Gnostic Insights

By Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.

Copyright 2022, All rights reserved

The instant the Aeons became self-aware, the ALL fell out of their unthinking, blissful union and arranged themselves into The Fullness. “Each one of the Aeons is a name, , each of the properties and powers of the Father, since he exists in many names, which are intermingled and harmonious with one another. … just as the Father is a single name, because he is a unity, yet is innumerable in his properties and names.” 

By this point in the Tripartite Tractate, the Son comes to be referred to as the Father, because the Son is the Father of the Third Glory*—the Aeons of the Fullness. We see here that the Son, although a singular monad, is still a unity of many Aeons. The Son becomes knowable through the innumerable properties and names of the Aeons. What does it mean by names? I think that these names are the first appearance of what we would come to call ego. These disparate identities include names like flower, tree, dog, human, even parts of living bodies who themselves are alive, like kidney cells. They’re not names like my name or like Frank or George. They are not those types of identities. These are functional identities. [*correction–I said the Father of the Second Glory but I should have said the the Father of the Third Glory]

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

The hierarchy of The Fullness prefigures the fractal patterns of our universe. “Minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors,” as Thomassen’s translation puts it, refers to personalities and how they relate to one another. “Elders of elders and degrees of degrees” refers to the manner by which things are sorted, stacked, and ordered–first, second, third, superior, inferior, and so on. Each with its own place, exaltation, dwelling, and rest reflects the fact that each self-aware entity has its own unique place in the grand scheme, its own personal expression or exaltation, a location different than its neighbors, thus possessing its very own point of view. 

“It is he, the Father, who gave root impulses to the Aeons, since they are places on the path which leads toward him, as toward a school of behavior. He has extended to them faith in and prayer to him whom they do not see; and a firm hope in him of whom they do not conceive; and a fruitful love, which looks toward to that which it does not see; and an acceptable understanding of the eternal mind; and a blessing, which is riches and freedom; and a wisdom of the one who desires the glory of the Father for thought.”

The originating Father continually emanates a Holy Spirit out through the Son that entices its generations to seek out their source. The Tripartite Tractate says, “It is by virtue of his will that the Father, the one who is exalted, is known, that is, (by virtue of) the spirit which breathes in the Totalities and it gives them an idea of seeking after the unknown one, just as one is drawn by a pleasant aroma to search for the thing from which the aroma arises, since the aroma of the Father surpasses these ordinary ones. For his sweetness leaves the Aeons in ineffable pleasure and it gives them their idea of mingling with him who wants them to know him in a united way and to assist one another in the spirit which is sown within them.”

It is said that although the Father put an unquenchable thirst to align themselves with the One into the minds of the Fullness, he did not reveal to them the Father’s ineffable nature and the impossibility of reuniting with him and surviving to tell the tale. This was doubtless to keep alive the hope of reunification with the Father as a motive for continually giving glory. [The Tripartite Tractate, v. 75]

The Aeons of the Fullness sat in perfect equilibrium in their hierarchy of ranks, stations, and names. They were a congress of one accord, meaning they agreed on everything and they cooperated together to bring about a single dream of Paradise. You could note one difference between the ALL and the Fullness is that, while the ALL sings their songs in blissful unison, the Fullness sings their songs in perfectly tuned, multi-toned harmony.

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

The generation of the Aeons was not a one and done deal. After their initial emanation out of the ALL, the Aeons continued to generate more and more Aeons through various combinations of Aeons giving glory. The pattern by which these younger Aeons were generated was the same as the manner by which the original Aeons of the Aeons were generated—as an exchange of love and admiration passed between the Father and the Fullnesses. The Aeons of the Aeons praised the Father together and together they received the Father’s reflected glory.

This exchange of praise from the Aeons and reflected glory from the Father resulted in the generation of new Aeonic emanations. As we have already noted, the exchange of admirations and glory between the Father and Son was like “the multitude of some who kiss one another with a good, insatiable thought, the kiss being a unity, although it involves many kisses,” and, like all fractals, this pattern replicated itself throughout the generations that followed.

These “kisses” first formed the generation of the ALL. Then the ALL procreated “innumerable Aeons, also in an uncountable way. They too beget by the properties and dispositions in which it exists. For these comprise its association which they form toward one another and toward those who have come forth from them toward the Son, for whose glory they exist.”

“As a result, just as they brought forth in glory for the Father, so too in order to appear perfect, they appeared acting by giving glory… since each one of them individually does not exist so as to give glory in a unitary way to him whom he loves…. The fruit of the Third Glory, however, consists of honors of the will of each one of the Aeons, and each one of the properties.”

This is saying that the entire system of the Aeons has a love and longing for the perfect, complete discovery of the Father, and that the Father “grants that he be conceived of in such a way as to be sought for while keeping to himself his unsearchable, primordial being.”

The Tripartite goes on to say that the Father “gave root impulses to the Aeons, since there are places on the path which leads towards him, as towards a school of behavior. He has extended to them faith in and prayer to him, whom they do not see, and a firm hope in him, of whom they do not conceive, and a fruitful love which looks toward that which it does not see, and an acceptable understanding of the eternal mind, and a blessing which is riches and freedom and wisdom of the one who desires the glory of the Father for his thought.”

“They have begotten, for he has knowledge and wisdom and the Totalities knew that it is from knowledge and wisdom that they have come forth. They would have brought forth a seeming honor: ‘The Father is the one who is the Totalities,’ if the Aeons had risen up to give honor individually. Therefore, in the song of glorification and in the power of the unity of him from whom they have come, they were drawn into a mingling and a combination and a unity with one another. They offered glory worthy of the Father from the pleromatic congregation, which is a single representation although many, because it was brought forth as a glory for the single one and because they came forth toward the one who is himself the Totalities.”

This verse describes how the Aeons mingle and combine with one another to give Glory to Father. All possible combinations of Aeons are needed in order to express the complexity of the otherwise ineffable Father. Each and every Aeon combined and recombined, and the glory they gave the Father was returned to them as additional Aeons, earning their designation as the Fullness of God.

“Those of that place are ineffable and innumerable in the system which is both the manner and the size, the joy, the gladness of the unbegotten, the unnamed, the unnamable, the inconceivable, invisible one. It is the fullness of paternity, so that his abundance is a begetting of the Aeons of the Aeons. They were forever in thought, for the Father was like a thought and a place for them.”

In their desire to give glory to the Father, that is, to align their wills with the Father’s will, Aeons of the Fullness were required to follow these three simple rules. They were to only:

1. Give glory to the Father, not to the Fullness. Aeons were to remain aligned with the Son and not shift their focus to the Fullness as a whole.

2. Give glory to the Father, not to individual Aeons. Aeons were to remain always mindful of the Father and not to give glory to themselves and their talented neighbors as individuals.

3. Give glory to the Father to the best of their own ability. Each Aeon was to give glory from its own location in the hierarchy. They were not to sidle up next to an Aeon who appeared closer to the Father in order to borrow that Aeon’s station to give better glory. Rather, the individual was to develop its own voice and talents through the process of giving glory to the Father. [The Tripartite Tractate, v. 74]

 By following these rules, the Aeons kept their focus on the Father and their motivations pure. While this may be a description of the Aeons and how they think and feel, it is also a description of us because, as we will soon learn, we are the fruit of the Aeons, so every characteristic that the Aeons possess we also possess.

The final Aeon that was produced as an emanation of the Pleroma of the Fullness arose by all of the Aeons giving glory together. The Fullness thus produced a final Aeon whom the Tripartite Tractate calls by the name Logos. Because Logos was produced through the entirety of the Pleroma giving glory as one, this Aeon possessed within itself all of the characteristics of the entire Pleroma.

Logos was not the equivalent of the Pleroma, though. Rather, Logos contained within its Self a fractal iteration of all the other Aeons. Because of this, Logos in his entirety resembled a model representation of the Hierarchy of God a fractal level down from the Aeons. That is why in my illustration of the Fullness I depict a large pyramid of golden orbs topped by a smaller pyramid resembling the entirety of the Pleroma. That smaller pyramid on top is Logos.

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By Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.

Copyrighted. All rights reserved.

When I first conceived of my theory of everything named “A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything” back in 2008, I was unfamiliar with Gnosticism. A Simple Explanation is presented in secular terms, using common concepts from all fields of human endeavor from math and science on through religion, psychology, and sociology. In A Simple Explanation, God is usually referred to as Metaversal Consciousness, and we here on this plane carry that consciousness forward into this life as Units of Consciousness. A Simple Explanation was written to appeal to folks who usually don’t go in for religion but who, nonetheless, are seeking an overall structure for understanding the mysteries of life.

Had I been a philosophy major like my brother, Dr. Bill Puett, I would have known the names for various aspects of the Simple Explanation, like panpsychism and monadism. I would have been familiar with works such as Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. But I wasn’t a philosophy major. I am instead a psychologist with a Ph.D. in Classical Rhetoric. My field of deep study is ancient texts and ideologies, and these are what influenced the development of my theory, not modern philosophers such as Leibniz or Kant. So rather than kludge together other people’s ideas, which is the normal way that scholars work, I built the Simple Explanation from the ground up using my own observation and logic.

And then around 2016, I read a copy of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. At first I found the ideas shocking. These were the very heresies my conservative Christianity had warned me away from. According to Christians, these beliefs were excluded from our modern versions of the Bible to protect the church from theological misinformation. I discovered that radical repackaging had removed from the New Testament a type of spiritual belief that was well- known to Jesus and his followers. This belief system, commonly called Gnosticism, describes Christianity differently than does our modern Church. Gnosticism makes sense of most of the more mysterious aspects of Christianity, including humanity’s role in the great scheme of things, and common questions such as “why is there evil in the world?”

Many of these answers to longstanding theological problems were resurrected along with the Nag Hammadi scriptures when they were rediscovered and exhumed from the desert sands in 1945. I learned that the Nag Hammadi scriptures had been buried deep in the Egyptian desert around 350 AD, preserving them from the great Biblical purge conducted by the Council of Nicene at the behest of the Catholic Pope and the Emperor of Rome as they shaped and packaged Christianity to suit their needs. Keep in mind that these ancient teachings have been held back from almost 2000 years of formal study and Christian theology. So what you are about to learn from the Nag Hammadi scriptures is fresh, clean, and unsullied by centuries of scholastic and theological opinions.

Over the next couple of years I carefully picked up the Nag Hammadi and I set it back down numerous times, lest I be led astray by false beliefs. Eventually I narrowed my focus to one of the codices in particular that seemed to accord most closely with my understanding of the teachings of Jesus. This book is called The Tripartite Tractate, which simply means the 3-part book. The “3” also refers to the 3-part nature of humanity: spiritual, psychological, and material.

I spent time conducting a word study on the Tripartite Tractate, attempting to nail down some very confusing, archaic language. I also made diagrams and illustrations of the ideas presented in the book as I read. Then I put the material away for another year to let it rest and percolate. Finally, in 2019, I wrote and published a small book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, based upon the Tripartite Tractate.

The purpose of The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated is to present the gnosis of the Tripartite Tractate as simply and clearly as possible. The format of the Gnostic Gospel book is similar to the Chick cartoon tracts I used to hand out during my Jesus-freak days in the late 1960s. Each concept in the Gnostic Gospel is illustrated by my own original artwork that converts difficult ideas from the Tripartite Tractate into easy-to-understand drawings. With my simple Gnostic Gospel, anyone, of any level of education, can grasp Gnostic theology.

Since that time, I have continued to develop the Gnostic theology as presented in the Tripartite Tractate through my New Gnostic Gospel blog and the Gnostic Insights podcast. I have also had the pleasure of presenting this Gnostic theology as a guest on numerous podcasts hosted by others. This book represents the current state of my personal gnosis within the context of a fully developed Gnostic theology. Although The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated presents everything one needs to know to remember the gnosis they were born with, this book goes beyond The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated to explain, as simply as humanly possible, the why’s and wherefores of gnosis.

Before we go any further let’s answer the question: what is gnosis? We keep talking about gnosis and Gnosticism, but what does this mean? Gnosis simply means knowing. And in the gnostic frame of reference, gnosis refers to remembering the truth of our existence and our origin. Gnostic literature says we come into life holding all of this knowledge within ourselves and we have complete access to the Father, the Son, and the Fullness at any time that we turn our focus upward. It is this direct conduit to the Father that brings us into alignment with our gnosis.

Gnosis is a Greek word. Another word related to gnosis is anamnesis. You know that the word amnesia means forgetting. Anamnesis means not forgetting. So the process of coming to gnosis is a process called anamnesis—or remembering. Just to let you know, this book sometimes throws around big words like anamnesis. Not to worry though, because the goal here is to explain these words clearly enough so you will be able to understand them without running to the dictionary.

Many people claim that it is impossible to know or describe the full glory of the transcendent, immortal Father due to our own human limitations. After all, how could limited beings such as ourselves possibly imagine the greatness of the originator of the universe, much less our place in the grand design? Wouldn’t lesser beings reflect a diminished view of God? Wouldn’t these lesser beings be limited to offering a tarnished glory that falls far short of the object of their praise?

The Tripartite Tractate, the book of the Nag Hamadi that I use as my primary source material, puts it this way: “If the members of the ALL had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who himself is the ALL. Thus creation would have been doomed from the outset to never comprehend the full glory of either the Father or itself.”

According to the Gnostic Gospel, the Father realized the impossibility of his creation comprehending himself and so the Father built a helpful workaround meant to aid comprehension through selfless union and cooperation with others in a shared task.

“For that reason, they were drawn into mutual intermingling, union, and oneness through the singing of praise from their assembled fullness. They were one and, at the same time, many, accurately reflecting the One who himself is the entirety of the ALL out of perfect union with itself and with the Son, and by means of a single shared effort, the ALL gave glory to the eternal one who had brought it forth.”

We will learn all about the Father, the Son, and the ALL in the pages to come. This book is organized in the order that Creation itself came from the Father. I like to begin with the cosmos as it unfolded and rolled out. The word for that sort of study is “cosmogony,” which is the study of the origins of the universe. This makes the most sense to me–to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principle players are and then, after that is established, to see how that applies to our lives. Then we can ask, “Why are we here? Is there a purpose to our lives? How should we live?” After that, we can finally consider the final roll-up of the universe and what happens after we die. All of these questions are answered very precisely in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This knowledge is “gnosis.”

Valentinian Gnosticism is a form of Christianity, and I maintain that it is the true form of Christianity that Christianity should be. It is my understanding that this wisdom would have been what Jesus was actually talking about, and that’s why the New Testament is consistent with what I have been teaching. When Jesus said, “I and my Father are One,” he was talking about the gnostic God Above All Gods. So you are not wandering into deep heresy by exploring Valentinian Gnosticism. However, if you are a Christian, you should know that there are indeed a couple of major heresies in Gnosticism.

One major heresy, and this is a big heresy, is that that the Creator God of this universe that we’ve been calling Jehovah or Yaweh is not the God Above All Gods. Yes, Jehovah is the creator of the heavens and earth. But his creation only extends to the mineral level. Basically, Jehovah is in charge of all the material in the universe. Jehovah makes our material universe hold its shape and appear solid. So, yes, Jehovah as the Creator God of our material universe is in line with Christianity. But Gnosticism then goes on to say that the creator of this universe is not the Father, but a fallen entity. The Creator God is an Aeon who fell from the Fullness of God. In the Tripartite Tractate the Aeon who fell is named Logos. After the fall, Logos became what is called the Demiurge.

Another big heresy in gnostic Christianity is the notion that everyone will be redeemed, even the Demiurge. As our Christian New Testament repeatedly says, redemption is not based upon merit or works. It is not based upon rituals such as baptism and communion . Redemption is based upon the fact that Christ came to Earth and it was the Christ’s job to redeem us all, not ours. So it doesn’t matter what you think about Christ. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in redemption  or not, because your beliefs and actions do not limit the ability of Christ to accomplish his mission.

I don’t see universal redemption as the negative heresy it is made out to be. I actually find it empowers the role of Christ more than our modern church doctrine. It makes Jesus even more important because everyone is redeemed. Everyone who ever was, everyone who lives now, and everyone who will ever be is covered by the redemption of Christ, because it is Christ’s job to do that and the Christ accomplished his job. This fact is actually stated throughout the New Testament, although generally misinterpreted.

It doesn’t matter whether you hold out as an atheist. The thing is, when you do hold out, when you refuse to acknowledge the mission of the Christ, then it’s a pretty good indication that you are not in tune with the Father, because the Christ is the emissary of the Father. So if you reject the redemption of the Christ, you are rejecting the Father. If you love the Father, then you will love the Son. And if you love the Son, you will love the Christ. Sounds pretty Christian to me.

Valentinian Gnosticism is most assuredly not a New Age religion. The books of the Nag Hammadi were written on sheepskin parchment and buried in a clay jar in the desert for 2000 years, so I don’t see how you could call it “New Age.” If Valentinian Gnosticism has tenets in common with other popular belief systems, then those would be truths that they all happen to share. That is, the gnosis they may have in common doesn’t imply they are historically related to each other.

For example, my book–The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated—comes from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. My retelling of the mythos is just good news for modern man. It is not hermetic; it is not a translation of wisdom from an Egyptian God. It is not New Age. This Gnostic Gospel is simply the story of who we are and where we come from. This is the information this current book will explain as thoroughly and as simply as possible. The gnosis I am sharing in this book honors God the Father and, as you begin to remember this inherent truth, you will experience a more joyful life. When we use our free will to remember our true inheritance, the God of this universe loses its power to control us. When we turn our eyes upward to the Father, we are freed from the burdens of this world.

Once you begin to remember that you are truly loved by our heavenly Father, you will suffer less. When you begin to walk with virtue rather than embracing vice, you will be happier; you will be joyful. Not all of the time. Bad things do happen. But suffering as a response to life’s challenges is unnecessary. We are living in a fallen world, and that, I suppose, is another gnostic heresy. For some reason, modern Christians want to insist that this world is blessed by God and is blessedly perfect. But we all know this world we live in isn’t perfect, and when you deny that fact you become unduly frustrated and sad , even to the point of depression. Pharmaceuticals are not the solution; gnosis is.

One last thing before we leave this introduction. This book is not a scholarly, theological tome. Gnosis means knowing. This sort of knowing is not related to book learning. Gnosis refers to remembering what you already know–anamnesis. The point of spiritual study is not to learn new things but to mine what you already possess deep inside of you. When you study new ideas, you must continually weigh the information you are taking in against your own discernment. The purpose of this book is not so much to teach you about Gnosticism; the purpose of this book is to stimulate your own innate gnosis. And there is really only one gnosis that matters in the end, and that is remembering your cosmic origin and the purpose of being alive.

Are you familiar with that expression that says, “You can’t take it with you”? You can’t take it with you usually means that your possessions and your money are worthless to you after you die. People say, “You may as well spend what you have now rather than hoard it, because you can’t take it with you,” or, “You should be more generous with your possessions and share them with others, because you can’t take it with you.” But aside from money and possessions, another thing you can’t take with you is worldly knowledge and book learning.

The memes that you pick up here in our material cosmos will not follow you into the afterlife. The only memes that will persist beyond this place and time are those that are compatible with the values of the Pleroma, often referred to as virtues. So you can be a billionaire here in this life, you could be a tech giant and shoot off your own rockets to Mars, you could be President of the United States or the head of a crime syndicate, but you won’t have a dime in Heaven.

Likewise, you can have three Ivy League degrees but learn nothing of lasting value. Your advanced degrees in religious studies or in physics or archeology are ultimately worthless. The only knowledge of lasting value is the gnosis that transcends this material cosmos. This is the type of knowledge we address in this book: gnosis of the Father and the Son, gnosis of the Pleroma and the Aeons, gnosis of the fall and how to avoid partaking in the fall, gnosis of redemption from the fall, gnosis of the mission of the Christ, and gnosis of the Simple Golden Rule of love and cooperation.

More than book learning, what we really need to learn is discernment. Our culture does not promote either critical thinking or discernment. Our culture actually promotes going along to get along. Our culture teaches us to feed our narcissistic egos and denies that we exist beyond our egos. Science officially denies the existence of souls because souls cannot be dissected, weighed, or measured, and science only believes in tangible evidence they can squeeze out of their experiments. You can’t tease out a soul in an atom smasher.

But here’s what I’d like to tell you today: that the academy of scholars don’t know much of anything of lasting value. This is because academia only studies “isms” and not gnosis. Academic publications are, for the most part, empty of any sort of gnosis or spiritual discernment. University scholasticism, another ism, scours the writings of other scholars and builds upon officially pre-approved conclusions. This is why the footnotes and the reference sections are so important, because they disclose the limits of the scholar’s inquiry.

These scholars are not mining the actual source of knowledge. Rather, they are continually adding and stripping wallpaper from the walls of academia and painting over other people’s decor in the name of intellectual progress. But it’s not progress; it’s only an accumulation of essentially useless information.

We have no need of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Knowledge should be used to inform your own gnosis. Knowledge should be weighed by the scales of your own discernment. The purpose of reading, writing, and arithmetic is to aid your own recall of gnosis. The purpose of scholarship, if you want to be a gnostic scholar, is to enhance your practice of gnosis. It is far better to be a gnostic practitioner with little formal education than to be a scholar with little or no gnosis. So go ahead and study, but realize that the study has no value unless it helps you to realize truth, and the only truth you need is Aeonic truth. The vast majority of memes do not lead us to truth. Most memes are forms of delusion, whether you pick them up from worldly culture or soulless universities. Most memes stand between you and your realization of self.

In academia, consciousness is largely denied. Some academics go so far as to claim that apparent consciousness is nothing but random nodes in a mathematical abstraction, and that what we think of as ourselves is only packets of information that arise from calculations. Those researchers who are into consciousness studies believe themselves to be at the forefront of uncovering the nature of consciousness through scientific procedure. They are attempting to discover the true nature of consciousness through reductionism and measurements.

The consciousness studies articles I have read attempt to reduce consciousness rather than expand it. They believe consciousness can be grasped by going tinier and tinier. That’s called scientific reductionism. It reduces the big to the tiny. This book is the opposite of reductionism. We keep going larger and larger, all the way up to the gigantic, to the immeasurable, to the level of the Aeons, the Pleroma, the Son, the Christ, and the Father. That’s the opposite direction of reductionism. It’s going large.

So hang onto your hats and let’s get ready to mine some very big gnosis.

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The purpose of Gnostic Insights is to help us all remember the gnosis we were born with, which is knowledge of where we come from and who or what is the originating consciousness, as well as the nature of our relationship to that originating consciousness. So far, we have looked at the Father, which is what we call the originating consciousness, and the Son, which is that consciousness made into a particular entity that we call the Son.

The Son is not the generalized, diffuse, no-thought consciousness of the Father, but rather like a bucket dipped into the ocean, with the Father being the ocean. The Son is the essence of the Father, now contained within the bucket. So it’s exactly the same as the Father, but it is a particularity. It is a singularity.

As soon as the Son was formed it immediately created more entities from its own Self in the same fashion that the Son came out of the Father. The distinct characteristics within the Son are variously referred to as the Totalities, the ALL, and the Fullness of God.

The ALL emerged from the Son, and it was said that this wasn’t like a casting off in the manner that a fungus casts off spores which then grow into their own little fungi. This was more of a spreading out of the Son and, by extension, the Father through the Son. The Totalities of the ALL remain completely within and inhabiting the Son.

In my description of the Fullness, I picture rays of a star, with each of the rays being part of the ALL, and each one of them expressing a slightly different characteristic of the Son out of which they spread forth.

My imagery for the Son is like a diffuse cloud sitting in this great inky blackness which is the Father, and out of this cloud comes a starburst, with each one of the rays of the star is one of the Totalities. At first the ALL was identical to Son, and all of these parts of the Son formed a unified Totality. As soon as the ALL came to know itself and to recognize its own individual consciousness, each one of the rays became its own singularity.

And once they did that the Totalties immediately recognized a self identity and formed themselves into what is called the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma. Pleroma simply means everything that is possible. All possible expressions of consciousness can be found in the Fullness of God. These Aeons of the Fullness of God quickly sorted themselves into what is called a hierarchy, which is like a pyramidal type of stack, with many more units located down at the bottom of the stack and fewer and fewer units as you go higher and higher.

In my illustrations, I picture the Hierarchy of the Fullness as a pyramidal stack of golden orbs, like cannon balls, with each orb being a particular Aeon. There are more cannon balls on the lower levels and fewer and fewer balls the higher you go up the pyramid, until finally at the top you have only a single golden orb.

There is a principle in Gnosticism that I call “the higher the fewer.” Using that principle the awakened Aeons of the Fullness of God sorted themselves into positions, places, powers, ranks, stations, and names, indicating that they each had their own individual point-of-view and they each had their own place and duty in the hierarchy of heaven.

Last week’s episode was supposed to be about the Son. But we’ve hardly heard anything about the Son himself. We hear about the Father being indescribable and we hear about the infinite number of spirits of the Church that form the body of the Son. But we really haven’t heard much in the way of descriptions of the Son itself.

This is because the only way that the Son can be described is through the Aeons, which is to say, through the fractals that come out of the Son. As we trace the path of emanations flowing out of the inconceivable Father and through the barely conceivable Son, we become more and more concrete in our ability to understand the nature of God. It is when we enter the realm of the Aeons that we can begin to recognize the panoply of properties of the Father and Son.

The Tripartite Tractate says, “They were forever in thought, for the Father was like a thought and a place for them. When their generations had been established, the One who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was deficient in the […] and he brought forth those within him, but since he is as he is, he is a spring which is not diminished by the water which abundantly flows from it.”

“Generations,” as the Tripartite Tractate uses the word, means “to create, to generate.” Here it is saying that when the Son was formed, all of the Totalities that make up the body of the Son were formed along with him, and their formation or generation did not lessen the Son or subtract anything away from the Son’s essence.

The word “deficient” as used here simply means not yet manifest. Deficient can’t indicate any shortcoming or inadequacy, because the Son is a complete embodiment of the Father, and his Totalities are a Fullness. The missing word indicated by the ellipsis […] probably refers to the structure of the eternal heavens; not “the universe,” because the material universe occurs further on down the line. So it likely reads, “When their generations had been established, the One who is in control wished to lay hold of and to bring forth that which was deficient in the heavenly plan and he brought forth those within him…”

The Tripartite Tractate says of these Totalities: “While they were in the Father’s thought, that is, in the hidden depth, the depth knew them, but they were unable to know the depth in which they were. Nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father and they did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed, so that it has been discovered that they were like a fetus.”

And so now we have these potential entities existing like a seed, living within the Father; existing as thoughts of the Father. They don’t know themselves, they’re not yet awake. They don’t know themselves and they don’t know where they are. They don’t even realize that they comprise the body of the Son. And in that sense they are like a fetus that is still inside the womb, still sleeping.

The Tripartite Tractate carries on to say that, “The one who first thought of them, the Father, — not only so that they might exist for him, but also that they might exist for themselves as well, that they might then exist in his thought as mental substance and that they might exist for themselves too, — sowed a thought like a spermatic seed.”

So, in other words, the Father wants them to wake up. The Father is spreading consciousness, awakened consciousness, throughout the entire body of the Son. He doesn’t want them only to be unthinking constituents of the Son, making up the overall body of the Son. The Father wants them all to have their own existence and their own realizations, their own consciousness, their own Self. The Tripartite describes them “like seeds in need of gaining nourishment and growth.”

So the fractals of the ALL were asleep, and the Father “wished to grant that they might come into being, as faultless ones.” The Tripartite says that the first step in bringing awareness to the Totalities was to give them, “the perfect idea of beneficence toward them.” Meaning that even though they didn’t yet know themselves, what they did know was that they were loved. That is all they knew: that they had a benefactor. Somebody cared for them and wanted only good for them. They awoke to Self realization because someone loved them. This beneficence was their first knowledge.

Now the Tripartite Tractate goes on to say that, “The One whom he raised up as a light for those who came from himself, the One from whom they take their name, he is the Son, who is full, complete and faultless. He brought him forth mingled with what came forth from him […].” Again confirming that the Totalities coexist with the Son, although they are not yet fully awakened.

“As for the parts in which he exists in his own manner and form and greatness, it is possible for to see him and speak about that which they know of him, since they wear him while he wears them, because it is possible for them to comprehend him.” And remember that in last week’s episode I used the analogy that the Totalities are to the Son as the cells that make up our bodies are to us—we wear them like a garment over our Self, and they wear our eternal Self over their little cells. We go everywhere they go, and they go everywhere we go.

“He, however, is as he is, incomparable. In order that the Father might receive honor from each one and reveal himself, even in his ineffability, hidden, and invisible, they marvel at him mentally. Therefore, the greatness of his loftiness consists in the fact that they speak about him and see him. He becomes manifest, so that he may be hymned because of the abundance of his sweetness … And just as the admirations of the silences are eternal generations and they are mental offspring, so too the dispositions of the word are spiritual emanations. Both of them admirations and dispositions, since they belong to a word, are seeds and thoughts of his offspring, and roots which live forever, appearing to be offspring which have come forth from themselves, being minds and spiritual offspring to the glory of the Father.”

This passage is saying that the manner by which the Totalities become awakened is through the process of praising the Father, singing about the Father’s sweetness to them. In other words, they come to Selfhood by giving glory to the Father. The “admirations of the silences,” which is to say, the glory given by the Totalities, “dispose” them to their individuality—“appearing to be offspring which have come forth by themselves.”

The passage also says that the Totalities are the Son’s “seeds and thoughts,” and that they will live forever. This affirms that the Son also lives forever.

The Tripartite Tractate then confirms the “heavenly plan” we filled in earlier as the missing words in the ellipsis, saying, “But on the pattern by which he was existing, so are those who have come forth from him, begetting everything which they desire.”

Perhaps this is a good place to begin talking about fractals. Fractals are a mathematical terms for objects that are “self-similar” and “replicate at larger and smaller scales.”

This leads us to discussing the concept of fractals. Every now and then I talk about fractals and if you don’t know what a fractal is I would like to explain it to you. Fractals are not discussed in the Nag Hammadi or in the Qumran manuscripts. Yet, fractals are all around us, all of the time. Our consciousness, like that of the Aeons, is a fractal expression of the Fullness.

Fractals are now recognized as a basic principle of mathematics and this manifested universe. But unless this concept of fractals is pointed out to you, you may never notice it because fractals weren’t even recognized or formulated until the 1970s. It was then that a mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term fractal in the first published paper on fractal geometry. I talk about fractals a lot on my blog, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. You can find the fullest explanation of fractals in the article that I wrote and published on the blog on January 6th of 2011, called “The Fractal Roots of Consciousness.” So if you’d like to study more about fractals and see imagery of what fractals look like, you may go to https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com and look up that article in the topical index over on the right-hand side of the page. But I’m going to explain it a bit right now for our immediate purposes.

First off, let’s look at some fractals that you are undoubtedly familiar with. Think of the branching structure of a river delta where it flows into the sea. You have a river and then it branches. And then each of those branches, branches again, and each of those branches branches, and they send out more and more branching structures. You can see them on Google Earth all over the world. Each of those branches are called fractals.

Using the same branching structure, roots of a plant send out finer and finer tendrils at each level of fractal branching into the soil. You start with one stem of the plant, but then the stem branches out and branches out and branches out with finer and finer tendrils as it goes into the soil, searching for nutrients and water.

Another good way to see fractals is to take a stock of broccoli and perform a simple experiment as demonstrated on my YouTube channel. If you go to the Cyd Ropp YouTube channel and look for Simple Explanation videos, you’ll find one that’s called Broccoli Fractal Demonstration.

Here’s how it works: you start with a big stalk of broccoli, fresh from the garden or market.  You have probably noticed this before, that if you pull one of the larger clumps off of that stalk, it looks just like a smaller version of that first stalk you were holding. And then you can take another clump off of that smaller stalk, and it looks just like those two larger stalks, only smaller. And you can keep breaking off smaller and smaller fractals of broccoli at least seven times, always resulting in a stalk of broccoli that looks just like the others, only smaller.  Each of those smaller pieces of broccoli are what is called a fractal iteration. This broccoli experiment is a nice little demonstration of what a fractal is.

I suggest that the consciousness of God is distributed in fractals, the same way that the broccoli stalk or the river delta or the tree roots are fractals. So we can imagine that the root of consciousness, the Father, is like the mother plant. The Son is that first bunch off of that mother plant of the Father–that first broccoli stalk if you will. The Totalities of the ALL make up the Pleroma of that first bunch of the Son. When the ALL becomes self-aware it recognizes itself in all of its variables and potential as the entire blueprint of our universe–because it is, after all, the mind of God. Each one of those Aeons of the Fullness of God is a fractal, and each of them replicates, on a smaller scale, the original Son who Himself is also a fractal iteration of the original consciousness of the Father.

Now, one thing about consciousness fractals, or “units of consciousness” as I call them in my Simple Explanation theory,  is that the Father is consciousness itself, and off of that initial consciousness come fractals that are each a unit of consciousness. So the Universal Unit of Consciousness is the largest fractal that we are aware of and it holds all of the blueprints and all of the potentialities for our entire universe, as thought arising out of the originating Father’s consciousness. And each one of the fractal iterations that come off of that Universal Unit of Consciousness also holds the potentiality of the Father as expressed by the Son. These fractal potentialities are first expressed as the combination of traits called the Pleroma of God, also known as the Fullness of God. When the Fullness sits in its unified perfection, ALL of the traits of the Son are on full display.

We will talk more later about how these fractal units of consciousness play out in our lives, when we begin to cover gnostic psychology.

So, just to run it past you again real fast, the Father is the originating consciousness. The first fractal of the Father is the Son. The Son quickly became a Father itself by branching out into the Totalities of the ALL. And as soon as those differentiations of the ALL arose, the Totalities of the ALL became aware of their own selves and they sorted themselves into the pyramidal hierarchical shape that is called the Fullness of God or the Pleroma.

Each one of those glowing golden cannon balls, as I described them in a previous podcast, each one of those is a full fractal of the Son of God, but it only expresses its place, position, rank, function, and point-of-view. In a similar way, our DNA expresses our body, yet our DNA carries a tremendous amount of unexpressed information that apparently goes far beyond our body. This extra 95% of our DNA is a mystery to geneticists who call it “junk” DNA. We can think of the junk DNA as the full Pleroma of our physical selves, not expressed in this lifetime.

So each of the Totalities, once they’ve become those little cannonball shapes stacked into their pyramidal hierarchy, are known as Aeons. And each Aeon is a fractal of the Fullness of God, but each Aeon only expresses its job, its point-of-view, its position, place, power, and name.

And now perhaps we can grasp the following passage from the Tripartite Tractate more clearly, incorporating our understanding of fractals:

“There is no need for voice and spirit, mind and word, because there is no need to work at that which they desire to do, but on the pattern by which he was existing, so are those who have come forth from him, begetting everything which they desire. And the one whom they conceive of, and whom they speak about, and the one toward whom they move, and the one in whom they are, and the one whom they hymn, thereby glorifying him, he has sons. For this is their procreative power, like those from whom they have come, according to their mutual assistance, since they assist one another like the unbegotten ones.”

They assist one another, working together. And this brings us back to the Simple Golden Rule, from A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which we will cover in depth later in this series [book].

For now, this is what the Simple Golden Rule says:

Units of consciousness work together with their neighbors to hold hands and help one another with knowledge, with physical assistance, and with love, to build the next level up, to build something they can’t make on their own. They will make it together with those with whom are working. The Simple Golden Rule is a fractal principle that runs our universe: holding hands in cooperation, being useful, giving. This is the base line of the golden rule and it works for everything. And it began up here, before creation, within this entity known as the pre-existent Church, which is the body of the Son.

I would love to hear from you. I encourage you to go to the Gnostic Insights dot com website and find my comment form and then write to me that way. I always respond to your questions and comments. I would love to dialogue with any of you that would like to talk this material over.

So thank you for spending this time with me and onward and upward. And God bless.

The Son and the ALL

Copyright by Cyd Ropp, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

Now imagine that this consciousness that we call Father gives birth to an emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation philosophy, we call this emanation a fractal. We’ll look at fractals later in the book because they play a big part in creation.

In the religious texts they call this emanation a Son. So now we have the Father and Son. In the silence of the absolute, the Father brings forth the first and only Son from its realization of itself. The Son is the Father having a thought. The Son is the Father knowing itself as the Father and having a realization of its own eternal Self.

The Son reflects the Father’s boundless greatness and love. The Son possesses every trait of the Father, for the Son is a complete encapsulation of the Father in which it dwells. Every trait of the Father is expressed now as a singularity, and that singularity is called the Son. We will also be looking at singularities, monads, and points of view in more depth later in the book.

And yet although it was a singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, it was no longer alone, for not only the Son, but what is called the ALL, or the Totalities, arose at once.  The ALL immediately appeared as the offspring of the Son, because the Son could not help itself from bringing others into existence, even as it was brought into existence by the Father. Because the Son is an emanation of the Father, it mirrors the Father’s creativity.

And so the Father knows itself and creates the Son, and the Son knows itself and creates the ALL. In the Tripartite Tractate the ALL is known as the pre-existent Church. This is not the same as your church down on the street corner with the people in it singing hymns on Sunday, but rather this is called ”the true preexistent Church.”

The Tripartite Tractate says, “for not only the Son but also the Church exists from the beginning.” The Tripartite goes on to say: “Before they all arose from the Father’s thought, he knew them, but they did not know the depth in which they found themselves, nor could they know themselves or anything else, for they were within the Father as an embryo or an unsprouted seed.”

Which is to say, they exist as potential. They were there, they live in the Father, they live in the Son, but they don’t know anything, they don’t know themselves. The Totalities of the pre-existent Church are not yet self-aware. The way the Tripartite Tractate describes this, “because they were newly formed the Father concealed their perfection from them until they could grow into the knowledge.”

This is why the Father revealed the Son to them, so that the ALL would be able to relate to the Son and see the Father’s glory according to the ability of each one to receive him. Nobody sees the Father. The Father is unknowable; the Father is too immense. When people say, “Oh, you can’t conceive of God. God’s too big and unknowable,” that’s true. But God formed itself into a singularity and that singularity is called the Son. And one of the reasons the Son is there is because we can know the Son; we can’t know the Father, but we can know the Son.

The Tripartite Tractate describes this this way: “The Son is no more and no less than the sum of the ALL. And they understood who he is and he is covered by the ALL. And with the birth of the ALL, the Son also became a Father.”

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

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

In my book, the Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, I illustrate these concepts. The way I think of it is this way: when I picture the originating consciousness of the original Father, I see just total blackness, an entirety of dark, dark blackness. Then when I picture the Son emerging and being held by that blackness, I see the Son as a foggy light that begins very diffuse, very foggy, emerging out of the inky blackness. That is what I see as the Son.

In the previous episode I talked about the characteristics of the Father, as recounted by the Tripartite Tractate in the Nag Hammadi Library. Now the funny thing about that whole last episode and discussing the characteristics of the Father is that the Father is unknowable. The Father is ineffable and illimitable and all of those gigantic words which mean that we can’t really comprehend the Father at all. So our attempts at description are somewhat ironic. So how is it that we can claim to know these characteristics of the Father–his sweetness, his greatness, and so forth? Well, that is because the Father reveals his own characteristics through the Son. And the Son is actually the God that we are able to relate to. Because of the Son’s form, it becomes the relatable Father to us and to the Aeons, the Son of that originating Father who is otherwise inexpressible and ungraspable.

The Son reflects and incorporates the characteristics of the Father. So it seems to me that we can infer the characteristics of the Father from the Son, and that’s what I think the author of the Tripartite Tractate did–inferred what the characteristics of the Father must be by examining the characteristics of the Son. And so now in this chapter, I would like to share more about the characteristics of the Son. What is the Son? What does it mean to be the only begotten Son of God? And what was this first expression of the Father?

The Tripartite Tractate sometimes refers to the Son as Father because the Son is the Father of the Totalities. Sometimes these names get interchanged and, again, this is a bit confusing, because the first Father is the originating source, the ground state of consciousness from which all else emanates. But the Father of us and of the Totalities before us, that is the Son–the only begotten Son of the Father.

The Tripartite Tractate puts it this way: “In the proper sense, he alone, the good, the unbegotten Father and the complete, perfect One, is the one filled with all his offspring and with every virtue and with everything of value.”

So here, near the beginning of the Tripartite Tractate, the writer is saying, and I quote, “Concerning the Father, rather, one should speak of him as good, perfect, complete, being himself the Totality. Not one of the names which are conceived or spoken, seen or grasped, not one of them applies to him, even though they are exceedingly glorious, magnifying, and honored. However, it is possible to utter these names for his glory and honor, in accordance with the capacity of each one of those who give him glory.”

Which is saying that it is a reflection of the speaker, like me saying these things, or the writer of the Tripartite Tractate claiming these things about the Father that are good and glorious. It is more a reflection of our capacity to understand and grasp the Father rather than the Father itself, because the Father is unknowable and ungraspable, and so the glory that we give is a reflection of our capacity to give glory. The Tripartite says of the Father that, “He is the one who is inconceivable by any thought, invisible by anything, ineffable by any word, untouchable by any hand. He alone is the one who knows himself as he is.”

And, after describing our inability to conceive of the Father, the Father therefore brings forth the Son, which is someone that we can begin to praise and grasp with any sort of true reflection of its Self.

So it is saying we really don’t know any of this stuff that we’re saying about the Father. But what we can infer is that now, as it says again, quote, “He is the one who projects himself thus as generation, having glory and honor, marvelous and lovely; the One who glorifies himself, who marvels, who also loves; this is the One who has a Son who subsists in him, who is silent concerning him, who is the ineffable One in the ineffable One, the invisible One, the incomprehensible One, the inconceivable One in the inconceivable One. Thus, the Son exists in the Father forever. The Father is the One in whom he knows himself, who begot him having a thought, which is the thought of him. That is the perception of him.”

The book says, “Just as the Father exists in the proper sense, the One before whom there was no one else and the One apart from whom there is no other unbegotten One, so too the Son exists in the proper sense, the One before whom there was no other and after whom no other Son exists. Therefore he is a first-born and an only Son. ‘First-born’ because no one exists before him and ‘only Son’ because no one is after him.”

So now we have the Son sitting inside of the Father, generated by the Father because the Father wished to be known. And there is no other generation of the Father other than this first One–the Son.

The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say something interesting here: that “Not only did the Son exist from the beginning, but the Church too existed from the beginning. Now he who thinks that the discovery that the Son is an only son opposes the statement about the Church because of the mysterious quality of the matter, it is not so. For, just as the Father is a unity and has revealed himself as Father for himself alone, so too, the Son was found to be a brother to himself alone, in virtue of the fact that he is unbegotten and without beginning. The Son wonders at himself along with the Father, and he gives himself glory and honor and love. Being innumerable and illimitable, his offspring are indivisible: those which, that is the Church of which we were speaking, those which exist have come forth from the Son and the Father.

And then this is an interesting analogy that the book uses. It says that the Church comes forth like kisses, a “multitude of kisses” exchanged between the Son and the Father, like “the multitude of some who kiss one another with a good, insatiable thought, the kiss being a unity, although it involves many kisses.”

So, in this analogy, the Church, the Totalities which are the constituents of the Church, are kisses that the Father and Son exchange between one another. It says, “This is the nature of the holy, imperishable spirits upon which the Son rests, since it is his essence, just as the Father rests upon the Son.”

So, the Son is a singular unity, what I would say is the first fractal emanation of the consciousness of the Father. It is like the bucket dipped into the sea. It has the same characteristics of the Father, and this is how we infer what are the characteristics of the Father–by looking at the Son. And the Son is comprised of innumerable imperishable spirits that have been exchanged between the Father and Son– like kisses. So the Son is a singular entity, however, the Son consists of uncountable spirits.

The Son is One and many at the same time, just as we humans, let’s say, have a singular spirit that governs ourselves–our governing unit of consciousness is what I call it. This is what many people refer to as “the soul.” You have your one governing unit of consciousness that you think of as yourself, yet you are comprised of countless, billions and trillions of subunits, in the sense of cells, and these are your smaller units of consciousness that make up your great Self.

The Son is the same way. The Son’s countless, illimitable–meaning an infinite number of–spirits make up the Son. And at this point in the Tripartite Tractate, these spirits are called the Totalities of the Church. And the Church remains within the Son. The Son “wears them like a garment” and they “wear the Son like a garment,” is how the Tripartite Tractate puts it. This is akin to our bodies and the cells inside of our bodies. Our cells don’t go walking around on their own without us. We go everywhere they go and they go everywhere we go.

The Son has that same exact type of relationship with the Church or the first emanations of spirit. In fact, this is another example of the precept: “As above, so below.” The Totalities of the ALL, or the pre-existent Church, are to the Son as our cells are to us. As above, so below.

Here’s how it’s put in the Tripartite Tractate: “The Church exists in the dispositions and properties in which the Father and the Son exist. Therefore, it subsists in the procreation of innumerable Aeons. Also, in an uncountable way, they too beget by the properties and dispositions in which the Church exists, for these comprise its association, which they form toward one another and toward those who have come forth from them, toward the Son, for whose glory they exist.”

We will revisit this idea of the generation of the Aeons later, but for now we will focus on the purpose of the Church, which is to give glory to the Son. That’s their main job and that’s why we have the same word “church” down here on earth. Our human church’s job is to give glory to the Father and to the Son, as it was in the beginning. The celestial Church’s job is to point toward the glory of the Father and the Son.

My definition of glory and giving glory is to be in perfect alignment with the will of the Father and the Son. When you are in perfect alignment with the Father, you are “giving glory” to the Father. It has to do with where you put your focus, and the focus of the celestial Church is the Father and the Son.

I think we all have an intuitive sense of what glory means. Glory is, “Oh my gosh! This is the best thing ever!” And what does it mean to give glory? Giving glory means that you are focused on an object in adoration and love; that is giving glory. Glory is recognizing the wondrousness of the object, and giving glory is reflecting that glory back to your object of devotion. The Father and the Son are glorious. And when I give glory to God, I am loving God by seeing that glory and acknowledging it and reflecting that glory back to God.

Glory is not something that you can offer to another person. When we glorify another person or thing, that is what I would call “vain glory.” When you give glory to someone else, it is in vain. We may love each other and be devoted to each other’s welfare, but it’s not a good idea to worship each other.

Glory is not worship for the sake of worship, as if God needed our adoration. This would imply that the Father of the universe is hungry and insecure and wheedling for our affection, as if we mere mortals could offer up anything of value not already owned by the Lord of ALL. That just doesn’t make any sense. Giving glory is not for God’s benefit, it’s for our benefit. The reason we give glory to God is because that is the method by which we tune in to God’s frequency. You could say that giving glory to God is how we synchronize ourselves with the One consciousness of which we are a part. And why would we want to synchronize with the Father?

The Gnostic gospel tells us that we were designed with a homing device that gives us “indescribable pleasure” when we are in communion with the Father and when we are operating according to plan. The closer we are to dialing into the Father’s frequency, the happier we feel. It is through this process of giving glory that we realign ourselves with the Universal Unit of Consciousness, or what we gnostics are calling the Father or the God Above All Gods. This is how we align ourselves for instruction and for renewal.

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

It is very important to choose your objects of glory carefully. In this distracting world in which we find ourselves, we are giving glory away right and left to things that do not deserve glory. We glorify movie stars and television stars, we glorify sports figures and pop stars. We glorify models and social influencers and products that we love. This is a distraction away from true glory, and it doesn’t make us happy. Giving glory to an unworthy object is like a sugary snack that is momentarily tasty but does not satisfy true hunger. Only glorifying the Father with love can make us happy. The other objects that we may find ourselves glorifying, these are imitations. These are part of the deficiency, and so they cannot ever fulfil us the way that we hope they will.

This is enough for today. Next week we will pick up discussing more about the Son and then move into the emanation of the Aeons.

If you are finding these gnostic insights helpful, please consider contributing to the effort. I would love to hear your questions and comments.