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The Nature of the Gnostic God

The Nature of the Gnostic God

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 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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