I don’t want it to be a bummer of an episode, but you know, it really seems like the world’s going to hell in a hand basket, as my grandmother would have said. It seems as though things are going downhill, certainly in our American culture, things turned around and went downhill extremely rapidly. Now, in hindsight, I can see it’s been happening for the last 30-40 years, but it never seemed like it was going to be a trajectory that would wind us up here. But here we are. There’s plenty of people talking about politics out there on the Internet, so I’m not going to talk politics per se, because, for one thing, whether you are a conservative or a progressive, or consider yourself to be a moderate, I want you all to hear this Gnostic Gospel that I’m teaching. So I don’t want to alienate and turn off anybody who gets offended by my political views, but this episode kind of goes into that, so hang on a bit.

I don’t need to tell you that the world is in turmoil. I don’t need to tell you that America is in turmoil right now, that America’s cities especially are in extreme distress. And this current political set of people has decided to usher in a new era of what it means to live in America. They’re trying to turn everything upside down and change it radically from what we’ve become accustomed to since the founding of the nation.

Now, I’m not sure what the motivation of the elites that run the show is. I suspect that they’re in it to enrich themselves and they really don’t care much about us people, about the citizens, the ordinary citizens. We really aren’t their first concern. Their first concern is power and money, and it really doesn’t even matter if they’re Democrats or Republicans. We know the people at the top, the men and women at the top, what are called the elite, are running the show in order to line their own pockets. They’re not running the show in order to make life better for us, they’re making life better for them and their families. So why? What’s going on? Who can we trust?

What is called progressivism now, which implies progress, doesn’t it? It implies a better future? Progress. Progressive. But it’s not really, sadly. Now for the ordinary voter, for the ordinary citizen who still believes in the progressive movement, it’s my belief that these people are being sold a bill of goods. Are being hoodwinked. They have good faith belief in the rhetoric that their elite leaders say, but somehow the promises made during campaigning for office rarely come to fruition. Never really trickle down to the ordinary citizen. Are you better off than you were four years ago? Are you better off than you were ten years ago? Are the cities safer? Are the homeless housed? Are the drug addicts taken care of and given a clean and better life? Has cancer been cured? Do immunizations really help? So without stepping on any of my listeners’ toes, I would say no, probably not. And that’s what I’m going to try to explain to you today.

It seems to me that part of the contract that we have with our government here in the United States is that we have freedom of thought. We have freedom of speech. Live and let live. You don’t have to agree with your neighbors. You don’t have to agree with the politics of your neighbors or the religion of your neighbors as long as they agree to leave you alone, and you agree to leave them alone. Live and let live—that’s always been my motto. Liberty above all. But now there is a deep culture of censorship and oppression that has been imposed upon us by the elites. And I think the ordinary citizen, as I started to say, when you think of progressivism, you’re thinking of what I call the Star Trek Universe, clean energy. No homelessness. Good nutritious food. Blue skies. It’s all beautiful. It’s all good.

But that’s not what’s coming about through the progressive platform that’s being imposed upon us, against our will. The reason I think that the progressives are hoping it’s going to work, they have a vision for the future of that Star Trek, blue sky universe. But what’s actually coming about? It’s more like the Mad Max universe. It’s more like the Terminator universe. It’s more a dystopian ruined cities, crime and control, corruption at the highest level universe. That’s what’s coming out. The leaders are saying we’re going to give you that beautiful Star Trek, everything is good, universe. But what’s coming out of their policies is actually the opposite. It’s darkness, oppression, conformity, lowering the bar rather than raising the bar. They don’t care. They don’t care about us.

So I’m not faulting the actual voters who keep putting these evil people into office because I think that your eye is on the prize. You are hoping for a better tomorrow. But I’m telling you, those people aren’t interested in a better tomorrow. They’re lining their own pockets. They’re interested in a better tomorrow for themselves. They don’t care about you now. Where then do these young progressives get their vision and their hope for a better tomorrow? They’re hoping that here and now on this physical earth, they can help to usher in an enlightened age. I’m sure that’s what you’re hoping for. But it’s not going to happen, because the people in control are not enlighted. And they’re greedy. The people that you put in charge really aren’t after the same goal that you are. And your goal, honestly, your goal is the Fullness of God. Your goal is returning to the Fullness and living in paradise, but you don’t realize it can only happen through the love that comes from Above. The love isn’t coming from the politicians. The love only comes from Above, so let’s take a look at this.

According to Gnostic thought, there is an eternal ethereal realm where all knowledge and all love resides. Our human consciousness, our human spirit, flows from Above. This material world that we live in, in Gnostic thought, is not the loving creation of that all loving, all knowledgeable God, but rather the result of a fall away from the ethereal plane. This material world we live in is a hardened, thick, and slow imitation of the ethereal plane. The Tripartite Tractate says that there was a creature up there, an Aeon, the best of the Aeons, named Logos, who fell from the ethereal plane, and it was the broken body, so to speak, of Logos that created our material world.

According to the Tripartite Tractate, Logos was horrified by what had happened, by what he had created down below. And it says that the best part of Logos fled back up to the Fullness of God leaving the broken bits down below. And that brokenness of Logos I’ve identified with its ego. See, all Aeons of the Fullness have an identical Self. That is a reflection of the Fullness of God. They are each a fractal of the Fullness of God, but they also have a particular position, duties and name, and their own powers, and that distinguishes them from the one Self that they all share. So in my translation of this kind of theology, I call their one Fullness that they all share their Self with the big S Self. And then their particularities is their ego. And we are fractals of those Aeons. So we have the same distinctions within ourselves.

We have the Self, so that is the sure knowledge of the presence of God, because we have the fractals of the Fullness of God, in our DNA. But we also have our ego, and our ego isn’t just a matter of pride or whatnot. Our ego is the part of us that interacts with the rest of the world. It’s our position and place and duties, et cetera. That’s our ego, just as Logos had his own ego. And it was the ego that was left behind down here to rule the material world, whereas the self of Logos fled back up to the Fullness.

This ego of the fallen Aeon is called the demiurge, and the demiurge is the architect and creator of this material world. But it is a forgetful God—it has amnesia. The demiurge does not remember the better part of Logos or the Self, or the Fullness, or the Father of consciousness because it fell and it’s cut off down here. It’s a blind God. That’s basic gnostic thought. So what’s left behind down here to rule our fallen world or cosmos, the whole universe down here, is a blind, ignorant fallen God who has no inherent love or knowledge. And that’s the fellow that’s in charge of this world—of this whole universe.

Now, this demiurge is able to make creations because he is of the Aeons and they all had these powers. So when Logos fell and left his ego down here below, that ego of the fallen demiurge, has bits and pieces of all the other Aeons. Except it’s only their egos. It’s none of their love and consciousness. It’s only their egoic consciousness. And what is an ego? It’s all about me. Me, me. It’s all self centered. So, this demiurge does not rule out of love and caring and compassion. This demiurge rules out of pride, self enhancement, recognition, power and control. Now that should resonate a bit to what I was saying in the introduction to this episode. That’s the way our rulers on this material plane rule. They use those powers of the demiurge to rise to the positions that they hold.

So here’s what it says in the Tripartite Tractate, and now I’m quoting out of part three of the tripartite tractate, beginning with verse 108.

“Whenever the two orders,” and one order, that’s the fallen and the other order, that’s the Fullness. So the Fullness is Above–love, knowledge, compassion, all of the virtuous aspects of God, that’s one order. The other order is this fallen world, which is based upon, created through, ego and taking care of myself, me, me, me, power control. “Whenever the two orders, those on the right,” and the gnostic gospel, funny enough, equates the right with Above, with the Fullness of God, and they equate the left with the fallen world and egoic self-centered behavior So right and left– “whenever the two orders, those on the right and those on the left are brought together by means of that thought which lies between them and gives them a common thought,” So the thought that lies between them is their remembrance of the Fullness of God. But because we’re fractals, so the humans have both left and right within them. We have a fractal of the Aeons, and we have a fractal of the fallen demiurge of the egoic Logo, “and gives them a common economy,” and an economy is a bounded space that causes things to work together. If we didn’t have a boundary, a bounded space, everybody would be rolling out into their own direction. There’d be nothing to bring us together. But we are formed to be within a community and economy. It might be a nation state, a state, a tribe, a family. Each one of those is an economy. “It comes to pass that both the left and right perform their works with the same zeal. Those on the right, copying those on the left and those on the left, also copying those on the right. Sometimes the evil order begins, in a foolish fashion, to work some evil and the wise order emulates it in the shape of a malefactor.” That’s a an evil person. “It, too, doing evil as if it were a power of evil. At other times the wise order sets out to do good and the foolish order emulates it so as to do the same.” So in other words, sometimes the Good ones act like bad ones and the. Bad ones act like good ones.

It goes on to say verse 109, “This is how it is with the things that are constituted in this way by such deeds: they have come into being resembling things that are dissimilar so that it has become impossible for the uninstructed to understand the cause of the things that exist. And because of that they have put forward different explanations. Some say that the existing things exist by Providence,” that is, by God, “These are the ones who observe the regularity of the movement of the creation and its reliability. Others say that it is something alien. These are the ones who observe the diversity and the lawlessness of the powers and its evil character. Others say again that the existing things are what are destined to be. These are the ones who have occupied themselves with this matter. Others yet again say it is in accordance with nature and still others say that it is accidental. The great majority, however, have only reached as far as the visible elements and know of nothing more than these.”

So, it is saying that if you are uninstructed in spiritual matters, then all you can discern of the world is what you observe and see because you do not have a sense of the ethereal presence of God or the ethereal Fullness Above from which we came. We are down here immersed in this material world and all we see is what we see. We don’t look beyond it. If you are uninstructed that we come from Above, then you can’t look Above what you see to figure anything better out. But this is what I was saying in my introduction—the spiritually uninstructed can only observe what they see on the earth and they think they can bring some semblance of beauty into the earth.

We all have a sense of the presence of God because we are all consciousness. The consciousness of the Father does flow down into creation below because we 2nd order powers have brought it in. When the best part of Logos fled back into the Fullness of Above he took with him the love and consciousness of the Fullness, leaving down below only brokenness, darkness, thickness, and egoic striving. So only brokenness, darkness, ignorance, and lack of love was left down here below with the demiurge. In order to bring love and consciousness into this universe. Logos, with the blessing of the Fullness and the Father, created us 2nd order powers. We are their fruit. We are the fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness. We are sent down into creation, all living things, everything that is meat and can move as opposed to inert minerals. We channel the love, consciousness, and remembrance of the Fullness of God along with us.

So we have a remembrance of the Father of consciousness. We do have a remembrance of paradise. We bring it down with us. It’s not coming from the fall. It’s coming from us, later on, when we living creatures began to populate the cosmos. And this, I think, is the remembrance of paradise that the people who are uninstructed in these matters think they’re going to usher in with their progressive agenda. But they’re not. They’re looking around at the fallen material world and thinking they can bring paradise to earth, but they can’t. Paradise is up Above. Our job as the 2nd order of powers is to bring consciousness and love to the cosmos. And then we are to return back home Above. Most people who are uninstructed, as this verse was saying, don’t remember that part.

And this is what my mission is. I’m trying to instruct my listening audience here to this podcast, that this stuff doesn’t happen down below. This is a fallen broken world. We’re supposed to be channeling love and consciousness out into this broken, fallen world and helping others to remember the Fullness of God. Now, we do a very poor job of that. We get caught in, as it was saying as I was reading to you out of the Tripartite Tractate a little bit ago, sometimes good people act like bad people and sometimes bad people act like good people. We’re caught in this never ending war with each other and with the material fallen plane. That is why we have death. That is why bad things happen to good people, because this world is essentially evil. But we bring the love and compassion of the Father down to it through our manifestation down here below. That is a basic gnostic gospel. We do a very poor job of actually doing that. I wish it weren’t so. I wish I were more Christlike, and that’s what the purpose of the Christ is. The Christ is actually the manifestation of 3rd order powers. We’re second order powers. The 1st order powers were the Aeons. The fallen demiurge and his minions of archons—they are not first order or second, they’re simply the powers. The 3rd order of powers is the Christ, and the Christ is brought with the full compassion, forgiveness, and love to remind us second order powers of our mission here on Earth and then to help us go home. Because you know, it’s not by works, but by grace. It’s by faith in the Father and the love of the Fullness, and the Christ that we are able to escape the boundary of this material world and return home. Home.

And that’s why it’s so important to be instructed in faith in Christ. It’s Christ’s job to redeem us. It’s not our job to redeem us. Our job was simply to bring love and consciousness to the fallen world. It’s not to redeem the fallen world. We don’t have that power. We keep getting caught in the never ending war instead.

Let me know what you think of this episode. Does it raise questions in your mind? Is there anything you’d like me to address? Let me know how it’s sitting with you. I look forward to your comments. If you would like to correspond with me, you can go to the gnosticinsights.com website, go to Contact Me, and send me an e-mail that way, and I will e-mail you back. Take care. Remember, the Father loves us. The Christ is here to help. The politicians, not so much. God bless us all and onward and upward.

What is gnosis? There’s a lot of Gnosticism out there on the Internet, isn’t there? And this gnosis that I am sharing with you is quite different from most of that Gnosticism that’s out there. Before 1945 and 1947, when the Nag Hammadi and the Qumran scriptures were discovered and dug up out of the deserts or pulled out of caves where they were hidden, the only Gnosticism they were familiar with was that which had survived the Great Purge brought about by the early Catholic Church and the Nicene Council. They were purposely stripping the Gnostic out of what has become our New Testament of the Bible, and we can wonder why.

I think it’s because actual gnosis puts people in contact with the Christ personally, with the Son and the Fullness personally, with the Father on a personal basis, the way that the Protestant Reformation brought a similar change to Catholicism. Because before and currently in the Catholic teachings, you’re only basically allowed to access knowledge of God through the interpretations of the church, and you accept their interpretations. The Pope is supposedly the infallible word of God, and your priests are the representatives of that official line of theology. So when Martin Luther reformed that way of thinking to say no, we can read the New Testament ourselves and come up with our own interpretation—well, that really opens up a can of worms, doesn’t it? Because if we’re each allowed to have our own personal interpretation of holy books, then our interpretations might be as varied as there are people, because all of us have our own opinions.

I mean, just look at our own opinions on something as innocuous as the foods we decide to eat. Have you ever looked around you and noticed how everybody you know now has a different diet? Some people are protein only, and some people are vegetables only, and some people are fruit only. Some people believe in all things in moderation and eat just a little. Some people are organic only, and some people are junk food only. When I had a bed and breakfast for a number of years, I learned this lesson very quickly because it’s funny when you lay out a table, a meal, for 10 or 12 people on a daily basis, year in and year out, you see how those 10 or 12 people all have particular and peculiar personal diets. I once had a table where one person let me know they only ate egg whites. They only wanted egg whites in their omelets and another person actually at the same table only ate yolks and wouldn’t eat the egg whites. And that was funny too, because who only eats yolks? But it was compatible when they were both sitting at the table. Right. It’s like that old saying: Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean. And so between the two of them, they licked the platter clean. So it’s like that with food. And it’s like that with our interpretation of scripture.

What is a mystic? Mysticism is the thought that we can directly perceive and commune with supernatural or ethereal forces–that it takes mysticism to get past our ordinary way of seeing things and get into that ethereal realm. When Martin Luther ripped the New Testament back out of the clutches of the Catholic Church and put it back into the hands of every person, he opened up this idea that we can read the Scripture and understand what it means to us.

Now the Protestant churches, and I’ve been to many Protestant churches–I didn’t grow up in the church because my parents weren’t exactly religious people, but I had my own personal relationship with Jesus ever since I was about four or five years old. And so I came up under the tutelage of Jesus personally, as opposed to what the church was teaching me. You know, some Bibles have what are called Red Letter editions? They have the words of Jesus written in red. So for many years I only read the red letters because I wanted to know what Jesus had to say about it.

Anyway, getting back to the original topic, before the Nag Hammadi and the Qumran scripts were dug out of the desert in the 1940s and then translated for us out of the original Coptic Greek, all that we knew of Gnostic belief was written by the people that hated the Gnostics, and those people are called heresiologists. Those who study (ology) means the study of heresies. And heresies mean unorthodox belief. So a heresiologist is one who studies unorthodox beliefs. And the Catholic heresiologists were the only ones who had ever seen the scriptures and then translated them for the ordinary believer, saying, that is wrong, and now the church teaches this, but that said that and so it was wrong. So everything they ever said about the Gnostic scriptures was about how bad and terrible they were.

When I was coming up, when I was a young Christian, I used to believe that line of thinking. I used to think, OK, the Nicene Creed is the truth and we have to believe everything that the Nicene Creed proposes. But, anyway, I believed in the veracity (that means the truth) of the Nicene Creed and the way the Protestant churches have formulated the New Testament now. So they’re no longer under the clutches of the Pope, yet each denomination has its particular emphasis, otherwise they wouldn’t be separate denominations. They’d all just be the Protestants, and there’d be a Protestant church, and it would be one church. But since every founder of these different flavors of Protestantism had their own take on what the New Testament said, they formed their own denominations. And a Protestant denomination is like, oh, the Baptists is one denomination, and the Presbyterians another, et cetera–those are denominations.

But let me get back to this idea that I began with of what is gnosis. See, the purpose of studying the scriptures, the purpose of studying the New Testament, the purpose of going to church, the purpose of reading the Nag Hammadi books, or the books of the Qumran, or of listening to so-called Gnostic podcasts, is to learn about the ethereal realm–is to learn the will of the God. Is to learn who the Father is, and what the Father’s will for us is. What is our purpose here on Earth? Why are we alive? What the heck is going on down here? And what does God have to do with it? What does the church have to do with it?

So I’ve noticed, and I think that probably most of you have noticed, there’s a worldwide push back against Christianity going on right now, and against Judaism. There is a worldwide pushback against the notion of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Christ. But these people that are pushing back against the faith, they don’t know their scriptures, they don’t know the Father. Generally they are atheists or, at best, calling themselves agnostic. And they think we’d be a lot better off just throwing it all away. Get people away from that horrible, restricting authoritative body called the church and these ridiculous moral precepts from 2000 years ago and further back that only restrict our freedom, our personal will. That’s all screwed up. I can tell you that that’s not right  thinking because it comes from ignorance.

Right thinking comes from knowledge and truth. We would even say right thinking comes from gnosis. And it is a precept all along throughout various religions and various holy books that you can only know the will of God by sitting quietly and praying and meditating and contemplating our relationship or your relationship with the ethereal. It doesn’t come—it cannot come—from looking all around us at popular culture and at politics and at social media and at television and movies and university courses. That isn’t where truth comes from. That’s where entertainment comes from. That’s where distractions come from. That’s where time killers come from. And a heck of a lot of bad thinking comes from that side. So if you are taking your opinions about the ethereal plane from popular culture, you won’t find it. You’re not gonna find gnosis in popular culture. I’ve noticed television shows, particularly on the streaming platforms, that have some kind of a religious tinge to them, some kind of a mystical overlay. If they’re about devils or they’re about angels, or they’re about priests, they aren’t coming from the ethereal plane, these written episodes that that we’re soaking in now. And so the theology from these is all screwy. The theology is all wrong. It’s amusing. It’s entertaining, perhaps, or maddening, if it makes you angry. But it’s not gnosis.

Here’s the reason: gnosis comes from above. Gnosis doesn’t come from below, and it doesn’t come laterally. I don’t think you can find the truth of the ethereal plane by looking around at other people. You may be able to find it through nature because nature is a reflection of the Fullness, but that sitting with nature as a reflection of the Fullness then takes you up—causes you to look upward. You know the trees and flowers all reach up, don’t they? They’re reaching to the Father. So if you are sitting in the forest and you are gaining inspiration, you are naturally going to be uplifted. You’re not going to sit in the forest being inspired by the Fullness and paradise that is reflected in the beautiful forest and get angry and get hateful and want to go out and kill people or conquer people. That would not be something that comes from above; that is a lateral or downward look. Is this making sense to you? Are you following what I’m saying?

So here’s the big point. The huge nugget that I started my thought out with this morning is this: If it is a given, such as it always says in the Gnostic scriptures and in the Christian and Judaic scriptures, the God Above All Gods wants to be known. That God is love. And God wants to be known. He wants us to know that he’s there. He wants us to know that we come from him. That’s the baseline of gnosis. Pardon me for using the word he. That’s generally what we say about the Father or the God Above All Gods. It shouldn’t stop you from coming to the Father. And I’ve explained this in other episodes that the only reason we use a masculine designation for the Father is because it’s an outward movement of love and knowledge. It’s a direction of the flow of the Father is outward—Yang—male, and that we come from that outward movement from the Father. If the Father is the ocean of consciousness, the ground state of consciousness itself, then it flows outward and down into these ever narrowing channels. These fractal channels down through the Son, down through the Totalities of the Son down through the Aeons of the Totalities, down from the Aeons to us, and we’re called 2nd Order powers. The ones in the ethereal plane are called 1st Order powers. We’re 2nd Order powers down here in this material world. It’s a downward flow, always from the top down, because the Father wants to be known. We weren’t just thrown up like a cat’s hairball down here and abandoned.

If you feel lost and you have no grounding and you feel abandoned, and all is darkness and blackness and there is no hope, then you’re looking in the wrong place for it. You have to look up because up is the direction from which comes love, belonging, communion, hope, safety, home, our inheritance. It all comes from above. We’re like these special creatures that come from above and we are inhabiting this material plane and we are going to go back.

And so what do we need to know? What is the gnosis that the Father would like us to know in order to feel peace, hope, love, security? How do you get to feel those things? Well, it has to be something that’s accessible to every creature on the planet—everything who’s alive on the planet, and so this includes the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees. It includes the bacteria, our friendly bacteria that inhabit our guts and keep us alive and healthy. We’re all 2nd Order powers from the pleroma of the Fullness of God’s self.

If God intended for you to have to read obscure 2000 year old manuscripts and memorize charts and memorize the names of Aeons and memorize all of these formulas and memorize the mathematical applications of astrology and so forth—well, how is that even possible? Does that make any sense at all? Who’s going to do that? How many people can do that? And that seems to me from what I observed to be the general state of Gnosticism that’s being promoted today in this world, when you look at Gnostic programs and read Gnostic books, they’re so labyrinthian, which means they’re a labyrinth, like a maze. You have to go here. Oh, no, that wasn’t it. Now you have to go there. Oh, no, that’s not it. Now I have to go here. Always looking, looking, looking, seeking, seeking, trying to find the truth. Well, that isn’t the way you find truth. You find the truth by sitting quietly and turning your attention upward to the God Above All Gods.

Or if that is too far away and too obscure, I recommend you turn your attention upward, to the Christ, because the Christ was conceived by the ethereal realm in order to help us 2nd Order powers go back home. The Christ is like our passbook. The Christ is perfectly structured and conceived and formulated to save everything down here below, and it even says that in the New Testament, it’s just that the Protestants and Catholics, they don’t believe it. They think most everyone else is going to hell and it appears as though many Gnostics today think everybody’s going to hell except for those few people who have stumbled upon some kind of magic formula to take them upward. Well, if it takes them upward, what then? Are they going to go up there all by themselves along with only a handful, the remnant, the elect? Very few thousands of souls are ever going to find Paradise, or ever going to go and reunite with the Fullness that way.

I don’t think that’s the way it goes. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think everyone is going to come back home because if we don’t all go back home, the Fullness won’t be the Fullness anymore. It will be the Partial. Do you see what I mean? If we are the fruit of the Fullness and we are promised to return to the Fullness, the Fullness won’t be full until we all come back home. The God Above All Gods will have lost pieces of himself down to “hell.” Forever and ever, according to religious people. Well, if that’s going to happen to most people, then what’s going to happen to the flowers? How are they going to learn about heaven? What’s going to happen to the birds—how are they going to study the books? See, everybody’s going back up. All 2nd Order powers are rolling back up out of the material plane  and going back up to the ethereal plane at the end of time, whenever that is going to be. And we get there by realizing our gnosis, accepting the salvation and redemption of the Aeon that was sent to save us and bring us home, that being Christ. Everybody’s going back home.

You know, it’s like we’re on a bus. It’s like we’re on a big school bus. The person waiting for us at the bus stop to help us off the bus, take our hand and walk us home—that’s Christ. That’s the job of the Christ and everyone recognizes the Christ, but not the people that are looking for him down here on Earth. And that’s why they hate the whole notion of there being a Christ or being an ethereal plane, or there being a God Above All Gods, I guess. They don’t want to look up. So are those people going to hell? No, because they’re also 2nd order powers. They’re also going to go back home, but they’re going to suffer first, and that’s of their own choosing.

Right now you don’t have to suffer. You don’t have to reject Christ. You just have to sit and turn your eyes upward. On this point, as it says in the letter to the Colossians out of the New Testament, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling and through him to reconcile all things to him.” All things, may I point out, “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. And you, back then, had been aliens in enemies and 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.” (Colossians 1:19-20; Hart’s New Testament).

Now Paul does add a little catch phrase at the end here. A little codicil. Paul is the guy who wrote this or is preaching this. He 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…” (Col 1:23). Now, the Christians generally think that that last sentence, if you abide in faith and are not moved away, means that if you don’t abide in faith and you are moved away, that you will not make it into heaven. But that isn’t what it says here. It says it’s “proclaimed to every creature under heaven,” and that includes all those living 2nd order powers, as I was saying. Because it said he reconciled “all things to him, making peace by the blood of his cross.”

So he said he reconciled all things to him, not just the good guys, not just the ones who died after having first proclaimed the glory of God. No, all things to him. And we’ve covered this in previous episodes that if you don’t accept the redemption of Christ now, it just means that you’re going to suffer hopelessness and despair, and then you’re going to die in hopelessness and despair. But Christ reconciled all things to him through his death. Therefore, you will be ultimately saved.

And then in chapter two of the letter to Colossians, it says in verse 13, “And, while you were dead in trespasses and in your foreskin of flesh,” because they talk about a lot of these things in terms of circumcision and foreskin, which is simply a metaphor for being tied to material versus having the material stripped away so that you are ethereal. So “while you were dead in trespasses and in your foreskin of flesh, 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, he exposed them in the open, leading them prisoner along with him in a triumphal procession” (Hart’s New Testament). So therefore, he’s saying while you were yet dead in your sin, he forgave all of your trespasses. He forgave all of your sins. It doesn’t say after you accepted him, he forgave all your trespasses. He says, “While you were dead in your sin, he forgave all your trespasses and nailed them to the cross,” along with his own dying flesh (Colossians 2:13-14).

OK, so I just wanted you to hear that it is biblical to believe in what we’re calling universal salvation because Christ had conquest not only against sin, but against the Archons and Powers of evil. And they’re all going to be exposed. The light is shining on them now. Back in the letter to the Romans, in Chapter 5, it says, “The Anointed, indeed, while we were yet weak, died in due season on behalf of the impious” (Romans 5:6; Hart). So once again, Christ didn’t die on behalf of the elect. He died on behalf of sinners, on behalf of people that are lost—not only lost but living in sin, no matter what your sin is.

Verse eight goes on to say, “But God shows his own love to us in that while we were yet sinners, the Anointed died on our behalf.” And in verse 12 it says, “Therefore, just as sin entered into the cosmos through one man,” (and I would say that isn’t really the man Adam, but is actually the Aeon, the fallen Aeon Logos. That’s how sin entered into the cosmos and death.) and death through sin, so also death pervaded all humanity, whereupon all have sinned.” Then in verse 18 it says, “So, then, just as by one transgression unto condemnation for all human beings, so also by one act of righteousness unto rectification of life for all human beings, for all human beings.”

I’ll try to explain more of these theological terms and Bible-speak in future episodes. In the footnote to this verse in Hart’s translation of the New Testament, he says that here and in the surrounding verses, “just as the first sin brought condemnation and death to absolutely every one, so Christ’s act of righteousness brings righteousness and life to absolutely everyone. Whether intentional or not, the plain meaning of the verse is that of universal condemnation, annulled by universal salvation.”

And that’s a really beautiful thing. That is a glorious thing because it is through the power of Christ that we’re all saved.

During the lost months of the 2020 shutdown, I spent much of my time watching the History Channel series “Ancient Aliens.” I began with a skeptical mind, but was soon persuaded by the variety of evidence presented. Many years earlier I had read Erich von Danikens’ Chariots of the Gods, so I had the basic outline of ancient alien theory already in my head. I had also read Whitley Streiber’s Communion when it came out, so I felt I had a passing familiarity with the concept of alien abductions. But the evidence presented on “Ancient Aliens” goes far beyond those early revelations. By this point in time, only a dedicated naysayer could remain completely skeptical.

Here’s the ancient aliens theory: that a variety of aliens from off-planet have been visiting our earth for thousands, if not millions, of years. That the stories told around the world by ancient human cultures of gods descending from the sky and living among them are true histories and not mere fables. That ancient aliens have given knowledge to humanity, particularly technological knowledge, to assist in the progress of human culture. That ancient aliens may have edited our DNA to make us into the modern human form we see today, and that they are possibly continuing to edit our DNA by means of alien abductions.  Moreover, it is even suggested that our entire ecosystem may have been seeded by aliens from the get-go, including the placement of our moon to stabilize earth’s axis and to create tidal motion.

I persuaded my brother, Bill, to watch the program with me, and so it is that we have watched and discussed every episode of their 15-season run that has been rebroadcast over the past couple of years, some more than once. Yes, many of the stories presented in the series overlap, and most of the evidence shows up time and again with the same commentary attached, yet my brother and I have found the repetition helpful in our effort to discern the truth of various aspects of the ancient aliens claim.

Bill and I are nothing if not open-minded, yet we anchor our gullibility with an unusually well-developed sense of logic and critical thinking. As you know, both of us are PhDs with specialties in Philosophy and Rhetoric, and we have both taught critical thinking and logic at universities. So do not come away with the idea that we uncritically bought every claim hook, line, and sinker. 

We have paid special attention to the question continually raised by the ancient aliens theorists—were these “gods” of the pre-flood era merely misinterpreted alien visitors with alien tech? Are the “fallen angels” of the Book Enoch angels from God, or were they actually ancient astronauts who moved to earth and occasionally married human women? It is said that the worldwide flood was sent by God to wipe out the angel-human offspring known as Nephilim. What were the Nephilim and what God would have wiped out the entire earth and everyone on it to kill them off, and how is it that some humans were spared by warnings from “angels”?

As observed by the program’s resident theorists, these types of stories can be taken as fables or as true histories and, if histories, are these actually the Biblical God, angels, and the gods of ancient cultures, or are they actually advanced, off-planet aliens who are apparently engaged in disagreements over human destiny, with sometimes catastrophic consequences?  These are the questions that have occupied much discussion between Bill and me over the past couple of years, and they have run on a parallel track to our Gnostic Theology pursuits as we untangle the differences and origins of archons, aeons, angels, and fallen angels, and the difference between the God Above All Gods and the God of this world. I am happy to announce that we have turned a rhetorical corner and landed upon some sound hypotheses at last. Perhaps you can use our analysis the next time you consider the role of extra-terrestrials in our world.

I realize that the following memes I’m going to share with you may sound new and strange unless you have previously studied gnostic cosmology. If you are new to Gnostic Insights, I encourage you to go to the GnosticInsights.com website and open the menu tab called “The Gnostic Gospel Primer.” There you will find a Valentinian Gnostic cosmology based upon the Tripartite Tractate book of the Nag Hammadi library. These initial eight episodes lay out in a clear and understandable way the basic cosmology of our universe and the origins of all things. The story is not difficult to understand, but it helps to listen to it from the beginning and go in order. There you will find episodes describing the God Above All Gods, as well as entities known as Aeons which dwell in a space called the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma. Aeons, by virtue of the fact that they dwell in the Pleroma, are by definition a type of ET.

This ancient well in Sardinia, Italy, the Santa Christina well, is said to represent the “keyhole shape” found throughout the ancient world. To me, it looks like the Pleroma.

Ancient alien theorists speak of ETs directing evolution to create our intelligent hominid species. Ancient alien theorists call into question the mainstream theory of evolution. They rightly point out that this planet of ours has not been around long enough for evolution to have spontaneously bumbled upon our exquisite design. They even call into question the premise that life on earth evolved randomly from a primordial soup into ever-increasing complexity and function. “Pan-spermia” has been proposed as a method by which primitive alien life forms hitchhiked their way across the heavens on asteroids to seed our oceans. According to ancient alien theorists, ETs probably interfered throughout ancient history to promote life on earth, including many interventions in protohumans to direct our upward evolution.

I tend to agree with much of what they say about the impossibility of Darwinian evolution to achieve our current biosphere. I invite you to listen to the Gnostic Insights podcast called “Evolution and Conscious Aeonic Design,” which you can find at the Gnostic Insights.com website menu under the tab “Complete Episodes Library.”  In that episode I call into question Darwinian evolution in favor of the same sort of planned evolution promoted by the ancient alien theorists. But where they identify “ETs” as the source, I identify those ETs as Aeons of the Fullness directing evolution.

Episode Four of the Gnostic Insights Primer describes these Aeons that came before this universe. The Aeons populate the Fullness of God in the Pleroma, and they consist of names, places, personalities, powers, and forces, all arranged in a hierarchy, each of them representing a quality of God that would come to realization in this cosmos in which we dwell. It is through their intervention in our universe that evolution occurs to bring about their vision of our material cosmos.  Simply ascribing evolution to the intervention of flesh and blood ETs merely pushes back the same ontological problems of random evolution—order cannot arise spontaneously out of disorder. 52 card pickup never finds the cards stacked in suits, and endless games of 52 card pickup over billions of years simply cannot achieve endless results of order from chaos. The physics of entropy always wins out. No matter how many times you toss the components of life up into the air, they never assemble themselves into complex working structures on the way down.

What is true for physical evolution is also true of technological innovation. Ancient alien theorists point out that our most important technological innovations are often discovered simultaneously by multiple inventors worldwide. Whether it’s old tech such as language, medicine, metallurgy, and architecture, or new tech such as radio, relativity theory, and the telephone, these inventions appear without evolutionary precedent, arriving fully formed to multiple people, often through dreams and visions. The ancient alien theorists ascribe these technological innovations to ETs guiding our development, either through physical manifestation as the benevolent gods of ancient earth cultures, or nowadays through the transpersonal field or Askashic record. They suggest the Akashic record is a pre-scripted, computer-type code, existing in a transdimensional space, that humans are programmed to access as needed.

Ancient alien theorist include our DNA as a form of proof of non-evolutionary technological leaps, as our modern human form does not appear to have evolved from more primitive versions. Yes, there were numerous protohumans, but they all mysteriously disappeared by the end of the last ice age, or the time of the great flood.

I agree that there is a transpersonal field, which is the repository of our collective memes—all that were, are, and will be. But I ascribe this transpersonal field to the divine dimension of the mind of the Universal Unit of Consciousness as described in my Simple Explanation blog and book. And I would agree that we are triggered to access this field as needed. It happens all the time in our daily lives for all sorts of information. Same thing holds true for inventors who see a need and whose contemplation leads them into the field for solutions.

The ancient alien theorists suggest that it is our familiarity with the field that is leading us in the trans-human direction of hooking our human brains up to a computer-mediated “cloud” so we can access information on demand and even download our complete consciousness, thereby achieving non-material immortality. Here I strongly disagree. I would say that the force behind such a drive for incorporeal immortality has two motivations. One motivation is our innate spiritual connectivity to the Fullness of God, the Son, and the Father, which promises the continuation of our immortal souls after death. The other motivation is from the other side of the coin—that of the archonic desire to achieve god-like status, including omniscience and immortality, without the benefit of God’s will and blessing. In other words, it’s replay of the presumptuous thought that brought about the Fall of Logos. It seems clear to me that our tech billionaires who are leading the way with transhumanism and space exploration are themselves personally playing out the Fall of Logos in their attempt to play God.

Again, if you have not listened to the Gnostic Insights Primer episodes, you will find a full episode devoted to the Fall of Logos and its cosmic consequences. You will find these episodes at the Gnostic Insights.com website under the menu tab labeled “The Gnostic Gospel Primer.”

Ancient alien theorists suggest that ancient astronauts developed our planet in order to create a sentient species fit to house the Ba, or soul, as described by ancient Egyptians. They theorize that ETs created humans to be vessels for souls, which implies that without their intervention, creatures do not have souls. Of all the theories proposed, this one strikes me as completely off-base. I would say that all creatures have souls. According to Gnostic cosmology, all creatures are the fruit of the Aeons. The Aeons sent their fruit into creation in order to populate creation with the Fullness of God. This fruit is called the Second Order of Powers, and we are all Second Order Powers, from bacteria on up to humans and beyond. If the universe is indeed populated by extra terrestrial life forms, then these, too, would be Second Order Powers because all life forms are. And all of us Second Order Powers possess souls.

There is, however, one type of entity in the universe that does not possess a soul, because these entities are not creatures from the Fullness of God. These entities are called archons. Archons are the inverted shadows of Aeons. Archons are incorporeal waves of entropy that emanate from the Demiurge. Archons are not “fallen angels” because they never were angels. We know these archons as demonic forces that frustrate and bedevil us in order to feed off of our negative energy. The world’s bad habits and cruelty are shepherded by archons. They are the forces the Second Order Powers were sent to do battle with in a never-ending war for dominion of the cosmos. For more on this topic, listen to Episode Five of The Gnostic Gospel Primer called “The Deficiency and Boundary.”  

Knowing what we know about archons, we can identify the non-physical entity known as Satan as an archon. Satan is also called The Accuser, and he is the source of temptation and illness, and the head of an army of demons or archons. Traditional theology identifies Satan as a fallen angel who rebelled against God because God elevated humans above angels. I would reinterpret this myth in a Gnostic way by saying that the God against whom Satan rebelled was not the Father God Above All Gods, but rather the God of this world, who is called the Demiurge in Gnostic texts. It is the Demiurge that Satan sprang from and it is the Demiurge with whom Satan struck the wager concerning the fate of Job. Satan is also credited with advancing human technology.

The archons appear to be very interested in advancing human technology. I suspect this is because it is easier to distract, delude, and even destroy humanity via technology than with any other means. Not only war technology and weaponry, but more benign appearing helpful technologies. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how destructive and divisive the internet has become through the innovation of social media. And how appealing and irresistible television has become! Then there is the realm of virtual reality—a realm controlled by archons who want nothing more than to delude and ensnare human souls. This type of delusion and division is the bread and butter of archons. So, when ancient aliens theorists point out the leaps made in technological innovation by the influence of incorporeal beings, I suspect archons at play.

Which brings us to angels. Angels are described as beings who appear to be trans-dimensional. By that I mean that sometimes they appear as physical humans and sometimes they appear as incorporeal light beings. They can physically touch humans, as when Peter was awakened in his prison cell by an angel’s touch, yet the same angel can pass through solid walls, as recounted in Acts 12:7. It is said that angels were sent to earth to protect and assist humans, and 70% of Americans believe they have a guardian angel. In Gnostic cosmology, it appears that angels are a type of being created by the Fullness of God, specifically for the benefit of humans, to assist them in the never-ending war against the archons. Angels are possibly aeonic personalities that have come from the Pleroma to assist. Therefore, when ancient alien theorists tell of incidents where non-corporeal beings appear as light forms to interfere in a positive manner with human technology, these are angels. Examples of angelic interference include the occasions where mysterious forces have appeared above U.S. ICBM sites and disabled nuclear-armed missles in their silos. These beings have also appeared outside the windows of the International Space Station and U.S. space missions to the moon.

So far we have identified Aeons, archons, and angels as entities who insert themselves into human affairs. But what of actual off-world, flesh and blood ETs from other planets and galaxies? Do they really exist? Yes, the remainder of encounters appear to be ETs. Ancient alien theorists propose that in the days before the flood, “gods” lived side by side with humans and occasionally took human women as sexual partners. These ETs claimed to have come from the star systems of Sirius and Orion in particular. These ETs had advanced technologies that they shared with the humans around them. They designed the ancient monolithic structures, including the pyramids found around the earth on every continent. They were the ones who used their tech to levitate gigantic boulders into place in stone structures all over the earth. Many of them appeared to have elongated skulls and green or blue skin. Some of them had reptilian, birdlike, or insectoid features, and some appeared to have non-human heads of canines, lions, and other animals. The Book of Enoch reports that some ETs mated with human women and produced monstrous offspring known as the Nephilim.  Enoch says that the great flood unleashed to cleanse the earth of these hybrid abominations, as they were not part of God’s plan for humanity. After the flood, the ETs on earth seem to have retreated or gone into hiding. Occasional modern sightings of strange humanoid creatures living deep underground, under the ocean, or under the ice of Antarctica, hint at their possible continued presence.

It is my opinion that the extra-terrestrials can be thought of as Second Order Powers just like us. It is often suggested by ancient alien theorists that the ET civilizations may be a million years more advanced than our own, and that is how it is they have interstellar flight and other advanced powers and technology. Looking at this theory with a Gnostic eye, it is my theory that we can think of their home planets as exactly like ours, but far ahead of us in time. In keeping with the concept of fractals, I suggest that these ET civilizations advanced with the aid of Aeonic design, and struggled with their own archonic influences, exactly as we do now. It is highly likely that civilizations all eventually fall as the egos of the ETs struggle against one another for dominion and control, even as we do—a fractal replication of the Fall of Logos. Ancient alien theorists point to evidence of space battles above and on earth in the past, including a notable battle above Nuremberg in 1561.

Just as we are planning to do, it is likely that ETs sent out their own exploration and colonization missions, and that some of them came to planet earth. They probably had the same motivations that our own tech billionaires have—preservation of their genetic line against future catastrophes married to the archonic drive to be as gods and terraform worlds to their own ends. There is also pictorial evidence that some of these ETs may have been robots given the task of seeking out and terraforming worlds. It is also quite possible that the civilizations that sent out the ET missions have already destroyed themselves through plague or warfare.

Finally, let us turn to the question of the ultimate ET: God. Who and What Is He? 

Episode Two of the Gnostic Insights podcasts describes the attributes of the Father, also known as the God Above All Gods. Briefly, the Father is the Illimitable, Eternal, Omniscient Consciousness that underlies our reality. The Father does not look or sound like anything.  He doesn’t hold conversations the way we do. The Father is undifferentiated consciousness itself. This Consciousness is the ground state from which all subsequent events emerge.

Possibly the most egregious heresy in Gnosticism is the proposition that the God of the Old Testament, Creator of Heaven and Earth, the Jealous God of the Hebrews, Yahweh, or Jehovah, is not the Father on High that Jesus called Father. The God of this earth is known to Gnostics as the Demiurge, and He arose as a result of the Fall of Logos the Aeon due to Logos’s presumptuous thought. To learn more about this topic in depth, please listen to Episode Four of the Gnostic Insights podcast.

The God of the Old Testament, Yahweh, is more tangible than the Father Above. Yahweh has discussions with humans as well as with entities such as Satan. He uses language and engages in prolonged conversations, as when He gave precise building instructions for the ark to Noah. He even makes wagers over Job and appears to change his mind regarding the sacrifice of Isaac.  When people refer to God as an old white man with a beard, it is the image of the Demiurge to which they refer, not the undifferentiated consciousness of the Father. This Demiurge character is the God Yahweh, the God of this world and the God of the Hebrews especially. It is the Demiurge that has a special relationship with the children of Abraham. Yahweh takes care of the Hebrews when they pray to Him and follow His rules, and He has arranged a variety of cataclysms, plagues, and floods, to preserve their particular line of DNA. Yahweh favors the Hebrews in battles.

Therefore, it seems to me that when ancient alien theorists refer to God as having sent the world wide cataclysm and flood that wiped out the Nephilim and all but about 3,000 surviving humans, it is the work of the Demiurge calling himself God. This is the jealous God who wants sole control of the earth and the God who is angered by uppity archons like Satan and other “fallen angels.” This is the God who wants Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on the mountain as a show of faith. But it was a true angel of the true Father Above who stayed Abraham’s hand and saved Isaac’s life. It is the Demiurge who tired of his people’s captivity in Egypt and sent the plagues so the Pharoah would release the Hebrew slaves and who parted the seas to make good their escape. But it was true angels from the true God who protected the Hebrews during their 40 year trek through the desert, guiding them with their light bodies and feeding them with mana.Well, there you have it. Aeons, archons, angels, or aliens?  I hope these distinctions help you sort out the ancient aliens theory.

My brother and I have discussed the concept of reincarnation for over 50 years. Bill has always favored the concept of reincarnation and I have always provided alternative explanations from a Christian worldview. But, once I had begun writing my Simple Explanation theory of everything, I came around to his point of view. In the past few years, Bill has used the concept of reincarnation with his hypnosis clients, and we have both been able to observe apparent evidence of reincarnation in practice.

For most of my life, the meme bundle that I hold has stuck pretty closely to evangelical Christianity, and we all know that Christianity currently holds that reincarnation does not exist. It seems to me that evangelical Christianity emphasizes the born-again meme so heavily that it doesn’t want any soul believing they have another lifetime during which they may be saved. Christianity is all about closing the deal here and now. When it comes to salvation, more lifetimes means more delay. Added to that is the expectation that any day can be the end of times or Judgment Day. What if someone thinks they can delay salvation until the next incarnation and then the world ends and that soul is left on the wrong side of the salvation divide?

But, over the last 15 years of writing and contemplating the Simple Explanation, and now The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, I have changed my point-of-view. I now can see that it makes a lot more sense that all souls are reincarnated time and time again. So, here is the reprint of an article titled “A Simple Explanation of Reincarnation” that I posted on May 16th of 2011 to my Simple Explanation blog.

Reincarnation is a meme common to most world religions and spiritual traditions, with the notable exception of contemporary Christianity. Many ancient as well as modern philosophers also incorporate the reincarnation meme into their philosophies.

Reincarnation is typically defined as “entering the flesh again.” Depending upon the particular memes held by one’s belief system, it is said that after a human passes on they may reenter their next life as a newborn human, or possibly an animal or some other form.

The Simple Explanation defines reincarnation this way:

Physical “death” breaks the bonds of a Self’s material instantiation, but not its karmic pattern. The freed unit of consciousness continues its existence at a non-material level until its karmic pattern causes it to reattach to a particular, newly instantiating aggregate of cells, at which time it is born again into Creation.

A previous Simple Explanation article, “Who Am “I” After Death?” describes the process this way:

The “me” that continues to influence the fate of the Self unit of consciousness after death is nothing but the holographic pattern of all the choices ever made by my unit of consciousness. In life, this karmically generated vibratory pattern attracts or repels the memes associated with my meme bundles. The memes I think of as “me” are not a part of my Self unit of consciousness, but are drawn to me by my karmic pattern. It is my karmic record that attracts and repels the patterns of memes surrounding my life at any moment. That the “you” that exists between material incarnations is nothing but your karmic record is proved by one of our basic assertions that all units of consciousness are fundamentally one and the same, and that all units of consciousness begin their individuated journey as perfect echoes of God. Then it follows that “I” develop as a result of my choices and the choices of others—“I” am my perfect unit of consciousness enshrouded in karma and the memes that my karma attracts.

The Simple Explanation suggests that reincarnations are not random events, but the continuation of karmically-mandated cycles of consequence that do not end with death. It is not logical to expect the consequences of one’s actions to end at one’s death; if you cut off someone’s ear and then die, does the person’s ear suddenly grow back? No. Consequences of behavior are not affected by the death of the doer.

The memes that one favors in life also continue to live on in the shared transpersonal field after one’s death. They were not the unit of consciousness’s property or invention to begin with, therefore it is safe to assume they also continue on after death.

In the Simple Explanation model, “I” consist of my karmic pattern, the memes I hold onto, and the “aggregate units of consciousness of my material body, from the subatomic particles to molecules to cells, all the way up through the units of consciousness of the body’s organ systems” overlaid upon my Self’s perfect unit of consciousness. In terms of reincarnation, it is only the aggregate units of consciousness and their associated material bodies that change from incarnation to incarnation.

In practical terms, here’s how I see reincarnation playing out. This person, Cyd, is composed of a Self unit of consciousness that is a fractal replication of the Metaversal unit of consciousness, and virtually identical to the Metaversal unit of consciousness. Overlaid upon the Self unit of consciousness is Cyd’s personality, which is largely defined by the memes Cyd holds onto, plus Cyd’s karmic record which inclines Cyd’s choices this way and that, plus Cyd’s physical body and its desires and limitations.

When this particular physical body is no longer able to sustain the constellation of units of consciousness that make up “Cyd,” this particular hierarchical collection of units of consciousness will disband their union, and all units of consciousness more complex than the molecular level will also pass on, along with the governing Self unit of consciousness. This means that at death, not just one soul passes away, but the souls of millions of aggregate units of consciousness, too. (The molecular, atomic, sub-atomic units of consciousness do not pass on at this time, because they are still able to do their respective jobs.)

Every newly instantiating piece of creation needs a unit of consciousness to oversee its life. At every conception, be it a leaf or a seed, a cell, an organ, or an egg, perhaps even a planet or a galaxy, nature’s karmic computer attaches a governing unit of consciousness. “Cyd’s” unit of consciousness will probably cycle into another newly aggregated body of units of consciousness who all, in the most perfect way imaginable, “deserve” one another. This new Cyd will resemble old Cyd to the extent that new Cyd adopts old Cyd’s memes. These memes will be drawn to new Cyd by way of old Cyd’s karma, which attracts some memes and repels others. Cyd’s new body may also carry some physical traits forward from the previous life in the form of epigenetic patterns that cause genetic traits to turn off and on, as karmically determined. It’s likely that new Cyd will be a human, not just because Cyd was human before but, more persuasively, because Cyd’s particular karma and meme bundles best instantiate her human form.

However, if I love to swim and surf and think about surfing nonstop, and I spend all my time sitting on the board on the water, I could very well reincarnate as a porpoise. Who knows? It has to do with the memes and the karma. I don’t see our incarnations as a process of becoming pure. It’s my understanding that the Hindu version of reincarnation believes that over many, many lifetimes, 10,000 lifetimes, 1,000,000 lifetimes, you become a better and better human being and you shed more and more memes until you have achieved the nil state of zero memes and the pure consciousness of the Father. I don’t think that’s the case because I don’t see a lot of progress in that direction. In general, it doesn’t seem to me that people are dropping memes throughout their lifetime. I think they probably come in with a certain meme bundle. Some of those memes rearrange, they get new ones, they drop old ones, but they’ve still got memes when they go forward into the next life. I don’t see each life time as a process toward perfection.

However, we do know that through gnosis you can in an instant reconnect with the Fullness of God. You can in an instant, know the Father, and that is what the Gnostic Gospel is all about. It’s remembering that you come from the Fullness of God and that you will return to the Fullness of God. And according to the various gnostic gospels as laid out in the Nag Hammadi, this world that we find ourselves in is inherently troublesome. That’s why it’s called the Deficiency, and it is inherently a source of delusion. Ongoing delusion. This is the work of the Demiurge and the archons. I think we’re caught in an endless war and that we are recycled down here to fight that war until the end of time. We don’t cause the end of time. The end of time was determined by the Fullness of God. We are part of a plan. We are part of the plan of the Pleroma. And there will come a judgment day when time does end and everything is recalled and that will be the day of full salvation for All Souls, including the fallen Logos. And the Deficiency and the imitation will not coexist with us any longer. We will all be living in a paradise that replicates the dream of paradise that has always been in the mind or the Fullness of God.

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This week we’ll hear part two of my interview with gnostic John Munter. He’s very much a follower of the Gospel of Thomas, which is one of the more popular gnostic books. John offers a unique method of interpreting the Gospel of Thomas. His books are called The Integral Gospel of Thomas Made Easy and The Samaritan Jesus. You’ll find that modern gnostics are still working these things out, and John and I come up with different interpretations of many passages of Thomas. I also found John’s comments on my book very interesting because he and I have such different points of view on many particulars and our conclusions are often divergent, yet he found A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel quite stimulating.

I’d like to remind you that knowledge is basically a collection of what I call memes, or information. Bundles of knowledge come as a package or set from various traditions, teachings, and books. This Gospel According to Thomas is one of those collections of memes. These are supposedly the secret teachings of Jesus. Now, personally I don’t believe that there are secret teachings of Jesus. If the Father wants to be known, he wants to be known by everybody. If the Christ came to redeem us, he came to redeem everybody. I don’t see why the Father or Jesus, or any other gnostic apostle or proponent would keep secret knowledge from us.

In my way of looking at these things, the only reason some gnostic knowledge is hidden is not because it’s being kept a secret from us, it’s because we have filters that block it out. So the hiddenness is generated by our inability to listen or understand or conceive of this gnosis that comes from God. The secrecy of gnosis I don’t think should be considered as being purposely kept from us, because it is God’s will that we know. It is God’s will that we do remember. So I just wanted to add my two cents in there at the beginning of this discussion with John about teachings from the line of Gnosticism that he is an expert in.

You will also notice that there is a big difference between the historically-based theories that John presents and the conceptually-based theories that my Simple Explanation focuses on. My explanations are based on a first cause principle–consciousness itself, the Father–and then develops logically outward from there. I think this is the way the author of the Tripartite Tractate thought about these things, because my Simple Explanation model dovetails perfectly with the Tripartite Tractate. These principles are also upheld by the New Testament itself, although not generally studied or recognized this way.

p.s. John noticed that he misspoke a detail he would like to correct for you scholars out there: It was actually the FIRST Apocalypse of James where Gospel of Thomas got Sayings 30 and 50, not the Second Apocalypse of James.

This week’s episode presents part 1 of an interview with a fellow gnostic, John Munter. John is among the first people to read A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate–he contributed an “advanced praise” blurb for the front of the book.

John shares his early background as a philosopher and divinity school graduate. He then tells a story of his relationship with a friend that transcends her physical death.

In this episode, John tells us about his unique method of interpreting the Gospel of Thomas. We will continue that train of thought next week.

His book, The Integral Book of Thomas Made Easy, is available on amazon. John also touches on material from another book of his, The Samaritan Jesus.

A podcast listener recently asked me to amend my categorization of the Demiurge as a malevolent force. He asked me to read the “Epistle to Flora” from The Gnostic Scriptures to see that the Demiurge is a force for good on the right hand side of the ledger. In other words, is the Demiurge evil or good? Turns out it’s a controversial subject in the Gnostic community. That is what we consider on today’s podcast.

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been talking more about the Demiurge because one of the Gnostic Insights listeners wrote to me and asked me to clarify this business about the Demiurge because he feels that I’m too hard on the Demiurge and I shouldn’t think of the Demiurge as evil but as just. He recommended that I read the “Book of Flora” which is contained in Layton and Brakke’s book called The Gnostic Scriptures. It’s by a Greek philosopher named Ptolemy who wrote around 150 AD.

And so for the past few weeks I’ve been reconsidering my position on the Demiurge, and I’ve reread parts of my book to see if I got it wrong. And I don’t think so. I think that indeed, the creator of this earth that we live on and all of the dead things—that would be the mud, the particles, the molecules up through the elemental level and the aggregations of rocks—Demiurge means architect, it means builder, and so Demiurge is a fine word for the creator of this universe. But is this creator the ultimate God? The God that we think of as Father in Christianity, for example. And that answer is no. This God is a lesser God, an intermediate God.

And when we look at the Old Testament and we look at the stories of how God interacts with humans, that God is very wrathful, is very angry and seems to have no problem with wiping out large patches of humans. So it’s hard to think of this as a loving God, but can we think of the Demiurge as justice as a just God? And this is what our listener was attempting to convey to me—that the Demiurge is not evil. The Demiurge is not Satan. The Demiurge, this blind justice. So let’s think about that.

Jumping out of that train of thought for just a moment, I wanted to bring you up to date on an interesting archaeological find. I read this this week in the news that the earliest original Hebrew writing was discovered by archaeologists recently. It’s a 3200 year old amulet. The oldest example of Hebrew writing, and it carries the name of Yahweh written out. And it’s called a curse tablet. This was found on Mount Ebal, near the biblical city of Shechem, and it’s what’s called a curse tablet. Apparently Mount Ebal was known from Deuteronomy 11:29 as a place of curses, and there was a big debris pile, which the archaeologists think is an altar, and within this pile of rubble they found this curse tablet. It was perfectly preserved. It was actually a metallic object and the curses were written in the metal itself and that’s why it survived. And according to this book of the Old Testament, Deuteronomy, priests and Levites were instructed to send curses in the direction of Mount Ebal. They’re supposed to stand in the valley between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, and send curses in the direction of Mount Ebal. So this object is lead and it had curses written in lead on the inside of it, and they used a CT scanner to bring up the letters because it was too delicate to actually open up this little amulet where the curses were written. But here’s what the phrase says inside in Hebrew: “Cursed, cursed, cursed, cursed by the God Yahweh. You will die. You will surely die, cursed by Yahweh, cursed, cursed, cursed.” OK, so this is an extremely important historical find because it dates Hebrew writing to these Old Testament days so that they actually could have been writing their history, that it wasn’t just oral traditions passed down. 500 years older than any other previous appearance of the word Yahweh, centuries older than previous record holder for the oldest Hebrew text in Israel.

Now, that’s a pretty interesting find, but what’s interesting to us here at Gnostic Insights is this idea. That if Yahweh were actually the God Above All Gods, or the Father of Jesus, the God of love, from which all virtue and love and righteousness emanates, what’s he doing standing around telling people to curse other people, or telling a mountain to be cursed? First, Yahweh throws curses around and kills people and tricks people and tortures people. That not the Father, not the God Above All Gods. And this is the God that we here at Gnostic Insights. Believe to be the God Above All Gods, the Father of all love, whom Jesus referred to as Father. And in contrast, this Yahweh, that is mentioned on this ancient lead tablet now, he’s a God who does not bring love but brings curses.

So back to this idea. What is the Demiurge and should we think of the Demiurge as Yahweh and should we think of this Demiurge as evil? Seems a bit evil to go around cursing others. Condemning them and killing them. That’s what we might call evil. Alright, I’m not sure that that is simply justice, although we do get caught up in the idea of capital punishment, don’t we? That an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? That’s Old Testament talk. See, that’s talk that is handed down by Yahweh. So when people say as indeed my listener did, that the Demiurge or Yahweh is directed through Logos, is directed through the Fullness of God, without its realizing that it’s being directed. See, the Demiurge Yahweh woke up in ignorance after the Fall, not remembering where it came from, not knowing who it was, and so when it said, “let there be light,” it thinks it’s creating the concept of light. And when it created the world, it thinks it is the sole creator of all of creation and of everything that has come to be, because it’s deluded into thinking that it is God and was unengendered—that is didn’t come from someone.

So again this listener asked me to read the Book of Flora and to come away with a kinder idea of the Demiurge to not be evil, but simply as justice. And so let me share a bit of this epistle to Flora with you here. So from Brakke and Layton’s introduction to the Epistle to Flora in The Gnostic Scriptures. They say, “one can distinguish, Ptolemy concludes, a perfect God who is good, also the God of Israel and the Old Testament who is just, and the devil who is evil.” So we’re talking about three different gods that Ptolemy is proposing. He carefully contrasts this view with positions that assert only two principles. That is, the God and the devil, which is the typical Christian point of view, and also the typical Hebrew point of view. In comparison Ptolemy’s tripartite scheme shows a relatively positive attitude toward the Craftsman, or the Demiurge. Which is the creator of the world and the God of Israel. They say some classic gnostic scriptures also follow the same tripartite scheme.

In the opening of the Epistle Ptolemy sets out to refute the other two opinions on the source of the Old Testament law. One opinion identified the legislator with the highest God. We’re talking about Old Testament law. You know the 10 commandments, but then all the other commandments that are printed in the Old Testament, as well, such as in Deuteronomy. Others identify, they say, the legislator with the devil and many scholars believe it may be the gnostic opinion who followed a myth of the Craftsman of the world called Yaldabaoth, who appears to be identical with the God of Israel, but they’re not sure of where that opinion came from. They’re just supposing it was Gnostic.

So here’s the beginning of the letter to Flora. And Flora was a Christian woman, and Ptolemy was writing to her to clear up some ideas. So quoting verse 33.3.1,

The law established by Moses, my dear Sister Flora, has in the past been misunderstood by many people, for they were not closely acquainted with the one who established it or with its commandments. I think you will see this at once if you study their discordant opinions on this topic. For some say that this law has been ordained by God the Father, while others following the opposite course stoutly contended that it has been established by the adversary, the pernicious devil, and so the latter school attributes the craftsmanship of the world to the devil, saying that he is the Father and maker of the universe.

Verse 3334 goes on to say,

Now it does not seem that the law was established by the perfect God and Father, for it must be of the same character as its giver. And yet it is imperfect and needful of being fulfilled by another, and contains commandments in congress with the nature and intentions of such a God.

And I would agree with that. You see the behavior of God has to be in keeping with its character. And if we’re talking about the God Above All Gods, the character of God is love and light. The character of God is communion, virtue—all good things come from the character of the God Above All Gods, the Father, and they emanate out into the Son and the Son emanates them out into the Fullness or Holy Spirit of God. Now you can’t get from these emanations to a God down here below on Earth, who writes commandments that go opposing to that or that behaves in the way that Yahweh often behaves in the Old Testament. Yes, many Christian sermons are about the Old Testament, particularly those of a Christian denomination called Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are Yahweh’s witnesses. They are the worshippers of Yahweh here currently on Earth, in addition to the Old Testament Hebrews, the Orthodox Hebrews, who continue to worship Yahweh since he became their tribal God. But we have stepped out of that tradition of worshipping Yahweh for the most part. We prefer to worship the God Above All Gods over all other gods, including Yahweh. And this is a God of love and of perfect peace and harmony. So Ptolemy was speaking of that when he was saying you can’t have commandments that are incongruous with the God Above All Gods, if they really come from God, therefore they must come from a different God. From a lower God. A different source. Which many of the ancient Gnostic traditions believed to be an evil God, the Demiurge they categorize as evil, Yaldabaoth evil.

Now the book of Flora is interesting in that Ptolemy goes into quite a bit of detail to show how exactly the various laws of the Old Testament laid out that there’s three different sets of laws. One set of laws can be said to be directly from God, one set of laws from Yahweh through Moses, and the other set of laws were created as cultural artifacts by the Hebrews, their laws having to do with society with how to run society. Most of the thou shoulds and should nots that are contained in the law book, and those aren’t necessarily from any God, but they’re through man in the name of God. And so he talks about these various types of laws and how they’re different from one another. And if you’re interested in those details, it’s not a bad logical argument. I recommend that you read the Book of Flora, beause I’m not going to go into it here.

But skipping down to the final part of the Book of Flora, which is verse 33 under the headline of The Nature of the God who is the author of law, (and that God who is the author of the law, that we would say is Yahweh, by the way). So what Ptolemy says is the lawgiver is an intermediate God,

for since this Division of the law that is God’s own law was established neither by the perfect God as we have taught, nor surely by the devil, which it would be wrong to say. Then the establisher of this division of the law is distinct from them, and he is the Craftsman and the maker of the universe or world, and that the things within it, since he is different from the essences of the other two, rather is in a state intermediate between them. He would rightly be described by the term intermediate. He is neither good nor evil, merely just. And if the perfect God is good according to his nature, as indeed he is, for our savior showed that one only is there who is good. (That’s a quote from Jesus, from the New Testament through Ptolemy, namely his Father, whom he manifested. We’re talking about Jesus being the physical manifestation of the son of the Father,) and if furthermore, the law belonging to the nature of that adversary is both evil and wicked, and is stamped in the mold of injustice.

(This and that is all proven through Ptolemy’s discussion in the Book of Flora that I refer you to),

then a being that is in a state intermediate between these and is neither good nor evil or unjust might well properly be called “just,” being a judge of the justice that is his. He is engendered in the image of the good God. And on the one hand, this God must be inferior to the perfect God and less than his righteousness, precisely because he is engendered and not unengendered.

And remember the God Above All Gods is the base state. It’s the ground state of consciousness. No one gave birth to the Father The Father is the unengendered ground state of consciousness. Everything that emanates from the Father is called engendered, meaning born from him. There is one unengendered Father, from whom are all things flow.

Or more exactly from whom all things depend, and on the other hand, he must have come into being as better and more authoritative than the adversary, and must be born of an essence and nature distinct from the essence of the other two, for the essence of the adversary is both corruption and darkness, for the adversary is material and divided into many parts, while the essence of the unengendered Father of the entirety is both incorruptibility and self existent light. Being simple and unique. And the essence of this intermediate produced a twofold capacity for he is an image of the better God.

That’s from the book of Flora. So what is this saying? That the Demiurge is a reflection. The Demiurge, remember, is a likeness of the Father. Is a likeness of the Son. Is a likeness of the Fallen Logos, who himself was a fractal of the Son. So the Demiurge is not an image because the images are the Aeons we talked about that last week, so he’s not a direct image out of the Fullness of God. The Demiurge is a likeness of God, but he is not God to us. It may be God to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Demiurge is God because look, he’s the Creator of the heavens and the Earth. That’s a pretty big field.

But I think that when we are in church or in a reverent and meditative state, meditating upon holiness, that what we are praying to, what we are meditating upon, what we are giving glory to, the Holy, Holy, Holy, isn’t the Demiurge. That’s a mistaken notion. In our heart of hearts, we 2nd order Powers come from the Fullness of God, so in our heart of hearts, we are giving glory to the God Above All Gods, the originating Father, and to the Son of that God Above All Gods, who is the encapsulation, the monad that represents the God Above All Gods. The Father that Jesus refers to can be either the Son or the Son’s Father because the Son was also a Father. The Son engendered the Fullness of God. So when the Son split into the Fullnesses of the Aeons, the totalities, the Son also became a Father. So we can think of the Son of God as Father. He’s the relatable God. The God Above All Gods is untouchable.

We can give glory to the God Above All Gods, but as Logos learned when he attempted to launch himself back into the realm of perfect glory, that will result in a stumble and a Fall instead, because we don’t have the capacity. We could say in religious terms we are not worthy to approach God the Father. It’s not that we are so much unworthy as it is that we are incapable of approaching the Father. That God Above All Gods. But we are very much capable of approaching the Son because the Son is the relatable Father that we were meant to be in contact with. We are children, or fractals, of the Son of God. We’re fractals of combinations of the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. We are their children. We are their fruit.

I do like to listen to radio preachers when I’m driving in the car. I like hearing the gospel preached. Now, sometimes preachers get things wrong when they’re delving in and grabbing things out of the Old Testament, because the Old Testament is ruled by a lesser God, that being the Demiurge. The New Testament is ruled by the God Above All Gods, and the Son of God, the emanations of that line of holiness. Through the Son of God through the Aeons, through the Christ which was created in order to bring us second order powers back home. We are down here on this material plane. We need to go back home to the spiritual plane from whence we came, and it is the Christ that brings us home. So when I say we are unworthy or there is talk in the New Testament that all of our righteousness is as dirty rags, we are unworthy, we are but worms—that’s referring to the material nature to which we are bonded here on the material plane.

I wouldn’t equate that with being a world hater. It’s OK to be joyful in creation. It’s OK to love particularly all of the living things around us, because remember, all living things come from above. All, living creatures are second order powers. It’s the life of this creation, the life that is coming down from above. What we love is life and light. We love the Fullness of God even in its bounded form, even it in its. you know, I want to say captured form down here below bonded to the material plane because the material plane is the realm of the Demiurge and the Demiurge’s creation. Not the birds and the bees and us. What the Demiurge created was the material, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the aggregates of minerals. That is the realm of the Demiurge, the planets the stars. It’s a beautiful realm. These things are beautiful, but they are the realm of the Demiurge, which means he’s in control and the Demiurge rules that realm with strict laws, strict laws of physics, strict laws of chemistry, strict laws of motion. And the laws of the Demiurge that come to us from the Old Testament.

These are strict and unyielding laws of behavior, and so yes, I can agree with the listener that the Demiurge represents justice, blind justice, unloving cold justice. Justice that doesn’t take into account excuses and pleas and cries and tears. It’s cold, hard justice. The justice, on the other hand that comes from the God Above All Gods, that comes from the Fullness of God through the Christ, that is a justice that includes love and forgiveness. Jesus said none are worthy. No, not one, but all are loved and all are forgiven. So the kind of justice that would send most humans to hell for eternal damnation. What does that sound like to you? Does that sound like the justice of a loving God, the justice of the Father? It doesn’t sound like it to me. The God that condemns humans to death and torture for eternity, so-called, that is the Demiurge. The Father of the Christ and the anointed, the Messiah, comes to give us forgiveness, comes to give us love, comes to say, yeah, I know that your righteousness is as dirty rags. Yeah, I know that you’re really no higher than the worms. But you know what? I love you. Anyway, you know what? I forgive you. Your sins are forgiven. You’re not going to hell. I love you. Come with me. Back up into the eternal realm where you will have peace and joy and love and rest.

Even rest for the wicked. Because the things burned up down below, those are the memory of the wickedness, the sins, the bad acts, the vices. That is what stays below down here and gets burned up by the fire. We’re all creatures of the God Above All Gods. We are the creation of the Fullness of God. We are their fruit, and we are coming home. All of us, none will be lost. That is not lessening the power of the Christ. That is not lessening the power of God. That is acknowledging the great glory and love of the God Above All Gods.

But now lastly there was a third character mentioned here by Ptolemy, and that character is the accuser, Satan. Let’s not conflate the Demiurge with Satan. Satan is another character. Satan is the accuser. Satan is an Archon, probably the chief Archon and these Archons are the sub selves, or the likenesses of the pleroma of the Demiurge, their likenesses of the pleroma above. So, as the Pleroma is to the Son up above and the Logos also was a fractal of that, he had his own pleroma that looked just like the full pleroma in the Son, so that pleroma was Logos sitting on top of his own little pleroma and they were fractals of that larger pattern. And the larger pattern didn’t fall. It was Logos who fell, and down here below it is the likeness of the Fallen Logos that is the Demiurge. The best part of Logos fled back up to the Fullness and is working with the Fullness. They’re the ones that cooked up the Christ to come and save us from the Fall and to come and save the Demiurge from the Fall, because the Demiurge isn’t going away to nothingness either.

The Demiurge is not inherently evil. The Demiurge is like the ego of Logos that got stuck down here below and thought he was Logos and thought he was God thought he was the pleroma of the Fullness. All wrong about all of that. He’s just the shadow of them. He’s a knockoff of the fractal of Logos and the fractal of Logos is a fractal of the Fullness of God. So that’s how it all works. That’s the stacking. Those are the stacked layers. Satan is an Archon, he is a sub self. We liken this within the pleroma of the Demiurge. The Demiurge itself is this full unit of the Fallen ego of Logos. The Demiurge was able to construct this world so perfectly because it does contain within itself all of the patterns and fractal formulas of the Fullness of God, but it doesn’t remember where it came from. It thinks that it is the end all, be all.

OK, I hope I have not muddied the waters here. I hope I’ve got some clarity. God bless us all. We say onward and upward because we’re heading back home to the Fullness. See you next week.

This episode looks at the origin of the Demiurge and our material universe. What is the Demiurge and how did it come about? What was the presumptuous thought that led the youngest Aeon to overreach and fall and how does that relate to Self and Ego? Why would the Father set things up so that this Aeon could make a unilateral decision that resulted in the Fall? Was it a mistake? Did God cause this Aeon to create evil? How is such a thing even possible? Was it God’s will that it should fall?

These are timeless questions. We take a deep dive into verses 75 through 78 of the Tripartite Tractate of the books of the Nag Hammadi in search of answers. This is gnosis presented clearly so you can understand.

This week’s episode is about confusion versus simplicity. Our God is not a god of confusion, but of peace. If you find yourself becoming more and more confused when studying gnostic scriptures and books about gnosticism, it’s possible you are heading down the wrong rabbit trails.

The simplest explanation that works to answer the question is usually the best explanation. That’s known as Occam’s Razor. The gnosis presented by the Tripartite Tractate is extraordinary in its simplicity. It also explains gnosis in reasonable and logical terms.

We don’t need to learn how historical gnostics practiced their religion. We don’t need to memorize arcane diagrams and rituals. All we need to do is remember the gnosis that is already within us. Anything more than that may be leading to confusion rather than clarity. And if you find yourself becoming disillusioned and disheartened, then what you’re learning is likely demiurgic and not gnosis.

Remember, the Father’s consciousness flows outward through the Son, and from the Son through the Aeons, and through the Aeons into us Second Order Powers birthed into the cosmos here below. We need to remember where we come from and whose consciousness we are a part of. We need to develop the discernment to be able to tell left from right, vice from virtue, demiurgic machinations from divine inspiration, and ego-centered willpower from God’s will.

We come from Above and we return to Above. Repent; be redeemed so you can return to your home Above. And remember when you pass over to the other side to head onward and upward; don’t look back.

The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated is a simple 50 pages long and profusely illustrated. This is the simplest possible presentation of the Tripartite Tractate, with no extra explanations or big, theological words.

If you find these podcasts helpful, please consider donating to help Cyd cover the cost. The Donor box can be set up for one-time or recurring contributions. And, remember to subscribe to Gnostic Insights so you don’t miss a single episode!

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One of the big heresies of Gnosticism is that all Second Order Powers, (and all living creatures, including us, are Second Order Powers), all Second Order Powers are redeemed by the Anointed emissary of the Father and all will someday return to the paradise of the Fullness. In other words, everyone’s going to heaven. No one is going to hell, not even the fallen angels. The idea that everyone will be redeemed in the end is called Universal Salvation and it directly contradicts what has become Christian orthodoxy.

This week as I was driving in the car, I listened to a radio preacher speak on this very topic. He was preaching a real fire and brimstone sermon and quoting from a passage out of the book of Matthew in the New Testament designed to put the fear of hell and damnation into his unsaved listeners. The set-up for the passage is: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left” (Matthew 25:31, New International Version).

First off, do you recognize the left and right reference? In the Gnostic Gospels the left represents the kingdom of the demiurge and the right is the kingdom of the Fullness of God. The left represents vice and the right represents virtue. The left represents the bottom-up material cosmos, and the right represents the top-down emanations of the Father. The separating of the left from the right is a common theme that runs throughout the Gnostic Gospel. It is gnosis that Jesus would have known.

In the verse that follows, the King says to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world” (Matthew 25:34). The kingdom spoken of by Jesus is the home of the Second Order of Powers, the place from which we came forth. The King is the governing unit of consciousness of our particular location within the Fullness of the Aeons. Our King is our governing Aeon: this Aeon is called the Son of Man because it is the governing consciousness of the emanations of the Aeons of the Fullness that take the form of us humans.

The passage goes on to describe the virtuous activities of those on the right—feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, offering hospitality to strangers, visiting the sick and those in prison. These activities all fall under the purview of the Simple Golden Rule of assisting one another in the same manner as the cooperative spirit of the Aeons of the Fullness. As a reminder, or in case you haven’t heard this because you are a newcomer to Gnostic Insights, the Simple Golden Rule states that units of consciousness reach out to hold hands with their neighbors, offering information, assistance, and love in order to build something greater than any of them could make on their own. You can read all about this principle in my new book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. 

Going on with Matthew 25, verse 40, the King says, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40).

The traditional rendering of Matthew 25:41 continues:

Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

They will also answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life (Matthew 25:41—46).

Hell and damnation and eternal punishment, right? The evangelical Christians believe they have a clear mandate to help as many humans as possible to escape this horrible fate. But, what if these concepts are based upon mistranslations of Matthew’s book that have been repeated in all subsequent editions of the Bible? That’s what David Bentley Hart’s fresh translation of the original Greek sources proposes. In fact, with the corrected translation of this passage, Hart’s New Testament brings Matthew in line with the equally ancient Gnostic Christian scriptures like the Tripartite Tractate. Let’s take a look at how Hart translates this passage from the original Greek.

“And when the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his throne of glory; And all the nations will be assembled before him, and he will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the kid goats, And will set the sheep to his right, but the kid goats to the left. Then the King will say to those to his right, ‘Come, you blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the cosmos” (Matthew 25: 31—34, Hart).

Now we can see that the Kingdom prepared for us was from the foundation of the cosmos, not the foundation of the world. As in the Gnostic gospel, the Kingdom pre-exists the Earth. The Kingdom of the Son of Man is from the Aeonic realm that we call the Fullness of God. It is the home of the Second Order Powers, created by Logos and the Fullness as a response to the Fall. We Second Order Powers were created as the means of bringing the life, love, and remembrance of the Aeonic realm into the universe so as to combat the amnesia of the demiurge.

Kingdom indicates a territory and people under one rule or governance. Usually in the Gnostic gospels we refer to pleromas rather than to kingdoms. But one could as easily call the Pleroma of the Fullness of God the Kingdom of the Fullness. And because the Fullness is arranged as a hierarchy, we can see that the pinnacle of the hierarchy is its King. The Aeon known as Logos was the original top of the Fullness, but he deserted his post and left the Pleroma of the Fullness to reunite with the Father in the Father’s realm of glory. That didn’t work out so well for Logos and he fell out of the ethereal realm. The result of that fall was our material cosmos.

The Fullness of God is a nested, fractal hierarchy. As a hierarchy, Aeons are arranged in a pyramidal shape that culminates in a singleton at the top. There is an ultimate King at the top of the Fullness—that would be the original Son of God, who gave birth to the ALL which gave rise to the Aeons of the Fullness. The Son of Man is an Aeon nested within the original pleroma of the Son of God. We human Second Order Powers are nested within the pleroma of the Son of Man. Later we will see that the Third Order Powers are fractals nested within the pleroma of the Anointed Christ.

Jumping to verse 41 out of Hart’s translation:

Then he will say to those to the left, ‘Go from me, you execrable ones, into the fire of the Age prepared for the Slanderer and his angels. For I was hungry and you did not give me anything to eat, I was thirsty and you did not give me drink, I was a stranger and you did not give me hospitality, naked and you did not clothe me, ill and in prison and you did not look after me.’ Then they too will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and did not attend to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Amen, I tell you, inasmuch as you did not do it one of the least of these my brothers, neither did you do it to me.’ And these will go to the chastening of that Age, but the just to the life of that Age (Matthew 25: 41—45, Hart).

 Now let’s compare verse 41 from the NIV version to verse 41 from Hart:

The traditional rendering of verse 41 is: “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”  Hart’s more accurate translation says, “Then he will say to those to the left, ‘Go from me, you execrable ones, into the fire of the Age prepared for the Slanderer and his angels.” Execrable means “appalling, terrible, dreadful, frightful, disgusting, deplorable, reprehensible, abhorrent.” It does not contain the implication of “cursed” which would be “damned, doomed, ill-fated.” So, Jesus was expressing his disgust with the terrible behavior of those on the left, but he was not dooming or damning them. 

And how about the “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”? This is an example of misrepresenting the Greek adjective “ainonios” derived from the word aion, or aeon to mean eternal. While aeon is generally translated as an age or a long time, it does not mean eternal. Here at Gnostic Insights we find that the word aeon more often refers to those self-aware conscious entities that dwell in the Pleroma of the Fullness of God. Hart typically translates ainonios and aion as a unit of time. The actual meaning of the word is more akin to our use of the word aeonic as ethereal consciousness. I tend to disagree with translating ainios as a unit of time, finding that translating it as a unit of consciousness works just as well and changes the implication of the text.

I propose that the text could as easily be interpreted as Jesus telling those to the left, “Go from me, you execrable ones, into the fire of the Aeons prepared for the Slanderer and his archons.” Or, “Go from me, you execrable ones, into the Aeonic fire prepared for the Slanderer and his archons.” Hart admits, in his postscript, that “ainios” “seems clearly to indicate a qualitatively  different—rather than successive—frame of reality, the divine sphere rather than the earthly” (p. 541, Hart). Therefore, I don’t think it’s any stretch to think of ainios as aeonic, and ainos as Aeons of the divine realm of the Fullness rather than a unit of time.

The Slanderer, by the way, is the actual translation of the word “devil.” The Slanderer, also called the Accuser, is the demiurge that runs us down and fills us with guilt and dread. And, of course, the Slanderer’s “angels” are not fallen angels from above, but are what we Gnostics call “archons of the demiurge” and they arose from the demiurge after the Fall.

Now, what is this aeonic fire into which the left is sent? Is it the eternal fire of hell? No, we have seen that “eternal” is not part of the formula. Is this then the well-deserved punishment for the disgusting, uncharitable ones on the left? No, it’s actually not a reference to punishment but to instructive chastening.

According to Hart’s translation of verse 45 and 46, Jesus says, “’Amen, I tell you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these my brothers, neither did you do it to me. And these will go to the chastening of that Age, but the just to the life of that Age.’”

In the footnote of Hart’s translation of verse 46, he says, “The word kolasis originally meant “pruning” or “docking” or “obviating the growth” of trees or other plants, and then came to mean “confinement,” “being held in check,” “punishment,” or “chastisement,” chiefly with the connotation of “correction.” He says, Classically, the word was distinguished, by Aristotle for instance, from timoria, which means a retributive punishment only.” Hart’s footnote indicates that later, in 1John 4:18, kolasis refers not to retributive punishment, but to the suffering experienced by someone who is subject to fear because not yet perfected in charity” (p. 53, Hart).

Compare this again to the traditional Christian interpretation of this verse: “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” Eternal punishment? No. Aeonic chastening? Yes. Punishment? No. Self-engendered fear? Yes.

This is in line with my gnostic insights on this topic. Those on the left, those who have not accepted the forgiveness and redemption of the Christ, do indeed suffer when they pass away from this life. This suffering is not handed down by an angry God but is rather their own recognition and guilt over their sins and shortcomings. The more sinful an unredeemed person is, the more they suffer when they die. The suffering comes from their own conscience as they see clearly the path of their ego-driven life and the true condition of their soul. There is no more confusion. All is clear. The lies and deception fall away and they come face to face with themselves. They can clearly see the huge chasm between their ego and their aeonic Self. There will be suffering, but not eternal punishment. The good news is that the suffering will pass with recognition of their need for salvation. As I described in the podcast episode called Overcoming Death, this hellish place they will find themselves in after what we call death is unbearable. After a period of denying their need for a Messiah to come help them out of this place where they have been set aside for pruning, they will of their own accord call out to the Savior to rescue them. The moment they repent of all that they now see clearly as their accumulated faults, they will be redeemed. The sins will be pruned away and cast into the fire but not their eternal spark of the One Self that was inside of them, unrecognized. Now the Self can move to the throne of their personhood and they will have forgotten all about their past shortcomings. Yes, even someone as awful as Hitler will forget and be redeemed. They will be able to move from the chastening bardo of death into the glorious realm of the Aeons and the Son of Man.

There will be no remembrance of our shortcomings which have been consumed by the Aeonic fire. Only our righteous behavior will be remembered in eternity. Therefore it stands to reason that righteous people who have walked with the Father during their lifetimes and repented along the way, will have many happy memories in heaven. Those who have lived in ego-driven vice and served the demiurge during their time on Earth will have little left to show for it. They will not remember their past deeds or the bad company they hung around with.

It is a very good thing that we may repent during our lifetimes and move our ego off the throne of our lives. It is a blessing and a lightness of heart when we are redeemed by the love of Christ. We are able to love because he first loved us. We do not lose our free will when we give our lives to the Father through the redemption of the Christ. On the contrary, we are freed from the control of the demiurge and are able to express the love of the ethereal plane here below, on Earth. By our love they shall know us as the children of the Aeons.

Let me know what you think of this good news. This is the Gnostic reformation of the gospel that Jesus taught; the proto-Christianity the pope and the emperor of Rome high-jacked from the faith. Fear of damnation and eternal hell is a construction of Rome. It is not the true gospel. Can I get an Amen?