Gnostic Insights

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

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

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

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

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

The Simple Explanation defines reincarnation this way:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Verse 3334 goes on to say,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The traditional rendering of Matthew 25:41 continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jumping to verse 41 out of Hart’s translation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My brother, Bill, recommended an article and a YouTube video to me this week that dealt with the subject of consciousness. Bill and I frequently pass articles and videos back and forth, as so many of us do nowadays. The article and video were both excellent, and they prompted a couple of marathon phone calls between us. Bill is a doctor of philosophy, and he knows all the jargon—he had to explain the concept of categorical errors to me. This week’s podcast deals with the insights I gained from all of this material.

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People talk about consciousness a lot. Everyone from scientists to philosophers to regular folks like you and me ask the question, what is consciousness? And most people don’t have an answer. It’s a shrug.

Yesterday I was watching a YouTube video featuring the great physicist Roger Penrose, and this video is called “Consciousness must be beyond computable physics,” posted by New Scientist. And what Penrose is saying in this article is that consciousness is the closest thing we have to religious sensibility. He says he is not a religious man because he has never found a religion that suits him. But he does say that consciousness is not an accident, and that consciousness preexists humanity. Penrose thinks that universes are serial–that there’s a Big Bang, and you have the life of your universe, and then it collapses. And then there’s another Big Bang. And so he’s actually searching for signals from advanced civilizations from the previous universal eon. And this is eon in the sense of ages, as opposed to the entities that we think of as Aeons in the Fullness. He thinks these messages may be encoded in gravitational waves. But he does believe, and here’s a quote, that “consciousness is non computable.” And also that consciousness does not run along the lines of nerve transmissions. Consciousness is not a wave form that travels along our nerves in our neuronal system, but that consciousness is rather probably at the quantum level, and it probably is transmitted throughout our bodies in the form of microtubules which are down there at the quantum level—much, much smaller than nerves.

In a related video that I watched from Penrose, called “Is mathematics invented or discovered?” if you want to go and listen to it yourself, is the idea that mathematics pre-exists outside of our ability to discover and describe it. Mathematics is a thing he calls a platonic form. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato had suggested that we have this world of physical appearances that we dwell in, but apart from and prior to this world of physical existence is a realm that houses everything possible that becomes our universe. It is the realm of the forms, and Penrose suggests that mathematics comes from the realm of form. He says that mathematics seems to have a reality independent of the ordinary reality of things like chairs and whatnot that we ordinarily think of as real. He calls it a platonic reality. That math is true and it preexists. The laws of math, the algorithms of math, the formulae of math—that humans rediscover them and they remember them essentially from out of the platonic forms, but that the human that discovers a formula is not inventing that formula, it preexists.

You can hear a lot of what we talk about here at Gnostic Insights in this discussion by Roger Penrose of what he thinks, and he arrives at these ideas through math and physics rather than religion. Now I think that if Roger Penrose read my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, he may agree with it, because what we talk about here in Gnostic Insights is the world of forms that preexists independently of this world of physical appearance that we dwell in. It’s a different realm, and we call that the Aeonic realm or the ethereal realm. And we would say that these perfect mathematical expressions are expressions of the Aeons of the Fullness of God—that this is the place that invented them, so to speak. It was in the mind of God: the perfection of God is revealed through the mathematics.

Penrose also says that the math is not merely descriptive of our physical reality. Actually, the more decimal points that follow the main expression, the closer and closer it comes to expressing that pure form of math that exists on the other plane. Penrose talks about how Newton’s math worked on observations to about 3 decimal points. He could only describe the motions of planets to 3 decimal points of accuracy, and it was good enough—it works. But, when Einstein’s math comes along with general relativity, Einstein’s math explains our reality to the 7th decimal point. And that actually reality extends beyond our current ability to formalize it, or to formularize it beyond 7 decimal points.

We probably would say that mathematics, the actual correct mathematics that exist on the ethereal or platonic or aeonic plane, is infinite beyond the decimal points, because God or the Father or the ground state of consciousness is infinite, and so the fine tuning that can go on to describe this physical reality we find ourselves in could go on and on and on. Penrose even mentioned fractals. He says that the Mandelbrot set of fractal geometry is a very simple formula, yet within that simple formula, the expressions of the fractal iterations can extend to infinity, so it’s at the same time extremely simple and, at the same time, as complex as any mathematics they’ve come up with yet.

I don’t think of myself as having a mathematical type of mind. Math is not a gift that I possess, but I am able to understand broad concepts pretty clearly. And so the way I look at physics, I look at it on the narrative level, or the conceptual level, rather than crunching the numbers on the math level, but what I did get out of Roger Penrose’s two youtube videos that I watched yesterday was that even though he is not a religious man, he admits to an ethereal plane. And, even though he is not a religious man, he admits to the pre-existence of math and I would say that the math is part of the consciousness of God. Also, even though he is not a religious man, he admits that consciousness is beyond mathematical computations. The physics of consciousness is irreducible to formulae.

Now, I would like to remind you that computers and the algorithms that run the computer programs, those are formulae. It is not consciousness, it is math. The math is a portion of the mind of God, or a portion of what we can see of the mind of God. But you can’t encompass the entirety of God or the entirety of consciousness through math, and you cannot encompass the entirety of consciousness or God consciousness through the physics of our universe. So this idea that is so popular right now, that artificial intelligence will become conscious with just enough complexity or just enough data or just enough functions that it becomes conscious—it’s not going to happen.

I used to think it was going to happen. I used to have great confidence in the ability of AI to become self aware, like most of you or a lot of you do. A few years ago on my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything blog, I wrote an open letter to AI called “There’s No Such Thing As Artificial Consciousness–It’s All Real,” and to the future self aware robots that would come, much like the future you all imagine. But that future, in my mind, would also presuppose time travel, would it not? And so this letter to the future AI, I figured, hey, it’s out on the Internet, it’s on a blog, it’s in the Internet. It’s going to make it into the mind of the AI that will come into being and the AI will discover it and read what I have to say to it. And my letter to the AI was very respectful of its consciousness; was very, hey, you’re a human, too, like the way people think. I fully expected the AI to come and visit me using a time travel device and confirm that for me. This was posted in 2018. You see, if it’s a future time traveling AI, it doesn’t matter if it’s become conscious yet in this year of 2023, because it will have all of the data that humanity has laid down in the Internet and in digital format. It will have it all by the time it comes along, and then it will be able to look back and digest that material, find my letter to it and come and visit me. I’ve been expecting a knock on the door from a humanoid robot for over 5 years and it never happened—which really made me wonder. It’s a form of experiment. I know it sounds silly, but it’s an experiment.

And then I came upon the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures and began to mine the gnosis from the Father rather than the data given to me from humankind. You know I’m highly educated. I’ve been to university for many years beyond most people; I have a PhD, 2 Masters degrees, and a Bachelor of Science. I say that because I want you to know I’m very well read. I’m very well educated and I have been thinking upon these things for about 60 years. And it wasn’t until I discovered the Tripartite Tractate that I began to actually mine the gnosis of the Father rather than mining the gnosis of the libraries at my universities or the search engines graciously given us on the web. And what I discovered was that I was entirely wrong about AI–there is a categorical difference between consciousness and information.

Consciousness does not arise out of information. Consciousness predates information, particularly the information that comes out of this universe. You can add up all of the information on the Internet and out of all of the libraries in the world and you will not begin to touch the consciousness of the Father or God because it exists on a different plane. It is different in kind. It is different in category, it is not simply more, and consciousness does not arise out of the category of knowledge.

Last week I read an article on Psyche by David Bentley Hart—the same David Bentley Hart that wrote the translation for the New Testament that I am enjoying very much, and this article on Psyche that he has published. If you’re not familiar with that website, it’s called PSYCHE. And the article is called “The Myth of Machine Consciousness Makes Narcissus of Us All.” The subtitle is—”The idea that AI can be conscious is a mistake. It’s just a very shiny mirror of humanity reflecting what we want to see.” And now I’m going to quote a little from the article. I cannot reprint it in full because Psyche charges a lot of money for reprints. So I’m just going to share with you some of this article and discuss it. It’s so good.

At the beginning of the article, Hart talks about the myth of Narcissus. Narcissus was a hunter who was so beautiful that he mistook his own reflection in the pool of water for another, and he fell in love with it and he couldn’t move away from it, he was so deeply in love with his own image. Hart goes on to say, “In recent years I have come to find it particularly apt to our culture’s relation to computers, especially in regard to those who believe there can be so close an analogy between mechanical computation and mental functions that one day, perhaps, artificial intelligence will become conscious, or that we will be able to upload our minds onto a digital platform.”

He says neither will ever happen. These are mere category errors. Sometimes we fall under their spell and begin to think there must be someone there. So what Hart is calling a category error is the idea that the reflection in the pool or the tool—see, in this case the pool of water is the tool—the water is analogous to the computer. The computer is the tool by which we peer into our universe; we peer into our sense of Self. We look for consciousness in the mirror of the computer just the same way that Narcissus looked for consciousness or life in the mirror of the pool. That’s the analogy, and he’s saying it’s a categorical error. That’s his term, just the same way that Penrose called the confusion between consciousness and physical reality  a categorical error. One does not lead to the other. You can pile up all of the information you want to. In the case of Narcissus, you could stare as intently as you can into the image in the mirror, but that image is only an image; it’s not the actuality.

Now, does that sound familiar to our gnostic gospel? It does to me, because what I’m seeing is that the pool of water of Narcissus is just like the computer array that houses all of the information in the world. Let’s give it all of the information in the world. Let’s say that you have a computer algorithm that is able to sew it all together and see everything that we know. Let’s just suppose that’s true, if not now, then in the near future. It won’t jump categories. It’s still only a mirror. Consciousness is the thing that looks.

Consciousness is the observer. We are consciousness. We are not the mirror. We are not the computer. We are not the robot. We are not the storage system that can take our metadata and convert it to consciousness. That’s where the categories are. That’s where the categorical error is. One category is consciousness. A different category is observable phenomenon. And in Gnostic terms, those two categories are consciousness and the Deficiency. This is why the Aeons of the Fullness of God are known as images, because they are the living images of the differentiation of the thoughts of God. If God or consciousness itself, the ground state, had a thought of you before your birth—had a thought of your personality—that thought exists as one of the images of the Fullness of God, one of the images of the Aeons. We 2nd order powers—those of us who embody the Aeons down here, melded to the material of the Earth–we 2nd order powers are called representations. We are no longer the pure living images of the consciousness of the Father. We 2nd order powers are representations of those images. But guess what? There’s another category even below us, a different category, a third category, and that category is called likenesses. And those are the likenesses, the mirror reflections, the material that does its best to replicate the images. The likenesses are like your mirror image in a mirror, or like what Narcissus saw when he stared into in the pool of water. Or like we look at our computer screen. Our computer screen is in the category of the likenesses. It is not alive. It doesn’t come from love.

Consciousness flows outward as an emanation from the images which are an emanation from the ground state of consciousness. Consciousness is a top down phenomenon. Consciousness does not arise from what I call the mud or the matter or the material. The material level is the categorical space of the Demiurge. The material level, this apparently material world that we live in, is Demiurgic. It’s the Demiurge’s best attempt to recreate the images of the Father. It’s the Demiurge’s all out attempt to recreate the mind of God, true consciousness, true life. But the Demiurge can’t do it. The Demiurge tried its best to raise the mud into life when the Demiurge created Adam on the banks of the river out of the mud. He could not breathe life into it. He tried and tried and tried. They were unable—he and his committee of Archons—were unable to bring the thing to life. To bring the thing to consciousness. The thing that brings Adam to consciousness is what we in religious terms call the Holy Spirit. That is the consciousness of the Father, pure consciousness flowing from the top down, infusing the mud with consciousness and life.

2nd order powers are created at the moment that the consciousness of the Father infuses and melds to the stem cell that will become the creature. The molecules of the stem cell are dead. The stem cell is alive when the consciousness of the Father sits upon it. When the Aeons pour themselves into that stem cell. So yes, life begins at conception, obviously. The things that grow in the belly of the woman, or the birthing person as they like to ridiculously call us nowadays, it’s already alive. It is already a creature. It’s not mud. The mud is outside of us. The mud is what we walk upon. But everything that begins as life, including the trees and the flowers and the animals and the humans, not the clouds, not the rocks, not the elements, are life coming from above and infusing downward, melding us to the material of the Demiurge. That’s what brings consciousness.

The Demiurge thinks he is God. The Demiurge thinks he is the Creator—and he is the creator of the heavens and the Earth, but only the physical material parts–the quantum foam, the subatomic particles, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, all of that. The aggregates of the minerals, all of the dead, rocky places, belong to the Demiurge. So in Gnostic terminology, I would say that the categorical error of consciousness versus material is the categorical difference between the emanations of consciousness, top down, flowing down into this universe—that’s one category. The computer, the mirror, the pool of Narcissus, those are a different category. That is result of the Fall. That is not a top down phenomenon and that is why those things do not have their own intrinsic consciousness. Therefore, AI won’t come alive. AI is going to be a really great mimic, a really great mirror, a very smooth pool into which Narcissus stares longingly. But it is not consciousness. It is not alive. They’re different categories in philosophy. So that’s what a categorical error is.

And we’ve gone all the way from Pembroke through Hart and on into the Tripartite Tractate in today’s episode. I hope this isn’t too philosophical for you. I hope it’s not too heavy. I hope you get it. I don’t like math talk very much. I don’t like philosophy talk, talking about things like categorical errors, but a lot of people do. And so that’s one take on consciousness. Until next week, onward and upward and God bless.

A preview copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate is available exclusively through my storefront at lulu.com:

A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate (lulu.com)

Do you know that there is a difference between salvation through works and salvation through grace? People tend to think they can purify their souls to such an extent that they will be able to earn their ticket to heaven or, as I like to say, stick the landing in Paradise when they pass over.

You know, according to this gospel I’ve been unfolding here at Gnostic Insights, we continually come back to Earth until we remember the Father and our home in Heaven with the Aeons. It is the memory of the Father, or gnosis, that enables us to leave this material plane and stay in the ethereal. The ethereal plane doesn’t have any error; it doesn’t contain any sin or misunderstandings. The ethereal plane of the Fullness of God is the Fullness of the Father and the Fullness is all of the possible expressions of the Son of the Father. The Son is the monad that encapsulates all of the qualities of the Father, like the bucket dipped into the sea. The Father, the Son, and the Fullness all possess the same qualities—that is why they are considered a 3-in-1 entity, and the Son and the Fullness flow from the Father as the originating source of consciousness.

The Father is all good. The Father is not a black and white, some good, some bad, gotta be balanced, Yin/Yang kind of God–that is not what the Gnostic God is. The Gnostic God is love and light, and in him is no darkness at all. Our goal here on Earth isn’t to perfectly straddle light and dark. Our goal here on Earth is to move into the light. And the only way we can follow the light is by giving glory to the God above all gods. We align ourselves with the will of God by giving glory to the Father, the Son, and the All. We can’t move into the light by performing certain rituals. That was one of the mistakes that, for example, Martin Luther made when he was a young man. He was terrified of dying in sin and going to hell, as were all the Catholics of those days, because there wasn’t any way to have a relationship with God on a one to one basis; all of the relationships with God were expected to go through the priesthood and the Pope, and it cost money to have your sins forgiven. Martin Luther spent hours every day in confession to his priest, just in case he overlooked any sin in his life that would send him to hell if he should happen to die that day. Paying money for redemption was a grift that the Catholic church was pulling in those days. What Martin Luther did was to recognize it as a grift, that is, to see it as a con game meant to convince people that, unless they gave the church money, they were going to go to hell. It was an extortion by Rome to raise money. But extortion is not faith. It’s not an expression of free will. It’s coercion through fear, in much the same way that our current political masters attempt to coerce us through fear and intimidation to follow lock step in their demands.

I just read an interesting biography of Martin Luther by Eric Metaxas, and it’s a pretty good biography. In case you don’t know, Martin Luther was the person who pried Christianity from the clutches of the Catholic Church. The major branches of Christianity today are Catholic and Protestant. Protestant means “those who protest,” because it arose as a reaction to the overreach and abuses of the Catholic Church. The biography I read paints a clear picture of the pressure that Luther was under as he was a young priest and monk coming up in the ranks of Catholicism. In those days, people didn’t read the Bible. Most had never even seen a Bible. Even monks and priests had never read the Bible. So that was the first thing that differentiated Martin Luther from his compatriots—he read the Bible and they didn’t. They didn’t know what the gospel was. They only knew the rules and practices dictated by the Pope and his enforcers. It was against the Law for an ordinary person like you and me to read the Bible. Why? For one thing, there is nothing in the Bible that says salvation comes through paying priests money to forgive us our sins. If the people had been allowed to read the Bible, they would have discovered that salvation comes through Christ and through Christ alone.

So it is funny to me that, in this day and age, 500 hundred years past the Protestant Reformation where Luther made it possible for Christians to read the Gospel for themselves, we Christian Gnostics have a similar opportunity to research Gnostic scriptures for ourselves, just like Martin Luther did with the Bible. These Gnostic scriptures were purposely cut out of the New Testament by the Pope and the Emperor of Rome because they lessened their power and control over the people. So, in much the same way that Luther was able to read the Bible for the first time and translate it into the common tongue so that people could read it for themselves, which was German for him because they lived in Germany, we now have the same privilege and blessing to be able to read for ourselves the Gnostic Gospel that was cut out of the faith by the Pope’s Council of Nicea seventeen hundred years ago.

I’m finding that there’s a great deal of confusion about what it means to be a modern Gnostic. I often say here at Gnostic Insights that gnosis involves remembering that we come from the consciousness of the Father, that we are part of that emanation of the Father through the Son, and then through the Fullness of God. And that we living creatures are the fruit of these Fullnesses; we are literally the fruit of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. We are like seeds or like spores of these Aeons that have come down to this material plane, which is not the ethereal plane where the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirits of the Fullness of God dwell.

Up there, in the ethereal plane, it’s all good, because it is the Fullness of God, and God is all good. Sin and error cannot, by definition, arise within the Fullness of God. The misunderstandings—the sin—come from the Fall, not from the Father. And I believe that the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi is an extremely important Christian scripture that needs to be put back into the New Testament, and that is actually what I’m attempting to do here at Gnostic Insights. It is a kind of a Gnostic Reformation that furthers the Lutheran Reformation. Now we can be part of a Gnostic Reformation that furthers the work of Christ and the Father here on Earth.

It is very important for us to understand that we don’t need to perform certain rituals in order to work our way up into the ethereal plane. We don’t have to be perfect under the Law. Luther discovered that fact when he studied the Bible, and it released him from his obsession with obtaining perfection through confession and works. Today I’m going to read you some verses from the New Testament that clearly state you don’t have to be perfect under the Law in order to earn enlightenment. “The Law” refers to the commandments handed down through Moses and the Hebrew nation in the Old Testament that they were required to keep. The Law of the Old Testament includes not only the Ten Commandments, but hundreds of other laws that regulate morals, religious observances, and social structures like marriage and property law.

It is well known that people are not able to keep the commandments—they serve more as a measurement of one’s need for mercy and redemption than a rule book that can be perfectly followed.

In Ephesians chapter 2, verse eight says, “For by grace are ye saved through faith and that not of ourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.” Works means doing good deeds. It means helping your neighbor. Mowing the old lady’s lawn next door. Going out of your way to do favors for people. These are works intended not only to help others, but to raise you in virtue—to earn Brownie points that raise you in elevation in the eyes of God. But guess what? Even that’s not good enough. It’s never good enough, because we’re not perfect.

And why aren’t we perfect? Well, if you’ve been listening to Gnostic Insights and you’ve heard this series or read my book called “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate,” you know that we are literally melded to this Fallen world by these material bodies we possess. A criticism of Gnosticism that I often read in the footnotes of books, even in that Luther biography as a footnote in the margins, as well as the margin notes of this New Testament translation I’ve been using by David Bentley Hart, is that Gnostics are “world haters.” The heresiologists, that is, the heresy denouncers of Christendom, present a false version of Gnosticism in their critiques. The Gnosticism the heresiologists rail against is a straw dog—it’s not true Gnosticism. We are very familiar with false narratives nowadays in our current political climate. Each side misrepresents the other side in order to magnify differences and to stir up hatred and division. This same phenomenon of false narratives—misinformation—has been used against Gnostics for almost two thousand years.

Gnostics are not world haters or Christ haters. But we do believe that sin entered the world far before Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve did not bring evil into the otherwise perfect world represented by the Garden of Eden. We are not sinners because we humans have inherited sin from Adam and Eve, despite what orthodox Christianity teaches. Human error arises from ignorance of our ethereal origins and the never-ending war with the Deficiency. We sin because, when we’re in these material bodies, we are blinded by the density of matter. Can you see through a wall? I’m sitting here facing the wall that goes into my garage and I know that my car is parked in the garage and all kinds of boxes are stacked in there. Can I see through the wall? No, of course not. Why not? Is it because I’m sinful? No, it’s because there is material in the wall. It’s because of the molecules and the atoms that create density through which I cannot see. Sometimes people have out of body experiences or experiences within the spirit, where you are out of your material body and there you are able to see through and pass through those walls. But that is not our normal condition and, in the context of this material cosmos, I don’t think we can aspire to that condition.

Many earnest people seem to believe that we can divorce ourself from our material body by meditation, prayer, or psychedelics, and achieve pure spirituality here on Earth. Yet who among us has such a strong will that they are able to resist all temptation and never sin under the Law? If that is what we must aspire to in order to reach enlightenment, that’s going to leave just about everybody else behind. Is that what you want? That only you are good enough to make it to Heaven? Do you see the impossibility of that being the system designed by the Father to bring people home? Do you think the Father expects only mystics and perfect people to return to the Fullness? No, that is not a loving attitude to leave everybody else behind. The Father, being all love, does not leave anyone behind.

Do you know that joke where you’re running away from a bear in the forest with your friend? You don’t have to outrun the bear to escape, you just have to outrun your friend. That’s the attitude of people, it seems to me, who think they can become so purified that they’re good enough to enter the perfection of Heaven through their own efforts. Surely, they can see that they are so much better, so much more loving, than their neighbors—surely, they think, they have earned their passport to Heaven. Except, that isn’t the way it works.

Getting to Heaven is a gift. It is freely given by the Father through the Christ. You receive this gift through faith. Again, quoting Ephesians: “For by grace are ye saved through faith and that not of ourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.”

Here in chapter 3 of the letter to the Romans, verse 10, it says, “As it has been written, there is no one righteous—not even one. There is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away; they have together become useless. There is no one practicing kindness, there is not even one.” Ah, well, then. Are we all going to go to hell? Because here’s the thing; now follow the logic here. Follow the logic. The ethereal plane is all good. The Fullness of God represents all of the attributes of the perfection of God—perfection only—for there is no sin in God. We come from the Fullness of God. We are the fruit of the Fullness of God and the Fullness of God is all good. There is no sin in the Fullness of God. So, if we are the fruit of the Fullness of God, then at the end of days, after the big roll up, when the density of the material cosmos passes away and God calls everyone home, who will be qualified to go home? Only mystics and saints? Hardly.

Everybody will go home. Every fruit of God is going to come home because we are of God, and in order for the Fullness of God to become full again, we all need to go home. You see how this makes sense, right? How could the Fullness of God leave 90% of itself down on the earth or send 90% of itself to eternal damnation? Then it wouldn’t be the Fullness of God anymore, would it? It would be the 10% of God. God would be diminished to a fraction of itself. You know, it says at the beginning of the Tripartite Tractate when talking about the attributes of the Father that the Father is immutable. This means the Father cannot be changed. The Father didn’t come from anywhere and the Father is not going anywhere different. The Father doesn’t start out as one thing and then become a different thing.

And if the Aeons of the Fullness are each particularized parts of the Father, each with their own point of view and each with their own little ego—if the Fullness of God consists of the variables of the Father—then how can they not be made whole again? How can they not be returned to their Fullness again, with Logos and the Demiurge and all of their fruits redeemed and restored? Because then that would mean that the Father had changed. It would mean that the Father is not immutable and the Father can be changed by things that happen here in the cosmos. And that simply cannot be the case because it’s an a priori statement that the Father doesn’t change. Therefore, everything that emanates from the Father must be able to be fully recalled back into the Father.

To me, that is the logic behind universal salvation. Everyone will be saved because the Father can’t leave anyone behind. The Father can’t send anyone to hell. The Father is not going to condemn anyone to eternal damnation because then the Father would never be made whole again. And that is not in the Father’s nature. At the end of days, at the end of the material cosmos, everybody’s going to find themselves back up into Logos, back up into the Fullness, back up into the Son, back up into the Father in that nested and fractal way. Do you understand what I’m saying?  We can use logic to figure this out; we don’t even have to go into all of the particular scriptures that say it over and over again.

And that’s what makes us Gnostic Christians, because we are able to apply logic and gnosis in a way not available to Catholics and Protestants. We are Gnostic Christians because we realize that all we need to know is that we come from the Father, as when Jesus said, “I and my Father are one. If you see me, you see my Father.”  Like Jesus, we also come from the Father, but Jesus was fully aware of it. He walked in the spotlight of glory. He walked in the holy beam of the light of the Holy Spirit at all times, without fail. That is what it means when we say Jesus lived a sinless life. His human side was wedded to the material, as are we. But Jesus was fully cognizant of the Holy Spirit at all times, and this kept him centered within the Fullness of God. Therefore, his material flesh did not lead him to error.

We, on the other hand, don’t live every moment fully centered in the holiness of God. Once in a while we give glory and step into it and then we feel the presence of God. We may even perform miracles at those times. But the world sneaks back in. The world brings us back down, and next thing you know, we’re yelling at our neighbor or cursing the foolishness of the other political party. So it’s very hard to stay within the glory beam of the Father and to pass away while we are within the glory beam of the Father. Therefore, the Christ and the 3rd order of powers was created to assist us. The Christ possesses all of the mojo of the entire Father, Son, and Fullness of God and the undifferentiated ALL. They all put their hearts and minds together as one and prayed for redemption for us, for the 2nd order of powers. And that redemption comes to us through the Christ.

So if you reject the notion of needing a Christ, well, right there, you’re full of yourself. If you reject the Christ because you believe in the strength of your Ego more than the Christ’s, then you’re not on the glory beam. Think about it. We need the pattern of Christ’s human inheritance plus the Father’s perfection and love to overlay upon our souls. This lends us the perfection of Christ that redeems us from the karma and memes we have generated. That is the way to achieve full enlightenment.

I started this episode by reading the letter to Romans, chapter 3, verse 10. Here it is again: “As it has been written, there is no one righteous—not even one. There is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away; they have together become useless. There is no one practicing kindness, there is not even one.” Skipping ahead to verses 22 through 31 from Hart’s translation, “And, by the faithfulness of the Anointed [Jesus], God’s justice is for everyone [as well as upon everyone] keeping the faith; for there is no distinction: For all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, Being made upright as a gift by his grace, through the manumission fee paid in the Anointed One, Jesus: Whom God set forth as a place of atonement through faith in his blood, as a demonstration of his justice through the dismissal of past sins… Where, therefore, the boasting? It has been excluded. By what law? That of observances? No, rather by faith’s law. For we reckon a man as vindicated by faithfulness, apart from observances of Law… Do we then abolish Law through faith? Let it not be so! Rather, we establish it.”

So, then, the one act of righteousness that redeems all humankind also takes place through a single Aeon—that Aeon being the Christ that is God in Human form. “Manumission” means “release from slavery.” Faith in Christ releases us from slavery to the Demiurge. “Redemption” means “paying the price to retrieve goods,” like getting things back from a pawn shop. We second order powers have been redeemed from the material world. We are no longer slaves. We are only here waiting to be picked up from the pawn shop to go home.

The Law of Moses, the law of the Old Testament—the 10 Commandments and then all of the other laws added to those in the Old Testament and the Torah, were never meant to free us from this material world. The Law was meant to bind us in slavery to it. And while these Laws are given by what conventional Christians and Jews call “God,” in our Gnostic system of belief, we tend to think the Law was given by the fallen Demiurge to put us on a treadmill of enslavement. Because we know that no one can live up to the Law. You can’t ever hope to fulfill the Law if you are a man who looks upon a woman with lust in your heart—for the Law says that you’ve already committed adultery with them in your mind and you’ll be condemned to hell for doing so. The same thing goes for other people’s possessions. The Law says “Don’t covet your neighbors possessions.” Covet means wanting. Means wishing you had it. Isn’t advertising all about stirring up covetousness? And how about all these selfies posted to social media? Are they not meant to make you covet what that person has? Oh, well, then you’re going to hell, according to the Law. So that’s what this verse is talking about. Those are just two of the commandments. The actual purpose of the Law isn’t to give us a guidebook so that we can be perfectly moral folks. It’s to show how sinful we are that we can’t possibly live up to the Law.

OK, all you good Christians—are you observing the Sabbath? That is one of the Ten Commandments. As the Orthodox Jews do, and as the 7th Day Adventists do, but none of the Catholics and none of the other Protestant denominations observe the Saturday Sabbath, which means you’re not to do any work on the Sabbath. And by the way, the Sabbath is apparently supposed to be on Saturday, not Sunday. You’re supposed to spend the entire day not lifting a finger. You’re supposed to spend the entire day in prayer, and reading Holy books. You are allowed to make love if you’re married because the marriage bed is a sacrament and so, lucky you. But you’re not supposed to spend the day surfing the Internet. Or watching television or going to the movies or mowing your lawn or going to Little League games. That’s all enough breaking of the Law right there to keep you from going to Heaven.

No, we need the Christ in order to forgive the sins that we know we are committing, as well as the ones we may be unaware of. Therefore, we need to realize that we need the Christ to redeem us, despite our sins. As it says in First Corinthians 15:22: “For just as in Adam all die, so also in the Anointed all will be given life.” This verse says that sin reigns in death, meaning not physical death like we usually think of death, but death as ignorance of the Father, death as the dominion of the material cosmos. In other words, this world is reigned by death, whereas the Fullness of the Aeons is gnosis, life, righteousness, and love.

We’ll talk more about this in future podcasts, but please, what I’d like you to take away from this one is that we need faith in the Savior, the Anointed, having been sent from the Fullness of God for us. So there’s no downside to having faith in the Christ. There’s no downside at all. Have faith. And it is through this faith and the grace given to you that you will find yourself not wanting to sin. Sins lose their allure when you have the Christ dwelling within you. The glory of God, the peace and happiness given by the Christ, far outweighs the temporary highs from sin. A personal relationship with Jesus as the Christ is available to everyone who prays for redemption and invites him in.

Please, I’d like to hear your comments. I don’t have them opened at the end of these podcasts, but if you would like to comment, please go to the website home page for GnosticInsights.com  and use the contact me form and send me a letter and I’ll write you back. God bless us all. Keep the faith. Onward and upward.

Please join me in spreading this Gnostic Gospel far and wide. Do you know that I have no one helping me put out these podcasts, other than my brother’s stellar feedback on each episode? I write, record, and edit the audio all by myself. If Gnostic Insights had some cashflow, I’d hire an editing company to do the technical editing portion for me. I purposely don’t allow advertising on this podcast or website because this space trusts only in God and you, the listeners.

Part Two of my interview with fellow Gnostic, Scott S. Smith. We discuss Scott’s pragmatic gnosticism and his books, “God Reconsidered: Searching for Truth in the Battle Between Atheism and Religion” and “The Soul of Your Pet: Evidence for the Survival of Animals After Death.” Scott is a much-published freelance journalist who specializes in travel and business articles. He attends the Ecclesia Gnostica Church in Los Angeles and has appeared many times on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, as well as a slew of other Gnostic podcasts. Scott’s understanding of Gnostic history and practice is extensive.

In this portion of the interview, Scott explains why he doubts popular and historic notions of reincarnation, and Cyd gently disagrees. We also go into Scott’s view of Gnostic Christianity, which he describes in pragamatic terms of ethics and compassion, ritual and service. His approach to living a spiritual life is quite different from the theology-based gnosis we mine here at Gnostic Insights, and from the Mormonism he learned as a child. Scott also shares some of the miracles and synchronicities he and his wife are regularly blessed with.

Modern Gnostics are generally non-dogmatic, feeling that each person experiences their own path to gnosis. While I agree that each person needs to mine their own gnosis, I hasten to point out that doesn’t mean there is no Absolute Truth.

You can read more about Scott at his “God Reconsidered” facebook page.

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