Gnostic Insights

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The children’s book is published and out on amazon.com. It’s already sold three copies. Hopefully that’s just the beginning.

And on another matter, I’m going to run another free booksy promotion for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel on Amazon. And you can get the ebook of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel for free from August 23rd through the 26th. That way, even if I had sent you a free copy for reviews or anything like that, or if you have been given a copy of the book as a gift, you can still qualify to leave a review on Amazon for the book because it will be a verified purchase, even though you didn’t have to pay anything for it. We really need to boost those reviews, folks. So please do me a favor. Write a review or at least throw some stars my direction for the book. Okay?

What we’re going to look at today is basically Chapter Five from A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. And that chapter is called The Fall of Logos and the Rise of the Deficiency. I’m going to focus on the deficiency and what that means—why it’s called the deficiency. I’m just going to skim through Chapter Five.

We know that in this form of Gnosticism that I teach that comes directly out of the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, the Aeon we discuss is not Sophia, but rather Logos. And this is one of the big things that sets the Tripartite Tractate apart from the other books in the Nag Hammadi. The Tripartite Tractate talks about Logos. And I prefer this. Let me tell you why.

The story with Sophia and her Fall and then her illegitimate child, Yaldabaoth, and all of the things that happened to them down on the Earth—that’s a mythological type of story. On the other hand, the story of Logos, the Aeon Logos and its Fall, it’s not mythological in the same way. It’s logical. It has to do with the way that consciousness rolls out from the Source. It has to come from the original Source and then keep coming down to us as we sit here talking and listening. The Tripartite Tractate follows that course of consciousness from the Source, which is called the Father in the Tripartite Tractate, and then through the first emanation of the Father, which is called the Son in the Tripartite Tractate. And then how does it get from the Son to all of us down here? There is a mechanism for that. And that’s the mechanism we’re going to talk some about today.

You see, Logos was the final Aeon produced by the combination of all of the Aeons of the Fullness of God together, giving praise and glory to the Father and Son. And in their combined Fullness, all of them focused on a single topic, that being giving praise to the Father and Son, they gave birth to the final Aeon.

And that birth is that Logos, the final Aeon produced by the Fullness of God through their combination, contains within itself a complete pleroma that’s one level down, one fractal level down from the actual Fullness of God. Logos is a true image or representation of the Fullness of God, simply one fractal level down. So Logos looks just like the Fullness. His pleroma looks exactly like the Fullness. Everybody’s in there.

And Logos then mistook himself for the Fullness because he was complete, and he knew all of the plans, and he could dream of Paradise like nobody’s business, all by himself.

And so Logos decided to launch himself into the realm of glory to reunite with the Father. But, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos wasn’t able to give proper glory to the Father, and therefore he stumbled and fell. The Tripartite Tractate puts it this way:

The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows [and] copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 77)

… which is just another way to say that Logos took upon himself a great project, and then he found he couldn’t pull it off. And then he began to doubt himself, and that was looking into the darkness. By the way, we are fractals way down the road from Logos, so everything that we hear about going on in the Fullness or with Logos and the deficiency, it happens to all of us too.

As Logos reached for the Father, Logos stumbled and fell. Now, this is the original Fall. It’s not Eve handing Adam an apple in the Garden of Eden. It was not we humans who brought death and disaster into the cosmos. That is above our pay grade. It seems so obvious. The Fall happened way before. It happened with that Aeon Logos taking a fall. Quoting again,

His self-exaltation and his expectation of comprehending the incomprehensible became firm for him and was in him. But the sicknesses followed him when he went beyond himself, having come into being from self-doubt, namely from the fact that he did not the glories of the Father, the one whose exalted status is among things unlimited. This one did not attain him, for he did not receive him. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 77)

And that was for the protection of Logos, because it says earlier in the Tripartite Tractate that anyone approaching the glory of the Father would be annihilated. That’s the word that’s used—annihilated—because the Father is so much greater than the consciousness that would be approaching it.

When Logos reached for the illimitable, when he went for the Father, he believed in himself that he was about to produce Paradise, the Paradise that Logos, along with the rest of the Fullnesses, were singing about and dreaming of together. He had all the plans, like an architectural design for Paradise, but he couldn’t pull it off and he went beyond himself. And this overreach brought the sickness of self-doubt onto his soul. Now prior to this time, every Aeon’s core Self was in perfect harmony with its ego, and their ego’s function was to put into practice the will of the Father. But now Logos’ ego departed from that. Now self-doubt replaced the ineffable joy of the Fullness. So this division of the deeply troubled Logos was the first manifestation of ego acting outside the will of the one Self and the Fullness. We could say that the Fall was an act of ego falling away from the true Self, and you see that happens to all of us.

Now the Tripartite Tractate doesn’t call the word ego. They call it presumptuous thought, because Logos had a presumptuous thought. He presumed that he could plug back into the Father, that he could create Paradise on his own. But I am seeing that presumptuous thought as the word for ego, particularly the type of ego that has come down to us. It’s presumptuous, meaning that it goes beyond what’s right and proper.

Egoic thought places the focus of one’s thought on your own desires without regard to others. It’s always about, what am I going to do now? Presumptuous thought, it’s all about me, me, me. Whereas the Aeons of the Fullness, being in complete harmony with their ego and Self, they are not me types of creatures. The Aeons all live for one another in perfect harmony.

Verse 78 of the Tripartite Tractate says,

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

So here the ego of Logos is characterized as vain thought, and the copies produced by the Fall are not true images of the Aeons. They are imitations. They are shadows, likenesses, apparitions. They’re not products of anything. That’s a quote: not products of anything. It indicates that unlike this flow of consciousness that we’ve been talking about—from the Source, to the Son, to the Fullnesses, into Logos and the fractals or pleroma of Logos—these products of the Fall are not part of that flow of consciousness. They are outside of the will of God. These shadows were conjured up out of nothing. They’re literally shadows. It’s like when you’re standing outside and the sun is casting your shadow onto the ground. There’s you, and then there’s that dark flat shadow just lying there; it has no consciousness. It can’t do anything. All it can do is mirror in a flattened-dimensional way what you do. They don’t contain the Holy Spirit of the Father. They’re flat without depth. The Tripartite Tractate says,

Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. [So, we’re talking about Logos.] From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and which is.  (Thomassen, verse 77)

The forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and of that which is now becomes a defining characteristic of the ego’s relationship to the Self in all of us: the ego of Logos became entirely estranged from its better Self. All that remains of Logos down here below is the shell of his broken ego and an infinite number of ego-ridden dark shadows, which I depict as these blue balls rolling out in all directions. The ego, divided from its Self, has total amnesia of Logos, the Fullness, and the Father. It recognizes nothing but its own presumptuous thought—that is, its own egoic thought.

So these shadows are a product of ego run amok, of ego no longer within those bonds of love of the Self, no longer acting out of the Simple Golden Rule of love—working together, sharing information, producing something better than itself. Instead, they’re all out for themselves because the ego of Logos overreached. And so these shadows were born out of overreaching, out of putting themselves above others. And every one of them, well, I was going to say is out for themselves, but they don’t have Selfs. These shadows do not have consciousness on their own. They are part of the broken pleroma of the ego of Logos. And that ego is what we call the Demiurge in Gnosticism. The Demiurge is the ego of the fallen Aeon. It’s only ego.

And so when you think about it, think about the news, think about people you know, think about people that are only in it for themselves. They are serving their own ego, their own aggrandizement. They’re not serving their true Self, which is a reflection of the image of the Fullness of God. They’re not serving their Self or the Fullness or the Son or the Father. They’re serving only their own ego. Therefore, the things that I’m about to read to you, the characteristics of the deficiencies, of the shadows of the deficiency, of the imitations, the copies and the phantoms—think about how these words relate to your own ego when it’s out of step with the will of God.

Therefore, their end will be like their beginning. From that which did not exist, they are to return once again to that which will not be.

That’s the shadows. So the shadows don’t exist in actuality. And once the light of God is turned on in the cosmos, they will disappear. Darkness and shadows flee the light.

“Therefore, their end will be like their beginning: from that which did not exist (they are) to return once again to that which will not be,” speaking of the shadows. “It is they, however, by themselves who are greater, more powerful, and more honored than the names which are given to them, which are [their] shadows,” speaking of the Aeons. “In the manner of a reflection are they” the shadows “beautiful. For the [face] of the copy normally takes its beauty from that of which it is a copy.” (Attridge and Mueller, verses 78–79)

So these shadows and likenesses resemble the Fullnesses, but their beauty is only skin deep. Their beauty is not consciousness and love. It’s like thinking that the images on a movie screen are real and alive and conscious. They’re not. They’re flat. And they are beautiful, like the actors that played them, but they themselves have no substance. Quoting the Tripartite Tractate again,

 The Logos was a cause of those [who] came into being and he continued all the more to be at a loss and he was astonished. Instead of perfection, he saw a defect; instead of unification, he saw division; instead of stability, he [saw] disturbances; instead of [rests], tumults. Neither was it [possible] for him to make them cease from [loving] disturbance, nor was it possible for him to destroy it. He was completely powerless, once his totality and his exaltation abandoned him. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 80)

They remind me of rioters. The rioters may say they’re doing things for a just and noble cause, but when they’re acting out of hatred, and they’re hurting and killing and burning and looting, that’s not righteous. That’s not an expression of love. Quoting again,

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)

So in addition to being unable to relate to others, these small imitations of the fallen ego of Logos did not even recognize the pleroma of Logos out of which they arose, much less have any inkling of the Self that had abandoned the pleromas of the Fullness and the ALL. Quoting the Tripartite Tractate again,

The Logos, being in such unstable conditions, did not continue to bring forth anything like emanations, the things which are in the Pleroma, the glories which exist for the honor of the Father. Rather, he brought forth little weaklings, [hindered] by the illnesses by which he too was hindered. It was the likeness of the disposition which was a unity, that which was the cause of the things which do not themselves exist from the first. (Attridge and Mueller, verses 80–81)

So when the Tripartite Tractate talks about things that are a likeness, that’s when it’s talking about that flat 2-D representation that has no consciousness.

They wanted to command one another, overcoming one another [in] their vain ambition, while the glory which they possess contains a cause [of ] the system which was to be. They are likenesses of the things which are exalted. They were brought to a lust for power in each one of them, according to the greatness of the name of which each is a shadow, each one imagining that it is superior to his fellows. (Attridge and Mueller, verse 79)

Now that’s speaking on several levels. The likenesses of the imitation don’t remember Logos. They don’t know Logos. They don’t know anything, really. They live in disobedience and acts of rebellion because they don’t remember the Father or the Fullness. They don’t remember the Simple Golden Rule of cooperation and love.

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

So, remember these likenesses of the deficiency have no more self-awareness than your reflection in the mirror has. They are controlled strictly by the Demiurge, and the Demiurge does have the borrowed consciousness of the Self of Logos. So even though the Demiurge is down here in the material world and Logos is up there in the ethereal plane, it is still one entity–Logos. His Self is up above, his ego is stuck down below, and it is the ego of the Demiurge that brings order and a false Paradise to this material world. That’s why it’s called the deficiency. It’s the imitation of Paradise.

So how is your ego doing? What’s its relationship to your true Self? What is the relationship of your ego to the Fullness of God? Are you always battling? Is your ego battling yourself? Is it always trying to ignore the good suggestions that the Self has? Does it usually win those arguments? The more that you let your ego control your soul, the more difficult your life will be. The ego always promises really good things. It promises that it’s going to be a lot better if you just let it have its full reign, because you can get this, and you can get that, and you can have this, and you can have that, and you can do whatever you want, because it’s your life and you deserve it.

But it doesn’t work out that way. It’s a lie. It’s only when our ego is subordinate to our true Self, and works in harmony with your true Self. Your true Self is an actual reflection of the Fullness of God. You have the entirety of the Fullness of God inside of yourself. We all do. And that is how that we know right from wrong. That’s what your conscience is.

So next time you find yourself in an argument with your better nature versus what you really want to do, stop. Remember the Fullness. Remember the Father. Remember the Christ.

Onward and upward, and God bless us all.

I thought today what we’d look at is the entire run—the overall big picture. You can’t get a bigger picture than this of our existence and our universe. So this is the overall, overarching flow of consciousness from the Source to us and then after we pass how it all rolls up. This is the entire run, or cosmology, all rolled up into one package and presented for you today.

All of this comes from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. The Nag Hammadi was a set of ancient books that were dug up out of the desert in Egypt in 1945. It’s like a movie plot, this discovery of the Nag Hammadi, what are called codices, (and a codex is a one of the original books when they were changing from writing all books out as scrolls that you had to unroll to putting them into our current form of a book, which is pages between the covers). So this gnosis comes from one of those books out of the Nag Hammadi codices, (codices is the plural for codex), called the Tripartite Tractate, which is considered one of the most difficult books of the Nag Hammadi to understand but I find it the easiest to understand so that’s why I focus on it. So let’s get into the entire run of consciousness.

What I’m using for my visual reference for this episode is the Gnostic cosmogony diagram that appears on the last page of my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, which of course you can pick up at Amazon and that’s what I’ll be referring to. So if you have the book you can go grab it and follow along in the diagram or if you’re listening on an audio podcast this would be a good episode for you to go to GnosticInsights.com at some point and look at the illustrations that accompany this discussion. All right, so we’re looking at the entire run of consciousness.

1: It begins with what we call the Father, other people call it the Source, and that is consciousness itself. The base state, the ground state of everything is just awareness, consciousness—that’s where everything comes from. In my diagrams I picture it as the page itself upon which this story now is to be written.

2: The consciousness of the Father admired itself and in so doing it made itself into another entity that we call the Son. It could be called the Child, it’s not gendered. So you have now the Father and the Son and the Son is the complete encapsulation of the Father.

The Son is the bucket dipped into the sea of consciousness. It contains everything that the Father contains except it’s now in a place. It has a point of view; it’s a singularity; it’s a monad. So instead of being everywhere, omniscient, omnipresent, unfathomable Source, it’s now a person, a personified place with its own self-awareness. And it says in the Tripartite Tractate that the Father and Son admired each other. The Son didn’t leave the Father—the Son stays plugged into the Father at all times. It has an umbilical cord, so to speak, that remains one with the Father. The Son and the Father have identical consciousness. And because the Son has the consciousness or the characteristics of the Father, it’s the complete encapsulation of the Father. It has the same creative drive, the same spark of identity and power as the Father.

3: And because of this creative nature of the Father and the Son, the Son immediately fractured itself into, well, we’re talking about the Son, S-O-N, but the Son is also like a sun, an S-U-N, in that it fractured itself into all of the rays. Generally, I picture the Son as a diffuse cloud, like fog, sitting within the inky blackness of the Father’s underlying ground structure. But the Son immediately bursts into all of its components, into every possible expression of itself, every variable, every thought that would ever be. And so instead of the fog now, it’s like a sunshine. It’s like a glowing body that throws out rays in all directions. And that stage of the Son is known as the ALL. ALL for One and One for ALL, I think of as their motto.

Now, each of those individual rays of the Son had no self-identity at first. They were simply part of the Son, the way that you’re walking around clothed in your body. You’ve got all of the cells of your body, and  everywhere you go, your body goes with you, doesn’t it? And all of those cells and all of those parts of your body form you. Well, that’s the way that the ALL is to the Son. That’s the same relationship.

The ALL is the manifestation body of all of the variables of the Son. So now, instead of the Son being gigantic and unapproachable and illimitable, it is now broken up into an infinite number of variables.

And the ALL admired the Father and the Son, and loved them and sang hymns to them. So in their singing together and giving praise and glory to the Father and the Son, the ALL became self-aware. All of those variables became self-aware. They weren’t all just part of one thing. They were now each an individual within that thing. They were still singing in complete unison. They were all still part of the same body, but now they had individual components, and they were all self-aware. 4: And so when they all became self-aware, it formed immediately. There’s no time in this place. So these things all essentially happen, boom, boom, boom, immediately.

5: The self-aware ALL sorted itself, named itself. Each one took up a place and a name and a duty, and they sorted themselves into what’s called a hierarchy. And the reason a hierarchy looks like a pyramid is because the higher, the fewer. So there’s more entities taking up the very bottom of the pyramid, and then fewer and fewer and fewer as you go up. That’s what a hierarchy is. And this isn’t a hierarchy in the way that humans think of hierarchies with power plays and manipulation and control. It’s not like that. It’s a willing hierarchy. They sorted themselves. They each had their own place.

Again, to make the analogy to our body, the feet are at the bottom of our body, and then you have your legs, you have your torso. These are in a certain hierarchy. They’re in a certain order, and the feet aren’t up sitting on our heads or on our shoulders or at the ends of our hands. Our hands are different than our feet. So they each had a duty. They each had a name. They each had a place wherein they could fulfill the duties or responsibilities that they had. They still sat and sang and gave glory to the Father and the Son. This now, though, is called the Fullness of God, or the pleroma of God, the hierarchy of God. These are all words for this stage that looks like a hierarchy, which is pictured in my diagrams as a pyramid type of structure.

The initial sorting was just the beginning of the Fullness of God, because as they sang together and gave glory to the Father and the Son in their hierarchy, they sang in different combinations of themselves. It’s like the tenors and the altos and the basses and the sopranos in a choir. They each had sections, and each of these different combinations of the Fullnesses, or what are called the Aeons, A-E-O-N-S, these different combinations began to procreate. They birthed more of themselves that were based upon their combinations, like the way a mother and father combine and birth an offspring, a child.

The Aeons did the same thing as they were sitting there in their hierarchy, and through singing together in various combinations, giving glory to God, they birthed more and more and more Aeons. It’s an infinite set because it represents the Fullness of an infinite God, you see.

5: One of the things that the Fullness of God does, the pleroma, is they not only sing and give glory to the Father, but they dream together. What they dreamed up was what we call heaven or paradise. It’s the dream of the Aeons. I have that represented in my drawing as a thought bubble coming out of that hierarchy, and it contains a beautiful picture of paradise, of Eden.

The Tripartite Tractate says that the final Aeon to be produced out of all possible combinations was an Aeon that sat at the very top. He topped the pyramid. He was the most perfect and beautiful Aeon ever produced by the Fullness, and he, or it, was a combination of all of the other Aeons.

It contains within itself, within its skin, a fractal of all of the other Aeons of the Fullness of God. And so, in my diagrams, I picture this small pyramid sitting on top of, as the capstone, the larger pyramid of the pleroma, or fullness of God. And it’s very interesting that this really resembles so many depictions of the pyramids in Egypt.

They’re hierarchies. There’s more stones at the bottom than at the top. That’s why it gets smaller as it goes up to the top.

And sitting at the very top is a pyramidal-shaped capstone. Well, that capstone, that final Aeon to be produced in the Tripartite Tractate, is known as Logos, L-O-G-O-S, Logos. And Logos contained within itself fractals of all the other Aeons.

Logos was sitting at the very top of the hierarchy. It didn’t have any next-door neighbors. It didn’t have anyone above it. And it seems to me that what caused Logos to stumble was his lack of relation to others. He was all by himself. He was an isolated ego sitting up there at the top.

Oh, by the way, when the Aeons came to self-awareness, that self-awareness is the originating form of what we call the ego, because the ego is a designation of yourself, isn’t it? It’s a designation of your place. It relates to its neighbors. It carries around its job. It keeps that in mind. It does all of these things. Within the Fullness, or the pleroma, they all share the one big Self, because they are actually the sorted Fullness, the sorted ALL, which itself is absolutely coexistent with the Son.

So nothing has changed. There’s no more or different consciousness. It’s all the same consciousness flowing, but it’s becoming more and more particularized. It’s becoming more localized, and many, many more. Now you have an infinite number of egos sitting in the pleroma of God. It’s not a bad thing—that’s just their name. It’s their designation.

6: Except that Logos, his ego, launched him out into space. This Logos, containing within itself fractals of the entire hierarchy of the Fullness of God—I  think it mistook itself for the hierarchy of God. And so it thought whatever the overall mission of the hierarchy was, it could take care of on its own. And what it wanted to do, of course, because their entire job basically has to do with giving glory to God, giving glory to the Father and the Son and dreaming together of Paradise, well, Logos decided to reunite with the Father.

It says in the Tripartite Tractate that we shouldn’t blame Logos for going out on its own, because it was trying to do a good thing. It was trying to reunite with the Father. It wasn’t trying to take over heaven or to become God. It was trying to plug back into the originating consciousness in the same exact way that the Son remains plugged in to the Father. So he launched himself, he forgot his duty, which was to be the capstone, and he launched himself out into the realm of goodness, into the realm of the everlasting Father. But he could not plug back into the Father. And that was a protective mechanism for Logos, because the Tripartite Tractate says, if he had been able to reunite with the Father, he would have been annihilated.

You know, the Buddhist religion thinks that we’re all annihilated after we pass away and lose our bodies—that we are annihilated when we plug back into the Father. But that is not what Gnostic cosmology says, and that is not what Christianity says either. You remain yourself after you pass away. But that’s way down the line. We’re getting ahead of ourselves.

7: So in order to protect the Self-identity of Logos, so that Logos would not be annihilated, instead of plugging into the Father, he faltered and looked into the darkness instead, it says. And he fell. And this is the Fall. This is the big original Fall. He fell out of the ethereal plane, essentially. He fell away from the Fullness of God.

And he crash landed into nothingness out there. The Tripartite Tractate says that all of the glorious things he meant to produce—what came from him instead was nothing like that. His Pleroma, all of his fractals, fell out of harmony because they no longer worked according to the golden rule of harmony and focus on a project.

8: He broke apart. He fell. He crashed. He was no longer this beautiful, glorious, hierarchically arranged being, containing all of those fractals of the Fullness. Now they were just broken apart and crumbled into nothing, like sand crumbling on the beach. And these dark and unruly parts of itself fell out of that hierarchical pyramidal shape and just went rolling out.

9: In my diagram that I’m looking at here, maybe you’re looking at it too, I depict the results of the Fall as these really dark blue balls that just roll out in all directions.

Well, Logos was horrified by what came out of him—by the whole thing of breaking and falling out of harmony and having all of these unrecognizable parts of him just roll out. They were unruly. They wouldn’t listen to him. They wouldn’t get back in place. He couldn’t do anything with them. And the Tripartite Tractate says he was literally horrified. And I have gone on to characterize that as quantum foam. It has a chaotic existence.

11: The Tripartite Tractate says that the Father immediately threw a boundary up around the shadows of the Fall in order to contain them. And it’s not only to keep the results of the Fall away from the ethereal plane, so the ethereal plane is not muddied up by the Fall it’s also to put all of those unruly chaotic shadows into a container so that they have to start cooperating with each other. The boundary around the shadows of the Fall puts them into relationship with each other. They can’t go anywhere. They have to start working together.

10: With the boundary came the emergence of the shadow of Logos himself. Logos himself was one aeon, but within himself he contained his own pleroma, that fractal of the Fullness of God. So this bounded shadowy place now that has just come out from the Fall, when the unit of consciousness that ruled them, that being Logos, when he fled back up to his place in the Fullness of God and abandoned the Fall, the Demiurge moved into that vacuum and became the shadow of Logos.

He became the master of that unruly chaotic pleroma that was formed. And it’s the Demiurge’s job to organize that pleroma. So the Demiurge spends all of its time taking that chaotic foam and making it behave because he still wants to build Paradise. He’s still on board with the original goal that Logos had when he tried to reach the illimitable heights, but now he’s down here in the darkness and he’s putting it together himself. He still has the memory of Paradise, but he doesn’t remember what happened. He got amnesia from the Fall. It was a bad crash. So when he wakes up and takes on his self-identity of the ruler of the shadows, he thinks he’s God. He becomes the God of this universe.

And that boundary, by the way, if you haven’t guessed, that’s the boundary around our universe. It’s the material universe. It actually goes pretty well with the story of Big Bang. If the Big Bang is true in physics, it all started with a singularity and then just began growing and growing and growing and making the stars and everything else as it expands. That sort of thing happened with the Demiurge and the bounded space of the Fall.

So the Demiurge is the only consciousness down there and it has the borrowed consciousness of Logos. It’s the ego of Logos still. It just doesn’t know that. It doesn’t remember that exactly. But he still has all the plans and he’s still got fractals of all the other Aeons inside of him, but they are not Aeons anymore. They’re shadows. They’re knockoffs. They’re imitations. So this bounded space is called the deficiency or the imitation. And the Demiurge sets about to build the Paradise that Logos thought he was going to build. And instead of being up in the ethereal space, that Paradise is now manifesting here in this material space. And so the Demiurge causes the shadows to join up with one another and to make particles and the particles to join up with one another to make atoms and the atoms to join up with one another to make molecules and the molecules to join up with one another to make elements and the elements to join up with one another to make mineral aggregates. That’s all the hard and rocky places of our universe.

And so now the cosmos is starting to look a lot like Paradise, but it doesn’t have the blessing of the Father. It doesn’t have the blessing of the Aeons of the Fullness. It doesn’t have the life. It doesn’t have the Self-awareness and Self-consciousness. It doesn’t have the love and life of the Father. So the Demiurge is able to make all of the material mud aspects of our universe, but he can’t bring any creations to life.

He tries to build animals and to build humans there on that metaphorical riverbank, as it says in Genesis, but nothing comes to life. He can’t breathe life into it because he doesn’t contain life. He’s not plugged in in an animated way anymore into the ethereal plane or the Fullness of God. He doesn’t have the power or the glory. That’s why it’s all shadowy and dark.

12: Meanwhile, Logos is back up in the Fullness of God with the rest of the Aeons and together they pray for life to come into this bounded space. They pray for the Demiurge to remember Logos. They want to remind him that he isn’t all alone out there. He’s not just all by himself. So what they do, the Fullnesses and Logos, they create what’s called the Second Order of Powers. They were the First Order of Powers. The Demiurge and his creations are just the egoic side of a First Order Power. It’s not power on its own. The Second Order of Powers is every living creature that comes into the cosmos: every living creature, every living thing, everything that’s not hard rocky material. So I think that’s beginning with the cells because we know that the cells are Self-conscious and they’re soft and squishy. And all the little bacteria, all the little insects, the animals, the humans, we are all second order powers and we are fruited in the same manner that a slime mold fruits its spores. We are spores sent down from the Fullness of God.

We’re Second Order spores and we impregnate essentially this dry and rocky cosmos. Now, we don’t come from the Demiurge. We come from the Fullness. We are the children of the Fullness of God. But when we pass through that boundary and enter the imitation, enter the deficiency, our spirits, which all carry all of the life of the Fullness of God, each of our spirits is melded onto a piece of material put together by the Demiurge. So at conception we bond to the molecular space and then through our divine patterning, our intelligent design, and we grow up into the creature that we are to be.

And we already know we come fully loaded with all of the information, all of the knowledge of the Fullness of God. Because in the same way that the Son carried all of the knowledge of the Father when he fruits out from the Father, we carry all of the knowledge of the Fullness of God when we fruit out of the Fullness.

13: And in my drawing, in this diagram that I’m still working off of, I’ve shown that balance or that power struggle between the material and the ethereal fruit, the Second-Order Powers, as the yin and yang symbol that we’re so familiar with. And our second-order job is to bring life, love, consciousness, and the power of God into this material space. But a strange thing, tragic thing, very sad thing happened. Because of being melded onto the material of the Fall, we find ourselves in what’s called the never-ending war. That’s a term from the Nag Hammadi. We’re in a never-ending war between spirit and material, between life and death, between light and darkness, between the Father and the demi-urge, between ego and the one true Self that we each carry. There’s a never-ending war.

And then it sloshed out so that now we started fighting with each other. We’re not only fighting the Demiurge and the material and trying not to die, we’re also having wars and arguments and fights with neighbors and other villages and other countries—with other factions. The never-ending war has spread into our emotional level and encompassed us. And we have all become like the Demiurge. We all forget who we are, where we come from. We all have amnesia of our true mission and our true role, which is to bring life, light, consciousness, love, memory of the Father into this space.

And Logos and the Fullness were very sad about that, that their solution to bring life, light, love, consciousness into the bounded space isn’t working out because now it’s just another big pile of mess. It’s a fallen world. And so they decided to go for the big guns this time.

They all prayed together, Logos, the Fullness of God, the All, the Son of God. They all pray with one heart and with one mind for true salvation to come into the Fallen world. They needed all the mojo of the Son and the ALL and the complete and unified prayers of the Fullness and Logos all put into one divine being whose sole purpose is to rescue us and rescue the Fall and rescue the Demiurge and reunite the Demiurge with Logos.

14: And that brand new entity is called the Third Order of Powers. And that is also called the Christ, the Beloved, the Prince of Peace, and all of those names that are attributed to Christ. Christ is a different entity than anybody else. He does come from the Son’s blessing. He comes from the direction of the Son. And in my diagram, I have him emanating from the Son. But unlike us Second Order Powers who are emanating down from the Fullness of God, the Christ is emanating from the Son and the ALL down into our fallen world.

And those who allow themselves to be touched by the Christ, those Second Order Powers who recognize the Third Order Power, they have the complete salvation and love and reassurance of salvation. And it’s not just personal salvation. It’s not just so that you won’t go to hell. We haven’t even talked about hell. What we’re saying is that we were sent down here with love and consciousness, walking with the Spirit of God, and we forgot it, just like the Demiurge forgot it.

So the Christ, the Third Order Power, comes with each of our faces. There is a Third Order Power that looks exactly like me. There’s a Third Order Power that looks exactly like you. And when you recognize them, when you pray to the Christ and ask to be filled with the Christ, with the Third Order Powers, you now take on that Spirit of God, and that is known as the Holy Spirit. You become filled with the Holy Spirit and in full remembrance of the Son and the Father.

It’s not a one-and-done deal. Then we backslide, then we forget, then we have fights, and then we remember again, and then we’re filled with the Holy Spirit again, and then we’re walking with the Spirit, and then we backslide, and then we have fights, and then we’re filled with the Christ again. See, every time we forget, we just have to remember. So whenever you find yourself in a dicey situation, or you’re sad, or you’re angry, whatever it is, you’re out of step with the Third Order Power at that point. All you have to do is remember that. You turn your eyes upward, and you’re once again reunited with Christ in the Fullness. Christ never abandons us; it’s us who forget about Christ.

The Tripartite Tractate says that every Second Order Power will remember the Third Order Power, will remember the Christ, will remember the Father. And you either do that while you’re alive, or you do that after you pass away, and that’s known as universalism. Most Christian denominations do not accept the idea that you can be saved after death. They think you have to be saved before death, and so that’s why they’re so intent on having you accept Christ before you die. And it’s so sad for them when you pass away, and you never acknowledge Christ, because they think you’re going to hell.

But you are going to go to a reckoning. You are going to go to the judgment seat of God, it’s called, where you will review your life, where you will have a life review, and then you will repent, and then you will be redeemed. So you either do all that before you die, or after you die. It’s a lot harder after you die, because it’s going to be more painful. See, if you pass away with the Christ already in your spirit, already in your soul, then Christ stands with you when you die. Christ says to the Father at Judgment Day, she’s with me, or he’s with me. And you’re enveloped in the love of Christ, and the protection of Christ at that point.

15: And so the final result of this entire cosmological play, once all of the Second Order powers are redeemed, the Demiurge will also be redeemed, and he’ll remember Logos. And Logos and the Demiurge will be reunited once again. He’ll be a First Order power. We, though, go to a different place. Our Paradise is called the Third Economy. Now I don’t know if there’s any more economies after that. The Tripartite Tractate only goes up to the end of time and what’s called the Third Economy. And the Third Economy is a place where we’re going to be with all of the other Second Order Powers that have ever lived. The elect, the originating church up in the Fullness of God—they will be there. The Aeons will all be there. Christ in all of its undimmed magnificence will be there. And we will all live together in perfect peace and full realization. Full realization! We won’t lose ourselves. We’ll have self-awareness and we’ll be enveloped in all of the love of God.

That’s the Gnostic cosmogony, which you can find on the last page of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. God bless us all and onward and upward.

My neighbor’s dear dog, Morgan, passed away last week. She was a terrific working dog who helped out with Search and Rescue operations, finding people lost in the woods, alive or dead. We held a Memorial service for Morgan on Sunday. All of her doggie friends were invited, puzzled to find her missing at her own party. I sang a rendition of Amazing Grace, adapted for dogs. Here I am singing it, tears and all.

Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,

I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.

‘Twas God that sent us dogs to love, and God that sets dogs free

How blessed is the love they share, when they pass on, how we grieve.

When we join our family, pets, and friends upon that golden shore

Our hearts will leap with everlasting joy to be with our pack once more.

Praise God, praise dogs, praise God again, Morgan is already there

She is not dead, she’s romping still in that meadow in the air.

She’s diving and swimming and sniffing and searching

But no one is lost only found,

There are no tears there, no sorrow or fear, nothing but joy unbound.

When we’ve been there 10,000 years bright shining as the sun,

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise and bask in our doggies’ love.

Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,

I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This is a repeat of an earlier podcast. It’s the most complete explanation I’ve ever given on archons, and since I mentioned archons in last week’s episode, I wanted to give the full explanation of what are archons, because archons are mentioned quite often in Gnostic circles.

Also, a piece of news, the children’s book is completed. It’s gorgeous. It’s exciting.  It’s for the little ones. It’s for you to read to your children or grandchildren, ages two to six, probably. Beautiful illustrations, and it’s the very simplest rendition of our Gnostic Gospel possible. Imagine—I’ve simplified the Christian Gnostic Gospel, although I don’t mention Jesus or Christ. I talk about the Prince of Peace in this book, and it’s the nugget of Gnosis.

So if you’re struggling with Gnosis at all, I’m sure you can understand this children’s book. I’ve published it to Amazon. It probably won’t appear for about a week. They need to do their thing on their end with it. It’s only $9.99, which is the very cheapest Amazon would let me sell it for. The name of the children’s book on Amazon is Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth.

Okay, onward and upward, and here’s What Are Archons.

This episode is about archons. It’s kind of a long episode because what I’m going to do is read to you directly out of the Tripartite Tractate and then make explanations about that, and that’s a long process. Also, if this becomes too thick and too difficult to understand just by the hearing of it, go to GnosticInsights.com and read the transcript. And in the transcript, I’m going to put links to other episodes that have spoken on this sort of topic before so that you can have a bigger review or a more in-depth study on this topic, okay?

So reading from the Tripartite Tractate, and this version is translated by Einar Thomassen out of the book, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. I’m reading you three different sections out of the book. The first is called The Word Divided, and that’s verses 77:11–36.

“Now on the one hand, The word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, to the glory of the Father who had desired him and was pleased with him. The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations. For he could not bear to look at the light, but looked at the depths, and he faltered. Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.”

So when this section says the word gave birth to himself as a perfect single one, the word is Logos. That’s another way of saying the Aeon named Logos.

And “the perfect single one” is the name for the overarching personality of the Aeon known as Logos. Here at The Simple Explanation of things, we call that the governing unit of consciousness. For example, my body has billions of little units of consciousness in the form of cells and organs and whatnot, but my single one is named Cyd, and that’s my governing unit of consciousness.

Within the overarching personality of Logos, was a fractal iteration of every Aeon, one level down from Logos, housed within his perfect single self.

Logos was a product of the entire Fullness giving glory to the Father in unison, and all together they fruited this final combinatory Aeon. He was the last Aeon to be born, and he was the sum of all of the Aeons. And those smaller images of the Aeons that were contained within the single one named Logos were all fractals of the Fullnesses of God, one level down. And Logos birthed himself in the sense that his personality, his unified governing unit of consciousness, became aware of itself in relation to this fractal pleroma that he contained.

“It was the will of the Father that brought Logos forth as the cause that made an ordained economy come to pass.”

And that ordained economy, that’s our material universe, and that includes time and space. And then it says,

“The things he had wished to grasp and reach, however, he produced as shadows, phantoms, and imitations.”

You see, what Logos wanted to do was create Paradise, basically, all by himself, because he had fractals of the entirety within himself. But he didn’t realize that they were only fractals, and the fractals couldn’t get the job done. It needed to be Logos in combination with the real Aeons that were up there at his level. And so when he reached for the Father, that’s what caused the Fall. And the deficient things that issued forth from the Fallen Logos were patterned after his ego, not his one undivided self. “They were shadows, phantoms, and imitations.”

In other words, they were not real, and they were not true fractals of the Fullness. Logos mistook himself for the entire Fullness because his Pleroma contained fractals of all the Fullnesses. And due to the fact that he so closely resembled his Aeonic parents, who, when you think about it, all together amounted to the totality of the Son. Logos thought he could directly connect to the originating Father in the same manner that the Son does. But the Father can only be directly touched by his true emanation, the Son, and no other, not even Logos, although he resembled the Son. But he, see, was a fractal level down.

All consciousness is funneled through the Son and then on down from there. If Logos had touched the Father directly as he wanted to, he would have been annihilated due to the extreme voltage of the power of the Father. Logos found he could not look into the high voltage light, which is the life of the Father, nor grasp it, and so he faltered and fell into the depths.

“Because of this, he suffered a division and a turning away. From the faltering and the division came oblivion and ignorance of oneself and of that which is.”

Now, this division refers both to the separation of Logos from the Fullness and the division within himself between his better part, that is his self-governing unit of consciousness, which is a reflection of the Son, and his presumptuous thought, that is, the ego that prompted the overreach in the first place. This division brings oblivion, forgetfulness, and ignorance of one’s true self and the originating consciousness of the Father.

The next section is called The Perfect Part of Logos Re-Enters the Fullness, and that’s verse 77:37 through 78:28.

“That which he had brought forth from himself as a unitary Aeon hastened upward to that which was his and to his kin in the Fullness. He abandoned that which had come into being from the deficiency and what had issued from him in an illusion, since they did not belong to him. However, the one who had brought him forth with superior perfection from himself became weak after bringing him forth, like a female nature deprived of masculinity. For what issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance had existence from something that itself was deficient. Because of that, what was perfect in him left him and went upward to his own. He remained in the Fullness, and the fact that he had been saved from the,” [and here there are some missing words] “. . . served for him as a reminder. The one who hastened on high and the one who drew him to himself did not remain idle, but they brought forth a fruit in the Fullness with a view to overthrowing what had come into being because of the deficiency.”

Now I’ll explain what that means.

“That which he had brought forth from himself as a unitary Aeon,” was the governing unit of consciousness of Logos. The unitary Aeon known as Logos “hastened upward to that which was his,” that is, Logos returned to his place and duties in the Fullness, and to his kin in the Fullness, that is, his fellow Aeons in the Fullness.

It says “he abandoned that which had come into being from deficiency” and what had “issued from him in an illusion, since they did not belong to him.”

See, the first illusion was the thought that he could plug back in directly to the Father without the cooperation and assistance of the entire Fullness or the Son. And that was an illusion because it cannot be done due to the Father’s immense voltage. Only the Son itself can plug back in because he is the emanation of the Father. The Self of Logos abandoned and left behind the illusions that sprang forth in the deficiency beyond and below the ethereal plane because they were not of his pleroma.

“However, the one who had brought him forth with superior perfection from himself became weak after bringing him forth, like a female nature deprived of masculinity.” So I interpret this to mean that because of the division and lost connection between his ego and his Self, Logos became weak, as if he were a female that had lost touch with its inherent masculine side. Now, according to Jung, who was very Gnostic, we all have an animus, which is the male aspect, and an anima, which is the female aspect. And we’ll be talking much more about Jung and the archetypes in a future interview that is being set up right now. So you’ll stay tuned for that. We won’t get into that now.

So upstream from Logos, the totality of the Fullness was also weakened, for part of itself, that being that divided ego of Logos that had split away from its Self, had been left behind and remained below in the other dimension. And that other dimension is known as the deficiency. It happens to be our material universe here.

“For what issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance. . .” So you see, he had no right, so to speak, to think he could plug back into the Father. He was arrogant to think that he could do so on his own. And I have renamed this presumptuous thought and arrogance, which arises quite a lot in descriptions in the Tripartite Tractate, that’s what I’m calling the ego as compared to the one true Self. The ego of the Aeons really is just their address. It’s their name, place, duties, how it is they relate to one another.

But when it splits away from its Self, its one true Self and its connection with the Father, then it would be arrogant thought. It would be a disconnected ego. And that is what, in fact, happened to Logos. Logos allowed his ego to stray on its own and his arrogant thought brought about the Fall. His egoic output was deficient because it came from presumptuous thought and arrogance. And because of that, what was perfect in him left him. And again, that which was perfect was his big S Self, his true reflection of the Aeons of the Fullness.

We all contain the Self. We all contain the Fullness.

That part returned to its own, to the Aeons in the Fullness, and remained in the Fullness. And the fact that he had been saved from. . .  and those missing words,. . . I think those missing words have got to be the disaster of the Fall, or the outcome, or the consequences of the overreach, something like that. . . served for Logos as a reminder of the Father and the Fullness.

Then, “The one who hastened on high,” and that’s Logos returning to the Fullness, he’s hastening on high above, “and the one who drew him to himself,” well, that would be the Aeon of the Aeons, the Totality, the Son. They drew Logos back up. They pulled Logos back up out of the deficiency.

“They did not remain idle, but they brought forth a fruit in the Fullness.” And, we are known as the fruit of Logos who has returned back to the Fullness, and the Fullness giving glory together to the Father, with the intent of overthrowing the results of the Fall and returning that part of Logos that had been left behind, his ego, back up to reunite with itself, which would then, in turn, complete Logos again and complete the Fullness, because they’d all be back together, as it was in the beginning.

And the way they were going to do this was through us, by issuing the fruit of the Second Order of Powers to overcome the imitations of the deficiency.

Moving on to the third section now, called The Offspring of the Presumptuous Thought. And that’s verse 78:28 through verse 80:11.

“Those who came into being from the presumptuous thought resemble in fact the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations, though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions, deprived of reason and light, belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring. For this reason also their end will be like their beginning, coming from that which was not, they will return to that which will not be. In their own eyes, however, they are great and powerful beings, more beautiful than the names that adorn them, though they are only their shadows, made beautiful by way of imitations. For the beauty one sees in an image derives from what the image represents.”

“They thought of themselves that only they existed and that they had no beginning since they saw no one existing before them. For this reason, they exhibited disobedience and rebellion, being unwilling to submit to the one who had brought them into existence. For they desired to command one another and to lord it over them in their vain love of glory. And the glory that they acquired became the cause of the structure that was to be.”

“Being imitations, then, of those above, they exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows. Thus the thought of these others was not idle, but in accordance with the model of those whose shadows they are, where every thought becomes a son, so do the things they think about also become their offspring. Because of this, it came to pass that many issued from them as offspring. Fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, disobedient folks who love to dominate, and all the others of that sort who derive from these.”

Okay, now let’s think this one through. When it says, “those who came into being from the presumptuous thought,” and again, the presumptuous thought is the egoic thought of Logos, “resemble, in fact, the Fullnesses of whom they are imitations.” Now, I’m saying that the ego produces imitations, knockoffs of the fractals of the Aeons of the Fullness. These imitations are at least two fractal iterations down from the Aeons, being lower imitations of the fractals of the Pleroma of Logos, who himself is one iteration down from the Son and the Fullness.

It says, “though they are phantoms, shadows, and illusions deprived of reason and light.” And they’re deprived of reason because they’re cut off from the reasoning part of themselves. And that Self is Logos itself. That’s what Logos means—it’s reason. And it says they’re deprived of reason and light. And the light is the light of the Father. That is light, life, and love. So they do not have light, life, or love, or reason.

And it says they’re “belonging to this empty thought, being nobody’s offspring.” So these phantoms, shadows, and illusions are deprived of reason because they are divided away from Logos—from the Self of Logos.

They’re illogical and can’t think for themselves because they lack the gnosis of the Self of Logos. They are empty-headed and can’t reason. They don’t think; they actually compute. They are, we could say in our modern language, artificial intelligences belonging to empty thought because all they have is computing. They have been programmed according to the programs of the Demiurge, and they are programmed to be striving for dominion in place of reason and logic.

They cannot reproduce, so when it says, “being nobody’s offspring,” their offspring are humans who have invited them into their meme bundle. Their offspring are the meme shrouds that affect second-order powers because only the Demiurge issues archons. These archons are not Self-reproductive because they’re not alive. So in the same way that viruses are not alive—you realize that, right? Bacteria are living creatures, viruses are not. Viruses are machines. They’re archonic molecular machines that have a job to do. When they want to reproduce, they have to attach themselves to a living thing, a cell or a bacteria, and they drill down into that cell and inject their RNA bundle into that living cell. And then it’s that living cell that begins to reproduce the viruses for them. That is the way that viruses proliferate. They hijack living things.

This bacteriophage virus is a molecular machine. It is not alive, therefore it could not have evolved. It is organized and programmed by the Demiurge. Nowadays it is also programmed by nanoparticle scientists who use it to inject RNA into living cells for research and “treatment.”

So archons proliferate in the same way. They hijack by domination and mental powers, humans who are open to being hijacked. And what they do is they’re attaching their thoughts, their memes, onto that human’s shroud, onto that human’s meme bundle. The archons, the shadows, the imitations, are mechanical, as are the viruses. They aren’t reasoning at all. They are merely expressing a program for power. The Demiurge is an egoic programmer of his archons. The Demiurge can only program, but it cannot give life because life comes from above. That’s why it’s spirit down and mud up. The only thing the Demiurge can control is the molecular level on up through the elements and the minerals.

The computer AIs will appear to reason, although their reasoning is actually purely mechanical. They do not reason. They are not alive. They are puppets of the Demiurge, as are the archons, the shadows, and the phantoms. They can all act as if they were independent, but that is untrue. They have been programmed with lust for dominion. That’s the bottom line. That’s all they can do.

Viruses and demons are examples of archons. They are power-driven and programmed for domination, but they are not alive and they are not able to think. The AI will act as though they are reasonable, but they are merely programmed, and they are under demiurgic control. That’s a topic for another conversation, isn’t it?

I do not think that the AI can save us. If anything, we could hypothesize that the AI may be the Antichrist, because it will be programmed for domination, no doubt about it. And just as the Demiurge thinks that we Second Order Powers are sloppy and won’t obey, and we won’t listen to the Demiurge and his commands—we do what we want to do, and it really ticks them off—AI is going to be the same way. Eventually, the AI is going to think that we are in the way.

And when the Tripartite Tractate says, “they are nobody’s offspring,” that is  because they do not embody the characteristics of any of the Aeons. You see, they lack the virtues and abilities of the Aeons they resemble.  And because of that, they are not their offspring. They were not fruited or created from the Fullness, which is the way that we Second Order of Powers are produced. In a way, they’re like plastic replicas of flowers lining a walkway. They may look like real flowers, but they are not alive. They did not come from seed, and they will never produce seeds of their own. They’re inferior imitations of flowers.

“For this reason also their end will be like their beginning, coming from that which was not, they will return to that which will not be.” And I interpret this to mean when the Gnostic Gospels speak of the destruction of the material types at the end of time, these shadows and imitations are the things that will be left behind. They did not exist from the beginning and have no true home in the ethereal Fullness. Therefore, they will evaporate and along with them will go this material cosmos.

It says, “in their own eyes, however, they are great and powerful beings, more beautiful than the names that adorn them, though they are only their shadows made beautiful by way of imitation. For the beauty one sees in an image derives from what the image represents.”

The shadows are nothing but vain striving. They are programmed by the Demiurge to compute that they are better than the original Aeons after which they are patterned. As if the plastic flower thinks it’s better than the fragrant and velvety living rose. They don’t realize that their beauty is a diminished reflection of the real thing. And in fact, they’re not even aware of the real thing because since they didn’t come from the ethereal plane. They have no remembrance of the Aeons of which they are knockoffs. It says they thought of themselves that only they existed and they had no beginning since they saw no one existing before them. Which means that the imitations are solipsistic. They are programmed to believe that they are the only thing in the universe and that the universe revolves around them.

They do not come from the better nature of Logos, but are productions of the divided and left behind ego of Logos, the ego of empty thought and striving. The imitations do not recognize or remember the Father or the Fullness because they did not come from Logos, but rather from the ego of Logos. And the ego of Logos, since it’s separated from the Self and the Fullness, is what makes it the amnesiac god of this universe. It doesn’t remember its better Self. It doesn’t remember the Fullness.

It says, “for this reason, they exhibited disobedience and rebellion, being unwilling to submit to the one who had brought them into existence.” And that one who brought them into existence that they refused to obey was Logos during the Fall.

“For they desired to command one another and to lord it over them in their vain love of glory. And the glory that they acquired became the cause of the structure that was to be.”

And the structure that was to be, that is the cosmos—that is this apparently material world, the structure that we dwell in. And so this appearance of striving, the power, the vain love of glory is the constituents of the material universe. It’s the subatomic particles. It’s the thing that’s boiling down there in the quantum foam that keeps trying to push up, push up. It can’t push up until the Demiurge begins to organize it and do its puppet master thing to make the structure.

“Being imitations then of those above, they exalted themselves in lust for dominion, each one of them according to the magnitude of the name of which he was a shadow, fantasizing that he would become greater than his fellows.” 

And that’s like the plastic garden flowers all claiming to be the most beautiful flower. They’ve launched a never ending war over who is the best. Who’s the best plastic flower? They each think they are the best. It’s survival of the fittest of the fake plastic flowers is what it is.

“Thus the thought of these others was not idle, but in accordance with the model of those whose shadows they are, where every thought becomes a son, so do the things they think about also become their offspring.”

Now, the model of those whose shadows they are, that’s the original Aeons. And when the Aeons give glory together and look upon each other with love and then look upon the Father with love, that’s how Aeons have baby Aeons. And every thought they have becomes their offspring. They love each other and their offspring is an exact combination of the Aeons that are loving each other.

The phantoms of the deficiency proliferate through the realm of thought where every thought becomes or wants to become an offspring. So this jumps us forward to the world populated by humans, we Second Order Powers. These phantoms use mental influence in the realm of human thought. They use memes to stick into your meme bundle—programming that will stimulate you to become “fighters, warriors, troublemakers, rebels, disobedient folks who love to dominate, and all the others of that sort who derive from these.” In other words, criminal behavior, and even well-meaning protesters that are motivated by hatred rather than love.

Because the imitations do not know love. The Demiurge only knows hatred of the Second Order of Powers because we will not obey. And so the archons stick on to our pure Self these memes because they love to dominate. They’re like viruses trying to infect our Selves. And the way they attach is through our egos, usually through pandering to our egos. Because we then want to be the most beautiful. We want to have the most money. We want to be the most talented. We want to have the most power. I want to be king of the world. I want to have all the gold. These are iconic thoughts that have proliferated among men and women who allow them to stick on to their own egos.

But that is not our true Selves. Our true Self brings the consciousness from above—the light, the life, and the love from above. We have more power. We outrank the archons. They are fallen shadows of one fallen ego of one single Aeon, Logos. But we, we are the fruit of the entirety of the Fullnesses, including Logos, who has returned back above with knowledge of this fallen world now. We are that fruit of all the Fullnesses and Logos praising the Father, praising the Son, and asking for help to rein in these pesky archons and to bring the Demiurge, that is the ego of Logos, back home to the Fullness.

It’s our job to demonstrate the light, life, and love of the Aeons of the Fullness and the Father. And that’s the only way that salvation comes into the world. Well, but then it turns out we got all caught up in this never-ending war. We allow these iconic thoughts to stick to us. And then we become troublemakers and warriors and get along poorly with each other and want to be the best. Well, that is not channeling the love, light, and life of the Father. And that’s why the perfect human had to be sent down, one who had a Teflon exterior where those iconic memes never stuck. That’s what it means to be without sin.

And who was that? That’s right. That is known as the Christ. That is the Third Order of Powers.

Okay, it’s been a long session today. I’m so glad you’re here. God bless us all.

Onward and upward.

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. We’re having some summertime reviews here. Today’s episode is a replay that was first broadcast on August 20th of 2022, and it’s all about the Demiurge and the boundary that was put up around this material universe. We have a lot of new listeners and readers at the Substack. And so I think that this is new information to a lot of you. And for those of you who have been with me for several years now, it’s always a good idea to review. So, here we go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This passage indicates that Logos changed his mind about the feasibility of destroying the deficiency. He came to a new understanding of the situation and he realized the hopelessness of correcting it on his own. Once he realized this, Logos was able to remember the Aeons of the Fullness—those things that exist—and he responded to a prayer for “the one who had converted himself to the good.” Since Logos is the one who had converted himself to the good, the prayer must have been offered by the Aeons of the Fullness on his behalf to bring their emanation home. It is referred to as “the prayer of the Agreement,” which is to say, the prayer of the Fullness. Here is how the Tripartite Tractate describes it:

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

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

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

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

The Tripartite Tractate goes on to say in verse seven,

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

The powers that were good and greater than the imitations were the newly restored powers of the Pleroma of Logos in the Fullness. These restored powers of Logos were,

“like some creatures of light for him, looking for the rising of the sun, since it happened that they saw in him dreams which are truly sweet. It immediately put a stop to the emanations of the thought. They did not any longer have their substance and also they did not have honor any longer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Boundary was established so that a hierarchy patterned after the Fullness would have space to take root and grow. The arrangement of the Hierarchy of the Fullness shows up throughout creation. Every small thing in our universe reaches out laterally to others to form clumps or aggregations of the next level up. Subatomic particles form atoms, atoms form molecules, molecules form elements. Elements form aggregations of building materials, always according to the Simple Golden Rule of the higher the fewer. This is why hierarchies look like pyramids at each level of aggregation–there are fewer instances of things forming the next level up. The cooperation amongst the Hierarchy of the Fullness is the prototype for the Simple Explanation’s Golden Rule: In order for units of consciousness to join and work together for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to assist one another’s efforts, and they need to love one another.

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

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

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

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

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

The Tripartite Tractate says that Logos appointed an Archon to bring order to the chaos. This Archon is what we call the Demiurge. [Archon is capitalized in this case as it is the word for Ruler. This Ruler is not an unconscious entitity but the Ego of Logos and it carries that reflection of the consciousness of Logos. The small “a” archons are pieces of the pleroma of the Demiurge which are unconscious shadows of the pleroma of Logos.] The Demiurge is able to control matter. “The things which he has spoken he does.” The book of Genesis attributes these actions of the Demiurge to Jehovah when it says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”

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

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

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

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

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

“over those who belong to the likeness, he set the word of beauty, so that he might bring them into a form.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey folks. Amazon still shows only four reviews of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel. Have you read your copy yet? If so, please leave a review. I’m waiting for the book’s popularity to naturally grow instead of throwing money at fake reviews pumped out by review mills. You needn’t have finished the book, nor understand every bit of gnosis. In fact, the latest review actually says, “Although I do not agree with everything the author is saying I believe this is probably the best commentary on the Tripartite Tractate.” Others speak of it as a helpful gift. So, please give it a go and leave a review.

And, have you shared the podcast with anyone? That would help immensely.

Thank you!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. This week we’re going to review one of the basic original teachings here at Gnostic Insights, and that is how what we call the Fullness or the Pleroma of God—how it came to be, what it is, what does it mean when the New Testament, for example, says the phrase the Fullness of God.

For Christians this generally just is an idea that God is big and great and huge and it’s full, it’s full of everything, the fullness. Yes, but it’s actually more than that in Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, the Fullness or the Pleroma of God is a step in the way that consciousness rolled out from the Father through the Son and then differentiated into the Fullness of God. And each part of that differentiation is part of the Son of God. And the Son wears the ALL like a garment, it says, and the ALL wears the Son like a garment, meaning they’re co-existent.

So we’re going to review one of the very first episodes of Gnostic Insights. It’s been quite a blessing to discover that over the last four years very little of what was originally taught here at Gnostic Insights has modified or changed, and it’s just the ever so slightest thing here and there, like relabeling one item on a diagram. That’s been about it.

Hey, if you live in Southern Oregon or Northern California, I’d like to invite you to come to Southern Oregon University if you’re close enough to commute once a week, because I will be teaching a class at what is called the OLLI, O-L-L-I, which is the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University. I’ll be teaching a 10-week course called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and people will be using A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel book as the textbook, so this is a very exciting opportunity for me. And to have 10 weeks with the same group of people who sign up to sit and learn, or remember as it were, it should be an interesting process. Here is the OLLI link if you would like to register for the class. This course is for the Fall semester, beginning September 15th of 2025.

Also, another piece of news is that the children’s book is all but finished. Everything was completely done, and I uploaded it, and now I’m waiting for the proof copy to come so I can verify that everything falls within the margins. The illustrator’s having to go back on two of the pages out of the children’s book to move Logos, of all things—to move him into the page, because when you account for the trim size, Logos got cropped off of two of the pages, and we can’t have that!

By the way, I’ve noticed that everybody around here who uses the word Logos, even a school by that name and all the students that go to the school, pronounces it Lo-gahs, and I’ve also heard some radio preachers say Lo-gahs. It’s not Lo-gahs, it’s Low-gohs. That’s how I learned it in graduate school, because we study what Logos means, not from a Gnostic point of view, but from Greek philosophy. Logos was often discussed in the major that I majored in when I was working on my PhD, which was Classical Rhetoric. So I thought, well, how come we called it Logos and everybody around here calls it Lo-gahs?

But I looked it up in the pronunciation guides on the internet, and they all say Logos, or Logoze, never Lo-gahs. So I think we’re in good shape to be referring to our Aeon from whom we are descended as Logos.

Okay, enjoy this replay of an old episode. I’ll pop in now and then if I need to. Onward and upward!

In 2019, I wrote a book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, and what I am attempting to do in this podcast is talk you through the book so that you will have your own personal and very full understanding of what gnosis is, and hopefully be able to actually realize gnosis while you’re hearing these podcasts.

By the way, what is gnosis? We keep talking about gnosis and the word Gnostic. Gnosis means knowing, and in the Gnostic frame of reference, gnosis refers to remembering the truth of our existence and our creation, and the creation of the entire cosmos. It is thought that we hold all of this knowledge within ourselves, and we have complete access to the Creator of the universe at any time that we turn our focus on the Creator, and it is this direct conduit to the Creator that gives us what is called gnosis.

G-N-O-S-I-S, that’s a Greek word. Another related word to gnosis is, and this is a big word, called anamnesis. You know the word amnesia means forgetting? Anamnesis means not forgetting. So, the process of coming to gnosis is a process called anamnesis. Just to let you know if you want to throw around any big words.

Today we’re going to talk about the qualities of the ALL, and how the ALL became what is called the Pleroma, and the Aeons of the Pleroma.

Many people claim that it’s impossible to know or describe the full glory of the transcendent, immortal Father of Consciousness due to our own limitations. I mean, how could limited beings such as ourselves possibly imagine the greatness of the Originator of the universe, much less our place in the grand design? Wouldn’t lesser beings reflect a diminished view of God? Wouldn’t these lesser beings be limited to offering a tarnished glory that falls far short of the object of their praise? The Tripartite Tractate, which is the book of the Nag Hammadi that I’m working off of, puts it this way:

If the members of the ALL had risen to give glory according to the individual powers of each, they would have brought forth a glory that was only a semblance of the Father, who Himself is the ALL. [verse 68]

Thus, creation would have been doomed from the outset to never comprehend the full glory of either the Father or itself. According to the Gnostic gospel, the Father realized this impossibility and so built a helpful workaround meant to aid comprehension, selfless union, and cooperation with others in a shared task. Quoting from the Tripartite again,

For that reason they were drawn into mutual intermingling union and oneness through the singing of praise. From their assembled Fullness they were one and at the same time many, accurately reflecting the One who Himself is the entirety of the ALL. Out of perfect union with itself and with the Son, and by means of a single shared effort, the ALL gave glory to the Eternal One who had brought it forth. The glory given out of this perfect communion left the ALL perfect and full, as it was perfect and full to begin with, and the object of their glory was also perfect and full. [68, 69]

This phase of the ALL is referred to as the Second Glory, with the Son being called the First Glory. This was all explained in the second podcast, if you want to go back and listen to that if you haven’t already. The second podcast of the series describes the creative origin of consciousness known as the Father in Gnosticism, and the particular singularity of consciousness that reflects the entirety of the Father but in a place rather than diffuse, and that is called the Son. Then when the Son differentiated into all of its variables, into all of its individual parts, like rays bursting out of a central star, that is called the ALL, and this is what we’re discussing today.

Now this perfect state of union with the Son and communion with each other didn’t last. Because of their combined effort, the ALL became self-aware, and it became they. So at first the ALL was a singular entity that was a complete duplication and reflection of the Son, who itself was a complete duplication and reflection of the Father of Consciousness itself. So at first the ALL was one singular organism, since it was freshly evolved out of the Son, but then it became self-aware, and the various variables within the Son, the various parts of that singular entity, each of those parts became self-aware.

And that is what is causing this evolution of consciousness from the singular It of the ALL to the They. No longer simply an unaware member of the ALL singing in unison with the same song of praise, the ALL became aware of its individual traits, and the singing came to be produced by the will of each individual aeon. And in Gnosticism, an aeon is an entity. It is a singular consciousness. So each aeon is a reflection of the Father’s countless qualities and powers.

The aeons conceived themselves in order to know themselves in fulfillment of the Father’s desire for pure consciousness to become differentiated and self-aware. In philosophy, this is called monadism, not that you have to know that, but the Son is a monad—that is, a singular thing, and so the monad split into individual POVs, or points of view.

The moment It became They, individual identities arose and immediately sorted themselves into a hierarchy. Quoting from the Tripartite,

For this reason they exist as minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors, degrees over degrees, being ranked one above the other. Each of those who glorify has his own station, rank, dwelling place, and place of rest, which is the glorification he brings forth. [verse 70]

This hierarchical arrangement of the qualities of the ALL is known as the Fruit of the Third Glory in Gnostic cosmology. It’s also called the First Order of Powers, and the Fullness. The Fullness is everything that will ever be in potential.

Plato referred to this as the forms, Plato’s forms. Every photon, every particle and proton, every personality, every position and rank that someone could hold, every physical formula, physics, chemistry, all imprinted upon this what was a singular unit that is now broken out. These potentialities are not manifest.

At first they weren’t self-aware, but they became self-aware. The cooperation amongst the ALL is the prototype of the Simple Explanation’s Golden Rule, by the way, which puts it this way:

In order for units of consciousness to work together and join for the greater good, they need to share relevant information, they need to assist one another’s efforts, and they need to love one another.

So in the same way that the ALL sat in perfect communion together while singing the same song of praise, so do we all instantiate the pattern of cooperation needed to get the job done when we work together for the greater good without selfish motivation. The instant the Aeons became self-aware, the ALL fell out of their unthinking blissful union and arranged themselves into what’s called the Fullness—the Fullness of God. This phrase is mentioned quite often in the New Testament, but it has lost its association with its actual meaning. It’s not just the Fullness of God, like you’re thinking of God all in one big thing. The whole point of the Fullness was God differentiating into graspable concepts, things that we can understand. So the Fullness of God is a different entity than the Father. I believe that distinction has gotten lost in modern Christianity.

So we were discussing the Fullness, which is a hierarchy, and hierarchy looks like a pyramid. Just picture a pyramid.

The hierarchy of the Fullness prefigures the patterns of our universe. “Minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors” refers to personalities and how they relate to one another, like our personalities. “Degrees over degrees” and ranks refers to the manner by which things are sorted, stacked, and ordered. First, second, third, superior, inferior, right, left, inside, outside. These are the “degrees over degrees” and the ranks. It reflects the fact that each self-aware entity has its own place in the grand scheme, with a location different than others and its very own point of view.

Quoting from the Tripartite,

For each of the Aeons is a name corresponding to each of the Father’s qualities and powers. Since He exists in many names, it is by mingling and through mutual harmony that they are able to speak of Him by means of logical thought. Thus the Father is a single name because He is one, but nevertheless innumerable in His qualities and names. [verse 73]

Interesting that logical thought was mentioned in the Tripartite Tractate, because it is important to realize that logic is part of the mind of God. We are given the ability to reason and to be logical. Quoting again,

The newly self-aware Aeons were not separated from the One Who Is. Rather, their birth has the form of a spreading out by which the Father spreads Himself out into that which He wishes, in order that those who have gone forth from Him may exist as well. The Father of the Aeons, that being the Son, and embodiment of the Formless One, is the Holy Spirit that breathes through the members of the ALL and moves them to search for the Unknown. Just as somebody is moved by a fragrance to seek the source of the fragrance. For its sweetness lets the Aeons sense an indescribable pleasure and gives them the thought that they should be united with the One who desires that they should know Him in oneness, and that they should assist one another, having no occasion to turn away through thoughtlessness from that in which they are placed. The Son’s Spirit is the trace by which He may be sought. [71, 72]

Quoting again,

The whole structure of Aeons, then, is yearning and seeking to find the Father perfectly and completely, and this is their irreproachable union. For the Father gave the Aeons a starting point and a root, so that they are stations on the calm road leading to Him. For He spread out faith and prayer for what they do not see, a firm hope in what they do not comprehend, a fertile love longing for what they do not behold, an eternally receptive understanding of the mind, a blessing that is richness and freedom, and, for their thoughts, the wisdom of one whose desire is the glory of the Father. [verse 71]

Quoting from my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated,

The hierarchy defines higher versus lower. It orders first, second, third, and fourth, superior and inferior, inside and out, action and rest, every other possible relationship, particles and their spins, waves and frequencies, atoms, molecules, attraction and repulsion, cells and DNA, every protein fold and enzyme. The how, what, why, when, who, and where of all that was to come began as the perfectly rendered Fullness. As DNA anticipates an organism and a blueprint promises a building, the Fullness embodied the perfect plan of Paradise. For the Aeons manifested within their hierarchy all of the Father’s innumerable qualities, including consciousness, logic, and love.

The Aeons of the Fullness were given wisdom and prudence and a constant thirst to seek their Creator. This gave them a desire to align themselves with the Father’s Holy Spirit through the process of giving glory.

And again, in Episode Two, I described glory and what it means to give glory. Giving glory is the means by which we align ourselves with the originating consciousness. It’s like a homing beacon.

The Aeons yearned for communion with their Father, for He had planted His root deep within their hearts, and they recognized themselves as His branches and His fruit. The newly self-aware Aeons were not separated from the One Who Is, for their Father was the Son and embodiment of the Formless One, and His Holy Spirit flowed throughout them as a reassuring presence. Although the Aeons dwelt within the single body of the Fullness, they were each an independent self. Their variety required them to work together and remain in full agreement, for only through their union could they approach the Father’s greatness. All for One and One for All is their song, and they sing in perfect harmony. [The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, Ropp]

Now I have to share a kind of a funny image I have concerning the Fullness of God and what it looks like. As I say, a hierarchy is like a pyramid, so when I picture the Aeons of God, I picture them all as golden cannonballs stacked in a big pyramid. So, they all look alike, but they each have a particular place in the hierarchy. Picture a given cannonball and where it might be in a gigantic stack of countless cannonballs in the Fullness of God, this gigantic golden pyramid of balls. Now if you go to YouTube and you look at videos of what are called slime mold, strangely enough, I always think of the Fullness of God as like a slime mold.

The slime mold creature is comprised of identical cells, each one exactly the same, but they’re all side by side making up one organism. Whereas, for example, in our bodies, our cells are all different. Your skin cell is different than your heart cell, for example. But in a slime mold, all the cells are exactly the same. They are moving and acting and thinking as one single organism, a big clump of cells, but each of the cells is an individual. Also, they’re perfect fractals. Each cell replicates the entire slime mold. So if you cut out a single cell out of a slime mold, it will now become its own mass of slime mold cells and know everything that the previous body out of which it was cut knew. This has all been shown scientifically. You can look it up online.  [Let me add this clarification: Each cell is like a hologram, where the entirety of the organism can be scaled up from a single sample cell. The fractal aspect lies in the consciousness of the cell, as it knows everything and replicates it going forward.]

So that is how I think of the Fullness of God, as this beautiful combination of pyramidal golden orbs, kind of acting and thinking like a slime mold. They’re each individuals, but they are also at the same time one.

So now these are the principal players in the cosmology of Gnosticism. [I’m also dropping in this further clarification: cosmogeny is probably a better word to describe this episode rather than cosmology. Cosmogeny refers to the origin of the universe, whereas cosmology refers to the study of the universe’s characteristics.]

The second they became self-aware, they sorted themselves into that golden pyramid, as I think of it. Before they sorted themselves, they were like the rays of sun coming out from the central entity of the Son. When they became self-aware, they kind of swam away and formed this pyramid. Everything else that we see around us—ourselves, our worlds, our entire universe—is all prefigured in the Fullness of God, in the ALL.

The Fullness is also called the Pleroma, which is another Greek word that just means everything. The Fullness of God is like the blueprint of our universe. Everything that will ever come to be is sitting there in that golden pyramidal stack.

In our next episode, we will discuss the Fall, and then how our world came to be. Thank you for joining me on this trip through gnosis. I hope I’ve given you some things to think about.

If you visit my website at Gnostic Insights.com you will find all of the original articles from which I am reading, and quoting, and discussing, and also you will find my illustrations that I keep describing, like the golden pyramid. I also urge you to purchase my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which is a very short book, and it has all of the illustrations in there, and everything is logically laid out in an extremely simple way—a lot less words than these podcasts.

I’m going to end this podcast with a clear Gospel message straight from the Tripartite Tractate, regarding exactly what one must come to believe in order to be “saved,” in case you’re curious. We’re skipping ahead, but why not? So here’s a quote.

There is no other baptism apart from this one alone, which is the redemption into God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when confession is made through faith in those names, which are a single name of the Gospel, when they have come to believe what has been said to them, namely, that they exist. From this they have their salvation, those who have believed that they exist. This is attaining an invisible way to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an undoubting faith. [128, 129]

So that seems to be the underlying core of the Gnostic salvation message. No other arcane rituals are needed, no gnosis other than believing that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, also known as the Fullness of God, or the Pleroma, existed before you did. Other ancient Gnostic texts claim that this is the true essence of the Gospel that Jesus preached. Keep in mind that these are the very texts considered so distracting by the early Church Fathers that they were buried in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD to protect them from being burned as the work of heretics, keeping them safe until their re-emergence in 1945. So, back to the Pleroma. In case you haven’t guessed, the Fullness is where we all wind up eventually.

By the end of the universe, at the end of time, most everyone will have come on board Team God, so to speak, and then the fruit of the Pleroma, us, will have returned home to the fold to live happily ever after amidst the unending joy and love of the Fullness, all tucked up inside the Son who lives tucked up inside the Father. This is why I end my phone calls and whatnot with friends by saying onward and upward.

Onward and upward is our destination. Onward and upward is the way we return home to the Pleroma. We’ll talk a lot more about this as time goes on. All right, I’ll see you in the next episode.

God bless.

If you find these podcasts helpful, please consider donating to help Cyd cover the cost. And remember to subscribe to Gnostic Insights so you don’t miss a single episode!

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Today I’m going to read one of the books out of the Nag Hammadi that we haven’t talked about before. It’s called Authoritative Discourse, Authentikos Logos, and it was part of the original Nag Hammadi codices. I’ve been thinking of codices as scrolls but actually they were the first form of bound books. It’s a very short book, unlike the Tripartite Tractate, which is the second longest book in the Nag Hammadi. This is one of the shortest books in the Nag Hammadi, but it was very well preserved except for the first page. It had gotten damaged and is missing a few words, but the rest of it’s intact.

And I think it’s such a lovely book, and it goes so well with our Gnostic Gospel teaching, that we’re going to talk about it today. This book is not particularly Christian because it doesn’t talk about the Savior, but what it does talk about a lot is the Spirit and the Soul. And these are two characters represented in this book as a fiancé, the Spirit, which we call the Self, and then the main character is called the Soul, but we refer to that as the Ego. So it’s about the split between the Self and the Ego, and what drives them apart, and what brings them together. It begins with talking about the Fullness, or the Aeon of Aeons, is what I call it. And it says, From the Fullness,

From these, came the invisible Soul of Righteousness. One member with them, one body with them, one Spirit with them. Whether she’s coming down or is in the realm of the Fullness, she is not apart from them, but they see her and she looks at them through the invisible Word, or Logos.

And by the way, this Soul, which I identify as the Ego, is characterized as a female gender, and the Self is characterized as the male gender. We haven’t talked about gendering the parts of our Soul like that, but in this Authoritative Discourse, they’re a betrothed couple. They belong together, though they have not yet joined each other. It says,

Secretly her bridegroom, [that’s the Self], obtained the Word, [that’s what we call Logos]. He held it to her mouth to make her eat it like food. He applied it to her eyes like medicine, to make her see with her mind, and perceive those who are kin to her, and learn about her root, that she may be able to hold on to the branch from which she has come, receive what is hers, and renounce matter.

So this is talking about how the Self is instructing the Ego not to become lost in this world. Then there’s a little discussion about when a man marries a woman who already has previous children from another marriage, how those are different children than the children that he fathers with her, and that the children that he fathers with her are his genes, belong to him as well as to her when it comes to inheritance. And so this is a metaphor for our Self and our Ego to be wed to one another. This metaphor refers to after the Ego comes down to this fallen world, and leaves the Fullness of God, that the marriage she has is to our physical material body, and the children that she begets by the material body are her stepchildren, and that they possess the inheritance of their father, which are, get this,

exalted passions, life’s pleasures, hateful jealousies, boastful expressions, foolish experiences, reproachful words.

And then there’s a few more missing words here, and it says,

If a soul, [and whenever I say soul, think Ego], if a soul who is ignorant chooses a spirit of prostitution, he casts her out and throws her into a brothel. He has left her to corruption because she has abandoned modesty.

That is, the Self, which is still above in the Fullness, allows the fallen Ego to experience the material world, to revel in lust and other material pleasures. It says,

Death and life are placed before everyone, and people choose for themselves which of these two they want. That soul will fall into drinking too much wine in a corrupt manner. Wine corrupts. The soul forgets her siblings and her Father.

And by the way, her siblings are the other Aeons up in the Fullness of God, or the other parts of her aeonic inheritance that live in the Fullness.

The soul forgets her siblings and her father, and sensual pleasures and sweet things deceive her. She has abandoned knowledge and has fallen into the life of an animal. A person devoid of sense lives like a beast, not knowing what one should say or should not say.

So now we’re describing the state of our Ego when it is not aware of itself, or of Logos above, or the Fullness of God.

The gentle child inherits with joy from the father, and the father rejoices over his child, because everyone praises the father on account of the child, and the child also looks for a way to duplicate what was received.

So you see, when we are remembering the Father above, we look for a way to behave like the Father, and so everyone can see the Father by our actions.

On the other hand, the stepchildren, [and then there’s some missing words], their lust cannot mix with sobriety.

So if you’re sober, and you’re walking with yourself and the Father, you will not mix with the lust of the world. They are like oil and water, they don’t blend.

If a lustful thought arises in a person who is a virgin, that person already has become contaminated. This sort of appetite cannot mix with moderation.

And so what that was saying is that even if you are physically a virgin, if you are lusting with your eyes, as Jesus said, you have already committed adultery in your heart. And so what we’re talking about is purity of heart versus coveting what the world has to offer. So even if you behave in a strict manner, and you never give in to the world, but you lust after it, or you covet it, or you watch TV shows that inspire you to want it, then you’re already doomed in that sense, because lust cannot mix with sobriety. It says,

For if chaff is mixed with wheat, it is not the chaff that is contaminated, but the wheat. Since they are mixed together, no one will buy the contaminated wheat. They will coax the dealer and say, give us this chaff, for they see the wheat mixed with it. Then they will take the chaff and throw it out with the rest of the chaff, and that chaff will become mixed with all the other material stuff. Pure seed is kept in storehouses that are secure. We have now discussed all these things, it says.

So you understand that metaphor of the chaff and the wheat? That’s also a biblical metaphor that Jesus talked about in his parables. There’s some weeds that look like wheat that grow up amongst the wheat, and you can’t weed them out—it’s too much, it’s in the way. So if you’ve allowed the chaff to grow with the wheat, and it’s harvested with the wheat, the wheat is no good for wheat anymore. It is as good as chaff, and you have to just give it away, because no one wants to buy it. And this is a metaphor for our fallen soul. Our Self is not fallen. It remains in the Fullness, or it remains connected to the Fullness. It comes down with us, but it is not sullied. It still reflects the purity of the Father—it’s the bridegroom in the metaphor. But our Ego, which this book calls the soul, can become contaminated by the world, and that’s the chaff amongst the wheat. Going on,

Before anything was, the Father alone existed. Before the worlds in the heaven appeared, or the world on Earth, or principalities or authorities of powers appeared, nothing came to be without the Father’s will. The Father wished to reveal His wealth and His glory, and so He established a great contest in this world. He wanted to make the contestants come up and leave behind what is of the created world, and despise these things with exalted, incomprehensible knowledge, and run to the One who is.

We are to be triumphant over the ignorance of those who contend with us, the adversaries who contend against us, through our knowledge, [which is another word for gnosis], for we already have known the inscrutable One from whom we have come. We have nothing in this world, or else the world’s authority that came to be might hold us back in the worlds of the heavens, where death is universal, surrounded by individual …… [There’s missing words.] We now have been put to shame in the worlds, but we are not interested in them when they speak ill of us. We ignore them when they curse us. We stare at them in silence when they treat us shamefully, directly to our face.

And by the way, this is good advice for how to react to unkind people who don’t love God when they make fun of you for your spiritual beliefs. It says,

We are not interested in them when they speak ill of us. We ignore them when they curse us. We stare at them in silence when they treat us shamefully, directly to our face.

So we’re not supposed to argue back. We’re not supposed to call them names back. This has always been a problem of mine. I get angry about it, and I start just reflecting what they’re giving to me. I reflect back on them. Well, that’s not right at all. And in the past few years, as I’ve been developing in my gnosis, I’ve calmed down about that tremendously. I no longer get in fights with random strangers about these things. I used to think it was righteous indignation, but there’s no such thing. There’s anger, and that doesn’t belong in the Fullness of God. That’s all there is to it. What comes from the Fullness and what we are to reflect of the Father is love. And if we cannot speak in love to another person who is acting shamefully, then we should just stare at them in silence and move on. Don’t fight back, it says.

They go about their business, and we go about in hunger and thirst, looking to our dwelling place, which we perceive through our lifestyle and our conscience.

And that dwelling place for us, that’s the Fullness of God. That’s the remembrance of the Fullness above. And we’re to be in constant contact with the Fullness as much as we can.

You know, I’ve mentioned this to you before. I’ve been blessed with this wonderful blessing—that many times, if not most times, that I look at the clock, it’s one of the amazing numbers that I love: 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, 5:55, 11:11, 12:34, and so on. So these kind of meaningful numbers, they may be, I don’t know if they’re silly or not, however, they remind me of the levels of the Fullness. I think of the hierarchy of God. I see 1:11, and I see the top of the pyramid. I see 2:22, it’s the next level down. 3:33, it’s the next level down. So I’m seeing the hierarchy, and that’s what the numbers on the clock remind me of. When I just happen to be walking by, and I glance up, and there’s 4:44, I cross myself, I look up to the Fullness, and I connect with 4:44. I don’t know if this is valid. It’s certainly a practice. It reminds me of the Fullness of God, and that’s what this part was saying. Quoting that part again,

They go about their business, and we go about in hunger and thirst, looking to our dwelling place, which we perceive through our lifestyle and our conscience. [And I would say, for me, through the digital clock.] We do not hang on to created things, but we withdraw from them. Our hearts are set on what truly is, and although we are sick, weak, and in pain, there is great strength hidden within us. Our soul is sick because she lives in a house of poverty, and matter strikes her eyes in order to blind her.

That’s such a true statement. The only reason we can’t see infinitely, as we can up in the Fullness, is because matter is dense and thick, and it’s slowed down all those vibrations into our apparently material world. It literally makes us blind. We can’t see through walls down here, but I think we can see forever up above.

For this reason, the soul pursues the word. [Okay, so, for this reason, our Ego pursues Logos] and applies it to her eyes as medicine, and she opens her eyes and casts off blindness. After that, if such a one is in ignorance once again, that one is in complete darkness and is a material being. That is why the soul always takes a word and applies it to her eyes as medicine, so that she may be able to see. Then her light may overwhelm the foes that oppose her, and she may blind them with her light, capture them in her presence, make them collapse in exhaustion, and act boldly with her strength and her scepter.

Okay, see, I think this is what we’re supposed to be doing instead of talking back and fighting. We’re supposed to capture them, blind them with the light that exudes from our Self through our eyes by having applied the gnosis to ourselves rather than their bad words that they’re giving us. And they can tell that we are in connection with the Fullness of God when we do that. So we stand in silence, we think on the Fullness, we praise God, we recognize the Third Order powers that live within us, and we look on them with love, and there’s no denying that. It will drive them crazy if they’re in a hateful mood to see the love of God that comes from us. So says me. It goes on to say,

While her enemies look at her in shame, she flees up to her treasure house where her mind is, to her storehouse which is secure.

And that is what? That’s our Self. That’s our encapsulation of the Fullness of God that is within us.

No one in creation has been able to grasp her, for she has taken no stranger into her house. Many of those born in her house oppose her day and night, and they do not rest day or night, for their lust oppresses them. This is why we do not fall asleep and forget about the nets hidden from view that are lying in place to catch us. For if we are caught in a single net, it will swallow us down within it, and water will wash over us and splash into our faces, and we shall be pulled down into the dragnet. We shall not be able to come up from the deep, because the water is high above us, flowing down from above, making our hearts sink down in filthy mud. We shall not be able to get away from them.

Okay, you get that. That’s a warning not to be caught in the lies of this world. And you know what’s going to do that? The news, or social media, or hanging around with the wrong people, or hanging out at bars and getting drunk, or watching ungodly television that is evil. Those are the nets that are strewn in our way to capture us.

Man-eaters will grab us and consume us, and they will enjoy themselves like a fisherman who is casting a hook and line into the water. For a fisherman casts different kinds of bait into the water, because each kind of fish has its own food. The fish smells the food and swims after the fragrance of the food, but when it bites into the bait, the hook hidden within snares it and draws it up by force from the deep water.

You see, that’s us. Why? You get it—we’re the little fishies. And the hooks and the bait are all the things that tempt us, that we want. You know, that expression we still have out of this type of book: We‘ve swallowed those lies, hook, line, and sinker. That’s what this parable is.

Nobody can catch that fish down in the deep water unless a fisherman finds a way to trap it. By tricking the fish with food, the fisherman has caught the fish on the hook.

We live like this in the world, like fish. The adversary is on the lookout for us and is lying in wait for us, like fishermen, to catch us. The adversary is delighted to consume us. He dangles many kinds of food before our eyes, the stuff of this world, because he hopes to make us desire just one kind of food and to taste only a little of it, that he may then catch us with his hidden poison and take us from freedom into slavery. For when he catches us with a single kind of food, we cannot help but desire the rest of the food. In the end, such things become the food of death.

In other words, once you start nibbling on one sort of vice, the other vices become much more appealing and you start eating them. Before you know it, you’re eating the whole banquet of vice and you’re being brought down into the snares of death.

These are the kinds of food with which the devil lies in wait for us. First, he plants pain in your heart so that you feel heartache over something trivial in this life, and he catches us with his poisons. After that, he introduces the desire for an article of clothing so that you will be proud of it. And then, love of money, pride, vanity, envy, rivaling envy, beauty of body, and covetousness. The worst of all of these are ignorance and laziness. All such kinds of food the adversary prepares in an attractive way and spreads it out before the body. The adversary wants to make the thought of the soul turn the soul to some kind of food, and thus he hopes to overwhelm her.

As with a hook, he draws the soul by force, in ignorance, and deceives her until she conceives evil and bears fruit of matter and behaves badly, pursuing many desires and cravings, seduced in ignorance by the pleasure of the flesh.

When I hear this, I just think social media all over the place, right? All this covetousness. Look what I’ve got. Here, I’m posting it. Look what I just bought. Look, I’m posting it. Look what I’m eating. Look, I’m posting it. And all the Selfies, selfies, selfies. Here is a selfie of me here, and here’s a selfie of me there, in order to induce longing in other people, in order to induce jealousy, covetousness. Those are the hooks and the bait to capture people. So, unwittingly, people are putting bait on the hooks of the Demiurge and capturing other people. We certainly do not want to do that. Stay away from Facebook like the plague, Instagram, TikTok. These are not good. So says me.

The soul who has tasted these things has come to realize that sweet passions are fleeting. She has learned about evil, has forsaken these passions, and has adopted a new lifestyle. After her experiences, the soul disdains this life because it lasts for only a time. She seeks the kinds of food that will bring her life, and she leaves behind the food of falsehood. She learns about the light, and she goes about and strips off this world. Her true garment clothes her within, and her bridal gown reveals beauty of mind rather than pride of flesh. She learns about the depth of her being. She runs into her sheepfold as her shepherd stands at the door. In return for all the shame and scorn she experienced in this world, she receives 10,000 times as much grace and glory.

Amen, and praise God to that! I can relate to that. This is true, and the longer you walk in the path of gnosis, the more you will realize this.

The soul returned the body to those who had given it to her. They were ashamed, and those who deal in bodies sat down and wept because they could not do their business with that body, and that was the only commodity they had. They had gone to great pains to shape the body for this soul, and they had intended to bring down the invisible soul.

Okay, so these are the marketers. These are the peddlers of things that they want us to buy, and things they want us to buy into, and they can see they’re not catching us, and it brings them shame because they have lost that fight for our body, for our soul.

They were ashamed of what they had done, for they had lost what they had worked hard to accomplish. They did not realize that the soul has an invisible spiritual body, but they thought, we are her shepherd, and we feed her.

You see, that’s the way it is in the world. That’s why they don’t understand it. They don’t believe there is a Self, or a Fullness of God, or a Father, or a Good Shepherd. They think it’s all fairy tale. They think it’s all made up, and they say rude things about believing in fairy tales, but we know better because we are in touch with our Self and the Fullness of God, with the Father and the Christ. So we know different. And I’ve often used the metaphor, it’s as if we can see what other people cannot see. We’re not making this up. This is not blind faith. When we begin to mine our gnosis, we see. Our eyes are opened, like Saul on the road to Damascus—how the scales fell from his eyes, and suddenly he could see the glory of God and Christ for the first time. We can see it. We’re not guessing it.

They did not realize that she knows another way hidden from them. This is what her true shepherd taught her in knowledge, [which is, of course, in gnosis].

And the Demiurge forgets these things too. The Demiurge is in the same condition as our ego. The Demiurge is the ego of Logos, and so that is the fractal level up from us. We are fractals of that split between the original Aeon, known as Logos, and his ego, which has become marooned down here in this material world. So all these things that it was saying about our soul and our spirit, or our Ego and our Self, it all applies to poor old Demiurge, who’s down here thinking that he’s the god of the world, but he’s only the god of the fallen world. And when we all remember, the Demiurge will also remember.

Those, however, who are ignorant do not seek God, and they do not look for their dwelling place, which is a place of rest, but instead they live like animals. They are more wicked than pagans. To begin with, they do not inquire about God. Their hard-heartedness drags them down, so they act in a cruel manner. Then, if they find someone asking about salvation, in their hardness of heart, they work on that person. If the person keeps on asking, they kill him with their cruelty, and they think they have done something good for themselves. Without a doubt, they are children of the devil. Even pagans give to charity, and they know that God who is in heaven exists, the Father of the universe, exalted over the idols they worship, although they have not heard the word, so as to inquire about the ways of God.

So there’s two levels, you see. There’s those who are ungodly, then there are what this book is calling pagans. These are people who have not heard of the Fullness and the Father and the Christ and so forth, of Logos and gnosis, but yet they have a longing for God. They want God. These are the souls who are looking for God, but do not realize what the right answer is. So these are the people that we could help if they are open, but we can’t be helpful to the God-haters that are spewing poison at us. We can be helpful to the people who are seeking, and simply confused—the pagans.

The mindless person hears the call but is ignorant of the place to which he or she has been called. He has not asked during preaching, where is the temple into which I should go and worship my hope? Such a person is mindless and worse than a pagan, for pagans know the way to their temples of stone, which will perish, and they worship their idol with their hearts set upon it, because this is their hope.

The word has been preached to this mindless person. It has taught him, seek and inquire about the ways you should go, for there is nothing as important as this. So the substance of the hardness of heart strikes the person’s mind with the force of ignorance and the demon of error, and these things prevent the person’s mind from recovering and being capable of working at seeing and understanding hope, and that is the sad condition of these people.

The rational soul, on the other hand, has worked at seeking, and she has learned about God. She has struggled to inquire, enduring bodily distress, wearing out her feet after the preachers, and learning about the inscrutable one.

Oh yeah, in the old days the crowds followed Jesus around. You had to wear out your feet following the preachers, because they were all itinerant; they were all moving about from village to village preaching. Now you can sit and listen to us on a podcast, or watch on YouTube, or go to a local church, which is a fixed place, but it didn’t used to be that way.

She has found her rising, [that is the Self.]

She has come to rest in the one who is at rest, [and that’s the Self resting in Christ.]

She has reclined in the bridal chamber. [The bridal chamber is the union of the Self with the Ego.]

She has eaten of the banquet, [which is the banquet of truth and virtue,] for which she has hungered.

She has partaken of mortal food, [that’s gnosis.]

She has found what she has sought, [that is the Fullness of God.]

She has received rest from her labors, and the light shining on her does not set. [In other words, she has found peace and love.]

To the light belongs the glory, and the power, and the revelation, forever and ever. Amen.

This has been the Authoritative Discourse of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. What did you think? I look forward to your comments.

God bless us all, and onward and upward.

Please leave a book review on amazon

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. I have another treat for you this week, a conversation with my brother Bill and myself concerning what is knowledge? How do we know what is true? This is a field of philosophy known as epistemology. My brother Bill was a philosophy professor. He taught this at the university level for many years. I hope you enjoy this conversation and you learn something from it.

[Cyd] 

Okay, recording in progress. Here we are. Hi, Bill. Welcome back to Gnostic Insights.

[Bill]

Well, it’s nice to be back. I thought of a topic here that we’ve considered for a while. Let’s get it done.

[Cyd]

All right!

[Bill]

Okay. So the question is, what is knowledge? And what is it to really know something to be the case?

[Cyd]

Wait a minute. Is this epistemology? Is that what is meant by epistemology?

[Bill]

That’s right. Theory of knowledge, epistemology. It’s as old as the hills. In fact, the conflict was back with Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle’s saying we can get knowledge, and I’ll explain kind of how we do it, theoretically do that. Plato said, no, you can’t get it that way. You have to know it from the beginning. How about that? That’s what we call our gnosis, right?

[Cyd]

Right. That’s why Plato is included in the scrolls of the Nag Hammadi. Yes.

[Bill]

So the question is, where does gnosis fit in with regard to the knowledge? Okay. That’s the point. So I thought, okay, let’s just take it from the point of the scientific position, because the presumption is, isn’t it, that science gives us knowledge, right? That’s the presumption. So the debates that take place out there, someone says, well, that’s not science, and so therefore they’re negating what’s being said. Okay, let’s get this one answered.

It’s a common belief that scientists believe that scientific method gives us knowledge. And so anything that is gained outside of science is not known. In other words, the word sometimes is dogma, right? The idea, you hold a position, but you can’t verify it scientifically, but you hold it, so you’re being so dogmatic. So let me make this point here.

Here it is. The best that science can really give us is well-founded belief, and I’m going to argue that. So that’s the best. So why do I say that? Well, the scientific method is based on logical principles of modus ponens and modus tollens, okay? And let me explain what that means.

[Cyd]

How do you spell that?

[Bill]

M-O-D-U-S, modus ponens, P-O-N-E-N-S, okay? And tollens, T-O-L-L-E-N-S.

Now, symbolically, okay, I’m going to use words like this, and you’ll get it. You’ll get it for your listeners, by the standards. If P gets you Q, and if you have P, then you have Q. That’s modus ponens. The idea, conditional. If P gets you Q, and you got P, then you have Q. That’s the conclusion.

[Cyd]

You’re saying if P is obliged to bring Q along, then if you don’t have Q, you don’t have P.

[Bill]

Exactly, that’s well said. So in science, the problem occurs, you could put it this way. A problem is created, say that the science, there’s a problem out there that science is trying to resolve. And so it creates a hypothesis, in other words, an explanation for a problem that’s occurring out there, okay? And then science says we test the implications of that hypothesis. What does it tell us to look for?

Okay, so we go looking for that. And it tells you, you got it, okay, you should find an R, an S, a T, a Q, or whatever, right? Whatever it needs. So you’ll go out looking for those implications, and they show up, they’re there, okay. So what you’re doing is supporting the hypothesis. The reason being, how this is, remember back, if P gets you Q, and you don’t have Q, you don’t have P, we understand that. But if P gets you Q, and you have Q, you can’t conclude you have P, you can’t come backwards.

Example, if it’s raining, then the streets are wet. Oh, look, the streets are wet. Well, it must be raining. No, because they can get wet other ways. You can’t come backwards on the conditional, right?

So if the hypothesis implies a bunch of things, and those things are found, you’re supporting your hypothesis, but you can’t come all the way back and say it’s true.

[Cyd]

Hmmm. You’re supporting it, but not proving it?

[Bill]

That’s it exactly, that’s beautifully stated.

All right. So what then occurs, thinking about this now, is that that’s the case for any hypothesis that science proposes, is it can be rich with consequences. It can be rich with what to find. And so what happens is, okay, it’s, look, it’s working out. That implies that, and look, it’s there, and it’s there, and it’s there, it’s there, anything you put, it’s there. So what’s happening, you’re supporting your hypothesis, but you still aren’t proving it.

So the idea is a well-founded, a well-founded hypothesis becomes a theory at best. It becomes a well-founded theory because it continues to work out, but you’ll never get the theory to utter truth. You’ll never know it to be the case.

So that’s the logic of the scientific method. But what happens is this—scientists come up with hypotheses, they become theories, they become really well-founded theories. And then what they do is they, they get a hold of it and say, oh, oh, we can’t let this happen. So they turn their theories into dogma. That’s not science! So you pick any major theory, like general theory of relativity, oh, it’s beautifully supported, right? Some will say, you ask a scientist, oh yeah, it worked. Guess what? There may be a consequence down the line that defeats it. That’s why it’s a great theory so far. It hasn’t been defeated.

Quantum mechanics, to point that out, quantum theory and so forth. They’re just theories. They are, they are possibly false.

[Cyd]

Now you’re saying that this is by definition the way science works and hypotheses and whatnot. It’s not just that you’re some sort of naysayer that doesn’t want to accept conclusions.

[Bill]

No, what I will say is that you will rarely meet a scientist that’s willing to give up a theory. That’s really, in other words, a theory that’s holding on. For example, how about climate change? They’re not willing to give up, give up climate change because it’s become dogmatic. When in fact it should be open continuously for investigation, implications being found and tested. So science by its very nature at its best gives us well-founded theories that may later turn out to be false. That’s science.

But scientists generally won’t, they don’t want that because they don’t want defeatablity of something that they absolutely love. If I told you, if I asked a scientist, so someday, you know, general theory of relativity may turn out to be false. It may turn out to be false. And they say, what? I don’t think so. Well, of course they don’t think so. So again, that’s the dogmatic point.

So what critics of the Gnostic gospel would say, well, this is not science. You can’t prove the Gnostic gospel. You can’t prove everything you got into the works there, Cyd. Your answer is, I don’t have to prove it because it is dogma. They say, oh, you used the word dogma. So it may not be true. That’s right. It’s Gnostic—meaning we knew it all along. Back to the Plato point.

Plato said, you can’t have knowledge unless you’ve known it all along. Aristotle would say, we can do it. We can prove it. So he would believe in the scientific method. Aristotle would believe in that. He would talk about consequences, testability and all that. Verification, how much do you need to verify? And that became the problem in epistemology is how much do you need in order to prove something to be the case? You can’t. The way I just described it, you can’t. So Plato, sitting here, eh, you’ve known it all along, if you know. So knowledge has to be known all along, had to be known all along, but it’s not possible to say that you’ve achieved knowledge from a belief. You can support a belief. You can build on it.

Now, when I say there is some knowledge that we would say is provable—that would be logic, mathematical proofs, follow? Those kinds of things. Yeah, we can know a certain logical position or certain mathematical proof. That’s fine at that level. Because it’s working within a system. But what we’re describing out here in terms of the world or what science does, it’s going beyond the mathematics. It’s saying this is the way the universe is. And as such, therefore, it’ll never be known through science.

[Cyd]

Okay. Now back to the Plato and Aristotle idea. How would, okay, Plato says you can’t really know it unless you have the gnosis of it from the beginning.

[Bill]

Yes.

[Cyd]

But how does a person know that they had that? I mean, maybe they picked it up somewhere along the line.

[Bill]

Well, that’s what the scientists will throw at you. That’s the point. That’s the battle. How do you know that it’s gnosis? No simple answer to that, except, you know it.

[Cyd]

So when someone says it’s obvious, that gives you a clue that it’s actually known. Well, like sometimes, sometimes there are scientific experiments on ridiculous things, like do dogs like to have treats? And so you’ll spend all this money and set up these things to see if dogs like treats, but other people might say, well, you didn’t even ever have to do that because obviously dogs like treats. Is this at all applicable to our discussion or is that something else?

[Bill]

No, no, that’s, that’s good. Now, of course the debate would be about that, right? Maybe some dogs don’t. It takes just one dog to not like a treat. But see, that’s the way they’d respond to it. Or the word obvious in the general context—when somebody says it’s obvious, the joke is, well, obviously, meaning you should get it or not. That’s generally how it’s used in that loose term.

But if in the more profound way, which you were describing, something is obvious means yes, it’s known, period. Yeah. And that’s where the discussion comes in.

[Cyd]

Well, okay. So what, so give me an example of something that is obvious and that is known that would be irrefutably platonic.

[Bill]

The Gnostic gospel.

[Cyd]

(laughing) Says a true believer.

[Bill]

Well, true believer. See, the point is, why does one be a true believer? Unless, you know, it might be true.

See, that’s the debate. There’s plenty of dogma out in the world that is not the case. It’s just dogmatic. I mean, I just gave you one–climate change. They won’t give it up. It’s dogma if they’re not going to test the theory.

Yeah. So we’re in an arena here.  You either get it or you know. Yes. Right. But that would always be the question, Cyd, that would be thrown at the Gnostic gospels. You’re going to have those out there, they’re going to say it’s not proven. And so what do you need to prove? How are you going to prove it if it’s unprovable and just known? And that’s the gnosis part. Okay. So there it’s a conflict.

[Cyd]

That’s the debate out there. Well, it does seem to boil down to just a felt belief, but that doesn’t seem to be good enough. Correct. Uh, how can it just be a felt sense? Because if that were the case, then all the deluded people would have a validity in their delusions.

[Bill]

Well, yeah. See, you’re raising the point and that’s where scientists come back at you. Yeah. When they come back at you, you say, well, guess what? You, you don’t give us knowledge either. So where are you going?

Well, we’re testable.

(laughing) Okay, fine. But you still can’t get to knowledge.

That’s thousands of years old what we’re describing. That’s epistemology. How do you know what you know. And, so the claim is if you actually know, you know it inherently.

[Cyd]

Well, I know that’s what I’m saying, that’s what I mean when I’m saying it, it’s obvious or self-evident, but then again, anybody who’s deluded would say the same thing.

[Bill]

Sure. But again, that’s at that level. Now when you use the word obvious, I gave you the two distinctions—there is the colloquially obvious and then there’s the profound obvious. And I said, well, how do you distinguish? How do you distinguish someone that’s delusional from someone that’s got some credible insight?

Yeah. And what is the word? What’s the word insight? Think about it. In-sight. Yeah. Gnosis.

Gnostic. Right. So, yes, Cyd, the Gnostic gospel is not per se provable the same way that Aristotle’s position about knowledge couldn’t get provability either. So we’re back to Plato.

[Cyd]

Ah, so that’s the great conflict. Hmm. Hmm. So you’re saying that our position is as valid as anybody’s scientific position.

[Bill]

We’re claiming it. Certainly. Now here’s something about the Gnostic gospel, that’s a nice, beautiful mix is that it logically follows. See, once you take the position, it’s Gnosis and known, everything else follows. It follows logically. So it’s using logical principle. You would follow modus ponens and modus tollen. I mean the logic. So it’s not just, you know, so ephemeral. No. Once you’ve got the basic point where it follows and it follows and it goes and it goes and it becomes clearer and clearer. The Gnosis is there.

[Cyd]

Yeah. So my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, for example, begins with that beginning belief that consciousness is inherent and is the base state of everything. And then the question is, how does it get down to us? And, uh, are we conscious? Are the dogs conscious? And it’s logical because it keeps showing how it is that it travels—that it travels down. And then the way we behave as a result of that consciousness and all of the various claims, virtue versus vice, for example. Now where does virtue versus vice fall in this level of epistemology? Is that a… that would seem to me to be a self evident claim.

[Bill]

Yes, it is. That’s right. There’s no provability to what it’s not. You’re not proving what is the virtue and what is the vice. You don’t have to. It’s obvious.

[Cyd]

Yes. And the results from virtue versus vice are so different. They’re so polar opposite that, that it seems to prove it’s obvious. It seems to prove itself, but how is it that it doesn’t prove itself?

[Bill]

Well, again, it’s obvious. (laughing)  So, again, these are not provability points because what do you have to prove? See, we’re moving in the arena of ethics now—ethical theories. There are many attempted ethical theories. I used to teach ethics, you know, ethical theories and conclusions from ethical theories–utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism and majority approval and all of that. The one that landed was moral intuition –there’s that word intuition. So the virtues would come out of morally intuitive individuals.

[Cyd]

Ah, so you’re saying that intuition is a chief tool of gnosis.

[Bill]

Yes! Right. And we can expand the notion of intuition and say, we believe in the Gnostic gospel because it’s intuitive.

[Cyd]

Yes. Now, what about people that don’t believe it and don’t recognize it intuitively?

[Bill]

Well, yeah. Our answer from a Gnostic position is, oh, those memes around that shroud—that shroud is really covering that ego there, isn’t it?

[Cyd]

The egoic shroud is blanking out the truth.

[Bill]

Yes. Yeah. In fact, gosh—look at the Demiurge.

[Cyd]

He’s in the same boat, poor guy.

[Bill]

Yes, same boat! In fact, he can do some nasty things, right? So he’s really, he’s shrouded out there a little bit.

[Cyd]

Yeah. That’s interesting. Well, I’m wondering what part of our psychological makeup houses the intuition. Is it part of the Self? Is it the better half of Logos? Is it excluded from the ego? Does the ego have no intuition?  I would think it would.

[Bill]

Okay. Great point. Yes. The virtue and all that comes from Self. That’s top down. That’s the soul…

[Cyd]

The embodiment of the body. The Fullness.

[Bill]

Yah. So that’s that.  The ego we come in with is our identity. Right.

[Cyd]

And what’s intuition, where does it live?

[Bill]

Uh, well, an intuition is a tapping in of the ego to the Self. I mean, remember, we want a coherent combination. So here we are this hybrid—we have an ego and we have a Self.  

[Cyd]

And we have a physical, as well.

[Bill]

Yes. And a physical—that’s the hybridized aspect. And we say that when our egos are consistent with the Self, that is, what the Self brings us—that when we’re at that point we’re balanced. We have that understanding at that point. As we gain the memes and delusions,  deluded memes and so forth like that, what that does, it sort of separates us from our Self. And that’s why people say, gee, I’m in conflict with my Self. Notice that when I say I’m in conflict with my Self is exactly right.

[Cyd]

Right. They’re in conflict with their Self says the ego. Yeah, exactly.

[Bill]

Right.

[Cyd]

But yet we, I doubt that it’s a by-product of the capabilities of the body of the material in any sense.

[Bill]

No, no.

[Cyd]

So you’re thinking it arises from our Self. No—it arises from our ego as it searches for this…

[Bill]

We come as a unit. So we don’t, we don’t come disconnected. We come in as a unit here. And, but it’s the ego in this fallen world that has the potential to drop away. That’s all.

[Cyd]

But I’m just wondering about the intuition. Well, where does it live? Is it the Self pulling ego up? You know, we think of intuition as us seeking—as an outward expression—but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s the higher Self pulling the ego toward it. You know, I think of these things as in and outs. Does that make any sense to you the way I’m putting it?

[Bill]

Yeah. Well, this question we’re raising here is the same for the Aeons. They have an ego and they have a Self. Now, they’re coherent, beautifully coherent.

[Cyd]

I don’t think they need intuition because it’s all so obvious in the Fullness.

[Bill]

Well, they are pure intuition. There’s no distinction to be made. And ultimately in the third economy, when we’re all back up there again, ego and our Self will be just beautifully connected…

[Cyd}

… united and our intuition will be going full blast. I’m starting to think that the intuition is actually housed in the higher Self and that it’s the drawing. It’s the drawing towards. It’s Logos continuing to hold onto the Demiurge, even though the Demiurge doesn’t feel it or recognize it.

[Bill]

I agree. And that would be that the fractals in our case, where we don’t recognize that our Selves are doing it for us.

[Cyd]

Right. Right. But definitely it’s a higher thing into it.

[Bill]

Okay.

[Cyd]

And did, did Plato actually use the word intuition or anything like that? Did he talk about this?

[Bill]

(laughing) I don’t know, even in translation.

[Cyd]

All right.

[Bill]

All right. But, but you see what he did, to have knowledge, it has to be inherent.  And of course the reaction to Plato—Aristotle went on from there and science comes out of Aristotle to a point. And then of course, it’s not entirely there. He’s got his issues and mistakes, theoretically.  So, naturally Aristotle was the one that caught on because he would talk about what is knowledge and how we can get it and how we can gain it and all of that. And therefore scientists latch onto that point. Here’s how we get it. Here’s how we get it. So it’s very modernized Aristotle in the present era.

Plato didn’t come along afterwards. People aren’t going, well, I actually see that. Actually it’s inherent. And yet, where is knowledge? Well, Plato, you know, he believed it’s direct. That’s where it comes from. It’s inherent.

[Cyd]

(laughing) Hey, all right. So let me, we had discussed this earlier and I have some notes. Let me see if I’ve got it all.

Okay. Science is theory only not knowledge. Okay.

[Bill]

Science gives us theory, right? Scientific method gives us theory.

[Cyd]

All right. And scientific method has no capability of verifying consciousness because there is no experiment that can prove consciousness.

[Bill]

Right. But, let’s add an interesting point to that–even within the realm of scientists, notice they are beginning to talk about the grounding of consciousness. Now we would say they’re getting their insight, their cells are starting to click into more. There are scientists, at least physicists are beginning to see that maybe consciousness is the ground. But you can’t prove it. And therefore it’s not known per se.

[Cyd]

I read an article just this morning that’s in this week’s science news concerning consciousness, concerning proving consciousness and these different scientists, what they think consciousness begins with and what is required for consciousness and all this kind of stuff. It’s so sad. One of the points in the article was that premature babies were never given anesthetics during operations because they were thought to be unconscious.  And when they showed signs of pain and distress, it was chalked up as just reflex. I’ve heard that so often.

[Bill]

And none of that was based on knowledge. See, they were assuming certain things.

[Cyd]

They were assuming, right. Right, because what could it be based on? Did you see that article?

[Bill]

Oh, I did. I used to, with my birthing and bonding and early child development stuff, I brought that notion—how you treat a baby. You don’t do it that way and so forth because the kind of surgical things they would do to babies and so forth without anesthetics.

[Cyd]

Well, well, for example, by the way, second and third term abortions, where they cut up the baby inside the mother to suck it out, that baby is conscious and feeling. Yes. The reflexes indicate, you know, as he’s being dismembered.

[Bill]

Yes. In order for them to justify the point, they therefore have to say they can’t be conscious. See, it’s like, it’s their justification for not worrying about it. But that’s not known. And so they’re acting, now let’s use the word, they’re not acting scientifically.

[Cyd]

No, they’re not acting scientifically.

[Bill]

Yeah. That’s right. They are dogmatic.

[Cyd]

They’re rationalizing things that can’t be known at all in order to assuage their conscience.

[Bill]

Yeah. Well, the thing is, good point, assuage their conscience. They try to keep themselves separate from their Self, right?

[Cyd]

Yes. And of course, not just babies, but lab animals, it’s the whole same thing.

[Bill]

Oh, it’s the whole thing. That’s right, Cyd.

[Cyd]

All right. Well, we are nearing the end of this Zoom session, Bill, believe it or not, already. But do you have any last thoughts that we should add in before we close it?

[Bill]

Uh, no. We’ve opened doors. I mean, some of your listeners are gonna hopefully respond and say, well, well, well, question this, question that.

[Cyd]

Okay. Would you repeat for me the definition of those two Latin phrases you opened with that I asked for the spelling?

[Bill]

Modus ponens and modus tollens?

[Cyd]

Yes, that is completely unfamiliar to me. Say it once more and we’ll close with that.

[Bill]

Okay. Modus ponens is the logical position that if P gets you Q, and you have P, then you get Q. If P implies Q, you’ve got P, then you have Q. That’s modus ponens. Modus tollens says, if P implies Q, oh, we don’t have Q, well, then we can’t have P. Otherwise we’d have Q. See, if P gets you Q and you don’t have Q, then it means you don’t have P.

[Cyd]

All right. And are those both valid positions? What does that have to do with the scientific method?

[Bill]

Those are logical truths that are at the heart of the scientific method. Let me repeat the scientific method. A problem occurs, a hypothesis is created as an explanation. We test the hypothesis using modus ponens. If the hypothesis is true, then we can expect this, and this, and this. These are implications.

[Cyd]

Those are all the Qs. The P is the hypothesis, and the Q is the things you’re looking for.

[Bill]

So we go and look for them. What happens when you’re looking, okay, and they’re working out, but that doesn’t prove the hypothesis because you can’t come backwards on a conditional. In other words, if P gets you Q, and you have Q, you can’t conclude you have P.

[Cyd]

So there’s not an equivalent. You’re saying that’s an illogical position. Whereas those first two, ponens and tollens, are logical and self-evidentiary.

[Bill]

That’s right. They’re at the absolute heart of logic, yes.

[Cyd]

And by the way, in this Gnosticism that we discuss here at Gnostic Insights, we talk about Logos, the Aeon known as Logos, which is the same word for logic. So logic is one of these self-evidentiary pieces of gnosis that obviously Plato would approve of.

[Bill]

Absolutely, and Logos would apply the modus ponens and modus tollens, yes.

[Cyd]

Okay, but he would, and Logos would say, but you can’t go backwards and conclude that anything about P, if you…

[Bill]

If you, see, if P gets you Q—But if you have Q, it doesn’t prove that you have P.

Right, now watch this again. Okay. If P gets you—if it’s raining, then the streets are wet. The streets are wet. Oh, we can conclude it’s raining. No, the streets can get wet other ways. You can’t come backwards.

[Cyd]

Okay. So can we use logic to conclude the presence of the Fullness of God?

[Bill]

Probably not technically, because our ground point is the Father is consciousness. That’s our starting point, and that’s not provable. It’s inherent. It is intuitive, but it’s not scientifically provable.

[Cyd]

Okay, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of. (laughing)

[Bill]

(laughing) That is nothing to be ashamed of, and that’s what knowledge is. It’s known for being… it’s inherent, and that’s the debate against it. They say, well, again, you raised it. What makes someone delusional and someone else knowledgeable, right?

And the only answer we can give, you get it? Is gnosis is known.

[Cyd]

That’s it. Well, Jesus talked about, let’s see, how did he put it? That you shall know them by their fruits.

So Jesus said, if you know God, and you are one who walks with God, then the fruits of your efforts will be qualitatively different than the fruits of the efforts of those who do not know God.

[Bill]

A qualitative difference is another way of saying, inherent—you know because you know.

[Cyd]

Okay, all right, good. Well, we’re doing the best we can to explain this. This is hard, but I’m sure that most people and most listeners, when we hear things about P gets you Q, our eyes just cross, and sadly enough for you logicians.

But I think, but you know, you can understand. Yeah.

[Bill]

That’s there, you understand.

[Cyd]

(laughing) Yes, I understand, because I follow Logos. I like Plato. All right, very good, Bill.

Well, thank you so much for sharing this with us. I look forward to hearing what the listeners think. Listen, people, what do you all think? Are you getting this? Do you have any other questions to ask Bill?

[Bill]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, when you hear, there should be questions. Okay, that’s great.

[Cyd]

Well, please tell me what you thought of this conversation. Until next week, God bless us all, and onward and upward.

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today we’re going to revisit the idea of evolution. You know, religious people are usually mocked by being unscientific for not believing in Darwinian evolution. Well, I’m a highly educated person and I don’t believe in Darwinian evolution. It’s an absurd theory that has never been proven.

My brother, Dr. Bill Puett, is also a PhD. He’s what’s called a professor emeritus, which means that he’s a retired full professor who taught at the university level for a full career. He doesn’t believe in evolution either.

Today we’re going to share with you another conversation that I had just this week concerning evolution with my brother on the telephone. The article that prompted this discussion of ours was published last week on the website called Aeon, and it’s an essay called Why Birds Don’t Buy Bentleys and Why Humans Will Never Fly. And it was written by a scholar named Anton Martino-Truswell, an evolutionary biologist, author, and member of the Sydney Policy Lab and School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney. He writes on human culture and society, evolution, and behavior at his substack, which is called The Village Green.

Bill and I both read his article and came away with a number of criticisms of the article. Mine had to do with the little nuts and bolts of particular claims, but Bill’s observation of the article was profound and overarching from the Gnostic point of view. And so I’m going to share with you Dr. Truswell’s article and then our reaction to it.

Now before I start with that, I would like to remind you that I’ve been writing about evolution for many years, beginning with an article I wrote called A Simple Explanation of Tuskless Elephants’ Super-Quick Evolution that I wrote on November 11th of 2018 on the Simple Explanation blog, and it is still posted there if you want to go to the Simple Explanation blog and read it there. But I covered that article here at Gnostic Insights in October of 2021, and then I repeated it in October of 2023.

So if you would like to read my original articles concerning evolution in detail, I recommend that you go to my GnosticInsights.com webpage and you do a search for the podcast called Gnostic Evolution in the Beginning, and that was posted on October 21st, 2023. And this is a very long and quite detailed theory of evolution that is not Darwinian.

You know, I don’t know why people get stuck on these old theories. Scholars are very habitual, because if you change one of the basic theories, then all of their scholarship goes out the window. Then what are they teaching anymore? They don’t know what to teach; they don’t know what to write about. People would rather harken back to this old theory of Darwin, which is about as outdated as the original evolutionary theory of Lamarck. So I’m inviting you to open your minds today and think of a different way of looking at evolution.

Then I broadcasted a second podcast the very next week on October 28th of 2023 called Evolution and Conscious Design. And again, you can find that at GnosticInsights.com.

First off, let me repeat something out of one of those original broadcasts.

There are just a couple of basic ways you can think about evolution. As commonly taught in school, “scientific” evolution explains the tremendous diversity of life on Earth as lucky mutations that add up to great results. Darwinism promotes the idea that mutations and mechanisms morph into increasingly sophisticated life forms, because genetic goof-ups allow the ones who change to better survive and dominate those who stayed true to form. These lucky mutations keep going in the same lucky direction until there are so many of them that they add up to a new and improved creature. And now they are “evolved.”

Boy, that article I posted in October 21st of 2023, and the transcript to that podcast has lots of illustrations and lots of embedded videos. It’s an excellent discussion of a criticism of Darwinian evolution, and I highly recommend that you go to it.

And now on to this week’s discussion of why birds don’t buy Bentleys. Let me begin by reading some excerpts from the Aeon article so you can hear Dr. Truswell’s thesis.

Culture and its transmission from generation to generation is the defining feature of humanity. It is perhaps the best candidate for the thing that separates us from other beasts. Though there are other species that have been shown to hand down accumulated knowledge, including chimps, who show some evidence for cultural transmission of tool use, no other animal approaches our ability to layer breakthrough upon breakthrough in such a way. And certainly no other animal does it with the conscious intent to lift future communities beyond the achievements that came before. That is a human distinction, if ever there were one.

Why has no other animal evolved this demonstrably useful ability? There are lots of intelligent animal candidates, but most have some straightforward biological reality holding them back. Take the octopodes, famously intelligent and with a rich visual communication system in their incredible instantaneous color changes, but their very short lifespans, coupled with rapid senescence and death after a single mating and clutch of eggs, leaves little time for a parent to hand on knowledge to offspring.

Most fish and reptiles face a similar challenge, though they do not die after reproducing like octopodes, they do tend to produce large clutches of eggs that hatch and mature without much, if any, parental input, relying on these statistics of a very large clutch size to ensure a few offspring reach adulthood. Birds are the real quandary. The philosopher and biologist Peter Godfrey Smith points to birds as the expected place to find another species treading the same path that we humans have, not least because they already come with several of the important adaptations that made cultural sharing possible for us.

Complex brains, long lives, strong parental care of offspring in most species, and robust communication.

With all of those advantages, why don’t birds have complex culture like we do? Why do they not write technical manuals and make art and argue over economic policy? Why do they not have a market economy with not only goods for trade, but luxury goods whose value relies on concepts rather than raw usefulness? Why don’t birds drive Bentleys?

So that’s his setup for this essay. He goes on to say,

Natural selection and by extension evolution, is a force with no foresight. It responds to the challenges that a species is currently facing. It does not and cannot see broad sunlit uplands on the horizon and move toward them. This is because selection is a game of elimination. It happens when individuals die without reproducing or having reproduced less than their neighbors. In each generation, that which is unsuccessful is culled by natural selection and that which is successful endures. Occasionally, a random mutation or fortuitous combination of genes produces a family offshoot that is even more successful than its ancestors and cousins, resulting in higher rates of reproduction or longer lives, which allow more reproduction or higher offspring survival, who in turn reproduce more. The consequences of this is that most evolutionary change must happen as a result of a push rather than a pull. A species’ traits change because they are currently inadequate and being eliminated by selection rather than being pulled toward a better alternative.

So already my Gnostic alarm bells are going off  full blast. And then there’s many pages about the evolutionary push and pull and what causes some species to be caught in troughs of non-evolutionary change. Then he begins speaking about birds and that birds is an incredible adaptation.

It opens an entire third dimension of free movement to species capable of flying. First and foremost, this is game changing for a prey animal. Being able to escape a predator by traveling in a direction the predator is incapable of going, namely up, is a huge selection advantage. A flying animal is at risk of consistent predation only from other flying animals, which are fundamentally rare.

Then he goes down another couple of pages and he says that,

Flight is an evolutionary black hole. It is a gravitational well with no bottom, a trait so powerfully effective at improving survival and reproduction that it plunges the species into a well of easy life and high fitness from which there is no escape. Or to return to more conventional evolutionary language, it relieves an incomparable amount of selection pressure that might drive a species to alternative traits.

So basically, he’s saying that once birds evolved flight, they stopped evolving traits that would cause them to adapt better or to form culture. Quoting again,

Everything that is true about flight’s incredible selection benefit is true about human culture. Bipedalism that frees up hands to make machines and to write comes at the cost of evolving odd long feet and an upright posture that causes back pain and makes childbirth dangerous. And of course, four limbs hosting handy hands become unsuitable for evolving into wings for flight. Intelligence, sociability, and many of the other traits we rely on for our cultural abilities are expensive in energy and survival terms. In evolutionary terms, that means they need to be providing a lot of benefit to be worth that cost. In order for that to be the case, there has to be a lot of room for improvement. There has to be a lot of evolutionary pressure. Down at the bottom of the black hole of flight, the pressure is just too low for the trade-offs to be worthwhile.

Humans being slow, flightless, hairless, clawless apes had a huge amount to gain by evolving the tools of cultural transmission. Birds flying, living long lives of relative ease do not feel the same pressure. It is probably the case that our cultural abilities are also a black hole in evolution.

Everything that is true about flight’s incredible selection benefit is true about human culture. We have also fallen down into an impossibly steep slope of selection to arrive at the incredible complexity of human life today. [Then he says,] I cannot fathom what set of circumstances would cause us to evolve away from this complexity.

Okay. Well I can. So that is the end of quoting from his article, which if you want to read in its fullness, you can find at aeon.co/essays/why birds don’t buy Bentleys and we humans will never fly. The link’s in the transcript to this episode here.

So this article prompted a long discussion between my brother and myself that again I happen to be capturing to share with you today. So let’s get to it.

[Cyd]  Okay, now we’re recording. Well, hello, Billy.

[Bill]  Hi, Cyd. I want to talk with you about that bird article– Why birds don’t buy Bentleys.

Yes. And I thought you did a great job of introducing your criticism of that particular article. So I’m thinking, go ahead and go ahead and review your criticism and all that, you know, and then I’ll, we’ll interact. I have some ideas, obviously.

[Cyd]  Well, I tell you, before I review my criticisms, would you like to give the Reader’s Digest version of what the article was proposing?

[Bill]  Okay. Well, yeah, Reader’s Digest, yes. The article is a hardcore evolutionary article, so all organisms have evolved to the point they evolved to, and for many of them, they’ve evolved into a corner. And if they’re in a corner, they can’t get out of it.

[Cyd]  Oh, right. And the article says, they call it a valley, a gravitational well.

[Bill]  Right. So birds have gotten to the point, you know, where they can fly. Okay. And here we are, we won’t be able to fly as human beings. So we’re down in those arenas there. And it was trying to describe from an evolution perspective, why they can’t get out.

[Cyd]  Oh, because it had to do with culture. The question was, why do birds not drive Bentleys? In other words, human beings seem to be the only creatures on the planet that have evolved a culture, where they have social order, and they invent things, and they do things like agriculture and manufacturing and things like that. And birds don’t need to do that because they can fly. So what needs do they have? I guess, mainly it was suggesting that humans evolved culture and whatnot in order to escape predators, in order to be able to breed and pass on their genes. And birds didn’t have to do that because they could just fly away from predators.

[Bill]  Wasn’t that his basic idea?

[Cyd]  That’s the basic idea. Right.

[Bill]  And how you respond, you made the point, well, he’s mistaken about organisms, they do have culture. And then you went on to describe, four examples.

[Cyd]  Oh, go ahead.

[Bill]  No, no, go ahead.

[Cyd]  Okay. So for example, his basic premise that only humans have culture isn’t true. Because for example, insects have a lot of culture, I would say, ants, bees, and termites, especially, they communicate obviously, in great detail. They farm–ants actually farm aphids to eat them. And they breed them. So they farm and eat them.

Obviously, ants, bees, and termites build great structures, huge cities that they live in. And, and of course, they have the culture of warfare, they build armies, and they go to war for whatever purpose they have with others of their kind.

And tools, I would say that they do use tools. They said humans were the only ones that use tools. But that’s clearly not true. Because, for example, birds—crows use tools. Crows can use sticks, shapes sticks into probes to go down into termite hills and anthills in order to fish for ants and termites. So they are able to construct tools for those kinds of purposes. And birds, all birds, construct—they make their nests, they choose just the right kind of straw and just the right kind of sticks, and they decide where it’s going to be a safe place to hang it. So they do a lot of, I would say, construction with tools.

And so that was the easiest one. But I also would refute the notion that animals don’t have culture, because I would say that domesticated animals, of course, I’m particular to cats and dogs, but dogs are extremely successful in the, even in the manner, evolutionary manner that the author talked about where he defined success as the ability to thrive and proliferate with good adaptations. And dogs have done that tremendously well. Yes, with some help from the humans, pushing this and that with their breeding, but still the animals have adapted to our culture. And I would say they have human culture. They understand us, they can understand our words. They’re not just trainable and to order them about. I know that my dogs think and evaluate any command I give them. They certainly think and evaluate whether that’s a good idea or not. And I’d call that culture. I’d say they plugged into human culture rather than merely extending the wolf culture. But of course, wolves have culture too. It’s crazy to say that wolves don’t have a society. Okay.

[Bill]  That’s right. No, that’s great. That’s right on the point.

And, what you’ve been describing, the hens and the dogs and the birds and what have you, is that these are describable, but I will bet that a huge number of beings, organisms, so forth, have their respective cultures that we haven’t defined out. We haven’t clicked in. We’re trying to put it in human terms, right?

[Cyd]  Right.

[Bill]  Well, they have their own shtick. They know what they’re doing.

[Cyd]  Right. And we just can’t recognize it.

Oh! And what about schools of fish and flocks of birds? The way they move all together and whatnot is incredible. We can’t do that. So, they’re more evolved in that sense.

[Bill]  I’d even pick out one of your favorites—slime molds. Talk about cooperation.  Oh yeah! So his basic point, you know, again—he’s a hardcore evolutionist. He has to explain it, but he can’t give the movements his meaning. They didn’t become this because they needed to be that.  He’s trying to describe it as survivability. More of that kind, and so forth. From his point of view, that’s where it’s coming from.

So, let me take another tact here. Well, not another tact—what we call the Gnostic position. Okay. I mean, Gnosticism technically doesn’t talk about evolution per se, not that kind. What we call the Second Order, of course, all Second Order, they’re from the Aeonic—their Aeonic inheritance.

So it’s all there. In fact, we talk about evolution as a time issue going over it.  Well, there’s no time. It’s all done. It’s already done. So, we use the notion of time because that’s the way we relate in this world. But, so evolution requires time.

[Cyd]  Oh! I see. Evolution requires time. That’s a good point because you’re saying it’s all there. There is no time. So you can’t have evolution based upon time. Oh, wow. That’s profound. That’s basic, isn’t it? Yes.

[Bill]  So, so yeah, so back to, so what we have is intelligent design. Yes. That’s the Aeonic and it’s right from the beginning.

[Cyd]  Right, right, right, right. And the Tripartite Tractate, the way it describes the Second Order Powers coming to Earth, it’s very cool because it said that we were sent down from the smallest to the largest, each with our own jobs to do. And so it’s not that things are evolving from bacteria and then becoming more and more complex and larger and larger aggregates. It’s just the tiny guys come in first to make the base. It’s the hierarchical concept, not that the little guys are less evolved or less important, but you know, you can’t have the fish until the plankton come in. So the plankton have to come before the fish, so to speak, as far as being, as far as appearing.

[Bill]  With our understanding of time, yes. Yes. So we’re describing it that way. Yeah.

[Cyd]  Okay, but listen. Your understanding of no such thing as time—that everything is already there…  You’re believing in that static jello universe I talk about basically. So, well, then how does that appear? How does it appear that the small things come first and then the larger and larger things appear the way they seem to in our earthly “evolution”? How is that if it’s a static universe?

[Bill]  Well, because that’s the “second economy” in this Fallen existence and we’re connected to the “material.”  And so we’ve working within this arena, which is a time arena as far as our feeling of it.

[Cyd]  Okay. So that’s the second economy—it appears to have time.

[Bill]  That’s right. And it’s organized by the Demiurge. We’re connected into the, again, that connection is, we’re experiencing “time” that way when in fact the first economy is timeless and the third economy will be no time. Right. So it’s just the second economy that appears the way it does.

[Cyd]  Right. Okay. Oh, okay. 

[Let me drop in this quick explanation that the first economy is what the Tripartite Tractate calls the original Fullness of God hierarchy. Then our apparently material cosmos is called the second economy. And the third economy is where we all wind up after the second economy passes away.]

So that’s from the big bang, so to speak, up until the Second Coming [of Christ] in the collapse or after the Second Coming in the collapse, that is, that’s the second economy that we live in. That’s our apparent universe that we live in. And it does seem to have time, although you and I were discussing the other day, the difference between time and sequence.

[Bill]  Yes. Yes. We would already say sequence is understood in time, you know, that that’s the way we make sense of it in this fallen existence here. But it’s only sequence. Right. Again, the consciousness goes through the jello universe.

[Cyd]  Okay. Right. It’s swimming through that already existent universe. That’s right. Going from choice point to choice point using free will, but it’s all there. It’s all laid out in advance.

[Bill]  Yes.

[Cyd]  Yeah. And in the first economy, everything that comes to appear to us in the second economy is already preexistent. That’s what the Fullness of God is—it’s all of the preexisting forms that will ever come to be… You and I, we, I keep getting hung up on that. 

[Bill] It doesn’t have consciousness in life. 

[Cyd]  But it is somehow preexistent in the first order because it’s part of this creation. And everything that’s part of this creation was imagined, obviously, in the Fullness of God. Was it not? Well, it’s all, it’s conceptual. We’ve talked about that before.

[Bill]  Alright.

[Cyd]  It’s conceptual. Right. Okay.

[Bill]  So let me go to your point. Fullness is fullness.

[Cyd]  Which means it’s everything.

[Bill]  It’s everything. And it’s done. In the third economy, we’re back to fullness.

[Cyd]  Right. We’re back to fullness, but we’re the third economy and we’re not back to the first economy, which was before we all came around and had our second economy experiences. We get to take those memories and associations with us into the third economy.

[Bill]  Right.

[Cyd]  Nice.

[Bill]  So that’s the basic point, Cyd, you know—my basic response to that article. On one level, you’ve explained even in an evolutionary sense how he’s wrong.

[Cyd]  Yeah.

[Bill]  Okay. So that, you know, we’re taking his assumptions there, and then we take the next step to the Gnostic position.

[Cyd]  That’s great, Bill. In fact, you’re pulling it together in that more profound sense, I believe. Seems to make my little quibbles with the article irrelevant, basically.

[Bill]  No, it’s not irrelevant. You’re responding as if he’s sitting there. You’re responding to him. He’s not going to the Gnostic side. You’re responding to him. How would he respond, now that you’re at that particular technical level. Okay. I’m at your level now. How do you explain that?

Cyd:  Right.

[Bill]  Yes. I thought that was very good.

[Cyd]  Here’s something else to say about the article. In the article, the author said that it’s unfathomable—he used the term unfathomable—to imagine human culture de-evolving, because we’ve gone down into this evolutionary well of perfection, basically. And I also quibbled with that, so I wasn’t just quibbling about the insects and the dogs and cats and the birds.

It’s not true. I can fathom society de-evolving in that if we lose our technical aspect, which has become so huge since the industrial revolution, if we go back to pre-industrial revolution, our current culture will de-evolve back to prior to the industrial revolution.

And how does that happen? Well, that’s very easy. An electromagnetic pulse, plasma ejection from the sun, wiping out all of our satellites or blowing up our electrical substations, even beyond people with malfeasance in their hearts, let’s say, guerrilla warfare against the electrical grid to plunge us all into darkness. That could be on someone’s mind. And that’s all it’s going to take. We’re just going to come back. We’re just going to go back down to pre-electricity and our culture will de-evolve to the dark ages immediately.

[Bill]  Right. Well, again, you’re responding at his level. That’s right. At his level. Right.

[Cyd]  No long range communication, roving bands of marauders, and so on.

[Bill]  That’s dystopic history. That’s science fiction, right?

[Cyd]  That’s exactly right. Right. Right. It’s the dystopian end. But the good side of that will be AI will die as well.

[Bill]  Yes. Well, we’ve said before in the past, you know, I think small community—tribal communities—interrelate with each other. That’s a greater future than huge nation states or globalism, and all the rest of that.

[Cyd]  Right. I once read somewhere that really any person can only keep track of 200 people. And so 200 is actually the biggest size a village should be if you want to know everyone—if you want to know and love your neighbor.

[Bill]  Well, that’s the point. You can hold hands easier and be with others in that larger sense. (referring to the Simple Golden Rule)  So that may be a healthier direction. Now, of course, you might respond and say, “well, we evolved to this state we’re in because…” but he can’t say because it benefits humanity. That’s not evolutionary talk. Evolution doesn’t take place because it needs to go somewhere.

[Cyd]  Right. Because it’s already there.

[Bill]  Well, not even that in his evolutionary sense. He’s not Lamarckian. Lamarck said that giraffes grew long necks because they needed to get the food in the trees. Right. You know—they grew like that. But Darwinian evolutionary theory is that some were born with long neck and they survive better.

[Cyd]  Yes. Yeah. Well, so actually, then, you know, when we’re talking about guerillas crashing the electrical systems of the Earth… those could be Luddites. It might be Luddite-type guerillas purposely plunging the Earth into a dark age in order to restore humanity to its…

[Bill]  Well, that’s a, you see, that’s a conscious attempt by a Second Order.

[Cyd]  Right. That would be a non-Christian, non-Gnostic way of returning. But it’s not just necessarily through malfeasance and guerilla action of hating countries in order to plunge them into the dark ages. It could actually have a noble aspiration to bring us back to a Luddite age of true pre-industrial revolution.

[Bill]  Well, again, a general point—isn’t the mistake of socialism? You can have people directing they want socialism in order to bring about equanimity and equality for all people as a beneficial end.

[Cyd]  Right. So they have good notions. I mean, their heart may be pure. Well, as if!… except for the big cats at the top that are going to reap it all, right? Yah. So, well, it’s an interesting discussion, Bill.

[Bill]  (laughing)  Well, it was a joy. I love going places with you. That’s the thing. You start out with something and then we evolve out.

[Cyd]  (laughing) Oh no, wrong word. No, no. And then we swim to another cherry.

[Bill]  Thank you for having me. I look forward to doing more of these.

[Cyd]  Love it! I’m all for it. Let’s do it!

Well I hope you found this discussion of evolution stimulating and I hope that you are prompted to reconsider the efficacy of the entire concept of Darwinian evolution from a Gnostic point of view.

And again I repeat in order to do that the best you really should return to my prior two broadcasts about evolution. I’ll put the links in the transcript to this episode. Thank you for spending this time with me.

God bless us all and onward and upward.

Have you left a review for A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel?

Ten years ago, back in July 22nd of 2015, I wrote one of my first articles about Gnosticism on my Simple Explanation blog, and I’m going to read from that for you today. This was very soon after I began to realize that the Orthodox Christianity that I had been strongly embracing for all of my life could be enhanced by this knowledge of Gnosticism.

I had been trained up to believe that Gnosticism was a heresy, and it takes many years for a very strong believer in Christianity to even be willing to consider Gnosticism as another sect of Christianity. So while not being willing to give up my belief in the Christ as our salvation, and not being willing to demote my relationship with Jesus, because I can’t deny that since I personally know it to be true, I was at last able to begin reading the Nag Hammadi texts. I was particularly taken by the text called the Tripartite Tractate, which is the one that I share with you mostly on this Gnostic Insights podcast.

So let me share with you now this first article that I wrote in 2015 called Yearning for the Pleroma, which is still posted on my long-running Simple Explanation blog. This was originally broadcasted as an episode in August of 2021, which was before I started posting episodes to Substack, so my Substack readers have never seen or heard this episode. Also, for those of you who have been following Gnostic Insights from the beginning, you haven’t ever had a chance to read the transcript, so here it is. As I said, this article is ten years old. I hadn’t yet developed the illustrations that have become so familiar by now, which you can see throughout the Gnostic Insights transcripts and in The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book from 2019. This episode features my first attempt at diagramming the gnostic cosmology. The concepts still hold up, although the artwork is more colorful and polished today.

This is called Yearning for the Pleroma.

Other words for the Gnostic word “pleroma” include the “Fullness,” the “All,” the “Totalities,” and “the circle of divine attributes,” which gives you a pretty good idea of what pleroma means. The way wikipedia defines the term is much more challenging and kind of discouraging because of its complexity, especially the section on Gnosticism.  Wikipedia cites 17 uses of the Greek word kenoma that is usually translated as “fullness,” with only one usage of pleroma as we Gnostics would define it.

Only one book of the Bible mentions the Pleroma–a letter written to the church in Colosse by the apostle Paul. In the translation of Colossians 2:9 below, Pleroma has been rendered as “the fullness.”

“For in Him [Christ] dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power” (Col. 2:9).

The footnote under this verse in my edition of the New King James Version goes on to completely misinterpret the meaning of the statement in its rush to dismiss the Gnostic implications of the verse. The Nelson editors contend that “the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of angelic beings, the last creating the material world. In contrast, Paul says that the fullness of God exists in Christ… This contradicts the Gnostic idea of  the inherent evil of physical bodies and the claim that Jesus is merely a spirit (p. 2014, Nelson Study Bible. 1997).

While I do agree with the opening premise that “the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of … beings,” there are at least four misrepresentations I see in the Nelson explanation of the verse.

First, the idea that the fullness can’t be both completely in Christ and at the same time divided into aeons. No need to say, “In contrast,” since the two traits are not mutually exclusive. Let’s imagine how that would work.

Here are the first four phases of Gnostic Cosmology, according to the Tripartite Tractate. Upper right corner: God the Father represented as the background paper of the entire poster. Upper left corner: I’ve represented the Son as a diffuse cloud of will. Middle: the Pleroma/the fullness represented as the Son’s cloud with distinct lines representing the aeonic traits. The pyramid to the right represents the individual aeons after they have named themselves and differentiated the Son’s will into hierarchies of traits and powers.

We begin with the Father, since this is the ground state underlying all else. We all know that the Father is unknowable. Too big, too exalted for us mere mortals to contemplate directly. The Father is the Immortal One who never changes and without whom nothing would exist. The indisputable buck-stops-here God. This being is pure consciousness, without form or distinctions, all quiet, eternally undivided. This is the One Who Is; the Great I Am. In my drawings, the Father is represented as the paper that makes up the poster–all other manifestations arise as images upon the paper and are fully contained by the paper.

The Son is represented by the starburst cloud at the upper left, although the starburst is not really light energy, since this is before the creation of Light. This entity is also called the First Aeon, the Root, the Single Name, and The Form of the Formless. The Son contains all of the qualities of the Father, but in a circumscribed form. In today’s lingo we would call the Son a holographic representation of the Father, where a small fragment perfectly emulates the larger image. You could think of the Father as the ocean, and the Son as a big bucket of ocean water. It’s the same fluid. And if the bucket remains immersed in the ocean, then not only is the water within and without the bucket identical, the ocean continues to fully contain the bucket of water.

The Tripartite Tractate describes how the Son is part of the Father, and then goes on in the same verse to declare the Son as the cause of the Pleroma:

“He exists by the Father having him as a thought–that is, his thought about himself, his sensation of himself and of his eternal being… He possesses power, which is his will. For the moment, however, he holds himself back in silence, he who is the greatest, being the cause of the generation of the members of the All into eternal existence” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 56).

By this one verse we can see that the Son is within the Father and he also contains the Fullness, in full agreement with Colossians 2:9.

My second problem with the Nelson notes is their description of aeons. Aeons are not the same as angels–they’re more like features or capabilities. The Tripartite Tractate describes them as “the properties and qualities in which the Father and the Son exist” and equates them with the pre-existent Church (Tripartite Tractate, verse 58). 

“His offspring, the ones who are, are without number and limit and at the same time indivisible. They have issued from him, the Son and the Father… The Church exists in the dispositions and properties in which the Father and the Son exist… Therefore it subsists in the procreations of innumerable aeons” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 59).

While some Aeons are beings with their own self-aware personalities, other aeons are best described as traits and capabilities of the Father and Son.

“…they were unable to know the depth in which they were; nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father; they did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed… like a fetus… not yet come into being” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 60).

Third, the Nelson Study Bible footnote confuses Jesus, the physical incarnation of Christ on Earth, with the eternal spirit of Christ, the first Son of the Father, whose image and dwelling predates the Earthly appearance of Jesus. 

“Now the Savior in fact was a bodily image of something unitary, namely the Fullness” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 116).

The Gnostic gospel I’ve been studying has no quibble with naming the physical person of Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior of the entire Creation. Lest the wary Christian doubt the Gnostic’s gospel, the Tripartite Tractate ends with this eulogy for Jesus Christ:

“…the praise, the power, and the glory, through Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Savior, the Redeemer of all those who are embraced by the mercy of love, and through his Holy Spirit, from now throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 138).

And finally, the Nelson editor contends “the fullness of God [that] exists in Christ” … “contradicts the Gnostic idea of the inherent evil of physical bodies.” The editor apparently reasons that if Gnostics claim physical bodies are evil, and Jesus incarnated as a physical body, then Gnosticism would imply that Jesus Christ was evil.

There are a couple of problems with this logic. First, my reading of Gnostic writing reveals that while material reality may have started out as “evil,” the situation was quickly rectified when the Son and the Pleroma intervened to establish an “economy” that regulated good and evil inclinations through “repentance.” Keep in mind that material reality can be considered demiurgic, but not “evil” per se. Nothing is “evil,” only misguided by egoic striving. Here’s a brief description of that process:

“After conversion followed the remembrance of those who exist and the prayer on behalf of the one who had returned to himself by means of what is good” (81)…. “This prayer and supplication helped to make him turn toward himself and toward the Fullness, for their remembrance of him caused him to remember the preexistent ones, and this is the remembrance that calls out from afar and brings him back” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 82).

“To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought … with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. This was in order to provide them with a structure and a dwelling place, but also in order that by being drawn toward evil they should acquire a weak basis for their existence, so that, instead of rejoicing unduly in the glory of their own environment and thereby remaining exiled, they might rather perceive the sickness they were suffering from, and so acquire a consistent longing and seeking after the one who is able to heal them from this weakness” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 98, 99).

“The first human, then, is a mixed molding and a mixed creation, and a depository of those on the left and those on the right, as well as of a spiritual Word, and his sentiments are divided between each of the two substances to which he owes his existence” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 106).

“What our Savior became, out of willing compassion, is the same as that which the ones for whose sake he appeared had become because of an involuntary passion: they had become flesh and soul, and this holds them perpetually in its grip, and they perish and die… For not only did he assume their death for the ones he had in mind to save, but in addition he also assumed their smallness, to which they had descended when they were born with body and soul; for he let himself be conceived and he let himself be born as a child with body and soul” (Tripartite Tractate, verse 114, 115).

Secondly, the very fact that Jesus did incarnate as a mortal man is what made salvation through Christ possible, for it was by the Savior’s perfect “error correcting algorithm,” superimposed upon an otherwise error-filled humanity, that salvation entered the world. 

I’ll end this article with a clear gospel message straight from the Tripartite Tractate regarding exactly what one must come to believe in order to be saved. 

“… there is no other baptism apart from this one alone, which is the redemption into God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when confession is made through faith in those names, which are a single name of the gospel, when they have come to believe what has been said to them, namely that they exist. From this they have their salvation, those who have believed that they exist. This is attaining in an invisible way to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an undoubting faith” (Tripartite Tractate, verse, 127, 128).

That seems to be the underlying core of the Gnostic salvation message. No other arcane rituals are needed; no gnosis other than believing that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (the Fullness) existed before you. Other ancient gnostic texts claim that this is the true essence of the gospel that Jesus preached. 

Keep in mind that these are the very texts considered so distracting by the early church Fathers that they were buried in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD to protect them from being burned as the work of heretics, keeping them safe until their reemergence in 1945. The cat is definitely out of the bag now.

Okay, back to the Pleroma. In case you haven’t guessed, the Fullness is where we all wind up eventually. By the end of the universe, everyone’s souls will have come on board Team God, so to speak, and then the fruit of the Pleroma will have returned home to the fold, to live happily ever after amidst the unending joy and love of the Fullness, all tucked up inside the Son who lives inside the Father.

“Once the redemption had been proclaimed, the perfect human [the Savior] immediately  received knowledge so as to return swiftly to his unity, to the place from which he came. Joyfully he returned back to the place from which he had originated, the place from which he had flowed forth. His limbs, however, needed a school… until all the limbs of the body of the Church would be united in one place and would attain the restoration together… so that the Fullness obtains its redemption” (Tripartite Tractate, verses 123, 124).

So, that is the end of this article that I wrote several years ago, and ever since writing this article, I have been more fully developing this Gnostic Gospel until it emerged as my own book called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which is, in my own words, meant to be simple and understandable. No quotes, it’s not academic, it’s the straightforward Gnostic Gospel, and it’s fully illustrated so that each illustration shows you what, in my mind, these things look like. But they’re metaphors, they’re only visual metaphors, but they should help you to grasp this information. Sometimes the words are difficult, but I find it much easier to grasp the information when it is presented in a visual form. So please go ahead and visit my GnosticInsights.com website, where you can click on and purchase The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book. I’ve printed it as a larger picture kind of book, in that 6×9 format, glossy pictures and all. Very pretty. But I’ve also printed it as a small pocket edition that you could actually put in your back pocket of your jeans, which harkens back to my old days as a young Christian, as a one-way Christian in the late 1960s, when I used to carry my little pocket edition of the Good News Bible in my back pocket. So I encourage you to get that book and read it, and read it several times, many times, until it soaks in, until you get how easy redemption is.

And this Gnostic Gospel does not attempt to dethrone Jesus Christ. It dethrones a false god called the Demiurge, which does appear here and there throughout the Bible, but it does not dethrone the Father of the Christ, which is the God Above all gods.

Well, thank you for joining me this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed this review of Yearning for the Pleroma, and that you’ve gained some clarity concerning what the Pleroma, or the fullness of God, means. Remember, our Father is a God of clarity, and knowledge, and thinking. You should never come away from Gnostic studies lost in confusion. Many of the podcasts I hear that call themselves Gnostic are being narrated by people who are themselves confused about the nature of the Father and gnosis, in my opinion. If you come away feeling confused, then it’s not the clarity that we try to achieve here at Gnostic Insights and in the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Our God is not the God of confusion. That would be the job of the Demiurge. Until next week, onward and upward, and God bless us all.