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Gnostic Insights

Gnostic Insights

By: Cyd Ropp Ph.D.
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 Gnostic Wisdom Shared and Simply Explained Personal Development Personal Success Spirituality
Episodes
  • Gnostic Evolution–in the beginning…

    Gnostic Evolution–in the beginning…
    Oct 21 2023
    Someone left a comment on an old article from 2019 on my Simple Explanation blog, and it caused me to reread the article. And, gee, it’s a good article. I don’t think we’ve ever shared it here on Gnostic Insights, so I’m going to talk to you today about a Simple Explanation of Gnostic Evolution. (this podcast refuses to allow me to paste the link to the original Simple Explanation article! grrrr....) There are just a couple of basic ways you can think of evolution. As commonly taught in school, "scientific" evolution explains the tremendous diversity of life on earth as lucky mutations that add up to great results. Darwinism promotes the idea that mutations and mechanisms morph into increasingly sophisticated life forms because genetic goof-ups allow the ones who change to better survive and dominate those who stayed true to form. These lucky mutations keep going in the same lucky direction until there are so many of them they add up to a new and improved creature, and now they are "evolved." These developmental genes are the same for all multicellular animals. Evolutionists believe they have been highly conserved through hundreds of millions of years of evolution. [Hox protein classification across model organisms by CLANS analysis, Hueber et al. ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI8m6o0gXDY&t=8s The second argument for intelligent design is called "specified complexity," which refers to the improbability of essential, highly complex operations arising by chance. The double-strand DNA machinery is one example of a super-complex mechanism where many steps must be accomplished using many components assembled in exactly the right order. Watch the short video below and contemplate how unlikely it is that the DNA replication process "evolved" by chance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNKWgcFPHqw&t=1s The complexity of mechanisms at the smallest possible chemical and biological levels argues against their having arisen by happenstance as quickly as they did. Below is the geological clock of earth. Look how soon protokaryotes arose on Earth--just half a billion years after the newly-arrived moon stabilized the planet's tilt and rotation. Yet all of the sophisticated machinery required for assembling and maintaining a cell was already available for use by the newly emerging single-celled organisms; if they hadn't been, the organisms could not have formed. How were those complex processes ready and waiting? By chance? I don't think so. For a religious system that existed long before modern science invented the concept of evolution, Gnosticism has a lot to say about it. The Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi scriptures that I use for reference, describes us humans as the end result of an unfolding, universal ecosystem it calls "The Economy." The supernatural beings credited with this intelligent design are the Father, the Son, and the Fullness.The Gnostic Gospel suggests that life on earth arose in several cataclysmic steps, with each jump bringing a new order of life to the planet via newly-minted instructions. The jump that started the Earth-ball rolling was the Fall itself, when a higher-order being named "Logos" tried to plug itself into an unauthorized location ("The Father") in order to accomplish a task it was not assigned. The Fall of Logos is the seminal act of the Gnostic creation story. When Logos "fell," it broke apart into all of its component pieces. The ruptured body of Logos is called "The Deficiency." The consciousness of Logos abandoned its dispersed components "down below" and fled back up to the Fullness. The abandoned components of Logos assembled themselves into "Those of the Imitation." Those of the Imitation are organized at the molecular level. They are unable to work together or to procreate with others of their kind. The Simple Gnostic Gospel now identifies prokaryotic organisms with "Those of the Imitation". These two prokaryotic lineages,
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    22 mins
  • Evolution and Conscious Design

    Evolution and Conscious Design
    Oct 28 2023
    In the Simple Explanation there is an ontological pull upward toward more complex aggregations of consciousness. Darwin's model is, on the other hand, a case of the blind simply bumbling by happenstance, by lucky accident, by dumb luck, to be a superior adaptation from the norm. Where I find it unlikely is that there would be a billion such bumblings in the same direction, that by dumb luck keeps heading in the upward and onward direction. The Simple Explanation would say the patterns of superiority are few and they are fractal, so the wheel does not need to be reinvented over and over. The Golden Rule and the hierarchical distribution of increasing complexity and responsibility cover much of it. And, due to the transpersonal nature of universal knowledge, basic mechanisms like hands and eyes only need to be invented once and then deployed or copied as needed. Consciousness is not a byproduct of the human brain, or even of complex systems of any sort. Consciousness is the ground state.
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    25 mins
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