Gnostic Insights

A listener to the Gnostic Reformation on Substack recommended a video this week about Near Death Experiences. NDEs. It’s been quite a long time since I looked into the subject. He was right in saying the video was gnostic. In fact, the experiencer in the video I watched confirmed many of the spiritual aspects of the gnostic cosmology I share here.

The video is called Neuro Surgeon Dies; Gets Shown Truth about Re-incarnation and Quantum World (NDE). The experiencer’s name is Eban Alexander and he’s written a couple of books about his NDE. You can find his book at this link: Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife

The video appears on a youtube channel devoted to Near Death Experiences. The channel is called The Other Side (NDE).

I watched a couple of more experiencer videos on the channel and then did a little research online. I found a few interesting educational articles written by a Catholic priest named Fr. Spitzer, who uses the findings to point to the existence of God and heaven. So there’s something we have in common. His site is called Magis Center  and the article is called 5 Credible Stories of Near Death Experiences (Peer-Reviewed).

Let me share the big takeaway first. We are loved. You are loved. Existence within and beyond this universe is love. There is no need to fear death or separation from loved ones. Consciousness does not cease with the death of the physical body—we move into a realm of love. And once you experience that cosmic love, you never forget it and you never doubt it, because it is not only as real as our normal reality, it is more real, more intense. And the experiencers who then return into their bodies are changed forever by that experience of love. The big takeaway is that we can share this love, God’s love, through being kind to those around us.

Let me share Dr. Alexander’s experience with you and at the same time relate it to our Gnostic cosmology.

Dr. Alexander was stricken with meningitis that damaged his neo-cortex and took his brain off-line. He had total amnesia of who he was throughout his experience. His body was in a deep coma that lasted for a couple of weeks. He was given a 5% chance of recovery into a vegetative state because of the extent and location of the brain damage.

He says his first experience was from the point of view of an earthworm. As far as he could tell, he was an earthworm. I would liken that awareness to the lowest consciousness level that connects directly to the molecules of the material world. We are all higher, eternal consciousness fused onto the transient material world. A fertilized egg would build itself up to an organism from that baseline, earthworm point of view.

He next observed a white, spinning light that threw off a musical melody—an extraordinarily beautiful melody. This resembles the figure that I associate with the Totalities of the ALL as they transition and emit the individual consciousnesses that make up the Aeons of the Fullness. It was at this point in the Gnostic cosmogeny that the Silences of the Totalities spoke the Word–that Word in Dr. Alexander’s vision is the musical melody.

The spinning light became a portal to what he calls the Gateway Valley. He describes the Gateway Valley as a verdant meadow where there is no death or decay, there is only life. And that life is packed with meaning and comforting consciousness. He found his earthworm consciousness to be sitting upon a butterfly’s wing alongside a beautiful female companion. Her presence gave him immense acceptance and comfort.

I’ve described this Valley in this way in The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated: “Redemption means returning to the Father’s abode—that Paradise dreamed by the Fullness, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment, and no deficiency. That Paradise where Christ is King and peace reigns supreme, and there is only cooperation, fellowship, and true love. In Paradise there is naught but life; so all the grass is green, and flowers blossom endlessly, and every soul that has ever lived, lives happily with their friends and families. Repentance allows one to grasp the love of the Father and so return home to Paradise” (Ropp, 44).

The Gateway Valley reminds me of the vision of Paradise I just shared with you. It also remind me of the “in between” place we have talked about in connection with the transpersonal field accessed through past life regression hypnotherapy, and our discussions of the bardos of the death experience.

It was there in the Gateway Valley that he became aware of a force—a Divine Wind—that brought love and acceptance from Above. Above this Valley he saw angelic orbs singing the most beautiful heavenly music.

This Divine Wind is known to us as the Holy Spirit. It is the force of love flowing out of the One consciousness Above that we refer to as the Father. Consciousness is a top-down phenomenon that flows like an unending stream, bringing love, life, and consciousness to all living creatures here below.

The angelic orbs sound very much like our description of the Aeons. I depict these Aeonic orbs as golden lights of fractal consciousness, arranged in a hierarchal form. For diagrammatic purposes, these Aeonic orbs are shown in their pyramidal, hierarchical positions. But in reality, the Aeons move about cosmic space as a dream of Paradise.

Dr. Alexander then talks about Deep Time. Deep Time is the timeless, non-linear sense of eternality that allows for Life Reviews. Time has no meaning in the afterlife, other than providing an overall view of occurrences. Deep Time allowed him to have a complete Life Review. He says this Life Review was not a sepia-toned movie of his life, but rather a real-time passage of his entire life that seemed to take as long as when it occurred. The fascinating thing about this Life Review is that it was not from his own point of view, as it is when we first experience it here on earth. The Life Review had 360 degree awareness of everything and everybody in the frame. Not only that, but he experienced the Review from their points of view, not his. So this Life Review demonstrates the actual effects that one’s behavior has on others, from their perspective.

It seems to me that this type of Life Review would have the effect of promoting true learning and growth, freed from the self-reflective egoic point of view. Imagine what life would be like if we had such empathy with others that we saw the consequences of our behavior from the perspective of the other rather than from the perspective of our Ego. This Life Review would bring true, deep repentance for the harms we carelessly strew about. With this sort of deep empathy we can truly repent of bad behavior and be redeemed into the perfection of our Aeonic inheritance of love, compassion, kindness, and acceptance.

This is why I continue to insist that our loving Father will not eternally punish any of us for the mistakes of ego down here on the material plane. We are blinded here by the distractions of the world and our own ego’s preeminence. Once those blinders are off in the afterworld, we have no need to embrace selfishness and vice. The loving beings Above welcome us back home with open arms. There is no wrath or condemnation Above, only love, forgiveness, and acceptance.

Dr. Alexander relates that the next level of awareness during his NDE was through another portal into what he calls The Core. The Core was black, inky darkness full of love and forgiveness, compassion, harmony, peace, and prosperity. He realized that ascension to the Divine requires Oneness with the Divine. He uses the word “Divine” rather than God, because we humans have attached misunderstandings to the concept of God. He speaks of One Mind. One love for self and others.

In my Gnostic cosmogeny, I depict the Father in the same way. As the inky blackness of primordial love and consciousness prior to the emergence of the Son and light.

 Dr. Alexander learned that prayer and meditation is the path to connect our free will to the One Mind. In his vision he saw countless sparks of consciousness below him, and he realized that these were people down below in prayer, connecting to the One Mind.

There were more details in his video, but these were the ones that jumped out to me as I was watching. I encourage you to watch the video and others on The Other Side (NDE) channel. I have peppered this transcript with links to all of the references made in this episode, including links to the relevant Gnostic Insights podcasts.

Again, our takeaway from this episode is to take heart and comfort, for we are truly and deeply loved. Love and consciousness is a top-down causality. If we must suffer because of the limitations of this material world, realize that we may suffer joyfully. Dr. Alexander urges us to spend our lives here showing God’s love for others through our own kindness.

This is a short episode, so it leaves you time to revisit the earlier episodes of the Gnostic Insights podcast referenced today, and to watch some of the NDE clips on YouTube. The other experiencers have slightly different details of their experiences, but they are basically the same as this one of Dr. Alexander’s.

Onward and upward!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week I had a very nice gift of a couple of different listeners writing to me with comments and questions and saying how much the podcast means to them. And that’s very special for me because you realize I’m sitting here recording this all by myself in the darkness of the early morning and it’s good to know that people are listening on the other side and getting something from this gnosis, so thank you very much.

I am going to address in this week’s episode a point that was brought up by one of the listeners. He wrote to say that he had been researching and learned of a fallen angel or a demon who asked Yahweh if he wished man not to sin and do the things he did not want them to do, then why didn’t he just take away their free will so they would obey? Apparently, this outraged Yahweh, and so he was cast out. Now, I don’t know this legend. If you happen to know who this fallen angel is, it would be good for you to write to me with his name and where I can find the original material in some ancient manuscript.

I think that the moral of the story is interesting. I did write back to him and say that of course, the Demiurge would be very angry at anyone suggesting he could remove the free will of humans. And the reason is because it’s not within the Demiurge’s power to give or remove free will. That power comes from the God Above All Gods. It’s part of our aeonic inheritance. We all have free will. All Second Order creatures that populate creation have free will because it’s part of the nature of the Father, and we are fractals of the Father. The Demiurge is not. The Demiurge, is a fraction, a portion, of one of the Aeons. It’s not within the Demiurge’s power to give or take free will from humans, and so the question that the archon asked the Demiurge embarrassed the Demiurge. It showed he couldn’t do something, and that’s why he got angry at the archon and cast him out. At least the legend apparently goes something like that. I haven’t read it myself, so I don’t know. But you could see why the Demiurge would be embarrassed by someone asking him about free will because he doesn’t know what free will is.

The Demiurge doesn’t like us having free will, because remember that the Demiurge can only control the material world through strings—through bonds like chemical bonds and physical bonds and willpower bonds, we could say. So that’s how it controls the material aspects. The atoms and molecules are run by laws, and they obey. If they didn’t obey the laws of physics, nothing would hold together in the universe. So the Demiurge is used to having control and having the objects that he controls obey him. And then along comes the Second Order powers and they don’t obey with that pesky free will. So it would really be embarrassing to him.

So let’s talk about free will today. I like to look at all of these issues as cosmogenic outgrowths of the origination, so that is why we always start at the beginning. Cosmogenic means how things got started, like genic as in Genesis. Cosmo, as in the cosmos, which, in the case of these spiritual matters, begins before the creation of our physical universe. That’s why we usually start with the Father and then the Son arose out of the Father as a monad of the Father—as a particular point of view—out  of the Father. And then as soon as the Son emerged from the Father, he broke into all of the possible variabilities within himself. These are called the ALL or the Totalities—all of the characteristics of the Son broken out into their infinite number of variables. So the ALL or the Totalities were individuals, but they didn’t have their own will because they were fully subsumed into the Son’s willpower because they were so unified. All for one and one for all. I think of that as their motto.

When they all realize their individual points of view, when they realized that they were individual entities and not merely spokes in the will of the Son, they arranged themselves. They sorted themselves into what we now call the Pleroma, or the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. No longer were they arranged as the starburst pattern coming out of a middle where they all thought one thought, but they sorted themselves into a pyramidal shape—into a hierarchy where each of these things are now no longer known as Totalities. Now they’re called the Aeons.

The Aeons sorted themselves and each had their own particular place, position, duties, and point of view. They were fractals, which means the Aeons is the substance of the Son. The substance of the Aeons contains all of the characteristics and potential of the Infinity of the originating Son. The Tripartite Tractate says if the members of the ALL had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each Aeon, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who himself is the ALL. From their assembled fullness they offered a glorification worthy of the Father, an image that was One and at the same time many because it was brought forth for the glory of the One, and because they had come forward toward him, who is himself the entirety of the ALL.

So, the him who is the entirety of the ALL is the Son. And the Son, then, is the Father of the Fullness, the Father of the Aeons. So you see, it says that they all have, in their assembled fullness, all of the characteristics of the Father. The Totalities transferred not only their knowledge, spirit, and consciousness to their offspring, the Aeons, the Tripartite Tractate says, “they became fathers of the third glorification, which was produced in accordance with the free will and the power they had been born with, enabling them to give glory in unison, while at the same time independently of one another, according to the will of each.”

So here we have an explicit comment that the free will has passed down now from the ALL into the Aeons. That free will conferred upon those Aeons their individuality and their cooperative structure, so they sorted themselves. I think that’s interesting to note. The Aeons sorted themselves into the hierarchy of the Fullness. They were not placed there or told where their position and jobs were and what they needed to do. They sorted themselves, which is an expression of free will right off the bat.

This reference to the third glories, by the way—that’s the first glory is the Father. The second glory is the Son. And the Third Glory is the ALL, which then becomes the Aeons. The Aeons of the Fullness are also known as the First Order of powers. And we creatures down here below we are the Second Order of powers. Powers are different than glories. Glories are pure images of the Father’s reflected glory. The Son loves the Father and the Father loves the Son. And these glories bounce back and forth as they give each other glory. And the ALL gives glory to the Son and the Father. That’s why they’re called the third glories. But the powers are actually expressions of free will. Powers are different than glories. Glories refers to giving glory. Powers are expressions of will and self-awareness. The First Order of powers, the Aeons, arranged themselves into a hierarchy, and quoting the Tripartite Tractate, it says, “minds of minds which are found to be words of words, elders of elders, degrees of degrees which are exalted above one another. Each one of those who give glory has his place and his exaltation and his dwelling and his rest, which consists of the glory which he brings forth.”

So the basic purpose of the Aeons was to further give glory to the Father and the Son. The heavenly realm is glorious. It exists to bounce this light around, just being so happy to be conscious and aware and alive. And the way they do that is by giving glory. That is how they use their free will.

Carrying on in the cosmogeny now, Logos was one particular Aeon in the Fullness of God. He was the last Aeon to be produced, and he was placed at the very top of the aeonic hierarchy. The Tripartite Tractate says of Logos, “For 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 when he wanted it. Because of that, he had received a natural wisdom enabling him to inquire into the hidden order, being a fruit of wisdom. Thus the free will with which the members of the ALL had been born caused Logos to do what he wanted, with no one holding him back.” That’s verse 75 and 76 of the Tripartite Tractate.

So you see the free will here again is being explicitly passed down. All of the Aeons have free will, but Logos was different in that he was one of those who had been given wisdom, which shows us that all of the Aeons have different talents and different expressions. They don’t all have wisdom. And Logos was given the ability to inquire into the hidden order. So this ability, combined with the free will that all of the emanations of the Father possessed, allowed Logos to act all by himself, to act unilaterally. Now, if the Father had not wanted an individual Aeon to have the power to act all on his own—to enact his free will to do whatever he wanted—he wouldn’t have given Logos the free will and power to do so. But these Aeons are expressions, they’re natural outpourings of the infinity of possibilities possessed by the Son, and the Father before the Son.

So, back to the original question that started off this episode, when the archon asked the Demiurge, Well, why did you give the humans free will? Go ahead and take it away, it doesn’t work that way. The free will flows down from the top and comes into everyone and every living thing as an uninterrupted stream of consciousness and willpower. Now, as you’ve heard by now, according to the Tripartite Tractate, Logos used that free will to reach for the Father all by himself. He wanted to plug back up into the Son and the Father and give glory on his own. Swimming upstream in that manner is not a possibility for the Aeons. And so instead of going up to rejoin the Father, which was a good and noble and glorifying thing that he tried to do, he fell out of harmony out of unity with the pleroma of the Fullness, and he broke apart into this solitary place that he found himself in. And that’s where we get our material world. The material world is the fallen world that was brought down when the first mistake occurred, that being Logos’s idea that he could swim upstream. Instead, he fell. That is the “original sin” that creates our entire universe.

And as you know, the Tripartite Tractate says that Logos was horrified at what had happened. This is not what he had intended, and this was not where he expected to wind up. So it says that the best part of Logos fled back up to the Fullness and the fallen part of Logos remained behind. And according to this Gnostic  Valentinian type of Gnosticism that we talk about here at Gnostic insights, the part that fled back up to the ALL was the Self that is the fractal of the Son that everybody possesses. That all of the Aeons continue to possess. That’s their core is their reflection of the Son—the package within them. That’s what fled back up to the Fullness, but the part that remained behind is what I’ve identified as the ego of Logos.

The ego is the part of us, as well, that reflects our individual points of view. It’s the monad part that is not the eternal One but the individual. And the Aeons have egos also, but for them it’s merely their address in the hierarchy. It’s their name and their place and their position and their job. The place from which they give glory. That’s their ego. But their essential Self is all the same. That’s the One. So the part that remained below, according to this particular Gnostic legend that we share here, is the ego of this fallen Aeon.

And that ego is all by itself down here. And it woke up to darkness and disorder and chaos. Not knowing who or where it was.

The Demiurge started to organize the chaos around it. And that is the entity that in the Old Testament of our Bible is identified as God, the creator of the heavens and the earth. That is not the Father or the Son or the God Above All Gods. The creator of the heavens and earth is what we now call the Demiurge, the architect of our universe. And he doesn’t remember where he came from. He doesn’t remember anything. But he does have within himself that characteristic that was given to Logos when Logos was placed at the top of the hierarchy. That characteristic of being able to look into the hidden order of all things. And it’s that ability to grasp physics, basically, that gave the Demiurge the blueprints to create our material universe.

The material Universe is the fallen bits of Logos, the shadows of the Aeons. And we call those shadows the archons. The Demiurge is composed of his archonic sub-selves, the same way that the Aeon called Logos was composed of little aeonic fractals of all the other Aeons down below him in the hierarchy. Those Aeonic fractals have become archonic fractals of the Demiurge. It’s an inverse world, an upside down world down here. And those archons don’t have free will. They are extensions of the consciousness of the Demiurge. So the Demiurge needs to control his material universe with very strong strings of power. Physical bonds. Chemical valances. These are the strings of power of the Demiurge that keep things holding together—that keep things working down here in this universe. The physical laws, the chemical laws and whatnot of this universe.

Back up there in the Fullness they decided to try to remind the Demiurge who he is and where he comes from because he doesn’t know that. He woke up and thinks he’s God. He woke up and thinks that everything emerges from him, and indeed it does down here below, but he doesn’t remember the Father and he doesn’t remember the Fullness of God or where he came from. He doesn’t remember that he is part of an Aeon known as Logos. He thinks he’s the big guy. He doesn’t want any other gods before him.

In their attempt to remind the Demiurge of who he is and where he came from, the Aeons of the Fullness came up with a plan to send down creatures into the otherwise dead material creation that’s ruled by the Demiurge. And so they fruited us. All Second Order powers are the fruit of the First Order powers and as their fruit we carry their inheritance—their DNA, so to speak.

Everything that is living, everything that is alive, everything that’s gestated and is born into this world is a Second Order power. And we come directly from the Fullness. We bring down the remembrance of the God Above All Gods. We bring down with us the remembrance of love and glory and our aeonic parents who are in heaven. So we have all of these memories that the Demiurge doesn’t even know about. And what else did we bring down with us? We brought down the free will of the Aeons and the ALL and the Son because we are of that direct lineage that flows downward into this material universe.

So we bring down free will, along with the love and the remembrance of the Father. This free will and life energy is melded onto the material of this world. The spark of life that creates the creatures when that creature is conceived, bonds to the molecules that make it up, and then it drives the organism that is formed. That is our aeonic inheritance, and it guides our creation. The Demiurge doesn’t guide the creation of the embryos, the Fullness of God guides the creation of the embryos. Intelligent design.

So here we are with all that free will, and the Demiurge doesn’t know what to make of it. He cannot make us obey. Creatures do what they want to. As far as the Demiurge is concerned, we’re all some sort of pesky vermin that have infected his domain. We have a somewhat antagonistic relationship with the Demiurge. That’s why we grow old and get sick and die in this world. But our spirit is eternal. And when our bodies die, our life energy pops out and is now immaterial once again. We came from above. We return to above.

In this theology, our free will often leads us to do things that aren’t the best for us, right? All the sadness and disappointment in the world, the vices, the addictions, the betrayals. This doesn’t come from our aeonic nature. It comes from us, down here, being distracted and forgetting to give glory. If we were giving glory to the Father and the Son and remain focused on the virtues and the love, then things are good. When we instead look around us, we forget about our glorious inheritance and truth and beauty and love and the knowledge of the virtues that make us happy. That’s the fallen state, and we can get back up.

We can remember the Father. Remember the glorious place. Remember our aeonic inheritance of the Fullness. When we use our own free will to stop looking around us at the garbage and instead look up at the glory. Let’s get glory, not garbage. There’s a bumper sticker.

So that’s what the whole Christian thing is about, that has been misunderstood and I dare say perverted by a couple thousand years of wrong theology—having lost and forgotten and buried the gnosis. Repentance is deciding this world ain’t all that. I no longer wish to serve the Demiurge and my own egoic selfish desires. We repent and look upward instead.

And then there is a Third Order of powers that came after us. And that is the Christ. The Christ is not exactly the same as the Son in Christian theology. The Son and the Christ and Jesus have all been smushed together, but they are actually three different things. The Son is that direct monad of the Father. It is uncreated. It is at the very beginning.

The Christ is the Third Order of powers, which means it came after the First Order of power—that being the Fullness, and the Second Order of powers—that being all of us down here. It was created after us, not before us, back when the Son was born. It was created after us, with the express purpose to bring us home. It’s the gatekeeper for us to get back up out of this material world, but we can only get back up there when we have done our part.

And our job is to bring love into this world. Our job is to remind the Demiurge that there is a power greater than it, that being the Father, the God Above All Gods. Our job is to bring love into the world, to show the Demiurge there is such a thing as love. And we can cooperate with each other using free will rather than force, coercion, and authoritarianism. The forces of coercion and authoritarian political structures are demiurgic. The forces of God are built upon love, glory, life and light. They’re coming from above, not from below. So we need to repent of the forces down below. We need to turn our eyes upward to the Third Order of powers that was created to bring us all of us home.

And that is the best use of our free will. We can have all the free will we want down here. It’s no problem using our free will, but our free will often gets us just into trouble in a bad way. If you’re tired of the trouble you’re in, use your free will right now, at this very moment. Free will means you always have the ability to exercise a choice in the here and now. That’s what free will is–exercising choice. Not feeling as though you are a helpless victim of destiny. Not feeling as though you were destined to be downtrodden, you were destined to become whatever you have become. That is a lie. That is not true.

Free will gives you the ability at any moment in the here and now to make a decision. To make a different choice. And that choice is to accept the redemption that comes through the Third Order of powers. And once you do that, you can be on that glory path again. You can remember the Father. You can remember what your true position, name, rank, and duties are, not what you’ve been taught down here they are.

You are no longer a cog in a heartless wheel. You are part of the glorious plan of redemption. To bring love into the world we’re down here. When we begin to exercise our free will for righteousness rather than for sin, we can enact the simple golden rule, which is that we reach out to other units of consciousness—Second Orders powers—to hold hands. Using our free will to hold hands with each other and then we can cooperate with each other to build something bigger and better than ourselves.

We come in as a single cell imbued with life from the Holy Spirit, and then we build ourselves up into organisms. And we do that by our cells are holding hands with other cells and sharing information, physical assistance, love, and coherence, and that’s what builds up creatures using our aeonic powers. It’s the simple golden rule of cooperation. Our cells are not slaves to our bodies. They are willing, loving, cooperative agents who have devoted their lives to keeping you and me alive.

Love only comes from the top down. From the bottom up it’s the forces of strong material control. The Demiurge’s strong bonds of no choice, no free will, stops at the molecular level. Above the molecular level, when life comes in, that point onward uses the simple golden rule. The Demiurge doesn’t act out of love. The Demiurge doesn’t remember the Father. It doesn’t remember the Fullness, it doesn’t remember its true self or Logos. It doesn’t remember what love is. The Demiurge is pure ego, but it’s also built upon the pattern of the Fullness of God. But he doesn’t know where the pattern came from. He thinks he made it up.

There’s a famous and long-standing conundrum in philosophy that says, how can we reconcile the concept of an all knowing God, if we subjects have free will? How is it that our actions aren’t controlled by destiny if God already knows what’s going to happen? Well, the way I answer that is that the All- knowing God Above All Gods has pre placed all possible choices in front of us. It’s like that multiverse theory in quantum mechanics. He has placed all possible choices before us, but it’s our individual free will that navigates the course between all of these choices.

I’ve made the analogy that it’s like a gigantic bowl of jello. This universe of ours with all possibilities in that bowl of jello and that bowl of jello is studded with an infinite number of cherries, and in our lifetime we swim from cherry to cherry to cherry. Those cherries represent choices.

I think that time is an illusion. The universe is static, but infinitely large, studded with all of these cherries. Time is our awareness of swimming from one choice using our own free will to the next choice, using our own free will. So in a real sense, the entirety of our lives is already conceived in the Fullness of God. It’s our self-awareness and free will that plod along at the speed of matter as we live our lives out as a linearity, a line of passing time. That’s my theory.

At the universal level, the infinity of the Fullness of God is represented by the potential of all possible choices a person could make as their life passes from one decision to the next. The fullness of all possible futures are represented within the universe. Free will is driving our consciousness through these potentialities and leaving behind the collapsed potential of history. So it’s open in front of us, but behind us it’s collapsed because we made those choices. So the line from one cherry to the next was already drawn. But in front of us, all that infinity of choices is available to us. (In my brother’s past life therapy, the client actually goes backward down the history trail and chooses a different cherry and goes forward from there.)

Of course, where we have found ourselves in the bowl of jello determines what our possible choices are in the next choice. We can’t jump from this cherry all the way across the universe to another cherry. We are pretty well confined to the here and now of our immediate surroundings, which we have come to through our free will. But you always have the choice to repent from that line you’ve been drawing and deviate your course to go upward and onward in the direction of the glory of the God Above All Gods. And that is what we call redemption. Repentance and redemption. It’s the Christ’s job to strew those glorifying cherries all in front of us and make sure we always have a choice to choose a righteous cherry.

Am I killing this metaphor? Is it going too far? Alright. Maybe we better call this an end to this episode. Thank you for spending this time with me. Onward and upward and God bless us all.

This episode I’m interviewing Adrian Smith again, which we did a couple of years ago almost exactly to the date, in September of 2021. Adrian is a Canadian with a degree in law from the University of London. He has worked variously as a minister of religion, as a businessman and investment analyst, and more recently as an author, blogger, and podcaster. His book is called A Prison for the Mind, Reflections of a Disappointed Fundamentalist, and his book explores the common characteristics of extremist ideologies, with special emphasis on woke philosophy.

Recently, Adrian spoke at the Glastonbury Symposium in England on the topic of the Canadian Freedom Convoy, which he called The Emperor Has No Clothes. So we’re going to touch on that talk he gave in Glastonbury. We’re also going to talk about how he came to Gnosticism and what gnosis means to him.

Cyd

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights, Adrian. It’s great to have you back again.

Adrian

Thanks for inviting me.

Cyd

Thank you. What got you interested in Gnosticism to begin with anyway?

Adrian

From a very young age, I was indoctrinated into a very strict fundamentalist Christian sect with a very domineering leader whom I call in my book, A Prison for the Mind, the wizard. And there was something very… Something that made me feel rather uneasy. And that was that we were always talking about the dreams, the revelations, the insights and miracles of other people. And it could seem rather dry and empty. And there was an implication that if there was to be any important revelations or visions that it would come through the hierarchy of the church. Not with the underlings. So it seemed as though our natural creativity and natural connection was being interrupted or suppressed.

And I read some of the work of Thomas Paine, in particular The Age of Reason, which he wrote towards the end of his life. And the reason that he wrote towards the end of his life is that he was writing on the subject of religion. And what he wrote was very controversial for its time. He wrote about the incestuous relationship between religion and political power and political authority, which I found very interesting, and he made a statement which stuck with me. It was there’s no such thing as a second hand revelation. Revelation can only occur in the first communication. So if you’re reading about or listening to or receive from someone who says that they had a miracle, that they saw vision, all you have is their word for it. And that you can’t really place your faith on that kind of evidence. That refers also to the subject of The New Testament, the book of John.

And in the book of John we read that the Apostles saw the risen Christ. And that they also witnessed him ascend into heaven. They go on to say that, in order to be saved, you are required to believe this. Which didn’t sit very easy with me. I felt uncomfortable with that approach. And in fact, I felt more comfortable with the approach of Thomas. Who said, you know, unless I see some evidence myself, I’m not going to believe it. And we read in The Book of John that Christ appeared to Thomas, and then he believed. And Jesus says to him. Thomas, you have seen and therefore believe, but blessed are those who have not seen, but have believed.

Yeah. So that’s the perspective of the book of John. But Thomas Paine goes on to say that he sides with Thomas. And that you don’t base your faith on second hand revelations or hearsay. And in fact, in the New Testament, what we have is hearsay on top of hearsay because we don’t have them saying it to us directly, but through several intermediaries. So it’s hearsay.

Cyd

What about the born again experience of Christians who have a personal relationship with Jesus that walk and talk with Jesus quite a lot? Is that not a personal revelation?

Adrian

Yes, it’s a revelation made to them. And they may feel entitled to believe in that. But it’s not a revelation made to me. And also, what I’m talking about may not apply equally to all forms of Christian experience or even Christian fundamentalism, but I belonged to something that was more cult like in that it had a very dominant leader. But the authoritarian model is not dissimilar to what we read in the book of John. We saw this. We’re entitled to believe it, but you are required to believe it. You must believe it. But it’s something that came to them and not to you.

Now, that led me into the Gnostic approach and the Gospel of Thomas. So what appears to have been occurring is that in the New Testament times there was a wide diversity of Christian expression. And the Gnostics represented a different way of looking at it, a different way of being a Christian. And they were obviously followers of John and they were followers of Thomas. There were some people who believed that Thomas was right. And this is found in the in the Gospel of Thomas in one particular verse: Bring forth that which is within you. The Gospel of Thomas is saying is that you have all the resources you need within you to save yourself.

Cyd

Yeah, that sounds very upsetting to fundamentalists. I can hear that thou art God, huh?

Adrian

It was very upsetting to the Orthodox Church. And we know a lot about the Gnostics by the criticisms that they received from church fathers, such as Ireneus, the Bishop of Leon, who criticized the Gnostics because each one of them brought forth something of their own. Something new every day. And that they were encouraged to have reference to their own dreams, their own visions, their own revelations. And they would share those dreams, revelations, and visions amongst themselves without a unified set of doctrines.

So, you might compare this to an artist, a painter who would instruct his students, but he would not instruct his students to give an exact duplicate of what the teacher was doing. They would be expected to take what they learned from the teacher and apply it to their own individual work of art. And it was this individuality that the church fathers didn’t like—that the Orthodox Church didn’t like—because they were looking for one church, one doctrine. A bunch of rules that apply for everyone. A bunch of doctrines that were set forth that you must believe as a requirement to be in the church. So it’s kind of a quantitative measure. They were very interested in converts. And there would be a checklist. You know—do you accept the authority of the church? Yes. Check. Do you attend the Sabbath services? Yes. Check, check.

Cyd

Oh yeah, yeah. And there still is. It’s called the Nicene Creed, and most churches recite it at the beginning of service.

Adrian

Right.  And the name of the game was get bums on seats.

Cyd

Right, right.

Adrian

And expand this as though it was a business. And you could tell that it was successful because it was an ever growing thing and that growth in membership was, in fact, proof that God was behind it in their mind. And that was an argument that that the wizard made. Look what a success I’ve made of this. Obviously God is behind it.

Cyd

Right.

Adrian

But Irenaeus, you know, said that they’re not content unless someone each day brings forth some enormous fiction. So to them it looked chaotic.

Cyd

Right. Well, they wanted the control and the power.

Adrian

Or a workable administrative structure. Right. But the ironic thing is that the Gnostics had a unity which allowed for them to accept these truths of other people and these revelations of other people without judgment. And also to have what we would call a qualitative experience of a unity of the spirit. It says in the New Testament, you know, the fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, gentleness, kindness. So their gnosis was a kind of experiential gnosis—knowing by direct apprehension of the truth, irrespective of intermediaries.

Cyd

Pausing for just a second here, the idea of the butts in the seats with the church fathers, or with any church—the big churches, the mega churches—so they’re very popular. Well, you know, I’ve had this Gnostic Insights podcast for a couple of years. I don’t have many butts in the seats. I don’t have many subscribers and it’s kind of the opposite of that philosophy. I think if I were, you know, more cutting edge or sexy or this or that, or employed Chinese drones to give me likes and retweets and so forth, but I’m not going to do any of that. I really detest all of that. I don’t think that is the truth.

Adrian

Well, I don’t think Gnostics are into the numbers game. They’re into the quality of the interactions and the quality of the learning and the knowledge. And they weren’t really big proselytizers. They were more secretive—secretive because they didn’t want to get burned at the stake.

Cyd

Mostly. Well, yeah. Well, I feel very exposed out here, by the way. You know, obviously I get pushback from Christians in my community. I get the evil eye stare, you know?

Adrian

Well, I’m coming back to something I said initially. I’m the last person to market my book because when I first wrote my book, I didn’t want anybody to read it. So that’s what kind of a marketer I am, you know?

And I think that maybe that’s my Gnostic roots, or maybe it’s like your brother counsels people using past life therapy—maybe there was something in my past, you know, some persecution.

Cyd

Ohh well, certainly. I’m sure we’ve both been burned at the stake on more than one occasion.

Adrian

There you go. So you know this. And even Thomas Paine didn’t write down his ideas about religion and what I just told you until he was old. Because if he did, he realized there might be a price to pay for all this.

Cyd

Sure, sure. And we are both older as well. So, the wisdom of age.

Adrian

That’s true, and it wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Cyd

Let me mention that that the publisher that is publishing A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel tells me there’s a 10,000 unit sales turning point in royalty structure. And I’m like, ohh, that’ll be the day. That is very hard to imagine.

Adrian

Good luck with that. Right. I hear you. But you know, I think we value to a greater degree the personal interactions. I know I’ve had lots of people read my book and I’ve entered into a dialogue with them and it’s been very productive on an individual basis. Maybe that’s what it’s all about, you know, at the end of the day.

Cyd

Relationships, right?

Adrian

Yeah, relationships. And in those relationships, entering into a dialogue. That furthers your gnosis, absolutely, and contributes to it. That’s the name of the game for the Gnostics. I mean, if it was up to the Gnostics, Christianity might have disappeared as an organized identifiable structure in your face. There’s not much difference between these highly structured churches and empires, you know. They’re interested in expanding the scope of their dominance and imposing on people a unified set of doctrines which I would call the believe it or else approach. You would be banished into outer darkness, which I eventually was. I got excommunicated from that church eventually. And as I say, that church was not uncommon, but there are other forms of Christianity that are much more experiential, for sure. I think the Quakers in particular. And you know, the charismatic Christians. Yes, yes. Again, though, you want to get your own connection going on your own.

Cyd

Well, I was having a discussion just yesterday with a young Christian/Gnostic gal and she was complaining about church hierarchies being this authoritative structure, and she doesn’t like to sit in a church and listen to a man telling everybody else that he knows what’s up and here, and you better hear it. She likes the home church setting where you’re sitting in a circle and everyone shares and everyone prays together and, you know, to me that’s very interesting because the church structure is hierarchical. It’s that pyramidal structure with top down authority, whereas the home church is a circle. It’s that torus shape where everyone’s sitting in a circle and they’re focusing on the center together, which is knowledge, or gnosis, or God. See what I mean? It’s a different structure.

Adrian

Yes, it’s like he had very different structure. In fact, in my book I do make reference to the Native American talking circle as being as being analogous to how early Christian Gnostics held their meetings. For example, taking turns being Bishop and things like that. So there would be no one person that stood out as the leader who would act as a conduit.

Cyd

Well, are the Quakers the church where they sit in a circle in their meetings, and no one’s in charge? And they just they sit and pray and talk. What church is that?

Adrian

I think that’s the Quakers. I think so, yeah.

Cyd

Yeah, well, then it’s no accident that that is one you resonate to.

Adrian

Right. We had something going on here. It was a native American thing, which is very analogous. You sit in a circle. The Bishop would be more of a convener. Each person says what’s on their mind. They had a dream. They had a revelation. They had an experience. How did they feel? What happened to them during the week? Talk about anything you want, you know?  And you go around, you pass the feather, and when you hold the feather, the floor is yours. So no one interrupts and says, what a load of crap, you know . Or puts up an argument against it or says anything. Except your job is to listen and that’s it. And it go you go around. I did this and I just found it enormously satisfying. The whole experience was just very fulfilling and it felt right. Yeah. But in the church, I constantly didn’t feel right.

Cyd

Right.

Adrian

Like this was, you know, there’s something bothering you. There’s a cognitive dissonance going on like you’re constantly being told something is true but witnessing contradictions in behavior. And internal contradictions. George Orwell talks about this, you know—double think. You encounter two sets of facts and they don’t match up. In order to continue to believe a lie, you have to put one of these beliefs in a memory hole and you have to forget about it or bury it.

Cyd

Wait, you’re talking about wokesters. Now you’re talking about the current political situation. It’s just amazing how the people cannot see what’s going on.

Adrian

Ohh, I’m totally talking about that. That’s another huge topic that we’re probably not going to have time for, but that was the subject of my talk in Glastonbury. It’s not at all dissimilar from what we’re discussing.

Cyd

Well, let’s talk about that. Let’s move into that a little bit.

Adrian

OK, I’ll try and keep it as brief as possible. It is a lot of information; I don’t know how to boil it all down, but let’s go. Yeah, well, the topic was the Emperor has no clothes. And the subject was the truckers convoy—the Freedom Convoy—which was the protest that took place in Ottawa in January, February last year. It was the largest peaceful process in Canadian history. Brought about by a mandate that the emperor said was based on science. And it resulted in truckers who didn’t want to get the Jabberwocky, which caused them to lose their jobs essentially, and they couldn’t work.

So they descended on Ottawa in huge numbers because they came from not only the un-Jabberwocky but also the Jabberwocky who just wanted freedom of choice, and they descended on Ottawa. And before they even landed in Ottawa, they were characterized as terrorists. They were characterized as misogynists, racists, people who don’t believe in science. Why do we tolerate these people? They take up space. They’re terrorists. They’re destroying the local businesses.

What actually destroyed the local businesses was their characterization as terrorists. So people in Ottawa were boarding up the windows, you know, and Trudeau fled the city and there was snipers on roofs. And it was all a theatrical job. It was all completely false. Protest was more like a giant Family Day. There were bouncy castles for the kids. There was dances, there was music. There were speakers. Amongst the speakers supporting the truckers was the only surviving signatory to Canada’s constitution in 1982. Our Constitution goes to 1982. And Danny Beauford, a resigned RCMP officer charged with Trudeau’s personal protection. There was Trudeau’s brother, who spoke on their behalf.

And, following the invocation of the Emergencies Act, which is a kind of a wartime measures act, which requires use or threats of serious violence and a threat to national security, Trudeau began arresting peaceful protesters. And they have been held as prison political prisoners pending trial. And he froze bank accounts. So the Emergencies Act had never been invoked before, except on this occasion. And then there was a public order Emergency Commission, which arrived as kind of a gift because there was six weeks of continuous testimony and evidence produced, which is now in the public record. And I spent most of the time this summer going over it all. And the end result was that there was no medical advice to that effect, you know, that he claimed. No one was prepared to say that the measure he introduced that sparked the protest was based on science. No one was prepared to say. No one would back it.

Cyd

No one would back it.

Adrian

No one was prepared to say that there was any actual violence. So the question kept coming up a time and time again. Was there any actual violence? The answer was always, oh, no, no, there was no actual violence. No, no, none of that. Yeah, and was there a threat to national security? The head of CSIS, Canadian Security and Intelligence Services, said that there was no threat to national security.

So this is a very brief synopsis, but the essence of it is that the view that the general public that watches the state-run media, or the corporate media, had of this protest was the diametric opposite, the complete opposite of the truth. It was not just not true, it was anti true. Oh, he said, for example, that they were stealing food from the homeless. Well, the other side of that was that no, they were actually feeding the homeless. And because there was so much food being donated to them that it filled all the soup kitchens, and not just in Ottawa, but all the way up to Sudbury. It was bulging with food.

Cyd

Ah, that’s great.

Adrian

And what it was, a lady who led the thing, it was her name is Tamara Lee. She’s a native. American grandmother, who started a Go Fund Me to help them. The whole idea was that they would go to Ottawa and hold up a few signs and enter into a negotiation over this mandate. You know—what’s the reason behind it? Do we really need to do this? Enter into a dialogue over it. It’s the only protest in history that I’m aware of where there was not some form of negotiation allowed and we’re just sticking to this narrative.

And I tend to view it as a very important insight into the mind of the World Economic Forum and those who belong to it. But also into the mind of the Demiurge who is described in the book of John as operation mind control. It’s like he sought to overpower humanity in their psychological and perceptual awareness. So it’s all about managing perceptions. And I see it as a form of black magic. A form of sorcery where it’s a smear campaign. It’s very common. It certainly happened in the church that I belonged to—anybody that opposed it got that kind of treatment.

Cyd

Well, for example, hold on. Let me let me break in just a second. You know Robert F Kennedy is the most hated person running for president right now by the conventional media and whatnot. I received an invitation via e-mail this week to attend an online town hall meeting to ask RFK questions and whatnot. Click here to be added to the list. Well, when I did the click here, Microsoft intervened and said, Stop! This is an unsafe site. You you may not go to this site, it said. And so I did a screen capture on that and I sent it to the RFK people and I said Microsoft’s blocking your meeting. And they didn’t know it. I was the one that let RFK know that Microsoft’s not letting him have his town hall this week. So, very interesting. Yeah. The Demiurge—they don’t want dialogue. They don’t want truth to come out.

Adrian

No, and you have to believe that there is such a thing as truth. Because when they were asked, well, if there was no actual violence, then how do you justify the invocation of the Emergencies Act, which requires that to be the case? Otherwise, it’s an unlawful invocation, and you guys would be liable for crimes. It would ordinarily be crimes like false imprisonment and false arrest. And they said, well, it was felt violent. Yes. So they’re going into an area where they don’t actually think there’s any such thing as an objective truth, that it’s all your perception. That it’s all your feeling or we thought that it would turn into something, but that particular argument was dealt with in the Act because the act says the violence must have happened on or before the date of invocation. But they kept coming back to we thought it was going to turn into something. So it was felt violence and so a lot of things were violence that you don’t ordinarily think of as violence.

Cyd

Ohh well that’s very typical. People become insulted so easily now and they call it violence.

Adrian

Well, silence is violence. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve heard that one in this context. They kept saying things like it was felt violence. It was anticipatory violence. Like, you know, the “pre crime” in Minority Reports. And honking was violence, and they introduced a couple of really unhinged individuals who claimed that they had been psychologically damaged by the honking. You know—that they’ve never been the same since they’d heard all this honking. Really unhinged. It turns out those people were actually assaulting and throwing eggs at the truckers.

So you know what else with all your economic harm, is violence? Well, any kind of strike or industrial action results in some form of economic harm, but in the case of the Ottawa protest, it did nothing but cause the place to boom. Every hotel was full that was open. Every restaurant was jam packed. The only reason that there was economic harm was because of Trudeau’s ridiculous mandates. And because they bought the idea that these people were terrorists. But a lot of them could see after a bit that no, these people were not terrorists, and so they opened their doors and their businesses flourished. So that whole string of words that were a reinvention of language, you know, like words don’t have objective meaning—they have just whatever meaning.

Cyd

Well, and that’s going on worldwide. That’s going on down here in the States as well. I mean that’s just the way it is nowadays. They’re controlling and changing the meaning of language, which makes it impossible for us to communicate. And, unless we’re able to communicate, we can never resolve conflicts.

Adrian

Of course, yes and so it’s just all your perception. There’s no truth, there’s no grand narrative.

Cyd

And that’s the Demiurge’s position. Remember, the Demiurge is an amnesiac god. He thinks he started everything, and that it starts and ends with him. Nothing objective. And so he doesn’t know that there’s a truth.

Adrian

Yeah. So for him, the truth is whatever I tell you, it is.

Cyd

Exactly, exactly. And that’s the way politics is now.

Adrian

The truth is whatever you want. What we tell you it is. And I included in my presentation a quote from Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand. She says, we are your single source of truth. And she  goes on to say, if it comes from us, it’s true. If it comes from anywhere else, it’s not true. Yeah. So that is the very definition of a cult. I couldn’t have described a cult more succinctly than that. Because it depends on being hermetically sealed. It’s like living, and I think this is analogous to my book, it’s like living inside of a darkened room. You don’t see any light. It’s pitch black in there, but if a little crack opens up in the wall, even a small amount of light, a small amount of truth, is enough to dispel the darkness. But they depend on cutting you off from any form of alternative explanation.

Cyd

Right.

Adrian

And no, in our tradition, our ancestors had a different view of things. Like we talk in law, in the philosophy of law, of the tyranny of the majority,and the tyranny of the experts. The tyranny of the majority is dealt with by a Constitution. The tyranny of the experts was dealt with largely by a jury system. And the jury system was, you know, the common folk. The common folk would hear a string of expert witnesses on one side and then they would hear a string of expert witnesses on the other side. The expert witnesses or the experts weren’t determining the conclusion of this thing. It was the jury, the average citizen.

Cyd

And we’re being cut out of the process now. The proletariat has been put down. That’s right.

Hey, guess what? We’re out of time.

Adrian

Cut out of that process. Right. Oh wow, I thought that was gonna happen. Yeah, but you know, I think it all made some kind of sense. I think it’s a nice wrap up. We didn’t get to get to much, but. We got to plenty.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week’s episode is about our spiritual inheritance. All of us Second Order creatures, not only humans but all living things, are the fruit of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And so, what are the Aeons’ characteristics that then transfer to us because we are fractal emanations of the Aeons of the Fullness of God? Now what does that even mean? Those are funny words. They’re not common in theological discussions, unless you happen to be a Gnostic Christian. So today we’re going to look at these words, beginning with verse 61 out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi.

In verse 61 of the Tripartite Tractate it says of what are called the Totalities, “While they were in the Father’s thought, that is, in the hidden depth, the depths knew them but they were unable to know the depth in which they were. Nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father, they did not exist for themselves. Rather they only had existence in the matter of seed. So it has been discovered that they were like a fetus.”

So you see what this is saying that while these entities that come to be known as the Aeons, while they were parts of the Son of God who was their Father, they didn’t know themselves. Because they were in such unity with their creator, the Son of God, they only saw themselves as part of this unity, so they didn’t know themselves at all. The way a fetus inside of a mother doesn’t realize itself yet. They don’t even realize that they comprise the body of the Son.

The Tripartite Tractate says, “For that reason, the Father had also thought in advance that they should exist not only for himself, but should exist for themselves as well. That they should remain in thought as mental substance, but also exist for themselves. He sowed a thought as a seed in order that they might understand what kind of Father they have.”

So the Father didn’t want them to remain simply an unknowing part of his own consciousness. The Father wanted them to have Self realization and be discrete, independent entities with their own thoughts and their own identity. In other words, the Father wants them to wake up. The Father is spreading awakened consciousness throughout the entire body of the Son. The Tripartite Tractate describes them as, “seeds in need of gaining nourishment and growth and faultlessness.” In verse 62 it says that the first step in bringing awareness to the Totalities was to give them, “the perfect idea of beneficence toward them.”

This means that even though they didn’t yet know themselves, what they did know was that they were loved. This is all they knew, that they had a benefactor, someone cared for them, and wanted only good for them. The Totalities began to awaken to Self realization because they were loved, and this thought of beneficence or love was their first knowledge. That’s very much the way a baby comes into the world. The baby, after it’s born out of the mother, the parents love that baby. It’s love the baby feels from the mother when the baby’s moved up to her breast.

The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say that, “The one whom he raised up as a light for those who came from himself, the one from whom they take their name, he is the Son who is full, complete, and faultless. He brought them forth, mingled with what came forth from him” (verse 62, Tripartite Tractate). And this is another way of saying that the Son coexists with the Father and that the Totalities coexist with the Son.

It goes on to say in verse 63, “This is not yet his greatness they have received. Rather he exists only partially in the manner, the form, and the greatness that he is.” That is to say that the Totalities are waking up in stages. First, they know that they are loved, but they don’t know the details of who loves them.

Going on, “As for the parts in which he exists, in his own manner and form and greatness, it is possible for them to see him and speak about that which they know of him, since they wear him while he wears them because it is possible for them to comprehend him. He is, however, as he is, incomparable.”

I often say that the Son wears the Fullness of the ALL like a garment and the Fullness wears the Son like a garment, which is the way that we wear this material body that we walk around in. The cells of our body clothe our eternal spirit. We go everywhere they go and they go everywhere we go.

Verse 63 continues, “In order that the Father might receive honor from each one and reveal himself even in his ineffability, hidden, and invisible, they marvel at him mentally. Therefore the greatness of his loftiness consists in the fact that they speak about him and see him. He becomes manifest so that he may be hymned because of the abundance of his sweetness.”

This is saying that the Totalities become awakened through the process of praising the Father by singing about the Father’s sweetness to them. They come to Selfhood by giving glory to the Father through song. And you see, this is the pattern of most human church services. It begins with singing hymns, by giving glory to God. And this is how our spirits are awakened, that we are the children of God, and that we are to learn from God. So the first step is singing hymns to the Father. That’s why church services begin with hymns.

Verse  64 says, “Both of them, the admirations of the Father and the dispositions of who they themselves are, since they belong to a word, are seeds and thoughts of his offspring” (That is the Totalities, and that is us, because we are also in that lineage of emanations of God.) “and roots, which live forever appearing to be offspring which have come forth from themselves, being minds and spiritual offspring, to the glory of the Father.”

So, remember that the Father’s consciousness and spirit flows out from him in an unending stream. It is His reflected glory, initiating through their singing of the hymns, that disposes the Totalities to grasp their own Selfhood, their own “individuality, seeds, and thoughts,” and that they will “live forever,” along with the Son. We are of that inheritance. We have inherited the dispositions and qualities of the Fullness of the Aeons, the Totalities of the Father. And to awaken to Selfhood, the way to do it isn’t to focus egoistically upon ourselves—it’s actually to focus on the Father, and to give glory to the Father. And it’s in that reflected glory that we can see ourselves.

The Totality is now complete in mind and spirit, and it possesses the aware consciousness of the Son. But the ALL at this point still remains an indivisible unity. So although they have individual Self-awareness, they continue to act as a single being. Being themselves, what is called this entity, the Fullness of God. In the New Testament, it often speaks of the Fullness of God, but it’s considered kind of an adjective, a description of the Father. The Father is Full, He is total, He is the Fullness of God. It goes beyond that in the Gnostic Gospel. The Fullness of God is a place, and in my mind I picture it as this hierarchy.

Well, we haven’t gotten to the hierarchy yet. Let’s go into that. Verse 67 says, “The births of his words, his commands, and his members of the ALL are innumerable and indivisible. He knows them, for they are himself. When they speak, they are all in one single name.” (That’s the Son.) “And if he brings them forth it is in order that they may be found to exist as individual qualities forming a unity.”

So, this Fullness of God and the progression of consciousness through the Son is found in the New Testament, although the meaning has been lost. Speaking of the Son in Colossians, Paul writes, “Who is the image of the Invisible God, firstborn of all creation, because in him were created all things in the heavens and on Earth, the visible as well as the invisible, Whether Thrones or lordships or Archons or power. All things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things and all things hold together within him, for in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling and through him to reconcile all things to him. Making peace by the blood of his cross through him. Whether the things on Earth or the things in Heaven (Colossians 1:15 through 20). So, you can see this comports very well with what I’ve been saying out of the Tripartite Tractate.

And like the Son before them, the ALL began to generate offspring. “But on the pattern by which he was existing, so are those who have come forth from him, begetting everything which they desire. For this is their procreative power, like those from whom they have come,” (that being the Father and the Son), “according to their mutual assistance, since they assist one another like the unbegotten ones.”

And again, the unbegotten ones are the Father and the Son. So it’s this mutual assistance of the Totalities of the ALL that carries forward throughout creation. As soon as the Totalities of the ALL came to know themselves—and how was that again? By giving glory to the Father, that is how they came to Self-awareness and to recognize their own individual identities.

Each one of them birthed a singularity that reflected both the Totality of the ALL and their own individuality. Verse 67 puts it this way, “Now all those who had gone forth from him, that is, the Aeons of the Aeons, being emissions born of a procreative nature, also procreate through their own procreative nature to the glory of the Father, just as he has been the cause of their existence. For that which they glorified, they bore.”

So, we have just heard that all possible expressions of consciousness, the illimitable, the ineffable nature of the Father, all possible expressions of consciousness can be found within the Fullness of God. These newly formed Aeons of the Fullness of God, it says, sorted themselves into what is called a hierarchy. Now a hierarchy is a pyramidal shaped stack of objects, like a stack of cannonballs or like a pyramid. So when I picture the hierarchy of the Fullness of God, I’m not in any way at all emulating the pyramids of Egypt, although I do believe that the pyramids of Egypt, their architectural design, did emulate the Fullness of the Father—that’s why they’re pyramids.

A hierarchy is a group of related objects that are interrelated and work together, and the principle that a hierarchy reflects—now picture a pyramid—is The higher, the fewer. So, the bottom level of the pyramid has the most blocks in it, and then the next level up has fewer blocks, and then the next level up fewer blocks, and it goes up and up and up until it culminates in the capstone at the top of the hierarchy. That is what is called the King or the Lord of that hierarchy—it is the top position of authority.

I think that perhaps people who think of themselves as anarchists do not like hierarchies. They do not like authorities, but we are made to be under authority. We are made on the pattern of the Fullness of God, which is a hierarchy of the higher, the fewer, and it culminates in the Father, with the Son right up there at the top. If you are an anarchist, you’re down there at that quantum foam level. You’re there before the formation of order and hierarchy. Hierarchy is the way that the universe builds up into what we see around us. To be a true anarchist would mean that you want to stay at the quantum foam level, and the quantum foam level is anarchic. It does not come together. It pops in and out of existence. It boils down there on the bottom like a boiling pot of water. It can’t build up because as soon as it boils up, it disappears and falls back down.

So that’s why in my illustrations I picture the hierarchy of the Fullness as a pyramidal stack of golden orbs, like cannonballs, with each orb representing a particular Aeon. And there are an infinite number of those Aeons because the Fullness of God is infinite and illimitable. That is “having no limits.” So using that principle of hierarchical design, the awakened Aeons of the Fullness of God “sorted themselves into positions, places, powers, ranks, stations, and names,” This indicates that they each had their own individual point of view. They each had their own location and place and duty in the hierarchy of heaven. When the ALL became Self aware, it recognized itself in all of its parts and its potential, and these parts and these potentials are the blueprint that comes to form our universe, because it is, after all, the mind of God.

So when the ALL procreated, each one of their aeonic offsprings emerged as a fractal of the Son itself, with each of them replicating on a smaller scale in each of their own golden cannonball orbs the original Son who is itself a fractal iteration of the consciousness of the Father. The Father is illimitable, diffuse consciousness; the Son is a sampling of the Father that entirely replicates the consciousness of the Father but with a border—a discrete parameter that gives the Son its own huge point of view. And then, within the Son, the differentiations of the Son became Self aware by giving glory to the Father.

And they procreated and they became each one a reflection of the Son as well as an identity of their own. I call that identity an ego because it reflects their own name. It reflects their own position, place, power, and duty. So, not only do they reflect the entire Self of the Fullness of the Son within themselves, they reflect a location, a point of view that allows them to recognize where they fit into this pyramidal stack of cannonballs. A point of view is where you are, right? It’s what you see from where you are. If they all sorted themselves into positions, places, ranks, duties and names, they’ve all got their own unique spot in this hierarchical place, and I simply call that the ego. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just your address and your name.

Verse 68 of the Tripartite Tractate says, “If the members of the ALL had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each Aeon, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who himself is the ALL. From their assembled Fullness they offered a glorification worthy of the Father. An image that was one and at the same time many because it was brought forth for the glory of the one, and because they had come forward toward him, who himself is the entirety of the ALL.

So now we follow what that says. What we’ve just been discussing is that the Son is a singular monad with a point of view. He’s still a unity though of many Aeons. The Son becomes knowable through the innumerable properties and names, powers and duties of the Aeons. We can’t really know the Son—he’s huge. We can know him to love him because we know that we are loved by the Son and, for those of us who have a relationship with the Son as represented through the Christ that came to Earth, (and if you’re a Christian, through the person of the human known as Jesus of Nazareth being the physical embodiment of the Christ of the Son of God) who loves us.

So we know ourselves in our full aeonic potential only when we realize that we are loved and give love back to the Father and the Son. It’s not a waste of time. It’s not a needless religious exercise to love the Father and the Son and the Christ because it’s through loving them that we receive our love back and our realization of who we actually are. We are not a collection of memes, a collection of worldly information. We are not a reflection of this family that we were born into and our human neighbors. Here we are truly reflections of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. We are their children. We’re living down here for a time. But I think it’s our spiritual journey to realize that we are the children of the Son of God. We are the children of the Father, of consciousness, the God above all gods. And that’s what gives us our fullest sense of who we are. That’s the only way we can recognize our spiritual gifts.

I’m going to end this particular episode by reading to you from the book of First Corinthians. It’s all about spiritual gifts. Perhaps next week we’ll go into the gifts in more detail, but let me read to you now how this, what I’ve been telling you out of the Tripartite Tractate, this Gnostic Christianity, how it does go hand in hand with the New Testament. Listen to this. First Corinthians verse 12 begins this way. It says, “Now I want to give you some further information in some spiritual matters. You have not forgotten that you were Gentiles” (And in this sense, I think we could say Gentiles as a worldly person). “following dumb idols, just as you have been taught.” And again in our modern world, these dumb idols are YouTube and Facebook, television, popular culture, Instagram. OK, these are idols.

“Now I want you to understand as Christians that no one’s speaking by the spirit of God who would ever call Jesus accursed. And no one could say that he is the Lord except by the Holy Spirit.”

So let’s say that you’re a practitioner who channels spiritual gifts, and you are able to heal or to prophecy. But you are not a believer in Jesus of Nazareth. You don’t believe in the salvation of the Christ. Well, this is declaring here, as far as the New Testament goes, that if you put down Jesus then you are not really channeling the spirit of God. You’re channeling some other spirit. And on the other hand, no one could say that Jesus is Lord, or the Christ is Lord except by knowing the Holy Spirit. So firstly that puts first accepting the Holy Spirit, loving the Father, loving the God Above All Gods, recognizing the importance of the Christ as represented by Jesus.

Then it goes, “All men have different gifts, but it is the same spirit who gives them. There are different ways of serving God, but it is the same Lord who is served.” And by the way, Lord, that’s that top of the hierarchical pyramid. It’s not supposed to be your ego on the top of your hierarchical pyramid. It’s supposed to be the Lord, right?

“There are different ways of serving God, but it is the same Lord who is served. God works through different men in different ways. But it is the same God who achieves his purposes through them all. Each man is given his gift by the spirit that he may make the most of it. One man’s gift by the spirit is to speak with wisdom, another’s to speak with knowledge. The same spirit gives to another man faith. To another the ability to heal. To another, the power to do great deeds. The same spirit gives to another man the gift of preaching the word of God. To another, the ability to discriminate in spiritual matters. To another speech in different tongues. Behind all these gifts is the operation of the same spirit who distributes to each individual man as he wills. As the human body which has many parts is a unity, and those parts, despite their multiplicity, constitute one single body, so it is with the body of Christ. For we were all baptized by the Holy Spirit into one body, whether we were Jews, Gentiles, slaves, or free men, and we all had experience of the same spirit.”

So once again, this is saying that if you’re in touch with the Holy Spirit and you’re on that Glory Road, if you’re looking up to the Fullness of God, we all receive the same top down Gnosis. It’s the same Holy Spirit that goes to each person. There are not individual interpretations of the Holy Spirit. It’s a singularity at the top. It’s a top down flowing emanation of gnosis.

I think we’ll pick this up again next time, talking about the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit and where we fit into the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. But for now, realize that when you turn your eyes upward to the Father, you’re looking in the same place I’m looking. You’re looking in the same place that anyone who has accepted the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the 3rd order powers of the Christ to come and take residence within your spiritual material body here. We are the 2nd order of powers, but when we remember that we come from above and to the Father, we shall return, we have invited the 3rd order powers to come in and those third order powers are full reflections of the Fullness of God.

So for today, know that you are loved. Know that when you love the Father and the Son and the Fullness, you are coming into your own true Self. That love flows back down into you and brings you awareness of the eternity and consciousness of the Father.

All of this is explained in my new book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. It’s still at the official publisher. It’ll be coming out pretty soon, I’m sure. I do have a pre publication version of it in black and white that is available now through my website at gnosticinsights.com. But if you wait a couple more months, you’ll get all of it in full color. Pretty fancy, but it’s going to cost twice as much, too. Have a good week. God bless us all, and onward and upward.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This form of Christianity that I’ve been teaching here at Gnostic Insights is Christian because, as you’ve noticed, we speak often of the saving power of the Christ. But in Gnosticism, the definition of Christ and the Christ is slightly different. It’s broader than it is in conventional Christianity. And so what I’d like to do today is look at this document called the Nicene Creed. It is the document that attempted to formulate what Christianity is, what Christianity means, because in the early days after Jesus walked the Earth there were many forms and many beliefs surrounding the Hebrew God and surrounding this person, Jesus of Nazareth, and what his role was and his relationship to the Hebrew God. There were many different versions of Christianity in those first 300 years. They pretty much varied by geography, by where people lived, and each region had its own particular spin on this new religion which, of course, in the beginning was a variation of Judaism because Jesus was a Jew and he was considered by the people who believe in him to be the coming of the prophesied Messiah of the Jews.

Those folks who remained faithful to the Jewish religion rejected the notion that Jesus was the Messiah. Now I am not a historian, so I don’t want to go deep into the history of these things. I’m more of a Gnostic philosopher where I attempt to share with you the gnosis that I have gained through decades of contemplation upon these things. That is a different sort of Christianity in general than comes down through the conventional church.

So what I want to share with you today is for people who do not necessarily have a church background or a Christian background. Or, if you do, you’ve heard of this thing called the Nicene Creed. And practically every modern denomination believes in this Nicene Creed. Creed is the word credo—meaning a belief or set of beliefs. Here at Gnostic Insights we would call that a meme bundle. The Nicene Creed is a meme bundle of what one must believe in order to call themselves a Christian. And it came to be that anyone who didn’t believe in those edicts of the Nicene Creed was labeled a heretic, and anyone such as myself that may profess other beliefs, other gnostic beliefs, for example, or there were dozens of other types of beliefs, well, those are heretics because they don’t believe in the Nicene Creed. So let’s look at the Nicene Creed today and see what it is that we agree or disagree with, as far as this Gnostic Reformation goes.

We believe in one God,
    the Father, the Almighty,
    maker of heaven and Earth,
    of all that is seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
    the only Son of God,
    eternally begotten of the Father,
    God from God, Light from Light,
    true God from true God,
    begotten, not made,
    consubstantial to the father.
    Through him all things were made.
    For us and for our salvation
        he came down from heaven:
    by the power of the Holy Spirit
        he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
        and was made man.
    For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
        he suffered death and was buried.
        On the third day he rose again
            in accordance with the Scriptures;
        he ascended into heaven
            and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
    He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
        and his kingdom will have no end.
 
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
    who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
    With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
    He has spoken through the Prophets.
    We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
    We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
    We look for the resurrection of the dead,
        and the life of the world to come. Amen.

 — Episcopal Church Book of Common Prayer (1979), The Book of Common Prayer. New York: Church Hymnal Corporation. 1979. pp. 358–359.

First off, let me remind you that it’s not a bad thing to have a meme bundle if you are an organization or an institution, because the memes that the members of that institution share is their common mindset, their common worldview. And it’s important to share the same world view if you’re going to say you’re a member of this place or that. In politics, for example, the shared meme bundle is what is called the platform of that party that you subscribe to, and that is how you know if you vote for this person who is in that party, they ought to align their values with the values that you hold because you share the same meme bundle. So that’s the purpose of memes in an institutional setting.

So let’s look at these memes in particular of the early Christian Church. The Nicene Creed was first developed in 325 AD at the request of the Pope and the Emperor of Rome. That was Emperor Constantine and Pope Clement. It was later amended in AD 381 to clarify certain points and to make it a lot more specific, and that was called the First Council of Constantinople of 381. So we’ll look at both of those creeds now and we’ll compare them to this modern Gnostic Christianity, which is a form of Valentinian Gnosticism.

It begins by saying, “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, the maker of all things visible and invisible.” And it was amended to say, “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things, visible and invisible.”

Well, if you’ve been listening to Gnostic Insights for any amount of time, you know that there’s a distinction between the Father Almighty, whom we refer to as the God Above All Gods, the originating source of consciousness, the ground state of all things. Everything emanates from the Father. So in that sense, it’s all true that the Father is the maker of all things visible and invisible. You know—”the buck stops here” in the ultimate sense with the God Above All Gods.

But he’s not exactly the Creator of Heaven and Earth. That is a separate God, a lower God referred to in the Old Testament as Jehovah, Yahweh, or the Demiurge. The Demiurge is the creator of this world that we live in—this material creation. And that is the #1 heresy, right? Because if you go to most any Christian Church, there’s no distinction between the God Above All Gods, the Father, and the God who created this Heaven and this Earth.

It goes on to say, “And we believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, the only begotten that is of the essence of the Father, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father. And in the Constantinople revision, it says, “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds,” and in parentheses “worlds” is translated as Aeons. So this insertion of the word Aeons is interesting because I would agree with that. Remember, the first fractal of the Father, the emanation of the Father out into some sort of existence, is called the Son, the Son of God. And the Son of God incorporates all of the characteristics of the Father, but in a place, so to speak. It is a monad. It has one universal point of view, whereas the Father has no point of view. The Father is spread out all over the place. Omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.

And it says that this begotten Son of God was begotten before the Aeons. If you take that literal translation I would agree, because the Aeons are emanations of the Son of God. The Aeons are entities. It’s not a unit of time, it’s a unit of consciousness. So all of the Aeons all together make up the Son of God. He wears them like a garment, and they wear him like a garment, which is what consubstantial is translated as. Here it says, “very God of very God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father.” So they’re one and the same thing, but kinda different. The Son is consubstantial with the Father because he is a complete and perfect fractal of the Father. So in that sense he’s the perfect reflection of the Father. But he’s a monad and the Father is not. And then the Son will break up into all of his parts and he is consubstantial with all of his parts. It’s like our cells of our body are consubstantial with us. You have the sense that you are this being walking around in this body. This body goes everywhere you go. That is the relationship of the Aeons to the Son.

Back to the Nicene Creed now. “By whom all things were made both in Heaven and on Earth,” and the revision says, “By whom all things were made.” So this is interesting that the revision was actually less specific in this case than the original 325 version, because you could say that all things were made by the Father or by the Son of God, because it’s all then coming down from them. We’re all downhill from them. We’re downstream from the Father, the Son, and the Aeons. But in particular, the God Above All Gods is not down here making things. He’s not down in the garden chatting with Adam and Eve. He is this underlying reality of everything. The God down here is a different guy—that is Jehovah. He is the creator of this Heaven and this Earth down here. The material plane is the realm of the Demiurge or Jehovah. And it’s his job to create it, to set it all up and to make the rules that everything runs by.

Back to the creed. “Who for us men and for our salvation, came down and was incarnate and was made man.” So, we’re still talking about the one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Now there’s separate steps in this Gnostic Christianity. The Son of God is the first fractal of the Father. The Son of God is all the way up there, back upstream, nestling into the Father. And it is the Son of God who breaks into all of the Aeons. Then it was one of the Aeons themselves that fell out of harmony with that Son of God package, also known as the Fullness of God. And it was one of those Aeons, Logos, or Sophia if you believe in a different line of Gnosticism. But I called this fallen Aeon Logos; that’s what it’s called in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. And it is Logos who fell out of the Fullness of God, broke apart, and created this material world. And when the best part of Logos fled back up into the Fullness because he was horrified at what had happened, he left behind part of himself, that being the ego.

And it’s that egoic portion of Logos that runs this realm. It’s that egoic portion of Logos that is the Demiurge Jehovah. The Son of God never fell. The Son of God stays up there, plugged into the Father and holding the Fullness of God. It’s just a portion of the Fullness of God that fell and created this Earth and that portion that stays down below. The Son of God came before the fall, came before the creation of Heaven and Earth, and stays perfect and unsullied up above. And Jesus came way later because Jesus is part human and part God. But we can say that one Lord Jesus Christ did come for our salvation, came down and was Incarnate, and was made man. We would agree with that. The Christ was formed for our salvation, to take us back up.

In the 381 edition, it says that “the one Lord Jesus Christ, who for us, men” (and women, we presume), “and for our salvation, came down from Heaven, was Incarnate,” (which means made into flesh,) “by the Holy Spirit and of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.” And we Gnostic Christians would tend to agree with that. The Christ is the Third Order of powers. We are Second Order powers ,we creatures that populate this Earth and this universe. But the Christ was made to give us salvation and take us back up. So the Christ is called the 3rd order of powers. It is a superior power to the 2nd order of powers. We 2nd order powers are glommed onto this fallen material world, which is a thicker, slower, energetic type of space than is the realm of the Father or the realm of God or the realm of the Fullness. The 3rd order of Powers was created by the Aeons and the Son and the will of the Father, all together praying for our salvation. You might have heard other people say yes, the Gnostics believe that we creatures on this Earth are angels that have become stuck in a material realm. That’s one way of putting it. We are the Fullness of God. We all carry the Fullness—the Aeons of the Son of God—but we are welded onto this material when we are conceived. The Aeonic inheritance, the love and life of the Father, come from above and impregnate a material molecule. And that grows into this creature—into the zygote or the egg that begins to develop.

So we all came down from Heaven. We 2nd order powers, all of the creatures of the Earth, we all came down from Heaven and we were all made incarnate by being put down into this realm and married to this physical plane that was created by the God of this world, Jehovah, the Demiurge. So the Christ comes down, was created later to bring us all back home because we got stuck down here. We are caught in an endless war, it’s called, with a dualistic system. It’s material plus spirit. So our spirits are caught in this material. And the Christ, the 3rd order of power, is far more glorious than the 2nd order of power. The Christ has all of the mojo of everybody altogether, and the Christ comes with each of our individual faces so that we recognize the Christ when we meet him. So there is 3rd order power for every 2nd order power. So every place that you find yourself, that Christ is already there waiting for you to recognize him. And once you do, then you are saved out of that situation that you’re in.

Back to the Nicene Creed. “That the one Lord Jesus Christ suffered and the third day he rose again and ascended into Heaven,” and then it goes into much more detail in the 381 version. “He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried. And the third day he rose again according to the scriptures. And ascended into Heaven and sitteth on the right hand of the Father.” Well, I don’t have any particular problem with that, but remember that Christ isn’t exactly the same as the Son. He incorporates the Son. You could say that the Christ was the Son made manifest in this physical world, and it’s necessary to believe in that manifest presence when it comes to you. And it comes to every creature, because that’s what takes you out of this place.

And it goes on to say, (from there, from Heaven), “from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” And then in the other translation, “from thence he shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead.” So this refers to the second coming of the Christ as an end times event, the second coming it’s known as. And in the 381 version it goes on to say, “whose Kingdom shall have no end.” And so that is the Kingdom of God. Well, the Kingdom of the Father will never end, of course. The Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of the Father is the Fullness of God. It’s all the way back up.

There are many versions of the realms of Heaven, right? There’s many different books, and many different religions really break out a whole lot of realms of Heaven. The Tripartite Tractate doesn’t talk about all those various realms. I can say that the original realm is the Fullness of God, and that we down here in this material realm are far from that place. We here at Gnostic Insights talk about an in between place that people go after they “die” and that is also where all of our shared thoughts and experiences reside. The original, you could call it the universal meme bundle that is attached to this universe, is in this place probably where the realm of judgment occurs. And then you either go up from there or you come back down.

But in this Valentinian Gnosticism you don’t go to hell, you do not go to hell and burn for eternity. You come back down until you repent and are redeemed by the Christ. Everybody in the end will be redeemed. Everybody will repent and be redeemed. And that was also a source of contention in the early church—whether even “the Devil” would be redeemed. Now, in our Gnostic belief, it’s the Demiurge that will be also redeemed along with the 2nd order powers, because the Demiurge needs to be redeemed to reunite with the Aeons above, because it is the egoic, fractured part out of the Aeon known as Logos, and Logos is trying to get his ego back. So the Fullness is trying to make itself full again. The Demiurge has to come back up for the Fullness to be full. We are the fruit of the Fullness, so all of us also need to come back up or the Fullness won’t be full. We are their children.

And then it speaks of believing in the Holy Ghost. We all believe in the Holy Ghost, it says. And in the 381 expansion it says, “We believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together, is worshipped and glorified, who spake by the Prophets.” And that’s what’s known as that Triune God, which of course was also a source of great contention in the early church. The idea the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—they used to use the term Holy Ghost, but we’ve come to associate ghosts with Casper the Ghost and woo woo spirits of the dead, so it’s been changed in recent years to the Holy Spirit. Well, the Holy Spirit is the life and love of the Father coming down through the Son, coming down through the Fullness and then coming down into this world through the life of the creatures below. So we incorporate the Holy Spirit just like Jesus did. Jesus was a man. Jesus was fully man and fully God. Well, we are fully man, and we are also fully God, but we don’t realize it.

Our Fullness of God is in every cell of our bodies. All things that are alive have the Fullness of God within them, and that is the Holy Spirit and the life and love that pour out into this realm that we live in. But we only have parts of our Fullness activated. It’s like a need to know basis. If the Fullness of God is 100%, I’m here walking around with maybe 4% of it activated. But the Christ, Jesus, when he came down, he had 100% of it activated. So that’s what it means to be fully God. He had the Fullness of God, the Son of God, and the Fullness of the Aeons of God, completely aware and active. And it is because of that that there is 3rd order power for everyone of us 2nd order powers because, if the Christ is 100%, then my 4% is covered within that 100%. It’s like a stencil overlay—parts of it are activated and parts of it are still hidden. So yes we believe in that Holy Spirit as well.

It goes on to say, “But those who say there was a time when he was not, and he was not before he was made, and he was made out of nothing, or he is of another substance or essence, or the Son of God is created or changeable or alterable, they are condemned by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.” Period. Boom. That’s what it says.

And this is true. The Son, the original Son of the God Above All Gods, is consubstantial with the Father. He’s like the bucket dipped into the sea. He’s there and he was not created. And he is not changeable because he is the full essence of the Father and the Father is immutable—the Father never changes. It doesn’t matter what goes on down here in the Earth, it doesn’t get upstream. That’s why after death or after judgment or after the end of the material realm, none of the bad things go back up because the Father, the Fullness, and the Son are immutable. They never change. So our crap that goes on down here below is what gets burned up in the fire. It is what falls away and is forgotten. That’s why we need to repent, to be redeemed. We can’t be redeemed if we’re carrying a bunch of crap with us, because that can’t go back. You have to repent of the sins, repent of the misunderstandings and the mistakes and the lack of love. Repent of the hatred and the divisions. You repent of it. Then you turn around and accept the redemption of the 3rd order that’s standing right there with your face on it, and then you can go up.

And that’s going to happen sooner or later to everybody. It either happens while you’re living or it happens during the transition of death. Or it happens in your next life, or your next transition of death. You will keep coming back down until you repent so that you can be redeemed, because the bad stuff has to be thrown into the lake of fire. You’re not going in there. It’s the bad stuff that you’ve repented of. You don’t want it anymore. Forget about it. Kick it out of the nest. It’s gone.

And then, in the Constantinople version of 381, it ends by saying, “We believe in one holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.” OK, so Catholic used to just mean correct, but it’s come to mean that particular Catholic Church, and then Martin Luther came along and said, oh, you don’t have to be Catholic, you can be this thing called Protestant because we protest the Catholic Church. So now you’ve got to be a Protestant or a Catholic. And they all still believe in the same Nicene Creed. They acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins.

So what is baptism? Is that really the ritual of being dunked into water or having water sprinkled on you, either as an infant or as a person who comes to the faith and accepts the Christ? Well, I would say it’s greater than that. The baptism is the Holy Spirit being invited in to baptize your entire soul. It’s when you exchange your 2nd order nature with the 3rd order power that you have invited in. The physical baptism of the water is a ritual that represents that baptism. It’s not the ritual that confers remission of sins. Remission means going away, the sins are gone. Being dunked in water doesn’t make you go to Heaven. What allows you to go to Heaven is to repent and be redeemed by the Christ. It’s the power of the Christ that does everything. It’s got nothing to do with what you do other than repenting of your sins. You do need to repent so that you could turn around and instead of facing the world, you turn around and you face the eternal. It’s a physical action and that allows for the sins to go away. They’re thrown away into that lake of fire. They’re forgotten.

And then we look for the resurrection of the dead, it says. There’s various views of resurrection depending on the church. Is everybody resurrected at once? The Rapture. If you’re still alive at the time it’s called the Rapture because you will be caught up and you won’t die, you will just fly up in Heaven. Or if you’re already dead, you’re gonna be pulled out of the ground and you’re gonna fly up into Heaven. Well, it’s not the physical body, of course, that is resurrected. It’s our spiritual body. It’s our aeonic inheritance. It’s that 4% now made 100% with the full knowledge of the Christ, because the 3rd order powers have come to indwell in me, and now I can go back home.

So we’re all going back home, even the Demiurge. “And the life of the world to come.” Yes. Amen. I’ll give that an Amen because that is our hope. We hope for a better world. We believe this is a fallen world and our hope and eternal life is above. The particularities of which Heaven, or how many levels of Heaven or blah blah blah—that really isn’t important. That’s nothing you need to know. It’s kind of above our pay grade, I think. All we need to know is repentance which leads to forgiveness and redemption. And acceptance that we are the fruit of the Fullness of God and to the Father, the God Above All Gods, we shall return.

OK. That’s my take on the Nicene Creed and how it relates to this Gnostic Christianity that I’ve been teaching. I hope this clarifies some aspects in your own mind. I hope it does not bring confusion. If you ever get confused by something I say, I urge you to write to me. Go ahead and contact me through the “contact me” form at gnosticinsights.com or you can go over to my substack, Cyd’s Gnostic Newsletter, it’s called. It’s also called the Gnostic Reformation, and that has comments open. You can go there and engage in actual dialogue with myself and with other people on these topics. God bless us all. Onward and upward.

The first ten minutes of this week’s episode begins with sharing some correspondence from a longtime listener, followed by a couple of questions from a newbie. After that, we’ll move on to an interview with my brother, Bill. The audio quality with my brother’s interview isn’t the greatest, even though it was conducted through the zoom app. I’m sending Bill a microphone/headphone set that will hopefully improve future recordings. Meanwhile, here’s the complete transcript below so you don’t miss a word.

Here we are in 1958. Billy, Cyd, and David

Bill Puett Interview, 08/24/23

Cyd

We welcome my brother, Dr. Bill Puett, back to Gnostic Insights. Bill is going to help clarify some issues with us between information versus knowledge, and what is a meme? Welcome, Bill.

Bill

Well, thank you, Cyd. It’s fun to be back on here.

Cyd

It’s great to have you on. You’ve become a mythical character on my Gnostic podcast because I refer to you so often, but we are so rarely graced with your presence.

Bill

Well, you kindly say that and glad to be part of it and work with my sister who does remarkable, remarkable work.

Cyd

Ohh well, flattery. Flattery will get you everywhere, right? OK, so. So we’re going to be discussing the previous episode where we were talking about memes versus karma, right?

Bill

And you know, you had mentioned in there the point that a meme is a unit of information, and that leads into what we’re talking about now, because units of information are not always facts.

Cyd

Right.

Bill

In fact, in my hypnotherapy practice, I help my clients drop memes that are false memes. You know, memes cover the ego. They create a shroud as you’ve stated many times before. And when a client says they want to change some behavior, I tell them that they really want to find their true selves. And by doing so, they make the changes that they hope for.

Cyd

So by their true selves. You’re not talking about their ego then, huh? Obviously.

Bills

That’s actually a great question. The Self—we understand the S Self. Yes, that’s the real Self. And then we have the ego operating in this world—the combo there. So what we’re doing is we’re dropping off the illusions that surround the ego that get in the way of connecting with our true inner self and we’re removing memes.

Cyd

So the ego is surrounding the true Self and then the memes are clinging to that ego.

Bill

That’s right.

Cyd

OK, got it. Go ahead.

Bill

And over a period of time, you know, to one’s life, we accumulate these memes. Because I make the claim that the majority memes are illusions. And so when we try to understand ourselves or we’re trying to understand our life and so forth is that we’re looking through a glass darkly. So in therapy then I want to remove or the illusions so that we get closer to who we are.

Cyd

But that sounds kind of Buddhist, doesn’t it? They’re always talking about illusions.

Bill

Well, the their type of the illusion is the illusion of Self. But we’re talking about the illusion of memes. That is a different point.

Cyd

Ohh. So this isn’t that Buddhist notion of illusions, then.

Bill

Oh, no, it’s the false memes that are illusions.

Cyd

OK.

Bill

Now we’re removing from their shroud these false memes. For instance, if a child is told by their parent that they would grow up not to amount to anything, that meme could be attached to the other person in the future. Now in therapy, we will drop that meme shroud and then the healing follows. You can take my therapeutic approach may be a way of mining gnosis to bring about healing. I have something more to say about the gnosis point here.

Cyd

OK.

Bill

I said since these may be false units of information, that raises the question of what we know to be true and how we know. Philosophers examine that question under the heading of epistemology, the question of what knowledge is.

Cyd

Right. That’s what gnosis means: knowing.

Bill

Right, so the Gnostics believe that knowing comes from within and you have talked about mining gnosis in order to recall truth from within. Now, Plato would have appreciated the concept of gnosis. You believe that what is known isn’t in the world, that is, we are born with it in our souls.

Cyd

By the way, let me pop in here a second to mention that the Nag Hammadi scriptures include Plato. So even back when that Big Jar was buried in the desert and dug up out of Nag Hammadi that has now formed these scriptures, (and the Tripartite Tractate is just one of the books that was contained in that big earthenware jug), Plato was in there as well. So the early Gnostics recognized Plato as in agreement with gnosis.

Bill

Oh, I love that. Yes. OK. So now that there is coherence there, yeah. Plato did state that knowledge is justified true belief. But what is it for belief to be justified as true? Now going to our memes—a meme to be known must be believed by the holder, must be true, and must have sufficient evidence for its truth. Now the question of what counts as evidence, and how much evidence is sufficient, are the prime issues of epistemology. So this problem of sufficiency has never been resolved. A proposed solution by Plato is that what is known is known innately, and that idea is, of course, not accepted by most philosophers. In other words, innateness is not accepted by most philosophers, scientists, and academics in general.

Cyd

And again, what do you mean by innateness?

Bill

That is being born with it. That is, it comes with the soul.

Cyd

Ah, So what we are calling the Self, the Fullness of God that we carry around within us. That is innate.

Bill

Yes, that’s exactly right. We are born with it. It’s from above.

Cyd

OK. OK, so the innate nature of the human comes from above, and that is the gnosis.

Bill

Exactly. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Again, again, most philosophers, scientists, and academics wouldn’t accept this notion that we’re born with that. Right.

Cyd

OK.

Bill

You see, they still have no explanation of what counts as knowledge. Now Plato did say justified true belief, but the issue is what do they mean by justify? What is the best that they can expect? That is, the scientists and philosophers and others, the best they can expect are well founded beliefs.

Cyd

Well founded beliefs, OK.

Bill

But even well founded beliefs can later be found false. That has happened over and over and over again in the history science. What are examples of beliefs that were held by scientists and philosophers and otherwise?

Cyd

All right.

Bill

There are so many. But let me throw a few little cuties at you. Alright. That in the universe our world is at the center. The earth is the center of the solar system. OK, OK. Phlogiston–have you ever heard of that? That is, that’s the combustible part of the material. When something is burned, phlogiston is released. Miasmas  was once considered the poisonous gas that caused disease. Disease was caused by miasmas. Or here, this is getting a little more updated—the fish stage of human development and embryos, was passing stages that look like simpler beings like fish and reptiles. Not true. How about in contemporary sense? The atomic model. The idea of a nucleus with electrons orbiting it. Ohh no, no. Electrons are not particles. They’re waves. They’re like clouds that are centered around the nucleus. How did light travel? Well, it traveled through the medium called the luminiferous aether. Lumen travels through aether. Or that the universe is static, that is, it remains the same size. Cyd, yes, and who presented that view that the universe as static? Not expanding? Einstein himself!

Cyd

Ohh really?

Bill

Or here’s a classic: spontaneous generation believes that complex life comes from inanimate matter. Right. Throw that away, but it was held at one time.

Cyd

So they were considered to be well founded beliefs, you’re saying. And even scientific. OK.

Bill

They were considered well founded beliefs. Now let me take it a bit further. This is a little bit of philosophy of science. People don’t really understand that the scientific method does not give us knowledge. Scientific method says that if a hypothesis they’re coming up with to try to explain something, you know something’s occurring out in the universe, and you need to explain it–so you create a possible answer. That’s called a hypothesis. That hypothesis tells you what else to look for. So we go looking for it and we if we find what it’s looking for, that supports the hypothesis. But it doesn’t guarantee it. It doesn’t bring us truth. Why? Let me give you a little logic point. If P gets you Q, and if you have Q, you can’t conclude you have P. It is, if it’s raining, then the streets are wet. Ohh, the streets are wet, therefore it’s raining. No, because the streets could get wet by other ways, right? Scientific method is like that. It says that if its hypothesis is true, then you can expect these things to happen. Yet, because they happen doesn’t mean that the hypothesis is correct. Because it may predict something that is not the case. Well then, if it predicts something that’s not the case, then the hypothesis is false. In other words, if P gets you Q and you don’t have Q, well, you don’t have P. So you can always falsify a hypothesis, but you cannot verify it as true. That’s the scientific method. The scientific method can only establish well founded belief. As long as the predictions are occurring as stated, then it is supported, and at best only becomes a theory.

Cyd

OK.

Bill

Theories never become facts. So theories get well founded and they get more well founded. They get even more well founded. They become really, really good. And then something happens. One of the predictions didn’t work out. So the theory is not true.

Cyd

Ohh, right, OK, I hear what you’re saying. So you can’t prove a theory to be true, but you can prove a theory to be false. Can’t prove a theory to be true, but, but you can disprove it.

Bill

You can disprove it.

Cyd

Yeah, that’s science, right?

Bill

That’s right. So science never gives us knowledge, just well founded belief. Isn’t that amazing?

Cyd

Yeah. OK. So because you’re saying that knowledge is different well founded beliefs?

Bill

OK, knowledge is a justified belief, it’s true, but it’s justified. We don’t know what or by how much, but we have evidence. But how much makes it true? And so if that’s the problem in the theory now, what happens is Plato would say, well, you see, you’re never going to get truth out in the world and experience that way. It’s not out here in the world as such. Knowledge only comes from within and Above. That’s why Plato would say it is innate.

Cyd

So that’s kind of indicating that a Mystic might be more in touch with knowledge than a scientist.

Bill

Yes, or a philosopher or a, you know, an academic. The presumption in the academic community is that we’re developing knowledge. But all the best we can do is to develop well founded beliefs according to Plato and for the reasons that I’ve just argued for. Plato believed that learning, properly conducted, was a way of recalling what is already known by a person. So those who attended Plato’s Academy were hoping to recall the forms in the ethereal world and therefore have knowledge. So in Plato’s Academy, they weren’t strictly scholastic. They were trying to recall, because that’s the only way we can know.

Cyd

Right. And that word is anamnesis—not forgetting.

Bill

Right. That’s good. The Platonists would find common ground with the Gnostics. You already indicated that. So gnosis is innate from the ethereal, cannot later be found to be false, therefore it is knowledge. It is through the mining of gnosis that truth is revealed.

Cyd

OK. So, you know that people say that the Bible is inerrant. In other words, that the Bible is knowledge from cover to cover basically right? That’s what infallible belief in the Bible is, right? That’s what fundamentalism is, that it’s inerrant and inerrant means not capable of error. But we gnostics, we have some disagreements with aspects of the Bible. So does that indicate that the Bible is information and not knowledge? What does that indicate? Or. Are we going to assume that the Bible was written by people who only wrote the truth of God? That’s what people are saying. That’s what the claim is.

Bill

But that is the claim. There are a number of problems that occur. Now, we might make the statement that there are a number of statements in the Bible that are gnostic—they resonate, they are there, are knowledge.

Cyd

They are gnosis, right? We can tell when the Bible is speaking gnosis because it resonates truth, OK. And that’s activating that innate knowledge, OK.

Bill

It also indicates that you know, and fundamentalism doesn’t like to hear this. There are a lot of illogical points in the Bible that don’t work together. They contradict each other. An inconsistency, for instance, is that God is all loving and people who don’t accept Christ as savior will go to hell forever.

Cyd

Ah, that’s a contradiction. So how could they both be true? OK.

Bill

We know from Gnosticism, and beautifully developed in your podcast, is that it’s logically developed. Doesn’t have inconsistencies in it. And so a difference between, say, a gnostic interpretation of Scripture versus that of the standard fundamentalist or the standard biblical notion is that the difference is the biblical stuff has contradictions and the gnostic interpretations do not.

Cyd

Right. And that’s why in this Christian gnosticism, it’s Logos, the major figure is Logos, which is logic. It’s got to be logical to be true.

Bill

Yes. And you develop this in the understanding of the Tripartite Tractate. It’s beautiful. You said it logically follows. But see, that’s a way of mining the gnosis.

Cyd

Right. It’s interesting how many spiritual or religious people do not even consider logic to be an essential characteristic of the Father, but we would say it is.

Bill

It is essential.

Cyd

So it’s love and it’s logic. The Father is love and logic and life. Hey, the three L’s. I like that. Love, logic and life, that’s a good one.

Bill

That’s right. This and the idea of the Gnostics, they were very individualistic in the sense that they’re mining their gnosis rather than developing out here. The church and theological development of others follow that. With Gnosticism, they want each individual to recognize their gnosis. And again, back to the Plato point. That was the purpose of the Plato’s Academy—is that each individual student was learning, would mine and understand forms.

Cyd

Ohh listen this is very important point. It’s something people often misunderstand. They think that I have my truth and you have your truth. But there is only one truth. That’s it, people go, it’s even that line out of Jesus Christ Superstar, we all have our truths. My truth is different than yours. No. Truth is. There is one truth, and Plato said that the eternal forms are one thing—a cup, a cup is a cup, is a cup. It’s not a cup to me and a dog to you. It’s a cup. So.

Bill

And so what we se are not different truths when we mine gnosis. We’re all recognizing the same truth.

Cyd

So we’re mining the same exact truth. So when I talk about the Fullness of God, it’s not one thing to me and a different thing to you. The Father is the Father, and the Father has certain immutable characteristics, and we acknowledge this to be true. So when I mine my gnosis and you mine your gnosis, we are literally mining the same exact gnosis.

Bill

That’s right.

Cyd

So it’s not this mysticism where I’m going to drop some drug and you’re going to drop some drug and we each have this wonderful experience and then we go to write it down and we come up with different things and different concepts and it’s all different. If it’s truth, it won’t resolve in differentness, it resolves in all being the same. All being One in the end. That’s pretty important. Hey, there’s a little satori.

Bill

Very good.

Cyd

OK, good. Well, thank you, my brother. I love you so much.

Bill

Thank you, Cyd. I love you and thank you for the invitation. This was fun.

Cyd

OK. All right. Onward and upward, we’ll. See you later. OK. Bye bye.

Bill

Bye bye.

Since we’ve been talking about reincarnation a bit lately, I’ve had some correspondence from a couple of listeners who have wondered about this idea of karma because, as I say, it’s your karma and your meme bundle that influence your next incarnation, or even your escape from this material plane and back up to the ethereal plane. So I would like to explain today what I mean by both memes and by karma.

Your karma is one of those huge topics that people can write dissertations on. In my Simple Explanation way of looking at things, what I do is I go to the meta level of all of the smaller concepts. Meta means above. So when I simplify I’m not dumbing down, I’m rising above. It’s really the opposite direction. The more profound a concept is, the smaller and simpler it can be stated.

When I was for a time an academic at the university level and I would go to conferences where people are expected to present their papers and, you know, these research papers that are generally presented at conferences, they aren’t really generated by the person in order to advance knowledge in the field. Yeah, that’s the stated purpose, sure. But the real purpose is to get promotions and to get tenure—things like that. And you’re required to produce a certain number of papers and present and publish every year. That’s what’s called publish or perish. So, when I would go to these conferences and listen to people’s papers, it was like, Heavens, it’s just a bunch of big words strung together very tightly, of interest, probably, only to the person that wrote it, and usually meaning nothing. How does that expression by Shakespeare go? It’s a quote from Macbeth: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”

Well, yeah, that pretty much sounds like it. That’s some wisdom from old Will Shakespeare. So I think it was the last conference I went to and it was my last because it’s like, what’s the point of this? It was extremely disappointing to me. I had a satori of the meaninglessness of this sort of scholastic research. That’s why I don’t try to write in a manner that exemplifies scholasticism and intelligence, and ohh aren’t I smart. That is not my goal whatsoever. I’m actually against that kind of writing and that kind of speaking. I’m trying to simplify all of the gobbledygook, or, as my brother Billy has always called it, argle bargle, down to its core, down to the actual meaning. And especially when we’re talking about gnostic insights. What we have to think of is, if this is a consciousness that comes before even our material cosmos, certainly before humanity, certainly before academia, what is the message from the consciousness that can come to any of the 2nd order powers?

See, you don’t need a college degree in order to understand gnosis. What you need is an ability to reason; to open your eyes and see what is going on. To anticipate consequences. This is what is needed to discern gnosis.

When I started this Gnostic Insights podcast a couple of years ago, I posted a couple of articles about memes, and I’ve noticed by looking at the stats that hardly anybody likes to listen to them. So that is why I’m explaining it to you today and then tying it into karma. A meme, as I use the term, doesn’t refer to those cute posters and those funny saying. A meme is any unit of information. And just as a gene is the smallest expression of an organism, a meme is the smallest possible expression of information. Now, we can put memes together and make meme chords and even big meme bundles because memes often go together. So when you consider something like, well, for example, I often use the expression of a cup. What is a cup?

Right. The notion of cup is a meme. And what do you think of when you think of the meme of cup? You think of a vessel with a handle, and that is usually what we drink our coffee or tea out of. But the particular expression of that cup meme varies in everyone’s mind. My cup meme is expressed by this coffee cup I’m looking at right now and it’s got cute little cartoons and kitty cats on it.

But your meme might be a hammered brass demitasse, right? Or your meme for cup might be a measuring cup if you’re a chef, and it will be one of those clear Pyrex cups with markings on it, but it’s still the same concept of cup—what Plato would have called cupness up in the land of forms. So that’s what a meme is.

Memes can express any kind of concept, so you can take any larger concept, even such as one like justice.  And what does justice imply? Google tells me that the definition of justice is the meme that people get what they deserve. OK, that itself is a meme. What does that mean? What constitutes deserving, influenced by a wide range of fields and viewpoints, such as the concepts or memes of ethics, rightness based on morality, rational thinking, law, religion, equity, and fairness. Well, those are big memes, aren’t they? So you could definitely spend a lot of time just trying to define the meme of justice. So anyway, that’s what I mean when I talk about memes MEME meme.

And the gnostic gospel that we talk about here at Gnostic Insights, that’s a bundle of memes relating to this Christian gnosis. So there’s a meme bundle for the Father, a meme bundle for the Son, a meme bundle for the ALL and the Fullness. There’s a meme bundle for the demiurge. A meme bundle for the fall, a meme bundle for Christ. A meme bundle for virtue and a different meme bundle for vices. Et cetera, et cetera.

People don’t generally recognize that they’re holding on to these various meme bundles. One way you could talk about a big overarching meme bundle is a worldview. And what we’re talking about here at Gnostic Insights is a gnostic Christian meme. And that is an ideology because it’s so huge. Different religions have their own meme bundles, and generally the follower of those religions hold on to the memes that are promoted by that religion. And it’s their differences between their meme bundles that define the boundaries of that religion. Same thing with political parties. Same thing with cultural subgroups and cultures as a whole. We share memes in common with certain people and by the way, the more memes you share in common with someone, generally you like that person all the more. We like people we share memes with. We distrust or don’t understand people that hold different memes than we do.

So what I’ve been teaching here at Gnostic Insights is that the meme bundle or the ideology that we hold determines our thoughts, our moods, our emotions, our actions. And when we pass away out of this material plane and into that in between space, the meme s that we hold at the time that we pass away determine our experience in the in between place and our experience of coming back to this Earth or going on to the ethereal plane. Evangelical Christians, of course, hold the meme bundle that only people who have accepted Christ, and in particular Jesus Christ, before they die, are going to go straight up to the ethereal plane. But where the gnostic Christianity differs from that of the evangelical Christianity is that it must logically be the case that if a person passes away from this material plane, i.e., dies without knowing Christ, without having accepted redemption, the Evangelical Christian would say that person’s never going to heaven because they died without salvation.

But the gnostic Christian says no. Everybody is eventually going to the ethereal plane because we all come from the ethereal plane. We are sparks off of the originating consciousness. We embody the Father, the Son, and the Fullness within these material bodies that we are walking around in, and when our material body stops functioning, our soul, our spirit, our Self and our Ego, are popped loose from being tied to the material plane, and we rise up to this other dimension or realm. And it is at that place where the memes of the world fall away. They lose their attraction to you temporarily, at least. In the in between space you can see clearly. I can see clearly now the rain has gone. OK. Where you can see clearly and then you have the opportunity to repent, to say, well, that didn’t work out very well. I didn’t really have that much fun. Yeah, eh. You repent, and once you repent, you are able to see the truth of the Father and see the Christ. And the Christ will be standing there saying, OK, awesome. Come with me. And the Christ, even at that point, will take you straight up.

If you don’t repent, then you’re going to be reincarnated. You’re going to come back down. Because the lack of repentance, even though you see clearly you go, but you know, I really like the world. I really love being down there on that material plane. I really like sex. I don’t think we’re gonna have sex in heaven. So I’m coming back to Earth. I’m gonna have all the sex I want. Or I really like to eat. I love, love, love to eat. We’re probably not going to be cooking and eating up above, not in the way we do down here because there’s no death and destruction up above, so we aren’t going to be killing animals and eating them, and we’re not going to be pulling carrots out of the ground and eating them either because the carrots are also second order powers. So whatever facsimile of eating that we are going to have up above, if that is the case, it’s not going to be this down here, below. And so a lot of people who reincarnate just for the food, just for the sex. Maybe you’re going to reincarnate because you love your family so much you can’t bear to see them go their own way, and you abandon them and go to heaven. So that’s another reason a person would want to reincarnate to come back to their cohort.

So we lay down our meme bundle temporarily while we’re in the in between space. We still have our Ego. We still have our personal identity and of course we are completely immersed in the big S Self in the in between place because we’re in One space that we can all share.

If you’re a new listener to Gnostic Insights, I recommend that you go back to the episode called Overcoming Death for more details on what I’ve been talking about–about the in between space and how it is that people would lay down their memes after death and still be able to go up above.

Now the main thing to realize about what is called universal salvation is that we are the children of God. It says that in the Bible. There’s no misunderstanding that. And it’s not going to be, but sadly, most of us are going to hell to be tormented forever. That isn’t the nature of our loving Father. It says over and over in the Bible that all who come to Christ will be redeemed. And in the Gnostic Gospel, we’re opening the door so that you can still be redeemed after death. But here’s the thing. If you’re listening to me now and you just want to wallow in sin or vice because you love, love, love whatever it is that you’re doing that you know isn’t from above, then you are rejecting the Christ. You are rejecting the Father. You are rejecting the ALL, and that is not a good, loving or helpful place to be. I think you know this in the deepest part of your heart. So don’t wait until you die to hope for this redemption. Assure your redemption now. Don’t push off redemption.

Now, what do I mean by the meme of karma? Forget about what you’ve learned—the details of karma. If you go up to a meta understanding of karma, all that karma is, it’s so simple. Karma is the consequences of your behavior. Karma is the consequences of your mindset. Karma equals consequences. That’s all. And the karma that you generate by your behavior and your thoughts, it deepens and ingrains the meme that causes that behavior or that thought. So if you continue to behave in a way that expresses some particular vice or sin, then you further entrench that vice and sin, because the karma of behaving or thinking of that vice deepens it and makes it stronger. Every time you repent of that vice—every time you repent—the Christ is right there to fill you with the opposing virtue. With the love that you’re otherwise pushing away. With the sense of worth. With the relief of guilt. So, the karma of redemption and salvation is to lessen the hold of the vices upon you—is to lessen the weight of the sin and everything that comes with that. The weakness, the guilt. The oh darn. I did it again. I wish I hadn’t done that. When you have that thought, that’s a form of repentance. Then, what do you do? Turn your eyes upward because this is the direction from which salvation comes. While we are sinners, Christ loves us anyway. While we are sinners, Christ dies for us anyway. And isn’t it awesome that Christ can find us even in the worst place that we might possibly be? Even if a person is in the most terrible situation and the most sinful possible thing, that Christ can be there anyway.

The pleroma of Christ is what is called the 3rd order of powers, and there is one 3rd order power that covers every single 2nd order power. So of course Christ can find you wherever you are. Of course Christ can go into the midst of whatever valley you are in—of depression or depravity—and pull you out because there’s a 3rd order power sitting right there waiting for you, that’s right there at your side. Every second order power has a third order power devoted to it. So, in my body here, my own pleroma has a certain combination of Aeons, a certain combination of the Fullness that’s activated. You know, like let’s say there’s X number of Fullnesses possible. If there’s an infinite number of Aeons, X amount, we’ve all got that full X amount of the Fullness of the Aeons, but they’re not all expressed. We have a certain pattern, like a stencil overlaid upon that. And so the pattern of Aeons that’s activated in my body that makes me the recognizable person that I am with my various talents and proclivities. That’s a particular pattern of the Fullness. Well, the Christ also has that particular pattern of the Fullness that I express, but one order up. The 3rd order up. So there’s a third order expression of the Fullness of the Christ for my second order expression of the Fullness. Do you understand what I mean? So of course the Christ can save anyone. There’s a third order of powers devoted to you, devoted to you. It says in the Tripartite Tractate that Christ comes with everyone’s face, so that when the Christ comes, you can recognize him, and that’s what I’m talking about here, with the pattern of 3rd order.

So anyway, our karma is the karma that we generate that causes the memes that we cling to to hold on to us. We hold those memes and they are bound to us like a covering through our karma, and my karma is different than your karma. Everybody’s karma is unique to the individual. When you pass away, your karma is momentarily laid aside so that you can see the truth in the in between place after you die. Then you can repent and go on upward and your karma will not reattach.

Negativity does not go forward into the ethereal plane, only the good karma goes forward into the material plane. So whatever accomplishments that I have had down here below, it’s my opinion that that karma, the positive karma, the virtuous karma, will go forward. It will stay attached to my particular Ego when I’m up above. But the negative karma that I’ve generated down here, the karma that I have repented of, that’s what’s get pushed away. That’s what gets “burned up in the fire.” It’s the negative karma. It’s the memory and consequences of your negative behavior. Once you are redeemed and go upward, Christ doesn’t take any negative karma up. Christ forgives and forgets.

So that’s my Simple Explanation of memes and karma and how it is that the karma attracts the memes that cling to your Ego, and those negative memes and negative karma are dropped when you repent and you are redeemed.

Onward and upward.

God bless us all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right now you don’t have to suffer. You don’t have to reject Christ. You just have to sit and turn your eyes upward. On this point, as it says in the letter to the Colossians out of the New Testament, “For in him all the Fullness was pleased to take up a dwelling and through him to reconcile all things to him.” All things, may I point out, “all things to him, making peace by the blood of his cross [through him], whether the things on Earth or the things in the heavens. And you, back then, had been aliens in enemies and thought, through wicked deeds, yet now he has affected reconciliation by a death, in the body of his flesh, to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.” (Colossians 1:19-20; Hart’s New Testament).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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