Gnostic Insights

Our particular pattern of Aeonic traits formed each of our individual personalities and egoic identities from our inception. We are all unique Second Order Powers reflecting our own Aeonic inheritance. This was determined in the Aeonic realm, prior to any physical instantiation. In terms of the often-asked question regarding “nature” or “nurture,”  nature is our Aeonic inheritance, and nurture is our Ego-generated memes, karma, and entanglements.

Our personalities reflect our heavenly or Aeonic inheritance, and that includes both our Self and our originating Egos. It is our Egos that go about this world interfacing with others and collecting memes. Our Egos are all different, whereas our Selfs are all the same. My Ego is only concerned with me, because that is the job of Ego—to take care of and serve the needs of my body. This function of Ego is selfish, but not inherently bad, naughty, or evil; it’s the Ego doing its job.

My governing unit of consciousness is identical to the universal unit of consciousness, which in Gnosticism we would call the Son and the Pleroma of the Son. I also hold countless fractals of that perfect originating consciousness within myself and my body.

Ego is like a garment that we wear. Ego is a garment that is cast over our Selves. Ego is like a vessel that contains a shadow outlining my Self’s unit of consciousness. Underneath this garment of “me” resides a perfect fractal of the originating units of consciousness, and that is known as my Self–Self with a capital S. Other people often call this Self the Spirit.  

Our bodies are an entire galaxy of units of consciousness at smaller fractal scales. Their activities and their karma aggregate upward in the higher the fewer manner, as they level up to eventually form my body’s karmic record of health and disease. They operate in a parallel world of smaller lives, inside of our bodies. As their messages aggregate upwards to the organ level, we begin to notice their communication and demands for food, sex, and other macro-scale activities.

The life of a cell is about as complex as any of our lives. The machinery within a cell is extremely complicated and interactive, and it operates according to the Simple Golden Rule of sharing information, assistance, and love for the betterment of all—in this case, our bodies. There is a marvelous animation on YouTube called “The Inner Life of a Cell.” If you go to the Gnostic Insights dot com website to view the transcript of this episode, you will find the link to the video. (8) Inner Life Of A Cell – Full Version.mkv – YouTube  The “Inner Life of a Cell” video illustrates the incredible complexity and apparent awareness of cells. You just gotta love those motor proteins! Watch the video and you will see what I mean.

Our gnosis embraces the entire run of the gnostic cosmology because we share the same values and structure as the Aeons that live in the Fullness of God. Their nature is the same as our nature because we are their fruits. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. My Self’s unit of consciousness is sitting on top of a fractal galaxy of hierarchically arranged units of consciousness, all working together to instantiate my body. While I may believe I am the only conscious soul inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, and each unit of consciousness has their own job to perform, each lives their own life, and they all lay down their own karmic record. And this holds true even when the fractal is no more than a cell or an organ. Within my body, countless units of consciousness of varying levels of complexity work together to keep my body alive and fully functional.

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

Simply put, gnosis is the realization that we come from above and that our Father is in Heaven and to Heaven we shall return. That’s all. Gnosis requires us to step down from the throne of Ego and the meme shroud of the imitation that we cling to and are trapped in to better reveal the light of God that shines from within. That’s all.

You cannot be taught gnosis. You must discover it for yourself. What we’re doing here at Gnostic Insights is opening your mind so that you remember the gnosis that already lies within your One Self. You do not need to memorize this gnostic cosmology or the names of various characters we discuss here. You don’t need to punish yourself with sacrificial acts to achieve righteousness. You need only to remember and acknowledge the inherent, immortal consciousness that flows from the Father.

The Father … “made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them, which is his beloved Son. … the one who is properly called “Savior” and “the Redeemer” and “the Well-Pleasing one” and “the Beloved,” “the one to whom prayers have been offered” and “the Christ” and “the Light of those appointed,” in accordance with the ones from whom he was brought forth, since he has become the names of the positions which were given to him. Yet, what other name may be applied to him except “the Son,” as we previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father, whom he wanted them to know?”

This passage says that the united prayers of the ALL, the Aeons, and Logos manifested the Christ.  The Christ is the Son of the Father made tangible, bringing full knowledge of the Son whom the Father wanted us to know.

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

The “army of Christ” was emanated with the face of every single Aeon so that we might each recognize and personally relate to the Christ. Remember, the Logos Who Fell had a little fractal version of every one of the faces of the Aeons within his Pleroma and when he fell his fractal images cast shadows and phantoms of the Aeons that became the inverted, apparent substance of this universe.

We living creatures are the Second Order of Powers, sent down to bring life into a dead cosmos. We are caught in a never-ending war with the shadows of the Fall. The Third Order Powers bring us the salvation of the Christ.

When the Christ was produced, his Pleroma became a true representation of the pre-existent beings of the thought of those who give glory to the Father. Because of this, there is a piece of light for every piece of darkness, a piece of life for every piece of death, and there is redemption for every Second Order Power that dwells on the material plane. There is also redemption for the Demiurge who rules this cosmos.

What accepting the Christ now does for you is that it opens the door for the Third Order Powers to enter and redeem your egoic soul. This power makes it possible to live a joyous and virtuous life. It allows the love of the Father to flow through you and out into the world. And it eases your transition after the physical death of your body, so you may enter the afterlife without fear, knowing that you rest in the Pleroma of the Christ.

The complete transcript of these episodes is available for reading under the tab “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel” at gnosticinsights.com, if you prefer reading to listening.

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

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

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

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

In the previous episode, we heard how the fallen Aeon named  Logos unexpectedly found himself in a new dimension referred to as the deficiency or the imitation. This dimension resembles the dreams of the Aeons of the Fullness, but in a knock-off type of inferior form. The imitation is all shadows and mirrors without truth or life. Logos was horrified by what had emerged from him as shadows and phantoms of his glorious Pleroma.

The manifestation of our universal space and the apparent matter contained within it was caused by the movement of Logos–the Fall. It was the shadows of the Pleroma of Logos that emerged to form this universe.

When Logos stopped trying to bully the shadows away, he turned from the presumptuous, egoic thought that had caused it all and began to remember his Self and the Father and his brothers in the Fullness. This remembrance allowed Logos to return home.

Logos and the Fullness began to produce a new offspring designed to “upset those who were in the defect.” This fruit is called the Second Order of Powers and it differed from both the original Aeons of the Fullness and the shadows of the deficiency. Whereas those of the deficiency arose from the egoic thought that led Logos to overreach and fall, “those of the remembrance” arose from Logos having the good thought of the Father and the Fullness. Those of the deficiency represent phantoms and confusion, whereas the new fruit, the Second Order Powers, are filled with the Holy Spirit that confers the consciousness and life of the Father.

We Second Order Powers come from the Fullness above. Logos emanated us with all of the inherent virtues of the Fullness that arise from “harmony and mutual love.” We have a pre-disposition to seek and pray to the Father and we are born with a thought and idea of the One Consciousness of which we are all a part.  We are designed to work together in “unity and unanimity,” which mirrors the Simple Golden Rule. 

And now a strange and tragic thing occurred. It turns out that when those of the remembrance came upon those of the imitation, they attempted to overthrow them out of an inherent sense of self-righteousness because, after all, the Second Order Powers are from “the good thought,” and the deficiency is not. The tragedy of what occurred next in this unfolding gnostic cosmogeny still affects us today, for no sooner did the Second Order of Powers begin manifesting on the material stage, they found themselves in mortal combat with the shadows of the imitation.

The Tripartite Tractate says that the Second Order Powers “fought against the order of those of the likeness, while the order of those of the likeness wages war against the representations and acts against it alone, because of its wrath.”

“The two orders assaulted one another, fighting for command because of their manner of being. As a result, they were submerged in forces and natures in accord with the condition of mutual assault, having lust for power and all other things of this sort. It is from these that the vain love of glory draws all of them to the desire of the lust for power, while none of them has the exalted thought nor acknowledges it…”

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I mentioned on the audio of this podcast that I would post the link to my new interview with Tessa Lena on her substack podcast, Tessa Fights Robots. Hers is a video podcast, so you can watch as well as listen if you would like.

Unusual Podcast Episode: A Conversation with Cyd Ropp (substack.com)

Now on with this week’s Gnostic Insights podcast. As you know, I am repeating the Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel episodes that we completed in November of 2022. You can find all 21 episodes of that series at gnosticinsights.com under the Tab labeled A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospels. We’re in the process of reviewing that gnosis to give you an opportunity to understand it better this time around. I am also working now on the book version that will be published soon. For new listeners, if you are joining us for the first time you may want to back up 7 episodes to the beginning of this review cycle, or go to that tab I mentioned on the Gnostic Insights website to catch up.

“After he was amazed at the beauty of the ones who had appeared to him, he professed gratitude for this visitation. The Logos performed this activity, through those from whom he had received aid, for the stability of those who had come into being because of him and so that they might receive something good, since he thought to pray for the organization of all those who came forth from him, which is stabilized, so that it might make them established. Therefore, those whom he intentionally produced are in chariots, just as those who came into being, those who have appeared, so that they might pass through every place of things which are below, so that each one might be given the place which is constituted as he is.”

This word “chariots” is interesting and often talked about. People wonder who and what came in chariots and what their mission was. This verse says that the Second Order Powers that Logos intentionally produced were sent down in chariots “so that they might pass through every place of things which are below, so that each one might be given the place which is constituted as he is.” Chariots means vessels, which people sometimes interpret as space ships, for example, which would mean that the Second Order Power are ETs. That would be an example of a modern mythological interpretation currently making the rounds.

My interpretation of chariots is not mythological, but biological. Every living creature is composed of cells. These cells are contained within their own boundaries called cell walls. I believe the most straight-forward interpretation of the chariots of the Second Order Powers is that the chariots are their own, individual boundaries that contain them and hold the life within: cell walls. Every living organism on the planet begins with a cellular mechanism contained within a vessel wrapped in a cell wall. Cells are small and additive. They fulfill what the verse says: they “pass through every place of things which are below, so that each one might be given the place which is constituted as he is.” In other words, every organism builds itself up through cells that develop into a creature “constituted as he is.”

The newly produced offspring of the Logos were patterned after the original Aeons of the Fullness; they are fractals of Aeons and fractal iterations of Logos. The First Order of Powers were the original Aeons of the Fullness. The Second Order of Powers is the fruit of Logos when he remembered his brothers in the Fullness and the Father. Because Logos was within the Boundary as he remembered, his new Pleroma was adapted to the shape of the Boundary. This alteration of the Second Order of Powers to come out of Logos enabled them to work cooperatively with each other to develop an ecology similar to the economy of the Fullness but fitted into the Boundary. As explained in the previous chapter, if the cosmos were an infinitely unbounded space, cooperative structures could not be formed because a Boundary is needed to push things together and hold them in relationship.

 These new Powers were given the ability and desire to wonder about their being and origins. They were also given the ability to think logically and to reason. And, just as importantly, they were given the harmony and mutual love needed to implement the Simple Golden Rule of selfless cooperation.

And here I would like to drop in this reminder that we humans and every living creatures on the planet, from bacteria on through the plants, insects, birds, fishes, and all animals including us, we are these Second Order Powers, fitted into the Boundary. And therefore, because “as above, so below,” everything that I am saying about the Second Order Powers applies to us. We were also given the ability to think logically and to reason. And we were given the harmony and mutual love to implement the Simple Golden Rule of selfless cooperation. And this is also why we wonder about our being and our origins.

The Second Order of Powers is also known as “the emissions of the remembrance.” Emissions is another word for emanations, and it refers to the origin of our consciousness. The Second Order of Powers was named the emissions of the remembrance because they were emissions of Logos, so they channeled the consciousness of the Father. The Second Order Powers embody the originating consciousness of the Father, passed down through the Son and the Fullness of God and on into Logos as he remembered his place and origin. They are also called emissions of remembrance because the Self imbedded in every Second Order Power remembers that they come from the Father.

Logos Fell because his egoic striving lead him away from the Fullness of God. He immediately recognized his mistake and tried to correct it on his own, but he couldn’t stuff the genie back in the bottle and the deficiency spread.

Logos came to a new understanding of the situation and he realized the hopelessness of correcting it on his own. Once he realized this, Logos was able to remember the Aeons of the Fullness—those things that exist—and he responded to a prayer for “the one who had converted himself to the good” offered by the Aeons on his behalf to bring him home.

The Pleroma of Logos was fully restored through remembering the One source of consciousness and the Fullness of God. The fractal body of Logos as images of the Fullness was restored; only his presumptuous Ego was left behind in the simulation.

As Logos retreated to its own in the Fullness, the Father placed a Boundary around the area containing that which had been produced as a consequence of the Fall. The purpose of this Boundary was to separate finitude from infinity, ignorance from truth, and light from darkness.

Another essential purpose of the Boundary was to establish an “economy” for a system about to unfold. The Boundary was established so that a hierarchy patterned after the Fullness would have space to take root and grow. The arrangement of the Hierarchy of the Fullness shows up throughout creation. Every small thing in our universe reaches out laterally to others to form clumps or aggregations of the next level up. Subatomic particles form atoms, atoms form molecules, molecules form elements. Elements form aggregations of building materials, always according to the Simple Golden Rule of the higher the fewer. This is why hierarchies look like pyramids at each level of aggregation–there are fewer instances of things forming the next level up.

The Demiurge is the creator god of this universe we live in. To faithful Hebrews and Christians, the name of the Demiurge is Yahweh or Jehovah. Other world religions have other names for this creator god. Stories of Jehovah fill the Old Testament and carry forward into the New Testament. However, an interesting thing about gnosticism is the declaration that there is another God who is called the Father–the God Above All Gods in gnostic theology. And in gnostic Christianity, the God Above All Gods is actually the Father to whom Jesus prayed. When Jesus said, “I and my Father are One,” and, “If you have seen me, you have seen my Father,” the God he is referring to is not Jehovah; the God Jesus is referring to is the God Above All Gods.

Logos appointed an Archon to bring order to the chaos. This Archon is what we call the Demiurge. The Demiurge is able to control matter. “The things which he has spoken he does.” The book of Genesis attributes these actions of the Demiurge to Jehovah when it says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”

The Demiurge works in a very different manner than the Fullness of God. The Pleroma of the Aeons in the Fullness metaphorically hold hands with one another as they share information, love, and assistance, and together they dream of Paradise.

The way the Demiurge brings order to its creation is through strings of power. The Demiurge strictly controls everything in our material portion of the universe using strong strings of power, like a puppet master. In chemistry and physics these strings of power are called valances and bonds–the bonds that hold the chemistry together. Those are literally the bonds of the Demiurge. The material, rocky parts of our universe do not have free will. They are simply extensions of the Ego that is the Demiurge.

Yet, Logos in the Fullness does have an influence on his fractured Ego down below. The Tripartite Tractate says that, “The Logos uses him as a hand, to beautify and work on the things below, and he uses him as a mouth, to say the things which will be prophesied.” So it is not as though our material universe is unable to be influenced by Logos in the Fullness; it is simply that the Demiurge does not realize the origin of these pre-existent images and so thinks it is the author of these great works.

It came to pass that the Aeon named Logos mistook himself for the original Pleroma of the Son of God, confusing the small, fractal copies within himself for the Totality of the Fullness. Feeling the fullness of glory within himself, Logos decided to give glory to the source of his awakening and launched himself from the Hierarchy in an attempt to reconnect with the Father. Logos believed his personal will was sufficient to reach the Father without adding the will of the united Fullness to his own.

As Logos reached for the Father, Logos stumbled and fell, shattering himself to bits. We refer to this as the original Fall. It’s not Eve handing Adam an apple in the garden of Eden. This is the Fall: Logos reaching for the Father, stumbling, and falling.

“His self-exaltation and his expectation of comprehending the incomprehensible became firm for him and was in him. But the sicknesses followed him when he went beyond himself, having come into being from self-doubt, namely from the fact that he did not the glories of the Father, the one whose exalted status is among things unlimited.”

The division of the deeply troubled Logos was the first manifestation of Ego acting outside of the will of the One Self and the Fullness. The Fall was caused by an act of Ego falling away from the Self. The Tripartite Tractate calls the Ego “presumptuous thought.” And isn’t that what egoic thought is? It’s presumptuous, meaning going beyond what is right and proper. Egoic thought places the focus of thought on one’s own desires without regard to others. What am I going to do? Presumptuous thought is all about me, me, me. The Aeons of the Fullness are not me types of creatures. The Aeons all live for one another: “All for one, and one for all.”

Ego is the designation of individual points of view. For Aeons, the Ego does not imply self-centeredness as we humans think of it, but simply the title for their names, stations, ranks, duties, and locations. Although the Aeons still dwelt within the single body of the Fullness, they were now each an independent Self with their own consciousness, identity, and will. Their variety required them to work together in order to remain in full agreement, for only through their union could they approach the Father’s greatness. Here at Gnostic Insights and at  A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything blog and book, we call that cooperative spirit and pattern The Simple Golden Rule.

The Simple Golden Rule says that in order to build something greater than any of us can build on our own, we need to reach out to our neighbors with love, information, and assistance to work together on a common project for the betterment of all. This pattern of cooperation is part of the Aeonic order, and we here in this universe have inherited this ability as a fractal pattern from above. It is our common Self and the Holy Spirit of love that enables individual Egos to work together for the betterment of all.

In Valentinian Gnosticism, Logos is the Aeon who fell. Verses 75 and 76 of the Tripartite Tractate describes the nature of Logos and how and why Logos fell. It is a unique feature of the Tripartite Tractate that the book does not describe the Fall in terms of sin and blame, but rather as an event that was destined to come about in order to usher in a “new economy” that differed from the ethereal Pleroma where the Aeons dwell.

This is our archetypal story, our pre-history as fruit of the Aeons. All this time we’ve been blaming the Fall on this ignorant, willful, Aeon Logos, but now the Tripartite Tractate is admitting that, honestly, it wasn’t without the knowledge and will of the Originator, of the great Father, because of course nothing on the ethereal plane exists without the Father’s will. We have inherited that will and it passed down through all of us creatures here below. The Father declared that it was fitting that “they should come into being,” and “they” is us. So we were part of the plan from the beginning. We were not accidents. We were not formed from a mistake.

By this point in the Tripartite Tractate, the Son comes to be referred to as the Father, because the Son is the Father of the Second Glory—the Aeons of the Fullness. We see here that the Son, although a singular monad, is still a unity of many Aeons. The Son becomes knowable through the innumerable properties and names of the Aeons. These functional identities include names like flower, tree, dog, human, even parts of living bodies who themselves are alive, like kidney cells.

The Aeons then arranged themselves into a hierarchy of “minds of minds, which are found to be words of words, elders of elders, degrees of degrees, which are exalted above one another. Each one of those who give glory has his place and his exaltation and his dwelling and his rest, which consists of the glory which he brings forth.”

The Aeons agreed on everything and they cooperated together to bring about a single dream of Paradise. You could note one difference between the ALL and the Fullness is that, while the ALL sings their songs in blissful unison, the Fullness sings their songs in perfectly tuned, multi-toned harmony.

In addition to their identities, the Aeons of the Fullness were all given wisdom, which is the ability to reason with logic and prudence. They were given a thirst to seek after the originating consciousness of their Creator and a desire to align themselves with the Father’s Will through the process of giving glory. And they were all creative geniuses, able to dream up a fully functioning mental Paradise where whatever they willed in the Father’s name happily happened. This dream of Paradise is our foretaste of heaven, shared by cultures around the world.