Gnostic Insights

Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.

Copyright 2022; all rights reserved

In our last episode, we began talking about Gnostic Psychology. This psychological approach has many roots in my thinking. It is not only based upon the Gnostic Gospel as I am interpreting it through the Tripartite Tractate book of the Nag Hammadi codices, but it is also based on concepts from my own “Simple Explanation” theory of everything. I have always been interested in psychology and have been fascinated by books on the human mind since I was a small child. This Gnostic psychology is also well-grounded by my formal education of a Bachelors of Science in Psychology, a Masters Degree in Counseling, and a Ph. D. in Communication, although very little of my psychological theory comes directly from those scholastic sources.

Additionally, and just as importantly, this psychology is based upon my own experiences as a clinical therapist and the clinical experiences of my brother, Dr. Bill Puett. Bill and I have been discussing the nature of personhood for many years. This psychology is the outgrowth of our combined educations and experiences of working with clients over scores of years. My brother and I are both unconventional practitioners who have always used an eclectic approach in our work that frees us to explore fresh pathways based upon “best practices” of treatment for each particular client. Neither of us has been constrained by adherence to traditional schools of thought and past masters of psychology.

I have always resonated to Jungian psychology, but my approach is not derived from Jung. Rather, I draw from the same original source that Jung drew from—the Gnostic Gospels. So, when I begin speaking about archetypes, these aren’t the archetypes of Jung’s depth psychology; they are the original Aeons of the Fullness found in the same Gnostic belief system from which Jung drew his inspiration. The same goes for Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, which was inspired by Jung’s life-long study of Gnostic material. It was only after the discovery of the Gnostic books uncovered from Nag Hammadi that Jung was able to find confirmation of his Gnostic-inspired depth psychology. Prior to the discovery of the Nag Hammadi, Jung learned of Gnosticism through Christian heresiologists such as Irenaeus of Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome who were dead-set against Gnosticism and only wrote about it in the negative. This is a sadly inverted manner of gaining gnosis, and Jung experienced great difficulty and angst in doing so. Jung was at last presented with the first translation of a Gnostic codex out of the Nag Hammadi books in 1951, making Jung the first scholar able to study and apply Gnostic teachings from the original source material. This Nag Hammadi codex is known as the Jung Codex and it contains several books, one of them being the Tripartite Tractate.

Near the end of his life, Jung himself said to a colleague, “The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neurosis, but rather with the approach to the numinous.” This Gnostic orientation of Jung’s depth psychology was problematic to the Jung Institute therapists following Jung’s death. They chose to suppress the Gnostic roots of Jungian psychology and buried his spiritual and alchemical writings in order to secure respectability for themselves and their Institute within the medical community.

In an article posted at gnosis.org, Stephan A. Hoeller, a Bishop of Ecclesia Gnostica, a neo-Gnostic church, is quoted as saying, “Our psychological nature (the microcosm) mirrors metaphysical nature (the macrocosm), thus Gnosticism may posses both a psychological and a religious authenticity. Gnostic psychology and Gnostic religion need not be exclusive of one another but may complement each other within an implicit order of wholeness. Gnostics have always held that divinity is immanent within the human spirit, although not limited to it. The convergence of Gnostic religious teaching with psychological insight is thus quite understandable in terms of time-honored Gnostic principles.”

I share this information about Jung with you as confirmation that psychology and the Gnostic Gospel go hand-in-hand. I assure you that I and my brother have not taken any of our theory from Jung himself, but have independently shared his path of gnosis to come to similar conclusions.

The last episode began by asking the following questions:

What is our psychology? Am I defined by my Ego? Or am I a spiritual Self independent of Ego? Am I a God? Am I an animal? Am I really conscious or am I random electrical fluctuations? Who am I? Do I have a soul and how is that different than a spirit? Is there a mind involved? What exactly is the Ego and how does it relate to my body and my spirit?  

This episode continues with answers to those same questions. If you haven’t yet listened to last week’s episode, I encourage you to do so. We are now on the 15th episode of our current series. You can begin the current series and fully catch up by going to the Gnostic Insights dot com home page and clicking on the Tab called “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.”  Links to all of those episodes may be found on that page. If you start at the first episode found at the Tab labelled A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, your path to understanding will be much easier. We’re pretty deep into Gnostic cosmology by this point, and this material is not easy. But,again, don’t worry, because this deep gnosis is good to know but not essential for your ultimate salvation. I remind you that all you need to realize is that we come from above and we will return to above. The Christ is taking care of rest. With that as a starting point, the gnosis will follow.

By now, if you have been listening to the Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel series from the beginning, you will be familiar with such concepts as “unit of consciousness,” “fractal units of consciousness,” “hierarchies,” “originating consciousness of the Father,” “toruses,” and, of course, the Gnostic Gospel cosmology and cosmogeny. If you are struggling with any of these concepts, please go back and review the series at that Gnostic Insights dot com tab I pointed out earlier. And I’d like to remind you that you may always reach out to me personally by using the Comments form at the Gnostic Insights website.

Now, let’s pick up where we left off last week.

We can think of a unit of consciousness as a perfect echo or waveform that is shaped exactly like the very first fractal iteration of the Father’s mind—the monad known as the Son. You could say that our universe is populated by fractal echoes of the Father’s primordial consciousness. Here at Gnostic Insights we called these units of consciousness the Self. The units of consciousness are all identical because they are all reflections of the Son’s initial unit of consciousness. If that is true, then why are we not identical to the Son and to one another? What makes me different from you?  The difference between us is based on a few simple principles.

First and foremost, each of our Selfs is an almost identical fractal of the Fullness of God. But, as is the case with DNA, although our master pattern is identical, not every facet is activated to the same extent in everyone, and the facets that are activated are turned on in different relative strengths. These facets of the Fullness are what we call the Aeons of the Fullness. Each Aeon represents a particular talent, name, function, power, and so forth, of the Son. If you imagine that golden pyramid I use to illustrate the Fullness, our unique personality reflects a slightly different pattern overlaid upon those glowing, golden balls. It’s like a stencil overlaid on top of the fractal Fullness—each one of us has a slightly different stencil obscuring the Fullness that allows a unique pattern of lights to show through.

Our particular, personalized pattern of Aeonic traits formed each of our individual 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. This individualized pattern and place is the beginning of our Egos. Egos are all different, whereas our Selfs are all the same.

You could call this core personality our heavenly or Aeonic inheritance, and that includes our originating Egos. Even the Aeons have Egos, but their Egos are not in the least bit self-centered or narcissistic, whereas our human Egos are self-serving because that is the job of Ego—to take care of and serve needs of the material body. It is the Ego that interacts with others and the with the world. This function of Ego is self-serving but not inherently bad, naughty, or evil. Even Aeons have Egos.

The Aeon’s Egos simply identify their names, positions, ranks, and duties in the Hierarchy of the Fullness. It is their Ego, or self-identity, that differentiates the Aeons of the Fullness from the pure beings of thought known as the ALL.

The Tripartite Tractate says that when the ALL became self-aware, they named themselves and sorted themselves into the Hierarchy—and that is when Ego arose. Aeonic Ego is nothing more than one’s identity, place, and function within the Fullness.  Even with their individualized Egoic identities, the Aeons of the Fullness are still able and willing to cooperate fully with one another to instantiate the Simple Golden Rule of sharing information, assistance, and love to produce something greater than any of them could make on their own. The first negative appearance of Ego was when Logos had the “presumptuous thought” that led to the Fall. And, because Logos was acting out of his isolated Ego when he overreached and fell, it is egoic overreaching that defines the motivation and behavior of the Demiurge and the shadows of the Fall.

Each of the units of consciousness that make up my body and my personality has their own duties and positions because each of these is also a fractal of the Fullness. Each of these units of consciousness has a part in the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God, and every thing in our universe knows how to do its job. Everything is endowed with the full knowledge of this universe, but it’s on a need to know basis. Every cell knows exactly how to be a cell. I wouldn’t know how to be a cell or a mitochondria or a bacteria; I don’t have a need-to-know. Nor would a cell or bacteria or mitochondria need to know how to be a human or a flower or a bee, because those parts are not activated in their Pleroma.

All of us Second Order Powers know exactly how to perform our own duties because we all come into this material existence with the necessary information and master pattern from the Fullness. Cells know their jobs and each organ in my body knows how to perform its job. The heart knows how to do the job of the heart, the stomach knows how to digest food. Everything in your body is a unit of consciousness and it is fully loaded with all of the information of the Fullness of God. But only its personal sphere of responsibility is unlocked. That’s what I mean by a need to know basis.

In the hierarchy of the Fullness of God and similarly, within the Pleroma of our bodies, we have every single type of unit of consciousness derived from the Hierarchy of the Son, from the cells on up through our governing Self unit of consciousness. Our governing Self sits on the top of our personal hierarchical Pleroma. We are all fractals. Within my body there are countless fractals of the Fullness of God, and each one of them is doing its job to keep me alive and walking around, because they are operating according to the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out and holding hands with their neighbors, and working together with information, with coherence, and with love to work for the betterment of all. I am the aggregate units of consciousness of my material body. I am also the self-aware governing unit of consciousness generated at conception. Like all units of consciousness, my governing Self came into this universe as a perfect echo of God’s mind. The job of this Self unit of consciousness is to oversee my body’s aggregated units of consciousness and to join with others at my hierarchical level of cooperation to build things.

Another factor that makes me different from you is the karma I have earned since my entry into this material world. We Second Order Powers all begin with a karma that is a blank slate of good intentions and virtue. Our karma does not earn any positive or negative consequences as an outgrowth of Ego until we are placed into this fallen world. At that point, our egoic behavior in the world creates a record of consequences of our behavior. Once our personal karma begins, the karma acts like a magnet to pull memes from our environment onto our Egos. Again, to remind you, memes as we use the expression refer to any unit of information, and the memes we resonate with the ones that attach to our Egos. Our Egos begin to look like a shroud of memes that drape over and further obscure our original Aeonic personalities. This meme shroud acts as a filter that determines what we are attracted to and repelled by. Everyone’s karma is different, as is everyone’s meme shroud, as they are reflections of your own thoughts and actions in the world.

I am influenced in my decision-making by many forces acting upon me as I approach the here and now. These forces include the karmic records and meme shroud that cover my Self, my Ego, and my body’s aggregate units of consciousness, as well as the karma and memes of those around me. Despite these influences acting upon me, it is always within my power to make a free will decision at any particular moment in time.

So, for most people, the answer to who am I?  is that I am my self-aware sense of me encased in this body of mine, and I would agree that we are that. But we are also the things we love and hate, plus the record of our actions in this world overlaid upon our governing unit of consciousness. Our universe is populated by fractal echoes of the Father’s primordial consciousness, and these units of consciousness are all identical, because they are all fractal reflections of the Son.

What makes me different from you is the pattern of my memes and the karma that have accrued, which overlays and filters out that perfect fractal Self. The Self unit of consciousness is a perfect reflection of the Fullness of God, but the subjective sense of me is not that perfect reflection of God because of my meme attachments and karma.

Units of consciousness gather their systemic patterns and the universal operating laws required to get the job done from the information constantly flowing into and throughout our universe. The phenomenon known as coherence ensures the compatibility and integrity of these universal patterns and laws. What we call love is the felt experience of coherence. Brethren units of consciousness need information and they need love in order to join together and work toward a common goal. Cells work together for the greater good of their organisms through information and love. Families and societies get the job of social order and cohesion done through information and love. In order for human units of consciousness to join hands and work together for the greater good, they need relevant information, including shared meme chords. They need to be willing to channel coherence from the Fullness and they need to love one another.

Anger, hatred, division, and finger-pointing cannot get the job done of making this world a better place, because those vices are not working out of coherence and love according to the Simple Golden Rule. The essence of the consciousness of the Father is love, whereas the essence of this fallen world is confusion, delusion, and ego-centrism. Our fallen world does not operate according to the precepts of the Golden Rule unless we take it upon ourselves to enact it.

The spirit associated with this material body of mine is a perfect replica of the originating unit of consciousness, a fractal of the Fullness of God. If, during this lifetime, my unit of consciousness is affected by the aggregated units of consciousness of my body, what then, if anything, do I carry with me when my body passes away? It seems to me that the individual me that persists beyond death, into the “in-between” space prior to my next incarnation, comes down to my ongoing karma and Ego. If this is the case, then the me that continues to influence the fate of the Self after death is nothing but the holographic pattern of all the choices ever made by my unit of consciousness in this physical life. My karmically-generated vibratory pattern attracts or repels the memes associated with my meme shroud. The memes I think of as me are not a part of my Self unit of consciousness, but they 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. My own archetypal dreams and my brother’s clinical experiences with the “in-between” place, as witnessed through his patients under hypnosis, indicates that our meme shroud is temporarily set aside, but not our Ego or Self after death. Our meme shroud reattaches as we enter a new life-cycle, providing continuity of identity from lifetime to lifetime. [See the appendix of this book to read articles on past-life therapy, reincarnation, and my childhood dreams.]

That the me that exists between material incarnations is nothing but our karmic record and egoic identity 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 fractal echoes of the Fullness of God. Then it follows that I develop as a result of my egoic choices and the choices of others throughout lifetimes. I am my perfect unit of consciousness, enshrouded in karma and the memes that my karma attracts.

In Yogic philosophy, it is said that an enlightened Yogi has become free of attachments and can therefore perceive the oneness of all things. The Simple Explanation of this phenomenon would be that the Yogi has successfully laid down all of his or her memes and can therefore perceive his or her perfect unit of consciousness, now stripped from its karmic shroud, freed of personal memes. The same phenomenon is known as Buddhahood in Buddhism and Sainthood in Christianity. According to tradition, these liberated units of consciousness are no longer bound to this material world by their discarded memes. If they do return to earth, it is in order to help others by sharing love and information.

In Gnostic terms, the more we identify with the Fullness and our One Self, the less we identify with our Ego and our memes. The more we practice the values of the Fullness known as virtues, the less inclined we are to practice the values of the fallen Demiurge—the vices. And, ultimately, our final release from all earthly karma and memes takes place as a gift given to us by the redeeming nature of the Christ, who frees our Self to return to its Aeonic home above once we stop holding onto all of the temptations that this realm presents to us.

I appreciate your dedication to gnosis. If you appreciate these messages, please consider donating to Gnostic Insights to help cover its expenses. I do not personally profit from these proceeds. Thank you!

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Gnostic Psychology: Human Nature, part 1

Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.

Copyright 2022; all rights reserved

Today’s episode of Gnostic Insights begins a chapter about the nature of humans. What is our psychology? Am I defined by my Ego? Or am I a spiritual Self independent of Ego? Am I a God? Am I an animal? Am I really conscious or am I random electrical fluctuations? Who am I? Do I have a soul and how is that different than a spirit? Is there a mind involved? What exactly is the Ego and how does it relate to my body and my spirit?  This is material is complicated, as we humans are complicated creatures. Therefore, I will be spreading this topic of human nature out over the next couple of weeks. If there were a university course called “Gnostic Psychology,” this would it.

By now in this series that we are calling A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, we have encountered a number of terms from my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. In this episode, we will again be discussing memes, fractals, units of consciousness, the Simple Golden Rule, and the shape of the torus. I will explain these concepts as we go along but, if this is your first time listening to the Gnostic Insights podcast, it would be helpful for you to back up and listen to the current series from the beginning. You can find it at gnostic insights dot com under the tab labelled “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.” This episode is the 14th in the current series of talks that are forming the chapters of my next book.

For most people, the answer to “who am I?” is that I am awareness of myself encased in this body of mine. Yes, we are that. But we are also the things we love and the things we hate along with the ideas and memories we cling to, which I call our meme bundle. Plus, we are the record of our actions in this world, which is called our karma, and that karma is wrapped around our unit of consciousness along with our meme bundle. And finally, our personalities also reflect the original personalities and talents of the Aeons that make up the Fullness of God. Even our use of the simple pronoun “I” requires examination.

Freud identified the human as having three distinct realms of thought. He called these the id, the ego, and the super-ego. The id controls our base instincts. The ego is our presenting personality and self-identity. The super-ego is our higher aspirations and noble thoughts. Not a bad start, but we are much more than those three simple concepts. My reading of the Gnostic Gospels has led to a further refinement of human personalities and psychology that I would like to share with you today. First, let me identify the id, ego, and super-ego in Gnostic terms. I will then go on to explain and expand upon their functions.

The Simple Explanation would liken the id to the thoughts and actions of the units of consciousness that make up our bodies. Each of the body’s units of consciousness are fractals of the Fullness, just as we are fractals of the Fullness at a higher level. The body’s units of consciousness each lead their own lives at their own level, position, and rank. Their duties are particular to their level and position.

For example, 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 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. Again, this constellation of smaller fractals make up the portion of our personalities that Freud identified as the id. The id is the body’s talk and demands.

Going on to Freud’s idea of the super-ego, we Gnostics would identify that with our big S Self. The Self is the fractal representation of the One Self we all share at the transpersonal level. The Self is a fractal representation of the image of the Son. We have spoken about the Self in previous episodes, particularly the episode called “Neverending War,” posted on September 3rd, 2022. We’ll tease apart the Self from the Ego as we move through this episode.

My Ego is not the totality of me, even though that’s who I usually think I am. We usually mistake our Egos for ourselves, but this is the delusion. We are much more than that. Other people refer to this Ego as one’s soul or mind. Yes, the Ego reflects our personalities, but I am much more than my personality. Nor am I my mind. My mind is like a tuning device that scans for information and locks onto data that fits into my meme bundle. The Ego feeds on the memes tuned in by my mind. My mind is drawn toward its preferred memes by my karmic record. Ego is not a conscious entity; Ego is a location within my personality that identifies with my memes bundle and interacts with others. Again, we spoke about Ego in the previous episode, “Embrace Virtue.”

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.  

I am a unit of consciousness that is identical to the universal unit of consciousness, which in Gnosticism we would call the Son and the Pleroma of the Son. These are the archetypal patterns held by the mind of God, so to speak, and I hold one of these fractals of that perfect originating consciousness within myself.

In terms of the model that I’ve constructed based upon the Tripartite Tractate, the Pleroma of the Son, usually referred to as the Fullness of God, appears in my illustrations like a pyramid of stacked golden cannon balls. It looks that way because it’s a hierarchy, and a hierarchy means “the higher the fewer.” A hierarchy looks like a pyramid. There are more objects at the bottom and there are fewer and fewer as you climb up toward the top. At the very tip top, just above this hierarchy of the Fullness, is the Son of God, or the Son of the Father, and the Son is a perfect fractal of the Father. If I think of my own Self, I have one of these pyramidal structures within my mental construct. That pyramid is my Self, and it is a fractal of the Fullness of God. Within my Self I have access to the entire Fullness of God. You could say I have access to all of the Aeons of the Hierarchy at both the mental and the physical level, as the body’s aggregated units of consciousness also reflect the Hierarchy of the Fullness.

In the Simple Explanation model, instead of picturing a golden pyramid, the Self unit of consciousness is described as looking like a donut—a geometric shape called a torus. I have resisted bringing the torus into the gnostic model because it does not appear in the ancient scriptures, unless it is identified as the “wheels within a wheel” we sometimes come across. However, the torus is such a good concept that it’s difficult not to include it. So, we can also think of the Self as an energetic bubble that’s shaped like a donut. This donut shape has a very, very tiny center, smaller than a material particle, and my consciousness is wrapped within it. There is a little donut associated with every particle and unit of consciousness in my body.

My body is a veritable galaxy of units of consciousness working in conjunction with the material particles of my body. The simpler the matter and units of consciousness, the more of them there are. So, while there is only one of me, my body is comprised of 11 organ systems made of 78 organs, which in turn comprise 30 trillion specialized cells made up of such a large number of atoms and molecules that I wouldn’t even know how to read or write the numbers. The more organized and complex the unit of consciousness, the fewer of them there are. This follows the hierarchical precept of the higher the fewer.

The mind, or ordinary consciousness, as well as the subconscious, is filtered as much by my body’s organ systems as it is by my Ego. The mind is an operating system, but the actual drive associated with will power is just that: a force or power that flows through us from above. My will power is my personal expression of the power that originates from the Father and passes through the Son and then through the Aeons and on through us Second Order Powers, along with information and consciousness itself.  The “Powers” reference in the titles of First Order of Powers and Second Order of Powers applies to this force of will power. Will power is freely distributed to all of us through the Father’s extension of its will. The Father and the Fullness are not stingy in gifting this will power to us. We have “free will.” The only limits to our free will is the limitations our minds place upon ourselves in the form of limiting memes and prior karma.

The organs and cells that make up my body are involved with my meat’s thought processes, not my Self’s higher consciousness. This is why scientists who study consciousness are mistaken when they identify consciousness as a by-product of the physical brain’s electrical activity. The most you can say is that what they are identifying as consciousness is actually the egoic output of the body’s fractal activities. However, the One Self that we all share is the origin and shared stream of will power and consciousness.

My Self’s unit of consciousness sits atop this hierarchical mountain of countless units of consciousness, all working to instantiate my body. I call that my governing unit of consciousness. While it may feel as though my governing unit of consciousness is the only conscious entity inhabiting this body of mine, my physical body is actually home to all of these aggregated units of consciousness, each with their own jobs to perform, each laying down their own karmic record. Lucky for me, their job is to hold me together and facilitate this life of mine, and they generally go along with the program and do a good job.

Another basic trait of my aggregated units of consciousness is this: the more units of consciousness on the same level of complexity that are laterally linked, for example, cells-to-cells, the greater their shared perception of here and now. This means that when you add up all of these units of consciousness together that make up my body, their aggregated consciousness is about as aware as my governing Self’s unit of consciousness. It is no wonder that I can get around so well without my conscious Self paying much attention to my behavior. The units of consciousness governing my legs, for example, take care of getting me where I want to go without needing close supervision. I am able to react quickly to my environment because the units of consciousness involved with sensory input and mechanical reactions to stimuli can do their jobs without needing my governing Self’s involvement.

Just imagine if this weren’t true—if you had to consciously will every action you take. We obviously don’t work that way. Step, reach, blink, duck, are carried out locally without conscious instructions from higher authorities. And, of course, the autonomic nervous system which controls the body’s inner organs, is almost entirely outside of conscious control. It takes a great deal of training and practice to learn autonomic control; this pursuit is usually left to Yogis, monks, and mystics.

The Ego is my subjective sense of who I am, where I am, and what I am doing. This Ego is largely a reflection of my personal choices. The meme bundle of my choices is called my karma and it consists of the memes I cling to, which are my beliefs and narratives, and the record of those thoughts and actions. My Ego also reflects feedback from my body’s aggregate units of consciousness and the choices they make.

I repeat, the Ego is not identical to the Self. The Self’s unit of consciousness is the full and perfect spirit that exists independently from this material instantiation. This spirit is often referred to by others as one’s soul.  I have the choice at every moment of time to either identify with my egoic me and my bundle of memes and karma or to identify with the immutable Self and the universal consciousness that transcends personal identity. An Ego is selfish, competitive, single-minded, short-sighted, and meme-bound. Transcending Ego, I reach out to others with love, assistance, and information for the betterment of all—what we call here at Gnostic Insights the Simple Golden Rule.

The egoic, small-s self, is self-centered, or more specifically, “Ego-centered,” and it only takes care of me. The Ego is patterned after the Fall; it is patterned after Logos, having fallen from the perfection of the Fullness of Spirit after breaking with the Fullness and seeking its own reward. The solo endeavor of Logos did not work out well and Logos fell. The result of the Fall is this apparently material world that we live in. And so, when you dwell deeply in the world as it appears, you are living an egoic lifestyle. My true Self, as a fractal of the Fullness, is unified with the Fullness of God—unified with the grand scheme of redemption, abounding joy, and limitless love. I have the choice at any moment of time to either identify with me and my bundle of memes or to identify with the universal unit of consciousness and the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God. The more I step away from my selfish Ego and identify with my transcendent Self, the more I can cooperate with other people and with the entire world in order to instantiate the Simple Golden Rule and work with others with information and love to build something that will benefit all.

Next week we will pick this discussion up where we left off.

If you are resonating to these gnostic insights, please consider donating to help pay the piper. I appreciate your support very much. Thank you.

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By Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.

Copyright 2022; All rights reserved

Gnosis means knowing, and to be a gnostic means that you are one who knows. The gnosis we are mining here at Gnostic Insights is taken from an ancient scripture, the Tripartite Tractate, out of the Nag Hammadi codices, but more than that, I’m deriving a lot of this information through contemplation and direct communication with the Father and the Fullness of God. That is my claim, and that is something that every person can do. We are all given the ability to commune directly with the Father and with the Fullness above.

What I am attempting to do here on the Gnostic Insights podcast is to share the insights I have gained through reason and contemplation, and to explain some of the more obscure passages in the Nag Hammadi scriptures. As a Gnostic Christian, I find that these insights give a deeper understanding of our New Testament in the Holy Bible, because much of this information was stripped out of the Holy Bible by the Nicene Council in the three hundreds, under the direction of Pope Clement and Emperor Constantine. Those of us who are not Catholics are no longer subject to the Pope, and none of us are subject to the Emperor of Rome. Therefore, it seems to me that those of us who love the Father should have the freedom of mind and the freedom of personal will to decide for ourselves which scriptures are holy, and this you must arrive at through discernment and the Holy Spirit’s leading. If you have not developed the ability of discernment, then you can easily be led astray.

For over 10 years now I have written a blog called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything.  The Simple Explanation presents a secular theory of how the universe goes together. In A Simple Explanation there are concepts such as fractals and the Simple Golden Rule that I have been explaining here as we go along, because they help to illuminate this Gnostic Gospel. Thus far, we have explained the origins of the ethereal universe, beginning with the Father of consciousness and proceeding on through the Christ.

We need to understand this entire run of the gnostic cosmology in order to understand the nature of human beings because, in Simple Explanation terms, we humans are fractal representations of the entirety of creation. This is the meaning of that expression, “As above, so below.” The tree is a common symbol for this concept. So, as a tree is represented as the branches above ground, there is a reciprocal set of branches below ground, and those are called roots.

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

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

Fractals are defined as fragmented geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each of which, at least approximately, is a reduced-size copy of the whole. That’s a property called self-similarity because they appear similar at all levels of magnification. Fractals are often considered to be infinitely complex. What this means is that fractal iterations can extend infinitely. The simplest way to think about it in my mind is with broccoli. And if you go to my Simple Explanation blog, December 11th, 2018, there is an article called “A Simple Explanation of Fractals, the Broccoli Fractal Video Demonstration.” In that video, which is posted on my blog and YouTube channel, I demonstrate fractals using an ordinary head of broccoli.

Have you noticed you can hold that head of broccoli in your hand and you can peel off one of those flower heads of the broccoli and it looks very much like the broccoli flower that you were holding in the first place, only, it’s much smaller. And then you can take that smaller piece and peel off another flower and it looks just like the previous one that you’ve peeled off. Only, it is again much smaller. You can do this broccoli exploration down to at least seven iterations. In the end you have an extremely tiny little broccoli floweret, but you can see it still has more little broccoli flowers within it; they just become too small to pull apart.

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

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.

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

In Simple Explanation terms, the enclosure of our material universe is a very large toroidal pattern at the outside edge of creation. I have identified that with the border that is spoken of in the Tripartite Tractate.  It is said that after Logos fell, he remembered the Aeons and the Father and his “better part” quickly returned back to the Fullness. The Father drew a boundary around what was left behind of the broken Logos down below, and that boundary encloses our material universe. We humans are a particular fractal emanation of the Pleroma of the newly restored Logos; we are Second Order Powers fruited down here to work within the material boundary. Yet we are patterned directly from the consciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Pleroma.

Because we are fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness, the rules and the descriptions of Aeonic life apply to humans equally as well. This is again another example of “as above, so below.” So when we hear or read about the nature of the Aeons, or the things that happen to the Aeons such as the fall and redemption of Logos, this happens to each and every one of us as well.

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

Previously, on the Gnostic Insights podcast, we have discussed the values on the left or the material values of the imitation, and these are in direct opposition to the traits of the Fullness. They are the other side of a dialectic to the values of the Father, those values on the right, which are the spiritual emanations of the ethereal plane. So hate versus love, impatience versus patience, lust versus chastity, greed versus generosity, those sorts of things.

We Second Order Powers bear the likeness of the First Order of Powers, which are the Aeons of the Fullness. We are also called “those of the remembrance,” because we were implanted with a dim memory of the Father and the Son and a longing to rejoin the Aeons in the Hierarchy and their dream of Paradise. We are considered superior to those of the imitation because we come from the noble thought rather than the presumptuous thought. We are true fractals of the entirety of the Pleroma, whereas the phantoms of the deficiency are shadows of the fractals of the broken Pleroma of the singular Logos. They are smaller and of a lesser order. They are not fractals of the Aeons, they are imitations of fractals of the Aeons.

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

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

At this point, I think I should explain a little better what a meme is as I use the term, so I’m going to read a couple of pages out of my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The importance of memes is that a huge part of our personality is shaped by the memes we collect and hold onto. The otherwise pristine nature of our underlying fractal unit of consciousness is affected by the memes we hold dear, as well as the memes we despise. We enjoy memes we approve of and we are repelled by memes we disapprove of.

The Sanskrit word for these provocative memes is samskara. Samskara is traditionally defined in Yogic philosophy as the habitual thought patterns collected by the Ego that interfere with soul consciousness. The memes each of us cling to, both those that we like and those that we actively dislike, influence our ability to exercise free will in the here and now when we unthinkingly lock onto a meme or set of memes. It is our belief in those memes that determines how we interpret and respond to our surroundings. Our response may or may not be the best response to a given situation, but it is the only response allowed for by our particular bundle. In other words, our meme bundles function as incoming and outgoing filters.

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

We each carry our own bundle of memes. These are the things we believe in, both for good or ill and, depending on what we believe in, this limits our ability to think and arrive at gnosis. So, if your meme bundle contains many values on the left—materialistic values like live fast and die young and leave a beautiful corpse–that’s a meme bundle from the deficiency that encourages fast and reckless living and leads to misery. Contrast this with living a life that is on the Aeonic, virtuous side that embraces the memes of the Fullness of God. These virtues and these vices are each important spiritual memes. When we speak of the never-ending war within our personalities and against the imitations of the deficiency, these are wars embracing the values of the Fullness as opposed to the values of popular culture.

We cannot fake the meme bundles we hold because they affect our lives and every choice we make. Pretending may fool others but it does not fool the Father. Our hearts need to be in authentic alignment with the Father and the Fullness in order for the love and gnosis of the Father to flow through us, and that’s why true repentance is necessary. We need to embrace the values of virtue—the meme bundle that flows from the Fullness of God. Embracing the meme bundle of popular culture gets us into trouble and holds us away from instantiating our true Self. Fortunately, the Christ imbues us with more power than the deficiency can wield against us, and it gives us the ability to overcome the imitation’s memes.

So goes the never-ending war. Repentance involves pushing away the deficiency’s memes. Repentance means you no longer try to get away with whatever you can get away with. Repentance means I don’t want to do that anymore. Redemption means dwelling on the right side of the virtue and vice ledger and, again, this isn’t to take away our fun. It’s because joy is only found on the virtuous side of the ledger. We are fractals of the Fullness of God. Therefore, in order to be truly happy, joyful, we shed the Demiurgic memes. This turning gives the Spirit of the Christ permission to redeem us. Then we are able to embrace the Father and the Fullness.

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

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

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

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

You cannot be taught gnosis. You must discover it for yourself. What we’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 ancient Chinese book called the Tao Te Ching describes it this way in verse 27:

The Sage is always on the side of virtue

            So everyone around him prospers

He is always on the side of truth

            So everything around him is fulfilled

The path of the Sage is called

            “The Path of Illumination”

He who gives himself to this path

            Is like a block of wood

            That gives itself to the chisel—

Cut by cut it is honed to perfection

Only a student who gives himself

            Can receive the master’s gift

If you think otherwise,

            Despite your knowledge, you have blundered

Giving and receiving are one

            This is called

            “The great wonder”

            “The essential mystery”

            “The very heart of all that is true”

                                                [Jonathan Star translation; 2001]

Here at the Gnostic Insights Podcast, I am not attempting to teach you gnosis, I am merely sharing the gnosis that I have discovered within myself. You have this gnosis within yourself, and if you resonate to what I am saying, this is merely you remembering gnosis. You have the entirety of the Fullness of God already within your Self, along with a remembrance of who you are and where you come from. Embrace virtue.    Onward and upward. I’ll see you next time, God bless.

If you appreciate these gnostic insights, please consider donating to the cause of bringing gnosis to our neighbors. Your donation is much appreciated. Thanks!

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The Army of the Christ

by Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.

Copyright 2022; all rights reserved

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I am so glad to be writing my next book together with you here at Gnostic Insights. These episodes are forming the chapters for the upcoming book which will be called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospels. This exploration of gnostic cosmology is uniquely based upon the text of one of the ancient manuscripts recovered from the Egyptian desert in 1945. The concepts that I am sharing with you are universal and applicable to anyone who is seeking the truth about consciousness, God, the nature of life, death, and suffering, and the nature of the simulated reality we appear to be living in. This gnosis is also a “gospel” in that the word gospel means “good news.” The good news is that this gnostic gospel offers the promise of a personal relationship with higher order entities and the God Above All Gods. This is not a challenge to established religions, but rather a clarification of the nature of the Father and our relation to the Father. This gnosis also clarifies so many of the puzzles that established religions, philosophies, and even science have been unable to answer. If a Great Awakening is currently underway, then this gnosis is an integral addition to spreading the Word.

Last week we began to look at the creation of the Christ and the Third Order of Powers. We will continue with that most important thought again this week. Be sure to go back and listen to the episode immediately prior to this one if you haven’t heard it yet. That episode is called “Christ and the Third Order Powers.” As always, these readings come from the ancient book called the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi codices. You can find a public domain copy of the Nag Hammadi and the Tripartite Tractate at gnosis.org. That is the translation I use for these Gnostic Insights.

Three episodes ago we covered the creation of the Second Order of Powers. That episode was called, “Second Order Powers—the New Pleroma of Logos.” There we discussed how we Second Order Powers were the generation of the new Pleroma of Logos when he returned from the Fall. We living creatures were designed to fit into the Boundary so we could operate according to the Simple Golden Rule to bring life, love, and cooperation into the otherwise dead deficiency. The Second Order Powers also bring a remembrance of the Father into his material realm, a memory entirely lacking in the shadows and phantoms of the imitation. We inhabit the deficiency, yoked to the apparent material of the imitation, and find ourselves trapped in a never-ending war with the deficiency.

The Tripartite Tractate says of us, “It was not from the sickness which came into being that they were produced… but (from) the one who sought after the pre-existent. Once he had prayed, he both raised himself to the good and sowed in them a pre-disposition to seek and pray to the glorious pre-existent one, and he sowed in them a thought about him and an idea, so that they should think that something greater than themselves exists prior to them, although they did not understand what it was. Begetting harmony and mutual love through that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since from unity and from unanimity they have received their very being.”

In the episode that followed, we learned that the Second Order Powers are subject to the “law of mutual combat” and, because of the never-ending battle against the deficiency, we tend to forget the harmony and mutual love of our higher Self and instead adopt the anger and violence of the enemy.

Picking up the story now in section eight of the Tripartite Tractate,

“The Logos which moved had the hope and the expectation of him who is exalted. As for those of the shadow, he separated himself from them in every way, since they fight against him and are not at all humble before him. He was content with the beings of the thought.” 

Logos was content with the beings of thought—those Aeons of the Fullness that form the master formulae upon whom we living Second Order Powers are modelled—”because he had hope and expectation of him who is exalted.” That hope and expectation is another way of saying that Logos had faith in the Father of the Totalities. We humans feel the same way Logos did when we turn to the Father in faith—we feel hope and expectation that something will come of our prayers. On the other hand, Logos was not content with the shadows that came out of him after the Fall. Logos rejected the phantoms of the deficiency that had arisen from the presumptuous thought of his Ego.

Logos sought a solution to the hatred and disorder taking hold of his Second Order Powers who were fighting the never-ending war against the deficiency. In last week’s episode, we read the passages related to the creation of the Christ. Here is a quick review of that process:

“And as for the one who is set up in this way and who is within the exalted boundary, remembering the one who is defective, the Logos brought him forth in an invisible way among those who came into being according to the thought.”

The Christ was brought forth to “those who came into being according to the thought.” We Second Order Powers are those who were brought into being according to the thought of the ALL. We are fractal representations of the Aeons of the Fullness, who are themselves Self-aware aspects of the ALL sorted into a cooperative Hierarchy “within the exalted boundary.” That’s up above on the ethereal plane.

Remembering the one who is defective—that’s down below. “The one who is defective” refers to both we Second Order Powers who have become lost due to the “law of mutual combat” as well as to the Demiurge who is the Ego of the Fallen Aeon, lost within this material deficiency.

Speaking again of the Christ, “The order which was his came into being from him who ran on high and that which brought itself forth from him and from the entire perfection. The one who ran on high became for the one who was defective an intercessor with the emanation of the aeons which had come into being in accord with the things which exist. When he prayed to them, they consented joyously and willingly, since they were in agreement, and with harmonious consent, to aid the defective one.”

We covered this passage in last week’s episode. Briefly, the “one who ran on high” was the Self of Logos. The entire perfection is the entirety of the ALL, which is co-existent with the Son. The emanation of the Aeons refers to the ALL who have become Self-aware entities inhabiting a region called the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God, or the Pleroma of the Fullness. When Logos prayed to them, they were only too happy to aid the defective one. We’re talking about the Totalities of the ALL, so of course they’re in agreement and harmonious consent, because they are always in agreement and harmonious consent. The ALL do not have their own individual Egos. They are One and the same with the Son.

Quoting again, and we covered this in more detail last week, “They gathered together, asking the Father with beneficent intent that there be aid from above, from the Father, for his glory, since the defective one could not become perfect in any other way, unless it was the will of the Pleroma of the Father, which he had drawn to himself, revealed, and given to the defective one. 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.”

“They gathered together, asking the Father” refers to the ALL praying upstream to the Originating Consciousness out of whom they were emanated along with the Son.

Then, 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.

Now, this next quote is really spectacular. Because it says that not only did the Christ manifest the face, or the countenance, of the Son, but it also manifested as the faces of all of the Aeons who had gathered together.

“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.”

It wasn’t only the singular Christ that was created–He who is the One image of the Son of God; it was the face of everyone who prays to the Father for help. This army of the Christ is the Third Order of Powers. These Third Order Powers are the Pleroma of the Christ, created as living images of the Son, the ALL, and the Aeons of the Fullness. They are far more powerful than we Second Order Powers and infinitely more powerful than the phantoms of the deficiency. There is one of those Third Order Powers for every one of us Second Order Powers down here, emanated for our redemption and liberation. The Tripartite Tractate says the Third Order Powers came forth in a “multifaceted form in order that the one to whom help was to be given might recognize them” as the answer to their prayers. “He also sees the one who gave it to him,” meaning the One, the Son, the Christ.

I interpret this to mean that “the one who needs help” is everybody down here below in this material creation. This includes all of us humans, all of us animals and plants, the bacteria, and all of the cells that make up our bodies. We are all Second Order Powers emanating from the Pleroma of Logos and we need help down here on this so-called material plane because we are stuck in a never-ending war with the Fallen Demiurge and the archons of the deficiency who are trying to kill us. The never-ending war is not only against archonic personalities, but against physical forces of chaos, entropy, and dissolution.

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.

Second Order Powers are representations of those same fractal Aeons of the Pleroma of Logos, but made to fit within the universal Boundary and remember the Father above. So, when we come down into this creation, we represent the faces of every single one of the Aeons of the Fullness. 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.

“For he revealed himself to him within him, since he is with him, is a fellow sufferer with him, gives him rest little by little, makes him grow, lifts him up, gives himself to him completely for enjoyment from a vision.”

In our modern Christian understanding, we think of the Christ as a singular entity—the Son. This is true, but our gnostic understanding adds the Pleroma of the Third Order of Powers into the equation. Even more limiting, Christians think of the Christ as only coming to Earth in the body of the man named Jesus of Nazareth. But the Christ also reflects and is able to redeem every representation that has ever come into this universe. Because of this, each one of us, whether we be humans or dogs, plants, insects, or skin cells, has a personal representation of the Christ that we can immediately recognize. You and I have our own, personalized, Third Order Power that brings us redemption. This is the true nature of the redeeming body and blood of Jesus—not that He hangs upon a cross until dead and is subsequently resurrected, but that his fractal story represents resurrection for all of us Second Order Powers, each with our own cross to bear.

“It had the designation of the Son and his essence and his power and his form, who is the one whom he loved and in whom he was pleased, who was entreated in a loving way. It was light and was a desire to be established and an openness for instruction and an eye for vision, qualities which it had from the exalted ones. It was also wisdom for his thinking in opposition to the things beneath the organization. It was also a word for speaking and the perfection of the things of this sort. And it is these who took form with him, but according to the image of the Pleroma, having their fathers who are the ones who gave them life, each one being a copy of each one of the faces… It has the name “the Church,” for in harmony they resemble the harmony in the assembly of those who have revealed themselves.”

When I prayed to the Father for salvation, I was able to recognize the Father and recognize the Christ because it came looking like me. There was a recognition of the power and personality of Christ. And when you pray to the Father for redemption and you pray to the Christ to save you, the Christ will appear to you in a form that you can personally recognize. The conventional Christian experience presents a truncated version of this mechanism by way of a personal relationship focused on Jesus. Jesus is the first fruit of the Third Order of Powers, and he is our exemplar.

Jesus is the example by which the salvation of Christ and his Pleroma of Third Order Powers walked the Earth, and he represents the perfection of the Christ. The perfect Self of Jesus never strayed into egoic behavior; he never forgot his true ethereal home; he knew all along who his Father was. And, when we pray for salvation from the never-ending war, we can also be filled with the power of the Christ and our own personal Third Order Powers. The Third Order Powers were produced as an army for the Christ, and we’ve each got our own soldier assigned to us. I don’t know for sure, but I’m thinking that this is where the idea of your guardian angel comes from. Many people have this notion that they have a guardian angel. It’s probably a Third Order Power that has your name on it; that’s your guardian angel.

My diagram of the Final Economy shows the Third Order of Powers nested right next to the Christ and above the Aeons of the Fullness, because the Third Order Powers were produced as an army for Christ and they were emanated after the Pleroma of the Hierarchy of God. They are placed above the Hierarchy of the Fullness that is the Pleroma of the Aeons, because the Third Order possesses the entirety of the ALL within them. They are co-existent with the Christ.

I acknowledge that this is a very different version of Christianity than has been traditionally presented to us. This is gnosis that was originally contained in the sacred scriptures that formed the New Testament prior to the Pope and Emperor of Rome getting their hands on it and stripping it out. It’s nice to know. I hope you get it. It doesn’t really matter, because all you need to know is that we come from the Father and to the Father we will return. We are emanations directly of the Father and the Father has promised to save us all and bring us all home.

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except through me.” This has been taken to mean that one must acknowledge the power of the Christ before the Christ can redeem you. But I hope you can see that this puts all of the power of redemption in your hands rather than Christ’s. The Christ will redeem all Second Order Powers by the end of time, with or without your acknowledgment. What accepting the Christ now does for you is that it opens the door for the Third Order Powers to enter 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.

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Christ and the Third Order Powers

By Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.

Copyright 2022; all rights reserved

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. For the past several episodes we have been working together on my next book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. The gnostic cosmogeny becomes more complex as each episode goes by so, if this is your first time listening to Gnostic Insights, I strongly recommend you visit the podcast’s home page and listen to the prior episodes in this series before going on, in order to avoid confusion. You can find the prior episodes in this current series under the tab “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.”  This week introduces the Third Order of Powers and the Christ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Onward and upward! And God bless us all.

Never-ending War

By Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.

Copyright 2022; All rights reserved

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. For the past several weeks we have been revisiting the core concepts of Valentinian Gnosticism as presented in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures. The version of the Nag Hammadi I use on this broadcast is the one you can find at gnosis.org. Unfortunately, the edition printed at gnosis.org does not contain verse numbers or any way to reference verse locations. But what you can do, and this is what I do, is use your browser’s “find on page” feature to type snippets of quotations, and that should lead you to the verse I am citing.

Before we head into any new material, let’s go over again some of the gnosis we have been mining out of the Tripartite Tractate. We have covered this part of the story in the past few episodes of Gnostic Insights and now you will hopefully understand it even better as you hear it coming around again.

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. The reason this dimension is called deficiency and the imitation is because it 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. Logos condemned these shadows but was unable to put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. By the way, “putting the genie back in the bottle,” is a fractal of this archetypal story of powers escaping containment, as is the tale of “Pandora’s box” that released evils into the world.

“The Father and the Totalities drew away from him, so that the limit which the Father had set might be established – for it is not from grasping the incomprehensibility but by the will of the Father, – and furthermore, (they withdrew) so that the things which have come to be might become an organization which would come into being. If it were to come, it would not come into being by the manifestation of the Pleroma. Therefore, it is not fitting to criticize the movement which is the Logos, but it is fitting that we should say about the movement of the Logos that it is a cause of an organization which has been destined to come about.”

“The limit which the Father had set” is what we refer to as the Boundary. Previously I have explained that in order for an ecosystem to form, a boundary must be set around a contained space. Containment is required to bring objects into relationship with one another, and this is how systems of organization come about. Scientists in the lab use petri dishes to contain and grow small biological systems; islands contain their own unique lifeforms and ecosystems; and the earth itself is a contained ecosystem at a larger scale.

Again, this verse says that the organization which was to come–that being our material universe–would not come directly from the Aeons of the Fullness manifesting here below. The Aeons were to remain protected in their ethereal purity up above. 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. This verse also says that the organization, economy, ecology of our material space was the will of the Father, and we are not to blame it on Logos.

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.

“The one whom he himself brought forth as a unitary aeon rushed up to that which is his and this kin of his in the Pleroma abandoned him who came to be in the defect along with those who had come forth from him in an imaginary way, since they are not his.”

When this verse speaks of “the one whom he himself brought forth as a unitary Aeon,” it refers to the Self-concept of Logos as a single Aeon rather than the collection of fractal contents that formed his interior.

This is where I find the imagery of my illustrations to be helpful in conceptualizing these ideas. My illustrations picture the Fullness of the Aeons of God as sitting within a pyramidal shape—a tetrahedron to be precise—with the Aeon known as Logos sitting at the top of that pyramidal hierarchy. Remember, Logos contained within himself fractal copies of all the other Aeons in the Fullness. My illustrations picture Logos as a pyramidal shape that mimics the entirety of the Fullness, placed as the capstone of the Hierarchy.

The “unitary aeon” of Logos is the pyramid that forms his capstone shape–not his interior Pleroma, but the single entity named Logos.  You can think of it like the skin of your body presenting yourself as a single, unitary organism, but we all realize our unitary organism is comprised of a Pleroma of countless cells. It was the same with Logos. “As above, so below.”

The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say, “From that which was deficient in itself there came those things which came into being from his thought and his arrogance, but from that which is perfect in him he left it and raised himself up to those who are his. He was in the Pleroma as a remembrance for him so that he would be saved from his arrogance.”

“That which was deficient in itself” was the arrogant thought of his Ego that led to the Fall. “That which was perfect in him” is the One Self shared by all consciousness that remained in the Fullness when the Ego of Logos fell. It was this One Self that called out to the fallen Logos as the first remembrance of the Fullness above.

“Those things which came into being from his thought and his arrogance” were the shadows and phantoms of his fractal contents—those fractal iterations of aeons that Logos had mistaken for the ALL itself.  The Pleroma of Logos had existed since his conception as emanations from all of the other Aeons of the Fullness, but the shadows and phantoms of his Pleroma emerged during the Fall. The shadows were the product of his egoic overreach and did not exist from the beginning.

“The one who ran on high and the one who drew him to himself were not barren, but in bringing forth a fruit in the Pleroma, they upset those who were in the defect.”

The “one who ran on high” is Logos, returned to the Fullness above, on high . The “one who drew him to himself” is the Self of Logos who called his fallen Ego to return to its home in the Fullness. It is this newly restored Logos that brought with it the memory of the Boundary and the consequences of the Fall. This sadder but wiser Logos 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.

The Tripartite Tractate says, “These newly formed beings did not have more substance, nor did they have a greater glory, for they are not equal to the pre-existent ones.” Those pre-existent ones are the Aeons of the Fullness who came directly from the Son and the Father. It goes on to say, “If, on the other hand, they were superior to the imitations, the only thing that made them elevated above them was that they were from a good disposition, for they had not come out of the sickness that arose.”

Whereas those of the deficiency arose from the 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, represent the virtues of the ALL and life that emanates through the Holy Spirit of the Father.

These Second Order Powers were fruited one by one and sent down to populate the space within the Boundary in order to bring life and love into the chaos and confusion. Coming from the top down, the Second Order Powers are filled with the Holy Spirit that confers the consciousness of the Father. These Powers represent all the life-forms on our planet, everything from bacteria through the plants all the way up through the fishes and insects and all of the animals, including humans.

The Second Order Powers are organized according to the Simple Golden Rule. Within each organism, all the various parts of the organism link together and hold hands to share information, love, and assistance to level up, level up, level up, from the cells on up through the organs and organ systems, resulting in a living organism. In this manner all of the organisms on our planet mirror the cooperative spirit of the Aeons above.

“Once he had prayed, he both raised himself to the good and sowed in them a pre-disposition to seek and pray to the glorious pre-existent one, and he sowed in them a thought about him and an idea, so that they should think that something greater than themselves exists prior to them, although they did not understand what it was. Begetting harmony and mutual love through that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since from unity and from unanimity they have received their very being.”

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. The Simple Golden Rule is the manner by which all creatures grow from a single ovum into extremely complex organisms. It is also the manner by which, on a larger scale, societies have the potential to develop into mutually beneficial, cooperative structures that mirror the cooperation of the Fullness.  

As we discussed at length in the previous episode called “The Fall and the Deficiency,” the phantoms are literally the shadows of the fractals of Logos. For every positive trait of the original images of the Fullness, the shadows are their inverse. For every virtue of the Aeons, there is an opposing vice promoted by the likenesses of the deficiency. The Tripartite Tractate says of these likenesses, “They thought about themselves that they were beings originating from themselves alone and were without a source.”

So we can see that the traits of the shadows of the deficiency are diametrically opposed to the traits of the Second Order Powers. In my illustrations I depict this never-ending war between the remembrance and the deficiency as the Yin / Yang symbol. My illustration shows the deficiency as little blue balls fitted into the downward-heading Yin side, with the Powers of the Remembrance, which now look like living green cells, sitting right against them and heading upward in the Yang position. This symbol well represents their dynamic balance within the Boundary.

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…”

So what it is saying here in verse 84 is that even though the Second Order Powers came into this creation with a better disposition because they are patterned directly after the Aeons of the Fullness, when they engage in war with the deficiency they take on the characteristics of the deficiency. Violence begets violence, forgetfulness begets forgetfulness. And forgetfulness is another word for lack of gnosis, because gnosis means knowledge, and the way you achieve gnosis is by remembering where you come from. Ignorance is the same as lack of gnosis. The Second Order Powers come into creation fully loaded with gnosis but, in the course of doing battle in this never-ending war with the deficiency, gnosis is forgotten and needs to be recalled.

Verse 85 of the Tripartite Tractate says because of the law of mutual combat, their envy, malice, rage, violence, lust, and ignorance ruled, and they began producing various kinds of matter and all sorts of powers.

In Chapter 6, The Deficiency, we saw that the shadows of the imitation arose in chaos. The imitations are not hierarchical; they do not know the Simple Golden Rule of cooperation with which to help each other build better, bigger things for the betterment of all. The deficiency is not able to do any of that. It’s all selfish; it’s all self-driven. It’s all about dominion and power. The Second Order Powers do know the hierarchical structure of cooperation, and so they are able to work together and share information for the greater good, but due to the law of mutual combat, some have forgotten how.

The verse above tells us that the law of mutual combat brings both parties down to the same level, resulting in vain glory and a lust for power and conquest. As a result of battling in the never-ending war, the Second Order Powers forget about love and harmony and become lost in their lust for power.

 Because the imitations of the deficiency waged war against the Second Order Powers, the Second Order began to act against its own Self out of anger. But the ones who were in opposition would not surrender, due to their own ignorance of what came before. “They believed they were self engendered,” and had given birth to themselves, and so they ignorantly believed they owed nothing to the previous powers, either above or below. They lacked the capacity to remember the originating source of consciousness, and they lacked the ability to reason with those of the remembrance.

Before we leave this week’s episode, let me contrast for you virtue and vice. Remember, virtue reflects the traits of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. These are all positive, loving traits because they emanate from the all-good Father. These virtues are all within the capacity of we Second Order Powers, and when we reflect these virtues, we dwell in the joy of the Fullness.

Love is the number one virtue. Patience, generosity, graciousness, mercy, forgiveness, welcoming, respectful, cooperation as opposed to obstructionism, free choice, hopefulness, joyfulness, truthfulness, industriousness, order, prudence–prudence, by the way, means knowing the right thing to do at the right time–logic, charity, kindness, empathy, humility, loyalty, justice, courage, remembrance. These are some of the values of the Aeons that we are able to manifest. You will notice that these virtues are the types of character traits that lead to true loving connections between human beings and other Second Order Powers on the planet.

In opposition to these virtues are the vices of the deficiency:

The most that you can hope for if you embrace the deficiency is an imitation of joy, which we generally call happiness. But, as I believe you know by now, happiness is a never-ending pursuit that our Egos reach for but never attain. “Oh, let’s go here; let’s go there! Let’s buy this; let’s buy that! Let’s eat this; let’s eat that! Hey, let’s do this now; let’s do that!” Everything promises joy. Sometimes you find temporary happiness, but it never fulfills. It never brings satisfaction. Pursuit of material gain always brings more and more desire for more and more material gain.

Here are just a few of the vices promoted by the deficiency that build up our Egos and weaken our spiritual connection to our higher Self:

Impatience, lust, greed, selfishness, cruelty, ruthlessness, anger, resentfulness, rudeness, obstructionism, vanity, narcissism, sloth or laziness, chaos, disorder, thoughtless action, greed, envy, arrogance, fear, confusion, gluttony, lying, treachery, betrayal. We can see that these are the values promoted by our material culture, Hollywood, social media.

The key to gnosis and joy does not lie there. We can only be truly joyful when we act out of love. When we forget our place in the Fullness of God, we operate out of ignorance and are subject to the evil influences of the Fall and the never-ending war. The Fall can only produce misery, fear, rage, and lust–never love; never happiness. No good ever comes from rage; no good ever comes from fear. Vice only brings ignorance and suffering, isolation and despair. When we dwell in vice rather than virtue, our life becomes part of the problem.

In our next episode, we will jump to the solution.

By Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.

Copyright 2022; All rights reserved

In 2019, I wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated where I translated the Tripartite Tractate into modern English in a very, very simple way, with illustrations to facilitate understanding. As I say, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated is very simply written, with none of the original quotes and arcane language contained in the ancient Tripartite Tractate. The purpose of the Gnostic Insights podcasts is to explore with you the gnosis that I continue to glean from my readings of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts.

What we are now doing here at Gnostic Insights is further polishing and condensing these podcast episodes into a single manuscript that I plan to call The Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. That title may seem oxymoronic, which means self-contradictory, because if you have listened for any time to Gnostic Insights you may be thinking that this gnosis is anything but simple. However, my goal here is to demystify the Gnostic Gospel by presenting it in a logical and straight-forward way so that any person who wants to understand it, can.

This gnosis is not an arbitrary fable. The Tripartite Tractate is more along the lines of a philosophy of science type of book rather than a book of myths. It proposes a certain starting hypothesis—that there is an original consciousness we call the Father—and it proceeds logically from that starting proposition through all the steps necessary to reach our observable universe. It is an inherently cogent argument that begins with the Father and winds up with us as living creatures in relationship with that consciousness. It “makes sense.” That is why understanding is more important here than memorization.

I believe that we all have this gnosis written within our Self that comes directly from the Father, the Son, and the Fullness of God, so awakening to this gnosis is more a matter of remembering rather than learning. Your willingness to listen with an open heart and mind is all that is required to achieve this remembrance because it is the will of the Father and the Fullness that you remember them. There is no other hidden knowledge to search out or genealogies to memorize, lodges to join, or secret rituals that must be performed; you only need to remember the gnosis that is inherent within you. It is my hope that, as you listen to this information and meditate upon it, you will come to understand the origins of our universe and our place in it. The gnostic faith is not blind faith but reasonable faith, and we were created as reasonable beings.

So far, we’ve talked about the Father, the Son, the ALL, and the Hierarchy of the Fullness. In Chapter 4—The Generation of the Aeons—we heard how the Aeons mingled with each other in the Fullness as they gave glory to the Father, and that this intermingling produced an infinite variety of Aeons within the Pleroma of the Fullness. Then in Chapter 5 we heard about the generation of Logos as the final Aeon produced by this intermingling of the Fullnesses and how the body or Pleroma of Logos contained a fractal copy of all the other Aeons. It was this original Pleroma of Logos that escaped his control as a result of the Fall.

We’ve also covered how the Ego of Logos overreached his position in the Hierarchy and how, instead of ascending to the heights of the Father, Logos fell out of the Fullness and lost the integrity of his Aeonic Pleroma.

If you have not heard the previous few episodes, I invite you to visit the gnosticinsights.com website where you will find all of these episodes posted under the tab called “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.” Now, carrying on…

Logos was horrified by the phantoms and shadows that issued forth from his presumptuous thought and regret turned into condemnation of the irrational things he had accidentally produced. At first Logos battled against the irrational imitations, but his anger had no effect on the chaos of the deficiency.

And so Logos turned away from the presumptuous thought that had brought about the Fall and he remembered his place with the Aeons of the Fullness and the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says that all of this remembrance produced within him a new Pleroma. This is a long quote, but the language is so lovely that it seems important for you to hear it. We will spend the remainder of this episode explaining it.

According to the Tripartite Tractate, “When the Logos which was defective was illumined, his Pleroma began. He escaped those who had disturbed him at first. He became unmixed with them. He stripped off that arrogant thought. He received mingling with the Rest, when those who had been disobedient to him at first bent down and humbled themselves before him. And he rejoiced over the visitation of his brothers who had visited him. He gave glory and praise to those who had become manifest as a help to him, while he gave thanks, because he had escaped those who revolted against him, and admired and honored the greatness and those who had appeared to him in a determined way. He generated manifest images of the living visages, pleasing among things which are good, existing among the things which exist, resembling them in beauty, but unequal to them in truth, since they are not from an agreement with him, between the one who brought them forth and the one who revealed himself to him. But in wisdom and knowledge he acts, mingling the Logos with him(self) entirely. Therefore, those which came forth from him are great, just as that which is truly great.”

“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.”

When Logos turned away from the presumptuous thought and began to remember the Fullness and the Father, he generated a new fractal Pleroma within himself that contained all of the images of the beings of thought. Only this time, since Logos was within the Boundary when he remembered the Fullness and the Father, his new Pleroma was fitted into the Boundary. This differed from the original Pleroma of Logos that Fell and deserted him because this Pleroma was able to work within the Boundary with reason and purpose, unlike the imitations of the deficiency who lacked the Father’s consciousness and the ability to pull themselves out of chaos. As the imitations were formed without the Boundary, they lacked awareness of the cooperative unanimity of the Fullness. Here is how the Tripartite Tractate describes it:

“It was not from the sickness which came into being that they were produced… but (from) the one who sought after the pre-existent. Once he had prayed, he both raised himself to the good and sowed in them a pre-disposition to seek and pray to the glorious pre-existent one, and he sowed in them a thought about him and an idea, so that they should think that something greater than themselves exists prior to them, although they did not understand what it was. Begetting harmony and mutual love through that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since from unity and from unanimity they have received their very being.”

When Logos remembered, he “raised himself to the good” and found himself back up in the Fullness. The new Pleroma of Logos began to emit a new fruit, an offspring, to displace what had come into being through the Fall. This new fruit consisted of living creatures that resembled the likenesses of the deficiency but were superior to them because they represent the union of the Fullness and are blessed with the Father’s consciousness. Here is how the Tripartite Tractate describes them:

“The powers were good and were greater than those of the likeness. For those belonging to the likeness also belong to a nature of falsehood. From an illusion of similarity and a thought of arrogance has come about that which they became. And they originate from the thought which first knew them.”

The powers of the likeness have the nature of falsehood because they came from an act of Ego that mistook its own will for the will of the Father. The verse above says that the “thought of arrogance” brought them about and, because of their superficial similarity to the Aeons, they continued in the ignorant misappropriation of names that do not belong to them, but belong to “the glories which exist for the honor of the Father”—the Aeons of the Fullness.

The broken-out pieces of Logos were no longer able to relate to each other the way they could when the original Pleroma of Logos was arranged in a hierarchical structure. When Logos overreached and fell, these shadows of the fractals that constituted his being left him and went out on their own. Because the Ego of Logos had been reaching for the heights when he fell, the parts of Logos that broke out from him continued to reach for the heights, only now they were driven by self-centered ambition. And, because they were not situated in a coherent structure, they lacked the ability to cooperate with each other.

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.

The Tripartite Tractate describes the Second Order Powers this way: “It was not from the sickness which came into being that they were produced…  Once he had prayed, he both raised himself to the good and sowed in them a pre-disposition to seek and pray to the glorious pre-existent one, and he sowed in them a thought about him and an idea, so that they should think that something greater than themselves exists prior to them, although they did not understand what it was. Begetting harmony and mutual love through that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since from unity and from unanimity they have received their very being.”

This verse says that 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.

I mention the Simple Golden Rule in most episodes. In case this is the first time you are hearing the Gnostic Insights podcast, the Simple Golden Rule is part of my Simple Explanation theory of everything that you can find over on my Simple Explanation blog. A dozen years ago I suggested that the way our material cosmos is constructed is through the cooperation of units of consciousness to build something greater for the benefit of all.  Here’s what it says: units of consciousness reach out to others like themselves to hold hands and focus on a project in the middle, sharing information, assistance, and love for the betterment of all. This results in a leveling up of the higher the fewer. For example, skin cells hold hands and share information, assistance, and love to make the skin organ. So while there are millions of skin cells, there is only one skin organ. Hence, the higher, the fewer. All objects in our universe build up from the small and numerous to the larger and fewer. In the case of Second Order Powers, they are units of the consciousness of Logos, fitted into the Boundary so that they could bring life to the deficiency. We will cover this phenomenon in depth in the next episode when we contrast the way Logos and the Demiurge go about bringing order to the universe.

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.

As verse 84 of the Tripartite Tractate puts it, “… he sowed in them a thought about him and an idea, so that they should think that something greater than themselves exists prior to them, although they did not understand what it was. Begetting harmony and mutual love through that thought, they acted in unity and unanimity, since from unity and from unanimity they have received their very being.”

In our next episode, we will look at how these Second Order Powers were manifested in the cosmos as living creatures, representations of the Aeons within the Boundary.

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By Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.

Copyright 2022, all rights reserved

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. As we delve deeper and deeper into gnostic cosmogony and cosmology I feel the need to remind you that this information is what gnosis is all about. This information represents the long-hidden knowledge that has been guarded from all but those specially designated the privilege of seeing it.  Here at Gnostic Insights we believe that gnosis is written on every person’s inner being, and therefore available to every person that seeks it out. The only sense in which this gnosis is hidden now is the limitation set upon each person’s readiness to receive. But whether or not you grasp these Gnostic Insights, you can take comfort in knowing that none of this is in any way essential to your redemption and resurrection. All you need to recognize is that the Father above is the source of your life and consciousness; that you come from the Father and to the Father you will return. Christian Gnostics recognize the essential role of the Christ in our return to the Fullness, because Christ is the correction that returns us all to full gnosis of the Fullness and the Father. So with that reminder, here is this week’s continuation of The Simple Explanation of Gnosticism.

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In our last episode, we heard about the Fall and the beginnings of our material universe. The Tripartite Tractate says the irrational things produced during the Fall, known as the imitations of the deficiency, were condemned by Logos. During the chaos and disorder immediately following the Fall, Logos battled against what came forth from him.

“Until the one who brought forth into the defect these things which were thus in need, until he judged those who came into being because of him contrary to reason – which is the judgment which became a condemnation – he struggled against them unto destruction…”   

This passage is saying that Logos had produced these deficiencies that were in need of reason and order. And because they were contrary to reason, Logos judged and condemned them. He initially tried to destroy them, but that didn’t work because the ones who opposed his condemnation and wrath would simply not obey, which is to say that reason and facts are powerless against egoic irrationality.

And so Logos gave up trying to cure the deficiency. Instead, what was perfect in Logos separated itself from its Ego and went upward to his own in the Fullness. 

“The Logos turned to another opinion and another thought. Having turned away from evil, he turned toward the good things. Following the conversion came the thought of the things which exist and the prayer for the one who converted himself to the good.”

This passage indicates that Logos changed his mind about the feasibility of destroying the deficiency. He 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.” Since Logos is the one who had converted himself to the good, the prayer must have been offered by the Aeons of the Fullness on his behalf to bring their emanation home. It is referred to as “the prayer of the Agreement,” which is to say, the prayer of the Fullness.

Here is how the Tripartite Tractate describes it: “The one who is in the Pleroma was what he first prayed to and remembered; then (he remembered) his brothers individually and (yet) always with one another; then all of them together; but before all of them, the Father.”

Here we see that the act of calling Logos back to the Fullness was similar to the act of producing him as an emanation in the first place. After giving up his attempts to correct the deficiency on his own, Logos returned to aeonic awareness. First he remembered the Father and the true source of consciousness and then he remembered the Son. Logos then remembered his brothers of the Fullness as individuals within a Totality, and lastly he remembered the Fullness as an entire gestalt. He remembered everything that existed from the first, before the Fall. And because he remembered, he was able to escape the deficiency and return his Self to the Fullness.

“The prayer of the agreement was a help for him in his own return and (in that of) the Totality, for a cause of his remembering those who have existed from the first was his being remembered. This is the thought which calls out from afar, bringing him back. All his prayer and remembering were numerous powers according to that limit. For there is nothing barren in his thought.”

The Pleroma of Logos was fully restored by the remembrance of 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.

The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say in verse seven, “The powers were good and were greater than those of the likeness. For those belonging to the likeness also belong to a nature of falsehood. From an illusion of similarity and a thought of arrogance has come about that which they became. And they originate from the thought which first knew them.”

The powers that were good and greater than the imitations were the newly restored powers of the Pleroma of Logos in the Fullness. These restored powers of Logos were, “like some creatures of light for him, looking for the rising of the sun, since it happened that they saw in him dreams which are truly sweet. It immediately put a stop to the emanations of the thought. They did not any longer have their substance and also they did not have honor any longer.”

In other words, once Logos remembered the Fullnesses, those lesser emanations of the egoic thought were recognized as things without spiritual substance and the knock-offs that had proceeded from his Ego were no longer produced.

We will return to this discussion of the new Pleroma of Logos in a later chapter when we introduce the Second Order of Powers. We will also come across the Pleroma of Logos again when we begin to look at the emanation of the Christ who will ultimately redeem the Fall. For now, we will continue to look at the time immediately following the Fall, and how our material plane came to be organized by the estranged Ego of Logos that we know as the Demiurge.

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. Remember from our previous chapter that the Tripartite Tractate does not regard the motivation of Logos as blame-worthy because he acted out of “boundless love for the Father.” So here we learn that the Father does, indeed, consider intent and not only the results of our actions. Additionally, as we discussed in the previous episode, the movement of Logos was the cause of an “ordained economy” that was destined to come about.

Verse 77 says that the Father and the Fullness set a limit on the results of the Fall so that an “organization” could come into being.

“The Father and the Totalities drew away from him, so that the limit which the Father had set might be established – for it is not from grasping the incomprehensibility but by the will of the Father, – and furthermore, (they withdrew) so that the things which have come to be might become an organization which would come into being. If it were to come, it would not come into being by the manifestation of the Pleroma. Therefore, it is not fitting to criticize the movement which is the Logos, but it is fitting that we should say about the movement of the Logos that it is a cause of an organization which has been destined to come about.”

The Father did not want the Fullness to direct the establishment of this new economy. The Father wanted to spare the Fullness from involving itself in the chaos below. We refer to the non-material plane as the ethereal plane. The dictionary calls it the celestial or heavenly plane. The Boundary serves the purpose of holding the deficiency away from the perfection of the Father and the ALL. This ensures the purity of the ethereal plane, so that none of its glory is diminished by the emerging economy, leaving intact the originating consciousness of the Father and the Son, the ALL, and the Fullness.

The Boundary serves the purpose of containing a space wherein an economy can emerge. And economy here means an orderly management or arrangement of parts and their relationships within an organization or system. You see, if you think about it, if there is no bounded space, if there is nothing but infinity, then there is no containment where things can be organized in relationship to each other; those little blue ball pieces of the broken Logos would just keep rolling outward and never interact with one another. It requires a Boundary to enable material to work together.

In this context, economy refers to what we commonly call an ecology. An ecology cannot proceed without a defining Boundary. The Boundary was not established to prevent the unreachable from being reached, but “for the sake of an economy that was to come about.” This economy was to be the creation of this material cosmos formed out of what was heretofore completely insubstantial and immaterial.

When the Aeon known as Logos overreached and fell, Logos split apart into the logical, reasonable One Self part and the irrational, chaotic inverse of that One Self which I’ve identified as Ego. Those are the two aspects of the mind of Logos. After the Fall, the One Self of Logos returned to the Pleroma of the Fullness. And once in the Pleroma the Self of Logos worked together with the Fullness of God and, with prayers to the Father, they came up with a couple of different ways to rectify the Fall and bring that fallen part of Logos, now called the Demiurge, back up into the Fullness of God. We will see in a later chapter how the goal of creation is to restore the unity of Logos to the Fullness of God.

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 cooperation amongst the Hierarchy of the Fullness is the prototype for the Simple Explanation’s Golden Rule: In order for units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to assist one another’s efforts, and they need to love one another.

However, since this bounded space is controlled by the Demiurge and not by the Aeons, the pattern of cooperation is an imitation of the Golden Rule. When we’re talking about physical objects like atoms and molecules, which are nothing but shadows and phantoms of that which exists above, loving refers to the force holding objects together that mimics the Hierarchy’s love. Because the pattern of the Hierarchy was carried by Logos when he fell, all of creation instantiates the same pattern. But, in this case, there is no true cooperation but only an appearance of cooperation imposed by the Demiurge.

In the Fullness, everyone knows their job and does it in perfect cooperation with others for the benefit of all. This was not occurring at this point in history. The deficiency was illogical; it was egoic; it was selfish; it was not working together. Therefore, the Boundary was established in order to push the uncooperative shadows together so that they would be able to work together to form an ecology.

Down here in our material universe, the parts of the universe that are material-only lack life. Those material-only parts belong to the Demiurge because the Demiurge was not an emanation of the life of the Father. However, the fallen Ego of Logos, the Demiurge, is the God of this material creation. It knows how to put together everything that was originally chaotic quantum foam with no rhyme or reason.

Using a facsimile of the Golden Rule which it carried as a shadow of its Aeonic programming, the Demiurge prompted the subatomic particles to hold hands with one another. This enabled them to level up to become atoms. And then the Demiurge caused the atoms to hold hands with one another and become molecules. And then the molecules to hold hands with one another to become minerals and mineral aggregations and elements. This is the province of the Demiurge even today—ruling the materiality of the dead universe, the mud.

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 that 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.”

“He is the lord of all of them, that is, the countenance which the Logos brought forth in his thought as a representation of the Father of the Totalities. Therefore, he is adorned with every which a representation of him, since he is characterized by every property and glorious quality. For he too is called “father” and god” and “demiurge” and “king” and “judge” and “place” and “dwelling” and “law.””

“The things which he has spoken he does. When he saw that they were great and good and wonderful, he was pleased and rejoiced, as if he himself in his own thought had been the one to say them and do them, not knowing that the movement within him is from the spirit who moves him in a determined way toward those things which he wants.”

Those of the imitation do not know of the Hierarchy of the Fullness, nor do they have assigned roles and places there. Lacking the cooperative design, they exist in a state of perpetual disturbance, driven by self-centered ambition. The Tripartite Tractate says the imitations “exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows” [Thomassen].  

In the Fullness, each of the powers and personalities of the Aeons is represented as a pure pattern of some aspect of the Logos itself. The phantoms of the deficiency were already a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than the Aeons, being shadows of the fractals of Logos, and they lacked their position in the hierarchical structure of the Pleroma. Consequently, they knew nothing but lust for dominion.

We can think of this Boundary as a bubble containing our universe. If you want to believe in the standard cosmology of the Big Bang and an expanding universe, you can picture these chaotic imitations as quantum foam. Quantum foam is the lowest level of instantiation in this universe of ours, and quantum foam is characterized by randomness and chaos. It does not work together, and that is why it is called foam, because it is popping in and out, constantly producing matter and anti-matter that cancel out and destroy each other. Consequently nothing is building; nothing is able to reach out to level up. They lack the Golden Rule of cooperation because they came from the Fall rather than from the Fullness.

The Demiurge went about organizing this universe out of the quantum foam: “over those who belong to the likeness, he set the word of beauty, so that he might bring them into a form.”

At first he established energetic waves, then subatomic particles followed by atomic particles. Everything according to “the higher, the fewer” pattern. The particles combine to make atoms; the atoms combine to make molecules; the molecules combine make elements; the elements combine to make minerals and the aggregations of minerals, and that is the limit of the God of this universe. The Demiurge can only level up to the mineral level. All of the hard, rocky places in our material universe are the handiwork of the Demiurge. So, yes, the Demiurge is the creator God of this universe and it is the one who orders the material universe and who keeps everything functioning down here–but only up to the mineral level.

The Demiurge works in a very different manner than the Fullness of God. The Pleroma of the Fullness is hierarchical, so it’s shaped like a pyramid, because the higher the fewer is a basic principle of hierarchies. The Pleroma of the Aeons in the Fullness metaphorically hold hands with one another and they share information, they share love, they share assistance, and together they dream of Paradise.

And we all share this vision of paradise. All of the humans on the planet have a foretaste of Paradise, and not only the humans but every living thing on the planet, from bacteria on up. We are all what is called the Second Order of Powers, and we come from the Pleroma. This will be explained more thoroughly later in the book.

We don’t come from the Demiurge; the Demiurge is only in charge of the material universe. The Demiurge is in charge of the mud, the material, the hard rocky places–at the small scale the dirt and the elements, and at the large scale the rocky planets and the stars in the heavens. If there are creatures on a planet, they coat the outside of the dead rocky planet. Life only comes from the Father. Life is top-down. Death is bottom-up.

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 upon 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.

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Next week we will pick up the mythology of our gnostic origins as we take a look at the creation of all of us living creatures that are known as the Second Order of Powers.

By Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.

Copyright 2022; all rights reserved

So far in our unfolding of the Gnostic Gospel, we’ve discussed the origin and nature of the Father as the originating consciousness. We’ve discussed the Son, which was the first localization of the Father. We have discussed the Son manifesting his various attributes, known as the ALL. We’ve moved beyond the ALL and discussed how the Totalities of the ALL became the Hierarchy of the Fullness as they became self-aware individuals with their own points of view. Each Aeon of the Fullness was an individual who is also an integral part of the larger whole.

Logos was the final Aeon conceived by the Fullness, and this singular being possessed the blueprint of all of the personalities, proclivities, powers, and positions arrayed in the Fullness. Logos embodied all of these distinctions of the Fullness as smaller fractal iterations within himself.

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.

The problem with Logos striking out on his own was that the Fullness always worked as one body, even though it consisted of an infinite number of individuals. Because Logos had been placed at the very tiptop of the hierarchy, he mistook his will for that of the Fullness and imagined he could, all by himself, build the Paradise that was being dreamt by the Fullness. Logos understood all of the plans and he possessed all of the necessary talents because he contained all of the blueprints of every one of the Aeons.

However, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos was unable to give proper glory to the Father. We have previously discussed that giving glory means focused praise and wondrous adoration of the object of devotion. The Aeons were only supposed to give glory to the Father and not to themselves or each other. But Logos looked down and beheld his own identity and thought he was complete enough to ignore the rules and offer glory on his own.

The Tripartite Tractate says, “The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows and copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted.”

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. This one did not attain him, for he did not receive him.”

Logos had not realized the impossibility of approaching the illimitable consciousness of the Father. Logos could “not attain him,” because the Father “did not receive him.” Because of his self-exaltation, another good synonym for Ego, Logos fully expected to reach the Father and to reproduce his own glorious reflection that would populate a new Paradise of emanations based upon himself. In other words, Ego’s opinion was not based on reality or truth, only his high opinion of his own capabilities.

Abandoning the Aeonic rules and his brothers in the Fullness, Logos “went beyond himself” and this overreach brought the sickness of self-doubt onto his soul. Prior to this time, every Aeon’s core Self was in perfect harmony with its Ego, and their Ego’s function was to put into practice the will of the Self, the Fullness, and the Father. Now self-doubt replaced the ineffable joy of the Fullness.

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.”

The presumptuous thought of the Ego of Logos arrogantly presumed that he was going to build the Paradise the Aeons dreamt of and populate it with his own emanations. But Logos was inadequate to the task and he produced instead “shadows, copies, and likenesses” of the Fullness.

Verse 78 says: “Like the Pleromas are the things which came into being from the arrogant thought, which are their (the Pleromas’) likenesses, copies, shadows, and phantasms, lacking reason and the light, these which belong to the vain thought, since they are not products of anything.”

Here the Ego of Logos is characterized as “vain thought,” and the copies produced by the Fall are nothing but likenesses, copies, shadows, and phantasms. The Tripartite Tractate says these likenesses are not “products of anything,” indicating that, unlike all of the other entities that came before, these imitations are not true emanations proceeding from the Father through the Son and on through the Fullnesses. These shadows were made up out of nothing and do not contain the essence of the Father’s consciousness. They are flat, without depth, like a mirror image is to the object it reflects.

In my illustrations, I picture the little pyramid of Logos sitting on top of the big pyramid and then launching itself out into the inky blackness toward the all-encompassing Father above. But, instead of going up, Logos takes a nose dive and goes down. That is why it’s called the Fall. In my mind, I picture Logos smashing into bits. This is metaphorical language because of course there isn’t anything to smash against; there is no material. Like a dry clump of sand, the pleroma of Logos just crumbles apart and dissolves into pieces. Only now, because they are shadows, the bits of Logos are no longer little golden balls. My illustrations depict the shadows of Logos as super-dark-blue balls rolling out and spreading forth in chaos.

The Tripartite Tractate says in verse 77, “Out of this there was a division – he became deeply troubled – and a turning away because of his self-doubt and division, forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and which is.”

The “forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and of that which is” becomes a defining characteristic of the Ego’s relationship to the Self. The Ego of Logos becomes entirely estranged from “his better self.” All that remains of Logos down here below is the shell of his broken Ego and an almost infinite number of Ego-ridden, dark blue balls scattering in all directions. This Ego, divided from its Self, has total amnesia of Logos, the Fullness, and the Father. It recognizes no one but itself.

The act of the beautiful Aeon reaching for the Father out of love, stumbling, falling, and breaking apart into dark, chaotic imitations produces the deficiency of the imitation. This deficiency is our material universe.

Logos was aghast at what had happened and the “best part” of Logos fled the scene and returned to the Fullness. The Tripartite Tractate says, “The one whom he himself brought forth as a unitary aeon rushed up to that which is his and this kin of his in the Pleroma abandoned him who came to be in the defect along with those who had come forth from him in an imaginary way, since they are not his.”

The governing Self of Logos is “the unitary aeon” that abandoned his Ego down below and rushed back up to his brothers in the Fullness. The Self of Logos, stripped of its Ego, reunited with the Pleroma of the Fullness. The Fullness abandoned the imitation and the copies and phantoms that had rolled out below because they had no part in their creation. They were unable to relate to the chaos because they only knew cooperation.

“Therefore, their end will be like their beginning: from that which did not exist (they are) to return once again to that which will not be. It is they, however, by themselves who are greater, more powerful, and more honored than the names which are given to them, which are their shadows. In the manner of a reflection are they beautiful. For the face of the copy normally takes its beauty from that of which it is a copy.”

This passage promises that the imitation’s time is limited. “Its end will be like its beginning,” because it is not an emanation from the Father, therefore its home is not above in the Fullness. At some point, this material cosmos will evaporate.

This passage also describes the shadows as beautiful in the manner of a reflection. The imitations resemble the Aeonic blueprints upon which they are modeled, but it is only a surface resemblance, lacking the depth of the Father’s consciousness. They may possess the names and faces of the original Aeons, but they are not fractals of the originals because they are not emanations from the Fullness. They are merely shadows of the Aeons that were copied within Logos.

We can imagine it this way: when we watch a movie we see actors projected onto a screen yet we realize that the actors are not really there in front of us. We know we are only seeing the flickering phantoms of their projected images. The phantoms of the deficiency are similar. They are projected simulations of the Fullness.

When Logos overreached because of presumptuous thought and fell out of knowledge into the darkness of ignorance, he shattered into a confusing jumble of disconnected parts. These pieces of the shattered Aeon were sicknesses–small, dark, ignorant, divided, and roiling with chaos. They reflected neither the glory of the originals in the Fullness nor the ecology of the Hierarchy. And, because they were no longer arranged in the pattern of the Hierarchy, they were clueless about their functions and their names. All that remained was ignorance and chaos.

Here’s how the Tripartite Tractate describes their condition in verse seven:

“The Logos was a cause of those who came into being and he continued all the more to be at a loss and he was astonished. Instead of perfection, he saw a defect; instead of unification, he saw division; instead of stability, he saw disturbances; instead of rests, tumults. Neither was it possible for him to make them cease from loving disturbance, nor was it possible for him to destroy it. He was completely powerless, once his totality and his exaltation abandoned him.”

In other words, immediately after the Fall, chaos reigned supreme. The bits and pieces and powers could not work together because they came from the isolated will of the fallen Aeon and not from the cooperative structure of the Hierarchy of the Aeons. In mathematical terms we would say that entropy was high in the beginning. Each bit of the fallen Aeon acted out of its isolated, personal Ego and not from any form of relationship.

The verse also says that the Ego of Logos was “completely powerless, once his totality and his exaltation abandoned him.” That is to say, the totality and exaltation of the Self of Logos abandoned his Ego to the Fall. Totality is another word for a Fullness or Pleroma as a unified entity, and the entity that was Logos abandoned the Ego in the Fall. Exaltation means high praise, and there was no praise for the shadows of the Imitation.

“Those who had come into being not knowing themselves both did not know the Pleromas from which they came forth and did not know the one who was the cause of their existence.”

So, in addition to being unable to relate to others, these small imitations of the Fallen Ego of Logos did not even recognize the Ego out of which they arose, much less any inkling of the Self that had abandoned Ego and escaped the Fall.

The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say, “The Logos, being in such unstable conditions, did not continue to bring forth anything like emanations, the things which are in the Pleroma, the glories which exist for the honor of the Father. Rather, he brought forth little weaklings, hindered by the illnesses by which he too was hindered. It was the likeness of the disposition which was a unity, that which was the cause of the things which do not themselves exist from the first.”

Again the products of the fallen Aeon’s Ego are contrasted with the original models in the Hierarchy. They were nothing like the emanations that came forth from the Aeons. Because the Ego of Logos was itself extremely unstable—chaotic, entropic, and ignorant of what came before—the bits that fell out during the Fall were also chaotic, entropic, and ignorant of all that came before. They did not know their programming instructions and they did not know their origins.

The Aeons of the Fullness are facets of the Son of God, and the Son, being an emanation of the Father, exists from the beginning. So the originating consciousness is that which exists from the beginning and its offspring is the Son, and the Son’s offspring is the ALL and the Hierarchy of the Fullness. These things that came out of Logos did not exist from the beginning because they are a product of the Fall, and once the Fall occurred, there is line in history where the things that exist from the beginning are before the Fall and the simulations that came into existence as a result are after the Fall. These would be the deficiencies of the imitation, the small and feeble knock-offs of the originals in the Fullness.

The passage says that although the little weaklings had the likeness of the disposition that was a unity, they did not exist before the Fall. Which is to say that the imitations of the deficiency were unable to fake the unity of the Fullness. Because Logos had been reaching for the heights when he fell, the imitation born of the Fall continued to be motivated by a desire to reach the unreachable. But now that upward drive was divorced from the goal of reaching for the glory of reunification with the Father. With no recall of who or what came before, this upward drive was entirely self-interested, for those of the imitation had no cooperative arrangement amongst themselves. What had been an upward pull to reunite the Fullnesses with the Father became an upward push arising out of each singleton, not for the glory of the Father, but for the vain glory of the individual. Vain glory means false glory.

Verse six of the Tripartite Tractate says, “They wanted to command one another, overcoming one another in their vain ambition, while the glory which they possess contains a cause of the system which was to be. They are likenesses of the things which are exalted. They were brought to a lust for power in each one of them, according to the greatness of the name of which each is a shadow, each one imagining that it is superior to his fellows.”

So, while deficiencies lacked the Aeonic attributes of the Fullness, they did display an imitation of those attributes: true cooperation replaced by egoic striving; glory to the Father replaced by vain glory. They did not know their place, station, or duty and so they each believed themselves to be Numero Uno. They were all characterized by a lust for power worthy of the greatness of their namesake–as if a sports fan were to mistake their own abilities for those of the athlete they most admire.

In this manner, Egoic striving for vain glory replaced glorious longing for the Father. Ambition replaced God’s will. The likenesses of the presumptuous thought, as they came to be known, recognized neither Logos nor the Father as their progenitor.

“They thought of themselves that they are beings existing by themselves and are without a source, since they do not see anything else existing before them. Therefore, they lived in disobedience and acts of rebellion, without having humbled themselves before the one because of whom they came into being.”

All of our Egos have a choice to cooperate with the Self or to deny the Self and stake a narcissistic claim to consciousness. Since this Ego of Logos was unaware of its origin as the Logos of the Fullness and the Father, it believed it was its own originating consciousness. Hence, everything that it produced was similarly ignorant of and disobedient to the Father and the Fullness. In this manner, the deficiency took on an imitation of life on its own, becoming the cause of the things that do not exist on their own account.

These descriptions of the shadows and imitations of the deficiency relate to our cosmos on many levels. The imitations arising from the fallen Ego of Logos consist of everything in this universe we have come to know, from the particles that make up the material of the physical cosmos, to the imitations of truth that pass for knowledge and atheistic explanations of life and consciousness.

Thank you for contributing to this effort. I hope that Gnostic Insights is helpful for you. Remember, all you really need to know is that we come from the Father and to the Father we will return. So relax into that thought and take comfort. You do not need to do anything else; you do not need to know anything else. You only need to believe that you are loved by the Father.

By Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.

Copyright 2022, all rights reserved

Let’s review for a moment. In the last chapter, the Totalities of the ALL had  awakened to themselves in fulfillment of the Father’s desire for innumerable points of view. Prior to their awakening, the Totalities of the ALL exist as unified facets of the Son. We can think of the shared consciousness of the Totalities of the ALL as the shared consciousness of the One Self of the Son. We refer to them as Totalities because they are parts of the One Totality of the monad we call the Son.

When the Totalities became conscious of themselves and their individuality they each became a singular monad with their own point of view. At this point we begin to refer to them as Aeons. The Aeons immediately sorted themselves into a hierarchy of names, places, powers, and duties based upon their unique points of view. This sorting is called the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma of the Fullness. The Tripartite Tractate says of these Aeons, “The aeons have brought themselves forth in accord with the Third Fruit by the freedom of the will and by the wisdom with which he favored them for their thought.” The First Fruit is the Son; the Second Fruit is the ALL; the Third Fruit is the Hierarchy of the Fullness.

It is important to note that at this stage of the Pleroma, each Aeon possesses a Self that reflects the full One consciousness of the Son. Its Self is identical to the Self of any other unit of consciousness. However, each Aeon now also possesses a newly-formed Ego that reflects its particular identity. This newly-minted Ego is a label that identifies a particular Aeon’s name, position, station and sphere of responsibility.

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 my mind I picture the location of this Aeonic Ego as the outside surface of the Aeon, because Ego’s focus is outward looking, focusing as it does on the Aeon’s interaction with those outside of itself in the Hierarchy. Those outside of an Aeon’s Self would be its neighboring Aeons. The Ego does not come into play during introspection–that introspective awareness is toward the Self, not the Ego. So the Aeonic Ego’s focus is on its position, power, place, and sphere of responsibility relative to its Aeonic neighbors—not in order to lord it over them, but to discern their respective roles in cooperating with each other.

According to the Tripartite Tractate, in order to remain aligned with the Father’s will, the Aeons needed to glorify only the Father and never themselves, nor any other Aeon, nor the Fullness as a whole. Furthermore, each Aeon of the Hierarchy of the Pleroma was to give glory from its own location, using its own God-given talent and not borrowing the talent of its neighbors. The Pleroma has a place for everyone, and everyone has their place. But watch out, the Fall is about to occur.

The Fall is what initiated this material cosmos in which we live. In religious terms, the Fall is generally described as the “fall from grace” that led to humanity’s expulsion from God’s presence in the Garden of Eden. In Judeo-Christian theology this fall is blamed on the woman, Eve, persuading her husband, Adam, to eat an apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This act of disobedience to the instruction of Jehovah not to eat of that fruit is considered the first act of willful disobedience to God. Since the God of Eden was Jehovah, the rule concerning the sinfulness of gnosis as represented by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil may be reframed as an imitation of the archetypal Fall commanded by the Demiurge to keep Adam and Eve under his control. We will cover this territory in depth later on in the chapter about the Demiurge.

In gnostic theology the Fall is shifted upstream, to a time long before humans were created. Back before there were even heavens and Earth.

In the previous chapter, we discussed the generation of the Aeons and the idea that the final Aeon produced by the unified will of the Aeons of the Pleroma was a very special Aeon. The Aeon who crowned the top of the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God contained within its Ego a copy of all of the other Aeons of the Fullness. These copies of the other Aeons were not equal to the originals in the Fullness because they were a fractal iteration down from the originals, yet they did faithfully replicate those original beings of the thought because of the manner in which they were produced. As the Fullness all together gave glory to the Father with a singular focus, that glory reflected back onto them and produced this final Aeon as a mirror image of their glorious Totality.

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. Yet these two different stories, one of Eve and Adam and the other of the Fall of Logos, both share the common features of disobedience to an explicit rule and a resulting expulsion from a Paradisical existence out into a cold, cruel world. At the archetypal level, both of these tales describe the same type of event. But on the gnostic side, this is our archetypal story, our pre-history as fruit of the Aeons. The Adam and Eve story is similar, but it is a pale imitation of the actual Fall of Logos, and the purpose of this imitation of that original archetypal fractal is, like most stories from the Demiurge, is to keep people in line–to keep them obedient to Jehovah.

The final Aeon produced by the will of the Father was placed at the very top of the Hierarchy. I liken its positioning to placing the star or an angel on top of a Christmas tree. This youngest Aeon carried within itself all of the traits of every other Aeon, perfect and complete. This was a very talented Aeon resembling the Son of God himself, who also carried all of the traits of the Aeons within its singular self. This final Aeon was named Logos, because he was also endowed with the ability to reason thoughtfully and to figure things out in a step-by-step manner. The word Logos in Greek means reason.

The Tripartite Tractate puts it this way: “This aeon was among those to whom was given wisdom, so that he could become pre-existent in each one’s thought. By that which he wills, will they be produced. Therefore, he received a wise nature in order to examine the hidden basis, since he is a wise fruit…”

This is a curious statement, because it seems to indicate that Logos was equipped to bring others into existence without the cooperation of his fellow Aeons. If the Father had not wanted an individual Aeon to be able to procreate without the agreement of the Fullness, why would the Father have equipped Logos to do so?

All of the Aeons have free will, because the Father has free will and everything that emanates from the Father carries the attributes of the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says, “for, the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one,” (this one being Logos), “such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him.”

This is the very definition of personal free will, even though it may appear to be predestined as God’s will. Yet we must realize that there is no free will without choice. As Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom don’t mean nothin’ if it ain’t free.”

Logos was loaded with free will, as are all of the Aeons. Yet the Father foresees our behavior before we do, which seems to contradict the idea of free will. We can resolve this classic theological conundrum by realizing that the Father anticipates every possible outcome of our free will. At the universal level, the infinity of the Fullness of God is represented by the potentiality of all possible choices a person could make as their life passes from one decision to the next. The fullness of all possible futures are within our reach as we pass through this universe; our own free will is driving our consciousness through those possibilities. The Father anticipates all possibilities in his infinite wisdom, and all possible courses of action are anticipated. This choice that Logos made was anticipated though not predetermined.

When Logos came forth, he attempted to approach the Father’s glory, not realizing that his effort was beyond possibility. Logos, “had wanted to bring forth one who was perfect from an agreement in which he had not been and without having the command.” The Aeons were not in on this plan of Logos, nor did he have the go-ahead of the Father. But he still wanted to give forth a perfect creation, a perfect Pleroma out of the fractal fullness of his own body that would be able to give full glory to the Father all at once in its totality, because he did not understand that such a thing was not possible. Yet the book says that “he, the Father, had brought him forth for those about whom he knew that it was fitting that they should come into being.”

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.

The Father knew this from the beginning and he allowed Logos to fall from the ethereal plane on purpose, so that the generations of the Aeons could eventually follow. We are the fractals of those emanations. We preexist in a different ethereal plane and the Aeons are waiting for us to return. We are their fruit.

Even though Logos contained iterations of all the other Aeons, Logos was not equal to the magnitude of the Son because the Aeons of the Fullness are smaller fractals of the Son. And the Aeonic copies held by Logos were a further order of magnitude less than the Aeons. We could say that, as a toy model car resembles a full-sized automobile, Logos likewise resembled the Son. And, whereas the Son is directly nested into the Father and able to commune directly with the Father, the Aeons are a couple of iterations downstream from the Father and unable to plug directly into the Father’s greatness without risking annihilation. The Tripartite Tractate says of Logos, “This aeon was last to have brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude,” referring, I think, to this concept of fractal iterations.

Because of the danger of coming face-to-face with the originating consciousness and surviving, the Father had set a boundary between himself and his offspring for their protection. The Father did not let the Aeons know of the impossibility of reunification with Him because He did not want to discourage their constant yearning for Him.

And now we are all set up for the Fall. The Ego of Logos marveled at himself in delight and wonder, for he saw in himself the beauty and perfection of the Fullness and he mistook his own grandeur for that of the Son. Logos decided to give glory to the Father out of his own Ego, in order to produce his own perfect and beautiful Aeonic offspring that would reflect the entirety of the Fullness. However, because Logos did not glorify the Father with the consent and participation of the Fullness, Logos broke the rules by which the Fullness operated.

“The intent, then, of the Logos, who is this one, was good. When he had come forth, he gave glory to the Father, even if it led to something beyond possibility, since he had wanted to bring forth one who is perfect, from an agreement in which he had not been, and without having the command.”

In doing so, Logos broke the Aeons’ basic rule and worked alone to glorify the Father. It begs the question: why did this occur? If the Aeons are all perfectly aligned with each other and with the Father’s will, and if their Egos are in alignment with their true Selves and working according to the Simple Golden Rule, why would Logos make such a huge misstep? Why and how did the Ego of Logos delude him into this unilateral action?

First, none of the Aeons were aware of the impossibility of returning to the Father’s glorious state. The Father did not let them know.

Secondly, I think it may have something to do with the placement of Logos at the top of the Hierarchy. As the final Aeon, Logos was placed at the very pinnacle of the Fullness. His location left him with no next door neighbors; he was up there all alone. There were none equal to him in position, rank, duties, or talents, and nothing located above him to stand between himself and the Father. Looking around, Logos saw none equal to himself up there on the top of the pyramid, and so his Ego understandably concluded that he was superior to the other Aeons. His positioning alone was enough to cause Logos to consider himself worthy of reuniting with the Father on his own.

Consequently, Logos unilaterally launched himself upward toward what is called the realm of perfect glory, forgetting all about his rightful position within the ecology of the Pleroma. The Tripartite Tractate says we are not to blame Logos for the Fall, because Logos reached for God out of an abundance of love. Indeed, all of the Aeons yearned for communion with the Father, for the Father had planted his root deep within their hearts and they recognized themselves as his branches and his fruit. Logos was trying to fulfill this inherent desire to reunite with the Father, and that was all good. The error was that Logos attempted to give glory to the Father without taking into consideration his place and duties in the Fullness.

As we read in the Tripartite Tractate, “the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one, such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him.

“The intent, then, of the Logos, who is this one, was good. When he had come forth, he gave glory to the Father, even if it led to something beyond possibility, since he had wanted to bring forth one who is perfect, from an agreement in which he had not been, and without having the command.

“And before he begot anything else for the glory of the will and in agreement with the Totalities, he acted, magnanimously, from an abundant love, and set out toward that which surrounds the perfect glory…”

Thomassen translates the word “magnanimously” in the scripture above as “presumptuously.” “And before he had yet produced anything to the glory of the Will and in the union of the members of the ALL, he acted presumptuously, out of an overflowing love, and rushed forward toward that which surrounds the realm of perfect glory.” Given that translation, the movement that resulted in the Fall was presumptuous thought, which is a pretty good synonym for Ego. Yet the intention of Logos was good.

The Tripartite Tractate is unique in its gentle assessment of not blaming Logos for the Fall.  The book says that this act of disobedience by Logos was within the will of the Father after all, and it was necessary to usher in an organization that needed to come forth “for the revelation of the Fullness.”

The Tripartite Tractate says, “for it was not without the will of the Father that the Logos was produced, which is to say, not without it will he go forth. But he, the Father, had brought him forth for those about whom he knew that it was fitting that they should come into being.”

The Father knew what would happen and the Father found it fitting that Logos should be conceived as he was and take the action that he did. The Father knew that this was the path that would lead to material creation—the economy that was to come— “so that the things which have come to be might become an organization which would come into being.”

And by the way, Thomassen generally translates the name Logos as the Word, which is also how it is translated in the New Testament. Thomassen substitutes one of the Greek meanings of the name Logos to mean the Word: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  That could also read, “In the beginning was Logos, and Logos was with God, and Logos was God.”

What these verses are saying is the Fall of Logos was needed in order to create the next generation of fractals of the Aeons. This next generation of fractal iterations of the consciousness of the Father, the Son, and the Fullness would come into being in order that the Fullness would be revealed through them. We could say that it is through the Fruit that came from the Fullness into Fall that a new material Hierarchy of God on Earth was created. Logos doubtless thought he was going to instantiate Paradise with his Egoic act. What came instead was a Fall from the Fullness and the first experience of estrangement from the Father.

This, then, is the gnostic version of the original Fall, a movement of Ego away from reason, logic, interdependence, duty, and place, which led to the creation of this material universe.

You may wonder why we spend time figuring out things that happened so long ago that our universe wasn’t even created yet. The reason is because of that oft-repeated maxim: as above, so below. Logos may have been the first to let his Ego lead him astray but he was certainly not the last. We follow the same patterns of behavior as the Aeons, because the consciousness that flows from the Father into the Son and into the Pleroma also flows into us. We are called the Fruit of the Pleroma, known as the Second Order of Powers, and we are subject to the same eternal laws that govern the Aeons. We possess the same Self that the Aeons possess, and we possess our own Egos that govern our interactions with our neighbors and with the world that surrounds us.

Our eternal Self continues to reflect the One Consciousness Above while our Egos identify our individual roles. Our Egos are so well developed that most of us mistake our Egos for our Self, as did Logos so long ago. We will look more closely at this relationship between our Self and our Ego later on in this book. 

In our next chapter we will look at the consequences of the Fall and the rise of the Deficiency.