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Gnostic Insights

Gnostic Insights

By: Cyd Ropp Ph.D.
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  • You, Your Body, and All of the Pleromas of God

    You, Your Body, and All of the Pleromas of God
    Apr 27 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This morning we’re going to hear an episode that was recorded in 2022 that bears repeating. It’s called Heavenly Pleromas. And if you’re fairly new to Gnostic Insights, or even if you’ve been with us for a while, all of this information about the various nested pleromas of consciousness bears repeating. You’ll even learn what the word pleroma means. Before we hear that, I’d like to mention something that came to me during a walk this week, and it has to do with this: Is it selfish to be kind to your body? Many people mistreat their bodies, and that’s a terrible thing to do because your body isn’t just you. You are like the Raja sitting on top of the elephant of the consciousness of your soul and of your body. You are the god of this universe that you ride upon. Not the big God, not the God Above All Gods, but a little miniature copy of a God. And this episode of Heavenly Pleromas will explain why it is that I’m saying that our bodies exist to support us, to keep us alive. That unit of consciousness that’s sitting on top, that you think of as you, that’s your Self and your ego, but it’s also the countless billions of units of consciousness that make up all of the living flesh of your body. Each of those little organs, each of those little cells, is alive and devoted to you. They are selfless in their devotion to keeping you alive. And it seems that the least that we can do is be kind to them—is to go ahead and separate that egoic self; that you sit up on the top of the mountain like Logos sat up on top of the Fullness. You need to be kind and respectful to everyone below you, to the Fullness of the pleroma of your body that’s keeping you alive, and to remember that each one of those little units of consciousness, each one of those little cells and organs and processes that make up your physical body are fractal emanations of the Aeons of the Fullness above. They each came down as you were being formed from the egg on up. The molecules belong to the Demiurge, but all of the living parts belong to the Fullness of God. And so, when you are bad to your body, if you mistreat your body, if you poison your body, if you deny your body the needs that it has for sleep and nourishment, then you are being unkind to the Fullness of God. You are spitting in the eye of the Aeons that entirely make you up. So just think of that the next time—don’t think that it’s your body and you can do whatever you want. It actually belongs to the Fullness of God, and we’re kept alive through grace. So be a kind ruler of those elements that make up your body. Now, here’s Heavenly Pleromas. “Pleroma” is a common word in gnostic scriptures, and it has a particular meaning that only relates to the Gnostic Gospels. In fact, we gnostics are expecting to wind up at the end of days in a Pleroma that others usually call “Heaven.” Today, I’d like to take a closer look at Pleromas in order to discover where we all came from and where we will wind up at the end of days. Pleroma is a Greek word for “all that which is contained within a body or organization.” The Pleroma of the Fullness of God is the Pleroma we most often refer to here at Gnostic Insights. The Pleroma of the Fullness of God is the sum total of all the individual characteristics and powers of the originating consciousness of the Father as manifested in the monad known as the Son. Here is how the Pleroma of the Fullness is described in the Tripartite Tractate: “Each one of the aeons is a name, , each of the properties and powers of the Father, since he exists in many names, which are intermingled and harmonious with one another. It is possible to speak of him because of the wealth of speech, just as the Father is a single name, because he is a unity, yet is innumerable in his properties and names…” This first differentiation of the properties contained in the Son is known as the ALL or the Totalities. The Pleroma of the ALL is pictured as a central star with rays going out in all directions, yet unified without personal identity within the single body and will of the Son. When the Totalities of the ALL become self-aware, they name themselves and sort themselves into the Pleroma of the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. “… the aeon of the Truth, since it is a unity and multiplicity, receives honor in the small and the great names according to the power of each to grasp it – by way of analogy – like a spring which is what it is, yet flows into streams and lakes and canals and branches, or like a root spread out beneath trees and branches with its fruit, or like a human body, which is partitioned in an indivisible way into members of members, primary members and secondary, great and small.” The Fullness of God is the Holy Spirit of the Father bursting out into individualized, fractal units of consciousness. The Fullness of God is pictured as a stack of golden cannon balls, ...
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    30 mins
  • The Nature of the Gnostic God

    The Nature of the Gnostic God
    May 4 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’m starting to review a few of our previous episodes from a couple of years ago because we have a lot of new listeners and, in case you haven’t backed up to listen to the entire series, I’m picking out what seems to me to be important ideas. And for those of you who have already heard this, again, like I said last week, it really bears repeating. It takes many, many times to hear these things in order to fully grasp them, as I’m sure you agree. Now, my intent here at Gnostic Insights isn’t to teach you these things so much as it is to remind you of these things, because it is one of the basic tenets of gnosticism that we are born with this knowledge—we 2nd Order Powers—and that’s everything that’s living in the cosmos. We 2nd Order Powers come down from the Fullness with all of the attributes and knowledge of the Fullness of God, because the Fullness is throughout our entire bodies. Every cell carries a fractal of the Fullness, and we carry a fractal of the Fullness in our overall personhood, our Self. We tend to forget all of this in the living of our life down here. The Tripartite Tractate says the reason we forget this knowledge is due to the what they call the never ending war, and the never ending war is the tension between those of the Remembrance—we 2nd Order Powers—and that which did not exist from the beginning, which is the Archons and the Demiurge. They don’t know any of this. The Demiurge thinks that it is the beginning of all there is. It doesn’t remember the God Above All Gods or Logos, its better Self. It thinks it came into this cosmos and woke up and suddenly the cosmos existed, which is kind of the way it is because it is the result of the Fall, and it’s the Fall that made the cosmos. It’s the Fall that split Logos in two and the better part of Logos goes up, returns to the Fullness and to the Father. That’s its One Self, its overall fractal of Selfhood. But it left behind, down here in the Fall, its broken pieces. That is the ego that overreached in the first place—the part that left the Fullness of God. It works for its own self. It doesn’t work for the overall good. It doesn’t remember the Father, the God Above All Gods, the Fullness from which it came. It doesn’t remember the Golden Rule of cooperation. So the Demiurge thinks it is the God and it goes ahead. And it is a God. It is the God of this world, and it creates the heavens and the Earth and all of the dry, hard, rocky parts—the material, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the minerals—that is all demiurgic. And that is the never ending war that we living creatures find ourselves engaged in. And because of the nature of always having to put up our dukes and fight, we forget the goodness and love and what our original purpose was for being incarnated in the first place, which is to remind the Demiurge of the love of the Fullness and the love of the Father and the love of the God Above All Gods. Our job is to bring love into this universe. So here is the beginning of that story. This is the story of the God Above All Gods, the God of the gnostic mythologies. Today we’re going to be looking at the concept known as the Father. As you know, we’ve been looking at the gnostic Gospel according to the Tripartite Tractate, which is one of the books of 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 material 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. So, first off, we acknowledge that gnosticism is a dualistic philosophy. 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 A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything or The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, (my prior gnostic book), 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 ...
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    29 mins
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