Gnostic Insights

Here’s a treat for you. This is the entire Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book read by the author, Cyd Ropp. This is the little book published in 2019 that was the springboard for all of the gnostic work that followed, including this podcast and the new, much longer, book that is about to be released.

This is the simplest presentation of gnosis that you will ever find. Only the essential gnosis was included. It is all based upon the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi texts. The gnosis you will find here is the type of gnosis that proceeds from an initial thought–the first thought of the Originating Source. That thought then flows outward and through a few levels downward until it manifests within all of us living creatures here in the cosmos. There are no fables in this gnosis–only the reasonable outflow of the path of consciousness. This is the story of consciousness.

I’m taking all of the illustrations out of The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated and putting them in order as the transcript to go along with this episode. I’m not reprinting the text. For that, you should buy the book, but you can follow along with the illustrations. And, as I’m putting together these illustrations in order of their appearance, I’m discovering that this episode transcript with the illustrations and the captions of each illustration turns out to be the very, very simplest presentation of this gnosis of The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. It’s even simpler than the very simple book that you’re going to listen to now as the audio, because it’s just the illustrations and just the captions. So, if you find the words confusing, look at the pictures. They ought to resonate with you; you ought to be able to recognize their meaning.

And remember, I’m not teaching this to you. I’m hoping to stimulate your own remembrance that you were born with. The reason I emphasize simplicity is that I like to imagine how it is that the Father can transmit information to us down here. How does this information actually come to us? The Father wants to be known and this is the information that he wants to be known. It’s like if you were trying to explain something to a leaf or to a worm. What is it you can tell them that they’re going to understand? This is why the information is very simple. It doesn’t have a lot of details. It’s a very simple transmission, directly, of consciousness. And that’s why it is so pared down from the information that you can generally find out there that passes for what they’re calling gnosis. Because remember, every living thing in the cosmos remembers the Father and the Son; remembers the Origin and the Fullness. So, the information has to be simple enough that any creature, any plant, any insect, any little squirrel can realize it. We are all second order powers. Onward and upward! And, enjoy the episode.

I am not going to reprint the text of the book here. For that, please purchase the book:

Here are my illustrations of the concepts presented in this book. These will illuminate the meaning of the text.

The Son is the first and only emanation of the Father. It is a monad. It is called the First Glory.

We Second Order Powers find ourselves locked into an endless war with the Deficiency.

The Final Economy will come after this cosmos passes away. The First Economy is the Fullness. The Second Economy is the fallen cosmos. The Third Economy is the redeemed result.

Amen

What we call Christianity today, the religion of Christianity, may not be exactly what the Christ had in mind. It may be a human interpretation and institutional package of the religion that Jesus promoted, but there is no reason to throw out the baby with the bath water.

When I was about four years old, I recognized the difference between Baby Jesus in the manger and Santa Claus. There was the religious iconography of baby Jesus in the manger and the Christian Christmas story. And even at a very young age before I started school, I’m like, yeah, Santa Claus is a kid’s story, but this is baby Jesus in a manger being sent down from God to redeem humankind. Well, I could relate to that. That was clearly a difference in kind from Santa Claus. It seems to me that people who don’t recognize Jesus and who don’t accept the whole notion that there is a God above and that there can be a Christ who is a very special etherical character that was sent into this cosmos in order to help us out—that’s a sad thing. I recognized Jesus when I was very, very young.

Anyway, I want you to realize that I have been a follower of Jesus for over 60 years now, and during that time I’ve been a very active student of the Bible and of Jesus in particular. I’ve been taking most of my spiritual notes from the red letter editions of the Bible, listening to Jesus himself. Yes, I’ve been in and out of churches, particularly in my teenage years and early 20s, but after I was married, my husband didn’t enjoy church, and so I stopped going. Nowadays I’m able to devote most of my time to spiritual pursuits (as a widow), but my spiritual pursuits are not what most people’s are who currently follow either Christianity or Gnosticism. And yet I’m calling myself a Gnostic Christian.

So, I’m following the Bible. And I am very happy that this new edition of the Bible came out—The New Testament by David Bentley Hart—which is a fresh interpretation of the New Testament from the original Greek. Most of the editions of the Bible that people read in church or that you have on your bookshelves at home are derivative of an old Latin translation hundreds of years old that has been Anglicized ever since, so the original meaning of the words are often lost or misrepresented. And those are the Bibles that people are following in what is now called the Christian religion.

There are a lot of errors in Christianity, but I find myself in a peculiar situation of being what I would call a true Christian. I know Jesus; I was baptized. In the past couple of years, I’ve been listening more to radio preachers again, like I used to in the old days, and I often find myself agreeing with what they say. I agree with 90% of what is taught in the Christian Church. It’s that 10% that’s the problem.

For example, a very important issue is that all Christian churches believe that you need to right now accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, period, because if you die before accepting Jesus, you aren’t going to heaven. And this causes much anxiety and much angst amongst Christians whose relatives, children, husbands, friends haven’t accepted the Christ—will not pray the sinner’s prayer and ask Jesus into their hearts. Because they’ve been taught, and therefore they believe, that all those people are going to hell, and they are anxious about it.

Yesterday I went to church. I don’t often go, I must say, but it was a Communion day and someone asked me to go. I think it’s a good thing to ask people to go to church and so I honored her by going with her. And I accepted Communion. Now one of the interesting things about Communion is that you are recapitulating the fractal of the Last Supper where Jesus broke bread, blessed it, and said, “This is my body which is broken for you. Eat this in remembrance of me.” And then he takes the cup of wine and he says, “This is my blood that is spilled out for you. Drink this in remembrance of me.” And that is what is called the Sacrament of Communion.

And Christians take that sacrament fairly often to remember Christ. But only Christians are allowed to take Communion. So, before the Communion is served, the minister will say something like, Now we ask that only those people who have accepted Christ come forward for Communion. And if you have not yet accepted Christ, one of the elders would like to meet with you and pray with you to accept Christ. But for now, please don’t come forward to take the Communion because it’s only for Christians. I can kind of see the point in that, but once again, it’s creating a divide between those who have acknowledged the power of the Christ here on Earth and those who have not, and presumably all those people that don’t go back and talk with the elders at the end of the service are going to go to hell if they die that night.

But the Bible doesn’t really say that. In the New Testament, and particularly the New Testament as translated from the original Greek by David Bentley Hart, this newest translation published by Yale University Press, doesn’t say that. Yeah. It says that Christ came for everyone. For everyone. Christ came to redeem everyone. That’s what it says. Now, as we have discussed in previous episodes here at Gnostic Insights, if your physical body dies, (because you never die, we are eternal spirit, so we are not dying). but if your hylic part, (that means your physical body, the demiurgic molecular part of your body), will die and stay behind because there is no material above. It’s all ethereal. It’s all spirit. Down here it is material or apparently material. That part won’t go up with you, so it seems to die. But when I say die, that’s just your material, because your spirit is eternal.

So, if your body dies before you have acknowledged the redemption of the Christ and the actuality and presence of the Father from which we all come, and the Aeons whose children we are, if you do not accept that now while you’re alive, you’re going to have a difficult passage after death. I’ll put the link here into the transcript for the episode called Overcoming Death, and that’s where you get into the various bardos such as are spoken of in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, or the purgatories of hell that the Catholics talk about. Because the ethereal plane is the reality.

This is why I’ve been sharing episodes with you of near death experiences that thousands of people by now have shared on YouTube. Watch some of these near death experiences. Now, if someone has a near death experience and they’re dead—by the way, it’s only near death because they come back. That’s why it’s called near death. But they were dead. They just came back because it wasn’t their time. So, if you have one of these types of afterlife experiences and you survived to come back to talk about, even if you were a staunch atheist before you passed away, you have to come to a reckoning once you become ethereal and it turns out you’re still alive. You go, What? I thought I was gonna be dead! I thought it was all over with! And those people sometimes have very difficult passages. Very difficult.

There’s 14 layers of bardos in the Tibetan tradition, and if you already believe in the Christ or the Buddha, if you already believe in the Father, you recognize it right off the bat, and you are more than willing to bathe in the love and warmth and light of the afterlife. But if you don’t, then each phase—the longer you stay in that post-life place, which I call a bardo—the more difficult it becomes until it becomes absolutely hellacious. And I believe that these are the depictions of hell that are now and then glimpsed throughout the Bible. The people reaching up from hell going, Oh, please, Lazarus, save me! I didn’t believe it, but now I do. Please pull me out. Pull me out! That is an afterlife experience of someone who staunchly refuses to believe in the Father or the spiritual existence after this life.

But please be aware that this misery is not punishment by the Father or the Son. The reckoning is self reflexive—from your ego for the benefit of your Self. It is your own egoic consciousness feeling regret for its past deeds. And the point of the reckoning and repentance isn’t punishment—it’s not a spanking by God. It’s for you to realize the harm you have done to yourself and others during this sojourn in material life, in order to strip off those egoic memes and rejoin the Aeons in the Fullness. Remember, the ethereal plane is separated from the darkness below by a Boundary. We need to leave the darkness behind in order to rise above. We don’t strip off our egos—we retain our identities—but we do strip off the pernicious lies and memes that have kept us bound to the cosmos.

But if you do believe in the Father, and I say the Father because Jesus came to point the way to the Father. He didn’t say, “worship me, worship me, worship me. I’m hanging on the cross forever. Now worship the cross.” And that seems to be the focus of church all the time. When I go to a church, even yesterday when I went to the Communion service, the minister kept pointing to the cross behind him. And they are limiting the power of the Christ to the action and death on the cross, and then the resurrection from the grave.

But the Christ is way more than that. The Christ came to save all 2nd order powers, not just the people who accept the Christ before they pass away from this body. It gives much more power to the Christ to believe that Christ came to save you even if you reject Christ. Jesus said, “I and my Father are one. I came to represent my Father.”

One of the most often quoted Bible verses is John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever would believe on him would not perish but have everlasting life.” That’s how it reads in our most common translations. So in that verse, it is conflating the Christ with the Son. And the Son is a different entity. The Son is the first breakout of the Father, who coexists with the Father as a monad and has all of the attributes of the Father. The Christ was formed after we 2nd order powers were formed in order to help us 2nd order powers. The Christ has all of the mojo of the Son and the Fullness and the Father. They’re all packed into this creature called the Christ, and Jesus is the human instantiation of the Christ on the planet who came to Israel two thousand and twenty-some years ago. Now let me read to you from John 3:16. Actually, let’s look at the whole chapter 3 of the book of John in the translation by David Bentley Hart. Quoting now,

“There was a man, one of the Pharisees whose name was Nicodemus, a ruler of the Judeans. This man came to him at night and said to him, (he came to Jesus at night—he sneaked in). He said, ‘Rabbi, we know that you have come as a teacher from God, for no one can produce these signs you perform, unless God is with him.’ (And this was after Jesus had already been healing people and doing miracles, like multiplying enough food that was in one basket to feed thousands of people at a time). In reply, Jesus said to him, ‘Amen. Amen. I tell you, unless someone is born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.’ Nicodemus says to him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old?’ Jesus replied, ‘Amen. Amen. I tell you, unless a man is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh. And that which is born of the spirit is spirit.’”

OK, now let me pop in here. I think soon I’ll go over another episode concerning the three-part nature of humankind, or of all creatures, really. We have a spiritual portion that comes directly from above and still dwells above. That is the One, capital One or the S, capital Self that is coexistent with the Fullness of God, and also is reproduced in every one of our cells and in our entire body as a fractal of the Fullness of God. That’s the spiritual part, and it lives above, and it lives in us.

We have the psychical part which is our psychological aspect, which is all that thinking and talking that people like to do. It’s this reasoning part. Animals and plants have it too.

And then there’s the physical part. And, the physical is our molecular material structure that only came into existence as a result of the Fall, the original Fall that created the cosmos, not the Fall of Adam and Eve. That’s a whole different error that we’ll get into again at some other point.

So, Jesus is saying you have to be born of both water and spirit. You know, when a woman goes into labor, her water breaks and a baby is born in a gush of water. That’s the amniotic fluid. But we are also born of the spirit, the One true Self that we embody, and people need to realize that and recognize that. Materialists don’t recognize the spiritual aspect of humankind. They only recognize the material and possibly psychological; not even necessarily the psychological. They only recognize the material. The material is demiurgic. It is the creation and the domain of the Demiurge and the Archons. The psychological is your egoic self. And the spiritual is your One that is bringing the love and the life of God. So, back to this Bible here:

“That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed because I have told you it is necessary for you to be born from above.” And, when we’re talking about above, we’re talking about up there with the Fullness and the Son, the Aeons, the Totalities, the Father. We call that above. It’s a different plane of existence, a different dimension, if you will.

“The spirit respires where it will” (or the spirit breathes, the wind blows. It’s a Greek word.) “’The spirit respires where it will and you hear its sound. But you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; such is everyone born of the spirit.’ Nicodemus answered and said to him, ‘How can this happen?’ Jesus replied and said to him, ‘You are a teacher of Israel and you do not know these things? Amen. Amen. I tell you that we speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen. And you people do not accept our witness. If you do not believe what I have told you of things upon the earth, how will you believe if I tell you of things of heaven? And no one has gone up into heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man.’”

And by the way, I think maybe a lot of these people with near death experiences, well, they haven’t gone up into the highest heaven, they haven’t rejoined the Fullness, but they’ve gone to that in-between place, which is a dimension right between heaven and earth.

“’And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, (that’s an Old Testament reference) so it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up.’” And Jesus is called the Son of Man. It’s an aeonic designation. There are also Sons of Dogs, Sons of Cats, Sons of Birds, etc. But we are humans, and that’s who we’re talking about. So Jesus was the Son of Man, embodying the Christ. It’s a designation of the Aeons.

Quoting again, “’that everyone having faith in him, might have the life of the Age.’” Hart translates the word Aeon as Age, as if it were a period of time. I believe that’s an error. It can just as easily be translated as an ethereal being that is eternal. You know it works to say the Age, because that’s going to be the Age of Heaven, and here we are in the Age of Earth. But there’s no need to say that. We could just as easily say, “everyone having faith in the Son of Man might have the life of the Aeons.” Because we’re from the Aeons and we’re going to return to the Aeons. OK, now here comes John 3:16:

“For God so loved the cosmos as to give the Son, the only one, so that every one having faith in him might not perish but have the life of the Age.” (or the life of the Aeons.) “For God sent the Son into the cosmos not that he might pass judgment on the cosmos, but that the cosmos might be saved through him. Whoever has faith in him is not judged. Whoever has not had faith has already been judged because he has not had faith in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: that the light has come into the cosmos and men loved the darkness rather than the light, for their deeds were wicked. For everyone who does evil things hates the light and does not approach the light for fear his deeds will be exposed. But whoever acts in truth approaches the light, so that his deeds might be made manifest—that that they have been worked in God.”

It doesn’t say whoever professes faith in Jesus the Christ will be saved. It says, “whoever acts in truth approaches the light so that his deeds might be made manifest.” Either you want to live on the side of virtue and the Aeons, or you want to live on the side of vice and sin and the Demiurge and darkness. The light, the truth, the life, comes from above and sits at the top of our Self and everyone is born with it. We are all called those of the remembrance. And what is it we are remembering? We remember the Father above and the fact that we are 2nd order powers that are sent down into this fallen place in order to bring life and remembrance to the fallen material of this world. That’s all.

And if you don’t remember that now, you remember it as soon as you die. And the people who’ve had near death experiences, even if they’re not Christians, even if they never accepted Jesus, even if they thought they were an agnostic but were trying to do good in the world—were do-gooders. I know quite a few do-gooders—agnostics or people who call themselves atheists, who are do-gooders. That means they love virtue. They don’t remember God; they’re rejecting God. They’re rejecting Jesus. They’re rejecting the Christ. They’re rejecting the Christian religion. They’re rejecting the church. That’s all mistakes. That’s ignorance; that’s not evil. But they do good. They love virtue. They tell the truth. They help others. That’s the side of virtue. And so when they pass away, they will immediately recognize the love and life that envelops them there in the in-between place. And they’ll go,  Oh, wow! I was wrong about that, wasn’t I? But ohh man, I’m so glad it’s true. Take me away. Here we go!

That is quite a different thing than people who embrace the darkness—who love evil, who love vice. Being a victim of vice; being a victim of archons—that’s not the same thing as embracing it. The evil-doers are the people that tell us lies, knowing they’re telling lies. I don’t care if they’re politicians or religious leaders or your spouse. If they’re telling lies and they know they’re telling lies, that’s evil-doing. If they kill people, murderers, rapists. These are things that never make it onto the side of virtue. There’s no excuse for rape. There’s no excuse for murder. Period.

But even those people are going to heaven. They’re going to have a reckoning when they get to the other side. Remember, we’re going to have that 360 degree life review where everyone you have harmed, you’ll feel their pain. You’ll re-experience the harm that you did through their eyes and their hearts and their suffering. And that’s a hard thing to experience. But we will all experience that and you come out the other side cleansed because of the Christ. Because the Christ came and took all that pain upon itself on our behalf. Now, if you pass away and you already love Christ, or you already love the Father—let’s say you’re not a Christian, but you’re of some other religion and you worship the true God or a vision of the Father. There’s only one God Above All Gods. So if you’re worshipping the God Above All Gods in your heart, you have been redeemed already, and your bardo experience will be glorious, and you will be taken in. But everyone’s going to be redeemed because that’s the Christ’s job. The Christ came to redeem us all.

I’ll leave you with one final quote. This is from the book of Romans—the letter to the Romans in the New Testament, chapter 3, verse 19. “And we know that the Law, whatsoever it says, speaks to those within the Law so that every mouth may be stopped up and all the cosmos might become accountable to God.” (and that’s the Old Testament Law, all the thou Shalts) “For all flesh will be vindicated before him, not by observances. For through law—full knowledge of sin. But now God’s justice has been manifested apart from the Law. Being attested by the Law and the prophets, And by the faithfulness of [Jesus], the Anointed, God’s justice is for everyone [as well as upon everyone] keeping faith; for there is no distinction: For all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, Being made upright as a gift by his grace through the manumission fee paid in the Anointed One, Jesus: Whom God sent forth as a place of atonement through faith in his blood, as a demonstration of his justice through the dismissal of past sins. In God’s clemency—for the demonstration of his justice in the present season—that he might be just and show him who is of Jesus’s faith to be upright. Where, therefore, the boasting? It has been excluded. By what law? That of observances? No, rather by faith’s law. For we reckon a man is vindicated by faithfulness, apart from observances of Law. The God of Judeans only, and not also of Gentiles? Yes, of Gentiles also, Since the God who both vindicates ‘Circumcision’ from faith and ‘Foreskin’ by faith is one. Do we then abolish Law through faith? Let it not be so! Rather, we establish it.”

By the way, this talk of circumcision and foreskins is odd to our modern ears. But it was a source of contention in the early church because the Jews were required to be circumcised as a display of faith in God and a metaphor of cutting worldly memes away from the soul. When Gentiles joined the Jews as followers of Jesus, some elders felt they also needed to be circumcised according to Old Testament Law, but other elders argued that Christians are freed from the Law since the Christ had paid the price for  their shortcomings.

And that’s religious talk, isn’t it? But it means we are not vindicated, i.e. we are not reconciled to the purity of God—(for you know, only the pure to go to heaven)—it is not through our doing, but Christ’s alone, that we are purified. That’s all that means. We are not vindicated through the Law, which means through observances, through rituals; we are pardoned through faith. And either you have that faith now or you’ll discover the faith one way or another—the easy way or the hard way—after you pass away. I actually invite you to join me, now, in faith.

Well, that’s all for today. God bless us all. God blesses us all. Onward and upward.

We’re nearing completion of the publication process for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. This will be a large, fully explanatory edition that lays out the gnostic cosmology from start to finish, with full color illustrations throughout. They have set the price around $30. I’m keeping my royalties to a minimum in order to lower the sales price for you. There is currently an inexpensive, black and white edition that I published myself that is available here if you can’t afford $30 or don’t want to wait to read it. The color edition will be available very soon.

And, in the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which was pre-gnostic gospel for me, I didn’t have a clear way to separate non-living material from living material. In my early diagrams, the hierarchy is a straight flow upward from the subatomic particles, on up through life, on up through cells. But, whereas in the gnostic gospel interpretation, there is a clear break provided to us by the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, there’s a clear break between the mud—that being the material that is not alive—and the meat—that being all of us animals, all of us creatures, everything that’s alive. Whether it’s a plant or a single celled organism or a human, every living creature is different in kind than the purely material objects. And the material objects are the subatomic particles, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the aggregates of minerals on up to the hard rocky bodies, like comets and planets. According to the Tripartite Tractate, these are not alive. The bodies themselves are part of the Fall. They are the dead byproduct of the Fall. They don’t think; they have no consciousness.

What does have consciousness is the ego of the Demiurge, and so, at least here in our cosmos that we are familiar with, every material object that is not considered living, such as rocks and sand, well, those are extensions of the Demiurge. Those are extensions like a puppet master and strings, right? They are the Demiurge’s extensions of its consciousness, and it is not fully conscious because it is lacking the One’s Self that comes from above. Its One Self fled, that being the Aeon known as Logos. So, Logos and its ego have become separated and it’s its ego that has constructed this material cosmos in which we dwell. Whereas Logos itself, the Aeon Logos, fled back up to the Fullness.

Anyway, this is a long preamble to what we’re trying to actually get to here, and if all of this was just gobbledygook to you, you need to back up and become familiar with some of the terminology from the gnostic gospel that I present here. So I will put a link to a more basic type of introduction to these concepts right here in the transcript to this podcast.

Back to the Scientific American article. It’s called Brains Are Not Required When It Comes to Thinking and Solving Problems, Simple Cells Can Do It. And the subtitle is Tiny clumps of cells show basic cognitive abilities, and some animals can remember things after losing their heads. So, what this article is about is a new branch of cognitive science called basal cognition, and they are coming to believe that the brain is not required for thinking. Well, that has been a tenet of the Simple Explanation going back 15 to 20 years now. The brain is not the origin of thought or consciousness, it’s merely like a radio that tunes it in. Your neurons are not where memories live. The memories are outside of us. What the neurons do is grow in response to the stimulus of those externalized thoughts, and some scientists are coming to recognize that fact now. They fought this all along. Most scientists, including most cognitive scientists who study the brain, keep looking for places in the brain where the memories live. But these basal cognition scientists now realize that the memory doesn’t live in the brain.

And by the way, to skip to the conclusion of the article—where the memories reside as far as they are concerned is in the electromagnetic grid that the creature emits or dwells in. Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist who has for a long time been an outcast in the scientific community because he’s been saying that all along. His research and his books are about how our thoughts and our relationships with one another exist in a field around us and a field in between us. Like between two people who have love for each other, there’s a sort of a rubber band, I think he described it. A rubber band stretching between them, which is an electromagnetic field that keeps them connected.

So, let me read you some of the main points out of this article, and then I’ll make comments on it as we go by. The article begins with a description of the research that a scientist named Michael Levin has done, and he studies planaria worms. The neat thing about planaria worms is that if you cut them in half, the head half will grow a new tail and the tail half will grow a new head. And, they are genetically identical to one another as clones. Now the interesting thing is that even though you chop off the head and the tail grows a new head, that new head knows everything that the old head knew. And this is a form of proof that the memories and knowledge that were contained in that planaria worm didn’t live in the head. They were somehow living in the entire worm. That’s groundbreaking research, believe it or not. Quoting from the article,

“Until recently, most scientists held that true cognition arrived with the first brains half a billion years ago. Without intricate clusters of neurons, behavior was merely a kind of reflex, [and that is what most people still think]. But Levin and several other researchers believe otherwise. He doesn’t deny that brains are awesome paragons of computational speed, and power. But he sees the differences between cell clumps and brains as ones of degree, not kind. In fact, Levin suspects that cognition probably evolved as cells started to collaborate and carry out the incredibly difficult task of building complex organisms, and then got souped up into brains to allow animals to move and think faster.”

OK, pause now. I’ll rerun, soon, my episodes concerning evolution because I don’t think evolution works that way. Evolution clearly does not work by things happening in the way that Darwinian evolution says they happen, that this works out well for an organism, so more of that organism survives, and then they breed, and now all of that organism is like that one that was successful. That’s the way Darwinism works.

What I claim is that the patterns are inherent. The patterns come from above. They are in fact from the Aeons of the Fullness. They are aeonic that way, and these patterns are brought down with the creatures that instantiate them. We are all born with our aeonic pattern intact, and it has nothing to do with evolution down here. And, by the way, it can look like things are evolving, but that’s simply because we 2nd Order Powers were sent down one by one, from the simplest to the more complex. It even says that in the Tripartite Tractate. You know, that book is over 2,000 years old and how it can describe such things is really phenomenal. So yes, maybe the oceans were populated with single celled animals at first and then the jellyfish and whatnot, but then that’s because they were the ones that were first sent down from the Fullness. In my opinion, they did not evolve from each other. There’s no clear links between species and types of organisms in the way that Darwinism claimed, and they still haven’t found any. So, although Levin is working with these planaria to show that the thoughts don’t reside in the brain, he still thinks that they evolve from clumps of cells. I don’t think so. Back to the article.

“That position is being embraced by researchers in a variety of disciplines, including roboticists such as Josh Bongard, a frequent Levin collaborator who runs the Morphology, Evolution and Cognition Laboratory at the University of Vermont. Quoting Bongard, ‘Well, brains were one of the most recent inventions of Mother Nature, the thing that came last,’ says Bongard, who hopes to build deeply intelligent machines from the bottom up. He says, ‘it’s clear that the body matters, and then somehow you add neuronal cognition on top. It’s the cherry on the sundae, it’s not the sundae.’”

OK. Well, isn’t that funny? They even used the expression bottom up. Now, if you’ve been with Gnostic Insights for any amount of time, you realize that the bottom up is demiurgic. The bottom up is what I was describing in my preamble there. That’s your particles, atoms, molecules, elements, etcetera. Bongard still thinks that the cognition grows out of the bottom up development. And since he is a roboticist, he’s going to build clever enough machinery out of molecules and elements that’s going to pop out cognition. It’s not going to happen, because cognition and consciousness comes from the top down. And you see, he said in this paragraph I just read you that somehow you had neuronal cognition on top. Well, yeah, on top somehow. That is the Holy Spirit of God coming down and attaching to the material. But it’s not going to happen at the whim of a roboticist.

Carrying on now,

“In recent years, interest in basal cognition has exploded as researchers have recognized example after example of surprisingly sophisticated intelligence at work across life’s kingdoms, no brain required. For artificial intelligence scientists such as Bongard, basal cognition offers an escape from the trap of assuming that future intelligences must mimic the brain-centric human model. For medical specialists, there are tantalizing hints of ways to awaken cells’ innate powers of healing and regeneration.”

And, yeah, I’ll give them that. On the medical side, and again, jumping to the big conclusion at the end of the Scientific American article—the patterns reside more in the electromagnetic sphere than they do in the material. We can rule out the material; they do not exist in the atoms themselves, but the pattern of electricity that surrounds a cell does contain its aeonic memory. It’s possible that the DNA double Helix is the basic antenna that brings in the cognition from the Fullness.

But what they are discovering is that, and this is coming from the end of the Scientific American article, if you stimulate tissue with even a digitally copied “memory” or electromagnetic pattern and apply it to tissue that never had that electromagnetic pattern, the tissue will take on that pattern. It will become cognitively identical, you could say, to the thing that was copied. But you see, we’re still talking about imitations, aren’t we? The Tripartite Tractate refers to the fallen world as the imitation and the deficiency. And so, if you take a living cell and you copy its electromagnetic signature and then apply it to a dead cell, what do you have? You don’t have a living cell. What you have is a zombie. Right? A ghoul. It’ll be moving around and replicating that first cell, but it’s not a truly living creature because it has not come down from the Fullness. It doesn’t have the spark of the life of God in it. It is a copy. It’s an imitation in the manner of a reflection—a very good one at the electromagnetic scale. Now, what I’m saying  is scriptural according to the Tripartite Tractate, I’m not just spinning theories here. And if you read my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, it’s all laid out step by step very carefully. The book is almost 300 pages long. It’s as careful and logical and simple, though complex, as you could want it to be, and I do explain everything fully. Back to the article.

“And for the philosophically minded,” it says, and that would be us, “basal cognition casts the world in a sparkling new light. Maybe thinking builds from a simple start. Maybe it is happening all around us every day in forms we haven’t recognized because we don’t know what to look for. Maybe minds are everywhere.”

And we would say, yes, of course they are. All 2nd Order creatures embody the Fullness of God. Back to the article. I’m jumping; this is not the entire article. It’s in order, but I’m skipping.

“Plants can sense their surroundings surprisingly well. They know whether they are being shaded by part of themselves or by something else. They can detect the sound of running water (and will grow toward it) and of bees’ wings (and will produce nectar in preparation). They know when they are being eaten by bugs and will produce nasty defense chemicals in response. They even know when their neighbors are under attack: when scientists played a recording of munching caterpillars to a cress plant, that was enough for the plant to send a surge of mustard oil into its leaves. Plants’ most remarkable behavior tends to get underappreciated because we see it every day. They seem to know exactly what form they have and plan their future growth based on the sights, sounds, and smells around them, making complicated decisions about where future resources and dangers might be located in ways that can’t be boiled down to simple formulas. As Paco Calvo, director of the Minimal Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Murcia in Spain and author of Planta Sapiens, puts it, “Plants have to plan ahead to achieve goals, and to do so, they need to integrate vast pools of data. They need to engage with their surroundings adaptively and proactively, and they need to think about the future. They just couldn’t afford to do otherwise.”

And, of course, you realize that me saying plants are 2nd Order creatures—all living things are 2nd Order creatures—so plants embody the Fullness of God, just like we do. They’re Aeons. Quoting the article again,

“The orthodox view of memory is that it is stored as a stable network of synaptic connections among neurons in the brain. That view is clearly cracking. Levine says some of the demolition work has come from the lab of neuroscientist David Glanzman of the University of California, Los Angeles. Glanzman was able to transfer a memory of an electric shock from one sea slug to another by extracting RNA from the brains of shocked slugs and injecting it into the brains of new slugs. The recipients then remembered to recoil from the touch that preceded the shock. If RNA can be a medium of memory storage, any cell might have the ability, not just neurons.”

OK, time out a second. Let’s hope this doesn’t get us banned. However, RNA and mNRA, anyone? Let’s just leave it at this: don’t believe the line that says that mNRA do not carry inherent changes to your DNA and to your hylic structure, to your body. People are being amended. Let’s leave it at that. Back to the article,

“Levin’s research has always had tangible applications such as cancer therapy, limb regeneration, and wound healing. But over the past few years he’s allowed a philosophical current to enter his papers and talks. ‘It’s been a sort of slow rollout,’ he confesses. ‘I’ve had these ideas for decades, but it wasn’t the right time to talk about it,’ he says.”

[Of course, I’ve had these ideas too, and I’ve been talking about them for decades.] Quoting the article,

“That began to change with the celebrated 2019 paper entitled The Computational Boundary of a Self in which he harnessed the results of his experiments to argue that we are all collective intelligences built out of smaller, highly competent problem-solving agents. As Vermont’s Bongard told the New York Times, ‘What we are is intelligent machines made of intelligent machines made of intelligent machines all the way right down.’”

OK, I’m going to stop quoting here now because I think it’s leading people astray at this point. Now, as you can hear, they’re still making the basic error that materialist scientists make, and that is equating our consciousness now to machines. Oh yeah, we’re no longer consciousness in neuronal structures. Now we’re machines. That’s right, but we’re not machines. Machines are demiurgic. Machines are built by the Demiurge. You see, the Demiurge cannot control living matter, it is out of his purview. Try as the Demiurge might, it cannot bring things to life. It can only, at the closest, make simulations and imitations of living things. Living things are called the 2nd Order of Powers. We are a Power that comes from the Aeons above. All living things—whether it’s these planaria or whether it’s the slime molds, whether it’s plants, whether it’s animals, whether it’s us—we are living creatures that embody the Aeons of the Fullness. We have aeonic inheritance. We are not imitations of the Aeons. We are the embodiment of the Aeons, just as Jesus was not an imitation of the Christ, Jesus was an embodiment of the Christ Aeon, fully and completely.

Life comes into the universe at the cellular level, not the atomic. The Demiurge has the power to dispel the quantum chaos and bring order to the mud, but much to its chagrin it cannot control the meat. That’s why the Demiurge, who is the God of the Old Testament stories, the Demiurge controls through laws and edicts, and demands absolute and strict adherence to the law. When Jesus came, he said he did not come to dispel the law, he came to fulfill it. We are no longer under the law. Those who believe in the Judeo-Christian lineage are no longer under the law of the Demiurge, is what it’s saying. We get our inspiration directly from the Fullness of God, directly from above. And because we are 2nd Order Powers that are sent down from the Fullness, we carry within us a perfect fractal of the Fullness of God. That is what, in other circles, even New Age circles and those outside of New Age, because this is not New Age, folks, this is thousands of years old—they call that the One, this fractal of the Fullness of God that we carry within us. That’s what’s referred to as the One with a capital O. We also, in Gnostic Insights, call it the Self with a capital S.  And we use the capital letters to indicate the holiness and reverence we have for the Father above.

Living organisms develop through the pattern of the Fullness above, as directed by Logos because we are actual fractals of Logos and our powers do not come from the Fall or fractals of the Demiurge. The fallen fractals of the ego of Logos comprise the material level only—from the bottom up. But we of the remembrance, what is called the psychical, psyche for psychological, for mind—we are the psychical. We are the thought-filled part. We come from the top down.

Therefore, we can conclude that the roboticists are not going to be able to stimulate, even if it’s made from cells, even if they take cells away from a creature; they’ve been using frog cells for this purpose—they take the cells out of the creature, which removes it from the overall structure of the frog. Now it only has the overall structure of the cell of the frog, and this is why what are called organoids can’t be stimulated to become frogs again. Once you remove a cell from the creature that you removed it from, as scientists have been trying to take, let’s say, brain or heart cells out of living creatures, the heart cell may still beat because it’s inherent in the heart cell to contract and expand. That is something a heart cell knows how to do without being embedded in the larger heart. But when you take that heart cell away from the heart or that brain cell away from the brain, you’ve decreased their scope of influence to the cellular level. And no matter how many of those removed cells you put in a Petri dish or you smear across the surface of a 3D printout of a brain or 3D printout of a heart, they never do level up to the organ or to the organism. All they can do is just be gigantic clumps of beating heart cells or gigantic clumps of, God bless them, brain cells that have cognition but they’re just pinging around amongst themselves, probably saying, What the Hell’s going on here? And they are to be pitied like lab rats. They are to be pitied, these organoids, but they’re not going to level up. They’re not going to become walking around homunculi. (A Homunculus is a man-like creature, a thing that looks like a human.) The robots are not going to come to life. In Battlestar Galactica, remember, the Cylons had developed living Cylons that were cellular overlays on top of machinery. That isn’t going to make them humans. I don’t even think they’ll become Cylons in the future.

OK, I’ve been pinging all over the place. This might seem like a very disjointed episode, but if you’ve been with me for a while, I think you’ll follow. Please leave me some comments, saying, Oh my God Cyd, this was over the top, or whatever. OK, tell me that you get it or not. I’ll put links in here to important previous episodes and articles on organoids leveling up and whether or not robots can become alive or AI will ever gain true consciousness. I’ve discussed all this at length previously, and also it can all be found in the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. The official Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel should be available in its full color, glorious form any day now.

OK. Thanks for spending this time with me. God bless us all. Onward and upward.

We’re nearing completion of the publication process for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. This will be a large, fully explanatory edition that lays out the gnostic cosmology from start to finish, with full color illustrations throughout. They have set the price around $30. I’m keeping my royalties to a minimum in order to lower the sales price for you. There is currently an inexpensive, black and white edition that I published myself that is available here if you can’t afford $30 or don’t want to wait to read it. The color edition will be available very soon.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today’s episode is an interview with one of your fellow listeners to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Her name is Hathaway Jane.

Hathaway wrote to me saying how much the Gnostic Insights episodes have meant to her. She’s also purchased and read A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything and A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, and she has some very kind words to say about how meaningful they have been to her. She said she’d like to talk to me on the phone and I suggested that we go ahead and do it as a public interview so that we can share her growth and her path with everyone else here.

Hathaway has studied Jungian analysis independently for many years now. For the past 15 years, she’s studied Carl Jung’s writing, particularly the Red Book and the Black Book, and then all of the other books that Jung wrote, as she says in the interview. And I find this remarkable because Jung is not easy to read, and Hathaway did this with a high school education at the time. She’s now attending university and she is in her last year of college studies. After she graduates from the university she wants to attend the Pacifica Graduate Institute in order to become a Jungian analyst. She studied Carl Jung independently through the Center for Applied Jungian Studies, which you can find on the Internet, and she’s also part of the Philemon Foundation. So let’s hear Hathaway’s journey.

Cyd: Hey, Hathaway.

Hathaway: Yes, how are you?

Cyd: I’m just fine this morning. How are you?

Hathaway: I’m good.

Cyd: It’s so nice to hear your voice. Welcome to the program. Thank you so much for being here.

Hathaway: Oh, no problem. I think your book is incredible. I’m not kidding. I mean, I have told you in my life I lived through my ego self 100% and I definitely had different personas that I put on for my family, so-called friends, people I thought were my friends. And it’s strange because I think I told you from 16 to about 29 I was an addict. And every day I wake up and I feel so incredibly blessed, just because, seriously, I mean, I know how hard it is. I know that. I honestly I shouldn’t be here—like there were a few times that came real close to not being here. And, my life was such a crazy mess, I can’t even explain. I got sober and I still was just in something inside me. Just was like this child that—this is what I’ve always felt this way—I’ve always felt like off. I don’t know to explain it really. Like I wasn’t like the other kids. I was an only child and spent a lot of time alone, and just went through some experiences that I would never wish upon anybody.

And I made it out and I see so many people who don’t. I mean, right now our country is in the middle of an opiate crisis, which nobody talks about. And it’s just like, what is going on here? And I honestly do believe that everything that’s going on here is a spiritual matter. And so I started with Carl Jung. And I don’t know if you know a lot about Jung, but Carl Jung, his whole life—he started writing the Red Book, and this was his own personal notes and all these beautiful mandalas that he drew. And then he built himself like little—it wasn’t that little, but it’s quite big. It’s at Bollingen. They called the Little Castle. And this castle, it’s so symbolic. He built it because of his dream. Because one day Jung said to himself, I’m 40 years old. He’s like, what is this? I don’t want to go to cocktail parties. This is stupid. He’s like, I have everything I need. I have more money than I could ever want. I’m successful. I’ve known. He’s like, this isn’t life. There has to be something beyond this. And he started asking himself, do I know my soul?

And he went through this whole transformation where he literally was, like, begging his soul to speak to him. And his soul did in his dreams. Now I don’t have dreams like that. So Jung has another way of doing it, which is called active imagination. I do mine through a learnt meditation, where I go to a trance level. But, after reading the Red Book I got very involved in CAJS—which the Center for Applied Jungian Studies. And my first teacher was a man by the name of Shane Eynon. He’s a psychoanalyst. He’s incredible. Like, I was so blessed. And for the first time in my life, I was just, like, it just, it really did, it smacked me in the face. And I was like, Oh my gosh. And then I was like, Oh my gosh! Because then I thought, I am out here racking up credit card debt to buy stuff I don’t need. Like, I am living in this illusion, and that’s a very weird thing to experience.

Cyd: Now, how long after you had become sober did you discover the Jungians?

Hathaway: Probably about 10 years after I’d been sober. And, during those 10 years, I wasn’t a nice person. I judged people—the friends I hung out with. It was just like there was this narrative and nobody knew any different. And so we just all followed this narrative. And I grew up in a very small town. So all those 10 years, I always felt there has to be something more than this. Like, this can’t be life. I have to grow old talking about this kind of stuff. And doing the same thing every weekend. I mean, don’t get me wrong—if that’s what you love to do, go do it. But it just wasn’t for me.

And I picked up Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche.  And Nietzsche, he mentioned Jung and some further reading. And I was like, who’s Jung? And so, I like Jung. And I was reading about this man. And I’m like, oh, my gosh, this man thinks like I do. And I bought the Red Book, the Black Book, and every book Jung ever wrote. And that’s all of them.

Cyd: So, right off the bat, you jumped straight into Jung. Wow. Because, you didn’t go to college, right?

Hathaway: I didn’t. No, not at that time. I have three years of college now; I only have one year left. And this is why—I think you called it synchronicity. And it definitely applies at that time to your book. Because I just was like, oh, my gosh! When I read your book, I immediately called my husband and I was like, Steven, I don’t think you understand how important this book is, I said to him. And he cannot get enough of it. He is just, like, blown away.

Cyd: Well, well, that that’s really great to hear.

Hathaway: I mean really, Cyd, how? I don’t know how you did it. I mean, I feel like God went right through you and just let you write away.

Cyd: Well, I kind of think that’s how it happens because 15 or 20 years ago, when I discovered my theory of everything, which is the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, that’s the secular version, that’s the sciency mathy version. And then, it was like 15 years after that, I discovered the gnostic, the Nag Hammadi, and the Tripartite Tractate. And I already had my superstructure in my mind, really firmly by that time. The Simple Explanation is a really nice frame to interpret just everything. That’s why it’s called: of Absolutely Everything. And by the way, when I wrote the Simple Explanation, I didn’t sit down to write it. Now, I don’t necessarily believe in channeling and that kind of thing, but what I sat down to write was a play based upon my dissertation, which is the trial of the California midwife. And instead of writing the California midwife play, boom, here come the principles from the Simple Explanation. I wrote the Simple Explanation in about two days, so obviously it was led by God.

Hathaway: That is all amazing. That is so amazing. And that’s when I picked up your book. I was like, you know, the Red Book is basically another version of your book. But it’s very, very difficult. Jung did this on purpose because you gotta remember back when—he was born in 1875. So back in that time, his biggest fear was being called a mystic. Yeah, I mean, it would have destroyed him. People back then had a very different mindset. And, you know, Jung’s Red Book did not come out till 2009. And when he was dying, he said, this book is not for this age. And when I die, he said don’t you dare publish it. He’s like, at least wait 20-30 years.

If somebody wouldn’t have wrote it down, I would be in such a different place. And I really do believe that life is supposed to be enjoyed, and I feel like the narrative out there is so opposite. I mean, honestly, I stopped watching TV eight years ago. And ever since I’ve been back at my mom’s, and she has that TV on. It’s like looking through 20 veils. And I’m like, oh my gosh, you can really see what and how they push it and the biases and everything. And I’m just like—that box is called the Idiot box. But I think it’s funny that it’s called tell a vision. Because it’s telling you a vision.

Cyd: Right. And it’s not a nice vision.

Hathaway: No, and a lot of it is very controlled. It’s like it’s just the same regurgitation of everything that’s always been there. I see the dumbing-down of America. And I see friends whom I have, who work themselves to near death to buy all these things that they don’t end up using. I mean, it’s about literally what neighbor’s, you know, boat’s bigger; who has a nicer car. And I’m just like, I can’t play that game. Like, there’s so much more out there.

You know, I did notice that my mom had that television on. I was like, mom, just look at what they’re like. She was like, ohh, my gosh. She’s like, I never really realized it that way. It’s just interesting. I don’t know. It’s the narrative. It really is. It’s the collective unconscious you don’t talk a lot about. You have your consciousness, and then there’s the collective unconscious. And the collective unconscious has been around since man has been around. And that’s in our DNA. Neil deGrasse Tyson—you know I love how he always says we’re all made of Stardust, but I wish he would elaborate on that. Because I think people don’t really understand or pick that up or really are able to picture it—that all are connected through energy in a very serious way. Yeah. And it’s not recognized. I mean, it is in some religions in some countries, but not in this country.

Cyd: Well, now, do you think that there is a malevolent force that is purposely enslaving people?

Hathaway: I do. Our government’s one of them.

Cyd: Everybody’s government. Government.

Hathaway: I know, I said, every government is one of them. I do believe that. Gosh, I’ve traveled a lot and I’m glad I did that when I was younger. Going to other countries and seeing how other people live was probably one of the best things I ever did. Just because, when you grow up in America, you take your piece of clay and you just get formed very easily into this mindset of this is life. And this is how you do it. And this is where you go and what you do. And I just was like, this isn’t.

My sister and I met up in Tibet, and when I was there those monks just blew my mind. It really showed me a different side of life—that there was nothing material and they were probably some of the happiest people I’ve ever met. And, you know, and it’s like they’re very isolated but fascinating. I remember one of them said to me, he’s like, you have so many superpowers that have been taken away from you. He’s like, you don’t even know how many powers you actually have. And, at the time, I was kind of like, I kind of get it. You know, I’m like, OK. And what I’m wondering, is what does he mean by that?

And then, when I met a specific group of people who… I have a very, very good teacher who has taught Eastern and Western mysteries by two Masters in the East and two Masters in the West. And there is actually kind of a playbook. And the thing that’s really hard about the Western mysteries and the Eastern mysteries is there’s kind of a belief in that community that they don’t ever find you. You find them. And if you find them then then it’s meant to be.

Cyd: Yeah, seek and ye shall find.

Hathaway: Yes, that’s a very hard belief. So like once I found my teacher, I was taught how to do Ascension prayer, which is a specific kind of prayer. And at first he doesn’t tell you why. Or he’s like here, this is what you just need to do. But now, after a year and a half, I understand fully why. But he never tells you the answers to anything because you have to find it. You have to find it for yourself, because if he tells you, then you’re, you know, it’s biased. He’s like, my experiences aren’t going to be your experiences. He’s like, so he’s like, he’s very cut and dry. Like I’ll give you, you know, the stuff to do and you do it and that’s when things really changed.

For about a year and a half ago, because I had just come out of this situation that was really—I just had a really bad experience with the people in my neighborhood. I had two pit bulls and they all hated my dogs and thought they were just these vicious dogs and they weren’t. One was a service dog for my husband, a federal service dog. And my husband has been gone and I had the both dogs myself and the neighborhood—I didn’t know had, like, a gossip little page or whatever, and they were saying some of the dogs got attacked or whatever. And I found this page and I think that’s why everybody left and right was calling Animal Control on me. And I’m like, what’s going on? And so I found this page and then it was too late. Because the guy who was the Animal Patrol officer was so persistent that he ended up telling me, if you don’t kill those dogs, I am, and he just marked them as extremely dangerous dogs. He’s like, now you have to go to court and all this stuff. And I had to move out and I was like in a situation and I had to put my dogs down.

Cyd: No! By the way, were they running wild or were they out of the yard? I mean, what? What was their claim against them?

Hathaway: No, no, no, no, no. Pitbulls. They didn’t like them. Yep. Just the breed. Period. Period. Lady’s dog got attacked in the neighborhood and some gossip started and for six months, and I have screenshots of this, that she erased it the minute I found it. Because we’re taking you all to court. The office was like, that’s not a service dog. And I showed him all the military papers. I’m, this is my husband’s service dog. I’m like, this dog has been, I think this dog is like, seriously, a $20,000 dog who’s been trained to, on command, to sit and stay in one spot. And we can walk away and for an hour he’ll be sitting there. Like, yeah. Your service dogs are trained. You can’t have a wild service dog.

Cyd: Yeah, of course.

Hathaway: They were so insistent, and this lady’s like, my dogs got attacked. And somebody in the neighborhood was like, it had to have been those pit bulls. And I found their little website. And I said, I went on there and I said, I’m so sorry you think it was my dogs. Unfortunately, that evening I was in Hutchinson, Minnesota, and I have it on the phone. And I mean that was really traumatizing.

Cyd: Oh, I’ll say.

Hathaway: I mean, our dogs are our kids.

Cyd: Well, absolutely, I love my animals so much.

Hathaway: Oh my gosh, I know.

Cyd: I love animals. My whole life, I’ve always preferred animals to people to tell you the truth, yeah.

Hathaway: I agree. Mark Twain said that, too. I remember he was like, I think I prefer my dogs to my friends. Yeah. That was a period in life where I could make a choice. I could either break down, freak out. Yeah, do all the things that I used to do, or I could sit down with my self and say, I don’t know why this is happening, but it’s happening for a reason and I don’t know why. And that’s exactly what happened.

It doesn’t excuse what they did, but I understand now. I don’t believe that there’s coincidences in life. I just don’t. I don’t believe that. You know, people are like, why does bad stuff happen? And I’m like, I don’t think bad stuff happens. I just think we look at it as bad. And we handle it that way. And we don’t ever look into the future at all. Like, why. You know? And I didn’t. I reached into my soul and I at that time I did not believe in God. I came from a Lutheran family. My grandma was very religious. But I never believed in a higher power.

And I’ll never forget, as I had to put my dogs down, one night, my heart hurt so bad. And I just said, I was like, God, please forgive me for all the things I’ve done in life. And I was like, I need to know you’re here and that you’re real. And all of a sudden I saw God and the most overwhelming feeling of love and light and warmth filled my body. This is an experience I will never forget. And I saw God. And I didn’t see him like standing there. It wasn’t like my eyes were seeing, but I could see in my mind this presence, and it was thick. And it was so warm. And it was so loving. And it was just pure love. And at that very moment my entire life changed drastically. I was already into Jung. I had already worked on myself. But that was real. That was so real. I mean, I remember I called my mom and my dad the next day, and my dad hadn’t passed away yet. And I was like, Dad, I saw God. I’m like, Dad, I said. I’m like, Dad, Dad, Dad! And my dad was, like, so happy because he’s—my whole life I always would joke around. I’d be, like, some hippie smoking somewhere wrote the Bible. You know, I was like, who knows who wrote that thing, you know? And I used to joke around about it, sarcastic with my dad. And he was like, you really don’t believe? And I was like, no. And I didn’t. I wanted to. It’s just I felt like my life had had so much tragedy in it and so much chaos.

And then I realized, yeah, it did. But all of that needed to happen in order for me to be able to know God on a personal level. Or Christ. I don’t really have like names that I put to them. I know some people have a really big problem with the word God because they’ve had bad experiences. So I will tell people sometimes, so like they’re, I don’t know if I can go there. And I’ll be like, don’t go there. I’m like, think of something that has loved you unconditionally, even it’s with a pet, which most people end up picking. And I say to them, now, take that pet’s name and make a little name for that pet. And just for now, we’ll call that your star word. And take your star word and that’s God. And pray to that because you are praying to God. He doesn’t have to have the name God. And I found out that that really helps a lot of people because like I said, the word God has been just shoved into so many different areas and…

Cyd: Well the definition of God—it’s memes. Those are human memes. Those aren’t God. And so people have negative associations to all of these memes that they’ve been taught is God. But it’s not God. So it’s just fine to peel off that label and just be open to the transcendent, to the highest. I was talking to a lady yesterday and she calls it the Source.

Hathaway: Yeah. And a lot of people I know call it the Source. So I did. And my name was Zoabi because my dog’s names were Zoe and Abi.

Cyd: Your dog’s name was Zoe?

Hathaway: Zoe. Yeah. Zoe. It’s Zoe and Abi. Yeah.

Cyd: One of my dog’s names is Zoe!

Hathaway: Are you kidding me? Oh my gosh. Do you know in Hebrew that means river?

Cyd: I think it means life.

Hathaway: It’s that river, like life, totally. The running river of life.

Cyd: Yes, and now that we’re Gnostic, it’s the river of life that’s flowing down from the Source and through the Fullness and into us.

Hathaway: That is so crazy that our dogs have the same name, and Abi means the Father like, you know, in Hebrew it’s, you know, Abraham. Father like. So our dogs have the same name. Oh my gosh.

Yeah. And when I do talk to people and people are like, well, I don’t get it; explain Jung to me. And I’m like, you got 10 hours? You know, it’s hard. It’s hard sometimes when people ask me, what are you doing? Like, what are you going to school for? And when I tell them I’m going to school to be a Jungian analyst. So, like, what is that? And I’m like, well, you know what therapy is right? And they’re like, yeah. And I’m like, well, it’s like that. But it’s totally not that. I mean, it’s a commitment. It’s a four year commitment.

When you have had trauma in your life, it messes with everything. It messes down to your cells. Down to the atoms in your body, all the way to the way you think and function and see life. And I see so many people who have been so traumatized that most of them either drink themselves out of it or they use some kind of substance. They got some kind of niche that just belongs to them. Anything to not feel that or think about it, or even address it. And I think we really believe in this country that a lot of people have suffered a lot of trauma and it’s not spoken about.

Cyd: Well, you know, it’s not only the trauma of your family or your relationships that you know in life. It’s the trauma of this fake culture that we were talking about. This uh, well, I don’t know what to call it other than this fake culture that we’re being programmed into and it’s trying to…

Hathaway: Keeping up with the Jones thing.

Cyd: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it’s jamming a square peg into our round holes. And it that is not what it’s meant to be and that’s why people are so unhappy, because you can’t replace the spirit with materialism.

Hathaway: No, no. I know people who are millionaires and they’re miserable. And I know people are like, ohh, if I had money. I’m like, no, it wouldn’t be better. You would have the same problems. Like, that doesn’t solve anything, you know?

And I remember—so, growing up, I was huge into hip hop and rap and my sister worked for BMG in Chicago at the time. And Notorious BIG had just been killed. And I’ll never forget that era. And then into the years 2006, especially 2006. In the African American community, there was so much chaos going on and there was so much being pushed. And it was done by the record companies and they were like, hey, if you’re not gangster rapping, we don’t wanna hear about.

For real, they were like, I mean, cause when rap first came out, there was a lot of like tribal, and Quest is very positive rap. But literally, they had a huge executive meeting with like five of the biggest labels and they were like, look, you weren’t gangster rapping. We don’t want to hear it.

Cyd: Oh, wow. So let’s just spread negativity as far and wide as we can.

Hathaway: Yeah, let’s push, you know, gangs and bloods and crypts. And, you know, because I hung out with a lot of those people were my friends, I watched it. And now I can look and be like, oh my gosh. To witness that. To witness how something so small, how something as beautiful as poetry, right? And for executives to take it and literally say, well, it better be gangster, you know, it better be hard. Or we’re just gonna ignore you. And for a long time, it was that way. I want to say until Kanye West came out. Leave it to Kanye to bridge more.

Cyd: Yeah, Kanye, right. And of course, by the way, the same thing is happening, you don’t watch television. I happen to watch too much television, but the streaming services—that they are becoming more and more perverse with, you know, pretty much with every show that they issue. It’s just going down and down and down. It’s awful.

Hathaway: See, that’s why I just can’t watch. Like, seriously, I can’t watch it. Like, my mom watches the soap opera. I mean, I get it. She likes it. Whatever. But I’m just like, yeah, Mom, you do know that this is, like, the farthest thing from reality, right? She’s like, yes, I do. But I even see it, you know, sometimes when I do see the TV, if I’m at somebody’s house and like a politician is on, I just am aghast at like, what? The things that come out of their mouths cause I’m, like, oh my gosh. I’m like, really? I just, I don’t know.

Cyd: Well, politicians are special class of human. I mean, they have to be power driven. Obviously they’re power driven and so that’s just that’s the baseline of that. It’s all ego. Hey, so…

Hathaway. Yeah, all ego.

Cyd: You were talking about in the first part of your life, you were driven by ego, and now I imagine the inverse of that, just that you’re being driven by or seeking or being guided by, let’s say, love and compassion and spirit.

Hathaway: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. Every day, I mean, I wake up every day and I never… you know, Jung said something that resonated with me. And I’ll never forget it when I read it and this was like five years ago. He was like, the moment a patient walks in the door, if I have any judgment, I might as well tell them to walk out and go away. And I’m like, oh, my God, he’s right. And, you know, humans judge in three seconds. That’s how long we take to judge somebody. It just blows your mind—in three seconds, like psychologically, that’s how quickly we judge someone. So I’ve had to train my brain. And it’s strange. But, when I meet people. I don’t take that approach. And I can’t take it because I’ve trained myself out of it. So it doesn’t matter what you look like or where you come from. That’s not it. It’s your soul that I care about.

Cyd: Yeah, but do  you judge their soul? I mean, do you think, ohh they’re spiritual or ohh, they’re lost in ego. I mean, is that a form of judgment?

Hathaway: No, because I don’t know. Honestly. In reality, unless I can sit down with that person and get to know them, I don’t know if that’s just their persona—one one of their personas they’re putting it on, and deep inside, they’re doing it for their family or they’re doing it to impress friends. But deep inside, you know, I’m miserable and I pray to God every day for something and stuff. Like, I just, I can’t judge people. I just can’t do it. It’s really hard for me to. I mean, even when I see somebody is doing something that is not very nice. The first thing that’s going through my head is, what happened to them to make them want to project that onto others?

Cyd: Yeah, that’s very wonderful reaction. I need to get to that place. I’m very judgmental in a negative way. And it’s not a good thing. I am loving. I want to be loving, and when I know the person, I fully love them. But strangers—boom, boom, boom–it just, you know, rubs me the wrong way.

Hathaway: And it’s not an easy thing to do. I mean, when I first started and I was like, really like, I cannot do what I am meant to do if I have that mindset of mind. And so, you know, when somebody’s super rude to you, you want it like this right away. It’s like it’s automatic.

Cyd: It’s like, right. It’s boom right back at him.

Hathaeway: Yeah, it’s like, pow! right back. It’s like that fight or flight thing. And it’s like, I had to literally shut that down and just be like, hey, I know you maybe think I cut you off, and if I did, I am so sorry. I hope you have a great day. And I’m sorry that you’re angry. And I really wish you the best.

And I’ve had literally people break down crying, because nobody’s ever been nice to them. It’s not always easy, but I know that. I feel like if God was watching me, He’s like, you already know what to do. So I’m like, OK, got it.

Cyd: Well, that’s wonderful.

Hathaway: Yeah. So that’s a little bit of my story.

Cyd: Oh, I’m so glad to have talked with you, Hathaway, and that you’ve talked with us. I think that what you’re sharing with us today is going to be so helpful to many people. Can you give anyone a first step or anything they should do or a website they should visit or anything like this?

Hathaway: They should definitely get your book and I tell everybody to get the Red Book. And you better get a dictionary.

Cyd: For the Red Book, but not for my books, right? My book is simple.

Hathaway: Yep. Nope, the Red Book. Yeah, because Jung was a scholar and he wrote in his time in the way they wrote. Which is, yeah, very confusing. But even if you don’t do the Red Book, you know, just plenty of YouTube channels. I mean, in South America and in South Korea, Jung is huge. I mean, there’s a K-pop band who just wrote a record about him. And it’s kind of interesting because nobody knew who Jung was like 10 years ago. And I’ve got to watch this, like, huge wave and people saying, oh, Carl Jung, I know who you’re talking about. And I’m like, really?

Cyd: Wow. That’s interesting.

Hathaway: Yeah, I’ve got to see that, which is really cool. And I’ve seen it in people. I’ve seen it and definitely in different cultures. I mean, the K-pop thing just shocked me. Yeah. Like, what? Like these teenagers are making a record about individuation and finding their souls.

Cyd: So you think my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, would be helpful?

Hathaway: Ohh gosh, Cyd. When I read your book, I was just ecstatic. My husband said, he’s like, I’ve never seen anybody write so just blunt and honestly. And yet, so clearly. And yet, I do have to go back and read each chapter, he’s like, because I’m not used to the narrative. And I’m like, exactly. I do, Cyd, I think I think your book is for the ages to come. And the ages here.

Cyd: That’s nice. OK, Gee—a perfect note to end on.

Well, that’s our interview with Hathaway Jane. Here’s a postscript to the interview that Hathaway mailed me today. She says,

“After speaking with you, I told my teacher that I appreciated everything he had taught me, but I know it’s time to move on. Most of the teaching was directions on ascending to the other realms, but I don’t feel that is my path. I cannot explain it and I don’t know if I ever will, but your book changed my thought process. I told you of the experience of the process Jung wrote about and how it’s close to your book, just very long and extremely difficult to read. I read your book at least a few times a week and I have to study it in order to soak in everything.

“I told you about my experience of feeling and seeing God when I read your book. It feels like I’m going over knowledge I used to know and forgotten, but I feel a fraction of the same overwhelming love I felt that night. I’m not sure what is next, but I hope we remain friends and get your book into more hands. I know so many people who are lost and I feel like they can’t get basic answers or they have to pay some guru or hope they discover a cult-like setting by chance. I know that usually leads to more confusion. I’m sure I will have more questions. All I know is that the more I read and listen to the gnostic gospel, your book and your podcast, the more synchronicities become clear. Much love, Hathaway.

And that’s exactly it. I’ve always said that A Simple Explanation is a paradigm-shifting theory of everything, because it has a whole different way of looking at the way the physics and chemistry and everything goes together. And this Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel is also paradigm shifting of conventional Christianity. But I believe in a better way. It helps us to know the Father better and deeper. It helps us to understand the difference between the Son, the Christ, and Jesus, and they’re all important, and they’re all glorious. So let’s give more glory to God. That’s the goal here.

If any of you listeners would like to have a discussion with me that we would then possibly broadcast for other people’s edification, I think it’s important to share our gnostic journeys with each other, because everyone comes to gnosis in their own way and through their own insights. So if you feel as though you have something that you’d like to share with others, please write to me using the Comments form here at Gnostic Insights. Or you can leave a comment directly at the Substack Gnostic Reformation page.

God bless us all, onward and upward.

My book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, is still available now as an advance, black and white edition. However, the good news is that the color edition is finally out of pre-publication and at the printers. So copies will be available very soon, if you want to wait for the color edition.

And, on another note, I found an illustrator for the children’s gnostic gospel book I’ve most recently written. She is a terrific artist and a self-identified gnostic for many years, so she really knows what she’s doing. I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as it is finished.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m your host. I’m really glad that you’re with me and that we are exploring these topics together. Today I want to share with you an article that was first printed in the UNT Digital Library. That’s the university library system. It’s by Bruce Greyson, and it’s called Near Death Experiences and Claims of Past Life Memories. This was printed in autumn of 2021 and it is accessed through the University of North Texas Library system.

My brother looked this up for us because of our topic last week on near death experiences. And, you know my brother, Bill Puett, is a hypnotherapist. He is a retired philosophy professor. Nowadays he helps people through therapeutic hypnosis. Bill often has experiences with his clients of that in between place that one experiences between lives. Many times Bill asks a client to go back and remember when an upsetting trigger first occurred in their lives, and sometimes these people jump back into a previous life. That is how Bill has become so familiar with the idea and working with people’s past life experiences.

Bill had raised the question with me after last week’s episode, Well, what about the in between place? How do these near death experiences comport with the place that Bill and his clients are so familiar with—that being the in between place where they work on past life issues. And, the in between place is where a soul is prior to being reincarnated. At least that’s the therapeutic metaphor that seems to be going on in these situations. So let’s look at this article together, Near Death Experiences and Claims of Past Life Memories, and we’ll see if we can make sense of it in a gnostic way.

Let’s begin with reading the abstract. An abstract on an academic article is the overview, the summation, of what the article is going to be about. So let’s see what Dr. Greyson has to say.

“Some features of near death experiences suggest that consciousness may continue to function after death of the body. The life reviews of some NDEs [that’s near death experiences] include what seemed to be memories of a past lifetime, some of which involve verifiable details suggesting that the experiencer has lived more than one life and can recall events from successive lives. These apparent past life memories parallel the claims of young children who remember past lives. Furthermore, some children’s past life memories include scenes from the period between lives that parallel descriptions of the realm in which NDEs occur. Some children’s past life memories include anomalous features that contradict common beliefs about reincarnation. In addition, the idea that humans reincarnate into a new earthly body seems to contradict the common NDE feature of encountering deceased persons in a non-earthly realm. However, those apparent contradictions can be resolved by reconceptualization of prevailing ideas about time and about what aspects of human consciousness may survive bodily death.”

So, the article goes into what is a near death experience, and we don’t have to redescribe that because we covered it in depth in last week’s episode. And then the next section is called The Life Review, which also presents examples of that 360° life review that we covered in the last episode. Well, this is interesting. He cites an example from 1791,

“When British Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort was only a 17 year old midshipman he fell off the boat into Portsmouth Harbour. Unfortunately, he had not yet learned to swim. After exhausting himself in his struggle to breathe, he lost consciousness and immediately experienced a feeling of calmness and noticed changes in his thinking. He later described it in this way. ‘From the moment that all exertions ceased, which I imagine was the immediate consequence of complete suffocation, thought rose above thought with the rapidity of succession. It is not only indescribable, but probably inconceivable by anyone who has not himself been in a similar situation. The course of those thoughts I can, even now in great measure, retrace the event which had just taken place. The awkwardness that had produced it were the first series of reflections that occurred.’”  He talks about remembering his childhood, another shipwreck… “’travelling backwards, every past incident of my life seemed to glance across my recollection in retrograde succession. Not, however, in mere outline as here stated, but the picture filled up with every minute and collateral feature. In short, the whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or its consequences. Indeed, many trifling events, which had been long forgotten then crowded into my imagination with the character of recent familiarity.’”

This was printed in Beaufort’s papers of 1858. The article then goes on to share many of the aspects of this near death experience that we talked about in last week’s episode.

“Such that many near death experiencers reported their life review not only helped them cope with losses, guilt and conflict, and find meaning in their lives, but also helped them make changes in their behavior based on what they had learned… 76% of those who reported re-experiencing their life events said they did so not only through their own eyes, but also from the perspective of others, feeling those other people’s emotions as well as their own. They reported this kind of empathic life review helped them understand the pain they may have caused others and the reasons for the pain they may have suffered at the hands of others.”

The article says that some life reviews additionally include mental impressions or images that did not seem to relate to the experiencer’s current lifetime. In these cases, experiencers reported apparent memories that they believed related to a previous earthly lifetime. Dr. Greyson then cites a case of a woman who believed she had had a previous life experience during her life review. But her recollections could not be proven as evidence because there was no way to compare it with the previous life. But then he goes on to quote another experiencer named David Moquin.

“When he was hospitalized with double pneumonia at age 48, he described visions of past lives during his near death experience as he was in and out of coma for several days. Quoting David Moquin’s NDE: ‘during that time I experienced at least two events that felt like past lifetimes. The one that has haunted me for the past 24 years was that of burning to death in an airplane crash. I kept seeing myself on fire and trying to reach a field just past a line of trees in a barbed wire type fence. I crashed, hit my head and tried to crawl out as I was engulfed in fire and couldn’t breathe. Many years later, a psychic told me that in my past lifetime I died landing a fighter plane on an odd single digit day in November 1944. I was born December 21st, 1940. My daughter, hearing the recording of the reading, googled and found that Captain Fryer was the only pilot that died on an odd single digit day that November, and that he died trying to land his burning P-51 Mustang. My favorite plane was always the P-51. The model sits on my desk. My daughter asked me questions and I seem to know the names of my Wing Commander, Squadron Commander, mother and father.’” That was recorded as personal communication in 2018. So, unlike the previous women’s apparent memories of a past life, Moquin’s NDE included verifiable details that were subsequently corroborated as true for a particular person who died a month before Moquin was born.

Dr. Nelson quotes a Pew Research Center finding that “one third of all Americans, even 1/3 of mainline Protestants and 1/3 of Roman Catholics whose contemporary religious orthodoxy excludes belief in reincarnation, believe that humans may at some point after death return to another life here on Earth.” That’s from (www.pewresearch.org /fact-tank/2018/10/01/new-age-beliefs- common-among-both-religious-and-nonreligious-americans/). The article is called New Age Beliefs Common Among Both Religious and Non-religious Americans.

Now, by the way, I don’t think that new age beliefs is a proper way to characterize belief in reincarnation. Reincarnation is a central idea in many Asian religions and it goes back thousands of years, at least as far back as our Christian and Jewish heritage. We’ve discussed reincarnation at depth in a couple of prior episodes here at Gnostic Insights, and I will include the link to those previous episodes in the transcript to this article so that you can go back and listen to them if you’d like.

“Researchers at the University of Virginia and at other universities around the globe have studied more than 2000 cases of very young children prior to school age who claim to recall details of the past life [I’ll include the citations at the end of the podcast article]. As well, in about 2/3 of those cases of young children, they’ve been able to identify the person the child claimed to have been in the past life based on the child’s memories, matching specific details of the claimed past life.”

Now, as an aside, my brother Bill and I have been discussing the veracity of reincarnation for decades literally by now. And I always resisted the notion because of my more Orthodox Christian beliefs. Bill has always thought that reincarnation was likely, and I generally have said that it was more likely to be a useful therapeutic metaphor; that when a person is apparently recalling a past life incident where this or that happened it was the way that their subconscious was accessing as an allegory their emotional troubles.

Or another way to write off memories of reincarnation would be that, for example, these young children or the man that died in the burning plane weren’t remembering their past life, but these were memories that were lodged in the transpersonal memory, or the transpersonal consciousness of the entire planet. Transpersonal is a Jungian term. It’s the meme bundle, in the way we’ve been talking about in the Simple Explanation. The meme bundle of everyone is clinging to our planet the way our personal meme bundle shrouds our self identity.

However, when I came to my realization of my theory of everything that’s called the Simple Explanation or the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, reincarnation was necessarily part of that philosophy. Because of the—and I don’t want to get into the weeds here, but—because of the toroidal nature of time, that time isn’t just linear, it wraps around, it keeps repeating over and over again.

And a torus—toroidal means based on a torus—is like a doughnut shape. So the way I conceive of time is that all potentiality comes down through the top funnel of that doughnut here and now is at the center of the doughnut and where the potentials collapse into one singularity here and now. And then what comes out to the bottom after the collapse is linear time because the potentials have collapsed and now it’s just time history of what happened during the previous string of collapse potential. I don’t want to confuse you with that.

Anyway, reincarnation and the repetition the cycles of time is part of the Simple Explanation. And, you know, I have taken the Simple Explanation theory of everything and applied it to the Gnostic Gospel, to the gnostic doctrines. And that’s my addition to what was written a couple of thousand years ago in the Tripartite Tractate that was part of the Nag Hammadi scriptures uncovered in 1945.

So, back to this article by Dr. Greyson. He says that the researcher who did most of the research in the beginning with the children, Ian Stevenson, beginning in the 1960s, limited his investigation to very young children between the ages of two and five before they had learned to read so that it would eliminate the claim that they had read something or that they have come across it, and that they were just reiterating what they had learned. “He also limited his studies to memories that came to the children spontaneously. The research avoided memories that were recovered in hypnotic past life regressions because of the increased suggestibility of people who are hypnotized.”

Now, of course, my own brother Bill’s experience with these types of stories is through hypnotic regression, so Bill’s clients would have been eliminated right off the bat.

The article says, “The issue is not that information acquired in hypnosis is never accurate, but rather that it is not reliable enough to be trusted as scientific evidence without additional verification. Greyson’s article says that the young children that Stephenson and other researchers have investigated not only have memories of past lives, but also often show behaviors such as phobias or preferences that are unusual within the context of their own families and are not explained by any current life events. However, these unexplained behaviors are usually consistent with the child’s statements about a previous life. For example, a young child who remembers a life that ended in drowning may show an unnatural fear of water or a young child in a Hindu family who remembers life as a devout Muslim may refuse to eat food not prepared according to Islamic law.” And so on.

And by the way, it’s these types of memory traumas or memes clinging to a persons soul, to their ego, that my brother Bill works with in his hypnotic therapy. A person comes to him with a complaint of a phobia, and they explore when that phobia occurred. Sometimes it’s a past life and they address it in the past life. And then when they come out of hypnosis, that phobia has been relieved because the meme was peeled off of them and discarded.

On the other hand, the article says that there are some cases in the University of Virginia collection that suggests that “their interpretation is not as straightforward as our common conceptions of reincarnation would suggest. For example, in some cases, researchers have investigated two or more children who recall the same past life.” [So that kind of throws a monkey wrench into our easy interpretation of this phenomenon, doesn’t it?]

Another troublesome finding is that a child can “remember the past lives of two different people who lived at the same time.” And there are a small number of such purported cases from the files at the University of Virginia. The University of Virginia files include 37 such cases, “which raised questions about how to interpret the children’s knowledge of someone else’s life.” Because of these inconsistencies, Stephenson, who initiated this line of research, never claimed that these cases were proof of reincarnation. “Instead, he referred to them as cases suggestive of reincarnation and cases of the reincarnation type.”

The article goes on to say both claimed memories of past lives and near death experiences have been controversial topics in academia because they challenge contemporary models of the mind brain relationship and may be open to multiple interpretations. He goes on to say, “several researchers have reported, anecdotally, that near death experiences became more open to the idea of reincarnation after their near death experiences.” As I said, I’m going to include these citations for this article at the end of this episode, so you can look all of this up yourself if you want to delve into it.

Dr. Greyson says that among more than 200 near death experiencers who have participated in his research, “1/3 said they believed that after death they will be recycled and reincarnated or reborn in the physical world. Another third reportedly believed that reincarnation is possible. Those are the same percentages of belief in reincarnation that the Pew Research Center found among the American population as a whole. However, some near death experiencers related their belief in reincarnation to specific events in their NDEs.

As a gnostic aside, here it is a funny thing: that it keeps being one third, one third, one third, isn’t it? You know, the Tripartite Tractate is called the three-part book, not only because the codex had three sections, but because it describes the three parts of humans—that being our spirit, our psychological, or what we might call soul, and our physical bodies. Another set of thirds. But it also has humans divided into three parts as well. The spiritual types which would be me, I hope to say, and you who are listening to this Gnostic podcast. And then there are the psychological types. They work out of their emotional centers, their psychological centers, rather than their spiritual centers. And then there are the physical types who only believe in the tangible, not even the psychological. Materialists. Most scientists are materialists. They only believe in what they can measure and weigh. So it’s very difficult to have a science of psychology, for example, because it all so subjective. You can’t measure it and weigh it, except by asking people subjective questions and then putting  that into various categories. But it’s subjective.

One problem that scientifically minded researchers have with the near death experiences and the past life memories is that the mind appears to be separate from the brain. They always want to equate our awareness and our consciousness with the brain and the brain’s activities—that consciousness is a byproduct of the brain. But we Gnostics realize that consciousness is not a byproduct of the brain. It’s more the other way around. The mind—consciousness—preexists the brain. It’s the foundation: consciousness. We begin with consciousness, and then we see how creation rolls out and builds up to become us with brains. That is not a scientific concept.

Now the article gets to what my brother Bill’s particular question was when he looked up this research. Let’s read it:

“In an apparent contradiction to the idea of reincarnation, many near death experiencers report having met deceased loved ones in some seemingly otherworldly environment in their NDEs. The question arises how it might be possible for deceased people to continue existing in some otherworldly realm after death if they have been reborn into a new earthly life.”

Greyson says, “The simplest resolution this apparent contradiction might be that deceased individuals might reside in some afterlife environment while awaiting reincarnation on Earth. Alternatively, one might speculate that different people may have different afterlife scenarios, some being reborn and others remaining in some other worldly realm. Or that one person might have several different afterlife scenarios, including both rebirth and continued existence in an otherworldly realm. This latter possibility is compatible with reported cases of mediumistic communication [that is, having a psychic reading], allegedly from deceased individuals who claim to have been already reincarnated but are able to leave their new bodies and present to the medium as discarnate spirits, and cases of apparitions of deceased individuals that appear after they have been born. Furthermore, given the claim of many near death experiences that the familiar concept of time as a linear progression doesn’t apply in the afterlife, it might be possible both to continue to exist in some other worldly realm and also simultaneously to be reborn on Earth.”

Now that is what my brother Bill and I have discussed: time. We know that the heavenly realm is eternal and that the Father itself is infinite. But we are eternal. In any case, we are not trapped in linear time. So, things that happen to us here in this material world happen one after another after another; they don’t all happen at once, at least not that we can tell. As I mentioned earlier in this episode, my idea of time has to do with potentiality wrapping around, coming down through the funnel, collapsing into here and now, and then coming out as history. That’s a cyclical version of time. Here in our earthly existence, we experience that collapse as always here, now. We’re always in the here and now. We aren’t in the future. We aren’t in the past. We’re here, now. But what happened in the past happened. That is the collapsed potentiality.

So, Bill and I have discussed that time in the other place. Time in the in between place and certainly time in the heavenly realm doesn’t present itself linearly. That’s the 360° life review that people experience. It can all happen at once, in an instant. We can sense it all, and we know that for the Father, time is completely nonlinear. The Father knows everything all at once. That’s what it means to be omniscient. It all happens at once. Omniscient, omnipresent, everywhere at once. All knowing at once. So time, once we are out of this material realm, is not the same as we experience it here.

Let’s see what Dr. Greyson has to say about this. “Many experiencers report that in their NDE’s they had not only an altered sense of time, but also a sense of complete timelessness.” And he cites a 36-year-old policeman who almost bled to death after surgery and what that man said was, “I knew what it was like to experience eternity, where there was no time. It’s the hardest thing to try to describe to someone. How do you describe a state of timelessness where there’s nothing progressing from one point to another, where it’s all there and you’re totally immersed in it?”

Greyson reports that among the 698 people who shared their NDEs with him, 59 percent, 415, said that they had a sense of timelessness in their NDEs. “Some of these experiencers said that time may still have existed on Earth, but that the realm of the NDE seemed to be outside of the flow of time. Everything in their NDE seemed to be happening at once, or they seemed to move forward and backward in time. Others said they realized in the NDE that time as humans know it was only ever an artificial construct of the brain and never really existed. That is, that the very concept of time had no independent reality.”

Here is how that was experienced by one of the people that he interviewed. She says that, “Before my NDE I used to think that the purpose of life was to evolve beyond the reincarnation cycle of birth and death. But after my NDE, I feel differently. This is primarily because the concept of reincarnation in its conventional form is a progression of lifetimes running sequentially, one after the other, and it wasn’t supported by my NDE. I realized that time doesn’t move in a linear fashion unless we’re using the filter of our bodies and minds. Once we’re no longer limited by our earthly senses, every moment exists simultaneously. I’ve come to think that the concept of reincarnation is really just an interpretation, a way for our intellect to make sense of all experiences happening at once.”

So Dr. Greyson’s article concludes, “NDEs that include apparent past-life memories in the life review suggest that humans can live on this Earthly plane more than once, and memories of past lives that include descriptions of the period between lives support the validity of NDEs. But little of that cross-validation between NDEs and apparent memories of past lives can be considered scientific evidence. At this point it appears that the question of reincarnation is a matter for which NDEs provide tantalizing directions for further research rather than definitive answers. “

He says, “ In particular, the temporal inconsistencies between encounters with deceased persons in NDEs and rebirth into subsequent Earthly lives, like so many ineffable features of NDEs, are challenging for scientists. These apparent contradictions and ineffability call for the identification of different methodologies or different means of expression to investigate them.”

Yeah. Well, I don’t think that’s going to happen. As I say, science is very materialistic. It really begins by looking very, very closely at material. When scientists study consciousness and the mind, they want to look at neuronal connections. They want to measure the speed of the synapse transmission of data. They want to measure the voltage of the electricity flowing through the synapses. This is the way science looks into these things that we look into from the other direction. Spiritual types and Gnostics start with consciousness and look how it manifests through material. We don’t look at material trying to find consciousness. I cannot imagine a scientific experiment that will ever prove reincarnation somehow arises from something that can be measured and weighed. The closest they can come to it is what they call anecdotal evidence. Anecdotes are stories. Anecdotal evidences of past lives is where someone remembers a past life or recognizes objects in their previous home and the people of their previous family.

We’ve had that kind of research and it still doesn’t count as “scientific” because it’s only, as they like to say, only anecdotal. So there is always going to be a schism, at least in our ordinary modalities, that this current age has. These are not going to be reconcilable through science. We can, from the gnostic point of view, we can reconcile science to us. We can reconcile science to the spiritual by showing that the material is a creation of the spiritual, and that is why Gnostic Insights continually restates that Gnostic cosmology of how consciousness flows from the Father through the Son, through the Fullness. From the Fullness, through the material existence of this plane.

But you’re never going to be able to look at the material existence of this plane of existence and see consciousness flowing back upwards unless you accept the fact that all of consciousness is carried in life—life and love and thought. Life, love, and logos is what exists. I mean, if scientists can’t even agree that life begins at conception, how are they ever going to get backward prior to conception?

OK, we’ve run out of time. Take a look at the transcript of this episode. You can find links within the transcript to previous episodes where this has all been discussed, and I will include the citations from Dr. Greyson’s article and the link to his article in the transcript at the end. Thanks so much for spending this time with me. God bless us all and onward and upward.

Greyson, Bruce. Near-Death Experiences and Claims of Past-Life Memories, article, Autumn 2021; Durham, North Carolina. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2017035/: accessed January 20, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu .

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Welcome back to Gnostic insights.

Lately I’ve been watching a lot of near death experience videos on YouTube. Have you been watching those? They really are fascinating. You can see that people have personalized experiences in their near death episodes. And by the way, in case you don’t even know what near death experience is, it’s when a person is clinically dead—no brain waves, no heartbeat—they can be dead for several minutes. They could be in a deep coma, a vegetative state, for months. However they get to be on the other side, it’s called a near death experience. And it’s not being mediated by the physical body because the physical body is shut down. And that’s a provable event by heart monitors, brain monitors—all of that.

And by now there have been thousands and thousands and thousands of people who have had near death experiences. There are many commonalities to everyone’s near death experiences, but then again, there are also personalized viewpoints of what their experience was for them and then what it means to them, just as all of us have our points of view in our walking around life. If I’m standing right next to you, you and I can both witness an event and yet we will tell it in our own words and in our own ways, perhaps even using our own metaphors if it’s a difficult thing to explain to someone else. And it’s no different with these near death experiences.

In fact, the near death experiences are so unusual and so out of the realm of our ordinary waking experience that people often have a difficult time even putting words to what they’ve witnessed. Some people come out of their near death experience all prepared to talk about it, but other people take years before they can put it to words and explain it.

So, I started watching these new death experiences on YouTube, and I’m making notes and whatnot. Then I decided, well, why reinvent the wheel? Why not look up a book where someone has already cataloged the near death experiences and written down their similarities and their differences, and written down some examples? So I went to a book called Evidence of the Afterlife. That was published in 2010 by Jeffrey Long and Paul Perry, if you want to look it up yourself. And so I made notes out of that book.

First let me share with you a description of what I believe are Aeons by a 13- year-old who had just died. And it says she rose and found herself inside a bright white soft cloud type of thing. She felt the total embrace of love and felt great safety and warmth. Within and attached to the cloud were three Angel-type of beings. They had great peace about them and were part of this cloud as if attached directly to it. She felt their grandness and their joy. She felt happy, peaceful, and a desire to stay amongst them. Suddenly, a large hand came toward her, not threatening, glowing with overpowering light. A voice said, my child, go back for you have much work left to do, and she was instantly back in her body. She felt angry that she had to return. And the condition that had caused her to pass away was healed upon her awakening.

When I read this, I think that this bright white soft cloud type of thing is what we call the Fullness of God, which is where the Aeons dwell. That is a total embrace of love, safety, and warmth, because the Fullness of God is a direct emanation from the Father. The Fullness of God, the Aeons of God, are directly attached to the Son of God, and the Son is the first manifestation. That is what it means by being the only begotten Son of the God Above All Gods of the origin of consciousness. And we know that the God Above All Gods isn’t merely consciousness—this God is love. Our sensation of loving and being loved is a direct emanation of the Father of consciousness. So, this 13-year-old girl found herself embedded within this cloud of love and consciousness.

And she saw three Angel type of beings. It doesn’t say in the Tripartite Tractate that Angels is a synonym for Aeons, but I think it is. Angels are perhaps a certain subclass of Aeons, but when someone describes an Angel or an Angelic type of being, this is one of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. So she saw three of these Aeons. Now, it’s also my thought that all of us humans, all of us Second Order Powers, are particular combinations of Aeons or unique combinations of various Aeons. Your combination of Aeons is slightly different than mine. We overlap for the most part because we’re humans. However, my talents are slightly different than your talents, and our talents come from the Aeons. Also, if we are reincarnated beings, we are also slightly different because of our past life experiences and the meme bundle that we carry forward with us from life to life.

So, speaking of this girl’s miraculous healing of the illness that caused her to die, people are often healed out of the deadly condition that led to their near death experience. They have out of body experiences where they observe the events going on around their bodies while their body is lying there dead or unconscious. One near death experiencer was born with cerebral palsy and had never used his hand. After his near death experience, he was able to open and use his hand for the first time in his life. And of course there is a story in the New Testament that’s just like that. Jesus healed a man who had been paralyzed in his hand and had never been able to open his hand, and Jesus told him that his sins were forgiven and to go ahead and open his hand, which he did. That story can be found in Mark 3 verses one through 6, in Matthew 12, verses 9 through 14, and in the book of Luke, verses 6 through 11.

45% of the people who have had near death experiences report psychic, paranormal, or other special gifts following their near death experience. Basically, they report that when you are having a near death experience and you’re on the other side, you’re in this place. We all have these extrasensory perception type of experiences–that that’s the way communication is carried on when we’re out of the material world. When we’re down here in this material world, we have to use our senses—our ears, our vision, our smell, our touch—to perceive the world around us. It’s very difficult to just have a pure experience, although people who do have second sight or who are able to have out of body experiences or remote viewing, they’re able to harness these types of abilities. Well, when you’re out of your body and you are pure consciousness, you’re pure spirit form—it’s all like that. There aren’t any senses because you don’t have your body to sense reality through.

So people report unusual ways of perceiving the Fullness of God, or this other place that they are. And they talk about a 360° vision where you can see all the way around. They talk about being in the company of others and being able to know what the others are seeing and feeling and thinking all at once, without confusion. So when they come back into their bodies, and they’re revived, about 45% of them carry some of this ability forward with them.

Another commonality is a complete loss of fear of death. And that’s because they have a conviction that death is not final and that there is a wonderful afterlife and it’s real. And they believe this because they have experienced this.

It’s impossible for me to think that these are demonic visions—that these are evil. Satan, the devil, and also the Demiurge, being a different being but on that side—they are not able to manifest love. They do not know love because they came from that egoic side of Logos when he fell. The love and consciousness returned back to the Fullness and that which stayed behind here in this material world, which includes that split off side—the dark side, the negative side, the side of Logos that does not remember the Father or the Fullness—I’ve been identifying that as the ego of Logos—it stayed behind. It doesn’t remember the Father. It doesn’t remember the love and the consciousness of the Father or its brothers up in the Fullness.

Now, we Second Order Powers, which is every living thing in this cosmos—every  living thing is called a Second Order of Powers—the First Order of Powers are the Aeons of the Fullness. We are their fruit, which is another way of saying that we are their children. They do remember the Father. The Second Order Powers have a dim remembrance of the Father and the Fullness. We know where we come from. That’s why all cultures around the world have a hope of Paradise. It’s not a cultural artifact of where they live and how they were brought up. It’s an inherent peace that’s deep within us. Satan doesn’t know that. Satan is not of the remembrance.

Satan is not a Second Order Power, so it can’t replicate the love of the Father. Satan’s version of replicating the love of Father is pampering the ego. Is pornography. Is rampant sex instead of love. Is satiety through overeating or through wonderful possessions and wonderful food. Good drugs. The high from heavy drugs is part of the Deficiency—Satan’s imitation of the Fullness above. These near death experiences, when you watch the videos on YouTube or you hear me talking about it here, they don’t have the same flavor. They don’t have the same tinge as the evil. I realize that Fundamentalist religionists, including Fundamentalist Christians, may think that what I’m speaking about is evil—is a deception of the lies of Satan. But if you have discernment of the love of the Father and belief in the saving power of the Christ, this is the same feeling as these near death experiences. It’s the right side of the Ledger, the virtuous side of the Ledger. It’s not the vice side of the Ledger.

As an aside, when I ran this episode by my brother Bill, he thought it odd that I dropped in the word Satan, since Satan doesn’t appear in the Tripartite Tractate. And that was because I was talking to Christians at the time that I made the reference to Satan here in this episode. But he’s right, Satan is not named in the Tripartite Tractate. However, there are Archons which are deputies, let’s say, of the Demiurge, and I’ve always thought of Satan as the chief deputy of the Demiurge. But you don’t have to be concerned about that right now. I think very soon I should have an episode about archons and the power structures of the archons.

Now, even people who are very deeply embedded in their fundamentalist religions can be deceived by Satan. They can be deceived by Archons. And the basic way you know that you’re being deceived by Satan or the Archons, or the Demiurge, is the lack of love. When you are motivated by anger, even if you call it righteous anger, even if you call it righteous indignation, that is not the love of God. The love of God is all forgiving. All embracing. “For while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us,” not, for once we killed the bad guys, Christ died for us. That’s wrong. It’s not your righteousness and it’s not your anger with the sword that brings you into the Heavenly realms. It’s not through our deeds at all.

These people who died and had their near death experiences weren’t earning a glimpse of Heaven. They just died in the middle of whatever they were doing, the way we all do. And yet they were taken directly into the Heavenly realm, and these people were sent back because it wasn’t time for them to be dead yet. And when they come back, they bring the peace, love, joy, the conviction that death is not final. They have felt themselves in the warm embrace of the Father, or of Jesus, or of Angels. There was no anger there. There is no judgment there.

They see beautiful meadows or prairies and each blade of grass is a unique creature and happy. There are butterflies, birds, rivers. It’s wonderfully tranquil, is how they describe it. They report the light is beautiful, and we know that God is often described as light. “And in him there is no darkness at all”. This is this place we’re talking about and that’s why the light itself feels like love. Golden sunshine. The bright white light, scintillating and warm. It smells sweet and inviting, like cupcakes it’s described, or warm vanilla sugar. The light smells delicious. And in the Tripartite Tractate there is a fragrance of the Father that is described and the fragrance of God is sweet and inviting. It’s part of the homing beacon back to the Father.

They describe unearthly beings. Not extraterrestrial aliens from another planet. If there are extraterrestrial beings from another planet, these are not them. You can’t conflate the Aeons of the Fullness or the Angels with extraterrestrial aliens because they have a different way of operating; they have a different feel about them.

Now, pretty much everyone describes what is called a life review. Just like the stories, just like in the movies or in the books—you  hear about people’s life passing before their eyes. So the life review is described in much the same terms no matter who undergoes it, and pretty much everyone undergoes it if they stay dead long enough. And their life review is very interesting because it’s done in this 360° way of knowing. It’s not like watching a movie screen, it’s more like being there. But it’s not just you being there, reliving the experience through your own point of view and your own eyes as you did when it first happened, because you see it through everyone’s point of view and through everyone’s eyes who was in the scene at the same time. Not only that, but you feel it emotionally through everyone’s feelings. So if you had said something harsh to a loved one—maybe you’re aware you were overly harsh, or maybe you’re not aware of the effect you had upon the loved one–well, during your life review, you feel what the loved one felt. You feel their pain. And this is why the life review can be an extremely painful event.

But, if you were repentant of it here on Earth before you die, it won’t be painful like that because you did repent of it. That’s the purpose of repentance—you recognize and learn from your mistakes. And if you don’t do it during your life, then you will have to do it when you pass over. One of the episodes here on Gnostic Insights is called Overcoming Death. In that episode, I described the near death experience or the after death experience in terms of Tibetan Buddhism and what they call the bardos of death. And that’s an in-depth description in that episode of what people who are unrepentant experience after they die.

So, if you repent of it, if you know you goofed up, best to give it to Christ. That way those Third Order Powers can come in and replace  Second Order anger with Third Order love. This is how this works in terms of this Gnostic Gospel that I’m sharing with you.

Anyway, that’s the life review that goes on and everyone has the life review. And by the time you go all the way through your life review, you come out cleansed. You come out the other side purged. And then you move on. Remember, it is said that in Heaven, there is no darkness at all, so our negative emotionality and our mean spirits don’t go forward into Heaven. When we find ourselves up there after this material Earth, it’s all onward and upward. It’s all good. It’s all beautiful. It’s all bright and lovely. So these life experiences that are clinging to us, they have to be purged before we get up there. Makes sense? Then people reunite with their lost loved ones, and there’s no more bitterness or anger if there was when they passed away. It’s gone now. It’s purged and it’s all love.

Jesus hanging on the cross probably had one of these near death experiences that we’re talking about. And when he had his 360° life review, the only sins that needed to be corrected was all of our sins. This is what is meant to say that Christ took on the sins of the world. I’ll bet you his 360° review was all of our errors and regrets, and the Christ took care of all of them on behalf of Jesus in his 360° life review. This is an idea of how it is that Jesus on the cross took away the sins of the world.

These people who returned from their near death experiences report that the afterlife is for everyone. Not just for near death experiencers. And of course, I say that’s true too. And this is why I think this is a proof of life after death. And it’s a proof of universal salvation. We can go through the New Testament and point out everywhere that it says that we’re all going to Heaven. That we’re all forgiven and Christ came to die for our sins, period. Not just for the people who go forward and profess Christ while they’re alive, but for everyone. Because remember—we’re all from the Fullness of God, and if we don’t return to the Fullness, then God is no longer full. Do you see that? If God were shedding 80% of the people down here who have sinned and didn’t profess Christ before they died, God wouldn’t be full anymore. He’s not going to lose us. We are the Fruit of the Fullness of God. We are taken care of by the Father and by the Christ. It’s their job to save us.

People report that the experience they have in their near death experience is realistic and it is greater than ordinary perception. It’s consistent and logical, by the way. People who have been blind, even blind from birth, can see in the afterlife. Well, of course they can, because they’re no longer attached to their material eyeballs in their body that don’t work. The life reviews include long forgotten events, so it’s not like they’re dredging them up and working on it. It’s coming to them. Boom, boom, boom. The relatives and friends they encounter on the other side are all deceased; you don’t run into live people up there. They are consistent across all cultures and all locations and children have the same near death experiences as adults.

And the powerful after-effects of the near death experience consistently change people’s lives for the better. They come back being better people, which to me is another proof that this is not a demonic lie. This is not a deception of Satan, because Satan doesn’t make people better. Satan doesn’t make people more loving. Satan makes people more egoic, more self-centered. More me, me, me. That’s what Satan wants you to be. True love—the love of the Father, the love of the Christ, the love of the Fullness of God—causes you to be open and giving and loving to other people. To be self-sacrificial. To want their good as much or more so than your good. So this evidence seems to point to an afterlife and a universe that is guided by a vastly loving intelligence, and we are part of that intelligence. We are fruits of the Fullness of God and the Fullness of God is a direct emanation of the Father, the God Above All Gods.

Before we finish up this topic, let me read from a list of bullet points I made concerning the transformative changes that people carry through when they come back to life after their near death experiences.

Transformative Changes from Near Death Experiences

 Wow. Sounds like it’s from the afterlife to me. Sounds like that is a message from the God Above All Gods. What do you think?

Until next week—onward and upward, and God Bless Us All.

If you come away confused, please write to me for clarification.Feel free to write to me privately using the Contact Us form at gnosticinsights.com. Or you can write to me via Comments at the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Public comments are encouraged at the Substack page so we can start up a dialogue on these things. I really appreciate the listeners who have written to share their stories with me.

We’re nearing completion of the publication process for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. This will be a large, fully explanatory edition that lays out the gnostic cosmology from start to finish, with full color illustrations throughout. They have set the price around $30. I’m keeping my royalties to a minimum in order to lower the sales price for you. There is currently an inexpensive, black and white edition that I published myself that is available here if you can’t afford $30 or don’t want to wait to read it. The color edition will be available very soon.

Welcome to the Gnostic Insights podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Cyd Ropp.

It’s kind of funny to call this gnosis a simple explanation, isn’t it? Because if you’ve been listening for any time, you see that it’s becoming more and more complex. But, what I mean by simple is that I’m not trying to hide the gnosis from you. I’m not trying to obscure the truth so that only the worthy can mine this gnosis. We are all born with this gnosis. We are all representations of the Fullness of God, and I think it’s my calling to share this gnosis with you and show you how you can mine your gnosis. The Tripartite Tractate from the Nag Hammadi is the book I’m using to do that, because it’s a very straightforward.

We are looking at not only cosmology of the ethereal realm, which means the study of the cosmos, but its a cosmogeny as well. And cosmogony means the beginnings of the cosmos. Cosmogeny is the study of the origins of our universe, and that’s what we’re doing here at Gnostic insights.

I hope you are enjoying these insights that I’m sharing with you. The Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel book will be a really great reference piece. Everybody who’s interested in Gnosticism will want to have this book as a reference. The glossary alone is worth the price. The Gnosticism that I’m sharing with you here isn’t the obscure historical Gnosticism of the past. I’m attempting to bring it into our modern vernacular.

And, if this is your first time joining us, it was very simple in the beginning. It started with a single concept—the consciousness we call the Father. And then it has rolled out steadily as the Father generates consciousness until it winds up with you.

On with today’s episode, which I’m calling As Above, So Below. Gnosis means knowing. And to be a gnostic means that you are one who knows. And the gnosis we are mining here at Gnostic Insights is taken from an ancient scripture, the Tripartite Tractate out of the Nag Hammadi codices. But more than that, I’m deriving a lot of this information through contemplation and direct communication with the Father and the Fullness of God. That is my claim, and that is something that every person can do. We are all given the ability to commune directly with the Father and with the Fullness above. What I’m attempting to do here on the Gnostic Insights podcast is to share the insights I’ve gained through reason and contemplation, and to explain some of the more obscure passages in the Nag Hammadi scriptures.

As a Gnostic Christian, I find that these insights give a deeper understanding of our New Testament in the Holy Bible because much of this information was stripped out of the Holy Bible by the Nicene Council in the 300s AD under the direction of Pope Clement and Emperor Constantine. Those of us who are not Catholics are no longer subject to the Pope. And none of us are subject to the Emperor of Rome. Therefore, it seems to me that those of us who love the Father should have the freedom of mind and the freedom of personal will to decide for ourselves which scriptures are holy. And this you must arrive at through discernment and the Holy Spirits’ leading. If you have not developed the ability of discernment, then you can easily be led astray.

Emperor Constantine

For over ten years now, I have written a blog called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The Simple Explanation presents a secular theory of how the universe goes together. In a Simple Explanation, there are concepts such as fractals and the Simple Golden Rule that I have been explaining here as we go along because they help to illuminate this gnostic gospel. Thus far, we have explained the origins of the ethereal universe, beginning with the Father of consciousness and proceeding on through the Christ. We need to understand this entire run of the gnostic cosmology in order to understand the nature of human beings, because in Simple Explanation terms, we humans are fractal representations of the entirety of creation. This is the meaning of that expression: as above so below.

The tree is a common symbol for this concept. So, as a tree is represented as the branches above ground, there is a reciprocal set of branches below ground, and those are called the roots. The same is true with us humans and all other Second Order Powers. We share the same values and structure of the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. Their nature is the same as our nature because we are their fruits. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. My Self’s unit of consciousness is sitting on top of a fractal galaxy of hierarchically arranged units of consciousness, all working together to instantiate my body. While I may believe I am the only conscious soul inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, and each unit of consciousness has their own job to perform. Each lives their own life and they all lay down their own karmic record. And this holds true even when the fractal is no more than a cell or an organ.

Within my body, countless units of consciousness of varying levels of complexity work together to keep my body alive and fully functional. Whereas my Self unit of consciousness may appear a very long way off from the Father in the Pleroma, especially if I conceive of them outside of our very large universe, if I instead turn inward, I am as near to God as the center of all of my units of consciousness. This is a different way of interpreting the practices of centering and grounding. When ancient texts speak of God residing in the hearts of man, I look at that shared zero point field that is at the center of our fractal units of consciousness.

Fractals are defined as fragmented geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each of which at least approximately is a reduced size copy of the whole. That is a property called self similarity because they appear similar at all levels of magnification. Fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex. What this means is that fractal iterations can extend infinitely. The simplest way to think about it in my mind is with broccoli.

If you go to my Simple Explanation blog December 11, 2018, there is an article there called A Simple Explanation of fractals, the broccoli fractal video demonstration. In that video, which is posted on my blog and YouTube channel, I demonstrate fractals using an ordinary head of broccoli. Have you noticed that you can hold that head of broccoli in your hand and you can peel off one of those flower heads of the broccoli and it looks very much like the broccoli flower that you were holding in the first place, only it’s much smaller. And then you can take that smaller piece and peel off another flower and it looks just like the previous one that you peeled off only it is again much smaller. You can do this broccoli exploration down to at least 7 iterations. In the end you have an extremely tiny little broccoli flowerette, but you can still see that it has more little broccoli flowers within it. They just become too small physically to pull apart.

So that’s what a fractal is. It’s a larger thing that can be reduced, reduced, reduced, reduced and each one of those reductions looks just like the piece you started out with, only smaller. And you can just keep splitting it off smaller and smaller and smaller. And if this were a purely mathematical fractal rather than a physical one like broccoli, you could go down or up through those fractal splits, pretty much infinitely.

I’m suggesting that consciousness itself is fractal and the largest consciousness is the Father. The Father had a thought and it became the Son; that Son was the first fractal iteration of consciousness. The Son had a thought and it became the ALL, and that is the next fractal iteration. And then the ALL became self aware, and it turned into the Aeons of the Fullness of God. These Aeons of the Fullness sorted themselves into a hierarchy, giving themselves names, positions, places, powers, and duties, and we call this sorted Fullness the Hierarchy of the Fullness, or the Pleroma of God. The Aeons are fractals of the Son of God, and the Son is a singular expression that completely encapsulates the Father.

The Father is unknowable because the Father is pure consciousness. The Father is illimitable—without limits, not confined to a shape or place. The Father is not walking round in robes with the long white beard. That is not the Father of the ALL. When Jesus said I and my Father are one, he’s not referring to the personified God known as Yahweh or Jehovah that walked through the Old Testament. That fellow’s name in Gnosticism is called the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the fallen ego of the Aeon named Logos. It was this egoic part of Logos that overreached and fell, resulting in this material plane. It is the Demiurge who created the heavens and the Earth. He is the chief Archon of the Cosmos. But he is most assuredly not the Father of the ALL, the Aeons, and the Christ.

In Simple Explanation terms, the enclosure of our material universe is a very large toroidal pattern at the outside edge of creation. I have identified that with the border that is spoken of in the Tripartite Tractate. It is said that after Logos fell he remembered the Aeons and the Father, and his better part quickly returned back to the Fullness. The Father drew a boundary around what was left behind of the broken Logos down below, and that boundary encloses our so-called material Universe. We humans are particular fractal emanations of the Pleroma of the newly restored Logos. We are Second Order Powers fruited down here to work within the material boundary, yet we are patterned directly from the consciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Pleroma. Because we are fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness, the rules and the descriptions of aeonic life apply to humans equally as well. This is again another example of as above, so below. So, when we hear or read about the nature of the Aeons, or the things that happen to the Aeons, such as the Fall and redemption of Logos, this happens to each and every one of us as well. Logos fell because he forgot his place and proper function in the Fullness.

When Logos fled home to the ethereal Pleroma, Logos left behind the darkness and the shadows. The deficiency he left behind arose from his ego’s presumptuous thought and overreaching, because that’s what Logos was doing as he fell. When Logos fell, he left the Fullness. He was no longer in perfect harmony with the other Aeons of the Fullness. Logos went out on his own with his own project, and it was the ego that caused the Fall. And because of his presumptuous thought and his overreaching, now every one of the fractals that he gave rise to down below are the shadows and phantoms of the Fall, and they all overreach. They are all built on ego. Therefore, the imitation is characterized by this presumptuous thought and overreaching, combined with the inverted traits of Logos.

Previously on the Gnostic Insights Podcast, we have discussed the values on the Left, or the material values of the imitation, and these are in direct opposition to the traits of the Fullness. They are the other side of the dialectic to the values of the Father. Those values on the Right, which are the spiritual emanations of the ethereal plane—so hate versus love, impatience versus patience, lust versus chastity, greed versus generosity—those sorts of dialectics. We 2nd Order Powers bear the likeness of the 1st Order of Powers, which are the Aeons of the Fullness. We are also called those of the remembrance, because we were implanted with a dim memory of the Father and the Son, and a longing to rejoin the Aeons in the Hierarchy and their dream of Paradise. We are considered superior to those of the imitation because we come from the noble thought rather than the presumptuous thought. We are true fractals of the entirety of the Pleroma, whereas the Phantoms of the deficiency are shadows of the fractals of the broken Pleroma of the singular Logos. They are smaller and of a lesser order. They are not fractals of the Aeons, they are imitations of fractals of the Aeons.

At this point in the story, we can begin to see human nature emerging because, well, this has been told as a creation story. It’s also the story of every human being. We humans are fractal iterations of the Aeons of the Fullness. We are their fruit. We have dim memories of a perfect Paradise as dreamt by the Fullness. We have a built-in longing for Fullness. We barely remember the Son and the Father other than an expectation of feeling loved, or that we should be loved. And we are locked into an endless war with the dark side of our natures and with other people who stand in our way.

Those of the imitation defend and embrace the darkness of the deficiency, while those of the remembrance do their best to overcome their darker nature and follow the light. Those of the remembrance may or may not be religious folks, but they do all seek a higher consciousness. Religious folks call this higher consciousness God, and the memory of the Fullness, Heaven. Those of the remembrance who are not part of a religious body or the meme bundle of religion are still spiritual because they do seek reunification with the One while rejecting the man-made institutions of religion. Others who heard the still small voice of God but can’t quite bring themselves to believe in “fairy tales” are seekers that wind up exploring podcasts like this as they search for something to believe in.

At some point during everyone’s life, each person decides for themselves whether to continue trusting their own presumptuous ego or whether to heed the call from Above.

At this point, I think I should explain a little better what a meme is, as I use the term, so I’m going to read a couple of pages out of my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The importance of memes is that a huge part of our personality is shaped by the memes we collect and hold onto. The otherwise pristine nature of our underlying fractal unit of consciousness is affected by the memes we hold dear as well as the memes we despise. We enjoy memes we approve of, and we are repelled by means we disapprove of. The Sanskrit word for these provocative means is samskara. Samskara is traditionally defined in yogic philosophy as the habitual thought patterns collected by the ego that interfere with soul consciousness.

The memes each of us cling to, both those that we like and those that we actively dislike, influence our ability to exercise free will in the here and now. When we unthinkingly lock on to a meme or set of memes, it is our belief in those memes that determines how we interpret and respond to our surroundings. Our response may or may not be the best response to a given situation, but it is the only response allowed for by our particular bundle of memes. In other words, our meme bundles function as incoming and outgoing filters.

We like people who share the same memes as we do. The more memes people have in common, the more they agree with each other and the more they like and respect the other person. Friends have a lot of memes in common. Co-religionists share the same religious meme chords. Tribal brothers and sisters share tribal memes. Democrats share liberal memes. Republicans share conservative memes, and progressives share socialist memes. All subcultures share their subculture’s memes. Some types of memes are more important than other types, and it’s the important memes that matter the most. If we agree on the meaning of the word justice, we can probably overlook disagreement over the meme of whether the toilet paper should go over or under the roll.

We each carry our own bundle of memes. These are the things we believe in, both for good or ill. And, depending on what we believe in, this limits our ability to think and arrive at gnosis. So, if your meme bundle contains many values on the Left—material values like live fast and die young and leave a beautiful corpse, that is a meme bundle from the deficiency that encourages fast and reckless living and leads to misery. Contrast this with living a life that is on the aeonic, virtuous side that embraces the memes of the Fullness of God.

These virtues and these vices are each important spiritual memes. When we speak of the never ending war within our personalities and against the imitations of the deficiency, these are wars embracing the values of the Fullness as opposed to the values of popular culture. We cannot fake the meme bundles we hold because they affect our lives and every choice we make. Pretending may fool others, but that does not fool the Father. Our hearts need to be in authentic alignment with the Father and the Fullness in order for the love and gnosis of the Father to flow through us. And that’s why true repentance is necessary. We need to embrace the values of virtue, the meme bundle that flows from the Fullness of God. Embracing the meme bundle of popular culture gets us into trouble and holds us away from instantiating our true Self. Fortunately, the Christ imbues us with more power than the deficiency can wield against us, and it gives us the ability to overcome the imitations memes. So gos the never ending war.

Repentance involves pushing away the deficiency’s memes. Repentance means you no longer try to get away with whatever you can get away with. Repentance means I don’t want to do that anymore. Redemption means dwelling on the Right side of the virtue and vice ledger. And again, this isn’t to take away our fun. It’s because joy is only found on the virtuous side of the ledger. We are fractals of the Fullness of God, therefore in order to be truly happy, joyful, we shed the demiurgic memes. This tuning gives the spirit of the Christ permission to redeem us. Then we are able to embrace the Father and the Fullness.

The gnostic call for redemption goes like this: because the 2nd Order Powers have gotten all gummed up chasing after the Archons and each other in endless war, another fruit was required to bring peace to this universe. The Fullness and Logos prayed to the Father individually and collectively, for a champion to end the war, and this champion is called the Christ. Here’s how the Tripartite Tractate puts it:

“The Aeons not only produced a singular fruit reflecting the Father, but that fruit also reflected their own individual countenances and aspects from their positions in the hierarchy of Fullness. In this manner, they went forth in a form that consisted of many forms, so that the one to whom they were going to help should see those to whom he had prayed for help, as well as the one who brought it to him.”

In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is the correcting algorithm for the 2nd Order fractals that no longer ring true. The Christ replicates all of the qualities of the ALL—that is, the full attributes of the originating consciousness in their pure form that existed prior to the Fall, with all of the confounding memes stripped away. We recognize the Christ when we encounter it, because it went forth in many forms that look just like us, so that when we pray for help, we recognize the one to whom we pray. When we accept the gift of the Christ, we invite a correction to our ego’s deluded meme bundle so that the best functioning of the universal unit of consciousness may be reestablished within us. The Christ also provides a homing beacon to the Son via a rooted love connection that flows into us from the ethereal plane.

Simply put, gnosis is the realization that we come from Above and that our Father is in heaven and to heaven we shall return. That’s all. Gnosis requires us to step down from the throne of Ego and the meme shroud of the imitation that we cling to and are trapped in to better reveal the light of God that shines from within. That’s all. You cannot be taught gnosis. You must discover it for yourself. What we are doing here at Gnostic Insights is opening your mind so that you remember the gnosis that already lies within your One Self. You do not need to memorize this gnostic cosmology or the names of various characters we discuss here. You don’t need to punish yourself with sacrificial acts to achieve righteousness. You need only to remember and acknowledge the inherent immortal consciousness that flows from the Father.

The ancient book called the Tao Te Ching describes it this way in verse 27:

“The sage is always on the side of virtue, so everyone around him prospers.

He is always on the side of truth, so everything around him is fulfilled.

The path of the sage is called the path of illumination.

He who gives himself to this path is like a block of wood that gives itself to the chisel. Cut by cut, it is honed to perfection.

Only a student who gives himself can receive the master’s gift. If you think otherwise, despite your knowledge, you have blundered.

Giving and receiving are one. This is called the great wonder, the essential mystery. The very heart of all that is true.”

(And that is from the Tao Te Ching translation by Jonathan Star, 2001.)

Here at the Gnostic Insights podcast, I am not attempting to teach you gnosis. I am merely sharing the gnosis that I have discovered within myself. You have this gnosis within yourself, and if you resonate to what I am saying, this is merely you remembering gnosis. You have the entirety of the Fullness of God already within yourself, along with the remembrance of who you are and where you come from. Embrace virtue.

If you come away confused, please write to me for clarification.Feel free to write to me privately using the Contact Us form at gnosticinsights.com. Or you can write to me via Comments at the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Public comments are encouraged at the Substack page so we can start up a dialogue on these things. I really appreciate the listeners who have written to share their stories with me.

The publisher is almost finished with A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. This will be a large, fully explanatory edition that lays out the gnostic cosmology from start to finish, with full color illustrations throughout. They have set the price around $30. I’m keeping my royalties to a minimum in order to lower the sales price for you. There is currently an inexpensive, black and white edition that I published myself that is available here if you can’t afford $30 or don’t want to wait to read it.

Onward and upward. I’ll see you next time. God bless.

By Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.

Copyright 2022; all rights reserved

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. We garnered several new subscribers from last week’s Christmas episode. I’m so glad you have found us!

This week’s episode is a review of an episode that was broadcasted in September of 2022. One of the Substack readers requested more information about the 3rd Order of Powers, so here goes. And for those of you who have been with Gnostic Insights from the beginning, these repetitions are excellent reviews, because as you know, this hasn’t been the easiest gnosis to unveil. The Tripartite Tractate is kind of complicated, but really, all you need to know—the bottom line—is that we come from the great consciousness known as the Father and to the Father we all return.  

In the course of recording these episodes for the past couple of years, and writing now three books on the subject, I listen to these episodes over and over as I am editing them, then re listening to them, and I always benefit by hearing them again. So even if you come across one that you think you’ve heard before—well, you know we always start with reviews anyway, so it’s repetitious in that sense. But then the entire big gnostic cosmology is like a big rolling torus, a doughnut shape, and that the information is continually coming in, and we process it, and then it wraps around again so that the next time you encounter it and it comes in and you process it and then it wraps around again, your gnosis deepens every time that you come across the information. At least that’s what happens with me. 

The gnostic cosmogeny becomes more complex as each episode goes by so, if this is your first time listening to Gnostic Insights, I strongly recommend you visit the podcast’s home page and listen to the prior episodes in this series, in order to avoid confusion. You can find the prior episodes in this current series under the tab labeled “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.”  This week introduces the Third Order of Powers and the Christ.

Thus far, in previous episodes, we have encountered several types of beings. Oftentimes when reading the Tripartite Tractate we run into the words “images,” “representations,” and “likenesses,” and they all refer to different types of entities. I keep a little cue card by my computer to remind me of who’s who. You may wish to do the same because these words appear frequently in the Tripartite Tractate and consistently refer to particular entities. Keeping them straight in your mind is very helpful to understanding the Gnostic Gospel.

The first Being to emerge out of the pure consciousness of the Father is called “the One” and “the Son.” The Son is the first emanation from the Father, yet it remains part of the Father as an extension of his Holy Spirit. The Son quickly differentiated into what are called “the Totalities” and the “pure beings of the thought.” They are also referred to as “the ALL,” because they comprise ALL of the totality of the Son’s nature and thoughts. When the Totalities became Self-aware they “named themselves” and “sorted themselves” into what are called the “Aeons of the Hierarchy of the Fullness.” The Aeons of the Fullness are also pure images of the Son, with the added feature of Self-awareness. The images never came down into this material plane; the images of the ALL and the Aeons are still pure etheric images of the original Son. These aeonic images of the thought are the First Order of Powers.

Next come what are called the “representations” of the Aeons, which  are the fractal Pleroma of the Fullness represented within the single Aeon known as Logos. The representations are a perfect, fractal copy of the original Aeons and their positions in the Hierarchy. These representations are the “Second Order of Powers” and “the fruit of Logos.” Logos sends these Second Order Powers into our material plane in the form of all of the living creatures that populate the universe. We humans count ourselves as Second Order Powers along with everything else that contains life. The Second Order Powers are emanations from the Father that flows through the Son, through the Aeons of the Fullness, and through Logos, and so carry the Holy Spirit that confers consciousness and life into this creation below.

There is a third type of being called “the likenesses.” The likenesses are also known as the shadows and phantoms of the deficiency. The likenesses did not exist from the beginning and did not come from the ethereal plane; they are not emanations of the Father’s consciousness and so do not contain the Holy Spirit of life. The likenesses were formed out of the Fall of Logos and are inverted shadows of the fractals of Logos. Our material universe is an “imitation,” or what people are now calling a “simulation,” of the Paradise dreamed by the Aeons of the Fullness.  The imitations of the deficiency are perverse versions of the representations and the images. Those living creatures here on Earth who work according to their own narcissistic ego promote the inverted values of the deficiency. While the servants of the imitation may look like representations of the Aeons of the Fullness, they have lost touch with the Father and their true mission here on Earth.

The representations, we Second Order Powers, have a dim remembrance of the Father and the Fullness above. As the fruit of Logos, our orientation is always slightly upward and onward, even though we may continually fall back to egoic behavior. But, when push comes to shove, we Second Order Powers eventually look to the Father for help out of our suffering, as did Logos when he sought to escape the deficiency and return to the Fullness above.

We can think of all of these diverse entities as a set of stacking fractals of the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God. The Aeons of the Fullness were the original Self-aware fractals of the consciousness of the Son who became their Father. Through a process of giving glory to the Father in various combinations, the “Aeons of the Aeons” conceived an infinite variety of Aeons to populate their Fullness. Fullness, by the way, is another word for Pleroma. The Aeonic fractals are the “images of the thought,” and that “thought” was the Son.

The final Aeon conceived by the Fullness was named Logos, and he was a composite of all of the other Aeons, one fractal iteration down. The Pleroma of Logos was emanated by all of the Aeons giving glory to the Father at once, and this action conceived the final Aeon called Logos. His Pleroma was a fractal iteration down from the Fullness of the Hierarchy. He so resembled the Fullness, that he mistook himself for the Totalities and set out for the “realm of perfect glory” all by himself. This overreach resulted in the Fall. When Logos overreached and Fell out of the Hierarchy of the Fullness, his broken body generated an inverted shadow of all of the fractals of his Pleroma. In the same manner that a mirror reflects ourselves but has no substance beyond the likeness, the shadows are dead likenesses of the Pleroma of Logos. There is a phantom likeness for every one of the images above. And those likenesses are the egoic side or the broken side–the shadow side—of the mirror.

Logos still retained his original Pleroma and, when Logos remembered the Father, his Self, and his brothers in the Fullness, he was able to return to the Fullness. This is when the Pleroma of Logos, began to generate the Second Order Powers, all of us living creatures–everything that contains the Holy Spirit, the spark of life.

Here is how the Tripartite Tractate describes the Pleroma of Logos that generated the Second Order of Powers:

“The thought of the Logos, who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him, was called “Aeon” and “Place” of all those whom he had brought forth in accord with the ordinance, and it is also called “Synagogue of Salvation,” because he healed him(self) from the dispersal, which is the multifarious thought, and returned to the single thought. Similarly, it is called “Storehouse,” because of the rest which he obtained, giving (it) to himself alone. And it is also called “Bride,” because of the joy of the one who gave himself to him in the hope of fruit from the union, and who appeared to him. It is also called “Kingdom,” because of the stability which he received, while he rejoices at the domination over those who fought him. And it is called “the Joy of the Lord,” because of the gladness in which he clothed himself. With him is the light, giving him recompense for the good things which are in him, and (with him is) the thought of freedom.”

This describes the Second Order of Powers, which are the Pleroma of the newly restored Logos. There is one of us Second Order Powers for every one of the likenesses of the Fall. Whereas the likenesses are shadows of the Aeons, we Second Order Powers are the true fractal fruit of Logos and we bring life, consciousness, and the Holy Spirit of love into this fallen cosmos. Because we Second Order representations were fitted into the Boundary that forms our cosmic ecology, we find ourselves bound in a relationship to the material of the deficiency. Since we are true, fractal representations of the Pleroma of Logos, we are a perfect match for every likeness of the shadow Pleroma of Logos. We have a one to one relationship with the matter that forms our earthly bodies.

And now we have reached the point in gnostic cosmogeny and cosmic history where the Third Order of Powers is created. There is a Third Order Power for every one of us Second Order Powers. The Third Order Powers are the Pleroma of the Christ that come from the ethereal plane to redeem us and, along with us, the Fallen thought of the Demiurge.

Let us turn now to the Tripartite Tractate to uncover the who, how, what, and why of Christ and the Army of Christ and what they have to do with us. What we’re talking about today comes from section eight of the Tripartite Tractate that is called the Emanation of the Savior.

“The stumbling, which happened to the aeons of the Father of the Totalities who did not suffer, was brought to them, as if it were their own, in a careful and non-malicious and immensely sweet way. It was brought to the Totalities so that they might be instructed about the defect by the single one, from whom alone they all received strength to eliminate the defects.”

The stumbling is the Fall of the Aeon Logos. The Aeons of the Fullness were made aware of the situation in a careful, “non-malicious and immensely sweet way” which implies that there was no condemnation or wrath involved. The passage says the Aeons were made aware of the deficiency by the single One, which is the Son, who also gave them the strength needed to eliminate the defects.

“The Logos which moved had the hope and the expectation of him who is exalted… The order which was his came into being from him who ran on high and that which brought itself forth from him and from the entire perfection.”

Logos had hope and expectation of the exalted Father’s love. The order which was his is another way of speaking of the restored Pleroma of Logos, which was from him who ran on high. I interpret him who ran on high as the Self of Logos–his singular, unitary Self-concept or unit of consciousness in Simple Explanation terms. That which brought itself forth from him are those fractal units of consciousness that make up the contents of the Pleroma of Logos. The entire perfection is the ALL and the totality of the Aeons.

“The one who ran on high became for the one who was defective an intercessor with the emanation of the aeons which had come into being in accord with the things which exist.”

Here we may wonder who exactly is the “one who was defective.” This phrase can refer to both the Demiurge who Fell and to us Second Order Powers. We Second Order Powers who have forgotten our true origin by engaging in the never-ending war with the deficiency have become “defective.” Likewise, the “defective one” also refers to the fallen Ego of Logos abandoned down below, whom we call the Demiurge—the agent of the Fall. By this time in the Gnostic cosmogeny, Logos would be praying for the redemption of both his fallen Ego and the Second Order Powers fruited from his Pleroma, both struggling in this material world. Indeed, the redemption of each of the Second Order Powers will prove to be a fractal version of the redemption of the Demiurge.

The Tripartite Tractate continues, “When he prayed to them, they consented joyously and willingly, since they were in agreement, and with harmonious consent, to aid the defective one. They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one.”

The ALL and the Hierarchy of the Aeons both constitute the Pleroma of the Son Who Has Become the Father. The Aeons stepped up joyously and willingly with the thought of being helpful to the deficient ones by bringing awareness of the Father’s glory and love. We know that the originating source of consciousness is the illimitable Father—the God Above All Gods. The originating Father is beyond comprehension, even for the Aeons. The only entity capable of grasping the illimitable God Above All Gods is the Son of the Father, who contains within himself all of the traits of the Father. It is this Son who has a countenance, a face, because the Father wants to be known to his emanations through the Son. This is how we know that when these passages speak of the Father, they are actually referring to the Son who has become a Father to his emanations, because the Aeons are able to behold the countenance of their Father.

By now we realize that when Aeons give glory together they produce new emanations; this is how Aeons make new fruit. The last time this had happened, all of the Aeons had emanated Logos as an image of their Totality. Now they gathered together and all of them, including Logos, gave glory to the Pleroma of their Father with harmonious consent while concurrently asking the Father to help them bring aid to the defective one. The difference between this act of fruiting and the one that originally brought forth the Aeon named Logos was that Logos was fruited by the individual Fullnesses giving glory to the Father together; this time the fruiting was the Fullnesses and the ALL giving glory alongside Logos while praying with specific intent for salvation to come to the deficiency.

The Tripartite Tractate says of their fruiting: “Then from the harmony, in a joyous willingness which had come into being, they brought forth the fruit, which was a begetting from the harmony, a unity, a possession of the Totalities, revealing the countenance of the Father, of whom the aeons thought as they gave glory and prayed for help for their brother with a wish in which the Father counted himself with them. Thus, it was willingly and gladly that they bring forth the fruit.”

The Gnostic Gospel calls this new fruit the Christ. The Pleroma of the Christ is the Third Order of Powers, endowed with more capabilities than the First and Second Orders, because the Christ embodies the entirety of the ALL and the particularity of the consciousness of each of the individual Aeons of the Fullness, along with the full power of the Holy Spirit and the Son’s entire knowledge and remembrance of the ethereal plane. This Third Order of Powers is fully equipped to bring remembrance and redemption to the Second Order Powers living in this fallen world and to the Demiurge.

“Not only did the aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, which was written previously, but also they generated their own; for the aeons who give glory generated their countenance and their face. They were produced as an army for him, as for a king, since the beings of the thought have a powerful fellowship and an intermingled harmony. They came forth in a multifaceted form, in order that the one to whom help was to be given might see those to whom he had prayed for help. He also sees the one who gave it to him.”

The emanation of the Christ brings all of the knowledge, power, and glory of the God Above All Gods through its Son and the Totalities into creation. The Christ is now in the process of bringing this gnosis to all Second Order Powers. There is a Third Order Power for each and every Second Order Power, and a Second Order Power for each and every shadow of the Fall. All we need to do is allow the Third Order Powers to take up residence within our individuated Pleromas. In this manner, the gnosis and love of the Christ will displace the shadows and bring redemption to us and through us. This is the true mission of Christianity.

The Tripartite Tractate has much more to say about the Christ and his Pleroma. In next week’s episode we will speak more about the nature and power of the Christ and the means by which redemption comes to the Fallen cosmos. I hope you will join me again next week for this very exciting episode. Until then, do not despair, for help is on the way.

Onward and upward! And God bless us all.

The publisher is almost finished with my next book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. This will be a large, fully explanatory edition that lays out the gnostic cosmology from start to finish, with full color illustrations throughout. They have set the price around $30. I’m keeping my royalties to a minimum in order to lower the sales price for you. There is currently an inexpensive, black and white edition that I published myself that is available here if you can’t afford $30.

Welcome back! This week’s episode is a chapter out of the new book you keep hearing about. This chapter deals with the Fall of Logos and the rise of the Deficiency. It will be familiar territory by now and may clear up some fuzziness of thought. I’m not including a transcript because this material is available in the book which is, of course, copyrighted. The color edition of the book should be available for purchase sometime in January or February. I’m taking one last proof read of the galley copy and, unfortunately, am finding a few errors of punctuation and spelling, , so it needs one more pass through the editing and art departments. Hopefully that won’t take long…

Before we begin, I would like to remind you that I am not teaching you gnosis, I am only reminding you of the gnosis we were all born with. We 2nd Order Powers come fully loaded with remembrance of the Father, the Son, and our Aeonic home in the Fullness. We are called “those of the Remembrance” for that very reason. But once we enter this material world, we tend to forget our ethereal origins because of the never-ending war down here. If what I am saying is true, then this gnosis will strike you more as an “aha” than a “huh?” and you will come away feeling less confused rather than more confused. Of course, you still need to listen with mindfulness and understand what I’m saying.

What do you think? Are you finding that to be the case? If you come away confused, please write to me for clarification.Feel free to write to me privately using the Contact Us form at gnosticinsights.com. Or you can write to me via Comments at the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Public comments are encouraged at the Substack page so we can start up a dialogue on these things. I really appreciate the listeners who have written to share their stories with me.

The publisher is almost finished with A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. This will be a large, fully explanatory edition that lays out the gnostic cosmology from start to finish, with full color illustrations throughout. They have set the price around $30. I’m keeping my royalties to a minimum in order to lower the sales price for you. There is currently an inexpensive, black and white edition that I published myself that is available here if you can’t afford $30 or don’t want to wait to read it.