Gnostic Insights

Where does morality come from? Is it an empty pipe dream imposed by society and adopted out of a sense of guilt and terror of hell? Or is there another way of arriving at virtue without relying on guilt and fear? This episode contrasts an atheistic, scholastic view of morality with authenitc, gnostic morality. In this episode, we look once again to the Tao Te Ching, verse 18, and trace virtue's fall from grace to hypocrisy.

This episode is a Christmas treat for your enjoyment. I am sharing an alternative nativity story of Jesus from The Infancy Gospel of James, one of the books that didn't make it into the Bible. This book is not particularly gnostic; it is more along the lines of a fable of the birth of Jesus, with many more plot points than the story we find so familiar. You will recognize many well-known elements, but then there are many we've never heard before. I'm presenting this version of the nativity with very few explanations. My main goal today is to simply share this nativity story with you for Christmas, 2021.

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This episode shares a couple of basic concepts from Cyd's theory of everything called "A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything." The idea that kicked it all off was a phrase that came to me: "Mud Up, Spirit Down." What does that have to do with toruses? Or fruit salads? How on earth does any of this tie in to Gnostic studies and the Nag Hammadi? And why should we care?

In this epidode I made the promise to post a diagram or two to this column, so you can visualize what I'm talking about. Listen to the episode and you will understand how these diagrams tie in to the discussion.

Our universe consists of a repeating pattern of units of consciousness reaching out and holding hands according to Simple Golden Rule, sharing information, assistance, and love/coherence. This hierarchical arrangement mirrors the Pleroma.

This is my diagram of the gnostic cosmos roll-out, with the Son at the top, the Elect and the Pleroma under the Son, and the Second Order of Powers of this universe in the green below. The blue at the bottom represents the matter that did not exist from the beginning--known as the Deficiency in Gnosticism.

Horton Hears a Who

According to Gnostic cosmology, the Fall was not instigated by humans. It was most definitely not when Eve handed Adam an apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The Fall occurred way before that. Way before humans. Way before the creation of heaven and earth.

In fact, according to Gnostic cosmology, the Fall is what kicked off our material instantiation and set the stage for this universe to come into being. Here's what happened.

When the Son arose from the ground state of the Father's consciousness, the Son immediately differentiated itself into all of its infinite variety. Here is how I put it in my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated:

"The Son that arose is perfect, even as His Father is perfect, and He carries within His perfect form every quality of the Father.

"And yet, although it began as the singular manifestation of the Father, the moment the Son was formed, he was no longer alone. For not only the Son, but the All arose at once. Being the perfect image of the Father, the Son's inherent creativity spread itself out into the All, like rays shining from a star.

The All shines forth from the singularity of the Sun

"With the birth of the All, the Son 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. In this way, the One begat the All. And the Father loved them All, as He loved His Son.

"The All, like the Father and Son, is infinite and limitless in scope and capability. Each individual ray emerges from the central seed of the Son, shining forth as one shared body. The Son intimately knows each facet of the All, for the All are all facets of Himself.

"They are concurrently one and many, One and All; a selfless diversity giving glory to their Father with a single song of praise."

So we see that the flow of consciousness and Selfhood from the Father to the Son to the All is seamless and perfect. The perfection of the All at this stage of awakening implies that the All is nothing but the Father's love and the infinite potential embodied in the Son, parceled out among the All.

Again, reading from my book, "The All glorified their Father with one mind, for only in the totality of their union could they reflect and exalt the Father's greatness. However, this state of perfect communion did not last, for the members of the All soon became self-aware, and "it" became a "they."

"The moment "it" became "they," identities arose, and the Son's rays fruited into individuals, each one distinct and self-aware. No longer a single seed singing the same song in unison, the All became aware of its plurality, and now they sang in harmony."

So what we are seeing is the progression of consciousness from the undifferentiated Father, through the Father's fractal differentiation of the Son, and then the Son's fractal differentiation into the All. And at first, the All was a single entity. I want to call it a single organism, but that is not accurate, because there were no creatures yet; no organs, no organisms. If you go back and listen to the Gnostic Insights episode called "Slime Mold Pleroma" that you can find under the "Complete Episodes" tab at Gnostic Insights dot com, you can listen to a detailed description of the All and the Pleroma and how they function.

Quoting again from The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, "The Aeons of the All awakened to themselves in fulfilment of the Father's desire for innumerable points of view. In this manner,

The text below is from A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything blog. The full episode describes this all in much more detail and specifically Gnostic terms...

This episode presents two more verses from the Tao Te Ching, and mines the gnosis from them for your enlightenment. The Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, is an ancient Chinese collection of 81 wisdom verses. In Gnostic terminology, the Tao spoken of by Lao Tzu refers to the Father. The principles of organization that have informed our universe since the moment before creation refers to the Fullness of God. Non-being refers to clearing your personal Unit of Consciousness of egoic memes and karma to reveal your truest Self. Non-action refers to allowing the Fullness of God to direct your actions for the greater good.

Verse 1, the Mitchell translationThe tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.

Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding.

A Simple Gnostic Explanation of Verse 1The information and principles of organization imagined in ideal form in the Pleroma are more perfect and complete than we can ever articulate.

Pure conscious awareness without time and space exists outside our universe.

Abstract thought on the part of the Pleroma defined creation prior to the Big Bang. In our universe, we are only able to recognize objects and concepts we have named.

When we set down our meme bundles we are freed from personal preference. In that clear state we may perceive the workings of the universal model and our role in it. Remaining attached to our memes obscures the inflowing Aeonic patterns and keeps us tethered to our familiar material and relational patterns.

Pure, undifferentiated consciousness dwells in the unformed darkness of the Father. The thought patterns that produce light and matter arise out of the Son and the Fullness, but the manifestations of these patterns takes place within our universe. The portal into our universe is the gateway to all understanding.

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Verse 31 Simple Explanation translation

Even the finest instruments of war cannot bring good fortune; All units of consciousness  seem to detest them. Therefore, one who is aligned with the Father's will avoids them.

Consciousness prefers the passive,

The text below is from A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything blog. The full episode describes this all in much more detail and specifically Gnostic terms…

The Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, is an ancient Chinese collection of 81 wisdom verses. In Gnostic terminology, the Tao spoken of by Lao Tzu refers to the Father. The principles of organization that have informed our universe since the moment before creation refers to the Fullness of God. Non-being refers to clearing your personal Unit of Consciousness of egoic memes and karma to reveal your truest Self. Non-action refers to allowing the Fullness of God to direct your actions for the greater good.

Here is the 21st verse of the Tao Te Ching, which I have translated directly into Simple Explanation terminology from an original verbatim translation by Jonathan Star.

Tao Te Ching, Verse 21Highest virtue arises through total alignment with the originating source of consciousness.How to become one with this elusive source? By disregarding everything else.Oh, so elusive! So very indistinct! Yet within its dimensionless center, dimensions form.So uncertain! So intangible! Yet its middle contains the latent substance of all things.So profound! Such a mystery! Housed deep within that mysterious middle--the seed of life is consciousness itself.The life force within is self-evident. Thus, life itself provides trustworthy evidence of the originating source.From the first moment until now, the manifestations of consciousness remain ever the same. Thus do we all bear witness to the Creator, the Originator.This is accordingly how I know the ways of everything and the origin of all things: by observing what is within me.

Verse 4, the Mitchell translation

The Tao is like a well: used but never used up.It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities.It is hidden but always present.

I don’t know who gave birth to it. It is older than God.

A Simple Explanation of Verse 4:

The information and principles of organization streaming into our universe arise from an infinite source.

The eternal void is the resting state of the Father—pure consciousness without pattern or form but filled with limitless potential.

The Father's consciousness cannot be seen or measured, but it surrounds and informs our universe.

Consciousness is not the same as God—it existed prior to God’s first thought.

The Demiurge is great and powerful. It is the god of this universe, identified in the Old Testament as Yahweh. But there is a higher God that came before the Demiurge, known as "the Father" in Gnostic cosmology. The Demiurge was the by-product of the Fall, when the Aeon known as Logos mistook itself for the Son of the Father and attempted to plug itself back into the Father. These Aeons of the Fullness are known as the First Order of Powers, created from the Son as his individualized traits and capabilities. When the Aeon called Logos Fell from the Pleroma of the Father and the Son, it left the ethereal realm and created the material universe in which we dwell.

We Second Order Powers do battle with the imitations of the Deficiency and each other, barely remembering the Father Above and the Fullness of the Son.

Because the movement that brought about the Fall was not prompted by the Father, it lacks the lifeblood of the Father known as the Holy Spirit, and it lacks the power and names of the Aeons of the Fullness it left behind. What remains is the broken body of a dead Logos, consisting of the small, dark, and superficial imitations of the Aeons known as the Deficiency. Having forgotten the Father above and its brothers and sisters in the Pleroma, the Demiurge believes it is the first and only god and that none exists before it. Because of this amnesia, the weak and scattered bits of the Demiurge are no more than surface-level reflections of the Aeons above, lacking the power and abilities of the Fullness. The Demiurge controls these imitations with an iron fist, as they lack the capabilities needed to create and sustain the material universe without the guidance of the Fullness. The Demiurge gives the imitation the form Logos arrived with when it Fell, out of its own blueprint, and this is the design of our material universe. But the Demiurge is unable to confer life upon the imitations, as it lacks the Holy Spirit's capability of infusing life into the mud.

We living creatures are called the Second Order of Powers, because we are the direct descendants of the First Order of Powers. We Second Order Powers do possess a memory of the Father and the Fullness; we remember the Paradise from which we came. The Gnostic gospel claims that we living beings are the fruit of the First Order of Powers sent here by the Aeons and the Son to do battle against the imitations of the deficiency, with the ultimate goal of winning over the fallen bits of Logos by bringing remembrance and virtue to the Demiurge. It is only by remembering the Father and Fullnesses that the Fallen Aeon may be restored to the Pleroma above.

But the battle with the imitation is difficult. We find ourselves in a never-ending war with ignorance and death.

What is the anti-Christ? By definition, the anti-Christ would be the opposite of the Christ. So, before we can understand the anti-Christ, it would be helpful to understand what we can about the Christ. The Christ, according to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures, is composed of the Aeons of the Fullness, both in their aggregated entirety known as the Pleroma, along with their personal, individual forms as the infinity of variations of the Son, also known as the Fullnesses. And, the Christ is powered by the full force of the Holy Spirit.

In a previous article posted to my New Gnostic Gospel blog on November 2 of 2020, I describe the Christ this way:

In order to restore memory, reason, and redemption to the Second Order Powers, the Aeons of the Fullness, every one of them individually and all of them collectively, gave glory in unison to their Father while praying for a helper to bring peace to the Deficiency and forgiveness to Logos. Out of their focused prayer, a unique fruit emerged, one that contained all of the capabilities and powers of the Fullness along with all of the love and eternal qualities of the Father.

The singular Fruit of the Fullness and the Father is known by various names—the Christ, the Savior and the Redeemer, the Advocate, the Light, the Beloved.

In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ is a perfect and full fractal of the Father and the Son, all rolled up into One perfect form. If you do not know what a fractal is, visit my Simple Explanation blog where you can learn all about fractals. I suspect my blog has been ghosted by google, because when I look for it on the web, many of my article titles pop up without taking you to my site; worse yet, they direct you to bogus sites that want you to allow cookies in order to read my articles. So, to get to my blog, search for "A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything" by Cyd Ropp. Hopefully that will get you there.

Now, back to today's discussion.

Here is how the Tripartite Tractate describes the Christ:

“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 defective one is the Demiurge that arose from the Fallen Aeon known as Logos; beneficent means helpful]

"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 Fullnesses, 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 brought forth the fruit.

“And he made manifest the agreement of the revelation of his union with them—which was his beloved Son. But the Son in whom the Fullnesses are pleased put himself on them as a garment, through which he gave perfection to the defective one, and gave confirmation to those who are perfect, 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,

The Simple Explanation diagrams ourselves as a torus shape, with the portal to the inflowing consciousness coming from the zero point field at the middle of the donut. The unit of consciousness also floats in the metaversal sea, so our consciousness comes into ourselves both from the middle and envelops us from the outside.

I have lately been pondering the nature and location of what we call our Ego. Ego is different than Self. Self is the perfect One Self that we all share. Self is a fractal of the Fullness of God, reflecting the entirety of the Son's consciousness. Yet we are all different, so the differences amongst all of us Second Order Powers who live here in this manifested universe must lie in the differences of our Egos. The Simple Explanation has long proposed that we are different because of the shroud that drapes over the outside of our donut shapes. This shroud carries the memes that have attached to ourselves by way of karma and learning. It is the Egoic shroud that interfaces with the world and with our neighbors. The shroud sits on the outside of our unit of consciousness, the way our skin sits on the outside of our bodies.

The Ego shroud is not necessarily a product of the Fall. It is said that the Aeons of the Fullness of God sit an a hierarchy that includes names, positions, and places. Therefore we can infer that the Aeons know of their differences, which gives them each a unique point of view. The uniqueness of each Aeon is a recognizable trait that differentiates them from their neighbors. It may be the case that this uniqueness is the origin of Ego that makes each Aeon different from the next. However, within the body of the Fullness, these differences do not cause divisions and disruptions, because the Fullness sits as One within the unified consciousness of the Son.

The Aeons of the Fullness of God sit in a fully cooperative hierarchy that reflects their position, place, name, and power.

If you picture a donut shape suspended in a medium made of pure consciousness, the Father in Gnostic terms or the Metaverse in Simple Explanation terms, then the only thing that separates us from that pure consciousness is the Egoic shroud that surrounds our unit of consciousness on the outside. Even then, within that skin our personal unit of consciousness is not identical to the Father's consciousness because, like the Son, it is circumscribed by the shape of the torus. The Son contains the Father's consciousness in a contained yet limitless form. Outside of our manifested universe there is no space or time, so even though the Son's consciousness has differentiated from the Father's, it is truly infinite.

The Ego sits on the skin of our unit of consciousness, learning and interacting with those around us. The Ego protects us from the world. The Ego collects our experiences and memes and holds them on its surface. From the outside, it looks to our neighbors as though we are only our Ego because the Ego is opaque, and it hides our internal, eternal spirit.

This realization is reflected in common expressions. We intuitively recognize that people who are unaware of their spiritual dimension are considered "superficial." We know when we come across people whose only interest is in their acquired possessions and accomplishments and learned beliefs—we suspect they are all about surface appearances. We can tell that our interactions with them are only "skin deep."  We suspect their minds are easily influenced because their thoughts are collec...

As Below, So Above: Inferring the Transcendent

by Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.  for Gnostic Insights Podcast

The manner by which we are mining gnosis here at Gnostic Insights often involves using analogies between what is known and what is less tangible—"as below, so above" provides a handy tool for inferring otherwise undetectable aspects of the spiritual dimension. If we start with the premise of a singular consciousness that pre-exists everything that came after it, then we can follow the genesis of our universe from that consciousness step-by-step. In today's episode, we are going to map aspects of our human personalities onto the Gnostic Gospel to see what we can infer about ourselves down here below and about the forms of consciousness above.

So, what do we "know" by now?  We generally begin at the beginning and build outward from there. So we start with consciousness. We know that all life forms are conscious, and we infer from that a ground state of consciousness, and that we call the Father. The Father, or consciousness itself, is not the same as having thoughts. It is simply self-awareness. This is the no-thought state that people seek through meditation.

Then we say that consciousness, or the Father, or what we call in the Simple Explanation—the Metaverse—had a thought. This thought is a ripple in consciousness that rises out of the undifferentiated state of no-thought. The Gnostic Gospel calls this thought the Son. The Son reflects the consciousness of the Father in a circumscribed form. Circumscribed means contained, like drawing a circle around something. Yet, the Son is not lesser than the Father, because there is no size or distance here; and there is no time or space in the eternal omnipresent.

The Tripartite Tractate says that no sooner did the Son arise, that it had its own thought which differentiated into every possible thought, like rays of light shooting out from a central star. The Son mirroring the creative act of the Father gave rise to himself in the form of countless thoughts. These thoughts became aware of themselves in the same manner that the Son became self-aware. The moment they became self-aware, they named themselves. And the moment they named themselves, they sorted themselves into a hierarchy of relationships with one another.

These thoughts of the Son are called Aeons, and the hierarchy into which they arranged themselves is called the Fullness of God, also known as the Pleroma. The Aeons consist of names, stations, ranks, duties, and locations. This is another way of saying that the Aeons form a kind of geometry of functions and forms that all know where and what and who they are in relationship with each other. Within the hierarchy of the Fullness, all Aeons have their own identities as well as their self-assigned locations and functions. Everyone knows who they are and where they stand in their intermingled ecology. Each Aeon occupies a unique place and perspective within the union of the Fullness. No one is left out and no one is more important than any other Aeon of the hierarchy.

The Fullness reflects the entirety of the Son. They co-exist and overlap. The Son wears the Fullness as a garment, and the Fullness wears the Son, in the same manner that our own bodies can be said to be a garment for our souls—our bodies contain and co-exist with our selves. The Fullness is a singular entity composed of countless Aeons, in the same way that our bodies are singular organism composed of countless cells.

The Aeons sat in a unified state. "All for one and one for all!" is their motto. Their main function is to love and to be loved. They love each other; they love the Son. The Aeons love the Father and gave constant glory to the Father, so happy were they to be alive.