• Transformative Near Death Experiences
    Jan 13 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic insights. Lately I’ve been watching a lot of near death experience videos on YouTube. Have you been watching those? They really are fascinating. You can see that people have personalized experiences in their near death episodes. And by the way, in case you don’t even know what near death experience is, it’s when a person is clinically dead—no brain waves, no heartbeat—they can be dead for several minutes. They could be in a deep coma, a vegetative state, for months. However they get to be on the other side, it’s called a near death experience. And it’s not being mediated by the physical body because the physical body is shut down. And that’s a provable event by heart monitors, brain monitors—all of that. And by now there have been thousands and thousands and thousands of people who have had near death experiences. There are many commonalities to everyone’s near death experiences, but then again, there are also personalized viewpoints of what their experience was for them and then what it means to them, just as all of us have our points of view in our walking around life. If I’m standing right next to you, you and I can both witness an event and yet we will tell it in our own words and in our own ways, perhaps even using our own metaphors if it’s a difficult thing to explain to someone else. And it’s no different with these near death experiences. In fact, the near death experiences are so unusual and so out of the realm of our ordinary waking experience that people often have a difficult time even putting words to what they’ve witnessed. Some people come out of their near death experience all prepared to talk about it, but other people take years before they can put it to words and explain it. So, I started watching these new death experiences on YouTube, and I’m making notes and whatnot. Then I decided, well, why reinvent the wheel? Why not look up a book where someone has already cataloged the near death experiences and written down their similarities and their differences, and written down some examples? So I went to a book called Evidence of the Afterlife. That was published in 2010 by Jeffrey Long and Paul Perry, if you want to look it up yourself. And so I made notes out of that book. First let me share with you a description of what I believe are Aeons by a 13- year-old who had just died. And it says she rose and found herself inside a bright white soft cloud type of thing. She felt the total embrace of love and felt great safety and warmth. Within and attached to the cloud were three Angel-type of beings. They had great peace about them and were part of this cloud as if attached directly to it. She felt their grandness and their joy. She felt happy, peaceful, and a desire to stay amongst them. Suddenly, a large hand came toward her, not threatening, glowing with overpowering light. A voice said, my child, go back for you have much work left to do, and she was instantly back in her body. She felt angry that she had to return. And the condition that had caused her to pass away was healed upon her awakening. When I read this, I think that this bright white soft cloud type of thing is what we call the Fullness of God, which is where the Aeons dwell. That is a total embrace of love, safety, and warmth, because the Fullness of God is a direct emanation from the Father. The Fullness of God, the Aeons of God, are directly attached to the Son of God, and the Son is the first manifestation. That is what it means by being the only begotten Son of the God Above All Gods of the origin of consciousness. And we know that the God Above All Gods isn’t merely consciousness—this God is love. Our sensation of loving and being loved is a direct emanation of the Father of consciousness. So, this 13-year-old girl found herself embedded within this cloud of love and consciousness. And she saw three Angel type of beings. It doesn’t say in the Tripartite Tractate that Angels is a synonym for Aeons, but I think it is. Angels are perhaps a certain subclass of Aeons, but when someone describes an Angel or an Angelic type of being, this is one of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. So she saw three of these Aeons. Now, it’s also my thought that all of us humans, all of us Second Order Powers, are particular combinations of Aeons or unique combinations of various Aeons. Your combination of Aeons is slightly different than mine. We overlap for the most part because we’re humans. However, my talents are slightly different than your talents, and our talents come from the Aeons. Also, if we are reincarnated beings, we are also slightly different because of our past life experiences and the meme bundle that we carry forward with us from life to life. So, speaking of this girl’s miraculous healing of the illness that caused her to die, people are often healed out of the deadly condition that led to their near death experience. They have out of body experiences where ...
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    26 mins
  • NDEs part 3: Reincarnation, Research, & Gnosis
    Jan 20 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. My name is Dr. Cyd Ropp, and I’m your host. I’m really glad that you’re with me and that we are exploring these topics together. Today I want to share with you an article that was first printed in the UNT Digital Library. That’s the university library system. It’s by Bruce Greyson, and it’s called Near Death Experiences and Claims of Past Life Memories. This was printed in autumn of 2021 and it is accessed through the University of North Texas Library system. My brother looked this up for us because of our topic last week on near death experiences. And, you know my brother, Bill Puett, is a hypnotherapist. He is a retired philosophy professor. Nowadays he helps people through therapeutic hypnosis. Bill often has experiences with his clients of that in between place that one experiences between lives. Many times Bill asks a client to go back and remember when an upsetting trigger first occurred in their lives, and sometimes these people jump back into a previous life. That is how Bill has become so familiar with the idea and working with people’s past life experiences. Bill had raised the question with me after last week’s episode, Well, what about the in between place? How do these near death experiences comport with the place that Bill and his clients are so familiar with—that being the in between place where they work on past life issues. And, the in between place is where a soul is prior to being reincarnated. At least that’s the therapeutic metaphor that seems to be going on in these situations. So let’s look at this article together, Near Death Experiences and Claims of Past Life Memories, and we’ll see if we can make sense of it in a gnostic way. Let’s begin with reading the abstract. An abstract on an academic article is the overview, the summation, of what the article is going to be about. So let’s see what Dr. Greyson has to say. “Some features of near death experiences suggest that consciousness may continue to function after death of the body. The life reviews of some NDEs [that’s near death experiences] include what seemed to be memories of a past lifetime, some of which involve verifiable details suggesting that the experiencer has lived more than one life and can recall events from successive lives. These apparent past life memories parallel the claims of young children who remember past lives. Furthermore, some children’s past life memories include scenes from the period between lives that parallel descriptions of the realm in which NDEs occur. Some children’s past life memories include anomalous features that contradict common beliefs about reincarnation. In addition, the idea that humans reincarnate into a new earthly body seems to contradict the common NDE feature of encountering deceased persons in a non-earthly realm. However, those apparent contradictions can be resolved by reconceptualization of prevailing ideas about time and about what aspects of human consciousness may survive bodily death.” So, the article goes into what is a near death experience, and we don’t have to redescribe that because we covered it in depth in last week’s episode. And then the next section is called The Life Review, which also presents examples of that 360° life review that we covered in the last episode. Well, this is interesting. He cites an example from 1791, “When British Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort was only a 17 year old midshipman he fell off the boat into Portsmouth Harbour. Unfortunately, he had not yet learned to swim. After exhausting himself in his struggle to breathe, he lost consciousness and immediately experienced a feeling of calmness and noticed changes in his thinking. He later described it in this way. ‘From the moment that all exertions ceased, which I imagine was the immediate consequence of complete suffocation, thought rose above thought with the rapidity of succession. It is not only indescribable, but probably inconceivable by anyone who has not himself been in a similar situation. The course of those thoughts I can, even now in great measure, retrace the event which had just taken place. The awkwardness that had produced it were the first series of reflections that occurred.’” He talks about remembering his childhood, another shipwreck… “’travelling backwards, every past incident of my life seemed to glance across my recollection in retrograde succession. Not, however, in mere outline as here stated, but the picture filled up with every minute and collateral feature. In short, the whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or its consequences. Indeed, many trifling events, which had been long forgotten then crowded into my imagination with the character of recent familiarity.’” This was printed in Beaufort’s ...
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    30 mins
  • Interview with Hathaway Jane
    Jan 27 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today’s episode is an interview with one of your fellow listeners to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Her name is Hathaway Jane. Hathaway wrote to me saying how much the Gnostic Insights episodes have meant to her. She’s also purchased and read A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything and A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel of the Tripartite Tractate, and she has some very kind words to say about how meaningful they have been to her. She said she’d like to talk to me on the phone and I suggested that we go ahead and do it as a public interview so that we can share her growth and her path with everyone else here. Hathaway has studied Jungian analysis independently for many years now. For the past 15 years, she’s studied Carl Jung’s writing, particularly the Red Book and the Black Book, and then all of the other books that Jung wrote, as she says in the interview. And I find this remarkable because Jung is not easy to read, and Hathaway did this with a high school education at the time. She’s now attending university and she is in her last year of college studies. After she graduates from the university she wants to attend the Pacifica Graduate Institute in order to become a Jungian analyst. She studied Carl Jung independently through the Center for Applied Jungian Studies, which you can find on the Internet, and she’s also part of the Philemon Foundation. So let’s hear Hathaway’s journey. Cyd: Hey, Hathaway. Hathaway: Yes, how are you? Cyd: I’m just fine this morning. How are you? Hathaway: I’m good. Cyd: It’s so nice to hear your voice. Welcome to the program. Thank you so much for being here. Hathaway: Oh, no problem. I think your book is incredible. I’m not kidding. I mean, I have told you in my life I lived through my ego self 100% and I definitely had different personas that I put on for my family, so-called friends, people I thought were my friends. And it’s strange because I think I told you from 16 to about 29 I was an addict. And every day I wake up and I feel so incredibly blessed, just because, seriously, I mean, I know how hard it is. I know that. I honestly I shouldn’t be here—like there were a few times that came real close to not being here. And, my life was such a crazy mess, I can’t even explain. I got sober and I still was just in something inside me. Just was like this child that—this is what I’ve always felt this way—I’ve always felt like off. I don’t know to explain it really. Like I wasn’t like the other kids. I was an only child and spent a lot of time alone, and just went through some experiences that I would never wish upon anybody. Jung’s , in Bollingen, Switzerland https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ And I made it out and I see so many people who don’t. I mean, right now our country is in the middle of an opiate crisis, which nobody talks about. And it’s just like, what is going on here? And I honestly do believe that everything that’s going on here is a spiritual matter. And so I started with Carl Jung. And I don’t know if you know a lot about Jung, but Carl Jung, his whole life—he started writing the Red Book, and this was his own personal notes and all these beautiful mandalas that he drew. And then he built himself like little—it wasn’t that little, but it’s quite big. It’s at Bollingen. They called the Little Castle. And this castle, it’s so symbolic. He built it because of his dream. Because one day Jung said to himself, I’m 40 years old. He’s like, what is this? I don’t want to go to cocktail parties. This is stupid. He’s like, I have everything I need. I have more money than I could ever want. I’m successful. I’ve known. He’s like, this isn’t life. There has to be something beyond this. And he started asking himself, do I know my soul? And he went through this whole transformation where he literally was, like, begging his soul to speak to him. And his soul did in his dreams. Now I don’t have dreams like that. So Jung has another way of doing it, which is called active imagination. I do mine through a learnt meditation, where I go to a trance level. But, after reading the Red Book I got very involved in CAJS—which the Center for Applied Jungian Studies. And my first teacher was a man by the name of Shane Eynon. He’s a psychoanalyst. He’s incredible. Like, I was so blessed. And for the first time in my life, I was just, like, it just, it really did, it smacked me in the face. And I was like, Oh my gosh. And then I was like, Oh my gosh! Because then I thought, I am out here racking up credit card debt to buy stuff I don’t need. Like, I am living in this illusion, and that’s a very weird thing to experience. Cyd: Now, how long after you had become sober did you discover the Jungians? Hathaway: Probably about 10 years after I’d been sober. And, during those 10 years, I wasn’t a nice person. I ...
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    36 mins
  • Consciousness–It’s a no-brainer
    Feb 3 2024
    Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I read a very interesting article this week from Scientific American, February 1st, 2024 edition. It’s a brand new article by a science writer called Rowan Jacobson. It was interesting to me because it just so happens to uphold—finally prove, in essence—one of the hypotheses of the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. You know, my Simple Explanation theory of everything was written over 15 years ago. The blog‘s been up that long, and there’s a book by the same name. If you haven’t gotten it yet, it’s a secular version of what we talk about here at Gnostic Insights. But it is gnosis nonetheless, because I believe that the universe was setting up for me in the Simple Explanation theory of everything, a way that I would then be able to read and interpret the gnostic gospel. That’s why the latest book is A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, whereas the first book was A Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. And, in the Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, which was pre-gnostic gospel for me, I didn’t have a clear way to separate non-living material from living material. In my early diagrams, the hierarchy is a straight flow upward from the subatomic particles, on up through life, on up through cells. But, whereas in the gnostic gospel interpretation, there is a clear break provided to us by the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi, there’s a clear break between the mud—that being the material that is not alive—and the meat—that being all of us animals, all of us creatures, everything that’s alive. Whether it’s a plant or a single celled organism or a human, every living creature is different in kind than the purely material objects. And the material objects are the subatomic particles, the particles, the atoms, the molecules, the elements, the aggregates of minerals on up to the hard rocky bodies, like comets and planets. According to the Tripartite Tractate, these are not alive. The bodies themselves are part of the Fall. They are the dead byproduct of the Fall. They don’t think; they have no consciousness. What does have consciousness is the ego of the Demiurge, and so, at least here in our cosmos that we are familiar with, every material object that is not considered living, such as rocks and sand, well, those are extensions of the Demiurge. Those are extensions like a puppet master and strings, right? They are the Demiurge’s extensions of its consciousness, and it is not fully conscious because it is lacking the One’s Self that comes from above. Its One Self fled, that being the Aeon known as Logos. So, Logos and its ego have become separated and it’s its ego that has constructed this material cosmos in which we dwell. Whereas Logos itself, the Aeon Logos, fled back up to the Fullness. Anyway, this is a long preamble to what we’re trying to actually get to here, and if all of this was just gobbledygook to you, you need to back up and become familiar with some of the terminology from the gnostic gospel that I present here. So I will put a link to a more basic type of introduction to these concepts right here in the transcript to this podcast. Back to the Scientific American article. It’s called Brains Are Not Required When It Comes to Thinking and Solving Problems, Simple Cells Can Do It. And the subtitle is Tiny clumps of cells show basic cognitive abilities, and some animals can remember things after losing their heads. So, what this article is about is a new branch of cognitive science called basal cognition, and they are coming to believe that the brain is not required for thinking. Well, that has been a tenet of the Simple Explanation going back 15 to 20 years now. The brain is not the origin of thought or consciousness, it’s merely like a radio that tunes it in. Your neurons are not where memories live. The memories are outside of us. What the neurons do is grow in response to the stimulus of those externalized thoughts, and some scientists are coming to recognize that fact now. They fought this all along. Most scientists, including most cognitive scientists who study the brain, keep looking for places in the brain where the memories live. But these basal cognition scientists now realize that the memory doesn’t live in the brain. And by the way, to skip to the conclusion of the article—where the memories reside as far as they are concerned is in the electromagnetic grid that the creature emits or dwells in. Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist who has for a long time been an outcast in the scientific community because he’s been saying that all along. His research and his books are about how our thoughts and our relationships with one another exist in a field around us and a field in between us. Like between two people who have love for each other, there’s a sort of a rubber band, I think he described it. A rubber band stretching between them, which is an electromagnetic field that keeps ...
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    28 mins
  • The Gnostic Christ
    Feb 10 2024
    What we call Christianity today, the religion of Christianity, may not be exactly what the Christ had in mind. It may be a human interpretation and institutional package of the religion that Jesus promoted, but there is no reason to throw out the baby with the bath water. When I was about four years old, I recognized the difference between Baby Jesus in the manger and Santa Claus. There was the religious iconography of baby Jesus in the manger and the Christian Christmas story. And even at a very young age before I started school, I’m like, yeah, Santa Claus is a kid’s story, but this is baby Jesus in a manger being sent down from God to redeem humankind. Well, I could relate to that. That was clearly a difference in kind from Santa Claus. It seems to me that people who don’t recognize Jesus and who don’t accept the whole notion that there is a God above and that there can be a Christ who is a very special etherical character that was sent into this cosmos in order to help us out—that’s a sad thing. I recognized Jesus when I was very, very young. Anyway, I want you to realize that I have been a follower of Jesus for over 60 years now, and during that time I’ve been a very active student of the Bible and of Jesus in particular. I’ve been taking most of my spiritual notes from the red letter editions of the Bible, listening to Jesus himself. Yes, I’ve been in and out of churches, particularly in my teenage years and early 20s, but after I was married, my husband didn’t enjoy church, and so I stopped going. Nowadays I’m able to devote most of my time to spiritual pursuits (as a widow), but my spiritual pursuits are not what most people’s are who currently follow either Christianity or Gnosticism. And yet I’m calling myself a Gnostic Christian. So, I’m following the Bible. And I am very happy that this new edition of the Bible came out—The New Testament by David Bentley Hart—which is a fresh interpretation of the New Testament from the original Greek. Most of the editions of the Bible that people read in church or that you have on your bookshelves at home are derivative of an old Latin translation hundreds of years old that has been Anglicized ever since, so the original meaning of the words are often lost or misrepresented. And those are the Bibles that people are following in what is now called the Christian religion. There are a lot of errors in Christianity, but I find myself in a peculiar situation of being what I would call a true Christian. I know Jesus; I was baptized. In the past couple of years, I’ve been listening more to radio preachers again, like I used to in the old days, and I often find myself agreeing with what they say. I agree with 90% of what is taught in the Christian Church. It’s that 10% that’s the problem. For example, a very important issue is that all Christian churches believe that you need to right now accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, period, because if you die before accepting Jesus, you aren’t going to heaven. And this causes much anxiety and much angst amongst Christians whose relatives, children, husbands, friends haven’t accepted the Christ—will not pray the sinner’s prayer and ask Jesus into their hearts. Because they’ve been taught, and therefore they believe, that all those people are going to hell, and they are anxious about it. Yesterday I went to church. I don’t often go, I must say, but it was a Communion day and someone asked me to go. I think it’s a good thing to ask people to go to church and so I honored her by going with her. And I accepted Communion. Now one of the interesting things about Communion is that you are recapitulating the fractal of the Last Supper where Jesus broke bread, blessed it, and said, “This is my body which is broken for you. Eat this in remembrance of me.” And then he takes the cup of wine and he says, “This is my blood that is spilled out for you. Drink this in remembrance of me.” And that is what is called the Sacrament of Communion. And Christians take that sacrament fairly often to remember Christ. But only Christians are allowed to take Communion. So, before the Communion is served, the minister will say something like, Now we ask that only those people who have accepted Christ come forward for Communion. And if you have not yet accepted Christ, one of the elders would like to meet with you and pray with you to accept Christ. But for now, please don’t come forward to take the Communion because it’s only for Christians. I can kind of see the point in that, but once again, it’s creating a divide between those who have acknowledged the power of the Christ here on Earth and those who have not, and presumably all those people that don’t go back and talk with the elders at the end of the service are going to go to hell if they die that night. But the Bible doesn’t really say that. In the New Testament, and particularly the New Testament as translated from the ...
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    29 mins
  • The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated
    Feb 17 2024
    Here’s a treat for you. This is the entire Gnostic Gospel Illuminated book read by the author, Cyd Ropp. This is the little book published in 2019 that was the springboard for all of the gnostic work that followed, including this podcast and the new, much longer, book that is about to be released. This is the simplest presentation of gnosis that you will ever find. Only the essential gnosis was included. It is all based upon the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi texts. The gnosis you will find here is the type of gnosis that proceeds from an initial thought–the first thought of the Originating Source. That thought then flows outward and through a few levels downward until it manifests within all of us living creatures here in the cosmos. There are no fables in this gnosis–only the reasonable outflow of the path of consciousness. This is the story of consciousness. I’m taking all of the illustrations out of The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated and putting them in order as the transcript to go along with this episode. I’m not reprinting the text. For that, you should buy the book, but you can follow along with the illustrations. And, as I’m putting together these illustrations in order of their appearance, I’m discovering that this episode transcript with the illustrations and the captions of each illustration turns out to be the very, very simplest presentation of this gnosis of The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. It’s even simpler than the very simple book that you’re going to listen to now as the audio, because it’s just the illustrations and just the captions. So, if you find the words confusing, look at the pictures. They ought to resonate with you; you ought to be able to recognize their meaning. And remember, I’m not teaching this to you. I’m hoping to stimulate your own remembrance that you were born with. The reason I emphasize simplicity is that I like to imagine how it is that the Father can transmit information to us down here. How does this information actually come to us? The Father wants to be known and this is the information that he wants to be known. It’s like if you were trying to explain something to a leaf or to a worm. What is it you can tell them that they’re going to understand? This is why the information is very simple. It doesn’t have a lot of details. It’s a very simple transmission, directly, of consciousness. And that’s why it is so pared down from the information that you can generally find out there that passes for what they’re calling gnosis. Because remember, every living thing in the cosmos remembers the Father and the Son; remembers the Origin and the Fullness. So, the information has to be simple enough that any creature, any plant, any insect, any little squirrel can realize it. We are all second order powers. Onward and upward! And, enjoy the episode. I am not going to reprint the text of the book here. For that, please purchase the book: You may purchase the original Gnostic Gospel Illuminated at gnosticinsights.com. Here are my illustrations of the concepts presented in this book. These will illuminate the meaning of the text. The Son is the first and only emanation of the Father. It is a monad. It is called the First Glory. The moment the Son was formed, the ALL emerged. The ALL wears the Son like a garment, and the Son wears the ALL. They are co-existent. The ALL is the Second Glory. The Aeons of the ALL awakened to themselves in fulfillment of the Father’s desire for innumerable points of view. The awakened Aeons sorted themselves into a cooperative colony of names, stations, ranks, duties, and locations. The Aeons of the Fullness provide the Master Pattern of our inherited consciousness. The Aeons of the Fullness dream as one of Paradise. Logos crowned the top of the Fullness. Logos mistakes himself for the Fullness. Logos stumbles and Falls while reaching for Glory. The small fractals that once formed the pleroma of Logos lost themselves during the Fall and rolled out into chaos. The Father and the Fullness were repelled by the Fallen, and a Boundary was formed to rein in the Deficiency. The values of the Demiurge lead to isolation and despair. The values of the Fullness lead to peace and joy. The restored pleroma of Logos and the Hierarchy of the Fullness conceive a new fruit called 2nd Order Powers. The Fullness is the 1st Order of Powers. The shadows of the deficiency that emerged from the Fall are small, dead, and ignorant of what came before. The Second Order Powers are emanations of the restored Logos, fitted into the Boundary. They come one by one to populate the cosmos with life. We Second Order Powers continually battle the archons of the Fall. We are a mixed creation of life from above and death from below. We Second Order Powers find ourselves locked into an endless war with the Deficiency. Gnosis is for those with eyes to see. Simply remember the Father and gnosis will follow. The Christ comes in a form that every...
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    39 mins