Episodes

  • God is Goodness

    God is Goodness
    Jun 8 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Don’t you think it’s interesting that God is so often in the news? If this were a purely secular life that we’re living, if life really had no meaning and there was no God, then why are people always talking about God? Even the people that say they don’t believe in God at all talk about God. For example, the big atheist of our generation is Richard Dawkins, and I’ve referred to Richard Dawkins many times in my writing, although I usually take his name out so as not to be impolite and call him out. But Richard Dawkins has been an extreme proponent of meaninglessness in our modern age. He tries to narrow all things down to material science. He’s a materialist. Lately, as it turns out, here in the springtime of 2024, Richard Dawkins has come to profess what he is calling cultural Christianity. Richard Dawkins now believes that, well, it may be all hooey that there’s such thing as a God or such thing as a Christ or that there was such a person as Jesus, but he now recognizes in his older age that if we throw all that away, there’s nothing to hang morality on. There’s nothing to hang hope or belief upon. You see, if you reduce our consciousness to a purely mechanical or mathematical or computer-like process, there’s no such thing then as morality or ethics because it’s a mechanical process. So, where would ethics come from? There’s no right or wrong process.And we know that isn’t true. We know deep in our souls, deep in our hearts, that there is such a thing as right or wrong. Now, the people that don’t believe in right or wrong, we call those people sociopaths or psychopaths. And indeed, there’s a lot of psychopaths running around who will kill you just as easy as look at you. All these random attacks, random stabbings, random shootings, mass murders, pushing people onto the subway tracks—these are the acts of sociopaths who are acting as if there were no such thing as righteousness or morality or goodness. But yet, if you yourself are a modern person, though not a sociopath, but you’re a good moral humanist, you do believe in right and wrong. You do believe in morality. You think it is better to be kind than to be cruel. You think it is better to love than to hate, although a lot of people who do not profess belief in God run around hating and they think that that’s love. Good things never come from hate. So people that are running around protesting in a hateful manner, burning things down, pulling things down, striking their opponents—they’re not going to bring about good change. Bad comes from bad. So if you want to make a better change for this world, if you want to make this world a better place, it has to come out of love. It has to come out of morality and righteousness. And you see, at long last, even Richard Dawkins, Mr. Big Material Scientist, has come to believe that there should be such a thing as cultural Christianity. Dawkins says now that Christianity seems to be the only religion that offers an uplifting, righteous type of way to be. And it’s true. Of all the religions in the world, or belief systems in the world, only Christianity offers a sacrificial savior. offers a human with the attributes of the Christ. And the Christ is the perfection of man. The Christ is perfection itself on both a physical level, emotional, and spiritual level—all things good, all things bright and beautiful, all love, no punishment, no vindictiveness, no revenge, no hatred—pure love. So, in our Gnostic Christianity, we acknowledge the Father and the Son and the Christ. We acknowledge the variables of the Son as being the fullness of God, and those are known as the Aeons of God that live in the Fullness. And it’s all on the good side. It’s not a yin-yang, darkness versus white kind of balance. It’s not a continuum between darkness and light, between love, and hate. It is not a dialectic. The Fullness of God, the Son of God, the Father, the Christ—they are entirely on the side of good. The darkness, the ignorance, the separation, the hatred exists outside of that ethereal plane, it exists down here in this material world. Indeed, as a Gnostic, we would say that materiality itself is a form of evil, and this is what drives people crazy against Gnostics. This is one of the big heresies. “Oh, you can’t call creation evil. It’s the creation of God! It’s all good and wonderful and beautiful!” But it’s not, is it? It’s full of death and pain and suffering and betrayal and hatred. Creation is the realm that expresses the fall away from ethereal purity. And here we are. Here we humans are. We are stuck in the middle between the material cosmos and the ethereal creatures of the Fullness, the Aeons, because we come from the Aeons. We are their fruit. We are children of the Fullness of God. We are literally the fruit of the Aeons of God. And we have been seeded down here on this now material plane to remind this plane of the ...
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    21 mins
  • What Is Your Worldview?

    What Is Your Worldview?
    Jun 15 2024
    Today we’re going to talk again about worldviews, ideologies, and memes. And the way I use the word meme is to represent an idea, a tidbit, a small piece of information. It was actually Richard Dawkins, of all people, that coined the term meme, and he used it as an analogous term to the word gene—so a meme is to worldviews and ideologies as a gene is to your DNA makeup. And your DNA is made up of genes, just as our ideologies are made up of countless memes. So I’m going to explain a little bit about what a meme is and what their effect is on our worldview. Do you know what your worldview is? What is your worldview? Have you thought about it? If you were king of the world, what would you have other people believe? What would be the consequences? If everyone believed what you believe, what would that world look like? Here at Gnostic Insights, I’m promoting a type of Gnosticism that comes from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, primarily, as a type of worldview, a type of ideology that would help everyone to get along, that would make this world a better place. It’s not just about our afterlife or what came before the Fall. It’s about: how do we live our lives now? So I’m going to give you some fresh information at the beginning of this episode, but then I’m going to kick back into an excerpt from a previously recorded episode concerning ideologies and worldviews. In 2018, I posted an article called Apocalyptic Visions on my Simple Explanation blog, and if you go to the Gnostic Insights homepage, gnosticinsights.com, I’ll be putting hypertextual links to that original article in this transcript. That first article, Apocalyptic Visions, was about the role of free speech in a representative republic, or what we usually refer to as a democracy. The system of government that the United States has been operating on is ideally run with what is called the consent of the people. That is, you agree with what your government is doing. The populace elects representatives who promise to bring the wishes of the people to their state house or to Congress, and to fairly represent those wishes. These representatives promise to vote in a manner that upholds the will of all the people in their district that they are representing. This is in stark contrast with a government ruled by a small group of elites who consider themselves superior to the populace, and therefore endowed with the ability to make better decisions than the people can make for themselves. These ruling elites do not care for the wishes of the people, and they do not feel bound to represent their constituents. In the kindest terms, this would be called a nanny state, because the people are being told what to do for their own good, like a nanny tells little children. In harsher terms, this ruling elite is called authoritarianism or fascism. In that case, the people may be told it’s for their own good, but really, it’s for the good of the ruling elite, which is usually a combination of extremely wealthy industrialists who make money from the legislation they enforce, and ideological fanatics who apparently believe in the agenda they impose upon the masses, again, “for their own good,” despite the negative outcomes their decisions may bring. There’s an old saying that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We also hear the expression, follow the money, in order to figure out who is actually in control. The ones who are in control are both those who profit financially at the expense of others, and those who gain more control over the population as an outcome of their decisions. So, when we find ourselves scratching our heads and wondering what on earth is happening, we can look around at exactly who is profiting by the decisions being enacted, both in power and control, and with money, big money. Figuring out who holds the power and who is making the money is key to figuring out what kind of government you have in control. And then look at the promises that are being made by those in control “for your own good” and “for the good of the planet,” and see how those promises are concentrating money and power in certain industries and rulers’ hands. In order to concentrate power in the hands of the rulers and the elites, it is necessary to shut down freedom of speech and freedom of thought. With the rise of social media and the concentration of mainstream media into the hands of a few powerful elites, freedom of thought may now be easily controlled by controlling the information that is allowed to get out. We call that sort of information control propaganda because only the officially endorsed information is allowed to be disseminated. The Tripartite Tractate speaks a lot about power and the roots of power. The following quote sums it up pretty well: “The thought of the archons is not barren. All that they thought about they have as potential offspring. Fighters, warriors, troublemakers, apostates, ...
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    19 mins
  • We Are the Children of the Aeons and other musings

    We Are the Children of the Aeons and other musings
    Jun 22 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week’s episode is going to be a little different. First, I want to share with you an update about my upcoming book, and then I’m going to play for you a couple of snippets of recording that I did off of my iPhone while cleaning house, one of them, and the other was while taking a dog walk. So those would be like Gnostic musings or Gnostic Stream of Consciousness. Now, about my book. A very strange thing happened on the way to having my latest book published. You know, the one that I’ve been talking about for almost two years now, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. I had found a publisher, a Christian publisher, and I thought, oh, this will be great. They’ll get it into Christian bookstores and it will be somehow made more acceptable because of that association with a Christian publishing house. However, it has not gone well. We’re 14 months into that process and I fired the publisher two weeks ago. We struggled through the editing phase, transcribing my ready-to-print book. So then I had to painstakingly, it took me months, go back through their editing and restore it to the way I wanted it to read and sound. So after we got through the whole editing, then it moved into actually printing proof copies of the book. And I have received and rejected three sets of proof copies of this book.I explained to them that, no, it’s all too light. So then they went back, reprinted another proof copy. And this time it was like looking at the pages without the light turned on and it was all very dark. And I said, well, that’s not going to work. That’s all wrong. And then they gave me a third version of the printout that looked like someone had spilled ink on the pages and you couldn’t even make out what the images were. So we went back and forth about it, whose fault it was, this and that, and try this and try that. And now 14 months into this process of having A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate printed by this publisher, I pulled the plug. I fired them. And now I am in the process of publishing the book myself, which apparently I should have done in the first place or could have done in the first place. You know, God’s will works in this somehow. What is the stumbling block here? Is it the Demiurge throwing roadblocks in the way of getting this extremely important book out and published? I imagine that the Christian publishing house thinks it’s me and this God Above All Gods that’s throwing the stumbling blocks in the way because this is a heretical work and it shouldn’t get published anyway. You could really go either way on how to interpret this. So for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been laying out the book again from scratch. I’m almost two years ago now in the process, if I had published this book myself. So I’m getting it ready to publish myself for one reason, in order to prove that the images, there’s nothing wrong with them and they’ll print just fine, thank you very much. So that’s what my next step is. But I can’t just reformat all of the images because I can’t take their manuscript that they edited and laid out in case there’s legal complications that I don’t know about. So I’m starting from scratch again on the manuscript of this book and relaying it out. I’m about a third of the way through reformatting the book in order to upload it to Amazon and publish it myself. And we’ll see how the colors come out. We’ll see how the book looks when I do it. But I wanted to explain to you why this book I keep saying, oh, this is going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, why it hasn’t come out now. It’s been 14 months in someone else’s hands and I just should have done it myself, I guess. Although there’s no shoulds. Everything works according to God’s plan. I know one thing—I’m a third of the way through the book now, formatting it, reading every page very carefully as I go through again. And I want to tell you, this is a beautiful book. You really are going to want to buy and read this book that I’m going to publish with nice bright pictures. So that’s where we are. And this cuts into our podcast time. So what I’m playing for you this week is a couple of recordings I have made just as I’m doing other things. They’re not me sitting down at my nice studio setup here. They are me doing housekeeping and speaking out loud while I do it. And then also me taking a walk with the dog in public. So it’s a different kind of very human episode. And let me know what you think. Because these are the way most of my ideas come to me in the first place. It is during these dog walks and housekeeping. So without any further ado, here’s this week’s episode. So I listen to a Christian radio station called The Dove. And it’s interesting how many hymns, particularly the newer praise songs, a lot of old hymns are actually very Gnostic,...
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    18 mins
  • I am not Me–Your Self (2024 edition)

    I am not Me–Your Self (2024 edition)
    Jun 29 2024
    This week’s episode was first broadcast in May of 2021 So far, here at Gnostic Insights, we have discussed the basic cosmology of Gnosticism as explained by the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi codices, and those are outlined in the first eight episodes of this Gnostic Insights podcast. I recommend that you listen to those first eight episodes, and you can find them on the GnosticInsights.com website, under the tab, The Gnostic Gospel Primer. We’ve also begun to discuss the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which was my previous format, you might say, for understanding our world. You see, we all build these models in our minds of how things work, and this is there, and that’s there, and this is who I am, and that’s who you are, and this is why things happen, and it’s all so confusing. So over the many years, I have developed a philosophy called A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which you can find on my blog of the same name, and it is not specifically what you would call Gnostic. However, it is Gnosis in the sense of knowledge, and I am always happy to share that. I have also incorporated a few of the basic memes from the Simple Explanation into my Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and that is why sometimes we hear words in my podcasts that you don’t find written in the Nag Hammadi, words like memes, and words like fractals, and units of consciousness. And so it’s helpful to listen to these podcasts basically in the order that they have been recorded so that you can understand the memes I am using, and this will assist in your own remembering of the Gnosis that is within you. Today’s episode of Gnostic Insights is about who we are. Who am I? is the question we always ask ourselves. Am I my ego? Am I my Self? Am I God Consciousness? Who am I? My ego is not really me, even though that’s who I usually think I am. We think of the mind and ego as ourselves, but this is the delusion. Yes, the me package reflects our personalities, but I am much more than the meme bundles and karma of this personality. Nor am I my mind. My mind is like a tuning device that scans for and locks onto my meme bundle. The ego feeds on the memes tuned in by my mind. My mind is directed toward its preferred memes by my karmic record. Ego is not a conscious entity. Ego is only a construction. Ego is like a garment that we wear. It’s a garment that is cast over ourselves. It is like a vessel that contains or a shadow that outlines 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. I am a unit of consciousness that is identical to the universal unit of consciousness, which in Gnosticism we would call the Father, the Son, the Fulness. 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. So in terms of the model that I’ve constructed in the first eight episodes of the Gnostic Insights podcast, the Fullness of God in the illustrations that I’ve drawn looks like a pyramid of stacked golden cannonballs. It just looks that way, because it’s a hierarchy, and a hierarchy means that 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. And 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. So if I think of my own Self, I have one of these golden pyramids within my mental construct, and that is myself. And it is a fractal of the Fullness of God. So within myself, I have access to the entire Fullness of God, or you could say, I have access to all of the Aeons of the hierarchy. In the Simple Explanation model, instead of this being a golden pyramid, the Self-unit of consciousness is described as looking like a donut, a torus. And I’ve been trying not to bring the torus into the Gnostic Insights. However, it is such a good model that it’s difficult not to bring it in. So we can also think of the Self as this energetic bubble that’s shaped like a donut that has a very, very tiny center, and it’s kind of wrapped all around me, and there’s a little donut associated with every unit of consciousness in my body, from the particles on up. When you’re looking at the illustrations, it makes a lot more sense. So I would also encourage you to visit a Simple Explanation blog and read about the toruses, or look at how it is that we might consider this donut shape to be a representation of the shape of our unit of consciousness. My body is a veritable galaxy of units of consciousness working to instantiate me. The simpler the unit of consciousness, the more of them there are. So while there is only one of me, my body is comprised of 11 organ systems ...
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    25 mins
  • Father, Son, ALL–Love Unfolding

    Father, Son, ALL–Love Unfolding
    Jul 6 2024
    Father, Son, ALL 2024 edition Welcome to the Gnostic Insights podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m here to share, well, what the title of this podcast is—Gnostic Insights—with you. Hey, I have some exciting news for you. I’m nearing completion of reformatting The Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate for publication. I anticipate uploading it in the next few days, and then I’ll need to examine the proof copy before releasing it for distribution. The Gnostic Reformation could really use your help in the form of contributions for the cause, for advertising and promotion. Miguel Conner of Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio has agreed to narrate the audiobook, and that will also be available by the end of summer, and I need funds for paying for his narration as well. So now is the time to contribute what you can to this effort. If you need a bribe, I’d be happy to personally mail you a signed copy of the book in exchange for your generous contribution of at least $50 to cover the cost. If that’s the case, please contact me privately with your home address for mailing. You can use the contact form at GnosticInsights.com and let me know. However, if you can’t afford the $50, that’s fine—any contribution would help. I appreciate whatever you can contribute. Thank you so much. Onward and upward! It’s summertime, and I’m distracted with working on the new book and with all of the events surrounding summer activities, so I’m going to rerun one of the foundational episodes from 2021, and this is about the nature of the Father, the Son, and then the Fullness. Enjoy! The Nag Hammadi scriptures were buried deep in the desert around 300 AD to save them from the great purge that occurred when the Bible was codified by the Pope and the Emperor of Rome and made into the packaged Christianity that we know today. Before that package, there was a type of spiritual belief that was well known to Jesus and his followers that was then cut out of the Bible out of the New Testament during the Council of Nicene. These ideas were preserved in a set of books called the Nag Hammadi, which were buried in the desert to keep them from the purge, and then they were rediscovered and dug up in 1945, so they have been kept away from almost 2,000 years of formal study and formal theology. What you hear from the Nag Hammadi scriptures is fresh and clean and uninterpreted by experts. So what I have done is study one particular book of the Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate, and it is that book which I used primarily in the book that I wrote called The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, which I published in 2019. I like to begin with a study of the cosmos or cosmology as it unfolded, as it rolled out. 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 what happens in our lives and why are we here. And then the final roll-up is the very, very end of time as predicted by the scriptures. So let’s begin at the beginning, and that has to do with what is called the Father. This story begins before the beginning of time, because there was no time before our material cosmos existed. And so if you think of the originating consciousness as a vast consciousness which has no place and no time, no history—it is nothing but pure consciousness without thought, similar to what the Buddhists call the Buddha mind, something people try to achieve during meditation, where you can be aware that you are conscious, but you have no particular thoughts or words or images going through your mind. No thought, no images, no structure or form, no thing at all. And this is the consciousness of the Father, and we only say the Father—there’s no gender, obviously. The Father is not a man with a beard and long robes. Obviously there’s no gender, it’s a singular consciousness, okay? So let’s get off the notion of being upset by calling it a father. I suppose we could call it a mother, or we could just call it consciousness. In the Tripartite Tractate, which is the book that I am translating for you, it is referred to as the Father. And this Father, its basic consciousness is not thoughts, but rather love, the sensation of knowing what we call love. So this consciousness simply is, without time, without any prior existence, unchangeable, unmovable, without beginning, without end, utterly quiet, utterly still, utterly alone. This Father is often described as all-knowing, but what is there to know? All-seeing, but what is there to see? All-loving, but what is there to love? Omnipotent wisdom, will, but to what end? There’s nothing there. Now imagine that this consciousness gives birth to a emanation of itself. In the Simple Explanation blog, we call this a fractal. In the religious texts, they call it a son, S-O-N. So now we have the Father and a Son. So in the silence of the ...
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    21 mins
  • Transpersonal Consciousness and Gnosis 2024

    Transpersonal Consciousness and Gnosis 2024
    Jul 13 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. This week I’m sharing with you an episode that was broadcast in 2021, very close to the beginning of the Gnostic Insights podcast, but it’s really good as I listen to it and I am going back and slightly re-editing it, and I think that you’ll get a lot out of this episode. It’s foundational, alright. Last week I made a plea to you for donations to help me publish this book that I’m putting out now. Please, if you can afford to, this is a good time to chip in and give me some financial support. I really hate asking for money. This goes against my grain in a big, big way, so please don’t confuse me with the televangelists or any other person out there with a podcast that’s always asking for money. You know I don’t ask for money very often. You can think of yourself as contributing to this extremely important book that’s coming out. You will be part of history at this point. I’ve inserted a donation form at the bottom of this page for you to use. That book, of course, is called A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate. You know, I started with a Christian publisher and that ran into troubles, and so now I am producing the book myself. I have completed the editing, the layout, the typesetting, and now I have uploaded it, and I’m waiting for my proof copy, at which point then I can put it on the market and release it to you. Okay, enjoy this week’s episode. Onward and upward! My goal here at this podcast is to share with you information from the Nag Hammadi, primarily from the Tripartite Tractate, concerning the gnosis of our existence, which is a big topic. Gnosis means knowledge, and the knowledge we talk about here is the knowledge of our preexistent conscious spirits and our souls, and how these fit into these bodies that we wear and we walk around with, and how it is that we interact with one another. And the reason it seems to me that it’s important to discover the gnosis that is within you is because this is your personal reassurance that you’re not alone in this universe. We are not alone. We come from the God Above All Gods initially, and we pass down through the Son and through the Aeons and the Fullness of God. Our spirit comes directly from the God Above All Gods. It’s a conduit. It’s a flowing stream. So we are embedded within the consciousness of the originating consciousness. That is like the background matrix of not only of our universe, but before our universe and outside of our universe. We are a part of this great Being that we call the Father in Gnostic studies. And I share with you the gnosis that I have gained over my entire lifetime of thinking about, praying to, pursuing the ideas of, in all the different forms, this form of consciousness. You know, as a child, I began these kinds of studies very young, probably around age four, oftentimes in conversation with my older brother, Bill, whom you run into here and there on Gnostic Insights. And then I majored in psychology because I wanted to understand psychology. I majored in education because I wanted to learn how to share and to educate other people. I have an advanced degree in counseling and an advanced degree in communication, yet I’ve discovered that all of these degrees don’t really matter much if there’s no one to talk to about it. So my purpose here at Gnostic Insights is to share with you the gnosis that I have come across, not so that you will adapt anything I say, but so that it triggers within you the gnosis that you carry, because we’re all sharing the same stream of consciousness. I would very much like to hear from you, because as an educator, it helps me to know where you are at, and I need to have questions from you in order to stimulate answers from me. I often feel as though I’ve used up all the information I have to share, and I know that’s not true, because my gosh, I’ve read so many books, and I’ve had so many papers on these topics, yet I need to know what you want to know in order to know what direction I should go with these episodes. So please, go to the GnosticInsights.com website, and go to the comments form, and send me your email, send me your comments, send me your questions, and then I can address them, hopefully publicly here at Gnostic Insights. I can preserve your anonymity, that’s fine. I’d like to know where you are in your Gnostic search, and then we can go together from there. So, this week I was at something of a loss about what to talk about, and so once again I am dipping back into the wells of time to my Simple Explanation blog, and I’m pulling out an article from January 31st of 2011. I’ll read it to you, it’s in Simple Explanation terminology, but then I’ll translate it into Gnostic speak, so that we can see how these things go together. The Gnosis I share with you comes not only from my own personal experience, but it comes from the Nag Hammadi, and primarily the text ...
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    24 mins
  • Redeeming the Demiurge

    Redeeming the Demiurge
    Jul 20 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Yesterday, that would be July 18th, 2024, I was a guest on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio with my good Gnostic friend, Adrian Smith and, of course, Vance Socci and Miguel Conner, and we were discussing the Demiurge. That’s why I’m running this episode this week about the Demiurge. But I encourage you to go to YouTube to the Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, to the episode that’s up this week now. It’s called Navigating These Gnostic Times. Here’s an episode concerning the Demiurge and redeeming the Demiurge from 2022. I’ve edited it down quite a bit to make it a lot more palatable. I hope you enjoy it. The redemption of the Demiurge is a two-step process. Part one had to do with bringing life into creation in the form of all of the Second Order Powers, who themselves are the living representations of the images of the Aeons above. Then part two of the redemption of this creation is the coming of the Christ along with the Third Order of Powers that the Christ contains, the Pleroma of the Christ. That’s the Third Order Powers. And the Third Order Powers come as a covering, as a redemption, for each and every one of the Second Order Powers. So it’s kind of a stacking situation, right? The Fall generated these fractals of the Aeons above, only smaller versions of those fractals because they come out of the broken body of a single Aeon named Logos. And Logos contained within himself a smaller version, so to speak, a fractal of all of the other Aeons. And when Logos brought those to this material plane, this material plane was what they called a likeness, the likenesses of the Aeons above, but they were dead. They weren’t alive. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. In a similar way that a mirror reflects ourselves, right? The mirror is a flat 2-D representation of my 3-D body. The material creation down here that started as the Fall of Logos is a likeness of the Aeons above in the Fullness of God—it’s a different, though, dimension, the way that the mirror is 2-D that reflects and backwards reflects, by the way, my 3-D reality. Our material creation is a 3-D reality that reflects, and in an inverted way, the Aeons above. So there’s a likeness of the images above for every one of the Aeons. And those likenesses are the egoic side or the broken side, the shadow side; they’re the inversion of the Aeons above. In order to redeem the Fall, in order to reclaim the body of Logos back up into the Fullness of God, to release it from this different plane that it has found itself on, the Second Order Powers, all of us living creatures, everything that contains the Holy Spirit, the spark of life, there’s one of us Second Order Powers for every one of the likenesses of the Demiurge of the Fall. And then, on top of us, there is a Third Order Power for every one of us Second Order Powers. And the Third Order Powers are the pleroma of the Christ that come along with the Christ to redeem creation. What we’re talking about today comes from the part of the Tripartite Tractate that is called The Pleroma of the Logos, Section 9. “When the Logos which was defective was illumined, his pleroma began.” So the Logos which was defective, that’s the Logos who has returned now to the Fullness of God, to his brothers back up in the Fullness. He abandoned his egoic broken unit of consciousness down here below. That’s why the Demiurge has no remembrance of the Fullness, because Logos himself, which carries the one spirit of the entirety of the Fullness and God, returned back to his home in the pleroma. “Pleasing among things which are good, existing among the things which exist, resembling them in beauty, but unequal to them in truth, but in wisdom and knowledge he acts, mingling the Logos within himself entirely. Therefore, those which came forth from him are great, just as that which is truly great. After he was amazed at the beauty of the ones who had appeared to him, he professed gratitude for this visitation.” “The Logos performed this activity through those from whom he had received aid for the stability of those who had come into being because of him,” that’s us, “and so that they might receive something good, since he thought to pray for the organization of all those who came forth from him, which is stabilized, so that it might make them established. Therefore, those whom he intentionally produced are in chariots, just as those who came into being, those who have appeared, so that they might pass through every place of things which are below, so that each one might be given the place which is constituted as he is.” So remember, all of us down here below, we are each constituted after a particular Aeon, or a particular Aeon who is itself combinations of Aeons. Everything down below that is living is modeled after the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And so, when the Logos who was redeemed, that is the body of the Pleroma of the Christ which comes down...
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    20 mins
  • Are People Inherently Evil?

    Are People Inherently Evil?
    Jul 27 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I finished getting my book ready for publication and it’s been uploaded to Amazon. I tried to upload it to Lulu, but there were problems with the process and I had to kick back to Amazon, I’m sorry to say. One of the listeners had requested that I go with the small independent publisher Lulu, and I did try, but there were problems. So it seems to be God’s will, we could say, that I publish on Amazon, getting the worldwide distribution. I’m expecting the proof copy about a week from today, and if it looks as good as it appears that it’s going to look, then I’ll be ready to release the book. A couple of listeners have taken me up on the offer and pledge that if you were to donate $50 towards the effort of getting the book published and distributed, I would mail you personally, from my house to your house, a signed copy of A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, and I’d be happy to do that for any of you. Just send me a comment through the contact card or through my email address if you have it, and you can have a book from me to you, and I would very much appreciate that, and God bless the people that have volunteered, so thank you very much. Having a bit of a pledge drive here, see? So the things that I had thought were going to be taken care of by the professional publishing company that I decided not to go with, now I’m going to have to be taking care of all of that—the promotion and that sort of thing, social media, all of that. Perhaps one of you listeners is good at those sorts of things and would like to volunteer to help spread the word. That would be terrific. Otherwise, go ahead and leave an extra $20, $25 if you can. I’m going to put the donation form at the end of the transcript to this episode here at GnosticInsights.com. I was listening to a radio preacher this morning, and he was talking, as they often do, about the inherent sin nature of man, or humanity as I would like to say, being a woman. He was saying that we are born into sin because of the original fall of Adam and Eve, and we have a sin nature. They’re always talking about the sin nature, and that that is why we need to turn to Christ and repent and ask for Christ to come into our hearts in order to redeem us because of our inherent sin nature. But you see, in Gnosticism, we don’t think of our psyche in exactly the same way. I wouldn’t say that we do have an inherent sin nature. What I would say, focusing on the good, is that we have an inherent godly nature because, as it says in the Tripartite Tractate and in other Gnostic Gospels, and as it says in the New Testament of the Bible, we are filled with the Fullness of God. And I am taking that literally, that we actually are filled with the Fullness of God, that we have our complete Self, that’s that big S self that is at the core of our being. Our inherent nature, in other words, is a full reflection of the Son of God or the Fullness of God. 14 “For this reason I bow my knees to the Father [f]of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15 from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, 16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— 19 to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. “(Ephesians 3:14-19) So, we do not have an inherent sin nature. We are children of the Aeons of God. We are children of the Fullness, and it’s actually an insult to the Fullness and to the Son of God to say that their children—for are we not the children of God? Are we not brothers and sisters of Jesus?—it’s a big insult to the Aeons and the angels and the Son of God that made us to say that we’re inherently evil. And it’s not because we fell. The Fall was instigated long before the humans came along. The Fall is the nature of our material universe, that’s all. It’s basically metaphorical language for moving from a different realm, a different home—from the ethereal non-material space of heaven, we might call it, or the Fullness of God. And the Fall was the accidental overreaching of that top Aeon, Logos, which has come down into our Christian tradition as the overreaching of the top angel, Lucifer. It’s the same story. It’s the same fractal. And it was that Fall that created our material space, leading to ignorance and forgetfulness of the Father and of all that came before. And all that did come before was the ethereal realm. One of my regular listeners and readers wrote a very good inquiry to me this week. And she had an insight. She had a satori, I believe, because I think it’s in my book, and she’s read my book, and I’m pretty sure that I had already ...
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    19 mins