Gnostic Insights

The purpose of Gnostic Insights is to share with you the insights that I have gleaned through many years of contemplation, prayer, and study of the Gnostic writings, mostly as written in the Nag Hammadi library, and particularly the Tripartite Tractate, which is one of the books of the Nag Hammadi. So far in this series, we have laid out the development of our universe from the originating Father’s consciousness, through the Son, through the Fullness of God. We’ve gone through Logos and the Fall, and the deficiencies of the Fall.

As I say, the purpose of these podcasts is to share gnosis with you and for you to soak this in and take in this gnosis for yourself. You need to understand in a reasonable way what’s going on. Gnosis means knowledge, and this implies thinking and reason. I attempt to lay out everything for you in a logical way so that you can follow along and make sense of everything so that it will become for you gnosis. Gnosis goes beyond simply hearing to understanding, and this is why I emphasize thought and reasoning as part of the process for gnosis. This approach to gnosis involves reason.

In Gnostic terms, as well as traditional Judaic and Christian terms, the Son is a piece of the Father and the Father is the originating consciousness, the ground state, the matrix behind our existence. The Son contains all of the characteristics of the originating consciousness in a discrete form—in a package, so to speak, like a bucket dipped into the ocean. The Son is the sea water inside of the bucket, which is identical to the great ocean that surrounds it. The Son is what we can call a perfect fractal of the entirety of the Father.

The Aeons are facets that emerge from the Son, each one different from one another, like the individual rays of a star. Together they form a single totality of the Son; the Son and the Fullness of the Aeons are identical. When the Aeons sit in perfect harmony together in a state known as the Fullness of God, this is also called the Pleroma. This particular aspect of Judaism and Christianity was cut out of the canonical texts of the Bible by the Emperor and the Pope during the Nicene Council’s packaging of Christianity for the empire. The Pleroma of the Aeons was well known to the Jews during the time of Jesus and survives in the New Testament as references to Aeons. But when I read the Bible, I find that these are generally misinterpreted as units of time rather than units of consciousness. The Fullness of God is also contained in the Bible as a more vague reference to the size or capacity of the Father, which is basically true, but it is stripped of its meaning as the aggregation of the Aeons. The Pleroma is the place of the Elect and the Spiritual Ones referenced in the New Testament.

According to Gnostic texts, our universe was created when one of these Aeons deviated from its place in the Fullness and headed out on its own without consent. Most books of the Nag Hammadi identify this Aeon as Sophia, while others identify it as the Aeon called Logos. My own interpretation of the Gnostic Gospel, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, identifies this Aeon with Logos. The gnostic gospels are religious books, and their rendition of these events carries implicit religious moral judgments. The Aeon who left to strike out on its own, is said to have fallen. This Fall is the original Fall referenced in the Bible, not the Fall of Adam and Eve in the garden, although it may be possible to consider the garden as a fractal fable that references the same.

In my view, the Fall represents the rise of ego, as this Aeon Logos acted on its own presumptuous thought, which is another word for ego, and its own motives apart from the will of the Father and the Fullness. As I said, the Gnostic texts differ in their identification of the Fallen Aeon as either Sophia or Logos, although these are very comparable terms—Sophia means wisdom, and Logos means knowledge and reasoning. Both, though, whether it’s Sophia or Logos, agree that the Fall produced this universe and the ruler of this universe. Once the Aeon fell, its abilities and plans spread throughout the contained space within the boundary that was put up by the Father, and this is what created our universe.

It is said that the Fallen Aeon was horrified by what was created and it retreated to the Fullness of God to figure out how to rectify the result of the Fall. Within that Pleroma a plan was hatched to deal with the results of the Fall. Within the Fall, away from the Pleroma, this contained the newly formed space and time and a separated entity with all knowledge of this place became aware of itself. The fallen Logos left part of himself behind. These are the shadows of the Fall. The fallen Logos in its entirety is the creator God of this world, and this creator God is called by the Gnostics the Demiurge. The Old and New Testaments call this the creator God Yahweh. And this is one of the great heresies of Gnosticism—the identification of the creator God as a product of the Fall rather than the God Above All Gods, or the true Father that is in heaven.

Because it is the result of the Fall and unsanctioned by both the Father and the Fullness, the universe produced by the Demiurge is devoid of life. It is not alive. It’s called the Deficiency. The Deficiency is populated by small, lifeless things, things that are shadows of the Aeons of the Fullness. It is also populated by forces and principalities that arose from and were left behind by the Fallen Aeon. In my Simple Explanation philosophy, it being science and math based rather than religious, I don’t identify the universe as fallen in the negative sense of being deficient. It is merely limited by localized monads that replace the omnipresent Metaverse. A monad is a particular point of view—singular points of view. And point of view is literally the way you see things. I have a point of view from where I’m standing and looking around. You have a point of view from where you’re standing and looking around. Everything in our universe, everything, including particles, atoms, molecules—everything—is in a particular time and place. It has its own point of view. Point of view is called a POV—Point Of View—and in philosophy these are called monads.

Now let’s think about what I’ve just been telling you. The Aeons of the Fullness of God are each a particular, unique facet of the traits of the Father, which of course are limitless. So that would mean that there would be an infinite number of Aeons. The Aeons work together as one organism. I generally picture them as a pyramid of golden balls all stacked together. They are one thing that is the Fullness of God. They are one thing, but they are each a particular facet of God, so they are each a little golden, glowing ball (is how I think of them). It’s like a stack of cannonballs that is basically infinitely large. Each of these facets has a job, a position, a power, a place. They are each endowed with capabilities, and when they all work in perfect harmony, they create the Fullness of God. They are the Son that, it is said, that they are worn like a cloak upon the Son, and the Son is a cloak upon them. In other words, they’re coexistent. And together, when they’re in perfect harmony, they are pretty much identical, although the Son is one unbroken unit and the Fullness is an infinite number, and these are called the Pleroma.

The last Aeon that was produced was called Logos, and Logos sat at the very tip top of this pyramid. And Logos itself was a small replication, like a model car is a replication of a big car. Logos was a replication of the entirety of the Fullness, but in miniature. It sat up there in its perfection, and it mistook its own self for the entirety of the Fullness. It’s as if someone were, for example, the President of the United States, and they mistook their own self for the entirety of the nation. They completely forgot that there was an entire nation of voters underneath them. And so they thought they could act alone without consulting the entirety. And that’s what Logos did—acted alone. The Fullnesses, the Aeons, were never supposed to act alone. They always acted together in concert, in perfect harmony. They were called a Congress of Perfect minds.

Logos mistook himself for the entirety and set out upon a project of his own, launching himself out into space, attempting to plug back into the originating consciousness, which was impossible. And instead of plugging in, Logos fell. Now, when Logos shattered as a result of the Fall, all of his little bits—that were each of them a little Aeon, but they weren’t Aeons, they were just models of the Aeons—they all rolled out and lost their pyramidal hierarchical structure. They were no longer sitting in the structure of Logos. They broke apart and rolled out. In the previous episode, I identified these rolled out parts of Logos as the quantum foam that forms the very first instantiations of material.

In the world of the Aeons of the Fullness, when they sit up there in the Pleroma, they are inert objects that all look alike, and they never deviate from their position and place. But together they sing one song together and they dream one dream, and I believe that this dream is Paradise. It’s the dream of Heaven. So what’s Heaven like? Heaven is like our world that we see around us. Imagine this fallen world of ours, such as it is, but without any negativity in it. Imagine our fallen world exactly as it is with trees and birds and flowers and plants and relationships between people. But imagine it without any selfish egoism. All work together—”all for one and one for all.” So, Heaven is like our fallen world, but in a perfected state where there is no disappointment, no death, no destruction, no rust, no brown leaves. Everything is alive and green and beautiful and working perfectly together. That’s the dream of Paradise. Logos carried that dream of Paradise within itself and when Logos fell, that thought of Paradise broke open and rolled out. But because the little pieces of Logos were no longer sitting in the cooperative hierarchy that Logos himself was patterned after, they had no cooperation amongst each other and they were not able to build the Paradise that had been dreamed of. So, the “good thought” is Paradise. The lost thought, the broken thought, is the Fall.

One aspect of the good thought of Paradise is the Simple Golden Rule, and it’s called the Simple Golden Rule because it comes from my book called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The Simple Golden Rule is this: that units of consciousness, and that is anything, it began with the Pleroma—they’re each a unit of consciousness, but it happens down here too; we are all units of consciousness)—and the originating consciousness, again, that’s the Father—units of consciousness are broken out parts of the Father). In order for units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to be willing to work together on a single project, and they need to love one another.

Love in the Simple Explanation is not only this feeling of love that we generally think of, but it is coherence. It’s the holding together. Holding together is love. When one works in a cooperative hierarchy, the Simple Golden Rule is at play, so everything is able to hold hands with its fellows and level up to the next level of sophistication. We work together to build the next level up. So for example, in a family, each individual in the family, mom, dad, the kids—when the family works well, they are working together, they’re sharing information with each other. They’re working on a singular project and they level up to the family unit and the things that the family does together. Everything holds hands with others like itself and works together on a central project. And this causes them to be able to level up, as I call it, where you could say it builds a product that benefits everyone. This is the Simple Golden Rule.

When units of consciousness do not work according to the Simple Golden Rule, they are unable to work cooperatively with one another because they are self-centered rather than centered on the common goal of the common project. When you are self-centered or selfish or egoic, you think of your own self and your own needs rather than the needs of your brothers and sisters and the project that you’re all working together on. Before the Fall, there was no such thing as selfishness. Prior to the Fall, there was no such thing as egoism. Everyone worked together. The Fullness of God is one structure, even though every one is an individual with their own name, position, place. But, after the Fall, self-centered egotism ruled the universe.

The Tripartite Tractate puts it this way. “Like the Pleromas are the things which came into being from the arrogant thought, which are the likenesses of the Pleromas. They are copies, shadows, and phantasms lacking reason, lacking light, these which belong to the vain thought, since they are not products of anything. They thought of themselves that they are beings existing by themselves and are without a source since they do not see anything else existing before them.”

Again, now we’re talking about the bits and pieces that broke out and rolled away from Logos. We are in verse 79 and 80 of the Tripartite Tractate, “Therefore, they lived in disobedience and acts of rebellion without having humbled themselves before the One because of whom they came into being.” And, “the One because of whom they came into being,” that’s the Fallen Logos.

And what is the opposite of selfishness? What is the opposite of egoic thought? One must have humility. To be humble is to think less of oneself—is to act in a manner that is loving. It is to act in a manner that is in accordance with the Simple Golden Rule. It takes humility to act in cooperation with others. The opposite of humility is selfishness.

Again, quoting, “They wanted to command one another, overcoming one another in their vain ambition, while the glory which they possess contains the cause of the system that was to be.” See, they did have a piece of glory. What is the glory that they possessed? It was the original pattern, the fragments of the Fullness. That was their glory that they possessed. Again, quoting, “They are likenesses of the things which are exalted.” And what are they? Likenesses of the Aeons above.

“They were brought to a lust for power in each one of them, according to the greatness of the name of which each is a shadow, each one imagining that it is superior to his fellows. The thought of these others was not barren, but just like those of which they are shadows, all that they thought about, they have as potential sons.” So, these broken bits of Logos, they have the ability, they have the capabilities that Logos had. “Therefore, it happened that many offspring came forth from them as fighters, as warriors, as troublemakers, as apostates. They are disobedient beings, lovers of power. All the other beings of this sort were brought forth from these.”

When we read the Tripartite Tractate, a lot of these references sound as if they’re talking about people, don’t they? Disobedient, violent, and so forth. But we’re still stepping through the cosmology of the universe, and therefore, when I am trying to map this information onto our universe, I’m also putting it onto the particles and molecules of our universe, and how is it that they work and how is this happening? And this is how I came to think that the fallen bits of Logos are the quantum foam that form our universe, because the quantum foam is chaotic, it never does level up. Quantum foam doesn’t directly reach out and become subatomic particles. It’s always popping in and out. It’s roiling. It’s just bubbling there.

“Logos was a cause of those who came into being and he continued all the more to be at a loss and he was astonished. Instead of perfection, he saw a defect. Instead of unification, he saw division. Instead of stability, he saw disturbances. Instead of rests, tumults. Neither was it possible for him to make them cease from loving disturbance, nor was it possible for him to destroy it. He was completely powerless once his totality and his exaltation abandoned him. Those who had come into being, not knowing themselves both did not know the Pleromas from which they came forth, and did not know the one who was the cause of their existence. The Logos being in such unstable conditions did not continue to bring forth anything like emanations of the things which are in the Pleroma, the glories which exist for the honor of the Father. Rather, he brought forth little weaklings hindered by the illnesses by which he too was hindered. It was the likeness of the disposition which was a unity, that which was the cause of the things which do not themselves exist from the first.” (verses 80, 81)

So, the things that exist from the first, these are the Fullness of God and the Pleroma; the things which do not exist from the first, these are the creations of the Fall. And Logos was unable to do anything. He couldn’t reign them in. He was astonished and he was horrified. Again, I have to emphasize that the reason for the disturbance and the lack of ability to work together on the part of the Fallen is ego; is self centeredness. In verse 81 of the tripartite it says, “until the one who brought forth into the defect these things which were thus in need, until he judged those who came into being because of him contrary to reason, and that is the judgment which became a condemnation, he struggled against them unto destruction.”

This condemnation of Logos is referred to as the metanoia, which is a theological term that basically means repenting, or turning away, turning back to the goodness. Logos turned to another opinion and had another thought. The thought that Logos originally had which led to the Fall is the thought that is forming this chaotic universe. Then Logos pulled back. He had a metanoia and he turned to another thought of good things. He prayed to the Fullness and to the Father to help him solve this problem that he had created down below. As a result of the Fall, “All his prayer and remembering were numerous powers according to that limit. For there is nothing barren in his thought, The powers were good and were greater than those of the likeness,” (verse 82). And the likeness is called the likeness or the imitation, because it is an imitation of the thoughts of the Pleroma. It’s an imitation or a likeness of Paradise, but it is not Paradise, and it is not the Fullness.

So, when Logos turned from the Fall and had his metanoia, he turned back to the Father and the Fullness and prayed to them to help. And they produced the 2nd Order of Powers as a fruit to send into the Deficiency in order to make right what had fallen and also to produce a new ecology, a new economy. And I believe that this new economy that was being produced is our material universe that we live in.

Quoting again from the Tripartite Tractate in verse 81, “The one who is in the Pleroma was what he first prayed to and remembered. Then he remembered his brothers individually and always with one another. Then all of them together. But before all of them, the Father. The prayer of the agreement was a help for him in his own return, and in that of the Totality, for a cause of his remembering those who have existed from the first was being remembered. This is the thought which calls out from afar, bringing him back. All his prayer and remembering were numerous powers according to that limit, for there is nothing barren in his thought. The powers were good and were greater than those of the likeness.”

“It was not from the sickness which came into being that they were produced” (that is the 2nd order powers), “from which is the good intent, but from the one who sought after the Pre-existent One.” (and the pre-existent is the consciousness of God.) “Once Logos had prayed, he both raised himself to the good thought and sowed in them a predisposition to seek and pray to the glorious pre-existent. And he sowed in them a thought about him and an idea so that they should think that something greater than themselves exists prior to them, although they did not understand what it was. Begetting harmony and mutual love through that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since from unity and from unanimity they have received their very being.” (And I refer to that acting in unanimity as the Simple Golden Rule.)

And, as we learned in the last episode, “As they brought forth at first according to their own birth, the two orders assaulted one another, fighting for command because of the manner of their being. As a result, they were submerged in forces and natures in accord with the condition of mutual assault, having lust for power and all other things of this sort.” (And this is that never ending war with the Deficiency that we talked about in the last episode.)

Going on to verse 90, “When the Logos which was defective, was illumined, his Pleroma began.” (That is the Pleroma of the new creation, the Fullness that is our universe.) “He escaped those who had disturbed him at first. He became unmixed with them. He stripped off that arrogant thought. He received mingling with rest when those who had been disobedient to him at first bent down and humbled themselves before him, and he rejoiced over the visitation of his brothers, who had visited him.” (That is the Aeons, who are helping him now.) “He generated manifest images of the living visages, mingling the Logos with himself entirely. Therefore, those who came forth from him are great, just as that which is truly great.”

And he is speaking of us—of the 2nd Order Powers. And when I say us, I mean all of creation, not just human. And we are a kind of imitation of the Pleroma now Above, of the Fullness of God, because the Aeons have come to help Logos to rectify the Fall to counteract those little blue balls that are imitations of each of those Aeons.

“After he was amazed at the beauty of the ones who had appeared to him, he professed gratitude for this visitation. The Logos performed this activity through those from whom he had received aid for the stability of those who had come into being because of him, and so they might receive something good since he thought to pray for the organization of all those who had come forth from him, which is stabilized, so that it might make them established. Therefore, those whom he intentionally produced are in chariots, just as those who came into being, those who have appeared, so that they might pass through every place of things which are below, so that each one might be given the place which is constituted as he is. This is destruction for the beings of the likeness, yet it is an act of beneficence for the beings of the thought, a revelation of those who are from the ordinance, which is a unity while suffering while they are seeds which have not come to be by themselves.” (verse 91)

So, what I’m trying to explain here is that Logos contained copies of all of the Aeons of the Fullness. When he fell, those copies broke forth and, because they were formed from disharmony and selfishness, they themselves were only able to manifest disharmony and selfishness, which in a material sense is the quantum foam.  Logos returned to the Fullness and prayed to the Father in Fullness, and the Aeons sent down representations of themselves into our universe, each one being a much more fabulous original than these deficient copies that broke out of Logos. And so these organizational patterns and names and faces, that is countenances, of the Aeons came to bring order and stability and solidity. That solidity is the new economy, the new ecology of this universe. The Fullness is an ethereal being—it’s spiritual, but the Fall brought separation, brought shadows, which was not able to level up, however, it was a physical manifestation. It was density. It was material. It was no longer spiritual or ethereal. Onto that material then the Aeons of the Fullness and the Father, through Logos’s prayer, brought stability, order, pattern and a kind of hierarchy made to fit into that boundary that is around the Fall and Deficiency. And now we have our universe.

All right, I think that’s enough for today. Plenty to chew on. Thank you for spending this time with me and sharing these gnostic insights. I hope they are of some help to you in picturing how we can work religion and science together. That is always what I strive to do—is take the mythological language and translate it into scientific observations so that there is no division between science and religion, because this is one universe we live in. There is only one truth and we are all just attempting to describe it in our own ways. Again, thank you for spending this time with me here on Gnostic Insights. Onward and upward. God bless.

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.

p.s. A listener has suggested a children’s version of the Gnostic Gospel story. I like that suggestion! Are any of you artists who would like to illustrate a children’s book? Please contact me ASAP.

The purpose of this series of podcasts is to share with you the gnosis that I have gleaned from my readings of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts. These podcasts are coming in the order as the cosmology of our universe unfolds, and I think it’s a lot easier for you to understand the material if you follow along in order. The particular book out of the Nag Hammadi that I am using as my primary reference is called the Tripartite Tractate. In 2019, I wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, where I translated the Tripartite Tractate into modern English in a very, very simple way. I also illustrated all of the concepts in order to facilitate understanding. It is my hope that as you listen to this information and then meditate upon it, you will come to understand the origins of our universe and our place in it, and also the major players at work for both good and for ill, and how does it affect our lives.

So far we’ve talked about the Father, the Son, the ALL, and the Fullness. We’ve talked about the fall of Logos, and we have talked about the Deficiency that came from the Fall. Now we’re getting to the good news, which is the plan that was devised by Logos and the Fullness of God in order to redeem the Fall and all that came from the Fall.

After the Fall, Logos broke apart and all of his small parts—which were themselves small copies of all of the originals of the Fullness because Logos was an entity that contained all of the Aeons inside of it, although smaller, fractal versions of the original Aeons. When Logos reached and fell, he broke apart, and these smaller fractals that constituted his being left him, and they went out on their own. Logos was horrified by what had happened, and the Nag Hammadi says that the best of Logos returned back to the Fullness, leaving the Deficiency behind.

As I explained in the previous podcast, the main reason that this is called the Deficiency is because the parts of Logos were no longer arranged in their hierarchical structure that encouraged cooperation. They all rolled out and became equal to one another. They were driven by ego and self-centered ambition because Logos had been reaching for the heights when it fell, therefore the parts of Logos that separated out from him continued to reach for the heights. However, because they are not in a cooperative structure of the hierarchy, they’re all self-centered. They’re all, each one, reaching for the heights on their own. They have no cooperative arrangement.

Logos regretted the Fall and the Phantoms. These are called the Phantoms, these little bits of him that rolled out—Phantoms of the Deficiency. Logos regretted the Fall, and the Phantoms born of the Fall. And “regret turned into condemnation of the irrational things he had produced.” Logos wanted their destruction because it was just a horrible thing that was happening.

As I said in the last podcast, when Logos beat it back up to the Fullness, the Fullness and Logos did not remain idle, but they cooked up a scheme to bring redemption to the Deficiency. They brought forth what is called a fruit, which is an offspring in the Fullness, with the view to overthrowing what had come into being because of the Deficiency. These new creatures that were devised are better than the Deficiency because they come from the union of the entire Fullness, whereas the Deficiency came out of a mistaken solo effort by Logos alone.

Out of this union of the Fullness and Logos came what are called the 2nd Order Powers. These powers are better and greater than those of the Imitation because they did not come into being out of ego and out of lack of thought. This new fruit of the Fullness and Logos was fitted purposely into the Boundary that surrounded the Fall and so, because they were fitted to live within this Boundary, they were able to have a cooperative structure the way the Fullness had a cooperative structure. The Fullness is a cooperative structure that looks like a hierarchy. And as I described in one of our first podcasts, the hierarchy is a pyramidal shaped structure.

The Deficiency is not a pyramidal shaped structure, and in my illustrations I have a circular boundary around the Deficiency.

So, the 2nd Order Powers are fitted into this circular boundary. They are not in perfect hierarchical arrangement, as is the Fullness, but since they are within a bounded space, they are encouraged to work together. They are in relationship to each other. If it were an unbounded space, it would be infinite and they would all drift apart. They would not be within a cooperative structure or an ecology, as it’s called. In other words, the newly produced offspring of the Fullness and Logos were patterned after the originals and the Fullness. They are patterns of Aeons, which is what the entities that live in the Fullness are called, but they are formed to fit within the Boundary rather than the hierarchy.

And the way I illustrate this in my book and in my blog is that circular boundary with living cells inside of it. It looks very much like a microscope slide. And if you go to my gnostic blog or if you go to my Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book, you will see all of these illustrations that I’m describing to you. You will see them in their beautiful, glorious color, and maybe they’ll be helpful for you to picture these concepts. I know it’s helpful for me.

So now, quoting from the Tripartite Tractate verse 83, “Logos sowed in them an inclination to seek and pray to what is glorious and preexistent. He also sowed in them an ability to think about it and a power of reflection, to make them realize that something greater than themselves existed before them, but they had not understood what it was. Bringing forth harmony and mutual love by means of that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since to unity and unanimity they owed their existence.”

More simply put, the Fullness is a cooperative ecology. Even though it is made up of an infinite number of entities, they sit in a hierarchical structure where everyone knows their position, place, power, and job, and they sit and they dream together in unison because they are a perfect cooperative ecology. The Deficiency is not a cooperative ecology, having arisen from ego. Now, these new powers were able to think about the Fullness and the Father, and it was given to them the ability to think logically and to reason. And this is why in my Gnostic Insights podcast I describe things to you and I give you the reason behind it because you and I are reasonable beings. We don’t only have to seek out exactly what is written. We can use logic and deduction and infer the truth of these things. It isn’t magic, it’s logic.

The Aeons and the Fullness are called the 1st Order of Powers, and they gave birth to a second Order of Powers called the emissions of the Remembrance, and emissions refers to units of consciousness. They are embodying the originating consciousness, which is called the Father. And the Father begat a Son which is the perfect and full sampling of the Father. And then the Son begat the Fullness of God, which is all of the Son’s characteristics broken out into those individual variables or those individual characteristics. So rather than being an amorphous infinite being, there are now particularities, each one being a sampling of that great being, and that Fullness is the 1st Order of Powers, the Aeons of the Hierarchy. And now they have given birth to a second Order of Powers that were formed to fit into the bounded space of the Deficiency.

In my illustrations I show this as the pyramid of golden orbs that I use to represent the Fullness, and then there’s a little thought bubble coming out of that pyramid and within that thought bubble is that microscope slide of the bounded space containing cells.

Logos and the Fullness produced a second Order of Powers patterned after the first Order of Powers that dwelt in the hierarchy. The 2nd Order of Powers was named the emissions of the Remembrance, because they had been created by the unified will of the Father through union with Logos and the Fullness, and therefore they contained the traits of the Father.

In verse 83, the Tripartite Tractate says, “The powers of Remembrance were adorned with the names of the preexistent whose likenesses they were. The order of those of this kind were in harmony with itself and with each other.” (This new Order of Powers reflected the values of the Son, but it was formed within a boundary rather than a hierarchy, so they had more freedom to assemble themselves into non-hierarchical patterns.) “These newly formed beings did not have more substance, nor did they have a greater glory, for they are not equal to the preexistent ones.” (And those preexistent ones are the Aeons of the Fullness who came directly from the Son who came directly from the Father, so they are preexistent consciousness).

It goes on to say, “If, on the other hand, they were superior to the Imitations, the only thing that made them elevated above them was that they were from a good disposition, for they had not come out of the sickness that arose, whereas those of the Deficiency arose from the Fall. Those of the Remembrance,” (and what they are remembering is that they come from the Fullness and the Father), “those of the Remembrance arose from the consecrated union of Logos and the Fullness. Those of the Deficiency represent phantoms and confusion, whereas the new fruit, the 2nd Order Powers, represent the virtues of the ALL.

And now a strange and tragic thing occurred. It turns out that when Those of the Remembrance came upon Those of the Imitation, they attempted to overthrow them out of an inherent sense of self righteousness, because after all, the 2nd Order Powers are from a consecrated union of the Fullness, and the Deficiency is not. Those of the Remembrance knew they were superior to those of the Imitation because they were nobler than those previous ones. The 2nd Order Powers began to fight against the shadows of the Imitation and, after all, that was their purpose. They were put into the bounded space in order to overcome what had come from the Deficiency and the Fall. Because the Imitation waged war against the Likenesses and the Fullness, the offspring of the Fullness acted against itself on account of its rage.”

That’s what it says. So, the Imitation is waging war against the 2nd Order fruit, and in response the 2nd Order fruit begins to act against its own self because it’s so angry about it, but the ones who were in opposition would not surrender due to their own ignorance of what came before.

“They believed they were self engendered and had given birth to themselves and so they believed they owed nothing to the previous Powers, either above or below.” That is in verse 84 of the Tripartite Tractate. In my illustrations I depict this never ending war between the Remembrance and the Deficiency as the Yin Yang symbol. And I am depicting the Deficiency as those little blue balls fitted within that circle heading downward on the yin side and the Powers of the Remembrance, which now look like living green cells, sitting right against them and going upward as the Yang.

Now, again from the Tripartite Tractate, verse 84, “The two orders fought against each other, struggling for command with such a result that they were engulfed by the forces and material substances in accordance with what is called the law of mutual combat, and they, too, acquired lust for domination and all of the other passions of this sort. And consequently, empty vain glory pulls them all toward the desire of lust for domination, and not one of them remembers what is superior or confesses it.”

So what it is saying here in verse 84 is that even though the 2nd Order Powers came into this creation with a better disposition because they are patterned directly after the Aeons of the Fullness, but when they’re standing there doing war with the Deficiency, they take on the characteristics of the Deficiency. Violence begets violence. Forgetfulness begets forgetfulness, and forgetfulness is another word for lack of gnosis, because gnosis means knowledge. And the way you achieve gnosis is by remembering where you come from. That is called anamnesis. Amnesia means forgetfulness and anamnesis is remembering. Ignorance is the same as lack of gnosis.

The 2nd Order Powers come into creation fully loaded with gnosis, but in the course of doing battle in this never ending war with the Deficiency, gnosis is forgotten and needs to be remembered again. And that’s the purpose of our Gnostic Insights podcast—to remember the gnosis from above.

Verse 85 of the Tripartite Tractate says, “Because of this, their envy, malice, rage, violence, lust and ignorance ruled as they were producing various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers.” In my previous podcast, I said that the objects that came from the Deficiency, because they are confused and lost are not hierarchical, do not operate according to the Golden Rule, wherein they help each other build better, bigger things for the improvement of all. The Deficiency is not able to do any of that. It’s all selfish. It’s all self driven. It’s all about Dominion and power. In other words, there is nothing about the Deficiency that was able to build up into creation because they can’t create; they can’t work together cooperatively. They didn’t know the hierarchical structure of cooperation.

The 2nd Order Powers do know the hierarchical structure of cooperation, and so they are able to work together and share information in order to level up to the next level and create. In my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything blog and the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything book, I discuss all of this in a non-religious way. It is a science and math based theory, but it is completely compatible with this Gnostic Gospel. In the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I identify the basic level of material instantiation as what is called by physicists quantum foam. And it is this chaotic, roiling, lawless foam that can’t ever level up. It just sits there boiling.

In the Simple Explanation I call them units of consciousness; here in the gnostic gospel we call them Second Order Powers. These units of consciousness—and the originating consciousness, again, is the Father, so everything in our creation that is a Second Order Power is a unit of consciousness, a fractal of the Father—these units of consciousness use the Simple Golden Rule to reach out to one another, hook up with others of their kind, share information and patterns in order to level up to the next level of creation. And everything levels up to the next level of creation. The quantum foam can’t do it because it’s the Deficiency, but now the 2nd Order Powers start coming in with hierarchical structure, and so they’re able to level up.

Here I’m going to drop in a slight change, and it’s this. According to my Simple Explanation theory of everything, everything was conscious, including the particles and the molecules.

But over the last couple of years, in discussions with my brother, Bill, we have amended that interpretation as it pertains to the Gnostic Gospel. The Gnostic Gospel isn’t quite as panpsychic as the Simple Explanation theory of everything used to be. And, according to this Gnostic Gospel, consciousness only proceeds from the Father. Consciousness is a top down phenomenon. Well, as you’ve been hearing for the last couple of weeks, the Fall wasn’t based upon consciousness, it was based upon ego. Egoic consciousness isn’t exactly the same as the Father’s consciousness or the Aeonic consciousness. The consciousness of the Father brings love and it brings life, as well as coherence and all of the virtues of the Father. It brings our DNA and all of the instructions for life for everything that’s alive on the planet, whereas the Fall was an outcropping of ego. It wasn’t from the Father’s consciousness. It was egoic consciousness that was self centered. Therefore, the quantum foam that came out of the broken bits of Logos were egoic. They were not consciousness from the Father.

When I recorded this episode, it was fresh out of the Simple Explanation coming into the Gnostic Gospel, and I went ahead and attributed consciousness to the subatomic particles, the particles, the molecules, and the mineral aggregates in a bottom-up kind of structure, thinking that they were leveling themselves up once they had a boundary. But, as I say, in deep conversation and contemplation with my brother Bill, we’ve come to understand that the mud cannot level up from the bottom. And, by leveling up, that’s that Golden Rule type of cooperation where you hold hands with your neighbors, you share information, love, and assistance and all together you build the next thing up. So, the way the cells hold hands and build the organs, and then the organs hold hands and build the organism—it’s like that. That’s your Golden Rule type of leveling up. The higher, the fewer.

How then did the quantum foam level up? Well, this is where we introduced the Demiurge a little bit earlier than we did in the original 2021 episode. The Demiurge is the architect of the material Universe. The Demiurge is the ego of Logos that stayed behind in the Deficiency when the best part of Logos fled back to the Fullness. So, the best part of Logos, that’s the aeonic consciousness and the Father’s life and love, went back up into the Fullness. That’s the part of Logos up there that, in cooperation with the Fullness, the pleroma of the Aeons, creates the 2nd Order Powers—us—and sends us down here into creation to bring life and consciousness down below.

Well, that implies there wasn’t life and consciousness until we come. This is a very complex subject and it really took us several years of contemplation to come up with this slight amendment to what this episode talks about, which just goes to show you that gnosis is an ongoing process. It’s not like I read the Tripartite Tractate and boom, I get it and now I can write books. It’s not that at all. I get it. I have the basic structure. I have the illustrations. But the nuances continue to develop and they still continue to this day to develop. My brother, Bill, and I have conversations on practically a weekly basis that last for a long, long time when we talk about these things—the difference between ego and consciousness and what that implies.

So anyway, as we will find out in an upcoming episode, there’s this character called the Demiurge, and he is the egoic structure of Logos, but without the Remembrance of the Father. [In the Simple Explanation the Demiurge was called the Universal Unit of Consciousness because he is the governor of the Universe.] He is the ignorant God. He is the God with amnesia and the God of this material portion of our universe—the hard, slow, muddy parts. That’s the Deficiency, and that is leveled up by the strict controls of the Demiurge. Only he doesn’t remember where he comes from. He thinks he’s God. He thinks everything begins with him. He is the jealous God that thinks that he creates everything, but he can only create the material because up above it’s ethereal, it’s not material. So down here, one of the key aspects of the Deficiency is that it is material. It seems to be solid. We can’t see through walls down here.

It’s the Demiurge that takes the quantum foam and, using bonds and strings like a puppet master, builds that quantum foam up into the subatomic particles, and then he joins them together to become particles, and joins particles together to become atoms and molecules. And then the molecules join together and become the elements of the periodic table.

The Demiurge is able to organize the Fall, but it can’t make it alive. He can’t give it love cause he doesn’t know love; he can’t give it consciousness because he’s not a conduit of the consciousness of the Fullness. He does it all by himself, out of Egoic power control. Then, when the 2nd Order Powers come in—they’re the ones that bring the consciousness, the life, and the love, and the Golden Rule of cooperation to everything that’s alive.

So that’s the difference between living things and material things. Now if this is all too confusing, that’s because I’m dropping it in here and it’s a full episode on its own, but I needed to correct the transcript that I’m sharing with you today. At this point in our gnostic cosmology, we are into creation. That bounded space is the Boundary around our universe. And, within the confines of my skin, countless units of consciousness of varying levels of complexity work together to keep my body alive and fully functional. At each descending level of complexity, from my governing self unit of consciousness on down through my organ systems, my organs, my cells, my body’s units of consciousness deal with increasingly simpler tasks, even as the material associated with them become smaller and more numerous.

Remember, the higher the fewer is a basic gnostic principle. So, if you think of your body not as the shape of your physical body walking around, but picture it as a hierarchy as well, picture it the way we picture the Fullness, as a pyramid, where the bottom level of the pyramid—and these are the particles that make up your body—these particles become atoms. There’s fewer atoms than there are subatomic particles, and the atoms become molecules. There’s fewer molecules than there are atoms, etc, etc. [inserting a correction here: the particles, atoms, and molecules do not “reach out to hold hands” because they are not conscious. They will be joined together by the Demiurge, who is the only conscious thing in the material-only portion of the universe. The Demiurge is the ego of the mind of Logos.]

The cells of your body—do you know they say there are as many cells in your body as there are stars in the universe? That’s how complicated your body is. The cells of your body reach out and hold hands and become your various organs and your organ systems, and these all work together and eventually culminate with you sitting at the top. And you think your self is all alone. But it isn’t. Your self is sitting on top of this entire mountain, this hierarchical mountain of units of consciousness.

That’s the basic Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which you can read about in depth in my book or on that blog. This that I’m telling you right now about the mountain of consciousness and units of consciousness, this is my theory, but it’s entirely compatible with what I’m telling you about the gnostic cosmology that comes out of the Nag Hammadi.

One interesting thought about the development of these philosophies is that the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything came about around 2010. I didn’t read the Nag Hammadi until, what was it? About 2016 or so? So I didn’t derive the Simple Explanation from my gnostic studies, but of course, as I was reading my gnostic studies, I had the Simple Explanation fully formed in my mind, and it turns out that they’re compatible. That’s why I’m sharing them both with you to help you build gnosis. It is my hope that every time I share one of my insights with you or one of my illustrations with you, it clears up confusion in your mind. It removes ignorance, which brings gnosis.

The Simple Explanation blog can be found at www.asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com. There are hundreds of articles about consciousness there on A Simple Explanation. But I don’t want you to go down a rabbit hole and get distracted or become confused. The only reason you should be reading these materials is in order to become less confused. Gnosis is lack of ignorance, lack of confusion. So if the Simple Explanation helps to bring you gnosis, that’s good. Whereas my Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which you can buy at any online bookseller, or go to my blogs and you’ll find it there in my own bookstore, is only 49 pages long, and half of those pages are illustrations. So it’s very simple. It’s very clear and direct, without any confusing extras added. It’s the kernel of gnostic thought.

In our next podcast we will go into the peace offered to end the endless war with the Deficiency. Once we finish laying out the entire gnostic cosmology, the podcasts will turn to applications of this knowledge in our real life world.

Thank you for spending this time with me today and I will see you next time. Onward and upward. God bless.

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.

p.s. A listener has suggested a children’s version of the Gnostic Gospel story. I like that suggestion! Are any of you artists who would like to illustrate a children’s book? Please contact me ASAP.

Today, we’re going to talk about how the ego of Logos led to the Fall and the Fall broke open into what became the Deficiency, also known as our universe. Our material universe is a deficient copy of the ethereal plane of the Paradise that the Aeons dreamed of. The great thing about this episode is it introduces another character to the play, and that one is called the 2nd Order of Powers. I’m inserting this at the beginning so it might pique your interest in what comes. We are the 2nd Order of Powers. The 1st Order of Powers are the Aeons, and we are their fruit. All of us living creations down here within this universe, we are all the 2nd Order Powers. We are fruits of the Aeons. We are their children.

The purpose of these podcasts is to explain to you what gnosis is in the simplest possible terms. My primary source is one of the codices that was in the Nag Hammadi manuscripts called the Tripartite Tractate–Tri, meaning 3; partite  meaning parts; tractate means book. So it’s the three-part book, and it’s a very clear explanation of Gnostic cosmology. And cosmology is simply origins—the beginning of the cosmos, the story of our existence, how everything goes together. That’s what cosmology is.

In 2019, I wrote a book based upon the Tripartite Tractate called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and over the past couple of years many people have suggested it would all be so much easier to understand if it were explained out loud in the form of a podcast. So this is what I’m doing. And I’m rolling out the Gnostic cosmology in chronological order, as it were, starting at the beginning and then going one step at a time because I think that that is the easiest way to grasp this.

So far we’ve discussed the origin of the Father and the nature of the Father. That is the originating consciousness. We’ve discussed the Son, which was the first localization of the Father. We have discussed the Son manifesting his various attributes, and that is called the ALL. We’ve moved beyond the ALL and we have discussed how the ALL became the Fullness or the Pleroma when they became self-aware. And each member of the ALL became a person, so to speak—a thought, a variable, that was self-aware.

Now we’re at the point where one of the self-aware aeons has decided to strike out on its own and plug back into the Father and because of this, that Aeon fell. One of these Aeons, the most perfect and complete of the individual Aeons, was named Logos, and he crowned the top of the Aeonic hierarchy. The Aeons sit there in a hierarchy that looks like a pyramid. This single Aeon consisted of all of the attributes of the good and perfect Fullness rolled into one individual. And because of this, this Aeon named Logos mistook itself for the entirety of the Fullness. It forgot that it was sitting there at the top, crowning pretty much an infinite number of Aeons that represent the Fullness of the Son of God, which represents the Father, the originating consciousness. This one Aeon thought it was the be all and end all, and so it launched itself up, trying to plug back into the originating consciousness. It tried to exit the Fullness, thinking that it was the Fullness. Logos decided to give glory to the source of its awakening and launched itself from the hierarchy in an attempt to reconnect with the Father. Logos believed his personal will was sufficient to reach the Father without the will of the united Fullness to add to its own.

Now, the Fullness always worked as one body. So, these were individual consciousnesses, but the Fullness is one entity and Logos was just the very tippy top of that entity. Logos imagined he could build the paradise that was being dreamt by the Fullness because he understood all of the plans and he possessed all of the necessary talents because he was essentially every one of the Aeons rolled into one. However, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos was unable to give proper glory to the Father.

And we’ve also discussed what glory means. Glory means that you are only focused on praise and wondrous adoration of this object of devotion. The Aeons were only supposed to give glory to the Father, not to each other, not to themselves as a whole, but only give glory to the Father alone. So they were all in a kind of eyes upward type of orientation.

Logos thought it was good enough that he could take care of this on his own. As he reached for the Father, Logos stumbled and fell, shattering itself to bits. This is the original Fall. It’s not Eve handing Adam an apple in the Garden of Eden. That’s way down the line. This is the Fall: when Logos reached for the Father and he stumbled and fell. Here’s how it’s put in the Tripartite Tractate.

“Because the isolated glory of Logos was inadequate to the task, everything he produced as a result of that effort fell disastrously short. Where there had been unity with the Son and with his brethren in the Fullness now there was a division and a turning away. The undiluted will expressed by the Fullness was splintered because Logos could not bear to look at the light, but looked at the depths and he faltered. What issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance had existed from something that itself was deficient. Because of that, what was perfect in him left and went upward to its own in the Fullness, leaving the sicknesses behind in the darkness.”

So, I’ve been describing the illustrations that accompany these concepts that I’ve put into The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. And if you remember from prior podcasts, the Fullness sits there like this great golden pyramid of individual golden orbs. Logos was sitting on the top and what he looked like was a little small pyramid made up of tiny little golden orbs. He was like a replication of the overall Fullness. When he decided to go out on his own, this was the first manifestation, you could say, of ego. It was the first time a consciousness acted outside of the will of the ALL or the will of the Fullness. You could say that the Fall was caused by ego.

The way I picture this is that little pyramid sitting on top of the big pyramid, launching itself out into the inky blackness toward the over-encompassing Father above and instead of going up, he takes a nosedive and falls. And that’s why it’s called the Fall—and he smashes into bits. This is metaphorical language because of course there isn’t anything, there’s no material yet, there’s nothing to smash against like a rock. He just crumbles apart and all of that beautiful little golden triangle of which he is made all rolls out into all of these dark little balls. The golden balls all turned dark in my illustrations. I depict the Fall of Logos as these super dark blue balls rolling out and spreading.

The Tripartite Tractate calls the ego presumptuous thought. And isn’t that what egoic thought is? It’s presumptuous; presumptuous thought. Egoic thought means that the focus of the thinking is on one’s self—is on one’s own plans. What am I going to do? It’s all me, me, me is what presumptuous thought is. And the Aeons, they’re not me type of creatures. They were not egoic. They all lived for one another. All for one, and one for all was their motto, I say. That’s not in the Gnostic gospel, but I think it’s a good motto for the Fullness. And so, what I read to you was that what existed from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance. Ego is called arrogance to think that he had the plan and he was going to build this paradise that they had all been dreaming of together. He was going to do it on its own, but he was inadequate to the task. And he left the sicknesses behind in the darkness. And in my illustration that’s those blue balls rolling all over the place.

The Tripartite goes on to say in verse 77, “from the faltering and division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is. Presumptuous thought and arrogance replaced wisdom.” Verse 78 says, “those who came into being from the presumptuous thought resemble, in fact the Fullness of whom they are imitations, though they are phantoms, shadows and illusions deprived of reason and light, belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring. In their own eyes, however, they are great and powerful beings more beautiful than the names of their originals in the Fullness, though they are only their shadows.”

Many of the books in the Nag Hammadi, instead of identifying this character as Logos, they identify this character as Sophia. Sophia means wisdom, and Logos means knowledge. I am working off of the Tripartite Tractate which identifies this Aeon as the one called Logos, not the one called Sophia. Personally, I prefer thinking of Logos rather than Sophia because Sophia in the other Gnostic books is a female character and I prefer not to replicate the Adam and Eve story by making the one who brings evil into existence a female.

The Aeons are not men and women, they are thought forms. The act of the beautiful Aeon reaching for the Father out of love, stumbling and falling and breaking apart into horrible little imitations called the Deficiency—it really doesn’t matter if that person is called Sophia or Logos. We’re calling it Logos. Logos was the final Aeon born from the will of the Son. And the singular being possessed the latent characteristics of the ALL, including the full variety of personalities, proclivities, powers, positions arrayed in the Fullness. Each Aeon of the Fullness was an individual who was also an integral part of the larger whole. So too Logos embodied all of these parts precisely situated within the whole that was himself.

When Logos overreached because of presumptuous egoic thought and fell into the darkness that is ignorance, he shattered into a confusing jumble of disconnected parts. These pieces of the Shattered Aeon were sicknesses—small dark, ignorant, divided, roiling with chaos. They reflected neither the glory of the originals and the Fullness, nor the ecology of the hierarchy. Because they were no longer arranged in the pattern of the hierarchy, they forgot their functions and their names.

Here’s how the Tripartite describes that in verse 80, “Those who had come into being did not know them themselves nor did they know the Fullness from which they had originated. Nor did they know him who had become the cause of their existence. That is, Logos, for since the word was in such an unstable condition, he no longer attempted to bring forth offspring in the form of emissions of glory. Instead, what he brought forth were feeble and small creatures, infected with the same sicknesses with which he himself had been infected.” [And that is egoic thought—me, me, me; what do I want? What do I want?]

“Because Logos had been reaching for the heights when he fell, the imitation born of the Fall continued to be motivated by a desire to reach the unreachable. But now that upward drive was divorced from the goal of reaching for the glory of reunification with the Father. With no recall of who or what came before, this upward drive was entirely self-interested, for those of the imitation had no cooperative arrangement amongst themselves. What had been an upward pull to reunite the Fullness with the Father became an upward push arising out of each singleton, not for the glory of the Father, but for the vain glory of the individual.” [Vain glory is a word that means false glory.] “For they desired to command one another and to Lord it over them in their vain love of glory. And the glory that was acquired from their striving became the cause of the structure that was to be.” That’s verse 79 of the Tripartite.

In this manner, egoic striving for vain glory replaced glorious longing for the Father. In other words, ambition replaced God’s will. The offspring of the presumptuous thought, as they came to be known, recognized neither Logos, the ALL, nor the Father as their progenitor.

“They thought of themselves that only they existed and that they had no beginning since they saw no one existing before them. for this reason they exhibited disobedience and rebellion, being unwilling to submit to the one who had brought them into existence.” Verse 78.

Now remember, Logos means literally the word in Greek: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God. “ That’s “In the beginning was Logos and Logos was with God.” So when the Tripartite says the word, it’s another name for Logos. So here in verse 80 it says, “The word then was the cause of these things coming into being, and he became increasingly desperate. He was dumbfounded. Instead of perfection, he saw deficiency. Instead of unity, he saw division. Instead of stability, he saw disturbance. Instead of rest, upheaval. Logos was unable to bring their love of disturbance to an end, nor could he destroy it. For Logos had become powerless when his wholeness and his perfection had abandoned him to become the Deficiency. The Deficiency took on an imitation of life on its own, becoming the cause of the things that do not exist on their own account from the beginning.” That’s verse 80.

Now the things that exist on their own account from the beginning, these would be the Aeons, the expressions of the Fullness are facets of the Son of God and the Son being a sampling of the Father exists from the beginning. So, the consciousness, the originating consciousness, is that which exists from the beginning, and its offspring are the Son. And then the Son’s offspring is the ALL and the Fullness. These things that came out of Logos did not exist from the beginning because they are a product of the Fall, and once the Fall occurred, there is a line in history where the things that exist from the beginning are before the Fall and the things that came into existence from the Fall are after the Fall, and these are the deficiencies—the small and feeble replicants of the originals. And the Tripartite Tractate says these irrational things were condemned by Logos.

“Because of that, what was perfect in him left and went upward to his own in the Fullness.” [That is, the best part of Logos left the Deficiency and went back up into the Fullness.] “The one who hastened on high,” [that is Logos] “and the one who drew him to himself,” [that is, the Son] “did not remain idle, but they brought forth the fruit in the Fullness, with a view to overthrowing what had come into being because of the Deficiency.”

So a plan was immediately hatched to gather up these broken bits of Logos that are rolling around out there, lost and egoic and not knowing who they are and where they came from. I keep thinking of these little blue balls rolling around in the darkness and a whisk broom and a dust pan trying to sweep them back up. Here’s what happened next. The Fall of Logos gave rise to what is called a Boundary—a wall between those who remained with the Father and the imitations that spilled forth from the fractured one as Logos retreated to its own in the Fullness. The Boundary hardened, containing that which had been produced and separating finitude from infinity, ignorance from truth, and light from darkness. Here’s how the Tripartite puts it.

“It was not without the will of the Father that this word had been brought forth, nor that he should rush forward. Rather, the Father had brought him forth for the things that he knew must take place. For this reason then it is wrong to condemn the movement of Logos. Rather, we should speak about the movement of Logos as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass.”

This is a very interesting aspect of the Tripartite Tractate. They’re not calling the Fall sinful. What the Tripartite said was that the motivation of Logos was noble and true. It was out of boundless love for the Father that Logos launched out into space, trying to reunite with the Father.  The Fall, as far as Logos is concerned, was an unintended consequence. However this verse just said that it was not unintended as far as the Father was concerned. The Father allowed this movement of Logos out of the free will of Logos in order to make an ordained economy come to pass—the will of God—come to pass.

It goes on to say in verse 77, “For the Father and the realm of the All now withdrew from him in order that the Boundary should be firm that the Father had fixed. For it does not exist to prevent the unreachable from being reached, but because of the will of the Father and also in order that the things that happened should be for the sake of an economy that was to come about.” And, sitting here as we do in creation, we must assume that the economy is this creation, this material world being formed out of what was completely insubstantial and immaterial, ethereal. The Boundary serves the purpose of holding the Deficiency away from the perfection of the Father and the ALL. This ensures the purity of the origin so that none of its glory is diminished by the Fall.

So, simply because there was a Fall and material creation is about to come into being, this in no way diminishes the originating consciousness, or the Son, the ALL, and the Fullness. The Boundary also serves the purpose of containing a space wherein an economy can emerge. And, economy here means an orderly management or arrangement of parts, an organization or system. What we would also call an ecology. You see, if you think about it, if there is no bounded space, if there is nothing but Infinity, then there is no containment so that things can be in relationship to each other. Those little blue ball pieces of the broken Logos would just keep rolling outward and never interact with one another. It requires a Boundary in order for material to be able to work together in a kind of ecology. In other words, the Boundary was established so that a hierarchy patterned after the Fullness would have a space to take root and grow.

The arrangement of the hierarchy of the Fullness shows up throughout creation. Every small thing in our universe reaches out laterally to others to form clumps or aggregations of the next level up. Subatomic particles form atoms, atoms reach out and form molecules. Molecules reach out and form elements. Elements form aggregations of building materials, always according to the simple rule of the higher the fewer. This is why hierarchies look like pyramids at each level of aggregation—there are fewer instances of things forming the next level up.

The cooperation amongst the ALL is the prototype for the Simple Explanation’s Golden Rule. In order for units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to assist one another’s efforts, and they need to love one another. And when we’re talking about physical objects like atoms and molecules, loving is the way they are joined. I call that loving. It’s the force of holding together. In the same way that the ALL sits in unitary perfection while they are singing their same song of praise, so all of creation instantiates the pattern of cooperation needed to get the job done when it works together for the greater good without selfish motive. So too the Fullness, though differentiated into units of consciousness of individual stations and ranks, dreams of a paradise where everyone knows their job and does it in perfect cooperation with others for the benefit of all.

This was not occurring at the point of the story where we are now. The Deficiency was illogical. It was egoic. It was selfish. It was not working together. And so the Boundary was thrown up in order to push them together so that they would work together to form an ecology. The virtues of the original Aeons did not remain within the Boundary. That fled to the Fullness when Logos retreated from the Deficiency, leaving behind small, weak imitations of the original. These phantoms of the imitation did not exist from the beginning, and so they possessed neither the love of the Father nor the originating consciousness of the Son and the ALL. Those of the imitation do not know the hierarchy of the Fullness, nor do they have assigned roles and places there. Lacking the ALL’s cooperative design, they exist in a state of perpetual disturbance driven by self-centered ambition. The Tripartite Tractate says,  “exalting themselves in lust for dominion. Each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows.”

See, in the Fullness, each of these personalities, each of these Aeons of the Fullness, is a pure pattern of some aspect of God. The Logos itself, before it fell, it was smaller versions or fractal copies of all of the other Aeons. It had all of the traits of the Aeons inside of itself. But then, when it broke open, all of those copies rolled out. And they were already small because they were just copies and now they weren’t even part of the hierarchical structure here, and so they knew nothing but lust for Dominion. They each thought that they were an Aeon, because each of them was patterned after one of these Aeons. But they weren’t. They were the imitations of the Aeons. The Tripartite says that those of the imitation give rise to “fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, and other such disobedient types, driven by the will to dominate.”

Left to their own feeble devices, those of the imitation strive against each other in a state of darkness, woe, and misery. The imitation arose from the broken body of Logos. Logos gathered himself up the best he could and returned to the Fullness to lick his wounds, leaving behind the shadows and phantoms of the Fall contained within the Boundary. The illustration I use for this is those dark blue balls now contained by a dark blue circle around them, so it looks kind of like a microscope slide of dark blue balls.

Verse 81 of the Tripartite says, “Logos regretted the Fall and the phantoms born of the Fall. Regret turned to condemnation of the irrational things he had produced. This condemnation became a judgement directed against them, aiming at their destruction. Logos and the one who drew him back to the Fullness did not remain idle, but they brought forth the fruit in the Fullness with a view to overthrowing what had come into being because of the Deficiency. Now all his prayer and remembrance were numerous powers also produced in accordance with the Boundary mentioned. These powers are much better and greater than those belonging to the imitation, for the imitation have the substance of darkness having come into being from illusory imitation and a vain and presumptuous thought. But these, on the other hand, are from a thought that had known them in advance  (Verse 82).

In other words, the newly produced offspring, fruit of the Fullness and Logos, were patterned after the originals in the Fullness, formed to fit within the Boundary rather than that pyramidal-shaped hierarchy. And we can think of the Boundary as around the universe, if you want to believe in The Big Bang and an expanding universe. And whereas those of the imitation, “are like oblivion and heavy sleep, like people who have troubled dreams in which someone pursues them and they are surrounded, these others, however, are for him like beings of light who are waiting for the rising sun, as when the dreamers have been able to see dreams in their sleep that are truly sweet.”

I picture these original broken pieces of Logos as quantum foam. Quantum foam is the lowest level of instantiation in this universe of ours, and quantum foam is characterized by randomness and chaos. It does not work together. That’s why it’s called foam because it’s popping in and out, popping in and out, and nothing is building. Nothing is able to reach out and make anything. They lack the Golden Rule of cooperation because they came from the Deficiency rather than from the Fullness. So now the Fullness and Logos are trying to put the Golden Rule into this broken chaos that has been formed.

These newly formed beings, “did not have more substance, nor did they have a greater glory, for they are not equal to the pre-existent ones” [that is the Aeons]. “If, on the other hand, they were superior to the imitations, the only thing that made them elevated above them was that they were from a good disposition, for they had not come out of the sickness that arose.”

In verse 83 it goes on to say, “He sowed in them an inclination to seek and pray to what is glorious and pre-existent. And he also sowed in them an ability to think about it and a power of reflection to make them realize that something greater than themselves existed before them, but they had not understood what it was. Bringing forth harmony and mutual love by means of that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since to unity and unanimity they owed their existence.”

So Logos and the Fullness cooked up a scheme to correct the Deficiency, and they created a fruit to put inside the Boundary with those quantum foam roiling chaotic self-centered entities that had come about from the Fall. And when it says he sowed in them an inclination to seek and pray to what his glorious and pre-existent, and the ability to think about it, what are they saying is that these things are conscious—they do exist from the beginning because they are the fruit of the Fullness and Logos. And when the fruit of the Fullness is produced in unanimity with the ALL—you see, it was a concerted effort that they all put together—then those fruit have the characteristics of the Aeons. They have logic and wisdom and the ability to think. They are conscious and they’re able to cooperate according to the Golden Rule.

In a previous podcast episode, we talked about what is a fractal. A fractal is a geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is approximately, not exactly, but for the most part, a reduced-size copy of the whole, and this property is called self similarity because they appear similar at all levels of magnification. Natural objects that are approximated by fractals include lightning bolts, coastlines, various vegetables like cauliflower and broccoli, river deltas, the veins in a leaf or roots of a tree. You see, they keep splitting into smaller but almost identical objects.

So, we previously defined the Son as the first iteration or fractal of the originating consciousness of the Father, and then out of the Son came its fractals that became the ALL and the Fullness. Logos was a single Aeon that contained within itself fractals of all of the Aeons. The phantoms produced by the Fall are not fractal iterations of the Son. They are broken code. The phantoms cannot replicate on their own. They lack activation by the source at the center. They were generated away from the universal consciousness.

The fruit of Logos and the Fullness discussed today does represent the 4th iteration of the fractal pattern of the Father and Son. We know this because fruit refers to the legitimate offspring of Logos and the hierarchy of the Fullness formed through the will of the originating consciousness. So, at this point in the Gnostic Gospel, new fractal iterations of the originals of the Fullness are entering the Deficiency. They’re bringing the perfection of the Fullness down into the bounded space of the Deficiency. These new beings are called the 2nd Order of Powers, which is another indication that they are self-aware entities because they are called powers rather than imitations. They are not identical to the Aeons of the Fullness, for they are offspring made to fit within the contained space of our universe. They are called Powers of the Remembrance for they represent the values of the originating source, whereas those of the imitation remember neither the values, the hierarchy, nor the originating conscious.

In my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which you can read as the blog out there on the blogspot or as the book of the same name, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, in terms of that we would call the 2nd Order Powers “units of consciousness” because they are each a unit of the originating consciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Fullness, and in that sense they are consciousness fractals.

It’s a lot to think about, but that’s how we get gnosis.

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

If you would like to converse about these ideas, you can visit my Gnostic Reformation on Substack where you can leave comments and engage with others.

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.

p.s. A listener has suggested a children’s version of the Gnostic Gospel story. I like that suggestion! Are any of you artists who would like to illustrate a children’s book? Please contact me.

The purpose of this podcast is to help us all achieve gnosis, which is knowledge of where we come from and who is the originating consciousness, and what is our relationship to that originating consciousness. So far, we have discussed the nature of the Father, which is the originating consciousness, and the Son, which is that originating consciousness made into a particular entity—that is called the Son. It is not the generalized diffuse, no thought consciousness of the Father, but rather like a bucket dipped into the ocean, with the Father being the ocean. The Son is the essence of the Father, but contained within the bucket. So it’s exactly the same as the Father, but it is a particularity. It is a singularity.

As soon as the Son was formed, it then also created more entities out of its own Self. In the same fashion that the Son came out of the Father, the Fullness of God, the ALL, came out of the Son. And it was said that this wasn’t like a throwing off, like the way a fungus casts out spores that then grow into their own little fungi—it was more of a spreading out. So the Son and, by extension the Father, remain completely within and inhabiting the branches that they send out.

In my description of the Fullness, it’s like the rays of a star, with each of the rays being part of the ALL, but each one of them expressing a slightly different characteristic of the Son out of which they are spreading forth. So my imagery for the Son is that the Son is like a diffuse cloud that’s sitting in this great inky blackness which is the Father, and out of this cloud comes a starburst. And each one of the rays of the star is the ALL.

As soon as the ALL came to know itself and to recognize its own consciousness, it became a they, and each one of the rays became its own singularity. And once they did that, they immediately formed themselves into what is called the Fullness of God, or the Holy Spirit, or the Pleroma. And Pleroma simply means everything that is possible. All possible expressions of consciousness can be found in the Fullness of God.

And the Fullnesses sorted themselves into what’s called a hierarchy, which is like a pyramidal type of stack with many more being down at the bottom and fewer and fewer as you go higher and higher. I’ve identified a principle in Gnosticism called the higher, the fewer. And so they sorted themselves into positions, places, powers, ranks, stations, and names—indicating that they each had their own individual point of view, and they each had their own place in the hierarchy of creation.

Today’s episode will be discussing the Fullness of God and the idea of fractals. Every now and then I talk about fractals, and if you don’t know what a fractal is, I would like to explain it to you. It’s not to be found in the Gnostic Gospels; it’s not to be found in the Nag Hammadi or in the Qumran manuscripts. It is a mathematical term. And it’s something that’s all around us all the time. Fractals are a basic principle of mathematics and of this manifested universe, but unless it’s pointed out to you, you may not ever notice it because fractals weren’t even noticed or formulated until the 1970s. So they were overlooked for many years, well, for all of time until the 1970s. It was actually in 1975 that a mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term fractal in the first published paper on fractal geometry.

I talk about fractals a lot on my Simple Explanation blog. You can find the fullest explanation of fractals in my article that I wrote and published in January 6th of 2011, called The Fractal Roots of Consciousness. So if you’d like to study more about fractals and see imagery of what fractals look like, go to my Simple Explanation blog and look up the fractal roots of consciousness in the topical index over on the right hand side. But you don’t have to do that. I’m going to explain it a bit right now.

First off, let’s see what are fractals that you’re familiar with. You know the branching structure of like a river delta where it goes into the sea? So you’ve got a river and then it branches, and then each of those branches, branches, and each of those branches, branches and they send out more and more branching structures. You can see them on Google Earth all over the world. Each of those branches are called fractals.

Here’s a funny story. I was trying to explain to my sister-in-law what a fractal is, and I told her, “Imagine your hand. And then imagine on each one of your fingers and on your thumb there’s a little hand and it’s got fingers and a thumb. And then imagine each one of those fingers and thumbs has its own little hand on it, and they also have fingers and thumbs, you see. So it’s the same pattern. The hand with the fingers and thumb and then five more hands with fingers and thumbs, and each one of those have five more hands with fingers and thumbs. That is the pattern of a fractal—the branching structures.”

The funny part of the story is that I was explaining this to my sister-in-law, and then we parked the car and we went into a little variety store. And as soon as we walked in the store, there was a display of a toy and what the toy was little hands that you could stick on each one of your fingers so that your hand becomes a fractal branching structure of more and more hands. Which is funny because I’ve just been explaining that to her, and that was the very metaphor I was using. So I was actually able to show it to her about two minutes later in physical form. Jung called these kinds of coincidences synchronicities. Anyway, back to the story.

As the roots of a plant send out finer and finer tendrils at each level of fractal branching into the soil—see, roots are the same kind of thing—you’ve got your one stem of the plant, but then each one branches out and branches out and branches out as it goes into the soil, searching for nutrients and water.

Another good way to see fractals is to take a stalk of broccoli. And I performed this experiment on my YouTube channel. So if you go to Cyd Ropp on YouTube and look for Simple Explanation videos, you’ll find one that’s called Broccoli Fractal Demonstration. Broccoli, when you bring it home from the grocery store, it’s one big clump, right? It’s a big stalk, and you’ve probably noticed this before that if you take one of the larger clumps off of that stalk, it looks just like that first stalk you were holding, only it’s smaller. And then you can take another clump off of that smaller stalk and it looks just like those two larger stalks, only smaller. And you can keep breaking off fractals of broccoli, at least to the 7th—what is called an iteration—to the 7th iteration. You can keep breaking off the broccoli. So it’s a nice little demonstration of what a fractal is, if you want to understand it in your mind.

I suggest that the consciousness of God is fractal in the same way that the broccoli stalk is fractal. So we can imagine that the root of consciousness, the Father, is, for example the mother plant. The Son is that first flower off of that mother plant—that first broccoli stalk if you will. And then the Son—all of its variables, all of its potentials, the entire blueprint of our universe, because it is, after all, the mind of God—each one of those Totalities is also a fractal. And each of them all replicate the original Son, who is also an iteration of the original consciousness.

Now, one thing about consciousness fractals, or as I call them in my Simple Explanation theory, units of consciousness—so the Father is consciousness itself, but off of that are fractals that are each a unit of consciousness—so the universal unit of consciousness is the largest fractal of which we are aware. And it holds all of the blueprints and all of the potentialities for our entire creation, as did the originating father’s consciousness. And each one of the fractals that comes off of that universal unit of consciousness also holds the potentiality of the Son and of the Father, but they aren’t necessarily expressed. So they’re there in potential.

It’s like your DNA. Did you know that your DNA is you, right? You know that by now. But did you know that your DNA also has, like, at least 95% of it is unknown—what they call junk DNA simply because scientists haven’t defined what is in that DNA. It’s not junk! It’s just that we don’t know what it means. All the rest of that DNA holds potentialities that are not being expressed by you because you are only about 5% of your DNA algorithm. That other 95% is unexpressed, but it’s probably, in my opinion, a fractal of the originating consciousness. So I think that our DNA probably holds all of the creation in it, but it’s only expressed as us, one person at a time, one creature at a time.

I hope I’m not hopelessly confusing you. I’m trying to explain what fractals are, because now and then I mentioned fractals. So, just to run it past you real fast: the Father is originating consciousness. The first fractal is the Son of the Father. The Son quickly became a father itself by branching out into the fractals. That is called the ALL and that was that original starburst kind of branch. And as soon as that iteration was branched out, it became aware of its own Self and sorted itself into the pyramidal hierarchical shape that is called the Fullness of God, or the Pleroma. And each one of those little cannonballs—those little glowing golden cannonballs, as I described them in a previous podcast—each one of those is a full fractal of the Son of God, but it only expresses its place, position, rank, function, and point of view. Much as our DNA only expresses us, we’re only a bit of the unexpressed DNA that we carry.

So each of the Pleroma, and those are called Aeons, once they’ve become those little cannonball shapes, those are your Aeons. That’s what they are known as. Each of them is the Fullness of God but it only expresses its job, its point of view, its position, place, and power. As I explained in the previous podcast, when we were talking about the Fullness of God, the Fullness sits in perfect harmony, perfect cooperation. So they are now individuals, but they are also one single organism called the Fullness or the Pleroma. They sing and dream one song, one dream. And that dream, by the way, is what we call Paradise. It’s our foretaste of paradise and it is the dream of the Aeons as they’re sitting there in the Pleroma. They all sing one song, but they sing it in harmony. Perfect. Beautiful.

The ongoing cooperation amongst the Fullness is the prototype of the Simple Explanation’s Golden Rule, which you can read about over on the Simple Explanation blog.  The Simple Explanation puts this way. In order for units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need to share relevant information with each other; they need to assist one another’s efforts; and they need to love one another. That’s the basic Golden Rule. In the same way that the ALL sat in unitary perfection together while singing the same song of praise, so do we all instantiate the pattern of cooperation needed to get the job done when we work together for the greater good without selfish motivation.

So too the Fullness, though differentiated into units of consciousness with individual stations and ranks, dream of Paradise where everyone knows their job and does it in perfect cooperation with others for the benefit of all. That is the loving pattern of the universe. When ego doesn’t get in the way, units of consciousness can hold hands and work together in order to make things work for the benefit of all. Like all of the cells in our body, they are not selfish. They all work for the entire body. If they didn’t, then we would die. Sometimes we have renegade portions of the body that have their own egoic agenda, and we call that cancer. And there’s that cancer growing out of control, taking over the body, taking over what should have been its original job, and now it just wants to grow itself. It’s kind of a definition of ego. And that has to be removed because it does not express the Golden Rule. It is not working for the benefit of all.

Now, let’s get back to the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book that I’m translating out of the Nag Hammadi. And we’ll get back to our storyline. Prior to the Fall, the Aeons of the Fullness sat in perfect equilibrium in their hierarchy of ranks, stations, and names. They were a “congress of one accord,” meaning that they agreed on everything and they cooperated together to bring about a single dream of Paradise.

The Aeons of the Fullness were all given wisdom, which is the ability to reason with logic and prudence. Prudence means doing the right thing at the right time. You have your logic, which is how things unfold, right? A leads to B, and B leads to C, and and if A = B and B = C, then A = C. That’s what logic is, right? Prudence is knowing how to apply rules as appropriate. So, the Aeons were given logic and prudence.

They were also given a thirst to seek after the originating consciousness of their creator, and a desire to align themselves with the Father’s will through the process of giving glory. And we’ve previously explained that giving glory is when you focus on an object of adoration. That’s what giving glory is. You are building up that object that you are glorifying. And in so doing, you are aligning your will with the object of glory. That’s why it’s important to only give glory to God. If you give glory to material objects or sports figures or movie stars, they will let you down because no human is worthy of being glorified, although we tend to glorify others all the time.

The Aeons were all creative geniuses able to dream up a fully functioning mental Paradise where whatever they willed in the Father’s name happily happened. It’s very much like our depiction of heaven, where you can fly around among the clouds and the buildings are all made of precious jewels and the streets are paved with gold. So that’s what the Pleroma does when they’re sitting there in their little cannonball shape—they’re actually dreaming that they’re flying around in the clouds and so forth.

In their desire to give glory to the Father—that is, in order to align themselves with the will of the creator—the Aeons of the Fullness were required to follow these rules. And these are listed in the Tripartite Tractate, verse 74.

So that is how you manifest your potential, by giving glory to the Father, not by looking at others and not by looking at yourself, but through eyes up. And that manifests your greatest potential because you are a fractal of the Father, as we’ve been discussing.

It is said that the Father put an unquenchable thirst to align themselves with the One into the minds of the Aeons of the Fullness. He did not reveal to them the Father’s ineffable nature. Ineffable meaning: unable to be grasped. And the impossibility of reuniting with the Father and surviving to tell the tale. They didn’t know that. They didn’t know the Father couldn’t be grasped and couldn’t be reunited with on their own. They were to always be seeking after the Father by giving glory. That was obviously to keep alive the hope of reunification with the Father as a motive for giving glory.

The Tripartite Tractate says it this way. I’m going to read this straight out of one of the popular translations of the Tripartite so that you can hear. It’s difficult to understand, it’s an arcane language, and this is the whole purpose of the Gnostic Insights and of my own book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated—to simplify this sort of language. But in order that you might hear it directly, this is what it sounds like. This is from verses 75 and 76 of the Tripartite Tractate.

“The Aeons have brought themselves forth in accordance with the third fruit by the freedom of the will and by the wisdom with which he favoured them for their thought. They do not wish to give honour with that which is from an agreement, though it was produced for words of praise for each of the Pleroma nor do they wish to give honour with the Fullness. Nor do they wish to do so with anyone else who was originally above the depth of that one or above his place. Except, however, for the One who exists in an exalted name and in the exalted place, and only if he receives from the One who wishes to give honor and takes it to himself for the One above him, and only if he begets himself, so to speak, himself. And through that One begets himself along with that which he is, and himself becomes renewed, along with the One who came upon him by his brother, and sees him and entreats him about the matter, namely he who wished to ascend to him. So that it might be in this way, the One who wished to give honor does not say anything to him about this, except only that there is a limit to speech said in the Pleroma so that they are silent about the incomprehensibility of the Father, but they speak about the one who wishes to comprehend him.

“It came to one of the Aeons that he should attempt to grasp the incomprehensibility and give glory to it, and especially to the ineffability of the Father. Since he is a logos of the unity, he is one, though he is not from the agreement of the Totalities, nor from him who brought them forth, namely the One who brought forth the totality—the Father.

“This Aeon was among those to whom was given wisdom so that he could become preexistent in each one’s thought. By that which he wills, will they be produced. Therefore, he received a wise nature in order to examine the hidden basis, since he is a wise fruit. For the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one, such as to make him do what he desired with no one to restrain him. The intent then of the Logos, who is this one, was good. When he had come forth, he gave glory to the Father, even if it led to something beyond possibility, since he had wanted to bring forth one who is perfect from an agreement in which he had not been, and without having the command.

“This Aeon was the last to have been brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude. And before he got anything else for the glory of the will and an agreement with the Totalities, he acted magnanimously from an abundance of love and set out toward that which surrounds the perfect glory. For it was not without the will of the Father that the Logos was produced. Which is to say, not without it will he go forth. But he, the Father, had brought him forth for those about whom he knew that it was fitting that they should come into being.”

Well, that’s what it sounds like when you read the Tripartite Tractate directly. Seems a little difficult to me, so don’t worry if you got lost. Here’s what I take from what I just read to you.

The last Aeon that was made by the will of the Father was placed at the very top of the hierarchy of the Fullness. Picture a star sitting on top of a Christmas tree. That’s this guy. The reason this final Aeon was given such a position of honor in the hierarchy was because it carried within its singular consciousness all of the traits of all of the other Aeons. This was a very talented and capable Aeon because it had the potential to manifest the Fullness of God, but all by itself. In fact, this particular Aeon was called the perfect single one, produced by the Father, who had desired him and was pleased with him. That’s from verse 77.

Now here’s what happened. It turned out that this “Aeon was one of those who had been given wisdom with ideas first existing independently in his mind, so as to be brought forth whenever he wanted.” He had also received a natural wisdom enabling him to inquire into the hidden order. And this Aeons’s name was actually the very personification of wisdom: Logos. Logos means wisdom or knowledge. Or the Word.

In the Bible, it says, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That word in the original Greek is logos and in the beginning was Logos, and Logos was with God.”

And here is the cause of the Fall: Logos mistook his singular Self for the entirety of the Fullness because he had the entirety of the Fullness manifested within his own Self. It’s as if you, as a human being, had all of the talents of every other human being that’s on the planet, and you were aware of it. You can do anything that anybody else can do. Therefore, you might mistake yourself for all of humanity. You might think that you were the only one. Logos mistook his singular Self for the entirety of the Fullness.

And I depict this in my illustrations as that golden pyramid that depicts the Pleroma. What I have is a little golden pyramid sitting right on the very tip top and the rest of the pyramid blackened out. It’s all in shadow because the little pyramid at the very tip top can’t see the rest of the Pleroma anymore. He has taken his eyes off of the glory of God, which is always focused upward, and he has now focused it upon himself, and not only doesn’t see the Father anymore, but he doesn’t even see the Fullness anymore.

And then he broke the rules. He acted unilaterally, and he acted without authority; it was not part of his job, what happened next. Because the Father had withheld the impossibility of singletons reaching the realm of perfect glory, Logos launched himself upward toward the Father like a rocket ship, thinking he could plug himself back in to the originating consciousness, because that was his desire. Which is why the Aeons all look upward when giving glory—they  all desire to plug themselves back in. Logos was sitting right on the top, and he launched himself up. He left the Fullness, reaching toward the Father. And as he reached for it, he stumbled and fell.

Here’s what it says in verse 76 of the Tripartite Tractate. “Thus the free will with which the members of the ALL had been born caused this one to rush forward, to give glory to the Father on its own. And before he had yet produced anything to the glory of the will and in the union with the members of the All, he acted presumptuously out of an abundance of overflowing love and rushed forward toward that which surrounds the realm of perfect glory.”

The Tripartite Tractate doesn’t hold this against him. It actually has a very loving and forgiving attitude toward the Fall. The Tripartite Tractate points out that the Fall of Logos was not due to bad motives on its part. On the contrary, Logos was attempting to give glory and reunite with the Father because of love when he fell. Again, from verse 76:

“Now the intention of this Logos was good because he rushed forward to give glory to the Father, even though he undertook a task beyond his power, having desired to produce something perfect from a union which he did not share and without having received orders.” He was no longer part of the Golden Rule where he would have been holding hands with the other Aeons and working together with knowledge and love to build something better. He did it all by himself. That’s what it means. Presumptuous. He presumed that he could do this all by himself.

And then verse 77 of the Tripartite Tractate says, “Furthermore, it was not without the will of the Father that this Logos had been brought forth, nor that he should rush forward. Rather, the Father had brought him forth for the things that he knew must take place. For this reason, then, it is wrong to condemn the movement that is Logos. Rather, we should speak about the movement of Logos as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass.”

And this is where we will take it up in our next podcast. We’re going to talk more about the Fall, which has nothing to do with Adam and Eve and an apple. The Fall happened long before humans came about, so we are not the cause of evil. So, we’ll talk about this more in our next episode of Gnostic Insights.

I also recommend again that you purchase my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, by Cyd Charise Ropp. You can buy that anywhere. You can certainly buy it off of my own blogs, or you can buy it at Amazon or any online bookseller. In this way you can find the simple story going forward without all these bigger explanations and diversions. You also see all the illustrations that I’m talking about.

Until next time. Onward and upward and God bless.

If you would like to converse about these ideas, you can visit my Gnostic Reformation on Substack where you can leave comments and engage with others.

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.

p.s. A listener has suggested a children’s version of the Gnostic Gospel story. I like that suggestion! Are any of you artists who would like to illustrate a children’s book? Please contact me.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. What we’re doing for the next several weeks now is coming back around again to review the basic concepts of this Gnosticism that we study here. At this point in discussing the early Christian Gnosticism, we’re studying consciousness. This is a branch of consciousness studies, is what they call it nowadays. And the reason we’re studying consciousness is because we are conscious. And the basic difference between this sort of consciousness studies versus the conventional modern way of studying consciousness is that the brain scientists and the consciousness studies philosophers don’t believe in an original source—in a pre-existent consciousness. Religious people do—that’s what they call God.

What I’m saying, and what I’ve been saying even before I learned this through reading the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, back when I wrote my original theory of everything called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, is that consciousness is the ground state of reality. Consciousness preexists everything. The modern people do not want to admit that. They mistakenly think that consciousness is a by-product of our brains. In fact, when I studied psychology in college, humans were the only ones ascribed consciousness. That’s why it’s so easy for scientists to treat lab animals as objects rather than conscious entities. You can’t be cruel to a Beagle dog or a mouse. But you can, because consciousness is the pre-existent state of all life. Life begins with consciousness. So, before there was any creation at all, before there were any mice or Beagle dogs or humans, there was consciousness.

And so what we’re studying now, we’re tracing the origins of consciousness from the ground state. The background radiation is consciousness. It’s called the Father. And in our last episode we talked about the Father. And the Son is the first breakout of that consciousness. It’s the first fractal monad that arose out of the ground state of consciousness. In religious circles that is called the Son.

Then the Son immediately differentiated into countless and infinite variables, because consciousness is infinite, into an infinite variety of variables of that consciousness, and that is what we identify as the Totalities of the ALL. But, even though they are independent variables of the Son, they do not have self-awareness. They have consciousness, but the consciousness is One—they are all One. So they think as one. They give praise to the Father as one entity. The ALL is a single One.

These are not necessarily religious terms. This is consciousness unfolding from the beginning. I’m trying to get us to how we came to be, so that is the relevance of this sort of study. How did the consciousness originate from the single source and then keep differentiating until it came into your brain, as you’re sitting here listening to this podcast. So, welcome back to this review of the ground state of consciousness and how it differentiated into the ALL.

This week we’re talking about what is called the Fullness or the Pleroma of the Fullness. And this is where we’re going to give rise to individualized awareness, just like you have awareness and I have awareness. We are individuals. We are each what is called a monad. That means we have our individual point of view.

So, let’s plug back into this review of an episode from a couple of years ago.

In 2019, I wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and what I am attempting to do in this podcast is talk you through the book so that you will have your own personal and very full understanding of what gnosis is and hopefully be able to actually realize gnosis while you’re hearing these podcasts.

By the way, what is gnosis? We keep talking about gnosis and gnostic. Gnosis means knowing and in the gnostic frame of reference gnosis refers to remembering the truth of our existence and our creation and the creation of the entire cosmos. It is thought that we hold all of this knowledge within ourselves, and we have complete access to the Creator of the universe at anytime that we turn our focus on the Creator. And it is this direct conduit to the Creator that gives us what is called gnosis. That’s a Greek word. Another related word to gnosis, and this is a big word, is called anamnesis. You know the word amnesia means forgetting. Anamnesis means not forgetting. So the process of coming to gnosis is a process called anamnesis. Just to let you know, if you want to throw around any big words.

Today, we’re going to talk about the qualities of the ALL and how the ALL became what is called the Pleroma and the Aeons of the Pleroma. Many people claim that it’s impossible to know or describe the full glory of the transcendent immortal Father of consciousness due to our own limitations. I mean, how could limited beings such as ourselves possibly imagine the greatness of the originator of the universe, much less our place in the grand design? Wouldn’t lesser beings reflect a diminished view of God? Wouldn’t these lesser beings be limited to offering a tarnished glory that falls far short of the object of their praise?

The Tripartite Tractate, which is the book of the Nag Hammadi that I’m working off of, puts it this way—“If the members of the ALL had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who himself is the ALL.”

Thus, creation would have been doomed from the outset to never comprehend the full glory of either the Father or itself. According to the Gnostic Gospel, the Father realized this impossibility and so built a helpful work-around meant to aid comprehension: selfless union and cooperation with others in a shared task.

Quoting from the Tripartite Tractate again, “For that reason, they were drawn into mutual intermingling union and oneness through the singing of praise. From their assembled Fullness, they were one and at the same time many, accurately reflecting the One who himself is the entirety of the ALL. Out of perfect union with itself and with the Son, and by means of a single shared effort, the ALL gave glory to the eternal One who had brought it forth. The glory given out of this perfect communion left the ALL perfect and full as it was perfect and full to begin with, and the object of their glory was also perfect and full.” This phase of the ALL is referred to as the Second Glory, with the Son being called the First Glory.

This series describes the creative origin of consciousness known as the Father in Gnosticism, and the particular singularity of consciousness that reflects the entirety of the Father, but in a place rather than diffuse, and that is called the Son. Then when the Son differentiated into all of its variables, into all of its individual parts, like rays bursting out of a central star, that is called the ALL.

This perfect state of union with the Son and communion with each other didn’t last. Because of their combined effort, the ALL became self-aware and it became they. So, at first the ALL was a singular entity that was a complete duplication and reflection of the Son, who itself was a complete duplication and reflection of the Father of consciousness itself. So, at first the ALL was One singular organism, since it was freshly evolved out of the Son. But then it became self-aware and the various variables within the Son, the various parts of that singular entity, each of those parts became self-aware. And that is what is causing this evolution of consciousness from the singular it of the ALL to the they.

No longer simply an unaware member of the All singing in unison with the same song of praise, the ALL became aware of its individual traits, and the singing came to be produced by the will of each individual Aeon. And, in Gnosticism, an Aeon is an entity. It is a singular consciousness. So each Aeon is a reflection of the Father’s countless qualities and powers. The Aeons “conceived themselves in order to know themselves in fulfillment of the Father’s desire” for pure consciousness to become differentiated and self-aware. And in philosophy this is called Monadism; not that you have to know that. But, the Father is a monad—that is a singular thing. And the Father wished to have company, let’s say, and so the monad had split into individual POV’s or points of view.

The moment it became they individual identities arose and immediately sorted themselves into a hierarchy. Quoting from the Tripartite Tractate, “For this reason, they exist as minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors, degrees over degrees, being ranked one above the other. Each of those who glorify has his own station, rank, dwelling place, and place of rest, which is the glorification he brings forth.”

This hierarchical arrangement of the qualities of the ALL is known as the fruit of the Third Glory in gnostic cosmology. It’s also called the First Order of Powers, and the Fullness. The Fullness is everything that will ever be, in potential. Plato referred to this as the forms, Plato’s forms. Every photon, every particle and proton, every personality, every position and rank that someone could hold. Every physical formula, physics, chemistry—all imprinted upon what was a singular unit that is now broken out. These potentialities are not manifest. At first they weren’t self-aware, but they became self-aware.

The cooperation amongst the ALL is the prototype of the Simple Explanation’s Golden Rule, by the way, which puts it this way: in order for units of consciousness to work together and join for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to assist one another’s efforts, and they need to love one another. So in the same way that the ALL sat in perfect communion together while singing the same song of praise, so do we all instantiate the pattern of cooperation needed to get the job done when we work together for the greater good without selfish motivation.

The instant the Aeons became self-aware, the ALL fell out of their unthinking, blissful union and arranged themselves into what’s called the Fullness—the Fullness of God. This phrase is mentioned quite often in the New Testament, but it has lost its association with its actual meaning. It’s not just the Fullness of God, like you’re thinking of God as all one big thing. The whole point of the Fullness was God differentiating into graspable things that we can understand. So the Fullness of God is a different entity than the Father. I believe that distinction has been lost in modern Christianity.

So, we were discussing the Fullness, which is a hierarchy and hierarchy looks like a pyramid. Just picture a pyramid.

The hierarchy of the Fullness prefigures the patterns of our universe. “Mind over minds, Words over words, Superiors over superiors” refers to personalities and how they relate to one another, like our personalities. “Degrees over degrees and ranks” refers to the manner by which things are sorted, stacked and ordered—first, second, third, superior, inferior, right, left, inside, outside. These are the degrees over degrees and the ranks. It reflects the fact that each self-aware entity has its own place in the grand scheme, with a location different than others, and its very own point of view.

Quoting from the Tripartite Tractate, “For each of the Aeons is a name corresponding to each of the Father’s qualities and powers. Since He exists in many names, it’s by mingling and through mutual harmony that they are able to speak of him by means of logical thought. Thus the Father is a single name because he is One but nevertheless innumerable in his qualities and names.”

It is interesting that logical thought was mentioned in the Tripartite Tractate because it is important to realize that logic is part of the mind of God. We are given the ability to reason and to be logical.

Quoting again, “The newly self-aware Aeons were not separated from the One Who Is, rather their birth has the form of a spreading out by which the Father spreads himself out into that which He wishes, in order that those who have gone forth from him may exist as well.”

The Father of the Aeons—that being the Son—an embodiment of the Formless One, is the Holy Spirit that breathes through the members of the ALL and moves them to search for the unknown. “Just as somebody is moved by a fragrance to seek the source of the fragrance for its sweetness leaves the Aeons in an indescribable pleasure and gives them the thought that they should be united with the One who desires that they should know him in oneness and that they should assist one another having no occasion to turn away through thoughtlessness from that in which they are placed.”

The Son’s spirit is the trace by which he may be sought. Quoting again, “The whole structure of Aeons, then, is yearning and seeking to find the Father perfectly and completely, and this is their irreproachable union. For the Father gave the Aeons a starting point and a route, so that they are stations on the calm road leading to him. For he spread out faith and prayer for what they do not see, a firm hope in what they do not comprehend, a fertile love longing for what they do not behold, and an eternally receptive understanding of the mind. A blessing that is richness and freedom. And, for their thoughts, the wisdom of one whose desire is the glory of the Father.”

Quoting from my book, The Gnostic Gospel illuminated, “The hierarchy defines higher versus lower. It orders first, second, third and 4th; superior and inferior; inside and out; action and rest; and every other possible relationship. Particles and their spins, waves and frequencies, atoms, molecules, attraction and repulsion. Cells and DNA, every protein fold and enzyme. The how what, why, when, who and where of all that was to come began as the perfectly rendered Fullness. As DNA anticipates an organism, and a blueprint promises a building, the Fullness embodied the perfect plan of paradise. For the Aeons manifested within their hierarchy all of the Father’s innumerable qualities, including consciousness, logic, and love.

“The Aeons of the Fullness were given wisdom and prudence and a constant thirst to seek their Creator. This gave them a desire to align themselves with the Father’s Holy Spirit through the process of giving glory. Giving glory is the means by which we align ourselves with the originating consciousness. It’s like a homing beacon. The Aeons yearned for communion with their Father, for he had planted his root deep within their hearts, and they recognized themselves as his branches and his fruit. The newly self-aware Aeons were not separated from the One Who Is. For their Father was the Son and embodiment of the formless One, and his Holy Spirit flowed throughout them as a reassuring presence.

“Although the Aeons dwelt within the single body of the Fullness, they were each an independent Self. Their variety required them to work together and remain in full agreement, for only through their union could they approach the Father’s greatness. All for one and one for all is their song, and they sing in perfect harmony” (The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated).

Now, I have to share kind of a funny image I have concerning the Fullness of God and what it looks like. As I say, a hierarchy is like a pyramid. So when I picture the Aeons of God, I picture them all as golden cannonballs stacked in a big pyramid. So they all look alike, but they each have a particular place in the hierarchy. Picture a given cannonball and where it might be in a gigantic stack of countless cannonballs in the shape of a pyramid. So that is how I picture the Fullness of God—this gigantic golden pyramid of balls.

Now if you go to YouTube and you look at videos of what are called slime mold, strangely enough, I always think of the Fullness of God as like a slime mold. The slime mold creature is comprised of identical cells, each one exactly the same, but they’re all side by side, making up one organism, whereas for example in our bodies our cells are all different. Your skin cell is different than your heart cell, for example, but in a slime mold all the cells are exactly the same. They are moving and acting and thinking as one single organism. A big clump of cells, but each of the cells is an individual. Also, they’re perfect fractals. Each cell replicates the entire slime mold. So if you cut out a single cell out of a slime mold it will now become its own mass of slime mold cells and know everything that the previous body out of which it was cut, knew. This has all been shown scientifically—you can look it up online. So that is how I think of the Fullness of God—as this beautiful combination of pyramidal golden orbs kind of acting and thinking like a slime mold. They’re each individuals, but they are also at the same time One.

So now, these are the principal players in the cosmology of Gnosticism:

The originating consciousness, which is called the Father.

The embodiment of that consciousness, which is called the Son.

The differentiation of the Son into the ALL.

And then the differentiation of the ALL becoming self-aware and becoming the Fullness of God and sorting themselves. The moment they became self-aware, they sorted themselves into that Golden Pyramid, as I think of it. Before they sorted themselves, they were like the rays of the Son coming out from the central entity of the Son.

When the Totalities of the ALL became self-aware, they kind of swam away and sorted themselves into this pyramid.

Everything else that we see around us—our Selves, our worlds, our entire universe—is all prefigured in the Fullness of God. The Fullness is also called the Pleroma, which is another Greek word that just means everything. The Fullness of God is like the blueprint of our universe. Everything that will ever come to be is sitting there in that golden pyramidal stack.

In our next episode, we will discuss the Fall and then how our world came to be.

Thank you for joining me on this trip through Gnosis. I hope I’ve given you some things to think about. If you visit my website, you will find my illustrations that I keep describing, like the Golden Pyramid. I also urge you to purchase my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which is a very short book, and it has all of the illustrations in there, and everything is logically laid out in an extremely simple way—a lot less words than these podcasts.

I’m going to end this podcast with a clear gospel message straight from the Tripartite Tractate regarding exactly what one must come to believe in order to be “saved.” In case you’re curious, we’re skipping ahead, but why not? So here’s a quote:

“But there is no other baptism apart from this one alone, which is the redemption into God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when confession is made through faith in those names which are a single name of the gospel, when they have come to believe what has been said to them, namely that they exist. From this they have their salvation—those who have believed that they exist. This is attaining an invisible way to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an undoubting faith.”

So that seems to be the underlying core of the gnostic salvation message. No other arcane rituals are needed. No gnosis other than believing that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, also known as the Fullness of God or the Pleroma, existed before you did. Other ancient Gnostic texts claim that this is the true essence of the gospel that Jesus preached. Keep in mind that these are the very texts considered so distracting by the early church fathers that they were buried in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD to protect them from being burned as the work of heretics, keeping them safe until their reemergence in 1945.

So, back to the Pleroma. In case you haven’t guessed, the Fullness is where we all wind up eventually. By the end of the universe, at the end of time, most everyone’s souls will have come on board Team God, so to speak. And then the fruit of the Pleroma—us—will have returned home to the fold to live happily ever after amidst the unending joy and love of the Fullness, all tucked up inside the Son who lives tucked up inside the Father. This is why I end my phone calls and whatnot with friends by saying, onward and upward. Onward and upward is our destination. Onward and upward is the way we return home to the Pleroma. We’ll talk a lot more about this as time goes on. All right. I’ll see you in the next episode. God bless.

If you would like to converse about these ideas, you can visit my Gnostic Reformation on Substack where you can leave comments and engage with others.

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 to the Gnostic Insights podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m here to share Gnostic Insights with you. I’ve written a couple of books based upon one of the tractates of the Nag Hammadi scriptures, which were buried deep in the desert around 300 AD to save them from the Great Purge that occurred when the Bible was codified by the Pope and the Emperor of Rome and made into the packaged Christianity that we know today. Before that repackaging of Christianity, there was a type of spiritual belief that was well known to Jesus and his followers that was then cut out of the New Testament during the Council of Nicene. These ideas were preserved in a set of books which were buried in the desert of Nag Hammadi, Egypt, to keep them from the purge. This big jug of scrolls was rediscovered and dug up in 1945, which means they were kept away from almost 2000 years of formal academic study and formal religious theology. So what you hear from the Nag Hammadi scriptures is relatively fresh and clean and uninterpreted by experts.

I’ve studied one particular book of the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate, and it is that book which I used primarily in the book that I wrote on the subject, called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which I published in 2019. That little book is a non-academic approach to the mythology of what can be called early Gnostic Christianity. The Gnosticism presented in the Tripartite Tractate and my Gnostic Gospel Illuminated is a very early version of Christianity.

The reason I say it’s Christian is that there is a figure called the Christ that runs throughout the Tripartite Tractate. There are also many other overlapping ideas that you can still find in the New Testament and traditional Christianity—the Father, the Son, the Fullness of God, the Fall, explanations of virtues and vices and their effects upon our lives, a need for relationship with our ethereal origins and assistance from the Christ. But the meanings of those words have changed so much during these past two thousand years of formal institutional religion that they hardly resemble their original meanings. The Gnostic Gospels use many of  the same terms as the Bible, but their interpretation and application is not what they originally were. When Jesus of Nazareth spoke of his Father, for example, who was he talking about? When we read of the Fullness of God in the scriptures approved by the church, what does that mean? When the Bible says that Christ will return with armies of angels to battle for our souls, what exactly is that about?

My goal here at Gnostic Insights is to reacquaint modern believers and nonbelievers with what I take to be the original intent of the religion that has come to be known as Christianity, in order to return it to the teachings that Jesus shared before the Nicene Council of the Pope and the Emperor of Rome changed everything to suit their own institutional agendas. To church folks this will initially sound like heresy, while to non-believers it will sound too churchy. To those folks who have fallen away from the church because they can’t reconcile inconsistencies between the Old and the New Testament, it will come as a welcome relief. And to those people who have never believed in God, this version of Christianity may be exactly what they haven’t been expecting and didn’t realize they were hoping for.

As I explain these Gnostic Insights to you, I will often use quotes out of the Old and New Testament as well as quotes from the Tripartite Tractate, in order to demonstrate their compatibility.

I like to begin talking about gnosis with a study of the cosmos or cosmology as it unfolded, as it rolled out in the beginning. The word for that, by the way, is cosmogeny—the study of origins of the cosmos. This makes the most sense to me—to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are in this great drama of which we are a part. We will look at the nature of consciousness and how and when it arises. After that we can discuss what happens in our lives and why we are here. We will look at the troubles we are burdened by in our lives and what we can do about them. And after all of that, we can look at the final roll-up at the very end of time as predicted by the scriptures.

So let’s begin at the beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. The story begins before the beginning of time because there was no time before our material cosmos existed. And so you can think of the originating consciousness as a vast consciousness which has no place and no time. No history. It is nothing but pure consciousness without thought, similar to what the Buddhists called the Buddha mind, which is something people try to achieve during meditation where you can be aware that you are conscious but you have no particular thoughts or words or images going through your mind. No thought, no images, no structure or form, no thing at all. And this is the base state consciousness of the Father.

Obviously the Father is not an old man with a white beard in long robes. Obviously there’s no gender. The Father is a singular consciousness without form or face. So let’s get off the notion of being upset by calling it a father. I suppose we could call it a mother, or we could just call it consciousness. In the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book that I am interpreting for you, it is referred to as the Father. And this Father’s basic consciousness is not thoughts but rather love—the sensation of knowing what we call love. So this consciousness simply is without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning, without end, utterly quiet. Utterly still. Utterly alone. This Father is often described as all-knowing, but what is there to know? All-seeing, but what is there to see? All-loving, but what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom will, but to what end? There’s nothing else there.

Now imagine that this consciousness gives birth to an emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation blog and book, we call this a fractal. In the religious texts, they call it a son–SON. So now we have the Father and a Son. In the silence of the Absolute, the Father brings forth the first and only Son from its realization of itself. The Son is the Father having a thought. The Son is the Father knowing itself. The Son is the Father having a sensation of its own eternal Self. This Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. The Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells. Every trait of the Father is expressed now as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son.

And yet, although it was a singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone, for not only the Son, but what is called the ALL arose at once. This figure of the ALL does not appear in orthodox Christianity, so here our Gnostic Gospel begins to diverge from the familiar.

The ALL immediately appeared as the offspring of the Son because the Son could not help itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father, because it is a reflection of the Father’s traits. And so the Father knows itself and creates the Son. And the Son knows itself and creates the ALL. In conventional religious talk, the ALL is known as the Pre-existent Church. This is not your church down on the street corner with the people in it hearing sermons and singing hymns on Sunday. This is the true, pre-existent church. The Tripartite Tractate says, “For not only the Son, but also the church exists from the beginning.”

The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say, “Before the ALL arose from the Father’s thought, he knew them, but they did not know the depth in which they found themselves, nor could they know themselves or anything else, for they were within the Father as an embryo or an unsprouted seed.” (I’m not going to cite verses here for purposes of flow, but you can find all of these references in my new book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.)

So, the ALL can be characterized as potential. They were there living in the Father, living in the Son, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know themselves. They’re not Self aware. The way the Tripartite Tractate describes this, it says, “Because they were newly formed, the Father concealed the ALL’s perfection from them until they could grow into the knowledge. This is why the Father revealed the Son to them, so that the ALL would be able to relate to the Son and see the Father’s glory according to the ability of each one to receive him.”

So, nobody sees the Father. The Father is unknowable. The Father is too immense. When people say, Oh, you can’t possibly conceive of God—God is too big and unknowable—that’s true. But God made itself into a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. In philosophy and early theology another word for this singularity of consciousness, by the way, is monad and the One.

One of the reasons the Son is there is because we can know the Son. We can’t know the Father, but we can know the Son. The Tripartite Tractate describes it this way: The Son is no more and no less than the sum of the ALL. “And they understood who he is and he is covered by the ALL, and with the birth of the ALL the Son also became a Father.”

This can be a little confusing because you have the originating consciousness, the God Above All Gods, which is the originating consciousness or the Father. The Father had a sense of itself. This was called the Son. The Son immediately reproduced itself, and this is called the ALL. With the birth of the ALL the Son also became a Father. The originating Father, that consciousness so lonely and still for eternity, now had a child who had also borne fruit from his glory. And in this way, the One begat the ALL. And the Father loved them all, as he loved his Son.

As I said, the ALL is referred to as the pre-existent church, and it’s also called the Second Glory. The First Glory was the Son; the second Glory is the ALL. The originating Father’s consciousness is incomprehensible. Its scope and greatness is so immense and so unfathomable that the Tripartite Tractate says anyone trying to take hold of it would be annihilated, and so the Father created the Son, thereby giving form to what had been his formless Self, for the Father’s desire was to be known. His desire was to love and to be loved. The Son that arose is perfect, even as his Father is perfect, and he carries within his perfect form every quality of the originating consciousness. Being the perfect image of the Father, the Son’s inherent creativity spread itself out into the ALL like rays shining from a star.

In my books I illustrate these concepts in this way: when I picture the originating consciousness of the original Father, I see just total blackness—an entirety of dark, inscrutable blackness. Then, when I picture the Son emerging and being held by that blackness, I see the Son as kind of a diffuse, foggy light that begins to emerge out of the inky blackness. That is what I see as the Son. Then immediately coming out of that foggy image of the Son like rays of a sun spreading out, I see bright golden light coming from the middle of that fogginess and beaming outward like the sun. These are helpful illustrations for me, so when I picture the ALL I picture it as a bright yellow starburst. The ALL, like the Father and the Son, is infinite and limitless in its scope and capability. In fact, another name for the ALL is the Totality. Each individual ray, each of the Totalities, emerges from the central seed of the Son, SON, and they ALL shine forth as One.

In the same way that a crystal refracts white light into all the colors of the rainbow, so the Son beams forth every one of his countless qualities as the individual and yet unified rays of the ALL. The ALL is a single entity, yet it has differentiations represented by each of its Totalities. You can picture each one as a ray coming out from a central starburst. The Son intimately knows each facet of the ALL, for the ALL are all facets of himself. The ALL is at the same time One and many. One and ALL. The ALL is a selfless diversity giving glory to the Father with a single song of praise. So, you can imagine the ALL as singing in unison when it sings. The Son who became the Father of the ALL shines forth as the emergent rays the ALL.

These are the basic ideas behind the Father of consciousness and the first off-shoot of that consciousness—the Son—and the variables of the Son—the ALL. I want to cover one more thing before we leave this introduction to the origin of consciousness. The Bible and the Tripartite Tractate talk a lot about glory and giving glory to the Father. Glory is one of those religious terms that is used quite a lot. But what is glory? And what does it mean to give glory?

Glory is the recognizable magnificence of someone. Glory is, Oh my gosh, that is so fabulous! So we say that the Father is glorious and the Son is glorious.

Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all.

And what does it mean to give glory? The Bible says that all glory proceeds from the Father, and we are to give glory back to God.

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

The Tripartite Tractate says that Self-awareness comes through the act of giving glory to God, and we’ll talk about that more in the next episode. Giving glory means that you are focused on the glorious object in adoration and love—that is giving glory. God is glorious, and when I give glory to God, I am loving God by seeing that glory and acknowledging it and reflecting the glory back to God.

So, glory is the wondrousness of the object and giving glory is reflecting that glory back at your object of devotion, and truly glorious things are those that reflect the glory of the Father. When we glorify a person or a thing as if it were glorious all on its own, that’s what I would call vain glory. Vain because no one but the creator of the universe qualifies to generate and to receive glory.

Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!

And glory is not worship for the sake of worship, as if God needed our adoration. This would imply that the Father of the universe is hungry and insecure and wheedling for our affection, as if we mere mortals could offer up anything of value not already owned by the Lord of Creation. That just doesn’t make any sense. So giving glory is not for God’s benefit, it’s for our benefit.

The reason we give glory to God is because that is the method by which we tune in to God’s frequency. You could say giving glory to God is how we synchronize ourselves with the one consciousness of which we are essentially fractal units. I’ll explain fractals at some other time. Why would we want to synchronize with the Father? The Gnostic Gospel tells us that we were designed with a built in homing device that gives us indescribable pleasure when we are in communion with one another and when we are operating according to plan. The closer we are to dialing in to the Father’s frequency, the happier we feel. It is through this process of giving glory that we realign ourselves with the universal unit of consciousness, or what we are calling the Father or the God Above All Gods. When I am speaking with people I often refer to this as the Glory Road or the Glory Beam.

That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him,

This is how we align ourselves for instruction and for renewal. When we center ourselves and sit in silence with the Father, we feel peace, happiness, joy, and love. When we acknowledge the Maker and focus in that direction, we give glory and we are united in glory. And when we give glory alongside others who are themselves giving glory, we share with them a worship experience of the One that transcends what any of us can experience alone. So this is not for the benefit of a needy God, but for the edification of the Saints. Edification means strengthening. It is through giving glory that the choir of which we are a part is able to sing along with one perfect voice.

It is very important to choose your objects of glory carefully. In this distracting world in which we find ourselves, we are giving glory away right and left to things that do not deserve glory. We glorify movie stars and television stars and musicians. We glorify sports figures, we glorify models, and products that we love. This is a distraction away from true glory, and it doesn’t make us happy. Only glorifying the Father in love can make us happy. The other objects that we may find ourselves glorifying—these are imitations. These are deficiencies and so they cannot ever fulfill us the way that we hope they will.

How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?

I think this is a good beginning for our basic concepts. We’ll talk a lot more about all of this in episodes to come, so thank you so much for being with me today and I’ll see you again next time. God bless. Onward and upward.

Last week we looked at the unreasonable assumptions made by Darwinian evolutionists. This episode continues that discussion. I am going to begin this episode with a very quick review of basic Gnostic cosmology.

In this series of podcasts I’m sharing with you the insights I have gained by my study of the Nag Hammadi transcripts and, in particular, one book of the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate. A new podcast listener tells me that some podcast hosts, such as Spotify, do not archive podcasts far enough back in time for new listeners to be able to hear the early episodes and catch up. So, beginning next week, I am going to put out a series of Gnostic Insights episodes that will relay the basic gnosis of the Tripartite Tractate and my commentary. This will serve as a review to longtime listeners and a necessary foundation for the newcomers. Meanwhile, here’s a brief introduction to those foundational concepts before we go on to today’s topic.

This cosmology begins with the ground state of consciousness that is called the Father. Then the Father has a particular thought and creates the Son. And the Son is a portion of the Father that contains all of the knowledge of the Father, but in a location, rather than being infinitely spread out. Then the Son immediately broke into its constituent parts, and these are called the ALL, and each one of the ALL is a fractal of the Son, just as the Son is a fractal of the Father.

And we’ve spent time discussing what fractals are, which are a mathematical concept. So please go back and listen to the podcasts in order so that you understand this material and catch up to where we are.

Gnosis means knowledge and the purpose of this gnosis is so that we might reason. Reasoning, logic, is a basic facet of the Father of consciousness.

The other basic factor of the Father is love. And love is not only this feeling of love that we have, but love is the containing force—the holding on to one another, to work together in harmony. We’ve also discussed the Simple Golden Rule, which is reaching out to others, holding hands metaphorically or in reality, working together on a single project with love, assistance, and information in order to build the next level up of complication or of sophistication.

Then the ALL of the Son, which is his differentiated parts, became self aware and each one of the ALL became a conscious entity on its own. I refer to these conscious entities as units of consciousness because they embody the consciousness of the Son and of the Father. These units of consciousness of the ALL constitute what is called the Pleroma or the Fullness of God. And the Fullness of God sits there in a unified body. There are many cells to it, each of them self aware units of consciousness, but all of the cells work in absolute harmony. They share one thought. They sing one song. They dream of a paradise. These units of consciousness in the Gnostic Gospels are called the Fullness or the Fullnesses of God. They’re also called the Aeons.

One of the Aeons named Logos had his own thought that deviated from the rest of the Fullness, and because of this thought, he overreached in his ambition and he Fell. And this is the first act of Ego. It is the first act of striking out on one’s own for what one thinks is the best thing to do, without being in harmony with the rest of one’s fellows. It’s the first deviation from the Golden Rule of working together.

When Logos fell, his parts broke apart and became what we call the Deficiency. The Deficiency is this universe in which we live. The Father immediately put a boundary around the Deficiency, and this space is literally our space and time that constitutes this universe in which we live.

We discussed how the deficiencies are small knockoffs of the Aeons of the original. They’re called the Imitation. They are not nearly as grand and glorious as the Aeons of the Fullness, arising as they did out of egoic thought.

When the Aeon who fell, Logos, saw what he had created out of his egoic thought, he was horrified and he immediately returned to the Fullnesses and prayed to the Father and to the Fullness to help him rectify the situation of having brought the Deficiency into creation. And of course, this is one of the heresies—considered a heresy by the church—is  is the idea that our universe that creation—is a Deficiency rather than a glory of God. But that’s actually a misunderstanding of the Deficiency.

The origination of the Deficiency may have been a Fall away from the Fullness and of the Father, but it didn’t stay that way because the Fullnesses and Logos sent back units of consciousness into the Deficiency in order to fix it; in order to make it better. Because the Deficiency when it first was created was unable to work together, arising as it did out of Ego rather than out of cooperation. It did not arise from the Golden Rule. And so, what originally came into being in our universe was what I believe to be the quantum foam level of instantiation. And quantum foam is non-cooperative; it just keeps bubbling in and out of existence. A constant boiling type of surface that never rises up to build atoms and molecules and this universe around us.

So the true Deficiency is the substrate of our material universe. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about the diversity of consciousness and life in this universe that occurred as the 2nd Order Powers entered. In other words, we’re going to talk about evolution. Today I will be reading out of a couple of my articles, one on the Simple Explanation blog, and one on the new Gnostic Gospel blog. I’ve had a long running science and math blog called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which you can find at https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com/ .  

On November 11th of 2018, I wrote an article called A Simple Explanation of Tuskless Elephants’ Super Quick Evolution, and I’d like to share that with you right now.

African elephants are rapidly evolving to lose their most precious physical trait, their ivory tusks. In a stunningly rapid instance of observable evolution, African elephant females are refusing to grow the ivory that poachers kill for. In an excerpt from the National Geographic, which says, “Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks. In Mozambique, researchers are racing to understand the genetics of elephants born without tusks and the consequences of the trait.”

I won’t read to you out of the National Geographic article, but you can try to find it on your own or you can go to this blog article that I’m reading out of right now on A Simple Explanation’s blogspot. But the point of the article is that decades ago, some 4000 elephants lived in Mozambique, Gorongosa National Park, and they have dwindled down to triple digits following the civil war. New research indicates that 200 known adult females, or 51% of those that survived the war, are tuskless and then 32% of the female elephants born since the war are tuskless.

Now, coming back to what I write, scientists are calling this evolution, but tell me, have you ever heard of evolution occurring in only one or two generations? When I was taught evolutionary theory, they said it took thousands of generations of minute changes to populate a beneficial mutation to the stage where you could say it had evolved. For instance, in 2012, Michigan State University researchers were very happy to demonstrate the evolution of citrate eating E coli bacteria after only 56,000 generations. 56,000 generations!

I remember the day I first learned about evolution in elementary school. There was an illustration in the textbook mocking the concept of Lamarckian evolution. Lamarck had promoted the idea that giraffes who stretched their necks to reach the leaves on higher branches, gave birth to calves with longer necks. No, no, Darwinians said. Natural selection is the way it happens as only long necked giraffes survived the lean years to give birth to more long necked calves like themselves, and that logic was supposed to have settled the argument concerning Darwinian evolution. The reason Darwinian evolutionary theory won out over Lamarck’s theory of epigenetic trait inheritance was that Lamarck’s type of evolution requires learning and volitional repetition, whereas Darwin’s creatures were either born lucky to have long necks or were doomed to be short necked losers. Even as a child of 10 or so, I recall wondering why, if long necks were so valuable as to have evolved into our familiar high nibbling giraffes, then why don’t all large grazing animals have long necks?

I happen to prefer the Simple Explanation’s theory of evolution. My theory of evolution reinserts learning and choice into the equation and removes the element of dumb luck. Seriously, who would ever look around themselves at the varieties of natural adaptation and believe that dumb luck at the material level accidentally brought it all about? It just doesn’t even make sense. It defies the basic rule of 52 pickup. And you’ve heard of that—52 pickup is: if you throw a deck of cards in the air, it never comes down stacked and in order. It never does.

So here is Ropp’s Simple Explanation of evolution. First, we accept that the basic matrix of our universe is consciousness. The Simple Explanation’s model of evolution is information-driven rather than happenstance-driven as the conventional model would have it. What I mean is that the Darwinian model we’ve all been taught relies upon the brute force of superior survival mechanisms that allow the superior creature to procreate and thereby pass on their superior genes. And after a tremendous number of such superior generations, the inferior fade into extinction and the superior organism becomes the new normal.

All this time I’ve been thinking that the Simple Explanation is somehow essentially divergent from Darwin. In the Simple Explanation there is an ontological pull upward toward more complex aggregations of consciousness. Darwin’s model is, on the other hand, a case of the blind simply bumbling by happenstance, by lucky accident, by dumb luck, to be a superior adaptation from the norm. Where I find it unlikely is that there would be a billion such bumblings in the same direction, that by dumb luck keeps heading in the upward and onward direction.

The Simple Explanation would say the patterns of superiority are few and they are fractal, so the wheel does not need to be reinvented over and over. The Golden Rule and the hierarchical distribution of increasing complexity and responsibility cover much of it. And, due to the transpersonal nature of universal knowledge, basic mechanisms like hands and eyes only need to be invented once and then deployed or copied as needed. Consciousness is not a byproduct of the human brain, or even of complex systems of any sort. Consciousness is the ground state.

Think of consciousness as the medium upon which is written the formulae of our universe. The Simple Explanation refers to this ground state as the Metaverse, and, by the way, the Gnostic gospel (jumping ahead) refers to this consciousness as the Father. And it contains every law of the universe as potential expression that manifests when and where appropriate. Smaller derivative units of consciousness are fractals of the originating units of consciousness that express themselves in every single material expression of our universe. And again, jumping ahead, in the Gnostic Gospel we call those the 2nd Order Powers, of which we are a part.

The most ambitious units of consciousness, or we would say, Second Order Powers, continue to find themselves occupying larger and more complex physical forms. Some of the units of consciousness that started in Earth’s primordial soup have remained in the soup, never attaching themselves to anything more complex than a single-celled organism.  

The most ambitious little life forms found themselves returning to slightly more sophisticated organisms with each incarnation. Lessons learned are carried forward, always incarnating more and more complex structures, and occasionally jumping to a more complex hierarchical level, driving the evolution of planetary life via memes accrued through Karma. Was Cyd’s Self unit of consciousness, ever a single celled organism? Probably so, beginning about four and a half billion years ago. Was Cyd’s Self unit of consciousness ever a jellyfish? Good chance it was, as the toroidal-shaped jellyfish is the oldest multi-organ animal on Earth, swimming our seas for the last 700 million years. Was Cyd’s Self unit of consciousness ever a dinosaur? Well, maybe, maybe not. I’d imagine the dinosaur memes and karma informed the development of reptiles and birds, not Cyd’s lineage. The first mammals apparently descended from a different lizard, therapsids. Was Cyd’s governing unit of consciousness ever a lemur or a chimpanzee or a Bonobo, or perhaps an Australopithecus or a Neanderthal? Probably, since their protohuman memes and karma would have informed human development and the Self unit of consciousness is attracted to familiar patterns.

In the Simple Explanation’s evolutionary model, no war is needed between natural selection and creationism, between science and religion. The Simple Explanation proposes that everything in the cosmos is created through metaversal principles embodied in all units of consciousness, and that each governing unit of consciousness evolves according to personal inclination and ability, through established patterns of meme acquisition and adaptation, and the utterly fair and impartial mechanism of karma. In the Simple Explanation’s evolutionary schema, Cyd is currently a human and probably has been for a very long time.

Am I therefore more evolved than my dogs? Not really. The family dogs are at the same level of hierarchical sophistication as the humans. The dogs’ billions of aggregate units of consciousness and their Self units of consciousness have all made decisions every step along the way that steered them into this life as these dogs.

Every governing unit of consciousness is an integral part of one aggregate or another, hierarchically upline and downline. Every slot needs to be filled. The most you could say of my state of evolution is that ambitious meme collectors evolve into ever more complex instantiations. And Cyd’s unit of consciousness and those of her aggregate units of consciousness are attached to some highly ambitious collections of memes. But whether or not this is anything to brag about is debatable.

Now back to the elephants. The Simple Explanation of this ridiculously rapid loss of tusks is that the elephants who were killed for their tusks carried that information into the transpersonal pool of universal consciousness upon their deaths, and made that data available to subsequent generations of African elephants. That meme probably reads, Hey, watch out! Those effers are gonna kill you to try to get their hands on your beautiful ivory tusks. Don’t grow ‘em!

Thus ends that article from the Simple Explanation blog from November 11, 2018. As I say, you can visit that blog and read that article if you would like to review what I just said. Also, the links to the original studies that were cited are contained in that article. That article that I just read you about the elephants and their tusks that was written in terms of the Simple Explanation’s, vocabulary, and so there were words in there that you’re not that familiar with, although you do know some of them by now, such as units of consciousness and fractals.

Five months later I wrote another article on the new Gnostic Gospel blog, and if you want to read the original of that, you can find it under April 23rd, 2019, and it’s called A Gnostic Perspective of Evolution: Refuting Darwin. I re-released an updated edition of that podcast last week.

The 2nd Order Powers are also called those of the remembrance, and I suggest that what was sown in the 2nd order of powers that lifted them above the imitation was the remembrance and for life forms that remembrance is contained in our double Helix DNA. As it turned out, the 2nd Order of Powers became infected with the same lust for dominion that had infected those of the imitation due to the law of mutual combat. And the two orders began a never-ending war over resources in the limited ecology of early Earth. The likenesses resemble the original Aeons of the Fullness, but they lost themselves in the confusion of Earth.

Now let me interrupt this here for a moment and say that we have not yet discussed Archons. Archons are other entities of the Fall that we haven’t talked about yet, since we’ve only been talking about the physical universe and Archons are immaterial. They are not physical—they are influences. So when we talk about the never-ending war with the living forms, it’s the Archons doing battle with the living forms.

Back to the article and quoting from the Tripartite Tractate, Verses 84 and 85, “The powers of the remembrance were adorned with the names of the Pre-existents whose likenesses they were—and that’s the Aeons of the Fullness. The order of those of this kind was in harmony with itself, and with each other. It fought, however, the order of those of the Imitation” (and that is the forces of the Archons which include, for example, entropy and death.) 

“It fought, however, the order of those of the Imitation, because that order waged war against the likenesses as they were producing various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers mixed with one another and in great number. Now the whole establishment and organization of the images, likenesses, and imitations has come into being for the sake of those who need nourishment, instruction, and form so that their smallness may gradually grow, as through the instruction provided by the image of a mirror. That, in fact, is why he created the human last after having prepared and provided for him the things that he created for his sake.”

I’m going to end this podcast with a quick review of the Simple Golden Rule because that is what evolution on Earth is all about. It could be considered the central takeaway message of the Simple Explanation. Your job is to reach out to others with love, aid, and information for the betterment of all. This goes for all units of consciousness. All 2nd Order Powers from the cells and organs to organisms and beyond.

Every physical manifestation links up with others of its kind in this universe. Atoms linked together to make molecules, molecules linked together to make cells. Cells linked together to make organs, organs linked together to make organisms, organisms linked together to create societies, and so on. And these are the building blocks of the next level of hierarchical aggregation.

This is re-instantiating the Hierarchy of the Fullness in this bounded material universe. And this is what is called the new ecology. It was a way to put the consciousnesses of the Fullness, the Aeons, into a physical form, and manifest them on this earth, and then this will go forward and become the next ecology.

So the first Ecology was the Hierarchy of the Fullness. The second Ecology is this material universe of ours. And then, once this universe is fully redeemed by the Christ, it will become the next hierarchical organization. And the way this happens is to reach out to others with love, assistance, and information for the betterment of all.

This has been the Gnostic Insights podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. I’ll see you next time. Onward and upward and God bless.

The second argument for intelligent design is called “specified complexity,” which refers to the improbability of essential, highly complex operations arising by chance. The double-strand DNA machinery is one example of a super-complex mechanism where many steps must be accomplished using many components assembled in exactly the right order. Watch the short video below and contemplate how unlikely it is that the DNA replication process “evolved” by chance. 

The complexity of mechanisms at the smallest possible chemical and biological levels argues against their having arisen by happenstance as quickly as they did.

Below is the geological clock of earth. Look how soon protokaryotes arose on Earth–just half a billion years after the newly-arrived moon stabilized the planet’s tilt and rotation. Yet all of the sophisticated machinery required for assembling and maintaining a cell was already available for use by the newly emerging single-celled organisms; if they hadn’t been, the organisms could not have formed. How were those complex processes ready and waiting? By chance? I don’t think so.

For a religious system that existed long before modern science invented the concept of evolution, Gnosticism has a lot to say about it. The Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures that I use for reference, describes us humans as the end result of an unfolding, universal ecosystem it calls “The Economy.” The supernatural beings credited with this intelligent design are the Father, the Son, and the Fullness.

The Gnostic Gospel suggests that life on earth arose in several cataclysmic steps, with each jump bringing a new order of life to the planet via newly-minted instructions. 

The jump that started the Earth-ball rolling was the Fall itself, when a higher-order being named “Logos” tried to plug itself into an unauthorized location (“The Father”) in order to accomplish a task it was not assigned. The Fall of Logos is the seminal act of the Gnostic creation story. When Logos “fell,” it broke apart into all of its component pieces. The ruptured body of Logos is called “The Deficiency.”

The consciousness of Logos abandoned its dispersed components “down below” and fled back up to the Fullness. The abandoned components of Logos assembled themselves into “Those of the Imitation.” 

Those of the Imitation are organized at the molecular level. They are unable to work together or to procreate with others of their kind. The Simple Gnostic Gospel now identifies prokaryotic organisms with “Those of the Imitation”. These two prokaryotic lineages, or domains, are still with us today–Archaea and Bacteria. Archaea is the oldest domain, with chemical signatures in strata going back four billion years. Very little is known about the domain Archaea, which, until the late 1970s, was misclassified by scientists as a type of bacteria. 

Prokaryotes arose remarkably soon after Earth’s formation. These solitary creatures lack a nucleus and organelles, their DNA is circular, and they replicate themselves by themselves–asexually. Nonetheless, prokaryotes display surprising complexity at the molecular level.

“Those who came into being resemble in fact the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations… They thought of themselves that only they existed and that they had no beginning, since they saw no one existing before them” [Tripartite Tractate, v.79].  

“Over those who belong to the imitation he placed the ordering word to provide them with form. He also placed over them the law of judgment, and, further, he also placed over them the powers that had their roots in the lust for dominion. He placed them to rule over them, so that the order should be kept in check either by the firmness of the wise word, by the threat of the law, or by the power of the lust for dominion, all of which diminished that order’s evilness, until the Word was content with them as useful for the economy” [Tripartite Tractate, v.99].

The above quote says that Logos supplied the materials he had left behind in the Deficiency with various kinds of non-physical aids. The term “ordering word” refers to both knowledge and organization, in the same way that words and syntax organize letters of the alphabet into meaningful packets of information that can link together to form sentences that blossom into language. DNA coding would be an example of the ordering word. 

“The Law of Judgment” refers to cause and effect and their predictable outcomes based upon physical and chemical laws.  “Powers” refers to “forces,” as in atomic and molecular forces–attraction and repulsion, spin, phase separation, even microgravity–pulling and pushing electrons and protons from one assembly to another. 

The forces within and between carbon atoms form the “carbon chain.” The carbon chain links carbon atoms to hydrogen atoms through shared electrons, forming the molecular basis of all life on Earth. Every living thing is constructed with carbon chains.

Gnostic cosmology states that Logos was unsatisfied with those of the Imitation. As described below, those of the Imitation were doomed from the outset to “multiform thought” because they arose from the unauthorized, solitary action of a single aeon–Logos–whereas the design of the Fullness emphasized cooperation and mutual effort among an entirety toward a shared goal. In other words, an ecology.

“Instead of perfection he saw deficiency; instead of unity he saw division; instead of stability, disturbance; instead of rest, upheaval… Those who had come into being did not know themselves, nor did they know the Fullnesses from which they had originated… being feeble and small creatures, infected with the same sicknesses with which he himself had been infected” [Tripartite Tractate, v. 80, 81].

Viruses, by the way, are a particularly insidious form of the Imitation. Viruses are not prokaryotes because they are not considered “alive” by any measure of life. Since they are not alive, they cannot be killed. They are not living cells but simply a shell housing strands of RNA and DNA gathered from their environment. They have no metabolism, no cells or cellular mechanisms, and cannot replicate the DNA and RNA they carry without invading and commandeering a living host’s machinery. The DNA and RNA found in viruses does not work to build the virus; it is merely freight until injected into a host cell. Despite their utter simplicity, viruses are able to carry out complex, mechanical invasion procedures on others’ living cells. Viruses, by the way, are extremely small. Meet the demons.

The “bacteriophage” virus infects both bacteria and archaea, including us, by drilling a hole through the victim’s cell wall and injecting DNA. The bacteriophage’s DNA then hijacks the host’s cellular mechanisms and instructs them to begin producing copies of the virus. Keep in mind we are talking about non-living beings able to organize and carry out complex functions.   

According to Gnostic cosmology, after the Fall, Logos returned first to the Father, then to the ALL altogether, and then one by one to his brothers in the Fullness. In this manner, with all of their individual and intertwined capabilities working in coordination, they produced a new fruit called “The Second Order of Powers”. 

“These powers were much better and greater than those belonging to the Imitation. … from a thought that had known them in advance” [Tripartite Tractate, v. 82].     

The next major jump into the “Second Order of Powers” forms the third Earthly domain called “eukaryotes,” which arrived soon after the Earth’s atmosphere turned to oxygen–about 2.7 billion years ago. These Powers are also called “Those of the Remembrance.” I would like to suggest that what was sown in the Second Order of Powers that lifted them above the Imitation was “the Remembrance” contained in double-helix DNA. For what is DNA but a huge book of instructions for higher-ordered life?

“He sowed in them an inclination to seek and pray to what is glorious and preexistent, and he also sowed in them an ability to think about it, and a power of reflection to make them realize that something greater than themselves existed before them, but they had not understood what it was. Bringing forth harmony and mutual love by means of that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since to unity and unanimity they owned their existence” [Tripartite Tractate, v. 83].

The encircling pattern shows up in this top view of a 3-molecule protein called a sliding DNA clamp homotrimer that forms a torus shape around a DNA strand, unzipping it like a zipper for replication.

New micro imaging techniques combined with computer simulations give never-before-seen glimpses into the glory of DNA. Take a look at the four known types of double-helix DNA. We are accustomed to seeing DNA from the side view; it’s a whole different view from the top:

Here are the side views and top views of DNA. The mandala patterns formed by DNA’s top view reveal another level of circular complexity that adds spice to DNA’s familiar lattice shape.

It appears the Simple Explanation is not the first to note the similarity between DNA’s top view and humanity’s love of a stained glass window or a pretty lace doily.

The Rose Window a fractal representation of the DNA homotrimer. You see, everything is fractals–fractals to a larger and smaller degree.  And the fractal of the rose window of the Cathedral of York Minster is a fractal representation of the DNA that we carry around in our bodies. You know–just like highways are fractal representations of the veins and capillaries that flow through our bodies. And the cars that drive along the highway—these are fractal replications of the pattern of molecules of blood that flow through those capillaries. Everything is fractals at larger and smaller scales.

The third domain of life on Earth is known as eukarya to science. With the advent of double-helix DNA came membrane-bound organelles and a nucleus, cellular respiration, and sexual and asexual reproduction. We humans and all of the Earth’s fauna and flora are part of the eukarya domain.

As it turned out, the Second Order of Powers became infected with the same lust for dominion that had infected those of the Imitation, due to the “Law of Mutual Combat,” and the two orders began a never-ending war over resources in the limited ecology of early Earth. The “Likenesses” resembled the original aeons of the Fullness, but they lost themselves in the confusion of Earth.

“The powers of the remembrance were adorned with the names of the preexistent, whose likenesses they were; the order of those of this kind was in harmony with itself and with each other. It fought, however, the order of those of the imitation, because that order waged war against the likenesses… as they were producing various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers, mixed with one another and in great number” [Tripartite Tractate, v. 84, 85].

The shadows of the deficiency that emerged from the Fall are small, dead, and ignorant of what came before. The Second Order Powers are emanations of the restored Logos, fitted into the Boundary. They come one by one to populate the cosmos with life.

I think this is pretty logical. It makes a lot more sense than the happenstance chance that is argued in Darwinian evolution that makes no sense at all. So, don’t take my word for it. Go and look at the pictures, go and watch those videos–they are incredible. And think about it. Use your own gnosis.

I apologize for the way the typefaces jump size and the overlarge images and for the random empty bars that may appear in your transcript. It seems as though all of the cutting and pasting of text and images between Word, blogspot, and WordPress has overburdened WP’s abilities. I tried and tried to edit the layout, but to no avail. It appears much cleaner in the original blog post from 2019 if you want to have a look.

Welcome to Gnostic Insights. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m your host. In 2019, I posted an article to my new Gnostic Gospel blog called If All Are Redeemed, Why Not Be Sinful?, and I’d like to share that with you today. Much of this episode was broadcasted in May of 2021; this content has been updated as my gnosis has deepened.

One of the big heresies of Gnosticism is that all Second Order Powers are redeemed by Christ and all will someday return to the paradise of the Fullness. Yes. Yay! Everyone’s going to heaven! No one is going to hell, not even the fallen angels. What joy! This seems to fly in the face of Christian Orthodoxy that promotes the idea that only those humans who confess a belief in Jesus as the Christ will make it into heaven. And those who don’t believe in Jesus will go to an eternal damnation of suffering in hell.  

Conventional Christianity states that Jesus came to save humanity, but only those who acknowledge Jesus as the only son of God and invite him into their hearts will be saved. This is the basis for all evangelism and all churches that follow the Nicene Creed, which is to say all Christian churches, whether Catholic or Protestant. This is why Christians are so keen on saving souls. They don’t want you to suffer for eternity in hell.

The Gnostic church begs to differ with that common interpretation of Christ’s mission. According to the books of the Nag Hammadi Library, all of Creation will be redeemed and returned to the Fullness and the Father’s home in heaven. All of creation, everyone and everything, will be made clean and pure and holy by the end. As they say, it will all be good in the end, and if it’s not good yet, then it’s not yet the end.

Gnosis refers to the ability to use reason and logic to arrive at spiritual truth. So let’s think together about this idea of Christ and redemption, and who does or does not go to heaven.

First, if Christ’s redemption were a matter of your belief, then Christ’s mission of salvation would be limited to what you believe. In other words, you would be the one holding the power of salvation, not Christ. Does that make any sense to you? Are you the one who redeems, or is Christ? Can you see how making your belief central to redemption actually limits the power of Christ? Can you see how that makes sinful humans more powerful than the mission of Christ’s redemption? Limiting Christ to your belief, it seems to me, is the greater heresy than simply trusting Christ to accomplish the mission. It is Christ’s job to redeem humanity, not yours.

Second, according to Gnostic texts, all creatures great and small will be redeemed. This means that all creatures are going to heaven. My dog has never professed a belief in Jesus as the Christ. Yet my dog is going to heaven. The fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the insects, the forest animals—all Second Order Powers are redeemed by Christ. It is the job of the Christ to redeem creation, irrespective of creation’s ability to confess that fact. Do you think that only good dogs go to heaven or nice fishes? Maybe only herbivores. Perhaps only parrots who can say Jesus saves.

Once we concede that it is only the Christ that can redeem, then what is the point of leading a virtuous life? Why not sin up until the end, have all kinds of fun and then waltz into heaven without repentance? Repentance, by the way, means to feel sorrow and regret. Are we allowed to sin willy nilly with no negative consequences? An even more profound question is why were we created in the first place?

According to the Tripartite Tractate, the 2nd Order Powers were created in order to rescue the fallen Aeon known as Logos. The most perfect and complete of the individual Aeons, Logos crowned the top of the aeonic hierarchy. This single Aeon consisted of all the attributes of the good and perfect Fullness rolled up into one individual. And as you know by now, from listening to the first eight episodes of Gnostic Insights, Logos had fallen from the Fullness and smashed to smithereens in a lower dimension. The broken bits of Logos scattered into space, forming our material universe, along with a host of powers and personalities, including demons, evil jinn, and Archons.

Logos imagined he could build the paradise dreamt by the Fullness because he understood all of the plans and possessed all of the necessary talents. However, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos was unable to give proper glory to the Father. As he reached for the Father, Logos stumbled and fell, shattering himself to bits. Because the isolated glory of Logos was inadequate to the task, everything he produced as a result of that effort fell disastrously short. Where there had been unity with the Son and with his brethren in the Fullness, now there was a division and a turning. The undiluted will expressed by the Fullness was splintered because Logos “could not bear to look at the light, but looked at the depths and he faltered.” That’s verse 77 of the Tripartite Tractate.

Going on to verse 78: “What issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance,” by the way, that’s another word for Ego, “What issued from this Ego had existed from something that was itself deficient, and because of that, what was perfect in him left him and went upward to its own in the Fullness, leaving the sicknesses behind in the darkness.”

The material space of our universe is known as the deficiency and the imitation in Gnosticism, and it was initially populated by nothing but the fallen Ego of Logos, and we call that Ego the Demiurge. The loss, the separation, of the Ego of Logos from his Self and from the Fullness was mourned by Logos and the Fullness. And so initially, before any 2nd Order Powers were sent into this material world, the Fullness and Logos were already mourning the loss and the separation, the splitting in two, of Logos into Self and Ego. And so those fallen bits of Logos that remained behind needed to be redeemed.

However, as the 2nd Order Powers entered this earthly dimension, they were immediately plunged into a never ending battle with the fallen. Due to the law of mutual combat, we temporarily forgot our Father in heaven and our mission of engagement and rescue. We were all infected with a host of fallen influences and fell into lifetimes of fear, regret, lust, and rage.

As the Tripartite Tractate puts it in verse 84, “The two orders fought against each other, struggling for command with such a result that they were engulfed by forces and material substances in accordance with the law of mutual combat, and they too acquired lust for domination and all the other passions of this sort. And consequently, empty vain glory pulls them all toward the desire of lust for domination, and not one of them remembers what is superior or confesses it.”

We humans are 2nd Order Powers infected with many, many fallen influences that blind us to our true natures and our mission. These negative influences prefer the deficiency to the Fullness. These negative powers of the fall represent the opposite of the ALL and of all that makes us truly happy and fulfilled. The survival reflex of the imitation requires the 2nd Order Powers to be miserable and lost because misery loves company. They influence people to fight against each other rather than fight and resist the evil fallen. Our lives become an endless and fruitless quest to find happiness through selfish pursuits. All you have to do is pop into Facebook or Twitter to find evidence all over the place of these fruitless pursuits that appear to cause happiness, but actually cause misery.

At this point in the Gnostic story, the Father and the Aeons of the Fullness produced a superior new entity, a 3rd Order Power called the Christ. It became the mission of the Christ to help the 2nd Order Powers remember and love the fallen so that the fallen could be redeemed. Love is the only power that can redeem the fallen. Why, then, was a 3rd Order Power needed to accomplish the task that the 2nd Order Powers were sent to accomplish? Why populate creation with well meaning but ignorant and confused 2nd Order Powers? Why not just send in the Christ to accomplish the redemption of fallen Logos in the first place? What is our function and purpose other than bumbling around in never ending war with the fallen?

The answer is because the fallen Logos must be loved and redeemed, one fallen piece at a time. Imagine if the original body of Logos resembled a human form, like we might picture an angel in heaven looking something like us. Now imagine that the heavenly body of Logos and the Fullness comprised the blueprint for every single potential body that would ever come to life in the imitation down here after the Fall. Imagine the body of Logos falling from an immaterial dimension, that being the Fullness or heaven, and crashing and breaking apart into a lower, slower, thicker dimension—our material universe—and spilling out the blueprints for the material universe.

Then each of our material lives and the parts that make us up from the subatomic particles on up through our bodies and our brains and everything, are themselves the parts of the fallen Logos that need redemption.**see post script clarification at the end of this article.**  Moreover, our personal stories, the drama that each human life enacts, are also stories of the Fall—stories that need redemption. Every life tells stories of Falls and Redemption, Temptation and Overcoming, Despair and Triumph. And every time an archonic influence is defeated and stripped from your personal life, part of Logos is redeemed.

When we live a virtuous life, we are following the principles of the Father and the Fullness in heaven, and we are participants with Christ in redeeming the Fall of Logos. When we live a sinful life, we are succumbing to the demons of the fall and contributing to the chaos and despair of the deficiency. I made up a chart with the values of the imitation or the deficiency on the left, and they are called on the left, and the values of the Father and of the Fullness on the right. The left is the material downward pull of the deficiency, and the right is the upward psychical and spiritual pull of the values of the Father and the Fullness.

This chart appears in this particular post, and I know I’ve described this chart to you before in prior episodes of the Gnostic Insights. So let me just briefly hit a few of them. If you’re living on the left, if you’re “enjoying a sinful life,” and it’s not actually enjoyment because joy does not come from the left side. Joy only comes from the right. The most that you can hope for if you’re living on the deficiency side is an imitation of joy, which we generally call happiness. But as I believe you know by now, happiness is a never-ending pursuit and we are often reaching for happiness. Oh, let’s go here. Let’s go there. Let’s buy this. Let’s buy that. Let’s eat this. Ooh, let’s have that. Ooh. Hey, let’s do this drug. See, everything promises this joy. Sometimes it brings you temporary happiness, but it never fulfills; it never brings satisfaction.

Pursuit of material gain always brings more and more desire for more and more material gain, so the values on the left that the sinful are pursuing—these are called vices and they are such things as impatience, lust, greed, selfishness, cruelty, ruthlessness, anger, resentfulness, rude, obstructionist. (And what I mean by obstructionist is this– Have you ever known someone who, no matter what someone else proposes to do, they go Nah, that’ll never work. So an obstructionist, they’re like a naysayer. That’s what that means. They’re wet blankets. They’re always pulling down good suggestions. That’s what obstructionist means.) Despair, depression, sloth or laziness, chaos, disorder, thoughtless action, greed, envy, arrogance, fear, confusion, gluttony. These are values or vices on the material side of the Ledger, and these are the things that generally are promoted in social media, strangely enough.

The values on the right actually are virtues that are part of our Aeonic inheritance from the Fullness of God. Well, you know, they say that God is love, right? So love is the number one virtue; patience, generosity, graciousness, mercy, forgiveness, welcoming, respect, cooperation as opposed to obstructionism, free choice, hopefulness, joyfulness, truthfulness, industriousness, order, prudence. Prudence, by the way, means knowing what to do at the right time. Logic, charity, kindness, empathy, humility, loyalty, justice, courage, remembrance. These are values on the right side.

And you can hear, as I read down these values of the right side, that these are the types of things that lead to true, loving connections between human beings. They are not the kind of thing we generally see on social media, by the way. And we kind of rarely see them in actual walking around life as well. But this is the goal—to live on the right side of the Ledger; to enact those principles rather than to chase after the emptiness of the vices on the left side.

Now back to my article. Because we are, in actuality, children of the Fullness, we can only be truly happy when we act out of love—that is, out of virtue. When we forget our place in the Fullness of God, we operate out of ignorance and are subject to the evil influences of the Fall. The Fall can only produce misery, fear, rage, and lust. Never love, never happiness. No good ever comes from rage. No good ever comes from fear.

Here is the reason we strive to lead a virtuous life: because only virtue can make you happy. All else leads to despair and depression because, as they say, the wages of sin is death. And that’s what that means. The imitation does not bring happiness. Despite a world full of false promises, vice can only bring ignorance and suffering, isolation, and despair. When you dwell in vice rather than virtue, your life is part of the problem and not part of the solution.

The Christ brings redemption and remembrance of the Father and the Fullness, one bit, one piece of the Fall at a time. Every time you resist evil and turn a bad habit into a good habit, you have redeemed a piece of the Fall. When you redeem all of your bits and pieces, you will be fully redeemed and regain your home in the Fullness. When all Second Order Powers have accepted the remembrance and the redemption of the Christ, then Logos will be fully redeemed and this material universe can pass away. At that point, paradise, with all of the love, peace, and happiness that is implied, will be fully restored.

The end goal of redemption is return to the Father’s abode—that Paradise dreamed by the Fullness, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment, and no deficiencies. That paradise where Christ is King and peace reigns supreme, and there is only cooperation, fellowship, and true love. In paradise there is nothing but life, so all the grass is green and flowers blossom endlessly, and every soul that has ever lived lives happily forever after with their friends and their families.

The Christ will leave no one behind to condemnation and hell. What kind of unholy savior would that be? From a previous article, I wrote: “Thus the Called will condemn evil and will turn away from the rage that has consumed them, and they will be healed as they acknowledge that they have an origin of their existence, and they desire to know what that is that exists before them. The Tripartite Tractate says in verse 132, “and even those who were brought forth from the desire of lust for domination, having inside them the seed that is lust for domination, will receive the recompense of good things if they have worked together with those who are predisposed toward good things and provided they decide to do so deliberately, and are willing to abandon their vain love, a temporary glory, so as to do the command of the Lord of Glory, and instead of that small temporary honor they will inherit the Eternal Kingdom.”

So what this is saying is that you have to step away from ego. You have to take your pleasure-seeking, ignorant side off the throne of your personality and allow the indwelling of the Fullness to reside on the throne of your personality. You can turn your vices into virtues whenever you run across them. Awareness is always the first step, and then you put it into action.

OK, I’ll confess something to you. I have a very short temper myself, and I often lose my temper even with strangers on the street. It’s a kind of a bizarre phenomenon. So I’ll be walking along and I’ll see something that makes me angry, like, for example, someone smoking a cigarette and they don’t put it out and they just flick it thoughtlessly out into the bushes. I walk up to that person, and I go Who do you think you are, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Who’s gonna pick that up? What if you burn down the place? Are we supposed to look at your cigarette butts? Blah blah blah. Blah blah. I get angry at total strangers. OK, this doesn’t do any good. I realize this is not a good thing. This is actually a vice and not a virtue. This righteous indignation is the thing that captures the do-gooders of the 2nd Order Powers into that endless rage and the war that never ends. We can’t win the battle through anger or through blah blah blah blah. It doesn’t work. We have to love these people. I’m trying to figure out how I might approach a person who flings a cigarette butt down in the street with love and kindness and compassion, but I can’t figure out yet how to do that. And so I’m just going to stop getting in fights with strangers on the street. And that’s been my mission for about the last two years is to stop having random encounters of righteous indignation. Step back. Breathe, give praise to God and go on. I think at some point I will have the wisdom to know how to engage people that would otherwise enrage me. But at the moment I don’t quite have that. So that was my confession.

Perhaps you are struggling with some other kind of thing. So remember you have to just drop the thing when you notice it’s bad. Drop it, stop it. These are called vicious cycles in psychology. Just stop doing it. Just stop it. Don’t worry about the consequences. The consequences are worse when you do engage in that vicious thing. So just stop it. Whatever it takes, just don’t do it. And the more you stop yourself from the bad behavior, the easier it is to embrace the other side of the Ledger. You will shift over to the other side once you stop doing that thing on the left side. You cannot grab onto that virtue as long as you embrace the vice.

From verse 133 of the Tripartite Tractate: As for those of the imitation who embrace the darkness and deny the light, well, “even they will obtain direct vision so that they will no longer have to believe only on account of a small word produced by a voice that this is how things are. For the restoration back to that which was is a single restoration. Even if some are exalted because of this economy, having been set up as a cause for things that happen, unfolding numerous physical forces and taking pleasure in them, they, angels as well as humans, will obtain the Kingdom, the confirmation, and the salvation.”

Verse 136 promises, “These too will be provided with dwelling places where they will dwell eternally after they have renounced the downward attraction of deficiency and the power of the Fullness has pulled them upward, on account of the great generosity and the sweetness of the Pre-existent Aeon.”

And that is the end of this article that I wrote on November 8th of 2019. If you want to read it for yourself, or if you want to look at that chart of vices and virtues and contemplate it, you can find it at my blog, which is called new gnosticgospel.blogspot.com.

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post script clarification**

When I wrote that article, I was actually maybe a little bit confused about the nature of the material particles in our world. That’s because in my original theory of everything, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, I ascribed consciousness and life to the material objects in our universe—to things like protons and atoms and molecules. But, as my own gnosis has progressed, and as I have contemplated these things since becoming more familiar with the Tripartite Tractate and writing The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and whatnot, I’ve come to realize that the thing that separates the soft and squishy parts of our universe—that being the living creatures, the 2nd order powers of which humankind is one—what separates us meat creatures from the particles of the Fall, is that the particles of the Fall, the material portion of our universe is not alive. It is not truly conscious. It does not come from Above.

All of the material pieces of our world—the protons, the atoms, the subatomic particles of all sorts, the molecules, the aggregates of minerals—the dead, hard, rocky places of the universe, those are not from Above. Those are by-products of the Fall. And what causes the material to seem to have consciousness, the thing that caused me when I wrote the Simple Explanation to think they were conscious, is that they are merely vehicles for the Demiurge’s consciousness. The Ego of the Fallen Logos is the Demiurge, and it’s the Demiurge that builds up and sustains the material portion of our universe. And the demiurge is the Fallen part of Logos that will be redeemed. But it is immaterial. It is not composed of the hard and rocky places that it now governs. The Demiurge, the Ego of Logos, will be redeemed by the Christ—will be freed from this material deficiency, from this imitation that it has built up.

So, the hard and rocky places—the molecules and the minerals, the rocks and stones, the sand, the protons, the subatomic particles, everything that moves around yet is not truly alive, does not come from the top down. Only the creatures, only us meat creatures come from Above. And life carries with it the consciousness of the Father. Life is the consciousness of the Father. The material will be left behind; it will evaporate. It is merely the shadows, the illusion of paradise. But it’s not really paradise. It’s dense and thick and slow. It is not going to heaven because it didn’t come from heaven.

OK. I just wanted to clear that up. I’ll probably spend another episode soon talking about that, but I didn’t want any misunderstandings to arise from what I have previously discussed in this episode.

Until next week, God bless us all and onward and upward.

What is gnosis? I know that some people, perhaps many people who come to listen to Gnostic Insights, come here because of the word gnostic. And gnostic has come to be identified to a large extent with the ancient manuscripts that were dug up out of Nag Hammadi, and the Qumran scripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls. And indeed, a lot of what I teach here has come out of the Nag Hammadi book called the Tripartite Tractate, as well as from my own familiarity with the Bible, mostly the New Testament, but a passing familiarity with the Old Testament. And I’m very surprised when I get comments from people that Gnostic Insights is “provincial.” I really have to laugh at that because I think what they mean by provincial is old-fashioned or narrowly constrained, very biblical or scriptural. But really, it isn’t at all. The gnosis that I’m sharing with you is the gnosis that has come to me through an entire lifetime of deep contemplation and much reading of what would be called wisdom books or holy books from a variety of religions.

Provincialism, as I think of it, is very narrowly constrained, like a person who is a strong believer in one denomination of Christianity, for example. They only believe the things that they have been taught, and we know that is what I call a meme bundle, right? The meme bundle of their church or their holy book is all they are allowed to believe in. That’s what provincialism is. It’s belonging to a church or a philosophy that restrains the way that you are allowed to contemplate; restrains the things you are allowed to think because it wants to make sure that you stay on the straight and narrow. You believe X, Y and Z. You believe it just in this manner that we teach you. And that way you’re safe and you feel comforted because you know that you’re going to heaven. It doesn’t matter what the other people are going to do because they have their own lives to lead. But you’re going to take the straight and narrow path. That’s provincialism.

I am anything but provincial. I’ve always been one who has curiosity and asks why? And, why is that? But not in a challenging way. Not in a way to confront authority and bring them down, but in a way to examine truth. What is the truth of the situation? What is the Truth? Truth with a capital T. That is not a provincial way of thinking. Modern provincialism would be following one of the political parties so closely that you only know and advocate for what that current cause is. My PhD is in Rhetoric, mostly classical rhetoric, studying ancient manuscripts. Generally the Greeks and the Romans, people like Cicero or Socrates and Plato. But as part of my coursework in gaining a PhD in Rhetoric, I also study ideologies—modern ideologies as well as the methods of persuasion that you would employ in advertising or propaganda. So when I read a press release that is put out or a scientific paper or a book, I read it not only for what the message is that the writer is trying to put across, but I look at the method that they are using to sell that idea. The definition of rhetoric is persuasion. The method of persuading another person to agree with you. That’s the baseline concept of rhetoric.

As our political situation and worldwide current wave of distress came upon us, I thought it was just big talk. And when I noticed that my university students would refer to historical events as dead white men, I thought that was kind of a funny way to dismiss all of what went before. But it’s not so funny now that the people who were once my university students have grown up and taken the reins of power. And they want to pull down all of the statues; pull down all of the foundational beliefs of, for example, our nation or any nation. And they want to start over from scratch. I can see the rhetoric. I can see the methods of persuasion. And one of the methods of persuasion is to change the language—to change the basic definitions so that people can no longer be assured of what they are saying or what they read or what they hear. They do not know what is true because we are being told it’s not true. You know—the founding fathers are just the dead white men, and we need to pull down their memories and their statues and start from scratch. So let’s burn the Constitution. Let’s burn the Declaration of Independence. Let’s burn the Bible.

I can understand the passion of that kind of religious fervor amongst people today. But their religious fervor—and by religion, I mean the current political persuasions that people adhere to so strongly that it has become religion to them—the current political religions are no more true than any of the other previous religions, so you can’t necessarily believe what is being taught, what is coming over the airwaves, what is coming through the Internet, what is being published, what the approved narratives are. You can’t believe them any more than the things that they are attempting to pull down. All of the constructions of humanity, all of the reasoning that goes on down here that leads to fervor—fervor—that’s another word for intense emotion, right? Well, emotionality, passion, fervor, doesn’t necessarily correspond to truth in any way. In fact, it’s probably the case that the more passionately you believe something, the more likely you are to be led astray.

When your passion leads you to rape, pillage, and burn, when your passion leads you to use violence, actual violence, not words are violence but actual violence. Beating people up, killing people, burning buildings down, pillaging other people’s property, stealing other people’s possessions—that’s a bit of a hint that you’re not on the right path. Truth doesn’t come at the edge of a sword. Truth doesn’t arise out of the ashes of pulling down and burning down other people’s things. Passion arises from the human. Passion arises from your emotions. And passion is not a gauge of truth. Just because you believe in something so strongly that you’re willing to kill for it or die for it, well, that doesn’t necessarily make it True.

So I guess this portion of what I’m saying is to urge people to reconsider their strong passions, particularly the passions that have been stirred up in the last 3-4 years, eight years, 10 years, 20 years. The ideologies that want you to become inflamed, that want you to become angry, that want you to scream and cry out in rage. Because rage is not love.

What do we know to be True? We should start with what we know to be true, not with what is popular or au courant. You cannot take your marching orders from an app. You cannot take your marching orders from the Internet. You can’t take your marching orders from the news media. So then how do you discern what is true? How do you know where to put your beliefs? What meme bundles to embrace, and which meme bundles to reject?

One reason I go to ancient documents is because at least, at the very least, they aren’t coming out of popular media. One reason that people who are trying to conserve modernity as we know it turn to the Constitution is because it’s an old document. They turn to the Declaration of Independence because it’s an old document. And even older than that, they turn to ancient wisdom texts such as the Bible, such as the books of the Nag Hammadi, such as the Bhagavad Gita or the Tao te Ching. At the very least, those books take you out of the popular course of thinking so that you can wind down and begin to have a relationship with the old wisdom texts to see what they were thinking then. What did they think was good? What did they think was the way that people should live?

The dissertation I wrote for my PhD was about the trial of a midwife in California who was a traditional practitioner. She used ancient midwifery ways that have been with us since the dawn of humanity, because babies are always carried in the same way and babies all need to come out of the same place. So the practices of midwifery have changed very little over thousands of years. This midwife, whose trial I studied, she was a traditional practitioner. And she was being tried by the legal system for, ironically enough, she was tried and convicted of practicing medicine without a license. But of course the funny thing about it, the reason it’s ironic, is that midwifery is not medicine—it’s midwifery. It’s an entirely different set of ideologies, worldviews, skills. The locus of power isn’t with the midwife, it’s with the mother. Whereas the locus of power in a medical situation is with the physician. Or the hospital or the insurance company. And the locus of power, of course, in the courts is aligned with the powerful positions of the physicians. There’s no locus of power that is aligned with the midwives. Many of the witches that were burned during the Salem witch trials or even before Salem in the 1500s in Europe, these “witches” were midwives. They were herbalists. They were women who lived alone and had no power to protect them.

So what I learned from the midwife position while I was working on my dissertation was to trust intuition. The intuitive connection with the transcendent. Traditional midwives, non medical midwives, don’t look things up and make sure that you’re on schedule and you’re on time or that this or that or the other thing that is on page 578, paragraph 9 is being followed. That isn’t the way midwives work. Protocols of that sort isn’t midwifery. Midwifery is being in touch, is being present, and knowing what’s going on by laying on hands on the women’s belly. By listening to the baby inside with her ears. She is the instrument, not the medical measurement equipment used in the modern hospitals.

So of course the midwife was convicted on all counts because she couldn’t justify anything she did because there was no expert. There was no authority to back her up. All of the authority and power lay with the physicians and the courts. Now,  a similar thing happens in the study of religion and spirituality. We look to the priests or the cardinals and bishops and the authorities. With gnosis we do not look to the outside. We certainly don’t look laterally at other people, so don’t turn to teachers. Don’t take my word for anything; I’m a teacher. Don’t take your minister’s word for the truth. Don’t take your senator’s word for the truth. Don’t take your president’s word for the truth. Don’t take your anonymous word for the truth on the Internet. You have to turn your eyes upward and inward. Truth comes from Above. Truth with a capital T comes from Above with a capital A. Everybody can do that. You can do that.

All you need to do is sit quietly, turn off the rabble rousing, center yourself within yourself. Take the earphones out, turn off the electronics, sit up straight in a quiet place. Or take a walk in a meadow or by the river or in a park. Go into nature and look up figuratively or actually, but don’t burn your eyes by looking at the sun—that’s not a smart thing to do. And ask the universe. ask the Father who am I? What shall I do? How do I reach you? What is true? What can I believe in? And you will get the answer. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will open. Ask and it shall be given.

The way that the simple explanation of absolutely everything, as I call my theory of everything, the way it came to me was after I retired from teaching, we moved out into the woods and I spent most of my time down at the riverside with my dogs. And as I stood there with my feet in the mud, watching my dogs play in the water, I contemplated. All I did was contemplate What can I know myself to be true? How do we figure this out? And the very simple answer first came to me. It’s just a two point answer: Mud up Spirit down. That was the beginning of all of this. So, as my feet were standing literally in the mud of the river, I understood that my body, that I, was standing between the mud and eternality above. And that I am made up of an eternal spirit and I am made up of the mud of the riverbank. And then, once you start with that kind of simple understanding, how does that combine? How is it that the spirit melds to the mud? How can I be eternal spirit walking around in mud?

And then everything else flowed from that. But not immediately. I sat with that idea for a while, and then when I had my bed and breakfast, I did a lot of contemplating while I was making breakfast, especially when I was working with fruit and making these gorgeous fruit salads. And I saw all the commonalities amongst the fruit. That all of the fruit, no matter what kind it is, whether it’s an apple, an orange, a pineapple, a watermelon, a tomato—whatever the fruit is, it always has a torus shape. It’s always in the shape of a torus. If you cut a piece of fruit in half, you will see the looping around structure of the doughnut of coming around the outside of the skin and going down through the middle of the core and looping around the outside and going through the middle of the core.

This is the toroidal pattern of creation, fractally replicating as an apple. The straight stem follows the pattern of the toroidal pole. The skin takes the shape of the outside of the torus, wrapping over the lip and falling into the gravity well of the stem. The seed explosion at the middle resembles the ananda/joy point of individual manifestation, carrying forward the next iteration of fractal expressions of the torus.

The Simple Explanation’s basic toroidal forces: yellow arrows = love, coherence, gravity pressing inward; white arrows cycle around the outside, up, over, and straight down through the center = constantly recycling protoenergy, karma; arrows out from the middle = ananda, joy, expansion, energetic and material manifestation into our apparent universe. 

And after dealing with the fruit for a couple of years, just noticing it, not trying to come to any conclusion, I went over on my break to the owner’s quarters at the bed and breakfast, and I stood before my typewriter. And I wanted to write a novelization, a popular book based upon my experience with the midwife and the midwife’s trial. And as I stood there with a blank and open mind and my fingers on the keys of the computer, instead of writing the midwife’s book, out came A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything from beginning to end. The whole book, page after page after page. Fully illustrated. I do not ascribe that to channeling. I don’t think that some departed ghost led me along, or demon or an angel. I do think that decades of cogitating on these simple thoughts finally coalesced in the background of my mind and came out on the page.

So, begin with the simple. Begin by simply being quiet and asking what is True? I do recommend that you read my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. I’ll put the link to the books in this episode transcript. And it was many years later that I came upon the Nag Hammadi and the Tripartite Tractate. I put them down for several years because it’s heresy. This is flat out not Christian Orthodoxy, and that disturbed me. Then, after putting it down, leaving it alone, not working on it, not thinking about it, when I came back to it, boom, boom, boom, the next book came out. So it’s my subconscious doing the work. And that next book was called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated.

And then several years after that—see, this all takes time, and this is why it helps to be an old codger like myself now. Wisdom comes with age. If you pursue wisdom, it will come. If you don’t pursue wisdom, if you stay enmeshed in the world, if you are a materialist, if you only believe what you read from experts or the talking heads on tv, you’re not going to mine wisdom. You’re mired down in the mud. So turn inward, turn upward.

Then my latest book, of course, is A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, which is my subconscious melding together The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated with A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.

We are here to bring love into this world. We’re to love each other. We’re even to show love to those we don’t get along with and to those that threaten us and disappoint us and break our hearts. We’re only to forgive so that we can love, and that can also take years.

Thank you for spending this time with me. Onward and upward and God bless us all.