Gnostic Christianity

What is gnosis? There’s a lot of Gnosticism out there on the Internet, isn’t there? And this gnosis that I am sharing with you is quite different from most of that Gnosticism that’s out there. Before 1945 and 1947, when the Nag Hammadi and the Qumran scriptures were discovered and dug up out of the deserts or pulled out of caves where they were hidden, the only Gnosticism they were familiar with was that which had survived the Great Purge brought about by the early Catholic Church and the Nicene Council. They were purposely stripping the Gnostic out of what has become our New Testament of the Bible, and we can wonder why. I think it’s because actual gnosis puts people in contact with the Christ personally, with the Son and the Fullness personally, with the Father on a personal basis, the way that the Protestant Reformation brought a similar change to Catholicism. Because before and currently in the Catholic teachings, you’re only basically allowed to access knowledge of God through the interpretations of the church, and you accept their interpretations. The Pope is supposedly the infallible word of God, and your priests are the representatives of that official line of theology. So when Martin Luther reformed that way of thinking to say no, we can read the New Testament ourselves and come up with our own interpretation—well, that really opens up a can of worms, doesn’t it? Because if we’re each allowed to have our own personal interpretation of holy books, then our interpretations might be as varied as there are people, because all of us have our own opinions. I mean, just look at our own opinions on something as innocuous as the foods we decide to eat. Have you ever looked around you and noticed how everybody you know now has a different diet? Some people are protein only, and some people are vegetables only, and some people are fruit only. Some people believe in all things in moderation and eat just a little. Some people are organic only, and some people are junk food only. When I had a bed and breakfast for a number of years, I learned this lesson very quickly because it’s funny when you lay out a table, a meal, for 10 or 12 people on a daily basis, year in and year out, you see how those 10 or 12 people all have particular and peculiar personal diets. I once had a table where one person let me know they only ate egg whites. They only wanted egg whites in their omelets and another person actually at the same table only ate yolks and wouldn’t eat the egg whites. And that was funny too, because who only eats yolks? But it was compatible when they were both sitting at the table. Right. It’s like that old saying: Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean. And so between the two of them, they licked the platter clean. So it’s like that with food. And it’s like that with our interpretation of scripture. What is a mystic? Mysticism is the thought that we can directly perceive and commune with supernatural or ethereal forces–that it takes mysticism to get past our ordinary way of seeing things and get into that ethereal realm. When Martin Luther ripped the New Testament back out of the clutches of the Catholic Church and put it back into the hands of every person, he opened up this idea that we can read the Scripture and understand what it means to us. Now the Protestant churches, and I’ve been to many Protestant churches–I didn’t grow up in the church because my parents weren’t exactly religious people, but I had my own personal relationship with Jesus ever since I was about four or five years old. And so I came up under the tutelage of Jesus personally, as opposed to what the church was teaching me. You know, some Bibles have what are called Red Letter editions? They have the words of Jesus written in red. So for many years I only read the red letters because I wanted to know what Jesus had to say about it. Anyway, getting back to the original topic, before the Nag Hammadi and the Qumran scripts were dug out of the desert in the 1940s and then translated for us out of the original Coptic Greek, all that we knew of Gnostic belief was written by the people that hated the Gnostics, and those people are called heresiologists. Those who study (ology) means the study of heresies. And heresies mean unorthodox belief. So a heresiologist is one who studies unorthodox beliefs. And the Catholic heresiologists were the only ones who had ever seen the scriptures and then translated them for the ordinary believer, saying, that is wrong, and now the church teaches this, but that said that and so it was wrong. So everything they ever said about the Gnostic scriptures was about how bad and terrible they were. When I was coming up, when I was a young Christian, I used to believe that line of thinking. I used to think, OK, the Nicene Creed is the truth and we have to believe everything that the Nicene Creed proposes. But, anyway, I believed in the veracity (that means the truth) of the Nicene Creed and the way the Protestant churches have formulated the New Testament now. So they’re no longer under the clutches of the Pope, yet each denomination has its particular emphasis, otherwise they wouldn’t be separate denominations. They’d all just be the Protestants, and there’d be a Protestant church, and it would be one church. But since every founder of these different flavors of Protestantism had their own take on what the New Testament said, they formed their own denominations. And a Protestant denomination is like, oh, the Baptists is one denomination, and the Presbyterians another, et cetera–those are denominations. But let me get back to this idea that I began with of what is gnosis. See, the purpose of studying the scriptures, the purpose of studying the New Testament, the purpose of going to church, the purpose of reading the Nag Hammadi books, or the books of the Qumran, or of listening to so-called Gnostic podcasts, is to learn about the ethereal realm–is to learn the will of the God. Is to learn who the Father is, and what the Father’s will for us is. What is our purpose here on Earth? Why are we alive? What the heck is going on down here? And what does God have to do with it? What does the church have to do with it? So I’ve noticed, and I think that probably most of you have noticed, there’s a worldwide push back against Christianity going on right now, and against Judaism. There is a worldwide pushback against the notion of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Christ. But these people that are pushing back against the faith, they don’t know their scriptures, they don’t know the Father. Generally they are atheists or, at best, calling themselves agnostic. And they think we’d be a lot better off just throwing it all away. Get people away from that horrible, restricting authoritative body called the church and these ridiculous moral precepts from 2000 years ago and further back that only restrict our freedom, our personal will. That’s all screwed up. I can tell you that that’s not right thinking because it comes from ignorance. Right thinking comes from knowledge and truth. We would even say right thinking comes from gnosis. And it is a precept all along throughout various religions and various holy books that you can only know the will of God by sitting quietly and praying and meditating and contemplating our relationship or your relationship with the ethereal. It doesn’t come—it cannot come—from looking all around us at popular culture and at politics and at social media and at television and movies and university courses. That isn’t where truth comes from. That’s where entertainment comes from. That’s where distractions come from. That’s where time killers come from. And a heck of a lot of bad thinking comes from that side. So if you are taking your opinions about the ethereal plane from popular culture, you won’t find it. You’re not gonna find gnosis in popular culture. I’ve noticed television shows, particularly on the streaming platforms, that h… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cydropp.substack.com/subscribe