybody. We are all fractals of the love of God, and the love of God abides in all of us if we will just open the door and let it out. It says in verse 21,

Beloved ones, if our heart offers no condemnation, we have confidence toward God, because we receive from him whatever we might ask, because we keep his commandments and do the things that are pleasing in his sight. And this is his commandment, that we should have faith in the name of his Son, Jesus the Anointed, and should love one another, just as he gave us a command to do. And whoever keeps his commandments abides in him, and he in that one. And by this we know that he abides in us from the Holy Spirit that he has given us.

So when we’re speaking of commandments here, it’s not the rules and regulations. It’s not all the laws of the Old Testament. Those are demiurgic laws. They do reflect what God would wish for us. Indeed, these laws may be true, but you won’t go to hell if you don’t do it. The more important thing is to believe in the Father and believe in the Son. And you can do this best by believing in Christ and the emissary Jesus who came to us to remind us of that.

Closing out the first letter of John here, chapter 5, it says, verse 18,

We know that no one who has been born out of God sins. Rather, whoever is born out of God keeps watch over himself, and the wicked one does not touch him. We know that we are of God, and that the whole cosmos rests entirely upon the wicked one. And we know that the Son of God has come and given us understanding, so that we may know the one who is true. And we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus the Anointed. This is the one true God and the life in the Age, (or the life of the Aeons). It closes by saying, Little children, guard yourselves against the idols.

And that’s the end of the book. And okay, I’m bringing all this up because it is Halloween. So, know whom you love, put on the armor of God, and then you can walk through the cosmos untouched by the spooky things. If you’re going to believe in spooky things, it doesn’t make sense not to believe in the Son of God.

Onward and upward. God bless us all.

According to the book of Colossians

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week we’re going to continue this study of Colossians in the New Testament as translated by David Bentley Hart. I keep promising some practical advice out of Colossians, and now we’re going to hit it here in chapter 3. It says,

If therefore you were raised together with the Anointed, seek the things above where the Anointed is sitting at God’s right hand. Set your mind on the things above, not the things on earth. For you have died, and your life has been hidden with the Anointed in God. When the Anointed our life is made manifest, then you too will be made manifest, along with him, in glory.

Now, you can interpret this in the Gnostic manner that we’ve been discussing here. The anointed is the Christ, and he is the Third Order of Powers. Jesus was the Third Order of Powers incarnate.

That is, the Fullness of God in its perfection manifested on the earth. All of us have the Fullness of God, but none of us have the perfection, because we have our karma that we bring in, and our bodies break down, and we are fighting the never-ending war against the demiurge and death. But the Christ, or the Anointed, when he came to the earth, he came to bring us the imprint of the perfection of the Fullness.

And we can take on that perfection of the Fullness of God when we ask for the Christ, or the Anointed, to anoint us, you see? And that replaces the Third Order of Powers in all of its perfection over on top of our Second Order Powers, which are fallen because they are bonded to the material plane. But we can raise our vibrations, is how New Agers like to speak of it, we can raise our self back up to the Fullness of God only through the perfection of the Anointed. That’s the perfection of the Anointed’s job on our behalf.

He’s like the correcting algorithm to our corrupted code. So, if therefore you were raised together with the Anointed, that is, once you have accepted the Anointed bringing you the Third Order of Powers, and you have asked them to help you and to cleanse your Second Order Powers, to bring them the perfection of the Anointed, then we are to seek the perfection above. Our focus is to be above, because we come from above, and we will return to above.

You see, it helps us to shift our mindset from being stuck down here—I’ve got a short life, and then I die. That isn’t it. We refocus then on above and the perfection of the Fullness of God, because we now once again can perceive that perfection of God, once we allow the Anointed to correct our fallen egos, you see? And when it says that we have died and our life has been hidden with the Anointed and God, our fallen nature—our Second Order Powers that have become corrupted—they are put away. They are displaced by the Third Order power, the perfection of the Anointed, and its nesting fractals.

And we nest into Christ, and we nest up on into the Father that way. Otherwise, we’re not nesting up into the fractals of the Fullness of God. We’re lost and wandering around in the fallen world, which is the province of the demiurge, and it’s not a pleasant place to be. Going on to verse 5,

So mortify those bodily members that are on earth.

Mortifying means put to death to kill those bodily members that are on earth, but it’s not talking about your body. It’s not saying that you should chop off your hand or your private parts. These are what the bodily members are that should be mortified—it says

whoring, (which is sexual promiscuity), impurity, passion, (and by that it means overwhelming emotions, being a slave to your emotions), mortify malign desire, (that is, you shouldn’t wish for bad things to happen. You shouldn’t wish for bad things to happen to other people), and acquisitiveness, which is a form of idolatry.

And acquisitiveness, my gosh, that’s our consumer culture. The purpose of commercials, the purpose of advertisements, is to inspire acquisitiveness in us, which is a form of idolatry, because we worship the exercise equipment. We worship the vacation to the best spot. We worship that kind of food. That’s what idolatry is. Verse 6 says,

On account of which things, God’s indignation is coming.

So God doesn’t like those things it’s saying. On the virtue versus vice ledger, those things fall on the vice side. And once again, that is sexual promiscuity,

Impurity,

and it doesn’t specify impurity in what, but it wants us to be pure. It wants us to be reflecting that purity of the Third Order Powers, reflecting the Fullness of God, reflecting the purity of virtuous living and virtuous thought.

Passion,

that is overwhelming emotions. Don’t be caught and brought down by emotions that boil up, because those emotions are being triggered by archons. Those emotions are being triggered by the demiurge. They want you to feel bad. They want you to feel hopeless. That is their door into your soul, is through passions. So we’re supposed to put those passions away.

Malign desire,

we want to get rid of that. Don’t wish for the bad. And this acquisitiveness, always having to have more, better. Verse 7 says,

and in which things you used to walk back then when you lived by them, but now you must put it all away. Indignation, animosity, malice, blasphemy, obscene speech from your mouth.

Okay, let’s look at those. “But now you must put all of that away. Indignation…” Boy, I bet a lot of you are like me. I used to be full of what’s called righteous indignation. I would be so upset. My passions would be riled up by becoming indignant at the injustice of it all, at injustice being done to another person, or cruelty to animals, or eating meat, or whatever the indignation is, the poor of the world. I’d become indignant over it. But it was righteous indignation, I thought, and so it was okay. But then I realized, and this was many years ago before I even discovered the Gnostic Gospels, that righteous indignation isn’t any good either, because it’s a form of passion, and it’s a negative emotion. And this negativity is what we’re trying to get rid of.

We do not belong in the world of negativity. Once we accept the Anointed and allow the Third Order of Powers into our soul, then we can put away that sort of negative indignation, because indignation belongs to the Father, it says. God’s indignation is coming. So we leave it up to him. “Judgment is mine, saith the Lord.” That’s a common quote. And it says we must put away indignation.

Animosity,

that is a negative stance against other people, or a negative stance against certain institutions. Animosity, just pushing it away in negative way. Animosity means bitter hostility. There’s no room for bitterness in someone who’s walking with the Anointed. Or open enmity, acts of hatred. Hatred is bad in all of its forms. And just because you believe that the object of your hatred deserves it, well they may. But it’s not our job to judge them, and it’s not our job to experience animosity towards them. Ultimately, they will be reckoned with. Ultimately, there is a judgment. No one gets away with anything, sooner or later. But it’s not our job to have hostility and hatred. So a hostile feeling or act, or not to be mean of spirit. Malice, that’s plotting against someone.

Blasphemy,

blasphemy actually refers to rejection of the Holy Spirit. It’s considered the only sin that’s unforgivable, although we as Gnostics believe that all sins are ultimately forgivable. But as long as you blaspheme the Holy Spirit and push the Holy Spirit away, you’re not allowing the forgiveness to come to you. And so that’s why blasphemy is a bad idea.

And, obscene speech from your mouth.

I’m a veteran, and in the service there was a lot of curse words and a lot of cussing. And it was hard to come home on leave and be around my parents, because every other word out of my mouth had become some sort of obscene speech, or so it seemed. So stop the habit of using obscene speech. It’s a bad habit, and it puts us on the wrong side of the vice and virtue ledger.

Going on to verse 9,

Do not lie to one another, having shed the old man along with all of his practices, and having donned the new man, who is renewed in full knowledge according to the image of the one creating him.

So that is describing what happens to you when you invite the Anointed to cleanse your Second Order pleroma. We invite the Third Order pleroma to overlay it and to bring us that cleansing. When the Third Order Power, that is, the Anointed, comes in to take up residence in your soul, it displaces your egoic way of being with the Anointed’s way of being, which is upward, onward and upward, focusing on above, which is living on the virtue side of the ledger. That is what it means to put on the new man, who is renewed in full knowledge. And that’s what we’re doing here at Gnostic Insights. Gnosis, gnostic, means knowledge, and it’s according to the image of the One creating him. So the gnosis comes from above. It’s not book learning. It’s not university learning. It’s the knowledge that comes directly from above. And then it says in verse 11,

where there is no Greek and Judean, no circumcised or those with foreskin, no barbarian, Scythian, slave or free man. Rather, the Anointed is all things and is in all.

Now, I believe that this goes directly against the diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI, that’s such a focus nowadays. It’s a false focus. The DEI agenda is not really meant to make everyone equal. In the end, it winds up privileging those in power, because it brings everyone down to the level of the slave, basically. So this passage says there are no differences among people. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white or brown. It doesn’t matter if you’re an immigrant or a native. It doesn’t matter if you’re a European, an Asian or a Western American. None of that matters, because we are all one in the Anointed. And that is the true DEI. That is the true diversity, equity and inclusion that can only come through Christ.

And this is one of the reasons why totalitarian governments are anti-religion. They don’t want you to think that religion brings equanimity, brings equality, brings inclusion. They want you to think just the opposite, that only the government can do that for you, when in fact that is an inversion, that is a demiurgic lie. You can only find the kind of diversity, equity and inclusion that comes from above. That is where it comes from. It’s part of the Simple Golden Rule.

It’s been a while since we talked about the Simple Golden Rule. That is that we reach out to others and hold hands, metaphorically, to work together on a shared project that none of us could do alone. And we do it for the betterment of all. That is not a government program. That is the golden rule that comes to us down from the Aeons. That’s the way the Fullness of God operates, working together on a shared project for the betterment of all, with love, with assistance, and with knowledge or gnosis.

That’s the simple golden rule. And there are old episodes devoted to the simple golden rule. I’ll put a link here in the transcript if you want to go back and listen to that in depth.

Verse 12 says,

Therefore as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved…

You know you can only be holy and beloved if you have been doing what the previous verses have suggested here in Colossians, to put off the old man. That is, set your ego aside and put on the new man, which is that restored and corrected version of yourself. It’s your best Self. You’re not being taken over by the Anointed. You’re not being taken over by Jesus.

You are being brought into the human that you were meant to be from the beginning. So,

therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, put on (Okay, now here’s the positive side of the ledger) inward compassion, honesty, humility, gentleness, and magnanimity.

So, compassion, that’s loving empathy. It means seeing how another person is feeling through their eyes, rather than what you judge them to be.

Honesty. Be honest. Delusion abounds in the land right now, honestly. The delusion comes from being dishonest, from not using your critical thinking skills, from taking liar’s words for how things work. Honesty is the best policy.

Humility, that is dethroning your ego off the throne of control and allowing your true Self, with a capital S, self. That is, that self given to you by the Anointed, that Self that is a reflection of the Fullness of God. That is how we become humble. That is what humility is. We’re to be gentle. Be gentle, kind.

And magnanimity. I looked up magnanimity, just to make sure I knew exactly what it means. And it means “the quality of being magnanimous, greatness of mind, elevation or dignity of soul. That quality or combination of qualities in character, which enables one to encounter danger and trouble with tranquility and firmness, to disdain injustice, meanness and revenge, and to act and sacrifice for noble objects.” Another definition says, “magnanimity is the virtue of being great of mind and heart. It encompasses usually a refusal to be petty, a willingness to face danger, and actions for noble purposes.”

Verse 13 says,

Upholding one another and forgiving one another, if anyone should have a complaint against anyone, just as the Lord forgave you, so you also.

That’s part of the Lord’s prayer, isn’t it? “And forgive us our shortcomings to the extent that we forgive others.” So this is one of the reasons why we cannot judge and condemn other people, because we have not been condemned. The Lord has forgiven us, particularly if you have accepted the Anointed into your soul. There’s no room for hatred. There’s no room for judgment.

Verse 14 says,

And above all of these, love, which is the bond of perfection, and let the Anointed’s peace rule in your hearts, to which you were indeed called in one body, and become thankful.

And that one body that we are called to be in, that’s the body of the Anointed. We are nested in a fractal sense up into the Anointed. He is our umbrella. He is our covering for all of our faults and sins. We nest up inside of him, and that mojo of the Christ takes it away. If we don’t nest up inside of him, we’re carrying all that burden around here in the fallen world. Verse 16 says,

Let the word of the Anointed dwell within you richly, teaching and admonishing each other in all wisdom, in psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, singing in grace within your hearts to God.

You know, songs are actually very much a part of the Fullness of God. It says in the Tripartite Tractate that the Aeons hymn to the Lord continually. That means they sing. They sing of the glory of God. Verse 17 says,

And everything you do whatsoever, in word or in deed, do all things in Lord Jesus’ name, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

See, Jesus as the Christ, he is the Anointed. He nests directly into the Son of God. He’s an extension that came down physically from the Son, and the Son is the only emanation from the Father. So when it says, “giving thanks to God the Father through him,” this is a literal translation that we nest up inside of the Christ. We nest up into the Son that way, and that nests us up fractally into the Father. Otherwise, we can’t reach him. When we’re down here lost, and when you pray to God, it’s actually the Son or the Christ that hears you. The Father is unapproachable. The Son is the only one that can approach the Father, because anyone else that would attempt to is annihilated because of the Father’s greatness. There’s too much of a power differential. Christ is like a resistor to the energy of the Father.

Now then there’s a portion of Colossians which certain harsh fundamentalist churches and many harsh religions around the world use to justify treating women as lesser beings than men, and it goes like this. Verse 18 says,

Wives, station yourselves under your husbands as is fitting in the Lord.

Now, this means be subordinate in the sense of arranging under, or being subordinate to, or being stationed under the shelter. So I take this not in that sense of being a slave to your husband, but in the sense of we’re nesting fractals. And so the family unit is nesting up, and the wife nests right inside of the husband. Because the next verse says,

Husbands, love your wives, and do not be bitter toward them.

So it’s the job of the husband to love their wives just as much as God loves us. And this takes away any being under someone’s thumb, because that’s evil. It’s a sad thing to be nested up into the fractal of a bitter, angry person who does not love the Father. That’s why it says, “Husbands, love your wives, and do not be bitter toward them.”

Children, obey your parents regarding all things, for this delights the Lord.

Once again, this is assuming that your parents are virtuous people. Paul is speaking here in Colossians to those who have been redeemed by the Christ. He’s speaking to the church, those who have accepted the Anointed.

Fathers, do not provoke your children so that they may not be dispirited.

Slaves, obey your lords according to the flesh in regard to all things, not by affecting slavishness before people’s eyes, like someone obsequious to human beings, but in sincerity of heart, revering the Lord. Whatever you do, work from the soul as for the Lord and not for human beings, knowing that you will receive the reward of the inheritance from the Lord. You slave for the Lord, the Anointed.

Now, while modern Western nations no longer support slavery as an economic system, there are reportedly 167 nations, mostly located in Asian, African, and Middle Eastern countries, that still force an estimated 46 million people to work as slaves. According to a site called World Population Review, “Forms of modern slavery include slavery by “ownership” (“chattel” slavery), government conscription (forced military service or government labor), forced prison labor, forced migrant labor, debt bondage (slavery until debts are paid), sexual slavery, forced marriage/child marriage, child labor, and forced begging.”

And even those of us who are not subjected to slavery trudge off to work to earn the paycheck that takes care of our daily needs. The point of the passage above is that “Whatever you do, work from the soul as for the Lord and not for human beings, knowing that you will receive the reward of the inheritance from the Lord. You slave for the Lord, the Anointed.”  This is why we’re always to do our best on the job.

The passage says not to “affect slavishness.” Affect means to pretend. Like when you’re sitting at your desk at work, playing mahjong on the computer or solitaire, and then when the boss walks by or your supervisor, suddenly you kill that program and you look like you’re working. You know that’s not right.

And, we’re not working for the employer anyway. We’re working for the Lord. So we are not to act “obsequious to human beings,” which means cringing or fawning before another person, like a whipped dog. We only glorify the Lord above, even when working for employers down here below. So this is why we do our best in all things, and the better you do, the better it reflects upon the Lord. You know, she’s a really good worker. Of course, she’s a bit on the religious side. She’s got some weird ideas about God, but she’s a really good worker. Well, that’s kind of what you’d like the attitude to be about you. Then verse 25 says,

For the one acting unjustly will suffer the wrong he has done, and there is no respecting of persons.

And this has to do with either judgment before we die or judgment after we die, and there will be a judgment. No one gets away with anything. The one acting unjustly will suffer the wrong he has done, and that’s that life review at the end of our lives when we pass away. We will see all of the things that we have done in the world from everyone else’s point of view. So everyone you are cruel to now or mean to now or petty to now, you will experience their hurt. You will experience it. You’ll be in their shoes experiencing the hurt that you are doing now to them. That’s what it means. We will suffer the wrongs that we have done. So it’s best to not act in a mean, petty, cruel, bitter, judgmental way against other people now or against animals or anything. It’s best to act loving because the love we give out now, we will re-experience after we pass. The bad things we do now, we will re-experience after we pass. The meanness and the cruelty, we’ll see it from the other person’s point of view, and it will hurt to a huge extent because there won’t be any delusion or lies blinding us to what we are doing. We’ll see it with eyes wide open, and we will feel remorseful. We will feel bad about it. Imagine that.

People say, Oh, Hitler couldn’t go to heaven. Look at all the bad he did, or put any other mean person in there that you want to. Yes, they will. But first, they’re going to experience all of the suffering that they caused to everyone else. They will experience it with eyes wide open, and it will pierce their souls, and they will feel very bad about it. But it’s all self-inflicted. All of the things that we’re doing are self-inflicted, and we will judge ourselves after we pass away. In the light of truth, there will be no lying. There will be no avoiding it, and only then will you see that you need to repent. Then you will repent. Then you will feel sorry for it all, and it’ll be a hard judgment and a hard repentance. But eventually, you will repent because “every knee will bow and every tongue confess” the Lord, the Fullness, and the Father. And if not now, then later, and it’ll be a lot harder later. But we don’t have to go through that.

Do you know you don’t have to experience that at all? If you truly and sincerely repent now and ask for the Anointed to correct the faults of your soul, ask the Anointed to take away the mean spiritedness, or to take away the judgmentalism, or to take away the laziness or slothfulness, or whatever those problems are. That’s what was meant at the beginning of this chapter, to “mortify the flesh.” Not physically, not whipping yourself like some deranged ritual from the Dark Ages, but to ask to be cleansed, to present yourself, to become redeemed by the correcting algorithm of the Third Order Powers.

Onward and upward. See you next week.

This book puts all of this gnosis together in a simplified form. Gnosis is as easy as you want it to be, or as complicated as you desire. This Simple Explanation will guide you through the often confusing terms and turns of gnostic thought and theology. The glossary alone is worth having on your bookshelf. Now available in paperback, hardback, and ebook/kindle.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week I shared for you the first verse of the Letter to the Colossians, out of David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament, which I highly recommend. Hart translated directly from the original Greek manuscripts, rather than deriving his translation the way most Bibles have been translated, which is from the Latin Vulgate and on into King James, and out that way—they just keep massaging the Latin. But Hart went back to the original Greek for the actual meaning of the words and the phrases.

And last week we talked about the fractals of Colossians, because when it speaks of the fullness of God, which it does often in the Book of Colossians, these are nested fractals. We are tucked up, we are nested upward in a pyramidal type of sense into the Aeons of the Fullness of God. We are their fruit, we are derived from them, so our consciousness flows downward out of the Fullness of God. And the Fullness of God is sitting there with what is called the Son of God, which is the only emanation from the original ground state of consciousness, the original state of the Father, the big G, the God Above All Gods. He emanated only one emanation, and that’s called the Son. And it encapsulates everything that the Father stands for and is, but in this monad, a singularity type of form. I think of the Son as this big, like, a big round gaseous ball. That’s the way I picture it in my mind. And then as soon as the Son was emanated, He also had his own emanations, because He is the exact spirit of the Father. And so as the Father created the Son, the Son created the Fullnesses, the Totalities, the Aeons of God.

I’m going to pick up in chapter 2 here of the letter to the Colossians, and he says,

For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for your sake, and for those in Laodicea, for so many who have not seen my face in the flesh, so that their hearts, being joined together in love, might be encouraged on toward all the riches of full certainty in understanding, for full knowledge of the mystery of God, of the Anointed, in whom are all the hidden treasures of wisdom and of knowledge.

He’s talking about gnosis when he speaks of full certainty and understanding, full knowledge of the mystery, the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge. That is the gnosis that Gnostics are mining. And I think that we here at Gnostic Insights are on the right track, and I thank you for joining me.

A lot of people who call themselves Gnostics and are out there exploring various Gnostic sites and scriptures and doctrines, these are, in my opinion, rabbit trails that don’t necessarily lead to true knowledge, true wisdom, true Fullness and certainty in the knowledge of God. It’s just one more thing, one more thing, one more thing. Got to find this, got to listen to that speaker, got to do this, got to do that.

There is really only one gnosis. It’s a very simple gnosis, and it is this: that we come from the Father. That’s all there is to it.

We second-order powers that live down here on the planet Earth and probably populate the entire cosmos, because that’s how it’s usually referred to in the New Testament as the cosmos, or the universe, we would call it, not just Earth, so this would cover the ETs as well. That we second-order powers—everything that has life. So that would be everything from the cells on up, from the bacteria on up through the plants and the birds and the mammals, including us.

It would not, by the way, include viruses, because viruses are not alive. Did you realize that? Viruses are called molecules. They are very clever molecules that have one job and one job only, and that is to conquer and kill and steal. That’s what they do to the cell. They conquer it, they invade it, they take its RNA, DNA out, and then spread it around to more cells so that they also will die and be conquered. That’s the job of a virus, which is demiurgic. It comes from the molecular level, and the demiurge only controls the molecules and the elements, the elementals of this cosmos. That’s what is meant by the elementals of this cosmos.

We are different than the viruses. We are not a virus upon the face of the Earth. We second-order powers are the extension of the Fullness of God. We carry the consciousness, the light, the life, and the love of the Father and the Son down into this, what would otherwise be completely dead, material world. So yes, the rocks, stones, the crystals, the clouds, and the rain, they are lovely to behold, but they’re not to be worshipped because they are part of the realm of the demiurge. And the demiurge made these things out of his memory of paradise. We also have that memory of paradise because that’s where we all come from.

Paradise is where the Aeons live. Paradise is their dream, and we are part of that. We come from there, so we remember it. Every human, every plant and animal, every cell in our body knows the Fullness of God because we all come from the Fullness of God.

The rocks and stones, the elements, the elementals, the powers of this cosmos derive from the demiurge. And he, of course, did come from the Fullness, but he, “fell” and got stuck down here and has amnesia. He doesn’t remember that he comes from the Fullness of God. He’s got all these wonderful plans and all the blueprints for paradise, but he thinks he made them up. He thinks he cooked them up. He doesn’t remember that he fell from above. That’s why he thinks he is God. He woke up, hey, where am I? Who am I? I must be God. Let me create the cosmos, and I will be the God of that cosmos. That’s the mind of the demiurge.

As long as we dwell in the cosmos, we are bonded to the elements of the demiurge because our physical flesh is made of molecules and elements. But we bring the life of the Fullness into that physical flesh, and so we are bonded to the material. That is the root of our struggles, the never-ending war against death. Because death is on the side of the demiurge, life is on the side of the Fullness.

That’s all we really need to know. We come from the Fullness above. You don’t even have to know what I just told you.

I think that everything on the planet that is alive inherently knows it because we have the Fullness, the patterning within us, and we know we didn’t fall. We were birthed down here. So we are not fallen with amnesia the way the demiurge is. He thinks he’s the end-all and the be-all. We tend to forget it, being trapped down here in this world while we’re living this mortal life. And then we struggle against each other. We struggle against the elements. We struggle against the demiurge and the archons, the powers of this cosmos. And we are caught in this never-ending war, and then we die.

And it seems like it’s all so helpless and hopeless, unless you flip the switch. And that was the job of the Anointed, the Anointed’s job. And Anointed is the actual word for Christ. We say the Christ, which has become like a title, Jesus the Christ, Jesus the King. But he’s actually Jesus the Anointed, or simply the Anointed one, meaning He who carries down from the Fullness all that we need to know. He’s the superpower that re-inhabits us and reminds us of the Fullness of God and the Father, the ground state of consciousness.

Materialism tries to teach us that we are a byproduct of the material, but we are not a byproduct of the material. No matter how many molecules you throw out there, unlike what science tries to sell you, these molecules and elements and minerals cannot randomly assemble themselves into life. They don’t do it. And even when scientists jam them all together in an attempt to grow what they call organoids, for example, grow a fake heart from scratch up, they can’t do it. The heart won’t act like a heart unless they, like viruses, steal the life of a beating heart and put it into that organoid. And that is what causes it to beat and to know that it’s a heart. But they can’t keep them alive because they will not level up.

lab-grown neuro-muscular organoid

And so back to the letter to Colossians, we’re in chapter 2 here. He says,

I say this so that no one may beguile you with plausible talk.

And another word for beguile is enchant or delude. And I want to tell you that the internet is full of beguiling talk. And most often, unless it includes a true gnosis of the Father and the Son and the Anointed, it is nothing but beguiling talk. And it is the type of talk that can lead us astray because it doesn’t lead back to the Fullness. If it leads up to the Fullness, you’re on track. If it leads to some cult or some leader or some technology, then it’s not.

Paul goes on to say in verse 8 of chapter 2,

Watch that there be no one who robs you by way of philosophy and empty deceit according to the traditions of human beings, according to the elementals of the cosmos, and not according to the Anointed.

You see, that’s what I was just saying. And the sad and frustrating thing is that, for example, I am often accused of beguiling by way of philosophy and empty deceit. But this is not philosophy and empty deceit. This is actually the gospel as preached by Jesus. And it was stripped out of the Bible so that this worldly church could have control over the minds of the followers and the beliefs of the followers. But that was never the plan.

The Anointed comes to each and every person individually. Gnosis is an individual pursuit, and it’s inward and upward. It’s not out in the world—who do I have to listen to?  what do I have to read? Because if you keep anchoring to the thought that even the grass and the trees are going to heaven, even your dog and your cat are going to heaven, what do they have to know? What rites do they need to perform? What books do they read? They don’t. They just know that they came from above, and they’ll go home to the above when they wither away. We’re fearful of that, but we don’t just wither away. We go home. This is a temporary sojourn, being wedded to this material world. We are in the world, but not of the world.

That’s what it means. Verse 9 says,

Because in him, (that’s the Anointed), dwells all the Fullness of deity bodily. And you are those who have been made full in him, who is the head of every rule and power.

So again, that’s that nested fractals notion. When we invite the Christ or the Anointed to bring us the correcting and the memory of the origin, because we’re stumbling around, lost in the cosmos, then we nest back up into the Anointed. We’re riding along with him, like the way Superman flew through the air with Lois Lane tucked under his arm. That Superman is our Anointed, and we believers, we’re like Lois Lane flying through the sky with Superman.

Quoting again, verse 10,

And you are those who have been made full in him, who is the head of every rule and power, in whom also you were circumcised with a circumcision not accomplished by hand, through the shedding of the body of the flesh, through the circumcision of the Anointed, buried with him in baptism, by which you were also raised along with him, by the faithfulness of the operation of the God who raised him from the dead.

So circumcision is a rite that was given by the Demiurge to the Hebrews to mark them as a special people apart from everyone else, because they were willing to have their foreskins cut off of their male appendages. But it’s a fractal. The actual circumcision is severing the ties we have to the material world. It’s cutting off the foreskins, so to speak, of the rule of the orders and the elementals over our souls, because we are otherwise stuck to them here in this bodily form. So the circumcision is not material. It’s actually spiritual. It merely means severing or cutting off the tie that binds you to the cosmos, so that you are free to look upward rather than downward. You’re free to look forward rather than backward. This is what onward and upward means. Circumcise.

Verse 12 says,

buried with him in baptism, by which you were also raised along with him, by the faithfulness of the operation of the big G God, (that’s the God Above All Gods), who raised him from the dead. And while you were dead in trespasses and in your foreskin of flesh, (which is your whole body of course), he gave you life along with him, forgiving all trespasses, expunging what is written by hand against us, contrary to us, in ordinances, and has removed it out of the way, nailing it to the cross, stripping the archons and powers, (and that again, that’s the henchmen of the demiurge), he exposed them in the open, leading them prisoner along with him in a triumphal procession. Therefore let no one judge you for eating and drinking or for taking part in a festival or in a new moon celebration or in sabbaths. These are shadows of things to come, but the solid body thereof is that of the Anointed.

So what was happening back in those days was that the Jews who had been converted to Christ were still laboring under the laws of the demiurge, that is the Old Testament laws. There is a Christian denomination called Jehovah’s Witness, and they also labor under that same set of Old Testament rules. The Seventh-day Adventists also labor under that set of Old Testament rules, and here Paul is saying those are a shadow of things to come, but you are not to be bound by those rules anymore because you’ve been liberated by the Anointed.

Now, from me to you, let me tell you right here, instead of waiting till we get to such a verse, that doesn’t mean, as some sects, some cults think, that means “anything goes.” Oh, I’m liberated by the Christ, therefore, oh, let’s have an orgy. Let’s all drop some ecstasy and have an orgy because we can do anything we want because we’ve been liberated by Christ. That’s the wrong attitude, folks. The attitude for liberation through Christ is to go onward and upward, not backward and down, and indulging in hedonism and sexual promiscuity is not the path onward and upward, it’s the path backward and down, and I’m pretty sure you know this because your conscience tells you so.

There will be a time of mingling. There will be a time that may sort of resemble something like an orgy, but it doesn’t happen down here in the cosmos. The Aeons of the Fullness, that’s the way they give birth to us. We’re probably remembering something of that glory above. The Aeons are immaterial, so any number of their spirits can mingle with any number of their spirits, and they make these kind of logarithmic minglings of an infinite variety, which gives birth to their children. We can’t do that down here. It doesn’t work. We have to be patient. We have to wait until we return to the Fullness of God.

Verse 18, Colossians says,

Let no verdict be passed against you by anyone affecting humility and a religion of the angels, venturing upon visions he has never had, blustering aimlessly by the mind of his flesh, not holding to the head from whom all the body, furnished and knitted together by its joints and ligatures, will grow with a growth from Big G God, (the God Above All Gods).

This blustering aimlessly by the mind of his flesh–that’s part of the Simple Explanation. Our flesh has a mind of its own. Each of our organs has a mind of their own. We are aggregating upward at the cellular living level. You know, we start from a stem cell, and then we keep differentiating, growing, branching out to wind up to be this organism that we are, whatever organism that may be, whatever living creature that may be. And each part of that growing upward is also alive and remembers the Fullness. That’s where the intelligent design comes into it. They know what they’re growing into because it came from the stem cell on up. The stem cell was a little miniature replica of the Fullness of God itself, so it knows everything. It knows how to grow the organism up that it needs to be, that it needs to become, in conjunction with the spirit that infuses it at conception.

Because the spirit, that spark of life, brings the consciousness of the Father into the material that builds up into us. So part of the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything is that our subsystems, our little cells and parts of ourselves, our organs, our organ systems, they all have a mind of their own. Your stomach tells you when to eat. Your sexual organs tell you to have sex. Your skin says, I’m cold or I’m hot. Cover up or take off some clothes. Your lungs say, give me a smoke. That is what is meant by blustering aimlessly by the mind of his flesh when people do not put their own overriding governing unit of consciousness at the top of the pile. You are supposed to have control over your body. And it needs you. I always say it’s the Raja sitting atop the elephant, right? Your body needs you, needs its controlling unit of consciousness, which is the most developed part of its galaxy of consciousness that is your body. You need to be aware of what’s going on. You need to be a wise and loving ruler to this galaxy that makes up your body.

If you don’t, the body takes control. And that’s how the lusts of the flesh take over. And people feel that they’re out of control because they are, because they’ve never exercised control over their body. But you don’t do it by willpower because willpower can fade. You have to do it by going upward and asking for the power of the Anointed to give you the power to control. So if an addict is withdrawing from a drug, they may feel helpless and hopeless. But if they turn to their higher power, if they remember that they come from above, that’s when they have the power to put it down. So not blustering aimlessly by the mind of his flesh, but rather holding onto the head from whom all the body, furnished and knitted together by its joints and ligatures, will grow with a growth from the God Above All Gods. That’s what it’s saying.

And we’ll finish up with this ending of chapter two, and then we’ll go into chapter three, which I promised you last week that we’d get to some practical advice about how to live that will help you walk with the Anointed, with the Fullness of God, and not fall back into the archons and the powers of the elementals. But finishing up with chapter two here, verse 20.

If with the Anointed you died away from the elementals of the cosmos, why are you submissive to ordinances as though living in the cosmos? Do not handle or taste or touch things that are all reduced to decay in being used up according to the injunctions and teachings of human beings, which things indeed, though having a reputation as wisdom on account of affected religion and mental lowliness and lavish neglect of the body, are of no real value against indulgence of the flesh.

So that means being unkind to your body is not going to help you take dominion over it. That means attending a church with an affected religion that doesn’t even remember the Fullness of God or the Father or the Son, but pays lip service to it, isn’t going to help you either. That keeps you bound to the law.

And this bit about mental lowliness, I take that to mean thinking that this kind of talk that we’re doing, this gnosis that we are mining, is somehow unholy, is somehow made up, and a philosophy of man, just another philosophy of man. Well, in my discernment, in my soul, I can feel the difference, and I’m wondering if you can.

Say, I’d love to hear some of your comments. If you’ve been following Gnostic Insights for any period of time, or if you’ve had any deep insights that have liberated you in any sense because of this particular ministry, I would sure like to know that. Would you drop me a line in comments or send me an email? Let me know if I can share your story with other people that are listening. I’d like to build some sort of a community here, not around me or around the podcast or my books, but a community of truth in the gnosis of the Anointed.

And if you’re brand new to Gnostic Insights and you’re…  okay, now we’re back in the 21st century… If you’re new to this podcast, it is different than the Gnosticism presented elsewhere. If you would like to know what the heck I’m talking about, please go to Amazon.com now and buy the book that is called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and that will lay it all out absolutely clearly, without possibility of misunderstanding.

And if that turns out to be too complex, because it is theology, the book that preceded it, called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is very short, profusely illustrated, very simple, no explanations at all, just the Gnostic Gospel.

God bless us all, onward and upward. See you next week.

This book puts all of this gnosis together in a simplified form. Gnosis is as easy as you want it to be, or as complicated as you desire. This Simple Explanation will guide you through the often confusing terms and turns of gnostic thought and theology. The glossary alone is worth having on your bookshelf. Now available in paperback, hardback, and ebook/kindle. Soon to be released as an audio book.

Fractals of Colossians

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I thought I would share with you one of the books out of the New Testament as translated by David Bentley Hart and published by Yale University Press, which, as I’ve said before, is very Gnostic in its interpretation because it uses the same words that our Gnostic Gospel uses. The translation is more precise than your normal conventional Bible.

Colossians is purportedly Paul writing a letter to this church in a town called Colossae. And I’m going to go through this verse by verse so that you can see how similar this is to the cosmology of the Tripartite Tractate that I am generally sharing with you. And he is writing this letter to the church in Colossae to exhort them to righteousness, let’s say, to help them walk in the path of the Christ.

And he says, for example, in chapter 1, verse 11, “being empowered with every power by the might of his glory for all endurance and longanimity, with joy.”

Longanimity means the disposition to be patient in the face of adversity, to suffer calmly. And boy, we could use some of that right now, right? You may not feel joyful all the time because of all that’s going on around us, but we can have endurance and longanimity if we’re walking with Christ, because he has the power over all of this.

“Giving thanks to the Father who has made you fit for participation in the Holy One’s allotment in the light.” And “the Holy Ones” is the Aeons of the Fullness of God, in my opinion. And they live in the light of the ethereal plane up there in the Fullness of God.

That is the place where the Aeons live. They are, “the Holy Ones who delivered us from the power of the darkness and translated us into the Kingdom of his love’s Son.”

His love’s Son—that’s a peculiar way to put it. Not his beloved Son, but the Kingdom of his love’s Son. So, the Son is the first emanation of the Father, the only emanation directly out of the Father, and he is still plugged into the Father. Whereas everything else that followed, the Fullness, and then us, and of course the various Principalities and Powers—they derive from the Son.

And remember, the Father’s love is his preeminent quality, consciousness and love, overwhelming love. He is nothing but love. He is the root of love.

Then it goes on to say, verse 14, “in whom we have the price of liberation, the forgiveness of sins, who is the image of the invisible God.”

Remember, the Father, the invisible God, he’s consciousness itself. He’s the ground state matrix. He does not have a face. He does not have an image. He’s not the fellow in the Old Testament walking around in the robes with the long beard. That is not the face of God. The Son is the image of the invisible God, and he is love embodied.

It goes on to say, “firstborn of all creation.” And in the footnotes, Hart says, this can also be translated as “of every creature the firstborn” or “born prior to all creation.” So the Son is the very first emanation of the Father. He’s the first thing.

And then it says, “because in him, the Son, were created all things in the heavens and on earth, the visible as well as the invisible, whether Thrones or Lordships or Archons or Powers.” And those are the invisible spiritual Powers. And the visible, of course, is this apparently material world that we are living in.

“All things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things. All things hold together in him. “

And if we’re thinking of nested fractals, even though the fallen Aeon, Logos, broke apart, and it is his shadow parts that create this material world, it’s of a lower vibratory order, we would say in our modern talk. We’re still within, ultimately, the Fullness of God. We’re still within, ultimately, the Son. The Demiurge may be our universal unit of consciousness that created this material universe, the fallen Logos, but sitting within the Son because these are all nested. He’s a fractal below the Son. All of creation are fractal offspring of the Son. And so, like any fractal formula, they continue to nest upward toward the One originating form or formula.

Picking that back up again in verse 18, “And he is the head of the body, of the assembly, who is the origin, firstborn from the dead, so that he might himself hold first place in all things.” So this is then the Christian doctrine that the Christ became embodied in the flesh of a human, Jesus, and he was dead and buried in a tomb for three days, and then he rose from the dead. And that is what makes him “the firstborn of all of the dead.”

And the promise of Christianity is that he’s the firstborn of the dead, but we will all be resurrected from the dead. So, death of this physical body that you’re walking around in right now, this is nothing to fear, because you will be resurrected the same way that Jesus was resurrected, through the power of the Son. That’s the point of Jesus being the firstborn from the dead, so that he might, “hold himself first place in all things.” Because, once again, he is our originating formula for the resurrected man. So this is again a fractal.

Verse 19, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling.”

And you see, this is an example of where our conventional Christianity has lost the actual depth of the meaning of the Fullness. This is a capitalized word, and the Fullness, according to the Tripartite Tractate and other Gnostic texts, is the place where the Aeons dwell. The Fullness is co-existent with the Son. The Son wears the Fullness like a garment, and the Fullness wears the Son. The Fullness is the breakout of all the parts of the Son. And it says, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling.” This is a fractal reference, that the Fullnesses, that is the Aeons of the Fullness, that is the pleroma, another word for Fullness, they live within the Son. So we’re nesting upward, up toward the One, you see?

That whole subtlety of what is the Fullness, and our relationship to the Fullness, and the relationship of the Fullness to the Son, has been lost. It goes untranslated in the New Testament, because the books of the New Testament that reference the Fullness and explain it, such as the Tripartite Tractate, were removed from the Bible by the Catholic Pope and the Emperor of Rome when they codified what Christianity is, and should be, and decided what texts should stay in, and what texts should be thrown out, and which priests would be honored and promoted.

So, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling, and through him to reconcile all things to him.” You see? To reconcile all things to him. Not just the ones who go to church, not just the ones who have recognized their gnosis and acknowledge the power of the Son and of the Christ, or that Jesus was the human incarnate of the Son, but rather, all things to him. And it keeps referencing throughout the whole New Testament that Christ came to reconcile all things to him. They just don’t believe it. They think, well, reconcile all things, well, who have acknowledged the Christ, and who have been baptized and cleansed of their sin, but if you die in your sin, you’re going to go to hell.

No, it doesn’t say that anywhere. It says “reconcile all things to him, making peace by the blood of his cross through him, whether the things on earth or the things in the heavens.” So that is saying that the Christ becoming incarnate, dying, and resurrecting was a message and a means to draw all of the Powers, and even before us second-order Powers, to draw all things in the heavens toward him, which includes the fallen Demiurge. And if there are other fallen angels, as are obliquely referenced here and there—we keep hearing about these one-third of angels falling from heaven. I haven’t run across it in my reading. It’s not in the Tripartite Tractate. But if there were a third of the Aeons who fell to earth along with Logos, then they’re also going to be reconciled back into the Fullness. They’re not going to be kept in chains below the earth forever.

And then it carries on, verse 21, to say, “and you back then had been aliens and enemies in thought through wicked deeds, yet now he has affected reconciliation by a death in the body of his flesh to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.”

Verse 23 says, “if you indeed abide in the faith established and steadfast and not moved away from hope in the good tidings that you have heard proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, became a minister.”

So that does seem to reference that you’re only going to be made blameless and irreproachable if you abide in the faith. That’s what Paul says. And here’s the thing. We’ve discussed this before in the episode called Overcoming Death. Christ died for everyone, and everyone will wind up back in the Fullness of God. If everything that is alive didn’t return back into the Fullness of the ethereal space, then the God, the Son, would have been diminished by their absence, wouldn’t they? If we are their fruit and most of the fruit gets thrown away because it’s rotten, well, you have a much smaller harvest than you are entitled to, right? But the Christ took care of everybody through his power, not through ours. So it’s not our own works or our own blamelessness that earns us the right to go to heaven.

So skipping a few verses on to verse 26, it says, “The mystery that has been hidden from the ages and from the generations, but that has now been made manifest in his Holy Ones, by whom God wished to make known that the wealth of this mystery’s glory is among the Gentiles, [that is, amongst all of us non-Jews], which is the anointed within you, the hope of glory, whom we proclaim, warning every human being and teaching every human being in all wisdom, so that we may present every human being as perfected in the Anointed.”

Okay, now let’s break that down. So what’s the mystery that has been hidden from the ages? Generations means those things emanating from the Fullness, being generated out of the Fullness, and that is us. We are the generations, all of us, all of us second-order Powers.

It’s not just humans, it’s blades of grass and butterflies and dogs, okay? It’s every living thing that has now been made manifest in his Holy Ones, and his Holy Ones are the third order of Powers. That’s the body that is the Christ.

The Christ is not exactly the same as the Son. The Son is still sitting in the ethereal plane, plugged directly into the Father, and the Fullness of God dwells within the Son. Now, generating from the Fullness, we’re the second order of Powers. Life, creation, it all comes from the top. Life, love, consciousness is a top-down phenomenon. The mud, or the molecules, the particles, the atoms, that’s a bottom-up phenomenon. That is after the Fall.

The Fall is the break between the ethereal plane and this apparently material universe that we live in. The Holy Ones live above. They are holy, which means that they have the same characteristics as the Father and the Son, so they are untouched by sin. Therefore, they are not the generations down here that have been melded to the mud. We are not the Holy Ones. We are the fallen ones.

We actually were sent down. We weren’t fallen. We were purposely birthed down here, so we’re not illegitimate. However, once we became bonded to the material that’s bottom-up, that demiurgic material, then we become “wicked,” or we become sinful. Not because it’s inherent in our souls, because we are from the good thought. We are fractals of the Aeons. We’re fractals of the Fullness of God, and we all have within ourselves the remembrance of the Fullness of God. We all remember Paradise, and that is why it feels so wrong down here. It feels so disappointing when things go wrong, and when we disappoint ourselves, when we choose to reach for sinful things, when we choose to partake in evil, whatever that evil is, you know it.

That is the deviation, and that comes from the bottom-up, and it has to do with our material makeup. But from the top down, we are pure, but we’re not pure enough to be called the Holy Ones, okay? So these Holy Ones that are being referenced here, that is the preexistent church, the Totalities, the Aeons that have never fallen, and it’s also the body of the Christ, because the Christ is the Son, and all the Fullnesses, and the knowledge that Logos brought back with him of this material world of the Fall. The Christ purposely arose from all of it. So he is the Son, but with all of the subsequent history also piled into him, whereas the Son stays pure. The Son is undefiled. He has to be, because he’s the nature of the Father. But the Christ, he became flesh for us, you see, so he was defiled. He did know the great death, which is ignorance. “Oh Father, why hast thou deserted me?” he said, just before he died, because he was dying, and the eternal Son never dies.

So the Christ did die, but then he resurrected, and that’s what the true Christian message is. That’s the gospel. So the Holy Ones are the third order of Powers that are incorporated into the flesh of the Christ. It’s his pleroma. The first order of Powers is the original Fullness of God. That’s the Son. He’s the first order of power. We’re the second order of power. That’s pretty high up there. But then we are sent down, and we are plugged into this material world. The third order of power is the composite that is the Christ, that is the Son, the Fullness, all of the holiness of the Father, and all of the Fullness, all of the Aeons, their best version, they’re all together in the Christ, and that is his pleroma. And that actually came down physically into this material world with, as I call it, the correcting algorithm for this space.

It is not perfect down here. This is a fallen world. We are no longer perfect once we begin to practice wickedness because of this flesh that we have been bonded to. Our spirits are ethereal, but our flesh is bonded to the material of the Demiurge, and that is where all the struggles come in. Our struggles brought about by our flesh are the desires of this material body. It’s not our spirit, because our spirit is of the good thought, but the material body has all of these pulls and desires. Even our organs—they have their own struggles, their own karma. You know, we have pulls to overeat. We have pulls to smoke. We have pulls to take drugs. We have pulls to have unsanctioned sex. We have passions. The Tripartite Tractate says passions are a sickness, and passions—that’s your emotions when we boil up.

Boy, I myself am a very passionate person, I must say. Not in the realm of sex necessarily, but I’m very passionate in my emotions, so I can flare up at the drop of a hat, and that is where my struggle is, or my surrender is in the direction of that equanimity, is in that direction of patience and long-suffering. So we each have what is called our cross to bear, right? You’ve heard that expression. We each have our own particular challenges brought about by being incarnated in this material flesh. Well, the Christ, when he incarnated, he did not ever succumb to those passions, to that desire of the flesh. He was tempted by the Demiurge and by Satan, but he said, “no, I’m not going to do it. I’m fine the way I am, thank you very much. I prefer to walk with the Father, and I wish that everyone would walk with the Father. And look, here’s how you do it.”

That is the message that the Christ brought. So he brought us teaching, which is supposedly captured here in the New Testament, but a lot of it was taken out. But he also brought us that supernatural aspect, and that supernatural aspect is the resurrection from death into eternal life. And that’s where our hope lies. We know things are going to be better because we will return to the eternal realm, and we know the eternal realm deep down inside of us because we were born with what’s called the good thought, the remembrance of the Father. We remember the Fullness. We remember Paradise, and we expect to go back there. That is what all humans hope for. And I speak of humans because we’re the humans, right? We do all this thinking and wondering and worrying, but the grasses know it inherently. They’re not worried. The butterflies know it. The birds know it. The dogs know it. The cows know it. Everybody else but the humans has assurance of their return to the ethereal plane.

So this is just a passing. We’re passing through this life. The Christ that walked among us, who goes by the name of Jesus in our traditions, and he carried with him the entirety of the Fullness of God. So as we second-order Powers are fractals of various combinations of Aeons, we each have our own aeonic heritage, our own aeonic parents. We’ve got our human parents, mom and dad, two of them, but we also have an aeonic combination that is unique to each one of us, mostly the same but also unique. We have various talents and various personalities, various characteristics are made manifest in each one of us.

And the third order of Powers that came to earth along with the Christ, there’s a third order power for every one of us. All of the third order Powers are manifested in the Christ when he came to the material plane. He brought all the third order Powers to us. And it’s the third order Power that is our Christ that we recognize. And each of those third order of Powers has the ability because it is the highest ranking power in the heavens. That third order Power of Christ, the Holy Ones, can overcome any and every challenge that we second order Powers encounter. It’s the Christ. The third order Powers are like an overlay upon our second order soul, upon our own unique pattern, and it is the perfection of us. And that’s what is the advantage to accepting the coming of the Christ to this material plane, that you know that you are taken care of. It’s not just the worry about whether or not you’re going to heaven or what’s going to happen to you after you die. The third order Power, if you will allow it to come in, will take up residence inside this material flesh along with your second order Power. So it’s not just your second order Power that’s animating the body.

The third order Power comes in with the holiness of God and then says, oh look, you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to do that. It’s okay. We got it covered. And that gives you the power to walk away. And once you start walking away from those temptations of the flesh, you could call them, because now you have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the indwelling of the Christ, you are suddenly free from the bondage. You see all these words? These are very familiar words in Christianity, but they have a much deeper meaning when you understand the gnosis behind them. “The wealth of this mystery’s glory” is how Paul put it. It is a mystery. It is supernatural stuff we’re talking about, but we are supernatural beings.

So people that want to steadfastly remain happy materialists, well, it’s a lie, first off, because you’re not happy. Addicts aren’t happy with their addictions. Mean people aren’t happy being mean. There might be a surge of satisfaction, but that satisfaction is just part of the dominion. It’s part of dominating another. It’s part of a power play. And the power plays are all on the part of the Demiurge. They’re not God. They’re not good. The Christ does not come as a power play to steal your soul. The Christ comes in order to give you the reinforcement troops that will help you overcome the lies of the Demiurge and his Archons. I think everybody knows this. The Tripartite Tractate says everybody knows it, but we tend to forget because of the nature of the never-ending war.

And the never-ending war is against the Powers of the Demiurge. It’s against the Archons that are constantly confounding and confusing us, constantly trying to bring us down, messing with our technology, messing with our families, messing with our governments. They are trying to control us. They are trying to control you.

This gospel, especially this Gnostic gospel, is not trying to control you. And this is where many churches and many Christians have gone astray. It’s not a matter of us controlling, of us overpowering, because, once again, that is us trying to do it without the third-order Power. It’s a matter of stepping aside, of relinquishing the power, not in order to be overpowered, but rather once you stop trying to dominate, then your eyes are opened. Then you can see, ah, ah, oh, wow, oh, hey, this is good. Ah, this is good.

You know, I belong to many evangelical churches and churches that preach redemption and come forward and accept the Christ and you will be freed. That’s good. That’s not bad stuff. And the people that do come forward to accept the Christ do have these marvelous experiences. Of course, I myself have experienced it, and I’ve been around many, many, many people who do go forward and experience the freedom that is suddenly… you know, the pain, the grief, the struggle falls away the moment you allow the Christ to come in. And that’s what the born-again experience is all about. But I think then the church often, not all of them, but many churches then re-enslave that person. They’ve accepted the Christ. They are free from bondage now of the Demiurge, but then they enslave themselves to the law of the church, working the good deeds to get to heaven. And that isn’t right either. So we’re perched on this precipice. We’re perched on this tipping point between the sinful nature and the rule-bound, law-bound nature of many churches. And that is just as bad as being on the other side.

Neither side is going to hell. Everyone is going to heaven because we’re all from there, and we all must return. Not for our sakes. It’s for God’s sake. The Father has to remain full. It’s a set. It’s a formula. We were sent down out of this gigantic set into this other space. And if we don’t return back to the set, then it negates part of the formula. And you can’t reduce God. God is ever the same. So the formula must be restored. We must be returned to the Fullness of God. Do you see how that works? Do you see the logic of that?

Then Colossians goes on to give some very practical advice for how you can walk in a virtuous life. But we need to take it as good advice of how to be free here on earth. But it’s not good advice on how to be saved, because we are already saved. We were never lost. We may appear lost temporarily while we’re wandering around in the bondage of the Demiurge. We’re lost if we are pretending that materialism is the way to go and we don’t have an eternal soul. But you’re not really lost, because God knows where you are. The Christ knows exactly where you are. Because, let me try to explain this one last time for this week, and then I think we’ll pick this up again in Colossians next week, where I can give you the advice out of Colossians for how to be happy, how to walk a happy and more secure life.

The reason we are never lost is because this body that you’re walking around in and this Self that you think of as yourself, it is completely known and understood and covered by third order Powers. There’s a third order Power for every second order Power, and we are the second order Powers. So you do have an angel hovering right behind you all the time. You’re not lost. It knows right where you are, and it is the holiness of the Christ just hovering all around you. But it is not a domination power-tripping thing the way the Demiurge is or the way other people are. It is gentle. It is the gentleness of the Holy Spirit. That’s why it is likened to a dove, and it’s right there with you, and all you have to do is acknowledge it.

Just remember, well, what if it’s true? What if I do have third order Power right here, right now? What if the Christ really did come to earth and bring me my own personal third order of Powers to help me and make me strong and make me holy again, make me happy, make me joyful? Why would you want to push that away? Try it on. It can’t do you any harm. You know, I’m back to Pascal’s wager, which I talked about a few weeks ago. If there is no third order of Power, and yet you invite the third order of Power in, you invite the Christ to come in and help you, “help me please. I can’t do this on my own. I’m too disappointed. I’m too sad. I need your help. I’m sick and tired of the way the world is treating me and the way I am in the world.” If you say something along those lines, and you will really mean it, because usually people who do profess, who do want to be, quote, born again, if it’s sincere, then it will come in.

The third order of Power will come and overlay your second order Powers, just bringing them light and love, comfort and knowledge, just bringing you the gnosis that you have forgotten, and once you let it in, you’ll recognize it. You’ll be lighted up from within. And like I was saying, if it’s not true, as in Pascal’s wager, Pascal said, look, what have you got to lose? If it’s not true, then what have you got to lose? Big deal. You won’t know about it because you’ll be blinked out into nothingness like you thought you’d be all along, so you won’t be there. It won’t matter. But if you do ask the Christ to come in and redeem your life, you’ll be opening the door—that’s the key.  You’re born again. You have gnosis. You’re redeemed and you feel the redemption. You have the assurance of the ethereal plane. You come to know your aeonic parents. You come to know your purpose in life. You begin treating people with love. I think that is the true gospel message that has been lost.

So let’s pick this up again next week. We’ll learn some particularities of how to do this.

God bless us all. Onward and upward.

This book puts all of this gnosis together in a simplified form. Gnosis is as easy as you want it to be, or as complicated as you desire. This Simple Explanation will guide you through the often confusing terms and turns of gnostic thought and theology. The glossary alone is worth having on your bookshelf. Now available in paperback, hardback, and ebook/kindle.

Logos and Sophia

This episode begins and ends with samples from the audio version of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel narrated by Miguel Conner.

I’ve been listening to the recording of Miguel Conner reading A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and it’s beautiful. It is thrilling. You’re absolutely going to want a copy of this because you can listen to it while you’re doing other things. I’ve been monitoring it, listening for audio errors, and doing all of my household tasks and ironing and washing dishes and whatnot while I’m listening to A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. It’s really neat. Here’s a sample.

Chapter 2, The Emanation of the Son and the All. The purpose of this book is to help us all remember the Gnosis we were born with, the knowledge of where we come from, and the nature of the originating consciousness that existed before us. Gnosis also involves understanding our personal relationship to that originating consciousness.

Chapter 1 began by sharing information about the Father, which is the name given to the originating consciousness. Imagine that this Father then gives birth to an emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation philosophy, we call this emanation a fractal. We’ll look at fractals later in the book because they play a big part in creation. In the religious texts, they call this emanation the Sun. Now we have a Father and a Son.

In the silence of the Absolute, the Father brings forth the first and only Son. By knowing Himself in Himself, the Father bore Him without generation, so that He exists by the Father having Him as a thought. That is, His thought about Himself, His sensation of Himself, and of His eternal being.

The Son is not the generalized, diffuse, no-thought consciousness of the Father, but more 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. The Son is exactly the same consciousness as the Father, now realized as a particularity. The Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. Boundless because the Father’s greatness continues to flow unimpeded through the Son. The Father brought Him forth while He remained united with the One from whom He had gone forth, receiving glory together. 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 now expressed as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. We will also be looking at singularities, monads, and points of view in more depth later in the book.

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, and all the totalities arose at once. The All immediately appeared as aspects 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.

The Son embodies the Father’s creativity. The Father knows itself and creates the Son, and the Son knows itself as the body of the All. The Tripartite Tractate says,

“He was given them as delight and nourishment, joy and abundant illumination. And this is His compassion, the knowledge He provides, and His union with them. And this is He who is called, and who is the Son. He is the sum of the All, and they have understood who He is, and He is clothed.”

The word clothed means the Son wears the All like a garment the same way our Self wears our body. In the Tripartite Tractate, the All is known as the preexistent church.

This is not the same as your church down on the street corner with people singing hymns on Sunday, but rather this is called the true preexistent church. The Tripartite Tractate says, “For not only the Son, but also the church exists from the beginning. His offspring, the ones who are, are without number and limit, and at the same time indivisible.” This indicates that the Son and the church arose simultaneously. This makes sense when we consider the All is the body of the Son. They are infinite in scope and indivisible because they fully reflect the Father’s illimitable scope.

In last week’s episode, I began sharing an article I wrote in 2019, when I first began interpreting gnosticism through the lens of my theory of everything called “A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.” We’re picking up where I left off in that episode, so if you have not listened to it or read it yet, you may wish to begin there at last week’s episode. We’re talking about the fall of consciousness away from the purity of the ethereal realm as represented by our One Self, and spreading out into the myriad units of consciousness down here in the material universe.

According to Gnostic texts, our universe was created when one of the Aeons deviated from its place in the Fullness of God and headed out on its own without consent. Most books of the Nag Hammadi identify this Aeon as “Sophia,” while others identify it as the Aeon called “Logos.” My own interpretation of the Gnostic gospel, presented in The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated andA Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel identifies this Aeon with Logos. By the way, “Logos” in Greek means “the Word” or knowledge. “Sophia” in Greek means “wisdom,” so they are obviously related terms, possibly referring to the same Aeon.

The Gnostic gospels are religious books, and their rendition of these events carries implicit religious moral judgments. The Aeon who left to strike out on its own is said to have “Fallen,” which is typically considered a bad thing. This “Fall” is the original Fall referenced in the Bible, not the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden, although we may consider the Garden as another word for the Paradise dreamt by the Fullness, and a reference to the same Fall as that of the Aeon. In either event, Adam and Eve’s Fall is a fractal of the same archetypal concept. In my view, the Fall represents the rise of the Ego away from true Self, as this archetypal Aeon acted on its own presumptuous thought and motives, apart from the will of the Father and the Fullness.

Here is where we catch back up with the Simple Explanation cosmogony. The Simple Explanation characterizes the Fall as simply the Metaverse having a Thought:

Then consciousness had a thought. This multidimensional Metaverse still lacked space and time but it now quivered with limitless mathematical potential unfolding into countless dimensions. In a twinkling, our entire universe was imagined in the fullness of its complexity, from the tiniest quanta through the greatest astral body; every animal, vegetable, and mineral; every element. Every thing and every function.

Once the Metaverse had a particular thought, thought became an object in the great sea of no-thought… On this day that time began, consciousness wrapped itself around our universe, forming a border between us and infinity. Mind took on a shape.

In the Simple Explanation, this shape is a torus-shaped container composed of conscious thought and its concept of this universe, which I call the Universal Unit of Consciousness (Universal UC). In Gnostic terms, this universal  “border” was thrown around the Fallen Aeon to limit its influence and hold it away from the Fullness until such time as the Fallen can be redeemed and brought back into the Pleroma. The Universal Unit of Consciousness “sits” within the Metaverse and remains in communication with it, although in the case of the Demiurge it is not aware of it.

As I said, Gnostic texts differ in their identification of the Fallen Aeon as either Sophia or Logos, although they seem to agree the Fallen produced this universe and its ruler. Once the Aeon fell, its abilities and plans spread throughout the contained space and created our universe. It is said that the Fallen Aeon was horrified by what was created and it retreated to the Fullness to figure out how to rectify the result of the Fall. Within the Pleroma a plan was hatched to deal with it. 

Away from the Pleroma, contained within this newly formed space and time, a separated entity with all knowledge of this place became aware of itself. This entity thought it was the prime parent of the universe because it was not aware of the Pleroma or the Father and Son. This creator-god is called by Gnostics “the Demiurge.” The Old and New Testaments call it the creator-god “Yahweh.” One of the great heresies of Gnosticism is our identification of the creator-god as a product of the Fall rather than the “God above gods,” or the true “Father.” 

Because it is the result of the Fall and separated from both the Father and the Pleroma, the universe produced by the Demiurge is devoid of life. It is called the “Deficiency.” The Deficiency is populated by small, lifeless things–things that are “shadows” of those that live in the Fullness. It is also populated by forces and principalities that arose from and were left behind by the Fallen Aeon. The Simple Explanation, being science and math based rather than religious, does not identify this universe as Fallen in the negative sense of being deficient. It is merely limited by localized monads replacing the omnipresent Metaverse. 

Looking at the hierarchical diagram above, the Demiurge sits near the bottom, producing the minerals of our universe. As the Demiurge is contained away from the Father/Metaversal consciousness, it lacks the life force and love that characterize the Father. The Demiurge can only produce lifeless matter—what I call “mud.” The Demiurge is able to animate the mud by means of the forces and principalities contained within the Border. A good example of animated mud is viruses. Viruses are not alive, yet they are amazingly complex molecules that are able to carry out far-ranging search and destroy missions. It is also thought that the Demiurge produces lifeless entities out of pure force rather than material. These disembodied entities are called “archons.” Archons are the offspring and servants of the Demiurge. And, in Christian parlance, archons are known as “demons.”

At this point in the story, many Gnostic texts explain how the Demiurge mated with the life-force carried by Sophia to produce living creatures out of the mud. Again, this is a religious or mythological description of the process of bringing consciousness to matter. Sophia is given the title of the Mother of Creation, bringing life to the universe. Her mission was authorized; it was the plan cooked up by the Fullness to redeem creation from the Fall.

Earlier in my studies, the Simple Explanation identified Sophia as the Universal Unit of Consciousness, but we have since revised that identification from Sophia to the Demiurge, Sophia is not technically within the Universe but remains outside of it. Sophia resides on the outside of the fractal border that holds the universe apart from the Metaverse. As such, she is pressed up against the Metaverse and also part of the toroidal flow, and it is this flow that pushes the life-force and consciousness out through the zero-point field at the center of the universal torus. In Gnostic terms, Sophia rides upon the outside of the Border, which I identify as “the waters” of ancient texts. It is said that Sophia’s “face” “presses against the waters” and can be seen by the Demiurge, contained within the Border.

My later studies of gnosticism focus on the Tripartite Tractate, which leaves the myth of Sophia entirely out of the creation story. My brother, Bill, finds all of this talk of Sophia’s role in creation to be strictly mythological and inaccurate. Bill prefers leaving Sophia out of the story entirely as a distraction from the simplicity of the Tripartite Tractate. I resolve this difference as thinking of Sophia as the mechanism that brings the life of the Fullness into the inert material of the cosmos. The Tripartite refers to such a mechanism, but leaves off the mythology of Sophia’s “fall.” However, those of you who have studied other gnostic books that feature Sophia, may find the reference useful at this point in the cosmogeny.

Many ancient Gnostic texts say that Sophia mated with the Demiurge to produce the living creatures of our universe. Another way of saying this is that dead matter is imbued with life and consciousness at the point where it emerges from the zero-point field at the center of the Universal Unit of Consciousness. Every living thing has its life force attached to the “mud” of its body at the point of conception. It is the consciousness given by the Father through the actions of Sophia melding with the otherwise dead material produced by the Demiurge that brings life to our universe.

The Simple Explanation puts it this way:

As the torus of our universe expanded, over and over and over again, echoes of the Universal Unit of Consciousness attached themselves to the particles streaming out of the center, each Unit of Consciousness (UC) with a particular, localized, point of view.

This is how “mud” becomes “meat.” It is through this process of populating the universe with consciousness that the Fall and the Deficiency is made whole—that is the job of us Second Order Powers. After that, Christ and the Third Order Powers bring complete remembrance of the Father and redemption from the Fall as they gather us all up to go home.

Gnostics can use this fresh insight to figure out other aspects of Gnostic belief, such as the relative strength and power of entities created by the Demiurge versus entities imbued with the life force of the Fullness of God, that being the true Father and the God above the god of this material sphere. The Tripartite Tractate says the life forms of this universe are the Second Order Powers sent to do battle with the forces of the Deficiency. We have been assured that the power that is in us is greater than the power that is in the world. I hope this article and the hierarchical diagram helps you to realize this.

Hey, in case you’re new to the podcast, and if you haven’t heard yet, my latest book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, is available in all formats, paperback, hardback, and e-book on Amazon.com and through my website here at GnosticInsights.com. The audio version will be released soon. I’m still editing it. That’s taking longer than I expected it would take. But it’s really wonderful, even if you have a print edition of the book. This episode was kind of short, I think. So, here’s another preview to tack on at the back end here of the audio.

Chapter 14, Overcoming Death. As I explained in Chapter 10, the governing unit of consciousness that I think of as me is affected by my ongoing karma and its associated meme bundle, overlaid upon my aeonic personality. What then, if anything, do I carry away with me when my body passes away and I am no longer attached to this material vessel? What happens to us when we pass on? That the me that exists between material incarnations is nothing but our karmic record and egoic identity is proved by one of our basic propositions that all selves are fundamentally one and the same, and that all units of consciousness begin their individuated journey as perfect fractal echoes of the Fullness of God. It follows, then, that I develop as a result of free will choices made by myself and others.

The memes I think of as me are not part of my one Self, but are drawn to my unit of consciousness through my ego’s karmic record. It is my karmic record that attracts and repels the shrouds of memes surrounding my life at any moment. The personality associated with me is a representation of the holographic pattern of all the choices I have ever made, overlaid upon my unit of consciousness.

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 his or her meme shroud and can, therefore, perceive his or her perfect unit of consciousness, freed of personal memes and independent from its karmic shroud. 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 now discarded memes. If they do return to Earth, it is to help others by sharing love and information that will help redeem others.

This chapter of the book is not from the Tripartite Tractate, but rather from the Bardo Thodol, known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The full title of the Bardo Thodol can be translated as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State. The Bardo Thodol is part of a larger volume called The Profound Dharma of Self-Liberation Through the Intention of the Peaceful and Wrathful Ones.

You may wonder why we are talking about this book because you may not consider it to be a Gnostic text. I look at Gnosticism as the truth that comes from the Father above and spreads out universally. Gnostic wisdom doesn’t have to come through what are considered to be historically Gnostic sources. Many people look at Gnosticism as simply an historical sect and, because they think of it in historical terms, they only want to consider texts such as the Nag Hammadi Scriptures or the Qumran Scrolls. These are, indeed, the traditional Gnostic texts. This volume has already shared some of the Tao Te Ching, which is Chinese wisdom that also reflects the same universal truths presented by traditionally Gnostic scriptures.

This chapter takes a look at the Tibetan Book of the Dead in the same way to see what gnosis we can mine there. The Bardo Thodol presents truths that have come through the Father and the fullness by way of Tibetan Buddhism. However, one needn’t be a Tibetan Buddhist to appreciate the wisdom that has been shared through the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Blessings. Onward and upward!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights.

I have removed an early version of the Gnostic Gospel website that was called The New Gnostic Gospel. I’ve taken it down in order to focus more on the websites that I’m active on. So, I was going through all of the old articles yesterday before I removed that website, and I pulled out one here from 2019, which is a very early version of my combination of The Simple Explanation and the Gnostic Gospel. So, I thought I would share that with you today. The original article was named Our Universal Hierarchy, Diagrammed and Simply Explained in Gnostic terms, which is a bit of a laugh because if you go to the website GnosticInsights.com and actually look at the diagram, it is rather complicated.

It does appear in the book A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, so you can find it there, but today I’m going to explain this diagram in both Gnostic terms and in Simple Explanation terms. And when I refer to The Simple Explanation—that was my theory of everything that I came up with many years ago, and it still holds true. I have a blog that’s been up for many, many years called A Simple Explanation, and you can go there to read about that gnosis. There’s well over 300 articles on this theory of everything, and it’s science-based, perhaps strange science to be sure, however it is science-based, and many of the predictions I have made over the years based upon my Simple Explanation hypothesis, my theory of everything—they’ve all been coming true. It’s a wonderful thing for me to be able to witness scientific proofs that have come about since I made these hypothetical predictions. So, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, you can go to A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.

It’s often said that there is no single Gnostic text or philosophy. While it is true that there is much diversity in the texts of the Nag Hammadi over details, there is a certain set of core beliefs that various Gnostics should be able to agree upon, and the diagram that is taken from my Simple Explanation blog and book applies just as well to our Gnostic beliefs as it did to my original hypothesis. This diagram is triangular-shaped, and at the very bottom of the diagram, if you’re only listening to this as a podcast and you’re not reading the article, the very bottom of this triangular shape at the base of the pyramid, these are organized knots of information streaming in from the universal unit of consciousness, and then just above those knots are subatomic particles and waves, and then, you know, they reach out and hold hands and level up to atoms, molecules, minerals, and mineral aggregations, and those are the Demiurge’s reign of control. He’s the creator of the material forms, so organized forces working together to manifest our material universe.

That’s what the Demiurge is in charge of as the creator of this universe. But then there’s a big jump once the Logos and the Fullness begin sending down us second-order powers into that otherwise dead universe, and that big jump is life, and these are living units of consciousness that are streaming in from the universal unit of consciousness, and the very bottom level is proteins and your cellular precursors, the inside bits of cells. The soft and squishy parts is what I like to call it.

Down below is the mud, and up above, that’s the meat, and then those proteins and cellular precursors hold hands with each other and level up, and the next level is the organelles and the cells, and these hold hands and level up to become organs, and the organs are groups of units of consciousness working together as similar cells in a common purpose. So, heart cells hold hands with each other to create the heart, and all together they beat and drive our blood, etc. The organs hold hands and level up to organ systems. You know, there’s way more cells in our body than there are organs, and there are far more organs than there are organ systems. So, the organ systems, that’s like your circulatory system or your lymphatic system. They are combinations of particular organs that are distributed throughout the body, and they work to support the organism.

So, the organ systems are organ units of consciousness supporting an individual organism, and that individual organism, that’s the egoic level of ourselves. Remember, our One Self is all identical to one another, and that is the fractal of the Fullness of God, but our material organism, that middle squishy part, the cells, organs, and organ systems, at the organism level, they are all different, right? I’m different than you. I look different than you, and my body works slightly different than yours does, and so that is associated with our ego, because it’s particular to us. Our spiritual Self is all identical, but our egoic level, where the emotions reside and most of our bodily functions, that’s at the egoic level, and that is taking care of this body that we walk around in.

The organism is the leveled-up version of the organ system. See, these organ systems are all working together. The brain communicates with the heart, and the heart communicates with the skin. At the same level of organization, they communicate with one another, and so at the organism level, that’s our governing unit of consciousness. It’s the raja sitting on top of the elephant, if our elephant is the body, and the raja sitting on top directs the elephant to go this way or that. That’s called discriminating intelligence in yogic philosophy, and that’s our governing unit of consciousness. That’s what we identify with as ourselves at the egoic level. My governing unit of consciousness is the one that makes all the decisions, and decides when to go to the store, and when to take a nap, and when to play with the dog. That’s my governing discriminating intelligence.

Then our organisms also hold hands and level up to a societal level of functioning. Our most basic societal level is the family unit, and then the family units create the village level or the neighborhood level, small enough that they can be thought of as one unit leveled up.

I read a scientific study a few years ago that said we are really only able to keep track of about 250 other people at our level. In other words, the ideal size of our societal level is about 250 other people, because then we can actually communicate and know each one of them. When it gets larger than that, we really can’t keep track of everybody.

So at the societal level, those are organisms working together for the common good. With humans, we make these towns, and they’ve got rules, and they protect us, and we have police, and fire departments, and all of that. That’s our leveling up. If we were ants, the leveling up would be the job of all those worker ants that go out to pick up the little pieces and bring them back to the queen.

The societal levels also can hold hands and level up, and that is our global system. That is our transpersonal system that wraps around this earth. That’s Gaia. That’s all of the units of consciousness that live on the planet. And Gaia is the governing unit of consciousness for the global system. Or in Gnostic terms, we’d be jumping back up to the demiurgic level. We left the demiurges controlled down behind at the mud level, but the demiurge is also in charge of the large earthly level as well, controlling the weather, for example.

And then above the global level, well, we’re part of an astronomical unit. We’re part of this solar system, and the solar system is part of this galaxy, and this galaxy is part of this galactic portion of our universe. And see, those are the galactic forces at the cosmic scale. So people that are studying astrology are generally working with the galactic forces.

And then above the galactic forces, what’s larger than the galaxies? Well, that’s the universe itself. That’s the universal unit of consciousness. That’s what the Demiurge is in charge of as the creator of this universe. If we think of our universe as a gigantic torus, it’s shaped like a womb, and it holds the living forms, the second order of powers that come down into the universe.

And then above the universal unit of consciousness, now we’re getting out of our universe. We’re above and preceding the formation of the universe, or leveling up again all the way to outside of this universe. That is the originating consciousness, the Father, the Son, the One. So this is an example as we’ve leveled up, leveled up, leveled up from the organized knots and the subatomic particles all the way up through all the meat, and up through the societies, and up through the galactic forces. We’ve leveled all the way up to One.

So we started out with practically an infinite number of individual units, and they keep decreasing as they level up, because the higher, the fewer. More particles than atoms, more atoms than molecules, more cells than organs, more organs than organisms, you see, more people than societies. So it keeps leveling up, and every time you go up. And it levels up through, by the way, it levels up according to the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out, holding hands with other units of consciousness that are at your same level of differentiation.

In other words, the people hold hands with the people, the ants hold hands with the ants, the cells hold hands with other cells. Every time you hold hands and level up to create that next thing that only all of us together can do. One person can’t make a city. He has to join with the other people and level up to make the city. So every time you level up, it reduces the number of units of consciousness, of that governing unit of consciousness, of the next thing, until we actually even escape the universe and become one again, because there’s tons of things at the bottom, and fewer and fewer as you go up, until you reach one. That is a profound concept.

The higher, the fewer.

Now, that diagram that I just described to you was designed when I made the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. However, it works equally well as a Gnostic diagram that explains how our universe is put together.

So if you were previously familiar with the Simple Explanation, and lots of people were, it’s been up for like 15 or 20 years by now, and the book’s been out that long. So if you like what I’m saying to you today, you should get that original book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. On the other hand, if you’re a reader of the Nag Hammadi texts, you might find that the Simple Explanation is useful for sorting out our Gnostic cosmogony. And in my book, The Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, that’s what I did for us. It took about 300 pages, but I wove them all together, and I explained Gnosticism in terms of the Simple Explanation, because it works.

And just to remind you, to simplify something does not mean to dumb it down. There is a principle in science called elegance. Even Sherlock Holmes worked on this principle. The simplest explanation that explains everything is the correct explanation. When you start getting lost or in the weeds, and you have to pull in this and pull in that and run down all these different rabbit trails to explain something, it is not elegant. Simplicity and elegance are the simplest way to explain something. The most profound things are the simplest.

And one way I like to think of that in Gnostic terms is that all of the living creatures on Earth are second-order powers. The flowers come from heaven. The squirrels come from heaven. So gnosis can’t be so complex that they can’t figure it out. They do figure it all out at the most simple terms. They do understand that they come from above, and that they will return to above. And that is the core concept. That’s the simplest thing. That is gnosis.

And all of our other talk, and all of our other diagrams, and all the various books of—is it the Sethian system or the Valentinian system of Gnosticism? Is it Christianity? Is it Buddhism? Is it Hinduism? These are all attempts to explain it to people in ways that people can understand. But they are not necessary, because all we need to know is the Gnosis that underlies them, and that is that we are the children of God. We are the children of the God Above All Gods. And there is only one ultimate creator of consciousness, and that creator is called the Father. And it predates this creator God of this universe that we live in. We are returning to the Father.

We will return to the ethereal plane. However, we’re going through this earthly manifestation experiencing materialism. It’s different than the ethereal plane. It resembles the ethereal plane, but it is ”fallen.” It’s at a slower rate of vibration. It’s dense and thick and confusing. And so it’s very hard to remember Gnosis when we’re in this state. In Gnostic terms, as well as traditional Judaic and Christian terms, the Son is a piece of the Father. The Son contains the ALL. The Son contains all of the characteristics of the originating consciousness in a contained and discrete form. The Son is what we now call a perfect fractal of the entirety of the Father. The Son is like the bucket dipped into the limitless sea of consciousness, and it contains exactly the same ocean water of consciousness that the Father contains.

There’s only one bucket that dips into that limitless sea, and that is the Son. The Son is the only emanation from the originating Father. The Aeons are facets that emerge from the Son, each different from one another. The Aeons are like individual rays of the sun. Together, they form the totality of the Son. The Aeons sit together in perfect harmony in a state known as the Fullness of God, also called the Pleroma.

Now, this aspect of Judaism and Christianity was cut out of the canonical texts of the Bible by the Emperor Constantine and Pope Clement during the Nicene Council’s packaging of Christianity for the Empire of Rome. The Pleroma of the Aeons was well known to the Jews during the time of Jesus, and it survives in the New Testament as various references to Aeons, but those Aeons have been interpreted through the Latin as ages, and this has caused a long-standing misinterpretation of Aeons as units of time, rather than units of consciousness. It’s the same word, Aeon—like Judgment Day is considered the purging of the Aeons. That is always translated as the chastening of the ages, or chastening unto the age, but it really means the corrections of the Aeons—the corrections that these units of consciousness are able to transmit to our egoic souls once we pass out of this confusion of life down here.

This is an extremely important misinterpretation of the Bible, and in David Bentley Hart’s recent translation of the New Testament, which is published by Yale University Press, he doesn’t translate the New Testament from these Latin translations as all of our other popular translations are. Whether it’s the King James, New King James, New International, New Standard, any of these other popular translations of the New Testament, they all really derive still from the Latin Vulgate, so they carry forward these mistakes having been translated into Latin and now translated into English.

What David Bentley Hart did was he went back to the original Greek that the New Testament was written in, and he translates from the Greek in what he called a pitilessly exact way. And although Hart generally continues to call Aeons Ages, at least throughout his New Testament Hart points out in the footnotes that this word Ages, or time everlasting, can be translated as until the Age to come, with a capital A, and that always means aeonian, or from the Aeons. So I choose to reinterpret those or to try on the interpretation in those instances of the Aeons as units of consciousness rather than the age to come.

It is a capitalized word, it’s a special word, so it’s not just time everlasting. So it points out to you whenever the word Aeon was translated, and then at the back of his Bible there’s a big section in the postscript about Aeons. So they were in the New Testament, they were just taken out by the Latin translation during the time of the Nicene Council.

Another common misunderstanding in the Bible is the Fullness of God. Now that Fullness of God is a vague reference in the Bible to the size or capacity of the Father, which is basically true, but it’s stripped of its actual meaning as the aggregation of the Aeons. The Fullness of God is where the Aeons live.

All the Aeons are sitting together as the Son of God, because they’re His variations, that is the Fullness of God, the Aeons. And the word pleroma is often kicked around in Gnostic circles. Pleroma is another word for fullness or everything that exists. It is the place of the elect and the spiritual ones that are referenced in the New Testament, the pre-existent church. That’s the pleroma.

Well, I think I’ll pick this up again next week, because we’ve taken up a lot of time already here, because I’ve been adding extra notes. This was supposed to be covered in one episode, but it rarely works out that way, does it? So next week we’re going to pick it up from here. Now this is out of my original 2019 article called Our Universal Hierarchy. I saved it out of the website that I just took down. So this is the way we’re bringing it forward into Gnostic Insights. We’ll pick it up right here next week.

Meanwhile, it’s my birthday on the 21st of September, and that’s why I’m running that free Kindle promotion for five days, from September 20th to September 24th. So everybody gets a present. I hope you go and check it out. Even though I won’t make any royalties because it’s been given away for free, it does count as hits or sales, so it will help raise the Gnostic Gospel in the eyes of Kindle, and it will help promote it. So that would be useful for you to go and download it.

I have some other good news. I discovered yesterday that the narration by Miguel Conner of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel has been completed. It’s been sitting there in my OneDrive folder, and I didn’t know that. He sent me two emails telling me that the narration was complete, and here’s the link, but those emails never did arrive. To me, I interpret that as an indication that this narration, and indeed this entire book, is very important work that the demiurge doesn’t want to get out. I’m going to listen to that narration today and tomorrow, and then I will upload it to Amazon to make it available to everyone. Then we’ll have all forms of the book completed.

Thank you very much. Until next week, God bless us all, and onward and upward!