This episode transcript is also posted to A New Gnostic Gospel 7/3/2022

copyright held by Cyd Ropp; all rights reserved

The Father

As you know, we've been looking at the gnostic Gospel according to the Tripartite Tractate, which is one of the books in the Nag Hammadi scrolls. The Tripartite Tractate is a book that focuses on the origins of our universe and everything in it, including us. So I thought we would look around again today and revisit the Tripartite Tractate and what it has to say about the Father as the first principle of gnosticism.

Philosophers often speak of the hard problem of consciousness. Materialist scientists don't believe in consciousness. They believe in a thing called monism, which is that we are only our physical bodies and that any appearance of consciousness or of a soul is merely a by-product of physical mechanisms, hormones, atoms moving around--this sort of thing. The counterpoint to that view, often called dualism, is that, yes, we have a physical body and then we also have a soul and it's your soul that survives after death. This gnosticism that comes from the Nag Hammadi is a religious system that presupposes that there is a soul and there is a body.

It seems to me that the soul that people speak of surviving is the consciousness that began with the Father and derives from the Father. And that is why, whenever I discuss the system of consciousness, whether it's in the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, it always begins with the Father, because the Father is where consciousness resides. The Father is consciousness itself. The Father is another word for consciousness. Then this entire creation cosmology that's presented through the Tripartite Tractate and then re-presented again in my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, is the path by which consciousness proceeds out from the Father through the Son, through the Totalities and the Pleroma of the Hierarchy, and on into the Second Order of Powers that populates the earth.

This is why we begin with the Father. The Father is the ground state of consciousness, and so this is why we begin to build out from the Father the flow of consciousness. My Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything book and blog are devoted to the notion of panpsychism, which suggests that consciousness resides in everything. In gnostic terms we say that the Father extends his consciousness throughout all living things that populate the cosmos.

I like to begin with the cosmos as it unfolded and rolled out. The word for that sort of study is “cosmogony,” which is defined as the study of the origins of the universe. This makes the most sense to me--to start at the very beginning and then to go through the entire process of how everything came to be and who the principal players are and then, after that is established, to see how that applies to our lives. Then we can ask, “Why are we here? Is there a purpose to our lives? How should we live?” After that, we can finally consider the termination of the universe and what happens after we die. All of these questions are answered very precisely in the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi. This knowledge is known as “gnosis.”

Today we begin at the very beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. This story, this cosmogony, begins before the beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos existed.

I'm going to compare a couple of different versions of the Tripartite so that we have a fuller picture of the Father. One of the books I'm going to use is The Nag Hammadi Scriptures edited by Marvin Meyer; the translator in this case was a person named Einar Thomassen.