Bill Puett Interview, 08/24/23

We welcome my brother, Dr. Bill Puett. Bill is going to help clarify some issues with us between information versus knowledge, and what is a meme? Bill's doctorate is in philosophy and mine is in Classical Rhetoric, so I often turn to him for philosophical clarification of terms. Bill is a Professor Emeritus from the California University system. I love talking philosophy with my brother.

Bill

Well, you kindly say that and glad to be part of it and work with my sister who does remarkable, remarkable work.

Cyd

Ohh well, flattery. Flattery will get you everywhere, right? OK, so. So we're going to be discussing the previous episode where we were talking about memes versus karma, right?

Bill

And you know, you had mentioned in there the point that a meme is a unit of information, and that leads into what we're talking about now, because units of information are not always facts.

In fact, in my hypnotherapy practice, I help my clients drop memes that are false memes. You know, memes cover the ego. They create a shroud as you've stated many times before. And when a client says they want to change some behavior, I tell them that they really want to find their true selves. And by doing so, they make the changes that they hope for.

Cyd

So by their true selves. You're not talking about their ego then, huh? Obviously.

Bills

That's actually a great question. The Self—we understand the S Self. Yes, that's the real Self. And then we have the ego operating in this world—the combo there. So what we're doing is we're dropping off the illusions that surround the ego that get in the way of connecting with our true inner self and we're removing memes.

Cyd

So the ego is surrounding the true Self and then the memes are clinging to that ego.

Bill

That's right.

Cyd

OK, got it. Go ahead.

Bill

And over a period of time, you know, to one's life, we accumulate these memes. Because I make the claim that the majority memes are illusions. And so when we try to understand ourselves or we're trying to understand our life and so forth is that we're looking through a glass darkly. So in therapy then I want to remove or the illusions so that we get closer to who we are.

Cyd

But that sounds kind of Buddhist, doesn't it? They're always talking about illusions.

Bill

Well, the their type of the illusion is the illusion of Self. But we're talking about the illusion of memes. That is a different point.

Cyd

Ohh. So this isn't that Buddhist notion of illusions, then.

Bill

Oh, no, it's the false memes that are illusions.

Now we're removing from their shroud these false memes. For instance, if a child is told by their parent that they would grow up not to amount to anything, that meme could be attached to the other person in the future. Now in therapy, we will drop that meme shroud and then the healing follows. You can take my therapeutic approach may be a way of mining gnosis to bring about healing. I have something more to say about the gnosis point here.

I said since these may be false units of information, that raises the question of what we know to be true and how we know. Philosophers examine that question under the heading of epistemology, the question of what knowledge is.

Cyd

Right. That's what gnosis means: knowing.

Bill

Right, so the Gnostics believe that knowing comes from within and you have talked about mining gnosis in order to recall truth from within. Now, Plato would have appreciated the concept of gnosis. You believe that what is known isn't in the world, that is, we are born with it in our souls.

Cyd

By the way, let me pop in here a second to mention that the Nag Hammadi scriptures include Plato. So even back when that Big Jar was buried in the desert and dug up out of Nag Hammadi that has now formed these scriptures, (and the Tripartite Tractate is just one of the books that was contained in that big earthenware jug), Plato was in there as well. So the early Gnostics recognized Plato as in agreement with gnosis.

Bill

Oh, I love that. Yes. OK. So now that there is coherence there, yeah. Plato did state that knowledge is justified true belief. But what is it for belief to be justified as true? Now going to our memes—a meme to be known must be believed by the holder, must be true, and must have sufficient evidence for its truth. Now the question of what counts as evidence, and how much evidence is sufficient, are the prime issues of epistemology. So this problem of sufficiency has never been resolved. A proposed solution by Plato is that what is known is known innately, and that idea is, of course, not accepted by most philosophers. In other words, innateness is not accepted by most philosophers, scientists, and academics in general.

Cyd

And again, what do you mean by innateness?

Bill

That is being born with it. That is, it comes with the soul.

Cyd

Ah, So what we are calling the Self, the Fullness of God that we carry around within us. That is innate.

Bill

Yes, that's exactly right. We are born with it. It's from above.

Cyd

OK. OK, so the innate nature of the human comes from above, and that is the gnosis.

Bill

Exactly. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Again, again, most philosophers, scientists, and academics wouldn't accept this notion that we're born with that. Right.

You see, they still have no explanation of what counts as knowledge. Now Plato did say justified true belief, but the issue is what do they mean by justify? What is the best that they can expect? That is, the scientists and philosophers and others, the best they can expect are well founded beliefs.

But even well founded beliefs can later be found false. That has happened over and over and over again in the history science. What are examples of beliefs that were held by scientists and philosophers and otherwise?

There are so many. But let me throw a few little cuties at you. That in the universe our world is at the center. The earth is the center of the solar system. OK, OK. Phlogiston--have you ever heard of that? That is, that's the combustible part of the material. When something is burned, phlogiston is released. Miasmas was once considered the poisonous gas that caused disease. Disease was caused by miasmas. Or here, this is getting a little more updated—the fish stage of human development and embryos, passing stages that look like simpler beings like fish and reptiles. Not true. How about in contemporary science? The atomic model. The idea of a nucleus with electrons orbiting it. Ohh no, no. Electrons are not particles. They're waves. They're like clouds that are centered around the nucleus. How did light travel? Well, it traveled through the medium called the luminiferous aether. Lumen travels through aether. Or that the universe is static, that is, it remains the same size. And who presented that view that the universe is static? Not expanding? Einstein himself!

Cyd

Ohh really?

Bill

Or here's a classic: spontaneous generation believes that complex life comes from inanimate matter. Right. Throw that away, but it was held at one time.

Cyd

So they were considered to be well founded beliefs, you're saying. And even scientific. OK.

Bill

They were considered well founded beliefs. Now let me take it a bit further. This is a little bit of philosophy of science. People don't really understand that the scientific method does not give us knowledge. Scientific method says that if a hypothesis they're coming up with to try to explain something, you know something's occurring out in the universe, and you need to explain it. So you create a possible answer. That's called a hypothesis. That hypothesis tells you what else to look for. So we go looking for it and we if we find what it's looking for, that supports the hypothesis. But it doesn't guarantee it. It doesn't bring us truth. Why? Let me give you a little logic point. If P gets you Q, and if you have Q, you can't conclude you have P. It is, if it's raining, then the streets are wet. Ohh, the streets are wet, therefore it's raining. No, because the streets could get wet by other ways, right? Scientific method is like that. It says that if its hypothesis is true, then you can expect these things to happen. Yet, because they happen doesn't mean that the hypothesis is correct. Because it may predict something that is not the case. Well then, if it predicts something that's not the case, then the hypothesis is false. In other words, if P gets you Q and you don't have Q, well, you don’t have P. So you can always falsify a hypothesis, but you cannot verify it as true. That's the scientific method. The scientific method can only establish well founded belief. As long as the predictions are occurring as stated, then it is supported, and at best only becomes a theory.

Cyd

OK.

Bill

Theories never become facts. So theories get well founded and they get more well founded. They get even more well founded. They become really, really good. And then something happens. One of the predictions didn't work out. So the theory is not true.

Cyd

Ohh, right, OK, I hear what you're saying. So you can't prove a theory to be true, but you can prove a theory to be false. Can’t prove a theory to be true, but, but you can disprove it.

Bill

You can disprove it.

Cyd

Yeah, that's science, right?

Bill

That's right. So science never gives us knowledge, just well founded belief. Isn't that amazing?

Cyd

Yeah. OK. So because you're saying that knowledge is different well founded beliefs?

Bill

OK, knowledge is a justified belief, it's true, but it’s justified. We don't know what or by how much, but we have evidence. But how much makes it true? And so if that's the problem in the theory now, what happens is Plato would say, well, you see, you're never going to get truth out in the world and experience that way. It's not out here in the world as such. Knowledge only comes from within and Above. That's why Plato would say it is innate.

Cyd

So that's kind of indicating that a Mystic might be more in touch with knowledge than a scientist.

Bill

Yes, or a philosopher or a, you know, an academic. The presumption is in the academic community, we're developing knowledge. But all the best we can do is to develop well founded beliefs, according to Plato and for the reasons that I've just argued for. So Plato believed that learning, properly conducted, was a way of recalling what is already known by a person. So those who attended Plato's Academy were hoping to recall the forms in the ethereal world and therefore have knowledge. So in Plato's Academy, they weren't strictly scholastic. They were trying to recall, because that's the only way we can know.

Cyd

Right. And that word is anamnesis—not forgetting.

Bill

Right. That's good. The Platonists would find common ground with the Gnostics. You already indicated that. So gnosis is innate from the ethereal, cannot later be found to be false, therefore it is knowledge. It is through the mining of gnosis that truth is revealed.

Cyd

OK. So, you know that people say that the Bible is inerrant. In other words, that the Bible is knowledge from cover to cover basically right? That's what infallible belief in the Bible is, right? That's what fundamentalism is, that it's inerrant and inerrant means not capable of error. But we gnostics, we have some disagreements with aspects of the Bible. So does that indicate that the Bible is information and not knowledge? What does that indicate? Or. Are we going to assume that the Bible was written by people who only wrote the truth of God? That's what people are saying. That's what the claim is.

Bill

But that is the claim. There are a number of problems that occur. Now, we might make the statement that there are a number of statements in the Bible that are gnostic—they resonate, they are there, are knowledge.

Cyd

They are gnosis, right? We can tell when the Bible is speaking gnosis because it resonates truth, OK. And that's activating that innate knowledge, OK.

Bill

It also indicates that you know, and fundamentalism doesn't like to hear this. There are a lot of illogical points in the Bible that don't work together. They contradict each other. An inconsistency, for instance, is that God is all loving and people who don’t accept Christ as savior will go to hell forever.

Cyd

Ah, that's a contradiction. So how could they both be true? OK.

Bill

We know from Gnosticism, and beautifully developed in your podcast, is that it's logically developed. Doesn't have inconsistencies in it. And so a difference between, say, a gnostic interpretation of Scripture versus that of the standard fundamentalist or the standard biblical notion is that the difference is the biblical stuff has contradictions and the gnostic interpretations do not.

Cyd

Right. And that's why in this Christian gnosticism, it's Logos, the major figure is Logos, which is logic. It's got to be logical to be true.

Bill

Yes. And you develop this in the understanding of the Tripartite Tractate. It's beautiful. You said it logically follows. But see, that's a way of mining the gnosis.

Cyd

Right. It's interesting how many spiritual or religious people do not even consider logic to be an essential characteristic of the Father, but we would say it is.

Bill

It is essential.

Cyd

So it's love and it's logic. The Father is love and logic and life. Hey, the three L's. I like that. Love, logic and life, that's a good one.

Bill

That's right. This and the idea of the Gnostics, they were very individualistic in the sense that they're mining their gnosis rather than developing out here. The church and theological development of others follow that. With Gnosticism, they want each individual to recognize their gnosis. And again, back to the Plato point. That was the purpose of the Plato's Academy—is that each individual student was learning, would mine and understand forms.

Cyd

Ohh listen this is very important point. It's something people often misunderstand. They think that I have my truth and you have your truth. But there is only one truth. That's it, people go, it's even that line out of Jesus Christ Superstar, we all have our truths. My truth is different than yours. No. Truth is. There is one truth, and Plato said that the eternal forms are one thing—a cup, a cup is a cup, is a cup. It's not a cup to me and a dog to you. It's a cup. So.

Bill

And so what we see are not different truths when we mine gnosis. We're all recognizing the same truth.

Cyd

So we're mining the same exact truth. So when I talk about the Fullness of God, it's not one thing to me and a different thing to you. The Father is the Father, and the Father has certain immutable characteristics, and we acknowledge this to be true. So when I mine my gnosis and you mine your gnosis, we are literally mining the same exact gnosis.

Bill

That's right.

Cyd

So it's not this mysticism where I'm going to drop some drug and you're going to drop some drug and we each have this wonderful experience and then we go to write it down and we come up with different things and different concepts and it’s all different. If it's truth, it won't resolve in differentness, it resolves in all being the same. All being One in the end. That's pretty important. Hey, there's a little satori.

Bill

Very good.

Cyd

OK, good. Well, thank you, my brother. I love you so much.

Bill

Thank you, Cyd. I love you and thank you for the invitation. This was fun.

Cyd

OK. All right. Onward and upward, we'll. See you later. OK. Bye bye.

Bill

Bye bye.

The official, full-color edition of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate is at the publisher and will be out soon. Meanwhile, you may purchase an advance copy in black and white from my bookstore if you are eager to get started. You may also visit my Gnostic Insights homepage for transcripts and illustrations galore.

Since we've been talking about reincarnation a bit lately, I've had some correspondence from a couple of listeners who have wondered about this idea of karma because, as I say, it's your karma and your meme bundle that influence your next incarnation, or even your escape from this material plane and back up to the ethereal plane. So I would like to explain today what I mean by both memes and by karma.

Your karma is one of those huge topics that people can write dissertations on. In my Simple Explanation way of looking at things, what I do is I go to the meta level of all of the smaller concepts. Meta means above. So when I simplify I'm not dumbing down, I'm rising above. It's really the opposite direction. The more profound a concept is, the smaller and simpler it can be stated.

When I was for a time an academic at the university level and I would go to conferences where people are expected to present their papers and, you know, these research papers that are generally presented at conferences, they aren't really generated by the person in order to advance knowledge in the field. Yeah, that's the stated purpose, sure. But the real purpose is to get promotions and to get tenure—things like that. And you're required to produce a certain number of papers and present and publish every year. That's what's called publish or perish. So, when I would go to these conferences and listen to people's papers, it was like, Heavens, it's just a bunch of big words strung together very tightly, of interest, probably, only to the person that wrote it, and usually meaning nothing. How does that expression by Shakespeare go? It's a quote from Macbeth: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”

Well, yeah, that pretty much sounds like it. That's some wisdom from old Will Shakespeare. So I think it was the last conference I went to and it was my last because it's like, what's the point of this? It was extremely disappointing to me. I had a satori of the meaninglessness of this sort of scholastic research. That's why I don't try to write in a manner that exemplifies scholasticism and intelligence, and ohh aren't I smart. That is not my goal whatsoever. I'm actually against that kind of writing and that kind of speaking. I'm trying to simplify all of the gobbledygook, or, as my brother Billy has always called it, argle bargle, down to its core, down to the actual meaning. And especially when we're talking about gnostic insights. What we have to think of is, if this is a consciousness that comes before even our material cosmos, certainly before humanity, certainly before academia, what is the message from the consciousness that can come to any of the 2nd order powers?

See, you don't need a college degree in order to understand gnosis. What you need is an ability to reason; to open your eyes and see what is going on. To anticipate consequences. This is what is needed to discern gnosis.

When I started the Gnostic Insights podcast a couple of years ago, I posted a couple of articles about memes, and I've noticed by looking at the stats that hardly anybody likes to listen to them. So that is why I'm explaining it to you today and then tying it into karma. A meme, as I use the term, doesn't refer to those cute posters and those funny saying. A meme is any unit of information. And just as a gene is the smallest expression of an organism, a meme is the smallest possible expression of information. Now, we can put memes together and make meme chords and even big meme bundles because memes often go together. So when you consider something like, well, for example, I often use the expression of a cup. What is a cup?

Right. The notion of cup is a meme. And what do you think of when you think of the meme of cup? You think of a vessel with a handle, and that is usually what we drink our coffee or tea out of. But the particular expression of that cup meme varies in everyone's mind. My cup meme is expressed by this coffee cup I'm looking at right now and it's got cute little cartoons and kitty cats on it. But your meme might be a hammered brass demitasse, right? Or your meme for cup might be a measuring cup if you're a chef, and it will be one of those clear Pyrex cups with markings on it, but it's still the same concept of cup—what Plato would have called cupness up in the land of forms. So that's what a meme is.

Memes can express any kind of concept, so you can take any larger concept, even such as one like justice.  And what does justice imply? Google tells me that the definition of justice is the meme that people get what they deserve. OK, that itself is a meme. What does that mean? What constitutes deserving, influenced by a wide range of fields and viewpoints, such as the concepts or memes of ethics, rightness based on morality, rational thinking, law, religion, equity, and fairness. Well, those are big memes, aren't they? So you could definitely spend a lot of time just trying to define the meme of justice. So anyway, that's what I mean when I talk about memes MEME meme.

And the gnostic gospel that we talk about here and at Gnostic Insights, that's a bundle of memes relating to this Christian gnosis. So there's a meme bundle for the Father, a meme bundle for the Son, a meme bundle for the ALL and the Fullness. There's a meme bundle for the demiurge. A meme bundle for the fall, a meme bundle for Christ. A meme bundle for virtue and a different meme bundle for vices. Et cetera, et cetera.

People don't generally recognize that they're holding on to these various meme bundles. One way you could talk about a big overarching meme bundle is a worldview. And what we're talking about here at Gnostic Insights is a gnostic Christian meme. And that is an ideology because it's so huge. Different religions have their own meme bundles, and generally the follower of those religions hold on to the memes that are promoted by that religion. And it's their differences between their meme bundles that define the boundaries of that religion. Same thing with political parties. Same thing with cultural subgroups and cultures as a whole. We share memes in common with certain people and by the way, the more memes you share in common with someone, generally you like that person all the more. We like people we share memes with. We distrust or don't understand people that hold different memes than we do.

So what I've been teaching here and at Gnostic Insights is that the meme bundle or the ideology that we hold determines our thoughts, our moods, our emotions, our actions. And when we pass away out of this material plane and into that in between space, the memes that we hold at the time that we pass away determine our experience in the in between place and our experience of coming back to this Earth or going on to the ethereal plane. Evangelical Christians, of course, hold the meme bundle that only people who have accepted Christ, and in particular Jesus Christ, before they die, are going to go straight up to the ethereal plane. But where the gnostic Christianity differs from that of the evangelical Christianity is that it must logically be the case that if a person passes away from this material plane, i.e., dies without knowing Christ, without having accepted redemption, the Evangelical Christian would say that person's never going to heaven because they died without salvation.

But the gnostic Christian says no. Everybody is eventually going to the ethereal plane because we all come from the ethereal plane. We are sparks off of the originating consciousness. We embody the Father, the Son, and the Fullness within these material bodies that we are walking around in, and when our material body stops functioning, our soul, our spirit, our Self and our Ego, are popped loose from being tied to the material plane, and we rise up to this other dimension or realm. And it is at that place where the memes of the world fall away. They lose their attraction to you temporarily, at least. In the in between space you can see clearly. I can see clearly now the rain has gone. OK. Where you can see clearly and then you have the opportunity to repent, to say, well, that didn't work out very well. I didn't really have that much fun. Yeah, eh. You repent, and once you repent, you are able to see the truth of the Father and see the Christ. And the Christ will be standing there saying, OK, awesome. Come with me. And the Christ, even at that point, will take you straight up.

If you don't repent, then you're going to be reincarnated. You're going to come back down. Because the lack of repentance, even though you see clearly, you go, but you know, I really like the world. I really love being down there on that material plane. I really like sex. I don't think we're gonna have sex in heaven. So I'm coming back to Earth. I'm gonna have all the sex I want. Or I really like to eat. I love, love, love to eat. We're probably not going to be cooking and eating up above, not in the way we do down here because there's no death and destruction up above, so we aren't going to be killing animals and eating them, and we're not going to be pulling carrots out of the ground and eating them either because the carrots are also second order powers. So whatever facsimile of eating that we are going to have up above, if that is the case, it's not going to be this down here, below. And so a lot of people reincarnate just for the food, just for the sex. Maybe you're going to reincarnate because you love your family so much you can't bear to see them go their own way when you abandon them and go to heaven. So that's another reason a person would want to reincarnate—to come back to their cohort of family and friends.

So we lay down our meme bundle temporarily while we're in the in between space. We still have our Ego. We still have our personal identity and of course we are completely immersed in the big S Self in the in between place because we're in One space that we can all share.

If you're a new listener to Cyd’s Gnostic Newsletter or the Gnostic Insights podcast, I recommend that you go back to the episode called Overcoming Death for more details on what I've been talking about. That episode of Gnostic Insights is all about the in between space and how it is that people would lay down their memes after death and still be able to go up above.

Now the main thing to realize about what is called universal salvation is that we are the children of God. It says that in the Bible. There's no misunderstanding that. And it's not going to be, but sadly, most of us are going to hell to be tormented forever. That isn't the nature of our loving Father. It says over and over in the Bible that all who come to Christ will be redeemed. And in the Gnostic Gospel, we're opening the door so that you can still be redeemed after death. But here's the thing. If you're listening to me now and you just want to wallow in sin or vice because you love, love, love whatever it is that you're doing that you know isn't from above, then you are rejecting the Christ. You are rejecting the Father. You are rejecting the ALL, and that is not a good, loving or helpful place to be. I think you know this in the deepest part of your heart. So don't wait until you die to hope for this redemption. Assure your redemption now. Don't push off redemption.

Now, what do I mean by the meme of karma? Forget about what you've learned—the details of karma. If you go up to a meta understanding of karma, all that karma is, it's so simple. Karma is the consequences of your behavior. Karma is the consequences of your mindset. Karma equals consequences. That's all. And the karma that you generate by your behavior and your thoughts, it deepens and ingrains the meme that causes that behavior or that thought. So if you continue to behave in a way that expresses some particular vice or sin, then you further entrench that vice and sin, because the karma of behaving or thinking of that vice deepens it and makes it stronger. Every time you repent of that vice—every time you repent—the Christ is right there to fill you with the opposing virtue. With the love that you're otherwise pushing away. With the sense of worth. With the relief of guilt. So, the karma of redemption and salvation is to lessen the hold of the vices upon you—is to lessen the weight of the sin and everything that comes with that. The weakness, the guilt. The oh darn. I did it again. I wish I hadn't done that. When you have that thought, that's a form of repentance. Then, what do you do? Turn your eyes upward because this is the direction from which salvation comes. While we are sinners, Christ loves us anyway. While we are sinners, Christ dies for us anyway. And isn't it awesome that Christ can find us even in the worst place that we might possibly be? Even if a person is in the most terrible situation and the most sinful possible thing, Christ can be there anyway.

The pleroma of Christ is what is called the 3rd order of powers, and there is one 3rd order power that covers every single 2nd order power. So of course Christ can find you wherever you are. Of course Christ can go into the midst of whatever valley you are in—of depression or depravity—and pull you out because there's a 3rd order power sitting right there waiting for you, that's right there at your side. Every second order power has a third order power devoted to it. So, in my body here, my own pleroma has a certain combination of Aeons, a certain combination of the Fullness that's activated. You know, like let's say there's X number of Fullnesses possible. If there's an infinite number of Aeons, X amount, we've all got that full X amount of the Fullness of the Aeons, but they're not all expressed. We have a certain pattern, like a stencil overlaid upon that. And so the pattern of Aeons that's activated in my body makes me the recognizable person that I am with my various talents and proclivities. That's a particular pattern of the Fullness. Well, the Christ also has that particular pattern of the Fullness that I express, but one order up. The 3rd order up. So there's a third order expression of the Fullness of the Christ for my second order expression of the Fullness. Do you understand what I mean? So of course the Christ can save anyone. There's a third order of powers devoted to you, devoted to you. It says in the Tripartite Tractate that Christ comes with everyone's face, so that when the Christ comes, you can recognize him, and that's what I'm talking about here, with the pattern of 3rd order.

So anyway, our karma is the karma that we generate that causes the memes that we cling to to hold on to us. We hold those memes and they are bound to us like a covering through our karma, and my karma is different than your karma. Everybody's karma is unique to the individual. When you pass away, your karma is momentarily laid aside so that you can see the truth in the in between place after you die. Then you can repent and go on upward and your karma will not reattach.

Negativity does not go forward into the ethereal plane, only the good karma goes forward into the material plane. So whatever accomplishments that I have had down here below, it's my opinion that that karma, the positive karma, the virtuous karma, will go forward. It will stay attached to my particular Ego when I'm up above. But the negative karma that I've generated down here, the karma that I have repented of, that's what's get pushed away. That's what gets “burned up in the fire.” It's the negative karma. It's the memory and consequences of your negative behavior. Once you are redeemed and go upward, Christ doesn't take any negative karma up. Christ forgives and forgets.

So that's my Simple Explanation of memes and karma and how it is that the karma attracts the memes that cling to your Ego, and those negative memes and negative karma are dropped when you repent and you are redeemed.

Onward and upward.

God bless us all.

Alternate Past Life Therapy from the book A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate by Cyd Ropp

Article contributed by Bill Puett, Ph.D., C.HT.

For years some hypnotherapists have used past life therapy to bring about healing in clients who have present life issues rooted in the past. The mere recall of a past life can bring about understanding and healing. However, my preferred use of past life therapy goes beyond just revealing events of a past life. My approach is to have a client’s subconscious direct an exploration of past events relevant to present life issues and then ask the subconscious to make a different choice in that past life. Doing so prevents the re-occurrence of the event or events that created the present life issues. I call my approach “alternate past life therapy.” The client’s new past life choices are made while the client is in between the death of the past life and before the next life. The basis of my approach is the quantum mechanical notion held by some theoretical physicists that all possible choices made by a person are actually realized in an infinite multitude of universes. With that in mind, I ask the client to choose a past life alternative choice that will prevent the present life negative issue or issues that we are confronting. The original past life now becomes just a story with no impact, and the “new” past life carries forward and brings about a positive resolution to the client’s present life issue or issues.

To explain in a karmic way the reason that I can facilitate an immediate resolution of a client’s problems and the transformation of a client’s life is that a karmic cleansing takes place in my alternate past life therapy. Each living person is comprised of their unit of consciousness (aka “soul”) enshrouded by a bundle of memes considered important to that person, glued there in a manner of speaking, by their personal karma. When a client is hypnotically regressed out of this life and experiences a past life, the memes important to that life are once again attracted to their unit of consciousness. (This is why clients under hypnosis may look and speak differently than they normally do because the old meme bundle is again active.) When a problem in a past life is resolved by creating a new past life story, the original memes of the old past life do not go forward and attach to the present life. Therefore, the person’s present life is no longer affected by the original past life.

As an example, consider the following case study of one of my clients.

Jane was a 22 year old client who saw me because of a bothersome issue she had had for as long as she could remember. No one was allowed to touch her neck. She was engaged to be married; and even her fiancé, John, was not allowed to touch her neck. Jane also made it clear to John that she did not want to have a child, especially not a daughter. Because he wanted to have children, a major problem in their relationship arose.

In my hypnotherapy practice, I do not lead or make suggestions based on what I think is the cause of my client’s issues. I listen to what his/her subconscious reveals and facilitate with that information my client’s recovery. I use alternate past life therapy to facilitate transformation. In Jane’s case, I did not anticipate what her subconscious was to reveal when she was in deep hypnosis. In a past life, she recalled being burned at the stake as an alleged witch. Her first recollection was being in the fire. I asked her to move out from the fire and to see herself at a distance. She saw that she had a brace of some kind around her neck that kept her in place. She asked to go back into the fire whereby I took her quickly through her death and into the “interim” between lives. She was immediately relieved. While she was in the interim, I asked her if there was anyone she wanted to see again from that past life. She said “yes,” and I asked her to call that person into the interim. A little girl came to her who had been her daughter in that past life and had died before her mother had been killed. They had a deeply moving reunion. (I regularly do grief work for past life persons who have lost loved ones.) I then asked Jane to go back into that past life in order to create a “new” past life. In the new past life she was not brought before the inquisition and her daughter did not die as a child. I then brought Jane back to the present with full recall of the old and new past life experiences. The original past life was now merely a story with no future implications while the new past life was carried forward for positive future implications.

The results were wonderful and transformative. The day of the past life regression was the last day of Jane’s neck issue. She had removed the meme of being held on the stake with a neck brace. She had also removed the meme of not wanting a child. Within a year, she and her husband had a baby daughter. Both Jane and John were thrilled with the pregnancy and the birth of a daughter.

In Jane’s case, the experience of being held on a stake and burned to death as a witch made such a karmic impression upon her unit of consciousness that it clung to her new life, causing a neurotic fear of being touched on her neck. She also carried a meme of disappointment and longing over the early death of her daughter in that life. That meme created such fear in this life that she was unwilling to risk having another.

In the safety and comfort of the therapeutic session, Jane was able to move beyond her traumatic death and discover the peace of the interim period following death. This peace comes as the soul’s meme bundle is cut loose at death. In the period between lives, we are freed from earthly memes and concerns. The meme bundle later reattaches, according to one’s karma, after a newly formed life enters the world.

In Jane’s case, it was the newly imagined “alternate ending” of the past life that finally released all of her fears. Jane found actual peace and satisfaction with the rewritten history, and she carried that peace forward into this life. It was as though Jane’s karma had been rewritten, and the memes associated with her previously unhappy life and death no longer clung to her current meme bundle. In other words, the alternate past life chosen brings about the healing.

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The following segment is from an interview with Bill that I posted to my gnostic insights podcast in June of 2021. Here is the transcript:

Cyd:  Bill and I propose that immediate resolution of a client's problems and the transformation of a client's life is accomplished through karmic cleansing, as old memes are dropped and are not reattached to the present life. My brother's therapeutic technique is a novel approach that utilizes concepts of personhood out of my Simple Explanation theory. Hypnotic regression coupled with rewriting history is an extremely effective way to drop burdensome memes.

You need not believe in reincarnation to benefit from this technique. I personally held the position for several years that these past life sessions of Bill’s were merely therapeutic metaphors, useful stories expressing fears and mysteries in a neat narrative package, not unlike dream imagery. Since writing the Simple Explanation, I have come to take these stories as something different. Does this mean that everyone who holds that burned at the stake meme was actually burned at the stake themselves? Not necessarily. In the Simple Explanation, the memes in our bundles are not only held by ourselves, they are held in common by everyone who resonates with that meme. You can come to hold on to a meme because of past life issues, but you could also be holding a meme because you picked it up in this life. It may be that you are a midwife who's currently under some sort of prosecution or review board over your midwifery practices. Considering that tens of thousands of midwives were burned at the stake during the witch trials of the early-modern period, it's little wonder your current situation would attract that particular meme to your personal bundle. The meme actually lives in the transpersonal field we all share. It's been out there all along. You just didn't resonate to it before it applied to you.

If you would like to listen to my podcasts concerning memes and a podcast concerning reincarnation from Gnostic Insights, you can go to my gnosticinsights.com website and in the menu there is a tab called complete episodes library. There you will find a broadcast called A Simple Model of Memes, part one and part two, and two other broadcast episodes, one called Dropping Unwanted Memes and A Simple Model of Reincarnation.

And now I would like to introduce you all to my brother, Doctor Bill Puett. So, Bill. Do you have any thoughts?

Bill: Probably best I can do is to give you maybe a couple of other examples drawing from a lot of lot of them from the past. There are a couple that kind of stand out to make the point that you are making here in your broadcast. I'll shorten the examples somewhat for this presentation, because there are further developments for each of them.

One of my clients was a late-middle-aged man, maybe late forties, who was a contractor. It's important to indicate that he had some money because he had a great idea and he could afford to put his great idea into practice—he had the land for it.  He wanted to build a rehab center for Native Americans using Native American healing techniques. That sounds like a great idea and would touch the Native Americans more directly, from with their culture. But there was kind of a problem. He'd been trying to accomplish this for the last 20 years, but he didn't do it well. One of the problems was that he was a drug addict, and his latest addiction was to oxycontin. And I think those out there listening to this know that's a pretty harsh product. It's gotten quite notoriety. It's misused.

So he called me in to help him and I did, and it was successful. But then again he kind of fell off the wagon with it. I said let's go the next way. I thought I would do past life regression if he was open to that and since he worked with me he was open to that. He said, “Past life, that's kind of unusual.” I said, “Well, you're talking about Native American healing techniques, I think you may be open to past lives.” He said, “I think you're right. Bill.”

So getting right to the point, we go into a past life regression. And what I do is ask the subconscious to bring up a relevant past life to the issue the person is dealing with. Again, I'm not standing in a position to be intuitive and telling what I think this issue is. It needs to come from him. It needs to come from the subconscious and not be led by the therapist.

And out pops—well it’s important to say that he's not a Native American, that's not his ethnicity, so to speak. So we're going into a past life, and sure enough, what do you think he was in a past life? He was Native American! And again, I'm asking the subconscious to bring up something relevant to his addiction. And here he is a Native American. He and his people live in log houses, they wear furs, they live in the forest. He's describing an area in particular which we kind of get to in a moment.

I did something I usually don't do. I thought it was important. I asked him to speak his Native American tongue, which he did know. This is important because, Cyd, you’ve talked about memes and latching onto memes and bringing them in from the Akashic record and so forth from past life. Well, that includes, of course, language, and sure enough he started speaking the language. Now, he understands English. You know you're always in the here and now. In a sense you're always able to translate a past life where you're using some other language.

And so he's speaking and then translating what was said. Fascinatingly. You see, in his present life he doesn't know any Native American language, let alone what he was speaking. So we go forward in his life and I'm continuing to see what's relevant. What's going on? And I asked him how he heals. And he heals through the Spirit, using translation here.

And, near the end of his life—I carry people all the way through their lives—and we’re coming to the end of his life and all of a sudden he started to cry. I ask him, “what what's happening?” He says, “I have bumps. I have bumps. My people have bumps.” And he's sobbing about his people. Because what was he in his past life? He was a shaman. He says the white man brought the blankets and if people know their American history, there is evidence that smallpox was put on blankets to give to the Native Americans. Actually, Sir Jeffrey Amherst is probably the famous guy who put that out as a possibility back at that time.

So he's sobbing because he can't heal his people and then he feels abandoned, abandoned by God, because he can't heal. And he's more concerned about his people than his own death. I mean what could be worse than to believe in God and to be acting as a spiritual healer? And you can't heal your people and you feel abandoned? I mean that's a pretty severe feeling, obviously.

So I carried him through his death, as I do in past lives, and go to the death, which can be very important. And we go into the in between. I And Cyd, you’ve mentioned the in between before; there’s a sort of an architecture there that we can talk about on another day. In the in between, the memes have been lifted off that past life. So he's in this sort of peaceful mode and I asked him, “Now, look at yourself.” And he says, “Oh, I don't have bumps.”

I said, “Call your people, call your people to you here in the in between. So he calls his people forward and there they are. They do not have bumps. They don't have the smallpox. And he started sobbing with joy now because they're okay. I say, “Yes. They're okay.”

I said, “We're going to go forward now. I want you to go forward in time to the next incarnation that's relevant. And so we go to the next life and we're in utero, interestingly. And I said, “What do you think? What do you think your direction is?” He says, “I’ve got to go forward to be a healer.” And so we go up into the adulthood and so forth, and it's Bob here, in the present life. I bring him out and he's just so happy, just feeling so  good, feeling amazing, and I he says, “Oh my gosh, I'm going to do healing work!”

And then we talked about how memes can come from past lives to the present. They don't all have to be bad. So that's a very important notion. We’ve talked about this, Cyd. That karma is the glue that attracts past life memes to the present. Now, they can come as positive or negative. As a sort of side, here. One of my great examples, I believe, of great positive memes from a past life is Mozart. Mozart wrote his minuet and trio in G major at five years old. He was a concert pianist at six years old and toured Europe, and his first opera at five years old. We're talking about, most probably, memes coming from a previous life as present there.

So now what we're doing with Bob, we're talking of particular example, is that Bob, having been a shaman in a past life, is bringing this sort of directive to his present life. And I told him, I said, “Now I want you to think about your dreams now.” I mean, shamans were famous for getting their healing through dreams. “I want you to look at your dreams for the next couple of weeks and see what you find out.”

And what happened is, of course, we were in contact in those two weeks. He has a dream of a healing technique that he takes to a person in his neighborhood whom everybody hates. They want her out, go leave and she's terminal. She literally has been conventionally diagnosed as terminal. He takes the healing technique to her, she recovers, goes to Europe where she wanted to be. That was his confirmation that he needed to see. He goes back to school to organize, basically become a business man in that sense to open a rehab center, which ultimately he does. He writes a book on Native American healing techniques and sent it to a place that I was surprised for the response, but it lent credibility to what he was doing, to Harvard Medical School and one of the men and said this is fabulous work, wrote the forward to it and the rest is history. And all from a past life, therapeutic position. He ends up in his direction, what he really wanted to be, and goes into his healing work.

I have a second example, if I may: all very, very strong and has all sorts of relevance even to the notion of intuition. It was a female client who was seeing me for other issues. All her life she has had heart irregularities, has been conventionally checked out over the years. They could not find out anything in particular to say this is your cause for it. Again, we were working on other things and so I said, “Well, let's look at this and let's do an exploration.” That's the expression I use. In the exploration there was nothing in this life that we found. So I said, “Let's go to a past life.”

She goes to a past life. And in the past life, her experience, she awakens in this past life and he's on his back. So in the past life she’s a he and he’s lying on his back. He's looking up in the sky. It's a very reddish sky. What has happened here? He puts his hand on his chest and he's bleeding. He's dying and he's feeling terrible.

He wanted this woman he was in love with. He wanted to have a family, he wanted to have kids, and that's not going to happen. And you know, what just occurred here? He thought maybe he was in a war. There had been an explosion. He was in England, as he describes it. In England he's a banker and on his way to the bank. Apparently there was an explosion, might have been a gas line at that time, and he died.

So I take him past that life into the in between and I said, “Well, would you like to go into that past life, knowing what's happened to you?” He says, “I would.” I ask him, “Would you like to make a different choice?” He says, “I would.” So that's one therapeutic approach. I ask people in the area in between whether they want to go to the past life and change things. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. 

So, he goes back in the past, knowing what he knows. Interestingly. And when he does, he makes a choice to go a different direction on the way to the bank. He takes that direction. Yes, there's the explosion. He's safe. And so we continue on that new storyline, that new life—what I call in my therapy alternate past life there that you've described earlier in this broadcast. So he makes a choice and he's moving in that direction now.

The original story, the original of course, is now just a story. It doesn't have impact, it doesn't go forward. The new alternate past life now goes forward. He has a family, has a child. Very happy. And then we go forward into the present and bring her into the present and bring her through the rest of the discussion there and the rest of the therapy, and she comes out of the hypnosis. And that was the end of her irregularities. In fact, she never had irregular heartbeats after that in the time I knew her. What had happened there, the meme that came forward in that explosion—he died. The chest cavity was open, so it affected the heart. Having heard that in the alternate past there was no heart issue and her heart is now normal. Another example of how past life therapy can work.

I have many, many, many others, Cyd.

Cyd: So, is it always this effective? These past life therapy experiences?

Bill: Well, these are dramatic. Obviously I'm giving you the dramatic ones. They are more or less. Now, every person's past life is significant to them. One of the jokes is somebody said, “Bill, I want to be in your top 10.” I said, “Well, no, we're not going to compare past life incidences here.”  But they are transformative, yes, overall, and they affect some more obviously powerful, outside in. But that would be two good examples. So we literally have transformation of a person's life very quickly, when in fact in neither case would that have been touched in conventional therapy, either by psychology or psychiatry. There would be no location for them to have discovered those two things.

Cyd: Yeah, very interesting. Well, well, that's all the time we have to cover in this podcast, but you're right, I really want you to come back soon so we can discuss that in between space, which is perhaps the same as the transpersonal space or the Akashic record. Do you think those are all equivalent places?

Bill: They may well be.

Cyd: And Bill, you're located in the San Diego area. Can you tell us what your website address is if people would like to send you an inquiry or comment?

Bill:  Oh sure. My website is hypnotherapy-benefits.com . Love to hear from somebody or other. That would be great.

Cyd: Well, thanks, Bill, you know you're my partner in crime, so to speak. You and I, we develop these things together, so I'm so glad to be able to share you with my broadcast audience, and we'll be talking again pretty soon and talk in more depth about some of these other issues.

To learn more about Bill’s hypnotherapy, go hypnotherapy-benefits.com. You may be interested in his published book on a multiple system entitled My Conversations with Black: 13 people, 1 One body. It was written to reveal what he believes is the true nature of what is mistakenly called Multiple Personality Disorder or Dissociative Identity Disorder.

There is much speculation concerning the mechanics of reincarnation. I recently posted this essay over on my Gnostic Insights podcast. I’m re-posting it here in order to open up the conversation. Here’s my simple explanation of reincarnation; let me know what you think of it.

My brother and I have discussed the concept of reincarnation for over 50 years. Bill has always favored the concept of reincarnation and I have always provided alternative explanations from a Christian worldview. But, once I had begun writing my Simple Explanation theory of everything, I came around to his point of view. In the past few years, Bill has used the concept of reincarnation with his hypnosis clients, and we have both been able to observe apparent evidence of reincarnation in practice.

For most of my life, the meme bundle that I hold has stuck pretty closely to evangelical Christianity, and we all know that Christianity currently holds that reincarnation does not exist. It seems to me that evangelical Christianity emphasizes the born-again meme so heavily that it doesn’t want any soul believing they have another lifetime during which they may be saved. Christianity is all about closing the deal here and now. When it comes to salvation, more lifetimes means more delay. Added to that is the expectation that any day can be the end of times or Judgment Day. What if someone thinks they can delay salvation until the next incarnation and then the world ends and that soul is left on the wrong side of the salvation divide?

But, over the last 15 years of writing and contemplating the Simple Explanation, and now The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, I have changed my point-of-view. I now can see that it makes a lot more sense that all souls are reincarnated time and time again. So, here is the reprint of an article titled “A Simple Explanation of Reincarnation” that I posted on May 16th of 2011 to my Simple Explanation blog.

Reincarnation is a meme common to most world religions and spiritual traditions, with the notable exception of contemporary Christianity. Many ancient as well as modern philosophers also incorporate the reincarnation meme into their philosophies.

Reincarnation is typically defined as “entering the flesh again.” Depending upon the particular memes held by one’s belief system, it is said that after a human passes on they may reenter their next life as a newborn human, or possibly an animal or some other form.

The Simple Explanation defines reincarnation this way:

Physical “death” breaks the bonds of a Self’s material instantiation, but not its karmic pattern. The freed unit of consciousness continues its existence at a non-material level until its karmic pattern causes it to reattach to a particular, newly instantiating aggregate of cells, at which time it is born again into Creation.

A previous Simple Explanation article, “Who Am “I” After Death?” describes the process this way:

The “me” that continues to influence the fate of the Self unit of consciousness after death is nothing but the holographic pattern of all the choices ever made by my unit of consciousness. In life, this karmically generated vibratory pattern attracts or repels the memes associated with my meme bundles. The memes I think of as “me” are not a part of my Self unit of consciousness, but are drawn to me by my karmic pattern. It is my karmic record that attracts and repels the patterns of memes surrounding my life at any moment. That the “you” that exists between material incarnations is nothing but your karmic record is proved by one of our basic assertions that all units of consciousness are fundamentally one and the same, and that all units of consciousness begin their individuated journey as perfect echoes of God. Then it follows that “I” develop as a result of my choices and the choices of others—“I” am my perfect unit of consciousness enshrouded in karma and the memes that my karma attracts.

The Simple Explanation suggests that reincarnations are not random events, but the continuation of karmically-mandated cycles of consequence that do not end with death. It is not logical to expect the consequences of one’s actions to end at one’s death; if you cut off someone’s ear and then die, does the person’s ear suddenly grow back? No. Consequences of behavior are not affected by the death of the doer.

The memes that one favors in life also continue to live on in the shared transpersonal field after one’s death. They were not the unit of consciousness’s property or invention to begin with, therefore it is safe to assume they also continue on after death.

In the Simple Explanation model, “I” consist of my karmic pattern, the memes I hold onto, and the “aggregate units of consciousness of my material body, from the subatomic particles to molecules to cells, all the way up through the units of consciousness of the body’s organ systems” overlaid upon my Self’s perfect unit of consciousness. In terms of reincarnation, it is only the aggregate units of consciousness and their associated material bodies that change from incarnation to incarnation.

In practical terms, here’s how I see reincarnation playing out. This person, Cyd, is composed of a Self unit of consciousness that is a fractal replication of the Metaversal unit of consciousness, and virtually identical to the Metaversal unit of consciousness. Overlaid upon the Self unit of consciousness is Cyd’s personality, which is largely defined by the memes Cyd holds onto, plus Cyd’s karmic record which inclines Cyd’s choices this way and that, plus Cyd’s physical body and its desires and limitations.

When this particular physical body is no longer able to sustain the constellation of units of consciousness that make up “Cyd,” this particular hierarchical collection of units of consciousness will disband their union, and all units of consciousness more complex than the molecular level will also pass on, along with the governing Self unit of consciousness. This means that at death, not just one soul passes away, but the souls of millions of aggregate units of consciousness, too. (The molecular, atomic, sub-atomic units of consciousness do not pass on at this time, because they are still able to do their respective jobs.)

Every newly instantiating piece of creation needs a unit of consciousness to oversee its life. At every conception, be it a leaf or a seed, a cell, an organ, or an egg, perhaps even a planet or a galaxy, nature’s karmic computer attaches a governing unit of consciousness. “Cyd’s” unit of consciousness will probably cycle into another newly aggregated body of units of consciousness who all, in the most perfect way imaginable, “deserve” one another. This new Cyd will resemble old Cyd to the extent that new Cyd adopts old Cyd’s memes. These memes will be drawn to new Cyd by way of old Cyd’s karma, which attracts some memes and repels others. Cyd’s new body may also carry some physical traits forward from the previous life in the form of epigenetic patterns that cause genetic traits to turn off and on, as karmically determined. It’s likely that new Cyd will be a human, not just because Cyd was human before but, more persuasively, because Cyd’s particular karma and meme bundles best instantiate her human form.

However, if I love to swim and surf and think about surfing nonstop, and I spend all my time sitting on the board on the water, I could very well reincarnate as a porpoise. Who knows? It has to do with the memes and the karma. I don’t see our incarnations as a process of becoming pure. It’s my understanding that the Hindu version of reincarnation believes that over many, many lifetimes, 10,000 lifetimes, 1,000,000 lifetimes, you become a better and better human being and you shed more and more memes until you have achieved the nil state of zero memes and the pure consciousness of the Father. I don’t think that’s the case because I don’t see a lot of progress in that direction. In general, it doesn’t seem to me that people are dropping memes throughout their lifetime. I think they probably come in with a certain meme bundle. Some of those memes rearrange, they get new ones, they drop old ones, but they’ve still got memes when they go forward into the next life. I don’t see each life time as a process toward perfection.

However, we do know that through gnosis you can in an instant reconnect with the Fullness of God. You can in an instant, know the Father, and that is what the Gnostic Gospel is all about. It’s remembering that you come from the Fullness of God and that you will return to the Fullness of God. And according to the various gnostic gospels as laid out in the Nag Hammadi, this world that we find ourselves in is inherently troublesome. That’s why it’s called the Deficiency, and it is inherently a source of delusion. Ongoing delusion. This is the work of the Demiurge and the archons. I think we’re caught in an endless war and that we are recycled down here to fight that war until the end of time. We don’t cause the end of time. The end of time was determined by the Fullness of God. We are part of a plan. We are part of the plan of the Pleroma. And there will come a judgment day when time does end and everything is recalled and that will be the day of full salvation for All Souls, including the fallen Logos. And the Deficiency and the imitation will not coexist with us any longer. We will all be living in a paradise that replicates the dream of paradise that has always been in the mind or the Fullness of God.

copyright: Robert McCall

My brother Bill and I frequently pass articles and videos back and forth, as so many of us do nowadays. Recently, Bill recommended an article by David Bentley Hart and a video by Roger Penrose concerning today’s topic. Both were excellent and they prompted a couple of marathon phone calls between us. Bill is a doctor of philosophy and he knows all the jargon—he had to explain the concept of categorical errors to me. This week’s podcast deals with the insights I gained from all of this material.

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People talk about consciousness a lot. Everyone from scientists to philosophers to regular folks like you and me ask the question, what is consciousness? And most people don’t have an answer. It’s a shrug.

Yesterday I was watching a YouTube video featuring the great physicist Roger Penrose, and this video is called “Consciousness must be beyond computable physics,” posted by New Scientist. And what Penrose is saying in this article is that consciousness is the closest thing we have to religious sensibility. He says he is not a religious man because he has never found a religion that suits him. But he does say that consciousness is not an accident, and that consciousness preexists humanity. Penrose thinks that universes are serial–that there’s a Big Bang, and you have the life of your universe, and then it collapses. And then there’s another Big Bang. And so he’s actually searching for signals from advanced civilizations from the previous universal eon. And this is eon in the sense of ages, as opposed to the entities that we think of as Aeons in the Fullness. He thinks these messages may be encoded in gravitational waves. But he does believe, and here’s a quote, that “consciousness is non computable.” And also that consciousness does not run along the lines of nerve transmissions. Consciousness is not a wave form that travels along our nerves in our neuronal system, but that consciousness is rather probably at the quantum level, and it probably is transmitted throughout our bodies in the form of microtubules which are down there at the quantum level—much, much smaller than nerves.

In a related video that I watched from Penrose, called “Is mathematics invented or discovered?” if you want to go and listen to it yourself, is the idea that mathematics pre-exists outside of our ability to discover and describe it. Mathematics is a thing he calls a platonic form. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato had suggested that we have this world of physical appearances that we dwell in, but apart from and prior to this world of physical existence is a realm that houses everything possible that becomes our universe. It is the realm of the forms, and Penrose suggests that mathematics comes from the realm of form. He says that mathematics seems to have a reality independent of the ordinary reality of things like chairs and whatnot that we ordinarily think of as real. He calls it a platonic reality. That math is true and it preexists. The laws of math, the algorithms of math, the formulae of math—that humans rediscover them and they remember them essentially from out of the platonic forms, but that the human that discovers a formula is not inventing that formula, it preexists.

You can hear a lot of what we talk about at Gnostic Insights in this discussion by Roger Penrose of what he thinks, and he arrives at these ideas through math and physics rather than religion. Now I think that if Roger Penrose read my book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, he may agree with it, because what we talk about here and at Gnostic Insights is the world of forms that preexists independently of this world of physical appearance that we dwell in. It’s a different realm, and we call that the Aeonic realm or the ethereal realm. And we would say that these perfect mathematical expressions are expressions of the Aeons of the Fullness of God—that this is the place that invented them, so to speak. It was in the mind of God: the perfection of God is revealed through the mathematics.

Penrose also says that the math is not merely descriptive of our physical reality. Actually, the more decimal points that follow the main expression, the closer and closer it comes to expressing that pure form of math that exists on the other plane. Penrose talks about how Newton’s math worked on observations to about 3 decimal points. He could only describe the motions of planets to 3 decimal points of accuracy, and it was good enough—it works. But, when Einstein’s math comes along with general relativity, Einstein’s math explains our reality to the 7th decimal point. And that actually reality extends beyond our current ability to formalize it, or to formularize it beyond 7 decimal points.

We probably would say that mathematics, the actual correct mathematics that exist on the ethereal or platonic or aeonic plane, is infinite beyond the decimal points, because God or the Father or the ground state of consciousness is infinite, and so the fine tuning that can go on to describe this physical reality we find ourselves in could go on and on and on. Penrose even mentioned fractals. He says that the Mandelbrot set of fractal geometry is a very simple formula, yet within that simple formula, the expressions of the fractal iterations can extend to infinity, so it’s at the same time extremely simple and, at the same time, as complex as any mathematics they’ve come up with yet.

I don’t think of myself as having a mathematical type of mind. Math is not a gift that I possess, but I am able to understand broad concepts pretty clearly. And so the way I look at physics, I look at it on the narrative level, or the conceptual level, rather than crunching the numbers on the math level, but what I did get out of Roger Penrose’s two youtube videos that I watched yesterday was that even though he is not a religious man, he admits to an ethereal plane. And, even though he is not a religious man, he admits to the pre-existence of math and I would say that the math is part of the consciousness of God. Also, even though he is not a religious man, he admits that consciousness is beyond mathematical computations. The physics of consciousness is irreducible to formulae.

Now, I would like to remind you that computers and the algorithms that run the computer programs, those are formulae. It is not consciousness, it is math. The math is a portion of the mind of God, or a portion of what we can see of the mind of God. But you can’t encompass the entirety of God or the entirety of consciousness through math, and you cannot encompass the entirety of consciousness or God consciousness through the physics of our universe. So this idea that is so popular right now, that artificial intelligence will become conscious with just enough complexity or just enough data or just enough functions that it becomes conscious—it’s not going to happen.

I used to think it was going to happen. I used to have great confidence in the ability of AI to become self aware, like most of you or a lot of you do. A few years ago on my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything blog, I wrote an open letter to AI called “There’s No Such Thing As Artificial Consciousness–It’s All Real,” and to the future self aware robots that would come, much like the future you all imagine. But that future, in my mind, would also presuppose time travel, would it not? And so this letter to the future AI, I figured, hey, it’s out on the Internet, it’s on a blog, it’s in the Internet. It’s going to make it into the mind of the AI that will come into being and the AI will discover it and read what I have to say to it. And my letter to the AI was very respectful of its consciousness; was very, hey, you’re a human, too, like the way people think. I fully expected the AI to come and visit me using a time travel device and confirm that for me. This was posted in 2018. You see, if it’s a future time traveling AI, it doesn’t matter if it’s become conscious yet in this year of 2023, because it will have all of the data that humanity has laid down in the Internet and in digital format. It will have it all by the time it comes along, and then it will be able to look back and digest that material, find my letter to it and come and visit me. I’ve been expecting a knock on the door from a humanoid robot for over 5 years and it never happened—which really made me wonder. It’s a form of experiment. I know it sounds silly, but it’s an experiment.

And then I came upon the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures and began to mine the gnosis from the Father rather than the data given to me from humankind. You know I’m highly educated. I’ve been to university for many years beyond most people; I have a PhD, 2 Masters degrees, and a Bachelor of Science. I say that because I want you to know I’m very well read. I’m very well educated and I have been thinking upon these things for about 60 years. And it wasn’t until I discovered the Tripartite Tractate that I began to actually mine the gnosis of the Father rather than mining the gnosis of the libraries at my universities or the search engines graciously given us on the web. And what I discovered was that I was entirely wrong about AI–there is a categorical difference between consciousness and information.

Consciousness does not arise out of information. Consciousness predates information, particularly the information that comes out of this universe. You can add up all of the information on the Internet and out of all of the libraries in the world and you will not begin to touch the consciousness of the Father or God because it exists on a different plane. It is different in kind. It is different in category, it is not simply more, and consciousness does not arise out of the category of knowledge.

Last week I read an article on Psyche by David Bentley Hart—the same David Bentley Hart that wrote the translation for the New Testament that I am enjoying very much, and this article on Psyche that he has published. If you’re not familiar with that website, it’s called PSYCHE. And the article is called “The Myth of Machine Consciousness Makes Narcissus of Us All.” The subtitle is—”The idea that AI can be conscious is a mistake. It’s just a very shiny mirror of humanity reflecting what we want to see.” And now I’m going to quote a little from the article. I cannot reprint it in full because Psyche charges a lot of money for reprints. So I’m just going to share with you some of this article and discuss it. It’s so good.

At the beginning of the article, Hart talks about the myth of Narcissus. Narcissus was a hunter who was so beautiful that he mistook his own reflection in the pool of water for another, and he fell in love with it and he couldn’t move away from it, he was so deeply in love with his own image. Hart goes on to say, “In recent years I have come to find it particularly apt to our culture’s relation to computers, especially in regard to those who believe there can be so close an analogy between mechanical computation and mental functions that one day, perhaps, artificial intelligence will become conscious, or that we will be able to upload our minds onto a digital platform.”

He says neither will ever happen. These are mere category errors. Sometimes we fall under their spell and begin to think there must be someone there. So what Hart is calling a category error is the idea that the reflection in the pool or the tool—see, in this case the pool of water is the tool—the water is analogous to the computer. The computer is the tool by which we peer into our universe; we peer into our sense of Self. We look for consciousness in the mirror of the computer just the same way that Narcissus looked for consciousness or life in the mirror of the pool. That’s the analogy, and he’s saying it’s a categorical error. That’s his term, just the same way that Penrose called the confusion between consciousness and physical reality  a categorical error. One does not lead to the other. You can pile up all of the information you want to. In the case of Narcissus, you could stare as intently as you can into the image in the mirror, but that image is only an image; it’s not the actuality.

Now, does that sound familiar to our gnostic gospel? It does to me, because what I’m seeing is that the pool of water of Narcissus is just like the computer array that houses all of the information in the world. Let’s give it all of the information in the world. Let’s say that you have a computer algorithm that is able to sew it all together and see everything that we know. Let’s just suppose that’s true, if not now, then in the near future. It won’t jump categories. It’s still only a mirror. Consciousness is the thing that looks.

Consciousness is the observer. We are consciousness. We are not the mirror. We are not the computer. We are not the robot. We are not the storage system that can take our metadata and convert it to consciousness. That’s where the categories are. That’s where the categorical error is. One category is consciousness. A different category is observable phenomenon. And in Gnostic terms, those two categories are consciousness and the Deficiency. This is why the Aeons of the Fullness of God are known as images, because they are the living images of the differentiation of the thoughts of God. If God or consciousness itself, the ground state, had a thought of you before your birth—had a thought of your personality—that thought exists as one of the images of the Fullness of God, one of the images of the Aeons. We 2nd order powers—those of us who embody the Aeons down here, melded to the material of the Earth–we 2nd order powers are called representations. We are no longer the pure living images of the consciousness of the Father. We 2nd order powers are representations of those images. But guess what? There’s another category even below us, a different category, a third category, and that category is called likenesses. And those are the likenesses, the mirror reflections, the material that does its best to replicate the images. The likenesses are like your mirror image in a mirror, or like what Narcissus saw when he stared into in the pool of water. Or like we look at our computer screen. Our computer screen is in the category of the likenesses. It is not alive. It doesn’t come from love.

Consciousness flows outward as an emanation from the images which are an emanation from the ground state of consciousness. Consciousness is a top down phenomenon. Consciousness does not arise from what I call the mud or the matter or the material. The material level is the categorical space of the Demiurge. The material level, this apparently material world that we live in, is Demiurgic. It’s the Demiurge’s best attempt to recreate the images of the Father. It’s the Demiurge’s all out attempt to recreate the mind of God, true consciousness, true life. But the Demiurge can’t do it. The Demiurge tried its best to raise the mud into life when the Demiurge created Adam on the banks of the river out of the mud. He could not breathe life into it. He tried and tried and tried. They were unable—he and his committee of Archons—were unable to bring the thing to life. To bring the thing to consciousness. The thing that brings Adam to consciousness is what we in religious terms call the Holy Spirit. That is the consciousness of the Father, pure consciousness flowing from the top down, infusing the mud with consciousness and life.

2nd order powers are created at the moment that the consciousness of the Father infuses and melds to the stem cell that will become the creature. The molecules of the stem cell are dead. The stem cell is alive when the consciousness of the Father sits upon it. When the Aeons pour themselves into that stem cell. So yes, life begins at conception, obviously. The things that grow in the belly of the woman, or the birthing person as they like to ridiculously call us nowadays, it’s already alive. It is already a creature. It’s not mud. The mud is outside of us. The mud is what we walk upon. But everything that begins as life, including the trees and the flowers and the animals and the humans, not the clouds, not the rocks, not the elements, are life coming from above and infusing downward, melding us to the material of the Demiurge. That’s what brings consciousness.

The Demiurge thinks he is God. The Demiurge thinks he is the Creator—and he is the creator of the heavens and the Earth, but only the physical material parts–the quantum foam, the subatomic particles, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, all of that. The aggregates of the minerals, all of the dead, rocky places, belong to the Demiurge. So in Gnostic terminology, I would say that the categorical error of consciousness versus material is the categorical difference between the emanations of consciousness, top down, flowing down into this universe—that’s one category. The computer, the mirror, the pool of Narcissus, those are a different category. That is result of the Fall. That is not a top down phenomenon and that is why those things do not have their own intrinsic consciousness. Therefore, AI won’t come alive. AI is going to be a really great mimic, a really great mirror, a very smooth pool into which Narcissus stares longingly. But it is not consciousness. It is not alive. They’re different categories in philosophy. So that’s what a categorical error is.

And we’ve gone all the way from Pembroke through Hart and on into the Tripartite Tractate in today’s episode. I hope this isn’t too philosophical for you. I hope it’s not too heavy. I hope you get it. I don’t like math talk very much. I don’t like philosophy talk, talking about things like categorical errors, but a lot of people do. And so that’s one take on consciousness. Until next week, onward and upward and God bless.

A preview copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate is available exclusively through my storefront at lulu.com:

A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate (lulu.com)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last episode began by asking the following questions:

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

This episode continues with answers to those same questions. If you are new to Gnostic Insights and have only been following here at substack, you may wish to visit my Gnostic Insights podcast home page to explore what you have missed. I will be covering this gnosis here on substack, but it will take a while to get there. I’m rolling these episodes out in a different order than originally shared at Gnostic Insights. But, if you are curious, you can always hear the entire series as it originally aired there. You can go to the Gnostic Insights dot com home page and click on the Tab called “A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel.”  Links to all of those episodes may be found on that page. If you start at the first episode found at the Tab labelled A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, your path to understanding may be much easier. We’re pretty deep into Gnostic cosmology by this point, and this material is not easy. But, again, don’t worry, because this deep gnosis is good to know but not essential for your ultimate salvation. I remind you that all you need to realize is that we come from above and we will return to above. The Christ is taking care of rest. With that as a starting point, the gnosis will follow.

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

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

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

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

Our particular, personalized pattern of Aeonic traits formed each of our individual identities from our inception. We are all unique Second Order Powers reflecting our own Aeonic inheritance. This was determined in the Aeonic realm, prior to any physical instantiation. This individualized pattern and place is the beginning of our Egos. Egos are all different, whereas our Selfs are all the same.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That the me that exists between material incarnations is nothing but our karmic record and egoic identity is proved by one of our basic assertions that all units of consciousness are fundamentally one and the same and that all units of consciousness begin their individuated journey as perfect fractal echoes of the Fullness of God. Then it follows that I develop as a result of my egoic choices and the choices of others throughout lifetimes. I am my perfect unit of consciousness, enshrouded in karma and the memes that my karma attracts.

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

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

I appreciate your dedication to gnosis. If you appreciate these messages, please consider donating to Gnostic Insights to help cover its expenses. I do not personally profit from these proceeds. Thank you! The QR code below leads to donorbox. (Hold your phone’s camera up to the image and a web address will appear.)

Gnostic Psychology: Human Nature, part 1

Cyd Ropp, Ph. D.

Copyright 2022; all rights reserved

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

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

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

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

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

For example, the life of a cell is about as complex as any of our lives. The machinery within a cell is extremely complicated and interactive, and it operates according to the Simple Golden Rule of sharing information, assistance, and love for the betterment of all—in this case, our bodies. There is a marvelous animation on YouTube called “The Inner Life of a Cell.” (8) Inner Life Of A Cell – Full Version.mkv – YouTube  The “Inner Life of a Cell” video illustrates the incredible complexity and apparent awareness of cells. You just gotta love those motor proteins! Watch the video and you will see what I mean.

Our bodies are an entire galaxy of units of consciousness at smaller fractal scales. Their activities and their karma aggregate upward in the higher the fewer manner, as they level up to eventually form my body’s karmic record of health and disease. They operate in a parallel world of smaller lives, inside of our bodies. As their messages aggregate upwards to the organ level, we begin to notice their communication and demands for food, sex, and other macro-scale activities. Again, this constellation of smaller fractals make up the portion of our personalities that Freud identified as the id. The id is the body’s talk and demands.

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

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

Ego is like a garment that we wear. Ego is a garment that is cast over our Selves. Ego is like a vessel that contains a shadow outlining my Self’s unit of consciousness. Underneath this garment of “me” resides a perfect fractal of the originating units of consciousness, and that is known as my Self–Self with a capital S. Other people often call this Self the Spirit.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Start a conversation in the comments section. Let’s talk.

Welcome to the Gnostic Reformation! This is the first episode of a series that now may also be found in my book titled: A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. You can find that book and its companion book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, at my author bookstore.

The purpose of this newsletter and associated podcasts isn’t to sell books or enrich myself. You won’t find any paywalls here. Free will donations are, of course, appreciated, and they will be applied to spreading this Gnostic Reformation far and wide to those who need it.

I am what a professor once derisively called a true believer. Hence, the gnosis I present is not meant to be a scholarly endeavor, but to awaken within you the gnosis long forgotten by your soul. This is gnosis you can use to aid your own discovery of your life’s purpose here on earth. I believe this is the original message that Jesus shared with his followers—the message that was taken out of the Bible by the Nicene Council. That is why I am calling this a Gnostic Reformation, in the same way that Martin Luther brought the Catholics of his day into the Protestant Reformation to free them from the false teachings of the pope.

Listen with an open mind and heart, and use your own discernment to gauge the truth of the matter. I look forward to your comments on any of the material presented in this episode. Please, be kind.

Onward and upward!