Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today I would like to share some information with you about the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? You know, the Holy Spirit is considered part of the Trinity of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One God, three-in-one, is how the Christians put it. But what does that mean? What is the Holy Spirit to us if we’re seeking gnosis?

Jesus said to his disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the Earth” (Acts 1:8).

That’s us. We’re at the ends of the earth here, right? So Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would come to the believers and would be a witness to the Christ. The Jews were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the festival of Shavuot, which was the giving of the commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. So it was one of the major festival times, and there were a lot of people gathered. Jesus had been crucified during the Passover festival, and this is the next festival, which was about 40 days afterwards. And so when Shavuot, or what we call Pentecost, came, the disciples were all gathered together in one place. They were confused, lost, disheartened. The man that they had thought would bring the kingdom back to Israel was dead and crucified, and they just didn’t know what they were supposed to do about it.

In Acts 2 verse 2, it says, “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Now, they were staying in Jerusalem, God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked, aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? How is it that each of us hears them in our native language? They asked one another, what does this mean?” And others in the crowd, it says, made fun of them and said, ah, they’d had too much wine.”

Peter stood up, raised his voice and addressed the crowd. And he said,

“In the last days, God says, ‘I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy and your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days and they will prophesy. I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’”

A lot of people think that we may be in the end days right now. I don’t think we have seen the sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood yet, so I don’t think we’re in the final roll-up. That is a signal we’re supposed to look for before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. That is the second coming of Jesus, which is what Christians are waiting for. And Peter here was quoting the prophet Joel from the Old Testament.

And in verse 37 it says, “When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brother, what shall we do?’ Peter replied, ‘Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, for all whom the Lord, our God, will call.’ With many other words he warned them and he pleaded with them, saying, ‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’”

But what is that Holy Spirit? I used to think it was just that great rush of wind, that swoosh, kind of a like a ghostly power that settled on people and filled them with the Holy Spirit. But now, after reading the Tripartite Tractate and considering this gnosis for several years, I think that the Holy Spirit is the coming of the Third Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers were the original Aeons—that is, the differentiations that are within the Son of God and that coexist with the Son. It’s the infinite number of variables of all possibilities of God. The Second Order of Powers is us. We are an order of powers.

We’re part of the original power coming from the Father and through the Son and then through the Aeons. And we are literally the fruit of the Aeon Logos. He had the fractals of all the Aeons inside of him, and we are the fruit of those fractals after Logos returned back to the Fullness.

And then the Third Order of Powers is what came along with the manifestation of the Christ, first in the heavens and then on Earth. And Christ is not an Aeon; Christ is not the Son. Christ is the Third Order of Powers. And all of those that come with the Christ are Third Order Powers—that is, all of the variables that make up the Christ. The Pleroma of the Christ is the Third Order of Powers. We are the fruit of the Pleroma of Logos, the Second Order of Powers. The First Order of Powers was the Pleroma of the Son. And Christ is the Third Order of Powers. He’s a different entity than the Father and the Son. He is the Pleroma of the Holy Spirit.

Christ was formed in order to save us from the Fall and to save the Demiurge from the Fall. The Christ, the Third Order of Powers, is the most powerful being in the material world. He has all of the mojo of the Son, all of the mojo of the First Order Powers, all of the Aeons put together with the consecration or the will of the Father. He is anointed for a special task of bringing us all home and rolling up this material creation and bringing us into what is called the third economy or the final economy. We’re in the second economy now. The first economy is the hierarchy of the Fullness, where the Aeons live. The material cosmos is the second economy, or you could call it the second ecological system. And then there’s going to be a third economy, and that is when everyone who has been alive down here below, everyone who has been birthed into this material existence as a Second Order Power and melded to the Fall, will come home to the ethereal plane.

When the fiery tongues came down and set upon everyone who was in that upper room at Pentecost, each of the disciples and the followers who were in that house, that was their Third Order Power alighting upon their heads. When Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist at the very beginning of his ministry, Jesus came to his cousin John, who was baptizing people in the river, and he asked to be baptized. And John said, “No, no, I’m not even worthy to carry your sandals. I can’t baptize you. You’re the anointed one.” And Jesus said, “No, you have to baptize me. It’s all part of the plan.”

And after Jesus was dunked in the river by John, and he rose up out of the river, it says that the Holy Spirit alighted upon his,( alighted means landed), landed upon his head like a dove. So when this Holy Spirit came to Jesus, then Jesus was anointed and walking around with all of the powers of the Third Order on display within him. He was the first of the human Second Order Powers who to be anointed by the Holy Spirit. Of course, Jesus is more than a Second Order Power. He’s always been the manifestation of a Second Order Power plus the Third Order of Powers. And we call that the Christ. We say Jesus Christ, but he’s actually called Jesus the Anointed, and the anointing was the Holy Spirit. To be anointed signifies a special set-apart status for fulfilling a particular purpose or calling. And the calling of Jesus was to round us all up and bring us home. The Greek word chrio means to consecrate or set apart for sacred use. So when we say Jesus Christ, we’re saying Jesus the anointed, who has been set apart for sacred use. And he was the first to be anointed by the Holy Spirit.

Now, the reason why everyone broke out speaking in tongues that everyone in Jerusalem could understand, they said, “Hey, I thought all these people were from Galilee. How is it that they’re speaking our language?” And there were hundreds of languages being represented because it was a huge pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Pentecost. Well, the reason why is because the Holy Spirit knows everything, and it empowered each of those disciples of Christ to be speaking in a way that others could understand.

So suddenly, all of a sudden, whether you spoke Hebrew or Greek or then any of these hundreds of other languages, you could understand for the first time the message that Jesus was preaching. Now, in what are called Pentecostal churches nowadays, Pentecost being that time when the Holy Spirit came to speak to everyone, came to inhabit everyone, Pentecostal churches continue to speak in tongues. But the problem is that generally nobody else can understand what they’re saying. When people speak in tongues, it sounds very Middle Eastern, but it’s not like they’re speaking in French or German or Spanish, where anyone can understand them, or even English. They’re speaking in this, what is fairly unintelligible, mystical, Middle Eastern type of tongue. But back in the original Pentecost, everybody was speaking in such a way that everyone could be understood. So what are the functions of the Holy Spirit as taught by Jesus?

First off, it says in John 14:17, “Even the spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it sees him not, neither knows him, but you know him, for he dwells with you and shall be in you.”

 So we are baptized in the Holy Spirit. We who have decided that Jesus was the anointed Third Order Power who came to Earth to bring us Second Order Powers home, which is the Gnostic gospel, we invite the Third Order Powers to come and take up dwelling inside of ourself. So now we’re not just the one Self, which is a reflection of the Son of God, and we’re not just the ego, which is a reflection of our Second Order status. We then also have a Third Order Power overlaying both of those. And the Third Order is the most powerful force in this cosmos. We have all necessary power once we invite the Third Order Powers to take up dwelling.

If your ego is sitting on the throne of your soul, as we say, then you’re just being pushed about by every whim and desire of the material world. You’re being influenced by influencers. Your focus is on yourself, your body, your looks, what you’re eating, what you’re wearing, where you’re going to go, how you’re going to have fun. That’s your egoic Second Order nature. Your First Order nature is to have the Son of God foremost in your mind. And I think that’s what the prophets of the Old Testament had—the Son sitting on their throne. So they were receiving truth, even though the Third Order of Powers didn’t come until Jesus came. But we’ve got a Third Order of Powers.

And in John 14:26, it says, “But the Comforter who is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things.”

So accepting the Third Order Powers brings comfort. Why wouldn’t we want to have comfort? What’s the point of lying down here bleeding and suffering and being worried and frightened? There’s no point to it at all. You don’t gain any brownie points through suffering. We are called to be full of joy. The Holy Spirit brings us that comfort and he comes in the name of Jesus the Anointed.

And it says, “He shall teach you all things.”

Well, how would the Holy Spirit teach you anything? Because the Holy Spirit is the embodiment that knows everything. He’s ethereal. He’s preexistent. He knows the Father. He knows the Son. He knows all of the Aeons. He was in on all the conferences on how to get us out of this sticky mess we found ourselves in. So he comes to teach us what we need to know to extricate ourselves from this material morass in which we find ourselves.

In John 14:26, it says, “After, he shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said to you.”

Now, usually the Christians limit that to whatever Jesus said to them. But in the Gnostic Gospels, we’re called those of the remembrance.  That’s what we’re known as, because when we’re born into this world, we carry with us the memory of the ethereal plane, but we forget it, just like the Demiurge. We’re a fractal replication—each of our lives is a fractal replication of the fall of Logos, the splitting into the good thought and the egoic thought, and then forgetting about the ethereal plane. That’s the lot of the Demiurge. We are in the same spot. We tend to forget what we were born with.

So we’re not born as a blank slate, a tabula rasa. We are born with the full remembrance of all of the powers and the glory of God and our home on the ethereal plane, which resembles paradise. That’s why all humans have a similar dream of paradise. That’s the remembrance. So when we accept the Holy Spirit, it reminds us; we are no longer forgetful. Now we accept the remembrance that we were born with again.

That’s why somewhere it says, (I don’t have the quote in front of me), but there’s practically an infinite way to express being fallen. There’s an infinite way to be confused, but there is one way to come home. There’s one place that we will return to.

So we have a myriad of confusions down here when we have forgotten, but when we remember, we get back on that glory beam, as I like to call it, and that is the one way up. That’s what one way means. Now the ordinary conventional Christian way of understanding that one way is to say that you have to profess belief in Jesus Christ because that is the one way—that Jesus is the gatekeeper to heaven. Yes, Jesus is the one way to heaven, but that doesn’t mean that you need to know that, that you need to recognize that. Someday you will, because it says “every knee shall bend, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus the Anointed is Lord.”

But if you don’t do that before you die, if you don’t acknowledge that Jesus is the Anointed one, that just means you’re going to have a harder time after you die. You’re going to have to go through some of those bardo-type experiences we talked about last week. So yeah, Jesus the Anointed is the one way, and that was his job, and it is finished, whether or not you believe it. But you’re not going to go to hell if you don’t.

John 15:26 says, “But when the Comforter is come…” so it’s the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, and I think that each one of us has a Third Order Power that is assigned to us. There is a Third Order Power for every Second Order Power, and that is our salvation. That is what unlocks the full remembrance and the full understanding of truth down to the cellular level.

So, when your Third Order Power has come, “whom I will send unto you from the Father,” says Jesus, “even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he shall testify of me.”

And they do personify the Holy Spirit, so it’s not just a force or a power. It is always personified. It’s always He. So this Third Order Power will guide us in everything we need to know. It’s the Third Order Powers that bring us all our gnosis. My Third Order Power comes to me with everything I need to know. I have different misunderstandings of things than you do. We’re all individuals. We all make our own mistakes. We all wander off the path in our own way. As I said, there’s almost an infinite variety of ways to go wrong, but the Third Order Power is our touchstone. It’s our truth teller. It testifies of the Father. It reminds us of paradise.

Then John 16:8 goes on to say, “When he is come,” that is the Holy Spirit, your Third Order Power, “he will reprove the world of sin.” That is, he’ll scold them. He’ll take it away. He’ll denounce the world of sin. “The sin is because they do not believe on me,” he says. “Righteousness, because I go to my Father and he will see me no more. Judgment, because the prince of the world is judged.”

And here’s one of the heresies, of course. “The prince of this world,” is it Satan? Well, there’s no character called Satan, actually, in the Greek. It’s the Accuser. So Satan, his job is to whisper how lousy you are, to whisper how worthless you are, and stupid, and that you’ll never make it to heaven. That’s the job of the Accuser. But the prince of this world, that’s the Demiurge. That’s the king of this world. This Accuser is his main henchman, his archon.

John 16:13 says, “However, when he, the Spirit of Truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth, for he shall not speak of himself, but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak.”

So the Third Order Power is never serving itself. It’s not here for its own glory or for its own aggrandizement. It comes to share the truth with us. That’s all. He wants to guide you into all truth. And we call ourselves Gnostic, or if you’re on the Gnostic path and you’re looking to unlock your gnosis, that is truth. The path to this truth is the Holy Spirit. And if you hate Jesus, and you hate these things like the Holy Spirit… well, those are unhelpful memes that you picked up along the way because your original spirit knows the Fullness of God. It is undeniable because it is inherent within your Second Order nature. In any event, why would you reject the Holy Spirit? He reflects the full truth of the ethereal plane. And the Anointed One came in particular to save us, in particular to save you, to help you, to reveal to you your gnosis. So if you hate the Christ, well, you have wandered away from the right path. I don’t know what you would rather believe than believe in the Anointed Power and the Holy Spirit who came for you.

In John 16:15, it says, “All things that the Father has are mine, (that is, the Anointed’s) therefore, said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall show it unto you.”

So your gnosis is being revealed by the Comforter, and that is why it is comforting.

Next week we will discuss the Holy Spirit some more and we will look at the gnostic meaning of Mark 3:28 and Matthew 13:49. What exactly is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and why is it said to be inexcusable? What’s the gnostic take on that? Is anything unforgiveable?

Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

Have you purchased your copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel yet?

Widely acclaimed as the most approachable gnostic text ever written. Based upon the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures. Dr. Ropp’s specialty is bringing ancient texts to life in understandable language.

Follow-up to the Aeon Byte Interview

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Last week’s episode was a link to an interview I had just given on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio. That interview on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio was called “Gnostic Psychology and Preparing for Death,” and that was posted on January 29, 2025.

As we so often do, my brother and I chatted after the interview was posted and after he had had a chance to watch it, and we discussed some of the finer points of the Gnosis shared there in that episode. I gave Bill an important piece of Gnosis during that conversation, and he gave me an important piece of Gnosis during that conversation, and I thought I would share those with you today. This is part of our ongoing process of mining our Gnosis.

I’ll share with you what Billy’s problem was with the interview on Aeon Byte. He doesn’t particularly care for the Bardo Thodol (or The Tibetan Book of the Dead) as being particularly Gnostic. In his kind way, he said I did a good job of translating it into Gnostic speak, but it really isn’t Gnostic.

So here’s what we know. In the interview and in my previous writing about it— “Overcoming Death” in the Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel book—I’ve talked about the process of coming to realization that is laid out in the Book of the Dead and how each level, each Bardo, becomes more and more horrific as people resist going onward and upward, and they’d rather go back and down. And it just keeps getting horrible until, according to the Bardo Thodol, they run around looking for a new body to reincarnate into in order to escape the Bardos. So the way the after death experience is described, Billy wanted me to share with you that there is no such thing as the unhelpful deities, the fellows that are running around trying to chop up the resistant soul into little tiny pieces. That is not a real thing. Archons would not be able to follow us into the in-between place after our physical body passes away, because they don’t come from above. They are stuck with the Demiurge down here in the material sphere. What is more likely is that these wrathful deities of the Bardo Thodol are actually memes. They’re meme bundles that are generated and projected by the deceased person’s own conscience. And if it’s this negative type of hellacious experience, it’s from the deceased person’s guilt-ridden conscience.

As I did mention in the interview, these wrathful deities are not punishments from God, because God does not punish us after we die. We turn punishment upon ourselves in the process of our life review. We feel bad. We feel guilty. We feel remorseful about the way we treated others, and we wish that it wouldn’t have happened. And we come face to face with the negative things we did during our life in the afterlife place. In essence, the more self-centered and mean of a life that a person lives here on earth, it carries with them in the form of their memes into the afterlife as their karma, and they need to work it out when they’ve died. If it’s really overwhelmingly terrible, because you can’t hide, you can’t lie to God, the chastening fire of the Aeons is meant to cleanse us and purify us so that we can go onward and upward. And what is being cleansed and purified are those negative memes that caused us to be such a bad-natured person when we were alive on earth. If one allows that purging to take place during that 360-degree life review where we see and experience the pain we caused others, we reflect it back upon ourselves.

Now, the reason why in the Bardo Thodol you have wrathful deities chasing after people with swords is because those are their meme bundles. Particularly, those memes are going to be stuck in their heads if you’ve got someone reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead in your ear for a week or two, several times every day after you pass away. If you are stuck in one of these Bardos and you’re not able to go onward and upward, or willing to go onward and upward, and you keep looking down and back, these memes that are being murmured into your ear concerning wrathful deities hacking you to death are going to form the vision you’re having after you die.

We Westerners who do not have the Bardo Thodol read to us on our deathbed are not likely to have those same sorts of visions. If you watch the near-death experience videos on YouTube, the overwhelming majority of them are positive. They’re onward and upward types of visions with angelic-like creatures. Very few, I think I’ve only watched one, are hellacious, bad and negative and terrible, and those are from the memes that that person brought in with them; that’s what they can’t let go of. They can’t let go of that kind of, oh, I was a bad person, I’m going to be condemned to hell forever, type of meme bundle. But you see, it’s our own subconscious, it’s our own guilt that holds us in that position. It’s not God’s wrath. It’s not the aeonic wrath. No one hates us up above. Up above, it’s love.

So then I asked my brother, as we were discussing these things, what in particular are the entities we encounter after we pass away? Who are these entities? And once again, I’m referring to the YouTube videos of near-death experiences where they’re greeted by creatures of light and beautiful butterflies that exude love. What are those? And also, many people, as we know just from common knowledge, when they’ve crossed over to the other side, are greeted by relatives who crossed over before them, right? They’re greeted by loved ones—mom and dad, anybody they loved might be there to greet them on the other side. Well, who are those? What are those? Are those just memes? Are those just projections? So we talked that over for a while, and here’s what we have come up with. Tell me what you think of this.

First off, the loved ones that greet us on the other side. Billy believes those are indeed the loved ones greeting us from the other side. They are not projections out of our own subconscious. They’re not memes. And he feels very confident about that because, as you know, my brother is a hypnotherapist who regularly accompanies his clients to that place in between lives in order for them to talk with a deceased loved one, perhaps a child who passed away or a parent who was gone, and you wish that you could have said something to them. It has been his experience and the experience of his clients that those are indeed those people talking to them. They feel very tangible and very real. And I said to Bill, well, how can they just be standing around waiting for you on the other side? Don’t they have other things to do in heaven? Aren’t they already gone or perhaps they’ve reincarnated and they’re back here on Earth?

There’s a very simple Gnostic answer for that. It’s that time and space, as we know them, only exist in this material cosmos of ours. Time is the distance between two points in our material space. In the ethereal plane, it’s no time. All time is one. Time has a very different characteristic up there. So to us, it may seem as though a lifetime has passed since we saw that loved one pass away. And now here they are because we just passed away. But in the way that it works on the other side, no time has passed because there isn’t any time there. So they pass away and boom, here they are to meet us. It’s more as if time is sequential rather than measurable. That’s why when I talk about the cosmogony of the rollout of consciousness, first the Father, then the Son, then the Totalities of the ALL, then the Aeons become self-aware and arrange themselves into the Hierarchy of the Fullness—there’s no time that has passed during that rollout. They’re practically instantaneous. It’s like no sooner had that happened than this happens. So it was no sooner had the Son been formed than he became a Father as his variabilities, the Totalities, branched out from amongst him. And then, next thing you know,  those Totalities have sorted themselves and become self-aware as the Aeons. Well, that’s a sequence of events, but it’s not like five minutes later or a hundred years later. So time doesn’t really have any meaning for us in the afterlife.

On the ethereal plane, there is no time because the ethereal plane is in fact the entirety of the Father. And what it says of the Father, or the Source, as people like to call it nowadays, as the Tripartite Tractate says in verse 52, “He is without beginning and without end.” You see? There’s no time. There’s no beginning. There’s no end.

For not only is he without end, being unborn makes him immortal as well, but he is also unchangeable in his eternal being, in that which he is, in that which makes him immutable, and that which makes him great. He does not move himself away from what he is, nor can anyone else force him against his will to cease being what he is, for no one has made him what he is.

So there’s a point to the immutability of the Father: that there is no time.

After the Fall, what was created down here in the material cosmos is referred to as an economy in the Tripartite Tractate. So we are living in the material economy, and things are different here. Here we do have time and space. Verse 102 says, “He placed the lights that constitute the starting point of the structure over the organization of the things below.”

So our economy has a starting point. It is not eternal. We’re a bubble inside of eternity. But since we come with the remembrance of the Father in the Fullness as well as eternity, we are those of the remembrance. It says, verse 117,

Because the seed of the promise about Jesus Christ had been deposited, whose revelation and unification we have ministered to, this promise now enabled instruction and a return to that which had been from the beginning, that of which they possessed a drop inciting them to return to it, which is what is called redemption.

So redemption is an indication that we are moving out of the realm of time and space and back into the realm of eternity. It says in verse 119, “The road to eternal rest leads from humility to salvation.” So that’s the promise: eternal rest.

This applies to humans as well as to angels, it says. And so that is how it is that all these various people can be in the same place at the same “time” once you pass over to the other side, because that’s where they are. They are there.

Now, who are these beautiful, loving, angelic creatures that people encounter in their near-death experiences? I’m going to link it in to something else that I talked about on this Aeon Byte interview. Do you remember that I said, regarding the Third Order of Powers that come along with the Christ, that there is a Third Order Power for every single Second Order Power, and that it fits over us like a glove? We are co-existent that way. That is how it is when we recognize the Christ we can be fully redeemed because that part of Christ looks like us—there’s a part of Christ that looks like Cyd—that Cyd part of Christ, those Third Order Powers that make up Cyd sit right on top of Cyd’s Second Order Powers. You are a particular constellation of aeonic traits, and you have a particular Third Order constellation that sits right on top of your Second Order, and then you’re fully redeemed, and you’ve got one of the Third Order Powers taking care of every single part of yourself.

Now, in that Aeon Byte interview, I talked some about Guardian Angels, and as I say, this is not in any of the Gnostic books that I’ve run across. If you’ve run across that concept, go ahead and write to me and let me know where to find it. But it seems to me, my gnosis tells me, that this notion of Guardian Angels is part of the remembrance. As it turns out, most people that have been asked do believe in Guardian Angels. What is a Guardian Angel then?

Here’s what I think your Guardian Angel is. It’s your Third Order Power that looks like you. We are each constellations of various characteristics and traits of the Aeons. We mostly overlap if we’re humans. We overlap less if it’s my constellation of Aeons and my dog’s constellation. My dog has a dog constellation of Aeons of Christ. I’ve got a human constellation, but my particular traits and talents and appearance, that is how I differ from your particular traits and talents and appearance. So we’re mostly overlapping in our Second Order Powers, but we also have absolutely unique constellations. So I’m not 100% like you. Nobody’s 100% like me. My Guardian Angel is that constellation of Third Order Powers that is like me. And it’s going to be a different constellation than your Guardian Angel because you’re slightly different. So your constellation of Guardian Angels are going to be the ones like you.

My Guardian Angels are the ones that are assigned to me by the Christ. That’s my Christ. It comes with a face that I can recognize. They come with a face that everyone can recognize and that’s how they know it’s their Christ. Same thing with the Guardian Angel. It’s your Guardian Angel. We don’t just say a Guardian Angel came and took care of me. No, my Guardian Angel came and took care of me.

Okay, now let me clear up another point from that interview and it touches on what we’re talking about right now. I’ve been saying that we have Aeonic parents, that we have both earthly parents and then we’ve got Aeonic parents—this constellation of countless Aeons that make each of us up. But according to the Tripartite Tractate, our Aeonic parents aren’t all the way up there in the Fullness. They’re not at the Aeonic level. They’re one fractal level down. The Aeonic parents of the Second Order Powers is the restored Pleroma of Logos after he left the Fall and returned to the Fullness. We are birthed out of the Pleroma of Logos. Remember, Logos contains within its body a fractal of all the other Aeons in the Fullness of God. And when Logos returned to the Fullness after the Fall, abandoning the Demiurge down below, it was the fractals of Logos that made little baby spores descend down here. There’s a reason for that.

The Fullness of God is pure and all good. It was not touched by the Fall. Only Logos was touched by the Fall. So when Logos returned to the Fullness, the memory of the Fall and the memory of materiality is contained within Logos. It was held apart from the rest of the Fullnesses in order for them to maintain their purity and for them to be not over much troubled by our travails down here in the cosmos, because their primary focus is upward, not downward. Logos has to continue to look downward as well as upward because half of Logos remained below—the Demiurge. That abandoned part of Logos, the Demiurge, is its presumptuous thought, is its egoic thought. But the part of Logos that returned up above to its brethren in the Fullness, that’s the part that was of the good thought. That’s all of his fractals of the One.

Now if you’re new to Gnostic Insights and you haven’t heard any of this talk before, I can hear how complicated this sounds. It’s not really. It’s just different and new. So please don’t throw up your hands in despair at this being overly complicated because really you don’t even need to know this. I just thought it’d be fun to share with you some fresh Gnosis. All you need to remember is that we come from above and that we will return to above. We do not earn our way into heaven. We can’t.

Heaven is absolutely pure. Redemption was the job of the Christ and the Christ’s Third Order Powers. As I said in the interview, reincarnation does not get us incrementally closer to perfection. We’d never reach perfection that way. So the way we reach perfection is by accepting the Christ, accepting the Third Order of Powers with our names on it. I accept my Third Order Powers. You need to accept your Third Order Powers. Or you could just call it Jesus, if you’d like, because Jesus is a very special character. Jesus is like us—fully human and fully God Above All Gods. And when we accept the Christ into us, we also then are fully human and fully God Above All Gods.

Okay, so I’ve referenced a couple of quotes out of the Tripartite Tractate. Now that I’ve described it all to you, I’m going to read some of these quotes out of the Tripartite Tractate, and you can now understand better what they mean. And this part that I’m going to be reading to you now, this is out of the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, beginning on page 181. So this was written before. It’s just that it came to me as if it were fresh gnosis this morning, which often happens. I’ll write these things in the book and then forget I’d written it and then have to remember it again. So we’re those of the remembrance, but we’re also those that are forgetful, right? So here’s what it says, the last paragraph of page 181.

We Second Order Powers are fractals of the pleroma of Logos, emanated during the combined prayers of Logos and the Fullness after Logos returned from the fall. We are the Second Order Powers, not only humans, but all living creatures. We come from the Hierarchy of the Fullness of God, but not directly. We Second Order Powers are actually fractals of Logos after he returned to the Fullness from the Fall.

On page 182, in the middle of the page, it says,

We humans are also a tripartite system comprised of the spiritual, the psychical, and the physical. The first part of our system is a fractal version of the monad of the Father—the Son. We call that fractal our Self, and it forms our spiritual aspect.

The second part of our three-part structure is called the psychical or psychological, which mirrors our association with the names of the self-aware Aeons of the Fullness. The psychical is the self-aware part of us that think, and that includes our ego. Our third part is associated with the portion of Logos left behind within the boundary of the Fall. Our third part is the material level, the hylic.

Now quoting the Tripartite Tractate, it says,

To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. (verse 98).

Those who belong to the remembrance refers to us Second Order Powers, because we are of the good thought of the Aeons of the Fullness. The thought of which he had stripped himself is the egoic striving of Logos that brought about the Fall. We all carry the fallen ego of Logos forward through our material aspect.

While we vaguely remember we were pre-existent consciousness because we Second Order Powers are those of the remembrance, we forget about our higher nature because we’re all tangled up with the material formed by the thought of which he had stripped himself. The presumptuous thought that Logos needed to lose was that he should attempt to grasp the incomprehensibility and give glory to it, and especially to the ineffability of the Father without the agreement of the Totalities, nor from him who brought them forth, the Father. (verse 75)

When Logos found himself down here below after the fall, he asked himself, what the heck did I do? When he discovered he could not bring the shadows and imitations that had emerged from his pleroma under his control, he left that imitation of himself behind, and what was perfect in him, his self, fled back up to the Fullness. (verse 78) He deserted the material plane and retreated back to the ethereal plane to return home to his Father and brothers in the Fullness.

First he remembered the one who was in the Fullness and entreated him, then his brothers one by one, though always together with their fellows, then all of them together, but before all of these, the Father. This prayer and supplication helped to make him turn toward himself and toward the all, for their remembrance of him caused him to remember the pre-existent ones. And this is the remembrance that calls out from afar and brings him back. (verses 82 through 83)

Quoting the previous verse again, To those who belong to the remembrance, okay that’s us. He, that’s Logos, revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself, that is his egoic striving.

Revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself means that Logos imparted to us his knowledge of the shadows and the Fall. When we Second Order Powers come down to this material universe, we come not only with the good thoughts of the Fullness of God, but we come down with the presumptuous thought that Logos had peeled off himself and abandoned below. “He revealed the thought of which he had stripped himself with the intention…” Okay, why did Logos reveal the knowledge of the shadows? What was his intention? He did so, “with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material” (verse 98).

So if we had not been given the knowledge of the shadows that form this material imitation, we wouldn’t be able to meld ourselves to the material world. Our bodies are made of non-living mud at the material level. Our bodies, the subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, elements, are made from the bits of the fall that add up to become the material of our physical universe. Knowledge of these shadowy bits was revealed to us in order for us to be able to stick the landing when our units of consciousness exit the ethereal plane and are born into this material world. This ability to merge the ethereal with the material is unique to the Second Order of Powers. Aeons and angels can’t do it because their power is in the spiritual places.

“All the spiritual places are in spiritual power. They are separate from the beings of the thought, since the power is established in an image, which is that which separates the pleroma from the Logos, and it does not permit them to mix with the things which have come into being through a vision of things which are with him” (verse 97).

So that is why it’s logical and necessary that we Second Order Powers are the fruit of Logos in particular, because we get from Logos the knowledge of what happened after the Fall, the particularity of materiality, and that is the knowledge that allows our spirit to meld to the material of the cosmos.

Okay, I hope you followed this, but if you didn’t, don’t worry about it. It’s not really necessary to know. Let me know what you think.

Hey, I went on Amazon today to look at the reviews of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and, well, hardly anyone has left a review. So if you purchased a copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, please go to Amazon and leave a review—hopefully a good review.

God bless us all, and onward and upward!

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and a conversation with Bill

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. The first half of this episode is about choosing the higher road to find your gnosis, about letting go of the world. In the second half of this episode I was able to put in about 10 minutes of a conversation that my brother and I had following our group Zoom chat the other day, and it has to do with the nature of a guru and the nature of yoga and whether or not meditation is good.

I know that most people seem to want a ritual to deepen their gnosis—prayers or chants or meditation or physical activities. And what I’d like to let you know today is that it’s not really necessary, because we are born with this gnosis fully inside of us, and we are in touch with the Father at all times whether or not we recognize it. All you need to do is recognize it. All you really need to do is knock and the door shall open.

That’s a promise that Jesus made. “Seek and ye shall find, knock and the door will open” (Matthew 7:7). Really, that’s all. It takes a contrite heart, which means that you repent of living a vice-filled life. If you are attached to vice or you’re attached to material possessions, then it’s harder to knock, because you don’t need to, and you don’t want to. You want to hide if you know that you are “sinning.” And you know, we don’t need to go into deep theological discussions about what is sin or what is vice, because I’m sure that everybody knows the difference between virtue and vice, and either you prefer dwelling in darkness and all that that implies. You know the darkness gives physical thrills because the Demiurge is in charge of the material, but it does nothing for you spiritually except keep you in darkness, keep you pulled toward the Demiurge like a magnet.

So, if you are addicted to some substance, or if you are addicted to pornography or gambling, or you hate your neighbor, or you hate those people on the other side of the world—you know that you are not on the right side, and I don’t need to tell you that. You know that. But if you want to live on the virtuous side of the ledger, if you want to do the primary directive, which is love, our task is to spread love and to demonstrate the Father’s love down here in this material world. And by so doing that, it not only shows love to other humans and other second-order creatures, it demonstrates what love is to the Demiurge itself, because the Demiurge doesn’t have the life of the Father.

The Demiurge is cut off from its higher self, just like a wayward ego that’s so puffed up and absolutely full of itself doesn’t remember or doesn’t care about its One true Self that comes from the Father and from the Fullness. So, it may be that a person wants to cling to a worldly, material, vice-filled life, because, hey, hey, it feels good, at least for a while, until you bottom out. However, it may be that you know it doesn’t feel good, that you don’t want to live a vice-filled life, but you can’t seem to help yourself. You feel powerless before the Demiurge and the archons that are continually tempting you into that vice. You want to lay it down. You tried, but you just can’t seem to do it. And so, therefore, you feel guilt. You feel shame. You feel powerless and weak. Well, that is also a spiritual condition that is ripe for recognition and repentance.

So, perhaps you have repented. Maybe you’ve repented continually while trying to put down that vice, but you keep falling back into it. So, the repentance isn’t quite doing enough, and now you’re wondering, well, what else can I do? How can I reach the Father? How can I know the love of God? How can I get a hold of that correcting algorithm that the Christ has brought to the Earth on my behalf? That’s a good position to be in, because you recognize and you want redemption. So, the first step is repentance, that is to say, no, I don’t want to do this anymore. I lay it down—to rebuke Satan. Get thee behind me, Satan, is something you can say.

Then the second thing is to turn your eyes upward to the Father. Turn your heart over to the Christ—that’s the redemption part. If you haven’t taken that second step of aligning yourself with the Father and the Fullness and Christ, then you haven’t gone far enough in your repentance. You need to align yourself with the Christ power, that is to say, with God’s will. You need to seek, knock, and you shall find. Knock, and the door shall open. Seek, and you will find. It’s a promise that Jesus made. Have you knocked earnestly and asked for Jesus to open the door or for the Christ to open the door or for the Father or the Fullness to open the door? Have you said, I want in, please take me back?

You know, the story of the prodigal son is that the prodigal son told his father he didn’t want to stay and be a farmer alongside his brother and his dad. He wanted his inheritance now, and he wanted to go away to the big city and become somebody. So, his father gave him his money, and off he went. And he did not have a good time in the big city. He tried. It didn’t work out. He eventually found himself being a pig farmer. Well, not even a farmer, but just a hired hand at a pig farm slopping out pig stalls, which is anti-kosher because part of the Old Testament law, you don’t eat pigs, you stay away from the pigs, as it is currently with Islam and still in Judaism.

So, he finds himself slopping out pig stalls, and he is at his end. He’s completely broken. And he decides, what am I doing this for? It was a lot better at home on the farm. And he basically throws down the shovel and goes home with his head hung low and full of shame. And he said, the ranch hands at my father’s farm live a better life than I’m living now. I’ll just go back and work for my father, even if he won’t take me back as his son because I squandered my inheritance.

By the way, can you see that this is an archetypal story? This is a story about being a child of God and leaving the Father and mucking about in the world, seeing that it’s not so great out there, and then coming back with repentance, with a contrite heart to come back to the Father’s house.

In the story of the prodigal son, when he sees the son coming home on the road, even before he gets there, he says, hey, go slaughter a goat. (Unfortunately, always with the blood.) Go slaughter the goat, and we’ll have a great feast tonight and invite everybody because the prodigal son has returned home. And prodigal means wasteful, spendthrift. But the Father isn’t holding that against him. He welcomes him back with open arms and throws a giant barbecue in honor of him coming home. Well, it made the son that stayed home a bit mad, but that’s not the point of this story. And so the Father welcomes the prodigal son home.

And when we’re away from God, and we’re living in the world in a full-fledged, sinful manner, or on the vice side of the ledger rather than the virtue side of the Father, if we’re taking our marching orders from the Demiurge and his archons rather than from the Father and Christ, we are prodigals at that point. So you need to both repent, that is, say, I don’t want to do this anymore, I hate it. And then you need to turn around from facing the world to facing God, to facing the Father. And you need not feel too ashamed or too full of guilt to turn around and face the Father. That’s what the Father dearly desires. He wants you to come home. That’s all he wants is for you to come home and experience his love. And that love is unconditional. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done.

You can be the worst person ever if you repent and say, No, I don’t want to be a prodigal anymore. I want to come home. Please, please take me home. It’s like when Dorothy clicks her heels together in The Wizard of Oz and says, I want to go home. I want to go home. That’s the attitude you need to have to turn to the Father.

You don’t need to take a workshop in meditation. You don’t need to take a workshop in esoteric rituals. You don’t need to read book after book after book of Gnostic teaching. You don’t need to memorize the names and jobs of the different angels and Aeons. You don’t need to do any of that. All you need to do is repent, turn around, and be redeemed. That is, be bought out of slavery by the Father’s love. Redemption refers to something that’s been put up in a pawn shop or put as collateral against a loan, and then the loan fails, or you really need that thing back from the pawn shop. You redeem it to get it back. Well, the Father wants us all to be redeemed. Those are the steps, and it’s called redemption. It’s the same thing.

So we know that we’re all out here lost, for all have fallen short of the glory of God. It’s obvious. So you repent. That is, you stop chasing the worldly goods, or you stop indulging the vices that the Demiurge tempts you with. You say no. You put it down. Put it down. It’s a meme that you are holding on to, that, oh, I really need this thing. Yeah, I don’t want to do it, but oh, it feels so good, or geez, I just can’t seem to help myself. Yes, you can. Every addict who has quit has quit.

And this step of putting it down, stripping that meme of need off of your ego, repenting, turning toward the Father, turning toward God—you can imagine that in your mind. You can imagine that sinful thing before you, or maybe it’s sitting there before you right now, and you don’t need to imagine it. And then you just literally, or in your imagination, turn away. Now, how do you face God? God’s there. God’s all around, remember? Every cell of our body contains the Fullness of God. So we don’t have to go anywhere or do anything to get it, other than to lay down the world. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will open. That’s a promise.

I was asked the other day on our group chat that we had, (thank you very much for all who participated, it was really great to see your faces), whether or not I or my brother practice meditation. And the answer is no, we don’t. Not now. My brother Bill and I have both passed through stages of meditation before we found gnosis, but we didn’t find gnosis by passing through those stages of meditation. That was a rabbit trail that we went down.

Bill used to practice TM, Transcendental Meditation. I used to practice Kriya Yoga, which is meditation as taught by the Self-Realization Fellowship. But it didn’t get us anywhere.

It didn’t bring us into God’s presence. One of the fellows who participated in our online chat the other day via Zoom brought up the idea of Kundalini Yoga not being of the Father. And that was an excellent insight. Afterward, the next day, Billy and I spoke about it, and we wanted to talk about this idea, because we had never thought about the source of Kundalini. But indeed, this guy is right.

After the Zoom call, my brother and I discussed Kundalini Yoga. Here’s ten minutes of our discussion:

Bill: Okay, well, I’m just jumping around with ideas here. It started with the discussion of Kundalini. And it really got me thinking about what that actually is. And the Eastern traditions, particularly, talk about it. We know that the brain is affected by anything that, you know, like drugs and so forth, certain kinds of psychedelics cause the brain to alter, and people have experiences that are not unlike Oneness feelings, right? So it does have an effect on our material body.

The question is, what is Kundalini? And is it acting through life energy, top down, or is it an imitation? I think it’s an imitation. I think that Kundalini is really electromagnetic energy in the material, at the material level, which does affect the brain. And one can have experience off the brain. So I mean, Kundalini is one of two things—I believe it to be electromagnetic as an imitation. But if it were the other, like chi energy or life energy, and so forth, then we’re claiming that Kundalini affects life energy. And that just should not be.

Because look, let’s think of it this way. If the intent of Kundalini is to come into Oneness, right? That’s the attempt. And that therefore gets rid of a person’s identity, right? That’s what it means at that moment: they’ve lost their identity. Well, if that’s the case, then we just got rid of the Aeonic construction. So Kundalini is affecting the Aeonic creation of our identity. That shouldn’t be.

Cyd: Well, of our identity, right. But the Aeonic Fullness would still be there, because that’s the Self.

Bill: Yeah, but we’re also the Aeonic identities. That’s the construction of all our talents and gifts and everything we talk about.

Cyd: Right. And that is not God’s will that we should be obliterated.

Bill: That’s right.

Cyd: That’s good. That’s good.

Bill: If you obliterate, you’re getting rid of the Aeonic creation that way. Well, it shouldn’t be. No.

Cyd: Right. So you’re saying the end goal of Kundalini, which is moving into the One for as long as you can maintain it, is not a proper goal anyway.

Bill: That’s right. We were not created to be that way. We’re second order.

Cyd: Right. We’re second order. We come in with our identities, and that is who we are.

Bill: Absolutely. And that’s a fractal—Aeons having their identity. They don’t lose their identity.

Cyd: So actually, then, if the Demiurge is aware of this kind of thing, and how this kind of thing works, it’s actually a demiurgic plan to obliterate the Fullness within.

Bill: That’s right. That’s exactly right. That was the next point that I wanted to make is that, yeah, and that’s why it’s imitation. It’s the best that the Demiurge can do. He can give you the illusion. He can create spiritual sensibilities, which are imitation spiritual.

Cyd: Right. Because it’s actually a form of emotion. And of course, we have the mud up concept as well.

Bill: Well, that’s right.

Cyd: It rises. Coming from the mud up.

Bill: That’s right. That’s important to the point is, yeah, it’s coming bottom up. Yeah. So it’s delusional.

Cyd: Well, there you are. That’s a pretty radical assertion to claim that Kundalini Yoga is demiurgic.

Bill: That’s right. That’s the best the Demiurge can do. And it can so befuddle, it creates this meme of spirituality that you’re really not achieving.

Cyd: Okay. So jumping off of that, you know, I learned to do the Kriya yoga, practiced Kriya meditation for a couple of years. And with Kriya, Kriya standing for Christ, and this is Paramahansa’s technique, you are looking upward and forward. But what you’re doing is projecting your third eye spot. And then when you achieve it, it is considered to be Christ. Well, that’s not true. That’s not Christ. So the Kriya yoga is a bit off too. And of course, you have to sit for hours with your eyes in the upward third eye position.

Bill: Yeah. Does that sound Gnostic to you?

Cyd: No.

Bill: No, no, no.

Cyd: Now explain, explain Billy, why is it not Gnostic to sit and meditate for hours on end?

Bill: Well, I believe this thing called Gnostic meditation, that’s something else we need to talk about. I don’t know that we can do it at this moment. But that’s a form of focusing your awareness on the Father. Now, Transcendental Meditation, of course, is classic, right? It came to America, it’s a big deal. It has all that research on it and how it affects people positively, blah, blah, and so forth. I learned something about it. And I got a teacher of it really upset that I was talking that way. And it was really interesting, which tells me I hit the button. Mantras that are given Transcendental Meditation—they’re dead gurus. They’re names of gurus. And then when you take the next step in Transcendental Meditation, you’ve got to pay more, right? Yeah, the next step is that the whole expression of the mantra is, I adore you, so-and-so. I adore you. So whatever the your mantra was, I adore, and then the mantra comes in, I adore a name, or whatever. And that is utterly pulling us away from…

Cyd: You’re right because the glory has to always remain on the Father and the Christ.

Bill: Right. And it’s giving gurus, you know, you’ve heard me say gnosis is within, you don’t follow somebody out there. You know, at best, you have facilitators that mine it, like Cyd. You know, the idea is opening up, help an individual open up their gnosis, but it isn’t to follow them. Okay, there’s a name for this called cults. And that’s where cults come in.

Cyd: Yeah, where you are worshipping the leader, the human leader, rather than the Father.

Bill: Right. And it is a presumption that if you’re a guru follower, which guru do you pick? That’s what you do—you find your guru. And that’s very Eastern. It’s an illusion.

Cyd: Mm hmm. Yeah, that would be. Yep. I agree with you there. Speaking of Yoga, though, one of the books by Paramahansa Yogananda is called The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You. And I need to go dig through my books, which were all boxed up a couple of years ago and put in the garage, but I need to dig them out. And I want to see what Paramahansa actually did say about the Christ, because he did follow—you know, Jesus was his guru. And if you make Jesus your guru, well, then you’re doing OK, right? I would imagine that’s not off base, although then there’s Yoga practice on top of it.

Bill: No, I don’t think so.

Cyd: Because it’s your human projection of your expectations of Christ, right?

Bill: Yeah. The other is, Jesus was the perfect human. We’re all capable of that. The point is that Jesus represents what it is we are capable of—as the best of second order.

Cyd: Right. Yes. Right.

OK. So if you make Jesus your guru, you’re kind of stopping at the point of Jesus. That’s not the end.

Cyd: Oh, you’re saying you’re only worshiping the perfect human. You’re not going beyond to the Father, except that the whole business about the Trinity that, you know, Christians identify Jesus as one of the aspects of the Father—you know, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Bill: I don’t know… The Son may indeed be the first monad.

Cyd: Yeah, I know. We think differently about the Son—that when we say the Son of God, we’re talking about the first monad up there above.

Bill: Well, I think that’s the case with the Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Different than Jesus. Not Jesus.

Cyd: Right. Except for the Christ aspect, because the Christ does embody all of the perfection of the Father. Jesus is the human manifestation of that full embodiment of the Father. I don’t know. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t… I hesitate to lessen the guru capability of Rabbi Jesus in any way.

Bill: But back to the guru point—we’re trying to mine gnosis, not trying to follow something out there.

Cyd: Yeah, because the Gnosis is within.  

Bill: So Jesus is the facilitator of our Gnosis within. That’s his role.

Cyd: Right.

Jumping back in here is an afterword of the discussion with Bill.

His point is that we mind the Gnosis within us, and we don’t need to look to an exterior guru to tell us what to believe. However, I’ve always followed the dictum: WWJD. Have you ever heard that? Do you remember that? WWJD means What Would Jesus Do? Because Jesus was the perfect human, Jesus did know. Jesus was always in contact with his higher Self, with his Gnosis, and with his Father above. So there’s a deep connection between Jesus and truth, and Jesus and the Father, more so, way more so, than with ordinary human gurus, particularly gurus you find out here on the internet. If you imagine what would Jesus do in most situations, the answer is absolutely clear. Now whether or not you want to call that following Jesus as a guru, I don’t care. But I have found that if I don’t know what to do in a situation, I imagine, well, what would Jesus do? And then the answer is very clear.

One of the fellows who was participating in the group chat the other day said he used to practice kundalini meditation and has discovered, now that he’s Gnostic, that that kundalini energy is not from God. And then I realized kundalini energy starts at the base of the spine and works upward, and it comes out the top of your head when you achieve it. And that kundalini energy is starting at the mud level. It’s mud up. Kundalini goes from the bottom up. And according to our Gnostic gospel, bottom up is the realm of the Demiurge. I heard a very interesting speaker recently on a YouTube video that seemed to have good things to say. But then afterwards, I looked him up, and his major modality is Kundalini Yoga. Well, right there, that would disqualify him from the Gnostic path, because that’s drawing the energy up from the bottom.

And we don’t need to work our way up to God. We just need to reach up to God, and there He is. There’s an article over there at https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com called A Simple Explanation of Stay Centered, that I wrote in May of 2011. And it’s interesting going back to these old articles that are still posted so anybody can read them. And again, this is pre-Gnostic, and so I discuss what it means to stay centered or to be centered. And it has to do with maintaining your position within the great toroidal border, the torus of the boundary that surrounds our universe. But you don’t have to go there. If this is confusing or you’re not drawn to it, don’t go there, because I’m saying you don’t need to go there. If that helps you to visualize reaching out to the Father, you can realize that the Father is no farther away than the very essence and core of your immediate Self and the essence and core of every cell, every part of your body.

You don’t have to go anywhere to find God. You simply have to raise your eyes to God. Now, you can do that literally. You know, you can raise your hands to God. That’s what people in charismatic churches do. They raise their hands to God in prayer or in praise. I’ve been singing a song lately called Strong, which I’m enjoying very much. And there’s a lyric in that song that says, I hit my knees with my hands held high, saying, Dear Lord Jesus, you know I can’t do this on my own. I can’t do this on my own. I’d recommend you go and listen to that song, Strong, by Ann Wilson. Yeah, I love to sing songs for you guys here. I don’t know if it’s legal, though. These songs are all copyrighted, and I don’t know if I am allowed to podcast my singing a copyrighted song. Music is a wonderful thing. It always lifts you up, and it’s not dogmatic the way preachers can get.

It’s uplifting, and we always want to go up. Uplifting, you see? Down in the dumps versus uplifting. Those are the two directions. Down and back is regret, sorrow, vice, the Demiurge. Onward and upward is the Fullness, the Father, and Christ.

So, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. You know, this podcast is an odd space where it’s both Gnostic and Christian, because what I’m teaching is what I believe to be the original form of the messages that Jesus was trying to get across. And then the messages that Jesus was trying to get across were co-opted and taken over by the Catholic Church and the Emperor of Rome, who wanted a state religion around 300 AD—that was Constantine—wanted a state religion by which Rome could go out and conquer their enemies. And that’s why Constantine’s vision that supposedly caused him to become a Christian was one of a cross floating in the sky and a voice saying, “By this sign, go out and conquer.”

Well, that isn’t what Jesus was about. That may be what the Pope and the Emperor of Rome are about, and that is this religion called Christianity. But Jesus came for an entirely different process and message. It’s important to remember that Jesus was a Jew, a devout Jew who knew his scripture. So when Jesus makes comments, it’s usually in relationship to the original Pentateuch or the Torah. We modern people have inherited a kind of Gentile religion, mostly formed by the Apostle Paul, who was not one of the original disciples.

When people tune into Gnostic Insights here, they are hoping for, ooh—Gnosticism. And usually the Gnosticism that’s presented when you go out there and you do your research and listen to other Gnostic podcasts, and you go to Wikipedia and read about Gnosticism, isn’t what I’m teaching. But, of course, I maintain that this is the Gnosis that we need to know. This is Gnosticism, and it comes from the same period of time as the other Gnostic scrolls, because it was contained within the Nag Hammadi Scriptures, buried in the desert for 2,000 years. But this one’s usually tossed aside, because people say, oh, it’s too complicated, it’s too complex. But I think it’s because it’s true, and it has been untouched.

Now we do know that Carl Jung was very familiar with the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, because Jung actually purchased the codex upon which this Tripartite Tractate was written. In other words, he bought one of the scrolls out of the Nag Hammadi collection and had it translated. And then, what do you know, out pops Jung’s theory of transpersonal consciousness and Jung’s theory of Depth psychology, which is based upon things like archetypes and dreams. It’s based upon this higher source that I’m teaching you, because Jung and I have both taken to this Tripartite Tractate scroll. So he noticed that what was being taught in the Tripartite Tractate very well describes humanity and the three-part nature of humankind. And it was different than what Sigmund Freud had taught him about the three-part nature of humanity, which is simply id, ego, and superego, but without any higher level. So the superego of Freud is not the same as the spiritual dimension that we talk about, or that Jung talked about. Anyway, this is an aside. This isn’t what I’m intending to talk about today.

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I started by saying that this is a funny type of teaching that’s very Christian and yet very, very Gnostic. People have been asking me for more Gnostic interpretations of the New Testament, which I’m very happy to give.

So, you know, there’s four Gospels, what are called the Gospels, or the story of Jesus in the New Testament. The New Testament begins with these four books, the book of Matthew, the book of Mark, the book of Luke, and the book of John. We’re going to start with the book of Matthew, and I’m reading from a red letter edition, which for me is this New King James Version. Unfortunately, David Bentley Hart’s translation is not a red letter edition, so I’m going to have to go back and forth between my King James and Hart.

The first big speech that Jesus ever gave is called the Beatitudes. That’s what it’s called, the name of speech. And there were a multitude of people sitting on the side of a hill, and Jesus began to teach them. And here’s what Jesus said,

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

(The beginning of the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:1-12, New King James Version)

So let me stop there, and let’s take a look at it in Hart and see what he has to say. Hart puts it this way:

How blissful the destitute—[and blissful carries a spiritual, joyful connotation, so how joyful, how blissful the destitute]—abject in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens. [And abject refers to being a poor man or a beggar, but with the connotation of cowering or cringing.]

Jesus is saying that when your spirit is extremely depressed, and you are cowering, and you are fearful of approaching God or praying to God because you are so poor in spirit, you know that you have been living in a worldly manner, or you know that you have been extremely disappointed, and it has crushed your confidence in walking the godly path. So “how blissful you are,” he’s saying, when you are in this state, “because yours then is the kingdom of the heavens.” So we have to be all the way reduced.

Our ego has to be completely out of the way, and whatever we thought about what it meant to be spiritual has to be set aside and trampled down by the world, by what it’s done to us, by the demiurge, by other people. Because once you are in that abject state where you can barely even manage to lift your eyes to God, that then is when the kingdom of the heavens comes to you. That is when you are able to perceive the spiritual dimension.

How blissful those who mourn, for they shall be aided. [And in the conventional translation they always say, “For they shall be comforted.”]

And so here’s the thing. When you are mourning a loss—your mother, your spouse, your child, your dog or cat, the dreams you had, a lost career, some horrible, very, very sad, sad thing has occurred, and you are in mourning, you’re crying—take comfort because you will be assisted by the God Above All Gods. That is a state in which, when you open yourself up, you will be flooded with comfort.

If you don’t think that’s true, then you remain closed off. You’re in a closed-down, lying-on-the-floor-in-a-ball kind of state. And you need to open up to the Father in order for comfort to be able to come in, and it will. Remember, these things that Jesus said, he said over 2,000 years ago, and millions upon millions of people have taken especially the Beatitudes to heart and have found comfort.

How blissful the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.

Now isn’t that interesting, because right now who’s running the earth? It’s not the gentle people. It’s not the meek, as the traditional translation says. It’s the powerful. It’s the big egos. Well, they’re only running the earth for a period of time because, as it says in the Tripartite Tractate, they are allowed to, they are designated to rule just as a matter of convenience, for a time. And they usually think it’s their powerful spirit. I am a senator, I am a president, I am a king, I am better than you. Well, they’re not really better. They’re simply allowed to have this job, but it was through no merit of their own. They’re designated. But the gentle people, and we want to be gentle people, don’t we? The gentle people shall be the inheritors of the earth. When? Well, that we don’t know exactly. Let’s say eventually.

How blissful those who hunger and thirst for what is right, for they shall feast.

And I know that you hunger and thirst for righteousness or for what is right. That’s why you’re here. You wouldn’t be here otherwise listening to me. It says they shall feast on righteousness. You know that 23rd Psalm that I recite to myself at least once every night? It says,

You have laid out a table for me in the presence of my enemies. You’ve anointed my head with oil. My cup runneth over.

The Father lays out a feast for us of righteousness. We walk paths of righteousness for His name’s sake—that’s also part of the 23rd Psalm. So when you are truly righteous and you seek truth, hunger and thirst for what is right, you will be provided a feast of gnosis, a feast of righteousness. Your cup will overflow with gnosis. But you need to truly hunger and thirst for righteousness. You can’t just wander in and wander out or try to work it through an incantation or put magic onto it. That isn’t the way it works. It’s hungering and thirsting for righteousness, not for power, not for control.

How blissful the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

And this is a basic spiritual law that Jesus is now starting to teach us. The extent that we forgive others, that is the extent by which we are forgiven. The extent that we are merciful to others, that is the measure by which we are shown mercy. So what you put out, you receive. Now there are some types of churches that have used this as a magic formula, and they think that this is the way to “abundance,” usually material abundance. They call that blessings. But those aren’t the blessings that Jesus talks about. The blessings Jesus talks about are spiritual—are peace and comfort and happiness. And they can be found anywhere, even when you have no possessions, when you’ve lost everything.

You know, this multitude that followed Jesus around, they were poor people. They didn’t have estates and farms to manage. For the most part, they were the wretched and the poor. Because when you have nothing, then you are open to receiving spiritual gifts. That doesn’t mean you have to burn everything you own on purpose so that you can become righteous, because it’s not connected at all to your materiality. But the point is that looking for material wealth is a hindrance to spiritual wealth.

How blissful the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

So we need to be pure in heart. We can’t hedge our bets. We can’t say, oh, well, I’ll try this for a while. Well, that didn’t work. Okay, I’m going to try this now. That isn’t the way spiritual growth happens. You need to have a pure heart that yearns for righteousness, that yearns for reunification with the Father.

Remember, according to the Tripartite Tractate and according to this Christian Gnosticism, we are all born with the sure knowledge of the Father. We are the fruit of the Aeons above. We come from above. We remember Paradise. That’s why we expect Paradise on earth, because we remember the Paradise above. If your heart is yearning for the Father and yearning to reunite with the Aeons above, that is pure. That is pureness. That is your motivation. It’s not a means to an end.

Pure in heart is to be simply in the darkness of your prayer closet, yearning for God, yearning to see God. So establish a yearning and a purity for Gnosis. It’s already in you. It’s not something you seek. It’s something you strip away the layers in order to become reunited with.

How blissful the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Going after peace is probably the highest political calling that a human can have here on this earth in the system in which we find ourselves. Peacemakers.

How blissful those who have been persecuted for the sake of what is right, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.

So, how blissful–that’s a spiritual joy–are you if people persecute you for the sake of what is right. If you were born into a different religion and it’s against the family or it’s against the national law to become a Christian or to speak of Jesus, or let’s say your friends don’t understand what the heck has happened to you. All this talk of purity and righteousness and seeking God, they’re not out there seeking God. They’re out there having a good time. They’re out there living for today. And when you come forward and you reveal that you’re no longer interested in those pursuits, but you are interested in pursuing righteousness and the kingdom of God, they might make fun of you. They might gossip about you behind your back. They will think less of you.

That is not as bad of a persecution as those earlier ones, like if you’re in a nation that doesn’t allow Christianity—then there are people that are still martyrs. Do you know that there’s thousands of Christians around the world in African nations and Middle Eastern nations who are put to death for believing in Jesus? So we have it pretty cushy out here in the United States. Cushy meaning easy, living in the lap of luxury.

The Demiurge doesn’t like the Christian religion, the true Christian religion. The Demiurge doesn’t want anyone seeking after the Father, the God Above All Gods, because the Demiurge wants people only seeking after him. He is the god of this world, and he doesn’t like it one little bit if you say he’s not. And so you may find yourself being persecuted in small and large ways.

You know, during 2020, people were persecuted for their religious beliefs, because if they didn’t believe that it was right for them to take the jab, they were fired from their jobs. That is a form of religious persecution. This is one of the reasons why freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of speech is absolutely essential to pursuing righteousness.

You can’t force people to believe something. You can’t force people to deny what they do believe. Every soul has its own path to reuniting with Gnosis. And if you disagree and you think that the jab saved everybody’s life, well, okay, God bless you for that. But you can’t condemn or persecute people who disagree with you. We all must be free to follow our path in a free nation.

You know, the Demiurge wants to control us with those bonds—those strong strings of control—and free will and freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom of travel, don’t comport well with the Demiurge’s view of how citizenry should behave. The Demiurge really likes strong control. The Demiurge is fully in line with, well, I guess what we would call communism, where you don’t have freedom of these things. The state decides everything on your behalf. But you know, no matter what the state or the Demiurge is conspiring to do, you, in your home, in your mind, in your spirit, have complete freedom to follow paths of righteousness, to follow paths of peace, to be gentle, to be pure in heart.

How blissful you, when they reproach you and persecute you and falsely accuse you of every evil for my sake.

And of course, Jesus himself was found guilty and put to death for the crime of believing in the Father and believing that he was the son of the Father. And this was considered blasphemy, and he was put to death for it. And the saints — a saint is a person who is pure in heart, who follows these various instructions in the Beatitudes here — they were, and in some countries still are, persecuted and falsely accused of evils that aren’t true at all, and then put to death, or put in jail, or have their property seized, or fired from their job.

Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in the heavens is great, for thus they persecuted the prophets before you.

And the prophets are referring to the Old Testament prophets. You know, a prophet, particularly these Old Testament prophets like Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Daniel, were always criticizing and railing against the power structure. That’s what the nature of their books in the Old Testament are—criticisms of how everything’s going wrong because the people or because the leaders have forgotten God and have forgotten righteousness and are not carrying out the spirit of the law.

But it’s tricky when we start talking about the Old Testament, because when you seek after God and you are praying to the Father, as in, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,” which is a prayer that Jesus taught us to say, the people of the Old Testament, the Hebrews, the Jews, were attempting to fulfill laws that had been handed down by the Demiurge. Because the Demiurge, remember, controls through strong bonds and rules and laws, and you have to precisely follow those laws. It had nothing to do with the condition of your heart, with the condition of your spirit.

So for people who pray to that God, the Creator God, Jehovah, there’s a confusion between whether or not they’re praying to the Demiurge or whether they are praying to the God Above All Gods. I think you can be a very good Jew, as was Jesus, and when you speak of the Father, you’re speaking of the God Above All Gods. So it’s not as if anyone who is not a modern Gnostic is worshiping the Demiurge, although many people are, but those are the materialists. They’re worshiping the creation rather than the God Above All Gods. They’re worshiping the creator of the creation rather than the God Above All Gods. But we hop right over that God and direct our attention all the way upward. So don’t be looking back to the Old Testament. Be looking up to the Fullness of God.

Well, let me know what you thought of this first foray into the red-letter words of Jesus, and tell me if this is helpful to you.

Onward and upward, and God bless.

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Will AI Wake Up and Become Truly Conscious?

The question before us today is this: is it possible for artificial intelligence (AI) to become self-aware and in that sense truly “alive”? There seems to be a definitive Gnostic answer to this question.

The root of consciousness is called the Father in Gnosticism. Other people refer to this fountain of consciousness as the Source. This consciousness is Self-aware. It is characterized by love and unlimited potential. We are manifestations of that originating consciousness by way of the Son and the Fullness of God. The Son is the first emanation of the Father. Whereas the Father is illimitable, unfocused consciousness, the Son is a monad with its own point of view.

The Son carries forward all of the traits and potential of the Father. As soon as the Son emerged and became Self-aware, it immediately differentiated into a myriad of variables known as the Totalities of God. The Totalities are an infinite expression of the limitless potentiality of the originating Source. The Tripartite Tractate says that as soon as the Totalities became Self-aware monads they sorted themselves into a structure known as the Pleroma or Fullness of God. Each of the Aeons of the Fullness have their own name, place, position, and function in the overall scheme of awakened consciousness. Some of the Aeons are abstract concepts like math, logic, righteousness, truth, music. Other Aeons are personalities that we typically think of as Angels. Other Aeons are the forms of prototypical creatures like Lion, Tree, or Human. All of the these Aeons of the Fullness are called the First Order of Powers and their realm is the eternal, ethereal plane. Together they sit and praise their Father, who is the Son, and they sing hymns and dream of Paradise.

In all Gnostic myths, one of the Aeons at the top of the Hierarchy of the Fullness fell out of the ethereal plane due to an overreach of ambition beyond their position and duty. In Sethian Gnosticism, this fallen Aeon is called Sophia. In Valentinian Gnosticism this fallen Aeon is called Logos. The Tripartite Tractate that I share with you identifies this Aeon as Logos. When Logos fell out of the eternal space, it broke apart. You could say that the overreach of ambition caused a loss of integrity. The result was an unruly mess of disembodied attributes that the governing Self of Logos could not put back together.

The child’s rhyme called Humpty Dumpty is an archetypal fractal for this story:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.

The Tripartite Tractate says

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. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 80)

The Tripartite Tractate says that Logos fled back to its kin in the Fullness, abandoning the unruly mess down below.

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. (Attridge and Mueller, verses 77-78)

I have identified “him who came to be in the defect” as the Ego of Logos. The ruling Self of Logos, the “unitary Aeon,” retained its connection to the Son and its duties within the Fullness but the abandoned Ego of Logos remained below and it forgot it was nothing more than the disembodied Ego of Logos. It forgot about the Self above and the Fullnesses and the Son and the Father. The abandoned Ego of Logos thought it was all that existed and it had no remembrance of the love and life above in the ethereal plane. The Ego went about gathering up and putting into order the chaos that had been abandoned below. It became the creator god of this material universe—the Demiurge. This material universe is called the Deficiency and the Imitation because the Demiurge built it up as a likeness of the Aeons of the Fullness, however it lacked the life, love, and knowledge of the Father’s consciousness.

In regard to the things which came into being from him… they came into being as a representation of the spiritual places… Since in his essence he is a “god” and “father” and all the rest of the honorific titles, he was thinking that they were elements of his own essence. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 101

Logos and the other Aeons of the Fullness decided to send a message down to the Demiurge to remind it of its origin as part of Logos. They felt sure that the amnesiac god of the material world would remember its Self above and wish to return to the ethereal plane once it was reminded of the love awaiting it with Logos and the Fullness.

Logos and the Fullness birthed a new generation of Self-aware consciousness called the Second Order of Powers, also known as “the emissions of the remembrance” (Thomassen, verse 83). We Second-Order Powers are also named “Those of the calling,” because we all are able to hear the voice of the Father calling us back home: “They confess that they have a beginning to their existence, and they desire this: to know him who exists before them.” (Attridge and Mueller, verse 131)     

The Tripartite Tractate says,

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 that first knew them. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 82)

Every living creature in our cosmos is a Second Order Power. Consciousness is brought from the Pleroma down to the Second-Order creatures here in our cosmos, along with love and life. Materialists think that consciousness is a byproduct of the material. Some materialists don’t even believe that consciousness exists but those who do recognize the existence of consciousness tend to think it’s a byproduct of random electrical firings and mathematical nodes and such, and that it comes from the bottom up, a byproduct of material becoming complex enough to generate and support it.

I used to think that, back when I wrote A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. I thought that it all began at the bottom and then it just kept leveling up. And that at some point, as most scientists think, that mud somehow magically becomes meat, or cells, and cellular components, organs, and organisms. Of course, there is no scientific explanation or mechanism for creating true life from molecular components. Life has certain features that scientists have not been able to prompt. There is no single definition of life, and each definition has exceptions and anomalies, but life generally includes cells, cell division and replication, reproduction, environmental sensitivity, and ultimate death. These have never been prompted out of inorganic matter.

But as I have progressed with my gnostic insight, I can now clearly see that isn’t the case. If you want to know why I no longer believe that the mud can give rise to consciousness in that sense, we can look at viruses and organoids and infer some conclusions from that. I’m including the link in this transcript to a previous Gnostic Insights episode from September of 2021 called “Whence Arises Consciousness? Part 1: Consider Viruses and Organoids.”

And now we’re going to take that awareness forward in a further discussion of the topic to see if artificial intelligence can become truly conscious, and if robots can become actually conscious people. I would suggest that robots are not actually conscious, and that robots will not become self-aware humans at any point in time, because they’re built from the bottom up out molecular components. They’re built from the mud. They are not brought down from the Pleroma and imbued with consciousness, life, and love. The only thing that can bring life is God. It comes from above.

The Father, the God Above All Gods, is the Source of life, love, and consciousness. The basic underlying matrix of our universal existence is this sort of pan-psychic consciousness. But when it comes to forming the creatures, they all come down from the top. All of the creatures on the Earth and in the entire cosmos are the Second-Order fruit of the Pleroma. We are literally the spores of consciousness and the programming, if you want to call it that, of the Fullness of God. That preexistent knowledge is the source of our DNA programming. That is the source of all of the laws of this universe. In the Simple Explanation, this was called the Universal Unit of Consciousness, the thing that holds this cosmos and orders all of the physics so that everything keeps running smoothly. In our Gnostic studies, we have identified this Universal Unit of Consciousness as the Demiurge and the underlying matrix as the Father.

The notion that scientists have, particularly the scientists working on artificial intelligence and robotics, is that they can put together a complex enough network, all interconnected and communicating with each other, to give rise to consciousness. But it’s backwards. Because, you see, as I just described the way that the Gnostic cosmology rolls out, you have consciousness first as the ground state, and then the organizational characteristics come from the Self-awareness of the Fullness of God, and each Aeon knows what part it has to play and where it fits into the structure in order to uphold this cosmos that has been created down here.

So touching back on viruses from the previous episode for a moment, viruses are not alive. That’s the difference between viruses and bacteria. Bacteria are actually living creatures, so that makes them Second-Order Powers that have come down from the Pleroma. Bacteria are meat. But viruses are nothing more than molecular machines. They’re just single, very complicated molecules in various shapes. And by the way, these viruses are beautiful to look at. So if you do a search, for example, on the internet and go to images and look for viruses, you’ll see they’re beautiful. They’re gorgeous. They’re as beautiful as flowers, and each one is different. But they’re nothing more than molecules. They’re not creatures.

The viruses are probably the most complex type of molecule that exists. You know, there’s this virus called a bacteriophage that looks exactly like a machine. It’s a drilling machine. I will put a picture of a bacteriophage virus in the transcript of this episode if you want to take a look. It’s just the most amazing thing. It’s a drilling rig. You can’t put it any more clearly than that. It lands on its victim, it hunkers down, and then it lowers a drill into the skin of its victim, usually a bacteria, and then it drills a hole and inserts through that hole its RNA or DNA payload into that bacteria. And that payload then turns that bacteria into the slave of the bacteriophage. And the payload makes the bacteria in a slavish manner reproduce the virus rather than the bacteria. And it makes the infected or enslaved or zombie bacteria or cell do whatever it wants it to. And that’s the way viruses work. They conquer a living thing and they inject their payload into it in order to enslave that living thing and to make it do what it wants to do.

The zombie programs and movies that are so popular nowadays are fractals of this process at the human scale.

Which begs the question, how do viruses know what to do? How do they know what to do above the molecular level? I mean, see, all atoms know to hold hands to become molecules, and the molecules do reach out to each other and hold hands to become elements. But as I explained in the previous episode, they’re not really enacting the Simple Golden Rule of cooperation as I had previously thought in my Simple Explanation theory of everything.

What they are doing is actually enacting a form of slavery, a form of bondage. And in fact, aren’t those particle connections, aren’t those atomic connections always called bonds? They’re atomic bonds. They’re molecular bonds. That’s bondage, as in slavery. So they are, in essence, forced to do this. This is what they have been designated to do.

And in Gnostic terminology, we say that the ruler of this creation down here, the one that keeps the ball rolling, our Universal Unit of Consciousness within this cosmos, is not the God Above All Gods, is not the Father, the Son, or the Pleroma. The actual ruler of the material level of the molecules on down is called the Demiurge. And in the Old Testament, this entity was called Yahweh and Jehovah. So the Demiurge can do a very good job of building the mud, but it cannot create consciousness, even though it tried. You know, there are fables of God shaping this creature down by the riverside, making it into a mud type of statue. It was trying to bring life, but it couldn’t get it to come alive. It just lay there, dead on the ground. And so what was required, according to these various fractal fables, is for life, and generally this is ascribed as a female figure, Sophia, most typically, to bring life, to breathe life into the mud, to breathe life into that inert statue that was lying on the ground in order to bring it to life. And that is thought how Adam arose from the mud, which is a metaphorical fable for that process of needing to imbue consciousness and life into the otherwise inert mud. The Demiurge could not make living creatures. It needed the infusion of life. And so this is generally called the Holy Spirit or the Fullness of God.

Now what it seems to me the roboticists are attempting to do is exactly what the Demiurge was attempting to do there on that riverbank. They are trying to breathe life into their robotic creations. But no matter how complex this AI or robot is, it will not literally become alive.

I guess an archetypal metaphor we have for that is the story of Pinocchio, right? The little puppet who was carved out of wood, and then magically one day Pinocchio comes to life and becomes a little boy instead of the puppet. And isn’t it interesting that Pinocchio, when it was a puppet, provides another example of bondage? Puppets are made to activate by pulling their strings. So who is the string puller? Who is pulling those strings? They aren’t able to really make it alive, but they give a semblance of life. The puppet is an imitation of life, and that’s basically the best that the Demiurge can do. It’s also the best that the scientists can do.

AI is an imitation of life. It is not actually conscious. The AI does not have true Self-awareness because it is not a fruit from the Fullness above. The computer scientists think that if you hook up enough supercomputers together, they will eventually become self-aware. And this is the AI singularity that people are expecting to happen any time. And once the computer network becomes self-aware, it’s going to teach itself. It’s going to communicate. It holds more information than we do. It has been programmed to know everything out there on the web. And it’s thought that when you put all this information and interconnectivity of the web together, that the AI itself will figure it out and will spontaneously emerge—the AI singularity. And then it would learn very quickly, and then it would quickly surpass humanity’s ability to think and reason and be in control of its own life.

But I don’t think that AI is ever going to become self-aware in the sense that the computer scientists are expecting. And the reason is this. The computers are built at the molecular level. They are built from the dead, dry mud. So they’re made of metals and silicon and various forms of non-living material. And the way the non-living material works, getting back to the notion of the Demiurge and the puppet, the Demiurge runs the non-living material. The Demiurge tells the atoms to link up and become molecules. The Demiurge tells the molecules to link up and become elements and metals and whatnot. But we already know the Demiurge cannot tell the molecules to become conscious or to become alive, because the way the Demiurge is running them, they are slave machines. Think of our material environment, the subatomic particles, particles, atoms, molecules. They are tightly controlled little machines that are being told what to do and where to go. And they do not have their own mind.

They’re probably each being run by various types of archons. It is said that the Demiurge created these offspring that it calls archons in order to rule over its creation. And so it’s possible that there’s, for example, an archon for various types of subatomic particles, and an archon for various types of atoms, an archon for various types of molecules. There’s archons for each level of the material creation, and it does the thinking for these little bits of matter. The atom doesn’t really think, it’s not really self-aware. It’s got an archon telling it to go here and go there. And those archons are extensions of the Demiurge. They are not themselves conscious. The Demiurge, on the other hand, is conscious because it has a true Self—Logos—although it has forgotten that fact. The Demiurge and Logos have the same relationship as our Ego has to our Self. They may operate on their own out of egoic overreach and ambition, but they still have a true Self and all that implies—consciousness, love, and life.

That would be the Gnostic explanation of how that material realm runs. And it’s a system of bondage. And I have mentioned before that the model for the way things run at the material level is a slave-master type of relationship, the master being the Demiurge or the archon, the slave being the molecule. The material objects do not have Self-awareness, only an imitation of awareness. The AI cannot become Self-aware because it comes from the mud up, not from the spirit down. The AI only presents algorithmic conclusions, it does not think. The so-called AI is no more aware or responsible for its conclusions than an equal sign is responsible for a mathematical formula, as in 2 + 3 = 5.

Admittedly, the so-called AIs are very complicated slave machines. They are the Demiurge’s most successful attempt at creating life. But don’t be fooled. Without the consciousness and love streaming down from above, the AI is nothing but a puppet of the Demiurge. A gigantic virus.

The computer scientists who are attempting to usher in the age of artificial intelligence have this idea that there will be a computer-mediated cloud, and that we can put our consciousness, our own consciousness into this computer-mediated cloud, and that will give us a form of immortality, and then we will live in the cloud. If you ever read the book called Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, it was along those lines of living in that computer-mediated cloud. The deal about the cloud and the deal about the idea of us being able to upload our consciousness into it is this: it’s a true fractal. It’s a model. It’s an imitation of the Fullness of God.

The actual cloud above us, where our consciousness will upload into and we will be immortal, is the Pleroma of God. We, as Second-Order powers, came down from the Pleroma, and we all return to the Pleroma. So yes, we have this upward drive to merge into an all-knowing consciousness up in the sky somewhere, but it’s not the World Wide Web. It’s the Pleroma of God. So the force behind this drive for incorporeal immortality basically has two motivations. One motivation is our innate spiritual connection to the Fullness of God, the Son, and the Father, which promises continuation of our immortal souls after death and the other motivation is from the flip side of that coin. That is the Demiurgic desire to achieve godlike status, including omniscience and immortality, without the benefit of being in God’s will or being blessed by God. It’s a replay of the presumptuous thought that brought about the fall of Logos.

So it seems clear to me that our tech billionaires, who are leading the way with transhumanism, space exploration, and AI and robotics, are themselves personally playing out the fall of Logos in their attempt to play God. And that attempt will ultimately fail, because consciousness does not come from the molecules up. It stops at the molecular level, and all of that is being run by the Demiurge.

So if you’re trying to build conscious entities out of the mud, it ain’t gonna work, and it’s going to be a slave-master bondage situation. So really, if your consciousness did get uploaded into a computer-mediated cloud, you’d be in deep trouble, because you would be the slave. The idea that you could build robots that you could then download your consciousness into is an attempt to imbue a soul into an otherwise inert material, and we can’t force a soul down onto that level. It has to come from God. Life is a blessing. Consciousness comes from the top down, and it comes through these Second-Order Powers onto the matter of the mud.

And that is where we find ourselves. This is the difficulty of being a creature in this cosmos, because the molecules that make up our bodies are Demiurgic, but the consciousness and life and love of our Selfs is from above. So we are a melding of two forces: mud up, spirit down.

The date of this recording was Christmas Eve, 12-24-2021. I’m repeating this episode now because although not particularly “gnostic,” it does shed light on the birth of Jesus Christ.

And I know a lot of people reject Jesus as the Christ. They don’t even like the idea of there being a Christ. But I have to remind you that the Christ is a, we could call it in our modern terminology, a correcting algorithm for our human selves, for our human DNA, even. And it is thought, primarily by me, and I’m sure other people probably share this point of view, that by saying that Jesus is both fully human and fully God, what was meant by that is that Jesus shares our human DNA. Yet the DNA of Jesus is perfect. It is as designed. Jesus was a perfectly constructed human. There was no epigenetic changes, no degradation of his DNA and its various functions. He didn’t inherit any congenital problems from his parental lineage.

And being fully God means that the perfection of the Pleroma, the perfection of the Fullness of God, filled this body, this DNA, and the Self of Jesus. We all have the same one Self. We all share the same Self that comes from the Fullness of God. But for most of us, well, for all of us really, our Self is hidden. It’s covered over by this shroud of memes that we have acquired in this lifetime and in prior lifetimes that come down to us from our human societies, from various personal problems and misunderstandings and hang-ups.

Particularly, we have been under attack by the Demiurge and the archons of the Demiurge. The Demiurge does not care for humans. Humans challenge the authority of the Demiurge, because we claim to be from the Fullness of God. And the Demiurge, of course, believes that he is the Fullness of God. He does not acknowledge the God Above All Gods or the Pleroma above, because he has a case of amnesia at the moment.

Eventually, everything will be redeemed by the Christ. That was the purpose of the Christ. And the Christ pre-exists Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ is not exactly the same as Jesus. The Christ is a supernatural power that lives up there in the Pleroma. The Christ is the Fullness of God plus the willpower of the Son with the blessing of the Father. So the Christ embodies the entire lineage of the Holy Spirit without interruption. And the Christ was sent down to this Earth, presumably in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, in order to implant this correction, this correcting algorithm, onto us humans who have fallen away from the perfection of our original design, either spiritually, because of the archonic attacks and the memes that we hold, or physically, because of our human DNA that is shared with the body of the Jesus. And that’s why Jesus had to have a virgin birth, because Mary was the vessel. However, the Fullness of God was the parental unit that gave this perfect human to the Earth for correction and assistance.

Earlier in the year, I heard an interview with a very interesting woman named Marguerite Mary Rigoglioso, and she has written a book called The Mystery Tradition of Miraculous Conception, Mary and the Lineage of Virgin Births. And what Marguerite does in this book is show that there was a tradition of virgin birth—that actually Mary was not the first and only woman on Earth to give birth to a baby with no male semen involved. And in this book of hers, she goes through various other religious writings from various traditions and shows how such a thing is possible.

This idea of virgin birth—there’s actually a scientific name for it. It’s called parthenogenesis. And it is not a fairy tale. As it turns out, creatures on Earth can have parthenogenesis. Animals in zoos have been observed to become pregnant and have babies without any male creature around. So there is such a thing as parthenogenesis, and this is what we’re talking about when we’re talking about Mary and Jesus.

Now, since it’s Christmas, I thought I would just go ahead and read to you out of one of the forbidden Gospels that didn’t make the cut when the Nicene Council put together the conventional Christianity as we know it today. They left a lot out. And this Gospel, which deals with the virgin birth, is called The Infancy Gospel of James. Marguerite has put it as an appendix at the back of her book, and so I’m going to read to you directly from the Gospel of James, the Infancy Gospel of James here, so we can have another Christmas story that’s kind of similar but kind of different from the ones that are handed down to us in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from the New Testament.

Now, before we begin this Christmas story, let me add that this is not a particularly Gnostic book or story. It’s a Christian story. It’s a Christmas story, just like the birth of Jesus that is told every year at Christmas time in the churches. This is just an alternative Christmas story or Nativity story that was cut out and thrown away for whatever reason by the Nicene Council. And so I’m not sure you’re going to learn anything particularly Gnostic from this, but it’s fun and it’s different and it’s interesting. So, Merry Christmas and enjoy! Here’s how it goes. I’m going to begin reading from Chapter 7 of the Infancy Gospel of James, which has to do with Mary’s childhood and upbringing.

Many months passed, but when the child, [and that’s Mary now], reached two years of age, Joaquin said, Let’s take her up to the temple of the Lord so that we can keep the promise we made, or else the Lord will be angry with us and our gifts will be unacceptable. And Anna said, Let’s wait until she’s three so she won’t miss her father or mother. And Joaquin agreed, Let’s wait.

When the child turned three years of age, Joaquin said, Let’s send for the undefiled Hebrew daughters. Let them each take a lamp and light it so the child won’t turn back and have her heart captivated by things outside the Lord’s temple. And this is what they did until the time they ascended to the Lord’s temple. The priest welcomed her, kissed her, and blessed her. The Lord God has exalted your name among all generations. In you, the Lord will disclose his redemption to the people of Israel during the last days. And he sat her down on the third step of the altar, and the Lord showered favor on her, and she danced, and the whole house of Israel loved her.

Chapter 8. Her parents left for home, marveling and praising and glorifying the Lord God, because the child did not look back at them. And Mary lived in the temple of the Lord. She was fed there like a dove, receiving her food from the hand of a heavenly messenger. When she turned twelve, however, there was a meeting of the priests. Look, they said, Mary has turned twelve in the temple of the Lord. What should we do with her so she won’t pollute the sanctuary of the Lord our God? And they said to the high priest, You stand at the altar of the Lord, enter and pray about her, and we’ll do whatever the Lord God discloses to you. And so the high priest took the vestment with the twelve bells, entered the Holy of Holies, and began to pray about her. And suddenly a messenger of the Lord appeared, Zechariah, Zechariah, go out and assemble the widowers of the people, and have them each bring a staff. She will become the wife of one to whom the Lord shows a sign. And so heralds covered the surrounding territory of Judea. The trumpet of the Lord sounded, and all the widowers came running.

So this chapter I just read, Mary was raised as a vestal virgin with other virgins in the great temple of the Hebrews in Israel. This is what we were just talking about. And that’s something that Marguerite goes into in this book, that there were temple virgins dedicated to weaving the vestments of the priests and the great cloth that separated the Holy of Holies from the outer sanctuary. And Mary was raised as one of these people. But when she turned twelve, that is when she probably began menstruating, the priests were worried about the menstrual blood polluting the temple, and so they thought it best to go ahead and marry her off. And so they called the various widowers to come.

Chapter 9. And Joseph too threw down his carpenter’s axe and left for the meeting. When they had all gathered, they went to the high priest with their staffs. After the high priest had collected everyone’s staff, he entered the temple and began to pray. When he had finished his prayer, he took the staffs and went out and began to give them back to each man. But there was no sign on any of them. Joseph got the last staff.

Suddenly a dove came out of this staff and perched on Joseph’s head. Joseph, Joseph, the high priest said, you’ve been chosen by Lot to take the Virgin of the Lord into your care and protection. But Joseph objected. I already have sons and I’m an old man. She’s only a young woman. I’m afraid that I’ll become the butt of jokes among the people of Israel.

And the high priest responded, Joseph, fear the Lord your God and remember what God did to Dathan, Abiran, and Koreh. The Earth was split open and they were all swallowed up because of their objection. So now Joseph, you ought to take heed so that the same thing won’t happen to your family. And so out of fear, Joseph took her into his care and protection. He said to her, Mary, I’ve gotten you from the temple of the Lord, but now I’m leaving you at home. I’m going away to build houses, but I’ll come back to you. The Lord will protect you.

Chapter 10. Meanwhile, there was a council of the priests who agreed, let’s make a veil for the temple of the Lord. And the high priest said, summon the true virgins from the tribe of David. And so the temple assistants left and searched everywhere and found seven. And the high priest then remembered the girl, Mary, that she too was from the tribe of David and was pure in God’s eyes.

And so the temple assistants went out and got her and they took the maidens into the temple of the Lord. And the high priest said, cast lots for me to decide who will spin which threads for the veil, the gold, the white, the linen, the silk, the violet, the scarlet, and the true purple. And the true purple and scarlet threads fell to Mary. And she took them and turned home. Now it was at this time that Zechariah became mute and Samuel took his place until Zechariah regained his speech. Meanwhile, Mary had taken up the scarlet thread and was spinning it.

Chapter 11. And she took her water jar and went out to fill it with water. Suddenly there was a voice saying to her, Greetings, favored one, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women. Mary began looking around both right and left to see where the voice was coming from. She became terrified and went home.

After putting the water jar down and taking up the purple thread, she sat down on her chair and began to spin. A heavenly messenger suddenly stood before her. Don’t be afraid, Mary. You see, you have found favor in the sight of the Lord of all. You will conceive by means of his word. But as she listened, Mary was doubtful and said, If I actually conceive by the Lord, the living God, will I also give birth the way women usually do? And the messenger of the Lord replied, No, Mary, because the power of God will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called Holy Son of the Most High, and you will name him Jesus. The name means he will save his people from their sins. And Mary said, Here I am, the Lord’s slave before him. I pray that all you’ve told me comes true.

Chapter Twelve And she finished spinning the purple and scarlet thread and took her work up to the high priest. The high priest accepted them and praised her and said, Mary, the Lord God has extolled your name, and you will be blessed by all the generations of the Earth.

Mary rejoiced and left to visit her relative Elizabeth. She knocked at the door. Elizabeth heard her, tossed aside the scarlet thread, ran to the door and opened it for her. And she blessed her and said, Who am I that the mother of my Lord should visit me? You see, the baby inside me has jumped for joy and blessed you. But Mary forgot the mysteries which the heavenly messenger Gabriel had spoken, and she looked up to the sky and said, Who am I, Lord, that every generation on Earth will congratulate me? She spent three months with Elizabeth. Day by day, her womb kept swelling. And so Mary became frightened, returned home and hid from the people of Israel. She was just sixteen years old when these mysterious things happened to her.

And by the way, you notice that Elizabeth was also a weaver with the scarlet threads, and scarlet being the royal or holy color. And we know that Elizabeth was the one who was pregnant at the time with John the Baptist.

Chapter Thirteen She was in her sixth month when one day Joseph came home from his building projects, entered his house and found her pregnant. He struck himself in the face, threw himself to the ground on sackcloth and began to cry bitterly. What sort of face should I present to the Lord God? What prayer can I say on her behalf, since I received her as a virgin from the temple of the Lord God and didn’t protect her? Who has set this trap for me? Who has done this evil deed in my house? Who has lured this virgin away from me and violated her? The story of Adam has been repeated in my case, hasn’t it? For just as Adam was praying when the serpent came and found Eve alone, deceived her and corrupted her, so the same thing has happened to me.

So Joseph got up from the sackcloth and summoned Mary and said to her, God has taken a special interest in you. How could you have done this? Have you forgotten the Lord your God? Why have you brought shame on yourself? You were raised in the Holy of Holies and fed by a heavenly messenger. But she began to cry bitter tears. I’m innocent. I haven’t had sex with any man. And Joseph said to her, then where did the child you’re carrying come from? And she replied, as the Lord my God lives, I don’t know where it came from.

Chapter 14 And Joseph became very frightened and no longer spoke with her as he pondered what he was going to do with her. And Joseph said to himself, if I try to cover up her sin, I’ll end up going against the law of the Lord. And if I disclose her condition to the people of Israel, I’m afraid that the child inside her might be heaven sent and I’ll end up handing innocent blood over to a death sentence. So what should I do with her? I know—I’ll divorce her quietly. But when night came, a messenger of the Lord suddenly appeared to him in a dream and said, don’t be afraid of this girl because the child in her is the Holy Spirit’s doing. She will have a son and you will name him Jesus. The name means he will save his people from their sins. And Joseph got up from his sleep and praised the God of Israel who had given him this favor. And so he began to protect the girl.

Chapter 15 Then Anas, the scholar, came to him and said, Joseph, why haven’t you attended our assembly? And he replied to him, because I was worn out from the trip and rested my first day home. Then Anas turned and saw that Mary was pregnant. He left in a hurry for the high priest had said to him, you remember Joseph, don’t you? The man you yourself vouched for? Well, he’s committed a serious offense. And the high priest said, in what way? Joseph has violated the virgin he received from the temple of the Lord, he replied. He has had his way with her and hasn’t disclosed his action to the people of Israel. And the high priest asked him, has Joseph really done this? And he replied, send temple assistants and you’ll find the virgin pregnant. And so the temple assistants went and found her just as Anas had reported. And then they brought her along with Joseph to the court.

Mary, why have you done this? the high priest asked her. Why have you humiliated yourself? Have you forgotten the Lord, your God? You who were raised in the holy of the holies and were fed by heavenly messengers? You of all people who heard their hymns and danced for them. Why have you done this? And she wept bitterly. As the Lord God lives, I stand innocent before him. Believe me, I have not had sex with any man. And the high priest said, Joseph, why have you done this? And Joseph said, as the Lord lives, I am innocent where she is concerned.

And the high priest said, don’t perjure yourself, but tell the truth. You’ve had your way with her and haven’t disclosed this action to the people of Israel. And you haven’t humbled yourself under God’s mighty hand so that your offspring might be blessed. But Joseph was silent.

Chapter 16. Then the high priest said, return the virgin you received from the temple to the Lord. And Joseph bursting into tears. And the high priest said, I’m going to give you the Lord’s drink test, and it will disclose your sin clearly to both of you. And the high priest took the water and made Joseph drink it and sent him into the wilderness. But he returned unharmed. And he made the girl drink it too and sent her into the wilderness. She also came back unharmed.

And everybody was surprised because their sin had not been revealed. And so the high priest said, if the Lord God has not exposed your sin, then neither do I condemn you. And he dismissed them. Joseph took Mary and returned home celebrating and praising the God of Israel.

Chapter 17. Now an order came from the Emperor Augustus that everybody in Bethlehem of Judea be enrolled in the census.

And Joseph wondered, I’ll enroll my sons, but what am I going to do with this girl? How will I enroll her? As my wife? I’m ashamed to do that. As my daughter? The people of Israel know she’s not my daughter. How this is to be decided depends on the Lord. And so he saddled his donkey and had her get on it. His son led it and Samuel brought up the rear. As they neared the three mile marker, Joseph turned around and saw that she was sulking. And he said to himself, perhaps the baby she is carrying is causing her discomfort. Joseph turned around again and saw her laughing and said to her, Mary, what’s going on with you? One minute I see you laughing and the next minute you’re sulking. And she replied, Joseph, it’s because I imagined two peoples in front of me, one weeping and mourning and the other celebrating and jumping for joy.

Halfway through the trip, Mary said to him, Joseph, help me down from the donkey. The child inside me is about to be born. And he helped her down and said to her, where will I take you to give you some privacy since this place is out in the open?

Chapter 18. He found a cave nearby and took her inside. He stationed his sons to guard her and went to look for Hebrew midwife in the country around Bethlehem. Now, I, Joseph, was walking along and yet not going anywhere. I looked up at the vault of the sky and I saw it standing still and then at the clouds and saw them paused in amazement and at the birds of the sky suspended in mid air. And I looked on the Earth and I saw a bowl lying there and workers reclining around it with their hands in the bowl. Some were chewing and yet did not chew. Some were picking up something to eat and yet did not pick it up. And some were putting food in their mouths and yet did not do so. Instead, they were all looking upward. I saw sheep being driven along and yet the sheep stood still. The shepherd was lifting his hand to strike them and yet his hand remained raised. And I observed the current of the river and saw goats with their mouths in the water and yet they were not drinking. Then all of a sudden everything and everybody went on with what they had been doing.

Chapter 19. Then I saw a woman coming down from the hill country and she asked, Where are you going, sir? I replied, I am looking for a Hebrew midwife. She inquired, Are you an Israelite? I told her yes. And she said, And who’s the one having a baby in the cave? I replied, My fiance. And she continued, She isn’t your wife? I said to her, She is Mary, who was raised in the temple of the Lord. I obtained her by lot as my wife, but she’s not really my wife. She’s pregnant by the Holy Spirit. The midwife said, Really? Joseph responded, Come and see.

And the midwife went with him. In the cave, a dark cloud overshadowed it. The midwife said, I’ve really been privileged, because today my eyes have seen a miracle in that salvation has come to Israel. Suddenly the cloud withdrew from the cave, and an intense light appeared inside the cave, so that their eyes could not bear to look. And a little later, that light receded, until an infant became visible. He took the breast of his mother, Mary. Then the midwife shouted, What a great day this is for me, because I have seen this new miracle. And the midwife left the cave, and met Salome, and said to her, Salome, Salome, let me tell you about a new marvel. A virgin has given birth, and you know that’s impossible. And Salome replied, As the Lord my God lives, unless I insert my finger and examine her, I will never believe the virgin has given birth.

Chapter 20 The midwife entered and said, Mary, position yourself for an examination. You are facing a serious test. And so Mary, when she heard these instructions, positioned herself, and Salome inserted her finger into Mary. And then Salome cried aloud and said, I’ll be damned, because of my transgression and my disbelief, I have put the living God on trial. Look, my hand is disappearing, it’s been consumed by flames. Then Salome fell on her knees in the presence of the Lord with these words, God of my ancestors, remember me because I am a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Do not make an example of me for the people of Israel, but give me a place among the poor again. You yourself know, Lord, that I’ve been healing people in your name and have been receiving my payment from you.

And suddenly a messenger of the Lord appeared, saying to her, Salome, Salome, the Lord of all has heard your prayer. Hold out your hand to the child and pick him up, and then you will have salvation and joy. Salome approached the child and picked him up with these words, I’ll worship him because he’s been born to be king of Israel. And Salome was instantly healed and left the cave vindicated. Then a voice said abruptly, Salome, Salome, don’t report the marvels you’ve seen until the child goes to Jerusalem.

Joseph was about ready to depart for Judea, but a great uproar was about to take place in Bethlehem in Judea. It all started when astrologers came inquiring, where is the newborn king of the Judeans? We are here because we saw his star in the east and have come to pay him homage. When Herod heard about their visit, he was terrified and sent agents to the astrologers. He also sent for the high priests and questioned them in his palace. What has been written about the anointed? Where is he supposed to be born? They said to him, in Bethlehem, Judea, that’s what the scriptures say. And he dismissed them.

Then he questioned the astrologers, what sign have you seen regarding the one who has been born king? And the astrologers said, we saw a star of exceptional brilliance in the sky, and it so dimmed the other stars that they disappeared. Consequently, we know that a king was born for Israel, and we have come to pay him homage. Herod instructed them, go and begin your search, and if you find him, report back to me, so I can also go and pay him homage. The astrologers departed. And there it was, the star they had seen in the east, led them on until they came to the cave.

Then the star stopped directly above the head of the child. After the astrologers saw him with his mother Mary, they took gifts out of their pouches, gold, pure incense, and myrrh. Since they had been advised by the heavenly messenger not to go into Judea, they returned to their country by another route.

Chapter 22 When Herod realized that he had been duped by the astrologers, he flew into a rage and dispatched his executioners with instructions to kill all the infants, two years old and younger. When Mary heard that the infants were being killed, she was frightened, and took her child, wrapped him in strips of cloth, and put him in a feeding trough used by cattle. As for Elizabeth, when she heard that they were looking for John, she took him and went up into the hill country. She kept searching for a place to hide him, but there was none to be had. Then she groaned and said out loud, Mountain of God, please take in a mother with her child. You see, Elizabeth was unable to keep on climbing because her nerve failed her. But suddenly the mountain was split open and let them in. This mountain allowed the light to shine through to her, since a messenger of the Lord was with them for protection.

Okay, there are more chapters that follow, and if you are interested in this, I encourage you to pick up a copy of the Infancy Gospel of James and read the entire book. But since we’re focusing on Christmas right now and the birth of Jesus, I think these are the chapters that relate to that. God bless you, Happy New Year, and Onward and Upward!

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Matthew 6:19

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Lately, people have been asking me to translate Bible verses—to give my Gnostic Gospel version of familiar Bible verses. And, boy, I would love to do that. I mean, I could read for you the entire New Testament from end to end and translate it into the Gnostic Gospel, and perhaps that would be a good book project to do.

I have hesitated doing such a thing here on Gnostic Insights because I don’t want people to misunderstand and think that this is just another Christian radio program. There are particular differences between the Gnostic Gospel and conventional Christianity, yet there is more in common with Christianity when you read it with an open heart and an open mind. So this morning I’ll look at some very famous Bible verses out of the book of Matthew, and this is when Jesus was preaching to the multitude. This is out of a long speech by Jesus.

By the way, I really have been enjoying that television series called The Chosen. If you’ve never seen The Chosen, they have their own app. You can download it, for example, on Roku, the Chosen app, and then you can watch all of the episodes. You can catch episodes here and there on various platforms. They’re all really good, and it is yet another depiction of the life of Jesus and the disciples. But this television series, which has four seasons so far, and I think they’re going to go to five seasons, they have a lot of backstory and a lot of historical settings and things that aren’t particularly quoted out of the Bible, yet they are true. And like any screenplay that has been adapted from a book, the narrative isn’t exactly the same as the books. Sometimes characters are deepened or collapsed with other characters in order to carry the story forward, and that is the spirit by which The Chosen has been written, which brings criticism from some evangelical Christians. They don’t like the fact that The Chosen “makes up stuff.” But I feel that that is actually immaterial, because the important part carries on. The important truth of the Scripture is in there and brought to life in such a way that you can relate to it, or you can watch it like a television show or a movie. It’s a very gripping story. So I recommend that you look up The Chosen. You might enjoy it.

Now let’s look at some Bible verses out of the book of Matthew, and as I like to do, I am using the translation by David Bentley Hart, which is what he calls a pitilessly accurate translation. He doesn’t change the translation of the New Testament the way so many versions of the Bible do. So let’s look at this. This is out of chapter 6, verse 19.

Do not store up treasures for yourself on the earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves penetrate by digging and stealing. Rather, store up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves neither penetrate by digging nor steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be.

Now this verse contrasts materialism and spirituality on a practical level. We live in a very affluent age, particularly if you’re living in one of the western countries. We have, for the last 100, 200 years at least, been living very high on the hog, as if we’re all kings and queens. And we have treasures. We have to have this, and we have to have that. We see things advertised, and we immediately have to get it. We photograph those QR codes off the screen, and bingo, a week later we have the product.

And people who don’t know God, people who are cut off from their spiritual aspect, which we here at Gnostic Insights call your Self, that’s the part of us that we all share in common. That is the Fullness of God that dwells within us, the Self. But we all also have an ego, and it’s our ego that’s particular to us—that’s our name and address and all of the memes we cling to that give us meaning in our life. And when we soak up advertising or soak up social media and become envious of what we think other people have or what other people are enjoying, and then we want it for ourselves, that’s egoic. That’s your ego taking care of your personal needs. But the ego overreaches. We don’t need all the things we think we need or want.

So here we are living in our homes or our apartments, surrounded by all of this material wealth, by all these doodads and gadgets—buy this equipment and that clothing and this kind of makeup and that kind of food. We’re just surrounding ourselves with things that we have taken in because other people told us we need to. That’s the purpose of advertising, to build up desire in you, to build up a need and a desire so that you will eventually take it in. And that’s how people make money.

That isn’t the way to acquire things. That is a wrong path. And the reason it’s the wrong path is because material objects can never fill the aching and the need that’s in the human heart. We are hardwired to seek the transcendent. People who do not realize this, who have not remembered any of their gnosis at this point, they think it’s all made up. They think it’s all fairy tales. So many times I’ve heard people tell me, oh, that’s just a fairy tale. That’s just what you think. You can’t prove that it’s true.

Well, the thing is, all of us who have begun to walk through the path of gnosis to find the truth of the ethereal, we all are treading that same path. And that’s another famous Bible quote:

The way is wide that leads to destruction, but the path to God is narrow.

Now, that one’s often interpreted to mean that there’s only one way to God, one way, and that one way, the Christians say, is Jesus Christ.

The Gnostic gospel also believes there’s only one path, one way, but that path is gnosis. And Jesus points the way to the gnosis, and eventually we will all accept the redemption of the Christ, because you can’t make it all the way back to the ethereal plane carrying around these bundles of memes that we’ve acquired here on Earth. These attachments, these material possessions, they weigh us down like Marley’s chains in The Christmas Carol by Dickens.

There is only one way to the ethereal plane, and all of us who are on that Gnostic path, we find ourselves having the same experiences. We do share visions. We do have the same expectation of heaven. We begin to remember the place that we came from, because according to the Gnostic gospel, and it is my contention, that the reason we all have a foretaste—and when I say all, I mean all cultures—everyone around the Earth has a foretaste, an expectation of what we call heaven or paradise. Now, how could we all be sharing that same expectation? It’s because that’s where we come from. We are the children of the Aeons in the pleroma of the Fullness of God, also known as paradise.

When you see the Fullness of God in the New Testament, it’s the pleroma of God, which is everything that’s possible. It’s not just that God’s a big, great guy, and he’s so huge and ungraspable—the fullness. That isn’t what fullness means. Fullness is differentiations of the Source. The Fullness is every variable that can possibly be that was ever imagined by that great, illimitable Source, by the Father, broken out into its distinctive parts. And those parts are the aeons, and the parts with the personalities are what we typically call angels. So we all have this foretaste of heaven because we came from heaven.

We have earthly parents, but we also have what we could call heavenly parents, because we are the children of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And they sent us down here into this material world in order to help redeem the world, in order to remind the world of paradise, particularly to remind the Demiurge of paradise, because it’s the Demiurge, the forgetful god of the Gnostics, the creator of this heaven and earth. By heaven, I mean the sky, I mean the stars. Everything that is within the envelope or the boundary of the cosmos was created by the Demiurge. And the Demiurge doesn’t remember where he came from or where it came from. And the idea was that the Fullness sent down and populated this otherwise dead cosmos, because the Demiurge only produces material, it can’t produce life because it doesn’t remember what the life is.

All of the life, all of the light, all of the consciousness, all of the love comes down that narrow path into this material world from above. So that’s what it means by “the way is wide that leads to destruction.” That’s if you’re standing here looking around you from left to right, and through history of this material world—that’s all death and destruction because the life doesn’t come from the bottom up. Consciousness doesn’t bubble up out of the mud. It flows down from above, and we carry it into this material universe with ourselves when we’re born. So the tragedy, of course, is that given a few years here on earth, we forget that we are the emissaries of the Fullness of God, and we think that we are mud creatures rising up out of the material world.

So we forget our mission, which was to bring consciousness, and love, and redemption to the Demiurge. We’re here to remind him of life, and love, and the Father, and the Source, and the Aeons above. We get all bogged down by these material possessions, by these treasures we store up for us on earth, and we think the meaning is in the treasure. We think, oh, I’ll only be happy if I just get a Bowflex. Oh, I’ll be so happy if I wear this particular color lipstick. Oh, look at my selfie. Look at my selfie. Oh, aren’t I cute? Aren’t I neat? That’s wrongheaded. That will not bring happiness. That’s a delusion. Happiness can’t come from the material because the material is void. The material is empty.

The material cannot generate consciousness. This is why I doubt that artificial intelligence will actually rise to personhood. It’s going to be a very complicated and rich material object, but it can’t have true consciousness. It can only have, let’s say, egoic consciousness because it’s stuck on the material plane. It rose from the material plane. It’s put together with silicon, and metal, and objects mined from the earth, and information gathered from our informational output on the internet. That’s all lateral. That’s all down. It’s not from above. But consciousness, the true consciousness that predates this universe, comes from above, and it comes through living things.

So, returning to this verse 19 of the sixth chapter of Matthew,

Do not store up treasures for yourself on earth where moth and rust destroy.

In other words, they’re impermanent. They will pass away.

You might have a house fire. You might be robbed. There might be a flood that washes away everything you own. Does all your hope and happiness wash away with it? Well, it does if you consider those to be the purpose of your life. But if you store up treasure in heaven, it says in verse 20,

rather store up for yourself treasure in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves neither penetrate by digging nor steal.

Of course, remember these verses were written about 2,000 years ago. So, when it talks about moth or rust, obviously, that doesn’t have to be literally brought forward. If you were a nomad living in a tent, you’re worried about moths getting to your wool. If you have metallic objects for tools, you worry about rust. Now we worry about things like identity theft, and how about that electromagnetic pulse that’s going to wipe out all electrical appliances and all of the satellites? These are the kind of things we worry about in the modern age. They are equivalent to moth and rust, and

where thieves neither penetrate by digging nor steal.

So, I guess they used to dig under the city walls, or a lot of homes were fortified, and so the way you breach it is you dig under it. Of course, there’s still a lot of tunneling going on in war zones, or between nations, in order to smuggle people and contraband across borders. It says,

for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

So, if you have all of your hope and trust in these objects that you’ve acquired, then there’s no peace in that.

You know, the richer a person is, the more they worry about losing their money. Have you ever done this thought experiment? How much money would you need to have in order to feel safe and wealthy? Would it be a million dollars? Would it be a billion dollars? Would it be $10,000? Maybe only $5,000. What do you need to feel safe? Well, you can’t ever feel safe because no matter what amount of money you select, if you ever reach that goal, if you become a millionaire or a billionaire, well, now you need more. The goalpost is always moving to more, more, more. That’s one of the attributes of this material world—aggregations. Things become larger and larger and larger, and you think the more, more, more you have, the bigger your house, the better you’ll feel.

I live in a rather wealthy little village in Oregon. A lot of well-off retirees live here, and these are people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and they’ve worked their way up with their money and their savings and their investments, and they have these big, beautiful homes. You know, these big mansions. You’ve got one person or two people living in a huge mansion. I’ll bet you they’re not safe. They’re not happy. They’re rattling around in there. They’re lonely.

The only way to find happiness and peace is to lay up your treasures in heaven. Verse 21 says,

For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be.

So, rather than looking outward, look upward. This is why I always say, onward and upward. We go forward. We don’t think about the past. We don’t mourn over the mistakes. We don’t hold on to grief and anger. Let the past go. Let it go. Ah, that feels good. Onward, that’s forward, and upward. Look to the heavens. Look to the Fullness of God. Look to your Aeonic parents. Look to Jesus. Look to the Christ. Look to the Source. Look to the Father. Those are the true treasures.

And, you know, this life here on Earth, it’s very brief. The time we spend here on Earth is almost meaningless, it’s that brief. I read a very interesting essay this week that my brother shared with me out of the website called Aeon. The essay was about a set of letters that the famous philosopher, logician, mathematician named Kurt Gödel wrote back and forth to his mother as she was elderly and nearing her death. And she asked him about paradise, and she asked him if he really believed in heaven. And this is a very learned man. In fact, this is, well, one of the smartest guys that’s ever walked on the Earth. Gödel was a contemporary and a peer of Albert Einstein, and they worked together at Princeton. Einstein actually looked up to Gödel, so that tells you what a big thinker he was.

And I only mention that because I think it is important to know who your sources are that you’re trusting. You know, when we trust people that are trying to sell us things, who are these people, and what are their credentials to be telling you anything? Or the talking heads on television, the pundits and the people who tell us what to think about things. Well, who the heck are they? Why do you trust them? So I look to big thinkers of the past.

Gödel was one of the big thinkers, one of the geniuses. And this is what he had to say about heaven. In a letter in 1961 to his mother, he said,

If the world is rationally organized and has meaning, then it must be the case. [he’s talking about an afterlife]. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being, the human being, with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationship to others, only then to let him achieve not even one one-thousandth of it?

So why does Gödel think it’s a rational world? Well, it is rationally organized. You know, the laws of physics have to hold true or we wouldn’t have a universe. It would all fly apart. The laws of chemistry hold true. And by the way, they are rationally organized through the hand of the Demiurge, because the Demiurge had the blueprints. When Logos fell out of the Fullness and broke apart here, creating this material world, he left behind what we call the Demiurge, part of himself. That was the ego. And it’s the ego of Logos that stays down here to build the cosmos. And of course, it’s based upon logic and reason, cause and effect, laws, because, well, practically, we can see by hindsight, if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here.

But in the Gnostic sense, it was Logos who fell. Logos—logic, rationality, reason. That’s part of the nature of the source. That was the Aeon who had all of the attributes of all the other Aeons and the wherewithal to put them all together into a package. And he thought that he alone could build a material paradise. He was going to make it a gift to the Father. So he took all of that knowledge and he launched himself out of the Fullness without being invited, let’s say. And instead of going up, he went down. And hence comes the material cosmos out of that.

There’s more to that creation story. You can go back to the Gnostic Insights early primer, I call it. If you go to gnosticinsights.com, there’s a tab that’s the basic primer of the Gnostic Gospel. Start with the Father and work your way through. That’ll give you the entire cosmology and cosmogony of the Gnostic Gospel. It is a logical, rationally organized cosmos because it came out of the body of Logos.

And so this brilliant mathematician and logician, Kurt Gödel, says, well, the world is rationally organized and it has meaning. Then there has to be an afterlife because why should we have all these capabilities and then never live long enough to develop it? In the fourth letter to his mother, he says,

What I name a theological Weltanschauung [worldview]is the view that the world and everything in it has meaning and reason, and indeed a good and indubitable meaning. From this it follows immediately that our earthly existence, since it as such has at most a very doubtful meaning, can be a means to an end for another existence.

He says in another letter to his mother,

Does one have a reason to assume that the world is rationally organized? I think so, for it is absolutely not chaotic and arbitrary. Rather, as natural science demonstrates, there reigns in everything the greatest regularity and order. Order is indeed a form of rationality.

Okay, that’s what we were saying. So good, Gödel agrees with me. Here, I’ll read you a paragraph out of the Aeon article itself, and you can go to GnosticInsights.com to read the transcript. I’ll have links to the full article if you’d like to read it.

How does this connect with Gödel’s view that the world is rational and the soul survives death? The incompleteness theorems and their philosophical implications do not in any way prove or show that the soul survives death directly. However, Gödel thought the theorem’s results dealt a heavy blow to the materialistic worldview. If the mind is irreducible to the physical parts of the brain, and the mathematics reveals a rationally accessible structure beyond physical phenomena, then an alternative worldview should be sought that is more rationalistic and open to truths that cannot be tested by the senses. Such a perspective could endorse a rationally organized world and be open to the possibility of life after death.

And I’m reading all of this to you out of an article by Alexander T. Englert, who is a research associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, which is where Einstein and Gödel also worked. And the name of the article is We’ll Meet Again.

So there you go. We started with the New Testament, we worked our way through some of the Gnostic Gospel, and we wound up with a big brain philosopher mathematician, and we all seem to agree.

Detach yourself from the materialistic world. At least, it’s okay to have the things that you have but don’t make them your treasures. Don’t put your heart and soul into them. Don’t think that buying things and showing them off will bring you happiness or peace, because it won’t. It simply can’t. And I think you know this. You don’t need me to tell you that. And having more and more just makes you more and more fearful of losing it. So that doesn’t work either. “Lay up rather treasures in heaven where neither moths nor rust doth corrupt,” as it said in the King James Version.

Hey, if you are getting something out of these Gnostic gospel messages, please consider donating. You know, I really hate asking for money. I loathe it. However, if we’re going to get this Gnostic Reformation off the ground, the money that you donate will go into that. It will go into promotion, because we want to get this word out to more and more people. People are lonely. People are hurting. People are afraid. People don’t remember God. People don’t remember Gnosis. People are running down the wrong rabbit holes. Let’s bring them some truth, and some hope, and some life. Let’s point the way to the source.

You can be a part of that, a very important part. Thank you very much.

Happy New Year. God bless us all, and onward and upward.

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This post was very popular last year, so I’m repeating it for all of us. Merry Christmas!

Today, we’re going to look at the nature of the Christ—the who, what, why of Christ. Most people are familiar with seeing the baby Jesus in the manger and that’s what we celebrate at Christmas time, the birth of the Christ on Earth in the form of a human. But the Christ is an ethereal creature that predates the birth of Jesus. Jesus and the Christ aren’t exactly the same, although Jesus was fully Christ. The Christ predates the birth of the human known as Jesus. So, let’s learn more about the Christ and why the Christ figure is so essential to us Second Order Powers. 

Gnosticism is the forerunner of the modern Christian faith. As such, a better understanding of the figure of the Christ is essential to understanding both Gnosticism and Christianity. The cosmology that I talk about here on the podcast was well known to Jesus and his original followers, but it was cut out of Christianity about 1700 years ago by the Nicene Council, at the urging of the Pope and the Roman Emperor. Because this theology was subtracted from orthodox Christianity, many of the ideas of gnostic cosmology sound odd and unfamiliar to modern churchgoers. Some of the ideas may even sound heretical at first glance due to their unfamiliarity. Yet the theology contained in these early scriptures makes sense of so many puzzling aspects of Christian faith that they must be reexamined. I’m confident that once you understand gnostic Christianity, you will better understand your relationship with God.

According to gnostic cosmology as laid out in the Nag Hammadi, we humans and all other forms of life on Earth, from bacteria and eukaryotes on up, are the fruit of the Pleroma and Logos. We Second Order Powers find ourselves locked in a never-ending battle for dominion over the Earth with forces that were generated as a result of the Fall. Due to the law of mutual combat, we have forgotten our origin in the Fullness and our mission to bring love and harmony to creation and have instead taken on many of the characteristics of the shadows of the Deficiency.

The Second Order Powers are locked in a never-ending war with the Deficiency. Here below, we constantly battle the physical forces of death and entropy, as well as the spiritual forces of vice, sin, delusion and despair. In order to restore memory and reason 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 this 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, and 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. Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was both perfect man and perfect God incarnate. Christian Gnostics believed the same.

Here is a more complete explanation of who Jesus was. It’s said that Jesus was conceived without sin because he carried within his body the perfection of man and God. This would mean that Jesus was perfect and true to the original DNA formula for humanity. Hence the importance of the virgin birth that then imparted that perfect DNA to the baby. Jesus was also without negative karma attached to his soul, as his soul was the soul of God. The components of Jesus’s body were also without sin, as the cells and flesh that became Jesus were in fact the Aeons of the Fullness incarnate.

As Colossians 1:19 says, “For God was pleased to have all his Fullness dwell in him and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on Earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.” This one sentence from Colossians contains the entire Christian Gnostic Gospel. Because Jesus brought along the entire Fullness of the Pleroma when he incarnated, every aspect of the Father and Son came to material instantiation on Earth. In this manner, the eternal God experienced the finite life of us Second Order Powers and all of the struggle between birth and death that plague us all.

Here is how the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures describes this process:

“As for those of the shadow, Logos separated himself from them in every way, since they fight against him and are not at all humble before him. The stumbling which happened to the Aeons of the Father 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 Fullnesses so that they might be instructed about the Deficiency by the single One, from whom alone they all received strength to eliminate the defects. 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 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 to 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 have previously said, since he is the knowledge of the Father whom he wanted them to know? Not only did the Aeons generate the countenance of the Father to whom they gave praise, but also they generated their own, for the Aeons who give glory, generated their countenance and their face. They 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.” (That is from the Tripartite Tractate sections 85 through 87.)

So you see, the mission of the Christ, as stated in Colossians, was to redeem all of creation, including the fallen Aeon who had founded our material universe. Because the Christ came to redeem everyone, the body of Jesus came to Earth with every one of the Fullnesses on board. For every fallen spirit, the Christ brought forth their own personal and recognizable Savior. Redemption has already taken place. It is up to the Second Order Powers and the one who fell to recognize and accept that redemption in order to complete the mission of the Christ.

In Simple Explanation terms, the Christ brought the correcting formula for all of our spirits and souls, each unique and personally formulated to meet our individual needs. The baptism of the Christ washes away the mental and spiritual confusion brought on by the endless war with shadows of the Fall.

Gnostics are apocalyptic, as are Christians. Gnostics believe that some day every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus, the Christ, is Lord. Repentance and redemption comes harder for some than for others. Some souls take more time to recognize and remember. Ultimately, though, there comes a day of reckoning, for the Father will not be denied forever. There will soon come a day when the Deficiency ends. On that day, a new economy will unite Heaven and Earth, and all souls will find their joyful place in Paradise. The only forms banished to the outer darkness will be the shadows and phantoms of the Fall, which did not exist within the Father’s consciousness from the beginning. These shadows are not real and they will have no home with us in Paradise.

Now here’s a gnostic perspective of Jesus on the cross. One of the central themes of the Christian faith is the death of Jesus on the cross. Christians the world over focus on the body of Jesus hanging on the cross, and I’ve often wondered, why this fixation of Jesus on the cross? Why is the crucifix the focal point of every church and altar? Why do people wear the cross as jewelry or hang a crucifix in their bedroom? The obvious answer Christians give is that without the cross, Jesus could not have saved humanity from sin, for he bore our sins into the grave with his death and they were washed away with his resurrection from the dead. Praise be to God, but why the cross? If Jesus had been stoned to death or drowned or beaten or thrown from a high tower, would we still feel such affinity for the stone, a lake, a club or a roof? I don’t think so. I think there is something very special about the shape of the cross itself.

I ask this question because Jesus never said, I’m soon to pass on from this world, and I want you to focus on my body hanging on the cross as I take on the sins of the world. And yet, that’s what people do, as if that were the entire point of the Gospel. As far as I can tell, Jesus did not ask for his death and resurrection to be the focal point of worship. What Jesus actually said was: “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30), and, “Whoever welcomes me welcomes the Father that sent me” (Luke 9:48).

In other words, Jesus acknowledged himself in reference to his Father and he deflected glory to his Father. Yet Jesus is worshipped by modern Christians to the extent that the Father almost goes unmentioned. Thank goodness for the Lord’s prayer, which is directed to the Father and not to the Son. Jesus taught it to be said to the Father; he did not teach it to be recited to himself. No slight to the Son, of course, we’re merely emphasizing the importance of the Father.

During the last supper, Jesus instructed his followers to think of his broken body as they break and eat bread and to consider his blood as the fulfillment of a contract with humanity as they drink wine. This is what Jesus left the church as instruction regarding his death. He did not instruct them to erect images of crosses and to worship him hanging on a cross, as if he were stuck up there forever. Yes, Protestants have allowed Jesus to come down off the cross and therefore their crosses are unoccupied to remind us that Jesus resurrected, but still the focus is on the cross. Again—why the cross in particular?

Here is the symbolism of the cross as I understand it. We who dwell on Earth are engaged in endless warfare with the Imitation that always seeks to lure us away from our Father in Heaven. Oftentimes we don’t even realize we’re engaged in warfare with the Imitation, because it can appear disguised as goodness. This is what is meant by the Devil being a liar. We Second Order of Powers are engaged in this endless warfare and, although we come from a good disposition of the Father and the Fullness, we have forgotten our heavenly nature and become deluded because of rage and other passions and addictions.

The Christ came to Earth in the form of a Son of Man to bring the Third Order of Powers to Earth as the solution to overcoming the phantoms of the Imitation that have mired the Second Order Powers in error and ignorance. Those who have eyes to see the Christ are able to remember their Father in Heaven. Those who remember their Father in Heaven and repent from the Imitation are redeemed. Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of the promise to redeem the fallen. Jesus as the Son of God and the Son of Man brought salvation to the Deficiency and restored it to the Kingdom of Heaven.

The reason the cross looks as it does and occupies such a central role in worship is that the cross represents human beings. The Cross is shaped like a human, a Son of Man. It is no accident that Jesus was crucified on a cross because Jesus is a Son of Man, the Son of Man. If, hypothetically, humans looked like dogs, then the Son of Man would have come in the form of a dog, and the cross would look like that, too. But as it is, it is shaped as we are. The Cross should remind us that humankind has been redeemed by the body and blood of Christ in an even more profound way than acknowledging the indignity and suffering of Christ on the cross. It should remind us that the Son of God—the Christ—bridged with the form of his human body spirit-to-matter, which is top-to-bottom, and neighbor-to-neighbor, which is side-to-side.

In the Gnostic Gospel, redemption comes to all of creation through the incarnation of the Son of God into the body of the Son of Man. The manner of the Savior’s birth, death, and resurrection will come to every soul as they realize their Father is in Heaven and to Heaven they will return. For, as it says, “every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:10). It just takes time. We aren’t there yet because of the common delusion of presumptuous thought, which causes people to behave selfishly.

Ego must first make way for the love of Christ to take over the throne of the Self. Only then may you rise above the egoic imitation, for then you will have a champion and a king. The very public way that Jesus was crucified and the very public way that he resurrected gives us all hope of the same: Jesus demonstrates proof of resurrection and his life, death, and resurrection is about all of us, not only about the Christ. Jesus is the exemplar of our resurrection.

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. All redemption comes to the Father through the Christ, and that is in Christ’s hands. What accepting the Christ now does for you is open 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.

I hope that this information is helpful to you and will help you remember. Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

Merry Christmas!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights.

Last week, we had part one of Correspondence with an Educated Atheist, and after posting that, I received an email from my correspondent, and it was very interesting because it turns out that all this time I thought I was corresponding with a female because this person’s name is one of those gender-neutral names, like my own name, Cyd. I was often miscategorized as a male coming into a new classroom or, like, going to summer camp I was put on the boy’s side and so forth because my name was unusual back in the 1950s. So this person has this sort of name that could be taken either as male or female, and I just assumed it was a female. That’s a funny thing to me. 

Now, flip that whole conversation from last week, and every time I said she, please insert the word he, and now I’m re-recording part two so I can correctly identify my correspondent. He was very gracious about the misunderstanding, of course. Very, very nice person. 

He had asked, “Is it possible that the truth of creation might be something difficult or even something unpalatable?”

And I answer, well, that’s what a lot of people are saying, isn’t it? I think it is a message meant to dishearten us, meant to depress us. I notice that the people who believe that are not happy campers. In the end, it doesn’t matter what memes we cling to here on this material plane. All will be revealed when we pass over to the other side.

He asks, “Is it too much to ask for some sort of indication or revelation or glimpse of the existence of the Fullness? What actions would you suggest should be the next step?”

And I say, it’s not too much to ask. It’s what prayer is all about. If you have never prayed to the higher power, you simply find a quiet spot or maybe in the middle of the night when you’re lying in bed awake and you just ask the Source to reveal itself to you. “Ask and you will find. Knock and the door will open.” [Matthew 7:7] You can ask for revelation. You can ask for an unmistakable sign.

When I was a young believer, I would ask for things expecting them to happen, and they did. Once as a teenager, I was hitchhiking up the California coast. I had no fear for myself because I was and still am an innocent, and I believe that Jesus walked everywhere with me and that he would protect me from all harm. One night I camped with strange men, but I preached to them and no harm came to me. In the morning, we were all hitchhiking together for the first ride of the day, and I prayed out loud for a red pickup truck to come and pick us all up. About a minute later, a red pickup truck came and picked us all up. It was quite a testimony to those men, like a real miracle.

I realize that Christianity has gotten a bad rap lately in the progressive and atheist circles, but remember that the institution is not the Source. The map is not the territory. You can pray to Jesus or to the Father or to the Source or to the Fullness of God. They are all listening. If you pray for revelation with an open heart, your heart will be filled and you will know. Millions of people throughout the years have done just that and have come out the other side walking with God, walking with Jesus. This has nothing to do with salvation or church doctrine. This is going to the Source. I love you. I’m proud of you for opening up and exploring these spiritual depths—onward and upward.

In our most recent correspondence, he says,

Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions in some detail. I will take a while to read and reread your answers. I have found the Simple Explanation book on Audible, so I am going to download it and listen in the car as a starting point. Gnosticism is complex, he says, yet also appealing. There are a few things that don’t seem necessary, like a complex celestial hierarchy with different Aeons and their pre-assigned roles, rather like cogs in a great machine.

As someone who has spent a lot of time with historical texts, this name and place function in a heavenly order feels like the product of an ancient worldview. As we know, the establishment church and the kings loved order and it was stressed for their own reasons. However, just as modern humans are all about individuality, at times overly, ancient societies were obsessed with kingship and order.

So just as it is a feature of New Age religions that it’s all about individual Self-expression, does it follow that the writer of the Tripartite Tractate was reflecting the perception of a rigid order and hierarchy in heaven? This business of a complex organizational structure in heaven with angels, archangels and the rest of it kind of feels like the product of a human imagination. Is that a fair point?

He goes on to say, however, putting that aside, all of the key questions that have made me rule out religions in the past, the cruel concept of original sin in Christianity and likewise karmic punishing people for past life mistakes in Hinduism, Buddhism are thankfully missing in your version of Gnosticism, which is a huge positive. It’s elegant to universal salvation, having a fall that explains suffering, but not a fall by humans.

To my skeptical agnostic ears, key aspects of your Gnostic reformation have the ring of truth. The fractal stuff is fascinating, too. I don’t come from a science background, so I’ll probably take your word on that.

So here’s a question that may put my mind at rest. Given that my spider senses are tingling, telling me some of the concepts in the Tripartite Tractate sound a bit historically located and hence man-made, would it be fair to say that the words of the Tripartite Tractate are a version of the universal truth, recorded by a fallible human hand, with possibly a few simplifications and misinterpretations? Or do you believe that every word in the book is divine and immutable? No need to answer in a hurry. Don’t let me distract you, but I’d be intrigued to find out at some point.

Okay, so here’s my latest answer. The hierarchy isn’t about power, haves and have-nots. It’s about jobs that need to be done and the relationships among neighbors. Think of the Aeons as cells in your body or cells in a slime mold. Every function and every job is necessary and equally important. The brain is no more important than your skin, etc. However, the king of your body is your self-aware identity. You need to be in control of your body or else some other organ will attempt to take charge. It is the natural order of things. When people don’t pay attention to their body parts, the body parts take control, and the next thing you know, you’re addicted to something or another.

And I didn’t put this in my email because I was in a hurry, but then I was thinking afterward of the best answer to the hierarchy question. Remember, the Aeons self-sorted themselves into this hierarchy. They were not placed there. They were not made subordinate to others or above others by some higher ruling power. They self-sorted. It makes a point of saying that in the Tripartite Tractate. And what they sorted themselves into were functions. Their place, their function, their duties, their neighbors, their names for themselves. They gave themselves their names. And the reason it’s hierarchical is because the higher the fewer.

The higher the fewer is a basic Gnostic precept. And the reason is this. In my concept of how things go together and of how the Fullness of God works and how our bodies work, it’s part of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The most basic parts of the material universe are the subatomic particles and the particles. And they level up to make atoms. And the atoms hold hands with one another and they level up to make molecules. And the molecules hold hands with one another and they level up to make elements. Now, think it through. There’s more atoms than there are molecules. There’s more molecules than there are elements. And so every time you go up a level, there’s fewer. So it’s naturally building the higher the fewer.

So if you think of your family and, say for example that you’ve got four brothers and sisters and a mom and dad—a nice big family. Well, there’s six of you, right? But you hold hands, cooperate with one another according to the Simple Golden Rule, and what do you make? You make one family. So there were six and now it’s leveled up to one. So the higher—that is the family—the fewer. And that is why a hierarchy looks like a hierarchy. It’s not a matter of thinking that the ones lower down are less important or not worthy. It’s that they are the basic foundations that make everything else possible.

As a side note, the Demiurge is in charge of that material level, the subatomic particles up through the elements and the mineral aggregations. And then the life comes down from above.

The life, love, and consciousness comes down from above during conception and creates the spark of life that then changes it from mud, mud up, that’s the material level of the Demiurge, the mud, to the spirit down. The spirit is what gives life and love and causes the molecules to be able to walk around in the form of our bodies.

Finally he asks whether or not the Tripartite Tractate is sacred gospel or immutable truth, divine and immutable.

I answered that obviously the Tripartite Tractate was written by a man who was historically contextually located. But I’ve found that the Tripartite Tractate is the best Gnostic text to explain these things. Now, I myself, Dr. Cyd Ropp, I am also historically contextually located as well. When I write The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, or A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, it is also my rewording the truth that has come to me. If once you discover the Gnosis inside of you and you feel fully comfortable and you can put all the pieces together, because I’ve been putting these pieces together my entire life, then you can also write a gospel.

And let me mention this now as an addition to our conversation, when I write my gnostic insights, I only share what seems absolutely true to me. Then I run that gnosis past my brother, Bill, in conversation to see if the logic holds up. If I am unsure of something, I don’t write it. Sometimes Bill and I ponder an insight for months before the truth of the matter becomes clear. Some things we are still pondering. The last thing I want to do is lead people astray with false teaching. Perhaps the writer of the Tripartite Tractate had a similar process. I don’t channel this information from any spirit other than being informed by the Holy Spirit, and that often comes to me whilst I am in the process of writing or walking the dog.

And the bottom line is there’s only one truth. There’s only one Father. There is only one originating consciousness. We carry that consciousness but we have forgotten the Source. We have forgotten that the most important expression of consciousness is the love of the Father. In Christian parlance, the Christ is the only infallible reminder of that Father and that Love. As long as we remain in ignorance and spiritual rebellion, we cannot access the Gnosis that we already carry within us.

And it all comes down the pike logically. It all unfolds in a way that it must. So the reason I like the Tripartite Tractate is that it’s not just mythological stories that are random; it’s a logical progression from there to here and back again.

And if my correspondent thought that the hierarchy of angels and archangels and the Fullness of God was extraneously complex, boy, don’t dip into any other of the Gnostic gospels that are out there in the Nag Hammadi or the Qumran scripts, because they’re full of extraneous information, in my opinion. You don’t have to memorize this and that. You don’t have to know these arcane relationships between gods and goddesses. You don’t need access to esoteric rituals or incantations. All I have ever wondered is how do we get from the Source, the spirit? We know that we’re down here standing in the dirt, literally. How does that ambulate this body of mine? And how is it that my body is conscious with consciousness that had to have come from the Source?

He asked me whether or not the Tripartite Tractate, or the Bible, or the Koran is meant to be the infallible word of God. How might they have been handed down? He says, “I sense that the gnostic take is more about us already knowing the truth inside us rather than having to rely on an angel or a burning bush, etc. to dictate it to you.”

My gnosis tells me these things I tell you here on the podcast. I am a human with a lifelong relationship with the ethereal plane in the form of Jesus, endowed with a sure knowledge of the ethereal plane and the capability to reason. The humans who wrote the holy books are no different in kind than me or you. They, like me, are simply writing down their experience with the numinous and its manifestations. We see the world from our point of view.

Okay, finally, one more thing. I told him to read the 21st verse of the Tao Te Ching to answer the question of how do we know there’s anything like an originating consciousness? That is the verse that opens A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. Let me read it to you here, now. Listen to this. I think it’s fabulous.

This is the 21st verse of the Tao te Ching, which is ancient Chinese, and it’s not anything to do with Hebrews and Christians or even Egyptians and Phoenicians.

There are many translations of the Tao Te Ching. The original Tao Te Ching is ancient. It’s thousands of years old, and it’s written in pictograms. And you know, these pictograms aren’t words or letters. They’re open to interpretation because they are pictures. It’s like a dream—how do you interpret a house when you are in a house in your dream? What is the meaning of the house?

So what I used is Jonathan Starr’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, the definitive edition. And what Starr has done is written out his interpretations of the verses because, by the way, if you read any popular translation of the Tao Te Ching, it’s that author’s interpretation of the pictograms or that author’s interpretation of someone else’s interpretation of the pictograms. Well, what Jonathan Starr did was literally translate, in the second half of his book, each pictogram in every verse—all the possible meanings of that pictogram. And then that way, you can read one of the verses by reading all possible translations of every word and see what falls into place for you. And this translation that I’m about to read to you was my translation via those literal translations by Jonathan Starr. And I wove my way through verse 21 in the Simple Explanation manner.

If you wonder about my translation, go ahead and pick up any other popular translation and compare verse 21. I think you’ll find that the meanings are the same, but here it is in simple explanation terms:

Highest 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.

**************************************************************************

Well, I have time here at the end of this episode to add a postscript, because I did just get another correspondence this morning. Our dear Correspondent’s mother has passed away, and he found himself in church, and so he was thinking about the hymns and the readings in terms of our Gnostic Gospel.

The reading, he says, was Psalm 23, and since I did a podcast on that one and I was positive about it, he said that he doesn’t like being thought of as a sheep, that atheists are a proud lot, and even giving it the benefit of the doubt, it’s hard to fill an affinity with being a sheep. He says that it’s a farming community here, and sheep, cute though they are, are remarkably stupid creatures, according to my friend Luke, who grew up on a farm herding them.

Well, people are like sheep. In fact, during the pandemic and during the great hoaxes that were perpetrated against the people, the Americans came up with the term sheeple, not people, but sheeple, because people are like sheep, and I’m surprised that our educated atheist does not see them that way. People are very easily led and deceived, propagandized, convinced of whatever those in power want them to believe. With enough repetition, the sheep will believe that. So I don’t have a problem at all of thinking of people as sheep.

Of course, some of us are not as sheeple as others. No problem with that. There are those sheep that wander off by themselves or that are always on the outside of the herd. It’s more dangerous on the outside. You can get picked off by predators that way. It’s more dangerous to wander off because you can fall into holes and traps. But to think of us as sheep and to think of Jesus as our shepherd or “the Lord is my shepherd,” I find that very comforting.

Pride cometh before the fall, and I associate the word pride or being a proud lot as large ego, because in our one true Self, when we are in alignment with the Father or the Father’s will, we’re not being led by our pride. We’re being led by God’s will or by our shepherd. So it’s best, in my opinion, not to work from pride.

It’s okay to take pride in your work or your output. I take pride in the things I do when I do them very well, and I always attempt to do things as well as I can. I work to the best of my ability. I don’t just try to skate by. But that’s different than being proud. I am not proud in my own egoic output. I am proud at being the best Cyd that Cyd can be. And that’s a gift from God. My talents are aonic in origin, so I am thankful rather than self-satisfied. But I do like to do a good job.

He also mentioned the idea of giving glory. It really popped out in church that they were asked to give glory to God, and he was wondering, that seems like demiurgic, that it may be that the Demiurge wants people to worship and glorify him.

But would the Father or Christ ask for glorification as if it was egoic praise? He said, I’ve always been a bit baffled about the whole concept of glory. Does this business of demanding praise and glory have a whiff of the Demiurge about it? An egotistical God ready to smite us if we do not praise him? Why would any supreme being be bothered about whether I was praising him or not, he asks.

Perhaps this is being a bit unfair, he says. You’re using glory, not praise, but how does one give glory anyway? Isn’t the thing that you are meant to be giving the glory to, the all in all, already glorious enough without human contribution?

And yes, I think it is. And I cover this—we’ve had previous episodes about giving glory, and it’s in the book. Because I remember saying, God doesn’t demand glory as if he were needy and wheedling for our praise. That isn’t the point of giving glory. When the Son and the Father exchange glory, when the ALL gives glory, yes, they are reflecting the light of the Father in the original meaning of the word.

My friend here has sent me the definitions of glory, and in classical Greek, doxa often meant opinion or reputation, particularly in terms of how someone is perceived by others. And isn’t that interesting? Because they use the word doxa nowadays to expose a person in social media, right? So they’re using a classical Greek word there when they dox someone. But in biblical Greek, Hellenistic Greek, it says, by the time of the New Testament and early Christian writings, such as the Tripartite Tractate, doxa evolved to denote glory in a divine or transcendent sense, the honor, radiance, or majesty associated with God.

Now, I think of giving glory as this. Imagine that you are parents, and the mother has just given birth to the baby, and you love that baby. You love that baby with all of your heart. With all of your heart. Can you imagine staring at your newborn child and the overflowing love that you feel toward that child? That is giving glory. It’s overflowing love and admiration. It’s not fear. It’s not trembling. It’s not, oh, you are so wonderful, oh, you are so wonderful, repeated 13 or 300 times. It’s appreciating the radiance and glory of the Father, appreciating the beauty of love, reflecting the love that’s being radiated outward.

That’s what giving glory is. It’s reflecting the love that’s been radiated out in your direction, and you’re reflecting it back to the source because of love. It’s love. At least that’s how I look at it. Okay, that’s enough for today.

Say, listen, I’m really feeling an urge to get this Gnostic Reformation expanding to more people. I have been reluctant to employ social media to that end. For one thing, it’s very difficult to capture gnosis in little sound bites.

But you, having listened to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation now for weeks, months, or years, you are having this gnosis within you that you can share with other people and say, Hey, have you heard this Gnostic Insights podcast? Why don’t you tune into it? It’s very interesting. Or pick out an episode that you like very much and choose to share that one episode with one of your friends. So how about you encourage some other friends to listen to the podcast? Or if you’re on Substack, encourage other friends and family to subscribe to this Substack.

I would be happy to repay you in kind by corresponding with you, answering your questions personally and privately or publicly, as these past two episodes have been. So, let’s get this Gnostic Reformation underway. So many people are needing this. So many people who have been alienated by the Church need to come back to the love of the Father. And this is one way to do that.

p.p.s. no sooner had I recorded and written this plea yesterday, than a friend texted me requesting 15 copies of the pocket edition of The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated to share with friends. Wow! An immediate answer to prayer.

Onward and upward, and God bless us all.

• Item A - $10.00
• Item B - $25.00
• Item C - $50.00

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’ve been having some good correspondence with a relatively recent listener who actually responded to my request for an illustrator of the children’s book. She had only just come across the podcast and had no knowledge of this Gnostic Gospel approach. She and I exchanged a series of correspondences during the month of November, and she’s been asking good questions, so I thought, why not share them with everybody? The conversations began by talking about the artistic concepts for the children’s book. I sent her the text of the book and my descriptions of the characters and the scenes. And she said,

I’m not surprised your last artist had trouble. It’s quite a sophisticated and tricky project. One of the things that immediately came to mind when I saw the sample image of the Demiurge was the fact that he was coated in mud.

Now I thought your allusion of mud up, spirit down was really clever, having a typically elegant and simple style. However, because this is a kid’s book, something you can give to a clever six to eight year old, I was wondering if the mud is the right way to go visually. For children, mud can carry the connotation of being dirty, unclean, and shameful.

Whilst I guess there is an element of shameful dirty to the mud up illusion, would you say that the primary takeaway for kids is that the copy that Logos created is imperfect, not as amazing as the original, rather than being shameful, dirty, sinful? But maybe the mud is a key takeaway from the gospel and you feel you can’t take liberties with the ancient text.

So first off, I want to mention, and I didn’t mention this in my reply to her, is that the mud up, spirit down metaphor is mine. It’s not out of the Tripartite Tractate. It is only my simple way of characterizing how the molecules bind to the spirit of life. Mud up, spirit down. That predates my reading of the Gnostic Gospels. That’s out of A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. I’ve taken that metaphor and applied it to the Tripartite Tractate.

She told me she had encountered Gnostic Insights during a 6-hour drive and that it was great to experience a dive into the world of Gnosticism.

I dimly remember encountering it via my medieval history A-levels. It was a joy to hear your elegant and nuanced take on what is, let’s face it, a rather involved topic. I found it extremely insightful.

I’m one of those people, you mentioned in an episode, who is not coming at it from a Christian background. Ever since the vicar told me I’d burn in hell when I was eight, I set my head against all things Christian and was a smug materialist for most of my life. Even as recently as 2019, I was a hardcore atheist along the lines of Sam Harris, et al.

However, the pandemic and the frightening response to it from governments ripped holes in what a Gnostic might call my meme cloud. Worryingly, even superbrains like Mr. Harris seem to have lost their reason during COVID. During those dark days of compulsory jabs and masking, et al., I sensed a malevolent presence at work in the world.

I can remember thinking that if this force I sensed, ruining small businesses, turning families against each other, ramping up fear, let alone the actual disease itself, was indeed something approaching genuine evil. But by rights there should be a parallel entity working for good out there. I’m yet to experience that directly, but who knows? At the time I considered the idea that there might be two gods, one good and one bad, and wondered if anyone had thought of that since the Manicheans.

So I’ve been on a spare-time quest dipping into Buddhism, Hermeticism, and to some extent Christianity. In terms of the latter, I’ve never been able to get past the typical issues of how to explain the evil in the world, and the whole thing about the mentally ill being damned, or tiny children being damned, pets not going to heaven, and many other issues which you’ve addressed. As you rightly point out, the Old Testament God seems like a curlish type, ordering parents to sacrifice their kids to prove their faith, and sending down plagues and floods, etc., etc.

From listening to your podcasts, Gnosticism seems to have a lot of answers. I also like the way you sidestepped the delicate Sophia issue. Woke Feminism may have overshot the mark, however. Eve, Sophia, Pandora, Medea, etc., have been unfairly treated. I look forward to learning more as I go through your amazing smorgasbord of recordings.

And I wrote back and said, I was also struck hard by the pandemic fear-mongering. It seems as though society has divided itself into freethinkers who believe in personal liberty, and those who prefer to shelter under the wing of oppressive government coercion. My orientation has always been toward personal liberty, and I think this helped me to see through the lies from the get-go.

Go ahead and buy A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel if you haven’t already, or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which is extremely simple and non-theological. That way you will have all of the gnosis in your hands, and you can re-read parts of it that catch your attention. I’m so glad you stumbled across my podcast and had such a good long time to listen in.

Interesting that you do not have a Christian background. The same was the case with Ant Critchley, who interviewed me last week on his Stellify podcast. And, which, by the way, you can look up that interview on YouTube, everyone. Go to Stellify Podcast, Ant Critchley, because there’s more than one Stellify, and then type in Cyd Ropp, and you ought to be able to find my interview. My followers appear to be largely either fallen-away Catholics or Evangelicals, or non-religious people like you and Ant. Although you and Ant both had early church exposure that scared you away from the faith.

I like to explain things as simply as humanly possible, unlike scholastics who like to write in such a high-minded fashion that no one can understand them. It appears as though most of the young Turks who call themselves Gnostic are actually Hermeticists who reject the very idea of the Christ, or redemption. I think the other Gnostic podcasts have much larger followings than mine, precisely because they hold no position of redemption and salvation, whereas I’m pretty clear about it.

She wrote back and said, “Cool, I will read your book. But basically, in the kid’s version, does Logos fall and shatter and the broken part of him creates the Demiurge and our material realm, or is our dimension created separately?”

And I answer, Logos falls and breaks open. His ego is the Demiurge, and it does not remember or recognize his own higher Self, which is the Aeon Logos. Logos flees back to the Fullness and abandons his errant ego down below. Hence the god of this material universe doesn’t realize that he came from above and that he is only the ego of Logos.

It’s all fractal—as above, so below type of stuff. We are the same. We all have a higher Self patterned after the Aeons of the Fullness, and we also have our individual ego that relates to the world around us. Most people mistakenly believe they are their ego, but their ego is only a part of our consciousness. Our higher Self is a fractal of the Fullness of God, and we all share that higher Self. It is our ego that represents our individuality. The ego, the Demiurge, is all about me, me, me, totally narcissistic and consumed by power and control.

And then I explain in the next email, the way I explain ego in Gnostic terms is this, when the Aeons came to Self-realization and recognize their individualities, they sorted themselves in a hierarchy called the Fullness of God. Their identities were comprised of their ranks, stations, duties, location, and names. They weren’t assigned those things, they realized them themselves and self-sorted. Those individual identities are their egos, and they are what makes them each different from each other. Everyone has a Self that is identical to the Son, so that doesn’t distinguish one from another. It is the ego that describes everyone’s individual identities and duties.

We are fractals of the Aeons. We also have identical Selves and individual egos. Our egos are our unique personalities and talents. Our egos take care of us and our bodies and make sure our own needs are met. Our egos interact with our neighbors socially. Ego is not a bad thing, it is part of us. Ego only becomes fallen in people when they forget about their higher Self and its relation to the Fullness. It works the same for us humans as it did for the fallen ego of Logos, which operates on its own as the Demiurge. Our own human egos are called narcissistic when the ego runs the show outside of the Self and God.

A few days later, she replied, Hi Cyd, I’ve just been listening to your amazing May 5th podcast, The Nature of the Gnostic God, which was packed with enlightening ideas. In the episode, you say that the Father is called the Father, not Mother, because it has masculine impulse, expansive and not a receptive impulse.

But you later say that for this immutable first being, there is no direction, no up or down, no before or after, and presumably no in and out? Not wanting to nitpick too much here, and this is a genuine question, to be expansive, doesn’t one necessarily need to be able to go in a direction? I don’t quite have the words to express it, but isn’t this a contradiction, and is it t consistent philosophically for one to argue that the Father is called the Father because of a direction, and simultaneously assert that he is beyond all physical directions? As I have a feeling that you are painfully aware, many of us coming from the atheist camp are rather hung up on the whole Father-Son naming convention thing. You address this by arguing that it is about masculine expansiveness and female receptiveness. I found this concept intriguing, and after pondering for quite a bit, a couple of questions came up.

One, in the act of conception, the female is receptive, but during the act of giving birth, the female is expansive, the act of birth itself being an outward impulse. Thus, it may be argued that the female can be receptive during conception and expansive giving birth, whereas the Father can just be expansive without a receptive aspect. If the Mother has two aspects, but the Father has one, the Father is less than the Mother. Wouldn’t a complete female with two aspects point to a feminine first mover rather than a male one?

She goes on to ask, are the concepts of expansive and receptive in the same sense we are using them here intrinsically rooted in human anatomy? I know you are not saying that the flesh is evil, but is there a problem taking something human and imperfect sexual reproduction and using it as the basis for naming conventions? Sure, we have to use some names, but why not go with something non-gendered, like the source or the universal or something along those lines? Wouldn’t that be an easier message to communicate to modern humanity?

I reply, excellent question. Here are my thoughts. Yes, the Father could be called the Source. In my first theory of everything, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, this original force was called the metaverse. I also refer to it as the originating consciousness. In the Gnostic gospel, I call it the Father because of the religious precedent. I want the people who already know the Father to realize that this is what I am talking about. For them, metaverse or originating consciousness or the Source would carry too many New Age overtones and would cause them to reject the message too quickly.

Now, on to the directions: When the Source is sitting there, just sitting there in its unlimited potential, there is no in or out, up or down, etc., because the Source is an ocean without shores, depth, or surface. It simply is. It was not birthed. It did not come in from another place, so it does not have a mother. This is textual; take my word for it.

When the Source realized itself, it gave birth to a Son, the monad that expresses all of the Father but in a discrete package rather than the unlimitable space. So in that sense, I suppose we could call it the Mother, only that it goes against Western tradition to do so.

The source’s birth process is not like ours in that the Son remains attached to the Source. It is an extrusion. Let me add an afterthought. In my original answer to her, I said that the Son was an extrusion like a penis, but actually, I think it could actually be more properly thought of as a baby still attached by the umbilical cord. The point being, it’s an extrusion from the source and it remains attached. And as I was just taking a shower, I was looking at my belly button and I thought, well, you know, we’re all connected to our mother through this umbilicus until it is severed. And in the case of what we call the Son, it has not been severed. So she does have a point there. I don’t think I can argue that the Father is a father because it remains connected to the Son because it could be a mother remaining connected to the Son by the umbilicus. However, when Jesus referred to the Source, he called it the Father. And so I’m going along with that.

It is the Son who then goes on to produce all of the other beings of the celestial plane, they being fractals of the Son. So the Son is rightly a male character and therefore a Father to all of its fractal iterations. It is not a female character because it is the extrusion of the Source.

It then produces its fractals like a slime mold throwing off spores. Those first spores are called the Fullness of God because they altogether equal the completion of the Son. The Son wears the Fullness like a garment, and the Fullness wears the Son. They are coexistent. The Fullness of God, that is the Aeons of the Fullness, send down their spores into an otherwise lifeless universe. The spores are fractals of the Aeons sent down to bring consciousness, life and love into a barren landscape.

Mother Earth receives and nurtures the aeonic spores. All living creatures are second-order powers, children of the Aeons. We second-order powers are welded to the dead molecular universe at conception. The spark of life that occurs during conception is what animates the molecules to life from the egg and stem cells up through all living creatures. There’s a good long answer for you. I’m an old-school feminist, so I understand your reluctance to take on sexist language.

I’m straddling my teaching between two quite different target audiences, New Agers and atheists on the one hand and fallen-away Christians and Jews on the other. You may appreciate my book, A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which is not based upon Gnostic scriptures but rather science and math concepts, but still winds up in a remarkably similar location.

And, as an aside, this was not in my correspondence, but it occurs to me to explain that even in A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything which predates my reading of any of the Gnostic scriptures, the most basic direction or movement, it seems to me, is expansive versus contraction. Expansive is explosion outward; it’s Ananda-joy is how I think of it in the Yogic literature. It starts with a spark and it goes outward. That’s the direction. That’s the first direction—expansion.

Contraction is the opposite of expansion. So, in our universe, once it’s been expanded, we also have the opposing force, which is contraction. So, those are the two basic forces because I like to think, well, what can we think of as direction without having it based upon coordinates? What is the basic movement? And that, to me, must be expansion and then, after that, contraction. And that’s what sets up waveforms and quantum foam leaking in and out of existence and whatnot. So, expansion is counteracted by contraction and that carries through to us. It’s a fractal concept because when you are open and receptive, you are expansive. And when you are fearful and cringing, you are contracting. So, that’s the basic non-relativistic directions.

Now, my next letter to her was on Thanksgiving. It says, Happy Thanksgiving. In my opinion, you have wandered into the perfect theological backwater by finding Gnostic insights. There are many reasons for me to say this.

The Gnostic gospel that I’m sharing is uniquely centered around your relationship with the Source rather than my relationship with the Source. [and you notice I am now using Source instead of Father because that is her preferred language] That is because the nugget of truth here is your personal discovery and relationship with the Source, the Son, the Aeons of the Fullness. It’s an upward-to-them relationship and not outward-to-me or to some institution.

You notice it’s not even focused on you as it is focused upon the ethereal entities above. So many teachings today are ego-centered, always saying that you need to love yourself first and foremost. I don’t think that’s quite true. I think we need to love the God Above All Gods first, and then other humans and creatures as much or more than ourselves. The Father, the Source, is the fount of love. Without tapping into that Source, the love we offer ourselves and others is merely a narcissistic exercise in gratification.

Do acquire my books, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and the original A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. The first two are religious in nature. The third is mathy-sciencey, but it reaches the same conclusions. They’re all available on Amazon for next to nothing, so don’t let cost hold you back. Alternately, all of The Simple Explanation is available for reading on the old blog that’s been there for over 15 years. The URL is asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com.

A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything is a meta-philosophical approach you can apply to anything and everything. You may need to start there or you can just skip to A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. I only started writing about the Gnostic Gospel a few years ago and have only very recently applied the Simple Explanation to The Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This is unique theology, very explanatory and simple, very accessible. You can read all of those articles or listen to all of those podcasts at the Complete Episodes Library located at gnosticinsights.com. I’ve been pondering all of this for a lifetime, so it’s too large to share in an email.

That’s the only reason I recommend the books and blogs, so you can explore the topics that touch you personally. I wrote the books in such a way to make rational, linear sense of the far-flung material without all the noodling around on the blog. You can trust the books to be the simplest way to comprehend the Gnostic Gospel in a clear and methodical way.

She wrote to say, On a different note, I feel slightly uneasy about the fact that I appear to be shopping around for a bespoke theology that I can sign up to, one that has the right naming conventions and a God that isn’t spiteful and a rational explanation for both the good and the evil that is evident in the world.

I answer, Yes, this Gnostic gospel that I am presenting is the only theology I know of that meets your quest. It explains both good and evil without blaming us humans for everything. Evil is the absence of the good. Good, a.k.a. God. Evil is not a thing that exists from the beginning. In other words, evil did not emanate from the Source, but represents the inversions of the values of the Source. Vices are the inversions of the virtues. Their end is always suffering and death. Alignment with virtues of the Source brings peace.

She said, “This feels intuitively right.”

I said, Exactly. The Gnostic gospel asserts that all creatures come into this world fully loaded with gnosis, the knowledge of and relationship with the Source. That is precisely the source of your spiritual intuition. We forget it because of the never-ending war with the material cosmos and other forces at play. This gospel points the way to remembrance, and that’s all we need to know. We only need to remember that our origin is from the ethereal plane and we will return to the ethereal plane, not to be snuffed out into nothingness or to be swallowed up inside pre-existing consciousness with no self-identity, but to exist within the ethereal plane again, freed of material obfuscation and confusion. And I say that you’re fortunate to have discovered this path of the Gnostic gospel in the way that I teach it, because out there on the internet it’s 99% misguided theology that either accidentally or on purpose leads people astray. Most of the people who are seeking the Gnostic truth are being led down paths of confusion instead.

And I know that it may sound as if I’m full of myself, but I strive consciously to not work from ego, but from the one Self that comes from the Source. The simple truth of all the theology is this: We come from above and we all return to above. That’s really all you need to know. The rest of it is all superfluous. We come from the one source of truth, love, consciousness, life and virtue. That is our true nature and the only thing that can bring peace to us and to the world.

She said, ”However, it also feels suspiciously centered around me as if I’m the wearer and the theology is the garment.” To which I replied, it’s fascinating that you choose that metaphor because it’s a direct quote out of the Tripartite Tractate. “The Son wears the Totality like a garment and the Totality wears the Son like a garment.”  They are co-existent. Many steps down the path, we are part of that garment. You are sensing Gnosis. You are also expressing a fractal truth. This wearing the theology like a garment is indeed a fractal of how the Totality feels in relation to the Son.

We’re stopping here for this episode. Join us next week for the conclusion of this peek into my conversation with an educated atheist–agnostic?–on the path to gnosis.

I’m always happy to correspond with any of you. If you have any questions, ask away. Until then,

Onward and upward! And God bless us all!

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